City on Fire (79 page)

She made a feeble raspberry. “Shut up, Charlie. Listen to me. This guy won’t let himself … not even the people like fucking blasting their love at him. People all around, who just want to love him.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“I worry about you,” she slurred.

“You worry about me? That’s funny, Sam. Do you worry like I might pass out in a stranger’s basement and choke to death on my own puke?”

“I worry you’re making yourself lonely, because—”

“I’m not lonely,” he said, or breathed, and then, as if to prove it, he leaned down and kissed her. For seconds, his eyes stayed closed; easier this way to imagine that she knew this was him, that this was what she wanted, their lips pressing together, hers still faintly acid, and that this was why she didn’t stop him. Really, he discovered when he pulled back, it was because she had passed out, head centimeters from his fly. He sat in the dark for a long time after that, trying to see her clearly.

“SHIT SHIT SHIT.” He shook himself awake. His legs were numb, his face sticky. The pop of fireworks had long ago stopped. What time was it? Mom was going to freaking kill him.

He roused Sam and made her walk him upstairs, partly because he was afraid to go alone, but partly so he’d know she could do it. Streetlights and electric green ailanthus swam in the windshields of parked cars. Some strange insignia on the door smelled like wet paint. She was going to stay, she said. She was sure Solomon Grungy would come, or was already here. She would catch the train later.

But how would she get home from the station?

There were cabs, she pointed out. Buses.

Maybe he could pick her up.

“It’s late, Charlie. You said you had to go, so go.” The way she said it—embarrassed, not looking him in the eyes—was a conversation-ender. He didn’t know what to do, give her a chummy shove or reach for her hand or try to kiss her again, so finally, while she watched from the stoop of the strange house, he pushed off into the riotous shadows and headed approximately north, toward where he hoped the station wagon still was.

An hour later, he was on the great artery of the L.I.E., in the protein jacket of his mother’s car. Sodium lights, veiled in humidity and mosquitoes, turned the landscape alien. Big colonies of apartment buildings appeared at intervals, deserted except for lights on a few random floors. Four hundred years ago, Indian tribes had moved among the black trees that fringed the roadway. Ex Post Facto sang about this, albeit elliptically. There was that song “Egg Cream Blues,” with its line about “kicking over stones in a Protestant graveyard.” Or was it “kicking over homes”? The crude mono of the recording and the singer’s strange accent made it hard to tell. Charlie chewed on a foil gum-wrapper to stay awake. He supposed it was really Sam he was mad at. After all his careful care for her, she had opted to stay with the friends who’d neglected her. He popped out EPF and felt under the seat for an old T. Rex cassette he’d hid there so she wouldn’t make fun. By the time it hit side two, the late-night traffic had slowed and narrowed to a single lane. There’d been an accident; men in uniform stood in the fuchsia bloom of flares, letting cars through one at a time. And what if they chanced to look in? Did he look drunk? High? Was he? He put on his Mets cap to cover his Mohawk. He rolled down the window and leaned forward and rode the brake.

When he reached Flower Hill, his mom was waiting in Dad’s superannuated armchair. He was pretty sure she’d turned off all the lights for the dramatic moment it would create when she pulled the pullcord. “Do you know what time it is, Charlie?”

“Can’t we talk about this in the morning?” He was already moving toward the basement; he could hear the soft retreat of small feet on the carpet upstairs, where his brothers were out of bed listening. But now his mom was up, too, a flurry of polyester.

“We can talk right now, young man. About why your shirt is all wet, for starters.”

“We should sleep in, look at this with clearer eyes.” He’d almost made it through the door to the basement when she snapped on the overhead light, the better to see him.

“Charles Nathaniel Weisbarger—what did you do to your hair?”

He could feel the bare skin peeking from under his ballcap, and he froze, one hand on the doorknob, as did his shadow. Things were suddenly very serious. If she insulted his hair right now, he was never going to forgive her. She reached up and pulled off the hat. And now they were both frozen, except, perhaps, for the jackass tears gathering in his eyes.

Her voice was soft. “What is wrong with you?”

He picked a spot on the wall to stare at. “I don’t know. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

“Charlie, is that liquor I smell?”

