The City of Mirrors (29 page)

I arrived in Mercy in the middle of the night. I felt as if I’d been gone for a century. I slept in my car outside the house and awoke to the sound of tapping on the window. My father.

“What are you doing here?”

He was wearing a bathrobe; he had come out of the house to get the Sunday paper and noticed the car. He had aged a great deal, in the manner of someone who no longer cared much about his appearance. He had not shaved; his breath was bad. I followed him into the house, which seemed eerily the same, though it was very dusty and smelled like old food.

“Are you hungry?” he asked me. “I was going to have cereal, but I think I have some eggs.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “I wasn’t really planning on staying. I just wanted to say hello.”

“Let me put some coffee on.”

I waited in the living room. I had expected to be nervous, but I wasn’t. I wasn’t really feeling much of anything. My father returned from the kitchen with two mugs and sat across from me.

“You look taller,” he said.

“I’m actually the same height. You must remember me wrong.”

We drank our coffee.

“So, how was college? I know you just graduated. They sent me a form.”

“It was fine, thank you.”

“That’s all you’ve got to say about it?” The question wasn’t peevish; he merely seemed interested.

“Mostly.” I shrugged. “I fell in love. It didn’t really work out, though.”

He thought for a moment. “I suppose you’ll want to visit your mother.”

“That would be nice.”

I asked him to stop at a grocery store so I could pick up some flowers. They didn’t have much, just daisies and carnations, but I did not think my mother would mind, and I told the girl behind the counter to wrap them with some greens to make them nice. We drove out of town. The interior of my father’s Buick was full of fast-food trash. I held up a bag from McDonald’s. A few dried-out fries rattled inside it.

“You shouldn’t eat this stuff,” I said.

We arrived at the cemetery, parked, and walked the rest of the way. It was a pleasant morning. We were passing through a sea of graves. My mother’s headstone was located in the area for cremations: smaller headstones, spaced close together. Hers had just her name, Lorraine Fanning, and the dates. She had been fifty-seven.

I put the flowers down and stepped back. I thought about certain days, things we’d done together, about being her son.

“It’s not bad to be here,” I said. “I thought it might be.”

“I don’t come all that much. I guess I should.” My father took a long breath. “I really screwed this up. I know that.”

“It’s all right. It’s all over now.”

“I’m kind of falling apart. I have diabetes, my blood pressure’s through the roof. I’m forgetting things, too. Like yesterday, I had to sew a button on my shirt, and I couldn’t find the scissors.”

“So go to a doctor.”

“It seems like a lot of trouble.” He paused. “The girl you’re in love with. What’s she like?”

I thought for a moment. “Smart. Beautiful. Kind of sarcastic, but in a funny way. There wasn’t one thing that did it, though.”

“I think that’s how it’s supposed to be. That’s how it was with your mother.”

I looked up, into the spring day. Seven hundred miles away, in Cambridge, the graduation ceremony would be just getting rolling. I wondered what my friends were thinking about me.

“She loved you very much.”

“I loved her, too.” I looked at him and smiled. “It’s nice here,” I said. “Thanks for bringing me.”

We returned to the house.

“If you want I can make up your room,” my father said. “I left it just as it was. It’s probably not very clean, though.”

“Actually, I need to get going. I have a long drive.”

He seemed a little sad. “Well. All right then.” He walked me to my car. “Where are you off to?”

“Texas.”

“What’s there?”

“Texans, I guess.” I shrugged. “More school.”

“Do you need any money?”

“They’re giving me a stipend. I should be all right.”

“Well, let me know if you need more. You’re welcome to it.”

We shook hands and then, somewhat awkwardly, embraced. If I’d had to guess, I would have said my father wasn’t going to live much longer. This turned out to be true; we would see each other only four more times before the heart attack that killed him. He was alone in the house when it happened. Because it was a weekend, several days would pass before anybody noticed he was missing and thought to look.

I got into the car. My father was standing above me. He motioned with his hand for me to roll down the window. “Call me when you get there, okay?”

I told him I would, and I did.

