City Boy (10 page)

“He waits till I’m getting ready to come home, he tries to get on the elevator when it’s just me and him. He always starts off talking about work, some question I have to say yes to. I know that trick. But whatever he says, you can feel the slime oozing out between the cracks. If we’re together long enough, he says other stuff. He asks about you sometimes.”

“Me? What the hell does he say?”

“You know. Sex stuff.”

“I will kill him.”

“No you won’t. This is him trying to get me rattled. It’s a power thing. If you come in and fight my fights for me, I lose.”

“Chloe, shit, this has been going on for how long? You’re stuck between floors with this slime devil, talking about our sex life?”

“I really don’t like that term. ‘Sex life.’ It’s so prissy. People should just say ‘fucking.’ It’s the express elevator, by the way, I’ve never known it to get stuck. You always exaggerate for dramatic effect.”

“So that’s what you talk about. You and me …” He couldn’t bring himself to say fucking. He got up from the couch and stood over her. He didn’t know how much worse this was going to get, how much longer he was going to have to listen to his wife relating, in a thoughtful tone of voice, things that should be treated as outrages, and which seemed specifically designed to render him an impotent fool. Upstairs the bass track of the kid’s stereo beat against the floorboards like a pile-driver.

“Oh I don’t tell him anything, do you really think I’d do that? He insinuates. I evade.”

“Couldn’t you just not take the elevator, don’t they have stairs, huh? Insinuates what?”

“You know. That married sex is boring. Like he would have the slightest clue.”

She gave him another appraising look, then rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand. The alcohol wearing off into fatigue. Jack had a sudden sickening doubt that things had happened the way she’d said. But it was crazy to start thinking like that.

“Look,” he said, trying to approximate calm. He wanted to take her to bed, reclaim her with everything he could put into his lovemaking, he wanted to unhear everything she’d said. But he knew there was more to come. “You’d better tell me what else.”

“Jack, honey—”

“Just lay it on me. Let’s get this over with.”

Chloe shrugged, suggesting that she was humoring an unreasonable request. “I went out for a drink with him the other night after work. Now don’t jump down my throat. It wasn’t anything. It was only to get him to back off. Gunfight at the OK Corral.”

“Where did you go?”

“What difference does it make?”

“I’m curious. Where people go to do things like this.”

“I’m going to ignore that insinuation. We went to Bandera. If that’s really important. Nothing happened, you are so paranoid. I’m telling you so that everything’s completely transparent. He’s not going to bother me anymore. I worked it out. Problem solved.”

Another unhappy thought visited Jack. “You’re telling me this because somebody might have seen you out with him and it might get back to me.”

“Well if it did I knew you’d do exactly what you’re doing now. Not understand. I had to show him I wasn’t scared of him. Everybody thinks things are so easy for me, all I have to do is smile and show a little leg and I get whatever I want, well, it’s absolutely not like that! It makes me feel stupid and horrible and worthless. Maybe I shouldn’t even try to do anything serious, I should just be some dim-bulb slut like everybody thinks I am anyway.”

She was blubbering now. Her face was growing red and heated, like a child’s. Part of Jack thought, unkindly, that she might be expected to start crying once he’d cornered her, part of him was concerned. “I don’t think that, come on.”

“I’m such a chickenshit. I know I shouldn’t get sucked into some little jerk’s power trip but I don’t know how else to do things, isn’t that pitiful? You want to know the truth, all I know is hitting on and not hitting on. Fucking over and getting fucked. That’s pretty much the way my world shakes out. Yes sir.”

“Now don’t get carried away.”

Immediately he regretted saying it, since her voice turned shrill and hateful. “Carried away. That’s rich. Like when you rant and rave about how nobody appreciates your great, stupendous writing, is that getting carried away? I’m sorry. I’m sorry. That was really crappy. I didn’t mean it. I bet you’re sorry you ever met me.”

“You know that’s not true.” He spoke as if trying to coax her down from a ledge.

“Yeah, but I don’t know
why
you’re not sorry. Poor Jack, you probably thought I was a normal person and here I’m a huge boring mess.”

“Don’t, Chlo.”

