The City of Mirrors

by Justin Cronin

  He removed an armload of textbooks and began loading them onto the shelves. “Let me ask you something. Of all the possible subjects in the world, why did you choose biochemistry?”

  “I suppose because I’m good at it.”

  He turned, hands on his hips. “Well, there you have it. The truth is, I’m just crazy about amino acids. I put them in my martini.”

  “What’s a martini?”

  His face drew back. “James Bond? Shaken, not stirred? They don’t have these movies in Ohio?”

  “I know who James Bond is. I mean, I don’t know what’s in one.”

  His mouth curved into a mischievous grin. “Ah,” he said.

  We were on our third drink when we heard a girl’s voice calling his name and the sound of footsteps coming up the stairs.

  “In here!” Lear yelled.

  The two of us were seated on the floor with the tools of Lear’s enterprise spread before us. I have never met anyone else who traveled with not only a fifth of gin and a bottle of vermouth but the sort of bartending gizmos—jiggers, shakers, tiny, delicate knives—one sees only in old movies. A bag of ice swooned in a puddle of meltwater beside an open jar of olives from the market up the street. Ten-thirty in the morning, and I was completely hammered.

  “Jesus, look at you.”

  I hauled my addled eyes into focus on the figure in the doorway. A girl, wearing a summer dress of pale blue linen. I note the dress first because it is the easiest thing to describe about her. I do not mean to say that she was beautiful, although she was; rather, I wish to make a case that there was about her something distinctive and therefore unclassifiable (unlike Lucessi’s sister, whose ice-pick perfection was a dime a dozen and had left no lasting mark on me). I could note the particulars—her figure, slender and small-breasted, almost boyish; the petite formation of her sandaled toes, darkened by street grime; her heart-shaped face and damp blue eyes; her hair, pale blond, unmanaged by clips or barrettes, cut to her shining, sun-touched shoulders—but the whole, as they say, was greater than the sum of its parts.

  “Liz!” Lear made a big show of getting to his feet, trying not to spill his drink. He threw his arms around her in a clumsy hug, which she pushed back from with a look of exaggerated distaste. She was wearing small, tortoiseshell-framed eyeglasses, perfectly round, that on another woman might have seemed mannish but in her case didn’t at all.

  “You’re drunk.”

  “Not in the least. More like in the most. Not as bad as my new roomie here.” He propped his free hand against the side of his mouth and spoke in an exaggerated whisper: “Don’t tell him, but a minute ago he appeared to be melting.” He lifted his glass. “Have one?”

  “I have to meet my adviser in half an hour.”

  “I’ll take that as a yes. Tim, this is Liz Macomb, my girlfriend. Liz, Tim. Don’t recall his last name, but I’m sure it’ll come to me. Say your hellos while I fix this girl a cocktail.”

  The polite thing to do would have been to stand, but somehow this seemed too formal, and I decided against it. Also, I wasn’t sure I could actually accomplish this.

  “Hi,” I said.

  She sat on the bed, folded her slender legs beneath herself, and drew the hem of her dress over her knees. “How do you do, Tim? So you’re the lucky winner.”

  Lear was sloppily pouring gin. “Tim here is from Ohio. That’s about all I remember.”

  “Ohio!” She spoke this word with the same delight she might have used for Pago Pago or Rangoon. “I’ve always wanted to go there. What’s it like?”

  “You’re kidding.”

  She laughed. “Okay, a little. But it’s your home. Your patria. Your pays natal. Tell me anything.”

  Her directness was totally disarming. I struggled to come up with something worthy of it. What was there to say about the home I’d left behind?

  “It’s pretty flat, I guess.” I winced inwardly at the lameness of the remark. “The people are nice.”

  Lear handed her a glass, which she accepted without looking at him. She took a tiny sip, then said, “Nice is good. I like nice. What else?”

  She had yet to avert her eyes from my face. The intensity of her gaze was unsettling, though not unwelcome—far from it. I saw that she had a faint swirl of peach fuzz, dewy with sweat, above her upper lip.

  “There really isn’t very much to tell.”

  “And your people? What do they do?”

  “My father’s an optometrist.”

  “An honorable profession. I can’t see past my nose without these things.”

  “Liz is from Connecticut,” Lear added.

