City Boy (2 page)

Neither of them quite knew what to say next. They were embarrassed for Mr. Dandy because he was too oblivious to be embarrassed for himself. Jack considered making some black friends for the express purpose of inviting them over. He thought this was funny, in an awful
kind of way. Later, when he tried it out on Chloe, she threw a pillow at him.

Mr. Dandy said, “I grew up in Back of the Yards. That’s all Mexican now. There’s whole churches they took over that’s nothing but Spanish. Padre Armando. Padre Jorge. You ever hear anything so silly? At least the colored keep to themselves that way.”

The longer you listened to such talk in silence, the more complicit you became, and the more likely Mr. Dandy was to move on to other races, creeds, and nationalities. Chloe hurried to invite Mr. Dandy to tell them what line of work he was in.

“I’m a railroader. Retired. A union man. I worked on the Burlington Northern longer than you been alive, young lady.” Mr. Dandy winked gallantly. He had puffy, prominent eyelids, like a frog, Jack took pleasure in noting. “So what is it you folks do?”

Chloe spoke the name of her employer, the famous downtown bank. “Jack’s the creative one. He’s a writer.”

“Part-time schoolteacher,” said Jack. He wished Chloe hadn’t come out with that. If you said you were a writer, people wondered out loud why they’d never heard of you.

“Part-time what?”

“Substitute teacher,” Jack admitted.

“Writer, like, books? Which ones?”

“I’m just starting out,” said Jack stonily. Damned if he was going to tell Mr. Dandy anything else that could be used against him. He was already pegged as the Jewish guy who didn’t even have a real job and wasn’t man enough to be ashamed that his beautiful wife was the one supporting him.

“
Angela’s Ashes.”

“Excuse me?”

“That’s the book you need to read if you want to be a writer. That guy’s rich now, you know. They turned it into a movie. And the best part is, he didn’t have to make anything up.”

Jack murmured that he had indeed read
Angela’s Ashes
, and admired it. Mr. Dandy said, “It’s full of all the great Irish themes. Tragedy. Suffering.
Innocent little children stricken dead. You get some suffering under your belt, young fella, so’s you’ll have something interesting to put in your book.”

I’m suffering right now. Activate flight plan. Outta here.
Jack sent telepathic messages to Chloe, willing her to receive them.

“Hey, you get stuck for ideas, you come talk to me. Thirty-seven years of railroading, I bet I got enough for two, three books. The glory days of rail, when you busted your hump and did a man’s work. Winters when the lines froze solid and summers when the wheels put out sparks and set off twenty miles of grass fire. Amtrak was a bad idea nobody’d thought of yet.” Somewhere inside Mr. Dandy’s yeasty flesh he was muscling an engine around a sharp curve, or some other legendary lie. His eyes kindled and his knuckles cracked. “I can tell you everything you need to know, all you got to do is write it down.”

Which would be worse, Mr. Dandy looking sideways at you, glowering and mistrustful, or Mr. Dandy waylaying you with scrapbooks and memorabilia, a runaway train on a collision course? Jack imagined timing his exits and entrances, furtively skulking in and out of the apartment so as to avoid Mr. Dandy, the legion of imaginative excuses he’d need in order to explain why he wasn’t writing about the glory days of rail,
Chloe, help
.

Chloe said, “Oh, Jack never runs out of ideas. You’d probably have to wait a long time for him to get around to your book.”

“Decades,” agreed Jack, deadpan, for Chloe’s benefit.

But Mr. Dandy was already losing interest in him, reverting back to his original glum disapproval. “Ah, whatever. Write a book, don’t write a book. Either way it don’t keep the world from spinning.”

A blast of amplified music startled them. It came from upstairs, loud but distorted, as if it originated inside an agitating washing machine. Reggae music, set on spin cycle.

Jack and Chloe looked at each other, then Mr. Dandy. He said, “That’s something you better get used to. This guy.” He jabbed his thumb at the mailboxes. Jack craned to read the name. Berserk? No, Brezak.

“Does he—” Jack began, but it had become difficult to make himself
heard. He tried to pantomime questions, who and what the hell. He shrugged at Chloe, who shook her head and looked unhappy.

