“Must have been while you were playing the flute,” he said, his tone and face suddenly hard. “From happy camp to happy college, and now what is it, happy graduate school? Art history? There’s something useful. Jesus, you’ve had it easy, had it handed to you, and you never even wonder how it all happens. No wonder you’re such a good girl.” A bite of meat was suspended in front of his mouth as he cast a narrowed eye at her clothes, her unpainted nails, her spartan fish, and she saw that he had a deep, cellular disdain for her he didn’t even realize.
His comment stung. “Well, who are you?” she demanded.
“Apparently I’m just the asshole who gets you the best table, who doesn’t play fair according to you.”
It was pointless for her to be defensive; she’d only played at being someone who was secure. Their differences began to spread like a spill on the white tablecloth. He might marry a woman like me, she thought, and I might marry a man like him, because we’d mistakenly think it is brave and good to colonize foreign soil. But she didn’t know who he was anymore than he knew who she was or how privilege wasn’t the same as certainty or power, neither of which she felt she possessed. The tide went out during the rest of their wordless, unraveling dinner, revealing the abandoned bones of an old dock.
Later that night, Dag took her to the armory at the top of Lincoln Hill, a deserted brick building with vast high-ceilinged rooms. The place had a disheartened, pissed-in smell, and was dark except for the moonlight that came in through panes etched with dirt. Chalkboards and chairs were pushed against the walls, the general and colonels having abandoned their fortress seemingly in a great hurry. She felt the need to hold on to Dag’s arm, to salvage the evening, and though he had appeared at first to be on proprietary terms with the place, brandishing his gleaming key at the front door, he didn’t seem to know where the staircase up to the view was.
“You haven’t been here before, have you?” she asked.
“Of course I have,” he told her, and then with the kind of logic she’d see later in his years in City Hall, he explained, “How else do you think I got a key?”
Eventually they found the stairs to the turret. It was a beautiful night by the open view, heat tempered with a breath of approaching September, and the trees mixed it up wildly. Dag pointed out various sites, named the neighborhoods that spread out before them—Kike Hill, Darktown, Spicville. He told her about shifting routes and planned development and what used to be where.
“From this very site, in fact,” he said, “our men fought the British. Not a great battle by any means, so you might not know of it, but it was significant—The Battle of Lincoln.”
Francine heard stray noises below, rats possibly, but more likely the city’s soul in a disgusted sigh at such a perversion, because she knew that what Dag had just told her was a complete lie. She’d done some research on the site once for an architecture project and knew that nothing more interesting than a four-minute visit from Lyndon Johnson had ever occurred in it. He turned in the moonlight to kiss her.
“That’s not true,” she said, pulling away from him, “about the battle. It didn’t happen here. Nothing did.”
“Shhh.” He grasped her arm, touched her lips. His fingers smelled of dinner. “Don’t be such a know-it-all. It’s not attractive. I want to kiss you now.”
There was a fluttering and a crash, as though a blackboard downstairs had fallen over. It’s the wind, Dag assured as his grip on her tightened, the westerly summer gusts—had she ever spent a summer in his city? He ran his hands over her breasts and pinched her nipples meanly. She slapped his hands away.
“Why do you make things up?” Francine demanded. “Why do you pretend that you know everything? That’s not attractive.” They heard voices then, the tangled sounds of another man and woman in an argument. “We left the door open,” she said breathlessly, fearful of being trapped on the turret, but also scared of Dag whose look was unreadable. “Maybe they’ll go away.”
He shook his head at her like a disappointed parent, and moved to the stairs. She followed, and by the time they reached the ground floor, the man and woman were engaged in a screaming match and wouldn’t have noticed if she and Dag had just slipped out. They clutched at each other, off balance, sloppy and drugged-up.
“Get the fuck out of here,” Dag barked, his spit silvering in the air. The two stopped, shocked straight for a minute. The woman, all teased hair and bones, moved away. Dag stood over the man whose eyes shifted unevenly.
“Piece of shit junkies,” Dag said.
“Fuck you, fat asshole college boy,” the man returned.
Junkies; Francine’s spine burned with hate. They took her radio and typewriter and security, and if not them precisely, then one of their friends; the city was full of them, Dag had often told her. She watched Dag’s body tense as he delivered a punch to the man’s stomach. Like his woman, the junkie was unsteady and folded like wet paper. For Francine, the episode could have ended there—a measured, if imprecise retribution—with the man wheezing on his knees in the armory dust. But Dag took a jump and leveled an unnecessary, toppling kick to his kidneys. Twin jolts of shock and shame collided at the base of Francine’s skull, a sensation that was tonal like the man’s moan, so that many years later, a certain pitch could make her feel as though she were suspended at the top of a cliff, her fall imminent.
“Those people make me sick,” the Mayor said when they were out on the street. He took a greedy drag of his cigarette. “Fucking bloodsuckers.”
“Why did you do that?” A cold fist had lodged in Francine’s throat. “Why did you have to go so far?”
“So far?” Dag stopped and looked at her.
“You already hit him once. That was enough.”
“Didn’t you see that they were going to mug us? That he was going to rape you maybe, Francine?”
“He could hardly stand. You could have left them alone.” She shook her head; how would she ever know what might have happened? “That wasn’t right.”
“Right,” he repeated, and flicked his cigarette into the street. “Did I hear you trying to stop me? No, I didn’t think so. One hit is okay, but two isn’t? You want it both ways. Jesus, you’re so fucking naïve.”
For a week after, Francine’s phone rang but she wouldn’t answer it. A police cruiser crawled up and down her street and then disappeared. One night, Dag got inside the apartment building and called her name from the other side of the door. His tone was unfamiliar; locked out, fearful of his need for her, exposed. She thought of how he clutched her when he came. Through her misery, she understood that in their time together, he’d never hidden himself from her. He’d shown her exactly who he was, even that night in the armory. That much was honest in its own way, more so than she’d ever been with him. How could she admit that what she’d admired in him was also what she hated him for, and that maybe they were not so different? Much sooner than she’d imagined, he was silent, and then she heard him leave. Less than two months together, and it was over, a clean, if ugly cut; still it stunned her to have been moved past so easily, to have left him so untouched.
There never was anything in the paper about a dead junkie, Francine had gone to grad school as planned, gotten married, had kids, and become Executive Director. She knew exactly how her life had happened, step by step, though on some days it still surprised her. Occasionally when she drove down Manton Avenue, she’d look for the pair from the armory, and every time she was waylaid by an addict in the supermarket parking lot, she’d give him a few dollars. A number of times since that night in the armory, she and Sanford had seen the Mayor eating alone in a restaurant—alone despite his popularity—and it never failed to recall for her his plaintive voice outside her door, and how she might have opened it again if he’d waited a little longer.
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