City Boy

by Thompson, Jean

“Look, I’m just going to sit out here, and if you’re gonna be hostile you can leave.”

  It would have made sense to go back inside, lie down next to Chloe, and let this odd girl lurk in the dark, if that was what she wanted. He was so tired but there was a tough knot of muscle lodged under one ear, the start of a headache, and enough irritation and unease to keep him from going back to sleep anytime soon. There wasn’t anyone he could tell about Chloe. He didn’t have those kinds of friends anymore, friends you could unload on about anything, or maybe he did, a couple of them, except they lived in different time zones and anyway, there would be something ungentlemanly and disloyal about making such calls. Pretending he was concerned about Chloe when what he really wanted was to rage and complain. She ran him. She ran him and he couldn’t help but let her. He said to the girl, “You want something to drink, wine or—”

  “Yes.”

  Chloe was still so soundly asleep that she didn’t stir even when he sat down on the bed next to her and touched her shoulder. “I’m going out back for a while. I’ll be right outside.” He could at least say he’d tried to tell her in case she woke up and missed him and there was some further scene. He doubted it; she was snoring into her pillow. It was either the alcohol or perhaps she’d taken one of the prescription sleeping pills she wasn’t supposed to take if she drank, and now he’d have to worry about that too because she couldn’t be trusted to take care of herself.

  There was an opened bottle of red wine on the kitchen counter, the wine in it level with the bottom of the neck. Jack stared at it, unable to remember when this second bottle had been uncorked. He found two plastic glasses, his sweatshirt, and in the front closet, an old striped blanket.

  When he went back outside, Ivory had positioned herself so she could see the length of the building’s hallways, and whoever might come through the front door. Jack handed her the blanket and she gave him a sharp, suspicious look, which Jack was later to interpret as disbelief that anyone might do something nice for her. “Thanks.”

  “Welcome.” He poured out the wine and gave her one of the glasses. She sniffed at it, tasted it by extending her tongue, like a cat drinking milk. “I can’t ever drink a whole lot. It makes my face turn red, I’m allergic or something. But I need to take the edge off, you know?”

  “I don’t guess you’d care to tell me …”

  She was busy draping the blanket around her knees. “What?”

  “Never mind.”

  “About him? Rich? He’s a little shit.”

  Jack said nothing. He wondered if she meant it, or if it was just the kind of thing girls said when love turned inside out on them. Ivory took another tiny sip of wine. “Is my face getting red?”

  “I don’t think so. I can’t tell.” It was unevenly dark in the yard. The sky above had the fizzing quality of a television turned to a blank channel. Its color was a dulled, meaty pink. It was never entirely dark anywhere in the city. There was always the reflected light of a thousand thousand mercury vapor street lamps, of car headlights and searchlights and skyscrapers. Babylon. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen stars, or even the moon. In his present state of mind this seemed sad, even desolating, a sign of how wrong his life had gone without his noticing.

  Ivory was prattling on. “Maybe it’s only the cheap stuff I’m allergic to, would that make sense? Those big jugs of cheap stuff? Once I swear my tongue started itching. But this isn’t bothering me, I think because it’s quality. You guys have money, I bet.” She waited. “So do you?”

  Jack roused himself. “That’s really kind of nosy.”

  “Well so is asking me about my love life, don’t you think?”

  He said, neutrally, “We can buy a bottle of good wine now and then.” In fact they both were and were not wealthy. When they’d gotten married, Jack’s father had transferred over to him some Treasury bills and bonds, with the understanding that they were meant to hold on to these assets, be prudent, reinvest the dividends. In time, as life events, that is, children, accrued, there might be additional gifts. Down the road, an inheritance. But for now Chloe had her school loans to repay, and they had a budget like anyone else. While it would be embarrassing to ask his parents for money, and his father would say sour things about it, there was money available if they really needed it. He’d never known it not to be, he had never had to live without its presence backing him up. He guessed that to someone like this girl, the things they took for granted would be beyond reach. He felt irritated, as if she had accused him of something. He said, “Okay, I’m sorry if I asked you a personal question. I thought you might want to talk about it. My mis-take.”

