The Largesse of the Sea Maiden Page 3

  Once I lived here. Went to Columbia University, studying history first, then broadcast journalism. Worked for a couple of pointless years at the Post, and then for thirteen tough but prosperous years at Castle and Forbes on Fifty-Fourth, just off Madison Avenue. And then took my insomnia, my afternoon headaches, my doubts and my antacid tablets to San Diego and lost them in the Pacific Ocean. New York and I didn’t quite fit. I knew it the whole time. Some of my Columbia classmates came from faraway places like Iowa and Nevada, as I had come a shorter way from New Hampshire, and after graduation they’d been absorbed into Manhattan and had lived here ever since. I didn’t last. I always say, “It was never my town.”

  Today it was all mine. I was its proprietor. With my overcoat wide open and the wind in my hair I walked around and for an hour or so presided over the bits of litter in the air—so much less than thirty years ago!—and the citizens bent against the weather, and the light inside the restaurants and the people at small tables looking at each other’s faces and talking. The white flakes began to stick. By the time I entered Trump Tower, I’d had a long hard wet walk. I repaired myself in the restroom and found the right floor. At the ceremony my table was near the front—round, clothed in burgundy and surrounded by eight of us, the other seven much younger than I, a lively bunch, fun and full of wisecracks. And they seemed impressed to be sitting with me, and made sure I sat where I could see. All that was the good part.

  Halfway through dessert the nerve in my back began to act up, and by the time I heard my name and started toward the podium, my right shoulder blade felt as if it were pressed against a hissing old New York steam-heat radiator. At the head of the vast room I held the medallion in my hand—that’s what it was, rather than a trophy; an inscribed medallion three inches in diameter, good for a paperweight—and thanked a list of names I’d memorized, omitted any other remarks, and got back to our table just as another pain seized me, this one in the region of my bowels, and now I repented my curbside lunch, my delicious New York hot dogs, especially the second one, and without sitting down or even making an excuse I let this bout of indigestion carry me out of the room and down the halls to the men’s lavatory, where I hardly had time to fumble the medallion into my lapel-pocket and get my jacket on the hook.

  I sat down with my intestines in flames, first my body bearing this insult, and then my soul insulted, too, when someone came in and chose the stall next to mine. Our public toilets are just that—too public—the walls don’t reach the floor. This other man and I could see each other’s feet. Or at any rate, our black shoes, and the cuffs of our dark trousers.

  After a minute his hand laid on the floor between us, there at the border between his space and mine, a square of toilet paper with an obscene proposition written on it, in words large and plain enough that I could read them whether I wanted to or not. In pain, I laughed. Not out loud.

  I heard a small sigh from the next stall.

  I didn’t acknowledge his overture, and he didn’t leave. He must have taken it that I had him under consideration. As long as I stayed, he had reason to hope. And I couldn’t get away quite yet. My bowels churned and smoldered. Renegade signals from my spinal nerve hammered my shoulder and the full length of my right arm, down to the marrow.

  The awards ceremony seemed to have ended. The men’s room came to life—the door whooshing open, the run of voices coming in. Throats and faucets and footfalls. The spin of the paper towel dispenser.

  Somewhere in here, a hand descended to the note on the floor, fingers touched it, raised it away. Soon after that the man, the toilet Casanova, was no longer beside me.

  I stayed as I was, for how long I couldn’t say. There were echoes. Silence. The urinals flushing themselves.

  I raised myself upright, pulled my clothing together, made my way to the sinks.

  One other man remained in the place. He stood at the sink beside mine as our faucets ran. I washed my hands. He washed his hands.

  He was tall, with a distinctive head—wispy colorless hair like a baby’s, and a skeletal face with thick red lips. I’d have known him anywhere.

  “Carl Zane!”

  He smiled in a small way. “Wrong. I’m Marshall Zane. I’m Carl’s son.”

  “Sure, of course—he would have aged too!” This encounter had me going in circles. I’d finished washing my hands, and now I started washing them again. I forgot to introduce myself. “You look just like your dad,” I said, “only twenty-five years ago. Are you here for the awards night?”

  He nodded. “I’m with the Sextant Group.”

  “You followed in his footsteps.”

