In the Night Café

by Joyce Johnson

  There was a big Chinese family on the bus traveling down to Mott Street. The kids were pointing at you and giggling. I knew they were saying “drunk” in Chinese, and I hated them for it. I got up from my seat and walked down the aisle to the front of the bus and paid your fare. “Oh,” you announced to all the passengers, to the world, “let me introduce my wife. This gorgeous, generous woman is my wife.”

  Despite everything, I knew you meant it. You had the most beautiful smile on your face. I put my arms around you and kissed you in front of all those Chinese strangers. I bent down and started to pick up the change you’d dropped, but you wouldn’t let me. “Leave it there,” you said. “Leave it for the poor.”

  You told me it wasn’t women. “It isn’t women, if that’s what’s worrying you. I’m not off somewhere picking up broads. I always come home, don’t I? I mean, here I am, baby, whatever that means. Whatever good that does you.”

  “What is it then?” I asked you. “Tell me. Why can’t you be here?”

  “Tomorrow I’ll stay home. I won’t go out, won’t drink. Just leave me food—no money. You can call and check up on me all you want.” Then you gripped my arms so hard the red marks were still there the next day. “Listen,” you said in a threatening voice, “I’ll only leave you once.”

  In the morning you were contrite when I told you what you’d said. The sheets were as drenched as if you’d had a fever. You asked for some coffee and I brought it to you. I sat myself on the edge of the bed, but you pulled me down and lay on top of me, looking into my eyes.

  There was always another chance in the mornings.

  Our worst battles took place in cabs with the driver’s contempt in the mirror.

  “Make the light!” No matter how drunk you were, you’d yell that out when we got to Grand Street, bitter that you’d had to be retrieved, reeled in by me.

  Billy kept track of you. We’d conspire to get you home. The phone would ring on Chrystie Street—“Maybe you’d better come up here, Joanna. I’ll try to keep him from leaving.” Somehow he’d steal your key ring from your pocket, so you wouldn’t be able to start the bike. Then he’d lure you out to the curb, where the cab would be waiting. When I opened the door, he’d wrestle you onto the backseat. “Give me the fucking keys, Billy!” You seemed to be dying of thirst, like a man who’d come in from the desert too late—all the beer, all the wine in the world wouldn’t have been enough.

  “It doesn’t make any sense.” I used to keep pointing that out to you. None of it made sense. I was still trying to keep you alive—that was really what we fought about. I was simply going to keep coming for you and waiting for you until you’d see there was nothing you could do that would shake me loose. I didn’t have any other plan. I thought we had time—maybe not forever, but years. I wonder how many years I would have stuck it out.

  “I’ll only leave you once.” I never questioned that. You’d lost too many people by the time you got to me. I could only leave you if I meant it to be for good—you’d never try to get me back. Maybe I’d get one call, long-distance, the way you called Caroline once in the middle of the night months after the divorce. Maybe you’d ask me the same thing in that same low, deadly voice. If I knew what I’d done. “Did you know? I want to know how cold you were when you worked it out.”

  I couldn’t imagine being cold to you. Hating you, but not being cold.

  I hit you one night. Maybe it was hate. One of those nights I’d dragged you home from somewhere in a cab. We were standing out on Chrystie Street and you wouldn’t come upstairs. You were insisting I look at the moon. Of all things, the moon. But I wasn’t about to grant you that. “I’m going to stay out here until God strikes me down,” you said, and I hit you right below the eye and ran down the block. I got to the corner, but there was nothing there. Just the hot, still air, the useless burned-out globe in the sky, the bums snoring under the bridal-shop windows. I didn’t know what I was running to. That was why I came back.

  VI

  Grand Street

  Fall 1963

  19

  SUMMER COULDN’T SEEM to end itself that year. At the Cedar Bar, the weirdness of the fall became a topic of conversation. The leaves should have been turning, but they weren’t. We noticed this even in the bums’ park across the street, where the sycamores wouldn’t yellow. Dust just kept falling on the dry green leaves.

