Why We Came to the City

by Kristopher Jansma

  She poured him a cup of tea. William sat with it on the edge of the bed, thinking he should let her have the chair, but she sat down cross-legged on the floor.

  “Your eye will be very swollen by tomorrow,” she said.

  William nodded. It hurt like hell, but he wasn’t about to let her see that. “So you live in Paris?”

  “Sometimes,” she said.

  “And you came all the way here for the show?”

  She stared at him, almost curiously. “I came to get something that belonged to me.”

  “Oh,” William said. “Me too.”

  She laughed and spat something from her teacup onto the floor. “No. You want to know who she was.”

  William frowned. “I guess.”

  Alisanne smiled, cryptically. “Who did this to you?”

  “Her father.”

  She seemed almost impressed. “Horrible little man.”

  “Not so little,” William winced. “I thought she wanted me to tell him what happened. She asked me, I think, before she died.”

  But now suddenly he wondered if what she’d meant was that he should make sure her father didn’t find out. If she had, in the final hours, regretted her plan. If it had even been her plan. William felt utterly foolish. He didn’t know what he’d been thinking. He didn’t know why he’d thought he knew anything about her at all.

  “And you called me because . . . ?”

  “You knew Irene better than me. I was hoping you could—shed some light?”

  Alisanne considered this a moment. “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why would you want me to ‘shed light’?”

  “Look,” he said, “we should—we should help each other out. I’ve been—Christ, just look at my face, okay? I’ve been through a lot already, so please just tell me.”

  “Tell you what?”

  William realized he didn’t know what he wanted to know. Who she was? Where she’d been? What she’d done? “How about where you met?” he said finally.

  “We met in San Francisco.”

  “And?”

  “And she was a terribly stupid girl. Away from home one week and already broke. Sleeping in the park, selling all the things she took from her nice grandmother. Trying to buy a sandwich. She fainted on the sidewalk in front of me. So I brought her home and let her stay with me. And what does she do? Reads all my Camus and messes up my sheets and kills my balsamine plant and makes me fall in love with her. So then one day I go out. I come home. She is gone. Stole an expensive first-edition book that my father bought me. Does that—how did you say it—shed light?”

  William rubbed his head. It didn’t. “I keep thinking if I knew who she was, I could . . .”

  But after all this time he didn’t know what he wanted to do. Let her go? Keep her close? Somehow do both things at once. Be free, and haunted, forever. If only he could keep her inside a box, safely stashed away in a closet or a drawer, to be taken out only when he wanted. In the pit of his stomach he knew that Irene would have hated this more than anything.

  “I just want to know if she really loved me,” he said.

  Alisanne shrugged. “She loved everyone.”

  “I want to know that she loved me best.”

  “She loved you last.”

  “But not on purpose.”

  “Yes, on purpose.”

  William considered this. “She would have left me eventually.”

  “Yes,” Alisanne agreed, “sooner or later.”

  William sighed. “I wanted it to be later.”

  “You think later you would have said, ‘Okay, this was good. I’ve had enough. Please die now. Excellent loving you.’”

  He supposed she had a point. Whatever might have happened between him and Irene in the long run—had there been a long run—if, at ninety-nine years old, he’d seen her slipping away on that hospital bed, something told him that he’d still have looked away before the last moment. He’d still have wound up lying next to a mound of sheets wishing she were underneath. He’d still be feeling her cool breath on his wrinkled neck.

  “Maybe there are people who live together eighty years who don’t love each other as much as you two did in one year. Maybe others spend a single night together and love each other more than you’ll ever love anyone. But what does that matter now?”

  William glared at her. Then he picked up his still-damp coat and said, “Come on. I bet I know what happened to your book.”

