In the Night Café

by Joyce Johnson

  He stood his ground, though. “Guess what crayon water is?”

  “Oh for some peace!” Caroline said warningly. “Blue. Now go.”

  He still wasn’t leaving. “You’ve got the wro-o-ong answer,” he sang as if he’d won his mother into his game, and then he looked at me. “It’s the lady’s turn.”

  Except for “hello,” he hadn’t yet spoken to me directly. I couldn’t manage the tone of half attention he probably expected. I said something about its sounding like an easy question, but it wasn’t. “Not the gray crayon and not the white one, right Tommy?” I said. And I remember how hard it was, how weirdly self-conscious I felt, saying that name.

  He gave the perfect, startling Zen answer. “A no-color crayon, of course.” I wondered whether Caroline heard the echoes the way I did. “No crayon, no color, no picture,” he said with triumphant logic.

  “That’s no way to talk,” Caroline chided him.

  I said, “I bet your dad told you that, didn’t he? He knew all about the colors of things.”

  His eyes narrowed and his face looked old for a moment. He was concentrating so painfully. “I forget,” he said, not looking at me now.

  “You can draw me a picture some other time,” I said. “Maybe we’ll meet again.”

  “Yes,” said Caroline. “That would be so nice. We’ll all keep in touch now that we’ve gotten to know each other.”

  Tommy didn’t go. I’d been sitting by myself on a blue velvet sofa, and very shyly he came and sat there too. He leaned back carefully against the cushions, his feet dangling in midair, hardly breathing, as if good behavior could make him invisible. Once in a while he’d glance at me hopefully, waiting, expecting something.

  “Well, it looks like you just fascinate him,” Caroline said.

  I remember thinking no one was giving that child anything at all, not even one look around his father’s city. At least someone should give him that. And I had that crazy, mistaken urge again to take him out of there, to vanish with him into that same lost space that Tom inhabited.

  I started talking about the glories of New York—the stone lions in front of the public library, the Staten Island ferry, the hundred stories of the Empire State Building. I must have sounded like some demented schoolteacher. I wasn’t saying anything I wanted to. The city I was describing seemed alien to me. Tom and I had never lived in such a place.

  Tommy wanted to know if the building we were in was a skyscraper. I told him it wasn’t; it just had a lot of floors, I said. I asked him if there were skyscrapers where he lived and he shook his head gravely, he didn’t think so, and then a light came into his face and he said, “I want to see all the tallest skyscrapers in the world.”

  He had moved closer. One thin little shoulder brushed against my arm. I reached down and took his hand, and I had no right to do so, no right at all.

  Caroline’s nieces showed up with boxes of cake from some famous French bakery on Madison Avenue. They’d bought their aunt a bunch of small pink roses and picked up a Chutes and Ladders game for the children. The roses were put in water in a cut-glass bowl and a pink linen cloth was laid over a table and the children were taken into the bathroom to have their faces washed. I said I had to be leaving, and Caroline said, “But you can’t! You have to stay for tea.” She seemed to feel very strongly about it, as if it remained to be proven that everything had really been very civilized.

  We all sat down around the table and she poured tea into white cups. A washed-out sun was sinking. I saw the sky turn violet over Brooklyn and there were long black barges on the river, and I wanted someone to draw the blinds.

  I think the nieces were a little shocked that I’d turned out to be someone young; widows were supposed to be much older. They were pretty girls, implacably wholesome and optimistic. It was strange to think they’d known Tom much longer than I had. He’d taken them sailing when they were little and taught them to swim. “When we moved up here, we thought about calling him, but we felt funny about it,” one of them said. They told me Caroline had always been their A Number One favorite relative. All afternoon they’d been thinking about her, and they’d finally decided she should definitely do something special with her hair before her old flame arrived to take her to dinner. They’d been meaning to bring this up ever since they’d met her at the airport. “You can just set it in rollers, you know, and try teasing it some on top.”

  She seemed a little embarrassed but pleased by all the attention. “I can’t be bothered. I’ve no aptitude for anything like that.”

