The Spectators

by Jennifer Dubois

  Cel stares at the coffin; it sways slightly, like a bassinet, and she wonders if this is done for effect or if the men don’t have the strength to hold it steady.

  All funerals remind Cel of her first, for the birches. Her mother weeping, tracing her finger along the ring of a stump, while Cel told her she was horrible, horrible, horrible. Her mother saying she hadn’t meant to cut them down—she hadn’t been the one to cut them down at all! The wind kicking up all around them—or did she invent that part later? Cel can only imagine what Hal would say about this, her deranged attachment to those fucking trees persisting through the years. In comparison Ruth’s funeral had seemed a wan, senseless thing. It was early November—a dull, liminal stretch of season that felt unmoored from memory; Cel couldn’t remember anything else ever happening around that time of year, and maybe this was why Ruth chose it. That was another thing she and Hal said to each other, for a while. Cel gave the eulogy, saying kind things cheapened by the unseemly length of time she’d been preparing herself to say them. Afterward, they ate a casserole at a folding table in the church cafeteria.

  The car begins to move, finally, and Cel turns to look at Mattie.

  “I forgot to ask you for a secret.” She says this only because there is no risk of him telling her one; it strikes Cel that she actually doesn’t want to know anything more about Mattie than she already does.

  “I don’t have any secrets,” says Mattie.

  “If that was true, you wouldn’t need a publicist.”

  “Well, in that case, you’re fired.” Mattie is deadpan enough that Cel flinches a little. “Because believe it or not, it is true: you are looking at a man without secrets.”

  He turns to stare out the window; he seems to be scanning the streets for something, though they are now far past the funeral.

  “Well. Not my own secrets, anyway,” he says after a time. “Only other people’s.”

  * * *

  —

  It was windy the night of the birches—of this, Cel is almost sure. She can almost see the hemlocks’ balletic swaying, a minor prelude to every storm. Horrible, horrible, horrible, she chanted—and was it the weather that made her wild? Did she feel a sort of heathen saturnalia—a sense of the world arranging itself to perform its heresies (lightning, thunder, rain), creating a chasm where unspeakable things might be shouted? She was only nine, and she was very sorry about the trees. Yet it isn’t the grief she remembers most, but the rage: that rage that was a funnel cloud within her, with no landscape to destroy. On whom might she exact her vengeance? Certainly not Ruth, who listened to the litany of her own outrages with an infuriating, impersonal patience. This is how she listened to the news about the trees, at first: radiating a subtle incuriosity that made Cel crazy, frenzied with an anger that was as deep as anything she’s ever known (and sometimes, she fears, far deeper).

  “Horrible,” Cel said again and again, and then: “I hate you sometimes.”

  At this, her mother buried her head on the stump and began to weep soundlessly.

  Later, Cel crept into her mother’s room and threw her face in her hair.

  “Mom?” she whispered.

  After what seemed a long while, Ruth said, “Yes?”

  “Could you ever teach me how to cut a tree like that?”

  “What?”

  “Not a special tree, I mean. I mean, like maybe just a little hemlock.”

  Saying this hurt Cel, which made her feel brave.

  Ruth sighed and turned to the wall. “I can’t teach you that,” she said. “Maybe your grandfather.”

  Cel disentangled herself from Ruth and went to the window. Below, the birch trees lay where they fell. Something in their glint seemed to take a skeletal character—a pile of femurs after a genocide—and she shivered.

  “Why can’t you teach me?” she said.

  “Because I don’t know how to do it, Cel.” Her mother sounded wondering. “Because it really wasn’t me that did it. It was someone else.”

  SIXTEEN

  semi

  1980

  “Fuck those Wall Street closet cases,” said Brookie when I finally told him about Matthew.

  We were on the train, forcing down execrable coffee. The graffiti in our car was strangely shaky, like a barely mastered alphabet.

  “He wasn’t Wall Street,” I whispered. The car was filling with a watery yellow light; it must have been the morning. I have no idea where either of us was going. We rode there for a while in silence.

  “Well, fuck ’em, anyway,” said Brookie after a while. And then: “Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry.”

  * * *

  —

  I’d watched Matthew’s press conference by accident—I was stumbling through the channels and there he was, reading from notes, blinking too rapidly, and because I was not yet accustomed to this particular taunt from the universe, I watched. Matthew had evidently already confessed to something, his indiscretion or however he was going to put it, and one could hear light jeering from the crowd. Though “crowd” is perhaps overstating the case—the spectacle of Matthew’s public surrender to character assassination turned out to be lightly attended, compounding its pitifulness. Eddie Marcus never would have allowed this during the campaign—don’t let them take photos of empty rooms at events! being one of his more astute insights.

  “And so,” Mattie was saying, “in order to avoid being a distraction to the Democratic Party and to avoid causing further pain to my family, I have decided to suspend my campaign at this time.”

  His voice was uncertain, as though he weren’t used to public speaking—as though he hadn’t already made one career out of it, and wouldn’t go on to make another. Next to him stood a pale, besieged Alice, looking about as miserable as she always had. It was impossible to guess what she knew.

