Jacket Weather, page 13
JUNE: That’s my least favorite nut!
JANE: And a layer of ground filbert.
JUNE: You are the most annoying person.
MIKE: A nice Entenmann’s.
JANE: With a cinnamon swirl.
JUNE: Stop speaking.
JANE: Y’know, when I was growing up—and I won’t tell you what era that was—there was not one Jew, anywhere, who didn’t mention a coffee ring at least once at some point during the day. Not one. You never went a day without picking up a coffee ring or saying “Pick me up a coffee ring.” And it was always delicious.
•
When Lou and Bernard are finished with the crossword—standing, Bernard with a length of dental floss hanging out of his mouth—Lou comes to the mirror near me to put on his sunblock.
“Lou, I made the best dinner last night. And it was so easy.”
“What’d you do?”
“I softened garlic in oil with a little red pepper. I opened a can of beans.”
“The cec’?”
“I used great northern. Tore up a head of escarole. Oregano, a little lemon. And I tossed it with pasta. I used the ditali you gave me.”
“Did the beans go inside?” he wants to know. He pokes a finger.
“No, the ditali’s too small.”
“Oh, if you use the lentils they go inside.”
“Tonight I’ll make lentils.”
“Le lenticchie!” he cries.
“I make ’em with broken-up linguine. More like a soup.”
“In brodo. You can make it two ways,” he says, moving in. “In brodo—wet, loose.” He demonstrates, rolling his shoulders. With a towel around his neck, like my cornerman. “More like a soup. Or—” He closes up, goes into a crouch. “Asciutta—dry, tight. You tighten it up.”
I slam my locker and snap the lock.
“Tighten it up,” he’s saying. “Tighten it up.”
•
Three mornings in a row I played Goats Head Soup. On the third, June said “Are you on shuffle or you’re listening to a record?”
“This is Goats Head Soup. Why?”
“This was my only—I played this record over and over. As soon as I got home from school, I’d go in my room and blast this record until my father got home. Because that was the only time I could do it. The whole house would shake. I got home at three thirty, and I had until five thirty.”
“You had a record player in your room?”
“Yeah. I had my room, and I was very self-contained. The only time I had to go out of there was to the bathroom.”
“But this couldn’t have been your only record.”
“When did they put it out?”
“Seventy-three.”
“What did they make, one record every year?”
“Yeah.”
“It was probably the only Rolling Stones record I had. No. Because I had the Majestic—” She tipped an imaginary lenticular jacket back and forth. “But that one was more trippy or something, this is the one I played over and over. And I used to dance around my room singing ‘Fuck a star, fuck a star!’ It was very exciting.”
•
A white ’65 T-bird swung out in front of me in traffic. And knowing its name reminded me that some of the pleasure of being alive is in knowledge and memory and the reassurance that your consciousness is a continuum, and therefore so are you.
•
a sudden thrill of wind
•
We were walking along Gramercy Park. On the southeast corner there’s a dark brick fortress, the kind of place where, before I met June, I used to fantasize I’d wind up rich, friendless, and safe from time.
Later I look it up online. Apartment 8AR is for sale. It’s $3.5 million.
“The listing says James Cagney lived in the building. And Margaret Hamilton, the Wicked Witch. Maintenance is six grand a month.”
“Forget it,” June says. “We can’t even afford the maintenance, let alone the apartment.”
“Three bedrooms, two baths.”
“It’s perfect,” she says. “Jeff could come and stay—”
Twice a year my friend Jeff came to visit from California and I gave him my place in Brooklyn.
“Jeff would have to live with us. And pay half the maintenance. And come up with the three million.”
•
The darkness breathes traffic.
•
I was looking at a Google map of the world. June brought me a coffee.
“Maybe we should go to Svalbard,” I said.
“I would go there.”
“Do you know where it is?”
“No.”
This is one of her signal qualities: she’s game. She’s in. I clicked minus minus minus and the place receded into the pale blue of the Barents Sea and then the Arctic Ocean.
“Is there a place I could name that you wouldn’t want to go?”
“Florida,” she said.
