City on Fire (49 page)

“Sure, if that’s what you want.”

“I just feel like we’ve barely talked lately.”

“I said yes, Mercer.”

“I know.” They were looking right into each other’s eyes. It was Mercer who had to turn away. “There’s that travel agent over on Ninth Avenue. I feel sorry for her, no one ever seems to go in. And Florida’s only a three-hour flight.”

“Why don’t we head north instead? Bruno’s got a place in Vermont I’m sure we could use for free.”

“In February?”

“I’m a little cash-strapped at present, Merce. Plus it would be romantic. Snowy midwinter, nobody around but us chickens … isn’t that the point?”

“Of course.”

“So let me phone Bruno as soon as this game is over.” As William turned back to the Knicks, Mercer continued to stare at the side of his face, unable to shake the feeling of defeat snatched from the jaws of victory while someone looked on from nearby. Then he told himself: No, this is good, this is perfect. They’d go far away from the drugs or William’s family or whatever was tearing them apart. Somewhere William wouldn’t be able to hide like this in plain view. Either he’d tip his hand, and Mercer would pounce, or Mercer would know for certain he’d been a damn fool, letting his imagination run away with him again.

37

JENNY NGUYEN WAS FIVE FOOT TWO IN SNEAKERS, small-chested, hippy (she thought), but with a fine, intelligent face. At rest, it could seem aloof, or wary, but when she laughed, which was often, her whole body relaxed. Her nails were bitten, her teeth even and vigorously white. She was a child of the suburbs. Also: an unreconstructed socialist.

Moving east, at twenty-four, she’d been a couple years out of practice, and was hoping New York would allow her to become again a force for justice in the world. This was the heart of the empire, after all, a powderkeg of alienated labor. Instead, she had ended up somehow as a wage-slave herself, dependent for her daily bread upon the rentier Bruno Augenblick, and the alienation that increasingly preoccupied her—quite against her will—was her own. She agreed with Bruno, for instance, that Valentine’s Day was a mercantile conspiracy meant to gin up commerce in the middle of February, otherwise the armpit of the year. But that didn’t mean it felt particularly righteous to be spending it alone.

Leaving the gallery that evening, she found another reason to curse her luck. She listened every morning for the weather report on WLRC; today, the weatherman had predicted wintry mix, rain turning eventually to sleet. But among the several ways she continued to fail to become a New Yorker was her perpetual inability to remember an umbrella—her assumption, when the sun was shining, that it would never stop. And now the sky was prematurely dark. Here came a cab kiting past with its sign lit, but a cab was an extravagance she wouldn’t be able to afford even if it were already raining, so she hurried toward the subway. She felt a drop, and then the sky opened like the hold of some great black bomber. By the time she reached her new building, she was soaking, hair in eyes, her canvas bag and the one-sheets within it a freezing, sodden mess.

Something about her absurd appearance or the sanctuary quality of the vestibule’s white light made it seem perfectly natural that the tall, bearded man then checking his mail should ask if she was all right. It was as if the rain had turned the costume she’d been wearing—competence, urbanity, purpose—translucent. As if he could see through to what was beneath, though his blue eyes would have had that penetrating quality anyway. His mailbox abutted hers, which meant his apartment must, too. Since moving in last fall, she’d sometimes heard music through the walls. She was fine, she said.

His voice was a broadcaster’s, unaccented. “You’re not fine, you’re soaked.”

There was a moment of awkwardness here, a little hurdle of activation energy they might never have cleared.

“Maybe I’ll catch a cold,” she said, “and then I won’t have to go to work tomorrow. It’s pretty much a win-win.”

The muted thunder of his laugh made her joke seem less lame. His name was Richard, he said. In his experience, a little Scotch would knock the damp right out of you. “The old ounce of prevention.”

“I just moved from the Lower East Side a few months ago. My cupboard’s bare.”

“I’ve got a bottle that’s currently just going to waste.”

At this, all kinds of flags went up, stories splattered across the Post in inch-high type, her father’s face when he’d pulled up to her first building, on Rivington Street, in the moving van. There was a whole set of codes governing the interaction of apartment-house neighbors: you stuck to small-talk and looked suspiciously on favors. But something about Richard—the gray in his hair or the casual slump of his shoulders, the assorted newspapers under his arm—made him seem safe. When she told him she was going to dry off and change, and then maybe she’d oblige, she didn’t think she meant it. Yet there she was fifteen minutes later in a tactically frumpy sweatshirt, being shown into his apartment. She appreciated that he didn’t lock the door behind her.

