City on Fire Read Free Page B

now lost in the shadows, now exploding into light. When he looked over at William, the chesterfield was back in its box on the floor beside the futon, and the jumbo bag of gumdrops was nearly empty. He could feel himself turning into his mother.
    They sat down at halftime, plates balanced on knees. Mercer had assumed that because there was a gap in the action William might turn the television off, but he didn’t even turn it down, or look away. “Yams are terrific,” he said. Like reggae music and Amateur Night at the Apollo, soul food was one of William’s elective affinities with negritude. “I wish you wouldn’t stare at me like that.”
    “Like what?”
    “Like I killed your puppy. I’m sorry if today fell short of whatever was in your head.”
    Mercer hadn’t realized he’d been staring. He shifted his gaze to the tree, already desiccating in its aluminum stand. “It’s my first Christmas away from home,” he said. “If trying to preserve a few traditions makes me a fantasist, I guess I’m a fantasist.”
    “Does it ever strike you as revealing that you still refer to it as ‘home’?” William dabbed a corner of his mouth with his napkin. His table manners, incongruous, beautiful, should have been an early clue. “We’re grown men, you know, Merce. We make our own traditions. Christmas could be twelve nights at the disco. We could eat oysters every day for lunch, if we wanted.”
    Mercer couldn’t tell how much of this was sincere, and how much William was merely caught up in winning the argument. “Honestly, William, oysters?”
    “Cards on the table, sweetheart. This is about that envelope you keep trying to shove into my field of vision, isn’t it?”
    “Well, aren’t you going to open it?”
    “Why would I? There’s nothing inside that’s going to make me feel better than I already do. God damn it!”
    It took him a second to realize that William was talking to the football game, where some unpleasantness announced the start of the third quarter.
    “Do you know what I think? I think you already know what’s in it.” As Mercer did himself, actually. Or at least he had his suspicions.
    He went to pick up the envelope and held it toward the TV; a shadow nested tantalizingly within, like the secret at the heart of an X-ray. “I think it’s from your family,” he said.
    “What I want to know is, how did it get here without a postmark?”
    “What I want to know is, why is that such a threat?”
    “I can’t talk to you when you get like this, Mercer.”
    “Why am I not allowed to want things?”
    “You know damn well that’s not what I said.”
    Now it was Mercer’s turn to wonder how much he meant the words coming out of his mouth, and how much he just wanted to win. He could see in the margins the cookware, the shelf of alphabetized books, the tree, all physical accommodations William had made to him, it was true. But what about emotionally? Anyway, he’d said too much now to back down. “Here is what you want: your life stays just the same, while I twist myself around you like a vine.”
    Pale points appeared on William’s cheeks, as they always did when the border between his inner and outer lives was breached. There was a second when he might have come flying across the coffeetable. And there was a second when Mercer might have welcomed it. It might have proven he was more important to William than his self-possession, and from grappling in anger, how easy it would have been to fall into that other, sweeter grappling. Instead, William reached for the new coat. “I’m going out.”
    “It’s Christmas.”
    “This is another thing we’re allowed to do, Mercer. We’re allowed to have time alone.”
    But Solitas radix malorum est, Mercer would think later, looking back. The door closed, leaving him alone with the barely touched food. His appetite, too, had deserted him. There was something eschatological about the weak afternoon light, made weaker by the tree and the