  “Oh, we’ll do it for you. Please—it’ll make all the difference.”

  “Don’t you think she ought to try it?” one of them appealed to me.

  “Absolutely,” I said, though I had no real opinion. Then I found myself saying, “Sure, take a chance. After all, what’s there to lose?” That was what Tom would have said. And if he’d been very drunk, he’d have put it, “Everyone dies. So why not?” But you could never say things like that at tea parties.

  By the time I left, the children had been coaxed into the bedroom to watch “Superman” and sure enough, the nieces had gotten Caroline onto a kitchen chair and put a towel around her shoulders. Bottles of conditioner had appeared and a whole arsenal of pink foam rubber. They were working against time. The gentleman from the past was due at seven. I learned he was a stockbroker, conveniently divorced, a man she could certainly have married if she hadn’t run off with Tom.

  One of the nieces wet a comb and started drawing it through Caroline’s hair and I saw a look come on her face of odd contentment.

  I kept learning about being a widow in little, distant flashes. I saw that after a very long while, if you had no one to touch you, you might eventually become someone who went to beauty parlors and paid to have strangers do your hair. You’d pay for the sensation of it, the hands of another human being pouring warmth on you, gently smoothing, stroking. You’d close your eyes and lean back into those hands and your face might have exactly that look, I thought.

  Life just goes on, you see, any old way it can. Even the dead can’t interrupt its flow.

  4

  I CALLED CAROLINE afterwards from the subway station at Twenty-third Street. That was the only other conversation she and I ever had. I said, “Caroline, I want to spend some time with Tommy tomorrow.” I had to shout it over the phone to her because a train was going by on the lower level, and hearing a silence at the other end, I knew there wasn’t a prayer she’d let me do it. I’d been sure she wouldn’t all along.

  She said, “My God, what’s all that noise?”

  I said, “I’m in the subway, Caroline,” and she said something about the awfulness of subways and how could I bear to ride them? And then she said in a chilly, constrained voice, “Could you possibly pick him up by eleven? I’d like to go out to brunch.”

  That was all. No questions.

  I’ve wondered ever since if she’d actually somehow been counting on me, wanting to leave me alone with Tommy from the start.

  “This is sweet of you, Joanna,” she said, as if I were doing her a favor.

  She wasn’t there when I picked him up.

  There are white, glittery mornings in New York when the wind steals your breath and salt runs out of your eyes. It was one of those, not ideal at all for a tour. It worried me that Tommy had immediately taken off his cap—a striped, knitted thing with a tassel on it—he’d stuffed it into his pocket in the elevator. It was babyish, he’d declared, and I’d felt it would be wrong to press the issue.

  I wanted him to have his dignity. In fact, I wanted to give him everything—enough to last a lifetime. I remember almost feeling that I could and at the same time thinking I didn’t know at all what I was doing. I’d been only a kid myself the last time I’d been alone with one.

  We had four hours. I told Tommy, “I’ll take you wherever you want.” That wa
s a little overwhelming for him, he wasn’t used to making choices. He asked for the Empire State Building, but couldn’t come up with anything else. He’d become shy with me all over again. I kept thinking he knew as well as I did what the day was really for.

  It took ages to find a cab. Finally one came into view, but an old woman tottered into the street under an enormous black fur coat and flagged it down. She called to us to get in with her. “You don’t want to stand around with your little boy in an awful wind like this.” A wind like this could knock you down, she told us. When I told her we’d be getting off at the Empire State Building, she said, “Well, that’s very educational.”

  She chattered away at us. “Your little boy,” she kept saying.

  I didn’t correct her. Tommy was kneeling beside me on the backseat, staring out the window.

  “Is this young man your only child?” she asked.

  I said, “I’m not his mother. He’s my husband’s child.” To say it in the present tense made Tom alive for a moment.

  Tommy had turned his head. His blue eyes penetrated mine. I felt he was telling me, Don’t give away our secret.