“I didn’t fuck him. You didn’t ask. But I know you want to know. So I’m telling you. Whether you believe me or not.”

“All right. We’re through talking about this.”

“I ruined everything. I made you think about it happening.”

“You aren’t responsible for somebody else’s bad behavior. You don’t have to hate yourself because sleaze boy—”

“I hate myself for being the fuckee, don’t you get it? God listen to me. Could I possibly be more vulgar?”

He pulled her up from the couch and let her cry weakly against his shirt. Crying was better than talking right now. She was still trying to get words out. “I don’t deserve you, why are you so nice to me when I’m so horrible? Why do you even put up with me?”

“Because I love you, dummy.”

“But why. Why do you love me?”

“There doesn’t have to be any why.”

They stood there, rocking, until Chloe inhaled through the mess of tears and said she was beat, she was just going to bed. Well he was beat too, not just from the argument, but from the effort of trying not to say some wrong thing that would make her distress ratchet up another notch, a doomed effort since there was never really any right thing to say. He could feel the weariness in all the stress points of his body: jaw, shoulders, gut. He tried to remember when it had become his part in their marriage to talk her down from ledges.

Chloe went into the bathroom to blow her nose and rinse her face, came out looking clean and small and subdued in an oversized T-shirt. Jack lay down on the bed with her. It was only nine-thirty and he knew he wouldn’t sleep, forget about sex, but he also knew his presence was required to soothe and console her. Perhaps this had always been his role, one he’d taken on freely. And perhaps it was inevitable that whatever you signed on for began to assume weight and shape.

Chloe fell into a wan, exhausted sleep after a few minutes. The music upstairs was as loud and obnoxious as ever; he was probably going to have to threaten the kid again. Chloe must have been truly spent to sleep through it. When Jack was certain she was breathing regularly, he got up and closed the bedroom door behind him.

This wasn’t the first time. Tonight might have been the messiest and most prolonged of Chloe’s meltdowns, but he’d seen them before, you could argue that he’d seen them almost from the beginning. There were times he thought they were just a method of getting attention, in the way that women always seemed to need attention, and maybe that was part of it. Maybe drinking too much and feeling overwhelmed at work had been part of tonight’s episode. But Jack was mindful of her history, of the suicide attempt that she always brushed off as “just a big mis-take.” And always, at some point, she rolled out her litany of self-hatred, her intractable insistence on how unworthy, disgusting, etc., she was. It all struck Jack as ludicrous, so demonstrably untrue that it must function as a kind of ritual self-abasement or false front, designed to mean the exact opposite of what she said. Then again, there was always the possibility that she believed it.

Now he was faced with trying to decide what, if anything, he should do. Chloe would wake up in the morning cheerful and apologetic and disinclined to discuss, or even remember, anything she’d said. He wasn’t going to let her off that easy. He was going to insist she go back to the therapist she’d seen in school. Or another therapist if, as he expected, she argued it hadn’t done her any good. It made him feel better to have a concrete plan. Going to a shrink was what people did, after all, when there was a problem. He knew she’d taken Prozac for a time, although he didn’t see that in itself as alarming. Back home in California, everybody from his soccer coach to his mother had been on Prozac. Maybe she just needed to go back on it. He wanted to believe that whatever was wrong could be set right, and that somewhere out there was the right shrink or the right dosage.

As for the creep at work. Jack had gone to a reception a couple of months ago for the bank’s new management-training class, where he’d shaken hands with a number of near-identical junior suits. He had trouble remembering anything distinguishing about their faces or conversation, let alone imagining any one of them as some Machiavellian seducer. They all seemed young and stiff and self-conscious. They held on to their wineglasses as if someone might come along and try to take them away. They hadn’t found much to say to Jack, either because he
was outside their business orbit, and therefore of no consequence, or else they veered away from him because they had in fact been talking dirty about his wife. There were two or three other women in the program besides Chloe, but they dressed like Soviet-era bureaucrats and were, if anything, more brittle and anxious than the men. It wasn’t hard to imagine Chloe attracting attention, both good and bad. It was all too easy to imagine.

