Chapter 26
CHARY
Laurie lived on the third floor. It was hot but still cozy.
His apartment had electric conduit and his own water closet behind a door, crown molding and square parquet floors, and even a fireplace.
His bed was a double-wide, headboard shoved between two windows, sheets half flung off and unmade.
He had no plants but a desk and chair and two stuffed bookshelves and the softest, widest brown-leather Chesterfield chair Chary had ever seen.
It looked like something from a magician's library, and it took up practically half the square footage of the apartment that the bed wasn’t occupying.
How the dickens he’d gotten the thing up three flights, Chary wanted to know.
It smelled lemony when he walked past, and didn’t that make every bit of sense.
Tomorrow had become I’ll tell you in the morning, which had seemed silly in the bright summer moonlight—it couldn’t be morning, not really—and now telling was impossible anyway, because they had to speak in whispers for fear of discovery.
Tomorrow might never come, Chary speculated. Raberding knew the truth about him and August, but his article hadn’t released and might never. Couldn’t they remain like this, full of nothing but each other’s understanding and desire?
They fell asleep and slept all the way through and therefore missing lunch.
Upon waking, they realized their folly at bribing the night-shift doorman instead of the day one; Laurie went out alone with his leather work case and came back with smuggled frankfurters and salty-hot french fried potatoes and roasted peanuts stuffed in, but the only drink they had was a dusty (diamond-pattern, pressed-glass) bottle of whisky, three-quarters full.
They became tipsy and aroused and came atop each other, dizzily licking salt from each other’s lips.
This went on, breaths hard, until they remembered it was summer, and Laurie rose up and pushed open the window above them.
A little bit of rebellion. They’d already been arrested for worse.
Laurie may never need to know.
In the library chair, Laurie straddled him.
It didn’t creak once as Laurie took Chary inside him and moved, and moved, and moved.
Lord, he knew how to fuck. Chary writhed and splayed his legs ’til his knees hit the wall and the bedpost. All he could think—beyond bliss—was that they’d never have fit in the 2nd Street rooming house, anyway.
They lived like this for two weeks.
Morning after morning at the corner newsies, the exposé on August failed to be released; morning after morning, Chary failed to gain the courage to tell Laurie the truth about his identity. His inheritance. That August was the one he truly admired for resilience and difference.
One afternoon, he went with Laurie to Newspaper Row at the behest of Sam Sullivan. Not for news; the editor hadn’t a clue why Raberding’s threatened article hadn’t gone out. Pulitzer had declined his kill request, as expected. Laurie’s story on boy glassworkers, though, he heartily preapproved.
(Mr. Sumner, Chary was told as he passed an empty desk adjacent Laurie’s, was out on sabbatical. Laurie had frowned. “He just had his vacation.”)
By next Wednesday shift, Lawrence Tulley, infamous investigative journalist, was competent enough with the blowpipe as though he’d been at it for months, although as the boy Milo had assumed, he was not nearly quick or accurate enough to make himself a living.
At first, Chary hadn’t known if Laurie was partially flubbing it or not—he seemed wholly competent in everything he tried—but Ira’s mood improved the more “mistakes” he observed from his perceived supplanter.
Then Chary understood the true depth of Laurie’s competence and understanding, and knew he was in trouble of becoming altogether too attached.
For his own part, Lawrence Tulley was, after all, “thoroughly undercover.”
Chary worked; Laurie shadowed him. In the mornings, they slept and fucked, and in the afternoons, Chary read and Laurie wrote at his desk until it was time to go again to the glassworks.
Early Friday morning brought freedom from routine and Laurie throwing his pen down, splattering ink and awakening him.
“What?” Chary muttered. “What’s wrong?”
Laurie leapt up and kissed him, spoke against his lips: “Nothing. It’s done. ‘Boys of Wright Glass.’ The first in serial.” He giggled and kissed him harder, and exclaimed, “Sam’ll lose his mustache!”
“Literally?” Chary asked blearily. “I don’t recommend it.”
This strange mania must’ve been since Laurie hadn’t slept yet, he thought. Or no. Perhaps not. He knew this feeling: it was the way he had felt when he finished a whole leadlight panel for his greenhouse, with perfectly smooth lead cames and colors the way he’d imagined them.
“A new serial,” Laurie said, kissing him once more; then he slid on socks back over to his desk. “I’m not gonna lose my job!”
“Was it in serious question?” Chary asked, suddenly more awake.
Laurie laughed. “Sam would never. At least not ’til they set the trial date, y’know. Then he might not have a choice.”
A glum thought. Chary’s arrest had been erased by Raberding’s smarming, but Laurie’s had remained. Chary had offered his own lawyer, but apparently, Sam Sullivan “Steamship” had gotten there first.
“Here, I’ll make you an actual fair copy.” Laurie plunked down in the desk chair, making the swivel creak.
“You do want me to read this one?”
Laurie paused, fresh paper in hand, and turned back halfway. “Yes? Of course. You don’t want to?”
“Absolutely, yes,” Chary said. “I didn’t expect you’d let me, that’s all, after last week.”
Laurie laughed again. “Why not? Normally, Hiram gets the job of first read. If it turns him green, I know I’ve done it.” He leaned and thrust papers into Chary’s hand. “Never mind the fair copy. Just you read it.”
Chary sat up, legs crossed, smoothed the papers flat on the sheets, and read. At the end of it, he had goosebumps, a tremble in his hands, tears faint in his eyes.
Laurie sat in his library chair now, smoking a rare cigarette and watching him. “Well?”
He’d finished his story, and soon, he would be done with him.
The nights in the glassworks were done, and so too these sunlit, apartment-bound days.
Laurie could move on to the next glass factory on his own power, continue his serials from new cities.
August would stay in Maine as he was supposed to, and everything would go back to the way it had been.
“It’s beautiful,” Chary said. “Heartbreaking. You have everything exactly correct.”
Laurie crawled up onto the bed and straddled him. He said, “You know, I was thinking I did,” and kissed him.