MARY (eyes wide with fear): Watch for the sharks! They got killer teeth. You’ll be crippled for life. You’ll be begging on street corners.
TC: Music!
MARY: Music! That’s the ticket.
(She weaves like a groggy wrestler toward a gargoyle object that had heretofore happily escaped my attention: a mahogany console combining television, phonograph, and a radio. She fiddles with the radio until she finds a station booming music with a Latin beat.
Her hips maneuver, her fingers snap, she is elegant yet smoothly abandoned, as if recalling a sensuous youthful night, and dancing with a phantom partner some remembered choreography. And it is magic, how her now-ageless body responds to the drums and guitars, contours itself to the subtlest rhythm: she is in a trance, the state of grace saints supposedly achieve when experiencing visions. And I am hearing the music, too; it is speeding through me like amphetamine—each note ringing with the separate clarity of cathedral chimings on a silent winter Sunday. I move toward her, and into her arms, and we match each other step for step, laughing, undulating, and even when the music is interrupted by an announcer speaking Spanish as rapid as the rattle of castanets, we continue dancing, for the guitars are locked in our heads now, as we are locked in our laughter, our embrace: louder and louder, so loud that we are unaware of a key clicking, a door opening and shutting. But the parrot hears it.)
POLLY: Holy cow!
WOMAN’S VOICE: What is this? What’s happening here?
POLLY: Oy vey! Oy vey!
MARY: Why, hello there, Mrs. Berkowitz. Mr. Berkowitz. How ya doin’?
(And there they are, hovering in view like the Mickey and Minnie Mouse balloons in a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. Not that there’s anything mousey about this twosome. Their infuriated eyes, hers hot behind harlequin spectacles with sequined frames, absorb the scene: our naughty ice-cream mustaches, the pungent roach smoke polluting the premises. Mr. Berkowitz stalks over and stops the radio.)
MRS. BERKOWITZ: Who is this man?
MARY: I din’t think you was home.
MRS. BERKOWITZ: Obviously. I asked you: Who is this man?
MARY: He’s just a friend of mine. Helping me out. I got so much work today.
MR. BERKOWITZ: You’re drunk, woman.
MARY (deceptively sweet): How’s that you say?
MRS. BERKOWITZ: He said you’re drunk. I’m shocked. Truly.
MARY: Since we’re speaking truly, what I have truly to say to you is: today is my last day of playing nigger around here—I’m giving you notice.
MRS. BERKOWITZ: You are giving me notice?
MR. BERKOWITZ: Get out of here! Before we call the police.
(Without ado, we gather our belongings. Mary waves at the parrot: “So long, Polly. You’re okay. You’re good girl. I was only kidding.” And at the front door, where her former employers have sternly stationed themselves, she announces: “Just for the record, I’ve never touched a drop in my life.”
Downstairs, the rain is still going. We trudge along Park Avenue, then cut across to Lexington.)
MARY: Didn’t I tell you they were stuffy.
TC: Belong in a museum.
(But most of our buoyancy has departed; the power of the Peruvian foliage recedes, a letdown has set in, my surfboard is sinking, and any sharks sighted now would scare the piss out of me.)
MARY: I still got Mrs. Kronkite to do. But she’s nice; she’ll forgive me if I don’t come till tomorrow. Maybe I’ll head on home.
TC: Let me catch you a cab.
MARY: I hate to give them my business. Those taxi people don’t like coloreds. Even when they’re colored themselves. No, I can get the subway down here at Lex and Eighty-sixth.
(Mary lives in a rent-controlled apartment near Yankee Stadium; she says it was cramped when she had a family living with her, but now that she’s by herself, it seems immense and dangerous: “I’ve got three locks on every door, and all the windows nailed down. I’d buy me a police dog if it didn’t mean leaving him by himself so much. I know what it is to be alone, and I wouldn’t wish it on a dog.”)
TC: Please, Mary, let me treat you to a taxi.
MARY: The subway’s a lot quicker. But there’s someplace I want to stop. It’s just down here a ways.
