City Boy

by Thompson, Jean

  Chloe wore her lightest summer suit, the gray. She carried a black briefcase and a slim black handbag. She was part of the purposeful going-home crowd, everyone weary and irritated and trying not to show it. The bus arrived in its own wind of exhaust and grit. Chloe got on and walked halfway down the aisle, balancing, swaying slightly, until she found a seat. The bus left the downtown precincts and bumped its way north to Clark. Chloe got off at her stop and walked the three blocks to the apartment, and by now there was a lagging, dragging quality to her walk, as if the weight or the heat of the day had finally worn her down.

  At dusk her bedroom light went on. The rest of the apartment stayed dark. Upstairs, Brezak’s shrouded windows began to glow. Just before the streetlights came on, a flock of dingy city birds, starlings, rose up chattering from someone’s backyard, like pepper thrown into the sky.

  A little after ten the bedroom light went out.

  Jack started the car and pulled away from his spot at the curb. It was the same rental car he’d acquired in Green Bay. No one here would recognize it. Chloe wouldn’t recognize it. He had spent the last three days following her as she came and went. He’d missed her return from Wisconsin. On one of his drive-bys their car wasn’t present; the next time it was. That disappointed him. He’d wanted to know the exact minute she walked in to find him gone.

  On Monday morning (and Tuesday and Wednesday mornings), Jack waited at the Dunkin Donuts across from the bus stop for Chloe to appear, walking alone, the first sight of her face and small shoulders. At evening rush hour he circled the city block that contained her building, desperate to be there when she came out, gunning the engine, swearing death to anyone in his way. He cruised ahead of her bus, cut through alleys to position himself to spy on her. He identified those parking spaces which, come nighttime, afforded the best view of the apartment windows. If he was lucky enough to find one, he parked and shut off the engine and settled in, sometimes for hours. There were times when he thought that people passing, people who lived facing the street, were taking notice of him, and then he started the car and drove off. He traced different patterns through the side streets, always bringing him within view of the apartment. It was amazing how quickly you could get good at this sort of thing. Yo ho! He was a pro. A pirate of the intersections.

  The first two nights he’d been on his own he’d paid for a room in a midtown businessman’s hotel, a utilitarian box with an air conditioner that roared on and roared off at regular intervals. On Monday he visited his broker, cashed in one of the Treasury bills, and set up a checking account at a new bank. He moved himself and his tatty belongings into a furnished month-by-month rental, a third-floor apartment in an Edge-water building that looked like a crime scene waiting to happen. Jack didn’t mind. It was close enough to his old neighborhood to suit his purposes.

  Except that his purposes changed from day to screwed-up day, or sometimes hourly. He was afraid he’d kill Chloe and Spence if he saw them together. He was afraid he wouldn’t kill them, would settle for offering up some really cutting remarks. He wanted to frighten Chloe and humiliate and punish her and then he wanted to forgive her and take her back again. He wanted to be a father to his child. He wanted the child to have never happened. His life both waking and sleeping had become a wheel that burned and turned and made a circuit of everything he felt, but always came back to rest on rage. He bought some cheap kitchenware and a lamp and a shower curtain for his new apartment. It felt like furnishing a prison cell.

  Each day (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday), once he knew Chloe was at work, he went back to the apartment and entered it. Already it seemed like a kind of museum, a place where a marriage had happened. He opened the mailbox and extracted anything that was his. He took a few things he didn’t think Chloe would notice: an extra can opener, lightbulbs, an old set of sheets. He prowled the rooms, looking for bodily secrets on refrigerator shelves and in the bathroom wastebasket. There were vitamins he didn’t remember on the kitchen counter. On her bedside table, a paperback book, The Physician’s Guide to Pregnancy. Within it were pictures of babies in different stages of being unborn. Tadpole, fish, space alien. It wasn’t a real baby yet. It hadn’t yet taken root in his mind.

  On Thursday he opened the apartment door to find one of the dining room chairs set in the entryway like a barricade. On the seat was an envelope with his name on it, written in Chloe’s pretty handwriting.

