City Boy (13 page)

“So, how’s the book coming?”

“Not bad. Slow.” It was what he usually said. Reg might not be Mr. Dandy, but Jack still kept his responses guarded. The physical process of writing was dull in a way that people couldn’t square with their notions of the glamour of it all. He had told Reg that his book was about California, growing up in California, which he hoped carried hints of trendy decadence and exotic sex, more interesting than anything he was actually writing about, let alone had experienced.

Reg said, “Well great, keep it up. There’s got to be some pretty good money in the book game.”

“Not usually.”

“Come on.” Reg looked at him expectantly. He thought Jack was joking.

“No, really. Some people get big money, most everybody else gets chump change.” If you ever got your book published in the first place.

If you ever finished writing your damned book.

“You mean, only the best-seller guys clean up.”

“That’s right.”

“When you say big money, what are you talking, a million? I’m asking because I really don’t know.”

“I guess there’s one or two who might make a million dollars writing the kind of books I write.” By which he meant serious, nonfluff books, literature. “Of course celebrities do all the time, you know, movie stars and politicians who get big contracts for their memoirs.” He hoped he didn’t sound too snotty or dismissive. For all he knew, Reg might enjoy reading the wit and wisdom of Monica Lewinsky.

“How long does it take to write a book, a year?”

“Or longer,” Jack said cautiously. He wasn’t sure where Reg was going with this.

“Say it took two years. You’ve still got a shot at making half a million bucks a year.”

“No, Reg. Not even close.”

“Oh, I get that it wouldn’t be for your first book. You have to build up to it, get name recognition. But there’s always that potential, right? The big score.”

“In theory.” Jack gave up trying to make disclaimers. From now on, he supposed, Reg would regard him as a millionaire-in-waiting, and an inevitable disappointment when none of it happened.

Reg said, unexpectedly, “At least it’s something you really want to, you know, devote your life to. Nobody gets to do that anymore, I sure don’t.”

“Hey, I thought you liked your job.” Reg was always talking about it in droning detail. The Healthy Home. The unremitting vigilance against the menace of mold and spores.

“Aw.” Reg waved a hand. “Sure, it’s a great job. Good money. A real growth market, the technology gets better all the time. Boss is kind of a hard-ass, hell, you can find that anywhere …” Reg was mumbling a little, his chin nudging the rim of the martini glass. “But it’s just a job, you know? It’s not a passion. Two different things …”

His voice trailed off. The coals simmered redly. Jack wondered if he should say something hearty and reassuring. He was trying to imagine
what Reg meant by passion, if he had secret desires to sing in musicals or be a NASCAR driver or start his own brewery or something even more unlikely. Reg wasn’t a guy you suspected of passionate depths, or rather, even his depths were ankle deep. But maybe (probably), Jack was just being a snob again …

After a moment Reg shook his head, hoisted his glass, drank. “Ah hell. You gotta have something to bitch about, right? Hurry up and get that book between two covers so we can have a big party for you.”

Jack said Sure, that would be great. Trying to reflect some small portion of Reg’s enthusiasm. Through the sliding glass door he could see that the women had come back into the kitchen and were getting busy with the food. Fran came out with a tray of stuffed mushrooms, little plates and napkins and forks. “How about something to munch on? How’s those coals doing, chief?”

Reg said the coals were getting there, just give him twenty minutes’ notice before everything else was going to be ready. Jack balanced his plate and glass. “Careful, those are hot,” warned Fran, just as he sizzled his tongue on a mushroom. He nodded, ducked his head to try and work the thing between his teeth, since he didn’t want to either swallow it down or spit it out. Luckily, Chloe came into the yard then, and he was able to worry it into a napkin while no one was looking.

“Hey, Reg.” She patted him on the shoulder. “How’s the Clean Air King?”

“Hi, beautiful. I’m great. Hunky-dory. When you going to leave this sorry guy and run off with me?”

“Not until after dinner at least,” Chloe said lightly. She looked terrific. She was wearing a black sleeveless shirt and white shorts and her bare arms and legs gave her the startling impression of nakedness. You forgot how much of a woman you could see, once they switched to summer clothes. She had done her hair in a heavy, complicated braid. There were fine, clean lines in her scalp where the hair crossed and recrossed. Chloe was always complaining that she had small breasts, always standing in front of mirrors and pulling her shirt tight to demonstrate how inadequate they were. He could see their pretty
curve at the neck of her blouse. He wouldn’t have changed anything about them for the world.

