Why We Came to the City

by Kristopher Jansma

  Walking down Broadway, past the line outside Letterman and past the smells of Angelo’s once again, Sara dug her phone out of her purse and called her mother, only to discover that she had already missed a call from “Home.” No matter how many times she tried to impress upon her parents and her sisters that, between the hours of eight and six, she “worked,” that is, “had a job,” and therefore couldn’t take personal phone calls, they always, always called then and seemed annoyed and surprised that she was ignoring them. Such was the tone exactly of the voicemail then from Sara’s mother.

  “Sara sweetheart, we really need to know the date for the wedding. We’re supposed to go to Ireland for three weeks in June next year and we have to book the flights now, but we can’t until we know if we should be in New York. You can still do it in Boston, by the way. Are you going to get a block of rooms? Hotels in New York are so expensive, we really want to reserve those right away, especially if you’re thinking about September, because that’s move-in for colleges and . . .”

  Sara jammed on the delete button so hard that she thought she felt the glass crack on her phone screen, though George kept telling her this wasn’t possible. How exactly was she supposed to worry about wedding planning? She didn’t care at all. All she needed was enough space to successfully fit two hundred friends and family members, a five-piece band, a Unitarian minister, four steaming tables, and a three-tiered cake covered in vanilla buttercream—and yet nothing felt right.

  She and George went to place after place. The rooftop of the NoHo Hotel and then an old ironworks called The Smithy, which had been converted into a medieval-looking space. The elegant Russian Dance Hall, the slick and seedy Club 99, and the Bronx Botanical Gardens. George had vetoed Guillermo’s on the Water in Hoboken (“I’m not getting married in New Jersey”) and a huge ballroom inside one of the former World’s Fair buildings in Flushing. (“Really? Your mother is going to let you get married in Queens?”) There was brief talk of being married in the Lower East Side Tenement Museum and doing a kind of Dickensian thing. There was a short investigation into what it would take to join the Rosicrucian Order, because Sara liked the Grand Lodge but it was only available for qualifying Masons. In one weekend alone, they had toured the Central Park Boathouse, a church converted into an artist’s collective, the Morgan Library, and NYU’s South Asian Institute. As with the apartment search, she was overwhelmed by a plurality of possible futures, each of which seemed as impossible to reach as April.

  While she waited for Jacob to come down on the bus, Sara milled around the far-downtown neighborhood. Even under a heavy coat, she was freezing in her dress. She paced up and down Bowling Green and up past the mouth of the Battery Tunnel. Her face felt heavy with makeup, her hair tight in its twist. She willed herself to stop craning her neck every ten seconds looking for Jacob, and to stop checking her text messages and to just take that particular moment in. To hold on to the lingering crust smell of French bread still emanating from the closed Au Bon Pain up the block and to keep the resilient greenness of the grass in front of her. Keep the prickly chicken-skin bumps on her arms and the way they felt under her palms as she rubbed to stay warm. Keep the angle of the shadow that belonged to the elevated walkway, which was closed and dark, and the stairwell leading up to it was chained off. Keep the chains clanking in the cold gusts of a passing black town car. It’s too quiet down here, Sara thought. She could feel the particular wet chill of the Hudson from a block away, but she couldn’t see it. The buildings were too new even though this was the oldest part of the city.

  Finally she saw Jacob coming from up the block wearing a black top hat and tails, which he’d rented from God knew where. He had on the patent leather shoes and a little cane thing with white tips. He looked like a pudgy Fred Astaire.

  “Oh my god, you look amazing!” she yelled.

  “I know!” he said. “I mean, so do you!”

  He hugged her and felt her shivering. “Why didn’t you meet me inside somewhere?”

  She lifted up her arms as if to say that she had no idea, but Jacob thought she was pointing across the street, toward the high fences that marked off the construction site there, and the hundred-story cranes that stood sentinel overhead.

  “Oh, I know. Can you believe it? Eight years later and still just a fucking hole in the ground?”

