MICHAEL FALKIRK
Opera audiences are the worst. The Orchestra de Teatro del Gullabini, on East 76th Street, has a crowded balcony elbow to elbow, but there’s still room for annoyance: one rich Fordham co-ed to Falkirk’s immediate left compulsively twirls her dorm room keys counter-clockwise around her finger until the chain winds all the way up, then systematically unwinds by twirling clockwise, over and over again, jooop! chink! jooop! chink! jooop! chink! She has an edifice of black hair and her earrings look like tinsel. Her cell phone in her lap as if she’s awaiting a call, even as the opera starts. He tries to pretend that because he feels an elemental hate for her means he can’t hopelessly lust after her.
Baroque gilded statuary encrusts every arch, every balcony is backlit with a kind of hellish crimson aura. There are heads on stakes, rows of them, people who’ve failed to answer the princess’s riddles correctly, which puts a smirk on Falkirk’s lips. A chorus of concubines sings, in Italian, “Shut up, the moon is caressing Turandot’s eyelids.” A thousand cultural-wannabe mafiosi exhale in self-congratulating ecstasy.
Falkirk, in the far left raised stalls, must have put on a few pounds in the last twenty-four hours. His tuxedo was right in the danger zone anyway, now it’s just ridiculous. It feels like an extremely thin but strong constrictor is wrapped around his thigh and biting its own tail. He almost wishes the seams would give way; he already looks laughable and alone, at least he would feel better. It is sure to be an extremely uncomfortable night. His mind keeps disembarking the frigate of the opera’s plot and he needs to re-board. It gets harder and harder each time it happens. He has no idea what he could possibly say to Red Stillskin. There’s a part of Falkirk that wants to fight it, fight it to the death, but that part is very faint and not at the core of Falkirk’s personality. Self-interest is, and that is what Stillskin is trading in. In a sense Falkirk has been shocked and eroded to the point where he’s concerned for Red Stillskin’s health and well-being, because if anything we’re to happen to Stillskin maybe the incriminating DVD would get out. The blackmail relationship is a darkly symbiotic one.
During the intermission Falkirk just remains seated while all life around him stretches and ambulates around. He’s a pillar of sadness, a pylon sunk deep into the sand while all around him a tide of middle-aged Italian couples mingles. Somewhere in here, as Falkirk curls his program into a tighter and tighter cylinder, the apparition of Red Stillskin, who Falkirk has dreaded seeing in the flesh, passed through all the standing audience members and approached the seat next to where Falkirk sat and reclined next to him, as he and the apparition were old friends. Stillskin’s face was ashen and his hand-hooks clinked like the chains of Marley’s ghost.
“I’m not really here, of course. I’m a figment of your mind.”
“I know.”
“So. Puccini! Not bad, good for a thrill. Did you know that Puccini was politically to the right of Wagner?”
“That’s fascinating,” Falkirk said inwardly, in the imaginary dialogue. “Listen, I just want to say I don’t think I’m going to be able to help Larry Geld…”
Stillskin snorted. “That’s funny. You know, even in this imaginary conversation, you know you shouldn’t try to put up a fight. It’s not just that you’re going to help. You’re going to bring us to a victory. He has to win.”
“I can’t guarantee anything. Every race is a gamble.”
“But you’re so good at this, the best. Houynhnhm is coming after you. How many races have you already won?”
“I haven’t win anything. I merely put my two cents in after some long difficult research of the landscape. Research mostly done by other people, younger people. Wide-eyed fanatics to the cause, like those two zombies you sent into the MLA to talk to me. And money. I had a lot of money behind me.”
“Geld’s a rich man, as you know. You’ll have money. If he senses you’re working for him, he’ll empty his pockets in a hurry. He knows you expect to be paid.”
“Because he doesn’t know what my true motivation for working for him will be.”
“Sure.”
“If I went to work for the Geld campaign it would cause such a disruption in my other business that people will begin to talk. Around lunches in D.C. ‘Has he lost his mind?’ they’ll say. ‘Geld’s a ghost. Senator Houyhnhnm is one of the strongest columns propping up the Democratic Party, in the bluest state in the union.’”
“But some of them will say, ‘Maybe Falkirk’s trying to mix it up, he wants to challenge himself, experience what it’s like to be with an underdog for once.’ So those guys will get the smile wiped off their faces when we wallop at the polls. Maybe they’ll figure you owe someone a favor. Or someone’s got the goods on you. Gambling. Undocumented housekeeper. Corruption. FEC violations. Or something worse…?”
