“Now that you ain't working, Nissy, you should come by the Misty Blue. You'd like it. You'd see all those guys from your high school days. They can dance.” She draws out the word dance until it actually seems to be dancing on the surface of her tongue. “You know what record I love? That old record by the Miracles. ‘Tears of a Clown.' I bet you like that record. You should see the brothers getting down at the Misty Blue, man. I didn't think old guys would be able to get down like that, but oh”—and her voice goes up and up, as the razor buzzes closer to my right ear, drowning out her words, and I wonder if the glory of over-fifty carousers will some day cause me to become right-earless. But soon her voice softens and the razor subsides, and Jackie—that's her name—is extending a mirror behind me with one long-nailed hand and spinning the raised chair with the other, providing me with a multi-angled view of myself. She knows that I'll be satisfied—I'm the only guy that asks “pacifically” for her—but those are the rules and I follow them as I follow the ebb and flow of her outlandish stories, as I followed Lyle onto the field in those autumns long long ago. I pay Jackie, tipping her five, and she winks. “See you in ten days, Nissy,” she's says, dropping the bills into the pocket of the billowy smock she wears. For a second I wonder what her body is like underneath that sheath of cotton speckled with the detritus of my graying temples. “Who's next?” she says, looking around the crowded shop. But there won't be a next, because the too-cool teenagers sprawled across the patent leather benches, flipping through the pages of sports magazines and inky tabloids, wait for Lyle, old-school football hero and style-cutter to the hip, high school elite. So, with no takers, Jackie just sweeps away the leftovers of my trim, picks up her own magazine—usually a car rag—and settles into one of the low-slung, beauty treatment chairs that tilt back toward a sink, and waits, I often wonder, through the ten days until I return.
“Come dance sometime,” she says to me as I head out the door. “I'm gonna miss you dancing on TV.” She's referring to Group/Solo, the game show I hosted for fifteen years, until last season, they, amid tabloid rumors of my forthcoming nervous breakdown (rumors that I only wanted to dance with the guests and had no interest in hosting the show), the new network regime—a green, ragtag assortment of twenty-eight-year olds who'd decided my style of hosting was, not “current” enough—put an old horse out of his low-rating 'ed misery. And I had no defense. The best part of the show did come at the end, when there'd be a group solo, in which I'd dance with the grand-prize winner. The house band would strike up some old standard and the winner and I would twirl away, as the credits rolled, past the gift displays and flashy game board. The new host, my youthful replacement who came to fame as a male cheerleader at USC, continues to dance, but he dances with younger contestants who swing and jack their taut, toned bodies into more current forms of social posturing. I couldn't do it. I wouldn't do it. I am not like Lyle, who thinks he hasn't aged, who has parlayed his years of experience and local celebrity into fashioning those young heads into visions of state-of-the-art black teenhood. Then again, growing old gracefully might work in the 'hood, but it has no place on TV.
After I leave the barbershop, I drive through the ragged remains of my hometown, down Water Street, the main drag, teeming with empty storefronts and devoid, it seems, of the life that existed there in my youth. I pass the old fabric store my father once owned, where the first publicity stills of Gail and me, the dancing couple, were taken years and years ago. (I still have the local newspaper clipping: “From Football Star to TV Star”). The “Black Astaire and Rogers” we were called, two hoofing black high school sweethcarts, drawn together by an obsession with dancing and great books. We tapped and tangoed our way across the nation's stages, through the Civil Rights movement and Black Power, through blaxploitation filcks and disco, dressed in the sequined and spangled two-pieces my mother sewed in my father's back room. After my father died the fabric store became a Jamaican roti house, then a bustling Chinese take-out joint people don't any more but they do go out to eat. Now it's just a hollow building, waiting for its next incarnation as a Latin grocery emporium. I drive past the curving line of workers and shoppers waiting for the first early-morning Water Street bus to carry them away from this listless relic of a town to more upscale places burgeoning with opportunity and some taste of liveliness. Then I'm on Exceptional Boulcvard, once the sight of a colorful and bouyant parade in my honor, heading toward the home—some say mansion—I have in the hills of the next town.
