In the Night Café

by Joyce Johnson

  We never had much stuff in that apartment on Twelfth Street. My mother said it looked as if Nicky and I were only camping out there. We could have packed up and moved out in a couple of hours, leaving behind us all the clothes that didn’t fit and the toys Nicky no longer played with. He used to race his bike from room to room, ringing his bell. I tacked my photos up on the walls, the crayon drawings he brought home from school. I didn’t have any of Tom’s paintings in that place. I’d tell myself I didn’t want to have to explain about them to Nicky. The things he had to understand about life were complicated enough.

  The paintings were safe where they were. Leon was storing them for me in his studio. For a couple of years, I called up gallery people and curators, but no one wanted to come and look at them because they’d never heard of Tom. Leon had made a rack where the canvases on their stretchers leaned against each other gently. They used to remind me of sails without wind. It seemed wrong not to keep trying to get them shown, but Leon said there was no use. The bottom had dropped out of the market for abstract expressionism just as he’d known it would. Once we talked about how frustrated Tom would have felt if he’d still been alive. He’d have turned his back on the whole scene, Leon said. He’d never have changed his work just to make things easier. “The man would have been impossible,” Leon said. “You know that, don’t you?”

  I said, “I guess I do. I guess I do know that.”

  Leon wanted me to go out with him. He said he was even extremely popular with little kids. We tried it for a while, but my heart wasn’t in it.

  I never asked to look at Tom’s paintings. Leon would call and say, “Come on down. I’ll take them out of the rack for you,” and I’d reply, as if I were only trying to be considerate, “No, it’s okay. I don’t have to see them.”

  I could never tell Leon that the paint on those canvases wasn’t just paint to me. Moments had been caught there, moments that had somehow left their tracks. You could follow those tracks and I knew where they would lead you. To a place where there was nothing, no movement at all.

  Sometimes my memory would land me suddenly on Chrystie Street. I’d see the two big rooms undismantled, everything still in its place. Certain paintings would come to me the same way, or a look of Tom’s—so clear and then gone. As Nicky got older, I’d try to recall him as a baby. I’d been so weary when we lived in Paris, I knew I hadn’t been conscious enough. I wanted to always be able to see all the faces Nicky had grown out of. But the pictures blur more and more every second you’re carried forward. You seem to get left with memories of memories.

  We’d been living on Twelfth Street about six years when Leon called me one day and said he could no longer keep Tom’s paintings. We’d been out of touch for quite a few months. I hadn’t known he was giving up on getting his work shown in New York and that he was taking a teaching job in Milwaukee. New York had gotten so expensive that even being poor was costing him too much money. Leon said he’d tried to find me another artist with extra storage space, but nothing had worked out, so now he was borrowing a friend’s truck to bring the paintings up to me. I’d just have to keep them in my apartment until I decided what to do next. The truck came the following Saturday afternoon. Leon carried all the paintings up the stairs for me. He arranged them as neatly as he could in a corner of the living room, downed a cup of coffee and gave me a quick good-bye embrace. “Look me up next time you’re in Milwaukee.”

  Nicky was staying over at a friend’s house that weekend, so I was alone after Leon left. I sat in the living room for a long time like a paralyzed person, staring at the backs of stretchers. Leon had turned everything to the wall. I thought of the painting Tom had done on the old mailbag we’d found in the street. It was mostly red, that was all I could remember. I had the awful feeling I might no longer be sure which one it was. I walked across the room and started pulling the smallest paintings out. I found the one I was looking for right away.

  When Nicky got home the next day, he said, “What’s going on here, Mom?”

  I’d moved most of our furniture away from the walls and polished the floor. Tom’s paintings were hanging all over the place. It was the first time the room had looked beautiful. Nicky wanted to know where so many paintings had come from. He said he really liked them, but he couldn’t tell what they were supposed to be. He seemed to have the idea they were like very hard books only grown-ups could understand. I told him the paintings were just themselves, that there was nothing hidden in them, and that he would see them better and better every day. I said the man who painted them had been someone I loved.

