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Nor was there any mistaking what the offer meant. Tom felt as if the chair had dropped out from under him. Felt weightless.
He said, “What about Lawrence?”
“Lawrence has some problems. Or, I don’t know, maybe they’re my problems. He says he doesn’t want to own me. He doesn’t want anybody else to, either. He says he’s ambivalent. I’m what he’s ambivalent about.”
Tom was considering this when the door opened and a crowd rushed in from the hot evening on Avenue B. Her friends. “Joyce!” one of them sang out.
She looked at Tom, shrugged and smiled and mouthed a word: it might have been “Later.”
Like any immigrant—any refugee—he was adjusting to his new environment. It was impossible to live in a state of perpetual awe. But the knowledge of where he was and how he had come here was seldom far from his mind.
Nineteen sixty-two. The Berlin Wall was less than a year old. John F. Ke
Privileged information.
He knew all this; but he still felt edged out of the conversation that began to flow around him. For a while they talked about books, about plays. Soderman, the novelist who tipped Tom off to the radio-repair job, had strong opinions about Ionesco. Soderman was a nice guy; he had a young, round chipmunk face with a brush cut on top and a fringe of beard under his chin. Likable—but he might have been speaking Greek. Ionesco was a name Tom had heard but couldn’t place, lost in a vague memory of some undergraduate English class. Likewise Beckett, likewise Jean Genet. He smiled enigmatically at what seemed like appropriate moments.
Then Lawrence Millstein performed a verbal editorial on folk music versus jazz and Tom felt a little bit more at home. Millstein was of the old school and outnumbered at this table; he hated the cafe-folk scene and harbored nostalgia for the fierce gods of the tenor sax.
He looked the part. If Tom had been casting a movie version of On the Road he might have picked Millstein as an “atmosphere” character. He was tall, dark-haired, lean, and there was something studied about his intensity. Joyce had described him as “a Raskolnikov type—at least, he tries to come on that way.”
Millstein performed a twenty-minute monologue on Char-he Parker and the “anguish of the Negro soul.” Tom listened with mounting irritation, but kept silent—and drank. He knew the music Lawrence was talking about. Through his breakup with Barbara and after the divorce, he had sometimes felt that Parker—and Thelonious Monk, and Miles Davis of the Sketches of Spain era, and So
Joyce ventured, “Nobody’s putting down Parker. Folk music is doing something else. It’s just different. There’s no antagonism.”
Tom sensed that they had had this argument before and that Millstein had his own reasons for bringing it up. “It’s white people’s music,” Millstein said.
“There’s more social commentary in the folk cafes than in the jazz bars,” Soderman said.
“But that’s the point. Folk music is like a high school essay. All these earnest little sermons. Jazz is the subject It’s what the sermon is about The whole Negro experience is wrapped up in it.”
“What are you saying?” Tom asked. “White people shouldn’t make music?”
Eyes focused on him. Soderman ventured, “The repairman speaks!”
Millstein was full of beery scorn. “What the fuck do you know about the Negro experience?”
“Not a damn thing,” Tom said amiably. “Hell, Larry, I’m as white as you are.”
Lawrence Millstein opened his mouth, then closed it. A moment of silence … then the table erupted in laughter. Millstein managed to say something—it might have been fuck you—but it was lost in the roar and Tom was able to ignore him.
Joyce laughed, too, then steered the conversation down a less volatile alleyway: she’d had a letter from somebody named Susan who was doing political organization in rural Georgia. Apparently Susan, a Vassar graduate, had been pretty wild during her Village days. Everybody trotted out Susan stories. Joyce relaxed.
She leaned over and whispered in Tom’s ear, “Try not to make him mad!”
He whispered back, “I think it’s too late,” and ordered another beer.
He had reached that subtle turning point at which he was not quite drunk but definitely a little past sober. He decided these were good people. He liked them. When they left Stanley’s, he followed them. Joyce took his hand.
The night air was warm and stagnant. They moved past tenement stoops full of people, bleak streetlights, noise, a barber shop reeking of Barbasol, to an old building and inside and up to a long room cluttered with bookshelves and bad, amateurish paintings. “Lawrence’s apartment,” Joyce confided. He asked, “Should I be here?” and she said, “It’s a party!”
The books were poetry, Evergreen Review, contemporary novels. The record collection was large and impressive— there were Bix Beiderbecke 78s in among the LPs—and the hi-fi looked expensive: a Rek-O-Kut turntable, an amplifier bristling with tubes. “Music!” somebody shouted, and Tom stood aside while Millstein eased a John Coltrane record out of its sleeve and placed it on the turntable—the gesture was faintly religious. Suddenly the room was full of wild melody.
Tom watched Soderman pull down the blinds, cutting off a view of the Con Ed stacks on Fourteenth Street, while someone else produced a wooden box containing a quarter ounce of seeded brown marijuana and a package of Zig-Zag rolling papers. Tom was amused by the solemnity of this ritual, including a few doubtful glances in his direction—was this new guy trustworthy? He bustled over and said, “Let me roll it.”
Smiles. Joyce asked, “Do you know how?”
He pasted together two papers to make a double-wide. His technique was rusty—it had been a long time—but he produced a creditable joint. Soderman nodded his approval. “Where did you learn that?”
He answered absently, “In college.”
“So where’d you go to college?”
“In the agricultural heartland of the Pacific Northwest.” He smiled. “A match?”
He meant only to establish his camaraderie, but the dope went instantly to his head. Coltrane’s sax, radiating from a single speaker, became a great golden bell-like instrument. He decided he liked Lawrence Millstein for liking this music, then remembered the diatribe in the bar and Joyce’s warning —Don’t make him mad—implying something about his temper and what she might have seen of it. He looked at Joyce where she stood silhouetted in the door to Lawrence’s ugly kitchen. He recalled the half promise she had made him and thought about the possibility of holding her in his arms, of taking her to bed. She was very young and not as sophisticated as she liked to believe. She deserved better than Lawrence Millstein.