City on Fire (53 page)

They used to sit up there on warm nights, William drinking beer with the sixth-floor Angels while Mercer perched nearby on an upturned bucket, studying the fires that broke out uptown every summer. Once, the enormous Angel named Bullet had waved his beercan toward the burning horizon. “You know this guy Maslow? He has this triangle I heard about on ‘Dr.’ Zig. When you’re down there on the bottom of it, you can’t appreciate what’s higher. This is why niggers, man, you can’t give them nothing. No offense.” Mercer did his best not to take any. The invitation to participate in Bullet’s delusions—that Mercer was not, in fact, black; that he and William were merely dear friends—was, properly viewed, a gesture of solidarity. And on second thought, Bullet himself looked awfully swarthy in most lights; Mercer couldn’t be sure he wasn’t speaking brother-to-brother. But William, who had appointed himself Surrogate Defender of the Brown People of the Earth, now proceeded to shoot holes in Bullet’s theory. It was obviously the landlords who paid to have the fires set. Insurance purposes, cutting losses. And landlords were, by and large, honkies. The practice was well-established; Jewish lightning, was the unfortunate term of art. Mercer braced for carnage, in case Bullet saw himself as white (or Jewish), but Bullet had always had a soft spot for William. Had Mercer had the guts to ask, he probably would have agreed to take part in the intervention—to host it, even.

Instead, the first person Mercer had called was Bruno Augenblick, who’d said, “You really don’t understand William, do you?”

To which Mercer had wanted to reply, So explain him to me, then. “I’m just supposed to wait around until he ODs, that’s what you’re telling me?”

“Is that what you think I want, Mr. Goodman?”

Mercer had assumed since their one disastrous meeting that Bruno, unlike Bullet, actually hated Negroes, or at least this Negro, but now he wasn’t so sure. He fingered the brochure from the Substance Abuse Treatment Center on Twenty-Eighth Street. The phone’s rendition of silence was as imperfect as its version of the human voice. There were faint pops and crackles, like bubbles in a glass of 7-Up. “I frankly don’t care what you want, Bruno,” he said. “What I want is to help William get off this stuff. I guess I was foolish enough to think you’d pitch in, seeing as how you’re old friends, or whatever it is you are.”

Bruno’s voice remained stiff, chilly. (How was there such a thing as German-language poetry?) “I’ll have to trust you to understand that this is precisely why I can’t have anything to do with your …”

“Intervention.”

“Precisely,” he said again. And that was that. He hadn’t even wished Mercer luck.

Now the curtain on the window was gray with dusk. It had been blue when Mercer had bought it, a thin fabric to replace the butcher paper William had taped across the glass. The headlights and taillights of the buses slouching toward the Port Authority traced the history of Western civilization on the cotton. It was, substantially, a history of soot. Though a few feet separated the curtain from Mercer’s head, he could make out individual particles of blackness, the democratic meaninglessness of them scattered at random across the gauzy gray cloth. Airbrakes sounded like breaking bottles. Stuck buses bleated like sheep. He’d been a passenger down there, once, his head filled with a mixture of fantasy, superstition, and the vestiges of childhood religion, a running monologue aimed at God. (Da ist keine Stelle, die dich nicht sieht.) And had he really been so different, fretting about the apartment this afternoon, setting out mismatched mugs, as though this weren’t an intervention but a tea party? He still acted as if the proper arrangement of surfaces might call down benediction, or grace. Of course, there was no telling when William would be home, though he’d been promised (falsely) a special dinner, to be served at eight. Mercer could only hope he wouldn’t show up at seven thirty. Or ten.

There came a sound like a shot. It must have been a garbage truck hitting a pothole—one of thirty-two distinct sounds he’d categorized that interfered with sleep in this city. But garbage trucks came with the dawn. So maybe he’d slept through the intervention, and now it was morning: same traffic, same crepuscular light. The fact that “dusk” could mean two nearly opposite things seemed indicative of something, if only that the membrane between the real and the cognitive had grown perilously thin. Then the sound returned in multiples—wham wham wham wham WHAM—and he realized the night hadn’t happened yet. The Angels had left the inner end of the vestibule unlocked again. Someone was banging on his door.

