In the Night Café (7 page)

Leon sat there with me and we waited for Tom to come back. “He's just taking a walk around the block,” Leon said. “He's always been like this—hotheaded. You could kill him sometimes. Caroline used to give him hell.”

I asked him to tell me what kind of person Caroline was. He said, “Oh, she's not so bad.” He told me he was the one, in fact, who'd met her first. She'd run away from some fancy girls' college in Virginia to study dance with Martha Graham and had just started modeling at the league. Her family had detectives out looking for her. He walked into a life class one day and there was this nervous, skinny blonde who managed to look like a debutante even though she was naked. The teacher kept yelling at her because she couldn't hold a pose. Later he found her in black from head to toe sitting on the steps outside the league, smoking, looking all red-eyed as if she'd gone into the dressing room and cried. He told her not to let the teacher get her down, and she said it was just that she'd never modeled before and she could see it was going to be terribly boring. He said, “What's your name,” and she thought a moment and said, “Veronica Christian.”

“I made her a little speech,” Leon said. “I said, ‘Veronica, I should obviously take you out and raise your spirits, but I happen to be financially embarrassed at the moment, so all I can do is invite you to Brooklyn for filet mignon.' She said, ‘You can afford
that
?'
and I said, ‘Yes, I can, if you're game.' So I took her to an A&P before we got on the subway. I was wearing a big raincoat from the marines—I slipped a couple of filet mignons under it. She said, ‘Well, really, darling Leon, shouldn't we have mushrooms and wild rice?' and stuck them under her sweater. That was how she talked. Classy, like Katharine Hepburn with a southern accent. I was very entranced,” Leon said. “I could hardly wait to get to Brooklyn. I snuck her past the landlady, got her into the room, turned on the hot plate, poured us some wine, and Tom walks in. ‘What's for dinner, Leon? Who's this?' Once she set eyes on him, I could have been a boiled potato. Three weeks later she's taking the bus with him and eloping to Elkton, Maryland. You know,” he said, “as Veronica, she was sort of great. She should have stayed Veronica. Maybe they'd still be crazy about each other.”

Then he got all red in the face. “Listen, that was a stupid thing to say. I'd better call it a night.” And he did.

I cleared the table, washed the dishes, scrubbed out the chili pot. I thought, Tom will be back when these dishes are done. But I finished too soon and the minutes kept dragging by. Even then I didn't have much faith in fate's benevolence. Whoever walked out the door could be gone for good. I remember washing the kitchen floor around midnight, the awful speckled brown linoleum where the roaches always danced no matter how many got stamped to death. I kept thinking of Caroline and how he'd left her, how he could just leave me and never even come back for the white painting. I thought if I sat down at the table and did nothing, I'd be just like her.

The bed shook and when I opened my eyes, the room was full of cold gray light. You were sitting on the edge of the mattress unlacing your boots, very slowly, as if each little hole required thought. You got them unlaced but you couldn't manage to get them off. You kept bending over them, tugging and tugging. I was so relieved and grateful you were back that if I'd yelled, it wouldn't have been sincere. I raised myself up on one elbow and said, “I'll help you.” My voice sounded strange to me, foolish; it seemed to be just trying itself out.

“Don't talk to me,” you said. “Don't help me.” I stayed balanced on my elbow. My eyes filled with tears. “Why can't I help you?”

You didn't want to answer. You mumbled something to yourself. “When hungry, eat. When tired, sleep.” You gave up on your boots and lay down on top of the covers. You'd never kept yourself so far away from me. Every night we slept in each other's arms, our legs all tangled, your hands holding my breasts.

It kept getting lighter. I saw the white painting float up from the dimness, the red so dark it could have been black; it was only remembering it that made it red.

“Put it out on the street,” I heard you say. “It's yours.”

Around noon you woke up angry. Like a child I trailed after you, asking you to tell me what I'd done. I went into the kitchen to make coffee and started crying because I'd failed to love you perfectly, and you came in and found me and still said nothing, just took a beer out of the refrigerator.

Finally you did tell me. You were still pretty drunk—you'd never gotten sober. Maybe I should have discounted everything you ever said to me in that state. But I never did because it always seemed to me you knew things then you didn't otherwise—things that sometimes seemed unbearable because of the awful truths in them.

