City on Fire (112 page)

“The irony is, I was only a couple miles away all these years. Amory didn’t mention that either, did he? But trust me, I’m sure he kept abreast. The drugs, all of it. You could have found me easily enough, but why do that? I was doing you a favor by not being around to remind you of things we both knew. It’s like we’ve been living in two different cities. You up here in all this marbled comfort, and me down there, killing myself in slow motion.”

It is one of Bill W.’s precepts that talking about your most shameful behaviors, exposing their undersides to the air, will make you feel better. In practice, though, as long as he won’t do more than harrumph at the possibility that they’re worth listening to, it’s Bill H-S who has the upper hand. And he knows it, they both know it.

“One of those things being that I’m a homosexual, Daddy. Or what was it you used to say when Liberace was on TV? A queer duck. I know this comes as no surprise, but for the record: I am attracted to men. I have sex with them,” William hears himself say. “And since I’m laying my cards on the table, I did end up finding someone I could fall in love with. Do you want to guess what happened next? I fucked it up, is what. I lied. I withheld. I was cold and prideful and within myself. All this shit I’ve been carrying around because of you, I couldn’t let go of, because I no longer knew where it stopped and the rest of me started. I clung to it like a guy who’s shipwrecked and doesn’t trust he can swim.”

There’s a rush of heat now on the back of his neck, like someone else has brought a torch into the room, but when he turns, he finds only more darkness. It’s just him and the inscrutable face before him, a contest of wills. Of Wills, he thinks. He lapses into silence, which he manages to keep up for an impressive time, whole minutes, maybe. But every impulse becomes unbearable sooner or later.

“Did you notice how you never touched me, Daddy, after Mom died? It was like I had contracted some disease. You had plenty of chances to like tousle my hair, or hug me, or punch me, even, but the best I ever got was a handshake. I used to think I remembered my shoulder being squeezed at the burial, but that was Uncle Artie. I’m sure this sounds like more childishness, but back then, I still looked at you like a god whose big hands could rescue me, if only I could get them to touch me.”

There’s a single candle left in the rightmost drawer, and a book of matches he uses to light a cigarette. He squints against the smoke.

“One of the things recovery has helped me see is how I was always trying to put myself in a position to be rescued. Regan was usually the one who rode in on her white charger, but one day, I thought, if I could just make it so the trouble was too big for her, you would have to step in. But you couldn’t even do that for Regan, could you.”

What he himself can’t do, having crossed again to within a half-dozen feet, is meet Daddy’s gaze. There’s a sour-sweet smell like ammonia, but he ignores it.

“I think you know I was right that day, by the way, no matter what Regan decided to hold back. The day we came to you, before the rehearsal dinner. You always did have feelings, where she was concerned. And you’re not a stupid man. Your daughter was left pregnant, without good options, and entirely on her own.” He’s had half a lifetime to circle around what a just resolution might really have looked like. “You should have called off the merger, at least, if not your marriage. You should have had the guy’s head on a pike, and Amory’s. Don’t tell yourself that keeping Regan close, making her a Director or however you say it, was the same as giving her what she needed. She was suffering so much with what happened that she used to make herself throw up. Did you know that? I hadn’t seen her for fifteen years, and I pretty much knew. You like to think of yourself as a man of duty, but when you’ve got one kid with a finger down her throat and another shooting his inheritance into his veins … you kind of have to wonder. And now Amory’s got you poised for the fall, from what I can see. Not to mention trying to have me taken out. And what’s your first instinct when I come to tell you? You stick up for him.”

Somehow, though, the closer William gets to justice, the worse he feels. There’s that “condition” people keep alluding to; maybe Daddy doesn’t remember any of this. Maybe, in fact, it was grief over William’s running away that began his decline. In which case who, really, owes amends to whom? And who is that enormous impersonal consciousness he senses out there beyond the edges, watching, expecting, disapproving? Maybe it’s none other than himself. Maybe out there is in here.

“I’ll tell you something else. I keep having this fantasy about some wide river or channel I’m on the bank of. I can look up, and on the far side is another, better self, holding hands with Mercer—that’s his name, my ex—and both of them are watching me flail over here, watching me from the life I’m supposed to have had. When did it become impossible to get there from here? When did that bridge get burned? Until tonight, I would have said it was the day before your wedding, with Regan and the toast and all that, but right now I’m thinking it’s right now. I mean, here we are for the first time in years, I’m talking about you never having touched me, and meanwhile your hand is right there, three feet away, and you still can’t reach across whatever separates us and just touch you. Me.”

