A year before all this, one Thursday afternoon in early November while Gordon is eating a ham sandwich at his desk, an orange-haired giant swaggers into his office. At first sight Gordon is in love, so the young man is ringed in fireworks, but anyone would stop chewing. The office is suddenly doll-housed, and the young man is in it like a dreamer, blinking around, scratching his throat. His throat is alpine. His forearms are clubs fleeced with orange. Orange froths out of the V of his white T-shirt and is greased back in rivulets on his head.
“Knock knock,” the young man says, knocking on Gordon’s bookshelf.
Gordon swallows his food.
“Secretary said go right in,” the young man drawls.
A few hours earlier a guy with a drawl phoned wanting financial backing to write a first-hand account of the stevedore life—“The real On the Waterfront.” Gordon told this guy to drop in around noon. “Yes, hello,” he says now, coming to his feet. “Gordon Canary.” He reaches across the desk to shake hands. It doesn’t often happen that he has to look up to look into another man’s eyes.
“Al Yothers,” the young man says, smacking his palm into Gordon’s. “You done with this?” He lets go of Gordon’s hand and picks up the half-empty cup of coffee on the desk.
Gordon gestures. “Uh—“
Al strolls over to the window and takes a sip.
“It’ll be stone cold,” Gordon says.
Al kicks the radiator. “Air blocking the flow.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Air pockets.” He turns the latch on the window and shoves, the muscles of his arm leaping into relief.
“It’s painted shut,” Gordon says. With a sound of splintering it opens. Al tosses out the coffee.
“Hey—“
Al glances at him. Now he’s trying to loosen the screw at the end of the radiator. “No can do,” he says. He sets the cup on the window ledge and withdraws a screwdriver from his back pocket.
Gordon finally gets it. He drops into his chair. “I asked for someone to see about it two weeks ago.”
“You know how they say ‘two weeks’ in England?” Al says. A few turns of the bolt, and air hisses out. “Fortnight,” he answers before Gordon can grasp the question.
Gordon waits, but apparently that’s all Al has to say on the subject.
Al squats, retrieving the cup. His thighs are like sandbags but his buttocks are as small as a boy’s. A ripple of spine where his T-shirt rides up. “It’s real backed up,” he says.
Gordon is squatting next to him, saying something. Saying “How does the air get in there anyway?” or something, meanwhile sliding his hand around Al’s waist. No, he’s standing, they’re both standing. Gordon is behind him. He reaches around and unbuckles Al’s belt, unzips his fly. Al grips both sides of the window frame. Two strokes and he’s hard and turning. His eyes are closed, mouth open. The door is closed. Locked. Before going over to him Gordon has shut and locked the door and told Margo to hold his calls. No, he has sent her out for another coffee and sandwich, and to the bank …
“When was the last time you had this drained?” Al asks, glancing at him.
A split-second too late Gordon looks up. Al’s eyes narrow. What amazes Gordon isn’t just how far he has let his imagination go, it’s the sense of nostalgia that’s egging him on, as if in some life, and it isn’t this one, he has actually danced this dance. By the time Al turns back to the radiator Gordon’s legs are trembling so badly the change in his pocket jingles. “Last winter,” he says.
Al doesn’t speak for a minute. Then he says, “Tell you what, Mr. Canary.” A jet of black water shoots into the cup, and he quickly tightens the bolt. “How about I keep this just loose enough so’s you can drain it yourself from time to time?” He straightens. Slips the screwdriver into his back pocket.
“All right,” Gordon says too eagerly. “Good idea.”
Al strolls over and sets the coffee cup back on the desk. There is a dime in Gordon’s paper-clip saucer, and he picks it up. “This here’s your screwdriver,” he says, flicking it off the end of his thumb.
Gordon fails to catch it. Laughs. “Right,” he says, covering it with his hand where it has landed on a manuscript. “Good idea. Well, yes, certainly, I’ll do it myself next time.”
“It’s a deal,” Al says.
His smirk goes straight to Gordon’s heart.
