Home Town

by Tracy Kidder

  He felt he had to reequip himself for driving. “See, what Oakie doesn’t understand, there’s a gray area. I don’t want to be driving, but I got no choice, if I want to work. Look at the risk. I’m out on ten grand surety and if I get caught I won’t see bail. But if I’m not working, I’m out here selling drugs. Which is worse? I heard about a Cinderella license, where you can’t drive after dark. I could get back into, like, the productive mainstream. A lot of guys in Springfield say, ‘Hey, you want to sell?’ For what? I want to get out of that hole. It ain’t easy.” He figured that if he didn’t break any traffic laws, he wouldn’t get stopped. Except here in Northampton. “I’m scared when I drive around here now. It stopped being fun. I get this knot at my solar plex. Oakie said even if he’s here, he can’t stick up for me. Outside Northampton, I’m relaxed when I drive.”

  He had a job and an apartment in a Springfield suburb now. He had invited Carmen to live with him there. He had felt compelled to take her back. “She’s a challenge. It’s like getting a Ph.D. in psychology. I don’t know. She’s a challenge.” He had few illusions, he said. He had tried to get her into a program called “anger management,” but she wouldn’t go, and she was still on drugs. “She’s not straight. I’m not either, completely. But I met these guys from the past and they’re straight now. It’s like a message, like proof you can do it. And I like the challenge. She’ll be doing drugs and taking my money. That’s a challenge and a half. I think of it, like that’s my cross. Nothing can get me down except that thing, the stuff and her.” The nun he’d met in jail had told him that after becoming whole, then holy, one became immortal. He remembered her saying, “Think of it as a caterpillar. We’re in the caterpillar stage. Then it turns into a butterfly.” Pondering those words in the quiet barroom, Frankie said, “So if I pass that test, I’ll probably graduate to something.”

  He figured that when he dropped his charges against Carmen, she’d turn on him again. But her court date wouldn’t come up for a while: “I’ve got her on a string until then.” Saying this, he assumed the stance of a deep-sea fisherman, leaning back, pumping an imaginary rod, reeling in a big one.

  It was time to leave. Outside the barroom doorway, Frankie paused and glanced furtively up and down the street, Strong Avenue, named for Caleb Strong, that eighteenth-century local boy made good—state governor, member of the Constitutional Convention. Then Frankie got in his falsely licensed car and drove away, very slowly. At the stop sign on Pleasant Street, he looked both ways.

  It’s a summer evening and the blood is hot. Tommy turns south on lower Pleasant Street. In the vista framed by the cruiser’s windshield, a dark thunderstorm sky that won’t come this way hovers over the Holyoke Range, lit from the west, a wall of green rising up to meet dark purple sky. For human eyes, there is ferment where the colors meet.

  Tommy turns around and heads back toward downtown. He glances at the little storefront of Primitive Leathers. “Whip me, beat me, make me feel cheap!” cries Tommy. He passes by. “I think cops here have to be a little more open-minded than they do in a lot of other places.” He adds, “Sometimes I think Northampton is the four corners of everywhere. Maybe every place is, but I think we have a little more. Maybe it’s all those psychologists’ shingles.”

  So many towns this size look sadly out-of-date on a summer night. But what an imaginative-looking place Northampton is on shirtsleeve evenings, the old buildings rolling by—the one over there with a rounded end like the stern of a Pullman railroad car, and that one with a turret on the top that looks as if it belongs in a fairy tale, and all those others with their window sashes painted cheery colors.

  The cruiser turns down Crafts Avenue, past a graffito on the brick wall of an alley: ROMANCE IS NOT SEXY. So much for champagne and candlelight. But on the sidewalks that surround downtown’s churches, on any given summer evening, the attractions of the natural world, the human hunger for each other, right now, right here on earth, are all visible in the pictures framed by the cruiser’s windows: Northampton roués making their moves in Birkenstocks; women draped in colorful Third World fabrics. In storefront after little storefront plumage is on sale, in dress shops and jewelry stores, and in boutiques that sell incense and exotic robes and sexy underwear. One hawker hands out ads for Self-Esteem Electrolysis, another for a show tonight at the Fire and Water Café, where a moonlighting college professor will perform an original one-woman cabaret entitled Conceptual Orgasm. Quick, darting swallows disappear beneath a gutter over the awning of a shoe store, as if birds, too, have secret assignations. A buxom transvestite ambles across Main Street. “Look at the rack on that guy,” says Tommy. “But, hey! This is America.” A pair of women in short shorts go jogging by. “I better get out of here. I’m having impure thoughts.”

