by Neal Pollack
Russo:
It’s not acceptable.
Bell:
It’s our dynamic. You’re the uptight asshole and I’m the friendly one.
Russo:
More like the party girl who’s up for anything.
Bell:
That remains to be seen. [Winks again.]
Russo:
Stop it!
Cohen:
I need some Jujubes to munch on while I watch this shit.
Russo:
Bell will remain quiet while I ask the real questions. Right, Bell?
Bell:
Hmph.
Russo:
OK, Cohen. Basically we need to explain why everyone who ever does business with you ends up richer than before. It’s highly irregular. It’s more than that. It just doesn’t happen.
Cohen:
Shouldn’t all business be like that? Since when was it against the law to make people wealthier?
Russo:
Usually people who claim they can do that are breaking the law.
Cohen:
Yeah, well, not me. There’s no reason to fuck people over as long as I can get mine.
Russo:
That’s the American spirit.
Cohen:
Fuck you.
Russo:
So then there’s the matter of the drug use.
Cohen:
You got a warrant? Do you really want to fuck with my lawyers long-term?
Russo:
No, but we were hoping you could rat out your dealers.
Cohen:
[Scratches head.] OK.
Russo:
Really?
Cohen:
As long as you give me good witness protection. Preferably in the area around Vail. The global economy is about to collapse. Business will be slow. And I’m probably going to disappear in two and a half years anyway.
Bell:
What do you mean, disappear?
Cohen:
I’m not entirely sure. It’s just something that happens to me.
Bell:
[Touching Cohen’s hand.] Aw. You look so sad.
Cohen:
I am vewy, vewy sad.
Russo:
Bell! Quit it!
Cohen:
It’s my fault. She can’t resist my tragic countenance.
Bell:
It’s true.
Cohen:
So, listen, if I give you information, I want something in return.
Russo:
Depends.
Cohen:
It’s an easy thing. I need you to look up someone.
Russo:
Who?
Cohen:
Her name is . . . was . . . might still be . . .
Russo:
What?
Cohen:
Juliet Loveless. At least that was her name a long time ago.
Russo:
OK.
Cohen:
You might want to start in Chicago. She used to work, maybe, at the Art Institute. She might not still be there. She also might not exist at all. Or maybe she left the country. Or married someone else.
Bell:
Someone else? Was she ever married to you?
Cohen:
Yes. Then no. Then no again. And now, I guess not.
Bell:
Who is she?
Cohen:
I don’t know who she is, or even if she is. But I can tell you who she was.
Bell:
I’m listening. For as long as you need me to.
Russo:
Goddammit.
Cohen:
Once upon a time, there was a damn sexy witch . . .
JULIET
1997
Juliet Loveless worked thirty-three hours a week at the museum shop at the Art Institute of Chicago. She probably could have worked twenty-five hours—her portion of the rent on the place in Lincoln Square she shared with another woman (or, as they’d said in her postcolonial feminist theory graduate seminar, womyn) was only $400—but she took the extra shift so that she could pay for her correspondence course in herbal Chinese remedies. Every month a thick sheaf of poorly translated papers would arrive from Queens, and then she’d take the El down to Chinatown to find supplies and also eat soup dumplings. At night Juliet would make tinctures and then try them out on friends, with intermittent success.
That’s really what she wanted to do full-time; she had a calling toward natural healing. But degrees were scarce, and paid clients even scarcer, especially in the Midwest. Meanwhile, the Art Institute job was fine. Juliet liked to stay busy, and there were always vast busloads of people and rafts of students pouring through the Art Institute’s doors. Juliet found it hard to believe that there were still human beings alive who would purchase a framed poster of Monet’s water lilies. But maybe she was just being cynical. Yes, Monet was overplayed, but so what? The haystacks were still beautiful, and people bought hundreds of postcards of them a day. She had a harder time rationalizing the Georgia O’Keeffe umbrellas, but at such moments she just rang up the credit card, smiled, and thought of ginseng. When you worked retail, it was best not to take the customer too seriously. Just give them the illusion of service and move them on along.
