“Six years in the middle of constant guerrilla warfare feels longer than thirty years anywhere else,” she said.
Oh-oh. Her voice was playful, but her dark eyes held a malicious sparkle. She was daring me to parry, to contradict, to challenge. I felt the air about me glowing feverishly. Suddenly we were drifting into the I-hate-New-York conversation, always productive of rifts between us, and soon we would be quarreling in earnest. A native can hate New York with love; an outsider, and my Sundara would always be an outsider here, draws tense and heavy energy out of repudiating this lunatic place she has chosen to live in, and grows bloated and murderous with unearned fury.
Heading off trouble, I said, “Well, let’s move to Arizona.”
“Hey, that’s my line!”
“I’m sorry. I must have missed my cue.”
The tension was gone. “This is an awful city, Lew.”
“Try Tucson, then. The winters are much better. You want to smoke, love?”
“Yes, but not that bone thing again.”
“Plain old prehistoric dope?”
“Please,” she said. I got the stash. The air between us was limpid and loving. We had been together four years, and, though some dissonances had appeared, we were still each other’s best friend. As I rolled the smokes she stroked the muscles of my neck, cunningly hitting the pressure points and letting the twentieth century slide out of my ligaments and vertebrae. Her parents were from Bombay but she had been born In Los Angeles, yet her supple fingers played Radha to my Krishna as though she were a padmini of the Hindu dawn, a lotus woman fully versed in the erotic shastras and the sutras of the flesh, which in truth she was, though self-taught and no graduate of the secret academies of Benares.
The terrors and traumas of New York City seemed indecently remote as we stood by our long crystalline window, close to each other, staring into the wintry moonbright night and seeing only our own reflections, tall fairhaired man and slender dark woman, side by side, side by side, allies against the darkness.
Actually neither of us found life in the city really burdensome. As members of the affluent minority we were insulated from much of the crazy stuff, sheltered at home in our maxsecure hilltop condo, protected by screens and filter mazes when we took the commuter pods across into Manhattan, guarded in our offices by more of the same. Whenever we yearned for an on-foot eyes-to-eyes nit-to-grit confront with urban reality we could have it, and when not there were watchful servocircuits to keep us from harm.
We passed the smoke back and forth, languidly letting fingers caress fingers at each interchange. She seemed perfect to me just then, my wife, my love, my other self, witty and graceful, mysterious and exotic, high forehead, blue-black hair, full-moon face—but a moon eclipsed, a moon empurpled by shadow; the perfect lotus woman of the sutras, skin fine and tender, eyes brilliant and beautiful as a fawn’s, well defined and red at the corners, breasts hard and full and uplifted, neck elegant, nose straight and gracious. Yoni like an open lotus bud, voice as low and melodious as the kokila bird’s, my prize, my love, my companion, my alien bride. Within twelve hours I would set myself on the path toward losing her, which perhaps is why I studied her with such intensity this snowy evening, and yet I knew nothing of what would happen, nothing, I knew nothing. Only I must have known.
Deliriously stoned, we sprawled snugly on the rough-skinned nubby yellow and red couch in front of our big window. The moon was full, a chilly white beacon splashing the city with ice-pure light. Snowflakes glittered beautifully on swirling updrafts outside. Our view was of the shining towers of downtown Brooklyn just across the harbor. Far-off exotic Brooklyn, darkest Brooklyn, Brooklyn red in fang and claw. What was going on over there tonight in the jungle of low grubby streets behind the glistening waterfront facade of high rises? What maimings, what garrotings, what gunplay, what profits and what losses? While we nestled our weedy heads in warm happy privacy, the less privileged were experiencing the true New York in that melancholy borough. Bands of marauding seven-year-olds were braving the fierce snow to harass weary homegoing widows on Flatbush Avenue, and boys armed with needle torches were gleefully cutting the bars on the lion cages in Prospect Park Zoo, and rival gangs of barely pubescent prostitutes, bare-thighed in gaudy thermal undershirts and aluminum coronets, were holding their vicious nightly territorial f ace-off s at Grand Army Plaza. Here’s to you, good old New York. Here’s to you, Mayor DiLaurenzio, benign and sanguine unexpected leader. And here’s to you, Sundara, my love. This, too, is the true New York, the handsome young rich ones safe in their warm towers, the creators and devisers and shapers, the favorites of the gods. If we were not here it would not be New York but only a large and malevolent encampment of suffering maladjusted poor, casualties of the urban holocaust; crime and grime by themselves do not a New York make. There must also be glamour, and, for better, for worse, Sundara and I were part of that.