  The old woman pursed her lips and said disapprovingly, “Well, I thought you seemed young to have such a nice big boy.”

  I had theories about kids. Superlatives were supposed to impress them—what was biggest or best or had the most of something. Of course, any seven-year-old boy would have to go right to the top of the Empire State Building. “And now for the longest elevator ride in the world!” I said to Tommy when we got out of the cab on Fifth Avenue. I even made him pause on the sidewalk and directed his eyes upward to the bright needle of the radio tower.

  He did what I told him, he threw his head back obediently. But now that we’d arrived, he showed no excitement.

  “I don’t want to,” he said. “I don’t want to go up.” His voice had a blanched-out sound to it, and I should have paid more attention.

  “Sure you do,” I said. We’d crossed the street and I was starting for the entrance to the lobby to buy tickets.

  Tommy pulled me back by my sleeve. “It’s too high for me,” he insisted.

  I made a try at telling him we’d be safe, we weren’t going to go outside, but he had such a pinched, stricken expression on his face that I stopped pretty quickly.

  “Okay,” I said. “Too many floors?”

  He gave a forlorn little nod that made me feel terrible. I could see he thought he’d let me down.

  I got him away from there, started walking him up Fifth Avenue, though I didn’t know where we’d be going next. I hated the way everyone got damaged, even kids, that Tommy would see his tall building and have to think of falling. I remember wishing for crowds, wishing Christmas hadn’t gone from all the shops. The mannequins were on uninteresting vacations now in Hawaii or Bermuda, languid and brown under nylon bougainvillea. The wind sent dirty bits of paper scudding along the gutters.

  Near Rockefeller Center we found a small broadcasting exhibit where you could see yourself on TV. Sheepish-looking people would show up on a large screen and on a row of television sets in the front window. Tommy said it was neat.

  We waited on line and we each took a turn getting on the platform, making blurry gray faces at the camera. Tommy asked me if he could do it alone. “This time I’ll be getting on my spaceship and you watch me out there on all the TVs.”

  I went out through the revolving doors and stood at the window as the line moved slowly forward. When Tommy climbed up on the platform, he waved to me with great solemnity, his arms making wide intersecting arcs above his head. He stretched his mouth into “Good-bye … good-bye… . ”

  The day was running out when we got to the zoo. Most people were keeping their children home that day. Bored tigers paced and yawned in their cages; tropical birds on dead branches picked at their feathers or went fluttering at light bulbs. It all seemed shabbier than when I was a child or when I’d walked through there with Tom one day only last spring. Flotillas of babies were out in strollers then, and I’d looked at them with secret hunger, wanting to be pregnant, wanting to be filled with baby—not daring to say it, of course—telling myself, Someday, maybe next year. “Why the hell did we end up here?” Tom had asked me.

  I bought Tommy a blue balloon, a box of Cracker Jacks, a plastic samurai sword. Tom would have bought him that sword, I thought. I kept trying to conjure him up, put him here with us.

  The seals were enjoying themselves that day. They shot through their pond, flipping themselves over as they chased each other in their brown water; they splashed off their rocks like clowns. When it was cold like this, I told Tommy, and there was nobody much around, maybe they were at their best, because they felt so much more at home.

  “I think nobody knows but us,” Tommy whispered.

  He leaned against me a little, and for a while we watched them, standing together by the black railing with its sign that warned you not to throw foreign objects in the water. “I’d never do anything dumb like that,” Tommy said.

  All of a sudden he stopped looking at the seals. A man was slowly approaching us, holding a tiny boy by the hand, holding him up, really. The child had just learned to walk and his legs, wadded into his red snowsuit, were still so uncertain that he seemed always on the verge of sitting down. Every few steps the man would have to stop and steady him, stooping because he was so tall.

  When they reached the pond, the man swung the child up and sat him on his shoulders. “Seals,” he announced to his son. He smiled at us. “That’s quite a show they’re putting on.”

