City on Fire (88 page)

Now the fact that the camp only ran from nine to three, with aftercare costing extra, seemed a kind of scam. She’d called ahead to let the camp people know Keith would be picking the kids up today. He was supposed to take them to a Mets game and then keep them through the weekend, and although she would miss them, as she always missed them, there was a part of her right now, and this must represent some kind of progress, that thought, Let’s see how he deals with all of this, with Will’s too-long showers and Cate’s nightmares, with waking at midnight to Cate hovering out in the hall and asking in her most forlorn voice, Can I sleep with you tonight? as if she hadn’t already assumed the answer was yes. The problem was that it probably wouldn’t bother Keith. He was a man who struggled with cause-and-effect. Late for camp? No big deal. The pilfering of an entire jar of Vaseline? Boys will be boys.

No, the problem was, actually, that she missed him. She missed his laugh, missed the way he balanced her out, missed sometimes not having to be the one who let things slide, and when Cate piped up from the doorway, she had to check to make sure her own face was dry, because with the lights off, except for the tranche of streetlight from between the curtains, she kept trooping back over their life as a family, trying to find the exact spot where the ground had given way. Climb in, sweetie, she would say.

When she thought now about sharing her bed with Andrew West, Andrew of the poreless skin and hair-model hair, what she felt was more like this indulgent mother-love than like the hunger she wanted to feel. She had put off mentioning him to the kids for a number of reasons, one of them being that Will might view him as a rival, and another being that there was probably something to that. Andrew was only twenty-eight. She had also put off sleeping with him. Still, she’d decided that tonight, when it was all over, she was going to let him do to her anything he wanted. She hoped Will hadn’t noticed the leg of lamb and the bottle of Chardonnay in the fridge when he went for the milk. Or, given that the kids were her only remaining conduit to her husband, maybe she hoped he had.

IT WAS OUT ON HENRY STREET playing Spot the Cab that Regan realized she didn’t have the fare to make it all the way uptown. Will didn’t have any cash, either—he’d blown his allowance on those damn wizarding cards—so her options were to be late for her meeting with Andrew or to put them on the subway alone. A pinkish fog crowned the tops of the bridges, humidity mixed with auto exhaust and the ash pouring out of the ghettos. Motes of birds hung motionless, white. Forecasters were predicting record highs today, and she could already feel her blouse starting to cling. She looked Will over. He was still a good boy, she thought, a good and bright and courageous boy, and the only people on the train at this hour would be commuters. She launched into a practicum on avoiding strangers, but he cut her off.

“We ride by ourselves all the time when we’re at Dad’s, Mom.”

“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that,” she said, meaning she had no way of knowing if it was just bluster. When she tried to follow them down into the station to make sure they got on the right train, Will groaned. She gave him a kiss on the head before he could duck away, and then one for Cate, and watched them disappear into the ground. But why, seconds later, was she following at a discreet distance? The turnstile wouldn’t let her through without paying, so she stayed there on one side of the bars, watching her progeny wait on the platform, flanked by older kids canoodling in hormonal fury and by West Indian women in nurse’s shoes and by people on benches who already seemed drunk. In one hand, Will had his yellow duffel, with his school’s crest on the side and a little bloom of tee-shirt caught in the zipper like a weed in the sidewalk. In the other hand, he held his sister’s.

Regan wished, not for the first time, that she were someone else, someone who would trust these eminently capable children, and so wouldn’t have to follow them down here, as if to jump the stile at the last minute, to scoop them up and save them from growing any older. But as they boarded and sat down facing her amid the entropic graffiti that now covered the windows completely, she couldn’t look away. Cate spotted her and waved before the doors closed, but Will just stared blankly ahead like any other adult with places to be—like William, somehow, the uncle he’d never met. Between them at any rate was enough space for another child. And she knew as the train pulled away that all these disappearing kids would be the picture in her head when she spoke before the cameras about the future of the company that was her family, and later as she watched her junior colleague and would-be seducee fumble with the corkscrew, and finally in the darkness when he began to snore and Regan was left on her own again, as one always apparently is.

