Jacket Weather, page 4
I wasn’t sure I could make it across the lot. People were pushing carts, loading their trunks. Why do so many people out here dress like toddlers?
I pressed on.
Because the alternative was what? Just let my life unwind in a parking lot outside of Heinen’s?
•
After dinner I was getting on the freeway and at the top of the ramp a big pink cloud was piled on the sky. And I saw that nothing was wrong, everything was okay.
How many times had a late advent of sunlight opened something inside me? A perspective. Always in response to stress or dread. That’s the only time I could ever master time’s trick, and only for a moment. I remember a Sunday before the first day of school, 7:30 in the evening: I’m looking out the apartment window as the sun melts in a tangle of black branches. I could only have been seven or eight, but the moment lives on . . .
Happiness is just a change in the light.
•
Next morning I paced the balcony like a crackhead in a holding cell. Waiting to fly home for her decision. As crazed at 50 as I was at 15.
The last time I was on that balcony with my old man, I was waiting to go to the airport. Hot afternoon. We were sitting in silence, I was gazing into the heat. He appeared to be dozing.
Then, without opening his eyes, he said “This afternoon, I’m going to consider . . . the categorical imperative . . . of Immanuel Kant.”
I looked at him.
“Try to figure out what he was driving at,” he said.
I laughed.
He said “I was fascinated by these guys. All the time I spent reading about them in college, and all I remember is that Kant took a walk every day, Spinoza ate dried apricots, and Schopenhauer played the flute.”
•
I call her as soon as I land. I don’t even wait to get in a cab, I’m still in the line. No answer. Right away I start to panic. Even though I know her husband’s off Sundays. By the time I get back home my hands are cold.
South 2nd Street is quiet. Couple of guys playing dominoes outside the bodega.
Then she calls. Asks about my flight as though nothing’s changed. As though everything’s normal. As though I’m not this insane speeding monkey over here. She’ll have a couple of hours after today’s open house . . .
•
Sammy scratched on a transom window of the J
•
Back home, I put on my reading glasses and I can see the weave of my jeans and the sunlit dust particles on the midnight-blue cover of my writing tablet, and there’s a flooding, swimming sensation at the world as it is and my ability to apprehend it. Bars of sunlight on the couch. They brighten and fade with the breeze. They come back, and fade. Everybody’s coming out after the rain, banging pots and pans, blowing plastic horns. The sky’s in the puddles, and people come out from the bodega awnings and doorways, out of the alleys, and with singing, with cymbals and timbrels and psalteries and harps, with trumpets, and up from the sewers and out of the parks, bringing gold, and silver, ivory, and apes, and peacocks. And with conchs and kettledrums, tabors and cowhorns. And snatching laundry off the lines, flying it like flags. “Come on, come on, come on!” Oh, my baby . . .
Standing on the corner, gym bag in my hand. Here comes Lou, on his way out already at seven a.m.
“What’s the action?” he says.
“You’re done?”
“Yeah, I was here five o’clock. Now I’m running all day. The Judge is peddling a script, he asked if I get it to De Niro. I’ll leave it at the office in Tribeca, with a note.”
I see the Judge in the morning two rows over. Tough customer, carries himself like an ex-champ: everything just so. I always seem to catch him in the mirror in his shorts, fixing his tie, with a shirt straight out of plastic—always a blue shirt with a white collar. A New York Supreme Court judge, but he wrote a couple of crime novels, and they made movies out of them.
One time my pal Phil Dray had jury duty with the Judge presiding. During jury selection, they asked Phil what he does for a living. At that point, Phil had a new book about the Mississippi Burning murders. The Judge interrupts, he wants a word. “Can the juror approach the bench?” The lawyers are looking at each other—“What’s this now?” Phil goes up. The Judge leans down—“Tell me: who was your agent on that book?”
Lou says “I’m not in touch with these guys lately, I ain’t had much action since Analyze That. But I’ll take the script downtown. The Judge was up to Rao’s—he hangs out with Sonny Grosso—but he couldn’t get nowhere with it.”
