Jacket Weather, page 9
MIKE: Right, right.
JANE: And um. And the puzzles are kinda great. And very hard, but—I could do one but that’s ’cause I cheated.
JUNE: How do you cheat?
JANE: Well, because I watched someone else do it, and then he showed me, and then I hadda look again, I mean—it’s—even when someone shows you one of these puzzles, it’s not like you can remember for two seconds how they do it. I mean it’s just— For my brain— I don’t have that kind of . . . It’s just too advanced, the—putting together pieces that fit together in different ways—I mean it just—makes me wanna scream, kill myself.
MIKE: And it’s usually something obvious.
JANE: Very obvious! And then in two seconds he shows you the whole thing—and you say “Oh my God, is that all it is?” And then you don’t even remember what he showed you.
MIKE: Yeah. But this is what I like about this story, ’cause Joe calls her at like—
JANE: [Laughter]
MIKE: —at 10:30 to go for a walk: he can’t get to sleep—
JUNE: Right, right.
MIKE: —he’s been alone all day—so they start out walking—just anywhere, right?
JANE [laughing]: Yeah. And then he still wasn’t ready to go home. I think he just wanted to prolong the walk. Which is probably why he—“Well let’s go to the Donut Pub!” But it was fantastic. Now he’s best friends with this guy and he learned how to do some magic tricks, which are really—
MIKE: Who, Joe?
JANE: Yes! He learned, I think, two card tricks last night that are unbelievable. And he learned how to do the pyramid puzzle which, forget it. I mean I saw it done forty-five times I still can’t do it.
JUNE: You must’ve had the best—so much fun. So many laughs.
JANE: It was. It was a lot of fun.
JUNE: Just like old New York. That’s so fabulous, Janie.
JANE [getting a little bored with the topic]: Yeah . . . Right . . .
JUNE: Good for you. Remember when those—that used to happen . . . more frequently? The way that everything just sort of always connected, and one step led to another?
MIKE: Spontaneous.
JANE [preoccupied]: It was great, it was so much fun . . .
MIKE: So were you there how late?
JANE: We were there till about one fifteen maybe? Or something like that.
JUNE: How fabulous.
MIKE: We gotta get together with Joe. He’s going to show us how to make those Italian cookies. With sesame seeds.
JANE: Yeah he wants to very badly, he’s dying to have a dinner, make a dinner . . .
•
Small yellow sun reflected in the front quarter panel of an old green truck idling at a light.
•
Ronkonkoma
Wantaugh
Speonk
•
Thursday after work we’re in the scrimmage at Penn Station, eyes on the board so we can jockey to the stairs and jostle our stuff down to the train and drag it across the platform at Babylon and onto the Bay Shore train and then haul it to the shuttle and pile it on the ferry dock—a suitcase, a bag of groceries, a bread, two cooler bags containing eight bronzini I froze and forty pork cutlets from Faicco—and load it on the ferry to Ocean Bay Park. Every summer Jane rents a house on Fire Island for a month. She stays out there, the rest of us come and go.
Now we’re on the top deck, June and I. As the boat picks up speed and foam peels off the hull, we’re reading a paper someone left behind—the obituaries.
“If you ever place an obituary for me,” she says, “don’t put my age in it. Leave that out.”
“Even when you’re dead, no one should know your age?”
“That’s right. No one should know that. Ever. No one needs to know that.”
“Really? I always tell people how old you are.”
“What do you say?”
“I say ‘I’m having dinner with June. She’s fifty-two, you know.’”
“No. Don’t say that.”
“People say ‘What’d you do this weekend?’ I say ‘I went to the movies with my older girlfriend.’”
“Don’t ever say that. If someone asks—”
“They don’t ask. I volunteer.”
“I know you do. From now on, you say ‘I’m not sure exactly. She’s in her early fifties.’ That’s all you have to say. From now on. From now until I die.”
“Got it. ‘She was born in the early fifties.’”
“No.”
