They ice-skated in Rockefeller Center. They went to the Cloisters, stood at the spot where they now knew they’d first met. They drank coffee, chewed pastry. They talked of the snow, the death penalty, but of nothing so much as each other. James found himself compelled to tell Rally what she looked like, as if the mirrors she’d looked in all her life hadn’t been truthful.
“You’re beautiful,” he told her.
“No,” countered Rally.
James kissed her behind the ear. “You’re beautiful.”
To get revenge Rally told James that he was her tiger.
“I’m what?”
They were naked in Rally’s bed again. It was a Saturday evening. Rally sat up, reached to a shelf, pulled down a book. “This is my favorite poem,” she said. “ ‘Disillusionment of Ten O’clock.’ It’s by Wallace Stevens. Listen. ‘The houses are haunted by white nightgowns—’ “
“Lie back down.” James tugged her elbow.
“No, listen. ‘The houses are haunted by white nightgowns. None are green, or purple with green rings, or green with yellow rings, or yellow with blue rings.’ “
“You’re not even wearing a nightgown,” teased James.
Rally poked him. “Listen, baby. Please. I want you to.”
“All right.”
“ ‘. . . or yellow with blue rings. None of them are strange, with socks of lace and beaded ceintures. People are not going to dream of baboons and periwinkles. Only, here and there, an old sailor, drunk and asleep in his boots, catches tigers in red weather.’ There. That’s it.”
Rally tossed the book, snuggled down beside James.
James breathed her in. He folded his arms behind his head.
“So I’m the tiger,” he said.
“And I’m the drunk. The sailor.” Rally sucked on James’s neck, then stopped.
They lay with their heads on the same pillow, looking at each other.
“I used to think Patrick was my tiger,” whispered Rally.
“Oh.” James’s stomach roiled.
“Don’t be mad, baby. I’m telling you because that’s why I let him do weird things to me. Tie me up and stuff. I thought he was all unique.”
“Oh.”
“But I don’t think that anymore.” She put her finger on his chest, pressed hard. “It’s you. You’re the one.”
James closed his eyes. He wanted to fistfight Patrick Rigg, to sprint the Verrazano-Narrows, to stay right where he was, in this bed, always. He thought of Otis.
“Is that what you want me to be?” he said. “Weird?”
Rally kissed him. “No, baby.”
James looked at her. He wanted to tell her about Otis, but his heart said wait. Save it, his heart said, for an emergency.
It was a Saturday night, the second of the new year. Patrick Rigg paced in his apartment. He’d simmered for a week, tried to ignore James’s absence. He knew James was with Rally. At Minotaur’s they’d been dancing together, protected by a sea of punks, and then they’d been gone.
Patrick had tried to busy himself with work, to fill his evenings with his other women. He’d lured Crispin and Kettle into his bed one night, wheedled the two of them into feats most men only pray for. But in his heart, for seven days, grew a black, factual weed: Rally had chosen James. The sentence filled Patrick’s mind like a chant. Rally had chosen James. Rally had chosen James. Rally McWilliams, his sexiest, most stubborn and self-obsessed moll, had thrown herself at quiet, corny James.
So what? thought Patrick, still pacing. You’ve got handfuls of women. Let the bitch go.
But he couldn’t. Patrick’s soul was a fragile house of cards, and the cards were the women of his life, stacked upon each other, every one in her place. He spent all his money on his women, fondled them, manipulated them. They were all he had. He had a dead mother and a dead brother, the memory of whom haunted Patrick daily. His Manhattan acquaintances drew near him only for his parties and his dark philanthropies. So Patrick counted on his women, on their bodies and their society, the way James counted on Otis. The removal of certain peripheral distractions like Freida wouldn’t have fazed Patrick, but having another man claim certain women of his, especially Rally, tightened Patrick’s breathing. It made him feel as if he were collapsing in upon himself, losing backbone, integrity, as if the horrors and loneliness of the universe, with which Patrick had struck a delicate truce, were breaking his terms and attacking. Besides, Rally was the only one of Patrick’s women who’d met his unspoken, impossible demands. Standing before his mirror, lying bound to his bed, she’d fallen in love with herself—become enamored of her own body and soul—and, because of that, she’d grown infinitely more gorgeous and necessary to Patrick.
