The camera, still recording, was on the scattered bundles of papers in the street, before careening wildly as the crewman pulled back inside the car, speeding off with his coveted tape.
“Police this morning reported several arrests. But as Trib Publisher Leland Brady just announced, live in our studio, most deliveries of the paper were completed to outlets around the city and suburbs. We go now to City Hall for a live statement from Mayor Zimmerman…”
The Mayor was a fitness fanatic who jogged to work every morning rush hour. He waved to commuters, occasionally slowed to press some flesh with a startled construction worker or stockbroker. His first press conference of the day often found him still in his running suit, tufts of thinning hair resembling an untended garden.
Zimmerman announced that the city, while taking no sides in the dispute, was obligated to protect the replacement workers now producing and delivering the Trib. When a reporter asked if the rank-and-file police force was unhappy having to assist non-union workers, the Mayor stretched as tall as his five feet, five inches would allow. His chest seemed to swell with indignation.
“They have their jobs to do, like it or not,” he said. “This is about fundamental protection under the law.”
Jamie clicked off the set, closed his eyes and tried to unscramble the events of the previous nights. Brady’s an inveterate gasbag, a bully and a union-buster too. I can see that.
But Jamie could also see the other side, enough to carry on an imaginary one-way conversation with Steven.
How can you be on the side of such a segregated union? Men who can summon enough rage to kick a guy as he lies helpless, who can shout, “Motherfucking nigger scab!” as easily as they could recite the Pledge of Allegiance?
To whom did Jamie owe his allegiance?
Didn’t he at least have the right to ask?
He was always amazed by how the city’s tabloid legends—the Hamills, Breslins and Blaines—could furnish an instant take on the issue of the day. How they could summon moral outrage, seemingly without considering the other side of the story, much less contemplate the possibility they were wrong. It was as if someone out of the blue had walked up, put a hammer in their hand, pointed to a nail and said, “Right here.” His cousin was like that. Jamie, conversely, could dwell for hours on an issue and end up more confused than when he began.
“Life is more complicated than you make it out to be sometimes,” Jamie had told Steven once.
“Only if you make it that way,” Steven said, as if nuance was an affliction. “You’re just too concerned about how people are going to react.”
Jamie couldn’t deny that. His mother always told him he worried too much, and that was why he had so much trouble falling asleep.
His insomnia began in earnest when Jamie reached adolescence. He would lie awake for hours, changing positions, until he couldn’t stand to stay in bed anymore. He would prowl the apartment into the wee morning hours. Molly would tell him, “Look at your father, he carries around everyone’s problems, and he sleeps like a baby. Just don’t think.”
“How do you not think when you’re still awake?” Jamie said.
“Then think good thoughts.”
He would read—comic books, newspapers, even a school assignment that was particularly dull and might put him out. He would wrap himself in a blanket on the floor and watch television with the sound turned down to a whisper. Eventually he would fall asleep—he always did. But it was only for three or four hours in the early morning. At least Molly let him sleep until the last possible minute on school days, knowing he needed every minute he could get.
As he lay in bed, contemplating the rally, the picket line and another day on strike, weariness set in. Jamie had gotten maybe four good hours sleep. He napped for another ninety minutes. He got out of bed and trudged into the shower. He ate a bowl of cereal and downed a glass of orange juice. It was time to go to the rally—or not.
He went out to his car and pulled two shopping bags from the trunk. He walked to the subway and took it to Grand Central. He bought a roundtrip ticket to Pleasantville. He went to a phone bank and dialed Karyn’s number. She answered on the fourth ring.
“I’m bringing Aaron’s gifts up today,” he said. “If you want to plan something during lunch hour, I can sit for him. If not, I’ll drop them off and come right home.”
He hung up without waiting for her to respond. He dragged the shopping bags to the platform and boarded the train. Steven would have to address the union masses without him, Mario notwithstanding, while Jamie attended to business much more personal.
