City on Fire (51 page)

“That’s an old wives’ tale.”

“Try me,” Mercer said, moving to firm up his own forces in Eastern Europe.

“Rauschenberg.”

“You know I’m no good with painters.”

“Fine,” William said. “Who is it that you like so much. Faulkner.”

“Faulkner was a dipsomaniac. And a womanizer.”

“Dostoevsky?”

“Compulsive gambler. Rabid anti-Semite. Did love his wife, though.” Mercer laid an awkward arm across the back of the couch. “Honestly, honey, sometimes I think I’m crazy.” Which was true; he periodically suspected himself of neurosis, though he was also aware that this suspicion, itself the source of the neurosis, was evidence of basically sound mental health. But William was looking straight at him now, smiling.

“Okay, you pass.” He swept the game board onto the floor, a gesture of pure cinema, and then shoved board and table out of the way to clear a patch of bearskin big enough for both of them. “You’ll have to be careful,” he said, “my bad arm’s still tender.” But elbows out, fingers on buttons, he was leading again, as in the early days, and all Mercer had to do was let himself be carried along.

Afterward, they lay together sweating, staring up at the dark-stained rafters. Blood vessels expanded, cooled. Little game pieces dug into Mercer’s back. It was so quiet here—the quiet of the country, which he realized he’d missed. Wind in the eaves. Birds calling and responding. Those had been some of the best times, early on, after they’d finished fooling around but before he’d returned to himself. He felt that his mind had clarified, like thick white butter exposed to heat—some sense of emergency lifting away.

Then he must have fallen into a dream, because he was in a movie house, trying to find a place to sit. The theater, sloping toward the screen, was somehow both bright and dark. There were no empty pairs of seats, only single ones dotted here and there. People stared at the back of his head, wanting him to hurry up and choose, but what if the theater held only a finite number of groups and couples, and they were already here? He ranged deeper into the tortuous upholstery. He found a couple of empty seats together, but they were perpendicular to the screen. Actually, every seat was, except the screen was no longer where he’d thought; it existed in every direction. He was seated now, at just the right distance, not too close, not too far, but anxious, because how would William find him? He turned to discover William standing in the aisle next to him, holding a popcorn and Cokes and smiling patiently down. And as he reached for William’s leg, the way a small child will reach for its mother’s, there welled up through a small hole in the bottom of Mercer’s soul a relief surpassing any he’d ever known in waking life.

HE ROSE THE NEXT MORNING to the sound of whistling. He couldn’t remember the last time William had been up first, but here he was, bustling about the cabin. He’d put away the game pieces, washed up last night’s dishes. A blizzard was howling outside the windows, but he seemed so pleased to be back in this place—so nostalgic, perhaps—as to almost invite suspicion. When he went to go get groceries, though, he asked Mercer to come. “There’s no one I’d rather get stuck in a snowdrift and freeze to death with,” William said. The trip was uneventful, the roads well-plowed. Mercer watched through the rental car’s whitening windshield as his lover sprinted toward a tin-roofed country store. There was another car a few spaces over, its muffler exhaling fog, but the strip of trackless skin exposed when William hiked his motorcycle jacket over his head to keep dry felt again like Mercer’s alone.

For lunch, they roasted hot dogs in the fireplace. Then, when the storm had passed, they bundled up and went out into the silent woods. “There’s something I want to show you,” William said. It was a swimming hole, meager and now frozen solid. He scrambled up onto a giant black boulder slippery with ice and stood there with arms spread wide, as though embracing all of space. Or all of time—the beard and sunglasses made him hard to read. When Mercer called after him to be careful, William beckoned him to follow.

He was right: the view was worth embracing. The sky was low and broody, but from here, near the treeline, you could see the forest rolling down into the valley, the lake tucked away like a pocket mirror. “Remind me again why we don’t live out here?”

“Did you really think I’d steer you wrong?” Then William pointed to the wide-open country beyond the next ridge. “New York’s that way. My compass is unerring.”

THE WEATHER WOULD HOLD for the rest of the weekend. They got up each day with the sun, wore themselves out on a long walk through the snow, and then retreated to the cabin for a nap. Then dinner and Scrabble and sex. William looked happier than he had in a year, healthy and sober and whole, as if it had only been the city light making him seem like an addict. Alas, part of the definition of an idyll is that it can’t last forever.

