In the Night Café

by Joyce Johnson

  We were standing on a corner waiting for the light to change. “In a heavy sea,” Tom said, keeping his eyes on the light, “that boat will snap like a pretzel. If he doesn’t leave before September, he’ll never make it around Hatteras.”

  “But hasn’t he thought of that?” I wanted to save Howard Stricker. I wanted someone to talk him out of going, to tell him to be very careful.

  “Oh yeah,” Tom said. “He’s thought of everything.”

  We got rid of Howard Stricker’s grayness with whitewash. Even the floors we painted white—we didn’t care about its being impractical. We put every dime we had into the place and ate chili every night. There was nothing left over for Tom to spend on canvas for a while.

  One night we went out when we were tired of working. We had hot-and-sour soup in Chinatown and wandered all the way down to Wall Street. It was one A.M. Wall Street was deserted, though a light burned here and there. Tom spotted an empty U.S. mailbag that had been left out in front of one of the buildings and bent down to inspect it. He grinned up at me. “What about it, kiddo?” It was made of perfectly good heavy canvas. No one was watching, so we rolled it right up and took it home with us. It was probably a federal offense, but it made us awfully happy. We felt the streets had given us something—that, too, was a sign of our luck. Tom cut up the bag and made two small paintings. They were the first he did in the new studio.

  We picked up a round table the same way—another gift from the streets. We found it abandoned outside an old bar in Little Italy that was modernizing itself into green Formica. It had dark rings on the wood from its previous life, and later there was a black spot where a cigarette of Tom’s burned into it. I was thrilled to get that piece of furniture. It had a real bohemian chic, I thought. Someone gave us a spider plant and Tom hung it over the table from the ceiling. I can see that table and two blue Mexican chairs half facing each other, set at an angle as if Tom and I have just pushed them back a little and walked away.

  I remember whiteness. Whiteness, especially in the mornings, looking down from the high platform bed. Everything seemed afloat, unanchored. The spider plant was singing, trembling toward the light. I wish I’d thought to take a picture.

  For years my mother kept the boxes I couldn’t open. “Leave them,” I’d say. “I don’t need anything.” She said I was being foolish. “You don’t remember what’s here. We could at least give this stuff to Goodwill.”

  So finally I got a knife and cut the tape on one of them. There were some chipped yellow plates wrapped in newspaper—they seemed neutral enough. She was right, I’d forgotten things. I worked my way through the box quite calmly, with curiosity. At the bottom was something round and heavy, also wrapped in newspaper. As I tore away the paper I saw that someone had wrapped a stone. It was an ashtray Howard Stricker had left, made out of a polished piece of granite. Tom used to keep it on our round table. Someone had actually wrapped it, cigarette ashes and all.

  Can you imagine? Ashes.

  I hadn’t told my mother I was living with Tom or moving with him to a studio, I just told her I was thinking of changing my phone number.

  “What are you doing that for?” she asked suspiciously.

  I said it was because some nut kept calling me. For a few weeks after that, she kept wanting to know about the nut and whether he’d called again and whether I’d reported him to the police and whether I’d gotten a chain for the door. Finally she said, “Well, I think you should change your number,” and I said, “Yes, that’s the simplest way to take care of that nut.”

  Just before we moved, though, I called her and told her I’d like her to meet this man, this artist Tom Murphy I’d been seeing lately.

  “What kind of name is that?” she said. “Irish? Catholic?”

  “Names don’t matter to me,” I said sternly.

  “Nothing matters to you. I know.”

  “Well frankly, Ma,” I said, “this man matters.” It was the first thing I’d told her in a long time that was the absolute truth.

  She didn’t say anything. I guess she just stood there in her old pink chenille robe in her avocado kitchen wondering about everything I wasn’t telling her. From the time I was eighteen and first started sneaking to Greenwich Village and hanging out with people like Arnie Raff, our entire relationship had been based on alibis.

  “I’m going to make roast beef,” she said. “It’s nicer than chicken.”

