In the Night Café (11 page)

I remember what you said to me that day, after we'd made love. “What are we doing here, laughing or crying?”

14

A
T FIRST HE
was going to show me how he could keep going, how he could pick up right from where he'd left off.

He even made an attempt to retrieve his job, though I'd warned him not to count on it. When he walked into the office two days after he got back, the supervisor at the market research place said he was amazed someone who took off without notice would have the gall to show his face: “I don't know how we'll get along without you, Murphy, but we will fill the gap.”

“Fill it and stuff it!” Tom shouted, and that was that.

No goddam office would ever trap him again, he swore to me. He'd only tried it out because I wanted him to. Now he'd find his own way to support us. An argument seemed to be going on inside him with someone he was mistaking for me. “Maybe I'm not what you need. Maybe you want a nine-to-five type—some guy who has to get permission to walk around the corner.”

The things I wanted I couldn't express to him—days with a shape I could count on, the life we'd had that ended on Tommy's birthday. He was painting in the mornings now that he wasn't working, but in the afternoons he'd get his thirst and head for the Cedar. He seemed to forget everything once he was up there. Finally we had a terrible fight because I'd cooked too many dinners he didn't show up to eat. He'd had a lot to drink and he got very mad when he walked in and I told him it was midnight and why hadn't he called me? He threw our clock out the back window because he thought I spent too much time looking at clocks.

The following day when I came out of work, I found him waiting on the sidewalk in front of the building. He presented me with an old alarm clock he'd bought from some bum on the Bowery. It had giant dented brass bells on its sides, but it didn't work at all, and we laughed about the whole thing. We made promises we'd both go back to the way we used to be with each other in that time, only six weeks ago, that seemed so fuzzed over now, like history.

He wanted me to know I was the one he'd always come home to, no matter how late it got uptown, so I had to promise him to quit being scared and jumping to the wrong conclusions. Already he was getting over what had happened in Florida. He still had me, after all. He still had his work. And even some of his afternoons at the Cedar hadn't been wasted. Lately he'd been hanging out there with a terrific young kid named Billy Cutty, an art student who'd come all the way from Phoenix on a motorcycle. Billy had found himself a deal renovating a loft that was going to be turned into a dance studio. It was more than he could handle by himself, so Tom was going to be his partner. This was a sign that the old luck was running again. “Everything's ahead of us, kiddo.”

Tom's divorce lawyer, George Steinbock, came over for breakfast one Sunday to pick out a painting for his fee. Artists' divorces were sort of his hobby—“a kick,” as he put it, because they allowed him to build up his collection. His other clients were businessmen, dentists, even a famous ballplayer. Leon said he'd made a fortune from them. George Steinbock had just bought a town house on Perry Street. He wanted a work of art that would cover a wall in his new dining room—floor-to-ceiling if possible. He'd made measurements and written them down in his memo book. To help him make up his mind, he'd brought along a girl friend he'd spent the night with. “Edwina has a great eye,” he said.

Edwina's eyes were behind dark glasses. Judging by her thinness, she was some kind of model. Her dress was so slippery it kept catching on parts of her bone structure and her nipples. She yawned and asked me where the little girls' room was when George announced he had news about Tom's case.

“They've agreed to settle out of court, so it's just about wrapped up now.”

He was sitting across from Tom at the round table. I was passing around a basket of bagels. “Oh, I'll have a poppyseed one,” he said.

My head was spinning, I couldn't look at Tom. But the poppyseed bagel gave me hope. Would someone select a bagel as he was about to tell very bad news? Though I knew the news couldn't possibly be good. George Steinbock had already told Tom what the attempt to see Tommy had done to his chances.

“There's a positive side and a down side. Do you want to hear the down side first?”

“Sure,” I heard Tom say in a flat voice.

“Well, they won't grant you visitation rights. It's no go there.” George Steinbock was cutting his bagel in half. He flicked a crumb off his cuff. “Of course, we expected that. It's no surprise.”

“There's a surprise?”

“In a manner of speaking.” The lawyer paused as if he needed to gather breath. He took a sip of his coffee. “The paintings. I'm asking them to send us a list, a complete inventory. Your wife wishes to retain them.”

Tom got to his feet. He was gripping the edge of the table. “You hear that, kiddo?” he cried out. “The paintings, too! She's taking the kids and all the fucking work!”

