In the Night Café (12 page)

Sometimes, though, he'd let Billy ride him home. Billy knew how to ask. “I really miss that old bike,” he'd say. “Why don't you let me take a turn at the driving?”

16

I
WAS AFRAID
of Christmas that year, but didn't know how to ignore it. On Christmas Eve I ran out just as the stores were closing and bought the last turkey on Mulberry Street. It was sixteen pounds, much too big for the two of us. I'd never cooked a turkey in my life. I had cut out a recipe for chestnut stuffing from the newspaper; next morning it took me ages to get off the shells.

The hours went by, hushed as if both of us were holding our breaths. I kept on chopping and stirring and Tom worked in the studio building stretchers. A little snow would come down every now and then and whiten the railings of the back fire escape. There was a mission for homeless men around the corner and I guessed they were having turkey, too—I could hear them singing “Deck the Halls,” “Adeste Fidelis.” Tom went out to get cigarettes. He said he'd never seen the Bowery so empty.

“I came right back, didn't I?” he said. “Today I'm not drinking. I can do it.”

I told him I knew he could. All he had to do, I said, was stay busy so he didn't start having bad thoughts. But it was nothing I knew or believed.

He went back to his stretchers. The electric saw went on and off for the rest of the afternoon, and the turkey kept getting browner. I could see it was going to look like the ones in those magazine pictures of families gathered around holiday tables, with the little wide-eyed children holding out their plates.

We nearly did get through that day except for the fight we had about Billy as I was taking the turkey out of the oven. Tom wanted me to hold everything. He was going to go and find him. Here we were with all this great food for the two of us, and maybe Billy was just sitting in his little place on Sullivan Street that didn't even have a phone or a refrigerator.

“But the turkey will get ruined,” I said.

“No it won't, kiddo. I know about birds. Just leave it where it is and turn off the gas.” I saw him reach for his blue nylon jacket, the one he always wore when he was on the bike. He was going to ride uptown and be back in no time. If he didn't find Billy in the storefront, he'd take a look in the Cedar.

“I don't want Billy here tonight.”

I didn't even mean it, but a dread was upon me. He'd get on the bike and he wouldn't come back. I thought about the patches of snow on the streets, the drinks he'd probably have in the Cedar. I was going to keep him alive by making him stay home.

We had to be alone, I kept insisting. Couldn't we even have Christmas by ourselves?

He thought I'd gone nuts. He didn't give a damn about the fucking bird. Was I jealous of Billy, jealous even of a kid? He'd never seen that in me before. He said it was like finding a flaw in a diamond. It spoiled something.

He threw his blue jacket on the floor and left me alone in the room. My hands were shaking as I set the table. I kept calling him and finally he came, but we sat there like two people on the verge of divorce. “Would you pass me some of that?” was about all we said. Afterward, when I stood at the sink soaking the dishes, the quiet still had that terrible hum.

I knew he was right. I'd been awful about Billy. But I'd kept him home.

You gave me a camera that Christmas. An old Leica—with a cracked leather case. But the lens was perfect. I'd never had a really good camera, never even knew I wanted one. I was still just taking pictures inside my head.

The Leica came from the Bowery. You'd never lost your habit of looking in pawnshop windows. Weeks before, walking on Rivington Street, you'd spotted it. You often saw incredible items up for sale on that block, even right out on the sidewalk. Once an old black wino wearing one shoe had offered to sell you a hardboiled egg. He'd displayed it in the palm of his hand, a fine-looking egg, white and uncracked. He wanted a nickel. You gave him a quarter and put the egg in your pocket. “I bought you this egg,” you said when you came home.

You were always turning up with little gifts that you'd hand me with embarrassment, because you couldn't seem to learn about being practical. You had an eye for silver. I used to wear an old chain you gave me. The catch had been broken, but you knew how to mend it. “You'll never lose this now,” you said. Silver lasted, wouldn't change. Maybe that was why it attracted you.

