Jessica Z Read online

  “I want to know how it goes,” I say. “Immediately.”

  “I’ll tell you. How is Patrick?”

  I sigh, and it isn’t an overdramatic sigh, either. “The only thing I know for sure about Patrick is that he still lives above me. Beyond that, nothing is certain.”

  “Oh, Jess.”

  “But I wish he was here right now.” I really do.

  “Won’t he be home soon?”

  “He works out in Mountain View, and all the trains are stopped. He’ll probably spend the night at his building. They have a gym there, that’s where they slept the last time.”

  “What a pain.”

  “I wish he was here.”

  “Can you call him?”

  “Maybe. I’ll try later. The phones are, you know. Down.”

  “Has Dad called yet?”

  “I didn’t finish all my messages, but I don’t think he did.”

  “He will,” she says. “Eventually.”

  I can feel that the conversation is going to end soon, and the thought of my sister hanging up bothers me so much that I hold the phone to my ear with both hands. Katie senses it.

  “I don’t have to go,” she says.

  “No, it’s fine. I’m just going to go sit and look out my window. I don’t know. It’s cloudy.”

  “Don’t turn on the TV. No news. Get a bottle of wine.”

  “I was thinking something like that.”

  “I love you, Jess Z.”

  “I love you, K.” And she’s gone.

  I’m usually reluctant to drink so early in the day, but it’s now half past noon and the city has been shut down and my sister says I should, so why not? There’s nothing in my apartment, though, and I don’t want to get dressed again to go up the hill and see if the corner store is open, so I grab Patrick’s key from my dresser. He’ll have something. Since tech perked up and he’s gone back to high-paying work, Pat has stopped drinking beer and become something of a wine snob. He even bought one of those stupid little wine fridges, which I plan to raid at this very moment.

  Patrick’s apartment has an identical floor plan, but I always feel disoriented when I go in. He has philodendrons strung everywhere, and he’s set up the room I use as a living room and office as his bedroom. Where my dresser lives, Patrick has a cello propped up next to a music stand. And in his kitchen, the spot where my rolling cutting board should be is occupied by a short stainless-steel wine refrigerator with a digital temperature display and glass front. It (along with the espresso-making machine that now dominates his counter space) looks out of place, humming there, surrounded by all the old linoleum and chipped Formica, but every shelf inside is occupied, and I fully intend to exploit this bounty. I look at the bottles and try to determine which one is the least expensive—that’s just what he’d love, after spending a shitty night on the gym floor at his office, to come home and discover that his sort-of-not-quite girlfriend had swiped his bottle of Château Something or Other that he had been saving for twenty years from now. There are a couple of screw-top bottles on the bottom shelf, red table wine, and I grab them both.

  My sister told me to. And Patrick says those screw-tops can be very good.

  3

  I’m in my bedroom, sitting cross-legged on a pillow in the bay window, holding my one good wineglass with both hands and watching the people still walking home through the now abandoned street construction four stories down. It’s just after three when I finish off the last of the first bottle. The wineglass is huge, more like a goblet, really, and I always drink too fast when I use it. But I’m not really feeling it today. I don’t think I am, anyway.

  I see a woman walking, barefoot, carrying a pair of pumps in one hand and a laptop bag in the other. There’s a man behind her; he has one little girl on his shoulders and another little girl walking next to him, holding his hand. The one walking tugs at the front of her pants like she has to go to the bathroom.

  Behind them, there’s a man pushing a fat woman in a wheelchair. They’re laughing about something together.

  Another man trips on the curb and looks around quickly to see if anyone was watching.

  I’m watching. Up here.

  Without taking my eyes away from the window I reach down to the floor next to me for the second bottle. The cap makes a metal scraping sound as I open it, and I pour myself another full glass. The phone is in front of me, and I pick it up and dial Patrick’s cell for the sixth time and there’s a half ring and some tones before the kind woman-robot voice tells me, like she has all the other times, that all circuits are currently busy. If I try his office directly, I’ll hear the same thing. And as I take the first sip from the new glass, I’m quite suddenly consumed by what I had, up until now, been holding off.

