Why We Came to the City

by Kristopher Jansma

  “There are one hundred and thirty-four different things you could eat here,” Jacob announced to Oliver, who was finishing his beef and scallops combo, the number-two special.

  “That seems like quite a lot,” Oliver replied, as he dabbed brown sauce from his lips.

  “It is a lot,” Jacob said. “But it is still a finite number of things. And yet you eat here every night. And I’m not being hyperbolic. I mean, I’m not exaggerating—”

  “Yes, Jacob. I went to Oxford, and I know what hyperbolic means. And I know—”

  Jacob knew he knew. They’d had countless meals together at Szechuan Garden and had this same argument practically as many times.

  “You eat here every night. You don’t eat at any of the hundreds of other restaurants in Stamford. Nor do you ever go to eat in Manhattan, which is just a train ride away—”

  “If you’d ever let me come over to your apartment . . .”

  “—where there are literally thousands of restaurants. And Brooklyn and Queens, which are, as we speak, in the midst of a dawn-of-the-century culinary renaissance where Michelin-starred chefs are grilling foie gras in aluminum-sided diner cars! No. You choose to eat every meal in this one place.”

  “You’re really very fixated sometimes,” Oliver said in his best therapist’s tone, pressing the tips of his fingers together in the same way as always, so that his hands became a little cage over his heart. “Consistency can be as much a virtue as variety. Besides, I like it here. These people feel like family. And the restaurant is only four doors down from my flat. But since you know that already, I have to conclude that this isn’t what’s really bothering you. Is it?”

  “What do you think it’s about then?” Jacob fired back. He was simply dying for Oliver to bring up Irene. To say something idiotic like “you know she’ll be fine” or “she’s lucky she’s so young” or “I’m sure your companionship means so much to her.”

  But instead Oliver said, “I think maybe you’re feeling some guilt about the lopsided shape the commitment in our relationship has taken.”

  What a passive-fucking-aggressive way of saying that, Jacob thought. Feeling competitive, he skipped the passive in his own response.

  “You mean how you sit around in your flat listening to Beethoven and watching Animal Planet while I fuck other people?”

  The words drew just a drop of psychic blood before Oliver regained his maddening calm.

  “I’m a monogamous person,” Oliver said calmly. “You know this about me.”

  It was true. Throughout his boarding school years, Oliver had pined away for the same allegedly straight classmate, except for Saturday mornings, when he’d come over to Oliver’s to fool around. Adopting this same confusion, Oliver had actually married a woman at age twenty, whom he hadn’t cheated on once in the three years before they’d separated.

  “Moreover I know that you are not, and you also know that this is perfectly fine with me. You’re young—”

  “I’m not saying that right now. Aren’t you listening to me? That’s not my point!”

  “Then what is your point?”

  Jacob thought he might rip his hair out by the roots. “My point is that you are a mental health professional!” he shouted, so loudly that it jolted a nearby couple from their cell phone screens. He imagined the fish in the tank rushing behind their fake, red rocks—

  Oliver didn’t raise his voice even a decibel. “And?”

  “The owner here bought you a tie clip on your birthday this year!”

  “It’s your own choice to order the Dragon & Phoenix every single time.”

  “Actually I get the ‘Dargon & Phoenix’ every time, thank you very much.”

  Oliver rubbed his eyebrows. “My point is that I never order the same thing twice.”

  “But you do! There are three hundred sixty-five days in a year and one hundred forty-six menu items, which means that you must eat the same thing at least two and a half times every year.”

  “And you never eat the same thing two and half times in a year? You’ve probably had ‘Dargon & Phoenix’ at least twenty or thirty times with me here by now.”

  “Yes, but I have also eaten a Guaco-Taco from San Lupe and spanakopita from the Olympic Flame Diner and chicken à la king from Bistro 19! This week alone I’ve had three kinds of frozen yogurt!”

  Oliver grinned the way he always did when he was sure he was about to win. “But that’s what you always get at those places.”

