City on Fire (71 page)

The increments that distract me from my own bigger picture, I’m realizing, are these three-month things you could practically set your watch by. Step 1: I discover something new. Step 2: I think: yes, finally, my life is about to begin, this is where I’m supposed to be. And then three months later I come out of a kind of trance and see I’ve been bullshitting myself again. It’s like my impulses or appetites are always running a season ahead of my brain.

After I switched high schools sophomore year, the something new was sex. It took me about two weeks to sleep with Brad S. - and pretty much scotch the chance of any of the girls there ever being friends with me. I guess the size of his apartment impressed me, or at the time I needed to feel like I belonged to that world. I liked the way his parents were never home, so it was like he owned the place, like an adult. And I liked the way he seemed to know what he was doing. Who else I shouldn’t have slept with: the senior class president. I learned a lot from all this, but it didn’t make me happy. (Maybe it’s a good policy not to sleep with people who don’t make me happy.) And by the time it ended, I was already moving on.

I remember the clerk at Seor Wax trying to get over on me by comping an advance copy of Radio Ethiopia and claiming I reminded him of Patti. But it was the sound itself I’d fallen for. I would become a musician (notwithstanding my staggering lack of musical eptitude). Or at least a devout apostle. I would move to the City, be swallowed by the scene. Now that I’ve penetrated the mysteries of the East Village, though, and started to see its darker side, I’m wondering again what it is I’m doing. Which makes me nervous about what comes next. What if three months from now, I want out?

But the thing is, I’ve started to think, you can’t only say no. You can’t only tear shit down and assume that what springs up in its place is going to be better. You have to build at some point. To commit. Isn’t this what punk was supposed to be about? Like, don’t despair, people. You can still pick up a guitar and drumsticks and make something. No Future - that stuff was just the content. The form said: HERE is your future. I think even SG and DT and NC have to see this at some level. The personal and the political being somewhat indissoluble in the hothouse of that house, there’s been some jealousy of the time I’ve been spending with certain of them lately. But at this point, having experienced what a real adult relationship looks like, if I stay interested in the PHP, it’s not in the way any of them think. What I’m interested in now is minds. Specifically: in changing them.

MONADS

[ 1959–1977 ]

I too had been struck from the float forever held in solution,

I too had receiv’d identity by my body.

—WALT WHITMAN

Leaves of Grass

59

THE FERRY TO BLOCK ISLAND WAS RUNNING BEHIND SCHEDULE, and it was already dark by the time Regan reached the Goulds’ rambling vacation house that last official weekend of the last summer of the 1950s—the start of her junior year. The driveway’s cars looked like cultured pearls in the moonlight, or a line of cooling embers. In the lit-up windows, hired men in white jackets bustled to and fro. Laughter and surf and the pock of badminton rackets could be heard from out back; that must have been where everyone was. But where the Goulds were, her brother was sure not to be, so she carried her suitcase inside and asked a tall woman with a guest-list where she might put her things.

The woman showed her to a room under the third-floor eaves, as far from the grown-ups as possible. The dresser where Regan put the clothes she’d brought from Poughkeepsie smelled faintly of talcum, and under that, rot. She was revising downward her assessment of Felicia’s personal fortune when out in the hallway a familiar voice began to count backward from sixty. Little kids, the unsupervised offspring of the guests who would be filling the house and the island’s one hotel for the weekend, stampeded over weary floorboards. She found William at the far end of the hall, in a room that mirrored her own. He lay back on the swaybacked bed in his blazer and unknotted school tie. His eyes were closed. “Forty … thirty-nine … hello, Regan.”

“Are you peeking?”

He patted the bedspread beside him. “Come give us a kiss.”

“You’re peeking, I can’t believe it. Don’t stop counting! You’ll disappoint the kids.”

“Maybe, but at least I’ve bought myself peace and quiet until they figure it out.”

“You’re terrible.”

“Come on. Kiss kiss.”

In his yearlong journey through the digestive system of the nation’s most prestigious prep schools, William had been trying on and discarding various selves, but with this latest incarnation, there was an element of recklessness, of testing to see how much she was willing to put up with. As he pooched his lips at her, a sour scent wafted up. “Jesus, William. You absolutely reek of booze.”

