The Candy House(6)

“—Eureka! Buck Mulligan cried. Eureka!”

As he read, Bix began to feel that he was being watched. The sensation was so familiar from his normal life that he was slow to react, but at last he looked up. Rebecca Amari sat at the opposite end of the subway car, observing him. He smiled at her and raised a hand. She did likewise, and he was relieved to find that it seemed okay to sit apart in friendly mutual acknowledgment. Or was it okay? Maybe it was antisocial to follow several hours of lively group discussion with a distant nonverbal greeting. Bix so rarely had to contend with questions of ordinary social etiquette, he’d forgotten the rules. When in doubt, do the polite thing; he’d internalized this dictum from his scrupulously polite mother too decisively to unlearn it. Reluctantly, he put away Ulysses and crossed the car to Rebecca, taking the vacant seat beside her. This felt instantly wrong—they were touching from knee to shoulder! Or was total body contact the norm for people who took the subway? Blood flashed into his face with such force it gave him vertigo. He rebuked himself: When mundane social interactions became heart-attack-inducing, something was wrong. Fame had made him soft.

“You live downtown?” he managed to ask.

“Meeting friends,” she said. “You?”

“Same.”

In that moment, Bix noticed his stop—Twenty-third Street—flying past the window; he’d forgotten he was on an express. He wondered if Rebecca would alight at the next stop, Fourteenth Street, en route to the district known as MALANDA, for Mandala-land. Bix had opened his new campus there the year after 9/11, and in eight years it had expanded into factory buildings, warehouses, and whole stands of rowhouses, until people joked that when you turned on the taps below West Twentieth Street, Mandala water poured out. As the train approached Fourteenth Street, Bix considered getting out and just walking home, but crossing his own campus in disguise seemed perversely risky. A downtown local was pulling in; he decided to take it one more stop and double back on an uptown local.

“You getting out here?” Rebecca asked as they both left the train.

“Just switching.”

“Oh—me, too.”

They remained standing on the southbound 1 train. Bix felt a wisp of suspicion; was it possible that Rebecca knew who he was and was following him? But she seemed relaxed, not starstruck, and his suspicion yielded to pleasure at riding the subway beside a pretty girl. A fancy seized him: He could get off downtown and walk to the old apartment on East Seventh Street! He could look up at his and Lizzie’s windows for the first time in well over a decade.

Preparing to alight at Christopher Street, Bix noticed Rebecca also making shifting movements suggestive of departure. Sure enough, she got off. “I wonder if we’re going to the same place,” she said, laughing as they climbed the exit stairs.

“Unlikely,” Bix said.

But Rebecca, too, turned east onto West Fourth Street. Bix’s suspicion flared again. “Are your friends at NYU?” he asked.

“Some.”

“Cagey.”

“It’s my personality.”

“Paranoid?”

“Careful.”

He was grateful for city noise to fill the silence. Rebecca walked looking straight ahead, which allowed Bix to enjoy, in sidelong glances, the delicate symmetry of her face, her freckled cheekbones bringing to mind a pair of butterfly wings. Maybe being so pretty was what made her careful. Maybe the Dick Tracy glasses were a beauty disguise.

She glanced over and caught him gazing. “It’s freaky,” she said. “How much you look like Bix. You could be brothers.”

“We’re both Black,” Bix said with a grin, quoting the line he’d prepared in advance for a white questioner.

Rebecca laughed. “My mom is Black,” she said. “Half Black, half Indonesian. My dad is half Swedish, half Syrian Jew. I was raised Jewish.”

“Don’t you win some kind of prize for all that? In the race combination sweepstakes?”

“Actually, I do. Everyone thinks I’m like them.”

Bix stared at her. “You have the Affinity Charm,” he breathed with awe. It was a term from Patterns of Affinity. According to Miranda Kline, the Affinity Charm was a potent asset, granting its rare possessors the trusted, enviable status of Universal Ally.

“Wait a minute,” Rebecca said. “You weren’t even at her lecture.”

“I… did the reading.”

They’d been waiting for the light to change at Bowery, and walked the next block in silence. At the corner of Second Avenue, Rebecca turned to him suddenly. “My last year at Smith, three years ago,” she said, in a kind of rush, “Homeland Security interviewed all the high academic performers of ‘indeterminate race.’ Especially if we studied languages.”

“Whoa.”

“They were pretty insistent,” she said. “Didn’t want to be told no.”

“I can imagine. With the Affinity Charm, you could work anywhere.”

As they neared First Avenue, Bix began recalling favorite landmarks: Benny’s Burritos; Polonia with its incredible soups; the newsstand along Tompkins Square Park that sold egg creams. He wondered which of them were still there. At First Avenue he paused to say goodbye before turning left—but Rebecca, too, was heading north. Suspicion reared up in him, impossible to ignore. He quickened his pace and gazed up the long gray avenue, wondering how exactly to confront her.