In the Night Café

by Joyce Johnson

  After he left, I became aware that the apartment had begun to disintegrate. Little pieces of it kept breaking off or falling down. There was a crack in the ceiling above the bed. I used to lie there and stare up at it. First it looked like the outline of a cloud drawn by a fine black pen, then the cloud began to resemble Texas.

  Gradually Texas began to look three-dimensional. It made my various lovers nervous. “That ceiling’s going to fall,” they’d point out accusingly, as if by inviting them there I’d endangered them deliberately. I believed Texas would fall someday, but I didn’t believe it would fall on me. So far something had held it up, and no one I personally knew had ever been crushed by a falling ceiling. I thought when it did fall, I’d be in Rome. A friend of mine had just found an apartment there with an extra bed for me, and at black times I’d remember to say “Rome” to myself as if I were really about to get an airplane ticket and go there. It was the most exotic of the ideas I had about turning myself into a luckier person.

  I was home the night Texas came down. The man I was with was married and was always holding up his wrist so I could look at the luminous numbers on his watch in the dark and tell him what time it was. He was a very nearsighted poet who could see nothing without his glasses, and he’d put them on top of a bookcase that jutted out from the wall behind the bed. As I lay in his embrace, I heard a loud ticking as if he were wearing a grandfather clock. The ticking grew louder and faster and he said, “My God, what’s that?” and we both sat up. Plaster rained down around us, falling on the pillow where our heads had been, crashing into the bookcase, severing his glasses neatly at the bridge but amazingly leaving the lenses intact. He put on both halves of the glasses and said in an awed voice, “I guess I’d better go. I’ve never had an experience like this. That was a close one, wasn’t it?” I helped him find his clothes and we brushed off the white dust as best we could, and pinching his glasses together so they wouldn’t fall off, he made his way home to his wife.

  I turned on all the lights and sat up the rest of the night staring at the enormous hole where Texas had been, wondering what it meant to find yourself alive when you’d done nothing in particular to ensure your self-preservation.

  That week a card arrived in the mail, silver ink on black paper:

  Dance the end of the world away.

  Make the apocalypse a night to remember.

  R.S.V.P. Regrets only.

  You had to pay attention to an invitation like that.

  It made me feel hopeful, though by then I’d been to enough parties to know whom you could expect to see—Arnie Raff, for example, or the poet in his new glasses turning up with his wife, or the old painters who liked to dance with you ostentatiously, wheezing for breath while their women exchanged ironies near the wine table.

  I took some of the rent money, since the landlord wasn’t rushing to make repairs, and went to Klein’s on Union Square and bought a dress. A slithery shift of something that looked like silk and was so much brighter than anything I had—all zigzags of purple, blue and green—that I didn’t quite know who I was in it. I could imagine wearing it in Rome if the world didn’t blow up.

  I wasn’t one of those who flourished at those famous downtown parties of the sixties. I knew what they were about, aside from abandon and ambition. You put yourself out there to be seen, to be taken up, to be judged in the flickering of an eye. I’d slip into watching and become, I thought, invisible. Then someone would accuse me of checking out and I’d make an effort for a while to simulate presence. Watchers stand alone, which is against the rules of parties. They’re like pieces that have fallen out of a kaleidoscope when all the other pieces are being shaken up so new patterns can be formed. It’s the kaleidoscopic nature of parties that makes them necessary or things might stay too much the same.

  The art scene never stood still for long. There were always people coming and going, surfacing overnight, disappearing into thin air without ever sending a postcard to a friend. People gave up on New York and went to Paris, California, Mallorca, Mexico. Some started dropping out of life altogether, people as young as I was mostly, leaping off rooftops into space, diving from windows and landing so gracefully there was only a little blood around the corners of the mouth.

