City Boy (38 page)

“Where does anybody get guns?” But Jack had to wonder how the hell he’d managed it. Bus trip? Shop by phone? Or was it another relic of his railroad days?

“Like he was ever going to shoot anything.”

“A few hours ago he was talking about shooting you and your boyfriend. I thought he was just bullshitting. Lucky for you he took his header down the stairs first.”

She rolled her eyes at this, but Jack could tell it rattled her, as it did him. His lungs convulsed and he coughed painfully. The ancient dust of the place was getting to him. He put the shotgun back and shut the closet door. Overhead Mrs. Lacagnina started up her vacuum cleaner, pushed it back and forth, without mercy, over the same piece of floor.

Mr. Dandy’s kitchen looked as if it had never seen a green vegetable. Yellow grease painted the wall behind the stove. The remains of his breakfast eggs were still in the sink. Mr. Dandy’s bathroom, with its lineup of jars and vials and poultices devoted to Mr. Dandy’s ailments, was better left unexplored. The bedroom was painted a deep, lurid blue. He’d made his bed, drawn up the sheets and the Najavo blanket that served as a spread.

Ivory hitched herself over, tested the mattress with one hand. “This is a dead man’s bed.”

Jack left her there and went back into the dining room. There was a framed picture of Jesus praying, done in the languid, romantic style, Jesus as matinee idol, light emanating from his face. Tucked in the frame, a collection of holy cards Jack didn’t bother examining. He moved on to a china cupboard. Behind its glass shelves were some ornate, silver-topped tankards, a ceremonial-looking soup tureen, a set of dinky rose-printed china that must have belonged to some unimaginable female relative of Mr. Dandy. A black-and-white photograph of
three grinning young men standing before a background of pine forest. Jack recognized Mr. Dandy from the nose and jaw. He was the one in the middle, with his arms around the others, a full head of (possibly red) hair, and somewhere beyond the borders of the picture, a railroad to run.

The dining room table was covered with a lace-printed vinyl cloth. Books and papers were heaped on it, and Jack sat down to go through them. Much of it was devoted to Mr. Dandy’s Medicare coverage. He sifted through phone bills and dentist’s bills and any number of paper scraps that scattered like moths whenever he lifted a layer of documents. He was losing heart for his chore. There was something horrible about it. A life reduced to these dirty leavings.

But in the end it didn’t take him very long to find what he was looking for, a brown cardboard accordion file with Mr. Dandy’s slapdash handwriting on the front: Imp. Documents. Jack thumbed through it without extracting any of it. More dead paper. Envelopes from the Brotherhood of Railroad Engineeers. Pension? Insurance? Someone else could decide.

Mrs. Lacagnina’s vacuum shut off and Jack drew the elastic over the file, snagged Mr. Dandy’s house key from its hook on the wall, just in case he had to come back for anything. Ivory still had not reappeared. He called back to her from the doorway. “I’m leaving. You probably should too.”

Her voice was muffled. He couldn’t hear what she replied. He said, “Well, lock the door on your way out.”

“Come here a minute.” Clearer now, as if she’d freed her head from some obstruction.

“What for?”

“Just come here for a minute. See something.”

He didn’t like to think what she might have unearthed in there. His chest ached and he felt feverish. He stood in the hallway, reluctant to enter the bedroom. “I really have to get home.”

“One second. It’s important.”

She was lying on the bed, her clothes in a heap on the floor. The blue walls made her nakedness appear as if she’d been recovered from deep
water, a drowning victim. Before he could speak she said, “You don’t have to do anything. I just want you to look. Can you see from there? You can come closer. This is the only time I’m doing this.”

He took a few steps toward her, stopped. Her arms were at her side. Her bare feet curled over the edge of the Navajo blanket. Her triangle of pubic hair was blond, with a tint of pink. Her hip, the bad one, was thin and sunken, like a shallow bowl. There was a knobby mass, strapped with muscle, where her leg bone joined it. The leg itself was a pale stick, wider at the knee than the thigh. It was hard to imagine how the contraption worked, bore weight, moved her forward.

Her eyes seemed bluer in the blue gloom. They were fixed on his face. She said, “I told you. Pretty funky.”

Jack didn’t want to think what his face was showing. He found himself shaking his head, no, but what did that mean, no, except that he was ashamed of his own shock.

