City on Fire (33 page)

“CHARLIE, THIS ISN’T about our last session, is it? Because we’re going to have to talk about that sooner or later. I’m a grief counselor, remember.”

“That has nothing to do with this, Bruce. It’s a decision I came to on my own.”

“And how does your mother feel about it?”

“She’s not the one who has to come sit here. I’m old enough to think for myself.”

“The goal of therapy isn’t really for you to be … how did you put it—”

“Cured.”

“Cured. Besides which, we’ve never really gotten down to what you’re grieving about.”

“But if I can’t be cured, what would be the point of doing all this? Or can’t you imagine there’s any way for a person to grow or change without a shrink being involved?” He and Sam had practiced. “And why doesn’t therapy ever seem to make anyone better? It’s like some kind of perpetual motion machine.”

“I’m hearing hostility in your voice, Charlie, that makes me think there’s a personal element here. If that’s the case, you should know that there are many other counselors with different approaches. I’d be happy to refer you across the hall to my wife, for example, or to a different practice altogether.”

“Nope, Doc. I’m telling you. Cured.”

The counselor studied him. The ends of his fingers pushed up from the nubbly cardigan like a range of small mountains. Charlie had never before noticed he was double-jointed. “Well in that case, I guess we’re done here. Though I’ll have to bill you for the whole hour.”

“Send it to my mom,” he said, and walked out of the office and toward the end of the block, where Sam was waiting, whistling the opening bars of “Gloria.” The Patti version.

23

IT’S HARD TO EXPLAIN to anyone up North, but Southern winters are their own kind of harsh. The milder climate means no one knows how to insulate a house, and as the day gets colder, light runs off the harrowed fields, receding toward the pines. Between here and there is this sense of utter emptiness, like if you hollered even animals wouldn’t hear you. And all the dread of it Mercer had felt growing up returned, with interest, over the Christmas break of 1975. Despite the fact that his father hadn’t said a word to him since his departure for New York, his mother contrived multiple excuses for them to gather ’round the armchair where Pop was now confined and behave as if things were normal. Normal, in this case, meant Mama performing her monologues about which of her church friends was in poor health and how well C.L. was doing in residential treatment in Augusta, as Mercer shifted uneasily on the ottoman. He felt like an asshole with his trim new moustache, his department-store clothes. Mama seemed not to notice how much of his native drawl was gone, but though Pop’s eyes never left whatever object occasioned the gathering (plate of food, Christmas tree, TV) he winced visibly whenever his son spoke. When Mercer felt that he’d had enough—that he would explode literally this time, leaving bits of brain hanging from the wallpaper—he volunteered to let Sally out, followed the arthritic old collie out to the dead grass the porchlight didn’t reach. He was shocked each time by all the stars you could see out here, the same ones the Greeks and Trojans had looked upon, a reminder that you were adrift in an insane vastness where nobody knew your name.

It was only on returning to New York that he could finally breathe again. He found all the lights off in the apartment, but that was nothing new. He didn’t think Carlos had gone anywhere for the holidays—wasn’t sure Carlos even had a family to go to. Waving away the cigarette smoke near the door, he shouted a greeting. Any sympathy he felt for Carlos, though, vanished when he reached his own room. A draft was lifting the covers of the exam bluebooks stacked by the head of his mattress. Or not a draft—the ceiling fan was on. He scanned his papers and clothes, trying to remember how he’d left them. He walked back out to the living room, searching for Carlos’s eyes in the light from outside. “Hey. The ceiling fan in my room is on.”

There came a sucking sound like a dry kiss. A face bloomed briefly, orange in the gloom.

“Carlos, did you go in my room?”

“It gets smoky in here.”

“Did you go in my room, Carlos?”

Mercer thought he saw a glint, a shrug. “You’re just like your brother, you know that?”

He was almost shaking now. “Carlos, I pay you money. It’s my room. You can’t go in my room.”

“You should have seen old C.L. in the jungle, boy. Real twitchy.”

