Acquainted with the Night Read online

  The old man, the one searching for 624 Avenue D, is the spectacle of the floor. Ambulatory, he spends long hours in the waiting room, where he occasionally urinates on the floor. Also, from time to time he exposes himself, spreading wide the folds of his white cotton gown with a quick flapping like a gull’s wings. This is disconcerting to new visitors, but my sister and I merely smile now, humoring him. We have found that a brief, friendly acknowledgment will satisfy him for the day. Between ourselves we call him the flasher, and giggle. “How’s the flasher today?” “Not bad. He looked a little pale, though.” Having seen his private parts so often, I feel on intimate terms with him, like family. He is not really annoying except when he gets on one of his 624 Avenue D jags, lasting for two or three days, after which he returns to simple urinating and self-exposure.

  My father, thank God, would never expose himself. The humiliation. As a child I once accidentally glimpsed a patch of his pubic hair; he looked as though he might faint with shock when he saw me in the room. My father, thank God, is in full possession of his mental faculties. Just yesterday he gave a philosophical disquisition, shortly after taking a painkiller. “There are times,” he said, “when the mere absence of pain is a positive pleasure.” He paused, and swallowed with difficulty. We could see his throat muscles straining. “That is,” he went on, “under certain extreme conditions a negative quality can become a positive one.” My heart swelled with love and pride. Isn’t he smart, my father? He cannot resist saying things twice, though, that is, paraphrasing himself, a trait I have inherited. I think it comes from a conviction of intellectual superiority, that is, an expectation of inferior intelligence in one’s listeners.

  “Six-two-four Avenue D?” The old man looms up, having padded in on soundless feet, before my sister and me in the waiting room.

  “I think it’s the other way,” I say gently. “Try that way.” He shuffles towards the door. My sister and I are chain-smoking and giggling, making up nasty surmises about the patients and their visitors.

  “That one will probably put arsenic in her grandma’s tea the day she gets home.” She points to a young girl with long gold earrings and tattered jeans, who is speaking sternly about proper diet to an old woman in a wheelchair.

  I nod and glance across the room at a fat, blue-haired woman wearing a flowered, wrinkled cotton housedress. “Couldn’t she find anything better to visit the hospital in? He might drop dead just looking at her.”

  We giggle some more. “How did the Scottish woman’s kidney operation go?”

  “All right. They took it out. She’ll need dialysis.”

  “At least she’s okay.” We lower our eyes gravely. We like the Scottish woman. There is a long silence.

  “Norman died last night,” she says at last.

  “Oh, really. Well ...” This is not a surprise. Norman was yellow-green for two weeks and wheeled about morosely, telling his visitors he was not long for this world. He convinced everyone and turned out to be right. “That’s too bad. He was nice.”

  “Yes, he was,” she agrees.

  Suddenly we are convulsed with laughter. Just outside the waiting room the old man has flashed for an elegant slender woman in a gray silk suit and bouffant hairdo, and carrying a Gucci bag. It greeted her the instant she stepped off the elevator. The astonishment on her face is exquisite and will sustain our spirits for hours.

  It occurs to me that my sister and I have not been so close since my childhood, when I used to hold the book for her as she memorized poems. I was eight when she began college. Her freshman English teacher made the class memorize reams of poetry; thanks to him my head is filled with long, luminous passages. I sat on her bed holding the book while she pranced around the room reciting with dramatic gestures:

  And this was the reason that, long ago,

  In this kingdom by the sea,

  A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling

  My beautiful Annabel Lee;

  So that her highborn kinsmen came

  And bore her away from me,

  To shut her up in a sepulchre

  In this kingdom by the sea.

  What are kinsmen, I wanted to know. And what is a sepulchre? I thought it terribly mean of her highborn kinsmen to drag Annabel Lee away, even if she did have a cold.

  “‘That is no country for old men,’” she intoned solemnly, “‘The young/In one another’s arms, birds in the trees ...’” When she came to “sick with desire/And fastened to a dying animal,” she grew melodramatic, clutching her heart and pretending to swoon. I was an appreciative audience. “‘Already with thee! tender is the night.’” She would flutter her wings like a bird, and if I giggled hard enough she would be inspired, at “Now more than ever seems it rich to die,” to stretch out flat on the bedroom floor.

  Eliot was her favorite. But even here, though reverent, she could not resist camping. “‘I an old man,/A dull head among windy spaces.’” She let her jaw drop and lolled her head about like an imbecile. She sobered quickly, though, delivering the philosophical section with an awesome dignity reaching its peak at “These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.”

  “What does that mean?” I interrupted.

  She could not tell me. She herself was only seventeen. But she said it beautifully, standing still in the center of the room, hand resting on her collarbone, head slightly cast down, long smooth hair falling over her shoulders: “‘These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.’”