  I didn’t appreciate the warm days, even though it was nice not to have to wear a coat. I knew I’d feel easier in the cold weather, when Tom wouldn’t be riding around so much on the bike. I used to look down our block as soon as I turned the corner, praying I’d see the red Harley outside our house. There were still too many nights when it wasn’t there.

  If Tom was home already, the television would be on. When I came in, it would be the six o’clock news and he’d be on the couch asleep. He was trying to cut down on his drinking and it made him awfully quiet, as if he could only hold on to himself by hardly speaking. We’d eat dinner with Jackie Gleason on full blast. It seemed funny that we should come to this—just a couple watching TV like millions of others tuned to the same channel. It was like the fate I’d always feared, that ordinariness would overtake me.

  Tom wasn’t painting. He’d walk through his studio just to get to the front door, without ever turning on the lights. On the wall in there was an unfinished canvas he couldn’t look at, one of the black-and-white paintings he hated now. He said he hated everything he’d done the past few months. He’d worked like a madman, not like an artist. That was why those paintings were no good. They’d all end up on the floor, he said, as soon as he had the guts to rip them off their stretchers. I begged him not to do it. What if months from now he felt differently? But I knew in my heart that he was right. Sometimes he’d talk about all the other paintings he’d lost, the work no one but fools would ever see. He told me you could lose everything you had by trying to replace what had been taken from you. “That’s the way they rob you twice, kiddo. Some people know that, have that in mind.”

  For a while he kept himself occupied making shelves and a kitchen counter from scraps of wood Howard Stricker had left behind. He said he wanted me to have my own darkroom. He was going to build it as soon as he got some cash. In fact, Billy had told him a big carpentry job was coming up—enough work for a couple of months. With a job like that, he told me, he wouldn’t have time to drink, wouldn’t have time to paint either, even if he wanted to.

  “Don’t you like me better when I’m not painting? Look how handy I am around the house?”

  All my adult life, I’d been lugging shopping bags home from supermarkets, but now Tom wasn’t going to let me do that anymore. Every Friday he was going to meet me after work at the Grand Union on Spring Street. He was very serious about it. Somehow he’d manage to show up there even if all afternoon he’d been drinking. On those days he never realized how long it took us to get home. He’d stumble along carrying those heavy bags with the rest of the loud world darting around him—housewives­ charging back to their kitchens from the fish store, kids screaming­ “Throw me the ball! Throw me the ball!” playing the last furious game on Mulberry Street before dinner. He’d always stop right there and watch them.

  I remember we kept buying tomatoes from an old man with a pushcart who always cheated us a little. They were the best and worst tomatoes, deep red, bursting, three pounds for a quarter. He’d load them onto his scale so fast there was no telling which ones were rotten. One night he informed us there was going to be a festa. “A good week for the saint,” he said with a wink, fanning himself with a fistful of dollar bills.

  Workmen had been going around the neighborhood that Friday, putting up the wires for colored lights. They’d strung one of them high over Grand Street, though I didn’t take any notice of it at first. We were standing on the curb waiting to cross when I felt Tom tap my arm.

  “Look up! Look up over there!”r />
  A dead bundle of feathers was hanging throttled against the sky. Just an instant before, he’d seen a pigeon fly straight into that wire.

  For days we talked about it. Tom kept saying it was one chance in a million. It had only been a question of the wire having the right amount of slack. But why had that bird flown into it when it had an entire sky to itself?

  In mid-October we had all our relatives over for Sunday dinner—part of our campaign to be normal. We invited my mother and Kevin and Grace and their kid. Tom took over most of the cooking. He promised me that even if Kevin brought him a bottle, he’d only drink Coca-Cola. Before everyone came, I scrubbed every visible surface in the kitchen, but still it would never look like Grace’s.

