“What do you think of Frisco?” Eddie asked, making polite conversation. I was grateful he had not brought up the night of our car ride.
“I like it out here,” I replied. “It’s . . .” I struggled to find the right words, but they wouldn’t come. “. . . so different from New York.”
He laughed and made that particular pronouncement that all people who are not from New York make: “Yeah, New York’s a nice enough place to visit, but I don’t know how anybody can ever live there.” He shook his head. “It’s certainly not for me.”
“I don’t know when Joey will be back,” I said. I noticed he was already more than halfway through his beer. Eddie, for all his cornfield patina, appeared to be a fast-drinker.
“Well, that’s all right. I just came to tell him I checked my P.O. box, and I got my letter today. Wanted to see if he did, too.”
“Your letter?”
“From the Department of Labor,” he said. “I got the job. Just wanted to thank Joey.”
“Thank him for what?” I was confused. Joey had mentioned both he and Eddie were applying for government jobs, but until that moment I hadn’t paid much attention to this fact, caught up as I was with my father’s journal and my new life on the houseboat.
“It’s an administrative position—I’ll be working as the secretary to some kind of mining engineer—but I ain’t ever worked in an office before. Now I gotta learn how to type before the end of the month. Me, typing, hah! I’m pretty sure Joey’s old man pulled some strings, and I’m grateful.”
“Oh,” I said, taking all this in.
“Yep, Joey’s old man is a cold fish, that’s for sure, but he still does Joey a good turn from time to time.”
“I guess congratulations are in order,” I said, offering him my hand.
“Say, thanks,” he said. “I just came around because I figured Joey might’ve gotten his letter, too. I’m itching to find out if we’ll be in D.C. together like we planned.”
Something about the way Eddie had said those words, like we planned, suddenly had me feeling hostile and irritated. I stood up, and—not very gracefully—snatched the empty beer bottle out of Eddie’s hand. I gave a little grimace that was meant to be a smile.
“Well, I’ve got to get back to work,” I said, moving as though to clear the bottles away and get back to business. Eddie cocked his head at me and I could tell what he was thinking. What had changed between us, he was wondering. And what could I possibly have to do so urgently?
“All right,” he said, as though giving up on the answer. He rose and smoothed down his T-shirt and blue jeans. “Well, I just came to tell Joey my news and see about that letter. You tell him I stopped by?”
“I will,” I promised. Eddie nodded and I felt embarrassed, aware of myself as a bratty child who had just thrown a tantrum. “I will,” I repeated stupidly, and tried to smile. “Thank you for coming by, Eddie.”
He smiled back easily. His blue eyes seemed kind, his white-blond hair angelic. I was a fool; my suspicions had been entirely my own. He turned to go and took a few strides towards the door, then paused.
“Miles? You’ll look out for him, won’t you?”
I froze. “What do you mean?”
He smiled sheepishly and shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know . . . Joey’s reckless. Letting guys like Bill and Donald buy him drinks . . . Anyway, two men, well, sometimes that attracts attention. And a white man and a Negro, well, people have a habit of remembering that pair, you understand? But he’s seemed to calm down some since he met you, and I’m glad. I hope you can . . . just”—Eddie shook his head—“keep it that way, and take good care of him.”
He turned and walked out the door. I watched him disappear, a black silhouette cutting through the bright light of afternoon.
• • •
Joey came back an hour later, carrying two bags from the little grocery store in town. I got up to help him but froze when I saw clutched in his hand was an open envelope.
“Eddie stopped by,” I dutifully reported. “He was granted a position at the Department of Labor and he wanted to thank you for your father’s influence.”
Joey’s face lit up. “Oh, that’s swell!”
“Eddie also wanted to find out whether you’d received your letter,” I added. He looked down at the envelope he’d been carrying as though he had forgotten it was there.
“I did!” he said. “I got the job!”
“Congratulations,” I said. I smiled and we embraced, but the truth was I wasn’t sure what any of this meant, and my heart was only halfway in it.
55
Your job with the State Department . . . what will you be doing there, anyhow?”