  Evenings, after I held the book and corrected her for about an hour, she would get dressed to go out on dates. Indeed, my memories of my sister at that period show her doing only those two things—memorizing poetry and getting dressed for dates. She let me watch her. She kept perfume in a crystal decanter whose top squeaked agonizingly when it was opened or closed. The squeak made me writhe on the bed in spasms of shivers. She squeaked it over and over, to torment me, while I squealed, “Stop, please, stop!” She laughed. “Come here,” she said. “I’ll give you a dab.” I went. But before she gave me a dab she squeaked the top again. When she left home three years later to get married I inherited her large bedroom. She left the perfume decanter for me, and often, feeling lonely, I squeaked it for the thrill of the shivers and for the memories.

  Now she is in her forties, the mother of two grown sons. “Do you still remember all the poetry?” I ask.

  She smiles. She has an odd smile, withholding, shy, clever, and she says, “‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate.’” When she gets to “Nor shall Death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,” she stops, her voice choking. We light up more cigarettes. “Six-two-four Avenue D?” he asks us. “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” she says, stubs out the cigarette angrily, and stomps off to the ladies’ room.

  I sit at my father’s bed, waiting for the night nurse to come. The man in the next bed and his wife are trying to make conversation with my father about an earthquake in China. My father, who in good health was gregarious and an avid follower of current events, has his lips sealed in wrath.

  “Maybe he’s not quite with it, huh?” the man’s wife says.

  I rise staunchly to his defense. “Oh, he’s with it, all right.”

  She pulls the curtains around her husband’s bed, as she does every evening for fifteen minutes. I envision them engaged in silent, deft manual sex.

  “You don’t have to stay here, you know,” my father says.

  “Why not? Don’t you want me to stay?”

  “Of course.”

  “So I’ll stay then.” This is the closest I have come to telling him I love him. Not very close. I long to tell him I love him and am sorry for his suffering, but am afraid he would consider that in bad taste. My father does not consider love or sorrow in bad taste, only, I imagine, talking about them. That he is dying is an evident obscenity that cannot be spoken. I do not want to say anything at this critical moment that he would consider in bad taste, or that might imperil his final judgment o
f me. My mouth waters with the sour bad taste of unspoken words. Reality, in fact, is in bad taste.

  “Six-two-four Avenue D? Six-two-four Avenue D?” The flasher is at the bedside. I point towards the door and he moves off.

  “What the hell does he want, anyway?” my father asks.

  “Six-two-four Avenue D.”

  He shrugs and grins. I do the same, like a mirror. We understand each other.

  The next day my mother and I stand at his stretcher in the corridor of the hospital basement after X-rays, waiting fifteen furious, endless minutes for an orderly to wheel him upstairs to his bed. He moans in pain on the hard pallet and wants my mother to wheel the stretcher upstairs herself. She says that is against hospital rules. Propping himself up on his elbows to glare at her, he shouts hoarsely: “Law and order! Law and order! That is the whole trouble with some people. Rules are made by petty minds, for petty minds to obey. Throughout history, the great achievements were made by those who broke the rules. Look at Galileo! Look at Lenin! Look at Lindbergh! Daring!” This speech has been too much for him. He falls back on the stretcher, his mouth wide open, panting. I grab the back of the stretcher with one hand, the IV pole with the other, and we dash on a madly veering course through the labyrinth of the basement towards the forbidden staff elevator. Our eyes meet in an ecstasy of glee and swift careening motion. I remember how he drove me anywhere I asked at seventy miles an hour, his arm out the window, fingers resting on the roof of the car, an arm sunburned from elbow to wrist. Oh Daddy, for you I am Galileo, I am Lenin, I am Lindbergh! Daring! We reach his bedside unstopped by any guardians of the law. He grips my hand in thanks, my life is fulfilled.

  Actually, my mother is not at all a fanatical law-and-order person. Only right now she thinks, hopes, yearns to believe that if she obeys all the rules in life God will look down on her with favor and let my father live. I know that he cannot live, so I can afford to be lawless.

  I carry his urine in a blue plastic jug given to me by an orderly like a sacred trust, to present to the proper nurse. I cannot find the right nurse, they all look alike. I have never looked at them, only stepped on the toe of one, in protest. As I search, a new patient approaches me, a small woman with straight white hair drifting about her cheeks in a girlish bob. “Have you seen my children?” She has a sweet face and a gentle, pleasing voice. “No? You haven’t seen them? Two little children, a boy and a girl, curly hair?”

  I shake my head again. “I’m awfully sorry, I haven’t.”

  The next day I see them. They visit with her in the, waiting room, large, weary, middle-aged, and kind. They treat her ever so kindly in the waiting room, and she treats them with aloof politeness. An hour after they leave she stops me in the corridor. “Have you seen my children? A boy and a girl, curly hair?”

  The day before the operation, cousins whom I cannot bear arrive to pay their respects. I wish the flasher would come in and perform for them but he stubbornly stays away. I even consider going to fetch him, but that would be exploitation. My sister is doing her duty entertaining the guests. Let her. She is the big sister.

  “Take me out for a drink,” I whisper to my nephew, her older son.

  He is a smart boy, though only twenty-three. He understands that his mother and I are losing our father and must be treated like children. He rises promptly like a great blond hairy tree, six foot two, and steers me to the elevator.

  “I bet I can drink you under the table,” I say.

