The City of Mirrors (The Passage 3)

The house, in a town called Osterville, stood on a bluff overlooking Nantucket Sound. It was enormous, room upon room, with a wide back lawn and rickety stairs to the beach. No doubt it was worth many millions of dollars, just for the land alone, though in those days I had no ability to calculate such things. Despite its size, it had a homey, unfussy feel. Most of the furniture looked like you could pick it up for pennies at a yard sale; in the afternoons, when the wind swung around, it tore through the house like the offensive line of the New York Giants. The ocean was still too cold for swimming, and because it was so early in the season, the town was mostly deserted. We spent our days lying on the beach, pretending not to be freezing, or lazing around on the porch, playing cards and reading, until evening arrived and the drinks came out. My father might have had a beer before dinner while he watched the news on television, but that was the extent of it; my mother never drank at all. In the Macomb household, cocktail hour was religion. At six o’clock everyone would gather in the living room or, if the evening was pleasant, on the porch, whereupon Liz’s father would present us with a silver tray of the evening’s concoction—whiskey old-fashioneds, Tom Collinses, vodka martinis in chilled glasses with olives on sticks—accompanied by dainty porcelain cups of nuts warmed in the oven. This was followed by ample quantities of wine with dinner and sometimes whiskey or port afterward. I had hoped our days on the Cape would give my liver a chance to recuperate; there was no chance of that.

Jonas and I were sharing a bedroom, the girls another, located at opposite ends of the house with Liz’s parents in between. When we’d come here during the academic term, we’d had the place, and our choice of sleeping arrangements, to ourselves. But not this time. I’d expected that the situation would lead to a certain amount of creeping around in the wee hours, but Liz forbade it. “Please do not shock the grown-ups,” she said. “We’ll all be shocking them soon enough.”

Which was just as well. By this time, I had begun to tire of Stephanie. She was a wonderful girl, but I did not love her. There was nothing about her that made this so; she was in every way deserving. My heart was simply elsewhere, and it made me feel like a hypocrite. Since the funeral in New York, Liz and I had not spoken of my mother, or her cancer, or the night when we had walked the city streets together but in the end had chosen to step back from the abyss and keep our allegiances intact. Yet it was clear that the night had left its mark on both of us. Our friendship, until that time, had flowed through Jonas. A new circuit had been opened—not through him but around him—and along this pathway pulsed a private current of intimacy. We knew what had happened; we had been there. I had felt it, and I was sure she’d felt it too, and the fact that we’d done nothing only deepened this connection, even more than if we’d fallen into bed together. We would be sitting on the porch, each of us reading one of the mildew-smelling paperbacks left behind by other guests; we would look up at just the same moment, our eyes would meet, an ironic smile would flash at the corners of her mouth, which I’d return in kind. Look at us, we were saying to each other, aren’t we the trusty twosome. If only they knew how loyal we are. We should get a prize.

I intended to do nothing about this, of course. I owed Jonas that much and more. Nor did I think Liz would have welcomed the attempt. The connection she shared with Jonas, one of long history, ran deeper than ours ever could. The house, with its endless warren of rooms and ocean views and shabbily genteel furnishings, reminded me how true this was. I was a visitor to this world, welcomed and even, as Liz had told me, admired. But a tourist nonetheless. Our night together, though indelible, had been just that: a night. Still, it thrilled me just being around her. The way she held her drink to her lips. Her habit of pushing her glasses to her forehead to read the smallest print. How she smelled, which I will not attempt to name, because it wasn’t like anything else. Pain or pleasure? It was both. I wanted to bathe in her existence. Was she dying? I tried not to think about it. I was happy to be near her at all and accepted the situation as it stood.

Two days before our departure, Liz’s father announced that we would be eating lobsters for dinner. (He did all the cooking; I’d never seen Patty so much as fry an egg.) This was for my benefit; he had learned, to his alarm, that I had never eaten one. He returned from the fish market in the late afternoon bearing a sack of squirming red-black monsters, removed one with a carnivore’s grin, and made me hold it. No doubt I looked horrified; everyone had a good laugh, but I didn’t mind. I loved her father a little for it, in fact. A lazy rain had been falling all day, sapping our energy; now we had a purpose. As if in acknowledgment of this fact, the sun emerged in time for the festivities; Jonas and I carried the dining table out to the back porch. I had noticed something about him. In the last couple of days, he had adopted a manner I could only describe as secretive. Something was afoot. At the cocktail hour, we drank bottles of dark beer (the only proper accompaniment, Oscar explained); then on to the main event. With great solemnity, Oscar presented me with a lobster bib. I had never understood this infantile practice; no one else was wearing one, and I felt a bit resentful until I cracked a claw and sprayed lobster juice all over myself, to an explosion of table-wide hilarity.