City Boy

by Thompson, Jean

  The class gaped. Such talk was like an evil spell. None of them was entirely sure what it meant but they knew it was an attack. They looked at the professor, who had turned stone-faced. Jack, dismayed, wondered if he was going to be forced to hate her, if she was like one of those cursed fairy-tale princesses who spat out snakes and toads.

  After a moment the professor said, “I guess I’d begin by asking you if everything you just said is unreliable and has an arbitrary meaning, or are you exempt from all that?”

  “You have to use language to investigate language,” said Ms. Chase, still sweet voiced, but with an edge of stubbornness. Jack had to admire the way she was able to carry on an argument even as those fishnet stockings did their thing.

  “Which theory class did you take? This all sounds very familiar. This,” he nodded to the rest of the class, including them as he excluded Ms. Chase, “is the way academics tell us that poetry doesn’t matter. The currently fashionable way.”

  “I just don’t think you can write without an informed self-awareness.” Her pen was moving across the notebook page even as she spoke, the spirals coming faster and tighter.

  “Critical theory’s a virus. It sends out legions of little jargon-spouting spores that infect everything they touch. How did you get into this course anyway? Did you take the beginning workshop?”

  “No, but I’ve written—”

  “If you had, you would have learned that poems aren’t logs that exist just so they can be gnawed down into little piles of toothpicks.”

  The class sensed something new and dangerous, a situation that might get genuinely out of control, and not for any of the usual reasons, such as students sneering at each other’s poems. The professor was no longer acting like their Scout troop leader, breaking up quarrels and leading sing-alongs; he was actually being mean.

  Jack raised his hand. He wasn’t sure what he was going to say, but he couldn’t let things go on any longer in this unbearable fashion. “Jack,” the professor said promptly.

  “I just wanted to say …” He filled his lungs with air as if this would fill his head with brilliant thought. “I’m thinking about why people write poetry in the first place, or at least why I write it. And it’s not really about language, even though language is the medium and it’s what we’re always arguing about. You write a poem because you want to communicate something with absolute clarity. All the nuances and contradictions and complexities, the whole nine yards. I have to believe you can do that. I have to believe that two different people can read a poem and come to the same understanding. That people can understand each other.”

  He stopped, feeling like an idiot. But what he’d said had been just vapid and heartfelt enough to calm the room down and bathe it in a wash of good feeling, a warm soup of good intentions. Understanding and communication, they were all for that. They were once more united. The professor, no doubt embarrassed by letting himself carry on so, began talking briskly about deadlines and reading lists.

  Ms. Chase was silent for the rest of the hour. She closed her notebook and gazed out the window at the gray clouds dropping ice on the empty sidewalks and lawns. She had the sullen expression of someone who knew she was being watched. Jack swore at himself for being so obvious. He was communicating with perfect clarity all right.

  He was going to say something to her after class, explain himself or apologize, but as soon as the bell rang she positioned her oversized shoulder bag, rose, and stepped out the door. A girl Jack knew from last semester claimed his attention and kept him from following. By the time he left the classroom with that girl and another friend, she was gone. “What was all that about?” the friend wondered, and Jack said he didn’t know, he guessed the professor had just gone off because of some professor thing. “Who’s that girl anyway?” he asked, but his friend didn’t know. No one remembered seeing her before.

  Ms. Chase was not in class the next time it met, nor the time after that, nor any other time, and the workshop closed seamlessly around her absence. The professor returned to his usual merry self. Jack looked her up in the student directory. She was Chloe Chase. C.C. There was a campus address and a phone number and the information that she was a graduate student. That seemed to explain something; only a graduate student would pick such a dauntingly wordy fight with a professor. He dialed her phone number twice and hung up before anyone answered. She seemed entirely beyond his reach. He told himself to just forget it.

