City on Fire (62 page)

So she set Claggart down. Mr. Feratovic held open the stairwell door, and Claggart bolted for it. The boots stumped down the stairs in hot pursuit. Jenny had little choice but to follow. By the time she reached the first floor, Claggart was sitting rigid in the vestibule, facing the street. Nose-prints smudged the glass. “You see? I find him here, exactly like this. Your friend, Miss Nguyen, he is not home.”

“We’re just neighbors,” Jenny said, wondering why she was so quick to correct him.

“You want I should lock him up until your friend gets back?”

“No, I’ll watch him.” She picked the dog up and, afraid to look at the super’s face, slunk back upstairs. Claggart whimpered a little and tried to get a view over her shoulder, his canine heart thumping from exertion. But how had he escaped in the first place? Steel doors barricaded the stairwells. The recessed elevator buttons were ill-suited to paws. And to protect his record collection, Richard kept his front door locked. Everyone did now. Even socialists.

That night, she kept waiting to hear the snap of Richard’s deadbolt, the three claps with which he summoned Claggart whenever he returned home, the golden enchantments of the Wurlitzer leaking through the wall. But when she used the spare key he’d given her and fetched Claggart’s dogfood, the flat next door was cold and dim and somehow creepy. It didn’t look like the home of a man whose return was imminent. Still, there had to be a reasonable explanation—Richard loved the dog, and wouldn’t have just abandoned him. It was a conviction that would stay with her, however illogically, even after Richard’s body turned up a week later, waterlogged, bleached, knocking against the pier of a boat slip in Brooklyn.

SHE’D HEARD IT FIRST from Mr. Feratovic, who’d heard it, he said, from the police. She would remember later how the super had looked so seriously down at Claggart, who crouched behind her, growling. How he’d shifted his unlit cigar from one side of his mouth to the other without using his hands. How he’d steamed away, leaving her clutching the doorknob for support. The eeriness of the hallway then, as if she were the only astronaut left on a space station orbiting the earth. But she would not cry, she’d told herself, as great, silent tears rolled down her face; she would not give Mr. Feratovic the satisfaction, when there had to have been some mistake. She would spend hours flipping stations on the radio, searching for it. She got no word either way. By midnight, she was ready to hurl the appliance out the window, watch it shatter in a cheap supernova on the black street below. Then she remembered: the goddamn scaffolding would catch it.

IT WAS GRIMLY FITTING that the Daily News, that first weekend in May, should bear testimony of Richard’s death (an “apparent suicide”). After that, word spread through the building like a contagion. Was it true? the neighbors said. Have you heard? But to a person, they fell silent at Jenny’s approach. She wanted to tackle them, to sit on their chests until they confessed their suspicions about her and Richard, to make them repeat after her: “We were just neighbors!” Even at work, she felt conspired against. Paperclips scuttled to the bottom of her totebag. Paintings lost themselves in storage. The frosted skylight above her ticked with a shower that didn’t let up for weeks. What light it let in was murky and aqueous, and she kept imagining sinking into water herself, the light on the surface receding, her breath stuck in her throat. How could anyone just give up like that? she wondered. And again: How could he have walked out on the dog? Unless his death had been an accident? Was it worse to be an idiot or a coward? No, coward was worse. It would mean she was going to have to hate him forever—and hate herself, for not having stopped him, the night they’d quarreled. Never before had foul play seemed like something to wish for. Still, if his wallet had been missing … Or if he’d, like, been in a love triangle, mixed up with the wife of a KGB assassin … But she’d left paranoia behind her. The unaligned miseries of life on earth were proving to be more than enough.

Then one day near the end of the month, a coffee cup appeared on the desk before her—not one of the blue paper numbers the deli used, but a diminutive porcelain mug filled with espresso from her boss’s special machine. Steam curled off the crema. She didn’t dare look up; five seconds ago, she’d been muttering under her breath, imagining she was alone. “If you like, I can take it away,” Bruno said, finally.

“No, thank you,” she said. “It’s really thoughtful.”

He seemed to hear this as an invitation to take the chair next to her desk, his preferred place to sit and bitch about the caprices of his artists—though as far as she’d ever been able to tell, his days were spent mostly in upmarket cafés. “Something is bothering you, Liebchen.”

