The Unnamed - By Joshua Ferris Page 0,9

just as quickly regretful of it. He removed a credit card from his wallet and followed her out. She was walking very quickly across a parking lot shared by suburban retailers and a grocery store, car-packed and big as a football field. “Jane!” he cried before he was out the door, and people seated near the window turned their heads and watched them go.

The sidewinding gusts were snow-flecked and bitter and filled his ears with a violent howl. “Janey!” He chased her down. She’d left without her coat and now she hurried away with her arms crossed, hands holding the opposite shoulders and her head lowered into the cold. She turned between two cars to lose him just as he reached for her. She shook him off but he grabbed her again and said, “Please, Jane.” She swiveled and hit him with the back of her fist. The blow landed just below his collarbone and made him flinch. “You stupid bastard!” she cried between clenched teeth. Angry tears came from her eyes like stubborn nails jerked out of brickwork. “You don’t fucking tell me that?” For some reason it came out as a question, which he couldn’t answer. Both confused, both at a loss for words. The little space between them, between cars, was filled with their furious white breath. She put her splayed hands on his chest and pushed him and he stumbled back a few steps while taking hold of her wrists. She yanked loose again.

“It was un-thought-out,” he said.

“After everything we’ve done, you would say that.”

“I would never do it,” he said.

“How do I know?”

A shopper rattled past them with a cart. He put his arms around her, but she kept her arms hugged to her chest.

“I never would,” he said.

8

The next day she drove into the city, the lower Bronx, to a storefront with a red plastic awning advertising African Hair Weaving. She parked at the curb and stepped out as a snowplow sparked past her down the neglected street. Eroded brick surfaces, dull and defaced, ghettoed the neighborhood. Wind picked up the trash. The chain-link fence to a barren lot was curled up at one corner like a pried-open sardine can.

She checked the name and address against what she’d written down. The front window was plastered over with yellowed clippings from hairstyle magazines and framed by a string of red Christmas lights. The same collage covered the door, obscuring what awaited her inside: two black stylists, one albino with pink pigmentation spots, both in heavy blue aprons and tending to matrons in chairs. Their hands paused in their labor as they turned to look at her. There were cords everywhere, cords and spray bottles and dusty fake plants reflected in the mirror-paneled walls. She saw him against the far wall, sleeping on a row of folding chairs.

A gust blew the door open again.

“Slam it now,” said the albino.

Jane did as she was told. When she turned around to face them a second time she forced a smile, feeling the interloper again, the tension of her unexpected presence in another random subculture. “That’s my husband,” she said, pointing to the man in back.

They were mostly quiet on the ride home. When they were out of the city, he said, “They were nice in there. I offered them forty dollars but they wouldn’t accept it.”

“Why did they agree to take you in?”

“I said I was having chest pains. I said I’d give them money if they let me sit down on one of their chairs, but they wouldn’t take it.”

“But they gave you the chair.”

“You expect the world to greet you with hostility,” he said, “and instead they give you a chair and call your wife.”

“You can’t count on that forever,” she said.

They pulled into the garage and she killed the engine but neither of them moved. She figured now, after African Hair Weaving, he would come to his senses. But he remained silent, and she realized that he was determined to persevere. The light clicked off. They sat in the oily darkness as if they were high school lovers at odds, too inarticulate to put their feelings into words, and with nowhere to go to resolve their differences but the car.

“What do you feel when you see a black albino?” he asked.

“Sorrow,” she said.

He stared through the windshield. “Me too.”

9

Becka was thirteen when he got sick the second time.

Puberty was hell. Everyone said that she’d lose her baby fat but it never happened. There was no