Before he could get it all the way open, Venus de Nylon, the Farfisa wizard of Ex Post Facto, swept into the apartment as if it were her own, and Mercer merely a butler or footman. The last time he’d seen her (Him? Her? Her.), she was in nurse’s whites and a Tina Turner shag that swayed side to side as she made dainty stabs at her organ. Now she’d shaved and waxed her head. With her gold hoop earrings, she looked like a Dominican Mr. Clean. She seized a picture frame from a bookshelf, a Polaroid of himself and William on the patchy grass of Central Park. “Well, this is cute.”

Mercer held out his hand. “We haven’t been formally introduced. I’m Mercer.”

Something stirred in her alligator-skin purse. She reached in and scooped from it a ball of white fur.

“And I see you brought your dog.”

Set down on the floor, the beast scrabbled under the sofa. There was a yowl, and Eartha K. streaked out and shot through the beaded curtain of the sleeping nook. The dog gave a few yaps at the swinging beads, as if gloating. “I wasn’t going to leave her tied to a lamppost, if that’s what you’re suggesting.” Venus’s eyes flicked back to Mercer. “Honestly, I never understood why a Hamilton-Sweeney would choose to live in this neighborhood anyway.”

“Like I said on the phone, I do appreciate your helping out with all this.”

“I knew the day would come. Billy’s always had to take everything to the end of the line.”

“Please, sit. Can I offer you coffee?”

“Aren’t you the Donna Reed of this motherfucker? But I don’t drink it. Weak heart.”

Venus took the futon, lifting her big knobby feet from their flats and curling them up on the cushion like a mermaid’s tail. Mercer couldn’t help but speculate about the body under the velour tracksuit. Had she had the surgery, the great final chop? Strategic bagginess made it hard to tell. He handed her the brochure. The idea here, he said, was to make William see how many people cared about him, the real him. The him he was with other people.

“And how many people is that, exactly?”

“I’ve got three confirmed, at this point.”

“Three plus you?”

“Three including me.”

“Shit.”

“I did get his sister to come.”

“I got to warn you, Mercer, you could get Jesus Christ himself to come and still not stop a serious habit. I learned that from watching Nastanovich. Our first bassist, you know. I really thought when he passed, it would scare Billy straight. Or at least back to coke. But a junkie’s going to do what a junkie’s going to do.” She touched his thigh. Mercer, suddenly disconsolate, didn’t remember to pull away. “Don’t take that amiss. I don’t want to see your boyfriend in jail or with a toe-tag, but you’ve got to accept that some people think the real them is whoever they are when they’re not around other people.”

Another knock at the door brought Mercer back to himself. Or to the version of himself he’d fashioned in order to make it through this. “That’ll be Regan.”

Since he’d last seen her, she had acquired a patina of health, as if she’d been on vacation, or to one of those new tanning coffins. Of course, the weeks around the solstice were when white people in general were at their whitest. Regan hesitated a moment before crossing the plane of the door, but no alarm began to sound.

“This is William’s friend, Venus,” Mercer explained. Venus extended a hand palm-down, as if to be kissed. Regan shook it and then, rather than sit on any of the available surfaces, walked around surveying the reclaimed furniture, the scrappy congoleum, the yellow ovoids of lamplight on the cracked plaster walls. The jacket of her business suit was a boxy armor. “Can I take that?” he asked. But she was cold and wanted to keep it. He apologized about the heat. “The landlord likes to turn it off and see how long he can go before anyone notices. I was just about to make some fresh coffee.”

“That would be lovely, thanks.”

“This is what we have.” He held up a yellow can of Café El Bandito, careful not to open the cabinet door wide enough that she’d see the wood-grained roach motels within. (Really, though, why did he care? Why, since they met, had he been so desperate to impress her?)

Regan approached the dog. “Can I pet him?”

“Her. Shoshonna.”

While the percolator burbled intestinally, Mercer took some creamer packets from the fridge and got down the sugar box and did a surreptitious roach check. He sought to verify in the glass-fronted cabinet that his guests were getting along, but instead, Regan had moved to the window, and was gazing down at the cinderblock on the fire escape, the dead flowers. The street below, full of stalled automobiles, would be a trench of bloody light. From down there, she would look like a portrait. “I don’t see why this shouldn’t work,” she was saying. Her voice had gone small and hard, as if a walnut were lodged in her windpipe. “He’s been looking for a home all his life, and now he’s got one. He can’t want to just throw that away.”

“Is that the choice?” Venus said. “Either/or?” Mercer set down the tray of coffee fixings. He hadn’t the heart to tell Regan that the beach chair she’d sunk into was meant for William.

