Three-Martini Lunch (28 page)

45

I
was off to have dinner with my folks at the “21” Club. It was true what I'd said to Eden about having to put in some time with My Old Man and My Old Lady. I'd spent less and less time with them ever since I'd dropped out of Columbia, mostly because whenever I did see them they only sang one tune, and that was to harp on me about getting a job. It was not a song and dance anyone wanted to hear, much less one I wanted to hear, but they were my family after all and I nonetheless felt obligated to see them from time to time.

But if I'm being totally honest I will tell you I was the one who initiated our dinner arrangements that night. I'd phoned my mother and gave her some line about how much I missed both her and My Old Man and that I was feeling too distant, and would she come into the city and have dinner? I even offered to make the reservation, which I thought was a nice touch. Throughout my childhood, my mother was often more preoccupied with her charities than she was with child-rearing, but she was always susceptible to a good guilt trip. Of course she called my father just
as soon as we hung up and demanded we all have dinner together as a family.

I felt bad when Eden came home and saw me getting dressed to go out, because I'd set up the dinner at the last minute and of course I hadn't told her about it. It wasn't as though I could invite her anyway and I hadn't expected she would get so bent out of shape about it. But as soon as I looked at her face it was plain to see how hurt she was. We'd been fighting—or not really fighting so much as silently warring, because when we fought Eden had this trick of being absolutely small and quiet and terrible—ever since the bad business that had happened at our party. For a little while before all that party business, just after we'd eloped, we'd been truly happy but I wasn't sure anymore that we were a match made in heaven. She had seemed like she was all for my becoming a writer at first, but when you really got down to it, she was very limited about what she was willing to do to help me achieve this goal. She was happy enough to type up my work and all that jazz but she wouldn't help me when it really mattered, and that was when it was time to get it into someone else's hands and get it published.

Earlier that day, Gene had stopped by the apartment. He had finally printed the first volume of
The Tuning Fork
and he'd dropped by my pad to give me a couple of contributor's copies. I was pretty happy to see it; if there's one thing a writer loves, it's to see his name in print. Usually whenever I looked at my name I looked right through it, but when you see it in print in a magazine or a book you get to see it the way other people see it and suddenly it becomes a solid thing like it never was before. Gene and I knocked back a few beers together and admired the slick look of the magazine and by the time he left to go lay copies out around all the Village cafés I'd gotten pretty high on myself. That was when I'd gotten the idea to phone my mother and set up dinner.

Now I was on my way to the restaurant, wearing a jacket that itched and was a little too tight in the shoulders but was the one I knew my
mother thought was most respectable. The pair of them were already at the restaurant when I arrived, which turned out to be bad news, because once the maître d' showed me through the dark barroom with all kinds of bric-a-brac hanging from the ceiling to their table and I saw them, both of them sitting with their hands folded together on top of the red-and-white-checked tablecloth, I realized my impromptu demand to have dinner together had alarmed them.

“Are you all right, Clifford?” my mother asked as soon as I sat down.

“Is this about money, son?” my father huffed. “Do you need money?”

I looked from one anxious face to the next. It was a helluva first reaction to a son wanting to have dinner with you, and very telling, too. I was disappointed they thought so little of me, but then they had always thought exactly that little of me and why should this change now? I reasoned. I cleared my throat and told them I was fine and didn't need any money, which, strictly speaking, was mostly true; the first part was more true than the second.

“Why the urgency, Clifford?” My Old Man pressed.

I shrugged. “Can't a fella want to have dinner with his parents?” I said. It could be exasperating to be in their company and I had somehow forgotten this fact in the time I'd spent away from them. I remembered it now in spades.

“The boy misses us, Roger,” my mother said, patting My Old Man's hand where it lay on the table. “Let's not question it too much lest the sentiment fall to pieces.”

The waiter came over and took our order.

“Want to order a bottle of Montrachet, Pops?” I asked My Old Man. It was what he ordered when we went to “21” and had something to celebrate. I felt like we did have something to celebrate but of course I hadn't told him about
The Tuning Fork
yet, so he couldn't know.

“Why would I do that?” he snapped. “And I've asked you before, Clifford,
not
to call me ‘Pops.'”