  Tommy tried to keep the conversation going. “They’re not afraid of us because we’re quiet. Animals like it. When you’re so quiet, they forget you’re looking.” He couldn’t take his eyes off the two of them.

  The man laughed and gave his son a bounce. “The seals like us,” he said to his son in his announcer’s voice. But there were other things to see and he moved on.

  “Did my daddy ever think of me?” Tommy asked.

  That was the question he’d been keeping inside him—the one he’d been saving for me, for anyone who could answer. Not Did my daddy love me?, you understand. Nothing as abstract, as adult, as that. What’s love after all but a kind of thinking? We hold to each other in our thoughts, we can’t let go.

  I did the best I could. I said some things that seemed quite inadequate. “Tommy, he thought about you every day. Your dad always talked about you and your sister. I know about all the things you and he used to do.”

  “Tell me about the things!” Tommy demanded. “Tell me all the things!”

  What I told him about was fishing, Tom taking him fishing when he was very little, a story I remembered about how he’d caught his first fish off a pier when he was only five. And his dad had rubbed it with black ink to make a print with it, as Japanese fishermen do for their sons, to mark the day for them. “And didn’t you give it some kind of funny name?” I asked him.

  Then suddenly I came up with the name myself. “Didn’t you call him Mish the Fish?”

  “Mish the Fish!” Tommy yelled jubilantly. “Mish the Fish!”

  I remember something else Tommy said that day. I was bringing him back to Caroline and we were walking up the sidewalk to the nieces’ apartment house, hurrying because it was late and the wind was blowing fiercely from the river. He slipped on a patch of ice and fell down hard.

  I helped him to his feet and he rubbed his eyes on his sleeve. We looked at each other for a while and my eyes got as wet as his.

  “I almost didn’t cry,” he said. “So I almost made it.”

  III

  The Fall of Texas

  Spring 1962

  5

  THE WORLD WAS supposed to end on a Saturday night in March of 1962. Some medieval astrologer had absolutely predicted it, and for a while the approaching cataclysm got a lot of play i
n the pages of the Daily News. You never believe such things, of course, but you don’t entirely disbelieve them either. People made jokes or decided to have parties. The idea was to go out with a bang.

  I was twenty-six. I don’t think I’ve ever felt older. In three years I’d had fourteen lovers. The count may even have been higher. There were the serious ones who took months of your life and all the transitional ones in between when you were trying to recover. Those were the ones you tended to forget, and if you passed one on Second Avenue, you’d give a distant nod and walk on too fast for conversation. I once asked one of them, “Why are we here?” as we were taking off our clothes, and I remember his answer, though not his name. “If you don’t know,” he said, “I can’t help you.”

  I was living then in a two-room walk-up on East Seventh Street above a linoleum store. My landlord was the linoleum king of the Lower East Side. Linoleum was that man’s passion; he was careless about his real estate. I’d moved into his building with a saxophone player named Arnie Raff, who met a rich girl in East Hampton one weekend and moved in with her and never returned—even to pick up his records, which I kept in boxes for a while, then put back on their shelves and played until the music wore out all Arnie Raff associations and became mine. Finally he remembered where his records were, the great sides he’d had ever since he was a kid and had to steal his brother’s draft card to get into Birdland to hear Charlie Parker. “Hey, why don’t I just come on by and get them?” he said, and I said, “No, you can’t ever walk in here again, Arnie. There’s nothing you can take out of here.” I’d always thought of myself as a gentle person and now here was a piece of someone’s life and identity I wasn’t giving back, as if I’d hardened without realizing it. It’s better to be tough than sad, I thought.

  I would have married Arnie Raff, although it seems incredible now. The illusion of kindness was in the chestnut color of his hair and eyes and the warm, Russian-looking moustache over his lips, which hid, as it turned out, a small mouth of real meanness. Arnie Raff was much more bourgeois than I was, which made me feel safe. He yelled at me about my cooking and sanded the floorboards of our apartment and stripped most of the plaster off a wall of brick, as if he meant to live there forever.