John Henry Days (32 page)

Pamela’s attention drifts to the wall of photographs again, to its constellation of affection. Her eyes dart between the faces of the father and the son. The nose and ears passed down between generations. What else is passed down. Resemblance is only the start of it. Most of it happens under the skin. There are other things, you squander them, use up what is good not knowing it is good before it is all used up. Then what are you left with? Nose and ears.

Convenient interruption to this line of thought, Cliff moves over and sits on the edge of his desk, closer to Pamela and now partition between her and the photographs. He says, “Sorry about that. Where … yes, your father. That’s why we’re so glad you came down. We’re trying to do the same thing. Teach the people about John Henry, educate the people about the history of the region and the history of Hinton and Talcott. When you see what we have organized today, you’re gonna have a kick. We have two men from town
going to have a steeldriving race, all sorts of music and things, we hired this band from Charleston, I haven’t heard them but they sure come highly recommended, play a lot of music from the region from what I understand.”

Is she staring perhaps a bit too blankly? Cliff purses his lips and shifts his tone. “But we don’t want to rush you,” he says, smiling. “You just have a good time this weekend and enjoy yourself with all that’s going on. Didn’t expect you to hand it over right now, did we? That’s why we brought you down here, so you can see for yourself what we’re doing down here. Think of it as us carrying on your father’s good work, what he was trying to do with his own museum before he passed on. No universities or anything contact you about his collection?”

“It’s not exactly like people are clamoring me.”

“Heh. It’s kind of specialized.”

“What are you going to charge?”

“I thought Arlene already discussed the figure,” Cliff murmurs, rearing back with a where did I put my glasses expression. “We’ve gone over the number quite a bit, I think—”

“Not pay, I mean charge.” Something new to her in her voice. What did she care? Here she is asking. “For the museum. What kind of admission are you going to charge people to see John Henry.”

He relaxes. “Oh that. It’s kind of early, but if you’re worried about that, don’t worry about that, it won’t be cheap I mean it won’t be expensive. Most of the people come through here, it’s families on vacation, families with kids and that kind of thing. Most of the admission would go to upkeep. The physical plant, the, preserve the physical condition of the exhibits themselves. Want to put a first-rate burglar alarm in there, too. Don’t know if Arlene told you had a break-in at the Visitors Center and someone made off with one of the sledges we had on display. Probably just some kids having fun and I can understand that, I have a son of my own and he was a bit of a hell-raiser but it was the property of a private citizen who let us put it out there for the visitors to see, so we’re very concerned about the security issue. So one thing we’re going to put our fees to is protecting the displays, make sure nothing happens to the items your father went to such great lengths … Is that a real huge concern, the fee? I mean is that a deal-breaker?”

“No, I—just wondering. My father didn’t charge. I think he just wanted the company, to tell you the truth. But the sign he put up, you almost had to be already looking for it to see it.” Her head darts toward the photographs on the wall. “Is that your son right there?”

“That’s Armand.” The collapse of his eyebrows and emergence of fault lines in his brow mark an emotion swiftly put into check before his smile asserts itself broadly, victorious over turbulence. “Quite a football player before the accident. You should have seen him play.”

“They’re here!” Janet aslant in the door, doorknob absorbing her weight.

“About time. Why don’t you bring a box in here, take a look at them.” He returns to Pamela. “There’s going to be a taxi to take you to the grounds, right?”

“Yes.”

The box is ungainly but Janet does not struggle despite her shallow physicality. A box of feathers. Cliff takes the box to his desk and slits the top with an engraved letter opener. They dig around in the packing peanuts, the bank president and his assistant, treasure hunters over cardboard flaps. “Oh, they’re beautiful,” Janet sighs.

“Pretty smart if you ask my opinion.” He tosses a cellophane package into Pamela’s lap. “What do you think?”

It is a hammer, a green hammer formed from mealy green foam. She bends it through the package and it obediently oozes back into its original shape. She looks up at the duo and nods.

“Keep it,” Cliff says, pleased. “We’re gonna be tossing them out, to the kids. It’s a keepsake.”

