City Boy

by Thompson, Jean

  So far he hadn’t been thinking of her body and its particulars. The question embarrassed him. “What do you usually do?”

  “I usually wait until it’s dark to do it the first time.”

  “I guess it’s up to you.”

  She shrugged and stood up to manage her skirt and underpants. She kept the long skirt wadded up against one side of her when she lay back down. “Well come on,” she said, mildly impatient.

  He was having trouble with the condom. Somebody should invent a spray-on model. The longer he had to work and fumble at it, the more desperate the whole business seemed, less an exercise of lust than of engineering, and when he finally got himself ready and positioned himself over her on his hands and knees, he had to think again about Spence and Chloe, get himself raging before he could push into her.

  It didn’t last long, and he didn’t try to do a good job of it. His body spasmed and everything left him, pleasure, thought, fury. The enormity of what he’d done was the only thing remaining.

  And yet it was all perfectly matter-of-fact. Their bodies came unstuck with the usual hideous plumbing noises. Ivory covered herself with her clothes before he could do more than register the memory of her thin, child’s body. Jack went into the bathroom to put his pants on. He felt dull and spent. He half-expected or hoped that she’d be gone by the time he returned, but she was stretched out on the bed, flexing her knee and then shaking the leg out again.

  “She’s not due home real soon, is she?”

  “She’s in New York.” He hadn’t meant to tell her. He hadn’t meant to avoid using Chloe’s name again, but so he did.

  “I thought you said she was at work. Never mind. I’ll go in a minute.”

  “Sure.” He didn’t want to lie down with her again so he stood looking into his closet, as if choosing a shirt.

  “She’s real beautiful.”

  He kept his back to her. “Thanks.”

  “I guess that’s why you’re so hung up on her.” Jack turned around then and she held up her hand. “Okay, you don’t want to talk about it. I’ll go in a minute, I just have to do this stretching stuff so my hip doesn’t cramp up.”

  “I’m sorry if I acted like a jerk about that.”

  “No biggie.”

  “I honestly wasn’t even thinking about it.”

  She was straining to adjust something along the length of her right side. “Yeah, don’t worry.”

  Jack found a shirt and put it on. He almost felt worse about the possibility that he’d hurt her feelings than about sleeping with her. So what was he trying to prove anyway? That he was a sensitive guy? That even if he engaged in joyless, get-even sex, he hadn’t lost his innate human qualities?

  Ivory swung her legs over the side of the bed. “Well I’d love to stay and chat, but I’ve gotta go to work.”

  Jack walked ahead of her to the front door. He opened it a crack to make sure Mr. Dandy wasn’t prowling the lobby, kept it open to discourage any fond-farewell scene. Not that he needed to worry. Ivory stopped just short of the door and punched him lightly in the stomach. “What does it take to cheer you up, huh?”

  He couldn’t think of any equally jaunty way to reply. He only shrugged, as if to say he didn’t know. Ivory said, “So we’re square now? You’re not gonna say anything to Rich?”

  “I wasn’t going to anyway.”

  Her braids had come loose and the escaped hair was damp and kinked, softening the line of her forehead. Her eyes widened and there was a moment when she was almost pretty, before her face twisted up again into a smirk. “So now he tells me,” she remarked, as if to an invisible onlooker. Then, to Jack, “Have a nice day.” She crossed the lobby and started up the stairs, waving her fingers over her shoulder, bye-bye.

  Nine

  From Chloe’s journal

  When I was six years old, Mom entered me in a contest, Little Miss Sparkle. She sent my picture in and I was chosen to be a finalist. I forget, or maybe I never knew, what kind of promotion the contest was tied into. Chamber of Commerce? Diamonds? Cleaning products? I imagine a bunch of advertising men shuffling through the photo entries, saying rude things about all the little girls who didn’t make the cut.

  “What’s a sparkle?” I asked Mom.

  “Something bright and shiny. When you sparkle, you look like this.” She made her smile big and white and hectic.