  Sara didn’t know what he meant, until she realized that she’d been standing there—trying to live in the moment and to be observant and aware—for twenty minutes directly across the street from Ground Zero without having even the slightest idea that this was where she was standing. The shame of this made her slump into Jacob’s shoulder. She’d never really known the city before the towers had fallen—just one class trip in high school to the Natural History Museum and a family excursion to see Cats. It had happened the third week of Junior year, two years of eager progress suddenly derailed into twenty-four-hour coverage of gray ash and bafflement. Her parents calling to report that so-and-so’s father was all right and that so-and-so’s father was missing, and weepy firefighters, and angry men in suits on CNN, and then shock, and then awe, and then tough and solemn boys in desert camouflage on FOX. And for years after it had felt like progress could be measured only in how much closer they were to rebuilding that wide and brilliant world and then gradually accepting that it would never be rebuilt—that it, too, remained a hole in the landscape.

  They walked a little farther and came up to the railing and looked out over the Hudson. A thin crescent of silver moon hung above Jersey City, and Sara tried to squint enough to see the time on the Colgate clock, glowing like an ember at the foot of the huge skyscraper there.

  “What’s up with you lately?” he asked. “Every time I see you or Irene it’s like you’re trading off periods or something. At least let George and I have a turn.”

  Sara paused, ready to tell Jacob everything and deal with Irene later. “I’m stuck in a subjunctive mood,” she said finally.

  “A what?”

  “Come on. You’re a poet. The subjunctive. Indicating that everything is possible and contingent. Hypothetical. I’m just having a subjunctive month.”

  “A subjunctive March,” Jacob agreed.

  Sara looked down. There beneath her three-inch heels was the cold white concrete of Manhattan. An inch beyond them, on the other side of the railing, was the cold, dark roiling river. Here was city, and there was not. Ever shifting though it might be, there was an edge to the city in every given moment. Its beginning and its end. It was a finite thing, after all. And inside the city was one apartment for her and George. And one place where they would exchange their vows and cut a cake and dance to a cover of Bon Jovi. And Irene would tell Jacob at one moment, just as there had been indeed one moment when Irene’s DNA had erred, and just as this very moment now the chemotherapy was either repairing this error or the cancer was growing. Time would tell, as sure as it would also pass. It could not be March forever.

  “Come on,” Jacob said, “let’s go crash this wedding. It’ll give me a chance to explain why you don’t really want to get married.”

  Sara giggled, though she knew he wasn’t entirely kidding.

  “First . . . you really just can’t tie down a guy like George. He’s got insatiable appetites. He’s got the soul of a rock-and-roll legend inside that nerdy shell. He’s like . . . you know who he’s like? He’s like Meat Loaf in there. That’s right, there’s a four-hundred-pound, sweaty animal locked up in there who would do anything for love.”

  Sara was laughing so hard, she could hardly breathe. “Thank you,” she said, giving Jacob a kiss on the cheek.

  “Let’s make out,” Jacob said. “I’m in love with you. Don’t marry that other guy.”

  “Sorry. You missed your chance,” Sara sighed.

  “Can I at least sleep in your attic once you get all lame and have a billion kids? Maybe make a little den, up above the garage.”
/>
  “Nope,” Sara said. “I won’t have you coming and going at all hours of the night, bringing your conquests to breakfast. What would my billion children think?”

  They went on like that for hours. And they did go to the wedding, and they did drink themselves sick on champagne cocktails until they were escorted out by the bride’s brother, a greaser named Mikey who tried to get Sara’s number even as Jacob was attempting to kick him in the shins. And Jacob promised, he promised, he’d come to Long Island for a long weekend at Luther’s beach house in April. Just the idea filled Sara with happiness all the way home, where she burrowed into the Murphy bed beside George, already sound asleep.