  She took a second, deeper sip, wincing pleasurably. “If it’s all right with you, Jonas, I’ll speak for myself.”

  “What part?” I said, as if I knew the first thing about Connecticut.

  “Little town called Greenwich, dah-ling. Which I’m supposed to hate, there’s probably no place more hateable, but I can’t seem to manage it. My parents are angels, and I adore them. Jonas,” she said, gazing into her glass, “this is really good.”

  Lear dragged a desk chair to the center of the room and lowered himself onto it backward. I made a mental note that this would be how I sat from now on.

  “I’m sure you can describe it better than that,” he said, grinning.

  “This again. I’m not some dancing monkey, you know.”

  “Come on, pumpkin. We’re totally wasted.”

  “ ‘Pumpkin.’ Listen to you.” She sighed, puffing out her cheeks. “Fine, just this once. But to be clear, I’m only doing this because we have company.”

  I had no idea what to make of this exchange. Liz sipped again. For an unnervingly long interval, perhaps twenty seconds, silence gripped the room. Liz had closed her eyes, like a medium at a séance attempting to conjure the spirits of the dead.

  “It tastes like—” She frowned the thought away. “No, that’s not right.”

  “For God’s sake,” Lear moaned, “don’t be such a tease.”

  “Quiet.” Another moment slipped by; then she brightened. “Like … the air of the coldest day.”

  I was amazed. She was exactly right. More than right: her words, rather than functioning as a mere decoration of the experience, actually deepened its reality. It was the first time in my life that I felt the power of language to intensify life. The phrase was also, coming from her lips, deeply sexy.

  Lear gave an admiring whistle through his teeth. “That’s a good one.”

  I was frankly staring at her. “How did you do that?”

  “Oh, just a talent I have. That and twenty-five cents will get you a gumball.”

  “Are you some kind of writer?”

  She laughed. “God, no. Have you met those people? Total drunks, every one.”

  “Liz here is one of those English majors we were talking about,” Lear said. “A burden on society, totally unemployable.”

  “Spare me your crass opinions.” She directed her next words to me: “What he’s not telling you is that he’s not quite the self-involved bon vivant he makes himself out to be.”

  “Yes, I am!”

  “Then why don’t you tell him where you were for the last twelve months?”

  In my state of information overload, and under the influence of three strong drinks, I had overlooked the most obvious question in the room. Why had Jonas Lear, of all people, needed a floater for a roommate?

  “Okay, I’ll do it,” Liz said. “He was in Uganda.”

  I looked at him. “What were you doing in Uganda?”

  “Oh, a little of this, a little of that. As it turns out, they’ve got quite a civil war going on. Not what the brochure promised.”

  “He was working in a refugee camp for the U.N.,” Liz explained.

  “So I dug latrines, handed out bags of rice. It doesn’t make me a saint.”

  “Compared to the rest of us, it does. What your new roommate hasn’t told you, Tim, is that he has serious designs on saving the world.
I’m talking major savior complex. His ego is the size of a house.”

  “Actually, I’m thinking of giving it up,” Lear said. “It’s not worth the dysentery. I’ve never shat like that in my life.”

  “Shit, not ‘shat,’ ” Liz corrected. “ ‘Shat’ is not a word.”

  These two: I could barely keep up, and the problem wasn’t merely that I was smashed, or already half in love with my new roommate’s girlfriend. I felt like I had stepped straight from Harvard, circa 1990, into a movie from the 1940s, Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn duking it out.

  “Well, I think English is a great major,” I remarked.

  “Thank you. See, Jonas? Not everyone is a total philistine.”

  “I warn you,” he told her, wagging a finger my direction, “you’re talking to another dreary scientist.”

  She made a face of exasperation. “Suddenly in my life it’s raining scientists. Tell me, Tim, what kind of science do you do?”

  “Biochemistry.”

  “Which is … ? I’ve always wondered.”

  I found myself strangely happy to be asked this question. Perhaps it was just a matter of who was asking it.

  “The building blocks of life, basically. What makes things live, what makes them work, what makes them die. That’s about all there is to it.”

