City on Fire (18 page)

“It’s just two nights.” His embrace was stiff. And then she had to step back, to break contact. Otherwise she would never have let them go.

“Tell your dad I said Happy New Year’s,” Keith said, pointlessly.

She watched them walk up Pierrepont Street, Keith holding Cate’s hand in one of his, the other hand carrying both bags. Will’s own hands were in his pockets, his head down, watching the rock-salt he scuffed skitter gutterward. And she was okay with this not because she was a bad person, but because there was no alternative. She could keep herself busy until their return. There were phone calls to make. There were—Lord knew—boxes to unpack. She would be fine. Everything was going to be fine.

14

HAD THE RASP OF THE KEY IN THE LOCK brought William to the door—or had William been waiting inside on the futon, arms crossed, in the shiny blue kimono of judgment—and had he then demanded to know where the hell Mercer had been all night, Mercer might have been prepared to confront him straightaway about the heroin. But at 6:15 a.m. on the first day of the year of somebody’s lord 1977, the loft was empty, save for the cat. In the grayblue light from the windows, the lump of sheets on the bed was an actual lump of sheets. Was it a kind of revenge, then, to return the chesterfield coat to its box, to slide it back under the futon where it had waited so long? Or was it, rather, a test, to see if William noticed it was missing? Too tired to decide anything for certain, Mercer trudged to the sleeping nook, shooed Eartha from his pillow, crawled half-dressed under the coverlet, and abandoned himself to troubled dreams.

He woke hours later to the warmth of another body in the bed, a heavy forearm across his chest, the ebb and swell of breath on the back of his neck, neutral with toothpaste. The faint catch in William’s throat meant that he, too, had begun to dream. Before the inevitable whimpering could start, Mercer decided to get up.

He put on one of the overdue Puccini albums he’d checked out from the library. He turned it up loud. He clattered around in the kitchenette, preparing breakfast for one; one way or another, he would pick a fight. But when William stepped naked through the beaded curtain (for he always slept naked), he looked as innocent as Adam. Finger-shaped bruises had appeared on his arm where it had been hurt a week ago, and he still held it against his chest, instinctively, for protection. Wouldn’t there have been needle-tracks? “What are you doing, you ridiculous man? It’s New Year’s Day, and you’re unwell.”

“I’m unwell?” This was Mercer, still/again full of doubt.

“Your cold.” Right. His cold. “Why don’t you come back to bed, let me take care of you? God knows you did it for me when I was down.”

William moved the Magnavox into the sleeping nook, placed it on a towel on the radiator at the foot of the bed. Mercer watched him work the rabbit ears. He decided to say something. “You have a good time last night?”

“Comme ci, comme ça. The Ex-Post revival seems harmless enough, though I’m half-deaf now. I missed you.” So maybe everything since their phone conversation had been a confusion, Mercer thought. Or if it hadn’t been, he wasn’t sure he wanted to know. He laid his head on his lover’s chest and let the static and glow of a soap opera sweep him away.

For lunch—or dinner, really—they ordered Chinese. They forked moo shu out of white cartons right there on the bed, a concession to Mercer’s ostensible ill health. At any rate, spending all day in bed had been enough to make him feel somewhat ill, like a kid playing hooky from school. William parceled out crumbs of information about his ex-bandmates, dressed up as anecdotes—just enough to seem not to be hiding anything. Occasionally, Mercer obliged him with a cough. He couldn’t find a way to turn the conversation to the drugs, and then William was asleep again.

Nor was this a new thing, the rhythm of small-talk and deferral, the elegant Noh dance around whatever was really at issue. William had always had a preternatural sense of how much he could get away with, of when to push and when to pull back. Mercer stared through the caul of televisual light at the sleeping face, trying to imagine it as a junkie’s. The black eye fit, anyway. And he wanted so badly to tell this face what had happened to him—and to ask it, What happened to you? But what if he did? The little kit with its needle and spoon, still vivid against the white of the interrogation room in his mind, seemed tied by invisible threads to all the private pain that predated Mercer, the stuff William didn’t ever talk about, the secretive slipping away he, Mercer, had pretended not to see. It was where all the loose ends met. If he started tugging at them, their entire life together might unravel. In the next room, a bell began to ring.

It was genuine dusk now, the bookshelf where the phone sat submerged in shadow. The ringing seemed antique, somehow, prematurely quaint, like the carillon of a village church slated for demolition. Mercer let it continue, to see if William would stir, and when he didn’t, gathered breath and reached for the receiver. It being a holiday, this had to be his mother. “I was beginning to think you’d been hit by a bus,” was her opener.

