Stewart and Jean (12 page)

Just when he was about to once and for all switch the primary focus of his financial and masturbatory energy to some other girl, she called and said they should set up a date.

“How about Mexican?” she suggested, when he asked where she would like to meet. He was happy to agree. In terms of getting drunk and gorged for a halfway-reasonable cost, at a halfway-decent place, Mexican was probably the best bet.

She picked the place. It was a spot near her in Brooklyn. If it had been in Queens instead he would have worried less about the price—some of those uppity Brooklyn restaurants were as pricey as Manhattan’s. On the other hand, there was a chance she wanted to meet near her apartment because she was considering having him come over afterwards.

They kissed hello, only a peck but on the lips. They got their margaritas, they got their chips and salsa. Marissa briskly flattened a napkin across her lap; it gave the impression that she was settling in and getting down to business. “So,” she said. “Want to do the post-op on Stewart and Jean?”

The drama between Jean and Stewart had been a huge boon when he’d needed some reason to talk to Marissa, and it wasn’t like he wasn’t still fascinated by it. But he wanted to progress, to be able to talk with her about her life, about his own. “Sure,” he said, dipping a chip in the salsa and eating it. Because he was with a woman he was hoping to seduce, he didn’t load the chip with as much salsa as he would have done normally, and he was more careful than usual not to let the sauce dribble down his chin. “But I haven’t been around him all that much. Actually been trying to get a different job.”

“Oh yeah? Where?”

“I want to get on as a tutor at Kaplan, tutoring kids to take the SAT.”

“Oh yeah? That’s cool.”

“It’s kind of a scam. I mean, not Kaplan, they’re legit, I think. But the SAT’s and all those standardized tests like that, they’re kind of bullshit. You don’t have to actually know anything. You just have to know how to work the test.”

“Well. You have to know how to read.”

“Okay. That’s true. The SAT does test for basic literacy, yes.” They munched and drank for a bit. Charles said, “How’s
your
job?”

“It’s been a little weird and stressful. Jean got mad for some reason and decided to quit talking to me.”

“Oh. Yeah?”

“I think she thinks I kind of breached her privacy with that stuff I told you, about the gun, and Stroudsburg.”

Charles wondered if the implication was that it was his fault she’d found out Marissa had spilled the beans, because he’d told Stewart and it had somehow worked its way back to Jean through him. But Marissa showed no sign of wanting to pursue that line of blame. She just talked about how Jean had asked Marissa if she’d told anyone about what they’d discussed that day at Chevy’s, and how ever since she’d seemed, if not cold, then uninterested in communicating about anything unrelated to work.

“How about Stewart?” asked Marissa.

“Same here. Like I said, I don’t really hang out with him all that much anymore.” Charles frowned. “But so, how did Jean find out you were telling people about the Stroudsburg gun thing?”

She looked up at him from under her brows. “You didn’t tell her?”

“Tell
Jean
? No. I’ve never talked to her.”

“You didn’t tell anyone else?”

“Well, I mean, I told Stewart. Like we, I mean, we
said
I was going to tell him, I thought that was the whole point of you telling me about it in the first place. About what you thought was going on, and all that. Did you tell anyone besides me?”

“No.”

On the one hand, Charles figured that was a good sign, if true—maybe he was her main confidante. On the other, he worried this might mean she was holding him responsible for the leak.

It sounded like the only other possibility was Stewart.

He made a face. “I mean, like I said, I told Stewart. Do you think Stewart would have talked about it with Jean?”

She frowned and double-dipped a chip. “Maybe,” she said. “But that would be weird. Although, I don’t know—their whole thing is pretty weird.”

Charles was silent a moment, wondering what had happened between Stewart and Jean. Between Kevin and Jean, for that matter. He supposed no one would ever know for sure.

The food came. Charles managed to change the subject to Marissa’s work. They talked about that a while. Then Charles told, in a breezy natural way, some stories he’d prepared. Marissa laughed at them, in the right places. But when he reached for her hand on the table, she gently and discreetly withdrew it. And when the check came, no matter how he fought for the right to pay, she insisted on going dutch.

Outside, Charles stood looking at her, trying not to be too yearning about it, as she lit a cigarette. Once she had it lit, she smiled at him. The smile was restrained. “So,” she said. “I live over this way.” She pointed behind herself. “But your train is this way?” She pointed straight ahead.