“I’m fine.”

“You should be sleeping more.” He would have liked nothing better than to manage every detail of her life, like a kid with a doll. It was the transparency of this instinct that Jenny appreciated, or the transparency of the transparency; Bruno knew himself to be living vicariously. In fact, he’d started to look lately like there was something keeping him up late with worry. “I have a doctor friend who could write a prescription.”

“I get more sleep than I know what to do with, Bruno. I’m the Wilt Chamberlain of sleep. I don’t need pills.”

“Ah. Well. I apologize, then …” This was new: he was offering, as if at great personal cost, to respect her autonomy. It was a kindness that almost made Jenny burst back into tears. She wanted to reward him, but how could she begin to explain the complications? Her hands wrestled on her desk. When she looked up, Bruno was giving her that X-ray look of his from beneath his shaved dome. “You know, when you first started here, Jenny, men turned to watch you walk down the street as if you were one of the ikons in the old paintings, a gilded circle around your head. Being men, they would be only too happy to collect you. But not Jenny Nguyen, I said. She’s too smart to be taken in. Of course nothing is more attractive than someone who needs saving.”

“Wow,” she said. “How much do I owe you, Dr. Freud?”

The weary look had returned to Bruno’s face, tempered perhaps by heat, or sadness. He took the cup and downed the espresso in a single draught. And then, oddly (because Bruno never touched anyone), he patted Jenny’s hand. “You will figure it out, is all I mean to say.”

CLAGGART’S EYES, moist and brown and rimmed with amethyst, were able to grow to a size that made the rest of him seem pitiably small and defenseless, and to project the purest distillate of melancholy—a melancholy from which only Jenny could save him, he would have claimed, had he had the power of speech. Every night, arriving home, she found him cowering under the U-bend of the toilet. His face furrowed, intelligent beneath its fur. The eyes sorrowed at her; at the door; at her again. She wanted to collapse on the couch, but whatever wraith had let him out that first time was no longer on hand, and invariably she surrendered. “Okay, hang on.” Perhaps selflessness would earn her a reprieve from grief.

Seven o’clock was some kind of citywide dogwalking hour, when hordes of ostensibly autonomous individuals, still in permutations of professional attire, rushed out of their co-ops tugged by leashes taut as waterskiers’ ropes, at the other end of which, straining like hairy engines, were spaniels, shih tzus, bichons frises. Jenny would just as soon have waited until later, avoided the butt-sniffing do-si-do that followed each time Claggart encountered another animal, the entanglement of leashes and compulsory good cheer, the conspicuousness with which she then had to hover over him with a baggie as he choosily chose a place to evacuate, so that no one would mistake her for one of them, the vast negligent army of dog-owners who left every sidewalk a mound of desiccated doo. Better, like the Puerto Rican guy from around the corner with his awful Chihuahua, to wait until midnight, to let the dog go where it went and leave it—an assertion of freedom she secretly saluted. But she needed to get to bed as soon as possible, because despite what she told Bruno, he was right: she’d contracted insomnia.

It wasn’t falling asleep that was the problem; one floor up from the avenue, where a dump truck’s unsecured tailgate could sound like an exploding shell, she’d gotten used to keeping a pillow over her head. But something inside kept rousing her hours before dawn. The bedsheet clung like a greasy bag. Her pulse thrummed in her head, a cloud of importunate bees. She would have said she’d been having a nightmare, but she couldn’t remember having dreamt about anything. The sleeping pills Bruno’s Dr. Feelgood eventually prescribed only made her more anxious. The major risk was you stopped breathing.

It might help her calm down, she thought, if she knew how long she’d have to wait for the sky to get light outside, so she bought a new clock-radio: a cheap, squat, vaguely toadish thing with a face that glowed when the batteries were in. Which just went to show how little Jenny knew about insomnia. What the glowing clock did, actually, was help her track how many hours it was taking her to fall back asleep, while the radio part got her hooked on an early-a.m. program called Gestalt Therapy. She recognized the form, or formlessness, from her hitch in college radio, and was fascinated despite herself by this fellow practitioner still beating his head against human foibles. But recognition wasn’t the same thing as rest.

