Did I tell you that she and I got married last Monday at City Hall and that we live in a $1.2-million place up in Connecticut, in the woods alongside a pond? It’s a fine big house that reminds me a lot of Wisconsin houses, especially the fact that we plan to fill it with kids. When she and I stroll along under our beech and hickory trees after a busy day running our mail-order bulb business, YoYoCo, I can hear the voices of our children tearing around the woods (though she is only six days pregnant). It happened like this. Every day I got out of the Manhattan rat race by going over to the Hotel Oshkosh on West 48th for a bite of lunch, and there I got to be pals with an old guy with hair in his ears named Bob Bobson who ran a sausage factory in Queens and who hailed from Sheboygan. Everyone at the Oshkosh came from back home, it was known as “The Wisconsin Embassy” and outside on the marquee in red letters eighteen inches high was the motto “Arntcha Gladger a Badger!” which tended to keep out the uptown crowd and lure in Wisconsinites. Every day at noon the lobby filled up with men in immense plaid pants and vast yellow shirts and sportcoats in many patterns, sportcoats you could leave on a park bench and know that nobody would steal them. It doesn’t take many of those gents to fill up a lobby, and they filled it with happiness and song. Their hearty voices whanged out one number after another as they patiently stood in line for a seat in the Rumpus Room and a good lunch of ham hocks and sauerkraut, songs such as “Hail Hail the Gang’s All Here” and “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” and “I’ve Been Workin’ on the Railroad” and “Let the Rest of the World Go By.” Bob sat and sang along in a tuneful bass voice and his little brother Rick who worked for him writing bus advertisements’d lean over my way and say, “Listen to those wahoos, they couldn’t sing their way out of a paper bag.” He was only a size 46. He ate chicken wings and tuna salad, had a perm and a mustache, and wore blue shirts and gray slacks. He had been a jazz columnist in Duluth-Superior and knew the words to songs like “Stormy Weather.” His plan was to crank out sausage ads until he saved a wad and then move to Vermont and write essays. When he heard I had a ticket to see Vanelle Montage (Play Ball! was S.R.O. into the 1990s), resentment filled his tiny red eyes and he refused to dine with me again, which was a nice deal. I would’ve given him the ticket except his friendship was too high a price to pay. I gave it to Bob. Big tears welled up in his eyes, his hand shook, and he set down his forkful of knockwurst. He said, “Mister, nobody ever gave me something for nothing in this town since coffee was a nickel.” He swallowed. He said, “Son, I’m going to let you in on a very nice secret.”
It was the Midtown-LaGuardia tunnel, the fabulous underground route to the sky that millions have dreamt about as they sat locked in place on FDR Drive watching their plane sail away to Honolulu, the tunnel begun in 1946 and shut down two years later when the Manhattan end popped up in the wrong spot. Bob leaned forward and said softly, “Take the alley behind that old building with the lady lit up on top and go down the ramp to the door marked ‘RAMP’ and honk twice. When it opens, go down to level 4 and through the door marked ‘DANG R’ and there it is, son, in two minutes you’re over to Queens and take the exit marked x and you’re at the United terminal.”
I found it. “DANG R” opened to a dirt track through a black stone tube, a couple big puddles a quarter-mile in and a stretch of plank road but I shot through at 55 with my headlights on high beam and two minutes later was at LaGuardia, pondering the business possibilities. Starting the next week, I made eighteen runs daily and all of my best Grant S. Pierce customers were glad to climb in the back of my truck and be delivered to the airport so suddenly, and I started to sell more orchids and rare flowers, many of which were presented to me, their chauffeur and pal, and then I bought a used bus. With the bus, it was three tight turns driving down to level 4 but I never was one to get upset about a few scratches on a motor vehicle, it is meant to be used, not saved. I painted the windows for secrecy, carried eighteen full loads a day, screeched around those tight turns, saved my money, courted June, and quit Grant S. Pierce. They wept on my last day at work and the old man thrust immense sums of money at me, begging me to reconsider, fifties and hundreds, fistsful, his big green eyes dissolved in pools of tears. June quit too. We have five hundred grand in the bank, and headed for Connecticut and bought this ten-acre spread for $6,296 in back taxes that an old customer of mine put me onto, where we aim to be happy and raise our children, like they sing about at the Oshkosh. We put down the cash, strolled around our pasture and woods, our creek, our gentle hills, our virgin pond, and drove back that afternoon to New York to sell the bus and the tunnel was blocked.
