City Boy (41 page)

Then Chloe got a lawyer also and there was a period when the lawyers shuffled procedures back and forth between them. Jack was impatient for that part to be settled. He wanted to sign off. He removed his name from the apartment’s telephone and ComEd accounts. He closed out any funds he had in the Chicago banks. He traded his Illinois driver’s license for a California one. Those were the easy things. Then the child would be divided into portions by some Cook County Solomon, and a court would tell him when and where to be a father.

The week after New Year’s Jack took a couple days off from work and flew into O’Hare. He had been gone almost exactly three months. There were arrangements to make about retrieving the rest of his belongings. There would be more of the signing off. The lawyers had set up a meeting between him and Chloe to get the machinery of the divorce in order.

The day was blue and clear, with a steady, mortifying wind off the
lake, crunchy snow underfoot, tire tracks turning from slush to rutted ice and back again. Jack met his lawyer for the first time. The lawyer dispensed some professional sympathy and said that they were awkward, these sessions, but they almost always went better than people feared. Jack said the last time he’d seen his wife he’d just finished beating up her boyfriend, and the lawyer said those circumstances were not as unusual as he might think.

The meeting was at the office of Chloe’s lawyer and they took a cab across town. The cab sped along Lower Wacker, down among the roots of skyscrapers, and surfaced near Union Station. Jack watched the shouldering crowds and the winter sun picking out the glass and chrome and the horizon opening up to the west where the expressway and the railroad tracks ran. It was the city that had refused to love him. Its bulk and ugliness and energy wearied him. Of course this had been one of his mistakes, to confuse a city with a woman, and now he had lost them both.

At the lawyer’s office they were shown into a conference room. Jack’s lawyer said, “Sunny California. We’ll have you back there in a twinkling.” Jack sneered. He hated being the recipient of charitable small talk.

They stood when the door opened. Chloe’s lawyer was a woman. There was a kind of rightness about that, a team of angry women taking him on. Everyone but Jack and Chloe shook hands. Even as Jack’s lawyer began talking, Jack was aware that the man was attempting to signal him. Except for one blind and dumb glance at Chloe Jack had not looked at her, but now he raised his head from his study of the polished table and regarded her. She sat at a little distance from the rest of them, and as far as she could get from Jack in the small room, but without much effort he could see her entirely as she sat. She was not pregnant in any visible way.

Jack turned to his lawyer, tried to indicate his own confusion. The lawyer had been prepped to talk about medical expenses and custody and visitation, and now he was gamely launching into his backup script about the division of property. Chloe’s lawyer responded with her own speech. Chloe didn’t look at anyone. The lawyers kept up their
choreographed call and response. The room revolved in minute increments as the earth tracked and spun. Jack felt a moment of black, dizzy nausea, as if gravity had loosened its hold. Was she really going to say nothing?

“Jack?”

His lawyer was smiling at him, his head cocked vivaciously. He was waiting for some answer. “I’m sorry,” Jack said, and the lawyer repeated his question. Was such and such acceptable? Jack said that it was. The lawyer was a winking, gibbering fool. No he wasn’t. He was hurrying things along as best he could, now that there was no need to parse babies. Then Chloe’s lawyer asked her a question and Chloe turned her head, considering it. Her face was puffy around the eyes and jawline. Or maybe it was the white sunlight that made the outlines of everything bleached and uncertain.

He could tell from the tone and timbre of the voices that they were drawing to some conclusion. He sensed another bout of handshaking coming on. Just as they were all getting ready to push their chairs back from the table, he said, “I’d like to ask Chloe if she’d stay and talk with me in private.”

The lawyers pricked up their ears, in a mannerly fashion. Chloe studied Jack. Her look was so opaque, she might have been wearing sunglasses. “Five minutes,” she said.

The lawyers cleared out. Jack let a beat of silence pass. “What happened?”

“A lot.”

“Did you have an abortion?”

“It figures you’d want to believe the ugliest possible thing about me.”

“Did you?”

“I miscarried at seventeen weeks.”

Whatever he might have said, he found himself unable to say. Chloe went on. “Maybe it’s just as well. I bet you would have hated it just for being mine.”

“No.”