Then came the morning walk, slaloming among the strollers. They appeared in clusters, as if by prior accord: fat white babies lounging like satraps in conveyances of aluminum, canvas, and elastic. The silence of these children gave her the creeps. And she resented the women who pushed them, their modish footwear, their secret reservoirs of income, their breasts swollen into the likenesses of fruit. The petit-bourgeoises. The Bettys, she used to call them, for short. This resentment, though, had begun to seem less political than she’d hoped. It was the resentment of the eight-year-old who wanted to be picked for kickball at recess, if not first, then at least not last. Anyway, the Bettys seemed not to see her, or the city dying around them. Spring was at its peak, and they moved toward the park’s cruddy grass like sun maids, two or three abreast, singing hymns of fecundity.

It was at this point that Jenny began to contemplate the likelihood that she was not gifted with any special world-historical mission or insight, that she’d never been any different from—by which it seemed she’d meant “better than”—anyone else. At nineteen, she’d built a whole belief system around the premise that there were two kinds of people, those who fought for a better world and those who only wanted what everybody else did. Now there seemed to be just one kind of person, inching from the former column to the latter. Indeed, she’d begun to see a peculiar symmetry between the Marxist narrative of progress to which she still wanted to subscribe and that of triumphal capitalism. That is, they seemed equally fantastic. Maybe she’d been a rube to believe in anything but the blind ontic quest to ensure one’s genes survived. And if there were an Invisible Hand, its finger would have been wagging at her; she never should have gotten her own leash tangled with a middle-aged alcoholic’s. But at least there was Claggart. “Come on, puppy,” she’d say, and would lead him gently away from the fancy treebox he’d been sizing up for a deposit. They were wronged parties, both of them, and whatever this thing was, they were in it together now.

53

CORRIDORS GONE DARK after the last bell; the puddled light of trophycases; the squeak of sneakers on a gym floor; corkboard announcements stirred by cross-breezes; vapors of ammonia; summer like a flash of thigh beyond a janitor-propped door … so this, Keith thought, was what six grand a year got you. It took him a while to find the Lower School, and really he only knew he’d arrived there when he spotted Regan in a small plastic chair at the hallway’s far end. One leg, crossed over the other, bobbed impatiently in the air. But what did she want him to do? He’d had a two-thirty phone conference with the U.S. Attorney’s office to set ground rules for an actual sit-down. Not that he could tell her that. She held her head stiff when he bent to kiss her cheek.

“Sorry,” he said. “Traffic. You look terrific.”

It was true; a little jolt of jealousy shot through him whenever he saw her leading a press conference on TV. She’d taken up running, Cate had said. She was still in work clothes now, signifying, perhaps, her willingness to drop pressing business and race uptown for the sake of the kids. Though in fact she could have been an hour late and no one at the school, with its Hamilton-Sweeney Memorial Library, would have said anything. And if Regan was always the Virtuous One, the Punctual One, what did that leave for Keith, except irresponsibility?

There being only the one chair, he leaned against the wall to wait. She obviously didn’t want to talk, but he had to assume he’d been summoned here, two weeks before final exams, because of Will. He’d been so withdrawn lately. Though it was hard to establish a basis for comparison. Once, during the dark years—or what he’d thought were the dark years—Keith had gone out to run some errands, completely forgetting Will was even in the apartment. Returning, he heard a noise from the bedroom, and stuck his head in to find his son sitting on the floor, utterly absorbed in some megalopolis he was engineering out of tinkertoys. In this, as in so much else, the boy took after his mother. Keith was thinking about the affinities between self-effacement and self-assertion when the door to Regan’s left opened. “Miss Spence will see you now.”

“Why’d you wait out there?” he murmured, following Regan into a beautifully appointed waiting area. Eames chairs surrounded a table of austere and vaguely Nordic wooden toys. Their names would be impacted, diacritical: Jûngjø. Fërndl. On the wall a white canvas held a single blot of red, menstrual in exactly the same way the toys were Swedish. Even the secretary was cute, but given the various givens, checking her out would have been a mistake.

She’d wanted to present a united front, said his wife.

“You sure you weren’t just trying to rub in that I was late?”

Before she could answer, they were being pushed—metaphorically, of course—into an inner office.