City on Fire (81 page)

Then, a week or two before Thanksgiving, the five of them went to a late showing of Taxi Driver at the run-down cinema at St. Mark’s Place. Movies were right up there with television and Casey Kasem on Nicky’s list of viruses on the body politic, but in this case, he’d been willing to make an exception. The poster had appeared several weeks earlier, Robert De Niro with his army jacket and Apache haircut, and you only had to pass within a dozen yards of it to see that this was a movie meant for them—that, as Nicky put it, Scorsese was using the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house. In the darkened theater, his arm kept brushing up against hers on the armrest, but she barely noticed. Because who Taxi Driver turned out to be made for was Samantha Cicciaro herself. There was the Sicilio-Catholic upbringing of the auteur, all those ineffable points of reference. There was beautiful Bobby D., with his chin as big as a Frigidaire, the resemblance around the eyes to her lover. And then there was Jodie Foster, who, despite her halter top and hot pants, was a child. And what did Scorsese mean Sam to feel toward the idea of them as a couple? Pity? Disgust? What you could not do was imagine that Travis Bickle’s infatuation with that little girl was healthy, or normal, or durable. That it would not end in tears.

That Friday, when Keith had arranged to leave work at lunchtime, she made him take her to see the movie again, in a newer theater near the U.N. For much of the second half, she watched his face, rather than the screen. But when they emerged into the weak sunlight of a November three o’clock, he just blinked and shook his head and said, “That was dark.”

“It didn’t touch a nerve?”

“What are you talking about?”

She gave thanks once more for his naïveté. Another test had been passed. She grabbed his arm. “Let’s go get a room.”

“You’ve got a room,” he said.

“That’s all the way back downtown.”

“I left my wallet at home, specifically so you wouldn’t make me burn through any more cash.”

A plan was forming. “Well, we’ll just have to go get it, won’t we?” She let her torso push against his arm and whispered in his ear a couple things she would let him do to her, if he would take her to a nice hotel.

“For Christ’s sake, Samantha. There are people watching.” But this was New York City; you had to do a lot worse than this to get people to watch. And the redness spreading to the tips of his ears meant she already had him.

OUTSIDE OF HIS BUILDING, he told her to stay in the cab, he’d be right back, but when she saw him pass the doorman’s desk, she bolted from the backseat, possessed again by the need to know exactly how far she could take things. She mumbled a floor number to the doorman, who barely looked up from his paper. No one suspected girls of anything. She caught up with Keith by the elevators, where she slipped a hand into his pocket. “What are you doing?” he hissed.

“I want to see where you live. I think I deserve that.”

He was looking over her shoulder toward the bright ribbon of street, as though calculating the odds of smuggling her back through the lobby unobserved. She looked relatively unsensational today, she knew, in jeans and a holey cardigan, but if she was a niece it would seem suspicious for her to be leaving so soon. An elevator dinged. “Fine,” he said, and hustled her into the empty box.

Upstairs, he stationed her just inside the door to his apartment. “See? This is it. Now don’t move until I come back to escort you out.” There was a ripple of déjà vu. She could hear lights flicking on, drawers groaning, while she waited in this hallway that smelled faintly of a thousand meals, as if some giant sweet dough had been packed into the pores of the walls. There was a mat for wiping feet, an umbrella stand, a table with a dish full of pocket-change, a framed painting or print of a harlequin—it was hard to tell, blears of light from the windows at the far end of the hall turned the glass opaque in places. A single tinkertoy poked half-concealed from a corner of the rug, like someone had tucked it there for her to see. She had imagined, for some reason, that his other life was as contingent as the one he’d been leading with her. In fact, it was solid, dense, and it would be harder than she’d imagined to break its hold on him—assuming she still wanted to.

She drifted down the hall toward those windows. How large this place was! The living room had that same unbearably lived-in look, as if at any moment, Keith’s wife and kids would return to take up the funny pages folded on the coffeetable, the mug of cold tea, the sad fat teabag slumped in a saucer of its own water. Which was maybe why he wanted her back by the door, ready for a quick getaway, but she couldn’t help but stop by the built-in bookshelves with all their picture frames, more pictures even than she’d snapped that fall for Land of a Thousand Dances. Surely it hadn’t been Keith who’d arranged them all there. He was too careless. It was someone like her, someone who needed the reassurance of the incontrovertible. Here was a photograph, for example, of a family at a picnic table by a lake. The little girl was blurry from trying to wriggle out of Keith’s arms. But the woman, with her Kodachrome red hair, was actually beautiful, the way the silver of the lake in the background and the dark green spruce were beautiful.

