The City Below

by James Carroll

  Bright led the way in, to a far room, a table apart They ordered drinks. Terry placed the cigar box on the table between them. He was aware of one man's sly overture toward Bright, and of the easy greetings others offered. But if he felt surprised, it was mostly at himself. Charlestown had felt far more alien and threatening than this place.

  Bright said, "I guess I'm at bat, huh?"

  "Does that make me the pitcher?"

  "I wish I'd talked to you about it before." Bright opened the cigar box and took out one of the tapes with his name on it "If I've felt ashamed of anything, it's that Squire thought he had something on me. In relation to you, I mean. Your brother is a genius at making people feel dirty."

  Bright's statement jolted Terry, the exact truth of it, in his own life.

  "I wanted to explain."

  "You don't have to explain anything to me, Bright."

  "Lucy," he said, breaking into an impersonation of Desi Arnaz, "you got some 'splaining to do."

  "No, you don't."

  "All very modern, aren't we?"

  "Do you want me to be shocked? Mr. Disapproval, you called me today. Is that what you want from me?" Suddenly Doyle did feel the push of his emotions. "Is that why, instead of just talking to me, you bring me into a gay bar? To rub my nose in it?"

  "You see, you do have a reaction."

  "Of course I have a reaction. The same way I have a reaction to your throwing in with my shit of a brother without talking to me. Why in God's name haven't you been talking to me? About Amory, about this."

  "Because I've been embarrassed, Terry. That's why."

  "Embarrassed? Jesus Christ, what kind of bluenose puritan asshole do you take me for?"

  "That isn't it You are a bluenose puritan asshole, but that isn't it." Bright was silent for a moment, then added, "I was afraid if I was up front with you, you'd cut me out."

  "Bright, come on. I—"

  "No. Let me say this, goddamnit! You asked me why I wouldn't talk to you. Well, let me talk."

  "I'm sorry."

  "I'm not talking about homophobia, okay? You don't see me as a nigger, I don't expect you'll see me as a queer. Okay? That's not what I'm talking about. Okay?"

  "Okay."

  "I was afraid, I mean, worried ... Shit!" He took a swallow of his drink to control himself. "Afraid you'd stop allowing yourself to feel ... for me ... that you'd never acknowledge again, what you said today."

  "That I love you."

  "Yes." McKay's hands, framing the cassette now, were the focal point of all his concentration.

  Terry reached across the table, touching him. "You mean, the problem is, if I'm straight, I can't love you?"

  McKay looked up. His eye was crystalline, clear as a mountain pool. "But you are straight."

  "That's right."

  "And straight men are afraid."

  "Of course we're afraid. The point is, so what?"

  "I'm afraid of you."

  "Of me?"

  "Of my feelings for you. It's how I've felt about you for years. You are how I figured out that I'm gay. Which is why I could never say it to you, ever."

  "Say that you're gay?"

  "Not exactly."

  "That you love me?"

  "Right."

  "Because you do?"

  Bright nodded, and he pulled his hand away from Doyle's. He dropped the cassette back into the cigar box, closed it, and placed his hand on it as if it were the Bible.

  Terry sipped his drink, then held the glass up. Bright clinked it with his, and that was that.

  Later, they walked in silence along the Charles River. At one point, Terry nodded toward the shimmering water, golden reflections beneath the streetlamps of Memorial Drive. He said, "See that money in the river? The coins?"

  Bright laughed, and said yes.

  "That's what my grandfather always called those reflections, King Neptune's stacks of gold." Terry paused, then said, "I took a suitcase full of bills away from Jackie Mullen today. Christ, was it only this morning? I didn't tell you that part. Jackie had been bribed to blow the whisde on Squire, that he was working for the feds. Amory gave Jackie a hundred thousand dollars." Terry pointed ahead, to the Harvard Bridge. "I took it out there and threw it over."

  "You what?"

  "I threw it in the river."

  Bright slapped Doyle's shoulder. "You're shitting me." At first he seemed angry. But then, in a lifetime's habit, he shook his head, simultaneously appalled and amazed at Doyle, what a numbskull. "Oh, Terry, you are some piece of work" But McKay recognized himself as the stupid one, for being surprised. "Some fucking piece of work."

