by Jack Livings
But that wasn’t how it was going at all. He wasn’t his father, not exactly, then. John was speaking calmly into the mouthpiece. Please, yes? Yes, I’ll wait.
So he can’t help the ingrained habits, the domineering attitude, but he’s not a perfect replica.
Do you mean in a different part of the hospital? John said.
…
Who saw him last?
…
Well, can I talk to someone who does?
…
John dropped the mouthpiece below his dripping beard and said, They lost him.
He said it the way a person might declare the corkscrew or pliers to be missing, with a hint of pique, a flat atonal lack of commitment to genuine concern. After another minute, John said, Thank you, and passed the handset back to Manny. He crossed his arms and studied his feet, all too aware that he was under observation. The presence of the other two men had forced John to react in a way that made it impossible for him to discern whether the news had moved his heart to concern or urgency.
How far’s Roosevelt? he said to the floor.
Thirty blocks? Manny said.
Thirty, my father confirmed.
All right, then, John said.
And back he went into the blizzard.
18.
John was only thirty-one but already showed signs of ticking around the eyes, the sympathetic droop of the lids you see in social workers and the clergy. His skin was pale, in some places almost transparent, the blue veins beneath his collarbone glowing through, and since graduating high school he’d worn a beard to cover his acne scars. He was fussy about it. He wasn’t interested in looking like Grizzly Adams. He aspired to project urbanity. On the occasion of his winning a vocal competition in the Catskills several years earlier, a part-time critic at the Kerhonkson Reporter had described him as being in possession of a “sort of diamond in the rough face.” His hairline was in retreat, which he’d accepted as the price of adulthood.
John had made two stops that night before arriving at the Apelles. Like everything he did, they had been attempts at forgetting that his son was dead. He had stopped first at the Cosmic Diner, a place he’d never taken his little boy and that he therefore hoped would not spring any memory traps on him. Anyone else would have gone to a bar, but John did not drink. His father drank, and that was reason enough for John not to. The second stop had been a movie theater that specialized in erasing time.
For the record, the bulbs in John’s brain were fine. He had just the right number, and they turned off and on when they were supposed to. His bulbs’ efficient reliability caused problems, however, since what he needed most in the world was to forget the death of his little boy, so he might have benefited from some faulty wiring or burned-out bulbs. But what he had instead was a perfectly functioning device for playing back his recording of a tragedy.
Four years had passed since he’d been inside the Cosmic, and when he’d entered he’d recognized a few of the waiters, and one of them recognized him, too, and didn’t seem to care that he’d taken up a four-top for the better part of the afternoon. John had been avoiding his eye, but when things calmed down the waiter sauntered over.
So you finally come for the job? the waiter asked, arms crossed over his profound chest. He wore a white shirt and black vest stained with a palette of soups and pastes, and transmitted the impatience of a professional forced to deal with amateurs all day long.
Where do I sign? John said.
Nikos, the waiter said, extending his hand.
Nikos, John said. I remember.
I tell you something, Nikos said. These guys … He shot the kitchen a forlorn look and stroked his white mustache, movements that invoked a spectrum of ancient disappointments that somehow encompassed brutal winters and rotten harvests, deaths at sea, generations living in the disfavor of the gods. It’s been a while, my friend. You’ve been in prison, no?
John shook his head.
Ran off with a woman?
Something like that, John said.
You finished school?
All done.
So finally now you come to work for us? the waiter said, jabbing John in the shoulder.
When he was at Juilliard, John had talked with this waiter sometimes, late-night, the place populated by old men in overcoats nursing cups of coffee, old women reading the Times with a magnifying glass.
These guys, the waiter said again. He slid into the booth across from John and leaned across the table. I tell you, he whispered. These guys. He can’t fire them, you know? Good luck if you do want to work here.
