City of Refuge

by Tom Piazza

  “Craig,” came the familiar voice, his old friend Peter, walking down the hall toward him.

  Craig turned toward him; he put out his hand and his friend said, “Stop…A handshake instead of a kiss?” and gave him a big hug. “You look great.”

  “So do you.” His old pal wore a pair of fine brown wool slacks, a white linen shirt with the sleeves rolled up and, like everyone he had seen so far at the EYE, very expensive-looking glasses.

  “Come on down to the office.” He clapped Craig on the shoulder and they headed off down the hallway past more framed covers, and around occasional stacked-up boxes of copies of the paper, books, office equipment.

  “I don’t know how you’re holding yourself together, bud,” Peter said to Craig as they walked. “How’s Alice doing?”

  Craig thought about how to answer this one. He didn’t even know how to answer it for himself. “It has been tough on all of us in different ways” is what he said. “I think she’s trying as hard as she can to make a normal environment for Malcolm and Annie. But, you know…how can it be a normal environment?”

  “Michelle and I want to have you guys over for dinner; we’ll get out the calendars and see what works. Here we are.”

  Peter ushered Craig into a wide, comfortable office that looked out over Michigan Avenue. “Have a seat.”

  “I want to look around a little,” Craig said, smiling. Theater posters, a Walker Evans photo of a railroad yard, and, unmistakable, a poster from one of the old UMich theater productions they’d been in together.

  “Ring a bell?” Peter said, joining his old friend.

  “Goddamn I can’t believe you have this thing hanging up.”

  “Wait until you see this.”

  On top of a long, low black lacquer bookcase Peter plucked from among fifteen or so small framed standing photos of his wife, children, vacations, one small one, slightly bluish and faded with age and handed it to Craig, an image of two young men and one young woman, the shorter of the two men with a huge nimbus of curly hair, holding a guitar, the three of them singing into a microphone. The tall guy with the shoulder-length hair in the middle was Craig, the guitarist was Peter.

  “Unbelievable,” Craig said, looking pointedly at Peter’s well-groomed, thinning hair.

  “Time marches on,” Peter said.

  “Whatever happened to Barbara Cohen,” Craig said, shaking his head and peering at the woman in the photo. “Where is she now,” as if no answer could be forthcoming.

  “She lives in Winnetka.”

  “You’re kidding,” Craig said, looking at his pal to see if he were joking.

  “One husband, three daughters, two dogs. At last count.”

  They sat down and chatted for a while, then they headed out to lunch at a steakhouse with heavy, dark wooden walls and floors, a 1920s-era temple of beef abundance, stockyard muscle, that had supposedly been one of Nelson Algren’s favorite spots. Craig enjoyed the vitality in the place, the energy. After they had ordered, Peter came right to the point and offered Craig a full-time writing job at the EYE, if Craig thought they might want to stay in Chicago.

  “I know I’ve told you, Craig, but the column has been just what we wanted. Alan has been looking for a feature writer with a strong personal voice, and he seems to be convinced that you can fill the job.” Peter went on to praise Craig’s work, adding specific things Lee Binner, the editor, had said. “We know that your living situation is still an up-in-the-air question for you. But the offer is on the table, when and if you want it. The benefits package, may I say, is exemplary. We can talk salary if you decide you want to talk more about it. No pressure at all.”

  This offer found Craig’s most vulnerable place, professionally. After years of editing, rather than writing, of Arthur Borofsky trying to steer Gumbo away from the kinds of substantial reporting Craig favored, toward the restaurant guides and home furnishing supplements and lifestyle gewgaws, hearing praise for his writing was the thing that got Craig at his most susceptible. Not to mention the fact that sooner or later the question of a steady income and insurance for his family would begin to loom larger than any other concern.

  He said the only thing he could say, which was how flattered and happy the offer made him, and how he would have to sit with it, discuss it with Alice, all of that. After lunch they parted in front of the restaurant, and Craig walked for blocks through the Chicago streets and the afternoon crowds, exhilarated, shaking with anxiety.

