In the Night Café

by Joyce Johnson

  “My mother gave me a present,” you told me later that morning. “Want to see it?”

  It was a pair of shoes, heavy black shoes with no laces. You’d brought them back with you in the paper bag; they’d even traveled all the way to the Bronx.

  The shoes had belonged to Frank. “He won’t be needing them where he’s going, so you can wear them,” your mother had said. “Go on. Take them,” she’d said, smiling, pushing the bag at you. “You were always after me to get you shoes.”

  We decided the only thing to do was get rid of them, get them out of the house. We went for a walk and left them next to a garbage can on Hester Street and the Bowery.

  21

  I USED TO need to keep proving to myself you’d really intended to live. I only trusted concrete, tangible evidence. The fact you’d just had the Harley repaired and bought new tires. A roll of canvas you brought home after the job ended, the first week in December. I didn’t trust love. I knew you would have wanted me to think everything was going to work out—to have left me with that. So that roll of canvas seemed more reliable.

  There were some days that were still warm when they should have been cold; we saw bums still sleeping in the park. That was why, even though we talked about getting ready for winter, you never got around to putting plastic up over the windows. You made me play hooky from work and we took the bike for a last trip to Sheepshead Bay, sat on the pier in the sun eating fried clam sandwiches. We had it all to ourselves; the kids with the drop lines were in school. If we ever got rich, we’d buy a boat, you said. Nothing fancy, It would have to be something sturdy with plenty of room, maybe an old Nova Scotia fishing boat we could live on in the summers. There was a change, suddenly, that we both felt—as if we’d come out from the weight and the darkness, and here it was, a radiant blue-gray Tuesday, from which we could see clear ahead to the rest of our lives.

  You said it was like a great temporary gift—something we’d had and lost and found again, without even looking for it.

  “Not temporary,” I insisted. “Not temporary.” We were having our usual philosophical difference, and you reminded me that nothing stays the same.

  “Oh, there you go,” I said. “Not temporary.”

  You hadn’t gone to Frank’s funeral, which was very small, just Kevin and Marie. Grace, too, had stayed away. You said you felt incredibly free of that part of your life—it was as if you’d cast it off with Frank’s black shoes. Maybe, without knowing it, your crazy mother had given you something you’d needed.

  “I’m going to stop drinking,” you said. “That’s over, too.” You were going to see if you could get through an entire week without any alcohol; you hadn’t been able to earlier in the fall. After work, you’d come uptown to meet me and ride me home on the back of the bike.

  Billy came over for dinner one night, full of gossip about some artist from L.A. you’d missed seeing in the Cedar Bar, and a party he wanted us to crash with him that was going to be full of millionaire collectors. He had news to tell us about himself. A gallery was going to show two of his paintings.

  “Hey Billy,” you said. “This is the beginning.”

  Billy looked a little abashed. For weeks, he said, he’d had something to tell you. It would probably make you mad at him, but when you saw the show, you’d find out anyway.

  I’d figured out Billy’s secret even before he said, “Tom, I’ve had to give up on abstract expressionism. I’m young, you know,” he pointed out, as if no one had ever noticed it. “There’s all this new stuff I’ve gotta try.”

  I had the feeling he expected you to rise up and shout that you were disowning him. It wasn’t that he wanted to be disowned; he just wanted to be sure that it mattered to you a lot that he was no longer under your influence. But all you said that night was, “Well, you don’t need anyone’s approval, Billy.”

  You were holding my hand under the table, and your fingers kept tightening around mine, but we were careful not to look at each other as we listened to Billy describe the new work he was doing. I remember it related to the Lone Ranger comic strip and the end of the real Wild West. His latest painting was two huge cowboy boots, standing toe to toe against a flat sunset-orange background. The gallery dealer had said it represented a dialog of great intensity.

  That was too much for you, of course. “Oh yeah? Better watch out for bullshit—it can swallow you up.”

  “I told you you’d get mad,” Billy said happily.

