“Let me take care of the counters, at least, William. My way of saying thanks.”
He had already started in on the dishes when William cracked a beer from the fridge and plopped down on the futon behind him and began to tease out of him the dreadfulness of Christmas. His own holidays, he said, had come and gone unnoticed. Ex Post Facto used to play an annual New Year’s show; without band practice, he hadn’t known what to do with himself but work work work.
The warmth of the water on Mercer’s hands and of the eyes on his back were a single sensation. “Work work work,” he repeated. “Poor you.”
William, standing, reached around him and took the dishtowel. “You’re adorable, you know. But you’ve done enough.”
“Have I?”
And then they were grappling on the minty floorboards. Belts, shirts came off. Lights went dark. Hands found skin. Everything that could happen happened, right up to the irrevocable, but at the moment when fear pulled him away, Mercer was still, technically, a virgin. “Do you know what I like best?” he asked, panting (as if he knew).
“Mm.”
“Just sleeping with someone. Just being next to someone while I sleep.”
William seemed willing to go along with this, if not thrilled. And it freed Mercer somehow to change his mind, and then they were grappling for real, two bodies painfully merging.
Afterward, leaving the lights off, they made their sweaty way over to the sleeping area. William shoved some boxes off the bed. He turned to the wall—don’t take it personally, he said, but he couldn’t sleep without facing a wall. Mercer, for his part, lay awake listening to the motorcoaches downshifting on the street below and the come-ons of hookers working the orifice of the Lincoln Tunnel. He felt roughed up, distantly, but then there was this sense of suspension, of not yet having drifted back into the size and shape and color of his own personal body. Of depths he’d forgotten he was immersed in going clear, like he could swim right down and touch the bottom of his life. He tried to ground himself in his surroundings. There must have been a breach in the window at the foot of the bed, for ice had formed in the corners between the two panes. Outside, the winter-bare fingers of a solitary tree played across the violet sky. How many words would the old Mercer have thrown at this tree, the bones of this tree, the dappled black bones of this wind-whipped tree, and at this sky? And how much farther away would they have carried him from the feeling still gathering inside? Here he was, six months into his new life, and already this creature beside him, white in the streetlight, in whom wild dreams might even now be unfolding, was his.
OF COURSE, history had a way of persisting, as it did now in the person of Carlos. Mercer’s solution was to avoid Alphabet City altogether. He might slip in at five a.m. to change for work, or some mornings not at all. He’d installed a travel iron at William’s place to flatten the wrinkles out of the previous day’s clothes. He would consecrate them with drops of aftershave and then head straight across town to teach. The nights of his own education in Hell’s Kitchen were often long, but he felt, purely as a pedagogical matter, that the benefits to his mental health more than offset any exhaustion.
Sexually, William was a naturalist, and preferred to make love at home, in the buff, unaccessorized, on the firm surface of the living room floor or in the little walled-off sleeping nook. The one quirk was that he sometimes asked to be slapped. Well, that and the mirror he’d hung by his side of the bed. But Mercer didn’t want to let on that he was too inexperienced to know whether this was anything to feel uncomfortable about. Afterward, cooling, sighing, chafed, he would study the reflection of his sleeping lover there, and would compare it to the unfinished self-portrait tacked to the wall. The hair in the drawing was shorter than that now on the head he loved, but the eyebrows were heavy in just the right way, charcoal for charcoal. To anything William said, they added intensity. The nose: crooked, busted once, William had told him, with that vagueness that let Mercer know better than to ask. But that was where the drawing ended. Below was just white space.
ONE NIGHT in mid-February, or rather, one early morning, Mercer found himself in a phone booth outside a discotheque on Third Avenue. He’d just dropped his key through Carlos’s mailslot and moved the last of his things into William’s apartment, and they’d stayed out late celebrating. Now it was time to explain his change of address to his mother. He was counting on the absurd hour and the arterial pulse of the music still throbbing inside him to propel him into saying what needed saying. But his courage ebbed at the sound of Mama’s voice, muzzy from sleep, as though she were talking through a corner of her scratchy nightgown. “No, you didn’t wake me, honey. I was just about to roll out the biscuits.”
