Jessica Z

by Shawn Klomparens

  Printed on the back of the card, at the bottom, it says: “Joshua Hadden—WILDFLOWER STUDY II—Chromolithograph, 2003.”

  Something must be going on today downtown, because the line I find upon my arrival at the Gram is out the door and up the block. I step in front of some people to peek in the door to see if Gretchen is inside, and get a nasty look from a woman in the line. As I turn back to the street, though, I see her short noon silhouette coming down the sidewalk.

  “Strike out,” Gretchen says.

  “There must be a convention or something going on.”

  “It’s that big antiques show thing.”

  “Antiques show. Right. But lunch?”

  “There’s Korean up the street. We’ll get in there. Antiques show people are afraid of ethnic food.”

  We walk up the street, and, unsolicited, I start to tell Gretchen about everything going on with Josh. I know she would have asked anyway, so it’s no big deal. I tell her about him getting so drunk, and I tell her about his call to his sister. We walk out of the shadow of a building into the sun and there are two soldiers with berets and guns stationed on the corner looking us up and down as we wait for the walk signal. The light changes, and just as we step into the street one of them says something that I can’t hear. Gretchen hears it, though.

  “Yes,” she says, turning back to him. “Yes, I bet you would, you asshole.” Then she actually spits at him and I gasp; the big gob of her saliva just misses his boot and the guy lowers his head and turns away while the other soldier, the taller one, laughs at him and tells him he’s a stupid motherfucker.

  “I cannot believe those guys,” Gretchen says as we continue across the street.

  “I can’t believe you, sometimes. How do you just spit on a guy?”

  “What, I should put up with that? No one should put up with that. Isn’t a guy in uniform supposed to be chivalrous? Now, go on with your story.”

  As predicted, we easily get a table at a Korean restaurant named, with no irony, “Korean Restaurant.” We order, and I tell Gretchen about the card.

  “Do you have it? Let me see it.” I give her the envelope and she takes out the card and looks it over. “Are you kidding me? This card isn’t for your friend, it’s for you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, he wanted you to see it.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “He didn’t seal the envelope, for starters.”

  “Maybe he trusts me?”

  “Yes. He should trust you. As you and I look at this card, this card right here in my hand, intended for another person. As we discuss its contents, he should trust you completely. Of course he knew you were going to look at it. Just like you look at his browser history. He did this? These flowers?”

  I nod.

  “It’s pretty.” She puts the card back in the envelope and carefully slides the flap closed, then drops it to the table. “Come on, Jessica. He doesn’t care about Amy, or what she thinks. What you think is everything, though. To him.”

  “Hello, psychic hotline.”

  “It’s not psychic, it’s common sense.” She takes some kimchi from the dainty enameled bowl between us with her chopsticks and holds it up, examining it from all sides like some lab specimen. Then she eats it in one massive bite.

  “I’d like to think he sincerely feels bad about being a jerk to my best friend.”

  “He does feel bad. He feels like you have the upper hand. That makes him feel bad. You seeing this”—she pats the envelope on the table—“puts him back in control of things.”

  “You’re kind of making me feel weird here, Gretchen.”

  “What, because I’m right?”

  “Not that.”

  “Look, Jessica, this might not be any of my business—”

  “Maybe it’s not your business.”

  “—but I really like you, a lot. A lot a lot. And I think I can say, I mean, I’ve wanted to say, maybe you being with him isn’t the healthiest thing? Your relationship, I mean.”

  “What are you talking about? And it might be going a little far to call it a relationship, I think.”

  “Oh, yeah. Tell me about that date you had again? Wait, was I the one who called it a date, or was it you? Road trips to Nevada? And where do you sleep most nights?”

  “Stop it, Gretchen. And where is this coming from, when the first thing you pester me about every single time we talk is the sexual aspect of this so-called relationship?”

  “Well, sex is sex is sex. That’s nothing. It’s fun. But being manipulated is something.”