He was irritable and impatient. It was plain that he wanted to be somewhere else and once again I'd gone and miscalculated the best way to approach him. Our dinner went on like that. My mother was charmed I'd wanted to see her so badly and was full of chatter, while My Old Man was ornery and kept looking at his watch. The pristine copy of
The Tuning Fork
I'd brought was tucked away in my old college attaché case, which was leaning against the leg of the chair I sat in. I glanced down and imagined the pages filed away in the dark down there and it felt like I was harboring something combustible that might go off at any time like a bomb. I wanted to wait for the right time but it was becoming increasingly clear to me that I would have to make my own moment. Finally, when our dishes had been cleared and my mother had ordered dessert, I took the issue out and slid it across the table to my father.

“What's this?” He frowned.

“A literary magazine,” I said.

He was silent as he gazed down at the table with a wary look in his eye.

“
The Tuning Fork
? Never heard of it,” he said finally.

“It's new,” I said. “A friend of mine just started it up. Gene—my friend—is pretty savvy. He's going to do big things on the literary scene.”

My Old Man raised an eyebrow before he could stop himself. He had been drinking scotch through the whole meal and now he put up his finger to signal the waiter to order some more but couldn't seem to get the waiter's attention. “Yes. Well. I suppose down in the Village all kinds of people are printing things up and calling it literature these days.”

“It's a good magazine,” I said, and immediately hated myself for saying it. My voice had taken on that goddamn whiney quality of defensiveness, which I knew would not go unnoticed by My Old Man. My voice was all froggy and I cleared my throat. “As a matter of fact, I have a story in this issue,” I said more loudly. “It really is a good magazine,” I repeated stupidly.

“I'm sure it is, and it's very nice that your friend is so fond of you,” he
said in a patronizing voice. Unaccustomed to being ignored, My Old Man gave up on the waiter, puckering his lips in agitation.

“That's not why he took my story: He asked me for it,” I said. “I didn't even know him before all this jazz. It was a
solicited
submission.”

“Of course,” My Old Man said. I hated the inflection he could put into the simple words
Of course
.

“Clifford, darling,” my mother cut in, sensing the discord and uncomfortable with it. “I'm sure your story is marvelous. I'd bet money on it. Wouldn't you, Roger? Wouldn't you bet money on it?” She elbowed him.

“Yes, yes,” My Old Man said. It was the affirmation my mother wanted but there was no dignity in it for me because his tone of voice was dismissive as hell.

“Easy for him to say,” I grunted under my breath, suddenly angry. “It's not his money.” I was referring to my mother's fortune. Hearing me mutter, My Old Man's head snapped to attention, a dark storm cloud hovering in the vicinity of his brow.

“What was that, dear?” my mother asked.

“Nothing.”

“Look,” My Old Man continued, suddenly changing tacks now that he'd given up on acquiring a final round of booze, “I've just realized I have some business to attend to back at the office. I'm afraid I'd better run back there now and take care of it. Doris—the business might keep me quite late; I think I'll sleep in the office tonight. Will you be all right driving back on your own?”

“Certainly, dear,” my mother replied.

I was good and steamed. My Old Man couldn't have been any more vague—
some business to attend to?
—but it didn't matter how vague he was, because my mother wasn't going to try to pin him down to specifics and he knew she wasn't and that was just the way it was. They had struck some sort of accord years ago, most likely without ever even talking about it, and this dynamic was well established and by now it had become the
bedrock on which they had built their marriage. He stood up and straightened his tie. He wasn't even going to stick around to be polite as my mother ate her dessert, the lousy bastard. He made his farewells, kissing my mother on the cheek and shaking my hand, and sailed across the room to retrieve his coat.

I knew perfectly well where he was going next and it wasn't back to the office. I looked at the table and there was the issue of
The Tuning Fork
with my story in it, still sitting in the space where the busboys had cleared my father's plate.

“Did you want your father to have that copy, dear?” my mother asked me, following my gaze to where the magazine lay forgotten on the table. “I can bring it home and put it on his nightstand.”

It took everything in me not to guffaw rudely and say something about My Old Man rarely sleeping next to the nightstand she meant, but I looked at my mother and I knew how badly it would hurt her.