Chloe saw him watching her and smiled in a way that was meant for him alone, and which tightened his groin. Whatever foolishness or social contortions they went through on such an evening, her smile told him the two of them would leave here, resume their real selves, be together again in their bed.

Fran had gone back inside and now returned, balancing a heavy pan. Jack stood. “Here, let me get that for you. This really looks good.” It was the shish-kebab skewers, which in Jack’s opinion always looked better than they ended up tasting. Something always charred or turned up raw. Chunks of green pepper or onion bumping through your gut.

Reg said, “You know what we could do, bring everything out here. Eat at the picnic table.”

Fran, who was flushed and distracted from the cooking, gave him a weary look. “It’s not picnic food. It’s rice pilaf and Tunisian carrot salad and sesame asparagus.”

“I bet the Tunisians eat outside all the time. I bet it’s more authentic.”

“Oh you don’t know one thing about them, Tunisians, who cares, there’s a million mosquitoes out here.”

“The tiki torches. Light ’em, we can sit here and laugh at the little devils.”

“I do not want you dragging out those ugly torches. They are revolting. They are
National Geographic
TV special.”

“Okay, how about mosquito repellent?”

“Forget it.”

“I will take personal responsibility for the mosquitoes.”

“Reg.”

“You could humor me, you know? Just this once. You could say it was kind of a kicky idea.”

“Except it’s not.”

Reg wouldn’t give it up. He was still joking, or pretending to, in a heavy alcohol-tinged fashion, but his bottom lip was curling in a babyish pout. “Well what good’s having a yard if you never use it?”

“What good is a dining room if you don’t eat dinner in it?” Fran’s voice climbed a notch. Her throat was hot crimson.

“Okay, I got it. How about we take a vote.” Reg nodded to Jack and Chloe, potential allies. Jack thought briefly about turning the hose on Reg, or maybe feeding him a mushroom.

“How about when you bother to plan a meal, shop for it, prepare it and serve it, you can decide where we eat. I already have the table set inside, so shut your face.”

“Ooh,” said Reg, falling back on wordless sarcasm, but Fran had already gone back into the house.

Jack and Chloe avoided looking at each other. Reg said, “She’s just jealous because mosquitoes never bite me.”

Chloe got up, saying she would go help Fran. Jack, left on his own, said, “It is pretty nice out here.” An insipid remark that he supposed was his attempt at taking sides, showing guy-type solidarity.

Reg stood and poked at the shish kebabs. “Am I supposed to put these on or what? She didn’t say. How the hell am I supposed to know?”

“Want me to go ask?”

“No, I’m just gonna sit here like a big dummy and wait for somebody to tell me what to do.”

“Women always kick up a fuss about their cooking,” Jack offered. More of the guy stuff.

“You want to know something? I don’t even like shish kebabs. You get everything off the skewers, it’s so full of holes it looks like it’s already been chewed.”

By the time they sat down to eat, everyone was cheerful again, in a way that was only partly false. You had to get around and get over such minor unseemliness. Jack understood entirely how irritation surfaced between two people who occasionally forgot they were lovers. It happened, no big deal. But he also had a private unease, as he held up his plate for Fran to dish out cubes of beef and pineapple and wizened vegetables, as he went through the process of eating and praising the food, that had to do with his own equivocal position here, his sense of being a target for his hosts’ separate discontents. Reg imagined Jack living out some high-finance, über-author dream, while Fran rubbed and
nuzzled him and imagined, well, he didn’t want to imagine and so become an active participant in her fantasy.

He didn’t really find himself thinking about sleeping with other women, or at least, not in any detailed, organized way. He took note of women, registered their faces and bodies, lingered for a time over the stray erotic urge, then passed on. He had a troubled sense of how such thoughts would invade you if you allowed them to. Now he was made aware of the roundness of Fran’s breasts shifting beneath her knit shirt, the jut of her ass as she leaned over to retrieve a platter, then a sudden vision of her body arched and working beneath his …

Throughout dinner he was scrupulous about not meeting Fran’s eye directly, or letting his hand linger next to hers as she passed him plates of food. No under-the-table kneesies. Damn the woman for setting off this commotion in him. Then he made an effort not to worry about either her or Reg, since it was only some accident of proximity that forced him to have anything to do with their problems.