“I wish you would sit,” George Steinbock said, sounding tired. He put down his coffee and waited. Then he went on, enunciating each word, as if he were forcing himself to speak to someone who didn't understand English. He said the list would be coming by registered mail next week. He said that after all, the paintings were of undetermined value. It wasn't a situation where the work of an established artist was involved. He said actually Tom was getting off lightly. That was the good news, which perhaps he should have mentioned earlier. The other side was making no financial demands—no alimony, no support payments. George Steinbock even had a theory that the trip to Florida had had some positive effect. “Your wife believes you're a dangerous person. She wants no further contact with you in any form. That's the best possible outcome.” He leaned across the table and said to Tom, “Look at it this way. You have no further obligations. It leaves you free.”

“Free,” Tom said. He was shaking his head and there was a strange glittery look on his face as if he was about to laugh. “Everything I've made, everything I've worked my guts out for, that's what they're taking from me. Did she figure that one out herself, or was it the old man's idea? Maybe I'm the one who isn't going to settle out of court.”

George Steinbock said sharply, “You'd better settle. Desertion, attempted kidnapping—that's what they'd claim. You don't want to stand up before a judge.”

“Oh yes,” Tom said, his voice trembling. “I appreciate your efforts. Free—that's something, isn't it?”

I remember saying I was going to make scrambled eggs if anyone was interested, and George Steinbock saying, yes, he'd be interested in eggs, as his girl friend finally walked out of the bathroom, her glasses off, in the full glow of all her makeup. She said she never ate breakfast as a rule. She took the chair next to Tom's and her skirt shot straight up her skinny thighs. She said, “Don't you think being up in the morning is a terrible shock to the system?” He gave her a stare that had all his fury in it. “What's going on here?” she asked. “Have I missed something?” And he said, “You always will.”

He rested his arm on the back of her chair and bent over her, his mouth almost against her ear. “I love what you're wearing, what you aren't wearing… . My life has just been ruined by a woman who used to look like you.”

“Too bad your life is ruined,” she said, grinning up at him, rearranging her long bare legs.

I walked away, got eggs out of the refrigerator and started breaking them against the rim of a bowl. I'd broken about half a dozen when I remembered George Steinbock was the only one who wanted any.

Now Tom was telling Edwina he thought he'd fix himself a drink. “I can see you're the only person here who'll join me.”

She gave a little shriek. “What makes you so sure of that?”

“Experience. You want references? George will tell you who to write to.”

You went to get some Jack Daniel's you had in the studio, but as it turned out, there wasn't much left in the bottle. I remember being glad it was Sunday, because all the liquor stores were closed. It was the only thing I was glad about.

I told myself we'd be okay until tomorrow. Maybe you'd take your pain more or less straight. It seemed better to me that way, only because I wouldn't be so frightened for you, though I knew the pain would be worse. I always felt utterly selfish when I had such thoughts, utterly wrong to want to protect myself from you when you fell into that darkness where you needed everything and nothing I had, nothing I was, could be of use. I remember feeling jealous of Edwina and being ashamed because that was so ridiculous. I should have been the one to join you. I should have been the one with a drink in her hand at eleven in the morning.

You lifted your glass to her. “To beauty,” you said. And it hurt me, even though I knew you were being ironic.

George Steinbock said maybe he'd come back some other time. Maybe this wasn't the right moment to pick out his painting.

You demanded to know what was wrong with today. “You think I've been finished off by my wife? You think there's an amount of shit I can't eat? Listen George, you can get a truck and come back here, grab every last painting in the studio, clean me out. Do you think that would make me give up?”

George Steinbock said that certainly wasn't his intention. I could tell all he wanted was to get away fast.

You told him he ought to take two paintings, since after all they were valueless. “Take two, and I'll do six more. See, that's what Caroline doesn't understand. All those years—and she doesn't even know who I am.”

You said George had to make his choice right away before you took back your offer. And you made him go with you into the studio without Edwina. “This is between my lawyer here and me.”

Edwina asked to borrow a comb. Then she wanted ice. “Your boyfriend never put any in my drink. He's a little nuts, isn't he?”

I told her you were pretty upset. She said divorce did make people very weird. She'd been divorced three times herself.

George had handled her last one and had gotten her terrific alimony. “What about you?” she asked.

I shook my head. “Never.”

“Why not?” she wanted to know. “Didn't anyone like you?”

You were the one who liked me. You said I was the kind of woman who needed to be married—at least you could do that for me. “I'm giving you my name,” you said. “Next time, though, you'll pick yourself a better bet.”

It made me crazy whenever you talked like that. “What do you mean—next time?”

