City Boy

by Thompson, Jean

  Jack stopped. He hated the sound of his voice. Its weak and whiny edge. As if even killing a man wouldn’t keep him from being pitiful and aggrieved.

  Spence spoke as if he had a mouthful of gravel. “They’ll find you. Police.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe I’m just another one of those unknown intrud-ers.” Police weren’t anything he could get his mind around right now. Police were something on television. “By the way, I got the address from your wife. If you do pull through this, you might want to bring home flowers.”

  “Last chance.”

  “Oh, I don’t know much about these medical things. You might be able to hang on for a good long while yet. Depends on, is this your basic ‘massive heart attack,’ like guys your age seem to—”

  “Last chance for you. Not do this.”

  “We’re about out of chances here. You might have noticed.”

  “Kill me kill you.”

  For a moment he wasn’t even sure Spence had said anything. His ears filled with a drumming sound, like water from a high-pressure hose. He shook his head clear. “I don’t think you’re in a position to kill anybody, sport.”

  “You kill you.”

  “Shut up, man.”

  Spence looked bad. Not as bad as Mr. Dandy maybe, but Mr. Dandy had already been dead. If he stayed he was going to have to watch that part. He should just go. He kept expecting to hear the buzzer, Chloe. He’d let her in and walk away. Leave the front door open, let her find Spence, scream, see what her lying self had accomplished. What it all came down to. A busted heart and a face turned to gristle. He wished it was over. The whole stupid woeful deal. His own stupid life. He pulled the phone out of his pocket. The shell too. Balanced them. Guess which hand?

  Spence watched him from the floor. His tongue protruded, thick and dry looking. Jack went into the kitchen, ran water in a glass, came back and squatted down next to Spence, put the glass to his mouth. Spence drank. The water in the glass came away tinted pink. Spence’s eyes bulged. He should go now. Let it all be over. Jack said, “Look at it this way. If I hadn’t come along, you probably would have blown out your heart valves in the middle of sex. Very embarrassing.”

  Spence didn’t answer. Jack wished he hadn’t said anything. His words were all spite and cheap shots, when he’d meant them to come out cold and righteous. He’d lost some advantage. He’d already lost Chloe. When she’d walked out of the house this morning, she’d still been his wife, and now she wasn’t, whether she knew it yet or not.

  Jack eased himself down on the floor next to Spence. His legs felt weak, either from the ebb of adrenaline or the last pulse of fever. Spence took no notice of him. His eyes were closed. Maybe he was already dead. No, there was air in him still. It visibly inflated his throat and chest. Waxy goose bumps stood out on the skin of his arms. Jack wondered what time it was, how long since Spence had been stricken. When you had a heart attack, you were supposed to take an aspirin, he remembered, although he’d never been sure why. Spence loved Chloe. He said so. If he died, no one would be left to love her.

  He tried to remember loving Chloe. He had to reach deep down for it. That beautiful, aggravating girl who’d walked out of a classroom without once looking his way. He hadn’t loved her then but he’d wanted to. He’d made a space for her in his imagination and the actual woman had come to occupy it little by little.

  It was a space he’d ripped wide open. He tried to picture it, a room like a heart or a heart like a room, something you could close off. “Hey,” he said to Spence. “You still here?”

  Spence didn’t answer. A pulse skittered in his temple, a rabbit twitching. He wondered if Chloe loved Spence, if they told each other that, I love you love you love you too. He tried to hurt himself with thinking it but nothing came. There was an end to everything. Jack picked up the phone, pressed 911, told the dispatcher that an ambulance was needed and where.

  He put the phone back in its cradle, set the lamps and the furniture to rights. Spence was still breathing, eyes closed, dreaming of pain. Jack waited until he heard sirens. When the buzzer sounded he pressed the release. He stepped outside to the hallway, leaving the apartment door open, and took the elevator down. Through the metal cage and shaft he heard the commotion of feet on the stairs, voices and radio chatter, weirdly close and echoing but invisible, like ghosts.

  The paramedics had left the front door propped open. Chloe was just then stepping beneath the awning. Jack saw her before she saw him. When she’d left this morning he’d been asleep. She wore her black suit with a white blouse. The awning lit her with filtered sunlight. There was a moment when he was able to take her in, her pretty, blooming mouth, the way her eyebrows worked as she considered the ambulance, how she stood up tall and straight in her high heels, as if there would always be someone to watch her.

  She saw Jack and yelped, a tiny sound that extinguished itself. Jack brushed past her. The street was still quiet. No crowd, idle or curious or alarmed, had gathered to see what the ambulance was about. It was as if this kind of thing happened every day.

  Afterward

  From California, Jack checked the Tribune obituaries on-line. Spence’s wasn’t among them. That was how Jack knew he had not died. He didn’t try to find out anything else, and no other news reached him. Nobody came after him with an arrest warrant. They must have been glad to see the last of him, and left it at that.

  He’d flown into LAX and called his parents from the airport. “Taking a few personal-leave days,” he told them. He didn’t offer to explain any further and he must have looked so alarming that they didn’t press him. He slept for most of three days in his old bedroom with its bookshelves of boys’ adventure books and closet full of swampy tennis shoes. On the third day his mother asked him, with painful tact, how much longer he thought he’d be staying. Jack said he didn’t know. He called an old high school friend in Huntington Beach and arranged to move into his spare room.