The entrance at the airport was gone, filled up, paved over. There was no trap door where the entrance had been, just asphalt. I jumped up and down on it but the pavement didn’t budge. She looked pretty well shut up for the time being. So if you’re heading to the airport, you ought to allow extra time.
Meanwhile I’m okay, so is June, and the baby is due in July. Yvonne has a new boyfriend, the third after the sculptor, a urologist named Cid, and is in the Bahamas with him, he loves to scuba dive. I sail, which is so relaxing for a lumberjack, though once in a while I do dearly love to bring down a tree. She and I mainly keep in touch through answering machines, mine says: “This is Yon Yonson, I’ve gone to Wisconsin to visit my aunts in Racine. I’ll come back—when I do, I’ll get back to you. Tell me what is your name.”
THE ART OF SELF-DEFENSE
ED HAD READ SOMEWHERE that it’s foolish to hit someone in the face because you can easily break your fingers and spend weeks unable to handle a fork, meanwhile the guy you hit suffers a small red mark on his cheek and sues you for the price of your house. Ed is forty-three, an age when bones are brittle, and yet the wisdom of having avoided injury didn’t make him feel any better after the softball game the Rocks lost 18–4 on Sunday afternoon to a bunch of jerks from Coleman’s Irish Lounge, and especially the play in the last inning, when one jerk ran over Megan Michael at third base.
Ed played left field, he saw it all: Megan didn’t play often because she was scared of the ball, but she liked to play, so, ten runs behind, they stuck her at third and the jerk came up to bat looking grim and manly and got aboard with a bloop grounder down the third-base line that she missed completely and when it then leaked through Ed’s legs the jerk took off like a runaway truck. He rounded second as Ed heaved the ball toward third—she never could have caught it—but instead of sliding, the jerk barreled in, his knees pumping, knocked her head over heels, stepped on her, and chugged home as all his fellow jerks jumped up and down and ran out to pound him on the back.
It was deliberate. He meant to cream her, it was obvious, but all the Rocks could muster was a few limp words of protest. Bill was the pitcher, he could’ve run at them fast, but he only stepped off the mound and said, “You’re ahead by ten runs, for Pete’s sake.” The jerk grinned and said, “Eleven!” Ed walked in from left field, saying, “Hey! What’s the big idea? Cut it out!” and by the time he got to third and the little pile of Megan in her green sweatshirt, the jerk’s colleagues were gathered around, asking her if she was okay. She was crying but said “Yeah,” thinking a real ballplayer would say that, and the jerk said, “Sorry if I hurt you but you were standing on the bag. The runner’s got a right to the basepath.” And then he reached down and she took his hand and he hoisted her up, and right then and there the moment passed, the correct psychological moment for hurling yourself at the jerk in blind rage and ripping his flabby arm from its socket and beating him over the head with it and throwing him down to the ground and spitting him to death. The Rocks’ chance for self-respect passed in the same moment.
He was an earnest little jerk with a mustache and no chin, watery eyes behind his horn rims, and his name was embroidered on his pocket: Nixon. He brushed some dirt off Megan’s shirt. “Don’t touch her,” Ed thought to himself, but didn’t say it. Bill said, “You’re sure you’re okay? Maybe you better sit down,” so she did. The Rocks murmured a few m
ore things, like “That was kind of rough, wasn’t it?” and “You didn’t have to do that, you know.” The jerk only shrugged and said, “Hey, you want me to go back to third? Fine.” “Hey, Nixon,” somebody said, “you had every right, man, you got it fair and square.” When the game ended, the jerk actually approached the Rocks’ bench—and the Rocks shook hands with him! Including Ed! All except lovely Megan, who was now weeping from the pain and couldn’t lift her arm. “Hey, hope you feel better,” called the jerk. Ed helped her to his car. The Irish Loungers were leaning around a white van, laughing, spraying beer at each other, and they all waved as Ed drove out, and yelled “Good game!” Ed didn’t get really angry until after he took Megan to St. Joseph’s, where the X-ray showed a broken collarbone, after he drove her to a drugstore to pick up pain pills and then dropped her at her apartment, and after she said, “Thanks for waiting around. It was really nice of you. I could’ve taken a cab or something. But, thanks.”