  She nodded approvingly. “Well, that’s nicely said. I’d say there’s a bit of the poet in you after all. I’m beginning to like you, Tim from Ohio.” She polished off her drink and set it aside. “As for me, I’m really here to form a philosophy of life. An expensive way to do it, but it seemed like a good idea at the time, and I’ve decided to go with it.”

  This luxurious ambition—four years of college at twenty-three grand a pop to amass a personality—struck me as another alien aspect of her that I was hoping to learn more about. I say alien, but what I mean is angelic. By this point, I was utterly convinced that she was a creature of the spheres.

  “You don’t approve?”

  Something in my face must have said so. I felt my cheeks grow warm. “I didn’t say that.”

  “You didn’t say anything. Piece of advice. ‘That man that hath a tongue, I say, is no man, if with his tongue he cannot win a woman.’ ”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Shakespeare, Two Gentlemen of Verona. In plain English, when a woman asks you a question, you better answer.”

  “If you want to get her into bed,” Lear added. He looked at me. “You’ll have to excuse her. She’s like the Shakespeare channel. I don’t understand half the things she says.”

  I knew almost nothing about Shakespeare. My experience of the bard was limited, like many people’s, to a dutiful slog through Julius Caesar (violent, occasionally exciting) and Romeo and Juliet (which, until that moment, I’d found patently ridiculous).

  “I just meant I’ve never met anybody who thinks that way.”

  She laughed. “Well, if you want to hang around with me, bub, better bone up. And with that,” she said, rising from the bed, “and speaking of which, I must be off.”

  “But you’re not half as drunk as we are,” Lear protested. “I was hoping to have my way with you.”

  “Weren’t you just.” At the doorway, she looked back at me. “I forgot to ask. Which are you?”

  One more question I had no answer for. “Come again?”

  “Fly? Owl? A.D.? Tell me you’re not Porcellian.”

  Lear answered in my stead: “Actually, our boy here, though technically a junior, has yet to experience this aspect of Harvard life. It’s a complicated story I’m much too drunk to explain.”

  “So, you’re not in a club?” she said to me.

  “There are clubs?”

  “Final clubs. Somebody pinch me. You really don’t know what they are?”

  I had heard the term, but that was all. “Are they some kind of fraternity?”

  “Um, not exactly,” Lear said.

  “What they are,” Liz explained, “are anachronistic dinosaurs, elitist to the core. Which also happen to throw the best parties. Jonas is in the Spee Club. Like his daddy and his daddy’s daddy and all the Lear daddies since fish grew legs. He’s also the whattayacallit. Jonas, what do you call it?”

  “The punchmaster.”

  She rolled her eyes. “And what a title that is. Basically, it means he’s in charge of who gets in. Honeybunch, do something.”

  “I only just met the guy. Maybe he’s not interested.”

  “Sure I am,” I said, though I wasn’t sure at all. What was I letting myself in for? And what did something like that cost? But if it meant spending more time in Liz’s company, I would have walked through fire. “Absolutely. I’d definitely be interested in something like that.”

  “Good.” She smiled victoriously. “Saturday night. Black tie. See, Jonas? It’s settled.”

  I had no doubt that it was.

  The first problem: I didn’t own a tuxedo.

  I had worn one once in my life, a powder-blue rental with velvet navy accents, paired with a ruffled shirt that only a pirate could have loved and a clip-on bow tie fat as a fist. Perfect for the island-themed senior prom at Mercy Regional High School (“A Night in Paradise!”) but not the rarefied chambers of the Spee Club.

  I intended to rent one, but Jonas convinced me otherwise. “Your tuxedo life,” he explained, “has only just begun. What you need, my friend, is a battle tux.” The shop he took me to was called Keezer’s, which specialized in recycled formal wear cheap enough to vomit on without compunction. A vast room, unfancy as a bus station, with moth-eaten animal heads on the walls and air so choked with naphthalene it made my sinuses sting: from its voluminous racks I selected a plain black tux, a pleated shirt with yellow stains under the arms, a box of cheap studs and cuff links, and patent leather dress shoes that hurt only when I walked or stood. In the days leading up to the party, Jonas had adopted a persona that was somewhere between a wise young uncle and a guide dog for the blind. The selection of the tux was mine, but he insisted on choosing my tie and cummerbund, examining dozens before settling on pink silk with a pattern of tiny green diamonds.