  The friend got him a job at the same place he worked, a small firm that produced and sold industrial videos. Jack learned the basics of production costs and inventory, rewrote brochures, did a little sales repping. It wasn’t a job he’d imagined himself doing, but then, he had not been able to imagine most jobs. After work he and his friend and one or two others from the office might go out for beers, or else they went home and watched Lakers games or rented movies.

  The longer Jack went through the motions of a normal, undesperate life, the more outlandish the last few months seemed. He didn’t speak much about his marriage and for the most part his friends behaved as if he’d been gone on a not very interesting vacation. They knew that most married people got divorced eventually. His friends were casual about work and serious about fun, about music and skiing and mountain climbing and working out. This cheerful pursuit of shallowness as an end in itself was something Jack had always professed to hate about California life, but now he appreciated its ease.

  He bought a three-year-old Jeep Grand Cherokee and spent his weekends driving the coast. Once he and his friends went to Mexico, fished and surfed and built bonfires on the beach. The moon turned the sand blue-white and the ocean to crumpled silver. Jack, drunk, tried to call Chloe but the call wouldn’t go through. He spoke to the rolling ocean instead, told Chloe how he was through with her, with loving her, he’d come out on the other side of it and soon it would no longer be necessary for him to want to tell her so.

  There was a conversation with his parents. He said nothing about Spence and nothing about the baby. He told them that he and Chloe had been having problems and had come to a parting of the ways. Jack’s father, no doubt cautioned in advance by his mother, said only that he’d never thought it was a good idea to marry so young. As if marriage was a kind of complicated toy, subject to breakage. His father called a lawyer friend who found a lawyer in Chicago, and Jack filed for divorce on the grounds of irreconcilable differences.

  Then Chloe got a lawyer also and there was a period when the lawyers shuffled procedure
s back and forth between them. Jack was impatient for that part to be settled. He wanted to sign off. He removed his name from the apartment’s telephone and ComEd accounts. He closed out any funds he had in the Chicago banks. He traded his Illinois driver’s license for a California one. Those were the easy things. Then the child would be divided into portions by some Cook County Solomon, and a court would tell him when and where to be a father.

  The week after New Year’s Jack took a couple days off from work and flew into O’Hare. He had been gone almost exactly three months. There were arrangements to make about retrieving the rest of his belongings. There would be more of the signing off. The lawyers had set up a meeting between him and Chloe to get the machinery of the divorce in order.

  The day was blue and clear, with a steady, mortifying wind off the lake, crunchy snow underfoot, tire tracks turning from slush to rutted ice and back again. Jack met his lawyer for the first time. The lawyer dispensed some professional sympathy and said that they were awkward, these sessions, but they almost always went better than people feared. Jack said the last time he’d seen his wife he’d just finished beating up her boyfriend, and the lawyer said those circumstances were not as unusual as he might think.

  The meeting was at the office of Chloe’s lawyer and they took a cab across town. The cab sped along Lower Wacker, down among the roots of skyscrapers, and surfaced near Union Station. Jack watched the shouldering crowds and the winter sun picking out the glass and chrome and the horizon opening up to the west where the expressway and the railroad tracks ran. It was the city that had refused to love him. Its bulk and ugliness and energy wearied him. Of course this had been one of his mistakes, to confuse a city with a woman, and now he had lost them both.

  At the lawyer’s office they were shown into a conference room. Jack’s lawyer said, “Sunny California. We’ll have you back there in a twinkling.” Jack sneered. He hated being the recipient of charitable small talk.

  They stood when the door opened. Chloe’s lawyer was a woman. There was a kind of rightness about that, a team of angry women taking him on. Everyone but Jack and Chloe shook hands. Even as Jack’s lawyer began talking, Jack was aware that the man was attempting to signal him. Except for one blind and dumb glance at Chloe Jack had not looked at her, but now he raised his head from his study of the polished table and regarded her. She sat at a little distance from the rest of them, and as far as she could get from Jack in the small room, but without much effort he could see her entirely as she sat. She was not pregnant in any visible way.

  Jack turned to his lawyer, tried to indicate his own confusion. The lawyer had been prepped to talk about medical expenses and custody and visitation, and now he was gamely launching into his backup script about the division of property. Chloe’s lawyer responded with her own speech. Chloe didn’t look at anyone. The lawyers kept up their choreographed call and response. The room revolved in minute increments as the earth tracked and spun. Jack felt a moment of black, dizzy nausea, as if gravity had loosened its hold. Was she really going to say nothing?

  “Jack?”

  His lawyer was smiling at him, his head cocked vivaciously. He was waiting for some answer. “I’m sorry,” Jack said, and the lawyer repeated his question. Was such and such acceptable? Jack said that it was. The lawyer was a winking, gibbering fool. No he wasn’t. He was hurrying things along as best he could, now that there was no need to parse babies. Then Chloe’s lawyer asked her a question and Chloe turned her head, considering it. Her face was puffy around the eyes and jawline. Or maybe it was the white sunlight that made the outlines of everything bleached and uncertain.

