In the Night Café by Joyce Johnson Read Free Book Online Page A

restaurant, before he moved on.
    That was the week the plasterers came early one morning. They rang my bell, getting me out of bed, two seventy-year-old Ukrainians in stiff white overalls like bakers, carrying buckets and brooms and a ladder. They wanted to know if my mother was home, having the innocent misconception that all young unmarried women in apartments were daughters. I tried to explain that I was my mother. They seemed puzzled, but they came in. They whacked at the ceiling with their brooms and the rest of it crumbled like icing. By the end of the day they’d made it solid as a rock. You could hardly see a fault line.
    I walked over to the infamous Cedar Bar after they’d gone. The poet, who’d been making himself scarce, would perhaps be there. I thought I’d tell him I had a new ceiling in a lighthearted manner, and thus lure him—or discover he was no longer lurable. The poet and I had never actually said we were having an affair, or even that we had some fondness for each other. We came at such matters obliquely. Often he brought along his tape recorder so that we could appreciate his voice for an hour or so giving his latest reading. “You don’t mind,” he’d say, switching the thing on. How could you complain about poetry? He was small and jaunty like a bright little warbler, and I think he flew around and visited others with his tape recorder.
    He was standing with some strangers at the bar when I came in through the swinging doors—two gloomy, serious men with beards who were there with their wives or girl friends. I noticed he had his tape recorder with him. He saw me right away and I smiled at him and walked forward and paused for a moment, but then he decided he hadn’t seen me after all. He made a little quarter turn and kept on talking, and I walked on and sat as far away as I could. I’d wait a bit, then leave, I thought. I’d walk past him and call out good-bye in a loud, arresting voice. I ordered a beer and sat without drinking it, picking at the label on the bottle.
    A man came from behind me and put a glass and some cigarettes down on the bar. His hand took a position very close to mine. I remember staring angrily at the ring he wore, a ring of heavy, carved Mexican silver with a square of dull red stone.
    â€œCan I buy you a drink?”
    â€œI already have one.”
    â€œYou don’t seem to like what you have.”
    â€œIt’ll do,” I said. I meant to sound completely discouraging. But then I looked up at him for the first time, and it was the man from the party. “Oh, I remember you,” I said in embarrassment.
    â€œLikewise,” he said, and stared at me the way he had that other time. “Do you come here a lot?” he asked me.
    I said, “Well … in certain periods,” though the period when I hadn’t was at least a year ago.
    I had loosened up the label on the beer bottle considerably, and now I peeled off a big strip of it. The man from the party put his hand on the bottle and moved it away.
    â€œWine would taste better—if you change your mind.”
    I said, “All right. I guess I’ve changed it.” I had a strange thought then: This is the beginning. I thought that in a while I’d walk out of there with him, that years would go by, just as I’d known he’d walk down Second Avenue in the rain.
    He asked me to tell him my name, then he told me his. Tom Murphy.
    â€œAn easy one,” I said.
    He told me right away he wasn’t entirely Irish; there was Norwegian blood on his father’s side. He had his father’s name, and he’d given his son that name as well.
    At that point I felt deflated. My psychic abilities had proven unreliable. So he was married, of course. So that was that. I asked him how old his little boy was just to make conversation.
    It took him time to answer. Somehow the question burdened him. “He’s only five.”