“Some people I was with were drinking.” It wasn’t until it was out of his mouth that he realized the Innocent Bystander defense—perfectly reasonable when she’d smelled Sam’s cigarettes on him back in May—made no sense for a product that was liquid, not gas. At least I didn’t eat mushrooms, he wanted to point out. Not as many as Sam, anyway.

“It is liquor! You drank, and then you drove my car.”

“I didn’t.”

She turned him toward her and slapped him. “Don’t you lie to me. Who were you with?”

He was sitting on the carpeted floor—not because she’d actually hurt him, but out of a wish not to be hit again. He covered his head with his arms, and all the hot frustration of the day was swelling and trembling in him and it seemed anything might have happened. But he couldn’t stand to have his own mother think the worst of him. “You don’t know her,” he said. If he thought her relief that it was a girl keeping him out late would mitigate her fury, he was mistaken; the next day, he woke up grounded. And the next, and the next, and so on into the fall.

66

LATER, WHEN TIME had gone all gluey and mutable, Keith would wonder: had it really only been three months since he’d been ordered to wait in the wrecked entryway of that house on East Third? And also: Why hadn’t he obeyed? In the event, though, there’d hardly been time to think. The young woman from the stoop had continued on toward the rear of the house, where a phone was ringing, and before he knew what he was doing, he’d followed her as far as the kitchen door. A bedsheet tacked over a window turned the afternoon light to marmalade. Having set down her stacks of LPs, she stood by the wall-mounted phone with her back turned, or at least those parts of it visible where the collar and hem of her tee-shirt had been sheared off with scissors. The music through the walls drowned out whatever she was saying, but when she shifted the receiver from ear to ear, he could see the swell of her hips down below and the fine muscles rippling up where her shoulders met her neck, swift little fish beneath the glassy calm of skin. It didn’t occur to him that she must have known he was watching, the way she stretched and yawned, letting him take in the whole length of her.

Then she hung the phone back on its wall-mount and flattened a hand against the crumbling plaster. As if in response, the noise fell silent. “All right,” she said, turning. “You said you need something from the mail?” He was speechless. “Some knucklehead probably took it out to the garage. What should I be looking for?”

“I don’t know. It’s a manila envelope. The postal code is 10017.”

“Stay here and don’t touch anything. This’ll just take a minute.” She paused on her way toward the back door. “You got a name, if anyone asks?”

“Sorry,” he said, like an idiot. “It’s Keith.”

Five minutes later, she returned with his envelope, and with a camera over one shoulder. He told her she was a lifesaver and offered her the envelope from his briefcase in exchange.

“What am I supposed to do with this?”

“I’m just the messenger—I don’t even know what’s in it.”

“It’s not often you see a messenger in a suit and tie, Keith. Especially ’round these here parts.” He’d almost forgotten he was still dressed for work; he would have regretted it, were it not for the impression she was flirting with him. She raised the envelope to her pierced nose and sniffed the seam. “You’re not even the tiniest bit curious what’s in this?”

He shrugged. He couldn’t see why Amory didn’t just pay for a courier, but continued not to ask. Or perhaps sensed that the answer was something he’d be happier not knowing. There were things you didn’t want to dig too deeply into. Look at what Nixon had tried to do to Daniel Ellsberg. To Daniel Schorr. “Not my business. I’m only doing a favor for someone.”

The envelope landed on a counter. “Well, I’ll let you get on with it. I should run.”

“You just got here.”

“I’ve got to go uptown and take some pictures while the light’s still good.”

“I’m headed that way myself,” he said, on an impulse. “We could split a cab.”

“I don’t do cabs. Cabs aren’t punk.”

“It’s on me.” He picked up the envelope. “I owe you for this, after all.”

He wondered what she made of his motives, sizing him up, and for that matter what he made of them himself. Perhaps it was as simple as this: he liked her grin, the crinkle at the bridge of her nose, the mouth a little large for the face. “Sam,” she said, sticking out a hand, and he’d recovered enough of his quickness to realize she was telling him her name.

