Eastman Was Here

by Alex Gilvarry

  He chose a corner room on the eighth floor because it had a panoramic view overlooking the East River, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the Promenade, close to where he lived, and where Penny was home with the boys. On the Manhattan side were the tenements, near where his grandfather had the sporting goods company, the proceeds of which had put him through Harvard.

  In his suitcase he looked for the few items he had brought back from Vietnam for his children. He’d give Lee the standard-issue Department of Defense Vietnam guide that he’d used while he was there. He fanned through the topics to make sure they were appropriate. AT HOME WITH THE VIETNAMESE, FAMILY LOYALTY, A WOMAN’S PLACE IS AT HOME, THE PROFESSIONAL MAN, VILLAGE LIFE, TOWN AND COUNTRY. For Toby, who was fascinated by the ocean, he bought a miniature, handcrafted fisherman’s boat in Honolulu. It was supposed to float in a bath. For both boys he got pilot’s wings from the Pan Am flight to Hawaii, but now he could find only one. He checked the pockets in the satin divider of the suitcase, uncovering tickets and receipts from long-ago trips. Instead of the missing present for his boy, he found the matchbook from the Waverly Inn. He still had it. He didn’t know he’d brought it with him to Vietnam, but there it was. Inside it, the phone number. He thought he’d burned it at some point, but that was another matchbook, a second one that he got off the bar at the Tic Tac, where he had called his buddy Eddie Sheenan and first heard the name Arnaud Fleishman. It was so perfectly Proustian, finding the matchbook now, and Eastman had to sit down on the bed suddenly because he felt overwhelmed.

  He flipped it through his fingers, thinking of what to do about Fleishman. What would happen if he called the number? Would Fleishman pick up? He would assume Eastman was still in Vietnam. So if Fleishman was home, he’d pick up.

  His mind felt drunk when he finally called.

  “Hello,” the man on the other end said. “Hello?”

  “Yes,” said Eastman. “I’m here.”

  “Who is this?”

  “I’ve been meaning to call you for some time now.”

  “Am I supposed to guess?” the man said. “Hello?”

  Eastman thought about it. Go ahead, guess.

  “It’s Alan Eastman.”

  “Oh,” he said.

  “I think you know my wife.”

  He didn’t answer right away, and Eastman thought he’d hung up. The silence was excruciating. Eastman held his breath, not quite knowing why. Then, much to Eastman’s surprise, the man said, “I’ve been hoping you would call.”

  This caught Eastman off guard. “You have?”

  “Yes. I suppose I’ve wanted to talk to you, too.”

  “You have.” Eastman considered the good this would do. Would it be another mishap, like in the middle of a suburban street, pushing Penny further away from him? Or would it bring about vengeful satisfaction, like a strong right thrown into a motherfucker’s nose? He considered just hanging up. But against his better judgment, Eastman said, “Why don’t we meet. Man-to-man.”

  “I’d like that.”

  “You would?” Eastman cleared his throat. “Then let’s go somewhere that you both went together.”

  “Well, jeez. I just figured you’d tell me where to go. There’s a hundred places.”

  “There are. Are you anywhere near the Village?”

  “Yes.”

  “How about the Waverly Inn? Tomorrow at four.”

  “Okay.”

  He had a date with his phantom. Eastman could show up or not; he still didn’t know what the right thing to do was apropos of Penny, but he didn’t have to decide that now. He had time. Go or not, he would inconvenience his phantom just as he had been inconvenienced.

  A week had gone by since he had a proper shave and he was growing quite a beard. When the morning came he shaved it in the hotel bathroom but decided to leave the mustache. Next he put on a pair of sunglasses, a T-shirt, and blue jeans. He looked dirty, unhandsome, undistinguished, unnoticeable.

