The City of Mirrors

by Justin Cronin

  “I’m Jonas’s pet project, you see,” she continued. “I’m the problem he wants to solve. It’s pretty noble, when you think about it.”

  “I don’t believe that,” I said. “He worships you. It’s totally obvious.”

  She sipped her wine and returned it to the table. “Let me ask you something, Tim. Name one thing about Jonas Lear that isn’t perfect. I’m not talking about the fact that he’s always late or picks his nose at traffic lights. Something important.”

  I searched my thoughts. She was right. I couldn’t.

  “This is what I’m saying. Handsome, smart, charming, destined for great things. That’s our Jonas. Since the day he was born, everybody’s loved him. And it makes him feel guilty. I make him feel guilty. Did I tell you he wants to marry me? He tells me all the time. Say the word, Liz, and I’ll buy the ring. Which is ridiculous. Me, who might not live past twenty-five, or whatever the statistics say. And even if the cancer doesn’t come back, I can’t have children. The radiation took care of that.”

  It was getting late; I could feel the city changing around me, its energies shifting. Down the block, people were stepping from the theater, hailing cabs, going in search of drinks or food. I was tired and overloaded by the emotions of the last few days. I signaled the waiter for the bill.

  “I’ll tell you something else,” Liz said as we were paying the tab. “He really admires you.”

  This was, in some ways, the strangest news of all. “Why would he admire me?”

  “Oh, a lot of reasons. But I think it comes down to the fact that you’re something he can’t ever be. Authentic, maybe? I’m not talking about being modest, although you are. Too modest, if you ask me. You underestimate yourself. But there’s something … I don’t know, pure about you. A resilience. I saw it the moment I met you. I don’t mean to put you on the spot, but the one good thing about cancer, and I mean the only thing, is it teaches you to be honest.”

  I felt embarrassed. “I’m just a kid from Ohio who did well on his SATs. There’s nothing interesting about me at all.”

  She paused, gazing into her glass, then said, “I’ve never asked you about your family, Tim, and I don’t mean to pry. All I know is what Jonas has told me. You never mention them, they never call, you spend all your breaks in Cambridge with this woman and her cats.”

  I shrugged. “She’s not so bad.”

  “I’m sure she isn’t. I’m sure she’s a saint. And I like cats as much as the next person, in the right quantity.”

  “There’s not really much to tell.”

  “I doubt that very much.”

  A silence followed. I discovered that swallowing took a great deal of effort; my windpipe felt as if it had constricted. When at last I spoke, the words seemed to come from another place entirely.

  “She died.”

  Behind her glasses, Liz’s eyes were intently fixed on my face. “Who died, Tim?”

  I swallowed. “My mother. My mother died.”

  “When was this?”

  It would all come out now; there was simply no stopping it. “Last summer. It was just before I met you. I didn’t even know she was sick. My father wrote me a letter.”

  “And where were you?”

  “With the woman and her cats.”

  Something was happening. Something was coming undammed. I knew that if I didn’t move immediately—stand up, walk around, feel the beating of my heart and the action of air in my lungs—I would fall apart.

  “Tim, why didn’t you tell us?”

  I shook my head. I felt suddenly ashamed. “I don’t know.”

  Liz reached across the table and gently took my hand. Despite my best efforts, I had begun to cry. For my mother, for myself, for my dead friend Lucessi, whom I knew I had failed. Surely I could have done something, said something. It wasn’t the note in his pocket that told me so. It was the fact that I was alive and he was dead, and I of all people should have understood the pain of living in a world that didn’t seem to want him. I did not want to take my hand away—it felt like the only thing anchoring me to the earth. I was in a dream in which I was flying and could not make myself land were it not for this woman who would save me.

