City Boy

by Thompson, Jean

  Jack stared at her. “Gotcha,” Chloe said.

  “Quit and do what?”

  “I don’t know, whatever’s going to keep me from listening to you be miserable every night of my life. Unless that’s the fun part for you. You know, the hopelessness and all.”

  Over the next few weeks they planned it out. Chloe was going into the bank’s management-training program. If he substituted even a few days a month, the money would be enough, barely. It was understood that this was a chance for him to make the writing work, one way or another, within a finite but unspecified period of time. They agreed that Jack might feel dependent, beholden, etc., that Chloe might come to feel burdened, resentful, and so on. They resolved to be clear-eyed and up front about these and other possible issues, talk things through. It pleased them to be arranging their lives this unconventionally. Chloe’s job, the only real job now left between them, was downtown. It made sense to move into the city, and besides, no one expected a writer to live in the suburbs. What were you supposed to write about, shopping malls?

  So now it was all up to him. No excuses. It filled him with dread. There had to be writers out there with titanic egos and monumental, obnoxious amounts of self-confidence. He wasn’t one of them. Maybe if he stumbled onto some unforeseen, high-profile success, he’d be transformed, maybe that was what happened to people. But this was difficult to imagine when he sat in front of the computer, that expensive, obedient, superbly engineered machine that had been chosen for its ability to effortlessly reproduce and transmit his every written thought, and felt like a goddamned fraud. At his lowest ebb he felt himself to be devoid of ideas, talent, taste. He wasn’t fooling anyone. He didn’t have what it took. Whatever it was. He tried to imagine the words he wrote at this very desk making their way out into the world, catching on fire in the minds of people he would never meet. It seemed absurd.

  Yet he knew that all this was to be expected, even the dopey, puerile, self-hating parts. It was what he’d signed on for, a process that might still lead to nothing, but there was only one way of finding out. And when he seized on something he’d written, a page, a paragraph, even a single word, and thought it was good, more than good, it allowed him to keep going until the next such time. As long as he kept going, he was allowed to take himself seriously.

  These were in a sense the most private moments of his life. He didn’t always feel like offering them up, even to Chloe, who sometimes, in her solicitude, sounded as if she was encouraging a slow child. He usually settled for saying that his day had been “not bad” or “not terrific.” Sometimes he fell into the easy pose of exasperation, since there was always something to be exasperated about in writing. But always there was what he held back.

  Chloe let a silence settle. Then she said, “They did a nice job on the floors, didn’t they?”

  “Yeah.” Floors. He recognized another Chloe tactic, a statement you were meant to agree with. But he was ready to be softened up. He didn’t like being out of sorts with her, especially when it was due to his own gloomy, backward pride.

  “It’s a selfish act, isn’t it. Writing. I mean it’s supposed to be all about communication, but it’s actually very self-involved.”

  Of course they’d been over this ground before. “Yup,” Jack said. “Damn near misanthropic.”

  “My name is Igor. I assist Dr. Frankenstein in the laboratory. His genius is far beyond me. I can only gape and marvel.”

  Jack raised himself off the couch just far enough to grab Chloe by the waist and pull her down on top of him. Her legs beneath her skirt were bare and he ran a hand behind one warm knee.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Don’t worry, I’m a doctor.”

  He pulled her dark hair away from her neck and kissed his way down to where he could feel her heartbeat. He waited to see if she would protest or pull back, but she didn’t. They had been too tired from moving in to make love last night. It felt like something they should do in this new place before much more time passed.

  Chloe stood up and took his hand and they slow-walked into the bedroom. Jack kicked his shoes away. Chloe’s dress had a zipper in the back and she presented herself to him so he could help. He loosened the zipper, then pressed against her from behind, spreading her legs and making her stagger a little, until he gripped her around the waist and steadied her. “Let me get this off,” she murmured, trying to twist around to face him.

