Stewart and Jean

by J. Boyett

  Stewart started to squirm, then caught himself and held still. “Just did,” he said. After that he kind of clammed up. Soon Charles made up something he had to do, and left the park. Stewart stuck around a bit before leaving.

  Stewart was still embarrassed as he rode the train home. When he’d started all this, it hadn’t seemed worth the time to figure out how he would explain himself to people who found out about his situation. It hadn’t even occurred to him that anyone would find anything out. He’d been alone in his room in Conway, looking at the scanty profiles of local girls, when he’d changed the settings to show him women from New York and idly scrolled through them: an embarrassing habit. And there had been Jean’s photo, complete with her first name (though not her last, of course). He’d recognized her, naturally. Right away he’d announced he was moving to New York, giving no other reason than that he’d always sort of wanted to. He got a bus ticket for the next week and went on Craigslist and started looking for roommates. Bought a book on New York from the Travel section of Conway’s bookstore and tried to study the maps. That book, a duffel bag with seven changes of clothes, a cheap laptop, his wallet, and his cell phone were all he brought with him to New York. The bus ride took three days and two nights. He got to see the country some. The morning he arrived, he called the number for the people in Queens he was renting a couch from. They said they would be there to let him in, as planned. With some work, he found the train he was supposed to be taking. Once the train came above-ground in Queens he was able to stare in awe at the skyline of New York, where he’d always dreamed of living.

  His only plan had been to confront Jean. Not even to confront her, really: to haunt her. To not let her simply forget she’d murdered his brother, and go about her successful life. Landing the job and seeing her stroll in unsuspectingly to do her shopping had filled him with a violent, wrathful sweetness.

  But he hadn’t thought he would have to explain anything to anybody. She would know why he was here: that he was the ghost of his brother. And he would be able to be that by simply appearing before her, passively. She wouldn’t want anyone to know who he was. All murderers want to keep their deeds secret, and he could count on her to isolate herself, in her shame and her terror.

  Somehow it had never occurred to him that she would have the gall to act like she had nothing to hide; that she would herself believe the version she’d told the police. He’d assumed he would easily be able to go about making a life the unspoken purpose of which would be to become a weight on hers. Now it looked like he wasn’t going to be able to keep the purpose so unspoken, after all. She was going to make him explain himself, on top of everything else she’d done. The fact outraged him, and left him feeling even more adrift now than before he’d left Arkansas.

  Six

  The next day was Stewart’s day off. Charles worked the nine-to-five shift, and by chance left the store just as Marissa was leaving the building. He called after her—she paused to say hello and ask how he was. He didn’t think it was his imagination that she was giving him an appraising look, as if she were still deciding what to do with him. Which would be good, he figured, since it meant she hadn’t yet decided to blow him off.

  She did keep glancing at the building entrance, and after a moment seemed to be trying to edge away. Charles hoped that was because Jean was still up there, and it would be awkward if she came out and saw Marissa talking to this guy who was friends with Stewart (and that it wasn’t simply because he repulsed her). He said, “You know, I talked to Stewart.”

  “You did?” she said, her face getting livelier.

  “Yeah. You want to, I don’t know, um.... There’s an Irish place a couple blocks away, called Muldoon’s. If you wanted to get a beer and talk about it. Or maybe, like, dinner.”

  She thought it over. Charles waited. He had the impulse to say something like, “Or if you don’t feel like it, that’s fine too,” but bit it back. He was trying to get out of the habit of saying stuff like that to women. If they wanted to reject him, fine, but let them do the work.

  Marissa eyed him just long enough for it to be awkward. In the end she decided he wasn’t bad. Besides, even if it did make her an evil nosey bitch, she really wanted to know more about this crazy thing that was going on. And she was afraid that if she bugged Jean about it, that would push her away and alienate her—so maybe she could just pump this guy till Jean felt like opening up.

  They went to Muldoon’s. Opening the door to the pub they were hit with a blast of off-key, fuzzily amplified caterwauling. Charles had never been here on a Thursday—apparently that was when they had karaoke on the schedule. The singer stood beside the door, oblivious to Charles and Marissa, drunkenly beaming at the lyrics on the TV screen as his friends from the office cheered. The song was “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go,” by Wham.

  “Is this okay?” asked Charles, taking advantage of the noise to put his mouth close to her ear.

  “Totally!” said Marissa, and turned to grin at him. “I fucking love shameless people.”

  They couldn’t sit at the bar if they were going to hear each other over that karaoke; they asked for a table in the back, somewhat shielded from the noise, which necessitated ordering dinner. Charles couldn’t really afford it, but it was worth it to be getting dinner with Marissa.

  He told Marissa Stewart’s side of the story. At first she was indignant. “So he claims his brother didn’t even do anything?”

  “Not exactly. He said Kevin was only pretending he was going to do something.”

  “Well, how was Jean supposed to know that?”

  “That’s kind of what I thought.”

