City on Fire (63 page)

The headmistress was not the one he’d been expecting … not, at any rate, the portly old lady with whom he’d clinked glasses at a Hamilton-Sweeney gala long ago. She’d been whatever was the female equivalent of avuncular, and he’d felt so good about entrusting his son to her that he’d written out a donation to the annual fund the very next day. But that event, along with the rest of the early ’70s, seemed sunk now beneath layers of tawny hilarity, like a waterlogged cherry at the bottom of a champagne flute, and the woman resettling herself behind the desk was, by contrast, a string bean. Her office was lit by a half-dozen floor lamps, as if direct light would have turned her to dust. And according to the stenciling on the door, she was not the Headmistress, but the Head of School. Each school—Lower and Upper—must have had its own Sturmbannführer, under the supreme command of that jolly fat dowager whose company he wished for now.

Transitions being for the intellectually frivolous, Miss Spence turned to Keith. “I’m sure Regan has told you,” she said, “I asked you both here today to discuss your son.”

“Amazing kid, isn’t he?” Keith said. “And you’ve done a great job with him. We’re thinking one more year and he’ll be ready for Groton.”

“One of us is thinking,” Regan interjected. This had become another bone of contention; he’d decided boarding school might be just the thing to pull Will out of himself, the camaraderie of early manhood, the sense of being liked and likeable that never really goes away. In the New England of Keith’s imagination, it was always autumn, always football season, auburn light from over the Berkshires raking long shadows of uprights across the manicured fields …

“These obviously are decisions to be made, important ones for William’s future,” said Miss Spence.

“Will,” Keith said. “William’s his uncle.”

“But what we’re here to focus on today is the present.” She slid a document across the desk. “As you’ve no doubt heard, they’ve been reading Shakespeare in his English class. I wanted to share with you a recent assignment.”

Her neutrality of tone could not disguise the fact that she was about to criticize his son; Keith’s impulse was to defend, to argue. “What is this, Hamlet? Seems like a heavy lift for sixth grade.”

“Rigor is what we offer here, Mr. Lamplighter. You’d find they follow a similar curriculum at Groton.”

The paper had been typed, with few obvious errors, on the old Remington that had gone missing from Keith’s study after Regan had moved out (along with, it seemed, everything else that had made home home). He recognized the crooked z, the number 1 used for lowercase ls to get around the broken key, the faint ghost of a t that haunted every g. , ran the title. And above that in red pen: . Regan made only a token attempt to peer over his shoulder. As he asked for a few minutes to read, Keith’s heart was in his throat; he had a distinct feeling of being ambushed.

In addition to being well-typed, the essay was surprisingly well-written. The sentences were blunt and lucid, yet the argument was intricate. According to his son, Hamlet had been misunderstood for centuries. Its protagonist was the victim of “outrageous fortune” only to the extent that the audience took his word for it. What if, on the contrary, Hamlet was a kind of unreliable soliloquist, hiding from us—and perhaps from himself—the full range of his homicidal impulses? That is, what if Hamlet had gotten exactly what he wanted? The plot, far from being a farrago of hems and haws, might be seen as a series of wish-fulfillments. And in this resided the play’s uncanniness: each act hinges on a death the hero has secretly longed for. For Examp1e, Will wrote,

The murder of the father, which my research says is Ham1et’s big conf1ict, in fact so1ves a bigger one. Looking at the textua1 evidence supp1ied by his subjects and his widow, O1d Ham1et was a terrib1e sovereign and husband. (Let’s not dwe11 on his fai1ings as a father, but p1ease note the huge gui1t trip he 1ays on his son.)

Keith skipped ahead.

Say Ham1et knows it’s Po1onius behind the curtain? The “accident” removes both a person who wou1d punish him for def1owering Ophe1ia and the pressure to make her “honest” (i.e., a wife). Throughout the p1ay, there’s a part of Ham1et that shrinks from women’s natura1 whorishness. We can see this when

Will had been experimenting with comments like this about women on recent visits to the old apartment. Almost as if he wanted to see what his dad would say. Keith knew this to be divorce static, deviations from the boy’s gentle and Regan-like mean, but when he’d heard Will one day, on the phone with some friend of his, refer to his mother as a bitch, he’d grabbed his beautiful smooth little aristocratic chin and insisted that if he was looking for someone to be mad at, he should be mad at him. At Keith.