  “It’s all right,” Liz was saying, “it’s all right, it’s all right …”

  Time moved then; we were walking, I didn’t know where. Liz was still holding my hand. I sensed the presence of water, and then the Hudson emerged. Decrepit piers jutted long fingers into the water. Across the river’s broad expanse, the lights of Hoboken made a diorama of the city and its lives. The air tasted of salt and stone. There was a kind of park along the water’s edge, filthy and abandoned-looking; it did not seem safe, so we headed north along Twelfth Avenue, neither of us speaking, before turning east again. I had given no thought at all to what would happen next but now began to. In the last hour, Liz had spoken of things that I felt certain she had told no other person, just as I had done with her. There was Jonas to think of, but we were also a man and a woman who had shared the most intimate truths, things that, once said, could never be unsaid.

  We arrived at the apartment. No words of consequence had passed between us for many minutes. The tension was palpable—surely she could feel it, too. I couldn’t say for certain what I wanted, only that I didn’t want to be away from her, not for a minute. I was standing dumbly in the middle of the tiny room, searching my mind for the words to capture how I felt. Something needed to be said. And yet I could say nothing.

  It was Liz who broke the silence. “Well, I’m going to turn in,” she said. “The sofa folds out. There are sheets and blankets in the closet. Let me know if you need anything else.”

  “Okay.”

  I could not make myself move toward her, though I wanted to, very badly. On the one hand there was Liz, and all we had shared, and the fact that, in every way, I loved her and probably had since the moment we’d met; on the other, there was Jonas, the man who’d given me a life.

  “Your friend Lucessi. What was his first name?”

  I actually had to think. “Frank. But I never called him that.”

  “Why do you think he did it?”

  “He was in love with somebody. She didn’t love him back.”

  Not until that moment had this chain of thought, in all its starkness, come clear to me. Call Fanning, my friend had written. Call Fanning to tell him that love is all there is, and love is pain, and love is taken away.

  “What time is the car?” she asked.

  “Eight o’clock.”

  “I’m going with you, you know.”

  “I’m glad you are.”

  A moment passed.

  “Well.” Liz moved to the bedroom door, where she stopped and turned. “Stephanie is a lucky girl, you know. I’m just saying that in case you haven’t figured it out.”

  Then she was gone. I stripped to my boxers and lay on the couch. Under different circumstances, I might have felt foolish, daring to think that such a woman would take me into her bed. But I actually felt relieved; Liz had chosen the honorable route, making the decision for both of us. It occurred to me that not once, neither at the restaurant nor as we’d walked, had I thought of Stephanie in the context of any betrayal I might have contemplated. The day felt like a year; through the windows, I heard the wash of the city, an oceanic sound. It seemed to creep into my chest, where it matched itself to the rhythm of my breathing. Exhaustion poured through my bones, and soon I drifted off.

  Sometime later, I awoke. I had the unmistakable sense of being watched. A sensation, vaguely electrical, lingered on my forehead, as if I had been kissed. I rose onto my elbows, expecting to see someone standing over me. But the room was empty, and I thought I must have dreamed this.

  About the funeral, there is little to say. To describe it in detail would be a violation of its confidential grief, its closed circuit of pain. During the service, I kept my eyes on Arianna, wondering what she was feeling. Did she know? I wanted her to know, but I also didn’t; she was ju
st a girl. No good could come of it.

  I declined the family’s invitation to lunch; Liz and I returned to the apartment to retrieve my luggage. On the platform at Penn Station she hugged me, then, revising her thoughts, kissed me quickly on the cheek.

  “So, okay?”

  I didn’t know if she meant me or the two of us. “Sure,” I said. “Never better.”

  “Call me if you get too blue.”

  I stepped aboard. Liz was watching me through the windows as I made my way down the car to find an empty seat. I remembered boarding the bus to Cleveland, that long-ago September day—the drops of rain on the window, my mother’s crinkled bag in my lap, looking to see if my father had stayed to watch my departure, finding him gone. I took a seat beside the window. Liz had yet to move. She saw me, smiled, waved; I waved back. A deep mechanical shudder; the train began to move. She was still standing there, following my carriage with her gaze, as we entered the tunnel and disappeared.

