Keep the Change (12 page)

“By the way,” she said, “let me ask you this, okay? Don’t you have a girlfriend?”

“I did.”

“Well?”

“She died in a fern bar stampede.”

A look of tolerance crossed Ellen’s face. Joe tried to remember Astrid charitably but all that came up was her pushiness, her health fetishes, her fascination with cosmetics. Astrid had taught him the field strategy for the aptly named war of the sexes. She had also taught him the charm and drama of picnics on the battlefield. It was a provisional life with this Astrid.

Ellen was as good as her word. When the meals came, she made short work of her big steak. Once when her mouth was too full, she grinned straight at Joe, and shrugged cheerily. This appetite amazed him. And when she was done, she flung herself back in her seat and said, “Ah!”

“Now what?” said Joe, putting down his own utensils. He was thinking about a cigarette. The tension of not mentioning the child was getting sharper.

“Would you like a suggestion?”

“Sure.”

“I’d like to go out to Nitevue and hit a bucket of balls.”

“I’d rather talk about Clara.”

“I’d rather hit a bucket of balls.”

They were the only two people on the range. It was a green band in the middle of prairie, glowing under floodlights. Nitevue was situated just off the highway east. It was an open shed with places to sit, three soft drink machines, a golf cart, and a small counter where one arranged for the clubs and balls. Ellen asked for a number-four wood and Joe asked for anything that was handy, which turned out to be a thing called a “sand iron.” The concessionaire looked just like a local farmer in a John Deere cap and overalls. He made it clear in every movement
that his class background had taught him to despise all sport and waste such as this. He handed over balls, clubs, and tees with an air of ancient loathing.

Ellen stood up on a kind of rubber mat and began firing the balls out through the bug-filled flood of light, almost to the darkness beyond. At first Joe just watched her. There were gophers speeding around, running, stopping, looking, whistling, trying to fathom life on a driving range.

Joe took three whiffs for every time he hit the ball. But even when he did connect, it just went up at a high angle and landed a short distance away. He took a somewhat mightier grip and swung hard; this time the ball almost towered out of sight, yet fell just in front of them. Quickly absorbing the spirit of this unusual game, he shouted, “Sonofabitch!” and examined the end of his club for manufacturing deficiencies. He went back and demanded another club; this one was a “two iron.” With it, he managed to scuff the ball along the ground in front of himself, while Ellen drove one long clean shot after another. What’s more, his arms ached from inadvertently fetching the ground itself blow after blow.

When she had finished driving her last ball, Ellen walked over to where Joe was sitting on a bench. Her cheeks were flushed with high spirits. Joe thought that it would be a very strange individual who didn’t find her lovely.

“You don’t seem to have much of a gift for this,” she said.

“I’m afraid I don’t. Actually, I tried it a few years back. I’m about the same. My dad took it up late in life. I always found something sad in that. Couldn’t put my finger on it.”

“Tell you what, why don’t you drop me at my place. I’ve got papers to correct and I make an early start. Probably by the time you get out of bed, I’ve been hitting a lick for two hours.”

Joe took a leisurely drive along the river and then turned up her street. There just didn’t seem to be any pressure anywhere. When they reached her house, he walked her to the bottom of the outside stairs to her apartment. She turned suddenly, reached to one of his hands, gave it a kind of rough squeeze, bounded up the stairs—“I enjoyed it!”—and was gone behind her door. He stood there vaguely happy, vaguely conscious that they had never made a real plan to see his daughter. He was ashamed to admit that it seemed too much. And the mention of Billy Kelton as a good father galled him.

The great window in the front room hung halfway open, the iron sash weights visible in their wooden channels. Cliff swallows ascended to their mud nests under the deep eaves of the old house. Joe thought, Man, I’m getting lonesome; let’s have a look at the young people. There were times when the views from his windows seemed full of undisclosed meaning, of tales waiting to unfold. But today their views were as flat as reproductions. He had a tubular glass bird feeder hung outside the sitting room window and the seeds it had scattered on the sill just seemed unkempt. The birds didn’t seem to care if they ate or not. He looked at the phone and it rested in its place as though its days as an instrument were finished. He felt there was nothing for him to do. Whatever was next, he hadn’t started. His old life smothered him.

