Noise

by Peter Wild

  But that’s not what this story is about. Because I know what you’d say about that if I did write that story, about an old man–a good man–a man everyone blames for his wife’s death, even though she did it her goddam self, without a bit of warning! This good man who can’t even picture his wife any more and can only seem to think about this freckled girl from camp–obsess about her, almost–that it’s ‘sentimental’, which is a word you keep using like it’s negative, but you know what? I don’t mind being sentimental. I’m happy to be sentimental. On my best days, the ones that are bearable anyway, I am exactly sentimental. Don’t you see that it’s a kind of gift to be able to find sentiment in life? I am at the end of things and the students are at the beginning and so I don’t blame them, but you are somewhere in the middle and here you are with your Legalise Marijuana and your longish hair and your hands always in your pockets and your long pauses…and goddam it, you should know better! You should know that you wake up and you pray for a little sentimentality on those days when it feels black and empty and you wonder whether you’ve missed your whole life. You should know that but you don’t. You think you know everything, but you don’t know anything.

  No, I know what you’re going to think of this story. Too corny, too small, nothing happens. You’re especially going to hate the part where the widower Dave gets up the strength to talk to the sandwich woman and she thinks he seems like a decent guy. You’ll say you don’t believe it, that she wouldn’t go for a ‘decent’ guy, that there has to be something more to her attraction, but maybe sometimes that’s all people want, someone to be decent to them. And maybe that’s all some people have to offer. I know you’re going to say something like, ‘We need more about the dead wife,’ but did it ever occur to you that there is no more? That people die and they’re dead and that’s that?

  So give me a C. I don’t care. The story is just going to be a story and not a druggy anatomy lesson. Dave’s going to ask the brown-haired sandwich woman to go for a walk and in the end, they’re going to hold hands and run to get out of the rain in a little tin-roofed gazebo that I’m putting where there is no gazebo and you can think it’s corny or ‘sentimental’ if you want, but that’s what I want to happen, goddam it. I’m not going to have her make up some excuse why she can’t, and have him go back to his apartment and please himself, even if you think that’s more ‘believable’. He’s going to say something that he’s planned out, something clever and funny to the girl about the club sandwich and joining her club (you’ve made it abundantly clear that you don’t like puns, but did you ever think that maybe she does) and she’s going to agree to go for a walk and that’s that. And if you can’t make a little thing like that happen–a goddam walk between two people, it’s not like he was asking her to marry him–if you can’t make even that happen in a story, then I don’t see why you’d bother writing a story at all! I don’t know why you’d even bother getting out of bed in the morning, to tell you the truth.

  And, in the workshop, if you urge me to continue the story, Dave and the sandwich woman kissing under a tree, their hands groping all over one another leading to we both know what…and don’t think I haven’t thought of that, a lot…goddam it, you’re just going to have to find another student to do your dirty work. I’m not going to write a sex scene just so you can feel like you’ve done your job. I would rather die never having published a thing than ruin the moment by having them do anything but hold hands. Dave staring at the freckles on the sandwich lady’s face. Rain falling around them.

  sunday

  hiag akmakjian

  There’s something about the song ‘Sunday’ that is evocative of my childhood (these things are always so personal) and the years when I was growing up. It took me back and I found myself reliving some of its happy-sad moments. A beautiful song.

  Sunday comes alone again.

  I was late for lunch. As I was leaving to go over to the Sforzas a few doors down from me, I got the call I had been expecting from the Journal about the photo story on Hoboken that they had proposed. The editor brought up an intricate point about secondary rights and, by the time we hung up, I was very late. Even so, old man Sforza beamed as I walked in. He was always a very affectionate and cordial man.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘let’s get started. Everybody must be starved. Do I hear any objections?’

  ‘No objections here,’ his wife said. She was wearing her robin’s-egg-blue apron and her hair was done up in a bun behind her head.

  I handed over the antipasto I had brought over, a special prosciutto I get on Ninth Avenue in Manhattan whenever I happen to be in that part of town.

