How It Ended: New and Collected Stories (38 page)

“Whose streets? Our streets!”

Corrine took up the chant. Her anger was righteous and liberating. She was cold, her ears and toes prickly with numbness. If the cops were trying to incite the crowd to violence, they were doing a good job of it.

“Whose streets? Our streets!”

She was a peaceful person, the mother of two, but she felt like throwing something, breaking something, running amok.

“Whose streets? Our streets!”

Seeing all the angry faces, she had a sudden vision of chaos spreading through the city, smoke rising from the brownstones. …

Finally at Seventy-first Street, they were herded east. As they approached First Avenue, word filtered through the crowd that it was sealed off, which made their progress seem completely futile.

Up ahead, cops on horseback towered over them. She still hoped she might find a level head, establish a dialogue, explain the purpose of their collective mission.

But she sensed anxiety rising around her, an increasing edge of anger and hysteria.

“They're making arrests!”

“Get back! They're charging!”

“You
bastards
!”

“They hit him!”

The mounted cops started moving forward as the crowd ahead of her fell back, reversing the momentum of the march, until she felt herself pushed back, up against the crowd bottled up on the sidewalk on the south side of the street. A plastic water bottle arced through the air and sailed past the head of one of the cops, shouts of distress, curses and screams rising from the intersection.

Three mounted policemen floated toward them, looming against the sky, and Corrine recognized one of them. All of a sudden the name came to her: Spinetti.

She thrust herself forward against the tide of retreat.

Sitting atop a huge chestnut mare, Spinetti held his billy club aloft, like a torch, the reins held loosely in his left hand, his eyes fixed on a point above or even beyond the crowd.

“Officer!” she shouted. “Officer Spinetti!”

The cop looked around, scanning the faces, holding his club at the ready.

A space had opened up on the street ahead of her. A boy in a puffy blue parka was lying facedown on the pavement, a dark stripe glistening on his flaxen hair, which was so similar in color to her son's that despite the obvious difference in ages, she had to fight back the notion that it was her son, Jeremy, lying there, bloody, on the pavement.

She waved at Spinetti from the edge of the circle that had cleared around the boy and the horse, feeling ridiculous as soon as she did so, not sure what she intended. “It's Corrine,” she said. “From the soup kitchen.”

He regarded her without obvious emotion.

She didn't know what to say. She wanted to break through his blood lust and recall him to his humanity, ask him how this could happen, to remind him that when they met, their country was under attack and the citizenry looked to him and his kind to defend them. She was shivering and it felt as if her jaw were wired shut. “We fed you,” she said finally. “We were proud of you.”

Spinetti stared down at her implacably. Finally he lowered his club, turning his horse and moving back toward the intersection, where a dozen of his comrades were clustered.

Two women knelt down to examine the boy, who was moaning. Perhaps he had been moaning before and she hadn't noticed. Voices behind her cleared the way for a doctor coming through, and he emerged from the crowd wearing a bright orange thermal suit, silver tufts of gray hair on either side of his balding head.

Washington suddenly appeared beside her, holding her close as she shivered violently in the midday sun.

“He gave us a ride home one night,” she said. “Me and Luke. He took four sugars in his coffee. I used to make him a fresh pot. I mean, what were we doing down there anyway?”

Washington was steering her west, away from the march. “Maybe so on a cold winter day you could prevent a full-scale riot from breaking out.”

She was still shaking. “I want to go home,” she said. “Do you think it would be okay if I just went home now?”

They offered her a ride downtown, but she didn't think she could bear even the company of friends. Finally, Washington found her a cab all the way over on Fifth. Veronica hugged her before she got in, and the cab-driver lurched manic-depressively down the avenue, braking and accelerating. She thought about the boy with the cracked head and about all the boys who would soon be bleeding and dying on the distant streets of foreign cities, and she wanted to scream at the senselessness of it all. She wanted to slap Spinetti. She wanted to draft the Bush twins. But most of all, she wanted to see Luke. She had tried to do her civic duty, but she was tired of trying to do the right thing, of always trying to be a good person and a good mother and a good wife. She wanted to live for her own desires and forget, if only for a little while, about the needs and wants of others. She wanted what
she
wanted. She wanted Luke. She wanted to be fucked senseless. She'd always hated the expression, but now, suddenly, she understood it. At this moment, being fucked senseless was the only thing that seemed to make sense.

