Manhattan had changed when I got back from theWest Coast. The heat had suddenly dissipated, gettingready for fall, and an occasional breeze found its waydown Second Avenue. The post-summer pickup had broughtwith it a patina of melancholy and a longing forrevision and transcendence. I had presciently, if innocently, removedSalomon Brothers from the cover of my textbook oninternational finance. Their trading room had adornedthe first edition, and the second--with its gentler,though not adactylous, cover--was just making itspresence known along Park Avenue and Wall Street whenwhispers of indiscretion in the auction of governmentbonds turned to headline hurly-burly. "So what's thestory of the girl?" a woman trader of foreign exchangein one of the local banks asked a friend of mine,studying the new cover with a female critical eye. "Isshe his girlfriend, or what?" There really was no story, other than I liked thephotograph of the involved, attractive lady standing ina chaotic sea of computer and display terminals, aslightly out-of-focus shot which gave the surroundingroom a yellowed air of late night smoke, as if mannedby muted traders who filled in forex tickets and softlycalled out, Where's your Swissie?, while sipping Budsand chalking cue sticks around a pool table. I had, to be sure, alleged that the cover's realpurpose was to bug the Japanese (with whom the book wasespecially popular), to administer visual cognitivedissonance at the level of bank training programs, itbeing a private hypothesis of my own that the workenvironment segregation of sexes provided theunderlying passion for the consumption of whiskey insuch surprisingly copious quantities in financial areasof Tokyo. Those of that occupation could afford it, itwas true, and, true, there was no social stigmaattached to public drunkenness, but it was also true, Ifelt, that the hostess bars, arenas of socialflirtation with strictly delimited rules, provided apoor substitute for the ever-present potential of soberor intoxicated fornication with a co-worker of equaland opposite sex, such as enjoyed in the rest of theworld. My own forays into inebriation in that sameenvironment had, of course, stemmed from another sourceentirely: namely, my protracted inability to supplyeven genus classification to the flora or fauna mychopsticks found floating in the iron pots of the ten-course meals graciously provided by respectful hosts,which inevitably lead to more whiskey while tests ofidentification were made, waiting for the olfactory andgustatory analysts to return with the recurring andreassuring message that it all tasted like Jameson. This I explained to my friend, as we sat in myapartment in the safer, if less cozy, culinary environsof Manhattan, whereupon he countered with an overlyinquisitive, but crushingly devastating, "What's hername?" I shamefully confessed I did not know. I, who had aspired to broad, but detailedknowledge of my field, to the esoterica of cross-currency swaps, lookback options, and Rembrandt bonds,to the history of the European Monetary System and thepolitics of the IMF, could not make delivery of thefirst name, much less phone number, marital status, andinvestment habits of this elusive siren who enticedpassing readers to direct their course toward theScylla and Charybdis of divergence indicators andexchange for physicals. No, I thought later, after thedeparture of my friend and only a small taste ofJameson, as I studied the once familiar, but nowincreasingly mysterious photograph, this lady does notmerely grace the cover, she does so with faith and long-suffering, bearing the good news to those fallen fromthe law, that they may be fructified in good works, andit would behoove one to girt loins, shod feet, graspsword, and set forth to make known her mystery. "We had a general cut-back, and she wasn'tconsidered essential personnel," relayed a voice fromthe swap sales group. "You're saying she's gone," Ideduced. "Gone, departed, flown away, swapped out fora Korean programmer to work on back office." She waslost but her name, Helena Maria Rachael Cirius, wasfound. What kind of name was that? I wondered,thinking Helena could be Greek; Maria, Spanish;Rachael, Jewish or Southern; and Cirius, well, are youserious? Clearly, not much was to be learned in thegenealogical realm, there being, after all, certain menand women who made professional careers out of namingbabies in an excessively creative and Gothicly ornatefashion; and, at any rate, the vision of Greek captivescarried into Spain with the Moslem invasion, who hadthen married among Sephardic Jews, the offspring ofwhich became marranos in the inquisitional persecutionof 1492, and years afterward set off for New Spain,their ships guided by the dog-star Sirius, was tooimprobable to be given serious consideration. On theother hand, there was only one Cirius, HMR, listed inthe White Pages, which prompted a quick call to theaccompanying number, and yielded the annoying anddisappointing information, delivered in an acousticallyoffensive voice, that such did not exist in this areacode, which left only an intriguing, if disquieting,street address in the East Village. That she had movedwas a possibility more likely than a simple, but fatal,fatigue of phone calls, or peremptory action on thepart of New York Telephone, so it appeared theremaining, necessarily corporeal, course was to conductpersonal interviews among those undoubted Vandals andVisigoths, whom the naive and excessively polite oftengrouped under the more affectionate euphemism,Neighbors. A week later, having put my affairs in order andarranged for time off work, I made the long trek downSecond Avenue to the East Village. In other rare foraysinto the forbidden zone, I had found the relentlessenergy and the hideous but somehow grotesquely magneticcaricature of ordinary life as terrifying as the stenchof death and as invigorating as the smell of moistpudenda. On this occasion, however, a restless coolnesswas in the streets, an icy intimidation and sense offoreboding which melted off the metal bars surroundingTompkins