Stewart and Jean

by J. Boyett

  He was speaking in a low hiss, keeping their conversation private. They were between two shelves, hidden from the cashiers and the front of the store. Instead of answering loudly enough to draw attention, and to draw help in case Stewart did flip out, Jean automatically matched his volume: “No, but I figured I may as well try it since apparently we’re going to be seeing each other all the time, thanks to you.”

  “It’s not supposed to be pleasant for you!”

  “Are your feelings hurt because I’m not mad enough that you’re stalking me?”

  He blinked like his eyes were stinging, and she wondered if he was going to cry. Fine, fuck him.

  She said, “I’m a human being, not some animal you’re tracking.”

  “How can you not even feel bad about it?” From the way his voice crackled, she thought he might soon have to start shouting in order to keep from crying. But for now both of them continued to speak in rough whispers.

  “How I feel about what happened to me is none of your business. The same way how you feel about him is none of mine. If you want to talk about how you feel then I guess maybe I’ll listen. But I do not want to talk about how I feel.”

  “My dead brother is none of my business?”

  “What happened between me and him in Rogers is not any of....” Jean faltered and trailed off, because the shooting death of his brother manifestly was Stewart’s business. And yet the memory of what had happened felt deeply personal … or maybe “personal” was the wrong word, given how endlessly she’d repeated her account, under official circumstances. But through it all she had held on fiercely to her sense that she owned the events, that they were hers to interpret. Not to fabricate, she had been scrupulously honest, but she would not let anyone twist the interpersonal and ethical dynamics to suit some other agenda, to make out like what Kevin had been doing hadn’t been so bad and she’d overreacted. Kevin had been asking for it. She was offended and confused that the mere presence of his brother should be enough to weaken that certainty, emotionally if not intellectually.

  So instead of finishing her sentence, she said, “What is it you want from me?”

  “I want you to regret it.”

  “Is that a threat?”

  “No. Jesus. I want you to regret having killed that human being, the way any normal person would.”

  Now she was the one having to blink against the stinging of her eyes. “And what about what he was gonna do to me, huh? Who gets to regret that?”

  “No one, now. He would have, if you’d given him a chance.” In a tone as if he were reminding himself that he had to be patient with her, because of how stupid she was, he said, “He was only kidding around. I’m not saying what he did was right, but he never would have really hurt you.”

  “I’m sure you’re right. He just would have held me down and fucked me when I didn’t want him to.”

  “He would never have done that! He was only kidding!”

  “Hey, you weren’t there, you didn’t see his face.”

  “Yeah, well now I never will,” he snapped.

  After that they stood glaring at each other and breathing hard.

  This is ridiculous, Jean thought.

  “Listen,” she said, in a carefully calm voice. A customer wandered into earshot, and Jean and Stewart watched him uncomfortably, waiting for him to go. He picked up on the vibe and looked at them in surprise, then moved away to leave them their space.

  “Listen,” she said again. Then, again, she stopped. She’d been about to say, “We have to find a way to live with each other.” But why? He was just a guy who worked in the bookstore downstairs, he wasn’t likely to work there forever. And it wasn’t like she would be in her current job the rest of her life, either. Who cared whether she and Stewart got along? Couldn’t she simply ignore him?

  But when he spoke again, still with that intense glare fixed on her, it was like she’d spoken her thought aloud and he was responding to it. “I didn’t come up here to live in harmony with you,” he said. “I’m not exactly sure of the details of why I came, but it definitely wasn’t that.”

  “As far as I can tell you came here so you could make me feel bad.”

  “Yeah. Thanks, that’s it—I just couldn’t figure out the right way to phrase it. But yeah, I moved up here to make you feel bad.”

  “Is that really the only reason you came?”

  “The only one you need to worry about.”

  For a while they continued merely to look at each other. But there was no reason to keep doing that, so Jean left.

