The Night Gwen Stacy Died (16 page)

“Sounds like a nice neighborhood,” Gwen said.

Iva said, “It did not used to be so good as it is now.”

Which Peter took to mean that the place could grow on you. He could see that.

“We heard animals last night,” Gwen said. “In the alley.”

“Rats,” Iva said. “Also”—here she paused, mimed the act of howling—“how do you say
this?”

“Wolves,” Peter said “Dogs.”

“Coyotes, she means,” said Gwen.

“Yes, this,” said Iva. “In the alleys, also sometimes in the park, you hear them.”

“But have you seen them?” Gwen asked.

Iva waved her hand dismissively at this, as if her expertise in such areas was being
challenged, though Peter could see that it was only that Gwen
wanted
to see one. She was funny about things like that. Whenever they saw a dog being walked
on the opposite side of the street, Gwen would practically knock Peter down to coddle
the thing, to work her fingers into its coat.

“You are very patient,” he’d heard her confide plainly to a dog that was tethered
to a bike rack outside a bar once, while checking the dog’s tags for the proper name
with which to address it. “Toast,” she’d added before Peter pulled her from the ground
where she knelt.

Iva continued, “They have to be removed.”

“Removed?” Gwen repeated.

“Sure,” said Peter. “Creatures like that could cause a lot of harm in the city. They
eat
dogs.”

“But they return,” said Iva. “If you want to see them”—she was talking to Gwen exclusively
now—“you must go to the lake. There they travel in packs.”

He could see Gwen had not yet exhausted the topic, so Peter took the opportunity to
step outside for a cigarette. There was a rickety bit of porch on the side of the
house, where if he strained his head, Peter could make out the dark expanse of the
park. He liked being close to so much land. He knew he had become distracted, that
he’d lost sight of his mission, but looking into the bulk of darkened shapes—barely
visible suggestions of what was really out there—he had the distinct feeling that
things were starting to come together.

How exactly to go about making things come together was unclear. It was his first
calling—if it could be called that—or anyway, it was the first time he had chosen
to try to follow the sketchy details from a dream to try to effect a change, and so
far, so good, but now what? He had a weapon, which seemed important. But what exactly
was he meant to do with it? Toward whom was he to point it? Peter imagined breaking
and entering into the bathrooms of the city’s loneliest men and making demands.
Come out with your hands up or I’ll shoot!
The entire proposition was absurd. In stories, those who hope to do harm call attention
to themselves. They kidnap public figures; they steal potent potions from scientific
labs and unleash monsters of their own creation on the general populace. But what
about the small and quiet criminals who hope to make no noise in their work? How to
save someone from himself?

The first week in Chicago he had snuck away for an hour or two with the pretense of
looking for work, but instead, he wandered the city, looking for clues. He rode city
buses. He walked the perimeter of parks. He found several small scrap yards, and he
spent the better part of a few afternoons wandering through the smashed up cars and
piles of trash. He saw nothing that resembled the isolated fragments from his dreams.
The thought occurred to him that it was Gwen who would have to lead him. He had the
foresight, yes, but she was there with him for a reason. He remembered the way she
had slapped him, straight out of the comics. He could do nothing but continue to look
for overlaps, make meaning of coincidence, and encourage her to keep improvising until
things started to resemble the stories he knew.

In the meantime, he washed dishes. He washed dishes in water so hot his arms stung
long after he’d removed them from the scalding basins. There were three sinks, a process:
wash, rinse, sanitize. After sanitization, it was contrary to health codes to rinse
a second time. He’d lift the dishes from their third bath still covered in suds—the
fluids of sanitation—but under no circumstances was he to ever rinse this dish again,
whatever he might think. This was explained to him by his supervisor at the Greek
restaurant, and explained again routinely by the prep cooks who chopped garlic and
destemmed spinach beside him.

“Peter, no good! No good!” they yelled.