  “The jig is up,” Jack said aloud. He sat down on the couch with it. Chloe had written:

  Jack:

  I know you’ve been here. Sooner or later we have to talk. I understand that you’re upset and you have issues

  “Issues,” said Jack to his invisible witness. “Buddy, we are lousy with issues.”

  but we have to think about the baby. We can’t afford to be selfish. Please call me here or at work, or just let me know you’re all right.

  Chloe

  “Selfish,” Jack told the witness. “Now there’s an interesting word choice.” But he went to the desk and picked up the phone. He wanted to talk to her, even if it didn’t go well. He’d been too long without talking. Words were beginning to back up in him, go sour from disuse.

  Before he tried Chloe’s work number, it occurred to him to press redial. The phone buzzed and a woman answered, “Mr. Spencer’s office.”

  Jack hung up. He stood for a moment, watching an eddy of dust drift and settle in a shaft of sun.

  There were still plenty of his clothes in the bedroom closet, clothes he hadn’t wanted to bother with. He chose a white dress shirt and a pair of old khakis. Unfolded them and laid them out on his side of the bed. Arms bent at the elbows, legs in an attitude of casual repose. A scarecrow. The husband who wasn’t there.

  He hurried to leave before he could change his mind and put the clothes away. It was one more childish, spiteful thing. And he was, by God, going to keep right on doing them.

  He’d just stepped out into the lobby and pulled the door shut behind him when he heard feet on the stairs above his head, Crap, too late to make it out the front door or unlock the apartment. A pair of legs came into view. They wore teal blue capri pants and straw sandals. A moment later the upper, teal blue half of Mrs. Palermo appeared.

  “Is that you?” she said. “Wait, don’t tell me. Jack.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Thank God. I can still remember a name once in a while.”

  “Sure.” Then, because she wasn’t going away, “How’ve you been?”

  “Oh I’m fine. But Mom’s not so hot. Her blood’s bad.”

  Jack waited for that to make sense. Nothing came to him.

  “It’s her heart. It’s not pumping enough oxygen into the blood, or not pumping fast enough, one of those.”

  “Is that, I mean it sounds …” It was harder than he would have thought to talk. He was rusty.

  “She needs a thingamafotchie. Pacemaker. That’s the next big fight. You say ‘operation,’ she acts like you’re measuring her for a shroud.” Mrs. Palermo had been rummaging one-handed in her tapestry bag, for cigarettes, Jack guessed. Now she stopped, moved a step closer. In the watery light of the lobby, Jack had an impression of teal blue lipstick, though he knew that couldn’t be so. She said, “You feeling all right?”

  “Me?” He spoke as if there might be some other self standing next to him. “Fine.”

  “You look, I don’t know. Shady.”

  “I’m shady?” He tried to make a joke of it.

  “Shaky, honey. I said shaky. Like you’re coming down with something.”

  Jack allowed as how he might be feeling a little off. He was relieved not to be accused of shadiness, just as he’d been relieved when Mrs. Palermo had turned out not to be Ivory. But now that was dissipating and the clamor of his life was reasserting himself and he was anxious to be gone. “Well …”

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do about her. Maybe find her a Sicilian doctor. A deaf Sicilian doctor so they have even more in common. Some
body to make her understand …”

  Mrs. Palermo shook her head. Beneath the black, teased carapace of her hair Jack could see her white scalp. Her voice thickened. “She’s the only mother I’ll ever have.”

  “Sure. It’s tough.”

  “My goddamn brother. I guess he’ll come to the funeral.”

  “Of course he will,” said Jack idiotically. He felt both unable to leave the spot where he stood and unable to stay, leaden, itchy, complicated, undone by the simple fact of someone else’s trouble. He’d stalled out, forgotten what it was you did or said in any such human episode. He might have kept standing there like a man doing a bad imitation of a mime if Mrs. Palermo hadn’t sighed, finally found her cigarettes, shrugged.

  “It’s in God’s hands. What else can you do.”

  “Amen,” said Jack, hoping he sounded reverent instead of snippy.