  “I did. I even worked for Castle and Forbes for a couple of years.”

  “How do you like that? And how’s Carl doing? Is he here tonight?”

  “He passed away three years ago. Went to sleep one night and never woke up.”

  “Oh. Oh, no.” I had a moment—I have them sometimes—when the surroundings seemed bereft of any facts, and not even the smallest physical gesture felt possible. After the spell had passed, I said, “I’m sorry to hear that. He was a nice guy.”

  “At least it was painless,” said the son of Carl Zane. “And as far as anyone knows, he went to bed happy that night.”

  We were talking to each other’s reflections in the broad mirror. I made sure I didn’t look elsewhere—at his trousers, his shoes. But for this occasion we men, every one of us, had dressed in dark trousers and black shoes.

  “Well…enjoy your evening,” the young man said.

  I thanked him and said good night, and, as he tossed a wadded paper towel at the receptacle and disappeared out the door, I’m afraid I added, “Tell your father I said hello.”

  MERMAID

  As I trudged up Fifth Avenue after this miserable interlude, I carried my shoulder like a bushel-bag of burning kindling and could hardly stay upright the three blocks to my hotel. It was really snowing now, and it was Saturday night. The sidewalk was crowded. People came at me forcing themselves against the weather, their shoulders hunched, their coats pinched shut, flakes battering their faces, and though the faces were dark, I felt I saw into their eyes.

  I came awake in the unfamiliar room I didn’t know how much later, and, if this makes sense, it wasn’t the pain in my shoulder that woke me, but its departure. I lay bathed in relief.

  Beyond my window, a thick layer of snow covered the ledge. I became aware of a hush of anticipation, a tremendous surrounding absence. I got out of bed, dressed in my clothes, and went out to look at the city.

  It was I think around 1 a.m. Snow six inches deep had fallen. Park Avenue looked smooth and soft—not one vehicle had disturbed its surface. The city was almost completely stopped, its very few sounds muffled yet perfectly distinct from one another: a rumbling snowplow somewhere, a car’s horn, a man on another street shouting several faint syllables. I tried counting up the years since I’d seen snow. Eleven or twelve—Denver, and it had been exactly the same, exactly like this. One lone taxi glided up Park Avenue through the virgin white, and I hailed it and asked the driver to find any restaurant open for business. I looked out the back window at the brilliant silences falling from the streetlamps, and at our fresh black tracks disappearing into the infinite—the only proof of Park Avenue; I’m not sure how the cabbie kept to the road. He took me to a small diner off Union Square, where I had a wonderful breakfast among a handful of miscellaneous wanderers like myself, New Yorkers with their large, historic faces, every one of whom, delivered here without an explanation, seemed invaluable. I paid and left and set out walking back toward midtown. I’d bought a pair of weatherproof dress shoes just before leaving San Diego, and I was glad. I looked for places where I was the first to walk and kicked at the powdery snow. A piano playing a Latin tune drew me through a doorway into an atmosphere of sadness: a dim tavern, a stale smell, the piano’s weary melody, and a single customer, an ample, attractive woman with abundant blond hair. She wore an evening gown. A light shawl covered h
er shoulders. She seemed poised and self-possessed, though it was possible, also, that she was weeping.

  I let the door close behind me. The bartender, a small old black man, raised his eyebrows, and I said, “Scotch rocks, Red Label.” Talking, I felt discourteous. The piano played in the gloom of the farthest corner. I recognized the melody as a Mexican traditional called “Maria Elena.” I couldn’t see the musician at all. In front of the piano a big tenor saxophone rested upright on a stand. With no one around to play it, it seemed like just another of the personalities here: the invisible pianist, the disenchanted old bartender, the big glamorous blonde, the shipwrecked, solitary saxophone…And the man who’d walked here through the snow…And as soon as the name of the song popped into my head I thought I heard a voice say, “Her name is Maria Elena.” The scene had a moonlit, black-and-white quality. Ten feet away at her table the blond woman waited, her shoulders back, her face raised. She lifted one hand and beckoned me with her fingers. She was weeping. The lines of her tears sparkled on her cheeks. “I am a prisoner here,” she said. I took the chair across from her and watched her cry. I sat upright, one hand on the table’s surface and the other around my drink. I felt the ecstasy of a dancer, but I kept still.

