by Matthew Batt
Jenae, I learned, was paying $350 to share an apartment with a girl named Stacey, from Ishpeming, Michigan, and a forty-year-old finance guy from Framingham, Mass., who followed them from room to room turning the lights off to save money. This was in Jamaica Plain, a neighborhood where shop signs were in English, Irish, or Spanish.
The Bridge people hung out fairly often at the Brendan Behan, just down the hill from her apartment. From the outside, it was a prototypical black-and-gold-lettered Irish pub where you imagined there would be a fiddler and a tin-whistler and somebody in a burly sweater beating on the old tam, but once you opened the door you were nearly leveled by the sound and smoke. The place was tight and loud, and it felt as if you were trapped in the hold of a submarine working its way through a barrage of depth charges. We’d scream over the Fugazi or 7 Seconds about what a genius/prick James Joyce was and whether Samuel Beckett would have written for Sesame Street or The Electric Company if he were alive today. A pint of Guinness at the Behan would set you back six bucks, so we tried to stretch things out by drinking on an empty stomach or after donating blood.
“It’s coming down to quitting drinking or selling plasma,” Jenae said, looking balefully at the bottom of her empty glass.
I told her about Thornton’s and how, after work, everybody got a free “shift beer,” which often turned into a six-pack, so long as it wasn’t anything fancy. She was intrigued. She had worked in, of all the world’s mysteries, a seafood restaurant in Nebraska.
The next day, I asked Bud if they needed any more help.
“Is she hot?” he asked.
I blushed, said I guessed so.
“Tell her she can start tomorrow,” Bud said. “But she better be hot.”
After class let out one day, the rain caught us both. I asked Jenae how she was getting back to Jamaica Plain.
“I haven’t melted yet,” she said, unlocking her bike by the door.
“I—” I said. I had to use one hand to keep the other from trembling. She hadn’t yet started at the restaurant, so we still hadn’t spent much time with each other. “I could give you a ride?”
“I bet you could,” Jenae said. “But I’ve got my bike.”
I told her I had a bike rack. It was true, but it felt like a line anyway.
“Do you know how to use it?”
“I—” I said. I almost threw up.
“You’re sweet,” she said, putting her helmet on. “But I’m meeting Stacey. We ride home together.”
I did some quick calculating.
“It’s a two-bike bike rack,” I said.
When I pulled up to their skinny building, which was shingled in tarpaper made to look like bricks, Stacey hopped out first.
“You ought to stay for a while,” she said. “It’s Wednesday. Root beer float day.”
“I don’t like owing people anything,” Jenae said. “This is probably a long way for you.”
I told her not at all, even though I was so lost I was probably going to have to hire a taxi to follow back to Fenway—I had only ever taken the T out there, and the roads were strewn about between here and there like a pot of spilled noodles.
“How about this,” she said. She pulled a strand of hair from her lips. “You come up for a root beer float and we’ll call it even.”
“Deal,” I said.
And it was.
We were soon spending upward of a hundred hours a week together, slinging burgers during the lunch shift around Fenway, dozing through classes in the afternoons, fumbling through play rehearsals in the evenings, and then pounding clam chowder out of bread boules at Doyle’s or Guinness at the Behan, fighting over Heaney and Yeats, playing darts till bar time at the Silhouette in Allston, whirling around greater Boston in a daze of heat, grease, beer, and shellfish. Pretty much before either of us knew what happened, there we were, a tangle of knees and elbows on my futon on Park Drive, the sun climbing up the Prudential Building before we even shut our eyes.
Suddenly it was August. We had acquired a puppy and had lived together for a year, and now we were packing a van at midnight to move to Columbus, Ohio. More grad school for me, and who knew what for Jenae.
I couldn’t believe it. She was coming with me. We were actually a couple. I could hear Pinter, Yeats, and Hopper cheering us on from behind their lonely tapestries.
When most people would have felt around for a ladder or a rope, Jenae jumped. To leap from this clutch of artists, expert liars, and aspiring drinkers; from this town rich in history, fish and chips, and beer at any cost; from the first home away from home for both of us, newly settled in and barely explored, to . . . Columbus, the heralded meteorological groin of Ohio? If ever there was a brave explorer, I daresay it was not the namesake of our future hometown, but Jenae.
