City Boy (12 page)

“You shouldn’t smoke.”

“If I get cancer, I get cancer.”

“Nice attitude.”

She blew smoke in a thin stream, ignoring him.

“What’s the matter with your leg?”

“What?”

“I noticed you had a limp.”

“Yeah, my pelvis is fucked up.”

“Oh, that’s—”

“I’m real used to it. I was in an accident when I was a little kid, it never healed right. There’s this place on my hip where there’s no bone and the skin just hangs. You want to see? It’s kind of interesting, in a gross way.”

“No thanks.”

“You were trying to that first night. Remember? You were scoping me. But hey, that was before you knew I was a cripple.”

“Cripple, what kind of talk is that.”

“But you were, weren’t you.”

“All right, maybe so. But I don’t think it means I should be doing it now.” He felt embarrassed, he wanted some logical exit from the conversation, wasn’t finding one.

She seemed to feel she’d caught him in some squeamishness that gave her an advantage. “Yeah, my whole leg is real gnarly. But you know what, you learn to stare stuff like that right down. My nickname in school was Swamp Thing. Because I walked crooked, worse than I do now, and I was dorky anyway. You get so shit people say doesn’t bother you. It rolls right off. So don’t think you can lay your Big Brother wisdom on me that’s supposed to make me behave like you think I should. ’Cause all I hear you saying is Swamp Thing, Swamp Thing, Swamp Thing.”

“It’s a pretty name.”

“
What
is?”

“Ivory.”

Another round of silence. Jack shifted his weight in the chair. His brain was still sending out sparks of static and agitation, but his body had begun to melt down into a deep, muscular tiredness. He said, “I had a big fight with my wife tonight.”

Her cigarette flared as she took a last drag and stubbed it out. Her light hair turned toward him, a milky spot in the gloom. “Care to say what about?”

“I don’t know what it was about.” Or it was about the fear he’d always had but refused to acknowledge, his own crippled part that he stubbornly pretended was invisible: that he loved Chloe more than she
would ever love him. He stood up. “I have to go to bed. Will you be okay out here?”

“Sure.”

He hesitated. “Promise me I won’t be sorry I let you in. That you’re not going to set the place on fire, anything like that.”

“Don’t worry.” She sounded tired also. “I probably won’t even talk to him. Thanks. For the wine and all.”

“If you’re not going to talk to him—”

“I just need to be here. I can’t be anyplace else. It doesn’t have to make sense to you. No offense, but I think I want to be alone right now.”

Jack left her sitting there and let himself into his apartment, and into his bed again, where Chloe turned toward him in her sleep and pressed herself against him. She was warm from the bed and sleep had soothed the unhappiness in her so she breathed calmly, and her hair smelled clean and he thought he understood the girl outside better than she would have imagined. If you were sad and in love, there was only one place you had to be.

He woke up early, the morning still gray, and walked out to the backyard. The grass was dank with dew and a rag of spiderweb in a corner of the fence was etched in dripping silver. The striped blanket was folded neatly on a chair and the girl was gone.

T
oday Jack was teaching social studies, the Westward Expansion, to a class of South Side junior high schoolers. O Pioneers! O Sacajawea and the Gold Rush and the Alamo! Like they cared. It was summer school, make-up classes for kids who had already sunk to the bottom of the heap. None of them wanted to be here, why would anyone? Only the Alamo excited any interest. It had drama, and teams you could root for. The Mexican kids in the class were all for Santa Ana while the black kids thought Jim Bowie was pretty cool on account of the knife. Yeah, but Santa Ana capped Jim Bowie’s ass. Yeah, but they was so lame. It took thirty or forty of em. Ol Jim cut em up. Bullshit, he was just hidin in the house. Want no house, was a fort. He was hidin, he was pussy. Was not. Was too. He dead pussy. Santa Ana took him out. Well Santa Ana be dead too.

Jack intervened, steered them back to maps and border disputes, and the class resumed its listless inattention. He was just another white guy come to tell them things they didn’t need to know. What use was the westward expansion to them? The gold was long gone and the land claimed, with no place in it for them. What use was history itself, since everything had been decided before they were born?