In Houston, I rented the first apartment I looked at, a garage studio with a view of the back of a Mexican restaurant, and got a job shelving books at the Rice library to tide myself over for the summer. The city was strange-looking and hotter than the mouth of hell, but it suited me. We search for ourselves in our surroundings, and everything I saw was either brand-new or falling apart. Most of the city was quite ugly—a sea of low-rise retail, shabby apartment complexes, and enormous, overcrowded freeways piloted by maniacs—but the area around the university was rather posh, with large, well-kept houses and wide boulevards flanked by live oaks so perfectly manicured they looked less like trees than sculptures of trees. For six hundred dollars, I bought my first car, a snot-yellow 1983 Chevy Citation with bald tires, 230,000 miles on the odometer, and a sagging vinyl ceiling I used a staple gun to reattach. I’d heard nothing from Liz or Jonas, but of course they had no idea where I was. There was a time in America when it was still possible to disappear by going left when everybody expected you to go right. With a little digging, they probably could have found me—a few well-placed calls to a few department chairs—but this presupposed that they would want to. I had no idea what they would want. I didn’t think I ever had.

Classes began. About my studies, there is not much to say except that they occupied me utterly. I made friends with the department secretary, a black woman in her fifties who basically ran the place; she confided to me that nobody in the department had actually expected me to come. I was, in her words, “a prize thoroughbred they had bought for pennies on the dollar.” To describe my fellow graduate students as antisocial would be the understatement of the century; no lawn parties here. Their minds were utterly unfettered by thoughts of fun. They also despised me for the naked favoritism shown me by my professors. I kept my head down, my nose to the stone. I adopted the practice of taking long drives in the Texas countryside. It was windblown, flat, without meaningful demarcation, every square of dirt the same as every other. I liked to pull the car to the side of the road someplace completely arbitrary and just look at it.

The one eastern habit I retained was reading
The New York Times,
and in this manner I learned that Liz and Jonas had made it official. This was in the fall of ’93; a year had passed. “Mr. and Mrs. Oscar Macomb, of Greenwich, Connecticut, and Osterville, Massachusetts, are pleased to announce the marriage of their daughter, Elizabeth Christina, to Jonas Abbott Lear of Beverly, Massachusetts. The bride, a graduate of Harvard, recently completed a master’s degree in literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and is currently a doctoral student in Renaissance studies at the University of Chicago, where the groom, also a Harvard graduate, is pursuing a PhD in microbiology.”

Two days later, I received a large manila envelope from my father. Inside was another envelope, to which he’d affixed a sticky note, apologizing for taking so long to forward it
.
It was an invitation, of course, postmarked the previous June. I put it aside for a day, then, the next night, in the company of a bottle of bourbon, sat at the kitchen table and peeled back the flap. Ceremony to be held September 4, 1993, St. Andrew’s-By-The-Sea, Hyannis Port. Reception to follow at the home of Oscar and Patricia Macomb, 41 Sea View Avenue, Osterville, Massachusetts. In the margin was a message:

Please please please come. Jonas says so too. We miss you terribly.

Love, L

I looked at this for some time. I was sitting in the window of my apartment, facing the alley behind the restaurant, with its reeking dumpsters. As I watched, a kitchen worker, a small, round-bellied Hispanic man in a stained apron, came through the door. He was carrying a garbage bag; he opened one of the dumpsters, tossed the bag inside, and closed the lid with a clang. I expected him to go back inside, but instead he lit a cigarette and stood there, inhaling the smoke with long, hungry drags.

I rose from the table. I kept them in my bureau, wrapped in a sock: Liz’s glasses. I had put them in my pocket that night on the beach and forgotten all about them until I was in the cab, by which time it was too late to return them. Now I put them on; they were a little small for my face, the lenses quite strong. I sat back down at the window and watched the man smoke in the alleyway, the image distorted and far away, as if I were looking through the wrong end of a telescope or sitting at the bottom of the sea, gazing upward through miles of water.

