City Boy (30 page)

Jack wondered if Spence was going on vacation with his family somewhere, and Chloe felt aggrieved by it. Or was she going to break his damn-fool heart all over again, and take him back?

He opted for French farce. “You, me, and the bears. Sounds idyllic.”

“Forget bears. Zero bears.”

Chloe had looked up some places on-line. She had printouts, rate quotes. There were pictures of chalets and knotty-pine interiors, sunsets over glassy lakes, happy vacationers picking berries, building campfires, hauling trophy fish out of foaming rivers. There were waitresses bearing trays of hearty north-woods fare, there was Paul Bunyan rendered in massive fiberglass. It was all a little corny, it all had the look of well-worn vacation country, generations of weary city families heading up to Minocqua or Lake Tomahawk. But what the hell. It was yellow August and Chicago baked in its own sweaty juices. It was bound to be cooler somewhere else, and besides, his wife was asking him to go away with her.

They settled on a place with golf and tennis. Not that they really wanted to play golf or tennis, but it seemed a good socioeconomic indicator, just as water slides and go-carts suggested another kind of place. For extravagant credit card promises, they got a three-night reservation. Jack picked Chloe up early from work on a Thursday and they stopped at a rest area north of the city so she could change into shorts and a T-shirt. They watched corn and bean fields give way to pasture,
hay fields, grazing black-and-white cows, red barns, the placid countryside of America’s Dairyland. “Vacation,” said Jack. “Vacation,” said Chloe.

Chloe rolled down her window and let her hair whip around her face. “When’s the last time we went away like this? Just for fun.”

He had to think. “Honeymoon.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope.”

“New Orleans.”

Jack nodded, keeping his eyes on the road. Chloe was silent as she calculated. “I guess you’re right. That’s sad.”

“All work, no play. Tragic consequences.”

“What’s that supposed to mean, tragic?”

“Nothing,” he said heavily. “It was a witticism. An attempt.”

“I don’t want to spend all weekend talking about stuff, okay? I want this to be a noncombat zone.”

The highway signs promised places like Bear Creek, Shawano, Belle Plaine. Clouds as white and puffy as a child’s drawing hung in a crayon-blue sky. The horizon began to close in with marching woods. Jack wondered if Chloe had fallen asleep. But she stirred. “Did you make an appointment with what’s-her-name yet?”

“I thought you said noncombat zone.”

“We aren’t there yet.”

“You’re pretending not to remember her name because you don’t like her.”

“Well, did you?”

“Not yet.”

She yawned. “I don’t know if I can do another of those sessions. I think I’m through with all that sad-sack talk.”

Jack said, “Well, I guess that’s good. It could be good. Depending on how you mean it.”

He waited for her to answer but this time she really had fallen asleep.

The resort was a snazzy new log construction designed to evoke historic lodges. Golf carts zipped over the last fairway. The parking lot was full of prosperous vehicles. There was an actual lake in the near distance.
Inside, the lobby was blond wood and timbers and chandeliers made of antlers. Their room was grandly oversized, with a balcony that offered a view of the shoreline. They felt hopeful, and then some.

They dropped their bags and went out to sit on the deck. A waitress came to take their drink orders. Chloe asked for club soda. She said, “Oh go ahead, get a beer or something. I’m tired of watching you not drink.”

Jack ordered a Leinenkugel. It sounded like something you ought to drink in Wisconsin. He said, “Now, that’s a lake.”

“Very close to what I had in mind. Yes indeed.”

The lake stretched out before them in a wide oval, gray at the dock just below where they sat, veined with blue and green farther out. The opposite shore was a third of a mile away. Toy houses lined the water’s edge and forested hills rose above them. The far ends of the oval were lost in the trees. A single powerboat buzzed across the lake’s surface. A tennis court not too far away sent out the friendly sounds of a ball traveling back and forth. The coming sunset filled the sky with stained-glass tints. It was as pretty a piece of cultivated nature as you could find within four hours’ driving distance.

The waitress returned with their drinks. Jack said, “I have a question about bears.”

“Just stay on the hiking trails and don’t throw away any food.”

She left and Chloe said, “That was actually a little more information than I needed.”