Carlos’s decision not to leave his chair now revealed its tactical brilliance. If Mercer went over to give him what was coming he would almost certainly end up in traction; yet because Carlos was sitting, it would appear that he, Mercer, had been the aggressor. He had visions of sirens flashing up the tenement façade, of being wheeled out handcuffed to a stretcher and remanded to Altana. Finally, he retreated to his room. He turned off the ceiling fan, turned the thing on the doorknob that would lock the room behind him. He would figure out how to jimmy his way in tomorrow; for the time being, his things would be safe, assuming Carlos didn’t have the energy to break down the door. Just in case, he slid the forty pages of manuscript, untouched since that summer, into his Italian-leather satchel.

“MERCER?” Through the bright strip between the jamb and the door of his loft, William seemed perplexed—not unhappy to see him, but unprepared. Had there been a mistake?

“I had a fight with my roommate,” Mercer forced himself to say. “I was wondering if I could maybe crash on your couch tonight, while things cool down.”

William glanced back into the interior before taking off the chain. “It’s a futon, not a very good one, I’m afraid, but you’re welcome to it. How was Dixie?”

“Terrible.” But his mouth had broken of its own accord into a grin and was moving toward William’s. It was as if that ottoman back in Georgia had been positioned over a cellar door, holding it shut, and what was inside was the fact that he’d all along been dreaming of this. “I missed you.”

“Don’t say that before you’ve seen the apartment.”

The only other time Mercer had come up, the loft had seemed reasonably tidy (though admittedly, William had hustled him out to dinner in minutes), but now it looked like a tornado had hit. There were clothes covering every surface, plus soda cans, cartons caked with rice, milky jars of paintbrushes, candy wrappers, a shopping cart full of coffeetable books, canvases aslant against walls. From the mouth of a vortex of jockey shorts, the cat, Eartha K., stared coolly. Mercer couldn’t not laugh. “Gracious! You’re a secret slob.”

“When I really start working, I get a little …”

“Do you realize how completely touching this is, that you would hide this from me?”

William looked sheepish.

“Let me take care of the counters, at least, William. My way of saying thanks.”

He had already started in on the dishes when William cracked a beer from the fridge and plopped down on the futon behind him and began to tease out of him the dreadfulness of Christmas. His own holidays, he said, had come and gone unnoticed. Ex Post Facto used to play an annual New Year’s show; without band practice, he hadn’t known what to do with himself but work work work.

The warmth of the water on Mercer’s hands and of the eyes on his back were a single sensation. “Work work work,” he repeated. “Poor you.”

William, standing, reached around him and took the dishtowel. “You’re adorable, you know. But you’ve done enough.”

“Have I?”

And then they were grappling on the minty floorboards. Belts, shirts came off. Lights went dark. Hands found skin. Everything that could happen happened, right up to the irrevocable, but at the moment when fear pulled him away, Mercer was still, technically, a virgin. “Do you know what I like best?” he asked, panting (as if he knew).

“Mm.”

“Just sleeping with someone. Just being next to someone while I sleep.”

William seemed willing to go along with this, if not thrilled. And it freed Mercer somehow to change his mind, and then they were grappling for real, two bodies painfully merging.

Afterward, leaving the lights off, they made their sweaty way over to the sleeping area. William shoved some boxes off the bed. He turned to the wall—don’t take it personally, he said, but he couldn’t sleep without facing a wall. Mercer, for his part, lay awake listening to the motorcoaches downshifting on the street below and the come-ons of hookers working the orifice of the Lincoln Tunnel. He felt roughed up, distantly, but then there was this sense of suspension, of not yet having drifted back into the size and shape and color of his own personal body. Of depths he’d forgotten he was immersed in going clear, like he could swim right down and touch the bottom of his life. He tried to ground himself in his surroundings. There must have been a breach in the window at the foot of the bed, for ice had formed in the corners between the two panes. Outside, the winter-bare fingers of a solitary tree played across the violet sky. How many words would the old Mercer have thrown at this tree, the bones of this tree, the dappled black bones of this wind-whipped tree, and at this sky? And how much farther away would they have carried him from the feeling still gathering inside? Here he was, six months into his new life, and already this creature beside him, white in the streetlight, in whom wild dreams might even now be unfolding, was his.

