Why We Came to the City

by Kristopher Jansma

  Jacob paused, surprised to hear her say this.

  “He’s been distracted,” she concluded, and began braiding the wrapper from her chopsticks, tapping her toe on the linoleum, looking about four inches from him when she spoke. Unlike George, as Sara got more anxious, she drank less. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Damn, that was a good line. He had never liked it before, mainly because he felt that his own family was unhappy in a generic kind of way. But Gene and Anjelica Blaumann weren’t his only family. Now it seemed undeniable to him that, whereas his New York family had indeed been happy in the way that all groups of young dreamers are happy before they’ve given up, they were all quite unhappy now, each in their own special ways. That was what made it all the more miserable: they couldn’t even be unhappy together.

  “Speaking of the wedding!” Sara said abruptly, though they hadn’t been speaking of it at all. She dug around in her purse and produced a lovely cream-colored envelope.

  He read it out loud. “‘Mr. Jacob A. Blaumann. Of question mark street. Apartment number question mark. NYC, NY. Question mark, question mark, question mark, question mark, question mark, dash, four more question marks.’ ”

  “I take my postal codes very seriously,” Sara said. “Open it already!”

  He did. “‘Please save the date of March 20, 2011, for the wedding of’”— he paused and then shouted her name across the room—“‘MS. SARA SHERMAN AMPERSAND MR. GEORGE MURPHY’—that’s a commendably bold font choice there—‘New York, New York. Invitation to follow.’ Don’t you need to tell people where it is?” Jacob asked, flipping the card over. “Where’s the place I check off chicken or fish?”

  “That comes on the invitation.”

  “This isn’t an invitation?”

  “No, this is a save-the-date card. The invitation comes—well, soon now actually, but I’ve been trying to get this to you since June.”

  “I’ve been swamped.”

  “I know. It’s hard to—I know it isn’t the same. Look. George and I wanted to ask you—we were wondering if you’d read something at the wedding. You pick. Something from The Bridge if you want. Of course, an original Blaumann would be fantastic, but—”

  Before Jacob could refuse, the little jingle bells on the front door sounded. He glanced around just in time to see Sissy Coltrane walking in, her bony arm hooked around Oliver’s. They were laughing and paused to punctuate their happiness with a soft kiss. Even the servers seemed to realize this was awkward, as in midconversation Oliver began strolling directly to his usual table, which was apparently also their usual table, and where Jacob and Sara were already sitting.

  “Oh! Jacob!” he shouted, loud enough to scare the fish in the tank in the back. “Funny to find you here! Sissy and I were just having a meeting. Sorry. You must be Sara. We spoke on the phone? I thought—I thought you two were heading for a big night out in the city.”

  Jacob watched as deep red shame soaked through the baggy skin of Sissy’s cheeks, and she looked as if she wanted to bolt out of Szechuan Garden and the entire state of Connecticut. Oliver did a very nice job of looking vaguely off at the window, as if the situation might disappear if he didn’t acknowledge it. Fortunately Sara wasn’t as ambivalent.

  She pulled Jacob to his feet, and they were out the door before anyone realized they were dining and dashing. It was like a scene in a movie—too exciting to be real. Or to be part of his life, at any rate. But the longer he sat there, mute, in the passenger’s seat of the Prius, the more sense it made. His secret, older boyfriend had a secret, older girlfriend. Sara, on the other hand, was fuming. She sped down the parkway ranting, like the Jacob of old. How dare he this and how dare he that. Jacob didn’t argue. She had a valid point. But what shocked Jacob the most wasn’t Sissy’s age or gender, or even the fact that Oliver was sleeping with another of his subordinates, but that he’d dared, period. How could someone who only ever ate at one restaurant juggle two love lives at once? Jacob was almost impressed.