The weather had turned hot and the classroom had no air-conditioning, only a couple of fans stirring the heat and making enough noise that Jack had to pitch his voice at a half shout to be heard. The students slumped over their desks or stared out the windows. The playground outside was sun-blasted asphalt that could have served as the pavement of hell, surrounded by chain link. Beyond that, cars moved slowly through the glaze of heat, past the ordinary ugliness of laundromats and check-cashing stores and whatever it was they sold behind those barred and grated storefronts. Billboards advertised Empleo Avisos and Fast Credit. Gardens of broken glass grew in the vacant lots. Some catastrophe had left a single wall of a brick building standing like one of those desert-rock formations that are given picturesque names. Children died on such streets. You read the newspaper stories, you were shocked by them, except that it happened too often to be truly shocking. Jack thought, If I was one of these kids, and this was what I saw every day, would I care that there was such a thing as Manifest Destiny, or the Northwest Passage, or anything else I read in a book?

He didn’t know and he wouldn’t have the chance to find out. He was only a substitute, here for a week to replace some luckless woman who’d broken both feet getting out of a bathtub, an accident he didn’t want to try and visualize. He wouldn’t be here long enough for any of these kids to learn, let alone remember, his name. He wrote words no one read, he stood in classrooms and spoke about the dead past to children who had already stopped tracking their futures. He felt disconnected from some important part of life itself, or perhaps it was only from his own life. He said, “Getting back to the Alamo …”

That evening he asked Chloe, “Do you want to start a family?”

“Now what brought that on?”

“I don’t know. Does it have to be something? Can’t it just be biology?

Like salmon spawning.”

“Salmon.”

“Well do you?”

“You picked a funny time to ask.” They were in the car, driving to dinner with friends. Traffic nudged along. Radiators labored. The temperature that day had reached ninety. By now it had slipped back a couple of notches, but a layer of gray humidity had settled in. Chloe had her compact out and was trying to put on makeup. The air conditioner blew a thin, inadequate stream over their knees.

“Just think about it. We can talk later.”

“I thought we decided this already. I thought we were going to wait five years.” Chloe scrutinized her lip line, made some tiny adjustment,
then snapped the compact shut and gave him a skeptical, I-dare-youto impregnate-me glance.

“You know why I’m bringing this up now? So you have to listen. Unless you want to get out and run through traffic.”

“Very sneaky.”

“We didn’t really decide, we said we’d decide later. Five years. I don’t know where you get that.”

“Because in five years I should have a track record at the bank, or wherever I end up working. I can take a leave without doing a lot of damage. I’ll be thirty-one, that’s not so old. What’s the big rush?”

A car pulled up next to them at a light, speakers turned up so high that even through the sealed windows they heard boom and feedback. The glass rattled. Jack supposed they should be glad that H.P.R.B. wasn’t into rap. He couldn’t explain to Chloe why the idea of children had struck him with such force. There was some need or lack in him he hadn’t suspected. He was a little embarrassed, but secretly happy. He waited for the rapmobile to pull past them before he answered. “I just want to be able to talk about it. I really want kids, I want to make plans. Buy little rubber footballs, things like that.”

“What if we have a girl?”

“I’m still getting her a football.”

“You don’t even like football, dope. I want kids too. Just not next week, okay?” Chloe reached over and took a swipe at his hair. “This is really kind of cute of you. Daddy.”

“Mommy.”

They smiled at each other, then Jack turned his attention back to driving. It was a few days after their quarrel. Things were going better. They were both making an effort. Jack had brought up therapy, in a tentative, roundabout way, hedging more than he’d planned, but at least he’d come out with it, and Chloe said maybe it wasn’t a bad idea. She was under a lot of stress at work, she could use somewhere to dump it besides on him, poor old Jack. Poor old Jack was glad she’d been receptive, although he didn’t think she’d actually gotten around to calling for an appointment. In the new, sunny atmosphere of the
last few days, it didn’t seem quite as urgent. He supposed Chloe was right, there was nothing urgent about children either, except that he wanted to try on the idea, imagine his life opening out into this new country.

He merged onto the Eisenhower and pointed the car westward, squinting against the sun, which was balanced on the horizon like an elongated red egg. The people they were going to see lived in the suburbs, in Elmhurst. They were Chloe’s friends, a woman she’d been in the M.B.A. program with, and the husband. Jack supposed that no matter how long he and Chloe were married, they would always be her friends, not his. Like certain pieces of furniture, some friends resisted joint ownership.