  Then I said, “I never told you this, Nicky, but I was married to that man before I met your dad.”

  He asked me where was this person now, and I told him he’d been killed falling off a motorcycle a long time ago. “Wow,” Nicky said.

  He stopped asking me questions, and I was relieved. He didn’t seem to be at all troubled about what I’d told him. A few days later, though, there was something on his mind. “Were this man and you going to have a baby?”

  I had a very hard time formulating an answer. I told Nicky that when you felt about someone a certain way, you couldn’t help wanting to have their child.

  Nicky thought this over a long time. He had one last question. “Mom, if he hadn’t died, would I have been born? Or would there have been a different me?”

  25

  I USED TO worry about failing Nicky, harming him in ways I couldn’t help. I had changed once he was born. I knew I had to keep going for him no matter what. Even sadness seemed a self-indulgence, something that had to be ruled out because it could rub off on him. Nicky had to be saved from everything dark and hurtful, everything unthinkable. I’d clutch his hand in mine and hurry him across streets, always on the lookout for the mad driver coming out of nowhere.

  Even though he missed his father, I had the feeling Nicky was happy. He considered he and I had a pretty good time of it. Across the hall from us on Twelfth Street lived a child we both felt sorry for. Every night we’d hear his parents screaming at him and at each other. The boy, who was older than Nicky, shocked him once by saying he hated his life. Nicky was only seven—it was the first time he’d come up against despair. “No one should hate their own life,” Nicky said indignantly.

  He was always healthy. I guess I took that for granted. But one morning, when he was ten, he woke up with an excruciating pain in his back. In a few days he could hardly walk, and no one could figure out what was wrong with him.

  What happened to Nicky seemed to have the terrible speed of an accident. It made no more sense than that, although a doctor told me boys of that age are vulnerable to strange illnesses. I kept thinking I’d allowed myself to become too innocent. I should have been more vigilant, warded off fate. I thought Nicky would die because Tom had died. But once he was in the hospital he started slowly getting better.

  I was working in midtown that summer, editing photos for a fashion magazine. Each day I’d leave my office a little early and go to a Chinese takeout place on Forty-ninth Street. After a while it was my regular routine. Nicky would call me in the afternoon and place his order. “An egg roll, of course,” he’d say. “And sweet-and-sour shrimps. And Mom, would you bring me a Coke?” I’d never liked him to have soft drinks, but he’d say, “Please, please,” trying to sound pitiful, and I’d always get one for him in the end.

  When I’d get to the hospital, the other mothers would be there already with their shopping bags. Soon whole families would be gathered around the bedsides of the children, everyone eating out of foil containers or off paper plates, like an odd kind of picnic or a birthday party that had been displaced.

  The children’s wing was in the oldest part of the hospital. It had a marble rotunda on the ground floor. When you took the elevator up, there was no more marble, just dim green corridors and unending linoleum and muffled fake laughter from all the television sets. The ki
ds pressed those switches the moment they woke up. If you came in the afternoon, it would be soap operas or game shows; by the evening it would be “M*A*S*H” or “The Odd Couple,” reruns of “The Flintstones.” There was a lady volunteer on Nicky’s floor who called herself The Teacher and came around with little workbooks. No one took her very seriously. She told me once that she was going to bring some literature to explain to Nicky what a biopsy was because he seemed so bright. She was taken aback when I shouted at her, “I’d rather you didn’t!”

  I kept thinking Nicky’s time in the children’s ward would irrevocably change him. A permanent shadow was falling across his vision of life and there was nothing I could do. I went to talk to a psychiatrist, who said, “What can I tell you? This will either do damage to your son, or he will rise to the occasion and be a hero.” I saw that this was true. There were those two alternatives. Somehow I could accept the logic of that answer.