He took the highway east over the foothills, passing a spot where you could shoot a buffalo and put it on your credit card. When he stopped for gas, a boy cleaned his windshield and poured out his heart to Joe. He said that his mother had been
married more than ten times and that he and his brother had lived in nineteen cities. The boy couldn’t remember the names of all the husbands but said, “We had to call every one of them sonsofbitches ‘Daddy.’ ” All Joe could think of was good solid ways of putting his old life to an end.

While the youngster cleaned the windshield and checked under the hood, Joe used the pay phone. It was late in New York.

“Ivan, hi, it’s Joe.”

There was a long pause. Joe pictured Ivan in his bathrobe, his thick, effective shape like that of a veteran football lineman, characteristically pressing a thumb and forefinger into his eye sockets.

“Why are you calling me in the middle of the night?”

“Because I need to see you.”

“I don’t like this, Joe.”

“Will you see me?”

“Of course I’ll see you. Where are you?”

“Montana.”

“
Look Homeward, Angel
.”

“Sort of.”

“Find what you expected?”

“More.”

“How did you leave off with Astrid?”

“I just flew the coop, adiosed it. I don’t feel too good about that, actually.”

“I’ll check in with her.”

“So, if you tell me it’s okay, I’m coming.”

“Sure it’s okay. Are you a cowboy again?”

“You know, Ivan, I sort of am.”

“It’s a riot,” said Ivan.

•

Joe slept all the way to La Guardia. After missing the whole night on the ranch, he watched the sun rise over the Atlantic Ocean.

He took a cab into the city, his small duffel bag on the seat beside him. The skyline of New York, with his cab pointed straight at it, filled Joe with excitement. The unpronounceable name on the cabbie’s license, the criminal style photograph, the statement on the grill that separated him from his passengers about his having less than five dollars in change, the omnipresent signs of crowd control measures excited Joe beyond words. Protected by their cars, motorists boldly exchanged glances on the freeway.

He checked into the Yale Club. The lobby was full of younger graduates and their dates. There was a wine tasting announced on a placard in the lobby and a Macanudo cigar sampling in the Tap Room. There were new regulations about jogging clothes in the lobby. There were serious conversationalists around the elevators and two harried bellhops with mountains of luggage on their carts. Four Southerners in their early thirties hooted and pounded one another. “Anybody catch the secretary of commerce doin’ his little numbah on the TV?” asked one lanky young man in a Delta drawl. When neither of his fellows answered him, a tight-faced man at the next elevator did. “I saw him,” he said, “and he was right on the money.” There weren’t usually this many young people around. It was a yuppie
Brigadoon
.

Joe carried his own bag to his room, walking down a hallway hung with crew pictures and ambulance-service citations from the First World War. Three Filipino maids chatted in the open doorway of a linen closet, greeting him as he passed. His room was really good, like a room in an old home, though he had to sidle around the bed to clear the dresser, the radiator,
and the writing desk. The room had a wooden smell. Joe remembered staying here when he was in school, riding down from New Haven on the train along the seaboard of battered buildings and grassless lots; sometimes he caught glimpses of the exhausted ocean or the odd things that had been thrown out, old window frames, a child’s toy bugle, wired bundles of newspapers, cars parked so long their tires were flat, all of which used to stir Joe. Sometimes it seemed superior to the space and quiet of the West.

Leaving his bag unopened on the bed, he went downstairs, back through the lobby and across to Grand Central Station. He walked down into the vast hall of railroading to buy a newspaper. He stared at the schedule boards overhead and noted that it was still unbelievably possible to go to White Plains.

He decided he would walk for a while. Still amazed at the unreturned glances of the crowd, he felt himself swept against the windows of the shops. He felt a growing desire to be better dressed. He sympathized with the men selling stolen and counterfeit goods from the curb; he thought it must take an exceptional individual to wrest himself from the anomie and become a customer. When cars were stopped in the intersections by traffic signals, he trusted the pattern of his fellow humans in pouring through the narrow gaps between bumpers. Yet it was hard to forget that with a slip of the clutch one was legless. Part of his sense of liberation in New York was the impression of human volume and the consequent trivialization of his problems. If an individual ran out into the crowd from a doctor’s office to shout, “I’ve just found out I have cancer!” it wouldn’t have much effect. New York really took the pressure off the basics and Joe felt this liberation in his buoyant stride, his desire to be better dressed, and his inclination
to try the cuisines of all peoples. His single year of life in the city taught him that fun at sex, there for the asking, was the steady undertone. Its utilitarian savor ran the risk of all pleasantries.

