City on Fire (23 page)

“And what happens to all this?”

“This? This is Bernard’s,” he said, nodding toward the fresh-faced chair of the Art History department across the room, whom William had met earlier, and to whom, come to think of it, Bruno had been attached all evening. “I have a place in Vermont where I repair between appointments. It is country that reminds me of my home.”

And maybe it was true that William needed to be understood, because how else to explain how crushed he was to learn that Bruno wouldn’t be back in the spring? But it turned out to be a moot point. After insisting on finding his own way back to school, he got caught sneaking in at dawn—the squawking birds of suburban Mass. betrayed him to the headmaster as the louche, late-sleeping pigeons of New York never would have—and, this being a third offense, he was expelled before completing the term.

SITTING NOW ON THE FRONT PORCH of the mountain house, watching his highball glass sweat and mosquitoes moil around a smudge-pot, he wasn’t at all sure he’d made the right decision. Bruno looked different than he remembered; heavier set, less coolly überhuman. Perhaps sensing his guest’s distress, Bruno didn’t push him, except to ask about his tux.

“What, this?” William had forgotten he was wearing it. “I ran out of laundry. Only clean shirt I had. Where is everybody? Where’s Bernard?”

“Bernard is in Boston.”

“Oh.” The shadows of the mountains were like the ridged backs of dinosaurs. Just twenty-four hours earlier he’d been at that restaurant in Central Park, surrounded by oligarchs with champagne flutes. The glass he’d raised to toast his father had been narrower than the one now trembling in his hand, and he could honestly no longer remember what he’d said to cause so much trouble.

“You’re welcome to stay as long as you like, William.”

“You’re not going to make me tell you what’s going on?”

“I do not need to know ‘what’s going on.’ Guests come and go all summer. There are three bedrooms currently vacant. You may take any one you like.”

But William stayed on the porch long after Bruno went to bed, and not only to avoid the possibility of being asked to join him. By now, his father would be married to Felicia Gould, and it was something to which, after years of adjusting, and adjusting, he just could not seem to adjust. That Daddy had declined to call the wedding off at the last minute should have come as no surprise. Indeed, if William III was being honest, he may even have been looking for an excuse to break with William II, the way a rocket’s liquid stage might long to escape the solid. What he’d been unprepared for was Regan, the only person besides their mom and Doonie he’d ever really trusted, taking sides with the enemy. If he was to survive it, she would have to be burned away, too. And sleep now was an impossibility. The wind shifted. The mosquitoes writhed, as if on fire. The ice was exploding in his Drambuie.

HE’D ASSUMED BRUNO was just being polite about guests coming and going from the mountain house, but it turned out he’d meant it. It started the very next weekend, with a carload of pale men from one of the urban centers—Boston or Philly, he hadn’t really been listening—crunching up the gravel drive. They emerged in straw hats and sunglasses, shirts half-unbuttoned, drinks seemingly already in hand. Stood with arms over open car doors and stared past the figure of Bruno waiting on the porch steps and beheld the valley beyond, midge-swirled and smoky at midafternoon. They didn’t actually say, Well, would you look at that; they didn’t need to.

And it was strange: once, William would have preened for them, acted the ingénue, but he could barely bestir himself from his deckchair to wave hello. Stranger still, none of them seemed to mind. He was almost certain Bruno would tell them something later, in private—Give him his space, maybe—but what accounted for the fact that now, at the moment of their arrival, the men tromping past him in the shade of the porch looked at him with the kindly expressions of people who had been there before? No one, William thought, could have possibly ever been here before. Amid all this bounty, yet unable to think about home without his espresso cup starting to quake on its saucer and the stilled cars of the driveway and the long ragged wildflowers starting to swim a little beyond the porch’s cool enclosure, like things glimpsed through a fever. At some point, he stopped rocking. Shouts echoed uphill from a swimming hole, fractured by boulders and gulleys. Through the black trunks of pines he caught a flash of flesh as one of the guests mounted the diving rock; there was a pause between its disappearance and the answering splash.

