City on Fire (77 page)

64

REGAN WAS TO SPEND HER EARLY THIRTIES puzzling over the central conviction of her twenties. Where had she gotten the idea that there was no problem so big love couldn’t fix it? But this was probably just another way of being hard on herself; a better question might have been, Where hadn’t she gotten it? Wherever you turned in those years, there were love beads and love-ins, “Love Me Do” and “When a Man Loves a Woman.” You couldn’t be a citizen of your own time and not believe on some level that love was, as another song put it, all you needed. She’d held fast to her love through the joys and sorrows of the ’60s. Through the showdown between Daddy and William, through Daddy’s wedding and her own, through Keith’s career change, Will’s birth, Cate’s … Perhaps this was why she was so slow to see the unhappiness creeping back in after they moved to the Upper East Side. Or to acknowledge, to herself or to her husband, that she saw it. She’d been so much unhappier in the pre-Keith past; she was still grateful to him for all he’d saved her from. In fact, she would come to wonder if it wasn’t that unhappiness she’d never told him about, the child who hadn’t been born, that lay between them now.

But whatever the cause, Keith gradually began to pull away. At six o’clock, she used to hear his briefcase hitting the ground, used to hear him steal toward the living room to catch the kids up in his arms before they could register he was home. Now he seemed to tiptoe for another reason: to buy himself as much time as possible before having to talk to anyone. He would go straight to the kitchen to mix himself a drink, which he drained with a pinched expression. He wasn’t the kind of man to complain about the mess the kids had made, but his mouth at rest was a frown, and she could feel him dwelling on something.

He’d lost interest in sex, too. This might have been a welcome development, as her own interest was waning again. Or maybe interest wasn’t quite the right word, but she often felt exhausted by the time they went to bed: bloated, unsexy, disembodied. Once or twice a week, she would get him off under the covers. He would rub her through her nightgown and she would pretend to come just before she knew he was going to, and he wouldn’t question it. But the condition for her not wanting him, it seemed, had been him wanting her. As soon as he stopped seeking her hand out, she discovered she needed his touch.

One night they were out at some professional function, a fundraiser for a children’s something-or-other, a drinks-and-tasting-menu kind of affair where you ate off little plates and mingled with clients and potential clients. Regan hated these things, not because the thought of abandoned children didn’t hit her where she lived, but because she was no good at eating standing up. To balance heavy food on a tiny plate, to manage fork and napkin and the drink there was nowhere to set down, and then to have to talk to men who invariably knew your father, or worse, your uncle … You ought to be able to pay money not to come to these things. And suddenly, Keith was talking to, laughing with, a woman who couldn’t have been older than twenty-four. She looked like a mythological creature, a silkie or dryad, long blond hair and a low-cut dress in which her breasts, without any apparent means of support, were offered like alluring canapés. This was more or less the universal ideal of female beauty, from which Regan was drifting further and further, sucked toward the Mommy Zone. Meanwhile, Keith just got better-looking. How could his love, which she’d put so much stock in, stand up to her early grays, her thickening ass, her stretch-marks and wrinkles?

She started walking everywhere: to PTA meetings, to drop Cate off at preschool, to the salon with its supersonic hairdryers. She walked one afternoon all the way down to Union Square and bought an exercise book from the four-story bookstore there, which had suddenly sprouted a fitness section. At home, she played Carly Simon on Keith’s high-end stereo and practiced isometric stretches, rolling a rolling-pin over her abdomen. Then, when that didn’t make her feel any better, she stuck a finger down her throat and, for the first time since Vassar, made herself throw up.

SHE COULDN’T HAVE SAID when this became a daily thing. It was as if there were two worlds, sealed off from each other by the bathroom door. When she wasn’t doing it, she didn’t think about it. Or she did, but only somewhere in the back of her brain, while up front she didn’t even acknowledge that she was looking forward to doing it again, already rehearsing the steps. First she would turn on the faucet in the bathroom, and the radio they kept on the sill by the clothes hamper, because there was no fan to cover the sound. Then she would crack the window enough to let street noise in, but not enough that what she was about to do would be visible to the great world. She would keep the door to the kitchen open, so that the smaller, nuclear world—Will, Cate—would see she had nothing to hide. And when it was all in place, this tongue-and-groove construction of sound, running water plus talk radio plus the broken-glass noise of a backhoe four stories below—she would pull the door and secure it with a metal hook a decade’s worth of warping and settling had been unable to dislodge from the doorframe.