  Shortly after dark, Tommy parks his cruiser behind the Castle and sneaks around behind Memorial Hall. Standing in the shadows, he surveys Pulaski Park. He’s looking for teenagers dealing drugs and drinking. Instead, he sees a female couple on a bench, locked in heavy petting, like a single figure with the several arms of Shiva. He turns away and heads back for his cruiser. In the parking lots behind Main Street, he glimpses a familiar sight: girls whose parents won’t let them out in immodestly short skirts crouching behind their cars, changing into their dancing clothes.

  He drives to the upper deck of the parking garage to render advice to one of the young officers, who has come across an awkward situation—a young woman’s battered car parked beside her boss’s Mercedes. When the patrolman shined his flashlight into the more expensive car’s backseat, the couple were about to be in flagrante delicto. No crime in that, but the woman’s car is improperly registered. Tommy confers with the officer. “You have every legal right to take her plate. Or you can cut them some slack.” Tommy drives away. “I guess she’s trying to move up in the world,” he says. “When the weather gets warm it’s amazing where people will fuck. It just proves that people are part of the animal kingdom.”

  In the perfumed night, under the lights on Main Street, the town looks all paired up, like Noah’s ark. The supervisor’s cruiser passes by the coffee shops. The day’s last meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous has adjourned, and what some locals call “the Hell’s Angels’ coffee klatsch” has begun—tough-looking men and women in leathers, sipping coffee and licking ice cream cones beside a fleet of motorcycles. Nearby on the sidewalk, Alan Scheinman stands alone. He’s dressed in hand-tooled cowboy boots and a silk shirt unbuttoned almost to his navel. Sipping iced coffee through a straw, Alan stares intently at the passing crowd, looking for her.

  One day while Alan was riding down the bike path, he saw another bicycle coming toward him, and a vision sprang into his mind. “A metaphorical image,” he called it. One person comes riding along, trailing all his “issues” behind, like cans tied to a newlyweds’ car. That person meets another similarly encumbered, and a terrible tangle ensues.

  The other bicyclist passed. He nodded to Alan. Alan said hi and rode on. Then another image surfaced. This time two strangers meet without their baggage being visible. But all of it is there, a huge pyramid of other people underneath each of them, a mile-high construction made up of their ancestors, their parents, the doctors who delivered them, their baby-sitters, the people who had looked at them in their baby carriages and pulled their little earlobes—a huge invisible crowd gathering when two strangers meet casually and glance at each other and one says hi. These thoughts amused Alan, and they left him no further from despair.

  He toyed now and then with the idea of going back to work. He’d long imagined developing the back side of Main Street. He made fast tours of a couple of buildings and talked to the owners, but his interest kept waning and reviving and waning again. He said, “I try hard but I suffer from indecision. One of my fears is that I’ll get started on something and be stuck, or not achieve some announced objective.” He seemed to be waiting for something to happen to him, like another meteor shower.

  Then one day, at
the end of a long walk, he resolved to act. “I’m not exactly a prime candidate for huge changes,” he said. “But at the very least I could start with the thought that I kept telling Suzanne: that if you don’t do anything, nothing changes.” By the time he got back to his apartment, he had made up his mind. “To have a more rewarding relationship I’m going to have to let go of a number of things.”

