The Tender Bar (22 page)

“Alley.”

“You do not look good.”

“Don’t feel good. Where’s Bravo Company?”

“They retreated when they realized I wasn’t Iwo Jima.”

On the way back to Manhasset I noticed for the first time that Sheryl was a horrible driver. She sped up, slowed down, switched lanes, came to lurching stops at red lights. By the time we reached Grandpa’s house I felt seasick. I didn’t wait for Sheryl to come to a complete stop in the driveway. I leaped from the moving car, ran inside and vomited in the bathroom. Crawling into bed I clung to the mattress, which was rising slowly like a soufflé. Sheryl came and somehow sat on the edge of the mattress, even though it was ten feet off the ground. She told me I was going to wake the whole house. Stop groaning, she said. I didn’t know I was groaning.

“Well, congratulations!” she said, or tried to. It came out: Congratcha-ma-lations! “Snuck into Publicans. Got thrown out of Publicans. Drank with m’reens. Smoked your fersh smigarette. I’m s’proud of you. S’proud.”

“Are you the devil?”

She left the room.

“Hey,” I called. “Why did you break up with Jedd?”

If she answered, I didn’t hear.

Somewhere in the house a radio was playing. Count Basie’s “One O’Clock Jump.” Beautiful song, I thought. Then the bouncy rhythm started to make me more nauseous. Would I ever be well enough to enjoy music again? I tried to fall asleep, but words and ideas leaped around in my head. I thought I was experiencing penetrating flashes of insight, and I wanted to write them down. I couldn’t get out of bed, however, because the mattress was still rising. How much farther could it go before my back would be pressed against the ceiling? I felt like a car on a hydraulic lift. Sprawled on my stomach, my head hanging over the side of the bed, I committed my flashes of insight to memory. I thought, My mother is the printed word, my father is the spoken word, Sheryl is the slurred word. Then all was blackness.

In the morning I woke from a nightmare in which marines were storming Grandpa’s house and using the chevrons from their sleeves to retape the bicentennial sofa. I took a long hot shower and sat on the stoop with a cup of black coffee. Uncle Charlie came outside and glared at me. I braced myself, but he saw my bloodshot eyes and must have concluded that I’d suffered enough. He shook his head and looked at the treetops.

“Now I can drive us home from the bars in Roslyn,” I said to Sheryl, showing her my new driver’s license, which my mother had forwarded to me. We were on the early-morning train, near the end of August, and Sheryl held the license up to the light from the window, to get a better look. She read: “‘Height, five-ten. Weight, one-forty. Hair, auburn. Eyes, hazel.’” She laughed. “Nice photo,” she said. “You look about twelve. No. Strike that. Eleven. What does your mother say in her letter?”

I read: “‘I’m attaching your insurance card, sweetheart, because if you’re ever in an accident, you must show that you have insurance.’” I looked down, embarrassed. “My mom’s kind of a worrywart,” I mumbled.

In the same letter my mother reported that she’d gotten a new job at an insurance company, which she was enjoying. “I don’t have such pressure at work or such a workload that I come home dead tired,” she wrote. “I think you will see a big change in me when you come home in that even though I am tired at the end of a day, when I come home now I do have something left of me.”

Folding the letter and tucking it into my pocket I told Sheryl about the clunker my mother had bought for me, a 1974 AMC Hornet with an orange racing stripe, which cost four hundred dollars. I didn’t tell Sheryl how the letter made me miss my mother, or how I looked forward to seeing her in two weeks, or how I worried about her all the time. I didn’t confess that while riding the train some mornings I couldn’t stop imagining something bad happening to my mother, that I’d try to replace these fears with my old mantra, then berate myself for adhering to my boyhood superstitions, then tell myself that it was better to be safe than sorry, because maybe the mantra still had some magic left in it, and if I abandoned the mantra I might cause something bad to befall my mother. I knew Sheryl would say that real men don’t think that way. Real men don’t have mantras, and real men certainly don’t miss their moms.