“Nah,” I said. “No big deal.”

I sat with her as she ate her profiteroles but excused myself soon after. I kissed my mother good-bye and made my way to the coat-check. I didn't have any cash and I had stupidly forgotten to ask Eden for some and now the coat-check man was smiling at me expectantly.

“Here,” I said, slapping the issue of
The Tuning Fork
on the coat-check counter. “You can use it for toilet paper.”

I left it sitting there and walked out into the chilly autumn evening.

46

A
fter we left the Y, I went back to my hotel room alone. I spent the evening handling the journal, gazing at it in amazement and nervously turning it over in my hands, but not opening it. I wasted away the better part of the night and the next morning engaged in this bizarre, devoted ritual. I forgot to eat. I have always regarded people who claimed they've forgotten to eat as melodramatic, but once the journal entered my life, I understood better: It is difficult to think about consuming anything when you yourself are being consumed. At one point I dozed off for a blessed, relieving spell, my arms hugging the journal to my chest, its musty scent greeting me upon my awakening, reminding me of the stern business at hand. As vaguely suicidal as it sounds, I was aware of wishing, for the briefest of moments, that I could've remained asleep. There was something about the journal that brought me back to earth as I woke up and came to; the fact of its existence soaked into my body like ink bleeding into a page. Looking back on things now, I realize I was trying to brace myself for the journal to somehow rewrite my memories of my father—or,
worse, delete them altogether—and one can never be ready for such a thing.

Around noon, there was a knock at my hotel room door. I jumped and froze.

“Miles?” came a muffled voice.

“Joey?” I shook myself into motion.

“Hey,” he said in a familiar friendly voice once I'd taken the chain off the door and opened it. His eyes scanned the room and rested upon the unopened journal lying on the bed. Down the hall, a baby started crying, reminding me to feel a shiver of shame for my seedy surroundings.

“Come in,” I offered, then hesitated. “If you want.”

“Sure.”

Joey moved into the room, and I closed the door behind him. The baby's shrieks filtered into the room at half-volume.

“So, good reading? What did your father write about?” he asked, sitting down on the bed and glancing at the journal. It had been almost twenty-four hours since I'd reclaimed the contents of my father's old locker at the Y.

“I don't know.”

“What do you mean, you don't know?”

I heard him gasp slightly as I shook my head.

“You mean you haven't opened it?”

“It's not that simple,” I said.

At this, he snorted. “Hah, okay, fine. But show me someone who says his family is simple, and I'll show you a liar,” he said.

I realized, in that moment, we had spent all this time searching for my father's locker, but that I had never asked Joey very much about his own history. I knew he hailed from hill country in Kentucky, that his family owned a bourbon distillery and were reasonably well off, or so I assumed from Joey's vague descriptions of things.

“What is
your
family like?” I asked now.

He shrugged. “Rich. Stupid. But I have some nice memories of my mother. She was bright, full of life, very patient with me when I was a child.”

“I see,” I said, recognizing all too well the familiar phrasing of his words. “How old were you when she died?”

“Seven. No one ever told me she was sick. I suppose I was a little bit of an angry kid after that. Looking back on it now, I guess that's why my father packed me off to boarding school for a time. Well, that, and his new wife . . . half his age and dumb as dirt, but still conniving enough to get a diamond on her finger and me enrolled in boarding school within the same week.”

“I'm sorry,” I said awkwardly.

“Don't be,” he replied. “Boarding school wasn't so bad. Plenty of poor little rich boys and you start to look around and realize a lot of guys have it worse than you do.” He paused and smiled at me. “Besides,” he added, “I fell for my first love in boarding school.”

He was very comfortable saying this. I wondered, privately, how many there had been.

“No . . . boarding school certainly wasn't the worst part of my childhood,” he said. “The worst part was when my uncle came to stay with us. He was the one who decided to take me out of boarding school and bring me back home.” He shook his head. “I wish he hadn't.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“Nah,” Joey said, refusing. He stood up. “Let's not talk about that now. Right now I want to celebrate. What do you say? You're clearly going to hold off opening that thing like it's some holy shrine,” he said, gesturing to the journal. “Let's do something fun in the meantime. Maybe a good distraction will loosen you up.”

