Stewart and Jean Read online

It occurred to her that even though he worked here, he probably couldn’t afford to buy one of these books. Some of these hardbacks were thirty bucks. With sales tax, that probably came out to nearly half his daily take-home; even if he were full-time, he couldn’t be making much more than four hundred a week before taxes. But she could buy them. Though she wasn’t rich, she still made more than seventy thousand a year. She picked up the McCarthy book and rested it in the crook of her arm, then set on top of it a hardback of the new Claire Messud novel, which she had a vague interest in. Idly she scanned the table for something else to buy. Flaunting her economic power was petty. But it was a real power, and it felt good to have a weapon, since he’d started the fight.

  He was still looking at her. Slowly she let her eyes slide up from the book covers and again meet his. She kept her mouth and eyelids heavy but otherwise tried to stay expressionless. He was standing still, glaring at her, breathing hard. After a moment she let her eyes glide back down again. Not as if she were scared to hold his gaze, but as if the books were more interesting.

  Even as he advanced on her, she wouldn’t look up. Only when he was right at her shoulder did she raise her eyes, giving him the kind of look a fashion magnate might give to a waiter who’d sat uninvited at her table.

  Seeing that he really was shaking, as if having trouble containing himself, she grew scared. But she refused to show it. Anyway, if he hit her here in the store, that would be the best thing that could happen. He’d be fired and so would no longer work in the building, and she’d be able to get a restraining order. “Yes?” she said, like speaking to him was a big concession.

  “Sorry, but what was that look you gave me a second ago?”

  “I noticed you were staring at me, so I glanced up to see if there was some problem.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, I didn’t like the way you were looking at me.”

  “Well, I’ll be more than happy not to look at you again.”

  They were in full view of the cashiers, and while they weren’t raising their voices, they also weren’t whispering. That Jamaican manager appeared beside them; “I’m sorry, is something wrong?” he asked.

  “Not with me,” Jean said smoothly. It would be inexact to say she was enjoying this, but she did feel exalted. This was a fight, and she was winning.

  The manager might have been predisposed to be on Stewart’s side—he’d always struck Jean as a guy who would rather defend his subordinates than kowtow to the customers, plus he was probably still mad that she’d stepped on that book—but Stewart looked so irrationally furious that it must have given him pause. “She was giving me dirty looks,” Stewart said.

  The manager turned from one to the other of them. “If you two have some personal business....”

  “I’m just here on my lunch break to buy some books,” Jean said, holding up the hardbacks in her arms as proof. “Your employee was staring at me. I looked back at him, but then decided to look away because it seemed silly to make a big thing out of it. That’s when he came over and started talking to me.”

  “Well, obviously that’s not all that happened. You two have some sort of personal history, and I....”

  “Oh, I never said that was all that happened. I meant that was all that happened today. Stewart and I do have a history, yes. Definitely. You can ask him about it. Go ahead, I don’t care. You can ask him right now.”

  The manager looked at Stewart, curious, waiting. But when Stewart not only failed to volunteer anything, but even dropped his eyes in shamed confusion, the manager said, “I don’t care about whatever goes on between you, I just can’t have it disrupting the store.”

  “That’s fine. I just got done telling him, I’m happy to pretend he isn’t here. I know I reacted like it was a big deal the other day, but it was because I was surprised. That’s over, though.”

  Peter took Stewart aside, leaving Jean to browse. He took him to the relatively quiet hall that led to the bathrooms. He didn’t want to snoop in Stewart’s private business, he reiterated, but Stewart was going to have to keep his cool. Stewart nodded. Peter asked if he wanted to go ahead and take his dinner break early, but Stewart said he wasn’t hungry. Peter told him to keep shelving then, but to get a new cart out of Receiving, one loaded with books for sections towards the back of the store, away from Bestsellers.

