IN SOME SENSE, SURE, she had already known what was coming six weeks ago, waiting for him in the park near his office. He was staging this in public so that she would have to maintain her fragile (he assumed) composure. Part of what had attracted her to him in the first place was the way he could be completely transparent to her while remaining to himself opaque. She loved the things he wanted to believe about himself, the way you love a little kid when he lies about who broke the flower vase. He wanted to believe, for example, that he’d been moving toward her these last few months, when really it was what he was running away from that mattered. As he climbed the steps to the park, a neglected oasis elevated one story above the hurly-burly of Midtown, she saw how this running had aged him. There were lines around his mouth she’d never noticed before, and bunchy little pouches under his eyes from lack of sleep. Honestly, they turned her on, an erotic charge that cut through her mood of resignation. She pictured herself kissing them. Straddling him in a curtained room, bending down to lick away the worry. But the most he would give her was a quick peck on the cheek, and even that was like he was doing her some big favor. The park was a semi-proprietary possession of the brick buildings of Tudor City Place, and at midday, it was sparsely occupied. She and Keith circled it like swans on water, a long, slow gyre on the path that might have been laid only for them.
“There’s something I’ve been meaning to discuss with you, Samantha.”
“Uh-oh. Sounds serious.” He used her name only when he was feeling especially paternal. She plucked a few nuts from the white paper bag he was holding—but how serious could it be, if he’d stopped to buy nuts?—and popped them into her mouth, insouciantly, she hoped. “But we’re talking right now.”
“I shouldn’t have let you come up to the apartment the other day.”
Well, of course he shouldn’t. They shouldn’t have been fucking in the first place, if he wanted to be strictly ethical about it. It was amazing; he seemed to believe that his actions had consequences only as kids believe in the Tooth Fairy: because other people said so, and because when you lifted up your pillow … look! A quarter!
“There’s a whole other side of my life you don’t see, Samantha. It’s like I split off from myself somewhere … And having you there, it made me feel like that me was watching this one, and I realized that all this has been a huge act of personal recklessness. I care about you, you know that. But that other me was always the person I meant to be.”
They had by this point, what with the charged pauses, made a complete circuit of the park, but the graveled path before them, across which a little boy was chasing an errant spaldeen, seemed to draw him on. Or maybe it was just the faceted perfection of his speech, which he must have turned over in his head for days, like a rock tumbler with a particularly obdurate chunk of rock. He was saying he felt like he needed to take some time and figure some things out, because he felt he may have made some … miscalculations somewhere, and however things shook out, his kids were … look, they were the most important things in his life. He didn’t deserve them. (Well, obviously, Sam thought. Parents never do.)
His face was chapped now, and he had worked himself up to soulfulness, if not actual tears, and she felt an almost distaste when he said he hoped she didn’t think it was anything personal. “Don’t patronize me, Keith. Of course it’s personal.”
“I just need some time.”
“Fine. Let’s not see each other, then. I’m not a child.”
Now he stopped and looked at her. Was she breaking things off with him? The glister of midlife sentiment was gone from his eyes, and his entire body was tensed at the midpoint between anger and hunger, which is exactly where she liked him best. In the second when she thought he might forcefully kiss her, she could see how hard it was actually going to be, giving him up, this wayward animal she’d learned to make trot or canter. But she forced herself to reach into the translucent little bag he was holding and take what remained and to say, around a mouthful of nuts, “It was getting a little stale anyway.”
And with that, it was essentially over, though they’d taken a few more laps around the park: one with him in his impulsive, ardent mode; one minimizing—poor kid, in over her head, doesn’t know what she’s saying—and one, finally, with him back to his impossible, his selfless and selfish, self. He took her hands in his expensive gloves and looked at her, and she could see him willing her not to be permanently fucked up by the last three months. (He, too, was a Catholic, she knew. In the sealed grave of a by-the-hour hotel she’d lain with her head on his chest and twitted with her finger the little silver cross he wore, until he’d told her to stop it.) He wanted her to remember, he said, that he cared about her, and that she deserved better. He would not use the word love, nor would she. It wouldn’t have been true, and anyway, she didn’t want to give him the satisfaction.
IT MUST HAVE BEEN CLOSE TO MIDNIGHT NOW. Cabs had sublimated off Central Park West to be deposited in other, more populous precincts. (Funny how in the City the money followed the energy, but could never quite keep up.) The lingering warmth of their tires left dark tracks on the road. Otherwise, a white perfection obtained. No feet had marked the sidewalk where Sam sat. No dogs had come out to yellow it. The glow of the traffic signal stretched almost as far as the vestibule, the party, Keith: red, then green. She’d never noticed before that it actually made a small click when it changed. Across the street, in front of the synagogue, a halo of green snow marked the entrance to the B/C station, from which Charlie continued not to emerge, and suddenly, shivering, she was struck by a deep fissure in the fairness of things. The adult who had fucked her and ditched her got to return to the world twenty stories above street level, while she, the seventeen-year-old, got left out in the cold alone. She stubbed out the cigarette, the last one. She made for the door. She’d changed her mind; she would storm the castle, propriety be damned. Charge in among the tailcoats and furs on behalf of every wronged woman since the beginning of time, make a spectacle of herself, as a kind of warning. She would tell him he’d better come hear what she had to say, if he didn’t want them both to land in jail, or worse, and everyone he knew and respected, everyone whose opinion he valued, would see the truth about the two of them, even as she discharged her duty.