  What if he needed to come into the city today?

  What if he needed to take a bus?

  What if he was just walking by a bus?

  It’s stupid. Stupid. I really can’t let myself think this. It’s the wine, that’s all. I pick up the phone and hit redial, then I hang up before it even connects. He never comes into the city for work. This is stupid.

  Here with me on the window ledge, clutched alongside my pillow and my wineglass, I have possibly the most beloved item from my childhood: a Rand McNally North American Road Atlas, publication date 1980. The year of my birth. My best friend Amy has a lumpy stuffed dolphin named Tippy, and I have this book of maps. The cover is gone and the stapled spine has been reinforced with masking tape, and printed across the top of the exposed index page in purple-marker little-girl letters are the words “Property of Jessica and Katherine Zorich.”

  Katie really, really wanted this when I left for college, but right now I’m very glad that I’m the one who got to keep it.

  Almost every page is covered with some sort of notation left years ago. Routes are traced in yellow highlighter or smudged number-two pencil. Trips to be taken, mileages calculated, locations marked where dream homes could be built. Katie might someday be married on this page, on this dot, or I might go to college on this other one. The latest imagined location of our father was plotted; where is he now, where is he going, where will he be after that?

  Where will I live someday?

  California takes up two pages, and I sit cross-legged with my pillow in my lap and set my wineglass to the side and look, look, where is Pat? There’s a Katie–pencil trace down the coast highway (a trip to be taken; we’d dreamed of a convertible), but following it with my fingertip there is no clue, nothing, I can’t see him; Mountain View is only a speck on the map insert and where could he be where could he be Goddammit where could he be?

  Just as I’m about to lose it, for real, I look up and out the window and I see him, coming up onto the end of our street at the top of the hill. It’s so obviously him, the short hair and funny way he kind of holds his big shoulders too far back and bounces when he walks, even from this far away I can be sure and I am completely happy about it. I come up to my knees and lean against the window, sending the pillow and the map to the floor and nearly knocking over the wine bottle as I do, hoping he’ll look up so I can wave at him and see him wave back. But he’s looking ahead, and even when he looks up at our building he doesn’t seem to see me until I pull up the peeling window sash and stick my head out.

  “Patrick! Pat!”

  “Hey!” he shouts up, and now he waves. “Buzz me in. Or throw me your keys.”

  I grab my keys, then let them fall and I’m afraid like always that they’re going to hit him in the face like they hit Danny last summer and he needed stitches to close up his cheek. But Patrick makes a neat one-handed catch, and in a moment I hear him running up the stairs. I meet him at the door and he wraps his arms around me and we stand there, door open, for a long time until he asks the obligatory question:

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yes. No?”

  “I know how you feel,” he says.

  We go sit on the couch, and Patrick rubs my neck.

>   “How did you get home?” I ask.

  “They ran a couple trains. Soldiers with big fucking guns all over. You got frisked before you got on. No bags allowed, no phones. All my shit’s still in Mountain View. Laptop, keys. What a mess.”

  I point to the window. “There’s wine,” I say. “I helped myself.” I’m half expecting him to say something pissy about me taking the bottles, but instead he stands up and says, “We can do better than that today.”

  “I don’t think I’ll appreciate the good stuff,” I say. “At this point.”

  “I will. My key?”

  “The dresser.”

  He goes, and I hear his steps as he moves around upstairs, hear his little wine cooling unit open and shut. Then I hear him start his answering machine, hear the unintelligible messages, and I listen, as I lean over and rest my head on the arm of the couch and draw up my knees, to the muffled voice that must be Patrick’s mom, calling over and over again.

  The next thing I know, Patrick is trying to move me on the couch to make room for himself, and I snap upright.

  “I’m not drunk,” I say.

  “Sure you’re not. Come here, you can lie back down.”

  “I just fell asleep.”