We had slept in, whiling away the morning in bed. Or rather, Joey had slept in. I had lain awake, listening to the sound of his soft snoring, restless, trying to picture Joey’s life after me. The life he would now have without me. Now he was awake. I got up to put on my pants, while Joey followed suit with considerable reluctance.
“I’ll be writing up armament reports for the Political-Military office,” he answered. “It’s only a paper-pusher job, really, but some of the information is classified: the quantities of munitions we supply to other countries and such.” Suddenly he laughed. “Actually, when you think about it, it’s not altogether different from what I was doing before.”
“What do you mean? From what you were doing in the Army?”
I asked him what guys actually did in the Army when there wasn’t a war on. He shrugged and said as far as he could tell it wasn’t all that different from working in any other industry because mostly it was all about supplies: You either counted supplies or audited the use of supplies or moved supplies from one place to another. I asked him wasn’t there more to it than that and he shrugged again and said: “Maybe for the officers. But the enlisted men . . . it’s like running one big national warehouse. Sometimes we pretend there’s a war on and we do training exercises. Then a couple of guys write up a report on how much supplies that would take.”
In spite of myself, I laughed.
It was difficult to stay mad at Joey. But ever since he’d gotten his letter from the State Department, a little ball of resentment had been rolling around in the pit of my stomach, growing bigger and bigger. I had no reason to feel betrayed. From the first moment I agreed to join him on the houseboat, we had never discussed the terms of our relationship, not once. And it wasn’t as if I hadn’t seen Joey flirt with others or observed his familiarity with the YMCA. Nonetheless, I was angry to think I could be one of a number, a transition point as he moved back to one coast from another.
Joey noticed the shift in my disposition almost immediately.
“What’s eating you, Miles?” he asked. He came over and put his hands on my shoulders. “Ever since I got my good news yesterday, you’ve been acting funny.”
I opened my mouth to deny it, but stopped. I would not be dishonest with him.
“I suppose I’m not ready—just yet—to part ways.”
He cocked his head and searched my face.
“What are you talking about?” he said, laughing. “The job’s in D.C.—that’s the beauty of it. When you go back to New York, we’ll be on the same coast.” He released his grip on my shoulders and let his arms slide down around my waist. “It’s possible we can go on seeing each other!” he said with a triumphant, matter-of-fact smile, as though he had solved a difficult math equation that he’d been working on.
“Oh,” I said, stunned. I felt the back of my neck bristle with a sudden cold sweat. “I hadn’t . . . thought of that.”
“Of course, the weekdays will have to be all work and no play, but on weekends I can take the train up to see you and get a hotel room for us.” He dropped his arms from my waist and picked up the letter he’d left lying on the table, looking it over and thinking aloud. “You know, the p
ay isn’t a heck of a lot, but it isn’t terrible, either. Maybe if I scrimp a bit in D.C. we can eventually get a little place of our own somewhere in Manhattan.” He put his arms back around me and tucked his face into my neck. Suddenly he started. “Gosh. What’s a matter with you? Your heart is beating a million miles an hour!”
“I’m all right,” I said. “I’m just excited, I suppose. This is news to me. I’m taking it all in.” I was excited. And more than a little frightened.
“You want that, don’t you?” he asked. “To go on seeing each other?”
“Sure I do.”
“Well, then,” he said. He gave my body a squeeze and released me. “We ought to celebrate.”
“All right,” I agreed, still dazed. Everything had changed in the blink of an eye.
“I’m happy. Aren’t we happy?” he asked.
I shook myself from my trance, trying to register the question he’d asked. Aren’t we happy? “Of course.”
“Look, you finish up what you’re doing here.” He gestured to where my composition book and my father’s journal lay open on the table. “I’ll go back into town and see if I can’t get us some champagne.” His eyes sparkled and he grinned, and I found myself grinning back. He started to leave, then paused and spun back around. “Oh!” he said, and pulled an envelope from his pocket. “Oh, yeah—this came for you. In my excitement yesterday, I put this in my pocket and forgot about it.”
