The City of Mirrors

by Justin Cronin

  My goal was to be a biochemist, and I wasted no time. My course load was crushing, my only relief a distribution course in art history that required little more than sitting in the dark and looking at slides of Mary and the baby Jesus in various beatific poses. (The class, a legendary refuge for science majors meeting their humanities requirement, bore the nickname “Darkness at Noon.”) My scholarship was generous, but I was used to working and wanted pocket money; for ten hours a week, at a wage just above minimum, I shelved books at Widener Library, pushing a wobbly cart through a maze of stacks so isolated and byzantine that women were warned against visiting them alone. I thought the job would kill me with boredom, and for a while it nearly did, but over time I came to like it: the smell of old paper and the taste of dust; the deep hush of the place, a sanctuary of silence broken only by the squeaking wheels of my cart; the pleasant shock of pulling a book from the shelves, removing the card, and discovering that nobody had checked it out since 1936. A twinge of anthropomorphic sympathy for these underappreciated volumes often inspired me to read a page or two, so that they might feel wanted.

  Was I happy? Who wouldn’t be? I had friends, my studies to occupy me. I had my quiet hours in the library in which to woolgather to my heart’s content. In late October, I lost my virginity to a girl I met at a party. We were both very intoxicated, didn’t know each other at all, and though she didn’t say as much—we barely spoke, beyond the usual preliminary blather and a brief negotiation over the mechanically baffling mechanism of her brassiere—I suspected she was a virgin, too, and that her intention was simply to get the thing done as expeditiously as possible so that she could move on to other, more satisfying encounters. I suppose I felt the same. When it was over, I left her room quickly, as if from the scene of a crime, and in four years I laid eyes on her only twice more, both times at a distance.

  Yes, I was happy. My father was right: I had found my life. I dutifully telephoned every two weeks, reversing the charges, but my parents—indeed, my whole small-town Ohio childhood—began to fade from my mind, the way dreams do in the light of day. Always these calls were the same. First I would speak with my mother, who usually answered—the suggestion being that she had spent two weeks waiting by the phone—and then my father, whose jovial tone seemed contrived to remind me of his parting edict, and finally both together. I could easily imagine the scene: their faces angled close together with the receiver between them as they called out their valedictory “I love you”s and “I’m proud of you”s” and “be good”s, my father’s eyes locked in an optic death grip on the clock above the kitchen sink, watching his money drain away at thirty cents a minute. Their voices aroused great feelings of tenderness in me, almost of pity, as if I were the abandoner and they the abandoned, yet I was always relieved when these calls ended, the click of the receiver releasing me back into my true existence.

  Before I knew it, the leaves had turned, then fallen, their desiccated carcasses everywhere underfoot, suffusing the air with a sweet smell of decay; the week before Thanksgiving the first snow fell, my inaugural New England winter, damp and raw. It felt like one more baptism in a year of them. There had been no discussion of my returning home for the Thanksgiving break, and Ohio was too far in any case—I’d have wasted half the time on the bus—so I accepted an invitation to spend the holiday with Lucessi in the Bronx. Stupidly, I had expected a scene of Italian life straight out of Hollywood: a cramped apartment above a pizza parlor, everyone yelling and screaming at one another, his father leaking armpitty garlic sweat through his undershirt and his mustached mother, in a housecoat and slippers, throwing up her hands and wailing, “Mamma mia” every thirty seconds.

