City Boy (11 page)

“Great, just keep it down, okay?”

Jack went to close the door when the kid said, “Everything all right down there?”

“Excuse me?”

“Thought I heard somebody hollering a while back.”

The kid was far enough away in the shadows that Jack couldn’t read his expression. He assumed, from the solicitous tone of voice, that it was smart-alecky. “Everything’s terrific,” said Jack. “You know. Friday night.”

He stared up into the gloom, then went back inside and shut the
apartment door. After a little time he heard them making their way down the stairs, a caravan of whisperings and snorted giggles. Then the outer door opened and a slice of street noise mixed with their sudden laughter.

J
ack was asleep, a light, dream-flecked sleep, and when he awoke he knew from his own alertness that it was still early, perhaps midnight, and he’d been asleep for only an hour or so. The buzzer from the street had been stabbing into his dreams.

Chloe raised up on one elbow. “
What?
”

“It’s nothing,” he told her. “Go back to sleep.” She rolled over into her pillow, never really having woken up. Jack rolled out of bed and hopped around to get his pants on. The buzzer sounded twice more. He couldn’t imagine who would come to see them. They didn’t have friends who dropped by after hours.

When Jack looked out through the lobby to the street, he didn’t at first recognize the small figure hanging back from the light. He was still trying to run through the catalog of people he knew. Then he came fully awake and saw it was the nameless blond girl, Rich Brezak’s sometime girlfriend, now cupping a hand against the glass to peer inside.

He wasn’t inclined to let her in. He advanced until he stood opposite her on the other side of the glass. She looked up, gave a good imitation of being surprised to see him. “Oh, I guess I hit the wrong button. Sorry.” The glass blotted the sound of her voice.

Jack didn’t believe that for a minute. “He isn’t home.”

She knew that already. “Yeah, I’m really sorry.” She didn’t look sorry. She shuffled her weight from one foot to the other.

“He isn’t home,” Jack repeated. “Believe me, I can tell.”

“Can I just talk to you?”

“Better you should stop waking people up and go home.”

“What?”

In order to be heard through the glass, she was half-shouting, but Jack didn’t want to wake Chloe. He put his mouth up to the narrow space where the doors joined. “Go home.”

It startled him when she put her mouth close to the same spot on the other side. “I need to get in there.”

“Yeah, sure.” You shouldn’t go opening doors if you didn’t know people.

“I have to leave him a note.”

“Try the post office.”

“You know what Rich says about you, huh? He says you ought to loosen up, quit kissing your wife’s ass.”

He took a step back from the glass. The girl tilted her head to look at him. The streetlight above her turned her hair lurid, ghostlike, and left her face featureless. “Oh come on, I was just messing with you. What do you care what he thinks anyway?”

“Why do you need to come inside if he’s not here?”

“I want to be here when he gets back. It’s important. Come on. I won’t ring your bell anymore but I’ll stay out here all night. Me and the muggers.”

He bet she would. She was that kind of nuts. He might have gone back to bed, let her take her chances, if it wasn’t for his own disquiet. He’d thought the night was over, and here it was still in process, as if he was now dreaming the fight with Chloe in some different script or permutation, and whatever he might do now was important.

The girl seemed to know he was wavering. “What are you afraid of, you think I’m going to shoot him or something? As if. Wouldn’t waste a bullet on him. Trap him, maybe, like the varmint he is. God, I’m kidding. You really do need to loosen up.”

From somewhere down the street came a commotion of screeching car tires and voices braying. They both looked toward it. “Are you gonna open this or what?”

Jack worked the bolt and held the door for her as she slipped in beneath his arm. “Thanks,” she said with enough of a sarcastic edge to indicate that it was about time. In the fuller light of the lobby she no longer looked menacing or hallucinatory, just an ordinary girl, something less than pretty, with a swagger and a smirk as self-conscious as a monocle.

They didn’t know how to manage looking at each other or not looking,
talking or not talking, now that they were standing in the same space. The girl recovered first. “Right. I’ll just make myself at home.”

