3

A FAKE-WOOD-PANELED station wagon, with a drooling black dog, its head thrust out the window in the back, pulled up, and Jennie waved. I dropped the candy bar wrapper and peach pit from the food I’d brought with me into a trash can. They were ten minutes late and the bus had been a little early. I’d eaten the candy bar while I waited, then the peach. Waiting made me nervous.

Jennie, rushing toward me, still looked like a fox—that reddish-brown hair, the thin, pointed face, her long nose. She was still five-three and one hundred five pounds, and I felt huge beside her, as if my large bones could crush her frail bones. The opposite of course was true. She was one of the strongest women I’d ever met, and some boys couldn’t beat her at arm wrestling. She shook my hand with the firmness of a man’s shake. “So how was the trip?”

“It was good.” It was bad. A nuclear disarmament demonstration en route to the United Nations had almost made me miss the bus. Someone who looked like Zap waved a “No Nukes” banner at me and would not let the cab drive on to the Port Authority. Where had my brother been all these months when I needed him? The bus was hot and I had to sit near the motor. A Mormon woman sat beside me and showed me pictures of her eight children. I tried to envision this woman in a red leisure suit in bed. Then she interrogated me. “You married? Kids?”

Tom laughed as he swept me into his arms. My feet dangled in the air and I clutched his shoulder. He’d put on a little weight and lost some hair around the crown, but mostly he looked the same. He wore a blue T-shirt that said “I’ve Got Charisma,” and held on to me a little longer than he should have. “You’ve changed,” he said, scooping up my suitcase and heading toward the station wagon.

“Hey, what’s that supposed to mean?” I rushed after him, but Jennie caught me by the arm.

“You know he says stupid things.”

“I know, but you forget.” I’d forgotten a lot, it seemed. I’d forgotten how Jennie was always a little formal when we hadn’t seen one another for a while. I’d forgotten she was always a little late with some dumb excuse and that Tom said things without thinking. It had been almost ten years.

“Sorry we were late. Aretha Franklin got out at the last minute. That’s the dog. We keep saying we’re going to send her to obedience school.” Jennie slipped her arm comfortably now through mine. Tom went on ahead. “God, it’s good to see you.”

“You look the same,” I said to her. The first time I saw Jennie she was walking a raccoon on a leash down our street and she handed me the leash. “You walk him,” she said. “He likes strangers.” The raccoon’s name was Calcoon; she’d found him sleeping in a garbage can. He’d taken to her immediately and later she told me Calcoon was the first thing she ever loved. I was the second. My brother was the third.

Our friendship, mine and Jennie’s, was based on proximity. We walked the same route to school four times a day for years. Later, it would be based on conspiracy. She was my best friend long before Zap made the mistake of falling in love with her.

We both watched Tom as he walked ahead to put my things in the car. Everyone had been surprised when she married him and some had suspected she had to get married, but that wasn’t so. There had been something large and rather stupid about Tom’s body when we were teen-agers. Even though he had the first perfect back I ever saw, I felt certain he’d grow flabby with age. The jowly cheeks and soft paunch of a shoe salesman. But instead I could see, as he threw my bags into the back of the wagon, how the opposite had occurred. He’d turned solid, almost to the point of stiffening, and reminded me of a cousin of mine who had a rare disease that was turning her bones into stone.

“The farm’s beautiful now, in June,” Jennie said, leading me over to the car. “Except that Aretha Franklin’s in heat. That’s why we had to bring her with us in the first place. She’s Cory’s dog. We have no idea why he named her that. He was only five at the time. Cory and Melissa are with Mom for the summer. She likes them to come for a stretch since Dad died.”

“He died?” Jennie’s father was a man who always smiled, like Jimmy Carter. It drove everyone crazy. I wonder if he was buried smiling.

“Two years ago. I thought you knew. It was a blessing . . .”

I offered to sit in back but they wouldn’t hear of it because the dog sat there, so we all squeezed into the front seat of the station wagon. I sat in the middle, between Tom in the driver’s seat and Jennie by the window, my legs pressed against the stick shift. The seat of the car was old vinyl and torn in parts, so that a billowy cotton puffed out of the innards and I felt the springs below me. Jennie made some feeble apology about the old station wagon, saying how the Chevy wouldn’t start. “Excuse me,” Tom said as he reached down to put the car in gear and grabbed my knee. I pressed against Jennie.

