The Tender Bar (37 page)

“Leave it, sport,” he said, seeing the look on my face. “Go home.”

“Yes,” Dalton said, looking down at his leather coat, which I’d splashed with scotch. “By all means, Asshole. Go home.”

I reeled down the sidewalk to Grandpa’s house and passed out on the bicentennial sofa. Waking at dawn I did an impetuous thing. I gathered all my articles from Yale and put them, along with a hastily typed résumé, into an envelope addressed to the
New York Times
. I’d show Sidney. And when the
Times
turned me down I’d forward the rejection letter to her. Dropping the envelope into the mailbox outside Publicans, I continued on to Lord & Taylor, where I sold more than one thousand dollars’ worth of merchandise, winning a silver letter opener, which I contemplated plunging into my heart.

A few days later I was shaving, getting ready for my shift at Lord & Taylor. Grandma came to the bathroom door. “Pat died,” she said.

Pat? Pat died years ago.
I squinted at Grandma’s reflection in the mirror.

“Uncle Pat,” she said. “Pat Byrne.”

She meant the father of my other cousins, the boys Grandma had always held up as “perfect gentlemen.”

“Those poor boys,” she said, wiping her eyes with the towel I handed her. “Nine boys without a father. Imagine.”

The church was hot, airless, overflowing with people. Grandma and I sat pressed together in a back pew and watched the Byrne sons carrying their father’s casket. Each son had slicked-back hair, pinkish cheeks, and great wads of muscle under his suit. They were all from the same mold, they all looked like their father, though one son seemed to stand apart. He even seemed to shoulder most of the weight of the casket. My heart ached for him, for all the Byrnes, and yet I wanted to leave. I wanted to run to Publicans, talk with Dalton about Montaigne, drink away all thoughts of fathers and death. But after the service Grandma insisted I drive her to the Byrne house.

We sat in the living room with Uncle Pat’s widow, Aunt Charlene. She was my mother’s first cousin, my first cousin once removed, but I addressed her as Aunt Charlene, as I always had. When I was a boy Aunt Charlene seemed to sense the storm of thoughts blowing through my head, and she spoke to me with a kindness that made me instantly calmer. She was no different that day. We talked for a long time, but I remember only one subject we covered. Fathers. She confided in me that she worried how her sons would cope without their father. I sensed that she wanted me to tell her something helpful, impart some wisdom about being a fatherless son, but I had none to give.

Just then Aunt Charlene’s son Tim, the strongest pallbearer, stepped forward. He apologized for interrupting. He shook my hand, accepted my condolences. His hand dwarfed mine. He was exactly my age but twice my size. He’d just graduated from Syracuse, where he’d played football, and his arms were the width of my legs. He spoke with the kind of blunt Long Island accent I’d worked hard to lose, but listening to him I wished I could get it back. His accent made him sound tough.

He asked if Aunt Charlene needed anything. Drink? Food? He held her hand as he asked. He was so sweet with his mother that Grandma looked at him with a mix of disbelief and adoration. Tim bent down and gave Aunt Charlene a kiss, then went off to get her a drink, fix her a sandwich, make sure the guests were comfortable. Grandma stared after him, then turned to me, her eye twitching, as if batting out a message in Morse code.

She didn’t need to say it.

Real men take care of their mothers.

twenty-nine
|
TIMES
MAN

D
ORA ANSWERED THE PHONE AT THE SALES DESK WHILE I WAS
with a customer. Above my fraudulent spiel about the candles and soaps I heard Dora telling the caller I was busy and couldn’t possibly be disturbed. “Who?” she shouted into the phone. “
New York Times
?”

I sprinted to the sales desk and ripped the phone from Dora.

“Hello?” I said.
“Hello?”

