“I just figured that sound must drive the neighbors crazy. I mean, it was driving me crazy. Hey, do you get music on those things?”
“No, I just wear them so strange guys won’t come up and bother me.” She studied him through the diamonds of the fence. “You want a beer?”
He did, if only because she was the one offering, but he told her, truthfully, that he shouldn’t. His mom was part bloodhound.
“You sure? You look like a man who could use one.”
He’d forgotten all about his swollen face. “I fell,” he said. “My name’s Charlie.”
Now he could see quite clearly a Cheshire grin spreading in the shadows behind the fence. “Well, don’t let me keep you, Charlie. I’d only get you in trouble.”
“Right,” he said. “Right,” and made his feet move across the brittle grass, toward the fence he now saw he’d have to climb right in front of her. It trembled under his weight; his jacket snagged for a second on a twist of metal at the top, but miraculously he did not fall.
When he got home, Grandpa was watching TV with the sound off. He didn’t mention Charlie’s lateness, and Mom, apparently, was sleeping, as she often was these days. Still dazed, Charlie sat down in the living room, his swollen eye facing away from the old man. On screen, the camera panned drunkenly across bleachers full of cheering people, zoomed in on an overweight woman who was jumping up and down. At the same time as it advanced the storyline—this woman would become the game show’s next contestant—the sequence conveyed a dense set of messages about luck, fate, prosperity, community. In his old life, Charlie wouldn’t even have registered them. Now they seemed obtrusive, artificial, like the bouncing mass of the woman’s hair, the gauzy orange of her university sweatshirt. Maybe because he was Canadian, Grandpa, in his armchair, didn’t change expression. But when the show cut to commercial, he pushed himself up with a grunt and shuffled to the kitchen. When he came back, he placed in Charlie’s hands a frozen bag. A mound of Eagle Eye shelled peas gleamed on the packaging, more seductive-looking than any real-life pea had ever been. Had something happened to Grandpa’s brain? “For your eye,” he said. “Take the swelling down.”
While Charlie arranged the bag of peas over his tender brow, Grandpa turned the TV off. In the next room, the icebox whirred, replacing the cold air he’d let escape. “Some kid at school does this to you, eh?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Did you deserve it?”
“Grandpa, I don’t want to—” Something in the old man’s face stopped him. It was like he was deep inside Charlie, and had been for some time. “Yeah. I pretty much deserved it.”
“And no one stood up for you?”
Charlie shook his head.
“Then you learned something, didn’t you? Now next time someone asks you what happened, if you’re all right, you say, ‘You should see the other guy.’ ”
“You should see the other guy.”
“But confident. With a smile. Like your face might break open.”
“You should see the other guy.”
20
ARRIVING AT THE PORT AUTHORITY BUS TERMINAL in July of 1975 with his cardboard suitcase in one hand and his letter from the Wenceslas-Mockingbird School for Girls in the other, Mercer felt divided as to how long he might stay in New York. Even before the letter he’d been divided: one part of him swanning with Jay Gatsby around an imaginary Gotham; the other part stolid and earthbound, nose to the deep fryer, in the stifling, sizzling South. He’d told himself—at night in his childhood bedroom, with its too-small bed and its clutch of overdue books on the nightstand—that the tension between the two was insupportable, that he must flee or, like the purer products of America, go crazy. He’d pictured himself how many times snapping shut his typewriter case, binding up his meager pile of manuscript pages, standing out by the highway with his thumb jerked north. It was just as plausible, though, that it was the divisions keeping him sane—his waking life excusing the impossibility of his dream-life, and vice versa. Had his former Shakespeare professor not invited him to come up like this for a job interview, he might still be back there in the bedroom he’d outgrown, turning his paper hat in his hands, the most literate short-order cook in northeastern Georgia.
He’d showed the letter to his mother first, in a kind of dry run, and watched her mouth purse as if he’d served her a slice of cake she knew to be poisoned. “You don’t know anyone in New York,” she’d said finally, but he was out ahead of her. He knew Professor Runcible, for one, and C.L. had an army buddy who had a spare room in his rent-controlled apartment. And hadn’t she wanted to be a teacher once herself, before she fell for Pop? “I’m twenty-three years old, Mama. There’s no guarantee I land a position, but I ought to at least go up there and talk to the man.”