He wanted not to sigh, not to be the sort of person who sighed at his mother. “Occam’s razor, Mama. Happy New Year’s to you, too.”

“This is a bad connection. I can’t understand what you’re saying.”

“I’m saying, why hit by a bus? I could have been working, or out on the town, or just decided not to call. I could have been doing any number of things.”

“Well, anyway, I’m glad you’re safe. What was that?”

“What?”

“Did you say something?”

In the sleeping nook, William had groaned theatrically. Mercer threw a couch cushion, aiming for the beaded curtain, but it missed and hit the window instead. More birds took flight from the cinderblock flowerbox outside: bursts of light loosed in the gloaming. Down in the street, a white van was double-parked, mired in graffiti, but why, in New York in 1977, would you paint a van white to begin with? “Nothing, Mama. Just opening a window.”

“Isn’t it cold there? The radio this morning said high thirties. You know I always listen for your weather, you and your brother’s. I certainly couldn’t live like you do, with the cold. And how are things working out with that new roommate of yours? I don’t think he’s ever once given you a message from me.”

She’d picked up the word roommate the first time he’d let it drop, and had been wielding it as a shield or weapon ever since. It was a tiny thing, really, and accurate as far as it went, but each repetition on either side, in holiday cards and birthday cards and the thank-you cards he wrote when a check from her appeared out of the blue (for the purpose of eliciting a thank-you) made him feel a little guiltier, until he’d stopped writing home altogether—another failure she’d detected with alacrity. “You must keep busy, Mercer, because when someone does pick up, it’s usually what’s-his-name.” Translation: Can you really believe you’re too busy to speak to your own mother? She was a kind of Rembrandt of implication.

“Actually, I gave my last exam two weeks ago, I told you that. I’ve been more or less free since then.”

“Well, we missed you at Christmas. C.L. missed you, I know.”

“They let him come home again?”

“Your father missed you.” And always there was this, the sfumato of guilt. Always your father. Yet if he’d told her to put the old man on the phone … what would either of them have done then? “Maybe you could make it down for Easter.”

“Geez, Mama. It’s January first. I’ll have to look at my teaching schedule.”

“They don’t let the kids off for Holy Week? What kind of school is it?”

“Not everybody’s a Christian, Mama.”

“Well. Spring break, at least,” she said, even though they both knew he wouldn’t be back for that, either. And, no better than she was, he agreed that he would think about it.

After ringing off, he had to lie face-down on the futon with the throw pillow over his head. He could hear William up and dressing on the far side of the beaded curtain. It parted and clacked back together. “Am I to surmise you’ve been talking to your family again?”

Mercer grunted, powerless not to wallow a little.

“What did we say about this? You’ve got to just make a little box in your mind, put them in there, seal it up.”

But what Mercer wanted wasn’t advice; it was commiseration. He flipped over onto his back and let the pillow fall to the floor. William had turned on a lamp, but otherwise, it was night. The blue windows of the warehouse across the street had gone black. “My father is an insane person,” Mercer said.

“Don’t be dramatic, sweetheart. Everyone’s father is an insane person. It’s a box they make them check on the hospital form before they let them take you home.” But William was back on autopilot; he wasn’t looking at Mercer but rummaging through the garment rack that served as their closet. Mercer watched from the futon, as though gathering evidence: the lamplight reaching its fingers across William’s neck, his slightly anxious face, his swollen eye. The day in bed, the Chinese feast, was a lie they’d both wanted to believe, but now William was once again distant and away, and things were going to end. Relapse or no relapse, William would eventually leave him. “Have you seen my coat?”

“Which one,” Mercer said, though he knew very well which one.

“The one you gave me, honey. The beautiful one.”

Here it was at last: an opening. But how was he going to explain why he’d taken the coat, and how he’d discovered drugs in it, without revealing where he’d gone last night? He needed more time to prepare. “Oh, that? I had to take it to the cleaners.”

“Why’d you do that? Which cleaners?”

“They’ll all be closed now. I lit a candle on the bookshelf there and I knocked into it like an oaf and splashed wax everywhere. I’m really sorry.”

“This was yesterday? Well, when did they say it would be ready?”

“I don’t know. A week?”

“A week?”

“I didn’t realize this would be such a big deal, William. It’s not like you were wearing it.” He was trying to decide whether William’s difficulty staying calm confirmed his fears. Though maybe this need for confirmation was itself a kind of confirmation.

