In the meantime, though, he had an afternoon to kill. He paused on a corner at Smith Street, considering where to go.
An old couple approached down the sidewalk, the man a little sporty gent in a polo shirt and fishing hat, the woman in a tan overcoat despite the summer heat. They bickered. He threatened to walk away and leave her behind; she snapped, “Go ahead—see if I care!” They ventured out across the street, a cat and dog tethered together for life. They didn’t like each other, but at least they had each other. Jack’s maternal grandparents had lived like that: they argued and fought every minute of their lives together, and then his grandmother died. Without his sparring partner, his grandfather had been desolate, inconsolable.
Another couple strolled by, hand in hand, content in each other’s company.
He stopped at a pay phone and searched his wallet for Michelle Wilber’s phone number.
A little white puff of a cloud drifted out across the blue sky, following Ben as he set off toward Red Hook.
An old Italian guy in an apron was sweeping the sidewalk outside a bakery on Sackett Street, crooning along in a cracked voice with the radio, Paul Anka and “Put Your Head on My Shoulder.” Up the block, a tiny East Indian kid was riding a broomstick, whacking himself on the butt with one hand, whinnying and galloping around like a snorting little pony.
Ben pulled out his video camera and collected a few shots, then continued on across the highway into Red Hook. He headed for a quiet back street called Imlay, home to the TIME Moving and Storage Company. During the day, the company’s fleet of small white trucks dispersed throughout the five boroughs, but at night they all returned here to park on the street like pigeons coming home to roost. Ben liked to film them, especially at night. In fanciful moments, he imagined that the company was the secret source of time itself, which the trucks delivered to the city.
Today he found a driver sitting in one of the few vans that remained at the headquarters. The old guy was reading the paper, leaning back with his feet up on the dashboard, a Yankees cap cocked high on his head. He looked mournful, yet content.
“Excuse me,” Ben said, “would you mind if I take your picture?”
“What for?” the man said warily, revealing a mouthful of crooked teeth.
“I’m making a film about Red Hook.”
“Suit yourself.” The man folded his paper, sat up, and posed stiffly.
Ben ran off a few feet of videotape. “Can I ask you a question?”
The man shrugged.
“I’ve been wondering—does it ever seem strange to you that your company is named after the one thing you can’t really move or store?”
The man didn’t show any surprise or amusement. He simply tapped the side of his head. “Whaddaya think this is for?” he said dryly. Then he opened his paper again and settled back to read.
Ben chuckled, then walked on, considering what to buy for dinner. That was the easy part—the hard part was thinking of something to talk about with his dad. What was it with fathers and sons, that weird, uncomfortable silence they couldn’t seem to escape? It must be a bummer to be a dad, he mused: one day you’ve got a cheery, talkative five-year-old who’s thrilled to play with you, the next you’ve got a sullen, uncommunicative adult on your hands.
He resolved to try harder. His father wasn’t going to be around forever. He rounded a corner, then stopped in the middle of the street. He’d started out with a hazy plan to make a film about the history of Red Hook. Then he’d realized that he was searching for his father’s history. Now it occurred to him that what he was really looking for was an explanation of himself. Maybe there was a reason why he was often lonely, why he felt estranged from other people. His father seemed to be the same way. Maybe it had something to do with his grandfather. Maybe the answer lay somewhere in Red Hook.
Tonight he’d find a way to interview his dad about the neighborhood. Set up the tape recorder without making a big deal of it. Say it was an “oral history.”
On the way back, he stopped in Carroll Gardens to shop for food. That was the great thing about the neighborhood: even in an age of giant supermarkets and convenience foods, it still had little mom-and-pop stores: butcher shops, a fruit and vegetable stand, bakeries, places where you could buy homemade pasta and olives by the pound.
He bought a bottle of wine and ingredients for the only fancy dish he knew how to cook: vegetable lasagna. It didn’t occur to him until after he was home that he’d gotten the recipe from his mother. He hoped his dad wouldn’t have some sort of flashback to his failed marriage after the first bite.
