City Boy

by Thompson, Jean

  Also by Jean Thompson

  NOVELS

  Wide Blue Yonder

  My Wisdom

  The Woman Driver

  COLLECTIONS

  Who Do You Love

  Little Face and Other Stories

  The Gasoline Wars

  SIMON & SCHUSTER

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2004 by Jean Thompson

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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  Designed by Jeanette Olender

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Thompson, Jean, 1950-

  City boy : a novel / Jean Thompson

  p. cm.

  1. Chicago (Ill.)—Fiction. 2. Married people—Fiction.

  3. Marital conflict—Fiction. 4. Apartment houses—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3570.H625C58 2004

  813′.54—dc21 2003057257

  ISBN 0-7432-4282-3

  eISBN: 978-1-439-12980-7

  In memory of a city boy

  Sergio Garcia

  1985-2003

  City Boy

  One

  They had a bad neighbor. Bad in all the usual ways, and difficult to ignore. Music, noise on the stairs, carelessness about the disposal of garbage. Above their heads, he carried on wrestling matches with the furniture. His uncarpeted floors were a soundstage. He dropped and bumped and scraped. Jack and Chloe called him Hippie Pothead Rasta Boy, or sometimes just H.P.R.B. Being witty made them feel better, although not for long. Pot smoke wafted down to them along with other alarming vegetarian burnt smells, brown rice flambé or tofu gone wrong. A perpetual low-grade party reigned upstairs. There were muffled shrieks, more of the furniture wrestling, comings and goings late at night. When, after a time, they complained, they got nowhere. The kid was too stoned, his life already too full of mess and distraction for anything they said to register. The landlord was no help, nor were the police, unless they wanted to get him busted for the drugs. Even under the circumstances that seemed like a crummy thing to do. So eventually they learned to live with annoyance, grievance, and the sense that an unfairness had been done to them.

  Their building had only four apartments, two up and two down. One in three odds of getting a rotten neighbor. Or no, that was figuring wrong but the odds didn’t matter, they’d still lost out. The building was seventy years old, faced with mellow brick, located in one of those near-north Chicago neighborhoods that was in the process of changing from bad to marginal to good. You had to put up with the occasional street crazy or filth pile, but that meant the rents were more affordable. They intended to be tough and savvy about city life, although neither of them had much practice with it.

  When the realty agent had first shown them the apartment, Hippie Pothead Rasta Boy must have been out of town, or sedated. The kitchen was small, the plumbing arthritic, the baseboards had been painted muddy brown. But Jack and Chloe fell in love with the expanse of front windows and good light, the hardwood floors the agent promised would be sanded and refinished, the sense of cozy space that allowed for a vision of smart urban living. They went out and drank martinis to celebrate signing the lease. The future had the same bright jolting perilous taste as the gin. They were young and just starting out, and every decision felt momentous.

  The remaining two neighbors were old, remnants of earlier migrations that had in turn been succeeded by other ethnic tides. Jack and Chloe’s apartment was first-floor front. Mr. Dandy was first-floor rear. Little Mrs. Lacagnina was directly above Mr. Dandy. Jack and Chloe were conscientiously nice to them. Or tried to be. Mrs. Lacagnina was entirely deaf, a fortunate thing given her proximity to H.P.R.B.’s antics. Jack and Chloe waved and arranged their faces in welcoming expressions as she staggered past with her trolley of groceries. Sometimes she allowed one of them to help her get it up the stairs. More often she brushed past them, her lips shaping soundless prayers or imprecations, wrapped in Sicilian widowhood as she was in her head scarf and old wool coat. The coat was rubbed slick with wear, a dark, boiled green, although it gave evidence of having once been black. Perhaps it had been bought new for the funeral of the anciently dead Mr. Lacagnina. She wore the coat even now, in the blooming warmth of spring. Her skin, what Jack and Chloe saw of it, was flat, chill white, like a milk carton. They hadn’t lived there long enough to know how she managed in wintertime, or if she now remembered she’d had another life before she’d taken up mourning.

