City Boy (36 page)

It felt strange to be in the passenger seat with Chloe driving. He could tell she’d moved the seat up and changed the mirrors. It was her car now. “Where to?”

Jack told her to go north on Ashland. The tired sun beat down. The sidewalks bled hot tar. Billboards offered
YOUR PRODUCT OR SERVICE ADVERTISED HERE
. A dozen empty semi trailers were parked in a fenced-off
lot, like cows in a pasture. A storefront advertized
VIENNA BEEF AND POLISH
. There were times and places in Chicago that nothing you rested your eyes on was soft or easy. Chloe said, “Why did you go to see Pat?”

He didn’t want to be reminded of that. It seemed like another failure. “Just to talk.” That sounded pathetic, as if he couldn’t get anyone else to talk to him. He added, dryly, “I had some issues.”

“Should I be worried about you?”

Jack thought about should. He said, “You’re riding high in April, shot down in May.”

“What?”

“Sinatra. ‘That’s Life.’ No. You should not worry about me.”

Chloe braked at the next light, put her turn signal on. Jack looked over at her. She said, “Let’s just go back home, okay? Could we try this?”

“Sure.” He didn’t know what she meant, try this, but his heart leaped up. It was sobering to think that his weakness might accomplish what all his rage could not.

They didn’t speak much until they were at the apartment’s front door. Jack laughed. It came out lopsided. He said, “This place.”

“What about it?” Chloe unlocked the street door and they stepped into the lobby, its familiar, coffee-colored light and anciently dirty tile floor.

It didn’t feel like home anymore. It was an arena where gladiators clashed and lions gnawed human bones. He wanted to say they should leave here, break the lease and go someplace they could change their luck. Clean start. He said, “Nothing.”

Once they were inside Chloe said, “Go on, lie down. You look like a stray dog.”

“Dog,” Jack said, by way of protest. But he went into the bedroom and sank into the mattress, face in the pillows. He heard Chloe moving around the room, closing the blinds, turning on a fan so that cool air blew across him. He felt the bed give way under her slight weight and he reached out for her.

Chloe drew in close to him and he turned onto his side and they kissed and he tasted the coffee she’d drunk and also something cooler, toothpaste, probably, and then beneath it all, just her.

She whispered, “I don’t think we should do anything, you know, the baby …”

“Oh, sure.” He rolled away, put a little space between them, stilled his hands. It was strange to think that there was a baby in the bed with them. He gave Chloe a loose hug that he tried to make nonsexual. “This is nice, though.”

“Mm-hm.”

Her body moved closer to his by degrees, turning as he turned. The old pattern of their nights together. Jack felt himself falling into sleep the way you fell into a tunnel or a well. He said, “I love you,” and sent the words back through layers of sleep and darkness.

Jack woke up fast, as if from a sound or a touch, but there was no echo in his ears and Chloe wasn’t there. It was still daylight. His body felt stiff, deeply aching. He took a moment to register this room that both was and was not his.

He rolled over, groaned at that portion of his spine that didn’t want to move with him. Smell of coffee. He made a stop in the bathroom. He could hear Chloe moving around in the kitchen. Told himself not to be such a chickenshit, quit hiding.

The kitchen was flooded with light. Chloe turned around from the sink, smiled at him. “Good morning.”

“Morning?”

“Yes, goofball, you slept, what, fourteen hours.”

“No way.” Among all the large and small shocks of the last few weeks this one struck him as absurd, unnecessary.

“I let you sleep. I figured you needed it.”

Jack found a mug, occupied himself with pouring coffee. He wanted to kiss her good morning but was unsure about how to start up all over, touch her. “It’s decaf,” Chloe warned.

“That’s okay. I think I poisoned myself with caffeine yesterday.”

“With something,” Chloe agreed. She was wearing shorts and a white oxford shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows. She never
tanned much, didn’t have the skin for it. Even now in late September there was only the faintest tint of sun to her bare legs.

Jack said, “I feel like the guy in
2001
, who wakes up on Jupiter and keeps turning into all these different ages.”

“Do you think you could stop saying weird things?”

But she was smiling, and Jack believed she must know what he meant. How he kept waking up in different worlds, one where his heart broke, one where Chloe loved him all over again. The enameled tea canister, the wineglasses in the shape of fish; here they were, just as he’d seen them before, or not really as before, because now he was inside with them.

