thought it would get their attention. Later, with all the lights out, she
stood naked on his bed and drew all over the wall—pretty good
drawings, he thought, some of them fairly obscene. He told her she
was going to make one hell of a kindergarten teacher and then pulled
her down again and wrapped his legs around her—she couldn’t have
weighed a hundred pounds.
When he finally took her home late Saturday afternoon, the sky
was slung so low over the rusty city and everything looked so beat up
and damp it seemed more like the end of winter, the beginning
of mud season, than the height of fall. He went out for subs with some
of his housemates and ended up at a Halloween party in one of the
Main Street bars. Bean was there and at one point stumbled over to
ask if Michael had a shovel in his car. He was wearing a girl’s hoop
earring and a bandanna. A pirate, Michael supposed, digging for
treasure. “This is upstate New York,” he said. “Everybody has a shovel
in his car.” Bean asked if he could borrow it and Michael asked if he
was snowed in. They both glanced through the crowd to the orange
light of the plate-glass window, to the brown and desolate street.
“No,” Bean said. “I’m not snowed in.” “Then you can’t have it,”
Michael told him.
After last call, he went by Damien’s. He went in the back way—a
set of wooden steps beside the garbage cans. This door was always
open. It led to a small screened porch and what had been the original
kitchen, which now stank of wood grown moldy with spilled beer.
There were still plenty of people inside. Ralph had an arrangement
with the police that usually allowed him to serve all night as long as
he flashed the lights at one and cleared the place of most of the
younger kids, and then locked the front door and turned off his sign.
Michael didn’t see the short-haired girl, Beverly was her name, but
Caroline was there, behind the bar with a couple of girlfriends. Ralph
was at a table playing chess. Michael had a beer and watched him for a
while. Then he had another and played some pool. At one point, about
ten of them did shots of schnapps, simultaneously, up and down the
bar, laughing like this was the wackiest college stunt ever. When
Michael finally left, Ralph was still at his game and Caroline was
curled up in a corner under her own parka. The sky just beyond the
ball field was beginning to lighten—nothing spectacular about it, just
the darkness turning into a queasy kind of pink. He could see a couple
of neighborhood dogs running together across the outfield, noses to
the ground. He could hear some poor working stiff trying to get his car
started in the cold.
There was no food in the house on Sunday and there was no use
bemoaning, yet again, this part of the state’s lack of decent delis and
diners. Hungover, all any of the downstaters wanted was a chocolate
egg cream and a buttered roll. But they drove over to campus anyway
and paid three bucks for brunch in one of the dining halls. They
watched the residents, mostly freshmen and sophomores, move
around the table with their trays—some of them still joined to last
night’s date, most of them stuck in same-sex groups of friends or
roommates who also hadn’t scored. A girl walked by wearing torn fairy
wings. Another had a tall striped hat. There was a subdued murmur
throughout the room, the smell of steam-table scrambled eggs and
burning toast and bins of bacon and beef bourguignonne. The staff had
hung cardboard skeletons from the window of the dish room; one of
them wore an apron and a hairnet. Michael noticed that most of the
kids eating had wet hair and damp clothes, just out of the shower, and
it made him think how young they looked, half formed. Outside, the
campus, too, seemed sodden, the leaves gone from every tree but still
lying in black heaps and scattered rags across the grass and along the
walkways.
Then a roll of laughter came from the far end of the room. And
then, following one another at a run, three guys dressed as the Marx
Brothers—Harpo, Groucho, Chico. They climbed over tables, sat in
girls’ laps, chased one another, the whole routine. Groucho put his
arms around one of the fat dish-room ladies and did the eyebrow
thing. Harpo had his bicycle horn. Their costumes were excellent—
theater majors, no doubt—and all their gestures dead-on. People
began standing on their chairs to watch, some of them shouting jokes
or bits of encouragement or merely caught up in the growing, crazed
enthusiasm that made Michael think of his own students when some
glorious distraction disrupted the day and sent them all to the
windows—a sudden hailstorm, a screaming fire en
gine, the milk delivery truck backing itself into a basketball hoop on
the playground.
And then, out of the blue, a boy stood up from one of the tables
and smacked a full plate of steaming eggs right into Groucho’s face.
The impact floored the poor kid, sent his cigar flying. There was a
moment’s pause in the general noise and Michael found himself
listening for a moan of anger or resentment, but what he heard instead
was only the silence of a change in the tide. Suddenly, someone else
dove for Harpo and pulled off his wig. He saw it fly into the air,
bouncing from hand to hand until somebody else slam-dunked it into
the milk dispenser. Chico’s hat, too, was being passed around and
when he appeared again among the crowd, he was hog-tied in his own
plaid jacket and someone had squirted ketchup and mustard down his
shirt. On the other side of the room, some girls were dancing around a
dog pile of guys—one of them had Harpo’s horn and was squeezing it
in short bursts, like a rising orgasm. Then Harpo scrambled free. He
was naked from the waist down, cursing wildly. He ran for the door
they’d come in through, hunched over, bare-assed and limping. Chico
and Groucho followed, Groucho turning as he ran, the nose and
mustache gone, the eggs still stuck to his shirt front and hair. He gave
the room the finger and was gone.
It took a few minutes for things to settle down. Someone else had
the bicycle horn and blew it intermittently, another guy held up
Harpo’s pants and underwear and danced them around a bit. But
people were returning to their seats, finishing their coffee, picking up
their trays. Michael turned to one of his housemates and said, “What
the hell just happened?”