“What time is it there?”
“Same time as where you are, Mercer, you know that. Is something wrong?”
Nothing is wrong, he thought. I’ve met someone. Say it. The empty phone-book holder dangled like a broken hand. Beyond the light-smeared glass, its acne of fingerprints, a feral-looking man picked through a pile of trash.
“Son?”
“It’s nothing,” he said. “Nothing’s wrong. Just, I’m up, and I was thinking of y’all.”
The silence that followed made him wonder how much she already knew. “You haven’t been drinking alcohol, have you?”
He closed his eyes. “Mama, you know I don’t drink.”
“Well, it’s nice of you to think of us, honey, but can I call you this weekend? I hate to run up your long-distance …”
That he’d placed the call collect was beside the point. Less than a minute later, they’d said their goodbyes and hung up.
Whereupon another of William’s virtues came to light: he recognized the limits of words. When Mercer didn’t get up from bed the next morning, he didn’t ask what was the matter, but simply laid a hand between his shoulderblades.
In fact, everything important about their domestic arrangements had been decided on, like the cohabitation itself, without the indignity of talking about it. It had been decided, for example, that William would move his artistic operations to a studio space he could rent for next to nothing way up in the Bronx. It had been decided, too, that they would not talk about William’s family. There were no photographs anywhere, nor any signs of a life prior to this loft apartment, and it seemed natural, almost, that William should have no past. Hadn’t he always been for Mercer a kind of mythological being, sprung fully formed out of a fire or a lake or a forehead somewhere? Yet, in almost direct proportion to his reticence on the subject of his own origins, William loved to hear about Mercer’s. After dinner, when he’d poured himself a few too many glasses from the economy-sized Chianti he kept on hand, he would get Mercer to shake out the Goodman family laundry again. He loved especially to hear about the utopian ambitions Pop had brought back from the war—his kibbutznik streak, William called it—and about the almost biblical struggles between Pop and C.L. “You know, I never saw it at the time, but I guess I had a little temper, too,” Mercer confessed one night, drying the dishes. “Or not so little, actually.” And he told William about how he’d knocked his crippled father down the night before he’d left for New York that first time. Back when he’d still believed life moved in Freytag lines, he’d thought this might make a fine early climax for his novel.
“And this is why he won’t talk to you?” William was in his usual postprandial posture: stretched out on the futon with his hands on his beltbuckle and his head propped up to watch Mercer clean the kitchenette. “Well, I guess it either has to go outward or inward.”
When Mercer looked back, puzzled, it was as if a mask had slipped. William had been thinking out loud, remembering something, and for a few seconds his face didn’t know what to do with itself. Mercer suddenly felt the full measure of his disadvantage in age, in financial independence, in skin tone and sexual worldliness—in how much he worshipped William, and wanted him, and needed him. He was sure William, who didn’t believe in needing people, wouldn’t have wanted hi
m to feel anything but equal, but there was such a thing as power, not granted to everyone equally, and that’s just how it was. So, rather than ask, “What goes inward, honey?” he kept his mouth shut like a good boy. And how did this not qualify as trust?
IT WASN’T UNTIL THAT SUMMER, and the Bicentennial celebration, that Mercer had the first inkling there could be anything wrong with these arrangements. After watching the tall ships from up on the roof, they’d made their way down to one of the basement boîtes just starting to spring up south of Houston Street. The fleet was in town, the trains full of sailors. Mercer thought it odd to be going out to dinner rather than watching the fireworks, but the friend who had chosen the venue had plenty of reasons to be suspicious of nationalism, William said. As who didn’t. “You’ve got to stop being so au fait.” He seemed keyed up, in his white dinner jacket and ripped jeans. But maybe it was just that he’d already had quite a lot to drink; Bullet, the Hells Angel who lived upstairs, had invited his crew over to party, and had been passing out bottles of malt liquor on the roof.