At first, of course, it was rough. The day we arrived, the sky was green between apocalyptic blasts of thunder and lightning, and the air gagged us with humidity. The rivers smelled sordid and flammable. People ate at White Castles, as though there were anything royal about steaming their hamburgers. This was going to take some getting used to.
Early on, a couple of guys in my grad school program took me to Mickey’s Bar and I bought a round with a five-dollar bill and got change back, after the tip. And then I realized we were talking about writing. Not like in Boston, where all we could talk about were writers. We were shooting pool, wearing cheese-stained T-shirts, listening to George Thorogood slice through pantywaist indecision by ordering three drinks at once, and we were talking about writing. Our writing.
At Ohio State, my peer mentor was this burly, bighearted Texan named Bruce. We talked on the phone just once, and before we hung up he had arranged for Jenae and me and Maggie, our sweet, six-month-old English cocker spaniel, to stay at his apartment while we looked for one of our own. Even though he was going to be out of town. Even though we had never met.
Bruce quickly became the kind of friend to me that brothers rarely make for each other. A friend of his from Houston, “a poet,” he warned, was entering my program too: a grizzly-bearded chain smoker named Bryan, who was as infamous for his iambs as he was his kilts. Though Bruce and Bryan were from Texas, they both had a strong proclivity for the North and all its trappings. Snow, pea coats, upland birds, dark beer, and soups, stews, and chowders for starters. Bryan, despite his most recent return address, was born in Cleveland, “by mistake,” he insisted. And I, despite having lived most of my life in Wisconsin, was born in Denver, which, granted, didn’t make me an obvious member of their clan. Then I met Bruce’s father, Allen, who showed me an 1845 map of the Republic of Texas—the only one a true Texan would abide. According to the map, where the panhandle shoots up clear through Colorado and even into some of unsuspecting Wyoming, I was a northern Texan, but a Texan nonetheless. Somehow or other we were all fellow expatriates and found ourselves, more often than not, smoking, grilling, swilling, and prevaricating on Bruce’s stoop on 6th Avenue. We were as unlikely as unreasonably good friends.
Bruce was married to an Arkansan named Emma, who seemed to follow whoever was cooking and scrub behind them as though salmonella were predatory. She did something with computers for which people flew her all over and paid her a lot of money. Their ebullient apricot-and-white Brittany, named Irma Jean, could bounce high enough to lick your teeth and liked to lounge on the back of their sofa as though it were the instrument she was born to master. Bryan was married to Sarah, a social worker from Denver, who had the patience of a glacier and needed every cube of it, given Bryan’s demeanor, which was as surly as it was sweet. Their cocker, named Cordwainer (aka Bubba), could sniff out a bagel in a safe and flattered me by peeing on no one’s shoes but mine.
Jenae was working at the Columbus AIDS Task Force, which was as meaningful a place to work as it was physically and emotionally exhausting. The fact that Bruce and Bryan and I were great friends and grad student idlers and that Jenae and Sarah and Emma had real jobs and didn’t have all the time that we did to coalesce as f
riends, things were a little cockeyed, but I was happier than I had ever been in my life.
After the afternoon workshops technically ended, classes would migrate across High Street to Larry’s Bar & Seminar, as it was called, for pitchers of swampy Molson Golden, baskets of chile-dusted peanuts, and the even straighter take on the shop talk that night. I got home from “class” one night, four pitchers to the wind, with bits of peanut shell stuck between my teeth, to find Jenae tear-streaked and furious.
“Hey,” I tried, “baby?”
“Whatever,” she said.
Wow. I realized I was being a complete asshole. We were having a great time when we were all together, but when we weren’t, I was in my own little world.
One autumn day not long after that, I found myself golfing with Lee Abbott. It sounds pretentious—golfing with the great author!—but students could make tee times at the OSU championship courses, whereas faculty had to be members. Lee would have golfed with Idi Amin if it meant getting a tee time.