As if to underline the drift of Stillskin’s phastasm’s words, the Fordham student with the keys returned to her seat directly to Falkirk’s left and began doing things, long before anybody else in the entire theater returned to their places. She engaged in the sorcery of women in public places going about their business, searching for some object in their bags perhaps, pulling their hair back as they look down demurely. And it is hard to determine what about the way they display the skin of their throat and the small star tattoo behind their right ear is accidental and what is deliberately meant for your eyes, what about what she dies is meant to signify the rest of her body which is hidden. Whether the intended and the actual effect of her allure overlap.
“She might be a little old for you.” The apparition with whom he’d been holding an imaginary conversation had noticed the student also.
“You don’t know a thing about me.”
“We’ll, it just depends on how you look at it I guess.”
The Fordham co-ed stretched her back and pressed both hands toward the rococo ceiling, cell phone clutches in one hand. She yawned with an adorable little squeak.
“What if Geld wins. What if he wins, and asks me to stay around. Am I going to then be his consultant forever? Are you just going to go on blackmailing me forever?”
“Now that would be a hopeless sort of life, wouldn’t it?”
“There’s no way out. I don’t see a way out. You are going to expose me. For something I did not even do. Some monster that you created in some lab somewhere. You put my head on to some monster’s body, my voice. How can you. How can you just break someone. How can you invent the unthinkable, and then force me to think it, until I start to doubt whether I did it myself?”
“You know you did it. Otherwise why would you be swearing over this chat which is not even happening.”
“We’ll if this chat is not happening really,” Falkirk thought-screamed, “then let me tell you right here to your face that I am going to kill you. I’m going to get you in a remote place where it’s just the two of us and I’m going to end your life and get my hands on the video and destroy it. All the copies there are.”
“Good for you. I respect your defiance. I’m not totally demonic, I mean once I get what I want out of you I will neutralize the situation by removing the threat to your reputation shall we say. But it’s got to be a victory and it’s got to be landslide. And for your information, I’ve had both man and beast come after me for my life and in every case I’ve ended up killing them. The shark that bit my hands off ended up hanging from a huge hook on a dock in Baja California. I’ve got photos.”
Before Turandot started up again, before the lights dimmed at the end of the intermission, one old hunchbacked guy somewhere to Falkirk’s right was whistling the famous “Nessun Dorma” aria over and over again, as they waited for the conductor to materialize. He whistled it incessantly as if to hammer into the heads of everybody in earshot Yes, I indeed know which melody is the famous one here.
And how ostentatious and status-obsessed was the detonation of applause after the big “money shot” aria. It wasn’t even sung very well, but the detonation of applause was not for that, it was because each member of the audience clamored in front of his neighbors to put on record his own refinement and discernment: _I know the famous aria! Look at me, applauding the famous aria while you just sit there, looking at your booklet!_ Racing each other to clap first, loudest, and longest.
“Well, what did you think?” he asks the woman to his left, acting on impulse.
“It was good.” She smiles with a credible familiarity. “Little violent. I wasn’t sure when to clap though sometimes. I just joined in with everybody else.”
“Opera buffs already know when to applaud before they even sit down.” He can’t believe this subject is coming up on its own, down some groove in the universe, although they are at an opera, after all.
“Where’s the fun in that?” She stands up and he rises, too, making eye contact, willing his eyes not to drop and appraise her.
“Two types of applause, you know. The applause you give which is a natural response to something spontaneous and unforeseen, and then the applause you’re planning on giving, which is anticipated.”
“Really.” She’s smiling at him and he can’t tell how real it is. She seems different than the attractive woman from his periphery, still attractive but now with her voice a new horizon has opened up in her, the tinnitus at work on her voice.
“Performers play games with the audience.”
“If you say so…” She doesn’t deliver this unpleasantly. She’s leaning over to collect her coat and her no doubt expensive bag. He lets his eyes skitter across her in a preliminary way, knowing there will be further chances for studying her shape. She’s wearing a lace-sleeve brocade dress which makes her shoulders appear even tinier than they really are. The pattern of the dress is a black silk background with raised overlapping silver lily pads on top, as if floating above bottomless depths. The luster slithering across the silk and silver is very diverting to the eyes.
“I hate the idea that I would say this to a complete stranger,” she begins when she turns around, coat still not on. “But have I seen you before?”
