City on Fire (24 page)

“William, there is something we should talk about.”

“Is there? Talking is such a drag.”

“You have had, I think, a good summer. You look healthy. It is a great country that makes this possible. But what will you do in the fall, when I leave for New York?”

“I didn’t know you were leaving.”

“It is nearly September, William. Every season has its end.”

The architecture of the future was suddenly reorganizing itself, corridors becoming dead ends. Was this his punishment for last night? “I could stay here. Take care of your house.”

“I found your sketchbook in the living room this morning. I took the liberty of looking through it. You have improved.”

“That’s private,” William said.

But Bruno appeared not to hear. There was a college a hundred miles south, he said, well-known among artists. He had several acquaintances who taught there, men and women he knew from stints at other institutions. He thought William might easily be accepted. “It would be a way for you to stay in these mountains, if that’s what you want.”

William looked out at the pond, the men, the otterlike sport. “Bruno, I still don’t understand. Why are you making this all so easy for me?”

Bruno now noticed the sleeve and began to roll it down over his arm. It wasn’t clear this was connected to anything, though he did say, “Believe me, this is not for you.”

THAT THE COLLEGE WOULD INDEED ACCEPT WILLIAM on such short notice was probably meaningless, given that it never rejected anyone. It was one of those progressive schools that were springing up across the land in the wake of the Eisenhower administration like mushrooms after a long rain. In practical terms, this meant William could do whatever he wanted, which suited him far better than the “rigorous character building” whose beneficiary he’d lately been. He took Drawing, and Philosophy, and Philosophy of Drawing; Social Realist Cinema, Latin, Psychoanalysis, Ecology of Mind … One course had him spend a whole semester painting a single still life; in another, he sat on the floor and glued together bits of cut-up magnetic tape. This is not to mention the on-campus performances: a concerto for transistor radio, another where the music was silent. Or afternoons spent lolling under the big pin oak at the heart of the Arcadian grounds, bullshitting with his new friends about the Bhagavad-Gita. Most of it was bullshit, on some level, but it was bullshit he felt passionate about, and in two areas—music and visual art—the passion was strong enough to burn through the veil that separated the two Williams, the real and the revenant.

By his second year, he was holding exhibitions in the little cottage he’d rented on a hill outside of town—what would later be called “happenings.” William strummed along to tape loops on his Spanish guitar while faculty members circulated in a fug of marijuana and red wine, inspecting his friends’ paintings. (William’s own paintings never made it onto the wall; unlike music, they were a thing, not an event, and somehow they never felt done. How could you know when you were done when you worked as he was learning to, splashing paint onto canvases in big, bloody gouts? How could you know when you’d bled all the feelings out?)

Over his five years as an undergraduate, he would have love affairs with teachers and students, and even once, unsuccessfully, with a woman. Why not? Barriers of all kinds were coming down. In 1964, he ate LSD with several other students and lay in a Busby Berkeley formation in a peach orchard on a summer night watching the stars throb like ventricles on the inside of a vast, blue heart. “Wow,” two people said at the same time, and everyone ended up kissing everyone else. That was the year of driving stoned and never crashing. Of wandering into classrooms in the dark and covering the chalkboards with automatic writing and leaving without turning on the lights. Of taking speed and hanging mirrors in the forest around the college, and painting themselves and the trees different colors.

Color more broadly was still an area of interest, as it had been when he’d watched footage of the Oklahoma City sit-ins on the TV back on Sutton Place, with Doonie in the doorway behind him. He had no TV now—he was a conscientious objector—but he followed the Birmingham Campaign and the March on Washington on the radio and wished there were any blacks here in Vermont to whom he might demonstrate his fealty. The best he could do was set up an Alice B. Toklas bake sale on campus and send the proceeds to SNCC—a down payment on the day when someone like him might actually have to work for a living, rather than rusticating here at art school, and someone like Doonie might retire to the Riviera, rather than to Hollis, Queens.