  We were in the car, driving downtown. I was wearing my red velvet Christmas dress. Earlier my mother had told me to Hold Still and make a kissing mouth while she dabbed and dotted at my face. My mother’s bathroom was like the laboratory of a wizard. There were lotions that smelled of coolness and flowers, and bath salts, chips of sea-foam glitter. There were colors in small glass bottles. I didn’t know the names of them, but I imagined I could taste them, like fruits. When she was finished with me, she sighed, “There’s my pretty girl,” and turned me round toward the mirror so I could grin at my new, lurid face.

  The rest I don’t remember as well. I was very young, after all, and those memories are like watching a movie with gaps and sudden zooms in and out. Mom held my hand as I trotted beside her through a big shiny echoing space. A hotel lobby? There were other mothers and other little girls all frilled and painted up, and I stared at them. They were pink powder puffs and yellow sugarplum fairies and blue satin princesses. There was a stink of hairspray and cologne. There was a stage, and a man with a microphone talking loudly.

  Then a light in my face and the man with the microphone squatting down to talk to me with his scary, unnatural enthusiasm, and my mother holding my hand and prodding me to answer. One little girl, one of the pink ones, wet her pants. There was a drumroll from the orchestra that suddenly materialized in my memory. “How about a big hand for our new Little Miss Sparkle!”

  It wasn’t me. It was a girl with bright auburn curls and her cheeks rouged up like apples. They went to put the crown on her—it was shiny, but I couldn’t tell you if it was made of rhinestones or aluminum foil—and she began screaming and flailing around. A lot of the other little girls were crying too, either because they were disappointed at losing, or because crying seemed like the thing to do just then. One of the mothers was crying. I wasn’t used to seeing grown-ups cry and it frightened me to see it, her face crumpling up like that.

  I didn’t cry. I hadn’t yet figured out that this was about winning and losing, pretty and prettier than.

  I think we’re all born perfect. It’s only later that we learn to be ugly, or stupid, or lazy, or whatever kind of crown other people put on our heads.

  Little Miss Sparkle kept shrieking. She hit some notes that approached dog range. Her crown cartwheeled away. She ripped the tablecloth from a banquet table and sent the dishes flying. She stuck the knives in her hair. She swallowed broken glass and spit it out like bullets. People screamed and ducked. The man with the microphone made the mistake of coming too close. She bit off his finger and decorated her white lace tights with stipples of his blood. Her mother said, “Lucinda Ann Evans, if you can’t take better care of your clothes, this is the last time I buy you anything nice.”

  In the car on the way home, Mom said, “Well. I’m sure if you’d won, you would have behaved yourself a lot better.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  She seemed to think I needed cheering up. “You know, it’s a very special thing, what you got to do today.”

  “Uh-huh.” I was kicking at the upholstered seat with my patent leather shoes. Maybe I looked disappointed, but I was lost in the wonderful thumping vibration I could make again and again.

  “Sometimes they’re looking for a certain type of girl. You just never know until you try. It’s not your fault.” But she gave the steering wheel a vicious jerk.

  Everybody has their own kind of trouble growing up. This was just the flavor mine came in.

  When we got home my dad said, in response to my mother’s wriggling eyebrows, “Why, don’t you look just beautiful, you look like a million bucks.” His tone made m
e uneasy. He reminded me of the man with the microphone.

  I rubbed at my face. The makeup felt greasy. I was glad when I could wash it off and change into my ordinary clothes. I was glad I was through with being pretty. It didn’t seem like the sort of thing that made anybody very happy.

  Ten

  Chloe came back from New York and everything was the same as before, except that now they waited for the next thing to happen.

  What? Chloe asked him. What is it? During a space of silence at the dinner table, or as they drove, or in bed before, during, or after sex. (Because they never stopped, even in their worst, angriest times, and this was either a sign of marital health, or of some relentless bodily imperative that had nothing to do with the two of them.) And Jack said, Nothing. Sometimes he was the one who asked, and Chloe the one who shrugged off the question and went on about her business. Nothing. Nothing. Jack hurt his mouth with smiling. His heart ticked, his brain spun. He wasn’t fooling anyone, he felt like one of those clocks with a glass case, all his inner workings visible. But neither of them was ready for a showdown.

