“Well, yes,” I said. “Or anybody. Not even Frank. It wouldn’t be fair to Howard if I blab about it before he and I have a chance to discuss it. You’re the only one I’ve told.”
“The reward for being closemouthed is getting to hear all the juicy stuff.”
“You think this is juicy?” I didn’t know why that notion pleased me.
“No, not really,” she said, after a pause. “Except in the context of our pathetic little lives. I mean Flaubert made literature out of provincial intrigue, didn’t he? I’ll probably just get a lousy column out of it.”
I was appalled. La Rae did invent letters for her column when the real ones were dull. Once in a while she even let me write one. “You can’t use this,” I said now. “It’s my life!”
“Relax, Paulie,” she said. “The names will be changed to protect the innocent—and the guilty. I’ll make it cancer of the you-know-what the husband gets, just when the wife is planning to cut it off to teach him a lesson.”
“You’re terrible,” I said. “You’re crazy,” and then I started laughing.
4
WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT I’d ever be hungry again, drooling over anemic-looking chicken, and peas the color of Astro-turf? But it was all part of the big recovery. The guy in the other bed eyed my supper tray the way people in Chinese restaurants ogle the food on the next table, as if it looks better than what they have. In this case, he was right. I mean, I was still on no sodium and low fat, but everything on his tray had been pureed into an anonymous gray mush. He was my second roommate in a week, a bleeding ulcer. The first one—Gil Danzer, another heart attack—had gone home two days before. It’s amazing how quickly you can get to know someone in a situation like this. Gil and his wife, Sharon, and Paulie and I became old friends in only a few days. Like us, they’d been married forever and had a couple of grown kids. Gil and I compared the details of how we’d gotten sick, as if we were describing the riveting plots of movies we’d seen. We’d both had anginal pain on and off for months, and we’d both blamed it on something we ate, or muscle strain, or our imagination. When his heart attack started, Gil was sure it was only indigestion, too; he and Sharon were in a restaurant, and he’d just polished off a plate of mussels marinara. “Ham!” I said, and we laughed like maniacs. Our heart attacks had made us war buddies; the common bond was survival. But we had other things in common: Gil was a sound man at CBS, and he’d been a professional trombonist when he was younger. He still played with a group—at one another’s houses—and he said I could sit in with them sometime. Gil wore his thinning, reddish hair a little long in back, the way we all used to wear it, and he had that patch of beard right under his lip some horn men think protects it. He reminded me of people I used to hang around with, and hadn’t seen in years. While we chewed the rag, Sharon and Paulie made plans to go out for dinner after we were both home. “But it has to be strictly kosher,” Sharon said. “No mussels, no ham.”
Those days in the CCU had really gotten me down. At first I was sure I was going to die, and then when I didn’t, living didn’t really seem like such a hot alternative. I spent most of the time feeling my pulse and craving a smoke. Ordinary things—using the bathroom and cutting my own food—were like privileges I’d lost forever. So it was great watching Gil get better. He’d had his heart attack a week before mine, and he became a kind of role model for me—walking around, gradually getting his appetite and energy back. Because of him, I started believing I wasn’t going to spend the rest of my life in bed, pissing through a tube. When Sharon came to take him home, we were all struck by how big his clothes were on him. I’d lost a lot of weight, too. It was the hard way to take it off, but we made a pact to keep it off. Sharon tied Gil’s get-well balloons to my bed and he came over and said, “So long, kiddo. Be good, and I’ll send you a cake with a file in it.” He hugged me hard and then he was gone.
The new guy, Gary Seiffert, was something else. He hadn’t stopped grouching from the minute they’d brought him in. The bed was too short, there was too much noise in the halls, his TV didn’t work right. He left it on all day, anyway, even when he was sleeping. I kept dozing off to canned laughter and waking up to Crazy Eddie screaming about his insane prices. I figured I’d get an ulcer, too, before I got out of there. Seiffert was recently divorced—for the second time—and I thought he looked at Paulie with a sort of snide and hungry look, as if to say: She’s great, but how long do you think it will last?
