City Boy (40 page)

Spence didn’t speak. Maybe couldn’t. His mouth was full of blood. “Where is she?” It infuriated him not to get an answer, even as he kept
his hands working, kept him from talking. It went on and on. Or no. It was all over quickly. Or maybe something fast kept happening over and over again. Spence tried to cover his head with his arms. He crumpled over on all fours. Jack hauled him up by his tie, kicked his knees out from under him. Spence sprawled facedown. His mouth left blood kisses on the white carpet.

Jack left him there, ran down a corridor, bruised himself on walls and door frames, bedroom bathroom kitchen bedroom again, all empty, and then it came to him that of course Chloe wasn’t there. Spence had been waiting for her, had buzzed Jack in because he’d thought it was Chloe.

Spence had rolled over on his back. He swallowed some of the blood, then heaved and vomited it back up. His shirt had come out of his pants and exposed a roll of white belly. He looked like something large and bloody and newly butchered. Jack went to the front door, opened it, took a careful look and listen. The building still slept. He closed the door again, turned back to Spence. “When is she supposed to get here?”

Spence’s face was mottled white and red. His eyes were squeezed shut. His mouth made shapes. “Oh come on,” Jack said. “Don’t tell me you’re giving up this easy.”

“Heart.” Shallow whisper.

“What?”

“I think I’m having a heart attack.”

“Bullshit you are.”

Spence clawed at his chest, tried to get free of his necktie, turned his head to one side and vomited more bloody soup. Jack stood over him.

“Heart attack? No kidding. This your first?”

Spence writhed and arched his back so hard that his head cracked on the floor.

“That a yes?”

“911.”

“Excuse me?”

“Call 911.”

“I don’t think so.”

When Spence opened his mouth, the blood formed strings in the hinges. He was pale now, blue-white pallor. The blood from his mouth and nose made a Halloween mask of his face. Sweat was rolling off him, soaking his shirt. “So when is Chloe coming?” Spence got himself up on one elbow, propped himself against the couch. “If I were you, I’d say.”

“There’s a meeting. After.” Sitting up seemed to ease him, or maybe some spasm had passed. “I need an ambulance.”

“Do you know I saw a man die just yesterday? Isn’t that an amazing coincidence?”

“Christ’s sake. Call. We can settle this later.”

“No, I think now’s a good time.”

“This is murder.”

“Not technically.”

Spence’s head drooped, and he sucked in air so hard he gagged. “My kids.”

“Mine too. Which is another thing we could talk about. Whether you’re the one who impregnated my wife.”

Spence raised his head, looked at him through meaty swollen eyes. Said something, or tried to.

“Didn’t catch that.”

“Chloe pregnant?”

“Don’t play dumb.”

“Didn’t.”

“Didn’t what, Jimbo? Stick it in her?”

“She didn’t tell me.”

Jack felt the bruises and throbbing places in his own body that he hadn’t been aware of until now. He thought about Chloe and Spence. What they told and didn’t tell each other, what they did instead of talking.

Spence tried to hitch himself across the floor to a phone sitting on an end table. Jack picked up the receiver, pocketed it. His fingers closed around the shotgun shell. He said, “There’s this question of just how many lies we got going here, yours and hers. Not sure what to believe.”

“I didn’t know. I swear.”

“Yeah, but you’d say anything right about now, wouldn’t you. You look like shit, man. Seriously.”

Spence mopped at his face with his shirt sleeve. Then the explosion in his chest set off another aftershock and he bent over. When he came to he said, “If I’d known …” He stopped, hoarding breath. “I wouldn’t have …” He raised a hand, indicated—the apartment? The affair itself? “We never meant to hurt you.”

“Well shoot. I do mean to hurt you. That’s what it’s all about.”

“Give me the phone.”

“You do this kind of thing on a regular basis? Cruise the office talent? Little afternoon training sessions?”

“No.”

“Convince me you’re telling the truth and I might give you the phone.”

“Once before.”

“Once. Heck. That hardly even counts.”

“I love Chloe.”

Jack bent down close enough to Spence to smell him, the mix of blood, ammonia, and aftershave. “I’ll sure tell her. In case you don’t make it.”

