She was blubbering now. Her face was growing red and heated, like a child’s. Part of Jack thought, unkindly, that she might be expected to start crying once he’d cornered her, part of him was concerned. “I don’t think that, come on.”
“I’m such a chickenshit. I know I shouldn’t get sucked into some little jerk’s power trip but I don’t know how else to do things, isn’t that pitiful? You want to know the truth, all I know is hitting on and not hitting on. Fucking over and getting fucked. That’s pretty much the way my world shakes out. Yes sir.”
“Now don’t get carried away.”
Immediately he regretted saying it, since her voice turned shrill and hateful. “Carried away. That’s rich. Like when you rant and rave about how nobody appreciates your great, stupendous writing, is that getting carried away? I’m sorry. I’m sorry. That was really crappy. I didn’t mean it. I bet you’re sorry you ever met me.”
“You know that’s not true.” He spoke as if trying to coax her down from a ledge.
“Yeah, but I don’t know why you’re not sorry. Poor Jack, you probably thought I was a normal person and here I’m a huge boring mess.”
“Don’t, Chlo.”
“I didn’t fuck him. You didn’t ask. But I know you want to know. So I’m telling you. Whether you believe me or not.”
“All right. We’re through talking about this.”
“I ruined everything. I made you think about it happening.”
“You aren’t responsible for somebody else’s bad behavior. You don’t have to hate yourself because sleaze boy—”
“I hate myself for being the fuckee, don’t you get it? God listen to me. Could I possibly be more vulgar?”
He pulled her up from the couch and let her cry weakly against his shirt. Crying was better than talking right now. She was still trying to get words out. “I don’t deserve you, why are you so nice to me when I’m so horrible? Why do you even put up with me?”
“Because I love you, dummy.”
“But why. Why do you love me?”
“There doesn’t have to be any why.”
They stood there, rocking, until Chloe inhaled through the mess of tears and said she was beat, she was just going to bed. Well he was beat too, not just from the argument, but from the effort of trying not to say some wrong thing that would make her distress ratchet up another notch, a doomed effort since there was never really any right thing to say. He could feel the weariness in all the stress points of his body: jaw, shoulders, gut. He tried to remember when it had become his part in their marriage to talk her down from ledges.
Chloe went into the bathroom to blow her nose and rinse her face, came out looking clean and small and subdued in an oversized T-shirt. Jack lay down on the bed with her. It was only nine-thirty and he knew he wouldn’t sleep, forget about sex, but he also knew his presence was required to soothe and console her. Perhaps this had always been his role, one he’d taken on freely. And perhaps it was inevitable that whatever you signed on for began to assume weight and shape.
Chloe fell into a wan, exhausted sleep after a few minutes. The music upstairs was as loud and obnoxious as ever; he was probably going to have to threaten the kid again. Chloe must have been truly spent to sleep through it. When Jack was certain she was breathing regularly, he got up and closed the bedroom door behind him.
This wasn’t the first time. Tonight might have been the messiest and most prolonged of Chloe’s meltdowns, but he’d seen them before, you could argue that he’d seen them almost from the beginning. There were times he thought they were just a method of getting attention, in the way that women always seemed to need attention, and maybe that was part of it. Maybe drinking too much and feeling overwhelmed at work had been part of tonight’s episode. But Jack was mindful of her history, of the suicide attempt that she always brushed off as “just a big mis-take.” And always, at some point, she rolled out her litany of self-hatred, her intractable insistence on how unworthy, disgusting, etc., she was. It all struck Jack as ludicrous, so demonstrably untrue that it must function as a kind of ritual self-abasement or false front, designed to mean the exact opposite of what she said. Then again, there was always the possibility that she believed it.