  SHELTER ISLAND

  George liked solving problems. Finding the square root of x using the Babylonian method. Unjamming the printer in the department office. Determining the number of Sun-like stars in a Brightest Cluster Galaxy based on the ratio of their luminosities. Tracing the most efficient possible route between his parking spot on Riverside between Seventy-second and Seventy-third, and the Borders outside Grand Central from which Jacob had consented to being (in his words) “kidnapped,” and down to East Fourth Street for Irene. Then back up through the Queens Midtown Tunnel and the Long Island Expressway, in early Saturday morning traffic, with a quick detour around an accident near Hauppage, and then onward until exit 70 brought them to the Sunrise Highway. Then Route 51 and the North Fork, where they’d take the ferry over to Shelter Island where Sara’s boss Luther took his family in the summertime, but which for this one weekend belonged to them, for nothing.

  It was important to appreciate nice things when you could. Fine wines, good friends, free beach homes. It would be just like old times, back in the dorms. They’d be up all night talking, playing charades and gin rummy, counting stars from the rooftop.

  George had a slight headache, the likely result of the whiskey he’d had at one that morning to celebrate the e-mail he’d gotten from an AAS committee member in Belgium inviting him and Allen to speak at the June conference in Pasadena about their mounting discoveries in the Ring Nebula. People were talking about it. Physicists anyway. Terabytes of new data every day that he and Allen were gathering on 237 Lyrae V’s collapse.

  He took a long sip from his Einstein thermos, its contents still warm after almost two hours. It was a relief to be leaving the city at last. Get the past few months behind them. Sara had been up half the night, packing and repacking, and now she was asleep in the passenger seat. In the rearview mirror he could see that Irene was texting on her phone and Jacob was dozing. George was glad that they could finally start focusing on what lay ahead. Jacob had booked tastings at some vineyards Oliver had recommended, and Sara had researched the best local seafood spots. Best of all, Irene had been steadily improving since her fourth chemo treatment at the end of March. Dr. Zarrani had seemed to feel things were going well when George had picked her up from the last infusion.

  “You may see the lump under her eye getting smaller, although don’t overinterpret this,” Dr. Zarrani had urged. “Sometimes there is some shrinkage due to liquid loss, but that isn’t necessarily indicative of cancerous cell death. Call me immediately if she feels swelling beneath her arms or an ache in her jaw, as this could indicate spreading to the lymphatic systems.”

  How on earth could Irene’s jaw possibly be connected to her armpits? George wished he’d paid better attention in AP Bio.

  “Obviously changes of any kind could be relevant,” Dr. Zarrani stressed to Irene. “Call the office anytime, and we’ll see you next week for fresh scans. Then we’ll know where we are.”

  He and Irene had celebrated with a pint of Cherry Garcia on the sidewalk, followed by two pints of Guinness and a round of Big Buck Hunter at McIntosh’s Bar on the corner. Back at home that night, George had done something he hadn’t done since college. He’d waited until Sara was asleep and then got up to pray. That Irene would soon be herself again, and that by extension Sara would be herself again and that he could be himself again. It had been a long time since he’d prayed, and it didn’t feel right, but maybe his words were getting through, because here they were, all together as planned, in a car headed to the end of Long Island, to meet the ocean at the horizon.

  • • •

  Luther’s house wouldn’t be available for another hour, because a cleaning service was coming to get things ready for them after Sigrid’s nephews’ departure for Norway that morning. So George decided their first stop should be at The Blue Anchor, where they kicked things off with raw oysters and Bloody Marys made of freshly juiced heirloom tomatoes from the hothouse garden out back. They sidled up along a long bar facing the bay and the still-rising sun. There was hardly anyone else there.

  “Isn’t this fun?” George said, raising his oyster shell up until everyone did the same. “Cheers!”

  Sara forced a smile as she slurped the slimy, briny creature from its shell. Something was clearly still bothering her. Jacob belched as he set his own shell down and said, “Delicious. Now, would anyone mind telling me what we’re doing out here? In April?”