Jack said, “How are you …” He didn’t yet have a way to talk about the baby. He didn’t even have a way to feel about it. “You know, the morning thing?”

“A little better today. I think I’m more into heartburn now.”

It was a fine, bright, Sunday morning. There was a newspaper to get through, and a plate of toast, and orange juice. After a little while Jack went into the living room and turned on the television to watch the news shows. Dressed-up men sat behind desks and moved their mouths like puppets. It was more
Space Odyssey
stuff and soon he stopped trying to focus on it. On the wall the water lilies floated in their blue-violet pool. There was a dusty outline on the desk where the computer had been. And there were gaps in the bookshelves where he’d taken books. It could all be put back. It would look exactly the same as before.

Chloe came in and sat down on the chair across from him. She looked at the television. “What’s this?”

“Some guys. I don’t know.”

They sat, intent on the television. Chloe said, “Should we get started? Do you want to talk?”

“Not really.”

“We have to.”

“Not yet.”

She didn’t understand. Jack said, “Let’s not say a lot of things that get us all worked up again. Let’s just go back to the way it was.”

“I need to tell you. What it was and what it wasn’t.”

“I don’t need to hear it.”

“It didn’t start out to be—”

Jack put a finger to his lips and shook his head.

“Please can we talk about the baby. You’re going to keep all this inside and stew over it and then you’ll throw it all in my face.”

“No, Chloe.”

“You can’t be anything less than a father. Or if you can’t, I need to know now.”

On the television screen, the puppet men moved their mouths. They talked about politics and war. Their knowledge was profound and deeply rooted, their reasoning subtle, their ideas grave. It exhausted Jack to think of all the effort that went into such heavy, heavy words. He said, “I will be a father to this child. I won’t ever throw anything in your face. Come here.”

Chloe got up to sit next to him on the couch. Jack put his arms around her and held her close. He felt her heart beating through his own chest. He wondered if the baby had a heart yet, if it was something you could hear with careful listening.

Over the next few days Jack stripped his rental place down to its ugly bones. He left the kitchenware he’d purchased for the next poor slob who came along. He restored the computer and everything else to its rightful place. He took the car back to Budget and signed off on the charges without looking at the receipt. There was still a lethargy in him. His head felt thick and clogged, his muscles had come unstrung. His body was catching up with the long distress of his mind. The weather changed overnight to autumn, or the first sign of it, a spell of gray, chill rain. Jack slept long and hard. Chloe often called him from work. He knew this was a kind of demonstration on her part, meant to prove something, but he was glad of it.

They didn’t mention Spence. Steered right around his name. That part was like some Victorian melodrama, an actor declaiming on a stage: his name shall never again pass my lips, and so on. But maybe that would feel different in time. A lot of things would. In the spring the baby would be here. Everything would change.

Jack had planned on going with Chloe to her first doctor’s appointment, but that morning he woke up with a wheezing cough. Chloe brought him a cup of tea. “Stay put. You’re not going anywhere today.”

“But I’m the one who needs the doctor.”

“Go back to sleep.”

After she left Jack drank some of the tea. It was an herbal potion that made him feel genuinely invalided. He wasn’t entirely unhappy to miss Chloe’s doctor visit. He had the normal male squeamishness about the mechanics of all this, how a woman’s body turned itself into a factory made up of bleeding, swollen parts.

He fell back to sleep for a time. When he woke up again he showered, dressed, stared out the windows at the unpromising gray sky. Over his head the kid’s stereo was cranked up a notch or two past acceptable volume.

All in all they’d been quieter than usual lately, and Jack was glad. He hadn’t wanted to think about Brezak or Ivory or any of the mess that went along with thinking of them. His cough seemed a little better now that he was upright. He made the bed so he’d be less tempted to get back in it, cleaned the bathroom, and took out the trash. On the way back, Mr. Dandy, who must have heard him, was lying in wait outside his apartment door.

Mr. Dandy looked even more frayed and ancient than usual. He seemed to be disappearing inside his clothes. His liver-spotted hands flapped. “You hear that racket?” Mr. Dandy’s breath carried unpleasant reminders of his digestive processes.

