Jack sat on the balcony staring out at the meager city lights. The night was clear, and he could see well into the distance. Beside him, on a redwood patio table, rested a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue Label. It was untouched. Jack wasn’t much of a drinker. He had carried the bottle out with him only because it had seemed to be the appropriate course of action.
His fist was swollen and red, the fingers frozen into a desperate hook. He could still feel an echo of the crack of his fist against the wall. The air was cool on the balcony, but it did little to ease the throbbing in his hand. He tried to keep it still, cradling it in his lap, but each tremor of hesitation sent agony past his elbow and shoulder and deep into his chest. Jack had never meant for this to happen. This was not the man he had set out to become.
From behind him, he could hear the shallow murmur of the television and the antic rattle of his cell phone skittering across the granite countertop. He refused to look back into the apartment. He refused to acknowledge the scene within. Far away from here, where the lights winked on the north side of the city, the glow from his apartment was inconsequential and unworthy of notice.
With the fingers of his left hand, Jack delicately traced the contours of his injured fist. The skin was drawn taut over distended flesh. He looked at the streets arrayed below him as he carefully probed the injury. Even so late at night, there were enough cars on the road to assure Jack that he would not be left alone with his thoughts. Vehicles passed four stories below with the sweet whisper of an urban stream. At odd intervals, a semi would pass, growling and rattling windowpanes.
Part of him wanted to look at his phone and see who was calling, but he was afraid he would see his brother-in-law’s number displayed on the caller ID. In fact, aside from some colleagues at the office, there was no one whose phone call he would have welcomed. A pressing matter from work, a fire to put out in Hong Kong or Singapore, might have provided a sufficient distraction: flurries of e-mail; frantic calls across the ocean to neatly dressed men on the highest floors of vertiginous columns of metal and light; and reams of documents to investigate and obscure foreign tax codes to uncover. Such business matters would have, at the very least, kept Jack busy through a long, unsettling night in which he would only have the company of his lurid memories. Unfortunately, though his office often worked late, it was a rare Saturday when associates stayed past two in the morning. There was little chance of the phone delivering him.
Across the street in a brightly lit room on the third floor of an apartment building, he could see a group of twenty-somethings mingling over glasses of wine. A kitchen table had been pushed out of the way toward the window, and a few men were seated around it deep in conversation. Dark wine sloshed as the men gesticulated and argued over some unknown point. At the end of the table, perfectly framed in the window, stood a young woman trying to engage the men in conversation. Her dark hair curled around her shoulders in erratic tendrils, and her cheeks became more flushed each time she spoke. During brief lulls in the traffic below, Jack could hear the woman’s voice as she tried to talk above the general din of the party. None of the men seemed to acknowledge her presence save in that off-hand way people use to dismiss an unwanted relative, which struck Jack as odd given the woman’s striking features. When he was younger and had regularly attended precisely those sorts of gatherings, it had inevitably been a woman who looked and moved very much like the woman in the window that he ended up talking to in some quiet corner as the end of the night drew near. She looked just like Julia.
He wondered what he looked like to that young woman. If she looked up, she might see nothing more than a forbidding silhouette with a bottle near at hand. What thoughts might go through her mind? Would she assume that he experienced a voyeuristic thrill at watching her? It seemed more likely that she would think nothing of him. She would glance up, notice his shadowed form, tilt her head slightly in confusion, and then return to her sad attempts to entertain the men at the table. At most, she would point him out to her friends as a final appeal for attention, forcing Jack to flee the puzzled, upturned faces of those below and seek refuge in the debris-strewn living room.
He knew that he should go back inside. It was still possible that he could mend things with Julia. A phone call. Anger management classes. Months of couples therapy while they lived apart. But then, after all was forgiven, there would still be the occasional wince from Julia whenever he moved close to her. Her eyes would always widen in unspoken accusation.
There were other options, of course. It wasn’t as though there were any children involved. It was little more than a starter marriage. They were both adults, and with time, the memories of their first marriage would fade until it was a dimly recollected bit of trivia mentioned at holiday dinners. While the alimony check would sting in the short term, he had no doubt that Julia would quickly find a better partner. And he was youthful enough to begin again. He could try to transform himself into, for lack of a more apt term, a better man.
