"Wow," said Andy. "I'm planning on moving to Manhattan. Do the jazz thing."
"I guess that's the place. I played in Manhattan, of course, back in the day."
His eyes lit up, and I could tell I'd impressed him. "Where'd you play?"
"When I moved there," I said, "that movie Urban Cowboy had just come out."
He shook his head, wrapped his large hand around his glass and took a swallow. "Never heard of it."
"It was a big deal at the time. People all of a sudden started buying huge belt buckles and cowboy boots and went line dancing. Half the bars in New York installed mechanical bulls. So, me and my buddy started a country band."
"Country is cool," he said, but I could see he was just humoring me. "Chet Atkins." We got a little drunker. I decided to confide in him. "I'm trying to get back to my roots," I said. "I'm not really a tax guy."
"I get it," he said. "You've been faking it all these years."
"Exactly my point. I don't even know that much about it. It's not like I ever studied or anything. I just fill out the forms and send them in."
"Does Laura know?"
"Lorna. Not really. Although she may suspect something. This sudden interest in music, for example. All I ever want to do is talk about 'Stella by Starlight.'"
He shook his head and grinned. "'Stella,'" he said. "That's some deep shit."
"You know it, man. It seems to me that I took a wrong turn somewhere back in my twenties. I can't say exactly how it happened, it just sort of did. One day I was like you, all hopped up on Wes and Joe Pass and Pat Martino, and then suddenly me and my buddy are playing these electronic bull bars and singing Patsy Cline." I tried to remember what had happened next, but it all seemed very mysterious somehow, as if aliens had erased my memories and sent me back to earth with the outside structure of a life, but none of the interior part, the part that mattered. "And now, here I am, staring at fifty."
"You think maybe it's too late?" he asked. He looked concerned. His acne was a serious problem, and I wondered if he took anything for it. It was going to be hard for him to get women looking like that.
"I don't know. I have three ex-wives. Can you believe that?"
"Damn," he said.
"What about you? What's your plan for taking Manhattan?"
"Gonna head up there, bring my ax, start hitting the sessions. That's it."
He seemed to believe in some mythical version of the city, where Sonny Rollins walked the Brooklyn Bridge at night practicing his saxophone, where you might drop down into some tiny club on Fifty-second Street and see Bird or Diz or Mingus. I didn't see the point in telling him it wasn't true. Perhaps, if enough people like him decided it was true, it would become true. What did I know?
"It's all gotten kind of fake up in New York, too, these days," I said.
He nodded. The smoke was really getting thick in Dan's, like maybe the chimney was blocked up. "'Not yet,' you said. You thinking of proposing?"
"To Lorna?" I was a little surprised I'd let that slip. Before I could answer, a bunch of alarms went off. People from the back of the bar started getting up and moving in our direction. "What's going on?" I asked the bartender, but she wasn't paying attention. A big guy with tattoos on his arms sitting next to me on my other side said, "Fire."
We headed out into the street. There were maybe forty of us—an entire bar full of customers, just no bar to be in. Sirens approached, engines appeared. We already had cops—they'd been in the back eating the shrimp basket. I could see Lorna's house across the street and one block south, a two-story brick row house with her landlady's bicycle parked out on the porch. There was a light on in the upstairs window, which was her apartment.
For ten years now, Lorna had been performing and taking in checks, but she'd never filed a form. Not one. I'd met her when she answered my ad on Craigslist and she came by my office—well, OK, it's not an office, exactly, it's just a house, but my block isn't zoned for a business—with a box full of letters from the IRS and the State, all neatly lined up in order by the date she'd received them, not one of them opened. She owed, with interest and penalties, something on the order of two hundred thousand dollars. I was working my way through the years, trying to rearrange her past for her, whittle away at the debt. In the meantime, we were having some pretty hot, if occasional, sex.