Mr. Dandy waved his hands around his ears as if shooing gnats. He raised his voice to bawl, “It’s enough to make you curse the invention of electricity, ain’t it? Nice meeting you folks.” He stumped off down the hallway, pursued by island rhythms.

Jack and Chloe retreated behind their own door. Through some trick of acoustics, the music wasn’t quite as loud, but it was clearer, jumpety jumpety jump, a singer carrying on about his no-good woman. Jack thought it was Bob Marley, but then, Bob Marley was the only reggae singer he knew. He said, “I didn’t think anybody was still big on this stuff.”

“This could really be a problem.”

“Wasn’t there some old Eddie Murphy reggae skit, ‘Kill de white people, kill de white people, yah yeah.’’”

Chloe said, “Seriously …”

“Give it a minute.” Chloe would expect him to go up there and complain, threaten, whatever. It was man’s work, the opposite of charm. It was nothing he looked forward to. He sat down on the couch with a magazine and pretended the loopy music wasn’t making his foot pat in syncopation.

From the bedroom Chloe called, “It’s worse in here. Like it’s traveling through the heat register.”

Hell and death.
He put the magazine down and stood. Just then the music stopped and someone upstairs took a running start, raced across the floorboards, and collided with a heavy object.

Silence followed. Chloe came out of the bedroom and the two of them gazed at the ceiling. Jack said, “Maybe they killed themselves. Death by reggae.”

“Is there a noise ordinance? We should find out. If it’s as bad as he was saying.”

“I hope it doesn’t come to that. The calling 911 part.”

“Wimp.”

“You gotta admit, it would be getting off on the wrong foot.”

“Well you have to work here. You decide if you can take it.”

“Yeah. My work.” He watched Chloe pick up a lamp without a shade and put it down again in the same place. They were still unpacking and everything was scattered and disordered. “Speaking of which …”

“I’m sorry honey, I had no idea he was going to pester you like that. What a character. I bet you money everybody calls him Jim Dandy. What.”

“Nothing.”

“Not nothing. What.”

“Just don’t go around introducing me to people as a writer.”

Chloe was messing with the lamp again. Jack thought they were both waiting to see if the music would start up again and force them to do something about it. Chloe frowned at him. “Really?”

“Yeah, really.” There were times when Chloe tried to charm her way past him as she did other people; Jack always called her on it. He didn’t want to be other people to her.

“You think I’m trying to make myself more interesting by bragging about you.”

“No,” said Jack firmly, although he might have believed something of the sort. But to admit the possibility would be to open the door to one of Chloe’s morbid self-criticism sessions.

“I can’t even tell normal people, like the ones I work with? How come? I want to brag about you.”

“Wait until I do something worth bragging about.”

Chloe made a face that was meant to express forbearance in the presence of long suffering. “Not this again.”

“Not the pep talk again, okay?” He’d published a few poems and two stories, all in magazines whose names were known mostly to the other people who published in them.

“I love ‘The Joyride.’ It’s a great story. Can’t I brag about that?”

“Do me a favor, say I’m an English teacher. Everybody knows what that is, you don’t have to answer a million questions.”

He didn’t feel like a writer yet and he wouldn’t until he had more to show for himself. Only in the last few months had he attempted to go about it in any organized, full-time fashion, although he’d always written
things, had always vaguely imagined doing something that messed around with books and literature. Teaching English to high school kids had been the path of least resistance. One night, after he’d again complained, whined really, about the things he was always whining about—students who were dull or rude or semicriminal, small-minded colleagues, administrators whose names were synonyms for incompetence, the daily round of frustration, tedium, and outrage—Chloe said, “Maybe you should quit.”

Jack stared at her. “Gotcha,” Chloe said.

“Quit and do what?”

“I don’t know, whatever’s going to keep me from listening to you be miserable every night of my life. Unless that’s the fun part for you. You know, the hopelessness and all.”

Over the next few weeks they planned it out. Chloe was going into the bank’s management-training program. If he substituted even a few days a month, the money would be enough, barely. It was understood that this was a chance for him to make the writing work, one way or another, within a finite but unspecified period of time. They agreed that Jack might feel dependent, beholden, etc., that Chloe might come to feel burdened, resentful, and so on. They resolved to be clear-eyed and up front about these and other possible issues, talk things through. It pleased them to be arranging their lives this unconventionally. Chloe’s job, the only real job now left between them, was downtown. It made sense to move into the city, and besides, no one expected a writer to live in the suburbs. What were you supposed to write about, shopping malls?

