City on Fire (22 page)

There was a pause. “Of course,” Amory said. “I wouldn’t dream of diverting you.”

Later, after he’d shaken hands and promised not to be a stranger, Regan followed Keith outside. They’d planned for her to stay overnight on Sutton Place while he took the late train back to Connecticut, and he assumed she’d come out to say goodbye. Instead, she said, “I had to get out of there.”

“Why? Was I okay?”

“Oh, sweetheart.” She paused on the wet curb, as if startled by the question. He was standing in the gutter. The rain had stopped, but inch-deep water bearing the sodden white petals of flowering trees parted around his shoes. “You were great. You were perfect.”

They were almost the same height this way, and he had an urge to reach for her, to secure her to the ground, so that she couldn’t slip away again until he’d understood her every last mystery. “Your brother liked me?”

“He’ll love you, when he gets to know how much there is to you. Like I did.”

It was the first time she’d spoken this word, “love,” and, characteristically, it was in a context that left him no way to respond. Also: How much of what?

“Let’s go somewhere,” she said, suddenly. “I’m signed out of the Chi Omega house until tomorrow.”

“Are you sure?”

For once, she didn’t pull away. Her thighs were soft against his, her mouth was open to him, and he could feel that for this one night, she was going to let him do to her anything he wanted. A dim alarm in the back of his head was already warning that it shouldn’t be like this, like some kind of reward for good behavior, but another voice was telling him that it might be months before she would feel this way again, and they were reeling back, stumbling against the parked Karmann Ghia, and she had taken his hands and put them on her sides, and of its own volition one was moving up to those wonderful, small breasts, warm under the firm armor of her brassiere, when he caught himself. They were still less than a block from her family. “Hold that thought,” he said. “Okay?”

They ended up at a hotel near Grand Central, under the name Mr. and Mrs. Z. Glass; he would have to subsist on canned tunafish for the rest of the month, but it was worth it. They didn’t even turn on the light or turn down the bed, but made love standing up, against a picture window to which rain still clung. It was like standing on the edge of a giant excavation pit. When he closed his eyes, she seemed to be somewhere out in the middle of it, amid tiny, floating lights, calling for him, but there was more of it the deeper he went. It was only just before he came, hugely, baffled, that he understood that this was not her first time, any more than it was his, and that he had still not quite managed to reach her. And even now, in his memory, as he lay cooling in the darkness of his dormitory, Regan was a world unto herself, pleased with him for reasons he could not understand …

17

WHEREAS HER BROTHER WILLIAM, at seventeen, was separated by only the thinnest membrane from the world that contained him. Which is to say: a city boy, definitively. He knew exactly which spot on which subway platform corresponded with which staircase on which other platform. He knew an empty subway car was to be avoided—someone had pissed in it, or thrown up, or died. He knew how to pretend you’d never heard of the famous person to whom you were being introduced, and how to pretend to buy the famous person’s pretense of never having heard of you. He’d learned the previous summer how to pick up grown men in public lavatories, and all the places in the Park the vice squad never visited. He couldn’t make a football spiral to save his life, but give him a broomhandle and a spaldeen and he’d hit the river from here.

At intervals over the last few years, he’d been shipped off to tired dorps like Putney, Vt., and Wallingford, Conn., and Andover and Exeter, N.H., stocked lakes into which the nation’s tributaries of wealth and privilege emptied. Other kids liked to make fun of his accent. To boys from Grosse Pointe and Lake Forest, Gothamite was only one step from Jew. But never once had he envied them, or cultivated, as his sister did, that deracinated East Coast drawl. He believed his connection to Manhattan would sustain him, like an anchor plunged into turbulent water.

And sustain him it had, right up until that summer—the summer he finally graduated high school. But sitting up into the wee hours on the eve of his father’s wedding in June, he could feel the chain straining, the connection about to snap. Or was it already morning? The sky beyond the ogeed bars of the kitchen window on Sutton Place had brightened enough to disclose the heavy-headed roses entwined there, his mother’s. They seemed to nod at him, admonishing; they knew what they would have done in his place.

He went to the dining room. From the brass hooks on the wall, he retrieved his Great-Grandfather Hamilton’s safari rifle. He checked the chamber; the bullet he’d discovered when he was a little kid was still there. Dress socks silenced his feet on the stairs.

