In the Night Café

by Joyce Johnson

  I laid the prints out on the floor all around me on sheets of newspaper, respecting my father’s fear of dust. My mother had been wrong—they weren’t ugly. They just weren’t photographs anyone who hadn’t known my father would have cared about. I think I knew that very quickly, even though I didn’t want to. I looked at each one for a long time, searching for what wasn’t there, as if my father, in his self-effacing way, had known what he was doing in obscuring the magic I was trying to find. But the photos were no more than they seemed to be at first glance; they could have been done by anyone with a good technical mastery of the camera.

  My father had tried out artistically posed portraits, still lifes of flowers and bowls of fruit, all the usual subjects. There were even many studies of a nude—I was thankful my mother hadn’t seen those. She had long, rather thin black hair and small breasts with very sharply pointed nipples, a Spanish-looking face. This woman never looked happy, just sort of sour and depressed, uncomfortable about the whole business. Her bed had an old scratched-up metal headboard and the spread she usually lay on had bouquets of ostrich plumes printed on it. Sometimes it was pulled to one side and rumpled, as if her lover had gotten up moments before and left her lying there. Once the woman had a small, dark child in her arms who never appeared again. Then she seemed to put on weight and look older, and the ostrich bedspread was replaced by one with a flamingo-and-palm-tree pattern.

  My father seemed never to have visited this woman at night. There was a window next to the bed, covered with lace curtains, and a filtered afternoon, courtyard light came in, like the light of a particular kind of sadness, the illumination of a lack of joy. Often a lamp beside the bed had been turned on as well, but that was always a mistake. If my father had waited for the light from the window to fall across the woman exactly the right way, he might have had one perfect picture that made up for all the others. Maybe the woman would grow impatient and complain that she was cold, or it would get late and he’d have to hurry back to the store from his “walk.” Or maybe he just never saw what the light could have done.

  I had the feeling I shouldn’t be having thoughts of that sort—part of me in despair over my father’s stunted life, the other part of me thinking he should have gotten the light right, angry with him. I looked up and saw the empty stretchers that now stood in a corner of the studio, all that was left of Tom’s summer of work. My father had never been able to say, “All these shots are going to end up on the floor.”

  20

  IT WAS THE beginning of November, still that quiet time, those strange days that were too warm. We used to wake up early the way we did in the summer, always surprised how dark it was. “We’ve still got an hour to make love,” Tom would whisper. We heard noises on the stairs one of those mornings; at first we thought some bums had spent the night in our building. Tom always chased them out because we were afraid of fire, but the worst they ever did was leave their smell behind or some empty bottles we’d have to throw away. Tom put on his jeans and went to our door to take a look. When he opened it, he found the housing inspector sitting on a step on our landing drinking coffee out of a container. The man had actually been waiting for one of us to come out. He seemed delighted with his cleverness.

  “Gotcha! And you said you didn’t live here. Where’s the wife? She in there, too?”

  I was still in bed. I heard voices, then our door slammed. I climbed down and ran over there. “Tom!” Then a crash on the landing made all our dishes rattle. “Tom!”

  “Stay inside, kiddo!”

  Later Tom told me he’d knocked the coffee out of the inspector’s hands. When the man charged at him, he’d let him have it really hard.

  I could hear them scuffling, banging against the banisters, all the way down the stairs. “Don’t ever come back here!” Tom was yelling. I still thought he must be fighting with a bum, a crazy one. I rushed to the front windows. When they came out, I saw that his opponent was someone wearing respectable clothes, a bald, heavyset man in a tan raincoat. Now the bald man and Tom were circling each other in the middle of the street. A driver stopped his car and blew his horn at them. All of a sudden, Tom broke forward, his fists moving very fast, and the bald man wobbled and sank, looking almost foolish, as if a chair had collapsed under him. I saw blood on his chin and on the collar of his tan coat. Tom was holding him down, shouting into his face.

