City Boy (7 page)

She spilled a little but got it down. “God, I’m a mess.” She sounded both more sober and more distressed.

“Nah. You’re just kind of drunk and on the way down.”

“I’ve been whining all night. Sorry.”

“A shoulder to puke on. Everybody needs one.”

“Please don’t say puke.”

They laughed at that. It was a relief to laugh in this weary, comradely fashion. Jack was thinking it was turning out all right. They would be buddies, or at least start off that way. In his mind he was already working it out, how they would get to know each other, the way that might progress. He was still leaning over her when she reached up with both arms and although he had not planned or foreseen it, they were kissing.

They staggered, trying to find a balance. Then Chloe pulled him down on top of her. He landed with his knees on either side of her, still in danger of falling over completely while she was rising up to meet him. He put one arm around her shoulders, which were thin and tense, tasted the inside of her mouth, still cool even through the alcohol bitterness, and then it no longer mattered what he had or hadn’t planned, he wanted her.

They kissed for a time, until that began to seem unsatisfactory. Jack tried to work her shirt loose. She allowed this, and allowed his hand to burrow beneath the fabric to reach her breast in a way he hoped did not seem entirely desperate and adolescent. Everything was happening in a blurred, hasty fashion, with too much clothing and furniture in the way. Their weight sank into the couch even as he got her shirt open and groped around at her waistband. She allowed this also, she seemed cooperative,
if not enthusiastic, in a way he didn’t want to admit was faintly disappointing. It was difficult to get her jeans slid over her hips, he didn’t want to think about those damn boots, but he finally managed it all, pulled her panties down too and cupped his hand over her pubic hair, his fingers exploring and prodding. She put her hand on top of his and bore down hard.

It was what he’d been waiting for. He wanted to be inside her that instant. They were going to have to get up and find the bedroom, or at least stand to get rid of the last of their clothes, or maybe he could manage to get himself out and open her legs enough to enter her. That was what he was attempting to do when she said in an unnatural, high-pitched voice, “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” and pushed him away.

He stared at her, confounded. She shrank back and tried to cover herself. “I’m sorry, I can’t do this. I’m really really sorry.”

Jack had stopped himself, in some conscious sense, but his penis hadn’t gotten the message and was still straining to get at her, dragging the rest of his body along with it. She rolled away from him; one of her boot heels caught him in the ribs. “I
mean
it.”

“Jesus Christ.” He managed to get himself untangled from her, sat down on one end of the couch. “What the hell’s the matter?”

“I know this is crummy, I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, you said that.” He could hardly believe what was happening, that it wasn’t a bad joke, or a notion he could talk her out of. “Wasn’t this all your idea, did I miss something?”

“I know, I thought I could, I wanted to, but I can’t.”

“‘Can’t,’ what’s that supposed to mean?”

Her head drooped. “Can’t.” Very quiet.

She sniffled, but Jack wasn’t buying it, wasn’t in the mood to feel sorry for her. He sat glumly. She said, “It doesn’t have anything to do with you—”

“Gee, thanks.”

“I mean I’m a horrible messed-up person. I’m completely toxic to be around.”

“Well you could have told me that up front. That you were a total flake.” He was angry and humiliated, he didn’t care what he said.

“I’m just not … really in my body right now.”

She sounded wistful, even a little puzzled. Jack dismissed it as more theatrics. “Sure, I get it. Nobody’s home.”

“I don’t blame you for being mad. I absolutely understand that.”

He didn’t want to be understood, at least not by her at this moment. “I have to go.” He got to his feet. She had pulled her pants back up; her shirt was still open and her bra straps were down around her elbows. Although she was sitting up primly, one small breast stared back at him, its nipple a blind eye.

“Please don’t feel like this is anybody’s fault but mine. I mean you seem like a really nice person,” she offered.

“Yeah, you did too.” He picked up his coat without putting it on, got himself outside, and made that car go. He drove and drove, sped down the empty streets, jammed his brakes, daring the cops or anybody else to get in his way so that he could wind up in some genuine trouble, but that seemed as stupid and sad as everything else that had happened, and finally, after a trip to the lakeshore, where there was nothing to do with the thick gray cold water except throw yourself in, or decide not to, he simply went home.

