Garth Hallberg - City on Fire

“Look at that. You’re a natural.” She tucked the lighter away in the clutch, saying something about her kids finding it, but made no move to return to the party.

“Aren’t you freezing?” he asked.

“I just can’t quite face having to go back in there yet. There are some people I really don’t want to talk to.”

He hugged himself and stamped his feet, waiting to feel different. “Anyway, William has a lot more experience at this than me, you know? At relationships.”

“Is that what he told you?”

“I thought maybe because I’m a boy, or man, I guess, was why he was keeping me in one compartment and y’all in another. But when you showed up at the school last week—”

“I’m sorry if I put you in a position. I had just moved out of my husband’s apartment. I needed so badly to talk to someone, and I thought maybe the divorce meant everything else might change, too. Maybe William would finally be ready to take down his stupid wall.”

“And I guess for my part I thought he’d open that invitation and some golden door would just be thrown open, and then we wouldn’t have to live anymore the way we’ve been living. It’s not without its charms, sort of, but how can we have a future together if I can’t even know these basic things about his past?”

“He’s always been secretive, my brother. Since he was a little kid. He thinks it creates some kind of personal power, to have a double life. I think he read too many comics.”

“So maybe I really came here because I knew it would piss him off if he found out. Not that you’re not lovely company.” And an almost unaccountable smile broke from somewhere within him. It was true. He liked Regan. She reminded him of other white girls he’d known, the fellow English majors who’d adopted him at U. Ga. “Can we go inside now, please? I’m bleeping gelid.”

She touched his arm with her good hand. “Hey, why don’t you come with me?”

“Come with you?”

“I’ve been summoned by Felicia’s brother. I’ll introduce you, and you can see what William’s up against. And maybe you can protect me.”

“Protect you from what?” But she had turned back toward the warmth of the bedroom. He retrieved his mask. “You’re sure you didn’t hear that sound?” he asked, before he pulled the French door shut. “I’m from the South. We know guns.”

She shrugged. “It’s Central Park West, Mercer. Probably just a truck backfiring.”

Inside, her stride grew more purposeful with every threshold they crossed, as if she were drawing strength from his presence, or from the drug, though he couldn’t be sure this wasn’t just the swimmy tempo of his own head. The guests seemed denser, too. Out of a jumble of bodies came hands clutching bottles, dentures bared in brays of Republican laughter, teeth freaky in their perfection, like Chiclets. He was the only nonwhite guest — though he hadn’t in the strictest sense been invited. And it must have been past midnight. Where was William right now? Leaning back against the wall of some bar’s men’s room while a blond head worked on him down below? He pushed the image away, let his consciousness become a tide coursing over the Persian rugs. Let Regan lead.

He couldn’t have said how many times she got detained, how many whiskey kisses she endured from how many middle-aged men, how many compliments on her appearance — you look good, a woman said, healthy, euphemisms whose referents he couldn’t quite pin down — how many frowns about her washclothed hand, nor how many eyes sized him up through slitted card-stock. A servant? Hanger-on? Charity case? Still, it bothered him less than it had in his first hour of the party, which he’d spent hiding behind an enormous potted palm. If he couldn’t yet enter the enchanted circle of the Hamilton-Sweeneys, he could at least make a close study of its effects, and maybe someday he would return hand-in-hand with William and none of them would dare say a word. And Regan, who’d looked so down when he’d spotted her in the kitchen — was that really a half-hour ago? — was magnificent, even with no mask. He’d seen this in William, too, the switch that got flipped in a crowd. What Mercer had put down to personal pathology was apparently genetic. She glowed like a holiday bauble while he bobbed along behind, unsure whether he was having a great time or an awful one.

Then, in the midst of a tall room packed with people, he looked up. Ten feet above his head, where the second story would have been, a gallery ran the perimeter, with a doorway leading onto it from each of the room’s four sides. And up there, facing them, stood a small, white-haired man who seemed to be smiling directly at Mercer. He wore no costume and no mask. Still, in his black tuxedo he had the air of a duke overlooking his domain. Mercer felt the masked heads receding, the chatter retreating like the sea inside a shell, the heat of the assembled bodies fading. The man unwrapped a hand from the wrought-iron rail, raised it palm-up in the air, snapped it closed.

Then Mercer realized that Uncle Amory — for that’s who it had to be — was beckoning Regan, not him. He nudged her, and she excused herself from whatever conversation she’d been in. She slipped her injured arm through Mercer’s and steered him toward a spiral staircase. They mounted to the balcony as through a cold, resistant fluid. The man’s close-lipped smile never wavered. He must at some point have been nice-looking; not a single fleck of color was still visible on his fastidiously groomed head. “My dear,” he said to Regan. “I had so hoped we would find each other tonight.”

“Amory Gould,” she said. “Allow me to present Mercer Goodman.”

Mercer noticed with a sinking feeling that she had not introduced him as anything, and that the implication was that he was somehow involved with Regan, rather than with William. Brute facts of his appearance were being used to shock, even to injure. But to dispel the confusion would be to betray her, and he couldn’t; her good hand now squeezed his biceps like a blood-pressure cuff. He was aware of the dryness of his mouth, the near-audible thump of his heart. The odd thing was that Uncle Amory had not stopped smiling. It was impossible to say what was anxious-making about him, apart from the hard blue stare. “So, Mr. Goodman,” he said. “What’s your line?”

Mercer coughed. He probably smelled like Woodstock. “Pardon?”

“What do you do, son?”

He’d learned not to let belittlement or even open insult goad him into a reaction. You’re the only one who has power over you, Mama had reminded him before he’d left for college, though he wasn’t sure he’d ever really believed it. What he was sure of was that Amory Gould didn’t. The man was watching him the way a kid watches an ant on whom he’s trained the sun via magnifying glass.

“I’m a teacher,” he ventured. “I work in the high school at Wenceslas-Mockingbird.”

“You must know Ed Buncombe, then, the Dean of Faculty.”

“Dr. Runcible is the new man.” Later, he would wonder why he hadn’t stopped there. But Regan’s talons were practically piercing the material of his dinner jacket, and Amory Gould still beamed inscrutably, and as the silence up here on the balcony thickened, Mercer had a sense that people were starting to watch from below. “And I write.” He knew instantly that it was a mistake.

“I see. And what do you write, Mr. Goodman?”

“Amory, don’t pry, please,” Regan said. “Mercer, you don’t have to answer that.”

“She’s right. Quite, quite right,” Amory said. “When you reach a certain age, you forget how fragile these things can feel. A puff of breath might knock them over. Would you believe I used to churn out verse myself, as an undergraduate? Dreadful. Eventually, I put it aside, took up a more practical career in government, then business. The three ages of man, you know. But let me ask you this, Mr. Goodman.” The head seemed to be swelling now, growing closer. Its eyes were rimmed with pink, like chunks of ice that had torn holes in the hands that handled them. “Your day job, the teaching, do they know about these other proclivities of yours? Because one owes it to them, and to oneself, to be honest.”