“The trouble is,” said his then roommate, Ivan Slater, after a year of this, “you end up buying them a fifty-dollar dinner. And the more indistinguishable they get, the more it’s like having some show dog in your pants that can’t live on ordinary kibble.”

“Stop!” Joe said. “Stop!”

His room was on the ninth floor but he mistakenly took the elevator to the seventh, got off, and had to press the call button and wait once again. A woman in her early thirties came along and pressed the down button.

“Hi,” said Joe. She had a sunny, outdoors look and wore a green-checked dress that suited her pretty figure.

“How are you?”

“I pressed the wrong button.”

“You mean you’re going down?”

“No, I mean in the lobby. I meant to get off at nine.”

“Your face is red,” she said.

He said, “I’m lonely.”

They had leapt through layers of intimacy with this exchange. He could have said anything. He could have asked her to have sex with him and gotten an uncomplicated yes or no response. But an elevator arrived, and she stepped aboard, saying, “Ta-ta.” Presently, his own elevator came and he was on his way to his room. His message light was on. How had she gotten his room number? But it was only Ivan confirming their dinner hour. He stretched out and watched television for a while. His bones ached. He let his mind follow the sirens from the street below. He imagined living here and the
thought was a happy one. He could go upstairs to the library or take squash lessons. He could breakfast here every morning before venturing into the street. Finally, a kind of sight which lay buried inside him, stunned to blindness not only by open country but by the sea, would awaken to something he never could have predicted. And he would choose to depict it. Out would come the brushes and paint. Dab, dab, dab.

Joe put on a clean shirt and a blue-and-green-striped silk tie. His suit jacket was rumpled but it was of such acceptable tailoring that he thought it made him look either hard-working or scholarly. He rather liked the figure he cut. When he got to the foyer of the dining room on the twenty-second floor a few minutes before eight, the girl from the seventh floor was there waiting for a table by herself.

“So, we meet again,” he said, a remark so deplorable to him that he immediately understood why she furrowed her brow and smiled formulaically. The intimacy of a short time ago was withdrawn. “So sorry.” The smile changed and became genuine. She turned her wonderful almost Mediterranean face to one side and regarded him. She is about to ask me something, and something big, he thought. She may ask me if I’d like a loan. I don’t know yet but soon I will.

The silver doors of the elevator opened and Ivan Slater stepped out, wearing the latest Italian fashions, wide shoulders, a kind of one-button roll, really an old-fashioned hoodlum suit but made in the bright shades of a discount carpet barn. The shirt was green and the tie was red. He wore great spatulate suede shoes and his pants were held up by what appeared to be a pajama string. His proximity to the fashion centers entitled him to spend a fortune to look like a fool.

Ivan’s round, pumpkinlike head and piercing black eyes seemed to say “Stop the music!” while he regarded his illustrator.
Joe remembered when he and Astrid used to stay in New York at Ivan’s apartment, making love by the second-floor glow of streetlights, mantis shadows climbing the walls.

“Hold it right there,” said Joe, turning to the young woman. “You were saying?”

“I was saying?”

“Weren’t you about to say something?”

“I wasn’t but I will if you like. I can see you’d like me to.”

Ivan, watching close, pounded Joe on the back with a sharp laugh. “I see you haven’t lost any of your speed,” he said in a voice that swung the headwaiter around from the middle of the dining room. “Not you,” Ivan called to the headwaiter, jabbing a finger up and down in midair over Joe’s head. “
Him
.”

When the headwaiter came, Joe deferred to the lady. She said she was waiting for someone. Joe and Ivan took a table near the middle of the room and Ivan ordered a margarita and buried his face in the menu. Joe asked for a bourbon and water, thinking it seemed like a vaguely out-of-town drink.