  Charles had been working one of the registers and had watched the confrontation between Jean and Stewart, then Peter’s intervention; though he hadn’t caught every single word, he’d followed the gist. What few convictions he’d had about the situation had faltered. That Jean woman sure hadn’t seemed to think she had any reason to be scared of Stewart. And Stewart had walked right up to her like he didn’t have anything to hide—he didn’t seem like someone who was doing something sneaky.

  Jean browsed a while through the bestsellers, then wandered away.

  Stewart was stocking children’s books, sweating and trembling, burning up, blood pounding hard enough to cause a headache. Next to the Children’s section was the Humor. Jean came drifting around the corner—quietly, but it was like an explosion in the mind. She looked at him, in the eyes, long enough to let him see she knew he was there and she wasn’t startled at the sight of him. Then she just stood there, not three feet away from him, and pulled a big Far Side collection off the shelf and began reading. It was awkward for her to hold it, since she already had almost two hundred dollars’ worth of books in her arms.

  Stewart saw black spots and had trouble breathing. “You have to stand right there?” he demanded in a murmur.

  She looked up at him with dead eyes. “I’m thinking of buying this book,” she said.

  “Looks like you already have enough books to keep you busy.”

  “I can afford them.”

  “All of a sudden you have this big urge to read The Far Side? When I just happen to be standing right here?”

  Jean returned her attention to the book. “Hey. You were the one who came up here looking for me. Remember?”

  He had to look away, seething. She was right, technically. But it was indecent, her following him around like this. It made sense for him to confront her—she was the one who’d killed his brother.

  He tried to get back to shelving. The titles swam before his eyes, and he realized he was slamming the books into the shelves so hard that he was bending their covers. He forced himself to calm down. Without looking at Jean, he said, “So you’re just going to keep coming around? Bugging me?”

  “I’m going to come here sometimes to do some shopping, like I always have.” Then she paused and looked up at him, as if the weirdness of the situation was hitting her anew. “I mean, isn’t that kind of what you want? You came up here looking for me, didn’t you? You saw my picture on OKCupid and decided to move to New York. You found out where I work and decided to get a job in the same building.”

  Stewart continued to work and seethe. What was happening now bore only the most perverse relation to what he’d had in mind, so that he could only think Jean was mocking him. Then again, he wasn’t sure what he had expected, what he’d intended to do.

  Jean watched him openly, taking in his confusion. Her eyes narrowed; he had the feeling she was realizing he wasn’t a threat after all, and that the revelation inspired no sympathy in her.

  He kept enough control of himself to finish shelving the children’s books properly, though he did get palm sweat on some of the covers. Jean didn’t look at him anymore, but she did keep standing there reading The Far Side till after he’d taken the empty cart away.

  She was so glad to find that he didn’t scare her, to find that he seemed to be the one who was scared, that she might have continued to lurk a while longer. But her work had piled up thanks to her sick day, so it wouldn’t be a good idea to stretch her lunch hour out any more.

  She left at about two-thirty. A little after three Stewart went to Peter and said he was sick and needed to go home. Peter looked dubious, but told him to go ahead. Charles was disappoi
nted, since he’d been trying to think up ways to feel Stewart out about everything.

  Charles left work at five and went across the street to the park again. To read his book, to check out girls, to look for Marissa. He had no special reason to go home. He lived in Harlem with two roommates, one of whom played video games with the volume up full blast. It dominated the whole common area. Four nights a week the guy worked as a bouncer, so it was usually no big deal. Tonight he was off.

  Scanning the metal tables along the side of the park, Charles was surprised to glimpse Stewart, brooding in the sun. He wasn’t even very far from the entrance of Temple—anyone walking by the park could see him if they happened to glance in the right place. After a hesitation, Charles walked over to his table.

  Even once Charles was standing at his elbow, Stewart didn’t look at him. It was weird. Did he really not notice him? It made Charles nervous. It brought him back to elementary school, where kids would always pick on him, and where he often didn’t understand the joke. “Hey, Stewart,” he said casually.