  “Meaning?” But Jacob could already feel the point sliding away from him.

  “Meaning why is it wrong that I order different things from the same restaurant every night, and right that you order the same things from different ones?”

  Jacob opened his mouth, but no fire came forth. Why should it be wrong? Wasn’t it more wrong that they had such a glut of dining options that they could eat somewhere different every night of the year, without repeating? That morning on the train Jacob had read an article in the New Yorker about a mountainous area of China roughly the size of France; its slopes were dust, and its citizens were malnourished if they weren’t starving. What sort of God created all men equal but then said fuck it when it came to the corners of the earth? What did the old lady mopping the floor in the back think about him leaving a third of his “Dargon & Phoenix” on his plate?

  The look she was giving him was the same sort that the crones in the cafeteria of Moses Maimonides Elementary had once cast his way when he’d eaten only the Hydrox and ignored the rest of his lunch. And how had the rabbis explained it? Because we are the chosen ones, beloved of God, had been the line until about third grade, at which point they began to add Because we were slaves for centuries, and then we wandered in the desert for forty years, and then we lived in unfriendly lands for more centuries. Always strangers, always scapegoats. Killed in Crusades and Holocausts that everyone else has forgotten. For their ancestors being forever fucked over, then, the logic seemed to go, it was okay for the Blaumann family to be better off now. There was often the suggestion that probably it would be only a short while before someone figured out how to take it all away again.

  This interpretation had reigned until he’d been bar mitzvahed and begun taking practical accounting and economics, at which point the reasoning became nonsecular: Because you are a participant in a prosperous free economy, in which the work your parents do is valued at a certain amount by the invisible hand of the market, and soon you will take your place in this grand system yourself, and through savings, investments, and avoiding the temptations of credit, you too will deserve privileges and comforts that others do not.

  “Hazan et hakol,” Jacob muttered.

  “A rabbi?” Oliver asked. “Is that what you wanted to be when you were a child?”

  Jacob shook his head. He half wanted to tell him—it was just nonsense and stupid superstition. So he’d sworn. So what? Was he going to be struck down there in Szechuan Garden? He opened his mouth to just say it after all this time, but the instant he did, he felt the phone in his pocket buzzing. He took it out and saw Irene’s picture on the screen.

  “Hello?” he said, almost before he’d actually answered it.

  “It’s Sara” came the voice on the other end, the sound of an ambulance backing up somewhere in the distance. “Irene’s fine. I took her phone because I get no reception in here.”

  “Did she go under all right?” Jacob asked softly.

  “We should know something in a couple of hours,” Sara said, and Jacob could tell she was at the end of her rope. “But George is losing it over here. He needs to go for a walk, and I have to finish these articles by Friday.”

  “You want me to take him to the park or something? Let him play in the dog run?”

  Jacob smiled, just long enough that Oliver smiled.

  Sara, however, sighed short and sharp. “I don’t care what you do
with him, but if he stays here another minute, I’m asking the nurses to sedate him.”

  “Tell him to meet me at the Bistro in an hour,” Jacob said, as Oliver called for the check.

  They walked back to the flat. Kissed and made up. Oliver insisted he take an umbrella and called him a cab down to the train station.

  • • •

  From the Hell Gate Bridge, Jacob saw his city, lit up and unreal, as ever. The tip of the Empire State Building was the electric blue of a urinal cake. It was half obscured by the fat clouds above, smoke thick, soot black, but reflecting everything beneath it. Broadway’s streetlights, the Times Square spotlights, the postgraduate apartment $4.99 IKEA track lights, the cigarette embers leaning out the windows of the Frederick Douglass Houses. A trail of white headlights flowing over the Triborough Bridge into town, and the ghostly trail of red brakelights limping back out through the jam.

