City on Fire (12 page)

“He’s always been secretive, my brother. Since he was a little kid. He thinks it creates some kind of personal power, to have a double life. I think he read too many comics.”

“So maybe I really came here because I knew it would piss him off if he found out. Not that you’re not lovely company.” And an almost unaccountable smile broke from somewhere within him. It was true. He liked Regan. She reminded him of other white girls he’d known, the fellow English majors who’d adopted him at U. Ga. “Can we go inside now, please? I’m bleeping gelid.”

She touched his arm with her good hand. “Hey, why don’t you come with me?”

“Come with you?”

“I’ve been summoned by Felicia’s brother. I’ll introduce you, and you can see what William’s up against. And maybe you can protect me.”

“Protect you from what?” But she had turned back toward the warmth of the bedroom. He retrieved his mask. “You’re sure you didn’t hear that sound?” he asked, before he pulled the French door shut. “I’m from the South. We know guns.”

She shrugged. “It’s Central Park West, Mercer. Probably just a truck backfiring.”

Inside, her stride grew more purposeful with every threshold they crossed, as if she were drawing strength from his presence, or from the drug, though he couldn’t be sure this wasn’t just the swimmy tempo of his own head. The guests seemed denser, too. Out of a jumble of bodies came hands clutching bottles, dentures bared in brays of Republican laughter, teeth freaky in their perfection, like Chiclets. He was the only nonwhite guest—though he hadn’t in the strictest sense been invited. And it must have been past midnight. Where was William right now? Leaning back against the wall of some bar’s men’s room while a blond head worked on him down below? He pushed the image away, let his consciousness become a tide coursing over the Persian rugs. Let Regan lead.

He couldn’t have said how many times she got detained, how many whisky kisses she endured from how many middle-aged men, how many compliments on her appearance—you look good, a woman said, healthy, euphemisms whose referents he couldn’t quite pin down—how many frowns about her washclothed hand, nor how many eyes sized him up through slitted card-stock. A servant? Hanger-on? Charity case? Still, it bothered him less than it had in his first hour of the party, which he’d spent hiding behind an enormous potted palm. If he couldn’t yet enter the enchanted circle of the Hamilton-Sweeneys, he could at least make a close study of its effects, and maybe someday he would return hand-in-hand with William and none of them would dare say a word. And Regan, who’d looked so down when he’d spotted her in the kitchen—was that really a half-hour ago?—was magnificent, even with no mask. He’d seen this in William, too, the switch that got flipped in a crowd. What Mercer had put down to personal pathology was apparently genetic. She glowed like a holiday bauble while he bobbed along behind, unsure whether he was having a great time or an awful one.

Then, in the midst of a tall room packed with people, he looked up. Ten feet above his head, where the second story would have been, a gallery ran the perimeter, with a doorway leading onto it from each of the room’s four sides. And up there, facing them, stood a small, white-haired man who seemed to be smiling directly at Mercer. He wore no costume and no mask. Still, in his black tuxedo he had the air of a duke overlooking his domain. Mercer felt the masked heads receding, the chatter retreating like the sea inside a shell, the heat of the assembled bodies fading. The man unwrapped a hand from the wrought-iron rail, raised it palm-up in the air, snapped it closed.

Then Mercer realized that Uncle Amory—for that’s who it had to be—was beckoning Regan, not him. He nudged her, and she excused herself from whatever conversation she’d been in. She slipped her injured arm through Mercer’s and steered him toward a spiral staircase. They mounted to the balcony as through a cold, resistant fluid. The man’s close-lipped smile never wavered. He must at some point have been nice-looking; not a single fleck of color was still visible on his fastidiously groomed head. “My dear,” he said to Regan. “I had so hoped we would find each other tonight.”

“Amory Gould,” she said. “Allow me to present Mercer Goodman.”

Mercer noticed with a sinking feeling that she had not introduced him as anything, and that the implication was that he was somehow involved with Regan, rather than with William. Brute facts of his appearance were being used to shock, even to injure. But to dispel the confusion would be to betray her, and he couldn’t; her good hand now squeezed his biceps like a blood-pressure cuff. He was aware of the dryness of his mouth, the near-audible thump of his heart. The odd thing was that Uncle Amory had not stopped smiling. It was impossible to say what was anxious-making about him, apart from the hard blue stare. “So, Mr. Goodman,” he said. “What’s your line?”

