City on Fire (6 page)

He would have been hard to miss even without the safety pins or the blindingly white hockey uniform or the big duffelbag on his shoulder. He was six foot six and seemed paler than usual, his mouth pinched like a rabbit’s. It was with some relief that William noticed his eyes were still on the floor. And then, as if sensing danger, they weren’t. To pretend not to see him would tax credulity. How much simpler the world would be if people could admit openly to hating each other! On the other hand, this was not that world. And William still believed, questions of utopia aside, in the social graces. “Sol!” he said, straining for warmth.

“Billy.”

“Of all the terminals in the world …” Sol was already scanning for exits, which meant William had an edge here. Ditto the Rangers-logo jersey; Sol was aggressively punk, shaven-headed, multiply pierced and inked (was that a new tattoo on his neck?), and should have opposed on principle the fascism of team sports. But then William recalled his own clothes, the ridiculous coat that swept the floor when he walked. This would almost certainly be reported back to his ex-nemesis Nicky Chaos, whom Sol served as foot soldier, cupbearer, avatar. The trick was to stay on offense, to keep Sol from noticing. “Late with your shopping?”

“What? Oh.” Sol glanced at the duffel as if at some jungle predator that had dropped down on him from a tree. “No, uh … hockey practice. The nearest free ice is out in Queens.”

“On Christmas Day? I didn’t know you even played.”

“Well, I do.” No one was ever going to accuse Solomon Grungy of repartee.

“I guess you’ve always had the makings of an enforcer,” William said. “Just be sure you take those piercings out when you play.” No response. “But how’s tricks? How’s Nicky?”

Now Sol grew testy; why did everyone always assume he knew how Nicky was?

“It’s a pleasantry. I’m just asking, without the band, what you guys have been doing.”

“Some people have to work.”

“I don’t remember Nicky being among them. I heard he was trying to paint now.”

“That’s just like you, Billy, to act like painting still matters, with the world going to shit all around you.” And here, falling back on Nicky’s old hobbyhorse about art versus culture, Sol seemed to relax; you could actually see a calculation lope across his face, where on most people’s it would have flitted. “But I guess Nicky’s been meaning to get in touch. What we’ve been doing is, we’re getting the band back together.”

“Like hell you are.”

From its inception, Ex Post Facto had been William’s baby. Well, his and Venus de Nylon’s. They’d dreamed it up that hazy summer of ’73. William had scribbled out a manifesto and a few songs, they’d enlisted a couple friends as the rhythm section, Venus had found some old bowling uniforms at a flea market and resewn them to look paramilitary, and they’d worn them down to the nightclub where a Hells Angel who lived in William’s building sometimes worked the door. They’d played those early shows as a four-piece. Only after they’d cut a record had Nicky Chaos come along. The sound needed a second guitar, he insisted, though his musicianship made Nastanovich, on bass, look like Charlie fucking Mingus. No, Nicky wanted to play guitar because William played guitar, paint because he painted. Sometimes it seemed as though what Nicky Chaos really wanted was to out-William William, even as William tried his damnedest to become something else. Sol shifted the bag on his shoulder and winced. “It’s true. Nicky booked a New Year’s show, a comeback.”

“Why’d he do that? You’ve got exactly zero original members of the band.”

“We found a real PA for me to run this time.”

Probably stolen, knowing Sol. Like the hockey uniform, which was suspiciously pristine, given the mud all over his boots, the black stuff under his nails.

“Plus we’ve got Big Mike.”

Ah. So they’d stolen his drummer, too. And if they had Big Mike, who else was left to stand in their way? Venus had washed her hands, and Nastanovich was no longer in any position to object. All of a sudden, William couldn’t remember what he was still trying to hold on to. Still, Nicky’s habitual indifference to the fact of other people brought out his inner autocrat. “Well, so long as you guys don’t use the handle.”

“What?”

“Tell him he can have Big Mike, but the name, Ex Post Facto—that belongs to me.”

“But we need the name, man. How do you think we landed a show at the Vault?”

“I’m sure you’ll come up with something. Nicky always had a way with words.”

For a moment, a helplessness entered in, an appeal to a camaraderie that had never really existed. “You should come see us, you know. You might be surprised.”

“I may just do that. But wait a minute … aren’t you missing something?”

“Huh?”

“Your stick.” He reached out to touch the place on Sol’s wide shoulder where a hockey stick would have rested. His rustling coat must have been charged up with static electricity, because a spark leapt between them, mute amid the terminal noise. And it was strange how time seemed to wind down. How, at the apex of Sol’s literal jump, fear gaped from behind his shocked-white face. Then he forced it back into a facsimile of the old Grungy sneer.