Ophe1ia’s 1ike the inverse of Gertrude. Ham1et becomes more obsessed with her the more she ho1ds back what he wants. Once she gives up her “virtue,” he gets bored. So Ophe1ia’s suicide frees him to not have to fee1 gui1ty anymore about his own horniness. It wou1d be a stretch to say Ham1et ki11s her, but in her death a11 his repressed wishes come together––punishment, purity, ob1ivion––in a symbo1ic “conf1ict” that removes any rea1-1ife obstac1e he might have to dea1 with. Which may be why it’s on1y a hop of a few scenes to the so1ution of the other “prob1ems.” Or rather, to the p1aywright waving his wand to make them go away. In conc1usion, if we 1ook at the origina1 Greek meaning of the term “hero”––“chosen of the gods”––Ham1et emerges as one, despite because of his apparent passivity. Or wou1dn’t you say that if he wants exact1y what he gets, he must get exact1y what he wants?

Keith continued to stare at the page, puzzled. When he raised his head, finally, both women were looking at him as if he were the one who’d written it. He forced a smile. “Well, I think it’s safe to say it’s not plagiarized.” The string bean asked if he didn’t find it unsettling. He scanned her face for subtext, but found none, which freed him to be irritated. “It’s an argument. Isn’t that the point of the exercise?”

She leaned back in her chair. “There is an attitude toward women here that his teacher and I find frankly disturbing.”

Funny that she should say this; the impression he’d got was of an absolute contempt for men. Selfish, careless, predatory men. “I can assure you, Will has nothing but respect for women. He’s a sweet, sweet boy.”

“Intelligent, too,” Miss Spence said. “He was probably hoping you’d see this.”

Grudgingly, because it felt like giving up, Keith admitted that, yes, he could see that.

“The question is, what is he trying to communicate?”

“I think what Miss Spence is saying is we need to do more to address his feelings about what’s going on at home,” Regan said. By we, she meant you, to which Keith wanted to say, Well, you’re the one who asked for a separation. But it already felt as if they were sitting here in nothing but their underwear, baring their slackening waistlines and winter-pale skin to the impassive Head of School.

“I’ll talk to him, Regan. I’ll take care of it.” Regan searched his face. “I swear.”

Sometimes, Miss Spence was saying, it was hard for grown-ups to remember how delicate children could be. Keith hated the way she said “grown-ups.” Also the way she kept referring to Will as a child. She talked, in fact, as if he himself were a child. Over-enunciating, gesturing with her prehensile hands. “Next year is a placement year, and without more continuity between home and school in terms of helping him emotionally through what may be a difficult time, we’re frankly concerned he may not be ready for the rigors of Upper School.”

“Are you kidding? Have you seen his Stanford-Binet? Besides, the freaking library—”

Regan jumped in. “Okay. That’s enough. You heard my husband. He’ll talk to him.”

Miss Spence appeared to have tasted something sour. He imagined her face freezing this way, but this was probably just the kind of misogyny she’d been getting at. He had the uncomfortable sense she’d turned her teacher-vision on him, and could see everything.

It was with gratitude, then, that he followed Regan back outside minutes later, into damp fresh early June. To anyone watching the front of the school, they would have seemed like routine parents on a routine visit, except that Regan kept slightly ahead, tapping down the steps in her black pumps. He touched her arm. “Hey. I appreciate your standing up for me in there.”

Only then did he see the blood rising in her cheeks. “Did you think I … You embarrassed me, that’s why. Honestly, sometimes it’s like you’re the teenager, Keith.”

“She’s overreacting. He’s a great kid.”

“He’s been a great kid. There’s a certain kind of kid like this, people love him, but he hits thirteen and—”

“He’s not going to turn into your brother.” She turned a shade redder. He tried to steer them back onto more familiar ground. “Honestly, I really do wonder if boarding school wouldn’t do him a world of good. And then it would give him a decent shot at Harvard—”

“You think Harvard is what I care about right now?”

“Of course not,” he said. “I’m only saying … Obviously, what we care about is if he’s happy.”

“Well? Does he seem happy to you?”