John raised his eyebrows. The owner, who occupied a stool by the door, his girth running over the sides of the seat like warm dough, spent his day ringing up checks and intermittently yelling at the staff, rousing himself only for shuffling trips to the head, didn’t strike John as the type who’d think twice about firing his own mother, much less his kitchen staff. That wasn’t the point. This waiter wanted to vent his spleen, divulge the same complaints he laid on anyone he got into a corner, John suspected. He was about to deliver a conspiracy, and all conspiracies were the same: conceived in fear, nourished with jealousy and spite. All Nikos wanted from John was a little collusion, a sign that he, a fellow white man, had also suffered as a result of the special treatment the Negroes, the coloreds, the whatever-they’re-called-this-week got. How about a little compassion, a nod of agreement at the injustice? John set his face to regard the waiter without malice, but with no hint of understanding.
They come down from Harlem, the waiter said quietly, splaying out his fingers on the tabletop. First he hire only one. But then another, and another. And now they’re a gang. If he try to get rid of one, he has a riot on his hands. The whole restaurant, burned. You see what they did in the Bronx, right?
John tipped back his head to indicate that he’d listened with an impartial ear, a judge on the bench.
The Black Panthers are everywhere, the waiter whispered, holding up his fist. You understand?
John sipped his drink.
I tell you one thing. He fire them right now, maybe no problem. Those people can’t stand cold, so no protests. I don’t make this up. It’s evolution, it’s scientific. This climate is all wrong for them. Survival of the fittest. They’re too easy to spot in the snow.
Nikos stopped talking and looked at John. He waited.
Finally John said, So how long have they worked here?
Nikos said, Twenty, twenty-five years. So you see my point, yes?
I suppose, John said.
The waiter leaned back in his seat and wiped his hands on the towel slung over his shoulder. You got a job? he said.
Trademark office, John said.
The waiter nodded. You still sing?
Here and there. Maybe a summer tour. Festivals.
So, the trademark office?
Just temporary until I get a role.
To keep the mind occupied, the waiter said.
Something like that.
No? Don’t occupy your mind?
It’s fine.
You don’t like it, you come work here, Nikos said.
What a joy that would be, John thought.
How’s family? Your wife is happy?
Yep, John lied. You know. Marriage.
Nikos smiled, exposing two rows of perfect popcorn kernels.
You lost your ring, Nikos said.
She’s pregnant, actually, John said. He and his wife had split up. She was not pregnant, at least not that he knew of. He hadn’t seen her in three years.
Congratulations, my friend! the waiter said, clasping John’s hand in his own.
Any day now, John said, nodding, smiling.
I’m sorry, now I’ve forgotten your name, John said, still holding the waiter’s hand.
Nikos.
Thank you, Nikos, John said, sliding out of his seat without releasing Nikos’s hand, making it impossible for Nikos not to get up from his seat, too. It was an old trick he’d seen his
father use, and he was surprised at how well it worked, as though he’d pulled an antique flintlock pistol out of its velvet case and it had fired a round straight and true.
I get you a refill, Nikos said, heading off to the fountain with the red plastic cup in his hand, his shoes crunching on the salt-caked floor.
John had worked at Patents & Trademarks off and on over the years, checking and cross-referencing files. Practically the entire research staff was singers. It paid by the hour. You set your own schedule. John preferred the emptiness of the place at night to the day-shift company of other singers, who were incapable of talking about anything but contests and auditions, whining about the undeserving and talentless who’d stolen their roles, the rest of the sad sad story. If not for the storm, he’d be on his way there soon.
Nikos was coming back. The way he held the cup at eye level, as though fording a chest-high stream, reminded John of a child. How old was Nikos? Cup met table with a slosh, which he dispatched with a single stroke of his towel.
I see your father all the time, Nikos said.
Oh, John said.
He comes for breakfast. Pretty girl with him.
Yeah.
She sits over there, though, and he sits over here. A real gentleman.
She’s his helper.
A nice girl, Erica. She’s been coming in since she was … Nikos held his palm out at table height.
Sure. She’s a nice girl, John said.
