The History of Now

by Daniel Klein

  Lying on her side, a lank of blonde hair covering her eyes, her knees bent almost to her chest, Lila straddles the worlds of wakefulness and sleep—a labyrinthine, pot-scented sleep. Once again, she has had her ‘flying nude’ dream, sailing naked over rooftops, swooping down now and then to peer into windows where families sit silently in front of television sets. It is a thrilling dream that makes her feel buoyant and free.

  With semi-consciousness come voices, strains of conversations overheard last night at Nakota’s tables. Since Lila began toking up with Pato upon arrival for her shift, these conversations have become more interesting to her. She plays a game of scripting in her head what was said just before she arrives with a tray of food and what will be said after she has left. At a table of five college boys, they were arguing about Red Sox pitchers when she swooped down their plates of tempura, but from their unmistakably tempered smiles, Lila knew they were playing a game too—they had been snickering as she approached, an obvious indication that they had been talking about sex, as they surely would again after she departed. And at a table of two New York couples, the conversation was about President Bush’s latest public gaff: “It will take time to restore chaos in Iraq.” The subject appeared to make them as giddy as sex did the college boys. She imagined that in moments their conversation would move on to weightier topics, like which private schools their children were applying to.

  The Dowds’s table was harder to read. They had reserved the large round table in the front window alcove where they played host to a group of eight men and women, every one of them as smart and confident-looking as Mr. and Mrs. Dowd. The Dowds had even placed the entire party’s order ahead of time—shrimp shirumono and two supersized wooden platters of sushi and sashimi. Lila knows her mother thinks the Dowds are phonies and she, herself, finds them patronizing, but nonetheless she is intrigued by their self-assurance, Mr. Dowd’s straying adolescent eyes notwithstanding. Lila wonders how people come to be so sure of themselves, so certain that everything they do is meaningful and correct. Were they born that way? God knows, no one in her own family had anything near that kind of confidence, not even Grandma Bea who always seems to Lila to be talking as fast as she can in order to deflect her self-doubts.

  An entire squadron of waitresses was enlisted to serve the table their soup course and when Mrs. Dowd saw them coming, she instantly raised a single finger and the guests clammed up. If Dowd and company had any secrets, it could not be from Lila’s Japanese cohorts, so they had to be keeping something from Lila’s ears. Tantalizing. Even a bit thrilling to think that she could possibly pose any kind of threat to the Dowds. Instead of returning directly to the kitchen, Lila had lingered on the other side of the alcove partition trying to catch the conversation that resumed after the help was gone, but all she heard were undecipherable whispers and bursts of laughter. That laughter sounded remarkably like the giggling she had recently heard at the college boys’ table, suggesting that sex was the Dowd table’s keynote topic too. Wife swapping? It was all over town that Mrs. Dowd was giving ‘private coaching’ to her leading man, Ned Shields.

  Now downstairs, the laughter gets louder, a great cascade of it, but it is more hearty than caustic. The loudest laugh indisputably belongs to Grandpa Wendell. Lila blinks her eyes, stretches her long limbs, and rolls onto her back. It sounds as though somewhere in the house there are as many partiers as there were last night at the Dowds’s reserved table. She rolls again so she can reach the drawer of her bed table, opens it, and withdraws her cigarettes and lighter. She swings her legs over the side of her bed, lights up, goes to the window, and opens it. Sitting on the sill, she takes three deep drags in quick succession, exhaling the smoke through the screen. As usual, these first puffs fan the embers of last night’s marijuana high.

  “You’re probably wondering what a fifteen-year-old black boy thought he was doing in Atlanta, Georgia.” From below stairs, a robust, deep voice that Lila has not heard before in this house or anywhere else.

  “Looking for black girls!” a second, unfamiliar woman’s voice roars, and again howling laughter.

  Lila finds herself grinning along with the laughter. Just the idea of a lively party going on downstairs is delighting. For years, their only guests have been Mother’s drama group friends and lately they have not been around, either. In any event, Lila is positive these cannot be Grandville Players down there; this laughter is far too genuine.

