In the Night Café

by Joyce Johnson

  “Our bike?” I had no idea you meant what you were saying.

  “Fucking right, it’s ours. Looks great, doesn’t it?”

  “I told you you should have warned your old lady,” Billy said.

  Later you teased me about the way I stood back from it, keeping myself awfully quiet as if the bike were some wild animal that was going to bite me. I stared at its dented red fenders, the tilt of its handlebars, the jumble of nameless parts that made it run. It seemed flimsy to me. It gave me the same funny feeling I’d had about Howard Stricker’s boat.

  “I don’t know what I think,” I said.

  You’d bought it from Billy that day for two hundred and fifty dollars—a bargain. You still owed him seventy-five. Billy was getting himself a secondhand panel truck, something he could use to haul lumber.

  “Billy’s teaching me how to ride it.”

  “Nothing to it,” Billy said. “Hell, you can ride it already.”

  “Come on, Joanna,” you said. “I’ll take you for a spin.”

  I said, “No thanks. Maybe later,” which struck Billy as hilarious.

  “Tom, you sure are in a lot of trouble now!”

  The two of you were both laughing, ganging up on me, a little high on beer, with that red Harley so gay and dangerous and your hands black from the grease you’d been putting on it.

  “Right now I think you’re out of your mind,” I said. “But I’ll probably get over it.” I knew I was being very square, the way old ladies were supposed to be.

  “Tom,” said Billy, “you can go down to Mexico on that thing. You can go anywhere. Just don’t ride it when you’re real loaded, though.”

  “I’m not going to sit around the Cedar getting loaded now that I have the bike.” You looked right at me, not at Billy, when you said it.

  I said, “Tom, promise me that.”

  “Promises are for children,” you said.

  It took a few days to talk me into it. I can still recite the reasons we needed a Harley 220 to improve our lives. We could park it anywhere. We could run it on practically no gas. The main thing, though, was the quality of the experience. On a bike you could be at one with the road, instead of insulated from it inside a machine. I’d never wanted to be at one with the road, but Tom said I was going to love it. “We have to have wheels,” he kept telling me, as if that were the only thing we’d lacked so far. “You’re looking at our freedom, kiddo.”

  When I’d go downstairs, I’d glance at the red Harley—its chain, its wheel spokes, its handlebars, all the bits of old metal our lives depended on. If you leaned, the bike leaned; if you resisted its motion, you’d throw it off balance. “It’s your ass going down the middle of the road,” Tom said. But he liked it that way. He said that was the way it always was anyhow.

  That first night he showed me how to get on it behind him. The place where I had to sit was called the buddy seat, and I was supposed to wrap my arms around him. All the time we moved we’d be locked together in that embrace. I said, “Oh, I see. It’s a machine for lovers.”

  “Yeah. Why do you think I bought it? Hold on now,” he said, and without any warning we were jolting over the cobblestones, wobbling around the corner toward the Bowery. I was clutching at Tom’s waist as if I could somehow slow us down. “Jesus Christ!” he yelled. “I’m doing the driving. All you have to do is sit.”

  “I’m trying!” I yelled back. I didn’t know whether I was excited or scared to death.

  “Try harder, kiddo. Or we’re going to have a spill.”

  I seemed to need a lot of rides to learn how to be a passenger. I used to wonder whether other women picked it up just like that. He’d get a little mad because it seemed I didn’t trust him. He said he could feel the fear in my body; he didn’t have to look over his shoulder to see it on my face. It reminded me of when I was little and afraid of dogs. I had a baby-sitter who once warned me that dogs could smell my fear, and I was always very frightened of the smell after that, much more than of the dogs themselves. I’d go up to strange dogs and make myself pet them just so the smell wouldn’t be on me anymore.

  The thing was, though, I did trust him. I trusted him with me but not with himself.