  WHIT

  My name would mean nothing to you, but there’s a very good chance you’re familiar with my work. Among the many TV ads I wrote and directed, you’ll remember one in particular.

  In this animated 30-second spot, you see a brown bear chasing a gray rabbit. They come one after the other over a hill toward the view—the rabbit is cornered, he’s crying, the bear comes to him—the rabbit reaches into his waistcoat pocket and pulls out a dollar bill and gives it to the bear. The bear looks at this gift, sits down, stares into space. The music stops, there’s no sound, nothing is said, and right there the little narrative ends, on a note of complete uncertainty. It’s an advertisement for a banking chain. It sounds ridiculous, I know, but that’s only if you haven’t seen it. If you’ve seen it, the way it was rendered, then you know that it was a very unusual advertisement. Because it referred, really, to nothing at all, and yet it was actually very moving.

  Advertisements don’t try to get you to fork over your dough by tugging irrelevantly at your heart-strings, not as a rule. But this one broke the rules, and it worked.

  It brought the bank chain many new customers. And it excited a lot of commentary and won several awards—every award I ever won, in fact, I won for that ad. It ran in both halves of the twenty-second Super Bowl, and people still remember it.

  You don’t get awards personally. They go to the team. To the agency. But your name attaches to the project as a matter of workplace lore—“Whit did that one.” (And that would be me, Bill Whitman.) “Yes, the one with the rabbit and the bear was Whit’s.”

  Credit goes first of all to the banking firm who let this strange message go out to potential customers, who sought to start a relationship with a gesture so cryptic. It was better than cryptic—mysterious, untranslatable. I think it pointed to orderly financial exchange as the basis of harmony. Money tames the beast. Money is peace. Money is civilization. The end of the story is money.

  I won’t mention the name of the bank. If you don’t remember the name, then it wasn’t such a good ad after all.

  If you watched any primetime television in the 1980s, you’ve almost certainly seen several other ads I wrote or directed or both.

  I crawled out of my twenties leaving behind a couple of short, unhappy marriages, and then I found Elaine. Twenty-five years last June, and two daughters. Have I loved my wife? We’ve gotten along. We’ve never felt like congratulating ourselves.

  I’m just shy of sixty-three. Elaine’s fifty-two but seems older. Not in her looks, but in her attitude of complacence. She lacks fire. Seems interested mainly in our two girls. She keeps in close contact with them. They’re both grown. They’re harmless citizens. They aren’t beautiful or clever.

  Before the girls started grade school, we left New York and headed west in stages, a year in Denver (too much winter), another in Phoenix (too hot), and finally San Diego. What a wonderful city. It’s a bit more crowded each year, but still. Completely wonderful. Never regretted coming here, not for an instant. And financially it all worked out. If we’d stayed in New York I’d have made a lot more money, but we’d have needed a lot more, too.

  Last night Elaine and I lay in bed watching TV, and I asked her what she remembered. Not much. Less than I. We have a very small TV that sits on a dresser across the room. Keeping it going provides an excuse for lying awake in bed.

  I note that I’ve lived longer in the past, now, than I can expect to live in the future. I have more to remember than I have to look forward to. Memory fades, not much of the past stays, and I wouldn’t mind forgetting a lot more of it.

  Once in a while I lie there, as the television runs, and I read something wild and ancient from one of several collections of folk tales I own. Apples that summon sea maidens, eggs that fulfill any wish, and pears that make people grow long noses that fall off again. Then sometimes I get up and don my robe and go out into our quiet neighborhood looking for a magic thread, a magic sword, a magic horse.

  Dear Jennifer Johnston,

  Well, to catch you up on things, the last four years have really kicked my ass. I try to get back to that point I was at in the fifth grade where you sent me a note with a heart on it said “Dear Mark I really like you” and I turned that note over and wrote on the back of it “Do you like me or love me?” and you made me a new note with twenty hearts on it and sent it back down the aisles and it said “I love you! I love you! I love you! I love you!” I would count there to be about fifteen or sixteen hooks in my belly with lines heading off into the hands of people I haven’t seen since a long time back, and that’s one of them. But just to catch you up. In the last five years I’ve been arrested about eight times, shot twice, not twice on one occasion, but once on two different occasions, etc etc and I think I got run over once but I don’t even remember it. I’ve loved a couple thousand women but I think you’re number one on the list. That’s all folks, over and out.

