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

Then he motioned to the bartender and I got my wine.
    I found out that he was a painter, that he’d just come back to New York after a long absence. He’d spent a lot of time in Mexico City; the last five years he’d lived in Florida—Palm Beach. He’d looked up a friend from the old days at the Art Students League. That’s how he’d heard about Annabel’s party and the Cedar. He didn’t mention his kid again or say we ,as married men did. He drank one beer after another very quickly, gulping each one down like someone enormously thirsty. He had a way of wiping his mouth fast on the back of his wrist the way a boy would, and sometimes, when he did that, I’d want to put my hand against his lips.
    I told him a lie I momentarily believed—that I’d be leaving New York very soon. I’d never been to Europe or anywhere much, and it was time. A girl friend of mine had a fabulous apartment in Rome—I remember how suddenly it became “fabulous.” She was an actress like me, and we were going to get work in Italian movies as extras because she had connections.
    â€œSo you won’t be here very long,” he said.
    â€œI hope not. Just a month or so.”
    â€œYou can’t count on the movies,” he said.
    â€œI never count on anything.”
    â€œI can tell that,” he said, not smiling the way he should have.
    And I said, “Really. How?”
    The hand with the Mexican ring came down over mine. I could feel the cool wood of the bar flat against my palm, and that shock of warmth over my fingers. Our hands just remained there like that, quite still, as if they’d been welded together, and I don’t think we talked for a while.
    Meanwhile I’d naturally forgotten all about the poet. His friends evidently left and then he remembered that he knew me rather well. Suddenly he appeared on the other side of me, saying, “Come and have a drink. I’ll get a table.”
    He looked down at the bar and saw the hands. It was a somewhat confusing moment. I said, “Carl, a gentleman has bought me a drink,” which I thought had a certain elegance of cadence.
    â€œCatch you later then,” he said, and I felt the little invisible threads between us break and he just dropped away from my life. We often ran into each other after that, but it was over. Many things ended that night—a whole period, a way of living I never really went back to.
    I left the Cedar with Tom Murphy and we walked all over the Village and all the way down to Chinatown. He told me he’d been wandering around like that ever since he got back to New York, couldn’t seem to get enough of it. We looked at ducks hanging upside down in windows on Mott Street and there was the smell of gunpowder in the air; we were supposed to be deciding on a restaurant. We walked back uptown again to an Italian bar on Houston Street, a place called Googie’s where you sat on little barrels and the customers were hoods, not artists. “You never got any dinner,” he said, though I told him I didn’t want any, actually. He ordered me a hamburger deluxe with French fries. “I have to take care of you now,” he said. “When you’re over there in Rome, you’ll remember the inconsiderate guy who made you walk your feet off.”
    My trip seemed very real to him—and by this time, to me as well. He was going to look at my apartment, and if it was big enough for him to paint in, maybe he’d take it over while I was gone and I could leave my stuff there. Finally, there in the bar, we talked about being two ships that passed in the night. I even found myself making a fairly fancy statement that maybe those relationships were the most perfect—just that pure first excitement and you said good-bye before things went sour.
    He asked me how long I’d had that belief, and I said, “Just for the last ten minutes.”
    He said,