For years she came in with her grandmother. Always helping out with the old ones.
Yes, John said.
But for a week or so now I don’t see them. Usually every morning but Mondays. But I think I haven’t seen them for a week. They finally run off together?
John smiled.
No, of course not, Nikos said. They don’t even sit in the same booth! But your father, he is okay?
He’s fine, John said. I’m sure he’s fine.
I think he has a touch of … Nikos tapped his head and frowned. Happens to the old. Happens to all of us.
I think I’ll check out the movie, John said, pointing at the TV on a wall mount near the kitchen slot. He straightened up to his full five feet nine and three-quarters inches. He was rabid about those three-quarters of an inch. It was bad enough being a lyric tenor sharing the stage with basses who could play tackle for the Giants.
Even still, Nikos had to look up at him. John shook his hand for the third time that afternoon.
All right, then, Nikos said.
All right, John said, and dropped back into the booth. Nikos went back to the wait station, and John sipped his Dr Pepper and watched the promo for a Vincent Price flick on The 4:30 Movie.
The trailer faded and one of the regulars shouted, Sound! The counterman, without looking up from his story in the Post, reached above his head to the volume knob with the assurance of a pilot setting a toggle switch on the ceiling panel. The Weather 7 graphic faded to the meteorologist, a comb-over in a turtleneck, blazer, plaid pants. He slid his flock of cardboard snowflakes and clouds across the magnetized map, pulled up some more from down south, then more from the north. Pivoting to a second map, he swept his arms across the greater metropolitan area, conjuring the storm. A cloud fell off and clattered faintly on the studio floor. He liberally exercised his right to bestow massive upon every noun he uttered. Massive storm. Massive fronts colliding. Massive snowfall. Twenty inches in New York. Thirty in Boston. Massive drifts. Massive tides! P. T. Barnum pitching meteorological disaster.
John closed his eyes to the miraculous banality of the world, the flat world on the black-and-white screen, the pointlessness of prediction. Massive, massive. Apocalypse and destruction. A hysterical troll two inches high trapped in a brown box, a herald of electric prophesy. A day was marked by the accumulation of dread. It drove him like a spike into the earth. In the morning he got out of bed and felt it plinking at his skull like rain. By the time he fell asleep, it was a sledgehammer. Maybe tomorrow he could allow himself to be crushed, maybe tomorrow he could give up.
He decided to stay for the beginning of the movie, and gathered up his coat and scarf and hat and dumped them onto a swivel stool nearer the TV. The counterman shifted down the counter like a great hairy animal grudgingly making room in his den, sliding his paper with his thick forearms, cutting his eyes, sizing up the intruder who dared trespass his habitat. John went back to retrieve his glass from the table. Returned, he settled in and lifted his face to the Sylvania screen.
The counterman closed his paper, and reordered its pages with the care of a priest arranging his vestments. I’ll leave the sound on for you, he said, lingering, inviting a smart-ass remark, but John said nothing.
Sure, you could get stabbed to death in broad daylight in your apartment lobby, but it was the incessant attitude that really killed you. The endless stream of commentary that piled up inside his head, glop clogging all the drains, the never-ending frustration of being in the way, of everyone else being in your way, of never being first, of telling yourself you’re all right with the elbow in your back but not with the boot on your toe. Remarks, always with the remarks. Some bitch in a fur flinging open a shop door and charging headfirst into the oncoming throng, expecting the sea to part before her glory. A cigar-chewing slob sprawled over the steps, gruntingly ceding passage with a You’re Welcome. On the subway, old women in pillbox hats, embalmed and powdered, motionless, then inexplicably viperous. High school kids whose faces were already closed for business. Not a spark of light anywhere. Everyone an enemy. Most days John wanted to kill someone; rarely did a day pass that he didn’t expect to be killed himself. He had not been bothered by these things before his son died.
