City on Fire Read online

  “Her brother Will, you mean? He’s in fifth or sixth grade, I think, at a school uptown. It’s coed, I don’t know why they don’t send Cate, too.” The colleague seemed to catch herself. “Why do you ask?”

  “Oh, no reason,” he said, turning to go. It was just as he’d thought: a mistake, a coincidence, one he was already doing his best to forget.

  But was it Faulkner who said that the past was not even past? Last week, on the last day of the semester, after the last dilatory scholarship girl had handed in the final final exam, a nervous-looking white woman had materialized at the door of his classroom. She had that comely young-mother thing—her skirt probably cost more than Mercer’s entire wardrobe—but it was more than that that made her look familiar, though he couldn’t quite pin it down. “May I help you?”

  She checked the paper she was carrying against his name on the door. “Mr. Goodman?”

  “That’s me.” Or That’s I? Hard to say. He folded his hands on the desk and tried to look non-threatening, as was his habit when dealing with mothers.

  “I don’t know how to do this tactfully. Cate Lamplighter’s my daughter. Her teacher mentioned you had some questions after the pageant last week?”

  “Oh, geez.” He blushed. “That was a mix-up. But I apologize for any …” Then he saw it: the sharp chin, the startled blue eyes. She could have been a female William, except that her hair was auburn instead of black, and styled in a simple bob. And of course the smart attire.

  “You were asking about Cate’s uncle, I think, whom we named her brother after. Not that he’d know that, not ever having met him. My brother, I mean. William Hamilton-Sweeney.” The hand she held out, in contrast to her voice, was steady. “I’m Regan.”

  Careful, Mercer thought. Here at Mockingbird, a Y chromosome was already a liability, and no matter what they’d said when they hired him, being black was, too. Steering between the Scylla of too-much and the Charybdis of not-enough, he’d worked hard to project a retiring asexuality. As far as his coworkers knew, he lived with only his books for company. Still, he relished her name in his mouth. “Regan.”

  “Can I ask what your interest in my brother is? He doesn’t owe you money or anything, does he?”

  “Goodness, no. Nothing like that. He’s a … friend. I just didn’t realize he had a sister.”

  “We don’t exactly talk. We haven’t for years. In fact, I have no idea how to find him. I hate to impose, but maybe I could leave this with you?” She approached to place something on the desk, and as she retreated a little pain rippled through him. Out of the great silent sea that was William’s past, a mast had appeared, only to tack back toward the horizon.

  Wait, he thought. “I was actually on my way to the lounge for coffee. Can I get you some?”

  Disquiet lingered on her face, or sadness, abstract but pervasive. She was really quite striking, if a bit on the thin side. Most adults when they were sad seemed to fold inward and age and become unattractive; perhaps it was some kind of adaptive thing, to gradually breed a master race of emotionally impervious hominids, but if so, the gene had skipped these Hamilton-Sweeneys. “I can’t,” she said finally. “I’ve got to get my kids to their dad’s.” She indicated the envelope. “If you could just, if you see William before New Year’s, give him that, and tell him … tell him I need him there this year.”

  “Need him where? Sorry. None of my business, obviously.”

  “It’s been a pleasure meeting you, Mr. Goodman.” She paused at the door. “And don’t worry about the circumstances. I’m just happy to know he’s got someone.”

  Before he had time to ask her what she was implying, she had withdrawn. He stole out into the hall to watch her go, her heels clicking through the squares of light on the tile. Then he looked down at the sealed envelope in his hands. There was no postmark, just a patch of corrective fluid where the address should have been and the hasty calligraphy that said He hadn’t known there was a Roman numeral.

