Three-Martini Lunch (33 page)

53

W
ithout consciously intending it, I had begun writing a memoir of sorts. On a whim, I'd picked up a composition book at a stationer in San Francisco, and before I knew it I was filling up the pages. I began to write down every childhood memory of my father I could recall. Other times, I rewrote the anecdotes in my father's journal. I alternated between my memories and his, strategically folding two halves together—the war hero and the old man in his armchair—so that they made a whole. It was a curious sort of call-and-response memoir. For me, it was also cathartic: a way to reconcile the avalanche of information I'd gained about my father upon recovering his journal with the thoughts and questions I'd had about him as a child.

“Listen to this,” I would sometimes say to Joey, reading a passage from my father's journal I had rewritten, or sometimes—when I was feeling especially brave—a passage written in my own voice, constructed out of my own memories. He would stop his happy whistling and put down
whatever he was tinkering with and listen carefully, nodding along as though impressed.

Most of the time I knew his quiet demeanor and sober, attentive expression were donned purposely for my benefit, as Joey's natural state was a chatty and merry one. But one day, as I was reading one of these passages aloud, a shadow passed over Joey's face that struck me as far more personal, and slightly anguished.

“Something wrong, Joey?” I asked.

“No,” he said, but the shadow was still there. I closed my composition book and looked at him more carefully.

“You mentioned your uncle once,” I said, blindly guessing at the source. “That he was the one who took you out of boarding school.”

“Yes.”

“What happened after that?”

Joey shrugged. “It's not important.”

“Please, I want to know. From what you've said, he didn't always live with you. Why did that change?” We were outside on the narrow deck that wrapped around the entire perimeter of the houseboat, and Joey was crouched over a broken electric toaster he'd found, trying to repair the contraption just for the hell of it. “Was he your father's brother?”

Joey shook his head. “My mother's. Her family did very well breeding horses—really impressive ones that ran in the Derby—but the truth is my uncle lost most of the family money betting. Around the time I was sixteen, he had to come live with us because he was flat broke.

“That wasn't what he told people, of course. He needed an excuse, so he decided I was it.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“He said he'd come to live with us to do right by his sister's memory and ‘correct' his nephew's development.” Joey caught the expression flickering over my face. “He said I was too soft,” he explained, “that boarding school was turning me into a pansy. Of course, it wasn't. But he'd visited
me a year or two earlier at school, and I think he'd caught on to the way of things for me.”

Joey did not say what he meant by
the way of things for me
, but he didn't need to: I knew. I wondered if Joey's uncle was what had come between him and his first love.

“The loaded insinuation was all he needed to get my father to allow him to dole out whatever corrective measures he deemed necessary. When it came to his progeny, my father was always happiest when other people were put in charge of doing all the real work. He has no spine and knows it. So . . . all this is to say, after my uncle made his veiled accusation and offered to step in, he pretty much had free rein. Drunk, unemployed, and in debt, he made a full-time job out of bullying me under the pretenses of ‘home-schooling.' I suppose it
was
an education of sorts, after all.” Joey shrugged again.

I thought of Wendell, grateful that while my mother didn't exactly stand up to him, she nonetheless did her best to keep me and Wendell separated from each other, and she never put Wendell in charge of my conduct in any way.

“At least I knew what I was in for,” Joey continued. “My uncle had come to stay with us once before, just for a week or so, a few months after my mother died. It was the first time I'd ever met him, and with my mother passed on, I remember being excited. I thought he might look like my mother, he might have her laugh, he might hold his fork the way she did . . . He didn't look anything like her. I just remember noticing how
red
he was. His complexion looked perpetually sunburned, his hair was strawberry—his eyes, even, were bloodshot. His neck sweated a great deal; there were stains around all his collars. I was only seven. That time, too, he declared I was too soft. He took it out on me by teaching me how to hunt.

“I'd told him about a little ritual my mother and I had of taking a walk around the property in the evenings and feeding the deer dried sweet
corn. My mother had a special way about her; she could get the deer to eat out of her hand.