I made her, thought Patrick darkly. I made her what she is. And no dopey-eyed accountant is going to take her away.
Patrick grabbed his coat. Gritting his teeth, he stormed out of the Preemption, unable to shake the twitching in his legs, the wrath in his lungs, the memory of his hands on Rally’s naked stomach.
This is crazy, thought Patrick. He stalked down Broadway, tramping the grates above the Seventy-second Street subway. Below him, under the grate, were shapes, voices, the sound of a guitar.
This is crazy, thought Patrick again. But his fury was a ticker tape in his mind, and the only way to pull its plug was to use the weapon in his left breast pocket.
“I’ll always hope to change things someday,” sang a voice from below.
Patrick stopped, stared underground. Beneath the grate was a tall, dark figure holding an instrument.
“Is it me?” yelled Patrick. He stomped on the metal.
“I was wrong,” sang the man, “and you’ll belong.”
Patrick kept stomping, glaring down. “Are you singing about me?”
The figure faded in the shadows.
Patrick walked on. He headed south, toward Wall Street, toward St. Benedict’s, the church he sneaked into every weekday evening to hear a priest talk. The church was half the length of the island away, but Patrick had delirium and adrenaline in him tonight. He strode with intent, with a singleness of purpose, rarely turning his head to either side. His exhalations hurried from his mouth like phantoms, and people on the sidewalk, seeing his glare, moved aside.
I need the priest, thought Patrick. Rally chose James, and I need the priest.
Patrick wasn’t religious. He wasn’t after traditional sacraments. What he wanted was the one thing besides women that could stop him cold: the voice of Thomas Merchant. Father Merchant, the pastor of St. Benedict’s, gave sermons that somehow galvanized Patrick’s heart, sermons that, like aslap, could knock light into the space behind Patrick’s eyes. Tonight, Patrick felt he needed that light. He felt that without it, he’d pull his SIG and squeeze the trigger and somebody would go down.
So Patrick marched down the island, all the way to Wall Street. It took him two hours, but he made it to St. Benedict’s. He pushed through the doors, found the priest in the confessional, slid into the stall built for sinners. Alone, in the dark, he began to speak.
* * *
* * *
In Black
Thomas Merchant was born with a good, clear heart, but little else. He was not handsome, articulate, or muscular. He spent his boyhood in the west of Ireland, in the seaside town of Spiddal. His father built boats and his mother was a mother, but both of his parents died from a strange, virulent skin disease when Thomas was only seven. He was then sent to New York City, to Harlem, where he was raised by his three aunts, Mabel, Margaret, and Mary Jude Merchant. These three women were six-foot-tall triplet sisters, and they were thought to be fairy creatures by Harlem’s children. From their girlhood to their deathbeds the Merchant sisters had jet-black hair that fell to their waists and identical, piercing green eyes. Their heads never went gray, they never married, and they never held jobs. They lived together on the edge of a vacant lot in what had once been a furniture warehouse. They were wealthy, and rumor went that they’d sailed from
Galway in 1959 with two sacks full of gold coins. The sacks were supposedly hidden in the warehouse, and Mabel Merchant, the quietest sister and the eldest by two minutes, was supposedly the one who drew coins from the sacks. The warehouse stood on 125th Street, the main artery of Harlem, but even the hardest thieves stayed away from the place and the hope of its gold, for fear of the Merchant fairies.
Into this corner of Manhattan came Thomas Merchant, a simple boy from a fishing village across the ocean. Following the death of his parents Thomas uttered not a single word for the length of one year. He sat in the vaulted chambers of the warehouse, staring at broken looms, pianos, and wardrobes, the wooden behemoths of another age, abandoned now to darkness and cobwebs. He inhaled and found good the musty airs of these chambers. On the top floor of the warehouse was the apartment where Thomas’s aunts lived. It was a warm, cheerful series of rooms, clean and full of sunshine. In these rooms the Merchant sisters cared for Thomas every evening. They fed him hot lamb stew and washed his hair. They read him stories and sang him to sleep. But they never nagged Thomas about his silence, and during the day they let him wander the warehouse and stare at whatever he wished. They were Irish, and they understood mourning in all of its incarnations. They knew what perversions of character could arise if a child’s reckoning of the world was harried and tampered with too often by adults. As a result they didn’t enroll Thomas in a school, and on the day that Mr. Gammer, the social worker who managed Thomas’s immigration, ventured out to the warehouse, the three sisters descended arms akimbo upon the door.
