City Boy (28 page)

Chloe didn’t call him that day, or the day after. This meant he was being punished for his stunt on the phone. Jack stayed inside, sunk in
himself. He considered calling her, inventing some excuse. He knew he wouldn’t be able to go a whole week without talking to her. A part of him was curious to see how long he’d be able to hold out, and even what new, outlandish thing he might do next. Chloe called on the morning of the third day.

“How’s it going out there?” Cheery tone. His heart was running laps.

“Fine. Busy. I’ve got a workshop that starts in a few minutes, so—”

“What kind of workshop?”

“It’s on computer fraud.”

“How to commit it, or how to catch it?”

“You know, you’re not always as funny as you think you are.”

“I’m not always trying to be funny.”

“How about that business the other day, was that supposed to be funny?”

“No, not really going for funny. Writers, you know. Always trying to paint a picture with words.”

“Because it was like getting raped over the phone. If you need to do things like that, find somebody who takes Visa and MasterCard.”

“Sorry.”

She was waiting for a better apology. Jack held his silence long enough to let her know it wasn’t coming. In the background he heard the sounds of—a hotel lobby? Voices, chiming elevators? At least she’d put on her clothes and come downstairs to call him. He said, “So how’s New York?”

“Fine.”

“Yeah? That’s great. How’s Spence? I bet he’s fine too.”

“Everybody’s okay.”

“Something like this trip, I bet it really builds the old esprit de corps. Team-concept management, all that good stuff.”

“This is so childish. You just can’t get over me being here. You want me on a leash so you can keep yanking it.”

“I’d say you were pretty unleashed these days.”

“What? What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

He’d wanted to choke down his anger but he’d failed and now it was too late to be anything else but angry, so he goaded her, he wanted to
see if she could turn everything she’d done into his fault, and here she was, coming through like a champ. He had an intuition, no, a twentyfour carat gold-plated
certainty
that she was drinking again, sneaking drinks like she did the fucking. And because of the drinking, or as a part of it, everything would be turned inside out, guilt into accusations, lies into hotly defended positions. The truth had never been good enough for Chloe because she was never good enough for herself. The funniest damn thing about all this was how well he was coming to understand her.

He said, “All right, look.” Stalling. He’d gone too far, too much was going off inside him, like Brezak’s Fourth of July fireworks. If he opened his mouth anything might come out, a flamethrower, a dud. Now he only wanted to get off the phone before things got any worse. “I’m sorry this … New York business has been such a big issue.”

“You’re the one who made it an issue.”

“Yes. I cop to that. But I think when you get back, we ought to set up another appointment.”

“With …”

“I think we ought to keep seeing her. Or somebody.” There had been only the one session. Something else had always come up.

“Or you could quit acting like a big jerk, which would be a lot cheaper. My workshop’s starting, I have to go.”

“How about I go ahead and make the appointment, we can talk about it when you get back. Because look, I’ve never been married before and I didn’t practice for it but maybe you get to a place where it’s not enough, two people in this little airtight cocoon called marriage, maybe you need to punch a hole in it once in a while, bring in a third party? Somebody to take the pressure off? I guess I can understand that.”

Jack stopped talking. Chloe said, “Are you feeling all right? You sound funny.”

“Let’s forget funny.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I’m fine. I’m just as fine as everybody else.”

“Maybe we should forget fine too for now.”

“Agreed.”

“Look, I really do have to go. But all right, sure, call and set something up.”

“I love you.”

“I love you too,” said Chloe, hanging up. And maybe she did.

Four more days. He wanted to stop counting. There were probably drugs that were big and bad enough to make you lose four days, but Jack didn’t know how to get his hands on them. Chloe had a prescription for Valium. He found them in the bathroom medicine cabinet. Weighed them in his hand. Vitamin V.

First he had to get past the mirror. Hey there, Mister Fool. He looked like crap. He hadn’t yet shaved or showered and his mouth was full of dry paste. His hair was stiff and matted, his skin dank, his eyes looked cracked, like eggshells. Maybe he should ask Spence who his barber was, get himself spiffed up. He’d never been inclined to think much about his looks, he thought they were average to good. In any case they were what they were, and since he didn’t think about them, he was defended against disappointments. But now he tried to see himself as others might, as a wife who was tired of him might.

