Christopher: A Tale of Seduction

Book by Burnett Allison

Greeting

My story, which is not mine alone, but also that of a far finer spirit, takes place in 1984. As those of you alive at the time will surely remember, this was the most important year in the realm of the literary imagination since the death of God. The reason was, of course, Mr. George Orwell's notoriously unreadable 1984, which warned of society's descent into an authoritarian hell, reeking of cabbage and old rag mats.

For decades, critics had bestowed upon Mr. Orwell's arbitrarily chosen title a profound significance, and so when the actual year finally arrived it was greeted with a collective exhalation of very bad breath. Sleeves were rolled up and typewriters shaken free of tobacco ash. In every periodical and newspaper, the novel was discussed, dissected, and reassessed. On television, pundits scoured the cultural landscape for any sign of Big Brother--a bootprint, a mustache hair, even a stray lump of scat. By spring, sales of 1984 had reached fifty thousand copies a day.

Of course, none of this meant anything. (So little truly signifies in the realm of the literary imagination.) For most people, 1984 was just another year: a ribbon of time marked by a seam or two--a birth, a divorce, a slow, stinky death--and as soon as it had passed it was all but entirely forgotten.

But I confess I am not most people.

For better or worse, 1984 changed me into something that quite closely resembles a human being.
--B. K. Troop

January

On Sunday, January 1, 1984, Manhattan awoke to find itself buried under a cliche--a blanket of white. For the next few hours, before a million tires got hold of it, the streets of the City would look, dare I say it, almost pretty. I had a mad whim to fling myself facedown in Times Square and execute a flabby snow angel, but I resisted the temptation and set myself to the matter at hand--boxing up my life. The moving van was set to arrive at noon.

Packing was no small task. I had lived in that basement apartment for the past twenty-three years and had picked up, in that time, a vast embarrassment of rare and beautiful objects. If the choice had been mine, I would certainly have avoided this day forever, but, just a week before, my beloved friend and landlady, Sasha Buchwitz, had nudged me awake with the imaginary handle of an imaginary hatchet, explaining that Satan was standing naked on her fire escape, demanding that she cut off my head. (Hers had been a spirited twenty-year battle with paranoid schizophrenia and clinical depression; she was losing.) I scampered out the very next morning and, greasing a few palms, secured for myself a one-bedroom apartment in a tenement just a few blocks away.

The doorbell rang as I taped shut the final box. I stood by with pride and watched as my life was whisked away on the shoulders of giants. The transition went off without a hitch--save for the queasy glare I was thrown by one of the removalists (a strapping, high-buttocked Dominican named Santos) in reply to my suggestion that he help christen my new digs by spending the night. His colleagues dragged him away by the elbows, and I set to work.

Sixteen hours later, just after cock's crow, I slid the last of my vast antiquarian library into its alphabetized place. What had once been an empty apartment was now a home. As I had yet to sleep a wink and am highly allergic to dust mites, I descended to the street, lost in a bleary, malevolent haze. My goal, a Denver omelet and Bloody Mary at my beloved Parnassus Diner, followed by a twelve-hour snooze.

I little suspected what the Fates held in store.

We nearly collided as he ran up the marble steps three at a time. He was of medium height with longish black hair and equally dark eyes. His head was large, well shaped. Our conversation was limited. "Oh, excuse me," we both said as we passed. It was only I, however, who glanced around for a peek--he was slender and strong all over. The fact that he did nothing to confirm that I was flagrantly neither all over, I took to be an ill omen, but one which I had come to expect whenever my fancy was stoked.

Our more substantial introduction came the next afternoon when I cunningly emerged from my lair at the precise moment that he entered his.

"Hello!" I said, stopping him in his tracks.

"Oh. Hi. I guess we're neighbors." He flashed the shy smile of an intelligent person who has just stated the obvious. And it was obvious--our doors were just three feet apart.

"I suppose so," I replied cleverly. "My name is B. K. Troop. What's yours?"

"Chris Ireland," he said, extending a smallish hand. Even in the dim light of the hallway I could see that he was a nail-biter; thankfully, the kind in whom vanity trumps self-loathing, which is to say that his nails were short enough to lift my eyebrows, but not turn my stomach. We shook. His hand was cold. No surprise, Manhattan was in the grips of an Arctic freeze.

