by Lucia Berlin
Buzz drove up in his Porsche. He got out, but left the motor on so music played loud. Stan Getz, bossa nova. Buzz had brought a large pitcher of frozen daiquiris. He and Maya sat on the steps, drinking from wineglasses. Frances danced under the cottonwoods to “The Girl from Ipanema.” Pete scowled; dominoes clicked. The daiquiris were strong. Cold, cold, delicious! “Sure!” Maya said when Buzz suggested that she and the boys pile into the car. They’d drive down by the Rio Grande where it was cool, go to a drive-in for hamburgers and root beer.
It was fun. A pretty summer night. When they got home, Buzz waited in the kitchen while she put the boys to bed.
“I had a good time,” Maya said.
“Me too,” Buzz said. “Damn, what a cheap date. Give her an ice cube and she’ll follow you anywhere.” They laughed and he kissed her. It thrilled her. He kissed her again. “You need some loving, someone to take care of you.” She pulled him to her, thirsty for him.
Pete was banging on the door.
“What is it?”
She stood inside the kitchen, behind the door. She had only lit one candle.
“What are you doing, in the dark?” Pete asked. “Sugar. I need to borrow some sugar. I can’t drink my coffee with no sugar.”
She poured sugar into a cup. Mice scattered behind the canisters.
“Here.” She handed the cup out the door.
“Thanks.”
After Pete had left, Buzz drew her to him again, but Maya had come to her senses. She moved away. “Good night,” she said. “Don’t come back when Paul’s not here.”
* * *
In August the thunderstorms came. It was wonderful, the sound of the rain on the tin roof, the lightning and thunder. There were tomatoes and squash and corn. Maya and the boys swam and fished in the clear ditch every day.
But the mice never did go away. The plumbing never got put in. Buzz came back often when Paul wasn’t home.
In the autumn Paul got a job in New York. He and Maya packed everything into the van and a U-Haul trailer. Pete and Frances and Romulo moved into the big house that same day. They stood waving and waving as the car and the U-Haul drove away. Maya waved too and she wept. The plants, the red-winged blackbirds, her friends. She knew she’d never be back. She knew this wasn’t a good marriage either. Frances died a few years later, but Pete and Romulo still live in the house. They are both old now. They sit under the trees and play dominoes and drink beer. You can see the place from Corrales Road. A fine old adobe, well over a hundred years old. It’s the house with the blazing red trumpet vine, the house with roses, everywhere.
A FOGGY DAY
Downtown the Washington Market is deserted until midnight Sunday when suddenly the fruit and vegetable markets open out onto the streets, wild banners of lemons, plums, tangerines. Farther down, toward Fulton Street, subtle reds and browns of potatoes, squash and yellow onions.
The buying and loading go on staccato until dawn when the last delivery truck is gone and the Greek and Syrian merchants speed off in black cars. By sunrise the market is as empty and dingy as it was before, except for the smell of apples.
Lisa and Paul walked in the rain, in deserted downtown Manhattan. She talked. “It’s like living in the country down here. Corn and watermelon in the summer … Seasons. This is where they bring the Christmas trees for all New York. They’re stacked for blocks and blocks. Forests! One night it snowed and three dogs were running wild like wolves in Doctor Zhivago. You couldn’t smell cars or factories, just pine trees…” She babbled on as she always did when she talked with him, or with dentists.
She wanted him to see it as beautiful, the city, her city. She knew he didn’t. He was looking at the men eating raw yams and stolen grapefruit, or burning orange crates in rusty incinerators. Bronze K Ration SIX FOR A DOLLAR cans, green Gallo Port bottles glistened in the light of the fires, shimmered in the rain. An old man vomited into the gutter where purple fruit wrappers blurred indigo at the grate like crushed anemones.
He would find no beauty at night, during the time when fires dotted the landscape for blocks around, silhouetting the gestures of the men into drunken ritual dances. Or from her window at dawn, looking down upon a half-naked black boy, asleep on a dazzling truck bed of limes.
