Ending (8 page)

Obediently I went toward the sound of the voice and saw in the square of yellow light that others were already gathered. It was the same sort of auction that we had attended on summer nights years ago and I remembered that I always sat up near the front, innocent and free from the possibility of coercion, while my parents would cautiously sit in the last row.

Once the auctioneer had given me a plastic letter opener inscribed Willie J. Parnes 25 Years Atlantic City N.J. “THIS IS ONLY THE BEGINNING FOLKS ONLY THE BEGINNING OF THE GIVEAWAY TRUST ME IF YOU’LL ONLY TRUST ME MOVE A LITTLE CLOSER HONEY I DON’T BITE CHOMP CHOMP,” and he held a set of clicking false teeth in his hand. Then he gave me a small American flag and I waved it in triumph at my parents, who moved closer and closer, a row at a time, as if they were ambushing the enemy.

They may have bought other things but I remember a radio, compact and ivory, that stood on our refrigerator at home after the vacation. Voices and music faded and blared, faded and blared, interrupted by fits of static for which my father beat it as if trying to revive someone in a terrible spasm of coughing. “Damn radio, damn radio! Oh, that bastard!” And one memory of the summer was less than perfect.

A small knot of people were in the auction room now, sitting together up front as if they were warming themselves at a hearth. A black woman smiled at me and removed her massive handbag from the folding chair next to hers, and I sat down.

“He just beginning,” she said. It was as if we were in church and I had not missed the opening remarks of the minister.

I wondered briefly what I was doing there then, as if I had been mugged and shanghaied and was just struggling to come to myself again. I thought, I should be home now dragging myself through some domestic rites, folding clothes warm from the dryer, making soup, chasing dust, concentrating on Jay, on Jay.

And then the auctioneer began again, his voice as soothing and hypnotic as one’s own pulse and heartbeat. “OKAY OKAY,” he said, his mouth too close to the microphone. “THIS IS THE RIGHT PLACE WITH NO OBLIGATION ABSOLUTELY NO OBLIGATION EXCEPT TO CONTROL YOURSELF AND NOT WALK OUT WITH EVERY INCREDIBLE BARGAIN THAT IS GOING TO MAKE YOUR EYES POP RIGHT OUT OF YOUR HEAD JUST TO WARM YOU UP A LITTLE BIT AND SHOW YOU THAT YOU HAVE NOTHING TO FEAR EXCEPT FOR THE GUY SITTING NEXT TO YOU I’M GIVING A FEW THINGS AWAY THAT’S RIGHT DON’T CLEAN OUT YOUR EARS MOTHER
GIVING
AWAY AS AN ACT OF FAITH AND FRIENDSHIP MOVE A LITTLE CLOSER DON’T MOVE AWAY WHEN THE MAN IS GIVING THINGS AWAY WHEN HE IS MOVED TO THE ACT OF GIVING HOW CAN YOU SEE MY FRIEND?” (to a man just entering and seating himself in the last row). “DON’T BE A STRANGER IN PARADISE MY FRIEND BUT COME CLOSER AND GET IN ON A GOOD THING.”

The man in the last row smiled and folded his arms.

“OKAY YOU BE THE SERGEANT AT ARMS AND SEE THAT NOBODY TRIES TO LEAVE HA HA.” A fan of ball-point pens opened in his hand. “A LITTLE LEGERDEMAIN SONNY,” (this to a small black boy who buried his face against his father’s coat). “THAT’S BIG FOR MAGIC COME ON SONNY PICK A COLOR ANYTHING YOU LIKE BECAUSE IT’S ALL YOURS WITH NO OBLIGATION TAKE IT TAKE IT.”

The father prodded and poked and the boy finally reached one small hand out and grasped the pen nearest to it. The father immediately took it from him and wrote with it on the back of an envelope.

“PENS THAT WRITE NOTHING BUT THE BEST HERE IN ATLANTIC CITY WHERE QUALITY IS FIRST AND FOREMOST PENS THAT WRITE UNDER WATER UNDER THE INFLUENCE TOASTERS THAT TOAST FOUR SLICES OF BREAD AT ONE TIME WITH A MAGICOLOR DIAL A BUILT-IN BRAIN THAT TELLS YOU WHEN YOUR TOAST IS READY RADIOS THAT FIT INTO THE PALM OF YOUR HAND BLENDERS THAT CHOP MIX BLEND GRIND WHIP BEAT SADISTIC BLENDERS AND PENS THAT WRITE FOR YOU AND YOU AND YOU”

I snuffled and felt my head nodding pleasantly, almost in rhythm with his voice. I had a right to be there after all, to have a little peace, the way a sick child has a right to absent herself from school and luxuriate in her mother’s care.

