City on Fire (72 page)

Later, when the tables had been cleared and a seven-piece band brought in to approximate the golden hits of Felicia’s youth, they danced together three times. Regan at that point still loved to dance, still loved the way it made her feel. She had played the Cyd Charisse role in the sophomore production of Brigadoon, and as her feet moved over the scrubby grass, she imagined she was back there, behind the footlights. Again, though, when L. wanted to kiss her, she shied away, she supposed because by that point she was too sloshed to feel in control, but perhaps really because she sensed in his wandering hands an impatience that gave her pause.

It was on this same sandy expanse that some of the younger men and the kids got up a game of touch football late Sunday morning, before a group luncheon at the island’s one nice restaurant. Whether it was suppressed recklessness or her second mimosa or the unstable interaction between the two, Regan decided to join in. Two of the Company’s junior vice presidents chose up teams, and out of deference to Daddy, she got picked early, even though she was the only girl. She and L. were on opposite sides. They ended up shadowing each other, offense and defense.

And how could she have failed to notice before how suitable L. really was, in his generic way, the summer-tanned calves beneath his rolled khakis bursting into motion, churning up the sand like a million fragments of light? Then again, maybe these thoughts were somehow emanating from her uncle-to-be, who stood on the back porch, having sworn off the sport as “too physical.” Because after the ball had been handed to her for the first time all morning; after L.’s own ardor or fighting spirit had gotten the best of him and he’d burst upon her and laid her out, in flagrant violation of the protocols of two-hand touch; after she’d lain on her back on the sand with the wind knocked out of her and her hair whipping around her head and L.’s beery breath in her face and his thigh like a marble pillar between her legs; when she’d turned her head like a little kid to see how others would react before deciding whether to laugh or cry, it had been Amory, some fifty yards away, her gaze had landed on. The other man on the porch—L., Sr.—had turned toward him, oblivious to the cries of foul gone up from the sand. But Amory, hands on the railing, was unmistakably focused on her. She began to laugh, and the boy on top of her did, too, his golden face flushing red. It was almost like acting. You decided to feel something, and then you felt it. She could see the cracked lenses of L.’s glasses and the pores of his upper lip. Their heaving bodies pushed apart and fell together, and then he rolled onto his back. They lay with the backs of their hands touching and belly-laughed at the lowering sky.

It was also Amory who proposed that the two teams, victor and vanquished, walk down to the restaurant before it started raining. Regan felt as if it were not her but some larger force operating through her that murmured something about taking a shower. She couldn’t have said to what degree something similar was at work in L. when he, too, opted out.

In the empty kitchen, over gin and tonics, they confirmed again that there were no hard feelings. “It’s just that sometimes a feeling gets the better of me,” the boy said. As he edged around the counter toward her, she slipped farther away and said she should really shower. There was still grit in her teeth.

Under the hot water, time moved too fast and not fast enough. She couldn’t decide if she wanted the luncheon expedition to stay away or come back. She would get out once the air temperature of the bathroom matched the warmth of her skin.

L. caught her in the hallway when she had only a towel on, as if he’d been waiting there. Kissing, fumbling, they moved through the gray house. Upstairs into who knew whose silent room, reeling backward laughing. Only not so silent now. From the roof came the first experimental spatter of rain. Plink. She scrambled up so that the bare part of her back was pressing against cold wood. “We just met,” she blurted. She laughed again a little nervously and pulled the towel he was tugging at tighter.

“Come on,” he said. “It’ll be fun.”

The hush that followed was unsettling. In the city, the continuous buzz and shudder of planes and cars and industrial machinery reminded you that the outside world still existed, and thus that you existed for it. Now, propped up against the headboard, she could see beyond the cross-stitch of drops clinging to the windowscreen only sky … and so couldn’t quite be sure what was real. Was it her laughter at the chill of his hand on her thigh? Or was it her knees pushing away his torso in the unlamped room? To some more sober self the scene felt sinister, like something on a movie screen that makes the audience mutter, Don’t. “Don’t,” she heard herself say. But he must not have heard. He had his khakis undone, the towel rucked up around her waist. At that moment, the outside world became imaginary; if she could have gone downstairs, she would have found that everything, people and dunes and lifeguard stands and jetty, had been raptured away in an atomic flash. Was she losing her mind? She’d consented to be kissed at first, she remembered, her ear, her neck, while between her thighs his hand might have been looking for misplaced keys. Or had that been the gin talking? Was this the gin pressing against her crotch? Her body was submerged in a liquid that kept her from moving, while her head reeled through space. Should she yell for help? No one would believe this wasn’t what she wanted. She was too drunk. And maybe he was too drunk, too, to know what he was doing. At any rate, there was no one around to hear. Even the servants were gone. “Don’t,” she begged, adding a fake laugh so he’d know she would forgive him if only he’d stop. But he had her wrists now in his surprisingly strong hands, and wouldn’t look her in the face, and he didn’t stop, until he did.