Zeus flung noisy handfuls of hail at our impervious window. We laughed. My hands slipped down over Sundara’s smooth small hard-nippled flawless breasts, and with my toe I flicked the stud of our recorder, and from the speakers came her deep musical voice. A taped reading from the Kama Sutra. “Chapter Seven. The various ways to hit a woman and the accompanying sounds. Sexual intercourse can be compared to a lover’s quarrel, because of the little annoyances so easily caused by love and the tendency on the part of two passionate individuals to change swiftly from love to anger. In the intensity of passion one often hits the lover on the body, and the parts of the body where these blows of love should be dealt are the shoulders—the head—the space between the breasts, the back—the jaghana—the sides. There are also four ways of hitting the loved one: with the back of the hand—with the fingers slightly contracted—with the fist —with the palm of the hand. These blows are painful and the person hit often emits a cry of pain. There are eight sounds of pleasurable anguish which correspond to the different kinds of blows. These are sounds: hinn—phoutt —phatt—soutt—platt—”
And as I touched her skin, as her skin touched mine, she smiled and whispered in unison with her own taped voice, her tone a bare sixth deeper now, “Hinn... phoutt... soutt... platt...”
8
I was at my office by half past eight the next morning and Haig Mardikian phoned exactly at nine.
“Do you really get fifty an hour?” he asked.
“I try to.”
“I’ve got an interesting job for you, but the party in question can’t go fifty.”
“Who’s the party? What’s the job?”
“Paul Quinn. Needs a data-sampling director and campaign strategist”
“Quinn’s running for mayor?”
“He figures it’ll be easy to knock off DiLaurenzio in the primary, and the Republicans don’t have anybody, so the moment is right to make his move.”
“It sure is,” I said. “The job is full time?”
“Very part time most of the year, then full time from the fall of ‘96 through to Election Day ‘97. Can you clear your long-range schedule for us?”
“This isn’t just consulting work, Haig. It means going into politics.”
“So?”
“What do I need it for?”
“Nobody needs anything except a little food and water now and then. The rest is preferences.”
“I hate the political thing, Haig, especially local polities. I’ve seen enough of it just doing free-lance projections. You have to eat so much crap. You have to compromise yourself in so many ugly ways. You have to be willing to expose yourself to so much—”
“We’re not asking you to be the candidate, boy. Only to help plan the campaign.”
“Only. You want a year out of my life, and—”
“What makes you think Quinn will settle just for a year?”
“You make this terribly enticing.”
Haig said after a bit, “There are powerful possibilities in it.”
“Maybe.”
“Not maybe. There are.”
“I know what y
ou mean. Still, power’s not everything.”
“Are you available, Lew?”
I let him dangle a moment. Or he let me dangle. Finally I said, “For you the price is forty.”
“Quinn can go twenty-five now, thirty-five once the contributions start rolling in.”
“And then a retroactive thirty-five for me?”
“Twenty-five now, thirty-five when we can afford it,” Mardikian said. “No retroactive.”
“Why should I take a pay cut? Less money for dirtier work?”
“For Quinn. For this goddamned city, Lew. He’s the only man who can—”
“Sure. But am I the only man who can help him do it?”
“You’re the best we can get. No, that sounds wrong. You’re the best, Lew. Period. No con job.”
“What’s the staff going to be like?”
“All control centered in five key figures. You’d be one. I’d be another.”
“As campaign manager?”
“Right. Missakian is coordinator of communications and media relations. Ephrikian is borough liaison.”
“What does that mean?”
“Patronage man. And the finance coordinator is a guy named Bob Lombroso, currently very big on Wall Street, who—”
“Lombroso? Is that Italian? No. Wait. What a stroke of genius! You managed to find a Wall Street Puerto to be your moneyman.”
