City on Fire (82 page)

Sure, he said, and gave her one more caress before withdrawing his hand. His face was still invisible above her. Maybe some other time.

WEDNESDAYS BELONGED TO DR. ALTSCHUL. She’d told her new secretary that the standing appointment was with an orthopedist, because it seemed imperative that no one at the firm suspect her of being a basket case, but who ever got this keyed up about going to the orthopedist’s? The morning before an appointment, she’d be unable to get anything done. Her eyes would pass again and again over the same press release or whatever, but her mind would be rehearsing what she would say to the analyst, her analyst. She had been right to hold out for a woman, and she loved the feeling of surrender she got, reclining on the couch. The empathetic blankness of the therapeutic voice. She even loved Dr. Altschul’s office, a low-ceilinged room in the basement of a brownstone in the West Village, which she Freudianly shared with her neo-Jungian husband. Regan knew these feelings weren’t real, they were called transference, but still, she was trying to honor them. This week, in particular, she would recount the dinner with Keith, and how she’d asserted herself, and the doctor would be proud of her. But all the voice beyond her shoulder said was, “And how did that make you feel?”

“You mean to just say what I felt, like that?”

“Is that what you think I mean?”

What the analyst was really getting at, Regan was pretty sure, was Amory Gould. For several sessions now, they’d been focusing on the period of time around Daddy’s remarriage, when the house on Sutton Place had been sold and William had disappeared and she’d first met Keith. The chronology was all jumbled up now, but everything ailing her seemed to begin back there. Just last week, she’d finally broached the subject of Block Island, and strangely, she heard herself talking on and on not about … whatever his name had been, but about the Demon Brother. You believe this man is somehow responsible for your rape, the doctor had said, just that blunt. And for covering it up. And now you work alongside him. “Well, he’s never at the office. He’s really more of a phantom,” she’d pointed out, because she never would have gone to work for Daddy full-time if she’d thought Amory was going to be around, would she? But it was true that shortly after she’d taken over Public Relations, Amory had been promoted from his nebulous consigliere position to Executive Vice President of Global Operations, and was suddenly everywhere, ferrying his tubes of blueprints all over the Hamilton-Sweeney Building. She knew the doctor felt Amory was a danger, though she made it seem as if it were Regan who felt it … unless Regan was projecting again, a word that made her think of a giant, two-dimensional Demon Brother hovering above and just behind her even here, in the sanctity of these four walls.

“You want to know what he does to torment me?”

“You feel your husband torments you?”

“Amory. My uncle. Since they moved everybody off the top floors to renovate, his office is on 30, not far from Daddy’s. But he comes down to 29 at least twice a day to use the water fountain closest to my door.” Regan studied the walls of the office, the African masks that had been hung there for the diversion of the patients. It was raining outside. Drops rolling down the window made the light ripple over the masks as though they were alive. She found herself staring at one with a single red eyebrow, a pig’s snout, triangular teeth through which a long tongue lolled. “I remember right after I got married, he convinced Keith to drop medical school. Why would he have done that, if not to torment me?”

“And that was important to you? That Keith become a doctor?”

Was this analysis or an inquisition? “No. But it was right around the time when I was trying to start my own family, separate from the one I’d grown up with. I know, maybe I should have moved farther away, but Keith always wanted to be in New York.”

“Did you tell him?”

“Amory?”

“Keith. That you wanted to move.”

“No.”

“But you were angry with him for not doing it.”

Regan’s hands looked ineffectual, lying there in her lap. And in fact, though she didn’t say it, it was Dr. Altschul she was now angry at. (Or was that with?) Because she was finally doing her best to come clean with Keith, and wasn’t that what mattered?

SHE WOULD MISS HER APPOINTMENT THE FOLLOWING WEEK. Missed appointments meant evasion, and could lead to a period of arrested progress, according to her reading (though all the books on psychoanalysis had been written by psychoanalysts, which seemed like a conflict of interest). But it was the day before Thanksgiving, and frankly, she felt she’d earned a break. It had been twenty-six weeks now since she’d last stuck her finger down her throat.

Thursday morning, they took the kids to the Macy’s parade. Will was too old, probably—he turtled his head down into his jacket, as if to keep from being spotted by anyone from school—but Cate, perched on Keith’s shoulders, could barely keep from jumping off. As Woodstock passed by, looming high over the tops of the boxed trees, a gust of wind tilted him forward. “Mommy!”

