Stewart and Jean (9 page)

But well before she arrived, he saw that she wasn’t smiling. On the other hand, she said, “I was waiting over there for you to come out.” That was good, presumably.

She really looked unhappy, though. Charles wondered if there had been some sort of weird, impossible-to-predict ramifications from their night of karaoke. Then he remembered how they’d met and realized that it probably had to do with Stewart.

“Can I talk to you?” she asked.

“Sure. You want to go someplace? Get a beer? Maybe Muldoon’s again?”

“How about someplace quieter?”

“Sure.”

As they walked he was scrambling to think of some nearby bar that might be quiet. Luckily Marissa said she knew a place and she led the way there. As they entered Charles glanced at the price list by the front door and was relieved to see that he could expect to survive the evening, albeit with injuries.

At least they sat at the bar, so there wouldn’t be a waiter to tip. Once they’d each ordered their beer, Charles said, “So. What’s up?”

“Um.” Marissa was tearing up the cardboard coaster in front of her, making a face like she was in physical pain.

Charles began to worry about her, actually. “Hey,” he said, lightly and cautiously placing his fingertips on her arm. “What is it?” The bartender started to put their beers down in front of them, stopped and scowled when he saw what Marissa had done to her coaster, and replaced it before setting down her drink.

Charles waited as Marissa fished around for the right words. “Have you talked to Stewart any more?” she asked at last. “About that thing?”

“No. Not really.”

“What do you think about him?”

“You mean, like, do I think he’s a good guy?”

“Yeah. Kind of. Pretty much.”

“Well. I mean, of course there’s all that stuff you told me about, with the stalking and everything....”

“Right, yeah, but aside from that.”

“Aside from that, he seems all right. Kind of intense. I would like him fine, except some of that stuff you told me about makes me wary.”

Marissa nodded, taking this in, nursing her beer.

Charles didn’t see how he’d said anything complicated enough to need taking in. “Why do you ask?” he prompted.

“Well, I like Jean too, a lot. She’s a friend. I mean, you know, a work friend.”

“Okay.” Then: “Yeah, she sounds nice.”

“She is. She’s cool. She’s just....” Marissa hesitated, and when she spoke again it was in a tone like she wanted to remind Charles that it was
his
friend, not hers, who was ultimately responsible for whatever was going on: “I just really think this whole thing with Stewart is messing with her head!”

“Well. I can understand how it would.”

Marissa outlined Jean’s plan to go to Stroudsburg, get a gun, and wait for Stewart to come up there to her so she could, presumably, shoot him.

Charles stared at her. “Well … I mean, I guess it sounds like she would only shoot him if he, like, came up there after her?... Which surely he wouldn’t really do....”

“Yeah, but what if she said something to him? Something to lure him up there so she could shoot him?”

Well, that sounded like it would be murder.

Charles wasn’t ready to use the word “murder,” though. Instead, he said, “You mean sort of like killing him on purpose?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. Probably not.”

They sat there in silence.

Marissa said, “It’s just, I think she’s really freaked out by Stewart. I think she’s scared of him. And people do crazy shit when they’re scared.”

“Right. Right.”

Marissa was running her gently-closed fingers over the glass, stroking it up and down. Her face not only looked like she might possibly be in pain, Charles realized; she looked like she really might cry. He tried to think of some way to keep her from doing so.

It was too late. Her face crumpled as she said, “I don’t want to feel like I’m
bad
-mouthing her or anything.... I mean, when you think of everything she’s been
going
through,” and she choked out some sobs.