  We went places that fall. On the weekends, when it always seemed to be Indian summer. We’d get up very early and put on our warmest clothes and go downstairs to the bike. Next door the garage would just be opening. All the men there knew us by now. They were Italians like everyone on the block except us. Sometimes they’d want to know did we ever hear from Howard Stricker? “That was some weirdo,” the owner once said, but with respect. We were weirdos, too, but we couldn’t help feeling they thought we were all right; we seemed to entertain them with our oddness. One guy, Ralph, would always stand on the sidewalk, seeing us off. “Listen you two! Don’t get caught in the rain.”

  I remember hurtling out over the Brooklyn Bridge in astonishing rushes of cold air, the steel beneath our wheels singing its one long high note. And the highways that took us out of the city, all ablaze the farther we went. Red/yellow. Red/yellow. For a while you could fill your mind up with those colors. Or with the roadbed beneath us which had to be watched so carefully—all those patches of things that could have done us in. Oil slick or sand, spills of gravel, the shiny places that were wet when we came up on them fast. We kept saying we had to buy helmets, but we never did.

  I was always freezing, trying to warm myself, my breasts bruised into you, skidding on the blue nylon of your jacket. I got to know the back of your neck by heart, the places where your hair grew thickest and curled a little. “You smell brown,” I remember whispering into your ear when we’d stopped for a light in some town in Westchester. I’d close my eyes and hold you even tighter when you speeded us down that narrow path between the lanes of cars. Death Alley, it was called, like the avenue in your old neighborhood.

  On the roads, I’d see other couples clenched in the same embrace. This was how we looked, too, I’d tell myself, surprised. Daring and fatal. I would never have been the girl on the buddy seat if it hadn’t been for you.

  Motorcycle riders would salute each other, holding their right palms up against the wind. It was always done so solemnly that at first it made me want to laugh. Then I began to think maybe we did all belong to the same thing—a secret society traveling the lanes cars wouldn’t dare to enter, coming out on our machines to burn up time.

  Now it seems crazy that I came to be so unthinking, accepting the danger of those rides the way I accepted the cold. Being like you, I used to feel, instead of like me. Didn’t we move out there as if we were one body? I was sure that if we died, we’d die together. But how could we die when we were so alive?

  Our red Harley had a sound I think I’d instantly recognize even today. It was much too elderly and low-powered to roar like the Hell’s Angels bikes. It made a kind of dry, apologetic sputter like an old smoker who couldn’t stop coughing. Out on the road I’d forget it, lose it, my ears would fill up with wind. It was a sound I always listened for in the loft, when I was alone. Sometimes I thought I heard it, even when I hadn’t. It was inside me, that dry sound, far away as if in the distant reaches of the Bowery, then coming closer, closer, as the bike turned the corner at Grand, loudest of all before the engine was shut off just under our front window. Then there would be silence and I’d know Tom was opening the downstairs door. “I made it home, kiddo. Made it one more time.”

  Promises were for children, but we were grown-ups. And he never made ones he knew he couldn’t keep. He’d go uptown to the Cedar, sure he’d only stop in for a couple of beers. Then suddenly it would be very late and he’d think, Why take the bus when he had the bike? When he was very drunk, he used to say he could almost ride the Harley in his sleep, that he was in fact a great driver, had always been a great driver, and didn’t I realize that by now? And he’d tell me again about the white MG spinning off the road, a
ll the times when something could have happened and didn’t, and wouldn’t. Because he drove the way he painted, with the same hands, the same eyes. “The instinct’s there, don’t you see? Don’t you know anything? Haven’t you learned a little from me by now?”

  Sometimes, though, he’d let Billy ride him home. Billy knew how to ask. “I really miss that old bike,” he’d say. “Why don’t you let me take a turn at the driving?”

  16

  I WAS AFRAID of Christmas that year, but didn’t know how to ignore it. On Christmas Eve I ran out just as the stores were closing and bought the last turkey on Mulberry Street. It was sixteen pounds, much too big for the two of us. I’d never cooked a turkey in my life. I had cut out a recipe for chestnut stuffing from the newspaper; next morning it took me ages to get off the shells.