“I broke it over some guy’s head when he crossed me.”

“I bet you did,” William said. “Anyway, I’ll be seeing you.” And after agreeing that he would—maybe New Year’s?—Sol hurried off toward the downtown 6.

Fucking holidays, William thought. Occasions to rethink your life, ostensibly, but how were you supposed to do that when other people kept dragging you back toward whoever you used to be? Even now, for example, he knew he wasn’t going to be able to ignore his curiosity about what Nicky Chaos was up to—just as he knew that in a few minutes, he’d be back in the basement-level bathrooms, seeking out the various forms of sweet release that waited there. Truth to tell, it was probably why he’d really come here in the first place. But so then, putting aside this hockey nonsense, what was Sol Grungy’s excuse?

5

MERCER UNTWINED THE MEAGER SHEAF of manuscript pages, set them face-down on the coffeetable, and rolled a sheet of A4 onto the drum of the new IBM Selectric, whose hum seemed accusatory. For half a year now, he’d let William believe this was a more or less daily ritual. If, when he got home from teaching, William was up in the Bronx attending to his own magnum opus—a diptych called Evidence I and II—that was okay; Mercer could use the time to toil in the vineyards of the novel. And if later, over dinner, Mercer refused to discuss the day’s progress, it was because it was his policy not to disclose details, rather than because they didn’t exist. He really would every so often sit down to the ramshackle Olivetti, as he used to back in Altana. Mostly, though, he lolled on the futon under a spavined volume of Proust. Blocked, he’d thought. But had writer’s block stopped old Marcel? Probably it was just a synonym for failure to buckle down, and as soon as he touched these virgin keys, fire would sweep across his cerebellum, flaming letters fly down through his fingers to scorch the page. By the time William returned, a Christmas miracle would be complete—duplicity exorcised for all time, months of inertia transubstantiated into art.

But things didn’t happen like they did in novels, and nothing continued to come. The last daylight inched like a cortège across the secondhand furniture, the Gentlemen Prefer Blondes poster, the tabby odalisqued on the rabbit-eared Magnavox, the cut-to-fit kitchenette congoleum, the tiny mirror placed above the sink because the bathroom was out in the hall, shared by the whole floor (another quirk from the factory days). The cremains of Christmas dinner, doubled there, were like an exhibit in the museum of his personal failings.

It was a measure of the derivative nature of Mercer’s distraction—distraction from distraction—that he didn’t hear anyone come upstairs until the doorknob began to rattle. Night having fallen, the person trying to get in was just a silhouette against the pebble-glass, and there was something odd in the way it carried itself. Some wild-eyed addict curled around a blade? A white-ethnic vigilante determined single-handedly to de-integrate the neighborhood? It was William. And when he opened the door and flicked on the overhead light, his lip was split open, his right eye swollen shut. Under the chesterfield draped over his shoulders, some kind of makeshift sling pinned his right arm to his torso. In the dizzy microsecond before he jumped up, Mercer was suspended between present and past, eros and philia.

“Jesus God, William, what happened to you?”

“It’s nothing.” His voice came from high up in his chest, a place Mercer hadn’t even known existed. He looked away as Mercer examined him up close.

“God! That’s not nothing!”

“Don’t be dramatic. It’s just a sprain. It’ll heal.”

Mercer was already rifling through his shaving kit for the mercurochrome, which Mama used to swear by when C.L. came in looking like this. Wages of sin. He made William sit on the futon and cocked the swivel-necked lamp. He raised his face to the light and brushed the tangled hair back with a thumb. There was another cut on the forehead, and a fist-sized bruise to match the arm. “I don’t suppose you’ll tell me what happened.”

William was pale. Shaking a little. “Please, Mercer. I just fell down some stairs.”

More likely, he’d been jumped for his wallet. William liked to tease Mercer about his “fear of the black man,” but the one time Mercer had allowed himself to be dragged north of 110th Street—ribs at Sylvia’s, followed by Patti LaBelle at the Apollo—the poverty had made their current living situation seem positively deluxe. Sere-looking vagrants scratching themselves in doorways, eyeing him like some kind of Benedict Arnold.… He dabbed gently at the cut with the mercurochrome. William sucked in his breath. “Ow!”

“You deserve it, love, scaring me to death like that. Now hold still.”