My wife's morning cab sits in the very center of the circular driveway. I pull in behind it and blow the horn. Gail comes out of the house, pauses on the steps to put envelopes in the mailbox, yells something back to Agatha, the maid, then comes over to the car. “Don't forget dinner tonight,” she says. Her body and voice are here with me in Long Island, but her mind is already in the office in Manhattan, her heart somewhere I'll never guess. “Are you listening to me, Dennis? We're meeting James at seven. We agreed this should happen tonight, so have Agatha set the alarm so you'll be up by five.” She smells of lilacs; her pearls tap against the half-raised car window as she leans to kiss me good-bye, turning her ear to me to avoid smudging her makeup. “Don't forget. You said you'd be there.” Then she turns, tall and graceful on the edge of her heels, and gets into the cab, off to make the 9:15 am train. I watch the cab drive away, then head into the house, through the dark foyer swathed in the fragrance of Gail's lilac perfume, to the skylighted kitchen, where Agatha stands at the stove and moves bacon around a frying pan with a long-tined fork. The sizzle of the grease competing with the blare of the TV on the counter. Agatha smiles at me, as she often does these days, a little sadly it seems, like she knows that the war's over and she has to serve bacon and eggs to the lone casualty right on the site of battle.
“You're on again today,” she says, with a hand on her hip and a nod toward the loud TV.
There I am, on the Game Show Network, a celebrity guest on The $25,000 Pyramid, sitting in the Winner's Circle, facing an anxious-looking, red-headed woman in a polka-dot dress. I'm leaning forward in my seat, yelling out a list of words to her, “groceries,” I say, “dry cleaning,” some “ums” and some “uhs,” and then, in a burst of inspiration, I say, “a spare tire,” and she shouts back at me “Things in a car trunk!” And I nod, and she jumps from her seat and we're hugging and Dick Clark (who never ever gets old; how old was he when we taped that?) comes over to the Winner's Circle and offers his congratulations. Cut to commercial.
“That was 1979,” I tell Agatha.
“I know,” she says. “You ripped that corduroy jacket right after you got home.”
Cable TV, the funhouse mirror that talks back to retired TV performers like me, televising like some kind of cathode-ray Dorian Gray portrait brought to life. In the months since my firing I'd seen my younger self on The Love Boat (as the jewel thief cousin of Isaac the bartender), Charlie's Angels (as the prosecutor whose wife is seeing another man), on Hollywood Squares (“Which state is the Iditarod in?” I'm asked. “A frozen state,” I reply, and the audience roars with laughter.) There I was on Match Game (“Freddie believed that the only way to make dogs like him better was to dress up as a BLANK.” The contestant's answer was “A can of dog food.” My answer, along with Richard Dawson and Brett Sommers, was “Fire Hydrant”). And there, between Patty Duke and John Astin and Mr. and Mrs. Phyllis Diller, were Gail and I together on Tattletales (“What's the one thing you hate most about your husband?” the wives were asked. Gail's answer: “The way Dennis snores.” We got one hundred points for the Blue Section.) Who would have thought, I'd asked Gail one night—while we watched ourselves on a Carol Burnett Show rerun on the Comedy Channel—that Cable TV, this threat to the Big 3 Networks that had kept us in business, this wave of the media future, would actually become a clearinghouse for the old network shows it threatened to replace? She just shrugged her shoulders and said, “Can you please turn the channel? Sex and the City's about to come on.”
&nbs
p; I eat Agatha's bacon and eggs and drift up to bed to sleep until noon, to have one of the mean daytime dreams that I've been having lately.
My dream.
