Christina's World, by John Addiego

Christina's World, by Andrew Wyeth (USA) 1948

Christina’s World

When the attack finally happened, it was almost a relief. Knowing all these years that the city was full of crazies, and who knew what kind of demons lurked behind the eyes of the guy beside you on the subway, Jacob had been rehearsing violence in his mind day and night. Slippery moves to break a hold, parts of your body never associated with fighting suddenly come to life like wolf eels lurching out of rocks in the city aquarium, inflicting deadly pain to the tenderest places on the other guy. You need to know how to use your hands, his brother Andy used to say, if you want to live in the city. Throw a punch, you do it like you mean it. 

He’d lie in bed half-asleep, fighting. His assailant would have him in a chokehold or a headlock, his arms slick and fishy, armpits smelling like a Sloppy Joe. Sometimes he wrestled all night while the enemy did some kind of shape shifting, changing into all these different people. Always he turned the tables, snapped a finger, elbowed a throat, heeled an instep, head-butted a nose, gouged an eyeball. You use the guy’s own weight against him, bring him down, and hold on for dear life.

So, when the real thing came, right before the violence started, it felt more like a dream than those reveries did. It felt like there was a cliff he’d decided to jump off.

This wasn’t the kind of world Jacob would have designed if it were up to him. It was just the way it is. Big fish cruise the East River all day eating small ones. Chicken hawks lurking above the schoolyard tear the throats out of songbirds. Even in the soil lab where he worked minimum wage, you’d see spider-like monsters under the microscope constantly tearing the limbs off their prey, devouring them alive before they also got eaten. You think it’s peace and love making things grow, Cheney, his boss, asked. No. Continuous violence, microbial fighting and eating and shitting and decomposing, that’s the recipe for fertile soil. It’s how you get a good crop, and how we make money to buy pepperoni sticks.

Cheney, who had him by about fifteen years and a hundred pounds of fat, carried. It was loaded and wedged above the crack of his ass. Wouldn’t it make sense for Jacob also to carry concealed? Take the course if you want, get a permit, do it legal, you’re such a Goody Two Shoes. 

Could be. But Jacob always felt like the real Good Guys didn’t do that. No offense, Cheney, but guys that do that end up killing innocent people or getting it turned on themselves. He’d read enough stories to know this. A gun is pulled, it’s like a sign: Somebody’s Going to Die Here. Who knows which crazies in your midst are also carrying? Or some scared trigger-happy cop? 

No. Better to use your hands, like his brother said. And so, when it finally happened, the guy asked, You want some of this? No, he didn’t want any of this, and Jacob could have turned his head and hurried off, but instead he put a hand on the guy’s arm and felt himself falling off the cliff.

The city had always intrigued him. Of course, he’d seen museums and ballgames as a kid, in high school snuck into strip clubs and a few other sleazy places with Andy and the guys. You come of an age where you have this insatiable hunger, and you think you could do just about anything anywhere in the world. Then it kind of zeroes in on a few possibilities. College, marriage, a scheme for making bank, freedom from your family, crazy trips you plan with your buddies. Then something really shit happens, and the city becomes the place you escape to.

And that’s mostly because you’re anonymous. What is it, ten, twelve million people rushing past each other, trying to survive? Jacob wondered how many of the ones he passed were escaping some kind of shame, some ugly thing from home.

There was going to be blood, obviously. The guy was twice his size, and he had a partner, and he and his friend had the woman down on her hands and knees. Jacob put a hand on the big guy.

This was in ’76, the Bicentennial Hoopla year, and Manhattan was nuts. He lived in a one-bedroom with three college boys who’d advertised for another roomie to cut costs, but he spent more time now with Jenna and her mom and daughter. Jenna was trying to carry a coffee and biscotti along with a squirming baby, and he gave her a hand, and that’s how it started. You carry her, I’ll carry the stuff, he said, and she laughed and thanked him, and a few minutes later they were talking.

And this was the thing: it seemed like they both loved to talk to each other about everything under the sun right from the start, even though he was coy about family stuff while her family was on display like a diorama. And this was the other thing: Roxie. Jenna’s three-month baby slept on Jacob’s chest, and the warmth of that baby’s head on his flannel shirt was like nothing he’d ever felt, and he kept wondering how her baby-daddy, or any breathing human being, could have slunk off and missed out on holding Roxie.

So, they were involved. They were seeing each other. He was coming by the house in Queens after work, getting real food from her mother Jane, holding her daughter Roxie, and listening to Jenna’s dreams of being an artist and a writer. Listening to Roxie’s snuffling breaths, watching her eyes move under those tiny lids. She’s dreaming, Jenna said. That’s REM sleep. What about, he asked. Probably milk, she laughed. That’s kind of her whole world, my boobs or the bottle. He couldn’t help looking at her boobs, and Jenna laughed again and he knew he was blushing. Maybe she dreams about things we don’t know, he said. Yeah. Jenna’s eyes got moist. There’s a kind of wisdom there, like she has an old soul, you know?

He knew, and he didn’t know, or he knew it was true, but he didn’t understand how it could be true. 