He shrugged. Chris was a good guy. Stocky, already balding, laidback, and funny. His father taught industrial arts in a Bronx high
school and that’s what Chris wanted to do, too. Michael knew
he’d be good at it. Everybody’s favorite teacher. Chris had made all the
furniture in his room—bed, dresser, desk, bookcase, even the box he
kept his dope in, intricately carved with vines and flowers, satyrs and
nymphs.
He was going to get married right after graduation and they had a
running joke around the house about what his girlfriend had decided
was going to be their wedding song: “Time in a Bottle.”
Chris shrugged, his elbows on the table. “The world is full of
assholes,” he said, nonplussed. “What are you going to do?” Michael
could see him asking his students this very question for the next thirty
years.
At Damien’s that night, Michael scanned the room for the shorthaired girl, not sure whether he was hoping to see her or not. There
were a few people in costumes, mostly masks or crazy hats, nothing
too ambitious. Some of the girls wore leotards under their parkas and
little ears on their heads—black cats or bunny rabbits. The less
shapely ones were kids in flannel pajamas or housewives in bathrobes,
curlers in their hair. One kid—every year—in a thrift-store trench coat
that he would part to reveal a piece of pink rubber hose glued to a
square of brown carpet whenever he caught a girl’s eye.
Ralph still didn’t have any decorations up, but there was a plastic
pumpkin filled with candy by the register and every once in a while he
lifted it and tossed some candy into the crowd. When Caroline
squeezed in beside Michael, she put her elbow on the bar and held out
her hand. “Where’s mine?” she asked, coyly, but a little defiantly, too.
Ralph looked her up and down, baring his teeth in that strange
grin. “Where’s your costume?” he said. He held the candy away from
her, eyeing the turtleneck and jeans beneath her parka. “You’ve got to
have a costume to get a treat,” Ralph said slowly, as if ex-
plaining something he thought she already understood. She stared at
him a second longer and then abruptly turned away. The ends of her
long hair briefly clung to Michael’s arm and shoulder as she turned.
Then Bean moved in. He was still wearing the earring and the
bandanna. He’d be wearing them for the rest of the year.
“Is he going upstairs?” he asked. He had put bits of black and
gold paper over his teeth. “To get his nut?”
Michael shrugged. But Bean was watching Ralph behind the bar
and didn’t seem to notice. Then he leaned closer, elbowing Michael’s
side as if he were the one with the attention problem. “Is he going
upstairs tonight?” he asked from behind his hand. “With her?”
Michael turned away from him—the bandanna was tight, digging
into his eyebrows. He had a sudden recollection of Pauline’s big face,
bearing down on him. “Doesn’t look like it,” he said, and Bean, still
watching Ralph, said a breathless, “Fuck.”
And then he took a drag from his bottle of beer and shouted,
“Hey, Ralph.” The hoop earring swaying with the effort. “What’s this
about ghosts? I hear you got ghosts. You can’t sleep at night cause of
the ghosts.” He looked around, noted the attention his voice had
drawn. “Or is it because you’re some kind of frigging vampire?”
Ralph was handing beers over the bar to outstretched hands.
When he finished, he walked down to where Bean stood. He touched
the corner of his mouth, the drooping ends of his dark mustache. “You
know, I never came down here when I was a kid,” he said softly.
“There was an outside staircase we used. Straight to the second floor. I
had it torn off when my folks moved south—it was a fucking death
trap, it was so rotten. But when I was a kid, that’s how we went in and
out. I never came in here. So I never really knew when the funeral
parlor changed over to a bar. I mean, to a kid, it’s all the same. People
are talking, somebody’s crying,
somebody’s laughing. A fight breaks out. Every once in a while there’s
this creepy silence and then everybody starts talking again. All the
same. Still is.”
He looked at them all. He seemed to be making an effort to stay
interested in his own words. “I had no problem with it. Dead guys,
drunks.” He shrugged to show his indifference. “All the same.”
“No ghosts?” Bean said. “No ghosts keeping you up at night, like
you said?”
Ralph let his black eyes rest on Bean for a minute. And then he
said, “Only you guys.” Michael laughed with the others. Then, as was
his way, Ralph leaned forward, squinting through his own smoke. “I
listen to you guys, when I’m upstairs,” he said. He had his hands on
the bar, a cigarette burning in one of them. “You don’t sound any
different from last year or the year before. Or ten years before. Or even
when I was a kid trying to go to sleep upstairs and there was a stiff
down here in the middle of it all. And next year it won’t sound any
different either.”
Bean straightened up at that, pulled himself back. “Fuck, I’m out
of here next year,” he said. He looked around as if for corroboration,
then pushed at the bandanna that had begun to slip over his eyelid. “I
won’t even be here.”
But Ralph only grinned, patiently. The long-suffering professor.
“That’s what I’m telling you,” he said, straightening up. “It won’t
matter.”
He turned to toss his cigarette into the sink behind the bar, and
Bean, his tongue still poking at his cheek, cried out sarcastically,
“That’s one hell of a scary story, Ralph,” just as Caroline was
squeezing herself between them. She had some of her girlfriends
behind her and Michael heard them giggling and whispering, “Oh my
God,” before he took in everything else. She squeezed up to the bar,
smiling, her parka with its dirty fake fur closed up around her neck,