After sundown, at a communal dinner, William sat quietly, doing his best not to ruin anyone’s good time. The other faces around the table, flush with wine and exercise, were like the faces of prisoners who’ve had their convictions overturned. Anyway, it was pure narcissism to think his inner devastation could have ruined this for them. He was just some beautiful boy, a sylph, a runaway, furnished for the pleasure of their gaze. Only Bruno—powerful, patient, impenetrable Bruno—cared to notice that William had hardly eaten. And even this he took in in a single flicker of attention, saying nothing.

Soon William was making excuses to eat on the porch. He set the plate of veal or spätzle or spaghetti on the stumpy rattan table and didn’t bother lighting the lantern. Laughter leaked through the screen door. Around it and around the ember of his cigarette, insects swarmed, along with the smells of smoke and room-temperature red sauce, like a rancid picnic. He tried to imagine the darkness of the porch merging with the darkness beyond, and himself with it, an animal crashing around in the underbrush. He tried to imagine Bruno coming to the door later, when the dishes had all been washed, looking for Narcissus and finding only the infinite dark. Even this—the old fantasy that there was still someone in the world who would chase after him, ask him what was wrong—now gave him no pleasure.

At times when the guests had returned to the other, urban halves of their lives, William was theoretically freer, yet he felt, if anything, worse. He could not read, could not sleep, could not tune his guitar. Only a few activities, pitched exactly halfway between stupidity and concentration, could still absorb him, and it was out of these that he had to cobble together a day. A baseball game on the radio; a crossword puzzle in the newspaper; a glossy magazine story about Elizabeth Taylor or Marilyn Monroe. He would send lists of magazine titles along when Bruno drove into town to do the shopping. William offered to pay (once he was legally adult, he had full control of the trust fund his mother had left him—plus the cash from selling off Regan’s Karmann Ghia through the local classifieds), but Bruno always refused, in a way that should have been welcome but that just felt patronizing. He came back laden with bags of free food, but William still had no appetite of any kind. Even the beauty of the landscape was an abstraction, like the beauty of a man in an advertisement for a cologne you could not smell. Between him and it, dead time piled up: so many seconds, so many hours, so many years. So many tons of food and cubic hectares of liquid to dispose of before he died, which he would probably do right here, in the Northeast Kingdom, on a day much like this one, at the tail end of ten thousand days just like this one.

One mid-July evening, after unloading groceries from the car, Bruno sat down in his own rocking chair. More guests were due tomorrow, and William thought he was going to say something about this—thought, with a kind of weird thrill, that Bruno had finally lost patience—but Bruno just said, “I brought you something.” He nodded to the paper bag on the end table between them. Inside was a sketchpad. Bruno rocked and sipped his cocktail, looking out to the far hills in which William had been feigning absorption.

“Bernard hasn’t been up here,” William said, finally. “Will we be seeing him?”

“Bernard and I had a parting of ways.”

He had figured this out long ago, but the point was to wound. “Hence the generosity.”

“No one is keeping you here, William. You are free to go at any time.”

“You have a position you’re looking to fill. Admit it. You want to fuck me.” The tears in his voice surprised him, tiny hot beads of helplessness, but he couldn’t stop himself: he didn’t want to let go of whatever was killing him. Didn’t want to change.

Bruno sighed. “As ever, William, your way of seeing the world is sui generis.” He got up to go inside. “And no, I wouldn’t take advantage of you even if I had no one else to amuse myself with. You are a child.”

He wanted to get up, to stop Bruno from leaving. He wanted to feel the hard Teutonic fist connect with his cheekbone. Instead, when the last of Bruno’s going-to-bed sounds had subsided, he stole into the bathroom and pulled the pullcord and looked in the mirror. It was true: he was a child, greasy and pale and thin and ungrateful, unloveable and unloved. Even the mother he carried inside him was less a memory than a dream. He turned the water on, loud, and wrestled the ancient razor-blade out of his shaving kit and considered for a long time the image it made against his fishbelly wrist. But once again, life proved too much for William Hamilton-Sweeney. What could one do but strop the blade sharper and attack the child’s bad moustache lately sprouted on one’s upper lip?

