Sweet Home Chicago

So hot in that bed! It was the first time Alex had shared a bed with Matt, and his first impressions were of the stifling, sticky heat. It was a pullout with a misshapen mattress, the duvet was too small and Alex was embarrassed when he so much as touched heels with Matt under the cover. The red digits of the clock in the corner made the whole place glow like a brothel – which didn’t help the situation. Sleeping face to face was an impossibly intense option. Flipping his pillow over once again Alex reflected that no, beggars can’t be choosers and that he should lower his standards if he was going to keep taking offers like Angela’s. It was so hot in the bed, so itchy and awkward – but Alex didn’t care.

He was in Chicago.

‘The Windy City!’ he had said to Matt as the Metra train rolled in slowly and the skyline grew from the horizon in front of their eyes. Matt didn’t respond. He had been quiet lately. The city of the big shoulders. The city by the lake, thought Alex, at last.

‘The Windy City!’ Angela had announced outside Ogilvy with her arms dramatically outstretched. Alex remembered how she was wearing shades even though it was evening. Fast food signs twinkled in them like fairy lights. He remembered how she had taken him into her arms – no need for pleasantries, he was welcome.

Angela.

It had been so long since Alex had seen Angela, he had forgotten how small she was, how fragile and birdlike her face was, her Latin black hair. Such a delicate, bony creature. Her Birthday party it was, last time he saw her. Three years then, since she left.

Re-arranging his position yet again, Alex found himself staring at the back of Matt’s head. How did he do it? The man could sleep anywhere, anytime. The room smelled sourly of sweat and he could hear the tireless hum and click of appliances throughout the flat.

And then he heard her.

With a shy scrape and a click she entered the room and skirted around the outstretched bed. Lying still, faking sleep, Alex could feel her presence as she moved towards the bathroom. Gambling, he opened his eyes as Angela walked past his face.

So hot in that bed! It was the second night Alex and Matt shared the pullout, and Alex, through some cruel paradox of fatigue, felt he had developed heightened senses. The more his eyes begged for rest, the more stifling the climate became. The more frustrated he grew with his restlessness, the larger the area that Matt spread himself over. A long end to a long day.

They had taken Angela for lunch at Stella’s, her favourite. Alex and Matt were instantly discouraged by the sight of a giant fist clasping giant cutlery over the entrance. Alex settled on a deep pan pizza, which he thought was authentic Chicago. Medium.

‘Honey you won’t even finish a small’ said Angela. It sounded ridiculous coming from her mouth. Her accent was still English, at least. Something inside Alex leaped at being called ‘honey’.

She was right. A bucket of sweating, rubbery meats and cheeses, chemical in both colour and smell, was placed before him. Thus prompted, he went to the ‘restroom’, where he was greeted by a plethora of comedy street signs glinting under stark lights.

When Alex re-emerged, he saw that Matt and Angela were talking. He was jealous of their bond. They had the same dark hair, the same curving nose. They wore the same black aviators – indoors. They looked like a pair of fugitives in a movie.

Matt had never stopped missing his sister, it was obvious.

Alex went out for a smoke.
They didn’t seem to notice his absence. He watched them through the sun-whitened windowpane. Angela’s face had fallen. Her mouth seemed to hang with the shock of whatever Matt was saying. Matt gesticulated with flicks of his wrist, punctuating his silent argument. His hair swayed, danced.

Alex screwed his cigarette into the wall.

And here he was in bed again with Matt, grasping at sleep, with smoking on his mind. Too polite to just switch on a lamp and read, Alex settled on nicotine as his bridge to sleep. He pulled a light from his discarded jeans and sidled towards the bathroom as stealthily as possible.

The bathroom was cold white tile, white fixtures, white everything. Alex opened the window and poked his head outside. The cool sank right into him. Sucking and lighting, he felt the nerve endings in his skin flare and a flush through his veins from head to toe.

Sweet home Chicago.

He listened. Shoes snapped in the street below, the echo bouncing off building walls, and beyond that the rushing of the city, fizzing and ever-present like static. There, with pinprick lights in the sky, was Sears, and John Hancock was over there. Chicago.

He felt his nostrils awoken by smoke.

The smoke was not his own.

To the right of him he saw Angela’s street lit features smoking out of the next window. Her cigarette was a tiny beacon as the wind bore her smoke to him. The Windy City. Thrilled, Alex watched her. She met his eyes and wordlessly, without gesture, she withdrew back into her room.

Alex burned with embarrassment. He felt as if he had seen her in too private a moment, as if he had seen her changing. Had he scared her? Did she mind him smoking out of her bathroom window? Why did she smoke out the window? He extinguished his cigarette on a heady impulse.