She got close enough to reach for the curving brass handle. She could see the doorman at his post, and the ghost of her own face floating in front of it. Her indignation made her beautiful, even to herself. She wouldn’t know for sure which one the wife was, but that didn’t mean the wife wouldn’t sense who she was, and there would come a moment when their eyes met and Sam would have to see what she’d done to this woman, how she’d hurt her. Then Sam thought of his kids, and particularly his son, five years younger than she was. The scene she would make, the whispers that would find their way back to him, his potential sense of it being, somehow, his fault. She made an awkward shrug at the doorman, the visual equivalent of “Sorry, wrong number.” She trudged, cold and smokeless, back toward her bench. It was almost a whiteout now; how would anyone see the ball when it dropped? Possibly it had dropped already, and the fireworks down in the harbor were too far away to hear. But then where was Charlie? She wished he would hurry up and come. She was about to sit down when someone, from the park entrance, said her name. She couldn’t quite make out the figure who stood there, a new depth in the shadows, in the snow, but the voice set tumblers falling inside her, in a keyhole that had locked up other things she ought to have known. “Hey,” it said. “We’ve been looking all over for you.”
9
WHAT WAS THAT?”
“What was what?”
“You didn’t hear that?” It had been a pop, a metallic flaw in the otherwise immaculate hush of the Park, so small Mercer might have imagined it. He cocked his head, as if to summon it back. Distant revels seeped through layers of stone and glass; over on Columbus, a snowplow mushed wearily past. The only other sound was William’s sister coughing beside him. Light through the curtain
ed door striped her ear and jawline, but her face, turned toward the end of the block, was invisible. “Maybe a firework or something,” he said.
“Is it next year yet, do you think? Because if it is, you have to kiss me.”
“William would love that,” he said.
“Just blame it on alcohol.” Regan did seem pretty drunk. Also high.
“But he knows I don’t drink.”
“So what were you doing with that wine when I found you in the kitchen?”
“Wait, was that—? Dag, I thought I heard it again. Must be something wrong with me.”
The balcony was outside her bedroom suite. Or rather, the suite of rooms her father’s wife insisted on pretending was hers, as she’d put it a few minutes ago, while he’d held her injured hand under the faucet (it being his lot in life, apparently, to play nursemaid to the Hamilton-Sweeneys). Water made pink by blood fanned against the porcelain sink and clung in drops, and when a flap of gray skin flipped back in the gush, he could see she was going to have a handsome scar. She was lucky she hadn’t hit bone. He searched the medicine cabinet. Not only was there no mercurochrome, there weren’t even band-aids. “Don’t expect to find anything under the surface,” she said airily. The champagne was analgesic. “I haven’t slept a night here since college. Felicia just likes it to look inhabited.” He’d folded a monogrammed washcloth into thirds and, after blotting her wound dry, wrapped the makeshift bandage around it. She needed to keep the pressure on, he said, until it clotted. But how to secure the tourniquet? “How about that thing?” She nodded toward the mirror. He scoured the reflection—the ivory carpet of the bedroom beyond. Then he saw that she was looking at her own chest, the butterfly brooch pinned there.
“Oh, I don’t want to use that. It’ll get all bent out of shape.”
“It was a Christmas gift from Felicia, I only wore it so Daddy would see me wearing it.”
“What’s she going to think when she sees you using it as a clothespin?”
“What’s she going to think when she sees you clinging to my hand? Because that’s pretty much the alternative.” She reasoned surprisingly well, for a drunk person.
His left hand keeping pressure on the cut, he had to use his right to undo the pin of the brooch and slide it from her low-cut dress. It was like a game of Operation. His pinky was inches from his lover’s sister’s breast. “You’re not helping anything, staring like that.”
“Be patient with me, Mercer. This is the most fun I’ve had all night.”
Finally, the brooch was loose. Once he’d pinned shut the washcloth, he retreated to the outer room to plunk down on the bed. The bedside lamp made the room swim up in stronger light. It was the Platonic ideal of a girl’s room, the one he imagined his students returning home to after a hard afternoon of field hockey: flounced bedspread, lacquered dressing table. Regan, now cradling the maimed hand, wobbled toward the French doors.
“Make sure you give that a more thorough cleaning as soon as you get home,” he said. “I’d hate for you to get lockjaw.”
“Come here. I’ll show you something.” And she’d led him out onto the little balcony.