  When you’ve been at war so long with a person, you forget they might wish you well. They might even be happy for you.

  The night Tom and I went out to Queens, the whole house smelled of furniture polish and my mother’s best china was on the table—I hadn’t seen those gold-rimmed dishes since my father died. My mother brought out wineglasses and put little cork coasters under them that showed Mexican peons asleep under sombreros. “Would you like some sherry?” she asked us. It was strange to feel like a guest rather than a daughter.

  We sat on the living-room couch with our sherry and our coasters and our feet on the red oriental rug. Tom said, “I bet this is the rug you danced on when you were little.”

  My mother was delighted. “Oh, that was certainly her favorite occupation. She couldn’t keep still if you turned on the radio. I’m surprised you remember that,” she said to me.

  I said, “Sure I remember it. I remember a lot.”

  “She was just a tiny little thing, but she insisted on dancing lessons—toe, tap. We gave her the best instruction in everything. It seemed very important at the time.”

  “But nothing’s wasted, Mrs. Gold,” Tom said quietly.

  “Oh yes,” my mother repeated doubtfully, “nothing’s wasted. Isn’t that the wisdom of the East?”

  My mother was taking painting lessons in the neighborhood that year, watercolor. Her teacher was Japanese. She brought out some studies of pots and flowers painted on rice paper. “There’s some really nice color here, Mrs. Gold,” Tom said. He pointed out the places where my mother ran into trouble with perspective. He told her how Vincent Van Gogh had built a special frame to help him get the perspective exact and how he’d carried it with him everywhere when he was learning. My mother wanted to know where she could get a gadget like that.

  “You know how I dried these watercolors?” she asked him. “I didn’t want to leave them out on the table because of the cat. So I stuck them to the refrigerator overnight with magnets.”

  “That’s certainly not very Japanese, Mrs. Gold,” Tom teased her.

  “But it works!” My mother was laughing, flushing like a girl. “You should try it.”

  She wanted to know whether Tom did still lifes too, or did he do figures? He told her he’d started out that way, of course, but now he was an abstract expressionist. My mother was disappointed, though she still maintained her smile. “I’ve heard of that,” she said politely. “Is that what people are buying­ now?”

  I assured her some abstract expressionists had made millions. I tried to create the impression of a boom.

  “I hope you’ll return to still lifes again one day,” my mother said. But she liked him, I could tell.

  In the kitchen she took me aside and whispered, “You know, I never trusted the other one,” meaning Arnie. “Even though he was a Jewish boy, I always felt he had something up his sleeve.

  “Come to the table,” she sang out and brought out the roast on a platter. She was picking up the knife to carve it herself, but Tom said quickly, “Let me take care of that for you.” The brightness went from my mother’s face; there was a wet look in her eyes. “You know we have no men in our family,” she said to me. “That’s really terrible, isn’t it?”

  And although we were going to wait till Tom had his divorce to tell her we were getting married, I nearly broke the news that moment. “Ma, I’m going to marry this man. You’ll have grandsons.” I thought of our sons, I think, for the first time, th
at they’d really be possible, that the children we’d have would fill in the empty spaces. Maybe it was even Nicky who flew into my imagination and took root there.

  I remember we were all dressed up that night in clothes we wouldn’t have worn otherwise. Tom had gone out and bought a white shirt and a necktie, and I’d ironed a pink cotton dress from the bottom of the closet that made me look like a milkmaid. I saw how even our costumes divided us from Ma, just like my lie about the phone. I wished we could all just be real to each other.

  Maybe Ma knew, though; maybe she did sense what was in the air. Suddenly she started talking to Tom about my father as if she’d never said to me, “Don’t throw yourself away on anyone.”

  “My husband was very talented artistically. He could have worked for the magazines, but because of the family he thought it wiser to have a business. He did the biggest weddings, you know, all over the borough, the fanciest affairs. He was in demand, let me tell you. His customers were always thrilled because he made them look so natural. He just spoke to them in a very quiet way until they relaxed totally. There’s quite an art in that.”