I was trying to explain about the painting, how I'd only wanted to sell it for your sake. You stopped me and said I was one of those people who could love but had no experience in accepting love—I'd never learned a way to do that. “I'm the only one who's ever loved you. Isn't that right?” you said.

I said, “How do you know?” and you said, “Because you're just like me.”

But you still hadn't lost your anger. “I had nothing to give except that painting. You knew that, and you wouldn't even take it. Am I that poor? Is that what I am now—nothing?”

When the white painting dried, you took it off the wall and did one that was mostly red. Leon brought the stockbroker around to see it. The stockbroker said it was great, but he'd bought a new couch that was a certain shade of orange, so he didn't want it. He said it wouldn't do.

You told him, “Sell the goddam orange couch.”

The stockbroker thought that idea was outrageous. “You don't understand,” he said. “It's Italian.”

10

O
NE MORNING ON
Seventh Street I woke up and looked around that small room. It was already getting crowded with rolled-up canvases. I stared at your brush marks on the walls. The floorboards were dappled with color; the May air smelled of turpentine. We were living inside your painting. I had a thought that took me by surprise,
I am in my life
. My real life had surrounded me. What I wanted was exactly what I had.

That was the moment, I think, when I finally gave up on the theater. It wasn't even painful. It just made sense. I saw it was what I had to do. I just decided to give you what you needed. I wanted to do it so quietly, though, you wouldn't even catch me at it.

So I lied to you, I acted. I said I was sick of the theater because I never got to work. But I had to be out in the world more, I wanted some kind of career.

You were a little hurt. “I thought you liked it here with me.”

An employment agent sent me to a place called Lester and Leaper, which she said had a very creative atmosphere. Lester and Leaper published illustrated, encyclopedic books on brilliantly inconsequential subjects.
The Complete Book of Pickles and Pickling
,
The Worldwide Toxic Mushroom Guide
,
Songbirds of the Western Hemisphere
. Mr. Leaper was seventy-two. His secretary was leaving him to marry the mushroom expert. I was hired to replace her. Her name was Melanie; I gathered her predecessor had been called Gloria. “You're not engaged, are you, Gloria?” Mr. Leaper asked me suspiciously. Without a qualm I said I wasn't.
Engaged
didn't seem to exactly apply to me.

There was a high marriage and engagement rate at Lester and Leaper. The work was fairly routine and there was no one around to flirt with, so girls got married to escape. Secretaries would turn up on Monday mornings with rings on their fingers and suddenly refer to “my fiancé.” Old girls who'd left would periodically drop in to show off their infants. It was the kind of office where people would create excitement by passing around homemade brownies. For each person's birthday there'd be a surprise party with the same pink-and-white cake ordered from Schraffts. Mr. Leaper would make a gallant speech of congratulation, putting on his glasses to read the correct name off the cake.

Mr. Lester was twenty years younger than Mr. Leaper. He was morose and not at all as nice. He'd stalk around desks, muttering about inefficiency; he played golf several afternoons a week. His secretaries were always the most glamorous and got very quickly married off. I was told that at a low point in the history of the firm, Mr. Lester's father had bought him many shares in it, because they both believed Mr. Leaper would retire any minute. But this was fifteen years ago, and Mr. Leaper was still going strong. His only problem was names. Sometimes a woman named Frances Patterson would appear, who was even older than Mr. Leaper. She was Mr. Leaper's widowed sister, who had once been married to a well-known explorer. She'd been one of the original editors in the company and a suffragette. Now she devoted herself to travel. When she came in, I'd have to drop everything and find hotel rooms for her in Cairo or Java.

I had a little cubicle with a geranium plant that had arrived even before Gloria. It was incredibly spindly and gnarled and I kept picking off the dried leaves and putting them in my ashtray. There was a window that looked out on a wall and a sliver of Park Avenue South. If you'd see someone with an umbrella, you'd know that it was raining. Across the avenue there was a parking lot that always looked empty with a sign that said Park Fast in enormous yellow and black letters. Now and then I'd look up from my typing and just stare at the word Fast.