Sonny Grosso’s one of the cops who made the French Connection bust. Done some cameos, some producing. Same as Frank Pellegrino, the owner of Rao’s. While Lou’s talking I get a glimpse of this world of producers and actors and mob guys and cops and judges, and they’re all the same people, and all anyone cares about is the movies. A little action.
•
And then I’m leaning on the wall outside the Y, reading a book. Later, June says about this time, “It’s like I was young again. The anticipation! Every day was a gift. And I knew you were going to be there, even the first time. God, that was exciting! Can’t explain it. That was very exciting.”
•
To Tere: “Today she was out walking around for lunch and she called. I told her I’d walk up the east side of Broadway. I spotted her coming down the west side, looking a little disoriented. I couldn’t imagine going around as that person. With all those curls, there was something improbable about her, bold and oblivious, different from the rest of us. She was like a mythical creature. Who found her way onto Broadway. I don’t recall ever feeling so happy. Just to see someone. Same thing yesterday, when she asked me to meet her after work, and I sat on my couch all afternoon, waiting, needing nothing more. And since there was no danger of sex, I knew it was just about her.”
•
We get an hour and a half before work. All the time in the world. We ride the 1 to Columbus Circle. Walk to a diner. She gets oatmeal and I get eggs. Settle up, I walk her back to One Time Warner, and our time is up. It always seems like a great wealth of time divided into shorter and shorter segments that expand as they get fewer until, always too soon, I’m watching her walk to the escalator, across the soaring atrium. I watch her all the way there, and she turns and waves. Up the escalator, she waves again—
And then I’m through the glass to the sky’s-the-limit that’s waiting for me, and I’m moving down Eighth Avenue—lucky in the world—through Midtown’s multiverse of intersecting reflections in the fresh morning roar.
•
jackhammers
•
We tipped the couch over backward, wound up on the floor with me on top of her. She had on white lace panties, I could see her bush. I got her jeans halfway down and remembered I didn’t have anything with me.
“You suck!” she said.
•
Five a.m., thunder in the dark: two long, soft, satisfying, reticulated unrollings of it, and then—complete rain. I lie there listening. There’s a flash of lightning through my eyelids, and then another soft, long roll of thunder, like a bolt of carpet bouncing down heaven’s stairs. Somehow, the rain increases. For a moment, I can hear the shapes of things in the rain like a blind man. A nearer crack of thunder starts three car alarms—two on this block. The rain increases again and there’s a war whoop from the street, then mad laughter, then “Yo! I’ll tell you about that tomorrow!” By 5:14 it’s over and the room has lightened, a few silver rainbeads hanging from the open sill, a cool breeze turning the blades of the window fan.
•
There’s that moment after you open your eyes, just a few seconds before you put the world back together, before you’re anyone in particular. You’re looking at a slice of light between the window frame and the shade. Then you take up your identity, with its memories and preconceptions, and it’s the same day as yesterday. But now I remember June. I wake up in my old life and then I remember I’m in a new life. And lie there listening to the birds and the BQE. Morning docked at the window like an ocean liner.
•
Then guess what? Her husband went to Thailand for a week. I guess he booked it when she asked for a divorce. Before they listed their place, she hired a painter to touch it up and took a few days off. I couldn’t believe my luck.
We were on top of the sheets in Brooklyn, in the afternoon. Window wide open behind the shade. It was after, I was lying on my arm, taking her in. She caught me looking and pulled back.
She said “You look like you’re gonna cry!”
I cracked up.
•
Over under sideways down. Days of fucking, the window-shade now lofted on a breeze, now tapping at the frame, clothes on the floor, lips puffy from kissing, jaw sore, tongue sore, raw below, eyes drowsy with beyond. Days out of time. Reawakened to your animal self, which lives to fuck and fucks to live, or dies, and everything else is bullshit.