You took a risk, getting me that camera. There it was, asking to be used. You'd even bought some rolls of film—allowing me no excuses.

“Oh,” I said politely, almost as if I didn't want it, “this is a really fancy one.”

I think I was lodged in your mind the way you were in mine. You were studying me all the time, doping out my secrets—the things I'd never ask for or dare to give myself.

Your secrets were harder, not always the kind to be brought to light. Not long after you'd finished all those stretchers, I came across something in your studio I wasn't supposed to see. It was a Saturday morning—you'd gone out to buy paint and I'd taken it into my head to surprise you. By then we'd both forgotten the fight we'd had on Christmas. I cleaned the two big studio windows; then I wet the broom and started sweeping. Sawdust was everywhere, bits of two-by-fours and plywood. I pushed the broom along in a professional manner, making neat little piles.

I was having an attack of happiness. The wet wood smelled sweet to me as it dried in the sunlight, and everything seemed calm and good. I wanted to make everything ready for you.

The broom turned over a small plywood triangle. For some reason I bent down and picked it up even before I noticed the writing on it. Five words in thick carpenter's pencil, NOW I WILL HANG ME. Paintings got hung, I thought. Maybe that was what it meant. I put the triangle in a bag of trash, buried it under orange rinds, empty cans.

I dug it out and read it again before you came home. The letters seemed to come unjoined when I'd stared at the words long enough.

I wasn't going to show it to you, but I had to. I said, “Hey, can you tell me what this is about?”

You said you'd just been fooling around. You didn't remember when it was you'd written on that piece of wood.

17

I
N THE SPRING
we started going on trips again. If it wasn't too cold, we'd get on the bike and Tom would head for water—Brighton or Rockaway, the gray, wide beaches. At that time of year even their trash cans were empty. In Sheepshead Bay one Sunday we found a pier where there were always four or five boys fishing with drop lines. “What do you catch here?” Tom asked them. They all said flounder. Tom bought himself a rod and we started coming back. I'd help him cut up the clams he used for bait, but I never got the hang of casting out. He'd catch crabs, blowfish—anything but flounder. We just came to be there really. We'd sit in the sun with our eyes on the line as it pulled against the blue. We came for the stillness. Sometimes out there I'd know he was thinking about Tommy. He'd talk to the boys with the drop lines, let them try out his reel. “No one fishes more seriously than kids,” he said.

We used to go to a clam bar right across the street that always filled up in late afternoon with red-faced men in windbreakers who'd been out since dawn on party boats. Tom would strike up conversations about how the bluefish were running and whether the tides were right. They'd try to figure him out. How come he knew so much? “I did a little fishing down in Florida.” “Marlin?” they'd ask him eagerly. “Yeah, I've gone out after marlin.”

Once a group came in who seemed to have caught nothing but beers. They were very loud in ordering their Bluepoint Specials and getting the waitress to pay attention to them. They all worked together in some insurance office. Someone was retiring after forty years, and the firm had rented a boat in his honor.

One of the younger insurance men started staring at us. Even when he saw that I noticed, he couldn't tear his eyes away. Something about us seemed to fascinate him. He was heavyset and Irish-looking in an ugly tan jacket; he'd gotten a very bad sunburn out on the water. He had sort of a military haircut that made him look belligerent from a distance. It alarmed me when he got off his stool at the bar and made his way over to our booth. He stood in front of Tom for a few moments, shifting his weight from foot to foot. He cleared his throat and said, almost in whisper, “Tommy?”

Tom was shaking his head. “Do I know you?” Then I heard him say, “Oh my God.”

“Joanna, this is my little brother,” he told me. “This is Kevin.”

Later Kevin said he'd been confused because I didn't look at all the way he remembered Caroline. He'd met her once years ago just before she and Tom went to Mexico City. Kevin kept grabbing Tom's shoulder and saying, “Can you believe this?” He called over a couple of his friends and introduced us. One of them said, “You never told me you had a brother.”

