by Sarah Bruni
When he walked Gwen into the apartment, she ran excitedly from the sink to the table, from the window’s view of the park to the mattress on the floor—you’d have thought he’d secured a penthouse suite. The apartment was borderline decrepit, sure to be full of cockroaches, but Gwen clearly was impressed, and in a way it endeared her further to him. At the time, watching her run through the near-empty room—touching everything, securing her arms around his neck—the stolen car and money, the gun and the police seemed to exist in some other reality that had nothing to do with Peter Parker, nothing to do with the woman he loved.
They had been living there two days when the Czech girl who lived below came up the stairs to introduce herself.
“You are from here?” she asked. Her name was Ivana—“Iva is for short.” She was likely Gwen’s age, but spoke with the low, throaty tenor of Slavic translation, which made her seem older, more sage than both Gwen and himself.
“No,” Peter said. “We’re new to the area.”
Iva nodded. “Two years I have been here,” she said. “I can explain.”
Which made it sound to Peter as if she would explain her journey from Eastern Europe, how she came to live in the Midwest from the Old World sophistication of opera houses and finely fermented beers. But what she had come to explain was purely practical advice. She explained how the man who lived on the corner sold drugs, how they would hear the people waiting for him in the alley. She explained how at night they were never to walk on the park side of the street, but to stay to the house side, where there were streetlamps, to avoid getting mugged.
“Sounds like a nice neighborhood,” Gwen said.
Iva said, “It did not used to be so good as it is now.”
Which Peter took to mean that the place could grow on you. He could see that.
“We heard animals last night,” Gwen said. “In the alley.”
“Rats,” Iva said. “Also”—here she paused, mimed the act of howling—“how do you say this?”
“Wolves,” Peter said “Dogs.”
“Coyotes, she means,” said Gwen.
“Yes, this,” said Iva. “In the alleys, also sometimes in the park, you hear them.”
“But have you seen them?” Gwen asked.
Iva waved her hand dismissively at this, as if her expertise in such areas was being challenged, though Peter could see that it was only that Gwen wanted to see one. She was funny about things like that. Whenever they saw a dog being walked on the opposite side of the street, Gwen would practically knock Peter down to coddle the thing, to work her fingers into its coat.
“You are very patient,” he’d heard her confide plainly to a dog that was tethered to a bike rack outside a bar once, while checking the dog’s tags for the proper name with which to address it. “Toast,” she’d added before Peter pulled her from the ground where she knelt.
Iva continued, “They have to be removed.”
“Removed?” Gwen repeated.
“Sure,” said Peter. “Creatures like that could cause a lot of harm in the city. They eat dogs.”
“But they return,” said Iva. “If you want to see them”—she was talking to Gwen exclusively now—“you must go to the lake. There they travel in packs.”
He could see Gwen had not yet exhausted the topic, so Peter took the opportunity to step outside for a cigarette. There was a rickety bit of porch on the side of the house, where if he strained his head, Peter could make out the dark expanse of the park. He liked being close to so much land. He knew he had become distracted, that he’d lost sight of his mission, but looking into the bulk of darkened shapes—barely visible suggestions of what was really out there—he had the distinct feeling that things were starting to come together.
How exactly to go about making things come together was unclear. It was his first calling—if it could be called that—or anyway, it was the first time he had chosen to try to follow the sketchy details from a dream to try to effect a change, and so far, so good, but now what? He had a weapon, which seemed important. But what exactly was he meant to do with it? Toward whom was he to point it? Peter imagined breaking and entering into the bathrooms of the city’s loneliest men and making demands. Come out with your hands up or I’ll shoot! The entire proposition was absurd. In stories, those who hope to do harm call attention to themselves. They kidnap public figures; they steal potent potions from scientific labs and unleash monsters of their own creation on the general populace. But what about the small and quiet criminals who hope to make no noise in their work? How to save someone from himself?
The first week in Chicago he had snuck away for an hour or two with the pretense of looking for work, but instead, he wandered the city, looking for clues. He rode city buses. He walked the perimeter of parks. He found several small scrap yards, and he spent the better part of a few afternoons wandering through the smashed up cars and piles of trash. He saw nothing that resembled the isolated fragments from his dreams. The thought occurred to him that it was Gwen who would have to lead him. He had the foresight, yes, but she was there with him for a reason. He remembered the way she had slapped him, straight out of the comics. He could do nothing but continue to look for overlaps, make meaning of coincidence, and encourage her to keep improvising until things started to resemble the stories he knew.
In the meantime, he washed dishes. He washed dishes in water so hot his arms stung long after he’d removed them from the scalding basins. There were three sinks, a process: wash, rinse, sanitize. After sanitization, it was contrary to health codes to rinse a second time. He’d lift the dishes from their third bath still covered in suds—the fluids of sanitation—but under no circumstances was he to ever rinse this dish again, whatever he might think. This was explained to him by his supervisor at the Greek restaurant, and explained again routinely by the prep cooks who chopped garlic and destemmed spinach beside him.
“Peter, no good! No good!” they yelled.