  I haven’t told her about what happened in the loft, and I certainly don’t intend to now. And for an instant, I think of Gretchen and Patrick, the great unspoken thing between us. But honestly, I don’t want to know anything about it.

  “He isn’t manipulating me, Gretchen.”

  “Okay, then. When was the last time you had sex?” She raises her eyebrow and waits a beat. “And I want all the details.” We both laugh, and this makes the tension I was feeling disappear. I’m happy for the change in subject, anyway.

  “Well,” I say, making a show of leaning forward a bit. “It wasn’t sex sex.” I tell her about going to the Marin Headlands, and about our trip into the bushes. When I tell her about the mess on my top and my thoughts about semen-resistant fabrics, Gretchen laughs and laughs.

  “Oh my God,” she says. She’s put her chopsticks down and she’s covering her face. “Oh my God. I can see the campaign. I can totally see it. You need to write that for PitchBitch. A big fake campaign. I can totally see it.”

  “For the active woman,” I say. “You’re active in so many ways.”

  “We know you get messy, active woman.”

  “A fabric that goes where you go. A fabric that takes it, just like you take it.”

  “This is so awful, Jess,” Gretchen says. She rubs her eye, shoulders shaking, with her elbow on the table. “But if you don’t write it, I’m going to.”

  Gert is asleep on the couch when I get back to the studio, and Josh is typing something on his laptop.

  “Hey,” Josh says, and he minimizes whatever it was he was doing on the computer. “You didn’t see Amy, did you?”

  “No. I’ll see her this week.”

  “Okay. You want to wake up Gert and we’ll get going?”

  I look over to the couch. Gert breathes slowly through barely parted lips, and his injured arm is folded up over his chest like a big broken wing.

  “Let him sleep a little, Josh. Aren’t we ahead of where you thought we’d be?”

  Josh shrugs and goes back to work on the computer.

  I go to the kitchen to fill my water bottle. Then I go to the bathroom, and, as I’m sitting there, my phone starts to buzz. The display says “UNKNOWN CALLER” which, at this time of day, is probably my sister calling from the lab phone because she forgot her cell or her battery is dead. I have no issues with talking to my sister on the phone while sitting on the toilet, so I flip it open.

  “Hello?”

  “Eh, Yosh? Is there, Yosh?”

  “What? Who is this?” I stand up quickly, and double-check the display.

  “Yosh? Is there?”

  “Yosh? You mean Josh?”

  “Yosh, Yosh! Is there?”

  “Hold on,” I say. Josh is standing there when I go out of the bathroom, like he’s expecting the call. “What is going on?” I ask him.

  “Here, here,” he says, holding out his hand. “It’s important.”

  “On my phone, it’s important?”

  “Just, may I have the phone, please?” Feeling like I’m giving in to something I shouldn’t, I hand the phone to him, and he puts it to his ear. “Bueno?” He looks at me and puts his free hand up to cover his other ear, then turns away and speaks in a flood of hushed Spanish. I stand behind him with my hands on my hips.

  “Sí,” he says, kind of urgently. “Sí, sí, sí!”

  “Josh,” I say. “Josh? What is
going on?”

  He waves his hand without turning to look at me, like a “keep it down” kind of wave, and keeps talking in Spanish.

  “That’s my phone, Josh.”

  He keeps talking, hunched over, taking slow steps away from me. I take slow steps and follow him. Finally he snaps my phone shut and hands it to me.

  “Sorry about that,” he says. “Thanks.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Yeah, I, I mean…it was an important—”

  I point to the studio phone on the wall. “Hello? Your studio phone? Right there? Extension whatever?”

  “He couldn’t call on an Academy phone.”

  “What are you talking about? Who the hell was that? Are you doing some drug deal on my phone? I can’t believe you!”

  “No, no, Jessica, seriously.” He kind of laughs. “It’s nothing like that.”

