The Spectators Read online

  The Spectators is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2019 by Jennifer duBois

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: duBois, Jennifer, author.

  Title: The spectators: a novel / Jennifer duBois.

  Description: New York: Random House [2019]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018013007 | ISBN 9780812995886 (hardcover: acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780812995893 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PS3604.U258 S68 2019 | DDC 813/.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2018013007

  Ebook ISBN 9780812995893

  randomhousebooks.com

  Designed by Debbie Glasserman, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Eileen Carey

  Cover illustration: based on images © DigitalVision Vectors/GettyImages (cityscape) and © E+/GettyImages (splashes)

  v5.4

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Prologue: Semi

  Part One

  Chapter One: Cel

  Chapter Two: Semi

  Chapter Three: Cel

  Chapter Four: Semi

  Chapter Five: Cel

  Chapter Six: Semi

  Chapter Seven: Cel

  Chapter Eight: Semi

  Chapter Nine: Cel

  Part Two

  Chapter Ten: Semi

  Chapter Eleven: Cel

  Chapter Twelve: Semi

  Chapter Thirteen: Cel

  Chapter Fourteen: Semi

  Chapter Fifteen: Cel

  Chapter Sixteen: Semi

  Part Three

  Chapter Seventeen: Semi

  Chapter Eighteen: Cel

  Chapter Nineteen: Semi

  Chapter Twenty: Cel

  Chapter Twenty-one: Semi

  Part Four

  Chapter Twenty-two: Semi

  Chapter Twenty-three: Cel

  Chapter Twenty-four: Semi

  Chapter Twenty-five: Cel

  Chapter Twenty-six: Semi

  Chapter Twenty-seven: Cel

  Chapter Twenty-eight: Semi

  Chapter Twenty-nine: Cel

  Chapter Thirty: Semi

  Chapter Thirty-one: Cel

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  By Jennifer duBois

  About the Author

  Beware, my body and my soul, beware above all of crossing your arms and assuming the sterile attitude of the spectator, for life is not a spectacle, a sea of griefs is not a proscenium, and a man who wails is not a dancing bear.

  —Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land

  I don’t think you can be a grown-up in today’s world and be shocked by anything anymore.

  —Jerry Springer

  PROLOGUE

  semi

  1969

  For years, this is how we remembered the man who would be Mattie M: walking through Greenwich Village, hands shoved into pockets, leaving a contrail of energy in his wake. He was Matthew Miller then—Counselor M. Miller, Esq., to the courts; Mattias Milgrom to his grandparents. Matthew to a very, very few. They say he had the charisma of a Kennedy, and not without reason—though he didn’t have the face of one, and doesn’t now; he only appears mild and unshockable and impossible to rouse to fury, if you didn’t know better. He had an inelegant, raccoonish walk he later unlearned for the cameras. But he also radiated a subtle electricity—something slight and untraceable that kinectified the air around him—and it was easy to mistake this, then, for the particular dynamism of compassion. Because compassion took work, he always said, and anyone who told you otherwise wasn’t really trying to be good at it.

  This quality, whatever it was, is entirely undetectable on television.

  If men can change until they disappear, then it shouldn’t surprise us that worlds can, too. And yet no matter what anyone says, there is no ceiling to our capacity for surprise. Two hundred years ago Washington Square Park was a mass grave, and before that it was a marsh. Today Christopher Street is a single diseased artery running from the Bronx drag queens all the way to the hospice under the West Side Highway. Thirty years ago you could still get arrested there for window shopping too close to another man. Fifty years ago Matthew Miller was born in a cold-water flat in Crotona Park, and twenty years ago he lived in a walk-up apartment on West Fourth Street that looked out onto a brick wall. And now he makes something like $3 million a year, according to Variety, and nobody knows where he lives.

  If anyone in the Village says they remember Matthew Miller, the question to ask is: which one?

  * * *

  —

  We began going to the Stonewall sometime after All-Street closed. Say what you will about the Genovese family, they were nothing if not democratic: when it came to the laundering of money, anyone’s dollars would do. Night after night, they served us watery, mislabeled drinks; night after night, we paid and did not complain.

  Our nights there streaked together: they were innumerate, each a whirling aleph of potential. Those evenings now are a kaleidoscopic disco ball, with lights that blink out if we look at any one too closely. Stand back a step and the spinning resumes, pixelating us to present.

  We stand in the park on Christopher Street, on one or many nights. The street kids hover nearby, trying to bum cigarettes: they are a pack, with inscrutable loyalties that seem to dissolve and re-form the way schools of fish change direction. Across the street, street queens in stolen dresses strike poses for the man behind the peephole. In the park, Brookie drapes himself over the statue of General Sheridan and begins taking liberties with his waistcoat.

  “Well, well, well,” he says. “Not as buttoned up as you look, are you?”