They had no privacy, his place or hers, and neither of them owned a car to park somewhere in the dark. He heard Jenna and her mom argue about it once, my house, my rules young lady, you will not be alone with a man, and it made Jenna crazy, so they worked out something even crazier: Fridays when Jane was at work, and Cheney gave everybody a long lunch so he could shoot the bull with his buddies and drink a few beers, Jacob caught a taxi and hoped Roxie would stay content in her crib long enough for them to have sex. 

It worked slightly more than fifty percent of the time.

What made him finally open up to her? It could have been the lovemaking, Jenna’s gorgeous nude person wrapped around him in her childhood bed while the baby slept a few feet away and their cries of pleasure had to be swallowed, except that, of course, once they were done, he had to dash out of there and catch another cab. Or it could have been one of their midnight talks, whispering into phones, when she kept prompting him to tell her about how he ended up where he was, even though he had so little privacy. But it ended up being a famous painting.

They were wheeling and lugging Roxie, who was nine months old now and a squirmy crawler, around the MOMA, Jenna’s favorite place in the world. People crowded around some of the most famous ones, like the starry night and the Campbell’s Soup cans. To see them right in front of you was something, and the sheer number and variety was at once exhausting and thrilling because you notice the brushstrokes and texture in ways he’d never imagined. You feel the colours come out of them and hit you. Jenna froze in front of one that was more subdued, it seemed kind of ignored or overlooked compared to lots of the others, even though he knew it was famous and he’d seen pictures of it. Christina’s World, by Andrew Wyeth. A young woman in a weird kind of prone position leaning on her arms out in the dry grass, out on the prairie or something, seen from behind.

Oh God, Jenna said. Oh God. And he felt it, and maybe Roxie felt it in his arms because she held still a moment. Jacob thought it told a story that was so lonely and beautiful and sad. She was looking toward the farmhouse and the endless sky, and she was scared.

That same downtown coffee house where they met, he started to open up as Jenna talked about the painting and nursed Roxie under the changing blanket. So, he said, my dad kicked me out three years ago and won’t ever let me set foot in the house again. I talk to my brother and my sister, sometimes with my mom if she thinks it’s safe, but he’ll have me arrested if I try to come home.

He’ll call the cops on you?

He is a cop. 

He’s also an abusive drunk, he said to himself. He’s also the guy who held him and Andy on his lap at Yankee Stadium on some of the happiest days of his life. What did you do, Jacob?

Basically? The whole thing was building up for years. Specifically? I took his Corvette, which he loved more than anything in the world, for a drive without his permission and wrecked it.

Oh shit, my dad would have blown up, too. He left when I was seven, but I remember his temper. Did you try to make it up to him?

Not really. He started beating on me before I could.

Shit! Did you hit back?

No. I thought about it, but I didn’t.

He thought about it. All those nights fighting in his dreams, the months he took karate and learned how to hit and fall and break holds, the shape shifting enemy would become his father, and Jacob would put him down. Crack his windpipe, kick his knee out. Hold on for hours. Let me go, you little shit, his father would snarl under him, but Jacob would say, I will not let you go.

Jenna pulled him in, right there in a coffee house while she was nursing. She kissed his ear and whispered that he was good, and he felt like he could pick them both up in his arms and the chair they were sitting in, he felt that strong.

And it was that night that it happened, after the museum and pot roast with Jane and Jenna’s sister’s family, late after getting off the bus, when he heard the woman scream. And a couple of people hurried off.

You want some of this? The big guy was on top of her while the other one stood near her head. Jacob felt weightless. He took the man by the arms and lifted him off her before something smashed his face.

The blow crushed his nose and sent a piece of his glasses into his eye socket. It caused his feet to leave the ground. He thought about dying there, a couple blocks from the safety of his front door. He thought about not seeing Jenna holding Roxie’s hands when she takes her first steps in a few months. Andy and Mom and Sis dragging Dad to his funeral. He felt Roxie holding still in his arms as they gazed at the painting. Bone and cartilage crushed and maybe driven into his brain. He remembered a Little League game when Derrick was sick and Coach told Jacob to take centre field, how he ran so fast across that expanse of green when a ball was hit.

He landed on his back and rolled to his feet in the karate stance. In the shadows and without his glasses, he couldn’t see the two men’s faces clearly, but he watched them back pedal with the woman’s purse and run off. It sounded like she was running and yelling somewhere behind him. A few seconds later, he sat against a lamppost.

Other voices, and then a hand on his shoulder, and people gasping and swearing about his face, and a wad of napkins or something pressed to it, and the woman crying and thanking him. Somebody said paramedics were coming, and another woman’s voice asked how he was. How he ran so fast and the ball almost disappeared in the sky before it came down into his glove, like it was the most natural thing in the world.

I think I’m good, he said.

John Addiego

John Addiego lives with his wife and near his daughters in Portland, Oregon and spends much of his time joyfully taking care of a baby granddaughter. He has a new story in the spring 2026 issue of Solstice Literary Magazine and has published two literary novels with Unbridled Books, The Islands of Divine Music (a novel in stories) and Tears of the Mountain, as well as one mystery with Oak Tree Press, The Jaguar Tree.