A Strange Commonplace (11 page)

Anna went into the first saloon she saw, a place called the Melody Room, and sat at the bar. It looked like a decent enough place, and there was another woman at the bar with her husband probably. Just the three of them on this Monday night. She ordered a Seven and Seven and bought a pack of Chesterfields from the machine near the phone booth. She staggered a little, and after she finished the drink, knew that she was pretty well gone. “He doesn’t love me any more,” she said to the bartender. “Take it easy, sweetheart,” the bartender said, “just take it easy.” She nodded and ordered another drink and then another in what seemed like a minute. The couple at the end of the bar was looking at her, and then the man walked over and picked her fur coat up from the floor. “The floor’s not exactly clean, Miss,” he said. “He won’t sleep with me any more,” she whispered to him. “He won’t, you know, do anything with me any more.” She was crying.

Jack called her sister, but Anna wasn’t there. The bitch was pleased to hear that she’d just
left.
“Maybe you’ll get home for supper now once in a while before midnight,” she said. “Mind your fucking business,” he said and hung up.

The couple at the bar lived on the same street as Jack and Anna, and the husband suggested that he take Anna home, she was really tight, he told his wife, not making any sense, and might get in trouble alone like that. “I always thought she was a drunk,” his wife said, although this was the first time that either of them had seen her anywhere near drunk, the first time, for that matter, that they’d ever seen her in a bar. “I really think I ought to take her home,” he said, “it’s a fifteen-minute walk and I’ll be back in no time.” His wife looked at him. “We’ll go together,” she said, “we’ll
both
go.” He laughed and shook his head.

“Christ, what the hell do you think I’m gonna do? What do you think I am?” She smiled knowingly at him, an infuriating smile, smug and aggrieved. At that moment, whatever trust that still existed in their marriage disappeared.

While Jack thanked his neighbors, Anna was telling them what a big shot salesman he was, how he could lay the law down to the branch manager, he was fearless, a hero, that’s why he had this great territory in East Flatbush and Canarsie, where there were maybe five businesses, but he was such a tough guy that he couldn’t bear to scare the boss by complaining, by
quitting,
God no! But he was great at meetings, oh! those meetings! He spent so much time after work at those
meetings!,
tell them about the meetings, Jack. Jack thought of how sweet it would be to strangle her right there, watch her turn blue, the fucking cunt. The couple backed away, nodding and smiling, then turned and walked off. “Come in the house, you drunk bitch,” Jack said. “Get in the fucking house before I kill you!” He pushed her in the door and slammed it. “Joey out in the cold and dark with his shoes falling off,” he said. “Oh, really,” Anna said, “now you know what I put up with all day, every all day.” “You’re his
mother!”
Jack shouted.

“She must be miserable with that guy to talk that way in front of strangers,” the husband said. “And what about him?” his wife said, “married to a drunk who just walks out whenever she pleases it looks like? Don’t they have a little boy? And did you see that dress she had on? Not much left to the imagination there.” “It looked all right to me,” he said, “that green dress you have looks like that.” “It does
not,”
she said, “not a bit! Looks all right to you! Maybe you’d like to take
her
out for a drink some time.” “Oh, for the love of Jesus,” he said. But he would, indeed, like to take her out for a drink, and a lot more. There was something lost and sweet in her face that appealed to him.

Jack pulled Anna into the living room and then saw the shards of the teapot on the floor, the teapot that Mom had given them for their first anniversary. She broke the teapot! Mom had told them that she’d looked for something really lovely and found it in Chinatown, and hinted that it had been very expensive. This was a lie, and he knew it. His mother had bought it in a local hardware store.