Now he was faced with trying to decide what, if anything, he should do. Chloe would wake up in the morning cheerful and apologetic and disinclined to discuss, or even remember, anything she’d said. He wasn’t going to let her off that easy. He was going to insist she go back to the therapist she’d seen in school. Or another therapist if, as he expected, she argued it hadn’t done her any good. It made him feel better to have a concrete plan. Going to a shrink was what people did, after all, when there was a problem. He knew she’d taken Prozac for a time, although he didn’t see that in itself as alarming. Back home in California, everybody from his soccer coach to his mother had been on Prozac. Maybe she just needed to go back on it. He wanted to believe that whatever was wrong could be set right, and that somewhere out there was the right shrink or the right dosage.
As for the creep at work. Jack had gone to a reception a couple of months ago for the bank’s new management-training class, where he’d shaken hands with a number of near-identical junior suits. He had trouble remembering anything distinguishing about their faces or conversation, let alone imagining any one of them as some Machiavellian seducer. They all seemed young and stiff and self-conscious. They held on to their wineglasses as if someone might come along and try to take them away. They hadn’t found much to say to Jack, either because he was outside their business orbit, and therefore of no consequence, or else they veered away from him because they had in fact been talking dirty about his wife. There were two or three other women in the program besides Chloe, but they dressed like Soviet-era bureaucrats and were, if anything, more brittle and anxious than the men. It wasn’t hard to imagine Chloe attracting attention, both good and bad. It was all too easy to imagine.
Jealousy was something he’d had to come to terms with in his young marriage. It roosted on his shoulder like a molting raven, dropping its occasional hideous, scabby feathers. Jack knew, as you knew any fact of nature, that there were plenty of men out there who’d lust after Chloe and make fools of themselves in the process. Chloe had a habit of referring to these men lightly. It was no big deal, she seemed to be saying, it was only to be expected. Jack didn’t find this reassuring. He didn’t like thinking these were routine happenings. He didn’t like that tonight she’d been the one to bring up, however backwardly, the word “enjoy.”
The dour bird on Jack’s shoulder dug its claws in. He wondered if Chloe’s keeping secret this new problem for so long—for how long, exactly? Shut up, he told the raven—meant it was something worrisome. Then he told himself it was his own goddamn problem if he was this wretchedly insecure.
Sooner or later you reached the end point of this sort of thinking, and there was nothing to do except put it aside, or start the cycle all over again. He was too tired for that, so he rewound the movie and straightened the kitchen. He was aware that the music from the kid’s apartment had stopped, thank God, but now there was some commotion on the stairs. This was typical: the kid and his entourage were on their way out, and the party was moving right along with them. He listened to the voices, it was hard not to, since they seemed to be stuck at some midpoint on the staircase. This happened often enough that Jack suspected they got too stoned to remember if they were coming or going.
The kid was laughing his head off, a loopy, braying sound. “You oughta get that tattooed on your ass. ‘My strength is the strength of ten because my heart is pure.’”
Male voice: “Fuck you, Brezak.”
“It’s not like you don’t have enough room back there.”
“And the horse you rode in on.”
“Yeah, if I had a horse, I could see which of you had the biggest—”
“God,” said the male voice, adopting a new, disgusted tone, probably because he was getting the worst of the slam contes
t, “another intellectual evening.”
Jack guessed the redheaded girl was out there: she had a recognizable, smutty giggle. And he thought he detected at least one other girl’s voice in the general commotion of talk and yahooing and whatever heavy objects they were dragging behind them. One of the girls said, “So are we going to Cosmos or what, I can’t believe you guys don’t want to go.”
“How much is cover, ten?”
“Ten, no way, eight.”
“It’s ten, it’s Ghostface Killa.”
“No way, it’s Viper.”
“Uh-uh. Ghostface.”
“Well whichever, it’s ten.”
“Eat me. Eight.”
“I don’t wanna go if it’s Viper.”
“Are you kidding? I love Viper.”
“Eat your mother.”
“You guys I need the keys, I have to go to the bathroom.”
“Grab my smokes, they’re on the TV.”
“You owe me for those. I got them when I got the beer. I don’t have the keys, you do.”