It was a nautical kind of day, around forty degrees, the wind gusting the flag sticks close to parallel with the ground, the rain right on the border of hail, but neither of us would admit that it was a stupid day to be anywhere but a bar. We both struck sufficiently good drives down a long par four, and as we sloshed down the fairway, he lit philosophically one of his Red 100s.
“Matt, my boy,” he said, “you have dragged this woman of yours all over creation, have you not?”
We hadn’t even been talking about Jenae, but I told him that he was pretty much right, so long as the distance between Boston and Columbus could be construed as “creation.”
“I am not,” he said, tapping ashes, “interested in frivolity, dilly-dallying, or shilly-shallying.”
We stopped at his ball, nicely laid up just shy of a sand trap. He pulled out El Conquistador, his trusty lob wedge.
“When are you going to do right by that woman?” he asked, flicking his cigarette to the turf. “Time to propose or get off the pot, am I right?”
He didn’t need to look me in the eye for me to know it wasn’t an idle question. He chipped his ball right up to the flagstick.
Jenae and I had been living together for three years by then. We were dog-parents together. We knew how to fold each other’s laundry. We’d go on “condom raids” with her friends at the local gay bars and to poetry readings in brewpubs with mine. We’d order nachos and a burger and split them as though it were second nature. We knew what kind of beer to order if the other was in the bathroom. I had thought it beside the point to have some ceremony and get a new set of titles. Being boyfriend/girlfriend seemed to have it all over husband/wife. As Billy Bragg says, doesn’t marriage just prove that our parents were right? Isn’t it the first step in getting divorced?
But we were in love—really, truly, deeply—and I wanted to marry that girl. Lee knew that. My mom knew that. And my grandma, who grew up on a farm and knew what it meant to have to walk a field of beans just like Jenae did, positively adored her. I hadn’t looked forward to getting married in the abstract, but all the particulars told me to do otherwise. And Bruce and Emma, Bryan and Sarah—all my favorite people were married, I realized. I wanted us to be them. I wanted us all to get married.
Economy
TO AUGMENT MY grad student stipend of four dollars a semester, I work at a Salt Lake City restaurant called, of all things, The New Yorker, and between shifts and school I cruise around Sugarhouse, one of two viable neighborhoods for liberal types who want to live in Utah but pretend they’re still in America. I’m on my hazard-orange Vespa-ish scooter, wearing waiter’s clothes, carrying a messenger bag loaded with flyers, a notebook, and—honest to God—Moby Dick.
I believe in accidents. Generally not the kind that will lay me out on the pavement, but rather the kind where I’ll turn a corner Jenae and I have turned a thousand times in her VW, and because I’m not in the Bug but on the vehicular equivalent of a T-ball stand, and therefore extra-careful about entering the flow of traffic, I might just see something I wouldn’t have seen before. A lime-green-jacketed realtor digging a hole for a new post, an appraiser down the street tape-measuring the yard, or the type of little red and white sign you buy at a hardware store to put on the dashboard of your life-size Camaro lawn ornament.
One blistering afternoon I notice a small, mustachioed man watering the lawn in the middle of the day—in the middle of a drought—in the middle of a desert! He seems more like a capricious landlord or sociopathic golf course groundskeeper than a homeowner. From what I can see, there’s no furniture inside and nothing on the walls. Only a ladder in the kitchen and a bucket of paint on the countertop.
It’s a house we’ve seen before. The cream-colored masonry caught my eye; it reminded me of the kind of brick they built everything with in Milwaukee, my more-or-less hometown. It’s got double-hung windows with huge stone casements and a big, fenced-in backyard with a haggard rose bush in the front, big as a small tree. The street name, Franklin, feels as full of promise as the Constitution itself.
