by David Gates
“I was supposed to call him last night,” Sylvia said, “and I forgot all about it. He’s such an old fussbudget. He said he was calling to make sure I’d gotten credit for the frequent-flier miles. But I think he just wanted to know I was safe.”
“He’s up at five in the morning thinking about frequent-flier miles?” Dave said. “He scared the piss out of me.”
“You ought to just go back to bed,” I said.
“I’m up now.” He looked into the breakfast nook. “Hey! Will you watch what you’re doing, Mister? You’re getting it all over the table.”
“It’ll clean up,” said Sylvia. “You ready for some coffee? I’ll get you a bowl for your cereal.”
“Don’t bother, I can get it.” He went into the kitchen and I thought, No time like the present. I took the little pill out of my shirt pocket, glanced in to make sure neither of them was looking, popped it in my mouth and washed it down with coffee.
Dave Senior came back in with a bowl of cereal and flopped down on the couch. I guess the rule didn’t apply to him. “Five o’clock in the morning.” He put a spoonful in his mouth and started watching the Big Bird dance with a bunch of children. “I didn’t want this day. And here it fucking is.”
I said there was no sense in taking two cars this morning—I wasn’t sure what that pill would do to me—so Dave drove us in the Caravan. We dropped the boy back in North Madison for the day, then went on to the hospital.
When the nurse on duty saw us walk into the intensive care, she brightened up. “Hi,” she said. “They’re moving her right now.”
“Oh, shit,” Dave said. “Now what the hell happened?”
“Oh, they didn’t tell you?” She was still smiling, they must train them to breeze over any bad words from people under stress. “She was awake and talking this morning, and Dr. Chambers thought she’d improved enough to go into a semi-private. And they might try to get her up for a few minutes this afternoon.”
“Hell no, they didn’t tell us.” Dave Senior shook his head. “That’s about par for this place. If she isn’t here, where the Christ is she?”
The nurse stopped smiling.
I took a big breath and let it out. “Thank God. Thank God. You know, they probably called the house when we were on our way here. Jesus, isn’t that wonderful.” It was like the weight of everything lifted up off of me—my arms actually felt light, like there was air under them. And then, just like that, it hit me that this little time, with all of us together, was rushing to an end.
The nurse ran her fingernail up and down a clipboard gracefully, searching. It seemed to take longer than normal. “She’s being moved to five-seventeen B. That’s in the other wing, fifth floor. You can take the elevator by the waiting room.” Dave Senior turned around and tromped out without so much as a thank-you. Sylvia stared at him. I told the nurse thanks for everything, that she’d been a wonderful person to us, then Sylvia and I followed Dave out. He’d been under all that stress for so long, you see, that having it suddenly let up—I don’t know, you can understand how it must have discombobulated him.
The waiting room, where I’d spent so much time the last couple of days, looked strange to me, like some place you haven’t seen in years—it could’ve been that pill starting to take hold. I hadn’t noticed before that it was all shades of green in here: green walls, green carpeting, green couch and chairs. To calm people down. I thought, With all this green around, plus a Valium pill, you ought to be ready for anything they throw at you. Dave Senior was over at the elevators; he touched his finger to the UP arrow, and it lit up green. The colored couple was there on the green couch—I was pretty sure it was the same couple—and I was going to nod at them except I wasn’t a hundred percent sure. And what for? We were in different boats now: them still here and me just passing through one last time, really a million miles from it.
When Sylvia and I got over to the elevators, Dave Senior pounded the lit-up arrow with the side of his fist. “Let’s go. Son of a bitch.”
Sylvia laid a hand on his arm. “It’s all right. She’s going to be okay—thank God.”
“Fine. You thank God. God’ll shit his pants when he hears from you.” He shook loose of her hand and pounded the arrow again.
She took a step back. “What’s the trouble? I should think you—”
“What’s the trouble? That’s beautiful. That’s a classic. That should be the family motto. What’s the trouble. You whored around on him”—jerking a thumb in my direction—“your daughter whores around on me, and you—”
“No, now you’re out of line now,” I said. The colored fellow was looking over at us, trying to make believe he wasn’t. “I can understand if—”
“What brought this on?” Sylvia said.
