David Gates - The Wonders of the Invisible World

I got off at Lex, the station deep, deep underground. I associate the name Lexington with the color green. Which, come to think of it, isn’t such an uncanny mental leap. But Lexington, Massachusetts, aside, I also think of Lexington, Virginia, and Lexington, Kentucky, as green places. Like Old Lyme, Connecticut. Hell, Greenfield, Massachusetts. So it always seems to me that Lexington, not Park, should be the avenue with the grass down the middle. It was Laura’s mnemonic that taught me the order of the avenues: Fat Men Piss Less, Fifth Madison Park Lex. A side of Laura that Greenfield will never know. The other day she told me there’s now a place in Greenfield where you can get real H&H bagels; did you ever hear anything so sweet? I walked to the Third Avenue end of the platform, belatedly worrying about what Jane meant by kind of important, and belatedly wondering if she’d been counting on me to worm it out of her on the phone. I took the long, long stairs instead of the escalator, little as I felt like it. Good for the buns. A thing one thinks about these days.

The plan was, have a quick drink, talk about whatever this was, then get her home to her husband. You saw this coming too, no? His name is Jonathan. A something at WNYC, unless it’s BAI. I need hardly add that I’m the Older Man. Back when Laura and I would sometimes have an adulterous couple out to the farm for a weekend — my brother Miller and, what was the name, Alix, were one of several — we used to feel parental. Well … what’s the expression I’m looking for? Something in between tempus fugit and mutatis mutandis.

I found the place okay — a name like J. P. Donleavy’s, Something Something Somebody’s — and I just stood there staring at the door with its etched, frosted-glass panels. Not in the fucking mood. A panhandler played doorman, jingling coins in a cardboard cup. Shivering. To avoid his glance, I looked up: the sky was that corrupted pink you get from streetlights and neon in whatever combination. Snowflakes fell out of the pinkness, though not enough to amount to anything. You could hear Billie Holiday inside singing “Ain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do.” So you had to give them a couple of bonus points for playing the Decca material: the Columbia stuff was a cliché, the Verve too depressing. So how much, I wondered, would their good taste inflate the price of their drinks? With that five gone to the subway woman, which I now thought was stupid — it might see her through, what, half a day? — I had twelve dollars, three tokens and maybe eight bucks in my checking account until payday tomorrow. I stuffed a dollar bill into the panhandler’s cup and was told God bless you. I told him it was a cold night, which he already knew and which ungraciously implied that I wouldn’t have been so munificent otherwise. Hey, you can’t come out of every human transaction smelling like a rose.

I stepped inside and my glasses instantly fogged; dead Billie now sounded alarmingly loud above the chattering voices of the living. I stuck my gloves in my pocket, wiped the inside of each lens with a pinkie, and there it all was, exactly what the name and the frosted-glass door panels promised: the tiny square floor tiles, the polished brass, the polyurethaned oak, the stamped-tin ceiling painted glossy ivory. Had this evocation of whatever it was supposed to be an evocation of ever gladdened a single heart? Have I mentioned that I fucking hate New York City?

I spotted Jane sitting at a square table with a white tablecloth, on which was centered a clear glass bowl with a gardenia blossom floating. Perhaps to go with Billie Holiday, perhaps not. But it suggested — unless the mood forbade it — a bon mot to get things rolling. I would gesture at the gardenia and say, Hey, this must be Lady Day Day. No, too obscure. Was that even a gardenia?

“Sorry, you waiting long?” I said. “Cab got stuck in all this traffic coming up Lex.” Will you find this pretense of being a cabber-about-town less contemptible when I tell you I kept it up partly for Jane’s sake? It seemed sad that her Older Man should be one who had to take subways. How many Older Men would she be vouchsafed in this life? Jane was appealing — the overbite, the boy haircut, the Trotsky glasses — but nonstandard. But appealing. Christ, she could get all the Older Men she wanted. Some of the younger ones, too. I seemed to be dishing out displaced self-pity to all comers tonight.

But what was she saying? “Say again?” I said, and put my index finger behind my ear as if the loud music was the problem.

“I said, ” she said, “how can you go up Lex?”

“What am I saying? Up Park.” I didn’t go into my riff about how Park should be Lexington. “Here, where can I stash this? On the floor, I guess. Don’t let me get hammered and forget it, okay?”

I set the clarinet case by my chair, craned around looking for a coatrack, then remembered to lean down and kiss her. She offered a cheek. I thought, Definitely not the Lady Day thing, then went and hung up my coat, arriving back at the table just as a waiter in a white apron set before Jane a grotesquely large snifter with a thimbleful of brandy in the bottom. I sat down and said, “You have Maker’s Mark?”

“Gee, I think we’re out,” he said. I’m far from the only bullshit artist in New York.

“No problem,” I said. “Jack Daniel’s? Over ice?” On the rocks sounds old-time, like ordering a Rob Roy.

“So,” I said.

“This has to be quick,” she said. “I’m officially at the movies with Mariana.”

“All ears,” I said.

“It’s weird,” she said. “I feel like more of a shit lying about that than actually — you know.”

“Well, better safe than sorry.”

She looked down into her glass and said, “Yeah, right.”

“So,” I said.

“So,” she said. She took a deep breath and let it out. “So yours truly thinks she’s pregnant.”

“You’re shitting me,” I said. “What do you mean you think ?”

“Well, for one thing I’m like three weeks late. And I’m never late. Plus I’ve been sick to my stomach the last two mornings. I went out this afternoon and I bought one of those pregnancy things, you know, at the drugstore. Except I’m too scared to use it.”

“Unbelievable,” I said.

“Really,” she said.

“How could it have happened, though?”

“If I knew that, ” she said, “it wouldn’t have happened. Obviously. I don’t know. Some stupid thing, I’m sure.”

Billie Holiday was singing “Baby Get Lost.” I know; I didn’t believe it either.

“Well, look,” I said. “Let’s not panic. For one thing, you’ve been under a lot of stress. Which can make people late. Which could also upset your stomach. Anyway, even if anything was wrong, I don’t think, as nearly as I can remember, I don’t think you’d be feeling sick in the morning this early on, would you?”

She raised her eyes and gave me the look I deserved.

My Jack Daniel’s arrived.

I looked over at the rows and rows of bottles behind the bar, presumably doubled by a mirror. I looked back at Jane. She was looking down into her glass.

I said, “Whose would it be?”

She shrugged. “Up for grabs,” she said.

“Have you told Jonathan?”

She shook her head, still looking down.

“Have you thought what you might do?”

“I’m a married woman,” she said. “Married women get pregnant, they have a baby, right?”

“Yes, but when—”

“I mean, that’s what you do, right?”

“But isn’t this a tad more complicated?” I said.

She shook her head, still staring down. Not no to my question, just no.