  Then a couple of months later he went to a party at somebody’s apartment, somebody he didn’t know. You didn’t need an invitation for such parties, you only had to know where they were. There was blasting music, and people jamming the balcony in spite of the cold. By the time Jack and his friends arrived, most people were drunk and getting drunker. It was the kind of party where the next day the hosts were obliged to go through the rooms to make sure that strangers weren’t still passed out on the furniture.

  The keg was in the kitchen. Jack rinsed out a plastic cup and filled it, then stood around wondering if there was something wrong with him for not having a good time at parties anymore. He said hello to a few people he knew, but it was too loud for much talking. The idea was to drink a lot and stumble around in an alcohol-induced blur and hope you came across a willing girl or some other adventure. He had just broken up with a girl he’d met at another such party. They’d had a spotty few months together before deciding that the convenience of sleeping with each other wasn’t worth the mutual boredom and irritation. Now it seemed to Jack in his gloomy state that his only options were to call his old girlfriend, who would probably let him come over in spite of everything they’d said about being through with each other, or to go home to his own solitary and miserable bed.

  People were dancing in the living room. Jack stood in the doorway, a nondancer trying to strike a pose of being too serious and preoccupied for noticing anyone hopping around to amplified music. Which would have served him well, if Chloe Chase hadn’t been one of the dancers.

  He didn’t know how he’d missed seeing her before. She was dancing with a guy Jack couldn’t take seriously, a skinny kid with buzzed hair and a white shirt and narrow black tie, like a parody of a Mormon missionary. Chloe Chase was dancing up a storm. She rocked and sweated. She was an entirely different being from the postmodern princess of the classroom. Her black hair was loose and it whipped across her shoulders. A strand of it caught in her open mouth and she teased it back and forth with her lips. The sight of this caused Jack actual physical pain.

  If only, if only this were a ’30s movie and he was Fred Astaire but better looking, and she was Ginger Rogers in one of those filmy movie star dresses, and he could cut in on her partner because everyone in the audience knew they were supposed to end up together. Since it wasn’t a movie, he had to stand there for another fifteen minutes watching her and the missionary carrying on. Jack didn’t think he was her date, just one of those weird-looking guys that beautiful girls palled around with sometimes.

  Finally they stopped and Chloe leaned into the missionary and said something in his ear and turned toward the kitchen. Jack followed her. She was taller than he remembered. The black fishnet stockings were not in evidence, but she was wearing a pair of high-cut leather boots that led the eye upward to the crotch of her jeans, well, his eyes would have ended up there in any case. In the kitchen she opened the refrigerator, pondered, and retrieved a bottle of water, which she drank greedily.

  Now or never. Jack stepped in front of her. She regarded him over the upended bottle. “Hi, I don’t know if you remember me—”

  “Oh God, you’re from that awful class.”

  She didn’t say it in any making-a-joke way. He guessed the good news was that she remembered him. He said, “Yeah, sorry about that, things got a little—”

  The music took another jump in volume and she shook her head, meaning she couldn’t hear him. Jack bent closer, realized he’d run out of things to say. She was staring up at him as if looking for another r
eason to dislike him. He said, “Your eyes are blue.”

  “What?”

  “I thought they were but I wasn’t sure.”

  She said something he couldn’t catch, pointed to her ear. He positioned his mouth over it. “I said, I quit writing poems and I’m changing my major to landscape architecture.”

  She didn’t want to smile at that but she did. Jack asked God for just another couple of sentences, enough to let him continue impersonating somebody clever and winning. She spoke next. “Who are you any-way?”

  “I’m Jack.”

  “Chloe.” She didn’t offer her hand. “I mean, who are you, one of those guys who works on the literary magazine and wishes On the Road didn’t exist so you could write it yourself?”

  Jack fell backward, clutching his heart in mock dismay in order to hide his actual dismay. He did, in fact, envy On the Road. “That’s me,” he said. “Callow to the core.”

  “I’m sorry, that was rude of me. It’s just, the writers I’ve met here can be so predictable. The same books, the same tired old poses. Always responding to past forms instead of creating new ones. Art has to be a revolutionary process, it can’t be content with stasis. That’s what I was trying to say in class when that asshole mugged me.”