It was nine o’clock when they reached the restaurant. Outside waited a shaven-skulled older man in seersucker and tortoiseshells, and an Oriental woman, much younger, who appeared to share Mercer’s ambivalence about being there at all. With fireworks booming invisibly to the west, the introductions were only semi-intelligible: Bruno, Mercer; Mercer, Bruno; William … Jenny? Jenny. The woman shifted in her heels, as if longing for sneakers. She said something about the kitchen closing early due to the holiday, but Bruno knew the maître d’hôtel—which he pronounced flawlessly, even at high volume.
Anyway, it was a European restaurant, at least as someone who’d never been to Europe imagined it: free jazz on the stereo, butcher paper on a wobbly table, delicate little lamb’s-cheek croquettes, candles heating the un-air-conditioned and otherwise unlit storefront to a disorienting degree, turning wine ruddy in the glasses. Since the place had no liquor license, William and Bruno had brought several bottles each, and by the main course were well into the third. Mercer, not wanting to seem a hayseed, had allowed himself a single, tiny pour, and now felt adrift on a sea of warmth, his face slick with it. Laughter would gong out from somewhere in the dimness and he would laugh reflexively, no longer caring what the joke was. He had a sense of similar scenes playing out elsewhere in the city, similar little expatriate conspiracies of good food and good drink while ashes rained down over the Hudson and the Soviets rattled their sabers and scientists in the Midwest moved the hands of the doomsday clock one tick closer to midnight. All you needed was a person who could pay for it.
In this case, he assumed, that patron was Bruno Augenblick. Mercer gathered that Bruno was some kind of art dealer, which might have explained William’s nerves, and the purpose of dinner, except that the vibe between them felt non-commercial. At any rate, Bruno was pretty clearly not heterosexual; the companion, the small, possibly Japanese girl who worked at his gallery, and whose name Mercer had already forgotten, seemed to be along mostly to illustrate to William that Bruno had a protégée of his own. Since Bruno was monopolizing William, she and Mercer wound up talking diagonally across the table. He was going into his second year of teaching, he said, carefully, when she asked what had brought him to our fair city. He was thinking of shaking up his syllabus in the fall. As a former high-school girl herself, maybe she could help. Had she read Balzac’s Lost Illusions?
She’d read about it in college at Berkeley, she said, still looking like she wished she were anywhere else. Was Balzac the one Marx liked so much, or was that the other one?
Mercer didn’t know, but Lost Illusions was one of his personal favorites. Basically, a young poet from the provinces comes to Paris to make his fortune and, in the fullness of time, discovers that he’s been wrong about everything. All the people he takes for geniuses are idiots, and vice versa. “This is like a venerable French genre. I’ve actually been working on an update,” he heard himself confess. “In the original, the historical background is the Second Empire, but in mine, it’s Vietnam.”
The smile across the table seemed to tighten. Because Jenny Nguyen was Vietnamese, not Japanese! Oh, cursed, cursed wine.
“I mean, it’s early going,” he added. “A lot could change.”
“Autobiographical?” asked Jenny.
He could feel the blood rising in his head. He hadn’t meant for this stuff about the novel to slip out in front of William. “Oh, not at all,” he said.
“I just thought, because of that whole ‘write what you know’—”
“No, I’m just feeling my way in. Forget I mentioned it.”
“It sounds not terrible, actually. You know, I’m sure Bruno knows people in publishing. God knows he knows people everywhere else.”
“Oh, no. I didn’t mean to suggest …”
He looked to his lover, embarrassed, but William was still deep in argument with Bruno. And had somehow obtained a cigarette. Though Mercer had never known him to be a smoker, he had to admit that William looked regal with it, exhaling through his nostrils, and then—just when the ash seemed dangerously long—leaning forward to flick it into the neck of an empty wine-bottle. The ash sailed neatly through the green gloom inside, touching down at the bottom like a horse high-diving in a circus. “Personally, I have high hopes,” William was saying, apropos of … well, what, exactly? “Failure is so much more interesting. All the evidence suggests that God considers mankind a failure. Things get interesting just at the point where they break down.”
