The Candy House
Jennifer Egan
To my writing group—Collaborators and compatriots,
Ruth Danon
Lisa Fugard
Melissa Maxwell
David Rosenstock
Elizabeth Tippens
The Brain—is wider than the Sky—
For—put them side by side—
The one the other will contain
With ease—and You—beside—
Emily Dickinson
For nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.
James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room
BUILD
The Affinity Charm
1
“I have this craving,” Bix said as he stood beside the bed stretching out his shoulders and spine, a nightly ritual before lying down. “Just to talk.”
Lizzie met his eyes over the dark curls of Gregory, their youngest, who was suckling at her breast. “Listening,” she murmured.
“It’s…” He took a long breath. “I don’t know. Hard.”
Lizzie sat up, and Bix saw that he’d alarmed her. Gregory, dislodged, squawked, “Mama! I can’t reach.” He had just turned three.
“We’ve got to wean this kid,” Bix muttered.
“No,” Gregory objected sharply, with a reproving glance at Bix. “I don’t want to.”
Lizzie succumbed to Gregory’s tugs and lay back down. Bix wondered if this last of their four children might, with his wife’s complicity, prolong his infancy into adulthood. He stretched out beside the two of them and peered anxiously into her eyes.
“What’s wrong, love?” Lizzie whispered.
“Nothing,” he lied, because the trouble was too pervasive, too amorphous to explain. He chased it with a truth: “I keep thinking about East Seventh Street. Those conversations.”
“Again,” she said softly.
“Again.”
“But why?”
Bix didn’t know why—especially since he’d only half-listened, back on East Seventh Street, as Lizzie and her friends called out to one another through a cumulus of pot smoke like disoriented hikers in a foggy valley: How is love different from lust? Does evil exist? Bix was halfway through his PhD by the time Lizzie moved in with him, and he’d already had those conversations in high school and his first couple of years at Penn. His present nostalgia was for what he’d felt overhearing Lizzie and her friends from his perch before his SPARCstation computer linked by a modem to the Viola World Wide Web: a secret, ecstatic knowledge that the world these undergrads were so busy defining, in 1992, would soon be obsolete.
Gregory nursed. Lizzie drowsed. “Can we?” Bix pressed. “Have a conversation like that?”
“Now?” She looked drained—was being drained before his eyes! Bix knew she would rise at six to deal with the kids while he meditated and then began his calls to Asia. He felt a wave of desperation. Whom could he talk with in that casual, wide-open, studenty way that people talked in college? Anyone working at Mandala would try, in some sense, to please him. Anyone not at Mandala would presume an agenda, possibly a test—a test whose reward would be employment at Mandala! His parents, sisters? He’d never talked to them that way, much as he loved them.
When Lizzie and Gregory were fully asleep, Bix carried his son down the hall to his toddler bed. He decided to get dressed again and go outside. It was after eleven. It violated his board’s security requirements for him to walk New York’s streets alone at any hour, much less after dark, so he avoided the trademark deconstructed zoot suit he’d just taken off (inspired by the ska bands he’d loved in high school) and the small leather fedora he’d worn since leaving NYU fifteen years ago to assuage the weird exposure he’d felt after cutting off his dreads. He unearthed from his closet a camouflage army jacket and a pair of scuffed boots and entered the Chelsea night bareheaded, bridling at the cold breeze on his scalp—now bald at the crown, it was true. He was about to wave at the camera for the guards to let him back in so he could grab the hat, when he noticed a street vendor on the corner of Seventh Avenue. He walked down Twenty-first Street to the stall and tried on a black wool beanie, checking his look in a small round mirror affixed to the side of the stall. He appeared utterly ordinary in the beanie, even to himself. The vendor accepted his five-dollar bill as he would have anyone’s, and the transaction flooded Bix’s heart with impish delight. He’d come to expect recognition wherever he went. Anonymity felt new.
It was early October, a razor of cold in the breeze. Bix walked uptown on Seventh Avenue intending to turn around after a few blocks. But walking in the dark felt good. It returned him to the East Seventh Street years: those occasional nights, early on, when Lizzie’s parents visited from San Antonio. They believed she was sharing the apartment with her friend Sasha, also an NYU sophomore, a ruse Sasha corroborated by doing laundry in the bathroom the day Lizzie’s parents came to see the apartment at the start of fall semester. Lizzie had been raised in a world oblivious to Black people except those who served and caddied at her parents’ country club. So frightened was she of their presumptive horror at her living with a Black boyfriend that Bix was banished from their bed during her parents’ first visits, even though they stayed in a midtown hotel! It didn’t matter; they would just know. So Bix had walked, occasionally collapsing in the engineering lab under the guise of pulling an all-nighter. The walks had left a body memory: a dogged imperative to keep going despite his resentment and exhaustion. It sickened him to think he’d put up with it—although he felt it justified, on some cosmic balance sheet, the fact that Lizzie now managed every facet of their domestic lives so that he could work and travel as he pleased. The legion of good things that had come to him since could be seen as recompense for those walks. Still, why? Was the sex really that good? (Well, yes.) Was his self-esteem so low that he’d indulged his white girlfriend’s magical thinking without protest? Had he enjoyed being her illicit secret?