Call from Jersey (9781468301625)

by Kluge, P. F.

  “People moved away?”

  “Parents are going, going, gone. Once they’re not around, it’s a whole different ballgame. One local phone call turns into four, long distance. Ex-wives, former employers, realtors, landlords, hell, a parole officer for Ronny Filippo. And Carol Saunders. I called a booking agent in Vegas. Unbelievable.”

  “I still don’t know why you do it,” Kate said. “No one even thanks you.”

  “I told you. It doesn’t happen without me.”

  “My point,” Kate said. “Exactly.”

  “Christ,” Gooker said. He turned to me. “This was an accident,” he said, “meeting you here, right?”

  “I came out to see my father,” I granted.

  “Well, let me tell you this. From a guy who knew you in gym class. We’ve got this reunion coming up. Don’t even think about missing it.”

  “He’s been kind of telling people you’ll be there,” Kate said. “Everybody.”

  “Who cares?”

  “You’re an attraction,” Kate said. “Your column and all.” The way she smiled at me, I knew she had delivered a compliment, a plain compliment, and it made me cringe. Right then, I wished I’d done more. Or, failing that, that the work I’d done had been less successful, that I was a writer’s writer, cruelly neglected. A poet, even.

  “We’re out of here,” Gooker said.

  “It’s gotten late,” Kate agreed. Then, on our way out the door, I saw one of those transactions—wordless question, silent answer— which took me right back to high school. Kate to Joan: Who’s taking you home?

  “I’ll give you a lift,” I said.

  “If it’s not out of your way.”

  “Even if it is. How often do I get to talk to you?”

  We watched Kate and Gooker pull out onto the highway we all lived on, the way people used to live on rivers; if you didn’t get out into the current you were becalmed, landlocked, dead. When I turned to face her, she had curled up in the seat, tucking her feet beneath her, the way women used to pose for calendars, tossing her hair a little as she moved.

  “So what’s he really into?” I asked.

  “You mean Gooker?”

  “Yes. I mean Gooker.” And I did, but Gooker was just a warm up.

  “What about him?” she asked. “What exactly?”

  “Come on, Joan.”

  “Women,” she said. “That’s what Gooker is into these days.”

  “And Kate?”

  “She lives with it.”

  “That so? How well does she live with it?”

  “You and your questions, George. Sometimes we used to go out, you asked more questions than my parents did when I got home. Kate evens the score, George. Now I told you, I’m trusting you not to …”

  “Who am I going to tell?”‘

  “The thing of it is, they’ve stayed together. That’s something. And you know what? Gooker? He’s always there. And he never changes.”

  “That’s good news? Gooker forever?” It sounded like a life sentence. “I’m sorry about you and Kenny.”

  “He changed. Not like Gooker. Lots of people change, right?”

  “Except Gooker.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Kenny changed alright.”

  “What happened?”

  “I liked what you asked back there, did we have good times before the bad? It was … thoughtful.”

  “And you said yes.”

  “A lot of good times. How well did you know him?”

  “We were best friends once. I thought we were, anyway. I knew him as well as I knew you.” Something in that last line made me wince, as soon as I said it. This return to New Jersey was rough on tenses. Maybe it was wishful thinking, but I corrected myself. “As well as I know you …” It sounded clumsy too. I hadn’t seen Joan or Kenny for twenty years. Know or knew?

  “If you had to describe him to a stranger, what would you say?” she asked.

  “There was always something up with Kenny. You know? A project, a plan, a trip, a phone call. Things he couldn’t wait to share. The next big idea. It was always something. You wanted a word? One word? I’d say … restless.”

  “You got that right.”

  “Read the great books. Folk music in the village. Walk into a black bar in Newark. Take over student government.”

  “Catch up with Joan Simmons,” she said.

  “That too, I guess.”

  “But with Kenny, it’s never enough … one thing. He’s always looking for something else. The insurance … Gooker wasn’t wrong … it runs on its own. And he has all this energy. Even his hobbies. Golf one year, tennis the next, we had a boat in Atlantic Highlands for a while. He was always on the lookout for something special that would take over his life. Something he could put himself into totally.”