  Mr. Dandy had more conversation in him. He was the first one they met. The day after they moved in, they found him out in the lobby, scrutinizing the names they had newly posted on the mailbox. “Orlovich,” he said. “What’s that, Jewish?”

  “Christ,” Jack said, but only loud enough for Chloe to hear. He felt her warning fingertips against his arm. Then she took a step past him and the light fabric of her dress brushed his knee.

  “Hi, I’m Chloe Chase and this is my husband, Jack Orlovich.”

  Jack watched the old man absorb the full impact of Chloe, Chloe being charming. His loose and mottled face seemed, for a moment, not young, but as if there might be a young man somewhere behind it. God he loved seeing that look on other men’s faces, even a creaking ruin like this guy, and knowing that he was the one who had Chloe. Not them. The old man pulled his stomach in and introduced himself as Seamus Dandy. Seamus! What’s that, Irish? Jack wanted to ask. They all shook hands. Jack made sure he gave him a wrenching grip. Mr. Dandy scowled. “You two are putting me on. You aren’t really married, are you?”

  “Really and truly. We just have different last names,” Chloe said in her pleasant, humoring tone.

  “Well that’s a bunch of hooey. What’s the point of getting married if you aren’t even going to sound like man and wife?”

  Jack had missed his chance back there with the Jewish remark. The thing to do when people asked belligerent questions designed to put you on the defensive—Are you Jewish/gay/gaining weight—was to say, heartily, No, are you? In this case the true answer was more complicated. Yes, by ancestry, his father, which was probably all Mr. Dandy cared about. No, by inclination and practice and by the way it’s none of your goddamned business. But he hadn’t been quick enough and now all he could do was stand there while Chloe did her usual swell job of handling things.

  Chloe laughed, as if Mr. Dandy had said something agreeably witty. “Oh, there’s lots of reasons.”

  “Huh,” said Mr. Dandy. “I’m a bachelor. It’s made for a long and happy life.”

  Chloe deflected Mr. Dandy’s further opinions on the married state by asking him if he’d lived here very long. Mr. Dandy said if she meant Chicago, he was Chicago born and bred and never lived anywhere else except for when he was in the service. If they meant this exact spot, he’d had the same apartment for twenty-three years last November.

  “Then you must like it here,” Jack said, making his official, inane entry into the conversation.

  Mr. Dandy looked as if he was trying to remember who Jack was. Oh yeah, the Jewish guy. “It suits me.”

  Chloe said t
hey thought it was a great building, so much more character than their previous cookie-cutter suburban complex. The construction was much better also. They didn’t skimp on materials back then; there was a big difference. She made it sound as if she was paying Mr. Dandy a personal compliment. Mr. Dandy said, “Well, they don’t let the colored in. That’s something. There was a Mexican gal once, she was in your place. That was only the one. Which ain’t bad, considering how they’re thick as fleas everywhere else.”

  Jack and Chloe didn’t dare look at each other, though a current of disquiet passed between them. Jack thought that Chloe was probably a little sore she’d wasted all that niceness on the old coot, maybe even chagrined that she’d courted him so transparently. Transparent at least to Jack; Mr. Dandy was as dense as the famously well-constructed brick walls. Chloe was good at getting people to like her, agree with her, do what she asked them to do. Diplomacy, they called it. Jack was the impatient one, while Chloe was better at negotiating with the world, smoothing the way. At least this was how they had come to think of themselves, one of the ways they had agreed to be a couple. Chloe had perfect pitch when she wanted something from people, knew how to read their high and low notes, say or do or be what was needed to harmonize. There are some beautiful women who stand a little to one side of themselves, gauging the effect they have, adjusting, stepping back or bearing down. And that was fine, except, perhaps, for those occasions when the mechanics showed a little too obviously.

