American Subversive

by David Goodwillie

  It was late now. Cressida’s party was getting sloppy. Touché had returned with our drinks and was nodding toward the dance floor.

  “Look,” he said.

  The lights were low. The DJ had hit her stride, and the crowd was responding—a mass of drunken, gyrating bodies trying to ward off impending middle age. And now I saw her, our dear hostess, shimmering in the middle of it all. She was being spun around by a fleshy editor from the Post, and as the song ended and their bodies came together, he suddenly dipped her one last time, pausing momentarily as her hair scraped the floor. Cressida came up laughing, grabbed the low-cut front of her top, and gave him a hug. A few nearby couples clapped.

  “She knows you’re watching,” Touché said, taking a sip of his drink. “So much fun, relationships.”

  “If that’s what you’d call it.”

  “Let me guess. You’re fighting about her latest column.”

  “Have you read it?”

  “I read them all,” my friend said, trying, and failing, to stifle a smile. “Dissecting the details of your hapless love life is one of my life’s great pleasures.”

  “So you’d be pissed off, too.”

  “I wouldn’t be involved with a dating columnist in the first place. Even the lovely Cressida. What did you expect?”

  “She swore she’d never write about us.”

  “Aidan, come on. I think deep down you like what she does, the power of her pen, so to speak. Of course, the power of your pen seems more the issue these days.”

  “Fuck off.”

  “Ah, yes . . .”

  We’d gravitated to the two large, south-facing windows, open wide to the breezy night, and were looking out across the balconies and rooftops of downtown Manhattan. Below us the bruised and cobbled streets of the old West Side sagged uncomfortably under the weight of discovery. Once a host to blood-spattered union men and long-limbed transvestites, the Meatpacking District was now a vulgar orgy of development, the titivated epicenter of New York’s grotesque and tragically hip. Even Touché, who was unbothered by things that drove most people to distraction, muttered as he gazed down on the midnight hordes stampeding past in denim and heels and highlights. Had these people been impacted by the bombing four nights before? Or had the news already been forgotten, brushed aside in favor of the more digestible, the more personally affecting, the more assuredly insignificant? I’m sorry if I seem bitter. You see, I know the answer.

  The bomb went off on the deserted fifteenth floor of 660 Madison Avenue at 3:45 a.m., on Sunday, August 22 (almost three months ago exactly). The building, as you know, houses Barneys, and as New York awoke that rainy morning to the searing image of a burning office tower, it was easy to believe the worst. Television: I remember so clearly that shaky helicopter camera panning in on the blast site. The hole was two stories high and almost as wide, and through the smoke I could just make out the hollow offices inside. It was all so familiar: the dead cell phones, the buzzing fear, the desperate need for information, and something else . . . an odd sort of pride. We were a city again, united through tragedy despite our countless divisions. But New York—or at least Manhattan—also presented a unique problem of geography. I was making coffee in my West Village studio, a short block from the Hudson, when I turned on the TV and saw the news. Instinctively, I went to the window and looked out at the sliver of visible river, wondering, if it came to that, how the hell I’d get across. It was something all of us on that overcrowded island had secretly pondered, because there was always the chance that more might come.

  But more didn’t come. The morning progressed apace. The mayor delivered a few steely-eyed assurances, then left the airwaves to the talking heads, the experts of our age, already spilling over with speculation. It was the beginning of a new battle; it was the end of an old war. It was us; it was them. For a while it was even spontaneous combustion—a kind of manhole explosion in the air. At some point a broader target was identified: consumerism. Could there be a better symbol of flawed Western values than Barneys, that most famous of high-end department stores? The war of civilizations had reached America’s upper classes—our preening, clucking socialites—and there’d be no ignoring it now. This, then, became the story, until late morning, when a fellow blogger, a guy I vaguely knew, wrote in a post that he’d recently been to Barneys with his girlfriend, and from what he remembered, the store didn’t go up fifteen floors.

