Union Atlantic (26 page)

Emerging onto the terrace, Nate encountered a ewe working a drainpipe loose with the scratching motion of her tubby white flank.

“You!” a man in a baggy gray suit called out. “Have you seen my sister?”

“Shit,” he said, recognizing Ms. Graves’s brother from one of his visits to her house. “I’ll find her.”

It seemed to take forever to wade through the milling crowd. Eventually, he managed to circle around to the parking area, where by the gate he finally saw her. She walked stooped forward and with great effort. When he reached her he saw she had bright-red scratch marks lined all up and down her arms and legs and one across the side of her neck.

“Ms. Graves, the dogs, they’re inside, they’re fine. It’s my fault. I wanted to feed them.”

Tears welled in her eyes, though her kindly, pained smile never faltered.

“These people don’t clear their underbrush,” she said. “There’s a nasty patch of briars in there. A few hours with the clippers is all I’d need.”

Lending his arm for support, he walked her slowly up the path.

“What on earth are you doing here?” she asked. “Don’t tell me these people are your friends.”

No sooner had he found a chair for Charlotte back up on the lawn than Mrs. Holland once more ascended the little riser, waving her arms and calling out to whomever remained to please, please, hurry up and watch. The bleary faces of a few stalwart celebrants turned just in time to see the barge on the pond explode in one single, hammering burst, the flames from the blast shooting twenty or thirty feet into the air before dripping back into the water like burning fuel, and so too over the dry grass, which began at once to burn.

Chapter 14

The heat kept on through July. On the Finden High playing fields, soccer-camp kids drilled from steamy morning to hazy afternoon, and the unfortunates remanded to summer school sweated it out in the same remorseless classrooms they’d tried all year to avoid. Mold flourished in unfinished basements and in the trunks of parents’ old cars littered with sodden swimsuits and damp towels smeared in suntan lotion and the remains of spilt beer. The moisture dampened even the sound of traffic, which in the normal course of events would have lessened once the semester ended, but school exchanges had been canceled in the wake of 9/11 and family vacations to Europe called off. Parents told kids to get summer jobs and pulled back from the promise of cars for college. You heard stories of people’s moms and dads being laid off from office jobs that if you’d ever bothered to contemplate seemed eternal in their boredom. The town put out the usual flags, and the flowers beneath them bloomed. And for all the worry shot down the cable wires, for all the jokes about duct tape and the
town police cordoning off the baseball diamond to detonate a grade-schooler’s lost knapsack, for all the hours of news spooling tape on the dirty bomber and Saddam’s vast arsenal and the tall, smiling Satan eluding our might in the mountains of some hopelessly foreign country, the drama club still had its bake sale and the library still sold books out on the sidewalk from noon to three on weekends, and you still wished for a clarifying rain at the end of each sweltering day.

Such a rain arrived on the Friday afternoon two weeks after the party, just as Nate was getting to Ms. Graves’s house. She led him into the living room and took a seat in her usual spot on the couch. In the stifling heat, the room’s disarray was strictly oppressive, the mounds of clutter like plants rotting in a jungle. None of this would ever be cleared away, he thought, not as long as she remained rooted here.

Her voice lacked its usual force and she often paused in her meandering discourse, which contained no more breathless jeremiads. She spoke awhile of Dewey and the spread of primary education, but he could tell her thoughts were elsewhere.

“You needn’t worry,” she said after a particularly long silence, during which he’d noticed the scabs still visible on her shins. “I know you aren’t studying for your exam anymore. You’ve been good to indulge me like this. I know I’ve bored you.”

“That’s not true,” he said, gnawing at the blunt end of his pen.

She gazed past him out the window.

“I’ve been thinking of birch trees for along the riverbank. What do you think? Perhaps a mix of things would be better.”

On his way over, Nate had tried telling himself that the documents wouldn’t matter, that she had already won her suit. But the excuse seemed thin now; Doug wouldn’t want the files if he couldn’t gain something by them.

“In any case, I’ll make us some tea.”

As soon as she left the room, he began darting from one pile of paper to the next, keeping a close eye on the door. He gathered bank statements, tax records, notarized letters, and anything else from that mass of print which seemed relevant. On a stack by the fireplace he saw a manila folder labeled “Society Minutes” and he shoved it in his knapsack along with the rest. His only thought as he went about his task was a disavowed one: that losing his father permitted him this moral lapse. As if, in some grand ledger, his loss had earned him a pass or two.

Ms. Graves returned carrying a tray of tea and biscuits.

“I’ve been returning to Whitman,” she said, as she poured them each a cup. “He’s right about most things. But if you take him to heart, you can’t always read the poems in your favor. He has this way of looking back at you. Here’s one I came across this morning. ‘To a Historian.’”

She put on her reading glasses and recited the lines in a slow, reflective voice.

“‘You who celebrates bygones, / Who have explored the outward, the surfaces of the races, the life that has exhibited itself, / Who have treated of man as the creature of politics, aggregates, rulers and priests, / I, habitan of the Alleghenies, treating of him as he is in himself in his own rights, / Pressing the pulse of life that has seldom exhibited itself, (the great pride of man in himself,) Chanter of Personality, outlining what is yet to be, / I project the history of the future.’

“Bracing stuff, no? The question is, can you chant personality without devolving into solipsism? Can you trust the pulse of life without becoming Mr. Fanning? Because he is the future. One way or the other. His kind of rapaciousness, it doesn’t end. It just bides its time.”

___________

L
ATER THAT EVENING
Nate stood in the middle of Doug’s kitchen watching him spread the files across the counter. He’d gone home first to shower and change but on the walk back he’d sweated through his T-shirt again.

