Why We Came to the City

by Kristopher Jansma

  “1991 Cabernet Franc. 1961 Grand Cru. 1984 Bordeaux . . . 1944 Cuvée . . . Holy shit, this bottle’s older than my father.”

  George breathed in deeply as he ran a gentle hand over the smooth curve of the glass. He imagined all that had gone into the air and the soil and the vines. 1944. In the middle of a world war, some farmer had harvested his grapes and split his oak trees and dried and charred the wood and forced the slats together with bands of metal. Outside there had been horror and fear, but in this bottle he’d hidden something made from holy sweat. Someone had corked it and set the bottle down with a prayer, knowing he’d never drink it. It was for sons and grandsons. It was waiting for some future, for someone. George wished that it had been waiting for him. Reluctantly he slid the bottle back into its place.

  When he looked back again, Jacob was bearing down on him. “All right. Enough. Are you going to tell me what the hell is wrong with Irene or not?”

  George froze. “What do you mean?”

  “She’s been texting that psycho ex of hers, Alisanne. I looked at her phone.”

  “She is?”

  “Yeah, all this shit about how they need to talk and there isn’t time to waste.”

  “Damn it,” George cursed.

  “She’s not writing back, thank God, but clearly something’s going on. The last couple of months you three have all been on another planet. So what is it? Did William do something to her?”

  “No, no,” George said. “I can’t—I’m not supposed to say anything.”

  “Enough drama—. This is too much. Even for her. It’s not like she’s dying.”

  George felt as if his heart had stopped, and he must have looked like it had. Jacob glared at him for another minute, then suddenly his face went slack. Without another word he turned and marched up the stairs.

  George followed after him and came up just as Jacob reached the top of the stairs and pointed at the girls, who were scraping dried eggs off the stovetop.

  “—the fuck didn’t you tell me?” Jacob shouted.

  For a moment everything was frozen. Then Irene threw her sponge down and walked out through the sliding-glass door that led onto the porch and began running at top speed into the spiky, sandy-colored grass that stretched between them and the foggy bay.

  Jacob went after Irene—stubby legs tripping and stumbling with every step over the uneven terrain.

  George was about to follow when Sara grabbed his wrist. “Let’s give them a minute.”

  “I swear I didn’t say anything,” George said lamely.

  “It doesn’t matter.” Sara looked relieved, and suddenly George realized that he had—eureka!—solved the problem. The truth was finally out, and Irene could blame it on him. But it would be forgiven, as it always was.

  They cleaned in silence for a few more minutes. Then they walked along the path where they found Jacob embracing Irene in a low trench of dune grass that stretched long and empty in either direction. The surf pounded against ancient black rocks and loosed a white spray that danced in the air for just a moment before falling into the sea again.

  “It’s just not fair,” he heard Jacob saying as they got closer.

  “There’s no such thing as fair,” Irene said softly.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked.

  “I didn’t want you getting all moody about it.”

  “I don’t get moody.”

  George watched the waves pounding the shore, each surge of salty water carving another molecule off the stones. In a hundred years the shoreline would be ever so slightly nearer. A hundred years ago, it had been ever so slightly farther out. A hundred years before that, it had been farther still. Hundreds of years from now it would carve in so far that it collapsed the house. Two hundred and fifty million years before, the continents had been fused. Maybe in another two hundred and fifty million years they’d all smash back together again.

  George and Sara sat down next to their friends. Irene smiled at him and he took a deep breath. Sometimes it paid to take the blame. Now there would be peace at last, and they could get on with their fun weekend. They’d clean for a few hours until the house looked better than new. He’d make jokes about hazmat suits, and they’d find more plus-size underwear, and Irene would begin sifting through the junk looking for sculpture pieces that complemented her seashells, and Jacob would call up Billy Budd from the oyster place and they’d talk, long into the night, just like they used to.

  “If I don’t make it—” Irene said slowly.

  Sara immediately cut her off. “Don’t say that.”

  “Seriously, Irene. You seem much better—” George began, but stopped as she shook her head.

