Vigil for a Stranger (6 page)

After work, when the bus let me off on Whalley Avenue, I almost always ate dinner at one of the restaurants there, and my favorite place was Jimmy Luigi's. I would go there three or four times a week, order a small white clam special, and have a beer while I waited and another beer while I ate. The pizza made a good cheap dinner, with a couple of extra pieces to take home for the next day's cold lunch, and the two beers were just the right amount to dull my various griefs and put me to sleep at night.

James was usually behind the counter making the pizzas. I was vaguely aware that he was Jimmy Luigi himself, though I never heard anyone call him anything but James, and I liked him a lot, instinctively, before I fell in love with him or really knew him. Even then, before he made a lot of money, he was overweight—not grossly, not unattractively (he's big and heavy-boned, like me, and he can stand a few extra pounds), but definitely overweight. I assumed he was Italian: the pizzas, the name, the big black moustache. I could see him growing up in East Haven. I could see his wife, probably a petite dark-eyed schoolteacher named Joanne, and his two clean-cut kids (Jimmy Jr. and Jennifer), a nice old matriarchal mother, half a dozen brothers and sisters all living in the same neighborhood, and a pool table and built-in bar in the basement of his split level.

I'm not totally unperceptive: that's the guy James would have been in an ideal world. Instead, he was an only child and an orphan and a burned-out C.P.A. His ex-wife Nona was a pediatrician in Baltimore. They had no children, which was one reason they split up. He lived on Avon Street in a third-floor apartment huddled so closely under the eaves that all the rooms were triangular. He was almost as lonely as I was.

I didn't actually meet him until I showed up one night for dinner and saw a big sign in the window that said Jimmy Luigi's was closed for a month and would reopen downtown on Chapel Street. I couldn't believe it: not only was my neighborhood pizza parlor deserting me for good, but I had been looking forward all day to my white clam special and two beers. Rituals were important to me. I didn't have a lot of friends, I had almost no time to paint, my feelings about my job ranged from boredom to loathing, my only child lived three thousand miles away and spoke a foreign language, my cat was dead. Jimmy Luigi's was one of the few stable, positive elements in my life. I went up the street to the Chinese place and had a greasy egg roll, vegetable fried rice that tasted canned, and so much tea that I couldn't sleep at all that night.

In those days, I was just getting into the oversized watercolors that would eventually become my trademark, if I had a trademark, and painting was more real to me than anything. The weekends would fly by while I worked. I had my rituals. Friday night, no matter how tired I was, I prepared the large surfaces on which I would work: I cut the paper from the huge roll I had bought instead of winter boots, soaked it in the tub, made stretchers and stapled the paper tight, like a white rectangular drum. By Saturday morning, when it was dry, I could start. Often, I hadn't had enough sleep—the excitement and anticipation would keep me awake—and I would enter the sparse morning light of the room where I worked, impatient to get going, and be paralyzed by the perfection of that expanse of white. How could I possibly improve it? What could I bring to this rare purity? And then the reluctance would pass and I would feel the adrenalin course through me, and I would squeeze out my colors, fill the two Mason jars with water, sketch in the outlines, and begin the initial wash. Time would pass, and the next thing I knew it was dark out, I was faint with hunger, and before me there was the rough beginning of a painting that filled me with a combination of rapture and dread. Sunday would be the same. I discovered that it was possible to finish a 40 × 60 inch painting in a weekend if I worked fourteen hours at a stretch.

Getting into my white uniform and stockings every Monday morning was like putting on prison garb, but all day Monday I would remain in a state of exhilaration. This wore off by the evening, and for the rest of the week things were at the point where my nightly beer and pizza were the high point of my life. I began to anticipate them around 2:00 every day.

The day after I saw the sign in the window of Jimmy Luigi's, I went down to the new place on Chapel Street and looked in the window. It was an unpromising little ex-shoe store a couple of blocks up from the Green. The windows were still filthy, but inside I could see men working. I thought I caught a glimpse of James, so I banged on the window. One man looked up from what he was doing and motioned me irritably away, but I banged again, and James finally came over, peered through the window, and came outside to see what I wanted.