Mercer coughed. He probably smelled like Woodstock. “Pardon?”

“What do you do, son?”

He’d learned not to let belittlement or even open insult goad him into a reaction. You’re the only one who has power over you, Mama had reminded him before he’d left for college, though he wasn’t sure he’d ever really believed it. What he was sure of was that Amory Gould didn’t. The man was watching him the way a kid watches an ant on whom he’s trained the sun via magnifying glass.

“I’m a teacher,” he ventured. “I work in the high school at Wenceslas-Mockingbird.”

“You must know Ed Buncombe, then, the Dean of Faculty.”

“Dr. Runcible is the new man.” Later, he would wonder why he hadn’t stopped there. But Regan’s talons were practically piercing the material of his dinner jacket, and Amory Gould still beamed inscrutably, and as the silence up here on the balcony thickened, Mercer had a sense that people were starting to watch from below. “And I write.” He knew instantly that it was a mistake.

“I see. And what do you write, Mr. Goodman?”

“Amory, don’t pry, please,” Regan said. “Mercer, you don’t have to answer that.”

“She’s right. Quite, quite right,” Amory said. “When you reach a certain age, you forget how fragile these things can feel. A puff of breath might knock them over. Would you believe I used to churn out verse myself, as an undergraduate? Dreadful. Eventually, I put it aside, took up a more practical career in government, then business. The three ages of man, you know. But let me ask you this, Mr. Goodman.” The head seemed to be swelling now, growing closer. Its eyes were rimmed with pink, like chunks of ice that had torn holes in the hands that handled them. “Your day job, the teaching, do they know about these other proclivities of yours? Because one owes it to them, and to oneself, to be honest.”

“Come again?”

“Writing, my boy. Oh! You didn’t think I meant … How embarrassing.”

Proclivities. The innuendo here had little or nothing to do with him personally; he knew it was meant to wound his presumed date. And yet the lightness of Uncle Amory’s regard was, in itself, humiliating. Nor did Regan make any effort to defend him. How had he ever kidded himself into thinking he could be part of this world?

Mumbling something about the lateness of the hour, he took his leave. Amory didn’t deign to shake hands, or say that it had been nice to meet him; he’d already turned to Regan and was telling her that, if she had a minute, they had important matters to cover; and what ever had she done to her finger? When Mercer glanced back, on the off-chance that she, at least, was ruefully watching, the two of them had already been sucked through one of the balcony doors. He wished he could disappear that easily, but the only way out was down the twisting staircase and across the full breadth of the room. His mask was suddenly meaningless. He was distinctly aware of the darkness of his skin against the white dinner jacket, the dryness of his eyes and mouth, the nap of his hair. The women, in their variegated little dominos, looked like savannah birds turning to watch a wounded rhino blunder by. Even the coat-check girl in the foyer seemed to smell weakness on Mercer. She took her time retrieving the Coat of Several Colors, and still he had to leave her a tip, so as not to confirm her worst intuitions. The elevator was obnoxiously slow.

By the time he hit night air, he’d begun to sober up somewhat, his shame cooling to a sort of melancholy. Here he was, expelled from Eden, back down on the street, where a lamppost was once again a lamppost, a parked car exactly the size of a parked car. The spires of Midtown were lost to the snow, and even the balcony from which (however briefly) he’d possessed the glittering life he longed for seemed smudged and blurry, like the memory of a dream. For a minute, the only evidence that he was in a functioning city and not in the ruins of the future was the bench across the street, where a human-sized patch of green amid the snow attested to recent occupancy. Someone waiting, no doubt, for a bus.

Then miraculously, way up Central Park West, at the very edge of what the slackening snowfall permitted him to see, one glimmered into view: two bulbs surmounted by a headband of light. It was always a mug’s game, trying to calculate whether surface streets or the subway would get you home faster, but he’d learned by trial and error not to overlook the transportational bird in the hand, especially not after midnight, and there would be something fitting, would there not, about ending this night and this year on a poky and prosaic city bus, amid the alcoholic, the epileptic, and the otherwise damned, in mortuary fluorescence, on a sticky floor, in the seat nearest the driver?