IT WOULD BE FIBBING to say the blackness lifted off William all at once after that; diseases don’t work that way. But he did at least start sleeping through the night more often and shaving every morning. In the afternoon, he’d hike down toward the lake on paths of mulchy leaves, or what appeared to be paths, human-sized spaces among trees whose names he taught himself as he drew them. His sketchbook slowly filled with hemlock and mountain ash, and with the little animals that would come stepping into the clearings if he sat very still, or reveal themselves as already there, squirrels, sunbathing turtles, once a deer. He would eat the sandwich he’d brought and not even notice that it had begun to taste again, and then would resume his hike. The creek that descended from the swimming hole babbled nearby. The orderly old wilderness would split for a huge slab of rock down whose face tumbled a falls, and here, in the light, on the sun-bleached rock, with the breaking water in his ears and the ozone of peaking vegetation in his nose, he was granted what he’d hoped for those first days after his arrival: he was no one, with no past and no future, nothing beyond the now and now and now of the white water surging into the clear.

And at night, at the long dining table, he started to open up a bit. If anything, the men’s laughter was harder than it had been at Bruno’s salon in Boston, and the part of him that lived for it was apparently still alive. Now, though, there was a second part, an artifact of his recent illness, as if his melancholy had, in a universe adjacent to this one, claimed his life. As if he were his own ghost, standing slightly behind himself, observing. He observed that he would at this point have gladly become Bruno’s concubine, out of pure gratitude. And he observed that behind the indulgent smile, there was a part of Bruno, too, holding back, as someone once burned will keep his distance from flame. Bruno was careful now never to leave his bedroom door open, literally or figuratively. Sometimes late at night William heard through it the sound of something swishing through the air, a grunting in pleasure or pain.

BY MID-AUGUST, heat was draped over the mountains like a wet carpet. Back in New York, he could allow himself to think without too much bitterness, envelopes from Yale would be piling up on the mail table in the West Side penthouse where his father now lived: letters about course registration, about inoculations, about Selective Service, about extra-long sheets, letters with his four full names stamped into them by typewriter, William Stuart Althorp Hamilton-Sweeney III. It had seemed a problem, at first: how to go off in the fall to this machine for the perpetuation of class privilege without also returning to the family for whom its earth sciences building was named. Then, like a magician’s knot, the problem resolved itself; he simply wouldn’t go. And once that decision was made, his future seemed secure. It was part of the enchantment of this valley to make anything seem possible.

Here, for example, stood William, poised above the swimming hole on a rock the size of a Volkswagen. His bare feet gripped the warm uneven granite as though made for it. Below revolved the ivory bodies of men. On the banks where their clothes lay in neat piles, two of those bodies had been lumpy and dangly and ill-proportioned, but in the water they became gods. Through the undulant glass of the surface, parts swelled and subsided, now a thigh, now an arm, now a lunar white ass as the young one, the handsome one, turned to shout up good-naturedly, “What are you, some kind of sissy?”

He glanced over at where Bruno sat in his long sleeves and wide-brimmed hat, reading the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, which took eight days to reach him here by mail. Last night, when the house was quiet, William had stolen down the hall and slipped into bed with the man who was now goading him, and after he’d sworn him to discretion, they’d athletically fucked. Even when he’d gone with strangers into their cars, or into the lavatories of Grand Central, William had never allowed things to go beyond the oral, the manual, the intercrural, and he now understood why they called this other thing consummation. He wondered, though, if Bruno had heard. He wondered if he’d wanted Bruno to hear.

“Come on! Jump!”

William shook off the shadow of his betrayal, reached down and peeled off his chinos, stood there with the wind on his skin. He was beautiful here, protected, admired. There was no prurience to it. Just men enjoying one another without shame or secrecy. And it was Bruno who’d made Eden possible. Bruno who sat reading and did not look up at the lithe body, now eighteen, as it took two quick steps and cannonballed into frigid water.

Later, he stretched out on the sand next to Bruno, unsure anymore if his body was so worthy of attention. “You should go in.”

“Ach.”

Except for the single syllable, Bruno might have been sleeping behind his dark glasses. And of course Bruno never swam. His skin was defenseless before the sun, he’d said. Now his right sleeve had slipped up his arm, revealing a blue tattoo, a number. William felt certain Bruno would have covered it if he’d known it was showing. Embarrassed, he retrieved his own pants from where he’d thrown them. “I’m just saying, you might as well enjoy it if you’re here,” he said, pulling them on.