Across from him, Pat said in a low voice, “Do you know what this Looney Luke business means? It means—”
“I know,” he said.
“And you’re not going to do anything?”
“I did what I could,” he said. “I made my gesture.”
She arose and put out her cigarette. “The phone,” she said.
In a sweep, a flow of color, she passed him. The brightness of her blouse brushed by. Buttons, too, at the center.
How odd, he thought. Once, with his love for her, he had been on the proper track, a good husband. Now, if the idea came to him, it was a sin, and the act itself was unthinkable. Time and intimacy, the incongruity of life. He watched her go, feeling lonely, feeling that perhaps he did not have the answers even yet. The principle of expectation . . . in him yet was this model, this standard of judgment. They had been divorced for two years, and in that time he had not seen anyone who could equal her.
I hang around her, he thought. I still have to be somewhere nearby.
Returning to his records and letters, he prepared notes for his dinner music program.
At five in the afternoon his program of popular music and talk for teenagers ended. Usually he went across the street and ate dinner in a booth in the back of the café, with his script beside him, his notes and ideas for the dinner music program.
On this July afternoon, as he finished ‘Club 17,’ he noticed before the glass window of the studio a group of teenage kids standing peering at him. Lifting his hand, he made a motion of recognition. The kids had been in before. The boy with glasses, wearing a sweater and brown pants and carrying a binder and school books, was Ferde Heinke, president of a science fiction fan club called The Beings from Earth. Next to him stood Joe Mantila, very dark and squat, like a troll. Joe’s shiny black hair oozed oil down his cheeks and neck, down his bumpy flesh to the cultivated fur of his mustache. Beside Joe was Art Emmanual, wearing a white cotton shirt and jeans; he was a good-looking blond kid, with a sturdy face, blue eyes, and great laborer’s arms. The first two were still in school, at Galileo High, and Art Emmanual, a year older, was out of school and apprenticed—he had told Jim—to a printer, an old man named Mr. Larsen, who had a shop on Eddy Street and who did wedding announcements and business cards and, occasionally, tracts for fundamentalist Negro religious sects. He was a bright, fast-voiced kid who, when excited, talked with a stammer. Jim liked all three of them. Now, as he left the studio and walked toward them, he thought how important this was to him, this contact with the kids.
“Hh-hey,” Art said, “that was a cool show, you know?”
“Thanks,” he said.
2
The three kids shuffled shyly. “We gotta go,” Joe Mantila said. “We gotta get home.”
“How about playing not so much of that sentimental big-band stuff?” Ferde said. “More combo, maybe.”
“You coming?” Joe Mantila said to him. “I’ll drive you.”
Two of them, Ferde and Joe, went off. Art remained. He seemed unusually keyed-up; he stood first on one foot and then the other. “R-r-remember that time,” he said, “wh-wh-when you let us sit in the control r-r-room when you were doing the show?” His face lit up. “That was cool.”
Jim said, “I’m going across the street and eat. You want to come along and have a cup of coffee with me?” Sometimes kids trailed along with him, asking him questions about radio and music, this and that. He enjoyed their company at dinner; they kept him from feeling lonely.
Glancing around, Art said, “My wife’s with me; she wants to meet you. She always listens to your show.”
“Your what?”
“My wife,” Art said.
“I didn’t know you had a wife,” Jim said. It had never occurred to him that this eighteen-year-old boy, just out of high school, earning fifty dollars a month, might be married; he had taken it for granted that Art lived with his family in an upstairs room with model airplanes and school pennants stuck up on the walls. “Sure,” he said, “I’d like to meet her.”
Art’s wife was in the station’s carpeted lounge.
“This is my w-w-wife,” Art said, blushing and, with his hand, touching the girl on the shoulder.
The girl wore a maternity dress. Except at her waist, she was exceptionally thin. Her hair was clipped short, ragged. She wore neither makeup nor stockings. On her feet were flat slippers. She drooped as she waited, and her, face was expressionless . . .. She had a narrow, somewhat small nose. Her eyes were striking. The pupils were quite dark, and she gazed in an absorbed, preoccupied way, seeing off into space. She was a rather undernourished-looking girl, but he could not get over her eyes; they certainly were majestic.
“Hi,” he said.
“Her name is R-r-rachael,” Art said.
The girl was still staring down at the floor. On her forehead was a frown. Then she glanced up at him solemnly. She reminded him of Patricia. Both of them were small-boned. Both had an unkempt animal-like toughness. Of course, he realized, this girl was no more than seventeen.
Art said, “R-r-rachael here listens to your show all the time; she’s home in the afternoon after she works, fixing dinner. She wanted to come up and meet you.”
To the girl Jim said, “Can I buy you a cup of coffee?”
“Oh no,” she said. “Thanks.”
“Come on,” he said. “Across the street with me while I eat dinner. It’s on me.”
After a glance at each other, they followed. Neither of them had much to say; they were docile but withdrawn, as if a part of their minds was uncommitted.
In the booth, he faced them across his plate of veal chops, his coffee cup, his salad and silverware. Neither Art nor Rachael wanted any thing; they sat close together with their hands out of sight. The café was noisy and active; the counter was jammed with diners, and all the booths were filled . . ..
“When’s the baby due?” he asked Rachael.
“In January.”
“You have room?” he asked. “You’ve got a place for it?”
“We have this apartment out on Fillmore,” Rachael said. “Down in the basement.”
“How many bedrooms?”
“One,” she said. “And a kitchen and living room.”
“How long have you been married?” he asked her.
“Since April 14,” Rachael said. “We got married up in Santa Rosa . . . we sort of ran off. You know? I was still in high school, and they didn’t think we should get marred. We told the license woman we were older. I said I was eighteen, and I wrote a note—I said he’s twenty-one.” She smiled.
Art said, “She signed the note with my mother’s name.”
“We used to get out of school that way,” Rachael said. “And then we’d walk around town or just sit in the Park. Golden Gate Park. My handwriting looks good.” She put her hands on the table, and he was conscious of the long, bony, fingers; mature fingers, he thought. Grownup hands. “A-a-and,” Art said, “the sheriff, he was the best man.”
“He even had a gun on,” Rachael said. “I sort of thought maybe he might do something to us. Take us back. Afterward he came over and shook hands with Art.”
“A-a-and the judge said—”
“If we didn’t have five dollars to pay him,” Rachael said, “we didn’t have to. But we did. We hitchhiked up. We stayed there that night with a girl I knew, at her house. We told her family we were camping or something. I don’t remember. And then we came back here.”
“What happened when they caught up with you?”
“Oh, they threatened us with a lot of different things.”