David Gates - Jernigan

I tried to understand why this was good news. Then I looked through for ads with pictures of naked bodies. I found some, most notably an endearingly swollen breast with nipple, and tried to get excited. Finally I put the magazine back as I’d found it — at an angle from the sofa a bit sharper than forty-five degrees — then got up and had a last swallow of vodka and looked around for something to write a note with. Best I could do was a felt-tip pen I found on the kitchen counter. I tore a paper towel off the roll that hung from the underside of the cabinets and wrote HAD TO GET BACK. THANKS AGAIN FOR EVERYTHING.—j. A job just writing that much, since the ink seeped and spread into the soft paper, and the tip of the pen dug in and ripped it if you bore down at all. Now, where do you put it so they’ll see it? I unscrewed the cap of the vodka bottle (took one last swallow), placed a corner of the paper towel over the mouth and screwed the cap back on. There: looked like somebody wearing a cape. Absolut Man, I thought: Dump ta dum!

When I got out on the street I couldn’t remember where I’d left the car. Right, 105th. Which was actually easy to remember because a five was like a two: Penny and Fred lived on 102nd, therefore the car was on 105th. What do you mean, a five is like a two? Like a two reflected upside down.

Boy, did I not want to go home. I drove a few blocks down West End, intending to go to 96th and get on the West Side Highway the opposite way from all the happy weekenders coming back bumper-to-bumper from their happy weekends at fucking two miles an hour. Then I just pulled over and double-parked by a pay phone. I couldn’t leave the city without giving old Miranda one last shot. Stupid, I grant you: You see Miranda and then what? You see Miranda and, one chance in a million, spend the night with Miranda and then what? I tried to make up a joke in my head with the name Miranda. Everything worked: Miranda decision, Miranda warning. Miranda rights, there was another one, something about how every man should have his Miranda rights. Oh, not in order to use such a joke on Miranda herself. It was just something I was doing in my head. If your name was Miranda, that stuff was probably like the old Are you Upjohn? to somebody named Upjohn. If there was really such a name as Upjohn, which sounded improbable to me just then. Well, Upjohn Laboratories.

I got the number from Information again, and this time she picked up the phone herself. “Are you Upjohn?” I said, giving the whole thing probably one twist too many.

“What number are you calling?” she said.

“Miranda,” I said. “Just joking. Peter Jernigan again. God, Jernigan again — sounds like Irish time here. Listen, how are you? I left you a kind of confused message before.”

“Right,” she said. “I was sort of half asleep when you called. How are you?”

“Oh, I’m, you know—” Get it together, I thought. When somebody says How are you? it’s not a real question. “Couldn’t be better,” I said. “Listen, I happen to be in your, well, I was visiting friends right in your neighborhood, and I was wondering if, I mean this is very spur-of-the-moment stuff, but if you weren’t doing anything I thought I’d invite you out for a quick drink or whatever. If there’s, you know, someplace in the neighborhood.”

“Well, that’s nice of you,” she said. “The thing is, I’m supposed to do something later on.”

“Oh, well, look,” I said.

“It was really sweet of you to call,” she said. “I hope you’re doing well.”

“Yeah, relaxing, little of this, little of that,” I said. “I actually find that if things are going well, that you’re actually more creative rather than—”

The telephone went clunk. My quarter dropping from somewhere inside to somewhere else inside.

“Hello?” I said.

“Are you calling from a pay phone?” she said. She made it sound disreputable.

“Yeah,” I said. “Well, listen, I shouldn’t keep you. Why don’t I, the next time I get to town, call you at work or something and maybe we can get together for lunch or whatnot.”

“Well, the thing is,” she said, “I’m not going to be there much longer because I decided to go to business school.”

“You’re kidding,” I said. “I think that’s splendid. We’ll have to get together and hoist one to your success.”

Silence.

“Well,” she said, “the thing is that once classes get going I’m not sure I’m going to have an awful lot of time.”

“Listen,” I said, “I know exactly how it is. The important thing is to get your work done. So anyway, I should be getting along. It was good to talk to you, and — good luck, right?”

“I’m glad you understand,” she said.

I got back in the car and went right into the dash after that Walkman. Megadeth, Webb Pierce, any fucking thing, whatever was in there, just get it going. I put the ear things on and turned the music up so loud it hurt. Then I turned it up louder, until I couldn’t tell what it was.

1

When I came in, the house was dark. And cold. Again. Always. I pulled the string and the kitchen light came on. On the counter next to the toaster sat a Christmas tree stand. Like a big spider: red metal bowl up on green metal legs. Under one foot, a note: IF YOU CARE. I tried to think back. Hadn’t we left things in reasonably decent shape? So what was the new offense? I wasn’t crazy enough to think Martha could have known by spooky mind power about my calling what’s-her-name, which I just wasn’t going to think about. (Miranda.) One of those disgraces best dealt with by putting off thinking about it. Once you’d moved on in time a little bit — making an analogy here between time and distance, though I’m not sure you can — it would be back in the past and therefore smaller. The law of perspective, as in Jon Nagy’s Television Art Book . Like an A-bomb blast, which seared you less the farther away you stood, in a featureless Jon Nagy landscape. I’m not explaining this right.

What I was supposed to do now, to show I cared , was get the tree set up. So I dragged it into the kitchen, laid it on its side and unscrewed the thumbscrews on the Christmas tree stand so I could slip the collar over the sawed-off end. Then I tightened them again, going around and around, three turns each screw, so as to keep the trunk dead center. The screws bit into the soft wood and I clenched my teeth. When it hurt my fingers to turn the screws anymore, I stood the tree up. Son of a bitch was cockeyed anyway. So fuck it. I carried it stand-first into the living room, as if it were a battering ram, and set it in the corner, between the end of the sofa and the window. My idea was to keep it away from the woodstove. If that wasn’t where she wanted the thing, she could move it. I filled a saucepan and poured water into the metal bowl so the tree could drink. Then I got the woodstove going and huddled on the sofa in my overcoat. What was it, Sunday? So 60 Minutes was on, unless it was over.

I tried to think when Christmas must be. Late in the week, wasn’t it? Friday? Saturday? Not enough information to think with: you’d need today’s date and then you could go on from there. I hadn’t bought anybody anything, assuming that we were exchanging gifts, as on a normal Christmas, and in what sense was this Christmas not normal? Technically speaking. There were grownups, kids and a tree: nothing to suggest an exemption. I thought, You could drive over to the mall right now and get that old Christmas shopping done , boy. Tomorrow the crowds would only be worse, and worse still the next day and even worse than that the day after.