Despite Seiffert, and my own restlessness, I was feeling much better about everything. My body didn’t seem like such a double-crossing traitor anymore. I worked my fork and knife out of the plastic wrap, and was lifting the lid off the mystery dessert, praying it wasn’t Jell-O again, when Janine walked in. I thought I’d have another heart attack. Paulie had just gone home—I could still see the depression she’d left on the seat of the bedside chair. I pushed the tray table away and said, “Jesus, Janine, what are you doing here?” and Seiffert lowered the volume on his TV and looked at us with interest.
“That’s quite a greeting, Howard,” Janine said. “What do you think I’m doing? I came to see you.”
“You know what I mean,” I said through my teeth.
Janine sat down on the side of my bed, crossed her beautiful legs, and smiled over at Seiffert. I motioned for her to close the curtain, but she either didn’t notice or decided to ignore me. “I went to the studio,” she said, “and your partner told me about you. I almost died. I called the hospital and you know them, they said you were critical.”
Jesus. “When did they say that?”
“I don’t know. Yesterday, a couple of days ago. Honey, I was so worried.”
“Paulie was just here,” I whispered. “A few minutes ago.” Seiffert lay on his side, completely absorbed by us now, as if we were a spin-off of the sitcom he’d been watching.
“I know, silly,” Janine said. “I’ve been waiting down the hall in the lounge for her to leave. That place is so smoky—”
“Janine,” I said, with barely controlled rage, “that was a really stupid thing to do.”
“Well, thanks a lot,” she said, and her freckled eyelids and the tip of her nose grew pink with emotion, the way they always did when we made love.
“Listen,” I said, in a kindlier tone, “this isn’t the place for us to talk.”
“I didn’t want to talk,” she said. “I just wanted to see you.”
She seemed much younger than thirty-three then, and irritatingly naïve. And although she was as pretty as I’d remembered—with her strawberry-blond hair, that flecked, creamy skin—she wasn’t that attractive, somehow. I thought of the day she’d first shown up at the studio, looking incredibly sexy and innocent in washed-out jeans and one of her son’s T-shirts. “Hi!” she’d said. “I found you in the Yellow Pages.” It sounded like the lyrics to a country-and-western number. I found you in the Yellow Pages, and lost you when your fingers walked away … But Janine was into more sophisticated music, mostly slow, pensive ballads. She told me she wanted to make a demo, that she had always dreamed of becoming a singer, and now that she was divorced it seemed like a good time for a career change. At the moment she worked at Bloomingdale’s, in Garden City, as a rep for a cosmetics company. She was one of those women who stand on the main floor of the store and spray other women with perfume as they walk by, as if they’re blitzing roaches with Raid. Mike wasn’t in the studio that first afternoon, and I’d been taking a nap when she came in. It started out as something professional between us. I let her sing for me and I accompanied her on the keyboard. She’d picked a Suzanne Vega number: “Undertow.” Her voice was pretty much what I’d expected—pleasant and thin, and definitely untrained. She could carry a tune, but she switched keys in the middle of the second verse without seeming to realize it. The wonderful thing was the way she stood there, as if she was on the stage of a concert hall, gesturing like crazy with her hands, gazing out toward the back rows of an adoring crowd. I found myself praisi
ng her a little, and then coaching her. I didn’t have an ulterior motive, I was only trying to help her out. When I told her how much a demo would cost, she looked so stricken I immediately said we had a sliding scale, which wasn’t true. If Mike had been there, it might not have happened, but I agreed to a price slightly below the cost of the operation, and decided I’d pay the difference myself and keep the whole thing off the books. It was an act of charity, like giving to Cancer Care or the Salvation Army. She lived in Hicksville with her sixteen-year-old son. She told me she’d been a child bride, that her ex-husband was an alcoholic who’d abused her and the kid. I really didn’t have a fix on her that day, only a feeling of sympathy, a kind of tenderness. Except for a few one-night stands when I was on the road, I had been faithful to Paulie since Marie. Most of the yearnings I’d had during those years were safe ones: movie stars, centerfolds, girls in bikinis I’d glimpse at the beach before they disappeared into the surf or I closed my eyes. Janine said later that she’d fallen for me the minute she’d walked into the studio, but I think she was just trying to be romantic, and her lousy life had given her a pathetic notion of romance. Anyway, the idea that I’d help launch her singing career had probably turned her on first.
