Huddled there in the corner and clutching the receiver as if it were a resuscitory device, I sipped at my drink and glanced forlornly round the room. A blue haze of cigarette smoke blurred the atmosphere and dimmed the feeble flicker of the wall fixtures (which were molded, I noticed, in the shape of steer horns). I could just make out the form of the three Indians, all lined up in a row now, gravely chalking their cues and contemplating the configuration of balls on the table before them as if it held the key to the secrets of the universe. Shirelle had joined the two epicures at the bar and was engaged in a hot debate over the length of time a three-minute egg should be cooked.
I finished my cognac. In combination, and on an empty stomach, the drinks were beginning to have a twofold effect — first, of intensifying my feelings of guilt and disloyalty, and second, of exacerbating the panic I felt over the nasty coincidences that had begun to infest my life. I sat there, half-drunk, warring with myself. I probed an ear for wax, toyed with a coaster that showed a red-nosed man crashing a car through his own bedroom wall, tapped my feet on the brass bar-rail. And then, as I couldn’t decide what to do — I found I was unable either to let go of the receiver or to get up from the barstool — I thought I might as well take things a step at a time and put something on my stomach. When Shirelle turned to pour herself another double vodka, I ordered a beer and two pickled eggs.
I don’t know what it was — the taste of the eggs, the odor of the vinegar or the odd amalgam of egg, vinegar, soda cracker, and beer — but I was suddenly skewered with nostalgia. These eggs, this beer, this depressing disreputable rundown backwater dive — together they recalled other eggs, other beer, other dives. I thought of a college friend who’d spent every waking moment cloistered in a saloon killing piss-yellow pitchers of draft beer and whose only sustenance derived from beer nuts, beef jerky and pickled eggs. Brain food, he called it. He drank up his book money, his date money, his food, rent, gas and clothes money, he grew pale, his flesh turned to butter. I worried about him — until I quit school. The graduation announcement came the following year, his name prominent at the top of the page, summa cum laude. I thought of a girl named Cynthia, who climbed mountains, wore lederhosen over her rippling calves and once let me creep under a table in a dark bar and stick my head between her thighs. I thought of fights, forged ID’s, vomit-streaked Fords. The eggs tasted as if they’d been unearthed in an Etruscan tomb, the beer was flat. I ate mechanically. Faces drifted into my consciousness, epoch by epoch, counters on an abacus. Then I thought of Dwight Dunn.
Like Phil, Dwight was a touchstone. We’d gone to school together, double-dated, squeezed pimples side by side, we’d struck out, scored, experimented with tobacco, alcohol and drugs together, we’d postured, pronounced, chased the same women, earnestly discussed Nietzsche and Howlin’ Wolf late into the night. Dwight had been best man at my wedding; when his father died I flew in from the West Coast and sat up with him. We were children, adolescents, bewildered adults. Dwight had stayed in New York — he was living on East 59th Street now and working for a public relations firm — but we’d kept in touch. Unlike Phil, he was a straight arrow, steady — I could picture the baggy chinos, madras shirts and Hush Puppies he favored, and the look of pained concentration (as if he’d been forced to decipher Finnegans Wake while undergoing electroshock treatment) the contact lenses gave him. Dwight, I thought, alcohol tugging at my flesh, good old Dwight. At that moment I was visited with my second inspiration of the evening: I would call him, call him and listen to his soft stuttering laugh and the comforting rhythms of his speech.
I dialed like a man in a burning building. Come on, I thought, counting the clicks, and then the information operator was on the wire, quick and efficient, and I scribbled the number on my bar napkin and called collect.
“Hello?” Dwight’s voice sounded distant, weary. For an instant I thought I’d wakened him — but no, it was just after ten in New York.
The long-distance operator interceded with a deadpan impression of Desi Arnaz: “Colleck call for any wan from Fee-lix: will you ’cept the charge?”
“What?” A tapping came over the line, and I envisioned a repairman in Kansas hammering a downed wire back in place. “Yes, yes — put him on.”
“Dwight?”
“Felix?”
“How you doing?”
“Fine,” he said. “What’s up?”
I couldn’t tell him, couldn’t give him specifics anyway. “Oh, I don’t know. I’m a little depressed.” Just then Shirelle threw back her head and laughed like an abandoned old whore with a meter on every orifice. “Did I tell you I’m rooming with Phil?”
We talked for half an hour before I understood the reason I’d called. “Listen, Dwight,” I said finally, “you think you could read me something from one of your notebooks?”
Dwight was a compulsive record-keeper — no, he was pathological, half a step removed from the crazy who keeps his own feces in labeled fruit jars. Not only did he list every experience he’d ever had — everything from breaking up with his girlfriend, rupturing his spleen or being victimized by pickpockets in Madrid to buying a pair of shoelaces — he kept track of every meal he’d eaten, the clothes he wore, states, counties and municipalities visited and distances traveled, gifts given and received, feelings felt, gas, electricity and water consumed, the number of points he’d scored in an intramural basketball game in junior high, cab fares, tips, the books he’d read, movies he’d seen (including where and with whom), records, shoes and nose drops purchased, every bowel movement, hiccough, belch and whimper of his life. He could tell you how many streetlamps line FDR Drive and how many times he’d passed under them, give you a blow-by-blow account of a trip he’d made to visit his grandparents when he was thirteen, describe Radio City Music Hall in terms of the number and texture of the seats.
I could appreciate what he was trying to do — each of us to a greater or lesser degree has the same impulse, after all, the same need to impose order on our sloppy irrational lives in the face of an indifferent universe. I could appreciate it, and benefit from it as well. My past and Dwight’s intersected at any number of points: he’d recorded my history, too.
Within moments I could hear the rustle of turning pages, and then Dwight’s familiar nasal tones: “Know how many points you scored against Fox Lane on January 18, 1967?”
Nineteen sixty-seven. Amazing. I had a vision of myself — alive, free, untrammeled and untroubled, dribbling an inflated sphere up and down a polished wooden floor as if nothing else in the world mattered. “How many?” I breathed.
“Twelve.” A page turned. “You remember who else was on the team?”
I listed them, all of them, right down to the benchwarmers — the thyroid freaks with the pinheads and the muscular little guys who weren’t quite quick enough to make first-string guard.
Then he was reading: “June 10, 1969. Picked up Felix at eight p.m. in my father’s Charger, took fifteen point two gallons of gas at thirty-one cents a gallon for a total of four seventy-one, and then drove to Port Chester to pick up Sherrie Ryan and Ginger Beardsley. I was wearing my new maroon bellbottoms and …”
The voice went on, precise and evenly modulated, the voice of order and reason, the voice that proved my past and promised the future. I just listened, nodding, memory blooming like a field of clover. We must have talked for an hour and a half. I was working on my third beer and sixth egg when we finished, and feeling that God was in His heaven and all was right with the world. “Dwight,” I said, my voice a pant of gratitude, “thanks.” The receiver fell into its cradle with a click gentle as a kiss.