City Boy (19 page)

When he reached the building’s front door he was relieved to note the absence of blood trails. The lobby was quiet. No sound from upstairs. He stood in his front room, letting the air-conditioning wash over him, and waited to see whether his body would take itself in some recognizable direction: bed, shower, desk. There was a knock at the door.

He opened it to find Rich Brezak standing there like the world’s funkiest door-to-door salesman. “Hey, I need to talk to you.”

“No you don’t.”

“I just wanted to tell you I’m sorry, man—”

“Fine. Go be sorry somewhere else.”

“—and that if you got a thing going with one of those hens, I’m cool with that, but I hafta tell you—”

Jack got him inside and shut the door. “Watch your goddamn mouth.”

“I thought your old lady went to work.”

“You should still watch it.”

The kid made a face that was just this side of sneering. Jack thought about throwing him out, but something cowardly was rising up in his throat, the familiar taste of dread. He settled for, “What do you want?”

“I just realized, I never been in your place before. Hey, sorry about this morning. Those chicks, who knew they’d go off like that? Tell you the truth, I’m sick of both of them. You okay, man? You look like shit.”

The kid had put on a shirt and his hair was slicked back from a
shower and at the moment he looked a good deal better groomed than Jack himself. Jack said, keeping his tone unfriendly, “Something on your mind?”

“My man Jack, I’m on your side here. You and me against the wacked-out bitches of the world. Meaning no disrespect to your very fine-looking old lady. Sorry! Sorry! Hey, Jack, if you’re so sensitive, you gotta be a little more discreet, I’m here to tell you. Mind if I sit down?”

Defeated, Jack pointed to the couch. Brezak settled himself in it and crossed his bare and bony legs. Jack couldn’t imagine any health food store wanting the guy to work there; he was pallid and undersized and he looked utterly resistant to vitamins. But there was also something whittled down and economical about him, like a cockroach, something just as persistent and unkillable. Brezak pulled a pipe and a lighter out of his shirt pocket, waggled it invitingly.

“I don’t think so.”

“Oh come on. Think of it as, like, combat pay. Don’t tell me you’re above it, I know better.”

Oh come on.
Jack shrugged and leaned forward as the kid fired up, then he took his turn. It would stink up the place. Chloe would raise hell. But he had all day to clear the air and besides, she was going to have to cut him a little slack. It was her turn to be on that end of things, wasn’t it? He sucked in a mouthful of smoke and let it do its thing. Then another round. His brain began producing cartoons. The ceiling, with its whorls and lumps of paint, was a fascinating place. The kid’s voice buzzed in his ear.

“You’re a fiend, man.”

Jack wanted to say no, he wasn’t, but first he had to consider if he knew what “fiend” meant.

“A total pothead. Lookit you, stoned to the eyeballs. You gonna sit on that till it hatches?”

“Sorry.” Jack fumbled the pipe and lighter back the kid’s way. He decided to risk words. “Hey, Rich? There’s nothing going on with me and …” He didn’t want to say, the hens. He couldn’t believe anyone actually said such a thing. “There’s just nothing going on.”

“Sure,” said the kid cheerfully. He let his lungs empty out and
watched the smoke curl, then vanish in the draft from the air conditioner. “She’s such a weird girl. You don’t want to get mixed up in any of her shit, I’m serious.”

Jack ignored the way the kid had gone from the general to the specific, from sleazy suggestion to sleazy confidence, and now sleazy advice. The kid twinkled at him through the wavering smoke. “She has kind of a thing for you, you know?”

“I don’t think so,” said Jack incautiously.

“Oh I think. Yes sir. She said you’re ‘serious.’ That’s her way of saying hot.”

Jack groaned. “What else did she say?”

“Not much. She told me you were over at her place the other night. She was trying to make me jealous. That don’t work on me, I just don’t have a hang-up about possession. Not people, things, nothing, it’s part of my belief system. I figure, whatever you got going on, that’s your deal.”

By now Jack had left off staring at the ceiling and was staring at the floor. There wasn’t much use in denying or explaining. He was already implicated. It was almost worse that the kid didn’t seem to mind sharing his women, mind, hell, he wanted to offer them up and then hang out and have nasty chats about it.

