The Fugitivities, стр. 17

5

In New York everything that matters occurs as part of a “scene.” Octavio had made inroads in the film scene and these networks overlapped significantly with the adjacent literary one. Jonah would pick him up after his shift got out at the Reggio, and they would fortify themselves at a local dive before making an appearance at an apartment in cozy book-lined apartment in Cobble Hill or Fort Greene or a chic loft in Tribeca. One of the bigger events of the season was the launch party for a new lit mag with a radical name and a sleek green cover. Octavio was tight with one of the founding editors whom he had known from his school days. The comrades funding the publication and staffing the key positions on its masthead reflected the city’s superconducting private school to Ivy League pipeline. The word on the street was that the most talented writers would be gravitating to its pages, attracted by the considerable sums on offer for fairly predictable content and by the “hot” interns prominently featured on the magazine’s elegant, minimalist website.

The launch took place at the magazine’s new offices, located in a refashioned Greenpoint warehouse right on the East River. Octavio and Jonah rolled up a little after eleven, entering into a scene that was sumptuous and well attended. The guests were balkanized into tiny groupuscules, each in their corners, accentuating the negative space of the floor plan, which in city psychology was also, of course, a supreme assertion of luxury.

All around the open cross section of the loft were the faces of the sad young literary men, each in their own way terribly preoccupied with the unbearable whiteness of being. Jonah knew them. Not personally, but almost by osmosis; and he felt a measure of ironic sympathy for their plight. They had self-consciously constructed themselves as a force for good. They had good politics, went to good schools (where he had first crossed paths with the tribe); they were good readers of the best reviews (which they hoped to emulate and rival), copies of which further advantaged a vintage mid-century credenza. They all wanted change and hated racism: principally in politics, and geographically in the vast hinterlands (starting in Long Island and New Jersey). The greatest shame of all was the racism in their own families. Sometimes, a good few drinks in, they wanted to confess those unpardonable horror stories in hot breathy convulsions that Jonah had some practice in compassionately, but firmly, evading.

He felt for them because what could be wrong with them, really? They wanted what he wanted, more or less. To see good ideas and good art triumph, especially their own. The only problem was that the ascendant power blocs didn’t seem to care a whit what they said. Those with the real power—the consulting firm types, the I-Bankers, the DC apparatchiks and the math majors gone to Wall Street that they knew from college—wanted art, if they ever thought about it at all, to be a larger, more expensive version of a desktop background. They were too busy rigging up massive systems that would liquidate the old printing-press jobs to worry about what was being said by the last cohort to have them.

The sad young literary men were the most despised men of their time. They held a declining share of even those few perches they had once held like grand viziers in the days of the Plimptons, the Mailers, the Updikes; when shuttling between mistresses in Connecticut and dipping down to Greenwich Village to drink with famous war correspondents was all in a day’s work. Most of the top jobs in their circles were held by women now, and the proclivities associated with fashionable narcotics were starting to be scrutinized and sometimes even openly deplored. There was still money, of course, but without status it was an enfeebled collateral glare. They formed, ironically enough, a genuinely besieged class; and presumably in their minds they constituted an oppressed one too, since whatever largesse and goodwill among the Midtown Maecenases remained was reserved strictly for identities that would appear charitably treated upon its disbursement. Since they would never be in that number, the spoils of a wilting branch had to be fought over ever more bitterly. It was the main reason such events were to be avoided. Over a shitty mixed drink, the knives come out: friends and colleagues cruelly humiliating each other while desperately trying to appear relaxed and popular. There was no direct danger to Jonah in this; he would be safely ignored. Unless he spoke up. But to what end? It was perfectly typical for him to spend a great deal of these tense soirées finding ways to say nothing at all.

Instead, he listened. To the cornered woman agreeing overenthusiastically; to the political argument; to the chopped ticker-tape phrases indexing the fait divers of industry gossip. Apparently, African child-soldier narratives were trending and there was speculation that one of them might snag a Pulitzer. The perennial topic, however, remained real estate. And on this point, there was much woe. For it is a truth generally observed that everywhere white money moves, it does so in the same settler-colonial pattern. Like so many before them, the sad young literary men had attempted to desert from the advancing army. They had crossed the river and set up camp in the desolate streets of postindustrial Brooklyn, only to find like Dances with Wolves that the army was close on their heels. Within a few years, the frontier would