Like Life (7 page)

“I’ll give you a call. When it’s on.” Scarp frowned.

Harry gazed at the striated grain of the table—a tree split to show its innards.
“What?”
he said, finally, slow and muzzy. He picked up his seltzer, knocked it back fast. He set the glass
down with a loud crack. “You’d do that for me? You’d really, honestly, do that for me?” He was starting to yell. The people at the table nearest the piano turned to look. “I have to go.”

Scarp looked anxiously at his watch. “Yes, I’ve gotta run myself.”

“No, you don’t understand!” said Harry loudly. He stood up, huge over the table. “
I
have to go.” He pushed back his chair, and it fell all the way over into a plant. He strode quickly toward the door and pushed against it hard.

The night was just beginning to come, and come warmly, the air in a sweet, garbagey thaw. Midtown was crawling with sailors. They were all youthful and ashore and excited to be this way, in their black and white-trimmed suits, exploring Manhattan and knowing it, in this particular guise, to be a movie set they had bought tickets to, knowing the park was up,
the park is up!
knowing there were girls, and places where there were girls, who would pull you against them, who knew what you knew though they seemed too bonelessly small to. Harry loped by the sailors, their boyish, boisterous clusters, then broke into a run. Old men were selling carnations on the corner, and they murmured indecipherably as he passed. The Hercules was showing
Dirty Desiree
and
Throbbin’ Hood
, and sailors were going in. Off-duty taxis sped from their last fares at the theaters to the Burger King on Ninth for something to eat. Putting block after block beneath his feet would clear his heart, Harry hoped, but the sailors: There was no shaking them. They were everywhere, hatless and landlubbed with eagernesses. Up ahead on his block, he saw a woman who looked like Deli strolling off with two of them, one on each arm. And then—it
was
Deli.

He stopped, frozen midstride, then started to walk again. “Aw, Deli,” he whispered. But who was he to whisper? He had tried to be a hooker himself, had got on the old hip boots and walked, only to discover he was just—a slut.

The Battery’s down
, he thought.
The Battery’s down.
He stood in front of the 25 Cent Girls pavilion. Golden lights winked and dashed around the marquee.

“Wanna buy, man?” hissed a guy urinating at the curb. “I got bitches, I got rods, I got crack.”

Harry stepped toward the cashier in the entrance booth. He slid a dollar under the glass, and the cashier slid him back four tokens. “What do I do?” he said, looking at the tokens, but the cashier didn’t hear him. Two sailors came up behind, bought four dollars’ worth, and went inside, smiling.

Harry followed. The interior was lit and staircased like a discotheque, and all along the outer walls were booths with wooden doors. He passed three of them and then stumbled into the fourth. He closed the door, sat down on the bench, and, taking a deep breath, he wept, hopelessly, for Breckie and for God and for that life here that seemed always parallel to his own, never intersecting, like some opposite shore of river he could never swim across, although he kept trying. He looked at the tokens in his hand. They were leaving bluish streaks in the dampness there, melting if not used. He fumbled, placed one in the slot, and a dark screen lifted from behind the glass. Before him, lit and dancing, appeared a 25 Cent Girl, naked, thirtyish, auburn-haired and pale:
National Geographic
goes to Ireland. There was music playing, and she gyrated to it, sleepy and indifferent. But as he watched she seemed to lift her eyes, to spot him, to head toward his window, slow and smiling, until she was pressing her breast against his pane, his alone. He moaned, placed his mouth against the cold single rose of her nipple, against the hard smeared glass, though given time, in this, this wonderful town, he felt, it might warm beneath his labors, truly, like something real.

               
IT
WAS
A
FALL
, Jane knew, when little things were being taken away. Fish washed ashore, and no one ate a clam to save their lives. Oystermen netted in the ocean beds, and the oysters were brought up dead. Black as rot and no one knew why. People far from either coast shuddered to think, saw the seas and then the whole planet rise in an angry, inky wave of chowder the size of a bowl. It was as far as their imaginations would allow, and it was too far. Did this have to do with them? They flicked off their radios, left dishes in the sink, and went out. Or they tuned to a station with songs. It was a season for losing anything small, living trinkets you’d thought were yours—a bracelet of mother-of-pearl, a lover’s gift, unhinged and slipping off into the night like something yearning and tired. The rain stopped dry. The ground crumbled to lumps, and animals maddened a little with thirst. Squirrels, smelling water on the road, gnawed through the hoses in cars and later died on the shoulders. “Like so many heads,” said a radio announcer, who then played a song.