Andy was talking to a cop. "What would I have to do?" he said.The cop was one of the ones who had been eating shrimp, and he'd brought his plate out with him. He stuck a French fry in his mouth, chewed and swallowed. "Depends," he said.
"You must have some kind of guidelines, right?"
"Sure."
"So, like, what? Hey, watch this." Andy put his hands on the ground and kicked his feet into the air, executing a fairly smooth handstand. He held the position, then collapsed his legs back to the ground and stood up. "What about that? Public nuisance. That count?"
"Hardly," said the cop. "You have to be a lot more threatening."
The alarms had stopped, and the general consensus from the people standing around in the cold was that there had been a grease fire in the kitchen. What we didn't know yet was whether we'd be going back in. A passing car gave us all a honk. I guess we looked like we might be demonstrating against something out there, all of us standing in a group.
"Like if I gave you a shove?" said Andy. It seemed to me he was drunker than I'd realized. Bigger, too.
"That might do it." The cop looked at me. He was big, too, probably about my age, although stouter. He had a kind of weary look to him, and I thought I knew how he felt. "You with this guy?"
"Sort of," I said. "Depends on what you mean."
"What would be your assessment of his mental state?"
"He's a jazz musician. He paints houses. He's moving to New York. I can't tell you a whole lot more." I didn't think the whole bit about the red ladder would interest the officer much.
"Well, tell him he's close to getting what he wants."
Andy then put me in a headlock. This was quite painful, as I have some stenosis in my cervical spine—C-5 and -6. My left arm went right to sleep. "Now, I'm in trouble, right?" he asked.
"You got it," said the cop. He put his plate down on the sidewalk and pulled something off his belt. It wasn't a gun, exactly—more like a ray gun.
"Go on," said Andy.
"Nah," said the cop. "I can't use this."
"Why not?" said Andy.
"You want to fill out the paperwork? Because I sure don't."
"Come on. No one will say anything."
"You don't know the half of it. Reports, questions. This guy here"—he pointed at me—"he puts in a call to the Examiner, next thing you know I'm on the front page."
Andy let go of me. "Sorry," he said. "I thought I could get Tasered."
I rubbed my arm and waited for the feeling to return to it. "You need to examine your priorities," I said.
"Sometimes I get a little out of control," he explained. "I spent my whole childhood on various medications."
They weren't going to let us back into Dan's. "You know what's just about five blocks from here?" I asked. "Come on. We'll go see the lights."
"I've heard about them, but I've never been."
"Well, you need to go. Better than getting zapped with fifty thousand volts any day."
"You don't know that," he said.
We hiked over. It was nearly midnight. There's this block nearby where every row house does up the Christmas decorations. Plastic candy canes eight feet tall, plastic manger scenes, whirligigs and all kinds of trains on outside tracks.
"Wow," said Andy. "It's like a dream I had once. Only better."
There was a baby Jesus made out of electrical wire nestled in a cradle made of rusty hubcaps. There were wooden snowmen and vinyl elves and camels. A tour bus pulled up behind us and people started to come out with their cameras. "What do you know about Liechtenstein?" I asked.
"I think it's, like, a big tax haven. I read that somewhere."
; We walked a little further. At the end of the block the decorations ended, except for an inflatable Santa on the roof of a dry cleaner's across the street, so we turned around in front of the hardware store and started back. I wanted to tell him things. I was full of advice, but I wasn't sure where to begin, or what the point would be to opening my mouth in the first place. I could tell him what not to do, what not to say, how not to go wrong along the way, or at least how maybe not to. He'd listen, sure, but it would just be sounds. I'd just be some guy who told him a bunch of stuff one night. He had to find it all out for himself.
"Hey, isn't that Laura?" said Andy, pointing across the street.
It was. Or at least it was someone who looked a lot like her. She seemed to be with someone. He looked a little like me. "Keep walking," I said.