  Jack noted that she must not have drunk much, to be able to jump right into an argument this way. He could have volunteered his own thought, that new forms were always a response to past forms, but that really wasn’t the direction in which he wanted to steer things. “I felt bad about that. He shouldn’t have lit into you. It was pretty hostile.”

  “I thought about staying in the class, just to force him to confront his totally regressive thinking, but I decided it wasn’t worth it. He’s obviously happy there in the poetry museum.”

  “Actually, it’s a pretty good class. But it would have been even better if you’d stayed.”

  It was the first mildly flirtatious thing he’d said to her, or at least the first one she’d heard. She didn’t answer, just flattened her lips in a perfunctory smile. Jack reminded himself that she was a girl who heard her share of come-ons and cheesy lines. He felt he’d lost ground and didn’t know how to regain it. The party still surged around them with its noise and commotion. He was trying to think of a way to ask her if she wanted to go somewhere quiet and talk, without actually using those words.

  The Mormon missionary guy came bounding up then. “God, it’s getting ugly here. There’s a girl in the bathroom trying to scrub off a tattoo with Comet.”

  “What did the tattoo look like?” asked Jack, but the missionary had decided to ignore him.

  “So if you’ve had enough fun for one night—”

  “It could also be kind of important just where the tattoo is. Because there’s some body parts you really don’t want to treat with Comet.”

  Chloe said, “Dex, this is Jack. Jack, Dex.”

  “How ya doin,” said Dex, indifferently.

  “Mucho gusto.”

  “I’ll get the coats, meet you at the front door.”

  “It was a genuine pleasure,” Jack called to his retreating back, then, turning to Chloe, “Who’s he?”

  “A friend.”

  “Uh-huh.” Dead end. Jack watched her getting ready to take her leave, and just as she said “Well … ,” he said, “how about I give you a ride?”

  “To where?”

  “Wherever you’re going. Dex too. I wouldn’t want him to feel left out or anything.”

  He waited while she made up her mind. He tried to see himself in her eyes. This tall boy with the hopeful, foolish smile, willing himself to be brave. Yes, brave, he’d forced himself to be so, as if this was his true self at last and she had called it forth. She could just as easily dismiss him and send that self back to where it came from but she didn’t, she said, “Sure, thanks, we could use a ride.”

  Forty minutes later Jack was sitting at a table in between Chloe and Dex in a Chicago bar of the fancy sort that his old self would not have had the nerve to enter. He ordered a beer and didn’t get carded. Sooner or later he was going to have to cop to being barely twenty years old but not, thank God, tonight. Tonight he was on a roll. He felt like a spy who’d bluffed his way into the palace. He studied Chloe’s hands on the blond wood of the table. They were restless hands, shredding a paper napkin, tapping, tracing those invisible spirals. Her nails were blunt and the skin was stretched tight over the small bones and knuckles. Warm hands or cold? He decided it was even a good thing Dex was there; it took the pressure off. And he was able to listen to the two of them talking in a way that she would not have talked to Jack alone. Dex asked Chloe how the new life plan was going and she said not bad, not bad. By this time next year, everything was going to be back on track.

  Jack nursed his beer and pretended he was a turnip, deaf and dumb and incurious. Dex said, “Good for you, honey. You deserve a lot bet-ter.” Jack wondered if Dex was gay. He didn’t know any straight men who called people “honey.”

  Chloe said, “He’s wondering what we’re talking about but he’s too polite to ask.”

  “Who, me? No, actually I’m kind of slow-witted. People are always saying things I don’t understand.”

  She laughed at that. Jack smiled and hoped he could keep his streak going. So far, attractive silence broken by witticisms was serving him well. Chloe said, “We were talking about this guy I used to be engaged to. I call him El Beefhead. Enough said.”

  “And the new life plan?” Jack ventured, all spy casual.

  “Oh, I left the Ph.D. program in English and started over in business school.” She seemed a little embarrassed. “I’ve taken a vow of pragma-tism.”