  In the days that followed, the hole in the building became a voyeuristic extravaganza. I took the E-train uptown to see for myself, and there it was, a giant black cavity, taunting the city with the expanding mystery of its origins. Yet Touché and I had yet to mention the event. That’s what friendship with him was like. A bomb, quite literally, goes off, shakes the foundation of our urban lives, and he’s making eyes at a DJ across a hazy room.

  “She’s good,” he said, as some synthesized Joy Division knock-off crescendoed through the loft. Or maybe it was Joy Division.

  “So what have you been up to?” I asked.

  “Taking flying lessons.”

  “Really? You’re becoming a pilot?”

  “I already am. I got my license last month.”

  “Why?”

  “Ah, Aidan, it’s what we do. We children of the wealthy are doomed by the long shadows of our forefathers to lives of insignificance. And so we learn to pass the time with material pleasures, embrace the hobbies of our birthright—boats and planes, horses and golf. How else to forget the failures of our class?”

  “Oh.”

  “I’m kidding,” Touché said, laughing. “A joke, you know? Maybe not so funny. My father flew when he was younger. And my uncles. And I thought if I learned, it might . . . it might help back home.”

  I didn’t push him further; Touché was always guarded about the situation in Venezuela. But even the silence worked in his favor, fueling rumors of his secret second life. Legends grow from a lack of information.

  He sipped his drink and looked at me.

  “What?” I said.

  “Why don’t you ever ask me about it?”

  “Venezuela? Because you’d never answer.”

  “You know what I think?” said Touché. “I think sometimes you . . . how do I put this . . . you buy too fully into the American narrative. And when opposing ideas are introduced, foreign ideas, you can’t accept them as potentially valid.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Oh, forget it. We don’t have to get into this.”

  “Into what?” I said.

  “A real conversation.”

  “Do you think I’m not capable?”

  “I think you’re not willing,” he replied. “And why should you be? You’ve found a place for yourself, a certain niche, even if it’s . . . again let me say this right . . . not undeserved but perhaps a bit inconsequential.”

  “Are you talking about my life or yours?”

  “Ah, yes. Maybe both. Maybe everyone’s.” He looked out over the party again. “The busy lives of the eternally hip.”

  “Sounds like a book title.”

  “Except the eternally hip never get around to writing books.”

  “Just blogs?”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Touché said.

  “It is what you meant.”

  “I’m talking about me. What my life’s been like for too long. But you. You have, what, thirty thousand people who read what you write every day?”

  “More like fifty.”

  “Fine. An impressive following. But you can get that many people to go watch a preacher, or professional wrestling.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “That it doesn’t matter. That we focus too much on statistics. On small details. Americans sit too close to the television.” Touché laughed. “I’m sorry. I’m getting wrapped up in everything that’s happened this week, and we’re here to have—”

  “You boys should always greet the hostess when you come to a party,” said a voice behind u
s. We both turned. Cressida was standing there, flush from the dance floor. Her auburn bangs were matted to her forehead, and her halter top clung like a wet stamp to her pale, freckled frame. Cressida wasn’t traditionally beautiful—her lips were too thin, her breasts got lost in bras—but with her curious eyes, her small button nose, and her almost perfect English ass, she could be quite stunning in specific moments.

  “A vision,” said Touché, kissing her theatrically on both cheeks. “And you must meet my friend Aidan. He was just asking about you.” But Cressida wasn’t playing along, so Touché held up his empty cup. “I’ll let the two of you get reacquainted,” he announced, and with that he drifted off in the general direction of the dance floor.

  “He’s such an asshole,” I said.

  “You love him.” Cressida was looking straight at me—questioning, considering, accusing, all at once. Then she blinked. “What’s wrong with you? You’ve been glaring at me all night. You can’t come over and say hello?”

  “Not if you can’t invite me in the first place. It’s so great to find out about your girlfriend’s party from someone else.”