  What I found couldn’t have been more different. They lived in Riverdale, which, though technically the Bronx, was as tony as any neighborhood I’d ever seen, in a huge stone Tudor that looked as if it had been hijacked from the English countryside. No spaghetti and meatballs here, no household shrines to the Madonna, no arm-waving drama of any sort; the house was as stultifying as a tomb. Thanksgiving dinner was served by a Guatemalan housemaid in an aproned uniform, and afterward, everybody repaired to a room they actually called “the study,” to listen to a radio broadcast of Wagner’s interminable Ring cycle. Lucessi had told me that his family was in “the restaurant business” (thus the pizza parlor of my imagination), but in fact his father was chief financial officer of the restaurant division of Goldman Sachs, to whose Wall Street offices he commuted every day in a Lincoln Continental the size of a tank. I’d known that Lucessi had a younger sister; he had failed to mention that she was a bona fide Mediterranean goddess, quite possibly the most beautiful girl I’d ever laid eyes on—regally tall, with lustrous black hair, a complexion so creamy I wanted to drink it, and a habit of traipsing into a room wearing nothing more than a slip. Her name was Arianna. She was home from boarding school, someplace in Virginia where they rode horses all day, and when she wasn’t lounging around in her underwear, reading magazines and eating buttered toast and talking loudly on the phone, she was striding through the house in tall riding boots and clanking spurs and tight breeches, a costume no less powerful than the slip in its ability to send the blood dumping to my loins. Arianna was completely out of my league in other words, a fact as obvious as the weather, yet she went out of her way to remind me of it, calling me “Tom” no matter how many times her brother corrected her and nailing me with looks of such dismissive contempt it was like being doused by cold water.

  My final night in Riverdale, I awoke sometime after midnight to discover that I was hungry. I had been instructed to treat the house “as if it were my own”—laughably impossible—yet I knew I would not sleep unless I put something in my stomach. I slipped on a pair of sweatpants and crept downstairs to the kitchen, where I discovered Arianna at the table in a flannel bathrobe, paging through Cosmopolitan with her elegant hands and spooning cereal into her flawlessly formed, generously lipped mouth. A box of Cheerios and a gallon of milk sat on the counter. My first instinct was to retreat, but she had already noticed me, standing like an idiot in the doorway.

  “Do you mind?” I asked. “I thought I’d get a snack.”

  Her attention had already returned to her magazine. She took a bite of cereal and gave a backhanded wave. “Do what you want.”

  I helped myself to a bowl. There was no place else to sit, so I joined her at the table. Even in the flannel bathrobe, her face without makeup and her hair uncombed, she was magnificent. I had no idea what to say to such a creature.

  “You’re looking at me,” she said, turning a page.

  I felt the blood rushing to my cheeks. “No, I wasn’t.”

  She said nothing more. I had no place to put my eyes, so I looked at my cereal. The crunch of my chewing seemed intensely loud.

  “What are you reading?” I asked finally.

  She sighed irritably, closed her magazine, and looked up. “Okay, fine. Here I am.”

  “I was just trying to make conversation.”

  “Can we not? Please? I’ve seen you watching me, Tim.”

  “So you know my name.”

  “Tim, Tom, whatever.” She rolled her eyes. “Oh, all right. Let’s get this over with.”

  She parted the top of her robe. Beneath it she was wearing only a bra of shimmering pink silk. The sight aroused me indescribably.

  “Go on,” she urged.

  “Go on what?”

  She was looking at me with an expression of bored mockery. “Don’t be dense, Harvard boy. Here, let me help you.”

  She took my hand and placed it, rather mechanically, against her left breast. A magnificent breast it was! I had never touched a goddess before. Its spherical softness, sheathed in high-dollar silk with a scallop of delicate lace at the edges, filled my palm like a peach. I sensed she was making fun of me, but I hardly cared. What would happen now? Would I be permitted to kiss her?

  Apparently not. As I was constructing a complete sexual narrative in my head, the wond
erful things we might do together, culminating in breathy intercourse upon the kitchen floor, she abruptly pulled my hand away and let it fall on the table with the same contemptuous gesture one might use for dropping trash into a bin.

  “So,” she said, reopening her magazine, “did you get what you wanted? Did that satisfy you?”

  I was utterly flummoxed. She turned a page, then another. What the hell had just happened?

  “I don’t understand you at all,” I said.