He turned to Anna and said, “You don’t give a damn about anything, do you? Joey, me, my mother,
your
mother, not a goddamn thing,” and then hit her across the face with the back of his hand and hit her again. She fell down and sprawled against the sofa, bleeding from her nose and mouth. “You bitch!” he shouted, “you mean drunk bitch! And I
got
the Nassau County territory, not that you give a shit!” At that moment, in Jack’s righteous mind, there had been no other women he’d slept with, certainly no Jenny, who had ceased to exist: he was understanding and faithful and self-sacrificing and noble. There was only Anna, who had no faith in him, who was a bad wife and a bad mother and a drunk trying to pick up men at a gin mill. He helped her roughly up from the floor and prodded her up the stairs in front of him. “Clean your face—and take that dress off, you look like a cheap whore!” He put his hand on the small of her back and pushed her into the bedroom. She fell again and sat slumped against the footboard of the bed, whimpering, bubbles of bloody mucus at each nostril. Her legs were thrust out before her, her legs open, and her dress had slipped to her upper thighs. He looked at her, instantly aroused, got down on the floor, and raped her.

Rockefeller Center

I
GOT TIRED AND BORED LISTENING TO HIM TELL ME about the afternoon, a few weeks ago, that his homburg, a ridiculous mouse-gray hat that made him look like a file clerk masquerading as a lawyer, blew off his head at Rockefeller Center, and rolled across the street to stop directly in front of a woman who picked it up and waited for him to cross over and claim it. I’d be ashamed to claim it, but that’s neither here nor there. The woman turned out to be someone he’d known in high school, a lovely girl whom he’d secretly adored. That was thirty-five years ago. They recognized each other, even though his hair was graying, and she’d put on about fifty pounds. She looked prosperous and beautifully groomed, and wore a camel’s hair polo coat with what he called “a reckless swagger.” It was a phrase he must have got from a magazine on how to live and what to do to be happy. They talked, and he asked her if she had time for a drink, so they went into a bar off Sixth Avenue. It was at about this point in his story that I more or less stopped listening, so I don’t know, with any accuracy, what happened next, although it’s possible that he became hesitant and coy with me about the rest of the afternoon.

It doesn’t matter to me at all. He did say, and of this I’m fairly sure, that the woman remarked that not many men wear homburgs anymore, and that it made
him
look distinguished. Or maybe he said that she said “but” it made
him
look distinguished. I’m also sure that she told him that she’d been divorced for almost five years, her husband having left her for his twenty-six-year-old secretary. What a perfect situation for total disaster. I didn’t mention this, of course: he was stupidly seventeen again and smitten.

It was especially boring and tiresome to hear him tell the story, again and yet again. How he bumped into the girl he’d been secretly mad about in high school, and there she was, right on the street. She’d picked up his homburg, which a sudden gust of wind had blown off his head, and waited for him to cross the street to reclaim it. He said that as he approached her, they recognized each other at the same instant, and that her face brightened as if
the sun had risen in her heart.
It was obvious that he’d picked up that unfortunate phrase from some noxious novel or maybe that feature on vivid language or whatever they called it, in
The Reader’s Digest.
He knew, he just simply knew, so he told me and told me and told me again, that she’d been as interested in him as he in her, all those years ago, but that things just work out the way they work out, or, in this case, don’t work out the way they might. He was babbling. She was married, had been married for years and years, with three grown children, one of whom she’d just had lunch with here in mid-town. She was on her way back to New Jersey, where she and her husband had just moved into a condominium. He went on and on and said they’d made plans to meet again, for lunch, somewhere near Rockefeller Center. I wasn’t paying all that much attention to him and made a show of looking at my watch, realizing, with some embarrassment, that I’d done the same thing when he’d first forced this story on me. I do recall that their planned meeting was imminent; he was so excited that he talked on, nervously, volubly, his face flushed and sweaty. I believe that Jung called this runaway speech “hysterical verbalization.” Amen. He was in this state, you must understand, over a woman of some fifty-five or so years, a woman as old as his
wife.
Was I missing something? Was he going to jeopardize his marriage over a grandmother? Good luck, I said, right. Really, yes, really good luck! I was still looking at my watch as I moved away, smiling foolishly at this foolish man.

