Kristopher Jansma - Why We Came to the City

Sara could no longer tell one day from the last or the next. Irene had told her about the biopsy results right after she and George had returned from New Year’s, and now it was March. What had happened to the intervening weeks was a mystery worthy of study by George’s counterparts at the theoretical physics laboratory. Sara suspected that something had happened to the very fabric of time itself. It was always March. Sara didn’t even need to see the gray dawn outside the one tiny window in George’s apartment to know it was out there, dismal and petulant.

She woke up each morning to the sound of her husband-to-be trying to extract himself from the Murphy bed without waking her. She dreamed of it closing up like a Venus flytrap with her inside. With her eyes nine-tenths shut, she breathed heavily so George would believe she was still dozing as he moved around the tiny apartment, from the toilet-in-the-closet to the shower-in-the-kitchen. Coffee dripped behind the spray of the shower. She peeked when George emerged, sopping wet, and proceeded to barrel about the apartment in his towel, trying to simultaneously pour the coffee, check the weather on his phone, and (on alternate days) water the plant. There was a hard deadline, always, of seven o’clock, because that was when George’s car was due for ticketing, and his panic grew and grew as the minute hand worked its way around. Already there were four parking tickets that George was fighting, plus a speeding ticket he’d gotten on the LIE, another from Riverside Drive, and a third he hadn’t yet told her about but that she’d seen hiding under a notebook and seemed to involve driving the wrong way down a one-way block in Tribeca.

Lying in bed, she imagined how much more smoothly things would go if people just listened to her. If her roommate, Karen, saw reason and moved out of their bigger apartment, regardless of whose name was technically on the lease. If Irene would not always wait until the last possible minute to text to say if she needed someone to take her to the hospital or pick her up. If Jacob would read the book she’d bought him for Hanukah. If Irene would hurry up and tell Jacob about the whole cancer thing, instead of always waiting for the “right time,” which was clearly never. If she and George would find the perfect glamorous yet intimate place to hold their wedding so she could finally mail the save-the-date cards she’d already bought and addressed. If William would sign on to Facebook again because even though she was mad at him for leaving Irene at the train station, she was also sure that they would make a great couple once she was all better.

Sara snapped to as George, showered and dressed at last, kissed her cheek to say goodbye. “Hey. When will I see you?” he whispered in her ear.

She opened her eyes. It was nearly seven. How had that happened?

“Irene’s meeting me to see an apartment in Morningside Heights during my lunch break, and then I’m going to try and get down to Battery Park tonight to see a place for the wedding. But I still have the ‘Hip Spring Break Destinations’ column to edit. Sheldon quit last week, so it got reassigned.”

“You’re already doing the six articles that Meegan left behind when she quit.”

Sara was too tired to get into that. “So I might just do that at the coffee shop until they close.”

George nodded, “Allen got us time on the Gerber satellite tonight, and he wants to go over the materials for the conference next month. And somewhere in there I have to find ten minutes to talk to that guy at Cornell. Someone’s on leave and might not come back. They don’t know when they’ll know.”

“You want to move back to Ithaca?”

“I don’t want to move anywhere. I just want a job.”

“Okay. We’ll just live in this closet forever then.”

“I like this closet. As closets go, this is a good one.”

Sara arched an eyebrow. “Oh yeah? Why’s that?”

“Well, I’ve been checking, but so far, this is the only closet in the city that has you in it.”

She couldn’t help laughing at the thought of George bursting into an apartment, opening the closet doors, and doing an apologetic about-face.

“Run away with me,” Sara said suddenly.

George laughed. “You want to elope?”

“I want to go to France.”

“Oh, is that all?”

“Come on. I’m serious. We’ve been talking about this forever! You, me, Irene, Jacob. Freshman year we found those berets at the Salvation Army, and we promised we would go someday. Remember? We watched all those Godard movies.”

George groaned, still pained by the memory.

“We’ve put this off for a third of our lives already. And I’m saying we should really think about going while we still have the — while we all still can.”

George checked his watch nervously. “Well, okay, but only if you have a few thousand dollars lying around I don’t know about.”

The thing was, she did. And while she loved that George always forgot, he did know she did. Before her grandfather, C. F. Sherman, had completely lost his marbles, his accountants had set up various accounts for her and her sisters. Trust funds, essentially, though she never called them that because it gave people the wrong idea: snobby and spoiled were immediate conclusions. In college, even though she’d worked part time every single semester and interned in the summers and paid for all her own books and meals, the fact that she didn’t have to, technically, had still occasionally caused friction when Jacob panicked about his loans and Irene had needed to sometimes sleep on their couches or raid their pantries when her latest fling had kicked her out.

Sara found it much easier to simply pretend the money wasn’t real and to live paycheck to paycheck like everyone else. Her mother kept telling her to just get a broker, hire a wedding planner, get a cleaning service, go to the tailor. But Sara refused to pay others to do what she could manage to do herself. If everyone else could do it, then she could too. Twice as much of it, even. And meanwhile she always looked forward to the days ahead of them, when everyone’s hard work would pay off, and George would have tenure somewhere, and Jacob would get a Fulbright, and Irene would sell her art for thousands, and they could all finally travel together, with all their future children tagging along behind them.

Sara stroked George’s cheek. “Hurry up. You’re going to get a ticket.”

He groaned. “See you at the end of time, then.”

“See you at the end of time,” she replied, with another quick kiss before he dashed out the door. When the door finally closed behind him, Sara cautiously untangled herself from the sheets, closed the bed, fixed her hair, brushed her teeth, and pulled on the clothes she had laid out carefully the night before.

• • •

Sara had learned of Irene’s cancer in the back of a taxi, sandwiched between the door and a human-sized cocoon made of iridescent silk. She had come down to Fourth Street to help extract Irene’s latest artistic creation from the living room and transport it to the K Gallery, where Irene intended to hide it in the back of the storeroom until she figured out just what the hell to do with it. They had been heading up Sixth Avenue when Sara observed that it was an unusually large piece for Irene.

She had sighed. “I know. Any bigger, and it’d be installation art.”

Sara had complimented the cocoon, which really was quite stunning and had an almost wet texture somehow, from the way the silk shone in the murky January daylight.

“So what happened?” Sara had asked.

“What do you mean?” Irene had replied.

“I mean what came over you? Why’d you make it?”