  “I know who you are! I can find you. You give me any trouble, and you’re dead.”

  I was more frightened by those words than by anything else that had happened. I still hadn’t figured out what the stranger had to do with us.

  When Tom let him go, the bald man got on all fours; it took him a few tries before he was able to stand. Then he ran up the street in sort of a zigzag pattern and disappeared around the corner­.

  The whole thing had happened in minutes. For a while I was sure the police would be showing up. I even thought I could hear their sirens in the distance. But Tom was laughing when he came upstairs. “Well, you finally got to see the great inspector.” His left hand was bleeding, but he wouldn’t let me take care of it. He walked up and down, sucking the blood off his knuckles.

  “You saw all that, didn’t you? The moves? See, I never forgot the old moves. He knew I was ready, that son of a bitch. Either I was going to get rid of him or one of us was going to die. I tell you, I was ready either way.”

  “To die?” I cried. “What are you talking about? What are you saying?”

  You couldn’t understand why I wasn’t just excited about your victory the way you were. “Why do you have such a round, long face?” you teased me.

  “What if something had happened to you?”

  “Everything’s happened to me already, kiddo.” And you told me to get dressed and go to work and not to worry. “It’s only another Monday.”

  I remember how it felt, going to the office that day—those orderly cubicles, those low, polite voices murmuring into phones. There was going to be a shower for the receptionist, and a big flowered greeting card came around. Everyone had to sign it and contribute three dollars and a witty remark. A couple of people had even written rhymed couplets. I sat with the card in front of me and couldn’t think of a thing, so I just wrote, “Best wishes, Joanna.” Whenever my mind drifted away from my typing, those two figures in the street started circling each other.

  That evening, when I got off the bus at Grand Street, I was almost afraid to walk down our block. I had the feeling I’d find our whole building gone, just an empty lot between the garage and the Italian butcher shop.

  But the moment I was on Chrystie, I saw our front windows all lit up. It was the first time in a couple of months. You’d turned on the big fluorescents, the ones you only used when you were working. I could even hear music as I ran up the stairs, a Lightning Hopkins record Billy had given us that spring. You were crazy about a song called “Last Night Blues.” For weeks you’d listened to it over and over, moving the needle back to the right groove. The last bars were playing as I came in and a wall was covered with an enormous piece of canvas. You’d nearly finished slapping gesso on it. All that white seemed to glow. It looked beautiful to me just the way it was.

  I remember a thought that came at me out of nowhere. That if the inspector hadn’t come, the lights wouldn’t have been on, there wouldn’t have been any canvas stretched across the wall. That maybe when you painted, it was like saying, “Either I was going to get rid of him or one of us was going to die”—somehow it was the same kind of feeling.

  But I didn’t want to know that about you. It made me think there was nothing to hope for—nothing but a life of furious, burning moments.

  You came over to me and kissed me, holding the wet brush at arm’s length away from us. “Last painting blues,” you said.

  You kept telling me we’d heard the last of the inspector. I didn’t let on I was trying to prepare myself for losing our place—it was
a fear I couldn’t get rid of, that somehow our days there were numbered. Numbered days. I thought I knew how it would happen. A letter would come from the housing department, with some kind of form to fill out, and all the information we’d give them would go against us. Whatever would be done to us would be done by some typist we’d never even see. I always expected to find the letter when I went down to get the mail.

  I was taking notice of FOR RENT signs again. There was a new one on a loft building on Rivington Street. Riding uptown behind you on the bike, I said, “Look at that. Maybe we could live there.” The words just slipped out. You didn’t say anything to me till we got off the bike in front of the Cedar. I was going to walk inside, but you laid your hand on the back of my neck and stopped me. “Wherever we go, we’ll always be together.” That was all you said. I never met another man who said “always.”

