Stewart and Jean (4 page)

Even after she’d finished her salad she lingered, chatting with him. She listened to his stories with interest and laughed a few times. She offered stories of her own, without Charles having to work hard at drawing her out.

Eventually Marissa said she needed to get back to work. Charles considered asking for her number, but decided against it. He had to check within himself and make sure his hesitation wasn’t mere cowardice; if he’d decided it was, he would have forced himself to go ahead and ask. But no, it really did feel premature, even though she was smiling at him with apparent sincerity. Besides, it wasn’t as if he was unlikely to bump into her again. In fact, she even said, “Well, see you in the park again, I hope.”

It was time for Charles to be getting back to work, too. There was a food kiosk on the other side of the park, called Sandwichcraft. That was where Charles had been heading when he’d gotten side-tracked. It was too late now. He’d sacrificed his chance to eat, in order to talk to the hot girl.

Charles left the store at five, but Stewart was on the closing shift. Temple locked its doors at nine, then they managed to get out of there before half-past. Some of the guys were going for some beers a couple blocks away, and they invited Stewart. He declined. He did think about accepting, though.

Now, in the dark, it was his turn to go to Bryant Park. He still worried about being out in a park after dark, as if he might be mugged and murdered, as if it were the Bryant Park of the seventies. This, despite the fact that there were still plenty of pedestrians and cars out. Stewart knew he was being dumb, but still thought he was doing well, considering the only big city he’d ever really spent time in was Dallas; and in Dallas, you really could get shot in the street. But Stewart had gone online and checked the stats, and knew that central Manhattan really was bizarrely safe.

The reason he wandered into the park was that he needed to make a phone call to his mother, and he didn’t want to do it at home. Or where he lived, anyway—“home” seemed an odd word to apply to that apartment in Ridgewood, so far out in Queens that he still got lost trying to get to it, filled with strangers, the roommates whose Craigslist ad he’d answered while still in Arkansas. If he were to try to talk on the phone there, everyone who happened to be in the apartment would hear every word of it—he didn’t even have a door he could close, he slept on a couch in the living room.

So his reason for ducking into the still-somewhat-scary park was to make a phone call; but he found himself dreading that conversation more than any of the most intimidating (and simultaneously alluring) scenes the city had to offer. He put the call off and strolled through the park, looking at the people, trying to eavesdrop.

There were so many different kinds of people. Languages he’d never heard spoken, races he couldn’t identify. With a few overheard conversations, he wondered why they were privately role-playing with each other, till he realized a millisecond later that, no, they really were rich, or in the fashion industry, or whatever. He heard one woman talking and he wondered with alarm what might be wrong with her, till he realized she was simply speaking Chinese or something.

There was a fountain. He sat on its edge. Even in a crowd, there was something mystical and removed about a fountain at night.

It wasn’t like he couldn’t appreciate what his mother must be going through. She’d never gotten over Kevin’s death six years ago. And she’d never stopped being freaked out by Stewart’s suicide attempt two years after that, even though he’d explained to her multiple times that he’d never really, truly meant to go through with it. The proof was that he’d never tried a second time, right?

He took the phone out of his pocket and held it in his hand. Rubbing it, looking at it. He imagined it popping out of his hand like a soap bar he’d squeezed and landing in the fountain, thus granting him a reprieve. It didn’t pop out of his hand, though. Finally he pulled up his list of contacts, pressed “Home,” and held the phone to his ear as the ringing tones started.

After the third ring, he began to hope maybe no one would pick up. He had just enough time to start feeling guilty for the hope before his mother answered.

She was worried about him, but for some reason her worry first expressed itself in questions about the weather. She was very worried New York was having a heat wave. He assured her several times that, though it was hot, it was still five degrees or so cooler than it had been in Arkansas.

“Yes,” she said, “but someone was telling me that it’s even worse up there, because there’s more concrete and it bounces the sun rays right back up into your face.”