A long face, long in the bones, like the rest of him. Forehead, jaw, nose, all the architecture carved out with a heavy hand. Eyes and mouth, his mother’s, the sweetener in the mix. He used to fret that his long-lashed blue eyes and curved upper lip made him look girly. It had taken growing up to balance him out, give him the face of a man rather than a pretty boy. Yet what women always remarked on were the vestiges of that prettiness. Maybe Chloe had grown bored with one or the other aspects of his looks, the man’s bones or the woman’s sweetness, or maybe just the sameness of him, a movie she’d watched for the hundredth time.

In the end he put the Valium back without taking any. He ran water for a shower, shaved, cleaned up his act. Weakness wasn’t going to get him anywhere with Chloe.

The ceiling was vibrating with reggae. Brezak had acquired a couple of new CDs—by now Jack was familiar with everything in his repertoire—and was in the process of playing them to death. The volume
level this morning was borderline, Jack could have let it go, but he needed to be pissed off at someone besides himself, and so he made his way up to the second floor.

Twice since the Battle of Khe Sahn, he’d made a point of intercepting Brezak on the stairs to ask about the injured girl. Her name, he learned, was Vicki. On the first occasion Brezak held up his own knotty arm to demonstrate how much tissue the girl had lost. And she was going to need skin grafts for the worst of the burns, but the really great thing was that she was still on her parents’ insurance.

“So she’s going to come through this okay?”

Brezak said Yeah, he guessed. He seemed unduly chipper, long since recovered from his fit of angry guilt. Perhaps he was rendered upbeat by the insurance news, or to give him more credit, relieved that the girl had survived in the first place. “The arm’s kind of tough, it means therapy and shit, but the rest, Vick figures she’s gonna have some really cool scars.”

Jack said he was glad to hear it. In the kid’s circle, where skin was routinely inked and perforated, he might well imagine that scars were cool. He thought of dueling scars at Heidelberg before the First World War, decided not to offer that up.

Brezak said, “In this weird way, she was even lucky. One of those big suckers goes off in your face, you have, you know, monster face.”

The next time Jack saw him, Brezak said the girl was out of the hospital now but taking it easy. Her parents were being major assholes, they wouldn’t let him in to see her. Jack imagined this was probably what it had taken for them to reassert some sort of parental control. A daughter firebombed and partly disassembled.

Now, climbing the stairs, Jack assumed the girl was out of danger and it was appropriate to return to complaint mode. Although this music wasn’t that bad, comparatively. It had a back beat that kicked, and the singer hit his high notes square on. My God, he was developing a critical taste for this stuff. He knocked, then pounded. “Rich?”

Feet crossing the floor. Through the closed door Ivory said, “He’s not here.”

Was he so square and clueless that these people were always going to take him by surprise? So it seemed. “Open up.”

“I told you, he’s not here.”

“I want to talk to you.”

“Go ahead.”

“It’s about Vicki.”

“What about her?”

“Would you at least turn the damn music down?”

As if someone had put a lid on a pot, the singing grew tiny. Jack waited, but the door didn’t open. “What are you afraid of?”

She worked the latch and opened the door just wide enough to give him a sour face. Jack said, “Were you one of those little girls who everybody kept saying how much prettier you’d be if you smiled more?”

“Fuck off.”

“I heard she’s going to be all right.”

“Yeah, they already kicked her out of the hospital.”

“That’s a little harsh.”

“Look, I don’t have to pretend to like her, even if she got herself blown up.” She’d twisted her front hair into a number of little braids. It wasn’t really flattering; it made her look pop-eyed from the tightened skin. But it was the first gesture toward vanity he’d seen in her.

He said, “So how’d it happen, huh? How’d she get hit by that rocket?”

“Stupid people always wind up getting in the way.”

They stared at each other. Jack said, “That’s your final answer?”

“Look, I have stuff to do.”

“I bet.”

The door closed in his face. But half an hour later she was downstairs applying her knuckles to his apartment door. He opened it.