  Neither of them quite knew what to say next. They were embarrassed for Mr. Dandy because he was too oblivious to be embarrassed for himself. Jack considered making some black friends for the express purpose of inviting them over. He thought this was funny, in an awful kind of way. Later, when he tried it out on Chloe, she threw a pillow at him.

  Mr. Dandy said, “I grew up in Back of the Yards. That’s all Mexican now. There’s whole churches they took over that’s nothing but Spanish. Padre Armando. Padre Jorge. You ever hear anything so silly? At least the colored keep to themselves that way.”

  The longer you listened to such talk in silence, the more complicit you became, and the more likely Mr. Dandy was to move on to other races, creeds, and nationalities. Chloe hurried to invite Mr. Dandy to tell them what line of work he was in.

  “I’m a railroader. Retired. A union man. I worked on the Burlington Northern longer than you been alive, young lady.” Mr. Dandy winked gallantly. He had puffy, prominent eyelids, like a frog, Jack took pleasure in noting. “So what is it you folks do?”

  Chloe spoke the name of her employer, the famous downtown bank. “Jack’s the creative one. He’s a writer.”

  “Part-time schoolteacher,” said Jack. He wished Chloe hadn’t come out with that. If you said you were a writer, people wondered out loud why they’d never heard of you.

  “Part-time what?”

  “Substitute teacher,” Jack admitted.

  “Writer, like, books? Which ones?”

  “I’m just starting out,” said Jack stonily. Damned if he was going to tell Mr. Dandy anything else that could be used against him. He was already pegged as the Jewish guy who didn’t even have a real job and wasn’t man enough to be ashamed that his beautiful wife was the one supporting him.

  “Angela’s Ashes.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “That’s the book you need to read if you want to be a writer. That guy’s rich now, you know. They turned it into a movie. And the best part is, he didn’t have to make anything up.”

  Jack murmured that he had indeed read Angela’s Ashes, and admired it. Mr. Dandy said, “It’s full of all the great Irish themes. Tragedy. Suffering. Innocent little children stricken dead. You get some suffering under your belt, young fella, so’s you’ll have something interesting to put in your book.”

  I’m suffering right now. Activate flight plan. Outta here. Jack sent telepathic messages to Chloe, willing her to receive them.

  “Hey, you get stuck for ideas, you come talk to me. Thirty-seven years of railroading, I bet I got enough for two, three books. The glory days of rail, when you busted your hump and did a man’s work. Winters when the lines froze solid and summers when the wheels put out sparks and set off twenty miles of grass fire. Amtrak was a bad idea nobody’d thought of yet.” Somewhere inside Mr. Dandy’s yeasty flesh he was muscling an engine around a sharp curve, or some other legendary lie. His eyes kindled and his knuckles cracked. “I can tell you everything you need to know, all you got to do is write it down.”

  Which would be worse, Mr. Dandy looking sideways at you, glowering and mistrustful, or Mr. Dandy waylaying you with scrapbooks and memorabilia, a runaway train on a collision course? Jack imagined timing his exits and entrances, furtively skulking in and out of the apartment so as to avoid Mr. Dandy, the legion of imaginative excuses he’d need in order to explain why he wasn’t writing about the glory days of rail, Chloe, help.

  Chloe said, “Oh, Jack never runs out of ideas. You’d probably have to wait a long time for him to get around to your book.”

  “Decades,” agreed Jack, deadpan, for Chloe’s benefit.

  But Mr. Dandy was already losing interest in him, reverting back to his original glum disapproval. “Ah, whatever. Write a book, don’t write a book. Either way it don’t keep the world from spinning.”

  A blast of amplified music startled them. It came from upstairs, loud but distorted, as if it originated inside an agitating washing machine. Reggae music, set on spin cycle.

  Jack and Chloe looked at each other, then Mr. Dandy. He said, “That’s something you better get used to. This guy.” He jabbed his thumb at the mailboxes. Jack craned to read the name. Berserk? No, Brezak.