The second time I saw her, at a prearranged time on Mike’s next day off, she was wearing something wildly inappropriate for a rehearsal at a storefront studio in Hempstead. It was a gold jumpsuit, and so loaded with spangles it hurt my eyes. I was glad we had curtains on the windows, that nobody else was in the place. I locked the front door and took her into the control room. She was very jittery; she kept clearing her throat and wiggling her fingers, as if they’d gone to sleep. “Just relax,” I told her. “You’re going to be great.”
But she wasn’t great at all. When I played the tape back, her eyelids and nose got pink and the rest of her went dead-white, the first time I’d seen her like that. I pictured her being shoved around by her husband—a big, mindless goon like Bluto in Popeye—and eating lonely suppers in her kitchen with her surly, teenaged son. I would have done anything to make her happy at that moment. What I did was tell her that everybody’s tape sounded like hell until it was sweetened. I fooled around with the equalizers until the mix was a little better. It was like cheering Annie up when she was a kid and got into a sulk. Janine was sitting on one of the stools, listening to herself through a headset, and I watched her face slowly change until it burst into a sunny smile. Then she jumped up and threw her arms around me. There was nothing sexual in it, at least not right away. I wasn’t braced for her attack and she almost knocked me over. The spangles scratched my neck. “Hey!” I said. “Take it easy!” I’m not sure exactly what happened next, but suddenly we were locked together, kissing in a hard, serious way. Her outfit had a zipper, one of those long, greased-lightning jobs. Maybe I started opening it just to get that scratchy stuff out of the way, and then I couldn’t stop. She wasn’t wearing anything underneath. The gold fabric was silky smooth on the inside, like her skin. She made me think of Marie, who was actually much darker and taller. It was the surprise of her, I guess—that she was new, totally unknown—but I didn’t understand that then. I didn’t understand anything. When she touched me, I became a mindless goon, grinding against her, lifting her into me. She wrapped her legs around me, trailing the jumpsuit she hadn’t quite stepped out of, digging her spike heels like spurs into my ass. She was still wearing the headset, too, but it was knocked askew. I could hear her distant, canned voice like a backup for our gasping breath.
That was almost three months before my heart attack. We saw each other as often as we could during those months. She came to the studio whenever I was sure Mike wasn’t going to be there, and I went to her house when we knew her son was in school. Once, he came home early, and Janine sent him to the basement on a phony errand, while I got dressed and sneaked out the door like a thief. It gave me a sick, heavy feeling listening to the kid’s voice coming up through the floorboards as I left, saying he didn’t smell any gas leak. We should have stopped it then, as if his coming in unexpectedly was a sort of warning or omen. But we didn’t—we started meeting in motel rooms. Quit while you’re ahead, my father used to say, before he threw all his winnings back into the pot.
Paulie and I had been together almost a quarter of a century—our silver wedding anniversary was coming up next June. Neither of us had ever made a big deal out of those things, but this year was different, we really had something to celebrate. Anyway, I liked being married—you didn’t have to be in a turmoil of excitement all the time. Married sex was friendly and familiar, even if it wasn’t that thrilling or frequent. I could sleep afterward. I could sleep instead if I felt like it. And Paulie and I were able to communicate in shorthand because so much had gone down between us: the early passion, the children, the fights, the reconciliations. I believed that we should be together when one of us kicked off, and I could see why my mismated parents had stuck it out. I’d always thought I would go first, because of my family history. And you only had to look around—about half the population are widows. More than half of Florida’s. When Paulie had that lump on her breast years ago, I thought I might lose her, and it seemed impossible, unnatural, for me to survive her.