It started to rain hard. They waited in the doorway of Sahini and Sons, Artichokes, until it lessened into a drizzle, then they walked on again, wet. Slow and lanky, like they used to walk in Santa Fe, like old friends.
* * *
In Santa Fe Lisa’s husband, Benjamin, had worked at George’s restaurant, with Paul. George was a mean lesbian who dressed like a cowboy, imagined herself Gertrude Stein, and served Toklas-type food. Escargots, marrons glacés. Benjamin played subdued jazz piano and Paul was headwaiter. They wore tuxedos. Neither of them said anything. The witty talkative patrons all dressed like Indians … velvet, silver, turquoise.
The men got home around two thirty in the morning, smelling like Shrimp Aurore and cigarette smoke. Lisa cooked breakfast while they counted their tips out upon the round wooden table in the kitchen. Once Benjamin made ten dollars for playing “Shine on Harvest Moon” five times for a politician. The men laughed, telling her about the customers and George.
Eventually they were both fired. Paul had an actual showdown with George on dusty Canyon Road, just like in High Noon. He did look a bit like Gary Cooper. She looked like Charles Laughton in cowboy drag and Bette Davis black lipstick. She won.
In Benjamin’s case he showed up to work one night and there was a Mexican with maracas singing “Nosotros, que nos quisimos tanto…” Benjamin rolled his Yamaha piano out, and, with difficulty, up into the VW van.
It was a good year though. Piñon smoke, laughter. The three of them listened and listened. Miles, Coltrane, Monk. They also listened to scratchy tapes of Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Lenny Bruce.
Paul was a poet. It seemed he didn’t sleep at all. He wrote, somewhere, all morning. Benjamin slept late, practiced, played most of the afternoon, and listened to music, earphones on, with the seriousness of a student in a language lab.
Benjamin was a large quiet man, a kind man with a firm sense of Right and Wrong. He was fatherly and patient to Lisa, except when she exaggerated (often) which he said was tantamount to lying. He never spoke in the past or future tense.
Every night she was surprised when he made love to her. He was tender, playful and passionate, kissing her everywhere, her eyes, her breasts, her toes. She loved his strong hands on her breasts and how he would make her come with his tongue. She loved the nakedness in his hazel eyes as he entered her.
Each night she thought that it would be different in the morning between them, after what had happened, as she had felt the first time she ever had sex … she wouldn’t look the same the next day.
After they made love he would put Vaseline and white gloves on his hands and then put on a Lone Ranger sleep shade and earplugs. Lisa would sit up in bed, smoking, remembering silly things that had happened that day and wishing she could wake him.
During the day she spent most of her time with Paul, reading, talking, arguing at the kitchen table. Later she imagined that it rained that whole time, because for months she and Paul read Darwin and W. H. Hudson and Thomas Hardy, by a piñon fire that also existed only in her mind.
* * *
Then there was Tony. An old Harvard friend of Benjamin’s, rich and darkly handsome. He drove Lisa home from Albuquerque to Santa Fe in twenty minutes, in a Maserati, in the rain. If other cars didn’t dim their lights he would turn his completely off.
He used to take Lisa to dinner at George’s, to hear Benjamin play. Benjamin played fine for his old bebop friend. “Round Midnight,” “Scrapple from the Apple,” “Confirmation.”
Tony wore Italian suits with leather lapels. Paul handed them menus, silent. Tony was breaking up with his wife. He sighed, “Man … I hate endings … I only dig beginnings.”
“Far out,” Lisa said. “I dig endings myself.”
Their eyes met over crystal glasses of cabernet sauvignon. “… and there will never, ever be another you…” Benjamin played. A Chet Baker tune …
The love affair between Lisa and Tony was inevitable, or so Tony said. Cheaply predictable, Paul said. Benjamin said nothing at all.
She was nineteen years old. Not to excuse her, just that she was at an age that needs a good talking to. She loved it when Tony said things like “We were meant for each other. Our eyebrows both grow together in the middle…”
One night when Benjamin came home she said, “Ben. I want words! I want words! I want a word with you!”
He looked at her. He took off his bow tie and the nine ruby studs from his tuxedo shirt. He took off his jacket and his shoes and sat down next to her on the rollaway bed.
