He went outside and walked slowly around the house, enjoying the smell of the fresh-cut grass. In the flower patch behind the house he looked at the old flower bed and saw that a few carnations were out, garishly pink. Memories of Cassie planting flowers in the back came to him, and of Ethel helping while his father looked on, bemused. Ethel would have slept in the flower bed if they hadn’t ordered her home at suppertime.
And then suddenly he understood; it was as if the small patch of garden had been dramatically bathed in illuminating light. He went into the house at a run, through the ground floor and up the steep stairs, taking them two at a time, and went straight into Gary’s room without knocking.
His brother was sound asleep and stirred only when he shook him by the shoulder. ‘What is it?’ asked Gary. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘Tell me, did you do any gardening here this year?’
Gary sat up and rubbed his eyes. ‘What are you talking about? I only mow the lawn. I hate gardening, you know that.’
‘There’re flowers in the back, where Mom used to grow them. And Cassie too. They weren’t there when I was back in May. So who planted them?’
‘How should I know? How can you be sure they’re not old flowers?’
‘Because they’re annuals, you nitwit. You have to plant them every year.’
Gary shrugged, as if to say, fine by me if you want to make a fuss about it. ‘Well, whoever planted them, it wasn’t me.’ He shook sleep from his head and looked at Michael with exasperation. ‘What’s this about, anyway?’
But Michael wasn’t listening any more. He was thinking hard, and wondering with a certain satisfaction what Maguire’s face would look like when Michael told him he knew whose prints were on the bat.
Six
1
‘POP,’ GARY HAD once asked, ‘what’s a Rubicon?’
And his father, in a rare bad mood, had snapped, ‘Something you’ll never have to cross.’
Would that were true of me, thought Michael, smiling a little ruefully at his own predicament, and looking down from the corner window of the thirty-ninth floor. He reckoned he had fifteen minutes before McLaren would grow impatient and come looking for him. The son of the company’s founder, McLaren had his father’s aggressive bluster but none of his talent. Another reason for Michael to be out of central office. And then he wouldn’t have to fire Streatley, whose drinking was out of control.
Fifteen minutes to decide. He looked down at the street, the familiar calming view where it had all started. In his first days at the firm, he would retreat here, to this corner window of the open plan, look down and see hansom cabs across the street from the Plaza Hotel. At lunchtime he would sneak the horses peanuts he bought from a hotdog stand on the corner.
He had come to New York fresh out of college. During his last two years at the University of Michigan, he had buried himself in his work, concentrating on civil engineering to the exclusion of any other subjects save the ones necessary for the BA requirements. The members of the Pining Friends of Sophie Jansen had graduated ahead of him, so he had few friends, and though he had dates with girls, he missed Cassie so much that he was incapable of starting a significant relationship with anyone else. To the girls he went out with he was consistently nice and equally uncommitted: the last one, a chemistry major from Petoskey named Jessica Mint, who was so smart and so good-looking that he couldn’t believe he didn’t feel more for her, told him he had a reputation as someone you shouldn’t think you were going to get very close to. He could not dispute this, since even sleeping with girls didn’t bring them into his heart, or move Cassie out of it.
So most of his time was spent alone and working, trying to reduce his obsessive thinking about Cassie. Why did she have to marry him? he asked himself again and again. He could understand her going away; he could even try to understand her going away with Ronald. But why marry him? He felt that having been knocked to the ground, he had been kicked in the teeth for good measure.
He went home rarely, and when there avoided walking anywhere near Cassie’s house, which Donny told him had been rented out. He also avoided the drugstore, though when he did encounter Marilyn she was always friendly. Even Alvin was polite, though visibly disappointed when Michael told him he had switched his major to engineering. He spent as little time in his father’s house as possible: instead he drove around the Back Country, hunting in winter with Donny for rabbits on the Half or, in warmer weather, fishing with him on the Still near Happy Valley. In his senior year he even spent Christmas in Ann Arbor.