Victor and Diego had worked their way up from dishwashing to kitchen prep, and as
such, they were willing to help Peter do the same, if he stuck around long enough.
Of course, he would not stick around long enough. He was being paid cash under the
table; this way there was no need to hand over his social security number or personal
information that might link him to the robbery of a gas station and a taxi three hundred
miles away. But already he was beginning to understand the constraints of the clandestine
existence he’d forged for Gwen and for himself.

Gwen had taken up Iva’s offer to clean houses with her, and she too would come home
with her hands cracked and brittle from so many cleaning products. Sometimes, he felt
bad he had brought her here. She clearly could have done better for herself than squeezing
the water out of sponges all day. But Gwen insisted that this is where she wanted
to be.

They had only lived together a few weeks, but already patterns were beginning to form,
routines he began to expect and look forward to. Every night they made dinner. Peter
did the shopping. Gwen pulled the pan out from beneath the sink and threw whatever
he bought inside of it, closed the lid. After dinner they went for walks, long walks,
in which Gwen wound her arm through Peter’s and they pointed out houses to one another
where they might have lived in another life, if Chicago were their city, and not just
this place where they were. They walked along the thrift shops on Milwaukee Avenue
and tried on clothes they sometimes bought. Peter had packed a change of clothes in
his duffle bag, but Gwen had come to Chicago with only the clothes on her back, so
it was far from frivolous to use some of their shared funds to buy a new pair of jeans
or T-shirt.

The last time they’d gone to the Salvation Army, Peter had run his hand along the
material of a navy blue dress with buttons and a cloth belt. While Gwen sifted quickly
through hangers in rows, Peter pushed the dress into her hands.

“What’s this?” she said.

“Try it on,” he said.

“I have nowhere to go in this.” Gwen held the dress up to her shoulders.

Peter shrugged.

“You’re blushing,” Gwen said. “Give it to me.”

When Gwen pulled back the curtain of the fitting room, Peter paused for a moment before
he stepped behind the curtain with her.

“Only one person allowed in the fitting rooms at a time,” a clerk called from the
counter.

“I’ll just be a second,” Peter said, but quietly for only Gwen to hear.

The dress was old-fashioned and it was cut for a woman with a bit more bust and hip
to her, but it hardly mattered. Peter stepped closer to the dress and fixed the collar
where it rose awkwardly in the back of Gwen’s neck.

“What’s the big idea?” she asked.

Peter reached for the rubber band that held back her ponytail and tugged twice to
free Gwen’s hair from it. He placed his hand at the small of her back and turned Gwen
toward the mirror, so she could see herself, so she could see how in this dress she
was a spitting image of the Empire State University science major who would become
Spider-Man’s first love.

“Put on the dress,” Peter would sometimes say at night, and Gwen would obligingly
walk out of her jeans in the bedroom and slip her arms through the fabric. Peter breathed
deeply into the material that covered her shoulder as he held her and felt that he
was breathing in so much that he had lost.

The way Spider-Man had clutched at Gwen Stacy’s body after she died, like there was
nothing he could do to make things right, Peter remembered. He remembered Jake curled
in a heap in his childhood closet, his fingers twitching. He remembered his mother
staring off into the buttons of the microwave without touching a number to heat her
dinner. Peter held Gwen in their bedroom in Chicago and breathed in the smell of her
hair.

“Okay, that’s enough,” Gwen would say then, and she’d put the dress on a hanger and
return it to their closet. And it was. Even seeing her in it for five minutes like
that was enough to conjure a world of loneliness and so affirm their reason for coming.

The truth was it had been easier than he would have ever imagined to coerce Gwen into
the car with him. It was as if she had been sitting there in the station, waiting
for him to show up. Peter had anticipated that the entire prospect would require some
convincing, and so he had planned to tell her everything—the nightmares, the comic
books, the way his brother had died—but Gwen had asked him to point the gun at her.
Gwen did most of the talking in the car. Gwen had removed his clothes, unprovoked,
on the very first night they shared a room.

