In the Night Café Read online

  “Glad to hear it,” Kevin said, forcing a smile.

  Kevin and his wife Grace lived somewhere near Idlewild, which hadn’t become Kennedy Airport yet. When we went out there on the bike the following Sunday, we got lost for a while riding through blocks of two-story red brick houses that all looked the same. Kevin had a small backyard, just a square of grass, a clothesline full of little overalls and a lilac bush. We ate barbecued chicken under Kevin’s lilacs as planes kept roaring right over us, dropping down in the sky to make their landings. Grace said she’d always been scared that a plane would crash on their roof. She wanted them to move much farther out on Long Island to a place that would be better for raising children. They had a three-year-old, a tiny asthmatic boy. Kevin held him on his lap, making him open his mouth for little pieces of chicken; sometimes his son would whimper and try to push his hand away. “A couple of times we nearly lost this one, but we pulled him through,” Kevin said proudly. Grace couldn’t have another baby, so they were trying to adopt. A Catholic agency was sending over a social worker to inspect them. That was another worry they had—that they’d fall short of perfection, that somehow they wouldn’t be judged suitable. It seemed strange how little sense they had of how good they were, good in ways that Tom and I could never be. They had a terrible amount of patience, they obeyed all the rules. I could see this even in the way the appliances shone in Grace’s kitchen, the jars and pots lined up like soldiers. Kevin and Grace were ready to worry about us, too, the way families worried about their own.

  It really upset them that we rode around on a motorcycle. “What made you get a thing like that, Tommy?” Kevin asked. He wouldn’t hear a word about its advantages. It must have been the insurance man coming out in him, I thought. He’d told us he’d been a cop in East Harlem for a few years until Grace made him give it up, but he seemed much too sweet-natured to have ever arrested anyone. Kevin had a friend in Rockville Center who sold used cars. This man could be absolutely trusted, he said. He wanted to take Tom over there to talk to his friend about trading in the bike. “I’ll bet your wife’s got her heart in her mouth, sitting on that little seat.”

  “Not anymore,” I said. “I love it.” I’d have told anyone that if they’d asked me. I lived for those Sundays, those trips we took that always somehow brought us back to ourselves even after one more week had collapsed on us. I only felt fearless when I was riding on the buddy seat.

  Kevin didn’t believe me, though. “Sure, Joanna,” he said, laying his hand on Tom’s back. “Well, now that I’ve found this guy, I want to keep him in one piece. So why don’t you use your influence?”

  Tom wasn’t annoyed. He was laughing. “Listen, I’m not about to buy a car. Anyway, you’re just my little brother. Look who’s giving who advice!”

  You didn’t want to talk about old times that day. I remember you warning Kevin about that. “Let’s keep it light,” you said. But there kept being silences heavier than the air in Kevin’s backyard. You and Kevin were strangers really. All you had in common were memories of that basement apartment in the Bronx.

  Kevin said he’d been sure for years that somewhere he’d run into you. He’d have you over to his house and Grace would cook you a steak dinner; then you’d have this talk you said you didn’t want. “You’re my only brother,” he said. “That means something.”

  “I don’t know what it means, Kevin. I haven’t been a brother. More of a writeoff. Isn’t that true?”

  “I used to think you couldn’t stand me.”

  “You were all right. To me you were just this little baby. I knew you shouldn’t hate babies. I wasn’t going to turn out like them.”

  “They’re pretty pathetic now,” Kevin said. “I notice you haven’t asked about them.”

  “That’s right,” you said. “I’m not asking.”

  “You have no intention of seeing them then?”

  “I can’t come up with one good reason, only a few bad ones.”

  “They never treated you right, Tommy,” Kevin said. “I could never understand it. I guess even back then they were kind of crazy.”

  “Let’s talk about the Yankees,” you said. “Fishing. Insurance. What’s the insurance business like?”

  “Well, maybe you’ll never have to meet my mother-in-law,” Grace remarked as I was drying dishes in her kitchen.