  On TV, Matthew thanked his supporters, then apologized to them, then said something I missed that elicited a smattering of mean-spirited laughter. Say what you will about Alice, she had a poker face that couldn’t be beat—except, of course, by Matthew. His was so good you didn’t even know he had one; you didn’t even know he was playing any sort of game at all. The phrase ghost bet floated up from somewhere as I watched him speak. He really was a talented politician, I thought. What a loss, what a terrible loss, for New York City!

  Other people thought so, too; for a while, Matthew was an object of no small amount of progressive nostalgia. The specter of his lost career flickered around reality—when Koch made his hideous compromises, when Dukakis got in that preposterous tank, when Bush demanded that we read his thin, hectoring lips and the nation, unbelievably, complied. Matthew stayed pure, throughout it all, and continued to be spoken of wistfully in certain lefty circles. And even when his show made this absurd, Matthew himself was never quite viewed as a joke—more as a baffling waste, like a genius rock star dead at twenty-seven.

  Though this is likely not why the journalist is calling me again.

  “I want to know what ended Matthew Miller’s political career,” he says in his second voicemail. “I think maybe it was you.”

  “That’s some crackerjack investigative reporting, Scotty!” I tell the answering machine. I’ve been talking to myself quite a bit in recent months.

  I want to know what ended Matthew Miller’s political career: for a while, I had wanted to know this, too. It might have really been the tabloid, of course, likely in conjunction with some seedier Barry campaign underling. It could have been a story Matthew Miller erected to disown a decision he’d already made—a way to dodge his darkest fear by pretending it was already real (this theory was volunteered by Stephen, formulated by his psychiatrist). I even entertained the notion that it could have been Eddie Marcus, casting Matthew as both a scapegoat and a stepping-stone—though he’d sabotage his own career soon enough, that blond fuck.

  It could ha
ve been any one of these things, or none, or something else I might never think to think of. It would never have occurred to me to take all the credit for Matthew’s downfall, however. Listening to the reporter’s voicemail, I almost feel a little flattered.

  I listen to the message again for spite, then applaud into the darkness. I am perhaps not well suited to living alone.

  * * *

  —

  I entered an era of compulsive, brutalizing walks.

  I stalked the ruins of the Lower East Side; I floated up to the dreamy realms near the park, hoping to cause a scandal. On Division Street, I gave thirty dollars to a man playing the French horn. He smiled at the money, then looked at me and frowned. On Orchard Street, I watched a procession of Chinese men bearing tall cloth banners, and began crying before I understood it was a funeral.

  I threw myself into writing, which I undertook in the same spirit as the walking—savagely, joylessly, with no sense of actually trying to get anywhere. I took some solace in thoughts of the work I’d be doing if I’d never met Matthew—the great art that he was personally denying the entire world! I erected elaborate fantasies in which future historians discovered the tragedy of my lost oeuvre (the mechanics of this part were unclear), inspiring global mourning for my brilliance. I liked to imagine Matthew becoming known as a great cultural criminal of history, along the lines of whoever torched the library at Alexandria. I spent entire walks thinking about this.

  I was dimly aware, even then, that I was being histrionic. And yet the knowledge that my misery was in some sense inescapably theatrical (as Grandmother would say) only made it worse. I felt myself entombed within a carapace of clownishness; inside it, I was echoingly, vertiginously alone.

  I walked to the East River, to watch the crimsonish sheen fall over the water. I walked to Forty-sixth Street, to watch Afroed, scorpion-spined boys play Frisbee without their shirts. I stared so long that a kid in a Ramones T-shirt stopped to ask if I was okay. Was there someone he could call for me? Was there anything he could do? In another life I might have had some ideas. But I had entered a stretch of celibacy—which, like the walking, I approached with a militancy out of all proportion to circumstance.

  We need to get you out, the boys kept telling me—I’d say that I was always out, and they’d say I knew that wasn’t what they meant. They proposed the Spike, the Eagle, the Man’s Country baths; they reminded me how much I’d liked Tenth Floor’s tiny dance floor. I couldn’t really imagine that: the lethal boredom of my present was beginning to lacquer over the past. From my new vantage point, all possible ways of being, all potential courses of action, looked more or less the same. When you truly can’t remember why anyone bothers with anything, hedonism just seems exhausting.

  Though the boys must have succeeded once or twice: I recall Donna Summer; excited discussion of whether the best new anti-parasite treatment was carcinogenic. But after a while, the boys’ obsession with joy—and their relentless insistence that I had experienced it, once—began to seem suspicious. Could their claims really hold up under scrutiny? I began to study my life as a skeptic, then a full-blown conspiracy theorist, scrutinizing my memories for signs of the real story. Wasn’t that the glint of a second shooter just off beyond the edge of the frame? And why, in that supposedly lunar nothingness, did the flag seem to ripple in the wind? And wasn’t it true—wasn’t it, in fact, undeniable—that I had been fooling myself all along?

