City Boy by Thompson Jean

Author:Thompson, Jean [Thompson, Jean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SOC035000
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Published: 2010-05-12T04:00:00+00:00

Seven

Chloe had left for work and Jack was searching through the apartment for her journal.

He didn’t bother feeling bad about it. If you were going to rummage in your wife’s underwear drawer and the back of her closet and through her desk, if you got down on your hands and knees to look under the bed, inhale the scurf of rolling gray dust and poke among the rinds of some forgotten, calcified food item, you had to be resolute about shutting down your finer feelings.

He couldn’t find the journal. He had to wonder if it was even here, if she might have taken it with her to the office. He had gotten it into his head to read what she wrote. He needed it to feed his unhappiness, keep it up and running.

After Chloe’s parents left town, Jack said, “We need to talk about this New York thing.”

“I don’t think so.”

“How many other people are going? Just curious.”

“I have no idea. What’s all this about, you don’t trust me out of your sight? Because then we really do have problems.”

He hadn’t answered. Backed down. There was nothing to accuse her with except his own jealousy and ravening need. He didn’t want to bring up Spence’s name just to bait her. New York became a code word for everything unspoken between them. By now Jack wasn’t even certain if he wanted to be proved right or wrong, a jilted husband or a crazy man. He wasn’t sure if Chloe’s journal would prove anything either, but he wanted to know what she wrote in secret. Pathetic, that he would have to read a book to know her heart and mind.

And then, just when he thought he had lost everything, Chloe would turn to him in bed and curl herself around him and they’d fuck, that was the word, hard and fast, and Chloe would whisper I want you, I want all of you, and there was something new and fevered between them that he would never get his fill of.

He stopped even pretending to work on his own writing. It no longer seemed possible to believe that the people he wrote about were real. Just as California had ceased to be a place he wanted to live, he didn’t want to write about it anymore. He supposed he’d thought of James Joyce writing of Ireland from the Continent. California would be his Ireland. He would reveal and expose the country of his youth (its beautiful surfaces and shallow depths) with his gifts of silence, exile, and cunning. Except he wasn’t Joyce. Funny how he hadn’t noticed before.

In an attempt to salvage something from the novel, he spent several mornings making elaborate notes, diagrams of where the plot and characters might take him, complete with swooping arrows and exclamation points and interlocking circles. When he looked at these pages, it was apparent that he had been drawing, not writing.

He didn’t say anything about this to Chloe. When she asked him how things were going, he said what he always did, that things were fine, not bad.

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