Jack had arranged to meet Michelle at five-thirty in a Greek diner in Park Slope. He arrived half an hour early with a copy of the Daily News; he figured he’d sit casually, sip a cup of coffee, and read, and that’s how she’d discover him—relaxed, carefree, mildly apologetic.
The problem was that he couldn’t focus on even the shortest articles. He looked up every time the door opened. As the clock over the grill parceled the time out in endless minutes, he was surprised and then alarmed by his level of eagerness and anxiety. As he thought about his short time with Michelle, it wasn’t the lovemaking he remembered most, but the fun they’d had on that first date. He was sad to think how long it had been since he’d known that lightness of spirit, that sense of adventure in his life.
Finally, Michelle walked in. She frowned as she set her purse down and slid into the booth.
“Hey, thanks for coming,” Jack said. “I just wanted to tell you—”
A sad-faced middle-aged waitress bustled up. “What can I get you folks?”
“I’ll have a cup of coffee,” Michelle said.
“I’ll just have a refill,” Jack added.
The waitress pointed to a folded card on the table. “We have a three-dollar minimum per customer after five o’clock.”
“It’s too early to eat,” Jack said. “We just want coffee.”
“I understand that, sir, but we have a policy here.”
He pulled out his wallet, yanked out a ten-dollar bill, threw it on the table. “Here. Why don’t you buy yourself a personality?”
The waitress drew herself up. “There’s no call for that kind of talk.” She left the bill lying on the table and walked away.
“I was a waitress once,” Michelle said. “It’s a tough job.”
Jack sighed. “I’ve had a rough week. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t tell me—tell her.”
He put his hands up in surrender. “You’re right.”
When the waitress walked by again, he apologized.
“Don’t worry about it,” she said gruffly. She walked over to her station and poured them some coffee.
Michelle leaned forward as soon as the waitress left. “I want you to understand something: maybe you got the wrong impression, but I don’t do that.”
“What?”
“What we did. One-night stands. Maybe you think that’s the kind of person I am, that you don’t have to call again.”
“Whoa, wait a minute. I just called you, didn’t I?”
“Jack—it’s been a week.”
“I’ve been going through a lot. I figured Jeannie would have told you. My landlord had a stroke.”
“She told me and I’m sorry. He seems like such a nice old man.” She was silent for a moment. “But that’s not enough.”
His eyes widened. “What do you mean?”
“You could have called and told me directly. Don’t you think I would have cared?”
He didn’t respond.
“There’s more to it than your landlord,” she said. “Isn’t there?”
He picked up a spoon and rolled it in his fingers. “I don’t know. Look, if you want the truth, I haven’t been very good with women since my divorce. Sometimes I think I might be too old for this dating business.”
“That’s not good enough.”
He sat up. “What’s not good enough?”
She pushed her coffee away. “Listen
, I was really hurt when you didn’t call. And I’m sorry to be so blunt, but I think you just want to be let off the hook. “You figure maybe if you admit that you’re nervous, some woman is going to come along and say, ‘That’s all right, honey.’ Well, it’s not all right. Everybody’s scared—the question is, what are you going to do about it? I don’t need another fifty year-old man who doesn’t want to grow up.”
“Hold on—I wanted to apologize. I just…I wanted to talk to you.”
She looked down at her lap for a moment, then raised her head. “There’s a problem.”
“A problem?”
“I’m sort of seeing someone. There’s a guy at work, a sales rep, who’s been asking me out for a while. After I didn’t hear from you for a few days, I accepted his invitation. He’s very nice.”
“Nice? This is what you want—nice?”
“He may not be the handsomest man in the world, and he doesn’t have some glamorous job like homicide detective, but he’s not afraid of a little responsibility.”
Jack put up his hands. “Look, I just wanted to see you again. I know I should have called, but I thought we had something special the other night. Are you all committed to this guy, or what?”
