City on Fire (34 page)

When Mercer looked back, puzzled, it was as if a mask had slipped. William had been thinking out loud, remembering something, and for a few seconds his face didn’t know what to do with itself. Mercer suddenly felt the full measure of his disadvantage in age, in financial independence, in skin tone and sexual worldliness—in how much he worshipped William, and wanted him, and needed him. He was sure William, who didn’t believe in needing people, wouldn’t have wanted him to feel anything but equal, but there was such a thing as power, not granted to everyone equally, and that’s just how it was. So, rather than ask, “What goes inward, honey?” he kept his mouth shut like a good boy. And how did this not qualify as trust?

IT WASN’T UNTIL THAT SUMMER, and the Bicentennial celebration, that Mercer had the first inkling there could be anything wrong with these arrangements. After watching the tall ships from up on the roof, they’d made their way down to one of the basement boîtes just starting to spring up south of Houston Street. The fleet was in town, the trains full of sailors. Mercer thought it odd to be going out to dinner rather than watching the fireworks, but the friend who had chosen the venue had plenty of reasons to be suspicious of nationalism, William said. As who didn’t. “You’ve got to stop being so au fait.” He seemed keyed up, in his white dinner jacket and ripped jeans. But maybe it was just that he’d already had quite a lot to drink; Bullet, the Hells Angel who lived upstairs, had invited his crew over to party, and had been passing out bottles of malt liquor on the roof.

It was nine o’clock when they reached the restaurant. Outside waited a shaven-skulled older man in seersucker and tortoiseshells, and an Oriental woman, much younger, who appeared to share Mercer’s ambivalence about being there at all. With fireworks booming invisibly to the west, the introductions were only semi-intelligible: Bruno, Mercer; Mercer, Bruno; William … Jenny? Jenny. The woman shifted in her heels, as if longing for sneakers. She said something about the kitchen closing early due to the holiday, but Bruno knew the maître d’hôtel—which he pronounced flawlessly, even at high volume.

Anyway, it was a European restaurant, at least as someone who’d never been to Europe imagined it: free jazz on the stereo, butcher paper on a wobbly table, delicate little lamb’s-cheek croquettes, candles heating the un-air-conditioned and otherwise unlit storefront to a disorienting degree, turning wine ruddy in the glasses. Since the place had no liquor license, William and Bruno had brought several bottles each, and by the main course were well into the third. Mercer, not wanting to seem a hayseed, had allowed himself a single, tiny pour, and now felt adrift on a sea of warmth, his face slick with it. Laughter would gong out from somewhere in the dimness and he would laugh reflexively, no longer caring what the joke was. He had a sense of similar scenes playing out elsewhere in the city, similar little expatriate conspiracies of good food and good drink while ashes rained down over the Hudson and the Soviets rattled their sabers and scientists in the Midwest moved the hands of the doomsday clock one tick closer to midnight. All you needed was a person who could pay for it.

In this case, he assumed, that patron was Bruno Augenblick. Mercer gathered that Bruno was some kind of art dealer, which might have explained William’s nerves, and the purpose of dinner, except that the vibe between them felt non-commercial. At any rate, Bruno was pretty clearly not heterosexual; the companion, the small, possibly Japanese girl who worked at his gallery, and whose name Mercer had already forgotten, seemed to be along mostly to illustrate to William that Bruno had a protégée of his own. Since Bruno was monopolizing William, she and Mercer wound up talking diagonally across the table. He was going into his second year of teaching, he said, carefully, when she asked what had brought him to our fair city. He was thinking of shaking up his syllabus in the fall. As a former high-school girl herself, maybe she could help. Had she read Balzac’s Lost Illusions?

She’d read about it in college at Berkeley, she said, still looking like she wished she were anywhere else. Was Balzac the one Marx liked so much, or was that the other one?

Mercer didn’t know, but Lost Illusions was one of his personal favorites. Basically, a young poet from the provinces comes to Paris to make his fortune and, in the fullness of time, discovers that he’s been wrong about everything. All the people he takes for geniuses are idiots, and vice versa. “This is like a venerable French genre. I’ve actually been working on an update,” he heard himself confess. “In the original, the historical background is the Second Empire, but in mine, it’s Vietnam.”

The smile across the table seemed to tighten. Because Jenny Nguyen was Vietnamese, not Japanese! Oh, cursed, cursed wine.