  At Grand Central, Jacob clutched Oliver’s umbrella in front of him like a shield, pushing past the crowds on the stairs and in the station and then on the sidewalks, under a white wash of streetlights, past the pale hordes in Bryant Park and Rockefeller Center. He tried to visualize what must be happening to Irene. He held it in his head like a poem, words and images and process. Awesome, in the old-fashioned sense of the word: inspiring of awe, to the point of humbling. The things they knew now, the things they could do.

  Less than fifty blocks away, in a sterile room, Irene was dressed in a loose white gown, laid out like a drowsy queen, the doctors circling around her like humble servants. According to what Sara had relayed to him from Dr. Zarrani, a tube would deliver pure oxygen through a mask, attached by an elastic strap. Clips would be attached to her fingertips and beige cups suctioned to her breastbone to measure the rate of her heart beating, the pressure of her blood. Lower down, a squid of electrode wires would creep across her thorax and out to her wrists, taking pulses back to the electrocardiogram—the EKG—while a pulse oximeter and a capnograph measured the oxygen and carbon dioxide in her blood. The first tumor would be removed via a periorbital excision, during which an invasion of her eyeball itself could—ideally—be ruled out. If not, they’d have to remove the eye itself, but the doctors had said there was essentially zero chance of this happening. Then, while a plastic surgeon began an ophthalmic reconstruction, the surgeons would move to the left arm, where the second tumor could be removed—along with a significant portion of the ulna to ensure that the cancer was fully contained. The extracted bone would be replaced by a graft from the iliac crest, this being the superior border of the “wing of ilium” (Jacob liked the delicate, angelic sound of that) along the superolateral margin of the pelvis.

  The truly good news here, according to Sara—who had taken on the role of interpreter between Irene’s doctors and the rest of them—was that the preliminary lymph node biopsy had come back clean, and the doctors believed there was a far superior chance that the postsurgical radiation and the second round of chemotherapy would have a lasting effect on the cancer, now that they were in the—again, less-than-ideal—situation of metastasis. Irene had progressed from stage one to stage two, which meant that the initial lump had sent off phalanxes in search of new territories. It had come down the mountainsides and into the valley of her elbow. But it hadn’t yet gotten to the ports. The lymph nodes, which traversed her whole body, were still unconquered. If only he could write it, somehow. If only they were words on paper, not facts in Irene’s body.

  • • •

  At Bistro 19, Jacob found George right where he expected, on the burnished brass stool at the far right, leaning heavily against the gray marble bar top. His top two buttons were undone, and his powder-blue sleeves rolled to the elbows. His dusty brown hair showed traces of fingered agitation, though now his hands were clasped as if in prayer around his whiskey glass. Jacob thought he looked like an off-duty priest having a word with his heavenly employer. Or he was only staring up at the grape-stained light coming through the old Tiffany chandelier, which hung elegantly above the bar with its leaded-glass vines and little winged cupids.

  George loved the ugly thing. To him, they conjured up the old New York—European money, Cole Porter, high style. “I’m gonna have one of these in my study someday,” he’d say in awe, when the third or fourth whiskey had hit him. In the back of his mind, Jacob planned to buy George a lamp like it someday, whenever their ships came in.

  Jacob decided to keep his jacket on but stowed the oversize umbrella in the stand near the door. George hadn’t even noticed him entering, he was so absorbed by the lamp. “Bless me, Father Murphy,” Jacob sighed as he flung his weight onto the stool, “for I have sinned.”

  George looked down at his watch. “All right, but let’s save some time, and you just tell me the ones you haven’t committed.”

  “I’m fine on graven images,” Jacob said after a second’s thought. “Never killed anybody. And I suppose I don’t exactly covet my neighbor’s wife.”

  George clicked his tongue. “Nuh uh-uh! ‘Nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass . . .’”

  “Oh well, if you want to get into the fine print.”

  “I just know how you can be around oxen, that’s all.”

  George downed his whiskey and motioned for another from Flo, the no-nonsense French grandmother who worked behind the bar, whose hair had been dyed to a fire it had never known in youth. She topped off George’s glass with J&B and then began making Jacob his usual—a gin martini with two onions.

