by Betsy Berne
C H A P T E R
18
I RAN INTO him a year later. To the day. I remembered because I file notable dates as scrupulously as I file seasons. It’s a habit that contributes to my flashback problem, and I don’t think I can blame it on the genes. After all our tormented collisions that summer, it must seem peculiar that it took a whole year for us to cross paths (a year in which I didn’t not try to run into him), but it wasn’t. It was predictable. It happened all the time. Quite often the city collaborated with fate in an elaborate scheme to protect you from yourself. Really, the city could be quite solicitous.
It was a genuine fall night, cold enough to make me shiver and windy enough to make the air dance with the unknown. My flashback problem had queered the summer, but the dancing air felt rejuvenating. Okay, it wasn’t just the fall. There was someone else in the picture, no big deal, but a step up, in my opinion. Not in my neighbor’s opinion. “You’ve merely gone from a shiftless Negro to a lazy Italian,” he’d insisted. But at least he wasn’t a musician or an artist. In fact he didn’t have one creative bone in his body, and as my mother pointed out (repeatedly), “It’s a goddamn blessing.”
I don’t remember where the lazy Italian was this particular evening. I was just minding my own business, standing on a sidewalk outside a small club in the creepiest part of the Village. The club was sixties-style crass, but my brother and his friends could get paying gigs there. Hank was playing with a big band—he and I had come to a comfortable truce—and they were between sets, so I’d stepped outside for some air. I wasn’t quite sure if it was the mirage that sometimes shadowed me or if it was the real Joseph Pendleton. I stood still for a moment, uncertain, and I may have backed up a few steps. I was wearing the same coat that I’d worn our prior September encounter, and he might have been experiencing his own flashback. I filed away his smile as he came toward me because it was one of the rare monumental ones.
“Are we allowed to say hello?” I said, and then I backed up so far I was inches from the brick wall. He came closer.
“I got your note. That was so nice. I’ve been trying to call you.”
“You can’t have tried too hard. I’m usually home at least twenty hours out of twenty-four.”
He shrugged, flashing the demonic grin. Two smiles of some magnitude; that caused another inadvertent step back. “Your note. I didn’t expect . . . well, at first I thought it was a liquid bomb, but then . . . really it was so sweet.”
His record company had come to be. It was doing well and it wasn’t just soft-dick jazz, it was the real thing—even my brother had given it his begrudging seal of approval. I had written him a note a month or two ago, a short impersonal note of congratulations. Really, I had sent it because after all this time, his animosity was still plaguing me. It would wend its way downtown purposefully; the trail of animosity came after me, off and on, for a year. It was unsettling; I had to curtail it, and I thought a breezy note might be a start. The last thing I’d expected was a response. My expectations were another year’s worth of experiences lower, which, in my case, was not necessarily a bad thing. Not at all.
“Well, you’re doing something worthwhile. I just wanted to tell you.” By now the bricks were scraping the backs of my legs. Impulsively, he pulled me forward and kissed me on both cheeks.
“I really was planning to call you.”
“Why are you here?” I stammered. I half sidestepped, half slid along the wall, the only conceivable way out.
“I’m checking out the band. Did you see the first set? Are they any good?”
“Really good. A guy I know plays with them, so maybe I’m biased. And you may remember, I’m not too discriminating.”
“I’ll trust your judgment this time. Are you . . . do you . . . well, do you want to go next door, have coffee or something?”
The place next door was even sleazier than the club. Everything ostensibly wooden was plastic, and there was an enormous shiny oval bar in the middle of the room like a big corral, with TVs hanging down from every angle. We were physically tentative as we sat down; otherwise it was as if the year had lasted less than twenty-four hours. That was the way it had always been though. Once the wavelength kicked in, it didn’t waver—unless the stakes were high, and tonight there were no stakes.
“I’ve followed your company. I’ve read all the press.”
“You’re keeping tabs on me?”