  The hours went by, hushed as if both of us were holding our breaths. I kept on chopping and stirring and Tom worked in the studio building stretchers. A little snow would come down every now and then and whiten the railings of the back fire escape. There was a mission for homeless men around the corner and I guessed they were having turkey, too—I could hear them singing “Deck the Halls,” “Adeste Fidelis.” Tom went out to get cigarettes. He said he’d never seen the Bowery so empty.

  “I came right back, didn’t I?” he said. “Today I’m not drinking. I can do it.”

  I told him I knew he could. All he had to do, I said, was stay busy so he didn’t start having bad thoughts. But it was nothing I knew or believed.

  He went back to his stretchers. The electric saw went on and off for the rest of the afternoon, and the turkey kept getting browner. I could see it was going to look like the ones in those magazine pictures of families gathered around holiday tables, with the little wide-eyed children holding out their plates.

  We nearly did get through that day except for the fight we had about Billy as I was taking the turkey out of the oven. Tom wanted me to hold everything. He was going to go and find him. Here we were with all this great food for the two of us, and maybe Billy was just sitting in his little place on Sullivan Street that didn’t even have a phone or a refrigerator.

  “But the turkey will get ruined,” I said.

  “No it won’t, kiddo. I know about birds. Just leave it where it is and turn off the gas.” I saw him reach for his blue nylon jacket, the one he always wore when he was on the bike. He was going to ride uptown and be back in no time. If he didn’t find Billy in the storefront, he’d take a look in the Cedar.

  “I don’t want Billy here tonight.”

  I didn’t even mean it, but a dread was upon me. He’d get on the bike and he wouldn’t come back. I thought about the patches of snow on the streets, the drinks he’d probably have in the Cedar. I was going to keep him alive by making him stay home.

  We had to be alone, I kept insisting. Couldn’t we even have Christmas by ourselves?

  He thought I’d gone nuts. He didn’t give a damn about the fucking bird. Was I jealous of Billy, jealous even of a kid? He’d never seen that in me before. He said it was like finding a flaw in a diamond. It spoiled something.

  He threw his blue jacket on the floor and left me alone in the room. My hands were shaking as I set the table. I kept calling him and finally he came, but we sat there like two people on the verge of divorce. “Would you pass me some of that?” was about all we said. Afterward, when I stood at the sink soaking the dishes, the quiet still had that terrible hum.

  I knew he was right. I’d been awful about Billy. But I’d kept him home.

  You gave me a camera that Christmas. An old Leica—with a cracked leather case. But the lens was perfect. I’d never had a really good camera, never even knew I wanted one. I was still just taking pictures inside my head.

  The Leica came from the Bowery. You’d never lost your habit of looking in pawnshop windows. Weeks before, walking on Rivington Street, you’d spotted it. You often saw incredible items up for sale on that block, even right out on the sidewalk. Once an old black wino wearing one shoe had offered to sell you a hardboiled egg. He’d displayed it in the palm of his hand, a fine-looking egg, white and uncracked. He wanted a nickel. You gave him a quarter and put the egg in your pocket. “I bought you this egg,” you said when you came home.

  You were always turning up with little gifts that you’d hand me with embarrassment, because you couldn’t seem to learn about being practical. You had an eye for silver. I used to wear an old chain you gave me. The catch had been broken, but you knew how to mend it. “You’ll never lose this now,” you said. Silver lasted, wouldn’t change. Maybe that was why it attracted you.

  You took a risk, getting me that camera. There it was, asking to be used. You’d even bought some rolls of film—allowing me no excuses.

  “Oh,” I said politely, almost as if I didn’t want it, “this is a really fancy one.”

  I think I was lodged in your mind the way you were in mine. You were studying me all the time, doping out my secrets—the things I’d never ask for or dare to give myself.

  Your secrets were harder, not always the kind to be brought to light. Not long after you’d finished all those stretchers, I came across something in your studio I wasn’t supposed to see. It was a Saturday morning—you’d gone out to buy paint and I’d taken it into my head to surprise you. By then we’d both forgotten the fight we’d had on Christmas. I cleaned the two big studio windows; then I wet the broom and started sweeping. Sawdust was everywhere, bits of two-by-fours and plywood. I pushed the broom along in a professional manner, making neat little piles.

