Kristopher Jansma - Why We Came to the City

“I know. I’m just worried.”

“It’s going to be fine. The scans are going to come back clean.”

“Don’t say that!”

“What? You think I’m going to jinx it? That bump under her eye is basically gone .”

“But you told me she said that doesn’t mean anything! I wish you’d take this seriously.”

George sighed. “I am.”

He tried to put his hand on her shoulder to pull her close, but she remained firmly planted just a bit too far away from him, her eyes narrowed.

“How much did you have to drink in there?”

“I thought we were supposed to be celebrating, for God’s sake.”

She crossed her arms — a bad sign. “All you’ve had to eat today are oysters, and you had the two Bloody Marys plus a shot at the bar. Maybe you want to let someone else drive?”

“I’m fine,” he said, trying to sound nonchalant. “Don’t worry so much, okay?”

“I’m just saying Jacob’s a lot heavier than you are. It doesn’t affect him as quickly.”

“He has the tolerance of a nun. He hardly ever drinks unless we’re all out together.”

He realized too late that he wasn’t helping his case exactly by reminding Sara that, in contrast, he had at least two drinks every night, whether they were out together or home alone. He was about to take it back, to try and explain what he’d meant, when he heard Jacob and Irene coming back over the gravel.

“Who does she keep texting?” George asked. “We’re all here.”

“Don’t ask,” Sara said.

“What’s the problem?” Jacob called out.

“No problem,” George said loudly, unlocking the car. “Let’s go.”

• • •

They only had to go around the corner to find the ferry that went to Shelter Island. George drove the car up onto the prow of a beautiful, barnacled service boat that went back and forth across the gray water all day long, buoying Benzes and Lexuses to the otherwise unreachable shore. As they moved out across the water, George stared at the spot their oysters had come from and wished that they weren’t now churning around quite so unpleasantly in his stomach. Fortunately the ride was soon over, and they only had to go a half mile up the hill to reach Luther’s beach house at last.

From the end of the driveway, they could only see how enormous it was. Three stories, shingled in impressive gray wood, with white trim. It had two garages and a kidney-shaped pool on one side. It was only when they got closer that they realized the pool was covered in thick green algae. The yard was scorched dead in patches and overgrown in others, littered from one end to the other with crumpled silver and blue Michelob Ultra cans and the jagged remains of two twenty-four packs of Dos Equis bottles. The cardboard boxes these had come in, presumably, were also in the yard, as were about a hundred red Solo cups, some used BIC razors, half-empty Herbal Essences shampoo and conditioner bottles, several cans of spilled paint thinner, and a wheelbarrow filled with what appeared to be the past century’s collection of withered Redbook magazines. A grimy hammock hung limply from a bolt in a leafless tree; the pole that had once supported its other end was, for some reason, sunning up on the garage roof.

“Was there a hurricane or something we didn’t hear about?” Irene asked.

Jacob whistled. “What, was Abu Ghraib all booked?”

Sara had both hands on her cheeks, jaw open. “The nephews,” was all she could say. “The nephews. The nephews.”

George trudged carefully up the walk, leading the way through the shattered glass and scattered cigarette butts to the door, which was slightly open. It was too much to hope that the inside would be unmolested, as it turned out. Everywhere he looked were more empties, more dead houseplants whose pots had been repurposed as ashtrays, more greasy pizza boxes, more melted plastic forks and spoons. Every single inch of the kitchen counter was taken up by liquor bottles. Fat ones, tall ones, green ones, brown ones. Handles of vodka with plastic screw tops. Liters of soda bottles used for mixers. Buckets of dirty water, perhaps once ice. A folding card table lay in three pieces on the floor, streaked with crusted white powder. Chairs were overturned, lightbulbs were broken in their sockets, molding Chinese food containers stood open. Either the cleaning people had never come, or they had arrived and done an abrupt about-face.

“It’s like Hunter S. Thompson, the Marquis de Sade, and Amy Winehouse hung out in here for a month!” Jacob seemed to be nearly in awe.

Irene reached down into a pile of sheets and pulled out a silver-sequined bra, each cup of which she could have sat inside of.

“Oh. My,” she said. “Looks like the nephews made some friends in town.”

Jacob trudged over to look at it more closely, crunching down on the brim of a straw hat as he did. “Hope there’s not a thong in there too.”

Sara was supremely annoyed. “Luther’s going to think we did this! What the hell? We’re going to have to clean all this shit up.”

Jacob kicked an open can of Spaghetti O’s across the room. “How about we just set the place on fire and tell him it got hit by lightning?”

Sara looked around again. “Why does every thing always have to be a disaster?”

• • •

A disaster. Jacob was soon telling them how this word came from the old Greek: dis , meaning “bad,” and aster , meaning “star.” Bad star. From back in the good old days when such misfortune could be attributed to the continual and predictable realignments of the cosmos. It was soon agreed that they’d go wine tasting first and deal with the mess when they got back. Swiftly they were back on the ferry. Sara was trying not to seem furious behind a pair of round retro sunglasses. Jacob hung out the window like a loyal hound dog, his ears all but flopping around. Irene kicked at the back of his seat as she sifted through the bag of shells she’d gathered. George hunted for a radio station everyone liked, which was impossible because Jacob hated everything, so finally they settled on a country station that nobody liked, just to punish him.

The outing at least got off to a decent start. At Raphael Vineyards they did the tasting and then split a bottle of First Label Merlot on the back porch, while Jacob talked to the server about skydiving and ended up with another phone number. After that it was Bedell Cellars, where Sara thought to mention that she and George were looking for a wedding venue, which got them a twenty-dollar discount on a bottle of blanc de blancs. They soldiered on to Shinn Estates, then made one last stab at a nice time at Paumanok, but by then it was midafternoon and they were all exhausted, having forgotten everything they’d tasted except that there had been an awful lot of it. George had felt himself slipping deeper into a fuzzy warmth with each visit, a sense of all being right with the world, with the exception of Jacob, who kept reeling him back into dissatisfaction. At some point they all agreed that lunch was in order, and so they got some cheese and bread and cured meats and set out to have a picnic in the green expanse overlooking the vineyard.

Sara had picked out the cheeses for each of them from a glass-enclosed aging cabinet. As she handed them to George, she explained her thinking. “You get a triple crème brie. For me, an Alpine… nutty, but firm.” For Jacob she went with the cheese with the most pretentious description: a Romano the color of earwax and with a “dry, granite texture” with a “saltiness hiding its butterscotch undertones.” Finally, for Irene, an Auvergne Blue — punchy and velvety, streaked with dazzlingly beautiful molds.

George almost regretted that in a few minutes they would all be devoured, except that nothing was making Sara happier than seeing her companions lying on her mother’s enormous old Scotch-patterned picnic blanket — he knew she’d packed it with just this tableau in mind. She took out a camera and began taking pictures of first the cheeses, and then of all of them on the blanket, and then the fields of grapevines beyond. It was perfect.