  “Does he—” Jack began, but it had become difficult to make himself heard. He tried to pantomime questions, who and what the hell. He shrugged at Chloe, who shook her head and looked unhappy.

  Mr. Dandy waved his hands around his ears as if shooing gnats. He raised his voice to bawl, “It’s enough to make you curse the invention of electricity, ain’t it? Nice meeting you folks.” He stumped off down the hallway, pursued by island rhythms.

  Jack and Chloe retreated behind their own door. Through some trick of acoustics, the music wasn’t quite as loud, but it was clearer, jumpety jumpety jump, a singer carrying on about his no-good woman. Jack thought it was Bob Marley, but then, Bob Marley was the only reggae singer he knew. He said, “I didn’t think anybody was still big on this stuff.”

  “This could really be a problem.”

  “Wasn’t there some old Eddie Murphy reggae skit, ‘Kill de white people, kill de white people, yah yeah.’’”

  Chloe said, “Seriously …”

  “Give it a minute.” Chloe would expect him to go up there and complain, threaten, whatever. It was man’s work, the opposite of charm. It was nothing he looked forward to. He sat down on the couch with a magazine and pretended the loopy music wasn’t making his foot pat in syncopation.

  From the bedroom Chloe called, “It’s worse in here. Like it’s traveling through the heat register.”

  Hell and death. He put the magazine down and stood. Just then the music stopped and someone upstairs took a running start, raced across the floorboards, and collided with a heavy object.

  Silence followed. Chloe came out of the bedroom and the two of them gazed at the ceiling. Jack said, “Maybe they killed themselves. Death by reggae.”

  “Is there a noise ordinance? We should find out. If it’s as bad as he was saying.”

  “I hope it doesn’t come to that. The calling 911 part.”

  “Wimp.”

  “You gotta admit, it would be getting off on the wrong foot.”

  “Well you have to work here. You decide if you can take it.”

  “Yeah. My work.” He watched Chloe pick up a lamp without a shade and put it down again in the same place. They were still unpacking and everything was scattered and disordered. “Speaking of which …”

  “I’m sorry honey, I had no idea he wa
s going to pester you like that. What a character. I bet you money everybody calls him Jim Dandy. What.”

  “Nothing.”

  “Not nothing. What.”

  “Just don’t go around introducing me to people as a writer.”

  Chloe was messing with the lamp again. Jack thought they were both waiting to see if the music would start up again and force them to do something about it. Chloe frowned at him. “Really?”

  “Yeah, really.” There were times when Chloe tried to charm her way past him as she did other people; Jack always called her on it. He didn’t want to be other people to her.

  “You think I’m trying to make myself more interesting by bragging about you.”

  “No,” said Jack firmly, although he might have believed something of the sort. But to admit the possibility would be to open the door to one of Chloe’s morbid self-criticism sessions.

  “I can’t even tell normal people, like the ones I work with? How come? I want to brag about you.”

  “Wait until I do something worth bragging about.”

  Chloe made a face that was meant to express forbearance in the presence of long suffering. “Not this again.”

  “Not the pep talk again, okay?” He’d published a few poems and two stories, all in magazines whose names were known mostly to the other people who published in them.

  “I love ‘The Joyride.’ It’s a great story. Can’t I brag about that?”

  “Do me a favor, say I’m an English teacher. Everybody knows what that is, you don’t have to answer a million questions.”

  He didn’t feel like a writer yet and he wouldn’t until he had more to show for himself. Only in the last few months had he attempted to go about it in any organized, full-time fashion, although he’d always written things, had always vaguely imagined doing something that messed around with books and literature. Teaching English to high school kids had been the path of least resistance. One night, after he’d again complained, whined really, about the things he was always whining about—students who were dull or rude or semicriminal, small-minded colleagues, administrators whose names were synonyms for incompetence, the daily round of frustration, tedium, and outrage—Chloe said, “Maybe you should quit.”