Chapter Eleven
Pressed for an explanation of why he’d agreed to move to the suburbs, Jamie might have blamed it on a childhood passion. He loved trains and had since riding the New York subway with Molly and Morris as a small boy.
In theory, commuting by rail to the city was appealing, a chance for Jamie to get in touch with his inner quaint. But he immediately wished they had never left Brooklyn. The streets in Pleasantville were so empty and quiet. He missed walking out his door and seeing people. He preferred continuous white noise to silence interrupted by a car motoring past his house.
“These crickets are insane,” he told Karyn on their second night in the house. “I can’t sleep.”
“You couldn’t sleep in Brooklyn either,” she said.
“It’s worse out here,” he said.
Who knows? Maybe I would have gotten used to it, he thought as the train left Grand Central. Jamie sat by a window, his bags of birthday gifts propped next to him. There were two other passengers—an elderly dark-skinned man wearing a turban and a long blue coat and a tall young woman with turquoise streaked hair, partially braided, in a clingy knee-length red skirt.
His neck was still tight so Jamie continued to rotate it gently, trying to crack it loose. He made sure to wear sunglasses to hide the damage from Aaron as best he could. When he arrived at the house, Karyn told him he could have Aaron for a couple of hours.
“I’m going to run to the gym and then I have a few errands to do,” she said.
He resisted asking if any were related to moving to Seattle. He didn’t want to risk another geography discussion that might dampen, or derail, his visit. Jamie only wanted to give Aaron his gifts before the Friday party brought a deluge of toys from friends. Most would be played with once or twice and finally heaped onto the mound of plastic rising in the corner bedroom with sloping ceilings.
Jamie had admittedly overdone the shopping. He had driven the previous Saturday to the big toy store off the Belt Parkway and wandered the aisles like a tourist. He filled his cart with a Lego assortment, Candy Land, (the only board game he recalled playing with either of his parents), a plastic ball and bat, a miniature set of cars with accompanying garage and a five-pack of Sesame Street books. These were all in addition to the starter tricycle Karyn had purchased and agreed to share as the gift from the two of them.
“Don’t go crazy—he has enough junk,” she’d said, prematurely consigning Jamie’s generosity to the pile of excess. More than anything, she hated messiness, anything left out of place. Jamie’s habits made her cranky.
“You leave shoes by the front door, clothes on the floor by the bed—why do I have to pick up after you like I would for a child?” she would say. “It’s not my job.”
“You’re right, it’s not,” he’d say. “So don’t.”
To keep the peace, he did make more of an effort. But she went too far when he would carry cookies or a bowl of rice into the living room and onto the couch. No sooner had he gotten up, Karyn would unleash a dust buster on his loose crumbs.
“I had roaches in the city,” she said.
“What are you worried about in the suburbs—a bear breaking in?” he said.
When it came to buying gifts for Aaron, Jamie dismissed her aversion to clutter on the grounds that he, the father in absentia, had to at least distinguish himself from Pleasantville’s general friend populace.
The mere consideration of himself as Dad was still something of an out-of-body experience for Jamie. But he relished the time spent with his son, preplanned as it was. He thought Aaron was as beautiful a little boy as he’d ever seen. He had Karyn’s rich lips, sparkling green eyes and even a small birthmark, as she did, below the right side of his mouth.
Aaron looked more like Karyn and, given the living circumstances, she made Jamie feel as if Aaron belonged solely to her as well. Early on, she tried to schedule Jamie’s visits around Aaron’s nap times. When that failed, she felt the need to supervise a routine diaper change, as well as a feeding and burping.
“You’re hitting him too hard,” she’d say. “You’ll hurt him.”
“I’m barely touching him,” Jamie would say. “At this rate, it’ll take a week.”
Several times he had come close to telling her to knock it off but he realized she had the final say on when he could come. When she left, he would rebelliously lift Aaron out of the crib, gently deposit him on the blue bed quilt in Karyn’s room—his too, once upon a time—and lie alongside him. He would nuzzle the baby’s warm reddened cheeks, carefully stroking his hair.