  His stomach turned to lead as Irene slowly lifted the left sleeve of her shirt to reveal another lump. It was the size of a golf ball.

  He didn’t know what to say, but Sara seemed to have it covered. “Has that been there since before we left? Irene, I swear to fucking Christ—”

  George knew Sara was right. Irene had known it. Probably she’d even known it that day in Dr. Zarrani’s office. She’d hidden it so she wouldn’t spoil the trip. He wanted to run into the ocean and pound back at the waves until they were still. He looked into the wide gray sky. For what reason—what reason could possibly exist for this? What plan could it be part of? And if there was Something out there that had known about this, well then fuck Him and fuck His plan and fuck whatever it had all been written on.

  “I’m just saying. If I don’t make it,” Irene repeated, “heaven had better look like this. It’s absolutely mythic.”

  George wished he could believe in it, but just then he couldn’t. Sara looked ashen.

  “I wouldn’t like it by myself. Just me here all alone,” Irene went on. “But I guess you and George would be along soon enough.”

  She put her arm around Sara, and Sara fell into her, leaning on Irene’s shoulder—on the good side. Irene kissed Sara’s forehead and reached her hand out for George. “Jacob, I don’t know. I guess we’d visit.”

  He laughed. “Jews don’t believe in hell. Though we’re not too sold on heaven either.”

  “Good thing you’re a terrible Jew then.” Irene smiled. They sat there for a while, quiet in each other’s company.

  George ran his fingers through the dune grass. Then, all at once, another solution came to him. “Fuck it,” he said suddenly, “I’ll be right back.”

  He turned and stumbled back through the sand toward the house. Inside he went through the messy kitchen, past a table filled with sticky, half-empty liquor bottles, to the basement door. Taking the rickety steps three at a time, he came to the bottom and soon located the dusty green bottle that Jacob had picked up earlier. He ran his fingertips over the year. 1944. The glass was cold against his palm as he went back upstairs and returned to his friends on the beach.

  “What’s that?” Sara asked immediately. “Is that Luther’s?”

  “Yes,” George said. “Or Luther’s father’s. Or his father’s father.”

  “So we’re just stealing it?” Irene asked.

  “No,” George grinned. “The Norwegian nephews did.”

  Jacob laughed, deep and proud, and then took out a pocketknife and started prying the cork loose. It came out in several pieces. Sara didn’t object as Jacob took a long drag from the bottle and sighed. “Now that is a terroir.”

  George raised the bottle to his wetted lips and tipped back. God. It was the most incredible thing he had ever tasted. The taste grew in his mouth, pulling on an alternation of taste buds. It made no sense, but he thought he could hear its taste. It tasted like a requiem he’d heard as a boy in the Basilica of the Sacred Heart. A priest his father had known at Notre Dame had died, and they’d driven five hours to South Bend for the service. God, it was still going. A few notes at first, gradually swelling in sequence to an offertory, and then
Communion—every flavor at once, until it was almost too much. The retreat then was welcome, sweet. And then, just at the very end something new—an aftertaste bound to linger deep in his memory. Like sitting in the basilica, the sound of the requiem in his ears, and the sure feeling that his father’s friend had been a good man, and was in a better place now. Up on the ceiling there were angels with outstretched wings, perfect golden circles haloing their heads. Some floating on clouds against the light, and others hovering, weightless, against the dark of night. It was the same dark of the sea beyond them, the same as the clouds that passed above.

  They passed the bottle around until it was drained. After a long time they all walked back to the car again. Irene agreed to call Dr. Zarrani’s emergency line on the way back. They’d set up an appointment to have the new tumor looked at as soon as possible. As for the house, they would leave it as it stood, minus one very expensive, very empty bottle of wine, which was now nestled under Jacob’s armpit as he climbed into his seat.

  Sara looked back one more time before they left. “We were never here,” she announced.