  Sara half-choked. “Sorry. Horseradish.” She was trying very hard not to look at Irene, who had promised that at some point that weekend she’d finally tell Jacob what had been going on. George wasn’t holding his breath.

  “Do we always need to have a reason?” Irene asked.

  “Think of it like spring break,” George chimed in.

  “Sure,” Jacob said. “All those times we went on spring break. Remember Cancún? When I did that body shot off of Mark McGrath? No? Me neither.”

  George knew Jacob would just keep pushing until something snapped. The only hope was diverting him.

  “Don’t look but I think the oyster shucker is staring at you.”

  They all turned cautiously—except for Jacob, who half stood and craned his neck just to get a look. There indeed the burly, bearded man was looking back at them, not that there were many others to look at. Giant tattooed tentacles wound around his muscled arms, curling out from the white straps of his apron and disappearing down into his gauzy white gloves, which never stopped moving, automatically maneuvering a knife blade between the closed shells.

  Jacob grunted dismissively. “You’d think by now you’d know my type.”

  “He’s breathing,” George pointed out helpfully.

  “He’s adorable,” Irene corrected. “And he’s staring right at you.”

  She swiveled on her stool, and the morning light glanced off her cheekbones such that George could just make out the reddish lump under her eye. Was he just imagining it, or was Jacob looking at it too? Sara definitely was.

  “I’ll go talk to him,” George offered. He’d had plenty of practice being Jacob’s wingman when Jacob didn’t want him to be.

  Over Irene’s cheers and Jacob’s protesting, George slid back from his seat and marched confidently across the room. He had successfully solved the problem of the foul mood; now he hoped to begin phase two, beginning a memorable story that they could tell each other over and over again that weekend and always. They had just begun their second round of Bloody Marys, and he was feeling very good after the long drive. A second drink always suffused his worries in the pleasant buzz of uvula and the sting of nostrils. Painted a little haze on everything. Amplified the timbre of Irene’s delight as George smiled at the oyster shucker as they began to chat.

  “Sorry, but where are these oysters from? They’re excellent.”

  “We farm them just out there by the Shelter Island ferry. Can’t get ’em fresher.”

  He held one up to show George. It was about the size of his open palm, dark and stony and still alive when the man slipped his knife into the thin slit and gave it a firm twist, cracking the shells apart before cleaning grit off the meat and placing it still in the pearly shell on a silver platter covered in crushed ice.

  George pointed back at Jacob. “My fr
iend was just wondering . . . we passed all these vineyards on the way over. But we don’t want to just drink the tourist stuff, you know? What do you drink around here?”

  He watched as he momentarily looked up at Jacob, his knife slipping for the first time, just catching the glove. A small red splotch appeared on the glove, amid the dried, darker blotches of past slip-ups. He dipped the blade down again into the shell and in one swift motion flipped it straight up into the air. Like lightning, his other hand came around and caught the oyster in an empty glass. He repeated this trick and then poured a shot of vodka over each. Then he scooped a little cocktail sauce onto each and squeezed a lemon over them.

  “For me?” George asked.

  “You asked what I drink around here. Plus your friend looks like the jealous type.”

  George winked and tapped the side of his glass against the shucker’s. He wasn’t wrong: no sooner had they each swallowed their oyster shots than George heard Jacob calling from the other side of the room, “When you and your new best friend are done over there, could you get us another round?”

  The man looked over at Jacob as he began to crack open a fresh oyster. “Tell your friend to open his mouth.”

  “That is never a problem,” George replied, and called over. “Hey, Jacob, open wide!”

  Jacob turned on the stool and opened his mouth.

  Without breaking eye contact, the man loosened the gray bivalve and positioned his knife underneath. Then in a fluid motion he flipped the oyster again, this time in a long arc, fifteen feet across the floor of the restaurant. Jacob had to lean back just slightly, enough to make Irene shriek in fear he’d fall, before, in one spectacular moment, he caught the projectile in his mouth and swallowed it whole. The girls cheered as Jacob stood up and walked over, grinning.