Dave Senior looked at me. “What, you didn’t tell her? That would figure. That’s about par.”
“What didn’t you tell me?” Sylvia said.
“The great peacemaker,” said Dave Senior, shaking his head. “The great cover-up artist. Okay, what happened to your daughter, Syl, she got creamed when she came barrel-assing out of the motel where she was shacked up with somebody else’s husband. This shit’s been going on for—”
“Don’t listen to this,” I told Sylvia. “He’s all hipped on this thing because he’s upset. As near as I can make out, she just went in there to use the telephone.”
“Where do you get that crap?” said Dave Senior. “She had her car phone, for Christ’s sake.”
Ding, and the elevator doors came open and we had to step aside for a gurney with an old, old lady flat on her back, asleep or in a coma maybe. All there was to her, poor soul, was just ragged white hair and poor thin, wrinkled skin over her skull; her closed eyes stuck up in their sockets like knuckles. I had a foolish thought—probably due to that pill, because I could feel it coming over me pretty strong now. I thought that she’d lived a good long life and for that reason she’d been chosen to take Bonnie’s place. I stole a look at Sylvia on the million-to-one chance she might be thinking the same fool thing. But Sylvia was looking at her watch, and I could tell just as if she was saying it out loud what she was really thinking: if Bonnie was truly out of the woods now, what’s the soonest you could get a plane to Phoenix? They wheeled the old lady off toward the intensive care, and we stepped into the elevator. My ears were humming and my legs felt like they had no bones. I fingered the coins in my pocket: okay, if this one’s a quarter, then this one has to be a nickel. So I couldn’t be too far out there yet. Dave Senior pounded the 5 button with his fist, the metal doors slid shut on everything that had happened until now, and up we went.
BEATING
He says, “I’m entitled, am I not?”
I say, “Whatever helps.”
The bartender sets a Johnny Walker in front of Tobias and a Diet Coke in front of me; he takes away Tobias’s old glass, drained to the ice cubes. My Diet Coke’s got a slice of lemon, for festiveness and sophistication, like they stick a Maraschino cherry in your ginger ale when you’re a little girl. I am so much not in the mood.
It’s Friday and I’d been looking forward to just going straight home and popping into the tub. But Tobias called me at Helping Hands and said could I meet him at the Little Finland when I got off work, and I just quickly said okay fine since I didn’t have time to get into a big thing with him. He called right in the middle of the preschoolers putting on The Three Little Pigs for the toddlers, and Margaret wasn’t thrilled with his timing. Neither was I. But I thought, Well, he’s had a hard couple of days, apparently. Something happened yesterday at the march on city hall, from what I could gather over the phone; last night he didn’t get in until after I was asleep, and he was still asleep when I left this morning. So I just thought, Okay, obviously he needs to talk. Plus the Little Finland was a place we used to go.
I want to tell him about The Three Little Pigs, though this clearly isn’t the time and anyway Tobias makes me feel—well, no, that’s not fair—I feel like my storie
s go on too long for him. The play just sort of evolved in the course of the day; one good thing about Helping Hands is, it’s the kind of place that allows for this. At Morning Story we were reading this junk Disney book of The Three Little Pigs that Josh had brought in, and Gwendolyn (who else?) said, “Can we put on a play of it? I have to be the wolf—no, Max has to be the wolf, and I have to be Fiddler Pig.” Nothing seems to drag Gwendolyn down: not the Laura Ashley dresses, not the waist-length hair that’s been trimmed but never really cut, not the moon-child name. Depressing that even Gwendolyn, at four years old, has already gotten it that bigness and badness are male things, but it was brilliant what she did playing Fiddler Pig: absolutely reveling in how stupid it was to build your house out of straw. She just completely upstaged poor little Max, who did his I’ll huff and I’ll puff in a naggy singsong, and when he blew the house in it came out spitty. I mean, no balls at all. Gwendolyn had decorated her paper-bag pig mask with tiger stripes and glitter glue around the nostrils. (Margaret vetoed strap-on snouts because they’d be too frustrating to make; Gwendolyn argued and got a time-out.) She danced around playing air fiddle as she sang, to the tune of “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf”:
My-y house is o-okay
O-okay
O-okay
My-y house is o-okay
Fiddle fiddle fiddle all day
I thought, Now, before you go crazy on this, remember this is basically a happy little girl. Maybe her house is okay. I guess I have an attitude because the mother comes in with her chopped-off hair and her power suits (so you wonder what weirdness causes her to make her daughter look just the opposite), and the father is this long-haired narcissist in a leather jacket that must have cost eight hundred dollars. He picks her up like once a month, and I have yet to see him drop her off in the morning.