“You have to have them, you’re the one who locked up, shit-for-brains.”
“I gave you three extra bucks, that was for smokes.”
“How do you figure it was extra, the beer was fifteen and you only gave me seven.”
“Eat me. I gave you nine. That’s six for the beer, fifteen minus six plus three.”
Jack had had enough. He stepped out into the lobby and looked up the staircase to the landing, where the kid, Raggedy Ann, and a couple of other skanky characters were camped out. “Hey, Rich?”
A single old-fashioned light fixture with a yellow bulb lit the stairs. The landing was in shadow. A long, skinny arm emerged, raised in greeting. “Oh hey, man, we were just about to leave.” Although the group didn’t look as if they were just about to do anything, except possibly hunker down further and play cards. “You ready, guys?”
Raggedy Ann had adorned her face with glitter. When she leaned over the darkened railing to peer down at Jack, it had the unnerving quality of a mask. The other girl—Jack hadn’t seen this one before, a chubby, moon-faced underaged-looking girl with large breasts squeezing out the sides of her halter top—whispered something urgently.
“Well go ahead but hurry up,” said Rich, standing and shaking out his legs, producing the keys from his pocket like a magic trick. He was doing a new thing with his hair, some sort of home-cooked dreadlocks involving a lot of red and green yarn. He looked like a Christmas ornament produced in a shelter workshop. “Here. Jeez. Friday night,” he said to Jack, by way of explanation for—the noise? the gathering? Although to Jack this explained exactly nothing, since the kid didn’t punch a time clock and hardly needed to blow off a week’s worth of stress. He’d once told Jack that he “helped out” at a health food store.
“Great, just keep it down, okay?”
Jack went to close the door when the kid said, “Everything all right down there?”
“Excuse me?”
“Thought I heard somebody hollering a while back.”
The kid was far enough away in the shadows that Jack couldn’t read his expression. He assumed, from the solicitous tone of voice, that it was smart-alecky. “Everything’s terrific,” said Jack. “You know. Friday night.”
He stared up into the gloom, then went back inside and shut the apartment door. After a little time he heard them making their way down the stairs, a caravan of whisperings and snorted giggles. Then the outer door opened and a slice of street noise mixed with their sudden laughter.
Jack was asleep, a light, dream-flecked sleep, and when he awoke he knew from his own alertness that it was still early, perhaps midnight, and he’d been asleep for only an hour or so. The buzzer from the street had been stabbing into his dreams.
Chloe raised up on one elbow. “What?”
“It’s nothing,” he told her. “Go back to sleep.” She rolled over into her pillow, never really having woken up. Jack rolled out of bed and hopped around to get his pants on. The buzzer sounded twice more. He couldn’t imagine who would come to see them. They didn’t have friends who dropped by after hours.
When Jack looked out through the lobby to the street, he didn’t at first recognize the small figure hanging back from the light. He was still trying to run through the catalog of people he knew. Then he came fully awake and saw it was the nameless blond girl, Rich Brezak’s sometime girlfriend, now cupping a hand against the glass to peer inside.
He wasn’t inclined to let her in. He advanced until he stood opposite her on the other side of the glass. She looked up, gave a good imitation of being surprised to see him. “Oh, I guess I hit the wrong button. Sorry.” The glass blotted the sound of her voice.
Jack didn’t believe that for a minute. “He isn’t home.”
She knew that already. “Yeah, I’m really sorry.” She didn’t look sorry. She shuffled her weight from one foot to the other.
“He isn’t home,” Jack repeated. “Believe me, I can tell.”
“Can I just talk to you?”
“Better you should stop waking people up and go home.”
“What?”
In order to be heard through the glass, she was half-shouting, but Jack didn’t want to wake Chloe. He put his mouth up to the narrow space where the doors joined. “Go home.”
It startled him when she put her mouth close to the same spot on the other side. “I need to get in there.”