  7

  Alisanne had a rental car, so she drove him back into Manhattan through the Midtown Tunnel. On the way, she told him what little she knew about Irene’s mother. Her name was Mary, and she’d come from Texas, where her first husband had worked on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. There’d been some sort of accident—a fire, she thought—and he’d died and Mary had gotten some insurance money out of it. She met Bernard Wyckoff somewhere outside New Orleans and got knocked up and married him. Irene, or Carrie Ann, had been born somewhere in the Florida panhandle, where Bernard’s family was from. The Wyckoffs operated several local strip clubs, including one where Mary wound up waitressing part time while Bernard gambled away what was left of the insurance money and his parents raised little Carrie Ann.

  It was there that Mary met a dancer named Izzy, whose real name turned out to be Mary as well. At some point one of the Marys seduced the other, and they ran away together. Irene was never entirely clear on why they left her behind. Possibly they thought she’d be better off with Grandma and Grandpa Wyckoff. Possibly they worried that Bernard, or his gambling buddies, would come after them if they took her along. Maybe there was a calculation: no judge in the Florida panhandle in the late 1980s was going to grant custody to an exotic dancer and her lesbian lover.

  Alisanne didn’t know, because Irene had never known. Bernard wound up marrying a woman he worked with, Maggie Pruder, and moving them all up to Brighton Beach to take over her family’s pool supply store. Mary and Mary had ended up in Virginia where now, both middle-aged, they worked for the department of public utilities in—and Alisanne seemed smug to have figured this out before William—a little town called “Irene.”

  Locked in a line of bumper-to-bumper traffic, somewhere down under the river, as the fluorescent green light of the tunnel cast a pallor over everything, William felt another piece go into the puzzle. Irene. Of course. And yet it didn’t feel finished. The puzzle didn’t match any image on any jigsaw box. No cityscape or field of sunflowers. No kittens with balls of yarn. Just another tortoise under the one above it, and on and on.

  William said nothing, focusing instead on rolling another joint without spilling weed all over the car. Alisanne watched him wordlessly as she drove them toward Mel’s Secondhand Shop, where Sara had taken the last of Irene’s things from the storage unit earlier that week. Alisanne parked just off Washington Square Park. They walked through together, sharing the joint as they avoided tourists holding bags from boutique shops, and stepped quickly past dreadlocked students on benches.

  It struck William suddenly that it was the first part of the city he’d been in all day that he recognized. A girl played the violin in hopes of spare change. A pair of bearded middle-aged men smoked cigarettes while playing chess. A trio of heavyset Germans stood under the great Arch and made peace signs with their fingers, while a man in an orange ski cap changed his pants a few feet from them. William couldn’t stop looking for Irene behind every lowered hood and winter cap. But he didn’t feel her anywhere.

  “You roll these like her,” Alisanne said, passing the last of the joint back to him.

  William took the last tiny hit and tossed it to the sidewalk. “Well, she taught me.”

  “Me too.”

  Mel’s was hot and crowded. Australian women walked up and down a maze of cramped aisles, examining denim jackets and mod-patterned dresses. Paisley a
nd flowers burst everywhere like fireworks. Technicolor angle-striped dresses and jumpsuits with bell-bottoms. Pictures of Twiggy and Audrey Hepburn, torn from old Vogues, now framed on the walls. Two men were having a contentious debate over a pair of silk pajamas. A fourteen-year-old girl was trying on a pair of pale mint-green shoes, yelling at her mother that she needed them. They were only three hundred and nineteen dollars. They were from the sixties! The mother, who didn’t look old enough to have owned shoes in the sixties, was ignoring her, checking an e-mail on her phone as the girl pitched a fit.

  “Excuse me?” William asked a harried-looking man in bubblegum-pink pants who seemed to work there. His cheeks were sunken like those of a corpse and made his eyes bug out. “We’re looking for an old book that someone might have sold you recently.”

  The man was already shaking his head. “No returns, no refunds.”

  “Oh that’s not—no problem. We’ll pay for it.”

