Goodbye Without Leaving (9 page)

When I finally met William Hammerklever, he was sitting at her table eating dinner as if he habitually ate dinner with Mary. It turned out, he did. He had curly salt-and-pepper hair and a blunt nose, and he wore old, soft, beautiful clothes. He was an older man who taught a Tuesday evening and a Wednesday morning class in statistics. The rest of the time he lived in Westchester and ran a computer company. It was not immediately clear if he was married, although later on I began to hear about a person called Madeline, who might or might not have been William's wife. By this time he was an established fact of Mary's life and thus of mine.

Anyway, it was not a good idea to ask direct questions. Mary was like a turtle and only pulled her head into her shell. It was going to be a long time—if ever—before I found out what was going on between them.

I said, “I'd like to creep into my room, I mean his room, and steal all his cashmere sweaters.”

“First grab is mine,” Mary said. “After all, I feed him.”

That, of course, was news to me, but then it all made sense. The day I saw her wearing William's sweater, I thought I knew what she had never told me.

21

Around my darling spouse I found that I had begun to walk gently, conversationally speaking—as if on eggs. I did not want the subject of babies to emerge as a topic of conversation. Our apartment was too small for a baby, and if we moved, my doom would be sealed. Therefore I never complained when the boiler broke down during a cold snap, since I did not want my sweetie to say, “It's too cold for you here. Let's move.” Nor did I tell him when I was almost mugged on the street, even though my would-be mugger was chased away by three elderly Ukrainian men.

Besides, I loved my neighborhood. You never knew what you would see out on the street: strange-looking men with pet boa constrictors wrapped around their waists, old black men playing blues guitar in the park, girls in extremely long or extremely short skirts walking their cats on leashes or strolling with parrots on their shoulders. At night in the summer the fire escapes were padded with mattresses and the air rang with shouts and squeals in Spanish and English. I liked walking from the kosher delicatessen to the pork butcher to the place that sold empanadas, and around the corner to the six Indian restaurants. You could buy black toothpaste from India in the alternative drugstore, and a walk down the block offered many opportunities to buy poor-quality reefer. It was homey and strange at the same time, just the sort of neighborhood for me.

I also did not tell Johnny how isolated I felt at the Race Music Foundation, or that during the workday my most significant conversations were conducted with two potheads called Ronnie and Luis who worked at Fred's Out-of-Print Records, housed in a dingy storefront a few blocks from the foundation.

The owner of this place, Fred Wood, was a morose-looking white dude who wore his pants hitched up high and favored the evil-looking, pointy little boots most people had thrown out years ago. He had a flat-top, little eyes and a long, cheerless face. I never saw him without a cigarette. It was rumored that he had made a lot of money on Wall Street but dropped out when his record fixation got out of hand. It was also rumored that he had been a speed freak, but he seemed so laid back that I often wondered if he had a pulse. He did have an encyclopedic memory for rock and roll, and every now and again I would need something I couldn't remember. These needs were as intense as any real addict's craving for drugs.

Fred did not seem surprised to see a white girl in this neighborhood, but then, he barely registered any emotion at all. He was more like a lizard than anyone I had ever seen.

“Hi. I need this record. I can't remember who did it or what it's called.”

Fred Wood looked at me impassively and said nothing.

“It's from about a million years ago. Two black guys. I just remember it's something about love that you feel deep down inside.”

“Yeah,” said Fred Wood. “Luis, give her ‘Deep Down Inside' by Bob and Earl. That's real obscure. They only played it a coupla times. Where'd you hear it?”

“I guess the coupla times it was played.”

“Solid,” said Fred Wood. He yawned. It was the only time his expression changed, but the cigarette never moved from his mouth. It was lodged in the corner.

“You useta be the white Shakette,” he said, in his monotone.

“I did.”

“Yeah. Ruby's going down the tubes. Violins and shit.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You still singing? You sang real good when Ruby let you.”

“I work at the Race Music Foundation.”

“Yeah? Good old Fred Willhall.
I do not play no rock and roll
.”

