A Bridge of Years (20 page)

He
was surprised and delighted to discover another attitude here,
not only in Joyce but generally, in the Village: a consensus that the
world outside was a sterile laboratory and that its only interesting
products were its failures, its rejects, and its refugees.

He
was as poor, certainly, as any refugee. Joyce put him up for a few
days when he arrived—until Lawrence objected— and persuaded him
not to sell his guitar. She had found a part-time job waitressing and
lent him enough cash for a room at the Y. She told her friends he was
looking for a day job and one of them—an unpublished novelist named
Soderman—told Tom there was a radio and hi-fi shop on Eighth with a
Help Wanted sign in the window. The store was called Lindner's Radio
Supply, and the owner, Max Lindner, explained that he needed a
technician, "somebody to work in the back," and did Tom
know anything about electronics? Tom said yeah, he did—he'd done a
couple of EE courses in college and he knew his way around a
soldering iron. Most of what Max's customers brought in for
repair would be vacuum tube merchandise, but Tom didn't anticipate
any trouble adapting. "The back" was a room the size of a
two-car garage; the walls were lined with tube caddies and testers
and there was a well-thumbed RCA manual attached to the workbench on
a string. The smell of hot solder flux saturated the air.

"My
last guy was a Puerto Rican kid," Max said. "He was only
eighteen, but there was nothing he couldn't strip and put back
together twice as nice as the day we sold it. You know what they did?
They fucking drafted him. Six months from now he'll be building radar
stations in Congo Bongo. I did my bit on Guadalcanal and this is how
the army repays me." He looked Tom up and down. "You can
really do this work?"

"I
can really do this work."

"You
start tomorrow."

After
work, his first priority was a place to live.

Joyce
agreed. "You can't stay at the French Embassy. It's not safe."

"The
what?"

"The
Y, Tom. It's nothing but faggots. Maybe you noticed."

She
grinned a little slyly, expecting him to be shocked by this
information. He wondered what to say.
My
ex-wife was politically correct—we attended all the AIDS
fundraisers.
"I
think my virtue is intact."

She
raised her eyebrows. "Virtue?"

To
celebrate his job they had come to Stanley's, a new bar on the Lower
East Side. Tom had begun to sort out the geography of the city; he
understood that the East Village was even more subterranean than the
West, a crosstown bus away from the subways, the Bearded Artist a
recent immigrant, which was why Stanley's sometimes offered free
beer in an effort to build a clientele. Lawrence's apartment was
nearby and Joyce's not too far from it and anyway nothing was
happening tonight in the gaudier precincts of Bleecker and MacDougal.

Tom
was pleased about the job, a little nervous about the evening.

Joyce
offered him a cigarette. He said, "I don't."

"You're
very light on vices, Tom." She lit one of her own. The office
where he worked at Aerotech had been designated smoke-free; none of
Barbara's friends smoked and the salesmen at the car lot had
been encouraged not to. He'd forgotten what a fascinating little
ritual it could be. Joyce performed it with unconscious grace,
waving the match and dropping it in an ashtray. In an hour, when the
bar filled up, the air would be blue with smoke. The stern
disapproval of C. Everett Koop was a quarter century away.

"At
least you drink."

"In
moderation." He was nursing a beer. "I used to drink more.
Actually, I wasn't a very successful alcoholic. My doctor told
me it was too hard for me to drink seriously and too easy to stop. He
said I must not have the gene for alcoholism —it just isn't in my
DNA."

"Your
which?"

"I'm
not cut out that way."

"Hopelessly
Presbyterian." She drew on the cigarette. "Something's
bothering you, yes?"

"I
don't want to fend off a lot of questions tonight."

"From
me, or—?"

He
waved his hand—no, not her.

"Well,
people are curious. The thing is, Tom, you're not a
label.
People
come here and talk about nonconformity and the Lonely Crowd and all
that jazz, but they're wearing labels all the same. You could hang
signs on them. Angry young poet. Left-wing folksinger. Ad executive
reclaiming his youth. So on. The real, true ciphers are very rare."

He
said, "I'm a cipher?"

"Oh,
definitely."

"Isn't
that a label too?"

She
smiled. "But no one likes it. If you don't want to hang around,
Tom, you have some options." "Like?"

"Like,
you could go somewhere else. Or you could tell everybody to fuck off.
Or
we
could
go somewhere else. Now or later."

She
sat across the table from him, one hand cocked at an angle and the
smoke from her cigarette drifting toward the ceiling. The light was
dim but she was beautiful in it. She had tied her long hair back; her
eyes were pursed, quizzical, blue under the magnification of her
glasses. He could tell she was nervous about making the offer.

Nor
was there any mistaking what the offer meant. Tom felt as if the
chair had dropped out from under him. Felt weightless.

He
said, "What about Lawrence?"

"Lawrence
has some problems. Or, I don't know, maybe they're my problems. He
says he doesn't want to own me. He doesn't want anybody else to,
either. He says he's ambivalent. I'm what he's ambivalent about."

Tom
was considering this when the door opened and a crowd rushed in from
the hot evening on Avenue B. Her friends. "Joyce!" one of
them sang out.

She
looked at Tom, shrugged and smiled and mouthed a word: it might have
been
"Later."