  When Tom said he’d like to see my father’s work, my mother sighed and looked embarrassed. “Oh, most of it’s gone. I couldn’t keep those files. What could I do with all those pictures of strangers? When the Viennese bought the business, he cleaned out the shop. Did you show him the shop?” she asked me.

  I told her I had. We’d stopped and looked in the window.

  “Well, that work isn’t good—everyone smiling with so many teeth like morons.” My mother stopped and demonstrated. “There’s no sensitivity, but he makes a living. He has an assistant, a nice Puerto Rican. My husband never had that. I pleaded with him but he wouldn’t listen. So … ”

  She caught her breath and leaned toward us over the red gladiolas we’d brought her. “Joanna may have told you—he went to a wedding and never came back.” That was how she always put it when she explained to anyone how my father had died. It had become her tragedy; the wedding was an irony that somehow made it worse.

  “It was this time of year, the big month. He’d worked every weekend, a man with a heart condition. The affair was on an estate—Oyster Bay—in a big garden. In the morning the temperature was ninety-nine. I said, ‘Don’t go. You’ll kill yourself.’ ‘They have tents,’ he said, and he went.”

  I said, “Let’s change the subject, Ma!” And I heard the way my voice sounded, cold, heartless.

  We did take one trip to Coney Island to look up Howard Stricker, inquiring around various boatyards till we found him. This was toward the end of July. He’d built some of his deck, but had made no progress on his cabin. To raise more cash he’d been working as a maintenance man on the Whirlwind and some other rides. He couldn’t get over it that we’d come all the way out on the subway to see him.

  He was living in an army tent on his half-finished deck. “What a suntan, Howard!” we said. It really was a terrific one, deep and even. It made him look younger, as if there was more life in him. For the first time I thought it might really be okay, that he’d probably make it to wherever he was going.

  He offered to cook us some brown rice on his camp stove, but Tom said, “No, forget that,” and found a place to buy us all hero sandwiches—really great ones with cheese and salami and tiny hot peppers.

  “Certainly this is the opposite of brown rice,” Howard Stricker said, chewing thoughtfully.

  The three of us sat on the deck on wooden crates, the pontoons rocking in the swells of water beneath us. The boatyard was on an inlet on Gravesend Bay. All that separated us from the Belt Parkway was a strip of gritty sand with some marsh grass growing in it. Cars whizzed by with a sound high-pitched like wind, but after a while you forgot them. You could just look out at the shine on the water.

  A crowd of gulls flew in, arriving suddenly out of nowhere. Tom stood up and started flinging pieces of Italian bread at them, throwing hard like a pitcher. They’d swoop and rise, swoop and rise, making their loud harsh squawks. There was one all the way out who wouldn’t come in. The feast its friends were having didn’t interest it for some reason. It was keeping its distance in the middle of the waves, bobbing up and down by itself.

  “See him out there,” Tom said. “That one’s the wise one. He’s beyond everything.”

  “Sometimes you get one like that,” Howard Stricker said.

  12

  RIGHT AROUND THE corner from where we lived, Grand Street turned into the street of brides. Four stores there sold cut-rate bridal gowns. The mannequins were very old. They had Celluloid marcelled hair, yellowish complexions. Tom used to say they looked like flappers who’d achieved sainthood. They had nylon veils and bouquets of dusty paper lilies—they held them up in the windows, smiling their mysterious waxy smiles.

  Tom used to kid me about those white gowns. “How about that one, kiddo? You’d look great in the one over there.”

  We’d decided we’d definitely get married in the fall as soon as he got his divorce. One day we’d just take a cab downtown and do the whole thing at city hall. Afterwards we’d have breakfast in Chinatown. It was funny to think how we’d wake up that morning in one state and lie down at night in exactly the same bed in another. I used to wonder whether becoming someone called wife would make me feel different. When I was still a virgin I’d had similar thoughts about sex. Sex, of course, had seemed a far more drastic experience. I think what marriage meant to me was the sealing of a love affair. I didn’t have a concept of it as an institution, never gave a thought to property and all of that.