Then the frame was being tugged from her hands and placed on the shelf. “What did I tell you?”

“That’s not where it goes,” she pointed out.

“Then put it where it goes, God damn it.”

She’d never seen him quite this mad, and though it stung, it was also thrilling, as if she’d planted her flag a dozen feet farther up the slope than it had been a minute ago. “What are you going to do?” she asked. “Punish me?” As she pulled him toward the sofa, she could feel the animal in him wanting to take over.

This time, though, things were off from the get-go; as soon as he entered her she could feel him softening. When she asked if he was all right, he said he couldn’t feel anything. She shifted. How about now? “I can’t feel anything,” he repeated, panicky, like an asthmatic saying, I can’t breathe. It was bullshit, she thought. He did feel something; it just wasn’t what he wanted to feel. And he thought she was a child. Finally, he slid off her and sat hunched over on the edge of the couch, fists pressed to his eyes, and in the dusky pre-rush-hour light, she seemed to feel the whole apartment quivering from the tension in his body, all that useless stiffness. Which was why, when she heard a board creak down a hall, she didn’t think much of it. She contaminated everything she touched, she was thinking, and here she had done it again: taken what was supposed to be a game, an experiment, and through the impossible scale of her wanting, or through simple curiosity, pushed it past what it would bear.

68

THAT HE WOULD OVERREACT SEEMED INEVITABLE, in hindsight, but that wasn’t why Regan had kept it from him. No, it was that saying it out loud meant admitting there was trouble, which Regan wasn’t ready to do until their third or fourth Tuesday at the old Italian restaurant. And which Keith, to judge by the reddening of his face in the Neapolitan gloom, wasn’t ready to do even then. Plus she’d been feeling shut out of his life for so long—that large, public life so unlike her own compact existence—that whenever anything happened to her that did not involve him, she was inclined to keep it hidden, as a counterweight. When he set his glass down, she thought it might shatter. “What do you mean, seeing someone?” Only now did the double entendre dawn on her: he thought she was seeing someone. And suddenly, there was guilt—exactly what she’d been trying to avoid.

“I mean an analyst, honey. I’ve been seeing an analyst.” The flush was slow to leave his cheeks. The bartender had stopped wiping down the bar and was pretending not to listen. “We talked about this back in the spring, remember?”

“About your seeing an analyst?” It was true that he’d never asked her specifically about the drop in her weight, probably because she’d sent him every signal that she didn’t want to be asked. She’d been down to 105 pounds when she’d caught a glimpse of her real self in the mirror—just a shimmer really, before the false image reasserted itself, but a shimmer had been enough.

“We don’t talk about marital problems, Keith, if that’s what you’re worried about. It’s really just a lot of boring family-of-origin stuff that predates you.” Which wasn’t wholly truthful, actually, but when there was a question of reducing or resolving tensions, her commitment to honesty was not unbending; this was one of the things Dr. Altschul had helped her to see. “You remember? A few weeks before I started work, you said something about people finding analysis really helpful. In fact, Dr. Altschul was the one who showed me you were right, I should do something professionally instead of sitting around the house all day waiting for the kids to come home from school.”

“I didn’t know you felt there were problems.”

Of course the waiter would choose that moment to bring the entrees: ravioli for her, and, for the gentleman, linguine vongole. A curtain of briny steam rose between them. She spooned some Parmesan onto her pasta, then let her hand rest palm-up on the checked tablecloth while the cheese went orange. She tried to think of something else. Of how easily, for example, he could have taken that hand.

“Do you like him, at least?”

“It’s the other Dr. Altschul. The wife.”

“Well, do you like her?”

“Are you jealous? I can’t believe this. You’re jealous.”

“I just feel like … you could have talked to me, Regan.”