•
Kevin and Philly are getting dressed, talking between two rows of lockers about doo-wop. Philly says he used to sing on the street, growing up in Brooklyn. Lou comes in to give me something from the paper and I grab his magazines from my locker. He’s wearing gigantic full-protection sunglasses over his regular glasses, as though he’s been to an eye appointment. With an irritated wave of the hand, he dismisses the doo-wop era as a childish excitement. He can let nothing Kevin says go unchallenged, for it’s each man’s role to disagree with the other about everything.
Talking to me across their conversation, he says “I never cared for it, doo-wop.”
“No? Not even looking back?”
“I rejected the whole thing,” he says. “I never liked the staccato singing. That staccato line. I prefer legato, the long line.”
He demonstrates the difference by singing a verse of some old sentimental song in both styles, first keeping time with a strict karate-chop gesture, and then crooning sweetly to me among the lockers and half-naked men, eyebrows raised, conducting a long, fluid line. Meanwhile, Kevin and Philly are talking about Ruby and the Romantics.
Pointing back and forth between us, Lou says “This is like you and me talking about Burger King.”
“What’s this now?” Kevin says. “What’re you saying, Lou?”
“Like hamburgers,” Lou says. “This is like you wanna talk about hamburgers, but instead of talking about P.J. Clarke’s, you’re talking about Burger King.” He pulls a frown and shrugs.
“You’re a thug, Lou. You don’t know what you’re—”
“In the upper echelons of music, these people are never spoken of,” Lou tells Philly, who’s pulling on a pair of red pants and trying to stay out of it. “These people are not in the pantheon.”
Kevin says “If it’s not Jimmy Roselli or Jerry Vale, you’re not interested.”
Lou turns to him, explaining as though to a child. “This is like you want veal Parmesan, but you’re going to the Olive Garden instead of Il Mulino.”
“Nobody cares about those guys,” Kevin says. “Jimmy Roselli’s for the birds.”
“Oh!”
“Aoh!”
“Oh, now you said it!” Philly says.
“Don’t ever—” Lou begins.
“If his name was Roseliwitz, you wouldn’t give a shit about him.”
Lou pantomimes astonishment. “Don’t ever let people hear you say that,” he cautions. “Don’t ever let people who know about music hear you say that. You know why? Because when you leave, they’re gonna say”—and here he rolls his eyes and slowly shakes a limp hand—“Ma-don’, this guy— Did you hear what he said? This guy’s ubazz’!”
“Aah, Louie,” Philly says. “Nothing’s been the same since Perry Como died.”
•
I was looking past her curls at the building across the street—we were both facing south. She dropped her head and clenched one fist.
•
To Tere: “She’s excited by things I’m jaded about. Walking around Williamsburg. Sitting in the dark in a place like a shop that outfits whaling ships, eating a cut of meat you first heard of two weeks ago that’s on every menu now. Or going to any of these other New Brooklyn places that take authenticity to a spurious extreme. But it’s new to her, so it’s fun.
“At Aqueduct I have to use the restroom, so I leave her on a vacant bench, in a half-lit corner, near a closed concession. When I come back, she’s between twelve guys asking who she likes in the early double.
“She doesn’t want to bet, she just wants to see the place. Wants to know if we can pet the horses. Just before post time I talk her into splitting a three-horse exacta box: 2/4/5. We’re at the finish line when they run past just like that. With the 3 out front. She’s already flipping through the program—‘Can we bet another one?’”
•
Summer breakfast: an iced coffee and a nectarine.
•
Lou’s coming toward me on 14th Street in the sun.
He says “Where you going?”
“I’m going the gym, I’m late today. You got your summer cut? Looks good.”
He says “My six-month haircut. January first, July first. He charges me seventeen dollars. I give him twenty-five. Fifty a year. A dollar a week.”
“Very good, Lou.”
“Aright: Mike! Let me go,” he says, as though I’ve detained him long enough.
•
“Everything’s a first. Shopping for dinner, running a handful of blackberries under the faucet while fixing breakfast. Waking up at grey dawn to coolness in the sheets and warmth where skin creases and a whiff of sweat and dried sex in a tenement room with thirty coats of white paint on the walls. Really, with her, just doing laundry would be a thrill.”
