In the Night Café Page 8

  There was a high marriage and engagement rate at Lester and Leaper. The work was fairly routine and there was no one around to flirt with, so girls got married to escape. Secretaries would turn up on Monday mornings with rings on their fingers and suddenly refer to “my fiancé.” Old girls who’d left would periodically drop in to show off their infants. It was the kind of office where people would create excitement by passing around homemade brownies. For each person’s birthday there’d be a surprise party with the same pink-and-white cake ordered from Schraffts. Mr. Leaper would make a gallant speech of congratulation, putting on his glasses to read the correct name off the cake.

  Mr. Lester was twenty years younger than Mr. Leaper. He was morose and not at all as nice. He’d stalk around desks, muttering about inefficiency; he played golf several afternoons a week. His secretaries were always the most glamorous and got very quickly married off. I was told that at a low point in the history of the firm, Mr. Lester’s father had bought him many shares in it, because they both believed Mr. Leaper would retire any minute. But this was fifteen years ago, and Mr. Leaper was still going strong. His only problem was names. Sometimes a woman named Frances Patterson would appear, who was even older than Mr. Leaper. She was Mr. Leaper’s widowed sister, who had once been married to a well-known explorer. She’d been one of the original editors in the company and a suffragette. Now she devoted herself to travel. When she came in, I’d have to drop everything and find hotel rooms for her in Cairo or Java.

  I had a little cubicle with a geranium plant that had arrived even before Gloria. It was incredibly spindly and gnarled and I kept picking off the dried leaves and putting them in my ashtray. There was a window that looked out on a wall and a sliver of Park Avenue South. If you’d see someone with an umbrella, you’d know that it was raining. Across the avenue there was a parking lot that always looked empty with a sign that said Park Fast in enormous yellow and black letters. Now and then I’d look up from my typing and just stare at the word Fast.

  It was orderly and mild at Lester and Leaper. I’d said I wanted to be out in the world, but I never felt I was. You could spend an entire lifetime in that office with your birthday party to look forward to every year and nothing too great or too bad would ever happen to you. I liked it more than I expected to. I liked it uneasily.

  You’d get up when I did every morning. You’d walk me to the stop for the Third Avenue bus. Sometimes we’d go to Rappaport’s­ first to have coffee. You’d buy a newspaper on St. Marks Place to take back with you. Later you told me you read the want ads every day—it shamed you to see me go off on the bus. When the Third Avenue bus came, sometimes you wouldn’t let go of my arm. You’d say, jokingly, “Oh, don’t take that one.” Once you rode all the way uptown with me. You were on your way to a gallery on Madison Avenue that had advertised for someone part-time. But when you saw what paintings they were selling, you just walked out.

  I’d sit on my typist’s chair and little pictures of you would flash up in my imagination. I’d see the empty rooms of the apartment, but then the door would open and you’d walk in with the paper under your arm. Or you’d be standing in front of one of the paintings, smoking, your eyes narrowed on something unresolved. Once a day, in the afternoon, I’d call you. There were times when the phone would ring and ring. My mind would start searching for you, trying to force up other pictures. I’d suddenly think you could be anywhere. I think I knew you were in danger, that I’d somehow left you exposed to yourself. But it wasn’t a conscious thought yet at all.

  You used to say, “Don’t I always tell you everything?” But you didn’t. You said things to me about the children you didn’t believe yourself. You’d see a little kid on a two-wheeler, and you’d say, “Tommy has a bike like that. He wants to stay on it all day. He wouldn’t like it up here.” Mostly you didn’t talk about them, though.

  If the subject came up, there was a word you always used: surgical. You’d made a surgical break; it would leave no scar tissue. You said you either had to live with your kids or be strong enough to allow them to forget you. That was the way you were about everything: either/or. I didn’t try to make you change your mind. I told myself you knew more than I did about kids. I was scared that if you ever went down to Florida to see them, you wouldn’t leave them a second time.

  I asked you once if you thought about what would happen when they were older. “When they’re sixteen or seventeen they’ll want to know you.”

  “Yeah, it’ll happen,” you said. “They’ll come looking for me. By then they’ll be able to handle it.”

  We both failed, we both were lying all the time when we were so sure we were being honest.

  On those long afternoons when I couldn’t find you, were you thinking of them?

  You turned up one day at Lester and Leaper. The receptionist said, “There’s someone at the desk to see you,” and when I walked into the waiting room, it was you. It was a shock to see you there, so threatening to all that mildness. For some reason you were wearing a strange, wrinkled tan suit that didn’t fit you very well. You stepped forward and kissed me right on the mouth and because the receptionist was staring, I laughed and said, “I know this person.” You said, “Let me see where you work.”

  I didn’t really want to take you inside. We passed two desks and I had to introduce you: “This is my friend, Tom Murphy.”

  “Friend?” you said loudly.

  I hated that you had caught me in my office personality.

  You wouldn’t sit on the visitor’s chair in my little cubicle. You went to the window and frowned out at the view. You wanted to get me out of there, to have me come downstairs.