  By August Nicky had seniority in Room K. New little boys kept coming and going, accident cases mostly. They lay beached on those high white beds, bewildered to find themselves in arrested motion. They’d each been felled by some miscalculation—running out too fast in front of a car, jumping off a stoop the wrong way. They’d go home with an arm or leg in a cast and sit out the summer in resentment, listening for the bell of the ice cream truck, driving their mothers crazy. “Hey man, what you break?” they’d ask Nicky, looking at the plaster around his torso with respect. “You break your back or something?”

  Nicky would explain his condition like a junior scientist. He’d picked up all the lingo from the doctors—“left lumbar vertebra … unknown organism.” “You see, in the X ray there’s a white swelling on the left lumbar vertebra.”

  Sometimes I’d look around the room and stare at all those simple broken limbs in envy. I’d wonder if Nicky did that too. Why couldn’t it have been something like that? Why had it been necessary for him to learn the awful possibilities, how your own body could suddenly turn against you, become the enemy?

  “An organism is just a germ of some kind, an extremely tiny one, you see.”

  He was the little scientist and he was the birthday boy. When the pain would come, he’d hold on to my hand the way he had at home on those nights I’d sat up with him. The egg roll would go into the garbage with the rest of the Chinese dinner. “Do you see that?” he’d say, pointing to the decal of a yellow duckling on the wall near his bed. “Isn’t that ridiculous to have that here, that stupid duck?”

  I agreed with Nicky about the duck and Room K’s other decorations—brown Disney bunnies in various poses, a fat-cheeked Mary and her little lamb, all of them scratched and violently scribbled over. I could see how they threatened his dignity.

  Mikel kept flying in from California to visit Nicky. He was always phoning me to ask how Nicky was and what I thought he should buy for him. There was a game called Boggle that interested Nicky for a week and an expensive tape recorder, which fell off the bed one day and broke, and a collection of intricate miniature robots from Japan. All this stuff piled up around him. The fruit my mother brought him turned brown in unopened plastic bags.

  Nicky only liked one thing, really; he could have done without all the rest. A fantasy war game called D&D that had been all the rage among the fifth graders. I never even tried to understand it. I just kept buying the strange-looking dice he asked for and the small lead figures that he’d have to paint himself—dragons and wizards and goblins—and new strategy books with ever more complicated rules. “I want to live in a fantasy world,” he told me. I remember it shocked me a little that Nicky knew so explicitly what he was doing.

  He refused to come back from that world very much. There were nights he’d hardly stop playing to talk to me. He’d only look up when I was leaving to tell me the special colors he needed. The nurses complained because there was always model paint on his sheets, silver and bronze from the armor of his warriors. If I’d encourage Nicky to get to know the other kids, he’d look at me wearily and say they didn’t have the same interests.

  “Maybe you could interest them in what you’re doing.”

  “Mom … I can’t. I’d have to start them from the beginning.” Still I was grateful to the makers of D&D, grateful he had a way to lose himself. If you walked those green corridors, you’d pass certain quiet darkened rooms where there were children who weren’t ever going to get well; there were parents on the elevator with swollen faces who’d never look you in the eye. A little girl in Room G died during visiting hours. I could hear her as soon as I got off on Nicky’s floor, a terrible high-pitched, rattling moan. It went on and on, and there were doctors running down the hall with machinery.

  I walked into Nicky’s room with my Chinese takeout shopping bag. He was staring at all his figures lined up in battle formation; he didn’t say hello. The other kids weren’t saying much either. Their parents hadn’t come yet. One little boy asked me, looking scared, “What’s that noise out there?” “Oh, someone’s very sick tonight,” I said, and I closed the door. I just shut that sound out. Then I felt I’d done something wrong, that we all should have acknowledged it somehow, we should have wept for the child who was dying.

  I used to try to get Nicky out of bed for some exercise. We’d walk up and down outside his room very slowly, the IV apparatus trailing behind us like a dog on a leash. Some nights we’d sit for a while in the visitors’ lounge, where there were brown plastic couches and ashtrays and tattered magazines, and Nicky would drink his Coke and go over his strategy books.