  18

  May 1992: The last of my coursework had been completed. I was to graduate summa cum laude; offers of generous graduate fellowships had come my way. MIT, Columbia, Princeton, Rice. Harvard, which had decided it had not seen the last of me if I cared to stay on. It was the obvious choice, one I felt bound to make in the end, though I had not committed, preferring to savor the possibilities for as long as I could. Jonas would be going back to Tanzania for the summer, then heading to the University of Chicago to start his doctoral work; Liz would be going to Berkeley for her master’s in Renaissance literature; Stephanie was returning to Washington to work for a political consulting firm. The graduation ceremony itself would not happen until the first week of June. We had entered a nether time, a caesura between what our lives had been and what they would become.

  In the meanwhile, there were parties—lots of them. Roiling keggers, black-tie balls, a garden fete where everyone drank mint juleps and all the girls wore hats. In my trusty battle tux and pink tie—wearing it had become a trademark—I danced the Lindy, the Electric Slide, the Hokey Pokey, and the Bump; at any given hour of the day, I was either drunk or hungover. An hour of triumph, but it came at a cost. For the first time in my life, I felt the pain of missing people I had not yet left.

  The week before graduation, Jonas, Liz, Stephanie, and I drove down to the Cape, to Liz’s house. No one was talking about it, but it seemed unlikely that the four of us would be together again for some time. Liz’s parents were there, having just opened the house for the season. I had met them before, in Connecticut. Her mother, Patty, came across as a bit of a society doyenne, with a brisk, somewhat phony graciousness and a lock-jawed accent, but her father was one of the most likable and easygoing people I’d ever met. A tall, bespectacled man (Liz had gotten his vision) with an earnest face, Oscar Macomb had been a banker, retired early, and now, in his words, spent his days “noodling around with money.” He worshipped his daughter—that was plain to anyone with eyes; less apparent, though undeniable, was that he vastly preferred her to his wife, whom he regarded with the bemused affection one might give to an overbred poodle. With Liz, the man was all smiles—the two of them would frequently chatter away in French—and his warmth extended to anybody in her circle, including me, whom he had nicknamed “Ohio Tim.”

  The house, in a town called Osterville, stood on a bluff overlooking Nantucket Sound. It was enormous, room upon room, with a wide back lawn and rickety stairs to the beach. No doubt it was worth many millions of dollars, just for the land alone, though in those days I had no ability to calculate such things. Despite its size, it had a homey, unfussy feel. Most of the furniture looked like you could pick it up for pennies at a yard sale; in the afternoons, when the wind swung around, it tore through the house like the offensive line of the New York Giants. The ocean was still too cold for swimming, and because it was so early in the season, the town was mostly deserted. We spent our days lying on the beach, pretending not to be freezing, or lazing around on the porch, playing cards and reading, until evening arrived and the drinks came out. My father might have had a beer before dinner while he watched the news on television, but that was the extent of it; my mother never drank at all. In the Macomb household, cocktail hour was religion. At six o’clock everyone would gather in the living room or, if the evening was pleasant, on the porch, whereupon Liz’s father would present us with a silver tray of the evening’s concoction—whiskey old-fashioneds, Tom Collinses, vodka martinis in chilled glasses with olives on sticks—accompanied by dainty porcelain cups of nuts warmed in the oven. This was followed by ample quantities of wine with dinner and sometimes whiskey or port afterward. I had hoped our days on the Cape would give my liver a chance to recuperate; there was no chance of that.

  Jonas and I were sharing a bedroom, the girls another, located at opposite ends of the house with Liz’s parents in between. When we’d come here during the academic term, we’d had the place, and our choice of sleeping arrangements, to ourselves. But not this time. I’d expected that the situation would lead to a certain amount of creeping around in the wee hours, but Liz forbade it. “Please do not shock the grown-ups,” she said. “We’ll all be shocking them soon enough.”