A tiny riptide of panic washes over him, he wonders what she knows about him, his crimes. “Like how?”
“Like on TV? Have you been on the news? Like Fox? For some reason…”
“I do go on the news programs occasionally,” he says, lowering his head comically as if defeated at being found out.
She takes on an air of commanding private detective crossed with precocious child asking adorable but tough questions. “Yeah, you’re like a political analyst, right? They call you in here and there to talk about certain topics. I’m a poli sci major at Fordham and I watch all that shit like a hawk.”
Now he’s the older guy shyly trying to handle attention and fame from an irreverent younger person even though this is a dance Falkirk has done before. “I’m flattered that you recognized me. It’s never happened at the opera before…”
“But people do notice you all the time.”
“Usually they’re trying to run me down with their Priuses. Or is it Prii?”
“Stop.” Rolling eyes and playfully swiping out with her hand at his arm.
“Being on TV I’m very unpopular in certain circles.”
The cellphone whose imminent ring Falkirk dreaded during Turandot goes off instead as he is trying to be charming and self-deprecating. She answers it and once she learns who it is gives an enthusiastic squealing hello and turns away from Falkirk. He looks around at the audience members milling and gathering themselves up to go and figures this is his cue. He turns away to leave when she notices his departure and lunges to stop him with her free arm while she’s still talking, then holding up a finger indicating he should wait.
“I’m at the opera, in the Upper East Side, yeah really swanky. Okay but it kind of dragged. They take forever to die, you know. But never mind, guess who I bumped into? He was sitting right next to me!”
He’s flushed with flattery until she says into the phone, “I don’t know, hold on…” Then to him, “Who are you? What’s your name?”
He tells her, a little deflated.
“Michael Falcork. From TV! He’s on talk shows and roundtables, and panels, on big time news channels. Way above CSPAN. Isn’t that bananas? I know, maybe he can help me write a paper for Berkman…” She wrinkles her forehead and shakes her head in a mildly negative fashion, looking at Falkirk: No way, in case you’re thinking I’m serious.
It’s while she’s talking on the phone that he allows himself to really investigate her. He politely looks her up and down and admires the symmetry of her body in its black silk sheath. Her chest isn’t totally decipherable in her clothing but there is enough of a silhouette to tell that she has an outstanding sloping bust. As if to indicate that she knows what he’s looking at, she tosses her coat back onto the theater seat, changes the phone to her other hand, and swivels her body slightly. She’s looking directly at him as she listens to some serious change of subject on the other end.
He takes in her softly be twitching face and starts the inevitable process of weighing pros and cons of what he sees. She has a quite ethnic receding chin and a largish Gypsy or Italian nose, very lightly hooked, but not badly so. Her face to Falkirk suggests a Slavic village where he can spy her whole brown skin and brunette line, the human pool this Praxitelean pinup emerged from. She’s slightly snaggletooth but then so is she.
As she’s talking he considers her still attractive but he can see there is a kind of ditsy-nerd hybrid going on which he flatters himself that he can take a critical eye to.
Falkirk makes to leave again. Even though it is just a fact that he wants to put his face deep into her naked chest and motorboat it, this waiting is getting awkward. She sees him leaving and promptly ends the phone call with an “Oh, gotta go, he’s leaving.”
Another stage of her personality develops as she clicks the phone shut. “I thought I recognized you during the intermission. This probably sounds so frickin stupid but I’ve never met someone in real life who I’ve seen on TV.”
“So which version is preferable?”
“It’s not for me to have a preference one way or the other.” Her face shows a little sourness. He instantly detects he made a faux pas somehow.
“Right.”
She gathers up her things again and wears a strange face as if she’s trying to decide if something of importance is happening or not. She dispels the sourness and reaches out a hand to be shaken. “Well, it was nice meeting you. Next time you’re on TV think of all us poli sci majors in the home audience painting our toenails and curling our hair. I’ll root for your side.”
“I definitely will think of that when I sit down in front of the camera from now on.”
“Nice meeting you. Bye.”
She turns away and he has that let-down feeling of a connection broken off before it really had a chance to form. Which actually happens to him a lot. He does not follow her out of the theater via the express aisle she leaves by but instead he deliberately goes up a different aisle choked with egressing opera buffs. He never got her name but she got his. He thinks about taking a cab out to the George Washington Bridge and doing a forward dive with two-and-a-half somersaults in the pike position.
