City on Fire: A Novel by Garth Risk Hallberg

Author:Garth Risk Hallberg
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Literary, Urban, Historical, Fiction
ISBN: 9780385353786
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 2015-10-13T04:00:00+00:00

54

WHAT SHE WANTED, ACTUALLY, was an airtight door to come down behind her, cleaving them cleanly, so that she could be angry at Keith without being angry at herself. Yet the boundaries were still so porous that a mere backward glimpse at him dwindling on a streetcorner could leave her reeling. Outwardly, of course, she kept her composure; these last months had taught her how to stand up to cameras, to deliver careful non-answers into fascicles of microphones. But inwardly she was a trained animal, inclined to leap into Keith’s arms the second he showed her kindness. The only solution would be to create between them some obstacle so large neither of them would be able to get around it.

The obvious candidate was Andrew West. He’d been helping her with the recent “setbacks” at Liberty Heights. (The Bronx had been in flames since the late ’60s, but as soon as the inferno touched one of their projects, it required a public statement.) And with how to sell to the press the plea deal that was now going to keep Daddy out of jail. Well after the twenty-ninth floor’s other denizens had packed it in, they remained in her office. The night janitor’s Hoover could be heard worrying a patch of carpet nearby. Light pooled on piles of prospecti and spiked phone messages. And on Andrew’s neck, bent over the desk at the same angle as the anglepoise lamp. His smell reminded her of Keith’s aftershave, a ceramic bottle of which had followed her to the new place. In the first days after the move, looking through boxes in search of something else, she used to brush against the raised sailboat logo, used to lift the stopper and breathe in the simple blue scent. But Keith’s simplicity was the kind that made complications for everyone else. Like how he used the aftershave to cover the smell of the cigarettes she knew he smoked. Which she herself had smoked, the year before he rescued her. Andrew, by contrast, wore only Speed Stick, and sometimes now in the warmth of their little conspiracy, she imagined she smelled his sweat. He hadn’t asked her out again, after that once, so she was going to have to take the lead here. Yet she couldn’t quite do it.

Later, she would lie in bed with her eyes open until the dark became a palimpsest of grays: chair, nightstand, the small gray stack of plays she’d checked out from the library back in March, determined to become again the literate person she’d once been. What had happened? Marriage had happened. The indictment had happened. The thing with Will. Work and cabs and dinner and dishes and every other blessed thing that left her here in a pile on the bedclothes, almost teary from exhaustion but still not ready to sleep. She’d been having this dream lately about a kind of gate, an alabaster thing as tall and deep as the triumphal arch down on Washington Square, but with a central passage too narrow to see through.

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