  “You mean you wanted to know the horrible details. You were hoping they’d be horrible.”

  “Just one thing. If you hate him so much, why come around here?”

  “God you are so clueless,” Ivory said. “You should go on game shows, be the one who makes everybody else feel smarter.”

  “And you can go on and make them feel nicer.”

  That stopped her. They sat in silence long enough for Jack to think they were through talking, and sooner or later one of them, him, probably, would get up and leave and that would be the end of it. She said, “It’s so he can’t pretend I don’t exist.”

  “I’m sorry if that’s what he’s doing.”

  “I don’t understand how people can all of a sudden shut you off. Shut themselves off. It’s unnatural.”

  No, it was entirely natural. He understood it perfectly. When he was younger he’d done it himself more than once. You got tired of a girl for whatever reason, or sometimes for no reason. And because you didn’t want to admit you were fickle or irrational or shallow, you simply ignored her. At some point there might have to be a conversation. Often enough the girl figured it out on her own and ignored you right back. It was a crude system but it got the desired results. At least as long as everybody played by the same rules. He said, “I don’t suppose you want any advice.”

  “No, but you’re going to give me some anyway.”

  “Find something else to do. This is a waste of your time.” As far as he was concerned, the kid would be a waste of anyone’s time. Love, go figure.

  She muttered that it was her time to waste. “Fine,” said Jack. “But I guarantee this isn’t going to end up the way you want it to.”

  “Well maybe you don’t know what I want.”

  That sounded like bravado to him, shaky bravado, but he let it pass. He heard tears in her voice, and beneath that, a layer of something stubborn, fey, reckless that might break through to the surface and produce crying or worse. “How old are you?”

  She consulted her glass of wine. “Twenty-one.”

  “Uh-huh. I mean really.”

  “Nineteen. Not like it’s any of your business.”

  “Don’t you think that’s a little young to be so caught up in the whole hopeless romance-stalker thing?”

  “No. I think it’s exactly the right age.”

  He tried again. “You have a home? Somebody who might be worried about you being out all night?”

  “Look, I’ve got my own place. Maybe you’d think it’s a dump, but it’s mine. I have a job, I pay my own bills. I take care of myself. So you don’t have to act like I’m some waif. “ She took a pack of cigarettes out of her jacket and lit one.

  “You shouldn’t smoke.”

  “If I get cancer, I get cancer.”

  “Nice attitude.”

  She blew smoke in a thin stream, ignoring him.

  “What’s the matter with your leg?”

  “What?”

  “I noticed you had a limp.”

  “Yeah, my pelvis is fucked up.”

  “Oh, that’s—”

  “I’m real used to it. I was in an accident when I was a little kid, it never healed right. There’s this place on my hip where there’s no bone and the skin just hangs. You want to see? It’s kind of interesting, in a gross way.”

  “No thanks.” />
  “You were trying to that first night. Remember? You were scoping me. But hey, that was before you knew I was a cripple.”

  “Cripple, what kind of talk is that.”

  “But you were, weren’t you.”

  “All right, maybe so. But I don’t think it means I should be doing it now.” He felt embarrassed, he wanted some logical exit from the conversation, wasn’t finding one.

  She seemed to feel she’d caught him in some squeamishness that gave her an advantage. “Yeah, my whole leg is real gnarly. But you know what, you learn to stare stuff like that right down. My nickname in school was Swamp Thing. Because I walked crooked, worse than I do now, and I was dorky anyway. You get so shit people say doesn’t bother you. It rolls right off. So don’t think you can lay your Big Brother wisdom on me that’s supposed to make me behave like you think I should. ’Cause all I hear you saying is Swamp Thing, Swamp Thing, Swamp Thing.”

  “It’s a pretty name.”

  “What is?”

  “Ivory.”

  Another round of silence. Jack shifted his weight in the chair. His brain was still sending out sparks of static and agitation, but his body had begun to melt down into a deep, muscular tiredness. He said, “I had a big fight with my wife tonight.”

