Outside, snow had again begun to fall. Joe tossed the bag into the alley and walked toward the bus stop. His limp seemed worse, his gait almost spastic. He also looked larger than before, as if he’d grown a layer of blubber. A breeze opened his coat, revealing a second coat, and protruding from its collar, the collar of a third.
“Do you want a ride?” I asked.
He looked at me.
“I’m going to call myself a car,” I said. “I can have it drop you wherever you need to go.”
In the distance the bus turned the corner. He looked back at it, then at me, and he said, “What I really am is hungry. You hungry?”
WE WENT TO AN ALL-NIGHT DINER. All I wanted was a cup of decaf, but when I said I was paying, he ordered fried eggs, bacon, hash browns, and a milkshake. Listening to him gave me heartburn. The waitress started to walk away, and he called her back to add onion rings and a green salad.
“Gotta get all the food groups,” he said.
He ate slowly, giving everything about fifty chews, until I couldn’t imagine he was tasting much more than mush and his own saliva. Long gulps of milkshake followed, his face stuck so far forward into the glass that his nose reemerged tipped with froth. He would then wipe his face on a napkin, crumple it, and drop it on the floor. All the while his eyes kept up a nervous hopscotch, to the door, to the counter, to me, the table, the waitress, the jukebox; his fingertips red and feathery with hangnails.
He asked when I had last played checkers.
“Probably twenty-five years ago.”
“I could tell.”
“I never claimed to be any good.”
“Victor’s a good checkers player. He’d be better if he slowed down a bit.”
This tidbit intrigued me, as for some reason I’d always pictured Victor as contemplative, at least when not drawing. I mentioned to Joe that the art had a strong gridlike feel to it, especially when assembled as a whole. He shrugged, either in disagreement or out of apathy, and went back to eating.
“You live around here?” I asked.
“Sure. Sometimes.”
I didn’t understand, and then I did, and when he saw that I’d caught on, he started to laugh.
“I could have you over sometime. We’ll have a sleepover. You like the great outdoors? Har har har.”
I smiled politely, which made him laugh even harder.
“You know what you look like,” he said, “you look like I just took a dump on your living-room rug and you’re trying to ignore it. Hell, I’m just messing. I don’t really live outside… . Feel better now?”
“No.”
“Why not? Don’t believe me?”
“I”
“Yes I do, then. I sleep in the park. Har har har. No I don’t. Yes I do. No I don’t. What do you think?”
“I don’t know.”
He smiled, kicked back the last of his milkshake, and waved the empty glass at the waitress. “Chocolate, please.”
There were still a couple of onion rings left, as well as the entire untouched salad. With his new drink he resumed the processchew chew chew chew swallow gulp gulp wipeand I got the impression that he was obeying some weird ritual, that he needed to finish his food and drink at the same time. I had a vision of us sitting there until sunrise, ordering and reordering until a happy coincidence gave him permission to stop.
Either that or he was just really, really hungry.
He said, “You see that?”
His chocolate-tipped nose pointed across the street to an unlit church.
“They got a shelter,” he said. “Doors close at nine, though, so on game nights we finish too late.”
I didn’t need to ask why he chose checkers over a bed. It would have been insulting for me to ask. Instead I said, “Where did you learn to play?”
He wiped his face with a revoltingly soiled napkin. I handed him another and he wiped, crumpled, dropped. “The nuthouse.”
Again, I smiled politely, or tried to.
“Har har har, dump on the rug, har har har.” He forked his salad and held the dripping leaves up to the light before popping them in his mouth. “I love me some greens,” he said, chewing.
“When were you there?”
“Seventy-two to seventy-six. You can learn to do anything in there. Lots of time, you know? It’s like the best college in the world. I got my four-year degree, har har har. If you weren’t nuts before they put you in there, you’d go nuts from boredom.” He laughed and drank and coughed out some milkshake and wiped his chin.
“Sal told me you used to be world champion.”
“Coulda beena contendah. Har har har. Yeah, I won some fucking money. Not much money in checkers. They got a computer now that can’t be beat. The human being is obsolete.” He sat back, patted his stomach. It was hard to tell where all the food had gone. All that remained on the table was three fingers of milkshake, which he eyed spitefully. “You want to know something about Victor, buy me dessert.”
I flagged the waitress. Joe asked for coconut cream pie.
“We don’t have it.”
He looked at me. “I want some coconut cream pie.”
“What about strawberry,” I offered.
“Does that sound like an adequate substitute?” he asked.
“Well”
“How bout some hair pie,” he asked the waitress. She looked at him, looked at me, shook her head, and walked away.
“Whatever happened to service,” Joe shouted at her. He looked at me. “I’ll have a brownie sundae.”
I got up and went after the waitress.
Joe stared sullenly at the tabletop until his dessert came. When it did, he didn’t touch it. He said, “Victor was in the nuthouse, too.”
“With you?”
“No.” He snickered. “You never met him, huh?”
“No.”
“He’s a lot older than me. We didn’t meet until he started coming to the club.”
“And when was that.”
“Right after I started advertising the tourney. So, 83. I used to make fliers and stick em up on telephone poles. He shows up, one of the fliers in his hand, like it was his ticket. I remember that night, there were only three of us, me, Victor, and Raul, who kicked it in a couple of years back. He and I played all the time cause nobody else showed on a regular basis. I knew Victor was decent cause he clobbered Raul.”
“Did he beat you?” I asked.
He began shoveling in the ice cream. “I said he was good.”
I apologized.
“I don’t care. But if you’re trying to get the facts, then that’s the fucking facts.”
“Did he ever mention where he was institutionalized?”
“Someplace upstate.”
“Did he mention the name?”
“That’s privileged information,” he said.
He didn’t say anything more until he’d finished his sundae, scraping his spoon along the inside of the bowl to gather the last threads of chocolate sauce. Then he grunted and took a deep breath and said, “The New York School for Training and Rehabilitation. That’s what it’s called.”
I wrote it down.
“It’s near Albany,” he added.
“Thank you.”
He nodded, wiped his mouth, dropped the napkin on the floor as the waitress passed. She hissed at him and he blew her a kiss. Then he sighed and said, “Pardon me while I drain the main vein.”
I paid the check and sat waiting for him to return. He never did. He went out the back door, and by the time I figured it out, his footprints were already filling up.
Bertha lies on the top floor of a private hospital on the east side of Manhattan. Well-wishers have filled her room with bouquets, but as she prefers the dark, the nurses have left the shades drawn and the flowers have all begun to die, producing a cloying stench that gets into one’s clothes. Nevertheless she will not consent to have the vases removed. She is impervious; she has tubes up her nose; and the comfort that the flowers provide means more to her than the momentary comfort of her visitors. Visitors come and go, but she is stuck; and if the room smells like a compost pile, that’s nobody business but hers. Who are these visitors, that they should have an opinion? Not her friends. Not the committees and boards of directors who have sent the flowers. Those people are not allowed in. She does not want to be seen in a state of decay. Only with the greatest of reluctance did she agree to come to the hospital in the first place. She wanted to stay at the house on Fifth. David prevailed upon her: she could not remain at home; she would die if she did not get proper care, in a proper setting. And what, exactly, was wrong with that? Louis had died at home. But David argued that if she went to the hospital she might live longer, and wasn’t that the idea? To stay aliveto clutch at lifeto dig fingernails into its greasy surface?