And West Is West

by Ron Childress

  Jessica manages to halt her retreat—partly because she has not yet paid for the tax mailing. “There must be a lot of Jessica Aldridges.”

  “No doubt,” the clerk says.

  “So why would I be that Jessica Aldridge?”

  The clerk, a middle-aged man with brown eyes and short curly brown hair, looks askance. “I’m just asking, ma’am. It’s my job.” Now his pupils dart across Jessica’s tatted arms.

  “That letter from a penitentiary?” she asks.

  “Yes,” the clerk answers. “So then, you are . . .”

  “Yeah. Well, I guess I do look like a person a prisoner would write to.”

  “Nah,” the clerk lies and goes back to business. He rings up the certified receipts. “Thirteen dollars and sixty-six cents,” he tells Jessica. “Thirteen sixty-six. That’s a good lottery pick. Now let me go find that letter of yours.”

  SKITTLES DANCES IN the yard while the concrete stoop pinches the skin under Jessica’s rear. Over the past weeks she has lost even more padding on her butt. She doesn’t care. Miss Shelly is not getting any weaker; maybe Jessica’s fasting, like the cosmic balancing she would like to believe in, has something to do with it? Not likely.

  At Jessica’s feet Skittles drops a toy, a stuffed ape made limbless. Again Jessica tosses the rag into the yard, weedy and barren from drought. Skittles, instead of chasing, nuzzles Jessica’s hand and Jessica wonders if she can scent Don on the letter.

  Pieces of her memory quilt together a past she has tried, for ten years, not to acknowledge. Her aunt telling her about Don’s conviction. Her pretense that he, having disappeared from her life, was meaningless to her. Her ache for her absentee mother. Her denial that she wanted a father. Her fury that he should be a drug dealer and had killed a man.

  “Go away,” she tells Skittles and pushes the dog’s snout from her face. She studies Don’s envelope. Its sealed flap is singed where she has tortured it with a cigarette, hoping to see it ignite. But it didn’t. Now she puts a pinky into the burn hole and tears.

  Skimming the letter, Don’s words feel like the touch of a soft hand.

  CHAPTER 22

  Washington, DC; New York City

  The summer has been hot, but Zoe is shivering. She is seated in the audience of a Broadway musical playing at the Kennedy Center and is chilled by more than air-conditioning. Beside her, Porter is rocking his rather large head to the left and right. She becomes aware that this might be disruptive to the people seated behind them. She becomes aware of how unaware Porter seems to be of anything but the singer on stage and her syrupy lyrics. And she begins to shift her attention from what is on the stage. She notices the ornate fixtures high above in the opera house, the elderly woman in the fox stole in front of her who is sitting next to an empty seat, the family beside her dressed in flip-flops and shorts. Seconds pass as slowly as minutes. And locked in her cold islet Zoe is mostly noticing that her hand is covered by Porter’s—whose fingers twine through hers and pinch the skin around the diamond solitaire.

  Its stone intermittently glints as Porter rocks her hand to the tempo of the song, something schmaltzy about lost love. The stone is neither too large nor too small. It is not schmaltzy. It is a stone as flawless as the pitch of the petite blonde on stage.

  Because Porter is her boss, she has so far been able to avoid the spectacle of wearing this perfect ring to the office. In fact she has not worn it at all unless prompted by Porter. He may attribute this to discretion, to her concern for their careers. In truth, she has not yet gathered the will to give back the ring. This is unsurprising since she couldn’t find the will to not accept it when—while they were preparing a lazy dinner of bruschetta and Chianti last Saturday—Porter got down on one knee.

  “Shall I knight you or call your osteopath,” she had joked as his knee cartilage popped on the terrazzo. Her comment dimmed the spark in his eyes. With Porter you cannot take certain things lightly—not sexism, not domestic violence, and as she was to learn, not the ritual of a marriage proposal. Is this generational? Porter’s serious expression had left her seriously at a loss, until he’d unclasped his hands to show her a small velvet ring box. Upon his opening it, she could only respond, “Excuse me,” as if someone on the Metro had indifferently stepped on her foot.

  She let Porter slip the ring onto her finger. For him this proposal must have been the foregone conclusion to their cohabitation. For her it only made imminent the inevitability of her leaving him. Immediately she should have said, “No, Porter. I’m sorry. I can’t.” But a torpor sank her into a chair. And after this she’d overindulged in the Chianti, with Porter assuming that they were celebrating.