Tom shifted gears again and this time struck against my leg. “Excuse me,” I said, leaning farther away from him. I pushed against Jennie, who had her nose to the glass like the dog in the back, and I put my hand on her knee. She took my fingers and gave them a squeeze. “I just can’t believe you’re here.”

“Me either.” I moved away from Tom.

“How long can you stay?” he asked.

“Oh, I don’t know . . . a week.”

“As long as she likes,” Jennie cut in.

“You can stay as long as you like.” Tom said it in such a way I knew he couldn’t mean it. He pushed his foot on the pedal.

“Slow down,” Jennie said, her mouth wrinkled into a pout.

A few moments later Tom shouted “We’re home!” as we turned down a driveway and all I could see were fields. I wasn’t prepared for the fact that they owned all of this. In the distance I saw the barn, the house, the coops.

“Enough room for you?” Jennie said, as we got out of the car and walked across the lawn. The sprinklers were going and it made me think of a game we used to play. All the lawns had sprinklers when we were growing up. Some turned in many directions like dancers, and some had a lot of legs of water reaching out like spiders. There were the sprinklers that jerked around the way the spastic boy in school jerked around. Some went in smooth circles and some rose and fell. Some rose high like clocks and others exploded like fireworks. Some were hidden deep inside the ground and we could only see the water shooting out of the grass, as if from an underground well.

We’d catalogued all the different kinds, and the game was to run through the sprinklers, but each sprinkler was different and required a different approach. Some we’d back into slowly, shivering, our faces wrinkled, and others we’d dash through, and some we tried to crawl under. If we timed it right, we didn’t get wet. That was part of the game. Stay dry. And then sometimes we just went in, hand in hand, Jennie and I, and there wasn’t anything to do but take it like soldiers.

 

Tom and Jennie thought I needed to meet new people, so the night after I arrived they threw a small cocktail party for me. It was one of those balmy June nights in which the moon carved out a niche for itself in a cloudless sky, and they set up card tables on the patio.

The Petersons, Ted and Roberta, arrived a little ahead of everyone else and were distressed at being early. “Should we leave and come back?” Ted offered. He kept tapping his watch and listening to it to make sure it was running. They wanted to sit on the porch until the others got there at seven-thirty sharp, but Jennie insisted they at least come out on the patio. Roberta wore a blue cotton skirt that was too short and a polyester shirt with bunny rabbits and a pack of Marlboros in her breast pocket. Ted was in shirt sleeves. He kept his hand on his wife’s hip.

I followed Jennie into the kitchen to bring out some trays. “I hope this isn’t going to be a disaster,” she groaned, thrusting her hands deep into the back pockets, trying to pull her snug jeans off her pelvis a little. The doorbell rang. Ted and Roberta looked visibly relieved. Buzz Weidman and his girlfriend, Janice, lived together near Trenton, which was a big sacrifice for Janice, she told me right away, because she was in urban studies at Rutgers and hated the commute. Buzz, who did marketing for Bell Labs, had a big bald patch in the middle of his head, which he tried to cover up with a strand of frizzy brown hair, combed across the crown; it kept slipping out of place. He had done primal scream therapy, he told me shortly after Tom introduced us, which had taught him to go after what he wanted. Once he screamed for four hours, on and off.

Three more people arrived and one of them from the back was a dead ringer for Mark. He was the same height, with his hair cut straight along the back of his neck. For an instant I thought it was Mark. Everywhere you look, you see the person you love. On subways, in crowded theaters, I’d seen Mark a dozen times since I found the note he left me on the table in our kitchen. Sometimes I even went up to him, prepared to have it out, only to find myself face to face with a perfect stranger.

From the front Joe didn’t look at all like Mark. He had dark eyes and freckles. He taught art at Silver Spring and a sculpture class at Princeton. His cousin, Irv, was in from San Francisco, where he worked for public broadcasting, and Irv’s “high school sweetheart,” Ilene, from East Orange, hung on his arm. We stood on the patio with drinks in our hands, talking about whether New York was dangerous or not. Tom said it was definitely dangerous and he’d never live there and he hated it when Jennie had to go to a lecture or something. Jennie frowned and seemed tense. “Tom thinks the whole city is Harlem.” She passed a cheese platter. “You can go crazy out here, living in the sticks, if you don’t go to the city once in a while.”