Jealousy was something he’d had to come to terms with in his young marriage. It roosted on his shoulder like a molting raven, dropping its occasional hideous, scabby feathers. Jack knew, as you knew any fact of nature, that there were plenty of men out there who’d lust after Chloe and make fools of themselves in the process. Chloe had a habit of referring to these men lightly. It was no big deal, she seemed to be saying, it was only to be expected. Jack didn’t find this reassuring. He didn’t like thinking these were routine happenings. He didn’t like that tonight she’d been the one to bring up, however backwardly, the word “enjoy.”

The dour bird on Jack’s shoulder dug its claws in. He wondered if Chloe’s keeping secret this new problem for so long—for how long, exactly? Shut up, he told the raven—meant it was something worrisome. Then he told himself it was his own goddamn problem if he was this wretchedly insecure.

Sooner or later you reached the end point of this sort of thinking, and there was nothing to do except put it aside, or start the cycle all over again. He was too tired for that, so he rewound the movie and straightened the kitchen. He was aware that the music from the kid’s apartment had stopped, thank God, but now there was some commotion on the stairs. This was typical: the kid and his entourage were on their way out, and the party was moving right along with them. He listened to the voices, it was hard not to, since they seemed to be stuck at some midpoint on the staircase. This happened often enough that Jack suspected they got too stoned to remember if they were coming or going.

The kid was laughing his head off, a loopy, braying sound. “You
oughta get that tattooed on your ass. ‘My strength is the strength of ten because my heart is pure.’”

Male voice: “Fuck you, Brezak.”

“It’s not like you don’t have enough room back there.”

“And the horse you rode in on.”

“Yeah, if I had a horse, I could see which of you had the biggest—”

“God,” said the male voice, adopting a new, disgusted tone, probably because he was getting the worst of the slam contest, “another intellectual evening.”

Jack guessed the redheaded girl was out there: she had a recognizable, smutty giggle. And he thought he detected at least one other girl’s voice in the general commotion of talk and yahooing and whatever heavy objects they were dragging behind them. One of the girls said, “So are we going to Cosmos or what, I can’t believe you guys don’t want to go.”

“How much is cover, ten?”

“Ten, no way, eight.”

“It’s ten, it’s Ghostface Killa.”

“No way, it’s Viper.”

“Uh-uh. Ghostface.”

“Well whichever, it’s ten.”

“Eat me. Eight.”

“I don’t wanna go if it’s Viper.”

“Are you kidding? I love Viper.”

“Eat your mother.”

“You guys I need the keys, I have to go to the bathroom.”

“Grab my smokes, they’re on the TV.”

“You owe me for those. I got them when I got the beer. I don’t have the keys, you do.”

“You have to have them, you’re the one who locked up, shit-for-brains.”

“I gave you three extra bucks, that was for smokes.”

“How do you figure it was extra, the beer was fifteen and you only gave me seven.”

“Eat me. I gave you nine. That’s six for the beer, fifteen minus six plus three.”

Jack had had enough. He stepped out into the lobby and looked up the staircase to the landing, where the kid, Raggedy Ann, and a couple of other skanky characters were camped out. “Hey, Rich?”

A single old-fashioned light fixture with a yellow bulb lit the stairs. The landing was in shadow. A long, skinny arm emerged, raised in greeting. “Oh hey, man, we were just about to leave.” Although the group didn’t look as if they were just about to do anything, except possibly hunker down further and play cards. “You ready, guys?”

Raggedy Ann had adorned her face with glitter. When she leaned over the darkened railing to peer down at Jack, it had the unnerving quality of a mask. The other girl—Jack hadn’t seen this one before, a chubby, moon-faced underaged-looking girl with large breasts squeezing out the sides of her halter top—whispered something urgently.

“Well go ahead but hurry up,” said Rich, standing and shaking out his legs, producing the keys from his pocket like a magic trick. He was doing a new thing with his hair, some sort of home-cooked dreadlocks involving a lot of red and green yarn. He looked like a Christmas ornament produced in a shelter workshop. “Here. Jeez. Friday night,” he said to Jack, by way of explanation for—the noise? the gathering? Although to Jack this explained exactly nothing, since the kid didn’t punch a time clock and hardly needed to blow off a week’s worth of stress. He’d once told Jack that he “helped out” at a health food store.