“He’s a Jew,” said Mardikian with a little dry laugh. “Lombroso is an old Jewish name, he tells me. We have a terrific team—Lombroso, Ephrikian, Missakian, Mardikian, and Nichols. You’re our token WASP.”
“How do you know I’m coming in with you, Haig?”
“I never doubted that you would.”
“How do you know?”
“You think you’re the only one who can see the future?”
9
So early in ‘96 we set tip our headquarters on the ninth floor of an old weatherbeaten Park Avenue tower with a really spectacular view of the swollen midsection of the Pan Am Building, and we set about the job of making Paul Quinn mayor of this absurd city. It didn’t look hard. All we had to do was assemble the proper number of qualifying petitions—a cinch, you can get New Yorkers to sign anything—and give our man enough citywide exposure to make him known throughout the five boroughs before the primary. The candidate was attractive, intelligent, dedicated, ambitious, self-evidently capable; therefore we had no image-making to do, no plastic-man cosmetic jobs.
The city had been dismissed as moribund so often, and so often had shown new twitches of unmistakable vitality, that the cliché concept of New York as a dying metropolis had finally gone out of fashion. Only fools or demagogues raised the point now. New York was supposed to have perished a generation ago, when the civil-service unions got hold of the town and began squeezing it mercilessly. But the long-legged go-getter Lindsay resurrected it into Fun City, only to have the fun turn into nightmare as skeletons armed with grenades began emerging from every closet That was when New York found out what a real dying city was like; the previous period of decline started looking like a golden age. The white middle class split in a panicky exodus; taxes rose to repressive levels to keep essential services going in a city where half the people were too poor to pay the costs of upkeep; major businesses responded by whisking their headquarters off to leafy suburbs, further eroding the tax base. Byzantine ethnic rivalries exploded in every neighborhood. Muggers lurked behind every lamppost. How could such a plaguey city survive? The climate was hateful, the citizenry malign, the air foul, the architecture a disgrace, and a cluster of y self-accelerating processes had whittled the economic base alarmingly.
But the city did survive, and even flourished. There was that harbor, there was the river, there was the happy geographical placement that made New York an indispensable neural nexus for the whole eastern coast, a ganglionic switchboard that couldn’t be discarded. More: the city had attained, in its bizarre sweaty density, a kind of critical mass, a level of cultural activity that made it a breeder reactor for the soul, self-enriching, self-powering, for there was so much happening even in a moribund New York that the city simply could not die, it needs must go on throbbing and-spewing forth the fevers of life, endlessly rekindling and renewing itself. An irrepressible lunatic energy ticked on and on at the city’s heart and always would.
Not dying, then. But there were problems.
You could cope with the polluted air with masks and Alters. You could deal with the crime the way you did with blizzards or summer heat, negatively by avoidance, positively by technological counterattack. Either you carried no valuables, moved with agility in the streets, and stayed indoors behind many locks as much as possible, or you equipped yourself with space-positive alarm systems, with anti-personnel batons, with security cones radiating from circuitry in the lining of your clothing, and went out to brave the yahoos. Coping. But the white middle class was gone, probably forever, and that caused difficulties that the electronics boys couldn’t fix. The city by 1990 was largely black and Puerto Rican, dotted with two sorts of enclaves, one kind dwindling (the pockets of aging Jews and Italians and Irish) and one steadily expanding in size and power (the dazzling islands of the affluent, the managerial and creative classes). A city populated only by rich and by poor experiences certain nasty spiritual dislocations, and it will be a while before the emerging non-white bourgeoisie is a real force for social stability. Much of New York glitters as only Athens, Constantinople, Rome, Babylon, and Persepolis glittered in the past; the rest is a jungle, a literal jungle, fetid and squalid, where force is the only law. It is not so much a dying city as an ungovernable one, seven million souls moving in seven million orbits under spectacular centrifugal pressures that threaten at any moment to make hyperbolas of us all.
Welcome to City Hall, Mayor Quinn.
