Wilderness
by G. S. Brouwer
​
He was nothing like she had been expecting. Clare Elliot had been awaiting a man in his upper forties with a receding hairline, a garish, fat tie, and a tweed jacket that flapped open as he walked. The man the maître d’ was escorting had hair that was tightly slicked to his head. It was the color of the wood-panelled walls and parted at a forty-five-degree angle backwards from his left side. His double-breasted light grey suit was cut as razor-sharp as his jawline. But it had been a long time since his shoes had been polished. Whether from the wine or from his words, Clare’s head began to swim. He looked nothing like his barrel-chested brother whom she’d met outside McSorley’s earlier in the day.
“So here I am. Jack Taylor,” he said unceremoniously and shook her hand before plopping in the chair. “I hear you had a busy day, Mrs. Elliot,” he added, nodding at her pair of rings.
She hated being called Mrs. It made her feel old at twenty-four. If she could never see a baby again, she would be happy. “Please, call me Clare.” He startled at her brogue. “What, have you never met a Black Irish before? We don’t all have blazin’ red hair.”
“I have. Just wasn’t expecting it.”
“And I wasn’t expecting you. I had a long day on Eighth Street before someone told me where to go.”
He flashed a crooked, mischievous glint of teeth. “Yeah, I hear that a lot. So how can I help you?” The waiter sidled up to the table. Jack said, “Bronx cocktail.”
When she’d ordered her glass of wine, the waiter had surveyed her, trying to decide if she was a Prohi, then shrugged. He didn’t give Jack a second’s hesitation. She couldn’t wait to vote for Roosevelt in November and end this senseless dry experiment. “Well, it’s about your book,” Clare said calmly, keeping her demeanor professional now that she was talking business. People already thought she was only an editor because her husband ran the house, and with men, she always had to draw the line before they got the wrong idea. She had never understood why putting on a presentable dress gave them the idea that she wanted more than she did. As it was, there was less and less to be impressed about. She was a multi-tour veteran at motherhood, and like the wool camel-colored stockinette dress she had worn that day, her dark satin evening gown was from the year before the Crash.
“Nobody’s read that,” Jack said firmly.
“You must be joking. I did. Well, most of it.”
The waiter placed the gin, orange juice, and two-vermouth cocktail in front of him, and Jack downed half of it in one slug. “Just catching up to you,” he said with a startling wink. Clare sat upright. “And I’m not joking. I’ve gotten laughed out of everywhere.”
“I didn’t laugh. I loved it.”
“No one’s loved it. I can’t even get my brother’s wife to read it. And she’ll read anything.” He placed his martini glass down and leaned forward against the linen tablecloth. “What about it did you love so much?” Jack looked at her with a squinting side eye.
“He opens saying that he didn’t know what he wanted. He just knew he wanted it and needed to find it. It hit me so hard.”
“But why?” Jack asked with genuine surprise.
“I mostly read genre work. Gangster stories, stories where everyone else is speaking about other worlds, imagined characters, going through the same stakes of death and evil rulers. Then you send me a story about real life, something I have felt before. Something that makes me feel seen.”
“I just wrote,” he said with a shrug. “Nobody cares about what I’m trying to do. I get told to spare them my high-flown references to writers I’ve read and art I’ve seen.”
“I loved it all along,” Clare answered, “from the first page, then realized it fully when his misery over losing the girl broke something in me. I started feeling everything with him. It was worse than a cry. It was more profound than that, like you can’t emote but just stare at the wall feeling pain.”
“I didn’t know I could do that.”
Her eyes widened. “I sat on the subway, staring at nothing until I realized I was four stops past mine. Nobody’s writing like this.”
“That’s why nobody wants to publish it,” he said. “It was insane to think I knew what I was doing.”
Clare pulled her painted cupid’s bow lips between her teeth and bit them, rolling flesh over her front teeth. “It’s genius. How can you not see that?” Heat spread over her cheeks.
“It’s just writing. But not anymore.”
“What do you mean?” she asked, leaning forward so far, she pushed the table back.
“I need to eat. I need to work. My brother’s an engineer on the docks, you know? Makes good money, enough to help me out. Best I can do is teach some classes where I can. It’s not much, but it’s something. Better than nothing like my writing got me.”
