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The man nodded. “Sure could.”
“You have money?”
He touched his left hip. Joyce heard the change jingle in his pocket. But his face was suddenly doubtful. “I don’t believe I do.”
She said cautiously, “How do you feel?”
He looked at her again. Now there was focus in his eyes— he understood the drift of the question.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know how this must seem. I’m sorry I can’t explain it. Did you ever have an experience you just couldn’t take in all at once—something so enormous you just can’t comprehend it?”
The LSD, she thought. Down the rabbit hole for sure. A naif in chemical wonderland. Be nice, she instructed herself. “I think coffee would probably help.”
He said, “I have money. But I don’t think it’s legal tender.”
“Foreign currency?”
“You could say that.”
“You’ve been traveling?”
“I guess I have.” He stood up abruptly. “You don’t have to buy me a coffee, but if you want to I’d be grateful.”
“My name is Joyce,” she said. “Joyce Casella.”
“Tom Winter,” he said. Early in the month of May 1962.
She bought coffee at an unfashionable deli where no one would recognize her: not because she was embarrassed but because she didn’t want a crowd chasing this man—Tom Winter—away. He was dazed, numbed, and not entirely coherent; but beneath that she was begi
He didn’t want to talk about himself or how he’d arrived here. Joyce respected that. She’d met a lot of folks who didn’t care to talk about themselves. People with a past they wanted to hide; or people with no past, refugees from the suburbs with grandiose visions of the Village inferred from television and all those self-righteous articles in Time and Life. Joyce herself had been one of these, an NYU undergraduate in a dirndl skirt, and she respected Tom’s silence even though his secrets might be less prosaic than hers.
He did say where he was from: a little coastal town in Washington State called Belltower. She was encouraged by this fracture in his reticence and ventured to ask what he did there.
“Lots of things,” he said. “Sold cars.”
“It’s hard to picture you as a car salesman.”
“I guess other people thought so, too. I wasn’t very good at it.”
“You lost your job?”
“I—well, I don’t know. Maybe I still have it. If I go back.”
“Long way to go back.”
He smiled a little. “Long way to come here.”
“So what brought you to the city?”
“A time machine,” he said. “Apparently.”
He had hitchhiked or ridden boxcars, Joyce guessed, a sort of Woody Guthrie thing; maybe that was what he meant. “Well,” she said, “Mr. Car Salesman, are you pla
He shook his head no, then seemed to hesitate. “I’m not sure. My travel arrangements are kind of vague.”
“You need a place to stay?”
He glanced through the window of the deli (STRICTLY KOSHER, like the sign in the Peace Eye Bookstore over at 10th and Avenue C). Evening now. Traffic labored through the shiny wet darkness.
“I’ve got a place,” he said, “but I’m not sure I can find the way back.”
Joyce suspected he was right. Coming down off some towering LSD kick, he’d probably bounce around Manhattan like the little steel ball in a pachinko machine. Joyce asked herself whether she was convinced of his harmlessness; she decided she was. Taking in strangers, she scolded herself—but it was one of those acts Lawrence had called “blinks of co
The offer seemed to provoke fatigue in him. “I would be very happy to sleep on your sofa. I’m sure it’s a wonderful sofa.”
“Very courtly,” she said. “It came from the Salvation Army. It’s purple. It’s an ugly sofa, Tom.”
“Then I’ll sleep with my eyes closed,” he said.
She lived in a little railroad apartment in the East Village where she had moved from the dorm at NYU. It was two flights up in a tenement building and furnished on no budget at all: the ugly purple sofa, some folding chairs, a Sally A
Tom stood awhile looking at the books. They were nothing special, her college English texts plus whatever she’d picked up at secondhand stores since then. Some C. Wright Mills, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Aldous Huxley— but he handled them as if they were specimens in a display case.
“Read anything you want,” she said.
He shook his head. “I don’t think I could concentrate.”
Probably not. And he was shivering. She brought him a big bath towel and a cotton shirt Lawrence had left behind. “Dry off and change,” she said. “Sleep if you want.” She left him stretched out on the sofa and went into the “kitchen”—a corner of the room, really, with a sink and a reconditioned Hotpoint and a cheap partition—and rinsed a few dishes. Her rent was due and the severance check from her department store job would cover it; but that would leave her (she calculated) about seven dollars to live on until she picked up some music work or another job. Neither was impossible, but she would have to find a gig or go hungry. But that was tomorrow’s problem—today was today.
She left the kitchen passably clean. By the time she’d finished Tom was asleep on the sofa—stark stone unconscious, snoring a little. She picked up his watch from the wooden crate table where he’d left it, thinking, It must be late.
Then she did a double-take at the face of the watch, which wasn’t a watch face at all but a kind of miniature signboard where the time was written in black numerals over a smoke-gray background.
9:35, it said, and then dissolved to 9:36. The little black colon winked continuously.
Joyce had never seen such a watch and she assumed it must be very expensive—surely not a car salesman’s watch. But it wasn’t a foreign watch, either. It said “Timex” and “Quartz Lithium” (whatever that was) and “Water Resistant.”
Very very strange, she thought. Tom Winter, Man of Mystery.
She left him snoring on the couch and moved into the bedroom. She undressed with the fight off and stretched out on the narrow spring-creaking bed, relishing the cold air and the clank of the radiator, the rattle of rainwater on the fire escape. Then she climbed under the scratchy brown blanket and waited for sleep.
Mornings and evenings, she loved this city.
Sometimes she slept five hours or less at a time, so she could have more morning and more night.
Nights, especially when she was out with Lawrence and that crowd, she would simply let herself be swept up in the urgency of their conversation, talking desegregation or the arms race in some guitar cafe; swept up by the music, too, legions of folk singers arrowing in on Bleecker and MacDougal from all over the country these days; in sawdust-floored rooms filled with her poet friends and folk friends and “beat” friends, earnest Trotskyites and junkies and jazz musicians and eighteen-year-old runaways from dingy Midwest Levit-towns, all these crosscurrents so fiercely focused that on some nights she believed the pitch-black sky might open in a rapture of the dispossessed and they would all ascend bodily into heaven. Nights like that had been common enough this winter and spring that she was eager for summer, when the pace would double and redouble again. Maybe Lawrence would publish his poetry or she would find an audience for her music. And they would be at the eye, then, of this luminous vortex.