  When the job Billy promised you came through, you took your whole first check and spent it on lumber. “You’re looking at your darkroom,” you told me. You were going to start building it once the pace slowed down, maybe after Thanksgiving. And you measured it off on the floor, drawing lines with blue chalk, so I’d get some idea of how much space I was going to have. The blue lines were still there the day I started putting things in boxes and the landlord came by and told me that even if I’d wanted to keep the place, it would have been impossible. He showed me the notice from the housing department that you’d never have to see, and I was glad that at least you’d died believing that you’d won.

  You’d even become sort of famous for a while around the neighborhood. A lot of people had looked out their windows that morning the inspector came. “That was some fight you had,” strangers would say, stopping you on the street. “Hey killer,” said the men in the garage.

  For about a week that month, I thought I was pregnant. I kept looking for the red stain that wouldn’t show itself, trying to remember how or when we had been careless, which night or morning the accident could have happened for which we were now going to pay the price. This baby made no sense at all, but I wanted it. That was the most dangerous part, the part that made the baby real. What if wanting had that much power?

  I knew of course exactly what would have to be done, where I could find the old doctor in Reading, Pennsylvania, who’d probably raised his prices if he was still in practice. I’d gone to him once when I lived with Arnie. I’d tried to see it as a test of courage, a trip a woman like me would have to make sooner or later. I was twenty-two. I couldn’t think of another choice. I still remember the bus ride back over the Jersey marshes, staring at the miles of flatness, the thick reeds standing in the rank water, the feeling of returning emptied—emptied and freed—bewildered by the way one state seemed to contradict the other.

  I’d told Tom about it once. He said he’d never let me go through that again. “We’d just have the kid,” he said.

  I’d begun to think that was the only way it would ever happen­. It had to be left up to chance, like gambling, while we raised the odds against it, warded it off. It would be the thing that would save us or the last straw. I guess I believed it would be the last straw.

  Tom asked me that week why I seemed a little down. I said I was depressed and didn’t know why.

  “Maybe you’re just getting your period,” he said.

  He took me to Chinatown to cheer me up. Now that he was making some money again, he wanted me to have a break from cooking. The job he and Billy were on was going to last a month, maybe it would even stretch longer. He was proud of how many nails he’d hammered that day—three hundred and fourteen.

  I thought of having the baby and how Tom would feel if he had to hammer nails and saw wood all the time in order to support it.

  He kept having the waiter bring us different dishes and asking me why I was eating so little. That was the night he told me his work was about to go into a new phase. He’d been thinking about the old Japanese scroll painters, how they’d sometimes increased the size of their strokes by tying bunches of sumi brushes together. He was going to find a way to do the same thing, but on a much larger scale. Didn’t I see how everything would become more crucial? You’d know with the very first moves whether a painting was going to make it. He was going to start experimenting with sketches, using housepainter’s brushes on small sheets of paper—but even huge canvases could be just as free. “No brush is big enough for what I want to do next.” he said.

  I left the table while he was paying the check. I went into the ladies’ room and looked again for the red stain that would tell me we could go on just as we were.

  It wasn’t till the next day that I discovered my body had been playing a trick on me. I’d only been pregnant with a mistaken idea. I remember thinking, Well, that was my last chance—and getting disgusted with myself for being so melodramatic.

  When Lee Harvey Oswald shot President Kennedy, you said the president was just like the bird we’d seen on Grand Street, the one that flew straight into the wire.

  Like everyone else in America, we lost a week to television. We didn’t even go uptown to the Cedar at night. Nothing could tear you away from the black-and-white pictures on the screen. You couldn’t shake the thought that any little detail could have deflected the president’s death. You even related it to the new sketches you’d tacked up all over the studio. Small things could become enormous. If the sun hadn’t been shining in Dallas, if the president hadn’t been the kind of man who felt invulnerable, if he hadn’t decided to ride in a convertible that day …

  Finally, there was the funeral. You were holding my hand when the three-year-old boy in the coat with the velvet collar saluted his dead father. You stood up suddenly and turned off the set.

