City Boy (4 page)

“Whoa, whoa,” Jack flagged him down. “You can’t play it that loud. Wife. Work. Sleep. Remember?”

The kid shrugged and looked sulky, but lowered the volume. Jack said, “Headphones. Quiet hours. We’ve got to get something worked out here, Rich.”

The kid said Sure, okay, but in the moment before he did so Jack caught the knowing look that passed between him and the girl. It was plain to them he was some hung-up fussbudget fixated on tiny decorum, an inhabitant of boring squaredom. They had their own absorbing world of sex and music and intrigue. He wasn’t any part of it. When you were under twenty, the boundaries were clear. He could hang with them, smoke their herb, groove to their music or pretend to. He would still amuse them.

Maybe it was just his brain on drugs that made this rankle. Hey, wiseass, you’re the one who’s the joke here. Let’s get that straight. He hated having his insulated bubble of smugness punctured, wanted to believe, in the face of all evidence and history to the contrary, that he was the only one capable of insight, observation, judgment. It was always a shock to realize that someone else was peering back in at him, that he was himself horribly visible.

He was ready to get up and leave, he was through with these people, but before he could get his hands and feet and all his other balky parts in motion, the door buzzer sounded.

The apartment building had a security door and a buzzer for people who wanted entrance. Also an intercom that was supposed to let you ask who was there, but this was broken, and looked as if it had been for some time. It wasn’t a problem for Jack and Chloe, who would only have to open their front door to see who was standing outside. But the kid would have to go downstairs. He and the girl looked at each other.

“Randy.”

“You think?”

The kid jumped up and hit the entry buzzer. Now it really was time for Jack to leave, but he lingered, just to see what new sort of oddity might walk through the door, and also to administer a few more cautions about the music.

There were feet on the stairs. The kid opened the apartment door
then made an effort to close it again, too late, somebody he didn’t expect already half inside, the kid giving up and walking away, the girl leaning forward with her lips pushed into a pout—all this happening in a second or so, as Jack struggled to get upright in the sagging couch cushions and brace for whatever menace was on its way into the room, vengeful drug lords or some other bad trouble he’d just larked his way into the middle of—

But it was only another girl. A narrow-shouldered, narrow-faced girl with a hitch in her step and pale, damp blond hair. She didn’t say anything, nor did anyone else. The kid resumed his seat on the floor. The Raggedy Ann girl hunched up close to him and got her hands busy with his shirt buttons.

The blond girl closed the door behind her and surveyed the room, Jack included, with an expression of haughty disinterest. She took a seat in a corner that put her in everyone’s line of sight, although the three of them were careful not to make eye contact. Jack was actually grateful for the music. Without it there would have been only glowering silence. Raggedy Ann was playing up to the kid for all she was worth, pressing and squeezing and carrying on voluptuously. The song ended and another song began. It seemed to be a contest among them to pretend that no one else was in the room.

The blond girl maintained her cool, scornful pose. She took a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of her denim shirt and studied it critically, then removed one and reached across the coffee table for the lighter.

Her sudden movement startled the kid, who had been lying back with his eyes half closed as the redhead fondled him. He’d been pretending the music was so compelling that he wasn’t noticing anything else, a supreme, almost yogilike act of concentration. But the way his eyes shot open and his head jerked gave him away.

The blond girl lit her cigarette, allowed herself a small, meant-to-be-noticed smirk, and tossed the lighter back on the table.

Jack thought he could guess what all this was about, although the notion of anyone fighting over the kid’s scrawny ass seemed ludicrous. Without meaning to, Jack was examining the two girls, comparing them, as if he were the one who got to choose. Raggedy Ann was, if not
prettier, at least more decorative, had gone to more effort with her eye makeup and silver rings and bright green blouse. The blond girl was less obtrusive, less costumed. Her clothes were drab and her hair hung flat and straight around her shoulders. She didn’t have much of a figure, at least as far as Jack could tell from all her flapping layers of cotton. She had on a patterned skirt of the sort of material that was usually made into cheap bedspreads. It was hiked up around one knee and when Jack tried to get a peek at her legs, she caught him at it and withered him with a look.