Then, downstairs and a world away, the vestibule door opened, and there was a surge in the volume of car horns. The dog growled. Even before the keyring took up its rhythmic jingle in the stairwell, Mercer knew it was William. His face must have telegraphed it, because Regan and Venus had tensed, too, like teenagers in a monster flick. They listened to his feet on the stairs. Or maybe Mercer had it backward: maybe William was the hapless victim at whom the audience was shouting, Don’t go through that door! He couldn’t remember if he’d locked it. Some fumbling ensued, and then it opened and William’s eyes were swinging around the room. There was Venus on the couch, and he could see William struggling to seem glad to see her. It must have taken a second to correct for the suit-jacket and the hairstyle, to recognize the other woman as the sister he hadn’t seen in a decade and a half, but the instant he did, his face shut down.

And why couldn’t he be high right now? Mercer wondered. Why choose this of all moments to be sober? Also, why was Regan crying? It gave William the advantage, standing there in his beard with his keys in one hand. “Why don’t you have a seat, and I’ll get you some coffee,” Mercer said. He wanted to flee in shame, to the kitchenette, to the next room, to the fire escapes and rooftops and the places where the city ended.

“Why don’t you tell me, Mercer, what she’s doing here? What are you doing here?”

Venus sighed. “Your sister’s here, O Best Beloved, because you’re strung out again.”

“Oh, no. Uh-uh. We’re not going to pretend this is somehow on my behalf.”

“William—” The nut in Regan’s throat had swollen; her color was deepening to bright red. Venus’s dog chose this moment to trot over and investigate William’s high-tops, which were spattered with paint like pigeon shit.

“I can’t fucking believe this. I’m going to go out in the hall now and count to ten, and when I come back everything is going to be sane, okay? How does that sound?” He made no motion to go. Venus, however, had retrieved her purse from the floor, preparing to jump ship. This was not what Mercer had pictured at all. Even three-on-one, William was winning. (But what was he winning?) That’s when Regan, God love her, rose. She was exactly the same height as her brother.

“William, I love you. You know that.”

“So does Mercer here, supposedly, so how come you’re all ganging up on me?”

“I do love you,” Mercer said quietly.

“We’ll discuss it later, Mercer.” He turned back to Regan. “Let’s be real. First that invitation, and now this. You thought I couldn’t last a month without you, and that was like 1961. So why the fuck are you back in my life all of a sudden?”

“That’s how long it took me to find you!”

“You can’t have been looking very hard, Regan.”

“I had a marriage. I had kids, two of them. And now Daddy’s in trouble—”

“And what—you expect the other heir to like race back in and reclaim his birthright? I never wanted what Daddy has, Regan. Whatever he thought. Mom left me more than enough.” It was a deft change of subject, but Mercer was too riveted to try to steer things back to the drugs.

“He grew up in the ’30s, William. People didn’t wallow in their feelings. That didn’t mean you weren’t like the little prince in his eyes. Why do you think the Goulds wanted him to pack you off to school?”

“—which he promptly did.”

As Regan hugged herself, she seemed to get smaller, as if trying to hide in her coat. “Have you never in your life made a mistake? Have you never deserved a second chance? Maybe it’s time to try forgiving people.”

“Anyway, you were the one who bore the brunt of their attention, as I recall.”

“Please don’t—”

“And whose side did Daddy take then? Whose side did you take? Fifteen years, Regan, and have you said a word about what happened?”

There was a silence. William seemed powerless not to press his hand.

“You lost the right to judge my choices the day you let the Goulds off the hook. If you need an ally now, go ask your husband.”

“But did Mercer not tell you? At New Year’s?” Damn it, Mercer thought.

“Tell me what? What does New Year’s have to do with anything?”

“Mercer, you didn’t tell him about the divorce?”

“This is all a bit Peyton Place for me,” Venus said. “Vámonos, Shoshonna.”

“No, wait,” Mercer said, trying to recover the script. “Look, we all love you, everybody loves you. We want you to get help.”

“Who says I need it?” William asked. “Is it you, Venus, who dresses in women’s clothes and bottle-feeds your dog? Or you, Regan, who’d rather die a slow death than admit what they let happen to you? Or is it you?” He turned to Mercer, and his voice softened. “Who can’t accept a single goddamn molecule the way it is? You don’t love things, Mercer, you love the ideas of things. You’re asleep and don’t even know it. Now if you’ll excuse me—”