  He walked down to the newsstand to check out the Times and the Herald, and wouldn’t you know it, his dispatch made the front page. He bought two copies for now. The Times didn’t have a Vietnam cover story that day. He felt some satisfaction in this, like he had scooped Heimish and the rest of them. Unfortunately his dispatch had a tabloid subtitle: DISPATCH FROM SAIGON: MURDER AFTER CURFEW. But still, it made him proud to see his byline on the front page and to read the words in print, words he wrote only a few days ago. No matter how small a publication, he never lost the thrill he received from reading his work in print, seeing it out there for the first time. There was a small celebration in his head.

  He walked through the Lower East Side, looking for the site of his grandfather’s sporting goods company. He heard it had closed, the Hermans ran it under as the neighborhood plummeted in the early sixties. Still, he thought he would be able to recognize the former store by sight. He walked up and down Orchard Street—wasn’t that where it was? When he didn’t see anything resembling what it looked like in his memory, he went around the block onto other streets that seemed familiar, past stripped-down cars and abandoned buildings. He didn’t know which block he was on when he saw a tall tenement that looked familiar. Yes, he knew it from his childhood. He proceeded down the street, which had a small commercial strip of delis and discount clothing stores. People only spoke Spanish. At the end, near a corner with no street signs, was his grandfather’s store. It was boarded up, with traces of black smoke on the brick from a long-ago fire. The sign was partially covered with plywood, but still, he could see the name visibly. Eastman. When the Hermans bought the store they kept the name, his grandfather had required it as part of the sale. And since business was good they had no reason to change anything. The storefront, though boarded up, didn’t seem beyond salvageable, and the apartment units above were occupied. Air conditioners hung out of some windows and dripped onto the street. Clothing and potted plants were on the fire escapes.

  He could sell the house, buy the storefront, and reopen Eastman’s Sporting Goods Co. He could specialize in boxing equipment, supply some of the local gyms. There were times over the last decade when the ruts he fell into with stalled books and those flimsy articles he wrote made him believe he could one day walk away from publishing. He would always be a reader, a proponent of the word, but did he have to write anymore? Did anyone still care about what he had to say? The fifties, the height of his talents, were a long time ago. He could revive his grandfather’s business and focus on his family. But it was now such a poor area, it would be a bad investment. What the neighborhood needed was a good councilman to secure the resources for recovery. He’d be better off going into politics.

  Eastman walked to the edge of Chinatown and the smell of the garbage coming from the gutters reminded him of Saigon. He hailed a cab on East Broadway and told the cabbie to go down to City Hall and over the Brooklyn Bridge toward his home in Brooklyn Heights. In the cab he read his Vietnam article again, which got him thinking about Channing. It took an honest soul, a pure adept reporter, to do this job. Man or woman, it no longer mattered, and Channing proved this to him as he cowered in his room. He still thought the old guard of American publishing was against her. He expressed this to her a few days later as they toured the shantytowns of Saigon. And he would be wrong. His comments would cost him another friendship—Channing and possibly her alliances at the Saigon bureau—but it was in the service of a realization: that this work, covering a war, had nothing to do with balls or thrills or adrenaline or age, but the exhausting desire for truth.

  He directed the cab to let him off at the corner of Pineapple and Hicks, about a block away from his home. Then he walked down Pineapple Street until he could see his house in perfect daylight. Now he didn’t want to get too close, he didn’t want to be seen, so he kept a reasonable distance from the house and stood by the bus stop on the corner. This way it looked quite natural for him to be waiting, reading his copy
of the Herald, waiting for the bus. After some time, with no movement in or out of the house, he decided to get closer and took cover behind a nearby tree. He rolled up the extra copy of the Herald he had purchased and tossed it onto the steps of his home. Then he walked back quickly to the corner bus stop to wait some more.

  It wasn’t long till Penny came out of the house, followed by his beautiful boys dressed in their summer gear. It was hard to watch their routine without being a part of it. Lee carried a brown-bag lunch and Toby a lunch box. As Penny locked the front door, Lee picked up the newspaper—good boy—and brought it up to his mother. Without even looking at it, she unlocked the front door and threw it inside, then they were off.