Out on the sidewalk and out in the sunlight, Pamela bites the cellophane and removes the hammer. She doesn’t see a garbage can and tucks the plastic into her back pocket. She grips the handle in her hand and it collapses on its pores. Thinks, ten-pound sledge, twenty-pound sledge. She takes it between her hands and compresses it into a ball, releases it and watches it wiggle like larvae. Two little white kids speed past her to catch up with their parents. In the minutes she has been inside the number of people on this slim street has doubled. She thinks back to the map in Herb’s Family Style and in her head unfurls a weird image of ant specks skittering along a tiny grid designated Hinton. People move past her in every direction. She is stationary in the rushing people. She is jostled and wonders where she is supposed to be right now.

The town is lousy with John Henry Days.

J
and Monica the Publicist were fucking biweekly, or not. Sometimes biweekly they fell asleep in a soaked tangle on Monica the Publicist’s bed, in their event clothes, shoes hooked on sheets. They had an arrangement. More than one morning they discovered house keys dangling in the front door, out there all night, daring someone to rob or kill them while they dozed in boozy prostration. Whoever was annoyed most by the morning sunlight on their faces got out of bed to pull the blinds. After a time the alarm clock by the bed waked them with traffic reports of highways they never traveled on. Monica the Publicist had to be at work at nine and did not allow J. to stay in her apartment. Nor did he wish to. She took a shower and dressed for work while J. tried to wring as much sleep as he could from the morning, waking for a few seconds as Monica opened a drawer in search for the correct underwear or turned on a faucet, and then falling back to sleep again. When Monica finished her preparations for another day of publicity, she slapped J., he slipped into his shoes and they left the apartment. At the newsstand in the subway Monica bought a medium coffee and J. bought the dailies. There they separated with a terse kiss. The train Monica took to work was the same one that provided J. with the most direct route home, but they wanted to be free of each other as soon as possible, so J. caught a train on the platform below that forced him to transfer two times before he arrived at his station. It was easier, this tacit arrangement.

The next time they saw one another after these biweekly sessions, a night or a week later at an event, when it was made apparent once again that they were part of something larger, cog and flywheel, they did not speak to each other. Monica made her rounds, talking to the key players in attendance that night, her boss, the client, the journalists, avoiding J., who talked to his fellow junketeers and drank heartily and filled his stomach, disdaining Monica. It took time to build, their need. The second time they saw each other at an event, one of them would say hello; they took turns so neither felt the other had the upper hand. The second time after their biweekly session, they talked
for whole minutes to catch up on what had happened in their lives since they were last in bed. J. made a deadline, or broke a deadline, had a run-in with the copy department, got a big assignment. Monica planned an event that came off well, failed to engineer some nice press, got a big client. They were glad to see each other, and often linked eyes from opposite sides of the room, communicating much in those glances. But it was the second time. They went home separately. The third time after their biweekly session, when two weeks had gone by, when they had reset, they spent as much time together as possible, holding hands, this was warmth, they danced if it was appropriate at that particular event. They made jokes about the other people in the room, kissed if no one was looking, it felt daring, they got reacquainted with the smell of their bodies. It was nice to see each other again. At the end of the night they went uptown, invariably uptown to Monica the Publicist’s apartment on the Upper West Side, and fell into her bed.

It was not a love nest; she lived there. She lived in a new building of dark glass and steel, in a one-bedroom apartment with beige walls and beige carpeting. She never had anything inside the refrigerator except wilted vegetables and takeout Chinese containers full of moldering things. She owned a water purifier that bulged like a malignancy on the kitchen sink faucet. The blinds had come with the apartment; the cleaning lady kept them gleaming and white. Monica still had the glasses she bought when she got her first apartment a few years before, and they comforted her, artifacts of soothing continuity. J. used them to drink water sometimes, in the middle of the night to ward off hangover. A year after their pattern had insinuated its simple rules, he noticed the pictures on the table next to the bed. She identified the members of her family for him. Periodically he would notice them for the first time and ask her about them. She’d tell him that she already told him who they were months ago, and he’d say he remembered even though he didn’t. Occasionally, suddenly upset anew by something her boss had said that morning or irritated by the inflection in J.’s voice, she exiled him to the couch, and sometimes he sulked there for his own obscure reasons. He lay down on the segmented couch, sheetless and prey to the circulated air.

