The City of Mirrors (The Passage 3)

“Do you mind?” I asked. “I thought I’d get a snack.”

Her attention had already returned to her magazine. She took a bite of cereal and gave a backhanded wave. “Do what you want.”

I helped myself to a bowl. There was no place else to sit, so I joined her at the table. Even in the flannel bathrobe, her face without makeup and her hair uncombed, she was magnificent. I had no idea what to say to such a creature.

“You’re looking at me,” she said, turning a page.

I felt the blood rushing to my cheeks. “No, I wasn’t.”

She said nothing more. I had no place to put my eyes, so I looked at my cereal. The crunch of my chewing seemed intensely loud.

“What are you reading?” I asked finally.

She sighed irritably, closed her magazine, and looked up. “Okay, fine. Here I am.”

“I was just trying to make conversation.”

“Can we not? Please? I’ve seen you watching me, Tim.”

“So you know my name.”

“Tim, Tom, whatever.” She rolled her eyes. “Oh, all right. Let’s get this over with.”

She parted the top of her robe. Beneath it she was wearing only a bra of shimmering pink silk. The sight aroused me indescribably.

“Go on,” she urged.

“Go on what?”

She was looking at me with an expression of bored mockery. “Don’t be dense, Harvard boy. Here, let me help you.”

She took my hand and placed it, rather mechanically, against her left breast. A magnificent breast it was! I had never touched a goddess before. Its spherical softness, sheathed in high-dollar silk with a scallop of delicate lace at the edges, filled my palm like a peach. I sensed she was making fun of me, but I hardly cared. What would happen now? Would I be permitted to kiss her?

Apparently not. As I was constructing a complete sexual narrative in my head, the wonderful things we might do together, culminating in breathy intercourse upon the kitchen floor, she abruptly pulled my hand away and let it fall on the table with the same contemptuous gesture one might use for dropping trash into a bin.

“So,” she said, reopening her magazine, “did you get what you wanted? Did that satisfy you?”

I was utterly flummoxed. She turned a page, then another. What the hell had just happened?

“I don’t understand you at all,” I said.

“Of course you don’t.” She looked up again, wrinkling her nose in distaste. “Tell me something. Why are you even friends with him? I mean, all things considered, you seem sort of normal.”

This was, I supposed, what passed for a compliment. It also aroused in me a fiercely protective instinct toward her brother. Who was she to talk about him like that? Who did she think she was, teasing me this way?

“You’re awful,” I said.

She gave a nasty little laugh. “Sticks and stones, Harvard boy. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m trying to read.”

And that was the end of it. I returned to bed, so sexually charged I barely slept, and in the morning, before anybody else in the house was awake, Lucessi’s father drove us to the train station in his monstrous Lincoln. As we disembarked, in an awkward reversal of customary courtesy, he thanked me for coming in a manner that suggested that he, too, felt a little baffled by my friendship with his son. A picture was emerging: Lucessi was the runt of the litter, an object of family-wide pity and embarrassment. I felt profoundly sorry for him, even as I recognized his situation’s similarity to my own. We were a couple of castaways, the two of us.

We boarded the train. I was exhausted and didn’t feel like talking. For a while we bumped along in silence. Lucessi was the first to speak.

“Sorry about all that.” He was drawing meaningless shapes on the window with his index finger. “I’m sure you were hoping for something more exciting.”

I hadn’t told him what had happened and, of course, never would. It was also true that my anger had softened, replaced by a budding curiosity. Something altogether unexpected about the world had been glimpsed. This life his family led; I had known that such wealth existed, but that is not the same as sleeping under its roof. I felt like an explorer who’d stumbled upon a golden city in the jungle.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I had a great time.”

Lucessi sighed, settled back, and closed his eyes. “They can be the stupidest people on earth,” he said.

—

What fascinated me, of course, was money. Not just because of the things it could buy, though these were appealing (Lucessi’s sister being Exhibit A). The deeper attraction lay in something more atmospheric. I had never been around wealthy people but had not felt this as a lack; I had never been around Martians, either. There were plenty of rich kids at Harvard, of course, the ones who’d gone to exclusive prep schools and addressed each other with preposterous nicknames like “Trip” and “Beemer” and “Duck.” But in day-to-day existence, their affluence was easily overlooked. We lived in the same crappy dormitories, sweated through the same papers and tests, ate the same atrocious food in the dining hall, like co-residents of a kibbutz. Or so it seemed. Visiting Lucessi’s house had opened my eyes to a hidden world that lay beneath the egalitarian surface of our lives, like a system of caves under my feet. Except for Lucessi, I actually knew very little about my friends and classmates. It seems improbable to say so now, but the thought had never occurred to me that there could be something so fundamentally different about them.