This Is Not Your City

by Caitlin Horrocks

  “Put him down,” the grandfather says. “He wants to get down.” His daughter is still rocking the boy. She is usually so calm, so businesslike. It is frustrating to see her undone by a boy watching an anteater. Is this what it would take for her to consider him redeemable, this blind ridiculous panic? “Let him down,” the grandfather says, and his daughter ignores him and he thinks he could perhaps make his daughter understand if the boy would just shut up. “Stop fucking crying,” the grandfather yells. “Just stop it.” Everyone quiets, but the grandfather can’t remember now what he’d planned to fill the silence. The straw rattles emptily around the orangutan head as he searches for something to say. “You think the anteater wants to hear that? You think it’s got anywhere else it can go? All these animals are stuck here for your benefit, kid. So shut up and get down off your mother and learn something.”

  As soon as the outburst is over, both mother and grandfather wait for it to shatter the boy completely. But instead he stops crying, because his grandfather has given him something to think about. As his mother lowers him to the ground he looks for the anteater in her small, dusty shelter. The boy thrusts his arms through the fence rails and opens and closes his fists. He thinks about being on the other side of the bars and how the animals never get to go anywhere, not ever. He thinks of all his favorite television shows, the walruses of Growing Up Walrus and the meerkats of Meerkat Manor and the crocodiles of The Crocodile Hunter. Are those animals trapped, too? He’d begged for the zoo, and the zoo is a terrible place.

  The boy begins to cry again. The mother hugs him, tries to get him to drink some juice, but he can’t stop. His chest heaves and snot runs from his nose. She sighs and opens the collapsible stroller and straps him in and says, “It’s time to go home, Honey.” People turn to watch them pass, the old man and the woman and the sobbing boy, whose body is too large for the stroller. Other parents shake their heads and think that if he were their child, he would be better behaved. A school group is waiting for a bus outside. One of their chaperones audibly clucks her tongue as the family passes. “Fuck you,” the grandfather tells her.

  His daughter looks back at him and smiles and the grandfather, for a moment, feels bathed in light. She turns away and he reaches for her shoulder. But the hand he raises is holding his drink and the other is holding her bag and both feel suddenly heavier. He weighs the cup in his palm and knows wistfully that the drink remains the best, most pleasure-giving thing he will experience that day, or the day after, or the day after that. He will see giraffes and he will hug his grandson and his daughter will smile at him and he will seize his mind on that orangutan cup and he will go to bed and he will wake up so he can have another. This is better than having no reason to wake up at all. After he flies home the months will pass until eventually his daughter will feel obligated to invite him for another visit, and he will feel obligated to go. He will hold his grandson every six or twelve months, and the boy will grow larger in his arms but remain impenetrable, and the Afghans will foist canned vegetables on him because they don’t stock fresh. He will play Charlie Parker cassettes at night as he goes to sleep, and then lie alone in the large bed, missing his wife who had once had perfect breasts and is he such a terrible person for telling a joke about them at her wake? They had sex and enjoyed sex all forty-seven years of their marriage, and now he feels the need to tell someone this, but there is no one left who would want to hear it. He will take his orangutan cup with him on the plane, and sit at home watching CNN and sipping out of its domed head, and the act will remind him of his day at the zoo with his family.

  The mother buckles her son into his car seat and her father sits next to him in the back. She looks at them in the rearview mirror as she pulls out of the parking lot. Her father has rested his hand on the boy’s head. The hand just sits there, not patting or soothing or stroking, but it seems to calm the boy all the same. Her father takes a tissue from a box in the backseat and hands it to the boy. The boy pushes the tissue against his face, gluing it to his mucus-covered lip in an effort to please. The grandfather touches his cratered cheek, checking the square white bandage. He looks up and meets his daughter’s eyes in the mirror. He is without a ready word, and his silence she is happy to interpret as love.

  As the mother drives she ticks off what remains in the day to do. Dinner is taken care of. They can eat off paper plates so there are no dishes to wash. Her husband can play cribbage with her father while she tends to the boy. He needs a bath before bed. They will all watch the news and then sleep. Tomorrow she needs to be at work. Tomorrow she needs to telephone the mad scientist.