“You sick?” the woman next to me asked.

“Yes. Only a cold.”

“Cold, huh? Jello for that, before it sets. Nice good hot jello clean out the passages.”

I rose from the seat, still nodding, and she patted my arm. “Jello,” she said again, and I lurched out into the gray light of the boardwalk.

My head felt clogged with the cold and with crowding thoughts as I sat on a bench in the bus station waiting to end my pilgrimage. There was a large family sitting near me. The children, uniformly pale and restless, banged their heels against the lower slats of the bench and swatted listlessly at each other.

“Stop it,” the mother said from time to time, pinching the arm of the child who happened to be nearest to her. “Stop it for Christ’s sake.”

The father dozed, snored, and woke occasionally, looking surprised to find himself there, with that particular wife and those squirming battling children. He’d rub his eyes and grunt, then settle his buttocks against the unyielding wood of the bench and sleep again.

A loudspeaker announced the departure and arrival of buses—“Ventnor. Margate. Ocean City.” The father was startled awake again and he turned his glazed eyes to look at me.
Now
what? his face said. He lit a cigarette and all the children vied for the honor of blowing out the match, spittle flying, sparkling as dew on the fine hair of my arm, on my pocketbook. “Watch out for the lady, stupid!” Father blew smoke rings to encircle the frail waist of the youngest girl. Mother laughed, leaned over for a puff, and gave the cigarette back, lipstick-marked and moist. Oh, how dare they be so intimate in the face of everything?

Their bus was announced and they rose at once like a flock of noisy birds. The last boy ran, tripping across my feet, and his mother yanked his arm with a pull that might have wrenched it from its socket and she smiled at me with an endearing smile full of bad teeth and apology.

I yawned, growing luxuriously sleepy, and watched the continuing parade of passengers. A man rushed across the depot floor and his shiny black suitcase flew open. “Oh sh-it!” he cried in true despair and his life’s secrets tumbled out as if they had been shot from a cannon. I jumped from the bench to help him and other people stopped too and bent over, picking up the pieces and flinging them back into the open mouth of the suitcase. “Damn lock,” the man muttered, as I touched his jockstrap, his Ivory soap, his
Modern Screen,
his white shirt wrapped in laundry cellophane, his alarm clock, his pamphlets on the new world of computer programming.

“Damn, damn,” he said, until the suitcase was filled to overflow. Another man gave him a length of rope and together they bound the suitcase as if it were a resisting prisoner. “Thank you, thank you all!” he called, waving his free arm and running toward the boarding gate. Then they announced the bus to New York.

Boarding the bus and sitting down next to a middle-aged black man, I knew how really tired I was. Jay was dying and I dreamed of a warm bath and food, of cool and perfect sheets. It was as if I were too distracted by life to be concerned with death. Yet when I tried myself once more, letting in the thoughts of darkness and of separation, my heart took terrible plunges. And Jay, surrounded now by the enemy, with the enemy living
inside
him, did he have dreams of soup and bread and other beds for sleep and love instead of for dying?

I
began to die then, my mouth and nostrils and ears filling with black earth, and I wanted to pull on the sleeve of the man sitting next to me and confess that I could not stand it, that I would not. But in his dark, African inscrutability, he had turned away from me and fallen asleep.

The bus moved urgently away from the delusions of childhood and back toward the real world. Going away hadn’t done very much, after all. Slowed time a little maybe, creating illusions like the ones in a slide show. Maybe I should have gone back to Jay’s beginnings instead. What happens to someone’s nostalgia when he dies? Jay, near the subway, waiting for his beloved and missing father. Mona, singing in her Bronx kitchen, polishing silver with a pink and pungent cream. Is it possible to reconstruct everything, if you go back? To
change
things? The neighborhoods were all changed. Buildings torn down. Nothing remained constant. Se habla español. Childhood, oh God. Elusive as this moment, now. The movement of the bus rocked and bumped me against the warm arm of the man sitting next to me. I yawned again, and my thoughts became sleepy and disjointed. Back again. Home. Jay. Then I felt myself going under too, into sleep.

The whole journey was made in that sleep and in the bus station in New York again, I went to a telephone booth and called the hospital. The floor nurse said that there were no major changes, that Jay had had a fairly comfortable day. He read a book, she reported. He ate some lunch. Then she connected the call to Jay’s room and I heard his voice. “Hello, Sandy?” His voice entered me. Could I say that? Your voice enters me.

He wanted to know about my cold, about the children. “Fine, fine,” I said. Your voice enters me.

I told him that I would come to see him as soon as the sniffles were gone. I actually used the word, as professionally cheery as a nurse. Then we blew kisses to one another that fell to their death somewhere in the trunk lines and I hung up.