Gordon sits like a pillar of salt. A good five minutes go by and then he places both hands flat on his desk and looks around his office. Everything before his eyes he is homesick for. His phone rings and he waits for Margo to pick it up at her end but it rings and rings and with each ring it’s as if his chances of saving himself diminish. He reaches for his coffee. He has the cup tipped at his mouth before he realizes that that black stuff isn’t dregs. In the same second it hits him that it isn’t too late! This affair in the wreckage of which he is staggering, it hasn’t happened yet!
He stands, goes over to the window and pulls it shut. Cracks his knuckles, paces. Sits back down at his desk and dials home.
“Hello?” Marcy says in her high, expectant child’s voice.
“It’s Daddy, honey. Is Mommy there?”
“Oh, hi, Daddy. Mommy’s outside hanging up the laundry. I’ll get her.”
“No, no, that’s okay. Just tell her I phoned, nothing important.” He checks his watch. Twelve-thirty. “Are you eating your lunch?”
“I just finished.” She breathes noisily. “You know what?”
“What?” He presses the receiver against his ear. He wants to hear her blood circulating.
“I forgot to say grace”—she’s whispering—“and my sandwich went mouldy.”
“Honey, it would have been mouldy before, and you just didn’t notice.” What the hell were they teaching her at Sunday school?
“No, it wasn’t mouldy before!” she cries.
“Okay, all right. Did Mommy make you another sandwich?”
“I ate the mouldy one,” she says piously.
That evening at the supper table he feels like someone who hears that the plane he decided not to board has exploded in midair. Doris and the girls seem like apparitions, Doris’s round face infinitely alive and kindly, a guardian moon. In bed he clings to her capsized body, and as if Al Yothers were nothing more than the catalyst to return him at last to this sanctified threshold, he gets an erection.
“Doris,” he moans.
But she’s asleep.
And there goes his erection.
Not his high hopes, though. Not his feeling that everything is going to be fine, that this is only the beginning, etc. An erection, even a short-lived one, that’s something in this bed.
The next day at the office, whenever he is in the corridors, he keeps an eye out for Al Yothers. To avoid him, he thinks. There is a proofreader named Tom Hooks, a surly kid with insolent little hips and fluttering blue eyes, whom he has taken mighty pains not to look at. Today, however, standing behind him at the Gestetner machine, he stares at the boy to reassure himself that his desire isn’t fatally pinned to one man but is spread out, restored to its old, harmless sprawl. Back in his office he sits at his desk and pictures Al Yothers over at the radiator, and feels, well, no more aroused than he is already. He wonders if he has ever been even half this aroused with Doris. He doubts it, although he remembers the first few years of their marriage as a time of perfect happiness. Maybe the way it works is, if you’re that happy once it vaccinates you against the possibility of being that happy again. He sits there rubbing his thighs, and the part of him that is feeling how long and bony they are, experiencing them as if with the hands of another man and thinking, worriedly, that they’re like a pair of goddamn banisters, that part seems like the last of it. The little brush fire that will burn itself out.
It’s just after four o’clock when the stevedore phones and says, “Hey,” and Gordon’s guts drain. He thinks it’s Al. “Al,” he says, and sees bombs blooming.
“No, Frank,” the stevedore says. “Frank Amis. Say, about yesterday…”
Yesterday he got held up. A shipment of pork bellies. He suggests a meeting tonight, five-thirty at the Lakeview Tavern, adding that this thing is big, real big.
Gordon says, “Drop by the office tomorrow.”
“I might not be alive tomorrow,” Frank says, which Gordon doesn’t fall for, but his head is in his hand and his heart is still banging, and so it happens that Frank is talking his kind of language. “All right, five-thirty,” he says. He then phones Doris to tell her he’ll be late.
At five-twenty, as he is putting on his coat, Frank calls back and shouts over what sounds like a foghorn that he’ll have to take a rain check. Gordon phones Doris to say he’ll be on time after all, gets a busy signal, waits five minutes, tries again. Still busy. He gives up and leaves the office.