  “Not yet.” He wanted her clothes tangled around her, wanted to push them aside and see her breasts and flushed stomach and perfect ass revealed in all the ways he could imagine, imagining just moments away from happening because his hands and mouth were full of Chloe and her breathing was damp and rapid and now he had to hurry to get his own clothes off. Chloe was on her back on the bed and he was leaning over her when the music started up in mid-growl, as if the volume control had been yanked hard right. Again it was reggae. Boom da boom da ya ya, hey mon, talkin boom da boom da ya ya.

  “I don’t believe this.”

  Jack tried to carry on for a while as if it wasn’t happening, had to give up. “Shit.”

  Chloe rolled away across the bed. “Maybe now you’ll want to go talk to them?”

  “Not this very minute.” With an effort, he reclaimed his body.

  “You still want to …”

  “Why not. It’s a cinch they can’t hear us.”

  So they went ahead, determined not to get chased out of their own bedroom. It felt as if they were trying to race the music to the end, boom da boom da ya ya, boom da boom da ya ya.

  It was another couple of days before they had any face-to-face encounter with the upstairs neighbor. Sometimes the noise level dropped off and they actually found themselves straining to hear the music. They let the weekend pass without complaining. After all it was the weekend, people stayed up late, carried on. It sounded as if giant mice, giant Jamaican mice, were loose upstairs, bouncing and tumbling and smoking weed. There was at least one girl up there; they heard her giggling and shrieking. But they saw no one. The inhabitants seemed to have entombed themselves, although it was fine spring weather and people were crazy to get outside, the way you were in a northern city once winter was behind you.

  On Sunday Jack and Chloe bought Italian ices and walked along Belmont Harbor and watched people launching their boats into the blue water. They explored the less threatening portions of their own neighborhood, went to a pizza place on Clark and drank a bottle of red wine. They walked home with the streetlights just beginning to bloom. The air was warm and scented with something that might only have been the right mix of pollution and automobile exhaust, but which smelled sweet anyway. A maple tree in an apartment compound was sending hundreds of kamikaze seedpods rattling to the ground. People were sitting out on their front steps in the twilight. Jack and Chloe exchanged greetings as they passed. They felt again the promise of the city, a place that might be ugly in its separate parts, but was beautiful in its whole.

  Chloe had to get up early for work the next morning. The people upstairs seemed to have no such imperatives. At ten-thirty the music was still bouncing merrily, and voices were cheering it on. Chloe sighed and looked at Jack. He gave her a mock salute, closed the apartment door behind him, and climbed the stairs to the second floor.

  Since it was inevitable that he’d be making this trip, he’d more or less rehearsed it in his head. He wished he was someone who flew into righteous rages and made threats and scared people. Once only had he gotten into it with a guy in a parking lot outside a bar, his first fight since he was a kid. They’d both been drunk and the other guy went down after a few sloppy punches, knocked off balance more than hurt. A crowd had gathered to watch. Now they began backing away. Jack, who was tall but not built so as to intimidate anyone, had laughed incredulously and spread his arms to show how harmless he was, and just then the other guy had risen up and tackled Jack around the knees and they both went down again.

  The upstairs hallway was a narrow corri
dor running the length of the building. It wasn’t hard to figure out which door was the problem. The wood fairly vibrated. Jack knocked, then pounded.

  The door opened. A girl with short hair dyed Raggedy Ann red peered out through a crack. “Hi, I live downstairs—” Jack began.

  The door closed. Now what. He raised his hand to knock again, and it reopened. This time it was a kid in a wrinkled gauze shirt, with a tuft of beard on his chin and an expression of droopy suspicion. “What’s up,” he said. A statement, not a question.

  Jack was only five, maybe six years older than the kid, but already he was at some age-related disadvantage. “What’s up” didn’t invite you to respond in any way that moved the conversation forward. It was some kind of hipster code or beer-commercial-speak, layered with irony. Jack settled for mumbling “Sup,” feeling stupid, then launched into his speech. “My wife and I just moved in downstairs …” The noise was making him shout. “Hey, can you cut that music down?”

  The kid turned to give some instruction to Raggedy Ann, who was probably busy spraying Ozium into the clouds of reefer smoke. The music subsided. Jack imagined Chloe downstairs, listening.