  She stomps out her cigarette in a piece of aluminum foil, wraps the butt, and drops it back in her drawer along with her cigarette pack and lighter. She pulls on her robe and steps out into the hallway. Fumes of coffee waft up to her.

  “I’ll tell you one thing, Wendell, after Grandville, there was something refreshing about men’s rooms labeled ‘colored.’ I’m not kidding. It’s kinda like truth in advertising. You didn’t have to be taking a leak next to some white guy who’s so nervous about you being beside him that he can’t get his flow going.”

  “Bill, please! There are children here.” The strange woman’s voice again. She sounds as if it is difficult for her to keep a straight face while scolding the man named Bill.

  Lila paces softly to the top of the stairs, starts down, then sits on the step just below the second story floor line. Through the banister rails, she looks down through the living room into the kitchen where only one half of the kitchen table is visible. The occupants of this end of the table are an old black man, a black woman, and a small Asian girl, Binx lying at her feet. For a fraction of a second, Lila quite literally wonders if she is still dreaming.

  “Registering in a black high school down there was a piece of cake,” the old man, Bill, is saying. “They don’t expect any parents or guardians or whatever to accompany you. Parents are too busy working or have too many other kids to tend to. So I just signed myself up and started classes that day.”

  “Where did you live?” Another new voice—a woman’s— from the blind end of the table.

  “At the ‘Y.’ They had a separate one for blacks, full of drunks mostly, but I got a nice room for ten bucks a week. They had a cafeteria too. I worked there, washing dishes mostly, but that covered everything I needed. Sweet setup for a motherless child.”

  “Did you graduate?” Wendell asks from the invisible end of the table.

  “Did he graduate?” the black woman repeats rhetorically. “Bill was the valedictorian. Smartest boy to come out of Booker T. Washington High in decades.”

  “And the competition was tough, I’ll tell you,” Bill says. “I had to contend with Sharon here. And she got help on her homework from her daddy.”

  “Now that’s a lie!” Sharon retorts, but just as Lila suspected, when the lady speaks she cannot suppress a wide smile, and soon the whole bunch of them are roaring again.

  Lila wants to join them at the table, mostly because she is dying to know who these people are and what they are doing here, but also because she is dying for a cup of coffee. Yet she also wants to keep listening unseen. She has always felt more comfortable as a bystander, and as one, she has developed a talent for filling in the blanks in conversations, so she remains on the stair, watching and listening.

  “That must have gotten you into college,” the hidden woman says.

  “Got me in, but didn’t pay for it,” Bill responds. “I had to work another two and half years before I could pay my way. But the time went by fast seeing as I’d gotten myself a girl. Fancy girl from a family that had a two-car garage.”

  “But only one car in it!” Sharon interjects, getting another laugh.

  Lila is convinced this couple has told this entire story hundreds of times before and that it has developed into a routine with Bill as the straight man for Sharon’s sassy comeuppances. But damn, it was one hilarious routine.

  “A two-car garage—that’s a sign of hope even if there’s not a single car in it,” Bill is saying. “I’ve always had a weakness for hope-filled people. Got that from my Grandaddy deVries.”

&nb
sp; DeVries?

  Lila is on her feet, trotting down the stairs and through the living room. She arrives at the kitchen table where, clutching her robe to her neck, she leans her head down in front of Bill’s. “Are you my uncle?”

  A second of stunned silence is followed by boisterous cheers.

  “What do I get if I am?” Bill says, looking up at the beautiful young woman.

  Lila is smiling. She shrugs, “Well, a kiss, I guess.”

  “Then I’m definitely your uncle.”

  “Wait one minute there, child,” Sharon says, all smiles herself. “That’s my man. And he’s only your cousin about ten times removed.”

  “Hell, that’s close enough!” Bill says, proffering his wrinkled cheek.

  Lila plants a big smooch on it and that elicits a bigger laugh than Sharon has roused all afternoon, a surprise among so many other surprises for Lila—she cannot remember any other time when she made a roomful of people laugh. Only now does she take in the other occupants of the kitchen table, a cute, forty-something red-haired woman on one side of Wendell and a small boy on the other. Lila is pretty sure she has seen the woman in town.