“In your other life.” You'd turned your head, so I couldn't see your eyes.

“Well, this is the one that counts!”

It kept coming up, that philosophical difference. The day we got married, though, you told me we'd both had such hard times, you'd decided God had finally taken pity on us.

I'd asked to have that Friday off from work. October 5. We made love when we woke up. Before we left the house, we remade the bed. Everything new—the pink sheets my mother had bought us, a Hudson Bay blanket, your kind of red, cadmium light, with a black stripe along the border. It lasted for years, then the moths got it.

There are pictures of the wedding—not the kind my father would have taken, just my mother's amateur snapshots. We're smiling as if we'll never stop, holding hands as we stand on line for the ceremony at city hall. Afterward, we're with Leon, the best man, at the French restaurant where my mother insisted on taking us because she was scandalized by the idea of Chinatown. I'm wearing the enormous white orchid she gave me, but I'm not at all embarrassed by that bourgeois flower. Your hands and mine are on the table, clasped together, as an elderly waiter stands by with a bottle of champagne and a white towel. The Eiffel Tower can be seen behind us with fireworks painted on the navy blue sky, and the two of us have that oblivious glaze that only shows up on the faces of people in love, as if there's light just beneath the flesh. But the color's so poor in these photos that everything's more orange than it really was.

Later, when we went home, you started a painting—two looming red shapes joined by a single mysterious gray stroke. You said it was you and me going down Grand Street.

15

T
HE FIRST NIGHT
Billy Cutty ever parked his red Harley 220 in front of the Cedar, he'd asked a stranger at the bar, “Say, how do I get to meet Jackson Pollock?” That person had been unkind. “Just go to the cemetery in Amagansett and walk to the biggest rock.”

“Shit, I was
fourteen
when the guy popped off. How was I supposed to know? Wish he'd hung on, though, so we could have had a few beers,” Billy used to say.

He told Tom and me he was twenty but made us swear to keep the secret. For everyone else, Billy's official age was twenty-five—he wanted people to take him seriously. He was growing himself a moustache, waiting for it to droop over the corners of his mouth. He'd touch it every now and then to see how it was coming along.

Billy didn't understand people liked him because he was so amazingly young. He had the long legs and goldenness of the boy cowhands in movies, the rash, overeager ones old-timers took along into Indian territory.

Billy had been doing construction work and sketching old boots and steerhorns and Chianti bottles in some cowboy academy of art in Phoenix before he and his Harley came into our lives. If he hadn't seen some reproductions on some postcards from the Modern, he'd never even have known there was a Jackson Pollock. “Phoenix is the dumbest hick town,” he said. “Well, in those days, I was what you'd call a hick, I guess.” Now he was drunk on New York and abstract expressionism and the mistaken idea that any strokes that ended up on canvas could be declared art. When Billy was just walking around or hanging out in artists' bars, he felt he might be an undiscovered genius. But he'd always get sick to his stomach, he told Tom, when he picked up a brush.

“Well, give it up, Billy,” Tom said to him once. “Forget it. Right now.”

Tom described to me how Billy had gone pale. “‘I can't, man. I've gotta keep doing it.'

“So I said, ‘Look at me. I'm sick every day'”

Whenever Billy came down to see us on his motorcycle, he'd take a long, hungry look at whatever was up on the walls of the studio. It alarmed me the way he'd walk up to paintings almost as if he were going to climb inside them. “How'd you do this one? What made you thin out this black?” He'd sound jealous and suspicious, on the lookout for a trick hidden somewhere, a marked card in the deck.

One time he asked Tom, “How long is it going to be before I can paint like you?”

“First you'd have to be me, Billy.”

“Okay,” Billy said with a grin, “I'll be you for a day or two.”

“I used to be like Billy,” Tom told me. “All excited because I'd just invented painting and obnoxious because I didn't know a thing. You wouldn't have given me the time of day, because I wasn't sophisticated.”

I did wish Billy would get tired of us and wouldn't visit us so often. He said he loved my chili and spaghetti, but apart from that, there seemed no subjects he could talk to me about, because I was a wife, not a potential girl friend for him. Billy hardly ever slept in his little storefront on Sullivan Street because “older women” of twenty-seven were always bringing him home for the night. “Well hell,” he'd ask Tom. “Was that love or what?”

Billy always wanted to hear Tom's war stories. He wished he hadn't missed out on all of that action. When Tom told how he'd lied about his age in order to join the navy, Billy couldn't get over it. “Your folks let you do that?”