The homburg, which, for some ridiculous reason, he’d affected a year or two earlier, blew off his head near the Rockefeller Center rink, so he told me. I was hoping that he’d tell me that it had been crushed by a truck or stolen by some idiot, but it survived and landed at the feet of a woman who picked it up and waited for him to cross the street and retrieve it. She was a handsome woman in her mid-fifties, a little overweight, perhaps, but well turned out in a camel’s hair polo coat and a little snap-brim felt hat. When he got closer to her he realized that she was the girl—a girl no more, of course—that he’d loved to distraction in high school, a feeling of which she was wholly and absolutely unaware. He wasn’t popular or smart or good-looking or hip or tough or talented, and she was everything perfect, even though there were some stories about her and a couple of older guys who’d dropped out. He took his hat from her and she smiled and he called her by name, how amazing, how strange it was, he said, to meet like this after thirty-five? thirty-
six
years. But she wasn’t that girl, it turned out, not at all, and her name was not the name he’d called her. He insisted that she was, that she must be, that she had to be, and she backed away from him and told him that her husband was meeting her here any minute. Then he said something that I took for a sign that he was heading, soon enough, into real trouble, despite the testament to gravity and stability of his absurd homburg. He wanted to tell this woman the
truth,
that he was sure that if he could make her remember that she
was
once the girl that he’d worshiped, she’d be sorry for having pretended to be a stranger, she would become his lover, they would live the life that they should have lived all these years, these lost years! He said none of this, luckily, but put his foolish hat on, thanked her, and walked toward Fifth Avenue. But she was the girl, no matter what she said, she
was
the girl, the same girl as always, beautiful and remote and lascivious and cruel.

His homburg blew off his head at Rockefeller Center. He’d bought and started wearing this hat after his wife admired an actor who wore one in a movie she liked, Clark Gable? or Gregory Peck? And he believed, too, that the hat made him look important, prosperous, and successful, although I told him, as nicely as possible, that an Adam hat doesn’t exactly say Money and Power. He apparently started running after the hat, which veered off the sidewalk into the street on the edge of its brim, “a grosgrain edge,” as he often remarked. He stepped off the curb and was about to check for traffic when he stopped to stare at a woman who stood on the opposite curb, watching the hat and him. He began to smile, according to a couple of people who were nearby, took a step or two toward her, and was about to call out to her, when a delivery van, barreling down the street, hit him and threw him thirty feet into the air. He must have been dead or near dead when he landed. The woman was, perhaps, one of the crowd that gathered, gawking and terrified, at his broken body and cracked head, but then she walked away and into her life, thinking, possibly, that the man looked familiar. The homburg simply disappeared. Perhaps some idiot took it.

Another Small Adventure

J
ENNY STARTS DRINKING THE MINUTE SHE GETS IN FROM work. An hour or so passes, during which time she keeps on drinking, tumblers of straight blended whiskey. A bronze figurine of a lioness with a lamb in its mouth stares at her from its place on the black-lacquered table, its blank metal eyes terrible. She stands, slumped against the wall, a glass of whiskey in her hand. She is so drunk that she is unaware that she has wet herself. She takes a drag on a cigarette, then drinks off half the whiskey and gags. She is still dressed in her office clothes, for what she calls her position in her place of business, but Mr. Neumiller would be shocked and disgusted to see her at this moment. She’s wearing a dark suit, a white blouse, and on her jacket lapel is affixed a small piece of costume jewelry, red and blue glass flowers perched on a spray of gold-plated stems. She bends over slightly, staggering away from the wall and then back again, and lifts the hem of her skirt to look, bewildered, at her soaked stockings and the puddle in which she stands, shoeless. She has no idea why she’s all wet underneath her clothes. She drops her cigarette and starts across the room to get another one from her purse, staggers again, reels, then falls heavily on her back, slamming her head against the floor and spilling her glass of whiskey. The radio, she realizes, is playing, a song that she likes, but what song it? and the singer is, the singer is, she can’t remember his name. I hope Poppa doesn’t come over tonight, don’t come over, Poppa, I’m fine, fine, fine. She says this aloud. She sits up suddenly, aware of her wet clothes, her discomfort, her helpless drunkenness, and abruptly knows why her clothes are sodden. Her eyes open wide and her mouth twists in selfloathing. She’s going to throw up, she thinks, she wants another drink, her head hurts, she wants to take a bath, she wants a cigarette, she can’t keep her eyes open, her mouth sags and she drools on her blouse, she wants Warren to come back and find her and love her and forgive her and take care of her and do whatever he wants. It’s a sin, but she wants to die.