He grinned and opened his blazer to reveal a bottle of rum. “Bad form to let the birthday girl’s hospitality go to waste, don’t you think?”

They sat on the bed for a while passing the bottle as he made fun of the room’s generically nautical décor and the pinheads whose laughter kept gusting up beyond the open window. And of course the posturing of the Ghouls. Each time he mispronounced the name, she heard pain. She felt it, too, obviously. On the other hand, she also felt, as she increasingly had these last years, the difference in their ages. Yes, she would rather her father have entered a monastery, but they were both adults, and if Daddy preferred to have a … a girlfriend (though the word stuck in her throat like a fishbone), the honorable thing was to smile and nod and not to stand in the way. Perhaps, too, she imagined some benefits accruing to filial diligence. Wasn’t the Karmann Ghia she’d gotten for Christmas one of these? In its too-perfect congruity with what a twenty-year-old might have wanted, it had clearly been picked out by Daddy’s consort, but maybe the larger impulse had been his. Maybe for the first time her superior maturity was being acknowledged. Appreciated, even. And when the little kids came back to confront William about his failure to look for them, Regan left him to charm his way out of the mess he’d made and went downstairs to join the party.

The house’s sandy backyard extended forty or fifty feet. This being the year when all things South Pacific were in vogue, the perimeter had been marked off with rattan torches that puffed and guttered in a stiffening wind. Whitecaps crashed grayly beyond the dunes, nearly invisible, while within the charmed circle glowed the faces of executives and their wives and various friends of the Goulds. Daddy, dignified in his summer-weight wool, pecked her on the cheek. She’d been hoping for an embrace, but he had a drink in his hand, and this felt more sophisticated—which, with Felicia looking on, was probably a good thing. She summoned over a waiter to give Regan a cocktail of her own, in a cup shaped like a tiki god. Then the brother, Amory Gould, offered his arm. “Come, dear. There are people I’d like you to meet.” Daddy’s smile may have wavered a bit here—Regan would never quite be able to decide—but when she pivoted into the haze of booze and firelight and the deeper black of stormclouds piling up to the east, a kind of inner hum overtook her.

Amory’s hand, soft on her lower back, propelled her through knots of guests. She kept waiting for him to get bored, but he hummed with an intensity of his own. He was barely taller than Regan, but had the impressive white hair even then, in his thirties, and that ingratiating manner; the way he introduced her as “Bill’s daughter—exquisite, isn’t she?” would have made her blush, had it not been as if she weren’t there. Eventually, they reached the outermost orbit of guests, where a gangly boy in a yachting sweater stood smoking. He wasn’t bad-looking, in a sort of bland, Episcopalian way, but his only real distinguishing features were his horn-rimmed glasses and his hair, so blond it too was almost white. Regan was surprised to feel the quickening of the hand on her back, unless of course she was imagining it.

“Regan Hamilton-Sweeney, may I present …” and then Amory said the name Regan would subsequently expunge from her memory, leaving only the initial L. “Regan here is down from … Vassar, isn’t it? I can’t keep my Seven Sisters straight.” They laughed more because it had the rhythm of a joke than because it was funny. L., said Amory, was a Harvard man.

“That makes us cousins, practically.” L.’s pause here was to let Regan know that he, too, saw Amory’s clumsiness, and she smiled, genuinely this time. It was all the opening Amory needed to burrow back into the crowd. L. gazed after him. “None too subtle, is he.”

“Oh, he’s not so bad,” she said. “It’s his sister you’ve got to look out for. This is her birthday we’re celebrating.”

“I mean I reckon he’s assuming because we’re around the same age …”

“You think he’s setting us up?”

At which they both laughed again, anxious. That should have been out of the question, L. said. His father was the president of a rival holding company in the City, and evidently in private called William Hamilton-Sweeney II all sorts of names that didn’t bear repeating. “Father can be kind of a son of a bitch, if you’ll pardon the expression. I’m surprised we were even invited.”

“Well, the, uh, Goulds were the ones making the arrangements,” she said. “It is their place, after all.”

“Yeah, we’ve been out a couple times already this summer. Have you seen the water yet? We should walk down.”

And because the alternative was to spend another half-hour talking about their parents like good children of the ruling class, she acquiesced. L. grabbed another pair of tiki cups from a circulating waiter, and without anyone seeming to notice, they slipped down the moonlit path and out between the dunes.

