In the Night Café

by Joyce Johnson

  “Go on,” you said. “Tell me I’ve done something crazy, tell me anything you want, kiddo.”

  I took the wrapping off very carefully in case it had to be used again. The package came from a toy store on Fifth Avenue, the best one in the city. It was a blue sailboat lying in a nest of white excelsior, a sort of miniature galleon with tiny brass cannons mounted on the deck and bright flags on the rigging. “It’s wonderful,” I said. “This is for Tommy, isn’t it?”

  “He’s six today.”

  “Why didn’t you say something?”

  “There it is,” you said. “I just said it. What am I going to do with this thing? What the hell am I going to do with it?”

  I said the only thing that came into my mind. “I guess you’d better take it to the post office.”

  You didn’t see how you could do that, though.

  You showed me a birthday card you’d bought for Tommy, a funny one with sixes and blue elephants all over it. You’d thought of putting it inside the package with some kind of message, but all you’d written so far was, I love you. Dad. How could anyone write a letter to a six year old that would have to say, I love you but I can’t be with you. How could Tommy be expected to understand that? And maybe the card would never reach him, maybe Caroline would throw it away. Or maybe the whole idea was wrong in the first place, too confusing. A kid doesn’t hear from his father for months—and then a goddam package arrives. And where do you go from there anyway? What’s supposed to happen after that? You’d even missed his birthday by now. “I’ve fucked it up for him,” you said. “I’m hurting him. Every day I’m hurting him.”

  I remember pushing my brain to find a fast way out of it. I wanted to fix it somehow—as if all it came down to was a question of whether or not to mail that package. Maybe that would take care of it for now, and then we could go back to what I thought had been our happiness, because I was afraid to understand what it was to lose one’s children or that August 7 would come around every year of our lives. I needed to believe you and I were enough for each other even if the rest of the world was out of control. “Florida” wasn’t just Caroline, you see, it was the kids—the way all our lives were bound up together, a knot you couldn’t untie. I remember advising you to send the package special delivery. “Then it will get there the day after tomorrow.”

  You were staring at me with such grief. “The day after tomorrow is too late.”

  You asked me what time it was. I thought it was eight-thirty. “I’ve got to call Tommy,” you said. “He’ll understand that, won’t he?”

  I said I didn’t know. Maybe it wasn’t the best thing, I said.

  “He’ll be up,” you said. “He holds out. No one can put that kid to bed. He likes to grab the phone—‘Hello, this is Superman. Hello, this is Mickey Mouse.’ I’d have to yell at him, ‘You wacky kid!’ ‘No, you’re the wacky kid, Dad!’”

  “Don’t do it,” I said. “Please don’t call down there.”

  “What are you talking about? What are you afraid of? Caroline?”

  I said, “I’m afraid of you.”

  You said it would be all right because it had to be.

  You walked past me into the other room and I heard the phone being dialed, heard you give the number to the long-distance­ operator. Then there was silence, and I knew the phone was ringing and ringing in Florida.

  I remember going all the way to the front of the studio and standing at the open window, and if there’d been a fire escape, I think I would have climbed out onto it. It wasn’t quite dark. The sky was still a kind of burnt-out red. A bottle crashed somewhere down the block and I heard the summer bell of a Good Humor truck. Bums were yelling in the park. They seemed to be fighting over a pair of shoes.

  A man was shouting. “You bitch! You bitch! Coldhearted fucking bitch! You want me to come down there and choke you!”

  13

  I STAYED WHERE I was, shut my eyes and steadied myself with my hand against the window frame. It was like those moments after an accident, when time weirdly slips back on you—you tell yourself, Nothing’s happened. I could still hear the bums yelling down below. Caroline must have hung up on him. I knew what she’d said to make him shout that threat at her. I knew the gist of it even without the words.

  If it had been me instead of her, what would I have done, hearing that voice ask that favor over the phone, ask me—of all people—for a way out of pain, just wanting to get past me to the kid. Could I even have thought of the kid at all? Suppose it had been Nicky. Would I have put Nicky on the phone? When they say everyone’s only human, they mean anger and craziness too, people who’ve loved each other turning into mortal enemies, clawing at each other’s soft spots.

  “Are you afraid of me now?” he said when I walked into the other room, where he still sat holding the receiver.

  I remember trying to act as if everything hadn’t come apart for good, as if you could press a button and turn everything rational, even though insanity, I knew, would always win. Everyone goes to extremes, I said, and I tried to convince him that the words he’d shouted at Caroline could be taken back, that she could be made to see he didn’t mean them.

  But of course he’d meant them, he insisted furiously. He could see I didn’t understand and he wasn’t blaming me, he wasn’t. It wasn’t in me to be hard the way she was. “She knows what she’s doing to me.”

  Suddenly he reached out and seized me by the shoulders and I saw that he was weeping. “They should have been your kids!” I told him there was no point even thinking that, but I was crying, too.

  Then he said, all right, he’d do it, he’d call Caroline again, but only because he still had to think about Tommy. It had nothing to do with her, and maybe he could make her listen if she didn’t just hang up on him again. Over and over he kept calling, but he was only reaching operators, and the operators would sing their song of “Sorry, the line is busy.” It was clear she’d taken the phone off the hook.