Finding a taxi was easy enough at this hour; everyone was fleeing Lower Manhattan as if it were on fire. Ensconced in leather that smelled like air freshener, they gobbled up Third Avenue in great gulps of nine or ten blocks. The sunlight had that rich tint it picked up summer afternoons, the red that made the blue bluer. Take a look take a look, the street vendors said when they stopped at a signal. She’d rolled her window down to light a cigarette. The smoke made complicated shapes in a shaft of sun between the high buildings, and then the cab lurched into motion again and the patterns were sucked out, replaced by the smell of overripe trash. “So you’re a photographer?”

Photography student, she said airily. And before his recalculation of her age could get too uncomfortable, she added, “At NYU. The School of the Arts. Graduating in the spring, actually.” Those had been friends of hers back there, whose house they’d been in. People she knew from the scene. They needed a little mothering sometimes.

He asked her about this scene, which he seemed to remember reading about in the style pages, and by the time she finished her explanation, they were up in the low Eighties and she was leaning forward to tell the cabbie to pull over. Across the street, where the Transverse entered the Park, someone had spraypainted a traffic bollard to look like Mighty Mouse. The shadows were starting to deepen. Will’s school was somewhere nearby. “Listen,” he said. “I know it seems ritzy up here compared to downtown, but it’s not really safe to go traipsing around the Park on your own. You hear about muggings constantly.”

“What makes you so sure I didn’t come here to jump tourists for their wallets?”

“Come on.”

“There’s only half an hour before it gets too dark to shoot, anyway. I’ll be fine.”

“Let me walk you,” he said.

“How will you get home?” she said.

“I live in the neighborhood.” It had never before crossed his mind to be even slightly embarrassed by this fact. In any case, she let him follow her in, under the dense midsummer trees. They bypassed the Reservoir and looped north, paths he hadn’t taken in years. The farther they went, the more spraypaint he saw: silver aliens doing battle on the backs of benches, wire-mesh trashcans engulfed in flame. For her, each was a kind of specimen. She would squat and raise the camera to her eye while he stood behind her, trying to remember how people were supposed to look when they stood. To anyone who saw him just then, he told himself, they clearly wouldn’t have belonged together, him with his briefcase, her in ripped jeans. Not that there was much of anyone around.

They ended up at the boathouse by Harlem Meer. The city had shut it down back during the fiscal crisis, and since then the gray-brick WPA structure had disappeared under layers of what she called “tags.” There must have been hundreds of them, scrawled hastily over the brick in some places but in others laid down in patient letters the size of trashcan lids. On the western wall, someone with real talent—someone who in another age might have been doing frescoes for popes—had painstakingly painted a winged nude, eight feet high. And it was this, this goddess of the park, that Samantha seemed determined to capture. Suddenly she was everywhere, all at once, trying from all angles, squatting down to shoot and also standing to gauge the dwindling light. The only sounds, besides the click of the shutter, were distant car horns and birds chattering off in the underbrush. A line from a poem he’d had to memorize in sophomore German pressed incoherently against the front of his brain. He tried to focus on the wall, on the painted image. Tapered waist sloping into hips. Breasts like bronzed mangoes. A head tilted back sideways, lips parted in ecstasy. There had been a time when Regan had looked like this, at least to him. But her body had changed, slackening from the kids, and then sort of winnowing, as if to prepare her transition from motherhood to career. If the body now moving forward once more to inspect the wall had offered itself to him, what would he have said? And at that very instant, she turned to ask him what he thought. He thought he should probably be going, was what he thought.

THE NEXT TIME an envelope appeared on his desk, he waited several days before taking it to East Third Street. Amory hadn’t said anything about timeliness, and Keith was concerned—or knew, somehow—that Samantha would be there. Which she was, when he finally went and knocked on the door. “What are you doing here?” she said, answering.

He stepped inside. She backed toward the wall. He put the envelope in her hand. She leaned toward his ear, so that he could actually feel her words, the way they shaped the air: “You scare me.” It was like something she’d picked up from a soap opera. And he was the one who was scared.

KEITH ONLY MADE IT TO CHURCH THESE DAYS a few times a year, and Regan had, for obscure reasons, always avoided it, but that Sunday, after ten o’clock Mass, he arranged to speak privately with Father Jonathan, the assistant rector. When, after some hemming and hawing, he confessed that he’d started to find his eye wandering (he couldn’t bring himself to be more specific than that), the priest recommended he talk to a professional. “That’s what I thought I was doing,” Keith said.