•
I go to sleep now and wake up with dread.
•
While the sky emptied and the city settled into night, I waited on the traffic island at Seventh Avenue and Christopher. By the newsstand. I texted her what side of the street I was on. And pictured her coming up the subway stairs and marching straight in the wrong direction. That’s June: walk like you know right where you’re going. Even when you don’t. I was there half an hour while time flowed around me. Guy with headphones walked by eating a taco from a wrapper, reading a book. Presently, I was able to hear through to the city’s quiet. Just the thump of the taxis on Seventh Avenue like wind. The living silence of a meadow at night. I waited so long I felt as if I owned that triangle. A newsstand, a mailbox to lean on. Village Cigars, white on red.
•
the blinking red/blue faces of people at café tables as a fire truck goes by
•
Thursday midnight L platform. A rat goes momentarily along the wall, the color of the track bed, which seems to be one oil-soot substance like the black compressed fallout of time. She’s got a thing about rats. Last night on Marcy Avenue one ran across our path and she said “Oh, that’s boring,” and veered away. Greasy white tiles, water dripping. When I dropped her off at Jane’s she said “Don’t talk to anyone.” Darkness down the tunnel. I feel a little drunk with her swimming in my eyes, buzzing in my ears.
•
Out the window, empty morning: a pop-up neighborhood on a grey background.
In here, a vase of red roses, breadcrumbs on a red tablecloth from our dinner last night. The sight of your A-shirt puts an ache in me. A pen you left behind.
•
I get an email there’s something at the desk. Turns out it’s a shopping bag with five pounds of pasta from Lou. Rigatoni, ziti, penne, butterflies, mezzi gomiti. Imported, nice stuff. Next day I see him on the track.
“What’s doin’?” he says. He drops the Post on his stack and we go around.
“Thank you for the pasta. I’ve got it piled on the counter, like treasure.”
He says “When you cook that pasta—I don’t know how much you make, but say you normally make twenty rigatoni.”
“I usually figure a quarter pound each person.”
“I never weigh it, but okay. You’re making a quarter pound of rigatoni: you make half of that, and you throw in the same amount of ziti or penne. Throw ’em in together, don’t worry about what it says on the bag. Throw ’em in together, don’t worry, they’ll get done.”
“Okay.” There’s no way I’m doing this.
“When it’s in the water—because it’s boiling violently!—somehow, the ziti goes inside the rigatoni, some of it. It goes inside there. This way, you get two. It’s chewy! Two pastas at once, with the sauce in there. Delicious!”
•
She was putting away the dishes and she came out of the kitchen in a white cotton shift, looking like an Italian movie star.
•
THE JUNE AND JANE SHOW
In a crosstown taxi . . .
JUNE: I’m gonna hit you.
JANE: I’m gonna—you’re not even gonna see me comin’, I’ll be so—
JUNE: Vicious. Short, and vicious.
•
Today I had my iPod on my desk at work because I had it from the gym. The women I work with clustered around. They had some laughs about it while I worked.
“Becca thought it was a medical device!” I tell June. “Little do they know I’ve also got a thousand CDs and a shelf of records. And a big box of cassettes. TDK C90s, some of them with handwritten cards. In blue Bic, over bumpy dried correction fluid. Some of them faded from being in the car.”
June says “I don’t know when the world changed.”
“Because it happens gradually. Step by step, you go from the inside to the outside. Life is a process of being gently shown the door.”
•
Go to the gym every day and you wind up with a web of tacit relationships: people you like at a distance but never talk to. People you feel are simpatico for some reason. The bony old man who, in his watchful nonjudgment, reminded me of my father and always looked at me with a twinkle of recognition. We nodded to each other every morning until one day I noticed he hadn’t been there in a while, and he never was again. A tall woman with a ponytail who’s quit coloring her hair. Sam and Deborah, who live at the Vermeer, and whose evident rightness as a couple draws you toward them. A brawny woman with a different kind of attention on her face, looks like a nun who slipped out of her habit to work out with the dumbbells every morning. Willie, a beanpole in his eighties, who comes from a shelter uptown and spends his day here doing yoga and stretching. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard him utter anything but an encouraging word. Father Joe—95 if he’s a day—he landed at Normandy!—wiry, bandy-legged, smiling—with long white hair and that true Catholic homing instinct that sees the best in people and seems aware of but unaffected by the ugliness in the world. He’s almost beyond gender he’s so pure. It’s a pleasure to see him in the morning. Seeing him shifts you, like music.