  "We're different, Bright."

  "Are we ever. A hundred thousand dollars? Unattached? Are we fucking ever! And I'll tell you something else. One bum eye, race, and sexual preference are not what make us different."

  "I know." Terry thought of the old joke, Caroline Kennedy and Martin Luther King's son. "What makes us different is, you're Protestant and I'm Catholic."

  McKay responded with abrupt solemnity, "That's true. I believe in a God of love. You believe in a God of forgiveness. You need to see yourself as a sinner, the good things in life as temptations. Your idea of worship is the Sacrament of Penance. Mine is Holy Communion."

  "Who are you kidding? You don't go to Communion."

  "That's a detail," Bright said. "My point holds. It doesn't matter either that you never go to confession anymore."

  "Except to you."

  "Which is only fair, since this is my Communion." Eat your body, Bright thought, drink your blood.

  It had started to rain. When they reached the bridge, they bid each other good night with a firm, somewhat formal handshake and a quick neck-pressing hug. Bright's cologne stirred Doyle's memory: the thrill of walking into Georgetown watering holes with him, how no one's girl was safe.

  "What was that line from Blake you used to cite, picking up girls? 'We are put on earth ... to bear the beams of love'?"

  "I don't say that anymore. The beams of love are not a burden."

  Their laughter now was full of affection one for the other, all they'd shared; but also, at last, it was bemused affection of each one for himself. What a pair they were.

  Terry turned toward Cambridge, and Bright toward the South End. His apartment was on St Botolph Street, half a mile up Mass. Ave. But Bright jolted to a stop. "Terry!" he yelled. When Doyle turned back, McKay called, "You're going to take care of those tapes, right?"

  Terry held up the cigar box. "Shall I just toss it in the river?"

  "I'd feel better if you burned them, the ones with my name anyway. Whose side is King Neptune on?"

  "You want to do it yourself? Would you feel better?"

  "No, no. I'd rather you."

  "I'll take care of it," Terry said.

  ***

  The light in their bedroom was still on when Terry came home. Before going up, he took off his wet coat He poured two Scotches. The drinks in his hands would tell her they had to talk. Explaining the day to Joan was his only chance of comprehending it Still carrying Squire's cigar box under his arm, he went up the stairs, paused at Max's room. The boy's sleep was always bliss. Because of the drinks, he did not stoop to kiss him.

  Their bedroom door was ajar. He pushed it open with his foot and entered quietly. Her light was still on, and the novel she'd been reading was a tent on the sheet beside her. The comforter was folded back. She'd fallen asleep with an arm flung across his side of the bed, but it was no invitation to wake her, and ordinarily he'd not have considered it. The edge of the circle of light from her reading lamp fell across her nightgown at her breasts. Her mouth was open slightly, her hair hiding one eye. The faint swelling and sinking of her body stirred him, and he was taken aback by the poignancy of the relief he felt just to be seeing her. His wife. His son. The feeling was, he could breathe again.

  Because the room sucked in the dampness on a night like that, she'd had a fire in the fireplace, and now it was nearly out. He loo
ked at his watch, surprised to find that it was nearly two o'clock.

  Having put the two Scotches on the white table, in the white bedroom, Doyle turned his back on his sleeping wife and bent to the fire. He added kindling and a log, then watched it flare. He opened the cigar box and took out the three cassettes marked McKay. With the tip of his pen he coaxed the brown ribbon of the first tape out of its track, unspooling it He balled the tape, yanked the last end free of the case, and dropped it onto the flame, which licked up at his hand like a famished animal. Whoosh! The tape writhed, curled, melted, and was gone.

  He was working on the second cassette when Joan's voice floated across the room on a draft of warm air, a sensation he took in as much with the skin on the back of his neck as with his ears.

  "What are you doing?"

  He turned to look at her. She was up on one elbow, the sheet back entirely now, exposing her white nightgown, the languor of her body. A strap had fallen from her shoulder. The shining cloth, directly in the light, clung to the hot face of her breasts.