“You can’t write like you did and then just stop.” He shook his head. She said, “You’re not a writer,” she scowled. “You’re a person who has written.”
“Yeah,” he said with his voice leaden with defeat.
Clare surveyed him and sniffed. He delivered a quizzical grunt. “You’re both nothing and everything like I pictured,” she said as Jack downed his drink.
“Oh, Miss pearl earrings thinks I’m too fancy?”
Clare laughed. “No. My taste has always run to the avant garde, which means it’s always a struggle for money. Unless it’s a breakout hit, it’s never going to pay what pulp does. Or so my husband tells me.”
“Don’t tell me about your husband. Tell me: do you want it?”
“I shouldn’t. But you know I do,” she said. She had read so deeply into his words, she felt she knew him. Too much of him had been put into his novel for her not to. And that was trouble. Jack Taylor was trouble. And he probably knew it, too.
“Where? Here at the table?”
“On the couch. Or in bed. Anywhere. Everywhere. I don’t want it to end.”
“And what about your husband?”
“He’s asleep.”
Jack nodded. “Good.”
“You have no idea,” she said quietly as his oceanic eyes made her head swim.
“What was that?” he whispered and cocked an ear toward her.
“Nothing,” Clare said. “So, go on. I’m waiting.” She took a large gulp, slowly removed her long black gloves, and patted her curls as he began. Clare bit her lip.
He started by describing a man driving a Model A through the back woods. He was tired, Jack said, and needed to stretch his legs.
It’s the hottest day of the summer, so his sleeves are rolled up as high as they can go and his forehead glistens with beads of sweat. He is lost in this unfamiliar land, long-past being along any line on the map he has with him on the front seat.
Just as he’s about to stop, he sees a house a ways up the road. It’s not exactly a shack, but it’s seen better days. There’s a shady front porch under an awning that seems almost as big as the house. Outside, he sees a woman sitting in a rocking chair with a tall glass of sweet tea. He pulls over and cuts the engine, climbing out with his knees so stiff, he almost collapses when his feet hit the ground.
“You sure look lost, city boy,” she says.
He reaches for the jacket of his tan linen suit draped over the seat and puts it on over his vest. “Well, if I’m lost, with that lilt, what does that make you?”
“Hick, hillbilly. I’ve heard ‘em all. But it don’t mean nothing. I know who I am.” She stands from her chair and places the cool glass on the back of her neck, brushing aside the hair that drapes down to just her shoulders. “Storm’s coming. Can’t do nothing but wait for it.” The man looks her up and down in her shapeless green dress with short sleeves and a floral pattern, and she glares back at him—not for doing it, but because he was so obvious about it. “There’s nothing around here you want,” she says.
“Maybe,” he says and sucks on his teeth. “Yeah, maybe.”
“Really now,” Clare said. She had sat rapt, her wine untouched since Jack began relating the story as quietly as a secret. “That’s a bit much. I’m going to have to just blue pencil this all out.”
“What’s too much?” he asked breezily. “You like stories that tell the truth. Do you want the truth or not?”
Clare licked her lips slowly. She nodded silently. “But that doesn’t mean there aren’t other ways to tell the truth.” Jack placed his forearms on the table as though he would crawl across it to her. “Jump forward in the story,” she said.
Afterwards, she places her hand and then her face against his bare chest, listening to him breathing. The thunder peals again, and the woman feels like something has broken open inside her, too. The tears run down her face like some pent-up anguish has been released from her, some burden lifted. He rubs her shoulder, and then slowly, caresses from her forehead along the top of her head to the back. “I’m sorry,” she says.
“What for? Not the first time a woman’s cried on me after.”
“Don’t flatter yourself,” she says, aiming to burst his inflating ego. “It’s not because I was so overwhelmed by your lovemaking.” Though she had been.
“Then what?”
“Nothing.” She can’t explain to him what it is like being a woman, doing a thousand little things and never getting a thank you. Instead, she had spent years being screamed at beyond all reason for eating in the bed after she crashes, all because she sometimes left a crumb or two behind and he felt like he was being disrespected. She can never tell of the hundred slights she had suffered, of the dozen ways she had learned to cope, to hide herself away. She can never make him understand how she no longer trusts the world and keeps a line with a wide buffer drawn far away from her one, true heart. She thinks he can never know that about her, but he does, all without breathing a word. All because he is a stranger, a man passing through who will never yell at her, who will never ask for a single thing from her. A man who knew what he wanted and took it the way she wanted to be taken once in her life. A man who, as she sees him driving away once the rain has broken, has a warm smile on his face. A smile she put there, as he has put one on her for the first time in years. For one steaming summer afternoon, all for a smile, she has given a passing man a glimpse of her guarded soul. And once he has made the turn and disappeared around the bend, she realizes he has taken all of it with him.