“The first thing my uncle did was make me build a hunting blind with him. That was the kind of hunter he was, you see: the kind to stack the deck by sitting in a blind and putting out feed. It wasn't terrible right away. I thought we were building a tree house at first. It may sound naïve, but I'd never killed anything in my life—not even a squirrel. I'd only ever shot BB guns at empty cans.”

I was inclined to believe Joey on this score. I thought of the concern he'd shown for Cob's insects that first night we'd met. Since settling into life on the houseboat, Joey was more often the one to feed and care for the insects in their little glass jars. He'd gone so far as to check a book on entomology out from the library.

“We were up in that hunting blind when it happened,” he continued now. “It could be that I was just a kid, that it was only my imagination, but that first deer that walked into the clearing . . . I swore it was this one doe in particular, one that used to come around and eat directly out of my mother's hand. We must've made a noise, or else she caught wind of us, because she looked up to regard us with her wet brown eyes, and she and I found ourselves locked in a stare. She was a beautiful doe, something regal about her, and gazing at her—for a moment at least—it seemed like I had somehow fallen out of time, that I was back with my mother, feeding the deer at dusk the way we always had.

“But then my uncle dumped the rifle in my arms and shouted at me to shoot. I did as I was told. I said a silent prayer she'd get spooked and run away, but she froze.”

“What . . . was the outcome?” I ventured.

“Bullet caught her in the foreleg and tore through her knee. She staggered and fell, but then she tried to get up again. She ran a few yards, and fell . . . ran and fell, ran and fell . . . The sight of it made me sick. My uncle
raged at me, complaining that I'd only wounded her and caused her a slower, more painful death.

“Those words were what put me to shame. He beat me with the butt of the rifle until I was bloody, but I hardly remember the pain of that. It was the pain of that doe, out there in the woods, sprinting and falling, sprinting and falling, flailing and on the losing side of life, that hurt the most.”

He looked at me.

“That's the part I still remember the most.”

I didn't know what to say. I felt bad for having brought it up, for having pressed him to talk. At the same time I was glad to know him better, to understand what made him tick.

We made lunch. The dark shadow dissipated from his features. Joey appeared to have shaken it off. For the remainder of the afternoon and evening, he was as happy as ever, puttering around the houseboat and whistling again like a canary.

It wasn't until later that night, after we'd gone to bed and slept for a few hours, that he hollered at the top of his lungs and sat up under the covers, dripping with sweat. I knew immediately he'd had a nightmare, and I knew, too, what the nightmare was likely about. I wasn't sure how to help, other than to soak a washrag in cold water and hold him while pressing the cool rag to his forehead.

It was unexpected and new to me, this vulnerability of his. It was the first time I saw it, and I didn't quite know what to make of it. It's true to say it made me love him more. But if I am being honest, it also made me more afraid of everything we were, everything we were doing to each other, and, most especially, everything we would do to each other in the future.

W
e began to experience the kind of growing pains that all lovers experience whenever they move in together and begin to play house. Which is to say, Joey's way of doing things was not my way of doing things, and vice versa. The major difference in our habits was, I believe, one that had its roots in class and race. In many ways, the color of my skin dictated mine, Columbia education be damned. I was aware of what little advantage life had afforded me; I was careful not to bring unwanted attention on myself. I had mastered the art of invisibility.

Joey, on the other hand, was privileged, and white, and had mastered the art of being seen. His uncle's beatings had only made him more determined to do as he pleased with his life, and he was only careful when it came to avoiding detection from official sources. From his tales, I deduced he had toed a fine line in the Army. These were tales that made me nervous.

One of his favorite habits on the houseboat was to lie on the deck
sunning himself, naked as the day he was born, eating cherries and spitting the pits into the water.

“We don't want to attract attention,” I often reminded him.

“I'm getting a sun-tan, not robbing a bank,” Joey would reply, waving me off.