  “Of course you don’t.” She looked up again, wrinkling her nose in distaste. “Tell me something. Why are you even friends with him? I mean, all things considered, you seem sort of normal.”

  This was, I supposed, what passed for a compliment. It also aroused in me a fiercely protective instinct toward her brother. Who was she to talk about him like that? Who did she think she was, teasing me this way?

  “You’re awful,” I said.

  She gave a nasty little laugh. “Sticks and stones, Harvard boy. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m trying to read.”

  And that was the end of it. I returned to bed, so sexually charged I barely slept, and in the morning, before anybody else in the house was awake, Lucessi’s father drove us to the train station in his monstrous Lincoln. As we disembarked, in an awkward reversal of customary courtesy, he thanked me for coming in a manner that suggested that he, too, felt a little baffled by my friendship with his son. A picture was emerging: Lucessi was the runt of the litter, an object of family-wide pity and embarrassment. I felt profoundly sorry for him, even as I recognized his situation’s similarity to my own. We were a couple of castaways, the two of us.

  We boarded the train. I was exhausted and didn’t feel like talking. For a while we bumped along in silence. Lucessi was the first to speak.

  “Sorry about all that.” He was drawing meaningless shapes on the window with his index finger. “I’m sure you were hoping for something more exciting.”

  I hadn’t told him what happened and, of course, never would. It was also true that my anger had softened, replaced by a budding curiosity. Something altogether unexpected about the world had been glimpsed. This life his family led; I had known that such wealth existed, but that is not the same as sleeping under its roof. I felt like an explorer who’d stumbled upon a golden city in the jungle.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I had a great time.”

  Lucessi sighed, settled back, and closed his eyes. “They can be the stupidest people on earth,” he said.

  What fascinated me, of course, was money. Not just because of the things it could buy, though these were appealing (Lucessi’s sister being Exhibit A). The deeper attraction lay in something more atmospheric. I had never been around wealthy people but had not felt this as a lack; I had never been around Martians, either. There were plenty of rich kids at Harvard, of course, the ones who’d gone to exclusive prep schools and addressed each other with preposterous nicknames like “Trip” and “Beemer” and “Duck.” But in day-to-day existence, their affluence was easily overlooked. We lived in the same crappy dormitories, sweated through the same papers and tests, ate the same atrocious food in the dining hall, like co-residents of a kibbutz. Or so it seemed. Visiting Lucessi’s house had opened my eyes to a hidden world that lay beneath the egalitarian surface of our lives, like a system of caves under my feet. Except for Lucessi, I actually knew very little about my friends and classmates. It seems improbable to say so now, but the thought had never occurred to me that there could be something so fundamentally different about them.

  In the weeks after Thanksgiving, I took clearer stock of my surroundings. There was a boy who lived down the hall whose father was the mayor of San Francisco; a girl I knew slightly, who spoke with a heavy Spanish accent, was said to be the daughter of a South American dictator; one of my lab partners had confided to me, apropos of nothing, that his family owned a summer house in France. All this information coalesced into a whole new awareness of where I was, and the thought made me incredibly self-conscious, even as I longed to learn more about it, to penetrate its social codes and see where I might fit.

  Equally fascinating to me was the fact that Lucessi himself wanted nothing to do with any of it. Throughout the weekend, he had made no secret of his contempt for his sister, his parents, even the house, which he called, in typical Lucessian fashion, “an idiotic pile of rock.” I attempted to draw him out on this subject but got nowhere; my overtures actually made him angry and snappish. What I had begun to discern in my roommate was the price of being too smart. He possessed an intellect capable of calculating reams of data without taking pleasure in any of it. To Lucessi, the world was a collection of interlocking systems divorced from all meaning, a surface reality governed only by itself. He could, for instance, recite the batting averages of every player on the New York Yankees, but when I asked him who his favorite was, he had no answer. The only emotion he seemed capable of was disdain for other people, though even that possessed a quality of childish bewilderment, as if he were a bored toddler in a man’s body, forced to sit at the grown-ups’ table and listen to incomprehensible conversations about the price of real estate and who was divorcing whom. I believe this pained him—he wasn’t aware what the problem was, only that it existed—resulting in a kind of nihilistic loneliness: he both despised and envied everybody else, except for me, to whom he attributed a similar vision of the world, simply because I was always around and didn’t make fun of him.