So now it was all up to him. No excuses. It filled him with dread. There had to be writers out there with titanic egos and monumental, obnoxious amounts of self-confidence. He wasn’t one of them. Maybe if he stumbled onto some unforeseen, high-profile success, he’d be transformed, maybe that was what happened to people. But this was difficult to imagine when he sat in front of the computer, that expensive, obedient, superbly engineered machine that had been chosen for its ability to effortlessly reproduce and transmit his every written thought, and felt like a goddamned fraud. At his lowest ebb he felt himself
to be devoid of ideas, talent, taste. He wasn’t fooling anyone. He didn’t have what it took. Whatever it was. He tried to imagine the words he wrote at this very desk making their way out into the world, catching on fire in the minds of people he would never meet. It seemed absurd.

Yet he knew that all this was to be expected, even the dopey, puerile, self-hating parts. It was what he’d signed on for, a process that might still lead to nothing, but there was only one way of finding out. And when he seized on something he’d written, a page, a paragraph, even a single word, and thought it was good, more than good, it allowed him to keep going until the next such time. As long as he kept going, he was allowed to take himself seriously.

These were in a sense the most private moments of his life. He didn’t always feel like offering them up, even to Chloe, who sometimes, in her solicitude, sounded as if she was encouraging a slow child. He usually settled for saying that his day had been “not bad” or “not terrific.” Sometimes he fell into the easy pose of exasperation, since there was always something to be exasperated about in writing. But always there was what he held back.

Chloe let a silence settle. Then she said, “They did a nice job on the floors, didn’t they?”

“Yeah.” Floors. He recognized another Chloe tactic, a statement you were meant to agree with. But he was ready to be softened up. He didn’t like being out of sorts with her, especially when it was due to his own gloomy, backward pride.

“It’s a selfish act, isn’t it. Writing. I mean it’s supposed to be all about communication, but it’s actually very self-involved.”

Of course they’d been over this ground before. “Yup,” Jack said. “Damn near misanthropic.”

“My name is Igor. I assist Dr. Frankenstein in the laboratory. His genius is far beyond me. I can only gape and marvel.”

Jack raised himself off the couch just far enough to grab Chloe by the waist and pull her down on top of him. Her legs beneath her skirt were bare and he ran a hand behind one warm knee.

“What are you doing?”

“Don’t worry, I’m a doctor.”

He pulled her dark hair away from her neck and kissed his way down to where he could feel her heartbeat. He waited to see if she would protest or pull back, but she didn’t. They had been too tired from moving in to make love last night. It felt like something they should do in this new place before much more time passed.

Chloe stood up and took his hand and they slow-walked into the bedroom. Jack kicked his shoes away. Chloe’s dress had a zipper in the back and she presented herself to him so he could help. He loosened the zipper, then pressed against her from behind, spreading her legs and making her stagger a little, until he gripped her around the waist and steadied her. “Let me get this off,” she murmured, trying to twist around to face him.

“Not yet.” He wanted her clothes tangled around her, wanted to push them aside and see her breasts and flushed stomach and perfect ass revealed in all the ways he could imagine, imagining just moments away from happening because his hands and mouth were full of Chloe and her breathing was damp and rapid and now he had to hurry to get his own clothes off. Chloe was on her back on the bed and he was leaning over her when the music started up in mid-growl, as if the volume control had been yanked hard right. Again it was reggae. Boom da boom da ya ya, hey mon, talkin boom da boom da ya ya.

“I don’t believe this.”

Jack tried to carry on for a while as if it wasn’t happening, had to give up. “Shit.”

Chloe rolled away across the bed. “Maybe now you’ll want to go talk to them?”

“Not this very minute.” With an effort, he reclaimed his body.

“You still want to …”

“Why not. It’s a cinch they can’t hear us.”

So they went ahead, determined not to get chased out of their own bedroom. It felt as if they were trying to race the music to the end, boom da boom da ya ya, boom da boom da ya ya.