They left for New York Monday morning, to beat the evening rush. Because their shoes were still wet from the woods, William took his off when he curled up in the passenger’s seat to sleep. They were coming out of the Lincoln Tunnel when his foot came to rest against the parking brake. His big toe poked through a hole in his socks. There were dark bumps near the base, like carbuncles. “What are those?”

“What are what?” William asked, stirring. “Eyes on the road!”

A delivery truck roared past, its airhorn a long, descending moan. Mercer’s palms were slick. “Those things between your toes. Are those bruises?”

William adjusted his sock so that the toe disappeared again. He was inviting Mercer to play along, to pretend he hadn’t seen anything, and Mercer might have done it, except that his interrogator, quiet these last few days, had returned, but with a different voice. It was the voice of Pop, demanding that he act, for once, like a man. “You’ve been using again, haven’t you?”

“Why are you saying this? We were together all weekend, Merce. We had a great time, didn’t we?”

“Before, though. This winter.”

William’s laugh had nothing to do with humor. “You know, we’re not each other’s property. My body is not your body.” He reached out to turn the radio up, but Mercer was finding his way past the lump in his throat.

“Can you not see this is a big fucking problem?”

“You’re being theatrical.”

“I’m theatrical?”

“I’m not going to argue with you, Mercer.” His voice rose. “I just—Look. I just went a whole weekend. Doesn’t that tell you something?”

“Listen to yourself!” Mercer’s hand hurt. He had banged, apparently, on the steering wheel. Of course, this was what William wanted. To be yelled at. Made the victim. Mercer turned the radio back down, so that they might, he pointed out, actually be able to talk for once.

Which was exactly why, William said, reaching for the knob, he’d turned it UP in the first place. “And don’t pretend like you haven’t known the whole time. You’ve always been a terrible liar.”

“We’re not done here,” Mercer said, but got no response. He was shaking inside, afraid of what he’d done, but also furious. William, though, was ever resourceful. Just when you thought you’d cut off all the angles, he would find a maneuver that led toward liberty, and now, at a stoplight a few blocks from the car-rental place, he simply hopped out of the passenger’s seat. His door slammed behind him, echoing up the fronts of the buildings. He moved onto the crowded sidewalk and disappeared around a corner. And then it was as if the weekend had never happened—almost as if they’d never left. Once again, Mercer Goodman could barely see sky.

40

SHERRI HAD BEEN GETTING the real-estate circulars for a while now. You wrote in once, to one, and all of a sudden they all had your name and address. Farmsteads in Connecticut, time-shares on the Jersey shore, rustic Adirondack retreats. Of course, to Larry—though he never would have thought of telling her—this three-bedroom house on the north shore of Staten Island already was a retreat. He’d bought it at Eisenhower-era prices the year of their wedding, and as his F.O.P.-backed raises outpaced inflation, they’d been able to add amenities like the wet bar in the basement and the handrail in the bath, the cutaway in the dining room wall through which he could pass plates to the kitchen without having to get up from his chair. Lately, though, Sherri had grown serious about a change. He’d taken her for Valentine’s Day to an old-timey resort upstate, and she’d wanted to drive around the next morning to look at property. Slowing down so she could peek back up some random driveway that dissipated like a jet trail among the conifers, he’d understood that the imaginary life she was sketching for them—you could have a workshop, we could rent out the basement—was really a way of talking about early retirement. With the fiscal crunch, the force was looking to trim payroll anyway, and she was tired of sitting up waiting for the phone to ring. The idea, when she turned back to him, was clear: he was supposed to volunteer to get the paperwork started. And then a week later a photo of that very house, the one they’d been idling in front of, had appeared on the corkboard above the wall-mounted phone in their kitchen. He’d tried to picture himself crutching his way down that grainy and nearly vertical driveway to check the mail. Having that be the highlight of his day. Scrabbling back up again, making wooden toys at a workbench.

He found her out back by the covered pool, wrapped in a horse-blanket, reading a library book while a mug of tea steamed on the arm of her Adirondack chair. It couldn’t have been more than fifty degrees out, but that was warmer than it had been in months, and Sherri had always had this need to be outdoors. He lowered himself onto the chair’s other arm, doing his darnedest not to wince. She obliged him by moving her reading glasses up onto her hair, still sandy-colored but now with streaks of gray. He wouldn’t have thought it possible that a woman could get more beautiful as she got older. He pulled the clipping from his pocket and pressed it to the weathered wood. “I found this pinned to the corkboard.”