“What was that crack supposed to mean?” she demanded.

“Which crack?”

“You know.”

He did know. He opened the door wider and allowed her to step inside. Jack watched her take in the room with darting, rabbitlike
glances. Even with his three days of nonhousekeeping, it was several cuts above anywhere she’d ever lived, he was pretty sure of that. She said, “Where’s wifey?”

“At work.” The short answer. “Her name is Chloe.”

“Chloe. What kind of name is that?”

“Old-fashioned. Like Irene.”

Her nearly lashless eyes flickered, but her face was more belligerent than startled. She wasn’t giving an inch. Jack said, “I saw that business on the roof.”

She shook her head. He thought this only meant she didn’t want to hear any more. “What were you trying to do, kill her?”

“No.”

“I saw you point a damn rocket at her.” Bluffing now. He couldn’t have sworn to it, in all the drifting smoke and rain vapor and drunken commotion and flash and sizzle. But he’d seen Ivory watching the other girl, crouching like a soldier on guard. Something about that rigid posture. A moment later the streak of fire and stinging air.

“Well I wasn’t really trying to kill her.”

He kept talking, trying to match her so-what tone, but he was deeply unsettled, he hadn’t expected her to admit to it. “What were you going for, disfigurement?”

“You make it sound so yucky,” she complained. “Besides, it really was sort of an accident.”

“Sort of.” He was having difficulty with this conversation. It seemed as unreal as a cartoon, cats chasing mice with sledgehammers, Wiley Coyote treading air as he ran off the edge of a cliff. He saw again the girl’s torn skin, the glossy blood. “Sort of doesn’t work for me.”

“Okay, I thought about it. How nice it would be if she went up in the air and came down like snow. I have to say, it crossed my mind. She’s such a pig, I don’t know why everybody’s always on her side. See, you’re doing it too.”

“What happened.”

“I was just thinking about it,” she repeated patiently. “I don’t know. My grandma used to say, ‘Don’t even pretend to do that,’ when I was a kid and I got into fights with my brothers and sisters and told them I
was going to push them down the stairs or poke their eye out with a stick. That always seemed so unfair, that you couldn’t even pretend to do something really rancid.”

“She lost part of her arm.”

“Oh come on. It honestly was an accident. Those little rocket things just take off on you. Besides, she’s going to be fine.”

“You’re crazy,” he muttered. He shouldn’t be listening to her.

“So what now, you going to rat me out?” She folded her arms and tilted her head back to look at him.

“Are you even a little bit sorry? Never mind. I guess it doesn’t matter.”

“God, Orlovich, you are such a girl.”

“She could have died.”

“Look, I didn’t do it on purpose. It was scary. I never saw anybody messed up that bad.” She did look sorry, or at least, she was trying to look sorry. “Are you going to tell Rich?”

“I have to think about this.”

“Oh, great. Leave it all hanging over my head.”

He was thinking about Spence. He wondered if he could take anything into his hand—gun, knife, club—and will himself to use it. Think about it long enough to call it pretending. “Hey, what are you doing?”

Ivory was standing in the dining room, peering down the hallway that led to the rest of the apartment. “Just seeing how the beautiful people live.”

By the time he caught up with her, she was in the kitchen. “Boy are you guys slobs.”

He hadn’t done much cooking on his own, but the evidence of it was piled up on the countertop and in the sink. “I’m the only slob.”

“What, she’s got you doing the dishes? You are so whipped.” Jack didn’t answer. “Got your number, don’t I.”

“You don’t know a thing about it.”

She made one of her trademark smirking faces and limped past him as he stood in the doorway. She took a step into the bedroom. “How about in here, you keeping up with your chores?”

“Maybe you should leave now.”

Instead she walked over to the bed and sat down on it, bounced.

Jack had pulled the covers up so that technically the bed was made, although he hadn’t bothered to do a good job and it had a slatternly, untidy look. He said, “What are you doing?” Although he knew. He already knew everything that was going to happen.

“How about I make you a deal.”

“Don’t talk like that.”

“Like how, exactly?”

“Like a whore.”

“Jeez, Orlovich. Don’t tell me a nice boy like you knows how whores talk.”