It was a two-bedroom unit, an L whose arms embraced her studio next door, yet the mess in the living room testified to his bachelorhood: loose typewriter ribbons and carbon papers, mountains of old magazines, terminal moraines of LPs jutting from the walls. A terrier emerged from this documentary chaos to snuffle the cuffs of her jeans. “Don’t mind Claggart,” Richard said. “He’s harmless.” Then she spotted in the corner, glowing wonderfully, a Wurlitzer jukebox. “Holy shit!” It was like being on a commuter train through the Bronx and seeing among the piles of crushed cars a pasture with a lone white horse. Richard seemed almost embarrassed. He’d snagged it for fifty bucks at a police auction, he said. He invited her to take a quarter from the hubcap that sat up top. Resisting the urge to linger, she punched in the first numbers she saw, a Sam Cooke, a Patsy Cline, and “Drift Away” by Dobie Gray, while he cleared a spot on the couch. Two glasses appeared. She waved her hand to stop him after an inch and a half of liquor had sloshed into hers. “Sláinte,” he said. They sipped and watched the rings of overspill evaporate from the faux-maple coffeetable. He made an unconscious sigh after swallowing. His radiators, like hers, were hyperactive. The little dog, achieving his lap, went still.

Jenny would have described the ensuing silence as not uncomfortable. And she would have described the man as elegantly disheveled, with his sleeves rolled to his elbows, his collar open, his shaggy beard. He’d brought the Scotch back from Scotland, he said finally, his eyes soft in the velvet light. Over there, it was just called whisky. Was it all right?

It was indeed, a soft blaze, a bloom that opened in her chest and moved outward from there, sending warmth to her extremities, filling her head with sweet fire. She asked what he’d been doing in Scotland.

He flushed. “A sabbatical, I guess you’d call it.”

“You’re an academic?”

“God forbid.”

“A priest?”

“Just a guy who had to get out of New York. When I need to pay the rent, I write.” And before she could say anything: “But what about you, Jenny? What do you do?”

In her experience with the men of this city, talking about work was the conversational equivalent of a general anesthetic. They would nod along and pretend to listen, but afterward would retain nothing. The gap between the enormous (to her) fact that she’d sold out and taken the job with Bruno and the scant impression it made on them left her lonely. Which was why she tried not to mention work, hewing to such comparatively scintillating topics as weather, sports, and that old standby, real estate. Besides, half the men the gallery brought her into contact with were gay, anyway. The mere fact that she’d given Richard this opening showed how rusty her social skills were. But he seemed genuinely interested, and she was surprised to find herself holding forth at length about the sorry state of contemporary art and the culture industry from which, on the Marxian view, it had become indistinguishable. “Actual artists are like mythological creatures,” she heard herself opine. “You hear about them, but a sighting’s pretty rare.”

Violins kindled on the jukebox. What about Warhol? he asked.

She’d seen him once coming out of a donut shop on Union Square, she said. And she had to admit that her heart went pitty-pat. “Sure, I’ll have a little more, thanks.” (Her host, she noticed, limited himself to the one glass.) “But can pop really be the endpoint of everything? Adorno and Horkheimer must be rolling in their graves.” The music ended. “Jesus, did I really just say that? This is why I should steer clear of hard liquor.”

He smiled. “This? This is mother’s milk. Though that’s if Mother’s a Celtic warrior-princess.” He rose to plug another few quarters into the jukebox. Trucker music, songs from the stray frequencies, from flyover country. “Which yours isn’t, I’m guessing.” She was used to the clumsiness of white people—their covert impatience to know which pan-Asian drawer to stick you in—so his relative straightforwardness was a nice departure. Besides, the whisky had softened her defenses.