Jack motioned her away from his apartment door, down the hallway that led to the back door and alley. They passed Mr. Dandy’s door, closed and silent, though for all Jack knew she’d rung his buzzer too, and the old man was awake and listening. “What are you … ,” she began, but he shook his head and pointed. She rolled her eyes, either exasperated or pretending to be, and walked ahead of him. She dragged one leg; he remembered her limping. She wore another of her long, droopy skirts, and he wondered briefly if that was for some purpose.

There was a backyard of sorts, a pocket-sized square of grass enclosed in a high board fence. Somebody, Mr. Dandy, probably, had planted hostas and lilies of the valley and a row of seeding lettuces around the borders. There was a cement walkway, a broom, and a hose neatly coiled on a reel. Two white plastic chairs were set out to enjoy the meager view. “Sit,” Jack told her.

She did so, although with no very good grace. “What did that crack about my wife mean?”

She shrugged. “I didn’t say it. Rich did.”

“Rich should mind his own goddamn business.” As always, he didn’t care to think about other people peering in at him, forming judgments.

“Yeah, he can kind of get to you, can’t he?” She lifted her head to gaze at the back of the building. Both Mr. Dandy’s and Mrs. Lacagnina’s darkened windows were crowded with half-seen objects wedged onto the sills and wadding the curtains. An electric fan, a vase empty of flowers, stack of newspapers, television antenna, pair of socks spread out to dry. All the debris of long tenancy pushing at the seams of their apartments.

The night was cool and the girl shivered inside her denim jacket, although she didn’t seem aware of doing so. “I don’t know, he thinks it’s funny that she’s always sending you up there to complain, it’s always she has to sleep, she has to work, she has a headache. He says she runs you.”

He didn’t respond. It served him right for asking in the first place. The girl leveled her stare at him. “My name’s Ivory, by the way.”

Maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t. It sounded too much like a made-up name, one of those things girls did to glamorize themselves. “It is,” she insisted. “God, I hate it when people get that look. Like Doreen or Heidi are supposed to be normal names?”

“I’m Jack.”

“I know. I saw it on the mailbox.”

“You’re a pretty observant bunch upstairs, aren’t you?”

“Look, I’m just going to sit out here, and if you’re gonna be hostile you can leave.”

It would have made sense to go back inside, lie down next to Chloe, and let this odd girl lurk in the dark, if that was what she wanted. He was so tired but there was a tough knot of muscle lodged under one ear, the start of a headache, and enough irritation and unease to keep him from going back to sleep anytime soon. There wasn’t anyone he could tell about Chloe. He didn’t have those kinds of friends anymore, friends you could unload on about anything, or maybe he did, a couple of them, except they lived in different time zones and anyway, there would be something ungentlemanly and disloyal about making such calls. Pretending he was concerned about Chloe when what he really wanted was to rage and complain. She ran him. She ran him and he couldn’t help but let her. He said to the girl, “You want something to drink, wine or—”

“Yes.”

Chloe was still so soundly asleep that she didn’t stir even when he sat down on the bed next to her and touched her shoulder. “I’m going out back for a while. I’ll be right outside.” He could at least say he’d tried to tell her in case she woke up and missed him and there was some further scene. He doubted it; she was snoring into her pillow. It was either the alcohol or perhaps she’d taken one of the prescription sleeping pills she wasn’t supposed to take if she drank, and now he’d have to worry about that too because she couldn’t be trusted to take care of herself.

There was an opened bottle of red wine on the kitchen counter, the wine in it level with the bottom of the neck. Jack stared at it, unable to remember when this second bottle had been uncorked. He found two
plastic glasses, his sweatshirt, and in the front closet, an old striped blanket.

When he went back outside, Ivory had positioned herself so she could see the length of the building’s hallways, and whoever might come through the front door. Jack handed her the blanket and she gave him a sharp, suspicious look, which Jack was later to interpret as disbelief that anyone might do something nice for her. “Thanks.”

“Welcome.” He poured out the wine and gave her one of the glasses. She sniffed at it, tasted it by extending her tongue, like a cat drinking milk. “I can’t ever drink a whole lot. It makes my face turn red, I’m allergic or something. But I need to take the edge off, you know?”

“I don’t guess you’d care to tell me …”

She was busy draping the blanket around her knees. “What?”

