| 13 |
Peter stayed with Gloria, vacating the 113th Street room, for another week of surrogate marriage. Gloria forgave him. “I don’t hold grudges,” she said begrudgingly. “None of us is perfect.” “You are,” he said, patting her ass — a secret kidder. He returned to the Goodwill couch, the bedroom denied him as part of the terms of his return, and banished, spent his nights and days there, half asleep, an exile, retired from the business of the world. He slept for almost three days, between dreams, exhausted, catching up.
“Aren’t you going to go to work any more,” she asked one morning, not wanting to nag but worried about loafers — her father, when he was alive, a loafer.
“Yeah, Glory,” he said, “one of these days I’m going to get up and …” Yawning.
“You’ll lose both your jobs, Peter, and what about school — do you want to throw away everything?” She worked herself into concern.
He opened his eyes only long enough to see that there was nothing to see. “Well,” he drawled, “the machine, the old machine slows down after a while, getting old.” He felt the years assault him, his hair turning secretly gray.
Gloria went to the bathroom to put on, as she called it, her face, and returned with an argument. “What do you think you’re talking about?” she yelled at him. “You’re just a kid. You got a whole lifetime ahead of you. How old are you, anyway? Twenty-eight?”
Almost twenty-seven. “Kind of tired, Glory. Can’t think of anything I want to do — sleep is all.”
“Peter,” she yelped, shaking him roughly. “Tomorrow you’re going to work, you hear me, or so help me, out you go.”
“I think you’re right,” he said.
“Promise me you’ll go to work tomorrow,” she said, “at least to one of your jobs.”
“You have only to nag,” he said, “and I gladly …” While she was waiting for him to finish his sentence, he stole a few seconds of uninterrupted sleep.
“What? Peter, it’s a sickness, sleeping like that.” She poked him in the side with her elbow. “Wake up.” She shook him, dislodging fragments of memory — his father went by, singing to himself.
“Can’t sleep when you shake me like that, Glory.”
She rolled him onto the floor. “Tomorrow you go to work, do you hear me?”
“Take my money,” he mumbled, “take my life, but spare this old gray head.” He dozed on the rug where he had landed, making the best of a hard bed. Money is honey, his father was saying to him — a first principle of natural lore.
“A man who doesn’t work has no self-respect,” she said, prodding him with her toe.
“I’ll work,” he said. “I’ll work. Promise. Work.” His father was going somewhere, leaving. I wish you the best, Peter, he said, everything — all of it. Whatever you do, I don’t want you to be a bum like your brother — and I’d tell Herbie that to his face if he were here.
“No one respects a man that doesn’t work.”
“Money is honey,” he said.
She tried tickling.
“Ummmmm. That’s nice.”
“Get up, Peter. Ira Whimple will be here in a few minutes.”
That got him. He lifted his head from the rug, opened the slits of his eyes. “You’re kidding me?”
“Maybe I am and maybe I’m not. Anyway, as I told you before, any friend of Herbie’s …”
He covered his ears, heard the roar of oceans.
“I have to go now,” she said. “I left a shopping list for you on the highboy — you don’t have to do it if you don’t want to,” she added. “There’s some coffee I made in the pot — all you have to do …”
Her words buzzed harmlessly in the air. As soon as his head touched the rug, he was asleep.
“I want you to see the way Peter can button his own coat,” his mother was saying. “He’s only five and he buttons his own coat with either hand, with his eyes closed if necessary. Come on up here, dear, and show everyone.”
Big for his age — he looked more like fifteen than five — he was embarrassed going up on the stage in short pants.
“He could tie his shoes by himself,” his mother added, “when he was only three and a half.” The enormous crowd cheered. “You can imagine how proud I am of him,” his mother said. “Go ahead, dear. Show them how you button your coat. He tends to be shy,” she explained to the crowd. “Show them, dear.”
It took him a moment to discover it: there were no buttons on the coat he was wearing. There was a zipper at the bottom, which turned out to be immovable — it was his oldest coat. He tugged at it in desperation, unable for the life of him to get it up; the tab of the zipper came loose in his hand.
The crowd hooted.
“Tie your shoes,” his mother stage-whispered from the wings. “Your shoes.”
He bent down reluctantly to tie his shoes, but because of the tightness of his pants — who but a prodigy could have such luck? — he was unable to reach his feet.
The crowd dispersed, audibly disappointed.
“Ask me to do something hard,” he yelled at the crowd, “something impossible.” No one listened.
“Come on away, dear,” his mother said gently. “You’ve done very well.”
“I’ve done nothing,” he cried.
“And who can say he’s done more,” she said.
The next morning Peter went to work. He fell asleep on the train and missed his stop, was shaken awake and evicted at 242nd Street, which was, he was told, the end of the line. Why the hell was he always falling asleep? And worse: why did he spend so much time awake? Ha! Who’s awake? He stood cross-legged on the platform and dozed. Each waking was an opening of wounds, a discovery of new losses. Too late to pick up the school bus and make his rounds, a man who dreamed of responsibility, Peter planned to call the Collegiate School and offer his regrets, thought seriously about it, wandered into a phone booth and actually called. He was surprised when someone answered — who knows what else he had dreamed was real!
“I’m afraid you have too many other interests,” the woman who ran things, the vice-principal and director’s wife, told him. Still drowsy, Peter was convinced, exalted by the insight — trains roaring by outside the booth — that too many other interests was his very problem. “In that case, I’d better give this job up,” he said, yawning.
“What about the children?” she said. “Think of the children.”
“I’ll be there tomorrow,” he promised.
He took the subway to Columbia, and while planning his day, had breakfast at Bickford’s: the 59-cent special (“Juice, I fried egg, sausage, potatoes, English muffin and coffee”). The comfort of the meal was not only that it was a bargain, but that everything — some things more than others — had the same reliable taste.
Whenever he was awake he had the obsessive urge to do something, aware as he sat, doing nothing, with nothing to do — no appetite even to eat — that he was wasting his life. He had only to look up; at the table in front of him (behind, if he was facing the other way), studying the New York Times, his face almost totally obscured, was someone familiar — the man he had knocked down in the 113th Street bathroom. It woke Peter momentarily. He wolfed down his meal — a breakfast of his own flesh — sitting sideways as he ate, to avoid being recognized. Embarrassed, he left suddenly — food still on his plate — and bumped into the man ahead of him at the door, who, on turning around, turned out to be Harry. “Excuse me,” Peter said, stepping back. Harry nodded darkly, straightened his tie, kept Peter waiting. They went off, not quite acknowledging each other, in opposite directions.