Emerald City (11 page)

The first long limb is high above the flames and a little to one side. On my belly I slither along to its end and look down. No one sees me. Smoke floats past in a column. Bradley doesn’t watch the fire, he keeps his eyes on Dad and Peggy and the Belson family.

Sweat drips down my face, and I feel it running inside my clothes. The fire makes a panting sound, but it looks smaller from above. Watching Bradley and the rest, I think to myself: How can I fix it? I remember what he said about the models, how they’re broken and it’s his job to repair them. One right piece, I think, and everything will turn good, like the soldiers dropping their guns on the battlefield. Just one piece. But what is it?

Then Bradley looks up. Maybe he felt me watching him. He doesn’t say a thing, we just look at each other a long time, neither one of us moving. Fire lights his face and makes his eyes look hollow. The only sound is wood cracking in the fire.

I rise halfway to my feet and jump. I stay calm until the second my shoes leave the branch and I see the bonfire coming at me like a giant orange mouth. People are screaming. I hear the crash I make, and there’s wild, rippling heat in my hair and clothes. Then I’m on the beach, rolled and pounded by a weight that is Bradley, pushing me into the cool sand, smothering flames with his body.

Everyone tells the story, how he pulled me out so fast the fire barely touched me. Like he knew I would fall, and was waiting to catch me.

“A premonition,” Peggy calls it, narrowing her eyes with respect.

“Reflexes,” Dad insists.

Bradley’s stomach got scorched. Not badly enough for the skin to be grafted, but red and blistered where he put out the flames in my clothes. At Lakeside Memorial Hospital they wrapped him in white bandages and told him to rest. They said the scars might last. I think Bradley hopes so.

My hair got burned, nothing else. It’s short now, and when I lie in bed at night, I think I can still smell the smoke in it.

Bradley has to stay in bed. I sit in a chair right near him. We don’t say much. It’s peaceful in his room, with the cars and planes and trucks twisting quietly over our heads.

“What’ll you make next?” I ask him.

He looks up, taking in all the years of projects. “I might quit for a while,” he says. “Try something new.”

“A stunt?”

“That’s old,” he says.

I glance at the door and see Dad watching us, holding a deck of cards. I realize Bradley’s talking to Dad more than me.

I have the oddest feeling then. I feel like our mother is there, like the four of us are together again in that room for the first time in years. As Dad deals out the hands, I see her, like she’s sitting beside me: her dark waves of hair, the thin gold coin she wore around her neck, her cigarettes that smelled like mint. I remember her warm hands and sliver of wedding ring.

What I notice most, though, is how different I look. My hair is pale and straight. My skin is darker than hers, and a little shiny. I have freckles on my arms, and when I try to sing, I hit every wrong note.

I lean over to say this to Bradley. You were wrong, I want to tell him, you imagined that part. But there’s a peacefulness in his face that I haven’t seen since before the accident. He feels her, too, I think, and he knows she’s not inside me. She’s gone forever. But she would want us to be happy.

Sonny drove his boat straight into the middle of the lake and cut the engine. They rocked in silence, the deep, prickling hush of a Midwestern summer. The lake was flat as a rug, pushed against a wall of pale sky.

The four of them were celebrating Sonny’s engagement to Billie, a girl with soft hair and a Southern accent. She kept to herself, leaning back in a chair with her legs propped on the rail. She had met Sonny the week before, at a party before her own wedding to someone else. This turn of events would have been more shocking in some lives than it was in Sonny’s; he was a man who lived by his own egregiousness, who charmed, offended, and was talked about at other people’s dinner parties. Stealing a bride was right up his alley.

Diana watched Sonny measure, shake, and pour martinis with
the ease of a cardsharp shuffling. She was forty-two, with a worn, pretty face. Her husband, James, sat beside her, looking amused. He and Sonny had been best friends since the army. James leaned back and looked from Sonny to his bride. “So tell us how you two happened,” he said.

Sonny just grinned, his eyes fine and vacant as crystal.

Billie swung down her legs and leaned forward, animated for the first time that day. In two sips she had finished half her martini. “Let me tell,” she said. “I’m dying to.”