Jane’s cat itself had fleas, just the barest hint, and she was going to get rid of them, take the cat to the groomer’s for the bath–dip–comb-out. There were rumors about fleas. They could feast on you five or six times a day and never let go. You could wake up in a night sweat with a rash and your saliva gluey and
white, in ligaments as you tried to speak. You could look out at your life and no longer recognize it.

The groomer was at a vet’s on the west side of town. It was where rich people took their cats, and it made Jane feel she was giving her cat the best possible care. This was a cat who slept on the pillow next to her at night. This was a cat who came running—happy to see her!—when she drove up in front of the house.

This particular morning she had to bring her cat in before eight. The dogs came in at eight-o-five, and the vet liked the cats to get there earlier, so there would be no commotion. Jane’s cat actually liked dogs, was curious about them, didn’t mind at all observing them from the safety of someone’s arms. So Jane didn’t worry too much about the eight o’clock rule, and if she got there late, because of traffic or a delayed start on the coffee she needed two cups of simply to get dressed in the morning, no one seemed to mind. They only commented on how well-behaved her cat was.

It usually took fifteen minutes to get to the west side, such was the sprawl of the town, and Jane played the radio loudly and sang along: “I’ve forgotten more than she’ll ever know about you.” At red lights she turned to reassure the cat, who lay chagrined and shedding in the passenger’s seat. Ahead of them a station wagon moved slowly, and Jane noticed in the back of it a little girl waving and making faces out the rear window. Jane waved and made faces back, sticking out her tongue when the little girl did, pulling strands of hair into her face, and winking dramatically first on one side and then the other. After several blocks, Jane noticed, however, that the little girl was not really looking at
her
but just generally at the traffic. Jane re-collected her face, pulled in her tongue, straightened her hair. But the girl’s father, at the wheel, had already spied Jane in his rearview mirror, and was staring, appalled. He slowed down to get a closer look, then picked up speed to get away.

Jane got in the other lane and switched stations on the radio, found a song she liked, something wistful but with a beat. She loved to sing. At home she had the speakers hooked up in the kitchen and would stand at the sink with a hollow-handled sponge filled with dish detergent and sing and wash, sing and rinse. She sang “If the Phone Don’t Ring, I Know It’s You” and “What Love Is to a Dove.” She blasted her way through “Jump Start My Heart,” humming on the verses she didn’t know. She liked all kinds of music. When she was a teenager she had believed that what the Muzak station played on the radio was “classical music,” and to this day her tastes were generous and unjudging—she just liked to get into the song. Most of the time she tried not to worry about whether people might hear her, though an embarrassing thing had happened recently when her landlord had walked into the house, thinking she wasn’t home, and caught her sing-speaking in an English accent. “Excuse me,” said the landlord. “I’m sorry.”

“Oh,” she said in reply. “I was just practicing for the—Are you here to check the fuse box?”

“Yes,” said the landlord, wondering who it was these days he was renting his houses out to.

Jane had once, briefly, lived in western Oregon but had returned to the Midwest when she and her boyfriend out there had broken up. He was a German man who made rocking horses and jungle gyms and who had been, like her, new to the community. His English was at times halting and full of misheard vernacular, things like “get town” and “to each a zone.” One time, when she’d gotten all dressed up to go to dinner, he told her she looked “hunky-dorky.” He liked to live dangerously, always driving around town with his gas tank on E. “Pick a lane and do stay in it,” he yelled at other drivers. He made the worst coffee Jane had ever tasted, muddy and burned, but she drank it, and stayed long hours in his bed on Sundays. But after a while he took to going out without her, not coming
home until two a.m. She started calling him late at night, letting the phone ring, then driving around town looking for his car, which she usually found in front of a tavern somewhere. It had not been like her to do things like this, but knowing that the town was small enough for her to do it, she had found it hard to resist. Once she had gotten into the car and started it up, it was as if she had crashed through a wall, gone from one room with rules into another room with no rules. When she found his car, she would go into the tavern, and if she discovered him at the bar with his arm flung loosely around some other woman, she would tap him on the shoulder and say, “Who’s the go-go girl?” Then she’d pour beer onto his legs. She was no longer herself. She had become someone else, a wild West woman, bursting into saloons, the swinging doors flipping behind her. Soon, she thought, bartenders might fear her. Soon they might shout out warnings, like sailors facing a storm:
Here she comes!
And so, after a while, she left Oregon and came back here alone. She rented a house, got a job first at Karen’s Stout Shoppe, which sold dresses to overweight women, then later at the cheese store in the Marshall Field’s mall.

