City on Fire (80 page)

An analyst, is what the priest said he meant. He was hairless, almost prepubescent-looking, not detectably ironic. “They can be tremendously helpful with these things. You and your wife have been married for how long?”

It was a rhetorical question; Father Jonathan didn’t pause for an answer, but pressed on. There was a fellow parishioner, he said, a psychologist, who had just published a book; perhaps Keith was familiar with her column in the Times? Keith nodded carefully. He did know the name. Father Jonathan explained that this parishioner and her husband, likewise a psychologist, had just celebrated their golden anniversary. That was twenty-five years. In the book, she suggested that the secret to this longevity was that they had gone out to dinner every Tuesday night for a quarter century. “Tuesday: think of it. Not Monday, with its re-entry to the week, but not yet Wednesday, the hump one has to get over. Tuesday. They simply let nothing get in their way.”

A fire seemed to kindle beneath the milk-mild pastoral face. Keith wondered what it must be like to renounce pleasures you’d never had a chance to know, to burn for some woman of the parish, to watch her tend the macaroni salad at the Rally Day potluck, her body ripe in its summer dress—to feel her hand on your arm and to know you would end up on your own that night, feeding the vestry cats. Or worse: listening to another self-absorbed layman lament the banked embers of his perfectly enviable marriage. But then another Keith, the hungry person he’d been with Samantha’s breath in his ear, felt like reaching across the mahogany desk and grabbing the little white tab of the collar and saying, Don’t patronize me, goddammit. For a moment, it seemed the room might be riven by these contradictions. That he might, like unruly Jonah, be swallowed up.

Then again, this was the twentieth century. There was no justice like that anymore. And so, on Tuesday, he took Regan across town to their old Italian place. Candlelight and red sauce. Something here had changed, but it took Keith a minute to place it: above the bar they’d installed a TV, which the bartender kept on while he polished glasses. Regardless of not being able to hear the sound, regardless of not giving two shits about American League baseball, Keith found himself unable to resist the distraction. The rims of upside-down glasses caught the grayblue light and led his gaze, no matter where he turned it, back to the screen, until he realized Regan was staring at him. “What?” he said.

“I asked you a question, honey. Have you not heard a word I’ve been saying?”

And that was it: die cast, jeux faits. The evening led not to a hotel room, as he’d secretly hoped, but to paying off the sitter and helping with homework and dealing with Cate’s litany of pre-bed complaints and reading her her story and dropping into sleep almost before their bodies hit the bed. The next day, in an empty office in the LCA suites, he watched his finger dial the number Samantha had given him. Which isn’t to say he was ready for her to pick up.

IT REALLY TOOK HIM BACK, the old neighborhood, though it had changed—some would say degenerated. Transvestites walked Seventh Avenue openly, mingling with nice middle-class kids doing their best to look homeless, and with students and tourists and book editors in tweed. But Keith’s condescension wasn’t convincing, even to himself. He missed this place. Why had they ever moved?

He spotted Samantha from halfway down the appointed block, where she sat on a stoop with a Carvel and a cigarette. She’d worn a skirt, and the sight of her long legs angled out over the flagstones swept every thought of home right out of his head. She made no move to stand, even when he was upon her—simply squinted up through the smoke. But it was a good sign that she’d dressed up. It must have meant she liked him.

At dinner, he was a perfect gentleman, a rich uncle in town for the week. (Presumably not everyone he’d known down here had moved away.) Samantha was the one who insisted on more wine, and when her knee insinuated itself between his under the table, he started away, as if it had been an accident. This was madness! Anyone might have been watching! You still haven’t done anything wrong, he reminded himself. God knows he’d had the opportunity to stray before, with any number of women. He had proven himself, had he not? But now he seemed to have fallen under some powerful enchantment. Up above, the girl continued to tell him about Diane Arbus and Danny Lyon and photography’s gift to painting—a nervous breakdown, she said; down below, her foot found his.

Then they were back at her dormroom, a tiny single she hadn’t finished unpacking after a summer away. Most of her classmates weren’t back yet, but she’d already managed to have a friend of hers, one of these graffiti artists, spraypaint a wall. He could still smell the fumes. “So much for your security deposit,” he said nervously, turning to take in the scrawls of black and silver crawling up toward the ceiling. When he looked back, she was leaning against her desk with a frank look on her face. Her tee-shirt, the same collar-ripped one she’d worn the first day he’d met her, had slipped off her shoulder. He approached and placed a hand on the curve above her hipbone, gave her a second to opt out. She reached instead for his belt.

