At intervals over the last few years, he’d been shipped off to tired dorps like Putney, Vt., and Wallingford, Conn., and Andover and Exeter, N.H., stocked lakes into which the nation’s tributaries of wealth and privilege emptied. Other kids liked to make fun of his accent. To boys from Grosse Pointe and Lake Forest, Gothamite was only one step from Jew. But never once had he envied them, or cultivated, as his sister did, that deracinated East Coast drawl. He believed his connection to Manhattan would sustain him, like an anchor plunged into turbulent water.
And sustain him it had, right up until that summer—the summer he finally graduated high school. But sitting up into the wee hours on the eve of his father’s wedding in June, he could feel the chain straining, the connection about to snap. Or was it already morning? The sky beyond the ogeed bars of the kitchen window on Sutton Place had brightened enough to disclose the heavy-headed roses entwined there, his mother’s. They seemed to nod at him, admonishing; they knew what they would have done in his place.
He went to the dining room. From the brass hooks on the wall, he retrieved his Great-Grandfather Hamilton’s safari rifle. He checked the chamber; the bullet he’d discovered when he was a little kid was still there. Dress socks silenced his feet on the stairs.
The second-floor hallway was hardly identifiable as the one where he and Regan used to stage parades. Its rug had already been moved to Felicia’s palace across the park, along with most of the furniture. Tomorrow—or, strike that, today—cleaners would arrive to prepare this house for its new owners. The guestrooms, though, had been left intact for the various male relations and business associates who’d traveled here for the wedding. He’d heard them come in from the rehearsal dinner around midnight and stay up dissecting the scene he’d caused there, the disgrace he’d brought upon the family. It was unclear whether they’d known he was awake directly below them, making his miserable way through a pint of Irish whisky stolen from the banquet room bar. At any rate, they hadn’t come down to the kitchen. And the whisky had a funny effect; beyond a certain point, each slug from the bottle unfogged his thinking, until the whole house seemed to tremble with clarity. The dormer window at the end of the upstairs hall. The sealed entrance of what had once been his parents’ room. And beside that, the guestroom where a bony collegian in orphaned bits of tuxedo sprawled snoring on the floor, his French cuffs blown open like flowers. Was this the guy who’d done it? This had to be him. The ones passed out in the beds were too old.
William stood in the half-light for what must have been minutes with the rifle’s long barrel wavering above the guy’s right ear. Just do it, you pussy. Pull the trigger. If you were any kind of man, you would do it. But where was Regan’s boyfriend, or fiancé now, Keith, whose job this should rightfully have been? Because the best William could do, in the end, was leave the rifle on the guestroom floor, hoping the fucker passed out there would see it upon waking, and know how close he’d come to dying. Or maybe finish the job himself.
Shaking, William ransacked his own room for clothes to fill a gymbag. He grabbed his guitar, the book of Michelangelo plates brought back from Regan’s semester away, his hand-me-down shaving kit, and keys from the nightstand. After a last jolt of liquid courage, he was out the door and down to the line of parked cars at the curb. Sweat and formalwear made a paste between his back and the driver’s seat of Regan’s Karmann Ghia. Beyond the window, dew coaxed scents from inert earth: the loam of treeboxes, the faintly salty asphalt, the whole summer perfume of rotting fruit peels and faisandés coffee grounds wafting from the trash piled at the curbs. The stop-sign at the corner glowed. If he’d known exactly how long it would be before he was back on these streets, he might have wanted to itemize things even more minutely, but to act in some valedictory way would be to make real to himself what he was doing, and if he did that, he might never go through with it, so he didn’t.
He’d been behind the wheel only once since Doonie taught him to drive, out past where the subway ended in Queens. It had gotten him kicked out of his third school (or was it the fourth?), but the engine turned over on the first try and purred like an animal when he gave it gas. The lights of Third Avenue were on a timed circuit; at twenty-seven miles per hour, you could coast all the way up to Harlem without stopping. There was hardly any bridge traffic this early on a Sunday, and soon he was flying toward points north, weaving only minimally.