  I was having an attack of happiness. The wet wood smelled sweet to me as it dried in the sunlight, and everything seemed calm and good. I wanted to make everything ready for you.

  The broom turned over a small plywood triangle. For some reason I bent down and picked it up even before I noticed the writing on it. Five words in thick carpenter’s pencil, NOW I WILL HANG ME. Paintings got hung, I thought. Maybe that was what it meant. I put the triangle in a bag of trash, buried it under orange rinds, empty cans.

  I dug it out and read it again before you came home. The letters seemed to come unjoined when I’d stared at the words long enough.

  I wasn’t going to show it to you, but I had to. I said, “Hey, can you tell me what this is about?”

  You said you’d just been fooling around. You didn’t remember when it was you’d written on that piece of wood.

  17

  IN THE SPRING we started going on trips again. If it wasn’t too cold, we’d get on the bike and Tom would head for water—Brighton or Rockaway, the gray, wide beaches. At that time of year even their trash cans were empty. In Sheepshead Bay one Sunday we found a pier where there were always four or five boys fishing with drop lines. “What do you catch here?” Tom asked them. They all said flounder. Tom bought himself a rod and we started coming back. I’d help him cut up the clams he used for bait, but I never got the hang of casting out. He’d catch crabs, blowfish—anything but flounder. We just came to be there really. We’d sit in the sun with our eyes on the line as it pulled against the blue. We came for the stillness. Sometimes out there I’d know he was thinking about Tommy. He’d talk to the boys with the drop lines, let them try out his reel. “No one fishes more seriously than kids,” he said.

  We used to go to a clam bar right across the street that always filled up in late afternoon with red-faced men in windbreakers who’d been out since dawn on party boats. Tom would strike up conversations about how the bluefish were running and whether the tides were right. They’d try to figure him out. How come he knew so much? “I did a little fishing down in Florida.” “Marlin?” they’d ask him eagerly. “Yeah, I’ve gone out after marlin.”

  Once a group came in who seemed to have caught nothing but beers. They were very loud in ordering their Bluepoint Specials and getting the waitress to pay attention to them. They all worked together in
some insurance office. Someone was retiring after forty years, and the firm had rented a boat in his honor.

  One of the younger insurance men started staring at us. Even when he saw that I noticed, he couldn’t tear his eyes away. Something about us seemed to fascinate him. He was heavyset and Irish-looking in an ugly tan jacket; he’d gotten a very bad sunburn out on the water. He had sort of a military haircut that made him look belligerent from a distance. It alarmed me when he got off his stool at the bar and made his way over to our booth. He stood in front of Tom for a few moments, shifting his weight from foot to foot. He cleared his throat and said, almost in whisper, “Tommy?”

  Tom was shaking his head. “Do I know you?” Then I heard him say, “Oh my God.”

  “Joanna, this is my little brother,” he told me. “This is Kevin.”

  Later Kevin said he’d been confused because I didn’t look at all the way he remembered Caroline. He’d met her once years ago just before she and Tom went to Mexico City. Kevin kept grabbing Tom’s shoulder and saying, “Can you believe this?” He called over a couple of his friends and introduced us. One of them said, “You never told me you had a brother.”

  Tom wasn’t talking much. After a while, I had the feeling he was waiting to get up from the table and drop out of sight for another thirteen years. Kevin kept on asking questions, though. Where had Tom been living? What happened to Caroline? How long had he been back in New York?

  Finally Kevin got quiet himself. “All right, Tommy. Say we didn’t run into each other. Would you have tried to look me up?”

  “I don’t know, Kevin,” Tom said. “I don’t know at all.”

  Even so, Kevin wanted us to leave the bar and go home with him right away. We had to meet his wife, see his kid.

  Tom said, “Too fast, Kevin. I’ll call you. We’ll get together.”

  “You won’t do it,” Kevin said.

  “Sure I will. Write down your number. I’ve got no problem seeing you.”