It was freezing out, with a brutal wind whistling up Chapel Street, between the buildings, from the Sound. I felt bad dragging him out in the cold, and once I had him there I wasn't sure what to say. All the way down, I had been thinking of the Hemingway story, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” and how much like that old man I felt. I suppose I had intended to reproach James for leaving the neighborhood, to tell him how I had depended on him and what a hole his leaving would put in my lousy little life.

“May I help you?” he said. His voice was kind. He wore earmuffs and a ski jacket. He looked like a bear. I just stared at him. “Can I do something for you?”

I pulled myself together and said, “I used to eat out at your place in Westville.”

“Yeah, I thought you looked familiar.” He stuck his hands in his pockets and puffed out his cheeks and rocked back and forth on his heels, the way people do when they're cold.

“It was really great pizza,” I said.

“It's going to be even better down here,” he said. “You wait and see.”

“I don't get downtown that much, really.”

“You will.” He smiled at me. “You'll come down for Jimmy Luigi's.” He looked like he wanted to leave, but he added, with dogged politeness, “Was there something I could do for you?”

I felt I owed it to him to say something else, he'd been so nice about coming outside to talk. “Well, my cat died,” I said. I meant that to be the beginning of a concise litany of my woes, culminating in my personal reaction to the loss of Jimmy Luigi's, but after I said it I couldn't go on, I couldn't lay my troubles on such a nice man, and so I said, “But it doesn't matter, I don't want to bother you, I just wanted to say I'll miss having your place right down the street from me. I really like your white clam pizza. I like the oregano especially.”

But he wasn't listening. He was frowning off into space, grimacing slightly, running his hand over his jaw and around to the back of his neck—portrait of a person thinking. He said, “Let me think, let me just think.”

“Really,” I said. “I don't mean to keep you out here.” I gestured vaguely up Chapel Street. It was winter-bleak, the whole city was, all of southern New England was grey and ugly, most of the snow melting as soon as it fell, the endless traffic churning up what was left, the air smelling of chemicals and exhaust and damp, and people on the street, chased by the wind, looking red-nosed and desperate and drugged-out on cold medications. I said, “I was just on my way up to—”

“Wait,” he said. “I'm thinking. How would you like a pair of them?” I looked at him. He had greenish-brown eyes that were very, very slightly crossed, and his front teeth were very, very slightly crooked. I didn't know what he meant. Pizzas? He said, “How about a couple of nice red tabbies?”

It turned out he ran a cat-placement service on the side. He didn't keep the cats himself; his friend Hugh had a barnful out in Southbury, and James was always on the lookout for potential adoptions. He placed an average often cats a month, he said, but the cats kept multiplying, he couldn't keep up. The two tabbies, though, had belonged to James and his ex-wife, Nona. She had remarried and had a baby and the baby was allergic to the cats, and so the cats had come to James and were now with Hugh. James couldn't keep cats in his tiny, triangular place, and besides he was never home, which wasn't fair to a pet. Their names were Rosie and Ruby, short for Roseola and Rubella. “We thought that was clever because my wife is a pediatrician,” James said. “Now I just think it's stupid. She still thinks it's clever. She and her new hubby got a gerbil for the baby and named it Dr. Spock, ha ha. But Rosie and Ruby are great cats—identical twins, six years old, neutered, affectionate, gorgeous, clean, fluffy, outgoing, intelligent, temperate in their habits …”

I agreed to take the cats. James smiled and shook my hand, and we went up to Claire's for herb tea and huge slabs of Hungarian coffee cake. We talked about our awful exes. James ordered a second piece of cake. I loved watching him eat, he ate with such unself-conscious enjoyment. I thought I had never seen such a contented man, and without his down jacket he wasn't really all that huge.