He started to speak but she stopped him with a jerk of her head on the pillow. The pillow was sunken. It bore the imprint of the dead man’s head, the long habit of its shape and weight. “Don’t say a thing. Just look and then you should leave. I can tell you didn’t think it was this bad. But this is me. You didn’t know. I couldn’t even make a list of all the things you don’t know. This is what somebody who loves you looks like. Now I want you to go.”

From Chloe’s journal

T
he doctor shined his light inside me. “Well well. What have we here.”

My feet were up in the stirrups and there was a sheet draped over my knees like a tent. It was the posture recommended for excavations.

The doctor wore a miner’s helmet with a headlamp attached in front. “Now you may feel some discomfort,” he warned me.

I yelped when I felt him burrowing in. Discomfort. They had their nerve, doctors, talking like that. He was walking around inside me now, tapping the walls with his infernal tools. I said, “Are you looking for anything in particular?”

His voice was distant, underground. “Evidence.”

I gritted my teeth. My nose tickled. I thought if I sneezed I might achoo him out of there, but that would be rude.

Finally he reemerged, puffing and blowing and brushing dust from his shoulders. “Very interesting.”

“What?” I didn’t like the sound of “interesting.” It was another doctor word they used to sneak the bad news in sideways.

“Somebody’s left a rubber doll in there.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Perhaps, but those are the lab results.”

“Is it a boy or a girl?”

“It’s choosing not to commit at this time.”

I was beginning to feel this doctor was a quack. I said, “None of this is very helpful. I was thinking it was a real, actual baby.”

“That’s a common misunderstanding. They aren’t real until later, when you get more used to the idea.”

“I was pretty sure I already was.” I was getting frustrated. What good were all the miracles of modern medicine, all the wonder drugs and super scans, if all you got out of it was a fake baby?

The doctor told me to sit up, get dressed. He busied himself with his prescription pad. “I’m going to start you on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, see if we can’t put some weight on you.”

“I guess I have to get used to the idea of being fat.”

The doctor’s pen stopped scratching. He looked me over with his doctor eyes. He had a long history of being smarter than everybody else, you could tell. It was something he took for granted. “Not fat. Normal, healthy, weight gain.”

“All right,” I said. “Sure. Bring it on.”

“Diet. Exercise. Vitamins. Lots of rest. The whole nine yards.”

“Roger that. Total health.”

“That means—”

“I stopped drinking. Way back before.”

I expected him to give me some kind of lecture. They never pass up a chance, believe me. Instead he looked up at all his framed diplomas and certificates, the things that allowed him to ask a lot of nosy questions or tell other people what to do. I could see myself reflected in the glass. He said, “Have you ever been totally honest about anything in your entire life?”

“Not really. Or not for very long.” He took me by surprise, I guess that’s how he pulled that answer out of me.

“So you’ve quit drinking except for—”

I told him I didn’t appreciate him taking that tone, that I was offended. The doctor wasn’t watching me, only my reflection in the glass of the frames. He said, “Your baby wants to be born.”

That’s when I started crying. Maybe he thought it was just part of an act. And yes I’d done that sort of thing before, cried because there was some advantage in it. But he was a woman’s doctor, he’d seen his share of crying women, and I wanted to believe he could tell the difference. That there was nothing sadder than the thought of a baby trusting me to get it into the world, let alone be its mother.

The doctor let me go on awhile, then he pushed the Kleenex box at
me. He said, “You must not think I’m unsympathetic. But unfortunately, I see this sort of thing all the time. People telling themselves they’re making a fresh start. Out with the old me, in with the new. They make decisions, resolutions, promises. You know, husbands, babies, that sort of thing. And maybe it even works for a while. But you’re still the same sad girl, aren’t you? Let’s shut down the waterworks now. You aren’t fooling anybody but yourself.”

C
hloe said it must have been horrible. The man dying right in front of him. She couldn’t imagine. Jack said it wasn’t that kind of dying, the way it was in movies. No agony or death rattle or the soul escaping the body. But yes, it had been sort of horrible. He didn’t feel like talking about Mr. Dandy, or anything else that had happened. He’d called the coroner’s office, done his duty about the paperwork, and now he lay propped up in bed. Fever ran through him like a live electric wire. He coughed his foggy cough. He felt as if he had narrowly escaped some engulfing catastrophe, a roiling wind or flood that had walked right up to him, stared him down, and then retreated. He asked Chloe what had gone on at her doctor’s appointment.