  HE AWOKE CHRISTMAS MORNING feeling guilty. More sleep might have helped, but years of Pavlovian ritual had made this impossible. Mama used to come into their bedrooms when it was still dark and toss stockings engorged with Florida oranges and gewgaws from the five-and-dime onto the feet of his and C.L.’s beds—and then pretend to be surprised when her sons woke up. Now that he was theoretically a grown-up, there were no stockings, and he lay beside his snoring lover for what felt like the longest time, watching light advance across the drywall. William had nailed it up hastily to carve a sleeping nook out of the undivided loft space, and had never gotten around to painting it. Besides the mattress, the only concessions to domesticity were an unfinished self-portrait and a full-length mirror, turned sideways to parallel the bed. Embarrassingly, he sometimes caught William looking at the mirror when they were in flagrante, but it was one of those things Mercer knew he wasn’t supposed to ask about. Why couldn’t he just respect these pockets of reticence? Instead, they pulled him closer and closer, until in order to protect William’s secrets he was, perforce, keeping secrets of his own.

  But surely the point of Christmas was to no more turn aside and brood. The temperature had been dropping steadily, and the sturdiest outerwear William owned was the Ex Post Facto jacket, and so Mercer had decided to give him a parka, an envelope of warmth that would surround him wherever he went. He’d saved fifty dollars out of each of his last five paychecks, and had gone into Bloomingdale’s still wearing what William called his teaching costume—necktie, blazer, elbow patches—but it seemed to make no difference in persuading salespeople that he was a legitimate customer. Indeed, a store detective with a rodential little moustache had trailed him from outerwear to menswear to formalwear. But perhaps this was providence; otherwise Mercer might not have discovered the chesterfield coat. It was gorgeous, tawny, as though spun from the fine fur of kittens. Four buttons and three interior pockets, for brushes and pens and sketchpads. Its collar and belt and body were three different shades of shearling wool. It was flamboyant enough that William might wear it, and hellaciously warm. It was also well beyond Mercer’s means, but a kind of enraptured rebellion or rebellious rapture carried him to the register, and thence to the gift-wrapping station, where they swaddled it in paper stamped with swarms of golden B’s. For a week and a half now, it had been hiding underneath the futon. Unable to wait any longer, Mercer staged a coughing fit, and soon enough William was up.

  After brewing the coffee and plugging in the tree, Mercer set the box on William’s lap.

  “Jesus, that’s heavy.”

  Mercer brushed away a dust bunny. “Open it.”

  He watched William closely as the lid made its little puff of air and the tissue paper crinkled back. “A coat.” William tried to muster an exclamation point, but stating the name of the gift, everyone knew, was what you did when you were disappointed.

  “Try it on.”

  “Over my robe?”

  “You’re going to have to sooner or later.”

  Only then did William begin to say the right things: that he’d needed a coat, that it was beautiful. He disappeared into the sleeping nook and lingered there an inordinate amount of time. Mercer could almost hear him turning in front of the skewed mirror, trying to decide how he felt. Finally, the beaded curtain parted again. “It’s great,” he said.

  It looked great, at least. With the collar turned up, it flattered William’s fine features, the natural aristocracy of his cheekbones. “You like it?”

  “The Technicolor dreamcoat.” William mimed a series of gestures, patting his pockets, turning for the camera. “It’s like wearing a Jacuzzi. But now it’s your turn, Merce.”

  Across the room, drugstore bulbs blinked dimly against the noon light. The tree skirt was bare, save for cat hairs and a few needles; Mercer had opened Mama’s present the night before, while on the phone with her, and he knew from the way she’d signed their names on the tag that C.L. and Pop had forgotten or declined to send separate gifts. He’d steeled him
self for the likelihood that William hadn’t gotten him anything, either, but now William squired forth from the sleeping nook a parcel he had wrapped in newspaper, as though drunkenly. “Be gentle,” he said, setting it on the floor.

  Had Mercer ever been anything but? A gun-oil smell assaulted him as he removed the paper to reveal a grid of orderly white keys: a typewriter.

  “It’s electric. I found it in a pawnshop downtown, like new. It’s supposed to be much faster.”

  “You shouldn’t have,” Mercer said.

  “Your other one’s such a piece of junk. If it was a horse, you’d shoot it.”

  No, he really shouldn’t have. Though Mercer had yet to find the gumption to tell William, his slow progress on his work-in-progress—or rather, lack thereof—had nothing to do with his equipment, at least in any conventional sense. To avoid further dissembling, he put his arms around William. The heat of his body penetrated even through the sumptuous coat. Then William must have caught a glimpse of the oven clock. “Shit. You mind if I turn on the TV?”