He refused to take things seriously, even when the Coast Guard made a turn of the harbor, patrolling. I tried to shoo him off the deck and back inside, but of course I'd have been better off herding cats. Instead, I wound up ducking inside while he grinned at the officers and made a jokey salute as they passed. This happened more than once. I was shocked and vaguely terrified—and, in all honesty, also a little amused in spite of myself—when one day Joey managed to invite them to come aboard our deck and have a beer.

Joey's charm produced that effect—such scenarios as you could hardly believe. His charm was, without a doubt, his greatest strength and most attractive quality. So it unnerved me one day to realize how profoundly it also bothered me. I remembered his casual familiarity with the YMCA and felt a terrible, deeply-annoyed jealousy. I'm afraid to admit, I judged him: He was too brazen, too comfortable, too easy with himself, and I wanted him to understand how dearly we might pay for this.

My irritation with Joey took on a strange form: I found myself hiding behind Janet.

“You ought to know,” I said to him one day, “I'm not like you.”

Naturally, he wanted to know what I meant. I told him I had a girl back home whom I planned to marry.

“Sure,” Joey said, shrugging good-naturedly. “But that's nothing very serious.”

I blinked at him. “What do you mean, ‘nothing serious'?”

“I mean, of course you have a girl.” I searched his face for sarcasm but found none. He asked me a few questions about Janet—mere details,
really. How did she dress, where did she live, what kinds of movies did we go to see, et cetera. He seemed idly curious, the way a kid might ask questions about life in China from a returning tourist.

“You don't seem bothered by all this,” I said.

“Why should I be?” Joey replied, shrugging. “She sounds fine—very down-to-earth and all that—but you can't have the same kind of feelings for each other as we do. It's not the same thing.”

“We're expected to marry. I wish you'd take this more seriously.”

“Nah,” he said, slipping his arm around me. “You just wish I was more like you: a grumpy old bastard in a young man's body.” He winked, and I sighed in resignation.

•   •   •

O
ne afternoon I was alone on the houseboat, transcribing pages from my father's journal, as had become my routine, when Joey's friend Eddie came looking for him. It was a pleasant day, and I had thrown all the windows and doors open to let in the fresh air. It was very quiet, and I had lost myself entirely to the stillness when an abrupt rap sounded on the open redwood door and Eddie poked his head in. I wasn't expecting anyone, and the brilliant flash of sunshine on his white-blond hair nearly startled me out of my chair.

“Whoa, fella,” he said, holding his hands up in surrender. “Sorry about that, chief.” I hadn't seen him since our late-night cruise down Lombard Street in Bill's Fairlane, but I recognized him easily. As he stood in the doorway he cut a distinctly lanky figure against the bright sunlight pouring in behind him. He looked like a boy who had just run in from a cornfield in Iowa or a wheat field in Nebraska. You almost expected to find a few stray pieces of straw in that white-blond hair.

“I guess we don't have a lot of folks dropping in unexpectedly,” I said, pulling my nerves back together and giving a good-natured chuckle. I had liked Eddie that first night I met him; he seemed straightforward, gentle.

“‘We'?” He grinned and arched an eyebrow, making me slightly uncomfortable.

“He stepped out,” I said, meaning Joey. “There's some beer, I think.”

“That'd be swell,” he said, nodding, and I went out onto the deck to fetch up two bottles. We didn't have an ice-box on the houseboat and Joey had solved this lack of a modern appliance by putting the sealed bottles of beer in a crab trap and lowering it into the chilly water. Eddie came outside and watched as I hauled up the rope and opened the trap.

“Looks like one of Joey's bright ideas,” he said, pointing to the crab trap with a faint smile playing on his lips. There was a twang to his Kentucky accent that Joey did not have. I opened one of the beers on the deck railing and handed it to him, then opened one for myself. Despite the fact the beers were sealed, there was always a faint odor of motor oil and just the tiniest hint of brackish seawater about them. We went back inside and sat awkwardly on the two deck chairs in the middle of the room. The breeze wafted in from the open door and the sound of water softly slapping the moorings drifted up to us.

