Making Love to the Minor Poets of Chicago by James Conrad

Author:James Conrad
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2000-12-26T05:00:00+00:00

Louis had Joanne meet him at an expensive restaurant downtown, where he insisted they sit outside. The night air was still muggy, and Joanne felt like she could write in it with her finger. Over chilled white wine and cool salads they told each other about their days.

One of the first things Louis had asked her four months ago was “Do you own a car?” after a meeting in which she had challenged the room to be more protective of the environment. His question challenged her and drew her to him as she had always been drawn to men who seemed to know more than she did.

Whenever Joanne would throw some article at him she’d found about fault lines running below Yucca Mountain, possibilities of an Ice Age, or the ever-threatening long, slow drip of groundwater through miles of rock, Louis would calmly look back at her and say something like “So your solution is to leave it all spread out, above ground, where eventually some breach of security will allow it to fall into the wrong hands or the wrong water tables?” Or, his favorite, “So you advocate the continued burning of fossil fuels, which will eventually turn that ozone hole we’re hearing so much about over Antarctica into a tear stretching all the way up to North America?”

After dinner they walked along the Chicago River with its spotlights on the sides of the city’s skyscrapers, their ornate towers lit up like a birthday cake along the river. He stopped at the front door of Executive Plaza Hotel, one of the first postmodern glass box buildings and eventual scapegoat of the architectural school. Louis pulled a room key from his pocket and handed it to her.

“You’re kidding,” Joanne said, looking up at the glass front of the hotel as if she could actually pick out the room the key was for.

“One night where we don’t have to sleep on opposite sides of the bed,” he said, pulling her into the revolving door, both of them packed into one stall like a couple on prom night. “It’s on the government. Surely they’d want us to look after our mental health.”

Upstairs they stepped into a dark room lit only by the wild skyline, which was so close around them that it seemed like they were in the center of an amusement park. Louis reached over and turned the thermostat all the way down to sixty.

“Quite a waste of energy, I’d say,” Joanne said.

“We’ll keep the light off,” Louis guided her gently to the large bed. Afterward they shared a cigarette, pressed together with the sheet, blanket, and bedspread pulled up to their chins.

“Tell me that part again, about the waves,” Joanne said, letting her eyes close, her head in that comfortable position at the indentation between his chest and shoulder. She was asking him to tell the story again about the French nuclear test he had been at a year before in Tahiti. A mile-long hole had been dug straight down through a reef and a hydrogen bomb detonated.

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