  Mrs. Palermo didn’t seem to notice one way or the other. “Look, I have to go. I actually have this whole other house I live in, and three kids, and a husband, and a refrigerator that needs filling. You still have my number, don’t you? Call me if you notice anything. Anything at all.”

  “I honestly don’t see that much of your mother.” Unless he wanted to add her to his stalking list.

  She waved this off. “It’s still a help.” She’d gotten past her emotion, turned brisk again. “I’ll be back in a couple days.”

  “Could I ask you … Does she still talk about your father?” His face burned. He should have kept on not talking. “I was just wondering.”

  “Oh, once in a while. Usually when I’m doing something she doesn’t like.” Mrs. Palermo held up her cigarette. “Dad doesn’t approve of me smoking. So I’ve been told. Who knows. Somewhere inside her head, the way she lives makes sense. I have to run, my son’s got an acupuncture appointment for his pitcher’s elbow. Don’t laugh. That stuff really works.”

  Jack said good-bye and loitered for a moment near the mailboxes so as not to have to walk outside with her. When he did open the door, he took two steps on the sidewalk and came face-to-face with Ivory.

  He almost yelped, swallowed it down. She recovered herself more quickly. “Well look who’s here,” she said, one eyebrow raised in sophisticated mock astonishment.

  Jack considered saying Sure, I live here, a non-joke she wouldn’t get anyway, settled for Yeah, uh-huh. She peered up at him. “You look seriously crapped out.”

  By now he’d even run out of monosyllables. Ivory continued. “What’s with the not shaving? And the hair?”

  He wasn’t aware there was anything wrong with his hair. She reached up and tugged at it. “A little scruffy.”

  He didn’t want anyone touching him. He said, “I guess I need cleaning up.”

  “More like you need to be run through a car wash.”

  She was giving him a merry look. Jack supposed he should be grateful that he apparently looked like shit. It provided a topic of conversation when they might otherwise have had to consider different matters. Then Ivory’s gaze shifted to high beam. Jack turned away.

  She said, “What. What is it.”

  And he was supposed to say, Nothing. He couldn’t get his mouth around it. He felt like some ungainly, flightless bird, too stupid to run, speak, save himself. He shook his head. Every part of him shook.

  Ivory said, “Come on, let’s get out of here.” Jack looked down at his feet. They seemed far away. “What did you do, murder somebody? Let’s go.”

  If she noticed that his car was different she didn’t say anything, only asked, “You okay to drive?”

  “Yes, Christ,” he muttered, trying to nudge out of the parking space. He was jammed in, had to shift from drive to reverse, reverse to drive, gaining an inch at a time, bumper grinding against bumper, stopping for oncoming traffic. The tires locked up and he had to start all over and maybe he wasn’t okay to drive but it was too late to say so now. Ivory wasn’t offering up commentary, just sitting with her knees drawn up and her skirt tented over them, as before, looking out the passenger window as if there was something absorbing out there, and he was grateful for her silence, even as her very presence unnerved him.

  Finally he managed it, achieved forward motion. For the ten minutes it took him to get to Edgewater neither of them spoke, and when Jack parked the car Ivory said only, “What’s this place?”

  “Where I live now.”

  She held her tongue, noticing everything. The grimed, barred windows, the pile of pee-stained newspapers, the tilting, funhouse staircase. When they reached the third-floor landing Jack opened the series of locks designed to inconvenience everyone except burglars. Ivory followed him inside. There was a living room/kitchen combination with a table and chairs, a sad couch, and a coffee table. Jack waited for her to say something snide about it. The place begged for sarcasm.

  But she only limped over to the couch and fell back on it. A small cloud of dandrufflike particles rose from the cushions. “Killer stairs.”

  “Oh. Sorry.” He hadn’t considered the stairs and her leg. It shamed him that he hadn’t thought of it.

  “Got anything to drink around here?”

  Jack’s meager refrigerator produced a bottle of iced tea. He split it between two glasses. He didn’t want to sit next to her on the couch. That would have brought them too close. He drew up one of the dinky kitchen chairs. Ivory said, “You all right now? I thought you were having some kind of fit.”

