“Nothing,” Will said.
“Hello, Ken.”
She couldn’t tell if Ken mumbled a response or not. It was odd: his mother, at the park, was always so friendly now. Regan decided to see and raise his ruse of not seeing her.
“Well, whatever you’re doing, honey, I wish you’d include your sister.”
“Mom,” Will said, without looking up. “You. Are. Embarrassing. Me.”
“This isn’t the easiest time for her.”
“Do you not see I have a friend here?” he said.
“It’s after eight. Maybe it’s time Ken went home.”
That was all it took for the boy to scramble to his feet, flash a hand at Will, and, eyes hidden by the brim of his ballcap, zoom past her into the hallway. “Bye, Mrs. Santos!” The front door clicked shut. She waited for Will to say something, but he just lay there in his own cap—the Mets, Keith’s team—staring at her ankles. When she left him, he was adding Ken’s cards and dice to the pile under his chest, like a dragon smothering his hoard.
By now, Regan knew herself to be the worst mother in the world—it was the very crest of the wave of guilt she’d been riding for the last three hours—but she was afraid that if she didn’t run tonight, she would resort to some other, less innocent set of penalties. These must have been more obvious than she’d thought, too, even before the crisis became overt, or what had Keith meant by giving her a pair of running shoes for her thirty-fifth birthday, telling her it would be good for her health? She’d been slow to admit it, but he was right. Most people lost weight when they started training for a marathon. Since Regan had taken it up, not long after New Year’s, she had gained four pounds, according to the bathroom scale. There were times when she’d even felt capable of living without a bathroom scale.
With the running shoes on, she felt like that again, freer. She streaked down the Promenade toward the glowing arms of the bridge. Breath. Breath. Breath. Breath. Like Lamaze. She wondered, was it just the divorce that was eating at her kids? That sense of abandonment she’d been warned was unavoidable? Or was that the damage of junior year, twenty years ago, still making her see herself as bigger in the minds of others than she really was? At least part of what was bothering Will was his grandfather. Upon returning from Keith’s last weekend, he’d asked her to explain the difference between a grand jury and a regular one. He knew her work was to make Grandpa’s company look as good as possible, so when she told him everything was going to be fine, did he assume she was just doing her job?
She began to climb the bridge now, blood humming in her head. Thoughts of work became thoughts of Andrew West, who was the real reason she’d been late getting home. He’d been tactful in his choice of restaurant. The casual décor, maracas and other mariachi trinkets, the anonymity of the neighborhood, had set her at ease. Who could possibly want to fool around after Mexican food? But when, post-appetizers, she’d broached the question of how they might shore up Daddy’s position in his talks with the U.S. Attorney, he’d told her she deserved a break from thinking about work all the time. He took a long drink from his margarita, then squinted and rubbed his forehead. “Ice-cream headache.”
She’d been titrating wine into her own system by the milliliter. She needed her wits about her.
“So, do you like music?” he asked, once he’d stopped squinting.
“Doesn’t everyone?” It came off as defensive, glib, and she could already feel herself shrinking. How ridiculous she must look in this windowless restaurant with this beautiful … well, kid. “I used to think I’d be in Broadway musicals when I grew up. I remember dragging my dad to see My Fair Lady.” She told him how Daddy had ended up crying, he laughed so hard. Daddy wasn’t much of a laugher, even then.
“And do you dance?” he asked.
“Why? Do you?”
“I won some trophies in high school,” he said. Then: “I’m only kidding.” But he did know this little disco where they could go. After dessert, of course—“They have the most amazing flan here.” Now her knees throbbed. She’d reached the summit of the bridge’s pedestrian walkway, a couple hundred feet above water, but if she couldn’t make it the whole mile without giving up, how was she ever going to manage twenty-six and change? Luckily, there was gravity to carry her downhill toward Manhattan. The city doubled in the water below her. Like those two images of the South Bronx. Before and After. Despite her expanded powers, there was still an awful lot she didn’t know about the company that bore her name. She didn’t even know, really, the first thing about the stranger she was thinking of letting into her bed: where Andrew West had worked before, to whom he reported now … For all she knew, he could have been hired by Amory to keep an eye on her, compromise her—who could say how far the Demon Brother’s reach extended?—though Andrew had been nothing but kind, and Dr. Altschul would have pointed here to a pattern of self-sabotage.
