But he recognized none of the stores in the row; everything seemed to have changed. He stood on the sidewalk staring at the darkened stores. His headache was receding, but his vision was still blurred and for a moment it seemed that one of the shops glowed with a gentle warmth; it seemed for a moment that snowflakes danced on the air, and he could hear the tinkle of the bell over the shop door, and a familiar welcoming voice saying, “Come in, you must be frozen. Annie, make him some nice hot chocolate.” He blinked his eyes. The stores were dark, eyeless in the night.
He began walking again.
When he heard the music, he thought his mind was playing a grotesque trick. His vision was beginning to clear somewhat, but now that the blurred distortion was vanishing, it seemed as though an auditory distortion were taking its place. As he came closer to 116th Street, he realized he was indeed hearing music, and he followed the sound, turning the corner and heading toward the bar in the middle of the block. There was a lighted doorway alongside the bar, with a steep flight of steps leading downstairs, and the music came from somewhere at the bottom of the steps, as though emanating in a burst of light from the center of the earth. A boy of about seventeen, wearing a tuxedo, was standing on the steps with a teen-age girl in a pink gown. Buddwing peered down the steps curiously, and the boy smiled and asked, “You looking for the wedding?” Buddwing smiled and said nothing. “You’d better hurry,” the boy said. “The beer and sandwiches are almost gone.”
He realized all at once that he was ferociously hungry, and he nodded at the boy, and then started down the steps, the girl in the pink gown smiling at him as he went by. The light grew stronger, the music louder; the narrow sharp flight of steps opened suddenly onto a wider mirrored alcove. The man he saw in the mirror did not startle him. He did not know who the man was, but at least the face, the body, were familiar to him; these had not changed since he had first seen himself early this morning at the
Or was that yesterday morning?
Was it tomorrow already?
He turned back toward the steps. “Do you know what time it is?” he asked the boy in the tuxedo.
“Almost two o’clock,” the boy said.
“Thank you,” he answered, and turned again toward the mirror. He had been awake since six o’clock yesterday morning, and it was now two o’clock this morning, and the man in the mirror looked very tired, older perhaps, but certainly not at all wiser. He smiled at himself sadly. Inside the hall, the band had begun a spirited tarantella. He straightened his tie and walked into the brightly lighted room. He searched for the food first because he had the feeling someone would detect him as a crasher and throw him out, and he wanted to make sure he got something to eat before that happened. The reception was still going full tilt, with distant cousins from Red Bank whooping it up in the middle of the floor with relatives from 114th Street and Second Avenue.
“Hey, Dominick,” someone shouted to a bald-headed man dancing vigorously with a young brunette, “Piano, piano! Ti viene una strocca!”
“Una sincope, stupido!” the bald-headed man answered, laughing, and wiped his sweating brow as Buddwing spied the bar across the room and headed quickly toward it. The man behind the bar was obviously a relative or a close friend, because he was wearing a dress shirt with his black bow tie loosened and dangling down his starched front, and with his sleeves rolled up and his arms wet from dipping into the icebox for sodas. His tuxedo jacket was hanging on a peg behind the bar, and he looked up at Buddwing as he approached and then grinned amiably and said, “What’ll it be, friend?”
“What’ve you got?”
“Ham or ham and cheese. Beer or soda.”
“I’ll have a beer and two hams,” Buddwing said.
“You the bride or the groom?” the man asked, and turned toward the keg of beer behind the bar.
“A little of each,” Buddwing said.
“Oh, you know them both, huh?” the man asked, drawing a glass of beer.
“Mmm,” Buddwing said.
“Rosie is my cousin,” the man said.
“She’s a nice girl,” Buddwing answered.
“You telling me? I know her from when she was running around with her pants wet. Now look at her, getting spliced.” The man laughed. “Two hams, right?” he asked, and put the glass of beer on the bar top. “You from this neighborhood?”
“No,” Buddwing said.
“I didn’t think so. I ain’t from around here, either. Well, technically, anyway. I’m from Brooklyn. But my wife lived here, you know. So when we got married, we wound up here.”
“I see,” Buddwing said.
“We were married right in the church on a hun’ fifteenth, matter of fact. Oh, it made my mother sick, believe me. She had to come all the way from Brooklyn, oh, it made her sick.”
“I know what you mean,” Buddwing said, smiling. “My wife’s parents live in Mount Kisco, so any important family function takes place up there.”
“Sure, naturally,” the man said. He reached into the large cardboard box behind the counter, and put two sandwiches in waxed paper bags before Buddwing. “It’s nice up that way, though, ain’t it?”
“Oh, sure,” Buddwing said. He took a swallow of beer. “That’s good beer.”
“It ain’t getting warm, is it?”
“No, it’s just right.”
“The keg’s almost gone. This’ll probably be breaking up soon. Look at them two nuts. They ain’t even left yet.”
Buddwing looked across the hall to where the bride and groom were circulating among the guests, accepting congratulations and good wishes, passing out small white boxes of candied almonds. Like the wedding in Milan, he thought, and then pushed Milan out of his mind.
“Is something wrong?” the man behind the bar asked.
“No, no. Nothing.”
“You keep blinking your eyes.”
“I have a bad headache, that’s all.”
“Why don’t you eat something? Maybe you’re hungry.”
“Yes, I am.”
“Go on. Sit down over there someplace and eat your sandwiches.”
“Thank you,” Buddwing said.
“You sure you feel all right?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“Because if you don’t, you see that guy sitting there in the blue suit? That’s Dr. Solomon, he brought Rosie into the world. I mean, if you don’t feel so good.”
“No, I feel fine, thanks.”
“Well, go sit down anyway, why don’t you? You look a little green around the gills.”
“All right, thank you,” Buddwing said, and he nodded and walked away from the bar and to a table at the far side of the hall. The band was playing Vicino il Mare, a mandolin picking out the tune to the accompaniment of piano, drums, and trumpet. Someone cracked a dirty joke to the groom, and he burst out laughing while the bride stood by in becoming blushing innocence. The sound of Italian floated on the air around him, pierced by the pizzicato mandolin, the brittle tinkle of laughter, the pleasant hum of celebrating people. The man behind the bar had said he looked a little green around the gills, and he did feel very weak now as he pulled a chair out from the empty table, felt his knees would fold beneath him at any moment, they had stumbled into the Milanese wedding last summer in the midafternoon, searching for a bar after the suffocating heat on the roof of Il Duomo. On the roof, he had pointed to one of the cherub faces carved into the stone icing and said, “He looks like someone I used to know.” Grace, with her back to the sun, the sun glowing in her hair, brass against brass, had answered, “You look like someone I used to know.”
He took one of the sandwiches from its waxed paper bag and bit into it. The sandwich was dry, no butter, no lettuce, two slices of lean ham on a starchy roll. He washed it down with a swallow of beer. The band was playing a medley of Italian favorites now, Torna a Sorrento and Tra Veglia e Sonno, and Maria, Mari, and finally Luna mezz’ ’o Mare. The laughter around him rose as an old man with a walrus mustache began singing the lyrics at the top of his voice. He was joined by two portly men at another table, and suddenly the hall was ringing with the words, echoing from the walls to assail Buddwing where he sat alone at his table, with a dust-dry sandwich and a glass of flat beer.