The second-floor hallway was hardly identifiable as the one where he and Regan used to stage parades. Its rug had already been moved to Felicia’s palace across the park, along with most of the furniture. Tomorrow—or, strike that, today—cleaners would arrive to prepare this house for its new owners. The guestrooms, though, had been left intact for the various male relations and business associates who’d traveled here for the wedding. He’d heard them come in from the rehearsal dinner around midnight and stay up dissecting the scene he’d caused there, the disgrace he’d brought upon the family. It was unclear whether they’d known he was awake directly below them, making his miserable way through a pint of Irish whisky stolen from the banquet room bar. At any rate, they hadn’t come down to the kitchen. And the whisky had a funny effect; beyond a certain point, each slug from the bottle unfogged his thinking, until the whole house seemed to tremble with clarity. The dormer window at the end of the upstairs hall. The sealed entrance of what had once been his parents’ room. And beside that, the guestroom where a bony collegian in orphaned bits of tuxedo sprawled snoring on the floor, his French cuffs blown open like flowers. Was this the guy who’d done it? This had to be him. The ones passed out in the beds were too old.

William stood in the half-light for what must have been minutes with the rifle’s long barrel wavering above the guy’s right ear. Just do it, you pussy. Pull the trigger. If you were any kind of man, you would do it. But where was Regan’s boyfriend, or fiancé now, Keith, whose job this should rightfully have been? Because the best William could do, in the end, was leave the rifle on the guestroom floor, hoping the fucker passed out there would see it upon waking, and know how close he’d come to dying. Or maybe finish the job himself.

Shaking, William ransacked his own room for clothes to fill a gymbag. He grabbed his guitar, the book of Michelangelo plates brought back from Regan’s semester away, his hand-me-down shaving kit, and keys from the nightstand. After a last jolt of liquid courage, he was out the door and down to the line of parked cars at the curb. Sweat and formalwear made a paste between his back and the driver’s seat of Regan’s Karmann Ghia. Beyond the window, dew coaxed scents from inert earth: the loam of treeboxes, the faintly salty asphalt, the whole summer perfume of rotting fruit peels and faisandés coffee grounds wafting from the trash piled at the curbs. The stop-sign at the corner glowed. If he’d known exactly how long it would be before he was back on these streets, he might have wanted to itemize things even more minutely, but to act in some valedictory way would be to make real to himself what he was doing, and if he did that, he might never go through with it, so he didn’t.

He’d been behind the wheel only once since Doonie taught him to drive, out past where the subway ended in Queens. It had gotten him kicked out of his third school (or was it the fourth?), but the engine turned over on the first try and purred like an animal when he gave it gas. The lights of Third Avenue were on a timed circuit; at twenty-seven miles per hour, you could coast all the way up to Harlem without stopping. There was hardly any bridge traffic this early on a Sunday, and soon he was flying toward points north, weaving only minimally.

It was when he stopped to pump gas near New Haven and spied through the tiny rear window the gymbag half-unzipped on the backseat that anguish again took hold. Where, exactly, did he propose to go? Vermont? Versailles? Valhalla? From a phone booth hard by the road, he gave the operator a name pulled from deep in memory. It was a big state, she said; she couldn’t find the number unless she knew the town. “Can’t you just look?” he said. “It’s an emergency.” Something in the voice—some crackle of pain—must have been persuasive, because a minute later came the familiar Continental inflections.

“William? How could I forget? If you are in the area, then you must stop by.”

“In the area” was putting it charitably; it was another eight hours before, following punctilious directions, he pulled off a switchback mountain highway and into some woods. At the end of a mile-long drive, on a steep hillside, was either a large cabin or a small lodge. The sound of the car had drawn Bruno Augenblick, William’s former drawing teacher, to the door; he was barely visible there, in the shade of the deep porch and behind a layer of screen. “Leave your things,” he called, over the dying engine. “First let us get you a drink.” The city boy, still shaking inside, was not to see the city again for half a decade. By that time, he’d be twenty-two years old.

