Paper Lantern

by Stuart Dybek

  She’d been away, she told me, and had only just received my messages. There’d been a last-minute change in her plans. She wasn’t thinking clearly, she was sorry, she hadn’t meant to make me worry.

  “Want to tell me what’s going on?”

  “What do you think is going on? You never ask directly, Jack,” she said.

  “I’m asking now.”

  “I was pregnant.”

  “You were pregnant? What does that mean? Why wouldn’t you tell me?”

  “Maybe it caught me by surprise. Maybe I hoped not to pressure you. You can understand not wanting to pressure someone, can’t you?”

  “No,” I said, “I don’t understand. Are you all right? Let’s start with that.”

  “Why not with surprise? Why aren’t you surprised? When Rey and I began sleeping together I was on the pill, but I went through a time when I had to get off, and he didn’t like using protection, so we went without it for years, and since he has a son by another woman I assumed it was me who couldn’t conceive. Obviously I was wrong.”

  “That’s not what I’m asking. I’m down to the simple, basic questions.”

  “You mean, like, Will you stay in Michigan or keep running if you get the chance to hide out on an island somewhere, an ocean away?”

  “You know that’s not fair. How about more like, Does he think the child was his? Or was it his?”

  She said nothing.

  “Look,” I said, “I’m going to hang up now and drive to your place so we can talk.”

  “Don’t, please, Jack, I won’t be here later.”

  “Where will you be?”

  “Basic questions don’t necessarily make things simple,” she said, ignoring my question. “What if I said I didn’t tell you because one morning I watched you from the dock fishing for dinner and suddenly wondered who is that out there on this little hidden lake in his kayak tagged like a viaduct wall in the inner city? What is he doing here, so out of place, trying so hard to fit into a new life he’s making up as he goes? And I went inside and opened your book and sat reading it as if for the first time on the bed—all mussed from our lovemaking—and the words were so sad and angry, more than I’d realized, more than the writer realized, and I wept, not just for the words themselves. I was thinking that ever since that first trip together in New York, I’ve been trying to fit in, too.”

  “Fit in? Into what? Like we haven’t been making it up together as we went along? Lise, what are you trying to do?”

  “To give you an answer. Remember that first night in the snowstorm, you came over for a grappa I brought back from Italy?”

  “Flavored with rose petals. I remember that night in exact detail. I’ve remembered it countless times. What does it have to do with now?”

  “Just listen, okay? I told you I went with Buck to Italy. Buck always bought art on his trips to Europe, mostly legit, though some he smuggled back into the States. After Rome, we went to a private auction in Amsterdam because he knew I loved Dutch painters—I’d collect them if I could—and among all the paintings and etchings there was this drawing of a hand and its shadow, unsigned, that I couldn’t stop looking at. It was as if I’d seen it before. Each time I changed the angle I looked from, the hand changed. At first it was as if it might be from a body that had suffered or was suffering, and then from a body asleep—a hand in a dream—or a hand still stinging that had just delivered a blow or left its handprint on a woman’s bottom—it was almost as if I’d felt it. Or a hand waiting to hold an unseen pen, waiting to write a secret message that could change a life, a message I knew was coming before it was written. Buck said it probably was a study for a painting, that its realism suggested the Dutch Caravaggisti—the painters influenced by Caravaggio, who in turn influenced Rembrandt and Vermeer. I asked if it could possibly be Rembrandt, and he said more likely it was someone like Hendrick ter Brugghen. You had to have a dealer’s card if you wanted to bid, so Buck did it for me. I paid six hundred euros—more than I could afford, but I had to have it. Buck said I needed to get an expert appraisal. If it turned out to be someone like ter Brugghen it would be worth money. ‘And if it’s Rembrandt?’ I asked him. He just smiled, then kissed me, and that night we—well, let’s just say we got intimate in Amsterdam in a way we hadn’t before. But when I came home, I never had it appraised, because if it was really worth something, I knew that in all fairness Buck and I were partners, like sharing a winning lotto number, like you and me at the track, and it wasn’t until I faced up to that partnership that I had to admit it didn’t feel right, not for the long term. Do you understand what I’m trying to say?”

  “I never noticed that drawing.”

  “It’s over my desk, in Limbo.”

  * * *

  There’s that couple at the station waiting for the express from Barcelona. One can guess that the woman is going off alone to have an abortion, but we know little beyond that about either of them. It’s hot. The woman wants to try an Anis del Toro, so they order two with water. She says it tastes like licorice. “Everything tastes of licorice. Especially all the things you’ve waited so long for.”