  Cass (in 5th grade you used to call me Mark—full name Mark Cassandra)

  PS—Where, you might ask, am I? Funny that you asked. After all those adventures I’m at an undisclosed location right back here once again in Ukiah, the Armpit of Northern California.

  Cass

  Dear old buddy and beloved sponsor Bob,

  Now hear the latest from the Starlight Addiction Recovery Center on Idaho Avenue, in its glory days better known as the Starlight Motel. I believe you might have holed up here once or twice. Yes I believe you might have laid up drunk in room 8, this very one I’m sitting in at this desk writing this letter, which is one of the few I’ll actually be mailing because I need a few things which are in that box in your closet, anyway I hope they’re still there. I think there’s a pair of jeans and I think there’s a few pairs of socks, and in fact if you would just bring the whole box. I’m down to one of everything, except for two of these socks, which are both white, but they’re not the same brand. My good old boots collapsed, but I have been given an excellent pair of secondhand running shoes here. But I am writing to tell you this—that I am not running anywhere, I am standing my ground, I intend to do the deal and here’s why. Because the last four years have positively kicked my ass. In the last four years I have been shot, jailed, declared insane, etc…and even though I’m just thirty-two years old I’m the only person I’ve ever met who’s actually ever been in a coma. I have been asked over and over by medical people who probably know what they’re talking about “Why aren’t you dead?”

  Wow, I think I just took a nap. They’ve got us on Antabuse here and sometimes, blip, you just fade out and dream. In a few days that’s supposed to pass.

  They won’t let me call you but I’m pretty sure they’ll let you come to Family Group, which is on Sunday, two to four. Before I mail this I will check if it’s O
K for you to come. I wouldn’t mind seeing a friendly face in the circle there.

  I’m not the type to trudge along, I’m the type to come shooting off the block, get twenty yards ahead of everybody else, and go stumbling and sprawling off onto the sidelines with a collapsed lung. And pretty soon I hear the others, here they come, I hear them trudging steadily along on their Road to Happy Destiny.

  I’ve got to have somebody reminding me to stay in my lane and take it easy, that’s where my buddy Bob C comes in, he’s my sponsor in the AA, but the thing about your sponsor is you’ve got to call him. I don’t like to call him. He’s always got something wise and reasonable to say.

  So if he turned up with my box of stuff and two cents of input for the Family Group discussion, what a relief.

  Cass

  Dear Old Dad and Dear Grandma,

  I’m sitting here in this room at this desk at the Starlight Addiction Recovery Center writing letters to everybody I know. I’ve got about a dozen hooks in my heart, I’m following the lines back to where they go. I hope somebody up there knows I’m sincere about this, I could certainly use a little help, but I might as well announce right here that I’m not about to get on my knees, because I’ve never been that way, and if your pal Jesus is waiting around for somebody like me to do something like that before he comes down off the cross, I’d say he can quit waiting. Damn this place and everybody in it, I mean I have just about had it with rehabilitation. The thing is group therapy has just made the kinks in my mind all that tighter. It’s basically a circle of terrified bullshitters kissing this guy’s ass named Jerry. If you’re late to a session they lock you out, late to a second session you’re expelled back on the street, I mean let’s all just step one step back and take a look at the fact that I was never in the Army because I cannot stand exactly that kind of discipline. Oh yeah. I am just pissed off, and that’s about it. I have to spend two hours every single night in this room at this desk considering these hooks in my heart and writing down my life history, which we each go up at the two-week point and read to them, read to all the others, sit there in a chair, read your history of the downfall of your pitiful self to a circle of ghosts. I may or may not get around to doing it. Right now I’m just filling a notebook with jazz, waiting for my handwriting to improve itself. Like I say though—I am I am I am sincere. I am sincere. Here’s some pretty good evidence—this is my third time in rehab, but my first time to make it past four days.