“My folks? Oh yeah. My mother said, ‘Be sure they get the address right. I don't want to miss out on the insurance.'”

Billy thought that was some kind of joke. “Whew!” he said. “Tough lady!”

Billy's mother had gone to bed and cried for a week because he was leaving Phoenix. His father was a Chevrolet dealer who hated artists and said New York was full of Jewish Communists and queers. We were among the kinds of people he didn't want his son to meet. He was waiting for Billy to have some sense knocked into him; then he'd take him into his business as a partner. “I'll never get that kind of sense,” Billy would say. Even when he was little, he and this man had always fought. It worried him that he didn't seem to have the right feelings about him. “I try to fake it, but he knows.”

It took a while for Billy to tell us exactly what he was faking. Finally it came out, one of those nights when the three of us were sitting at our round table after Billy had eaten three helpings of everything. His real father had been a fighter pilot who'd been shot down over the Philippines two weeks before Billy was born.

Tom was awfully rough with Billy when he heard about that. “Why all the secrecy? Why the hell didn't you say so before?”

Billy shrugged and clammed up for a while. Then he said his dad didn't like him to talk about it. “He always tells everyone I'm his boy. I mean, Dad's the one who brought me up—”

“Dad,” Tom interrupted him coldly. “Let's not hear any more about
Dad
, Billy. Your dad is the dead one. Don't mix them up.”

It was the only time I ever saw Billy at a total loss for words. He was running his thumb over his moustache, smoothing the fine gold hairs against his lip.

“You'll always be in trouble, Billy. There's no one who can take the pilot's place.”

I came home from work one evening and found Billy Cutty's red motorcycle standing by the curb. You were squatting down beside it next to him, tightening something on one of the wheels with a wrench. When I was halfway down the block, you stood up and called to me, wiping your hands on your pants.

“How do you like our bike, kiddo?”

“Our bike?” I had no idea you meant what you were saying.

“Fucking right, it's ours. Looks great, doesn't it?”

“I told you you should have warned your old lady,” Billy said.

Later you teased me about the way I stood back from it, keeping myself awfully quiet as if the bike were some wild animal that was going to bite me. I stared at its dented red fenders, the tilt of its handlebars, the jumble of nameless parts that made it run. It seemed flimsy to me. It gave me the same funny feeling I'd had about Howard Stricker's boat.

“I don't know what I think,” I said.

You'd bought it from Billy that day for two hundred and fifty dollars—a bargain. You still owed him seventy-five. Billy was getting himself a secondhand panel truck, something he could use to haul lumber.

“Billy's teaching me how to ride it.”

“Nothing to it,” Billy said. “Hell, you can ride it already.”

“Come on, Joanna,” you said. “I'll take you for a spin.”

I said, “No thanks. Maybe later,” which struck Billy as hilarious.

“Tom, you sure are in a lot of trouble
now
!”

The two of you were both laughing, ganging up on me, a little high on beer, with that red Harley so gay and dangerous and your hands black from the grease you'd been putting on it.

“Right now I think you're out of your mind,” I said. “But I'll probably get over it.” I knew I was being very square, the way old ladies were supposed to be.

“Tom,” said Billy, “you can go down to Mexico on that thing. You can go anywhere. Just don't ride it when you're real loaded, though.”

“I'm not going to sit around the Cedar getting loaded now that I have the bike.” You looked right at me, not at Billy, when you said it.

I said, “Tom, promise me that.”

“Promises are for children,” you said.

It took a few days to talk me into it. I can still recite the reasons we needed a Harley 220 to improve our lives. We could park it anywhere. We could run it on practically no gas. The main thing, though, was the quality of the experience. On a bike you could be at one with the road, instead of insulated from it inside a machine. I'd never wanted to be at one with the road, but Tom said I was going to love it. “We have to have wheels,” he kept telling me, as if that were the only thing we'd lacked so far. “You're looking at our freedom, kiddo.”

When I'd go downstairs, I'd glance at the red Harley—its chain, its wheel spokes, its handlebars, all the bits of old metal our lives depended on. If you leaned, the bike leaned; if you resisted its motion, you'd throw it off balance. “It's your ass going down the middle of the road,” Tom said. But he liked it that way. He said that was the way it always was anyhow.

That first night he showed me how to get on it behind him. The place where I had to sit was called the buddy seat, and I was supposed to wrap my arms around him. All the time we moved we'd be locked together in that embrace. I said, “Oh, I see. It's a machine for lovers.”

