The City of Mirrors (The Passage 3)

“What time is the car?” she asked.

“Eight o’clock.”

“I’m going with you, you know.”

“I’m glad you are.”

A frozen moment passed.

“Well,” Liz said, “I guess that’s it.” She retreated to the bedroom door, where she paused and turned to face me again. “Stephanie is a lucky girl, you know. I’m just saying that in case you haven’t figured it out.”

Then she was gone. I stripped to my boxers and lay on the couch. Under different circumstances, I might have felt foolish, daring to think that such a woman would take me into her bed. But I actually felt relieved; Liz had chosen the honorable route, making the decision for both of us. It occurred to me that not once, neither at the restaurant nor as we’d walked, had I thought of Stephanie in the context of any betrayal I might have contemplated. The day felt like a year; through the windows, I heard the wash of the city, an oceanic sound. It seemed to creep into my chest, where it matched itself to the rhythm of my breathing. Exhaustion poured through my bones, and soon I drifted off.

Sometime later, I awoke. I had the unmistakable sense of being watched. A sensation, vaguely electrical, lingered on my forehead, as if I had been kissed. I rose onto my elbows, expecting to see someone standing over me. But the room was empty, and I thought I must have dreamed this.

—

About the funeral, there is little to say. To describe it in detail would be a violation of its confidential grief, its closed circuit of pain. During the service, I kept my eyes on Arianna, wondering what she was feeling. Did she know? I wanted her to know, but I also didn’t; she was just a girl. No good could come of it.

I declined the family’s invitation to lunch; Liz and I returned to the apartment to retrieve my luggage. On the platform at Penn Station she hugged me, then, revising her thoughts, kissed me quickly on the cheek.

“So, okay?”

I didn’t know if she meant me or the two of us. “Sure,” I said. “Never better.”

“Call me if you get too blue.”

I stepped aboard. Liz was watching me through the windows as I made my way down the car to find an empty seat. I remembered boarding the bus to Cleveland, that long-ago September day—the drops of rain on the window, my mother’s crinkled bag in my lap, looking to see if my father had stayed to watch my departure, finding him gone. I took a seat beside the window. Liz had yet to move. She saw me, smiled, waved; I waved back. A deep mechanical shudder; the train began to move. She was still standing there, following my carriage with her gaze, as we entered the tunnel and disappeared.

* * *

18

May 1992: The last of my coursework had been completed. I was to graduate summa cum laude; offers of generous graduate fellowships had come my way. MIT, Columbia, Princeton, Rice. Harvard, which had decided it had not seen the last of me if I cared to stay on. It was the obvious choice, one I felt bound to make in the end, though I had not committed, preferring to savor the possibilities for as long as I could. Jonas would be going back to Tanzania for the summer, then heading to the University of Chicago to start his doctoral work; Liz would be going to Berkeley for her master’s in Renaissance literature; Stephanie was returning to Washington to work for a political consulting firm. The graduation ceremony itself would not happen until the first week of June. We had entered a nether time, a caesura between what our lives had been and what they would become.

In the meanwhile, there were parties—lots of them. Roiling keggers, black-tie balls, a garden fete where everyone drank mint juleps and all the girls wore hats. In my trusty battle tux and pink tie—wearing it had become a trademark—I danced the Lindy, the Electric Slide, the Hokey Pokey, and the Bump; at any given hour of the day, I was either drunk or hungover. An hour of triumph, but it came at a cost. For the first time in my life, I felt the pain of missing people I had not yet left.

The week before graduation, Jonas, Liz, Stephanie, and I drove down to the Cape, to Liz’s house. No one was talking about it, but it seemed unlikely that the four of us would be together again for some time. Liz’s parents were there, having just opened the house for the season. I had met them before, in Connecticut. Her mother, Patty, came across as a bit of a society doyenne, with a brisk, somewhat phony graciousness and a lock-jawed accent, but her father was one of the most likable and easygoing people I’d ever met. A tall, bespectacled man (Liz had gotten his vision) with an earnest face, Oscar Macomb had been a banker, retired early, and now, in his words, spent his days “noodling around with money.” He worshipped his daughter—that was plain to anyone with eyes; less apparent, though undeniable, was that he vastly preferred her to his wife, whom he regarded with the bemused affection one might give to an overbred poodle. With Liz, the man was all smiles—the two of them would frequently chatter away in French—and his warmth extended to anybody in her circle, including me, whom he had nicknamed “Ohio Tim.”