Back in Isabel’s apartment I was surprised to see her ex-husband, Eddie, sitting on the sofa, smoking a pipe. It wasn’t Sunday and yet he was there, looking tranquil and domestic, with his younger daughter, Janice, on his lap and Harry nestled close to his side.

In the kitchen Isabel was busy, oven-flushed and happy. It was Janice’s birthday and her father had come for the celebration dinner. Paul was wearing a paper birthday hat with a green feather on it. He took my hand and led me to inspect the cake on display next to the refrigerator.

I began to set the table and Eddie came in from the living room, his face lost in the veil of smoke from his pipe. He leaned in the doorway and watched me. “So Jay is having a hard time,” he said.

“Yes.”

Eddie’s pipe made sounds like faulty plumbing and he sucked and sucked at it, as if he were trying to draw out new ideas. “Tough break,” he said at last. “Tough break.”

I placed a basket of candy at every place setting, and a noisemaker and a party hat. My hands trembled as I put the silverware down. I wondered how he felt on this celebration of his daughter’s birth. Did he remember the original day and his first sight of her in the world?

“So you’re at the hospital all the time?”

“Yes.” Was it to be an incantation of my days?

“I hate hospitals,” Eddie said. “The smell.”

“It brings out anxieties,” I said.

“No, it’s the smell. I’ve always been sensitive to odors.”

“You get used to it.”

“Is Jay in pain?”

“Sometimes. His back. He’s weak, fatigued.”

Eddie sighed and tapped out the now dead ashes from his pipe. “Tough break,” he said again.

Then Izzy and the children came in bearing steaming bowls of meat and vegetables and potatoes. We sat down and let the conversation fall to the children, who were elated by the presence of their father at the table. Even Harry and Paul seemed to rejoice. And Eddie was in complete charge, king for a day, carving meat and giving masculine admonitions to all to eat everything and grow strong. He included us in his benevolent gaze as it circled the table. Yet another wife and children. Was there nothing that Eddie couldn’t take on? And Izzy, caught in the brilliance of his smile, was radiant and intoxicated. I watched as she put choice food on his plate and passed it back to him in remembered ceremony.

The children blew the noisemakers at each other in earsplitting blasts, and they ate candy recklessly, before they finished their dinner. Then Isabel went to bring in the cake and the oldest child shut the lights. The candles sputtered and cast a pale glow. Janice leaned forward, shut her eyes, and made her wish.

I looked across the table at Eddie and saw that his face was ineffably sad, that he grieved in his own way for the ruins and the losses of decision and chance.

Then Janice blew fiercely at the tiny flames of the candles until they were all extinguished and we sang to her.

I
NSOMNIA AGAIN AND WHY
not? The worst fantasy of all had become the truth. I was going to be abandoned. In a sense I had been abandoned already. I rolled over onto my stomach and lay there baby-style, limbs loose. What now? Maybe a complete regression, thumb-sucking and all. Except that I had never really done that. I did other things, disposed of other truths a long time ago, lay in bed rocking and loving my own body. And I was in charge then, could make things be the way I wanted them to be—or else. But not now. The power had been lost somewhere in transit, and I could only go back and remember. Yet it was a comfort, this new nocturnal ritual. Reaching in blindly I pulled out another time when I had been threatened by loss, a time when Jay had been less than perfect. Or had not. It didn’t really matter now. But I could still revive the feeling.

We were at a studio party when the name Diana came up in conversation, and I was instantly alerted. Someone teased Jay about it—a girl who worked on the show, did continuity or something, a girl with a myopic squint and spittle in the corners of her mouth when she laughed. She said his name in two syllables, “Ja-ay,” implying shared knowledge, and she teased him about Diana. I had been to rehearsals and other parties and I had heard the name before. She was one of that lineup of dancers who do all the fancy footwork on the Jerry Mann show, just before Jerry parts the curtains and comes through each week. I didn’t know which one she was, might never know. The brassy opening theme played in my head. There were always ten girls, a reasonable variety of blondes and brunettes and two token blacks. They changed and yet they remained constant. One of them was named Diana.

The party continued and I looked at Jay, appraising him, but I didn’t detect any change. What did I expect anyway? Guilt inscribed on his forehead? Little furtive glances, a new nervousness in his style? Nothing doing. Jay was himself, having fun, catching my glance instead of evading it. He was a little drunk and his look was sensual, misted and suggestive. I smiled at him, full of terror and response. I looked for clues and there weren’t any. All that married ease between us, a thousand messages flashed with the eye, with little body gestures. Jay was having a good time, but he’d be ready to go home in a little while. He’d want to make love after the party and so would I, almost as an extension of the camaraderie between us as we moved separately in that crowded room.