NACH.COM

The letter from Oscar was sickening, repulsive at best, a soliloquy on the tax burdens of high earnings-to-debt ratio, tedious job-related cocktail parties that his otherwise “cool as hell” boss at the shoe company required him to attend, and limos “every now and then for kicks.” His letter included too many unwanted details of June in Key West at the folks’ winter place, before that a March week in Zurich, where “the shoe talk was dull, but those Swiss women were something else,” and then he wrote something about tentative plans for April in Paris, September in Tokyo, October in Beijing, Bangkok and Sydney, and then “maybe a Christmas reunion in Key West at my folks’ place? Interested? Hey, how’s it going, anyway?”

Jack wondered for a moment if he could afford to go to Florida for Christmas, but of course that was out of the question. If he could afford to go anywhere he would go back to New Jersey to visit his parents. In all likelihood he would not be able to afford a trip to New Jersey, but his parents would gladly pay to bring the prodigal son home. They would pay for Helen too, and it would be a nice dull family visit. No, Jack, realized, he could not go to Key West, and that was just as well because he did not want to.

“Oscar wants me to come to Key West for Christmas,” Jack said, returning the letter to its envelope.

“Oscar is a pig,” Helen said as she leafed through a new J. Crew catalog. She didn’t even care that Oscar had invited Jack alone. Oscar knew Jack had been living with Helen for nearly two years, but she didn’t say a word about the insult, Jack noted, because Helen had long ago concluded that she could not be insulted by a pig.

“Is he still fucking his women?” she asked, swirling her hips as she turned the pages of the catalog.

“Yes,” Jack said. “Great ones in Zurich.”

“He’s such a pig,” she said, dropping the catalog, kissing Jack on the cheek and then walking to the bedroom to change clothes.

“I know,” Jack said, and he did know, he knew that Oscar was a detestable human being, a blight, a negative, destructive force.

Helen shouted from the bedroom, “Not like my Jack. Why do you even write to him?”

Jack couldn’t make out what she said. He walked to the bedroom and saw Helen naked from the waist up, her bra draped over a bed post. She bent to the floor to pick up a dropped white t-shirt.

“Nice,” Jack said, and she, rising to face him proudly and firmly, smiled and said, “Why do you write to him.”

“I don’t know,” Jack said.

She pulled the shirt over her torso.

“What?” she asked as her hair-shrouded head emerged from the shirt.

“I don’t know why I write to him. Habit. Ritual. Obligation. Friendship. I’m not sure. It’s easier to write than not to.”

She pushed her long red hair behind her shoulders and moved to her dresser, where she stood, searching through a small glass box for the right pair of earrings. “Because you always write to him,” she said. “It’s just what you do. It’s hard to stop, kind of rude I guess. He’s such an asshole.”

“Yes, I guess that’s it. He’s an asshole, and I write to him. I keep hoping he isn’t an asshole, but he is.”

Helen tilted her head to one side as she inserted a wire through an ear, and while doing so she said, “He’s always going to be an asshole.”

“Maybe,” Jack said as he moved toward his dresser. “He wasn’t so bad in college.”

“Oh no?”

“No, he wasn’t.”

“Right.”

Jack sat on the bed, untied his shoelaces and pulled off his black shoes, and then he stood and pulled off his blue jeans to change into a pair of shorts. Helen was right. Oscar was just as bad in college, a perennial drunk and womanizer who kept a tally of his conquests, who rated women by their vocalizations during intercourse, a man who had no cares in the world that didn’t involve his own pleasure and satisfaction. He was a racist, sexist elitist bastard not because he hated minorities, women and the poor but because of his utter disrespect for all classes of humans that were not Oscar.

“Anyway,” Jack said, mainly to distract himself from his own thoughts, “Maybe we’ll go to New Jersey for Christmas.”

Helen always enjoyed the visits to New Jersey, as if meeting the boyfriend’s family was not a duty or an onerous chore - as it was for Jack when they went to San Francisco to see Helen’s family - but an opportunity to bond, to become part of the family, as if that would somehow precipitate a wedding. Perhaps it would, Jack thought, because a wedding seemed likely.

“Do you think your parents will pay?” Helen asked. “Otherwise, we can’t afford to go.”

“I know,” Jack said. “I think they’ll pay.”

“That would be nice. I like your family.”

“I know.”

Jack sat on the bed to tighten the buckles on his sandals but before he had a chance to do so Helen sat on his lap.

“I like them,” she said. “Do you like my family?” She kissed his nose and he could smell the sweetness of her neck.

“Yes,” he said. “I like them.”

“You’re lying.”

“No I’m not.”

“You are. You hate my family. You hate my parents and you hate my brother.”

“I don’t,” Jack pleaded.

“You do.”

“Not your brother,” he said, smiling, then kissing Helen on the forehead, nose, lips and then pushing her up off of him.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go for a walk.” He buckled his sandals.

They had both suffered through long dull days at work, he at the newspaper office, she at the federal building, and in keeping with what had become their summer routine they celebrated the end of the work day with an evening stroll along the avenues. They walked hand in hand, offering the few details of their days worth recounting, spotting a new exhibit in one of the galleries, a new film at the movie theater, new merchandise in one of the radical chic shops, and a completely new menu in a cafe that was too expensive for their budget. Jack insisted on stopping at a book store to look, once again, at the Elliot Porter collection of western photographs that for weeks he had been studying in rapt amazement. Helen occupied herself in the fiction section. When Jack found her after a brief but dizzying stop in the religion section she had already picked two used books that she then took to the cashier and paid for: Angle of Repose, by Wallace Stegner, and The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, by Yukio Mishima.

On some evenings they interrupted their strolls for beers or, on Two-Fer Tuesday,  margaritas. Sometimes they stopped for full dinners, including beers or margaritas or wine. If it was particularly hot and they couldn’t afford dinner they sometimes took refuge in the air-conditioned movie theater. But on this particular Tuesday night they had resolved to eat a simple dinner at home, despite the heat, so after the book purchase they walked up and down the avenues a little while longer and then up and down the tree lined streets, gazing past lawns and roses and vines and into the curtained windows of large Victorian mansions. They tried to imagine what they would do differently if they lived in a beautiful, elegantly decorated house instead of in a cramped, dusty apartment.

“Let’s travel,” Jack said. “Let’s go to Europe.”

“I hope we can some day,” she said, squeezing his hand.

“And Africa,” he said. “And Japan. I’d like to see Japan. And Israel. And Switzerland”

“So would I,” she said.

They strolled back to the apartment for bread, salad and ice cold beer.