“You say West Broadway, miss?”

“West Broadway, yes. At the corner of Reade.”

As they approached her building, a shaft of sunlight pierced the windshield, momentarily blinding her. For years, this part of the city had been gloomy at this time of the afternoon, entombed in shadow. This was what they called “a silver lining.”

2004

The Last Bachelor

Emerging from the surf, Ginny was amazed to discover A.G. sitting cross-legged on her towel, chatting up her niece. Her first reaction was entirely self-conscious—wondering how she looked dripping wet in her ratty blue Speedo—her first impulse to flee. She hadn't seen him in—what, a couple of years? That night after the Alzheimer's ball, when he'd drunkenly asked her to go with him to Saint Barts. After a quick inventory of her own imperfections, she noticed his paunch. When had that happened? Watching him hit on her niece, interpreting the casual slouch of his posture as he leaned on his elbow, she decided that what was interesting wasn't the belly per se but his lack of self-consciousness, that he'd probably never stoop to suck it in or even count it against himself when he was tabulating his own defects. He still had the same boyish, timeless shock of blond hair—she was quite sure he'd taken it very much to heart when she told him, early on, that he looked like Robert Redford. She could read, even from this distance, the old sense of entitlement, the ease and confidence as he turned his charms on a beautiful young woman half his age. This is what had always, in her mind, saved him from being a caricature, that he deviated just enough from the type—even if it was only a question of scale. In this case, the way that his vanity was larger and more impregnable than that of other middle-aged men who obsessively chased younger women, spent hours at the gym, or, failing that, risked herniation trying to, at crucial moments of presentation, inhale that extra flesh around their middles. Perhaps she was reading too much into what could be a simple, innocent tableau, but that, too, was A.G.—the fact that he inspired this kind of hermeneutics. This speculation on Ginny's part was the work of an instant, the interval between two waves breaking around her ankles. Before the second had retreated beneath her feet, she felt angry at herself for the intricacy of her speculation, for caring that much. Wasn't it far more likely that he
was
a type, and that the supposed complexity was her own embroidery on a standard pattern? Hadn't he disappointed even the modest hopes she'd invested in him?

She had reason to chastise herself again, approaching them, when she realized that she was the one sucking in her own stomach, but this was mitigated by the pleasure of seeing his reaction when she sat down beside him and shook the salty water from her hair.

“A.G., this
is
a surprise. I see you've met my niece.”

For a man who prided himself on his composure, he was comically discomfited, though he made a valiant recovery, kissing her on the cheek, doing his best to convey the impression that he'd practically been expecting her at any moment. He then excused himself as quickly as one with his exquisite manners could. Ginny had the satisfaction of watching him retreat down the beach, slightly duck-footed as he struggled for purchase in the dry sand. Yes, she remembered that, chasing after him one day through the snow in Aspen—seeing his splayed tracks, thinking it made him even more endearing.

“What was that all about?” she asked Lana, who blushed.

“I don't know. He was like, you know. He was just kind of …” She shrugged.

Well, actually, yes, Ginny did know. But she wasn't feeling entirely collegial toward her niece at this moment, appraising her as she imagined A.G. had, and she conjured a strange conceit—that the concavity of a young woman's tummy was precisely calibrated to the paucity of her wisdom. God, she was young. Of course Ginny had watched A.G. pick up women who were no older than her niece. But until this moment she would never have thought of her niece—her little Lana—as having anything in common with those girls. “Kind of what?”

“Well, you know. Friendly.”

“You mean he was hitting on you.”

“Well, he just kind of sat down. Actually, he walked past me a little and then came back and introduced himself. He asked me if this was Gibson's Beach, and I told him I wasn't from here, and then we just started talking.”

“Did he ask you out?”

“Well, he said he was kind of busy this coming week but he'd call me next Monday.”

Ginny nodded. She told herself it wasn't Lana's fault. She counted to ten. She tried to tell herself she took no pleasure in this, in feeling, suddenly, so very worldly-wise. “I expect he
is
fairly busy,” she said, shaking a cigarette from the pack. “Unless I'm very much mistaken, he's getting married this weekend.”

