Jacket Weather, page 15
She was breathing more heavily now.
“Joe’s of Avenue U, Gravesend, and L and B Spumoni Garden around the corner. New Corner, in Dyker Heights; Il Colosseo and La Palina, in Bensonhurst. Gargiulo’s, in Coney Island.”
She was fast asleep.
“In Queens,” I went on, idiotically, “there’s Manducatis, in Long Island City, and Piccola Venezia, in Astoria. Park Side, in Corona; Lenny’s Clam Bar and Bruno, Howard Beach; Don Pepe, in Ozone Park . . .”
•
For Lou’s birthday, I take him a container of chickpea soup out of the freezer, made with fennel and tomato and orange peel. We get talking about food.
“Our house used to smell so bad,” he says. “My mother would fry cauliflower. Broccoli, smell up the whole house. Tripe, she made. Fish—forget about it.”
“I remember that fish smell from my grandmother’s place. Fish with garlic.”
“Never get rid of it.”
“No, because they lived upstairs in these airless—”
“Tenements, yeah. Or the sauce, on Sundays. On Sundays, every floor smelled different.”
“I made braciole last week. That takes you back, the smell of that in the sauce.”
“I used to like the rigatoni—with meatballs.”
This gets us started on different approaches to the meatball. Two kinds of meat? Three? Or just beef. Ninety percent lean, or eighty/twenty? He holds the door for me as we go out in the cold, zips his hoodie, throws his scarf behind.
“Some people put raisins. And pignole.”
“That must be Sicilian.”
“Yeah. But I had it at a wiseguy’s place in Queens—Punchy Illiano, part of the Gallo crew—he made it for me: delicious! I said ‘How come you’re making this? You’re Napoletan.’ He said ‘I had them over a Sicilian’s house and I liked ’em.’ So he started making ’em like that himself.”
•
The grey street-level air of a November afternoon. That grey of impending snow. The pavement seems to glow, and sounds are nearer. Somewhere a truck is backing up.
•
Saturday I walked over to my storage space. Manhattan Mini Storage, in a yellowbrick building takes up a whole block at the end of 17th Street, all the way west. Floor 10, aisle 7. Windowless quiet with the lights always on. A few of the aisles were taped off and there was a guy rolling a fresh coat of grey deck paint on the concrete floor. Big floor fan blowing to dry it.
Sign in the elevator:
Holiday
hours
We will close
at noon on
Thanksgiving day
and Christmas day,
and will re-open
the following
mornings at 7am.
•
She turned to look at 14th Street through the reflection in the bus window, slipped a hand in mine, gave it a squeeze.
•
THE JUNE AND JANE SHOW
We’re sitting in Elephant & Castle, where, amid the clatter of forks and dishes, Jane’s talking about a long-ago Thanksgiving dinner . . .
JANE: —Because June always has to know what’s going on. And you know how small my kitchen is.
MIKE: Yeah. One person at a time.
JANE: But she has to lift every lid, read all the ingredients, especially the tiniest print, to make sure there’s no—
JUNE: Michael that doesn’t happen. I was very young.
JANE: Uh-ha.
JUNE: I’ve evolved.
JANE: The expiration date, country of origin. She has to make sure you’re not adding something she doesn’t wanna eat. Always.
JUNE: Because she does.
JANE: No. Not on your plate.
JUNE: On everyone else’s but mine? She’d say to me “Don’t tell Sharon, but I did use butter. I didn’t use olive oil, I used butter.” So that’s why I was in her kitchen looking in her pots making sure she wasn’t sneaking any bacon—
JANE: I didn’t!
JUNE: Or giblets, or other organ meats.
JANE: The pupik, maybe.
MIKE: Where is the pupik again, exactly?
JANE: And a touch of ground lungs.
MIKE: What were you making?
JANE: Stuffing. And I was using things she decided she couldn’t eat at the time. ’Cause she’s a vegetarian? And I was using chicken soup. But she didn’t eat chicken soup, so I got vegetable broth and I made two pots of stuffing: one here and one there. She comes over and she starts to—wants to look at all the cans, in the garbage, and wrappers—“What’s going on?”—she likes to ask a million things, she likes to poke around, she likes to get a spoon—she likes to do everything.
