City on Fire (74 page)

SHE EVENTUALLY GREW TO FEEL OKAY about the town. It was scruffy, beat-up, depressed, but resolute. And aside from the pizza, the food was surprisingly decent, though maybe anything short of awful would have seemed that way. If she had fantasies of further investigating the Goulds, amassing proof that they weren’t what they seemed, she didn’t follow through. Meaning there was no plan, she had no real reason still to be here. She killed the endless hours in local diners and cafés, or in her rented bathtub, forking moo shu pork from a box on the floor while she read her way through such plays as the college bookstore carried. At Vassar, she’d been a Shakespearean, but these were mostly contemporary, the theater she’d dismissed as absurd for absurdity’s sake. Now it seemed a higher form of realism. Here stood Regan, after all, on a stage cleared of other people, with no logical path forward. Just senseless stretches of time, static little vignettes separated by “blackouts”—which on the page, paradoxically, took the form of white space between starved black intervals of text.

LATE AFTERNOON, a funeral parlor on the East Side of Manhattan. Rows of empty folding chairs face a casket. The carpet is dark, the walls salmon-pink. Enter: a little girl, wearing the uniform of the private school she’s been out of for a week. Her younger brother, also at home, has been told she is visiting a friend down the street, but really she has come here, an hour before the start of the viewing neither of them will be allowed to attend, to say goodbye to her mom. Such is the compromise she’s reached with her father, after resorting to the tears he cannot bear to see her cry. Now, as he lingers in the doorway, she approaches the casket. The silver dress. The red hair, the eyes only slightly sunken. They’ve done a good job with the face; it’s just, something is off about the mouth. Mom’s had been so alive, always in motion, always with a smile or an ironic sigh—they should have had William come and sit for the likeness.

She had been the one big act of rebellion Daddy, from two long lines of Presbyterians, had ever managed: Kathryn Hébert, a New Orleans-born Catholic. And lately, as Regan entered her own refractory age, Mom had said that what seemed to be your problems were sometimes a function of not paying better attention to other people’s. Regan thought about this often. There was a man missing half his tongue who for a few months had sat on the landing at the subway entrance up by school, shaking a cup for change. Every time Regan passed him, there came a second when the desire to give almost overwhelmed her. But to reach into her satchel for her wallet would mean letting him see that she had a wallet, which would mean she would have to give tomorrow, and the next day; and looking at him without reaching for the wallet would mean she didn’t care; and using the other subway entrance would mean admitting she was ashamed of what after all everybody in this city felt, so she taught herself to hurry past without seeing. Then one night as they came back from the school production of By Jupiter in the company of other girls and their mothers, Mom had stopped on the landing to dig around in her purse. Twenty years in New York, and she could be so excruciatingly touristy. She met the man’s eye, pressed a bill into his hand, and then they’d moved along back to their privileged world, except for Regan, who lingered to watch the man take out his own wallet, place the bill inside, and then continue shaking. Her mother’s belief that you could know the first thing about anyone else’s problems struck her as both presumptuous and manifestly wrong—like the belief that God would be merciful, even when you weren’t asking. Hadn’t Mom suffered there in the end? She’d been rear-ended at an intersection in Westchester, on her way to a luncheon. The car skidded forward into the highway. A truck struck the driver’s side. It must have left no teeth, because the problem Regan has detected in the mouth before her is its dentures. Mom suffered a great deal. This is the other lie they’ve told William, that it was quick and painless; for two days, while she held on, Daddy had been with her at the hospital round-the-clock. It was when Doonie had become Doonie, and Mom had ceased to be Mom. What Regan knows: the universe has no author. And now neither does her mother. And so there is no one here to bid goodbye, as Daddy reaches for her hand.