Sheryl came searching for me in the file room later that morning. She had a cross look on her face, and I assumed it was because I didn’t have any money for lunch and I’d asked her to float me a loan. “It’s your mom,” she said. “There’s been an accident. They’re waiting for us at home.”

We ran to Penn Station. Sheryl bought a six-pack and we drank them all before we reached Bayside. “I’m sure it will be fine,” she said. But already it wasn’t fine. My mantra had failed, and I had failed my mother.

Walking past Publicans I looked in the window, heard the laughter, saw the happy faces along the bar. I almost suggested to Sheryl that we stop for a quick one. Uncle Charlie would understand. I hated myself for this impulse, for letting my thoughts stray one second from my mother, but I was frightened and I regarded Publicans as the best available antidote to fear. I longed for the bar in a new and desperate way, a portentous way.

At Grandpa’s house I threw some things into a bag and Sheryl kissed me good-bye. “Be a man,” she said, not in her typical way, but in a tender, encouraging way, as if she believed I would be.

Grandpa bought me a plane ticket and Uncle Charlie drove me to the airport. Along the way he told me what he knew. My mother had been returning home from work when a drunk driver going the wrong way, with no headlights, hit her head-on. She had a broken arm and a concussion. The doctors were concerned that she might have suffered brain damage. “She has amnesia,” Uncle Charlie said.

I asked Uncle Charlie what would happen if my mother couldn’t remember me. He said he wasn’t sure what I meant. I wasn’t sure either. I think I was asking him who I would be if my mother didn’t know me.

eighteen
| LANA

T
HERE WERE JAGGED CUTS ON HER FACE AND CLUMPS OF MATTED
blood in her hair. Her eyes were half open, a new and terrible kind of blank face. I leaned over her. “Mom?” I said. From somewhere behind me a nurse said my mother was on powerful pain medication and would be in “limbo” for some time.

“You’re pretty big for a ten-year-old,” the doctor said.

“Excuse me?”

“Your mom told me she had a ten-year-old son.”

“Oh.”

“And when I asked if she knew where she was, she said New York.”

“We moved here from New York.”

“I thought as much. I even took her to the window and showed her the palm trees and cacti, but she insisted. New York.”

When visiting hours ended I left the hospital and went back to our apartment. I tried to calm down by reading a book. No chance. I turned on all the lights, then turned them all off. I sat in the dark, thinking. I sat on the bank of the canal, watching the water. I was exhausted, but couldn’t go to bed, because whenever I closed my eyes I pictured the moment of impact. Frightened, lonely, I thought about what my mother had told the doctor. She was right, in a way. I was ten years old.

There was no planning, no premeditation, no thought whatsoever: My hand was reaching for the phone and my finger was dialing Lana, the high-school glamour girl I’d described to Sheryl. Before I’d left for the summer Lana and I had talked briefly at a party, and even made vague promises to get together. I didn’t think she was serious, and I’d never expected to work up the courage to phone her. But now, with my mother in limbo and my psyche in freefall, I felt an urge that transcended teenage lust, if anything can be said to transcend teenage lust. I felt a longing for Lana that was like the longing for Publicans, and I knew dimly that it had something to do with the need for protection and distraction.

We met at a Mexican restaurant near her house. Lana wore her shortest shorts and a flowery blouse, the shirttails knotted at her waist. A summer in the sun had given her skin an astonishing luster, while lightening her hair with streaks of honey and buttermilk. I told her about my mother. She was very sweet and sympathetic. I ordered a bottle of wine, almost as a lark, and we both smirked when the waiter didn’t ask for identification. After dinner Lana seemed tipsy as we walked to the parking lot. “Is this your new car?” she asked.

“Yes. It’s a Hornet.”

“I see that. Nice racing stripe.”

“It’s orange.”

“Yes. Orange.”

I asked if she needed to be home early.

“Not really,” she said. “What did you have in mind?”

“We’ve got two options. We can go to a movie. Or we can get some Löwenbräu and drive to the top of Camelback?”

“Camelback. Definitely.”