  “Hi, Jack Orlovich.”

  He extended his hand. The kid stared at it as if it were a piece of machinery that came without instructions. They weren’t doing real well at the greetings thing. Finally the kid shook, a vaguely sticky, squirming grip. “Rich.”

  “Nice to meet you. Look, you have to keep the noise down. Especially when we’re trying to sleep.” Screw diplomacy.

  “Oh … Okay.” The kid—Rich—leaned into the door. Beyond him Jack could see some grimy wood floor and an ugly couch that looked like you’d get a rash from sitting on it. “So when do you guys sleep?”

  “Right now.”

  “Yeah?”

  You wouldn’t think it was a hard idea to get across. Jack couldn’t tell if the kid was belligerent or just way stoned. His hair was long and pulled back into one of those rat-nasty ponytails. He looked shifty as hell, but not really dangerous.

  The kid turned his back to Jack and had some sort of conversation with the girl behind him. Then he swung around again. “Does your plumbing work?”

  “I guess. Sure.” Now what.

  “Mine’s screwed up, we got no water pressure. You know anything about plumbing?”

  He didn’t, and Chloe was waiting downstairs for him, but the kid was opening the door wider, beckoning, and Jack stepped inside. How could he not? Three days of listening, he wanted to see where they kept the trampoline and the pipe organ.

  The apartment was laid out like his and Chloe’s, same-but-different enough to make him feel as if he was the one who was stoned, or had followed a white rabbit down its hole. The kid was leading the way back to the kitchen, loping through the rooms with a sturdy gait that Jack well recognized. The music was still damn close to loud, and Jack took the opportunity to turn it down a few notches without the kid noticing.

  He had an impression of walls painted in bright, inflamed colors, turquoise and purple, and blinds drawn across shut windows, and curtains on top of that, and too much lamp light, and stale, overcooked air, a total effect of hectic claustrophobia. The television and stereo and their attendant cords and clutter took up one entire wall, like an altar to noise, or maybe to Bob Marley. A poster of him, his brooding silhouette edged in bands of rainbow, hung on the wall where, in his own apartment, Jack would have seen a newly hung print of Monet’s water lilies.

  There were stubs of melted candles in jar lids, paperback books, clothes hung on doorknobs, scattered newspapers, mail, drinking glasses abandoned with an inch or so of suspect liquid in the bottom, plastic forks, towels, a pair of ancient, peeling cowboy boots, magazines, a couple of empty jugs of supermarket wine, a Halloween mask of a green and melting-faced monster, a bag of foil-wrapped chocolate Easter eggs, a paddle racquet missing its tethered rubber ball. This and more was piled or strewn on floors and tables. He told himself it was just like the way he’d lived when he was the kid’s age, though he didn’t really believe it.

  When Jack reached the kitchen, the Raggedy Ann girl was there too. “It ran out right in the middle of doing the dishes,” she said, an aggrieved housekeeper.

  The kitchen wasn’t worse than the rest of the place, or at least it wasn’t exponentially worse, as he might have feared. It smelled of curry, and some other spices he couldn’t put a name to, something dank and weedy that he associated with countries where people died of plagues.

  The kid said, “I think maybe it’s the water line, the whole line coming into the apartment, because the bathroom doesn’t work either.”

  Jack pretended to examine the faucet, even made a show of opening the cabinet beneath the sink and fiddling with the valve. How dumb were these people? “Well, for whatever reason, it looks like your water’s been shut off.”

  “No way.”

  “God, Richard, weren’t you supposed to call them? Wasn’t there some kind of big deal deal with the bill?”

  “Shit, man.”

  The two of them looked incapable of formulating any sort of response besides staring longingly at the sink. Jack said, “There was probably some water still in the pipes when they shut it off, so you couldn’t tell right away. Tomorrow’s Monday, you can call the water company in the morning.”

  “This just sucks,” said the kid, peevishly. “I mean, we can’t even flush the toilet.”