  Mrs Sforza yelled happily, ‘No Frills–All Thrills.’ That was the motto stitched on her apron which one of her sons, Dom or Paul, had given her on her birthday. She put the prosciutto on a plate with slices of honeydew melon she brought out from the fridge.

  It was a very summery fall and we ate at the table in the backyard outside the ground-floor kitchen. The yard was nothing more than a cement rectangle behind the row of buildings. Individual yards were divided off by low fences of unpainted planks running from the buildings to the back alley behind the houses. There were plants in pots outside the kitchen windows, and at the back end of the Sforzas’ yard was their old pear tree. It was gaunt looking and had been there since my childhood. I could see how the whole back area had a desolate look but not to the people who lived there. To us it was just a nice quiet spot in Hoboken. We didn’t really see it any more.

  ‘Good prosciutt’–the real thing,’ Mr Sforza said. ‘Probably from Manziano’s, am I right?’

  ‘Prosciutt’. Italians really understand ham,’ Mrs Sforza said with feeling.

  When we were finished with the antipasto, Mr Sforza went inside and brought out the main dish. He himself had prepared it. He enjoyed cooking what he called nuts-and-bolts food: roasts, cutlets, steaks.

  ‘Anybody here hate capon?’ he asked with a grin.

  He set the platter of roasted bird at his place on the table and inhaled its aroma.

  ‘This’s going to be good,’ his wife said happily.

  He put three generous pieces on three plates and next to each portion added a white mound of mashed potatoes. With the ladle he poked a crater into the centres and ladled in gravy, then carefully added a large spoonful of peas alongside.

  ‘There’s plenty of gravy, so help yourself.’

  He poured Chianti from a straw-covered bottle.

  ‘Salut’!’

  ‘Did you know that Hoboken is now the most densely populated city in the United States?’ Mr Sforza said. ‘Very few people know that. When my grandparents first arrived here back in the 1920s Hoboken was mostly empty lots with a few scattered houses. It was New York’s seaport then. In fact, even when I was a kid, just before the second war, it still had that empty look. Remember?’ he asked his wife. ‘Not too many houses.’

  Mrs Sforza nodded. ‘Frankie Sinatra was around then too. Old Blue Eyes. He lived just a few blocks from here, before he became a movie star. They used to call him Frankie. Then he became Francis.’

  ‘Old Blue Eyes,’ I said. ‘Probably if he had been born and raised in London, they would have made him Sir Francis.’

  ‘In Italy,’ Mr Sforza said, ‘they would have made him Saint Francis.’

  ‘They already have a Saint Francis,’ Mrs Sforza said. ‘Besides, Old Blue Eyes is still Frankie to me.’

  She winced and eased dentures from her mouth and slid them back in again–a flash of white-and-pink upper plate. She smiled shyly when she saw me noticing.

  The Castellanos–my family–and the Sforzas had been living next door to each other in Hoboken for so many years that we were more like uncles, aunts and cousins than neighbours. After my parents died, whenever I called up Mr and Mrs Sforza to ask whether I could come by and have lunch with them, always on a Sunday, they always said sure, come on over. They were much older than me and had grandchildren already but the generation gap d
idn’t bother them and it didn’t bother me–I doubt that we even thought about it. I knew they missed their sons Dom and Paul, who had been my friends as we were growing up and who had married and moved away and had families of their own. I visited Mr and Mrs Sforza out of habit but also I was aware, living next door to them, how alone they were most of the time. The sons and their wives and children visited as often as they could, but that was seldom more than once a year–but they never missed Christmas.

  I liked Mr Sforza for the way he loved his wife. He was not at all sentimental. ‘You have a good wife,’ I once heard a friend say to him, and Mr Sforza said, ‘She’s OK.’ ‘Just OK?’ ‘Very OK.’ He confided to me later, in case I might wonder whether there was some secret to his marital happiness, ‘She’s a woman you have to adjust to.’ I said that made her sound difficult and I hoped he didn’t mean it that way, and he laughed as though I were cracking some dumb kind of joke and said: ‘No, no, no, she’s easy. It’s an easy adjustment.’ Which left me in the dark. ‘In other words, she’s OK,’ I said as a prompt, hoping he would build on that and say something different. ‘Very OK,’ he replied in complete agreement.

