Right after Jimmy woke up, when his face hadn’t set yet, and he’d been up all night on speed, he thought he saw a trace of Bob Dylan. Ouspensky said a man could go mad looking at a broken ashtray, or was it a dirty ashtray, or could it be your own mirror when you look into it to see the person you wish you were. I want to be famous and she wants to be thin. What about the image reflected back at you, yourself in someone else’s mirror, a reflection you don’t recognize. Jane talked about not recognizing herself and together they took hundreds of pictures in photo booths. Jimmy had a few on his mirror. Jane posed in profile, certain that one side off her face was thinner, while Jimmy would drop his down, and look up only with his eyes, a cigarette hanging from his lips, a la Belmondo. He couldn’t understand why she was so attached to her family and bothered to remember or to write down the facts as she knew them, as she put it. He told her that and she said, It’s my family and you don’t have to understand.
One afternoon at Macy’s Jane was visited by a woman she’d barely even heard of, the wife of the Austrian friend of her sister, the one who had thought of her as a Lolita that summer when she was twelve. The visit was unannounced. The woman was small, like the man, and she and Jane drank coffee in the employee cafeteria, sitting at the counter. Jane was on her break. Like her husband, the wife was supposed to be a genius. One of the reasons for their marriage was to produce more geniuses. “We are Skinnerians,” she explained to Jane. “But we don’t work with rats anymore.” The woman looked into Jane’s face, studying it as if it were a maze. She asked if Jane liked her husband. She said with pride that her husband wanted her to meet and like the women he was interested in. “He’s interested in me?” Jane asked. “Because I don’t think of him that way. He’s nice, but I’ve never been attracted to him.” Jane announced her answers the way the woman asked the questions, objectively, disinterestedly. The woman paid both checks and said it was good to meet her, hurrying off to her next case, perhaps. Jane didn’t test well anyway.
To Jane it was all very European, if disturbing, like art films, like Rocco and His Brothers and 8½. Her sister would be furious. Returning to her position behind the Barbie doll counter, she observed Frank as she sold and didn’t sell dolls. She watched him and he watched her. Jane stayed late to find herself alone with him. And once alone, in his office, as he wheeled toward her on the office chair, the recognition of what she was doing shocked her into abeyance, her heart alone giving her life, beating so loudly the room itself seemed alive. The walls were her flesh and she fled.
Jane’s parents were introduced by a boy they nicknamed Stiff Jesus, because, her mother explained, he was very skinny and very tall. To this day Marty can remember what Sylvia was wearing when they first met. She has long brown hair, almost to her waist; she plays tennis, rides horses, wants to write and draw”. She was always happy, he tells his daughters. Both are in night school, working during the day, trying to get a college education at night. Her father studies Latin and remembers his conjugations. Sylvia works as a secretary. They date for seven years and each time Marty tells his mother, Rose, that they want to get married, Rose drops to the ground and says she’s dying. They eat in Chinese restaurants every Sunday and when they fight Marty leaves Sylvia standing in the middle of the street. “After one fight,” Larry tells her, “they stopped seeing each other for a whole year and your father cried in his pillow every night.” They make up. They neck in the park and are virgins when they marry. Grandma Rose does not drop dead.
I’m gaining weight, Jimmy noticed, getting up in the middle of the day, in the middle of the week. He’d fought with Maurice and Felix, and Jane was working behind a doll counter in a department store. Sometimes she scared him to death. He couldn’t figure out what she wanted. Last night he’d called her and she said she’d been reading but it sounded to him as though she were visiting one of her fabled relatives in Russia. He couldn’t talk to her. He wished he could just phone up Kerouac and talk to him, but he was rumored to be somewhere in Florida with his wife or mother, watching television and drinking beer, or that’s what people said. Sentences flowed out of him, he didn’t hold back, it just kept coming. Kerouac could write about a guy he’d just met and what it was like, introduce him to the reader, and then it’d be a dream or a party that he was at with Mardou and they’d be drinking and she’d go home pissed off and he’d come home the next day and on and on. It was all the subject of his work and it was his life. But Jimmy hadn’t met a Neal Cassady who could have taught him about life and consequently Jimmy felt he wasn’t actually living. He shared this unspoken feeling with Jane. If Jane were around today, he’d see a movie with her. She was good for movies. Like the time they went to see Broken Blossoms, in its innocence so consoling to both of them, as if there really existed a time before sex. Annoyed that there wasn’t a magic feeling between them, Jimmy walked on ahead, and Jane, not knowing that, clicked her heels slightly as they reached the subway. And she thinks she’s not unrealistic, he thought while she thought that holding onto her feelings about him was something outside her control, as was having been born into a dramatic, or crazy, family.
Uncle Larry was complaining about his bleeding ulcer and drinking milk along with a corned beef sandwich. “The combination would make anyone sick,” he said. When Jane was a child visiting him and her father at their office on Broadway, Larry seemed so casual and offhand, she never would have suspected an ulcer or imagined that anything could bother him. “Down with the bosses,” the two bosses ironically shouted to the salesmen who’d been with them for years. “Down with the bosses,” she too yelled. Larry bossed from a big office with a large mahogany desk behind which he sat and looked out the picture window over his city, talking expansively, a cigar in his mouth, his bleeding ulcer his own business. The salesmen pointed in the other direction when she wanted to find her father’s office. In a room the size of a generous closet Marty was bent over the rolltop desk covered with bills and dirty pipe cleaners. This other boss always yelled at her to keep her room clean. For reasons Jane never understood, though they were raised in that part of America with the biggest concentration of active socialists, though they shouted down the bosses, they had never even gone to lectures or belonged to the Party when everyone else they knew had. “Socialism seemed European to me,” Larry said.
Felix, her European, had done a disappearing act. Jimmy didn’t look at her the way she thought she wanted, the way men did in movies, not yet. But Frank did. He looked at her like that. With her heart in her mouth, as if suffering from a toothache, she followed Frank home, pretending, when they met on the subway, that she was going to see a movie at the New Yorker. His apartment was much worse than hers. Depressing, she thought, distracting herself from his overwhelmingly physical presence, even though he was short, for a man, not more than four inches taller than she. Her stockings pulled tight around her thighs. Frank offered her red wine that his family in Buffalo made specially. That’s where he was from — Buffalo — they ran an Italian restaurant. Big family. Italians in Buffalo. Hadn’t she heard about…