  Zoe’s funk has continued through the five days since, aided by Porter’s wine closet and Xanax. So far he’s made no comment about the empty bottles of grappa in the recycle bin or the pills disappearing from the bottle she found in his desk. He hasn’t mentioned her beached dolphin passivity during sex or even her inability to complete the sub-Saharan donation report he’d asked her to turn in by Tuesday. Porter had been as clueless to these signs of her discouragement as he is to the sighs of the person sitting behind him at the Kennedy Center—a stranger who, just as Zoe does, finds Porter’s oversized bobblehead annoying.

  After centuries pass, and like a wildfire on a windy day, applause crackles up around her and blows toward the stage. Porter’s sweaty hand releases Zoe’s and he rises. He slaps his palms so furiously that Zoe fears they’ll rupture and spatter her with blood. After he stops clapping, they slow-step with the crowd into intermission.

  The August night is humid as they exit onto a terrace as vast and characterless as a parking lot. Porter goes to a parapet and stares at the lights across the Potomac. In the middle distance a dinner cruise putt-putting toward Georgetown transmits the clinks of glassware. How many more calm and tepid nights like this might there be if Porter and she marry? Zoe considers whether such a life might not be so bad after all.

  Porter has charm. He is handsome and fit for his age. He is capable and loyal. He is able to laugh at himself and generous about the faults of others. He is intuitive in his decision making but analytic about the merit of his ideas. In other words, he is an easy person with whom to work. And this might not be a bad attribute in a husband.

  “Porter,” she says before her speechlessness returns.

  “It’s all right, Zoe,” he says. “I understand.”

  But Zoe does not. How can he know what she needs to say? And if he does know, does such perceptiveness and sensitivity make him an even better prospect for a life partner?

  “I guess I was kidding myself,” he adds.

  The whine of a jet descending toward Reagan allows her a moment for composition. “It’s not about our ages,” she says. “It’s about . . . It’s that . . . You are a fully formed person.”

  After many seconds he smiles. “So you think I’ve stopped growing?”

  Porter is on the wrong track. Zoe tries to clarify aloud to him and to herself what she means. “No. It’s that . . . you would always be taking the lead for us.” In her stumbling she feels much less mature than he, like a student speaking to her professor, which confirms her argument against their marrying. And she realizes something curious then: she cannot recall their ever fighting. Their relationship has progressed so smoothly that it is as though she is being funneled into a cage. Still, she trusts Porter and she knows he is not toying with her. It is her feelings that are the trap. Her months with him have passed without incident, except for a growing affection and solidarity. Marriage does seem the logical conclusion. This is the trap.

  “If you need time,” he says.

  “Perhaps a decade might help . . .”

  “Put us on the same plane?”

  Confusing the metaphor, she tracks another descending jet.

  “A decade is a long time,” Porter says. Then he sings a short bar. “ ‘Will you still need me . . . when I’m sixty-four?’ ”

  She doesn’t an
swer the question.

  “Ouch,” Porter says lightly. “You’re right. We shouldn’t get married.”

  Apparently Porter has different rules for making a proposal than for rescinding it. In the latter case humor is a permissible Band-Aid. But now she’s the serious one.

  “I care for you,” she says. “I’ll always appreciate what you gave me. The time and space to grow up enough to be on my own.” This may not be true. But they’re words to toss into the vacuum she’s creating.

  Porter looks toward the black water and for an instant the night encloses them. The Kennedy Center’s foyer lights have flashed, signaling the end of intermission.

  “But didn’t you live alone when you first moved to DC?” Porter asks, weakly contradictive.

  “I was with you every day in the office, even before we were together.”

  Porter’s leaning forearms pull back from the parapet rail. His lanky frame pivots toward the bright glass walls. He takes a step and nearly sinks. When he is upright he rests against a planter, then against Zoe. “Stunned there for a second,” he says.

  Somehow this cheers her—not that she is causing him pain but that she has made him alive again. This will be their first and last disagreement, she decides. But if they’d had more disharmony, if they’d been more immature, maybe then she would have accepted him. Arm in arm they enter the foyer as the more focused concertgoers shuffle up carpeted steps toward the auditorium.