72

IF YOU THROW A BANANA AT A WALL, there’s a small possibility it will pass through the wall. Or so, at any rate, Jenny Nguyen had thought, straphanging on an uptown bus thirteen hours earlier. It was a thing she’d heard on the radio that morning. “Dr.” Zig Zigler had been ranting about riots in the street, or their absence, and though Jenny knew first-hand the futility of civil disobedience, his weird case in point for low-probability events (why throw a banana at a wall?) seemed eloquently to evoke the odds of her ever being other than alone. Her most recent dial-a-date, the one from which she was returning, had been big and russet-haired and eager as an Irish setter, which had only made her feel, by contrast, pinched and premenstrual. The entire thing, from sitting down to splitting the check, had lasted under an hour. Now burnished buildings and cars slipped free of her outline on the bus’s window. She wasn’t totally repulsive, she didn’t think—she’d shaved her legs; her new antiperspirant was holding its own against the ninety-degree heat—and if she could just not have had so damn many opinions … but why futz around with counterfactuals? What the Jenny in the window was doing was lugging a totebag full of grant applications back to her un-air-conditioned apartment to order in Chinese and spend another hour working, and then, maybe, as a treat, allow herself a couple more pages of her dead neighbor’s manuscript before sleeping, waking, doing it all over again. On one hand, you couldn’t count on anything; on the other, on any given day, change was vanishingly unlikely.

Maybe that was even a good thing, because two and a half months after the last time something really had changed, she still felt a jolt of loss every time she set foot in her building, a kind of gamma signature scintillating through the metal partition between her mailbox and Richard’s, and radiating from behind what she still thought of as his door. She hadn’t noticed yet that the hallway upstairs was hotter than it should have been, heat wave or no heat wave. The bouquet of kerosene she chalked up to ethnic cooking in 2-J. Still, there was a slight hesitation between working the key into the sticky lock of her own door and opening it—a second in which the apartment remained a black box. One/zero. Did/didn’t. Involved/uninvolved.

Then she was ahead of herself, hands flying to nostrils. A window had been propped open, loosing a cross-breeze on the charred black papers plastered over everything. Smoke drifted near the light fixtures. Drawers gaped at crazy angles. Wet clots of clothes and paper clung to the countertops like confetti to windshields after rain. The boxes she’d stacked so carefully in the corner—the boxes and boxes of Richard’s things!—had been torched and then soaked, it seemed. Claggart, socketed in one corner of the sleeper sofa, looked a little rheumy-eyed, but otherwise intact. She was about to call him to her when she realized that an arsonist could still be lurking in the apartment, listening to her breathe.

She grabbed the dog and rushed down to the lobby, taking the fire stairs two at a time. It was what the fire stairs had been here for all along. But what had been the likelihood of them ever fulfilling their purpose? Then again, maybe the odds depended on whether you were for or against, the banana or the wall.

THE COPS, WHEN THEY FINALLY ARRIVED, were thinking burglary. She’d tried to point out that nothing was missing. Plus why the fire? The taller of the officers held the curtain back from the window, examined the scaffold beyond. “Usually they’ll be looking for a TV.”

She didn’t have a TV, she said.

“How you expect she fits a TV, with all these boxes?” Mr. Feratovic was standing in the doorway with his arms crossed, scattering the napalm of his disapproval over everything. It had been his idea, over Jenny’s opposition, to involve the police, and now she saw why. “You keep this much things, is a fire hazard. Officer, you agree this place is a fire hazard?”

“Officer,” she said, “would you agree that that scaffolding out there is an invitation to burgle?”

“Junkies looking for an easy score,” the tall officer continued, as if he hadn’t heard. “They see they aren’t going to get what they’re after, they decide to trash the place.” When Jenny asked if he was planning to dust for fingerprints he just laughed.

Later, Mr. Feratovic brought up some fans to help pull the smoke out. He’d seen worse, he said. By morning, she wouldn’t even notice the smell. But in fact she would find that night that she couldn’t sleep with the windows open. The idea that someone had been here, treading her carpet, breathing her air … it rattled her. And there were hundreds of breakins in the city every day, according to the shorter cop—what if these burglars should come back? Well, at least Richard’s manuscript was undamaged; when she’d folded out the hide-a-bed, it had been lying in the space underneath, where it must have fallen the night before.