The lobby is thronged with opera people discussing how they’re going to get out of Lenox Hill which is dead at night, to them. Now that the alluring woman is ancient history an old feeling reasserts itself and supersedes his loneliness, a feeling of hopelessness and danger. Through the shifting pattern of black bodies in evening wear crossing back and forth across the lobby floor, on the other side of the large chamber he sees the man. Not the apparition that had chatted with him earlier. The actual living breathing man. Falkirk realizes he’s never seen Stillskin in a tuxedo before tonight (how’d he tie the tie?), and in fact he realizes he hasn’t seen the man that many times altogether, in any mode of dress. But it’s him, his eye-glasses full of homicidal light obscure his eyes and give him an unsettling air of seraphic self-assurance. Indeed he crosses the floor as if not taking steps but carried in some kind of dolly like Count Dracula across a movie set. Falkirk feels the aperture of time closing, his fate narrowing around him like some slow-motion trap that he lowers his head to accept…
“You know, you said something on Fox I had to ask you about.” It’s the posh college student’s voice, she’s right next to him. He looks over at her compact body, foreshortened because she is close to him and under him by several inches.
He chokes. “What’s that?”
“I figure you’re right here, before you go off into the night and I lose you for good I better take this chance to get the real deal.”
“That’s fine. That’s…totally fine,” Falkirk says, looking over at Stillskin who continues to come on like a shark through human keep, although his pace seems altered by the sight of Falkirk’s company. “I never got your name?”
“Cassie. Cassandra, but Cassie. Loznitsa.” She is oblivious to the man with no hands coming for Falkirk’s soul. “You were talking about why some people clap for some things and not for others. You’re like someone that studies that, right?”
He thinks he might be dreaming, a strange mixture of dream and terrible nightmare. To get a fan and be destroyed at the same time. Just how it’s supposed to happen it seems. “People say that, yes.”
“You said on the show something about how the GOP applauds. Versus Democrats. Republicans applaud more frequently per hour than Democrats. Research shows.”
“I think…” He’s too distracted for this even though he has always hoped it would happen. “…one of the other guests said that must be proof that Republicans believed they were right more than Democrats, and therefore they affirm that rightness by applauding regularly and often during speeches.”
“And Democrats are more timid and unsure of what they believe hence the more infrequent claps,” she said. She seems older now that she’s looking him in the eye with a challenging line of inquiry. He can see more of that Slavic heritage in her serious face.
She closes her eyes for a few seconds, then opens them and says, “But then another guest suggested, and you acted like this was a good point, that the frequency of the applause coming from the GOP was due to desperation, or an insecurity, therefore they need to repeatedly remind themselves…”
“Of something. Ah, here’s somebody I know. I was wondering where you were. Cassie, I want you to meet Paul Stillskin. Paul, this is Cassandra Loznitsa.”
“How do you do.” Stillskin looks like a different man engaging in polite niceties.
“Nice to, uh, meet you.” She doesn’t know what to do with her hands if the handshake is thwarted by the unfortunate circumstances. “What did you think of the opera, Mr. Stillskin?”
“It was quite compelling. The violence. And you?” Falkirk with a microscope eye he didn’t know he possesses scrutinizes Stillskin for hints that the man might already know this young woman, that she is another make-believe zombie sent to attach to him for some further stratagem of the blackmail plot. Is she going to be used in some tawdry way to solidify Stillskin’s hold over him? Falkirk for the first time notices that if it weren’t for the glasses Stillskin would resemble a malevolent James Taylor crossed with Belloq from Raiders of the Lost Ark.
“My heart was pounding during the parts that I recognized, the music,” Cassie says. “I’m not sure where that came from.”
Falkirk raises eyebrows and summons all his strength to play the fearless party host in control. Everything depends upon his being this person at this moment. “These bits of culture just find a way to seep right into our heads.” He turns to take in Stillskin’s bald glower and feels some courage permeate his chest. “And then when they pop up again, it’s a wonderful feeling, like dopamine entering the bloodstream.” Stillskin seems very uncomfortable and deflated, this cannot be a man who assigned Cassie on some secret mission to take him down. Falkirk sees for the first time a kind of advantage or way to pull ahead of his omnipotent tormentor.
“Cassie,” Falkirk says, all familiarity, “Paul here is trying to court me, rather forcefully I’d say—“ (here a smirk on Falkirk’s face comes from God knows where, and he sprays it on both Cassie Loznitsa and Red Stillskin, as if part of the act) “—to come and work for him on something big starting later this year. A campaign for ‘04. Very hush-hush. And will be for several months. Cassie’s one of the tribe too, she’s a political junkie like us. A wonk.”