Rosie and Ruby moved in with me the next day, and James two weeks later, and the new Jimmy Luigi's opened on Valentine's Day and was a smash hit from the beginning. I quit my job with Dr. Mankoff. James showed me how to keep the books for Jimmy Luigi's and then dumped everything in my lap. He hated that part of it—his old profession. He wanted only to make pizza. Sometimes I helped out on Friday and Saturday nights, working alongside Jimmy and his chief assistant Raymond in the hot kitchen. I grew to love the heat, and the good-natured insults, and the clean, redstained aprons we all wore, and the overpowering smells of tomato and oregano and yeast. I learned how to flatten a ball of dough and twirl it into a circle, but I could never make mine as thin as James's. What I liked best was removing the finished pizza from the oven with a long-handled wooden paddle, flipping it onto a metal tray, and slicing it—zip zip zip—into perfect eighths.

And that's all there is to say about my life with James. We were a phenomenon: two people who managed to be happy together. It was that simple, and after the complexities of life with Emile, simplicity was what I was looking for.

I did my best to put Alison Kaye and her Filo-Fax out of my mind, but I didn't succeed. All day Wednesday, I was conscious that the next day was Thursday, and that her lunch date at Chez D. was for 1:30, but I didn't let myself do any of the things I wanted to do, which ranged from getting out all my old pictures of Pierce and studying them with a magnifying glass to making frantic phone calls to try to locate Haver & Schmidt or Chez D. or Alison Kaye herself. Consequently, I did nothing. James was working, and I was supposed to be painting and doing laundry. I sat around all day staring out the window at the wind ripping the leaves off the trees in our back yard.

On Thursday morning, I woke with a sense of urgency, still gripped by the violent and bloody atmosphere of a dream I could mercifully remember nothing about. As soon as James left for work at eleven, I gathered together all my photographs of Pierce. There weren't many. His official college photo in the Oberlin yearbook, a candid shot (taken at a picnic) also in the yearbook, the photo of the two of us (in color, with red eyes) in front of his apartment building, and another photo (black and white, and rather murky) of Pierce and two guys he knew in drama school wearing huge straw hats and serapes and holding guitars and grinning insanely.

I got the rectangular magnifying glass out of the little drawer at the top of the compact edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (the boxed set, which Emile had purchased in 1976 when the Book of the Month Club had a good deal on it—when I was in the Yale–New Haven psychiatric ward learning to make baskets). I couldn't look at the OED without resentment—that my husband had been so undisturbed by my troubles that he could perform the prosaic act of ordering from the Book of the Month Club a two-volume, 4000-page dictionary in a language he was making secret plans to repudiate along with his wife. In fact, he left the dictionary behind when he took off with Denis for France, and I would have given it to the book sale along with Proust except that it was too heavy to carry.

I looked at the graduate school photograph first, because Pierce was wearing a hat—I thought I might catch a hint of the Mr. Pierce in the hat by the Frick. But all I could see was my Pierce: close up, how white his teeth were (I remembered them as yellowish), what a smile he had, how his hair hung in his face. And, from a detective's point of view, how nondescript he was—an ordinary guy, neither handsome nor ugly, not big, not little, no distinguishing features, no visible quirks. Anyone asked to describe him would think only: average, Everyman, John Q. Public.

I looked at the other photographs. The college portrait didn't resemble him much (jacket, tie, set jaw, steely eyes), though it could have been his duller, straighter, handsomer older brother if he had had one. The candid picnic shot showed him bent over a cooler of what was probably illegal beer, glancing over his shoulder with an enigmatic look that, on examination, could have been either quizzical or irritable. He was overshadowed by a blonde girl in shorts who stood posing with her hand on her hip—Judy somebody, I vaguely recalled. Judy somebody's legs were undoubtedly the reason the photograph was included—Pierce was incidental.

The photo of Pierce and me was the best. We were about the same height, and we were dressed similarly in jeans and jackets. He was hatless, looking straight into the camera with his characteristic expression—a crooked, dubious smile—but he was also squinting into the sun, and so his face, less clear than it could have been, was distorted into a mild grimace. (Beside him, I'm looking down at my shoes, and as I stared at Pierce's sunstruck face and the meek-looking top of my head, I vaguely recalled being furious with both him and Charlie—who took the picture with his Instamatic—though the reason why eluded me. The best I could dredge up was that Pierce had said something that angered me, and Charlie had laughed at my anger, and that the whole silly dispute hadn't lasted very long.)