I imagined her friend Katherine analyzing this whole business, giving it a neat Freudian twist. She’d say something asinine about Janine and Jason’s girl both being vocalists, that I was competing with my own son, and going through a midlife crisis. Or that I was unconsciously in love with my daughter, or my sister. She’d said plenty of that crap already about Frank Peters. Of course he screwed around all the time, and when I wasn’t with Janine, I had sensible thoughts about ending the affair and getting my life out of jeopardy. But whenever I was with her again, I’d lose sight of the danger, or I’d put things off. I knew it was going to be difficult. She was ambitious far beyond her dreams of becoming a singer. Maybe being battered had something to do with it. Maybe it contributed to that feisty, stubborn quality that drew me to her and scared me off at the same time.
Now I faced her without feeling any physical attraction, only a desire to get it over with without having to go through the tortured motions. I wished I could close my eyes the way I did at the beach to end a fantasy. It was a chickenhearted wish, but I reminded myself that I was a sick man—critical maybe—that I’d already made a resolution to break it off with her the night I’d come here. I got out of bed and pulled the curtain around us, holding the short, ridiculous hospital gown closed behind me. “Janine,” I said, once I was back in bed, with my heart knocking from the effort, from the dread. “Thanks for coming, but I’d like you to go home now. I’ll call you as soon as I can.” I spoke softly, because of Seiffert, whom I sensed still listening on the other side of the curtain, but I also heard condescension and coldness in my voice that had nothing to do with him.
Janine had obviously heard it, too. “I see,” she said bitterly, and dramatically loud. “So this is the kiss-off. Without any kisses.”
“Please,” I said. “Come on, Janine.”
“No, you come on,” Janine said. “I don’t want to get you upset, Howard, because of your condition. But you can’t get rid of me like this. I’m a human being, too, remember, with feelings and rights. And don’t forget that we have a business arrangement between us, too.”
How could I forget? I’d cut three demos for her already, all of them heavily edited, and so enhanced with echo she sounded like the Supremes in the Howe Caverns, but she still wasn’t satisfied.
I closed my eyes and kept them closed for a very long time. I might even have dozed off. When I opened them again, Janine was gone, someone had taken away my uneaten supper, and the curtain between the beds was open. Seiffert must have been lying in wait, watching me, because as soon as I looked at him he grinned and gave me a broad, conspiratorial wink.
5
THE MOMENT I STEPPED out of Penn Station and onto Seventh Avenue, I felt that old rush of excitement. So many people, and in such marve
lous variety! I hadn’t been to Manhattan since Howard’s heart attack and I’d almost forgotten what it was like to be part of that restless throng. In the suburbs, only a nuclear accident could bring out crowds like these.
It was the day before Howard’s release from the hospital and I’d told him I wouldn’t visit him again until that evening. He was going to have other company in the afternoon: the kids would be there, and so would his partner, Mike. I had said I was going to Macy’s to buy a new shower curtain, that the Herald Square store had the biggest selection. I walked to Thirty-fourth Street, but I only glanced across the way at Macy’s, whose windows were dressed in shades of russet and gold for the fall. It was strange that the changing seasons thrilled me more here than they did on Long Island. All those years, and I was still lonesome for the soaring skyline, that artificial barrier to wind and light.
Street vendors cried, “Check it out, lady, check it out!” offering belts, umbrellas, falafel, sunglasses, watches, orange juice, batteries. It was a veritable bazaar of one-dollar bargains. If I walked a little further in any direction, I might find everything necessary for human survival spread out right there on the sidewalks.
But I boarded an eastbound bus instead. There weren’t any empty seats—two young toughs sat in the ones up front designated for the elderly and the handicapped—and I imagined Howard saying, “See, this is what you call civilization.” He would look through the bus window and indicate the added irony of the homeless shuffling along right next to the well-heeled. And he’d point out that most of the merchandise sold on the street was defective. Once he got going, he’d tackle littering, and municipal corruption, and ordinary one-on-one muggings. He’d be right, of course, and he’d be wrong. I mean if I really checked out those bargain batteries, I’d probably find they’d lost their zip. And crime in the city was as common as dirt. I knew that none of this was civilized, but maybe it wasn’t civilization I was after, only a more intense reality.
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