by J. Boyett
stewart
and
jean
J. Boyett
Saltimbanque Books
New York
Copyright © 2015 by J. Boyett
Book designed by Christopher Boynton
All rights reserved under International and
Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
For Mary Sheridan.
For my parents.
For Pam Carter, Dawn Drinkwater, and Andy Shanks.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
The Little Mermaid (A Horror Story)
Brothel
Ricky
The Victim (and Other Short Plays)
Poisoned (a play)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Mary Sheridan was among the early readers. Kelly Kay Griffith and Rob Widdicombe provided me with extensive notes and edits. Mary Sheridan agreed to go get drunk with me at Chevy’s for “research,” so thanks for that.
One
It was spring, and the Astoria beer garden was bustling, loud groups scattered in clumps among the long picnic tables, bright in the nighttime floodlights. Still, Jean and Stewart had been able to find a relatively secluded spot. The fresh breeze swept the air clean. “It’s so nice,” said Jean.
“Yes,” said Stewart.
Jean eyed his mug. She was trying to pace herself so they would finish at the same time. “I’ll get the next round,” she said.
“Oh, no.”
“Come on, I insist.”
“No way.”
He was cuter than his picture had been. That was a nice surprise. Jean stopped herself from suggesting they get a pitcher, the way she would have done with one of her girlfriends—she didn’t want to risk getting drunk enough to go home with this guy.
They finished their beers. Bulldozing over her protests, he went to buy the next round himself. Although a little exasperated by his insistence, she mainly thought it was sweet.
Jean checked her e-mail on her phone and texted back a girlfriend who’d texted to ask how it was going (“good so far,” she wrote), and finished in time to clink mugs with him upon his return. That first swallow of the new mug was like a pleasurable jolt of cold electricity.
“So what do you do?” she asked.
“Oh,” he said, ducking his head, “I’m just kind of looking right now.”
Jean got the distinct vibe he didn’t want to talk about it. “Hey,” she said, reassuringly, “the economy.”
“Yeah, I know. Tell me about your job.”
“Oh, it’s boring,” she said. Which it was, but as she described it she made it sound even worse. “IT stuff. Web development.” The nicest part, she told him, was that she got to work across the street from Bryant Park. Obviously it was a convenient location, being right next to Grand Central. “And even though the crowds can sometimes be annoying, I actually kind of get off on all the bustle, and being right in the middle of Manhattan. I’m still a little starry-eyed about the city, I guess.” The major drawback of the location, she joked, was that there was a Chipotle restaurant on the ground floor and she was always having to resist the urge to stuff her face in there.
“Although I don’t know,” she said. “I love New York, but I sometimes think about moving upstate. Or to Pennsylvania, even. Getting a car, commuting.”
Stewart wrinkled his nose. “Why?”
“I don’t know. I love New York, but I like greenery too, and I like change. Commuting would be a way to change but still stay in the city. Why live in one quasi-foreign northeastern town when you could live in two?”
It turned out Stewart had just read a book about Grand Central, so they talked some about that. He asked some intelligent questions about her job; he might be temporarily unemployed, but he was plainly smart, and even seemed to know a bit about web design. Jean was going to start asking about his background, when he said, “You’re very beautiful.”
Jean actually blushed, and reconsidered that pitcher. “Oh, thank you, that’s so sweet.” Jean was happy enough with the way she looked—wavy black hair, athletic body, big eyes—that she didn’t need the affirmation, but it was still charming to hear him say so. There was something intense about Stewart. He smiled at her, he was interested in her, but there was something aloof about it, almost challenging. It would have put a lot of women off, but Jean dug it. Maybe it was perverse, but she found herself turned on by her sense that, if they were to hook up, they’d wind up fighting a lot. “I was actually just thinking that you’re cuter than your profile picture.”
“Oh, so I have an ugly picture?”
“No, that’s not what I meant.”
“Can I make a confession? I saw your picture on OKCupid a long time before I ever messaged you.”
“A long time? How long?”
“Oh. Couple weeks.”
“How come you waited?”
“I guess I had to work up to it.”
Jean took a long pull on her beer, still eyeing Stewart. He was laying it on pretty thick, but who cared. Once she’d swallowed, she said, “So what was it about my profile that made you message me?”
“Your photo.”
“That seems shallow. What about my witty self-description? My painstakingly-assembled list of favorite books?”
“I read those. But it was the photo that made me write to you.”
“Hm. I’ll take that as a compliment.... You know, to be honest, I was on the fence about writing you back.”
“Because of my non-cute profile picture?”
“No, and I didn’t say it wasn’t cute.... It was because your message was so intense. In a good way. But also in a, Whoa, way.”
“You mean all that about how I’d never written to a woman on OKCupid before, but felt like I had to get in touch with you?”
“Mainly that.”
“Well. It was the truth. I figured I may as well tell the truth, right?”
“Sure.”
There was an awkward lull. Jean killed time with another swig, and then, when the pause kept going, she gestured at the beer garden as a whole and said, “I love this place.”