He woke the next morning feeling a complicated shame, both for himself and for her. When he was able to think more coolly, he computed the amount of alcohol involved and soberly—that was the word—was almost grateful nothing more had happened. She had been drunk, and although he knew that girls sometimes got drunk so that they could permit themselves to have sex, he didn’t want to imagine how things might have gone if she’d had her second thoughts a few minutes later. She might even have called the police, had him arrested for rape, and he would have had a hard time trying to get anyone to believe otherwise. Things like that happened, you heard about them. He told himself he’d been lucky, but he didn’t believe it, and in spite of the deep wound to his pride he was sick with wanting her.

What, if anything, should he do now? He could call her or write a letter, demand an explanation or pretend that he understood. Or stay the hell away, give up on her this second time. He had been badly
treated. Maybe she hadn’t intended to goad and frustrate him, but in the end she had not been afraid to do so. Maybe she’d only brought him along for the evening, brought him home, because he was someone she judged she could get the best of, dismiss easily. He didn’t really believe that of her, although thinking that way satisfied his darkest moods. She had only been unhappy. Unhappiness made people heedless of anything or anyone else, made them cruel.

Since there was nothing else he could do, he wrote a lot of poetry. In one sense this made him feel better, but it also rendered Chloe and everything that had happened between them more distant and fevered, and less real.

A couple of weeks passed. Jack couldn’t have been said to be avoiding her, since he didn’t know where she spent her time, but at least he’d kept himself from calling or showing up at her door. He was standing in line at a coffeehouse when Dex came up behind him, scanning the menu.

Jack nodded to him. He didn’t know if Dex remembered him. He had an equal, if contradictory, fear that Dex knew everything that had happened that night. “Oh, hey.” Dex said. “You’re the guy from the party.”

“The limo driver.”

“Yeah, how you doing?” Dex wore a red plaid cowboy shirt with shoulder seams shaped like arrows. He was so skinny, he looked like a little boy dressed by a mother with a bad sense of humor. Jack had to wonder about the rest of his closet. He paid for his coffee and moved away. But he wasn’t fast enough about adding cream, which was where Dex caught up with him. “Say, you talk to Chloe lately?”

Jack said that he had not. Dex opened three sugar packets, spiked his coffee with cinnamon, dumped in enough 2 percent milk to turn the whole mess gray. “She had to drop out of school, she had herself a little bit of a breakdown.”

“A what?”

“Nothing meds won’t cure. Poor girlie. Always tries so hard. She’s one of those people who thinks if you just make a plan and stick with it, if you’re very
intelligent
about it all, you get what you want.”

“Breakdown, what, she’s in the hospital?”

“Oh no, Mister Party Man, excuse me I forget your name. She went back to her folks in St. Louis.”

“But she’s all right?”

“Well sure. It was just a little episode. I honestly don’t know if she’d like me talking about it. It was sort of messy. She’s fine now. Good as new. Or will be.”

Jack was having trouble separating Dex’s prattle from what the words really meant. “What’s she doing there, St. Louis, she’s going to stay there?”

“For a while, I guess. Do Mom and Dad things. Take a little mental health break. Get away from El Beefhead.”

“The boyfriend …”

“That big sack of poop. He is so not helpful. I called him, I left messages. Nothing. What does it take to get some people’s attention? Girl takes a stomachful of pills and aspirates her own vomit and all that other good ER stuff. Oh shit. You did not hear me say that.”

If they’d been somewhere more private, Jack could have strangled Dex to get the real story from him, or maybe punched him out just on general principles. The worst he could do here would be to spill Dex’s coffee. “She tried to kill herself with pills?”

“Kill, I don’t know what she was trying to do. It could have been one of those cry for help things. I had, honestly, no idea. I mean sure, she was sad and all that, but I wasn’t thinking
fragile
.”

The person he really wanted to hit, Jack realized, was himself. “So the beef guy … ,” he began, hoping he was someone everything could be blamed on.

