“Oh, don’t mind me,” Jack said. “I wouldn’t want to interfere with someone seeking professional help.”
“I was just wondering if you’re still parking on the street now and then—I mean since the incident on Houston Street.”
“Oh, yes,” Tepper said. “When I can find a legal spot, of course. I only park in legal spots.”
The man nodded. “Of course, of course,” he said. “I wonder if you’re going to be parked anywhere in the early evenings this week. Sunday morning’s not really possible for me. I live in the suburbs.”
“I was thinking of trying to find a spot on East Seventy-eighth this evening,” Tepper said. “Between Lexington and Park.”
“Would that really be convenient?” the man asked.
“Oh, yes,” Tepper said. “Between Lexington and Park is very convenient, as long as you’re not looking for a spot that’s going to be good for tomorrow. It’s No Parking Eleven A.M. to Two P.M. there. Mondays and Thursdays one side of the street, Tuesdays and Fridays the other. Where the parking gets hard is farther east. Around First Avenue, say, that’s murder. Farther up—in the eighties, say, around First Avenue, East End Avenue—it’s even worse. Terrible. But between Lexington and Park is very convenient. Very convenient.”
“Well maybe I’ll see you then,” the man said, moving away toward his own table. “And thanks for the autograph.”
A waitress approached the table and poured them each a cup of tea. She stood with her order pad at the ready, but she seemed to be suppressing a giggle. She kept her eyes away from Jack.
“Two regular sushis and two Kirin beers,” Tepper said.
“Sort of on the rare side,” Jack added, causing the waitress’s giggle to burst out.
“I don’t believe I’ve ever been with anybody who was asked for an autograph,” Jack said. “Unless you count Pete Reiser, of course, and I’m not sure you’d say that I was exactly ‘with’ Pete Reiser, since I was one of the people asking for his autograph. It does occur to me that the last time we were at this establishment I was suggesting that maybe you might want to consult a shrink and now people are coming up to you and talking about consulting a shrink and the shrink is you.”
Tepper nodded, and poured himself some tea. “These things happen,” he said.
“Actually, they don’t, usually,” Jack said. “I think you’ll find that it’s pretty rare for someone to hint to an old friend, in a kindly and thoughtful way, that the old friend might need a head checkup, maybe just an oil change and lubrication, and the next week there’s a survey in the Post or the News or one of them that sixty-seven percent of the people surveyed say they think it would help their peace of mind or psychological health or whatever to counsel with the old friend in the front seat of his Chevy Malibu, which is legally parked but is otherwise, you’ll have to admit, a sort of odd place for a counseling session. I don’t think that’s the sort of thing that happens regularly. Sixty-seven percent!”
“They tell me that figure’s gone up a little,” Tepper said. “The survey was taken before Channel Two had the interview with the person who said I’d given him the backbone to ask for a promotion he should have gotten years ago. Funny, I don’t remember that person. I watched the interview, and he really doesn’t look like anyone I’ve ever seen before.”
“And before the editorial in the Post,” Jack said.
“Editorial in the Post?”
“Of course you haven’t seen it,” Jack said, “because you still think the Post is an afternoon paper, even though everyone else reads it in the morning. I figured that, so I brought it along.” He reached into his pocket and unfolded the front page of the Post, which had been torn from the rest of the paper. Most of the front page was taken up by a picture of Tepper in his car. Tepper recognized it as one of the shots the photographer from the East Village Rag must have taken at the time of the original story by Jeffrey Green. The editorial, set into the picture, was headlined SIMPLE GOOD SENSE FROM AN OLD-FASHIONED GUY. Jack read it out loud:
In an era when we’re constantly being told how complicated everything is, the city has taken to its heart Murray Tepper, a man who somehow finds life simple. Mr. Tepper sits in his car in a legal parking spot simply because it is his right to do so. When he is asked what he’s doing there, his answer tends to be simple: “I’m reading the paper.” When strangers join Mr. Tepper in the front seat, his advice to them is simple and straightforward. All of them come away feeling better about their lives. Maybe we can all learn something from Murray Tepper. Maybe everything isn’t complicated after all.