It happened right there, standing up, Samantha bent back over the desk with her panties around her feet and her shirt up around her neck. He was unprepared for how aggressive he could be, given the all clear. After Will was born, Regan had stopped wanting it like this. Even when she was pregnant with Cate, her belly in the way, it was missionary, ten minutes of it, and lately not even that. He was angry, actually angry at her, he discovered, for holding back so much. For putting him here. Then Samantha’s tender little grunts, the sweat of her neck in his mouth or her hand reaching down to pull him deeper, brought him back. He was in a college dormroom, someone was pounding on the wall for them to keep it down, and this twenty-two-year-old woman was bucking underneath him, her hand gripping the edge of the desk, as he streaked out into eternity. The miracles of coeducation. Everything you could possibly want, and all it took was your soul.

They fell onto her unmade bed, striped by light through the miniblinds. “That was …”

“Mm,” she agreed, apparently too sated to speak.

There was a shared shower room further along the hall, but he couldn’t very well use it (this was an all-girls floor), so he cleaned up as best he could with the towel she offered and began to put his clothes on.

“I don’t want to be … you know. But can I see you again?”

She told him when he could call her next. It seemed somehow too intimate to kiss her goodnight. He snuck out to the elevator bank.

In the steel of the closing doors, he looked flushed, disheveled, glowing, but inside, a coolness was already spreading. He didn’t meet the eyes of the boy in sweatpants who rode down with him, who had probably been plotting to sleep with Samantha himself—how could anyone not be?—or of the security guard at his desk in the otherwise empty lobby. Emerging into the humid night, crossing under the trees of Washington Square Park, Keith found himself thinking instead of the bedtime stories he’d once read to Will. Their heroes were always straying from well-lit paths and into the woods. Or maybe it was a single wood: the dark place where the things they feared most dwelled. And so, he reassured himself, he had the advantage of knowing already how this had to end. He had stopped to admire a flower, had gotten waylaid in the shadows, but in no time at all he would be back on the path again, renewed and rededicated. For was that not the point of the woods?

67

A PHOTO SURVIVES from that fall, black-and-white, of Samantha Cicciaro on the weedy median of Houston Street, a few blocks east of West Broadway. It’s daytime, afternoon, sunlight strong from the west, maybe getting on toward rush hour. On either side of her, the asphalt brims with late-model sedans, their narrow taillights and boxy grilles. A city bus has pulled to the curb to discharge a passenger, man or woman, tough to say at this distance. Somewhere in deeper focus is a building whose girders thrust straight through its walls and into the vacant space next door. Deeper still, the building that was her favorite, a tall, Victorian, red-brick structure presided over by a golden statue above the portico, a mischievous little god.

Her dad had given her the Nikkormat for her birthday a year earlier. (You had to be careful, she’d told Charlie once: if you mentioned something like that around him, or sometimes just glanced longingly through a shop window, he’d buy it for you, and then you couldn’t enjoy it, because you’d be too busy wondering if you’d guilted him into spending more than he could really afford.) Now, afternoons when Keith could clear his schedule, they would ramble around the wilderness blocks north of Central Park or south of Bleecker, snapping photos. In this case, he’d turned the camera on her. But despite the city teeming all around, she appears through the viewfinder to be alone. Her tee-shirt’s cut short to bare a strip of midriff; over it she wears a man’s blazer, sleeves rolled and safety-pinned. She has chopped her hair to chin length and dyed it what in this picture will appear to be dove-gray but is really black, roots streaking through like paler lightning. There is a little porkpie hat. Her arms loop back behind the lightpost she’s leaning against, as if chained there, and her face, lips parted, turns upward to catch the sun. Like a flame reflected in a window, the face seems to belong to a different dimension than the rest of the image. And it is this, the eyes, the mouth, one keeps returning to. What was she thinking?