  The waitress came over. She was genuinely Irish, like from Ireland. They ordered their beers, and each ordered nachos. Neither had realized the other was also going to order nachos, so they got some quick easy laughs out of that. The opening of Foreigner’s “I Want to Know What Love Is” came blaring from the karaoke machine, along with the first few lyrics, passionately crooned by a drunk with what sounded like a cold, so they had some groans and laughs about that as well. By the time their beers arrived they were ready to settle back in to talking about Jean and Stewart, and Kevin. “Even if Kevin was ‘only pretending’ he was going to rape Jean, he deserved what he got,” she pronounced. “Anyway, why would he do that? Only a person who was dangerous anyway would do that.”

  Charles was nodding. Even as he did so, however, he said, uncertainly, “Oh—I don’t know....” Marissa bared her teeth at him a little. But he sensed that his best shot was to stick to his guns and not give in to her at the first pressure—besides, he did think she was possibly being not completely fair. “I don’t mean Jean was wrong to shoot him if she thought he was a threat. I just mean it’s not, you know, totally incomprehensible why he might have acted like that. Even though it’s still wrong!”

  “Enlighten me. Why might he have?”

  “Well, you know. Stewart said he was, like, a macho guy. And kind of an asshole.”

  “Stewart said he was an asshole?”

  “Not in so many words, but yeah, basically. An asshole, but not a bad guy. Like, a sexist, but not a misogynist exactly. And not a rapist, according to Stewart. Not a racist, but a guy who liked to tell racist jokes, to rile people up.”

  “Okay.”

  “But a guy like that.... The way Stewart told it, Jean really bought the show Kevin put on for people. Like, she took it more seriously than he meant people to. She thought he really was all those things. And maybe Kevin got offended, or even got his feelings hurt, even though of course it’s his own fault if people think he really is what he pretends to be. Because guys who have this big asshole front, lots of times they’re actually really sensitive, and the front is because they’re insecure. So even though it’s irrational, a guy like that might take offense that someone took him seriously. Because he’s insecure and over-sensitive, which is the whole reason for the front in the first place. And if he isn’t willing to admit to himself that th
at’s the dynamic, he’s that much more likely to get mad at Jean and want to get back at her, for having thought he was such a bad guy. And the way he does that is to act like she’s right. To him, the point probably was that she’d feel stupid once she realized how totally harmless he actually was. He didn’t realize she couldn’t tell the difference between his acting-out, and the real thing.”

  Marissa said, “Okay,” not as if she were necessarily accepting his theory, but as if she would consider it. She looked like she was fine-tuning her evaluation of Charles, too. “You must be pretty sensitive, yourself, to rattle off a psych profile like that.”

  “Well. I don’t know how sensitive I am. I mean, I still think it sounds like he engineered a situation where Jean was totally within her rights to shoot him.”

  “No, I don’t mean ‘sensitive’ as in ‘you old dumb softie,’ I mean it as in ‘smart,’ ‘perceptive,’ stuff like that.”

  “Oh. Okay. In that case.”

  There was a group singing “Bohemian Rhapsody,” and they’d gotten to the baroque part right before the hard-rock freakout, the part with all the “Scaramouche” stuff, and they were falling all over each other and generally fucking up. Charles and Marissa laughed, and mocked the singers for a bit, until Marissa hoisted her beer and said, “How many drinks’ll it take to get you up there singing with me?”

  “More than I can afford.” Immediately Charles wished he hadn’t said that. Hopefully, Marissa would think he was only joking (even though it was true). She did kind of laugh a little as she swigged her beer, which was nearly half-gone.... He would definitely have to pay both their tabs now, just to prove he could. Fuck the rent.

  They went back to talking about Kevin, Stewart, and Jean, although Charles was looking for ways to broaden the scope of the conversation and refocus it on himself and Marissa, so as not to get irretrievably trapped in this gossipy ghetto. Hoping it might prove to be a useful, smooth transition, he said, “I feel like I knew guys like that back home.”

  “Where are you from?” asked Marissa, as he’d hoped she would.

  “Spokane.”

  She evinced interest. They talked about Spokane a while, about how it wasn’t near Seattle, about how he might love it but he didn’t like it. He asked where she was from.

  “D.C.,” she said.

  “The halls of power,” he intoned. She made a face like that wasn’t necessarily funny, but like she was finding him cute anyway.

  They got refills on their beers, and continued to evolve the conversation. Before their nachos were done they’d ordered a third round of drinks. Charles didn’t know how he was going to eat for the next week after he paid for all of this, and was telling himself that he better get a lay out of it, if not tonight then eventually.

  She asked what it was like getting his MFA from Sarah Lawrence.

  “Meh,” said Charles. “I mainly did it as an excuse to move to New York like I’d always wanted. In retrospect I wish I’d just moved here and written. Would’ve been cheaper.”

  “But now you’ll always have that diploma,” Marissa pointed out.

  Charles was on the verge of saying, Yeah, right, and I’m putting it to good use working for minimum wage, but reminded himself not to harp on his low economic status when flirting. Why undo with one dumb remark whatever he might accomplish by paying for dinner?

  She asked if he still did any writing. “Yeah,” he said, “I go up to the Hungarian Pastry Shop and work on stuff.”

  “The Hungarian Pastry Shop? What’s that?”

  “You don’t know the Hungarian Pastry Shop?!”