In fact, the opposite. Last week, out the window, Keith had watched Will skateboarding down on the street. And only at that distance, cutting sloppy ellipses between parked cars, the wind in his too-long hair, had he seemed to cut loose. At the boarding school, he could be free to feel the thing he felt down on the street—free from the spectacle of his grandfather’s case, free from the depressing custody visits, free from the toxic presence of Keith himself. He was willing to deprive himself of his son, if it meant allowing Will to stay young a little longer. Or did he simply want to escape from the sense that Will, too, could somehow see inside him? “No, I guess he doesn’t,” he said.

“Then don’t try to sell me on this, please.”

“I don’t understand the hard line here.”

“William went to boarding school. You know that.” She seemed on the verge of saying more, but was Regan, and so held on to herself.

“Maybe we could consider sleepaway camp this summer. As a trial run …” He couldn’t seem to stop talking about this. It was the one form of connection available right now.

But her arm was up, a taxicab sloping toward the curb where she stood. “I have somewhere to be.”

“We could split a cab,” he said.

“I’m not going where you’re going.”

“You don’t know where I’m going.”

“Wherever it is, I’m not going there.”

He watched her slide into the backseat. In its sober skirt, her ass was possibly a bit broader than the Lower School secretary’s, but had more character. It had always been one of her best features, and anyway, he was glad to see her looking healthy again. Separation suited her. Unfortunately, what suited her didn’t always suit him. This maybe had been the problem to begin with. Still, he’d seen the look on her face back there; no matter what she said, she really had jumped in to defend him. Didn’t that point to the possibility that she still loved him, too? And as the yellow cab lost itself in a school of its fellows, as he stared after a sunstruck rear window that may or may not have been Regan’s, he had an urge to take a knee, kiss the ground, cross himself for luck. Because what she wanted, she’d obviously been signaling, was for him to act on those feelings. To change his life. To finally figure out how he was going to win her back.

54

WHAT SHE WANTED, ACTUALLY, was an airtight door to come down behind her, cleaving them cleanly, so that she could be angry at Keith without being angry at herself. Yet the boundaries were still so porous that a mere backward glimpse at him dwindling on a streetcorner could leave her reeling. Outwardly, of course, she kept her composure; these last months had taught her how to stand up to cameras, to deliver careful non-answers into fascicles of microphones. But inwardly she was a trained animal, inclined to leap into Keith’s arms the second he showed her kindness. The only solution would be to create between them some obstacle so large neither of them would be able to get around it.

The obvious candidate was Andrew West. He’d been helping her with the recent “setbacks” at Liberty Heights. (The Bronx had been in flames since the late ’60s, but as soon as the inferno touched one of their projects, it required a public statement.) And with how to sell to the press the plea deal that was now going to keep Daddy out of jail. Well after the twenty-ninth floor’s other denizens had packed it in, they remained in her office. The night janitor’s Hoover could be heard worrying a patch of carpet nearby. Light pooled on piles of prospecti and spiked phone messages. And on Andrew’s neck, bent over the desk at the same angle as the anglepoise lamp. His smell reminded her of Keith’s aftershave, a ceramic bottle of which had followed her to the new place. In the first days after the move, looking through boxes in search of something else, she used to brush against the raised sailboat logo, used to lift the stopper and breathe in the simple blue scent. But Keith’s simplicity was the kind that made complications for everyone else. Like how he used the aftershave to cover the smell of the cigarettes she knew he smoked. Which she herself had smoked, the year before he rescued her. Andrew, by contrast, wore only Speed Stick, and sometimes now in the warmth of their little conspiracy, she imagined she smelled his sweat. He hadn’t asked her out again, after that once, so she was going to have to take the lead here. Yet she couldn’t quite do it.

Later, she would lie in bed with her eyes open until the dark became a palimpsest of grays: chair, nightstand, the small gray stack of plays she’d checked out from the library back in March, determined to become again the literate person she’d once been. What had happened? Marriage had happened. The indictment had happened. The thing with Will. Work and cabs and dinner and dishes and every other blessed thing that left her here in a pile on the bedclothes, almost teary from exhaustion but still not ready to sleep. She’d been having this dream lately about a kind of gate, an alabaster thing as tall and deep as the triumphal arch down on Washington Square, but with a central passage too narrow to see through. The gate was unlocked now; she was supposed to enter. But she didn’t know how things looked at the far end—only that you couldn’t come back to what you’d had to let go of in order to fit through. And what if no one waited there to receive her?