They went maybe a quarter-mile, to where a rock jetty broke the curve of the shoreline. On an impulse, or maybe because adjunct-hostess duties had been wearing on her, Regan pulled off her shoes and waded into the water in her tennis skirt. It was cold, but she stayed in calf-deep, letting the shiver rise past her knees. Far-off lightning stabbed the sea. “You know,” L. said, wading out to her, not bothering to roll up his pants. “You’re not so bad yourself, for a Hamilton-Sweeney.”

As he stared at the side of her face, she felt as she did more and more these days: excitement and nerves and transgression all mixed together so you couldn’t tell which was which. She drained her drink—her third or fourth of the night, she’d lost count—and set the tiki cup adrift, a bottled message. “I think I felt a raindrop.” He tried to blame this on the surf, but she knew that if she stayed here, he would want to kiss her, and she wasn’t sure she liked him that way. “We should head in.”

They returned to the yard to find everyone packed together, facing the wide back porch, the proscenium where stood her father and the Goulds. Daddy beamed stiffly, but his discomfort with public speaking wasn’t something Felicia shared. She hoisted her pagan vessel into the air. Her voice, scrubbed of any trace of her native Buffalo, was capable of remarkable penetration. “When Bill asked, I can’t say I hesitated,” she was saying. Regan thought of Lemuel Gulliver lying there politely while soft-footed Lilliputians scampered back and forth with their tiny ropes. And then of the buffalo nickels her mother used to save for trips to the beach, to give to her or William, whoever saw the ocean first. “Although it’s always a daunting task to bring two families together, we’ll have all our friends and colleagues to help. I couldn’t imagine lovelier people to celebrate with, and we certainly look forward to seeing you all at the wedding.” The wedding? No wonder L. had been surprised; this wasn’t a birthday, after all, but an engagement party. Regan looked around frantically for William, but maybe he’d already sensed it, earned the nickel no one was around anymore to give them, because he still hadn’t come down from upstairs. Which was where she finally spotted him, or thought she did, a childlike head in a small, square window.

WHETHER DADDY GENUINELY LIKED FELICIA or was merely being swept along by her energies had been a topic of regular debate between Regan and her brother, back when the latter had still been living at home. It might have been some kind of silver lining here that the point had at last been settled in Regan’s favor. But that night, when she broke the news, William accused her of having taken Felicia’s side all along, which couldn’t have been further from the truth.

The truth was that she would have been the first to scrap the diplomatic pose and join him in his fulminations against the Goulds if she hadn’t seen how lonely Daddy had been. Mom had died in ’51, and for most of the next decade, he’d sworn off dining and opera and the social functions they used to frequent. He gave himself over to his work, sometimes returning home as late as eight in the evening. But business and pleasure were not so easy to wall off from each other in a city as thick with both as New York. A couple years ago, he’d returned to public life, and Felicia had arrived soon after, trailing her brother and familiar. When he couldn’t avoid talking about her, Daddy referred to her as his “friend,” as if Regan and William were still children whose sensibilities this half-truth might spare. In fact, it had only aggravated their sense of betrayal, in that it let Daddy feel he was being more solicitous toward their feelings than he actually was. He didn’t believe in feelings, really—not even his own. It was almost an ideology with him now. Regan had seen him cry only once over her mother’s death, and then only through the cracked door of his study the morning of the memorial service, when he and Artie Trumbull had sat with a bottle of cognac on the desk between them (though, as William would point out, she couldn’t be certain the glimmer in Daddy’s eye hadn’t been a trick of the light, or of memory).

But in at least one respect, William turned out to be right: alcohol made the engagement go down more smoothly. Regan had two Bloody Marys with breakfast the next morning, and lunch was similarly boozy. Brother and sister might have shared a conspiratorial look from their respective tables on the lawn, except that brother refused to come down to eat; he would spend much of that weekend holed up in his room, or out God only knew where, on the principle that the greatest punishment he could render against his oppressors was to deprive them of the glory that was William. Not that Daddy noticed; at his own table, surrounded by well-wishers, he seemed a little drunk, too. And so Regan ended up smiling over at L., who sat across from her, under the flapping white edge of a tent thrown up against the threat of rain.