Kristopher Jansma - Why We Came to the City

Even though Oliver got away with telling most people he was in his early forties, he’d really be turning fifty in a year. He didn’t look it, which was all Jacob cared about. A high forehead that was still topped with bristly black hair and eyebrows to match. Talking about his father always resulted in a goofy grin that made him look adorably younger still. His father, a native Algerian, had brought their family to Kolkata when Oliver was still young, to join the staff at a major hospital there. He had lived there for only a few years before being sent off to boarding school in England, but he spoke, often, about those golden days with unflagging sentimentality, which annoyed Jacob almost enough to discount all the grinning that came along with it.

He waited for a pause and then said, “My father used to pay me a dollar a day to massage his feet after work. He had terrible arches and was too stubborn to get the right sort of shoes. He’d get these hard corns the size of quarters. I don’t know how he got them sitting at a desk selling supplemental life insurance all day. He’d make me scrub them off with a pumice stone.”

He loved to watch the quick rise of Oliver’s right eyebrow when he received surprising information like this. It was as if the information were being weighed on an old mechanical scale. “You must have been very close then, at that age,” Oliver said.

“About as close as a king and his court jester. An inch from applause or beheading, any given day.”

Oliver stroked his chin, “And why didn’t the queen do the massaging?”

A bit too quickly, Jacob said, “The queen did more than enough.”

“Had you always wanted to be a poet?” Oliver asked, changing tacks quickly and startling Jacob with his aim. This was how it worked — score a point and then veer away.

“Nope,” he said.

Oliver now had only two options, the first being to press him “Well, what then?” but he’d go with the second, a long, tense silence. A Stille Nacht in the trench warfare of their conversation. Jacob would be damned if he’d cave, like a patient on his couch, and answer the question. Jacob had never told anyone what he’d wanted to be as a child. Oliver’s intuition had led him to the right spot.

It wasn’t a typical embarrassing juvenile wish, like wanting to be a fireman or a professional wrestler or a helicopter pilot. No, it was far weirder than that. Long ago he had sworn he wouldn’t tell, and he never had. Not to his mother and not, in all his nights of drunkenness, to Sara or Irene. Not even George knew this particular secret, and he knew Jacob’s ATM pin (3825, spelling FUCK on the keypad), the music video he’d first gotten off to (Aerosmith’s “Love in an Elevator” on MTV late one night at his grandparents’ place in Daytona Beach), and the name of every boy Jacob had ever slept with — or at least the ones whose names he’d known. Never being hung up about anything was a source of pride for Jacob, but this secret he’d sworn he’d never tell. He’d sworn it to God. And even though he didn’t believe in God anymore, thinking about saying it still made him sweat.

Jacob switched from the tea to a large glass of red wine and though he was still picking at his own food, reached over to grab the menu wedged between the soy sauce bottles and began counting up the available items. Fifteen appetizers. Nineteen special items. Eight vegetable dishes, including “dynasty shyimp,” which he didn’t think was a vegetable, typo or no. Four chow meins, nine diet items, and twelve dim sum options. Five kinds of egg foo yong and six fried rices. Four lo meins, five mei funs, and four side order options. Seven items marked “our most popolur enteree,” distinct on the menu from the “top ten best sellers!!” Twelve kinds of soup, and twenty-three special combination platters.

“There are one hundred and thirty-four different things you could eat here,” Jacob announced to Oliver, who was finishing his beef and scallops combo, the number-two special.

“That seems like quite a lot,” Oliver replied, as he dabbed brown sauce from his lips.

“It is a lot,” Jacob said. “But it is still a finite number of things. And yet you eat here every night. And I’m not being hyperbolic. I mean, I’m not exaggerating—”

“Yes, Jacob. I went to Oxford, and I know what hyperbolic means. And I know—”

Jacob knew he knew. They’d had countless meals together at Szechuan Garden and had this same argument practically as many times.

“You eat here every night. You don’t eat at any of the hundreds of other restaurants in Stamford. Nor do you ever go to eat in Manhattan, which is just a train ride away—”

“If you’d ever let me come over to your apartment…”

“—where there are literally thousands of restaurants. And Brooklyn and Queens, which are, as we speak, in the midst of a dawn-of-the-century culinary renaissance where Michelin-starred chefs are grilling foie gras in aluminum-sided diner cars! No. You choose to eat every meal in this one place.”

“You’re really very fixated sometimes,” Oliver said in his best therapist’s tone, pressing the tips of his fingers together in the same way as always, so that his hands became a little cage over his heart. “Consistency can be as much a virtue as variety. Besides, I like it here. These people feel like family. And the restaurant is only four doors down from my flat. But since you know that already, I have to conclude that this isn’t what’s really bothering you. Is it?”

“What do you think it’s about then?” Jacob fired back. He was simply dying for Oliver to bring up Irene. To say something idiotic like “you know she’ll be fine” or “she’s lucky she’s so young” or “I’m sure your companionship means so much to her.”

But instead Oliver said, “I think maybe you’re feeling some guilt about the lopsided shape the commitment in our relationship has taken.”

What a passive-fucking-aggressive way of saying that, Jacob thought. Feeling competitive, he skipped the passive in his own response.

“You mean how you sit around in your flat listening to Beethoven and watching Animal Planet while I fuck other people?”

The words drew just a drop of psychic blood before Oliver regained his maddening calm.

“I’m a monogamous person,” Oliver said calmly. “You know this about me.”

It was true. Throughout his boarding school years, Oliver had pined away for the same allegedly straight classmate, except for Saturday mornings, when he’d come over to Oliver’s to fool around. Adopting this same confusion, Oliver had actually married a woman at age twenty, whom he hadn’t cheated on once in the three years before they’d separated.

“Moreover I know that you are not, and you also know that this is perfectly fine with me. You’re young—”

“I’m not saying that right now. Aren’t you listening to me? That’s not my point!”

“Then what is your point?”

Jacob thought he might rip his hair out by the roots. “My point is that you are a mental health professional !” he shouted, so loudly that it jolted a nearby couple from their cell phone screens. He imagined the fish in the tank rushing behind their fake, red rocks—

Oliver didn’t raise his voice even a decibel. “And?”

“The owner here bought you a tie clip on your birthday this year!”

“It’s your own choice to order the Dragon & Phoenix every single time.”

“Actually I get the ‘ Dargon & Phoenix’ every time, thank you very much.”

Oliver rubbed his eyebrows. “My point is that I never order the same thing twice.”