Kristopher Jansma - Why We Came to the City

William took his jacket off and offered it to Irene as they stepped outside. She took it gratefully and held his arm to keep from toppling over on her heels.

“A gentleman!” Sara cried, sticking her tongue out at George. He had gotten his jacket halfway off before remembering what was in the pocket. Then he got stuck getting it back on.

“I’m a mess!” he laughed.

“Uh-oh.” Sara was always a bit delighted when he’d had too much to drink, as if he were a child who had eaten too much cotton candy at the county fair.

“There. Is. A. Hot. Tub.” Jacob said, staring over onto the far corner of the balcony, like he’d just spotted the shroud of Turin. “There is a hot. Tub.”

“It’ll be freezing!” Sara shouted.

Jacob skidded and slid as he raced over to the enormous plastic tub, which was covered by a thick pad. He pressed his hands against the covering, and his eyes rolled back into his head.

“It’s warm!” he cried. “It’s warm!”

“Not like anyone packed a swimsuit!” George shouted.

“As if you all haven’t seen me naked a dozen times before,” Jacob shouted as he tore off his sweater and began in on his buttons.

“ William hasn’t! Jacob Blaumann, you put your clothes back on this instant!” Irene cried.

But it was too late — George was already helping him push the cover off. The two of them were no better than fraternity pledges when things like this came up.

Irene was worried that Juliette and Abeba might decide to return after all, or that some guest might come back looking for a forgotten purse or phone — but she was so tired of worrying. Worrying about her job and her doctor’s appointment. She began to undo the tie on her dress. The cold air felt wonderful against her sore muscles, and her feet ached to be free from her shoes.

“Irene!” Sara was screeching.

“Come on, Mom,” Irene said, handing William his coat back again.

“William! Sorry about this — we’re not usually quite this reck less.”

His face was red hot despite the subzero air. “I think I’ll go.”

“Seeya!” Jacob shouted, as everyone caught a glimpse of his ass lowering into the water.

“William, don’t!” Sara screeched. “I’ll be so embarrassed if you leave.”

Would she really? If they met twenty years from now, would she remember? That time in the hot tub at the Waldorf when we all got drunk and you left? William bet that she would, and that he would, and he was so tired of remembering all the times he had left before things became insensible. Plus, Irene had gotten her dress off at last. He wanted to look but didn’t dare. Instead he looked up at the red blinking lights on top of the building. Years ago his father had told him they were there to keep planes from hitting them.

Half dressed, George rushed back inside to stow the jacket safely on the couch.

“Now this is living,” he heard Jacob shouting.

“Get bathrobes!” Sara yelled. “Or towels or something.”

George dug two terrycloth robes out of a closet and grabbed a pair of towels from the bathroom. When he came back out onto the balcony, he found that his three friends — and William — had all gotten into the bubbling tub. The girls’ underwear had gone see-through, but they kept their shoulders level with the water. William kept his eyes fixed on the stratosphere.

“Come on in, you big baby! We’re not going to look,” Jacob bellowed.

George undid his shirt while the girls hooted and hollered, and by the time his pants were off, Jacob was doing old-timey stripper music. “Da da da DA… Da da da DA…”

“No small bills!” George joked. “Fives and tens only, or I’m going right back inside.” He thumbed the elastic of his Superman-blue boxer briefs, just enough to make Sara and Irene shriek, and then he climbed into the hot tub and dunked his head under at the sound of the popping champagne cork.

After coming back up and taking a long sip from the bottle, George turned to William. “After tonight we’re either going to be best friends or you’ll never talk to us again.”

“My night with The Murphys,” William joked.

“Oh my god! Do you remember? People used to call us that!” Sara cried.

Eventually George began to talk to him about people they’d known in common at school and then people who’d been at Yale. It was like they’d always been friends.

Yale. Despite appearances, Jacob was, slowly, beginning to stew. He expected that William imagined they did this sort of thing every weekend, but this was actually a first for the four of them. And he’d expected to feel triumphant — this, after all, was exactly the type of thing he was always trying to get them all to do. He was their ever-present diversion. Player of panpipes; God of wine; their much-needed anarchic spirit. He was the one who, back in the early years, had always insisted they should do shrooms and consummate the obvious tensions between them in some sort of orgy. They’d laughed, but he’d been perfectly serious. He’d wanted George, and George had wanted Irene, and Irene had been in love with Sara and George too, probably, so why not? Everybody had been in love with everybody — except him.

And now that they were there, sitting in a hot tub on the top floor of one of Manhattan’s most exclusive hotels, he was steadily feeling less and less like a child left home alone without the grown-ups around and more like they were the grown-ups. All that glorious sexual tension had petered out. They sat there as platonically as brothers and sisters sharing a bathtub.

And now George was going to propose? Of course Jacob had known this would happen eventually. It had been coming for years now — the end of all this. No more drinking champagne in hot tubs at three in the morning or joking about fox hunts. The end of the years that they’d spent discovering this city like strangers in a strange land. Now they were just here. Now half of them would be married — hopelessly monogamous. Why would anyone do such a thing? Now they’d be just another lame, sexless couple and he’d be left with Irene.

George was trying to make the story of his commute sound exciting, again, and Irene was telling William and the others about her day — about the car rides with the art. And William was saying how much he really liked some of it — how he’d taken an elective at Yale called “Art After Warhol.”

Jacob found himself laughing uncontrollably. “Art?” he was saying, shouting, spitting. “This crap isn’t art. This is what happens when people who hate art try to make art.”

Irene was nodding.

William felt emboldened. “But what does art even mean today in an age of commercialization — when the drinks we’re having all night are named after poems and poets, just to make a buck?”

Jacob snorted. “ The Waste Land is the fucking Waste Land no matter who misnames a drink after it. Fuck it. Two words or one, you can’t cheapen it after the fact.”

“Hear, hear!” cried Sara.

William rose. “Well, that moldy yam in a box makes you ask yourself, what is art really? Ultimately it’s a question that we can never really answer.”

“Sure we can. I’ll answer it right now,” Jacob said.

“But—” Irene began.

“No! No buts !” he was crying, and to illustrate his point, he lifted his great white rear out of the water. “It’s always but, but, but, but, but.”

There were shrieks and groans as Jacob reseized the watery floor.

“Real art obliterates artifice. The Night Watchmen doesn’t jump out at you and say ‘Hey! I’m just a bunch of paint!’ No. It makes you forget that it ever had to be created in the first place. It makes you tremble before it. If anyone’s trembling in front of a yam-in-a-box, it’s because they’re laughing. Or puking.”