“He hired me for my research abilities.”

Fred Wood looked me up and down. He was not a savory or healthy-looking person, but he had a kind of eerie charm which was strangely benign. When he looked at me I felt an undeniable thrill, the sort a married woman ought not feel for the creepy proprietor of a secondhand record store.

“Your research abilities,” he said tonelessly. “Which are undeniably ample, I have no doubt.”

“Don't you doubt it for a minute,” I said.

Suddenly Luis returned with “Deep Down Inside” by Bob and Earl. Fred Wood put it lovingly on the turntable. He had long, boneless-looking fingers. His acoustical system was amazing. No matter how loud he turned up the sound, there was never a speck of distortion. The rig had been custom-made by an electronics genius and speed freak who got very strung out and split to California. This system was his greatest creation.

“It's his monument, man,” Luis said.

Bob and Earl were of the gospel-inspired school of rock and roll. As the first notes rolled over us, we froze. We might have been hostages listening to the national anthem, and maybe we were. The opening had heavy gospel riffs on piano and shadow guitar. I felt my hair stand on end.

When it was over, a tear slid down Fred Wood's cheek. He took the record off the turntable with great tenderness and slipped it into its little paper jacket. Luis and Ronnie quietly went back to work with the air of people who had been chastened.

“It's really beautiful,” I said.

“Oh, yes,” said Fred Wood. He removed the dead cigarette from the corner of his mouth. He gave me the record in a used bag. “It is awesome.”

22

For a long spell I was as happy as I could be. I was doing something I loved and I was marginal at the same time. My love for marginal people was a kind of lunatic variant on the fact that I had spent a good part of my childhood in secret pursuits. Who would ever know these people except me? The day I saw Fred Wood cry upon hearing Bob and Earl's “Deep Down Inside,” my heart opened to him and I realized that I would always love him. I adored Ronnie and Luis.

My best and in fact my only friend at the Race Music Foundation was the overexcited acoustical engineer, James Hill, who referred to himself as “the Bopper.” His mother, who came in once in a while to do the foundation's books, was known as “the Bopper's mother.”

Every day he came bounding into my cramped little research space, slapped something on my turntable and said, “Hey, baby. Listen to
this
giant side.”

The Bopper did not like blues or gospel, and he felt that Dixieland was to black music what early infancy is to people. He hated it. He liked very extreme jazz and he had convinced the Reverend Willhall that these strange, noncommercial wailings would disappear off the face of the earth if left uncatalogued by him. He was pressing the foundation to turn the conference room, in which no conferences were ever held, into a sound stage so that he could record the unrecorded musicians he found in jazz clubs. They often came to visit, some in what looked like the last stages of drug addiction, and some looking as fit as marathon runners, or wearing business suits and carrying electronic keyboards under their arms.

“Someday,” he said, “the Bopper's gonna get together an interesting amount of money and open a club. Just for extreme jazz. Call it the Cutting Edge.”

This sounded to me like a good way to lose an interesting amount of money, and besides, I told the Bopper, the Cutting Edge sounded like a beauty parlor.

I had a hard time with extreme jazz. It was like reading a book in a foreign language you haven't really studied. “I hear it, but I don't get it,” I said.

“You rock and roll people are simple tools,” said the Bopper. “You probably like ‘Right on the Tip of My Tongue' by Brenda and the Tabulations.”

I adored Brenda and the Tabulations.

I was also happy because I was secretly married. I had begged Johnny to let us have a couple of months before we announced it. He did not immediately understand the reason for this. I said I wanted the reality to sink in.

“In other words, set, as in concrete,” he said.

Well, that was certainly the gist of it. Since I believed marriage to be private, and Johnny felt it was public, we made a deal. We would have the joy of a secret marriage for two months and then we were going to tell our parents
and
proclaim it to the world at large. An announcement in
The New York Times
. Parties. Then I agreed that we would move so we could have a housewarming.