Anyhow. Trying not to be a bitch about being in this actually kind of scrimy little bar instead of home in the tub. And trying not to get started on quality-of-life stuff in general: e.g., coming in the door just now, I had to get around this babbling homeless man thrusting a shopping bag at me, God knows why. I thought I knew most of them who hang around the neighborhood, but this one seems to be a new acquisition. Though of course with Tobias the last thing you want to do is complain about what a drag the homeless are.
“Heave-ho,” Tobias says, by way of toasting me, and drains off half the glass. He was here when I got here, and already long gone inside himself. I mean he’s still talking and everything, but I could be anybody, you can just feel it.
“See, this is the thing that kills me,” he’s saying. “Everybody saw the Times, right? And so they all assume, I mean I assume they assume, that this is the way it went down. I don’t know, everything is like that movie anymore. You know. Oh, fuck. Famous Jap movie. Rosh Hashanah, Rosh Hashanah Mon Amour.”
This is one of Tobias’s things. Not a joke, exactly. But like the way he calls a yarmulke a Yamaha, or he’ll say, “Whatta we got in the Norhay?” meaning our refrigerator. That one took me weeks.
“See, I was there,” he’s saying. “I mean, not that I was any more there than the Times guy. But he came with his agenda, which we all do. You know, me the same as anybody.” He takes a smaller sip, like he’s already home free and anything he drinks now is just for the luxury. “But what I saw,” he says, “what I saw, was a bunch of cops just zeroing in on this one black guy and absolutely hammering the living fuck out of him. It was fucking Rodney Two, man.” Back when Rodney King happened, Tobias taped it off the news and for days he’d be playing it over and over, saying, Unbelievable, unbelievable.
“You mean using their sticks?” I say.
“You better believe using their sticks. You know, okay, I can see it, he was yelling shit, all right? But Jesus Christ. I’ll tell you something, it took my breath away.” Sip. “And the fucking Times reports it ‘marred only by minor disturbances.’ ”
“Maybe the Times person just missed it,” I say. “If you’re one reporter, you can’t be everywhere.”
“Yeah, right. Maybe. Possibly. But I also kept checking News 88 and WINS. And they also had jack shit.”
“The Post didn’t have it this morning?” I said. “Sounds like right up their alley.”
“You know I won’t buy the Post,” he says. “Look. Doesn’t matter. The New York Times is what people read who have the power to get anything done.” Sip. “What I’m saying is, all the information about this is being very, very adroitly fucking managed.” Sip. “Fuck it, what are we even talking about it for?” He waves his glass for the bartender.
“It’s just extremely obvious,” he says, “that the word was put out, high up. I call the police guy I’ve been dealing with all week, okay? And suddenly, ‘We have no record of that.’ Imagine this shit? I call the guy in the mayor’s office—and I don’t assume he’s a total asshole just because he works for Giuliani—and it’s like, ‘Well, the police say they have no record.’ And so now this becomes the truth. It’s like There is no war with Oceania. We have never been at war with Oceania. And of course the way they sell it to the media, Now we certainly don’t want to have another situation like L.A. on our hands here, DO WE, GENTLEMEN? So word goes out, everybody gets with the program and everybody’s happy except some nigger who was asking for it anyway.”
“Could you keep your voice down?” I say. I sneak a look around, but there’s nobody black, thank God.
