City on Fire (98 page)

IF IT ALREADY FELT ODD, moving across town for a month—why couldn’t the maid just come over to Sutton Place?—the deal Regan reached with Lizaveta made it odder: she would take most days off, Regan would keep the refrigerator stocked, and they’d both keep it from getting back to Felicia. And so, for the duration of August, the younger Hamilton-Sweeneys were marooned in that enormous penthouse across the park, animals atop Mount Ararat.

That there were two of them did little to blunt the loneliness. In fact, William and Regan were together even less than he and Daddy had been. Her internship started promptly at nine, and by the time he rolled out of bed, she’d have left. She was often still gone at dinnertime, and was on some kind of weird diet anyway, which she must have picked up in Europe. And when she did get home she returned to the great library on the second floor, or to the adjoining guestroom, where she was staying. The one time she always managed to be around was Saturday afternoon, when Daddy telephoned. “Oh, we’re fine,” she said. Otherwise, her message was clear. She’d abetted William’s escape from Block Island for his sake, not her own, and now she wanted to be left alone.

At first, William filled the empty hours with soap operas. He’d become a partisan of As the World Turns. But the sheer size of the apartment he was rattling around in (paid for, he was sure, with Daddy’s money) made him feel decadent, and not in the good way. He’d always thought of his family as merely well-to-do, like their Sutton Place neighbors. Money was stupid, but it wasn’t wrong. Here, by contrast, the denizens of the lower floors, affluent though they may have been, stayed hidden from view, as if they occupied a different plane of existence from the truly rich. And further cracks were appearing everywhere he looked. The newscasts that came on after The Guiding Light carried images of Communist upheavals in Indochina. Of black kids in neckties being cold-cocked at lunchcounters. Of busloads of protesters rolling toward the South. He thought of Doonie, forced into early retirement. Where was she now? Still in that tarbox neighborhood in the outer boroughs where she’d taught him how to drive? Certainly not in a place like this, with its acres of Persian rug.

He started going to public pools in the hot hours before dusk, just to feel connected to the lives of other people—to break free, somehow, of the prison of class. His favorite was 145th Street, where the Negroes went. At first, they stared skeptically at his baggy trunks and underdeveloped muscles and the thick novel he pretended to read to hide his nerves. But the attitude up here was live and let live, and by the third day, William was an accepted fact of life. He propped the book on his shock-white chest and, shielded by the cover, admired the gleaming bodies of the men stretched out on the concrete a few yards away.

One evening, after showering off the chlorine, he went up to the library to look for Regan. It was deserted, its windows muffling the dying noise of rush hour to the south. Sunlight gushed in, crimsoning the bindings on Mom’s old books. They must have been moved over here recently, as everything would be someday. Libraries had never been William’s thing. The vastness of their surroundings made the small clutch of books a person was capable of moving through in a lifetime seem puny, and the shelves themselves merely flimsy bulwarks thrown up against the slow fire of acid on paper, the great red H-bomb of mortality. He reached for the handle of a French door and stepped out onto a balcony. On the next balcony over, maybe five yards away, Regan sat in dungarees with her knees to her chest and one arm dangling a cigarette. She made him think of the Pietà from his Michelangelo book—an effigy of loss so bafflingly deep it made his own look like a birdbath. Worse: he didn’t know why. “Hey.”

“Hey yourself.” The way she could become instantly casual irked him a little.

“Is that a Continental thing, the cigarette? Un’ affectazzione?”

She let a boll of smoke hang before her open mouth. Sucked it swiftly into her nostrils. “If you’re angling for one, forget it.”

“You know damn well I’ve been smoking for years,” he said. “I’m coming over.”

When they were side-by-side on her balcony, though, silence again prevailed, not counting the traffic below. He wanted to assure her that whatever was eating her, she could tell him, but that felt suddenly impossible. All he could do was put an arm around her. Again, her hair had that smell he couldn’t quite place. It must have been a new shampoo, he realized. Italian. “Hey. Can I ask you something? When you came back from the airport that day, your hair was still damp. How did you have time to wash it before you got here?”

“Do I seem in the mood to talk?” She must have heard how snappish she sounded, because after a minute, by way of apology, she offered him a drag of her cigarette.

