“Don’t be petulant,” he said after a moment.
Petulantly I said: “I’m not.”
* * *
—
At a loss, I fucked a painter. He lived in the Ansonia. When I rode up to see him, I’d push all the buttons in the elevator. There was a different scene on every floor: flamenco dancers, barefoot violinists, pinched-faced ancients in New Deal garb, ensconced amongst the turrets. Everyone in that building was either on the way up or on the way down. And in that elevator it was easy to believe my life might still be in its rising action—arcing up toward artistic triumph and personal fulfillment and spectacular, climactic nights with many men I did not love.
* * *
—
On TV, Jimmy Carter nagged us about our confidence.
“He actually looks like a peanut if you think about it long enough,” said Brookie.
We were stoned. We were always stoned.
“Anyone looks like anything if you think about it long enough,” said Paulie. He was dressed as a werewolf. He’d recently been cast as an extra in a movie about marauding Native American spirits; it was shooting in the Bronx, where disaster tourists roamed the afternoons, clutching their cameras and wandering into all the shots. Down the street, another studio was making a movie about the firebombing of Dresden. Paulie didn’t get a callback for that one.
The soundtrack of that summer was breaking windowpanes; sidewalks glittered with chevronels of storefront. There were bank robberies every day. We heard about a Puerto Rican bank that got robbed so often they’d posted a sign asking robbers to be patient while English interpreters were summoned. We laughed about that, though not as much as we used to laugh about other things. We spent our nights at the Serpentine or the Mineshaft or lying on pillows at St. Mark’s. We were somehow doing more drugs and having less fun. Brookie kept threatening to move back to California.
“Do you really have to come home like this?” said Brookie to Paulie. “Do they really not give you a sink?”
“Not really,” said Paulie, swallowing a bite of sandwich through his makeup. “The other night I growled at some tourists.”
“If you don’t want those people coming, maybe you should stop making those movies.”
“Hey, all publicity is, you know, whatever.” Paulie frowned into his sandwich.
“No sense of civic engagement,” said Brookie, shaking his head. “Not like Citizen Semi over here.”
“Are you suggesting that Paulie only choose projects that cater to suburbanite sensibilities?” I said. “Maybe it is time for you to leave New York.”
“You’ll see,” Brookie muttered. “One of these days, I’m outta here. And then you’re all going to have to start finding your own friends and making your own jokes.”
“I make jokes,” I said.
“One day you’re gonna wake up and, poof, I’ll be gone. And then won’t you be surprised!”
“Not if you keep talking about it,” I said. “Anyway, this city isn’t without its opportunities. Just look at Paulie here! Dreams do come true.”
Paulie bared his teeth at us.
“And see?” I said. “A joke!”
“You’d miss me, though,” said Brookie, looking up at me. “Wouldn’t you?”
“Please.”
“Wouldn’t you?”
“Oh, Christ,” I said. And then: “Yes, of course I’d miss you. I’d miss you if you ever gave me half a chance.”
* * *
—
Not long after that, I heard that my grandmother was dying.
“Finally,” said Brookie. I suppose he could see I wasn’t entirely undone.
I told him that I thought I might go see her.
“What?” Brookie scoffed. “Do you think she’d come see you if you were dying?”
I said I didn’t know. This was before I’d had the opportunity to witness countless surprise appearances at deathbeds; Paulie and Nick would have been touched, I think, by the many cameos at theirs. Though almost nobody behaves well at the end, more people than you might imagine do turn up.
But it all seemed very abstract then, this idea of a grandmother burying a grandson—it was theoretical to the point of self-indulgence, which was a mode of thinking my grandmother particularly despised.
“What does it matter what would happen if what wouldn’t happen did?” she’d said more than once, often just before exiting a room. I’d be left trying to parse this sentence enough to dispute it, forgetting whatever question had initiated the exchange—which may, it occurs to me now, have been the entire point.
In the end, I decided I would go. The boys weren’t overly aggrieved—though they’d all inveighed on the issue, ultimately they weren’t terribly invested. There was a show at Escuelita that weekend. And perhaps they were growing used to my capitulations.
And so I went, to stare down my grandmother at last. Her friends from the athenaeum were there, already eyeing her book collection. They cleared out when I arrived, either from delicacy or terror. And then I was at last alone with her, shaking in her serge-curtained bed.
“Hello, Grandmother,” I said.
She did not reply. The doctors had said she wouldn’t recognize me. I’d told them I was used to that. Above her was a framed picture of Prague’s astronomical clock, glowering like an evil eye. I had no idea what it meant to her—asking would have once been impertinent, and now was impossible. When everything’s unsaid, it becomes difficult to regret any specific silences.
These days, such regrets have become my life—waking me from sweaty nightmares with the electric emergency of things too late to say, or do, or know—and in such moments, my grandmother’s approach can start to look a lot like wisdom. Which is another thing too late to say, only further proving her point.
But the silence between my grandmother and me then: it had a sort of peace.
I sat with her awhile, and when I left I took the clock off the wall.