After graduation he headed, as if directed, straight for New York and his first full-time job. He had been very lucky to get it, the sole person hired that year by McLaren with only a Bachelor’s degree. Why had he been so insistent on New York? It was not a question he could ever satisfactorily answer, not even eight years later as he looked down on Central Park and got ready to see McLaren. He supposed the fact that Sophie Jansen had gone there influenced him, for if even Sophie – high priestess in Ann Arbor of The New Yorker magazine and Vanity Fair, the embodiment of self-confident style in Michael’s undergraduate eyes – felt the need to flock to the Mecca called Manhattan, who was he to think of going anywhere else? And it seemed the place where the other world he was always searching for might be found; the place, as he understood it, where taste was dictated and disseminated to the rest of the country.
His job was as low level as you could get. The 59th Street bridge was being renovated, and he was assigned the job of reviewing cylinder tests made on the concrete and tension tests performed on the steel. The task was not unimportant, and it was specified in detail by the City, but his duties were simple and mind-numbingly dull. He worked in the open plan among the engineering draftsmen, whose cubicles were divided by shoulder-high partitions. Michael didn’t even have a cubicle of his own, so junior his standing, and was expected to use any place unoccupied that day by a more senior colleague.
Most of the more senior engineers were family men and lived outside Manhattan – Yonkers, Queens, the near suburban towns of Long Island – arriving in the morning from their commutes already looking tired, rushing out like clockwork in the evening to catch their trains. Two or three of them, however (including Streatley, his immediate boss), were happy to take him under their wing, and it was from them that he found his vocation. There were no opportunities to work on the historical wrought iron bridges he loved (‘they’re all dinosaurs, I’m afraid’ Streatley had remarked, though he was partial to them too) and there was little inspiring in his second assignment – tracking the repetitive construction of multiple box-girder bridges over a Connecticut interstate. But informally Michael was learning from these engineers all about the detailed application of pre-stressed, reinforced concrete, and that was to prove his bread and butter.
He never got entirely used to working on the thirty-ninth floor, and the height of Manhattan’s buildings seemed somehow preposterously unnatural, almost unreal. Where he lived, on the other hand, was entirely too real for his liking – a basement room in the Flushing house of his former housemate Sam’s ageing aunt. His landlady, Mrs Gennaro, was polite but unfriendly. He had the use of the kitchen, and could watch television in the living room, but both were available on the clear understanding that when she entertained (which was often – a continuous flow of relatives and neighbours came for home-cooked meals of pasta and roasts), then he should make himself scarce. He had his own key to the house, but with no separate entrance felt quite unable to bring anyone back. Not that he had friends to entertain, much less a girlfriend to share his bed.
Each morning he walked to the Flushing subway, rode it to Grand Central, then walked north to work, alternating between Park, Madison and Fifth Avenue. Lunch was a hotdog across from the Plaza, then back to the office where he studied manuals on stressed loads and looked at the New York Post; evenings he usually went straight back to Flushing, where he read engineering monographs borrowed from the office library and watched
Mrs Gennaro’s television when she didn’t have company.
In his last two years in Ann Arbor, his fear had been manageable, suppressed as it was by his immersion in engineering and by his longing for Cassie. Here in New York, both in the office and at Mrs Gennaro’s he felt safe, in the same way he had felt safe as a boy, playing with marbles in his bedroom upstairs. But he was as scared the rest of the time as he had been after his mother died. New York – its scale, its pace, its almost breathtaking hardness – was scary; it made him feel vulnerable, almost fragile. Possibly it was a delayed reaction to the beating he had taken from Ronald. Coward, he often said to himself, and he found himself sensitive to any possible physical confrontations, often going to absurd lengths to avoid them: crossing the street if he saw a drunk lurching ahead of him, wary and nervous when anyone grew boisterous or aggressive anywhere near him.
Sometimes in the morning he would look at himself in the mirror, stripped to the waist for shaving, and wonder, Why should you be scared? This is a man’s body. For he had filled out in his last two years of college, helped by two summers of construction work, and he now stood a little over six feet and weighed 175 pounds. But he felt that inside this impressive shell a small boy remained in residence.