He sits there for a while feeling the implications of this error, like a man running his tongue over a loose molar. Time is doing this funny thing where he can’t tell how much of it is passing. Also space: the darkened walls seem to have slid back on tracks, like scenery into the wings, leaving the two of them alone in this flickering circumference. There has to be some way to wound Daddy. To make him feel the cruelty Amory Gould had presided over. But it had taken William years to riddle out its intricacies himself, and then only after he’d been able to put aside the belief that Amory had marshaled resources beyond his grasp of human nature. Years Daddy wouldn’t spend. Or didn’t have. Meaning Amory hadn’t had to preside, not really. And somewhere, William must still be seventeen, the boy rushing to throw himself athwart the tracks of his fate, because he feels that at last he’s reached it, the part that matters, the thing that must be seen. (As somewhere else, he turns away, because he cannot bear to look.) Try again, William. Make it all connect. Grip the knife and twist.

“It was rape, Daddy. Rape that got her pregnant. The son of the man you merged with. Rape that I brought to you in your office that day, when all I could think about was wrecking a fucking wedding. Wrong after all, both of us—and if I managed to set the usurpation back a decade or two, so what? However it went between Regan and his protégé, Amory was always going to end up with strings to pull. But he wasn’t pulling my strings when I stood there in front of you, unfeeling, using Regan’s suffering for my own selfish purposes. I convinced myself that if you refused to see a problem, maybe it would go away. Daddy, I know you understand. I know you understand me.”

In truth, though, he knows no such thing. Because when, at last, on an impulse, he reaches out to touch his father’s hand, what shakes free is not an apology, or a condemnation, but a snore. Daddy has been asleep for some time now, to say nothing of that smell. Which means (William thinks—and it kills him) he’s going to get away with everything.

EAST VILLAGE—12:12 A.M.

CRUMMY ORPHEUS THAT HE IS, Mercer has resisted a last look back at the hospital. Even if the shopping cart weighs more than you’d think, even if the man inside it is paralyzed, Jenny will be okay, he knows; this side of his own Mama, he’s never met a more stubborn girl. Anyway, what has today taught him if not that all he can do for other people essentially amounts to very little? If William is dead, he is dead.

Yet a strange thing happens as he drifts south and east: nothing. Or rather, everything. There is more than one way to be out of time, it seems, and now he is stranded between two worlds, one in which a bomb has gone off and one in which it hasn’t, at least not here. To judge by what stands around him, William still lives. But to the extent that it only means less finality and more heartache, Mercer is no longer even sure if this is the world he wants to be in. If he’s ever loved William enough.

In the breast pocket of his shirt is the last joint from his motherlode. He’s never quite adjusted to the fact that in New York you can walk down the street smoking this stuff openly, but now he thinks what the hell, he’s invisible anyway. He lights it. Coughs. Inhales again. It doesn’t fail him. Where usually a high creates thought-connections that lead elaborately away from the moment he’s in, this one pulls him back from the brink of the future. A façade on Fourteenth Street has sprung a hole, through which other holes shuttle in and out, laden with free groceries. Alarms and sirens wail in clashing keys, but no one notices until the cops are upon them.

He walks on, past flashlights and floating cigarettes, sticking as close to the street as possible. He hardly recognizes these as the same sidewalks he wandered back when he lived with Carlos, not only because of the blackout, but because so much of what he’d seen then he’d refused to admit to seeing. The denim boys on roller skates, the hustlers in twos and threes with their come-hither glances. All of them, like William, were willing to endure a certain quantum of danger in pursuit of pleasure, or vice versa. A solitary moped whizzes past, its headlamp streaking the bars of a wrought-iron fence. The word that occurs, spectral, is probably not the right one for how Mercer feels. How he feels is: like a human pinball. Then a voice out of the darkness rasps, “Hey, you.” Meaning me, he thinks. Meaning him.