Iowa Winter
The week Junior died, the temperature dropped to fourteen below and stayed there. The seats on my Honda felt like they were made of plywood, and the engine groaned before turning over, a low sound like some Japanese movie monster waking up after a thousand-year sleep. I had long underwear on under my suit, but I could still feel my legs numbing up. Four miles to the funeral parlor, and the heater never did kick in.
After it was over, we all went back to Louise's for food. There was a big ham her sister, June, had brought down from Madison, and the girls, Maddy and Chris, were there with their husbands and kids. Louise had made chicken and seven-layer salad and brownies, and there was plenty to drink, too. I went to work on some wine and also took responsibility for the music. I played Willie Nelson's Stardust album, because I remembered Junior had liked it, and because I did, too.
Louise got me alone about an hour into it and pointed out toward the porch, where a lone person stood all bundled up smoking a cigarette. "What am I supposed to do now?" she said.
"We all knew this was coming. It has to be a bit of a relief." I didn't quite know what she was driving at.
"Not about Junior—that is a relief." She pointed again. "I mean about him. About Clay."
I sipped some more wine. It was good stuff—better than I'd buy for myself. I get the Mediterranean red, which is cheap but drinkable. "A man who'll step outside for a cigarette in this weather has to really love to smoke," I said. "I might join him."
"I don't think he has any plans," she said. "Neither of them did. And now that Junior is gone, I'm afraid Clay's just going to stay."
All along, I'd done my best not to think too hard about Clay and Junior. They'd met at a support group—I knew that. Coffee, cookies, a musty room in the basement of some school. The spring before, with Junior's health deteriorating fast, he'd moved back into the house, and Clay had come along. They looked the same—skinny and getting skinnier, big, hollowed-out eyes. Going through the same hell, it was easier to have each other there. I don't believe they were being boyfriends together, exactly—they were both too weak. Mostly, they watched TV, drank sodas and smoked cigarettes, counted out each other's pills. It was a good thing that Clay was around, particularly those last months, since it took some of the burden off Louise. But now I could see the problem.
"Can't he go home to his people?"
"His people don't want him. They disowned him a long time ago."
"Maybe he should have thought about that when he decided to embrace an alternate lifestyle."
"I can't go through it all again. You don't know how bad it was. With your own son, that's one thing. A person can do it. But I'm really afraid. You know how you read about old people, and when their spouse dies, they just suddenly lose their own desire to live?" She looked at me. Our problems were different. I had drunk myself out of this marriage ten years ago, but it didn't mean we weren't in love.
"You think he's going to die now?"
"I don't think it, I know it. And I won't have it happen here. There's only so much a person can do."
"What do you want from me?" I said.
"Tell him he has to leave."
I looked out at the figure on the porch. It was cold enough to freeze birds right out of the air, and he was calmly finishing his cigarette. A person in the process of moving right beyond his body. "Me?"
"Please, Lenny?" she said.
The twins, Kayla and Kaylin, ran past us giggling, each of them clutching a ham sandwich. "Those girls sure can eat," I said. "Maddy might want to think about putting them on a diet."
I used to have a nice little house-painting business. After I sold that, I drove truck for R. C. Reynolds up in Cedar Rapids, mostly routes in the Midwest. Paper products. Then I started to get lower-back trouble, and at fifty I went on disability. I was already out of the house, set up in my own place out here by the river. It flooded the first year, bad, and you can still see the marks on the walls where the water came to. I drank beer at the time, and I remember how when I came back from a week on Louise's sofa to survey the damage, my empties were floating around in the middle of the living room like barrel-shaped aluminum fish. Insurance eventually took care of most of it, but I learned fast that life by myself wasn't necessarily going to be a big bachelor party.
My second day in the house, before the flood, Louise came by with a bunch of dinners in Tupperware, each labeled neatly across the top: "Lasagna," "Meatloaf," "Soup Beans," and "Chinese." I didn't know what she meant by that last one, and I never did open it to see what was inside. It's still there. When I want Chinese, I'll usually go into town and head to Ding's for the lunch special.