  As the skyscrapers emerged on the horizon, and the city noises grew in his ears, and the world outside the car filled up with people, rushing around with such purpose, Jacob felt like no part of it at all. He couldn’t shake the feeling all through the night as Sara dragged him through the streets, outraged and leery the whole time, to the caterer and the cupcakes (they skipped the dancing) and to the speakeasy, where they really did pass through a secret passage to sit at a narrow bar and sip twenty-dollar cocktails made with Carpano Antica and house-made ginger syrup and yellow chartreuse. He let the night happen to him, moving through it all like a ghost. At the end of the night, he stood at the foot of the hotel escalators and kissed Sara goodbye on both cheeks and said he had to get back home. He promised to meet her and George for brunch in the morning, though he already knew he would not go. She promised him it was going to get better, that he didn’t need Oliver—and Jacob knew that that was true. He wasn’t feeling like this because of Oliver. This was how he’d felt all along, but Oliver, Anchorage House, and even Ella had been distracting him from it. He was absolutely lost.

  Jacob walked all the way to Columbus Circle. He’d been gone so long, the old MetroCard in his wallet had expired. He bought a new one and went down to the 1 train, waiting at the very end of the platform, trying to get as far as he could from the fiddler and the guy with a washboard who were playing something intolerably cheerful. He closed his eyes and waited to feel the faint breeze—the front end of the gust of wind before the train—the first signal to every real New Yorker that a train was coming, before you could lean out and see the headlights on the tracks or hear any noise at all. He still knew just where to stand to have the doors open right in front of him. When they did, he stepped into the back of the train and for the first time in his life found himself in a car that was completely empty. His heart pounded as he studied the vacant yellow and orange seats. He stood, in the very center, as the doors closed, and he began to fly along beneath the ground. He shut his eyes and tried to feel as if he were weightless, on a new planet, lost in the sound of the tunnels. Instead he felt himself underwater, unable to breathe, as if the car were packed with a thousand people.

  And then, with no one there to see, Jacob wept for the first time since Irene had died. And he kept weeping, even after he transferred to a 2 train at 72nd Street. Nobody minded much. It wasn’t so odd, in the city, to see a grown man crying in the middle of a whole lot of people. He got off at 110th, with the dark void of Central Park at his back, and walked the rest of the way to his old apartment—some thirty blocks through Harlem, lurid and alive, all brassy horns and endless green lights arching above the avenues. Everyone seemed younger than they had been a year ago; everything felt bigger. It was always the same city, only more so, and this was why he’d had to subtract himself from it. He couldn’t stand to see it not being less so: the bums and the bridges and the bodegas and the bottles that overflowed the trash cans on the corner. She wasn’t there, and it seemed impossible that all this could still be going on.

  NOVEMBER

  Either Oliver felt guilty enough or Jacob’s cold shoulder wore him down, because at the beginning of November the paperwork was completed to have Jacob join the staff part time as an assistant art therapist. This meant he’d work an extra shift per week, which barely helped cover his train ride each day up and back from Harlem, but he didn’t mind. Under the auspices of this “special pilot program,” he was even able to get permission to walk with patients around the property. He had a budget to buy books (one copy of The Odyssey, which had to be shared) and an hour a week to meet with patients to discuss readings on an individual basis. Maura signed up, and then so did Roy (they were “dating” now, whatever that meant when you were both stuck in a mental institution), and then Jane and Annabeth joined.

  It was slow going. A lot of them protested the choice of material. Many seemed to be hoping they’d talk about
The Hunger Games, but Jacob encouraged them to read slowly and out loud if a passage didn’t make sense at first. They discussed history and geography as they hiked around in the crisp, late autumn fog. Around the overgrown foundations of the original manor house, they dissected the Lotus Eaters, and down in the graveyard they went over the cannibalistic Laestrygonians. Under the drip of mossy overgrown trees, Jacob began to recall some of the Gothic creepiness that had appealed to him about this place not so long ago. They walked to the farthest north side of the property, past the stables with the collapsed roof, where they could stand amid the rubble and read from “Nausicaa” while the clean-suited men and women of Discover Card waited for the bus across the highway. Down by the duck pond they watched the Chinese Academy boys soccer team practicing their goal kicks. Jacob and Maura spoke about the Cyclops.