  Jack stepped up his teaching schedule. It was easiest to spend less time at home. And the kids cheered him up, or at least distracted him. They were so fiercely contained in their own worlds, he had to take several steps out of himself just to meet them halfway. What did he know about being a black girlchild with her hair done up in a dozen bead-tipped braids, wearing a Baptist cross around her neck and a Starter jacket? What would it take for him to learn? What did he know about any childhood except the one he’d had? For that matter, how could he claim expertise in even his own life when it seemed to be galloping off in all directions. No wonder he’d stalled out as a writer. People thought you could just make everything up. But there were some things you had to know.

  The kids made fun of his name. They giggled and put their heads close together and made him rhyme with itch and bitch. They called him Little Britches, they called him the Big O. He allowed some of this, although he insisted that to his face they at least attempt his name. And whenever he stumbled over Javier or Laquanda or some other name and they indignantly corrected him, he said, mildly, that it was a sign of respect to call people what they wished to be called. He made his point. He watched their expressions turn inward, visibly learning.

  Maybe there were some things your own face wouldn’t tell you; somebody else had to see it for you. These days when Jack looked in a mirror he leered and jigged and mugged, like the kids in his classroom when they knew they were being watched. And Chloe asked, Why are you making that weird face, and he said he didn’t know what she meant, it was nothing.

  In some universe of French farce, husbands and wives always had lovers, it was understood. They had elegant conversations about it. It was all very blithe and civilized.

  Ivory hadn’t come around, either upstairs or downstairs, or at least Jack hadn’t seen her. It had been a couple of weeks now. Perhaps she was avoiding Brezak. Perhaps she was avoiding him. Whatever the reason, Jack was grateful. He had to wonder if he’d used her to strike back at Chloe, well of course he had. There were times he imagined himself saying to Chloe, You have somebody on the side, well so do I, now we’re even. There were other times he thought Ivory was exactly what kept him from saying anything, from some simple, righteous vengeance. It was his own guilt, or maybe something even less worthy, a wish that he might have slept with some other, prettier girl, or maybe he was only a coward.

  Then Chloe surprised him by suggesting they go away for a weekend.

  “What exactly did you have in mind?” Jack asked. Feeling his way. He had no idea what this meant.

  “As far north as we can get. You know. Piney woods. Mosquitoes. Birch-bark canoes. Taverns where they have stuffed deer heads and fish on the walls.”

  Jack thought briefly of Reg and his Wisconsin summers. He tried to match Chloe’s bright, determined tone. “Doesn’t really sound like your kind of vacation. The rustic stuff.”

  “Did I say rustic? No. More like, lodge. Lodge with a spa.”

  “What brought this on?”

  “Well, I got to go to New York, but you really haven’t had any kind of a trip …”

  Careful not to look at each other. “So anyway,” Chloe went on, her voice flattening a bit, downshifting, “I can only take a long weekend, I don’t get any real vacation time this first year, so this is probably the best I can do. If that sounds like anything you’d enjoy …”

  Jack wondered if Spence was going on vacation with his family somewhere, and Chloe felt aggrieved by it. Or was she going to break his damn-fool heart all over again, and take him back?

  He opted for French farce. “You, me, and the bears. Sounds idyllic.”

  “Forget bears. Zero bears.”

  Chloe had looked up some places on-line. She had printouts, rate quotes. There were pictures of chalets and knotty-pine interiors, sunsets over glassy lakes, happy vacationers picking berries, building campfires, hauling trophy fish out of foaming rivers. There were waitresses bearing trays of hearty north-woods fare, there was Paul Bunyan rendered in massive fiberglass. It was all a little corny, it all had the look of well-worn vacation country, generations of weary city families heading up to Minocqua or Lake Tomahawk. But what the hell. It was yellow August and Chicago baked in its own sweaty juices. It was bound to be cooler somewhere else, and besides, his wife was asking him to go away with her.

  They settled on a place with golf and tennis. Not that they really wanted to play golf or tennis, but it seemed a good socioeconomic indicator, just as water slides and go-carts suggested another kind of place. For extravagant credit card promises, they got a three-night reservation. Jack picked Chloe up early from work on a Thursday and they stopped at a rest area north of the city so she could change into shorts and a T-shirt. They watched corn and bean fields give way to pasture, hay fields, grazing black-and-white cows, red barns, the placid countryside of America’s Dairyland. “Vacation,” said Jack. “Vacation,” said Chloe.