  I order Johnnie Walker Red, he orders Johnnie Walker Black. I wonder what is the difference between the red and the black, but not wishing to appear so ignorant in front of a younger man, I don’t ask. From the way he drinks I realize he is an adult, and feel almost resentful that he grew up secretly, behind my back. I imagine now that women look at him with lust. I try, merely for distraction, to look at him with lust but cannot manage it.

  During the third double Scotch my nephew says, “Have you met the woman who’s looking for her children?”

  “Yes.”

  “You know, I thought if we could introduce her to Six-two-four Avenue D maybe we could make a match.”

  I choke with laughter, sputtering Scotch all over the table. What a brilliant sally, a pinnacle of wit. I wish I had thought of it. Yet inside I am thinking, That is really in bad taste. Such bad taste. Young people.

  He drinks four, I drink only three. I feel old, middle-aged. What do the other drinkers think about us? I don’t look old enough to be his mother, nor young enough to be his girlfriend. They think he is a young man doing a middle-aged woman a favor, which he is. I wonder if I am boring him with my gloom. The hours I spent holding the book for his mother long before he was born or even dreamed of come back to me.

  “Terence, this is stupid stuff:

  You eat your victuals fast enough;

  There can’t be much amiss, ’tis clear,

  To see the rate you drink your beer.

  But oh, good Lord, the verse you make,

  It gives a chap the belly-ache.”

  That is unfair. He is a good boy and I love him dearly. I put my hand on his. “Thanks for getting me out of there.” What I really want to say is this:

  ’Tis true, the stuff I bring for sale

  Is not so brisk a brew as ale:

  But take it: if the smack is sour,

  The better for the embittered hour;

  It should be good to heart and head

  When your soul is in my soul’s stead;

  And I will friend you, if I may,

  In the dark and cloudy day.

  But I don’t think he cares for poetry. I doubt if his mother ever told him how I held the book for her; she is not given to discussing the past, says she remembers very little.

  The day of the crucial operation we crowd into the room to see my father wheeled out on the stretcher. There are too many of us for comfort, but what can we do? Everyone has a right to be there, everyone wants to say goodbye. Once again, his lips are sealed in wrath. You don’t care about anyone but yourself, dying. Selfish. Brain. Heartless. I shout all this at him from behind closed, withering lips. What about us? What about me? Not one word for me? His eyes open. He looks around at us one by one, enumerating the members of his tribe. He is groggy from the shot, but he says mildly, “If you’re all here, then who’s home taking care of the little girls?”

  Those are my little girls he’s talking about. He has forgotten nothing and no one, keeps us arrayed in his eye like a family portrait, precious and indestructible. My heart leaps up, to a grief that cuts like a knife.

  “Six-two-four Avenue D? Six-two-four Avenue D?” He edges up and appeals to the crowd of us around the stretcher. We ignore him. Go find the old woman with the children.

  The odd thing is, I think, when it is over and we bid goodbye to the waiting room, that all along I knew exactly where 624 Avenue D was. It was near my high school. I had a friend who lived in 628, in a row of attached two-family houses on a modest, decent street. Had I met the flasher anywhere else but the terminal waiting room, I would gladly have given him directions to find his way home. There, I was powerless. I wish I could explain that to him.

  PLAISIR D’AMOUR

  THEIR NAMES CAME TO her in a dream, Brauer and Elemi. They were a couple, close to thirty. In the dream they walked holding hands along the southern edge of Central Park, stopping to admire the restless buggy horses pawing the pavement. Then they had breakfast in the Plaza Hotel: a waiter who bowed discreetly from the waist served them eggs Benedict and ambrosial coffee. Afterwards they walked in the park, where the smell of cut grass rose keen and fragrant. As if by telepathy, they stopped walking at the same moment and sat down on a bench to talk. Vera’s first thought on awakening was that the dream had been so realistic; nothing happened in it that could not happen in real life.

  She reached for an old plaid bathrobe—originally John’s, but it had lost its aura of identity by now and felt anonymous. Vera, who was slim, had to fold over the excess
fabric and belt it securely. In the kitchen she found her daughter, Jean, just sixteen, already finishing breakfast, peering through thick glasses at Madame Bovary. The pot of coffee was waiting on the stove. Jean made it nearly every morning, using a filter, and it was excellent. When Vera praised it, as usual, Jean slowly closed the book, her eyes fixed on the vanishing page till the two halves snapped shut. All the years of inculcating good manners have worked, thought Vera.

  “Thanks. Did you sleep all right? You didn’t take any of those pills, did you?”

  She was touched by her daughter’s concern. Vera only occasionally took the sleeping pills prescribed when she left the hospital five months ago, but Jean was righteously wary of drugs. She also had strong feelings against cigarettes, abortion, and war. “No, I haven’t taken them in over a week. I slept fine. I had a funny dream, though.”

  “Oh, really? What?”

  “This man and woman with very odd names who eat at the Plaza and walk in Central Park.”

  Jean leaned forward smiling, her face resting in her palms, some strands of loose blond hair falling over her hands. “What were their names?” She was looking at her mother with almost the same eager attention she showed to her friends. Unprecedented and flattering though this was, Vera became aware that she did not wish to reveal the names of Brauer and Elemi.