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She exhaled a long wisp of smoke. “My uncle was in Italy. He never talked about it. Whenever I asked him about the war, he got this really unpleasant expression. He’d stare at you until you shut up. So I knew this was basically bullshit. It kind of made me mad. If Ray wanted to live out some heroic existence, why not just do it? It wasn’t even what you could honestly call nostalgia. He wanted some magic transformation, he wanted to live in a world where everything was bigger than life. I said, ‘Why don’t you go to Italy? I admit there’s not a war on. But you could live on the beach, get drunk with the fishermen, fall in love with some little peasant girl’ He said, ‘It’s not the same. People aren’t the same anymore.
Tom said, “Is this a true story?”
“Mostly true.”
“The moral?”
“I thought about Ray last night. I thought, What if he found a tu
“He’d go to war,” Tom said. “It wouldn’t be what he expected, and he’d be scared and unhappy.”
“Maybe. But maybe he’d love it. And I think that would be a lot more frightening, don’t you? He’d be walking around with a permanent hard-on, because this was history, and he knew how it went. He’d be screwing those Italian girls, but it would be macabre, terrible—because in his own mind he’d be screwing history. He’d be fucking ghosts. I find that a little terrifying.”
Tom discovered his mouth was dry. “You think that’s what I’m doing?”
Joyce lowered her eyes. “I have to admit the possibility has crossed my mind.”
He said he’d meet her after her gig at Mario’s.
Alone, Tom felt the city around him like a headache. He could go to Lindner’s—but he doubted he could focus his eyes on a radio chassis without passing out. Instead he rode a bus uptown and wandered for a time among the crowds on Fifth Avenue. On a perverse whim he followed a mob of tourists to the 102nd-floor observatory of the Empire State Building, where he stood in a daze of sleep-deprivation trying to name the landmarks he recognized—the Chrysler Building, Welfare Island—and placing a few that didn’t yet exist, the World Trade Center still only a landfill site in the Hudson River. The building where he stood was thirty years old, approximately half as old as it would be in 1989 and that much closer to its art deco glory, a finer gloss on its Belgian marbles and limestone facades. The tourists were middle-aged or young couples with children, men in brown suits with crisp white shirts open at the collar, snapping photos with Kodak Brownies and dispensing dimes to their kids, who clustered around the ungainly pay-binoculars pretending to strafe lower Manhattan. These people spared an occasional glance for Tom, the unshaven man in a loose sweatshirt and denims: a beatnik, perhaps, or some other specimen of New York exotica. Tom looked at the city through wire-webbed windows.
The city was gray, smoky, vast, old, strange. The city was thirty years too young. The city was a fossil in amber, resurrected, mysterious life breathed into its pavements and awnings and Oldsmobiles. It was a city of ghosts.
Ghosts like Joyce.
He shaded his eyes against the fierce afternoon sun. Somewhere in this grid of stone and black shadow, he had fallen in love. This was certain knowledge and it took some of the sting from what Joyce had said. He wasn’t fucking ghosts. But he might have fallen in love with one.
And maybe that was a mistake; maybe he’d be better off fucking ghosts. He tried to recall why he had come here and what he had expected. A playground: maybe she was right about that. The sixties—that fabled decade—had ended when he was eleven years old. He’d grown up believing he’d missed something important, although he was never sure what—it depended on who you talked to. A wonderful or terrible time. When the Vietnam War was fought in, or against. When drugs were good, or weren’t. When sex was never lethal. A decade when “youth” was important; by the time of Tom’s adolescence the word had lost some of its glamour.
Maybe he had expected all these wonders assembled together, served with a side of invulnerability and private wisdom. A vast phantom drama in which he was both audience and actor.
But Joyce had made that impossible.
He had come here wanting love—some salvaging grace— but love was impossible in the playground. Love was a different landscape. Love implied loss and time and vulnerability. Love made all the props and stage sets too real: real war, real death, real hopes invested in real lost causes.
Because he loved her he had begun to see the world the way she did: not the gaudy Kodachrome of an old postcard but solid, substantial, freighted with other meanings.
He raised his eyes to the horizon, where the hot city haze had begun to lift into a comfortless blue sky.
He bought di
Joyce emerged from the shadows with her twelve-string Hohner and a nervous smile. Out of some tic of vanity she had chosen to leave her glasses offstage, and Tom was mildly jealous: the only other time he saw her without her glasses was when they were in bed together. Without them, under the stage lights, her face was plain, oval, a little owl-eyed. She blinked at her audience and pulled the microphone closer to the chair.
She began without much confidence, letting the guitar carry her—more certain of her fingers than of her voice. Tom sat among the quieting crowd while she ran a few arpeggios and chord changes, pausing once to tune a string. He closed his eyes and appreciated the rich body of the Hohner.
“This is an old song,” she said.
She sang “Fa
But this was Joyce, and she loved these words and these tunes.
She sang “The Bells of Rhymney” and “Lonesome Traveler” and “Nine Hundred Miles.” Her voice was direct, focused, and sometimes inconsolably sad.
Maybe Larry was right, Tom thought. We love them for their goodness, and then we scour it out of them.
What had he given her, after all?
A future she didn’t want. A night of stark terror in a hole under Manhattan. A burden of unanswerable questions. He had come into her life like a shadow, the Spirit of Christmas Yet to Come, with his bony ringer pointed at a grave.
He wanted her optimism and her intensity and her fierce caring, because he didn’t have any of his own … because he had mislaid those things in his own inaccessible past.
She sang “Maid of Constant Sorrow” under a blue spot, alone on the tiny stage.
Tom thought about Barbara.
The applause was generous, a hat was passed, she waved and stepped back into the shadows. Tom circled around behind the stage, where she was latching the Hohner into its shell. Her face was somber.
She looked up. “The manager says Lawrence called.”
“Called here?”
“Said he’d been trying to get hold of us all day. He wants us to go over to his apartment and it’s supposed to be urgent.”
What could be urgent? “Maybe he’s drunk.”
“Maybe. But it’s not like him to phone here. I think we should go.”
They walked from the cafe, Joyce hurrying ahead, obviously concerned. Tom was more puzzled than worried, but he let her set the pace.