Jack said, “I love my wife. I don’t know why I’m telling you, it’s not like you care, or it makes me any less of a—forget it.”

“No, I hear you, my man Jack—”

“And quit calling me that, would you?”

“—which reminds me, that’s another thing she said about you, she thinks you’re sensitive. Man, you are really screwed. ‘Sensitive,’ that’s like catnip to chicks. Hey, maybe she’ll give me a break, transfer all her weird obsessive shit to you.”

“Sound of hollow laughter,” muttered Jack, reaching for the pipe again.

“Her name’s really Irene.”

Jack regarded him over the exhaled smoke. The kid’s head pumped up and down. “I swear to God. Irene Sosnowski. I guess I’d be changing my name too. Let me guess, she told you the leg story.”

Jack shrugged. He didn’t want to say or not say. It was distasteful to be discussing a woman in this way, part by part.

“Guy I know, he knows her folks. They’re some kind of DPs, and they’re more Polish than the pope. And get this, they’re deaf and dumb! Yeah, in Polish and English both! Can you imagine? They have about eighteen kids. Nobody knows how to say, ‘We got enough kids already.’ Poor as shit. So there’s this accident, little Irene gets mashed by a car, and afterward they’re too deaf and dumb to keep taking her to the doctor like they should, or maybe they’re too cheap, or maybe they take her to see some Polish witch doctor instead, who knows. They basically let her hip rot. Boy,” the kid finished, running out of language himself. He shook his head in stoned amazement.

Jack said nothing. He was still trying to get his mind around the idea of Irene Sosnowski. The name fit her better than Ivory, which he’d never believed anyway. Irene Sosnowski, a girl with a name like a limp, and two strikes already against her. Jack didn’t think he knew any Polish people, not actual ones. They’d been in short supply in Sherman Oaks. His father’s Slavic ancestors were a generation back and a world away, Russian and Serbian, not Polish, and he supposed that made some sort of difference but he was too ignorant to know. Irene Sos-nowski. She’d have brothers and sisters called Stan and Alvin, Bernice and Lillian, names that, like hers, were old before their time. The family would live on the bottom floor of some stoop-shouldered house, or one of those Chicago four flats that lined certain streets like rows of broken teeth. The older kids would always be in the process of moving out and the younger ones would hardly know them. They’d grow up waving and clapping to get their parents’ attention, maybe learning sign language in Polish, all those consonants knotting their fingers.

Now he was imagining things again, a bad habit, making the world into a story, he should concentrate on what he knew for sure, which was that he was in shit up to his neck here. He closed his eyes. Maybe he and Chloe could move. He couldn’t think of any other way to extricate himself. Maybe he could talk to Ivory, tell her—what? No more blow jobs, or if there were any, they didn’t really count? That he loved his wife, and that was why he was seeking her out, to tell her so? Anything
he said would be absurd or dishonest or both. He was still discomfited from his talk with Chloe. He was tired of words, the effort of wrangling and coaxing and explaining. He wanted to be deaf and dumb. Maybe the kid and his crew had it right. They yelled and screamed and fucked and fought and didn’t try to cover it up with layers of talking, didn’t try to pretend that one thing was its opposite, or that they didn’t feel what they felt.

Jack roused himself, opened his eyes to see the kid sprawled out on the couch. The kid’s hair was beginning to dry and portions of it were reasserting themselves, like an animal’s fur bristling. The braids had gotten pretty sad by now. Only the ends were still plaited. The rest was all snarls and fuzz. He didn’t want to think the two of them had anything in common. He didn’t want to see himself as some older, better-financed version of the kid. He didn’t want strange young girls brooding about him, or at least, he didn’t think he did.

The kid stretched and scratched and grinned. He opened his mouth and words came out. Jack didn’t hear them. They blew away like smoke in the roar of the air conditioner. Maybe he really was deaf and dumb now, or just too stoned to comprehend speech, or else he’d used up all the words in his head and nothing in his life made sense anymore.

A
week, Jack and Chloe attended their first counseling session. They had expected to be nervous and they were. The counselor came highly recommended, in the discreet way that such recommendations were made. They were lucky she’d had a cancellation and could see them this quickly. Jack didn’t like the idea much. What if she asked probing questions, took them to task for doing things wrong? But he kept this unworthy fear private. He told himself that the counselor was used to seeing people like him and Chloe, that she’d certainly seen much worse. Couples in every state of misery and disrepair came through her door on a regular basis. People who never should have been married in the first place, to each other or to anyone else. People who’d totaled their relationships. He and Chloe just needed a tune-up.

