Man About Town: A Novel (44 page)

He had twenty minutes to wait for the next train on the Kilmer line. Not enough time for a drink, really; not to mention that the little bar in the station didn’t look like the kind of
place where you went in and asked for a pinot gris. He went out to the street for a cigarette.

Had he ever before set foot in New Jersey? Maybe a Howard Johnson’s on the Turnpike. Past that, it was just a mythical place, the absolute inverse of Arcadia or Cockaigne. You said New Jersey and you thought of a burning rubber tire. Yet Newark, which he had casually assumed would resemble Hiroshima or Dresden, was just an ordinarily dilapidated eastern city. Except that his was, as far as he could see, the only white face in the crowd in front of the train station.

He had meant to use these minutes to think, finally, about what he might possibly say to his quarry. But he couldn’t focus just now. He scanned the landscape, trying to settle on a good site for the biotechnology innovation zone. As his head swiveled around he couldn’t help noticing that there were any number of hot men standing around. He didn’t let his eyes rest on any of them, not for a nanosecond. Someone had warned him once: don’t stare at black guys, they’ll think you’re dissing them and then they’ll cut you.

He supposed he was safe; probably there was some little perimeter around the station that was patrolled enough to assure that Amtrak passengers weren’t randomly murdered. But he didn’t look. He felt a little thrill of danger as his eyes zipped past the vacant spaces where there was something he wasn’t supposed to look at. Along with some indignation: I’m here, I have a right to look at anything. Who are you people to tell me what I can look at?

You people. Did Michael know that, deep inside, Joel still thought “you people?” Probably. He seemed to know everything else. Maybe that was what Joel couldn’t tolerate, finally: that Michael knew everything about Joel, about himself, about each moment he passed through. Or knew all he cared to know, certainly an important distinction. Joel was the only one who needed to know stuff.

He ground out his cigarette and immediately lit another; it
was a long ride to Roseville. Twelve-thirty. Michael was at Hecht’s, dealing with the lunch crowd. Of course he hated that job, must have hated his whole life: helping someone choose a tie or counting packets of underwear, going home to his cell on T Street to change, then hurrying to meet a dumpy, depressed old man who insisted, absolutely demanded that Michael tell him the obvious, that he was a dumpy, depressed old man. How tiresome for Michael, no wonder he had walked out. He had given Joel so much at such a bargain price. Michael had offered up his beauty and youth and life for the price of dinner and the occasional scarcely missed gratuity, and all Joel had had to do was shut up about it.

He had killed it. Sacrificed a chance—surely his last chance—for ordinary happiness, because he needed to know stuff he already knew. As he had made this trip in order to make the vital discovery that it wasn’t 1964 and New Jersey was not New Mexico.

He had tried happiness. If he was only going once through this life, why shouldn’t he do what he wanted, rather than what would make him happy?

Why should he have imagined that he would step off the train in some hamlet thirty miles from the city and find taxis waiting?

From the platform outside the station he saw, through a window, a ticket agent. But when he stepped inside, there was a shade pulled down over the ticket booth. On the shade, in black letters: “Ticket Agent 6 A.M.-2 P.M.” It was only one-thirty Joel bent down and called through the slot below the shade, “Hello.” There was no answer. He went back outside, stood in front of the open window to the ticket office. The agent looked back at him incuriously, as if he were an image on a television screen, not a live person standing four feet away from her.

She was a large black woman, with a blue shirt and a necktie. Joel thought, sequentially, perhaps, but it was almost as if he
were thinking all these things at once: you are a lazy Negro who got this job through some quota, I am a despicable racist, I can’t really be a racist if I recognize it, you’re lazy anyway or you wouldn’t have closed early, you’re looking at me with hatred so you must be a racist too, I would probably look at me with hatred if I were you, I just want to ask a question, can’t we just deal with each other like humans. And finally: I am enacting this national drama all by myself, she’s just sitting there while a strange man stares at her through her window.

“Excuse me,” Joel said. She just stared, and he went on. “I was wondering how you get a taxi here.”

She sighed. “I don’t know, honey.” So sadly, as if she had been wondering the same thing for years. “Maybe you could call one.”

“Uh-huh. Do you—” There was really no point asking the question. “Do you happen to know a number?”