Clare had tears in her eyes, streaming down one after the other over her cheeks. “That was beautiful,” she said. “That’s exactly what you needed to say.”
Jack shrugged. “Yes, and now I’m a person who’s written.”
“I shouldn’t have said that,” Clare said between sniffles. “I didn’t mean that.” Jack fished into his pocket and handed her a handkerchief. “That’s a story that needs to be told. You can’t waste all this talent.”
“What talent?” Jack said, picking up his glass. “I wrote this book that I was so proud of, that I put so much into, and I tried to put it out in the world, but it was stillborn. And now I’m walking in this dark place where no one can see or hear me. I want what I see to be heard, but I’m alone in this wilderness, shouting until I’m hoarse. No one is going to listen, and I know it. I’m tired. No one cares about my stories.” He bolted the remainder of the lukewarm cocktail.
“I do,” she said. “Your writing is the clearest window into you. I feel like I knew you before I ever met you.”
“So what?”
“So what? So what… is that I fell in love with you because of your writing.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“You fool,” she said, clutching at the tight string of pearls around her neck. “You are such a fool. You know so much more than you let on. You try to hide it, but there’s so much of you wrapped up in your characters. And you sit there nonchalantly, and you say: so what? You know what I want, and you made me sit here and listen to that story just to torture me.”
“There are so many ways I could just leave you dangling on the edge, wanting more.”
She leaned as far over the table as she could manage, hoping to show as much cleavage as she could muster in the dress, and looked straight into his eyes. “Yes. That. I want more.” She blew out a long stream of air and looked to the ceiling as her whole body shook.
“Do you want it?”
“I need it.”
“But what about your husband?”
“He doesn’t have to like it. He trusts my judgment.” She thought of Ronald plopped with his rakish blond hair in his chair, sweating no matter the season, with his sleeves rolled up, his collar and short, fat tie loose, with slack suspenders ready to fall off his shoulders. He would be angry, but he would let her have her way in the end.
“Should he?”
“It doesn’t matter. I need this, and you know it. And I need to get out of here. Now.”
Outside, a freezing rain was falling. Jack opened a black umbrella with a scalloped canopy over them. She listened to the icy streaks strike the fabric before they dripped from the points of the metal veins. Drunk on illicit alcohol and one another, Clare walked to the nearest El station. She didn’t know where she wanted them to go, or how to get there, but she chose the uptown-bound platform and huddled close to him. On the far track, a downtown express clattered through. New York glistened in the night like a Hopper painting. Once the train had gone down the line and the track signal light blinked from red to green, the cacophony faded away. Clare heard a new rumbling in the distance of the approaching uptown train. She leaned out over the tracks to catch a glimpse of it, then returned to beneath the umbrella. As she shifted from foot to foot, looking off in the distance still, Clare broke the long silence in their conversation by taking the manuscript from her bag. “I still believe it’s genius, I really do. I’ve never seen anyone do what you’ve done before. I’d love to be able to be the one to put your book into print and binding and then send it out into the world with our house imprint on it.” Clare knew what the right thing to do was. The reasonable thing. “But we’re barely making ends meet at the house, and you know we can’t publish this, right? Believe me, I’ve been wishing every moment since I read you that I had the money for it.”
The train approached, rattling the wooden planks beneath her feet and vibrating through her whole body. “It doesn’t matter. They were just words, nothing more. Never will be.”
“I disagree.”
She wanted Jack to look her square in the eyes, and beneath the brim of his fedora, hold her face and kiss her like she’d never been kissed. Clare stopped hearing the squealing train. The conductor brought the train to a stop. The doors opened. She stowed the pages back in her bag and stepped aboard. Clare Elliot wasn’t going to be reasonable. Now she just needed to go tell him.
Elsewhere in the city, Jack Taylor had already stepped in front of an oncoming train.