Kristopher Jansma - Why We Came to the City

“Yes,” George said. “Or Luther’s father’s. Or his father’s father.”

“So we’re just stealing it?” Irene asked.

“No,” George grinned. “The Norwegian nephews did.”

Jacob laughed, deep and proud, and then took out a pocketknife and started prying the cork loose. It came out in several pieces. Sara didn’t object as Jacob took a long drag from the bottle and sighed. “Now that is a terroir.”

George raised the bottle to his wetted lips and tipped back. God. It was the most incredible thing he had ever tasted. The taste grew in his mouth, pulling on an alternation of taste buds. It made no sense, but he thought he could hear its taste. It tasted like a requiem he’d heard as a boy in the Basilica of the Sacred Heart. A priest his father had known at Notre Dame had died, and they’d driven five hours to South Bend for the service. God, it was still going. A few notes at first, gradually swelling in sequence to an offertory, and then Communion — every flavor at once, until it was almost too much. The retreat then was welcome, sweet. And then, just at the very end something new — an aftertaste bound to linger deep in his memory. Like sitting in the basilica, the sound of the requiem in his ears, and the sure feeling that his father’s friend had been a good man, and was in a better place now. Up on the ceiling there were angels with outstretched wings, perfect golden circles haloing their heads. Some floating on clouds against the light, and others hovering, weightless, against the dark of night. It was the same dark of the sea beyond them, the same as the clouds that passed above.

They passed the bottle around until it was drained. After a long time they all walked back to the car again. Irene agreed to call Dr. Zarrani’s emergency line on the way back. They’d set up an appointment to have the new tumor looked at as soon as possible. As for the house, they would leave it as it stood, minus one very expensive, very empty bottle of wine, which was now nestled under Jacob’s armpit as he climbed into his seat.

Sara looked back one more time before they left. “We were never here,” she announced.

George drove slowly up the darkening highway, back to the city. The girls whispered for a while, and Jacob stared out the window. Before long everyone else fell asleep and seemed so peaceful. George drove on. It occurred to him that everything he was experiencing now, they were missing. Sadness waited for them, just past the edge of their dreams. It would be patient for hours yet to come, just as his own sadness seemed to hover just beyond the magnificent afterglow of the wine. Great patterns of light streamed across the window like red and white comets. He was unworried, and he didn’t know why. It was just so much easier for him to believe, when he felt this way, that there was some reason, and that there was another reason just alongside it why he didn’t need to know what it was.

They returned to the city, and in three days Shelter Island seemed as distant to Jacob as Tierra del Fuego. He closed his eyes on the train up to Anchorage House in the morning and tried to summon a vision of that sandy shore reaching out toward the ocean, but all he could see was the alien lettering in the tunnels south of the Wakefield stop. He tried to remember the dark smell of the sea, but its scent had already been overwritten in his memory by the puke he’d had to wipe off the face of a nineteen-year-old psychotic named Thomas who believed himself to be a submarine. “HMS Sybil , lowering periscope!” the kid had shrieked. “Dive! Dive!” before losing his lunch all over the television set in the common room. “You forgot to shut your hatch,” Jacob had reminded him, as they passed arm in arm down the hall to the nurse’s station. He tried to recall the feel of sand beneath his feet and the taste of oysters. “It’s dark down here,” Thomas had whispered, until finally the HMS Sybil had gone quiet.

A dry heat welcomed them back. By the first week of May, it was approaching eighty-five degrees in late afternoon. Still, Jacob persisted in wearing his tweed jacket up to Anchorage House each day and back to Irene’s at night. “It’s very breathable,” he told her when he arrived at her door, drenched in sweat. He passed several evenings helping her shuttle some of her older paintings into storage at the gallery and trying to clear space in the living room by sorting through the piles of odd crap that she’d amassed. “Keep that Baggie of tulip bulbs, but get rid of that Oktoberfest hat — no, keep the feather, actually. Do you think you could pry just the runners off that toy sled for me? I know there’s a screwdriver here somewhere.”

Jacob didn’t mind. He wanted to help, and he was no good talking to doctors. He kept sending Irene into hysterics at inappropriate moments. Once an MRI had to be redone because he was making her giggle so much. Irene sweet-talked the technician into printing the blurred scan anyway, and she’d given it to Jacob as a thank-you.

His other main contribution was trying to get George to unclench, but whenever Jacob called him out for moping around, mute and worried, George acted utterly surprised that anyone would be worried about him . He stared at the New Yorker articles that Jacob thrust at him in the waiting room and then minutes later looked up in complete confusion. “Was this — what? I’m sorry, which article? Just a second, I have to go to the bathroom.” Jacob had never seen anything like it — the man had to pee practically every half hour. He wanted the doctors to check George out for Nervous Dachshund Syndrome. (That was the one that got to Irene so badly that the MRI had to be done over.) George claimed all the fluorescent lighting was giving him headaches, but Jacob didn’t buy it. The last two visits Sara had wound up asking him to simply take George to a bar somewhere so he’d stop agitating everyone.

The date for Irene’s surgery arrived as abruptly as a summer thunderstorm. Sara had been through three hundred hoops to make sure they had permission to wait in the recovery room, when regulations permitted only family. Jacob appreciated the effort but politely declined. The thought of sitting around in a sterile room for ten hours on a Saturday, watching ¡Vámonos, Muchachos! reruns on her laptop and waiting for an update was just about the worst thing he could imagine. Irene said she understood, and instead he took the day before off and stocked her apartment with half a Rite-Aid’s worth of gauze, Chicken & Stars soup, Assure milkshakes, instant mashed potatoes, and a case of bottled ginger soda in case of nausea.

That night after dinner, Irene snuggled into his arm while Jacob read her his favorite poems with his Patrick Stewart impression, which always made her laugh. He watched as her eyelashes brushed the bump below. In a few hours the lump would be sitting in a stainless steel tray, and below Irene’s eye would be a raw abscess. He read much of the night and took the train up to work in the morning, while Irene headed to the hospital to meet Sara, George, and the scalpel.

After a long shift, Jacob tried to take his mind off the situation by going out with Oliver for dinner at Szechuan Garden in Stamford. Oliver wouldn’t pry into what was going on with Irene. He had that singular gift among therapists of getting patients chatting about the weather or the rising price of stamps. Then suddenly they would crack open like walnuts, exposing their deepest secrets. Jacob suspected this was why Oliver liked him, because while Jacob never kept his thoughts to himself, he persistently refused to be cracked.

Oliver was telling a story about growing up in East India. “When I was a boy, my father and I used to go on these long walks through the banyan forests, and we’d play games to see who could correctly identify the greatest number of trees.”