  I admitted to her I couldn’t help being curious. I wouldn’t have minded seeing Marie just once.

  “You don’t want her in your life,” Grace said fiercely. “You don’t want her near you.”

  She said Marie had made a lot of trouble for her years ago before the marriage, told Kevin a lot of lies about her. “Just for spite,” Grace said, as if she were still puzzling over it. “Just to cause harm. I never knew there were people like her. Everyone was nice in my family. She said some woman had told her I’d had a baby and given it away in Chicago, because I went there one summer to stay with my aunt. Why would anyone make up such a story? I never even had a boyfriend in high school before I started going with Kevin. And Kevin really believed her. He used to tell me how beautiful his mother was. She’s not beautiful now, never was—not what I call beautiful.

  “Kevin and I are all right now, though. And you know why? Because I never have to go with him anymore to see her. And they never come here. Maybe that’s terrible. Kevin says I should feel more pity. But that’s the way it has to be.”

  Kevin had moved his parents out of the Bronx, Grace told me, found them a small apartment in Marie’s old neighborhood in Hell’s Kitchen. He sent them a check for the rent every month. His father had lost a leg to diabetes—“All that drinking,” Grace said. “It caught up with him.” Kevin had gone with his mother to the doctor, when the doctor wanted to explain to her what meals to make for Frank. But Kevin didn’t think Marie paid much attention. Sometimes she didn’t cook anything for days. Sometimes when Kevin went to the apartment, it was so filthy he’d have to spend hours cleaning it, carrying out all the garbage. “You can’t talk to him when he comes back from there,” Grace said. “You have to give him room for a while. Go and mow the grass, I tell him.”

  This is what I did one day on my lunch hour. I took the subway uptown and walked around Hell’s Kitchen. I had the Leica with me. I was still getting used to it, getting over feeling I was an impostor taking pictures. Give yourself permission, you used to tell me. I’d been practicing that, stealing bits of life here and there, learning to be fast, indistinguishable from the city’s rush. Only the mad and the lost seemed to stand still, so that someone like me might pause and record them.

  I passed the hospital where you were born and went farther west, through long brown blocks where even the stones looked bruised. Bodegas sold mangoes, dark twisted tubers, candles for the dead—wax rainbows in cheap glass. Boys hooted after me in Spanish. There was a burnt-out car near Tenth Avenue, then a wheelless one with a big blue-eyed doll’s head hanging by string from the rearview mirror. The head had a look of stupid amazement, so I took its picture, establishing my credentials so to speak.

  Maybe the Irish were all indoors that day. I didn’t see any. Still, it was Marie’s zone. She could have stepped out from any chalked-up doorway in cracked five-and-ten bedroom slippers, cursing the terrible decline of the neighborhood, cursing the filthy spies, the sons who were ungrateful, the bums she’d spread her legs for.

  Don’t look that woman in the eye! That’s what one would warn oneself. Take her in quickly. Don’t even let her see you turn your head.

  Too many clothes for this warm afternoon, slip sagging under the garish coat, riotous red lipstick on askew. Pathetic. Maybe a social worker could decide that, professionally—or someone with Kevin’s kind of goodness. My Leica, though, would do its job without pity. All I’d have to do was get too close to her, endure the furious glare for a moment, step in and out of the electrical field.

  Then I’d come back to you
armed with that picture. “Look at this,” I’d say. “This has nothing to do with you.”

  18

  HOWARD STRICKER HAD told us not to pay attention to housing inspectors, but one of them discovered us. He knocked on our door one morning—luckily, I’d already gone to work. Right away he told Tom he didn’t approve of our setup. “Do you live here?” he asked, casting his eyes up to our platform bed. “No one should live here.”

  Tom said, “Why would I live in a place like this?” He told the inspector we lived in Queens with my mother.

  “So what about the bed?”

  The bed was just for taking naps, Tom said. Some nights he’d work very hard and want to lie down for a while.

  “With girls, maybe?” the inspector said with a leer.