In Shakespeare, tragedy was the flame struck from the clash of moral principles; here her maternal desire to see him meaningfully employed warred with her Old Testament mistrust of cities. Her lips pursed tighter. “I suppose it’s only polite. But you’ll have to ask your father.” Which would turn out, as he feared, to be another order of drama altogether.
Afterward, in the mothball heat of his bedroom under the eaves, he tried to convince himself it was Pop he was running from, or C.L., or the cultural drought of the little town whose distant water tower he could see from his window. Or that he dreamed of New York because it was where the saviors of his youth had hung out. Melville and James Baldwin and especially Walt Whitman. But Pop obviously suspected him of having other motives, which Mercer couldn’t quite put out of his mind, or see.
Next morning, he was boarding a Greyhound bus, on a thirty-dollar See America Pass. Through day and into evening he rode with his legs folded into the cramped space of the window seat, a back-broken paperback of The Age of Innocence propped against them, his brown suit laid out carefully on the rack above. Clearly, his chief weakness as a novelist heretofore had been his inability to keep pace with the complexity of real life. To imagine, for example, that the triumph his fugitive hero would feel at the pine forests whooshing past and the taillights of his countrymen strung out jewellike ahead might be tempered by an equally exquisite guilt. Or, on a purely physical level, by discomfort. With the sun still out, it was too hot, but when night fell, Mercer got cold. No matter how wide the window went, the bus smelled like the rotting carpets of the coloreds-only motel rooms of his distant childhood. He read and slept but mostly stared through the glass and tried not to make eye contact with the passengers alighting serially on the seat beside him: a bantamweight old farmer on a hemorrhoid pillow, an ex-con picked up at the gates of a jail, a Jehovah’s Witness in support hose who from midnight to two a.m. read audibly from a marked-up Bible. That he could hear her wasn’t an accident, he was pretty sure; she wanted his immortal soul. But she disembarked in D.C., and the seat remained blessedly empty until the bus pulled into the blasted parking lot of a minimall somewhere in New Jersey.
The sky was by then pink with morning. The only viable tenant appeared to be an Orange Julius. For having so far husbanded his cash pretty well, Mercer rewarded himself with one of the eponymous beverages. He returned to find the bus’s luggage hold open and a G.I. in mufti doing pushups nearby. Two women too old for teddy bears played with teddy bears. The driver, a small, raisinesque Pakistani whose nicotine dependency had them stopping every forty minutes, stared out across the asphalt. In the absence of parked cars, the brushed-metal cobra-style streetlights seemed contextless and creepily regular, as though deposited there by UFO. A sunburned white kid with a ballcap and a zippered case of tennis rackets shifted from one sneaker to the other, waiting to board. He had a strong chin, clean cheeks, delicate little triangles of down on the back of his neck where the cap ended. Mercer knew in a flash the kid would be his seatmate.
Riding toward the coast, they exchanged not a single word. Then they crested the ridge of Weehawken, and there it was, New York City, thrust from the dull miles of water like a clutch o
f steely lilies. As they rumbled down past billboards toward the great churn of the tunnel entrance, the seatmate’s arm sort of flopped against his own on the armrest, so that they were barely, just barely, touching, the brown and the beige, a plane of contact one atom wide, and the huge opposed feelings inside Mercer swelled until he thought he might burst right here, a firework on the heights of New Jersey, never to reach his destination. But fifteen minutes later, watching the driver unload his typewriter in the oily gloom of the bus-station subbasement, Mercer would be squeezing the moment back into some inner oubliette. The kid had made off with his rackets, never to be seen again, though Mercer would ever after equate the Manhattan skyline with the smell of English Leather cologne.