Occasionally he would tear up and whisper, “I’m so sorry.”
Aaron could not grant him clemency for his role in this nuclear calamity. But as he grew into a toddler, his eyes brightened at the sight of Jamie—or dah-dee.
Three weeks before Jamie’s gift-bearing visit, Aaron had clomped over, carrying a mini-basketball and wanting to be hoisted up to a plastic rim for a dunk shot. A basketball connection! Jamie was a mess of conflicting emotions, joy mixed with melancholy. The truth was that it felt damn good to feel something, anything, since the chain of life-altering events that followed their move to the suburbs.
It was late winter, 1991, when he and Karyn bought the charming colonial with the glass-enclosed porch from the elegantly dressed blonde real estate broker with the model’s legs and the William Buckley syntax. She insisted they could afford the monthly payments without mentioning that they both would have to continue working—along with everything in the 85-year-old relic for which they would owe almost a quarter of a million dollars.
“Lovely starter, walk to the train,” Buckley had said with her lips barely moving. They had a deal by the following morning.
Hours after the movers hauled their stuff from Brooklyn, Karyn welcomed him to his new country palace with breaking news: the hot water heater had burst, flooding the finished basement and ruining the carpet.
The carpet was no big deal, she said. It could wait to be replaced, but not for too long because the real bulletin, the lead that she had calculatingly buried, was that within roughly nine months a little rug rat was coming.
One year earlier, Karyn’s almond-shaped eyes had glistened with unbridled sincerity as she promised to not even think of starting a family until Jamie was doing better in the take-home department. Now she would be requiring a shopping spree to accommodate a waistline soon to undergo biological alteration.
“Can you believe it?” she said, shaking her fists and nodding vigorously. “You’re going to be a father.”
A father.
A father?
Shit, Jamie thought. How can I be a father when I haven’t cracked the code yet of being a son?
“The one night we didn’t use the diaphragm, remember?”
“You said it wasn’t that time of the month.”
“I guess I just miscounted.”
“Jesus…”
“You’re not happy about this, about having a child, even if we didn’t plan it?”
As he stood on the threshold of the quarter-million starter—his feet suddenly feeling as if they were tacked to the welcome mat the sellers had graciously left them—did it really have to be a choice between delight and devastation? Jamie would soon enough embrace the notion of impending parenthood. It was the marriage he didn’t quite know how to nurture.
He realized he had gone along with the move to the suburbs because he had somehow convinced himself it was consistent with a new pattern of accepting change in his life. But the thought of leaving Brooklyn had never occurred to him—and not to Karyn as far as he knew—before she came home from work one evening, furious and near tears.
She had spent forty-five minutes trapped in a stifling, packed elevator that delivered commuters from the Clark Street subway platform to the street-level station lobby. The city was beating her down, she said. She needed to breathe. She wanted a yard, a porch, her own retreat from the daily publishing grind.
“I’m willing to commute,” she said. “The train is therapeutic.”
But she gave notice at work six weeks after the move because the electrical field along the rail tracks couldn’t possibly be healthy for the baby—nor could stressful work for forty-five hours a week. Her aunt, who lived a mile up the Saw Mill River Parkway, happened to know someone who knew someone who could land her part-time work at a small bookstore in nearby Chappaqua Village.
“How can we afford this?” Jamie asked.
“You want the baby to be brought up with neither parent around?” Karyn said.
Implicit in this last loaded question was the weight of her being pregnant and not having her mother—lost to breast cancer during Karyn’s sophomore year at Princeton—live long enough to see it. Her father, since remarried, had relocated to Los Angeles.
“My aunt is like a mother to me,” Karyn said. “Who else am I going to lean on?”