  “I know, come here. Lie down.” He pulls me back down so my head is resting in his lap, and pulls the afghan from the back of the couch and arranges it over me. I close my eyes and hug my knees, and as I adjust myself I can feel with the back of my head just how lean Patrick has become. He’s lost a lot of weight since he went back to work, exercising at the gym there and sloughing off the hard-party gains of what he calls “the severance year.” He’s also been running, almost every morning, with Dana, the dyke triathlete who lives in the building across the street from us and motivates him, he claims, by shouting things like, “Move it, you fat fucking breeder!” I don’t know Dana that well. She kind of intimidates me.

  “How much weight have you lost, Pat?” I mumble. I don’t want to open my eyes.

  “Just about enough.”

  “How much?”

  “Thirty pounds? Maybe a little more.”

  “Skinny boy.”

  “I can go back.”

  “I like skinny boy better.”

  Patrick plays with my hair, and I think about how long I’ve known him, how many times we’ve been on this couch like this. He had come down to help me carry boxes up from the rental truck the day I moved in almost five years ago. He seemed nice enough and funny enough and cute enough, and, above anything else, harmless enough. As in: completely nonthreatening, almost disappointingly nonthreatening. We carried boxes, I ordered pizza, he brought down a six-pack of beer, and after we finished he said good night and went back upstairs. See you around sometime.

  Harmless enough. Right.

  “Do you mind if I turn on the news?” he asks.

  “I’d rather you not. I don’t want to hear it.”

  “I’ll mute it. You don’t have to hear it.”

  “I don’t want to see it, either.”

  “Keep your eyes shut, then.”

  He fidgets around under me as he hunts for the remote, and I hear the electric zing of my old television coming on. As he promised, Pat kills the sound immediately, but of course I have to look.

  By a quarter ’til nine, Pat has made two more trips upstairs to his little steel refrigerator. Each time he goes up, I hear footsteps, thumping, bottles clanking. I hear his voice, too, on the phone: sometimes urgent, sometimes quiet. No matter how hard I try I can’t make out any words through my ceiling and his floor. Each time he comes back down there’s a new bottle in his hand, and by now we’re both feeling it. I’ve had a couple strong cups of caffeinated tea, too, so I’m edgy and awake on top of being drunk.

  I warm up some leftover takeout I have from last week and we share it from the folded paper container, dueling with our forks as we watch the silent news footage rotated through every half hour: the same smoky aerial shots, the same shirtless guy rescued from a rooftop, the same torn bus lying on its side. The bottom of the screen has a news ticker, and it’s starting to drive me crazy.

  SF SUICIDE BOMB TOLL 108; EXPECTED TO RISE

  CA GOV TO TOUR BOMB SITE TUES.

  LUCKY CAT RETURNS HOME AFTER CROSS COUNTRY TREK

  Viewed against everything else, the last one seemed almost funny the first hundred times I saw it roll by, but on pass one hundred and one it makes me very angry. I stand up, clumsily, maybe a little too theatrically, and drop my fork into the paper container in Patrick’s lap.

  “I can’t watch this anymore,” I say. “I can’t take it.” I stomp through the doorless opening into my bedroom, sit on the bed, and cross my arms. I’m not really sure what I’m trying to accomplish by doing this, but now I’m here, and, for nothing but the principle, I stay seated on the bed. Pat continues to eat. Slowly. And I sit.

  “I know what you’re doing,” Patrick says.

  “Oh. So?”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “Okay.”

  Patrick turns off the TV and rises from the couch, losing his balance a little, then comes and sits next to me on the bed.

  “Will you stay tonight?” I ask. “I need you to stay tonight.”

  “Only to rest,” he says. “The rule.”

  “The rule. Right.”

  He looks at me and raises an eyebrow. “You have to promise.”

  “I promise,” I say.

  “I’m serious.”

  “I promise.”

  Naturally I’m not promising anything, and my fingers don’t even need to be crossed. I’m not going to play coy, either; circumvention of this rule involves deception, the deception of the ordinary. So rather than slink around and give Pat sideways looks, I stick to routine: brush teeth, wait my turn to pee, cast off sweats, jump into bed. And as soon as Patrick turns off the light and slides in under the covers, I’m on him.