“I grew up in L.A. My folks came from Vietnam before it was Vietnam,” she said. “On a plane, not a boat, but …” L.A. had always fascinated him, he said. It was one of the few places he thought he could live. And this somehow got her opening up about her old neighborhood, student radio at Berkeley, the activist years—stuff she didn’t ever talk about anymore. Sitting in an armchair under yellow lamplight in front of a black window in an apartment whose only other light was the milky rainbow of the Wurlitzer, Richard was like a giant, welcoming ear. Or a reflecting device, beaming her best self back at her. “Hey, this is kind of fun,” she said. “You want me to run next door and get some pot?”

Then something crackled on his desk. Richard glanced over at the mess of paper there.

“A mouse?” she asked.

“There seems to be a poltergeist around here lately. You believe in them?”

“Um. Not per se.”

“Sorry, it’s just my police scanner.”

“Oh, God. Look at me. You’ve probably got work to do.”

“That wasn’t a cue to go.”

But she was already on her feet, reasserting her independence. “I should. I’ve got things to take care of, too, and I’ve got to open the gallery in the morning for some rich asshole to come in and not buy things. But thanks for the drink, Richard. Any time you need a cup of flour or an egg …”

There was a twinge of pain in his face, as if a headache long deferred were now returning, and she had the sudden intuition that maybe he had been the one in need of human contact. And this settled the debt, took away whatever was starting to seem weird. Later, from her own apartment, she would think she heard through the wall a reprise of Dobie Gray. Where was that guy now? was one of her last thoughts as she plummeted toward unconsciousness. Because, talk about art, “Drift Away” was a fucking masterpiece. She was half in love with Dobie Gray.

A WEEK WOULD PASS before she spotted Richard again, this time at the homuncular grocery across the street, fishing in a pocket for change to pay for three different newspapers. “Parallax,” he said, mysteriously, placing a finger alongside his nose like a character from a novel. He waited for her to make her purchases and saw her back across the street. They watched the lighted numbers above the elevator door diminish, in a silence stiffened by its once having been breached. Then he mentioned, as the doors rolled back, that they’d barely made a dent in his whisky. That was an oversight that should absolutely be corrected, she said.

Soon they were in the habit of having a nightcap together, not every night, but close enough that she looked forward to it all day, and was disappointed if it didn’t happen. A tasting, he called it. Duck on over for a tasting. She was fascinated, in particular, by his fascination with everything except himself—a quality you rarely encountered in a man. He seemed to know the life stories of every other tenant in the building, past and present, and would tell them to her if she asked. “I hope that’s not because you’re inviting them all over for a tasting,” she said.

“Matter of fact, I’ve got an appointment at ten with Mrs. Feratovic, the super’s wife, if you wouldn’t mind hurrying things along.”

Or she would drape her legs over the arm of the couch and curl her unpainted toes and talk wryly about California, and about all the things she used to imagine her life would be like, back before she realized she wasn’t going to be able to save her own family, much less the world. His way of listening, of asking questions, made her feel funny and charming and, underneath that, needed. Unless that was just the whisky.

Or was she, she began to wonder, the teensiest bit attracted to Richard? He had to be pushing fifty, with wings of peppered brown hair that swooped down over his ears like a Hapsburg monarch’s, his nose had been broken in two places, and she’d decided in college that Freud was no friend to women, and so didn’t believe in the Electra complex. But compared to the men she’d met so far in New York—parties too loud to hear anyone speak, dial-a-dates in the cryptic style of Harold Pinter plays—the whisky ritual felt like what her father would have called an elegant solution. And if he were to make a move on her, she couldn’t say with one hundred percent certainty she would have resisted. Though what could anyone really say these days with one hundred percent certainty?

38

TO THE QUESTION of what he was doing in an idling van on the west side of Manhattan, the Prophet Charlie had no answer. Nicky certainly hadn’t offered one; had just yanked him off tinfoil duty on a day when he should have been in school and handed him a pair of the coveralls the Post-Humanists seemed to buy in bulk. McCoy, said the name over the pocket. Cool, thought Charlie: another field trip. With any luck, he’d be paired with Sewer Girl this time—maybe even get to watch her slip into her own coveralls and out of that ratty hockey jersey, now seriously the worse for wear. Instead, it was again D. Tremens who waited in the van out front. He finished wiring the radio back into one of the dashboard’s holes, yawned, and muttered something about thieves. Then, without so much as a greeting, he floored it around the corner.