In the Night Café by Joyce Johnson

Author:Joyce Johnson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2014-04-01T16:00:00+00:00

V

The Red Harley 220

Fall 1962–Summer 1963

14

AT FIRST HE was going to show me how he could keep going, how he could pick up right from where he’d left off.

He even made an attempt to retrieve his job, though I’d warned him not to count on it. When he walked into the office two days after he got back, the supervisor at the market research place said he was amazed someone who took off without notice would have the gall to show his face: “I don’t know how we’ll get along without you, Murphy, but we will fill the gap.”

“Fill it and stuff it!” Tom shouted, and that was that.

No goddam office would ever trap him again, he swore to me. He’d only tried it out because I wanted him to. Now he’d find his own way to support us. An argument seemed to be going on inside him with someone he was mistaking for me. “Maybe I’m not what you need. Maybe you want a nine-to-five type—some guy who has to get permission to walk around the corner.”

The things I wanted I couldn’t express to him—days with a shape I could count on, the life we’d had that ended on Tommy’s birthday. He was painting in the mornings now that he wasn’t working, but in the afternoons he’d get his thirst and head for the Cedar. He seemed to forget everything once he was up there. Finally we had a terrible fight because I’d cooked too many dinners he didn’t show up to eat. He’d had a lot to drink and he got very mad when he walked in and I told him it was midnight and why hadn’t he called me? He threw our clock out the back window because he thought I spent too much time looking at clocks.

The following day when I came out of work, I found him waiting on the sidewalk in front of the building. He presented me with an old alarm clock he’d bought from some bum on the Bowery. It had giant dented brass bells on its sides, but it didn’t work at all, and we laughed about the whole thing. We made promises we’d both go back to the way we used to be with each other in that time, only six weeks ago, that seemed so fuzzed over now, like history.

He wanted me to know I was the one he’d always come home to, no matter how late it got uptown, so I had to promise him to quit being scared and jumping to the wrong conclusions. Already he was getting over what had happened in Florida. He still had me, after all. He still had his work. And even some of his afternoons at the Cedar hadn’t been wasted. Lately he’d been hanging out there with a terrific young kid named Billy Cutty, an art student who’d come all the way from Phoenix on a motorcycle. Billy had found himself a deal renovating a loft that was going to be turned into a dance studio.

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