  I liked Mrs Sforza even more–a lot of quiet energy packed into that small aproned frame and old-world look. The way her soft white hair was drawn to a tight bun behind her head gave her a daguerreotype look: ‘Peasant Woman, Abruzzi 1850’. I liked her eyebrows too–bushy and pure white, rising and falling almost comically. As she listened intently to what you said they would slide up and down with interest.

  The Sforzas usually asked for family news and I always went prepared. I told them about my mother’s oldest niece, Lucy, who had married a college traveller for Prentice-Hall because, she said seriously, he was gone most of the time and she liked the quiet. We all knew her husband and knew what she meant.

  ‘Ralph, Lucy’s youngest son. Remember him? He just got accepted at Stevens.’

  ‘Little Ralphie?’ Mrs Sforza said. ‘Jesus.’

  ‘Is his health any better now?’ Mr Sforza asked.

  ‘His health has always been fine,’ Mrs Sforza said. ‘What does health have to do with it?’

  ‘You’re right,’ he said, ‘I was thinking of Angela’s kid, with the lung.’

  I told Mr Sforza I thought the capon was excellent and he told me I was obviously a gumba to appreciate down-home cooking.

  ‘Old-country down-home cooking.’

  Also this was no supermarket capon, he said. He got this beauty at Keller’s farm, up near Lake Hopatcong.

  ‘You went to Keller’s?’ Mrs Sforza asked.

  ‘How do you think this thing got here–UPS?’

  ‘You went back to Keller’s after that remark about Italians?’ Mrs Sforza said in shock.

  ‘Oh, that was just his humour. The Kellers are nice people, believe me.’

  ‘Hu-mour?’ Mrs Sforza turned to me. ‘He said, “Italians are good decent folk–both of you.” ’

  Her husband laughed. ‘Get it? That’s funny.’

  ‘I don’t care about the humour part. It’s the other part I don’t like,’ Mrs Sforza said. ‘Good decent folk?–you kidding? Folk? What are we, in an operetta or something? When was the last time his country had a Renaissance?’

  ‘Ah, you don’t get the point. Here, have some more peas. And let me give you some more potatoes.’

  Docilely she held out her plate and accepted the potatoes. I marvelled at how much she could put away for her size. She set the plate down in front of her and, rubbing her knuckles against her cheek, massaged her gums from the outside.

  ‘I’m glad you come around once in a while,’ she said. ‘We eat good all the time, but we usually eat better when you’re here–you know, pig out when there’s company. When you’re retired you pig out a lot.’

  ‘Eating is the hobby of old age,’ Mr Sforza agreed.

  ‘In Florida, in old age, they play shuffleboard. Up here, we pig out,’ his wife said.

  ‘Down there they pig out too, don’t kid yourself.’

  ‘On frozen orange juice.’

  Mr Sforza said he and his wife enjoyed our get-togethers, and he thought that one of the reasons I had been coming over more frequently in recent months was that I was unconsciously searching for my dead father.

  Mrs Sforza looked aghast. ‘Jesus, Marco, where were you raised? On a raft?’

  My father had been a widower for a few years and then had died six months ago, of stomach cancer.

  ‘No, hey!’ Mr Sforza said to me earnestly. ‘I don’t mean that’s the only reason you come over.’ He was careful not to mention my being single now–a new thing. ‘And no disrespect. It’s just that you’re also looking for your father. You know how horses go back to the places they used to go around to with their masters. Well, you know…people…I mean, we’re not that different.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Mrs Sforza said.

  ‘Aaah, Mike’s not taking it the wrong way. He understands.’

  His wife glanced over to make sure, then looking at her husband she pointed a finger at her temple and spun it round and round.

  Mr Sforza continued: ‘And soon we’ll be gone too–the last connection with your father. Look,’ he said before his wife reacted, ‘I’m only saying what’s true. That’s the way life goes. Did I ever tell you about the time your father attempted suicide?’