  George drove slowly up the darkening highway, back to the city. The girls whispered for a while, and Jacob stared out the window. Before long everyone else fell asleep and seemed so peaceful. George drove on. It occurred to him that everything he was experiencing now, they were missing. Sadness waited for them, just past the edge of their dreams. It would be patient for hours yet to come, just as his own sadness seemed to hover just beyond the magnificent afterglow of the wine. Great patterns of light streamed across the window like red and white comets. He was unworried, and he didn’t know why. It was just so much easier for him to believe, when he felt this way, that there was some reason, and that there was another reason just alongside it why he didn’t need to know what it was.

  JACOB IN THE WASTE LAND

  They returned to the city, and in three days Shelter Island seemed as distant to Jacob as Tierra del Fuego. He closed his eyes on the train up to Anchorage House in the morning and tried to summon a vision of that sandy shore reaching out toward the ocean, but all he could see was the alien lettering in the tunnels south of the Wakefield stop. He tried to remember the dark smell of the sea, but its scent had already been overwritten in his memory by the puke he’d had to wipe off the face of a nineteen-year-old psychotic named Thomas who believed himself to be a submarine. “HMS Sybil, lowering periscope!” the kid had shrieked. “Dive! Dive!” before losing his lunch all over the television set in the common room. “You forgot to shut your hatch,” Jacob had reminded him, as they passed arm in arm down the hall to the nurse’s station. He tried to recall the feel of sand beneath his feet and the taste of oysters. “It’s dark down here,” Thomas had whispered, until finally the HMS Sybil had gone quiet.

  A dry heat welcomed them back. By the first week of May, it was approaching eighty-five degrees in late afternoon. Still, Jacob persisted in wearing his tweed jacket up to Anchorage House each day and back to Irene’s at night. “It’s very breathable,” he told her when he arrived at her door, drenched in sweat. He passed several evenings helping her shuttle some of her older paintings into storage at the gallery and trying to clear space in the living room by sorting through the piles of odd crap that she’d amassed. “Keep that Baggie of tulip bulbs, but get rid of that Oktoberfest hat—no, keep the feather, actually. Do you think you could pry just the runners off that toy sled for me? I know there’s a screwdriver here somewhere.”

  Jacob didn’t mind. He wanted to help, and he was no good talking to doctors. He kept sending Irene into hysterics at inappropriate moments. Once an MRI had to be redone because he was making her giggle so much. Irene sweet-talked the technician into printing the blurred scan anyway, and she’d given it to Jacob as a thank-you.

  His other main contribution was trying to get George to unclench, but whenever Jacob called him out for moping around, mute and worried, George acted utterly surprised that anyone would be worried about him. He stared at the New Yorker articles that Jacob thrust at him in the waiting room and then minutes later looked up in complete confusion. “Was this—what? I’m sorry, which article? Just a second, I have to go to the bathroom.” Jacob had never seen anything like it—the man had to pee practically every half hour. He wanted the doctors to check George out for Nervous Dachshund Syndrome. (That was the one that got to Irene so badly that the MRI had to be done over.) George claimed all the fluorescent lighting was giving him headaches, but Jacob didn’t buy it. The last two visits Sara had wound up asking him to simply take George to a bar somewhere so he’d stop agitating everyone.

  The date for Irene’s surgery arrived as abruptly as a summer thunderstorm. Sara had been through three hundred hoops to make sure they had permission to wait in the recovery room, when regulations permitted only family. Jacob appreciated the effort but politely declined. The thought of sitting around in a sterile room for ten hours on a Saturday, watching ¡Vámonos, Muchachos! reruns on her laptop and waiting for an update was just about the worst thing he could imagine. Irene said she understood, and instead he took the day before off and stocked her apartment with half a Rite-Aid’s worth of gauze, Chicken & Stars soup, Assure milkshakes, instant mashed potatoes, and a case of bottled ginger soda in case of nausea.

  That night after dinner, Irene snuggled into his arm while Jacob read her his favorite poems with his Patrick Stewart impression, which always made her laugh. He watched as her eyelashes brushed the bump below. In a few hours the lump would be sitting in a stainless steel tray, and below Irene’s eye would be a raw abscess. He read much of the night and took the train up to work in the morning, while Irene headed to the hospital to meet Sara, George, and the scalpel.