“Good afternoon,” said Mr. Gammer. “May I please see Thomas?”
“You may not,” said Mary Jude. She was the sternest sister, the one who approved least of men.
“Well . . .” Mr. Gammer wore a tie that looked like a fish. “What has Thomas been up to?”
“He’s been searching his soul,” said Mabel.
“And playing a little piano,” smiled Margaret Merchant. Margaret was the friendly sister, the one most enjoying her life on earth.
“He’s been teaching himself,” added Margaret.
“Piano.” Mr. Gammer nodded approvingly, wrote something on his clipboard. “And has Thomas been mixing with other neighborhood children?”
“Good-bye,” said Mary Jude.
Thomas watched and heard this conversation from his hiding place behind a Scottish sideboard. He also hid there and watched when Jack Lance, the butcher’s son, delivered parcels of lamb and cuts of steak wrapped in white paper, or on Sundays when Brenda McMannus, the black, fifteen-year-old paper girl, came bearing The New York Times. Thomas watched Jack press bricks of lamb into Aunt Mabel’s hands, the price of the meat scrawled in blue ink on the white paper. He admired the way Brenda McMannus carved parts in her hair, the way halter tops hung from her shoulders, the way she held the bound newspaper between one wrist and one hip while she chatted with Aunt Margaret. When Thomas focused on these rituals, these small, reliable physical events, everything else in his mind faded to black. He forgot the yellow pustules that had mottled his mother’s arms, the close and stifling air of his packed transatlantic plane flight. Mostly Thomas found that if he could sink himself into a moment and trust it and feature against the black velvet curtain of his mind the one thing his eyes were beholding, then his loneliness dissolved, and he was at peace.
Thomas’s aunts noticed his single-mindedness, his alarmingly clear, constant gaze. They discussed it when Thomas wasn’t around.
“He’ll be an inventor,” predicted Margaret.
Mary Jude snorted. “He’ll scare the hell out of people is what he’ll do.”
“He’ll be a priest,” said Mabel.
At age eight Thomas began speaking again, little by little. He went to high school, played basketball, suffered puberty, enrolled at Columbia. He dated and grappled with girls, one of whom, Jocelyn Rich, rattled his heart when he was nineteen. Sustaining him through all these trials was the hermetic, honing instinct of Thomas’s mind, the ability he’d always had—on the seaside rocks of Spiddal, in his aunts’ cavernous warehouse—to rule out of his concentration everything but the object or company at hand. It was this instinct that made much of the world either sad to Thomas or evidently off-limits. For he found at a young age that very few things could endure his scrutiny. Nature could do it—trees and grass and the Hudson River could take being stared at, and Thomas spent countless happy hours of his youth sitting in Riverside Park, witnessing the breezes there, breathing in the flowers and the snows. Creatures, however, were another matter. Animals, except for the occasional, slavishly friendly dog, were as skittish as squirrels, and anxious to avoid contact with Thomas. People were no different. In high school Thomas had never minded sitting on the bench during basketball games, admiring his teammates as they leapt and streaked down the court, their arms and legs as smooth as pistons. To Thomas’s horror this staring habit prompted Coach Laverty to pull Thomas aside one day and inquire whether Thomas was a freaking queerbag homo. In similar fashion the first night that Thomas removed Jocelyn Rich’s bra, he gazed at her naked chest so long and so quietly that Jocelyn pulled the blanket up over herself.
“Come on,” she told Thomas. “Let’s go. Grab me.”
Thomas was startled by her words. He was in the presence of something lovely, namely Jocelyn, and he wanted to stay there with the loveliness, not rush to another moment.
