Kristopher Jansma - Why We Came to the City

“Where would you go, if you could go anywhere?” she asked.

After a little thought he said, “Think I’d really like to be a goatherd.”

“Brilliant!” Sissy clapped her hands as if he’d correctly identified a shape in a kindergartner’s lineup.

“I’d live way up on the side of a mountain with a long winding path down to the bottom. There’d be a river there, full of nymphs and woods nearby haunted by panpipes. And people from the town on the other side of the valley would cross the river and hike up the path and buy my goats whenever they needed to make sacrifices to the gods. I’d be known, mountain-wide, for having the best goats for currying godly favor.”

He could tell Sissy was mentally fitting him for a straitjacket. He just didn’t care.

“And there’d be this little cave on the far side of the mountain, at the right edge of the known world, where some horrific monster was rumored to dwell. The kind that spits acid and devours children whole. And anytime something went wrong, we’d all blame it on the monster. Bad weather, dead crops, sick relatives. Can you imagine? If evil was just this thing that lived down the road? Not some North Korean Napoleon or Afghani fundamentalist fanatic. Not some — some all-pervading uneasiness. Not some malignant cell on a mission. Imagine if you could point to a spot on a map and say, There — that’s where bad things come from. ”

The phone rang on Sissy’s desk. Dropping her pencils in a pile onto the table, she swooshed over to pick it up. “Sissy Coltrane?… Oh hi, Oliver! You’re—… Oh yes, he’s here. Would you like me to send him over?… Oh. Sure. All right. Okay, bye now! Talk to you later.”

“Whither shall I wander?” Jacob asked, raising his arms to the ceiling.

“He says you’ve got a surprise visitor waiting out by the gates!”

Jacob felt the sudden weightlessness, the vanishing of all walls and floors and tables, the fresh new world of the top deck of a cruise liner. Had Ella really come back to visit him?

Wasting no time at all, he charged back to his locker, threw his jacket on over his work clothes, and marched outside and down the gravel driveway. A little green Prius was idling on the other side, its driver half hidden behind an enormous and fashionable pair of rounded orange sunglasses, hair trimmed short. He wondered what Ella could be saying to Winston that was cracking him up so much that he could hear him laughing all the way up by the old, disused, and slouching stables. But then she whipped the sunglasses off and Jacob saw her face.

It was Sara. He’d never seen her behind the wheel of a car before — back in college, George had driven them everywhere in his old beat-up station wagon. Now he recognized the haircut, and the glasses, from the Facebook photos of her and George at fancy cocktail gatherings in Boston, at the mahogany Harvard Faculty Club, at Tresca in the North End, in The New Bostonian ’s corporate suite at Fenway Park.

Wishing the nuns had thought to dig a moat around the place, he waved as Winston opened the gates so Sara could drive in. She jumped out of the puttering car and ran to him — some feat in the cream-colored heels she was wearing. Mud splashed all over the old-lace bows on the toes as she tackled him in a slender-armed bear hug. He remembered the shoes had been Irene’s once — she’d blown almost two hundred dollars on them at Mel’s.

“Jacob!” she shouted, melting into his shoulders as she hugged him. Then, straightening herself up, she pulled a gold-embossed envelope from an orange ostrich-skin handbag that matched her sunglasses. “So this is where you work? Wait. I have to move my car before this nice man gets in trouble.”

He followed her back to the green Prius and climbed in. He was about to ask what she was doing here when she threw the gear into reverse. A black-and-white screen flickered on in the dashboard to show that the driveway behind them was clear, and a sensor went off when she got too close to one of the brick walls as she K-turned around.

“Um, my shift isn’t over for another hour, crazy.”

Sara flashed her eyes at him mischievously. “You’re being kidnapped! I’m sorry, but it was the only way. This morning I called Oliver, and he agreed wholeheartedly that you needed to be taken down to the city for a belated birthday bacchanal.”

“He said that?”

“Well, no, he said you’d become a ‘first-class mope,’ and I said you always were a first-class mope but that if you’d recently reached platinum mope status, something had to be done.”

They were speeding down the street toward the southbound Hutchinson River Parkway. Jacob knew that the more he resisted, the more Sara would insist.

“Could we make a quick stop at Oliver’s? I’m still in my uniform.”

Sara appeared delighted. “I get to see the flat ?”

It took Jacob a moment to remember that he had told Irene all about “the flat” last year and that, as with everything in their circle, it had soon been repeated.

“How would you like to see the Szechuan Garden?”

Even after all this time, he knew her far too well.

Before long they were seated across from each other in his usual spot, just back from the side window. Jacob had changed his clothes at Oliver’s and now looked “dashing” according to Sara, in a blue striped shirt and dark wool pants. As they had their first round of Tsingtaos, she outlined the epic evening that she had planned for them: they were to eat nothing too filling here at the old Szechuan Garden, because she had a seven-thirty appointment with a caterer at Seventeen Madison, which meant they’d feast on free samples of passed hors d’oeuvres (including the chef’s famous pickled radishes), minted lamb lollipops, rock shrimp served on Himalayan salt blocks, and of course the signature sirloin Sriracha sliders.

After that there would be a cake tasting at Happy Puppy Wonder Cakes, down in SoHo, which had the best lavender buttercream frosting and the infamous “crack” cookie pie filling that had been deemed the “city’s crackiest” by New York magazine that summer. After that, dancing was possible, depending on the crowd at Niagara, to be followed by drinks at an Oscar Wilde — themed speakeasy called Dorian Gray’s, which was “secretly” located behind a full-length portrait of a French cavalier in an otherwise excellent crêperie on Allen Street. You had to pull on one of the light fixtures next to the painting and then tell the painting how many in your party, and if there was room, the picture would slide over to let you in. If not, you wrote your cell-phone number on a piece of paper and slipped it through a small crack in the wall, and someone would text you when there was a booth available.

Jacob didn’t know where to begin: perhaps that there’d never been prohibition on alcohol in Ireland, where Oscar Wilde had been born, or in London or France where he’d later lived, and that he’d died more than twenty years before there was any need for speakeasies here in America. But he listened to Sara gush about these places she’d been dying to go ever since leaving the city. It was as if nothing had changed for her. She thought she could walk back in, and it would all be the same. She told him he was welcome to crash that night in her hotel room, where George would meet them in the morning.

Jacob didn’t see the point in arguing, seeing as he had absolutely no intention of doing any of this. They were on their second round of Tsingtaos, and it wasn’t quite five o’clock. He’d never seen Sara have more than three before needing to curl up and take a nap somewhere. Already he was planning on persuading her to come back to Oliver’s. He found himself only half listening to her as she spoke. Scarlet leaves scattered as the bus rolled up and sighed to a stop outside the window. Needlessly, he ran his eyes down the familiar columns of misspelled food items and pointed out his favorites to Sara.