WHEN HE’D GONE, she slunk half-naked to her bedroom on the third floor, ducking below the windows, and locked herself in, ready to play dead at the first sign of his return. She let her crying become audible only after hearing a door slam downstairs. He’d thanked her warmly afterward, as if she’d given him a gift. But if it had really been a gift, why did it hurt so much? What she wanted now was her father, or her brother, but she was too ashamed to go find them, and scared he would come back first. Eventually, she crammed her things into her suitcase and limped down the back stairs, pausing at landings to listen. She hurried to the car without leaving a note. Her windshield wipers were useless against the squall that had blown up. It was to be a rough ride back on the ferry. She would spend it locked in the lavatory, kneeling before the toilet. Only on the mainland, in a restroom behind a Sinclair station, would she discover the small perfect circle of blood in her underwear.

THERE WAS A PAUSE on the phone when Daddy reached her in Poughkeepsie that Monday, a thick bolus of shame and anger and loathing that stopped her throat. “I was feeling sick to my stomach,” she lied. “So I decided to drive back a little early. Sorry I didn’t tell you; I didn’t want to rain on your parade.” He didn’t think to probe the logical gaps here—just said, in his abstracted way, that he hoped she was feeling better. Having spent the whole drive back rehearsing the part she would now be expected to play, she told him she was.

It would take her another month, spent mostly in bed, to decide to tell her father what had actually happened that weekend. And then a month after that, and another missed period, to screw her courage, et cetera. She knew she wouldn’t be able to get the words out over the sorority house’s communal telephone, and so, on a Friday in mid-November, she drove down to Sutton Place. What she found there, though, was odd: to the usually neat stoop clung hundreds of yellow leaves, their skeletons like darker tracery. She remembered for some reason how she and William used to collect them, and how Doonie would iron them between sheets of wax paper strewn with the shavings of crayons. Stained glass, they’d called it. The reason was that she was stalling.

The first floor was silent, save for the kitchen. There, she came upon Doonie bent over a shipping carton, a wisp of hair escaping from her bun, more white in it than there used to be. Part of her wanted to bury her face in the cook’s broad back, smell that old sturdy smell, let her tears soak the cotton. But Regan was older now, too.

“Miss Regan,” Doonie said, looking up. “I didn’t expect you back.”

“What are you doing?” Regan nodded at the newspaper-wrapped parcel in Doonie’s hand, hating the note of command that had entered her voice. Doonie looked equally surprised to find it there.

“Some of these pots and things I bought out of my own purse over the years. Kathryn and I always had an understanding I’d take them with me when I left.”

“But you’re not leaving us, are you?”

Doonie raised a finger to her lips and motioned toward the open door. “It’s not my choice, Regan, but in thirty-five years, I never cooked a haute cuisine, and I ain’t about to start. You’ll have to talk to your father about it.”

Regan stormed into the hall. They were getting rid of Doonie now, too? Indecent, was what it was. She’d nearly forgotten her purpose in coming here when she entered the unlit living room and saw the silhouette facing the bay window. Beyond it, in the courtyard, a Japanese maple had exploded into red, filling the squares between the mullions with fire. Amory Gould. The nervousness she’d always felt around him had now thrown off its mask. It was revulsion. Her instinct was to run, but at that moment something made him turn around, and a weightless smile replaced whatever had been on his face. “Ah, Regan! Let me pour you a drink.” Without any gesture toward turning on the lights—without, indeed, seeming to notice they were off—he moved toward the credenza.

“I’m …” She swallowed. “Thanks, but I’m not thirsty.”