“Oh, it’s complicated all right,” Tepper said.
“Are you going to tell me about the complications of some places saying No Parking Eight A.M. to Eleven A.M. and other places saying No Parking Eleven A.M. to Two P.M.?” Jack said.
“Well, that, too,” Tepper said. “But I mean all of this publicity. It’s brought some complications. A reporter tried to interview Linda when she came out of the apartment to take my grandson to his play group. Richard, of course, is not happy about that. And it seems to be building. You can’t turn on the television without seeing Barney Mittgin, talking about my wisdom and insight; he makes me sound like one of those Indian gurus who always have fifteen Rolls-Royces and a couple of ladies from Shaker Heights to wash their feet. We’re getting a mountain of mail at the office every day, and a huge number of e-mails. Almost all in support. Actually, I’ve got Arnie Sarnow working on what kind of list that could turn out to be. But, all in all, that amount of activity makes it hard for everybody to concentrate on selling the tchotchkes through the mail. Also, I got a call from Sy Lambert, who’s some kind of literary agent.”
“Some kind of literary agent!” Jack said. “He’s in the papers all the time. He’s the biggest agent in town. Also the loudest.”
“He said when this is all over I’d be able to write a book about what had happened,” Tepper said. “The way he put it was that he’s sure I have a book in me.”
“It sounds like a medical condition,” Jack said. “Like kidney stones. It sounds to me like the question was whether they’d have to operate or you might pass it.”
Tepper nodded. “It’s all taking up a lot of time at the office,” he said.
“But, even so, you’re still parking—on East Seventy-eighth Street tonight, for instance,” Jack said. He made it sound sort of like a question.
“More like early evening,” Tepper said. “PBS has a program on Devon and Cornwall at nine, and I promised Ruth I’d be home in time to watch it with her.”
18. Confrontation
A LOT OF THE PEDESTRIANS AT SEVENTY-EIGHTH AND Park were people coming home from work. They carried briefcases or backpacks or shopping bags or all three at once. Joggers in skimpy costumes—apparently unaware of the mayor’s campaign for more modest clothing—were walking toward Central Park, using the wait at a red light to put one foot high on a lamppost and do stretching exercises. Someone who had just parked in front of the entrance to an apartment building was being accosted by a doorman, who kept pointing to a yellow line painted on the curb. Tepper assumed that the parker was a person of some experience who was quite aware that the traffic department didn’t use yellow curb lines to denote no parking areas and that the yellow line in front of the building was simply an attempt by the building’s management to frighten off the uninformed. The car in question had barely fit into the space in front of the entrance, leaving virtually no room between cars. Anyone coming out of a taxi would have to walk twenty yards to the corner to reach the sidewalk.
“You leave no room,” the doorman said, in a heavy Spanish accent.
“Property is theft!” the parker shouted, as he walked away. The doorman, looking puzzled, shrugged and went back inside the lobby of the building. At around six-thirty, Tepper rounded the corner at Park and began looking for a spot on Seventy-eighth Street.
In two or three places on the block, there appeared to be small crowds of people—n
ot just a few neighbors who’d stopped to chat while walking their dogs but a couple of dozen people looking out toward the street. As he drew nearer, he saw that each crowd was standing near what appeared to be a parking spot. They were waiting for him.
He thought he saw two television trucks double-parked toward the end of the block, almost at Lexington. He also noticed that the first clot of people awaiting him had made a mistake: what looked like a spot was actually governed by a sign farther down the street that said Diplomatic Plates Only. Tepper never parked in Diplomatic Plates Only spots. He resented Diplomatic Plates Only spots, but he didn’t park in them. A bit farther down, on the downtown side of the street, he saw a legal spot. It said, NO PARKING 11AM-2PM TUES & FRI. There was plenty of room for his Chevy. It was a beautiful spot. He pulled in front, backed into the spot, turned off the motor, and reached for the New York Post on the seat next to him. No sooner had he opened the paper than he heard a knock on the passenger-side window. It was the man he’d spoken to at lunch. Tepper rolled down the window.