  Jack only wished it had been the power bill. “Well … ,” he said, preparing himself to leave before they asked to come downstairs and use the bathroom.

  “Why do they even charge you for water, what kind of rip-off is that? It’s like charging for air.”

  “Or food,” Jack couldn’t resist, which made the kid give him that sullen, cross-eyed look again, before he decided it was funny, and laughed.

  “‘They belly full.’ Yeah man, some things just don’t change.”

  “Yeah.” He must have uttered some Rastafarian password without knowing it.

  “Hey, you want a drink? Look and see what we got.” The kid nodded to the girl, who opened the refrigerator and began rattling through the shelves.

  “Thanks, but my wife’s got to be wondering what happened to me.”

  “Tell her to come on up and party,” said the kid cheerily. He was sloshing a bottle of undrinkable wine into not entirely clean plastic glasses.

  “Work tomorrow,” Jack reminded. “Maybe some other—”

  “One drink. What the hell. No water, plenty of wine. Come on, don’t be a total killjoy.”

  He was exactly that, he was the King of Killjoys, and he didn’t want to get too chummy because he guessed, correctly, that this was only the first of many occasions when he’d be up here trying to get the kid to do or not do something; nevertheless here he was, taking the glass, sitting down on that ugly couch, not passing up the joint when the kid sent it his way.

  Or no, it hadn’t happened quite that fast. They were still in the kitchen when the girl, whose name no one had thought to tell him, shrieked without warning, “Mouse! Mouse!”

  She was squawking and pointing to the floorboard next to the refrigerator. Jack caught a disappearing glimpse of something gray and frantic. “Oh God,” said the girl. “Rich, we have to set some traps.”

  “What are you so scared of, you’re only what, five hundred times bigger than it is? It’s a living creature, it has a right to exist.”

  “I don’t care, I don’t like the way they sneak around on their sneaky little feet. And they’re dirty.” She appealed to Jack. She had some kind of dire stuff on her eyelashes that turned them into dark blue spikes, and a number of tattoos peeking out of her clothing like glimpses of underwear. “Don’t you think mice are just vermin?”

  Jack was struck by the notion that the times they’d thought the people upstairs sounded like mice, it might have been actual mice. No, a bigger concern was that the mice might begin commuting downstairs. He said, “Well, killing mice isn’t
any worse than frying a chicken or—”

  “Exactly,” said the kid, happy to launch into this. “That’s why I don’t do that shit. Eat flesh. It’s unnatural.”

  Jack, who could never keep himself from meeting an argument with an argument, said, “Animals eat other animals. That’s pretty natural.”

  This stopped the kid for a moment, but then he kept right on coming. “McDonald’s isn’t natural. Antibiotics and hormones and brain and bonemeal in cattle feed isn’t—”

  “Okay, forget McDonald’s. We’re living creatures too, we’re allowed to exist, take up space, eat. You know, survive. We don’t have to apologize for being here.” By this time Jack was drinking the wine, which was so sharp and metallic, he found it necessary to get a great deal of it down, so as to anesthetize himself against the taste.

  “Survive, yes, not trash the planet so corporations can make big piles of money for their stockholders. The white man’s Bible spells it out, page one, where the Lord gives man dominion over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and every living thing that moves upon the earth. It’s a fucking business plan.”

  He must be one of those white guys who went around pretending they were black. It seemed like a really tortured way of going natural. At the same time, Jack couldn’t entirely disagree with the kid’s sentiments, although he himself might put it in some less simpleminded way.

  The kid said, “Come here,” beckoning him through the dining room—at least that’s what it was in his own apartment. Here it was harder to determine function. In the front room the kid shoveled through a pile of books and came up with a frayed paperback, Triumph Over Babylon. The cover showed a city skyline, Babylon, presumably, skyscrapers and power lines and traffic signals, the works, everything wavering and crumbling. “This lays it all out. The roots of the struggle against the death culture.”

  “Oh. Sure.” Jack sat down to open it. The first chapter was called “The Black Jesus.” He wondered, not for the first time, why he bothered writing fiction, inventing things.