But he saw as he took it that the summer would end without any deeper understanding between them. She would trek back to Poughkeepsie, and he’d be packed off to yet another school with the intercession of Uncle Artie. In short, other people were not to be relied on. If there was to be any growth here, any meaning, he would have to make it himself.

SNEAKING OUT AT NIGHT after Regan had gone to bed was a cakewalk: straight through the lobby, past the concierge who never said a word. William had been going to bars on and off since he was fifteen, but always under the banner of youthful high spirits. Now a kind of grim fury held sway. Where he’d once favored student dives and no-cover jazz clubs, or the iconic Cedar Tavern, hoping to catch a glimpse of de Kooning, he began to consult the atlas of cruising spots and fern bars he’d been compiling half-consciously for years. He’d known that whole time that he was a homosexual—had done little to hide it and had sometimes even reveled in it, as a weapon against people who wanted him to feel bad about himself. But the designation had remained largely theoretical until the school before last, where, with a handsome but confused senior from Westport, Connecticut, he’d had his first real physical encounter. The boy had been an eager enough collaborator as they spelunked each other there in a storage room behind the auditorium, but William’s reputation was already atrocious, and afterward the boy had avoided him. William couldn’t be sure, but he thought a complaint from the boy’s parents might have been what led to that expulsion. At any rate, he’d been living for months like a sexual camel. Now he was ready to go further.

The art of the pickup happened mostly with the eyes. Usually all it took was one volley of glances. You felt someone looking at you, and the second you looked back he looked away … and then when he felt you still looking and looked back, you looked down at the surface of the Manhattan you’d ordered because somewhere you’d gotten the idea that’s what grown-ups drank, and a claim had been staked. William would feel his legs jittering beneath the table; later, he and his subject would rendezvous outside, in cars with the engines already running. If he was being honest with himself, the danger was part of the rush. But his conquests mostly turned out to be dispiritingly courteous: shy, married men from New Jersey whose single greatest fantasy was to swap hand jobs with a teenager. He’d end up under the West Side Highway, staring out across the empty Hudson, and in the instant of his coming the pallid digits beneath him would dissolve and he would feel, paradoxically, a suspension of his loneliness, a widening of his life into something brighter, bigger. Then the damp and the cold would set in and he would feel lonelier than ever.

When the bars ceased to feel risky enough, he graduated to the Park. He bought Benzedrine strips from hopheads and dissolved them in cups of deli coffee and waited under his favorite streetlamp. Then, in the darkness under the trees, his repertoire expanded. There were young men in the Park as well as old ones, black men as well as white, and he found he wanted these particularly. He wanted them to be rough with him, to punish him for something. For wanting that, maybe. It would later seem a wonder that the worst he came away with was a little chafing. By September of 1960, when he arrived at his new and final school, he brought with him more experience, more awareness of how to get from other people what he was after, than he could have acquired in like a dozen internships.

THE DOWNSIDE was that, away from New York again, he no longer stood in the way of the wedding. He did indeed graduate, and the start of the following summer, a year after it had first been mooted, William found himself in the fitting room of a wizened Jewish tailor whose question-mark posture seemed designed to save him the trouble of bending to take inseams. Daddy had insisted on bringing William down here personally, as if it were some rite of passage, the fitting of the armor that would gird another Hamilton-Sweeney for the battlefields of the haute bourgeoisie. From the changing room, William could hear him out there on the sales floor. “We’ll need a couple of suits, too, Mr. Moritz, in addition to the tuxedo. William has an interview at Yale.” Which was ridiculous; he was a Hamilton-Sweeney. But if Mr. Moritz noticed, he didn’t let on. His shop had a clubby air, at once polished and musty. No female had set foot there since the time of the Borgias. The front door, open to the unseasonal heat, wafted back a breeze of cigar-smoke and leather. “And the dinner jacket is for Friday, if you can do it. He’s agreed to be my best man.”

The William in the mirror had stripped down to boxer shorts and an undershirt discolored under the sleeves. He’d been wearing the shirt last night, in the bushes near the Ramble. A few leaf-crumbs still clung to it. There were cuts on his legs from the branches. He tried to remember if his dad had seen these legs in the years since they’d become hairy—wondered if he would even recognize this body as his son’s, or how he would feel if he’d known what other men were doing with it in the Park, in the dark.