THE SPRING AFTER HER ABORTION, Regan attended Mass at a Carmelite chapel near the bungalow she’d rented. On the Church’s own terms, her actions were meaningless, even damnable, but the service was in Latin, which meant she didn’t have to listen to the God stuff, and the nuns who mostly filled the pews felt comforting. The sisters, people in town called them, as if they were interchangeable. They never asked what had brought her. Maybe they knew they couldn’t understand. But no, she decided, that too was presumptuous. Then, on Wednesday nights, with a group of surprisingly unsanctimonious parishioners, she began making the rounds in a rickety truck that delivered meals to people who needed them. Handing coffee cups and hot foil containers through the truck’s open side-panel, she saw her mother in the subway. She made herself look into the faces of these men and women who slept in alleys and parking lots less than a mile from mansions built by industrialists and subsequently abandoned for the ’burbs. These houses had to sit empty, it occurred to her, to prevent a collapse in property values … in much the same way as a certain quantum of working-age Americans had to be kept jobless to ensure a buyer’s market for labor. So maybe Mom had been right about this much at least: Where exactly did Regan Hamilton-Sweeney get off feeling sorry for herself?

SHE WENT HOME TO NEW YORK, and then to college, believing she’d found what she’d been waiting for up there—a return to perspective. Six months away should have been enough. But back among people who didn’t know what had happened, she felt heavy again, as if more than one life remained within her. And as Felicia hinted now and then, the heaviness wasn’t just imaginary. Her body was still craving whatever had sustained her up in Buffalo. She would watch herself in the campus cafeteria, in the grip of some impulse, load up on instant mashed potatoes and bland chocolate cake and milk from the boxy steel milk machine. Later she would lock herself in the windowless attic bathroom of the sorority house. With the lights out, she would recall those other sisters, the Carmelites, and fantasize that they’d helped deliver a girl—a terrible warm bundle in the crook of an arm, her sobbing perfectly calibrated to Regan’s pain receptors here in the Chi-O john. Other times it was a boy. Sometimes she would hum, so quietly no one could hear, that nonsense song Daddy used to sing when William was in the pram. And now she would start to feel fat with guilt. Fat with grief. Finally, she would make herself vomit, as a fellow pledge had shown her how to do in more innocent days.

By mid-November her teeth had begun to feel funny, her hair to come off in her hairbrush, and she’d lost twelve pounds when she weighed herself, which was daily. It couldn’t have been good for her—she was smart enough to know that, even when the door was locked and the crazy person inside her emerged—but there seemed to be no bottom to her shame.

THAT WAS THE DECEMBER she met Keith, at the wrap party for Twelfth Night. The stage was the one place that felt safe to her now, and though the Sylvia Plath equation of authenticity with suffering had come to seem like teenage flummery, pain had deepened her acting. Or the role had: Regan disappearing into Viola disappearing into Cesario. She was still wearing stage makeup when she noticed the broad-shouldered and inordinately attractive young man watching her from the far side of the student-union basement. On the hi-fi was the Flamingos’ “I Only Have Eyes for You,” and already the song and smoke and bodies around them were melting into a tunnel of synesthetic glass.

It was important that Keith was everything the other boy wasn’t. Physically, he could have broken L. over his knee. She wouldn’t find out until their first official date that he’d played football, but it didn’t surprise her; the athlete’s thoughtless grace, that ease in his own body, made her feel nothing was ulterior. When he said he could walk her back to her sorority, if she wanted, what was on offer was simple protection. Companionship. And where most walkers watched the ground, Keith Lamplighter looked at the moon.

He was a senior at the University of Connecticut, studying to be a doctor, but his studies seemed not to take up much of his time. During exam period alone, he rode the bus to Poughkeepsie twice to take her out to movies. On the second of these dates, he asked for her address back in New York City. The brevity and good cheer of the Christmas card that arrived there the following week would sustain her through an outwardly miserable vacation. Amory had returned from overseas to help with the wedding arrangements, and Felicia had pressed Regan into trying on bridesmaid dresses. But the Goulds could not reach her mind, or the thoughts of Keith that filled it.

By the time she brought him to meet Daddy and William—by the time he stood up to Amory with his wondrous self-assurance—her weight had stabilized, and she had begun to feel, however improbably, that she was being rescued. She wanted to give Keith something in return, to reward him for being so well-adjusted, generous, handsome, bright, uncomplicated. What she would give him, she decided, was herself.