They raised their glasses and drank to the bears, and then again to avoiding bears. The sunset deepened. Jack asked Chloe if she was hungry and she said she wanted to lie down for a little first.

“You feeling okay?”

“Kind of draggy. I am a drag. Sorry.” There were patches of muddy skin beneath her eyes. When Chloe was overtired, her face took on a taut, stretched look, an unsettling skull-beneath-the-skin quality. “I think I just need a nap. Come get me when you want to eat.”

“You need anything? Want me to come with?”

But Chloe told him to stay put, she was the official drag here. Jack ordered another beer. He watched the sun touch the western edge of
the lake, fire the water into opal and gold. The deck, and the lounge behind it, filled up with people coming in from their golf games or antiquing tours or other organized fun. For the most part they were older than him and Chloe. The resort’s prices were too steep for the young and struggling. The guests were Midwestern healthy, that is, well fed, sunburned, good-natured. They wore clothes that had been purchased specifically for vacations. Every one of them seemed to be in a fine mood. They were whooping it up. They were getting their money’s worth. Jack had to keep reminding himself of where he was. It was all too disorienting, as if he’d ended up in somebody else’s vacation by mistake.

After forty-five minutes he went back to the room to check on Chloe. She was curled up, asleep, the blanket pulled over her. The window curtains were drawn and the room was dim. He used the bathroom, came out, spoke her name. She didn’t stir. She looked as if she’d fallen from some great height. Jack shut the room door behind him and went back to the lounge.

He sat at the bar and ordered a sandwich. The beer was making him feel thickheaded, so he switched to scotch. The sandwich came and he got busy with it.

“Fight?”

It was their waitress from earlier. She was standing next to him at the bar. “Excuse me?”

“You two have a fight?”

After a moment he said, “Not this time.” He hadn’t really noticed her before. She was older than him, mid-thirties perhaps, and she looked like she’d been a cocktail waitress all her life. Something thin, wiry, and worn down about her. Cigarettes-and-coffee skin. Pretty in spite of it. A band of green eyeliner along her upper lid, black below. Her eyelashes were shaggy. Red hair, chemical and overbright, but Jack thought it was probably meant to look dyed, it was red for fun, the same way people did hair pink or purple. Her name tag said Susie.

She said, “I know. None of my business.” She raised one eyebrow, as if waiting for him to decide between baked potato or fries.

“Susie.”

“That’s me.”

“You married, Susie?”

“Twice. I think I’m over it. Don’t listen to me. I’m a girl with an attitude.” There was Wisconsin in her voice, in the bleating
a
s and the upward twist she gave her sentences.

Jack turned on his bar stool and surveyed the room around him as a conversational tactic, a way to look at something else besides her. “All these people are happily married,” he announced.

“You think? I could tell you some stories. Well. Back to work. I’m sure glad you nice folks didn’t have you a spat.”

Jack watched her as she made the rounds of her tables. The resort went in for middle-of-the-road sexiness when it came to uniforming their servers. White ruffled blouses, cleavage available if you looked hard enough, short black skirt with just a hint of dirndl. She moved with a measured efficiency, picking up, putting down, dispensing chat, smiles, change. He was trying to remember if he’d left her much of a tip.

He finished his drink and his sandwich, paid his tab, and went back to the room. Chloe didn’t seem to have moved. Jack leaned down to feel her cheek. She wasn’t feverish, and her breathing was calm. You couldn’t really be angry with someone for falling asleep.

He went back out to the deck. By now the sky was completely dark. The resort had illuminated their portion of the docks and shoreline with small electric lanterns, so as not to be sued by guests who might otherwise fall into the drink. There were a few lights visible on the lake’s far shore. A cool breeze was blowing. It smelled of lake damp and pine. He turned his head so that he was facing only blackness: tree, water, sky. Whatever else might happen, he was glad to be in this place where you could have the illusion of peaceful nothingness.

After a minute Susie came out of the lounge to take his order. “I don’t need anything, thanks. Just getting some air.”

“She didn’t kick you out, did she?”

“She’s sleeping. Catching up on her sleep.”

“Glad to hear it. Saves a lot of trouble. Thought we’d have to find you a flop.”

Jack took in her tough, serviceable little body, the jut of her hip as she balanced her tray, her watchful eyes in their rings of makeup. He said, “No need. Thanks.”