JUNE: You’re exaggerating.
JANE: No, I’m not. All of a sudden, June is holding up this huge big bowl of stuffing—drops the whole thing upside down on the floor. “Oops!”
JUNE: [Laughter]
MIKE: And what’d you say?
JUNE: She told me to get the fuck out of her kitchen. “Get outa my house, get outa my kitchen!”
JANE: “Don’t come back. I’ll call you.”
JUNE: “You’re eating it.”
JANE: Annoying is not the word.
•
Still dark when I go down the subway stairs in Brooklyn. I come up at Sixth Avenue to a grey-on-grey morning with an edge to the atmosphere, the thought of snow on the air. Lou’s coming from the Y, I hand him five copies of Travel + Leisure in a brown paper bag, which he takes without breaking stride.
Behind me, someone says “What just happened?”
I do my workout. Before I go back down at Seventh, I stop at the top of the stairs to do the crosswords with Lenny. We talk about old movies and I give him a crime novel I’m done with.
“You going somewhere for Thanksgiving?” I ask him.
“I’ll probably take it easy,” he says. “Stay home and make some phone calls. I got a sister in New Jersey and a daughter down South. Then go to the Salvation Army. They serve Thanksgiving dinner in the afternoon. Beautiful dinner with turkey and all the fixings, very nice.”
This used to be Steve’s post, outside Duane Reade. We talked nearly every morning. One day Steve was gone, and a week later, Lenny was here.
•
It’s dawn at the end of East 4th Street, at the end of Houston, the end of Delancey. The Williamsburg Bridge affords a view of dawn over the boroughs. Beside us, a bouncing dump truck sounds like the world hit its head on the roof. There’s a cardboard pine tree swinging from the mirror, and LaGuardia’s the usual mess.
•
Three p.m., finishing the dishes after Thanksgiving dinner with my mother, then we’ll take a plate to my aunt at the nursing home. Back in New York, June’s making a pie to take over to Jane’s tonight. She sends an email: “I miss you so much that I am going to put on all your clothes and walk around the apartment, and maybe I’ll go downstairs to the Westside Market in them too.”
•
Four forty-five, very dark. I say her name, and within that syllable, the room just-perceptibly lightens. Yesterday was another rainy drive to Calvary. Goose tracks in the snow on my father’s grave. And now I’m staring out at the luggage carts. Transparent shadow of a water bottle in a sunsplash on a seat back. How do we stand it, the tragedy of time always slipping through our fingers? This anticipation, the time we’ll spend together this weekend—this is literally what we are, and we’re losing it by the second. And now we roll back, and the frozen puddles and the wet tire tracks go orange.
•
I was cutting garlic in the kitchen. “Deeper Shade of Soul” came on. I popped my head out to say something and June was dancing in her corner of the couch. I mean, it was minimal—she was giving it as little as she could. A seated Canarsie: the face of unconcern, hands overhead, keeping time. Bugalú—it’s irresistible, that beat. So then I started up with a kind of Egyptian shuffle, side to side, head in profile, elbows at angles, like a hieroglyph come to life on the wall of a tomb. She had her arms up, phone in one hand, pointing this way, then that, still not remotely bothered, and I was doing the Johnny Boy dance that Robert De Niro does at the end of Mean Streets: hands like twin pistols, side to side and up and back . . .
•
Lou’s reading the paper on the treadmill, I stop to say hi.
“What’s doing?” he says.
“I read an article this morning says that according to sixty studies, exercise is worthless for weight loss.”
“Nah, it does nothing,” he says. “I been on here an hour and a half. Whatever I burn, it’s a slice of pizza. One ice-cream cone. The only exercise that works is this—” and he pantomimes pushing himself back from a table.
I said “You know what I really miss about being young? It isn’t drinking or smoking or whatever, it’s doing what I want and not worrying about it. Like you’re gonna live forever. You get older and no matter what you do you see shadows in the corner.”
“That’s right. But your father went, right?”
“Yeah, he did.”
