“My last guy was a Puerto Rican kid,” Max said. “He was only eighteen, but there was nothing he couldn’t strip and put back together twice as nice as the day we sold it. You know what they did? They fucking drafted him. Six months from now he’ll be building radar stations in Congo Bongo. I did my bit on Guadalcanal and this is how the army repays me.” He looked Tom up and down. “You can really do this work?”
“I can really do this work.”
“You start tomorrow.”
After work, his first priority was a place to live.
Joyce agreed. “You can’t stay at the French Embassy. It’s not safe.”
“The what?”
“The Y, Tom. It’s nothing but faggots. Maybe you noticed.”
She grinned a little slyly, expecting him to be shocked by this information. He wondered what to say. My ex-wife was politically correct—we attended all the AIDS fundraisers. “I think my virtue is intact.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Virtue?”
To celebrate his job they had come to Stanley’s, a new bar on the Lower East Side. Tom had begun to sort out the geography of the city; he understood that the East Village was even more subterranean than the West, a crosstown bus away from the subways, the Bearded Artist a recent immigrant, which was why Stanley’s sometimes offered free beer in an effort to build a clientele. Lawrence’s apartment was nearby and Joyce’s not too far from it and anyway nothing was happening tonight in the gaudier precincts of Bleecker and MacDougal.
Tom was pleased about the job, a little nervous about the evening.
Joyce offered him a cigarette. He said, “I don’t.”
“You’re very light on vices, Tom.” She lit one of her own. The office where he worked at Aerotech had been designated smoke-free; none of Barbara’s friends smoked and the salesmen at the car lot had been encouraged not to. He’d forgotten what a fascinating little ritual it could be. Joyce performed it with unconscious grace, waving the match and dropping it in an ashtray. In an hour, when the bar filled up, the air would be blue with smoke. The stern disapproval of C. Everett Koop was a quarter century away.
“At least you drink.”
“In moderation.” He was nursing a beer. “I used to drink more. Actually, I wasn’t a very successful alcoholic. My doctor told me it was too hard for me to drink seriously and too easy to stop. He said I must not have the gene for alcoholism —it just isn’t in my DNA.”
“Your which?”
“I’m not cut out that way.”
“Hopelessly Presbyterian.” She drew on the cigarette. “Something’s bothering you, yes?”
“I don’t want to fend off a lot of questions tonight.”
“From me, or—?”
He waved his hand—no, not her.
“Well, people are curious. The thing is, Tom, you’re not a label. People come here and talk about nonconformity and the Lonely Crowd and all that jazz, but they’re wearing labels all the same. You could hang signs on them. Angry young poet. Left-wing folksinger. Ad executive reclaiming his youth. So on. The real, true ciphers are very rare.”
He said, “I’m a cipher?”
“Oh, definitely.”
“Isn’t that a label too?”
She smiled. “But no one likes it. If you don’t want to hang around, Tom, you have some options.”
“Like?”
“Like, you could go somewhere else. Or you could tell everybody to fuck off. Or we could go somewhere else. Now or later.”
She sat across the table from him, one hand cocked at an angle and the smoke from her cigarette drifting toward the ceiling. The light was dim but she was beautiful in it. She had tied her long hair back; her eyes were pursed, quizzical, blue under the magnification of her glasses. He could tell she was nervous about making the offer.
Nor was there any mistaking what the offer meant. Tom felt as if the chair had dropped out from under him. Felt weightless.
He said, “What about Lawrence?”
“Lawrence has some problems. Or, I don’t know, maybe they’re my problems. He says he doesn’t want to own me. He doesn’t want anybody else to, either. He says he’s ambivalent. I’m what he’s ambivalent about.”
Tom was considering this when the door opened and a crowd rushed in from the hot evening on Avenue B. Her friends. “Joyce!” one of them sang out.
She looked at Tom, shrugged and smiled and mouthed a word: it might have been “Later.”