Jack clung to that tenuous strand of optimism in part because the cast net of the city lights demanded it of him. Like a long horizon lit by the rising sun, there was too much potential in the scene to dwell on what had been lost. If not for the sharp ache of his fist grounding him in reality, he might have felt elated, positively buoyant at the faint scent of freedom. Except.
Except that every time Jack’s mind wandered, it lingered over memories of the fight: Julia’s hair in disarray and the salt and milk smell of her skin and the sour scent of fear. The fight had not been entirely one-sided. Most of the broken plates and glasses were a result of Julia’s rage, as was typical in their fights. She, however, had thrown the objects at the ground or the wall whereas he had taken out his anger on her body.
He couldn’t even remember how the fight had started, but it had devolved into a free-for-all critique of everything that had ever been wrong with their marriage. Every slight from the past four years resurfaced and became magnified. The arguments over finances and vacations and children, each were revisited and replayed with startling fidelity. And a shattered piece of flatware commemorated each remembered outrage. For most of the fight, Jack remained terse and unexpressive as he weathered the rage. Of course, Julia’s most persistent criticism of him throughout their marriage had been his lack of passion, and nowhere had that absence been more evident than in their arguments.
His parents, through the example of their own muted marriage, had shown him that it was far more proper to suppress and contain his anger, as doing so allowed a family to function more harmoniously. He had quickly learned that such an approach wasn’t feasible with Julia. The less he reacted, the more she would antagonize him. He couldn’t even argue correctly.
Somewhere in the midst of Julia breaking wine glasses into sparkling tesserae, Jack had lost his ability to restrain himself. It felt like a small glass ball deep inside his chest had been crushed, oil oozing beneath his skin. His vision dimmed as Julia moved close to make sure he wasn’t ignoring her. Her hands flashed in his face, gesturing as she insulted his prowess in bed, his masculinity, anything she could find that might hurt him. Jack grabbed one of her wrists and produced a guttural sound he hadn’t known that he could make. Julia’s eyes grew larger and then narrowed in fear as Jack brought his fist down into her face.
Sitting on the balcony, he couldn’t recall her making a sound as he had broken her nose–all he had heard was a moist crunch–though she had almost certainly yelped in pain. When he moved to strike her again, Julia pulled away from him and broke free of his grip just before the blow landed. Off-balance, Jack’s punch plunged into the wall, breaking through the plaster before connecting with a concrete pillar inside.
After that, everything had passed in a blur. Julia screamed obscenities at him through tears as she ran to the bedroom to throw clothes into bags. Jack heard her only faintly, as if across a wide canyon, and he sank to the floor holding his plaster-dusted hand. Julia didn’t bother to staunch the flow of blood from her nose, and the evidence of his transgression trickled down her face and stained her blouse with red smears. Before she left, she said something that must have been an ultimatum or a threat, but Jack just looked at her blankly.
Once she was gone, he had slowly stood and walked over to the kitchen sink to wash his hands. His body felt flushed. He spent long minutes looking around the room without seeing anything, and then he opened the liquor cabinet. He grabbed the first bottle of liquor he could see, believing that he might be able to erase the evening with the proper dose. Even with the promise of alcohol-induced oblivion, the reality of the apartment was too stark, so he had fled outside.
The party across the street was dying down. Jack looked over at the bottle again in consideration. He briefly toyed with drinking half the bottle in some symbolic gesture, but he pushed the idea aside. The night was cool, and the pain his hand was subsiding. It seemed as though he was in the middle of a great crossroads, but he couldn’t tell where the paths lay or even how many were spread out before him.
He looked up at the sky, the stars only dimly visible through the milky ambient light, and asked for guidance. He expected no answer and was ashamed of the cliché in asking for help from on high. Jack knew that everything would be resolved concretely and definitively. There would be no moment of realization. From this point, it was a simple mechanical process. Once the gears stopped churning and the pistons began to slow, perhaps then he would have the freedom to move. Until that moment, he would let the great machine around him spin and whirl.
Someone began to pound on the front door of the apartment. A masculine voice, deep and angry, yelled over the rhythmic beating. Though muffled, it was recognizable as the voice of his brother-in-law. Jack smiled. He walked back inside, stepping carefully over the stray pieces of broken ceramic and glass. Waiting at the front door for a moment, he breathed deeply, and then reached out with his bloated hand to open the door.