“Yes, darling. I saw it! He bowed to you!”

“Did you see it, Daddy?”

Keith, underneath, seemed barely to hear, because something had happened to distract him again. It only grew more pronounced at home. When they sat down to their turkey dinner, he seemed unable to let his gaze rest on anything for more than a second. Will had to ask him twice to carve a second helping of white meat. “What’s the matter, Dad?” he said, pointedly. “You have somewhere else to be?”

“No, no, I just …”

It was a sentence he would never finish. Regan couldn’t figure it out; had she done something wrong? Maybe it was the bird. He’d wanted to hire a cook when she’d started the new job in May, but that was just the sort of thing she’d sworn off when she’d resolved all those years ago to stop being a Hamilton-Sweeney. They already had a maid, and Regan refused to make her work on Thanksgiving. And so the pile of dishes they’d made they had to do themselves. Keith and Cate took first shift, but after a half-hour, she offered to take over, and they drifted off to the living room to watch TV. She didn’t realize Will hadn’t joined them until she felt his eyes on her back from across the room, as if she were a math problem he was struggling to work out. “Carl’s parents are splitting up,” he said, abruptly.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” she said. And then, because she didn’t want him to inherit the WASPy indirection that hobbled her, she cribbed a line from the analyst’s playbook. “How does that make you feel?”

He paused to consider. She had an urge to turn and sweep him off his perch, cover him with kisses. But he was passing into that age where mushy stuff embarrassed him. His arms and legs seemed every morning to have grown another half-inch, and his posture was suddenly awkward. Soon patches of unaccountable hair would bloom on his blemishless body and strange yearnings would seize him like giant fists. It was a bittersweet fact that made her want to kiss him. She felt, though, that even as he became a man, the earnestness he’d been born with would not desert him, and this allowed her to keep her back turned, her hands clunking around in the warm, soapy water. “I don’t know,” he said, finally. “Bad for Carl, I guess.”

And that was when he asked her, point-blank: “Are you happy, Mom?” The honest answer was No. But she could hear through the flatness of his voice an anxiety that made her feel she’d failed him. Which only went to show the limit of Dr. Altschul’s vision: If expressing herself meant hurting her children, how could she? She turned, her hands still slick with dishwater, and crossed the room to the stool where Will sat and put her hands on his cheeks. She tilted his face so that it caught the light from over the sink, on the assumption that the better she could see him, the better he’d be able to see her. “I am happy, honey,” she said.

He raised the cuffs of his sweatshirt to blot his cheeks. “Ew, Mom. Food water.”

She flicked more water onto his face and grinned. “You make me very happy.”

“Gross!”

HERE WERE THE ORIGINS of magic, or religion, or both: there were certain words that, when you spoke them, had the power to create the thing they depicted. For Regan was happy that weekend, wasn’t she, in her own limited way? It would certainly seem so, later. She was happy to take her kids to the zoo on Friday, happy not to cook dinner that night, happy to have the annual chance to use cold mashed potatoes as a sandwich condiment, and happy Saturday morning (she would tell Dr. Altschul), as she watched her husband and son put on their jackets and head out for Will’s jujitsu practice. Happy right up to the point when the mail arrived.

It was lying as usual in a little explosion on the foyer floor; the doormen sorted and distributed it within the building. Magazine, catalogue, bill, catalogue, catalogue, solicitation … but then she saw a business envelope with no postmark, or even address. There was something uncanny about the way her name sat alone on the long, white rectangle.

She had to have already known, then, what was in it. Had to have noticed, on some level, how often Keith called to make excuses for being late, or came home when she was pretending to sleep and headed straight for the shower. That angle he’d sat at at Thanksgiving dinner, one leg to the side, as if at any moment he’d have to spring up to block the doorway, or turn off the ringer on the phone. Or why else would she have locked herself into the bathroom to read it?

Held up to the light, the envelope revealed a single piece of torn loose leaf. She already felt like giving in, making herself sick, letting go in less than a minute all that she’d so painfully built. But now she could hear Will and Keith returning from jujitsu, unzipping jackets, their shoes hitting the welcome mat where the mail had been fifteen minutes ago, back when it had still been possible to pretend her life had not changed. She sat down on the edge of the tub, tore off the end of the envelope, blew on it, tipped out the paper. This is what it said, in lowercase type that did not sit quite neatly on the line:

he is 1ying to you.