  I tried to explain I couldn’t do that. Secretaries didn’t just leave the premises unless it was lunch hour. It’s a rule everyone understands about work, but as I tried to explain it to you that day, I suddenly felt you were right. It made no sense. Why couldn’t a person go where they wanted to?

  “Come on,” you said roughly and pulled me up off my chair and I had to walk out with you. We went down in the elevator to some hamburger place off the lobby where there were no customers because it wasn’t lunch hour. We sat in a torn, gloomy booth and you said very sadly, “I feel terrible. I put you in that place. Wasn’t it me that put you there?” By then I’d realized that you’d been drinking. I asked you what was going on. I said, “Where did you get that awful suit?”

  “On the Bowery,” you said. “For seven dollars.”

  “Forgive me,” you said, taking my hand, though I didn’t know what I was supposed to forgive you for. “This has been a significant day,” you said, and when I asked you why, you told me it was because you’d finally gotten yourself a job, just like me. Market research. “You didn’t think I’d do it, did you?”

  So that was the reason you got the suit. “All us working fuckers got to look the same.”

  IV

  Chrystie Street

  Summer 1962

  11

  AT THE CEDAR, everyone was talking about a sculptor who was quitting, giving up art. Others had quit, always very quietly, but the way Howard Stricker was going about it was odd and spectacular. He’d been building a boat in his studio, a twenty-five-foot catamaran. He planned to launch it in the East River in a few weeks’ time. Then he was going to sail it by himself all the way down to Key West. He said he would live on rice and fresh fish. What he was going to do with his life after he reached Key West he never told anyone. People hadn’t paid much attention to Howard Stricker before. They didn’t exactly admire him now, but they were awed by his craziness. No one believed the boat would float. A bullet would be faster, one painter said.

  Leon said we should definitely look at Howard Stricker’s studio, which was downtown on Chrystie Street between Grand and Hester, just around the corner from the Bowery. He said he’d seen it and it was cheap and big and that Howard Stricker was said to be looking for key mo
ney so he could finish his pontoons and leave on schedule. Tom called him one evening and he told us to come over.

  Howard Stricker had worked in stone and had stubbornly kept sculpting the human figure as if he lived in some century of his own. He was forty years old and it was said he’d never sold one piece. I don’t know whether his work was good or bad, because when he’d decided to build his boat, he’d taken a sledgehammer and a power drill and broken up everything he’d done. When we met him, he referred to this with a kind of pride. “It took three days,” he said, “but of course that was much less time than it took to make them.” The broken pieces were all upstairs, so no one who took the studio would have to deal with them. “It seemed better to put them there,” he said, “than out on the street.”

  Above the studio were two empty floors where there’d been a fire thirty years ago. Howard Stricker said, “You can use them for storage, burial purposes, plenty of room for whatever.” He got a flashlight and took us up to see them. The windows were gone, he told us, and that tended to make the whole building cold in the winter. Birds had gotten in up there, pigeons, you could hear them chortling in the dark. When Howard Stricker turned his flashlight on, a couple of them got scared and flapped up to the ceiling. I saw piles of white stones like fragments from some ancient ruin. After we started living in the studio, I never went up to those floors myself, though Tom rummaged around there all the time.

  The studio was two enormous rooms as gray as a cellar. You could see that at first Howard Stricker had tried to fix the place up, had even been ambitious. He’d constructed a high platform for a bed and built a big stone fireplace and there was a wall outside the bathroom made of dull-colored chunks of marble embedded in cement. At some point, though, he’d lost interest. There was an old three-burner stove and a refrigerator from the forties that hummed loudly above our conversation and a sink encrusted with whatever he was putting on his pontoons.

  We saw them that night—long, slender things. They did have a grace. Tom was quite taken with them. He told Howard Stricker they looked like Brancusi birds. But it worried me that you could see each seam in the wood. I thought they had an awfully homemade look.

  Howard Stricker said he’d hoped he’d be through by now, but he’d run out of money. He’d been advised to put many coats of some terribly expensive acrylic sealer on his pontoons and he had to buy more wood to make a deck and a small cabin by August. He said he’d seen such boats in the South Pacific when he was in the service, and it was beautiful the way they skimmed the waves; the tension between the pontoons made a perfect balance.

  He seemed to like having us there. I had the feeling he never had much company. He drew sketches for Tom of the pontoons’ inner structure and made us some muddy coffee that he poured out of a pot through a strainer. He said he’d invite us to the launching.

  Finally Tom asked, “Well, what would it take to reimburse you for all the improvements here?”

  Howard Stricker thought it over, staring at us. “Four hundred dollars,” he said. “I could get more, but that would be enough. Rent’s seventy dollars a month. No one’s supposed to live in this building. The health inspectors will come around and bother you, but don’t pay them any attention.” He left the room so Tom and I could talk about it.

  Tom was tremendously excited. He walked up and down in the front of the studio, trying to measure it off. “There’s so much space here, Joanna. Look at the length of those walls. You could paint anything, make something huge. This is our kind of luck, kiddo. Everything from now on is going to happen just like this.” I believed it, too, though I think part of me was skeptical. There was all that grayness. It was almost as if the walls were imbued with Howard Stricker, as if his loneliness and failure had somehow eaten their way inside them. But I believed in our luck.