20

Here I must leap ahead in time, because that is what time did. I finished my degree at a quickstep; this was followed by a postdoc at Stanford, then a faculty appointment at Columbia, where I was tenured in due course. Within professional circles, I became well known. My reputation increased; the world came calling. I traveled widely, speaking for lucrative fees. Grants flowed my way without difficulty; such was my reputation, I barely had to fill out the forms. I became the holder of multiple patents, two purchased by pharmaceutical concerns for outrageous sums that set me up for life. I refereed important journals. I sat on elite boards. I testified before Congress and was, at various times, a member of the Senate Special Commission on Bioethics, the President’s Council on Science and Technology, the NASA advisory board, and the U.N. Task Force on Biological Diversity.

Along the way, I married. The first time, when I was thirty, lasted four years, the second half that. Each woman had, at one time, been my student, a matter of some awkwardness—chummy glances from male colleagues, raised eyebrows from the higher-ups, frosty exchanges with my female co-workers and the wives of friends. Timothy Fanning, that lothario, that dirty old man (though I had not turned forty). My third wife, Julianna, was just twenty-three the day we married. Our union was impulsive, forged in the furnace of sex; two hours after she graduated, we attacked each other like dogs. Though I was very fond of her, I found her bewildering. Her tastes in music and movies, the books she read, her friends, the things she thought important: none made a lick of sense to me.

I was not, like many a man of a certain age, trying to prop up my self-esteem with a young woman’s body. I did not mourn the years’ unraveling, or fear death unduly, or grieve my waning youth. To the contrary, I liked the many things my success had brought me. Wealth, esteem, authority, good tables at restaurants and hot towels on planes—the whole kit and caboodle that history awards the conquerors: for all of these, I had time’s passage to thank. Yet what I was doing was obvious, even to me. I was trying to recapture the one thing I had lost, that life had denied me. Each of my wives, and the many women in between—all far younger than I was, the age gap widening with every one I took into my bed—was a facsimile of Liz. I speak neither of their appearances, though all belonged to a recognizable physical type (pale, slender, myopic), nor of their temperaments, which possessed a similar brainy combativeness. I mean that I wanted them to
be
her, so I could feel alive.

That Jonas and I should cross paths was inevitable; we belonged to the same world. Our first reunion occurred at a conference in Toronto in 2002. Enough time had gone by that we both managed to make no reference to my abrupt severing of the relationship. We were all “how the hell are you” and “you haven’t changed a bit” and vowed to keep in better touch, as if we’d been in touch at all. He had returned to Harvard, of course—it ran in the family. He felt himself to be on the verge of some kind of breakthrough, though he was secretive about this, and I didn’t press. Of Liz, he offered only the bare-bones professional data. She was teaching at Boston College; she liked it, her students worshipped her, she was working on a book. I told him to say hello for me and let it go at that.

The following year, I received a Christmas card. It was one of those photograph cards that people use to parade their beautiful children, though the image showed only the two of them. The shot had been taken in some arid locale; they were dressed head to foot in khaki and wearing honest-to-God pith helmets. A note from Liz was written on the back, penned in a hurried script, as if added at the last second:
Jonas said he ran into you. Glad you’re doing well!

Year by year, the cards kept coming. Each showed them in a different exotic setting: atop elephants in India, posing before the Great Wall of China, standing at the bow of a ship in heavy parkas with a glacial coastline in the background. All very cheery, yet there was something depressing about these photos, a mood of compensation.
What a great life we’re having! Really!
Swear to God!
I began to notice other things. Jonas was the same hale specimen he’d always been, but Liz was aging precipitously, and not just physically. In previous pictures, her eyes had been distracted in a manner that made the photo seem incidental to the moment. Now she looked at the camera dead-on, like a hostage made to pose with a newspaper. Her smile felt manufactured, a product of her will. Was I imagining this? Furthermore, was it fancy on my part that her darkening gaze was a message meant for me? And what of their bodies? In the first photograph, taken in the desert, Lear was standing behind her, wrapping her with his arms. Year by year, they separated. The last one I received, in 2010, had been taken at a café beside a river that was unmistakably the Seine. They were sitting across from each other, far out of arm’s reach. Glasses of wine stood on the table. My old roommate’s was nearly empty. Liz had touched hers not at all.