  Kevin called only a couple of days later, right around dinnertime. I ran up the last flight of stairs because I could hear the phone ringing and ringing in the studio. When I picked it up, Kevin didn’t say hello, just “Can you get Tommy? Where’s Tommy? I’ve been trying him all day.” Kevin always called him Tommy, as if the two of them were still little kids. When I told him Tom still had the carpentry job, he said, “Oh Christ, I forgot.” He sounded awful. “Kevin, is everything okay?” I remember being scared he’d tell me something had happened to his kid.

  “To tell you the truth, things aren’t so great.” He paused and then, lowering his voice, said in a strange, embarrassed way, “I had to take my father to the hospital this morning.”

  The man who had locked Tom out on the roof was dying. That was what ran through my mind, those two things connected. But for Kevin’s sake, I said what you say when you hear that kind of news, that I was sorry.

  Kevin said the doctors had amputated his father’s right leg, but it had been no use. “He’s going fast. That’s the way it is. Something could happen any minute. Mother’s here with me. You’d better tell Tommy that.”

  He told me the best place for Tom to look for them was in the waiting room on the sixth floor of Polyclinic. He kept coughing, clearing his throat. “If Tommy doesn’t want to come, I’ll understand. But something like this—you know how it is… . Honest to God, I didn’t know who else to call.”

  Mother’s here with me. Those seemed the most unbelievable words. They brought her so close, made her seem like someone I knew. But what else could Kevin have called her?

  “You know, your mother’s up there with Kevin,” I told you when you came home from work. I asked you what you were going to do, dreading that you’d go. I wanted life to just leave us alone. That was the kind of person I was turning into.

  But you said right away, “Kevin can’t get through this by himself.”

  I knew all your stories about the two kids who’d had to share a fold-up cot in a tiny room in that basement in the Bronx. Sometimes, for no good reason, Frank would come in and turn on the lights. He’d drag the older one out of bed and start beating him with his belt and his fists. The little brother had learned fr
om the older one not to cry; instead he’d pee and completely soak the mattress. There were times the older kid would get punished for that, too, in the mornings.

  “See, Kevin was always too tenderhearted,” you said once. “I could never get him trained.”

  As for you, you believed you had a rock in your heart where forgiveness should have been. Maybe it was a birth defect, you used to say, something you’d inherited from Marie. Or maybe you were cursed with having too good a memory. “It’s the guys who remember everything who have to drink. That’s why you always hear the best stories in bars.”

  At one A.M., when you called me from a pay phone, Frank was still alive. “I saw the old man. I saw Frank. They’ve got plastic all around him like meat in the supermarket. He didn’t even know I was there. Lucky for him.”

  I could hear a jukebox. It was the very end of November, and someone was already playing “White Christmas.” You said you’d made Kevin come with you to an Irish bar on Eighth Avenue. Kevin needed a few drinks, needed something. “It isn’t the death that’s getting to him. It’s that no one’s dying, no one you could have called a person.”

  I kept expecting you to say something about Marie, but you didn’t. Finally I couldn’t help asking, “Did you see her?”

  For a few seconds all I heard was more of “White Christmas.” I guess you were deciding you’d better make a joke of it. “Sure, for about five minutes. It was some reunion—hearts and flowers. A very moving experience.”

  “Tom,” I said. “Was it bad?”

  “Go to sleep, kiddo. Don’t wait up.”

  It was dawn when I heard your key in the door; then you stumbled against something out in the studio. You were carrying a big paper bag that you threw all the way across the room before you hoisted yourself up on the bed. You sank down next to me, and after that, you didn’t move, didn’t even try to take off your coat. I could feel the cold on the hard corduroy, on your face. The only thing you’d tell me was that after Frank had died, you and Kevin had taken a cab up to the Bronx and spent a fortune driving around the old neighborhood. I got you out of the coat, pulled blankets over you. You kept shuddering in my arms even after you fell asleep. Once you woke up and said, “Don’t go anywhere.”