  Her cigarette flared as she took a last drag and stubbed it out. Her light hair turned toward him, a milky spot in the gloom. “Care to say what about?”

  “I don’t know what it was about.” Or it was about the fear he’d always had but refused to acknowledge, his own crippled part that he stubbornly pretended was invisible: that he loved Chloe more than she would ever love him. He stood up. “I have to go to bed. Will you be okay out here?”

  “Sure.”

  He hesitated. “Promise me I won’t be sorry I let you in. That you’re not going to set the place on fire, anything like that.”

  “Don’t worry.” She sounded tired also. “I probably won’t even talk to him. Thanks. For the wine and all.”

  “If you’re not going to talk to him—”

  “I just need to be here. I can’t be anyplace else. It doesn’t have to make sense to you. No offense, but I think I want to be alone right now.”

  Jack left her sitting there and let himself into his apartment, and into his bed again, where Chloe turned toward him in her sleep and pressed herself against him. She was warm from the bed and sleep had soothed the unhappiness in her so she breathed calmly, and her hair smelled clean and he thought he understood the girl outside better than she would have imagined. If you were sad and in love, there was only one place you had to be.

  He woke up early, the morning still gray, and walked out to the backyard. The grass was dank with dew and a rag of spiderweb in a corner of the fence was etched in dripping silver. The striped blanket was folded neatly on a chair and the girl was gone.

  Four

  Today Jack was teaching social studies, the Westward Expansion, to a class of South Side junior high schoolers. O Pioneers! O Sacajawea and the Gold Rush and the Alamo! Like they cared. It was summer school, make-up classes for kids who had already sunk to the bottom of the heap. None of them wanted to be here, why would anyone? Only the Alamo excited any interest. It had drama, and teams you could root for. The Mexican kids in the class were all for Santa Ana while the black kids thought Jim Bowie was pretty cool on account of the knife. Yeah, but Santa Ana capped Jim Bowie’s ass. Yeah, but they was so lame. It took thirty or forty of em. Ol Jim cut em up. Bullshit, he was just hidin in the house. Want no house, was a fort. He was hidin, he was pussy. Was not. Was too. He dead pussy. Santa Ana took him out. Well Santa Ana be dead too.

  Jack intervened, steered them back to maps and border disputes, and the class resumed its listless inattention. He was just another white guy come to tell them things they didn’t need to know. What use was the westward expansion to them? The gold was long gone and the land claimed, with no place in it for them. What use was history itself, since everything had been decided before they were born?

  The weather had turned hot and the classroom had no air-conditioning, only a couple of fans stirring the heat and making enough noise that Jack had to pitch his voice at a half shout to be heard. The students slumped over their desks or stared out the windows. The playground outside was sun-blasted asphalt that could have served as the pavement of hell, surrounded by chain link. Beyond that, cars moved slowly through the glaze of heat, past the ordinary ugliness of laundromats and check-cashing stores and whatever it was they sold behind those barred and grated storefronts. Billboards advertised Empleo Avisos and Fast Credit. Gardens of broken glass grew in the vacant lots. Some catastrophe had left a single wall of a brick building standing like one of those desert-rock formations that are given picturesque names. Children died on such streets. You read the newspaper stories, you were shocked by them, except that it happened too often to be truly shocking. Jack thought, If I was one of these kids, and this was what I saw every day, would I care that there was such a thing as Manifest Destiny, or the Northwest Passage, or anything else I read in a book?

  He didn’t know and he wouldn’t have the chance to find out. He was only a substitute, here for a week to replace some luckless woman who’d broken both feet getting out of a bathtub, an accident he didn’t want to try and visualize. He wouldn’t be here long enough for any of these kids to learn, let alone remember, his name. He wrote words no one read, he stood in classrooms and spoke about the dead past to children who had already stopped tracking their futures. He felt disconnected from some important part of life itself, or perhaps it was only from his own life. He said, “Getting back to the Alamo …”

  That evening he asked Chloe, “Do you want to start a family?”