  He could tell from the tone and timbre of the voices that they were drawing to some conclusion. He sensed another bout of handshaking coming on. Just as they were all getting ready to push their chairs back from the table, he said, “I’d like to ask Chloe if she’d stay and talk with me in private.”

  The lawyers pricked up their ears, in a mannerly fashion. Chloe studied Jack. Her look was so opaque, she might have been wearing sunglasses. “Five minutes,” she said.

  The lawyers cleared out. Jack let a beat of silence pass. “What happened?”

  “A lot.”

  “Did you have an abortion?”

  “It figures you’d want to believe the ugliest possible thing about me.”

  “Did you?”

  “I miscarried at seventeen weeks.”

  Whatever he might have said, he found himself unable to say. Chloe went on. “Maybe it’s just as well. I bet you would have hated it just for being mine.”

  “No.”

  Chloe gave him another flat stare. “The doctor said there was probably something wrong with it. That’s usually why you lose a baby. Anyway. ” She let her hands turn palms downward, a cup of sunlight emptying.

  A child would have tied him to her forever. In spite of everything, he’d wanted that. He said, “I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry for what part, exactly?”

  “For you. For the baby. Come on.”

  “What you did to Spence was inhumane.”

  “And what Spence did to me was pretty fucking raw.”

  “God, I hate it when you talk like that. You’ve turned into a total thug.”

  “Yeah, I guess I have. Good work.”

  “Not everything’s my fault, Jack.”

  Now that he’d grown more used to looking at her directly, he was able to scrutinize her. He hadn’t been mistaken. Her face was fuller, looser. A downward turn to her mouth, the slightest suggestion of gravity. Maybe no one but himself would have noticed. He’d studied Chloe’s face the way an art collector studied a painting. She saw him staring. “What?”

  “Nothing.” And because Chloe would know it wasn’t nothing, he said foolishly, “How’s Spence?”

  “Why do you ask, so you can go try to finish him off?”

  “Not everything’s my fault either,” he reminded her.

  “He’s fine. He’s going back to work in a couple of weeks. He’s in a cardio rehab program. There’s a special diet, stress tests, and monitoring.”

  “I bet you signed the office get-well card.”

  “Not that it’s any of your business, but we’re getting married. After both the divorces are final.”

  Because he had only this peevish, hateful voice left to him, Jack said, “Congratulations. Usually, the heart attack sends them back to the wife.”

  “I know you think I’m a horrible person and Spence is a horrible person and we deserve each other. But we really are happy. It’s like all the sad, awful things that happened brought us closer.” Chloe reached beneath her chair for her handbag. She gathered it to her and folded her hands on top, as if waiting for permission to leave. “You can go over and get your things anytime. I don’t live there anymore. Use the lawyer’s address if you need to correspond with me.”

  He was through with talking. “Fine.”

  When Jack didn’t say anything else, she stood up, actually smiled. “I’m glad this part is over.”

  He supposed she meant the legal session, but she might just as easily have been talking about Jack himself. He opened the door of the conference room for her and they walked together down the corridor. Chloe said, “You’re back in Los Angeles?”

  “That’s right.”

  She was almost friendly, now that she was finished with him. “Oh my God, I meant to tell you. Fran and Reg. They’re splitting up.”

  “Yeah?” Because it seemed he was obliged to express interest, he added, “How come?”

  “You won’t guess in a million years. Fran found all this gay porn and gay chat room stuff on Reg’s computer. He had this whole secret life. Now honestly, did you ever have the faintest suspicion?”

  “Nope. Never saw it coming.”

  “He claims he’s bi, he’s equally attracted to men and to women. I don’t even want to know how that works! Fran’s devastated. She’s in a support group. I guess you’d need one. Reg moved to Boys’ Town. Can
you even imagine it? Reg making the scene at a leather bar? Isn’t that too wild?”

  “Wild.”

  “I guess Fran’s available now.” She actually nudged him in the ribs.

  “Reg too.”

  Chloe giggled.“You’re awful.” Then she checked herself, turned more polite and conversational. “So, are you getting some writing done out there?”

  “Just working.”

  “Oh, I bet you’ll get back to it, now you’re in California again. Because it has to be so much easier, writing about a place when you’re actually there.”

  They were almost to the bank of elevators at the end of the corridor. Jack knew she meant to leave him there, shake hands or even kiss him. He stopped walking. Chloe realized it a couple of paces later, halted and looked back at him. He said, “Please don’t blow me off being charming like you do everybody else.”

  She sighed. “I was trying to be pleasant.”

  “Don’t. Not if it takes an effort.”

  “I’m sorry you think I can’t be nice to you without being insincere.”

  “I stopped writing. I won’t be doing it anymore. That’s not your fault. I would have figured it out sooner or later.”

  He could see Chloe puzzling over this, not only what he’d said, but whether she ought to involve herself. “But it’s what you’ve always wanted to do.”

  “Things change. As we see.”

  “What about your book?”

  “A lot of books never get written.”