  Mrs Sforza slapped her hand on the table and spun away. ‘Jee-zus!’ She said it to her husband but she was looking at me. ‘We invite the guy over for lunch and you—’

  ‘Waidda minute, waidda minute,’ Mr Sforza said. He was unflappable. ‘That’s what they thought. He would never commit suicide, your father.’

  ‘Who’s “they”?’ I asked.

  ‘The police that arrived at the scene.’

  A laugh exploded from Mrs Sforza. ‘Oh, that time!’ She looked happy again.

  ‘You serious?’ I asked.

  ‘If you mean is it a true story, yes. Your father was driving to Newark early one Sunday morning–you know, one of those days when you hardly see a car on the Pulaski Skyway. It must have been about six in the morning and it was summertime and beautiful out and he was crossing the Hackensack river when he got this sudden urge to stop at the edge of the roadway–just park the car and get out. There was nothing but empty highway as far as he could see in either direction and he figured it was safe, so he did. He leaned over the railing and looked down at the river.’

  ‘This is good,’ Mrs Sforza said to me. ‘You’re going to like this.’ She was looking very happy now.

  ‘Usually you hardly ever see a patrol car, especially on a Sunday morning and especially that early in the morning. But wouldn’t you know it, just at that moment some state troopers or something come by and stop and one of them goes over to see if your father’s OK and your father says, sure I’m OK, I was just admiring the view. The cop looks at him thinking he’s maybe a little crazy or something and says he’d better go admire it someplace else and never try parking in the middle of a highway again. The cop said because there was no traffic he’d let him go this time. ‘No problem,’ your father said, but he just stood there hoping they’d go away so he could take another look at the river. So the trooper says, ‘C’mon, c’mon, first you go, then we leave. I don’t want no suicide on my hands.’ So your father laughs. ‘No, no,’ he says. ‘I’m a happy man. I’m enjoying life.’ That’s the way your father talked–the way people from Campobass’ talk. We don’t waste words.’

  ‘He wasn’t from Campobass’,’ Mrs Sforza said. ‘He was Calabres’.’

  ‘He wasn’t from Campobass’ but he had a cousin or something from Campobass’ on his mother’s side. So anyway, they all got in their cars and took off. Your father said the Hackensack looked really very beautiful from way up there.’

  ‘Yeah, look at it from ground level some time,’ Mrs Sforza said. ‘Especially Jersey City. Jee-zus.’

  Mr Sforza filled our glasses and said he knew it sounded crazy but nowadays he fel
t happiest with the memories of dead friends. Like my father.

  ‘Which is not surprising. When you get to be our age, practically the only friends you have left are dead.’ He said he sometimes wished he was a believer so he could say prayers for certain people, but if you don’t believe, you don’t believe. ‘And at seventy-four you don’t get converted too easy. Clara here gave up on me long ago. She told me I’m going straight to hell and not to bother to pass Go and collect my two hundred dollars. Which makes me laugh.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, I mean, she would be absolutely right except that there’s no such place as hell. But try to tell her that.’

  ‘There’s no proof,’ Mrs Sforza said. ‘You got proof?’

  ‘Nobody believes in hell any more.’ I was attempting a little diplomacy. ‘A lot of people still believe in heaven, though. Funny.’

  ‘Heaven!’ he said with a laugh. ‘Right here is heaven. See that pear tree over there? That’s heaven. This lunch is heaven and so is this wine. Here, let’s have the rest of this heaven. Salut’!’

  He poured what was left in the bottle, a little for each of us. I looked over at the spindly pear tree straining up from the cement. I had always seen the tree but had never really looked at it. It was a grouping of withered branches but it had six plump pears: there were so few leaves left you could see them all just hanging there. Compared to the tree, the pears looked young and healthy, almost gaudy, like Christmas tree ornaments. They were big and round and handsome, each one emerald green with one pink cheek, like a Gourmet photo spread on the beauty of orchard fruits.