69

LEAVING KEITH IN THE GRAVELED PARK above First Avenue four days before the holiday, Sam had felt so jittery she’d almost tripped over the stairs. Freedom! By nightfall, though, she realized she was the one who’d been left. So had she been, to him, just some dumb teen? Was all he wanted—all any man wanted—a surface to reflect back the self he wanted to see? She found herself wondering again that Wednesday, when Nicky Chaos tried to talk her into spending Thanksgiving at the Phalanstery. A true Post-Humanist would treat it like any other day, he said. Think about it: the subjugation of land, of animals, and of the red man, rolled into a single orgy of consumption. But an orgy of consumption sounded like exactly what Sam needed right now, and so, before the dorms closed for a long weekend, she crammed a backpack full of clothes and took the train out to Flower Hill.

The first thing she did there was check the mailbox, in case there was some warning from the registrar waiting for Dad. This is to inform you that Samantha Cicciaro has not attended … Right. Like anyone really cared how she occupied herself; the whole concept of in loco parentis had been vaporized in some kind of national encounter session circa 1973. And when she trudged around back to see if her actual parent was here, the yard looked as if it hadn’t been touched in months: rusty TV aerial and forsaken treehouse, grass lifeless as the sky, L.I.E. mumbling behind the trees as it had every day since she was three. The truck was gone, the bulb above the workshop door inert. You wanted so badly for things to change, and then you didn’t. She dug in her pocket for her keys and touched the touchplate on the jamb, an old reflex, like dipping into holy water before entering a church.

The space inside had been immaculate once, polished valves and ordered intricacies of tubing. Now all lay in disarray. Lengths of black hose gaped, disconnected from anything. A shotgun was being used as a paperweight. Silver nitrate dusted the floor. It was the workshop of a man losing his livelihood. Yet it was also a chance to grant the favor Nicky had asked when it became clear she wasn’t going to spend her holiday with him, eating beans from a can. “He’s the fireworks guy, right, your dad? Do you think you could nick us a little something while you’re out there?”

Why? she’d said. So he could blow up some trashcans? Tie rockets to the tails of cats?

“Give me some credit, Sam. Or are you still sore about that church? I thought we’d moved on.” Nicky had seemed edgier than usual, rolling a piece of old fruit around in his hands like Silly Putty, but he had indeed moved on. He was taking one last shot at getting Ex Post Facto back together, he told her (though aside from tales of long-ago jam sessions with Venus de Nylon and Billy Three-Sticks, there was little evidence the band had ever been his). A reunion gig had been booked for New Year’s Eve. Talk about an arbitrary holiday, she said. This shitty world’s a year older; what’s to celebrate? “Yeah, but Billy was always funny about it. I remember he used to say, as goes that first night, so goes the rest of the year. He swore to play every New Year’s, at the stroke of twelve, until he died or the world ended, whichever came first.” Nicky’s plan for the reunion show was to make some flashpots to light off at the end of the last set—something really spectacular. “I’m thinking a kilogram of black powder would do it,” he said, but he was clearly shaky on the metric system. A kilogram would obliterate half the East Village if you weren’t careful, and anyway, Dad would never keep that much lying around Flower Hill, even in his days of distraction. She decided she would take just a pinch of the slow-burning polverone instead, and hope that, with the mess, Dad wouldn’t miss it.

It lived in an airtight box at the back of the shop. As in a dream, she watched herself tamp one, two, three grams into a test tube, cork it, stash it in her backpack. And now some stars, for flash. As a little girl, she’d had to memorize the contents of the thousand inch-square drawers that lined the east wall, like entries on the periodic table. The sorcerer’s apprentice, Dad had called her, and she’d relished the jealous look she always got from Mom when the two of them walked up the hill at dinnertime. Later, after Mom left, Sam had renounced the family trade, but the names and cautions had stuck with her. Potassium—Keep away from water. Silver arsenic—Fatal if ingested. She spooned some nitrates into a troika of tubes and wrapped each in a tee-shirt to keep the glass from breaking. After a final survey, she turned the lights off and ambled up to the house. No one was around to see. She sort of wished, in fact, that Dad would get home already. But as the sky outside her bedroom window went dark, he didn’t come, and didn’t come. Hadn’t she told him she’d be here for Thanksgiving? The whole point was not to have to feel alone.