I slipped into a restaurant around the corner for breakfast. I sat at a table and ordered bacon and eggs and some more coffee. The coffee was grim — I tried to drink it without tasting it. I looked at my watch. It was time to get Annie.
The watch was pancake flat, the size of a half dollar. Lou Baron had given it to me a couple days ago. First there had been a phone call one afternoon telling me about someone who owed money and hadn’t paid. I had gone to the address Baron gave me, had found the guy and had beaten him up. I had used fists on his face and feet on his ribs. The next day somebody had dropped off a package at Round Seven and had told me it was for me. The watch had been inside. Engraved neatly on the back was the legend, To Nat from Lou Baron, in tiny script. The watch even kept time.
The sky outside was seven various shades of gray. I went back to the Stennett and told the doorman to find my car for me. He brought it out from the garage and I gave him a dollar. I looked at the Lincoln and smiled. It was low and lovely with plenty of spirit under the hood. I got behind the wheel, put the top down and looked up at the gray sky again. I turned a key in the ignition and drove to the house where Annie lived.
I hit the horn. Time passed while she hurried down four flights of stairs. Then the front door flew open and she ran down the walk to the car. I opened the door for her and she bounced into the seat beside me.
She was wearing brown loafers, black tights, a soft brown skirt and a black cashmere sweater. She looked like a wood nymph. “A ride in the country,” she said. “It sounds like a groove.”
“It’s the wrong day for it.”
“That doesn’t matter, Nat. I want to look at trees and smell fresh air. I want to get high on oxygen. And it’s not a bad day.”
I told her it would probably rain.
“I hope not,” she said. “I like this car with the top down. Wind blowing my hair around. I like it.”
We drove around looking for the country and we couldn’t find it. We took one of the principal streets straight out of town and that didn’t do any good. It was just a big city street that kept on in the same vein even when the city stopped. We tried other roads, still looking for the country, and we found everything else. We found housing developments and school districts and country clubs. We found highways and freeways and throughways and causeways. We did not find the country.
“Oh, hell,” she said. “We’re halfway to Albany, I think. This isn’t working out, Nat.”
“Should I turn around?”
“I guess you might as well.”
I found a Texaco station and pulled in for a transfusion. He wiped my windshield, checked my oil and water, filled my tires. I gave him a credit card and he performed rituals with it. Then I turned the Lincoln around and aimed it at the city again.
“There used to be country,” Annie said. “The city ended at the Kenmore line and after that there was country. I used to live just inside the city line. There were big vacant lots to play in. Now they’re all ranch houses.”
She stretched out a hand. I lit a cigarette and put it between her fingers. She took a very long drag and blew out smoke.
“We used to go for drives in the country every Sunday,” she went on, “when the weather was nice. Pack a picnic lunch, spread a tablecloth or a blanket and eat outdoors. Or my old man would build a campfire and we would bake potatoes in the coals and grill steaks over it. None of the charcoal briquette stuff. Just a plain wood fire. My brother and I went around picking up dead wood and my old man would build a fire. Now they have anti-fire laws and everybody has a brick barbecue in the backyard and there isn’t any country anymore. Just a chain of suburbs running from Buffalo to New York. Let’s find some place that cooks rare steaks and makes big drinks. I want to get high, Nat.”
So we found a place just outside of Buffalo whose decor was colonial American, with hardwood Windsor chairs and ladderback barstools and plenty of wooden timbers holding up the ceiling. Anne got going with a double gin and tonic and had two more before they brought the food around. We passed up steak and settled on roast beef, which seemed to be the special. They brought us each a big slice an inch thick with roasted potatoes and creamed spinach on the side. Afterward I had brandy and she had more of the gin and tonic. She shot high as a kite.
“There’s no country anymore,” she said. “Isn’t that rotten?”
“You still playing that song?”
She had eyes like an owl. “It’s not a song. It’s the sad truth. Nothing is the way it used to be. It never is. I don’t belong here, Nat.”
“Where do you belong?”
More gin. “In a bus called Limbo on a one-way street. Going the wrong way. You remember those houses we passed today? The split-levels?”
I remembered ugly houses set row on row, like crosses in Flanders Field. They all looked different, with different paint jobs and different landscaping — but they also all looked the same.
“In a suburb,” she said. “In a fifteen-thousand-dollar split-level trap with a husband in my pocket and a baby in my uterus. Picture this. The husband works for a big company. His salary isn’t too great but they have a dandy pension plan. I have charge accounts and heavy furniture and a washing machine. And my bridge game is lousy but it’s something to do while you trade platitudes.”
It sounded familiar, I thought. It was Donald Barshter’s life.
“Where I belong,” she was saying. “By the book, by all the rules. The rules fell flat. You know why? Because I started liking jazz. All right, that’s easy — you find the husband and you make him build a stereo rig in the basement recreation area. But I liked jazz the wrong way. I went to clubs. I met men and I talked to them. I’m a good listener. I learn things.”
She was smoking a cigarette. It fell from her fingers and started to scorch the linen tablecloth. She didn’t notice it. I picked it up and put it out.
“So I learned a subculture. Isn’t that handy? I learned a subculture. I learned there were things happening that didn’t happen in split-levels. I learned that some people get along without a pension plan. And I found out something. Annie Bishop just couldn’t make it in a split-level. She couldn’t swing with the bridge-and-canasta set. She’d be living in a world without colors.”
She started to drink more gin and tonic. I took the glass away from her and told her to go easy. She pouted at me, then forgot about the drink.
“That split-level,” she said. “That imaginary split-level. I took it and I put a sign on it. Know what the sign said?”
“What?”
“That’s easy,” she said. “It said, ‘Annie doesn’t live here anymore.’ Like the song. Buy me another drink, Nat.”
She had one more drink and went over the edge. She made the john just in time and came out a few minutes later with a green look. I paid the bill and steered her outside to the car. I drove her to her apartment, carried her upstairs and undressed her for bed. By then she was out cold. I wedged her under the covers, tucked her in and turned off the lights.
When I got outside again it had started to rain. I put the Lincoln’s top up and drove back to the Stennett. I turned the car over to the doorman and went inside. There was a message for me at the desk, a number to call. I didn’t recognize the number and called from the pay phone in the lobby instead of from the phone in my room. I didn’t want to go through the switchboard.
I didn’t recognize the voice that answered. I told it who I was. Then there was silence for a minute, and then there was Baron’s voice. “Nat,” he said. “Glad you called. Get over here, will you?”