  She rolled her eyes, a habit I hated (although when I’d said as much, months before, she replied that eye-rolling was what I did for a living, one blog post at a time). Someone called her name, and she looked up and blew a kiss to a departing couple. When she turned back around, her smile had evaporated. “Aidan, can we try not to ruin the night? It’s been a hard enough week already. It’s all hands on deck at the paper. Dozens of reporters, hundreds of leads . . . all leading nowhere. I’ve been at the office late every night. I must look a right mess.”

  “You haven’t called once.”

  “There hasn’t been time.”

  “There’s always time. You said it yourself in one of your fine columns on commitment.”

  “Stop it.” She moved closer, clasping her arms loosely around my waist. Then she looked at me again. This time the bravado was gone, and I could see how exhausted, how fetchingly vulnerable she was under that dusting of freckles and makeup.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered, through strands of damp hair, and I was, though for what, exactly, I wasn’t sure. Fighting, I guess. Stubbornness. Selfishness. Hell, when aren’t we sorry?

  I don’t want to make this sound overly dramatic. This was hardly the height of romance. We were just two people on the fringes of a party, made small by sound and circumstance, but—and I keep thinking cinematically as I recall that night—if the camera had panned in close, it would have caught something genuine. Though I wouldn’t call it love. We were too far along for that.

  “Stop looking at me,” she said.

  “But you look nice.”

  “Nice?”

  “Yes. Nice. Sexy. Beauti—”

  “We need to talk.”

  “I know.”

  She cleared her throat and gazed outside. “What do you want?”

  It was the worst kind of question, and it grew in the silence that followed. There were a thousand answers—all correct, but none quite right.

  “I want to have dinner tomorrow night,” I said.

  She looked surprised. “Okay, fine, but I have to work late again.”

  “What exactly do they have you doing?”

  “I don’t know. Chasing scraps. Not even scraps. The metro desk is a mob scene, which means I probably won’t have to write a column this month.”

  “Oh, too bad,” I said, but she ignored the comment.

  “There’s just so little information, something has to break. I mean, how can someone succeed at—that’s not the right word—but you know what I’m trying to say. How can a person plant a bomb, completely undetected, inside a well-secured office building in the middle of Manhattan? Do you know how many security cameras there are on Madison Avenue?”

  “We’re still in the early days,” I said.

  “But there’s been nothing. And not a peep from the FBI either. Oh, listen to us, prattling on like everyone else. We throw a party to give people a few hours of fun, and look, we’re all still working.”

  The room came back to us then, puncturing the moment, what was left of it. Cressida suddenly seemed unfamiliar, like someone I knew only casually. People were hovering nearby, waiting to talk to her, to say hello or good-bye. She had to go. We kissed, lingering for a moment, but no longer.

  “Okay, tomorrow night then,” she said, and waded back into the scrum.

  I made my way to the bar and ordered a beer. The party had peaked and was coming down the other side. It was a weeknight after all, and we weren’t so young anymore. Early thirties, midthirties, a few even older. We had entered the second stage of city living. These days we checked our watches, wary of the critical difference between one and three in the morning. These days we agreed with each other more than we used to, if only to avoid awkwardness or argument. And these days we betrayed one another, too. With women, with men, with work. Our close friends—from childhood, from college, from those first anxious years in New York—had moved away or melted into marriage. Our new friends were hungrier, more successful, a bit ruthless. We’d all been here a long time now.

  I was drunk and floating, group to group, like everyone else. No one cared at this hour about listening. The music was still loud. People were making out. I walked to the bathroom but the line was too long. Where once we laid our drugs out on coffee tables, now we sniffled and fidgeted as we waited to do them alone. Why hadn’t Cressida asked me to stay the night? Maybe she’d tried and I’d missed the signal. No, there had been no signal. I looked across the room at the DJ. She was doing a shot with another girl. Had Touché gone home? Maybe I should go home. Cut the proverbial losses.