Still, some barriers remained meaningful. In a moment of champagne-induced weakness, he had called Felicia’s on the phone at Christmastime of 1962, planning to apologize to Regan, belatedly, for having stolen her car. Instead, he got Stinking Lizaveta, Felicia’s new femme de chambre. “Who is this?” she said, while he fought to silence his breathing. “Is anybody there?” And there was the barrier of the mountains, which kept the seethe of the cities at bay. When President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas, it had felt like fiction, like a report from an imaginary place. After graduating, he moved even farther out into the countryside—and farther into his painting. His grasp of current events was therefore even more tenuous, and it was not until a couple weeks afterward, stopping into the post office in town to pick up his mail, that he would find his “Order to Report for Armed Forces Physical Examination,” covered in stamps marked

God only knows how the mailman had found him. He was supposed to have reported to his local draft board office two weeks ago—and that office was still, according to this document, the one on Church Street in Lower Manhattan. There was probably some simple way, he thought later, to change his address and thus avoid the three-hundred-mile haul back to New York in the ancient truck he was driving by then. But the sudden prospect of seeing it again, the city, his city, set his heart struggling like an animal in a too-small cage. The next morning, with his canvases and guitar and the boxes of art books he’d accumulated blocking the passenger’s side mirror, he was rattling back down the switchback highways, toward the Hudson River Valley and the vertiginous homeland beyond.

THE SERGEANT WHO INTERVIEWED HIM didn’t believe him about the homosexuality. “Of course,” he said. “Right. Just like every other wiseacre who walks through here.”

“No, but I mean I’m practicing.” What shame there had ever been his five-year exile had burned right out of him. And the thought of being bombed or shot at tended to focus the mind. Beyond the little glass room, fanblades whirred, long strips of flypaper wriggling eel-like, ends affixed to the fans’ steel cages. There were rows of metal desks with typewriters, and every time a form was pulled from a roller, it got tucked under a paperweight to keep it from blowing away. The interviewer, an apple-cheeked Southerner who still had a narrow strip of white at the back of his neck where his hair had been shaved, looked reasonably cool, but despite the tremor of the glass from all these pounding typewriters, not the faintest zephyr made it to where William sat, uncomfortably close to the desk.

“With a last name like yours, pal, you’d think there’d be easier ways to get a deferment.”

William was starting to get genuinely nervous. He’d long ago concluded that the loving God of his mother was a cartoon character, and he’d never much believed in even the nail-paring old man who stood back and let the Hamilton-Sweeney bullion pile up in the vaults, but at moments of high anxiety, he was not above imagining a pedantic and capricious demiurge out to punish him for his sins. “I smoke pot, too, if that counts against me.”

“If we let it, Mr. Hamilton-Sweeney, we’d lose half our conscripts.”

“Sergeant, what do I have to do to prove that I’m a fag?” What, indeed, was he doing? He was reaching forward, touching the man’s hand. “If necessary, we could go somewhere more private …” The din of typewriter keys seemed to die down. In a lower voice, he added, “Not that I’m attracted to you personally, you understand, but in the name of science—”

Then a bright pain buzzed in his ear, where the sergeant had struck him. “There are rules here, son,” he said, a minute later.

“Do they involve abusing your examinees?”

“You try to make a scene out of this, and I will have you in jail.”

“I’m not leaving without my paper,” William had the presence of mind to say, from his doubled-over position. The rubber stamp came down like a hoof. Unfit to Serve. The guy didn’t even look at him.

On his way out, he passed another officer, who had presumably come to see what the commotion was about. William brandished the paper, gave his ear a final rub, and paraded out into the waiting room where rows of ungroomed young men in bluejeans sat or stood, looking uniformly uneasy. If he expected them to applaud, he was mistaken; they stared as if he were an ostrich escaped from the pullet factory, and themselves condemned to become dinner. No matter; he was free. He hustled down the stairwell and burst through the double doors and into the brightness of the fatherland at noon.