She pulled some bills out of her purse and set them down. “I’ll see how it goes. Who knows? If it doesn’t work out, maybe I’ll give you a call.”
Jack whistled in disbelief. “‘Maybe’ you’ll call me. Jesus, you’re a tough cookie, aren’t you?”
Michelle slung her purse over her shoulder and stood up. “The dating business hasn’t been much fun for me either.”
Jack stayed at the diner, moping. He couldn’t believe how hurt he felt. Evidently you never got too old for heartbreak. When the waitress returned to check up on him, he absently ordered the meat loaf special, which he then pushed around the plate for half an hour.
Out on the side-walk, the heat was finally draining out of the day. He took a walk, joining the flow of pedestrians along Seventh Avenue.
He had the nagging sense that he was supposed to be doing something, but he couldn’t force it into his consciousness. After a while, he looked up a side street and saw a familiar church. He turned off the avenue and descended the stairs into the basement meeting hall. He felt a strange thrill—as if he’d been given the password to a nationwide secret society, a subterranean world.
A speaker was just finishing, a twenty-something kid with a muscle shirt, a gold chain, and a thick Long Island accent.
“I didn’t tell my girlfriend I was in the program,” he said, “’cause I wasn’t sure I could stick with it. But then I finally broke the news, You’d think she’d be thrilled, ’cause all we ever did the whole time we were going out was sit on the couch all night, staring at the tube and drinking and getting high. “You wanna talk couch potatoes—we were a couple of mashed couch potatoes.”
Even though this was only his second meeting, Jack had noticed that the horrific AA stories were often accompanied by a dark humor. The cop in him approved.
He turned around to find a small, hunched man staring directly at him. At last, he thought, someone is on to the fact that I’m an impostor. The man’s heavy-lidded eyes blinked slowly and then he pulled his chin in and looked away.
“And then,” the kid continued, “I was telling her, hey, let’s get out, you know, do stuff, go to concerts, whatever—like I was realizing how pathetic our relationship had been. And you know what she did? She broke up with me.”
The kid paused, stared down at the floor, shook his head. “And I just can’t…I can’t get my mind around that. Like, instead of having a real boyfriend who wanted to take her out, she’d rather have me sitting on the couch like a vegetable. And it makes me so angry that I just want to drink, or snort up a big fat line. And that’s why I’m glad I’m in the program, ’cause I can come here and be pissed off and I don’t have to pick up a fucking bottle.”
Jack turned around. The hunched man was gone.
After the kid finished, others got up to sympathize and trade similar stories. Jack looked around and realized that they shared a deep pool of experience, a profound bond. He was sitting in the middle of a bunch of alcoholics—and he was jealous.
A woman told how hard it had been for her to go home for the Fourth of July and be surrounded by her drinking family. A man got up to say that he was starting a new job, and he was afraid, and tempted to drink to quiet his fear. And Jack sat and listened to the stories, soothed by the rhythm of their voices, these people who looked so calm but spoke of such incredible turbulence in their lives. He was startled every time someone stated, “I’m so-and-so, and I’m an alcoholic.” He watched their faces, revealed under pools of light. He was so used to people lying all the time, lying about the most trivial things just because it was their habit to lie—he didn’t know what to make of all these people struggling to reveal their most uncomfortable truths.
Priests were probably used to such stories. Many times he’d wondered what it must be like to sit in the dim booth of a confessional, whispering. But Jews didn’t have confessionals.
Cops did, though. Half the job was calling people in, trying to get the truth to surface. Contrary to popular belief, force was rarely used. The pros, the hard cases, knew enough to shut up, but a lot of perps—miserable, tired, guilt-ridden—seemed as if they had been praying for the chance to spill.
After the meeting, he wandered into a local Irish bar.