Like
any immigrant—any refugee—he was adjusting to his new
environment. It was impossible to live in a state of perpetual
awe. But the knowledge of where he was and how he had come here was
seldom far from his mind.

Nineteen
sixty-two. The Berlin Wall was less than a year old. John F. Kennedy
was in the White House. The Soviets were preparing to send missiles
to Cuba, precipitating a crisis which would not, finally, result in
nuclear war. In Europe, women were bearing babies deformed by
thalidomide. Martin Luther King was leading the civil rights
movement; this fall, there would be some trouble down at Oxford,
Mississippi. And the Yanks would take the World Series from the
Giants.

Privileged
information.

He
knew all this; but he still felt edged out of the conversation
that began to flow around him. For a while they talked about books,
about plays. Soderman, the novelist who tipped Tom off to the
radio-repair job, had strong opinions about Ionesco. Soderman was a
nice guy; he had a young, round chipmunk face with a brush cut on top
and a fringe of beard under his chin. Likable—but he might have
been speaking Greek. Ionesco was a name Tom had heard but couldn't
place, lost in a vague memory of some undergraduate English class.
Likewise Beckett, likewise Jean Genet. He smiled enigmatically
at what seemed like appropriate moments.

Then
Lawrence Millstein performed a verbal editorial on folk music versus
jazz and Tom felt a little bit more at home. Millstein was of the old
school and outnumbered at this table; he hated the cafe-folk
scene and harbored nostalgia for the fierce gods of the tenor sax.

He
looked the part. If Tom had been casting a movie version of
On
the Road
he
might have picked Millstein as an "atmosphere" character.
He was tall, dark-haired, lean, and there was something studied about
his intensity. Joyce had described him as "a Raskolnikov type—at
least, he tries to come on that way."

Millstein
performed a twenty-minute monologue on Char-he Parker and the
"anguish of the Negro soul." Tom listened with mounting
irritation, but kept silent—and drank. He knew the music Lawrence
was talking about. Through his breakup with Barbara and after the
divorce, he had sometimes felt that Parker—and Thelonious
Monk, and Miles Davis of the
Sketches
of Spain
era,
and Sonny Rollins, and Oliver Nelson—were the only thing holding
him together. He had traded in his scoured LPs for the CD versions of
some of these records. It was an anomaly, he sometimes thought, these
old monophonic recordings deciphered by laser-beam technology. But
the music just rolled on out of the speakers. He liked it because it
wasn't crying-in-your-beer music. It was never pathetic. It took your
hurt, it acknowledged your hurt, but sometimes—on the good
nights—it let you soar out somewhere beyond that hurt. Tom had
appreciated this strange way the music translated losses into gains
and it bothered him to hear Millstein doing a self-righteous tap
dance on the subject.

Joyce
ventured, "Nobody's putting down Parker. Folk music is
doing something else. It's just different. There's no antagonism."

Tom
sensed that they had had this argument before and that Millstein had
his own reasons for bringing it up. "It's white people's music,"
Millstein said.

"There's
more social commentary in the folk cafes than in the jazz bars,"
Soderman said.

"But
that's the point. Folk music is like a high school essay. All these
earnest little sermons. Jazz is the
subject
It's
what the sermon is
about
The
whole Negro experience is wrapped up in it."

"What
are you saying?" Tom asked. "White people shouldn't make
music?"

Eyes
focused on him. Soderman ventured, "The repairman speaks!"

Millstein
was full of beery scorn. "What the fuck do you know about the
Negro experience?"

"Not
a damn thing," Tom said amiably. "Hell, Larry, I'm as white
as you are."

Lawrence
Millstein opened his mouth, then closed it. A moment of silence . . .
then the table erupted in laughter. Millstein managed to say
something—it might have been
fuck
you
—
but
it was lost in the roar and Tom was able to ignore him.

Joyce
laughed, too, then steered the conversation down a less volatile
alleyway: she'd had a letter from somebody named Susan who was doing
political organization in rural Georgia. Apparently Susan, a Vassar
graduate, had been pretty wild during her Village days. Everybody
trotted out Susan stories. Joyce relaxed.

She
leaned over and whispered in Tom's ear, "Try not to make him
mad!"

He
whispered back, "I think it's too late," and ordered
another beer.

He
had reached that subtle turning point at which he was not quite drunk
but definitely a little past sober. He decided these were good
people. He liked them. When they left Stanley's, he followed them.
Joyce took his hand.

The
night air was warm and stagnant. They moved past tenement stoops full
of people, bleak streetlights, noise, a barber shop reeking of
Barbasol, to an old building and inside and up to a long room
cluttered with bookshelves and bad, amateurish paintings. "Lawrence's
apartment," Joyce confided. He asked, "Should I be
here?" and she said, "It's a party!"

The
books were poetry,
Evergreen
Review,
contemporary
novels. The record collection was large and impressive— there were
Bix Beiderbecke 78s in among the LPs—and the hi-fi looked
expensive: a Rek-O-Kut turntable, an amplifier bristling with tubes.
"Music!" somebody shouted, and Tom stood aside while
Millstein eased a John Coltrane record out of its sleeve and placed
it on the turntable—the gesture was faintly religious. Suddenly the
room was full of wild melody.