His heart was a fist. It took nothing to set him off. A subway turnstile eating his token. Some cabbie cutting a corner too close to where he was standing. The kids slouching all over everything, cigarettes tucked behind an ear, blocking the sidewalk, clogging things up for sport, just like everyone else jockeying for a little attention, poor babies. Cry me a fucking river.
He hated wiseass countermen with shellacked hair and dirty white T-shirts, toothpicks rolling across the craggy range of their misbegotten dentation, a fading tattoo of a pair of tits as doleful as Dopey’s eyes on one forearm. Yet John didn’t rise to the bait. Not today. He wished to be anywhere but New York. To fall into a battle with the counterman, to have the standard-issue verbal altercation over this little patch of real estate, would be a leap into the abyss, confirmation that the city existed right now, that it was within him, and today he didn’t have room for it.
A flashbulb memory, sitting on the hot sand with his sisters at the Cape. The shore was a sheet of dark, ovoid stones, the water so cold that going in had been a heroic act. He was small, and Fil and Tracy had held his hands, and he’d entered the shallows between them, gingerly, and he’d stopped when the sharp cold bit into his thighs, he’d leaned back like a dog against its leash, and they’d let him go back to the beach while they waded deeper and deeper into the dark water. It had been in a bay. There had been no waves. The stones had warmed in the sun and the heat wobbled around him and he kept his legs on the towel. Where had their parents been? Fil and Tracy came back with hard skin—cold, rigid, and rough under his fingers. They’d lain flat on the stones and he smelled their wet towels steaming beneath them.
Because he couldn’t excise or beat to death the part of him that time-traveled, he had settled on this establishment, a hermetically sealed capsule buried during an earlier life. His memory went everywhere with him, that was the problem. In his wallet was a photograph he hadn’t looked at in three years. At first he’d thought when the memory had faded he might look at it. He imagined looking at it, holding it by its scalloped white edges, and though he didn’t weep anymore when he thought of it, the memory hadn’t faded a shade. Nope, it had done just the opposite, it had expanded, covering the landscape in every direction.
Could he stay here all night if he got his head straight? It was a good stool h
e was on, that’s what Bronson would say, a good stool, and the movie would be good, and that would get him through until dinnertime.
Be a man. A man with balls and a spine. Pull yourself together.
Hey, the counterman said, eyes fixed on John. He’d been trying to get John’s attention for some time. John turned away from the opening strains of The Pit and the Pendulum. The counterman stood up straight and hooked a thumb through his leather belt while with the other he stroked his stubbled cheek as though he’d just woken up.
You gunna order or what? the counterman said, pacing the words as if reading from a cue card.
Dr Pepper, John said, tipping his cup.
We got Mr. Pibb.
John looked back at him, down at the glass of Dr Pepper he’d been working on for the last hour. Some toast, he said.
Wheat white rye.
Rye, John said. Through the cutout, John saw Nikos palling around with the line cook.
The counterman called it, hojack whiskey down, and went back to smoothing his paper. He shook his head, whether at John or some indignity contained in the Post, it was hard to tell, and really there was no difference.
John pulled out his plastic pouch of Sir Walter Raleigh and his pipe, a bruyère so smooth it could have been poured from a pitcher, a richly figured barrel with a line as graceful as La Maja Desnuda’s hip. So he’d been told by the guy who’d sold it to him. One eye still on the movie, he folded a paper napkin several times until it was firm as a pool table bumper. He held it all together by pinning one corner to the counter with his thumb. Then he rapped the bowl of the pipe against the bumper, each whack dislodging a spray of carbonized tobacco.
Hey, buddy? the counterman said.
John continued unabated, his face an expression of most genuine perplexity, as if to comprehend this request would require that he speak a foreign tongue, and intended to antagonize so completely the counterman that there could be no other possible reaction than violence.
You wanna knock it off?
The pipe hovered by John’s ear. In the kitchen, a patty sizzled under the cook’s steak weight. John brought down his arm, cracking his pipe against the counter with an extra snap of the wrist.