  “Oh, cut it out,” the man says.

  That green light at the end of Daisy Buchanan’s dock is the color of hope. At the start of the novel, it seems that hope and waiting might be the same shade. Jay Gatsby, Newland Archer, all those nocturnal citizens of Winesburg, Ohio, hope, dream, yearn, and wait. They wait for love, which is, as such stories go, indistinguishable from waiting for life. Even the sickly Michael Furey in “The Dead,” singing in the chill rain, who dies for love, is waiting for life. His ghost still waits. Waiting is what ghosts do. If, in such stories, the wait ends in disillusionment, then at least that defines what it means to have lived. Then there are writers like Beckett or Kafka, for whom the disillusionment is so profound that it transcends the theme of love. The disillusionment isn’t merely with mankind but with God, the kind of disillusionment that is by definition beyond understanding. Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name …

  In Kafka’s The Trial—where a man, all but anonymous, waits to be judged for an undisclosed crime—the situation is not unlike the wait in Hemingway’s “The Killers,” a story that was often anthologized before Hemingway fell out of fashion—as if fashion could erase the influence of a style that rearranged the molecular structure of American letters.

  “The Killers” is supposedly an inspiration for Edward Hopper’s iconic Nighthawks, which hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago. There are so many reproductions of it that when you finally see the original, at 331⁄8 by 60 inches it seems more modest than one might have expected. Although it’s a nocturne, it is paradoxically as much about light as any of the Impressionist paintings a few galleries away. The diner illuminates a dark city corner with a stark light it doesn’t seem capable of throwing on its own. There’s a counterman and three customers—a man and a woman, who might be lovers, and a thickset man off by himself, who could be a hit man. He could be Death. They sit as if waiting, not for something to begin, but to end.

  In “The Killers,” two hoods from Chicago, sawed-off shotguns under their black overcoats, wait in a diner for the Swede. The clock in the diner runs twenty minutes fast, a clever detail like that hospital radio that plays only at night. The streetlight flickers on outside the diner’s window. The killers order bacon-and-egg sandwiches to eat while they wait, but the Swede doesn’t show. He’s back at his rooming house, on his bed, face to the wall, when Nick Adams, who works at the diner, goes to warn him. The warning has no effect; the Swede knows his situation is hopeless.

  “I can’t stand to think about him waiting in the room, and knowing he’s going to get it. It’s too damn awful,” Nick tells his coworker, George, back at the diner.

  “Well,” George says, “you better not think about it.”

  I put off going back up north to the cottage until the landlord there—a kindly man who’d told me, when I’d first stopped to buy raw honey from him, that he
read Yeats to his bees—asked me to retrieve my things, as he needed to close the place for winter. So on a Saturday in October I drove through the last of the color change, an achingly beautiful time in Michigan, tinged as it is with the knowledge that it will be a long, hard season before the leaves reappear. I packed my kayak and my fishing gear, a duffel bag of clothes, the unfinished piece on loons, and a few of the books from the beer box—the field guides, mostly, which I thought I might want to page through again someday.

  Four Deuces

  You play the buggies, too?

  I noticed you studying that racing form like it’s a rich uncle’s will. Yeah, I know that look, like it’s a chess game and you’re Bobby Fischer thinking so many moves ahead it’s like he can see the future. Tell you, there was a time I could close my eyes and pick a winner like I was following my finger around a Ouija board. It’s probably why Frank that sumnabitch married me. Called me his Lucky Bud—not like the beer, you know, like bosom buddies, like a rosebud. Been years, but back when me and Frank that sumnabitch was first married we lived at Sportsman’s in the summer.

  Win? You bet your dupa we won. Won this goddamn bar.

  This place, can you believe it, used to be a shithole called the Verman Lounge? Guy named Adolph Verman owned it. Verman the German, everyone called him. Tell you, I had the birth defect of a name like that, I’d think about calling my place a business something else. But men gotta be the big shot. A primo corner location and Verman was losing money. Frank, to give that sumnabitch his due, saw the potential. He was a dreamer, Frank was. I’d tell him that and he’d go, Rosie, you know the difference between a dreamer and a visionary?

  No, Frank, you tell me.

  A dreamer’s asleep, Rosie. A visionary’s so wide awake everyone else seems like zombies. It ain’t the place, Rosie, it’s the name of the place that’s a loser. Picture yourself some working stiff. All day in the foundry you been visualizing a cold brewski, its head of foam sliding down a frosty stein. Are you going to patronize some dump that sounds infested—Verman the German’s—rats giving the heil Hitler, the bar like a conveyor belt of cooties carrying off your beer, flies so thick you can’t see the Sox losing on the TV, and when, God help you, you go to take a leak, crabs in the crapper!