  I went to cruising sites and clubs, though not for any normal reasons. I went to the Metropolitan bathroom and eyed the men eyeing me through the stalls. I invited sex only in order to reject it—though this was a cheap thrill, as they go. The only person I think I ever really disappointed was a flasher on Clinton Street; he opened his coat with a sudden voilà gesture, and I looked so unsurprised that he closed it again, very quickly, and went off muttering into the night.

  I went down to the West Side Highway, for old times’ sake. I walked the Lower East Side, scowling at the peace signs. I sneered at pigeons, at colorful laundry waving in the early morning light. I went to the Rambles, to the exact spot where a rat had once scurried over my foot while I gave a blowjob to a man in a beret. I wondered what had happened to the man; I wondered what had happened to the rat.

  Out of gratuitous, impotent spite, I wished bad things for them both.

  part three

  But seasons must be challenged or they totter

  Into a chiming quarter

  Where, punctual as death, we ring the stars….

  —DYLAN THOMAS

  Every silence quotes a greater silence.

  —ALICE FULTON

  SEVENTEEN

  semi

  1980–1985

  A hundred thousand stories, all with the same ending. A triumph of plotting the Greeks would envy. So when, exactly, do we raise the curtain? Which narrative thread shall we pull to unravel a generation?

  * * *

  —

  Say it began with the thing in Paulie’s mouth.

  What sort of thing? we asked three times. Paulie was in the living room, practicing for an audition. This is when we heard it first: an odd, slurring distortion in his speech.

  This was in the spring of ’82. Paulie was in a foul mood, due to the public boycott of his werewolf movie. City Council claimed it unfairly stereotyped the Forty-first Precinct.

  “Too bad we don’t know anybody there anymore,” Brookie said, and winked at me.

  “He was in the State Assembly. Hey, Paulie. Say that line again, will you?”

  Paulie obliged, and we heard it once more—a strange sort of curl, like he was playing deaf, which we immediately accused him of doing.

  “Because if you are, then it isn’t very good.”

  “I’m not.”

  “It’s also very offensive.”

  “I’m not,” he said, and we noticed that he’d answered. “It’s this cold sore.”

  A cold sore?

  “Or something. There’s this spot.”

  We marched him to the kitchen and bent him over the sink. A flashlight was suggested and produced; batteries were sought and found. Then, one by one, we stared at it—this knurl of dark matter, crouching at the back of Paulie’s throat. Now, how did that get there? we thought and must have said out loud. The thing in Paulie’s mouth wasn’t large or particularly gruesome—yet it was so unlike anything we’d ever seen in a mouth. Something about it seemed both comical and ominous—a goose outside your airplane window, right before it’s sucked into the engine.

  “This is bad timing,” said Paulie when we finally let him up. “I have to sing tomorrow.”

  “You have to go to the doctor tomorrow,” we told him.

  And miraculously, he agreed.

  Perhaps in that moment we saw the plot run straight through to its ending—perhaps this was how it began for us.

  * * *

  —

  Or perhaps it wasn’t then, but a few moments before. Perhaps it began as we were leading Paulie to the kitchen, as we were watching him open his mouth.

  The Angel of Death was swooping low over the houses. Between the sound of wingbeats in the distance and the sound of feathers settling on the roof, there comes a silence. This is the final echo of a certain kind of hope, the downbeat of a new sort of fear.

  Perhaps this, then, was the beginning.

  * * *

  —

  Or say it began with the rumors. We’d been hearing them for a while—though we could never quite agree on what we’d heard, or when, or whether, in those early days, we were hearing about the same thing at all. In the grand tradition of epic villains, ours went by many names.

  Some of us remembered being handed a pamphlet on Fire Island sometime around Labor Day. Was this in ’81? Though we were vaguely aware of it even then, we supposed, this new affliction affecting the a
stoundingly slutty—sailors, hustlers, anyone whose sex life was a full-time job. Who had that kind of time? We should only be so lucky! We threw away the flier; we’d thought it was about a party.

  Some of us heard about something coming from Los Angeles—a scourge of the jet-setters and out-of-sight-wealthy—and this version sounded vaguely faddish, like something you might want to get in on early. But promiscuity, like class, is a spectrum on which everybody claims the middle: we did not worry about it much.

  Then there was the thing called “the Saint’s Disease,” which you caught at the Saint and was the reason Stephen never wanted to go there anymore. This was just the club bug of the month, we figured—a new critter to add to the menagerie, alongside the crabs, the amoebas, the enteric parasites (shigellosis, amebiasis, giardiasis). These would tear through like mono at summer camp, and the Health Department would send people out to test the water. Then we’d all wash up at the pharmacy to get a shot; they made you stand in line holding a ticket, as at the deli, and we made a big show of pretending to be embarrassed. This routine was just the cost of doing business; if you were squeamish about it, then maybe you needed to look into a different kind of business.

  Nevertheless, we decided to indulge Stephen’s paranoia, and avoided the Saint for a while.

  Perhaps these were the beginnings—misty, choral, understated, for a storyteller with some subtlety.