(The place is a narrow church pinched between broad buildings on a side street. Inside, there are two brief rows of pews, and a small altar with a plaster figure of a crucified Jesus suspended above it. An odor of incense and candle wax dominates the gloom. At the altar a woman is lighting a candle, its light fluttering like the sleep of a fitful spirit; otherwise, we are the only supplicants present. We kneel together in the last pew, and from the satchel Mary produces a pair of rosary beads—“I always carry a couple extra”—one for herself, the other for me, though I don’t know quite how to handle it, never having used one before. Mary’s lips move whisperingly.)
MARY: Dear Lord, in your mercy. Please, Lord, help Mr. Trask to stop boozing and get his job back. Please, Lord, don’t leave Miss Shaw a bookworm and an old maid; she ought to bring your children into this world. And, Lord, I beg you to remember my sons and daughter and my grandchildren, each and every one. And please don’t let Mr. Smith’s family send him to that retirement home; he don’t want to go, he cries all the time …
(Her list of names is more numerous than the beads on her rosary, and her requests in their behalf have the earnest shine of the altar’s candle-flame. She pauses to glance at me.)
MARY: Are you praying?
TC: Yes.
MARY: I can’t hear you.
TC: I’m praying for you, Mary. I want you to live forever.
MARY: Don’t pray for me. I’m already saved. (She takes my hand and holds it) Pray for your mother. Pray for all those souls lost out there in the dark. Pedro. Pedro.
II Hello, Stranger
TIME: DECEMBER 1977.
Place: A New York restaurant, The Four Seasons.
The man who had invited me to lunch, George Claxton, had suggested we meet at noon, and made no excuse for setting such an early hour. I soon discovered the reason, however; in the year or more since I had last seen him, George Claxton, heretofore a man moderately abstemious, had become a two-fisted drinker. As soon as we were seated he ordered a double Wild Turkey (“Just straight, please; no ice”), and within fifteen minutes requested an encore.
I was surprised, and not just by the urgency of his thirst. He had gained at least thirty pounds; the buttons of his pinstripe vest seemed on the verge of popping loose, and his skin color, usually ruddy from jogging or tennis, had an alien pallor, as though he had just emerged from a penitentiary. Also, he was sporting dark glasses, and I thought: How theatrical! Imagine good old plain George Claxton, solidly entrenched Wall Street fellow living in Greenwich or Westport or wherever it was with a wife named Gertrude or Alice or whatever it was, with three or four or five children, imagine this guy chugging double Wild Turkeys and wearing dark glasses!
It was all I could do not to ask straight out: Well, what the hell happened to you? But I said: “How are you, George?”
GEORGE: Fine. Fine. Christmas. Jesus. Just can’t keep up with it. Don’t expect a card from me this year. I’m not sending any.
TC: Really? Your cards seemed such a tradition. Those family things, with dogs. And how is your family?
GEORGE: Growing. My oldest daughter just had her second baby. A girl.
TC: Congratulations.
GEORGE: Well, we wanted a boy. If it had been a boy, she would have named him after me.
TC (thinking: Why am I here? Why am I having lunch with this jerk? He bores me, he’s always bored me): And Alice? How is Alice?
GEORGE: Alice?
TC: I mean Gertrude.
GEORGE (frowning, peevish): She’s painting. You know our house is right there on the Sound. Have our own little beach. She stays locked in her room all day painting what she sees from the window. Boats.
TC: That’s nice.
GEORGE: I’m not so sure. She was a Smith girl; majored in art. She did a little painting before we were married. Then she forgot about it. Seemed to. Now she paints all the time. All the time. Stays locked in her room. Waiter, could you send the maître d’ over with a menu? And bring me another of these things. No ice.
TC: That’s very British, isn’t it? Neat whiskey without ice.
GEORGE: I’m having root-canal. Anything cold hurts my teeth. You know who I got a Christmas card from? Mickey Manolo. The rich kid from Caracas? He was in our class.
(Of course, I didn’t remember Mickey Manolo, but I nodded and pretended yes, yes. Nor would I have remembered George Claxton if he hadn’t kept careful track of me for forty-odd years, ever since we had been students together at an especially abysmal prep school. He was a straight-arrow athletic kid from an upper-middle-class Pennsylvania family; we had nothing in common, but we stumbled into an alliance because in exchange for my writing all his book reports and English compositions, he did my algebra homework and during examinations slipped me the answers. As a result, I had been stuck for four decades with a “friendship” that demanded a duty lunch every year or two.)
TC: You very seldom see women in this restaurant.
GEORGE: That’s what