Irv loved San Francisco except for the cold and the fog, which he claimed hung over his head like the plague and kept his spirits low. “Seal Point, you know, Seal Point. I’ve been there six times and I’ve never seen a seal. All I see is fog and hear seals barking. For all I know it’s recordings of seals.”

“Hey, Tom, the girls want some gin and tonics over here. Tom’s a great guy,” Buzz said. He patted me on the back. “C’mon, Tomasino, the girls are thirsty.”

“I’ll help you,” I said and wandered back into the house with Tom. Buzz and Janice accompanied us into the den, where the bar was set up. It wasn’t clear which girls wanted gin and tonics or how many were wanted, but Tom started making five. Janice had just bought a new car, a Nova, and it was a gas guzzler.” You New Yorkers don’t have to worry about that sort of thing, do you?”

“What sort of thing?” Tom asked, handing me a gin and tonic I hadn’t asked for.

“Cars,” I said.

I went back out to the patio, where Jennie had bug bombs burning in red and green glasses to keep the biting insects away and a faint odor of DDT hung in the air. Ted and Roberta moved outside as well. She asked me how I afforded keeping my car in the city. “Oh, I don’t have a car. We were just talking about cars.”

Roberta said that the automobile was the state animal of New Jersey. Janice walked over. “You know,” she said to me, “I heard that planners are working on a roller-skating map of Manhattan. You know, what streets to skate on. Manhattan’s falling into its sewers and they’re designing roller-skating maps.” I told her I worked in slum renovation and didn’t know about roller-skating maps. Joe wandered over with a little platter of cheese. When he smiled, his forehead wrinkled. He was tall and thick like a tree you could climb. Janice reached over and took some cheese and licked it. Her tongue was blue like a chow dog’s. Joe munched on celery. “You girls talking shop?”

“Oh, not really,” I said. “Just talking.”

“I’m working on a series of paintings called The City.”

“Oh, that sounds interesting.”

Joe shrugged modestly. His straight hair fell to either side of his forehead and he kept brushing it away with a nervous hand. “You married?”

I laughed, amused at his directness. “Separated.”

“I know. Jennie told me. I’m divorced.” We both laughed, as if we were sharing a private joke. “Pretty awful, no?”

“The pits,” I said.

“How long’s it been?” He sipped his drink.

“Since February.” It had been a long time since I tried to make conversation with a man I wanted to get to know, and I didn’t know what to say next.

“Oh, now’s the hardest time,” Joe said. I felt at ease. “I’ve been on my own for four years now. I got custody. My wife was from Thailand. She went berserk in a supermarket in Arizona. I don’t even know what she was doing in Arizona.” He whipped out his wallet and showed me photographs of two dark-haired but not very Oriental-looking children. “We were kids ourselves when we got married. Dumb mistake.”

“Yeah, I know,” I mumbled. Jennie waved at me from the kitchen, thinking I needed rescuing but ostensibly to hand me more food platters. “See you later,” I said to Joe, but as I drew away I experienced something I’d imagined lost to history, like Pompeii or Hannibal’s horse. I wasn’t even aware of it as I’d stood there talking with Joe, but as I walked away I felt myself pulled back to him as if by some magnetic field, and that pull left me lightheaded. Desire came creeping back as I scanned the heads to see where Joe was going, desire that had lain dormant since the winter, that had found its outlets mostly in the swimming pool and in some dreary masturbation, ever since that last night before he left, when Mark made wild, inspired, hypocritical love to me.

“Having a good time?” Jennie asked.

“I was talking with Joe.”

“Uh-huh, I saw.” She arranged cheese puffs on a tray. “His wife went crazy in Arizona. But he’s got cute kids.”

She handed me a tray of ham and cheese, and I carried it back. Joe was in a corner, talking to Janice, who held him by the sleeve, whispering into his ear. I tried to see the expression in his eyes. I put the platter down and noticed a man I hadn’t seen before standing in a corner by the buffet. He held a Coke in his hand and he looked crooked. At least he seemed crooked to me, but perhaps I was looking at him at an angle, or perhaps he couldn’t make up his mind if he wanted to be there or not. He smiled and it was a half-smile. His arms were half-folded across his chest, the Coke was cocksided, his head was at a slant.