A few minutes later he is standing at a red light across from the parking lot. The lot adjoins the cemetery where, filling the last available space on the Canary family headstone, his name, date of birth and a dash are etched. This was his mother’s doing, a deathbed effort at immortalizing her denial that he married Doris and created more Canarys. “You’ve got to hand it to her,” Doris laughed at his mother’s burial, while he reeled at the dash. He never visits the grave or even walks through the cemetery’s praised gardens, although tonight the place beguiles him. The sky above it is mauve and soft, frayed by naked tree branches, the moon like a place where the sky has thinned out, or like a moon long gone, a fossil moon. He toys with the idea of a stroll. He looks at his watch, then glances behind him for some reason, and there, hunched under the awning of a tavern, is a giant.
Al Yothers.
It’s him, all right. The orange hair. He has on a black leather jacket. He looks furtive and menacing, until he catches sight of Gordon, and then his face opens like a child’s.
“Hey!” he calls.
Gordon pretends not to hear. He turns back around.
“Hey! Mr. Canary!”
Gordon takes a deep breath and turns again. The boy is trotting over to him. “Oh, hello,” Gordon says.
“Al Yothers.” He holds out his hand.
Gordon shakes it. “Yes, I remember.”
“I wanted to ask if your rad was giving out any heat.”
Between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand he holds a stogie. Gordon stares at it and says, “Yes, I’m quite comfortable now, thank you.”
“Glad to hear it.” Al takes a last puff and flicks the cigar to the sidewalk, crushing it under the heel of his black boot. “I got a few complaints this morning about the friggin’ things still being ice cold.”
“Mine’s doing fine.”
Al nods. He smiles and looks down, not shyly but as if Gordon wouldn’t get the joke.
“Well, goodnight,” Gordon says because he knows that Al is going to ask if he wants to have a drink in that tavern behind them. Because his life up until now calls for some show of resistance, however counterfeit.
The tavern turns out to be a new Chinese restaurant that hasn’t changed the old sign, but they go in anyway, Al saying he hasn’t eaten “Chink chow” in years. When they are seated he removes his leather jacket and hangs it on the back of his chair. Today he’s wearing a blue janitor’s shirt with “Al” stitched on the pocket, which holds another cigar. He yawns and stretches. He seems breathtakingly young and exotic to Gordon, his big white hands like shells. “Hoo Wah Family Restaurant,” he drawls, reading the aluminum-foil letters hanging from a string behind the bar. He looks at Gordon. “You a family man?”
“Yes, I am,” Gordon says quietly.
“The family man is the cornerstone of civilization. Am I right, Charlie?” This addressed to the waiter, who has brought their menus.
“Family man,” the waiter says energetically. “Very good.”
“Famry man,” Al mimics before the waiter is out of earshot. He withdraws the other cigar, lights it. Exhales out his nostrils. His nostrils are huge, gorilla-sized. He looks up at the ceiling, and Gordon gazes at the pillar of his neck as he knows he is being invited to. Gordon is someone counting the seconds between lightning and thunder. It’s out of his hands, it’s imminent. A recurring dream that he should know to manoeuvre his way through except that in this dream he’s a sucker. This is the dream where he opens the door to midair and strides right out.
“What is it?” he says. Al is looking at him now, squinting.
“Shoot,” Al says, “you’re the spittin’ image of that fella on TV, who am I thinking of?”
Gordon takes off his hat and sets it on the chair beside him. “You’re from the South,” he says, changing the subject.
“Greenville, South Carolina. Population 58,161 as of 1953.” He nods to Gordon’s left. “Your coat fell.”
It has slipped off the chair. When Gordon picks it up he feels something sticky on the lapel. It was his father’s coat, high-quality camel-hair, an heirloom, and normally Gordon would be anxious to clean it right away but he just hangs it on a hook in the wall behind him, then sits down with the feeling of having crossed a point of no return. Another one. He wonders if what an affair amounts to is a series of points of no return. “Shoot,” the boy is saying, “that skinny fella with the curly hair,” still trying to figure out who Gordon looks like, and as Gordon can only imagine being mortified by the comparison he says, “Are your folks still in Greenville?”
“They were killed in a car accident when I was two months and two days old.”
“Jesus. I’m sorry.”
