A thought whipped past as if on a stock ticker: Go back and fight. Be a man. Fight. He stepped toward the diner and saw the waiters tending to the counterman, whom they’d comforted into a booth. It was not big enough to contain his sprawling mass, his lolling head. The counterman was facing away from the window, and John moved yet closer to the glass and watched as Nikos applied a bag of ice while another waiter planted pats of reassurance on the man’s back, broad as a Volkswagen. He would have ripped my head off, John thought.
A man and a woman, the woman in a long cashmere coat, her shoulders padded with snow, passed John on their way into the diner. They were just inside when they saw the huddle at the booth, and they turned right around and left.
Nikos glanced back at the door, and saw John through the glass, the nice young man with manners, peering in at him, his face desolate. Why would he behave this way? Every day Nikos watched customers flow in and out, mostly regulars, dependable people. A boy disappears for years. He returns and… this. Who could explain such behavior? He lifted his arm from the counterman’s back and shooed John away, the same threatless gesture his father had employed to rid his café of the poor boys who begged five lepta coins from the customers back in Patras. Such a life, here in this stupid filthy flat city. Such a life, that he should find himself here, working in this place, nursing the broken head of this maniac.
A normal person, having incited a stranger to murderous rage, having possibly broken some part of his own hand in the process, might find his own thoughts to be as thrashingly wild as a flock of geese frightened into flight, but John, forged in a Caldwell-brand furnace, was tempered to resist chaos. He had it to thank for his controlled performances—he never missed a cue, never botched his blocking. His body was under control. He kept his voice under control, no matter the venue. But it had turned out that audiences wanted a wild man, not a record player.
He inhaled a sharp bellyful of February, his face a Kabuki mask. He waved farewell to Nikos, and as he did, he realized that for a few minutes he’d forgotten his son.
He walked south on Broadway. A flotilla of gray cloud was dragging across the jagged reef of high-rises. Wind barreled down the avenue, bending the saplings planted in the center divider, and John sank deeper into his collar. Northbound, southbound, the avenue was awash in hazy taillights, red dots and dashes transmitting an endless, meaningless telegram.
His chest was tingling and his blood was flying around inside his limbs. A man must maintain dominion over himself. His appearance is his calling card. Things his father said.
What would it feel like, he wondered, to grab the wrist of anyone who sat across from him—even Nikos—and pull that person to him in a tight embrace? How great the gift of another person’s attention, how unthinkably loving. He’d gone the wrong way with the counterman, but he’d had his attention, just for a moment.
John ducked into a tobacconist’s, not his usual. The man behind the counter, his pilled brown sweater zipped up to his chin, strands of white plastered to his shiny scalp, was yelling into the phone, And, and, and you think you have time to wait for the next goddamn thing to just fall into your goddamn lap, like you have all the goddamn time in the world?… You’ll see what happens? How can you say that?
The shop was one of those miraculous closets that occupied gaps between the city’s plusher retail offerings, with only enough room inside for a counter along one wall and a corresponding corridor wide enough for a single customer. The tobacco was under glass, and stacked to the ceiling on shelves behind the register; cartons of cigarettes were stacked high on the counter and to the ceiling on shelves behind John. From somewhere among the boxes a transistor radio played Ravel. The owner yelled, I’ll call ya back!
Never work with the public, had been Albert’s advice to John. The old man had got that much right.
Evening, John said.
The man raised his considerable eyebrows without uttering a sound.
Sir Walter Raleigh Aromatic in a pouch, John said.
John heard the glass door slide, and the man’s arm appeared in the case at knee-level, felt around for the blue pouch, his eyes on the ceiling, upper lip curled slightly, the face of a doctor conducting a digital probe.
A sharp medicine, the man said.
I suppose, John said, opening his wallet.
A physician for all diseases and miseries, the man added, standing, stabbing at the cash register’s gray keys.
John held out the money.
Sir Raleigh’s final words, addressed to the axe that separated his head from his shoulders, the man said, taking the money, stabbing the keys again, the cash drawer shooting into his gut.
Is that so? John said.
A poet to the end, the man said.
This was the problem with people, John thought. They were always springing traps to make you listen, but they never listened in turn, like a preacher in a pulpit.
You don’t say, John said.
Ya, the shopkeeper said, waiting. When John only stared dumbly back at him, the man relented and dropped the money into his hand. This pleased John, to have broken him, and sympathy surged up to fill the empty space annoyance had vacated. What did this old man have but his little brown box of a store and someone to yell at on the phone? Why spoil his fun? And where else did John have to be, and who else did he have to talk to? But he couldn’t think of how to make it right, and he dropped the change into his pants pocket, slipped the pouch of tobacco into his coat, and said, Good night. The man’s finger was already in the phone’s rotary wheel. Didn’t matter whose ear he was chewing, as long as someone was forced to listen. Up crept a bitter snarl into John’s throat, a wild desire to tell the old man to shut the fuck up for once in his life. What a pain in the ass he must be to his family, alternately barking disapproval and dispensing unsolicited lectures on subjects useless and obscure. Cuts of tobacco, biographies of colonial governors, the history of the Tariff Act. If he’s so goddamn smart, what’s he doing running a smoke shop? Brains didn’t get you very far, not in this world, did they, pal?
John paused at the door and took his time arranging his scarf. All he needed was to catch the old man out, all he needed was a touch of spark to tinder and he could give the guy a piece of his mind. He’d be doing the world a favor. He listened to the rip and burr of the wheel as the man dialed. This city was a petty tyrant’s paradise, its citizens ever open to assault from distemperate delivery guys and short-fused butchers, the asinine ministrations of bagel shop proprietors.
He couldn’t linger any longer. In or out.
Louise? Louise? Put your mother on, the shopkeeper said.
John was ready. The speech was writing itself. The man’s accent—Louweese? Louweese?—was an assault, the conversion of an innocent wisp of a word into a boot-clad lout.
John had struggled in diction class with Edith Braun, the German octogenarian who taught from a nubby green recliner, perspective rendering her face the same size as the oblong soles of her size-four feet, the student forced to sing directly at that oval trinity because Braun was deaf and corrected pronunciation by eye. John’s exercises for her were abominations, his mouth a flopping mess, and he’d drilled hours a day to adopt a stage voice that was part Olivier, part machine, and in the end wholly unnatural. He’d become, in the process, as intolerant as Braun of imperfect pronunciation.
Hello? Nora, is that you, love?
The word thumped John in the chest. Love, rolled flat as dough. He glared through the glass door. February, whore of a month. This weather, the city’s punishment for glib April, when the sidewalks flooded with people concussed by the air and sun, incapable of walking a straight line, dumbly following their noses toward the new grass in Sheep Meadow, the Great Lawn. February was when everything died. Even January offered up empty blue skies, but February was a dark, Norse month of ice and cold.