City on Fire (55 page)

They sat on a step as she wolfed the sandwich down. She was careful to finish, he noticed, before telling him that he wasn’t fooling her, she already knew exactly who he was. “You think I haven’t seen you down by the bodega? You’re that guy writing about Sam’s dad, aren’t you?”

Something clicked for him. “And you must be S.G.” Her reaction was one he’d seen in maybe half a dozen courtrooms: a down and leftward dart of the eyes while the facial ice reset. He took from his pocket the folded paper he’d made notes on, but had no time to consult it. He was flying blind now. “You know, I’ve got a complete published run of Land of a Thousand Dances at home, so I’ve learned some things about you and your buddies. But the fact that you’re up here spying on Billy Three-Sticks doesn’t have to be part of the story. You and D.T. and Sol, and who’s the other one? Iggy, right? I’m sure there’s a reasonable explanation for what you’re doing. Is there something you’re trying to protect Billy from? If you could bring me back down to that house to meet the others I’d only take up a few minutes of everyone’s time.”

“I just came here to pack up my stuff, jack. How about you? What’s your explanation?”

He struggled to recall. “I’m trying to get a better picture of what Samantha was like.”

“Well, you’re sure going about it all wrong, hanging around the West Forties.” The graffiti’d figure seemed to ripple on the wall behind her, as on a television with bad reception. It wasn’t waving, as he’d thought. Its hands were in the air. “Off the record,” she said. “That’s a thing, right? It means you can’t use anything I say.”

In a less caffeinated state, he might not have agreed so quickly. But she had something to tell him. He wondered if this was it. “That’s very much a thing. We’re off the record right now.”

She turned the wax paper around in her lap, studied it like a mirror. “What you have to understand about Sam is that she was screwy about men. She could never see that they were all in love with her.” She glanced up. “Hell, you seem like you are, too. And people in love are not to be trusted. I mean, when she got a boyfriend for a little while, we gave her no end of shit, like we thought it was beneath her. ‘Loverboy,’ we called him. Sam’s Loverboy. But that whole time before Thanksgiving, before she came crawling back to live with us …”

“She was living in the house.”

“Just for that last month, Thanksgiving to Christmas. But there were a couple months before that when she was barely even coming by to say hi, and I know it hurt Nicky’s feelings. Which he really does have, no matter what anyone says.”

“Nicky? I thought his name was Iggy.”

She looked confused. Stricken. “Crap, what time is it? They’re going to start to wonder where I am. And if he thinks I’ve been talking to a reporter …”

He who? Then what? But he knew better than to push her now. “How will I find you again, though, if I let you go?”

“What makes you think you could stop me?”

And then she was bringing the binoculars down with great precision on his testicles, and he was on his side on the oily cement, watching her walk away. He struggled to speak around the pain: “Wait.” Her tall white boots paused at the edge of the loading dock, just where day started. He had a feeling it would be the last he ever saw of her. “You didn’t tell me why you were packing up your stuff.”

“You’re not much of a detective, are you, old man?” She seemed to reach a final decision. Pulled her fur tight around her. “Billy Three-Sticks went to ground four days ago. Hasn’t been back since.”

45

INCREASINGLY, AFTER WILLIAM’S DISAPPEARANCE, Mercer would find himself returning to that winter, trying to nail down some turning point, some moment about which he could say, It all started when.… The search wasn’t orderly, or even continuous; he could go for hours caught up in questions of test preparation, of dry-cleaning, of Middle-Eastern affairs. But then on the subway or on line at the place down the street where he went when they were out of toilet paper—or rather, when Mercer was—he’d be accosted by a memory. Here was William shaking a handful of change as though preparing to shoot dice. Here was William rummaging for a token in the pockets of the bluejeans heaped on the sleeping-nook floor—picking them up and tossing them aside, without it ever occurring to him to deposit them in the hamper. And here was William, spied on once from above, stealing away from the building in the bloody pre-rush-hour light. If he were truly headed uptown to paint, he would enter the subway on the far side of Eighth Avenue, but here he was turning downtown instead. Here was William, in other words, leaving by slow degrees.