  I remember the tall, beautiful, coffee-colored girl with strange green eyes who’d appeared out of nowhere that winter and was seen at all the artists’ parties for a while, the wildest of all the dancers. Her name was Annabel, it was the season of Annabel. She had a little baby named Anton, whom she’d carry everywhere in her arms and put to sleep in back bedrooms among piles of coats and ride home with at dawn in taxis with various infatuated strangers. She moved into a railroad flat on St. Marks Place, where immediately there were surprising numbers of hangers-on, smoking joints and drinking wine while Annabel made big pots of rice and beans, West Texas style, on her three-burner stove as if she were everyone’s mother. You could go there on Sundays for brunch and eat bacon and grits and dance to Ray Charles on the phonograph at eleven-thirty in the morning. “Ooh don’t go,” Annabel would say if she caught you heading for the door. “I hate an empty house worse than anything.”

  The story went around that Annabel was in hiding from her ex-husband, a remittance man from an old Boston family whom she’d met in Paris while she was modeling. But she never acted like someone who was hiding.

  One week, though, at the beginning of the summer, people were asking, “Has anyone seen Annabel?” Nobody had. Annabel left her baby with a friend one afternoon and never came back for him. She told the friend she had an important date. She wore an armful of ivory bracelets and a little green silk shift and new gold sandals. She went rushing off to meet some deadbeat, who gave her an overdose of heroin. After several days an electrician found her body in a cellar on Avenue C.

  I realized later that in an indirect way Annabel helped to change the direction of my life, though I might never have thought it if she hadn’t died the way she did. We always smiled at each other, but I can’t recall that we ever had a single conversation. I was never even sure she knew my name. It surprised me, in fact, to get one of those black-and-silver cards.

  She sent out so many—to more people than could ever have fitted into her apartment. Even early in the evening there was a fancy uptown crowd no one knew piling out of taxis in the rain, pushing their way in past Annabel’s friends drinking wine out of paper cups on the stairs. In her brief season, this was the big event.

  Upstairs it looked like Halloween. Annabel had draped all the furniture in black sheets and lit candles. She wafted from room to room, very high and giggly, a lost child in a silver gown. People milled around in the dark in their wet coats, spilling beer on each other and saying, “Hi, I didn’t know it was you,” in hushed voices. Somewhere in the back the baby woke up and started crying. “What is this shit anyway?” someone said drunkenly and turned on the lights.

  Too much had been expected, of course, so all the guests felt cheated. They also hated being caught with their imaginations down. Where was the gaiety, the wit, the inspired madness with which artists would greet the apocalypse? “Tonight Marcel Duchamp would not be impressed,” one of the old painters commented loudly.

  From then on it was like a party for someone going away whom no one gave a damn about anymore, not even Annabel, who drifted into a room with one of the guests and locked the door. Later people said she’d been trying to tell the rest of us she saw doom up ahead, but that night no one cared.

  I didn’t feel much like dancing, so I walked back to where the baby was. I wanted him to stop crying. His head banged against my shoulder when I picked him up. I kept repeating, “Shh, Mommy’s coming soon,” though I knew that wasn’t the case, and patted his bottom, which was very wet. I felt utterly inept. Suddenly he was quiet, so I put him down in his crib. “Go to sleep, Anton,” I said, pretending authority, but I heard him wail as soon as I walked back into the party.
/>   People were doing the latest thing, something called the Twist, in which a man and woman rotated their hips in front of each other but never touched. I poured a glass of wine, looked around the room and thought very calmly, There is no one.

  A man came up from the street. I noticed him because he wasn’t wearing a coat, just a heavy gray sweater and a green scarf around his neck, and I remember thinking he must be cold. He had thick brown hair wet from the rain and a face that had been used a lot, fierce eyes set deep in smashed bone, the right one angled down sharply. He was a very good-looking­ man, so I decided he would be dangerous, spoiled rotten by women no doubt. For a while he stood near the door at the edge of things, like a player waiting his turn in a game, sizing up his next move. Now and then he’d tighten his lips, pressing them together as if against some oblique thought he couldn’t voice to anyone. He caught me staring, so I stepped back a little behind a dancing couple. When I looked again, the party had swallowed him up.

