So Wally thinks, Enough of this, enough of delicacy and indecision, enough of eliding and eluding, and he takes the train to Chambers Street and walks all those cold, blowing blocks over the frozen grit gone black along the curbs with an almost angry determination, as if he had some right to show up unannounced, and he does, doesn’t he, being a person after all, with a heart and a voice and things to say and a life to live, a life that he’s in the middle of living, and which is, as they say and he is beginning to understand for himself, short. So. He walks fast up Greenwich, steering clear of patches of black ice, which reveal themselves garishly just as he approaches, reflecting neon signs and traffic lights.
He knocks on her door, mindful this time of striking the wood, not the glass, and exactly in that moment his resolve shrinks. Just like that. Goes from mighty to meager. It’s Monday night. For him the weekend, Game being closed on Monday and Tuesday nights during the winter, but for her, he realizes, oh yeah, for her a school night, and her first day back besides. She’ll be displeased when she comes to the door. She doesn’t come to the door. He can see a light, but some people leave a light on when they’re out, but why would she be out on a school night and her first day back besides? And who lives in New York without a buzzer?
He goes to the corner, where a neon shamrock heralds, he guesses, a bar? Yes. A décorless bar, neither shabby nor chic but really, truly, almost Zen-like in its lack of appointments. The interior is actually a degree darker than the streetcorner outside, under its pinkish streetlamp. A black curtain hangs just inside the doorway, to cut down on drafts, presumably, but it seems to suck up light, too, sealing stray bits of street light from the entryway. It’s the kind of place Alice would never set foot in. The few people drinking are mostly men, middle-aged, overcoated. There’s no music and no TV, but a sportscast is emanating from a radio behind the bar, and it seems possible that everyone’s tuned in very intently, and equally possible that no one’s paying any attention at all. Wally feels like he’s stepped into an allegory. “Got a phone?” he asks. There’s no pay phone, but Wally does a bit of explaining and the bartender, a looming, burly, bald guy (of course), slides the regular phone across the bar, then watches while he dials (making sure it stays local, Wally supposes, but envisions a fleeting scenario involving the guy’s memorizing the dialing pattern upside down and then embarking on a campaign of harassment that leads to Esker’s changing her number, changing her locks, coming home to find gifts of small dead animals on her doorstep . . .).
“Hello?”
“Esker?”
“Yes?”
“It’s Wallace James.” Why so formal? “I wanted to talk with you.”
“Okay.”
“I wanted to also see you. While talking with you.”
“Oh. Oh, now? Where are you?”
To the bartender: “What’s the name of this place?”
“Black Pete’s.”
“Black Pete’s.”
“What’s Black Pete’s?”
“The bar on the corner of your street.”
“Really? I never knew it had a name. You’re on the corner of my street? Are you asking me to meet you at a bar?”
“No. I just came here to use the phone. Some people don’t have buzzers. I’ll come back over, okay?”
“No,” she says. “No, I’ll come there.” She hangs up. He has the impression she’s amused. Better amused than displeased. Maybe.
He gets a draft and sits. Another middle-aged man in an overcoat. There is nothing to look at, not even a Heimlich-maneuver poster, not even a coaster. The lug of a bartender is polishing pint glasses slowly, with no affect but somehow all of his heart. The other patrons are all either listening or not listening to the rhythmic rise and fall of the sportscast. It’s like a bar you’d find along some county road up near Grange Hill in a weatherbeaten wood-frame building. Or in some nondescript developing nation. Or an Ionesco play. Black Pete’s, Black Peter, isn’t that what Danish kids call Santa Claus? But the shamrock would be Irish. Then someone in the corner behind him—it’s so dark inside, Wally failed to notice any life forms in that vicinity—begins to play the accordion. Eastern Europe, then. Or a peasant village in the Alps. Or a David Lynch movie. The game would be more fun if Esker were here. He checks his watch but finds his wrist bare. Quick panic: could it have been removed from his person without his noticing? The bar is actually a den of thieves, a meeting spot for a band of cons, secretly sly and nimble under their burdened, oblivious postures. But no: he left it on his dresser top after showering, which he did before he came, a late-Monday-afternoon shower, not his usual routine, and thus the forgetting to include his watch when he put the rest of his clothes back on.
The truth is, he left home in a rush. Once he decided where to go, it had seemed important not to lose momentum. Also, he lied to Ann about where he was going. Ridiculous. He doesn’t do that, but he did, told her he had to meet with a potential new supplier, and then left before she could ask why he’d showered for it. He thinks he lied kind of altruistically, protectively: why should Ann have to bother herself with thoughts about her father and her math teacher’s ambiguous, dubious relationship? She has enough on her plate, with the mathski and Winter Concert and physical therapy and being a teenager and everything. But Wally isn’t utterly dimwitted about the fact that he was mostly protecting himself.