She wanted to know if that job he’d found was working out okay. He told her it was. “Well, that really was some good work on your part, finding a job straight off like that,” she said. It sounded like begrudging praise—but why shouldn’t it be? She’d made no secret of not wanting him to move to New York out of the blue like he had.

She wanted to hear about the apartment. He tried to keep the details from her, but soon the only way to keep her from knowing that he didn’t have his very own room would have been to lie to her, and it didn’t seem worth doing that. Though if he’d known in advance how horrified she’d be, he might have changed his mind.

“Do you want me to send you some money?!” she moaned.

“
No
, Mom. Just relax, it’s only for right now at the beginning. Lots of people live this way when they’re just starting off in the city.”

Then they were quiet for a while. He felt ashamed for having spoken harshly to her. Especially since he knew good and well why it freaked her out for him to be gone.... Gentle as the sound of the fountain was, its genuine presence was almost enough to drown out her distant, tinny voice. He couldn’t help but track the drifting passersby with his eyes, try as he might to concentrate on his mother half the continent away.

“Well,” she said, for something to say.

Stewart had an urge to put his hand in the fountain water, but no one else was doing it. Maybe that was prohibited, or maybe the water was dirty. “So,” he said. “How’s Dad?”

“He’s all right,” she said, sounding annoyed, as if Stewart knew perfectly well that he wasn’t. “He’s asleep right now, or I’d put him on.”

“Oh, that’s too bad,” he said, relieved.

There in the brightly-illuminated nighttime city he sat at the fountain and watched the crowds of busy strangers. He thought of his parents, alone in Arkansas, all alone there now that their only surviving son was gone.

Stewart had resolved to stay on the phone until he felt his duty had been done, but it still felt undone when he got off—he just couldn’t bear to stay on any longer. They said goodbye, they said they loved each other, then they hung up.

He sat alone and watched the milling crowd with no idea how to mingle in it.

The next day Charles worked the early shift again, from nine to five, and again Stewart worked from noon to nine. When Stewart arrived Charles said hello and tried to strike up a conversation. He tried to be friendly enough to maintain the exchange and learn about the guy, but he was inhibited from being
too
friendly by all the stuff he’d heard about him. The conversation didn’t get off the ground.

On his lunch break Charles went back to Bryant Park. He walked across to Sandwichcraft, even though it was a little pricey for him. Once he had his sandwich he sat near the spot where he’d met Marissa the day before, and idly scanned the park as he ate. He didn’t see her. It was just as well. Ideally, when they met again, he should have something to tell her about that subject that interested her so much.

Jean called out the day after seeing Stewart downstairs at Temple, and the next morning she was tempted to do so again. But that was crazy. What was she going to do, quit her job? It was absurd to have shot Kevin and moved to New York and still be intimidated by the incident. In comparison to those two steps, taking a bunch of sick days seemed pathetically ineffective.

At the office she made a point of smiling at everyone and saying hello and being especially cheerful. To polite inquiries after her health, she responded with a wave of her hand and the assurance that it had been nothing. In public Marissa got the same sort of greeting as everyone else, which hurt her feelings some. But when she poked her head into Jean’s cubicle and asked again how she was doing, Jean granted her a wry shrug.

Something about the way Marissa’s eyes seemed so carefully loaded with concern, about her hushed and serious tone, worried Jean. She saw that Marissa wanted to talk about this stuff. Jean didn’t feel particularly like talking about it anymore, but she sensed that if Marissa couldn’t converse about it with her, she’d find someone else.

She hadn’t even told her roommate, Helen, even though Helen was one of her closest friends in the city and could tell something was bugging Jean. But if Helen found out about her weird quasi-stalker, she might start to worry, considering that she and Jean lived together. And it would be a bit much, dealing with Helen’s worry and with the Stewart thing itself, both at the same time.

Anyway, for the moment, she wasn’t up for either pandering to or policing Marissa.

Although her attention wandered, she managed to work competently all morning. No one watching her would have known she was disturbed—at worst they would have thought she was bored and daydreaming. Marissa was proud of her for that.