Bruno smiled, as if he’d been trying to explain ethics to a headstrong toddler. “You and I only have the luxury of feeling this, of course, William, because our entire lives are nourished by capitalism. We are like the little mushrooms on the log.”
Oh, right. This fiscal crisis thing. FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD.
“Which is my point exactly,” William said. “Growth from decay.”
“An ungainly metaphor, fine. But let us be factual. Let us take your friend, the one who usurped your musical enterprise.”
“Nicky Chaos was never my friend. He was just some kid who hung around at shows and happened, Mr. Big Shot Gallery Man, to offer us a practice space when we needed one. I didn’t know he was going to take over the damn band.”
“You should have seen an insurrection coming. This is one of those people who carries Nietzsche in his pocket with a bookmark halfway through. Did he tell you he came to see me about taking him on as a client?”
“This is Captain Chaos you’re talking about?” asked Jenny Nguyen. “The nihilist you can’t say no to? I hate dealing with that guy. He called like every day last fall. Seemed a little desperate, honestly.”
“Probably because the band had broken up,” William said.
Bruno continued. “He believes he is a great artist who also makes music; really he is a bad musician trying also to make art. And what is this art? Spraypaint. For him, kulturkritik is moustaches drawn on ladies in your Sears catalogue. He thinks a safety pin is jewelry. He confuses brutality with beauty. This is very American.”
“I sometimes think he’s trying to become a version of me,” William said.
“A more bankable version of you, you mean.”
“Don’t tell me you agreed to represent him! Jesus, Bruno, I thought better of you.”
“As you yourself have discovered, Nicky Chaos takes persistence to the point of obsession. In a way, he is himself a work of art. A fact of which he’s no doubt unconscious, or else he would ruin it. But more to the point: One day, I arrange to sell the only canvas he showed me to an acquaintance of mine, a banker. ‘An investment,’ I tell him. He will never know the difference, a thousand dollars is a rounding error for him. But for Nicholas? He can now afford groceries for a year. Do you think this is possible without the help of the bourgeoisie, all the beautiful, helpless children renting brownstones and dining on osso buco?”
“That place on East Third’s a squat. I don’t think he’s ever paid rent.”
“We are like infants, William. I include myself, of course. We may not believe Mama and Papa exist when we cannot see them, but that doesn’t mean we don’t depend on them.”
“But really, this is your definition of ‘interesting’?” William had another cigarette lit. For a second, Mercer had the impression he hadn’t extinguished the first. “Because if so, look at how your beloved free enterprise system has deformed the word. I mean it. When it comes to replacing your dreams with its own it turns out to be as efficient as any Central Committee.”
“But why do the alternatives have to be either corporatocracy or the gulags?” said Jenny, exasperated. You got the feeling she could have ended the argument in about three seconds, had the men bothered to invite her into it. Which maybe was why they didn’t.
“Except in this case the dreams are wet ones rather than nightmares. America isn’t that far from totalitarianism, Bruno. You just happen to like the perfume she’s wearing.”
“Only an American would say this.”
“Look around you. It’s the end of the week, how do we express our dissatisfaction with the system? We go to a restaurant and bitch over screw-top wine. We make ourselves into a bourgeoisie-in-waiting, in case anything should happen to the real McCoy. It revolts me to say this, but I’m with Nicky Chaos on this one. Choice isn’t the same thing as freedom—not when someone else is framing the choices for you.”
Mercer had the uncomfortable sense of being some kind of case in point. The napkin in his lap was stained like a surgical gown. What would the parents of his students have thought of all this?
“And William, you prefer to the general welfare … some Platonic ideal of freedom.”
“How could anarchy be any worse for the general welfare than this? I say let the city go bankrupt, the buildings fall, let grass take over Fifth Avenue. Let birds nest in storefronts, whales swim up the Hudson. We can spend mornings hunting for food, and afternoons fornicating, and at night we’ll dance on the rooftops and chant shantih shantih at the sky.”
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