It was 1966—the year of Black Power and Jerry’s Kids and “Eight Miles High.” Behind the bright blue flag of the sky, a man was roaming outside a space capsule, tethered only by a rubber umbilicus. Meantime, down below, the kempt façade of the world he’d left behind was crumbling. Streamers of pot rode the lunchtime air; swirls of graffiti had bloomed on the postboxes and on the cornices of municipal buildings; near where William had parked, two white kids, a boy and a girl, sat on a flattened box on the sidewalk asking stockbrokers for change, as if this were no more morally significant than asking the time of day. And it all seemed to William to betoken not decline but progress—to presage the breaking through of some more ecstatic and penetrating way of life. For how could his own father, the very incarnation of bourgeois order, have appeared on the streets where the son now stood? No, William thought, digging what little change he had out of his pocket to give to the coyote-faced girl: New York now belonged to the future. And it was going to protect him this time, he was sure of it. Never again would they let each other down.

18

THE 1973 NATIONAL MAGAZINE AWARDS were held in a flyblown banquet room way up near the Columbia School of Journalism—an area not known for its elegance. Then again, neither were journalists. And so, if you’d scanned the crowd before the lights dropped, your eye might have come to rest on a table not far from the stage, and a tall man whose nobility set him obscurely apart. It wasn’t in his clothes; the way he wore his rented tuxedo, it might as well have been a sportcoat and jeans. Nor was it in his bearing, exactly (a few crumbs from dinner still clung to his beard). Rather, it was something inside, something his physical surroundings couldn’t quite touch. This was the magazine reporter, Richard Groskoph. And as the plates were cleared and the PA system crackled on, he wasn’t even here. He was five minutes into the future, where his life’s work had just been vindicated.

He was a perennial nominee, it’s true, in the category of “Reporting Excellence,” but this year, he’d finally made finalist. The article in question had been pegged to the cancellation of the lunar landing program. Somehow, though (as was often the case with Richard’s work), it had metastasized into something else altogether. It had taken him the better part of two years to report and write, and when he looked around at his colleagues at nearby tables, the cream of ink-stained New York, he knew the competition was his to lose. He was close enough to the podium to see filaments of lint on the emcee’s black lapels. To picture the guy, a second-tier local Jerry Lewis, rehearsing his jokes in a kitchen in Rego Park, in boxer shorts and garter socks while his wife ironed his pants. Kids were wrestling on the floor of the next room and the teakettle was shrieking and there was too much going on for anyone to notice the shabby state of the jacket, and suddenly Richard’s colleagues at the table were applauding. Had he won? Had he really won?

He had not. An editor from The Atlantic Monthly was making his way forward to accept the award—slower than necessary, rubbing it in. Well, the prize had been meaningless all along, Richard reminded himself. Still, there were certain kinds of meaninglessness you wanted to experience from the inside, feeling flashbulbs caress your skin as you hoisted the little coppery statuette over your head.

It even had a name, he learned afterward; the “Ellie,” in tribute to the more glamorous Emmys. The chief fact-checker at the magazine was a sometime member of Richard’s Wednesday night poker circle, and he must have said something to the other guys, because that week they started in before Richard could get his coat off. “Don’t look so glum,” said Benny Blum, from City Hall. “Ellie comes to those who wait.”

“Though maybe this is a case of an Ellie in the hand …,” someone said.

“It’s not the writer the Ellie goes to, anyway. It’s the editor,” said the checker.

“That true, Rick? It was never your Ellie to lose?”

“Hey—don’t call him Rick,” another voice interjected. This was the bridge-and-tunnel baritone Richard had been bracing for: “Dr.” Zig Zigler.

He and Zig had been best friends as cubs in the city room of the World-Telegram, where the bulk of the table had met. Like many a drunk, Zig was a lot of fun, right up to the point when he wasn’t. Only Richard knew the details of the crack-up. Instead of resigning to protest “the whole canard of journalistic objectivity,” as he liked to claim, Zig had been fired for fabricating stories, and some combination of that secret and a subsequent fistfight in which he’d broken Richard’s nose had caused the rift between them. Zigler had emerged from a long drying-out period less fanciful and more caustic. More recently, he’d earned a measure of renown hosting an early-a.m. talk show on local radio. Each weekday, he took the calls of a dozen or more devoted listeners, along with headlines from the morning paper, as pretexts for a running state-of-thecity lament. Still, he envied Richard. And now, with everyone turned toward him, he dropped the other shoe. “A little respect, please. That’s National Magazine Award Finalist Richard Groskoph you’re talking to.”