Approaching the house on Gin Lane, the so-called cottage with its sprawling wings, white porches and shingled gray gables, A.G. saw the white tent rising up above the perfectly squared green privet battlements that surrounded the property of his future in-laws. The gates were open. As he drove in, he was presented with a scene of furious activity. He stopped the car in the middle of the driveway and watched. Painters and window washers on ladders had stormed the big house. Three maids waddled like white ducks up the path to the guest house, bearing linens. Half a dozen young men who looked like camp counselors were setting up the tables beneath the tent. Gardeners were scattered about the property, planting and deadheading flowers; still more flowers were coming out of a van from a Manhattan florist. And an anonymous tradesman was taking a leak against the side of the pool house. All of this had been set in motion by his proposal to Pandora Bright Caldwell Keirstead, of Chattanooga, Palm Beach and Southampton, several months before. It wasn't exactly a spur-of-the-moment decision. He'd actually purchased the ring at Graff more than a month before and carried it with him on two dates with Pandy, somehow losing his resolution each time. Finally, he'd invited her to One If by Land, which practically forced his hand, it being notorious as a setting for proposals. Before their appetizers had arrived, two other swains had dropped to their knees in front of their dates. Pandy blushed deeply the first time; the second proposal she pretended not to notice. If she was disappointed that A.G. had stayed seated when he popped the question, she wasn't about to show it.

The announcement, the planning, the registry of gifts—all followed inexorably but somehow insubstantially, like scenes constructed from pixels. A.G. sat in his car in the driveway and tried, at this late hour, to reconnect himself to this series of events. He knew he should feel elated, or scared—or both. He listened for the chuffing sound of the ocean waves. He wondered why you could always hear the surf from the yard at night but never during the day.

A rabbit rocketed across the driveway and disappeared into the privet, closely pursued by Woofter, the Keirsteads' retriever. The dog barked twice at the hedge before turning away and trotting back toward the house.

Leaving the Meadow Club after her tennis lesson, Ginny Banks caught a glimpse of a scene she'd never expected to witness: the rehearsal dinner for A.G.'s wedding. She stood at the edge of the doorway, looking in on the assembled company. Besides family, there was the table of best men—A.G. having assembled a team of five, rather than leaving anyone out. Tommy Briggs, Wick Seward, Nikos Menzenopoulus, Cappie Farquarson and Gino Andreosa. Back in the day, they had all been known as ladies' men. Nikos and Gino were among the last of the old school playboys in the mold of Agnelli and Rubirosa, race car-driving Euro sybarites. All of them had eventually married at least once—most of them twice, although Gino and Wick were currently between. They'd chased, and bedded, many of the same girls, initially women their own age and later their younger sisters. A.G. was the last of his kind, the last unmarried man of his generation. For two decades he had been a kind of prince of the city, gliding between the social clubs of the Upper East Side and the nightclubs downtown, an intimate of artistic circles as well as the world of inherited wealth. He belonged to the Racquet Club, the Brook Club and the Century Club, was an early investor in a famous SoHo art gallery and a patron of several literary magazines. He was also a famous lover, a playboy who cut a wide swath through Manhattan and Europe, faithfully alternating between models and debutantes. For years he conducted an affair with a married screen idol, while continuing to pursue an international serial-dating career. His fortieth-birthday celebration, which took place on Nikos Menzenopoulus's yacht,
Dionysus
, inevitably appeared on subsequent lists of “Parties of the Decade.” Cappie Farquarson went into rehab three days later, and Nikos eventually became involved in two paternity suits, both plaintiffs citing A.G.'s party as the date of conception. A.G. himself managed to escape these kinds of entanglements, although at some point in the years that followed his name began to be invoked as a synonym for a certain kind of arrested development. He'd been eligible for so long that he ceased to be plausible. Married couples, seating their dinner parties, began to think of him as a hopeless case—a quaint relic of their wild youth. “Who can we put next to Celia?” “There's always A.G.” “Do we really want to do that to Celia? I mean, even if she hasn't already slept with him, I think she's had enough of the bad boys for one lifetime.”

Ginny turned to see Lori Haddad with her daughter Casey in tow, looking in on the scene. “Can you believe this?”

“I'm actually seeing it,” Lori said, “but I still don't believe it.”