Chloe had made the appointment. She said she wanted a clean start, everything set right between them, to go along with the rest of her new clean-start life. Jack had tried, halfheartedly, to talk her out of it. “You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to. I think we’re in a good place now. I think we’ve gotten through the worst.”

It was true, they were both making an effort. They were, for the most part, happy. Chloe declared that she didn’t miss drinking at all. She should have quit years ago. She slept better now, she had more energy. She’d bought a journal bound in beautiful marbled Italian paper and was busy taking notes for her book. Jack had been allowed to admire the perfect blankness of the thick cream-colored pages before she shut it away. Chloe talked less about things at work, which Jack thought was a good sign. The office creep apparently no longer in the picture. Nor had they seen or heard much from the crew upstairs, the kid or either of the girls. For the first time in a long while, nobody else in their marriage except themselves. And now, this counselor.

The counselor’s name was Pat Rubin. Her office was in Oak Park, in a weathered brick building that also housed a drug-treatment program, a divorce lawyer, a collection bureau. A place you went in order to transact embarrassing business. The counselor said they were to call her Pat. A big woman, dressed in flowing blue-green draperies. She had a big jolly laugh that didn’t seem in keeping with the circumstances of her clients. “Take a few deep breaths, guys. We’re here to make you feel better, not worse.”

They smiled brightly. Jack thought about reaching for Chloe’s hand, but decided that would seem too much like putting on a show. He never liked the idea of someone else scrutinizing him, sizing him up, and here he was in exactly the sort of place where that was done. “So let’s see,” Pat Rubin said. “Somebody’s got to go first.”

“Her,” said Jack.

“Why’s that?” asked Pat. She really was a big woman. The loose clothes made it hard to tell exactly where she began and ended.

“So I don’t get it wrong. That’s just a joke. But I guess …” Both women were looking at him. “I guess there’s no such thing as just a joke around here, is there?”

“Well, you said you wanted Chloe to begin, but in fact you’re the one who’s talking.”

“Yeah. I am.” Jack shut his face and sat back in his chair.

“Chloe?”

Chloe’s hands were folded up in a tidy bundle. She still wore her office clothes, nylons, heels, a navy suit with a scallop of white at the neckline. Her hair pulled back in a twist. All business. She said, “We had some problems because I was drinking too much. That’s one place to start.”

“How does it feel, saying that?”

“Not terrific.”

“Tell me about your drinking. Do you drink every day?”

“I actually quit drinking, so it’s not an issue anymore. I’m trying to learn to handle job stress better, and deal with frustration in more appropriate
ways. Jack’s had to put up with a lot. I think he’s still angry about it.”

He hadn’t expected that last. He looked over at Chloe, failed to catch her eye. Pat Rubin nodded in a way that indicated neither approval nor disapproval. Jack wondered if she’d ever been married herself. She was somewhere north of forty. She didn’t wear a wedding ring, only a bracelet of clicking blue-green stones and some oversized silver costume rings. Hot-pink nail polish. He guessed she was one of those big women who chose to make a statement with how boldly they presented themselves. She was attractive in a flashy, retirednightclub singer sort of way, hell, she’d probably been married and divorced two, three, four times, an expert.

Now she said, “I’d like to get back to the drinking, Chloe. But let’s give Jack his turn.”

Jack planted his feet and flexed his knees, as if getting ready to take a charge. “Right. Good to go.”

“You’re not loving this, are you, Jack. Being here.”

“That’s very good. I’m betting you have a number of advanced degrees.”

He’d meant it to come out funny, not sarcastic. After a measured pause, Pat Rubin said, “What are you so afraid I’m going to say?”

“Not you. It’s what I might say.”

Next to him Chloe made a small, audible breathing sound. Jack said, “Maybe it’s not always a good idea to talk too much about things. Put names on problems. Because then you’re always thinking about them. Like if a doctor tells you you’ve got cancer. All of a sudden everything’s worse, because there’s that name.”