A Visit From the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan [40]
“Scotty, man, how goes it?” Bennie said, patting me warmly on the back as we shook hands. “Sorry to keep you waiting. Hope Sasha took good care of you.” He gestured at the girl I’d been dealing with, whose carefree smile could be roughly translated as: He’s officially not my problem anymore. I gave her a wink whose exact translation was: Don’t be so sure, darling.
“Here, c’mon back to my office,” Bennie said. He had his arm around my shoulders and was steering me toward a hallway.
“Hey wait—I forgot!” I cried, and ran back to get the fish. As I slung the bag from the coffee table into my hands a little fish juice flew from one corner, and the corporate types both jumped to their feet as if it were nuclear runoff. I looked over at “Sasha,” expecting to find her cowering, but she was watching it all with a look I would have to call amused.
Bennie waited for me by the hall. I noticed, with satisfaction, that his skin had gotten more brown since high school. I’d read about this: your skin gradually darkens from all those cumulative years of sunlight, and Bennie’s had done so to a point where calling him Caucasian was a stretch.
“Shopping?” he asked, eyeing my bundle.
“Fishing,” I told him.
Bennie’s office was awesome, and I don’t mean that in the male teenage skateboarding sense—I mean it in the old-fashioned literal sense. The desk was a giant jet black oval with a wet-looking surface like the most expensive pianos have. It reminded me of a black ice-skating rink. Behind the desk was nothing but view—the whole city flung out in front of us the way street vendors fling out their towels packed with cheap, glittery watches and belts. That’s how New York looked: like a gorgeous, easy thing to have, even for me. I stood just inside the door, holding my fish. Bennie went around to the other side of the wet black oval of his desk. It looked frictionless, like you could slide a coin over the surface and it would float to the edge and drop to the floor. “Have a seat, Scotty,” he said.
“Wait,” I said. “This is for you.” I came forward and gently set the fish on his desk. I felt like I was leaving an offering at a Shinto shrine on top of the tallest mountain in Japan. The view was tripping me out.
“You’re giving me a fish?” Bennie said. “That’s a fish?”
“Striped bass. I caught it in the East River this morning.”
Bennie looked at me like he was waiting for a cue to laugh.
“It’s not as polluted as people think,” I said, sitting down on a small black chair, one of two facing Bennie’s desk.
He stood, picked up the fish, came around his desk, and handed it back to me. “Thanks, Scotty,” he said. “I appreciate the thought, I really do. But a fish is bound to go to waste, here at my office.”
“Take it home and eat it!” I said.
Bennie smiled his peaceful smile, but he made no move to retrieve the fish. Fine, I thought, I’ll eat it myself.
My black chair had looked uncomfortable—I’d thought, lowering myself onto it, This is going to be one of those hellish chairs that makes your ass ache and then go numb. But it was without question the most comfortable chair I had ever sat in, even more comfortable than the leather couch in the waiting room. The couch had put me to sleep—this chair was making me levitate.
“Talk to me, Scotty,” Bennie said. “You have a demo tape you want me to hear? You’ve got an album, a band? Songs you’re looking to have produced? What’s on your mind.”
He was leaning against the front of the black lozenge, ankles crossed—one of those poses that appears to be very relaxed but is actually very tense. As I looked up at him, I experienced several realizations, all in a sort of cascade: (1) Bennie and I