Peter had been with a few local girls in early adolescence, he had visited a prostitute
more recently; once, regrettably, he had slept with a fare in the back of his cab,
but these had been quiet, efficient exchanges, the scripted trajectory from grope
to release that he had learned from movies along with everyone else. None of this
had prepared him in the least for the patient concentration of Gwen Stacy slowly unbuttoning
his shirt—as if not to wake him—while he pretended to sleep. Peter had understood
that if he opened his eyes, Gwen would be there, inches from his face, the blond ponytail
that she favored hovering between them like an intermediary, ready to bargain. He
had told himself that he wouldn’t touch the girl, though every hour of the drive he’d
felt increasingly prone to question this rationale; she was young, and, at the time,
he wasn’t even sure how young—she was almost certainly lying to him about her age.
But young, possibly a full ten years younger; seventeen, he feared, was not a bad
guess. When she had finished with the buttons, she started to trace lines in his skin
with her fingers. Peter cleared his throat. He fought the impulse to open his eyes.
He’d said, “Gwen, go to sleep.”

“I can’t sleep,” she had said. “Obviously.”

“You should try,” Peter said.

Several minutes went by and Peter thought he had successfully evaded confrontation,
when he felt something flicker twice between his ribs. Peter exhaled, lifted her on
top of him and looked her in the eye. “Hmmm?” he asked.

“I didn’t say anything,” she said.

“You didn’t say anything,” Peter repeated. “Did you just lick me?”

Gwen shrugged. “Uh, I guess, yeah I did.”

Peter closed his eyes. But their speaking somehow seemed to grant her further access,
permission to continue. She kissed his face—eyebrow, chin, ear—quietly, and it was
only when he began to push off her clothes that her demeanor shifted. She became loud,
sharp in her movements, which gave Peter the distinct feeling she was performing for
him—or worse, that he was her first—a thought that Peter quickly pushed from his mind,
even while he was covering her mouth with his hand.

“Shhh,” he whispered. “Do you want to get caught?”

Gwen had giggled into his hand at his little joke, which really was no joke at all.
The old thrill of getting caught having sex, in this case, did not apply. He had paid
for the room; it was theirs to use as they wanted. Getting caught, in this case, applied
to each of their joint actions leading up to the acquisition of the hotel room, a
laundry list of morally questionable decisions.

And so while he might have preferred to wait to consummate whatever they were going
to be to each other, it was Gwen who had pursued him. It was Gwen who had unfastened
the buttons of his shirt and pushed her hand along the flat plane of his stomach,
and it was Gwen who had made so many strange noises, so much like something in pain,
that when Peter thought back to this first night, he had to work hard to remind himself
that he hadn’t forced himself onto her. She seemed to oscillate between wanting to
run things and wanting to follow his lead. She had asked him that night in the bar
to call her Gwen, to retire all other names for the purpose of addressing her, and
he had agreed, complied; besides, it was the name he had always used in his mind to
address her even if he didn’t do so with his voice. So he was glad that she wanted
to take the name he had offered her, but also it made him feel a little uneasy, like
there were parts about the rules they were making that only she understood.

For the first week, he’d allowed himself to be distracted.

“What would you rather be?” Gwen would ask. “A collie or a greyhound?”

“A collie,” he said. He kissed the underside of her wrist, where her veins crossed
paths.

“Montana or Wyoming?”

“Wyoming,” Peter said.

Gwen wrinkled her nose at him. “Invisibility or x-ray vision?”

Peter sat up. “What kind of question is that?”

“The one I’m asking,” Gwen said.

“Invisibility.” He said it quickly, but he could feel pressure building in his face,
the shame of thinking himself special.

“Why?” Gwen said.

“How should I know,” he said.

It got quiet for a minute.

“It’s okay,” Gwen said after awhile. “I would want to be invisible too.”

More recently—perhaps as he grew to care for her more, perhaps as she grew to share
more in common with the Gwen Stacy whose stories he read as a child—Peter had become
lazy with letting the messy contradictions in his brain hang loose for her to see.
The other day Gwen had asked him, apropos of nothing, “So what do you think will happen
to us if we get caught?”

“Nothing will happen to you,” he assured her. “It’s a good thing we put on that little
show with the gun for the security camera. We can say I kidnapped you, and no one
would question it.”