The woman’s name was Frances and her husband was Reginald. Fran and Reg. Fran worked for American Express in some corporate capacity. Reg sold air-purification systems, fancy, hi-tech machinery that pulverized odors and used electrostatic filtration and ionization to zap bacteria, dust mites, and anything else that you’d been breathing all your life and which hadn’t killed you yet. Chloe had been Fran’s maid of honor at their wedding, as Fran, later, had been Chloe’s. The two of them gossiped on the phone and met for lunch downtown and compared notes about their jobs and, Jack was sure, husbands. That was all fine except that every so often the women felt it necessary to mount a full-scale dinner offensive between the couples. Jack was resigned to this even though it meant he spent a lot of time paired off with Reg, watching off-brand sports like hockey or auto racing, or hearing about high-energy, virus-killing fields. Tonight was the first time since Jack and Chloe’s move to the city that they’d all gotten together. At least it was a weeknight and they couldn’t stay late. Jack had encouraged the idea of a weeknight.

Fran and Reg had bought a small but actual house. Some of the dinner inviting, Jack figured, had to do with showing it off. When they pulled into the driveway, he noticed evidence of new, aggressive landscaping—skinny trees held upright with staking, meandering flower beds that, at this point, were growing mostly wood-chip mulch. A straw wreath with a clutch of pink flowers and pink ribbons hung on
the front door. Jack wondered how long it would take for Chloe to say something complimentary about it all.

Not long. Fran opened the front door before they could knock, and she and Chloe hugged. “This is so cute,” Chloe said, meaning the wreath. “We could never put anything like that on our door, it’d be gone in fifteen minutes.” Sometimes Chloe liked to maintain the pose that they lived in an urban combat zone.

“Jack, darling.” Fran held out her arms for him to embrace her. She liked to flirt with him by making a show of pretending to flirt with him. Jack went along with it, he supposed he didn’t mind the little bit of a feel that came his way, perfumed arms, breasts, mouth on his neck, all of it timed and executed to get the most for her money before she pulled away and beamed fondly at him. Jack actually liked Fran; she meant no harm and she was pretty, in a toothy, corn-fed blond fashion. But it was such a sad, strangled way to get a little of what she needed, or thought she needed. All the desperate energy that went into finding some safe, small channel. He was glad that Reg wasn’t a hugger.

Reg was out in the backyard, priming the grill. “Shakespeare!” He and Jack shook hands. Jack smiled gamely at being called Shakespeare. It hadn’t been funny the first time. Reg waved at Chloe, who was still in the kitchen with Fran. Reg asked him what he wanted to drink and Jack said Was that a martini there and Reg said It was, it was. Jack could count on there being martinis at this house, looked forward to them. They went along with the sweet expanses of lawn and the calming views of actual sky, the sifting leaf shadow and carriage lamps and mailboxes and swing sets and purple-martin houses set on poles and sparkling garbage cans and well-stocked garages, all the fond, absurd equipment of suburbia. Jack had to admit, he still felt a certain affection for such things, a comfort level he couldn’t deny. This was what he’d grown up with after all, or something very similar, even as he was sure he would never live this way again.

Reg went inside and returned with a cocktail shaker and a glass for Jack. “Here you go. I don’t know where the girls went. Probably upstairs, going to the john together. Why do they do things like that?” Reg shook his head. Clearly, he was satisfied to have a wife he could
make such ritual complaints about. It meant that life was going along in ways he expected and understood. Reg had sandy hair already thinning on top, although he wasn’t yet thirty, and small, handsome features. Or at least, Jack supposed he was what women considered handsome. It was a salesman’s face, pink, well-barbered, the face of a professional smiler.

“How’s that martini?”

“Perfect. Hits the spot.”

“We’re having shish kebab.”

“That’s great.”

“Fran got these contraptions, special skewers that are supposed to keep your mushrooms and shit from falling off.”

“Always a problem.”

“I said we should do steaks but she wanted something fancier. Company food. Wait till you see the salad.” Reg got up from his lawn chair and ministered to the coals. The grill was one of those heroic, oversized models, suitcase shaped and mounted on a sturdy trolley. It had its own hinged hood and carving shelf and hooks for utensils. Jack was mildly surprised that they hadn’t yet traded up to gas.