  “Oh come on, Jess,” he says, moving out from under me. “We aren’t doing this.”

  “Why not?”

  “We said we wouldn’t. This was your rule in the first place, remember? And you promised.”

  “Can’t we? Just tonight?”

  He groans.

  “Can’t we? I need to feel close to you.” And I’m not lying when I say it. “I need to be close to you.”

  “We can’t.” He puts his arm around me as he says it, and that wounds me more than if he had just turned away.

  I play the “O” card. “I could tend the garden,” I say, letting my voice trail off.

  “No, Jess,” he says. “Come on.” Somewhere, over the evolution of our strange relationship, “tending the garden” has become the secret code for the performance of oral sex. I have no idea where it came from, or what it means exactly; something about raising crops maybe? Pat swears I came up with it, but I know it had to be him.

  “I really will,” I say. I thought this would be it, this rare irresistible deal-maker. It’s not the act I’m so opposed to, it’s the tedium. Well, that, and the disconcerting feeling sometimes that I can’t breathe. But I’m drunk, so why not?

  “You don’t have to do that,” he says, and I think, I have him! Then he rolls away from me. “I don’t want you to do that.”

  And then I sigh and give up.

  But there is one thing that’s been bothering me. I listen to him breathing for a little bit, his slow exhalations, then I roll toward him and touch his shoulder. “Hey, Pat?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Were you trying to call someone?”

  “What?”

  “Those times you went upstairs, for the wine, were you trying to call someone?”

  “I was trying to call everyone, Jess.”

  “Oh.” And I leave it at that.

  Pat’s breathing slows and winds down into a wheezing drunken growl. After an hour or more of listening to it I can’t take it or anything else, and my hands move down toward myself. And that great habitual tonic against sleeplessness and anxi
ety I’ve depended on—and only been able to achieve alone—since the ninth grade works its magic once again.

  Patrick snores right through it, and as I close my eyes and my pulse settles down and the shuddering slips from my shoulders and neck, I wonder in that sleepy, senseless way: if a shirtless man is saved from a rooftop a thousand times, is he saved forever?

  4

  Pat leaves for a long run before I get up. I thought I’d have a rare chance to sleep in, but my rest is interrupted when Mike calls to see how I’m doing. I’m fine, I tell him, and he’s fine too, for the most part.

  “The girl who rents from us hasn’t come home yet,” he says. “The police came by, they didn’t really tell us anything. We’ll just keep waiting, I guess.”

  “Mike, I’m sorry.”

  “All we can do is wait.” Mike says this with the gravity of a real-live grown-up. Suitable trait for an employer, I think. “Listen,” he goes on, “I think everyone should just stay home this week. I mean, maybe we can all get together and catch up and have lunch at the office on Friday if the buses are going. You’re doing the Cippoletti project, right? Work on that at home, if you can, and we’ll play it by ear for Friday.”

  “Just let me know, Mike.”

  This Cippoletti thing involves me writing three paragraphs of promotional copy for a company that makes women’s bike shorts—it’s a job that should take all of twenty minutes, but I’ve stretched it out into a two-week project. And now that I can do it from home, my workday will be spent searching Google, reading catty blogs and online comic strips, and shooting instant messages to Katie in her lab at BU. This isn’t really so different from what I do at my office anyway; I just won’t need to be covert about it now.

  The TV stays off while I work, and I intentionally avoid reading news sites. I’m feeling a little blocked, so I surf around online and hope creativity will strike. I check my favorite blog, the PitchBitch, but there hasn’t been a new post since last Friday, which isn’t so surprising with everything that’s gone on. Written anonymously by a girl here in the city who works—just like I do—in advertising and PR, it’s read obsessively by everyone in my office. I’ve been accused by my coworkers of actually being the PitchBitch, which is more than a little flattering but in no way possible because: (a) I’m nowhere near clever enough to write like her, and (b) She’s been pursuing some new guy, Jazzboy, she calls him, in serious online detail over the past few weeks. And he refuses to give in. How could this man—this idiot, we’ve all concluded—resist the obvious intellect and charm of the PitchBitch?