“Does this mean she’s going to lose?”

Doug fingered an envelope, glancing at the return address.

“She was always going to lose,” he said. “It’s just a question of when.”

“She’s not evil, you know.”

“You feel bad, huh?”

“Wouldn’t you?”

Doug flipped through another folder, ignoring Nate’s question. “This is good,” he said. “You’ve done well. There’s beer in the fridge if you want it.”

Taking one, Nate wandered down the hall, through the first empty room, and into the space where the TV stood in the corner. Here, binders and files now covered a large portion of the floor. Two laptops, their power cords running several yards to the wall sockets, were set up on the kitchen table, which had been brought in and placed beside the couch.

Doug followed him in and turned on the Sox-Yankees game.

“The fact is, she was obliged to give us copies of those papers weeks ago. That’s the law. So you can relax. It’s not on you.”

They watched as the designated hitter, Ramirez, struck a ball deep into center field, driving home the runner at third and bringing the crowd at Fenway to its feet.

It wasn’t too late to walk back into the kitchen, Nate thought, to gather those papers up and leave. “You were wrong about the baseball thing,” he said. “I did watch it before I met you.”

“You’re a weirdo.”

“Yeah. So are you.”

“Why don’t you go upstairs. Go ahead. Take your clothes off. I’ll be up in a bit.”

Nate’s heart thudded against his chest. “What if I don’t want to?”

“Suit yourself.”

The bed hadn’t been made. Nate pulled the sheets up and tucked them in, arranging the cotton blanket at the foot of the mattress and putting the pillows back in place. He wondered if he should keep the lamp on but decided not to, leaving only the light from the bathroom. He folded his trousers and put them with his shoes and belt on the floor in the corner. The nights he’d stayed over they had always been under the sheets together, Nate getting Doug off, never the other way around. He had never even been naked in front of him.

He waited there in his underwear, terrified at the thought of what kind of person he was for wanting this. He waited ten minutes and then another ten. He could hear the television still on downstairs, switched to a different station.

Eyes closed, trying to forget everything—his life and the world outside this house—he sensed that for all the highs he’d experienced while stoned in the back of Jason’s car or tripping by the lake, for all the cares that such forcings of the brain had displaced, none would free him from himself as this might.

To be pressed down into the bed by Doug’s full weight, the last remnant of the minding self rubbed into oblivion. To be taken over and used up and made to go away. A body as strong as Doug’s could do that to you.

At last the sound of the TV ceased and a few moments later Doug came through the bedroom door. He walked to the window and leaned against the sill.

“You’re not taking your shirt off?” he asked.

“I don’t look like you. I’m not muscular.”

“That’s fine. You’re more like a girl that way.”

“Is that how you think of me?”

“I’m just saying, you’re fine. Go on. Take your shirt off. And the boxers.”

Nate pulled his T-shirt over his head and laid it on the bed beside him and then he slipped his shorts off, his throat tightening, just a thread of air reaching his lungs.

Pushing his shoes off and unbuttoning his shirt, Doug approached the bed.

“My God, you’re young,” he said, taking Nate’s chin in his hand. “You really are.”

Withdrawing from his touch, Nate lay back on the bed, covering himself with one hand.

“I’ve never done this,” he whispered.

Making no reply, Doug picked Nate up by the rib cage and turned him over onto his stomach.

“Just close your eyes,” he said, shifting onto the bed. And then Nate felt Doug’s knees pressing against the inside of his own, spreading his legs apart. He’d been self-conscious about his body for so long, for so many years, and yet he’d still never known the sensation could be this intense, as if, perversely, by enacting the fantasy of self-forgetting the self only grew stronger and more ineluctable than ever. He heard the drawer of the bedside table open and close.

“Here. Up on your knees.”

Doug’s hands grasped him at the waist, pulling him backward. He turned his head to look up at him but again Doug told him to close his eyes. A thick warmth pressed up against his ass and then, after a
moment of struggle, he felt a sudden, sharp ring of pain coil up through his body and into his head, making the blood beat at his temples and forcing him to gasp for breath.

“Don’t worry. I’m not going to rape you.”

That he would lose control of his bowels seemed certain but when that sensation ended he found himself able to breathe again, breathing and sweating, still in great pain but a pain that moved too fast along the tips of his nerves to make him want to stop.

He felt Doug’s pelvis flat against him and the muscles of his back and neck released and he let go, the vigilant self finally fading as the thrusting began, the shock of it driven into him over and over.

From the base of his spine some liquid locked deep against the bone released and burst up into his skull, heating his brain to the edge of fainting. Leaning down on his forearms, his forehead to the mattress, he held on for another few seconds and then came without touching himself, his head jerking sharply backward, his shoulders contracting down his back.

A few strokes later Doug pulled out of him and rolled flat on the bed.

Nate stood and headed quickly for the bathroom, closing the door behind him.

“You all right?” Doug called out a few minutes later.

“Yeah,” he said, leaning against the tiled wall of the shower, the old dread of discovery and the basic penal shame washing back over him with the scalding water.

Part
Three

Chapter 15

From the window of his office on the tenth floor of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Henry Graves looked down over the crowds rushing westward along Liberty Street and up Nassau toward the Fulton Street station. Those who hadn’t already been let out early for the Columbus Day weekend moved with more than their usual haste toward the buses and subways that would drain them from the city by the tens of thousands, emptying them into Jersey, Westchester, and Long Island, where supermarket inventories had already dropped a few points and the local banks had balanced their sheets for the week and sent their people home.