  By the way Stewart wasn’t startled to hear his name, you could tell that he had in fact known Charles was there and had just been ignoring him. He took a deep breath, not quite a sigh, and, not looking up at Charles but turning his head Charles’s way, said with a tired voice, “Hey, man.”

  “You care if I sit down?” asked Charles, afraid Stewart was going to tell him to fuck off. But instead Stewart nodded and said to go ahead. Charles sat.

  For nearly a minute Charles sat with him quietly, watching Stewart stare at the crowd. Finally, he said, “Hey, you know, maybe it’s not a good idea to be sitting right out here where Peter or Dan can see you. Especially Dan, I think.”

  Stewart didn’t respond.

  Charles said, “Because you said you were going home sick, I mean. I mean, not that they’re hard-asses or anything. But, you know. It is your first week, and all.” Charles waited, to give Stewart a chance to reply. Then he said, “And I think you said you only just moved to the city. Right? And only just found an apartment and everything. It would suck if you had to go looking for a new job and everything. I mean, not that they’re going to fire you or anything. But, you know.”

  A moment went by. Charles got the strong impression Stewart didn’t want to be talking about all this. Stewart said, “Yeah, well, you know.”

  Charles glanced around at all the strangers, at the girls in the skimpy summer dresses. “So,” he said. “You know. You just moved here last week, right? So what brought you up here?”

  Another pause. Charles wished he hadn’t sat down. Stewart obviously didn’t want him here. It would be weird to just stand up and walk off, but it would be even more awkward for them both to sit there in silence.

  But now Stewart said, “Well. You know that girl, that I kind of got into it with today?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well. This is going to sound crazy, but she killed my big brother Kevin.”

  There was a white-noise roaring everywhere, like the whole world was inside a conch shell. This was exactly what he’d been hoping for, Charles realized now that it was here: the surreal irreality of reality itself, the privileged sphere of reality. He’d expected he would have to sneak around and ask clever questions in order to trick Stewart into revealing his secret. It was disarming to have Stewart be so frank about it, and Charles was about as tongue-tied as he would have been if it really had been a total surprise.

  Even when he was able to speak, all he managed was, “She killed your brother?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How?”

  “She shot him a couple times in the chest.”

  “Why?”

  “No good reason.”

  Charles thought about pursuing this the way he’d originally planned, under-handedly playing dumb with questions like, “Then how come she’s not in jail?” After thinking it over, though, he said, “Hey, man. I feel like I should tell you that I actually, like, know about this stuff.”

  Now Stewart looked directly at him with interest. Charles explained about how he’d bumped into Marissa the other day and hadn’t been able to refrain from asking her why she’d had it in for Stewart, and he told the story as Marissa had told it.

  “My brother did not rape her,” was the first thing Stewart said, angrily, when Charles was done.

  “Marissa actually didn’t say he had, she only said he’d tried to.”

  “He didn’t do that either! He would never have done that, to anybody. And he knew Jean.”

  Charles knew good and well that people are often raped by friends or dates or acquaintances, so Stewart’s protest didn’t mean much. But Stewart was upset, so Charles let him keep on talking instead of pointing this out.

  “They went to fucking school together,” continued Stewart, “in Conway. At Central Arkansas University. They were in the Honors Program together. And my brother would fuck with her sometimes. Just teasing, is all. Because he was a gun nut and a Republican, so she didn’t approve of him. He had a Confederate flag hanging in his room, he liked to argue about how the South was no more racist than the North and the Civil War was purely a states’-rights issue, and he liked calling it the War for Southern Independence. Half the reason why he said shit like that was to get a rise out of people. And, you know, usually the liberals he’d argue with couldn’t really beat him in a fair fight—their whole position basically was that he had to be wrong, because only terrible people thought that way.

  “I mean, he fucked with me the same way—I’m a liberal too—I hate Bush—I’m going to vote for Obama. We got into some real fights over that stuff.