Spence’s nose was leaking fresh blood. He no longer resembled the corporate top dog, the man at ease with kings and commoners, smiling and joking to demonstrate his human side even as he presided over the intricacies of Big Money. The change had the same shock value as newsreels of cities after wartime bombings.

Jack said, “You want to know something funny? Or more like really ironic? I don’t think I love her. Not anymore. Because you can’t keep taking it and taking it. The things she’s done. I don’t just mean doing the nasty with you, Jimbo, though you’re certainly implicated. More like …” He stopped. It embarrassed him to be explaining himself to Spence. Yet there was really no one else he could tell. “Anyway.” He shrugged. “She pushed it and pushed it and here we are. You and me.”

Spence didn’t speak. Jack fingered the shell in his pocket. He liked the feel of it, its shape and weight. It reminded him of a child’s stubby pencil. He hadn’t meant to start talking again. But he was aware that he
hadn’t yet explained himself properly, gone about it right. He thought he could have told Ivory, but she was gone. He’d let her go, for good or ill. “I guess what I mean is, you start out loving a woman and if it goes wrong, if it turns into some spectacular, ball-busting flameout, like …” It was Jack’s turn to wave a hand. The hand blurred, the walls breathed, he was—the technical term for it—fucked up. “Well, it ain’t love after that. It’s whatever you get when you keep it around too long. Like milk going bad. And then when you know she’s a drunk and a liar and a whore and you still …”

Jack stopped. He hated the sound of his voice. Its weak and whiny edge. As if even killing a man wouldn’t keep him from being pitiful and aggrieved.

Spence spoke as if he had a mouthful of gravel. “They’ll find you. Police.”

“Maybe. Or maybe I’m just another one of those unknown intrud-ers.” Police weren’t anything he could get his mind around right now. Police were something on television. “By the way, I got the address from your wife. If you do pull through this, you might want to bring home flowers.”

“Last chance.”

“Oh, I don’t know much about these medical things. You might be able to hang on for a good long while yet. Depends on, is this your basic ‘massive heart attack,’ like guys your age seem to—”

“Last chance for you. Not do this.”

“We’re about out of chances here. You might have noticed.”

“Kill me kill you.”

For a moment he wasn’t even sure Spence had said anything. His ears filled with a drumming sound, like water from a high-pressure hose. He shook his head clear. “I don’t think you’re in a position to kill anybody, sport.”

“You kill you.”

“Shut up, man.”

Spence looked bad. Not as bad as Mr. Dandy maybe, but Mr. Dandy had already been dead. If he stayed he was going to have to watch that part. He should just go. He kept expecting to hear the buzzer, Chloe.
He’d let her in and walk away. Leave the front door open, let her find Spence, scream, see what her lying self had accomplished. What it all came down to. A busted heart and a face turned to gristle. He wished it was over. The whole stupid woeful deal. His own stupid life. He pulled the phone out of his pocket. The shell too. Balanced them. Guess which hand?

Spence watched him from the floor. His tongue protruded, thick and dry looking. Jack went into the kitchen, ran water in a glass, came back and squatted down next to Spence, put the glass to his mouth. Spence drank. The water in the glass came away tinted pink. Spence’s eyes bulged. He should go now. Let it all be over. Jack said, “Look at it this way. If I hadn’t come along, you probably would have blown out your heart valves in the middle of sex. Very embarrassing.”

Spence didn’t answer. Jack wished he hadn’t said anything. His words were all spite and cheap shots, when he’d meant them to come out cold and righteous. He’d lost some advantage. He’d already lost Chloe. When she’d walked out of the house this morning, she’d still been his wife, and now she wasn’t, whether she knew it yet or not.

Jack eased himself down on the floor next to Spence. His legs felt weak, either from the ebb of adrenaline or the last pulse of fever. Spence took no notice of him. His eyes were closed. Maybe he was already dead. No, there was air in him still. It visibly inflated his throat and chest. Waxy goose bumps stood out on the skin of his arms. Jack wondered what time it was, how long since Spence had been stricken. When you had a heart attack, you were supposed to take an aspirin, he remembered, although he’d never been sure why. Spence loved Chloe. He said so. If he died, no one would be left to love her.