  “You finish the show,” Zoe tells him. She hurries away before she can’t. She doesn’t glance back to see if he is following.

  “COFFEE?” MARIATU ASKS as Zoe props her bag by her door. Though it is late Mariatu is curious. Or perhaps she is primarily offering a sympathetic ear—after all it is past midnight and tomorrow is a workday, though not for Zoe. In the goodbye note she’d left for Porter, she’d scribbled how it was best if she resigned. She’d weighted the note with his engagement ring.

  “Coffee,” Zoe confirms.

  While Mariatu fills the brewer Zoe tells her about her night. Like a psychiatrist Mariatu asks no questions, merely hmms sympathetically at intervals to let Zoe know she is listening. She fills two mismatched mugs—swag, Zoe sees, from various work-related conferences. Is it cynical of Porter to assign Mariatu consistently to event duty? Her plaited hair and distinctive face make her a representative not easily forgotten.

  “So you will not even return to the office?”

  “I need to leave right away,” Zoe explains.

  She senses herself judged, as much by Mariatu as by the ritual masks on the wall, which with their high foreheads and small features represent a tribal Sierra Leone vision of female dignity and calm—traits the opposite of Zoe’s for many weeks.

  “But,” Mariatu pleads, “won’t you miss your work?”

  My work, Zoe thinks. What has become of it anyway? Since April, when WIDO’s accountant finally nosed out the bribe she had sent to Jean-Pierre in Burundi last December, Zoe has only been tasked with proofreading donor reports. So far the scandal has not leaked to the outside world, or even to the other staff, but she fears that Porter might be preparing to fall on his sword. Her leaving is the best, or at least the easiest, solution for everyone.

  “I’ll miss the people,” Zoe says.

  Mariatu strokes Zoe’s cheek and she is overcome by the loss of what she is giving up—which is not simply Porter or her job or even her friendship with Mariatu. She is losing her future. She has failed, here in DC, to invent herself. The next morning, ignoring Porter’s texts, deciding to get a new number, Zoe is on the train back to New York.

  “I’VE ALWAYS DEPENDED on the kindness of strangers,” Zoe tells Marla, her freshman-year NYU roommate.

  “Me, too. Thanks for the house-sit.” Marla has been waiting on the stoop of her Henry Street building. Zigzagged with fire escapes it might have been teleported from a 1950s Hollywood movie. And Marla, smoking and leaning back on her elbows, looks like she belongs in one—except with the sexes reversed. Her most famous role to date was as Stanley in a cross-gender production of Streetcar last year, and even now she is wearing a wife-beater.

  “Man, it’s hot. You up for some brewskis, Blanche?” Talking through her cigarette, Marla scratches her chin like a longshoreman.

  Zoe feels lighter. “God, it’s good to see you.”

  Marla flicks away her cigarette and gets up so she can squash Zoe into her with her man-arms.

  “REMEMBER THAT GUY?” Marla asks. They are seated in Marla’s favorite dive, the old Skinny on Orchard. “Ben what’s-his-name? You know, from our modern poetry course. The lit major you thought was hot.”

  “I thought you thought he was hot.”

  “Come on. You stalked him to that gay cowboy disco in Hell’s Kitchen. That’s how much you liked him.”

  So far Zoe and Marla have consumed two plastic pitchers of ale.

  “That was a rumor,” Zoe says. “And, hey, it’s not like I outed him or anything. He wasn’t even gay.”

  “I know, I know,” Marla says. “He went there to score some ecstasy.”

  “I heard it was Ritalin and that he needed it to cram for midterms.”

  “Maybe. But he got kicked out for selling Ambien to that divinity student.”

  “The Nigerian who woke up sleepwalking naked in Washington Square.”

  “So, I have a confession,” Marla says. “I hooked up with him once.”

  “With the Nigerian?”

  “No. With Ben. I was experimenting. Are you angry?”

  Zoe is laughing, perhaps too hard. “He was a good-looking boy, but I never stalked him to Hell’s Kitchen. “But . . . but”—and here, laughing, emphasizing, she jabs an index finger at the air—“I did run into him one night up in Times Square.”

  “What the hell were you doing up there?”

  “My parents came into town to see Phantom.” And as if she’s run into a wall, Zoe’s laughter stops. “I mean . . . my grandparents.”