Usually the gift shop was packed full of the jangly earringed blue hairs of Kenilworth and beyond, but there were lulls, 3:00 p.m. Wednesdays, when Juliet could wander around the store straightening shelves and pretending to dust. She was doing that one afternoon when she looked up. Just a few feet in front of her was a guy, a really cute guy, or at least she thought he was cute. He was wearing a gray hoodie and had a bike helmet tucked under one arm. His brown hair flopped a little bit in front and looked messy, like it had been under that helmet for a while. He was skinny, which guys tended to be when they biked a lot. Juliet bet he had a nice butt, then immediately castigated herself for thinking about his butt, which was not what you were supposed to think, but it was out there now.
The guy was staring at her. She’d seen that look occasionally during sex, but that was usually temporary, or the guys were faking it. This one was not faking it. There was something in his eyes, something deep, something wise, something old. He looked at her like you’d regard a lover, not a stranger.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi, yourself,” she said.
“It’s really you.”
�
�Of course it’s really me,” she said. “Who else would it be?”
“I can’t believe it.”
“Can’t believe what?”
“That it’s really you.”
“Yeah, you said that. Are you going to stop being so weird and actually introduce yourself?”
“Oh shit,” he said. “I’m sorry. That’s right, you don’t know.”
“Don’t know what?” Juliet said.
The guy extended his hand. “I’m Brad,” he said.
She took it. “Juliet,” she said.
“Brad Cohen.”
“OK, Brad Cohen.”
He looked at his feet and shuffled shyly.
“What is going on, dude?” Juliet said.
“I don’t know how to say this,” Brad said.
“Just say it.”
“Well, I came to the Art Institute last week and I saw you through the gift-shop window. Since then I’ve been back every day to see if you were working, trying to get up the nerve to talk to you. And today I did.”
“That’s very creepy.”
“I know,” he said. “I hate to approach like this. But I didn’t remember your phone number.”
“Remember my phone number?”
“I mean, know. Know your phone number.”
Juliet saw her supervisor regarding her a little suspiciously. A few oldster customers were starting to trickle in.
“Look,” she said, “I have to work.”
“I know, I know,” he said. “I just want to spend one night with you, go out, get to know you. Have a meal. Something. Just talk. I’m not obsessed.”
“You sound obsessed.”
“I’m not. I just want to talk to you for a while.”
“If you ask me out like a normal person, I will grant your wish. Otherwise, forget it.”
Brad took a breath, seeming to gather his senses. “OK. Juliet. Will you go out with me tonight?”
“I have plans tonight. But I’m free tomorrow.”
He looked very excited. “That’s fine!” he said. “That’s great! I will pick you up at seven.”
“Make it seven thirty.”
“Good.”
He put a hand on her shoulder gently and gave her a low, sad, serious look. “See you tomorrow night, Juliet.”
“Don’t you want to know where I live?” she said.
“I already know where you live,” he said.
“What?”
“Oh no,” he said.
He looked alarmed, truly distressed. Juliet had never seen a person cycle through so many emotions in such a short period.
“Oh no, what?”
“I mean, I don’t know where you live. North Side maybe?”
“Yes,” she said flatly. “I live on the North Side. Doesn’t everybody?”
“Not everybody,” he said. “I live on the South Side.”
“Fair enough,” she said. “There’s a Polish bakery just off Lawrence on Damen near my place. Pick me up in front there.”
“I will,” he said. “I won’t be late.”
“I bet you won’t,” Juliet said.
That night, Juliet met her roommate Margaret for their weekly drinks at the Hopleaf. Beers were expensive there. Some pints ran three dollars and fifty cents or four bucks. But they were good beers, and the place was a short bus ride away.
“It was weird the way he looked at me,” Juliet said. “It was like he knew me.”
“Guys try that move sometimes,” said Margaret.
“But this wasn’t fake,” she said. “Not like he was trying to look into my soul. He just knew everything. It was really intense.”
“Well, you’ve got to follow through,” Margaret said. “You could use a little intensity in your life.”
“I guess.”
“That accountant you’ve been dating is really boring.”
“I found his pot stash,” Juliet said. “And then he tried to lie and say it wasn’t his.”