  Back in her cubicle, she didn’t think the encounter had bothered her much. In fact, a few times she said to herself, Poor Stewart. But when she left work and walked to Grand Central, she kept peering compulsively over her shoulder. She kept it up even once she was walking home from her station. Even once she was back in her apartment with the door locked.

  Her right hand was shaking. To still it she gripped it with her left. Her ears were ringing, as if the gunshots had only now exploded in front of her, instead of six years ago. How loud they’d been! And the way Kevin had gone sailing backwards so slowly, his arms overhead and outstretched, so that she’d wondered what he was doing till she’d realized he was falling because she’d shot him. In her head she knew he must not have fallen slowly at all, but that was the way she remembered it. And there had been all that blood.

  She tried to read but it was impossible to concentrate so she put the book down. Only then did she realize it was one of the books she’d bought when she was showing off to Stewart. She flipped open her laptop and called up Netflix. There was a long queue of foreign movies she’d been meaning to watch, but she didn’t feel like seeing anything real and decided to just watch “Frasier.”

  The laugh tracks droned. When she’d shot Kevin, blood had splattered back onto her.

  Even if she did get a new job, or Stewart left his, he would keep putting himself in her line of sight as long as she let him. So she couldn’t let him.

  Eight

  Jean had been talking to people back home about the whole Stewart thing—a very select few people, anyway. Like her old best friend Penny.

  Jean and Penny had been friends in high school, but Penny had gone to college in Louisiana. During those four years they’d drifted apart slightly, then reconnected after graduation. Jean wasn’t in touch much with the friends she’d had in the Honors College, in Conway. Most everyone had believed her account of what had happened, but Kevin had had an undeniable charisma and, despite his abrasive antics, lots of people had liked him. There had been a certain ambiguity to the whole shooting/rape situation. Anyway, even though her friends had on the whole been perfectly willing to be supportive of her, after they were done being supportive they generally had not seemed keen on hanging out any further. Kevin’s friends, of course, had generally not been supportive. Penny had never met Kevin.

  Jean called Penny the Saturday after her encounter at Temple with Stewart and tried to describe the meeting, but couldn’t quite put it into words satisfactorily. Penny was saying for the thousandth time that Jean should call the police and inform them of what was going on, “just in case.” This was undoubtedly true, but Jean felt embarrassed at the thought of calling the cops on Stewart when he technically hadn’t done much, yet.

  Apropos of nothing, Jean said, “I’m thinking of moving out of the city.”

  “What?!” exclaimed Penny; then, with a gleam of hope, “Back to Arkansas?”

  “No. Like, to Westchester, maybe. That’s north of the city. Or even to Pennsylvania, and commuting.”

  “Oh.... Jean, honey, you’re not letting Kevin’s brother run you off, are you?”

  “Oh, no. No. I just finally miss having a yard, is all.”

  After she got off the phone she went online and started looking for a place, preferably a stand-alone home, one where somebody could walk right up to the front door. As she clicked through the sites of various realtors, looking at the pictures, it came to
her that, actually, she really did miss having a yard. Maybe she should even think about getting a mortgage and buying a place, though the idea was kind of freaky. She made some calls and got some appointments to look at places in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. Why delay?

  For a second she felt excited about the proposed life-change, the trees and space and all that. Then she remembered what her actual plan was, and it was like all the guts in her lower belly suddenly hardened to solid ice.

  She got a shower and went to Jersey City. Walking to the train she used her smartphone to call up a list of Jersey City gun shops.

  Once at the gun shop, she felt a strange tumult. Though fluorescents, the lights seemed somehow warm. It felt like being back in Arkansas. But that was strange, because even in Arkansas she’d never been in a gun shop. Her family had been one of the few she’d known of growing up that hadn’t kept guns in the house, and she herself had always been more or less against them, and had considered New York’s anti-gun laws one of the perks of living there.