It was a woman from the personnel department at the
Times
. Her name was Marie. In the weeks since I’d sent my clips to the
Times,
I’d forgotten putting the number for Lord & Taylor on my résumé. It had seemed safer than the number at Grandpa’s, where someone might think a caller was trying to get down a bet. Marie said my clips had been read by an editor, who liked them. Half of me wanted to scream. The other half wondered which wise guy from Publicans was doing a pretty fair falsetto and pranking me. Smelly—is that you? But this Marie person kept using words Smelly wouldn’t know, so I decided she was the real thing. The
Times
offered a training program for recent college graduates, she said. You started as a copyboy, but you could work your way up to a position as a full-fledged reporter. Was I interested? I tried to think of the perfect way to say that I was. I wanted to sound casual, but not too casual. Eager, but not overeager. I gripped the phone tighter and looked at Dora. No help. I looked at the customer I’d just abandoned. Less help. She was tapping her foot, checking her watch. I decided to keep it simple. “I’m interested,” I said to Marie.

“Good. How soon can you get me some more samples of your work?”

“More? I sent you everything I wrote for my college paper.”

“Huh, that is a problem. The editors feel they need to see more before they can make a decision.”

“I suppose I could go to New Haven and look through the microfilms at the library. Maybe I missed something.”

“Why don’t you do that. And if you find anything, let me know.”

After hanging up the phone I was delirious with adrenaline. I danced back to the customer and sold her a box of jasmine-scented candles, eight or twelve hand towels, and a Waterford cigarette lighter, which helped me edge out Dora for high seller that day. The prize was dinner for two at an Italian restaurant. When I gave Dora the gift certificate she put her hand on my cheek. “Such a good boy,” she said. “I don’t know why all the other ladies hate you.”

Waiting to pull out of Grand Central, leaning my head against the window, I saw her walk through my reflection. She wore a tan linen skirt and a sheer ivory short-sleeved top, and she was carrying a slice of pizza on a paper plate. Trying to find a car that wasn’t crowded, she stooped to peer into my window, then continued down the platform. Moments later she came back. This time I waved. She jumped, then smiled. She came into the train car and sat beside me. “Hello, Trouble,” she said. “Where you heading?”

“Yale. To get some more clips to show the
New York Times
.”

“No!”

“I sent them my stuff and they want to see more.”

She squeezed my knee.

“You?” I said.

“Home to see my parents.”

As the train clacked north I talked about fate. Fate kept throwing us together, I argued. From Constitutional Law to Grand Central our paths were forever crossing. Obviously fate was trying to tell us something. How else to explain this chance encounter? Especially when I was going back to Yale on an errand inspired by her. The universe, I said, wants us together.

She let me plead my case while she ate her pizza. When she finished she patted her hands together, to get rid of the crumbs, and said, “Maybe I was wrong.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Maybe you should have gone to law school after all.”

I frowned. She stroked my arm. She said that she agreed with everything I said, but she didn’t want to risk hurting me again. “That’s what I was trying to tell you when we had dinner last month,” she said. “I’m confused. I’m fucked up. I need—”

“I know. Time.”

“You’re always so sure about people,” she said. “Everything is so black or white with you. You don’t have any trouble letting people in.”

“I wish I knew how to let people out.”

She patted her lips with a paper napkin. “My stop,” she said. “Good luck with the
Times.
Let me know how it goes.”

She kissed me and hurried off the train.

When I reached New Haven all I wanted to do was find a bar and call my mother. I had to force myself to sit in Sterling Library and look through microfilms of old newspapers, which did not improve my mood. Though there were indeed articles I’d forgotten, there had been good reason for forgetting them. They were insignificant briefs about nothing, a few hundred words here and there about this speaker or that event. Marie at the
Times
wouldn’t deign to use them to wrap up her unfinished sandwich after lunch.