He finally did something about it after an incident one evening in a crowded bar near Lincoln Center, where he had arranged to meet two of his older colleagues from work. When he came in, he couldn’t see them, so he bought a Scotch and water at the bar, next to a group of big guys in suits. Spying his colleagues at a table in the rear, he made his way past this bunch, and one of them – a Bruce Willis lookalike but bigger, with a gold chain around a turtleneck – accidentally backed into him, spilling some of Michael’s drink. When he turned round Michael assumed he was going to apologize.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ said Michael amiably. ‘No big deal.’
The guy eyed him with a long, hard stare. ‘You better hope it’s not,’ he said, unsmiling, until Michael shrugged, feeling himself blush, feeling he would rather do anything than confront this man, sensing his lower legs beginning to tremble and his throat grow so tight that he could not have spoken if he’d wanted to. After another stare, the guy snorted. ‘I’ll let you slide, jerk-off.’
This tipped the balance, and he decided to do something – anything, however uncharacteristic – which might allay his feeling of utter powerlessness, for he was determined not to have the fear any more, reasoning that if he did not rid himself of it now, he would end up serving a life sentence. Through a casual mention from a former college boxer at work, Michael started going to a boxing gym in the West Forties. There a trainer named Malley set Michael his initial regimen. He was a small man with an unmarked face and big ears, but his hands looked like a short order cook’s, full of welts, red scar lines, and odd puffy bits of skin around the fingernails. He had fought professionally and trained a few mildly celebrated boxers thirty years before. Now he ran the gym, and looked after newcomers like Michael.
For a month he wouldn’t let Michael in the ring with anyone, confining him first to the heavy bag, then the speed bag, then to shadow-boxing under his careful instruction and eventually some sparring against Malley himself, holding up oversized mitts. When he finally let him fight, Michael was knocked down twice near the end of a two-minute round by a Hispanic kid who made apparent his contempt of the businessmen who used the gym (this seemed to include Michael) and had already hit Michael with a low left hook right into his cup protector.
But he got better quickly, though Malley now threw him in with lighter fighters. He felt less scared on the streets, more confident, and more aggressive – once he thought he saw the same medallion man from the bar near Lincoln Centre, and followed him half a block, until a man turned round who was unknown to him. What was I going to do? he asked himself. Somebody pushed him on the subway and he pushed back; a cabby gave him the finger when he was slow crossing Madison Avenue and he walked over and asked the cabby if he wanted to get out of the cab (he didn’t).
In the gym he fought with a new ferocity, especially when matched against what Malley called the East Coast White Kids, the preppies with their fading jock powers and social cockiness. Put in the ring with a fresh-faced kid who worked for some astronomical salary at a brokerage house, Michael knocked him down with a barrage of punches – jab, right hand, jab jab, jab, right hand – then almost hit him again as he was getting up. ‘What is your problem?’ the kid had said as he climbed slowly out of the ring, and Michael felt his aggression melt away, replaced by embarrassment.
It was after this that Malley took him aside. ‘Did something bad once happen to you?’
‘Why?’
‘Well, how do I put this? I just get the feeling you’re here for the wrong reasons.’
‘I’m not a weirdo,’ he said indignantly.
‘I never said you were, and believe me, we get plenty of those in here. Psychopaths who don’t mind hurting people, psychotics who enjoy hurting people, repressed homosexuals who like the smell of other guys’ sweat. I can recognize them all right, but you I can’t make out.’ He looked around the gym. It was getting late, and there were only two Hispanic kids hitting the speed bags, and a cop Michael knew to say hello to jumping rope.
‘Sometimes,’ Malley continued, ‘we get guys in here who’ve been bullied. They come in because they feel humiliated, and they want to kill the world in a return match. Frankly, sometimes you seem that way to me, but you’re too big to bully. So where did all this anger you’ve got stored up inside come from?’
‘I wasn’t always this big.’
‘Maybe,’ said Malley doubtfully. ‘Something’s pushing you, that’s for sure. Maybe you don’t know yourself.’
‘I know all right,’ said Michael.
Malley waited for a moment, but when Michael said nothing else he shook his head. ‘Whatever it was, if I were you I’d let it go. I don’t think you’re really cut out to be a hard guy. It’s not in your make-up.’
‘Really?’ said Michael testily, feeling slightly aggrieved.
‘Take it as a compliment.’