“Hello, Mr. Tepper. Remember me from the restaurant today?” the man said. “My name is Alan Harris. I wonder, if you have a few minutes, you’d mind if I joined you?”
“I’ve got more than a few minutes,” Tepper said. “It’s Monday, a little after six-thirty, and this place is legal until Tuesday at eleven.”
He leaned over and opened the passenger-side door. As Alan Harris got in and sat down, there was some jostling among the people behind him, and Tepper realized that at least part of the crowd was forming a line that led back from the passenger-side door. People from the other little crowds along Seventy-eighth Street had moved to where he was parked. Some of them had joined the line; most of them were just standing next to the wall of an apartment building, watching.
“I really appreciate this,” Harris said. “I got here early, but there was soon a crowd. And then whenever a parking spot would open that you might take, we all moved. But there wasn’t really any running or pushing. We all just moved the line over to the next spot, and I was still first.”
Tepper nodded. “I’ve always liked an orderly line,” he said.
“It’s about my wife, Jessica,” Harris said, without further introduction. “A very fine person, as I told you at lunch. She writes short stories. She was in that graduate fiction program at Columbia, and then what had been a sort of part-time job with an advertising agency got to be full-time, partly because she was so good at it she just kept getting promoted, and the money was tempting, and then Kevin came along, and, with one thing and another, she’s just got back to writing in the last couple of years. But she’s already had a couple of stories published in small magazines. Apparently, she’s quite talented.”
“Apparently?” Tepper asked.
“Well, that’s the problem,” Harris said. “You see, the sort of thing she writes is not easy for me to judge. She writes what they sometimes call magic realism. It’s a style of fiction writing, mainly in Latin America. Most of the writers are from places like Argentina and Chile. My wife happens to be the rare Connecticut magic realist. So the magic stuff—some of the stuff that you’re not sure whether it’s a dream, and there are a lot of serpents and things—happens at places like shopping malls or school plays. But it’s the same sort of writing. In her stories, there are things that happen that you never can tell for sure are supposed to have really happened. I mean, this woman is supposed to be having a baby but it’s a goat. Or maybe it’s a baby that looks like a goat. Or maybe it was a dream. Or maybe the whole story is supposed to be a dream and the woman herself is not real. You know what I mean?”
Tepper nodded. As it happened, he told Harris, he had a certain familiarity with the subject. He had once had a client who was convinced that a strong connection could be made between magic realism and magic, meaning that people who had sent away for books by writers like Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Marquez would be a good market for a magic set that included six surefire tricks (with instructions), a top hat, and a wand. Tepper was able to summarize his view of that notion in one old-fashioned New York word—cockamamie—but to satisfy the client he did a small test mailing. The test indicated that readers of magic realism had slightly less than the normal interest in magic tricks.
Harris seemed encouraged to know that Tepper understood what he was talking about. “The problem is that I just don’t get this kind of thing. I’m a civil engineer, Mr. Tepper. I mean, I’m more or less in the sales end now, but my training was as an engineer. To me a thing is pretty much what it is. A baby is a baby. A goat is a goat.”
“So you can’t really comment very well on your wife’s stories?”
“Right. Exactly. It’s understandable for someone who started writing stories sort of late—or came back to it sort of late, really—to be worried about being taken for a housewife who’s dabbling. And I can see in my wife’s face when we talk about one of her stories that she thinks I’m just sort of patting her on the head and saying, ‘That’s nice, dear.’ I know it’s very painful for her.”
“My wife does watercolors,” Tepper said. “She’s also quite talented, they say. I’m not a real connoisseur of art. I did do an art campaign once. The same genius who thought there was a connection between magic realism and magic tricks was convinced that you could sell reproductions of great art through the mail by using the subjects of the paintings rather than the style. At first it didn’t seem too crazy—say, using subscription lists of ballet magazines to sell Degas reproductions. Sooner or later, though, he got to believing that to sell that famous picnic scene Manet painted all we needed to do was get hold of a list of people who had sent away for fancy picnic baskets. That sort of thing. We would have done just as well with lists of people who had sent away for books by Jorge Luis Borges. Nothing!”