  “Now what brought that on?”

  “I don’t know. Does it have to be something? Can’t it just be biology?

  Like salmon spawning.”

  “Salmon.”

  “Well do you?”

  “You picked a funny time to ask.” They were in the car, driving to dinner with friends. Traffic nudged along. Radiators labored. The temperature that day had reached ninety. By now it had slipped back a couple of notches, but a layer of gray humidity had settled in. Chloe had her compact out and was trying to put on makeup. The air conditioner blew a thin, inadequate stream over their knees.

  “Just think about it. We can talk later.”

  “I thought we decided this already. I thought we were going to wait five years.” Chloe scrutinized her lip line, made some tiny adjustment, then snapped the compact shut and gave him a skeptical, I-dare-youto impregnate-me glance.

  “You know why I’m bringing this up now? So you have to listen. Unless you want to get out and run through traffic.”

  “Very sneaky.”

  “We didn’t really decide, we said we’d decide later. Five years. I don’t know where you get that.”

  “Because in five years I should have a track record at the bank, or wherever I end up working. I can take a leave without doing a lot of damage. I’ll be thirty-one, that’s not so old. What’s the big rush?”

  A car pulled up next to them at a light, speakers turned up so high that even through the sealed windows they heard boom and feedback. The glass rattled. Jack supposed they should be glad that H.P.R.B. wasn’t into rap. He couldn’t explain to Chloe why the idea of children had struck him with such force. There was some need or lack in him he hadn’t suspected. He was a little embarrassed, but secretly happy. He waited for the rapmobile to pull past them before he answered. “I just want to be able to talk about it. I really want kids, I want to make plans. Buy little rubber footballs, things like that.”

  “What if we have a girl?”

  “I’m still getting her a football.”

  “You don’t even like football, dope. I want kids too. Just not next week, okay?” Chloe reached over and took a swipe at his hair. “This is really kind of cute of you. Daddy.”

  “Mommy.”

  They smiled at each oth
er, then Jack turned his attention back to driving. It was a few days after their quarrel. Things were going better. They were both making an effort. Jack had brought up therapy, in a tentative, roundabout way, hedging more than he’d planned, but at least he’d come out with it, and Chloe said maybe it wasn’t a bad idea. She was under a lot of stress at work, she could use somewhere to dump it besides on him, poor old Jack. Poor old Jack was glad she’d been receptive, although he didn’t think she’d actually gotten around to calling for an appointment. In the new, sunny atmosphere of the last few days, it didn’t seem quite as urgent. He supposed Chloe was right, there was nothing urgent about children either, except that he wanted to try on the idea, imagine his life opening out into this new country.

  He merged onto the Eisenhower and pointed the car westward, squinting against the sun, which was balanced on the horizon like an elongated red egg. The people they were going to see lived in the suburbs, in Elmhurst. They were Chloe’s friends, a woman she’d been in the M.B.A. program with, and the husband. Jack supposed that no matter how long he and Chloe were married, they would always be her friends, not his. Like certain pieces of furniture, some friends resisted joint ownership.

  The woman’s name was Frances and her husband was Reginald. Fran and Reg. Fran worked for American Express in some corporate capacity. Reg sold air-purification systems, fancy, hi-tech machinery that pulverized odors and used electrostatic filtration and ionization to zap bacteria, dust mites, and anything else that you’d been breathing all your life and which hadn’t killed you yet. Chloe had been Fran’s maid of honor at their wedding, as Fran, later, had been Chloe’s. The two of them gossiped on the phone and met for lunch downtown and compared notes about their jobs and, Jack was sure, husbands. That was all fine except that every so often the women felt it necessary to mount a full-scale dinner offensive between the couples. Jack was resigned to this even though it meant he spent a lot of time paired off with Reg, watching off-brand sports like hockey or auto racing, or hearing about high-energy, virus-killing fields. Tonight was the first time since Jack and Chloe’s move to the city that they’d all gotten together. At least it was a weeknight and they couldn’t stay late. Jack had encouraged the idea of a weeknight.