Portland Noir

Montgomery Park

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VIRGO BY JESS WALTER

Pearl District

My side of the story… you want my side of the story?

That’s funny. The suits at the newspaper said the same thing when they fired me-that I should give my side of the story.

As I usually do, I chose to say nothing, and the next day the Oregonian ran its “Public Apology to our Readers” full of righteous puffery about how I “acted maliciously and recklessly,” how I “broke the sacred trust between a newspaper and its readers.”

Well, here we are again… someone pretending to want my side of the story, as if the truth were a box that you could simply flip over when you want another version. Well, there are no sides, no box, no truth.

We both know you don’t want my side of anything. You don’t want to understand me, you don’t want to know me, and you sure as hell don’t want to feel what I felt.

This is what you really want to know: Why did he do what he did?

Fine. You want to know why I did it? I did it to let her know how much she meant to me. That’s why I did it, all of it-for her.

This all began in late October. We’d had the same old fight, with the same stale grievances Tanya had been lobbing at me for three months, almost since the day I moved in: Blah, blah, stalled relationship; blah, blah, stunted growth; blah, blah, I worry that you’re a psychopath.

I said I’d try harder, but she was in a mood: “No, Trent. I want you out of here. Now.” I gathered my things. Carried four loads of clothes, shoes, CDs, action figures, and trading cards down to my car. I was about to drive away when I saw… him.

Mark Aikens, Tanya’s missing-link ex-boyfriend, was loping up 21st like some kind of predator, like a fat coyote talking on a cell phone. She had moved to Portland for this loser, even though she made twice as much as he did. She requested a transfer from the Palo Alto software company where she worked and found a small condo in the Pearl District, but she wasn’t in town six months before he’d slept with someone else and she tossed him out. Mark Aikens was a cheating shit.

He swung around a light pole and skipped up the steps of our old building. She buzzed him up. A sous chef at Il Pattio, Mark Aikens was one of those jerkoffs who acts like cooking is an art. She always said he was sensitive, a good listener. Now he was up in our old condo, listening his sensitive, cheating ass off. For two hours I sat in my car down the block while this guy… listened. It had grown dark outside. From the street, our condo glowed. I knew exactly which light was on-the upright living room lamp. She got it at Pottery Barn. Through our old third-floor corner window I could see shadows move across the ceiling from that light and I tried to imagine what was happening by the subtle changes in cast: she’s going to the kitchen to get him a beer; he’s going to the bathroom. How many fall nights had I snuck home early from work and looked up to see the glow from that very light? It had been my comfort. But now that light felt unbearably cold and far away, like an astronomer’s faint discovery, a flicker from across the universe and the icy beginning of time.

I might have gone crazy had I stared at that light much longer. In fact, I’d just decided to ring the buzzer and run when the unimaginable happened.

The light went out.