INCREASINGLY, AFTER WILLIAM’S DISAPPEARANCE, Mercer would find himself returning to that winter, trying to nail down some turning point, some moment about which he could say, It all started when.… The search wasn’t orderly, or even continuous; he could go for hours caught up in questions of test preparation, of dry-cleaning, of Middle-Eastern affairs. But then on the subway or on line at the place down the street where he went when they were out of toilet paper—or rather, when Mercer was—he’d be accosted by a memory. Here was William shaking a handful of change as though preparing to shoot dice. Here was William rummaging for a token in the pockets of the bluejeans heaped on the sleeping-nook floor—picking them up and tossing them aside, without it ever occurring to him to deposit them in the hamper. And here was William, spied on once from above, stealing away from the building in the bloody pre-rush-hour light. If he were truly headed uptown to paint, he would enter the subway on the far side of Eighth Avenue, but here he was turning downtown instead. Here was William, in other words, leaving by slow degrees.
The night of the intervention—the night he’d walked out the door and not come back—had merely literalized it. Nevertheless, the effect on Mercer was baleful. He held it together for his girls at work, but afterward, as in his earliest days in the city, he walked home via the most circuitous route possible, looping up toward Central Park rather than face the emptiness of the loft. It was getting on into spring, and under the glass globes of streetlamps the trees were pushing out green. Sound carried farther in this oxygen-rich air; he might hear laughter from the entrances of restaurants on the east side, where valets helped expensive people out of the interiors of cars. He peered through the lit windows of the apartments where they lived—apartments he’d once pictured himself inhabiting. William had come from this world, had been a natural aristocrat, which was maybe what Mercer had fallen in love with in the first place. (Though who’s to say? Who’s to say why a kid at the state fair picks a particular five-dollar animal pinned high on the corkboard behind the sideshow barker, that particular one, and will then spend ten dollars trying to shoot a balloon with a BB gun?) Anyway, for Mercer, there would be no transfiguration.
If he put off reaching home until eight or nine o’clock, he believed, he might find William waiting there on the futon, rocking forward in that way of his, hands between knees, penitent. I’ve thought about it, he’d say (for he always had to let things sink in before he could really hear them). You were right. Instead, when Mercer switched on the lamp by the door, there was only Eartha K. In the first few days after Mercer took over the management of her food supply, she’d dabbled with lesser degrees of aloofness—even once rubbing against his leg when he came in. But she’d soon learned that his sense of duty alone was sufficient to keep her fed, and now they were like inmates in a prison yard, circling each other uneasily, in orbits as wide as the cramped apartment would allow.
Then one evening after work, he went to dump her tin of Friskies onto a saucer, a chore William knew he found disgusting, and couldn’t find the can-opener. Or the pliers he thought to use in its place. Come to think of it, where was the TV? Or that pile of jeans? Yes, at some point since this morning, William had been back here. Mercer imagined him pale and hunched, moving through the loft with a bag and throwing things in at random. Maybe he was pawning them, or bartering them for heroin. But upon closer inspection, the pattern revealed an unexpected forethought. Mercer had bought a four-hole toothbrush holder, e.g., to sit by the kitchen sink. It now bared a poignant third hole. And for William to think about oral hygiene meant he must really be serious about not coming back.
MERCER HAD ALWAYS BEEN what his mother called a good eater, in contradistinction to C.L., but that night he could barely choke down a meal. There was no pleasure in it. And this seemed to be the new order of things. Where once he would have raided cookbooks for challenges with which to woo William, he now settled for the four food groups of bachelorhood: Frozen, Cold Cuts, Breakfast Cereal, and Takeout. His energy level ebbed, to offset which he drank more coffee. There was perpetually a half-pot souring in the faculty lounge at school, and visiting it gave him a way to mark time. Every few hours, between periods or even during them, he dragged himself up the three flights of stairs and stood at the window with his paper cup of joe. No one cared what he did anymore—not unless you counted the little cop who’d apparently been asking around. Outside, office workers carried bagged lunches from the deli. This was how he would end up, too: aging and anonymous and alone, on a numbered street the sunlight never quite reached.
Once or twice, at night, he planted himself in front of the typewriter, trying to get back to the book he’d come to New York to write. It was supposed to be about America, and freedom, and the kinship of time to pain, but in order to write about these things, he’d needed experience. Well, be careful what you wish for. For now all he seemed capable of producing was a string of sentences starting, Here was William. Here was William’s courage, for example. And here was William’s sadness, smallness of stature, size of hands. Here was his laugh in a dark movie theater, his unpunk love of the films of Woody Allen, not for any of the obvious ways they flattered his sensibility, but for something he called their tragic sense, which he compared to Chekhov’s (whom Mercer knew he had not read). Here was the way he never asked Mercer about his work; the way he never talked about his own and yet seemed to carry it with him just beneath the skin; the way his skin looked in the sodium light from outside with the lights off, with clothes off, in silver rain; the way he embodied qualities Mercer wanted to have, but without ruining them by wanting to have them; the way he moved like a fish in the water of this city; the way his genius overflowed its vessel, running off into the drain; the unfinished self-portrait; the hint of some trauma in his past, like the war a shell-shocked town never talks about; his terrible taste in friends; his complete lack of discipline; the inborn incapacity for certain basic things that made you want to mother him, fuck him, give your right and left arms for him, this man-child, this skinny American; and finally his wildness, his refusal to be imaginable by anyone.
It might have helped Mercer to talk about how ill all this made him feel, but inability to talk about it was one of the illness’s symptoms, as well as an underlying cause. He was like a person with a full-body rash just beneath his clothes. The fear that the rash would repulse people was stronger than the hope that fresh air might help it heal.
Of course, there was one person from whom he couldn’t conceal that something was wrong. On Sundays, when his mother called, he filled the dead air between them with perfunctory reports about teaching and meteorological conditions and whatnot, but couldn’t lift his voice into the melodious register of well-being. She never asked about his roommate anymore, he noticed. But she continued to speak in the anodyne phrases for which he’d compiled an imaginary translation table:
And she was right. It seemed impossible that he’d chosen to live here, at a latitude where spring was a semantic variation on winter, in a grid whose rigid geometry only a Greek or a builder of prisons could love, in a city that made its own gravy when it rained. Taxis continued to stream toward the tunnel, like the damned toward a Boschian hellmouth. Screaming people staggered past below. Impossible, that he now footed the rent entire, two hundred bucks monthly for the privilege of pressing his cheek to the window and still not being able to see spectacular Midtown views. Impossible, that the cinderblock planter on the fire escape could ever have produced flowers.
Which didn’t prepare him for Mama’s threat, in early April, to come visit him instead. It was the vision of her in Easter clothes and a large floral hat bowling through the hustlers at the bus station that finally coaxed out of him the admission that he might be able to make it down for spring break after all. We’d pay for you to fly, she said, if that made things easier. Some meaning he couldn’t quite translate danced just out of reach. “No, Mama,” he said finally. “I’m not a kid anymore. I can pay for things myself.”