“I am not. But really, it seems like it’s working. And the music, it’s good. Even my brother . . . I mean, there’s real integrity behind . . . oh, I forgot, that’s not your thing.”
“You have to be able to afford integrity. I found a fat-cat investor who doesn’t have a life, so this company is providing him with a vicarious one.”
“How about yours?”
“Mine? Oh, I don’t know. It’s better than just running the club, I suppose, but it’s the same old thing, too many people to placate, too many egos, doing the dance for investors. I’m thinking about . . . well, I’m thinking about Paris, moving back. Maybe playing.”
“Playing?”
“Well, we were only . . . I was only going to give this a year and now it’s been more than . . . what about you?”
I ignored the we even though it was not an inconsequential slip. I stored it, for old time’s sake.
“I’m painting, not enough, writing more of that crap than I want to, I guess. But it’s okay. I guess.”
“You guess?”
“Don’t you sometimes wish you could go really low, to breakdown low, and then you’d have no choice, you’d have to change, have a transformation?”
“You have had a transformation. I can see—”
“Yeah, right, a transformation. Not really.”
“Yes, really.”
“I don’t know. Well . . .” I blushed. “Oh, I don’t know.”
“I don’t know? I haven’t heard one of those in a long time.” He laughed at me and I took cover. “You don’t have to be nervous.”
“I’m not. Oh, I guess, well, maybe I am.”
“Don’t be. Well, how did the show in Paris go? What was that guy’s name?”
“It went well, surprisingly well. I’m going to have another show with him in a few months. Yeah, he’s been great so far. It’s just here in New York. I’m probably the one who should move. Oh, by the way, you were right. He did hit on me.”
“I’m always right. What’d you do?”
“No, you’re not.”
We retreated to safer ground instinctively, just as we always had. We continued to think out loud, but only safe thoughts. We moved in closer but not too close. It was strenuous to keep up the conversation without saying anything, but probably less strenuous than it would have been to say something. I kept my hands busy lest they stray.
“So what else is new?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
I tried another tactic. “Hey.” I spread my hands out in front of him. “Look.” He was puzzled. “My fingernails—I stopped biting.”
“I forgot about that.” The fingernails got us through another few minutes, but fingernails are attached to fingers, fingers are attached to hands, hands are attached to arms, which are attached to the torso. Forget about the head, it’s useless when it crowns a body afflicted by the human condition. Fighting the human condition—in its extreme form, that is, in the form of Joseph Pendleton—made my mind go blank and my limbs stiffen, so I tripped on a land mine in enemy territory.
“Oh, I know what else. I wrote another movie for another cosmetic company, equally as stupid, I . . . oops.”
“It’s okay. All right, I can see it’s not okay. You were there, now I lost you. Damn.”
“I’m sorry.” My face got red, and the haunted year, the year he’d missed, crowded my eyes.
“Don’t be sorry. Christ. You’re upset, that’s all. But you won’t . . .” He looked equally pained. Oh, maybe I’m exaggerating, but pained enough that he couldn’t look at me. “We were ha
ving a good time, before, and now it’s ruined.”
My mind had been in motion, overflowing for so long, and here was my opportunity, here was my receptacle sitting directly across the table. “It’s just that, what happened with you, it triggered things, a lot of things. It’s not your fault. You just happened to be there. It’s just . . . the baby thing.” And then I broke down, for the first time in his presence, not the grandiose fabrication in my mind, but his quite ordinary human presence. He’d never witnessed my tears, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d had doubts as to their authenticity in the past. I wouldn’t be surprised if he had never truly believed that he or the ghost baby were the cause of any anguish—melodrama maybe, but not anguish. I never left a whole lot of clues, so why would he have believed it—especially when it would be easier not to. But he did now.
“The baby thing.” His voice was as empty as his face.
“It’s okay, it’s okay. Really, it’s just . . . you were in the wrong place at the wrong time, that’s all. Now tell me, what’s next? Tell me something fun. What’s your next record? Are you traveling much? Are you going away somewhere fun?”