He tried to remember loving Chloe. He had to reach deep down for it. That beautiful, aggravating girl who’d walked out of a classroom without once looking his way. He hadn’t loved her then but he’d wanted to. He’d made a space for her in his imagination and the actual woman had come to occupy it little by little.

It was a space he’d ripped wide open. He tried to picture it, a room like a heart or a heart like a room, something you could close off. “Hey,” he said to Spence. “You still here?”

Spence didn’t answer. A pulse skittered in his temple, a rabbit twitching. He wondered if Chloe loved Spence, if they told each other that, I love you love you love you too. He tried to hurt himself with thinking it but nothing came. There was an end to everything. Jack picked up the phone, pressed 911, told the dispatcher that an ambulance was needed and where.

He put the phone back in its cradle, set the lamps and the furniture to rights. Spence was still breathing, eyes closed, dreaming of pain. Jack waited until he heard sirens. When the buzzer sounded he pressed the release. He stepped outside to the hallway, leaving the apartment door open, and took the elevator down. Through the metal cage and shaft he heard the commotion of feet on the stairs, voices and radio chatter, weirdly close and echoing but invisible, like ghosts.

The paramedics had left the front door propped open. Chloe was just then stepping beneath the awning. Jack saw her before she saw him. When she’d left this morning he’d been asleep. She wore her black suit with a white blouse. The awning lit her with filtered sunlight. There was a moment when he was able to take her in, her pretty, blooming mouth, the way her eyebrows worked as she considered the ambulance, how she stood up tall and straight in her high heels, as if there would always be someone to watch her.

She saw Jack and yelped, a tiny sound that extinguished itself. Jack brushed past her. The street was still quiet. No crowd, idle or curious or alarmed, had gathered to see what the ambulance was about. It was as if this kind of thing happened every day.

F
rom California, Jack checked the
Tribune
obituaries on-line. Spence’s wasn’t among them. That was how Jack knew he had not died. He didn’t try to find out anything else, and no other news reached him. Nobody came after him with an arrest warrant. They must have been glad to see the last of him, and left it at that.

He’d flown into LAX and called his parents from the airport. “Taking a few personal-leave days,” he told them. He didn’t offer to explain any further and he must have looked so alarming that they didn’t press him. He slept for most of three days in his old bedroom with its bookshelves of boys’ adventure books and closet full of swampy tennis shoes. On the third day his mother asked him, with painful tact, how much longer he thought he’d be staying. Jack said he didn’t know. He called an old high school friend in Huntington Beach and arranged to move into his spare room.

The friend got him a job at the same place he worked, a small firm that produced and sold industrial videos. Jack learned the basics of production costs and inventory, rewrote brochures, did a little sales repping. It wasn’t a job he’d imagined himself doing, but then, he had not been able to imagine most jobs. After work he and his friend and one or two others from the office might go out for beers, or else they went home and watched Lakers games or rented movies.

The longer Jack went through the motions of a normal, undesperate life, the more outlandish the last few months seemed. He didn’t speak much about his marriage and for the most part his friends behaved as if he’d been gone on a not very interesting vacation. They knew that most married people got divorced eventually. His friends were casual about work and serious about fun, about music and skiing and mountain climbing and working out. This cheerful pursuit of shallowness as an end in itself was something Jack had always professed to hate about California life, but now he appreciated its ease.

He bought a three-year-old Jeep Grand Cherokee and spent his weekends driving the coast. Once he and his friends went to Mexico, fished and surfed and built bonfires on the beach. The moon turned the sand blue-white and the ocean to crumpled silver. Jack, drunk, tried to call Chloe but the call wouldn’t go through. He spoke to the rolling ocean instead, told Chloe how he was through with her, with loving her, he’d come out on the other side of it and soon it would no longer be necessary for him to want to tell her so.

There was a conversation with his parents. He said nothing about Spence and nothing about the baby. He told them that he and Chloe had been having problems and had come to a parting of the ways. Jack’s father, no doubt cautioned in advance by his mother, said only that he’d never thought it was a good idea to marry so young. As if marriage was a kind of complicated toy, subject to breakage. His father called a lawyer friend who found a lawyer in Chicago, and Jack filed for divorce on the grounds of irreconcilable differences.