“Andrew,” she’d said matter-of-factly, as the dinner plates were cleared. “I’m worried I’ve misled you. My husband and I only just separated, and what I really need now, more than anything, is a friend.”
He didn’t fight back. The gleaming teeth that had probably never seen a cavity, the sculpted hands that absently twirled the air, searching for the squash racket he’d left back in Webster Groves … they could have slipped into a janitor’s closet for seven minutes of heaven or parted and never seen each other again, or anything in between, and Andrew West would have been just fine. And the fact that he carried it so lightly shook her. Stupid! How could she have thought this meant anything to him? After some coffee and more small-talk, he’d kissed her chastely on the cheek and closed the door to the cab.
At the foot of the bridge, she slowed to a trot. The leafless trees of the park behind City Hall beckoned like black hands. She longed to stop for a minute and take a breather, but she didn’t dare; a park at night, even one this small, was no place for a woman alone. And that was what time had finally made out of Regan. A woman alone. She saw again the yellow police tape stretched across the end of her father’s block, turning white in the New Year’s snow. The white sheet being fed into the ambulance. To be minding your own business, immersed in the mess of your life, and then for it all to go black. This was what religion had been for, supposedly, a place to put your fears about whether there was anything beyond that black. She wished someone else were here right now. To be honest—and it killed her—she wished Keith were here right now.
But she let the shadows chase her back onto the bridge. At speed, the lights of the cars on the lower level blurred and disappeared. The water below was a great erasure mark. There was only her breathing and the rhythm of her feet on the pavement. She could have been jogging home to the old place, an intact marriage, undamaged kids, except. Except there was no Manhattan anymore. She was Brooklyn-bound.
In the living room, Mrs. Santos sat in her hard chair watching Telly Savalas watch a building burn on Kojak. The lights here were still off, and the interaction of the yellow overspill from the foyer and the blue flicker of the TV gave this, the theoretical center of the home, a bleak and migrainous aspect. Regan advanced into the room, digging in her purse for money, glancing over at Kojak’s enormous lolly because sometimes she didn’t feel comfortable looking Mrs. Santos in the eye. “You didn’t let them watch this, did you? Because Will’s so curious about everything, and I’m not sure he’s old enough …” She realized she’d insulted Mrs. Santos, but she couldn’t apologize without altering a power dynamic that was already—face it—fucked. Besides, her homework from therapy this week was to stop apologizing so much.
Mrs. Santos continued to knit. “A man calls for you while you are out.”
Regan’s pulse was still up, tympani in her chest. “Did he leave a message?”
“No, just a name.” Regan was completely in her power now.
“Well, do you remember what it was?”
Mrs. Santos smiled to herself, in private triumph. “We do not have this name in my country. Merced,
is something like this. But the family name, I remember. Is Buen hombre. Good man.”
42
THE NIGHT OF, or the evening of the day of the Night Of, Mercer stripped off the necktie and Oxford-cloth shirt of his teaching costume and sprawled prone on the bed, hoping sleep would make the hours between five and eight pass quickly. His eyes stayed open, though. The days were getting longer again; this time a week ago, he wouldn’t have been able to make out much of the portrait tacked to the wall, save maybe for a mitre-shaped tangle of hair. Now those eyes that were not quite William’s seemed to accuse him. He turned the other way, to face the window and the beaded curtain that hid the rest of the loft. Out there, futon and armchair had been drawn together, in an angle open toward the door. And there was a place of honor for William, too, a fraying nylon beach chair Mercer had found up on the roof—which, for all he knew, belonged to William, anyway.