  Finally he told me to go to bed. “I don’t want you sitting up with me.” He switched on a small lamp next to the phone and lay down on the couch with a pack of cigarettes.

  All through that night I’d half wake up, yellow burning against my eyelids, and think I’d hear him, speaking very low, still giving the number to the operators.

  When I got up to go to work, Tom was asleep on the couch in all his clothes, the empty cigarette pack crumpled on the floor. I turned off the lamp and let myself out of the house as quietly as I could.

  At the office I did a lot of staring at the Park Fast sign. I called Tom at ten. There was no answer. Every time my phone rang after that I felt dread and wished I’d stayed at home.

  He called me in the middle of the afternoon. There was a lot of noise in the background as though heavy vehicles were grinding by, and he was shouting over it to me, telling me he’d had to take some money out of the bank.

  “Tell me where you’re calling from!” I cried.

  He was in an Esso station, he said. I remember he was very precise about where he was—standing in a phone booth on a highway just outside Easton, Pennsylvania. He said he’d found a truck that would take him all the way to Florida.

  “I’m taking Tommy his present. What do you think about that, kiddo?” Sometimes when he’d just finished a painting his voice had that same sound—a kind of defiance and elation, as if he was giving the world notice nothing could ever change what he’d arrived at.

  He said the truck was leaving and he’d see me next week, and I never got to tell him what I thought.

  When I came home later, sure enough the package was gone. I could see he must have wrapped it again, put the striped paper back around it, tied it up with the ribbon.

  If he’d even had five minutes with Tommy, I think he could have lived with it.

  That was the night I heard from Harry T., who had been to see his lawyers and
a judge who was a personal friend, and had also informed the Palm Beach chief of police that his daughter’s life had been threatened. Harry T. took pains to make me understand what an influential and popular man he was—though he didn’t show me his charming side and I never would get to eat oysters with him in Palm Beach’s finest restaurants.

  He addressed me as Miss Whoeveryouare. “You get him for me,” he said. “You put that son of a bitch on the line.”

  I’d never run up against anyone like Harry T. No one with such conviction that he was the Authority and knew what was right and therefore had to be obeyed on the spot. I could imagine him waving a gun if he found it appropriate—backed up by lawyers, judges, restaurant waiters, maybe even God. I saw why Caroline had run away from such a father.

  At first I tried to sound like a Kelly Girl, someone who really didn’t know the ins and outs of the business. “I’m sorry. He’s gone out… . I don’t know exactly what time he’ll be back… . ”

  But then Harry T. started thundering about “whereabouts,” demanding “whereabouts.” I recognized “whereabouts” as a police kind of word. It was the place they’d come and corner you and take you away in handcuffs.

  I said, “Well, this is where he lives, but he isn’t home right now, so I really can’t get him for you. Perhaps you would leave your phone number.”

  There was a roar from Harry T. “The son of a bitch knows my number! Don’t you lie to me, miss. You’d better tell me what he’s up to.” It was almost as if he had his eye on the very truck that had picked Tom up in Easton.

  I lost my Kelly Girl’s voice. A large, dry pit got stuck in my throat and I couldn’t seem to swallow it. I knew it wouldn’t do any good to plead with a man who had no doubts, but I did some pleading anyway. “Listen, whatever he said to your daughter he didn’t mean. He was just terribly upset. You know he’d never do anything to her—to anybody. Haven’t you known Tom for years? That’s not the way he is.”

  “He’s scum,” said Harry T., “to put a plain word on it. Dangerous, crazy. A so-called artist. He had my girl hoodwinked. You’ll find out for yourself, Miss Whoeveryouare. Why don’t you tell him a couple of things if you hear from him. Tell him, don’t even think of setting foot in the state of Florida. Don’t call to speak to little Tommy. I’m taking legal steps to protect my grandchildren. He won’t be seeing those kids again. He’s not even going to get near them.”

  You used to say it all came down to timing.

  Take the way the two of us had met—happening to turn up like that at the end-of-the-world party. Or even the fact that you hadn’t died at nineteen on the deck at Anzio when the guy next to you got hit. His blood was all over you, but you were alive—you could have been standing where he was.

  Maybe you should have played it safe, you admitted later, and never gone back to Florida, but you were counting on one thing. That the kid was still crazy about the two-wheeler you’d given him, that he still pedaled it up and down the sidewalk, where sometimes you’d even found him in his pajamas, his mouth smeared with Skippy peanut butter that he’d helped himself to in the kitchen. A couple of mornings when you hadn’t made it home the night before, he’d been waiting for you when you got out of the MG. “Let’s go for a drive, Dad. Are you going to play with me now?” It had been hard for him to understand when you told him you weren’t up to it. You’d stood there blinking in the sun with your hand over your eyes, so drunk you hardly knew what you were saying, without the slightest memory of the roads you’d just been on, the swerves and curves under the palms and the mangrove trees.

