Stern

by Bruce Jay Friedman

  Inside the restaurant, Stern's father kept grabbing the elbows of waiters and customers, turning to Stern, and saying, “You know how long I know this guy?” Stern would guess, and his father would say, “I know this guy for seventeen years” or “We go all the way back to 1933,” bobbing his head up and down, as though to testify he was telling the truth, however astonishing the statement may have seemed.

  During dinner, Stern said, “I went through a cruddy period. I don't know what in the hell hit me.”

  “I heard,” said his father. “You know how I feel about you, though, don't you?”

  After a while, his father said, “How do you plan on getting back? I think, in your situation, your best bet is to walk over west and catch a bus going downtown. Lets you off slightly north of the station. You can duck down and walk the rest of the way underground or, if you like, you can grab a cab. I haven't figured out how I'm going home myself … “

  Often now, for the first time since it had happened, Stern was able to see the bitter episode in his recent life for what it was: an ignorant remark, a harmless shove, no one really hurt, much time elapsed, so what. Yet, other times, the thought of it became unbearable and he would try to shore up his mind against it. Then it was as though his head were a leaky basement which Stern patrolled from the inside, running over with plaster each time a picture of the man down the street threatened to slide in through a crack. One night, the basement leaked in so many places he could not get to them all.

  He had come back after a short visit to what his son called “the slippery houses,” a group of high, slanted, darkening hill peaks, all clumped together in a tilted village with cottages stuck on the sides like canapés. “We ought to get out of our house and see what it's like around us,” Stern had said to his wife and son, but they had always wound up taking a silent, peculiar drive to this one place. Their car could barely make it up the hills of the careening village, and Stern wondered what kind of people lived in such a strange, slanted place. It seemed you would have to be lowered down to your neighbor's house, if you wanted to do any visiting, and then hoisted back. He wondered what kind of tilted lives the people inside the houses led, what kind of wobbly activities they were up to, and whether they would come clinging and suction-footed to the door if he rang the bell. In all the visits, they saw only one person who lived in the village, a pointy-headed boy of the sort who was always being sent to town with bread and cheese and several farthings and then set upon immediately by rascals.

  Back home after the drive that night, Stern's son asked him if dinosaurs were good, and when Stern said, “There were all kinds,” the boy asked, “How about pirates? Were any of them daddies?”

  “Some pirates were daddies,” said Stern.

  During his troubled, spinning weeks, Stern had often brushed by the child, saying, “No elephants, no whale questions,” and gone to hold on to something or to lie somewhere in a sweat. Now, as though to make up for his brusqueness, he held talks with the boy on an almost formal schedule.

  “I can remember being inside Mommy,” said the child, taking off Stern's shoe. “I knew about the Three Stooges in there. Now I'm taking your foot's temperature. It's quarter past five.”

  During dinner, the boy said, “Were you ever a magician before you became my father?”

  “Right before,” said Stern.

  “Could you tear a Kleenex into a thousand pieces and then turn it back into a whole Kleenex again?”

  “I could do that one.”

  “Do you learn about the inside of soda at college?”

  “I don't know,” said Stern. “I don't know that. No soda now. No pirates. I'm just going to sit here.” He was eating an apricot dessert then, and he began to breathe so hard he thought something would fly out of his chest. “I've got to go out and get some air,” he told his wife.

  “Is it all right for daddies to go out in the dark?” asked the boy, and Stern said, “If they're very careful.”

  Outside, walking on leaves, Stern could not catch his breath and wondered if he should call a cab. He saw himself walking all the way to the man's house only to collapse, wordless and exhausted, on the doorstep, having to be put outside near the garbage for someone to see and take home. He thought it was unfair for him to be depleting his strength in a long, cold walk while the man sat in a tasteless but comfortable armchair, his forearms bulging after a day at the lathe.

  When he had gone a few hundred feet, he thought of turning around and telling his wife where he was headed or at least leaving a note on the porch so that someone would know his whereabouts in case he wound up cracked and bleeding, the life seeping out of him, yet completely out of public view. He imagined people saying of him later, “The funny part is they could have saved him if only they'd been able to find him in time.” He thought that perhaps he would find a man on the way, have him stand by, and, as soon as Stern's head hit a pipe or something, speed off to get an intern. The cold snapped about him now and seemed to have made everything a little harder. There would be no soft earth to fall into, and any contact at all with the ground would mean great, tearing skin scrapes.

  When he was halfway to the man's house, it crossed his mind for the briefest instant that the fluids drained from the bodies of unconscious people, and as a precaution against this embarrassment he stopped to urinate in some leaves. He was worried about being completely unable to talk when he got to the man's house, knocking at the door and then standing there, cold and choking, while the man inspected him. He had heard that if you did some physical exercise, tension would flow out of you, and once, before an important job interview, he had run briskly around the block. “Have you been running?” the interviewer asked, and Stern said, “I didn't want to be late.” The run had checked the tension, but Stern had gasped incoherently through the interview and come off poorly.

  Now he began to jog a little through the leaves; when he came to the man's house, he took a long time before actually setting foot on his property, a move which somehow would have made the visit irrevocable. He thought of just putting his heel inside the fence, crushing the grass down a bit, and then going back home and getting his mind so elastic and sophisticated he'd be able to see that crushing a little grass was defiance, too. It didn't have to be face-punching. But when he put one foot inside, he took another step, too, and then another, a man going into a cold pool, and then walked the rest of the way to the door at a brisk, routine pace, as though by walking routinely he could turn this into a routine call.