Joey handed me the envelope and leaned over to kiss me. I kissed him back in a perfunctory way.
“Be right back.”
“Okay,” I agreed, and watched him go.
When I looked down at the letter, I froze. My heart stopped and I felt the blood drain from my face. It was from Janet. I opened it. Her letters had come back to her in the mail, she wrote, marked RETURN TO SENDER and, alarmed, she’d tried to telephone my hotel room. What was this post office box address the hotel clerk had given her? Where was I sleeping if not the hotel?
It didn’t take me long to figure out that the clerk at my former hotel in San Francisco had opted to return my mail while at the same time bewildering Janet with news of the P.O. box address when she’d called. I wondered if this had been done out of malicious intent; he had certainly glared at Joey and me with hatred and disgust.
I folded the letter back up and slipped it into its envelope, wishing dearly that it didn’t exist. The small tremor of panic I’d felt when Joey suggested we go on seeing each other once we were both back on the East Coast had been amplified by the abrupt materialization of Janet’s letter, Janet’s handwriting, Janet’s words. What was I doing? I was suddenly terrified.
In less than ten minutes I had all of my things packed and had walked down the road—in the opposite direction Joey had taken—to telephone for a taxi to take me across the bridge to the bus station in downtown San Francisco. I wrote a note—a painfully casual note, for I was trying harder to convince myself than I was trying to convince him that I was indifferent to this affair—to say I was headed back to New York. My family needed me, I wrote (without giving specific details I knew he would never have believed anyway), so I was going back East and anyway it was time for me to be moving on. I cannot imagine what it was like for Joey to come home and find that note. I feel pretty low whenever I think of it, to have written it, for it was full of cowardice and lies.
56
The ride back to New York was dull, gray, seemingly endless. The roads were slick with early-winter rain, causing the bus’s brakes to squeal from time to time as the driver attempted to wrangle the great lumbering steel beast steady as we zoomed over the pavement. Newcomers getting on the bus struggled out of their dripping coats and allowed the rainwater to soak into the upholstery, releasing the humid odors of wet, dirty wool. Morale among the passengers was low, befitting my own mood.
I made it back to New York and came home in a surreal daze, back to my old bedroom in my mother’s apartment. Technically speaking, I was a Columbia graduate now—no longer a student—and my prospects ought to have been bright. But I felt neither here nor there. I was free to go forth as a man with a diploma, an adult who could proudly put the words summa cum laude on his résumé, yet I felt distinctly dispirited and unambitious. My life had not really begun. I had thought that it was actually beginning during my time in San Francisco. Or, more specifically, in Sausalito, on that houseboat. Those rare days had felt more like the start of something than anything else I’d experienced. But it had been a false start; I was sure of that now.
I met with Janet to tell her I was back in town and explained things to her as best I could. I mentioned Joey, but said that we were merely friends and that he’d put me up for a spell as a matter of financial practicality. Money was likewise the reason I gave Janet for seeing her less often.
“I can’t afford to take you out as much,” I said to her.
“I like the park,” she said. “The park is free.”
“It’s getting much too cold out now,” I said. “I promise I’ll get some work soon, and then I can take you out properly.”
“All right,” she agreed.
But this was a false promise, too. I wallowed about and didn’t go looking for work, not right away. My mother and Cob were puzzled by my depression. From their vantage, they only knew I had gone away on an adventure and returned victorious with my father’s keepsake, his words, his journal, his war stories.
“I’m proud of you, son,” my mother said, holding the journal when I first showed it to her and gazing at it in wonder. “You done it.” She opened it to a random page and her face screwed up with emotion as her eyes ran over the familiar shapes of my father’s handwriting. Then the sound of Wendell snoring in the living room broke her reverie and she hurriedly handed the journal back to me, then wiped her eyes. “Here,” she said in a low voice, “I hope you read eve’y word, and it makes you proud.”
“It already has,” I said, hoping to reassure her.
“Then why you look so sad?”
There was an answer to her question, but not one I could speak aloud.