  “My granddaughter, Lila,” Wendell announces and she is introduced all around.

  “I didn’t mean to interrupt,” Lila says, sitting down next to the boy. On the table are a basket of bagels, a ripped loaf of French bread, a plate of cheeses and another of fresh fruit. Lila takes a pear and bites into it.

  “You didn’t interrupt much,” Sharon says. “Bill, here, was just discoursing on the story of his life. The long version.”

  “Hell of a lot more interesting than mine,” Wendell says. “But you know, we still haven’t got around to the missing link—Mr. Henk deVries. I can’t find more than a word or two about Henk in any book.”

  “Henk?” the little boy chirps, grinning. “Henk? What’s a Henk?”

  “He’s the man who owned Bill’s great-great-grandmother,” Sharon replies, her tone abruptly cool, colorless. “Henk bought her from another white man.”

  For the first time that day, there is no quick, jocular response, no smiles, no laughs. No one even speaks or looks in another’s eyes. Wendell is crestfallen. He wishes he had not brought the subject up—not now, not yet. He wonders if he should make an apology for his ancestors, like the kind the new generation of Germans make for the sins of their fathers, but he is afraid it would sound lame, trivial.

  Lila sets her pear on the table and looks over at Bill deVries. “I’ll tell you what I think,” she says as earnestly as Wendell has ever heard her speak. “I think your great-great-grandmother was the love of his life.”

  “What makes you think that, child?” Sharon asks.

  Lila quickly glances at her grandfather, a tacit acknowledgment that she has been examining the open history books and family Bible that he has been leaving open on virtually every surface of the living room.

  “Because she and their children were the only family he ever had,” Lila says.

  “Then I think so too.” The speaker of these words is the bright-faced, ten-year-old girl sitting to Bill deVries’s right; and everyone at that table, with the probable exception of her brother, knows without a moment’s thought that this child from Wuhan is speaking with unique authority. They all look at her in gratitude. Bill raises his coffee cup as if in a toast. The phone rings.

  Wendell stands, goes to the hallway phone, and answers it. It is Franny.

  “Dad? It’s three-thirty! There’s a line in front of the theater!”

  “Geez, I lost track of time,” Wendell says. Keeping his customers waiting does not disturb Wendell, but the tone in Franny’s voice does. Lately, she always seems on the verge of panic. “I’ll be right over,” he says.

  Wendell hangs up and returns to his guests. “Totally forgot about the Sunday matinee.”

  “Now that’s a sin if there ever was one,” Bill says.

  “We need to get going anyhow,” Sharon says, rising. “Tomorrow’s a school day.”

  “You’re teachers?”

  “I am,” Sharon replies. “Bill’s the principal.”

  “Somebody’s got to keep her in line,” Bill says, laughing again. He shakes everyone’s hand, including Johnny’s. “See you in church,” he says.

  * * *

  Wendell does not even try to read in the projection booth this afternoon; the day is too much with him. He reviews every moment of it in his mind as down below Harry Potter zooms around his school campus, a jet-propelled preppy. Of all the day’s encounters and exchanges, the one Wendell keeps coming back to is the sudden eruption of laughter he shared with Bill deVries on Melville Street. It felt like grace, a wordless, riotous commingling of souls. He wonders if theologians ever turn their minds to the spiritual possibilities of laughter.

  A knock at the booth door surprises him. Esther was not planning to come until late this evening. He takes a quick gander through the booth’s tiny window. No problem down there: Potter zooms on.

  “Who is it?”

  “Lila.”

  He lets his granddaughter in, gestures for her to sit in his upholstered chair so they do not bump into each other. Lila has not been up here with him since she was thirteen.

  “Those people were nice,” she says.

  “Very. I had a great day, kiddo. And I liked what you said a whole lot.”

  “I really meant it.” Lila pulls up her legs so she can kneel on the chair seat and peer down at the screen. After a few moments, she says, “Do you get the whole Harry Potter thing?”