The meal was quite good, once you steered around certain of the skewered items. There was red wine and white, also good quality, though Jack, mindful of driving later, took only sips. The others drank and laughed, drank and laughed, and Reg and Fran seemed to be friends again, and the hyper-filtered air blessed their lungs, and Chloe was next to him, one bare shoulder within grazing distance of his mouth. Fran brought out coffee and a lemon tart for dessert and Jack began to calculate how soon they’d be able to express their thanks and regrets and escape into the night. He tried to get Chloe to look at him but she was intent on her wineglass, staring into it and agitating it in those familiar tight spirals.

Fran said, “I wish you guys lived closer. We could do this more often.” Although she looked weary and even untidy from the effort of mounting the evening. Her yellow hair was pushed into a crest at the top of her head and her makeup had smudged around her eyes, making black fishhooks at the corners.

Jack said, “You’ll have to come in to the city, see our place. We’ll have us a night on the town.”

“That’d be sweet,” said Reg. “Anytime. I’m your boy.”

Chloe said, “It’s a dump. Our place.”

The others looked at her, waiting for her to make a joke out of it. Chloe lifted her gaze from her wineglass. Her braided hair seemed to pull at the corners of her eyes, lengthening them. “I mean, we fixed it up some, but it still screams, ‘Let’s live in squalor and pretend we like it that way.’”

Fran said, “Oh come on. I saw it when you were moving in. It’s really a cute apartment. All those windows.”

“It’s what you get to see from the windows that counts. You know, the gang wars and such.”

Jack said, “I haven’t seen any of that, and neither have you.”

Chloe shrugged. The expression in her narrowed, heavy-lidded eyes was one of bored disagreement. “Fine. Whatever you say. Then there’s Rastaman upstairs, I told you guys about him, didn’t I?”

Fran said, “Oh, you can run into that sort of thing anywhere.” Glanced at Jack. She was trying to help him out, she wanted him to see that.

Reg said, “No shit, gangs? You gotta watch out for that. Bad news.”

“There aren’t any gangs where we live. Chloe’s just into telling war stories.”

“Like nothing like that ever happens.”

“It’s a perfectly safe neighborhood. The realtors have a statistical—”

“Jack’s just into acting like he knows more than anybody else.”

“Cut it out, Chlo.”

She finished off the wine in her glass, raising it delicately, since she knew the others were watching. “I speak the truth. In
vino veritas
. It’s a dump.”

“In which a lot of people would be happy to live.”

“Yeah. Stupid people.”

“Put a lid on it.”

“Uh-oh. Now he’s working up to a manly anger.”

Reg and Fran had gone entirely silent. Settling down the misbehaving spouse not their job, just as he and Chloe had hung back earlier, when Reg was trying his damnedest to be a jackass. In fact, if you considered Fran sleazing all over him, he supposed he was the only one of
them who hadn’t yet acted badly tonight—all of this passing through his mind in an instant, along with some calculation of how much Chloe had been drinking before he decided, enough.

He stood. “Time to go.”

“Am I embarrassing you? I’m embarrassing him.” Chloe turned to Reg and Fran, nodding.

“The only person you’re embarrassing is yourself.”

“I’m being indiscreet. Too bad. Or, as the French have it,
Tant pis
. It bothers him. Living in a crappy little apartment because he can’t bring himself to find a real job, now that doesn’t bother him.”

Fran said, “Oh, Chloe.”

“It’s an artist thing. Romantic failure. The reason nothing he writes sells is because it’s actually too good for anyone to read.”

“We’re leaving. Or I am. Suit yourself.”

“Joking! Joking! He has no sense of humor about this stuff,” Chloe said, confidingly, but she did push her chair back from the table and looked around her, as if there was some further process required to get herself gone but she’d forgotten what it was.

Jack lifted her up by her elbow. “Thanks for dinner. It was really very nice. Thanks for having us.”