“It’s cool.”
“So you’ve never been here?”
“No. I just moved to New York a week ago.”
“Oh, wow! I must have been hogging the conversation and not letting you talk about yourself at all.”
“No, no.”
“Where did you move here from?”
“Arkansas.”
Jean brought her mug down on the table with a thump. “What?”
“I’m from Arkansas.”
“Oh my God.” Stewart merely looked at her. “Oh my God!” She fluttered her hands, raised her voice, trying to convey the momentousness of the occasion. So far he didn’t seem properly impressed. “I’m from Arkansas!” she finally let fly.
Even now he didn’t seem blown away. In fact, he said, “I know.”
“How?”
“Well, for starters, it says so on your OKCupid profile.”
“Dude. Do you know the odds of us both being from Arkansas? I never meet anyone from home! Where are you from?”
“Conway.”
“I’m from Fayetteville.”
“I know.”
That was right, she’d put her hometown on her profile, too. “That’s amazing,” she said. Stewart didn’t disagree, neither did he look particularly amazed. “And, what, you just up and moved last week? What brought you here?”
“Just something I had to do.”
“Yeah, I can understand that. I love Arkansas, but I was ready to get out of there by the time I left.... Wow, you’re from Conway. I went to school there!”
“I went to school in Little Rock.”
“You seem so much less amazed than I am.”
&nb
sp; Stewart shrugged apologetically.
“I mean, I lived in Conway for four years,” Jean said. “What’s your last name?”
“Bruno.”
Jean stopped short. She stared at Stewart and tried to tell herself that Bruno wasn’t such an uncommon name—but from the unconfused, challenging way Stewart met her gaze, she knew.
When he didn’t volunteer anything, she said, “I knew a Bruno once.”
Stewart nodded. “Kevin Bruno,” he said. “But I think that was in Rogers, right? Not Conway.”
The real sounds of the beer garden were distant and faint—the ringing in her ears grew loud enough to hurt. Her nerves were numbed; the knowledge of what her flesh touched, like her fingertips on the cold wet glass of the mug, all came in as superficial information emptied of sensual content. Unable to think quite clearly, she cast back through a lifetime of movie-watching, looking for some generic movie character she might channel, who could field all questions for her. “It was in Conway I met him,” she said. “And knew him. Went to school with him. But I did last see him in Rogers.”
“Right. Sorry.”
He was still smiling. Jean looked more closely, and wondered how she could have been so blind as to have missed it before: the angrier he got, the bigger he smiled.
She started to feel something like anger herself, though the quivering massive emotion was too big, dangerous, and unstable to identify precisely. It would have been like staring at the sun in order to list all the colors it consisted of. “So you, like, what, messaged me as a joke?”
“Not a joke,” he snarled. He collected himself, waited till he was back under control to continue talking. “Like I said. I saw your picture. And when I saw it, I had to write you.”
“No you didn’t.”
“Yes I did. I had to meet you.”
“For a fucking date.”
“Just to meet. I mean, obviously I couldn’t tell you the real reason.”
“Yeah. Obviously. No shit. So you, what, you just moved out here last week, logged onto OKCupid, and spotted my profile?”
“I saw it when I was still in Arkansas.” Under the circumstances, it was absurd to think either of them could manage an emotion as petty as embarrassment, but from the way Stewart dropped his eyes it was plain that was what he was feeling. “I always daydream about moving to New York. And so I set the search function on OKCupid to show me girls in New York instead of Conway because, I don’t know, New York’s where I liked to fantasize about living. And then when your photo popped up it was different. Then I knew I had to come.”
“So I’m the one who finally motivated you to come. So you ought to be thanking me.”
His face spasmed and then contorted with so much rage that Jean thought he might hit her. She forced herself to calm down, to take some deep breaths and look at it from his point of view. Not so as to sympathize, but so as to predict what he’d do next. “Okay,” she said. “So. You’ve met me. So? Now what?”
Finally the smile was gone. Stewart was scowling and breathing deeply as he glowered at her. It seemed like he might cry. “I just wanted to see you,” he managed to get out. “I wanted to at the time, but the police and everybody else told me not to. But I always regretted letting them talk me out of it, and when I happened to see your profile, I knew I wasn’t going to be able to live with myself if I didn’t, didn’t confront you.”
“Okay. Whatever. Confront me.”
“You with your smart, sexy pictures, with your cutesy little description of yourself and how smart and ambitious you are. Not a care in the world and meanwhile my brother’s dead.”
That wild emotion Jean dared not directly look at was bubbling over. Gripping the handle of her mug like she’d go spinning off the planet otherwise, she leaned forward across the table. “I haven’t a care in the world because your brother’s dead,” she hissed. “He tried to rape me. Luckily I had a gun, so I shot him in the chest. I’m sorry for your loss but I would do it again.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t believe my brother would ever try to rape somebody.”