It was orderly and mild at Lester and Leaper. I'd said I wanted to be out in the world, but I never felt I was. You could spend an entire lifetime in that office with your birthday party to look forward to every year and nothing too great or too bad would ever happen to you. I liked it more than I expected to. I liked it uneasily.

You'd get up when I did every morning. You'd walk me to the stop for the Third Avenue bus. Sometimes we'd go to Rappaport's­ first to have coffee. You'd buy a newspaper on St. Marks Place to take back with you. Later you told me you read the want ads every day—it shamed you to see me go off on the bus. When the Third Avenue bus came, sometimes you wouldn't let go of my arm. You'd say, jokingly, “Oh, don't take that one.” Once you rode all the way uptown with me. You were on your way to a gallery on Madison Avenue that had advertised for someone part-time. But when you saw what paintings they were selling, you just walked out.

I'd sit on my typist's chair and little pictures of you would flash up in my imagination. I'd see the empty rooms of the apartment, but then the door would open and you'd walk in with the paper under your arm. Or you'd be standing in front of one of the paintings, smoking, your eyes narrowed on something unresolved. Once a day, in the afternoon, I'd call you. There were times when the phone would ring and ring. My mind would start searching for you, trying to force up other pictures. I'd suddenly think you could be anywhere. I think I knew you were in danger, that I'd somehow left you exposed to yourself. But it wasn't a conscious thought yet at all.

You used to say, “Don't I always tell you everything?” But you didn't. You said things to me about the children you didn't believe yourself. You'd see a little kid on a two-wheeler, and you'd say, “Tommy has a bike like that. He wants to stay on it all day. He wouldn't like it up here.” Mostly you didn't talk about them, though.

If the subject came up, there was a word you always used:
surgical.
You'd made a surgical break; it would leave no scar tissue. You said you either had to live with your kids or be strong enough to allow them to forget you. That was the way you were about everything: either/or. I didn't try to make you change your mind. I told myself you knew more than I did about kids. I was scared that if you ever went down to Florida to see them, you wouldn't leave them a second time.

I asked you once if you thought about what would happen when they were older. “When they're sixteen or seventeen they'll want to know you.”

“Yeah, it'll happen,” you said. “They'll come looking for me. By then they'll be able to handle it.”

We both failed, we both were lying all the time when we were so sure we were being honest.

On those long afternoons when I couldn't find you, were you thinking of them?

You turned up one day at Lester and Leaper. The receptionist said, “There's someone at the desk to see you,” and when I walked into the waiting room, it was you. It was a shock to see you there, so threatening to all that mildness. For some reason you were wearing a strange, wrinkled tan suit that didn't fit you very well. You stepped forward and kissed me right on the mouth and because the receptionist was staring, I laughed and said, “I know this person.” You said, “Let me see where you work.”

I didn't really want to take you inside. We passed two desks and I had to introduce you: “This is my friend, Tom Murphy.”

“
Friend?
”
you said loudly.

I hated that you had caught me in my office personality.

You wouldn't sit on the visitor's chair in my little cubicle. You went to the window and frowned out at the view. You wanted to get me out of there, to have me come downstairs.

I tried to explain I couldn't do that. Secretaries didn't just leave the premises unless it was lunch hour. It's a rule everyone understands about work, but as I tried to explain it to you that day, I suddenly felt you were right. It made no sense. Why couldn't a person go where they wanted to?

“Come on,” you said roughly and pulled me up off my chair and I had to walk out with you. We went down in the elevator to some hamburger place off the lobby where there were no customers because it wasn't lunch hour. We sat in a torn, gloomy booth and you said very sadly, “I feel terrible. I put you in that place. Wasn't it me that put you there?” By then I'd realized that you'd been drinking. I asked you what was going on. I said, “Where did you get that awful suit?”

“On the Bowery,” you said. “For seven dollars.”

“Forgive me,” you said, taking my hand, though I didn't know what I was supposed to forgive you for. “This has been a significant day,” you said, and when I asked you why, you told me it was because you'd finally gotten yourself a job, just like me. Market research. “You didn't think I'd do it, did you?”

So that was the reason you got the suit. “All us working fuckers got to look the same.”