“Oh… sure…” Lindsay was a little confused.

“How old are you?” I asked her. I gestured at the empty space in the booth beside Perkus, but she didn’t dare. “Have you ever seen a Montgomery Clift movie?”

She brightened. “I saw The Misfits!”

You’re seeing them now, I wanted to tell her. We’re hoping to enlist you into their company. Instead I said, “Did you know Montgomery Clift was buried in Prospect Park?”

“Can you bring some mustard?” said Perkus stonily.

“Oh, right, you always have mustard, sorry!” Off Lindsay scurried to find some. I suddenly imagined what it might have been like for Oona Laszlo, in her glue-girl phase, apprenticed to a little tin god of guerrilla criticism, one not yet tempered by a decade of broadsider’s block. Even tempered he was obnoxious.

“Hey, Colonel Mustard,” I whispered. “You’ve really got her dodging bullets. Lighten up.”

Perkus only gritted his teeth at me, a cartoon of impotent rage. Lindsay returned with a ramekin of yellow mustard, and then gamely ignored the rotten vibes, which were as undeniable between us as the chocolate smell (unless, that is, you were immune to chocolate smells). “You’re… Chase Unperson, aren’t you?”

“Insteadman, yes, that’s me.”

“Sorry-Insteadman.” Lindsay slapped her forehead. She was shaping into one of the all-time apologizers. Perkus, meanwhile, was having a kind of fit. It was lucky his mouth wasn’t full, or bits of beef and bun would have flumed through his nose. “Un-person,” he sneezed in bitter hilarity. “Chase Unperson!” He still hadn’t looked at Lindsay directly, or what would pass for directly in his ambidextrous gaze.

“Funny,” I said, trying to absorb and neutralize Perkus’s hostility. Lindsay, I could see, was only going to take anything in the air between me and Perkus as her fault. Too late. The default deference in her role as waitress, given the obvious distress in Perkus, would prevail. She shrunk away, giving me a funny helpless smile. Perkus and I were left to the travesty of our steaming mounds of food, spoiled under clouds of chocolate and ill manners, spoiled, really, under Perkus’s outright and indignant fury. It helped nothing that we’d been there, in our regular booth with our regular order, so often before. Hemmed in by ghosts of our more innocently garrulous selves, the days of the discovery of our friendship, early September, felt like years ago now. We gnawed the cheeseburgers despondently, under the regime of all we couldn’t say.

I looked on Perkus, for the first time, as a creature formed of anger. That was how I’d characterized Richard Abneg to myself, but I’d reserved the judgment for Richard, blinding myself to the essence the two had in common. In truth, there was anger enough to go around. I knew I should ask myself (Strabo Blandiana, in one of his post-needle talks, would have gently insisted I do so) why I made my world out of these kind of persons. Who else struck me as angry in my vicinity just lately? Oona Laszlo, with her acid flippancy. I ached for her. We’d planned to meet up after my dinner with the Danzigs-Oona liked to be more accidental, but I’d persuaded her to be my reward for getting through the evening.

Lindsay surprised me. As she set down our check-Perkus had signaled to her for it even as he wolfed the last bite of his burger, and I’d only unpacked and rearranged my own-she said, “If you guys want to party sometime-”

“Oh-” I began.

She tucked one of the restaurant’s cards under my place mat. “Here’s my number. Or just, you know, look for me here.” I shouldn’t have been surprised at all. She was a waitress, after all, on a fading afternoon, and, in the Of Human Bondage way of waitresses, she’d grab any ticket out.

Perkus slapped down a twenty, really slapping the table, punctuation to his mute wrath. Lindsay and I both looked up shocked. “Pack up his burger to go,” said Perkus tightly.

“Oh, that’s okay-” I began.

“For Biller.”

“Oh.”

On the sidewalk, Perkus turned from me, his gloveless knuckles buried in the pockets of his suit, almost, it appeared to his knees, the white sack containing my leftovers tucked into his elbow. The chocolate wind howled, the early winter still so fierce, the sky darkening at four. I drifted after him, trying to demonstrate we were together on the sidewalk. He muttered, “You’re something, Chase, you’re really something.”

“It’s better than not even trying, Perkus. She wants to ‘party’ with us. Who knows?”

“She thought you wanted her, Chase.”

“No, no.” I shook my head, but he didn’t see it, pressing on ahead toward the corner of Eighty-fourth, toward his building. I didn’t really want to keep him outside without a coat for long, but I hurried after. “She could tell you liked her, Perkus, anybody knows that a friend often plays the go-between-”

“Anybody knows nothing, Chase. You don’t see yourself, you don’t see the way women cast their eyeballs at you like a kid shooting marbles on the sidewalk.”

At least I’d sparked some irate brilliance in him, I thought, instead of the moribund bovine cheeseburger-chewer he’d been inside Jackson Hole. Perkus couldn’t be so intimidated by his waitress, it didn’t seem possible.

“You’ve got women falling out of open windows, out of trees, you’ve got women on the moon, Chase. You don’t have any idea how it might be different for me. You actor, you utter unperson.”

“Now, that’s not-”

“How can you fail to see your hostility toward me? I mean, Montgomery Clift? Please.”

Hostility? I’d been thinking I’d just uncovered Perkus’s. Would I always be just one insight away? Insight was an onion, I doubted there was anything but layers.

“I’ve been trying to help you,” Perkus said. “And this is the way you repay me. Well, you’re a hopeless case anyhow. I wash my hands.”

Perkus helping me! At least I understood that everything was inside out and upside down. Rather than argue with him like a couple going through a breakup on the street, I elected to silently agree. I was a hopeless case.

“Do you ever look in the mirror, Chase?”

“Sure,” was my idiot reply.

“How convenient that you’d mention Montgomery Clift to her. You resemble Clift, you know. Before the accident.”

Perkus somehow managed to make this seem a warning, or even a threat. In his view every Clift, I suppose, was scheduled for a face-rearranging encounter with a windshield or dashboard. There being no happy medium between innocence and jaw-smashing, ruinous disenchantment. Now I felt my own hostility around me like a burred skin. Also I tried on my despair. For Perkus, I was cast permanently as fool. Maybe I was one, I’d had to consider it before. Yet I’d always preferred to think I was a harmless fool, at least. Who knows, maybe I’d been lasciviously poaching on my friend’s burger waitress. I might be that irresponsible, it seemed to me now. In point of fact I was reeling, rudderless, without a compass, high on phantom chocolate and infidelity, ignoring the phone, voice mail piling up, in deranged avoidance of the Janice cancer crisis. I ought to be stifling tears at a press conference somewhere, giving evidence of my loving support in this crisis. Perkus was surely right to be mad. I must be acting out.

We stood at his entrance, in a penumbra of stubbed butts from the previous night’s sidewalk smokers. A single half-full martini glass stood perched on the curb. Inside, a tuner was refurbishing Brandy’s piano, the plinked notes groaning sharper as he tightened its bolts. I offered Perkus the card on which Lindsay had scribbled her digits. He didn’t budge hands from pockets, only glared. He wouldn’t even go for his key until I was safely away, and so we hovered in stalemate, me in a coat and scarf, Perkus shivering in his suit jacket, its two buttons pathetically done up, covering nothing. The white sack containing my burger-Biller’s burger-rustled in the crook of his arm.