  I had a dream one night after that in which I saw Howard Stricker’s catamaran floating quite nicely on a deep green sea as still and flat as a lake. It was sort of like an oversized sled with its deck high up on runners. People sat on the deck calmly drinking coffee. Then the sea boiled up into enormous waves. The boat was thrown about, tipped over onto its side. All the people on the deck spilled off like toy figurines and I found myself with them in the terrible water.

  Tom said what I’d seen in my dream was what sailors called white water. He’d run into it himself on a minesweeper in the Ligurian Sea. “It was like being trapped in a tin can with the hand of God shaking it. There were times you’d get real religious out there. That was only the beginning of the trouble we had. About a week later we hit a mine. That was what we were out there for, that was the deal. A thing like that could happen any minute.”

  “What happened to the ship?” I asked.

  He was silent for a moment. “Oh, the sweeper went down. For a while everything burned. You’d never think water could burn, would you? I had this life preserver. I floated on my back, just looking up at the sky for hours, waiting, not thinking of anything really. I mean my wonderful youth in the Bronx, and all of that, didn’t run through my mind. I just emptied out—ready. Finally a destroyer came along and picked me up. See, it wasn’t my turn. I guess I was meant to be here like this, looking out the window at Seventh Street twenty years later.”

  Howard Stricker’s launching was on a Saturday at the end of June. He’d been working day and night to finish the pontoons; all the rest would have to be done at a boatyard in Coney Island. Tom said he’d help him. He went to the Cedar and rounded up a couple of artists, Bruno and George, who came along not because they knew Howard Stricker but just so they could tell their drinking friends what they’d seen. We all rode down together on the Third Avenue bus.

  It was one of those bright blue afternoons that make you think of trees and the seashore and wonder what you’re doing in the dust of the Bowery. All the way downtown Bruno kept making wisecracks. “So you can’t get a gallery, you jump in the river. Well, I hope that guy has had swimming lessons.” No one laughed, though, so he finally just kept quiet.

  When we got off at Grand Street, Tom said, “Let’s do this with some wine,” and George said, “Great. This is some far-out opening all right.” I guess it was Howard Stricker’s vernissage in a sense.

  Howard Stricker didn’t have much to say to anyone. He wasn’t thinking about anything but protecting his pontoons. He kept lashing rope around them in different ways, then not being satisfied and starting again. They were too long to go around the bends in the stairway, so he was going to lower them out the front windows on some pulleys he’d made. “I’m hoping for the best,” he said, looking up at Tom, wiping some of the sweat off his face. He sent Tom and Bruno downstairs to wait for the pontoons on the sidewalk.

  From there you could see how fragile the operation was. The pontoons dangled awkwardly, trussed up in the air three stories above the pavement. They lost their gracefulness when you saw them like that. To me they looked more unreliable than ever. I found myself thinking again about those seams where the water might get in.

  Howard Stricker’s launching caused a commotion on Chrystie Street. Italian housewives were hanging out their windows and a crowd of sidewalk superintendents gathered, the men from the garage next door and even some bums who stumbled over from the strip of park across the street, where the greenest green was the green of broken bottles. The bums were rubbing their rheumy eyes and poking each other. “Lookit that! What’s those wooden things?” If you looked in their direction, they’d shout, “Hey! Got some change?” They gave each other wise, significant glances when they saw Tom’s wine. “How about that now?”

  Howard Stricker had rented an old flatbed truck. After the pontoons had been loaded on it, and the little platform he’d built out of scrap wood to hold his outboard motor, he ran upstairs for the last time and came down with a duffel bag and a box of tools. I remember seeing him stand very still on the sidewalk, staring up at the windows of his studio before he got on the truck.
Then he reached in his pocket and handed Tom the keys. “Well, it’s your place now.”

  He wouldn’t drink the wine. “Nothing for me,” he said in that curt way he had, as if words were just exhalations that got wasted.

  Tom turned to the bums and held out the bottle. “Go on,” he said. “Take it.” They must have been startled by such good fortune, but they grabbed it right away.

  The truck took us all the way across Grand Street to the launching place on the East River Howard Stricker had picked out, where it didn’t take long at all to attach the three parts of the boat to each other and lower the whole thing into the water.

  Then Howard Stricker swung himself down off the pier and crouched over the motor on his little homemade platform as the current began carrying him away from us, ostensibly toward Brooklyn. There was a breeze from the north and the river was running fast. The pontoons skimmed the surface just as he’d said they would.

  We all went wild, even wisecracking Bruno, waving our arms, yelling, “Bon voyage, Howard! Bon voyage!” He heard us and scrambled to his feet with a funny, stunned smile on his face. He was a man walking on water who couldn’t believe it.

  Tom said, “Come on, Joanna,” and we said good-bye to the others and started making our way back across Grand Street. I had the idea he wanted to spend the rest of the afternoon in the studio now that we had the keys, but when I asked him if that was where we were going he said, as if he were tired, “No, kiddo. Not today.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t really want to go there right now either,” I confessed.

  He didn’t seem to want to talk, and after we’d walked on a bit I said, “What are his chances?” Which was the question I’d been holding back since the beginning.