  He kept turning up after that. The late morning was his favorite time, just when Tom was painting. “Have to check out the conditions here,” the inspector would say. He’d give the walls a few raps and squat down to examine the plumbing. Taking a chair in the studio, he’d jot things down on his clipboard. “Hey, you got any coffee?” Tom said the inspector felt free to indulge in art criticism. “I don’t know about this one,” he’d say, walking up to a painting and shaking his head. “Guys like you get good money for this stuff?”

  Leon said he’d heard about this inspector from other artists he knew. “Bribe the bastard,” he advised us. “He’s just coming around with his hand out.”

  When Tom offered him a hundred dollars, the inspector acted deeply offended. “Not me. I don’t take bribes.”

  “A gift,” Tom said, and made it a hundred and fifty, which was about all we could have raised since there hadn’t been any carpentry work for a while.

  “What do you think I am?” said the inspector. “I see you still got the bed. That looks very bad. You’re asking for it with that bed, in my opinion.”

  For a day or so, we thought about getting rid of the bed. The mattress was new—a gift from my mother. Where would we sleep, though? I went to a camping goods store and brought home a foam rubber mat, so thin it could be rolled up and hidden. “Fuck that,” Tom said. “We live here. We’re not a couple of gypsies.” He stayed up all night and constructed an ingeniously hinged rack that went around the bed. He said he’d just shove some canvases up there every morning. On weekends we wouldn’t have to worry because the inspector would be off duty.

  On his next visit, the inspector took note of the rack. “Busy, busy, making improvements around here,” he commented. Then he condemned our stove, our refrigerator and our hot-water heater. “Too old,” he said. “These are fire hazards. You’re just working here, so what do you need them for?”

  Tom showed up at my office that day as I was about to go out for lunch. “Surprise,” he said. But he wasn’t smiling. “Come on, kiddo. I’ll treat you to a sandwich and some iced tea.” When we were in the elevator, he put his arm around me.

  He told me the news in the Greek coffeeshop around the corner. He said he’d called Leon again for advice. Leon thought the guy might settle for three hundred, but just to be on the safe side we’d better get rid of the appliances and buy new ones.

  I ate at that coffeeshop every day, and all the waitresses knew me. The one who brought us our order glared at Tom. I’d burst into tears and she probably had the impression I was being jilted. Tom said he’d never thought a refrigerator and a stove would break my heart. But it was more than that—more than the money we didn’t have and couldn’t get. If we couldn’t stay in the loft, where would we live? If we had to move to a small apartment, Tom couldn’t paint. If he couldn’t paint, I’d lose him. I saw very clearly what all this was going to lead to. So I sat there sobbing, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry for doing this,” as Tom kept ripping paper napkins from the holder and handing them to me. But I couldn’t tell him the true cause of my grief.

  We decided not to do anything. There really wasn’t a thing we could do. We just kept stacking paintings around the bed in the mornings. We continued to wash in our illegal hot water and cook on our illegal stove. We waited to see what would happen the next time the inspector came. Weeks went by with no sign of him. At first we thought he was on vacation; then we began to hope he’d been transferred to a new district. Even so, we never really felt rid of him. The inspector remained with us. He was like a force we couldn’t keep out. It was as if the world had decided people like us were somehow in the wrong. We had to be hounded supposedly for our own good, saved from the very conditions that made our existence possible.

  One evening after work that summer, I ran into Arnie Raff on the main floor of Bloomingdale’s. There he was, just a few feet away, all dressed up in a white suit with a little striped bow tie. His moustache was gone—instead there was a strange bluish space between his nose and upper lip. I checked myself for evidence of emotional disturbance and found none, so I walked up to him and said, “Hello, Mr. Raff.”

  He looked stricken either by panic or guilt, but then he seemed to realize I meant him no harm. “Well, hello there,” he said, and we carried on one of those catching-up conversations in which no one really listens to the other person’s news. We could have been two former classmates who’d known each other slightly in high school.

  “What are you doing in Bloomingdale’s?” I asked, since it was a place Arnie’s principles wouldn’t have allowed him to be caught dead in when we lived together on Seventh Street.