"The pleasure's all mine," I murmured. And it was. His features were fine and pretty, his complexion faintly olive, and his smile so pearly white that I, as one deprived of dental care until the age of fourteen, could only marvel.

"Rumor has it that there's a superb Greek diner in the area," I crooned. "Do you know where?" I knew exactly where the Parnassus was, of course (a playful snapshot of me was tacked above the cash register), but I wanted to prolong our intercourse.

"Sure," the boy said. "Right on the corner. But I'm not sure it's superb." Then he smiled at his door in a way that said, "Enough, ye pest, be gone."

I smiled back in a way that said, "You haven't seen the last of me, dearie. Not by a long shot."

I hurried off to the Parnassus, where, wolfing down a piping-hot Welsh rarebit, I told my dearest friend, Cassandra Apopardoumenos, all about my meeting with the fetching lad who lived next door.

A less worldly waitress would have said "good luck" or "fingers crossed," but not the Athens-born Cassandra, who, over the course of a rich and varied life, had become a veritable storehouse of signs, charms, divinations, and other quaint prospects of love.

"Do yourself a favor," she instructed. "Get yourself a four-leaf clover. When you swallow it, think of the kid, and you'll end up marrying 'im."

I choked, but passed it off as a laugh. Inwardly, I was seized by the oddest distortion. The thought of marrying anyone had always been anathema to me. There was no limit to my hatred of such a picture. And, yet, Cassandra's words had delighted me.

"Marry him?" I said. "Good God! I only want to seduce him!" She answered with a knowing smile. "Besides," I snickered, "where on earth would I find a four-leaf clover this time of year?"

Weeks passed before Christopher and I spoke again--which is not to imply that in the meantime I did not get to know him much better. The wall that separated our apartments was made not of brick or stone, but of some contemporary amalgam of plaster dust and spit. I overheard quite a bit of what went on in his cell. Plus, as a committed smoker of cigarettes, I left my front door ajar during waking hours, rendering me privy to a great deal of what Mr. Marcel Proust would have called la vie d'escalier.

The following is what I learned, or, to be more accurate, deduced. First, that my young neighbor was a reader. I rarely heard his television, except at seven o'clock on weekdays when he parked himself with a self-cooked meal before the grim journalistic stylings of Mr. Daniel Rather. The rest of the time, silence. And what else does a young solitary with flashing Mediterranean eyes, vivid with intelligence, do hour upon hour in a silent apartment but read?

Second, he was chaste. For not once in those weeks did he entertain a single visitor or spend an evening out. With one exception--every weekday afternoon teenagers came a callin'. Which led me to my third conclusion: Christopher was a tutor. I did not learn what sort of tutor until one afternoon when I met on the steps an icicle-nosed Medusa with big bosoms and hundred-dollar sunglasses (then, a hefty sum), who, as we passed, dropped a spiral notebook at my feet. I picked it up and handed it back, but not before I had glimpsed, inside, an alphabetized list: ablution, abomination, abrogate. The mystery was solved: Christopher prepared youngsters for the verbal section of their standardized college admittance tests.

"Thanks," the beast snarled.

"Don't mention it." I smiled, but my heart already ached for the lad. The only thing more dreary than teaching is teaching something useless.

Fourth, I guessed that my neighbor was an aspiring writer. One afternoon he lugged past my open door three reams of typing paper. The fact that there had yet to emanate from his apartment the clack of a typewriter brought me to my last deduction. He was, among writers, the most unfortunate sort: the hopelessly blocked. A storyteller without a story. Of course, it was possible that he wrote by hand, but I doubted it. He did not seem like the pretentious sort.

On Tuesday, January 24, I reached the limits of my patience and, unannounced, applied my knuckles to his door. In Manhattan, such an act is as rare and startling as a pheasant-sighting in Central Park. I heard a rustling of trousers and a slow, creaking advance to the peephole. I stepped closer and flashed my oyster-grays. A moment later, the door opened, sliding back a steel pole that extended from the lock to a metal divot in the pine floor.

"Hi," he said shyly.

"Good afternoon, Master Ireland. I would like to invite you to dinner. My place. Tonight."

I set my jaw, daring him to rebuff me. I saw it all--his desire to do exactly that, his suspicion that I would put up a fight, and his final surrender to neighborly civility.

"Oh. Okay. Su...