  “And then he remembered he was Jewish.”

  “He knew that all along. But Israel … that was what he was looking for.”

  “But … that didn’t have to mean divorce …”

  “Yeah, it did. You have to see it his way. There’s a kind of logic. If it were the kind of commitment he was looking for … total … I was a goner. Anything I could come along on would be … near beer.”

  “Now I get it,” I said. And I did. That would be Kenny, over-the-top and all-out. No trailing spouse, no next of kin. The only question—which I decided to save—was whether Kenny gave up his old life to find a new one or choose a new one to lose the old.

  “How about you, George,” Joan asked. “Have you changed?”

  “There’s a difference of opinion,” I began. “Some say, yes I’ve changed. Others say, no.” It surprised me how easily this talk came to us, this resumption of intimacy after years of not knowing. “It goes on from there. One school of thought says I’ve changed too much. The other says, too little.”

  “Sounds like you’ve got people talking about you, at least.”

  “Maybe. But it’s nothing that I hadn’t thought of myself. What about you?”

  “Post-Kenny, you mean?”

  “Yeah. What now?”

  “Beats me. I spend a lot of time wondering how to get from here … to there.”

  “Where’s there?”

  “Out … away … gone. Any suggestions? You’ve been all over.”

  “Let me think about it,” I said. I doubted an answer would come to me soon. She was New Jersey. She was on the inside looking out and I was on the outside looking in and what it came to was what the old man liked to call “the same difference.”

  “Well, if you think of something,” she said, sitting up, looking ready to leave, “put it in a letter. Or call me. I’m in the book.”

  “You know what I’d like to do?” I said. “Tonight?”

  She didn’t say yes, she didn’t say no, but she listened for what was coming and that made me feel like I was back in high school with her, not certain if I was asking too much, which was wrong, or too little, which was also wrong. Poised between two kinds of regret, I tried to ask for something that was just right.

  “I’d like us to take a ride. Just around.”

  “You’re on,” she said. She smiled.

  Cruising past shopping centers and drive-ins that were almost as old as we were, she took control of the radio without being asked to—I liked that take charge touch—and stopped turning when she ran across Frankie Valli keening “Big Girls Don’t Cry.” I told her about God-the-D.J.

  “That’s what I like about New Year’s Eve,” she said. “The only thing I like. The way they play old songs, counting down through the years.”

  “It’s a little too soon to give up,” I said, echoing what Pauline Kennedy told me. “You were always smart. You still are. And you’re still looking good.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “You’re looking better, actually.”

  “Are you hitting on me, George?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Well, when you decide … tell me, okay?” She laughed and
curled up on the seat, like we’d been going steady for awhile. “Same old George,” she said.

  We turned off the highway and drove up into the Watchung Mountains through Mountainside, New Providence, Berkeley Heights, past houses where people we used to know used to live, where their parents—one or both—still sometimes lingered, but most had turned over, houses devouring generations, so that the realtors’ signs seemed to say fill me, feed me, next! We talked about everyone we knew and when we got to the end of that, silence came, but it wasn’t empty silence, because the open window gave us the summer night, full, heavy, just at the edge of turning, and the radio kept pumping out oldies but goodies, so the silence was alright, it was better than okay, because there was no place else we would rather be than in a car, driving around, with Buddy Holly singing “True Love Ways.”

  “You know where to, now?” I asked and I expected her to tense, guessing whether I wanted to take her to a motel or something, but that wasn’t what I had in mind.

  “Yes,” she said. “I know.”

  “Where?” I challenged, feeling in control. “I’ll bet you don’t.”

  “The thirteen bumps.”

  “Jesus!” I said. “You got it.”