THAT NIGHT, and indeed that entire last week of 1976, William would refuse to go see a doctor. Typical, Mercer thought. Secretly, though, he had always admired his lover’s independence: the grin he kept up even in the midst of the most heated dinner-table arguments with friends, and the Morse code his hand seemed to press into Mercer’s thigh beneath the tablecloth’s white hem, the air of secret exemption. Living with him was like getting to see the side of the moon that usually hides its face from us. And as he tended to William’s injuries—black eye, sore jaw, a sprain self-diagnosed as “mild”—Mercer again began to feel that, if he did everything right, William might eventually come to depend on him. He moved the TV to the sleeping nook. He cooked elaborate meals, keeping mum whenever William filled up on candy bars instead. Against his every inclination, he didn’t press William any further on what had happened. And when, on New Year’s Eve, William finally said he was starting to go stir-crazy, he had to go put in a couple of hours at the studio, Mercer swallowed his objections and shooed him out the door.

As soon as he was alone, Mercer cleared as much of the fold-down counter as was possible and got out the little sawed-off ironing board. From the wardrobe rack by the door, he retrieved William’s tuxedo and his own good suit, the one he’d come to the city with and now realized made him look like an insurance salesman. He’d made dinner reservations for nine o’clock at the little deconstructionist bistro downtown William had liked so much last summer. And maybe they could go out afterward, just the two of them. It was true that it had been a long time since they’d been dancing. He methodically attacked wrinkles and then laid the jackets out on the coverlet. They looked like paperdolls, William’s white tuxedo jacket, his own tame brown suitcoat, just barely touching at the ends of the sleeves where the hands would have been. But when the phone rang, he knew even before picking it up who it would be. “Where are you?” he couldn’t help asking. “It’s almost eight.”

Change of plans, William said. Had he mentioned he’d run into an old acquaintance, who told him Nicky and the others were premiering their new project tonight? It behooved him, he’d decided, to verify with his own eyes that it was a total disaster. “You should come. It’ll be like watching the Hindenburg.” There were voices behind him.

“You sound like you’re with people already.”

“I’m at a payphone, Mercer. A Chinese woman is trying to sell me cigarettes off a panel truck.” There was a muffled sound, and he could in fact hear William, at some distance from the mouthpiece, saying, No. No, thank you. “But yes, I thought we could meet up with people at the venue. You won’t have to pay. Bullet will be working the door.”

“Bullet scares me, William.”

“I can’t not be there. I need to see with my own eyes the extent of the travesty.”

“I know, but I thought with your arm still healing …”

“It’s punk rock, Merce. Come as you are.”

There was a spike in background noise. A television or radio seemed to be shilling something, but exactly what got lost in the miles of wire. Distance seeing. Distance hearing. Someone near enough to drown out even the ads laughed or coughed. For the first time he would consciously admit, it occurred to Mercer to wonder if William might be cheating on him. “You know what? I’m feeling a little under the weather.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Kind of achy. Fluey.” It was too much detail; the secret to lying, he’d learned, was not to appear too eager to persuade. But he wanted William to detect the fib, to come home and confront him. The second that elapsed here was enough for Mercer to know he wouldn’t. His voice grew honestly hoarse. “Don’t you at least want to change clothes?”

“Why don’t you come out, honey? Cut loose a little.”

“I told you, I don’t feel good. I’ve got to lie down.”

The silence that followed was audible; the wire took it and twisted it into a sound, a faint, cottony buzz. “Well, don’t wait up. We’ll probably be out late.”

“Who’s we?”

“Be good to yourself, Merce. Drink fluids. I’ll see you next year.” And in another eruption of noise—laughter, almost certainly—the call ended, leaving only a dialtone.

Mercer returned to the sleeping nook with its matched jackets. He had wanted it to strike William as a kind of blissful bower; now that future had been ripped away, and all he could see when he put on his glasses was how young the mirror on the wall made him look. Not sexily, androgynously young, in the style of the age, so much as, frankly, naïve. His soft belly, the dark skin stark against his briefs’ white elastic. He’d assumed that the discomfort he sometimes felt about going out in public with William had to do with shame about … well, about the way they were. But he wondered now if it wasn’t rather that he was afraid it was only this, the blackness, that William saw when he looked at him. Of people thinking he was some kind of trophy. The best times had been right here in this apartment, where they performed for no one but each other: dreams recounted, games of Scrabble played, sporting events enjoyed (William) or tolerated (Mercer). Behind him in the mirror lay the parched Christmas tree. And on the radiator, that goddamned envelope.