Charles shrugged in vague, unwilling agreement. “You feel like getting a coffee or something?” he asked.

She grimaced. “Ah, then I’d never get to sleep. You know?”

“So maybe a beer?”

“I better not. That margarita knocked me out.”

“Okay. Well. It was good seeing you!”

“You, too!”

“Let’s do this again soon.”

“Totally.”

He went to hug her. She let him. But when he put his face near hers she drew it back. In a mildly apologetic tone she said, “Hey, what if we didn’t kiss this time?”

She said, “Or we could just kiss on the cheeks. How’s that? We’ll kiss on the cheeks, like friends.” And she kissed him on his cheek, then drew her head back to check his reaction.

“Oh well, it’s non-optimal, but hey,” he said, and pretended to laugh.

Marissa pretended to believe he was really laughing, and to laugh along with him. He let her go.

He watched her walk away, feeling dense, sad, and sodden. Felt so bad he laughed at himself, silently. Made himself turn away, start walking towards the subway station. He wished he’d gotten the chance to fuck that hot skinny angular redhead with the big wild eyes. It wasn’t simply horniness, or the male desire to add another notch to his belt, though partly it was that. Mainly, it was that, if they’d fucked, that would have been a real, memorable experience they would definitely have shared. It would have sealed in those hours they’d spent together, and insured their continued existence. Now, they were likely to just forget each other. If he bumped into her at a party in seven years or whatever, there would be no proof they’d ever really known each other at all.

As the years passed, Jean and Stewart would see each other occasionally, by chance, in passing, on the street, at a movie. Sometimes they would say hello, sometimes they’d each pretend not to have seen the other and would keep walking, not out of hard feelings but simply because they were both in a hurry. Once they bumped into each other back in Arkansas, when they were both there for a visit. But that was years into the future.

The first time they saw each other again, after the thing at Jean’s place in Stroudsburg, was at the Hungarian Pastry Shop. Jean’s year-long Pennsylvania adventure had ended and she’d recently moved back to New York. That year of spending nearly a third of her waking life commuting had felt almost like a monastic withdrawal, and it was disorienting to be back in the city full-time. She had decided to start keeping a journal. She’d bought a nice one, with faux-leather binding and faux-handmade paper, and now she was sitting at one of the tables at the Hungarian, coffee in hand, looking at her crisp blank new journal and ready to get started. Some guy who was returning to his table, having gone to the front to get a refill, did a double-take as he was walking by and stopped. Jean looked up. It was Stewart.

She didn’t invite him to sit down, but he stood next to her table and they chatted for a few minutes.

She asked if he was still at Temple. “Oh, no,” he said. The place had been nice, but he’d managed to piss Dan off often enough that he’d decided he should go ahead and quit before he got fired. Right now he was working at Barnes and Noble, which sucked because it was barely enough to pay his rent (he’d moved into a place with some people, he had his own room now). He’d put in to become a guard at the Metropolitan Museum. He figured that would be an okay life, standing around looking at the art. And it had health insurance and was union. Meanwhile he was toying with the idea of trying to become a receptionist at a yoga studio. He thought maybe he’d like to try yoga, and figured this would be a way to get free lessons.

Jean was still at the same company. But their office had moved downtown. That was why she hadn’t been to Temple in a while. Now she sometimes spent her lunch hour browsing in a different bookstore, the smaller McNally-Jackson. But that was less convenient to her new workplace than Temple had been, so she didn’t go to bookstores as often anymore.

Before Stewart went back to his own table, Jean burst into laughter. Smiling, a little tightly, Stewart watched her laugh. “What’s up?” he asked.

“I was just remembering our date, and how it blew my mind when I found out you were from Arkansas,” she said. “I mean, it just blew my fucking mind.”

They each worked at their own table—Jean wrote in her journal; she didn’t know what Stewart was writing. His table was in the back, and hers was near the front, facing away from him. When she got up to leave she glanced his way. He was hunched over, writing something, working intensely. She thought about going back to say goodbye to him, but they’d already said whatever they were going to say, so she just left.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

J. Boyett is a novelist, playwright, filmmaker, and founder of Saltimbanque Books, and can be reached at
[email protected]
.

For more information check out jboyett.net.

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