Jack sank back into the sofa. He felt like an idiot in so many different ways, there was no use in trying to sort them out. He wished there was a lever he could pull that would drop him through the floor and into his own living room. The blond girl spoke up above the music. “Who’s the big asshole?” Meaning him.

The kid was pretending he’d just noticed her. “Him? He’s …” It was clear that he’d forgotten Jack’s name. “Neighbor.”

“What did you tell him about me, huh?”

“Nothing. Christ.”

“Because he’s looking at me like he heard something really choice.”

“God, you are so paranoid. Like everybody’s supposed to care about you and your crazy psycho-bitch routine.”

“Right,” said the girl, sending smoke through her nostrils. “I remember how much you used to hate it. And all the different interesting ways.”

The redheaded girl lifted her mouth out of the kid’s neck for long enough to say something utterly vulgar.

Jack got to his feet. “Just leaving. Take it easy.”

Nobody said anything, although the kid raised his hand in a halfhearted wave. Don’t let the door hit you on the butt on the way out.

Jack paused in the hallway. He no longer felt the pot, at least not in the way he had before, but he was still addled and unsteady and uncertain about what had really happened. He stared at the closed door, shook his head as if there were someone there to agree with him about the strangeness of it all, then made his way downstairs.

The music was a low growl overhead. He supposed this was the best
you could hope for. He saw how quickly they would come to accept all such unacceptable intrusions and annoyances.

Chloe was asleep. She lay on her side with the covers drawn up to her waist, leaving her arm and shoulder bare. The arm was long and graceful and as insubstantial as a bird’s wing, and like a wing it was bent at the elbow as if tensed for flight. Her face was in shadow but the line of her throat was clear and the dark mass of her hair spread across the pillow with that same look of arrested motion. He wanted to wake her up, tell her everything, get her to laugh and marvel and exult in how lucky they were to have each other and the life they were building together, a life the freaks upstairs would neither know nor appreciate. What had happened tonight would be incomplete to him until he told her the story. But tomorrow was a workday, and he let her sleep.

He had only gone into the bathroom for a minute and when he came out he paused, listening to what was going on in the bedroom overhead. It was not the first time he had heard these sounds, although never this clearly. On other occasions it had been possible to at least pretend they were something else. What unsettled him now was not so much the sounds themselves, but his absolute certainty that no one had come downstairs from the second floor.

W
hen Jack was a kid growing up in the boring perfection of the southern California suburbs, he longed for all the places that were not southern California. From television and movie screens, magazine covers and billboards, he took in all the bright and dark, slick and grainy images. They jumbled together like a giant commercial for the world: wheat fields, tornados, barns, eagles, coal mines, Graceland, Christmas tree farms, Mayan temples, subways, Bedouins, windmills, flagpoles, manholes. Amazing stuff, all of it. Indiana seemed as foreign and exotic as India. And always there was the feeling that life, real life, was going on somewhere just beyond his reach.

His father was a surgeon who specialized in sports-related injuries. His mother made stained-glass artifacts in a studio attached to the pool house. His older sister was serious about riding horses. Jack grew up with his parents’ expectations, although they did not weigh on him very heavily. He was meant to go to medical school, prosper, buy real estate of his own. His mother worried that he didn’t join enough group activities. His father was always telling him to get his nose out of a book and go outside and
do
something. Karate, soccer, Little League, cross-country: he moped his way through all of these before he was allowed to give them up. A bit of a loner, a kid who looked out from inside himself.

He experimented with all the commercially available forms of rebel-lion: motorcyles and angry music and marijuana. He was smart enough to get through high school without much exertion, smart enough also to stay beneath the radar when it came to troublemaking, or for that matter, achievement. Camouflage and dissembling came naturally to him. His real self was in hiding, waiting to emerge in the same way he felt his real life was waiting for him.