“What do you have in mind?”

“My friend Sally Ann is throwing a party,” he said. “She's got this rickety old house up on Potrero Hill and throws the best parties.”

Part of me dreaded the thought of going to a party, but Joey had a point about needing a distraction: Ever since I'd brought the journal back to the hotel with me, I'd been in a state of arrested development, unable to push myself forward.

Joey offered to pay for a taxi. We flagged one down and rode along, talking excitedly and blowing cigarette smoke out the windows. Once across town, the taxi climbed to the top of a steep hill and dropped us off in front of an elaborate, sagging, dilapidated Victorian with lots of frilly, fussy scrollwork like icing on the eaves and gables. At one time the house must've been charming, but now it was an eyesore. Someone had painted the house a garish combination of red, purple, and yellow while painting the trim a glossy black, the color of an oil-slick. There were spots where the paint was already peeling and a number of places where the paint's fidelity to the contours of the scrollwork was imprecise.

A long staircase led up to the front porch. At the top of the stairs, we pushed a buzzer, but this formality was pointless, for the party was raging so loudly it swallowed up the sound of the buzzer. Joey shrugged again and turned the doorknob, and we poked our way shyly into a crowded room. A few partygoers nodded at us in a vague, indifferent way as we brushed past them. They were dressed in a sort of unintended uniform, in black turtlenecks or striped sailor shirts, all punctuated with a sprinkling of black berets and red scarves. Everyone looked self-consciously artistic and off-kilter, and I recognized an echo of Greenwich Village in this scene. In a far corner, a group of people gathered around a young art student who was reading a poem aloud as an RCA projector cast sporadic images of nude men and pregnant women juxtaposed with ripe fruit and the mushroom cloud of an atom bomb exploding onto a whitewashed wall. Jazz trumpeted from a record player in the next room.

“Let's find Sally Ann,” Joey shouted over the noise.

He grabbed my arm and steered me through the party. We moved down a series of hallways until we came to the center of a large back-parlor
where a woman sprang up from where she had been on a blue velvet sofa, leaning on the shoulder of a clean-shaven man and smoking a hookah pipe.

“Darling!” she said, tossing away the hookah hose upon seeing Joey and throwing her arms wide for theatrical effect. “My very
own
darling! I'm positively overjoyed!”

“Sally Ann!” Joey called back, throwing his arms wide in return. They fell into a hug.

Sally Ann was a honey blonde with satiny-looking curls cut short to her shoulders. Her lipstick had been drawn on in a painstakingly careful manner, successfully carving out a bow tie where God himself had declined to craft one. She wore a full tulle skirt the color of cotton candy and a pair of pale pink slippers. A smart black sash had been cinched about her waist with the clear aim of emphasizing her hourglass silhouette. And although it was doubtful she had set foot outside of her apartment during the course of the evening, a superfluous white pill hat crowned her head, complete with a rather absurd, billowing ostrich quill that first shot upward, then eventually drooped down to nearly brush the tip of her nose, hovering directly in the space between her bright blue eyes.

As I took her in, her clothing and countenance appeared like the direct product of some women's magazine's article on how to be a good hostess—but so much so that there seemed to be an air of costume about her, as though her getup was mocking the very idea.

“What on earth
is
this thing?” Joey asked, picking up the mouthpiece from where she had dropped it on the carpet and following the hookah's hose back to where it was attached to its colored glass vase.

“Isn't it exotic, darling? Dick brought it back from the Middle East to amuse me.” She leaned towards us in a confidential way but did not lower her voice. “I think he's got it in his head this Arabia nonsense will inspire me to join his little harem,” she said, elbowing Joey in the ribs and tilting her head to direct our attention towards a man across the room. Dick
stood leaning over a petite doe-eyed girl, brushing her neatly trimmed bangs out of her eyes and cooing something into her ear.

“You're not cut out for harem life, Sally Ann,” Joey commented. “You're a class act at center stage but I don't know how well you'd do in the chorus.”

“Frankly, my darling, neither do I,” she replied. Sally Ann turned to me, took a closer look, and flourished a hand in my direction. “But I see you brought your own fine specimen!” As I bristled at this condescending appraisal Joey shot me a look of apology, but Sally Ann seemed not to notice. “Who is this maddeningly handsome and muscular young fellow?”