It was when he stopped to pump gas near New Haven and spied through the tiny rear window the gymbag half-unzipped on the backseat that anguish again took hold. Where, exactly, did he propose to go? Vermont? Versailles? Valhalla? From a phone booth hard by the road, he gave the operator a name pulled from deep in memory. It was a big state, she said; she couldn’t find the number unless she knew the town. “Can’t you just look?” he said. “It’s an emergency.” Something in the voice—some crackle of pain—must have been persuasive, because a minute later came the familiar Continental inflections.
“William? How could I forget? If you are in the area, then you must stop by.”
“In the area” was putting it charitably; it was another eight hours before, following punctilious directions, he pulled off a switchback mountain highway and into some woods. At the end of a mile-long drive, on a steep hillside, was either a large cabin or a small lodge. The sound of the car had drawn Bruno Augenblick, William’s former drawing teacher, to the door; he was barely visible there, in the shade of the deep porch and behind a layer of screen. “Leave your things,” he called, over the dying engine. “First let us get you a drink.” The city boy, still shaking inside, was not to see the city again for half a decade. By that time, he’d be twenty-two years old.
WILLIAM HAD FIRST ENCOUNTERED Herr Augenblick while attending the school before the school before this last one, whose generous ratio of carrot to stick, it was thought at the time, might benefit a young man of his … idiosyncrasies. Friday afternoons, the boys who’d behaved were bused thirty-five miles east to metro Boston, where for a few hours they were free to walk around Harvard Square and breathe the air into which, God willing, they might one day matriculate. William had made only a couple of friends at the new school, both of whom lacked his hard-won skill at dodging demerits, and so he often found himself wandering the Square alone, while his classmates hit the movies. He liked particularly to slip behind the walls of the college and pass himself off as a student there. He could smoke his cigarettes openly. He could cadge free lunch in the residence halls, so long as he carried a book to immerse himself in (and if he hadn’t brought his own, one could always be nicked from the library). One such Friday, he saw a cluster of students with Very Serious Expressions sitting on one of the quadrangles, reproducing in their outsized drawing pads a bronze statue of some dour old Puritan. He was curious, suddenly, to see just how far his imposture might go. A sketchpad cost fifty cents in the campus bookstore, and pencils set him back another nickel. He found the students where he’d left them, arranged on a brick curb facing the statue. No one looked up when he sat down among them, or looked over at the pad where he’d begun to sketch. He’d actually lost track of time when a pair of hands clapped once. Standing over him was a man in seersucker, maybe forty, with owlish tortoiseshells and a skull shaved bare. “This brings to an end our session.” The accent was German, or Swiss. The shirtsleeves were buttoned to the wrist despite the Indian-summer heat. “Please leave your work on the bench. I shall avail you of my judgment next week.” The students began to shuffle away, but the man held William back. “And you are … ?”
“William Hamilton-Sweeney. I transferred in.”
He indicated the pad under William’s arm, which William handed over. The face stayed unreadable as it scanned his drawing, which had started out as a cartoon and ended up halfway serious. Finally, without warning, the instructor ripped the page off, balled it, and deposited it in the wire-mesh trashcan to his left. “Start again.”
That fall, William would become the most diligent student in the Friday-afternoon
drawing class, though he pretended not to look forward to it. The instructor never offered him so much as a word of praise, but always set aside time to review his work at the end of the session, and after the last class of the semester he pulled William aside. He had planned a little gathering that Saturday night, “a kind of salon. A few of the more advanced students will be there, and local artists, and some of the tenured faculty. You might find yourself edified.” To reveal his inability to attend would be to admit that all along he’d only been a boarding-school refugee, and so that night he snuck back off campus and walked the two miles to the bus station on Route 117.