“What don't you believe, Mommy?”

“He's still got twenty-four hours to leave the country.”

“Maybe we're being too cynical.”

“Mom, what don't you
believe
in?”

“Mommy doesn't believe in fairy tales, honey.”

“What do you suppose it is about
her?
I mean, is it just that she happened to be the one sitting in the chair next to him when the music stopped?”

“Well, besides that she's young and pretty and thin and rich. And she's from his hometown. That seems to count for a lot with these southerners.”

“Good point. So what does she see in him?”

“Well … He's charming and smart and he has a D-I-C-K the size of Florida.”

“That sp—”

“We know what it spells, honey,” said Lori, covering her daughter's mouth.

A. G. Jackson had grown up on Lookout Mountain in Chattanooga, although his own father was an émigré from Birmingham, by way of Vanderbilt. As the vice president of the local bank, he was a respected member of the community, although their circumstances were more modest than those of the native oligarchy. A.G. distinguished himself as both scholar and athlete, joined his schoolmates on bonefishing expeditions to Islamorada and quail-hunting jaunts at their south Georgia plantations while his father managed their trust funds. A.G. was raised to believe there was no higher title a man could aspire to than “gentleman,” and this Episcopalian epithet was so constantly attached to Jackson
père
, often accompanied by the words
old school
, that his son couldn't help but sense an almost imperceptible undercurrent of condescension from those whose secret faith was more Darwinian. The old man's rectitude was in part a reaction to the flamboyance of his own father, who'd made and lost two fortunes, one in stock speculation and one in real estate, while he was growing up. A.G.'s father did all he could to temper his son's fearless and exuberant character, so reminiscent of his grandfather's, while his wife secretly undermined this program, instilling in him a sense of confidence and entitlement. Her own family was among the first families of Charleston and she saw no reason to defer to the local gentry. Her husband would scold her for saying, as she so often did, “Who's the handsomest, smartest little man in the whole wide world?” “Please, Kate,” he'd say. “You'll spoil the boy.” While A.G. absorbed from his father a respect for tradition, position and inherited wealth, his mother taught him to believe in his own secret superiority. Their marriage, from his vantage point, was a happy one, although his mother sometimes believed that she'd sold herself short, that her husband lacked the necessary fire and grit to advance her ambitions.

No family loomed larger in Chattanooga than the Keirsteads. They had made their original fortune in land and later compounded it with an interest in a soft-drink empire based in Atlanta. In the past half century their holdings had spread from the Southeast throughout the country and around the globe. A.G. had gone to school with Burton Keirstead III, aka Trip, whose father had taken a benign interest in A.G.'s career, even writing him a letter of recommendation to Harvard. They had stayed in touch after A.G. moved to New York, occasionally dining together when Keirstead was in the city, and the old man sometimes steered some business his way. As a young investment banker, it certainly didn't hurt to be acquainted with Burton Keirstead, Jr. Trip, meanwhile, married a girl from Savannah, built a house on Lookout Mountain and took an office downtown, next door to his father's, which he visited when he wasn't following the salmon from Nova Scotia to Russia, or the birds from Georgia to Argentina. Their friend Cal Bustert, to nearly no one's surprise, burned through his trust fund, bouncing between fashionable resorts and rehab facilities; marrying, spawning and divorcing; wrecking cars and discharging firearms at inappropriate targets, including, finally, himself. A.G. had flown south for the funeral, a somber yet lavish affair that lasted for three days.

Most of their former classmates, after forays into the North, settled within a few miles of their parents and married girls they'd known for years. A.G. always returned for the weddings—five of them the year he turned thirty—and always brought a different date, and in time he returned to stand as godfather to the children. He visited his parents on Thanksgiving and Christmas. Only rarely did he bring a girl along for these family holidays, and when he did, she was inevitably from what he called, without self-consciousness, “a good family.” But his parents learned in time not to get too attached to any of them.

Despite his increasing success in New York, he maintained a deep loyalty to his hometown. Chattanooga, Tennessee, the South—this was part of him, and distinguished him from the mass of rootless Yankees with whom he associated in Manhattan. He always told his drinking buddies in both cities that he would return one day, although as the years passed it became harder and harder for his friends in either place to take this threat seriously.