These were, as any fool knew, the steps people take to emerge from the cocoon of their childhoods, sprout wings and become adult butterflies. I had never seen my true love so content. He liked
being
things: lawyer, husband. He was dying to tell everyone he knew. For a person who craved the marginal, I had married someone who loved being right out in the center.

Of course, he noted, everyone would assume that I was pregnant. I curled my eyebrow at him. And why, I wondered, would everyone think that?

“Well, secret marriage and all,” Johnny said.

“Tell them I look like hell in white,” I said. “Tell them we're so extremely assimilated that no rabbi would marry us, and since we're Jewish, no one else would either. Say we couldn't get married by a judge because I have a prison record.”

“People get married in prison all the time,” Johnny said.

“Oh, what's the big deal!” I said. “Tell them that's how we wanted to get married. You wanted to get hitched at the old Hud's Rock and Roll Hut but it closed.”

“Hud's,” said my husband dreamily. “It was probably like that place you go to. Fred's. A sort of dusty place that smells of vinyl and marijuana smoke. Every record ever made. I wanted to walk down the aisle to Garnet Mimms singing “I'll Take Good Care of You.'”

“How I love Garnet Mimms,” I said. “My mother is going to be awfully angry when we tell her.”

“Not to worry,” said my husband. “I'll take care of her. I'll tell her the truth: it was the only way I could convince you to do it at all.”

“That won't go over too well either. She'll just complain about how abnormal I am.”

“And I will say that's why I married you.”

I looked at my husband with true love. Oh, the bliss of being married to a litigator who knew his way around difficult people, especially one who loved Garnet Mimms. It was almost too good to be true.

23

Our announcement did not go over very well with either set of parents. My mother was predictably aghast. She fixed me with a look I had known well in childhood: rage, and disappointment. My mother felt that defiance was the criminal activity of childhood.

“You must be pregnant,” she said.

“I'm not,” I said.

This made everything much worse. If I was not pregnant, then it was clear that I had only one reason: to defy her. To deny her a wedding. To throw it in her face.

“Listen, Gert,” said my extremely agreeable husband, who knew how to twist a mother or two around his little finger. “It was the only way I could get the girl to have me. She really and truly doesn't approve of white dresses and flower girls and stuff. I'm not mad for it myself. You can give us a great big party and introduce us to all your friends and not have to go through the hell of planning a wedding.”

My mother sat in a wing chair and took a lace handkerchief out of her sleeve. She was not so much crying as sniffing, which I had found very confusing as a child.

“To think of all the pleasure you've deprived them of,” she sniffed. “Our friends were so looking forward to making a fuss. You two are very foolish. Just on a practical level—people do not send wedding presents under these circumstances.”

I was about to say “We'll do without,” when I saw Johnny's warning look. He had obviously found some way to play this and he didn't want it disrupted.

“Look, Gert,” he said. “Think of it this way. The worst is over. We're married! A nice, hassle-free fact of life. No horrible wedding plans, no hysteria. Nice and easy. But we would love a party.” At this he paused and looked at me. His look said, Shut up. We'd love a party. “You can tell your friends it was a quiet, family wedding, the nice, civilized kind, and now you can go crazy interviewing caterers, okay?” To my amazement, it
was
okay.

Johnny's parents were slightly less irate, but they were clearly puzzled.

“Are you two going to have a baby?” Dolly said.

“No, Ma,” said Johnny. “We just wanted to be together quietly for a little bit, that's all.”

“I'm afraid I don't understand you young people,” she said. “In my day it was all different. These sorts of things weren't done.”

“Oh, come on, Ma,” said Johnny. “People have always done this. Wartime, and stuff like that.”

“
Stuff like that
usually meant strong parental objection,” said Dolly. “You two would have had our blessing.”

It was Johnny's father's job to lighten things up. He was Dolly's perfect counterpoint: casual, easygoing and cheerful.

“Oh, come on, Dolly,” he said. “I'd have been a lot happier running off with you than stuck in that horrible tuxedo, dancing in those awful patent leather shoes. What a wedding! You did the right thing, you two. I just wish you'd do it again so we could watch. I've never been to City Hall in all these years.”