  Just before he left, he asked you for a favor. A guy had asked him to do a twelve-foot mural for a new bar in the Village. He’d roughed it all out and could paint the whole thing in an afternoon. But his place was too small and he’d have to borrow someone’s studio.

  “Sure,” you said. “How about Monday?”

  That weekend there was an anniversary of Pearl Harbor; a special program, “Victory at Sea,” ran for two straight days on television for hours and hours. You sat in front of the set with the blinds drawn and watched the whole thing. I kept making pots of coffee and feeling shut in. I didn’t care much for all the endless footage of old battles, the sounds of explosions and artillery fire. I went out and walked around Little Italy, bought a lot of food, decided to make a leg of lamb—something different, ambitious. I was busy washing lettuce for a salad when you called to me to come quickly.

  “They’re showing Anzio!”

  I said I’d be there in a minute. I could even have turned and watched the screen from where I was standing, but I still had the water running.

  You saw your sweeper, the one you’d been on during the invasion. It was just a glimpse, but you recognized it. “Jesus Christ! There it is!” I heard you shout. And I did turn then, but it was gone. We kept hoping the camera would come back to it, but the show moved on to a different part of the war. And even now, I don’t know what kept me from looking sooner. It seems like some failure of love, some need I had to hold myself back from you a little.

  I sat with you, though, the next day and watched the end of the show, the victory part, the part where all the soldiers and sailors came home jammed onto the troopships and all the foghorns and whistles were blowing in New York harbor and military bands were playing and people were going nuts on the docks, making V signs and waving little flags, welcoming their boys. There was a whole sequence of shots that just showed people embracing.

  You said, “No one was there. No one was there for me.” Tears ran down your face, and I started crying, too.

  I remember some things as inconsequential as specks of dust. Bits of shell in an order of scrambled eggs—like having chalk in the mouth.

  It was Monday. The morning. There were bits of shell in the eggs. The short-order cook in the diner on Grand Street had the radio on. An announcer said Frank Sinatra’s son had been kidnapped and that it was the first day of Chanukah, the Jewish festival of lights.

  “I feel full of light,” you said.

  We paid the check and you walked me to the corner. The bus came right away.

  There was one call from you later. Around three, when I was at the office. You surprised me by saying you wanted me to know where you were in case I happened to phone the studio. “Billy’s using the place, so I got out of the way. I’m up here at the bar.”

  I said, “Oh,” trying not to sound disappointed because of your promise about staying away from alcohol. But you said you’d only had one drink, a beer. “I didn’t even finish it. What do you think of that? I walked away and left the glass.”

  Your voice was warm, very buoyant, the way it was when we first knew we loved each other. You’d never called me like that just to let me know I didn’t have to worry.

  We were going to my mother’s for dinner that night. You said you’d pick me up right after work. “I’m going to do the whole bit now—go home, shave the face, put on a suit for the old dame.”

  “You don’t have to go that
far,” I said, laughing.

  “Ah, what’s the difference? … Okay, kiddo. See you later.”

  “I’ll wait for you on the corner,” I said.

  Winter blew in suddenly that afternoon. The sky darkened around four, and well before five, snow had started falling. Limp, white flakes that clung to people’s sleeves—I remember thinking the crystals looked magnified like the cutouts kids pasted against schoolroom windows. Everyone was saying this snow wasn’t going to stick, but they lacked conviction. People left work earlier than usual, putting up umbrellas, hurrying along Fourth Avenue to the subway.

  The snow kept eddying down. I remember standing on the corner of Twenty-ninth Street watching it blow against the black and yellow letters of the Park Fast sign. A woman from my office saw me and said, “What a night.” I’d been waiting for Tom about a half hour by then, and I said something about my husband coming uptown on the Third Avenue bus and she said it would probably take forever. I didn’t have the awful fear that would always seize me in the future whenever anyone was late unexpectedly. I just kept standing on that corner, thinking he’d show up any minute, but the minutes kept going by, flying past me, piling in drifts, and at six I went to a booth across the street to call the studio, and got the dime back because there was no answer. I kept calling after that, every ten minutes, putting in the same dime, though I couldn’t think of a reason he’d be there, and what if he came to the corner and didn’t know where I was?