Driving home to St. Anthony Park, he imagined himself racing in from left field after the collision and decking the jerk with a flying tackle. Bashing his face in. Hard hammer blows to the jerk’s gut, sharp jabs to the chinless face (Left! Right! Left! Uppercutuppercutuppercut!)—then, as all the other jerks came lumbering drunkenly toward him, disposing of them one-two-three with lightning karate kicks, whirling, dodging their big windmill swings, kicking kneecaps (“Arrrgghhhh!”), pounding heads together, flipping the flabby hombres up high and down flat on their fat backs (“Oooofff!”), and when they wobbled back up on their flat feet and pulled out paring knives, he dispatched them with quick little jujitsu brick-breaker thrusts to the throat, wap wap wap wap, and they went down like pigs at Hormel: Wham! Bam! Pow! Wham! Krrack!
He coasted around Madison School and up Dowell Street. The yellow backhoe sat up on his grass, the deep trench lay along the curb. He parked in front of Spander’s and jumped the trench to his yard. Two months of sewer work and still no pipe in sight. In the cool house nothing stirred except a breeze through the white curtains; the white kitchen smelled faintly of lemon. The flowers in the back garden perched on the hill in ranks, an audience, divided by rows of stones. Leonie was at her mother’s, because Ethel was having her lymph nodes removed on Monday morning, or was it a gland? Mel was sick, too. Then Ed remembered the faint little peep of protest that came out of his mouth in left field, the timid ladylike petulance, the stamping of his tiny foot, when mayhem was what the situation called for, assault with a baseball bat. Coward. Why had he walked toward third base so slowly if not to make sure he’d get there too late?
He could recall other occasions when he had backed away from trouble. And it wasn’t nonviolence, it was failures of nerve. He hadn’t turned the other cheek, he had merely averted his eyes and walked away from fights. People could see this weakness in him. People were walking on him, and he would have to put a stop to it. The answer was so simple, it floated into the kitchen into plain view, like the glass of beer on the table in front of him. Hit someone. He’d have to go out and pop somebody to cure his cowardice. Maybe it wasn’t exactly cowardice but more like an eye-hand coordination problem, that he couldn’t pull the trigger on his fist. Some brain cells were flabby up in the anger circuit. Anger mounting in the brain, creating conditions likely to bring on a stroke. If he did nothing, soon his hands would shake, he’d become an old man who berates children. One good shot at a jerk would flush out the system and restore him to health.
He threw the beer down the sink and went for a walk. Down the alley behind the fine old colonial houses, past the school and the tennis courts and a little way into the park, and he stopped in a grove of poplars. How to stand to get off a good punch? Like a pitcher on the mound. Body relaxed, eyes narrowed to slivery dark slits. Step off the rubber with left foot, bring right arm forward, fist clenched. Pow! He set the next Sunday as the deadline for the punch. No. Wednesday. A real punch. No shoving, no “Oh yeah?”s and “Look out”s and nonsense like that, a straight-on assault on somebody who deserved it.
That night Leonie called. Her mother was in a panic about the operation. Ed could hear weeping in the background. Leonie was worn out. “How’s your dad?” he asked. “Useless,” she said. Monday morning, he had two chances. The bus driver told him in a brusque tone of voice to step to the rear, and briefly Ed considered letting him have it, but then the guy said it to the next person, too. Ed got off downtown, crossed the street, and a vicious punk in a beat-up tan station wagon swerved right into the crosswalk, honked, gave him the finger, zoomed away. Ed yelled “Hey! You!” and ran a couple steps after the car as if he might chase it to the next stoplight, rip the door open, haul the kid out, and beat the buttons off him, but the next intersection was a long way off and the light there was green. The kid sailed on. Ed went to work. “Today’s the day,” he said. “Your time is coming.” Several times that day he said, “Be ready. It’ll come. Don’t let it pass.” He heard his boss talking to secretaries in his fruity, pompous voice, and Ed strained to pick up some blatant sexist remark that might warrant a good pop in the snoot but heard none. Later, the clown strolled into his office wearing brilliant red-plaid pants and a lurid green bozo jacket. “How’s it going, old boy?” he asked. Ed let it pass.
En route home, a marquee he never noticed before, two blocks from work: “Live Continuous Sex ON STAGE See Hear Smell Touch And Much More SPECIAL SURPRISE ACTS & Things You Thought Were Illegal GROUPS WELCOME.” He tried the door. Chained. What kind of jerk would run a slimy business like this, hanging out garbage for children to see and disturbing their delicate sense of the beauty of things—maybe he could return in the evening, jump onstage, and cream the emcee, a pimply little creep in lizard pants. Wipe the smirk off his face, put a little life into his blank eyes. Get arrested, be interviewed by TV: “Why did I do it? Because I have the capability of outrage at outrageous things, that’s why!”
We Are Still Married Page 32