City on Fire (84 page)

Then one afternoon they were idling near the nexus of two avenues and an expressway. It was almost Christmas, and a Santa Claus in a vacant lot was offering to appear in pictures for five dollars. The trim on his suit was mangy, as if it had been dug out of a dumpster, yet young mothers queued ten deep on the sidewalk, holding the hands of kids waiting to get in. Sam watched through her lens. Black and Latin kids were a fixation of hers; she could beam at them the goodwill she felt toward all people of color without having to feel any of the guilt. A bus pulled to the curb, blocking her view, and then moved away again. Out of nowhere came a boom. A cloud of smoke roiled above a shuttered sporting-goods store two lots down. Women were yelling, and there was a kind of stampede away from Santa. “Whoa. Fucking gas lines up here,” Nicky said, and then fixed Sam with a curious expression, as if waiting to see what she would do. But before she could respond, D.T. and Sol were shoving back into the van. A brand-new duffelbag in red, white, and blue was handed forward. “Is that the right size?” Sol asked, breathlessly. “It’s the biggest one I could find.”

“Jesus,” Sam said. “You guys were in there? Are you okay?”

“That was too close for comfort, Sol. But it looks like no one got hurt.” Nicky’s tone was lost in the sirens that had begun to wail. Her camera swung toward the expressway’s off-ramp, where an ambulance was hitting gridlock. Click.

“Hey, you two aren’t, like, in any way responsible for what just happened, right?” They had joined the mass of traffic trying to get away from the explosion. With night falling, the back of the van was in shadow.

“For a gas main explosion?” Nicky said.

“Con fucking Edison, man,” Sol added.

Something between the sporting-goods store and the ambulance had slid into her viewfinder, a decisive moment. She was pressing the button when her elbow got jostled, queering the shot. “Would you knock it off already?” This was Sewer Girl, on a tilt. “Seriously, Nicky, I don’t know why you’d bring her along.”

“You want to know who’s ultimately responsible?” Nicky asked. “Look around, Sam. It’s the whole rotten country. People need to wake up to the fact that no one’s looking out for them.” It was true that as another ambulance screamed on the expressway, the whores by the on-ramp seemed to take it in stride, the way you accepted potholes, or the third-world wars Nicky said made for cheap bananas. Overhead, exit signs rimed with road salt slid by. Port Morris, Melrose, Mott Haven—these were third-world countries, practically. Still, it was the kind of talk that had made her so uncomfortable at the end of last summer. “But not to worry, Sam. We’re on the same side. Our fates are all bound together now.”

WERE THEY REALLY, though? Nicky was starting to treat her like a girlfriend, but she wasn’t even sure she liked him. On top of his delusions of grandeur, he smelled like summer sausage. She would still be brooding on Christmas Day, laying out the place settings for dinner, when Dad took the phone call that changed everything. What put her on notice was his silence, the way he listened without speaking. When she ventured a glance, he was pale. Her first thought was that someone, somehow, had heard tell she’d stolen from him on her last trip out. Her second was that it was a no-go on getting the contracts back. “Yeah. Uh-huh. I understand.” He hung up the phone so hard that it rang again, hanging in the air.

“Everything all right?” she said, trying to sound like him. Dry. Cool. But no longer.

“Those fuckers.”

“What fuckers, Dad?”

The echo seemed to remind him she was here. So at least this wasn’t about Thanksgiving. Or was it? “That was Rizzo. He goes out to Willets Point an hour ago to grab something, the lock on Shed 13 is busted, and the watchman next door’s just seen a giant in a hockey uniform running toward the train. We’ve been hit again, Sammy. They’re robbing me blind.”

“Your polverone.” Already, though, she knew it wasn’t polverone. If she could just look back at those pictures she’d taken, the ruined church, the sporting-goods store, the color of that smoke, the Rangers bag … but she shouldn’t have been doing so much cocaine. Where the fuck had her camera disappeared to? Her father squeezed her hand.

“Black powder, honey. High-test. It had to be a dozen kilos. They cleaned out the entire shed.”