He ascended through Brutalist atriums and Byzantine stairways, his arms feeling yanked from their sockets, his eyes that special brand of bus-ride dry. Mostly, though, New York was the people. He’d never seen so many as confronted him that morning. Before him on the sidewalk, at head height, were too many other heads to count, moving up and down with the bodies they were attached to, like ripe fruit bobbing in a barrel. Fat faces, thin faces, pink faces, brown faces, bearded and naked, hatted and bald, male and female and everything in between. Dazed unto stillness, his heart doing calisthenics in his chest, he was an obstruction, an abstraction; the masses could have trampled him had they so desired. Instead, they broke around him at the last possible second, jostling him bodily, perhaps, but leaving the essential Mercer Goodman untouched. Not to put too fine a point on it, but who the hell in this bustling city even cared who the essential Mercer Goodman was? It was this, as much as anything, that made him feel he’d stepped into a dream.
C.L.’S BUDDY CARLOS lived above a one-screen porno theater on Avenue B. The spare room he had to offer was more like a closet, only minus the privacy. There were chewed-out places in the doorframe where the hinges should have been and a discolored bedsheet to separate it from the kitchen. After some haggling, Carlos agreed to sleep there himself, and for the privilege of taking over the larger bedroom, with its locking door and ceiling fan and a mattress about which the less said the better, Mercer coughed up $220 for the month, which was $70 more than Carlos paid for the entire apartment. This arrangement worked out well enough for Carlos, who’d had trouble holding down a job since his discharge; unemployment checks and the vigorish he charged his roommates were his only visible sources of income. But it was an unforeseen blow to Mercer’s own budget. As soon as he’d settled in, to the extent that settling was possible, he called Wenceslas-Mockingbird to schedule a meeting.
Dr. Leon Runcible, recently installed there as Dean of Faculty, had been something of a legend on the campus of the University of Georgia when Mercer was there. He was about as eminent as it was possible to be without tenure. Head boy at Groton, chosen by W. H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets series while still in his twenties, subsequently the author of a well-regarded volume on the poetry of the metaphysicals.… His manner was still faintly Grotonian—especially the voice, declaiming iambs—but when Mercer’s Shakespeare class got to Lear on the heath, he’d raised his arms toward the ceiling and grasped at the air with an intensity that made the veins on his hands stand out. Then, just as quickly, he was back to that patrician poise, tossing off an allusion to Whitman Mercer would later pursue in the paper that won him the freshman English prize (making him the first Negro ever so honored). For a semester or more after that, Mercer had led his mother to believe he was still leaning toward an accounting major. In fact, most mornings found him in the second row of the modern language building’s great lecture hall, watching the young professor produce sentence after sentence of exegesis, like loaves from a bottomless basket.
The massive desk of a dean’s office now did nothing to reduce the Runcible dazzle, but Mercer felt his undergraduate laurels as a withered garland upon his brow. As a secretary brought tea and cookies, he heard himself venture a Freudian reading of Countess Olenska, arguably the heroine of the book Runcible had enclosed with the letter. He had just begun to generate real insight when Runcible sighed. “Hearing you talk, Mercer, makes me wonder why I left the classroom for the thanklessness of administration.” He gestured with the back of his hand as if to dismiss the leather-bound books, the fieldstone hearth, the huge windows onto Fourth Avenue. “But my late mother was an alumna and donor, and I suppose in some sense I hoped to honor her devotion to her alma mater. Now about the position. The board here, the prior administration, they can be rather old-fashioned in their thinking on certain matters. They do not always hear the varied carols I hear. The carols that for that matter the city council, on whom we depend for certain zoning exemptions, increasingly hears.”
Wait a minute; it was Mercer’s mind they were after, right? Runcible swept on.
“As I’m a newcomer to the school, it only makes sense for me to install some exemplars of my point of view. For instance: I look at you, Mercer, and I see an articulate young scholar, to have whom any graduate program in the country would be lucky. But as circumstance has it, here you are, available, and here we are with an opening in fourth-form English—that’s an Anglicism for tenth grade—and I have only one concern, really.”
“It’s okay. I’m used to being the only black guy in the classroom.”