For a short time she mourned him, believing he had anchored her, had kept her from floating off into No Man’s Land, that land of midnight cries and pets with too many little toys, but now she rarely thought of him. She knew there were only small joys in life—the big ones were too complicated to be joys when you got all through—and once you realized that, it took a lot of the pressure off. You could put the pressure aside, like a child’s game, its box ripped to flaps at the corners. You could stick it in some old closet and forget about it.

Jane pulled into the vet’s parking lot at ten after eight. She lifted the cat up into her arms, pushed the car door shut with one hip, and went inside. Although the air of the place was slightly sour—humid with animal fear, tense with medicine,
muffled howls drifting in from the back—the waiting room felt pleasant to her. Hopeful with ficus trees. There were news-magazines on the tables, and ashtrays made from Italian glass. There were matted watercolors on the wall and a silk-screened sign in a white metal frame saying,
ANIMALS
MUST
BE
LEASHED
OR
HELD
. Jane walked up to the large semicircular counter ahead of her and placed the cat down on it. Behind her was a man seated with a leashed and lethargic golden Labrador, and Jane’s cat peered around back at it, shivering a little. On the other side of the waiting room was a large poodle with the fierce look of a Doberman. His ears were long and floppy, uncut, and his owner, a young woman in her twenties, kept saying, “Come here, Rex. Lie down, baby.”

“Can I help you?” asked the woman behind the counter. She had been staring at a computer screen, tapping at a keyboard and bringing up fiery columns of numbers and dates.

“I’m here to bring my cat in for grooming,” said Jane. “My last name is Konwicki.”

The woman behind the counter smiled and nodded. She tapped something into the computer. “And the cat’s name?” she asked.

“Fluffers,” said Jane. She had once thought she would name the cat Joseph, but then she had changed her mind.

The woman rolled her chair away from the computer screen. She picked up a large silver microphone and spoke into it. “Fluffers Konwicki here to be groomed.” She set the microphone back down. “The groomer will be out in a minute,” she said to Jane. “You can wait over there.”

Jane pulled the cat to her chest and went and sat in a fake leather director’s chair opposite Rex the poodle. A woman and her two children came in through the front entrance wheeling a baby carriage. The woman held open the door and the little boy and girl pushed the carriage through, all the while peering
in and squeaking concerned inquiries and affectionate names. “Gooby, are you OK?” asked the boy. “Gooby knows he’s at the doctor’s, Mom.”

“You kids wait right here,” said the mom, and she approached the counter with a weary smile. She brushed her bangs off her head, then placed her hands flat out on the countertop and stared at them momentarily, as if this had been the first opportunity all morning to observe them empty. “We’re bringing a cat in for surgery,” she said, looking back up. “The name is Miller.”

“Miller,” said the woman behind the counter. She tapped something into the computer. She shook her head, then got up and looked at a clipboard near the cash register. “Miller, Miller, Miller,” she said absently. “Miller. All righty! Here we are!” She smiled at Mrs. Miller. The world was again the well-oiled machine she counted on it to be: All things could eventually be found in it. “You want to wheel the cat back around here?”

Mrs. Miller turned toward her children. “Kids? Wanna bring the kitty back around here?” The little boy and girl pushed the baby carriage forward, their steps solemn and processional. The woman behind the counter stepped out from her usual post and held the door to the back part, the examination room, open. “Wheel the cat right in there,” she said. She wore white shoes. You could see that now.