  Driving past the house the first night, you actually saw the MG. It was parked in its old spot in the driveway as if no one had moved it since you’d gone, like you’d come out any minute and get into it, instead of being on the wrong side of the street in a rented Chevy. You let the Chevy roll to a stop. You turned off the lights and sat listening to the insects thudding against the windshield. Across the street all the windows were black; everyone was up there on the second floor in the air-conditioned dark. The baby would be on her belly in the white crib. Maybe Tommy was talking in his sleep, kicking off his sheet—it always landed on the floor.

  You saw that Caroline had put flowered drapes over the windows of your studio. You were trying to remember the last painting you’d done up there before you left, but you couldn’t quite see it, couldn’t quite bring it into focus—the way you couldn’t quite see the faces of your children. You thought of the face you couldn’t see at all, the one that belonged to the tall man you were still pretty sure must have been your father, though Marie used to swear you’d only dreamed about him. You imagined your own face dissolving slowly like a bar of soap dropped into water—that was the way it must be for Tommy by now.

  Early in the morning you came back in the Chevy and circled the block. You kept doing it every twenty minutes or so. You had the birthday present on the seat next to you, which was where you were going to put the kid when you opened the door and called to him and told him to get in. You were going to tell him you were just making a surprise appearance because you’d missed his birthday, that it was a secret from everyone else. The day was just going to be fun for him—nothing emotional. You couldn’t do that to Tommy. You’d take him out to the marina, the pier where he’d caught his first fish. “I’ll bet you can do it again, Tommy,” you’d say. “I’ll bet you can catch an even bigger one.”

  You remembered a pay phone there at the bait place. You’d call Caroline and tell her you had Tommy; you’d get him back in time to go to bed. Though even that was kidnapping, if they wanted to get technical about it.

  But you also thought of going all the way—you did keep coming around to that. Taking Tommy with you. Just stealing the kid and the Chevy and driving till you could no longer pay for gas.

  “I could have done it,” you said, after you told me that last thing, looking me straight in the eyes. I always knew you loved me enough to want me to know everything.

  And what about us? I remember thinking, but I kept the words inside me. I saw there was no Us right then when it came to Tommy.

  You used to test me with guessing games, but I was never much good at them. There was always some obscure Zen answer I’d end up missing.

  Once you held out your fists and asked me did I notice anything unusual. “Take a look at the knuckles,” you said.

  But I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary.

  You blamed it on my sheltered life. If I’d grown up in the Bronx, I might have known what to look for. All your knuckles were flattened, except for one on your right hand.

  You said in a proud, sad voice, “Well, they didn’t get that way from holding paintbrushes.” You’d broken them all yourself, getting into fights, smashing them against people’s heads. “One of these days I’m going to smash the last one.”

  There was no fight when it happened. It was that morning you were cruising in circles waiting for Tommy. You were taking the Chevy around the corner the fifth or sixth time. When you saw the patrol car blocking the road, you drove your right fist into the dashboard.

  “I smashed the last one,” you said when you called me from Florida.

  By the time I heard from you, I couldn’t think beyond wanting you back, couldn’t think at all beyond my need of you. I’d keep walking into your studio and turning on all the lights, telling myself you’d surely come back because you’d left all your paintings behind—there was even the new black one you still had to finish. I couldn’t believe just in myself as the reason, despite what you’d tried to teach me. I’d take off my clothes and put myself to sleep in the sheets that had your smell, superstitious about changing them.

  I never got any wiser from loving you. All the time we were together, the two things I believed never canceled each other out: That love was bound to make everything all right. That no matter what I gave you, it wouldn’t be enough.

  S
ix days—that’s all you were gone. They’d locked you up down there in Florida, but only kept you overnight. Caroline wanted you a thousand miles from herself and the kids and decided to drop the charges. A patrol car drove you to the airport and they shipped you back on Pan Am, all expenses paid. Harry T. bought the ticket.

  You sent me a telegram with the flight number. It came early in the morning, and I called in sick and didn’t go to work and went out to the airport and waited. I’d washed my hair and put on the dress I’d worn the night I met you. I wasn’t sure who you’d be after so much had happened to you. It was as if I’d have to win you all over again.

  I remember standing at the arrival gate very scared because everyone was coming off the plane except you, one stranger after another. You were the last one to walk through, and people turned their heads and gave you edgy, disapproving stares, seeing only wildness in you, trouble. You hadn’t shaved for days; there were black-and-blue marks on your face; your right hand was wrapped in a dirty bandage. You raised it in the air when you saw me and tried to smile, and I ran forward and you said, “You’re beautiful.” You said, “On the plane I kept thinking you wouldn’t want me. Why would anyone in her right mind want me?”

  It was late afternoon by the time we got home. You said you’d had moments when you thought you’d never see the place again, that you’d blown it permanently. You talked about blue—the pure, terrifying blue you’d seen from the windows of the plane. “It’s the blue of emptiness.”

  I told you there was no emptiness now. “Not now. Don’t think about it.” I stood on my toes to reach your bruised lips and started kissing you into silence, closing your eyes with kisses, too. I pressed into you with my whole being and heard you cry out as if I’d hurt you, and we swayed together in the middle of the floor like dancers before the advent of the Twist and distance.

  I remember what you said to me that day, after we’d made love. “What are we doing here, laughing or crying?”