  I don’t know about visionary, but Frank could be a hoot. Always had a way with words. Voluptuous. Who but Frank woulda called me voluptuous? Sumnabitch wrote me poems when we first met. He’d scrawl them with my eyebrow pencil on two-dollar bills. I hid them from my mother. What Frank called a poem, she’d call a mortal sin. She’d of had to confess reading them and do penance. Even now, thinking about them, I feel the blood in my face. But I always was a blusher. It’s a weakness in a poker-faced world. I had naturally red hair, not like girls today dyeing it weird Technicolors. And the figure that went with it was natural, too. It ain’t like Frank that sumnabitch didn’t notice. Bosom Buddy—real subtle, huh? I saved the poems in a shoe box, three hundred and twelve bucks’ worth of two-dollar poems. Mementos, my royal keister! I was trying to figure how to cash them without getting arrested for passing pornographic money. You think those dirty bills are still good for spending or did Frank that sumnabitch ruin them, too?

  How you liking that Polish beer?

  Personally, I don’t think it’s worth the half buck extra. Czech beer, that’s different, and I hate to admit it cause I’m Polish. Frank that sumnabitch was a bohunk. They take their pivo seriously. Pivo’s a breakfast food for them. The Polacks run on vodka, higher octane, but burns you out faster. You Mexican? You look like a bullfighter with that little ponytail, not that I ever been to a bullfight. I aced Spanish in high school. Cómo se llama?

  Rafael. That’s an angel’s name, ain’t it? You an angel? Don’t worry, you can take the Fifth on that. And I ain’t gonna card you neither cause angels never look their age. Here, Rafael, tak, try a sip of this. Put your money away, first one’s free, kid. You don’t mind if I join you. Tak. Don’t want you having to drink alone. Na zdrowie!

  Like that, Rafael? Chopin vodka, made from spuds, not goddamn cornflakes. Prettiest bottle on the shelf. Not to say it ain’t a rip-off. It was Frank’s idea to carry imported pivo when all those Poles fled here before the Wall fell. We put up an old Solidarno poster and a picture of the Polish pope next to Mayor Daley. Frank figured immigrants want a little taste of the homeland, so we put in ywiec on tap, but DPs pledge their allegiance to whatever’s cheap. Frank that sumnabitch wasn’t visionary on that one.

  But he was right about buying this bar, not that we coulda afforded it without luck. Buena suerte, right? When we first started going out, Frank that sumnabitch was working at the train yards as a railroad dick, which you can imagine made for some lousy jokes. His job was to keep people from stealing and vandalizing and the bums from riding the rails. Frank was the kinda dork who’d saved his toy trains. Loved railroads, but hated his job. He wasn’t the kind of sumnabitch cut out for regular hours or getting bossed. Complained it felt like the freights heading west were leaving him behind. He’d always wanted to be a cowboy. Instead a keeping the hobos off, he said he had the urge to join them.

  So, Buffalo Frank Novak, what’s stopping you? I’d kid him.

  He’d go, That was before I met my voluptuous Rosebud. You know, Rosie, it don’t hurt to have a fantasy that if things get desperate there’s always an escape route. But that Verman bar’s our real ticket out. All it needs is a coat of paint, a blue neon sign, and a new name. The right name can change everything.

  Like magic, huh, Frank?

  Presto change-o, Rosebud.

  So, what would you call it? I ask him.

  Well, if it was a ship, with red sails in the sunset, I’d name it after you, Rosebud, but a tavern—you don’t want your name plastered on no bar.

  Actually, I wouldn’t have minded, you know, the Rose Room or something classy, with lighting to match. An electric rose glowing in a Chopin vodka bottle for a bar sign, maybe a piano playing, or at least Sinatra and the Stones instead of the “Too Fat Polka.” But I told him what he wanted to hear: No, Frank, don’t go naming some bar, even if it happens to be your dream in life, after me.

  He goes, Notice its address? 2200 West 22nd. Four deuces. Could call it Deuces Wild, but that seems to invite bad behavior. But Four Deuces, that’s a deceptively lucky hand. A man with a hand like that lays in wait for the kill. Know the odds on a hand like that, Rosebud?

  No idea, Frank.

  Four hundred and twenty-six to one.

