The Heat of the Sun

business that took him away for days.
    ‘I want to go back to Europe,’ he said one afternoon when he should have been at the office. ‘Or somewhere. Anywhere.’
    We stood on the boardwalk at Coney Island. Muffled in scarves and overcoats, we faced the heaving Atlantic like explorers at the prow of a ship. Cotton candy, on long sticks, jutted up in our
hands. We had been on the Wonder Wheel and the carousel, and Trouble had had his fortune told. Behind us, a calliope played ‘After the Ball’, and the melody dipped and soared, buffeted
by the wind. Trouble wore no hat. Bright hair flicked about his forehead.
    ‘But what will you do?’ I said. ‘Don’t you have an ambition?’
    ‘I’m looking for my way. Someday I’ll find it. You’re a poet, Sharpless. You don’t know how easy you have it, seeing your way clear like that.’
    ‘Clear?’ Nothing was clear. Kate Pinkerton, laughing over her teacup, had shown me the truth: my poetry was a sham. I was a journalist, and that was all. Not even a good one.
    Trouble said he had to get away, to escape.
    ‘From what – from your family?’
    ‘I hate my father. I wish I had no father.’
    Sugary pink clouds dissolved on my tongue. ‘You don’t know what you’re saying. My father fell down in the street and died. Don’t you think I’ve wished he were alive
again every day since then?’
    ‘What do you want me to do, feel grateful? Bless my good luck?’ In the chill wind my own face, I knew, was reddened; Trouble’s remained smoothly pale, like a mask. ‘Look
at the senator, and look at me. I’m nothing like him, am I? Mama must have had an affair. The senator married her to cover the evidence. Why else would a Manville throw herself away on
a naval lieutenant? That’s all he was, you know. Lieutenant Pinkerton, a nobody. His father ran some fleabag hotel in Atlantic City.’
    I gripped the boardwalk rail. My cotton candy reeled away on the wind and I dropped the stick through a gap between the planks. ‘I’m sorry, I can’t see your mother having an
affair.’
    ‘You can’t see her at all. I’ve always known that something was wrong, as if somewhere there were a hidden key, and all I had to do was turn it and everything would make sense.
Sometimes I remember another life, a different life, and imagine I was stolen from it when I was young. A smell, a texture, a rustle of fabric, something sets me off and I’m back there just
for a moment. It happened in Paris, in the Louvre. It happened in a tailor’s on the Upper East Side. It happened’ – he paused – ‘back there, in the
fortune-teller’s booth.’
    The Atlantic swelled towards us, consequential as time. Gulls screamed in the sky. Trouble, I knew, was possessed by strange, deep-set moods that came upon him like an overspreading cloud. One
evening, on a jape, we had found ourselves at a college production of The Mikado . It was bad, but bad enough to be funny; only Trouble, sitting beside me, seemed unamused. He twisted his
hands. During ‘Three Little Maids from School’ he bolted from his seat. I found him in an alley outside, pale and shaking, but when I asked him if he were sick he shook his head almost
angrily and demanded that we find a drink, another drink.
    Ships – two of them, far apart – laboured blackly against the grey horizon. To my relief, Trouble brightened. ‘Guess what the fortune-teller said? I’ll become a gentleman
of great importance and marry an exotic beauty. That would have to be Louise Brooks, wouldn’t it?’
    That evening I was meeting ’Gustus Le Vol at Benedict’s, a Village diner much favoured among Aunt Toolie’s crowd. I had been surprised to hear from Le Vol;
since leaving Blaze he had been out west and had written to me seldom. I wondered if we still had anything in common.
    It was a Friday, and Benedict’s – ‘Eggs’, as we called it – was crowded: the usual mixture of college students, writers, artists, and general riffraff, eager for
their steak or eggs or goulash washed down with bitter coffee, before they jangled out into the night, ready for pleasures of a less innocent kind.
    A hand waved to me from a rickety table. Le Vol was hemmed in on all sides. The editorial committee from a magazine called Explosion! was meeting close by, arguing over its latest
manifesto; at the next table, a bushy-bearded mesmerist leaned forward lasciviously, caressing the hand of a fey-looking girl; behind them, a party of tarts