He ordered breakfast at a little egg and hamburger restaurant where the waitress, a tiny black woman named Mirabelle, knew their names. “You look tired,” Mirabelle said. “Both of you.”
“Coffee,” Tom said. “And a couple of those Danishes.”
“You don’t need Danishes. You need something to build you up. You need aigs.”
“Bring me an egg,” Joyce said, “and I’ll vomit.”
“Just Danishes, then?”
“That’ll be fine,” Tom said. “Thank you.”
Joyce said, “I want to be alone a little bit today.”
“I can understand that.”
“You’re considerate,” Joyce said. “You’re a very considerate man, Tom. Is that a common thing where you come from?”
“Probably not common enough.”
“Half the men around here are doing a Dylan Thomas thing—very horny and very drunk. They recite the most awful poetry, then get insulted if you don’t go all weak-kneed and peel off your clothes.”
“The other half?”
“Are lovable but queer. You’re a nice change.”
“Thank you.”
“Something’s bothering me, though.”
“That’s not surprising.”
“Tom, I know why you lied to me. That part is understandable. And it wasn’t even really lying—you just kept a few things to yourself. Because you didn’t know whether I would understand. Well, that’s fair.”
He said, “Now you’re being considerate.”
“No, it’s true. But what I don’t understand is why you’re here. I mean, if I found a hole in the ground with the year 1932 at the other end I would definitely check it out … but why would I want to live there? To catch a bunch of Myrna Loy movies, chat with F. Scott Fitzgerald? Maybe get a real close look at Herbert Hoover? I mean, it would be absolutely fascinating, I’ll grant you that. But I have a life.” She shook her head. “I think it would be different if the tunnel ran the other way. I might be really tempted to jump a few decades down the road. But to take a giant step backward—that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.”
She lit a cigarette. Tom watched the smoke swirl up past her eyes. She had asked an important question; she waited for his answer.
He was suddenly, desperately afraid that he might not have one—that there was nothing he could say to justify himself.
He said, “But if you didn’t have a life … if you had a lousy, fucked-up life …”
“So is that how it was?”
“Yes, Joyce, that’s pretty much how it was.”
“Nineteen sixty-two as an alternative to suicide? That’s a weird idea, Tom.”
“It’s a weird universe. The defense rests.”
Mirabelle arrived with Danishes and coffee. Joyce pushed hers aside as if they were an irrelevancy or a distraction. She said, “Okay, but let me tell you what worries me.”
Tom nodded.
“Back in Minneapolis I went out with a guy named Ray. Ray used to talk about World War Two all the time. We’d go to the movies and then sit at some cheap restaurant while he told me about Guadalcanal or the Battle of Midway. I mean everything, every detail—I can tell you more about Midway than you want to know. So after a while this began to seem kind of strange. One day I asked him how old he was when they dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. Ray says, 1 was twelve —almost thirteen.’ I asked him how he came to know all this stuff about the war and he told me he got it from books and magazine articles. He was never in the army; he was four-F because of his allergies. But that was okay, he said, because there was nothing happening nowadays, nothing like the real war, not even Korea had been like that. He told me how great it must have been, guys risking their lives for a cause they really cared about. I asked him what he would have done if he’d had to invade Italy. He gave me a big smile and said, ‘Shit, Joyce, I’d kill all the Nazis and make love to all the women.’ ”
She exhaled a long wisp of smoke. “My uncle was in Italy. He never talked about it. Whenever I asked him about the war, he got this really unpleasant expression. He’d stare at you until you shut up. So I knew this was basically bullshit. It kind of made me mad. If Ray wanted to live out some heroic existence, why not just do it? It wasn’t even what you could honestly call nostalgia. He wanted some magic transformation, he wanted to live in a world where everything was bigger than life. I said, ‘Why don’t you go to Italy? I admit there’s not a war on. But you could live on the beach, get drunk with the fishermen, fall in love with some little peasant girl’ He said, ‘It’s not the same. People aren’t the same anymore.
Tom said, “Is this a true story?”
“Mostly true.”
“The moral?”
“I thought about Ray last night. I thought, What if he found a tunnel? What if it led back to 1940?”
“He’d go to war,” Tom said. “It wouldn’t be what he expected, and he’d be scared and unhappy.”
“Maybe. But maybe he’d love it. And I think that would be a lot more frightening, don’t you? He’d be walking around with a permanent hard-on, because this was history, and he knew how it went. He’d be screwing those Italian girls, but it would be macabre, terrible—because in his own mind he’d be screwing history. He’d be fucking ghosts. I find that a little terrifying.”
Tom discovered his mouth was dry. “You think that’s what I’m doing?”
Joyce lowered her eyes. “I have to admit the possibility has crossed my mind.”
He said he’d meet her after her gig at Mario’s.
Alone, Tom felt the city around him like a headache. He could go to Lindner’s—but he doubted he could focus his eyes on a radio chassis without passing out. Instead he rode a bus uptown and wandered for a time among the crowds on Fifth Avenue. On a perverse whim he followed a mob of tourists to the 102nd-floor observatory of the Empire State Building, where he stood in a daze of sleep-deprivation trying to name the landmarks he recognized—the Chrysler Building, Welfare Island—and placing a few that didn’t yet exist, the World Trade Center still only a landfill site in the Hudson River. The building where he stood was thirty years old, approximately half as old as it would be in 1989 and that much closer to its art deco glory, a finer gloss on its Belgian marbles and limestone facades. The tourists were middle-aged or young couples with children, men in brown suits with crisp white shirts open at the collar, snapping photos with Kodak Brownies and dispensing dimes to their kids, who clustered around the ungainly pay-binoculars pretending to strafe lower Manhattan. These people spared an occasional glance for Tom, the unshaven man in a loose sweatshirt and denims: a beatnik, perhaps, or some other specimen of New York exotica. Tom looked at the city through wire-webbed windows.
The city was gray, smoky, vast, old, strange. The city was thirty years too young. The city was a fossil in amber, resurrected, mysterious life breathed into its pavements and awnings and Oldsmobiles. It was a city of ghosts.
Ghosts like Joyce.
He shaded his eyes against the fierce afternoon sun. Somewhere in this grid of stone and black shadow, he had fallen in love. This was certain knowledge and it took some of the sting from what Joyce had said. He wasn’t fucking ghosts. But he might have fallen in love with one.
And maybe that was a mistake; maybe he’d be better off fucking ghosts. He tried to recall why he had come here and what he had expected. A playground: maybe she was right about that. The sixties—that fabled decade—had ended when he was eleven years old. He’d grown up believing he’d missed something important, although he was never sure what—it depended on who you talked to. A wonderful or terrible time. When the Vietnam War was fought in, or against. When drugs were good, or weren’t. When sex was never lethal. A decade when “youth” was important; by the time of Tom’s adolescence the word had lost some of its glamour.