  The Lion Gate

  Renee watched the boy walk along the beach, thinking only of refusal. He was selling something towel to towel and whatever it was, she was sure she didn’t want any. The boy was skinny and pale, with wild red hair and freckles. A spray of acne across his forehead made her feel sorry for him and then made her feel old. She guessed she was twice his age. He was handsome, despite the acne, despite his dirty T-shirt and cargo shorts and unzipped backpack leaking magazines and glue sticks. When he arrived at her towel, she draped a flowered beach-wrap over her still-pale thighs. Renee looked attractive without looking younger than she was, and most of the time she was proud of this.

  He held a stack of handmade postcards, kaleidoscopic whirls of collaged Greek celebrities, headlines, ads. He shuffled through them and handed her a rose made of bikini tops and marble statues. “Send a card to the people back home?” he asked, in accentless American English. The stem of the rose was a single long leg. The thorns were high-heeled shoes, meticulously cut.

  “Where are you from?” Renee asked, surprised.

  “Boston. Cambridge.”

  “Pittsburgh.”

  “No way—mostly Germans and Italians here. Some dudes from UC-Davis at the hostel last week, but they left. Now it’s just me. And you.” He stared at Renee as if she were an exotic animal, precious and possibly endangered. “I’m Tick.”

  He asked how she’d ended up in Nafplio, and she started her story in the wrong place, too early, so that she thought she must be boring him, talking about her sabbatical from work, the years she’d fantasized about a trip to Greece. This was supposed to be the land of her lunch-hour romances, the novels of her airport layovers and waiting rooms: the strong-thighed women of Sparta, the oracles of Delphi, pledged to Apollo until strapping soldiers tested their resolve; the difficulty of courtship in the Late Helladic in their language without love letters, whose written form included only numbers and nouns. Linear B script was meant solely for inventories. In her favorite novel, an ingenious suitor managed to write his beloved a poem, a list of the gifts he would give her: One woman, one gold bowl/One woman, one gold cup.

  She’d begun the trip staying in youth hostels because they seemed more adventurous, but the lounges were full of people like Tick, drinking Metaxa and strumming guitars and looking askance at her, the middle-aged woman who clearly didn’t belong. In a youth hostel in Argos, the rooms were painted with large murals of drug paraphernalia. She slept in a bunk bed under a picture of a crooked hypodermic needle and thought: I am too old for this. I am not old, but I am far too old for this. A desk clerk had recommended Nafplio, a town sufficiently off the tourist trails that she could put the backpackers behind her and stay in a proper hotel without bankrupting herself.

  She told Tick more of her story than she meant to, then stared down at the card. “Whose leg is this? Do you know?”

  “Victoria Beckham. Posh Spice. I spray a latex glaze over the tops so the pictures won’t fall off in the mail.” He didn’t offer his own travel story, but he gave her his full name, Ticknor Cody Whitworth. Renee laughed and then felt badly. “I’m named after George Ticknor,” he explained. “He collected a lot of books and founded the Boston Public Library. My parents are professors.”

  Renee imagined what they might have intended, the wellscrubbed Ticknor who wielded a lacrosse stick for his East Coast school, wore polo
shirts and got good grades. Tick’s scrawniness seemed new, or temporary, his T-shirt sized for breadth he used to work at. He had been living out of a backpack for the last eight months, he said, on sandwiches and takeaways, and Renee offered to buy him dinner.

  At the restaurant Renee was garrulous with wine, with the stored-up silence of a solo vacation. She spoke about the vanished boyfriend to whom she was not sending mail, about her discomfort with having, at age forty-three, only a boyfriend, about the many boyfriends Renee worried she’d squandered her twenties and thirties with. She’d kissed a lot of men and found no princes. Just frog, all frog. Or perhaps she’d kissed and discarded men who would have been, if not princes, allowable substitutes. She’d trawled through the frogs in her memory, holding her loneliness up against their perceived faults, wondering if it could have provided sufficient cover. She had resolved to be more forgiving, more patient, to entertain possibilities. Tick was not a prince, or a long-term solution—he was far too scruffy and broke and young—but he was, in the moment they kissed, something possible.