  “Nope, but I didn’t get Cinderella either.”

  “If I tell you something, can you keep it to yourself?” Lila keeps her eyes on the screen.

  “Yup.”

  “Like not even tell Mom.”

  “Okay.”

  “Or your . . . whatever? Girlfriend?”

  “I can keep a secret,” Wendell says.

  Lila keeps staring through the little window. “Potter is an incredible dork,” she says.

  “Okay, I promise not to tell a soul,” Wendell replies, grinning.

  “I’m serious about this!” Lila snaps.

  “And I’m listening,” Wendell snaps back. Uncharacteristically, he finds himself resenting his granddaughter. She has broken in on his perfect day, burglarized his sense of unlimited connectedness. But, of course, she is a teenager who undoubtedly feels connected to nothing.

  “Somebody’s doing a number on me,” Lila says. “Somebody you know.”

  “How? In what way is he doing a number on you?”

  “You know, following me around all the time. And acting stupid.”

  Wendell does not respond right away. He is not in a mood to talk around things. “Is he harassing you? Is it sexual?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Can you tell me who it is?”

  “No.”

  Wendell sighs. “Well, there’s not much I can do then, is there?”

  “It’s Flip Morris.”

  Wendell’s reverie of his happy day is all but gone, shoved aside by rancor. “What exactly does Flip do to you?”

  “He follows my bus after school. Or sometimes he’s just there when I get off it.”

  “In his police car?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does he try to get you in the car with him?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We have to report him, you know.”

  “No!”

  “Yes, we do, Lila. That crosses the line.”

  “You don’t understand, Wendell. That’d just make things worse.”

  “How?”

  “It just would,” Lila says. She has turned in her seat to face him as if to accommodate the about-face of her logic.

  “Well, I can’t let this go on,” Wendell says.

  “I shouldn’t have told you.”

  Wendell says nothing. He and his parents never discussed his own problems. If there was ever anything he could not hold in, he went with it to his sister, Ma
rie, but he was adept at holding things in so those occasions were rare. At Lila’s age, Franny often unloaded to him on a single subject: her impossible mother. Wendell would listen sympathetically, but he always ended up counseling patience and forbearance. Franny lived most of the time with her mother—what else could he say to her?

  In many ways, Wendell is more of a father to Lila than he had been to Franny, clearly because he lives with Lila fulltime and is a stand-in for her real father, but also because he feels more adequate to the role in his sixties than he did in his thirties. Yet right now, Wendell is feeling far less than adequate. Lila has always been an ambivalent child and has only become more so in her teens. It is singularly difficult to argue with ambivalence.

  “What if I said something to Flip’s dad?” Wendell says finally.

  Lila thinks a moment, then shrugs. Wendell takes that as an ambivalent assent. He takes a step to the window and peers down at the screen. “Definitely a dork,” he says.

  Bridget Jones’s Diary elicits howls of laughter from the evening audience, but the film makes Wendell feel melancholy— the plight of Ms. Jones, single and frustrated, reminds him too much of Franny. A few weeks back, he had returned home to find Franny in the darkest of her blue moods; if he had not been able to figure that out from the look in her eyes, he would have from the half-empty bottle of Zinfandel beside her on the kitchen table. It had taken a few more glasses of that saccharine stuff for her to name her torment—a man, of course, a set designer from New York she had met at the Dowds’s. He was a theater snob with a lean body and a caustic wit, her favorite poison. Jean-Marc redux, Wendell surmised, although neither of them voiced the obvious comparison. For reasons Wendell could not completely follow—something to do with the Players’ new production—she refused to see him again, punishing him and herself at the same time, her specialty. Sometimes Wendell wonders if Franny would be happier in New York or Boston, although judging from Bridget Jones’s slapstick romances in London, city life for a thirty-something woman was not always a picnic on the Thames. But then again, who would have predicted that a sixty-five-year-old man who had forged a life of solitary contentment in his small hometown would, in a matter of months, become steeped with feelings of tenderness for a woman he met in a grocery store?