The view was godlike, cinematic: the City as he’d dreamed it from his homely hometown seven hundred miles away. Resolving out of the snow, like a picture tuned in on a television, were crenellated apartment buildings, yellow windows punched out of the darkness, powdered sugar shaking down over the layer-cake hotels down on Central Park South. Light pollution seemed to emanate from within the clouds, the byproduct of some hidden organic process, like the warmth made by blood. To the east, the Park was a vast dark quarry. The lintels and pergolas and gargoyles massed above kept the snow off, mostly, but he was surprised that Regan, in her skimpy dress, wasn’t ready to turn back inside. Indeed, she seemed to breathe easier out here, in the quiet. “You should see it on a clear day.”
“No, it’s a hell of a view,” he said.
“I mean I don’t want you to think I’m in thrall to Felicia or anything, but it did seem like a shame not to show you the room’s best feature, since you’re up here. Also …” Fumbling one-handed in her clutch, she’d pulled out a lighter and what looked to be a slightly zaftig toothpick. “I got this from the woman who did my hair. You want?”
Mercer demurred. “I don’t do that, either.”
She said, “I wouldn’t, normally, but I’m in the middle of this divorce, and tonight’s been a train wreck, and I figured … Would you mind holding that lighter for me?”
He was getting cold himself, but obliged her, and when she’d taken a long pull on the charred-smelling stuff—the heat radiated—he decided he was well wide of his mark for the evening, anyway. Without asking, he took the doobie from her good hand and copied her, the three-fingered grip, the held breath. “Don’t exhale yet. Like that. Slowly.”
He coughed. “You really are peas in a pod, aren’t you?”
“Who?”
“You and William. He doesn’t talk to you, you don’t talk to your stepmother …”
“Father’s wife.” Their voices were at odds, but their hands cooperated to get the joint back to her. The streets below were like streets on maps, free from people and eye-level disorder, and he could feel the force of mutual appreciation binding them together. “My brother hates her, too. Does he not talk about this?”
“Not as such.”
She sighed. “What are you really doing here, Mercer? I mean, what exactly are you and William to each other? It’s okay—you can tell me.”
It was at this moment that he’d first heard the pop.
“HONESTLY, I DON’T KNOW,” Mercer said now, as if her question had just reached him. “I don’t know anymore. I mean, like you said, it’s good to have someone. But whatever happened between the two of you, it eats at him, like a hole inside him he thinks he has to hide. I suppose the sense of mystery was part of what attracted me. But I didn’t come to New York because I wanted to live with a stranger. At some point, I assumed he’d … I don’t know.” He motioned for the joint, but it was now too small to suck on without burning his fingers, so he flicked it, sending it skittering down however many stories, a flare in the dimness.
“Look at that. You’re a natural.” She tucked the lighter away in the clutch, saying something about her kids finding it, but made no move to return to the party.
“Aren’t you freezing?” he asked.
“I just can’t quite face having to go back in there yet. There are some people I really don’t want to talk to.”
He hugged himself and stamped his feet, waiting to feel different. “Anyway, William has a lot more experience at this than me, you know? At relationships.”
“Is that what he told you?”
“I thought maybe because I’m a boy, or man, I guess, was why he was keeping me in one compartment and y’all in another. But when you showed up at the school last week—”
“I’m sorry if I put you in a position. I had just moved out of my husband’s apartment. I needed so badly to talk to someone, and I thought maybe the divorce meant everything else might change, too. Maybe William would finally be ready to take down his stupid wall.”
“And I guess for my part I thought he’d open that invitation and some golden door would just be thrown open, and then we wouldn’t have to live anymore the way we’ve been living. It’s not without its charms, sort of, but how can we have a future together if I can’t even know these basic things about his past?”
“He’s always been secretive, my brother. Since he was a little kid. He thinks it creates some kind of personal power, to have a double life. I think he read too many comics.”
“So maybe I really came here because I knew it would piss him off if he found out. Not that you’re not lovely company.” And an almost unaccountable smile broke from somewhere within him. It was true. He liked Regan. She reminded him of other white girls he’d known, the fellow English majors who’d adopted him at U. Ga. “Can we go inside now, please? I’m bleeping
gelid.”
She touched his arm with her good hand. “Hey, why don’t you come with me?”
“Come with you?”
“I’ve been summoned by Felicia’s brother. I’ll introduce you, and you can see what William’s up against. And maybe you can protect me.”
“Protect you from what?” But she had turned back toward the warmth of the bedroom. He retrieved his mask. “You’re sure you didn’t hear that sound?” he asked, before he pulled the French door shut. “I’m from the South. We know guns.”
She shrugged. “It’s Central Park West, Mercer. Probably just a truck backfiring.”
Inside, her stride grew more purposeful with every threshold they crossed, as if she were drawing strength from his presence, or from the drug, though he couldn’t be sure this wasn’t just the swimmy tempo of his own head. The guests seemed denser, too. Out of a jumble of bodies came hands clutching bottles, dentures bared in brays of Republican laughter, teeth freaky in their perfection, like Chiclets. He was the only nonwhite guest—though he hadn’t in the strictest sense been invited. And it must have been past midnight. Where was William right now? Leaning back against the wall of some bar’s men’s room while a blond head worked on him down below? He pushed the image away, let his consciousness become a tide coursing over the Persian rugs. Let Regan lead.
City on Fire Page 9