During my first week back, I barely got out of bed. At first she was perplexed, but soon enough puzzlement gave way to impatience, and eventually, my mother—a woman who could only tolerate inactivity for so long—roused me.
“I don’t know what cause you got to feel so sorry for yo’self, but I didn’t raise no lazybones!” she scolded, creating a small tornado of force as she pretended to tidy my room. It was impressive; she managed to rip the sheets off the bed and stuff them in her laundry basket before I was entirely out of it.
I took the subway down to the messenger dispatch in midtown and was given my old job back. I did not attempt to contact Mister Gus or resume my duties for him, figuring it was best to leave well enough alone. My days were spent peddling around the city, making deliveries for the messenger service, and my evenings were spent side-stepping Wendell. Whenever we bumped into each other in the living room or in the hallway, we squared off and stalked around my mother’s apartment, leering at each other with the hateful eyes of two jungle cats.
My greatest pleasure during that dreary time was the delight in Cob’s face when I read entries from our father’s journal aloud to him in the evening. But other than the happy, golden half hour or so I spent doing this, I was left with a profound sense of being idle after Cob went to bed. I told myself this was a result of no longer having my studies to occupy me, but I knew things were more complicated than that.
I had felt the first pangs of regret before I’d even signed the note and left the houseboat, but I didn’t know how much these feelings would intensify until I came home one day and found my mother waiting anxiously in the living room, pacing in circles.
“He wouldn’t say what he come for,” she announced in a plaintive voice when I entered the apartment.
“Who?” I asked.
“The white
boy who rang the bell. He asked for you by name, but he wouldn’t say what he come for.”
My heart leapt.
“Did he say he was coming back?” I asked.
“No,” she said with certainty.
“Oh.”
“He say he wait for you at the coffee shop around the corner.”
“What?”
“He say he wait for you at the coffee shop around the corner,” she repeated, and gave her foot an impatient stamp. “Hurry now. You go an’ see about it. I don’t know what on God’s green earth he want, but he trouble, an’ this family ain’t fixin’ for no trouble.”
With my messenger bag still slung over my shoulder, I dashed for the door. Enthusiasm carried me down the stairs, along the street, and around the corner.
I was feeling a bit high and dazed when I neared the coffee shop . . . and then, peering in the large plate-glass window, I saw him. Suddenly everything came crashing down around me as I surveyed the situation and the dim buzz of comprehension began to seep into my core. The white boy waiting for me in a booth at the coffee shop was not Joey as I had hoped and expected it would be, but it was someone I knew. I blinked at his familiar sandy-blond hair and pert retroussé nose, and as I did so, he looked up and noticed me, too.
It was Cliff, from the Village. I had not seen him since the terrible night of his house-party. What he wanted from me now, I couldn’t say, but he had seen me and there was no going back. Saturated with the soggy weight of disappointment, I took a deep breath and pushed through the coffee shop door.
CLIFF
57
I guess I surprised everybody pretty good by going up to Harlem. It was all part of my new policy of goodwill. I’d decided to turn over a new leaf. I knew I’d been a lousy husband to Eden lately, what with all that prizefight business and the hotel room. I’d gotten into a pretty destructive state, and when you got down to it even I had to admit the truth behind this had to do with my frustrations about my writing and My Old Man. I had resolved the issue by grabbing the bull by the horns and approaching him directly and making an official submission. Eden was mostly staying out of it but she did mention it had arrived in the mail and that she had spotted the envelope on My Old Man’s desk. I had addressed it directly to him and marked it “Private and Confidential” and a week later I received back a date-card in the mail, making an appointment for us to have lunch at Keen’s. “We will discuss your pages,” he’d written in his cramped chicken-scratch handwriting at the bottom. It was a little funny he hadn’t commissioned Eden to send the date-card out because according to her he rarely did that sort of thing personally, but then again I was his son and it was only natural that I get better treatment. I knew the pages I sent him were good and he was likely to think so, too, and I tried not to read too much between the lines. Now there was nothing left to do but wait.
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