  After a long shift, Jacob tried to take his mind off the situation by going out with Oliver for dinner at Szechuan Garden in Stamford. Oliver wouldn’t pry into what was going on with Irene. He had that singular gift among therapists of getting patients chatting about the weather or the rising price of stamps. Then suddenly they would crack open like walnuts, exposing their deepest secrets. Jacob suspected this was why Oliver liked him, because while Jacob never kept his thoughts to himself, he persistently refused to be cracked.

  Oliver was telling a story about growing up in East India. “When I was a boy, my father and I used to go on these long walks through the banyan forests, and we’d play games to see who could correctly identify the greatest number of trees.”

  Even though Oliver got away with telling most people he was in his early forties, he’d really be turning fifty in a year. He didn’t look it, which was all Jacob cared about. A high forehead that was still topped with bristly black hair and eyebrows to match. Talking about his father always resulted in a goofy grin that made him look adorably younger still. His father, a native Algerian, had brought their family to Kolkata when Oliver was still young, to join the staff at a major hospital there. He had lived there for only a few years before being sent off to boarding school in England, but he spoke, often, about those golden days with unflagging sentimentality, which annoyed Jacob almost enough to discount all the grinning that came along with it.

  He waited for a pause and then said, “My father used to pay me a dollar a day to massage his feet after work. He had terrible arches and was too stubborn to get the right sort of shoes. He’d get these hard corns the size of quarters. I don’t know how he got them sitting at a desk selling supplemental life insurance all day. He’d make me scrub them off with a pumice stone.”

  He loved to watch the quick rise of Oliver’s right eyebrow when he received surprising information like this. It was as if the information were being weighed on an old mechanical scale. “You must have been very close then, at that age,” Oliver said.

  “About as close as a king and his court jester. An inch from applause or beheading, any given day.”

  Oliver stroked his chin, “And why didn’t the queen do the massaging?”

 
A bit too quickly, Jacob said, “The queen did more than enough.”

  “Had you always wanted to be a poet?” Oliver asked, changing tacks quickly and startling Jacob with his aim. This was how it worked—score a point and then veer away.

  “Nope,” he said.

  Oliver now had only two options, the first being to press him “Well, what then?” but he’d go with the second, a long, tense silence. A Stille Nacht in the trench warfare of their conversation. Jacob would be damned if he’d cave, like a patient on his couch, and answer the question. Jacob had never told anyone what he’d wanted to be as a child. Oliver’s intuition had led him to the right spot.

  It wasn’t a typical embarrassing juvenile wish, like wanting to be a fireman or a professional wrestler or a helicopter pilot. No, it was far weirder than that. Long ago he had sworn he wouldn’t tell, and he never had. Not to his mother and not, in all his nights of drunkenness, to Sara or Irene. Not even George knew this particular secret, and he knew Jacob’s ATM pin (3825, spelling FUCK on the keypad), the music video he’d first gotten off to (Aerosmith’s “Love in an Elevator” on MTV late one night at his grandparents’ place in Daytona Beach), and the name of every boy Jacob had ever slept with—or at least the ones whose names he’d known. Never being hung up about anything was a source of pride for Jacob, but this secret he’d sworn he’d never tell. He’d sworn it to God. And even though he didn’t believe in God anymore, thinking about saying it still made him sweat.

  Jacob switched from the tea to a large glass of red wine and though he was still picking at his own food, reached over to grab the menu wedged between the soy sauce bottles and began counting up the available items. Fifteen appetizers. Nineteen special items. Eight vegetable dishes, including “dynasty shyimp,” which he didn’t think was a vegetable, typo or no. Four chow meins, nine diet items, and twelve dim sum options. Five kinds of egg foo yong and six fried rices. Four lo meins, five mei funs, and four side order options. Seven items marked “our most popolur enteree,” distinct on the menu from the “top ten best sellers !!” Twelve kinds of soup, and twenty-three special combination platters.