"And then you both went back to work until half an hour ago. You and Quincy. All alone up there in that big shiny building. Remember how you used to tell me what a strange feeling it was to be there at two in the morning? The only one in the whole building. You said you felt like an astronaut ready to blast off. Why bother sticking to the story at this late date?"
"It's hard to admit things to you, Merry," I said. "I don't mean to sound condescending but it's like explaining death to a child."
"Thank you," she said.
"You look all scrubbed and fresh. You really do. Terrific."
"I think I'd like to go to sleep now."
"Can we still be friends?" I said.
She went to Mexico for the divorce. I took her out to the airport and met her when she returned. I was twenty-three and she was twenty-two.
I stepped out of the shower. I could hear the weather report on TV, which made me think of a friend of mine, Warren Beasley, who used to be a weatherman. I dried myself, hitched the bath towel around my waist, went to the phone and could not remember who I wanted to call. I looked at the TV screen for a moment and then found myself in a chair about a foot away from the set, watching intently. I could not tell what was happening on the screen and it didn't seem to matter. Sitting that close all I could perceive was that meshed effect, those stormy motes, but it drew me in and held me as if I were an integral part of the set, my molecules mating with those millions of dots. I sat that way for half an hour or so. Then a commercial came on, one I had seen and heard dozens of times, and I got up quickly and walked around the room, feeling numb and sleazy, the way an awakening man feels when he realizes he passed out drunk on his host's sofa the night before. I went over to the coffee table and checked my mail. There were some bills and five or six Christmas cards. One was from a girl in Denver; she had written: when YOU FEAR ENOUGH TO FEND THE FURRY BEAST. Another was from my sister Jane, who was living in Jacksonville with her husband, Big Bob Davidson, and their three children. It wasn't a Christmas card in the usual sense; it was closer to a family newsletter, the kind Jane sent every year at this time. It was mimeographed on a standard piece of bond paper; there was a magazine cutout of a sprig of holly pasted to the top of the page.
Merry Christmas from Florida,
As I sit down to fill you in on another year in the Davidsons' busy life, I can't help but wonder if we haven't all been shortchanged. There simply couldn't have been 365 days to this year.
To start with, we adore Florida. We try to take full advantage of the sun, the beach and the mild climate. This casual, informal living suits we Northerners just fine. With all the sunshine favoring our fair city, the little people (Vaughn, 6; Blair, 4; Sue Ann, 2) are free from colds and sore throats all year round.
In April, we made a whirlwind trip to Big Bob's beloved Philadelphia where we spent a zany day with the whole Davidson clan gathered to greet their wandering hero. What a memorable day that reunion was, particularly for Bob, who, I feel compelled to report, had more than his share of the ample liquid refreshment on hand. Then we scooted up to Old Holly, in Westchester County, where we visited with my Dad, who is still "knocking them dead" on Madison Avenue, and my dear "little" brother David. It was such a pleasant visit, but also sad, with the memory of Mother still lingering like notes from a far-off flute in that big old house. But David cheered us up with a gala day in the city, capped by a visit to his office in midtown Manhattan. We met many of his associates and even one or two TV "celebs." Bob was mighty impressed!
Summer was a fun time in Jax, but also hectic. We had quite a few cookouts on our modest patio and I drove the "three musketeers" over to the beach almost every day. We had a hurricane in September with many killed. Then it was time for Vaughn to go into first grade. Our little "scholar" combed his hair and put on a brand new suit for the occasion. However, just last week Bob had to rush him to the hospital for surgery to correct some kind of congenital problem. I hope I will have good tidings on this subject next year at this time.
Bob and the children join me in wishing everyone a joyous Christmas and a very prosperous New Year.
Her signature, Jane Davidson, was at the bottom. At my father's house in Old Holly, where they spent most of their visit, they never got out of their tennis sneakers and khaki shorts. This was a new Jane to me, this long-striding American man-woman. When we all lived together in Old Holly, I had never thought of either of my sisters-Mary was the other- as being anything less than feminine. Now here was Jane as co-captain of a roller derby team. They ate nothing but hamburgers, frankfurters and potato chips. Big Bob always seemed to be on the floor wrestling with the kids and their dog while Jane ran up and down the stairs like Babe Didrikson Zaharias, two steps at a time and a shitty diaper in her hand. My father, whose fantasy life (I suspected) was a curious blend of the dusty vast splendor of longhorn aristocracy and the faultless breeding of English dukedom, viewed this panorama with glacial disdain, one suede elbow resting on the mantelpiece, his stately manor stance, and a putrid cheroot in his mouth- Charles Bickford in a boundary war with some effete sheep rancher. But he managed to remain calm and an hour after they had left he confessed to a distant loneliness. He was a complicated man, often coarse in speech and manner, unintentionally comic at times, yet possessed of genuine insight- a good man, I think, beneath the snarl and brawl. Evidence of his fantasy life, manifested mainly by the clothing he wore and the books in his library, did not seem apparent to anyone but myself, and it may well be that I sought to dilute the force of his reality, the powerful effect on me of the very fact of his presence, by mixing some giddy daydreams into the jug. My father had served in the Pacific during World War II. He came back with some shrapnel in his chest and a lot of medals. He kept the medals hidden and never talked about the shrapnel but I knew that both were there. We had a long talk about sex and death and I drove back to the city even faster than usual.
I remembered who I wanted to call. It was Pike. I told him I had something important to discuss and we decided to meet at Zack's Bad News, a small bar in the East Village where he spent a lot of his time. I shaved, sprayed on some deodorant, ferreted some food particles out of my teeth with dental floss, then sandblasted with the electric toothbrush and gargled with mouth wash. I put on a pair of green chinos with slash pockets, my mandarin opium-shirt and Tobruk desert boots. Then I slipped into the stained leather Montana grizzly-hunting stud-coat I had just bought at Abercrombie's. I decided to walk down to Zack's. It was cold and the wind came around corners carrying the smell of snow and a faint intimation of evergreen from the Christmas tree stands. On Third Avenue the buses went by in packs, lit up like operating rooms, each window containing several moribund heads. A few yards in front of me was a man with a transistor radio. He held it to his ear and crossed the street with no regard for traffic. I walked behind him for five blocks and he didn't lower the radio once. I moved alongside him. He was listening to a weather report and talking to himself, or talking back to the radio. He was much younger than I had expected, a boy of about fifteen, very round and blotchy in appearance, secret eyes peering out of the baby fat, and he had the slightly retarded look of incipient genius-that crowlike scratchy cunning of the city's ragpickers and bottle-savers, those evolutionary masters of survival. The boy looked at me.
"Snow bulletin," he said.
I never liked to get too close to such people. I crossed Third Avenue quickly. I had gone less than a block when I heard him shouting to me. He was standing on the other side of the avenue near a lightpost, hands cupped to his mouth and the radio tucked into his armpit, calling to me, his bulky figure vanishing and reappearing, a slide presentation, as the cars and buses passed between us.