  Five minutes later I turned up onto Johnson’s Drive for the first time in twenty years. This was memory lane time, jolting over the 13 speed bumps that led up to the main part of the road, which ran along a ridge right above Route 22. Memory Lane? Lovers Lane, too. This was where we used to park. There were other places, better maybe, dark and secret sites all over Watchung Reservation, but they didn’t have the view from Johnson’s Drive. From here you could look down at the river of highways, the shopping malls, where search lights panned the skies when new stores opened. You could sight across the sprinkled lights of the suburbs all the way to where Goethals Bridge arched over to Staten Island. And—though it took a clear night—sometimes, beyond the salt meadows, beyond Jersey City’s humping shoulder, you could spot the topmost stories of Manhattan’s tallest buildings. It was a wonderful place to feel romantic: an aching, yearning, promontory place. I could feel it now, an enormous surge of memory, a whole wave of wanting, when New York City was in the direction of my dreams, so that I could sit for hours with Joan or sometimes Kenny and see my future on the horizon, twenty miles east. That was high school, senior year.

  “Does anybody come here anymore?” I asked. There were new houses on both sides of the road.

  “Are you kidding? Kids don’t park in cars anymore. They’ve got vans. They’ve got summer places. They’ve got their parents’ permission.”

  “Oh.” I felt silly. Parking up here now, I wasn’t acting my age, I wasn’t even acting like a kid. I was acting like the sort of kid who didn’t exist anymore.

  “Are you surprised, George? Disappointed?”

  “I don’t know.” But I did know. I knew as soon as I came around a curve and found a little road that led to a clearing, a cul de sac we shared with some beer cans and a tipped over shopping cart. Unbuildable lot, unbeatable view. When I snapped off the headlights, it felt like I was turning off a bedroom light, not to sleep but to dream, dream of a boil of lights that stretched out forever, highway lights and refinery beacons and planes circling over Newark Airport and the far touch of the Manhattan skyline, like a first glimpse of Oz.

  “Wow,” I said. “I’d almost forgotten.”

  “Not me,” she said. “We used to come up here and … let’s face it … as far as sex goes …” She laughed. “You weren’t about to … I mean, even if I was willing … You weren’t going to …”

  “Pathetic.”

  “All I’m saying is that I loved sitting up here and looking out and talking. I loved talking to you. You bubbled over with things. And I wished …” She turned away. “I wished that I could hang in there with you a little more. That’s what you never knew. You were going places. And I wished I could’ve come with. I missed out.”

  “We both missed out, maybe.”

  “And if we’d connected, that wouldn’t have changed things, would it? Should it? You’d have gone anyway. You were headed out, it was written all over you. And I was staying.”

  “And here we sit.”

  “Yeah.” I ran my thumb, then the side of my hand over the tip of her cheek, feeling for tears and finding them and she watched me do this, eyes-wide. “You must think I’m such a mope, George. I’m not. I do lots of things. Read. Take classes. Ordinarily, I’m okay, considering. Really. But seeing you at the diner tonight … and coming up here now … it makes me thoughtful.”

  Now she fished in her purse for some Kleenex to dab her face with, then a cigarette. The tears were gone now. I sensed a change in her, a shift of gears. She looked at me as if she hadn’t decided what to do with me. Or as though she wanted me to decide what to do with her.

  “So,” she said. “Did you ever get to your big three?”

  “What?”

  “You used to go around saying there were three places you had to see before you die. You wanted to see Tahiti because it was the most opposite from New Jersey. Remember?”

  “What were the others?”

  “Mount Kilimanjaro, because of some Hemingway short story. We even went to see the movie they made out of it at the Strand, down in Plainfield. I remember you said it was nothing like the story.”

  “That I remember.”

  “And you were already doing research. You told me that the thing about Kilimanjaro was you could walk to the top of the mountain. No ropes or pitons needed. Did you ever make it?”

  “Not quite to the top,” I confessed, uncomfortable with the implication that I hadn’t scaled the peak. “You can walk it alright. But the altitude gets to you and there’s no way of knowing about that until you try it.”

  “The thin air got you.”

  “Yes,” I said. “The air.”