  So, we get an asking price from Verman, and now that Frank’s fantasy has a name, the Four Deuces, it becomes his obsession. He was the kinda sumnabitch always needed an obsession. It’s what got him stealing from the railroad—he was a relatively honest sumnabitch up to then. Perfume, leather coats, rugs, booze, guns … He’d fence the goods on Jewtown and we’d play the funny money at Sportsman’s. Mr. Visionary would be up to all hours calculating the odds on that racing form. Einstein never figured harder. Frank had a theory there was a hidden pattern to luck, and if you could find it the odds would be on your side.

  Don’t matter if it’s astrology or astrophysics, he’d say, they’re both about a pattern in the stars that allows you to predict. That Oriental rug you’re standing on is just a design to you and me, Rosebud, but if a swami saw it, he’d know there was a prayer woven in it.

  Would the swami know you stole it off a boxcar?

  Wouldn’t matter. That’s why in Aladdin the carpet could fly, cause he knew its secret power, Frank would say, and go back to his prognostications.

  Mostly he’d get hosed.

  One night on Memorial Day weekend, I tell him I wish we were at a movie or the beach or anywhere other than Sportsman’s, and he says, Hey, nobody’s twisting your arm to be here, and I joke I could do better with my eyes closed, then I close them and point to Devil May Care, a long shot. It pays thirty to one on my two-dollar bet.

  Rosebud, try it again, Frank says.

  I pick three wi
nners that night, and stop only cause I get dizzy. We take home eight hundred and change for three hours’ play. Woulda taken Frank two weeks of dicking around to clear that. You can bet that sumnabitch wanted his lucky Rosebud along after that. You and me, Rosebud, he’d say, Romeo and Juliet, Bonnie and Clyde, Lucy and Ricky, and I was too goddamn dumb to tell the difference between love and superstition.

  And Frank was one superstitious sumnabitch. He’d wear the same lucky track clothes and make sure I was dressed the same down to my lucky underwear. You can use your imagination as to what that might be. I knew what turned him on. We’d sit in the same lucky seats along the stretch …

  Sure, you can buy us a round, Rafael. Vodka’s on you, brewski’s on the house. Fair? Chopin and ywiec—a Four Deuces boilermaker. Tak. No cheap-ass Beam and Millers for us. Na zdrowie!

  Smooth, but I wonder am I tasting the vodka or the pretty bottle. You like tequila, Rafael? We stocked tequila when the neighborhood went south of the border. Tequila gets me rowdy. Here, we’ll have a little taste challenge, Chopin versus No Way Jose Cuervo. Tak. Na zdrowie!

  That’s firewater, Rafael. Remember I warned you: tequila gets me rowdy.

  So, yeah, superstition—we always sat along the stretch. Lester, this half-blind smoke with Parkinson’s, on Social Security, would get there early and save our seats. Frank would buy him dinner—beer and a brat—and stake him to a couple two-dollar bets. What Lester wanted though was hot tips, or what Frank that sumnabitch took to calling hot nips.

  No, I ain’t going to explain why, and not cause I’m embarrassed, but cause it’s retarded. Use your imagination. Frank could be a hoot, but he was also one of those guys who like never got past high school humor. Anything he could turn into a sexual innuendo he would—not something I admire in a man. Like there was a horse I picked named Whinny Pooh—cute, right?—that Frank insisted on calling Whinny Poohtang. That’s funny? Like I’m supposed to go tee-hee at a naughty macho word.

  Frank that sumnabitch noticed when I read the racing form we’d lose cause I’d pick the horses by their names. I mean, you see a horse named You Bet Your Dupa, well, you got to bet your dupa. Or Lady’s a Tramp—I love Sinatra doing that, so you got to play that little filly. Same when they’d parade the horses around the track. I’d play them by color or how their manes were styled. He’d say, Rosebud, don’t look at their names, don’t look at their manes, female intuition’s blind, just close your eyes and pick. But I couldn’t not peek. Not just cause I hated to miss seeing, but closing my eyes in a crowd gets me light-headed, like my balance is off. Like seasick. Frank that sumnabitch would cover my eyes with his hands, and then he started blindfolding me. In public, I mean. He wore this lucky tie, a souvenir from the Thoroughbred track at Arlington. It was wide and had a sparkly picture of a horse winning by a nose, the jockey whipping him across the finish line. He’d wind that tie around my eyes so there were no distractions to what he took to calling my deal-with-the-devil psychic powers. I played along. But I knew I was faking. I didn’t have no psychic powers, just dumb luck.