“This is my friend Miles. Miles? Sally Ann. Sally Ann, Miles.”

“Oh, but you don't
have
friends, darling,” she said. She suddenly whirled about in my direction. Later, Joey explained that Sally Ann was incapable of addressing more than one person at a time. It was how she had cultivated that breathless, confiding charm of hers. As a result she had a perpetual habit of referring to whomever she wasn't addressing in the third person, as though they weren't present. “Honest,” she continued, blinking her blue saucerlike eyes at me. The conversation was now a private one between the two of us. “Ask him! He doesn't have friends. Not a one.” She leaned in. “Do you want to know why? Because all of his friends fall in love with him,” she answered. “It's true! They
all
do! Every last one.”

“Aren't
you
his friend?” I asked.

“Well, now; you've got me there, you clever devil.” She laughed and reached out for Joey's faintly stubbled, lightly clefted chin, pinching it between her fingers and tipping his face in my direction. “But I swear to you, it's true. And can you blame them?”

I was too embarrassed to answer. Joey blushed and Sally Ann laughed again. She released Joey's chin and turned again to me.

“I haven't seen you around before,” she said, making a quick study of my person. “And I know
everyone
in the city.”

“It's true,” Joey said. “She does.”

“You aren't from here, are you?”

“No,” I said. “New York.”

“My, that's quite a distance. How long do you plan to stay?”

The question caught Joey's attention, as though it dawned on him that
he
hadn't asked how much longer I planned to stay. My only mission had been to find my father's journal, and now it was accomplished. Sally Ann, I noticed, was watching Joey's face from the corner of her eye and registered his uptick of interest.

“I suppose . . .” I faltered, glancing nervously at Joey, “I'll probably catch the Greyhound back in the next day or two.”

“Why so soon? Don't you like Frisco?” Sally Ann asked in a stagey, pouting voice, as though I had just insulted her favorite cousin.

“I do,” I reassured her. “I'm afraid it's a question of money. I've run through too much already; my hotel room is a daily expense I can't afford indefinitely.”

She was still watching Joey out of the corner of her eye as I announced my imminent departure. Reading his reaction, her mouth twisted and her eyes narrowed, and I realized with a shock that she was jealous.

“Isn't that a shame?” she remarked, turning to Joey. “Won't you be sad to see Miles here leave so soon?” It was plain she already knew the answer.

“As a matter of fact,” Joey said, fixing me now with a steady gaze, “I will.”

We exchanged a somber stare as Sally Ann shifted on her feet, annoyed to find herself so easily ignored.

“Well!” Sally Ann exclaimed, breaking the weighty tension of this exchange. “This calls for a drink! It isn't proper to send someone off without a toast to wish him
bon voyage
.”

She ushered us to a little wet-bar in her living room, her cotton-candy tulle skirt swishing absurdly as she moved. We made our way through the
bodies at her direction. She cleared her throat and a handful of party guests who were poking around the bar's stash of booze tittered and politely moved off to the side.

“You know . . .” she said, ducking behind the bar and rummaging around, “I think I may have just the thing . . . Now, if I can only lay my hands on it . . . Aha! Here it is!” She resurfaced, proudly holding up a bottle of champagne by its shiny-foiled neck. I looked at the iconic shield-shaped label and made out the words
Dom Pérignon
.

“Wouldn't you like to save that for a special occasion?” I asked. In the ten or so minutes since we'd met, I had been able to work out for myself how little Sally Ann liked me. She shot me a look now that said I was not to interfere with her performance of magnanimous delight.

“Nonsense. We should drink to your visit and send you off in style! And besides, why drink tomorrow what you can drink today?” she replied. “That's my motto.” She winked. “Now,” she continued, offering the bottle in our direction, “who would like to do the honors? Joey?”

Joey accepted the bottle and proceeded to unwrap the foil and remove the wire cage. The cork came out with a loud
POP!
and the mouth of the bottle smoked a little like the barrel of a gun. Most of Sally Ann's glassware was already engaged, and we wound up pouring the champagne into three Dixie cups. Sally Ann ordered Joey to fill them up to the brim.