  Brookie turns to us and stage-whispers: “It’s like iron down there, girls.”

  Stephen notes that the statue is bronze, and we head across the street.

  Inside, we blink against the darkness and begin counting the almost-strangers: we know faces but not names. A porcine lawyer and a scare queen dance to the Supremes in a low, viscid light. A man in a camel-hair coat stares at the hat in his hands, half-pretending to have wandered in by accident. All around is the smell of weak, formaldehyde-tasting liquor; and piss—especially, though not exclusively, near the bathroom; and Ambush perfume, hovering above a smell of sweat that is, it must be said, undeniably masculine.

  “God knows we don’t come here for the ambience,” says somebody, probably Paulie, on one or many nights.

  In the front room, all and sundry are picking up good vibrations; in the back room, the loneliness won’t leave us alone. The women’s room door swings open and reveals its royalty: the queens recently exiled from the Goldbug or the One-Two-Three. Everyone here comes from somewhere else
: Milano’s and Omega; Westchester and West Virginia; off-Broadway callbacks and the New York Stock Exchange. Our own group hails from rich Midwestern matriarchies and poor Howard Beach Catholics, St. Paul’s preparatory academy and the St. Vincent’s psych ward, the United States Navy and the Tisch School of the Arts. Brookie has recently returned from a stint in San Francisco, which we will never stop hearing about. But wherever we have come from, tonight, we are here.

  We dance, we drink, we lose each other. We sip from glasses streaked with grime and, it turns out later, hepatitis. We stare at boys with hip-huggers and teased hair; we stare at boys in stage makeup who do not necessarily work in the theater. A man we’ve known forever takes off his glasses, and we stare at him, too. Perhaps he catches us—perhaps we let him—and for a moment, the Dionysian evening stills to a single Apollonian face: even as the ephebes and catamites, concupiscent and riotous, dance all around us in the dark.

  There is nothing new under the sun, one of us always said about everything: and no, maybe not even this.

  We stop at the wishing well—which is sometimes filled with ice, though usually with something less poignant: empty boxes, crates of beer. It doesn’t matter: we did not come here to be prissy. We toast to the wish we all share—the one that is always the same, and that almost always comes true. Then we toss our coins, and sometimes they bounce back at us, and either way Brookie declares that tonight, he can feel it, is his lucky night.

  Which, in a way, they all were.

  * * *

  —

  It would be tempting, in later years, to imagine Matthew Miller was amongst us, even then. Perhaps he was one of those furtive, suit-wearing figures, barely visible beneath the smear of sodium lamps, lingering down by the docks until the cops came by with their nightsticks.

  Perhaps he was one of the shadows stealing across the Ramble, wedding ring in pocket, telling himself he did not know who he might meet there.

  Perhaps he was a slouching, behatted shape coming in late to a show at the Jewel or Metropolitan.

  Perhaps we even reached out—into that extraterrestrial, annihilating darkness—and touched him: this man we believed would always be a stranger.

  Perhaps this was the last time we were right about Matthew Miller, or much of anything at all.

  * * *

  —

  Before we go out, we must get ourselves ready.

  We linger over drinks and records; we try to persuade Paulie not to sing. We tell Stephen he’s handsome if we think he deserves it that week—it seems unjust that such British Invasion looks can harbor such continental depression. Brookie asks Stephen if he’s ever considered not dressing like a narc. Stephen asks Brookie if he’s ever considered not dressing like a pimp. Then Stephen tells Brookie that novelty-seeking is a classic sign of narcissistic personality disorder, and Brookie asks what’s the disorder where you diagnose everyone with a disorder, and Stephen says it isn’t his diagnosis, it’s Freud’s, and we groan and say oh please God not again.

  Outside, maybe, it is summer. The night has scaled down the sour smell of New York City in the heat. Paulie moves ahead of us, always the best at managing cobblestones in heels. Brookie and Stephen are arm in arm now, abruptly reconciled. We pass Washington Square Park, its arch glowing golden in the darkness. Above us, maybe, is a full moon. It shimmers like an enormous backlit tooth, and we stop for a moment to stare. Then we float down Seventh Avenue, making jokes so funny we know we’ll remember them forever.

  In Paris the students are wresting the hands off of clocks—if only we’d had that idea.

  * * *

  —

  We had our bad times, too, of course.

  There were those afternoons Stephen spent on the floor, listening to Billie Holiday and asking everyone in earshot if they felt like committing suicide.

  “Not more than usual,” Brookie would say. We’d laugh—or if we didn’t, we’d let pass an airless, respectful beat where laughter might have gone. We would have felt differently if we’d known how many times Stephen would go on to try it—and try it, and try it—before finally getting it right in 1988 (which was, as we all agreed, not a minute too soon).