After the first few times J. entered Monica the Publicist’s apartment building, the doorman began to say hi to him. Hey, my man, he said, winking, white gloves quick to tug the burnished handles of the doors. He had witnessed J.’s arrival and probably had a few theories; he had seen the other men Monica brought home, he saw her on the many nights she came home alone and he probably had a few theories. Then he was replaced by a man who
knew nothing of J.’s arrival to the complex, and this new doorman said nothing. There was a gym on the second floor, and a sign-up sheet for the jacuzzi on the third.

Of course they despised each other. Other lovers appeared, were wined and dined, escorted them to events, retreated back into the city. These brief romances with the scavengers and anglers of the city intersected with but did not perturb J. and Monica the Publicist’s arrangement. It was not a hush thing, it was not a keep quiet thing, but neither mentioned their biweekly partner to their new lovers; there was no need, two nights a month was not a particularly large section of time, suspect only after months and months, and the relationships never lasted long enough to force them to the juncture of revelation. Nor were these would-be rescuers from the arrangement worth discussing during the biweekly assignations. There was the stockbroker who desperately wanted to meet celebrities and left Monica standing, vodka gimlet in her hand, as he tried to woo the Nigerian lingerie model by the bathroom door; there was the time J. showed up with the calculating new conscript in the factchecking department who was transformed horribly after a cosmopolitan and had to be cut loose, bad news, colleagues made jokes for weeks. Sometimes, at an event, J. or Monica would see these new arrivals, and they resisted the urge to interrupt the deep conversation by the canapés (did his face ever seem that alive when she talked to him, did her face ever seem that illuminated from within when he told her a story, no not at all, they had an arrangement), resisted the impulse to swoop down with drink tickets and spirit away the engaged biweekly partner with a lascivious come-on. There was no need. The events came and went, and so did the new people.

Once in a while one of them said I love you, to flat sonant agreement from the other pillow, and it always took them a while to fall asleep when that happened.

Passion at first when it appeared as if their relationship might one day accord with conventional ideals. J. saw Monica first, as she handed out press packets by the coat-check room one night. He thought she was pretty. Monica met him a few events later, when she came over to massage a junketeer who was conversing with him. She introduced herself, as was her custom at events, because she never knew where a stranger might fall in the scheme of things. They ended up kissing a few events later, a friendly good night peck on the cheek that quickened sweetly. As they would never do again once the arrangement asserted itself, they did the normal things, saw movies and ate at restaurants. Monica put the dinners on her corporate credit card because J.
was a writer and expensible. He bought her flowers. Their comrades in the business, on both sides of the events game, thought they made a nice couple. They were a good-looking couple, and besides how are you going to meet anyone real in this business. The cab rides back to Monica the Publicist’s home often embarrassed the drivers in those first months, but J. tipped well, and there were worse things that could happen in a cab.

One of them wanted to end it, and the other did not put up a fight. Neither could recall exactly who brought it up; they each had their own motives. Apart from their individual reasons, there was one common to many citizens in the metropolis: They believed there was something more in this city waiting to be discovered, something just for them. They parted as friends. J. had never left any item in the dark building and that simplified matters. It had curdled, things like that curdled and there was nothing that could be done about it except move on. The city was big. Two weeks later they were back in Monica’s bed, and two weeks after that, too.

Of course they loved each other. The ceiling above the bed twinkled with a universe of events, they picked out and named the familiar constellations to make sense of their lot in life. Whole mythologies up there, sundry pantheons. There blazed the Doughnut, right there, the loose ring of stars named after a certain kind of event held in formerly hip establishments groaning through the final days of their decline, where the salsa was tepid and deracinated, the greens inevitably soggy and depressed. There, a quadrant below, was the Greenstein Belt, named after the Park Avenue plastic surgeon whose clients booked large banquet halls in the fancier hotels to hawk eponymous perfume, where the sick lighting livened the scars of designer surgery into ugly relief. There, spinning there, was Ursus, whose distant, serried stars signified publishing events where the literary heavyweights who had done their best work in the fifties smoked cigars, got into fights over who would be remembered sixty years from now and puzzled over feminist attacks on their hirsute corpus. They came quickly, in silence always, and disengaged and chatted about their private constellations, arid boredom drying their secretions swiftly, they picked out stars until one realized that the other had not said anything for some time, and they were alone.