In the Night Café by Joyce Johnson Read Free Book Online

that wasn’t the case, and patted his bottom, which was very wet. I felt utterly inept. Suddenly he was quiet, so I put him down in his crib. “Go to sleep, Anton,” I said, pretending authority, but I heard him wail as soon as I walked back into the party.
    People were doing the latest thing, something called the Twist, in which a man and woman rotated their hips in front of each other but never touched. I poured a glass of wine, looked around the room and thought very calmly, There is no one.
    A man came up from the street. I noticed him because he wasn’t wearing a coat, just a heavy gray sweater and a green scarf around his neck, and I remember thinking he must be cold. He had thick brown hair wet from the rain and a face that had been used a lot, fierce eyes set deep in smashed bone, the right one angled down sharply. He was a very good-looking­ man, so I decided he would be dangerous, spoiled rotten by women no doubt. For a while he stood near the door at the edge of things, like a player waiting his turn in a game, sizing up his next move. Now and then he’d tighten his lips, pressing them together as if against some oblique thought he couldn’t voice to anyone. He caught me staring, so I stepped back a little behind a dancing couple. When I looked again, the party had swallowed him up.
    A little later he was standing right in front of me. He took me in, I don’t know how else to say it. My tremendous uncertainty, my habit of watching, my ridiculously bright dress. It was as if he could read my bones, it wasn’t that he wanted anything. “Why do you hang back?” he said and walked away.
    I stood amazed where he left me, wanting to run after him and find out who he was. But his fierceness really scared me. I didn’t want him telling me I’d made a mistake, that he’d said all he was ever going to say to me in one question I couldn’t even answer, which suddenly seemed the entire painful puzzle of my life.
    He was one of those people who’d probably never surface again who kept wandering in and out. He’d disappeared by the time I got brave enough to look for him.
    To tell the truth, I wasn’t sorry. I thought of his blue eyes and his handsomeness and how the night might have gone.
    Down on St. Marks Place in the cold darkness the world was still intact, and I carried his question into the rain.

6
    T HERE WAS A DAIRY restaurant in those days on Second Avenue where you could sit all night under big yellow globes of light with baskets of fresh rolls and saucers of butter in front of you until the dark turned pale and you could go home. It had the world’s gruffest waiters but they understood their customers. They’d forget about you for hours if that was what you wanted. You always knew nothing bad could ever happen to you in Rappaport’s.
    I went there after Annabel’s party. I sat down at one of the long empty tables up front and ordered coffee. There were braids of bread in the window and cheesecakes under a fluorescent light that turned them blue. The wet glass was like a black pool. I could see my transparent self in it marooned behind all the baked goods and occasional ghosts passing through me on the other side, swimming by under umbrellas or with Sunday newspapers above their heads.
    I sat there an hour or so watching the rain fall on the avenue. And when I think about it now, it seems that I was waiting, that I even knew who one of the ghosts would be, as if I were somehow dreaming my own life.
    I saw the man from the party. He was walking downtown very slowly, still with no coat on, holding up his face like a blind man daring the rain to fall on him. The lights from Rappaport’s took him by surprise. He came up to the window and leaned against the wet glass. I put down my coffee cup, almost afraid to breathe.
    He didn’t see me sitting there. He stared at the cakes, the pasted-up menu, the clock on the rear wall of the