  “Don’t tell me there’s a game on. It’s a holiday.”

  “I knew you’d understand.”

  Mercer tried for a few minutes to sit alongside and watch William’s beloved sport, but to him televised football was no more interesting, or even narratively intelligible, than a flea circus, so he got up and went to the kitchenette to do the other stations of the Yuletide cross. While the crowd whooshed and advertisers extolled the virtues of double-bladed razors and Velveeta shells and cheese, Mercer glazed the ham and chopped the sweet potatoes and opened the wine to let it breathe. He didn’t drink, himself—he’d seen what it had done to C.L.’s brain—but he’d thought Chianti might help put William in the spirit.

  Heat built over the two-burner stove. He went to crank open the window, startling some pigeons that had settled outside on his winter-bare geranium box. Well, cinderblock, really. They fled down the canyons of old factories, now lost in the shadows, now exploding into light. When he looked over at William, the chesterfield was back in its box on the floor beside the futon, and the jumbo bag of gumdrops was nearly empty. He could feel himself turning into his mother.

  They sat down at halftime, plates balanced on knees. Mercer had assumed that because there was a gap in the action William might turn the television off, but he didn’t even turn it down, or look away. “Yams are terrific,” he said. Like reggae music and Amateur Night at the Apollo, soul food was one of William’s elective affinities with negritude. “I wish you wouldn’t stare at me like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like I killed your puppy. I’m sorry if today fell short of whatever was in your head.”

  Mercer hadn’t realized he’d been staring. He shifted his gaze to the tree, already desiccating in its aluminum stand. “It’s my first Christmas away from home,” he said. “If trying to preserve a few traditions makes me a fantasist, I guess I’m a fantasist.”

  “Does it ever strike you as revealing that you still refer to it as ‘home’?” William dabbed a corner of his mouth with his napkin. His table manners, incongruous, beautiful, should have been an early clue. “We’re grown men, you know, Merce. We make our own traditions. Christmas could be twelve nights at the disco. We could eat oysters every day for lunch, if we wanted.”

  Mercer couldn’t tell how much of this was sincere, and how much William was merely caught up in winning the argument. “Honestly, William, oysters?”

  “Cards on the table, sweetheart. This is about that envelope you keep trying to shove into my field of vision, isn’t it?”

  “Well, aren’t you going to open it?”

  “Why would I? There’s nothing inside that’s going to make me feel better than I already do. God damn it!”

  It took him a second to realize that William was talking to the football game, where some unpleasantness announced the start of the third quarter.

  “Do you know what I think? I think you already know what’s in it.” As Mercer did himself, actually. Or at least he had his suspicions.

  He went to pick up the envelope and held it toward the TV; a shadow nested tantalizingly within, like the secret at the heart of an X-ray. “I think it’s from your family,” he said.

  “What I want to know is, how did it get here without a postmark?”

  “What I want to know is, why is that such a threat?”

  “I can’t talk to you when you get like this, Mercer.”

  “Why am I not allowed to want things?”

  “You know damn well that’s not what I said.”

  Now it was Mercer’s turn to wonder how much he meant the words coming out of his mouth, and how much he just wanted to win. He could see in the margins the cookware, the shelf of alphabetized books, the tree, all physical accommodations William had made to him, it was true. But what about emotionally? Anyway, he’d said too much now to back down. “Here is what you want: your life stays just the same, while I twist myself around you like a vine.”

  Pale points appeared on William’s cheeks, as they always did when the border between his inner and outer lives was breached. There was a second when he might have come flying across the coffeetable. And there was a second when Mercer might have welcomed it. It might have proven he was more important to William than his self-possession, and from grappling in anger, how easy it would have been to fall into that other, sweeter grappling. Instead, William reached for the new coat. “I’m going out.”

  “It’s Christmas.”

  “This is another thing we’re allowed to do, Mercer. We’re allowed to have time alone.”