  Which was just as well. By this time, I had begun to tire of Stephanie. She was a wonderful girl, but I did not love her. There was nothing about her that made this so; she was in every way deserving. My heart was simply elsewhere, and it made me feel like a hypocrite. Since the funeral in New York, Liz and I had not spoken of my mother, or her cancer, or the night when we had walked the city streets together but in the end had chosen to step back from the abyss and keep our allegiances intact. Yet it was clear that the night had left its mark on both of us. Our friendship, until that time, had flowed through Jonas. A new circuit had been opened—not through him but around him—and along this pathway pulsed a private current of intimacy. We knew what had happened; we had been there. I had felt it, and I was sure she’d felt it too, and the fact that we’d done nothing only deepened this connection, even more than if we’d fallen into bed together. We would be sitting on the porch, each of us reading one of the mildew-smelling paperbacks left behind by other guests; we would look up at just the same moment, our eyes would meet, an ironic smile would flash at the corners of her mouth, which I’d return in kind. Look at us, we were saying to each other, aren’t we the trusty twosome. If only they knew how loyal we are. We should get a prize.

  I intended to do nothing about this, of course. I owed Jonas that much and more. Nor did I think Liz would have welcomed the attempt. The connection she shared with Jonas, one of long history, ran deeper than ours ever could. The house, with its endless warren of rooms and ocean views and shabbily genteel furnishings, reminded me how true this was. I was a visitor to this world, welcomed and even, as Liz had told me, admired. But a tourist nonetheless. Our night together, though indelible, had been just that: a night. Still, it thrilled me just being around her. The way she held her drink to her lips. Her habit of pushing her glasses to her forehead to read the smallest print. How she smelled, which I will not attempt to name, because it wasn’t like anything else. Pain or pleasure? It was both. I wanted to bathe in her existence. Was she dying? I tried not to think about it. I was happy to be near her at all and accepted the situation as it stood.

  Two days before our departure, Liz’s father announced that we would be eating lobsters for dinner. (He did all the cooking; I’d never seen Patty so much as fry an egg.) This was for my benefit; he had learned, to his alarm, that I had never eaten one. He returned from the fish market in the late afternoon bearing a sack of squirming red-black monsters, removed one with a carnivore’s grin, and made me hold it. No doubt I looked horrified; everyone had a good laugh, but I didn’t mind. I loved her father a little for it, in fact. A lazy rain had been falling all day, sapping our energy; now we had a purpose. As if in acknowledgment of this fact, the sun emerged in time for the festivities; Jonas and I carried the dining table out to the back porch. I had noticed somethi
ng about him. In the last couple of days, he had adopted a manner I could only describe as secretive. Something was afoot. At the cocktail hour, we drank bottles of dark beer (the only proper accompaniment, Oscar explained); then on to the main event. With great solemnity, Oscar presented me with a lobster bib. I had never understood this infantile practice; no one else was wearing one, and I felt a bit resentful until I cracked a claw and sprayed lobster juice all over myself, to an explosion of table-wide hilarity.

  Imagine the perfection of the scene. The table with its red-checkered cloth; the ridiculous bounty of the feast; the golden sunset streaming toward us across the sound, then sinking into the sea with a final flash like an elegant gentleman tipping his hat in farewell. The candles came out, polishing our faces with their flickering glow. How had my life led me to such a place, among such people? I wondered what my parents would have said. My mother would have been pleased for me; wherever she was, I hoped its rules included the power to observe the living. As for my father, I didn’t know. I had severed all ties completely. I saw now how unfair I’d been and vowed to get in touch. Perhaps it was not too late for him to make my graduation.

  When we’d finished dessert—a strawberry-rhubarb pie—Jonas clinked his glass with his fork.

  “Everybody, if I could have your attention.”

  He rose and moved around the table so that he was standing next to Liz. With a little grunt of effort, he turned her chair so she was facing him.

  “Jonas,” she said with a laugh, “what the hell are you doing?”

  His hand fumbled in his pocket, and I knew. My stomach plunged, then the rest of me. As he bent to one knee, my friend withdrew the small velvet box. He opened the lid and held it before her. A huge, nervous grin was on his face. I saw the stone. It was enormous, made for a queen.