Call from Jersey (9781468301625)

by Kluge, P. F.

  VIII.

  PAST THE PERTH AMBOY TOLLBOOTHS, I came into a zone that would challenge any travel writer: essence of New Jersey. Check it out. Tired looking tar-paper-sided houses, motels and gas stations, a fourteen-screen movie theater next to a place that offered clowns and pizza and then, up onto the Raritan Bridge, arching over a sprawl of chemical plants and ponds, rotting wharves, factory parking lots, high-tension wires, oil refineries where smokestacks, burning off gas, looked like giant pilot lights, flaming day and night, marking a shoreline that asphyxiated fish shared with washed up medical syringes. But I was happy, happier than I’d been in years, because Pauline Kennedy still had hopes for me and now—this is all it took— the Drifters were on the radio, singing “Save the Last Dance for Me.”

  Suddenly I felt that I hadn’t returned from high school to the present at all. I was still back there somewhere, young and promising, a writer-to-be, driving a car in the dark and listening to a heart-capturing song, and sometimes when I think of God, I picture him as a kind of disc jockey, a sort of Wolfman Jack, plugged into a mega transmitter that can send music wherever it wants and, if you were lucky, God the disc jockey sent out the perfect music to match your mood. The Drifters, the Silhouettes, the Moonglows, all the bird groups, Meadowlarks, Robins, Orioles, those eerie doo-wop harmonies, and Jesse Belvin singing “Goodnight, My Love” while we danced the last dance in the high school gym, crepe paper trailing off basketball hoops, coats piled on classroom desks, cars parked outside, waiting for us to match the mood with the road. It all came back: the ache, the awkwardness, the whispers and, after saying goodnight, the ride home, the loosened tie, the rolled-down window, the rolled up sleeves, turning Saturday night into Sunday morning.

  Failure, not success, was what used to bring me to Irene’s. When my dates ended earlier than I had hoped, as they always did, I would come into Irene’s for a sausage-and-peppers sandwich. I would sit at a counter with people who always looked like they’d made out better than I had. Some of the guys had their dates with them, mussed up, pawed-over women in whom horniness had yielded to hunger. God, how I wanted to join them! Pauline Kennedy was right. They were my audience, those Jersey people parked along the counter, those couples tucked in booths, the guys in gym class, the girls in the bleachers at basketball games, they and their parents too, they were the ones I pictured when I sat down to write. There were classier audiences out there, but I performed for Jersey people. I performed for years too long, never deciding whether I was thumbing my nose at them or blowing a kiss, celebrating where I had come from or how far away I’d gotten. You’d think I’d have figured that out by now. That, I guessed, was why Pauline Kennedy wanted me at that reunion.

  As soon as I stepped inside, I was sorry. There was no mistaking it, the place was owned by Greeks now. You developed an instinct for this: the whorehouse carpeting, the black Naugahyde booths, the wood-veneered plastic paneling, the oil painting of the Parthenon, the shiny black pants and wrinkled white shirt on a tired looking waiter emptying a can of beans into a bowl on the salad bar, with all the style of a mechanic popping a can of Quaker State into a clunker that had started burning oil. But the hostess said they still made sausage and peppers sandwiches, so I let her lead me to a booth and, declining adventure at the salad bar, I stepped over to the juke box, and someone tapped me on the shoulder.

  “Hey, dipstick, the reunion’s three weeks from now.” Someone from high school? Whoever he was, he’d gotten old fast: big had gone to heavy, blonde had gone to mostly bald.

  “You don’t know me?”

  “Wait a minute, it’ll come.” But I doubted it would and he looked like he doubted it too, daring me, as though he was wearing a disguise I’d never be able to penetrate. Then, to my surprise, I had him.

  “Gooker Cerruti,” I said, offering my hand. Dan Cerruti, nicknamed “Gooker” for his habit of tramping through brooks and swamps, rolling in mud, hunting frogs. “Not a nice boy,” Mom said. Still, we’d been friends once.

  “Still in the neighborhood?” I asked.

  “You don’t think I’d drive from out of state to eat here, do you? No, George, I’m staying close to the scene of the crime.”

  “How are you doing, Gooker?”

  “Come on over and sit with us. I’ll tell you.” He led me to a booth which looked out on Route 22. Dining-with-a-view: all that separated sixty miles per hour west from sixty miles per hour east was a concrete divider and a cloud of poisonous exhaust. It was a miracle that they could grow the best tomatoes in the world in this state. Or make sausage and pepper sandwiches they’d never manage in Colorado.

  “The girls are in the john,” Gooker explained.

  “Wife and daughter?”

  “Wife and wife’s friend,” he responded, glancing towards a ladies room door that had a cut-out figure of a Greek peasant woman with a basket of melons on her head. I couldn’t see what was on the men’s room door. A guy at a deep-fryer?

  “You know both of them,” Gooker said.