There was a window here in which they might have tackled the question of who should have talked to whom; he’d been holding back for years whatever it was that had made those thousands of dollars disappear from the kids’ college funds that one time, before they just as magically reappeared. It was a conversation Dr. Altschul would have encouraged, even if its ultimate issue would be that it was Regan, and not Keith, who’d kept the first secret. But she still wasn’t healthy enough to tell him about all that. She used the side of her fork to cut her ravioli into smallish squares, leaving her knife untouched. It was an old habit: dirty as few dishes as possible, limit the amount of trouble you cause for other people. “We’re talking about it now,” she said. “This is a good thing.”

They finished their dinner in near-silence (or he finished while she picked at hers) like those older couples you sometimes saw who wouldn’t even meet each other’s eyes. She used to wonder how they got that way. One day you just became them, was the answer. But when the check arrived, Keith suggested they walk home, rather than take a cab.

It was a brisk November night, with dry leaves rustling behind the wall of Central Park. Here and there, electric lights cleared larger spheres of green and gold in the otherwise deep-blue tangle of branches. The tentativeness with which he reached for her hand reminded her of when they’d first dated, and she liked that; he was seeing her again as a person with a will not his own. He’d actually asked which route she wanted to take, rather than simply deciding, and she’d chosen Fifty-Ninth Street; these days, you had to be crazy to cut across the Park after sundown.

But apparently you had to be crazy to walk at all. Halfway along the Park’s southern perimeter, with the stink of the carriage horses behind them, she became aware of another set of footsteps, following. Every thirty yards or so, a streetlamp made long shadows that shrank and shrank and then grew and grew after they’d passed beneath, and at the outer reaches of that growth, she could make out, in addition to Keith’s head and her own, the top of the shadow of the person following them. She knew from Keith’s rigid arm that he must see it, too. They sped up. The shadow kept pace, and now on the ground she could see its shoulders. Soon there would be a torso, arms, a blade, a voice wanting all their money. Just when it seemed, though, that the shadow would catch them, Keith wheeled around and demanded, “You got something to say?” She turned in time to see a wiry black kid frozen in the middle of the sidewalk, maybe a dozen feet away. A tuft of green hair stuck from beneath his stocking cap. His eyes were locked onto Keith’s. They looked so startled that she couldn’t be sure he wasn’t just a fellow pedestrian out for a night stroll. At any rate, he seemed to decide Keith was trouble, and pivoted and slunk away.

“Wow,” she couldn’t help saying. “Where did that come from?” He shrugged, embarrassed. And suddenly her limbs turned to jelly and she was cracking up. She could barely stand; it felt good to laugh. Then he was laughing. They stood there leaning on each other, gasping, relieved.

And after the sitter had been paid and the kids put to bed and the teeth brushed and the sleepwear donned, they lay in the dark reliving it. “You were incredible,” she told him. Her head was on his chest. “You got something to say? I always wanted to do something like that.”

“Regan, look,” he said—which of course she couldn’t, without moving her head. “I know I haven’t always been the person you’ve needed. Or frankly, deserved.”

“Keith—”

“No, let me finish. This is a long time coming. I go through my days, honey, I’m thinking, me, me, me, what about me, what does this mean for me, and somehow in my mind you’re still at home, and the kids are crawling around on the rug and I’m thinking, well, at least that’s one part of my life I don’t have to worry about …”

He was doing it even now—me, me, me—but at least he was trying. “What do you have to worry about, honey?”

His chest rose under her. Paused. Fell. “That’s not important right now. What’s important is, I know there have been problems, and I’m sorry, and I’m going to do better from now on.” And then, having discharged a burden she still didn’t comprehend, he kissed the top of her head. “And you’re right. Good for you for seeing someone.”

She said it again—You got something to say?—but this time only she laughed. His hand, which had found its way under her shirt, brushed her nipple. She could feel her body answering him, tensing, opening, but her brain didn’t want to put at risk what had otherwise been their first good night in a long time—to reduce his standing up for her and his baring of his soul to a mere campaign for sex. She touched his wrist. Directness was another thing she’d been practicing with Dr. Altschul. “Honey, I’m exhausted, and we’ve both got work in the morning. Maybe some other time?”