Stewart and Jean (7 page)

“Oh, come on, don’t be a wimp.”

“Oh ho, is this a challenge?”

“Yeah, it’s a challenge. It’s a dare.”

“Okay, so I accept this dare, but you’ll have to accept another dare in the future, of equal or greater value.”

“What dare is that?”

“To be determined.”

“So basically just a blank check.”

“In exchange for singing karaoke in this crowded Irish bar? Yup, that’s what I want.”

They drained the last of their mugs and Marissa insisted they go sign up right away—no reprieves. Oh well, if they were singing instead of drinking, he’d save some money at least. There was a harmlessly malicious edge to the grin and wink Marissa gave him. Who knew if anything would come of it, even a make-out session; for the moment it was pleasurable enough just to be her plaything.

Jean continued popping into Temple Books as she’d always done. She made a point of going just as often as ever, albeit without the same relaxation as before; not at first, anyway. She didn’t go on any more big sprees—it was wasteful, plus she found piles of books you don’t have time to read depressing. So after that one time she no longer tried to flaunt her greater economic power. To begin with she would pointedly ignore Stewart. But soon she could flip through books again for minutes at a time with hardly a thought of him. He also soon seemed able to go about his work without being excessively preoccupied with her.

She got used to seeing him there. Once she started thinking the whole thing over in the absence of adrenaline, it became a little less egregious, although still kind of nuts. He never threatened her or anything—to be honest, he never had. She could understand why Stewart would be fucked up over his big brother being killed, even though she refused to feel guilty. It wasn’t like Stewart had known his brother was a rapist, or anything. It even would be understandable for him to refuse to believe Kevin had ever tried to rape her.

After all, Kevin hadn’t always been such a bad guy, though it had been hard to remember that ever since the thing had happened. Or rather, it had never occurred to her to remember it till she started seeing Stewart around. He brought those early days back, so that sometimes she was even able to recall them almost without the taint of the intervening trauma. They’d had some laughs, her and Kevin. Early on.

One day, about three weeks after her date with Stewart, she was at Temple, leaning her shoulder against one of the shelves, flipping through a volume of Proust and wondering if it would be worth it to forego the time needed to read ten other books instead, just to banish her sense of failure at not having read Proust. Stewart appeared before her with some books to shelve. He glanced up but seemed hardly to register her. That was how accustomed they’d gotten to seeing each other. It was crazy—she wondered which of them was Jane Goodall and which the chimp.

For no particular reason, she let her eyes stay on Stewart after he’d looked away; she was mulling over this weird connection they had, and reflecting that the most bizarre part was how it had become part of their everyday lives.

Stewart noticed she was looking at him and looked up at her in turn.

Without thinking it over first, Jean smiled faintly and in a soft voice said, “Hi.”

From his face you would have thought she’d told him to go fuck his mother. For a few seconds Jean could pretend she was misreading him, since he seemed unable to find his voice to say anything. Maybe she should have looked away, but it was hard not to keep an eye on someone who was staring at you like that.

Finally he walked up to her. When he came to a halt he was already too close. She stood her ground. “What did you say to me?” he demanded, in a tightly-controlled growl.

“I said ‘Hey,’” she said, tightening down her gut and clamping her feet to the floor in preparation for a fight, keeping the book between him and her.

“And why did you say that?” he asked. “Why did you say ‘Hey’ to me?”

“Because I saw you standing there and decided to try being civil.”

Jean had reasoned out, over the last couple weeks, that even if Stewart did lose his shit and attack her, he probably wouldn’t seriously hurt her and she would be able to use the event to press charges or at least get a restraining order against him. Not that a restraining order was likely to do much good. Anyway, that certainly wasn’t very comforting now, when it looked like he really was going to slap her. She resolved not to flinch unless he actually went for her, and hoped she still looked steady and unafraid.

She was succeeding better than she could have guessed. So much so that her cool, distant, aloof face was taken by Stewart for contempt, and nearly really did goad him into hitting her.

He said, “Why would you be civil to me? Are we friends or something?”