* * *
—
Matthew hadn’t answered when I called from Iowa, and he didn’t answer when I was back in New York. But this happened sometimes. And so it was ten days before I realized what was going on.
A few hours after that, he called me—intuiting, with the impeccable sixth sense of the cowardly, that the hardest part was over.
He said: “I need to see you.”
“Oh?” I said. “You gonna send a helicopter, or what?”
On the other end, his breathing sounded ragged and shallow. I pressed my ear into the receiver so I could hear it better.
“Because the subway’s down, you know,” I said. “That’s the kind of thing people are going to expect the mayor to be aware of.”
And you’re too gorgeous to be uninformed, I might have said, but I didn’t want him to know that I remembered.
“I’ll send a car,” he said.
“You better believe this is the last favor I’m ever doing for you.”
I hung up before I could hear him tell me it was the last one he’d ever ask.
* * *
—
The ride took forever, the car finally depositing me before a restaurant on the Upper East Side. Inside, the place was empty—maybe good old Eddie had rented it out for the occasion. Matthew was sitting at the bar, cheek cupped in his fingers, poring over some papers—engaged in the hideously dull calculations of governance even then, no doubt. When he saw me, he shook his head ferociously, as though trying to concuss himself back to reality.
We sat, and I watched Matthew stare into the tablecloth. I could have gone ahead and gotten things started (Let’s get this over with, I might have said. We both know how this goes: nothing new under the sun!), but the longer he stayed silent, the more determined I was to wait him out. I could afford to be stubborn: I’d already lost what I had to lose, which quit
e possibly was nothing.
“Well,” he said after a long while. “They caught us.”
There was a buzzing in my ears, a smell of camphor in my nostrils.
“And ‘caught’ meaning—?”
“They have pictures.”
“Oh.” The sun shifted, casting a fretwork of shadows on his face. “Well, how do I look?”
“I haven’t seen them.”
“How do you know?”
“They were quite—specific. In their descriptions.”
“ ‘They’ being…?”
“The Post.” He drummed his fingers on the table; he had bitten his nails down so far that it was uncomfortable to watch this. “Well. Most proximately.”
“And by ‘proximately,’ you mean…”
“I am given to understand there’s more.”
“More what?”
“Doctored forms. Well, stolen first, doctored second, to make it appear as though you were being compensated for nothing, out of state funds.” He winced. “That’s a felony, if we were going to get into it. But we aren’t.”
“Why not? Don’t know any decent lawyers?”
He shut his eyes.
“Did they at least have a good pun for the caption?”
He opened them again. “I can’t see you anymore.”
I laughed, too loud for the room. “That’s why you sent a car? So I could hear that line in person? I guess you really did need a writer.”
His eyes were asking me to understand, but I was not going to—was never, never going to, if he wasn’t even going to try to make me.
“Sooner or later—”
“Yes,” I said. “Well, that’s an excuse for anything, isn’t it?”
The waitress came to pour coffee; her gestures had a Stanislavskian crispness that for some reason exhausted me. I was a player with a small Act I part, staring down the interminable second half—I was sweating under the stage lights, the collodion melting into my eyes. And still, and still, the show must go on!
Somewhere in the distance, Matthew Miller was explaining some things to me. He was saying that he’d agreed to admit to infidelity and withdraw from the race. He was saying there would be a press conference. He was saying they’d agreed not to release the pictures, nor describe what manner of man was in them. A possibility was occurring to me, or so I thought. Now, I know that I wasn’t considering an idea so much as crafting a plot point—a deus ex machina so saccharine I would have been mortified to catch myself buying, let alone contriving, it. But still, for a moment, it seized me—the thought that Matthew had ulterior, possibly honorable, possibly chivalric motives.
“Why would the Post agree to that?”
He said quietly: “I suspect it isn’t their terms.”
He’s doing this for me!, I thought wildly: the sort of piercing realization that seems to hint at the true order of things, and sometimes even does. You somehow know a man loves you, and then somehow, for a while, it is true.
“You don’t have to do this to protect me,” I said.
Matthew looked at me oddly. “I’m not protecting you.”
I felt a spiky laugh grow in my throat, and when Matthew leaned forward and said, “I’m protecting Alice,” it burst out onto the table.
“Don’t,” I said, “bring poor Alice into this.”
I was still speaking rather loudly. To his credit, Matthew did not look around to see who might have heard.
“Did you notice that the one time you take me out in public is the one time it’s the cowardly thing to do?” I was retroactively developing an intense interest in the protocol of this conversation. “Did you notice that? Is that kind of funny? Is that kind of a coincidence?”
On Matthew’s face was nothing—not performance but deletion. A canceled check, a trick mirror. The light changed—the room flooding with the flat brightness of an approaching meteor—but it turned out to only be a truck blocking the window. It rumbled away, the world restored.
“I guess it probably isn’t a coincidence,” I said.
“There is the question,” said Matthew carefully, “of what good I could still do.”
Though seconds earlier I’d been conjuring my own noble intentions for Matthew, it was unendurable that he would try it himself. This is probably when I first hated him.