It’s on the corner of the street Jenae and I have come to call our favorite in Sugarhouse: 800 East, a quiet, straight haven of pavement between two of the busiest roads in Salt Lake. Wide enough for parking on both sides, but narrow enough so that only ten-speeds or Big Wheels drag race here. It’s one of the few neighborhoods in all of Salt Lake where the streets have not just numbers and letters but names, like Browning and Emerson—poets and writers, no less. The homes are set back a fair bit from the road, but not so far that you can’t hear your neighbor when he Hulloes! to you in the morning. Any hour of the day you’ll find strollers, joggers, bikers, dog walkers, unicyclists, roller skaters, speed walkers, kite flyers, bums, drunks, missionaries, cops, robbers, cowboys, Indians . . . every day, the hoi polloi on parade under a thatchwork canopy of oaks older than all of us put together.
Although 8th East, as it’s called, is not exactly on my way to or from anything, I had forced myself to take it as often as possible, having quickly learned that real estate, even in a supposed buyer’s market, can come and go in a day without so much fanfare as a SOLD sticker.
A few days later, when I see the red and white For Sale sign in the window of that house on 8th, I can’t help but feel like Ahab. Not the peg-legged one who nailed a gold doubloon to the mast, all cocksure and blustery, but the one who must have about choked on his hardtack every time some bloody fool atop the mizzenmast shouted, Thar she blows! only to have spotted another right or blue or goddamned Greenland whale and not the mighty sperm that was his Moby Dick.
But there it is, finally, on this scorching day in July: a sign—a sign!—in the window. This must be the place.
I park my scooter, drop my helmet on the seat, and run up to the door. I call the number on my cell phone as I peer inside. The phone rings and rings, and it begins to sound more like the distant alarm I’m feeling. The house, from what I can see, is disgusting. If this is going to be The House, I think, it’s going to start out like Cinderella’s story wherein we will be forced to spend a lot of painful time on our hands and knees at the behest of a cruel stepmother, waiting for something magical to happen with wands, a squash, geriatric fairies, and rodents.
A man’s small, pinched voice comes through the line, and it is not, I realize, my fairy godmother. I tell him who I am, why I’m calling, where I’m calling from.
He sounds as if he’s ready to be highly annoyed with me, as if he were expecting a federal agent or property appraiser. When he understands that I might give him money rather than pinch it, he chippers up.
“I can be there in half an hour. Half an hour. I’ll hurry hurry. Just down here in Murray, you know. Be there right quick. We’ll show you the place, we will all right. Name’s Stanley, by the way,” he says. “Stanley. See you soon.”
I scoot to a convenience store, buy a Coke, and zip back to the house, hoping the glare of the window was playing tricks on my eyes. I look inside again and think about
calling my landlord to see about extending our lease. Thank God my grandmother isn’t around to see this. The apparent condition of the house seethes from between the bricks. If it were a person, I would recommend, if not dramatic surgery, a generously cut caftan and a personal trainer or two. A burka perhaps.
I call Jenae at work, who’s guarded but optimistic, and then Sully, our last-chance realtor. In his jaded, realtor way, Sully is piqued. He knows from experience that we have been nearing the Fuck It stage of home buying. It is preceded by the Just Looking stage, the Very Interested stage, the We Love It We’ll Take It stage, the What Do You Mean Our Offer Fell Through? stage, then the Well This Is the One We Really Liked Anyway stage, followed by the It’s Already Under Contract? stage, and finally, of course, the Fuck It stage, when exasperation courts thirty-year (or, hell, even adjustable-rate) mortgages with all the grace and romance involved in asking your cellmate if he’ll rub lotion on your back.
“So,” Sully says, “you found another one. Super!” He seems campily amused by the fact that every house I have found has fallen through. As if he has been blameless by finding and showing us house after house that we hate. “And you said it’s listed through who?”
I tell him it’s for sale by owner, and Sully laughs.
“What?” I say. I am not amused. My grandmother is three months dead, and my mother has been a listing wreck, sick with grief. I am working two jobs, we are still broke, about to become homeless, and it is over a hundred freaking degrees for the eighth day in a row. People have shot strangers for less.
“What, Sully?” I say.
“Nothing,” Sully says. I can hear him leaning back like an executive, even though he is a waiter with me at the restaurant more often than he is a businessman. Mostly he’s a really good guy, but now is not the time. “Just gotta love the Fisbos,” he says.
