Kristopher Jansma - Why We Came to the City

She reached across the table and took his hand in hers. “I’m so glad to see you’re okay, Jake. We’ve all been worried about you.”

Her eyes were red underneath heavier-than-usual mascara. We all? Who did she mean, besides herself and George? Was she still talking to William, even? He thought about telling her that he’d nearly driven up last month, after Oliver’s dad died, but instead he asked, “How is Georgina doing?”

She let her eyelids flutter shut as if she couldn’t bear to look at him as she said it. “He’s hanging in there. He’s — you know. I think of all of us, he was probably the least ready for what happened.”

Jacob paused, surprised to hear her say this.

“He’s been distracted,” she concluded, and began braiding the wrapper from her chopsticks, tapping her toe on the linoleum, looking about four inches from him when she spoke. Unlike George, as Sara got more anxious, she drank less. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Damn, that was a good line. He had never liked it before, mainly because he felt that his own family was unhappy in a generic kind of way. But Gene and Anjelica Blaumann weren’t his only family. Now it seemed undeniable to him that, whereas his New York family had indeed been happy in the way that all groups of young dreamers are happy before they’ve given up, they were all quite unhappy now, each in their own special ways. That was what made it all the more miserable: they couldn’t even be unhappy together.

“Speaking of the wedding!” Sara said abruptly, though they hadn’t been speaking of it at all. She dug around in her purse and produced a lovely cream-colored envelope.

He read it out loud. “‘Mr. Jacob A. Blaumann. Of question mark street. Apartment number question mark. NYC, NY. Question mark, question mark, question mark, question mark, question mark, dash, four more question marks.’ ”

“I take my postal codes very seriously,” Sara said. “Open it already!”

He did. “‘Please save the date of March 20, 2011, for the wedding of’”— he paused and then shouted her name across the room—“‘MS. SARA SHERMAN AMPERSAND MR. GEORGE MURPHY’—that’s a commendably bold font choice there—‘New York, New York. Invitation to follow.’ Don’t you need to tell people where it is?” Jacob asked, flipping the card over. “Where’s the place I check off chicken or fish?”

“That comes on the invitation.”

“This isn’t an invitation?”

“No, this is a save-the-date card. The invitation comes — well, soon now actually, but I’ve been trying to get this to you since June.”

“I’ve been swamped.”

“I know. It’s hard to — I know it isn’t the same. Look. George and I wanted to ask you — we were wondering if you’d read something at the wedding. You pick. Something from The Bridge if you want. Of course, an original Blaumann would be fantastic, but—”

Before Jacob could refuse, the little jingle bells on the front door sounded. He glanced around just in time to see Sissy Coltrane walking in, her bony arm hooked around Oliver’s. They were laughing and paused to punctuate their happiness with a soft kiss. Even the servers seemed to realize this was awkward, as in midconversation Oliver began strolling directly to his usual table, which was apparently also their usual table, and where Jacob and Sara were already sitting.

“Oh! Jacob!” he shouted, loud enough to scare the fish in the tank in the back. “Funny to find you here! Sissy and I were just having a meeting. Sorry. You must be Sara. We spoke on the phone? I thought — I thought you two were heading for a big night out in the city.”

Jacob watched as deep red shame soaked through the baggy skin of Sissy’s cheeks, and she looked as if she wanted to bolt out of Szechuan Garden and the entire state of Connecticut. Oliver did a very nice job of looking vaguely off at the window, as if the situation might disappear if he didn’t acknowledge it. Fortunately Sara wasn’t as ambivalent.

She pulled Jacob to his feet, and they were out the door before anyone realized they were dining and dashing. It was like a scene in a movie — too exciting to be real. Or to be part of his life, at any rate. But the longer he sat there, mute, in the passenger’s seat of the Prius, the more sense it made. His secret, older boyfriend had a secret, older girlfriend. Sara, on the other hand, was fuming. She sped down the parkway ranting, like the Jacob of old. How dare he this and how dare he that. Jacob didn’t argue. She had a valid point. But what shocked Jacob the most wasn’t Sissy’s age or gender, or even the fact that Oliver was sleeping with another of his subordinates, but that he’d dared , period. How could someone who only ever ate at one restaurant juggle two love lives at once? Jacob was almost impressed.

As the skyscrapers emerged on the horizon, and the city noises grew in his ears, and the world outside the car filled up with people, rushing around with such purpose, Jacob felt like no part of it at all. He couldn’t shake the feeling all through the night as Sara dragged him through the streets, outraged and leery the whole time, to the caterer and the cupcakes (they skipped the dancing) and to the speakeasy, where they really did pass through a secret passage to sit at a narrow bar and sip twenty-dollar cocktails made with Carpano Antica and house-made ginger syrup and yellow chartreuse. He let the night happen to him, moving through it all like a ghost. At the end of the night, he stood at the foot of the hotel escalators and kissed Sara goodbye on both cheeks and said he had to get back home. He promised to meet her and George for brunch in the morning, though he already knew he would not go. She promised him it was going to get better, that he didn’t need Oliver — and Jacob knew that that was true. He wasn’t feeling like this because of Oliver. This was how he’d felt all along, but Oliver, Anchorage House, and even Ella had been distracting him from it. He was absolutely lost.

Jacob walked all the way to Columbus Circle. He’d been gone so long, the old MetroCard in his wallet had expired. He bought a new one and went down to the 1 train, waiting at the very end of the platform, trying to get as far as he could from the fiddler and the guy with a washboard who were playing something intolerably cheerful. He closed his eyes and waited to feel the faint breeze — the front end of the gust of wind before the train — the first signal to every real New Yorker that a train was coming, before you could lean out and see the headlights on the tracks or hear any noise at all. He still knew just where to stand to have the doors open right in front of him. When they did, he stepped into the back of the train and for the first time in his life found himself in a car that was completely empty. His heart pounded as he studied the vacant yellow and orange seats. He stood, in the very center, as the doors closed, and he began to fly along beneath the ground. He shut his eyes and tried to feel as if he were weightless, on a new planet, lost in the sound of the tunnels. Instead he felt himself underwater, unable to breathe, as if the car were packed with a thousand people.

And then, with no one there to see, Jacob wept for the first time since Irene had died. And he kept weeping, even after he transferred to a 2 train at 72nd Street. Nobody minded much. It wasn’t so odd, in the city, to see a grown man crying in the middle of a whole lot of people. He got off at 110th, with the dark void of Central Park at his back, and walked the rest of the way to his old apartment — some thirty blocks through Harlem, lurid and alive, all brassy horns and endless green lights arching above the avenues. Everyone seemed younger than they had been a year ago; everything felt bigger. It was always the same city, only more so, and this was why he’d had to subtract himself from it. He couldn’t stand to see it not being less so: the bums and the bridges and the bodegas and the bottles that overflowed the trash cans on the corner. She wasn’t there, and it seemed impossible that all this could still be going on.