52
52. Permanency does not seem to be, as yet, an aspect of the relations we explore from our dissatisfaction with the options codified social levels make available.
Bob decided to bring his wife, Joanne, to New York for two weeks, during which he moved out of our apartment and into one that had just become vacant down the hall from us. Today, I think he was convinced she would return home at the appointed time.
“Are you going to tell her about us?” Marilyn asked. She looked very worried. But I think she also felt that, if he did, it might at least bring things between Bob and his wife to some kind of conclusion, either way.
But Bob said. “Are you crazy? If I did that, she’d kill you, Chip, and me. Naw, I just don’t think she could even take that. That’s not what I’m bringing her up here for.”
“Suppose after she gets here,” I said, “she wants to stay?”
Bob humphed. “What’s she gonna stay for? She feels about me just about like my parents do. I just thought maybe we could get a few things worked out between us, and quit like friends. My folks’ll take the kids for two weeks. But how’s she gonna leave five of them behind any longer than that? After we get our thing all done, we can really be together, the three of us. …”
Joanne arrived three days later, to be followed by a couple of relatives, who looked around the city, somewhat dazedly, for four more. Cousin Louanne (dark as half-Seminole Joanne — though she swore there was no Indian at all in her branch of the family) and Joanne — both, indeed, darker than I — had sung hymns and country songs together as girls. Once, when Marilyn and I were showing them around the city, we stopped up to see Bernie at a small Broadway recording studio, where he was working with a teenage singing group and there was an extra hour of paid-for studio time. He let the two women put down a track of their full, brassy harmonies on “Yes, Jesus Loves Me”—only now one and now the other would crack up laughing, with hands over her mouth, turning away from the hanging mike in a torrent of giggles, before they ever reached the end of a chorus. “Oh, come now —!” the other would say. “Now, come on, you!”
In the very first hours, there were notes of tension between Joanne and Bob: a sudden harsh word, from one, from the other, now an angry look from Bob, now a pout from Joanne.
Twenty-two-year-old cousin Lonny was a corn-silk blond, full-bellied, small-shouldered, and far too pale for anyone to believe he was really from rural Florida. One afternoon he climbed tiredly up our four flights to sit a while in our kitchen. In his gray suit and red tie, he let me pour him a cup of coffee, while he asked: “Do you mind if I take these shoes off? I just ain’t used to the kind of walkin’ you folks do up here in New York City.”
“Sure,” I said. “Go on.”
And, under the table, he toed a new, too-tight, black loafer off a very white sock.
I commented that Bob and Joanne seemed to be having some trouble already.
Lonny picked up the pink plastic prototype automatic spring-operated toothpaste dispenser — his basement-inventor father had sent him up here to see if he could sell it to any of these northern supermarket chains — turned it over, looked at it, and set it on the table again. “Well, that’s the way they been goin’ on at one another ever since the two of ’em got together. I don’t expect it’s ever gon’ change. I like the son of a bitch — I really do. But when he run off, me and everybody else told her she was better shut of him.”
Marilyn stood at the kitchen window, looking through plants, across clotheslines, at fire escapes. She hadn’t really moved or said anything in two or three minutes.
“Lonny — ” I set the coffee pot down, folded my arms and leaned back against the stove — ”what do you think the real problem is with those two?”
“They only got but one,” Lonny said. “They’re just too damned country — the both of ’em. That’s all.”
And a day later, after a big breakfast of bacon, toast, fried potatoes, pastry, eggs, and pancakes at our place, with Joanne and me dividing the cooking, Louanne and Lonny went off to catch a cab to the airport and the plane back to Florida, leaving their country cousins to deal with New York.
Both Marilyn and I tried to be as friendly as we could. Marilyn gave Joanne a red felt winter coat. And when Bob and Marilyn were off at work, I took her on a tour, from the roof of Radio City to the Staten Island Ferry.
As we stood at the deserted rail and Joanne looked over the glass-green water at the New York skyline, I realized, while her black hair lifted and fell against the red collar, that, with only a push. … I didn’t do it of course. But it was odd suddenly to know I was capable of seriously considering murder. She turned to me then. “You treatin’ me nicer than Bob,” she told me. “He done asked me up here, and now he don’t pay me no min’ at all since I come.”
The next day, when she came over to sit for a while in my kitchen (again Bob and Marilyn had gone to work) and, at her urging, I’d gone to type up a section of my novel in the front room by the window looking into the airshaft, she suddenly set a cup of coffee down on the wing of the typing stand.
“Oh, thank you …!”
She gave me a dark smile and moved quickly away. But I was struck with the strange and awkward fact that, at no time during my life, through five novels now, had anyone else ever thought to bring me, unbidden, a cup of coffee while I worked.
52.1. Broadway theater is, of course, central to the experience of New York — though Broadway tickets were beyond what Marilyn and I could afford. But that season a new young playwright, Terrence McNally, had premiered his first Broadway play, And Things That Go Bump in the Night, starring the wonderful Eileen Hackett. The title had certainly come from the old prayer that, years ago, Chuck and I had listened to WOR’s Jean Shepherd recite, meditate on, and extemporize over, on his midnight-to-three radio program: “From ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggety beasties and things that go bump in the night, Dear Lord, deliver us.” The play had received good reviews, but it was not doing well commercially. Then The Village Voice, convinced of the work’s import, had mounted a campaign to keep it running — and the theater had actually decided to sell tickets for only three dollars each!
Yes, I was interested in seeing it. But mainly I thought it would be nice for Joanne to see at least one professional theater piece in the course of her two-week visit. With not much idea what I was getting into, then, I took the subway up to the box office and purchased four tickets — for Marilyn and me, for Bob and Joanne.
That night we went.
Set in a world that has just gone through an atomic war, the play centered on a macabre family — a mother, a late adolescent son, and a slightly younger daughter. The family suffered from some disease, or possibly a mutation, as a result of which they had to lure someone in from the outside and murder him or her every night. If they did not, the mother explained, they would turn on and kill each other. To that end, the son goes out and returns with a young man he’s picked up for the night, presumably to have sex with. As the young man talks to the son about his attempts to have a meaningful life, the boy records his conversation. When the two boys go off to make love, the daughter photographs them through a keyhole.