The house on Beacon Hill was like a museum, with paintings hung willy-nilly on every wall. The food was every bit the equal of Doonie’s. Herr Augenblick—now just Bruno—lived awfully well for a visiting instructor, it seemed. William let himself have a glass or two too many of champagne and, mustering all available perspicuity, inserted himself into various conversations. It didn’t bother him to hear people murmuring as he moved away that this was the one Bruno had mentioned, the Hamilton-Sweeney; he was pleased to find the other guests—all older, almost all male—hanging on his jokes like hollyhocks on a line. Occasionally, he caught Bruno watching from the far side of the room, but it was only at the end of the night, as guests were putting on coats, that the drawing instructor approached him. “Those two are walking back toward the college. Perhaps you would prefer an escort.”
“No, thanks,” William said, pretending to look through the pile on the bed for his own jacket. “I like to be alone.”
“And you are not in fact headed that way, no?”
“Beg pardon?”
Bruno gestured toward the green-and-gold rep tie trailing from the pocket of the blazer William had uncovered. “The colors of one of our local lycées, I believe.”
“You knew this whole time, didn’t you?”
“Don’t pretend to be surprised. You never appeared on my class list.”
“Okay, but why didn’t you say something?”
“William, an artist is someone who combines a desperate need to be understood with the fiercest love of privacy. That his secrets may be obvious to others doesn’t mean he is ready to part with them.” What the hell was that supposed to mean? William wondered. But of course, he already knew. He’d known what Bruno was since the very first day of that class, when the sunlight had gleamed off of the shaved dome of his head, but he had not realized that Bruno had seen quite so far into him. “But now the term of my visiting lectureship has expired. You will have to decide on your own what path to pursue.”
“And what happens to all this?”
“This? This is Bernard’s,” he said, nodding toward the fresh-faced chair of the Art History department across the room, whom William had met earlier, and to whom, come to think of it, Bruno had been attached all evening. “I have a place in Vermont where I repair between appointments. It is country that reminds me of my home.”
And maybe it was true that William needed to be understood, because how else to explain how crushed he was to learn that Bruno wouldn’t be back in the spring? But it turned out to be a moot point. After insisting on finding his own way back to school, he got caught sneaking in at dawn—the squawking birds of suburban Mass. betrayed him to the headmaster as the louche, late-sleeping pigeons of New York never would have—and, this being a third offense, he was expelled before completing the term.
SITTING NOW ON THE FRONT PORCH of the mountain house, watching his highball glass sweat and mosquitoes moil around a smudge-pot, he wasn’t at all sure he’d made the right decision. Bruno looked different than he remembered; heavier set, less coolly überhuman. Perhaps sensing his guest’s distress, Bruno didn’t push him, except to ask about his tux.
“What, this?” William had forgotten he was wearing it. “I ran out of laundry. Only clean shirt I had. Where is everybody? Where’s Bernard?”
“Bernard is in Boston.”
“Oh.” The shadows of the mountains were like the ridged backs of dinosaurs. Just twenty-four hours earlier he’d been at that restaurant in Central Park, surrounded by oligarchs with champagne flutes. The glass he’d raised to toast his father had been narrower than the one now trembling in his hand, and he could honestly no longer remember what he’d said to cause so much trouble.
“You’re welcome to stay as long as you like, William.”
“You’re not going to make me tell you what’s going on?”
“I do not need to know ‘what’s going on.’ Guests come and go all summer. There are three bedrooms currently vacant. You may take any one you like.”
But William stayed on the porch long after Bruno went to bed, and not only to avoid the possibility of being asked to join him. By now, his father would be married to Felicia Gould, and it was something to which, after years of adjusting, and adjusting, he just could not seem to adjust. That Daddy had declined to call the wedding off at the last minute should have come as no surprise. Indeed, if William III was being honest, he may even have been looking for an excuse to break with William II, the way a rocket’s liquid stage might long to escape the solid. What he’d been unprepared for was Regan, the only person besides their mom and Doonie he’d ever really trusted, taking sides with the enemy. If he was to survive it, she would have to be burned away, too. And sleep now was an impossibility. The wind shifted. The mosquitoes writhed, as if on fire. The ice was exploding in his Drambuie.