  There was a simple stone walk through some short grass and a step leading up to a brown oaken door. He had expected the house to have some memorable characteristics, symphonic music to play when he actually set foot inside the fence. He knocked on the door and suddenly shook with hope that the wife would answer and say she was sorry but the man was attending a meeting of the Guardian Sons. It was an election meeting to select officers who would be even more pinched and thin-lipped than the old crew. He would say to the woman, “Your husband said something to my wife and I want to say I know about it and he's not getting away with it. You tell him that.” Then he would be able to go back home, his mission accomplished. After all, he had tried. It wasn't his fault the man was not in.

  The man opened the door and Stern blinked to see him better, startled that although he stood only two feet away, he still could not really make out his face. It was as though he were looking at the man through an old pair of Japanese binoculars he had once bought. They were expensive, but Stern had never quite gotten them adjusted right and always saw things better with his eyes. He could see that the man was shoeless, however; wore blue jeans and a T-shirt; and kept his head cocked a little in the incredulous style Stern remembered so clearly. The beer had taken some effect; he seemed a little heavier than Stern recalled. His arms were about the same, perhaps a little thicker in the foresection than they had seemed to be from the car.

  “Are you the man who said kike to my wife?” asked Stern, happy he had only sho
rt sentences to get out.

  “I think I remember that.”

  “About a year and a half ago?”

  “That's right.”

  “You shouldn't say that, and we're going to fight.”

  “All right. Let me get my slippers on.”

  Stern had not expected any delays, and when the man closed the screen door he thought of how little insurance he had and wondered if he could call out, “Excuse me just a minute,” and run back to take out another policy, then return. He wanted so bad to live he would have settled right on the spot for being a bedpan patient all his life. If only there were someone with whom he could enter into such a bargain. The man came back and said, “Come on around back here,” walking toward the rear of the house, and Stern did not follow. He remembered that he had not brought along an observer to run for an intern and wondered if he could hail one now, not to stop the fight, but just to stand by and watch it and know that it was going on. He thought that maybe the man's wife was watching through the shades and, if Stern's head were opened, she would call for help, waiting first until he was almost through. He wanted to stop what was happening, take the man aside, and say, “Look, the important thing was for me to come down here. Now that I'm here, there doesn't have to be any fight. I didn't think I could make it, but here I am, and why don't I just go back now?” But, instead, he followed the man to the backyard and said, “I don't know how to begin these.” The man paused a moment and then hit Stern on the ear, a great freezing kiss covering the entire side of his face. The lobe seemed to slide around a little before settling in one place, and Stern was so thrilled at still being alive he jumped a little off the ground. But then his joy was erased by a warm shudder of sympathy for the man, who had been unable to knock him unconscious with the blow. It was as though all those years at lathes, building arm power, had gone to waste. More because it seemed to be expected of him than because he felt anger, Stern tried to throw a punch in the smoothly coordinated style of a Virgin Islands middleweight he had watched on TV, but it was as though a belt had been dropped over him, constricting his arms, and the blow came out girlish and ineffectual. Lowering his voice several octaves, as if it were he who had delivered the ear kiss, he said, “Don't talk that way to someone's wife and push her,” and only after he had said it did he realize he had fallen into an imitation of an old deep-voiced high-school gym teacher who used to say, “Now, boys, eat soup and b'daders if you want your roughage.”

  “Shit I won't,” said the man, and Stern said, “You better not,” still blinking to see the man's face. He saw his socks, though, faded blue anklets with little green clocks on them. They were cut low, almost disappearing into his slippers, and reminded Stern of those worn by an exchange student from Latvia at college who had brought along an entire bundle of similar ones. Now Stern felt deeply sorry for the man's powerful feet, which were always to be encased in terrible refugee anklets, and for a second he wanted to embrace them.

  His ear began to leak now, and he walked off the man's lawn, not sure at all how he had done. The hot flush of exhilaration that had come with the punch stayed with him awhile, and yet when he had gone halfway back to his house the cold flew into his shirt and rode his back and he began to shake with fear of the man all over again. Inside his house, his wife was sponging the dinner table and said, “What happened to your ear? It's hanging all off.”

  “I had a fight with that guy from a year and a half ago. The one who said the thing to you. I can't understand it. I was all right for a while, but now I'm afraid of him all over again.”

  “That's some ear you've got,” she said.

  “Ears never worried me,” he said. “I don't understand why I still have to be afraid of the bastard. Come on upstairs.” They walked to the steps and his wife said, “You go first. I don't like to go upstairs in front of people.” And Stern went on ahead, annoyed at being denied several seconds of behind glimpses.

  Upstairs, in his son's room, he looked at the six or seven children's books on the floor. Pages were torn out of them, and Stern wondered how the child was ever to become brilliant on so ratty-looking a library. Once, in some kind of sheltering, warmth-giving act he really couldn't explain, Stern had bought children's rugs and hung them all over the walls. The boy had said, “Rugs on the wall?” And Stern had answered, “Of course, and we put pictures on the floors, too. We eat breakfast at night and get up in the morning for a bite of supper. This is a crazy house.”

  Now Stern walked around die room, touching the rugs to make sure they wouldn't fall on his son's face. Then he said, “I feel like doing some hugging,” and knelt beside the sleeping boy, inhaling his pajamas and putting his arm over him. His wife was at the door and Stern said, “I want you in here, too.” She came over, and it occurred to him that he would like to try something a little theatrical, just kneel there quietly with his arms protectively draped around his wife and child. He tried it and wound up holding them a fraction longer than he'd intended.