WILLIAM HAD FIRST ENCOUNTERED Herr Augenblick while attending the school before the school before this last one, whose generous ratio of carrot to stick, it was thought at the time, might benefit a young man of his … idiosyncrasies. Friday afternoons, the boys who’d behaved were bused thirty-five miles east to metro Boston, where for a few hours they were free to walk around Harvard Square and breathe the air into which, God willing, they might one day matriculate. William had made only a couple of friends at the new school, both of whom lacked his hard-won skill at dodging demerits, and so he often found himself wandering the Square alone, while his classmates hit the movies. He liked particularly to slip behind the walls of the college and pass himself off as a student there. He could smoke his cigarettes openly. He could cadge free lunch in the residence halls, so long as he carried a book to immerse himself in (and if he hadn’t brought his own, one could always be nicked from the library). One such Friday, he saw a cluster of students with Very Serious Expressions sitting on one of the quadrangles, reproducing in their outsized drawing pads a bronze statue of some dour old Puritan. He was curious, suddenly, to see just how far his imposture might go. A sketchpad cost fifty cents in the campus bookstore, and pencils set him back another nickel. He found the students where he’d left them, arranged on a brick curb facing the statue. No one looked up when he sat down among them, or looked over at the pad where he’d begun to sketch. He’d actually lost track of time when a pair of hands clapped once. Standing over him was a man in seersucker, maybe forty, with owlish tortoiseshells and a skull shaved bare. “This brings to an end our session.” The accent was German, or Swiss. The shirtsleeves were buttoned to the wrist despite the Indian-summer heat. “Please leave your work on the bench. I shall avail you of my judgment next week.” The students began to shuffle away, but the man held William back. “And you are … ?”

“William Hamilton-Sweeney. I transferred in.”

He indicated the pad under William’s arm, which William handed over. The face stayed unreadable as it scanned his drawing, which had started out as a cartoon and ended up halfway serious. Finally, without warning, the instructor ripped the page off, balled it, and deposited it in the wire-mesh trashcan to his left. “Start again.”

That fall, William would become the most diligent student in the Friday-afternoon drawing class, though he pretended not to look forward to it. The instructor never offered him so much as a word of praise, but always set aside time to review his work at the end of the session, and after the last class of the semester he pulled William aside. He had planned a little gathering that Saturday night, “a kind of salon. A few of the more advanced students will be there, and local artists, and some of the tenured faculty. You might find yourself edified.” To reveal his inability to attend would be to admit that all along he’d only been a boarding-school refugee, and so that night he snuck back off campus and walked the two miles to the bus station on Route 117.

The house on Beacon Hill was like a museum, with paintings hung willy-nilly on every wall. The food was every bit the equal of Doonie’s. Herr Augenblick—now just Bruno—lived awfully well for a visiting instructor, it seemed. William let himself have a glass or two too many of champagne and, mustering all available perspicuity, inserted himself into various conversations. It didn’t bother him to hear people murmuring as he moved away that this was the one Bruno had mentioned, the Hamilton-Sweeney; he was pleased to find the other guests—all older, almost all male—hanging on his jokes like hollyhocks on a line. Occasionally, he caught Bruno watching from the far side of the room, but it was only at the end of the night, as guests were putting on coats, that the drawing instructor approached him. “Those two are walking back toward the college. Perhaps you would prefer an escort.”

“No, thanks,” William said, pretending to look through the pile on the bed for his own jacket. “I like to be alone.”

“And you are not in fact headed that way, no?”

“Beg pardon?”

Bruno gestured toward the green-and-gold rep tie trailing from the pocket of the blazer William had uncovered. “The colors of one of our local lycées, I believe.”

“You knew this whole time, didn’t you?”

“Don’t pretend to be surprised. You never appeared on my class list.”

“Okay, but why didn’t you say something?”

“William, an artist is someone who combines a desperate need to be understood with the fiercest love of privacy. That his secrets may be obvious to others doesn’t mean he is ready to part with them.” What the hell was that supposed to mean? William wondered. But of course, he already knew. He’d known what Bruno was since the very first day of that class, when the sunlight had gleamed off of the shaved dome of his head, but he had not realized that Bruno had seen quite so far into him. “But now the term of my visiting lectureship has expired. You will have to decide on your own what path to pursue.”