In the time it took these stoned apprehensions to shamble across the stage of his attention and do their little twirl, the traffic signals had gone from yellow to red, pinning the bus into place a dozen blocks off. He leaned against the pole of the bus-stop sign, trying to recover the earlier image of himself as a romantic figure, the loner in the long, brown coat. He whistled a few bars from La Traviata. He thought poignantly about himself thinking. He was appreciating the soulful billow of his own breath before him when from behind the stone wall across the street, the darkened Park, came the most upsetting sound he’d ever heard. It was a sob: high, breathless, gurgly, like a dying seal. And then it stopped. It must have been another fantasy, or at the very least none of his business, but even before it came a second time, some animal matrix beneath the skin of his consciousness had been activated. The bus was now only ten blocks away, or fewer, kneeling to discharge a passenger. He willed it to hurry up. He would hop aboard, and the sound, assuming it even was a sound, would be the problem of the person now climbing off. Except the traffic signals had gone red again. Shit, he thought. Shit. What was he supposed to do?

The noise did not recur. He thought of all the harmless things it could be. A dying fox; there were foxes in Central Park, weren’t there? The wind moaning over a plastic bag caught in a tree. One of those sad, compulsive men who cruised public spaces in search of anonymous rough sex. Whatever it was, it was not his responsibility, and this timely ride home, his reward for all he’d endured tonight, was—

The driver laid on the horn as Mercer darted in front of the oncoming bus, toward the far side of the street and the park entrance. As he plunged under the snow-crazed tangle of limbs and into the bosk, he had to rely on his memory, on an impression of something he hadn’t been listening for. It had seemed close to the wall, hadn’t it? He cursed his dress shoes, which threatened to slip out from under him on the icy downhill path. A pile of black boulders rose to the left, a screen of bushes to the right. You’re a fool, Mercer Goodman, he thought—a clown on the heath, with no Lear. Still, what if it had been a human being? Well, what if? In that case, there was probably more than one human being, an attacker and a victim, and Mercer, with his bow tie and his soft dilettante’s hands, would just be fresh meat.

He stepped over the knee-high iron piping that edged the path and forced his way between two bushes. At first the earth running up to the wall was an illegible sheet of snow and shadow. But he must, with that same animal attunement that had marched him here, have sensed breathing, or warmth, because as he stared at the base of the wall, a crumpled mess resolved out of it. He approached. Some birds perching atop the masonry nestled down in their feathers, vigilant. It was just a kid, he saw. A boy. No, a girl, short-haired. Her face was turned upward, toward the plane of light spreading over the wall, her head twisted back uncomfortably on her neck. She was unconscious, maybe dead. Blood from her shoulder had spilled out to color the snow. Mercer was appalled to remember that blood had a smell, a coppery kind of smell. He thought for a second he might vomit.

“Help!” he yelled. His voice boomed off the wall and dissipated in the void behind him. He yelled again. “Help!” The birds resettled themselves. The girl did not stir. You weren’t supposed to move a body, and he didn’t want to touch it, so he stood for a minute, looking down at the black form he would now forever be involved with. Then he took off, between the bushes, up the path, a ghost burst out of the jaws of hell, shouting as if anyone might save him.

10

REGAN HAD FELT THE EYES before she’d seen them, moving over her like a pawnbroker’s fingers. And if she’d imagined having William’s gay black boyfriend on her arm might protect her, those eyes made her feel that even this had been choreographed, like the divorce, the storm out in Chicago, the knife with which she’d cut herself. Which was of course somewhere near the heart of Uncle Amory’s power: to be in his presence was to come into propinquity with designs far larger and older than oneself, great star-maps wheeling across an empty planetarium dome. As far as she could tell, these designs were the sole basis for his interest in other people. Not curiosity, not sympathy, not even amusement, but underlying the canny simulation of normal personhood, the simple question of what might be in it for him. Whatever it was, in this case, must have been significant, because the last time he’d appraised her so openly had been that long-ago weekend on Block Island, when she’d mistaken it for attraction. And then there was how swiftly he’d dispatched poor Mercer, alighting on his secret in a single swoop. She felt bad about this, but compared to her own, decades-old injury, it was a flesh wound; Mercer would heal. She hurried into the room off the balcony not to abandon him, but to deprive Amory of the chance to steer her.