by Kluge, P. F.
“Hell of a feed,” Gooker said, leaning back in his chair. “New York’s great!”
“Well, happy birthday.”
“Don’t sing it, don’t even think it,” he protested, shaking his head. “No point trying to kid this group about my age. If I told you I’d been skipping grades on account I was brighter-than-average, I don’t reckon you’d believe that one either.”
“No,” Joan. “You cheated off me.”
“Count me in,” Kate added.
“Well, come on! The stuff they taught us in high school. Latin? Would you believe it? Algebra. Anybody around this table used any algebra lately? Algebra help you do your income tax return?”
“What they were doing,” Kate said, “what they were trying to do, was teach you how to think.”
“Well you know what I think? I think spending six weeks on Paradise Lost at Rutgers was a joke. What were they afraid of? A shortage of poets? What’d I need that for? Was it gonna help us catch up with the Russians? You know how I know it’s poetry? It’s got a raggedy right hand margin. Other than that …”
“What can I do with him?” asked Kate, mostly for my benefit. “No poetry in that man.”
Boy are you wrong, lady, I thought, remembering how Gooker compared her to three kinds of moving vehicles.
“Poetry!” Gooker cried. “Don’t start. Have I got poetry. That old bitch Kennedy pumped me full of it.
‘When the values go up, up, up
And the prices go down, down, down
Robert Hall this season
Will show you the reason
Low overhead!
Low overhead!’”
That last bit, a clothing store jingle we all remembered, Gooker had sung. Now he subsided, triumphant. He’d gotten loud and people were looking our way, though not unkindly. That was Gooker. A pain in many ways, yet somehow it mattered how he was feeling.
“Well, she wasn’t a bitch,” Kate said after a while. “She was a role model.”
“Yeah? Just what role was she trying out for? Wicked Witch of the West?”
“It couldn’t have been easy, facing us every day,” Kate persisted. “Plus she was a single woman. A professional. I always thought she cared.”
“But what good was it?” Gooker pleaded.
“What do you think was good? Shop class?”
“Driver education! Donut runs! Plus, it helped you get your license and, if you passed, they cut a little off your insurance. That’s useful. Later people buy cars. The cars need tires. They come to me. See?”
Kate threw up her hands. “I give up.”
“Did you like the food?” I asked. “Really?”
“Dynamite!” Gooker exclaimed, bouncing right back. “Best meal I ever had.”
“If you get in the habit of coming in, there’s lots of other places we can try,” I said. “Not just on your birthday.” I caught an amused smile on Joan’s face, as if to say, are you a sucker for punishment? But, I’d enjoyed this evening. Gooker swarmed with gambits, jokes, pretensions. Kate’s pattern was subtler— sneakier, almost—but I sensed she was watching, calculating possibilities, risks, costs. With their kids almost grown, she might not be willing to sit in Basking Ridge, thumbing through Architectural Digests while Gooker “worked late” at the tire store. She might have a few surprises left in her.
“So,” I continued, “let me say it before you say it. A great place to visit but you wouldn’t want to live here.”
“The thing of it is,” Gooker said, “I’ve got obligations you don’t have.” He sounded like a general discoursing on command responsibility, a pilot navigating turbulent skies while heedless passengers picked at food trays.
“Kids?”
“It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it.” He made it seem important that the twenty-first century not miss out on the next version of Kate and himself.
“Could you bring up a family here?” Kate asked. “I’m sure some people do … but maybe I’m old fashioned, I don’t see my kids growing up in an apartment.”
“Lawns and sprinklers in the summer, leaves in the fall—I still burn ‘em, just for old times sake,” Gooker said. “In the winter there’s snow and snow men and shoveling snow. In the spring, mud and daffodils poking out from underneath.”
I was flabbergasted. Gooker’s version of the four seasons, delivered with absolute conviction. As though I had challenged him and he needed to defend himself.
“And sure, it would be easy to say it’s for the kids, we live this way …”
“It is for the kids!” Kate interrupted.
