Becoming Chloe

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  “Shit,” I say. “We just ran out of tape.”

  She looks up at me, sees I’m holding the very last of her house pictures. Number eleven, I think. A new one. I didn’t even know she had this one. At least, I don’t think I did. It’s hard to see in this light. It’s hard to keep track.

  “Just set that last one up against the wall where I can see it.”

  “You know it’s not going to look like this, right, Chlo? You do know there won’t be trees or grass.” Or a house for that matter. We’d be lucky to get a studio.

  “You always say that to me, Jordy.”

  “I know. I just want to make sure you didn’t forget.”

  “We can get more tape tomorrow, right?”

  “This might be a tight week, Chlo.” Like they’re not all.

  “You could lift some.” She’s gone back to her work now. She’s taken up the scissors from our box and she’s cutting the paper into some kind of intricate design.

  “I don’t know if it’s worth going to jail for.”

  “They wouldn’t put you in jail for just tape, would they?”

  “Might. Never can tell. Depends on the mood people are in.”

  “Well, I have to have tape, or I can’t finish this.” But she looks finished. She’s put the markers and the scissors away in our box.

  “What are you making?”

  “It’s for you,” she says. “It’s a crown.” She brings it over to me and holds it in place around my head. But it won’t stay in one piece in the back. Not without tape. She has a point about that. “There you have it. King Jordy.”

  “What am I the king of?” I feel tired all of a sudden. Too tired to rule.

  “Well. This. Where we live.”

  I laugh. “All this, huh?”

  “Well, it’s something. And at least you’re the king of it.”

  “No, that’s good, Chlo. You’re right. It’s good to be king of something. I bet you could figure out how to make it stay without tape.”

  I take it off and look. It’s amazingly intricate, in five colors, with cutout paper filigree and a snake weaving in and out. How she does these things, I’ll never know.

  “It’s beautiful, Chlo.” She takes it from me and figures out how to cut a tab and slot with the scissors. I’m impressed. I say, “You know I can only wear it down here in the cellar, though. I can’t wear it on the street.” I figure she’ll ask why not in a second, so I beat her to it. “Because I’m not the king of anything up there.”

  Chloe nods thoughtfully. “Right,” she says. “That’s exactly the point.”

  I set the crown on the corner of our mattress and we go to sleep the way we always do, blankets pulled up to our chins, Chloe draped over my back like she wants to get inside my skin but hasn’t yet managed to get any closer than this.

  In the morning I leave her at Chock full o’Nuts to drink coffee with six sugars. I give her two dollars in case the waitress starts thinking Chloe can’t pay. It doesn’t work to have things like that happening while I’m away.

  “I have to go see Rene,” I say. “So this could take a while. I could even be two hours. You have to wait here the whole time.”

  “Boring,” she says.

  “I know. I’m sorry.” I see a newspaper over on the next table, an empty table with a newspaper someone up and left behind. “Here,” I say, and get it for her, and set it on the table in front of her. “You can look for pictures.”

  “Get tape,” she says.

  “Yeah, okay. Don’t go away this time.”

  “Lift it if you have to.”

  I give her that look, the one I use to remind her that she’s saying quiet things too loud.

  On the way over to Rene’s I stick my head into the free clinic. There’s a basket of condoms on the counter nine days out of ten, and you can take as many as you want for free. It’s there, so I duck in and grab a handful, six or seven, and stick them in the pocket of my duster.

  The woman at the counter has a modern hairstyle, about two inches long and all moussed back in waves. She smiles at me.

  In a kind of purposely singsongy voice, I say, “Thank you.”

  “S’what they’re there for,” she says, purposely imitating my song voice.

  I try to think of a way to get to Rene’s without going by the leather store. There are lots of ways, but they all have me walking a little farther. And that’s stupid, I decide. What am I, a little kid? I can stand to see something it hurts to want. I can see it and then just keep walking. It happens to lots of people every day. We all survive.

