City Boy (24 page)

“Burgers,” said Jack. “Nothing better.”

“E. coli. That’s what they put in beef nowadays. I quit eating it. I don’t want to end up with worms.”

Ed looked at Jack, eyebrows raised, for some clue as to how he should respond. Jack said nothing. The trick with Mr. Dandy was to let him blather on unchallenged. Ed didn’t know that. “Well,” Ed said, “that’s why you cook it. To kill any contaminants.”

Mr. Dandy dismissed this with a hiccup. “You can’t cook out the mad cow disease. There’s mad cow in Texas. The government doesn’t tell you because the big ranchers give them money. That’s why there’s those Eat Beef commercials. Paid for with our taxes.”

Ed said, “I think you’ve been watching too much
X-Files
.”

“Ex-who?”

“Never mind.”

“This your father?” Mr. Dandy asked Jack.

“Father-in-law.”

“He talks like you. Peculiar.”

“Thank you,” said Jack.

“They fired my doctor. Whoever invented the HMO, he oughta be hung, then shot.”

“Fired?”

“Won’t pay for him anymore. He was a good doctor, I don’t know what they had against him. Had a good-looking nurse too. Big knockers, careless about her buttons. You get as old as I am, you look forward to a thing like that.”

Mr. Dandy didn’t look very well, not that he was ever the picture of rosy good health. He was curving into himself like a question mark and there was a tremor to his hands that Jack hadn’t noticed before. Mr.
Dandy said, “I got arthritis. I got the hard arteries. I got a soft spot in my one lung. I got the prostate.” He turned toward Ed, studied him up and down. “You old enough for that yet? Prostate?”

Jack left them and went inside to get the burgers.

They sat at the dining room table eating dinner. By now they were all quiet with each other, they seemed to have agreed among themselves that there would be no more unpleasantness. Jack had left the burgers on for too long and they were crusty. No one complained. He guessed that he and Chloe would have some kind of blowup once her parents left. Or maybe not. They might just table it, give it a bye. That was one way people dealt, he guessed. Strategic silence. He remembered he’d advocated as much to Pat Rubin. He wondered if Pat had any kind of a hot line.

They were still eating when Jack and Chloe sighed, put down their forks, looked at each other. “Honestly,” said Chloe. “I was beginning to hope he’d moved.”

“What in the world is that?” Allison asked, staring at the ceiling. It seemed to visibly bulge at each concussive impact, although that didn’t seem structurally possible.

Jack said, “The guy upstairs gets carried away once in a while. Be right back.” He and Chloe managed to smile at each other, a faint, herewe go-again smile, another fifteen rounds with Rasta Boy. Maybe the smile was only a kind of reflex, but he felt better for it.

The kid had the music cranked up as well. Bob Marley and the wailers wailed. It was like old times all right. Jack knocked. He could still hear the racket in the far room. Brezak must have invented some kind of giant floor-stamping machine. He knocked again. The door opened a narrow width and Ivory looked out.

She must have known it was him. Her face was ready for him. Sullen and belligerent. He couldn’t think why she might be angry with him, except that everybody else was.

Even before Jack could speak, she said, “Yeah, yeah. I know. Rich-ard,” she shouted into the apartment. Brezak shouted back. The pounding stopped.

Jack said, “And if you could just …”

She turned and did something to drop the volume on the music. There were occasions when Jack thought that most of the problems of the world could be solved if you got rid of loud music.

Ivory reappeared at the door. “There. Happy now?”

Her mouth was held too tight and her eyes were trying their damnedest not to let anything past them and she was not angry with him, not really, she was only wounded, by her life and everything in it, sad girl whose sadness came out crooked. For the second time that day Jack allowed his body to speak for him. He reached for her, drew her in, kissed her hard on her hard mouth, took in the damp, human smell of her skin and hair, her shoulder blades thin and jutting against his arm. It was like holding a child, her bones were that meager, or a willful animal that might struggle dangerously, although she didn’t try to pull away from him. He released her and stepped back. “Happy now,” he said.

Her mouth was pink and inflamed from him. She rubbed the back of her hand across it, staring him down as the door closed.