  But Solitas radix malorum est, Mercer would think later, looking back. The door closed, leaving him alone with the barely touched food. His appetite, too, had deserted him. There was something eschatological about the weak afternoon light, made weaker by the tree and the layer of soot that coated the window, and about the chill blown in through the crack he’d left open. Every time a truck passed, the frayed ends of the wine’s wicker sleeve trembled like the needles of some exquisite seismometer. Yes, everything, personally, world-historically, was breaking down. He pretended for a while to distract himself with the flux of jerseys onscreen. Really, though, he’d snuck back into his skull with tiny wrenches to make the kinds of adjustments that would allow him to continue living this way, with a boyfriend who would walk out on you on Christmas Day.

  2

  LATELY CHARLIE WEISBARGER, age seventeen, had been spending a lot of time on appearances. He wasn’t vain, he didn’t think, nor did he particularly dig his own, but the prospect of seeing Sam again kept sucking him back toward the mirror. Which was funny: love was supposed to carry you out beyond your own borders, but somehow his love for her—like the music he’d discovered that summer, or the purposeful derangement of his senses—had only ended up casting him back on the shores of himself. It was as if the universe was trying to teach him some lesson. The challenge, he guessed, was to refuse to learn.

  He took an album from the stack by the stereo and put a penny on the stylus to keep it from skipping. The first Ex Post Facto LP, from ’74. Bonus trivia: released only months before the band’s breakup, it had also been the last. As power chords ripped through the speakers, he fetched a round black box from the closet shelf to which he’d banished the getups of his childhood. Dust clung to the lid, like skin on cold soup. Instead of clearing off when he blew on it, it swirled up and got all in his mouth, so he wiped the rest off with the nearest thing to hand, an old batting glove scrunched scrotally against the base of his nightstand.

  Though he knew what was inside the box, the sight of Grandpa’s black fur hat never failed to send a jolt of lonesomeness right through him, like stumbling on a nest from which birds have flown. The Old Country Hat, Mom had called it—as in, David, does he have to wear the Old Country Hat again? But for Charlie, it would always be the Manhattan Hat, the one Grandpa had worn a couple Decembers ago when they’d ridden into the City, just the two of them. Their cover
story was a Rangers game, but what he’d made Charlie swear to keep his trap shut about was that they were going to the Radio City Christmas Spectacular instead. Brusque as hell, the old Bialystoker had been, shoving through the crowds. Honestly, Charlie didn’t see why all the cloak-and-dagger: no one was going to believe his grandpa would pay to see those shiksa hoofers anyway. Afterward, for an hour, maybe, they’d stood above the rink at Rockefeller Center, watching people skate. Charlie was underdressed for the cold but knew better than to complain. Finally, Grandpa reached over and opened his knobbly fist. Inside, embalmed in wax paper, was a butterscotch candy Charlie had no idea how he’d come by, like the last heirloom smuggled out of a war zone, more precious for having been hidden.

  The truth was, Grandpa was feeling sorry for him. Since the miraculous birth of Charlie’s twin brothers, no one was supposed to acknowledge the fact that the older son was being shunted aside, but Grandpa meant to atone—a frankness Charlie appreciated. He’d asked to go to Montreal for Hanukkah this year, but Mom and Grandpa still blamed each other for Dad’s dying. So it was like two deaths, almost. All Charlie was left with was the hat.

  He was surprised to find now that Grandpa’s huge head had been no bigger than his own. He posed in his closet-door mirror, three-quarters, right profile. It was hard to tell how he’d look to Sam, because other than the hat, he was wearing only briefs and a tee-shirt, and also because shifting fogs of allure and disgust seemed to interpose themselves between Charlie and the glass. His long white limbs and the goyish down on his cheeks sparked a hormonal flicker, but then these days so could the rumble of a schoolbus seat, the scent of baby oil, certain provocatively shaped items of produce. And his asthma was a problem. His Clamato-red hair was a problem. He tugged the hat down, filled his birdy chest with air. He shifted his stance to conceal the zit sprouting from his right thigh. (Was it even possible to get a zit on your thigh?) He checked himself against the photo on the LP sleeve: three artless men, skinny like himself, and one scary-looking transvestite. He wasn’t sure he could picture the hat on any of them, but no matter; he found it beautiful.