  Even now, looking uncertainly around the gun shop, she was against them. Even that one day in Rogers, she’d been against them as a general principle. If Kevin had paused long enough to challenge her by saying something like, “Oh, I see all of a sudden you’re pro-gun,” she would have denied it. She remembered that when she shot him, she’d been studying Kant’s categorical imperative for a class. According to the categorical imperative, you were supposed to act as if each one of your actions obeyed an ideal universal law. If Jean had believed that the world was a place where practicing the categorical imperative made sense, would do some good, then she supposed she wouldn’t have shot Kevin, or else she would have felt bad about it later. But, regardless of whether or not she personally was or was not predisposed towards seeing the universe through the lens of ethical considerations, there was no denying the fact that this was a world of special cases, and that when push came to shove there was something a little ridiculous about insisting on abstract principles when the stakes were so concrete.

  Really, it was strange how familiar the store felt. If you raised a seagull from the day it hatched in some aviary in a deeply inland zoo, and then one day opened under its beak a sealed bottle filled with sea air, giving the bird a whiff, who knew what would stir inside it. The place had a smell, with a chemical crispness to it. Like a grandmother’s mothballed closet you would sneak your head into sometimes as a kid.

  The guy behind the counter had mutton chops and a soul patch, and a long gray ponytail. His T-shirt was stretched tight over his big belly and tucked into his jeans. “Can I help you?” he asked, looking his cute customer up and down without quite being a dickhead about it.

  Jean went up to the counter and said she was interested in something for home defense. The guy showed her a revolver. The main thing she noticed about it was that it didn’t look like the gun she’d shot Kevin with.

  He was explaining stuff to her about the gun. She said, “Can it shoot through a door?”

  He gave her a funny look, like how cute she was was no longer the primary thing he was thinking about. “Why would you want to shoot through a door?”

  “Like, if someone were trying to break it down.”

  “Depends how thick the door is.”

  She told the guy that right now she was living in Queens, but that she was moving to Pennsylvania really soon, and asked if he could go ahead and start a background check using her current address.

  No, the guy told her. It was illegal for him to sell a gun to someone out of state. But he told her about an upcoming Pennsylvania gun show where she would have no problem buying one. There would be private citizens there selling their goods—unlike licensed dealers such as himself, private citizens didn’t have to run background checks or anything.

  By Monday, when she returned to work, the ball was already rolling for her to move to Stroudsburg in a month—she had appointments to look at a couple of places. It was exhilarating to be making such big changes so fast, and so impulsively. She’d decided to rent for the moment, instead of trying to buy. Partly because she objectively knew that applying for a mortgage on a lark would be crazy, partly because if she rented she could move sooner.

  Marissa came by after lunch and stood over Jean, at her computer. “Want to go out for some margaritas after work? Or is Monday too early in the week to start drinking?”

  “Monday is the perfect day for it,” Jean said.

  They talked like they might go someplace nice and respectable but wound up walking west to Chevy’s at Times Square, laughing all the way at how trashy they were. The Mexican food was relatively cheap, for Times Square. The margaritas were big. The restaurant’s bright colors, noise, and plastic gaiety were fun to laugh at. “It’s better than some stuffy bullshit!” declared Marissa, gulping down her cherry margarita.

  Jean had gotten a normal-flavored margarita, though they were both jumbo. “Hey, you don’t have to justify your love of Chevy’s to me.” Of the two of them, Marissa had been the more enthusiastic about going there.

  Half an hour later they were both stuffed, with their plates still more than half-full, and they were each well into their second jumbo margaritas. Marissa had decided to mix it up and try a raspberry-flavored one.

  “I love these things!” said Marissa, lifting the massive heavy glass up to her face. It wasn’t much smaller than her head. “Because they’re like my name. Get it?! Margarita, Marissa!”

  “Oh, God. We’re going to get totally shit-faced, aren’t we?”