70

THERE WAS A PERIOD just after the inevitability of ruin hove into view and just before it smashed into the hull of your life that was the closest to pure freedom anybody ever got. The fateful decisions had all been made by some remote historical figure, a you who no longer existed. Nor would the you who’d eventually have to live them down resemble in any but the most general sense the you you were today. The oven was preheating, but your goose was not yet cooked. In the meantime, it didn’t matter whether you smote your oppressors or went around writing checks to everyone you’d ever wronged or anything in between. And it had to mean something, Keith would think afterward, that what he’d decided to do with all that freedom was not return to Sam, but settle their accounts for good. So why had it made him feel worse? Those last few mornings of his married life, he’d stood at the mirrored bureau as before, baring his teeth to check for remnants of English muffin, watching his hands cruise through the involved origami of a double-Windsor knot. But the familiar a.m. chamber music—the eggy sizzle in the kitchen, the shugsplash of water on the vanity where Regan put on her makeup—carried an extra charge of presence from his conviction that it would soon cease to exist. At any second, she would drift into the mirror’s beveled edge holding up a dyed-black hair she’d plucked from a throw cushion in the living room, or that hotel key he’d misplaced.

In fact, it wasn’t until the Sunday after Thanksgiving, six days after he’d finally broken things off with Samantha, that the shipwreck or -burning or whatever it was really got under way. He was sitting up in bed, reading John le Carré by lamplight. She was staring at the pages of The New York Review of Books, to which she’d subscribed a month earlier, after picking it up in her analyst’s waiting room. She seemed to like exactly those things he found most irksome about The New York Review of Books: its unapologetic boringness, its privileged hostility to privilege. But they did both enjoy the Olympian self-regard of the personal ads. She said she wanted to try one on him now. Her voice was strangely thick. “ ‘MWM. Smart, athletic thirty-six-year-old. Politics, cinema, running. Seeking attractive woman for companionship, more.’ Can you believe that?”

“What’s not to believe?”

“ ‘MWM’ means he’s married, Keith. What if his wife were to read this stuff?”

There was a tightening in his chest, as if a rope were being cinched. “Would she know it was her husband?”

“A wife tends to know when something’s going on, Keith.”

“Does she?” There was a cobweb in the corner of the ceiling; how had he not noticed this? “So then why are you acting so scandalized?”

“It’s for effect, Keith. Don’t you think it’s time we discussed how you’ve been lying to me?”

It had a strange result, this calm of hers: it pissed him off. He rose and went to sit on the chair, so that he could see her properly, and found that he was shaking. “I don’t know. Are we going to pretend it’s all my fault?” he said. And then her beautiful composure was collapsing, and she was covering her face with a pillow so the kids wouldn’t hear, sobbing so hard that for a long time she couldn’t even speak. It was awful.

Though not as bad as the hours to follow. He wouldn’t talk about his infidelity in other-than-abstract terms, and she wouldn’t tell him how she’d found out. Instead, what they picked apart in choked whispers was the marriage itself. Or rather, two marriages: his version and her version. Back and forth they went over every last grievance, like people walking on coals, until the pain seemed almost reassuring. (At least in this, the pain, the repetition, they were still together.) And when the garbagemen started to bang around outside, heralding the end of this endless darkness, they made love, exhausted, barely moving, as though twice their actual age. He’d never felt so close to her, ever; the fact of his having been inside someone else (or for that matter, the thought of someone else inside Regan) couldn’t change how deeply they knew each other. What if this was what he’d had to find out: how close they could still be? What if he told her that? But it was too late, the sex would change nothing. He would probably never be this close to anyone again.

And two days later, they were sitting the kids down in the living room. It seemed impossible that a week earlier they’d stood together on Seventh Avenue watching balloons bob brightly by, knowing that the shadows passing over them were just that, that soon they’d feel again the sun. It had been completely wasted on him! How could he have let himself suffer, on what was to be their last holiday as a family, over what he’d done to Samantha Cicciaro—a child, basically, who wasn’t even his own? In the seconds before Regan began to speak, Will looked stricken. But she was never more brilliant than when the stakes were high: sturdy, compassionate, in command. Leaning forward to take their hands, she started to explain that sometimes Moms and Dads … Cate’s face crumpled like paper tossed onto a fire. Keith wanted to say something, but when he opened his mouth, he found himself on the verge, too. It was just hitting him that he would now only see them on pre-set dates, weekends and even-numbered Thursdays or something equally unbearable. When he’d thought of losing everything, everything hadn’t meant this. Not this Regan, the deep-down Regan he’d fallen in love with. Not his kids.