The accordion music is oddly spellbinding. If this were an allegory, what would the accordion represent? He drinks his darkish beer at a tippy little table, and the music makes him a peasant, with his barrel chest and broad knuckles; he’s a farmer, of what? Cabbages. Bulgur. Sorghum. No—he works with horses, he is a horse trader, he pulls back their lips to check their teeth, he holds their hooves upturned between his knees to see whether they are properly shod, he runs expert fingers over their long, flickering muscles and tendons, he carries sugar cubes in his pocket, his secret stash. Or he is a baker, with a coating of flour always upon him like ash, all day long reaching into the oven with a long wooden peel, kneading dough with his thick fists, shaping the daily loaves round and oblong, and the braided loaves for Sundays, and the more exotic, exquisite ones he molds privately after hours, loaves in the shapes of fish and stars, mandolins and angels and women . . .
Is he drunk? He’s only had one pint. Probably at Black Pete’s they slip something into the drinks. He’s not sure whether he phoned Esker ten minutes ago or forty. He is watching the accordion player. Why is there an accordion player? The accordion player looks up and smiles at him. Too surreal. Wally is going to have to leave. He stands up, and there’s Esker in the doorway, the black curtain swaying, a thin column of pink street-light leaking in behind her. She comes and sits at his little table, and he sits back down. She hasn’t bothered with a coat, she’s just run over and is a little rosy and breathless with the cold. She is something else, too, something he never would have expected. Jaunty.
“Hello. I’m in person,” she says.
No response.
“Hello. I’ve met you in a bar,” she says.
Nothing.
“Hello. I’m Esker. You called me. There’s somebody playing the accordion behind you. What a weird place.” She looks over each shoulder. “What a weird place. What are you drinking? Beer?” She gets up and goes to the bar and comes back with two bottles, no glasses. “What did you want to say to me?”
“You’re jaunty this evening.”
“I cleaned my basement out!”
He lifts his glass. “Whatever gets you going.”
She laughs. “What did you want to say to me?”
He searches, comes up empty. “I don’t know exactly.”
“Slipped your mind.”
She’s teasing him. Enjoying herself.
The best defense is a good offense: Coach MacPharland, junior-year varsity football. He ribs back. “That must have been some basement.”
“Oh, it was.”
“Buried treasure? A lost Picasso. Revolutionary War documents.”
“You’ve been watching too much Antiques Road Show.”
“What, then?”
“It’s what I didn’t find.”
“Rats?”
“No, actually, I did find those. Or mouse droppings, anyway. I thought I had a ghost. And I—don’t.”
“You don’t.”
“I think it was just me.”
“You’ve been haunting yourself?”
She nods, once, almost imperceptibly, as if serious.
“How? Sheets? Rattling chains? Oooooooh . . .” He makes sound whistle across the top of his beer bottle.
She laughs again. “Never mind. That’s not what you took a cab all the way over here on a Monday night to discuss.”
“I took the subway.”
“I stand corrected. I thought you were a fancy restaurateur.”
“I hate that word.”
“Well, that’s a relief.”
She’s just wearing some kind of sweater over another sweater and pants, and her hair as usual is quite styleless, but she’s glowing, somehow, her eyes are like liquid and her spine is straight and pressed forward, her elbows planted unabashedly on the little tabletop; she is self-possessed. And unrelenting.
“What did you come all the way over here on a Monday night for, anyway?”
“To talk with you.”
Eyebrows up: So talk.
So talk. Right. “Well.” He rubs his chin. Okay. “I think you’re maddening. I think you’re difficult and I like you, possibly, and I get the feeling you’re going to bolt, or you’ve bolted. Except not tonight, you’ve kind of messed up what I wanted to say, because you don’t seem remotely bolt-inclined tonight. So I’m flummoxed.” He says this last word in quotes, a little ironic protective device.
“I like you, too, possibly.”
“All right, then.” Then, less combative-sounding: “I see.”
And they sip a little, privately, at their beers, and look elsewhere than at each other, and listen to the accordion player, who carries on with his very Old World mix of suffering and gaiety, neither of them knowing now exactly the next step, but Wally acknowledging to himself that it is no longer possible to wear his happiness lightly. It’s become more like an anvil. On a rope around his neck. He feels stumbling, bumbling, not without dread.