City of Truth Read Online Free

invoking national security and other shibboleths." I left the shower and padded bare-assed into the bedroom. Clothes per se were deceitful, of course, but nudity carried its own measure of compromise, a continual tacit message of provocation and come-hither. I dressed. Nothing disingenuous: underwear, a collarless shirt, a gray Age-of-Lies suit with the lapels cut off. Our apartment was similarly spare, peeled to a core of rectitude. Many of our friends had curtains, wall hangings, and rugs, but not Helen and me. We were patriotic. The odor of stale urine hit me as I approached the elevator. How unfortunate that some people translated the ban on sexually segregated restrooms — PRIVACY
    IS A LIE, the huge flashing billboard on Voltaire Avenue reminded us — into a general fear of toilets. Hadn't they heard of public health? Public health was guileless.
    I descended, crossed the lobby, encapsulated myself in the revolving door, and exited into Veritas's thick and gritty air. Sprinkled with soot, my Adequate lay on the far side of Eighty-second Street. In the old days, I'd heard, you never knew for sure that your car would be unmolested, or even there, when you left it overnight. Dishonesty was so rampant, you started your engine with a key. I zoomed past the imperially functional cinderblocks that constituted City Hall, reaching the market district shortly before noon. Bless my luck, a parking spot lay directly in front of Molly's Rather Expensive Toy Store — such joy in emptiness, I mused, such satisfaction in a void.
    "My, aren't you a pretty fellow?" a hawk-faced female clerk sang out as I strode through Molly's door. Pricey marionettes dangled from the ceiling like victims of a mass lynching. Eighty-dollar stuffed animals stampeded gently toward me from all directions. "Except, of course, for that chin."
    "Your body's arousing enough," I replied, casting a candid eye up and down the clerk. An Isaac Newton University T-shirt molded itself around her breasts. Grimy white slacks encased her thighs. "But that nose," I added forlornly. A demanding business, citizenship.
    She tapped on my wedding ring and glowered. "What brings your here?
    Something for your mistress's kid sister?"
    "My niece is getting burned today."
    "And you're waiting till the last minute to buy her a present?"
    "True."
    "Roller skates are popular. We sold fifteen pairs last month. Three were returned as defective."
    "Lead the way."
    I followed her past racks of baseball gloves and electric trains and up to a bin filled with roller skates, the new six-wheeler style with miniature jets in the heels.
    "The laces break in ten percent of cases," the clerk confessed. "Last April an engine exploded — maybe you saw the story on TV — and the poor girl, you know what happened? She got pitched into a culvert and cracked her skull and died."
    "I believe Connie likes yellow," I said, taking down a pair of skates the color of Mom's Middling Margarine. "One size fits all?"
    "More or less."
    "Your price as good as anybody else's?"
    "You can get the same thing for two dollars less at Marquand's."
    "Haven't the time. Can you gift-wrap them?"
    "Not skillfully."
    "Sold."
    * * *
    I'd promised Gloria I wouldn't just come to Connie's post-treatment party — I would attend the burn as well, doing what I could to keep the kid's morale up. Normally both parents were present, but that deplorable person Peter Raymond couldn't be bothered. "I've seen better parenting at the zoo," Helen liked to say of my ex-brother-in-law. "I know wart hogs who are better fathers." You could find a burn hospital in practically every neighborhood, but Gloria had insisted on the best, Veteran's Shock Institute in Spinoza Borough, a smoke-stained pile of bricks overlooking the Giordano Bruno Bridge. Entering, I noticed a crowd of ten-year-olds jamming the central holding area; it seemed more like the platform of a train station than the waiting room of a hospital, the girls hanging together in