Kristopher Jansma - Why We Came to the City

It was there that Mary met a dancer named Izzy, whose real name turned out to be Mary as well. At some point one of the Marys seduced the other, and they ran away together. Irene was never entirely clear on why they left her behind. Possibly they thought she’d be better off with Grandma and Grandpa Wyckoff. Possibly they worried that Bernard, or his gambling buddies, would come after them if they took her along. Maybe there was a calculation: no judge in the Florida panhandle in the late 1980s was going to grant custody to an exotic dancer and her lesbian lover.

Alisanne didn’t know, because Irene had never known. Bernard wound up marrying a woman he worked with, Maggie Pruder, and moving them all up to Brighton Beach to take over her family’s pool supply store. Mary and Mary had ended up in Virginia where now, both middle-aged, they worked for the department of public utilities in — and Alisanne seemed smug to have figured this out before William — a little town called “Irene.”

Locked in a line of bumper-to-bumper traffic, somewhere down under the river, as the fluorescent green light of the tunnel cast a pallor over everything, William felt another piece go into the puzzle. Irene. Of course. And yet it didn’t feel finished. The puzzle didn’t match any image on any jigsaw box. No cityscape or field of sunflowers. No kittens with balls of yarn. Just another tortoise under the one above it, and on and on.

William said nothing, focusing instead on rolling another joint without spilling weed all over the car. Alisanne watched him wordlessly as she drove them toward Mel’s Secondhand Shop, where Sara had taken the last of Irene’s things from the storage unit earlier that week. Alisanne parked just off Washington Square Park. They walked through together, sharing the joint as they avoided tourists holding bags from boutique shops, and stepped quickly past dreadlocked students on benches.

It struck William suddenly that it was the first part of the city he’d been in all day that he recognized. A girl played the violin in hopes of spare change. A pair of bearded middle-aged men smoked cigarettes while playing chess. A trio of heavyset Germans stood under the great Arch and made peace signs with their fingers, while a man in an orange ski cap changed his pants a few feet from them. William couldn’t stop looking for Irene behind every lowered hood and winter cap. But he didn’t feel her anywhere.

“You roll these like her,” Alisanne said, passing the last of the joint back to him.

William took the last tiny hit and tossed it to the sidewalk. “Well, she taught me.”

“Me too.”

Mel’s was hot and crowded. Australian women walked up and down a maze of cramped aisles, examining denim jackets and mod-patterned dresses. Paisley and flowers burst everywhere like fireworks. Technicolor angle-striped dresses and jumpsuits with bell-bottoms. Pictures of Twiggy and Audrey Hepburn, torn from old Vogue s, now framed on the walls. Two men were having a contentious debate over a pair of silk pajamas. A fourteen-year-old girl was trying on a pair of pale mint-green shoes, yelling at her mother that she needed them. They were only three hundred and nineteen dollars. They were from the sixties ! The mother, who didn’t look old enough to have owned shoes in the sixties, was ignoring her, checking an e-mail on her phone as the girl pitched a fit.

“Excuse me?” William asked a harried-looking man in bubblegum-pink pants who seemed to work there. His cheeks were sunken like those of a corpse and made his eyes bug out. “We’re looking for an old book that someone might have sold you recently.”

The man was already shaking his head. “No returns, no refunds.”

“Oh that’s not — no problem. We’ll pay for it.”

The man sighed and tapped the sides of his alligator shoes together, his hands still busy tugging things uselessly into temporary order, soon to be undone by the browsing customers. He looked at Alisanne, then back at William, and registered a fair amount of concern.

“Before we get to books, sweetheart, you need a hat worse than anyone I’ve ever met.”

William blinked. “I do?”

The man balled his hands and looked William in the eye. “Your forehead looks like an eggplant. Come here. When I’m done people will think you’re Don Draper.”

The man climbed a small ladder to retrieve a man’s hat from a high shelf, up above a rack of kipper ties. He pulled down a charcoal-gray one and pointed William toward a mirror. Not only did it hide the lump above his eye, but it also looked awfully good. More Sam Spade than Don Draper, but he liked it. And he couldn’t explain why, but he had the strangest feeling that Irene would have liked it too.

“Can you wear a hat to a wedding?” he asked Alisanne.

“Is it outside?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” William said.

“Just take it off during the ceremony. Don’t be vulgar.”

William promised, and the man pointed them back toward the used books. There were hundreds, all piled up and in no particular order. Alisanne began sifting through the stacks. William didn’t even know what they were looking for. He opened books at random looking for handwriting or doodles that looked like Irene’s, but it was tough to tell. Was that her 7 in the phone number scrawled in the margin of The Count of Monte Cristo ? Was that her lazy spiral on the back page of The Little House on the Prairie ? Just then William’s finger paused on a green volume that seemed familiar.

The Iliad . Homer. He picked it up and opened it slowly. Its pages were covered in familiar handwriting. His own. But also in hers. He’d forgotten all about the book. He’d last seen it in her hospital room, before she was moved to the ICU. Afterward it had been the last thing on his mind. Sara had surely brought it home and put it into storage with the rest of her things. And now it was here.

“Aha!” he heard Alisanne shouting from just around the corner. She emerged with a plain, if somewhat beaten-up white book by Albert Camus. In plain red lettering, it said L’Etranger and beneath that, simply, Roman . The shop, apparently unaware that it was a rare first edition, was selling it for $1.50, which Alisanne paid gladly.

“I have to go now,” she said. “Thank you, William.”

He moved in, suddenly, to hug her. She tried to jump back. Then, having failed to escape the embrace, she surrendered.

“Who knows,” she said, “what she ever saw in either of us.”

But now that they had met, William, somehow, thought he did know. There was something about Alisanne that felt familiar. She was too blunt where he was too polite, but underneath was a kindness so strange that they both usually hid it away. And he supposed that must have been what it was. What Irene alone had been able to see. The thing she’d loved.

After paying for his new hat and his own former book, he stepped outside and returned to the park, where he sat down on the icy bench not far from the silent fountain. He opened the book carefully. He remembered that first night, how she’d defended, in a way, his preferred translation when Jacob had tried to mock it. Lattimore. Richmond Lattimore. She had underlined his first name in blue ink, on the title page. William smiled. He wondered how many more of these moments he might have in his lifetime.

Suddenly he hoped that he’d never find all the pieces. He was glad there was nothing but tortoises all the way down. The air smelled of vegetable curry, and there was a frenzy of branches up in the trees above him. Only then did he remember he was still wearing Alisanne’s clothes. Sitting there in them, and in his new hat and the scarf from Irene, he felt almost like another person entirely. So this was what it was like. This was what Irene had learned. How to be someone new.