She admired the medieval pragmatism of that hook. And she admired the scale, with its nubbed rubber mat. It presented itself as the one solid place to stand in the world. But the spin of the intricately hatched dial, the blur of numbers and the almost idiographic line segments, the yaw from side to side through the positive and negative values, made her feel less that she was on solid ground than that she was at sea, up on a tiny crow’s nest, so severely many degrees out of plumb that if she fell there would be nothing to catch her but blue. She would feel in an overwhelming way how everything around her, radio, hook, scale, had been prepared for just this—an unfreedom at once exhilarating and queasy-making.

She was always careful to finish with the scale before looking into the mirror, because mirrors were not to be trusted. There was the matter, for example, of the doubling. For every thing reflected, the mirror fabricated two images: the one in the surface and the one in the silvering. You will see if you ever touch a mirror that as your finger approaches, a ghost-finger appears around it, and even with your fingertip to the glass, you will not have reached the finger trapped beneath. Nor should you count on your eyes. The world is actually upside down. Regan would be feeling sick now indeed. Sick like sex with a fever, with a stranger. Sick like slick, wet shame.

She pinned back her hair. She knelt by the porcelain bowl. She saw her shadow in the water and closed her eyes. Pulling the trigger, the Chi Os used to call it. It had been a sort of club, at first, you walked out of the powder room feeling you had proved something. On the radio, a doctor who wasn’t a doctor free-associated about the garbage strike. Rats bit babies in East Harlem. There were lines for gasoline in Jersey and for water in Biafra. How many gallons were wasted every five minutes the faucet stayed on? She sometimes thought she heard footsteps in the kitchen making the lid on the cake stand clatter. This would be Will, roaming the apartment in long, urgent arcs, having intuited that she did in fact have something to hide. She would wait for his feet to go away and she would close her eyes and she would work her index finger past her teeth and the wet lining of her tongue and into the hole at the back, almost sexual, almost like being an infant again, plus the brief distress signal that made her want to bite down, hard, but what had she proved if not that she was tough, that she was in control, the thing men feared because they could not touch it, reach it, hurt her, her fingertip’s tip was on the trigger, she swallowed the sound, prim, a cat coughing.

The sick came up out of her so fast it was a good thing she’d practiced. She’d get the finger aside just in time, and even in the hot acid swoon make sure her head was over the toilet, where another self swam and muddied as the water did. She was such a good girl there was no sound but the plop of liquid into liquid but it hurt like hell to keep it quiet. Another spasm. Little tears in the inside corners of her eyes. And then it was done, her temperature had spiked, a fine postcoital sweat was on her skin. Her forearms made a chord across the cold front of the bowl, a misericord to rest her forehead on, the smell would go away soon.

Then came the deep listening, in which she could hear each layer of sound, and beyond all of them, the wind grieving over the edges of the hole she’d now cleared in herself. Like the edges of a tarp stretched over a hole in a roof in Buffalo. The saddest part, maybe, was that the seconds that followed were the best part of her day. The ceiling would lift off the room and its walls would telescope toward the sky like a great funnel and she would feel her lost child out there, the angelic sisters, her mother departing from her. Her dear dead mother plucking at the neckline of her cosmic sweater and turning away. “No matter where you are, she sees you,” Daddy had said that day, squeezing her hand and looking down into the coffin. He’d meant to comfort. It was practically the only mention. And then came the ten seconds in which Regan hated herself more than ever. Time to tear two squares of toilet paper and wipe down the bowl’s rim and the bottom of the sink. To brush teeth with a nerdle of Gleem. To flush again and fill the Listerine cap half-full of Listerine and half-full of water. To gargle and drink a glass from the tap, unpin the hair, glance in the mirror again. Window down, radio off, light a match. Do not risk a third flush. And sometimes, while the tank refilled from the second, she would hear socked feet scurrying off toward a far corner of the apartment, as if in flight.