  And so I did, instantly. There was Kate Kramer, “Kiss Me, Kate,” a game, spunky cheerleader whom Gooker had dated all through high school. And the woman who followed her—who stared at me and then, God knows why, blushed—was Joan Simmons and now I was sure I was back twenty plus years, that I’d never left town at all, because my heart was in my throat.

  “Hello, George,” she said, reaching for my hand which— thank God—hadn’t even had time to break into the clammy sweat they used to produce whenever she was in the vicinity.

  “Hi, Joan,” I said, stepping aside as she slid into the booth, right next to me. She’d been a year behind me, when those things mattered, when a senior who dated a junior would be kidded about “robbing the cradle.” Yet we had dated, a dozen times at least, and nothing was robbed. By junior year, Joan Simmons had the sort of figure boys cartooned in schoolbooks. “She won’t do anything,” the word was, and I never proved otherwise. Still, it could make you feel grown up, just walking with her. She was game about going into New York and once she got me to acquiesce in her policy that there would be no sex between us— our mutual understanding that her body was something that could harm us both, so we’d better not arouse it—she was good company. After high school, we’d lost touch. The world was full of women I hadn’t met. Still, I wondered about her sometimes. What became of high school beauties anyway?

  After the hellos, the hugs, the stares, Gooker took charge, which was alright with me. I’d talked about myself enough today. And what do you say to the likes of Joan Simmons after half a lifetime? “What’s new?” “How you doing?” Besides, my life got tracked through newspapers, my columns were like letters to the mildly interested, and there was that photo that I changed every couple of years, so people could watch me grow older. But Gooker was an unknown. Kate and Gooker. And Joan. Gooker was easy. It all came tumbling out: the tire business on Route 22, the equestrian estate in Basking Ridge, the time share in the Poconos, the age of his kids, the cost of his home, the prospect of retirement, Gooker favoring Florida while Kate had thoughts of Charleston. His many excellences, his memorable errors, his secret pleasures. Europeans denounce us for this full, unforced disclosure; Japanese are appalled by our lack of restraint. I loved it. So little time, so much catching up to do! That’s what it was, catching up, and underlying it—what foreigners miss—the notion that we were in life together and catching up brought us back in formation, back where we belonged and we could move forward not as a generation—that was too literary—not as a gang—that made us closer than we were—but as what the old man called “a bunch.” That’s what we were. A bunch.

  “So,” Gooker said when he’d finished his adventures in cocoa futures. “What about you, hotshot?”

  “You see the column, don’t you?”

  “Sure we do, but …”

  “I cut out the article about castles you can stay in around Austria and Germany,” Kate interjected, appealing to Gooker. “That sounded like something we m
ight do.”

  “Anyway, you married or something?” Gooker asked. He wasn’t into castles. “Or you just dial room service?”

  “I was married. No more.”

  “What’d she …” Gooker’s expression darkened. “She didn’t die?”

  “Oh no. She lived.”

  “Kids?”

  “No.”

  “That’s nothing, then,” Kate said. “Getting married and having no kids is like going steady, is all.”

  “A divorce like yours doesn’t mean dippity,” Gooker declared. “If it were a car accident it would be a fender-bender. Just drive away from it.”

  I sensed that my story was going flat. Ho-hum. It needed punching up.

  “She was a stewardess, actually,” I said. That got their interest.

  “A stewardess?” asked Kate. “Isn’t that kind of a … cliché?”

  “Well, it happened.”

  “Hey, listen, George,” Gooker asked. “Is it true what they say about those girls …”

  “You mean, a man in every country? Like sailors?”

  “No, not that.”

  “The mile-high club?” Kate asked. She was a game woman, give her credit, hanging in with Gooker, smirk for smirk. An oddly companionable couple, in an x-rated pop-some-popcorn-and-put-on-a-porn-film way.

  “What I hear is that stewardesses have an unlimited supply of those little weenie cocktail bottles they wheel around on carts. They got closets full of them, I hear.”

  “Not that I saw.”

  “Well, shit! First they took away Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny …”

  “Who’d she fly for?” Joan asked.

  “Thai.”

  “She was …”

  “Yes.”

  “George, old buddy,” Gooker said. Now he was really impressed. “We’ve got to talk. What happened?”

  “She was someone who wanted to come to the U.S. badly. A green card kind of thing.”

  “I heard about those cases,” Gooker said. “Arrangements of convenience.”

  “I was doing a favor,” I said.

  “Yeah, right,” Gooker said. “Did you put the blocks to her?”

  “Gooker!” Kate protested.

  “Excuuuuse me,” he said. “Like you weren’t wondering.”

  “I thought it might … develop … once we got to New York. This was someone I’d have done anything for. But what I did was all she wanted.”

  “The perfect husband!” Kate said. “It’s … in a way … romantic. It’s noble!”

  “I still think you should’ve put the blocks to her,” Gooker said. “It’s not like you were asking for the moon.”

  “You were always a nice guy,” Joan offered. “I’m not surprised.”

  “What have you been up to, Joan?”

  “Oh …” she stubbed out a cigarette, looked up, and for the first time our eyes met. “I’ve been busy fucking up my life.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. I felt as though she were accusing me; it sounded as though I were apologizing to her, as if it were my fault.