The night of the intervention—the night he’d walked out the door and not come back—had merely literalized it. Nevertheless, the effect on Mercer was baleful. He held it together for his girls at work, but afterward, as in his earliest days in the city, he walked home via the most circuitous route possible, looping up toward Central Park rather than face the emptiness of the loft. It was getting on into spring, and under the glass globes of streetlamps the trees were pushing out green. Sound carried farther in this oxygen-rich air; he might hear laughter from the entrances of restaurants on the east side, where valets helped expensive people out of the interiors of cars. He peered through the lit windows of the apartments where they lived—apartments he’d once pictured himself inhabiting. William had come from this world, had been a natural aristocrat, which was maybe what Mercer had fallen in love with in the first place. (Though who’s to say? Who’s to say why a kid at the state fair picks a particular five-dollar animal pinned high on the corkboard behind the sideshow barker, that particular one, and will then spend ten dollars trying to shoot a balloon with a BB gun?) Anyway, for Mercer, there would be no transfiguration.

If he put off reaching home until eight or nine o’clock, he believed, he might find William waiting there on the futon, rocking forward in that way of his, hands between knees, penitent. I’ve thought about it, he’d say (for he always had to let things sink in before he could really hear them). You were right. Instead, when Mercer switched on the lamp by the door, there was only Eartha K. In the first few days after Mercer took over the management of her food supply, she’d dabbled with lesser degrees of aloofness—even once rubbing against his leg when he came in. But she’d soon learned that his sense of duty alone was sufficient to keep her fed, and now they were like inmates in a prison yard, circling each other uneasily, in orbits as wide as the cramped apartment would allow.

Then one evening after work, he went to dump her tin of Friskies onto a saucer, a chore William knew he found disgusting, and couldn’t find the can-opener. Or the pliers he thought to use in its place. Come to think of it, where was the TV? Or that pile of jeans? Yes, at some point since this morning, William had been back here. Mercer imagined him pale and hunched, moving through the loft with a bag and throwing things in at random. Maybe he was pawning them, or bartering them for heroin. But upon closer inspection, the pattern revealed an unexpected forethought. Mercer had bought a four-hole toothbrush holder, e.g., to sit by the kitchen sink. It now bared a poignant third hole. And for William to think about oral hygiene meant he must really be serious about not coming back.

MERCER HAD ALWAYS BEEN what his mother called a good eater, in contradistinction to C.L., but that night he could barely choke down a meal. There was no pleasure in it. And this seemed to be the new order of things. Where once he would have raided cookbooks for challenges with which to woo William, he now settled for the four food groups of bachelorhood: Frozen, Cold Cuts, Breakfast Cereal, and Takeout. His energy level ebbed, to offset which he drank more coffee. There was perpetually a half-pot souring in the faculty lounge at school, and visiting it gave him a way to mark time. Every few hours, between periods or even during them, he dragged himself up the three flights of stairs and stood at the window with his paper cup of joe. No one cared what he did anymore—not unless you counted the little cop who’d apparently been asking around. Outside, office workers carried bagged lunches from the deli. This was how he would end up, too: aging and anonymous and alone, on a numbered street the sunlight never quite reached.

Once or twice, at night, he planted himself in front of the typewriter, trying to get back to the book he’d come to New York to write. It was supposed to be about America, and freedom, and the kinship of time to pain, but in order to write about these things, he’d needed experience. Well, be careful what you wish for. For now all he seemed capable of producing was a string of sentences starting, Here was William. Here was William’s courage, for example. And here was William’s sadness, smallness of stature, size of hands. Here was his laugh in a dark movie theater, his unpunk love of the films of Woody Allen, not for any of the obvious ways they flattered his sensibility, but for something he called their tragic sense, which he compared to Chekhov’s (whom Mercer knew he had not read). Here was the way he never asked Mercer about his work; the way he never talked about his own and yet seemed to carry it with him just beneath the skin; the way his skin looked in the sodium light from outside with the lights off, with clothes off, in silver rain; the way he embodied qualities Mercer wanted to have, but without ruining them by wanting to have them; the way he moved like a fish in the water of this city; the way his genius overflowed its vessel, running off into the drain; the unfinished self-portrait; the hint of some trauma in his past, like the war a shell-shocked town never talks about; his terrible taste in friends; his complete lack of discipline; the inborn incapacity for certain basic things that made you want to mother him, fuck him, give your right and left arms for him, this manchild, this skinny American; and finally his wildness, his refusal to be imaginable by anyone.