“So you’re gonna go too. Nothing you can do about it. You know what this guy told me once? Joe Beck, a bookmaker—he was half a gangster, bookie—he started drinking, wife threw him out, his daughter didn’t have nothing to do with him: all kinda problems. He had money, but nothing to live for. So he told me ‘I don’t care what happens to me, I’m ready. I’m ready to go.’ I said ‘What, you wanna die?’ He said ‘Hey, if it was good enough for Al Capone.’”
•
At dawn I’m walking through Tompkins Square Park. Sound of geese overhead like the sound of fucking on old bedsprings.
•
June and I went crunching through the crusted snow to the lake, late in the afternoon. Wet tracks—from people, deer, small animals—had exposed the grass underneath. We made our way through dry dead weeds. The lake was still. No breeze, nothing moving. I smelled the mud and wet snow and felt I’d let my most vital connection lapse, and for so long it could never be made right. Taken a wrong turn a long time ago. Living in the city, you forget you’re going to die. But I remembered that kind of afternoon—the white snow against the dark-grey sky—like I remembered my death. It rang a bell.
•
I was at the wheel, driving us across Pennsylvania, back to New York. She’d been asleep for an hour.
I slowed us onto an exit ramp and she opened her eyes.
She said “What else, Bunny?”
So foggy you can’t see the corner. But when you get there, there’s no fog there. It’s at the next corner. And behind you. It’s the illusion of density. Of substance. It’s the buildings uptown disappearing behind screens of snow that don’t exist at any point between here and there. It’s that one December, seen through layers of subsequent Decembers and backed by Decembers that came before it. On the ground, that December had no apparent mood or hue or characteristics, there was no thingness to it. Its qualities are apparent only from here, looking back.
When was there ever more than a moment’s perch in time?
•
One night after work, forty years ago, in Cleveland, I took the Rapid Transit train downtown, a Friday night in early December, that’s how I remember it, right after work, in the dark. For some reason, maybe by mistake, I took the train to 25th Street instead of downtown. I was going to the record store, Record Rendezvous, where Jimmy Jones presided, maybe it was payday, and after mentally paying all my bills and figuring and refiguring my budget for the next two weeks, maybe I had an extra twenty to blow. I could usually manage to buy a record or two every couple of weeks. Anyway, I got off the Rapid at this deserted station, this deserted platform across the river from downtown, and it was snowing. I was a little lost but not completely lost, because I could see the Terminal Tower across the river, through the falling snow. I was just lost enough. And since I had nowhere to be that night and didn’t have to work the next day, which opened my imagination or dropped my defenses against it, and since I was accountable to no one, I started walking toward downtown. I must have dared myself to do it—just walk there—and started walking down the hill toward the river. Not that it was a long walk or anything. It was a challenge to routine, to the idea that I had to get right home or explain myself to anyone or to myself. It was a challenge to established routes. And so I made my way downhill and then, in the dark among the weeds, I found an unused road along the river, and I followed it. The snow was falling in big flakes and ticking into the weeds, and through it I could still see the Terminal Tower. I was lost but not too lost, and because it was Friday and payday I was free, but just free enough to know it. I think of this as the time of Sandinista!, the Clash record, but it could have been a year later. I don’t remember what I bought at the record store, I don’t remember being there, I don’t remember downtown or by what bridge I crossed the river. What I remember is walking on a road that wasn’t quite a road, through tall dead weeds, with the Terminal Tower visible through the falling snow, in the early dark of a Friday in December, having what turns out to have been one of the happiest nights of my life.
•
“Yeah, Mike. This is Lou, I got your message. I’ll call you later. To figure out what to do. It’s no big deal. Y’know, there’s no rush. The only problem is tomorrow—I gotta leave the gym early. By eight, I gotta be out. Eight thirty, the latest. Eight fifteen, the latest, ’cause I gotta go to the fur market. Give this guy a hand. He called me, says ‘Lou, you come in, I need you for, y’know, just for the day.’ I’ll probably work about, who knows, ten hours, twelve hours. But he takes care of me pretty good. So, uh—anyway . . . I’ll call you later, we’ll figure it out—maybe you can leave them in the building, or whatever. Alright? But no pressure. And, ah—those cookies from Fortunato’s were delicious. The filled one I liked—What was that, a pasta ciotta. The one with the ricot’ inside’s delicious. Had it with coffee. Alright. —Even the biscotti: delicious. I thought they were there longer than that, 1976. Alright. Later. I’ll be in touch.”