  The man sighed and tapped the sides of his alligator shoes together, his hands still busy tugging things uselessly into temporary order, soon to be undone by the browsing customers. He looked at Alisanne, then back at William, and registered a fair amount of concern.

  “Before we get to books, sweetheart, you need a hat worse than anyone I’ve ever met.”

  William blinked. “I do?”

  The man balled his hands and looked William in the eye. “Your forehead looks like an eggplant. Come here. When I’m done people will think you’re Don Draper.”

  The man climbed a small ladder to retrieve a man’s hat from a high shelf, up above a rack of kipper ties. He pulled down a charcoal-gray one and pointed William toward a mirror. Not only did it hide the lump above his eye, but it also looked awfully good. More Sam Spade than Don Draper, but he liked it. And he couldn’t explain why, but he had the strangest feeling that Irene would have liked it too.

  “Can you wear a hat to a wedding?” he asked Alisanne.

  “Is it outside?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” William said.

  “Just take it off during the ceremony. Don’t be vulgar.”

  William promised, and the man pointed them back toward the used books. There were hundreds, all piled up and in no particular order. Alisanne began sifting through the stacks. William didn’t even know what they were looking for. He opened books at random looking for handwriting or doodles that looked like Irene’s, but it was tough to tell. Was that her 7 in the phone number scrawled in the margin of The Count of Monte Cristo? Was that her lazy spiral on the back page of The Little House on the Prairie? Just then William’s finger paused on a green volume that seemed familiar.

  The Iliad. Homer. He picked it up and opened it slowly. Its pages were covered in familiar handwriting. His own. But also in hers. He’d forgotten all about the book. He’d last seen it in her hospital room, before she was moved to the ICU. Afterward it had been the last thing on his mind. Sara had surely brought it home and put it into storage with the rest of her things. And now it was here.

  “Aha!” he heard Alisanne shouting from just around the corner. She emerged with a plain, if somewhat beaten-up white book by Albert Camus. In plain red lettering, it said L’Etranger and beneath that, simply, Roman. The shop, apparently unaware that it was a rare first edition, was selling it for $1.50, which Alisanne paid gladly.

  “I have to go now,” she said. “Thank you, William.”

  He moved in, suddenly, to hug her. She tried to jump back. Then, having failed to escape the embrace, she surrendered.

  “Who knows,” she said, “what she ever saw in either of us.”

  But now that they had met, William, somehow, thought he did know. There was something about Alisanne that felt familiar. She was too blunt where he was too polite, but underneath was a kindness so strange that they both usually hid it away. And he supposed that must have been what it was. What Irene alone had been able to see. The thing she’d loved.

  After paying for his new hat and his own former book, he stepped outside and returned to the park, where he sat down on the icy bench not far from the silent fountain. He opened the book carefully. He remembered that first night, how she’d defended, in a way, his preferred translation when Jacob had tried to mock it. Lattimore. Richmond Lattimore. She had underlined his first name in blue ink, on the title page. William smiled. He wondered how many more of these moments he might have in his lifetime.

  Suddenly he hoped that he’d never find all the pieces. He was glad there was nothing but tortoises all the way down. The air smelled of vegetable curry, and there was a frenzy of branches up in the trees above him. Only then did he remember he was still wearing Alisanne’s clothes. Sitting there in them, and in his new hat and the scarf from Irene, he felt almost like another person entirely. So this was what it was like. This was what Irene had learned. How to be someone new.

  Just then he saw a hint of color on the edge in the back of the book. Carefully he turned to find a beautiful scene on the back leaf done in watercolors. Grays. Purples. Yellows. Blues. A busy street. Cars moving around a traffic circle while tall buildings gleam in the sunlight. White towers rising up into the blue heaven of a new day. The red neon on a Chinatown restaurant, still lit in the daytime. Sunlight gleaming off a water tower. The hushed, holy green that crept into the brown skeletons of city trees. Asphalt meridians curving through. Far away, the line of towers forming a horizon at the river. And rising up behind it all—the Brooklyn Bridge. No doubt it was hers. Her colors, her lines, her trembling wavelength. It was titled only “View from 4R,” but there on the opposite page was a note, in her handwriting.