  But when I pass the store, I don’t just keep walking. It stops me dead, like seeing an old flame step out of a cab on a busy street. And once I’m stopped I stay stopped a minute, and I look at the duster coat. And I make the mistake of thinking about going to Rene’s wearing that coat. It would be so different. It would be better even than it is now. He would look at me and see things he never saw before. I would be just as big as Rene and have just as much power, and we would have to find new games to play, ones that reined in both of our powers so we didn’t both get burned to a crisp by all that self-satisfied cool.

  The guy in the store is not the same guy as yesterday. He’s a little older, maybe forty, with silvery hair and heavy black eyebrows. And a weird kind of male-pattern baldness that leaves one little hank of hair all alone by itself on his upper forehead, like an island. I’m so busy thinking about the duster coat and Rene and the new games that it takes me a minute to realize he’s checking me out. I look him in the eye and drink in all that raw approval. And I almost wish the opportunity hadn’t presented itself. I know in a flash that I probably—potentially—could get that coat. But I am not going to bend over for it. I refuse to bend over to get that coat because then every time I wear that coat, instead of feeling like the king, I’ll feel like a guy who bent over. Instead of men crossing the city to fall down at my feet, I’ll be picturing men crossing the city to tell me to bend over. I shake my head at him and walk on.

  Over my shoulder I hear his voice. He’s come out onto the street to call after me. “Hey, kid,” he says. “Where ya going, kid?”

  I’m going to Rene’s.

  “Jordan,” Rene says. “My man.”

  I am struck dumb, as always, by how gorgeous he is. He’s standing at the door in just a pair of jeans. He lifts weights, and his chest has great definition. And not one single hair. Not even around his nipples. He has a little skinny goatee, jet-black. He is Hawaiian and Nicaraguan, very dark and smoky and dangerous and gorgeous, and sometimes I just can’t believe my own luck. Actually, every time. I just can’t believe it.

  “Business or pleasure?” Rene asks, stepping back to let me in.

  “Maybe both,” I say. “Maybe a little of both.”

  Then I know again how bad I need that coat, because I feel how it would be to stand in his one-room studio with the collar up and the sleeves pushed up to my elbows, saying, Maybe a little of both. That’s the real me. I have to find a way to step up to what I know I could be.

  “Which comes first?” he says, but he’s already peeled my coat off onto the floor and he’s unbuttoning my shirt, and then I couldn’t talk if I wanted to. His arms are around my waist and he picks me up so my feet are an inch off the ground and he puts me down on his big bed.

  Rene doesn’t do this with just anybody. Lots of guys come by here to get work or do business, and Rene doesn’t take them all into his bed. It reminds me that I’m right about what and who I think I am.

  “I need some more work this week,” I say. “Only nothing too dangerous.”

  Rene laughs at me. We’re lying on his bed and he’s on his back with my head on his chest, so my head bounces up and down when he laughs at me. “You always say that, my man. You say you need cash, but you’re afraid to get busted. You want work with no risk. I got no work with no risk. You don’t make a hundred dollars running an errand if there’s no risk.”

  “What do you have, then?”r />
  “Maybe some package deliveries. Next week.”

  “How much?”

  “One-fifty each. Special for you. That’s top dollar, my man.”

  “What’s in the packages?”

  “For one-fifty, you don’t get to ask. That’s what all the money’s for. For a guy who ain’t afraid to get busted and knows better than to ask.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  “You’re learning,” he says. “You’ll learn. You want the job or not?”

  “I just can’t afford to go to jail.”

  “Who would look after Chloe.” He says it like a flat sentence, not like a question. He says it like criticizing me, throwing my own words in my face so I can get a good look at them. See how wrong they are. “Let her fall, Jordan. She ain’t you.”

  “Yeah, she is,” I say, and sit up and reach for my shirt. “Sure she is.”

  “You want the work?”

  “How long do I get to decide?”

  “Day after tomorrow. I don’t hear from you by then, I make other arrangements.”

  “I’ll think on it.”