  "I'll tell you in a see." He continued to unravel the brown ribbon, bunched it, and dropped it on the flame. Then he burned the third tape in the same way.

  He brought the drinks to the bed, swirling Joan's as he handed it to her. She was sitting up now, leaning back against the bedboard. Her novel was at her midriff, a shield.

  He raised his glass in a toast.

  The strap of her nightgown was back in place. The sheet was demurely at her knees. She had pushed the cone of the reading lamp away. The lamp, the fire, and the spotlight on the oil portrait were the room's only sources of illumination, yet the double of each one glowed in the reflection of the black wall of windows. The panes were streaked with rain, coming down hard now. The wind moved the branches of the great oak, but the bedroom was quiet.

  Terry sat beside his wife. "You won't believe me," he said. "Nothing I tell you will seem real. I don't believe it myself."

  "What?"

  "Nick, Jackie, Bright—the end of a story that started a long time ago. Nick finally goes after his old enemy, the Italian gangster he's been fronting for. With Jackie, he sets a trap for him. But his bait is Bright, because of the bank. Bright gets drawn in by the man I told you about yesterday, Amory. I followed him this morning, and it all came unraveled right in front of me. All of it." Terry dropped his eyes. "You told me to leave it alone." He stopped, giving her a chance to speak. She said nothing. He added, "If I had, Bright would have been ruined."

  Joan let her gaze drift, with his, to the fireplace. "Those tapes you just burned ..."

  "Implicated Bright A money-laundering operation, including a loan-back scheme from Commonwealth Bank Bright was using drug money to rebuild Roxbury." Terry shrugged. "Social justice, but still a major crime. The tapes were Nick's, made for the FBI, a contact set up, probably, through Jackie Mullen—all to bring down Tucci. But guess what? Before the tapes get delivered, Jackie betrays Nick. He warns Tucci. Their story is still being played out, I don't know how. But as of a minute ago"—he gestured toward the fire with his glass, then took a drink—"Bright isn't part of it anymore. He's all I care about."

  "Your brother..."

  "My brother has to play the hand he's dealt himself." He looked over at her, but her eyes remained fixed on the fire. "The point is, Joan, I'm out Nick and I finished with each other finally. Nothing he does, or has ever done, involves me anymore. Do you understand that?"

  She nodded, hugging the novel as if it were a child, but she said, "You just told me I wouldn't believe you."

  "That I'm finished with him?"

  She shrugged. When he looked, with her, toward the fire again, his gaze went instead to the painting on the wall above it His beautiful wife, their son, the dream of love that had always seemed more the artist's or her father's than his. So enchanted. A line from Dostoyevsky popped into his mind, a poster quote from his seminary days, and he said it without meaning to: "Real love, compared to fantasy, is a harsh and dreadful thing."

  He stopped, drank, started again. "As I walked home, I rehearsed, half out loud, what I would say to you. It seemed important that I should put into words what had become so clear to me." It seemed he was addressing himself to the woman in the portrait, and also to the child.

  "I am your husband, Joan." This was what he'd said aloud to the Cambridge night, and he said it again. "There is no music in such a statement, but it's the second most basic thing about me. I am your husband. You are the only one who can change that, and maybe now you will, because it is that kind of moment You may stop being my wife if you choose to, but me, I will never stop being your husband. That is the first thing I have to say."

  He paused, not looking at her. His eyes went to the black mirror of the wall of windows. The trees were swirling in the weather. He spoke as to the images in the glass, going on record.

  "The second is this: I am Max's father. That is the rock, Joan, of my life, the basic truth. And nothing can change that ever. Nothing past and nothing future. Not Nick. Not science. Not God. Not even you. I am Max's father, period. I am not asking you, I am telling you. Do you understand?"

  He looked at her finally.

  Tears were streaming freely from her eyes. He put his finger at her chin, turning her face to him. He said, "I know everything."

  "Everything," she said flatly.

  He took the book out of her arms and laid it aside. "And I don't ever want to talk about this ever again. Do you understand?"

  Without warning she fell against him. He held her while she wept. He said, "I love you."