  Finally, I called the Cedar. When the bartender shouted, “Tom Murphy!” I knew he had to be alive; he was there, after all, somewhere in that crowd. But when the bartender came back, he said he hadn’t seen him, not since around three, come to think of it, so I asked for Billy, who’d only just walked in and said, “Well, you know how he gets. Should I tell him you’re mad at him if he turns up?” Billy said he’d left the studio a couple of hours ago; he’d last seen Tom around noon.

  I knew there was something I had to make sure of then, just as if I’d always known. Tom would have parked the bike in front of the house. He would have run upstairs to change for a few minutes, then gone right out. All I had to do was see the bike.

  I ran out into the street and stopped a cab. “I have to go to Chrystie Street.” The driver said, “Where? Where’s that? Is that in Manhattan?” When we got to Grand and the Bowery, I told him, “Make the light.” I tried to say it the way Tom did. I had the driver let me out at the corner and I ran the rest of the way to our house. But the bike wasn’t there.

  A man from the garage was shoveling snow. He stopped what he was doing and stared at me. “What’s happened?” I cried.

  “Oh honey,” he said. “You’d better go upstairs.”

  Upstairs there was nothing. Nothing and no one. The light was on over the round table, and the clothes on the chair were the ones we’d taken off the night before and the bed was still all rumpled up. I went to the refrigerator—I don’t know why—and opened it and saw the remains of the leg of lamb that I’d been saving, wrapped up in foil. I kept thinking the phone would ring, but it didn’t. I went downstairs again to make the man in the garage talk to me, but all he’d say was, “Honey, call the police.”

  It had happened at three-thirty on Grand Street and the Bowery, whatever it was that happened. He really had been on his way home. There at the crossing he suddenly rose up from his seat, almost as if he was trying to get off it, and the Harley hit the back of a truck. No one could ever really explain it. The traffic was heavy, but not moving fast. The bike itself was hardly damaged. But he’d hurt his head falling from it. He lay in the street until the ambulance came. The last thing he said was, “I’m Tom Murphy.”

  I’ve always thought about him giving his name, maybe even knowing how close to home he was. The rest of it, too—dying alone. Maybe he was thinking about that.

  VII

  The Children’s Wing

  22

  I REMEMBER PEOPLE kept finding me apartments and I’d go and look at them on my lunch hours. A super would take me up the stairs and let me in. It would always be two small rooms that were supposed to look great when they were plastered and painted, but meanwhile you could see the brown marks, ghosts of mirrors and pictures that had hung there, chests that had once been shoved against the walls. I’d walk around, pull open a closet, listen to the way my steps sounded on the bare floor. “Thanks,” I’d say. “I’ll think it over.” But already I’d have the thought, I’ve lived here before.

  I couldn’t start my life till I had an apartment, so finally I decided I’d better go to Paris. Even my mother thought it was a good idea—she gave me the money for the trip. It was February by then. Everyone said, Don’t go to Paris in February, but anyway, I went. I bought a one-way passage on the SS America. I’d always felt Europe had to be approached little by little; you couldn’t just land there all at once.

  I had to go where no one knew me. I craved rudeness, normal indifference—no one lowering their voice to ask if I was taking care of myself. I had to see if I could start over from nothing. I stood on the deck as the SS America pulled away from the pier and waved to my mother and Kevin and Grace. I could feel the vibrations of the engines and it was very cold. There was a gray sheen of ice on the river like tarnished metal.