  “You hypocrite. You give me all this shit about me having my phone here, and then you’re arranging creepy calls from some dealer or something on my phone? That’s my phone, Josh. Mine!”

  “It wasn’t a dealer, Jess. It’s, I’ll tell you all about it at dinner.”

  “No dinner tonight. You’re crazy if you think I’m having dinner with you tonight.”

  “Come on,” Josh says.

  There’s a noise from the couch, and we both look over to see Gert sitting up and scratching his head with his good hand.

  “Oh, boy,” he says. “That was some sleep. Jess, you ready to start on the shoulders?”

  I look back to Josh. “You are unbelievable sometimes,” I say.

  18

  Josh and I speak very little over the next few days while the rest of my body is scanned. Gert does most of the work, and though I feel Josh looking at me from behind the bulk of the scanner from time to time, I ignore him. I work with him during the daytime, but at night I do not dine with him, and I do not sleep with him.

  Gert is the interface between us. And as we’ve begun to scan my secret parts, I’ve let myself trust him. He’s used his good hand to wrap strips of tape under and around my breasts to force them up and together for the scanner, and he’s used that hand to spread my knees and aim the laser eye in close between my legs. He takes the work seriously, and he never makes jokes. Well, I’ve never heard him make jokes about me, anyway. I trust him.

  I’ve stayed at my place for the past two nights. Partially because it feels nice to be home, and partially because I want to make Josh feel bad. I take the time to work on my project with Gretchen, and I take the time to write some material for Cippoletti. I savor eating by myself, and I savor drinking wine alone in bed while I read.

  I return to my home, and I listen for noises, above and below.

  And on Wednesday night, it happens, just as I knew it would at some point or another. I run into Patrick as I’m climbing the stairs. I see his legs, coming down, almost to my landing. Turning around would be too obvious; I’m stuck.

  “Hey,” he says, stopping on the landing.

  “Hey?” This seems far more awkward for me than it does for him. I feel like an idiot.

  “Things going well?”

  “Things are, yeah. Busy. You?”

  “Busy too. Crazy busy.”

  “Yeah.”

  Neither of us says anything for a moment. Patrick fingers his keys and stuffs them into his pocket, and then he clears his throat.

  “Hey,” he says, “we’re all going out for a drink at the Palace, if you want to—”

  “No, no, I have to do some work.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah. It’s, you know. Work.”

  “Oh. Well, I’m out, then. See you around.”

  “See you.”

  I think for a moment that he’s going to touch my arm as he passes me on the stairs, and I brace myself for the shock of it, but he just lifts his hand in a half wave and goes by. I call Katie as soon as I’m through my door.

  “I just saw him,” I say as soon as she picks up. “I just saw Patrick.”

  “Uh oh. Like from afar? Or was there interaction?”

  “On the stairs. Full interaction.”

  “Full?”

  “No, no! Just, talking.”

  “Was it weird?”

  “Not for him. Weird for me. I think he asked if I wanted to go out for a drink.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said I had to work. I feel like an idiot.”

  “Do you miss him?”

  “I don’t know?”

  “What’s up with—”

  “Josh is in the doghouse,” I say. I tell her about dinner with Amy, and the bizarre phone call.

  “Creepy,” Katie says. “And you’re still letting him scan your bum?”

  “That part is proceeding as usual.”

  “I have a question. Just what is he doing with all these scans?”

  “Well, he’s using them in some prints he’s going to make, somehow, but…it’s a good question. I honestly don’t know.”

  The rest of the evening is spent with leftover Chinese and some lousy white wine, reviewing the digital brochure mockups that Gretchen has sent to me. The files are huge, and they’re difficult to view on my smallish old monitor, but the stuff looks good and the design is well done and I feel a silly thrill at seeing so much work being built up around something I wrote.

  I type up some comments to Gretchen in an e-mail, and as I’m just about to hit send, there’s a general clumsy knocking around downstairs.

  “Danny.” I hear Patrick calling in what he thinks is a whisper. “Danny?”