  “Peter says hello, by the way,” Craig said as he set his laptop case down on the couch and loosened his tie.

  “Oh,” Alice said, absently, doing something in the kitchen. “Great. How’s he doing?”

  “He’s great,” Craig said. He was not going to tell Alice about the job offer yet. Add it to the list of secrets.

  “Did you meet the editor?” Alice said.

  Annie came skipping, excitedly, into the room.

  “Uh, no,” Craig said, picking his daughter up and hugging her. When he set her down she jumped up and down a couple of times and Craig gave her a questioning frown-smile. “But apparently he likes the columns.”

  “He ought to,” Alice said, stepping into the living room, drying her hands and looking down at Annie, who looked up at her with a barely contained glee. “Annie has some big news.”

  “What’s that?” Craig said, looking from one to the other.

  “I’m in the play!” Annie said.

  “That’s great,” Craig said. A moment went by as he felt Alice watching him. “What kind of play is it?”

  “It’s a padgin…?” she looked at Alice.

  “Pageant…” Alice said, looking back at her.

  “Padgint about Thanksgiving.”

  “Wow. And…you’re going to be in it.”

  His daughter nodded, exaggeratedly, jumping up and down again.

  “Annie’s going to have lines to remember and everything,” Alice said, looking down at her.

  “Who wrote the play?” Craig said.

  Alice narrowed her eyes at Craig, slightly, as if to say, Is that the most appropriate thing you could think of? “Mr. Bourne.”

  Mr. Bourne, Annie’s third-grade teacher, was a gentle man with sandy brown hair, who wore ties with Bugs Bunny on them. Craig found him irritating, and had told Alice after parents’ night three weeks earlier that he thought Mr. Bourne was “professionally unthreatening.” She had looked at him as if he were crazy and said, “It’s a problem that her third-grade teacher is unthreatening?” What he had meant was that he found something suspect about the man’s warm fuzziness, but it was undeniable that every student at the school loved him, including Annie.

  Craig nodded, and said “Wow” again. “That is really great.” Alice was staring at him. “I am so proud of you. When is the play going to be?”

  “Just before Thanksgiving,” Alice said. “Right around when you’d expect them to have a Thanksgiving pageant.”

  Dinner was strained. Malcolm ran a toy Ninja Turtle along the edge of the table even after Alice had told him, twice, to put it away, and Craig took it from him and set it on top of the refrigerator. This started Malcolm crying.

  “Stop crying, Malcolm,” Craig said.

  His son kept crying, saying “I want Leonardo” through his tears.

  “That’s what happens when a grown-up tells you to do something and you don’t do it. You have to listen.”

  “I want Leonardo,” the boy wailed.

  Alice began clearing the dishes. Annie sat at her spot, looking down into her plate. “Finish your peas,” Alice said.

  “I’m not hungry,” the girl said.

  “You were hungry before, Annie. Finish the peas you took.”

  Craig glared at Alice, but her attention was focused on Annie. One more pointless battle of wills, he thought.

  “I have a stomach ache,” Annie said.

  Alice took a deep breath, then another, then said “Fine” and picked up Annie’s plate, adding, “You may be excus
ed from the table if you’re not feeling well.”

  Annie got out of her chair and went to her bedroom.

  They sat across from each other. What had begun as an after-dinner exchange about what his problem had been earlier, why he hadn’t been more enthusiastic for his daughter’s sake, had turned into a speech by Craig, about New Orleans, and how the city deserved their support, and Alice had gotten quiet, smolderingly quiet, as he went on.

  “All I’m saying,” Craig said, lying, because it was not all he was saying, “is that I don’t know how great it is for her to get so attached to her new friends and to ‘Mr. Bourne’ when we may not even be staying here.”