“Yeah. Why do you think I bought it? Hold on now,” he said, and without any warning we were jolting over the cobblestones, wobbling around the corner toward the Bowery. I was clutching at Tom's waist as if I could somehow slow us down. “Jesus Christ!” he yelled. “I'm doing the driving. All you have to do is sit.”

“I'm trying!” I yelled back. I didn't know whether I was excited or scared to death.

“Try harder, kiddo. Or we're going to have a spill.”

I seemed to need a lot of rides to learn how to be a passenger. I used to wonder whether other women picked it up just like that. He'd get a little mad because it seemed I didn't trust him. He said he could feel the fear in my body; he didn't have to look over his shoulder to see it on my face. It reminded me of when I was little and afraid of dogs. I had a baby-sitter who once warned me that dogs could smell my fear, and I was always very frightened of the smell after that, much more than of the dogs themselves. I'd go up to strange dogs and make myself pet them just so the smell wouldn't be on me anymore.

The thing was, though, I did trust him. I trusted him with me but not with himself.

We went places that fall. On the weekends, when it always seemed to be Indian summer. We'd get up very early and put on our warmest clothes and go downstairs to the bike. Next door the garage would just be opening. All the men there knew us by now. They were Italians like everyone on the block except us. Sometimes they'd want to know did we ever hear from Howard Stricker? “That was some weirdo,” the owner once said, but with respect. We were weirdos, too, but we couldn't help feeling they thought we were all right; we seemed to entertain them with our oddness. One guy, Ralph, would always stand on the sidewalk, seeing us off. “Listen you two! Don't get caught in the rain.”

I remember hurtling out over the Brooklyn Bridge in astonishing rushes of cold air, the steel beneath our wheels singing its one long high note. And the highways that took us out of the city, all ablaze the farther we went. Red/yellow. Red/yellow. For a while you could fill your mind up with those colors. Or with the roadbed beneath us which had to be watched so carefully—all those patches of things that could have done us in. Oil slick or sand, spills of gravel, the shiny places that were wet when we came up on them fast. We kept saying we had to buy helmets, but we never did.

I was always freezing, trying to warm myself, my breasts bruised into you, skidding on the blue nylon of your jacket. I got to know the back of your neck by heart, the places where your hair grew thickest and curled a little. “You smell brown,” I remember whispering into your ear when we'd stopped for a light in some town in Westchester. I'd close my eyes and hold you even tighter when you speeded us down that narrow path between the lanes of cars. Death Alley, it was called, like the avenue in your old neighborhood.

On the roads, I'd see other couples clenched in the same embrace. This was how we looked, too, I'd tell myself, surprised. Daring and fatal. I would never have been the girl on the buddy seat if it hadn't been for you.

Motorcycle riders would salute each other, holding their right palms up against the wind. It was always done so solemnly that at first it made me want to laugh. Then I began to think maybe we did all belong to the same thing—a secret society traveling the lanes cars wouldn't dare to enter, coming out on our machines to burn up time.

Now it seems crazy that I came to be so unthinking, accepting the danger of those rides the way I accepted the cold. Being like you, I used to feel, instead of like me. Didn't we move out there as if we were one body? I was sure that if we died, we'd die together. But how could we die when we were so alive?

Our red Harley had a sound I think I'd instantly recognize even today. It was much too elderly and low-powered to roar like the Hell's Angels bikes. It made a kind of dry, apologetic sputter like an old smoker who couldn't stop coughing. Out on the road I'd forget it, lose it, my ears would fill up with wind. It was a sound I always listened for in the loft, when I was alone. Sometimes I thought I heard it, even when I hadn't. It was inside me, that dry sound, far away as if in the distant reaches of the Bowery, then coming closer, closer, as the bike turned the corner at Grand, loudest of all before the engine was shut off just under our front window. Then there would be silence and I'd know Tom was opening the downstairs door. “I made it home, kiddo. Made it one more time.”

Promises were for children, but we were grown-ups. And he never made ones he knew he couldn't keep. He'd go uptown to the Cedar, sure he'd only stop in for a couple of beers. Then suddenly it would be very late and he'd think, Why take the bus when he had the bike? When he was very drunk, he used to say he could almost ride the Harley in his sleep, that he was in fact a
great
driver, had always been a great driver, and didn't I realize that by now? And he'd tell me again about the white MG spinning off the road, all the times when something could have happened and didn't, and wouldn't. Because he drove the way he painted, with the same hands, the same eyes. “The instinct's
there,
don't you see? Don't you know anything? Haven't you learned a little from me by now?”