They used to sit up there on warm nights, William drinking beer with the sixth-floor Angels while Mercer perched nearby on an upturned bucket, studying the fires that broke out uptown every summer. Once, the enormous Angel named Bullet had waved his beercan toward the burning horizon. “You know this guy Maslow? He has this triangle I heard about on ‘Dr.’ Zig. When you’re down there on the bottom of it, you can’t appreciate what’s higher. This is why niggers, man, you can’t give them nothing. No offense.” Mercer did his best not to take any. The invitation to participate in Bullet’s delusions—that Mercer was not, in fact, black; that he and William were merely dear friends—was, properly viewed, a gesture of solidarity. And on second thought, Bullet himself looked awfully swarthy in most lights; Mercer couldn’t be sure he wasn’t speaking brother-to-brother. But William, who had appointed himself Surrogate Defender of the Brown People of the Earth, now proceeded to shoot holes in Bullet’s theory. It was obviously the landlords who paid to have the fires set. Insurance purposes, cutting losses. And landlords were, by and large, honkies. The practice was well-established; Jewish lightning, was the unfortunate term of art. Mercer braced for carnage, in case Bullet saw himself as white (or Jewish), but Bullet had always had a soft spot for William. Had Mercer had the guts to ask, he probably would have agreed to take part in the intervention—to host it, even.
Instead, the first person Mercer had called was Bruno Augenblick, who’d said, “You really don’t understand William, do you?”
To which Mercer had wanted to reply, So explain him to me, then. “I’m just supposed to wait around until he ODs, that’s what you’re telling me?”
“Is that what you think I want, Mr. Goodman?”
Mercer had assumed since their one disastrous meeting that Bruno, unlike Bullet, actually hated Negroes, or at least this Negro, but now he wasn’t so sure. He fingered the brochure from the Substance Abuse Treatment Center on Twenty-Eighth Street. The phone’s rendition of silence was as imperfect as its version of the human voice. There were faint pops and crackles, like bubbles in a glass of 7-Up. “I frankly don’t care what you want, Bruno,” he said. “What I want is to help William get off this stuff. I guess I was foolish enough to think you’d pitch in, seeing as how you’re old friends, or whatever it is you are.”
Bruno’s voice remained stiff, chilly. (How was there such a thing as German-language poetry?) “I’ll have to trust you to understand that this is precisely why I can’t have anything to do with your …”
“Intervention.”
“Precisely,” he said again. And that was that. He hadn’t even wished Mercer luck.
Now the curtain on the window was gray with dusk. It had been blue when Mercer had bought it, a thin fabric to replace the butcher paper William had taped across the glass. The headlights and taillights of the buses slouching toward the Port Authority traced the history of Western civilization on the cotton. It was, substantially, a history of soot. Though a few feet separated the curtain from Mercer’s head, he could make out individual particles of blackness, the democratic meaninglessness of them scattered at random across the gauzy gray cloth. Airbrakes sounded like breaking bottles. Stuck buses bleated like sheep. He’d been a passenger down there, once, his head filled with a mixture of fantasy, superstition, and the vestiges of childhood religion, a running monologue aimed at God. (Da ist keine Stelle, die dich nicht sieht.) And had he really been so different, fretting about the apartment this afternoon, setting out mismatched mugs, as though this weren’t an intervention but a tea party? He still acted as if the proper arrangement of surfaces might call down benediction, or grace. Of course, there was no telling when William would be home, though he’d been promised (falsely) a special dinner, to be served at eight. Mercer could only hope he wouldn’t show up at seven thirty. Or ten.
There came a sound like a shot. It must have been a garbage truck hitting a pothole—one of thirty-two distinct sounds he’d categorized that interfered with sleep in this city. But garbage trucks came with the dawn. So maybe he’d slept through the intervention, and now it was morning: same traffic, same crepuscular light. The fact that “dusk” could mean two nearly opposite things seemed indicative of something, if only that the membrane between the real and the cognitive had grown perilously thin. Then the sound returned in multiples—wham wham wham wham WHAM—and he realized the night hadn’t happened yet. The Angels had left the inner end of the vestibule unlocked again. Someone was banging on his door.
Before he could get it all the way open, Venus de Nylon, the Farfisa wizard of Ex Post Facto, swept into the apartment as if it were her own, and Mercer merely a butler or footman. The last time he’d seen her (Him? Her? Her.), she was in nurse’s whites and a Tina Turner shag that swayed side to side as she made dainty stabs at her organ. Now she’d shaved and waxed her head. With her gold hoop earrings, she looked like a Dominican Mr. Clean. She seized a picture frame from a bookshelf, a Polaroid of himself and William on the patchy grass of Central Park. “Well, this is cute.”