C
hloe had left for work and Jack was searching through the apartment for her journal.

He didn’t bother feeling bad about it. If you were going to rummage in your wife’s underwear drawer and the back of her closet and through her desk, if you got down on your hands and knees to look under the bed, inhale the scurf of rolling gray dust and poke among the rinds of some forgotten, calcified food item, you had to be resolute about shutting down your finer feelings.

He couldn’t find the journal. He had to wonder if it was even here, if she might have taken it with her to the office. He had gotten it into his head to read what she wrote. He needed it to feed his unhappiness, keep it up and running.

After Chloe’s parents left town, Jack said, “We need to talk about this New York thing.”

“I don’t think so.”

“How many other people are going? Just curious.”

“I have no idea. What’s all this about, you don’t trust me out of your sight? Because then we really do have problems.”

He hadn’t answered. Backed down. There was nothing to accuse her with except his own jealousy and ravening need. He didn’t want to bring up Spence’s name just to bait her. New York became a code word for everything unspoken between them. By now Jack wasn’t even certain if he wanted to be proved right or wrong, a jilted husband or a crazy man. He wasn’t sure if Chloe’s journal would prove anything either, but he wanted to know what she wrote in secret. Pathetic, that he would have to read a book to know her heart and mind.

And then, just when he thought he had lost everything, Chloe would turn to him in bed and curl herself around him and they’d fuck, that was the word, hard and fast, and Chloe would whisper I want you, I want all of you, and there was something new and fevered between them that he would never get his fill of.

He stopped even pretending to work on his own writing. It no longer seemed possible to believe that the people he wrote about were real. Just as California had ceased to be a place he wanted to live, he didn’t want to write about it anymore. He supposed he’d thought of James Joyce writing of Ireland from the Continent. California would be his Ireland. He would reveal and expose the country of his youth (its beautiful surfaces and shallow depths) with his gifts of silence, exile, and cunning. Except he wasn’t Joyce. Funny how he hadn’t noticed before.

In an attempt to salvage something from the novel, he spent several mornings making elaborate notes, diagrams of where the plot and characters might take him, complete with swooping arrows and exclamation points and interlocking circles. When he looked at these pages, it was apparent that he had been drawing, not writing.

He didn’t say anything about this to Chloe. When she asked him how things were going, he said what he always did, that things were fine, not bad.

For the Fourth of July, some of the old Northwestern crowd, Reg and Fran among them, were coming into the city for the fireworks. They were all going to meet in Grant Park and find a good spot, smoke the dope that somebody still kept on hand, watch the electric sparks rain into the black water, add their stoned oohs and aahs to everyone else’s. The night before, Jack said to Chloe, “You haven’t had a drink in three weeks.”

They were in bed, a non-sex night, the two of them lying quietly, loosely twined, before sleep. There was enough light from the street to outline the shape of the windows and Chloe’s soft profile.

“Yay for me.”

“Yes, yay. You should give yourself credit.”

The sheet rustled as Chloe moved away, untangling herself. “It’s not all that big a deal. A few weeks. You said so yourself.”

“I only meant, you shouldn’t expect to accomplish something that big instantly. But it is a big deal.” Jack reached over and pinched her nose gently. “Dummy. I’m giving you positive reinforcement.”

“I know.”

Jack waited. He pinched her nose again. “You’re supposed to say something nice now.”

“I know that too. Okay. But sometimes I don’t think I can ever be nice enough back to you. I feel like one of those Third World countries that can’t ever get out of debt.”

“You shouldn’t turn every piece of good news into something you feel bad about.”

“But I do. Because I can do it better than anything.”

He had to stop himself from sighing audibly. She could go on and on like this. And Jack’s job was to keep protesting and reassuring, in ways that were never effective but somehow necessary, that she was wrong about it all, she was not worthless, undeserving, and so on. He was the ambassador to a Third World country, a place with some desperate, inequitable, crippled government that would never really improve.

Jack said, “I don’t even think you believe that about yourself. That you’re some terrible human being. You’re used to saying it, is all. It allowed you to have low expectations of yourself that can never be a source of disappointment. It’s a defense mechanism.”