He was speaking in a low hiss, keeping their conversation private. They were between two shelves, hidden from the cashiers and the front of the store. Instead of answering loudly enough to draw attention, and to draw help in case Stewart did flip out, Jean automatically matched his volume: “No, but I figured I may as well try it since apparently we’re going to be seeing each other all the time, thanks to you.”

“It’s not supposed to be pleasant for you!”

“Are your feelings hurt because I’m not mad enough that you’re stalking me?”

He blinked like his eyes were stinging, and she wondered if he was going to cry. Fine, fuck him.

She said, “I’m a human being, not some animal you’re tracking.”

“How can you not even feel bad about it?” From the way his voice crackled, she thought he might soon have to start shouting in order to keep from crying. But for now both of them continued to speak in rough whispers.

“How I feel about what happened to me is none of your business. The same way how you feel about him is none of mine. If you want to talk about how you feel then I guess maybe I’ll listen. But I do not want to talk about how I feel.”

“My dead brother is none of my business?”

“What happened between me and him in Rogers is not any of....” Jean faltered and trailed off, because the shooting death of his brother manifestly was Stewart’s business. And yet the memory of what had happened felt deeply personal … or maybe “personal” was the wrong word, given how endlessly she’d repeated her account, under official circumstances. But through it all she had held on fiercely to her sense that she owned the events, that they were hers to interpret. Not to fabricate, she had been scrupulously honest, but she would not let anyone twist the interpersonal and ethical dynamics to suit some other agenda, to make out like what Kevin had been doing hadn’t been so bad and she’d overreacted. Kevin had been asking for it. She was offended and confused that the mere presence of his brother should be enough to weaken that certainty, emotionally if not intellectually.

So instead of finishing her sentence, she said, “What is it you want from me?”

“I want you to regret it.”

“Is that a threat?”

“No. Jesus. I want you to regret having killed that human being, the way any normal person would.”

Now she was the one having to blink against the stinging of her eyes. “And what about what he was gonna do to me, huh? Who gets to regret that?”

“No one, now. He would have, if you’d given him a chance.” In a tone as if he were reminding himself that he had to be patient with her, because of how stupid she was, he said, “He was only kidding around. I’m not saying what he did was right, but he never would have really hurt you.”

“I’m sure you’re right. He just would have held me down and fucked me when I didn’t want him to.”

“He would never have done that! He was only kidding!”

“Hey, you weren’t there, you didn’t see his face.”

“Yeah, well now I never will,” he snapped.

After that they stood glaring at each other and breathing hard.

This is ridiculous,
Jean thought.

“Listen,” she said, in a carefully calm voice. A customer wandered into earshot, and Jean and Stewart watched him uncomfortably, waiting for him to go. He picked up on the vibe and looked at them in surprise, then moved away to leave them their space.

“Listen,” she said again. Then, again, she stopped. She’d been about to say, “We have to find a way to live with each other.” But why? He was just a guy who worked in the bookstore downstairs, he wasn’t likely to work there forever. And it wasn’t like she would be in her current job the rest of her life, either. Who cared whether she and Stewart got along? Couldn’t she simply ignore him?

But when he spoke again, still with that intense glare fixed on her, it was like she’d spoken her thought aloud and he was responding to it. “I didn’t come up here to live in harmony with you,” he said. “I’m not exactly sure of the details of why I came, but it definitely wasn’t that.”

“As far as I can tell you came here so you could make me feel bad.”

“Yeah. Thanks, that’s it—I just couldn’t figure out the right way to phrase it. But yeah, I moved up here to make you feel bad.”

“Is that really the only reason you came?”

“The only one you need to worry about.”

For a while they continued merely to look at each other. But there was no reason to keep doing that, so Jean left.

Back in her cubicle, she didn’t think the encounter had bothered her much. In fact, a few times she said to herself,
P
oor Stewar
t
. But when she left work and walked to Grand Central, she kept peering compulsively over her shoulder. She kept it up even once she was walking home from her station. Even once she was back in her apartment with the door locked.

Her right hand was shaking. To still it she gripped it with her left. Her ears were ringing, as if the gunshots had only now exploded in front of her, instead of six years ago. How loud they’d been! And the way Kevin had gone sailing backwards so slowly, his arms overhead and outstretched, so that she’d wondered what he was doing till she’d realized he was falling because she’d shot him. In her head she knew he must not have fallen slowly at all, but that was the way she remembered it. And there had been all that blood.