  As for his unhappy fate: perhaps I didn’t value him enough as a friend. Sometimes I think I might have been the only friend he ever had. And it is strange, after so many years, that from time to time my thoughts still turn to him, even though he was, after all, but a minor actor in my life. Probably it is the idleness of my circumstances that draws me to the recollection. With so many years to fill, one inevitably gets around to everything, opens each drawer of the mind to rustle around inside it. I did not know Lucessi well; no man could. Yet the failure to know a person does not rule out his importance in our lives. I wonder: how would Lucessi regard me now? Were he to wander, miraculously alive, into this prison of my own making, this becalmed memorial to things lost, ascend the marble staircase with his graceless Lucessian gait and stand before me in his clunky shoes and ill-fitting trousers and Yankees’ jersey stinking of unwashed Lucessian sweat, what would he tell me? See? he might say. Now you get it, Fanning. Now you really get it, after all.

  I returned to Ohio for Christmas. I was glad to be home, but mine was the exile’s gladness; none of it seemed to pertain to me anymore, as if I’d been gone for years, not months. Harvard was not my home, at least not yet, but neither was Mercy, Ohio. The very idea of home, of one true place, had become odd to me.

  My mother did not appear well. She had lost a great deal of weight, and her smoker’s cough had worsened. A glaze of sweat appeared on her brow at the smallest exertion. I paid this little mind, accepting at face value my father’s explanation that she had overdone it making ready for the holidays. I dutifully went through the sentimental motions: tree trimming and pie baking, a trip to Midnight Mass (we never attended church otherwise), opening my presents while my parents looked on—an awkward ceremony that is the bane of all only children—but my heart was nowhere in this, and I departed two days early, explaining that with exams still ahead of me, I needed to get back to my studies. (I did, but that wasn’t the reason.) Just as he’d done in September, my father drove me to the station. The rains of summer had been replaced by snow and biting cold, the warm wind through open windows by a blast of desiccated air from the dashboard vents. It would have been the perfect time to say something meaningful, if either of us could have imagined what such a thing might be. When the bus pulled away, I did not look back.

  About the remainder of that first year, there is not much else to say. My grades were good—better than good. Though I knew I had done well, I was still astonished to see my first-semester report with its barricade of A’s, each emphatically embossed i
nto the paper by the old-fashioned dot matrix printer. I did not use this as an opportunity to slack off but redoubled my efforts. I also, for a brief time, acquired a girlfriend, the daughter of the South American dictator. (He was actually the Argentine minister of finance.) What she saw in me I have no idea, but I wasn’t going to interrogate the point. Carmen possessed a good deal more sexual experience than I did—a great deal. She was the kind of woman who used the word “lover,” as in “I have taken you as my,” and she applied herself to pleasure’s project with greedy abandon. She was blessed with a single room, rare for a freshman, and in that hallowed precinct of draped scarves and female aromas she introduced me to what might have passed for actual, grown-up eroticism, working her way through the full menu of bodily delights, appetizers to dessert. We did not love each other—that sainted emotion still eluded me, and Carmen had little use for it—nor was she what I would call conventionally attractive. (I can say this because I wasn’t, either.) She was a little heavy, and her face possessed a slightly masculine bulk around the jawline, which looked like a boxer’s. But unclothed, and in the heat of passion, crying out naughty things in her Argentine-inflected Spanish, she was the most sensual creature who ever walked the earth, a fact magnified a hundred-fold by her own awareness of it.