  He said he’d come there to buy perfume, perfume for someone’s birthday.

  I said, “Oh, are you getting it for your wife?”

  He conceded that he was. “I’m surprising her.” But he didn’t know what kind to get. “What do I know about perfume?” he said, imitating the rough, sullen air of the old Arnie.

  I actually ended up accompanying him to various perfume counters. I was sure he’d never tell his wife who had smelled her present.

  We kept opening bottles and passing them to each other for sniffs and spraying the contents on each other’s wrists. I acted as if I really cared how different kinds would smell to her. He seemed to be in awe of his wife, who he said had spent her summers in the south of France when she wasn’t in East Hampton; he was also proud of the fact that she collected valuable wines—she didn’t drink her collection, he explained; she just liked owning the old bottles with their labels. And now she’s collected you, Arnie, I almost said. Finally he settled on a tiny hundred-dollar bottle of the stuff I assured him smelled the best. “Probably she’ll hate it,” he said gloomily.

  “Arnie, do you remember that frying pan you gave me?” I asked. “I still use it.”

  Arnie frowned. “What frying pan? I don’t know what frying pan you mean.”

  I couldn’t believe he had forgotten something of such symbolic importance. “Red,” I said. “My twenty-fourth birthday.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I admit I made a few mistakes.”

  “Water under the bridge, Arnie,” I said, with a wave of my hand.

  He told me I was looking good, but that was because he wasn’t looking at me. “Things have worked out for you, haven’t they?”

  “Yes they have. I’m terribly, terribly happy,” I told him.

  Happiness that had terror in it. I still remember that choice of words.

  And what was I doing that evening so far uptown? It must have been one of those black periods when I’d come home to Chrystie Street knowing I wouldn’t find you there, knowing you wouldn’t even necessarily be at the Cedar if I called. You were just out—caught in some barroom time machine where the numbers on the clock never shifted until suddenly the bartender served the last round, and even then it was as if you’d just come in.

  It was very hot on Chrystie Street those summer evenings. But the air in the stores I used to visit after work was perfectly chilled. I’d pull things off racks, carry them into dressing rooms. It was quite exhausting trying on so many outfits
. Sometimes I’d be looking at myself in a three-way mirror and my eyes would fill. Before I came out, I’d have to put on a lot of mascara.

  “Why are you always going shopping?” you asked me, puzzled because I never made any purchases.

  “These are the best times we’ll ever have.”

  I remember you saying that in a sad voice, and I didn’t know what you meant, because the better times seemed like a brightly lit station so infinitely far away we wouldn’t see it till we were almost there; meanwhile the black tunnel we’d entered went on and on.

  I was learning to be very good at waiting. Great at it, in fact. It was like learning to ride on the buddy seat—one of my main accomplishments. Waiting things out. That was how I was going to save you.

  I developed techniques, I could dispose of whole hours, though I never became a crossword fan like Caroline. I learned to work a sewing machine—everyone was still wearing shifts, which took very little work and material. The sewing would wear me out, and I’d lie down on the couch and pretend to sleep, setting the clock next to me. The numbers would glow greener and greener as the summer light faded from the room. It was like being a child again, put to bed too early. Glass would break in the park, kids would go by on roller skates. Around midnight the iron gate over the garage would come down with a crash.

  When I’d hear you come in, I’d sit up, a little dazed. “Tom? Want something to eat?” But you hardly ever did.

  “Well, it’s there if you want it.”

  Well, I’m there if you want me.

  Sometimes it was easiest to just stay very late at the office, outlasting the old woman who came to empty all the waste baskets. One of those nights, on its way downtown, my bus stopped at Tenth Street and you got on, very smashed. To find you on your way home so unexpectedly seemed almost a miracle. You stood next to the driver, fumbling for change. You pulled your pockets inside out. Pennies and nickels rolled all over the floor. You were laughing and saying, “Oh shit, oh shit,” because you didn’t have the balance to pick any of it up.