I went back into the kitchen for another tray. “That’s Sean,” Jennie said. She whispered without changing her facial expression, the way people in spy movies do. “Don’t take him too seriously. I don’t.” But I could see where it might be difficult not to take him seriously. He stood alone in the corner and it was clear he was simply bored with all of us. I put down a platter of egg salad sandwiches not far from where he stood, poured myself a glass of wine, and went back to join Joe.

As I passed, Tom caught me by the arm. “C’mon, you’ve gotta say hello to my friend. He’s just back from the Coast. Yale graduate. Very smart.” Tom pointed to his brain. Then he dragged me over to meet the man in the corner. “Sean, this is Jennie’s friend from way back. Our friend, Debbie. You guys talk.” Sean put down his Coke, rocked slightly on the balls of his feet, and extended a cold, damp hand. Now he was smiling. Or trying to smile.

We shook hands and his grip was firm. He apologized for his clammy palm; the Coke bottle had been very cold. He was big and he wore corduroy slacks and a blue shirt with rolled-up sleeves. His eyes were large and blue. They had an emptiness about them and his black beard made his eyes look bluer and emptier. “You from around here?” I asked, trying to sound the way I thought they might sound in that part of New Jersey.

He nodded. “My parents have a place up the road.”

“Oh, you’re a farmer?” He rolled his eyes and shook his head. “A teacher?”

He looked at me, bored. “I’m a stuntman.”

“A what?”

“A stuntman, you know. I smash up cars and take punches for famous people.”

“Oh,” I said, “I’ve never met a stuntman.” He did not appeal to me, and yet I knew that by objective standards he was an appealing man.

“Now you have.” I expected him to yawn.

“It sounds interesting.”

He sighed slightly. “It’s not very interesting.”

I’d heard his story before. He was on the way to make it big as a famous actor until someone found out he was a good athlete and now he was bitter. I looked at his arms. He had strong biceps with veins running through them. Thick, blue veins. Mark’s arms were white and limp. They looked like a woman’s arms, except for the hair. But underneath they were very strong and those limp arms managed sixty pushups a morning. Mark had deceiving arms. “Anything I might have seen you in?”

“Oh, I had a bit part in the Vietnam War.”

I smiled. It was one of those odd and rare instances when I took an immediate and intense dislike to someone. When Joe waved at me from across the room, I was grateful for an excuse to walk away.

The guests left mostly in the same order they had arrived. Ted and Roberta had to drive the sitter home fairly early. Buzz and Janice kissed everyone on the cheek and said it was the best party they’d been to in decades. I watched as they put on their sweaters, jingled their keys. I walked outside and sat in one of the inner tubes on the old tree. As I rocked, the branch creaked.

Joe came outside to find me. “We’ll be leaving soon.” He swung his legs into the inner tube beside mine and we swung in opposite directions but with a kind of strange syncopation. Buzz and Janice waved at us from the porch. “Nice meeting you,” Buzz called. “I’d like to see you again,” Joe said. “Will you be here for a while?”

I felt complacent. “I’ll be here this week.”

“Good.” He rose, smiling. “I’ll give you a call.”

He never did.

After everyone left, my eyes gazed in the direction where I thought New York City must be. A place that had been home to me and that I now faced with a kind of dread. It was the hour when shows were letting out, when the restaurants were getting crowded again. But here it was quiet and I felt safe. Even as a hand rested on the back of my neck, I knew nothing would happen to me out here.

“You should get some sleep,” Jennie said.

“In a little while.”

She asked me what I was looking for out there and I told her I didn’t know but I thought I was looking toward Manhattan. She wrapped her arm around my shoulder. “Some planner you are. You’re facing Pennsylvania.” She turned me toward Manhattan, where she thought I wanted to be pointed. I shuddered. “Do you want to talk?”

I shrugged. “What’s there to talk about?”

“Look,” Jennie went on, “I’m not going to force you, but if you want to or need to talk, will you tell me?”

I told her I just missed him. There wasn’t really much more to say. I couldn’t say I wanted to get back at them. I couldn’t even say that to myself. For a while we stood together, arms on each other’s shoulders, facing a dark sky and a horizon, faintly illuminated, enough to let you know or at least suspect that America’s most complex metropolis was just beyond these placid fields.