Picture this: a woman, my wife, honey-colored, just over fifty years old. She's wearing a tapered plaid skirt with a matching jacket, padded shoulders accentuating the cinched waist that she tends to diligently with daily sit-ups and diet pills. Her hair is swept up from her neck, poised there with a barrette that she'd covered herself the night before with the remaining scraps of her outfit's fabric. She likes everything to match. She stands in the center of a moving subway car, the A train swooshing downtown toward her son's Greenwich Village apartment, hanging onto the metal passenger bar so as not to tumble into the unsuspecting lap of the gentleman reading the Post seated directly beneath her. She wants a seat. She's tired from the daily PR grind of lunches and conferences and the metaphorical prostitution it entails, but no one offers her a seat—not the gentleman with the Post, not the teenager in hightops, nor the man she recognizes from the suite of offices next to her own expensive suite of office space. This lack of courtesy doesn't really bother her though; chivalry died, she told me once, with the interment of King Tut. She realizes (or rationalizes) that with her heels and her brown auburn-tinted hair and slightly tight-fitting suit hiding her age she could easily pass for thirty, thirty-five even. But sometimes she wishes she weren't so, so—a word doesn't even come to her. She wishes that the youthful zest that gets her extramarital affairs and whistles on the street could disappear the moment she appeared on the subway train. Because no one offers a young woman a seat. But this also refreshes her, catapults her into new reasons for striving harder . . . or so she says.
She likes everything to match. But, as she said to me, she and I don't match anymore.
Just after my dismissal from the game show, Gail (and I) had a party, a cocktail thing to which everyone came: television people glued to their Nokias like the tiny cell phones held the secret of life; vulgar young music business-types that Gail associates with at work, their boxer-clad asses gaping out of baggy jeans; nosy starstruck neighborhood boors bent on being impressed; and the new breed of nameless, free-drink–drinking wannabes looking to make names for themselves.
It really was Gail's party; no one wanted to talk about my recent departure from their professional entertainment ranks. While she waltzed around the house, floor to floor, guest to guest, I planted myself near the bar, chatting mainly with the nervous catering administrator who often interrupted our boundlessly empty conversation with snide orders to his celebrity-gazing staff. Gail glowed in these situations, and because she glowed, occasionally surrendering herself to the music and spinning like a bump-and-grind pixie, the house glowed, as did I, as best I could, feeling old and unwanted, but mainly just bored. (Gail doesn't dance with me at parties anymore. “I like to dance the way the kids dance,” she says. “You want to get too close. I'm not in tap shoes anymore.”) That night, she danced with our son, James, making a not unawkward fifty-four-year-old's stabs at the latest crazy dance steps, her head ajerk with the beat, her mouth wrapped around the lewd lyrics, and everywhere the house breathed her lilac odor echoed her laughter. It was the generous chortle of a young woman, reckless, massaged by the knowledge that her whole life lay before her like a road repaved solely for her to travel upon.
I wanted to see Jackie.
The energy emanating from the Misty Blue almost made up for the lack of life in my old hometown. The parking lot out front was thick with cars and people preparing to party. I could smell the tangy odor of marijuana to my left; could hear the drunken shouts of a thick-thighed woman in high heels and a short purple skirt coming from my right. I turned that way, and there was Jackie, holding up the woman, helping her toward her car.
“Is that you, Nissy?” She sped up her step, now dragging the woman along with her as she approached me. “Look at you, Nissy. Looking all cute.” The drunk woman in her embrace looked up at me, as if the sight of me and my possible cuteness might snap her out of her daze. She seemed to recognize me for a second, but her buzz had a grip on her memory; it held it away from her and she couldn't grab it back. She gave up and let her head loll back on her shoulder.
“Be right back,” Jackie said. She hurried the woman to a Taurus that was parked just ahead of my car and shoved her inside. Then she stood, pressed down the front of her own miniskirt and turned back to me, her face all bright eyes and smile.
At our table inside, Jackie pointed out some old-timers and updated me on their lives since I knew them in high school. She'd dated the sons of at least seven guys I'd known when I was younger than she is now.