HE SPENT THE FIRST FEW NIGHTS of the separation in a hotel, on his expense account. After his disaster with the municipal bonds, he’d rededicated himself to business ethics, but he was going to have to be careful about money for a while now. He hadn’t remembered his razor, so his face was stubbly against the pillow. What he had remembered was to tuck in among his changes of clothes one of Regan’s framed photographs of the four of them from a few summers back, at Lake Winnipesaukee. He set it up on the nightstand, as if he might swim down into the past, where nothing could go wrong.

On the fourth day, the frame got returned to the suitcase and then unpacked again and set up on the coffeetable of the Tadelises’ living room, after the master of the house had gone to bed. It had surprised Keith, frankly, to discover that Greg Tadelis was his closest friend. They hadn’t seen each other since their days together at Renard. But when he’d called and explained that he was having some trouble in his marriage, Tadelis had said, “Please, Lamplighter. Our couch folds out. Stay as long as you need.”

Mrs. T. was less sympathetic. She seemed silently pleased that the golden couple, with their fancy address and prep-schooled offspring, had got their comeuppance, and Keith suspected her of siding with Regan. He’d never thought much of Doris Tadelis back when they were all going to company picnics together, but it bothered him now that she would just assume he was the one to blame for the separation. He was, of course—but how could she assume it? Maybe she’d seen through him all along.

He ate dinner each night at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central, preferring to endure the shame and the cost of sitting there alone rather than face this formidable woman across her kitchen table. Still, when he came in and apologized for working late, she would snort derisively, as if to say, “You think you’re too good for my pot roast, don’t you?”

He had to get out of here, obviously, but looking for a place of his own, even a one-bedroom with a short-term lease, would have meant admitting the separation wasn’t temporary. Then, the week before Christmas, he’d arrived at the old building for his scheduled visit with the kids to find Regan out front, supervising movers as they angled his piano, now hers, into the open maw of a van. She’d gotten her hair cut short, a bob, he thought it was called, like she’d had it when she’d been in Twelfth Night. The fact that it could have been short for days now without his knowing stabbed at him. When he asked what she was doing, she turned her face away. “What does it look like I’m doing?” She sounded like she’d swallowed a cough drop. “I found a place in Brooklyn Heights.”

“For Pete’s sake, Regan. Brooklyn? How far are you going to take this?”

“Not in front of the kids.” He looked and saw them watching through the glass of the vestibule. He became aware, too, of the movers, conspicuously ignoring him. She whispered, “Our home, Keith. You brought her into our home.”

“What are you talking about?” But he knew exactly what she was talking about. She’d somehow figured out one of the things he’d omitted—that he’d betrayed her even under her own roof, or had tried—and now she was moving out. As a fitting together of problem and solution, it was classic Regan.

He could hang on to the apartment or sell it, she said, or whatever the hell he wanted; she just didn’t want to set foot in it again.

And how were they supposed to afford a second apartment?

“I’m not dependent on you anymore, Keith, remember? I have a job.”

They stood there not five feet apart, her arms crossed, his own hanging like butchered meat at his sides. Whatever they thought of all this, the movers and the doorman weren’t about to let on—they were New Yorkers. Even the kids, behind the slice of streetscape floating in the glass, had mastered the art of pretending not to see.

SUPERFICIALLY, OF COURSE, keeping the apartment made things easier for Keith. (Who he was, he was realizing, was a person for whom things superficially are easy.) Underneath, it did anything but. The living room, absent its piano and its rug and its couch, wore an air of dereliction. The kids’ beds had been taken, too. He’d have to buy new ones, another blow to his already tight finances.

She’d left the big horsehair mattress in the master bedroom, perhaps not believing that he hadn’t fucked his mistress on it, but too sentimental to throw it out. It had been her grandmother’s, and then her mother’s, and after her father’s remarriage, Felicia Gould had been eager to get rid of it. They’d had to disassemble the bedstead in order to get it into the elevator of their newlywed apartment in the Village. (It was larger than a king, and probably predated standard mattress sizing.) He’d borrowed a mallet and a chamois cloth from the super, wrapped one inside the other. He could feel Regan cringing inside each time he brought the mallet up against the bedrails, but she never said a word. They’d had so much fun on that mattress, making the kind of ruckus she never let herself make later, when paper-thin walls were all that separated them from the baby. And he’d never imagined horsehair could be so comfortable, the way it conformed to you whether you slept the sleep of the guiltless, like Keith, or like Regan tossed restlessly. Now the impress of her body was never going to fade, any more than would his memory of the little alarmed noises she emitted from deep in dreams.