  “Hey,” Gooker said. “If yours was a fender-bender, Joan’s was … boy … it was a head-on collision. Total.”

  “We should’ve never been on the road,” Joan said. She looked out at Route 22. There was a break in traffic and I noticed the garbage that collected along the divider, blown out tires, beer cans, chunks of styrofoam. She looked at me. “One kid.”

  “You’re skipping something,” Kate prodded.

  “What’s that?”

  “Who you married.”

  “Oh.” She turned to me. “You knew, didn’t you? I always thought you must’ve heard, some way.”

  “No.”

  “I married Kenny Hauser.”

  “Kenny,” I said. “You married Kenny? You’re kidding!” We were friends, Kenny and I. We were rivals. We were budding writers, co-winners of the I-Speak-For-Democracy contest, the Ruth and Gehrig of the National Forensic League. He edited the yearbook, I honchoed the school newspaper. We were going to be great, of course. It happened all the time, I guessed. How great? How soon? Those were just details. Catch me in Hollywood or Paris, my book in Scribner’s window, that gorgeous woman on my arm, making a speech, accepting an award. You might say these things pass, these youthful boasts and ententes. Maybe not. If I hadn’t been in touch with Kenny Hauser, or he with me, it was only because we weren’t ready to come to the table yet. Meanwhile, the years slipped by.

  “Tell me something,” Gooker said. “You ever do any travel pieces on Israel?”

  “Not much.”

  “Come to Israel, come stay with friends?” he pressed. “All that bullshit?”

  “No.”

  “Because that’s who your old friend Kenny Hauser works for these days.”

  “I didn’t know,” I said, glancing at Joan and, once again, sorry that I hadn’t kept in better touch … in any touch at all, really. It was odd how we cluttered our lives and avoided going back to the subjects of our true wonder. “What about the insurance business? His father’s outfit? Hauser Agency?”

  “Oh sure,” Gooker answered, “he fills out a form, what’s your occupation, he puts down insurance. Beats writing down, agent of a foreign government. But the insurance is on automatic pilot. Bunch of women running it. Israel is what your old buddy lives and dies for. He’s on TV all the time.”

  I glanced at Joan, waiting to see how she reacted to Gooker’s denunciation of her ex-husband. Was she one of those divorced people who sifted the past, picking out the good parts? Or did she repudiate it all? I found, when I looked, that she was staring at me.

  “I always thought you knew about us,” she said. “I assumed you knew.”

  I shrugged. “News to me.”

  “Hey, come on Joan. It wasn’t in the newspapers. How’s George going to find out? Flying Thai!”

  Kate gave her husband a look. He made Thai sound like thigh. And he made it sound dirty. Meanwhile, Joan was still giving me a look as though—somehow—she was upset that I hadn’t heard about her and Kenny.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s just that …”

  “What?” Gooker pressed, but not unkindly. I think he was intrigued.

  “Well, when you grow up together, the way we did …” She threw up her hands. “Never mind. It’s … you figure that word gets around. One way or another.”

  Gooker shook his head and held his tongue. He gave me a look—half shudder, half shrug—which implies that things didn’t work that way. People weren’t connected.

  “Not that it would have made any difference,” Joan added, in a way that suggested maybe it would have.

  “What I hope,” I said, “for your sake and Kenny’s … is that it wasn’t all always bad. I hope it was good first.”

  “Oh, sure,” she replied. “We had some good times in there, someplace.”

  “Well, hell, who doesn’t have memories,” Gooker declared. “I dropped dead tomorrow, Kate would have a lifetime of memories to live on.”

  “Oh really?” Kate deadpanned.

  “Oh Christ …”

  “I mean, is there a specific occasion you have in mind?”

  “Geez, I’m tired of that Jewish stuff,” Gooker said, returning to familiar ground. Kate rolled her eyes. I guessed she’d heard it all before. “I’m tired of that shit. Okay? Sue me! Never forget and never again and all that. They think they’re turning me on. I got news, babe. They’re turning me off. Push comes to shove, I’m telling you … What ever gave him the right to preach?”

  Gooker made me uncomfortable. The oldies but goodies mood that had carried me up from Lakehurst was gone, replaced by transmissions from another station, an abrasive all-talk all-news operation. I tried to change things.

  “So … how’s the reunion?” I asked.

  “You wouldn’t believe it,” Gooker said. “The work.”

  “I wish he never started,” Kate said. “People don’t appreciate it.”

  “Hey! If
I don’t do it, who will? If I don’t make those phone calls, they don’t get made. And there’s no reunion.”

  “Well? Is that such a tragedy? If you want to see people, you see them. So why bring together a bunch of people you don’t care about, you barely even remember?”

  “The fifth and the tenth were snaps,” Gooker said. “Everybody’s still around or if they’re not, then their parents are. Like your old man. I want to get in touch with you, I call him … bingo. But now, oh baby, we’re out beyond the reef.”