“What do you think of Frisco?” Eddie asked, making polite conversation. I was grateful he had not brought up the night of our car ride.

“I like it out here,” I replied. “It's . . .” I struggled to find the right words, but they wouldn't come. “. . . so different from New York.”

He laughed and made that particular pronouncement that all people who are not from New York make: “Yeah, New York's a nice enough place to visit, but I don't know how anybody can ever live there.” He shook his head. “It's certainly not for me.”

“I don't know when Joey will be back,” I said. I noticed he was already more than halfway through his beer. Eddie, for all his cornfield patina, appeared to be a fast-drinker.

“Well, that's all right. I just came to tell him I checked my P.O. box, and I got my letter today. Wanted to see if he did, too.”

“Your letter?”

“From the Department of Labor,” he said. “I got the job. Just wanted to thank Joey.”

“Thank him for what?” I was confused. Joey had mentioned both he and Eddie were applying for government jobs, but until that moment I hadn't paid much attention to this fact, caught up as I was with my father's journal and my new life on the houseboat.

“It's an administrative position—I'll be working as the secretary to some kind of mining engineer—but I ain't ever worked in an office before. Now I gotta learn how to type before the end of the month. Me, typing, hah! I'm pretty sure Joey's old man pulled some strings, and I'm grateful.”

“Oh,” I said, taking all this in.

“Yep, Joey's old man is a cold fish, that's for sure, but he still does Joey a good turn from time to time.”

“I guess congratulations are in order,” I said, offering him my hand.

“Say, thanks,” he said. “I just came around because I figured Joey might've gotten his letter, too. I'm itching to find out if we'll be in D.C. together like we planned.”

Something about the way Eddie had said those words,
like we planned
, suddenly had me feeling hostile and irritated. I stood up, and—not very gracefully—snatched the empty beer bottle out of Eddie's hand. I gave a little grimace that was meant to be a smile.

“Well, I've got to get back to work,” I said, moving as though to clear the bottles away and get back to business. Eddie cocked his head at me and I could tell what he was thinking. What had changed between us, he was wondering. And what could I possibly have to do so urgently?

“All right,” he said, as though giving up on the answer. He rose and smoothed down his T-shirt and blue jeans. “Well, I just came to tell Joey my news and see about that letter. You tell him I stopped by?”

“I will,” I promised. Eddie nodded and I felt embarrassed, aware of myself as a bratty child who had just thrown a tantrum. “I will,” I repeated stupidly, and tried to smile. “Thank you for coming by, Eddie.”

He smiled back easily. His blue eyes seemed kind, his white-blond hair angelic. I was a fool; my suspicions had been entirely my own. He turned to go and took a few strides towards the door, then paused.

“Miles? You'll look out for him, won't you?”

I froze. “What do you mean?”

He smiled sheepishly and shrugged. “Oh, I don't know . . . Joey's reckless. Letting guys like Bill and Donald buy him drinks . . . Anyway, two men, well, sometimes that attracts attention. And a white man and a Negro, well, people have a habit of
remembering
that pair, you understand? But he's seemed to calm down some since he met you, and I'm glad. I hope you can . . . just”—Eddie shook his head—“keep it that way, and take good care of him.”

He turned and walked out the door. I watched him disappear, a black silhouette cutting through the bright light of afternoon.

•   •   •

J
oey came back an hour later, carrying two bags from the little grocery store in town. I got up to help him but froze when I saw clutched in his hand was an open envelope.

“Eddie stopped by,” I dutifully reported. “He was granted a position at the Department of Labor and he wanted to thank you for your father's influence.”

Joey's face lit up. “Oh, that's swell!”

“Eddie also wanted to find out whether you'd received
your
letter,” I added. He looked down at the envelope he'd been carrying as though he had forgotten it was there.

“I did!” he said. “I got the job!”

“Congratulations,” I said. I smiled and we embraced, but the truth was I wasn't sure what any of this meant, and my heart was only halfway in it.