Kristopher Jansma - Why We Came to the City

The driver who picked William up expressed mild concern for him with a perfunctory “Are you okay, sir?” before returning to his phone call in some West African — sounding language. William said nothing. He closed his eyes and did not open them again until they’d arrived.

• • •

When William stepped into the glass and steel lobby of the hotel every eye was on him. How bad did he really look? Fortunately, before the porters could swoop in on him, a woman approached him from the bar area.

“You are William Cho?”

She wasn’t what he expected. Since he’d first seen her name written on the back of Irene’s dirty Polaroids, he’d been envisioning a regal French beauty. Leslie Caron from An American in Paris or María Casares from Les Enfants du paradis . In his mind she’d existed in black and white.

But here was Alisanne, in the somewhat-acned flesh. Thick eyebrows. Greasy, dark hair cut in a childish bob. Lips wide, flat, and pink, parted slightly, as if she were about to chew something. Her hands were blue and veiny, her nails polished black. Her nose looked as if it had been broken and then rebroken a few times for good measure. She had a wart on her neck the size of a pencil eraser with thick black hairs springing out of it. The black hood she was wearing was part of a denim coat and her black boots were laced up to her knees.

The porters looked displeased as he trudged inside, leaving sand behind on the dark carpet. He apologized, but Alisanne didn’t appear to care. The hotel seemed to be constructed of different-sized panels of glass in interlocking square frames. Some were frosted to the point of complete opacity and others were crystal clear. Behind the desk was a waterfall, flowing somehow up and not down. An enormous sculpture of a spider eating a wasp sat in the middle of an otherwise pleasant-looking garden. There were four oversize gnome statues in the mailroom. Were they part of the building decor? Or had someone ordered them? William tried not to stare into the adjacent yoga studio, where people were bending themselves into holistic pretzels.

They went wordlessly to the sixth floor, where Alisanne opened her door with a keycard and invited him to remove his wet clothes. “Take a shower. I’ll find you dry clothes. And some tea.”

William hesitated, seeing that the shower was divided from the main room only by a pane of frosted glass that didn’t reach the black-tiled floor.

“You are — not my type,” she said flatly.

Reluctantly he removed his wet pants and shirt. Alisanne dropped them into a plastic bag and ordered some tea while he showered and washed what felt like an entire sandbar from his hair. Clean and warm at last, he stepped out in a towel, and Alisanne handed him a pair of ripped black jeans and a T-shirt for a band called MALADROIT. He was a little embarrassed to find that they were almost exactly the same size.

She poured him a cup of tea. William sat with it on the edge of the bed, thinking he should let her have the chair, but she sat down cross-legged on the floor.

“Your eye will be very swollen by tomorrow,” she said.

William nodded. It hurt like hell, but he wasn’t about to let her see that. “So you live in Paris?”

“Sometimes,” she said.

“And you came all the way here for the show?”

She stared at him, almost curiously. “I came to get something that belonged to me.”

“Oh,” William said. “Me too.”

She laughed and spat something from her teacup onto the floor. “No. You want to know who she was.”

William frowned. “I guess.”

Alisanne smiled, cryptically. “Who did this to you?”

“Her father.”

She seemed almost impressed. “Horrible little man.”

“Not so little,” William winced. “I thought she wanted me to tell him what happened. She asked me, I think, before she died.”

But now suddenly he wondered if what she’d meant was that he should make sure her father didn’t find out. If she had, in the final hours, regretted her plan. If it had even been her plan. William felt utterly foolish. He didn’t know what he’d been thinking. He didn’t know why he’d thought he knew anything about her at all.

“And you called me because…?”

“You knew Irene better than me. I was hoping you could — shed some light?”

Alisanne considered this a moment. “Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why would you want me to ‘shed light’?”

“Look,” he said, “we should — we should help each other out. I’ve been — Christ, just look at my face, okay? I’ve been through a lot already, so please just tell me.”

“Tell you what?”

William realized he didn’t know what he wanted to know. Who she was? Where she’d been? What she’d done? “How about where you met?” he said finally.

“We met in San Francisco.”

“And?”

“And she was a terribly stupid girl. Away from home one week and already broke. Sleeping in the park, selling all the things she took from her nice grandmother. Trying to buy a sandwich. She fainted on the sidewalk in front of me. So I brought her home and let her stay with me. And what does she do? Reads all my Camus and messes up my sheets and kills my balsamine plant and makes me fall in love with her. So then one day I go out. I come home. She is gone. Stole an expensive first-edition book that my father bought me. Does that — how did you say it — shed light?”

William rubbed his head. It didn’t. “I keep thinking if I knew who she was , I could…”

But after all this time he didn’t know what he wanted to do. Let her go? Keep her close? Somehow do both things at once. Be free, and haunted, forever. If only he could keep her inside a box, safely stashed away in a closet or a drawer, to be taken out only when he wanted. In the pit of his stomach he knew that Irene would have hated this more than anything.

“I just want to know if she really loved me,” he said.

Alisanne shrugged. “She loved everyone.”

“I want to know that she loved me best.”

“She loved you last.”

“But not on purpose.”

“Yes, on purpose.”

William considered this. “She would have left me eventually.”

“Yes,” Alisanne agreed, “sooner or later.”

William sighed. “I wanted it to be later.”

“You think later you would have said, ‘Okay, this was good. I’ve had enough. Please die now. Excellent loving you.’”

He supposed she had a point. Whatever might have happened between him and Irene in the long run — had there been a long run — if, at ninety-nine years old, he’d seen her slipping away on that hospital bed, something told him that he’d still have looked away before the last moment. He’d still have wound up lying next to a mound of sheets wishing she were underneath. He’d still be feeling her cool breath on his wrinkled neck.

“Maybe there are people who live together eighty years who don’t love each other as much as you two did in one year. Maybe others spend a single night together and love each other more than you’ll ever love anyone. But what does that matter now?”

William glared at her. Then he picked up his still-damp coat and said, “Come on. I bet I know what happened to your book.”

7

Alisanne had a rental car, so she drove him back into Manhattan through the Midtown Tunnel. On the way, she told him what little she knew about Irene’s mother. Her name was Mary, and she’d come from Texas, where her first husband had worked on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. There’d been some sort of accident — a fire, she thought — and he’d died and Mary had gotten some insurance money out of it. She met Bernard Wyckoff somewhere outside New Orleans and got knocked up and married him. Irene, or Carrie Ann, had been born somewhere in the Florida panhandle, where Bernard’s family was from. The Wyckoffs operated several local strip clubs, including one where Mary wound up waitressing part time while Bernard gambled away what was left of the insurance money and his parents raised little Carrie Ann.