“It was fine. Very routine. We’re going to have a perfectly healthy something-or-other.”

“Do they do tests, what?”

“Half a sec.” Chloe went into the bathroom, opened cabinets, ran water. She came back with a thermometer and shook it down. “Open wide.”

“Why don’t we have one of those digital thermometers?”

“These are more accurate. Open.”

Jack wriggled his tongue around the glass tube, concentrated on trying to work a little air around it. He imagined the end of the thermometer bulging red and then exploding, like a cartoon. Chloe sat on the bed beside him. “They do blood tests. Poke around. No biggie.”

“On-grm?”

“They do sonograms later. If you decide you want one, or there’s some reason for it. He wants me to gain more weight. The doctor. He wants me to pig out. Get ready for the new sow me.”

Jack said “Nnhh,” by which he meant she would never look like a sow, and it was probably a good idea for her to eat a little more. “Nngry?” he added.

Chloe shook her head. “I’ve still got the queasies. The pigging-out part probably comes later. Quit trying to talk.”

So he quit. He watched Chloe do her Big Nurse impersonation, folded arms and tapping foot and mock glare. She wasn’t really a nurse. He wasn’t fooled. Jack smiled a thermometer smile. The doctor told the nurse to eat more. Chloe hadn’t filled out any. The skin of her face was still too tight. She was nothing but hard, sharp angles: shoulder blades, kneecaps, collarbone. He would pack the refrigerator with butter and cream cheese and pastrami sandwiches and what was it she didn’t say that was making her thin? If he had gone to the doctor’s appointment with her, would everything today have unhappened? Mr. Dandy still be alive? Never seen the girl’s sad nakedness? Chloe popped the thermometer out of his mouth and announced he had a temperature of a hundred and one.

Jack slept, but his arms and legs were both heavy and restless and kept flopping like fish, startling him awake. His head fired and hummed. He was convinced that someone else was in the bed with him, that Chloe had discovered him and Ivory in bed together. The terrible nakedness of that leg, the part of it that was only bone papered over with skin. He had never meant for her to love him like a fever burning anything it touched.

Then it was dark and Chloe was getting into bed with him. Jack woke up long enough to ascertain that this was real. She wouldn’t let him kiss her, pushed his mouth away from hers. “I don’t want your germs. Go back to sleep.” She said that Mr. Dandy’s name was now Mr. Bones. Mr. Dandy grinned and nodded. His false teeth chattered like a windup toy.

Jack woke up needing to pee. He had no sense of time. He might have slept for one hour or for ten. Chloe lay on her side, curled away from him. In the bathroom Jack swallowed two aspirins and ran cold
water over his hangdog face. There was no sound from the upstairs apartment. He couldn’t remember hearing them since he’d gotten home from the hospital, and that seemed odd, even wrong. He stayed very still, listening at the bathroom vent. “Ivory?” But nothing whispered back to him. He wouldn’t know what to say to her anyway. She hadn’t wanted him to say anything. She hadn’t wanted to hear him say he didn’t love her back.

He slept again. Woke up to the discreet sound of the front door closing, Chloe leaving for work.

After a while he hauled himself out of bed, coughed up some lingering crud, and stood in a hot shower. The fever had broken but he felt light-headed, weak. Almost exactly twenty-four hours ago he’d been doing exactly the same thing, showering, dressing, standing in the front room listening to Mr. Dandy and Brezak.

He went out into the lobby. Nobody there, nothing stirred. It didn’t feel haunted as much as lonesome. He went back inside and tried to call Chloe, got her voice mail. “Hey, it’s me. Sorry I missed you. Call when you get this.”

Almost as soon as he put the phone down it rang. He picked it up again. “Hey, gorgeous.”

Silence. Then a strange woman’s voice, low pitched, with a rasp in it. “Gorgeous. I like that.”

“I’m sorry, I thought … Sorry.”

“Well I’m not.” She laughed. “Keep it coming.”

“Sorry, who is this?”

“Jack Orlovich, right?”

“Do I know you?”

“Yes and no. Don’t hang up. This is about your whore of a wife. Yeah. You got it now?”