She tried to read but it was impossible to concentrate so she put the book down. Only then did she realize it was one of the books she’d bought when she was showing off to Stewart. She flipped open her laptop and called up Netflix. There was a long queue of foreign movies she’d been meaning to watch, but she didn’t feel like seeing anything real and decided to just watch “Frasier.”

The laugh tracks droned. When she’d shot Kevin, blood had splattered back onto her.

Even if she did get a new job, or Stewart left his, he would keep putting himself in her line of sight as long as she let him. So she couldn’t let him.

Jean had been talking to people back home about the whole Stewart thing—a very select few people, anyway. Like her old best friend Penny.

Jean and Penny had been friends in high school, but Penny had gone to college in Louisiana. During those four years they’d drifted apart slightly, then reconnected after graduation. Jean wasn’t in touch much with the friends she’d had in the Honors College, in Conway. Most everyone had believed her account of what had happened, but Kevin had had an undeniable charisma and, despite his abrasive antics, lots of people had liked him. There had been a certain ambiguity to the whole shooting/rape situation. Anyway, even though her friends had on the whole been perfectly willing to be supportive of her, after they were done being supportive they generally had not seemed keen on hanging out any further. Kevin’s friends, of course, had generally
not
been supportive. Penny had never met Kevin.

Jean called Penny the Saturday after her encounter at Temple with Stewart and tried to describe the meeting, but couldn’t quite put it into words satisfactorily. Penny was saying for the thousandth time that Jean should call the police and inform them of what was going on, “just in case.” This was undoubtedly true, but Jean felt embarrassed at the thought of calling the cops on Stewart when he technically hadn’t done much, yet.

Apropos of nothing, Jean said, “I’m thinking of moving out of the city.”

“What?!” exclaimed Penny; then, with a gleam of hope, “Back to Arkansas?”

“
No
. Like, to Westchester, maybe. That’s north of the city. Or even to Pennsylvania, and commuting.”

“Oh.... Jean, honey, you’re not letting Kevin’s brother run you off, are you?”

“Oh, no. No. I just finally miss having a yard, is all.”

After she got off the phone she went online and started looking for a place, preferably a stand-alone home, one where somebody could walk right up to the front door. As she clicked through the sites of various realtors, looking at the pictures, it came to her that, actually, she really did miss having a yard. Maybe she should even think about getting a mortgage and buying a place, though the idea was kind of freaky. She made some calls and got some appointments to look at places in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. Why delay?

For a second she felt excited about the proposed life-change, the trees and space and all that. Then she remembered what her actual plan was, and it was like all the guts in her lower belly suddenly hardened to solid ice.

She got a shower and went to Jersey City. Walking to the train she used her smartphone to call up a list of Jersey City gun shops.

Once at the gun shop, she felt a strange tumult. Though fluorescents, the lights seemed somehow warm. It felt like being back in Arkansas. But that was strange, because even in Arkansas she’d never been in a gun shop. Her family had been one of the few she’d known of growing up that hadn’t kept guns in the house, and she herself had always been more or less against them, and had considered New York’s anti-gun laws one of the perks of living there.

Even now, looking uncertainly around the gun shop, she was against them. Even that one day in Rogers, she’d been against them as a general principle. If Kevin had paused long enough to challenge her by saying something like, “Oh, I see all of a sudden you’re pro-gun,” she would have denied it. She remembered that when she shot him, she’d been studying Kant’s categorical imperative for a class. According to the categorical imperative, you were supposed to act as if each one of your actions obeyed an ideal universal law. If Jean had believed that the world was a place where practicing the categorical imperative made sense, would do some good, then she supposed she wouldn’t have shot Kevin, or else she would have felt bad about it later. But, regardless of whether or not she personally was or was not predisposed towards seeing the universe through the lens of ethical considerations, there was no denying the fact that this was a world of special cases, and that when push came to shove there was something a little ridiculous about insisting on abstract principles when the stakes were so concrete.