  “Odysseus is kind of obnoxious,” Maura observed. “He manages to get away from Polyphemus and instead of being, I don’t know, grateful, he’s got to stand on his ship and call him a ‘shameless cannibal’ and a ‘coward.’ No wonder the poor thing decides to hurl half a mountain at him. And then Poseidon makes him get lost for another ten years or whatever?”

  “Hubris,” Jacob said. “Arrogance. Pride. Everybody’s got a bit of it in them somewhere.”

  Maura looked as if she might prefer to just jump into the duck pond. Jacob had never paid much attention to her before, but she was a sweet kid, shyer than Ella and twice as anxious.

  “Well, think about it this way,” he said. “If Odysseus hadn’t been so high on his own superior intelligence, he’d have gotten home to Ithaca in weeks, not years. He wouldn’t have lived with the sorceress Circe or seen the land of the dead or bested Scylla and Charybdis. That’s half the story, and the better half too. Literature is really just the documentation of human struggling.”

  This seemed to perk her spirits up more than a little. Jacob was happy to be outside, talking about poetry. The ducks hadn’t yet flown south, and the boys across the way were running comically in place, cotton socks pulled up to their knees. Thanksgiving was coming up. He couldn’t believe it had been a year already.

  “I wish we still had gods,” Maura said eventually.

  “I’ve never been very religious myself,” Jacob admitted.

  “No, I mean gods, plural. What I love about this book is that there’s all these monsters just sort of going about their evil business. And there are twelve gods running around up there on Mount Olympus, fighting, getting in each other’s way, hopping down to mess with the mortals whenever the mood strikes them. It all just makes a lot more sense to me. None of them are all-powerful or all-knowing, not even Zeus. They’re constantly getting stuff wrong. It explains all the evil stuff that gets missed, like these monsters on their islands. Makes more sense than there being just this one God up there, supposedly completely understanding everything and intending everything—even, like, plagues and assault rifles and starvation and AIDS and homeless veterans and just plain old sadness.”

  Jacob tried to step in, but Maura wasn’t nearly finished.

  “And, like, everyone seems to think that this must be proof that there is no God. Or that if there ever was a guy up there smiting sinners and sending angels off to grace the faithful, He’s packed his bags and headed off for greener pastures. But what if the Greeks had it right, and there are just too many of them. Bumping around up there, trying to get things right and not always doing such a great job—forgetting monsters, getting too drunk, and running off with the wives of other gods, but still coming through with a nice miracle now and then? I think we need more gods. That’s what I think. One isn’t enough.”

  Jacob clapped. It was a rant he’d be proud to call his own.

  Maura grinned. “Oh, by the way, I got a letter from Ella last week! She’s making the dean’s list at school and dating some new guy named Fred. Seems nice, if you like guys named Fred. Everything’s going really well. She asked about you.”

  Jacob looked off at the lake. He wondered how a diaper had managed to get in there, and he watched as the bloated, grimy thing floated back and forth in the breeze. “You know, before The Odyssey, before the Trojan War even started, Odysseus didn’t want to go?”

  Maura shook her head.

  “He didn’t want to be a hero or get into a huge war over Helen of Troy, even though he’d sworn an oath to Menelaus that he would. The poor guy just wanted to stay home. So he pretended he’d gone insane, thinking it would get him excused from military service. He ran around plowing his fields, day and night, with salt instead of grain and, I imagine, ranting and raving like a lunatic for any and all to see. And everybody bought it—he almost got away with it. But then Agamemnon came by and decided to test Odysseus to see if he was truly crazy. He put Odysseus’s infant son down in the field in front of the plow. He reasoned that if Odysseus were really insane, or really wanted to stay safe at home, he’d plow right over his son. But of course, he didn’t.”

  “What a jerk,” she said. “The other guy, I mean.”

  “Oh, well. He gets hacked to death later on,” Jacob grinned.

  This didn’t seem to comfort her as much as it did him.

  “My point is that Odysseus knew he had to choose,” he said. “He knew that even though the gods favored him, they weren’t going to get him out of the jam. He knew he was going to have to stop pretending and get out there and fight, not just because he loved his son but because he had made an oath and was bound to keep it. And so he went off to the longest, bloodiest, most absurd war that had been fought in the history of mankind. And he was the one who cleverly dreamed up the Trojan horse and finally ended it.