  A mentally disturbed boy appeared there one night. He was tall and had a man’s build already, muscled arms and shoulders. He looked eighteen or nineteen years old, though I later found out he was only fifteen. He had a face that could have been beautiful, but you didn’t want to see his eyes. They were all red and enflamed, emptier than a statue’s. I thought of the word baleful when I saw them. The boy with the baleful eyes. He was wearing dirty jeans and an old gray T-shirt. I thought he might have come in off the street.

  Nicky and I were alone. This boy walked right over and stared down at us. I spoke to him softly, trying to sound calm. “Are you looking for someone?” I said.

  He started shaking his head, grinning. “Who? Looking for Mr. Who. Have you seen Who?”

  I said I hadn’t seen him.

  “Are you a nurse? You’re not a nurse.”

  “The nurses are outside the visitors’ room,” I said. “Just down the hall.”

  He sat down next to Nicky. He rapped on Nicky’s cast with his knuckles. “Hello, Mr. Who. Want a cigarette?”

  Nicky was sitting very still. “No thanks. I don’t smoke,” he said in a small voice.

  The boy laughed and stood up. He took out a pack of cigarettes and some matches. He lit a match and held it up close to Nicky’s face for a moment. Then he lit his cigarette with it and stared down at us a while longer. “My name is Joseph,” he said. “Do you like me?”

  “I like you very much,” I said.

  He studied me a long time, almost as if I were someone he remembered. Then he threw the cigarette on the floor and drifted out.

  Earlier that day a boy from Nicky’s room had gone home. When we got back there, we saw that the empty bed was taken. A small suitcase stood beside it and a nurse was tucking in the blanket, making hospital corners. A little while later an intern led Joseph in, dressed in pajamas. “Mom,” Nicky whispered, “they’re putting him in here.”

  “Don’t worry about it, honey,” I told him.

  I went out to the nurse on duty at the desk and made a complaint. They had no right to put a boy like that in with sick children. The children would be frightened, they had enough to contend with. A boy like that should be put in a special place. “It’s the only bed available,” the nurse said. “There’s no private room for him now. Try to understand he’s sick too, he needs care. We’re going to watch the situation very
carefully.” When I told her about the cigarettes and the matches, she said, “My God. We’ll take care of that.”

  “Where does he come from anyway?” I asked her, and she told me the name of some institution upstate.

  My telephone rang in the middle of the night. A nurse said, “Hold on. Your son insists on speaking to you.”

  Nicky got on the phone, all keyed up and out of breath. “Mom, you have to give me some advice. You know that guy Joseph?”

  “What’s the matter, Nick?” I said.

  “Well, guess who he’s picked to be his friend? He keeps getting off his bed and coming over to talk to me. It’s too weird. I don’t know what to say to him, so I just listen.”

  I wanted to go straight to the hospital and bring Nicky home. I said, “I guess you’re doing the right thing, honey.” I asked him if he was scared.

  “Not so much. But it’s hard, Mom.”

  “The next time he bothers you, just pretend you’re asleep. Maybe he’ll go to sleep, too.”

  “Okay,” Nicky said. “Can I call you again if I have to?”

  I turned on the lights and sat up and read so I’d be sure to hear the phone. I called him back early in the morning. Joseph was sleeping, Nicky told me. The nurse had finally given him some kind of pill.

  I went to the office as usual but I couldn’t get much accomplished. Around three I gave up and went to the hospital. They were mopping the corridors and a game show was on in Nicky’s room. A housewife from Baltimore, Maryland, had just won a walk-in refrigerator and a trip for two to Bermuda. “Yay! It’s the fat lady! I knew it!” a kid was yelling to the others. I found Nicky propped up in bed painting a dragon, making each scale of its wing a different color. I looked around for Joseph, but I didn’t see him.