OF COURSE, history had a way of persisting, as it did now in the person of Carlos. Mercer’s solution was to avoid Alphabet City altogether. He might slip in at five a.m. to change for work, or some mornings not at all. He’d installed a travel iron at William’s place to flatten the wrinkles out of the previous day’s clothes. He would consecrate them with drops of aftershave and then head straight across town to teach. The nights of his own education in Hell’s Kitchen were often long, but he felt, purely as a pedagogical matter, that the benefits to his mental health more than offset any exhaustion.

Sexually, William was a naturalist, and preferred to make love at home, in the buff, unaccessorized, on the firm surface of the living room floor or in the little walled-off sleeping nook. The one quirk was that he sometimes asked to be slapped. Well, that and the mirror he’d hung by his side of the bed. But Mercer didn’t want to let on that he was too inexperienced to know whether this was anything to feel uncomfortable about. Afterward, cooling, sighing, chafed, he would study the reflection of his sleeping lover there, and would compare it to the unfinished self-portrait tacked to the wall. The hair in the drawing was shorter than that now on the head he loved, but the eyebrows were heavy in just the right way, charcoal for charcoal. To anything William said, they added intensity. The nose: crooked, busted once, William had told him, with that vagueness that let Mercer know better than to ask. But that was where the drawing ended. Below was just white space.

ONE NIGHT in mid-February, or rather, one early morning, Mercer found himself in a phone booth outside a discotheque on Third Avenue. He’d just dropped his key through Carlos’s mailslot and moved the last of his things into William’s apartment, and they’d stayed out late celebrating. Now it was time to explain his change of address to his mother. He was counting on the absurd hour and the arterial pulse of the music still throbbing inside him to propel him into saying what needed saying. But his courage ebbed at the sound of Mama’s voice, muzzy from sleep, as though she were talking through a corner of her scratchy nightgown. “No, you didn’t wake me, honey. I was just about to roll out the biscuits.”

“What time is it there?”

“Same time as where you are, Mercer, you know that. Is something wrong?”

Nothing is wrong, he thought. I’ve met someone. Say it. The empty phone-book holder dangled like a broken hand. Beyond the light-smeared glass, its acne of fingerprints, a feral-looking man picked through a pile of trash.

“Son?”

“It’s nothing,” he said. “Nothing’s wrong. Just, I’m up, and I was thinking of y’all.”

The silence that followed made him wonder how much she already knew. “You haven’t been drinking alcohol, have you?”

He closed his eyes. “Mama, you know I don’t drink.”

“Well, it’s nice of you to think of us, honey, but can I call you this weekend? I hate to run up your long-distance …”

That he’d placed the call collect was beside the point. Less than a minute later, they’d said their goodbyes and hung up.

Whereupon another of William’s virtues came to light: he recognized the limits of words. When Mercer didn’t get up from bed the next morning, he didn’t ask what was the matter, but simply laid a hand between his shoulderblades.

In fact, everything important about their domestic arrangements had been decided on, like the cohabitation itself, without the indignity of talking about it. It had been decided, for example, that William would move his artistic operations to a studio space he could rent for next to nothing way up in the Bronx. It had been decided, too, that they would not talk about William’s family. There were no photographs anywhere, nor any signs of a life prior to this loft apartment, and it seemed natural, almost, that William should have no past. Hadn’t he always been for Mercer a kind of mythological being, sprung fully formed out of a fire or a lake or a forehead somewhere? Yet, in almost direct proportion to his reticence on the subject of his own origins, William loved to hear about Mercer’s. After dinner, when he’d poured himself a few too many glasses from the economy-sized Chianti he kept on hand, he would get Mercer to shake out the Goodman family laundry again. He loved especially to hear about the utopian ambitions Pop had brought back from the war—his kibbutznik streak, William called it—and about the almost biblical struggles between Pop and C.L. “You know, I never saw it at the time, but I guess I had a little temper, too,” Mercer confessed one night, drying the dishes. “Or not so little, actually.” And he told William about how he’d knocked his crippled father down the night before he’d left for New York that first time. Back when he’d still believed life moved in Freytag lines, he’d thought this might make a fine early climax for his novel.

“And this is why he won’t talk to you?” William was in his usual postprandial posture: stretched out on the futon with his hands on his beltbuckle and his head propped up to watch Mercer clean the kitchenette. “Well, I guess it either has to go outward or inward.”