“Thank you. For telling me how I really feel. I can never figure that part out.”

“Well Christ, Chloe, if there’s something you don’t like about yourself, make some effort to change it. That’s why I want to give you a lot of credit for not drinking. You’re taking control. You’re addressing a problem honestly and working toward a solution.”

Chloe didn’t answer, and his own words hung in the air, fatuous, glib, pompous, the distillation of a hundred slick magazine pages on Healthy Living. Chloe kept her silence. She was either thinking about what he’d said, or she was treating it with the unspoken contempt it deserved.
He should apologize. She was probably waiting for him to do so. Somehow things had gotten all twisted around until he couldn’t remember who had done the most wrong to whom.

Another space of silence passed. He touched Chloe’s bare arm. “Is there anything you want to tell me?” he whispered. But by then she was asleep.

T
he Fourth of July weekend started out muggy and gray, a headache sky that made you squint and shield your eyes even in the absence of sun. Everyone watched the horizon, expecting the worst. After all, it was Chicago. By noon the first line of storms pushed in from the northwest. Long, ripping peals of thunder sounded. Lightning forked and danced. Picnickers in forest preserves ran for cover. A drilling rain followed. It soaked the patriotic bunting along parade routes in Northbrook and Skokie, it kept sailboats in the harbor and moved the backyard barbeques in Bridgeport inside. Then the rain passed away to the south and people tried to calculate how much clear air they’d have before the next batch of violent weather arrived. Because summer storms always seemed to arrive in platoons, fresh waves of electricity and lashing rain. If you watched from the roof of a very tall building (say, the Hancock, which might have been built for no other purpose), at any time you would see, out over the lake or down along the Indiana border, advancing or receding, the wall of blue-purple cloud that meant falling rain.

Everybody worried about the lakefront fireworks and how crummy it would be if they had to cancel. There was a rain date if they needed it, and somebody somewhere in the public events office would decide whether or not to be a giant killjoy. At six o’clock Chloe was on the phone to their friends who lived in Lincoln Park. A light, steady drizzle was falling. The television radar showed fist-sized patches of green rain near Rockford. It could go either way, disperse or settle into a downpour. The friends said they could still come over. Which meant taking the chance of being in traffic when the skies opened again, then hanging out on someone’s apartment balcony or watching videos.
Chloe said Sure, they could still get together. It was clear no one had a lot of enthusiasm for plan B. Reg and Fran were coming to Jack and Chloe’s place first, they were already on their way. Once they’d arrived, everyone would check the weather again, figure something out.

Jack very much hoped it would stop raining, and they would spend the evening in a group that would dilute the presence of Reg and Fran. It wasn’t their fault that he didn’t want to see them. After the infamous dinner, Chloe had called to apologize. Reg and Fran had been just terrific about everything, just super. They completely understood. They fell all over themselves to understand. It was, gee whiz, the kind of thing that could happen to anyone. Jack resented even their niceness. There was something craven about it.

It was raining harder when Reg and Fran showed up. “Who ordered this weather?” asked Reg, stamping his feet to dry them. He was wearing a shirt made out of a flag, different patches of oversized red white and blue stars and stripes, laid out so the stripes ran perpendicular and hectic.

Fran said, “It’s so great to see you guys?” Giving it the rising inflection of a question. Jack imagined them in the car on the way here, discussing how to comport themselves. He felt sorry for them, and guilty about his own ill will. Nothing was their fault. They hadn’t asked to witness someone else’s misbehavior and humiliation. They didn’t have to come here, try to smooth things over. Sometimes going through the motions of friendship was indistinguishable from real friendship.

There was the rain to talk about, and whether or not they should stay or go to Lincoln Park, whether and when they’d hear about the fireworks. Jack and Chloe served glasses of lemonade. Lemonade, now, that hit the spot. Reg and Fran were delighted with lemonade. They could have been offered beakers of O negative and that would have been fine too. Chloe maintained a detached, ironic smile, which Jack recognized as a defense against shame. She asked Fran to help her in the kitchen and the two of them trooped off. Jack wondered, not for the first time, if there were things Fran knew about his marriage that he himself did not.