  Chloe rolled down her window and let her hair whip around her face. “When’s the last time we went away like this? Just for fun.”

  He had to think. “Honeymoon.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope.”

  “New Orleans.”

  Jack nodded, keeping his eyes on the road. Chloe was silent as she calculated. “I guess you’re right. That’s sad.”

  “All work, no play. Tragic consequences.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean, tragic?”

  “Nothing,” he said heavily. “It was a witticism. An attempt.”

  “I don’t want to spend all weekend talking about stuff, okay? I want this to be a noncombat zone.”

  The highway signs promised places like Bear Creek, Shawano, Belle Plaine. Clouds as white and puffy as a child’s drawing hung in a crayon-blue sky. The horizon began to close in with marching woods. Jack wondered if Chloe had fallen asleep. But she stirred. “Did you make an appointment with what’s-her-name yet?”

  “I thought you said noncombat zone.”

  “We aren’t there yet.”

  “You’re pretending not to remember her name because you don’t like her.”

  “Well, did you?”

  “Not yet.”

  She yawned. “I don’t know if I can do another of those sessions. I think I’m through with all that sad-sack talk.”

  Jack said, “Well, I guess that’s good. It could be good. Depending on how you mean it.”

  He waited for her to answer but this time she really had fallen asleep.

  The resort was a snazzy new log construction designed to evoke historic lodges. Golf carts zipped over the last fairway. The parking lot was full of prosperous vehicles. There was an actual lake in the near distance. Inside, the lobby was blond wood and timbers and chandeliers made of antlers. Their room was grandly oversized, with a balcony that offered a view of the shoreline. They felt hopeful, and then some.

  They dropped t
heir bags and went out to sit on the deck. A waitress came to take their drink orders. Chloe asked for club soda. She said, “Oh go ahead, get a beer or something. I’m tired of watching you not drink.”

  Jack ordered a Leinenkugel. It sounded like something you ought to drink in Wisconsin. He said, “Now, that’s a lake.”

  “Very close to what I had in mind. Yes indeed.”

  The lake stretched out before them in a wide oval, gray at the dock just below where they sat, veined with blue and green farther out. The opposite shore was a third of a mile away. Toy houses lined the water’s edge and forested hills rose above them. The far ends of the oval were lost in the trees. A single powerboat buzzed across the lake’s surface. A tennis court not too far away sent out the friendly sounds of a ball traveling back and forth. The coming sunset filled the sky with stained-glass tints. It was as pretty a piece of cultivated nature as you could find within four hours’ driving distance.

  The waitress returned with their drinks. Jack said, “I have a question about bears.”

  “Just stay on the hiking trails and don’t throw away any food.”

  She left and Chloe said, “That was actually a little more information than I needed.”

  They raised their glasses and drank to the bears, and then again to avoiding bears. The sunset deepened. Jack asked Chloe if she was hungry and she said she wanted to lie down for a little first.

  “You feeling okay?”

  “Kind of draggy. I am a drag. Sorry.” There were patches of muddy skin beneath her eyes. When Chloe was overtired, her face took on a taut, stretched look, an unsettling skull-beneath-the-skin quality. “I think I just need a nap. Come get me when you want to eat.”

  “You need anything? Want me to come with?”

  But Chloe told him to stay put, she was the official drag here. Jack ordered another beer. He watched the sun touch the western edge of the lake, fire the water into opal and gold. The deck, and the lounge behind it, filled up with people coming in from their golf games or antiquing tours or other organized fun. For the most part they were older than him and Chloe. The resort’s prices were too steep for the young and struggling. The guests were Midwestern healthy, that is, well fed, sunburned, good-natured. They wore clothes that had been purchased specifically for vacations. Every one of them seemed to be in a fine mood. They were whooping it up. They were getting their money’s worth. Jack had to keep reminding himself of where he was. It was all too disorienting, as if he’d ended up in somebody else’s vacation by mistake.