And of course there are people you dislike with never a word exchanged between you. But the worst aren’t the ones you’d expect. It’s not the guy in a permanent rage because four years ago someone got to a machine before him, and who sprays and wipes everything down before using it, including his own basketball, which he carries in a duffel bag. (People here fall into two categories: those who wipe down the machines after using them and those who wipe them down before.) It’s not the freak who wants to know if you’re a Jew and compulsively jams the trash barrel up against your locker, even while you’re there, and with whom you’ve twice come right up to blows.
No, the ones who really get to you are the ones who remind you of yourself. It’s a schmuck like Skeezix, who spends his nights at theater and the movies and hustles in here every morning to disgorge his impressions and opinions on everyone. Toddles into the cardio room with an armload of newspapers and a jumbo water bottle and leans on the back of some woman’s bike, giving her the benefit of his insights, like a high school English teacher, and relieving his back of the weight of his belly. She cuts her workout short, he moves to another woman. When that one splits, he lugs himself after David Rothenberg, on the track. He goes all around the place interfering with people’s workouts. A predatory bore. Gets on a recumbent bike, opens the Times like a map, and spends the next half hour listing toward his neighbor, informing him and forgetting to pedal. And he’s one of those guys has to get up close to make a point. He’s educating Angel, the locker room attendant, leaning over the towels. He’s got a guy pinned down at the sinks, dissecting a musical made in 1958. Follows Tim into the shower reciting baseball stats. He’s talking through a toilet door.
He’s probably driven his wife insane. I’m sure this is how June sees me. Just today she’s trying to shave her legs and I’m in there recounting one of my frequent revelations about some song recorded fifty years ago, talking to her through the steam. She doesn’t seem to be listening.
I ask her: “Am I getting on your nerves?”
She says “You’re very chatty this morning.”
Today he’s on a StairMaster, Skeezix, with the paper. Just reading the Arts section up there, not moving. A girl steps off a machine, sees a friend. So they’re catching up. Interrupting his reading. Skeezix is craning around so they’ll know his displeasure. He’s pissed they haven’t given him a chance to weigh in. Finally he speaks up—tells them to take it someplace else. They move away. And now he’s bitching about them—across two people on stair machines—to a woman at the end of the row. I can hear him through my headphones.
•
I walk into Wu Liang Ye after work on a rainy Thursday night and there she is down the room, smiling at me, showing not a trace of the long workday. Waving. Me, I work an extra half hour I act like I’m coming off a 36-hour shift in an army field hospital. She left the house at seven this morning and there she is—lit up—at a two-top, out of the rain.
I kiss her and sit down, she says “You are so. Smart. To think of coming here. You’re the smartest man I know.”
•
Saturday afternoon, reading on the bed. My attention wanders from the page to the window outside ours, the water-tower skylines superimposed in rising ranks—dozens of water towers, and all the intricacies of a cityscape lit by the sun: facades, arched windows, cornices, cranes, scaffolding—row on row of these in the placid light, every detail registered on the glass plate. A world without mass, without time, without sound, dreaming itself all day in the glass. With a frame around it. One puff of rising steam.
•
On an overcast Sunday morning she went down on me and coaxed it all out of me, every thought in my head, all of the past. Left me staring at the ceiling, blank.
•
Yesterday I had one of those mornings your pants are too long and your hair’s not right and you hate your shirt and you look like an old balding eunuch in the train window, just completely off your step, and I get to the gym I keep dropping things and my headphones get snagged and yanked halfway off my head until I’m in a fury. And then I realize: thirty days since I had a cigarette. The last three times I tried to quit I went a month and then lit up under stress. So that’s what this is about. Fear of commitment. Trying to get myself wound up so I light a cigarette. Because if I cross the one-month threshold, I have no excuses.