  “No, no, no, I’m fine, I’m fine.” Marissa took a moment to regain control of herself, but also to drink some more. There was a lull, despite the blaring music, and on the other side of the lull they found the mood had changed. Marissa tucked her chin and looked up at Jean seriously; “How are you doing?” she asked. “With that thing?”

  “With Stewart?”

  “Is that his name? The guy from the bookstore? The Arkansan?”

  “Yeah. Stewart.”

  “Well?”

  Jean drained the last of her margarita; the straw made a dry croaking sound, and she signaled the waitress for another. She was light-headed, if not frankly drunk. But she’d already gone too far to do anything productive tonight, so she might as well say fuck it and go all the way. When she turned to look across the table again, Marissa was still waiting for an answer, with her serious expression on. “I think I’m moving out of the city,” Jean said, trying to be breezy about it.

  Marissa’s face fell. “Because of Stewart?” she said. “Jean, you don’t have to be scared of him! We can do something about him!”

  “No, no, no.” Jean was flustered—she’d intended her comment as a change of subject. “No, it’s not that. I’m just moving to Stroudsburg. In Pennsylvania.”

  “Well why would anyone move to Buttfuck, Pennsylvania unless they were being chased there?”

  Thirty seconds ago Jean had thought she was stuffed, but now she found herself picking through her refried beans, lifting a forkful to her mouth, and swallowing it, only to have a reason to put off answering. She said, “Grass. Also, the gun laws are different there. So....”

  Marissa stared at her as if she were not only crazy, but perhaps morally repugnant as well. “You’re going to get a gun?”

  “Well. Why not?”

  “If you think you need a gun then it sounds like you’re not doing so well with the whole bookstore-guy thing. It sounds like you’re scared of him.”

  “Once I have a gun I’ll be significantly less scared. Besides, I’m not scared. I’m just trying to be cautious. Responsible.”

  “If you think you’re unsafe then you need to call the police.”

  “Yeah, well, except he’s not doing anything illegal. All right, Marissa? And neither will I be if I move to Stroudsburg and get a gun. Now can we talk about something else please?”

  They gossiped about work through most of their third margaritas, but their hearts weren’t in it. Gazing on the last inch
or two of her drink, slurring her words, Marissa said, “Wanna share a cab home?”

  “You live in Brooklyn. I live in Queens.”

  “Fuck.” Marissa gazed sullenly out the window at the taxi- and tourist-clogged street. It wasn’t even dark yet.

  Jean had again started picking through her food and absently eating it. Also slurring her words a little, she said, “You know, the thing about having a gun....”

  She stopped. Marissa waited for her to start again, eyes fixed on her, all ears.

  Jean was evacuating her rice to the part of her plate already occupied by her half-eaten, cooled burrito. Keeping her eyes on the food, as if this were an operation of great importance, she said, “Having a gun, when you live alone someplace … I mean, you know, you’re allowed to defend yourself.”

  “Sure.”

  “And this way, it’s kind of like Stewart gets to choose.”

  Marissa waited for her to keep talking and, when she realized she wasn’t going to, said, “Choose what?”

  “Well, you know. The scary thing about Stewart is … I mean, it’s not even scariness. It’s just anxiety. Wondering, like, what’s he going to do? If he just wants to work at the bookstore and live in the city, that’s his business, I can live with that. But if he’s going to hurt me, I’d rather just find out that’s what he’s got in mind and get it over with. So I’ll get a place in Stroudsburg. I’ll get a gun, just so I’m safe. I’ll make sure Stewart knows where my new place is. And if he comes up there, trying to trespass, trying to force his way in … then I’ll know.”

  Marissa stared at Jean, scrunching up her eyebrows, not certain she’d followed all that. “Then you’ll know … what?”

  “What he’s got in mind.”

  Still Marissa stared at her, trying to digest it. “What do you mean, you’ll make sure Stewart knows where your new place is? Wouldn’t you rather he didn’t know?”

  “He’ll know where it is. And then, if he comes, I’ll know what his intentions are. And I’ll be able to handle it.”