He looked up at her and managed a smile. A certain effort there, she thought.
“No,” he said. “Not really. I figured it out. New York City. I’m in New York. But the date …” He held out his hands in a helpless gesture.
Oh, Joyce thought. But he wasn’t an alcoholic. His eyes were bright and clear. He might have been schizophrenic, but his face didn’t radiate the pained perplexity Joyce had seen in the faces of the schizophrenics she’d met. (There had been a few, including her uncle Teddy, who was in a “care home” upstate.) Not an alcoholic, not a schizo—maybe he had taken something. There were some odd pills circulating around the Village these days. Dexadril was popular, LSD-25 was easy to come by. An out-of-towner who had picked up something at the Remo: that was possible. But not really a tourist. The man was dressed in jeans and a cotton shirt open at the collar, and he wore the clothes comfortably; they weren’t some outfit he had cobbled together for an afternoon of slumming. So perhaps he is One of Us after all, Joyce thought, and this fraternal possibility moved her to sit down next to him. The bench was wet and the rainwater soaked through her skirt; but she was already wet from dashing out of the West Fourth Street station of the IND. Okay to be wet on a cold afternoon at dusk because eventually you’d find a comfortable place to get dry and warm and then it was all worth it. “You look like you could use a cup of coffee.”
The man nodded. “Sure could.”
“You have money?”
He touched his left hip. Joyce heard the change jingle in his pocket. But his face was suddenly doubtful. “I don’t believe I do.”
She said cautiously, “How do you feel?”
He looked at her again. Now there was focus in his eyes— he understood the drift of the question.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know how this must seem. I’m sorry I can’t explain it. Did you ever have an experience you just couldn’t take in all at once—something so enormous you just can’t comprehend it?”
The LSD, she thought. Down the rabbit hole for sure. A naif in chemical wonderland. Be nice, she instructed herself. “I think coffee would probably help.”
He said, “I have money. But I don’t think it’s legal tender.”
“Foreign currency?”
“You could say that.”
“You’ve been traveling?”
“I guess I have.” He stood up abruptly. “You don’t have to buy me a coffee, but if you want to I’d be grateful.”
“My name is Joyce,” she said. “Joyce Casella.”
“Tom Winter,” he said. Early in the month of May 1962.
She bought coffee at an unfashionable deli where no one would recognize her: not because she was embarrassed but because she didn’t want a crowd chasing this man—Tom Winter—away. He was dazed, numbed, and not entirely coherent; but beneath that she was beginning to sense a curious edge, perhaps the legacy of whatever journey had brought him here, or some ordeal, a tempering fire. She talked about her life, the job she’d lost at Macy’s book department, her music, relieving him of the need to make conversation and at the same time letting her eyes take him in. Here was a man maybe thirty years old, wearing clothes that were vaguely bohemian but not ragged, a traveler with traveler’s eyes, who wasn’t skinny but had the gauntness of someone who had ignored meals for too long.
He didn’t want to talk about himself or how he’d arrived here. Joyce respected that. She’d met a lot of folks who didn’t care to talk about themselves. People with a past they wanted to hide; or people with no past, refugees from the suburbs with grandiose visions of the Village inferred from television and all those self-righteous articles in Time and Life. Joyce herself had been one of these, an NYU undergraduate in a dirndl skirt, and she respected Tom’s silence even though his secrets might be less prosaic than hers.
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.