A buddy had once shown me the many lovers’ lanes that honeycombed the first hump of Camelback Mountain. He liked to go up there and spy on couples when he was bored and horny. But that had been months ago, and it had been broad daylight, and now it was a dark moonless night. Nothing looked familiar as I drove up and down and around the hump, searching, hoping that Lana wouldn’t sober up or grow restless. She fiddled with the radio while I told her that I was determined to find one special spot, which afforded a breathtaking view and total privacy, neglecting to mention that it sat on a cliff atop a steep slope of rock. At last, after forty-five minutes, I found the familiar dirt road that ran up the side of the hump and dead-ended at the slope that led to the special spot.

“Ready to climb?” I said, shutting off the Hornet.

“Climb?”

I held the bag of Löwenbräu in one hand and Lana’s arm in the other. The slope grew steeper with every step. Lana, panting, asked how much farther. “Not much,” I said, though I had no idea. I hadn’t actually climbed with my buddy. I’d simply taken his word for what was up there. Eventually the slope became a wall, a nearly perfect vertical. “Ouch!” Lana said. She’d brushed a cactus and scraped her thigh. She was bleeding. At the top the wall curved back toward us. I threw the bag of Löwenbräu up, pulled myself over with a chin-up, then reached back for Lana. When we had both reached the summit we lay on our backs, gasping, laughing, inspecting her injury. We then crawled forward to the far edge of the cliff and there was the view my buddy had described, a million lights shimmering below us, as if the valley were a still lake reflecting the stars.

“Damn,” Lana said.

I opened two beers and handed one to her. A breeze blew her dirty blond hair into her eyes and I pushed it back. She leaned forward to kiss me. I closed my eyes. Her bottom lip was plump, like a marshmallow. She pushed her tongue inside my mouth. I opened my eyes. She opened hers. I could discern the edges of her contact lenses, the clots of mascara at the tips of her eyelashes. She closed her eyes again and kissed me harder, forcing my mouth open wider. I undid the top button of her shirt. No bra. Impossibly firm. I squeezed, and tried to look without staring. I didn’t want to be ungentlemanly. She pulled away and undid the knot at her waist, then opened her shirt, inviting me to stare. She reached into my pants. I took off her shorts.

“Are we going to do this?” she said.

“I hope so.”

“You need to wear something.”

“I’ll keep my shirt on.”

“No. Like a condom.”

“I don’t have a condom.”

“Then we can’t.”

“Right, right. Of course not.” Pause. “Why not?”

“Do you want a little JR Junior running around?”

I stood. I took a long swig of Löwenbräu and stared at the stars, chastising myself.
Why didn’t I think of birth control?
Simple. Because I didn’t know anything about birth control.

Lana lay at my feet, her shorts off, stretched out in the starlight like a sunbather. Her legs were apart and she was glistening between them. No star overhead glistened more brightly, and suddenly no star seemed as far away. If I let this moment pass, I thought, if I let Lana put on her clothes and then walked her down the slope to the Hornet, this night would haunt me forever and possibly determine the course of my life. At the very least I’d have to move. I wouldn’t be able to face Lana, or my schoolmates, or drive each day past Camelback Mountain. Thereafter, for me, Camelback would be Mount Virgin, mocking me and my inability to reach the top. I had to do something, and fast, because Lana looked as if she were seconds from standing and putting her shorts back on.

“Wait here,” I said.

“Wait—where?”

Before she could say another word I dove over the side of the cliff and went sprinting down the slope. Racing to reach the bottom before she could protest, or follow, I miscalculated the angle and severity of the incline. I tripped, then rolled. A cactus stopped me, its stickers sinking like knitting needles into my knee. I screamed.

“What happened!” Lana yelled.

“Nothing!”

She must have assumed I had condoms in the car. She certainly couldn’t have foreseen what I was about to do. She would have screamed if she’d known that I was going to start up the Hornet and peel away, leaving her on that windblown mountain.

In Scottsdale, in 1981, nothing was open after midnight. The desert was dark, desolate, closed until morning. My only hope was an all-night convenience store. I sped down the hump and swerved onto Scottsdale Road. With every shuttered store and darkened strip mall I thought about giving up. But fifteen miles from Camelback I spotted a neon sign. Circle K.