S Rozan - Absent Friends

Marian's sure. She's sure about little Jeanine: People aren't born to be one thing or another, she tells Jimmy. People decide. Jeanine can go anywhere she wants to go.

Jimmy doesn't argue. But he thinks about himself and fires. Markie and cars. Tom and quiet talks at Flanagan's with suit-coated men who come and go. He thinks about Mrs. Molloy's eyes when she looks at Jack, always the same look since they were kids, like she sees something bad standing behind him that the rest of them can't see. He's not really sure how many choices any of them has, about which way to go.

But Marian's sure. She wants to do it for her job, help people find their ways to go. A career of saving people. That's what Marian went to college for, saving people.

Business, she tells him, laughing, the first time he says this to her. Business administration, Jimmy, that never saved anyone. But Jimmy knows what she wants, he knows why she's doing it the whole time she's in college, the only one of them to go. It's so she can work at one of those places, the Red Cross or someplace, when she's finished, an important job where she can save people.

And now she is finished, graduated back in June up at City College, Jimmy late because he has to trade shifts, take that long train ride into Harlem. Graduation's outdoors, clear and warm and not a cloud in the sky. Jimmy's way in the back, way on the side, when the graduates march in. The wind is up. They have to hold their flat hats on and their black gowns flap and Jimmy has a little trouble picking Marian out, he's so far back and they're all dressed the same. But when the dean calls her name and she strides across the stage like someone really tall on her way to someplace important-though she's shorter than Jimmy, and she's only going to shake the dean's hand and sit down again-Jimmy watches her and knows that if he forgets his own name, forgets where home is, forgets why you fight fires, he'll always remember how Marian walks.

When she starts the new job two weeks later-she lined this job up before she graduated, that's Marian's way, how she does things-Jimmy takes her out to celebrate. Just the two of them at Montezuma's, in St. George, they eat paella and lobsters and drink wine, neither of them knows what paella is before they order it, but it's great. Though Jimmy thinks maybe they could be eating cardboard and on this night he'd like it.

Jimmy lifts his wineglass, offers a toast.

To saving people, he says.

Candlelight sparkles in Marian's wineglass and her eyes. To saving people, she says, smiles at him. Your way and mine.

That smile, when Jimmy sees it, he'd slay dragons if they were keeping Marian from finding her way.

Someday, he says, and though he's still smiling, his voice has gone quiet in a way that makes Marian lower her glass and really listen, someday you'll be the one. The one making decisions, how to save people, who to save.

Marian tilts her head. Someone has to, she says.

Her eyes are almost black, with tiny lights, some reflected from the candles, but some Jimmy's seen before, light that's always there in Marian's eyes. I'm glad it's going to be you, he says.

And he doesn't say: And I'm glad it doesn't have to be me.

To do the kinds of things Marian does, the things she wants to do, you have to be pretty sure you know what's good for people.

But, Marian would say if he said this to her-he knows she would, because she has-like little Jeanine: her sister's a hooker, her mother's a drunk. How can you not be sure it would be good for her not to be like them?

When she says things like that, Jimmy can't argue.

But still.

His kind of saving, it's different. Buildings are going to burn, he puts the fires out. People inside are going to die, he fights a tug-of-war with death, and if he wins-so far, he's usually won-they live. There's not much to figure out: not burning is better than burning, living is better than dying.

Anyone knows that.

When they leave Montezuma's, Jimmy puts his arm around Marian. Her shoulders are warm under her soft sweater, and he has to stop and kiss her. The way she holds him when she kisses back, he almost abandons his plan so they can go straight home. Instead he takes her hand and leads her downhill.

Where are we going?

You'll see.

They wind up at the terminal. Jimmy pays two nickels, and they're on the ferry. As the boat starts to move, he unslings his backpack on the deck, pulls out a bottle of real champagne from France, and two glasses. Marian laughs, like music. Jimmy pops the cork. Champagne fizzes up, spills over his hand and tickles. She holds the glasses while he pours, and they drink champagne all the way to Manhattan, watching the towers with their sparkly lights get closer, get bigger. And then, all the way back home.

That night, Marian's graduation night, summer was starting; tonight it's close to ending.

In bed in the Cooleys' basement apartment, Marian walks her fingers along Jimmy's ribs as though she's counting them. Superman, she says, something on your mind?

Me? No, uh-uh. Jimmy smiles. Only you.

Seems like you're worried about something.

Jimmy's surprised. On his way home he was thinking about Markie, about Jack, about Mr. Molloy asking for help over a beer in Flanagan's. He was trying to figure what to do. But when Marian opened the door, kissed him in the doorway under the stairs, well, that was the end of that.

Just stuff, says Jimmy.

He could tell her: what Mr. Molloy's problem is, what he wants Jimmy to do. But there's two things about that. One is, Marian gets mad at Jack a lot these days. Grow up! she tells him. Anyone else saying the kinds of things to him that Marian does, Jack would blow up. But Marian always had special ways she could talk to Jack, ways no one else could. And Jack could always make Marian laugh. Always before; but not now. Now when Jack's wild, when he does his stupid stuff, Marian gets mad.

And even though it's kind of impossible not to like Tom, she doesn't want to be around him a lot, not for a while now. Not since they were all too old not to know what Mr. Molloy does, what Tom now does. Jimmy doesn't push it when Marian says she has to work the night Tom has Mets tickets (though Marian loves baseball) or when she drops by only long enough for one quick eggnog at Tom and Vicky's Christmas party and spends most of that time talking quietly with Peggy Molloy. Sometimes Jimmy wonders what he'd do, himself, if he and Tom weren't part of each other's first memories. But they are.

Tom goes far back in Marian's life, too, of course, as far as he goes in Jimmy's, and Jack does, too. But with girls it's different. The girls see this kind of thing, see most things, a different way.

For the girls, Jimmy thinks, it's not just who people are. Not just that they've all always known each other, been in the middle of each other's lives like all the different colors making up the same picture, all the different sounds in the same song. That's not enough. For the girls, it's the kinds of things you do, too. For them, those can change how they think about people. For him, for the other guys, what you do, that's one thing, but who you are, that's another.

Maybe the way the girls see things is right, and his is wrong. That wouldn't surprise Jimmy. But whose way is right, he thinks, that's not what matters sometimes.

And there's the other thing, too: Marian wouldn't get it, why Jimmy can't just go to Jack and tell him what's going to happen, tell him he has to cool it or he'll be screwed. But if it's the truth, Jimmy, she'd say. Why can't you just tell him, if it's the truth?

Jimmy knows having the truth is only part of the answer, but he doesn't know how to tell this to Marian.

So when Marian asks what's on his mind, Jimmy says, Just stuff.