She decided now to turn on a light. Claggart was still a little damp from the shampoo she’d used to get the smoke out, but she placed him next to her on the invertebrate mattress and balanced a wineglass on the sofa arm like a fetish to prevent further trouble. She flipped to the pictures she’d used to mark page 17, where she’d left off reading “The Fireworkers.” The wine would knock her out after a few minutes, a few more pages, she thought. Hours later, though, she would be sitting up re-reading, pulse thrumming, certain that the breakin had been no low-probability event. Someone had wanted what was in these pages wiped out—and possibly not just that. She was going to have to take action come the morning. Or was it already morning? It was only when she turned to check her alarm clock that she realized she was missing something, after all.

73

IT HADN’T TAKEN LONG after his return from Altana for fissures to resurface in Mercer’s life. The girls of Wenceslas-Mockingbird—good kids, really, their sangfroid no deeper than morning ice—kept shooting him looks of commiseration. Then one day, in the mirror of the faculty washroom, he’d seen why. Insomnia had left heavy luggage under his eyes. He’d missed spots shaving. It was the third day in a row he’d worn this particular shirt, and the sweater-vest he’d been using to hide the rumples had itself begun to rumple. After blotting his armpits with paper towels, he’d stepped back into the hall. There was this hot, yellowy stillness the air always got in the minutes before the last bell, as if it were stiffening itself to be shattered. Voices nearby conjugated vouloir in unison. From a janitor’s closet came the odor of something burning. The door had been left unlocked, and when he opened it, two girls in field-hockey uniforms whipped around from the window. Where was their hall pass? Did Coach Curtis know they were in here? And what was that smell?

“What smell?” one of them had said, even as her accomplice, unable to hold it in any longer, coughed up a cloud of bluebrown smoke. “Mr. G., be cool, please. We’re like a month from graduation.”

He held out a hand. He must have looked slightly unhinged; though they’d pitched the evidence out the window, they seemed alarmed, as if he were not an English teacher but the Kneesocks Killer himself. “Where’s the rest?” The accomplice blurted that it was in her locker. He heard himself propose a deal. They had until three o’clock to turn the pot in to him for disposal. Provided they swore never to indulge again, he wouldn’t say anything.

Probably he really had meant to destroy it, but he’d been unprepared for the sheer heft of what these daughters of privilege would produce: a baggie the size of his head, which it seemed a shame to waste. At first, he’d dipped into it only in the evenings, as a soporific, but soon he’d added an a.m. application as well. (Was incineration not a method of disposal?) His pedagogy grew erratic. He could feel his first-period sophomores watching his shirttail detach from his waistband as he elucidated a nicety from Portrait of the Artist on the board. The FORMAL cause of a thing—he wrote the word out in great big majuscules—was that it fulfilled its own definition. (Why had William left him? Because William was no longer living with him.) And the FINAL cause of everything, according to ARISTOTLE, was the unmoved mover. ὃ οὐ κινούμενον κινει̑. “A.k.a. God.” At just that moment, Dr. Runcible had appeared outside the classroom door. It must have gladdened his heart to see an honest-to-goodness Afro-American wunderkind teaching these Caucasian girls Greek. What Runcible couldn’t hear, through the stenciled glass, was Mercer explaining that the first two causes were typical Aristotelian horseshit. More crucial, and not incidentally almost impossible to isolate, was the EFFICIENT cause of anything—the x that had brought about y. Or could the good doctor hear after all? Because now he was leaning in to ask if Mercer could stop by after class. Mercer sensed what was coming, but as if from a great distance. A year’s worth of lessons crowded the chalkboard at eye level, cloudy eraser marks and beneath them the blurred tangle of chalk-lines like the paths of electrons. One day, he and William had been speeding toward each other; the next, careening away. But why? Why y?

In camera, Runcible had dispensed with small-talk. There’d been a complaint. “Two of our girls, at an honor-board hearing, claimed to have come to an in-kind understanding with you about their scheme to supply the entire senior class with marijuana. Testimony that would seem to comport with your recent demeanor. Do you want to try to explain this to me? Because frankly I’m at a loss.”