  A little later he was standing right in front of me. He took me in, I don’t know how else to say it. My tremendous uncertainty, my habit of watching, my ridiculously bright dress. It was as if he could read my bones, it wasn’t that he wanted anything. “Why do you hang back?” he said and walked away.

  I stood amazed where he left me, wanting to run after him and find out who he was. But his fierceness really scared me. I didn’t want him telling me I’d made a mistake, that he’d said all he was ever going to say to me in one question I couldn’t even answer, which suddenly seemed the entire painful puzzle of my life.

  He was one of those people who’d probably never surface again who kept wandering in and out. He’d disappeared by the time I got brave enough to look for him.

  To tell the truth, I wasn’t sorry. I thought of his blue eyes and his handsomeness and how the night might have gone.

  Down on St. Marks Place in the cold darkness the world was still intact, and I carried his question into the rain.

  6

  THERE WAS A DAIRY restaurant in those days on Second Avenue where you could sit all night under big yellow globes of light with baskets of fresh rolls and saucers of butter in front of you until the dark turned pale and you could go home. It had the world’s gruffest waiters but they understood their customers. They’d forget about you for hours if that was what you wanted. You always knew nothing bad could ever happen to you in Rappaport’s.

  I went there after Annabel’s party. I sat down at one of the long empty tables up front and ordered coffee. There were braids of bread in the window and cheesecakes under a fluorescent light that turned them blue. The wet glass was like a black pool. I could see my transparent self in it marooned behind all the baked goods and occasional ghosts passing through me on the other side, swimming by under umbrellas or with Sunday newspapers above their heads.

  I sat there an hour or so watching the rain fall on the avenue. And when I think about it now, it seems that I was waiting, that I even knew who one of the ghosts would be, as if I were somehow dreaming my own life.

  I saw the man from the party. He was walking downtown very slowly, still with no coat on, holding up his face like a blind man daring the rain to fall on him. The lights from Rappaport’s took him by surprise. He came up to the window and leaned against the wet glass. I put down my coffee cup, almost afraid to breathe.

  He didn’t see me sitting there. He stared at the cakes, the pasted-up menu, the clock on the rear wall of the restaurant, before he moved on.

  That was the week the plasterers came early one morning. They rang my bell, getting me out of bed, two seventy-year-old Ukrainians in stiff white overalls like bakers, carrying buckets and brooms and a ladder. They wanted to know if my mother was home, having the innocent misconception that all young unmarried women in apartments were daughters. I tried to explain that I was my mother. They seemed puzzled, but they came in. They whacked at the ceiling with their brooms and the rest of it crumbled like icing. By the end of the day they’d made it solid as a rock. You could hardly see a fault line.

  I walked over to the infamous Cedar Bar after they’d gone. The poet, who’d been making himself scarce, would perhaps be there. I thought I’d tell him I had a new ceiling in a lighthearted manner, and thus lure him—or discover he was no longer lurable. The poet and I had never actually said we were having an affair, or even that we had some fondness for each other. We came at such matters obliquely. Often he brought along his tape recorder so that we could appreciate his voice for an hour or so giving his latest reading. “You don’t mind,” he’d say, switching the thing on. How could you complain about poetry? He was small and jaunty like a bright little warbler, and I think he flew around and visited others with his tape recorder.

  He was standing with some strangers at the bar when I came in through the swinging doors—two gloomy, serious men with beards who were there with their wives or girl friends. I noticed he had his tape recorder with him. He saw me right away and I smiled at him and walked forward and paused for a moment, but then he decided he hadn’t seen me after all. He made a little quarter turn and kept on talking, and I walked on and sat as far away as I could. I’d wait a bit, then leave, I thought. I’d walk past him and call out good-bye in a loud, arresting voice. I ordered a beer and sat without drinking it, picking at the label on the bottle.

  A man came from behind me and put a glass and some cigarettes down on the bar. His hand took a position very close to mine. I remember staring angrily at the ring he wore, a ring of heavy, carved Mexican silver with a square of dull red stone.