His college entrance exam scores and grade point were good enough to get him into the California schools, but he wasn’t having any of that. His mother’s brother had gone to Northwestern, and that allowed him to enroll there, where his parents couldn’t possibly keep an eye on him.

Jack loved it from day one. He loved the deciduous trees igniting with autumn, and the stiff lakeshore winds, and the enormous, souped-up city just beyond the borders of campus. In the beginning Chicago shocked him with its purposeful shoving crowds and the sheer size of its raw and blighted parts. But it was the world he’d been denied, and he was in a hurry to make up for lost time.

It only took him a semester to change his major from premed to English. Because he wasn’t blond and didn’t talk about surfing, people at first refused to believe he was from California. He found he could use this to his advantage. He stopped telling friends that his family lived in Sherman Oaks and instead said Los Angeles, or if he wanted to make a flourish, “You know, the City of Angels.” He broke up with his long-distance high school girlfriend. He joined the campus chapter of the ACLU. He and his friends made weekend excursions to the Art Institute and Blackhawks games. A number of times they went to a particular South Side blues club, where it thrilled them to have the bartender nod at them in recognition. Jack was pretty sure that his real life had started, but he wasn’t yet as confident that this was his real self.

When his parents asked him what he was going to do after college, he said he would teach. At that point it was only an answer designed to put them off.

Of course he took poetry writing classes. Writing was both easier and more difficult than it would become later. Easier because he was ignorant of all the mistakes he was making, harder because he wasn’t used to the way writing could jerk you from high to low and back again. He loved the workshop classes, he sometimes wished you could make a living going to poetry workshops, well, you almost could, if you stretched grad school out long enough. At first he wasn’t confident
about speaking up in class, but he made himself pretend to be confident, and, amazingly, it worked.

In these classes students gathered together to encourage each other’s writing in productive and positive ways, and sometimes this actually happened, but everyone knew the classes were also about showing off. Jack enjoyed the competition, the first time in his life he could say that about anything. His writing was good enough to cow his fellow students, who were reduced to quibbling about things like the way he used capital letters. When it was time to talk about other people’s poems, he developed a habit of holding back his comments until the rest of the class had spoken. If he felt the poem was bad, he said so more in sorrow than in anger. If it was good, he was generous with praise. Even the professor sometimes seemed to be waiting for him to declare himself and pull the discussion one way or another. And even in the intense atmosphere of the workshop, where many of the students were further agitated because they were sleeping with each other, or failing to sleep with each other, or had already slept with each other and were no longer on civil terms, Jack was someone everyone agreed to admire.

Privately he believed he was one of the best writers on campus, but then his heart sank as he thought about the universe beyond the university.

It was the start of spring semester of his junior year. “Spring” was a bad joke. The weather was sleety January. The classroom on this first day smelled of wet wool and radiator heat. It was an advanced class and most of the students filing in knew each other, knew the professor, knew where they stood in the pecking order. There was an atmosphere of weary professionalism in the room, like soldiers who have been through a number of battles and know what the next campaign will bring.

Jack arrived late and was annoyed to find the seat that he thought of as his, the far corner of the back row, already occupied. The girl who had taken his place looked as if she was accustomed to sitting exactly where she wanted to. She had black hair looped up on top of her head and held there by two ivory chopsticks. She wore a white ski sweater and ripped blue jeans and beneath the jeans were black fishnet stockings.
The stockings just killed him. He sat down a few seats away and tried not to look at her exposed knee, or the long rip along the inside of her thigh, but then he found himself looking at her face, which was every bit as disconcerting. She was exactly the kind of girl who young men wrote poetry about. She might have been sitting there for just that purpose, like a model in a figure-drawing class. The arch of her eyebrows, slant of her cheekbones, soft chin, and full mouth were rendered in clear, pure lines. It was an intelligent face, its expression a bit severe, perhaps from a long experience of being stared at.