It might have helped Mercer to talk about how ill all this made him feel, but inability to talk about it was one of the illness’s symptoms, as well as an underlying cause. He was like a person with a full-body rash just beneath his clothes. The fear that the rash would repulse people was stronger than the hope that fresh air might help it heal.

Of course, there was one person from whom he couldn’t conceal that something was wrong. On Sundays, when his mother called, he filled the dead air between them with perfunctory reports about teaching and meteorological conditions and whatnot, but couldn’t lift his voice into the melodious register of well-being. She never asked about his roommate anymore, he noticed. But she continued to speak in the anodyne phrases for which he’d compiled an imaginary translation table:

And she was right. It seemed impossible that he’d chosen to live here, at a latitude where spring was a semantic variation on winter, in a grid whose rigid geometry only a Greek or a builder of prisons could love, in a city that made its own gravy when it rained. Taxis continued to stream toward the tunnel, like the damned toward a Boschian hellmouth. Screaming people staggered past below. Impossible, that he now footed the rent entire, two hundred bucks monthly for the privilege of pressing his cheek to the window and still not being able to see spectacular Midtown views. Impossible, that the cinderblock planter on the fire escape could ever have produced flowers.

Which didn’t prepare him for Mama’s threat, in early April, to come visit him instead. It was the vision of her in Easter clothes and a large floral hat bowling through the hustlers at the bus station that finally coaxed out of him the admission that he might be able to make it down for spring break after all. We’d pay for you to fly, she said, if that made things easier. Some meaning he couldn’t quite translate danced just out of reach. “No, Mama,” he said finally. “I’m not a kid anymore. I can pay for things myself.”

46

THEN OUT OF THE BLUE CAME THOSE WEEKS in March when Jenny didn’t hear the Wurlitzer through the walls or see Richard in the hall or elevator. She contrived reasons to linger by the mailboxes on her way into the building, or to run across to the superette where he bought his three daily papers: she needed milk, or a knob of ginger, or a Chore Boy sponge. (What didn’t they carry, tucked away on high shelves the manager reached by means of a mechanical claw?) But she never saw him. Maybe he’d gone back to Scotland. Maybe he wintered in Miami Beach. They hardly knew each other, after all. Maybe they were no longer friends.

It was the middle of April when she saw him again. She was teaching herself yoga out of a coffeetable book, determined to whip mind and body back into shape. She’d torqued herself into Elephant Pose: hands flat on carpet, torso arched, one leg cramped into place behind her, the other rampant, trembling, seventy degrees overhead. A few feet from her face, a celebrity in a headband beamed orgasmically. Then a sound from the wall distracted her, and she collapsed onto the floor. Just another of the city’s noises, she told herself, come to unhorse her. Her first few months in New York, she used to sit and get high and listen to them, for fear of listening to the voice inside. That voice now repeated the centering chant from the book: Tat tvam asi. It meant: You are that. But how could she be sure yoga wasn’t just another form of commodified quiescence? This was a sometimes attractive and sometimes frustrating wrinkle of the dialectic, she’d found: everything turned out to be the superstructure of some other thing. And here you were, thinking you were free … The sound came again, in triplicate, through the wall between her place and Richard’s. It was definitely a knock; it was meant for her. And it was all the excuse she needed to abandon her attempts at bourgeois self-actualization. She threw on sweats over her underwear and hied her butt out into the hall.

She’d never seen Richard actually drunk before, she realized when he opened the door. She said something like, “You’re back,” and he just stared at her with a tight smile stuck to his face like a shaving plaster. There was a single light behind him, the green-shaded banker’s lamp on a desk now covered with newspapers. Only when she reminded him that he’d knocked did the old courtliness return. Of course, yes, come in. He cleared space for her on the sofa. Then he dropped his long body into the deskchair, perilously close to tipping over the bottle on the desk. “Taste?” he said.