  “Nothing wrong with that.”

  “No, there’s not. It’s just different. Grad school that actually trains you to earn a living.”

  “That can be important.”

  She leveled her eyes at him. They were as blue as the impossible skies in a child’s storybook. “Yeah. Especially if you don’t want to depend on some total prick to support you.”

  Dex said, “You gotta lay off the rich boys, Cece. There’s always hidden costs involved.”

  “So this guy,” said Jack, not wanting to dwell on the topic of rich boys, “is he in school here too, do you have to trip over him all the time?”

  “He’s not in school,” said Chloe, in a way that was meant to close off discussion, but here was that damned Dex winking at him, either because there was a good story that wasn’t getting told, or—He didn’t want to think for what other reason.

  “So the poetry class,” he said. He knew he was asking too many questions, like an interview. “How did that fit into business school?”

  “Oh, that was just like a last fling. My little humanities fix. And you know how well that turned out. Okay. Why did you say what you did that day, were you trying to shut me up?”

  “I was trying to shut both of you up.”

  “Ooh,” said Dex, appreciatively.

  “Seriously. You were both getting your feelings hurt. I didn’t want that to keep happening.”

  “His feelings,” Chloe snorted.

  “Sure. You were telling him he was irrelevant and fusty and out of it.”

  “Oh, let’s get off it. Let’s put it behind us.” She looked at her empty glass and Dex rose obediently to go to the bar. When he was gone, Chloe said, “So you think I was mean to him. I’m a mean person.”

  “No. You had an opinion and you were very articulate in expressing it.”

  “You think I’m opinionated.”

  “I didn’t say that either. What do you care what I think, anyway?”

  “It’s not really about you. El Beefhead used to tell me I was a smart-ass. That I was too competitive.”

  “You mean, you were smarter than he was.”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “Why do you care what he thinks either? He’s not worth it,” said Jack. He thought this would be easy enough. A few cheap shots at the old boyfriend. Gir
ls liked that kind of thing.

  Chloe gave Jack another of her appraising looks. He was more used to it this time, but it was also from closer range, and it made all his ignorant gallantry cleave to the roof of his mouth. She said, “It’s just a confused time for me right now. I probably shouldn’t even be allowed out in public.”

  “Sure.” Jack nodded, as if he knew what she was talking about. She was drinking faster than he was and he wondered if she was a little drunk now. He was trying to take it easy himself, which was a change from the way he and his friends usually operated, getting drunk enough to abdicate responsibility for anything they did. He wanted to keep a semblance of a clear head in her presence.

  “So you’re some kind of undergrad.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Jack.”

  “Right again.”

  “Well, let’s just have a good time tonight. Let’s forget there’s any such thing as intelligent conversation.”

  “Sounds fine to me.” As long as she let him stay, he’d agree to anything. Dex returned with her drink and she downed a good portion of it in short order. It had never occurred to Jack before that beautiful girls had the capacity to be unhappy.

  They stayed at the bar until nearly closing. Jack remained on the edges of their talk, which was mostly about people he didn’t know, history he had not been a part of, the inbred feuds common to graduate students. He kept his mouth shut, kept listening. He was beginning to form a new, or more shaded, impression of her. The part that was sharp edged, that was glib and argumentative, was also brittle, like a crust, something of a deliberate effort. In much the same way, she laughed and carried on with Dex and from time to time her gaze lifted to survey the room, as if inviting people to observe just how bright and carefree she was being.

  Every so often Chloe or Dex asked him a question or lobbed some joke in Jack’s direction and he smiled and said something in return. He was trying to imagine how the night might end, just what configuration it might take, everything he was capable of imagining. He guessed they wouldn’t stay in the bar much longer. Dex was showing signs of wear. He laughed with a kind of whinny, and he kept rubbing his eyes. Chloe was increasingly silent. Cunning Jack kept smiling and doing his turnip routine. “Okay, I’ve had it,” Dex announced. “Shit faced.”