— The one young man who started that restaurant on Washington Street. I knew him when he was just a boy. His parents are very proud of him. Very proud. Told me that he got the idea for it from eating sandwiches over to the Jersey shore. This goes back a ways. My own boy was in the armed forces then.
— Mrs. Vincenzo, you shouldn’t talk.
— I’ll talk if I want to.
— Buddy just move off a couple feet, here, give the lady some fresh air, the paramedic remarked to Aaron, over whose face then passed a dark cloud of rejection. Meanwhile, adjacent, the operator of the crosstown bus, on the radio, — A fender bender type thing. A flat. Young lady been nice enough to give away some of her soft drinks, and the kids? They all drinking sodas. Some playing cards.
— You want me to get that open for you? Offered the guy on the hood of the station wagon, motioning at M. J.’s front door. — Could open that easy. Just need a credit card or something. Let me do it.
Every northeastern town had its eccentric with the artificial tan. Many of these characters got their tans from local tanning salons, and Hoboken had a tanning salon, but it was on the uptown end where M. J. rarely traveled and anyhow she believed that tanning salons involved irradiation. Fair of skin, as her family were all fair of skin, she was from a long line of ivory that in winter looked delicate and in summer looked unhealthy, people of the ice, this ancestry of Anglo- and Irish-Americans who by birthright didn’t have to live in towns that were built up on swamps as Hoboken was, she was white, and this gentleman on the hood of the station wagon was tanned through some means, through an applied juice, a poultice, an Egyptian henna or some such, which he attempted to mete out over himself evenly, under cover of night, in a harsh bathroom fluorescence.
— I’m supposed to be having a party in less than an hour. The guests are coming really soon. Where’s my boyfriend? He’s supposed to be here.
— You just need a credit card is all.
So his neighborliness revealed itself as an attempt to get to her credit cards, which, in any event, were her parents’ credit cards, namely a Visa card issued by her parents’ bank and an American Express Platinum. All of the money, or requests for money, flowed back to that originary trunk, as all her parents’ money flowed back to the central bank and its charter for which Washington voted, when president, in 1791. All money referred to the original money of British feudal lords, which, transferred, supplemented, by plastic cards, karats, ducats, nuggets of gold, stock certificates, bonds, computer printouts of mutual fund holdings, was nonetheless merely a recognition of the origin of money, held by people who did not tan well and who did not need to apply juices to their pale veneers. She assumed, moreover, that all original money was stewarded by men, because women were held to be forgetful and given to mercurial temper and who were anyway inclined to leave the control of money to others, who had pockets. The men were all in a bar someplace, mired in self-hatred, flattering courtesans who would look hideous in the morning, they were pondering the box-office dominance of a certain Austrian bodybuilder whose accent made him sound startlingly like a fascist; it was almost impossible not to imagine that this Austrian, who may possibly have used juices to tan his veneer, was a fascist. She used to come home at night and Gerry would be sitting at the kitchen table with the local phone book open and she would ask what he was doing, and he would say, Reading the phone book. She would ask why he was reading the phone book. He had no explanation, he was just reading, and when again they were attempting to think of people to invite to the Mad Son Electric Opening Gala, he’d turned to reading the white pages, unable to make contact with her in a way that satisfied either of them, uncertain, even, what it was to make contact; Gerry improvised, Looking for rock stars, because there were these Hoboken bands and they just lived up the street, they all had day jobs, one guy copyedited for one of the larger publishing houses, and you used to see them on the buses going into Port Authority and Gerry was thinking he was going to invite these celebrities to the Mad Son Electric Opening Gala, but then he never did, nothing came of it.
— You don’t have your own credit card? M. J. said. — Because I’m not sure I want to sacrifice one of my credit cards for a lock. I mean, they’re not really mine, anyway. They’re for emergency use, and if I lost one, I’d have to notify the bank.
— Suit yourself, the tan man said.
— I don’t give a hoot if he was the greatest singer of the century! Mrs. Vincenzo shouted. Aaron rocked beside her in recognition of her oratory. — I’m saying he ought to come back and visit the town where he got raised up. Doesn’t make good sense. My boy was in some trouble here in town before he went off to the services and I still lived here with the neighbors and the friends who seen what I’ve been through. They understood my troubles. This is where I’m from. I’m not going to be from anywhere else.
— Mrs. Vincenzo, said one of the paramedics, — would you be willing to get into the ambulance now?
A dispute broke out between the kids playing cards, a black kid and a white kid and soon several others had gotten into it, and they held the white kid down and they pulled off his sneakers, probably cost $37.50 apiece, tied two laces together, the kid cried out No! No! but they held him down. Now M. J. noticed that harvest of sneakers, draped on the power lines. The instigators flung the sneakers up, tried to get them to drape over the lines. Please, no, those are brand-new sneakers! They were calling him faggot, because what else did you call a kid, you called him a faggot, that was the worst thing you could be. She looked at Aaron to see if he registered this, whether a lifetime of being mostly hated by your peers was enough to be a predictor of madness and alcoholism, but Aaron had wandered toward the crosstown bus and was now disputing its route with the driver.