  Then, later, after undressing, he moved the straps of her nightgown off her shoulders. She let the silk fall from her breasts, and she cupped his head as he lowered his face to kiss her nipples. His breath and tongue were cool on her body, and she realized with what sad heat she had been punishing herself all this time.

  "I love you," she said.

  He heard the familiar inflection—that you!—but for once he chose not to take it as a hint of there being someone else.

  The complacency of their naked, spent embrace, not so long afterward that the fire had gone completely out, was interrupted by the shocking, shrill sound of the telephone. Joan could not imagine answering it, but Terry knew that the night of trouble was not over yet. He leaned to the table for the phone, while Joan pulled the sheet up and watched the rain streaking a pane of glass in the middle set of French doors. The spring bough of the oak brushed the glass, a measure of the storm's energy.

  She was aware of Terry's clipped responses on the phone, the wonder in his voice, the alarm. But such was her state by then, in the elation of pure aftermath, that she assumed somehow he would turn to her with something good.

  She didn't imagine he would turn to her with, "Joan, there's been a robbery." He was cupping the phone, holding it away from her. He was as naked as she was, which made the words even more absurd, impossible. "A robbery at the Fogg. They ransacked your office. They took a print A Michelangelo."

  ***

  In the pitch dark, on foot, Squire easily slipped away from Tucci's estate. Without streetlights, the road along which he found himself running was like an endless black tunnel. He was aware of passing other driveways, but they would lead to houses whose garages had alarms and where dogs slept lightly. He felt the threat of rain in the air, which increased his sense of urgency, and it was only by a calculated act of will that he was able to pace himself. He trusted that what he needed, he would find.

  A car.

  He heard the noise of a car approaching from behind, and he plunged into the bushes just before the headlights came rushing around a curve. He crouched and watched it pass, then went onto the road again, feeling no calmer. He lit a cigarette, took a few quick drags, then tossed it into a small puddle. He forced himself to walk instead of running. He pictured the coming rain as an ocean liner, its huge bow steaming toward him without knowing he was there, a sole survivor in the night sea. He did not know why the weather s
hould be such a threat.

  It seemed a long time, but it was only ten or fifteen minutes before the road wound down into a valley across which a developer had spread a quilt of lots and houses, modest and tidy, with lights left on over front doors and in hallways to discourage burglars. These households would have dogs too, but Squire also knew that, along the road soon, he would find businesses that served the people who lived in the tract houses.

  He felt lucky that it wasn't raining yet.

  Around another curve he came to a Getty station, closed up for the night The whiff of gasoline was strong. The car he needed, a dark, late-model sedan, like a cop car, was parked between the station office and a Dumpster. Before using his wire-and-hook, he froze one last time, to listen. The first crickets of spring, a stream running in the nearby woods, but otherwise not a sound. He had forgotten that he was wearing rubber gloves, and realized it now with satisfaction. Fucking A. He was infallible.

  In quick order, he had the door unlocked, the ignition wires out from their casing beneath the dash, the wires hot together, and the motor running. He put the car in gear and took off. The headlights he did not snap on until he was half a mile down the road, approaching, miraculously, the ramp for Route 128, which would take him quickly to the brightly lit Mass. Pike. With the sky open and illuminated by the roadway lights and the lights of many buildings, even at that hour, he saw that the weather front was not an approaching ocean liner but a city, and he said its name aloud, as if reading stenciled letters on a prow. "Cambridge," he said, "to the rescue." When it started raining then, he began singing "American Pie," drumming the steering wheel.

  Within a few minutes, his manic mood had evaporated. He was pulling slowly through the college streets toward Harvard Square. "And the three men I admired most..." By now he was reciting the lyric, quietly, without inflection, unaware that he was doing so. "They took the last train for the coast..." His eyes clicked from car to car, from building to building, as he drove, looking for signs of anything that could stop him.

  At Mt Auburn Street he saw the Florentine tower of the Catholic church, and on instinct he pulled into its parking lot. He got out of the car and, hunched against the rain, jogged across the lot to the rectory, as if he'd planned to do so all along. He peeled off the surgeon's gloves, pocketed them, and rang the rectory doorbell once. A few minutes passed, and he rang it once more.