  Through the whole conversation he had felt at a disadvantage, since he was covering up his own doubts; he didn’t even really believe what he was saying anymore. He didn’t know what he really felt or believed, so he tried twice as hard to pump up the idea that he knew what he felt and believed, and he knew it was unfair, but he was afraid. He didn’t yet have a name for what it was he was really afraid of, but it was apparently painful enough for him to keep yattering away despite the fact that something was off-kilter in the way he was handling it, and maybe, if he just kept talking, whatever it was would just…stay away.

  “Are you out of your fucking mind?” Alice said.

  The question, delivered in a loud voice, startled Craig. He tried to quiet her, afraid that the kids would hear. She had never spoken in exactly that tone to him.

  “I will not be quiet. What do you want? You want Annie to live in a…a…an oxygen tent? You want her to just stop living because you can’t be in New Orleans? We have to find some way of having a life. Your own daughter has been through a horrible upset, and now she has a chance to make a few friends and have some fun, and some validation, and you don’t know if that’s a good thing? Oh my God…” She put both hands over her face.

  Craig sat and watched Alice sob. He was left behind, with his own idiotic voice being played back to him. He gazed down, in shame, at the fake wood-grain veneer of the table on which his arm sat. Sand dunes, whirlpools, caverns. He pressed his hand against it. He heard Alice push her chair back from the table.

  “Please wait,” he said. He tried to press his slightly cupped palm flat, against the table. It wasn’t as if there were a lot of places left to hide.

  “Please wait,” he said, again. “I am so sorry.”

  He stared at the table. Alice’s words had made him hear himself as Alice had heard him, and as Annie had heard him. In that flash, a different angle had revealed something in the shadows that he had guessed at before but never been forced to acknowledge. He had been using Annie. He needed to sit with it for a moment. Alice was still there.

  “I am so sorry,” he said. It wasn’t just Annie he was using. He knew that. But using for what? Don’t you know, Craig? What was he turning into?

  Alice said, “I don’t know what to do, Craig. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what we are supposed to do. We can’t stop living.”

  Craig nodded his head, still unable to look at her. Living…living meant change—he remembered that much, he had read it someplace. Alice had been changing. Annie was changing. Now something was being asked of him—him—that New Orleans could not answer for him. None of what he had assembled around himself, none of the icons or heroes, the music, the cultural exoskeleton, none of it could answer this. He was going to have to answer, himself.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said, again. “Please give me a chance. I’m going to try. Just…give me a chance.”

  Palm trees, blue sky, then the woman waving frantically to the circling rescue helicopter…

  “This is no time to be rescued,” says the familiar voice, and then she is pulled down and James Bond pulls the orange and white parachute over himself and Pussy Galore, stranded on some Caribbean island as the CIA men in their gray suits circle in the helicopter and Craig felt around the bottom of the big green plastic bowl with his fingertips for any remaining popcorn. Alice was curled up at the other end of the couch, reading. The Goldfinger theme music came up with its foreboding yet sensual rising and falling ostinato, then the striptease trumpet with the plunger mute and Shirley Bassey’s brassy vocal as Craig reached for the remote on the low coffee table.

  “Can you turn it down a little?” Alice asked, looking up from over the top of her copy of Middlemarch.

  “That’s just what I was about to do,” Craig said. It was the night after their argument. He hit the volume button and rode the closing theme music down to a tolerable level. Annie and Malcolm were long since asleep, and Alice seemed happy enough—warm, protected, immersed, pillows behind her back and legs covered with the hemp throw her brother had sent them for Christmas two years ago. Craig wondered if there were time enough for another movie before they would have to cash it in for the night. Sometimes you could reach a point of diminishing returns, though; you could wake up in the middle of the dream, as if awakening from anesthesia in the middle of an operation, and ask yourself, what the hell am I doing?