‘I need to know I can look after myself.’ He had a flashing image of himself, flat on his stomach, lying on the paving stones outside his father’s house, as Ronald Duverson tried to beat him half to death. Half?
‘Look after yourself? You can look after yourself. Look, even Mike Tyson got beat up in jail, so if it’s a guarantee you want, forget it – there’s always somebody who’s tougher.’ He looked at Michael gently for a moment, then said, ‘Take my advice.’
When he didn’t continue, Michael felt forced to ask: ‘What advice?’
‘Try to forget about whatever happened to you. But if you can’t, and you ever come up against whoever fucked you up the first time, don’t fight back right away.’
‘What, and let him do it again?’
‘Of course not. But in a fight like that there’re no rules, so don’t act like you’re in a ring and someone’s about to call time. Try instead to surprise the son of a bitch. One way or another, do something unexpected.’
After this Michael stopped going so often to the boxing gym, and when he did he usually just hit the heavy bag and skipped rope. He began to realize that he had been confusing machismo with masculinity; as if he had decided that his physical humiliation by Ronald Duverson was keeping him from becoming a man; as if he could only be a man by acquiring the ability to hurt Ronald as much as he’d hurt him. He had hoped that as his physical confidence grew, he might also feel confident enough to forget about Cassie Gilbert, and he even bought a pop psychology book, which said it could help rid him of unwelcome thoughts. But it must not have worked very well, since shortly after reading it – about a year after he arrived in New York – he saw Cassie, at 12.38 one Thursday lunchtime as he walked down Madison Avenue in the fifties on the west side of the street.
Having yet to adopt the New York precaution of not looking at strangers, his eyes that day swept across Ma
dison and came to rest on a young woman with shoulder-length hair, blue-black and from his vantage point very straight and shiny. He watched with interest that turned to disbelief as the figure raised a hand to sweep back the fringe that came down over her forehead, and when she turned sideways to him he saw the familiar straight nose, the thin-lipped mouth and short, pointed chin. The woman nodded (she must have been with someone) and then as she nodded again her teeth clamped down on her lower lip. He had stopped walking by then, fixated on the female figure, but now the woman was obscured by people passing by, and he could only see her overcoat, which was a long, blue wool one. He wondered when Cassie had bought that. When the crowd cleared he couldn’t see her at all, and he raced to his corner and waited for the light, then rushed across the street and stood at that corner, looking up and down Madison Avenue and east and west along the side street. But she had gone, and he had walked back to work feeling absolutely desolate until on 49th Street he saw her again, between Madison and Fifth, and this time he had run and caught up to her, and when the woman turned at the sound of his running footsteps he had seen a highly attractive young woman who wasn’t Cassie Gilbert.
That was not his only sighting, and they were all upsetting, even when the misidentification only lasted for a second – catching a glimpse of shoulder-length hair on the subway, or an obscured face in the elevator up to work. The worst happened in a steakhouse off Broadway, where he’d been invited by the senior engineers to someone’s farewell dinner. He’d been impressed by the refrigerated anteroom where sides of beef were hung to age like punching bags. He’d sat with the others, eating a pork chop (cheaper than steak) and nursing a beer when he looked over at the bar and saw, there on a bar stool, Cassie again, wearing a silk lilac blouse and a short, sexy skirt. She never used to dress like that. She had low leather boots on, and at one point as she reached down to tug on one of them, Michael saw her hair was shorter now and looked rougher and drier than the soft, full strands he had known, though he figured that might be the effect of the light in the restaurant. His throat was constricting and his chest seemed to be filling up. How did she find me here? he thought, with the excited joy of a small boy on Christmas morning. He was about to get up and go to her, had actually risen in his seat – he sensed his colleagues looking at him, wondering what was up – when to his consternation he saw that she was with someone, a tall, muscular man in a blue suit standing next to her bar stool. When he realized the man was Ronald Duverson (Why is Ronald wearing a suit?), his happy excitement turned to a terrible feeling of heartbreak, and then the maitre d’ walked over to the couple, spoke in the man’s ear and began to lead the two of them to their table, and Michael saw that it wasn’t Cassie or Ronald after all.
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