  Caroline had more of a grasp of such things. Maybe not at the start when she was trying out wildness and pretending to be Veronica. I think it was something that came to her bitterly, after Mexico. As love got chipped away, the institution became meaningful. Later she could be a widow and fail to mourn. Or maybe, after Tom left her, she continued to want him; maybe that was always the problem. Even now I know next to nothing about Caroline. I know what she did, but not how she felt.

  Those first months with Tom, I used to think of her as “Florida,” “down in Florida”—more of a previous address than a person. “Any day we’ll hear from Florida,” I kept telling myself after Tom finally wrote her in July, giving her the name of the lawyer Leon had found him who was going to take a painting in exchange for his services. It was the only word she’d had from him in four months. I know I didn’t make the effort to imagine “Florida” receiving such a letter.

  Weeks went by without an answer. Then, slowly—through her silence—Caroline became clearer to me. She was striking back at Tom. Silence was all she had. It reminded me of holding on to Arnie’s jazz collection—a last stubbornness.

  The letter came at the beginning of August in a cream-colored envelope. For a second I thought someone had sent us a formal invitation. It lay on the broken tiles under the mail slot in our downstairs hallway. I’d walked in with a shopping bag of groceries. I bent down and picked up the envelope and when I saw who it was from, I almost wished it hadn’t arrived.

  We had been happy, and I knew all at once that it would change. It was like weather, great masses of air suddenly shifting so that even the light looks different. You know you’ve been in a certain period when it ends.

  I took the cream-colored envelope upstairs. I gave it to you as soon as you came home. You ripped it open and started reading the letter right away. I went to the sink and washed dishes because I couldn’t bear to watch you.

  When I asked you was the letter okay? you said it was perfect. But I didn’t think your voice sounded good.

  “Everything’s fine. She’s getting herself a lawyer. If they taught you how to write such letters in finishing school, this one would get an A.”

  You folded it up small. You shoved it under the stone ashtray on the table.

  “Thirteen years,” you said, as if you’d never added them up bef
ore.

  I remember August seventh was a Monday, and I couldn’t seem to get you to wake up. You told me you weren’t going into work. “I can’t cut it,” you said. You lay on your back with your arm crooked over your eyes. I asked if you were feeling ill, but you said you weren’t. “I can’t cut it, that’s all.”

  At first I thought it was your job. Lately your supervisor had been bugging you—“What’s the matter with you, Murphy? Been up all night with a sick painting?”

  We’d been riding the bus uptown together to our offices every morning. It felt strange that day to get on it alone.

  You’d been working on a new painting all through the weekend. This one wasn’t coming fast like the others. Maybe because there was no red in it and so much black—black strokes that kept getting denser and denser, crowding out the white. “I’m narrowing my palette,” you told me. I thought I knew what was really keeping you home—all that black coming in, taking you by surprise.

  I felt very sure you were painting when you didn’t call me at the office. I felt proud of myself for not phoning, not breaking in on you, learning how to be an artist’s wife.

  When I came home, though, and took a look in the studio, I saw that the painting hadn’t changed at all.

  I didn’t hear your key in the door till I’d warmed up dinner enough times to be mad at you. I was convinced you’d been at the Cedar. Then you told me how you’d spent most of the day—walking in and out of toy shops. When I heard that, it scared me.

  You leaned against the refrigerator, watching me fuss with a pot on the stove. “Don’t bother with that for now.” There was something left out in the studio that you wanted me to see. You said you’d actually bought something.

  I went in with you and saw a large package on the floor, all tied up in ribbon and gift-wrapped in red-and-blue-striped paper. You told me, “Go ahead. Open it,” and I said, very puzzled now, “You bought something for me?”