Kristopher Jansma - Why We Came to the City

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At Bistro 19, Jacob found George right where he expected, on the burnished brass stool at the far right, leaning heavily against the gray marble bar top. His top two buttons were undone, and his powder-blue sleeves rolled to the elbows. His dusty brown hair showed traces of fingered agitation, though now his hands were clasped as if in prayer around his whiskey glass. Jacob thought he looked like an off-duty priest having a word with his heavenly employer. Or he was only staring up at the grape-stained light coming through the old Tiffany chandelier, which hung elegantly above the bar with its leaded-glass vines and little winged cupids.

George loved the ugly thing. To him, they conjured up the old New York — European money, Cole Porter, high style. “I’m gonna have one of these in my study someday,” he’d say in awe, when the third or fourth whiskey had hit him. In the back of his mind, Jacob planned to buy George a lamp like it someday, whenever their ships came in.

Jacob decided to keep his jacket on but stowed the oversize umbrella in the stand near the door. George hadn’t even noticed him entering, he was so absorbed by the lamp. “Bless me, Father Murphy,” Jacob sighed as he flung his weight onto the stool, “for I have sinned.”

George looked down at his watch. “All right, but let’s save some time, and you just tell me the ones you haven’t committed.”

“I’m fine on graven images,” Jacob said after a second’s thought. “Never killed anybody. And I suppose I don’t exactly covet my neighbor’s wife. ”

George clicked his tongue. “Nuh uh-uh! ‘Nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass…’”

“Oh well, if you want to get into the fine print.”

“I just know how you can be around oxen, that’s all.”

George downed his whiskey and motioned for another from Flo, the no-nonsense French grandmother who worked behind the bar, whose hair had been dyed to a fire it had never known in youth. She topped off George’s glass with J&B and then began making Jacob his usual — a gin martini with two onions.

“I can sing all the books of the Old Testament to the tune of ‘Ten Little Indians.’”

“Please don’t,” Jacob said, as George began to lift an imaginary microphone to his mouth. “I’ve had enough flashbacks to Hebrew school for one night already, thanks.”

“Awww. Did Dr. Oliver try to get you on the couch again?” George joked. “Metaphorically, I mean. Not literally. I mean, literally’s fine too, but — oh! Hey, guess who’s here? Look over in the corner there.”

Jacob turned casually in his chair and looked into the dark, rear corner of the restaurant, where he recognized the narrow profile of William Cho. He was wearing a well-tailored gray suit with a dark wool tie. He had clearly just had his hair cut, perhaps at the request of the girl seated across from him, sharing his order of the mahi-mahi. She was maybe a few years younger, also Korean, with liquid black hair that spilled over her bare shoulders. Her great dark eyes were fixed lovingly on William. His were looking back.

“It’s William, right?” George was saying.

Jacob saw William swivel slightly in his chair, noticing them at the bar and stiffening, twisting around to keep his back to them and his face toward his date.

George looked annoyed. “It’s pretty ballsy of him to bring a date here. He knows this is one of Irene’s — I mean, he knows this is our place.”

Jacob hummed in agreement. It was ballsy of William. Uncharacteristically ballsy. He watched William, who was clearly pretending to listen attentively to his date while not so slyly looking at the two of them in the reflection of the mirror on the far wall.

George did a few quick twists on his stool and nearly slid off. “So. You were saying. About Oliver? He’s been picking your brain again, has he?”

“What did you want to be when you were a child?” Jacob sighed, but George thought he was asking, not answering.

“The winner of the Nathan’s hot-dog-eating competition. What did you want to be?”

“A carpenter,” Jacob lied.

“What, like you wanted to build houses?”

“No,” Jacob said, “I mean I wanted to be Karen Carpenter.”

George made an inaudible crack about bell-bottoms.

Jacob shook his head. “I really need to break this thing off with Oliver.”

“Never a good idea to date the guy who signs your paychecks, I’ve always said.”

“You’re marrying a woman who shares your bank account,” Jacob reminded him, as Flo finally came back and pushed his martini toward him. He pulled the tiny cocktail sword from the onions and let them settle into the conical bottom of the glass.

“A man’s got to have his secrets,” Jacob continued. “How are you going to pay off all your mistresses if you don’t have any money of your own?”

George hummed for a moment, as if considering the possibility. “I can’t think of anything more terrifying than having a mistress,” he said finally. “I can barely keep track of Sara. You ever watch that show about that Mormon guy with all the wives? He’s got three wives, and he spends the whole time trying to keep them from killing each other. No thanks.”

“You don’t marry all of them! That’s the whole — have I taught you nothing?”

“You taught me how to make chili once.”

Jacob sipped at his drink as he launched into a long tirade about the antiquated concept of marriage, how it had originated as a way of transferring property, a means of arranging for the exchange of goats and camels. How in the twenty-first century women especially ought to be fighting this old-fashioned way of thinking, this imperialism of the heart and the sex organs.

He was hardly feeling drunk at all yet. He wished he hadn’t had coffee on the train. But how else was a man supposed to stay awake long enough to get properly obliterated?

Then George went on about Sara, and the wedding planning, and God knew what else, Jacob stared down into his martini glass. The two little onions stared back up at him. He was exhausted, and his stomach was a great un-Pacific ocean of alcohol and caffeine. His bones ached in a way that he could feel them, independent of his flesh, and it made him feel like a skeleton in a Jacob suit. God. He didn’t want to be pain-in-the-ass Jacob. Not tonight. He wanted to be fun-and-funny Jacob. Court-jester Jacob! Did other people get as tired of being themselves as he did? How could they manage it, when most of them seemed so goddamn dull?

What were William and his date talking about? What did anyone actually talk about? The dry weather? His boring job? Her ambitions to someday work in fashion?

George leaned back a bit too far on his stool and nearly fell. “Be right back. Going to hit the loo. Keep an eye on our friend over there. I want to be able to give Irene a full report on Mr. Cho’s hot date when she gets up.”

Jacob sighed and took advantage of George’s absence to check his phone for messages from Sara. But there was nothing. He saw that William and his date were pretending to squabble over who paid the check. Oh my goodness, who will win? Jacob wondered, rolling his eyes as she acquiesced and permitted him to pay. And what did you want to be when you were a child, William? A spineless, self-important, soulless jerk? A hypocrite who studied literature before going into finance? Someone who beds the finest woman in all of Manhattan and then ditches her the second she needs help? Jacob had half a mind to stalk over there and lay him out, right onto the plate full of obsessively picked-over fish bones. But he remained seated, tracing something out on the surface of the marble bar, writing the ancient characters in the sweat from his drink: . Once Jacob had been forced to write it five hundred times in a notebook.