Garth Hallberg - City on Fire

THERE WAS NOWHERE ON EARTHmore desolate than a Gristedes on New Year’s Eve. Sprigs of limp parsley clinging to the holes of the grocery baskets; dreary fluorescent bulbs, one of them gone gray, like a dead tooth; the palsied old man at the head of the checkout line, shaking out his coin-purse. It was the last place you wanted to take stock of your life. Indeed, for most of the last decade, Keith Lamplighter had managed to avoid thinking about groceries at all. He marched off to Lamplighter Capital Associates in the morning and returned home around this time, seven or eight, to a replenished fridge — as if heads of lettuce had just sprouted there while the door was closed, Regan had claimed, there at the end. “You don’t even know where the store is. ” Which wasn’t true; Keith did. It was just that the numbers escaped him: between Sixty-Fifth and Sixty-Fourth? Or Sixty-Fourth and Sixty-Third? He’d walked by it often enough, but it took up no space in his consciousness, as the number of his extension at the office took up no space, because he never had occasion to call it. Now he was getting to know the Gristedes the way you know a person with whom you are really angry: intimately, from the inside, he thought, as a bell shot the cash drawer out from its hiding place.

No, Regan had been right, as usual. Success in America was like Method acting. You were given a single, defined problem to work through, and if you were good enough in your role, you managed to convince yourself of its — the problem’s — significance. Meanwhile, actors who hadn’t made the cut scurried around backstage, tugging at ropes, making sure that when you turned to address the moon, it would be there. You told yourself you were the only one who ever labored, even as the curtain behind you rippled, as from the swift soft movements of mice. How many times recently had Keith resolved to bear in mind his beaten-down supporting players? To be a better and more Christlike person? But it was as if some allergic reaction to the Gristedes was blocking him. The light had a lurid green in it that made everything it touched seem sickly. Perhaps it was to irradiate the food, to keep microscopic spores from spreading across the surface of Keith’s bachelor provisions — pretzels and Sabrett franks and Air-Puft buns — until he’d made it out of the store. If he ever made it out of the store.

The old man at the head of the line having tottered out the door, the only other people around were women. They stared at the colorless flecked-tile floor or the soap-opera stars on the magazine racks. Directly ahead, some wisps had freed themselves from the drab ponytail of a teen mother already pregnant with her next kid — a hairstyle for someone who had no time for a hairstyle. She seemed not to see the daughter tugging at her trailing scarf, begging pretty please for an Almond Joy. For a second, the curtain was about to part, Keith’s heart was in motion.… That could have been his scarf-end, once. That could have been his hand feeling for the quarter he surely would have come up with had this been his little girl. But he’d believed he had better things to do, and the girl seemed to know this; when he flashed her what was meant to be an anodyne smile, she nuzzled into the leg of the mother, who glanced back at him with an expression that pretty clearly said, “Pervert.”

It took several more lifetimes to reach the cashier. The checkout, the kids would have said. Will had wanted to be a checkout when he grew up. This was when he was three or four, and Regan had still been home with him all day, barring some business with the Board. She’d blushed, though Keith hadn’t meant to signal disapproval. “That’s not what you said yesterday, honey. Tell Daddy what you said yesterday.” Keith could feel something welling up inside him. He wanted to be like his dad! But when Will didn’t respond, Regan said, “Fire truck. He wanted to be a fire truck.” Well, of course he did, because how, at four or however old he was, could he have understood what a wealth adviser did? Keith himself didn’t understand, it turned out. But it would become one of those moments, one of those little domestic moments he’d let slip behind the curtain while he was busy center-stage, Succeeding. And now, trying hard to meet the eyes of the surly teenager totting up his purchases and to remember that she was as real as he was, he was doing it again. Thinking only of himself, of how to get to where he was going. And of how he would now be late.

IN TRUTH,he’d been looking all along for some excuse to blow off the annual Hamilton-Sweeney gala. Uncle Amory had signed his invitation personally, but even the five-minute intermezzi in which he and Regan met to hand off the kids were unbearable, and though it should have been possible in a crowd of several hundred guests to avoid each other, he knew it would never happen. Regan would keep close to him, ostensibly because they were adults and could behave like adults, but really as a kind of self-punishment. He’d lately come to understand that she’d been punishing herself for a long time.

Though now that she’d taken Will and Cate and moved to Brooklyn, he felt as if he were being punished, too. He wandered the old apartment like some wraith with no power to alter anything he saw. Absent her half of the books, those remaining had collapsed into decrepit piles on the shelves or fallen to the floor. She’d taken the lamps, too, and her million framed photographs. Sometimes at night, in the dark, he heard phantasmal children sliding down the hallways in their socks. They might have been living here still, had Regan not eventually learned about the time he’d brought his mistress into the apartment. It was the one bit of information he’d left out of his confession, knowing the pain it would cause. (Well, that and her age. And her name.)

He’d sworn never to bring Samantha here again, and, since breaking things off, had refused to take her calls. Then, earlier this week, she’d reached him at work. She’d somehow found the number — the one he didn’t know himself. She was coming into the City for New Year’s; could they meet? He got a kind of helpless hard-on thinking about her, or the ghost of her, kneeling on the couch in her white cotton panties, elbows on armrest, looking back over her shoulder, like a dare. “We have to talk,” she said. “I’m not pregnant, so you know. But it’s important.” He said his in-laws were expecting him at the gala. It was true, technically, and in case she thought she’d ruined his life, he wanted her to understand that she hadn’t. But he might, he added, have a little time earlier in the evening, so long as they met in a public place. “You don’t have to worry, Keith,” she said. “You’re not that irresistible. And I’ll be bringing a friend.” And so it had been established that they would meet at 9:30, at a nightclub downtown called the Vault.

COOL NIGHT AIRsummoned him back out of himself. The avenue lay hushed under the first snow. He stood for a minute, breathing it in, listening to the meticulous tick of flakes hitting the grocery bag propped against his hip. Half a block away, a figure with a shopping trolley had doddered out into the crosswalk. The signal flashed DON’T WALK, staining the snow red. Keith noticed the headlights of a school of taxis farther north, carrying speed downhill. Could the cabbies see, in this weather?

He reached the stranded shopper just in time to hustle him across to the far curb. It was the old man from the store, a little bald fellow in a soiled fisherman’s cap. “Jesus. You’ve got to be more careful,” Keith said. The man blinked up at him through thick glasses, his eyes wet and uncomprehending as a farm animal’s. He said something in a high-pitched voice that sounded Spanish, but the consonants had all been gummed away. Keith caught himself replying at half-speed, and in an accent, as if that would make his English any more intelligible. Finally, he managed to establish through a ridiculous pantomime, pointing to things and holding up certain digits, that the man lived a few blocks south.