For a couple of days after the funeral, I thought about it. I didn't want to get involved, particularly, but I did want to be helpful. This Clay person and I had at least one thing in common, which was that we'd been disowned by the people that loved us because of our behavior. In my case it was drinking and causing scenes, in his it was having sex with men. We didn't have to do these things. I knew that Junior's getting sick was more or less inevitable. Before he ever turned up back in Iowa City from San Francisco, I figured there was something wrong. He was still healthy then, still shiny and optimistic, talking about how he was going to write children's books, signing up for classes at the university. But I understood why he was back, and Louise did, too. And when he started to lose weight and get sick, we didn't ever even say the word, but we all knew. He was taking almost forty pills a day by the end.
I went by to see Clay. It was a weekday, and Louise was at work up at the hospital. I had a drink first, of course—Early Times on the rocks. It was good, but it didn't prepare me for what it felt like to step outside. Even with the sun shining, the air was a smack in the face. The river was solid as concrete, and the outer branches of the trees made me think of cracks in a windshield. I wondered if weather like this made them shut down completely, or if underneath it all they were still growing.
Clay was watching television in the living room. "Hey," he said, when I came in.
"Hey yourself." I stood over him. His cigarettes were on the coffee table, along with a can of Pepsi and a partially completed crossword puzzle. He was in jeans and a short-sleeved shirt that was too big for him and that, it occurred to me, might have been one of my old ones. "You want to get out of here for a while? Go get one of them three-dollar coffees?"
He grinned, showing teeth as yellow as a horse's. He needed a shave, too. "All right," he said. "You buying?"
"I am."
We didn't talk in the car. I found a space right out front of The Coffee Company, fed the meter a couple of quarters, and we went in. He got a cappuccino, and I had a Siddhartha, which the sign translated as "breakfast blend."
"That's a novel by Hesse," Clay said.
"I know it." We headed away from the counter and back to an unoccupied sofa that looked like it had come straight from some old lady's attic without any vacuuming in between. He sat on that, and I settled onto a chair opposite. There was a little table in between us. "It's still a dumb name for a cup of coffee." Someone walked past us with a teapot on a tray. "You know what chai is?" I said. "It's the Hindi word for tea. You order chai tea, th
at's like asking for a sandwich sandwich."
We sipped our drinks. The place was relatively quiet—a couple of tables away a grad-student type was clicking away at his laptop. A middle-aged woman was reading a book. Light jazz drifted down from hidden speakers somewhere above us.
"I think I can guess what this is about," Clay said, finally.
"What?"
"Well, when Louise had that trouble with the dishwasher, she called you to come look at it. And you fixed it the next day."
"Yeah."
"And you fixed that step out front last fall."
"I can do a couple of things."
"You want me to go."
"It's not me that wants it, exactly."
"Right. I get it."
I was thinking how easy this was. He understood the situation. I took another sip of coffee and felt something nice and comfortable kick in, like it does after the first drink of the evening. "So then it's understood? What needs to happen?"
Clay leaned forward. I could see all the bones in his face. "Lenny," he said. "There is no place."
"Sure there is. Don't you have a friend you could stay with?"
His eyes held on to mine. "Junior was my friend. Junior was everything."
"I appreciate that. But Junior is gone. You knew this was going to happen—both of you did. Didn't you ever talk about it? Didn't you ever plan?"
"No," he said. "We didn't plan."
"Well, that wasn't that smart then, was it?"
"Maybe not."
"You can't expect my wife to take care of you."
"I won't bother anyone. She won't even notice I'm there."
"What are you going to do?"
"I don't know," he said. "It's something I've been thinking about. There was really just one thing I did up until last week, and that was take care of Junior. Without him, I'm kind of at a loss." He laughed nervously. He had a very deep voice, croaky from all the smoking he did.
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