Charles wasted a few seconds wondering what she was crying for, before taking advantage of the opportunity to press his palm gently against her back and rub it in slow circles. “Hey,” he said, “hey now. No one thinks you’re bad-mouthing her. Everybody understands.” He quickly added, “Everybody who knows about this, I mean. Which as far as I know is just me. I haven’t told anybody.” It was plain enough why she was crying: partly, no doubt, because she felt stressed out by the whole situation; but also in order to amp up the emotion. If she wasn’t officially an actress then that was only because the theater was too small a stage for her when the whole world was sitting there available; and like a true ham, she didn’t care which character the script wanted to highlight, if she was in the scene then it was hers. Charles, whose favorite actor was William Shatner, had a thing for hams. He rubbed her back, feeling the smooth bones of her ribs and spine through the red, sheer fabric, the kind of fabric only females get to wear, a fact which for some men makes it nearly as erotic as those body parts that only females get to have. Charles widened the circles of his arm, letting his hand finally hook onto her neck, where his fingers consolingly caressed the nape, while his other hand came to rest on her forearm. Experimentally, he pulled her towards him, and she let her head rest obligingly against his chest. He stroked his fingers through her curly thick hair and whispered, “Shhh, shhh.” She was one of those girls who liked drama. Well, sex and romance might not always be the very most effective spurs to drama, but Charles was confident they were well up there, and from the way Marissa was burrowing her head into his chest it looked like she thought so too. Charles knew that girls like that could be wild and unpredictable—a fight could be as dramatic as sex—a girl might decide actually fucking him was less dramatic than calling the whole thing off right before fucking him. But it was worth the ride, because Charles fucking relished that shit. It was the only time he felt truly alive, to use the cliché. He tucked his head down, lifted his hand from her forearm to touch her chin and tip it back, doing everything gently so as not to destroy the delicate equilibrium, and slowly lowered his head to hers and tasted her mouth before the universe could stop him.

They made out for a while, and Charles felt good about where they stopped—it wasn’t like Marissa called it off because she was getting bored or irritated, it was more like they both mutually drifted away from it because if they progressed much further it would become something it was embarrassing to do in public. This bar was apparently a hang-out of Marissa’s, after all (Charles loved it when girls demonstrated they didn’t mind being seen with you by making out with you in public on their own turf). She remained leaning against him, letting him put his arm around her shoulders and caress her right arm with his thumb while they drank their second round.

They talked about her work. Charles preferred that to talking about his, because he was afraid of reminding her how much less money he made than she did—but she drew him out on the subject of his job and he told some stories that made her laugh. Charles could be a funny guy, particularly when inspired by the presence of a woman. That was probably his main strength.

Eventually, she said, “So what do you think I ought to do about the thing with Jean and Stewart and the gun?” She was much calmer about it now, probably because of all the energy she’d expended in crying and making out.

“I’m not sure what we can do about it,” he said, using the first-person plural in the hopes of acclimating her to the idea of thinking of the two of them as a couple, as a pair who had dealings with each other.

She recoiled from him slightly. “We need to do something if we think she might kill him.”

In the excitement Charles had forgotten that the stakes had gotten that high. Now he remembered, and pictured with distant horror a world in which he allowed Stewart to get shot. “What should we do, though? I guess I should warn Stewart?”

“Well, but I don’t want it to get back to her that I’ve been talking about her behind her back.”

Charles mulled it over. Warning Stewart that Jean might be setting a trap to kill him, without letting him know why Charles thought so, seemed like a tall order. Then again, if that was the task Marissa wanted to set for her champion or whatever, then so be it. “I’ll figure something out,” he said.

As a reward, she nestled against him. The noise and bustle of the bar continued around them. The commotion was not an intrusion of the world, but a cocoon protecting himself and Marissa from it.

Marissa’s cheek stirred against him; not restlessly; she was nuzzling.

Charles risked lowering his mouth to her ear and murmuring, “I’m really sorry about everything that’s going on between Stewart and Jean, but I’m also glad it gave us a reason to talk to each other in the first place.”

It gave him a thrill to dance so recklessly along the blade of her irony and sophistication. Breath bated, he watched to see what she would do; he let the air out in relief when, instead of ignoring his sappiness or rolling her eyes at it, she rotated her face up towards his again and smiled at him, and held her mouth there for him as he bent down to kiss it.