“‘I’m not sure exactly. I know she was born in the fifties. The early fifties.’”
“I’m gonna hurt you. In your sleep, I’ll hurt you. I’ll shave off all your hair.”
“Don’t you worry. ‘She was born sometime back in the early fifties.’”
“Your eyebrows. How’d you like that?”
•
Stars through pine branches, the unbroken insect screel like fishing line running out of a reel.
•
That time June suggested Fire Island as a chance for Jane to start clearing out the dead friends and relations whose ashes were in her closet. Not in urns but in plastic bread bags, unnamed. We took a bag down to the beach in the dark and I caught a face full of ash and bone shards that BG tossed into the wind. Jane thought it might be Lenny Baron. Definitely wasn’t John Vogel, whose remains she’d sprinkled, a little at a time, in Bloomingdale’s and Saks. Going up and down the escalators.
•
Meanwhile, back in the city that first summer, she let me know that after the place sells, she’s going to stay with Jane, across the street. I told Tere: “Maybe she’s clearing some space for herself. Some room to breathe.”
•
Lemon-ice sky, greyblack bay as we walk to the dock to meet Bobbie and Dara. And as we’re coming back with the wagons, golden light under greyblue clouds.
•
Someone posts a clip on Facebook of a woman with her arms locked around an eighty-pound wombat. She lugs it around, its belly exposed. I call June over.
“That’s a stuffed animal,” she says.
“It’s a wombat.”
She stares at the screen without expression as the creature allows itself to be trundled around in a wheelbarrow.
“No,” she decides. And gets off the couch.
•
That time a big white Lab wandered into the yard and we called the number on its tag and left a message, and before we heard back, the dog wandered out again, and BG, mortally afraid of ticks, followed it saying, unpersuasively, “Here, honey; here, sweetheart,” walking parallel to it on the sidewalk as it moped and sniffed through the brush nearly all the way to Ocean Beach, “Here, sweetie; here, honey,” before we caught up with them and June marched into the weeds and grabbed its collar . . .
•
After our sunrise visit to the beach, we take the sandy wooden stairs. June in her white jean jacket and pajama bottoms, barefoot. Jane in her Ramones T-shirt and tartan shorts, barefoot. They go on ahead, close in conversation, paying no attention to anything else. I stop to look at a pine branch beside the walk. Needles and small cones are standing out in a yellow concentration of the water-clear light of this hour.
Reminds me of Northern California: pine branches warming in early sun, a blue sky beyond. So it’s not just this pine I’m seeing, and it’s not just today. This light has a keen edge of meaning for me because it’s underscored by time the way a movie scene is underscored by music. In this case, the music of experience.
Back at the house, Jane’s busy reading the news on her AOL page instead of the 75,000 unread emails in her inbox while June pours water into the coffeemaker.
•
Coffee. The rising chatter and the unspooling sound of insects. Leaf and windowscreen shadows on the pages of the book I’m reading. A cardinal answering his own questions.
•
Every morning at Fire Island, June and I walk on the beach to watch the sun come up. We started taking a plastic bag. As we go, we fill it with trash. Water bottles, beer cups, Mylar balloons from parties. The balloons we pop to get more in the bag.
After a week of this we go past a couple of kids under a blanket.
“You know what they’re saying?” I asked her.
“What?”
“They’re saying ‘Look, there’s that weird old couple who go down the beach popping children’s balloons.”
•
That time we busted Jane in the dark in her plaid shorts, with her hair standing up, toasting a marshmallow on the stove.
•
Late in August, late in the day, and silvery sun in the curl of a wave before it breaks.
“This is the kind of day that reminds you you’re going to die.”
“What’s on me?” she says, turning in circles to see her ass. “Did I sit in something?”
“Yeah, I’m afraid so.”
“What is it?”
“I can’t tell.”
“I’m very unhappy, Mike!”
•
The world is rustling all around us.