65

SUMMER IN NASSAU COUNTY was fireflies and bottle rockets and cats getting it on in the shade of parked cars and playing cards clothespinned to bike spokes—all that Norman Rockwell crap—so you can bet people freaking loved the Bicentennial. Through the windowscreen of his basement room at midday, Charlie could already smell the sulfur trails of sparklers. It was funny, though, if you thought about it: those elegiac little flags flapping on the neighbors’ lawns were just advertisements, basically, planted by a local life-insurance salesman whose name was printed on the poles. To get anywhere near the real heirs of the Revolution, the punk rockers, you had to go into the City. Not that he’d ever have put it this way to Mom. Instead, he told her he wanted to go see the tall ships. With friends, he said—an alibi she was only too eager to accept. They hadn’t discussed how he’d be getting there; later, he could claim there’d been a miscommunication. But she’d wanted him back by eleven. “Even if the fireworks run over. Eleven—repeat it back to me, Charlie.”

“Geez, Mom. Mellow out.” He’d left the room before she could change her mind. That was yesterday.

Now, in the upstairs bathroom, he used scissors to attack his head. Cutting your own hair was harder than you’d think, and he almost wussed out at the sight of the first clump stuck like a reddish thistle to the slope of the sink, but then he pictured Sam’s grin when she saw him. With the faucet running to cover the sound, he plugged in his dad’s old electric razor and prayed it still worked. The motor whined. Hairs snowed crimson onto the formica. It came across so tough on the sleeve of Brass Tactics, which he’d set on the counter for reference—the strip of uncut hair sprung defiant from the scalp—but in the mirror, with the bucolic drone of some homeowner’s lawnmower and the pop of early firecrackers in the background, it looked like a starved rodent had collapsed atop his skull.

He used some balled toilet paper to sweep the hairs from the counter into the bowl of the sink, and thence down the drain. Then he knelt to check the tiles for strays. Before he’d finished, a splashing sound made him turn around, and what he saw almost gave him a heart attack. The sink was overflowing. Shit. He grabbed a towel from the towel-rack. By the time he reached the faucet, runoff had snaked across the sloped floor, under the door, out into the hallway. Fucking shit. In his haste, he’d taken one of Mom’s monogrammed towels, but there was no going back now. He did his best to soak up the water and then fished in the drain, trying not to register the gunked texture of the pipes. He came up with an evil little Hitler moustache of hair. He wadded it in Kleenex and flushed it down the toilet.

Out in the hallway, towel in hand, he stood listening for Mom. Abraham, age three, appeared in the doorway of the room where the twins should have been sleeping. The blameless mouth widened as Abe took in the water on the floor and his brother’s ruined scalp. He clapped a hand to his cheek and pointed just to make sure Charlie knew he knew. “You rat me out, I give you a bruise,” Charlie said. “Now go finish your damn nap.” It was no fair, having brothers too young to be mad at. And this was their lawn being mowed outside; Mom must have gotten tired of waiting around for Charlie and decided to do it herself. He dropped the towel and swabbed it around with his foot and balled it up at the bottom of the linen closet. He waited for the mower to move into the backyard. Then he bolted down the stairs and out the front door, snatching Mom’s car keys off their hook en route, hoping like hell she wouldn’t see him.

THE WAY SAM TALKED about her dad made Charlie kind of scared of the guy. So, notwithstanding the prommish scenario he’d envisioned—ringing the bell, being invited in to wait in the living room until Sam emerged blushing from the back of the house—he idled at the curb and honked until she came out. If she was thinking of this in date-like terms, you couldn’t tell it from her clothes. She wore her same old Television tee-shirt. She did, however, say his hair looked amazing, which instantly made everything pretty much worth it. She’d brought their jointly owned eight-track of Horses, and on the way in they listened to it twice through, singing along as they descended the back half of the Q-Boro Bridge like a bomb lobbed at Midtown: Coming in in all directions, white, shining silver …

Charlie was worried about Mom’s wagon getting stolen if he left it parked for eight hours in the Village, so they took a spot above Fourteenth and headed down on foot toward where a friend of Sam’s was supposed to be getting off work. She’d been nipping from a brown-bagged bottle. He reached for it and, after checking for cops, took a swig. “This is one of those guys from your record-store photo shoot we’re meeting?”