Like any immigrant—any refugee—he was adjusting to his new environment. It was impossible to live in a state of perpetual awe. But the knowledge of where he was and how he had come here was seldom far from his mind.
Nineteen sixty-two. The Berlin Wall was less than a year old. John F. Kennedy was in the White House. The Soviets were preparing to send missiles to Cuba, precipitating a crisis which would not, finally, result in nuclear war. In Europe, women were bearing babies deformed by thalidomide. Martin Luther King was leading the civil rights movement; this fall, there would be some trouble down at Oxford, Mississippi. And the Yanks would take the World Series from the Giants.
Privileged information.
He knew all this; but he still felt edged out of the conversation that began to flow around him. For a while they talked about books, about plays. Soderman, the novelist who tipped Tom off to the radio-repair job, had strong opinions about Ionesco. Soderman was a nice guy; he had a young, round chipmunk face with a brush cut on top and a fringe of beard under his chin. Likable—but he might have been speaking Greek. Ionesco was a name Tom had heard but couldn’t place, lost in a vague memory of some undergraduate English class. Likewise Beckett, likewise Jean Genet. He smiled enigmatically at what seemed like appropriate moments.
Then Lawrence Millstein performed a verbal editorial on folk music versus jazz and Tom felt a little bit more at home. Millstein was of the old school and outnumbered at this table; he hated the cafe-folk scene and harbored nostalgia for the fierce gods of the tenor sax.
He looked the part. If Tom had been casting a movie version of On the Road he might have picked Millstein as an “atmosphere” character. He was tall, dark-haired, lean, and there was something studied about his intensity. Joyce had described him as “a Raskolnikov type—at least, he tries to come on that way.”
Millstein performed a twenty-minute monologue on Char-he Parker and the “anguish of the Negro soul.” Tom listened with mounting irritation, but kept silent—and drank. He knew the music Lawrence was talking about. Through his breakup with Barbara and after the divorce, he had sometimes felt that Parker—and Thelonious Monk, and Miles Davis of the Sketches of Spain era, and Sonny Rollins, and Oliver Nelson—were the only thing holding him together. He had traded in his scoured LPs for the CD versions of some of these records. It was an anomaly, he sometimes thought, these old monophonic recordings deciphered by laser-beam technology. But the music just rolled on out of the speakers. He liked it because it wasn’t crying-in-your-beer music. It was never pathetic. It took your hurt, it acknowledged your hurt, but sometimes—on the good nights—it let you soar out somewhere beyond that hurt. Tom had appreciated this strange way the music translated losses into gains and it bothered him to hear Millstein doing a self-righteous tap dance on the subject.
Joyce ventured, “Nobody’s putting down Parker. Folk music is doing something else. It’s just different. There’s no antagonism.”
Tom sensed that they had had this argument before and that Millstein had his own reasons for bringing it up. “It’s white people’s music,” Millstein said.
“There’s more social commentary in the folk cafes than in the jazz bars,” Soderman said.
“But that’s the point. Folk music is like a high school essay. All these earnest little sermons. Jazz is the subject It’s what the sermon is about The whole Negro experience is wrapped up in it.”
“What are you saying?” Tom asked. “White people shouldn’t make music?”
Eyes focused on him. Soderman ventured, “The repairman speaks!”
Millstein was full of beery scorn. “What the fuck do you know about the Negro experience?”
“Not a damn thing,” Tom said amiably. “Hell, Larry, I’m as white as you are.”
Lawrence Millstein opened his mouth, then closed it. A moment of silence … then the table erupted in laughter. Millstein managed to say something—it might have been fuck you—but it was lost in the roar and Tom was able to ignore him.
Joyce laughed, too, then steered the conversation down a less volatile alleyway: she’d had a letter from somebody named Susan who was doing political organization in rural Georgia. Apparently Susan, a Vassar graduate, had been pretty wild during her Village days. Everybody trotted out Susan stories. Joyce relaxed.
She leaned over and whispered in Tom’s ear, “Try not to make him mad!”
He whispered back, “I think it’s too late,” and ordered another beer.