“Never mind.”

“About him? Rich? He’s a little shit.”

Jack said nothing. He wondered if she meant it, or if it was just the kind of thing girls said when love turned inside out on them. Ivory took another tiny sip of wine. “Is my face getting red?”

“I don’t think so. I can’t tell.” It was unevenly dark in the yard. The sky above had the fizzing quality of a television turned to a blank channel. Its color was a dulled, meaty pink. It was never entirely dark anywhere in the city. There was always the reflected light of a thousand thousand mercury vapor street lamps, of car headlights and searchlights and skyscrapers. Babylon. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen stars, or even the moon. In his present state of mind this seemed sad, even desolating, a sign of how wrong his life had gone without his noticing.

Ivory was prattling on. “Maybe it’s only the cheap stuff I’m allergic to, would that make sense? Those big jugs of cheap stuff? Once I swear my tongue started itching. But this isn’t bothering me, I think because it’s quality. You guys have money, I bet.” She waited. “So do you?”

Jack roused himself. “That’s really kind of nosy.”

“Well so is asking me about my love life, don’t you think?”

He said, neutrally, “We can buy a bottle of good wine now and then.” In fact they both were and were not wealthy. When they’d gotten married,
Jack’s father had transferred over to him some Treasury bills and bonds, with the understanding that they were meant to hold on to these assets, be prudent, reinvest the dividends. In time, as life events, that is, children, accrued, there might be additional gifts. Down the road, an inheritance. But for now Chloe had her school loans to repay, and they had a budget like anyone else. While it would be embarrassing to ask his parents for money, and his father would say sour things about it, there was money available if they really needed it. He’d never known it not to be, he had never had to live without its presence backing him up. He guessed that to someone like this girl, the things they took for granted would be beyond reach. He felt irritated, as if she had accused him of something. He said, “Okay, I’m sorry if I asked you a personal question. I thought you might want to talk about it. My mis-take.”

“You mean you wanted to know the horrible details. You were hoping they’d be horrible.”

“Just one thing. If you hate him so much, why come around here?”

“God you are so clueless,” Ivory said. “You should go on game shows, be the one who makes everybody else feel smarter.”

“And you can go on and make them feel nicer.”

That stopped her. They sat in silence long enough for Jack to think they were through talking, and sooner or later one of them, him, probably, would get up and leave and that would be the end of it. She said, “It’s so he can’t pretend I don’t exist.”

“I’m sorry if that’s what he’s doing.”

“I don’t understand how people can all of a sudden shut you off. Shut themselves off. It’s unnatural.”

No, it was entirely natural. He understood it perfectly. When he was younger he’d done it himself more than once. You got tired of a girl for whatever reason, or sometimes for no reason. And because you didn’t want to admit you were fickle or irrational or shallow, you simply ignored her. At some point there might have to be a conversation. Often enough the girl figured it out on her own and ignored you right back. It was a crude system but it got the desired results. At least as long as
everybody played by the same rules. He said, “I don’t suppose you want any advice.”

“No, but you’re going to give me some anyway.”

“Find something else to do. This is a waste of your time.” As far as he was concerned, the kid would be a waste of anyone’s time. Love, go figure.

She muttered that it was her time to waste. “Fine,” said Jack. “But I guarantee this isn’t going to end up the way you want it to.”

“Well maybe you don’t know what I want.”

That sounded like bravado to him, shaky bravado, but he let it pass. He heard tears in her voice, and beneath that, a layer of something stubborn, fey, reckless that might break through to the surface and produce crying or worse. “How old are you?”

She consulted her glass of wine. “Twenty-one.”

“Uh-huh. I mean really.”

“Nineteen. Not like it’s any of your business.”

“Don’t you think that’s a little young to be so caught up in the whole hopeless romance-stalker thing?”

“No. I think it’s exactly the right age.”

He tried again. “You have a home? Somebody who might be worried about you being out all night?”

“Look, I’ve got my own place. Maybe you’d think it’s a dump, but it’s mine. I have a job, I pay my own bills. I take care of myself. So you don’t have to act like I’m some
waif
. “ She took a pack of cigarettes out of her jacket and lit one.