  There were the nights we reopened sealed wounds, settled questions. There were the nights we became the wrong sort of drunk. There were the restless puritanical nights of going nowhere at all—though these, at least, we have forgotten. There was the night a scare queen accused Brookie of stealing the Cinzano ashtray she’d been carrying in her purse. There were the nights white lights flooded the dance floor and we raced to find properly female partners. Stephen once grabbed a startled-looking butch dyke we thought for sure was going to deck him, but who turned out in the end to be a very good dancer. This was a pretty funny story when we told it later. There was the night the cops stormed the women’s bathroom and pulled down everyone’s underwear. This story was never funny, and we never told it.

  * * *

  —

  Here’s a story that’s a different sort of funny: Matthew Miller, onetime champion of the abandoned and depraved, is now Mattie M of TV’s Mattie M Show—ratings zenith, cultural nadir. You can catch him any weekday afternoon, ministering to a parade of unfortunates before a vampiric studio audience—as well as six million at-home viewers, enjoying the thrills of the Colosseum from the comfort of their own living rooms.

  But enough of this. Enough. There is nothing more to say. Matthew Miller was here, and now he’s gone. And if we don’t yet believe in the permanence of disappearance, then there is nothing in this life that will convince us.

  * * *

  —

  Though we’d been semi-regulars at the Stonewall, we managed to miss the riots. This was not the night we were arrested, and first met Matthew Miller. That happened a week earlier, at a raid no one remembers anymore.

  Afterward, we were taken to The Tombs and booked by a fat-lipped warden. Our cell smelled of cinderblock and shit. We’d managed to get roughed up a bit during the scuffle, and there was a bruise on Paulie’s cheek that seemed to be blooming before our eyes (there’s something strangely auroral about a hemorrhage, as we’d all come to learn later). But it was Stephen who really alarmed us: he’d hit his head weirdly, and now his eyes were waxing and dimming in a way we did not like.

  Across the hall, the fat-lipped warden smirked.

  After a while, we heard a clang and a silhouette appeared in the doorway—a man with a medium build, wearing a hat at an angle. This, we figured, was the lawyer. We’d all heard stories about the kinds of lawyers cops called for people like us.

  “I’m Matthew Miller,” said the man. He had the faintly twanging vowels one associates with Depression-era New Yorkers. “I’m your PD.”

  He stepped forward, into a bar of less-dark shadow. He seemed to take on substance as he moved—coiling with potential energy, like a bulldog or a boxer.

  “Is anyone here hurt?”

  We pointed at Stephen, whose eyes were still flickering through their lunar phases. He was restless, and had already retched twice in the corner.

  “Lemme take a look,” said the lawyer. He managed to sound like he was actually asking permission. From his pocket, he produced a tiny flashlight, which he waved into Stephen’s eyes.

  “Well, I don’t think you’re ready to give up the ghost quite yet.” The lawyer stood and began jotting something in a notebook. On his left hand, a wedding ring glinted, with prop-ish shininess. “But we do need to get you to a hospital. What’s your name?”

  Stephen didn’t answer, and so the lawyer turned to us. A cloud outside shifted, and in the minor light we saw him, for a moment, in more detail: a wedge of white calcium on his thumbnail, a certain asperity to his brow. His eyes a bemused, hallucinatory green. On his face an expression that could, to the untrained eye, look very much like nothing—but which turned out later to be an unsurprised acknowledgm
ent of the world’s complexities, and a fundamental disinclination to judge them.

  The lawyer drummed his fingers against the pages of his notebook. His nails, we noticed, had been bitten down to the quick. We winced, imagining the nervy sparks he must feel.

  “What’s his name?” he asked us again.

  And we waited, wondering who wanted to know.

  part one

  ONE

  cel

  1993

  Cel is in the greenroom pre-interviewing the devil-boy when the first reports of the shooting come in.

  The devil-boy’s name is Ezra Rosenzweig, though Cel has been told to address him only as Damian. He has a black odalisque neck tattoo and thumb-sized subdermal horn implants; Cel keeps expecting these to twitch expressively, somehow, like the ears of a small dog. But the devil-boy’s horns do not move, and alongside his shaved eyebrows they contribute to an expression of general impassivity, so Cel doesn’t quite register the extent of his surprise when he stops speaking of satanic baptismal rites and says, “Oh, shit.”

  Cel follows his gaze to the television, turned to a perpetually mute CNN. On the screen is a crimson-blazered anchorwoman with melancholic eyes. Below her, a BREAKING NEWS chyron declares that a shooter, or possibly two, has opened fire at a high school outside Cleveland. Cel turns up the volume.

  “—High School has over fifteen hundred students enrolled,” the anchorwoman is saying. Below her, rolling text announces reports of multiple casualties. The anchor wears an expression of perfectly choreographed concern—Cel would never have noticed the hint of relief beneath it if she didn’t work in television. “No word yet on who the shooter, or shooters, may be, but some early reports have suggested that students themselves could be involved—”