Tom wasn't talking much. After a while, I had the feeling he was waiting to get up from the table and drop out of sight for another thirteen years. Kevin kept on asking questions, though. Where had Tom been living? What happened to Caroline? How long had he been back in New York?

Finally Kevin got quiet himself. “All right, Tommy. Say we didn't run into each other. Would you have tried to look me up?”

“I don't know, Kevin,” Tom said. “I don't know at all.”

Even so, Kevin wanted us to leave the bar and go home with him right away. We had to meet his wife, see his kid.

Tom said, “Too fast, Kevin. I'll call you. We'll get together.”

“You won't do it,” Kevin said.

“Sure I will. Write down your number. I've got no problem seeing you.”

“Glad to hear it,” Kevin said, forcing a smile.

Kevin and his wife Grace lived somewhere near Idlewild, which hadn't become Kennedy Airport yet. When we went out there on the bike the following Sunday, we got lost for a while riding through blocks of two-story red brick houses that all looked the same. Kevin had a small backyard, just a square of grass, a clothesline full of little overalls and a lilac bush. We ate barbecued chicken under Kevin's lilacs as planes kept roaring right over us, dropping down in the sky to make their landings. Grace said she'd always been scared that a plane would crash on their roof. She wanted them to move much farther out on Long Island to a place that would be better for raising children. They had a three-year-old, a tiny asthmatic boy. Kevin held him on his lap, making him open his mouth for little pieces of chicken; sometimes his son would whimper and try to push his hand away. “A couple of times we nearly lost this one, but we pulled him through,” Kevin said proudly. Grace couldn't have another baby, so they were trying to adopt. A Catholic agency was sending over a social worker to inspect them. That was another worry they had—that they'd fall short of perfection, that somehow they wouldn't be judged suitable. It seemed strange how little sense they had of how good they were, good in ways that Tom and I could never be. They had a terrible amount of patience, they obeyed all the rules. I could see this even in the way the appliances shone in Grace's kitchen, the jars and pots lined up like soldiers. Kevin and Grace were ready to worry about us, too, the way families worried about their own.

It really upset them that we rode around on a motorcycle. “What made you get a thing like that, Tommy?” Kevin asked. He wouldn't hear a word about its advantages. It must have been the insurance man coming out in him, I thought. He'd told us he'd been a cop in East Harlem for a few years until Grace made him give it up, but he seemed much too sweet-natured to have ever arrested anyone. Kevin had a friend in Rockville Center who sold used cars. This man could be absolutely trusted, he said. He wanted to take Tom over there to talk to his friend about trading in the bike. “I'll bet your wife's got her heart in her mouth, sitting on that little seat.”

“Not anymore,” I said. “I love it.” I'd have told anyone that if they'd asked me. I lived for those Sundays, those trips we took that always somehow brought us back to ourselves even after one more week had collapsed on us. I only felt fearless when I was riding on the buddy seat.

Kevin didn't believe me, though. “Sure, Joanna,” he said, laying his hand on Tom's back. “Well, now that I've found this guy, I want to keep him in one piece. So why don't you use your influence?”

Tom wasn't annoyed. He was laughing. “Listen, I'm not about to buy a car. Anyway, you're just my little brother. Look who's giving who advice!”

You didn't want to talk about old times that day. I remember you warning Kevin about that. “Let's keep it light,” you said. But there kept being silences heavier than the air in Kevin's backyard. You and Kevin were strangers really. All you had in common were memories of that basement apartment in the Bronx.

Kevin said he'd been sure for years that somewhere he'd run into you. He'd have you over to his house and Grace would cook you a steak dinner; then you'd have this talk you said you didn't want. “You're my only brother,” he said. “That means something.”

“I don't know what it means, Kevin. I haven't been a brother. More of a writeoff. Isn't that true?”

“I used to think you couldn't stand me.”