On the night before her wedding, she explained, her father had thrown a party aboard an old steamboat. Sonny had pursued her, flirting openly whenever he found her alone, eyeing her from a distance the rest of the time. Late in the evening they were standing alone on the deck when abruptly he took off his gold Rolex, held it up in the moonlight, and threw it in the water. “Baby, when I’m with you,” he said, “time just stops.”

Billie narrowed her eyes as she spoke. She was very young, and strands of roller-curled hair spiraled like ribbons down her back. “I’m like, please,” she said, “could you possibly be more corny? But”—and here she seemed to struggle, reaching for Sonny’s hand—“it was like when you’re half asleep and you hear voices, you know, from the real world, and you just think, No, I want to stay asleep and have this dream.”

She paused and tried to catch their eyes, but James and Diana were looking as far away as possible. They’d been hearing the story for years in various forms—from the Hawaiian tour guide Sonny fell in love with while gazing at the view from Kaala Peak, threatening to jump unless she agreed to come back to Chicago with him; from the astrologer who had obsessed him from the moment she divined that his mother had been killed in a small plane crash when Sonny was
five. This very boat—a 34-foot ChrisCraft flybridge—he had bought twelve years before in the certainty that he would marry a professional water-skier he’d seduced the previous night. That was Sonny: music, a few drinks under his belt, the light falling a certain way, and any pretty waitress might receive a declaration of love, an impassioned lecture on their two converging fates. If she was smart, she would laugh it off and bring him his change. Not that Sonny didn’t mean it—he could mean almost anything. But his attention span was short.

“So we escaped in a lifeboat,” Billie concluded. “Daddy was mad as hell.” She grinned irrepressibly now, a young, mischievous girl whose life had taken a sudden turn for the thrilling.

“That’s quite a story,” James said, with a sly look at Diana.

Sonny mixed another round of drinks. It was August, one of those hot, hot days when the sky seems to vibrate. Diana longed to strip down to her bathing suit, but her legs embarrassed her. Veins had risen to the surface in recent years. These seemed more offensive now, in the presence of Billie, who had long, gleaming legs and knees delicate as teeth.

“I hope Daddy will forgive me after Sonny and I get married,” Billie said, suddenly despondent. “And Bobby, too, my fiancé. I’ve known him since the fifth grade.”

“Your ex-fiancé,” James reminded her.

“Oh yeah,” she said. “Ex.”

James and Diana’s friendship with Sonny had had its perfect moment twenty years before, in the early seventies, when Diana wore short polyester dresses and thick pale lipstick. Sonny would squire them from one Chicago nightclub to the next, and each time they went inside she felt they were expected, that the party could really
begin now that they had arrived. In pictures from those days James and Sonny looked surprisingly big-eared and eager. They were typewriter salesmen for IBM, and had started a side business marketing inventions—a solar bicycle, aerosol tanning lotion—that failed one by one and left them nearly bankrupt. In the end James quit and went to law school; Sonny later cashed in on fast-food investments he’d had the prescience to make early on. But in those first days they’d been convinced success was imminent, and would wedge fat cigars between their teeth and talk about the good life. Diana pictured it coming suddenly and with violence, a shock that would leave them reeling. But like so many things, success took longer than they thought to arrive, and by the time it came, it merely seemed their due.

After a second round of drinks, Diana went down to the cabin. The sun hurt her eyes—it had been like that since she’d started researching her dissertation, “Crisis and Catharsis in the Films of Alfred Hitchcock.” She had promised James she would cut down the hours she spent viewing, but lately she found that everything in her life—the telephone calls, the endless, hopeful pounding of their son Daniel’s basketball against the garage door as he struggled to match his father, the bills and invitations—seemed like nothing but distractions from Hitchcock’s tense, dreamlike world, where even the clicking of heels was significant. Diana often felt weirdly nostalgic as she watched, as if her own life had been like that once—dreamy, Technicolor—but had lost these qualities through some misstep of her own.

James came down to the cabin. He glanced up toward the deck, smiling, and shook his head. “Nothing changes,” he said.

“Am I crazy,” Diana said, “or is it more romantic this time?”

“You’re crazy,” James said.

