“I’ll tell her you called, Dave.”
“No, that’s all right.” I wanted to warn him not to, but seizing on a bit of strategy with all the subtlety of an opera tenor plunging a knife into his breast, I said, “It’s no big deal. I’ll catch up with her.”
“OK,” he said.
“Don’t even mention anything,” I said.
“OK, Dave. A friend of the family.”
“No! That’s the whole thing. Don’t even mention it.” I thought for a moment and was seized from behind by what seemed a rather brilliant idea. “Dave’s not even my name,” I said.
“OK. Who is this?”
I very quietly hung up and kept my hands on the phone, just as I did when I was in Chicago and allowing myself just a few calls a day from my list of Butterfields. A wave of futility came over me, followed by an equally powerful wave of humiliation. It wasn’t until I placed the phone on the bedside table and buried my face in the cool, barely yielding pillow that I remembered this hadn’t been one of my ordinary long-shot phonecalls: I’d just been very close to Jade; I still had the phone numbers; I still had an address; and I was loose in the world and unstoppable.
I showered and rang up room service and had them send me French toast (what Hugh called “lost bread”), ham, orange juice, and a pot of coffee. I had a wedge-shaped view from my window and I watched the Saturday shoppers ten floors below streaming past me like the world viewed from a box camera. How beautiful it all seemed…
I read the newspaper as I ate breakfast like a man with a stable life. Despite the agonies of expectation, I felt I sat in the lap of towering luxury. I ate as slowly as I could, read as slowly as I could, and would have liked to have tied sandbags to the hands of time. Since the day of the fire I had wanted no more of time than for it to move swiftly and humbly along, like a nun in the rain, but now my life had texture again.
I noticed in the newspaper that Krapp’s Last Tape was being performed that night in a small theater on the East Side. It was my favorite Beckett play and I remembered that Ann liked it, too. Tickets only cost four dollars and I could actually afford to attend. Impulsively, I called Ann.
“Sorry to interrupt,” I said. “But I was wondering if you’d like to see a play tonight?”
“Not really. Hugh called.”
“That’s good,” I said. I don’t know what I meant. I might have been feeling all of us coming together again.
“Hugh’s in town with his new girl,” Ann said. “They went to Chinatown. They’re buying spices and oils. She’s also going to introduce Hugh to a healer, a Chinaman much older than the century, who’s going to divulge certain secrets of herbal teas. She’s so much better for him than I am.”
“So are you going to see Hugh tonight?”
“No. They’re going back to New Jersey. Where I’m sure they belong.” Ann laughed; she sounded edgy and she was poking around trying to locate the exact dimensions of her sadness, jabbing at her feelings as if with a stick.
“And you don’t want to see Krapp’s Last Tape?”
“I don’t think so.”
“My treat?”
“I said no.”
We were silent for a moment.
“So should I still give you a call around six?” I said.
“Only if you want to,” answered Ann.
Suddenly restless, I left the hotel and headed for the streets.
I wandered uptown on Fifth Avenue starting at 34th, gazing into the generous-looking windows of electronics shops that featured pocket cameras, battery-operated tape recorders, and short-wave radios. While somewhere near, across the street, or perhaps next door, Hugh and Ingrid were smiling uncertainly at a small circular window with eight-inch glass behind which stood a miniature red wagon that held a pair of diamond and emerald earrings. It was their mild misfortune to have the tastes and appetites of the rich and to suffer the wanting of things they couldn’t even remotely afford—whereas I walked the same street and noted that the carved Mexican chess set could be mine if I wanted it, likewise the Austrian binoculars, and likewise the Japanese setting for eight, with soup bowls and a covered dish, painted my favorite shades of blue and yellow, and marked down from thirty-five dollars to nine.
I could explain this so much better if I’d lived in some other time, if the story of my love was a true ballad, if I could shake my fist at the sky and believe not that I was gesturing at layers of ozone and oxygen, at chunks of mineral and pockets of gas, but at heaven, at a real heaven, alive with intelligence, churning out time and circumstance.
I was walking up Fifth Avenue to pass an hour or two before it was time to call Ann. Hugh was with his new lover remembering the things he’d been taught to want when he was young. Who knows how many people were out there with us? A million seems a fair guess. New York is the place in America where you’re most likely to meet someone you know; it’s our capital of surprise encounters. If you stay there long enough you might see everyone you ever knew.
I’m thinking of a skeleton bent expectantly over a radar screen and Hugh and I are blips of light heading into each other’s path with the blind imperiousness of comets.
We are blind to the future. We can barely hold on to our strange versions of the past. We see only a little of what is directly before us. We know almost nothing. The only way we can stand it is not to care. I care and I can’t stand it.
I should just breathe in and out and be brave. But not knowing what is going to happen next and living with the hope that whatever it is it won’t be too difficult to understand is like driving at top speed with the windshield completely painted over with a picture of where you used to live.
I had been looking in the window of the Doubleday Bookstore. I was thinking of going in to buy Ann a book. It had once been a common thing for me to bring her things to read, trading her a copy of Jews Without Money for The Good Soldier or The Subterraneans for Strait Is the Gate. We were so entertained by our differences. And I was thinking that a part of that pleasure might be recaptured if I brought her a book. But nothing on display in the window seemed right for Ann and I couldn’t think of anything I’d read recently that I wanted to give her. I turned around and I saw that across the street and a little to the north was Tiffany’s. Jade and I once saw the movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s. We’d skipped school and watched it at the Clark Theater in downtown Chicago, and when Audrey Hepburn went searching for her cat in the rain Jade and I sat sobbing in that empty theater, squandering our emotions with the abandon of drunken pirates reeling through port with a sack full of gold.
I thought that I would go and take a close look at Tiffany’s. If I saw Jade soon, it would be something I could tell her about. I walked to the corner and waited with about fifty other people for the light to change. I was folded into the crowd and feeling poorly dressed. In Chicago, a city of blondes, I always felt dashingly Semitic, but here in New York, surrounded by men in dark suits and inkwell eyes, by women with huge spreading mantles of electrified black hair, in that mass of silk ties and jewelry, I was overwhelmed by the classiness of Manhattan and had the hick’s reflexive comeback: Are these people for real? It was in the middle of the day and I could have been standing in the lobby of the Opera House. As subtly as I could, I glanced from face to serious face, at the large noses that were displayed like genetic trophies, at the furry eyebrows and four o’clock shadows, at a powder blue beret, a shaved head, a teenager with a red velvet yarmulke.
And then I happened to let my glance drift to the other side of the street where a knot of pedestrians just like the one I stood in was waiting for the light to change. And there was Hugh, standing at the edge of the curb and staring directly at me. Next to him was a tall woman with reddish braids wearing a sleeveless shirt and a denim skirt. She was holding a shopping bag and looking straight up into the sky. I followed her gaze and saw a small plane expelling gauzy smoke and sky-writing a message: and H, an O, a V…