Runcible coughed, as if a shard of cookie had gone down his windpipe. It went on long enough to be alarming, ten or fifteen seconds, and when he’d recovered, the face behind his hand remained claret-colored. “Oh, no, Mercer. For me, it’s not a question … Rather—can I speak in confidence? It’s that you are a male.” The word landed with an odd spin. “Adolescent girls can have the appearance of women, but they still see teachers as figures of great power. I speak from experience. The fellow who would be your predecessor departed under certain clouds. A line had been crossed, if you follow. I need to be sure you follow.”
Mercer promised Dr. Runcible there was no reason to worry. If given a chance here, he would do nothing to reflect poorly on his patron, or on the school, or on the memories of Wenceslas and Mockingbird (whoever they were). “On that you have my word.”
HE WASN’T TO BE ADDED OFFICIALLY TO THE PAYROLL—wasn’t expected to turn in a syllabus and prep a classroom—until the week before Labor Day. And so, for the rest of the summer, he had all the time he should have needed to make serious headway on his first opus. There were only two problems. The first was that he could barely afford to feed himself. The second was the apartment. All day, moaning and warmth from the movie theater below wafted distractingly through the floorboards. And Carlos seemed never to leave, not even to do laundry. His habit of sitting in the living room, studying his own shadow in the mud-gray screen of the unplugged TV, was unnerving, as was the cigarette perpetually asmolder between his swollen knuckles. After Mercer came back from a coffee run one day to find his Waterman pen missing—it had been a graduation gift from his mother—distraction shaded over toward paranoia. And when he worked up the nerve to tell Carlos to stay out of his things, Carlos just shrugged and said the rent would be going up in September.
Mercer began locking his room in the morning and heading for the big library on Forty-Second Street, where you could call up any of three million books from the basement. He sat facing away from the clock, under a powerful vent blasting marble-cool air. A shabby woman in fingerless gloves sat nearby, filling stacks of paper with huge words, five or six of them to the page, letters so big Mercer couldn’t quite read them. If he could fill a page with his own normally sized words, the day was a success. It had taken Flaubert a week, after all, to manage that much. Provided you believed Flaubert. Afternoons, he made notes for the next day’s work and, in the name of research, sank himself into The Red and the Black and L’Éducation sentimentale and nibbled at the edges of Combray.
And then, to save subway fare (and to forestall his return to Carlos, and the armpit heat of Avenue B), he walked. Manhattan turned out to be situated on a series of barely perceptible hills. They lifted you up eve
ry half-mile or so, offering a vista of foreshortened intersections, a fleshtoned sea. The busiest crossings—Seventh Avenue and Fourteenth Street, Sixth Avenue and Eighth—acted as catchments for panhandlers and street vendors and West Indian women like the one from the bus holding out little tracts like takeout menus, warning Mercer that the end was nigh, that only cheeses could save him. The farther south he walked, the more godless the city became. He occasionally even saw men holding hands, as if daring anyone to say something. It was fascinating—just anthropologically—that they could coexist with the traffic cops and the street-corner preachers, in universes that overlapped but somehow did not touch. And every so often, someone must have become confused about which of these universes Mercer belonged to, because he would feel that he, too, was being picked out of the crowd. He’d turn and see a Hispanic in white jeans appraising him frankly across an avenue, or an older man in tweed watching from a sidewalk café, cigarette floating in lazy semaphore. It would be Mercer who had to lower his gaze. But this lowering apparently signaled something, too; once or twice he even felt himself followed, and couldn’t be sure he hadn’t invited it, however accidentally.
One ominous evening in August, under the first thunderheads in weeks, he was mooning around the labyrinth where West Fourth Street crosses West Eleventh Street, absorbed in not being absorbed in these things, when he felt a hand on his shoulder. He turned to find a mussed-looking white guy grinning up at him. “Hey, I think you dropped something.” With his dark hair and lynx-like features, the fine white clavicle showing between the lapels of his leather jacket, he was … you wouldn’t say classically handsome, but striking. In one hand was a guitar case; in the other, a yellow pencil, held eraser-end first. It took Mercer a minute to shift his frame of reference. “Oh,” he said, taking the pencil. “Thanks.” And snuck another look at the storm-colored eyes before turning to go.
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