HE’D ASSUMED BRUNO was just being polite about guests coming and going from the mountain house, but it turned out he’d meant it. It started the very next weekend, with a carload of pale men from one of the urban centers—Boston or Philly, he hadn’t really been listening—crunching up the gravel drive. They emerged in straw hats and sunglasses, shirts half-unbuttoned, drinks seemingly already in hand. Stood with arms over open car doors and stared past the figure of Bruno waiting on the porch steps and beheld the valley beyond, midge-swirled and smoky at midafternoon. They didn’t actually say, Well, would you look at that; they didn’t need to.
And it was strange: once, William would have preened for them, acted the ingénue, but he could barely bestir himself from his deckchair to wave hello. Stranger still, none of them seemed to mind. He was almost certain Bruno would tell them something later, in private—Give him his space, maybe—but what accounted for the fact that now, at the moment of their arrival, the men tromping past him in the shade of the porch looked at him with the kindly expressions of people who had been there before? No one, William thought, could have possibly ever been here before. Amid all this bounty, yet unable to think about home without his espresso cup starting to quake on its saucer and the stilled cars of the driveway and the long ragged wildflowers starting to swim a little beyond the porch’s cool enclosure, like things glimpsed through a fever. At some point, he stopped rocking. Shouts echoed uphill from a swimming hole, fractured by boulders and gulleys. Through the black trunks of pines he caught a flash of flesh as one of the guests mounted the diving rock; there was a pause between its disappearance and the answering splash.
After sundown, at a communal dinner, William sat quietly, doing his best not to ruin anyone’s good time. The other faces around the table, flush with wine and exercise, were like the faces of prisoners who’ve had their convictions overturned. Anyway, it was pure narcissism to think his inner devastation could have ruined this for them. He was just some beautiful boy, a sylph, a runaway, furnished for the pleasure of their gaze. Only Bruno—powerful, patient, impenetrable Bruno—cared to notice that William had hardly eaten. And even this he took in in a single flicker of attention, saying nothing.
Soon William was making excuses to eat on the porch. He set the plate of veal or spätzle or spaghetti on the stumpy rattan table and didn’t bother lighting the lantern. Laughter leaked through the screen door. Around it and around the ember of his cigarette, insects swarmed, along with the smells of smoke and room-temperature red sauce, like a rancid picnic. He tried to imagine the
darkness of the porch merging with the darkness beyond, and himself with it, an animal crashing around in the underbrush. He tried to imagine Bruno coming to the door later, when the dishes had all been washed, looking for Narcissus and finding only the infinite dark. Even this—the old fantasy that there was still someone in the world who would chase after him, ask him what was wrong—now gave him no pleasure.
At times when the guests had returned to the other, urban halves of their lives, William was theoretically freer, yet he felt, if anything, worse. He could not read, could not sleep, could not tune his guitar. Only a few activities, pitched exactly halfway between stupidity and concentration, could still absorb him, and it was out of these that he had to cobble together a day. A baseball game on the radio; a crossword puzzle in the newspaper; a glossy magazine story about Elizabeth Taylor or Marilyn Monroe. He would send lists of magazine titles along when Bruno drove into town to do the shopping. William offered to pay (once he was legally adult, he had full control of the trust fund his mother had left him—plus the cash from selling off Regan’s Karmann Ghia through the local classifieds), but Bruno always refused, in a way that should have been welcome but that just felt patronizing. He came back laden with bags of free food, but William still had no appetite of any kind. Even the beauty of the landscape was an abstraction, like the beauty of a man in an advertisement for a cologne you could not smell. Between him and it, dead time piled up: so many seconds, so many hours, so many years. So many tons of food and cubic hectares of liquid to dispose of before he died, which he would probably do right here, in the Northeast Kingdom, on a day much like this one, at the tail end of ten thousand days just like this one.
One mid-July evening, after unloading groceries from the car, Bruno sat down in his own rocking chair. More guests were due tomorrow, and William thought he was going to say something about this—thought, with a kind of weird thrill, that Bruno had finally lost patience—but Bruno just said, “I brought you something.” He nodded to the paper bag on the end table between them. Inside was a sketchpad. Bruno rocked and sipped his cocktail, looking out to the far hills in which William had been feigning absorption.
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