As the pregnancy progressed, even Jamie’s clumsy attempts to pursue meaningful communication in the bedroom were rebuffed. In the beginning, Karyn was tired, nauseous, immersed only in the climax of a good novel. By the second month, she was downright dismissive. In one tearful tirade that Jamie could only pray was hormonal, she accused him of plotting to use his penis like a sword to abort an unwanted child.
Out of sheer financial panic, and, yes, as an excuse to escape mounting tensions, Jamie lobbied Cal Willis for extended night hours. He began staying in the city, alibiing that he didn’t want to risk navigating the darkened parkway for fear of falling asleep at the wheel. It was easier and less stressful to stretch out on the bed in his old room at his parents’ place.
Then came a night when Jamie went with the flow of late-afternoon office banter and career commiseration. He landed in a taxi with Debbie Givens after drinks at Kelly’s, her hand massaging his crotch, her tongue locked in his. Jamie thought better of it by the time they reached her place in the Village. “I’m married and my wife is pregnant,” he said in excusing himself. Left unsaid was that he had no interest in awakening next to a body—tight as it was—and having to participate in another round of career-advancing chatter without the alcoholic inducement.
Stepping out of the cab, Debbie announced herself impressed with Jamie’s conscientious rejection. She kissed him on the cheek and sent him back to the office and on to his parents’ apartment. Jamie went home early the next evening after work, determined to make a sincere plea that he and Karyn figure out some way back onto the same existential track.
She wasn’t home. Her note on the kitchen table said she was out shopping for baby furniture with her aunt. They would have a late dinner too. He shouldn’t wait up.
What Jamie read was an unambiguous directive: keep your damn sword in its sheath.
Chapter Twelve
Downtown Pleasantville looked as if architectural planners had established one side of Bedford Road as Then, the other as Now. The diner on the west side of the street was an old boxcar configuration wedged between the hardware store and the local pizza joint. Directly across were the headquarters of three real estate brokers and an upscale supermarket. Its entrance was obscured by three men and one woman carrying picket signs denouncing the company for anti-union practices.
Jamie glanced uncertainly at the picketers, wondering for a moment if they had been strategically placed there by Steven. He laughed off his paranoia and let Aaron lead him by the hand, up the t
wo steps to the glass door of the diner.
“Go he-uh, dah-dee. Go he-uh.”
Stepping inside, Aaron crouched to brush permanent scruff marks off the little Nikes Karyn’s aunt had bought for him. He rose nonchalantly, took Jamie’s hand and led him to one of the window booths. Each one contained an old-fashioned wall-mounted jukebox. Jamie slid in alongside Aaron and reached across to inspect the selections. At the top of the first page, he flipped to an oldie he remembered from his sister’s collection of ancient 45s. The Righteous Brothers: “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling.”
The waitress was notably short, with fleshy arms and hair dyed orange, cut a few inches below her ears. She enthusiastically greeted Aaron while sizing up Jamie with a peripheral but poorly concealed gaze. Jamie turned to face her, lest she get an angled view behind his sunglasses of the swelling under the shades.
“How’s it going, little buddy?” she asked Aaron. “You want the usual?”
Jamie, unable to share in this insider information, turned to Aaron, hoping he would place his order on cue.
“Cute boy,” the waitress said. “Love those pudgy cheeks and the way you cut his hair short in the front so you can see those big green eyes. He’ll be a ladies man for sure some day. Are you Dad?”
“Gill-tee, dah-dee,” Aaron said, pulling on Jamie’s left pinky.
“I am,” Jamie said.
“He comes in with his mom a lot,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve seen you around. Playing hooky from the office?”
Jamie shrugged. “I guess you could say that.”
He looked past her to the clock on the wall behind the counter. It was ten past noon, the rally presumably underway downtown. Jamie imagined Steven at the microphone on a small stage in front of the Trib, strumming chords on a guitar and expressing his labor outrage in verse. Jamie took some comfort from recalling how Steven, who had fancied himself a folk singer in high school, could barely carry a tune.
“Gill-tee, dah-dee. Gill-tee.”
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