Then she walked in behind him.

Alex held his breath as she edged in alongside him. Her shoulder was wedged against his. Alex felt years of barriers dissolve at this contact. Wordless still, she handed him a cigarette and lit it. She avoided his gaze.

He tried to find the courage to speak. Something cool, unexcited.

‘You never used to smoke.’

Could do worse.

‘Neither did you’ she said, still not looking at him.

He tried to look as cool as possible while smoking. Like DeNiro. No, DeNiro’s an old man now. Contemporize.

‘Enjoying Chicago?’

‘Yeah, lovely place.’

Silence. Alex wasn’t going to break it until he had something perfect to say. Angela took a long, thirsty drag. They waited.

‘I’m not coming back you know.’

Smoke trickled upwards from those lips.

‘No?’

‘No.’

‘Matt misses you.’ Alex gambled.

‘I know. He said.’

‘He wants you home.’

‘Well he should come here, with me. He wants me home? Fuck that, this is home.’

‘You don’t mean that.’

‘I do.’

Her voice had the promise of anger, but Alex was beyond treading softly.

‘Your parents miss you.’

‘Fuck that.’

‘They do, though.’

‘Fuck that.’ Smoke exploded on the F.

Alex was silent.

‘I hate those bastards’ said Angela, as if it was expected of her ‘they can forget it, they don’t want me back, it’s just an image.’

‘What?’

‘I hate those bastards.’ There was a choke bubbling beneath her words.

‘Why?’

No, no. Wrong question, Alex thought. Shit.

‘Because…’ she shouted, then checked herself ‘Look, you don’t know the shit they do. The shit they’ve done. I hated it there. Matt hates it there.’

And he hates it more now that you’ve gone, thought Alex. She was right though, he didn’t know. No one talked about Matt’s parents, really. Not even Matt.

‘Fuck that. I’m not going home. I know that’s why you’re here.’

She took a desperate drag on her cigarette. Alex thought he could see a tear.

‘I didn’t think that was it...’

‘It was. What do you even know? You don’t even know me.’

A cold pain right to Alex’s core. She had always been in the background of his friendship with Matt, for years. Through dinners, picnics and parties he had always had some part of his mind trained on her. Now this relationship had been wiped, his presence worthless in her eyes. For a moment they stayed silent, smoking.

‘You don’t smile much do you?’ she said abruptly, with a mocking frown.

‘I don’t know. I hadn’t really thought about it.’ Alex said, confused. His feelings were still smarting. ‘I suppose I don’t always have a reason to’.

‘You don’t need a reason’ she said.

And then she kissed him.

Or rather tried to. She quickly pressed her lips against his, hard, and then pulled away before Alex could register the situation. She pressed the balls of her hands into her eye sockets, and spoke with a whine.

‘Sorry. No. I’m gonna go to bed.’

The tears were back. Wildly she threw her cigarette out the window and left him startled, confused and excited with the charcoal taste of her smoke on his lips.

When he returned to the pullout, still reeling, he saw the silent mound of Matt under the cover.

Alex knew he was awake.

So hot in that bed! The last time Alex shared the bed with Matt, not even Matt could sleep. The two had disposed of the cover completely, and were painfully over-aware of each other’s presence. The clock’s red digits were still throbbing in the corner. Half past two. It would wake them up in the morning for the Greyhound.

They had been walking today, down Magnificent Mile, around Millennium Park, Grant Park and from Shedd Aquarium to Navy Pier.

When walking by Lake Michigan, Matt spoke.

‘Impossible to think this is a lake. Look at it. It’s got to be a sea, an inland sea.’

It was one of the only unprompted things he had said all day.

But here, in the humid red oppression of the room, on their pullout couch, he spoke again.

‘Did you kiss Angela?’

‘What? No. No way.’ Alex sputtered, afraid. What had Matt heard exactly? What had Matt understood about last night?

‘Ok.’

Alex, more awake now than ever, thought about asking what Matt knew. He decided to let the tension dissolve.

‘I have half a mind to kiss you, you know’ said Matt ‘it looks like the bloody Reeperbahn in here.’

They laughed. There’s Matt at last, thought Alex.

‘Next year- Hamburg!’ he joked.

The appliances hummed, the walls were sore red and behind all that, somewhere, was the rushing of that city.

And then Angela’s voice, muffled and thin, came singing through the door.

‘Baby don’t you wanna go…’

It danced over them. So fragile, so quiet.

‘Oh, baby don’t you wanna go…sweet home Chicago.’

Matt turned to face Alex. He looked him in the eye.

He had a broad smile on his face.

I guess you really don’t need a reason, thought Alex.