“Of course you did, sweetie. I put it there for you to find.” She didn’t move to take it.

“Is there something you want me to do with it?”

“I thought you might want to call it. See? I circled the number. Pretty transparent, as ploys go.” She’d closed her book. She had that faint little line she got around the corners of her mouth, like she was teasing him, but her voice was dead earnest. “Don’t you remember this one, from Valentine’s Day? It’s the one with the gables, north of New Paltz.”

“That hotel was full of hippies.”

“You said you liked it.”

“New Paltz is like a magnet for them. Energy fields or something.”

“Honestly, Larry, I’m starting to feel a little strung along here. Do you know how much you were home this week?”

He reached for her hands. Strong, warm from the tea. “Why would I string you along?”

“Twelve hours, not factoring sleep.”

It was his turn to sigh. He let go of her hands, turning to face the taut blue skin that covered the pool. They’d been among the first people in the neighborhood to put one in, back when they thought they’d have kids. In-ground, because Larry had trouble with ladders. Once in the water, though, he could move like anyone else. Summer mornings, he used to do laps. Afternoons, neighbor kids wore a wet path through the kitchen, where Sherri baked Toll House cookies and mixed pitchers of lemonade. But those kids had grown up, had stopped sending graduation announcements and Christmas cards. A couple of them had run off to the West Coast; one was in jail. A chainlink fence with green privacy netting had risen on one side of the yard. On warm days, you could hear a new group of kids behind it, laughing and experimenting with swear-words and splashing in pools of their own.

“There must be a case,” she said.

“There are a lot of cases, honey. That’s the problem.”

“No, there’s a specific one. What else could it be? Certainly not how much your bosses appreciate your efforts, ha ha. But when you won’t talk to me about it—”

“That was your idea, to stop bringing work home. I knew it was going to bother you.”

“What am I supposed to do?” she said. “You know I’ve never wanted to put you in a position, but what about my position? If I don’t speak up, you’ll put this paternal thing you have ahead of me. It’s a kid, right? Or a lost cause. Or both. Oh, God, don’t tell me it’s both.”

It was true. Even before New Paltz, the Cicciaro case had begun shunting the others aside. He hadn’t admitted this to himself because he was never going to close it. It was uncloseable. Yet it was the one that had followed him home. That had entered his dreams. “You should come work for me. Replace McFadden.”

“I know you, Larry. I know your little messiah complex you think is such a secret. Wait. Hear me out. I understand that you feel like you can’t walk away from this. But we’re not getting any younger. And your spending seventy hours a week on the job isn’t putting us any closer to getting out of here. There’s always going to be another case.”

“Are we fighting? Is this some kind of ultimatum?” He was still on the arm of the chair.

She placed a hand on his back, her fingers parting around the misaligned vertebrae. “We’re talking, like adults. Look at me, sweetie. I wouldn’t have married you if I thought you were going to be the kind of man who needed ultimatums.”

“I promise you, Sherri—”

“Or promises either,” she’d said, as he leaned down to kiss her.

Yet it was strange; that Monday, when he slipped away from the office early and took his afternoon paper over to Beth Israel, he would be nagged by the feeling of having given her his word. Why else had he come back here, at the end of visiting hours? He flipped off the beige Magnavox in the corner, which the girl’s father had left tuned to daytime TV. The window was supposed to stay closed, to keep dust from penetrating this nominally sterile environment, but Pulaski cranked it to its maximum width of three inches. There was ice-melt on the sill outside. The girl would never see the birds tippling at the puddles, but he liked to think that somewhere deep inside the shell of her body, she would feel the fresh cold air, hear the sounds of city buses sloughing past and the drug commerce from the park across the way and know she wasn’t missing anything. And maybe she liked the smell of loose tobacco as much as he did. He’d barely gotten his pipe lit, though, when an intense nurse swept in to tell him he couldn’t smoke on this floor—did he not see the machine she needed to breathe?—and cranked the window shut again. He resisted the urge to flash his badge; she knew who he was. Anyway, she was right.