“Yeah, well, he did, and the police believed it too.” Jean realized she was trembling, and wasn’t sure her legs would work—she stood up, and found that they did. “Thanks for the beers,” she said, and started to walk away, then turned back and said, “Don’t follow me.” She walked out of the beer garden, keeping her eyes forward, even turning her nose up a little, making herself walk in a straight line. When she passed the huge bouncer at the entrance she wouldn’t allow herself to stop and talk to him, not that she knew exactly what she would have asked him for. It wasn’t very late and the neighborhood was pretty crowded—she’d probably be okay. It wasn’t till she was nearly a block away from the beer garden that she looked over her shoulder to make sure her date wasn’t following her. All things considered, she figured she was handling this pretty well, whatever it was.
Two
The whole thing was unnerving, that was for sure. Jean called some friends back home to talk about it, once she was sure her voice wouldn’t shake. Most thought she should call the police on Stewart. “For what?” she said. All he’d done was move to New York, then contact her via her publicly available dating-site profile. Maybe if he continued trying to contact her, she would try to get a restraining order or something. Not that she could really argue with her friends. Perhaps the wise thing would have been to notify the police, regardless of whether or not she thought he’d technically committed a crime. Maybe she preferred not to think about any of it.
Besides, in her most empathetic moods, she felt she could maybe understand where he was coming from. If he really did believe his brother had been innocent. In that case, she could understand how a normal, non-violent guy might have felt driven to confront her.
A few days went by. In the building where Jean worked on Forty-Second, there was a bookstore, Temple Books, next to the Chipotle. Not many bookstores left in New York, and even less in other cities, she figured. She liked to go there sometimes, during her lunch break or after work, to chill out and browse.
Today was like that. She’d brought a lunch to eat in the park, but it was past the middle of the day and she still wasn’t hungry. So she decided to hang out at Temple. She got a hot chocolate in a to-go cup from their café and took it with her as she went wandering through the books. First she paused among the bestseller display tables, to see what the world was reading. Some of them, like Cormac McCarthy, she planned to get to someday. Others she gawked at with a kind of delicious, self-indulgent horror, like a series of books called Skinny Bitch. The cashiers and manager stood in a square enclosure, raised like a dais, presumably so they could keep an eye out for shoplifters. She’d never exchanged a word with any of them except when she was buying something, but they’d become familiar enough that she kind of felt like she knew them.
She didn’t let herself get too caught up in the bestsellers, since she was only here for an hour at most and didn’t have a whole idle day stretching before her. Moving through the display tables and past the Sci-Fi section, she made a right before hitting General Fiction—tucked in behind the register and before the bathroom hallway was a tightly-packed niche containing Cultural Studies. She’d thought Feminism was back here, too, but she’d misremembered—it was around the corner. Still, it was a nice quiet section, and in front of her face she saw Jacobs’s Life and Death of American Cities, which was on her list of books to read. A moment after she’d picked it up and started thumbing through it, she was absorbed. There was a step-stool, for reaching the higher shelves. Absently Jean sat on it and turned the pages back to start the book at the beginning.
For a long time she stayed that way, alone, except for a guy in his forties whose body odor was somewhat strong and who crouched near her, reading Schopenhauer with an intense scowl. Jean didn’t mind the company, or the odor. She would have liked to think his company was more suitable for her than that of most of her web design colleagues, though she didn’t know if tha
t was true. Guys who read Schopenhauer were cool.
Sipping her hot chocolate, she realized it wasn’t hot anymore. That snapped her out of her absorption, since it meant she must have been here a while. She checked her phone and saw that it was indeed time to head back up to the office. Slurping down the dregs of her chocolate, she headed to the cashiers, Jacobs book in hand.
As she approached the register she wasn’t paying much attention, because she was looking around for a wastebasket to throw her now-empty cup in, so she didn’t actually look fully at the cashier till after she’d extended the arm holding the book. Then her fingers went flaccid and she took a step backward as the book fell to the floor. At the slapping sound it made, people turned to look.
Towering above her on the raised platform, looming over her, Stewart looked like he belonged here, in his black T-shirt and trimmed goatee. Holding his eyes on her with no special effort, he blithely said, “I saw you come in.”
But if that were true he must have been somewhere other than here at the registers. Because she would have noticed him when she came in, standing here among all these guys she almost felt like she knew.
Again there was a mental hum that all but supplanted the real noise of the store around her. Again there was a strong and unstable sensation that she dared not quite look at, but this time it was more akin to fear than anger. “What are you doing here?” she whispered.
Stewart frowned and turned an ear towards her. “What?” he said, with apparent sincerity.
“What are you doing here?” she repeated, at closer to a normal volume.
“I work here,” he said, as if it were obvious, which it was.
Jean took a step towards him, out of some complicated mixture of motives. Underfoot she could feel the book she’d dropped, and was dimly aware she should move back, because you weren’t supposed to step on books. She had no idea what to say to him. Whatever she might say, she was afraid it would come out as a plea rather than a threat.
Suddenly there was the short, heavyset, bald Jamaican manager standing next to Stewart, pointing at her feet and saying, “Excuse me, please don’t walk on the books, ma’am!”