Kristin FitzPatrick
Excerpt from "A New Kukla"
by Kristin FitzPatrick
published in Colorado Review, Summer 2008, Volume 35, No. 2
Richard agrees to meet Raisa on the ninety-fifth floor. She’ll have the herbs and a surprise for the baby, too. You’ve been married nearly a year, she says. Surely there is a baby. In a month, he tells her. A girl, she says. It has to be. This is what they say this morning, when she returns last night’s call: three rings she didn’t answer.
He wants to get the tea, or herbs, whatever, at her flat tonight, wants to listen to her kettle whistle, to adjust the antenna and curl under her arm while they watch the puppet program. Come to my new job instead, she says. And be there by closing time. Her husband works first shift now. She has to catch the Howard line by nine-fifteen.
By eight o’clock the lift reaches the twentieth floor, and his ears pop. The pressure pushes on his forehead, on his temples. He rotates his jaw without opening his mouth. Pop, pop. He doesn’t want the other passengers to click their tongues and exchange looks. At the sixtieth floor he grabs the rail behind him. The pressure has landed on his chest. He wants to kneel or lie down.
He hasn’t seen the John Hancock Center since it opened, not up close. He hasn’t strolled down Michigan Avenue since he first left the narrower streets of London to take the job at the university, when he first met his wife. They were walking along this block, the one below, because it was a romantic place to take a new girlfriend, and as he led her into the wind, her scarf kept threatening to fly away. He caught it every time. Each time she laughed harder and drew him closer. There is already a taller tower in the works, to be finished next year, but the project may drag on longer, maybe until ’73, he’s heard. Now, in the lift, it feels like he’s already moving down rather than up, as the pressure crushes him, forces him to push his shoulders back, pull his head up, and breathe from his gut.
Doors open at the Ninety-Fifth Restaurant. He gestures for the men in suits and the women in pearls to file out ahead of him. They relieve their ears by moving their jaws—Like cattle, or pigs! one of them says. All laugh.
This is the restaurant he has heard about. Carpet and white linen absorb most of the laughter. Chandeliers cast a white-gold sheen on wineglasses, fur coats, the fold of an ascot. Patrons file out or ask for one more. A piano keeps time.
It is ten past eight when he enters the lounge and sees his brother-in-law, Bobby. Richard steps aside to let a waiter by, and he stays there, frozen, in the dark space along the wall. It is Bobby’s hair that catches his eye. It glows the same orange as the end of the cigarette Bobby holds up next to it. In certain weather, his hair curls tight as the tobacco shreds when they burn. He flicks ashes onto the floor, spits into a half-empty glass, shouts, curses, and makes a backstroke-like gesture. He is talking to the bartender, who keeps his head down, arranging and rearranging coasters and bowls of mixed nuts and bottles underneath the bar. Even when Bobby leans forward and asks for affirmation, the bartender does not look up. Bobby has brought the rough and tumble of the Back of the Yards to the Ninety-Fifth.
If Richard could breathe, he would ask Bobby for a smoke. If he could hold down anything beyond guilt and grief—and it is precisely guilt and grief that he feels rising up to his mouth now as he searches for Raisa—he would take a seat next to Bobby. He would forget his reasons for coming here and kill an evening with Bobby Conlan.
He unbuttons his collar until it splays out to the edges of his shoulders. He wants shirt fashion to cycle back to a time when collars didn’t draw attention. The inside of the collar is wet now, as sweat runs from forehead to sideburns and pools above his clavicle. He looks around. The men’s room might make a nice hiding place, a place to hide until this woman who isn’t his wife finishes her shift, but Bobby might walk in. It’s not worth the risk. Richard wants to board the lift, return to the street, and run home.
Richard knows Bobby has been working up to this drunken state since noon, after he put the Back in Ten sign on the door of Conlan’s Nursery, clicked the lock, and marched to the corner. He probably threw some crisps in the bag to cover the bottle. Lunch. Bobby is tired from the day’s lifting and change making, from watering the plants, and from staring through the window. This is his hard day’s night out. He is here because he can’t blow all his money at the Rusty Harp or the Broken Chord. He can’t shoot the breeze with those guys, can’t empty his wallet down to driver’s license and draft card. Not there, not tonight, in these hours for private grief. Tonight the Conlans—Bobby and the others, but especially Richard’s wife, Gail—are preoccupied with their older sister Joy. Gail has not left Joy’s side since yesterday.
[end of excerpt]
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