  “I can sing all the books of the Old Testament to the tune of ‘Ten Little Indians.’”

  “Please don’t,” Jacob said, as George began to lift an imaginary microphone to his mouth. “I’ve had enough flashbacks to Hebrew school for one night already, thanks.”

  “Awww. Did Dr. Oliver try to get you on the couch again?” George joked. “Metaphorically, I mean. Not literally. I mean, literally’s fine too, but—oh! Hey, guess who’s here? Look over in the corner there.”

  Jacob turned casually in his chair and looked into the dark, rear corner of the restaurant, where he recognized the narrow profile of William Cho. He was wearing a well-tailored gray suit with a dark wool tie. He had clearly just had his hair cut, perhaps at the request of the girl seated across from him, sharing his order of the mahi-mahi. She was maybe a few years younger, also Korean, with liquid black hair that spilled over her bare shoulders. Her great dark eyes were fixed lovingly on William. His were looking back.

  “It’s William, right?” George was saying.

  Jacob saw William swivel slightly in his chair, noticing them at the bar and stiffening, twisting around to keep his back to them and his face toward his date.

  George looked annoyed. “It’s pretty ballsy of him to bring a date here. He knows this is one of Irene’s—I mean, he knows this is our place.”

  Jacob hummed in agreement. It was ballsy of William. Uncharacteristically ballsy. He watched William, who was clearly pretending to listen attentively to his date while not so slyly looking at the two of them in the reflection of the mirror on the far wall.

  George did a few quick twists on his stool and nearly slid off. “So. You were saying. About Oliver? He’s been picking your brain again, has he?”

  “What did you want to be when you were a child?” Jacob sighed, but George thought he was asking, not answering.

  “The winner of the Nathan’s hot-dog-eating competition. What did you want to be?”

  “A carpenter,” Jacob lied.

  “What, like you wanted to build houses?”

  “No,” Jacob said, “I mean I wanted to be Karen Carpenter.”

  George made an inaudible crack about bell-bottoms.

  Jacob shook his head. “I really need to break this thing off with Oliver.”

  “Never a good idea to date the guy who signs your paychecks, I’ve always said.”

  “You�
�re marrying a woman who shares your bank account,” Jacob reminded him, as Flo finally came back and pushed his martini toward him. He pulled the tiny cocktail sword from the onions and let them settle into the conical bottom of the glass.

  “A man’s got to have his secrets,” Jacob continued. “How are you going to pay off all your mistresses if you don’t have any money of your own?”

  George hummed for a moment, as if considering the possibility. “I can’t think of anything more terrifying than having a mistress,” he said finally. “I can barely keep track of Sara. You ever watch that show about that Mormon guy with all the wives? He’s got three wives, and he spends the whole time trying to keep them from killing each other. No thanks.”

  “You don’t marry all of them! That’s the whole—have I taught you nothing?”

  “You taught me how to make chili once.”

  Jacob sipped at his drink as he launched into a long tirade about the antiquated concept of marriage, how it had originated as a way of transferring property, a means of arranging for the exchange of goats and camels. How in the twenty-first century women especially ought to be fighting this old-fashioned way of thinking, this imperialism of the heart and the sex organs.

  He was hardly feeling drunk at all yet. He wished he hadn’t had coffee on the train. But how else was a man supposed to stay awake long enough to get properly obliterated?

  Then George went on about Sara, and the wedding planning, and God knew what else, Jacob stared down into his martini glass. The two little onions stared back up at him. He was exhausted, and his stomach was a great un-Pacific ocean of alcohol and caffeine. His bones ached in a way that he could feel them, independent of his flesh, and it made him feel like a skeleton in a Jacob suit. God. He didn’t want to be pain-in-the-ass Jacob. Not tonight. He wanted to be fun-and-funny Jacob. Court-jester Jacob! Did other people get as tired of being themselves as he did? How could they manage it, when most of them seemed so goddamn dull?