The Waiting Room (6 page)

"What do you mean—‘these people'? This guy just wants to hassle us, Abner—"

"Please, Sam, I'll handle it—"

"You wanta get outta da car," said the cop. I looked at him. I saw that he'd straightened, unbuckled his holster, had his hand on his .38. I could see only his midsection, from his waist to the bottom of his neck. I looked at Abner. "What the hell's going on, Abner? What'd you do, murder someone?"

"No," he said. "But I think we'd better get out of the car."

"Abner," I said, "he's got no
right
—"

"
I
know that, Sam.
You
know it. But
he
doesn't know it—"

"Oh, Good Lord!"

The cop bellowed, "Get
out
of the car. Now!"

"Why?" I bellowed back.

Abner shook his head as if in disbelief. "Sam, don't get him upset."

The cop leaned over again. He patted his .38 slowly, menacingly. I saw that his face was very pale, as pale as snow, and that the J-shaped birthmark was bright red, as if it were actually a slit in the skin. "You bad-mouthin' me, boy?"

I shook my head. "No, I'm just asking why we've got to get out of the car. You have to give us a
reason
for stopping us, don't you know that?"

"Sam," Abner said urgently, "he
doesn't
know that. He doesn't know much at all. Now, if he wants us to get out of the car, I think we should get out of the car—"

"Just him," the cop said, and nodded sharply to indicate me.

I said again, "Oh, Good Lord."

"Now!" the cop bellowed, and straightened once more, his grip hard on the .38.

I got out of the car, slammed the door, peered over the roof at the cop. "Now what?" I said, and heard a tremor of fear in my voice.

"I don't know," the cop said. "I don't know," he repeated, clearly confused now.

"Huh?" I said, also confused.

"I don't know," he repeated, appeared to be lost in thought for several moments, then swaggered back to his motorcycle, right hand slapping the holstered pistol again, head moving from side to side in time with his swagger. He got on the motorcycle and roared off west, toward Queens.

~ * ~

"Next time," Abner began, and I interrupted, "Next time I'm going to get that asshole's badge number and I'm going to sue the goddamn city for goddamn harassment,
that's
what's going to happen next time!"

"He could have killed you," Abner said.

I stared disbelievingly at him. "What in the hell for?" I asked.

"Because it's part of his job."

We were well out on Long Island now on a narrow, all-but-deserted dirt road that paralleled the ocean. Although I couldn't see the water, I could smell salt air. Abner was driving very slowly. I said, "It's part of his job to
kill
me, Abner? What kind of crap is that? Cops don't just kill people without reason."

"Yes, I know that, Sam. But sometimes they do kill people. Sometimes they have to."

"In self-defense, sure, or to stop someone from killing someone else, sure—but it's always a judgment call, Abner—"

"Precisely." He gave me another
I told you so
kind of grin. "You've got your hand in the box, Sam," he said. "You've got it in up to the elbow. But it's not too late to pull it out. I'll stop the car and we can say 'Good-bye, it's been nice seeing you again,' and that'll be it. You can go back to your apartment. You can go back to worrying about money, women, whatever it is you worry about, Sam, and you'll be okay. But you've got to get out of the car, and you've got to get out now."

I shook my head.

"Think about it first, Sam."

I shook my head more briskly.

"You're making a mistake," he said, and turned down a rutted lane then up a little rise. The ocean was in front of us. He brought the car to a halt and nodded to indicate a rambling, tumbledown beach house about a hundred feet in front of us. "We're here," he said.

"Good," I said. "Now maybe I'll find out what kind of crap it is you've gotten yourself into."

"Sam?" he said, and I noticed that his tone had changed, had become conciliatory.

“Yes?"

"I'm glad you're here, Sam. I need a friend. I really do desperately need a friend."

~ * ~

The first kiss that Leslie and I shared was in the parking garage behind the Imperial Palace. I had tried for a first kiss in the restaurant. I had put my hands on the sides of her head and had drawn her closer to me over the table. But she'd turned gently away. I thought a couple of things then. One was that she didn't want to kiss me because I'd been eating Chicken Garlic. But so had she, so I discounted that possibility. Then I thought that she was simply being cautious, that the sort of
 
kiss I wanted from her was the sort of kiss that she had reason to withhold unless and until the moment was right.

The moment was right thirty minutes later, in the parking garage, as we walked hand in hand to my car. I stopped, turned to her, and we had a long, passionate, and hungry kiss. We
were
hungry for each other. That was clear then, as we kissed. It had been clear over the Chicken Garlic. It had been clear three days earlier in the taxi. But nothing, of course, happens instantaneously.

She said, when we stopped kissing, "Our first kiss."

~ * ~

She's not always beautiful. There are moods and personalities within her that transform her. But she is beautiful most of the time, and sometimes, for a minute or more, I find myself looking into her face and I hear myself saying at last, as if in awe, "You're so beautiful!" I think she doesn't know how to react when I say that. She likes it when I say it, and she has said of herself that she's "pretty nice to look at," but I think it's possible that I embarrass her with my spontaneous declarations of her beauty. So, occasionally, I want to snatch the words back.

Once, when we were in the car and she was driving, I studied her profile. It was not the profile I expected after looking into her face. It was strong, and forward, and resolute, and if someone, I thought, were to make a caricature of it, that caricature would probably look much like the profile of an Easter Island stone. It was a contrast I hadn't expected.