•
She’s making the bed in an A-shirt and boxers, hair up.
•
To Tere: “This week is deliriously good. Her husband’s away, we’re together every minute we can be. But I’m living in the shadow of the future. She keeps saying ‘This is a gift. This week is a gift.’ Which I hear as ‘This will never happen again.’ When I get near the subject of the future, she says ‘I don’t know what that looks like.’
“She’s keeping a spreadsheet of things we should do. Including countries to visit. But she doesn’t know what’s going to happen and doesn’t want me to wait. Meanwhile she wants a shelf for all her stuff in my bathroom.”
•
I started to say it—we were in bed—she saw it in my eyes—I was saying it—“I—”
“Don’t say it!” she said.
•
“Kevin, what’s that carrot salad recipe with the pepper flakes?”
He looms over me with a towel around his waist—he’s a big dude. “Two pounds of carrots, cut on the bias, and then cut each piece in three. Bigger than a matchstick. Throw ’em in boiling water for three minutes—”
“Salted water?”
“Very salty water, three minutes, till they’re just a little—”
“Yeah.”
“Then immediately toss them in a bowl with six tablespoons of red-wine vinegar, dried oregano, four cloves of garlic sliced thick so you can find them. Because they turn blue in the vinegar.”
“Okay.”
“And four bay leaves, you toss it all up. Salt and pepper, of course. And then just enough olive oil to make it shine. And leave it sit for twenty-four hours. And every time you walk past, you give it a stir.”
“It’s in the fridge or out?”
“Out. And always stirring. And that goes good with anything—with meat, whatever.”
“Yeah, same as all these cold salads with oil and vinegar. Tuna with onion, lentil salad, I make. Beet. Cucumber with dill. Even chopped cabbage with oil and vinegar.”
“I take a wedge of cabbage and a head of radicchio, couple of radishes, a few cherry tomatoes, and then salami cut into little rods, toss that with oil and vinegar, it’s delicious.”
“Wait, what’s that last one again?” A voice from down the aisle. Kevin starts it again.
“Wait, wait—” The guy goes into his gym bag for a notebook. “I’m going to a picnic tomorrow . . .”
•
The window gate’s swung open, the window’s open wide. She’s got her head on my chest and I’m looking past the fire escape at Sunday morning. Yesterday we stopped at a Dominican place under the J tracks and got a morir soñando. “To die dreaming.” Today her husband gets back. If I were dying, the building across the street would be the most beautiful one I ever saw. Not the Duomo, not Fallingwater, not the Flatiron. Just a yellowbrick tenement in the sun on South 2nd Street.
•
One of the signs of summer: a molten trickle down the outside of the Vermeer. Orange, mute. Every summer I watch it from the pillow. After June found a buyer, she spent eight months on Jane’s couch and then bought a studio here, right across the street. Fourteenth and Seventh. What’s this, our third summer here? I can’t keep track. July’s July. Every July is all Julys. I sort my memories by the month. By the season. Don’t we all? The studio looks north, to the Chrysler Building and the Empire State. From the sleeping alcove we see an outside wall at a right angle to us. Early in the morning, the water that’s dripped down the wall from an air conditioner mirrors the eastern sky.
•
Every morning I was outside the Y on 14th Street, waiting for June. Life doesn’t get better. That expectant point is as good as life gets. I was watching the world and myself in it. On the point of the present moment with room to move around in it. Waiting is what I was made of. And I trusted she would show. And I couldn’t believe I trusted it but I was starting to. We were like a rubber raft: maybe it’s wobbly climbing on, but that thing’s not going down.
She disappears in the sun with the people crossing Sixth Avenue and reappears by the newsstand. And when she does, I’ve already spotted her. Something in me sees her before I do. It’s gnosis! Before the sight of her has made its way through the bureaucracy of my cognition, I’m on it. There’s a hole that only she fills. She coincides perfectly with the possibility of June.
I watch her come. We’re trying not to smile, but she hits me with it because who cares, and then we’re wrapped in the heat of those smiles and waiting is overtaken by experience.