“Don’t get me started. Definitely not worth killing yourself over. Bout of hives, maybe. He owns that bar we went into the other night, or part of it. Wheeler-dealer. He owns a lot of stuff. I don’t know why she kept going back there. Scene of the crime.”

“Was he there that night? At the bar?”

“Na. Probably out with some new lucky girl. It must be hard for somebody like Chloe, you know, Miss America, when things don’t work out. She’s not used to it. I mean if you’re beautiful and smart and
you always brush your teeth and do your homework, why shouldn’t you live happily ever after?”

Jack asked if Dex was likely to see or speak to Chloe and Dex said he guessed so. Would Dex tell her that her friend from the poetry class was sorry to hear she was having troubles? He made Dex repeat it. He didn’t feel any confidence that Chloe would remember his name, just as Dex had not, or even if she’d known it to begin with. One more reason having sex that night wouldn’t have been up at the top of the good ideas list. He walked away in a fog of dread and guilt and sweat. Even though what had happened to Chloe had not actually been his fault, he felt at least complicit as a witness. There was nothing he could do for her now, besides hoping she had friends other than Dex.

That was all Jack heard of her for some time. She did not reappear on campus, or at least he didn’t see her, nor Dex. The semester ground to a halt in May and he went back to California for the summer. He got a job umpiring kids’ park-district softball, just to get out of the house and away from his parents’ increasing fretfulness about his future. Four years of tuition at Northwestern was a lot of money, even for the doctor. Jack was going to be a bum. He could have stayed home and been a bum, it would have been a lot cheaper. Jack said he’d pay back the money, if it was so damned important. (Ha, his father remarked.) Jack said he didn’t care about money, he just wanted to do what made him happy. Well Christ, his father said, terrific, son, but you don’t really seem happy, and Jack had no answer to this.

It was a relief to go to work and arbitrate disputes among eight-year-olds. (The adults involved were another story.) He was soothed by the green and manicured playing fields, and the moment when the sunset crossed over to twilight and the lights came on, and the simplicity of the game itself. He liked the kids and their kid-sized sorrows and problems, which, now that he was older, seemed easily solvable. He wished he was a kid again just so he could go back and do it right. In the same way, softball, which he’d been largely indifferent to as a child, now appealed to him as a great way to avoid anything more complicated. His life seemed to be taking place in slow motion, like the arc of a ball thrown high for an easy catch.

He drove home from the games with the radio turned up loud. Sometimes he stopped at a friend’s house and watched movies, or they might head down to Santa Monica or Venice and hang out on the beach. They met girls there and on occasion the girls knew about parties or somewhere else to go, and they’d spend the night together. But even this felt like killing time. He didn’t tell anyone about Chloe, though he and his friends traded war stories about sex. There was no way he could turn her into a joke or something to brag about or even an episode with a definite conclusion. California, his life there now and in the past, seemed much the same way, something left hanging, a ball that never landed, a place where there were no real events, only beautiful surfaces refracted through the glass of car windows. Whatever else happened, he decided, he wouldn’t be coming back here.

In August he returned to school. Although it was a relief to be in Chicago again, he had no enthusiasm for classes. He was only practicing things he already knew, papers and tests and sitting in chairs. He was simply waiting until he got his degree and would be expected to enter what was archly called the real world. He had used up all the available poetry classes and started in on writing fiction. It was the only part of school he enjoyed. And you could at least pretend fiction would make you money someday, although he didn’t announce it to his father as a career move.

He might never have seen Chloe Chase again, he wasn’t one to believe in fate or destiny or anything more grandiose than good or bad timing, if he hadn’t agreed to go to a campus lecture with a friend. It was a women’s studies lecture, not the kind of thing he usually went in for, but the girl who wanted him to go—the
woman
, come on, Jack—told him not to be a total pig, it wouldn’t kill him, he might even learn something. Besides, he never went anywhere anymore, just stayed home wearing a hole in the couch, which Jack had to admit was true. But, he argued, he’d probably be the only male there, he’d feel stupid. “Jack, it’s not lingerie shopping,” his friend said, and he gave in.