  There were conversational topics to avoid: they could barely name ten of the same bands. As children they didn’t play with the same toys or watch the same television shows. Renee talked about Land of the Lost and H.R. Pufnstuf and how a young Morgan Freeman gave phonics lessons on The Electric Company. Tick talked about The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.

  He was rewardingly curious, though, asking sincere questions about Renee’s job in a dental practice. “I’m just the office manager,” she said. “I don’t have anything to do with the teeth.”

  “Not even the big plastic ones with eyes? Like you use to show kids how to brush?”

  “We don’t do pediatric. I get the catalogues, though. I could order you the Adventures of Molaropolis, Baron von Bitterbite vs. Mr. Mouth Guard.”

  Renee was joking but Tick said yes, order them now. He needed the Adventures of Molaropolis. He could not imagine not knowing what was going on in Molaropolis these days. He dragged the two of them to the Nafplio internet café to place an order.

  Tick had surprisingly bad teeth. Renee couldn’t help but notice. It was one more thing that made it impossible to imagine this happening back in Pittsburgh, her and Tick, Tick coming by the office to see her and all her coworkers asking each other, “Did you see his teeth?”

  They spent nights drinking wine on the beach and then walked back to her hotel room, where Tick watched hours of Greek soap operas while she fell asleep. He almost never came to bed with her. Many nights he didn’t seem to go to bed at all. Renee would wake up to find him still sitting on the floor, industriously decoupaging. On a few nights she woke up, disturbingly, to find him curled at the food of her bed sobbing. “What’s wrong?” she asked, petting the length of his knobbed spine, but he wouldn’t tell her. Other nights Renee woke to find him gone.

  They tried a club together only once. Tick disappeared, leaving her for an hour with their two shots of ouzo. She finally got up to leave and spotted him dancing, his limbs flailing like a seizure, meeting her eye with a look not of guilt, but of absentminded pleasure, the surprised recognition of finding something he didn’t realize he’d misplaced. Renee assumed that night he’d end up with someone younger, another tourist or a beautiful young Greek woman. Part of her thought this would be right and good and appropriate, however painful. But Tick returned to her, as he returned to her every night, even if the night was morning, the hotel laying out its continental breakfast. She opened the door and he offered her a bouquet of warm rolls. One morning he had a package: The Adventures of Molaropolis had arrived. Renee ate rolls in bed while Tick read aloud, doing different voices for Demi D. Kay and Ginger Vitus.

  Tick brought her weed one night, and they smoked it in the dark on the beach. “H.R. Pufnstuf,” Tick snorted, suddenly getting it. “Puff and stuff. Puff some stuff. Puff and—”

  “H—R—Pufnstuf, who’s your friend when things get rough? H—R—Pufnstuf—can’t do a little ’cause he can’t do enough.” Renee sang the chorus of the old show, and Tick joined in on the reprise.

  “You’re much cooler than my parents,” he told her.

  “Oh God.”

  “I meant that as a compliment.”

  “I know you did. That’s why I’m dying a little inside right now.”

  Renee was already embarrassed by how much she’d told him that first night at dinner, about the various frogs. She didn’t dare say more about the most recent Frog, the one who said someday for years when she spoke of children; she was the one who’d broken it off, not because she no longer loved him, but because she was forty-three years old, and she was terrified that someday had become nearly too late. The ache she’d felt for the last two years at every baby on the bus, every child in the park, had sharpened to pain, reproachful and insistent. She could hear now the someday for what it had always been—never, it’s not what I want—and blamed herself for forcing the Frog to lie, for allowing herself to hear only what she wanted. Newly single, she’d still been unsure what to do: fertility treatments, sperm donors, if they worked at all, could total tens of thousands of dollars her insurance wouldn’t cover. Many adoption agencies wouldn’t even consider her, a single woman at her age, and the ones that would needed $25,000 up front that she didn’t have, years she wasn’t sure she wanted to spend, reams of forms to fill out, all of them asking in different ways the obvious but undignified question of why, why wait so long, why do this alone? She didn’t have enough money to buy herself a child, but she had enough for a trip. Perhaps, Renee had thought, she just needed some time away to help her make a decision. Perhaps the solution would present itself.

