I had met Giddle, but she was of little real help. The stream of New York, at least the one I imagined, moved around her as it did around me. She seemed as isolated as I was, which was troubling, because she’d been in New York, as far as I could tell, for many, many years. She would tell me about herself but it often contradicted something she’d said on a different day. Once she said she was raised in a Midwestern Catholic orphanage. We wore green skirts, she told me, white blouses, white bobby socks, saddle shoes, green jackets. We watched the nuns shower. But on another quiet morning at the diner, she told me her father sold appliances. They’d lived in Montreal. Her mother stayed home, was always there when Giddle returned from school. She had three brothers. Got an F in French. And I looked at her and nodded and realized she had forgotten she’d told me about the nuns a few days earlier.
Something would happen, I was sure. A job, which I needed, but that could isolate a person even further. No. Some kind of event. “Tonight is the night,” I later believed I’d told myself on that particular night when I heard the music and Nina Simone’s voice, walked into the bar on Fourteenth Street, and met the people with the gun. But in truth I had not told myself anything. I had simply left my apartment to stroll, as I did every night. What occurred did so because I was open to it, and not because fate and I met at a certain angle. I had plenty of time to think about this later. I thought about it so much that the events of that evening sometimes ran along under my mood like a secret river, in the way that all buried truths rushed along quietly in some hidden place.
* * *
“This is my wife,” the nasal man in elegant clothes said as I sat down next to them at the bar. “Nadine.”
He said it again. “Nay-deeen,” and looked searchingly at her.
She ignored him, as if she were used to this audible pondering of her Nadine-ness in bars, for the benefit of strangers.
“We were at a wedding,” Nadine said, turning to me. “They asked us to leave. They asked Thurman to leave, I mean. But I don’t like weddings anyway? They make my face hurt?”
That was how she spoke.
“Why did they want you to leave?” I asked, but I could sense why. Something about their presence in an empty bar many levels below what the man’s clothes might suggest.
“Because Thurman lay down in the grass?” Nadine said. “He started taking pictures of the sky. Just blue sky, instead of the bride and groom. He’d had a few too—”
“I did not have a few too. I was looking for something decent to photograph. Something worth keeping. For posterity.”
“Oh, posterity,” Nadine said. “Sure. Great. If you can afford it. You could have just told Lester you didn’t want to be the picture taker.”
There was a camera sitting in front of him on the bar, an expensive-looking Leica.
“You’re a photographer?” I asked him.
“Nope.” He smiled, revealing a tar stain between his two front teeth.
“But the camera—” I couldn’t think of how to say it. You have a camera but you aren’t a photographer. I sensed he would only keep meandering away, like something you are trying to catch that continually evades your grasp.
“Better to say yes,” Thurman said, “and then disappoint people. I mean really let them down.”
“Lord knows you’re good at that,” Nadine said in a quiet voice.
“I’m talking about building a reputation.”
“So am I,” she said.
“All I want,” Thurman said, “is for people to stop asking me to come to their weddings. And funerals.”
“I don’t mind funerals?” Nadine said. “Except when they buried my daddy in a purple casket. That was awful.” She turned to me. “Thurman knew my daddy? Daddy was a mentor to him? A teacher?”
“A mentor,” I repeated, hoping this might lead somewhere, to some explanation of who she and Thurman were. Because they were someone or something, I was sure of it.
“Well, my daddy was a, I guess you could say pimp. Pimp is acceptable — I mean now that he’s dead. And you know what? People don’t say procurer anymore.”
I thought of the narrow wing tips in tropical bird colors. Who knew what was true.
“And my mother was a whore, so they got along perfect.”
Probably nothing was true, but I liked the challenge of trying to talk to them. I had spoken to so few people since arriving that it felt logical to interact in this manner. It was direct and also evasive, each in a way that made sense to me.
“May he rest in peace,” Thurman said. “A gentleman. I wanted to ask him for your hand in marriage. You were fourteen and goddamn. I wanted to just marry the pants off you.” He grinned and showed the ugly stain on his teeth. “But then there was no point. It wasn’t marrying to get in your pants, since you were allowing it. Not with me. That motherfucker you did marry, later on.”
Nadine frowned. “Do you want a purple casket, Thurman? Because Blossom might have one all picked out for you. With a copper millennial vault, to preserve your—”
He got up, walked to the end of the bar, and aimed his camera at a sign above the register. SORRY, NO CREDIT.
Three or four drinks in, still they hadn’t asked me anything. But what interesting thing did I have to tell? I was content to listen to their stream of half reports on people I’d never heard of, stories I could not follow, one about a baby named Kotch. “This lady was nursing him,” Nadine said, “and then another lady and you begin to think, wait a minute, whose baby is Kotch? I don’t know who was his mother and who was a wet nurse—”
“I’ll make you a wet nurse,” Thurman said as he grabbed Nadine and put his hand between her legs. She twisted away and then she was prattling about a McDonald’s she once went to in Mexico. I had been in a McDonald’s commercial when I was in high school, and I thought, as Nadine spoke, that it might be a story I could share with them.
“McDonald’s is supposed to be the same everywhere, right? Well, not in Mexico. They Mexicanize it. Hamburguesa con chile. No fries—fri-jol-es. I was with my ex. We were starving and I was ready to eat beans. We’re at the counter and find out we have no money. He had lost his wallet.”
She went on about this ex, the revolution he had been fomenting that never took place and had led to their harsh and vagrant life in the mountains of northern Mexico, the hole in his pocket that his wallet wriggled through, leading to his inability to provide for her the most fundamental thing — a McDonald’s hamburger. That was how she put it, that he couldn’t provide even a hamburger. After which she left him and went to Hollywood, where the nightmare really began, a series of episodes and hard luck that involved rape, prostitution, and an addiction to Freon, the gas from the cooling element in refrigerators.
“What you get,” Thurman said when she was finally finished, “for marrying a motherfucker.”
“I don’t want to talk about him. And stop calling him that, would you?”
“You brought him up.”
“Only to tell her about the Mexican McDonald’s.”
“I was in a McDonald’s commercial,” I said.
“Oh, you’re an actress!”