“That’s what we say” Gooker retorted. “But it’s for the kids in us. All of it. The Little League, the Boy Scouts, Halloween and Christmas, the whole thing. Otherwise … let’s face it … they’re in college. What used to be home is just a stop-off now. A laundry. A bank. They’re gone. But I don’t see us moving anywhere …”
“Maybe we should,” Kate said. “I like those lofts that George was pointing out.”
“Yeah,” Gooker said. “Sure. That’ll be the day. We sell Basking Ridge and move into Fun City. Some place that’s about the size of my tire showroom, only on the eighth floor, up a freight elevator, and I’ll rent a porto-san we can put in a corner, behind a curtain. That appeal to you?”
“It kind of does, actually.”
“Why?”
“Never mind. You wouldn’t understand.”
“Wouldn’t understand, huh?” Gooker was annoyed. “The whole world moves out to the suburbs, am I right, on account of the schools and air and room. It’s the American dream out there and I could make money betting that most of the people eating in this here restaurant and all of the people working in it would give their left nut to have what we have and here you are saying, oh honey, let’s bag it all and move to town. Well, try me. I’ll put on my thinking cap. Tell me why we have to move.”
“It’s nothing,” Kate replied, jaws tight. “We’ll talk about it later.”
“Sorry, honey.” He glanced at me. The hearse. “What’s logic got to do with it?” He shrugged and turned to me, brightening. “I almost forgot,” he said. “You need a reunion update.” He reached inside his back pocket and pulled out a notebook. “We had 409 graduates in our class …”
“George doesn’t want to hear this,” Kate said. “He’s got another life here.”
“He does so want to hear it,” Gooker fired back, pleading with me not to correct him. “We have 180 deposits already, fifty bucks per head, covers room rental, dinner with wine and the D.J. I’ll be telling you about in a minute. We got a cash bar …”
Kate escaped with Joan to the lady’s room. It was past the kitchen and downstairs. They’d be a while. Grateful, Gooker watched them go.
“She just doesn’t get it,” he said. “Where was I?”
“Deposits. One hundred and eighty so far.”
“And a couple more in the mail, every day. And phone calls. Remember Bobby Eastman? His father worked for Korvettes, in sporting goods? Bobby calls and says for fifty bucks he should get some drinks. It shouldn’t be a cash bar. Like I’m making a profit.”
“Tell him I’ll buy him a drink.” The class clown. Imitations of Myron Cohen, Shelley Berman. A generation too late for the Catskills. “What’s he up to?”
“Dogs.”
“Pet shops?”
“Kennels. A franchise deal. Dog Heaven. Sounds more like a pet cemetery. But he’s worth a fortune. Screw him. More important. Remember Carla Cordero?”
“Sure.” Pleasant memory. In the days when you could call someone nice, she was nice. Too nice to date. But we’d talk for hours at the back of the school bus and I went over to her house sometimes. And I hadn’t thought about her for years. But now, just picturing her made me feel good about the reunion. Her inscription in my yearbook had run to half a page. Now I wanted to go to the reunion, just to hug Carla Cordero.
“Dead,” Gooker said. “Years already.”
“Carla?
”
“I spoke to her mother, retired down the shore. Spring Lake. Some kind of female cancer.” He glanced up and saw his wife approaching, with a look that said she’d wait to use another restroom.
“You were going to tell me about the disc jockey,” I said. Carla Cordero. I wondered how far she’d gotten beyond her picture in the yearbook, if she’d had time to grow into anything else or was that as far as she got. After years of absence, she’d come back to mind, flared right up, only to flicker out.
“The guy’s a genius,” Gooker said. “He’s a young punk, name’s Eugene Moretti, and I figure, that young, what does he know about when the music was good? This is for the class of 1964, I say. I don’t want any folk music, protest music, psychedelic disco, rappity-hop-hip bullshit. He says, pick a week, any week, so I say, November 22, 1963, when Kennedy bites it, who remembers the music? And he rattles off the top ten, like that. Garnett Mims and the Chanters, ‘Cry Baby.’ You believe it? Got any requests, get ‘em in now. I’m in. The Skyliners ‘Since I Don’t Have You.’”