He has made his way, as best he can determine, to the northern entrance of Tompkins Square Park, where he once heard Ex Post Facto play. It’s a wonder he hasn’t thought to look here for William before tonight; the place is notorious (he’d subsequently pretended not to have learned) as a spot for cruising and drugs and worse. From the dense shadows beyond the gate comes the smack of skin on skin, followed by laughter and swift steps ebbing among the trees. Music somewhere. The voice speaks up again. “Yeah, you. You got any more of that?”

“Any more of what?”

“ ‘Any more of what,’ he says.” Mercer’s unsure whether this is meant for him or for some third party, also invisible. “Of what you’re smoking, Your Majesty.”

He hesitates. “How do I know you’re not a cop?”

At this, the laughter ramifies into what’s definitely more than one voice. They sound half-stoned already. Mercer’s roach makes a neon arc as he extends it, less out of a sense of camaraderie than in hopes of satisfying them and thus ending the interaction. The joint flares, crackling, and he can just make out liquid eyes in a face his mother would have called “high yellow.” Then, like the Cheshire Cat’s, they’re gone. Instead of returning to him, the joint drifts farther back, to be inhaled by another man, or boy, it sounds like. Mercer’s face is heating up, but why be embarrassed? Mama’s not around to see him, nor could she, were she. “Just so you know, I don’t have any money,” his mouth says, because some rational part of him still thinks it’s worth getting this out there. But his interlocutors apparently don’t give a shit. “The end is nigh, brother. We’re just trying to have a good time.”

Uh-oh. Walk away now, Mercer thinks. Trouble is, he’s grown attached to this joint. And so, as if some more powerful narcotic has been mixed in with the dope, he’s following the voices and the dwindling orange bloom of it back along the path. There’s a bend, which as he rounds it gives way to more light, a thousand feathers curling through the leaves. Then the vegetation clears, and he can make out bodies, beefy, hairy, some of them sans shirt. Music thumps from a ghetto blaster wedged into the crotch of a tree. An exfoliated disco ball dangles among the branches, and a man in leather chaps and a train conductor’s cap plays a flashlight across it, which is where the light comes from. Well, that and a trashcan someone has set unfragrantly ablaze. Where the flicker barely reaches, men hold each other and sway. Mercer blinks to see if they’ll go away. “You want a beer or something?” says the boy holding the joint. His shirt’s open at the chest, which glows like molded brass.

“I guess.” Mercer hopes the diversion will allow him to turn and go. But he finds he can’t, even after the boy has disappeared into the dark behind a bench.

Waiting, he tries not to look out of place, to make too much eye contact or too little—tries, that is, not to see the melding of bodies in the underbrush, most of them dark like his own, the shocking pink flashes of tongue and palm. At not seeing, he’s had lots of practice. There used to be a path made of flagstones between Mama’s kitchen and the vegetable garden. One spring, heavy rains had loosened them in their footings, so that you could see around each one a little black gap just perfect for a penknife. He’d gotten the idea to pry one up, and when it came free—a wet, sucking sound—he’d found the verso teeming with shiny-backed creepy-crawlies asquirm in the blacker mud. One of the things he fears most is that beneath the masonry of his own consciousness lies some similarly primeval carnival of appetite, and so, from the moment he first passed through Port Authority, he’s been patrolling the borders of his thoughts, tamping down the flooring, keeping things cool and dry and orderly. And perhaps (it occurs to him) cutting himself off from what’s available for his art. Or does it explode?

“I brung you this.” The boy is back. A beer bottle, its label damp and peeling, insinuates itself into Mercer’s hand.

“Brought.”

“Huh?”

“The participle.” The boy stares puzzled at his flame-licked profile. Mercer wonders if William used to think of him this way: as a boy. I don’t drink, he wants to say now, as he said then, but what would Walt Whitman do? Obviously, Old Walt would take up the burden, bear the brunt. Bringing the bottle to his lips, he nearly chips a tooth.

“You’ve got to … here, let me …”

The boy does a thing where he uses his own bottle to dislodge the cap of Mercer’s. Mercer repeats the swigging motion more cautiously. What’s inside might as well be beechwood-aged horse piss, but in the last twenty-four hours, he’s been chased, cross-examined, and nearly sent through a windshield, all without eating; he can be forgiven if his mouth is dry. “How old are you?”