“I guess I’ll just take this.” William grabbed his motorcycle jacket, his Ex Post Facto jacket, off the floor. “I’ll try to be quiet when I come in.”

“You’re going out?”

“I’ve been malingering too long, honey. Work to do; I’m weeks behind on the diptych. And I expect you’ll be turning in early, with your cold and all.” William gave him a quick, cool kiss on the cheek, and with that he was gone, leaving Mercer somehow more alone than he’d been before—as if it were having once not been alone that made the difference.

15

THAT SUNDAY, when Ramona Weisbarger stuck her head into the basement, she would find Charlie lying back on the dandelion shag with clamshell headphones clamped to his ears and his eyes closed and his hands folded over his chest like a pharaoh’s. He was sensitive about light, as about everything else, and two years ago, the year of David Bowie, all the lamps in his room had been covered with scarves, so that she began to wonder if he might be homosexual. Now there was only the gray light from the window up near the ceiling, which made him look a little peaked. His color had been bad at dinner last night, too, and he’d barely said a word, but she’d chalked that up to him staying up till all hours New Year’s Eve with the Sullivan kids, whom Maimie let run wild. And she hadn’t at the time noted his failure to appear for breakfast this morning—there was plenty else to worry about—but when one of the twins complained about weird noises coming from Charlie’s room, she’d come down and found him like this. She knew better than to ask if anything was wrong; there was no surer way to start a fight. Instead, she asked what he was doing, and got no response. Her knuckles drummed a tentative solo on the doorframe. “Earth to Charlie.”

He opened his eyes, pointed without expression to the headphones. He mouthed the word: Headphones.

So take the damned things off, she might have said, back when she’d had a husband to back her up. Since the blowup this summer, though, uneventful little exchanges like the one just passed had come to seem like blessings, and she never thought to wonder whether they weren’t worth shattering.

Not that the headphones really obstructed much. The radio had been turned all the way down, she would have noticed if she’d wanted to, and beyond the airless voids around his ears, Charlie could hear her quite clearly, as he now heard the stairs creaking with her retreat and, directly above him, the twins arguing about who got to go fight the monster and who should stay behind. How could she not have noticed the money missing from the babysitting envelope? How could she not have wondered why he’d come home so early Saturday morning? How could she not have noticed the alcohol boiling out of his pores at dinner? When she reached the first floor, he went to shut the door again, which, in some pathetic gesture toward maternal omnipotence, she’d left open. This time, he locked it.

He lowered himself back to the rug, gingerly. Twenty miles away, at Beth Israel Hospital, the best friend he’d ever had was lying in more or less the same posture, and all he wanted to do was go and be with her, watch over and protect her, but he was too late, and now he’d trapped himself here in this wood-paneled prison, where no one knew that the victim, the one whose name the radio said they weren’t releasing, was Samantha Cicciaro, or that her friend Charlie Weisbarger had been with her both before and after the shooting, or that any second now, some machine might start making the dreaded beep that meant her heart had stopped. It seemed to him, studying the chaotic stalactites of the sprayed-on ceiling texture, that every person on earth was sealed in his or her own little capsule, unable to reach or help or even understand anyone else. You could only ever make things worse.

The facts supporting this theory he’d spent the weekend dredging up one by one: the graffiti on the tile of the 81st Street station, the exit gate like a barber’s jar of combs, the rending sound it had made as he pushed through it. He’d even been humming, he now remembered—humming!—as he’d ridden up to meet her. It was a habit he’d had since he was a kid, something grounded so deep inside his body he couldn’t always be sure he wasn’t doing it. Or maybe he liked the conceit of not being quite in control of himself, which meant he couldn’t be held accountable. Plus when you hummed audibly in public, other people kept their distance. This had become increasingly important over the last year, when he’d been forced to spend more of his life in waiting rooms, in a house teeming with black-clad cousins and people from temple, in the office of Dr. Altschul, the board-certified grief counselor. But there weren’t like great throngs of people on that uptown train. It had been either just shy of midnight or just after—not a time anyone wanted to be caught out of range of TVs and friends and girls to whom they were ready to give their virginity. Charlie himself was only here because he’d lost track of time. His dad had left him a watch in the will, but Charlie refused to wear it, at first as part of some general rebellion against the tyranny of clock-time, and later (after Grandpa had pointed out that it was a perfectly good watch, and that David could have left it to his own blood descendants, Abe and Izzy) as a kind of penance. He consequently had no idea how late he was to meet Sam. He had hope, though. That, plus—for real this time—a serious need to pee.