Harris nodded, politely waiting for Tepper to enlighten him on what that had to do with the problem of being married to a Connecticut magic realist. The line outside the car was getting longer. The people weren’t shouting to hurry or knocking on the window—for New Yorkers, they were being remarkably polite—but they did seem to be edging closer to the window, as if taking up some of the slack space between them and the car would get them in faster.
“Anyway,” Tepper finally said. “I don’t know a lot about composition and all that. And a lot of watercolors of landscapes or fishing wharfs look pretty much the same to me—all very nice, of course, but pretty much the same. But my wife gets a blue in her paintings that I truly love. I genuinely love that blue. It’s a terrific blue.”
Tepper stopped talking and just sat there nodding his head, as if thinking about how much he liked his wife’s blue. Harris didn’t say anything for a while.
Then he said, “Do you mean I should look for something in my wife’s work that I can truly get excited about?”
Tepper looked impressed. “That might be an idea,” he said.
“You know,” Harris said. “She is really great at describing serpents. I can’t say I always know why the serpents are coming out of people’s noses, and, well, other places, but when she starts talking about that serpent you can just see it right there in front of your eyes. You get sort of edgy about having the thing wrap itself around you. Actually, it’s terrifying. I’m not sure I’ve ever told her how really blown away I am by her serpents.”
“I like seeing a nice serpent now and then,” Tepper said. “When I take my grandson to the zoo, the snake and lizard house is our third favorite place, after the chimpanzees and the tigers. By the way, people who have shown an interest in snakes and other reptiles have no more than the normal interest in buying those really tough leather boots that are supposed to protect you from snakebites. We found that out the hard way.”
Harris glanced out the window at the line. “Listen, Mr. Tepper,” he said, “I really can’t thank you enough for—”
He was interrupted by a loud knocking on the driver’s-side window. Both Tepper and Harris looked over. A large
police sergeant was standing in the street, signaling for the window to be rolled down. When Tepper had lowered it halfway, the policeman said, in a tone that seemed overly polite for a New York policeman, “Excuse me, sir. I’m afraid I have to issue you a summons.”
“There must be some mistake, Sergeant,” Tepper said. “This spot is legal until tomorrow morning at eleven A.M. Possibly you have it mixed up with the spot down the street that says Diplomatic Plates Only. I never park in Diplomatic Plates Only spots.”
“It’s not exactly a parking ticket, sir,” the sergeant said, consulting a card he held in his hand. “It’s for being in contravention of the city ordinance against unlicensed demonstrations or exhibitions that could, because of crowds or other effects, be a danger to the public or the public peace.”
“I’m not familiar with that ordinance,” Tepper said.
Another voice, from behind the police sergeant, said, “It has been on the books since 1911, it is a Class C misdemeanor, answerable in person in criminal court, and it is roughly comparable to the concept in civil law of an ‘attractive nuisance.’” The person who had spoken stepped in front of the policeman and introduced himself: “I am Victor Hessbaugh, the city attorney of New York.”
Just behind Hessbaugh, a large man who was wearing a Prairie Home Companion T-shirt said, “Hey, there’s a line here, buddy.”
As Hessbaugh went into more detail about the summons—how soon it had to be answered, the acceptable methods of paying the fine, the offices in Manhattan and other boroughs where the fine could be paid, the court where a not guilty plea could be entered—the man in the T-shirt repeated, “There’s a line here!”
For the first time, Tepper saw television cameras. Two cameramen had apparently moved to the front of the crowd when the sergeant appeared. One of them got shoved backwards as the crowd suddenly shifted. The man in the T-shirt had elbowed Hessbaugh aside and was immediately grabbed by the sergeant who had given Tepper the summons.
Tepper Isn't Going Out: A Novel Page 11