He did say where he was from: a little coastal town in Washington State called Belltower. She was encouraged by this fracture in his reticence and ventured to ask what he did there.
“Lots of things,” he said. “Sold cars.”
“It’s hard to picture you as a car salesman.”
“I guess other people thought so, too. I wasn’t very good at it.”
“You lost your job?”
“I—well, I don’t know. Maybe I still have it. If I go back.”
“Long way to go back.”
He smiled a little. “Long way to come here.”
“So what brought you to the city?”
“A time machine,” he said. “Apparently.”
He had hitchhiked or ridden boxcars, Joyce guessed, a sort of Woody Guthrie thing; maybe that was what he meant. “Well,” she said, “Mr. Car Salesman, are you planning to stay awhile?”
He shook his head no, then seemed to hesitate. “I’m not sure. My travel arrangements are kind of vague.”
“You need a place to stay?”
He glanced through the window of the deli (STRICTLY KOSHER, like the sign in the Peace Eye Bookstore over at 10th and Avenue C). Evening now. Traffic labored through the shiny wet darkness.
“I’ve got a place,” he said, “but I’m not sure I can find the way back.”
Joyce suspected he was right. Coming down off some towering LSD kick, he’d probably bounce around Manhattan like the little steel ball in a pachinko machine. Joyce asked herself whether she was convinced of his harmlessness; she decided she was. Taking in strangers, she scolded herself—but it was one of those acts Lawrence had called “blinks of connection” in a poem. The grace of an unexpected contact. A kind of touch. “You can sleep on my sofa if you want. It’s not much of a sofa.”
The offer seemed to provoke fatigue in him. “I would be very happy to sleep on your sofa. I’m sure it’s a wonderful sofa.”
“Very courtly,” she said. “It came from the Salvation Army. It’s purple. It’s an ugly sofa, Tom.”
“Then I’ll sleep with my eyes closed,” he said.
She lived in a little railroad apartment in the East Village where she had moved from the dorm at NYU. It was two flights up in a tenement building and furnished on no budget at alclass="underline" the ugly purple sofa, some folding chairs, a Sally Ann standing lamp from the Progressive Era. The bookcases were made of raw pineboard and paving bricks.
Tom stood awhile looking at the books. They were nothing special, her college English texts plus whatever she’d picked up at secondhand stores since then. Some C. Wright Mills, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Aldous Huxley— but he handled them as if they were specimens in a display case.
“Read anything you want,” she said.
He shook his head. “I don’t think I could concentrate.”
Probably not. And he was shivering. She brought him a big bath towel and a cotton shirt Lawrence had left behind. “Dry off and change,” she said. “Sleep if you want.” She left him stretched out on the sofa and went into the “kitchen”—a corner of the room, really, with a sink and a reconditioned Hotpoint and a cheap partition—and rinsed a few dishes. Her rent was due and the severance check from her department store job would cover it; but that would leave her (she calculated) about seven dollars to live on until she picked up some music work or another job. Neither was impossible, but she would have to find a gig or go hungry. But that was tomorrow’s problem—today was today.
She left the kitchen passably clean. By the time she’d finished Tom was asleep on the sofa—stark stone unconscious, snoring a little. She picked up his watch from the wooden crate table where he’d left it, thinking, It must be late.
Then she did a double-take at the face of the watch, which wasn’t a watch face at all but a kind of miniature signboard where the time was written in black numerals over a smoke-gray background.
9:35, it said, and then dissolved to 9:36. The little black colon winked continuously.
Joyce had never seen such a watch and she assumed it must be very expensive—surely not a car salesman’s watch. But it wasn’t a foreign watch, either. It said “Timex” and “Quartz Lithium” (whatever that was) and “Water Resistant.”
Very very strange, she thought. Tom Winter, Man of Mystery.
She left him snoring on the couch and moved into the bedroom. She undressed with the fight off and stretched out on the narrow spring-creaking bed, relishing the cold air and the clank of the radiator, the rattle of rainwater on the fire escape. Then she climbed under the scratchy brown blanket and waited for sleep.
Mornings and evenings, she loved this city.
Sometimes she slept five hours or less at a time, so she could have more morning and more night.
Nights, especially when she was out with Lawrence and that crowd, she would simply let herself be swept up in the urgency of their conversation, talking desegregation or the arms race in some guitar cafe; swept up by the music, too, legions of folk singers arrowing in on Bleecker and MacDougal from all over the country these days; in sawdust-floored rooms filled with her poet friends and folk friends and “beat” friends, earnest Trotskyites and junkies and jazz musicians and eighteen-year-old runaways from dingy Midwest Levit-towns, all these crosscurrents so fiercely focused that on some nights she believed the pitch-black sky might open in a rapture of the dispossessed and they would all ascend bodily into heaven. Nights like that had been common enough this winter and spring that she was eager for summer, when the pace would double and redouble again. Maybe Lawrence would publish his poetry or she would find an audience for her music. And they would be at the eye, then, of this luminous vortex.
But mornings were good, too. This was a good morning. It was good to wake up and feel the city waking up around her. Since she had lived in New York the rhythm of the city had become a stabilizing pattern. She had learned to distinguish the sound of morning traffic from the sound of afternoon traffic, both distinct from the lonelier siren sound of the traffic late at night. Morning traffic woke her with promises. She did not dislike the city until noon; at noon it was coarse, loud, unruly, plain, and chokingly dull. Lunch hours at Macy’s she had written songs about the night and morning city, little spells against the crudity of midday.
Tom was still asleep on the sofa. Joyce was faintly surprised by this. She had imagined him vanished in the morning, like a dream, like smoke. But here he was: substantial in his rumpled clothes. She heard the clank and moan of the bathroom plumbing; he stepped into the kitchen with his face freshly washed and his eyes as wide and dazed as they had been the day before.
“New York,” he said. “Nineteen sixty-two.”
“Congratulations.”
“It’s amazing,” he said.
“You really are from out of town.”
“You could say that.” His grin was big and a little silly. “Feeling better this morning?”
“Better. Giddy, in fact.”
“Uh-huh. Well, don’t get too giddy. You probably need breakfast.”
“Probably.” He added, “I’m still broke.”
“Well—I can buy us breakfast. But I have to meet Lawrence at noon. Lawrence might not appreciate knowing you slept here.” Tom nodded his acceptance without asking who Lawrence might be—very courteous, Joyce thought.