  Then I saw my boss, Derrick Franklin. He was holding court near the front door. I turned back toward the bar, but it was too late. I’d been spotted. Derrick waved me over with a sly grin, followed by an aside to his older male companions. They laughed, too readily. Money people, I thought.

  “Aidan, you’re out late,” he said, making a big deal of looking at his watch. “Collecting material, I hope.”

  Derrick found this sort of thing amusing. I—and the rest of his blogging empire—found it exasperating. But he signed the paychecks, so I stood there and endured fifteen torturous minutes of Roorback anecdotes and Cressida jokes—all of them at my expense. When the talk finally shifted to weightier matters, I excused myself and ducked into Cressida’s empty bedroom. My phone had been buzzing all night with e-mails, so I shut the door and turned on her computer.

  Blogging was a business, at least for me, and I was contractually obligated to produce at least a dozen well-researched posts a day, the first by 8:30 a.m. For this I received a modest salary and health insurance, but the real benefits weren’t so quantifiable. If Roorback wasn’t New York’s most popular blog strictly by numbers, it was certainly one of its most essential; the people who read it were the city’s new bourgeois, the complex circuitry of the information age (and I, a kind of hidden conductor). Because of Roorback I now had access to a New York I’d only read about before. Touché’s New York. Cressida’s New York. A New York of public names, private clubs, and the kind of parties that made the papers. It’s funny: you search forever for success, and then, as soon as you stop trying so hard, you wake up one morning and suddenly you’re somebody. Of course, you also remain the person you were, and for me that meant in debt. I was thirty-three years old, had $35,000 in unpaid student loans, and $1,200 in my checking account. In life’s slower moments—on subways or in bed—these facts momentarily caught up with me, until I got to where I was going or fell safely asleep. I’d convinced myself that living paycheck to paycheck was some kind of martyr’s life, the only true way to experience New York as a young man. Implicit in that lie, of course, was the assumption that my situation was temporary, that being mildly impoverished was only a phase. Except the phase had settled in, become steadfast, enduring.

  Cressida’s laptop was coming to life. Lights and beeps
, a soft whir. I looked around the room. She’d been here three years, and still it felt only half lived-in. The walls were bare. Her books were stacked in a corner on the floor. She’d made an effort to clean up, but that meant lumping clothes into piles, kicking shoes under the bed. Only her desk was neat, a few folders to one side of the computer, a collection of recent clips on the other. I picked up the one on top, her latest column, and skimmed it, my eyes landing hard on the all-too-familiar sentences.

  Something has come between us, and it’s never been more evident than in the moments before sleep. Once, these were ours, together, but now the literary has replaced the libidinal, and the stuff of rainy weekend mornings—books and lazy crosswords—has become the focus of our bedroom nights. “What’s wrong with me, Jack?” That’s what I want to scream as I lie there beside him, feigning interest in some magazine of my own, but really reading the same page over and over again, like an obsessive child, unable to concentrate on anything—

  I couldn’t go on. When friends asked, Cressida and I were quick to throw up a smoke screen, tell them her columns were an amalgamation, a compilation, even a fabrication, but no one really believed us. “Jack” was no work of fiction. The bitch.

  Outside the door, the party was dying. The DJ’s turntable classics had been replaced by someone’s iPod, and songs kept getting cut off halfway through. I clicked my way online. I’d learned early on that late-night blogging was a fast road to trouble. Beware the drunken slur, the 3 a.m. slander; it was advice I adhered to closely. But blogging was an addiction, the Internet a drug. There was always an in-box to sift through, comments to read, links to follow. But that night the online traffic was lighter than usual. In the drawn-out aftermath of a major story, the rest of the world had gone quiet. News was still being made, of course, but the press wasn’t paying attention. The limelight could only shine so much, even in this day and age, and just then there was only the bombing. That left the rest of us—we cynics, humorists, and online opiners—feeling ignored and slightly worthless.