“I mean, it’s early going,” he added. “A lot could change.”

“Autobiographical?” asked Jenny.

He could feel the blood rising in his head. He hadn’t meant for this stuff about the novel to slip out in front of William. “Oh, not at all,” he said.

“I just thought, because of that whole ‘write what you know’—”

“No, I’m just feeling my way in. Forget I mentioned it.”

“It sounds not terrible, actually. You know, I’m sure Bruno knows people in publishing. God knows he knows people everywhere else.”

“Oh, no. I didn’t mean to suggest …”

He looked to his lover, embarrassed, but William was still deep in argument with Bruno. And had somehow obtained a cigarette. Though Mercer had never known him to be a smoker, he had to admit that William looked regal with it, exhaling through his nostrils, and then—just when the ash seemed dangerously long—leaning forward to flick it into the neck of an empty wine-bottle. The ash sailed neatly through the green gloom inside, touching down at the bottom like a horse high-diving in a circus. “Personally, I have high hopes,” William was saying, apropos of … well, what, exactly? “Failure is so much more interesting. All the evidence suggests that God considers mankind a failure. Things get interesting just at the point where they break down.”

Bruno smiled, as if he’d been trying to explain ethics to a headstrong toddler. “You and I only have the luxury of feeling this, of course, William, because our entire lives are nourished by capitalism. We are like the little mushrooms on the log.”

Oh, right. This fiscal crisis thing. FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD.

“Which is my point exactly,” William said. “Growth from decay.”

“An ungainly metaphor, fine. But let us be factual. Let us take your friend, the one who usurped your musical enterprise.”

“Nicky Chaos was never my friend. He was just some kid who hung around at shows and happened, Mr. Big Shot Gallery Man, to offer us a practice space when we needed one. I didn’t know he was going to take over the damn band.”

“You should have seen an insurrection coming. This is one of those people who carries Nietzsche in his pocket with a bookmark halfway through. Did he tell you he came to see me about taking him on as a client?”

“This is Captain Chaos you’re talking about?” asked Jenny Nguyen. “The nihilist you can’t say no to? I hate dealing with that guy. He called like every day last fall. Seemed a little desperate, honestly.”

“Probably because the band had broken up,” William said.

Bruno continued. “He believes he is a great artist who also makes music; really he is a bad musician trying also to make art. And what is this art? Spraypaint. For him, kulturkritik is moustaches drawn on ladies in your Sears catalogue. He thinks a safety pin is jewelry. He confuses brutality with beauty. This is very American.”

“I sometimes think he’s trying to become a version of me,” William said.

“A more bankable version of you, you mean.”

“Don’t tell me you agreed to represent him! Jesus, Bruno, I thought better of you.”

“As you yourself have discovered, Nicky Chaos takes persistence to the point of obsession. In a way, he is himself a work of art. A fact of which he’s no doubt unconscious, or else he would ruin it. But more to the point: One day, I arrange to sell the only canvas he showed me to an acquaintance of mine, a banker. ‘An investment,’ I tell him. He will never know the difference, a thousand dollars is a rounding error for him. But for Nicholas? He can now afford groceries for a year. Do you think this is possible without the help of the bourgeoisie, all the beautiful, helpless children renting brownstones and dining on osso buco?”

“That place on East Third’s a squat. I don’t think he’s ever paid rent.”

“We are like infants, William. I include myself, of course. We may not believe Mama and Papa exist when we cannot see them, but that doesn’t mean we don’t depend on them.”

“But really, this is your definition of ‘interesting’?” William had another cigarette lit. For a second, Mercer had the impression he hadn’t extinguished the first. “Because if so, look at how your beloved free enterprise system has deformed the word. I mean it. When it comes to replacing your dreams with its own it turns out to be as efficient as any Central Committee.”

“But why do the alternatives have to be either corporatocracy or the gulags?” said Jenny, exasperated. You got the feeling she could have ended the argument in about three seconds, had the men bothered to invite her into it. Which maybe was why they didn’t.

“Except in this case the dreams are wet ones rather than nightmares. America isn’t that far from totalitarianism, Bruno. You just happen to like the perfume she’s wearing.”

“Only an American would say this.”