At six-thirty, Ben opened the wine and poured a glass before chopping the mushrooms. He had another glass while the lasagna was baking and felt guilty because there wasn’t much left for dinner. He cleared the kitchen table of a pile of film magazines, grant proposals, and other crap and set out the silverware and plates. He checked to make sure that the batteries in his Walkman were good, popped in a blank cassette.
By the time the food was ready, his dad still hadn’t arrived. Ben sipped more wine and watched a dopey sitcom, listening with one ear for the front gate to clang shut.
By nine o’clock, he was so hungry he sat down and ate.
By ten, he was so pissed off he was ready to clock the old man over the head with the wine bottle.
At eleven, he called the dive bar, Monsalvo’s, where he’d rescued his father before. The bartender said he hadn’t been in all night.
He was in bed just drifting off when he heard his father unlock the front door. “Thanks a lot,” Ben muttered, and fell into a restless sleep.
When Jack returned to his son’s apartment, the place was dark. He banged his shin on a chair, but was able to pull out the heavy futon bed without making too much noise. As he undressed, the urge to call Michelle again weighed powerfully on him and he “wondered if it was like an alcoholic’s thirst.
twenty-nine
WHEN BEN GOT UP, his father was sitting in the kitchen eating a bowl of granola.
His dad made a face. “This tastes like something you’d feed pigeons. Don’t you at least have any sugar to sprinkle on it?”
“No. I’m allergic to sugar.”
“Allergic? Whaddaya mean?”
Sugar made Ben’s skin break out, but he didn’t want to share that particular secret this morning. “What happened to you last night?” he asked instead.
“Last night? Why?”
“I made dinner. I told you I’d cook.”
His father clapped his hand to his forehead. “Oh, shit. I’m sorry, kid. I was at a meeting.”
“A meeting? What meeting?”
“You said you had the day off.”
His father didn’t answer the question. “Look,” he said, “I’ll make it up to you. How about we go get lunch somewhere, my treat. Someplace fancy.”
“I’m not in the mood.” Ben turned to the fridge to get some milk.
“Come on, we’ll get a great lunch, that’ll cheer you up. How about Peter Luger’s over in Williamsburg? Best damn steak in the city.”
“Dad!”
“What?”
“I told you: I don’t eat meat.”
His father looked startled. “You don’t? Since when?”
“Since about five years ago. Don’t you hear a word I say!”
“Hey—don’t bite my head off just because I offered to buy you lunch. We’ll get spaghetti. Vegetables. Whatever you want.”
They went to a fancy place down by the base of the Brooklyn Bridge. Ben didn’t say a word during the whole drive, even about his father smoking in the car. He was so quiet he scared himself: his silence mirrored his father’s long silences when he was growing up. A red burst of anger flared up in him. His film project was no use. Nothing was any use. It didn’t matter what the deep psychological reasons were: he was going to turn out just like the old man. A turtle. As usual, his dad ate his lunch section by section: meat, vegetables, starch. Watching him was torture.
His father had some cheesecake for dessert. “This is great,” he said. “You want some?”
Ben groaned. “That’s it. I can’t take it.”
His father looked bewildered. “Take what?”
“What did I tell you? This morning, when we were in the kitchen?”
“Oh, damn. I’m sorry—you’re allergic to sugar.”
He stared at his father in disgust. “I could have told you I had cancer and you’d hardly have noticed.”
“Whoa, come on, kid. Don’t be like that. I’m sorry. Really. I’ve been crazy busy these past couple of weeks.”
“You’re always so wrapped up in your own business.” Ben noticed his voice rising into an embarrassing higher register. “What you have to do is so much more important than anything else.” His voice cracked, as if he were regressing to childhood. “More important than being a father. Or a husband.” You Left! he wanted to shout. I Was Only Eight Years old! How Could You Do That If You Really Loved Me?
“Now hold on—” his father started to say, but Ben cut him off.
“No wonder Mom got so disgusted.” Something inside him spiraled out of control. “No wonder she calls you a loser.”
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