  “Get the alibi straight, girl. Was it your parents or your grandparents? . . . Zoe? . . . What’s wrong?”

  Zoe’s eyes are welling.

  THE TAVERN’S TOILET has a door with a broken latch that only gives Zoe a moment’s privacy to stare into her bloodshot eyes. She doesn’t want Marla worrying that she has invited a train wreck to crash in her apartment. It’s burden enough for her to have come to Marla because of a breakup. She can’t also dump onto her friend the horror of her grandparents’ passing, the issue of her revised parentage.

  Some people like to live as if there is no tomorrow; Zoe is trying to pretend there is no yesterday. But, now and again, the things she has buried rise like vampires to bite. Zoe rinses her face in the tavern bathroom’s filthy sink, then heads out to the bar.

  “HARRY, THIS IS Zoe. Zoe, Harry,” Marla says the next morning. She’s leaning over a terrarium on the kitchen counter. “Harry’s total contraband. Something about salmonella poisoning and kids kissing their shells. So no kissing.”

  “Sorry, Harry,” Zoe cheeps, hung over, as she looks through the side of the turtle’s glass lagoon.

  “I owe everything to Harry. Harry’s the guy who got me off off-off- Broadway and on off-Broadway. He never gets tired of hearing me run lines. Do you, handsome?”

  Marla, in a swirl from packing, informs Zoe that Harry is a connoisseur of raspberries, the riper the better. “Thanks for watching the place. See you in September,” she says, hugging Zoe.

  “Break a leg,” Zoe says with forced joy and snares Marla’s cheek with a kiss.

  After the door closes behind Marla, Zoe dissolves back into the futon. She feels like a salted slug.

  CHAPTER 23

  New York City

  Because Ethan prefers to sulk alone he begs off whenever Alex invites him to dine with him and Juliette. He is a little jealous of her. She has taken over Alex’s life, has even gotten him a solo at Medusa, a first-floor gallery in Chelsea. Ethan ends up at Sixth and Thirty-First, in a Starbucks where he orders
a caramel Frappuccino and sticky rolls, sugar being his latest stimulant of choice.

  “Eleven twenty-eight,” says the barista, a pretty woman in a head scarf.

  Ethan looks at her, contemplating how their religious differences might affect their potential future together and why she has just given him the time of night. Then Ethan snaps awake. “Oh, sorry,” he says and gives her his Visa. Shockingly it’s not rejected. He’s been getting warning letters for not keeping up with his minimum credit payments. He’d intended to pay back his incipient debts after the check for his condo sale cleared, but he’d leveraged the mortgage and what he’s getting won’t even cover his lawsuit fees.

  At a counter before a window Ethan sits a few stools down from another lone diner and imagines they are posing for a contemporary Nighthawks; the man is studying his smartphone like it’s a naked woman and Ethan is connecting his laptop to the free Wi-Fi.

  Ethan navigates to his own kind of porn—the calculation of what UIB is gaining by using his algorithms. Imagining dominance over the markets is his version of fantasy sex—his lustful scenario involves erratic exchange rates among the dollar, euro, renminbi, rupee. He runs his numbers at least once a day. More often on lonely days.

  But it is finally just a fantasy; without UIB’s mainframe computing power he can’t react in real-time to international events. His laptop can only slog through retroactive analyses of what might have been. Masturbation by another name. Yet he can’t stop this self-abuse. Every day he opens his browser to hunt for headlines that would have engaged his algorithm.

  Today’s news cycle has been light. But not for Ethan’s algorithm. The big event is a botched drone strike: a terrorist supposedly blown up a year ago has resurfaced. Now he’s inflaming the Arab street with a web video. Mullahs are inciting protests outside US embassies.

  Ethan’s fingers, on autopilot, input the day’s Forex data and he learns that the Pentagon’s announcement of its failure caused the dollar to drop by three-quarters of a cent. This was followed by an immediate two-thirds recovery. The movement is not huge, but that the gyration went on longer than the usual two-hour decay is. And based on the funds UIB allotted to his program on the day before he was fired, Ethan’s algorithm has just turned a fantasy profit of almost two million dollars, of which a fifth of one percent would have been added to his annual commission. Ethan slumps over his laptop as if they, he and the machine, have just had sex.