  He drank his tea, wished there was more of it. “I’m fine.”

  “Except for living in a shithole you’re fine.”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “I bet it’s not, Orlovich. I bet it’s real short and to the point.”

  “Don’t call me that. Jack. My name’s Jack.”

  “Excuse me, Jack. You going to tell me? She kick you out?”

  “I don’t really want to talk about it.”

  “Sure you do. You’re about to bust wanting to talk about it.”

  She wiggled her eyebrows, pale little stubs, blond caterpillars. She was slouched inside her clothes. He found it difficult to look directly at her, remember the thin, damaged body beneath those cotton layers, the further trouble he’d made for himself. But because of that shared trouble, she was the only person he could tell.

  “She was screwing around on me. I found out a while back. Or I wasn’t sure. I called her on it. I made her admit it.”

  The eyebrows reached the top of their arc and stayed up. “Who’s the guy?”

  “Her big fat sack of shit boss.”

  “That is so bogus.”

  “Do you know what that word really means? Or are you just using it to mean something else?”

  “Whatever, don’t tell me the worst problem you have right now is vocabulary. So what did you do, did you do anything to her?”

  “We had a fight. What do you mean, do anything? Like try and blow her up? Christ.”

  “Hey.”

  “That’s almost funny. No, it is funny. Fucking hilarious.”

  “No it’s not.”

  Jack shook his head. He didn’t want to say any more. He didn’t want to think about what his face must look like.

  “Hey, come here.”

  She scooted forward to the edge of the couch, wrapped her legs, in their long skirting, around his knees. Well why not. Why the hell not. He hitched himself toward her on the kitchen chair, bent over to bring his face close to hers. Her energetic mouth and tongue sought him out. This time he wanted it to be about something besides spite and bad feeling. He owed that much to her, and to himself.

  They were in the bedroom. Jack had already undressed and kicked his clothes into a corner of the uncarpeted floor, the girl had, as before, bundled her big skirt around her leg and was waiting for him, her arms over her head, flattening her child’s breasts still further, when Jack said, “I can’t do this.”

  “I’d say you can.” She meant his erection.

  “No condoms.”

  She sighed. “Some
bachelor pad this is. Look, it’s all right without them.”

  “No it’s not.”

  “I honestly don’t have anything vile. And you could pull out beforehand. It’ll work.”

  “No.”

  She propped herself up on one elbow, leaned over him so the limp fringe of her hair grazed his throat. “You want me to take care of you?”

  He nodded and closed his eyes. It was not possible to pretend that none of this was happening.

  When she had finished with him and his breathing was rolling downhill and his heart was once more beating back inside his chest, he opened his eyes and said, “Good Lord.”

  “That was all right, then?”

  “More than all right. Good Lord.”

  This seemed to please her. She wrapped herself in the stiff, cheap blanket that still smelled of its plastic packaging, and hiked herself up to lie next to him. “See? Don’t I know how to cheer you up?”

  “Yeah. Look—”

  She wouldn’t let him apologize. “It’s all right. Some other time. I don’t mind. It’s nice to know there’s one thing I’m good at.”

  “You shouldn’t run yourself down like that.”

  “Well gee, Your Highness. I’ll try harder to keep those laughs coming.”

  Through the opened window came the filtered sounds of distant street repair, jackhammering and the thunder of heavy equipment. Some previous tenant had left a Japanese-style paper lantern over the ceiling light fixture. It was pale green with a bamboo pattern. Only now did he realize it was the same lantern that hung in Ivory’s kitchen and had thrown its green light over a scene much like this one. This struck him as meaningful, one of those weird little cosmic interstices that had to be significant in some way he hadn’t yet figured out. He said, “Chloe’s pregnant.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Those laughs just keep on coming.”

  “So …”

  “I don’t know if it’s mine. She says it is. Yeah. Like I can trust her on that.”

  Ivory was silent. He’d been whining. He could hear the echo of his own weak, aggrieved voice. How much more worthless could he be. Then Ivory put her hands on either side of his face and kissed him.