•
I step out of the YMCA but the day outside is just a larger room. One of those days the sun never quite comes up, and it’s getting dark already at eight a.m. Down the end of 14th Street, bare branches have stained the white sky pink around the edges. It’s a card you mailed in childhood that dropped in your box today.
•
On the kitchen counter, I filled a big glass jar with a pound of ground Italian espresso roast from Porto Rico. I moved a half-pound bar of Irish butter from the freezer to the butter compartment. Also in the fridge, by way of staples, were a carton of eggs, a jar of grated Locatelli, and a Tupperware cylinder where I collected Parmesan rinds, which I used in soup. The freezer had a loaf of rye, half a loaf of raisin bread, and provisions diverted from dinners I’d made: beef borscht, chickpea soup, and sauce with braciole and sausage. In a blue ceramic bowl on the counter were a bulb and a half of garlic, and beside the sink bottles of vinegar and a liter of oil, nearly full. In the cabinet, there were open and unopened boxes of linguine, capellini, and farfalle. So we were pretty well fixed.
•
She’s away, and the bed feels like there’s no one in it, not even me. The Empire State Building stands there breathing cold white light in the fog like an organ not of sound but of light: dimming, disappearing . . . brightening to upthrust white light of the 1930s before dimming again . . . disappearing . . . until there’s only that diamond cat collar above the moving clouds.
•
On my way through the cardio room, I stop to see Lou. He’s on a stair machine, he’s been there an hour, reading the papers, climbing. He gives me some newspaper items he’s been saving for me. An obituary. A piece about a new health study that debunks an old one. A supermarket circular where he points out a couple of specials.
Philly’s on a rowing machine. I ask him how it’s going.
“I’m depressed,” he says. “Time of year. I’m getting old. I turned seventy the other day!”
“Yeah, it’s the holidays. Maybe the new year things turn around for you. Maybe you meet a girlfriend.”
“I had a girlfriend. She moved to Arizona.”
“I remember.”
“Broke my heart. That’s been five years now. I don’t think that’s gonna happen for me anymore.”
He takes a good pull.
Then he looks up and says “What’s gonna happen to me, Mikey? I got old.”
“Anything can happen anytime.”
“I used to think that.”
“Don’t give up hope. Because you know what the alternative is?”
“What’s that?”
“You start keeping an eye on the price of rib roast, like Lou. He just gave me an ad for Stew Leonard.”
“You’re right, pal.”
•
Waiting behind a dirty windshield on Kenmare Street. There’s red light caught in the grain of the road and in the steam rising from an exhaust pipe. Just waiting, in this heat of consciousness I call my life. Right now is where it hurts to miss you: the parts I know I won’t remember. This is where real life is: down in the folds of time’s fan. Then the steam turns green.
•
Lying awake in the dark . . . a nerve in the night . . . feeling that she and I are mortal and vulnerable and there’s not much standing between us and old age . . . a siren goes by . . . in that bath of night that isn’t really dark . . . where the room and what’s in it are a pointillation of grey and orange and lilac . . . and even the black windows in the wall outside are seen as if through snow . . . that familiar noncolor of night in every city, all your life . . . a “darkness” that doesn’t hide you. There’s no safety in the dark. There isn’t even much darkness in it.
•
Snowcapped water towers emerging in the blue hour. Caillebotte.
•
sirens gossiping down Seventh Avenue in the night
•
Today I was bitching to Lou about this guy Marvin, who started out with a padlock on one of the public lockers for weeks on end and who’s now got four lockers tied up with his dry cleaning and shampoos and ointments and ramen and depositions and accordion files and who knows what, running some kind of whizbang law practice out of the locker room. “It’s getting to be I can’t find a locker in the morning, with this guy.”
