Kem Nunn - Chance

It was good, he would think later, that she had spoken as and when she had. For he knew just then it was not Jaclyn Blackstone in his arms at the door of his building. The stress of the evening, the coinciding of such bodies in space and time, in such ways as have been heretofore noted, the intensity of such repercussions as one might only imagine had very clearly served to call forth Jackie Black and my God was she something. Any man not wanting to fuck her blind should go hang himself. Chance fell to wrestling with her.

She was strong. Chance was drunk. She was intent on having his dick in her hand. In the almost certain knowledge this might prove his undoing, Chance fought to prevent it. He contended, like Jacob with the angel, though for opposite ends. Where the former had hoped to secure a blessing, Chance meant to avoid one. Their struggles carried them about the brick-lined entrance. Chance’s shoulder slammed against the building’s intercom system, no doubt ringing his downstairs neighbors. From here they twirled away as if in dance, across the sidewalk, stumbling with enough force into a plastic trash container to knock it over and into the street. It was the container filled with empty wine bottles from Chance’s apartment. Several tumbled from the sidewalk to the street and went skittering along the asphalt. One broke upon an iron grate leading to a storm drain. A light appeared in the window of the downstairs apartment fronting the street. A small dog began to bark.

Cumulatively, these distractions proved enough to break the witch’s spell. He felt the strength go out of her arms. She pulled back from the light to a corner of the entry where she sank to her haunches, circled her knees with her arms, and began to cry. Situated just so, she was once more the Jaclyn Blackstone of the Oakland hospital, alone in her bed, the bird with the broken wing.

Chance looked up to find one of his downstairs neighbors, a balding, potbellied computer programmer he had on more than one occasion heard either in heated argument or violent lovemaking with some live-in female partner Chance had yet to lay eyes on, standing at the doorway of his apartment.

The man, having opened the inside door, was still somewhat obscured by the heavy metal screened door that opened to the entry where Chance and Jackie Black had vied for Chance’s member. Chance supposed that the programmer had positioned himself just so in the assumption that the steel mesh of the door would provide at least some modicum of protection should things go badly in the street. “Everything all right?” the man asked, his voice pitched at a higher octave than any Chance had yet to hear him use.

“Yes,” Chance told him. “Sorry. Sorry for the disturbance.”

The man remained at the door.

“It’s all good,” Chance said.

The programmer peered for a moment longer into the dimly illuminated scene, the darkness beyond, no doubt hoping for a look at Chance’s invisible opponent, if only to make his story complete. Failing this, the man glanced once more at Chance, nodded, and went back inside.

Chance moved to where Jaclyn still cowered in the shadows. “I don’t know how I got here,” she said. “I don’t know what just happened.”

Chance bent to take her hands in his own. “Are you all right?” he asked. She appeared to be so.

Her eyes searched his face. “Was it Jackie?” she asked.

“She didn’t tell me her name, but yes, I believe it was.”

“That’s never happened,” she said. “Only with him.”

He let her use the apartment to make herself presentable while waiting for a cab. “This is where you live?” she asked. She had expected something on a grander scale. He told her about the divorce. She washed her face. He made coffee. He was curious as to how Jackie had gotten his address. “I guess you’ll have to ask her,” she told him.

“You don’t know?”

“I don’t always remember. There are blank spots.” She saw his laptop in the kitchenette, open on the table. “You were still up,” she said.

“That little bit at the restaurant… sleep didn’t feel like an option. What happened after you left? What did he say?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“He can be like that. He’s a control freak. He likes to keep people off balance. He likes suspense and high drama. I haven’t seen him since we left the restaurant. At least that’s how I remember it.” She touched a key and woke his computer. “The axiom of choice,” she said, and the shadow of a smile played across her face, half flirtatious, like she’d been that day in the bookstore. If only she had not been so alluring. It would all have been so much easier.

“Mathematically speaking,” Chance told her, “an axiom is a proposition that is assumed without proof for the sake of studying the consequences that follow from it. You could say that’s how we live. Life presents us with choices. We’re defined by the choices we make yet we make them in uncertainty. In hindsight our choices will often seem arbitrary.”

She appeared to give this some thought. “I’m not sure what a mathematician would say,” she said, her face clouding. He had the feeling she was not altogether comfortable with his take on the matter. “I mean,” she went on, “they sometimes have different meanings for words; like arbitrary. ” She seemed to be posing this as if it were a question.

“Certainly. There’s a language of mathematics and I am not conversant. Words are what I have and it’s the words as words that interest me.”

“It’s words as words I like to escape now and then,” Jaclyn Blackstone told him.

Chance could hear his neighbors in the apartment below. Gratefully, they were neither arguing nor making love. The voices were low and indistinct, probably, he thought, still talking about what had happened outside their door, and for a short time that was all he and Jaclyn had to listen to, the distant murmuring of other voices in unseen rooms.

“I didn’t know he was violent,” Jaclyn said. He assumed it was Raymond Blackstone they were about to discuss. She told him about the stalker, Raymond’s response to her call for help. That was how it had started. Eventually he’d asked her out. It was only after the marriage that she saw the violent streak. There was another time lag between her seeing it and his directing it at her. That had come one afternoon amid the rolling hills of West Marin. They’d gone for a drive in the country, out to the coast to see the lighthouse at Point Reyes. Coming back there had been a flat tire. They’d both gotten out of the car. He had set about exchanging the flat for the spare. It was true they’d both been tired, the sky darkening at the end of a long day. On the bluff overlooking the lighthouse they had shared a bottle of wine. He had lifted the car on the jack without first loosening the lug nuts, which meant only that he would have to lower it again in order to do so. It was a minor mistake, of little consequence. But she’d said something, a joke perhaps? It was lost to her now. He’d struck her in the face with the jack handle. Just like that. “Like being struck by lightning,” she said. “Out of nowhere on a cloudless day.” Later he’d apologized. He invented a story for the emergency room doctors, but afterward, driving her home from the hospital when it was clear that she was no longer responding to his words, he had pulled the car to the side of the road and he had let her know how it was, how it would be, if she ever told anyone, if she ever tried to leave. Incongruously, it had seemed to her at the time, he had wanted sex when they got home. He liked seeing her beaten up, she guessed. He’d gotten off on it. It was at some point in and around that time that Jackie Black had made her first appearance.