“Babs,” he said. (He used to call her Babs.)
He was silent then, taking off his pants and shorts and socks. He sat naked on the bed, tired, and she knew what a good man he was.
“I’m a man of few words,” he said. He held her head in his piano-playing hands.
“I love you,” he said. “I love you with all my heart. Don’t you know that?”
“Yes,” she said and she turned over and cried herself to sleep.
It all got very passionate and painful and yes cheaply predictable. Lisa left Benjamin, taking only “Far Away and Long Ago” by W. H. Hudson. She left for Tony and romance, but Tony was “going through a lot of changes right now” so she went to live alone in a stone house in Tijeras Canyon.
Benjamin drove up to the house. She had sighed, watching him come from the window. Paul walked behind him, pale.
“Hey, Babs … it’s time to move on. We’re going to New York. Go get in the van,” Benjamin said.
She stood there, trying to think. Benjamin had already climbed into the VW. Paul waited in the doorway while she gathered together her few things. She lit a cigarette and sat down.
“Christ. Go get in, will you?”
Stumbling, she followed Paul.
When they got to the house, after a silent ride, Benjamin changed into a tuxedo and went to work. He was playing with Prince Bobby Jack, at the Skyline Club. “She brings me coffee in my favrit cup…” Good blues.
Lisa and Paul packed everything into boxes from M and B Liquors. An uncanny moon toppled fluorescent over the Sandia Mountains. Ordinarily she and Paul would have rejoiced at such an event. They just witnessed it, shivering outside.
“Be a good wife to him, Lisa. He loves you, with all his heart.”
* * *
Benjamin and Lisa left for New York the next morning. Paul waved good-bye and walked away toward the apple trees.
Lisa drove most of the way to New York, even through Chicago. Benjamin slept most of the way, with his eyeshade on, except when they crossed the Mississippi River. That was really beautiful, the Mississippi River.
They drove through the little town where Paul was born and saw the house and the barn. At least Lisa insisted that that must be the place … She could imagine him in the green field. Towhead kid. Red-winged blackbirds. She missed Paul a lot.
* * *
“Well, Paul,” Lisa said to him on the second day of his visit to New York, in the Varick Street drizzle … “What did you want to talk to me about?”
“Nothing, really … I just didn’t want to wake Benjamin.” (Benjamin had played a Bronx wedding the night before.)
“New York was a good move,” he went on to say. “I can’t believe how he is playing.”
“Really! Man … he has worked … six months just to get in the union … then strip joints, one-nighters, Grossinger’s … but he’s been jamming with some great musicians.”
“He’s had some good jazz gigs though.”
“I wish you had heard him play with Buddy Tate, with all those old, old-time Count Basie cats. He was really swinging.”
“He’s always swinging … he is a fine musician.”
She knew that.
“I saw Red Garland last week, at Birdland. He was standing at the bar. I said hello and he said hello back.”
She was thinking about Red Garland, humming how he played “You’re My Everything,” when her arm brushed Paul’s on Varick Street. She got so dizzy with desire for Paul she stumbled, then skipped, to get back in step. I am wicked, she said to herself and concentrated on the sidewalk. Step on a crack. Break your mother’s back.
“Let’s ride the Hoboken ferry!” she said, as pleasant as ever.
They crossed to the old ferry station. It was empty. So clearly a Saturday morning. A newsman asleep, whiskery, a Time paperweight clutched in his hand. A cat stretched awake on the magazine rack. Silly kittens, all gray.
It was very dark. Rain swirled soot into cracked diamond skylights. Paul and Lisa’s footsteps echoed loud, nostalgic, like in an old empty gym, or a train station in Montana late at night during some family crisis.
The ferry was barely visible in the fog, an elegant heavy Victorian lady, skirting tugs and obtusely slow garbage barges. The ferry creaked slowly, carefully, into the landing. Paul and Lisa’s footsteps echoed loud again on the wooden deck. Pigeons moaned above them on the rotting roof, their iridescent oil-feathers the only color of the morning.