Looking back, there are so many possibilities. That summer, she had found her way to the intersection of all kinds of power lines and vectors of force, some of which she was aware of, some of which not. She could have been thinking, for example, that there had to be something wrong with seducing a man twice your age—that man right there, Your Honor, crouching in the grasses with a camera for a face. Or about the envelopes she teased him about never opening, which she’d heard contained Nicky’s stipend from some rich relation. Or about that house on East Third, and how much loyalty you owed friends who were so obviously fucking up big-time. She could have been thinking about the fact that it was now the Tuesday after Columbus Day and she hadn’t been to a single class since the end of September. Or about her dad, who would have been appalled, a good Catholic girl like his Sammy. Hadn’t keeping her away from all this been his reason for getting her on the private-school track in the first place? But Dad, egged on by Richard Groskoph with his paper and pen, increasingly existed in a world of his own devising, where his own father and brothers were still alive, and fireworks in New York still synonymous with the Cicciaro name. This was what she got, anyway, from calls home. She could have been thinking about any or all of this.

But it was Indian summer in the city, the time she spent the rest of the year waiting for, and she’d learned early on that it did no one any good to dwell on things beyond the presentat-hand. As a poet she liked had written, “You just go on your nerve.” And so at the instant the shutter clicked, she was thinking mostly of a sandwich on the menu of her favorite luncheonette: salty salami and capicola piled an inch thick, good bread, sharp white cheese, mayo that dribbled out the sides and onto the wax-paper wrapping when you pressed down with your fingers.

She would make Keith follow her there that afternoon. This was part of the wonder of those days: seeing how far her power over him extended. There was something about Keith, some part of him she sensed being held back, that made her hungry for proof he cared. They sat in a molded plastic booth far enough from the window that no one outside would spot him; he had a Coke and watched her eat. In between bites she tore his straw wrapper to bits she dropped into the ashtray. She took her lighter and tried setting the bits on fire. Finally, he reached out and took her wrists with marvelous roughness. “Stop,” he said. “You’re going to get us kicked out.” For a minute, the real Keith had resurfaced. She wanted to capture him in a jar, study him, see if he was willing to ruin himself for her.

That she didn’t think he was was why she loved him.

There was also, of course, the sex: fitful, explosive, scarily vulnerable. She’d decided long ago that the second-party orgasm was a lockerroom rumor, and had resigned herself to the clumsy ministrations of the adolescent male. But sometimes with Keith, early evenings when they returned to her dormitory, or to a ramshackle hotel east of Grand Central, she could feel herself approaching the lightless place of myth. Her hands would roam on his body, or his on hers, until she almost couldn’t tell which was which, and she would be frightened he would stop her, or she him, but neither did. It was like a swing on which she was swinging higher and higher, through no conscious mechanism, but simply through wanting the more open air.

Actually, maybe love was the wrong word—to be in love with a person, you had to respect him, and there were times when she didn’t respect Keith, exactly. When he tried to treat her tenderly, for instance, she was a little disgusted. But these glimpses of the anger beneath his pressed exterior made her feel like she’d do anything to please him. Would she suck him off in a hotel shower? Would she get down on all fours and let him take her like a dirty magazine? She would, and she would, because that was the source of her power over him: not being quite real. And all of this—or most of it, anyway, sanitized for mixed company—she longed to confide in Charlie. There were times when she still tried to call him. But of course Charlie, like all the men in her life, had abandoned her the second he saw she wasn’t going to be what he wanted.

ALL TOLD, this season of her life must have lasted a couple of months, though she felt sometimes that it had been years and other times mere days. Maybe it was the way that hotel room kept coming back and back that made time seem less like a line than like a circle, dilating and contracting. They couldn’t always get the same room, obviously, but wasn’t every hotel room the same? Same cigarette burns and smoke-smelling curtains, same foam-core pillow and scratchy sheets. Later at night, she’d head back to the Phalanstery to smoke dope and unwind, but a note of complex ressentiment had entered her relationship with the Post-Humanists. She hadn’t been out in the van with them since back in August, when they had torched an abandoned church for kicks and she’d drafted a story about it she’d subsequently let Sewer Girl read. It wasn’t the sacrilege of burning a church that had disturbed Sam, so much as the pure waste, because somewhere inside she couldn’t quite accept that life itself was a waste. Which was exactly her problem, Nicky might have said. That, and putting too much in writing.