  Kevin and Grace always got very nervous whenever we suggested they should come and see us. Tom said it was shyness. Their lives were so different from ours, they probably thought they wouldn’t like our place and were afraid they’d say the wrong thing. Once when we’d gone out there, Tom had tried to give them a small painting. Kevin said stiffly, “Well Tommy, this is really an honor.” He’d called to Grace to come in from the kitchen and they’d had a little argument about where to hang it. Of course it would have to go in the living room, and they kept taking down pictures of flowers and Jesus and ducks flying over lakes and trying it out unhappily. At last Tom said, “Listen, this isn’t the right painting for you. I’ll do another one sometime that you’ll like better maybe.” “Oh, it’s very nice,” they said, but we could tell they were grateful to be let off the hook.

  When they finally saw where we lived, they were sort of shocked, though they did find things to admire like the marble fragment wall erected by Howard Stricker. Kevin walked around with Tom, looking carefully at everything; he had his little boy riding on his shoulders because Grace didn’t want him on the floor getting splinters. He kept asking worried, practical questions, like weren’t we too cold in the winter? Tom laughed and pointed out the loft bed. “Well, you see, all the heat rises up there.” He had a can of Coke in his hand, and it didn’t seem to bother him to pour his brother a glass of Scotch. He even showed everyone where my darkroom was going to be.

  My mother got on the warpath right away. “What do you need a darkroom for?” she asked me.

  I’d told her I’d been fooling around a little with photography; I wasn’t ready yet to tell her it was serious. “It just costs too much to have things developed,” I said.

  “Don’t you let her do it!” my mother appealed to Tom. “She’ll ruin her hands.”

  I said I didn’t care about my hands. I didn’t give a damn.

  “What if you get offered a movie role? It could happen.”

  “Ma!” I said. “It’s not to be discussed. Okay?”

  “Darkrooms are unhealthy,” she insisted. “I know about such things.”

  “Let’s all move to the table,” Tom said loudly, and started dishing out the olives and red peppers we’d brought home from Little Italy.

  My mother didn’t mention the darkroom again. Instead she started telling Kevin and Grace about my great career on Broadway. Grace couldn’t hear enough about it. She must have thought I was crazy not to have bragged to her about it before. My mother made it sound as if I’d practically been another Shirley Temple, as if I’d been too good for all the parts I never got, as if producers had come to her begging on their knees and she’d had to proudly turn them down. Sure, I said, the truth was, we’d had a great glamorous time of dragging around to a million offices and eating all our dinners in the Fifty-seventh Street Automat. But Kevin and Grace were under my mother’s spell. She even wanted to show them all the yellow, flaking clippings that had my name in them and invited them to her house for that purpose. From where they lived, she said, it would only take them twenty minutes to drive over. It was her last stand, but I didn’t see that. I only knew she was sucking all the air out of my life.

  I threw down my fork and said in a choked voice, in front of everyone, “Whatever I do, whatever I become, I’ll never be as great as I was when I was nine years old.” It was the way she’d made me feel for a long time, but I’d never been able to just come right out with it. It was as if even now, when I was twenty-seven, I still believed my mother would have no use for me if I couldn’t do all the great things she expected. When I was little, I actually used to fear that someday she’d lose interest in me, the way she seemed to have lost interest in my father.

  After I’d spoken, my mother’s eyes looked teary. I tried to make a joke, but it came out wrong. “Excuse me,” I said, getting up to go to the oven. “The star has to check on the lasagna.”

  Tom put his arm around my mother’s shoulders. “Your daughter’s great with the camera. She’s a natural. So I want her to have her own little setup here.”

  A natural. The moment he said it, that word cut through everything. He could have been saying it for her benefit, but he never told lies about people’s work.

  He kept his arm around her. “I’ll make her wear gloves, Mrs. Gold,” he said.

  My mother went home that night before dessert. She said she had heartburn. She said it was from the spices in the lasagna, but no one gets heartburn from Oregano. I didn’t hear from her for a couple of weeks. “Call her up,” Tom said, but I didn’t, I couldn’t.