Victor and Diego had worked their way up from dishwashing to kitchen prep, and as such, they were willing to help Peter do the same, if he stuck around long enough. Of course, he would not stick around long enough. He was being paid cash under the table; this way there was no need to hand over his social security number or personal information that might link him to the robbery of a gas station and a taxi three hundred miles away. But already he was beginning to understand the constraints of the clandestine existence he’d forged for Gwen and for himself.
Gwen had taken up Iva’s offer to clean houses with her, and she too would come home with her hands cracked and brittle from so many cleaning products. Sometimes, he felt bad he had brought her here. She clearly could have done better for herself than squeezing the water out of sponges all day. But Gwen insisted that this is where she wanted to be.
They had only lived together a few weeks, but already patterns were beginning to form, routines he began to expect and look forward to. Every night they made dinner. Peter did the shopping. Gwen pulled the pan out from beneath the sink and threw whatever he bought inside of it, closed the lid. After dinner they went for walks, long walks, in which Gwen wound her arm through Peter’s and they pointed out houses to one another where they might have lived in another life, if Chicago were their city, and not just this place where they were. They walked along the thrift shops on Milwaukee Avenue and tried on clothes they sometimes bought. Peter had packed a change of clothes in his duffle bag, but Gwen had come to Chicago with only the clothes on her back, so it was far from frivolous to use some of their shared funds to buy a new pair of jeans or T-shirt.
The last time they’d gone to the Salvation Army, Peter had run his hand along the material of a navy blue dress with buttons and a cloth belt. While Gwen sifted quickly through hangers in rows, Peter pushed the dress into her hands.
“What’s this?” she said.
“Try it on,” he said.
“I have nowhere to go in this.” Gwen held the dress up to her shoulders.
Peter shrugged.
“You’re blushing,” Gwen said. “Give it to me.”
When Gwen pulled back the curtain of the fitting room, Peter paused for a moment before he stepped behind the curtain with her.
“Only one person allowed in the fitting rooms at a time,” a clerk called from the counter.
“I’ll just be a second,” Peter said, but quietly for only Gwen to hear.
The dress was old-fashioned and it was cut for a woman with a bit more bust and hip to her, but it hardly mattered. Peter stepped closer to the dress and fixed the collar where it rose awkwardly in the back of Gwen’s neck.
“What’s the big idea?” she asked.
Peter reached for the rubber band that held back her ponytail and tugged twice to free Gwen’s hair from it. He placed his hand at the small of her back and turned Gwen toward the mirror, so she could see herself, so she could see how in this dress she was a spitting image of the Empire State University science major who would become Spider-Man’s first love.
“Put on the dress,” Peter would sometimes say at night, and Gwen would obligingly walk out of her jeans in the bedroom and slip her arms through the fabric. Peter breathed deeply into the material that covered her shoulder as he held her and felt that he was breathing in so much that he had lost.
The way Spider-Man had clutched at Gwen Stacy’s body after she died, like there was nothing he could do to make things right, Peter remembered. He remembered Jake curled in a heap in his childhood closet, his fingers twitching. He remembered his mother staring off into the buttons of the microwave without touching a number to heat her dinner. Peter held Gwen in their bedroom in Chicago and breathed in the smell of her hair.
“Okay, that’s enough,” Gwen would say then, and she’d put the dress on a hanger and return it to their closet. And it was. Even seeing her in it for five minutes like that was enough to conjure a world of loneliness and so affirm their reason for coming.
The truth was it had been easier than he would have ever imagined to coerce Gwen into the car with him. It was as if she had been sitting there in the station, waiting for him to show up. Peter had anticipated that the entire prospect would require some convincing, and so he had planned to tell her everything—the nightmares, the comic books, the way his brother had died—but Gwen had asked him to point the gun at her. Gwen did most of the talking in the car. Gwen had removed his clothes, unprovoked, on the very first night they shared a room.
Peter had been with a few local girls in early adolescence, he had visited a prostitute more recently; once, regrettably, he had slept with a fare in the back of his cab, but these had been quiet, efficient exchanges, the scripted trajectory from grope to release that he had learned from movies along with everyone else. None of this had prepared him in the least for the patient concentration of Gwen Stacy slowly unbuttoning his shirt—as if not to wake him—while he pretended to sleep. Peter had understood that if he opened his eyes, Gwen would be there, inches from his face, the blond ponytail that she favored hovering between them like an intermediary, ready to bargain. He had told himself that he wouldn’t touch the girl, though every hour of the drive he’d felt increasingly prone to question this rationale; she was young, and, at the time, he wasn’t even sure how young—she was almost certainly lying to him about her age. But young, possibly a full ten years younger; seventeen, he feared, was not a bad guess. When she had finished with the buttons, she started to trace lines in his skin with her fingers. Peter cleared his throat. He fought the impulse to open his eyes. He’d said, “Gwen, go to sleep.”
“I can’t sleep,” she had said. “Obviously.”
“You should try,” Peter said.
Several minutes went by and Peter thought he had successfully evaded confrontation, when he felt something flicker twice between his ribs. Peter exhaled, lifted her on top of him and looked her in the eye. “Hmmm?” he asked.
“I didn’t say anything,” she said.