•
One morning we walk to town, Ocean Beach. There’s a dozen guys on a bench in front of the bakery. Shooting the breeze. All in shorts, all comprehensively tanned. They look like mob guys, or ex-cops. June wants to take their picture, she works up the nerve to ask. One guy jumps up, moves off. The rest are in high spirits, they tell her to fire away. She thanks them when she’s done. They tell her if she comes back, they’ll be on the bench right across from this one. They move with the sun.
•
We walk on the sand as the waves dump themselves on the beach and pull back, overturning shingle. The ocean puts you in touch with your death wish. That yearning for infinity. It satisfies your need to disintegrate and disperse. To be diffuse. We watch a wave’s reflection in the sand as it’s overtaken by the wave. There’s a sandpiper at work. It chases the outgoing shine and flees the incoming foam. This is its anxious beat: it works the disappearing zone of reflection in the sand, the forever-vanishing now.
•
“Hey Mike. Boy, these weeks go by fast, ah? It’s that time of the week already, Thursday. Aright, lemme know what’s going on, if you want me to pick this stuff up. Send me some direction. Aright Mike, take care Mike. Thanks.”
•
Way down the beach, a girl in a white sundress . . .
On Driggs Avenue, “Maggie May” was coming out the window of one of the cars at a light, and it reopened a place inside me: part imagination, part memory. Part ache for a time after which you never feel life quite so sharply again. The everlasting September. The mandolin player took his extra half measure—the very moment when summer ends, that last of it, after Labor Day. I cut between cars and could hear him hanging on: he held this glistening moment captive in a repeated phrase. And finally—after the band came back in and he knew the spell was slipping—he started changing it up, trying one thing and another to hold time still as the song moved on. Up over Metropolitan, a flight of pigeons flashed and turned.
•
“Tere, I quit drinking caffeine at night. But I still sit up smoking cigarettes and staring holes in the dark till I find something hopeful in something she said.
“She can’t commit to anything except specific activities. A trip to the shore, that new place on Grand. She wants to go to the Sheep & Wool Festival in Rhinebeck next month. So we’re cool through the third week in October.
“She won’t even say she’s with me. It’s not that I need to hear it so much as I wonder what keeps her from saying it. I told you when she sells her place she’s moving in with Jane, right? While she looks for something to buy. Sure, she can stay at my place whenever she wants. But she won’t move in with me. How do I explain that to myself?”
•
A cloud of furling dust in the open top of a compound bucket that a construction worker has put down after emptying it into a dumpster.
•
Lou folds up his newspaper when he sees me. His T-shirt’s so threadbare it’s transparent. They talked to him about it—there’ve been complaints—but he doesn’t see it. Far as he’s concerned, there’s some life left in this shirt. I wind up going around five times with him. Some reason he’s thinking about Dean Martin today.
He says “Dino was on a bill with Sinatra at the Westchester Theater, so we all went up. I saw Sinatra with everybody, Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, but now he’s with Dino, everybody wants tickets.”
“Westchester? Why up there?”
“Westchester Premier Theater, in Tarrytown. Tony Dime had a piece of it, he was a wiseguy, did two years over the place. He says ‘Come on, we’ll eat first’—you could eat there too: place was a gold mine. They took so much money outa there before they got caught. Anyway, see the show, Tony says ‘Come on backstage, meet Frank.’ I said ‘Tell ya the truth, I rather meet Dean.’ He said—” Here Lou wagged the metronome, no-can-do finger of doom: “‘Nobody sees Dean. Nobody. The limousine picks him up at noon, he plays golf alone, he eats alone, backstage he’s got a room to himself.’”
“You met Sinatra instead?”
“Oh. Lots of times. And I saw him play thirty shows, after he came back in ’73. Twice a year, I saw him.”
“Here?”
“Here, Vegas.”
We go half a lap in silence.
I tell him “Dylan made a record of Sinatra songs.”
“Who?”
You have to say it twice, if you open a new subject with him.
“Bob Dylan.”