  Grace phoned to invite us to their house for dinner. “How’s your mother?” she asked.

  I said we’d been out of contact for a while. Suddenly I felt awful, as if we’d be out of contact forever, both of us stubbornly not calling.

  Grace said my mother seemed the kind of determined person who’d never take no for an answer. “Does her birthday happen to fall in January or February?” she asked me.

  “January twenty-eighth,” I said.

  “That’s what I thought.” Grace sounded very pleased. She told me that every morning, right after she did the breakfast dishes, she looked at the astrology column in the Daily News and did horoscopes for herself and Kevin. “I really like to keep an eye on the future.”

  “Not me,” I said. “I don’t want to know.”

  “You’d rather have everything just come at you?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose so.”

  “Tell me your birthday anyway,” Grace said. “Just for fun.”

  But I wouldn’t, even though I didn’t want to seem unfriendly. “Oh Grace,” I said. “We don’t believe in all that.”

  I proved I was less stubborn than my mother because I was the one who finally called. I expected reproaches, but I didn’t get them. Instead she asked how my darkroom was coming along. That was an extraordinary concession on her part—to speak of it as something real, something that would be built and come into use and existence. She’d always acted as if other people’s needs were unfathomable, out of control.

  There was a tiredness in her voice that day, and I asked her why. She told me she’d been reorganizing the house, making a clean sweep of everything she didn’t need, giving away my father’s clothes and all the old leather suitcases with his initials on them. “They’re not even lightweight, like the ones they make now. I wouldn’t want to be hauling one through an airport.”

  “You planning to fly somewhere, Ma?” I asked her. And she said, “Well, I might. I’m going to be sixty and I’ve never been anywhere to speak of.”

  “You could have gone years ago,” I pointed out.

  “I was worried sick about you… . How could I leave the country?”

  “Nothing was going to happen to me, Ma.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I’m not so sure.”

  “But now everything’s fine,” I told her. It was only a little lie. There are certain old habits you can’t ever break.

  My father had been another nontraveler. My mother used to complain bitterly about his luggage collection. She couldn’t figure out what it was for, since she could never get him to take a vacati
on with her. He had a predilection for leather goods—expensive wallets, cigarette cases. He’d just buy suitcases that appealed to him and put them in the backs of closets. Right after he died, I’d helped my mother put his suits in a couple of them. “Where did your father think he was going?” she’d asked me.

  He’d packed one suitcase himself. My mother found it soon after we talked on the phone when she was going through stuff in the attic. She called me because she wanted me to come out with Tom to pick it up. “This is going to interest you very much, Joanna,” she said. It was full of my father’s prints, packed between layers of cardboard—the photos he used to take for his own pleasure, the ones my mother once told him were so ugly. Perhaps she’d always felt guilty about that, because she said she couldn’t bring herself to go through them; she was leaving that to me. It would be a very nice idea to send the best ones out to photography magazines. “After all, your father subscribed to them for years.”

  When Tom heard about my father’s prints turning up, he said, “Listen kiddo, maybe you’re going to be disappointed.”

  “Maybe I won’t be,” I said. I was convinced I was going to discover something extremely important, something that would tell me who my father really had been—not just the quiet, worn-out man who always had to be in his store, finishing his dinner long before I finished mine, then slipping away again, giving me a quick kiss on the forehead if I ran after him, a whiff of his smoker’s breath.

  The night we brought the suitcase home in the subway, I opened it in Tom’s studio and stayed up for hours looking at all the prints. Before I showed them to Tom, I wanted to be sure how I felt about them myself.

  My father had been an orderly man, always very methodical. Once when a woman came to the store to see if she could get a copy of an old wedding picture, I heard him tell her he’d never misplaced a negative. It was like him to have packed very carefully, so that dust wouldn’t get on any of his work. He must have counted on the suitcase being found one day, imagined someone pulling those photos out from all those layers of cardboard, finally appreciating his art.