The two of them were alone on the boat. They laughed, changing seats a dozen times, promenading the decks. Fog surrounded the boat.
“Paul! There’s no New York! No New Jersey! Maybe we’re in the English Channel!”
They stared and stared out into the fog until eerily then there were yellow boxcars, red cabooses from the Jersey shore. A dream about a freight yard in North Dakota.
The ferry banged into the pilings. Gulls fluttered, then balanced again on the swaying logs.
“Come on, let’s get off,” he said.
“If we stay we don’t have to pay.”
“Lisa, why don’t you ever do things right? Like why don’t you buy a dustpan?”
“I hate dustpans,” she said, following him off the ferry. Actually she bought them often, but threw them out by mistake.
They stood outside on the way back, leaning on the salty rail, not touching.
“I wish you were happy,” he said. “When Ben went to get you … it was the most courageous thing I ever saw a man do. He forgave you. It saddens me to see it made so little difference.”
* * *
She wanted to be seasick, to tell him how ever since she’d been in New York she talked to him all day long, saved his letters to read at dusk on the roof, where the sky seemed like New Mexico.
He ran his hands through his pale hair. “I missed you, Lisa. I have really missed you.”
She nodded, her head bent, tears misting the water and foam like frosted glass. Her teeth chattered.
She pointed to the WORLD sign from the World-Telegram building glowing neon through the fog.
“That’s the first thing I see when I open my eyes every morning. WORLD. Except backwards, of course.”
Clearer now, they could see her laundry on the roof above the loft on Greenwich Street. The sooty brilliant clothes flapped against the rain-black buildings around City Hall.
“Look at Diana!” She laughed.
The bronze statue of Diana rose just above her laundry, as if she were going to hurl it all into the Hudson.
“But it was you who forgave me, Paul,” she said. As the ferry approached the landing the engines shut off. Even when the ferries are crowded this is a moment of terrible silence. The water slapping against the wooden hull until the boat docks with a sullen thud and a shatter of frightened gulls.
“Paul…” Lisa said, but she was alone. Paul had turned. He was walking in long western strides toward the metal gate at the bow, anxious now to be getting back.
CHERRY BLOSSOM TIME
There he was again, the postman. After she first noticed him Cassandra began seeing him everywhere. Like when you learn what exacerbate means and then everyone begins to say it and it’s even in the morning paper.
He was marching down Sixth Avenue, his shiny shoes lifting high above the ground. One/two. One/two. At Thirteenth Street he turned his head to the right, pivoted, and disappeared. He was delivering mail.
Cassandra and her two-year-old son Matt were on their own morning route. The deli, the A&P, the bakery, the firehouse, the pet shop. Sometimes the laundry. Home for milk and cookies, then back down, to Washington Square. Home for lunch and a nap.
When she had first noticed the postman, how their paths crossed and recrossed, she wondered why she hadn’t seen him before. Had her whole life been altered by five minutes? What would happen if it altered by an hour?
Then she noticed that his route was timed so perfectly that for blocks at a time he would step onto the far curb exactly as the light turned red. He never deviated along the way, even the rare pleasantries were accounted for and predictable. Then she noticed that hers and Matt’s were too. At nine, for example, a fireman would lift Matt onto the truck or put his hat on Matt’s head. At ten fifteen the baker would ask Matt how was his big man today and give him an oatmeal cookie. Or the other baker would say, Hello, beautiful, to Cassandra and give her the cookie. When they got out the door on Greenwich Street there the postman would be, stepping off the curb.
It’s understandable, she told herself. Children need rhythm, a routine. Matt was so young, he liked their walks, their time at the park, but by one on the dot he’d be cranky, need lunch and a nap. Nevertheless she began to try to vary their schedule. Matt reacted badly. He wasn’t ready for the sandpile or for drowsy swinging until after their walk. If they went home early he was too keyed up for a nap. If they went to the store after the park he’d whine, writhe to get out of the basket. So they went back to their usual routine, right in the postman’s footsteps sometimes, across the street at others. No one stood in his way or stepped out in front of him. One/two. One/two, he cut a straight swathe down the center of the sidewalk.