Mercer held out his hand. “We haven’t been formally introduced. I’m Mercer.”
Something stirred in her alligator-skin purse. She reached in and scooped from it a ball of white fur.
“And I see you brought your dog.”
Set down on the floor, the beast scrabbled under the sofa. There was a yowl, and Eartha K. streaked out and shot through the beaded curtain of the sleeping nook. The dog gave a few yaps at the swinging beads, as if gloating. “I wasn’t going to leave her tied to a lamppost, if that’s what you’re suggesting.” Venus’s eyes flicked back to Mercer. “Honestly, I never understood why a Hamilton-Sweeney would choose to live in this neighborhood anyway.”
“Like I said on the phone, I do appreciate your helping out with all this.”
“I knew the day would come. Billy’s always had to take everything to the end of the line.”
“Please, sit. Can I offer you coffee?”
“Aren’t you the Donna Reed of this motherfucker? But I don’t drink it. Weak heart.”
Venus took the futon, lifting her big knobby feet from their flats and curling them up on the cushion like a mermaid’s tail. Mercer couldn’t help but speculate about the body under the velour tracksuit. Had she had the surgery, the great final chop? Strategic bagginess made it hard to tell. He handed her the brochure. The idea here, he said, was to make William see how many people cared about him, the real him. The him he was with other people.
“And how many people is that, exactly?”
“I’ve got three confirmed, at this point.”
“Three plus you?”
“Three including me.”
“Shit.”
“I did get his sister to come.”
“I got to warn you, Mercer, you could get Jesus Christ himself to come and still not stop a serious habit. I learned that from watching Nastanovich. Our first bassist, you know. I really thought when he passed, it would scare Billy straight. Or at least back to coke. But a junkie’s going to do what a junkie’s going to do.” She touched his thigh. Mercer, suddenly disconsolate, didn’
t remember to pull away. “Don’t take that amiss. I don’t want to see your boyfriend in jail or with a toe-tag, but you’ve got to accept that some people think the real them is whoever they are when they’re not around other people.”
Another knock at the door brought Mercer back to himself. Or to the version of himself he’d fashioned in order to make it through this. “That’ll be Regan.”
Since he’d last seen her, she had acquired a patina of health, as if she’d been on vacation, or to one of those new tanning coffins. Of course, the weeks around the solstice were when white people in general were at their whitest. Regan hesitated a moment before crossing the plane of the door, but no alarm began to sound.
“This is William’s friend, Venus,” Mercer explained. Venus extended a hand palm-down, as if to be kissed. Regan shook it and then, rather than sit on any of the available surfaces, walked around surveying the reclaimed furniture, the scrappy congoleum, the yellow ovoids of lamplight on the cracked plaster walls. The jacket of her business suit was a boxy armor. “Can I take that?” he asked. But she was cold and wanted to keep it. He apologized about the heat. “The landlord likes to turn it off and see how long he can go before anyone notices. I was just about to make some fresh coffee.”
“That would be lovely, thanks.”
“This is what we have.” He held up a yellow can of Café El Bandito, careful not to open the cabinet door wide enough that she’d see the wood-grained roach motels within. (Really, though, why did he care? Why, since they met, had he been so desperate to impress her?)
Regan approached the dog. “Can I pet him?”
“Her. Shoshonna.”
While the percolator burbled intestinally, Mercer took some creamer packets from the fridge and got down the sugar box and did a surreptitious roach check. He sought to verify in the glass-fronted cabinet that his guests were getting along, but instead, Regan had moved to the window, and was gazing down at the cinderblock on the fire escape, the dead flowers. The street below, full of stalled automobiles, would be a trench of bloody light. From down there, she would look like a portrait. “I don’t see why this shouldn’t work,” she was saying. Her voice had gone small and hard, as if a walnut were lodged in her windpipe. “He’s been looking for a home all his life, and now he’s got one. He can’t want to just throw that away.”
City on Fire Page 42