As they walk in ruptured moods, hands in pockets, Jamey looks at Elise.
“Don’t you think it’s odd?” he says, holding his coat closed at the collar.
“What?”
“Him showing up like that.”
“Weird coincidence.”
Jamey squints into the distance. “Is it coincidence?”
Elise snorts. “What else could it be?”
“I didn’t want to leave the house for a reason,” he says testily.
“Now you stopped making sense,” she says, and they walk in silence, both annoyed.
Jamey wants to hide out all the time, but Elise is at work today, and they’ve run out of toilet paper and coffee, so he’s forced to go to the deli. It’s ugly out here, as he thought it would be, and he walks into dank wind.
Dim faces look down from the roof: kids smoking. Snow hangs, unspent.
Jamey thinks he’s hallucinating: it looks like a guy moving a grandfather clock (which he can hardly hold upright) down the cracked sidewalk on a skateboard.
The guy is wearing wraparound sunglasses and a denim jacket.
“Yo, help a brother out,” he says.
Jamey gestures to see if the guy means him.
“Yeah, you, I got to get this pain-in-the-ass clock into this truck but the truck ain’t here yet. Let’s move it into the Holiday!”
“What are you doing with this thing?” Jamey asks.
“My grandma needs it fixed,” he says with a straight face.
Jamey stares at him, deciding.
“I’m Tony. I live here.” The guy scratches the blemishes on his white chin, then grins. “I’ll buy you a drink, man.”
Jamey shrugs, amused, and uses his back to push open the door as they guide the tilted clock into the dive bar. Smoke and old wool. A tiny dog sleeps in a knitted red bed on the cigarette machine.
“We’re just resting it here for a second,” Tony tells everybody as he positions the clock by the door.
The bartender: square face, dead eyes, and a gold hoop in one ear. He gives Tony a look Jamey can’t decipher.
“My grandma,” Tony says conspiratorially to Jamey, twirling whiskey in the fingerprinty glass, “is a woman of God. She prays every minute she’s awake. She prays for you and she don’t even know you yet. You should come meet her sometime. She’ll make you cocoa. She got three cats and two of them is blind. They were born blind,” he says matter-of-factly.
The clock strikes a quarter hour.
A lady with a lipstick ring shakes her head. “Why the fuck am I in here if I wanted to sit next to church bells ringin’?”
“This ain’t no church, Gwen,” Tony says.
Tony follows the horse race on TV. He looks like a grasshopper: huge eyeballs, spindly limbs, and a predatory mouth. He probably gets laid but has to spend all his money to get her drunk and high, even though he could spend the same on a hooker, but won’t.
“We should hang out sometime,” he says to Jamey. “You seem like you from somewhere else.”
Tony springs off his stool to see if the truck arrived, then asks Jamey for a quarter.
The clock watches over them all.
“Hey Jamey, order us another round?” Tony yells from the pay phone in the corner.
When Tony sits back down, he scratches his arms. He sees Jamey see that, but it doesn’t stop him.
“My grandfather died three years ago,” Tony offers. “He took care a his old lady, he was good to her, he worked for thirty-nine years in this factory over in Red Hook.” Tony considers life and fate for a moment, then continues. “She’s the shit, my grandma. She barely got any friends left, and the ones still alive, they down in Florida. But she loves New York, man. She got her butcher, her cheese shop, her tailor, all on one block. Same block she grew up on.”
“She sounds amazing.”
Just then, a man in a work jumper, dusty and mad, arrives. Jamey wonders if this is the guy with the truck.
But the bartender backs up and smiles, crosses his arms to observe.
Tony sees the man and his jaw drops.
The man pops Tony in the mouth, and Tony cradles his face and looks with pure hurt at his attacker.
“Wally, what? Why’d you do that?” Tony asks, his lip bleeding.
“Where do you even think you can sell a fucking clock, Tony? This is the third time you done this. Are you retarded?”
Tony looks blamefully at the bartender. “Did you call?”
The bartender shrugs.
Wally hustles Tony off the stool. “Your grandmother deserves better than a turd like you. Get up, and help me get this back into the apartment.”
“The clock drives me crazy! I’m not selling it just to sell it.”
“Everybody knows why you would sell it, Tony. Not a big secret, you faggot.”
The two men sourly collaborate on moving the giant object over the threshold and into the dark light of an East Village evening.
Jamey has another whiskey. Gwen makes him sit next to her and she studies him.
“Who are you, anyway?” she asks.
“Nobody special,” he says, giving her a sideways smile.
She cackles hoarsely, and her lips work over the too-perfect dentures. “Oh, join the club, my love,” and she gestures for the bartender to pour Jamey another.
When she reaches into her coat pocket for beef jerky, and breaks herself off a piece, she offers one to Jamey, who accepts, and then she feeds the last bit to the dog. He suddenly doesn’t think he should eat it, and watches to see if the animal gags. When he can, he delicately drops his jerky on the floor. Gwen talks while he sits politely, wondering what she wants.
She narrows her eyes at him after a while. “You got the look of a bona fide paranoid.”
He finally makes an excuse and escapes.
The Gorowskis come over for dinner. As a gift, Mrs. Gorowski brings a paperweight with a sea anemone in it, and Elise presses it to her heart. Elise makes beef stew and potatoes from a magazine recipe.
“So is your son visiting anytime soon?” Jamey asks.
“No,” Mr. Gorowski says.
“Are you going anywhere, taking any trips?” Jamey asks.
“No, just making it through the winter, sitting tight,” says Mr. Gorowski.
And Mrs. Gorowski looks on with beautiful eyes but her husband doesn’t translate. It’s an awkward hour because she’d be the one to get the talk going. So they eat in genteel quiet.
They have Entenmann’s banana cake for dessert. Debussy trills and plings among static on the transistor radio, and Elise fake yawns until their landlord and his wife finally leave.
“I feel sorry for her,” Jamey says when they’re gone. “He controls her, don’t you think?”
Elise shakes her head. “She likes not having to talk. That’s what I figured out tonight.”
“I don’t know about that.”
Elise looks at Jamey. “You’re, like, suspicious of everyone lately.”
Jamey blinks innocently. “Not suspicious of you,” he says, and clears the plates.
The next afternoon, Chloe and Star play hopscotch on the sidewalk, and Terry knocks and invites Jamey to see their baby raccoon.