Jean decided to go to Temple at lunch. Before she’d gotten to work this morning, in fact over the last couple days, she’d simply accepted that she was going to sacrifice the store. But now that she was here she understood that was unacceptable.

The weird thing, the thing that she wondered at now, was that she had ever been scared of him. Outraged was one thing. But what could he do to her? It wasn’t like she’d ever consent to be alone with him. And she carried pepper spray, so there was that if he ever tried to follow her. Fuck him.

She waited till late to take her lunch. She interrogated herself carefully as to whether or not she was putting it off out of fear, but was confident she was not. On the contrary; she
wanted
to see him.

Her timing was good. When she walked into Temple, Stewart was shelving books in the Classics section, right at the edge between it and the Bestsellers. He saw her come in. As she took her first few steps into the store, she let her eyes rest calmly on his, thick disdain soaking her mouth and drawing its corners down. Then she stopped among the islands of book-stacked tables, ostentatiously flipping through the new Cormac McCarthy hardcover.

She was aware that Stewart seemed unable to look away from her. In her peripheral vision she could see him staring at her with amazed fury, the muscles of his jaw and mouth bunching up, his eyes popping.

No doubt he had fantasized about this as some sort of old-fashioned vendetta. Back in Arkansas it had maybe seemed exotic and daring. Let him see now that actually he was nothing but a nobody working in a dead-end retail store for probably minimum wage. He was nothing to worry about.

It occurred to her that even though he worked here, he probably couldn’t afford to buy one of these books. Some of these hardbacks were thirty bucks. With sales tax, that probably came out to nearly half his daily take-home; even if he were full-time, he couldn’t be making much more than four hundred a week before taxes. But she could buy them. Though she wasn’t rich, she still made more than seventy thousand a year. She picked up the McCarthy book and rested it in the crook of her arm, then set on top of it a hardback of the new Claire Messud novel, which she had a vague interest in. Idly she scanned the table for something else to buy. Flaunting her economic power was petty. But it was a real power, and it felt good to have a weapon, since he’d started the fight.

He was still looking at her. Slowly she let her eyes slide up from the book covers and again meet his. She kept her mouth and eyelids heavy but otherwise tried to stay expressionless. He was standing still, glaring at her, breathing hard. After a moment she let her eyes glide back down again. Not as if she were scared to hold his gaze, but as if the books were more interesting.

Even as he advanced on her, she wouldn’t look up. Only when he was right at her shoulder did she raise her eyes, giving him the kind of look a fashion magnate might give to a waiter who’d sat uninvited at her table.

Seeing that he really was shaking, as if having trouble containing himself, she grew scared. But she refused to show it. Anyway, if he hit her here in the store, that would be the best thing that could happen. He’d be fired and so would no longer work in the building, and she’d be able to get a restraining order. “Yes?” she said, like speaking to him was a big concession.

“Sorry, but what was that look you gave me a second ago?”

“I noticed you were staring at me, so I glanced up to see if there was some problem.”

“Uh-huh. Well, I didn’t like the way you were looking at me.”

“Well, I’ll be more than happy not to look at you again.”

They were in full view of the cashiers, and while they weren’t raising their voices, they also weren’t whispering. That Jamaican manager appeared beside them; “I’m sorry, is something wrong?” he asked.

“Not with me,” Jean said smoothly. It would be inexact to say she was enjoying this, but she did feel exalted. This was a fight, and she was winning.

The manager might have been predisposed to be on Stewart’s side—he’d always struck Jean as a guy who would rather defend his subordinates than kowtow to the customers, plus he was probably still mad that she’d stepped on that book—but Stewart looked so irrationally furious that it must have given him pause. “She was giving me dirty looks,” Stewart said.

The manager turned from one to the other of them. “If you two have some personal business....”

“I’m just here on my lunch break to buy some books,” Jean said, holding up the hardbacks in her arms as proof. “Your employee was staring at me. I looked back at him, but then decided to look away because it seemed silly to make a big thing out of it. That’s when he came over and started talking to me.”