Park and flowed out into the streets to bepicked up and spread by passing automobiles. She had lived on Avenue B: a boundary, a border, afrontier, which, were it to separate Texas andMexico, would be termed el poso del mundo, but in thepresent case was, perhaps, more properly designated asel mundo de los posos. The gentleman drinking out ofthe brown paper sack was already tilting beyond thezenith of gravity's rainbow, and it was onlycoincidence that he fell forward on his face,muttering, "My name is Snake, stay outa my way, I'llbite you good," as I approached the siren's erstwhileapartment entrance. Carefully watching my ankles, Ilooked over the somewhat legible names posted besidethe rusty metal door. Helena Maria was not among them,and after pushing each of the four buzzers, one by one,to no observable effect, and making a careful survey ofthe customs of the block, I entered a nearbyconvenience store, purchased a can of Budweiser, andsat down against a wall which proclaimed It's not overhasta el finito to await promising building traffic. "No biting," I admonished Snake, who had decidedto join me in my repose, and he looked at mescornfully, if blearily, and waved his arm toward thestreet, intoning, "Those that be bitten be dead," afterwhich there was little need for further conversation.Daylight was rolling into shadows before a scurryingfigure, a waif of a girl toting knapsack and rolledposter made a sudden darting assault on the door with ashiny key. "Excuse me," I said, springing up, "I'm anacquaintance of the fair Helena Maria Rachael Cirius,and I was wondering if she had perhaps changed herdomicile, and if you knew her, or could tell me whereshe had gone." "Yeah, I knew her and she moved. Try the MarsBar," she said, slamming the door behind her. "TheMars Bar?" I asked Snake. "Ain't no Milky Way," heobserved unhelpfully. Well, what you seek, you find,was a law of the universe I often relied upon in thecourse of research, knowing that the seriousness ofintent caused books containing relevant information tofall off library shelves into one's path, and totalstrangers to converse on helpful topics at adjoiningrestaurant tables; so it was that over the next threeor four days (it is difficult to be precise), duringwhich I afforded myself the musical luxury of everyselection on the Mars Bar jukebox, I also traversed thestreets of the East Village, beginning at 14th andFourth Avenue, working my way down to Avenue B, thenback up 13th Street to Fourth, and so on to 1st Street,a process that terminated at the Mars Bar, whereupon Iwould return along Bowery and Fourth to start theprocess all over again, expecting at any moment shewould come blasting out of a doorway, bearing, perhapsin a plain brown wrapper, perhaps in an autumnalkaleidoscope, an itemized index to the secrets of theuniverse. Sometimes in this or that place, upon inquiry asto occupation, I would explain that as Odysseus soughtthe Golden Fleece, so did I seek the most beguiling ofthe Helens, and I would produce the book with herpicture from the rucksack, and expound on her virtueswhile the inquirer flipped through the text, read thetitle, and eyed my torn jeans and faded T-shirt, andoften, with surprising humanity, bought me a drink andattempted to direct my attention to some other maidenacross the room, or to reassure me the book would bringa dollar down at the flea market. Hours flowed intodays, days into nights, and nights into almost placeswhere each waitress was almost an actress, and eachbartender almost a poet or a composer. As is often thecase, the end was contained in the beginning, for Ifinally found her in the wee hours of the morning as Iwearily collapsed onto a Mars Bar stool next to the Neo-Thulite, the Sound Man, and the Chef, as well as otherswith whom I had not broken brew. And there she was, sipping cranberry juice andvodka. "This is you," I said, showing her the girl on thecover. "No, that's me," she replied, pointing to theskull on the wall with the mousetrap nailed to itsforehead. "I've just lost my job and my boyfriend, inthat order." Some of the fatigue departed in a burst ofSchadenfreude. "How very tragic," I said. "About thejob, I mean." She looked me over. "Where did you get this?" "I am the author." "And I'm the mother of God," she responded in atone that did not incline one to dispute it. I tried a change of tack. "It's okay. I wouldnever judge a cover girl by her book," I said. "I was definitely a gypsy in yaksha-yuppieclothing." A moment of silence while Lou Reed invited us totake a walk on the wild side. "What are we to do, now that we have discoveredlow finance?" I asked. "Is this the bar at the end ofthe universe? The new world order? Skull and bonesand applied principles of rat psychology?" "The gift of penetrating vision is denied tothe uninitiated," she responded. "It is firstnecessary to undergo symbolic death and resurrection,to cast off the old creature, and to make room for thenew." "Another drink?" "I had in mind something more dramatic, like anauto-da-fe of my image and your alleged oeuvre." We walked hand-in-hand to 5th Street, to her walk-up apartment, where we opened a bottle of wine, andcarefully laid the book on a cross-thatch ofphosphorous matches in a baking tin. We shared aglass, and uttered silent prayers, and ignited onecorner. The flames hovered around the edges of the book,until the outer pages began to curl and roll up one byone, slowly turning to ashes like years of the pastdecade. I was burning up inside, and removed myclothes and lay on the futon, the sweat running off myforehead and shoulders and thighs. And we stayed like that, for a while, staring intothe dying flames, while the shadows crept back aroundus, and the late-night chill reentered the air, andthe passing footsteps became the muffled sound ofleaves scattered by the wind. And then she stood toremove her own clothing, and to sigh, and to shake outher hair. "As of yet there's no sign of life," she said,listlessly straddling the corpse. And I realized,then, that I had failed to detect the slow fading ofher visage. |