Chloe gave him another flat stare. “The doctor said there was probably something wrong with it. That’s usually why you lose a baby. Anyway.
” She let her hands turn palms downward, a cup of sunlight emptying.

A child would have tied him to her forever. In spite of everything, he’d wanted that. He said, “I’m sorry.”

“Sorry for what part, exactly?”

“For you. For the baby. Come on.”

“What you did to Spence was inhumane.”

“And what Spence did to me was pretty fucking raw.”

“God, I hate it when you talk like that. You’ve turned into a total thug.”

“Yeah, I guess I have. Good work.”

“Not everything’s my fault, Jack.”

Now that he’d grown more used to looking at her directly, he was able to scrutinize her. He hadn’t been mistaken. Her face was fuller, looser. A downward turn to her mouth, the slightest suggestion of gravity. Maybe no one but himself would have noticed. He’d studied Chloe’s face the way an art collector studied a painting. She saw him staring. “What?”

“Nothing.” And because Chloe would know it wasn’t nothing, he said foolishly, “How’s Spence?”

“Why do you ask, so you can go try to finish him off?”

“Not everything’s my fault either,” he reminded her.

“He’s fine. He’s going back to work in a couple of weeks. He’s in a cardio rehab program. There’s a special diet, stress tests, and monitoring.”

“I bet you signed the office get-well card.”

“Not that it’s any of your business, but we’re getting married. After both the divorces are final.”

Because he had only this peevish, hateful voice left to him, Jack said, “Congratulations. Usually, the heart attack sends them back to the wife.”

“I know you think I’m a horrible person and Spence is a horrible person and we deserve each other. But we really are happy. It’s like all the sad, awful things that happened brought us closer.” Chloe reached beneath her chair for her handbag. She gathered it to her and folded her hands on top, as if waiting for permission to leave. “You can go over
and get your things anytime. I don’t live there anymore. Use the lawyer’s address if you need to correspond with me.”

He was through with talking. “Fine.”

When Jack didn’t say anything else, she stood up, actually smiled. “I’m glad this part is over.”

He supposed she meant the legal session, but she might just as easily have been talking about Jack himself. He opened the door of the conference room for her and they walked together down the corridor. Chloe said, “You’re back in Los Angeles?”

“That’s right.”

She was almost friendly, now that she was finished with him. “Oh my God, I meant to tell you. Fran and Reg. They’re splitting up.”

“Yeah?” Because it seemed he was obliged to express interest, he added, “How come?”

“You won’t guess in a million years. Fran found all this gay porn and gay chat room stuff on Reg’s computer. He had this whole secret life. Now honestly, did you ever have the faintest suspicion?”

“Nope. Never saw it coming.”

“He claims he’s bi, he’s equally attracted to men and to women. I don’t even want to know how that works! Fran’s devastated. She’s in a support group. I guess you’d
need
one. Reg moved to Boys’ Town. Can you even imagine it? Reg making the scene at a leather bar? Isn’t that too wild?”

“Wild.”

“I guess Fran’s available now.” She actually nudged him in the ribs.

“Reg too.”

Chloe giggled.“You’re awful.” Then she checked herself, turned more polite and conversational. “So, are you getting some writing done out there?”

“Just working.”

“Oh, I bet you’ll get back to it, now you’re in California again. Because it has to be so much easier, writing about a place when you’re actually there.”

They were almost to the bank of elevators at the end of the corridor. Jack knew she meant to leave him there, shake hands or even kiss him.
He stopped walking. Chloe realized it a couple of paces later, halted and looked back at him. He said, “Please don’t blow me off being charming like you do everybody else.”

She sighed. “I was trying to be pleasant.”

“Don’t. Not if it takes an effort.”

“I’m sorry you think I can’t be nice to you without being insincere.”

“I stopped writing. I won’t be doing it anymore. That’s not your fault. I would have figured it out sooner or later.”

He could see Chloe puzzling over this, not only what he’d said, but whether she ought to involve herself. “But it’s what you’ve always wanted to do.”

“Things change. As we see.”

“What about your book?”

“A lot of books never get written.”

“I don’t understand. You have so much talent. You really do, I hope you don’t think I’m saying that for some devious reason.”