  He’d been, he said, “the patron saint of strippers.” He’d stop hanging around with them so much. “And maybe I’ll stop taking pictures of the kinds of things I’ve been photographing.” He began the next day, in his apartment. He sorted through piles of photographs. “Someday I’ll either have a show, or when I die people will find this huge body of moderately pornographic material.” He gathered up the many props he had acquired for photographing fantasies that he and his models had concocted: leather bikinis, a red latex bodysuit, feathery masks, garter belts and outlandishly high-heeled shoes, black leather vests and collars. All these he now deposited in boxes, which he sealed and carried downstairs to his storage room.

  For years he’d saved a box of letters from his first real girlfriend. He threw them away.

  The odd wooden contraption still stood in a corner. It looked like a piece of sculpture now. Birdhouses dangled where once young women had hung by the arms, posing for his camera. “Gosh,” said Alan, looking at it, “I went out with so many kinky girls I can’t even remember which one wanted me to make it.”

  “I have a date Saturday night,” Alan said about a week later. “She’s on welfare, has two kids, goes to community college. She has a goal. She’s kind of pretty. The problem is, there’s this huge socioeconomic gap between us, which I’m more sensitized to than ever.” She lived in a Northampton housing project. He had never visited one of those. On their date, they were going to Boston with her kids. He fretted over whether to take them in the Rolls, which would be comfortable, or his other car, a battered Honda. “When it comes to human beings as opposed to numbers, I’m totally hopeless. Things exist in reality in a much tinier form than they do in my mind. I’m probably a person who should have had an arranged marriage. Just one bad experience after another. It’s almost safer to ruminate on Suzanne than to go back out on the street again. I’m really scared about this date.” He chose the Honda.

  The next week, heading off to the project on his motorcycle, Alan said, “I’m on the road to another adventure.” He said of the new woman, “She has had probably as many bad relationships as I have.”

  Alan’s prospective new girlfriend had come down with the flu. While she slept, he took charge of her children, one three, the other five. He squired them all over downtown, buying them treats. He watched them cavort on the playground equipment in Pulaski Park. “It was nice,” he said afterward. “I got a chance to be controlling and parental with actual children, instead of thirty-year-old women.” He liked the housing project. It seemed like a real community, a place where neighbors helped each other out.

  He hadn’t slept with her. He wasn’t sure he wanted to. He was awaiting what he called “chemistry.” He had paid for dancing lessons for her daughter. And he was very worried about doing too much this time—of making this woman feel he was trying to buy her, of letting her know there were a lot of things that he could buy. “I’m trying to be careful, but I think she spotted me in my Rolls.”

  He rented a movie, a Hollywood production, not especially risqué, and brought it to his new girlfriend’s place. They’d been watching only a few minutes when, the actors on her TV screen having fallen into a clinch, she said, “This is too racy for me.” He left her apartment disconsolate.

  From time to time errands took him out of town and north past the Castaways, and he’d always look for Suzanne’s car. He hadn’t seen it there or caught a glimpse of her downtown in a long time. He decided she had moved. The thought smothered him. One night he went down to the office that he rented out on the floor below his rooms and called her number. He let it ring a couple of times and then, in a panic, hung up. Almost immediately the phone in the office rang. The person on the other end, Suzanne presumably, must have used the call-back option. He got out of there fast. He walked across Main Street to the Hotel Northampton, and at the pay phone called her number again and again hung up, and again the phone he’d used began to ring immediately. He felt wretched. Some nights later he saw her profile reflected in the glass of a door he was about to enter. He hurried away, taking refuge around a corner.

  Reflecting on her time with Alan, Suzanne said, “It just really felt like he was making the moves for me and living my life. He’d breathe for me probably, if he could. I’d mention something so casually, an author, or something I was thinking of doing, and next thing I knew there was a package at my door or on my table. It was nothing that I was going to be able to really pursue, I felt like. On my own. He’d do it for me too much.” She thought it poignant. “But it’s not enough to weave this sort of tapestry of love. I think there has to be, I think you have to be maybe partners more, and, a little more equal. It’s a thing I have trouble with, too. My sister calls me the blonde who makes the plans.”