“Did he even offer you any?”
“No,” said Juliet. “That was the worst part.”
“The bastard.”
“I don’t even like to smoke weed. It makes me sleepy. But it’s a really interesting medicine.”
“Medicine,” Margaret said flatly.
“Yeah, it contains all kinds of chemical compounds. There’s the THC, of course. That’s the chemical that makes you high. But they’re doing all kinds of research in Israel and Europe. There’s another chemical called CBC that has been shown to reduce seizures.”
“Huh.”
“And it has a lot of other uses as well. It can help reduce pain and stimulate the appetite. There’s even this one strain that they’ve developed in Amsterdam that, if you ingest enough of it—usually in liquid form—it can create these incredible lucid dream states that seem to go on forever.”
“Like hallucinations?”
“More intense than that. More realistic. Almost like deep psychic medicine. Your brain reshuffles your life while you sleep and you don’t even know it’s happening exactly. It’s almost as though your brain can live in several realities concurrently. They say that time gets so compressed, it almost becomes meaningless.”
“Sounds heavy,” said Margaret.
“It’s in the early stages of research,” Juliet said. “They’re doing clinical trials in Holland.”
She took a sip of beer. “Man,” she said. “It’s amazing what herbs can do. I would love to do work like that.”
“You could research on me,” Margaret said. “Unofficial.”
“Nah,” said Juliet, “you’re not fucked up enough. Nine times out of ten, you’d still end up being the music editor of New City.”
“True enough,” said Margaret, who had devoted her professional life to the arduous task of listening to amazing live music six nights a week.
“Maybe,” Margaret said, “you could research it on this guy who came to visit you at work. Sounds like he could use some help unpacking his brain.”
“I don’t know anything about him,” Juliet said, “except that he might be stalking me. Or that he’s some kind of psychic.”
“Juliet, if there’s anyone I know who could handle dating an actual psychic, it’s you.”
That was true enough.
Juliet waited outside the Polish bakery. The pastries in the window glowed unnaturally, greens and pinks, some kind of hideous marzipan that seemed to sit in the window for weeks at a time. You could probably play street hockey with most of the pastries. The bakery didn’t ever seem to have many clients. It was usually just a half-dozen beefy men sitting around playing checkers and drinking coffee. Any time you got more than a mile away from a heavy yuppie district, half the storefronts became either covers for the Mob or for Democratic party regulars, which were often the same thing.
But it was so much local color as far as Juliet was concerned; they never bothered her. And no one else ever bothered her either when she was in front of the store. That was for sure. She had other problems, like the freaking cold. Her scarf wrapped around her neck three times. She tucked her chin into her chest. She’d grown up in Arizona, where it only got this cold once a year and then only if you went up into the mountains. But here she was, standing on a street corner on the North Side in October, and she could practically feel the ice crystals forming in her nostrils.
A man was walking up the street toward her. He wore a long peacoat and a tall hat with a thick, furry brim, vaguely Slavic in style, not out of place at all in this neighborhood. His breath came out in thick puffs, seeming to surround his head like smoke clouds. There was a lot of it too, making it look like he was emerging from some sort of self-generated mist.
He got closer, and Juliet could see that it was Brad.
“Hello there,” he said.
“Hello,” she said. “I thought you said you were picking me up.”
“Here I am!”
“In a car.”
“Oh,” he said. “I don’t have a car. I could get one if you want.”
“You can just get a car?”
“Sure,” he said. “It’s not like they’re a rare commodity.”
That was true enough. Most of Juliet’s friends didn’t have cars. She didn’t have one herself. But it would have been nice tonight.
“That’s OK, we can take the El,” she said. “Or walk. Or whatever. But I’m going to be cold.”
“Of course you’re going to be cold,” he said. “It’s Chicago.”
“Where are we going anyway?”
“Not far. I was thinking we could grab some Peruvian food,” he said, “and then the Handsome Family is playing at Schubas.”
“That’s one of my favorite types of food,” Juliet said. “And one of my favorite bands.”
“I know,” Brad said.
“How do you know?”
“I guessed.”