So I quit The Scene. I quit the drugs. I quit the Soho Star. I sent out resumes and got offered a new job at a small paper in the Midwest.
Which left me with only one other thing I had to do.
"I'm going away," I told Lauren. We were walking by the harbor path in Battery Park on a winter Sunday. She had her arm in mine. I was looking away over the unbroken line of benches, squinting through the brittle sunlight to watch the tiered ferries sputter through the water toward the Statue of Liberty. I heard Lauren beside me release a trembling sigh. "I've been offered a job in another city, and I'm going to take it."
She slipped her arm out of mine. She slipped her hands into the pockets of her dark woolen overcoat. "I'm assuming this isn't an invitation," she said.
I took a slow scan of the water back to the tip of the island, up to the twin towers of the World Trade Center standing massive against the afternoon sky. I was going to miss this city, I thought. "Lauren, look," I said. "I never lied to you about the way I felt."
"No. No, you didn't. God knows I tried to get you to, but you never did."
"I've just… changed too much. I can't make any more small adjustments. I'm going to be thirty soon. I need to start again somewhere else."
She stopped on the path and I stopped, and we faced each other. I don't know why it surprised me to see her wiping her nose with the woolen gloves on her hands. We'd been so glib and cynical and crazy with each other, it was hard for me to realize how much I meant to her.
"Well, listen," she said with a miserable laugh. "Fuck you and all that. If you don't mind, I'm not gonna go through the whole routine. Crying gives me a headache, and I'm sure you can fill in the blanks. Anyway, it won't change anything. Have a nice life, Jason, okay?"
She walked off quickly, looking small and sad in the long coat and the watch cap pulled down over her hair, the knit scarf trailing behind her. A hunched, unhappy figure against the sparkling harbor. I wanted to call her back but what for? I knew I'd only browbeat her into forgiving me so I'd feel better. I watched her go, watched her blend with the crowds around the ferry stand, meld with the scenery-people, plane trees, and those two stalwart towers.
Then I turned away and walked off in the opposite direction.
Now, Manhattan's skyline sank out of sight as the plane settled down toward the runway. I came out of myself and turned away from the porthole. I had an odd, heavy sensation inside me-an intimation of danger-a feeling that I was coming here for deeper and more perilous reasons than I knew. Because it was strange, wasn't it? That call from Lauren just as I had to decide what to do with my mother's house. The timing was strange, the coincidence of it. It gave me the feeling that I was returning not just to the East Coast but to the past itself, returning to confront the past itself, to face it as a new man and prove to its ghosts and shadows that I was a wholly different man than I had been.
The plane touched down with a jolt. I shook myself, trying to throw that feeling off, that odd, heavy intimation of danger.
It wouldn't go away.
The Television Room
Night had long fallen by the time I left the airport to drive out to the island. There were spots of rain on the windshield of my rental car. It was a sleek, jolly little red Mustang, low to the ground. It dodged and wove sweetly through the expressway traffic.
I talked to Cathy most of the way out. Her voice was thin and tinny and faraway in my cell-phone earpiece. She told me about the kids, their day at schooclass="underline" a good grade on a spelling test, a part in a school play. It was still daylight where they were, she said. The sky, she said, was clear.
Man oh man, I wished I hadn't lied to her about Lauren. I wished I had told her I was going to see her while I was here. She wouldn't have minded. She would've trusted me. I wasn't sure why I had kept it to myself. Just an impulse really, a momentary whim. It wasn't that I was planning to sleep with Lauren again, or anything. I wasn't an idiot, after all. I think it's just that sometimes-sometimes when you live a good life, a stable life-you want to leave room for the possibility of something else, for the excitement of the possibility. It was like letting Tanya touch my arm… just for a moment sometimes, you feel compelled to leave life open to the thrill of disaster.
Anyway, I hadn't told Cathy the truth, and I found I couldn't tell her now. Feeling uncomfortable and guilty, I asked her to put the children on. They said hi to me one by one. I asked them how they were. Fine, they said. When they were done, I switched off the phone and kept driving.
I slid from the highway into my hometown. I came along the broad road past the car dealerships and gas stations at the town limits. Then it was up the hill into the residential areas, where streetlights shone down on the canopies of maples and elms above me. Yellow and red and green leaves glistened, slick with the light rain. Behind the trees, entry lights gleamed white by the doorways of tranquil clapboard-and-shingle houses. Inside, behind the curtains, room lights burned yellow and warm.
It was just another Long Island suburban town, but it was my town. I'd been back here often over the years, of course, to visit Mom and my brother. Every time, it struck me with an almost-mystical familiarity. I felt I could walk its streets blindfolded, and if its streets were gone, I could walk blindfolded on the paths where they had been. I felt as if the map of the place were branded on the longest-living part of me, as if I could die and trace its outline on the after-darkness.
The house where I grew up and where my mother went mad and died was on the corner at the bottom of a hill. It was a substantial two-story colonial with white clapboards and dark green shutters. It was set back on a broad, flat lawn and shaded by oaks and a tall cherry tree. I'd been paying a caretaker to keep the grounds neat and a housekeeper to dust and air out the rooms, but when I pulled into the driveway, I thought the place had a forlorn, abandoned look to it all the same.
Inside, when the door had shut behind me, it seemed very still. I don't suppose that houses get any quieter when people die in them. I don't suppose it was any quieter than if my mother had gone out for a while on one of the rambling walks she sometimes took before her heart got too bad. But she hadn't gone out for a walk, and when I turned on the foyer light, the rest of the house spread dark around me and, as I say, it seemed almost preternaturally still.
I stood at the bottom of the stairs with my suitcase in my hand. I looked up into the shadows of the second-floor landing. Her bedroom was up there, haunted by my imagination of her last hour. I imagined her lying in bed alone, feverishly explaining the signs, the omens and connections that were so obvious to her, but that no one else could see. The fall of the Republic. The Second Coming of Christ. The coming of savagery again to the scattered nations. Explaining and explaining to no one in a whisper. Reaching out in the dark as if to take hold of my wrist-me, because I was the only one who had the patience to listen to her…
But I wasn't there. No one was. I had begged Mom for years to come live with me. Cathy and I had both begged her. But I think she liked taking care of my brother. Paying his keep, making his bed, his lunch, doing his laundry. I think it gave her a sense of purpose. Of course, he was no good to her when the crisis came. Alan-that's my brother's name-Alan-had been living with her for over a decade by then. A ruined, useless man. A great pontificator on What's Wrong with the World, but incapable of holding down a job or starting a family or putting bread in his own mouth. When he sensed that the end was near, he decided it was time to take what he called a "vacation." He withdrew about forty thousand dollars from Mom's various accounts and went off to Bermuda. As far as I knew, he was still there.