  They visited the Palamidi Fortress that loomed over the city, a sweaty climb of 1000 steps to the top and achingly beautiful views of the Argolic Gulf. Renee read a pamphlet explaining that the fortress was erected by the Venetians in 1714. “Heh,” Tick said. “Erected.” On a weekday, the other visitors were mostly school groups. Renee walked by herself along the ramparts. When she returned to the courtyard Tick had infiltrated a snack break. Despite the lack of common language, he and some children had begun a mock battle between Venetians and Turks. Tick, leading the Ottomans, died extravagantly at the feet of a dark-haired girl, the mortal weapon of her pencil case buried between his elbow and side. A boy, excited by the heat of battle, kicked Tick hard in the ribs. Something in Tick flashed as he leapt, standing and looming over the boy. The child stepped back in surprise, almost fear. “Don’t do that,” Tick said. “Okay?”

  “Okay,” the boy parroted. The children were being corralled by their chaperones, but the boy stood long enough for Tick to stiffly clap a hand on his shoulder. Like father and son, Renee thought. Awkward father and obstreperous son. But still.

  She made her proposal the next evening. Tick looked terrified. “A baby?” he said, his eyebrows high and eyes round and bloodshot. “With me?” They were in a restaurant, the other patrons looking studiously away.

  “It would be—with you, but it wouldn’t be with you. You wouldn’t have to support us. We’d just go our separate ways.”

  “When?” Tick asked, and this was not the question Renee expected.

  “When what?”

  “When are we going our separate ways?”

  “I don’t know.” Renee stabbed briefly at her spanakopita, answered his question with spinach in her mouth. “I have to be back at work at the end of September.”

  Tick did the math. “Oh,” he said. “That’s weeks away.” He sounded relieved, and all of a sudden several weeks was all the time in the world, all of it anyone could want or need. He stared into his water glass. “So. You want a Baby Tick.”

  “I want a baby. I’d be honored to have you be the father,” she added. “But I don’t want you to feel creeped out. You don’t have to really be a dad. I know how young you are. I’m sure you don’t want that yet. But I’m ready, and I’d be so grateful if you’d help me.”

  Tick still looked confused more t
han anything, and Renee wanted for a moment to take it all back. She pictured a hyperactive infant with Tick’s vertical red hair and angry skin and felt doubts unfurl.

  “Why me?” Tick said, his eyebrows knit together, and Renee wondered, why him?

  “You’re smart,” she said. “You’re funny. You’re nice, and you’re good with kids. You like meeting new people. I’ve enjoyed spending time with you. And you’re not bad looking.” Renee enumerated Tick’s many fine qualities until they were both very taken with this person, this Ticknor Whitworth, whom Renee thought so highly of.

  “What if I wanted to? You know, be around. Play with the little guy. Or girl.”

  “Maybe,” Renee said, and her immediate evasion surprised her. “I wouldn’t want you to feel obligated.”

  “I wouldn’t.”

  “I don’t even know where you’re going to be living, when you come back to the States. If you come back.”

  “I could come to Pittsburgh,” Tick said, and Renee smiled tightly.

  “How about you just think about the one thing,” she said. “Before you think about the other. How about you just decide on whether or not you’re willing to—help me. Just that for now. And maybe Pittsburgh we talk about later.”

  Back at the hotel Tick showered, and climbed under the sheets smelling like hotel soap, his skin and hair still damp. He reminded her of something very fresh and new, like a plate still steaming from the dishwasher or a fluffy load of laundry. He had trouble that night in bed. Renee assumed that their conversation at dinner was distracting him, but it wasn’t the first time Tick had had this problem. Renee couldn’t help but take it personally however often Tick told her not to. He’d told her that she was beautiful, she was sexy. Told her that it was all him, just some stuff he’d been going through, nothing to do with her at all. His erections could flag quickly, especially as they paused for a condom. Sometimes he softened inside her. “Would it be better for you without?” Renee asked that night.