  “If he had never gone—if he had stayed home with his son as any sane man would want to do—well, who knows? For sure, Homer wouldn’t have written one book about him, let alone two, and half of Western literature wouldn’t have been based on the trials and tribulations of this crafty, arrogant guy and all the good and all the evil he saw. This guy who won a war and spoke to gods. This guy who dined at distant palaces and sailed to corners of the globe that no one had yet set foot on. This guy who crossed over into the land of the dead and returned to tell about it. There wasn’t a man alive then who’d seen so much of the world as Odysseus, good and bad, and that is the point.

  “You’ve got to entrust yourself to the waves, lash yourself to the mast, pray the gods are on your side, and rely on cunning to survive the rest. The seas are full of forgotten monsters, yes, but they’re full of forgotten glories too. And the people who stay home and sit out the war never get to see them. That’s what I think, anyway.”

  Maura beamed up at the clouds rolling busily across the wide gray sky. And for a little while, until the November chill won out, they both believed there was a heaven out beyond them where a pantheon of gods and goddesses still did their occasional best to keep tabs on a world that had only gotten larger since everyone in it had stopped believing in them.

  DECEMBER

  It wasn’t clear who found out about Oliver and Sissy. Certainly Jacob hadn’t told anyone. But the rumor spread overnight, until everyone had heard the news. Allegedly the board was upset. Sissy was Oliver’s direct report, and one or the other of them would have to go. Word was that Sissy was taking this as her chance to leave and go out West, with icy streams in summer and horseflies and grand plateaus and blackbirds and whatnot.

  Oliver called Jacob into his office that afternoon. He kept the door shut and spoke in whispers, as if he might somehow get in more trouble. “Jacob, I don’t know what you’ve heard, but obviously—”

  Jacob stood back and raised his arms dramatically. “I’m shocked—shocked!—to find out that there is gambling going on in this establishment.”

  “Is that supposed to be funny?”

  “It’s pretty funny in Casablanca at least,” Jacob said. “Look, I don’t care if you want to try to be straight. I don’t think it’s
going to work, but hey, I get it. After your father and everything.”

  “Jacob, I don’t want to talk about that. I’m trying to—damn it, I’m trying to apologize to you here. I tried for months to make it clear that our relationship just wasn’t working.”

  “Hell, Oliver, I knew that.”

  “Then why didn’t you just end things with me and move on, if you knew?” Oliver looked as if he might cry.

  Jacob felt terrible. What a way to treat his gloomy octopus. “I think I was sort of taking the year off. I didn’t want to make any decisions I’d regret.”

  Oliver’s eyes were wet. “You thought you might regret leaving me?”

  It sounded a lot sweeter than he’d meant it, but Jacob was willing to let him have it. “It was a dumb idea.”

  Oliver looked out his window. “Sissy has agreed to leave. The board will give her a severance for keeping quiet. She’s going to move out to Montana and start a community art program there.”

  Jacob whistled. “Well, if I’d known there were payoffs involved . . . you and I shouldn’t have been so discreet.”

  But Oliver wasn’t laughing. “She has a daughter. Did you know that? She’ll be eleven next month. We get along, she and I. Her name’s Virginia. I thought maybe it wasn’t too late for me to be a father to her.”

  Jacob snorted. “Trying to take a positive role in a young girl’s life? I don’t know, Oliver. That sounds unhealthy to me.”

  But Oliver didn’t laugh. “You must think I’m a fool.”

  “Look, go with her then. Round up cows with Sissy if that’s what you want to do. Nothing’s stopping you, Oliver. Really. Nothing.”

  Oliver seemed unconvinced, so Jacob clapped his hands and struck a mock-triumphant pose: “‘Therefore, take me and bind me to the crosspiece half way up the mast; bind me as I stand upright, with a bond so fast that I cannot possibly break away, and lash the rope’s ends to the mast itself. If I beg and pray you to set me free, then bind me more tightly still.’”