  It’s just a little bit after one in the morning.

  There’s one last “Danny?” followed by the thump thump thump thump of him running up the stairs, and, wait a second, is he pausing on my floor? The moment is nothing, and he thump thumps again the rest of the way up and I hear his keys and his door opening and shutting above me.

  There is water again. A toilet flushing. I hit send and close down my computer and rise up out of my chair with my right ear cocked toward the ceiling.

  There are footsteps. Furniture is moved. Chair legs groan against the old wood floor.

  I’m holding my breath and listening.

  And, maybe with a little more certainty than the last time I did it, I stand up and go to my door.

  There is no crying of hinges or creaking of steps when I make my way up to Patrick’s floor, and when I’m there I halt and take a breath before I take one last step toward his door. Just as I raise my hands to brace myself so I can place my ear against the wood, the doorknob rattles and suddenly, slowly, certainly, the door opens and there he is, standing shirtless and rubbing the back of his neck with his free hand. I drop my hands and jog my right foot forward to keep myself from falling through his doorway, making a stupid face because I am so, so busted.

  I’m surprised by the fact that I feel so calm. I step into the dark apartment—one step, two—and Patrick, facing me, takes two steps back and stops. We’re toe to toe with the door open and a wash of blue fluorescent light behind me.

  “You were at my door,” he says, blinking against the buzzing glare coming in from the hall. “The other night.”

  “Yes,” I say. “I was.”

  “You didn’t knock.”

  “I know.”

  “You could have knocked.”

  “I was observing.”

  “Is that another word for spying?”

  “No. Just observing.”

  “You should have knocked. You could have observed me in person.”

  Standing there, facing each other, my eyes are just about level with his chin. A smile breaks across his face, and I catch a hint of his boozy breath.

  “Are you drunk?” I ask. My arms are at my sides.

  “Maybe. Maybe a little. Not so much. Are you?”

  “Not so much. Should I be?”

  The smile goes, and he brings his hands forward to put them on my waist. He doesn’t look stern. If anything, he looks slee
py and maybe even a little…sad? “You don’t need to be,” he says. My arms go up and around him, like a reflex.

  “I don’t need to be, I guess.”

  We move farther into his apartment, feet in sync, step, pause, step. My arms tighten, and so do his, and my chest presses into him. His cheek is scratchy with day-old beard against my forehead, and I close my eyes and tilt my head and press my face into his neck, and I smell the bar and his home and his work. Mostly it’s just him I smell, there in the skin of his neck.

  Patrick’s lips press into my hair.

  “Did you get your work done?” It’s a whisper, a murmur, into my hair.

  “I did my work,” I say. “It’s never really done, though.”

  “It never really is. I miss you.”

  “Do you?”

  “Yes.”

  “We fit together well,” I say, and as I say it, Patrick’s balance goes for a second and we wobble, and then we keep each other up. “Like this.”

  “Yes. Like this. Do you miss me?”

  I could tell him the truth and say yes, but I’m afraid if I do, this perfect moment will somehow vanish. So I say nothing; I stand and tighten my arms around him and hold my closed eyes against the line of his jaw.

  “You do, don’t you,” he says.

  I don’t speak.

  “I know you do.”

  We take more steps—slowly—Patrick leading me backward in the general direction of his bedroom. One of the windows is open in there, and the lightest breeze comes through and briefly makes his wood-slatted blinds chatter. Pat’s hand is up my shirt and his palm presses warm against the small of my back, and when we take another step he staggers and I think we’re going to fall but we don’t, and the whole time his hand is there at my back. I laugh for a moment about the near disaster but when I look up at him I stop; his head is tilted back and his eyes are closed and his lips are barely parted. Then he blinks open his eyes and smiles and looks at me.

  “Who’s leading here?” he asks.

  “Are you really drunk, Pat?”

  “Nooo,” he says. Then he smiles again. “I’m not, really.”