“You didn’t say anything,” Peter repeated. “Did you just lick me?”
Gwen shrugged. “Uh, I guess, yeah I did.”
Peter closed his eyes. But their speaking somehow seemed to grant her further access, permission to continue. She kissed his face—eyebrow, chin, ear—quietly, and it was only when he began to push off her clothes that her demeanor shifted. She became loud, sharp in her movements, which gave Peter the distinct feeling she was performing for him—or worse, that he was her first—a thought that Peter quickly pushed from his mind, even while he was covering her mouth with his hand.
“Shhh,” he whispered. “Do you want to get caught?”
Gwen had giggled into his hand at his little joke, which really was no joke at all. The old thrill of getting caught having sex, in this case, did not apply. He had paid for the room; it was theirs to use as they wanted. Getting caught, in this case, applied to each of their joint actions leading up to the acquisition of the hotel room, a laundry list of morally questionable decisions.
And so while he might have preferred to wait to consummate whatever they were going to be to each other, it was Gwen who had pursued him. It was Gwen who had unfastened the buttons of his shirt and pushed her hand along the flat plane of his stomach, and it was Gwen who had made so many strange noises, so much like something in pain, that when Peter thought back to this first night, he had to work hard to remind himself that he hadn’t forced himself onto her. She seemed to oscillate between wanting to run things and wanting to follow his lead. She had asked him that night in the bar to call her Gwen, to retire all other names for the purpose of addressing her, and he had agreed, complied; besides, it was the name he had always used in his mind to address her even if he didn’t do so with his voice. So he was glad that she wanted to take the name he had offered her, but also it made him feel a little uneasy, like there were parts about the rules they were making that only she understood.
For the first week, he’d allowed himself to be distracted.
“What would you rather be?” Gwen would ask. “A collie or a greyhound?”
“A collie,” he said. He kissed the underside of her wrist, where her veins crossed paths.
“Montana or Wyoming?”
“Wyoming,” Peter said.
Gwen wrinkled her nose at him. “Invisibility or x-ray vision?”
Peter sat up. “What kind of question is that?”
“The one I’m asking,” Gwen said.
“Invisibility.” He said it quickly, but he could feel pressure building in his face, the shame of thinking himself special.
“Why?” Gwen said.
“How should I know,” he said.
It got quiet for a minute.
“It’s okay,” Gwen said after awhile. “I would want to be invisible too.”
More recently—perhaps as he grew to care for her more, perhaps as she grew to share more in common with the Gwen Stacy whose stories he read as a child—Peter had become lazy with letting the messy contradictions in his brain hang loose for her to see. The other day Gwen had asked him, apropos of nothing, “So what do you think will happen to us if we get caught?”
“Nothing will happen to you,” he assured her. “It’s a good thing we put on that little show with the gun for the security camera. We can say I kidnapped you, and no one would question it.”
Gwen laughed. “How many years do you think you would get?” She was tracing her fingers in patterns along the small of his back, teasing him, testing him.
“Oh, ten? Twenty?” Peter said. “It doesn’t matter.” He leaned in for her mouth, bit her lip softly. “We’re not going to get caught.”
“And if I say that I chose to leave with you, what would happen to me?” Her fingers ceased their tracing pattern along the waist of his jeans. She was waiting for him to answer.
“You wouldn’t say that,” Peter said.
“And if I did?” She persisted.
“You wouldn’t go to jail,” he said. “Your father would pull some strings.”
“What
strings?”
“You know, with the law. It helps to have a father who’s the chief of police.”
Gwen wrinkled her nose. “My father’s an accountant,” she said.
“Admiral Stacy?” Peter said. He shook his head. “Only if by accountant you mean he’s accountable for the safety of the entire New York police force.”
Gwen continued to talk over him. “He’s an accountant. He’s never even been to New York! He’s fifty-two years old, and he has high blood pressure. He taught me to read. He took me camping in the Ozarks every summer until I turned thirteen.”
“I have a hard time believing he’d have time for so many vacations!” Peter said.
“Stop it,” Gwen said.
“What?”
“Forget it.”
“We’re just playing.”
“I don’t want to play like this,” she said, and she turned from him suddenly, brusquely, and pretended to sleep.
“Gwen?” he said.
She faked a snore.
“I guess I’ll sleep on the couch,” he offered.
“Good idea,” said Gwen’s back.
They didn’t have a couch in the apartment. She knew that, obviously. Peter dragged a blanket and pillow to the cushioned chair near the window and began making a bed for himself there. He looked out the window to the park where there was a man sorting methodically through the trash can, seeming to catalog the contents of each object he extracted. An order existed in the most unlikely things if you just waited to detect it. Peter dozed off after a while, and when he woke up, it was because he could feel her standing over him. For a moment he thought he was dreaming, the old dream as it had come to him in Iowa, kneeling over his bed—he held his breath, he waited for it—but this was different.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey,” he said.
“You were sleeping?” she asked.
“I guess so,” he said.
“I love you,” she said quietly, simply. “That’s why I can become her when I’m with you.”
Peter nodded.
“But if you confuse my father with some stupid cartoon character again, I’ll leave.”