  “Pink?” Needless to say, it wasn’t anything that would have flown in Mercy, Ohio. A powder-blue tux, yes. A pink tie, no. “Are you sure about this?”

  “Trust me,” he said. “It’s the kind of thing we do.”

  The party, as I understood it, would be a sort of elaborate first date. Members would have the chance to look over fresh prospects, called “punchees.” I was worried that I didn’t have anyone to bring, but Jonas assured me that I was better off alone. That way, he explained, I would have the opportunity to impress the flotilla of unescorted women imported for the occasion from other colleges.

  “Get two of them into bed, and you’re definitely in.”

  I laughed at the absurdity. “Why only two?”

  “I mean at the same time,” he said.

  I had not seen Liz since my first day in Winthrop House. This did not seem strange to me, as she lived in Mather, far down the river, and moved in an artsier crowd. I had, however, through discreet, well-spaced questioning, managed to learn more about her connection to Jonas. They were not, in fact, a strictly Harvard couple but had known each other since childhood. Their fathers had been prep school roommates, and the two families had vacationed together for years. This made sense to me; in hindsight, their verbal jousting had sounded as much like an exchange between two precocious siblings as a romantic twosome’s. Jonas claimed that for many years, they actually couldn’t stand each other; it wasn’t until they were fifteen, and forced to endure two foggy weeks with their parents on a remote island off the coast of Maine, that their mutual antipathy had boiled over into what it really was. They’d kept this from their families—even Jonas confessed that there was something vaguely incestuous about the whole thing—confining their passions to secret, summertime trysts in barns and boathouses while their parents got drunk on the patio, not really thinking of themselves as boyfriend
-girlfriend until they’d both wound up at Harvard and discovered that they actually liked each other after all.

  This account also explained, at least partly, the oddness of their relationship. What else but shared history could bond two people who possessed such fundamentally incompatible temperaments, such divergent visions of life? The more I grew to know them both, the more I came to understand how truly different they were. That they had traveled in the same social circles as children, attended virtually interchangeable country day and boarding schools, and been able to navigate the New York subway system, the Paris Métro, and the London tube by the time they were twelve said nothing about who they really were as people. It is possible for the same circumstances that draw two souls together to keep them forever at arm’s length. Herein lies the truth of love, and the essence of all tragedy. I was not yet wise enough to understand this, nor would I be, until many years had passed. Yet I believe that from the start I sensed this, and that it was the source of my affinity, the force that pulled me to her.

  The day of the party arrived. The daylight hours were all desultory preamble; I got nothing done. Was I nervous? How does the bull feel when he is marched into the ring and notices the cheering crowds and the man with his cape and sword? Jonas had gone off for the day—I didn’t know where—and as the clock neared eight, the appointed hour, he had yet to show himself. The midwesterner in me was forever disturbed by the regional differences in what was and was not considered late, and by nine-thirty, when I decided to dress (I had entertained the girlish fantasy that Lear and I would do this together), my anxiety was such that it verged on anger. It seemed likely that his promise had been forgotten and I would spend the evening like a jilted groom, watching TV in a tuxedo.

  The other difficulty lay in the fact that I did not know how to tie a bow tie. Probably I couldn’t have accomplished this in any event; my hands were actually shaking. Managing the studs and cuff links felt like trying to thread a needle with a hammer. It took me ten full minutes of cursing like a longshoreman to lodge them in their proper holes, and by the time I was done, my face was damp with sweat. I mopped it away with a bad-smelling towel and examined myself in the full-length mirror on the bathroom door, hoping for some encouragement. I was an unremarkable-looking sort of boy, neither one thing nor the other; although naturally slender, and without significant blemishes, I had always felt my nose was too big for my face, my arms too long for my body, my hair too bulky for the head it sat atop. Yet the face and figure I beheld in the mirror did not look so unpromising to me. The sleek black suit and shiny shoes and starch-hardened shirt—even, against my expectations, the pink cummerbund—did not appear unnatural on me. Instantly I regretted the powder-blue getup I’d worn to prom; who knew that something as simple as a black suit could gentrify one’s appearance so thoroughly? For the first time, I dared to think that I, this plain boy from the provinces, might pass through the doors of the Spee Club without an alarm going off.