“Fun? What’s fun? Look, you don’t have to change the subject. I can handle it. You don’t have to do that for me.” His voice softened into lullaby territory, and that, in tandem with the reproachful look, was insurmountable. I was in deep trouble. “A year . . . after all the . . . well, I never imagined we’d be friends. You know, it was brave, writing me that note.”
“No, no, it wasn’t, I just figured you don’t get much credit, and I . . . I . . . well, I just didn’t want you to hate me anymore.”
“I never hated you. I had to . . . well, it doesn’t matter. I don’t hate you.” He didn’t look away but I had to. “It’s later than I thought. I have to go. I’m supposed to have a drink at the club with this—”
“That’s okay, I should go back in anyway. Oh, maybe I should just go home; it is late.”
“Well, why don’t I put you in a cab?”
“All right.” It was more than all right. I wanted nothing more than to get up from the thick plastic-wood table. I stood up clumsily but fortunately landed on my feet. I think he came to me, but maybe I went to him. You see, it didn’t feel like a year had passed, and we stood in a raunchy bar causing yet another scene. Even though it didn’t feel like it, it had been another year, and I stood like a baby chick finally being fed, and he held me up for what seemed a long time but probably wasn’t. I opened my eyes because I wanted to commit this one to memory, get this one right. This go-around I wanted to make sure I had all the details.
“It’s different,” he whispered. “It feels different.”
I was wobbly and I have to say he was, too. But by the time we got out the door he’d recuperated.
“So, are you going to tell your friends about this?”
“No! How humiliating!”
“They’re probably so bored by it now anyway.”
“Don’t flatter yourself.”
“Hey, let’s get this cab.”
“I don’t really need a cab—it’s not that far, I can just walk . . .”
It was true. It wasn’t very far. I could’ve walked, and maybe I should’ve walked, but I didn’t walk, and we surrendered to the human condition in the cab, and just before I got out he mumbled, “Maybe I’ll call you later.”
“Maybe?”
“Yeah, maybe.” He got huffy. “Yeah maybe. That’s the way it . . .”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” But I was smiling as I got out, and he flashed one back from the cab.
•
When I consulted Aaron the next day, she had trouble coming up with an appropriate platitude. I had to prompt her. “What about closure?”
“Oh, screw that sorry old closure,” she said. “There are some people you just don’t get out of your system.” But then she added that “you do move on,” and then she assured me that I had moved on.
And when my eyes got moist later during my six o’clock show—it was the episode where the token nerd on the show killed himself by mistake with his father’s gun—they weren’t moist because he hadn’t called. In fact I hadn’t even waited for his call. Nor was I thinking, Hell, duped again. Foiled again. No, I knew, and knowing tears are nothing to be ashamed of. They were not the tears of a deceptor or the tears of a deceptee, they were tears of consequences, of circumstances, maybe even adult tears, and they would cease, because no matter what year it was, even if the years that passed felt more like days, he and I were always going to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
“Remember, you can’t sweep the funk under the rug.”
—Bootsy Collins
A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S
My thanks to Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, Bruce Tracy, Deborah Treisman, and Barbara Jones for their insight and encouragement. My thanks also to the MacDowell Colony, Kevin Thompson and David Kuhn, and Pearson Marx for their hospitality.
A B O U T T H E A U T H O R
BETSY BERNE is an artist who has written for The New Yorker, Vogue, and The New York Times Magazine. A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, she lives in Manhattan.
This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2001 by Betsy Berne
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Villard Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
VILLARD BOOKS is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.
Colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Berne, Betsy.
Bad timing / Betsy Berne.
p. cm.
1. Manhattan (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction. 2. Pregnant women—Fiction. 3. Jazz musicians—Fiction. 4. Single women—Fiction. 5. Adultery—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3552.E7295 B3 2001
813’.6—dc21 00-040833
Villard Books website address: www.villard.com
eISBN: 978-0-375-50664-2
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