“I’m sorry,” he said. I wanted to laugh in his face, but was afraid what else might come out if I tried. I knew even then that nothing could capture the feeling of this moment—anything I did could only distort it, mock it, make it into a piece of high camp. In the end, I decided on a homicidal civility.
“Well,” I said, proffering my hand and flashing a bright, savaging smile. “I wish you all the best in your future endeavors.”
And then it was over, and I was somehow out the door. I stumbled along the street—Matthew had known better than to try to get me back into the car—though I don’t know where I went, and probably didn’t then, either. All I knew was that I would never love like that again—I knew, I knew, I knew that I would not.
And in this, and only this, I would be right.
FIFTEEN
cel
On the way back to the studio, Mattie is silent. He’d refused to speak to anyone after the interview—he’d stormed back through the greenroom, sending several pastries falling to the floor, and then made a beeline to the limousine, hitting the locks when Luke tried to get in behind him. Cel, alas, was already inside. She shot Luke a look like What the hell am I supposed to do? and he responded with a flail like You think it even matters? She watched him watch them for a moment before turning to hail a taxi.
The way back to the studio is along Seventh, but Mattie tells the driver to take the FDR. The day is softening into broad midmorning light; Cel can’t believe it’s still so early. She tries to calculate exactly what percentage of this debacle can be said to be her fault. Blair McKinney, she decides, is not. They’d baited Mattie with an abstract question only to entrap him with the irrefutable concrete: you think the problem’s guns, Mattie, but the kid that got shot with one thinks the problem is you. The whole thing would have been bad enough even if the kid hadn’t shown up—even if Mattie had only managed to pick a pointless fight with half his viewers, as well as one of the most vociferously well-funded lobbying groups in the country. Like Mattie, the gun rights people had been on the defensive since the shooting. They certainly weren’t natural allies of the CPA, with its whiff of nanny-state presumptions. But now Mattie had just given them a powerful incentive to join in attacking him, and Blair McKinney had given them an elegant way to do it.
Above them the sun is winking manically, spinning murderous spokes of light.
Hal had had a .30-06 hunting rifle. He’d taught Cel to use it in the stealthy way he taught her many things: by enlisting her help until she’d learned enough to know how to begin to learn more. He must have believed she would have, if she had to, and Cel likes the idea that Hal had bet on her in this way: it links her in a nebulous, posthumous sort of love, and the gun made this literal. She almost wishes she still had it—though as a child, she hadn’t liked to touch it. She regarded it as necessary and private in a way just short of ugly. Maybe Ruth had felt this, too; maybe that was why she didn’t use it. Cel and Hal had said this to each other, consolingly, a few times right after. But even then, Cel had had her doubts. Most likely Ruth had forgotten about the gun, or else never known it was there. One thing Cel does not doubt is her mother’s determination.
“I know how that went,” says Mattie abruptly, and Cel jumps. “So you don’t have to tell me.”
He is staring out the window away from her; beyond him, the river is a flat silver annelid.
“Not that you would, anyway,” he says.
“I’m sorry?”
“Your job is to never quite tell anyone anything, right? So in a
situation like this your job is to not tell me how I did.”
“I think it’s my job to tell you how to do better?”
“Yeah, well, you don’t have to do that, either.”
Cel nods, and Mattie tells the driver to turn down Houston. They are on the lam now, apparently, just like Ryan Muller.
“So why don’t you tell me something else,” Mattie says, when he leans back.
“What?”
“Tell me something else,” he says. “Tell me something I don’t know about you.”
“I really don’t know what you—”
“One thing.”
“You don’t know anything about me.”
“So it shouldn’t be hard to pick.”
“Okay.” Cel scans her life for fun facts; facts of any sort seem scarce. Behind Mattie, she catches fractional snatches of scurfing water. “Okay,” she says. “I was voted Most Changed in high school.”
“Most changed?” says Mattie. “From what to what?”
“From who knows what to you tell me, I guess.”
Mattie nods at this, but doesn’t laugh.
On Houston, they encounter a parade. Or maybe not a parade—there are people wearing leather jackets and diapers and Bush masks—though Cel doesn’t put anything past New York City. At their center, a clot of emaciated men hold up something that looks very much like a coffin.
“I think it’s a funeral,” says the driver doubtfully—and yet it seems clear that whatever this is is not only a funeral. Men shout and wave banners around the coffin; a short, sibylline person walks behind it, shaking with an oracular fury. Cel can’t even tell whether the coffin is real: some real things are like that.
“I think it’s a protest,” she says. It comes out in a horrible, hushed, schoolgirl sort of voice, and she winces at the sound of herself. She is grateful for the tinted windows.
The driver mutters something, and Mattie barks at him to turn down Essex. This is startling, as Mattie is not generally a barker. The driver shakes his head; it is obvious they’re not going anywhere for a while, and Cel can feel him wishing this drive were metered. Mattie’s gaze is locked on the driver’s headrest; Cel can’t tell if he’s even noticed the funeral at all. Maybe he is the clinical egomaniac Luke always says he is, though Cel has little use for diagnoses. They are just one way of describing things, which cannot save you from the exhausting crush of all the other ways.
The Spectators Page 18