“I guess it’s always romantic when two people fall in love,” Diana mused. “Even if it turns out not to be real.”

“Turns out!”

“Well, never was.”

“It’s been a long time since the last one,” James said, washing his hands in the sink. “I thought maybe he was outgrowing it.”

“Oh, let’s hope not!” Diana said.

James gave her an odd look, then opened the small refrigerator and peered inside it. He’d been a star basketball forward at the University of Michigan, and still had the ropey limbs and urgent, visible veins of an athlete. Lately Diana had wakened sometimes in the middle of the night to find James’s eyes wide open. “What are you thinking about?” she would ask repeatedly, nervously, though he writhed under her scrutiny. She was worried he was having an affair, or wishing he were having one.

“You know,” she said, moving near him, “today makes me think of the old days.”

“Me, too,” James said. He was tossing things into a bowl: mayonnaise, ketchup, Tabasco, chopped celery.

Diana watched his face. “We’ve changed since then,” she said. “More than Sonny.”

“Let’s hope so.” James looked up, meeting her eyes. “How?”

“I’m not sure.”

She had noticed that she and her husband were more affectionate in public than in private nowadays, as if the presence of other people relieved some pressure between them. “I mean, back then,” she said, “how do you think we expected our lives to turn out?”

James picked up an egg and rolled it from one palm to the other a few times, then set it gently on the counter.

“We were kids,” he said.

Years before, while she and James were dating, Diana had once been seduced by Sonny. At the time she was twenty-three and fresh out of Smith. Sonny didn’t like her. She’d been trying for weeks to win him over, but he seemed hardly to notice. She and James were staying on Lake Erie at the house Sonny had borrowed that summer, and while James made crayfish stew for dinner in the main house, Diana brought Sonny a scotch in the cabin he used as a painting studio. He painted copies: Pollock, Motherwell, Kline, de Kooning—anything really, as long as it was abstract (he drew badly). He worked from small reproductions cut from the pages of books, and his results were uncannily good. They filled the walls of his Clark Street apartment, and first-time visitors were astonished by the daunting collection he seemed to have amassed.

Sonny surprised Diana that day by looking pleased to see her. It was raining, and while she shook the drops from her hair, Sonny shut the door behind her and lifted the drink from her hand. He sipped, then handed it back for her to share. “I’m pretty hard on James’s girlfriends,” he observed.

“I’ve noticed. Is that a policy?” She was nervous, and held the glass in both hands.

“I keep the boundaries clear, nobody gets the wrong idea,” he said.

It took Diana a moment to understand. “God, it’s not like anyone would,” she said. “I mean, you’re James’s best friend.”

“That’s why it scares me.”

He went to the window and looked outside at the rain. Diana sipped his drink, relieved it was only this he’d had against her, not something worse.

“You think I should relax about it?” he asked.

“Sonny, you have to promise.”

She crossed the room and stood beside him. She had finished the scotch, and now she felt loopy, bold. Setting the glass at her feet, she took Sonny’s hand. “Friends?” she asked.

He nodded, then shyly put his arms around her. As they hugged, Diana teased herself, imagining what it would be like to make love to Sonny. Then he drew back, took her face in his hands, and kissed her.

Diana was as stunned as if he had slapped her. Gently she tried to pull away, but Sonny was running his palms along her back and kissing her neck as if this were all something they had agreed on. She tried to take it as a joke. “I’ve heard of self-contradiction,” she said, “but this is outrageous.” Sonny didn’t pause, and as the moments passed, Diana felt drawn in by his fierce arousal, by the very fact that something so unthinkable was actually happening. The feeling was not quite desire, but something like it. It held her still while Sonny eased her onto the concrete floor, pushing a folded rag behind her head. She was crying by then, and tears ran from her eyes into both ears. She pulled Sonny to her, hooking her fingers over the thick ridges of muscle along his spine. He felt heavy and strange in her arms. His belt buckle struck the concrete—once, then again, over and over again with a thick, blunt sound. She closed her eyes at the end. When Sonny was done he stood up, slapped the dust from his hands, and picked up his paintbrush. Diana touched the floor beneath her, thinking she might have bled, though there was no reason. She ran through the rain back to the house, convinced her life would never be the same.