“You come up here for the fishing? Golf ? Just a little getaway? Quality time for the two of you? What’s your name, hon?”

Jack told her. “Nice to meet you, Jack. Look, don’t mind me. It’s what I do for a living. Cocktail talk. Smart mouth. Cheer people up. A lot of guys go for it.”

“I bet they do.”

Her attention lifted from him to a table of golf buddies who were reaching the bottom of their glasses. “Well, don’t sit out too late. We’re not supposed to tell the guests, but sometimes those damn bears come right up on this porch, looking for something tasty.”

“Thanks for the heads-up.”

He watched her walk over to the golf buddies, jolly them up, watched them decide to stay for one more round. After a little while he got up and went back to the room, stripped off his clothes and lay beside Chloe in the strange bed. He couldn’t give himself much credit for passing up something he didn’t want in the first place, but at least he was capable of making a normal, adult decision.

Jack woke up to the sound of a running shower. He opened his eyes to the room’s unfamiliar light and shadows. Chloe came out looking scrubbed and small in a white terry-cloth robe. “Oh. You’re awake.”

“How’s Sleeping Beauty?”

“God. You must have thought I’d died on you.”

“You slept right through dinner. I bet you’re starved.”

But when they were seated in the knotty-pine and gingham dining room, facing a menu that swam in syrup and butter and offered five different kinds of pancakes and four different kinds of pig, all Chloe wanted was juice and toast. “What,” said Jack.

“Nothing.”

“If you’re sick …”

“No, I just don’t feel like, whatever it is you got, moose-meat pie and spaghetti.”

“Biscuits and gravy. Fine. Don’t eat. Cheaper that way.” Chloe still looked tired, out of sorts, and the last thing he wanted was to push her into some stupid argument for no reason. It brought home to him how very badly he wanted this small interlude where he could pretend that everything was well between them.

After breakfast they wandered along the lakefront. It was a clear, bright day with the wind from the north and it was possible to imagine that someday soon it might be autumn. They got in the car and took a tour of the local country, the roadside stands selling corn and white peaches and cherries and honey, the gift shops where you could buy ugly quilts and wood burnings and teddy bears and cheese, cheese, cheese. They ate lunch at a tavern that did indeed have deer heads and fish mounted on the wall, and rest rooms labeled Pointers and Setters, and Chloe had her appetite back now and ate a club sandwich and potato salad, and for a joke they put quarters in the jukebox and played all the polka songs, the ones with tubas and accordians. An old man at the bar, as dry and spry as a grasshopper, asked Chloe to dance. When she protested that she didn’t know how, he took her hand and guided her up and down the plank floor, slow at first, then a merry, bouncing pace that made her gasp and wheeze with laughter. Jack watched the old man’s face kindle with pleasure and he thought how it was a harmless kindness, in certain circumstances, to share your pretty wife.

The music ended and Chloe sat down, fanning herself and out of breath, and the old man clapped Jack on the shoulder and wanted to buy him a drink, and Jack said thanks, but they’d better get a move on.

The old man told Chloe to come back sometime on her own, leave Junior at home, and everybody in the place got a good laugh out of that one.

They were still smiling when they got in the car, and Jack said, “Well, that was—”

“Look, there’s something I have to tell you, and I don’t know how else to do it except just say it.”

His first thought was, Not now. Not this happy, high-water moment that would be taken away from him. He stared out the windshield and waited.

“I’m surprised you don’t know already, I mean, it’s right under your nose …” Jack turned toward her, shaping words. “I’m pregnant.”

Then she said, “Say something.”

Jack shook his head. “Incredible.”

“Tell me you’re happy.”

“Sure.” He started the car. “That’s great. Yay us.”

“Mornings are getting a little rough. That honestly happens. What? What is it?”

“Shell shock. Give me a minute.” He turned onto the highway and headed back toward the lodge. “You’re sure about this?”

“I did one of those tests. I guess I should go to a doctor to make sure. But I swear, I can tell. I feel all
fertile
.” She waited for him to insert some enthusiasm.

“So when is all this … When?”

Chloe’s expression grew avid. “You’re supposed to count from your last period, but I know it’s got to be a couple weeks after that, so July August September October November December January February March. Sometime in March.”