  “What about Tahiti?”

  “Easy. I’ve been there a half dozen times.”

  “God, you used to get excited about Tahiti. You said it right here. You said it was as far away as you could get from New Jersey.”

  “It’s gotten closer.”

  “And Tibet?”

  “Soon.”

  “You don’t sound so excited about it.”

  “Because …” I leaned back in the seat, hands behind my neck, and stretched. She was good at asking questions; in no time she was hitting the same sore point the old man had been pounding at for years. “By the time I get to a place, the game’s already over, Joan. It’s on the circuit. Airlines, hotels, tours, the whole drill. I’m the leader of the pack. I travel alone, but there are plane loads and busloads behind me, which is something I don’t always feel good about.”

  “So tell me something about Bangkok. You mentioned Thailand and Gooker started to go into orbit.”

  “It might have been a great city once,” I said. “Or pleasant, anyway. You still see traces, canals and temples. The people are still there and the food. But it’s cars and traffic and smog. Gooker might still get turned on. There’s plenty of action, that’s for sure. But I don’t like to write about the place.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I started out discovering the world as it is. But these days, I sell the world as it’s not. Anyway, don’t rush off to Bangkok. It’s a Buddhist Los Angeles.”

  I heard an intake of breath, in, not out, as if I’d jabbed her.

  “What’s wrong?” She was looking out the window now, struggling with herself.

  “George?”

  “Yes?”

  “I haven’t even been to Los Angeles. Las Vegas is as close as I got.”

  I turned towards her. I touched her forehead, ran a finger over her face, turned it my way. I pulled her towards me and we kissed and in a moment we had gotten as far as we had ever gone. Our catching up. And what started as sympathy started turning. She was still something. I felt her nestling against me. I drew her closer. Joan Simmons! Gentlemen, start your engines!

&nbs
p; “My God!” she said. She went with it awhile. Now she stopped. “We’re necking! We’re parking on Johnson’s Drive and necking.” She glanced towards my hands. “You’re feeling me up!”

  “If the cops come by and shine a light in here …”

  “You’d better take me home, George.”

  These days she lived in an apartment just off the highway in Scotch Plains. It was the sort of red-brick, fifty-unit complex that used to be called a garden apartment, mostly because the developer tucked a few Japanese yew trees onto a patch of crab grass and left just enough room for a tripped-over tricycle and a Korean-made hibachi. We parked in front. I switched off the ignition, pushed in the headlight switch and wondered what would happen next.

  “I’ve got a confession to make,” she said. Oh no, I thought, here it comes: a younger boy toy stretched out in front of the television, a hard-body stud-muffin with a remote tuner in one hand, a beer in the other, please don’t tell Kate and Gooker. She took her time about it, though, lit a cigarette and inhaled slowly, the way they do in the movies, only after they’ve had sex. The smoke trailed out the open window, out towards the highway. I tried picturing what life was like in these garden apartments. Joan and her boyfriend. What would their program be? What would our program be? Rent a couple movies at Video Shack? Watch Blue Velvet? Surf-and-turf specials at the Bull and Barrel? Take a place down on the shore next summer, sand in your shoes, steaks on the grill, Springsteen on the radio?

  “I always thought of you as the chance I’d missed,” she said. It jolted me, the timing and the content. It wasn’t about a boyfriend. It was me. Holy shit, it was me! “The chance I wish I’d taken. Swear to God. I thought about you plenty. Once a week, anyway. Then I saw you sitting there in Irene’s when Kate and I stepped out of the ladies’ room, where she’d been telling me about this guy … and I saw you and I said, oh my God, is this my reward or punishment?”

  “That’s for you to decide.”

  “What I’ve decided, is that it wouldn’t feel right for us to go inside tonight and …”

  “So it’s just like the old times after all. I drop you off and drive home.”

  “I don’t like the picture. You walk into a diner and I’m there like I never left—which let’s face it, I haven’t—and you pick me up and drive me around and we go home to this …”