If you can get through not smoking without smoking, what excuse do you have?
Anyway, nothing to see here. Let’s keep it moving.
•
I miss you tonight, after the rain, near midnight, and truck-booms and traffic-wash from the BQE, and a chill from under the window, and October, and you recent to this bed.
•
We’re walking to buy groceries when I’m stopped by some ginkgos on 13th. Leaves utterly yellow, sky utter blue. It stops me inside. And that effect reminds me it’s me in there, and not some impostor. At the same time, this sight goes so deep, so far back, that am I even me anymore, at that point? June’s half a block away before she notices I’m not there. I’m still here, staring up at the leaves and sky. Every year, I run up against this and my inability to describe it. This juxtaposition—yellow on blue—is one of the absolutes, where words run out. Beyond meaning. There are others in other seasons. In autumn, it’s this.
•
DAY ON CORSA & CO
IMPORT RS
TEAS AND COFFEES
•
Clear cold October morning we’re reading in bed when I remember Lou’s magazines. Pull on some clothes and make it downstairs with his People and Entertainment Weekly, plus Coastal Living, with holiday decorating tips, and Food & Wine. A maintenance guy is hosing off the sidewalk. Here comes Lou with his plastic handle bag. “You didn’t have to make a special trip!” he scolds. Reaches in the bag, pushing aside gym shoes, coupons, newspapers—“This is for June”—frees up a bottle in a bag from a hardware store. A Montepulciano.
“Oh. Very nice.”
“I also got a bottle of Sangiovese. Very good. It’s the number-one grape in Itly. The blood of Jove. It’s the oldest grape. Goes back to the Romans, this grape.”
“This one’s enough, Lou. She’ll like this.”
“Does she like red wine?”
“She likes this one.”
“She drinks white wine? What does she like?”
“No, no, this is good.”
“Pinot grigio?”
“Please. I don’t want you to buy it.”
“Nah, nah, I just like to know what people like.”
“She likes Sancerre.”
“Oh, dry, crispy. Like a cheaper Meursault.”
I wonder if he can smell pussy on my face and move myself downwind. We stand outside the building talking about the prices of things and what we’ve eaten this week.
“I went to Joe’s,” I tell him. “Joe’s of Avenue U, in Gravesend. Anyway, I thought of you: they had vastedda on the menu.”
“They still got the vastedda? What else they got?”
“Well, they’ve got that pasta with sardines—”
“Oh, with the finocch’—”
“That’s right, and raisins—”
“And the pignole. That’s a Sicilian dish.”
“Right. It’s a Sicilian place.”
Jim comes across the street. I’ve met him, he runs numbers out of the Donut Pub, but Lou reintroduces me as a top guy, one who never wears a hat, even in the coldest weather. Lou’s wearing a watch cap and Jim’s got a tweed newsboy. Jim says “What about Aldo? He never wears a hat.” And they start telling me about Aldo, who likes to walk.
“Remember he walked to Coney Island?”
“He walked to Yonkers one time!” Lou said.
“I was on a bus on Eighty-Sixth Street, I looked out and there he was! Though that’s nothing for Aldo.”
“Aright, let me go,” Lou said. He had to get on with his errands.
•
Rain here all day. Wet leaves on parked cars and in the gutter, leaf stains on the sidewalk. Cooking soup.
•
And every night the sirens. What more do you need to know?
Standing on the corner of 34th and Lex, after Samuelson, waiting to cross. Grey November, a nothing day. One of those motionless days outside of time. A few years ago June got me started with these doctor visits. Before that I never in my life went to a physical that wasn’t for a job. In the first three months she got me set up with a GP, a dentist, an eye doctor, and a Park Avenue dermatologist who went over me with a wand. At some point you go from watching for danger from outside to expecting it from within. Samuelson dismissed me with an all-clear. Few years ago, that wouldn’t have been a big deal. But crossing Lexington, I’m thinking More time with June.