  Marissa drew herself up in mock offense. “Do I look like a woman who spends much time in pastry shops?”

  “It’s a coffee shop, mainly. Up by Columbia. It’s famous for, uh … well, there’s a lot of graffiti in the bathroom, from Columbia students mostly, like this super-witty pretentious graffiti.”

  “You’re really selling this place.”

  “No, come on, you should go. It’s just good coffee, and no radio playing, and people writing and reading and talking. I take it back about the pretentiousness, it’s actually really authentic. Like, you know those sorts of places that were part of your original daydreamy reasons for moving to New York? It’s one of the last places like that, that hasn’t closed yet.”

  They ordered more beers to wash down the last of their nachos. From the front of the bar came crashing the noise of yet another drunken chorus, this time howling their way through “Born to Run.” Marissa leaned forward and fixed upon Charles her manically gleaming eyes, and laughed. Charles laughed, too.

  “Can I make a confession?” she said.

  “Uh-oh.”

  “I love karaoke.”

  “So go up there. You couldn’t possibly be worse than these guys.”

  “You wanna do it together?”

  Shit. “It might take another beer or two.”

  “Oh, come on, don’t be a wimp.”

  “Oh ho, is this a challenge?”

  “Yeah, it’s a challenge. It’s a dare.”

  “Okay, so I accept this dare, but you’ll have to accept another dare in the future, of equal or greater value.”

  “What dare is that?”

  “To be determined.”

  “So basically just a blank check.”

  “In exchange for singing karaoke in this crowded Irish bar? Yup, that’s what I want.”

  They drained the last of their mugs and Marissa insisted they go sign up right away—no reprieves. Oh well, if they were singing instead of drinking, he’d save some money at least. There was a harmlessly malicious edge to the grin and wink Marissa gave him. Who knew if anything would come of it, even a make-out session; for the moment it was pleasurable enough just to be her plaything.

  Seven

  Jean continued popping into Temple Books as she’d always done. She made a point of going just as often as ever, albeit without the same relaxation as before; not at first, anyway. She didn’t go on any more big sprees—it was wasteful, plus she found piles of books you don’t have time to read depressing. So after that one time she no longer tried to flaunt her greater economic power. To begin with she would pointedly ignore Stewart. But soon she could flip through books again for minutes at a time with hardly a thought of him. He also soon seemed able to go about his work without being excessively preoccupied with her.

  She got used to seeing him there. Once she started thinking the whole thing over in the absence of adrenaline, it became a little less egregious, although still kind of nuts. He never threatened her or anything—to be honest, he never had. She could understand why Stewart would be fucked up over his big brother being killed, even though she refused to feel guilty. It wasn’t like Stewart had known his brother was a rapist, or anything. It even would be understandable for him to refuse to believe Kevin had ever tried to rape her.

  After all, Kevin hadn’t always been such a bad guy, though it had been hard to remember that ever since the thing had happened. Or rather, it had never occurred to her to remember it till she started seeing Stewart around. He brought those early days back, so that sometimes she was even able to recall them almost without the taint of the intervening trauma. They’d had some laughs, her and Kevin. Early on.

  One day, about three weeks after her date with Stewart, she was at Temple, leaning her shoulder against one of the shelves, flipping through a volume of Proust and wondering if it would be worth it to forego the time needed to read ten other books instead, just to banish her sense of failure at not having read Proust. Stewart appeared before her with some books to shelve. He glanced up but seemed hardly to register her. That was how accustomed they’d gotten to seeing each other. It was crazy—she wondered which of them was Jane Goodall and which the chimp.

  For no particular reason, she let her eyes stay on Stewart after he’d looked away; she was mulling over this weird connection they had, and reflecting that the most bizarre part was how it had become part of their every
day lives.

  Stewart noticed she was looking at him and looked up at her in turn.

  Without thinking it over first, Jean smiled faintly and in a soft voice said, “Hi.”

  From his face you would have thought she’d told him to go fuck his mother. For a few seconds Jean could pretend she was misreading him, since he seemed unable to find his voice to say anything. Maybe she should have looked away, but it was hard not to keep an eye on someone who was staring at you like that.

  Finally he walked up to her. When he came to a halt he was already too close. She stood her ground. “What did you say to me?” he demanded, in a tightly-controlled growl.

  “I said ‘Hey,’” she said, tightening down her gut and clamping her feet to the floor in preparation for a fight, keeping the book between him and her.

  “And why did you say that?” he asked. “Why did you say ‘Hey’ to me?”

  “Because I saw you standing there and decided to try being civil.”

  Jean had reasoned out, over the last couple weeks, that even if Stewart did lose his shit and attack her, he probably wouldn’t seriously hurt her and she would be able to use the event to press charges or at least get a restraining order against him. Not that a restraining order was likely to do much good. Anyway, that certainly wasn’t very comforting now, when it looked like he really was going to slap her. She resolved not to flinch unless he actually went for her, and hoped she still looked steady and unafraid.

  She was succeeding better than she could have guessed. So much so that her cool, distant, aloof face was taken by Stewart for contempt, and nearly really did goad him into hitting her.

  He said, “Why would you be civil to me? Are we friends or something?”