She shook her head mournfully. Joel wondered if Michael’s mother looked like this.

“Oh. Well, could I get some change?”

“I’m closed.” Rather sternly: you can see I’m closed, do you think you’re somebody special?

“Oh.” It didn’t matter: it wasn’t as if he could call information and expect the semi-animate being at the other end to tell him how to get a taxi in Roseville, New Jersey. “Do you have any idea where Bridge Street is?”

“Bridge Street? Why, honey, that’s Bridge Street right out there. Why would you want a taxi to take you to Bridge Street?” She shook her head—this was one stupid white boy—-and probably went on shaking it as Joel made his way through the parking lot, packed tight with commuters’ cars, and out to the street.

The bridge for which the street was named crossed the New Jersey Transit tracks. It led from the right side to the wrong side. Joel had never fully understood this expression until he saw how, to the west of the tracks, Victorian piles were scattered on a gently rising hill with oak and maple trees; in their driveways were Range Rovers and Mercedes station wagons.
To the east, Bridge Street marched straight by a couple of blocks of three-story shingled tenements, then softened into a curve as it entered a sea of ranch houses. A development from the fifties, probably, the houses bought with GI loans. Each still had an antenna on the roof, though cable must surely have got to Roseville by now. Joel guessed Petras Baranauskas had not grown up in one of the big houses on the hill. He headed east.

It was Indian summer, if that phrase was still permissible. Native American summer, then; anyway, warm enough that Joel took off his jacket before he’d gone half a block. He was right, the house numbers were ascending: 1261 when the tenements gave way to what a faded sign declared was Roseville Meadows, 1507 after a bend in Bridge Street that made Joel lose sight of the station. Probably 1693 would be past that next bend.

Joel stopped, trying to ready himself. For what was he planning to do? It wasn’t just that he hadn’t thought what to say, in the second or two he was likely to get before the door slammed in his face, what few words might sum up everything. He wasn’t even sure whom the words would be for. Was there really something he wanted Petras Baranauskas to know, to carry away from this encounter? Or was it that he was trying to craft in advance his own memory? I stood before him and I said … Whichever, he was already thinking past the moment. He was walking toward Petras’s house with no intention except to walk away from it, not to be there but to have been there. This calmed him, oddly. In a few minutes, he would have been there and would be walking back toward the train station. Unless Petras actually, say, shot him, nothing was going to happen in the next few minutes that he couldn’t walk away from.

He heard singing behind him, or sing-songing, and turned to see a dark, Latino-looking woman holding the hand of a little boy with blond hair. She was walking briskly, the babbling kid could barely keep up with her. Joel realized that she was hurrying to get past him, because he was a stranger, a pedestrian in streets
not meant for them. The little boy went “Hi.” Joel answered “Hi there!” in the bright voice he used with children and the occasional slower congressman. The woman glared and tugged the boy along still faster.

Joel was a stranger on a pilgrimage, like some movie star passing through a village on his way to visit a lama. Except the way to a lama was much clearer. First, you saw some guys with saffron robes and horn-rimmed glasses, they gave you yak milk while they instructed you in the appropriate way to approach the sage, you passed through this portal and that vestibule and at last came before him. Both of you were ready, the sage nodded calmly, prepared to deliver an inscrutable answer to whatever question you had come so far to ask.

Sometimes, when he was young, Joel had thought about going to see some holy man. Auden, except he died. Kerouac, except he died. He never went: maybe he was smarter when he was a kid, maybe he knew these great men would have nothing to impart to him except Scram. Perhaps it was, objectively, risible that Joel had journeyed at last only to see a man whose great achievement was that he took his clothes off once. But the guy would probably say Scram as eloquently as Auden would have done.

Joel continued up the street, rounded the bend, and saw, just a couple of houses away: in the driveway, a young man, wearing only cutoffs, hosing down a Mustang. His muscular back was turned to Joel, he was facing an uncovered front porch on which stood the dark woman and her toddler. Next to them an old man sat in an aluminum lawn chair. The woman was saying something. The young man shut off the water and listened to her. The woman pointed straight at Joel: there he is. The young man turned.