62

WHAT NICKY DIDN’T SEEM TO GET was that music had been a lark, a joke. William and Big Mike, both painters, already spent all day taking themselves too seriously. Venus cut hair for a living. Up until the oil crunch of ’74, Nastanovich had worked in a fish cannery in Union City, New Jersey. They didn’t want to treat the band like a job. They’d chosen the name via Ouija board, for God’s sake. They’d made up the track listing for the first LP before writing a single song:

SIDE A

Army Recruiter

VHF

Egg Cream Blues

Anyone Over 3O Gets It In The Neck

East Village Zombies/UWS Ghouls

SIDE B

Brass Tactics

Down on the Bathroom Floor

Dog Parade on Avenue B

It Feels So Good When I Stop

Someday, Comrade Fourier (The Lemonade Song)

Most of it had been recorded in one take, William declaiming spontaneous poetry in that mock-Cockney accent because he had no idea how to really sing. The Constructivist cover art, the uniforms Venus had sewn for their live act, the manifesto from which William would read aloud before each gig, and really the whole revolutionary mise-en-scène had just been a way to blow off steam, to fuck with people’s heads. If they’d managed to reach some kid at the back of the Vault or in a crash-pad in the East Village or wherever he’d first heard Brass Tactics, it had been at least partly accidental. Or did the music at some point cease to belong to those who’d made it? Because here was Nicky, throat clenched, trying to show William how to replicate that hitch in his own voice from “Dog Parade” where they’d had to splice together two vocal takes—an overly literal exegete of what was for him, if not for his bandmates, a sacred text.

Once Nicky had usurped the vocal duties entirely, each rehearsal became like an audition for the Philharmonic. If it had been up to him, they wouldn’t even have stopped to piss. He’d wander over to a corner of the garage in the middle of a song, unzip, and urinate in an old paint-can, still shouting into his microphone. And what could you say, really, in the face of such commitment? While Nicky practiced the same three-bar phrase over and over again, until the melody lost its meaning, William could only stare down at the guitar cords coiled densely on the floor. Sometimes, as a kind of art-school exercise, he attempted mentally to disentangle them, but the grimy little tabs of masking tape marking Channel 1 and Channel 2 were useless. It was impossible to tell anymore which cord led to his Danelectro and which to Nastanovich’s Jazzmaster bass and which to Venus’s Farfisa and which to the knockoff Fender Mustang Nicky wore like a talisman but never touched.

Not that William was painting much these days, anyway. He’d hit some kind of wall right around the time he’d realized no one was ever going to care what he did with a brush the way a thousand screaming teenagers seemed to care about what he and his buddies had banged out one weekend with two hundred dollars of recording time and a pile of borrowed gear. Plus his corpus to date sucked eggs. For months, Bruno Augenblick had been after him to take part in a group show at the gallery. He wanted to come by the loft to pick out two or three pieces, but to William, in the winter light through the sooty window, it all looked reactionary, redundant, underwritten by the motions of a system too vast to comprehend, the way planetary spin inflects the movement of wastewater down a drain. Another way of putting it might have been that he was blocked, but this raised questions he didn’t want to think about. He experienced it instead as a second-by-second disinclination to continue.

When his shoulder started to ache under the guitar strap, William would make eye contact with Venus and then stage some interruption—a beer run, a cigarette break—knowing full well that Nastanovich would use this as an excuse (Well, so long as Billy’s gonna smoke, I might as well go grab a sandwich…) and that his absence would buy them fifteen or twenty minutes of down time. Because it wasn’t really a sandwich the bassist needed as he slunk out into the night; it was a fix.

Given the slightest invitation, the tiniest recognition of their brotherhood of need, William would have followed. But he’d sworn to keep his own dabbling secret, as if to deny that heroin had changed anything at all. After that first, transformative nod in the office above the record store, he had resolved to wait a week before doing it again. It was like waiting to call a phone number someone had slipped in your pocket after a grope in a club. And when, after only thirty-six hours, he did dip back into the bag, he first tried snorting it like coke, while Eartha K. looked on from the futon. At some point in the past, H would have been exactly the sort of thing he hurled himself into headlong. But it was as if he sensed the gravity of the line he was soft-shoeing around. He’d seen the kids on Christopher Street who turned tricks to feed the habit, their potholed arms, hellish smiles the telltale gray-brown of teeth gone dead at the root. Some part of him wanted to preserve for as long as possible the option to opt out, to reveal himself to have only been playing at degradation.