“Look around you. It’s the end of the week, how do we express our dissatisfaction with the system? We go to a restaurant and bitch over screw-top wine. We make ourselves into a bourgeoisie-in-waiting, in case anything should happen to the real McCoy. It revolts me to say this, but I’m with Nicky Chaos on this one. Choice isn’t the same thing as freedom—not when someone else is framing the choices for you.”

Mercer had the uncomfortable sense of being some kind of case in point. The napkin in his lap was stained like a surgical gown. What would the parents of his students have thought of all this?

“And William, you prefer to the general welfare … some Platonic ideal of freedom.”

“How could anarchy be any worse for the general welfare than this? I say let the city go bankrupt, the buildings fall, let grass take over Fifth Avenue. Let birds nest in storefronts, whales swim up the Hudson. We can spend mornings hunting for food, and afternoons fornicating, and at night we’ll dance on the rooftops and chant shantih shantih at the sky.”

“But why leave the band, if you’re so politically sympatico with Nicholas?”

“I can agree with him on certain things and still believe fundamentally he’s a sociopath.”

“In a world with no law, it’s the sociopaths who rule. The Stalins, the Maos, you know this, William.”

“What do you think, Mercer?” Jenny now interjected; he couldn’t tell if she was trying to do him a favor by dealing him into the conversation or calling him out for not extending the same courtesy to her. The skronking jazz from the kitchen had ended abruptly. Three pairs of eyes settled on him.

“I think it may be true,” he said carefully, “what Bruno is saying, to the extent that I understand it. But that doesn’t mean it’s not depressing. The reason we can say anything we want in America is that we know it makes no difference.”

Whatever pride Mercer had felt in this little aperçu dissolved when he saw William and Bruno clink their glasses and drink to it; he’d been mistaken, somehow, about how serious they were. Then William was asking the waiter where the little boys’ room was. The waiter apologized; it was out of order, awaiting a plumber.

“Well, I suppose I’ll have to do this the old-fashioned way. I’ll leave you three to talk.”

Still grinning, William stumbled up the stairs into a part of town people talked about as if it were the Wild West. Mercer, abandoned, rearranged his napkin. He could feel the owlish gaze returning to him. “So,” Bruno said. “How does it feel?”

“Are you going to be obstreperous all night, Bruno?” Jenny asked. “Because if so, I’ll bow out now.” Another favor, Mercer realized; for motives he could not imagine, Jenny Nguyen had been trying all night to throw him a rope.

“You are right, my dear, as usual. I withdraw the question.”

Still, Mercer wanted to know. “Wait. How does what feel?”

“To be the latest addition to William’s collection.”

He looked around, but the only help he found was his own bewildered face blinking at him from the mirrored wall. This was why people smoked cigarettes, he saw now, or chose ridiculous glasses. Sans accessories, you were naked.

“See? He had no idea,” Bruno said without turning to his companion, who by this point was making a conspicuous show of interest in the contents of her own purse, perhaps looking for cab fare. “Shall I enlighten you?” He crossed his arms. A cigarette burned between two fingers. (It was remarkable how much you could tell about a man from the way he held a cigarette, Mercer thought fleetingly. Bruno, like Carlos, had a considerable threshold for pain.) “As far as I can tell, Mr. Goodman, you are a gentleman. But you should know that our dinner companion has a history of bolting at the first sign of emotional complication. I would hate for you to not be prepared for this.”

“You must think you know William pretty well, then.”

“He loves to play these what-if games about the coming of the revolution, but there is still in him that thing that is used to having every whim answered, every challenge smoothed away. It’s what comes of being raised a prince.”

“A prince of what?”

“A prince of New York, of course.” His eyes narrowed. “You must know our William is, or was, heir to one of the largest fortunes in the city.”

It was as if, Mercer would think later, he had discovered a birthmark William had been hiding—a big one, right at the center of his chest. Why had it been kept from him? (And by whom, really? Mercer couldn’t claim not to have noticed the elasticity of his lover’s funds, funds as deep as underground springs, and possibly as inexhaustible, or not to have gotten the distinct feeling at times that William had settled in the blighted old factory building in the West Forties not out of poverty, but out of spite.) Furthermore, why was Bruno telling him now? He was about to tell Bruno, untruthfully, that he didn’t believe him, when William reappeared, rubbing his nose with his pocket-square. “What did I miss?”