“I liked ‘This I Swear’ better. The flip side.”
“Also, ‘Stay,’ ‘Silhouettes,’ ‘Tragedy.’ Quick, who sang that one? His one and only?”
“Thomas Wayne,” I answered. “Who do you think you’re dealing with?”
“Sonofabitch!” Gooker cried and we started singing, on the way out of the restaurant. I thought we sounded good. I was sending it out to Carla Cordero.
At the end came one of those moments that gives you goose bumps. The taxi dropped us in front of the garage where Gooker had parked, a couple blocks from my apartment. Kate and Joan conferred. Then I looked at Joan Simmons, not knowing whether she was going to say goodnight to me or to them. We hadn’t talked about it. I didn’t know. She stood by my side while the attendant brought out Gooker’s Landrover, which he walked around, checking for dents. She watched them get inside. Kate handed her an overnight bag. We waved as they drove around the corner and disappeared down Amsterdam Avenue.
“Wow!” I shouted as we headed across Broadway. I damn near jumped for joy.
“What is it?” she asked.
“You had me going there. I didn’t know whether it would be a thank-you-for-the-lovely evening and you’d climb in the back seat of the Gooker-mobile. Or this.”
“Well … it’s this,” she said. “For the weekend.”
As soon as we entered the apartment, I had her in my arms, right in the darkened foyer, like there were parents somewhere inside and we didn’t want to wake them. I took her hand and led her down the hall towards the bedroom. She saw the mosquito netting, a muslin curtain hanging from the ceiling, draped over the edges of the bed.
“That,” she said, “turns me on.”
“Just come along.” I led her to the side of the bedroom. “Close your eyes.” I pulled back the curtains, slid back a glass panel, and led her out on to the terrace. I’d been saving it for her, for now. I guided her to the railing and, moving behind, put my head next to hers, let her back fit against my front. Then I told her to open her eyes.
“Oh my God, George.” She was looking down at Columbus Avenue, traffic moving through staggered lights that you could watch changing, turning off onto cross streets, passing through the west side and curling into the dark rectangle of Central Park. Fifth Avenue was a line of battlements. Harlem was north. Ominous and dangerous. But the south side was spectacular, the way it caught the sun in the morning, pink and tentative, and lit up at night like the sky itself, a wall of stars. That never stopped pleasing me. It got to her, too, seeing it for the first time. She fell back against me, relaxed, folding into me. I heard her saying something, whispering. “God, god, god,” it sounded like, “all the things I’ve missed.” She leaned over the railing, like a kid at the edge of a wishing well. “It makes me thoughtful,” she said, finally turning to me. “Wonder if there are kids out there tonight. In Jersey. Dreaming. Big city and all …?”
“I hope they are.”
“Yeah, well …” She turned and looked at me and the look said now. “Hey, George. This is the kind of talking people do in between stuff.”
She disappeared into the bathroom. I sat on a chair and waited for her, wondering what was coming. Then I sensed someone standing behind me. She moved in front. She’d showered. She was wearing an old shirt of mine.
“I want this to be perfect,” she said, taking a last drag on a cigarette. She moved towards me, took my hands and pulled me towards her. “But that would put the pressure on. With perfect there’d be nothing to top. So, slow dance, fast dance. Whatever.”
We spent the weekend together, even Sunday night. It was funny, going around New York with her—street fairs, the park, Lincoln Center, a delicious afternoon nap followed by espresso in a backyard garden on a brownstone street. In the old days, when we’d come to New York together, it was as though we were discovering a magic city. We went to off Broadway plays I read about in the New Yorker, fun things like “The Fantasticks” and “Little Mary Sunshine,” hip shows like “The Connection,” terrifying ones like “The Blacks,” when glaring black people lured sweaty-palmed ticket purchasers on stage to be baited and humiliated. We’d ridden hansoms through Central Park and, taking the wrong subway, gotten lost in Brooklyn, and we’d bought Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind at the Sheridan Square bookstore. There was music at Gerde’s Folk City or the Half Note Club. We were right back there, the nights we’d walk the streets off Washington Square, headed for Little Italy, singing songs from “West Side Story.”
