Coming home was a different story.
He was thinking about it during his last hour on the job, and by the time he reached it he was walking all the way over at the edge of the sidewalk, as far from the building’s entrance as he could get without stepping down into the street. He was like an acrophobe edging along a precipitous path, scared to look down, afraid of losing his balance and falling accidentally, afraid too of the impulse that might lead him to plunge purposefully into the void.
He kept walking, eyes forward, heart racing. Once he was past it he felt himself calming down, and he bought his two bottles of beer and his pack of cigarettes and went on home.
He’d get used to it, he told himself. It would get easier with time.
But, surprisingly enough, it didn’t. Instead it got worse, but gradually, imperceptibly, and he learned to accommodate it. For one thing, he steered clear of the west side of Eighth Avenue, where the Rose of Singapore stood. Going to work and coming home, he kept to the opposite side of the street.
Even so, he found himself hugging the inner edge of the sidewalk, as if every inch closer to the street would put him that much closer to crossing it and being drawn mothlike into the tavern’s neon flame. And, approaching the Rose of Singapore’s block, he’d slow down or speed up his pace so that the traffic signal would allow him to cross the street as soon as he reached the corner. As if otherwise, stranded there, he might cross in the other direction instead, across Eighth Avenue and on into the Rose.
He knew it was ridiculous but he couldn’t change the way it felt. When it didn’t get better he found a way around it.
He took Seventh Avenue instead.
He did that on the weekends anyway because it was the shortest route. But during the week it added two long crosstown blocks to his pedestrian commute, four blocks a day, twenty blocks a week. That came to about three miles a week, maybe a hundred and fifty extra miles a year.
On good days he told himself he was lucky to be getting the exercise, that the extra blocks would help him stay in shape. On bad days he felt like an idiot, crippled by fear.
Then the Albanian got fired.
He was never clear on what happened. One waitress said the Albanian had popped off at the manager one time too many, and maybe that was what happened. All he knew was that one night his relief man was not the usual wild-eyed fellow with the droopy mustache but a stocky dude with a calculating air about him. His name was Dooley, and Paul made him at a glance as a man who’d done time. You could tell, but of course he didn’t say anything, didn’t drop any hints. And neither did Dooley.
But the night came when Dooley showed up, tied his apron, rolled up his sleeves, and said, “Give her my love, huh?” And, when Paul looked at him in puzzlement, he added, “Your girlfriend.”
“Haven’t got one,” he said.
“You live on Eighth Avenue, right? That’s what you told me. Eighth and Sixteenth, right? Yet every time you leave here you head over toward Seventh. Every single time.”
“I like the exercise,” he said.
“Exercise,” Dooley said, and grinned. “Good word for it.”
He let it go, but the next night Dooley made a similar comment. “I need to unwind when I come off work,” Paul told him. “Sometimes I’ll walk clear over to Sixth Avenue before I head downtown. Or even Fifth.”
“That’s nice,” Dooley said. “Just do me a favor, will you? Ask her if she’s got a sister.”
“It’s cold and it looks like rain,” Paul said. “I’ll be walking home on Eighth Avenue tonight, in case you’re keeping track.”
And when he left he did walk down Eighth Avenue — for one block. Then he cut over to Seventh and took what had become his usual route.
He began doing that all the time, and whenever he headed east on Twenty-second Street he found himself wondering why he’d let Dooley have such power over him. For that matter, how could he have let a seedy gin joint make him walk out of his way to the tune of a hundred and fifty miles a year?
He was supposed to be keeping it simple. Was this keeping it simple? Making up elaborate lies to explain the way he walked home? And walking extra blocks every night for fear that the Devil would reach out and drag him into a neon-lit hell?
Then came a night when it rained, and he walked all the way home on Eighth Avenue.
It was always a problem when it rained. Going to work he could catch a bus, although it wasn’t terribly convenient. But coming home he didn’t have the option, because traffic was one-way the wrong way.
So he walked home on Eighth Avenue, and he didn’t turn left at Twenty-second Street, and didn’t fall apart when he drew even with the Rose of Singapore. He breezed on by, bought his beer and cigarettes at the deli, and went home to watch television. But he turned the set off again after a few minutes and spent the hours until bedtime at the window, looking out at the rain, nursing the beers, smoking the cigarettes, and thinking long thoughts.
The next two nights were clear and mild, but he chose Eighth Avenue anyway. He wasn’t uneasy, not going to work, not coming home, either. Then came the weekend, and then on Monday he took Eighth again, and this time on the way home he found himself on the west side of the street, the same side as the bar.
The door was open. Music, strident and bluesy, poured through it, along with all the sounds and smells you’d expect.
He walked right on by.
You’re over it, he thought. He went home and didn’t even turn on the TV, just sat and smoked and sipped his two longneck bottles of Bud.
Same story Tuesday, same story Wednesday.
Thursday night, steps from the tavern’s open door, he thought, Why drag this out?
He walked in, found a stool at the bar. “Double scotch,” he told the barmaid. “Straight up, beer chaser.”
He’d tossed off the shot and was working on the beer when a woman slid onto the stool beside him. She put a cigarette between bright red lips, and he scratched a match and lit it for her.
Their eyes met, and he felt something click.
She lived over on Ninth and Seventeenth, on the third floor of a brownstone across the street from the projects. She said her name was Tiffany, and maybe it was. Her apartment was three little rooms. They sat on the couch in the front room and he kissed her a few times and got a little dizzy from it. He excused himself and went to the bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror over the sink.
You could go home now, he told the mirror image. Tell her anything, like you got a headache, you got malaria, you’re really a Catholic priest or gay or both. Anything. Doesn’t matter what you say or if she believes you. You could go home.
He looked into his own eyes in the mirror and knew it wasn’t true.
Because he was stuck, he was committed, he was down for it. Had been from the moment he walked into the bar. No, longer than that. From the first rainy night when he walked home on Eighth Avenue. Or maybe before, maybe ever since Dooley’s insinuation had led him to change his route.
And maybe it went back further than that. Maybe he was locked in from the jump, from the day they opened the gates and put him on the street. Hell, from the day he was born, even.
“Paul?”
“Just a minute,” he said.
And he slipped into the kitchen. In for a penny, in for a pound, he thought, and he started opening drawers, looking for the one where she kept the knives.