  It was true I’d picked the worst time of year to cross the Atlantic, but that seemed right, as if the test of myself was already starting. I’d climb the steel stairs and let myself out on a deck where passengers must have sunned themselves in good weather in wooden lounge chairs that were all chained down. The wind would make the tarp that covered them snap and rattle like a drum, but I’d manage to fight my way to the railing. I’d hang on as the world kept tilting, wondering if I’d get to see white water, if white water was actually white. I’d never asked Tom that. Once a sailor came and chased me downstairs. “You shouldn’t be up here,” he told me.

  There was something absurd about being a passenger—as if you could do anything because nothing counted. You believed you were being carried forward, but the waves couldn’t tell you where you were or how far you’d come. Maybe only sailors knew the truth.

  I met an Englishman who was going home after seventeen years in America. He’d been in the British navy during the war, then had lived in Montana raising sheep and trying to write novels about his experiences and drinking a lot, I gathered, though he was drying out now, and marrying a couple of times. The sheep had been the most successful part of his life, but now he didn’t even have them anymore. He was taking nothing back with him but his American accent, which really wasn’t so American, but I didn’t tell him that. The skin around his eyes was stretched very tight and he had a way of smoking cigarettes down to the last quarter inch, singeing the tips of his fingers. He was a humorous man, who’d say things like, “To what do you attribute your continuing state of good health?” as each day we sat with each other in the vast dining salon that emptied more and more, as if the ship had been struck by plague. We’d laugh and cheer as entire courses flew off the tables and had to be swept up. It was our mutual failure to get seasick that had made us notice each other to begin with—or maybe it was some aura we both had of people who knew something about hard times.

  He’d asked me why I was going to Paris in February, and I’d told him I was on my vacation. “That hardly needs saying,” he responded dryly. But the next day I found myself saying my husband had been killed in an accident in December. It was the first time I’d told that to a stranger. I kept thinking I saw little bits of Tom in him.

  He didn’t say, “I’m sorry,” or “That must have been terrible.” He just took a couple of seconds to digest the fact, then said he was thinking about where we could possibly make love, since neither of us had a private cabin.

  We ended up on the floor of a locked shower room with some German businessmen pounding on the door, shouting Heraus, impatient to come in and use the facilities. They were standing in the
corridor looking daggers at us when we came out. We kept sneaking in there the rest of the voyage, both of us too driven to care about comfort or what other people thought. It was as if there couldn’t be enough of sex for either of us, or just ordinary human warmth, flesh against flesh. The Englishman got off at Dover and I went on to Calais. “We must write each other,” he said, but we never did.

  In Europe all the colors were different. No one had ever told me that. Washed-out olives, browns, grays; a silver sky. America had redness, I realized. From the train on the way to Paris, I saw Van Gogh’s black crows standing in a field pecking at old straw.

  At first I had a room near the Opéra that didn’t make sense—each wall a different chalky paint, maroon velvet drapes on the windows, murky roses on the bedspread engorged like human organs. It seemed I’d ended up in a bed like the one my father had photographed. I walked around all day dizzy, went to museums and saw nothing that registered, spoke only to waiters. I’d wake in the middle of the night on Chrystie Street thinking I heard Tom’s key in the door. That was Hôtel Opal, where one morning, sitting on the awful flowered bed drinking coffee, I suddenly thought, It can be no worse than this.

  I moved to a much poorer but better hotel, this one in Montparnasse, where I should have been all along. Everyone had told me Montparnasse was where all the artists were. I think that was why I’d stayed away at first. The hotel was full of young American women in distress, always a few weeks behind with the rent. The concierge had no mercy. She threw out a girl from Detroit because she claimed she’d found menstrual blood on the sheets. I helped Clarice, the girl from Detroit, put her things into suitcases. She was weeping pathetically and saying, “But this is my home.” It was a room just like mine, a bare pink cell, with one forty-watt bulb over the bed and another over the sink—clever wiring had been done by the concierge’s husband so you couldn’t get the two to work at once. Clarice had hung strings of beads on the walls, thrown a lace tablecloth over the bed, bought a geranium. So it was home, as I too had come to understand it.