“You were all right. To me you were just this little baby. I knew you shouldn't hate babies. I wasn't going to turn out like them.”

“They're pretty pathetic now,” Kevin said. “I notice you haven't asked about them.”

“That's right,” you said. “I'm not asking.”

“You have no intention of seeing them then?”

“I can't come up with one good reason, only a few bad ones.”

“They never treated you right, Tommy,” Kevin said. “I could never understand it. I guess even back then they were kind of crazy.”

“Let's talk about the Yankees,” you said. “Fishing. Insurance. What's the insurance business like?”

“Well, maybe you'll never have to meet my mother-in-law,” Grace remarked as I was drying dishes in her kitchen.

I admitted to her I couldn't help being curious. I wouldn't have minded seeing Marie just once.

“You don't want her in your life,” Grace said fiercely. “You don't want her near you.”

She said Marie had made a lot of trouble for her years ago before the marriage, told Kevin a lot of lies about her. “Just for spite,” Grace said, as if she were still puzzling over it. “Just to cause harm. I never knew there were people like her. Everyone was nice in my family. She said some woman had told her I'd had a baby and given it away in Chicago, because I went there one summer to stay with my aunt. Why would anyone make up such a story? I never even had a boyfriend in high school before I started going with Kevin. And Kevin really believed her. He used to tell me how beautiful his mother was. She's not beautiful now, never was—not what I call beautiful.

“Kevin and I are all right now, though. And you know why? Because I never have to go with him anymore to see her. And they never come here. Maybe that's terrible. Kevin says I should feel more pity. But that's the way it has to be.”

Kevin had moved his parents out of the Bronx, Grace told me, found them a small apartment in Marie's old neighborhood in Hell's Kitchen. He sent them a check for the rent every month. His father had lost a leg to diabetes—“All that drinking,” Grace said. “It caught up with him.” Kevin had gone with his mother to the doctor, when the doctor wanted to explain to her what meals to make for Frank. But Kevin didn't think Marie paid much attention. Sometimes she didn't cook anything for days. Sometimes when Kevin went to the apartment, it was so filthy he'd have to spend hours cleaning it, carrying out all the garbage. “You can't talk to him when he comes back from there,” Grace said. “You have to give him room for a while. Go and mow the grass, I tell him.”

This is what I did one day on my lunch hour. I took the subway uptown and walked around Hell's Kitchen. I had the Leica with me. I was still getting used to it, getting over feeling I was an impostor taking pictures. Give yourself permission, you used to tell me. I'd been practicing that, stealing bits of life here and there, learning to be fast, indistinguishable from the city's rush. Only the mad and the lost seemed to stand still, so that someone like me might pause and record them.

I passed the hospital where you were born and went farther west, through long brown blocks where even the stones looked bruised. Bodegas sold mangoes, dark twisted tubers, candles for the dead—wax rainbows in cheap glass. Boys hooted after me in Spanish. There was a burnt-out car near Tenth Avenue, then a wheelless one with a big blue-eyed doll's head hanging by string from the rearview mirror. The head had a look of stupid amazement, so I took its picture, establishing my credentials so to speak.

Maybe the Irish were all indoors that day. I didn't see any. Still, it was Marie's zone. She could have stepped out from any chalked-up doorway in cracked five-and-ten bedroom slippers, cursing the terrible decline of the neighborhood, cursing the filthy spies, the sons who were ungrateful, the bums she'd spread her legs for.

Don't look that woman in the eye! That's what one would warn oneself. Take her in quickly. Don't even let her see you turn your head.

Too many clothes for this warm afternoon, slip sagging under the garish coat, riotous red lipstick on askew. Pathetic. Maybe a social worker could decide that, professionally—or someone with Kevin's kind of goodness. My Leica, though, would do its job without pity. All I'd have to do was get too close to her, endure the furious glare for a moment, step in and out of the electrical field.

Then I'd come back to you armed with that picture. “Look at this,” I'd say. “This has nothing to do with you.”