Jack said, unnecessarily, that he heard it. Mr. Dandy hooked one hand over Jack’s elbow in a death grip. “I got half a mind to turn the gun on them.”

“You don’t have a gun.”

“Says you.”

“That’s right.” The door to Mr. Dandy’s apartment stood open. Jack saw a vista of brown upholstery, wallpaper gone shiny from bodies rubbing against it, a whiff of the same unfresh combustion that emanated from Mr. Dandy. Jack said, “If I thought you really had a gun, I’d come in and take it away from you. Go back in, turn on the television.
Or get some earplugs. I don’t like it any better than you, but just deal with it.”

“They practice abominations.”

“Good for them.”

“Used to shoot rats on the railroad. We had rats big as cats. Hell, bigger. They get into the grain cars. Big as damn ponies.”

Jack pried Mr. Dandy’s hand from his arm. “Go back inside. Chill.”

“Used to be guys who that was their whole job, rat catcher. Go around and shoot all the punks.”

Jack left him standing there. He thought the old man was addled.

Back in his own apartment, the noise from upstairs was well above the level where he would have felt justified in complaining, but he wasn’t in the mood to take it on. He thought it best to stay away from them, get into the habit of disengagement. He guessed he’d have to talk to Ivory eventually. He needed to put an official stop to what they’d never, officially, been doing. He wasn’t looking forward to that. There was an unease in him that he couldn’t talk himself out of, the certainty that he’d behaved badly toward her, no matter that she was a hell of a good sport. There would be no way to feel right or easy about it. He and Chloe should get a new place as soon as possible. Whether from cowardice or simple self-preservation, there would be another end to things.

He heard some commotion on the stairs. Brezak’s voice. Jack couldn’t make out the words, but the tone was unpleasant. Laconic, jeering, snide. Classic Brezak. Another voice, which Jack identified with some dismay as Mr. Dandy’s. He moved to the front door, cracked it open, ready to intervene if he had to.

“Wow, you just made a mistake. You have me confused with somebody who gives a shit what you think. Tell you what, how about I give you a dime and you can go call somebody who gives a shit.”

Mr. Dandy’s shrill and furious voice broke in over Brezak’s words. “Shut your nasty trap! You and your nigger music! I don’t have to hear cussin too!”

“Yeah, like nigger’s the coolest. What’s your problem, man, maybe you should take your racist ass back down—”

“You punks are worse’n niggers! That’s right! Worse!”

Brezak laughed his donkey’s laugh. “Oh, that one hurts.”

“You don’t turn that noise down, I call the police! They’ll settle your hash!”

“Sure, go ahead. I’ll call whoever it is picks up senile old—”

“Pervert! Queer!”

“What, now I’m queer? Make up your mind, man.”

There was a sound like snoring, though Jack knew it wasn’t that, and then a confusion of noise, Brezak saying “Hey,” in a normal conversational tone, and something heavy and graceless landing again and again, and Jack stepped out into the lobby to see a white and untidy doll, except it was Mr. Dandy, arms and legs and flopping neck, thump down the stairs and come to rest at an impossible, ugly angle, one foot caught in the banister, head on the bottom step.

Jack ran to him. Brezak was still at the top of the stairs, looking down as Jack looked up. “What did you do to him?”

“Nothing! I swear! He just fell over, he had some kind of fit.”

Jack knelt next to Mr. Dandy’s head. A purple sack of blood, like a balloon, had formed beneath the skin behind one ear. His eyes were half open and his dentures had come loose and gotten mixed up with his bleeding tongue. “Call 911, go!”

Brezak disappeared back into his apartment. Jack tried to check Mr. Dandy for breathing, pulse. If there was breath in him, it was somewhere deep inside. And Mr. Dandy’s skin was so thin and loose, Jack’s fingers couldn’t get a purchase, feel anything beneath it. There was no way to untangle him, start CPR or anything else, without risking some new injury. Jack reached into Mr. Dandy’s mouth, tried to unfurl his tongue, clear his airway. “Can you hear me? Mr. Dandy?”

One of Mr. Dandy’s eyes fluttered open, roved from side to side, unseeing. The pupil was black and exploded looking.

Brezak ran downstairs, followed by Ivory, moving slower. Brezak said, “He was schizting out. Acting weird. Not that he isn’t always weird.”