For one vertiginous instant, the split-second it took the young man to turn around, Joel thought he was going to see the Santa Fe boy. As perhaps some believers, in the moment of their death, must be giddily confident that they are about to see the
pearly gates—Joel was just that certain. If you flipped to page 174, you would unfailingly be presented with the smile, the golden immaculate torso. Joel had, only for that instant, the sensation that life was as sure, as fixed in its order, as the pages of a magazine.

The young man turned, his coarse, stupid face unsmiling, his torso—a good third of which was blazoned with a tattoo whose argument Joel could not decipher from so far away—tensed. Not a gift he was giving, but a threat. Joel didn’t belong on this street, strangers didn’t walk down streets in Roseville Meadows. On the porch, the old man stood up to get a better look. He folded his arms across his chest, a powerful chest for such an old man.

Everyone was looking at Joel, even the little boy stood quite still, looking. Joel looked back. At the Santa Fe boy, at his son in the driveway, at his grandson, who reached up now to take his hand. The hand of a patriarch: he and his generations of men looked intently at Joel, who had come into their world like some kind of virus.

Joel called out, “I was trying to get to the train station.”

No one said anything for a minute. Ridiculous, obviously he wasn’t near the train station, he might as well have said he was looking for the Eiffel Tower.

The Santa Fe boy stepped forward to the edge of the porch and said—so gently and seriously, in a low voice Joel could scarcely hear: “You’ve come the wrong way.”

In Penn Station, Joel passed a newsstand that had an electronic ticker in the window:

President, Congress Break Budget Impasse. They’d done the deal—suddenly, it always happened suddenly. This was the
night they’d write up all the technicals, so the bill could go to the floor in the morning and all the members could fly home. This was the night, and Joel wasn’t there; probably Herb had been frantically calling him all afternoon. He was in big trouble, but if he caught the five o’clock Metroliner he could be on the Hill by eight or so. People would just be buckling down, finishing off the free pizza brought in by the Lutheran Hospital Association or the National Academy of Proctology, ready to put the finishing touches on the rural hospital amendments or the Harris—Flanagan amendment on HIV. He could still get there in time.

He sprinted for the ticket counter, stopped short. There had to be fifty people in line. They all looked like the kind of people who wanted to go to Nebraska and would try to negotiate with the ticket agent in Croatian. Joel would stand behind them, watching as the digital clock flashed 4:50, 4:55, and his head would explode. He ran to the machine where you could buy a ticket with a credit card, but there was a sign: it was out of order, thank you for riding Amtrak.

A sign: he was not supposed to catch the Metroliner. He was supposed to stay in New York and tomorrow he was supposed to go back to Roseville and blurt out some inanity at Grandpa Baranauskas.

As he rode up the escalator to the street, he thought: he wouldn’t lose his job, not for one truancy. Not to mention that he didn’t need the job, as there would no longer be any particular reason to keep his wallet stuffed with twenties. Maybe Michael had just been in a hurry? No, he would at least have called to Joel through the bathroom door. He was gone, gone.

Eighth Avenue was one-way the wrong way. If he wanted a cab to Sheridan Square he should have gone out the other end of the station. But it was still beautiful out, and what were twenty blocks or so?

At each cross street the sun, low over New Jersey, seemed to burn a path for itself straight across the island. In between,
Joel saw fathers. A million other people, but he noticed only the fathers—this one holding a kid by the hand, this one with a kid on his shoulders, this one lecturing a dark, gawky son who was … almost ripe, a few years short of legal, and already a knockout. Old man, do you know that your son is beautiful, do you know that there are predators ready to jump him as soon as you let him out of your sight? Probably he did know.

If Joel had thought about it, he would have expected that Petras was a father. That if Petras had accomplished nothing else these thirty years, he would—even if just inadvertently—have managed to breed. Why should this have made Joel feel so sad, marginal, useless? So his particular complement of chromosomes would not be replicated. So he had missed all those wonderful experiences, changing diapers, paying college tuition. Hell, he could still have that experience if he wanted—if not with Michael, then with some other kid. There were plenty of guys at Gentry ready to suck an old man dry. He could adopt any one of them and have both the cardinal joys of fatherhood. Writing checks. Knowing somebody would jump your kid as soon as you let him out of your sight.