“Nuns raised me. I was Al for Alan but the sisters christened me Albert after Albert the Great, 1193 to 1280 A.D.” He picks up his menu and blinks hard, and Gordon fears he has opened a wound, but this isn’t grief, this is memorization. A few moments later Al looks up and starts reciting: “Moo goo guy pan—sliced chicken with mushrooms and mixed Chinese vegetables. Tai dop voy—chicken, shrimps, barbecued pork with mixed Chinese vegetables. Soo guy—buttered breast of chicken with almonds and sauce. Ma po dow fu—bean curd with minced pork and hot sauce.”
Gordon laughs, amazed.
Al signals the waiter. Word for word, in the same inert voice and gazing above the menu at a spot on the wall, he repeats the recital, adding three more dishes while the waiter and Gordon pretend that there’s nothing unusual about ordering this way. “A big amount of food” is the waiter’s only reaction, which it is. Gordon thanks God that Doris gave him ten dollars this morning. It goes without saying that the bill will be on him, not just because he makes more money but because (this also goes without saying) he will be the one to fall in love.
That he already is in love he doesn’t yet know. He sits there like a man who still takes an interest in everyday life. When the soup arrives he makes a show of savouring the aroma, and the steam fogs his glasses. The noodles are as fine as corn tassel. He winds them around his spoon. Al dices his up with a knife and fork. Al holds the floor, the theme being “Chinks,” their eating habits (slurping, shovelling it in), the food they themselves eat (Labrador retrievers and stray cats), their feelings (none). Anyone else and Gordon wouldn’t still be sitting there, but it’s as though he has to let the boy dig this hole because if they’re headed anywhere together, it’s down there.
All the same, he is glad they are by themselves in a corner and relieved when Al, after a pause, moves on to encyclopedias. Does Gordon own a set? He owns several… no, not the Encyclopaedia Britannica, although they have two sets at his office. Has Gordon read it?
“I refer to it now and again,” Gordon says. “Of course.”
“I’ve read it right through twice,” Al says. “All twenty-four volumes, start to finish. I’m on my third go-round, up to the D’s.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Everything you need to know is there. All the facts there are and ever were. That’s all I’m interested in. The facts. The truth.” He drains his glass of rice wine.
“Well,” Gordon says, “the truth is only a version—“
Al bangs down his glass. “Test me on a D fact. Something before Delilah.”
“Go ahead,” Al says, frowning.
Gordon opens his hands. “Daphne.”
“From Greek mythology,” Al fires back. “The nymph that turned into a lily pad.”
Gordon is curiously relieved. “Laurel tree, actually,” he says. “She turned into a laurel tree.”
Al blinks. “You sure about that?”
“Yes. Yes, quite sure.”
Al’s face goes slack. “Daphne, laurel tree,” he says. “Daphne, laurel tree.”
“You got the gist right,” Gordon says.
Al shoves aside his soup bowl and folds his mammoth arms and says, “Gimme some C’s. I’ve got the C’s down cold.”
Gordon doesn’t want to do this. A quiz is not what he’s here for. “I seem to be drawing a blank,” he says.
“Go on,” Al says impatiently.
So Gordon says, “Lewis Carroll.” Al gets that right. Gordon says King Charles. And concerto. The rest of the food arrives, and he says Cervantes, cubism, Castries, curlew—facts and things, words that would be in an encyclopedia, although it doesn’t seem to matter, Al takes a stab at anything and isn’t frustrated when he is wrong, even when he is idiotically wrong. Glassy-eyed he listens to the right definition and then repeats it twice. Every time he is idiotically wrong Gordon’s tender feelings dilate a little.
They carry on like this—at Al’s insistence sticking with the C’s—until the check arrives, by which time Gordon is down to words like chop suey and China. “Check,” he says, reaching for it.
“A resident of Czechoslovakia,” Al says.
If he’s joking, Gordon can’t tell.
Al picks up one of the fortune cookies from the tray and cracks it open. “The person should take it easy,” he reads. He comes to his feet. “Shoot, I was hoping to take it hard.”
Gordon is standing to get his wallet out of his coat pocket. When Al says that, Gordon freezes, and then so does Al. They stand there looking at each other like a pair of gunslingers.
“I know a place we can go to,” Al says. “Just up the street.” He strokes his own head. Gingerly pats it as you would an unfriendly cat.