Fantastic Metropolis

I ask Jak if he has run into his new neighbor, the blond one, again, and there is a brief silence. He says, yeah, he has. She knocked on his door a few days later, to borrow a cup of sugar. That’s original, I say. He says that she didn’t seem to recognize him and so he didn’t bring it up. He says that he has noticed that there seem to be an unusually high percentage of blond women in his apartment building.

Let’s run away to Las Vegas, I say, on impulse. He asks why Las Vegas. We could get married, I say, and the next day we could get divorced. I’ve always wanted an ex-husband, I tell him. It would make my father very happy. He makes a counter-proposal: we could go to New Orleans and not get married. I point out that we’ve already done that. I say that maybe we should try something new, but in the end we decide that he should come to Charlottesville in May. I am going to give a reading.

 

My father would like Jak to marry me, but not necessarily in Las Vegas.

 

The time that we went to New Orleans, we stayed awake all night in the lobby of a hostel, playing Hearts with a girl from Finland. Every time that Jak took a heart, no matter what was in his hand, no matter whether or not someone else had already taken a point, he’d try to shoot the moon. We could have done it, I think, we could have fallen in love in New Orleans, but not in front of the girl from Finland, who was blond.

A year later, Jak found an ad for tickets to Paris, ninety-nine dollars round trip. This was while we were still in school. We went for Valentine’s Day because that was one of the conditions of the promotional fare. Nikki was spending a semester in Scotland. She was studying mad cow disease. They were sort of not seeing each other while she was away and in any case she was away and so I went with Jak to Paris for Valentine’s Day. Isn’t it romantic, I said, we’re going to be in Paris on Valentine’s Day. Maybe we’ll meet someone, Jak said.

 

I lied. We didn’t go to Paris for Valentine’s Day, although Jak really did find the ad in the paper, and the tickets were really only ninety-nine dollars round trip. We didn’t go and he never asked me, and anyway Nikki came home later that month and they got back together again. We did go to New Orleans, though. I don’t think I’ve made that up.

 

I realize there is a problem with Las Vegas, which is that there are a lot of blond women there.

 

You are probably wondering why I am living in my father’s garage. My father is probably wondering why I am living in his garage. It worries his neighbors.

 

Jak calls to tell me that he is quitting his job at VideoArt. He has gotten some grant money, which will not only cover the rest of the school year, but will also allow him to spend another summer in Turkey, digging things up. I tell him that I’m happy for him. He says that a weird thing happened when he went to pick up his last paycheck. He got into an elevator with seven blond women who all looked like Sandy Duncan. They stopped talking when he got on and the elevator was so quiet he could hear them all breathing. He says that they were all breathing in perfect unison. He says that all of their bosoms were rising and falling in unison like they had been running, like some sort of synchronized Olympic breast event. He says that they smelled wonderful—that the whole elevator smelled wonderful—like a box of Lemon Fresh Joy soap detergent. He got off on the thirtieth floor and they all stayed on the elevator, although he was telepathically communicating with them that they should all get off with him, that all seven of them should spend the day with him, they could all go to the Central Park Zoo, it would be wonderful.

But not a single one got off, although he thought they looked wistful when he did. He stood in the hall and the elevator door closed and he watched the numbers and the elevator finally stopped on the forty-fifth floor, the top floor. After he picked up his paycheck, he went up to the forty-fifth floor and this is the strange thing, he says.