  Her psychiatrist had told her that what lay behind her stripping was an obstacle in her life, and she agreed. She remembered his telling her, “You think you’re earning a decent amount of money right now. You have a certain amount of independence where you don’t have to work five days a week nine to five and you can take three weeks off if you want to and travel, and you can make this much money. But if we get through this, you can make as much money, you can have the same freedom and everything else.” She had remained skeptical. “I feel in a way that I’m still the wounded woman or something. I see a lot of that, in the women I’m working with, that I’m stripping with, women with great potential but with something wrong.” She said, of her therapist, “He’s like, ‘We need to spend two years on this, so you can get this out of your system and out of your way.’ ” She had quit going to him now, only partly because of the expense. “I think I can find things out in another fashion. I don’t want to try to exhume things. I like the mystery, anyway.”

  So she was still dancing. She needed the money, and she insisted she still liked the work. “I do! I really do! I like being the center of attention. I like making people feel good. I like the whole challenge of that, and the turnover that’s involved in that, too, and a crowd, you know. I can get a following and everything else, you know. I don’t think I could get that in a lot of other jobs. You know, a lot of people say, my gosh, you’re really a dancer and a comedienne, because after a while if things are getting really dry and slow, I’ll just do something, just do something funny and just do my best to be Jay Leno or something up there on the stage, and it usually works.”

  She wasn’t tired of the work, but she was sick of the Castaways. “I need a change. I need a challenge. I need to move up. I need to challenge myself and go see a dance coach, and develop a new routine, and feel like I’m a little more invested in it. It’s too easy just to cruise through. And the money hasn’t been good at the Castaways lately. People are saving money, whatever. I’ve just heard that the business is down. So I can’t afford to have that happen.” Alan had told her once that if she had to do that kind of work, she ought to do it at a place like Saint-Moritz, not a grubby little joint in western Massachusetts. She didn’t feel ready to go that far. But the region contained larger, better strip clubs than the Castaways.

  Alan has decided to go out slumming with some friends. They’ll have a few drinks, some good conversation, a mildly picaresque adventure. In the afternoon, Alan’s party arrives in downtown Springfield, in front of the Mardi Gras.

  On the windows, multicolored blinking lights outline a cartoon painting of a naked reclining woman and a champagne glass. The windows are all painted over: no free looks inside allowed. The vista up the street, of gray, half-demolished city blocks, hardly looks inviting, but the doorway even less. Almost anyone would feel a qualm when entering a place like th
at in daylight. To leave a nighttime street for a dingy bar or strip joint is one thing. It is different on a sunny afternoon. The daylight is reproachful, a reminder that a choice is being made, again, to waste the daylight of a life. So the atmosphere seems just right for slumming. Alan and his friends enter laughing through the turnstile; no cover charge is levied at that early hour. The crowd inside is small, but a couple of women are performing on the stage, one lying on her back in gynecological position, another rubbing herself against a pole that reaches to the ceiling. The elevated stage has those same blinking Christmas tree–like lights around it. Alan says he thinks electricians probably have a special name for them. Then he sees Suzanne.

  She is between sets, dressed in high heels and a black string bikini, which leaves to the imagination only a few square millimeters more than the bodies writhing on the stage. She might be a picture of the universal nightmare, in which one finds oneself in underwear in public. It is like Suzanne, however, not to grab a robe. For Alan, both the splendid and the terrible in her.

  They stand beside a round table a little distance from the stage, bathed in dark orange light. Alan stands as close to her as a person can without making contact, his pale blue eyes fastened on her face. She looks squarely back at him. It is inevitable, of course, that they should meet this way again.

  Alan approaches his friends, who are sitting by the stage, and says they have to leave. In the car, he tells them, “Suzanne said to me, ‘Isn’t it funny? We first broke the ice at a strip joint, and now we’re meeting in a strip joint again.’ ” He says they made a dinner date for tomorrow night. He says, with a question in his voice that asks whether he is understood, “My heart is like a bell that’s stopped ringing but is still vibrating?”

  On Main Street a boy is practicing the craft of panhandling. His clothes are clean. His pants have a brand name on them. “Got any spare change?” he calls to Alan.