A couple weeks went by and Charles didn’t find an opportune time to warn Stewart about Marissa’s suspicions. Away from her and the sexual field she generated, her fears seemed far-fetched. Just because Jean was moving to Stroudsburg was no reason to assume she was plotting murder. And as a guy from the West, Charles found nothing particularly ominous about the idea that she would want to get a gun, once she was living someplace where they were legal. It had been thirteen days since their thing at the bar, and in that time he and Marissa had had one date, on the weekend. The date had been warm, fun, and lively, and Charles believed Marissa when she said her job was too busy just now for her to meet him this week. Maybe she was dating other guys, too—Charles could understand that. However, if they were only going to see each other once a week then it was frustrating that they hadn’t had sex yet. If they had to wait until the fourth date or whatever, then at this rate Marissa might easily lose interest in him beforehand.

On their date she’d asked if he’d broached with Stewart the subject of Jean’s possible trap. Charles had admitted he hadn’t, and had fended off her reproaches. He figured that if he acquiesced too easily and showed no resistance at all, Marissa was likely to get bored with him soon. That said, he reflected that, after all, it was a worrisome possibility, and he kept a sharper eye out for moments to bring the subject up with Stewart.

Meanwhile, Jean had already moved to a place she found in Stroudsburg. She and her roommate Helen had parted amicably, since Helen had been able to quickly find a replacement roommate. Jean and Helen had had a little goodbye party Jean’s last night in the apartment—just the two of them, plus four beers—and had promised each other to meet soon for drinks. They’d both been wondering if they really would.

She’d gone to that gun show the guy at the Jersey City gun shop had recommended. It would be lying to say there hadn’t been an element of fun to it. It had been an adventure, renting a car and finding her way along the highway to the nondescript town and its convention center. With trepidation she’d walked into that big bustling warehouse of a building, feeling as if she were trying to infiltrate a bevy of extra-terrestrials in a flimsy rubber-suit disguise. But if the denizens of this other world did notice that she didn’t belong, it only inspired them to be especially nice to her. And that gave Jean a warm feeling, because, Pennsylvanian though these people might be, what they reminded her of the most was Arkansas, of a gun-toting, right-leaning, Christian, rural breed that she’d avoided and lightly derided growing up, but that she realized now she’d missed. She’d drifted up to some guys at a table and explained what she wanted—home defense, etcetera—and they’d quite solicitously shown her the kind of handgun she needed and made sure she understood exactly how to use it. Despite the fact that the men had been lightly flirting, she’d had the feeling that she was in the hands of uncles or cousins who would let nothing bad happen to her. (She knew there was an Arkansas joke in there somewhere, but fuck it.) It was all the more poignant for the fact that they’d felt like uncles and cousins from whom she’d been long estranged, due to her own negligence. She’d had the urge to hang out longer—some of those vendors had some cool stuff, antiques and samurai swords and so on—but she had a long drive, so she’d taken her handgun back to the new house in Stroudsburg where she hadn’t yet unpacked a single box, then dropped the car off at the rental place, then taken the bus back to her new home.

Every morning she rode her bike to the bus station and chained it there to be retrieved at night. The commute to Manhattan was a drag, but it was nice to be living in a detached house with a tree in the yard. And Stroudsburg, being a new place, still seemed a touch exotic, though that would surely change.

Stewart got some voice messages from his mom.

When she called now—even when Maggie called—he normally let it go straight to voicemail. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to hear their voices, he always listened to the messages right away. This time, when he began to play his mother’s first message, he was especially glad he hadn’t picked up and talked to her live. If he’d been near his phone when she’d started calling, he would have eventually answered just this once, because she’d called multiple times, re-dialing each time her message went too long and cut her off, and if Stewart had seen her calling over and over like that he would have assumed someone had died.

He was in the living room when he started to listen to the first message, sitting on the couch he rented. A few seconds into the message he hung up and went upstairs to the roof to start it over again.

She’d left five messages. He saved each one, though to save them was like storing salt in a wound. In her voice he could hear how she was struggling not to cry. There was something heroic about her effort, about how almost completely she succeeded.