It couldn’t last. I should have known, from seeing those mood shifts, how she could stop in mid-sentence to follow the trail of a thought. Monday found her in my kitchen, trying to make coffee. She was standing by the stove, wearing one of my shirts. The look on her face suggested something had just occurred to her: she was staring off, into the air shaft, following a thought.
“What is it?”
“This coffee machine of yours, I’ve been trying to figure it out.” She confronted a device that cost $2,000 in Milan.
“Me too. I used to have an instruction booklet.”
“You mean …”
“I call up the place, they hook it up and check me out on it. They train me. But I haven’t gotten around to it.”
“You’ve never gotten a cup of coffee out of this thing?”
“Not yet.”
“How long have you had it?”
“Two years,” I confessed, wondering whether the warranty began at the date of purchase or of first use.
“God!” She turned away from me and walked back into the bedroom. I followed and found her sitting at the edge of the mattress, her face in her hands, and from the way she was moving, something was happening under there, but I couldn’t tell whether she was laughing or crying.
“Actually … I eat breakfast out.”
“Yeah,” she said, taking her hands away. “I guess you do.” She looked around the bedroom: travel brochures and laundry bag and pieces of cardboard that came out of my shirts when they came back from the laundry. “What do you do with yourself, George?”
“Well, I’m on the road a lot …”
“No. Not then. Now. Days like today. If I weren’t here today. Would someone else be here?”
“No. I’d be by myself. There are people I could call who’d be glad to hear from me. For dinner. Or a movie. Some of them I could sleep with. But not here …”
“What are you aiming for?” she pressed. “So you saw Kilimanjaro, Tahiti and maybe you’ll see Tibet. But what do you want?”
“Whoa …” I said, raising my hand. “Could we have breakfast first?”
“I wasn’t expecting … a house beautiful,” she said. “You’re alone. And I know you travel a lot. But this …”
“Okay. Maybe this won’t make sense to you. The reason this apartment doesn’t look like home is because it isn’t. And the reason for that is that I’ve always believed I would find a place I’d know was the
right place for me and that’s when the books would come out of the boxes and the garden go in the ground and yes there’d be real coffee in the morning.”
“And it’s not here? The view and all?”
“I used to think it was. You bet. I spent most of my life thinking once I got here … that was it. An apartment with a view of the park. That was making it. That was happiness. But there’s more to it than that. It’s about the work I do and how I feel about myself. It’s complicated.”
“Complicated …” She nodded like she understood, like she was willing to leave things at that. She’d asked, I’d answered. But it didn’t feel like the right answer. Things went downhill from there. A too quiet breakfast at Sarabeth’s Kitchen. A quick return to the apartment to pick up her bag. A taxi ride to the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Whatever we’d had was slipping away. When we faced each other, we were almost strangers.
“See you,” she said, heading up the escalator. Another of the rushed, nonchalant, non committal farewells she specialized in.
“Joan!” I called out after her, followed up the escalator. I hated seeing her walk up the escalator, helping the machine along, getting the weekend over with. “This is all wrong,” I said. “The way you’re going. Like we stepped out into the parking lot at the reunion and had a quickie in the car, for the hell of it.”
“Do you think there’ll be an awful lot of that going on?” she asked.
“Don’t do this,” I pleaded. “Don’t joke.”
“I’ve got to get back, George. You know that.”
“I know.”
“Okay.” Now we were at the base of a second set of escalators that led up to the bus loading docks. Her expression softened as she came back to me. “I make this mistake sometimes that lots of women make. Men, too, maybe. I don’t know. For a while there, I thought that you were someplace I’d never gone to. A place I’d never been. A place I wasn’t sure I’d reach. I thought of you as a place. You know the old joke. You can’t get there from here. You had. And I thought maybe I could too. With you. Follow?”