  He looked around the warm, nicely furnished living room that Alice had found for them and which had been the center of their life for the past month and a half in Elkton, Illinois. The gray slate backing behind the fireplace with its chain mail curtain and tools. Craig had been boycotting the fireplace, even though it was fireplace weather. He resisted making a fire, with its overtones of staking a claim to Home, to shelter; it felt too much like ratifying their presence there. He would not sign off on the implied contract. Alice seemed to understand this intuitively; twice in the preceding weeks she had suggested making a fire, but at Craig’s mumbling about not being sure whether the flue was open, or it being too late and he didn’t want to let it smolder after they were asleep, she let it drop. Deflecting Annie had been a little harder—a fireplace was an absolute and compelling novelty for her—but the fact remained: the fireplace had not yet been used.

  The television sat up against the wall that ran at an oblique angle to the fireplace, and the sectioned, angled couch had been set up nicely so that you could enjoy either the electronic or the actual hearth. At the other end of the room the dining table, near the kitchen, was smallish but offered everything necessary, including a window that looked out across the banked-up ground with its well-groomed lawn to the leafy and pleasant street. A bedroom for them and one for the kids, and even a small storage room that he had dragooned into use as the World’s Smallest Study, as he called it in e-mails to friends, some of whom were exiled like himself, some of whom were back in New Orleans, and some of whom were old friends from another time with whom Craig, suddenly, had a renewed appetite for contact.

  It was not a permanent arrangement, but it was as comfortable as anything could be for the time being, while the roulette wheel spun and the ball of their future bounced around and Craig hung suspended in an agony of ambivalence. Somewhere down in New Orleans, his life was on hold, a red light blinking on a phone in a darkened office, waiting for someone to pick up.

  He glanced at Alice and, to his surprise, found that she was watching him.

  “Hey,” he said, for lack of anything better, out of embarrassment, as if she had been reading his thoughts.

  “Hey,” she said, with a serious expression on her face. She kept her eyes on him. Craig tried to imagine what this look was, what conversation they were headed for.

  Finally, he said, “What are we doing?”

  Alice didn’t answer immediately. She held his gaze, then she said, “I think we are trying to do the right thing, and there is no right thing.” Quiet again for a moment, and then, “Every choice we have ends up with some kind of huge…loss. It ends up with something getting lost that is really just…irreplaceable. And I’m sorry, Craig. I am really sorry about that. I want you to know that I am really sorry about that.”

  “Yeah,” he said. He was holding his breath, and he decided to breathe. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “I know.”

  “They off
ered me a job,” he said.

  “Peter did?”

  Craig nodded. “I walked all around the Loop…”

  He didn’t finish the sentence, shook his head a little. “I feel so fucking torn. How are you supposed to make any kind of reasonable decision under these conditions?”

  “I don’t think you can,” she said. “The whole thing is unreasonable.”

  “I was walking around, and I just felt like…I can be free. We could have a whole new life, and be here, and I felt so fucking ashamed of myself for thinking that.”

  Alice watched Craig say this, and she suddenly imagined birds, a lot of them all at once flying up into the air, as if they had been suddenly released from a cage, all in different directions. Where, she thought, did these weird images come from? She used to write down her dreams; that was something else she needed to start doing again. After a moment she said, “Do you remember when you bought me the journal?”

  He tried to locate the memory.

  “Just after we moved to New Orleans,” she said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “The leather one. The black one.” He smiled.

  “I was thinking about that the other day.”

  Craig waited for her to go on, but that seemed to be it. He made a mental note to buy her another journal, someplace.

  “I miss it, too, Craig.”

  He nodded his head, closed his eyes. Silently, in his mind, he said Thank you.

  “I know,” he said.

  “But it’s like something has to…” she searched for a word…

  “Readjust,” he said.

  “Yeah,” she said.

  Craig let out a long sigh.

  “I don’t want to lose it,” he said.

  “You can kill it if you hold on to it too tight,” she said. “Maybe it has to change.”

  “I…” he shook his head, didn’t go on. It was going to take a while to shake out.

  The next morning, Craig sat at his desk with the coffee he had carried in from the kitchen. He did not open his laptop but sat drinking the coffee and feeling the hot liquid make its way down inside him. He looked out the window into the yard under the low branches of the rhododendron hedge.