“Oh really, a campaign,” she says, confidentially (confidently) talking shop with the older men who’ve let her into their club. “Who is it?”
Stillskin stammers and seems to be wrestling with what to say. Falkirk is watching this and is sure this must be a dream. The college student from Fordham has really disarmed the old fucker. Falkirk decides he needs to carry Cassie around with him, wear her around his neck like an amulet against fiendish evil blackmail.
“It’s Lawrence Geld,” Falkirk finally says, to no sign of recognition on Cassie’s face. “A dark horse. Very dark. He’s an economist, wrote a lot of white papers on welfare and unemployment.” Lukewarm reaction from Cassie. “It’s against Houynhnhm, for the Senate seat.”
“Wow. Whoa. You’re going against him?”
Stillskin looks pained and disarmed. Falkirk is looking to the door and hitting his forked fingers together to force his gloves on tighter before going out into the cold. “You’ll be hearing a lot about Larry Geld this time next year. Geld in ‘04. I’m heading out, Cassie, would you like to share a cab?”
The barest sliver of a pause. “Yeah, that sounds good.”
“Ok, Paul. Goodnight. Sorry we couldn’t talk. And oh, that thing? Before I agree with your proposal and give you my signature, send me all the relevant materials, and I’ll email you.” Not a whiff of their dark business in anything he said. Falkirk realizes that when everything is in the light he will be proven not only innocent but the bigger man. He heads for the door but Cassie remains standing with Stillskin for a few seconds. Falkirk is far enough away that he cannot hear what Stillskin says to the young woman before she says “It was nice to meet you, I think” and walks to Falkirk, and they head out onto the sidewalk and the cold January Manhattan night.
***
In the cab halfway through Central Park, Falkirk realizes he doesn’t have much time to make that first unbreakable connection with Cassandra Loznitsa.
“Do you know what in the world he said to me just now before we left?” she asks.
“No. Something banana-cakes, I’m guessing.”
“He said ‘I just want your extra time and your…kiss.’ What the fucking fuck? Yeah right!”
“He just falls apart at the sight of some s like you.”
“And you work with him? That’s hilarious.”
“No, I might work with him. Might. I just told him to send me the papers to get him to go away.”
“What about the race against Houynhnhm?”
“Haven’t made up my mind. Your extra time and your kiss, eh?”
She shakes her head, shaking off this crazy night. She seems amused rather than insulted or creeped out.
Once they’re out of Central Park and into the West Side, the amusement level on her face begins to brighten and increase as she prepares to come to her destination and say goodbye. The brightening aura seems to indicate that another aperture of time is closing…always closing…
“Where do you work?”
“It’s called Anatolia Turkish Cuisine. I could crawl my way there from my apartment, it’s so close. Which is both good and bad.”
“How would you like to work on a Senate campaign in a few months?”
“With The Artist Formerly Known as Creepazoid?”
“He’s really not bad when you get to know him. He just has a few quirks.”
“Just a few. What about you? You’re not even on his payroll yet, and you’re recruiting me? Listen, you’re just offering me a job because you’re trying to impress me with your power, status, and money. And it’s kind of working. But it won’t get you where you want to go.”
“Well, I’m not blind, I won’t deny it.”
“All guys say that.” She’s laughing and moving towards the door. “Like having eyes is a get out of jail free card. Actually no that’s not fair, it’s not a jail.”
“You’re very good looking, and that’s the truth. And if nothing else I would like to talk to you about it, the job. It could be a good leg-up if you want to make your way in politics from the entry level. A paid internship. It could go way up from there. I could teach you a lot.”
“I bet. Well, I have to admit I’m intrigued. I didn’t think I would meet someone at the opera tonight, sit next to a TV personality.”
“Oh no, stop calling me that,” he says, mirthfully.
The amusement has never left her face this whole time. He wonders if it ever would.
“You can let me off here,” she says to the driver. The cab pulls to a stop, she opens the door, he tells her he’s paying.
“Here’s my card. Don’t wait too long to call.”
“Why? Isn’t this gig in a few months?”
“But by then this good feeling I have may have changed. I like to get on top of an idea as soon as it comes up.”
She takes the card and makes a face as she’s absorbing the echoes of what that last sentence could have been about.
The driver doesn’t drive off until Falkirk tells him to.