  “Can I buy you a drink?”

  “I already have one.”

  “You don’t seem to like what you have.”

  “It’ll do,” I said. I meant to sound completely discouraging. But then I looked up at him for the first time, and it was the man from the party. “Oh, I remember you,” I said in embarrassment.

  “Likewise,” he said, and stared at me the way he had that other time. “Do you come here a lot?” he asked me.

  I said, “Well … in certain periods,” though the period when I hadn’t was at least a year ago.

  I had loosened up the label on the beer bottle considerably, and now I peeled off a big strip of it. The man from the party put his hand on the bottle and moved it away.

  “Wine would taste better—if you change your mind.”

  I said, “All right. I guess I’ve changed it.” I had a strange thought then: This is the beginning. I thought that in a while I’d walk out of there with him, that years would go by, just as I’d known he’d walk down Second Avenue in the rain.

  He asked me to tell him my name, then he told me his. Tom Murphy.

  “An easy one,” I said.

  He told me right away he wasn’t entirely Irish; there was Norwegian blood on his father’s side. He had his father’s name, and he’d given his son that name as well.

  At that point I felt deflated. My psychic abilities had proven unreliable. So he was married, of course. So that was that. I asked him how old his little boy was just to make conversation.

  It took him time to answer. Somehow the question burdened him. “He’s only five.” Then he motioned to the bartender and I got my wine.

  I found out that he was a painter, that he’d just come back to New York after a long absence. He’d spent a lot of time in Mexico City; the last five years he’d lived in Florida—Palm Beach. He’d looked up a friend from the old days at the Art Students League. That’s how he’d heard about Annabel’s party and the Cedar. He didn’t mention his kid again or say we, as married men did. He drank one beer after another very quickly, gulping each one down like someone enormously thirsty. He had a way of wiping his mouth fast on the back of his wrist the way a boy would, and sometimes, when he did that, I’d want to put my hand against his lips.

  I told him a lie I momentarily believed—that I’d be leaving New York very soon.
I’d never been to Europe or anywhere much, and it was time. A girl friend of mine had a fabulous apartment in Rome—I remember how suddenly it became “fabulous.” She was an actress like me, and we were going to get work in Italian movies as extras because she had connections.

  “So you won’t be here very long,” he said.

  “I hope not. Just a month or so.”

  “You can’t count on the movies,” he said.

  “I never count on anything.”

  “I can tell that,” he said, not smiling the way he should have.

  And I said, “Really. How?”

  The hand with the Mexican ring came down over mine. I could feel the cool wood of the bar flat against my palm, and that shock of warmth over my fingers. Our hands just remained there like that, quite still, as if they’d been welded together, and I don’t think we talked for a while.

  Meanwhile I’d naturally forgotten all about the poet. His friends evidently left and then he remembered that he knew me rather well. Suddenly he appeared on the other side of me, saying, “Come and have a drink. I’ll get a table.”

  He looked down at the bar and saw the hands. It was a somewhat confusing moment. I said, “Carl, a gentleman has bought me a drink,” which I thought had a certain elegance of cadence.

  “Catch you later then,” he said, and I felt the little invisible threads between us break and he just dropped away from my life. We often ran into each other after that, but it was over. Many things ended that night—a whole period, a way of living I never really went back to.

  I left the Cedar with Tom Murphy and we walked all over the Village and all the way down to Chinatown. He told me he’d been wandering around like that ever since he got back to New York, couldn’t seem to get enough of it. We looked at ducks hanging upside down in windows on Mott Street and there was the smell of gunpowder in the air; we were supposed to be deciding on a restaurant. We walked back uptown again to an Italian bar on Houston Street, a place called Googie’s where you sat on little barrels and the customers were hoods, not artists. “You never got any dinner,” he said, though I told him I didn’t want any, actually. He ordered me a hamburger deluxe with French fries. “I have to take care of you now,” he said. “When you’re over there in Rome, you’ll remember the inconsiderate guy who made you walk your feet off.”