  “You do that, my man. You think hard. Think what you want in this life. Don’t throw a good life away.”

  When I get back to the Chock full o’Nuts, Chloe is AWOL.

  “Shit,” I say out loud. “Shit, shit, shit. Shit.”

  It races through my mind that maybe we’ll never meet up again, and then I can take dangerous work, or even get a day job, and live more like other people do. But I don’t really want her to be gone. I just run through the advantages of having it forced on me.

  I ask the waitress which way she went, how long ago. She looks at me like, What am I, a friggin’ detective service? But she doesn’t say any of that. Just shrugs.

  I walk out to the street again. Listen to the traffic noise and take a deep breath of carbon monoxide. Then I think, maybe she went to the leather store to look in the window. Maybe she even went to the leather store thinking I’d be there, looking in the window.

  She’s not there. Just the guy with the hair island, who recognizes me immediately and looks elated to see me again. He waves me in. I shake my head. He waves again. No, really. Come in. I shake my head again. I can tell I’m inflaming his passion every time I say no.

  Then I think, at least I’ll touch that coat. Try it on. That will be a moment, anyway. Something I can go back to in my head just before sleep tonight. I go inside.

  Guy says, “You like that coat, huh?”

  “It’s a pretty nice coat,” I say.

  “That would look great on you.” He takes it off the half-mannequin. I drop my own duster coat to the floor. “Come over here by the mirror,” he says.

  We walk toward the back of the store. He helps me into the coat like gentlemen did for ladies in the fifties. Or so I hear. He’s standing behind me, his eyes on me in the mirror.

  I look at myself. I’m everything I thought I would be. I’m everything I always knew I could be. I never should have put it on. I know that now. It sinks into my stomach like a heavy meal I forgot to chew. I can’t take it off now. If I take it off, I’ll never be me again.

  I turn the collar up. Roll the sleeves back two turns. Push the sleeves up to my elbows.

  The guy is smoothing it down in the back, over my ass. Like leather needs plenty of smoothing; sure, we all know that. I feel his hands at my waist. He moves up a little closer behind me. Then, when I don’t move away, a lot closer.

  “We can get you into this coat,” he says. “At a price you can afford.”

  “I don’t have any money.”

  His eyes are on mine in the mirror. “We can get you into this coat,” he says.

  I know now I have to take it off. Because he wants to get me into it all right, but first he wants to make it mean all the wrong things to me. One way or the other this feeling will be over.

  “Let me show you something in the back room,” he says, and he turns his back to me and walks away. As he ducks behind the curtain I think, just for a minute, that he’ll go back there and trust me to follow. I wonder if I could outrun him.

  But then he sticks his head back out and looks at me. “Coming?”

  I duck back behind the curtain. It’s like a stockroom back there, and he’s leaning against some cartons, smiling at me.

  “Bet the owner would be pissed about this,” I say.

  He laughs. “Honey, I am the owner.”

  “Ah. Well. That’s handy. Thing is, I’m not willing to bend over for this coat. If I’d do it for anything, I’d do it for this coat. But as it turns out, I’m just not willing.”

  He doesn’t stop smiling. “Would you go down on your knees for that coat?”

  And it’s a question I can’t answer right off the bat. And the more I don’t answer, the more we both know it’s a possibility. I’m too flexible right now for my own good.

  Then I make a decision what to do, and it makes my heart jump. When I walk up close to him, I wonder if he can hear it. My heart. I feel like I can hear it. Like it might give me away.

  I unzip his pants and he stands up straight so I can take them down around his ankles. All the way to his shoes. And I go most of the way down with them. So it looks like I really will end up on my knees.

  Then I run faster than I ever have in my life.

  I shoot through the curtain and out the door of the shop. I swing right and pray I can hit the corner before he sees which way I’ve gone. At the corner I turn and look over my shoulder to see if he’s out yet. He’s not. But I should look where I’m going because I slam into a lady.

  “Hey!” she says.

  I turn the corner and think I’m home free, but then I hear him behind me.