  “Shit,” he said. Then she wouldn’t see the front page until later.

  The boys’ summer camp must have begun and he figured this is where she was taking them. He followed, half a block behind on the opposite side of the street. The summer camp was at a nearby church on Remsen, Our Lady of Lebanon. They walked like this for a time, Eastman slowly tailing his own family, separated by half a block. The church was not far at all, and Penny and the boys arrived quickly. She said good-bye to Lee and Toby, gave them each a kiss, and waited by the gate until they checked in with the camp counselor. Once they joined the other children they were out of his sight. Penny waved to them. He felt outside of time and this farcical distance felt impossible to sustain.

  Penny didn’t turn back to the house. Instead she proceeded along the street toward the bank on Montague. The little detour intrigued him. She was up to something now that she had a free morning. He moved along at the same speed and distance as before.

  When she went into the market, he let a minute pass in order for her to move away from the produce by the entrance. Be patient, he told himself. Then he went for it, grabbing a shopper’s basket on the way in. Inside the basket were pages of coupons from the Daily Saver, and for some reason this annoyed him even though he wouldn’t be buying anything. He went back to the front door and switched baskets out of habit.

  She was in the fruit aisle. She picked several bananas, both green and a few on the ripe end. Some apples, some oranges. Then she moved to dairy for a half gallon of milk. In another aisle, she pulled a tin of the kind of coffee she liked. He trailed behind, an aisle back, before investigating where she had been. He noticed the empty space where she had taken the milk carton and then the coffee can. He grabbed stuff off of the shelves, too, in order not to seem suspicious.

  Penny was quick in a market. She didn’t waste any time deciding or consulting a list. She knew what the family needed. He stood back and watched her approach the cashier to pay for the groceries. He left his decoy basket on the floor and carefully passed through a closed cashier aisle. As he moved through the aisle Penny looked right at him, and he turned his head away quickly and staggered out. They would have made eye contact were it not for his sunglasses. He waited behind a parked car a few shops down, thinking he was caught. He was hoping she would come out and look for him. But when Penny exited the market she seemed normal, composed, didn’t act like anything had happened. What was worse? That maybe she did see him and didn’t care? Or that after he saw her he couldn’t go up to his own wife and say hello? Both of these possibilities ate away at him. He could hear his heart beating, rattling inside his rib cage.

  Penny walked in the direction of home and Eastman followed.

  A summer swell of heat, dew in the air, a slight breeze, shade under the tree branches—he was walking in and out of the shadows, trailing behind. His nose and throat felt like he had been crying all morning, and that’s essentially what he was doing. He was crying on the inside. Why must he go through this? Why must he follow her? Why couldn’t he go home? Of course he could, but if he did so the relationship could be over quicker. He was afraid of this, afraid of what could happen, even though the worst was behind him. Up and down the blocks, men were turning their heads. She smiled politely at the shopkeepers and the people on the street. This is what it was like to be dead, he thought. To have died and have your soul linger around, watching over your family—what horseshit! Ghosts didn’t watch over their families. They lived in torture not being able to do anything. They lived with a lump in their throats and fire in their hearts. He almost couldn’t take it anymore; he wanted to shout her name.

  She stopped at a newsstand and bought a pack of cigarettes. She was smoking again. Picked the habit back up while he was away. He hoped she would see the stacks of newspapers at her feet. The Herald, look down. The headline, Penny. She unwrapped the package of cigarettes and yes, something caught her eye. She must have seen the front page and immediately she paused, struck by his name in a byline of bold letters. Her name, too.

  She went into her purse for change and paid for a copy of the paper. Then she moved to the corner, put down the groceries, lit a cigarette, and stood there reading it.