“But surely you’ve come to celebrate the good news?” When she didn’t respond, he pressed a glass into her hands. The company’s largest competitor, he said, had just that morning agreed to a takeover. “This adds extensive interests in Central America to our holdings. And it stands to make you”—he clinked with his own glass the glass that hung between them—“a very wealthy young woman.”

“Who is it?”

“Who is who?”

“The competitor,” she said, though she already knew the answer. The wine was sickly sweet, cloying. She drank not for congeniality, but for courage.

“I introduced you at the engagement party. The son seemed to take a shine to you. I felt certain you would make a fine match.” His face swam up through the gloom, a lamprey from the shadows. “Or was there another misunderstanding? In any event, everything worked out fine, Regan, and you’ll learn that sometimes self-interest means putting long-term security ahead of affairs of the heart. Anyway, let’s drink to your father. Nothing, I’m sure, could spoil this moment for him. They’re in the office upstairs as we speak, blowing dry the ink.” And in case she didn’t get the point, which was to keep her big mouth shut, he clinked her glass again, hard enough that a bit of his own wine leaped in. Almost as if he’d meant to infect her, she would think.

60

ACTUALLY, HER NAME WAS NOT JENNY. This was a condition she shared with billions of other people living at that time, but most were oblivious to it, whereas Minh Thuy Nguyen thought about it at least once a day. Her father and mother had emigrated from Vietnam back before anyone knew to feel sorry for them. Not that there was any reason to feel sorry, Dad said—the country had been at war on and off for a thousand years, like most of the rest of the globe, and anyway the Nguyens weren’t living in some shell-shocked Indochinese village but in a wide white ranch house in an unincorporated canton of the San Fernando Valley where they didn’t pay city taxes and where in the early evening when the light homed in low over the mountains and the DDT truck rolled through to spray for mosquitoes, the yards’ synchronized sprinklers could have been the fountains of Versailles, wasting their bounty on the ridiculous desert grass. But white people turned out to be profligate with their pity, too; as early as middle school, other kids had started looking at her with that expression that said, Vietnam … Yikes! And so, on the first day of sixth grade, when Mr. Kearney called the roll, Minh Thuy had corrected him. “It’s Jenny.”

“Jen-yi?” he ventured.

“Jenny.” She was only twelve, but already she knew he couldn’t care less what she called herself. California was beautiful in exactly this way: so long as you kept your lawn green and your grades up, you could do any weird old thing you wanted. And Jenny was one hundred percent Californian.

The new name split her life in two. There was, on the one hand, home: the shady world where she continued to answer to Minh Thuy. Her mother, a migraine sufferer, kept semi-sheer drapes drawn through the bright hours of the day, so that the sunken living room stayed dim. Minh Thuy could barely make out the jade Buddha and the crucifix butted up like bookends on the mantel there, the photographs of overseas relatives, or the volumes of Victor Hugo on the desk where her father composed his weekly letter to the editor of the West Covina Times. She might hear him in the kitchen chopping vegetables, the chock of his knife on a cutting board of space-age polymer, while her mother lay on a straw mat by the coffeetable with a washcloth over her eyes, as if dead. (The softness of American beds overwhelmed her when she was having an attack, she claimed, though surely she could have found someplace less conspicuous to lie down.) The migraines provided a handy alibi for why Minh Thuy never invited friends over, for why every sleepover or Brownie troop meeting took place at Mandy’s house, or Trish’s, or Nell’s. Only later did she realize her parents had used the migraines as an excuse, too. She would think back on Dad’s wet bar, a hundred dollars’ worth of liquor bottles to which he took a dustcloth each Saturday, as though at any second the house might fill with his colleagues from Lockheed. She would think of the hi-fi bought on installments from Sears, used only for the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts on Sunday afternoons. Of Mom and Dad sitting stock-still on the davenport, listening to Samson et Dalila. She would recall the strange smells of her friends’ houses, one like fish food, one like cottage cheese; she couldn’t remember which was which, but if they smelled strange, how must her own house smell to them? The world of Minh Thuy was like an odor that, terrifyingly, she could not herself detect. But within those walls she’d remained an obedient child, saying her prayers, eating soup in the summertime, practicing her violin in the garage so as not to disturb her mother.