The City, and What It Cost Me

Mrs. Ashby brought her ward to town in my second winter there, and gave her everything that could be given.

It is not, honestly, the money I remember. I remember the noise — sixty people in a room with a string quartet and no place to stand, and Vera in the middle of it in black. A man in a dinner jacket was telling her about his vineyard. She let him finish, and then she said one sentence, and he laughed for a long time, and then he stopped laughing and stood there holding his glass with nothing to say. She had been made for this the way a key is made for a lock. She was working.

She had a way of letting a man finish a sentence before she answered it, and then answering the sentence he should have said instead, and no man in that city ever noticed he had been corrected.

Trey Sutter noticed nothing at all, which is the more expensive version of the same thing. He had an inheritance out of coal and the face of a man nobody had ever told no. The first time I saw him he put a lighted cigarette down on the Perlmans' lacquered table and covered it with his palm and then looked around the room to see who had noticed, and I have never disliked a man so immediately in my life. After that winter Mrs. Ashby got the two of them in the same room on purpose, and I knew what she was doing and let it happen anyway.

I did not take it well.

I have looked for a way to write this part for twenty-two years and there is no way. The truth is that I learned to be cruel in that city, and that I learned it quickly, and that the person I practiced on was Emmet.

He came up on a Tuesday with a paper bag of things from Della and a coat that was far too heavy for the weather. I met him at the station and I was ashamed before he opened his mouth.

"You've got thinner," he said.

"I've been studying."

He looked at my shoes, and he looked at my coat, and he did the thing he always did, which was to decide not to notice.

I took him to eat at a place I could not afford and I did all the talking, because a man doing all the talking does not have to hear anything. I told him about Professor Perlman. I told him about the theater. I called the shop the business, twice, and the second time I heard myself do it and did not stop.

And on the platform, with the train waiting, he said, "Your sister asked would you come down for the summer," and I said I could not, and he said, "No, I didn't figure you could," and he was not bitter about it, and that was the worst of it — he was not bitter, he was just paying.

I stood on that platform after the train went and understood the ledger for the first time exactly as he had taught me to understand it: that a thing can be given freely and still be owed, and that the columns of it are kept by somebody who is not the giver and not the receiver.

There was a flare in that city too, at the top of the refinery on the Jersey side, burning yellow over the water; I could see it from the expressway. It lit nothing. It stood over the things that made the money, and the money went out under the river and made more money, and I used to find reasons to be on that road at night, and I never told anyone why.