  He got low and sat down on a hydrant across the street behind a Pontiac that was illegally parked. The article was long, and if she chose to read it all now, he’d need to rest his legs. He didn’t know how much longer he could keep this up. And what was the purpose of following her around? To drag himself through more pain? Hadn’t he gotten enough?

  Penny kept on reading, which made him feel the slightest bit hopeful. Danger, intrigue, fragility, he squeezed it all into that first dispatch. He wanted her to know she could lose him. He might never make it back.

  But then she stopped. She’d lost interest. He knew that look.

  No, don’t stop. You haven’t turned the page.

  She folded the paper, picked up her bag of groceries, and quickly, without thought or feeling, threw the paper in the trash.

  So that’s where his work belonged, in the corner wastebasket with the rest of the rubbish. She didn’t even have the decency to take it home to show the boys. He was ashamed for her. And he beat himself up because he shouldn’t have seen it. Following her was detrimental to both of them. And just how many times had he been bored by her work? Countless occasions. He even drilled her on its validity, criticized her conference papers and academic publications for being too verbose. Tried to push her into writing popular nonfiction and make her let go of academic writing.

  He was guilty of the same, or much worse. Guilty of taking her work and discarding it.

  Is this what he finally deserved?

  Penny kept walking, not in his direction but around the corner, north, presumably returning home. He couldn’t bring himself to take another step. He let go. He’d only followed her for a short time that morning, and it was more damaging than helpful. Better to live not knowing. Another unexpected blow would only drive him toward madness. Besides, he had time, she wasn’t expecting him home and Eastman had someplace to be.

  • • •

  Eastman thought he would recognize him from their dispute in the street. He never saw the man’s eyes, but he remembered that chin, prominent, statesmanlike. Maybe a bit of stubble. And that pimp’s mustache made you want to hold the son of a bitch down and shave it off. High cheekbones. A handsome man. Academic type. What did academics dress like in the summer when they didn’t have a tweed coat to hide behind? How did he wear his hair? Eastman never got a look at it. Was it fashionable? Yes, it would be. Penny was one who took to modern fashions. She wouldn’t fuck just anyone.

  He arrived at the Waverly Inn a half hour early, just as the lunch crowd was finishing. He thought it best that they meet at an off-hour, four o’clock. It would be quiet and they wouldn’t have an audience. He took a table by the window because the tavern was dark with low ceilings, and Eastman wanted some sensation of air. He sat facing the door so he could see everyone who came and went. The waiter brought him a seltzer, which he sipped. He played with his silverware and resisted the urge to check his wristwatch as he didn’t want to appear nervous, not even to the staff.

  Eastman scrutinized each man who came through t
he door. A gentleman with a cane and the kind of circular glasses worn by rare-book dealers. Then a young man, tall, nicely dressed. He was close to what Eastman imagined as his phantom, but a woman followed behind him and they got a booth together in the back of the tavern. Others came in and out. An actor he recognized from movies sat down at the bar and ordered a beer.

  He didn’t have a list of things he wanted to say. One-on-one he could always improvise. He knew the gist of how he’d play it. He was concerned about whether this meeting was going to get back to Penny, and so he would have to be on somewhat good behavior. Keep composure, sit up straight. Speak with authority. He will revere your authority. Don’t try to sound too smart. He has a PhD, remember. He thinks he’s smarter than you. Let him. You’ll intimidate him by not intimidating him. When you get down to it, present him with options. Tell him there are plenty of ways to make an exit.

  If you have to resort to violence—you won’t—but if you absolutely have to, first ask him politely to step outside, because you don’t want to make a scene. You walk outside ahead of him, somewhere out of the way, and then turn around and ambush him, quickly. A jab into his belly to take the air out of him. If he’s wearing a jacket, pull it over his head and continue to hit him in the body—fewer marks in case of a lawsuit. But you won’t have to take these measures because you will have a civilized conversation. And remember, all of this will eventually get back to Penny. Don’t do anything to make her hate you.