  “Little son of a bitch,” he yells. “No way you get over on this one, you son of a bitch.”

  I’m running fast and the leather coat is flying out behind me, and I realize I look dignified running in this coat. I don’t feel like a sneak thief—even though just at the moment I am that exactly. I feel like Superman. I look dramatic, I just know it, the way it flows out behind me like a cape. I look like I was born to move just like this, and maybe I never need to stop.

  “You little son of a bitch,” he yells, “I’ll make you sorry you were ever born.”

  As I swing into an alley I think, Asshole, you’re years too late.

  I look over my shoulder and he has his pants up, but his fly is still open. And he’s slowing down. He’s not yelling at me anymore because he can’t spare the wind. His face is red and his hair is flapping and I know I’m home free. I’m younger than he is, and I have this magic coat. I’ll run forever and he’ll wear down.

  At the end of the alley I know I’ll have to make a choice. If I go right, I’ll pass the restaurant again—the one where Chloe is supposed to be. And what if she’s there this time? I don’t want to meet up with her until this is over. I don’t want to draw her into this. I stretch closer to the street, already prepared to go left, and here comes Chloe. Wandering into the alley.

  “Run, Chlo!” I grab her by the wrist as I fly by, spin her around in the right direction.

  But, Chloe being Chloe, I look back and she’s just standing there, looking confused. A split second later the guy catches up with her. I can see he couldn’t have gone ten steps farther. I was home free. Damn it, I was home free. Goddamn you, Chloe, you always do this to me. I was home free. This was working and you messed it up. Damn you, Chlo.

  He has one of her hands twisted behind her back now, and one arm across her collarbone.

  I just made a huge mistake. Because if I hadn’t stopped, if I had kept running, he wouldn’t have known she was anything to me. He would have nothing. Now he has everything. Now the whole thing just flipped over. It seems shocking to think I could lose a battle in this incredible coat. How can I look this great and lose?

  “Friend of yours?” he asks. He’s barely able to say it, he’s so out of breath. I resent people who can afford to get out of s
hape like that.

  Then Chloe does what I could have predicted Chloe would do. She bites him. Sinks her teeth into his arm and doesn’t let go. I am here to testify: Chloe bites hard. Nobody wants to know how hard Chloe bites if she gets it in her head to. Nobody deserves to find out.

  The guy screams, spins her away from him. Slaps her hard across the face.

  That’s when I know I have to hurt him.

  They’re deep into the alley now, Chloe kind of pulling him along. He’s got hold of her wrist and he’s twisting it, and he has his back turned to me. For one split second of fatal mistake he abuses Chloe and turns his back on me all in the same breath. Funny how we do things before there’s even time to think how it will turn out. I run back in.

  There are garbage cans in the alley, so I go to pick one up. That’s all it’s going to be. I’m just going to bash him in the head with a can and go on my way. I think it’ll be empty, or filled with something light. Well, truthfully, I don’t think. My brain is all black and anyway there’s no time.

  The can I grab is like fifteen times heavier than I expected. God only knows what’s in it, but I pick it up anyway. I have so much adrenaline, I can actually lift this thing. I have so much adrenaline that when I feel the muscles pulling in my armpits, down my rib cage, it seems like something unimportant happening far away. As it comes down on his head I know—before it even hits him—that it will probably break his neck. Something about the angle and the weight. I see that coming. But now it’s gravity, and you can’t stop gravity.

  As he’s lying facedown in the alley I look down and think, It was about Chloe. Not the coat. I wouldn’t do that for a coat.

  I don’t know what I did to the guy. I probably never will. Maybe he’ll wake up with a hell of a headache. Maybe he’ll be in a wheelchair all his life, moving it around by blowing into a tube. Maybe I wasted him right on the spot. I just know I didn’t do it for the coat.

  I grab Chloe’s hand and we run away. When we turn out onto the street I slow us down to a normal walk. “Just walk,” I say. “Just act like everything’s normal.”