Now I really needed a drink. I phoned my former roommate, who had stayed in New Haven to attend law school. We met another friend and two women at a bar. After a few drinks we all piled into the friend’s car and headed for a restaurant. Along the way my friend accidentally cut off a car full of young men our age. They were wearing muscle shirts and gold chains and they were not appeased by our apologetic wave. At the next red light they rushed our car and threw open the doors. I was in the front passenger seat with a woman on my lap. I leaned across her, to shield her from the blows, which made me a stationary target. One man, wearing rings or brass knuckles, punched me six times, rapidly, in the side of my face, saying something like, “Yalie dick,” while another man exchanged punches with my friend, the driver. When the light turned green my friend managed to get the car into gear and sped away.

My lip was gushing blood. A bump on my forehead felt like a budding antler. Something was wrong with my eye. We went to a hospital but the wait was several hours. “We’ll self-medicate,” my friend said, leading me to a bar around the corner. I wondered why the bells in Harkness were ringing so late. I asked the bartender. “They’re only ringing in your personal belfry there, ace,” he said. “You prolly got some kinda concussion. Tequila’s the best thing for that.” I looked at him. He was familiar. The bar was familiar. Was this the bar where I drank up the seventy-five dollars my mother had sent me to become JR Maguire? I told my friends that JR Maguire wouldn’t have gotten mugged. JR Maguire was too smart to let something like this happen to him. They had no idea what I was talking about.

I slept a few hours on my roommate’s sofa and at dawn I caught the first train to New York. From Grand Central I took a cab to the
Times.
Standing across the street from the newspaper I marveled at how grand and august the building looked, the globe lights along its front wall with their Old English lettering: Times
.
The same typeface as the sign above Publicans. I wanted to sneak closer and peer through the windows, but there were no windows. I thought of the great reporters who passed through that front door each day, then thought of my pathetic clips in the folder under my arm. I wished those muscle-shirted thugs in New Haven had beaten me to death.

A man stood ten feet from me. He wore a checked blazer, white shirt, regimental necktie, and his thick shock of white hair reminded me of Robert Frost. Though he had no teeth he was eating what appeared to be a baloney sandwich, and beaming at me, as if he were about to offer me a bite, as if he knew me. I smiled back, trying to place him, before noticing that he was wearing nothing from the waist down. His “personal” baloney, in the glaring early-morning sunlight, was white as scrimshaw. When I looked at it, he looked at it, then looked up, smiling still wider, delighted that I’d noticed.

Now there could be no doubt. Clearly the universe was speaking to me, and it was saying that I was not meant to work at the
Times.
The signs were everywhere, from my encounter with Sidney to my assault in New Haven. Now this. The universe was telling me that I would have been to the
Times
what Naked Frost was to Times Square—an obscene intruder. As cops descended on Naked Frost and dragged him off, I wanted to rush to his defense, to tell the cops that Naked Frost wasn’t to blame, he was only an unwitting messenger of the universe. I felt more kinship with the man than pity or contempt for him. Between the two of us, I probably had more alcohol in my bloodstream.

In a way, I was relieved. Had I landed the job at the
Times
I couldn’t have summoned the courage to walk into that building each day. It was all I could do now to walk across the street and push my way through the revolving doors, into the marble lobby, up to the security guard. I told him my name and handed him my folder and asked him to give it to Marie in personnel. Hold on, he said. He picked up a phone, spoke to someone, hung up. “Thoid flaw,” he said to me.

“Excuse me?”

“Thoid flaw.”

“Third—me? No, no, I just came to drop off this folder. I don’t need to see her. I don’t
want
to see her.”

“What can I tell you? She’s waitin’ fawya.”

The only sensible thing to do was run. Catch the next train to Manhasset, hide in Publicans, never look back. But how could I disappear now that I’d been announced? Marie would think I was a kook, and that was something I could not abide. Better that she see me disheveled and half drunk than that she think me unstable.

Rising to the third floor I studied my reflection in the brass doors of the elevator. I’d always imagined striding into the newsroom of the
New York Times
in a brand-new suit, with polished black lace-ups, an English spread collar, a gold necktie, and matching suspenders. Instead I was wearing torn jeans, scuffed loafers, a T-shirt flecked with blood. And my right eye was swollen shut.