Who can govern the ungovernable? Someone always is willing to try, God help him. Out of our hundred-odd mayors some have been honest and many have been crooks, and about seven all told were competent and effective administrators. Two of those were crooks, but never mind their morals, for they knew how to make the city work as well as anybody. Some were stars, some were disasters, and they all, in the aggregate, helped to nudge the city toward its ultimate entropic debacle. And now Quinn. He promised greatness, combining, so it seemed, the force and vigor of a Gottfried, the glamour of a Lindsay, the humanity and compassion of a LaGuardia.
So we put him into the New Democratic primary against the feckless, helpless DiLaurenzio. Bob Lombroso milked the banking houses for millions, George Missakian put together a string of straightforward TV spots featuring many of the celebrities who had been at that party, Ara Ephrikian bartered commissionerships for support on the clubhouse level, and I dropped in at headquarters now and then with simple-minded projective reports that said nothing more profound than
play it safe
keep on truckin’
we’ve got it made.
Everybody expected Quinn to sweep the field, and in fact he took the primary with an absolute majority in a list of seven. The Republicans found a banker named Burgess to accept their nomination. He was unknown, a political novice, and I don’t know if they were feeling suicidal or simply being realistic. A poll taken a month before the election gave Quinn 83 percent of the vote. That missing 17 percent bothered him. He wanted it all, and he vowed to take his campaign to the people. No candidate in twenty years had done the motorcade-and- handshake routine here, but he insisted on overruling a fretful assassination-minded Mardikian. “What are my chances of being gunned down if I go for a stroll in Times Square?” Quinn demanded of me.
I didn’t pick up death vibes for him and I told him so.
I also said, “But I wish you wouldn’t do it, Paul. I’m not infallible and you’re not immortal.”
“If it isn’t safe in New York for a candidate to meet the voters,” Quinn replied, “we might as well just use the place for a Z-bomb testing sight.”
“A mayor was murdered here
only two years ago.”
“Everybody bated Gottfried. He was an Iron Cross fascist if anybody ever was. Why should someone feel like that about me, Lew? I’m going out.”
Quinn went forth and pressed the flesh. Maybe it helped. He won the biggest election victory in New York history, an 88 percent plurality. On the first of January, 1998, an unseasonably mild, almost Floridian day, Haig Mardikian and Bob Lombroso and the rest of us in the inner circle clustered close on the steps of City Hall to watch our man take the oath of office. Vague disquiet churned inside me. What did I fear? I couldn’t tell. A bomb, maybe. Yes, a shiny round black comic-strip bomb with a sizzling fuse whistling through the air to blow us all to mesons and quarks. No bomb was thrown. Why such a bird of ill omen Nichols? Rejoice! I remained edgy. Backs were slapped, cheeks were kissed. Paul Quinn was mayor of New York, and happy 1998 to all.
10
“If Quinn wins,” Sundara said one night late in the summer of ‘97, “will he offer you a job in his administration?”
“Probably.”
“Will you take it?”
“Not a chance,” I told her. “Running a campaign is fun. Day-by-day municipal government is just a grubby bore. I’m going back to my regular clients as soon as the election’s over.”
Three days after the election Quinn sent for me and offered me the post of special administrative assistant and I accepted without hesitation, without one thought for my clients or my employees or my shiny office full of data- processing equipment.
Was I lying to Sundara on that summer night, then? No, the one I had been fooling was myself. My projection was faulty because my self-understanding had been imperfect. What I learned between August and November is that proximity to power becomes addictive. For more than a year I had been drawing vitality from Paul Quinn. When you spend so much time so close to so much power, you get hooked on the energy flow, you become a juice-junkie. You don’t willingly walk away from the dynamo that’s been nourishing you. When, as mayor-elect, Quinn hired me, he said he needed me, and I could buy that, but more truthfully I needed him. Quinn was poised for a huge surging leap, a brilliant cometlike passage through the dark night of American politics, and I yearned to be part of his train, to catch some of his fire and be warmed by it. It was that simple and that humiliating. I was free to pretend that by serving Quinn I was serving mankind, that I was participating in a grand exciting crusade to save the greatest of our cities, that I was helping to pull modern urban civilization back from the abyss and give it purpose and viability. It might even be true. But what drew me to Quinn was the attraction of power, power in the abstract, power for its own sake, the power to mold and shape and transform. Saving New York was incidental; riding the lines of force was what I craved.