  “That Jean girl thought that because he had a few automatic rifles he was responsible for every school shooting in America, and because he made a few off-color jokes he was responsible for all racial prejudice, and because he was a macho, traditionally masculine guy he must be a rapist. When half the time he was kidding, and the other half he was just making some good points that people don’t like to hear. Myself included, I don’t excuse myself. He was an independent thinker, he wasn’t some thug. He was in the fucking Honors College!

  “Anyway, she thought all this stuff about him. And as kind of a fuck-you, he would sometimes act like she was right.

  “They wound up in Rogers for this big party over spring break. At somebody’s house, way out, sort of in the countryside but not quite. They had a bonfire. That kind of party. Lots of beers.

  “The next morning everyone took off someplace, except for Jean and my brother. Jean stayed because she was passed out. When she woke up she was freaked out to see Kevin was there. She was all freaked out to be alone with him. He was like, ‘If I’d wanted to rape you I could have just done it while you were passed out.’ And that freaked her out even more, even though it should have reassured her, because it was true if you think about it. Her being all afraid of him like he was some monster, it pissed him off, and to get back at her he pretended like she was right. He acted like he was chasing her around the house and everything, just playing. But she took him seriously, and she grabbed the gun that was in the bedroom nightstand and she shot him in the chest.”

  Stewart was done talking. He glared at Charles, defying him to challenge his account, then once again stared straight ahead.

  Charles frowned and pondered. There was something odd about the story—nevertheless, it wasn’t what he’d been expecting and that alone gave it the flavor of truth. “But if they were the only people at this house, how did you hear your brother’s side of the story?” he asked, then realized what a blunt, asshole question that was. The fact was, Charles wasn’t sure he wanted Stewart’s version to be true. The idea that Jean had killed his brother to save herself from rape might be more dramatic, though that wasn’t how he phrased it to himself.... Also, if he wound up believing Stewart’s story, that might make it harder to talk to Marissa about it.

  “That’s her side,” Stewart said. “That’s the way she says it happened. Except for....�
�� He got tangled up for a moment, frustrated with his inability to figure out the right way to say it. “I mean, you have to read between the lines of what she said, a little bit. But not much.”

  “What were her exact words about what happened?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  Neither one of them said anything.

  Till Charles said, “So you think it was all a misunderstanding?”

  “I think she had it in for him.”

  Charles’s interest was reinvigorated. If Jean had been plotting to kill Stewart’s brother all along! Charles’s brain apprehended the idea through a veil of disbelief that would make it truly dazzling, if it proved to be true. “You think that she, like, was planning to do it?” he asked, a little breathlessly.

  But now Stewart got flustered and confused again, and he said, “Maybe not exactly. Not consciously. But they were … it was a thing with them. They weren’t just two people who disagreed, there was a really intense thing between them. People had always said so, even before the thing happened. That’s what they told us afterwards, anyway. I had never heard of her before he died, my brother never told me about her, because we didn’t....”

  Stewart trailed off without explaining why his brother had never told him about Jean.

  The silence continued. Charles kept glancing over at Temple—if Stewart wouldn’t worry about getting caught by Dan, Charles would worry on his behalf. Also it might be awkward for Charles if Dan got pissed at Stewart and at the same time saw Charles talking to him, even though Charles wasn’t doing anything wrong.

  As he was absorbing Stewart’s tale, it occurred to Charles that they’d skipped over the most recent part of it. Tentatively, he said, “So, what about now, man? I mean, you moved to New York and now you work in the same building as her. That’s kind of a weird coincidence. And Marissa said you asked her out on a date, without telling her who you were.”

  “Who’s Marissa?”

  Charles explained that Marissa was the redhead who’d yelled at Stewart the other day.

  It was almost like Stewart had asked who Marissa was merely as a way of putting off having to answer the question. Charles figured the polite thing would be to drop the subject, if Stewart plainly didn’t want to talk about it. But then he realized how badly he wanted to know. “So, like, how did you wind up in New York? How did you wind up on an OKCupid date with Jean?”