“Are you ready in there, William?”

He pulled on the tuxedo pants and the shirt to cover the offending body. His father, seeming not to perceive the roominess when William waddled out onto the sales floor, nodded approvingly. William almost slapped Mr. Moritz’s hand as it palsied its tape measure up to his crotch. Outside, captains of industry passed, unmoved by the festival air. “My assistant will hand-deliver,” the tailor said, rolling the tape measure back up with unthinking precision. “The girls can’t resist a fellow in evening clothes.”

“That’s what I keep telling him,” Daddy said, as William made a silent, fervent wish that the day of the wedding would be even hotter than this one.

THE TUX ARRIVED FRIDAY, as promised. He couldn’t say it looked any different than the saggy travesty that had swallowed him in the shop, but when he tried it on, it fit. He adjusted the seal-gray vest, checked the mirror on the closet door. He looked good. Looked—he might as well admit it—sexy. Which was auspicious; Regan’s fiancé, whom he’d met back in April, was coming down for tonight’s rehearsal dinner, and though William didn’t plan to seduce him, exactly (it was her own engagement that seemed to have pulled Regan out of the previous summer’s funk), William did think Keith Lamplighter was about the handsomest man he’d ever laid eyes on. A single admiring look would be enough, and eliciting it was just the little project he needed to distract him from this matrimonial fiasco.

He’d turned all the way around to inspect the rear view when he heard a whimper from the closet. He went to investigate. Behind the hanging clothes was a waist-high crawlspace where he and Regan had played as kids. More recently, it had been a convenient spot to stash alcohol. It’s where he found her now, in the same posture as last summer on that balcony: balled up, forehead pressed to knees. Wincing a bit for what it might do to his new pants, he crawled back until he was beside her. Was she hyperventilating? When he reached for her hands, she tucked them under her, pulling her legs tighter. She seemed to want to retract any extension of herself, to become a moveless white egg. He asked if she needed a drink. The only response was the laughter of guests somewhere in the house. “Because I sure do.” He rummaged in the suitcase where he hid his booze and found the little silver flask he’d stolen from Bruno’s party, as a keepsake. The bourbon stung. He left the cap unscrewed, extended it to Regan. The smell, at least, might jolt her back to the world. “Kind of late in the day to throw a rod over the wedding, if you ask me.”

She turned away, as if afraid he would see her face. “Fuck you.”

Well, this was a first. Not that he hadn’t said the same thing dozens of times to her. “I know what you really mean is that you worship me, Regan, so I’ll forget you said that. But are you going to tell me what’s wrong, or are you just going to take it out on me?”

“How can I tell you,” she said, possibly to herself, “when I haven’t even told Keith?”

“Haven’t told Keith what?”

She looked back, studied him in the dimness of the closet. Her cheeks were splotchy and red, but surprisingly dry. “You have to promise this stays between us. Promise.” And then, huddled under the hanging clothes, she revealed that she hadn’t really been to Italy.

“I knew it!” he said. “No wonder you wouldn’t let me borrow the car.”

“No, listen. Please. It’s because of something that happened at the start of junior year. A misunderstanding, with a boy. I was … pregnant—”

“—Christ. What?”

“And I had to go away to take care of it.”

“You had a baby?” This was bizarre. “Where is it?”

“William, please. There was no baby.”

He slumped back against the wall. And now, she said, the boy responsible had shown up in the wedding party commandeering the guestrooms. The sole heir of the company Daddy’s had swallowed. He’d been out to Block Island a couple times, that summer before the merger. Afterward, he’d joined the Board.

“That guy? He’s notorious, Regan. He was a few years ahead when I was at Exeter. Or maybe Choate. I wish you’d checked with me before letting him into your bed.”

In the end, she took the flask. “I just spotted him downstairs talking shop with Amory Gould. I can’t bring myself to let him see me here, William.”

“Why? The guy refused to help pay for it? Or was he a jerk to you after?” William took a mental inventory of nearby weapons: steak knives, paperweights, his great-grandfather’s old safari piece that hung on the dining room wall. “I swear, if he was unkind in any way …”