“Talent’s only part of writing. It’s either something you have in you or you don’t.”

Jack didn’t offer anything else, and after a moment Chloe said, “Well …”

He pressed the elevator’s call button. Chloe waited with him, and when the car came she gave him a kiss on the cheek and said, Take care, and Jack said, You too, and he stepped inside and the door closed and he rode down twelve floors, down and down and down, wishing he could lift himself up with some ironic, buoyant thought. Chloe was what he’d had inside him. She’d been the only extraordinary thing about him. His outsized love and outsized fury. Now he would be like anyone else, shrunk down to normal, made up of itches and exasperations and, in time, he supposed, his share of some purely normal happiness.

He took a cab back to the garage where he’d left his rental car. The lawyer was expecting him, but Jack thought they’d both be relieved if he didn’t show up. Instead he drove north, past all the landmarks and intersections he’d taken care to learn so that he could feel he truly lived here. It was the first time he’d seen his old street, his block, in winter
weather. The curbs were heaped and churned with old snow that in places had turned the color of Coca-Cola. To park, you let the frozen tracks grab hold of your tires and slide you into a space. Every car was scummed with layers of dried salt.

He had to park two blocks away. The wind made his eyes and nose stream. The Hawk, that was the name people gave to the Chicago wind. Someone told him that, way back when he’d first arrived at Northwestern. And he’d made a point of remembering it, working it into conversation. But did anyone still say it? He wasn’t sure. Maybe it was outdated even back then, a piece of old slang that only reached someone like him when it was already used up. No matter how he’d tried, he had never really belonged here.

The heat had been turned down in the apartment. Nothing was untidy or out of place, but the cold made it unwelcoming. Chloe had cleared out her closet and desk and other items Jack had to remember by their absence. The Monet water lilies were gone, and the area rugs. She’d left the TV and VCR and stereo. He assumed that Spence had better ones.

Jack set to work. He made a pile of the winter clothing he would no longer need, set it aside for Goodwill. He disassembled the computer and stereo components. He’d have to call the lawyer and find out which one of them owned the furniture. Tomorrow he’d come back with movers, have them box up his books and anything else he wanted to ship. He hauled bags of unwanted things out to the trash. The backyard was full of oddly shaped snow-covered lumps, like the bodies of Arctic explorers.

He was sorting through the bathroom shelves when he heard, unmistakably, the sound of a baby crying from upstairs. It went on for a time, then ceased. Someone flushed a toilet overhead.

Jack went out into the lobby. He’d assumed that Brezak wasn’t home, and counted himself lucky. Now he saw that new names were on Brezak’s mailbox.
J. DESOTO, M. DESOTO
. A nice young couple with a baby.

So Brezak had gone, or maybe he’d finally been thrown out, and was living his dirty, disorganized life somewhere else. Jack had to remind
himself that these were rentals, he shouldn’t be surprised when people moved on. Piece by piece his own life here would be erased. He wondered if Ivory had made it to Florida, if she was on a beach with the hot sun freckling her skin, rubbing suntan lotion on her withered leg, daring people to stare. He knew this was a sentimental thought and she deserved better from him. She had made it possible for him to imagine the different shapes and ways of loving, its cruelties and extravagances, how someone might desire men and women equally, or reach the very end point of desire.

Someone named Rogers had taken over Mr. Dandy’s apartment. Jack and Chloe’s names were still on their mailbox. Jack used his key to open it, pulled out some old pizza flyers. They were damp and shredded, as if something had been making a nest in there. Mrs. Lacagnina’s name was still in place. Who would have thought she’d outlast everyone else.

Jack had pulled his car up to the front door to load suitcases when Mrs. Lacagnina herself came out, dragging her grocery cart. Jack waved. He wondered if she’d find it strange that he’d returned, then he wondered if she’d even noticed he was gone.

Mrs. Lacagnina didn’t wave back. She stared at him with no sign of recognition, but Jack thought her face might be so hardened by age and deafness that it no longer recorded actual expressions. Jack opened the passenger door of the car, tried to convey his willingness to escort her to the grocery. He wanted to believe that in spite of everything, he might still be a person who was kind to old ladies.