“I read that. Not the greatest voice, but he has it here,” he says, tapping his heart. “The greatest singers don’t always have the greatest voices. They have it here. I met him one time, at Jerry Orbach’s place.”
“What, in the seventies?”
“Yeah, seventies sometime. Good guy, nice guy. Didn’t say nothing, just sat in the corner, kept to himself. He asked me about Joe Gallo. Because he was writing that song about him.”
Later, in the showers, he’s talking about Perry Como—Mr. Relaxation: “The man who invented casual. He came along at the right time. He was perfect for TV like Bing Crosby was perfect for radio. Perry Como’s personality wasn’t too big. So he’s perfect for Middle America. Because he’s right in your living room, y’know. So Sammy Davis Junior, even Sinatra—they’re too big for your living room. They’re nightclub singers. But who’s gonna buy a ticket to see Perry Como? He’ll put you to sleep.”
While we’re drying off, he demonstrates Perry Como’s deceptively easy style, with men moving around us in the tiled room: “With a song in my heart, I behold your adorable face . . .”
•
She stood at the crosswalk twirling one of her curls around a finger.
•
PARKING GARAGE
OPEN 24 HOURS
ENTER
•
“Philly, where was the Five Spot?”
“What?”
“The Five Spot. Where was it?”
“I think it was Bowery, near Cooper Square. I’m not sure, I never went to the Five Spot.”
“No? Before your time?”
“I used to go to a club called Slugs’—on East Third, between B and C.”
“When was that?”
“Nineteen sixty-eight. ’Cause I just got outa the Army. I went there—in a dashiki. Can you believe that? And shades and a little kufi. Pharoah Sanders was looking at me like Who’s this white guy coming here in a dashiki?”
“That’s not a big stretch, for you.”
He said “I used to go there to see Roland Kirk. You know about Roland Kirk?”
“Yeah. Whistleman.”
“Yeah! You know what Roland Kirk would do at the Village Vanguard? He’d come off the stage, still playing—he was blind! he had a guy to lead him—and he’d go through the audience up the stairs, out on Seventh Avenue, still playing—people outside going, What the fuck is this? And he’d come back down the stairs, get back onstage and finish the show.”
•
“Today I’m talking to Andrea at work about June when she ventures to ask if I’ve ever considered seeing someone.
“It’s the delicate approach that lets you know how far you’ve strayed. The bedside manner. This is you, Ken Pound, Tony, and now Andrea who’ve suggested I seek professional help. And a lady in the cafeteria. Plus the breakers on the L train and a deaf guy handing out cards. I turned one over it said ‘Get some help, willya?’”
•
Eight a.m., Steve’s crossing Seventh Avenue—homeless guy sits by the subway, outside the Vermeer. Says he got picked up by the cops last night for sitting too close to the stairs.
“Transit cops?”
“Transit cops, yeah. They said it wasn’t ten feet. I was locked up all day, so I couldn’t make no money. Which means I didn’t sleep, because I couldn’t pay for my room last night. I understand they got a job to do, but they took my milk crate, they took my cushion. Plus it was my birthday.”
“Happy birthday. At least you’re not waking up today fucked up, or hungover. Both of us.”
“Right,” he said. “Not knowing where you are.”
“Who you are.”
“What you did. My worst ever was I smoked what I thought was a joint, but it was laced. I woke up three days later in Florida, with a knot like this in my pocket with blood on it, and no idea what happened. I don’t like that.”
“No.”
“First thing I did I went to the bathroom and washed off the top three bills, bought a bus ticket back to New York, and dropped the knot in a panhandler’s cup to get rid of it. Never did find out what happened.”
•
“What are you eating?” I asked her.
“Licorice.”
“From where?”
“Downstairs.”
“Okay.”
“What else?”
•
Taxi driver praying with his shoes beside him on a piece of cardboard by his cab in Midtown.
•
“Feel like going to the movies tonight?” I ask her, out of the blue.