“Yeah, sure.” You shouldn’t go opening doors if you didn’t know people.
“I have to leave him a note.”
“Try the post office.”
“You know what Rich says about you, huh? He says you ought to loosen up, quit kissing your wife’s ass.”
He took a step back from the glass. The girl tilted her head to look at him. The streetlight above her turned her hair lurid, ghostlike, and left her face featureless. “Oh come on, I was just messing with you. What do you care what he thinks anyway?”
“Why do you need to come inside if he’s not here?”
“I want to be here when he gets back. It’s important. Come on. I won’t ring your bell anymore but I’ll stay out here all night. Me and the muggers.”
He bet she would. She was that kind of nuts. He might have gone back to bed, let her take her chances, if it wasn’t for his own disquiet. He’d thought the night was over, and here it was still in process, as if he was now dreaming the fight with Chloe in some different script or permutation, and whatever he might do now was important.
The girl seemed to know he was wavering. “What are you afraid of, you think I’m going to shoot him or something? As if. Wouldn’t waste a bullet on him. Trap him, maybe, like the varmint he is. God, I’m kidding. You really do need to loosen up.”
From somewhere down the street came a commotion of screeching car tires and voices braying. They both looked toward it. “Are you gonna open this or what?”
Jack worked the bolt and held the door for her as she slipped in beneath his arm. “Thanks,” she said with enough of a sarcastic edge to indicate that it was about time. In the fuller light of the lobby she no longer looked menacing or hallucinatory, just an ordinary girl, something less than pretty, with a swagger and a smirk as self-conscious as a monocle.
They didn’t know how to manage looking at each other or not looking, talking or not talking, now that they were standing in the same space. The girl recovered first. “Right. I’ll just make myself at home.”
Jack motioned her away from his apartment door, down the hallway that led to the back door and alley. They passed Mr. Dandy’s door, closed and silent, though for all Jack knew she’d rung his buzzer too, and the old man was awake and listening. “What are you … ,” she began, but he shook his head and pointed. She rolled her eyes, either exasperated or pretending to be, and walked ahead of him. She dragged one leg; he remembered her limping. She wore another of her long, droopy skirts, and he wondered briefly if that was for some purpose.
There was a
backyard of sorts, a pocket-sized square of grass enclosed in a high board fence. Somebody, Mr. Dandy, probably, had planted hostas and lilies of the valley and a row of seeding lettuces around the borders. There was a cement walkway, a broom, and a hose neatly coiled on a reel. Two white plastic chairs were set out to enjoy the meager view. “Sit,” Jack told her.
She did so, although with no very good grace. “What did that crack about my wife mean?”
She shrugged. “I didn’t say it. Rich did.”
“Rich should mind his own goddamn business.” As always, he didn’t care to think about other people peering in at him, forming judgments.
“Yeah, he can kind of get to you, can’t he?” She lifted her head to gaze at the back of the building. Both Mr. Dandy’s and Mrs. Lacagnina’s darkened windows were crowded with half-seen objects wedged onto the sills and wadding the curtains. An electric fan, a vase empty of flowers, stack of newspapers, television antenna, pair of socks spread out to dry. All the debris of long tenancy pushing at the seams of their apartments.
The night was cool and the girl shivered inside her denim jacket, although she didn’t seem aware of doing so. “I don’t know, he thinks it’s funny that she’s always sending you up there to complain, it’s always she has to sleep, she has to work, she has a headache. He says she runs you.”
He didn’t respond. It served him right for asking in the first place. The girl leveled her stare at him. “My name’s Ivory, by the way.”
Maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t. It sounded too much like a made-up name, one of those things girls did to glamorize themselves. “It is,” she insisted. “God, I hate it when people get that look. Like Doreen or Heidi are supposed to be normal names?”
“I’m Jack.”
“I know. I saw it on the mailbox.”
“You’re a pretty observant bunch upstairs, aren’t you?”
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