“If anybody had a camcorder yesterday,” he says, “that tape got bought for major, major bucks. You’ll sure as shit never see it.” Another glass of whisky arrives, the old glass goes. “Well, hey, not to worry. Bernie’s on the case. Going to blow their whole game wide open. He thinks. Anyhow, he was there when I left last night, working on his letter to the Times. Bernie Adler, the Undefeated. Faxed it to them and everything so they’d be sure to get it in. Oh, yes, Mr. Adler, certainly. Another little thing you’re never going to see. Gee, we had to hold it for space reasons, or it’s like Our computer must’ve eaten it.” Sip. “Fuck it. What I’m going to do, I’m going to get stinko.”
No kidding, I want to say.
When I can finally get Tobias out of the Little Finland, I take him around the corner to Biagio’s, where I keep passing him the bread before our food arrives on the stupid theory that bread soaks up alcohol. (He really doesn’t do this very often.) He tells me about five times that we have to eat in a hurry because I have to get him home in time for the news at ten. It’s now like eight o’clock.
But instead of going straight home, he says we have to walk past where he parked the car, all the way over between York and East End, to make sure it’s okay. It’s like, what more could happen to it? Last week we found the driver’s-side door handle wrenched up halfway out of the door and papers from the dash all over the front seat. This pathetic ’81 Honda Civic. Maybe it would be better not to keep locking the thing; this was about the eighty-fifth time. So now the key won’t open Tobias’s side anymore and his window goes down only partway. Which is especially a drag because one thing he used to actually enjoy was driving in the summertime with his elbow out the window. This is one of the ways you know Tobias isn’t really a New Yorker at heart despite what a New Yorker he is. He always says he’d never have an air-conditioned car for just this reason. (I can see it, right? Tobias Baker, man of principle, turning down the Lexus somebody’s trying to give him because you can only hang your arm out the window of a shitbox car like we have.) Anyhow, there’s Old Betsy up ahead, between a Cherokee (which I personally would love to have) and a something else.
“Looks much the same,” I say. Chain holding down the hood so they don’t get the battery again, and the red thing on the steering wheel—not The Club but this thing Tobias says is just as good as The Club. “Actually, I sort of feel sorry in a way for somebody that would pick this car to break into.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t,” he says. “You know, a lot of the time lately? I visualize coming down the street and I see some son of a bitch fuck
ing around with the car and I would pound their fucking head into the pavement and kick their balls in. I am really fucking sick of fucking crime.”
“I know, I’m sick of it, too,” I say. “What I guess I meant, it’s like it would be somebody so beaten down that they wouldn’t even presume to break into a Grand Cherokee or something.”
“Right, they’re animals. They smell. I could smell it the other day when they broke in and they were sitting going through the glove compartment. That smell. You know, you start out telling yourself that this is what you would be inside of a week if you couldn’t bathe, you didn’t have anyplace to shit—but the brute fucking fact is that you’re not that, man, you’re just not. I can’t even believe I’m saying this, but you know? I mean, I think back when I first went to work for Bernie, and he even told me, he said, ‘We’re not going to work miracles here,’ but I—okay, now check this out.”
He tosses his head at the car going by: a glossy little Jeep thing with music thudding out of it and two black guys with baseball hats, the rear license plate framed in glowing purple.
“Couple of brain surgeons, probably,” he says. “Mustn’t jump to conclusions, right? You have any idea what a rig like that costs? I mean, beaten down, who’s beaten down in this situation, man? You know, you can completely see how it happened.”
“How what happened?” I say.
“The thing,” he says. “No, World War Two. You know, the cops just had enough of it. At that minute. And something fuckin’ broke, you know? I mean it could’ve been me. Easily. Easily.” He snorts. “Hey, confront your racism, right?”
Upstairs at last, he lies back on the futon, breathing through his mouth, eyes rolling. I untie his work boots and tug them off, getting not a lot of cooperation though not a lot of resistance either.
“And another evening bites the dust,” he says. “At least we got away from that shit for a couple of hours.”