  William—Thank you for the book. I hope Sara gets it back to you! And I hope you don’t mind I did a picture on the other page, back when we were broken up and I thought I’d probably never see you again. I should explain, I guess, since you’ll want it back now. That’s the view from my bedroom at my grandmother Fiona’s apartment, 12 Spruce Street, where I went away to live when I was a girl and, let’s just say, not the most darling granddaughter ever. I loved it there, but then she got sick and passed away. I took some money and ran off because I didn’t want to have to go back home again. Once I told you how I was born into the wrong family. For a long time I looked for my right one, and now I know I found it. Sorry I stole your mother’s kimono. We should have been friends a long time ago, William. I would have liked that. Since we met, I’ve been wondering if this is fate, you know? Not in a cheesy way, but what if, no matter what I did all these years, I’d still be dying, just somewhere else? But then I think that maybe the where is what’s important. If the gods bother, then man must have free will. Je suis toujours sur le point de te quitter. All my love, Irene.

  William sat there a long time. So she was from—well, just where he was from. He studied the picture again. Irene’s childhood kingdom. Like him, she’d stared out at this at night and fallen asleep in the same womb of street noises. Who knew? Maybe they had passed each other on field trips, or crawled under the same turnstiles. Surely they’d both gotten up early on snow days to watch NY1 to check for school closings, and on the Fourth of July they’d both watched the same fireworks in the same sky. They had skinned their knees on the same sidewalks and answered the same essay questions on the same Regents Exam. And when everyone else had left home to come here, they had been leaving there to come home.

  8

  After a while William left and started walking toward the closest train that would take him home. He called his mother on the way, but she didn’t pick up, and then he remembered she would still be with Chongso’s mother, wearing red mudang robes in their living room, with all the shades down and curtains drawn, while the assembled members of the Kim family sat on the couches and watched her do a dance that their grandparents’ grandparents had done. There would be howling and shouting and crying. The ghostly ancestors, lacking the proper equipment for speech, would be invited to borrow her vo
cal cords and tongue and lips. And the Kims would gradually allow themselves to believe what they needed to believe. That Chongso was fine. Locatable. Watching over them in the company of a hundred generations of Kims. William wanted to believe in this too; he was so tired of pretending that he didn’t.

  He picked up his phone and, through its cracked screen, sent a text message to Sung-Lee, the girl he had gone out with twice while he and Irene had been broken up.

  Did you hear about Chongso?

  I kno! So sad! How r u?

  I’m good. How are you?

  Really good. Drink sometime?

  His thumb hovered over the screen. Staring down at the penumbra of green light, he felt an odd sensation running up his arm. He moved his thumb gently to the keyboard and replied.

  Now?

  They met near South Street Seaport, where she knew a place that had good drinks and wasn’t too noisy. William soon found himself walking down Fulton Street, staring up at the Brooklyn Bridge again, which from this side seemed almost made of light. He felt the shadow of something close behind him. He passed dark window displays full of faceless mannequins. A saxophone cried out from the footsteps of the church. Everyone, everywhere was drunk.

  William moved through crowd after crowd, seeking her silhouette. As he crossed under the FDR Drive, he heard Sung-Lee calling his name from the opposite corner. It took him a moment to spot her: in a navy blue coat with white trim, stepping out of a cab. She expertly navigated the cobblestones in stiletto ankle boots. She kissed him lightly on the cheek when he got close.

  “I almost didn’t recognize you,” she said. “Love what you’re wearing.”

  “You do?”

  William knew he was blushing. Sung-Lee looked far more beautiful than he’d remembered, at least in the soft light of the street. She wore a glittering necklace of silver sharks’ teeth. Her eyes were shadowed by a soft green.