“I’m looking at you,” he whispered.
Jocelyn scowled. “Well, don’t.”
Thomas tried to pull the blanket back off his date, but Jocelyn held it to her neck.
“Let me see you,” said Thomas.
Jocelyn rolled her eyes. “They’re breasts, Thomas. They’re just sacks of fat and milk ducts.”
Thomas felt like he’d been slapped. Nothing to him was just anything.
“I’m only a girl,” said Jocelyn curtly. “I’m not something to worship.”
“I wasn’t worshiping you,” said Thomas. “I was looking at you.”
“Well, stop it.”
Thomas tried to smile. “You smell nice,” he said. “Sort of . . . warm.”
“Thomas,” sighed Jocelyn, “are we going to screw or what?”
For Thomas it was like that with almost everybody. Not that every woman asked him to screw her, but it seemed to Thomas, especially at college, that human beings charged around at far too vicious a pace, expecting to be assessed or used or summed up very quickly. Students argued about Plato and Alfred Hitchcock, as if, after a couple of books or movies, they’d become metaphysically privy to these men’s hearts and minds. Thomas didn’t blame his peers for this habit, or label it as pretension. He just didn’t understand it. It seemed to Thomas that he belonged to some alien race, from some other planet, where the creatures sat around looking deeply into one another’s eyes, sometimes for centuries, before they dared utter a word to each other.
In fact, during his junior year at Columbia, Thomas took an acting class where the teacher made the students do just that. They had to pair off and sit cross-legged opposite each other, staring quietly into one another’s eyes for five minutes. Speaking or looking away from your partner was forbidden. Thomas was paired up with a girl named Elvetta Vandemeer, a senior who’d recently been cast as Juliet for a campus Shakespeare production, and who’d had lunch at the cafeteria with Thomas once or twice. Elvetta had a black fence of bangs across her forehead and midnight-blue eyes, and the first thing Thomas saw when he looked into those eyes was Elvetta’s pride, the pleasure she took in believing herself a tragic, stunning Juliet. But after about a minute, when the other couples in the room were starting to snigger, Thomas’s vision pierced the Juliet in Elvetta’s eyes and got a glimpse of what lay beyond.
Elvetta took a sharp breath. “What?” she whispered nervously. “Thomas, what?”
Thomas didn’t speak or blink. He was lost suddenly in the young woman before him, the blue galaxies of her fears, the vastness of her heart. Everything else went black
and Thomas stared into Elvetta, into stories that either she was imagining or he was, stories where Elvetta was tied to a rock, being devoured by a sea monster, stories where Thomas and Elvetta were naked together and she lay in his lap and he counted every hair on her head.
“Stop it,” hissed Elvetta. She didn’t want to lose, to look away. “Stop it, Thomas.”
Thomas gazed on, at another story behind Elvetta’s eyes, a story where she was holding a man by the throat.
Elvetta slapped Thomas’s face. “Stop it!”
Thomas blinked, woke from his reverie. He was back in class, seated on a hardwood stage, his cheek stinging. He rubbed his cheek, while Elvetta glared at him.
“Why did you do that?” asked Thomas.
The teacher hurried over, breathless with hope.
“Yes, why?” said the teacher.
Elvetta blushed. The whole class gathered around.
“Thomas was . . . being rude,” said Elvetta. She stood, left the class, and never spoke to Thomas again.
Thomas was stunned. He was stunned even further when Elvetta quit the Shakespeare production the day after this acting exercise.
“Why are people afraid of me?” Thomas asked his aunts. He still lived at the warehouse during his college days. It was only ten blocks from school.
“Because you aren’t afraid of anything,” said Mary Jude.
Thomas thought about this. He was drinking coffee with his aunts, playing a card game they called Sluice, a game only he and his aunts knew the rules to. It was February, and the tree branches outside the window were sleeved in ice. Thomas was twenty. Mabel was smoking a briar pipe.
“I’m not a hero,” muttered Thomas.
“I never said you were a hero.” Mary Jude snapped up a card. “I said you weren’t afraid of anything.”
“And you play the piano wonderfully,” added Margaret.
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