“And one daughter,” she said, with a grin illuminated by the vodka cocktails she sucked down. “But that was just an experiment,” she added. “You know how it is, Nissy. You've seen the world.”
“But I still live near here,” I told her. “The world is overrated.”
“I'll believe that when I see it.” She took a sip of her drink, then shouted over the thump of the music, “Why aren't you home with your wife?”
“She's entertaining a houseful of people I don't like or know,” I said.
“Maybe if you got to know them,” Jackie said, “you'd like them.”
“I'm too old for them,” I said.
“But not too old for me?”
“Nope.”
“Why not?”
I didn't know how to answer that at first. But I thought about her cutting my hair and I thought about her baby-sitting her second cousin and I looked at her dreadlocks and miniskirt against a background of old men with whisky glasses and smiles that had known what frowns felt like and cars that knew the lyrics to the songs that I loved and I said, “Because my wife will never forgive me.”
She had started to sip again but paused, holding her glass before her, cutting me a look that could have shattered the cocktail glass she was holding. “You cheated on her?”
“Nope.”
“Then what did you do to her?”
“I got old.” My mind's eye was on Gail dancing at the party. “I got old first.”
“And that's unforgiveable?”
“She never thought that would happen,” I said, suddenly warming to this conversation, warming to a theory I'd never spoken aloud and only rarely thought in any substantial way. “No,” I said, and I took a long, deep gulp from the glass of wine that had been sitting there, untouched, in front of me. “No, that's not it. It's not that I got old. It's that I like it.”
“You like being old,” Jackie said.
“I love it,” I told her. I wasn't exactly sure that I believed that last comment, but it felt good to say, so I said it again. “I love it and that's what my wife can't forgive.”
“Wow,” said Jackie.
“Wow, indeed,” I said. “Let's have another round.”
It was the first second round of many second rounds that I would share with Jackie, who became my best friend of sorts. We went to movies and basketball games. We shared ice cream at the Carvel on Water Street near my father's old fabric shop. We went to the amusement park in East Meadow where Jackie won me a teddy bear that looked, she said, like me when I came in for my haircut. One night, as we were driving back from a movie, a song called “I Think I'm Goin' Outta My Head” came on the radio and the falsetto tones of Little Anthony lifted me up inside. “I love this song,” Jackie said. She grabbed my hand and yanked me out of the car and as drivers passed us, the radio turned to the highest volume, the headlights outlining our two-step, Jackie and I danced along Exceptional Boulevard.
Another evening, another party at our house, this time for our son, James, and his new contract. I invited Jackie.
She showed up in an apple-green dress and strappy high-heeled sandals, her dreadlocks piled high atop her beaming face. We talked for a while, I introduced her to Gail and some of the rappers Gail represented, then she swooped into the party, a whirl of green.
“She could be your
daughter,” Gail said.
“What are you talking about?” I said.
Gail just rolled her eyes at me and turned, melting back into the party.
Later I found Jackie on the dance floor and said, “Take a bow.”
“What?”
“Follow me.”
We went out onto the back patio. The stars were like tiny spotlights poking through the thick black fabric of the sky.
“‘Take a bow,' ” I told Jackie, “is an old family saying. Whenever someone was overreacting or overdramatizing or just cutting up, we'd say, “Okay, take a bow.”
“Like, when a director says ‘cut'?”
“Exactly,” I said.
“The sky is beautiful, isn't it?”
“It is,” I said. “My wife thinks you and I are having an affair.”
“What?” Jackie's laugh was like a loud bark. “Should she be thinking that?”
“No,” I said. “She shouldn't. But she wants to, I think. I think it would make me more interesting to her somehow.”
“She's beautiful, your wife.”
“Yes,” I said. “She is.”
“Have you told her that lately?”
“I haven't told her much of anything lately. We don't really talk to each other much.”
“You need to tell her she's beautiful. Then she won't think you're jumping my bones.”
“Maybe you're right,” I said.
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