~ * ~

I don't think I
grew
to love Leslie. I think it happened all at once, and over time I grew to understand exactly
why
I loved her. The times we had together confirmed the good sense I had to love her in the first place. Which leaves the question of whether my love for her has grown deeper. I don't know if that's a legitimate question. I think love latches on and grows more tenacious, but I think that right from the beginning it is what it is, deep or not, and the deeper it is from the beginning, the more tenaciously it sticks.

W
hen Abner and I were growing up, he never gave me good advice. It's true that I rarely asked for his advice; why ask for advice from a nerdish-but-lovable-little-brother type? That's the type I gave advice
to.
But there were a few times when, out of adolescent desperation, I did go to him for advice. Once I asked him which girl to ask to the freshman hop.

"Belinda Becker," he said. "She likes you."

That was what I wanted to hear, because I liked her and had all kinds of fantasies about her; but when I called her she said, "Drop dead, weasel!"

Another time he advised me to see a movie called
The Blob,
which he swore was just about the greatest thing since ice cream. I paid good money to see it, and I thought it was the worst thing since visible nose hairs. So I didn't grow too fond of Abner's advice. That's one reason I stayed put when he advised me to get out of the Malibu—his advice had always been so lousy.

He was also intriguing the hell out of me.

He drove the last hundred feet to the house.

"Yours?" I asked. We got out of the car and walked toward the beach house. It sat virtually alone on the beach, and though it did indeed look "tumbledown" it didn't look abandoned. It looked very comfortable, at least from the outside. The wide, wraparound porch had something to do with that look. I've always liked porches; they're great places to sit and listen to crickets and peel apples.

"No," Abner answered, "it's not mine, it's a friend's—it's Art DeGraff's. Do you remember him?"

I nodded. "I remember he was an asshole. What's he doing these days?"

Abner had his hands in the pockets of his shiny brown pants, and his head down. I saw him smile slightly, as if at some secret. "Looking backward," he said, and didn't elaborate.

We were within fifty feet of the house then. My eyes were on Abner. I heard, "Hello, Abner." I looked toward the house. A tall woman in her early twenties was standing in the doorway. She was wearing very tight jeans, a loose-fitting long-sleeved white blouse which she filled wonderfully, and I said to Abner, my eyes glued to her, "Who's
that
?"

"That's Al," he answered. ''

“'Al'?”

He nodded. "Her real name's Allison, but she likes to be called Al—I call her Al."

She stepped back from the doorway and closed the door. I glanced at Abner. His head was still lowered. He stopped walking and looked sadly at me. "She's not what she appears to be, Sam."

"Who is?" I asked.

He continued looking at me for a few seconds, then he said, "No one. Not me, not her. No one."

I smiled broadly, as if I knew he was trying to be coy and cryptic. "It sounds like you're lost in a world of confusion."

"No," he said, "not quite yet. Soon, though. The signs are there, I'm making plans—I'll tell you about them sometime."

"You worry me, Abner." I added, "Of course, you always did."

He stared at me; his sad, pleading look changed to a look of resignation, as if he'd been expecting steak and potatoes all day but was getting carrot salad instead. Then he started walking again, his head down, hands in his pockets, and I said, as we stepped onto the porch, "We've got quite a bit to talk about, Abner. We've got a lot of years to catch up with." I spoke casually, cheerfully, the way I would have if we'd just that moment happened upon each other and were going to have dinner to hash over old times. "I mean, we haven't seen each other in twenty years—"

"Twenty years," he said. "So what?!"

"Sorry?"

"Two hundred years, a thousand years—"

"I don't understand, Abner."

"It
is
a world of confusion, Sam. You're right. I can see that."

"Good for you," I said, and added, "Abner, I think you've gone over into Munchkin Land. Why don't you let your big brother Sam help you back?"

"No," he said, his tone suddenly clipped, and deadly serious. He looked questioningly at me: "Munchkin Land—that's from
The Wizard of Oz
, isn't it?"

"I think so," I said.

He shook his head, frowning a little. "No," he repeated, "it's not Munchkin Land." He opened the front door of the beach house. "And you're not my big brother."

~ * ~

It was a very large room I entered; "the great room," Abner called it. There were at least a hundred photographs on the walls, some in black and white, some in color, most of them five by seven or eight by ten, some larger. Abner told me he'd taken them for the photographic book he'd once planned to do—"About Manhattan," he said. Indeed, most of the pictures had a nice Manhattan flavor to them. "They remind me of who I am," he said.

"Sure," I said, "I guess we all need that." I was still feeling the sting from his "And you're not my big brother" remark.

There were at least a dozen plants in the room, although there was very little direct sunlight because the two windows faced north. Several of the plants were of the large, floor-standing variety that would have dominated a smaller room. Abner said they were "a kind of fern" and went on to give me their scientific name, which I can't remember and couldn't spell if I did. Some of the others were in small clay pots that had been hung from the ceiling on lengths of decorative reddish-brown twine. I recognized some of these; one was a nerve plant—so named because its leaves curl up when touched—and another was clover, which I like because it's so simple. The plants gave the room a slight tangy smell, "the smell of the earth," Abner said, "a good smell,
a
real
smell."

A huge gray stone fireplace took up half the north wall. Several large, brightly colored throw pillows lay in various places around it.

"The plants don't live long," Abner said. "About a week, most of them, then I've got to throw them out and buy new ones."

"Don't they need more light?" I asked.

He nodded. "Yes. That's one of the reasons they don't live long."

"Then why have them at all?"

He answered simply, in the same vaguely pleading tone he'd used earlier, "Because I need them, Sam. Because they're alive."