Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack! (6 page)

“Don’t be dense,” Jingle said. “You know what I mean. My sister has no jewels! One diamond the size of a
petit pois
and
that’s it
!”

Tucker said, “My mother says big rocks are vulgar.”

“What else
could
she say?” Jingle said. “She could hardly say I’d like to rip up my whole life in little pieces and start all over again, could she?”

“I guess my father’s fairly conservative,” Tucker said.

“Which is all right in the fund-raising business,” Jingle said, “but in this business it’s going to be our
bête noire
.”

Over the weekend, Tucker’s father began experimenting with health-food recipes. For Sunday breakfast there was Granola Cereal Mix, made with soy flour and unsulphured dates, and wheat germ, sesame seed, and raw honey. For Sunday lunch, eggplant cutlet with organically grown vegetables in sour cream. Supper was haddock salad and Ambrosia Cream.

Monday morning, Tucker’s mother made a date with him for that night in New York, for dinner and Christmas shopping. Tucker was to meet her outside the Donnell Library after she finished work at 5:30.

Tucker didn’t go back to Brooklyn Heights after school. During school he avoided P. John, which was easy, because the Creative Writing class didn’t meet Mondays. Tucker was still sticking to the idea of putting Natalia and Dinky and that evening out of his mind. He had already signed up for shop next term, and inquired when the chess club met.

At 3:30 he caught the Third Avenue bus up to the fifties and walked across to Donnell library, with every intention of investigating books on astronomy.

There were librarians and librarians. There were the ones who wrote letters and read the latest magazines behind the information desks, and looked up at you as though you’d just dropped into their living rooms uninvited. And there were the ones who conducted a small inquisition before getting up from their seats:
Is it listed in the card catalog; did you look for it in the 600 section; did you look in Pay Duplicate?

But always, Tucker knew, there were the ones who really really knew where everything was, and the answer to every conceivable question, and ways to look up things which would shame and astonish Socrates, Plato, Solomon, and Dr. Pangloss.

Such a librarian was on duty that afternoon in Donnell, behind the desk in the third floor reference room.

In minutes she produced a large blue volume with a paragraph in it, summing up the information Tucker had requested.

Renaissance House: For emotionally disturbed youngsters ages 11–17. Specialists with schizophrenics, as well as milder problems. Resident therapy supervision; six psychologists on staff and consulting psychiatrist. Year-round academic classes in all subjects. Excellent music, art, and physical ed. program on 500 acre estate, cottage plan. Limited enrollment. Box 12, Doylestown, Pa.

Tucker sat there thinking for a while after he finished the paragraph. He began to nail-bite, which was a throwback to his younger days when he attended public school on the West Side in New York and gangs of boys would mug him for his lunch money, or steal his bike out from under him; and he began to loathe himself all over again for thinking it was enough to just
be
there in life, as Jingle had pointed out his father did.

If he had had any pizazz he would have made her laugh all that evening, and made P. John ride up in front with the driver on the way home in the taxi, and held both her hand and Dinky’s, and asked her for a second date, and said some great thing before kissing her good night.

There was an old man in a shabby coat sitting next to Tucker, following the words in an encyclopedia with a gnarled finger and whispering them as he read. He had a grease-stained brown paper bag next to a red cap with ear muffs attached to it, and he smelled of salami and looked like the type who lived in one of those single rooms you could look up and see him walking around in, under a naked light bulb dangling from the ceiling, with milk cartons on the windowsill.

Tucker decided it was probably the way he himself would end up one day, still a library freak, still an “inadequate” with perspiring palms and underarm odor.

Before Tucker went downstairs to meet his mother, he made a photostat of an article he found in
Science Digest
, about a four-year-old girl who developed breasts and pubic hair after eating several jars of her mother’s hormone cream for wrinkles. Since he would not be seeing Dinky again if he could help it, he would slip
it
in the mail to her. It was Dinky’s kind of story.

“I think we both deserve a good thick sirloin steak,” Tucker’s mother said, not even bothering to study the menu in Mario’s Villa d’Este, “and I need a very dry martini.”

“What was your first date like with Dad?” Tucker asked while they waited for the waiter to come to the table.

“My first date with your father was ruined by Jingle,” his mother said, “just as I suspect Jingle is going to ruin our future.”

“Why is he going to ruin our future?”

“Because Jingle isn’t really capable of being committed to anything. Jingle likes beginnings, but he doesn’t like middles, and he doesn’t stick around for endings. Jingle likes splash and fanfares and grand openings, but he runs from any kind of routine.”

“How did he ruin your first date with Dad?” Tucker said.

“It was a double date,” Tucker’s mother said. “Jingle told your father to get tickets for the theater. The stock market had fallen very low, and your father was depressed because he’d just put money into the market for the first time. But Jingle said the only way to handle that kind of depression was to defy Fate and celebrate.” His mother paused to give their order to the waiter, and then she continued. “So we celebrated. Theater, dinner after at the Algonquin, and from there to Greenwich Village to hear some jazz. It was all great fun, a million yaks, except for one thing.”

“What was that?” Tucker said.

“Jingle didn’t have one cent. Not with him, and not in his checkbook. The whole evening was on your father. …
That
was our first date.”

“At least what went wrong was somebody else’s fault,” said Tucker. “At least Dad wasn’t to blame.”

“Why do you say that?” his mother asked.

“No reason,” Tucker shrugged. “Can I buy a tennis racket?”

“You cannot,” his mother said, “but you
may
.”

T
HERE WAS A RED
velvet couch shaped like a sleigh in the middle of the floor.

“I want your honest opinion about something,” Tucker’s father told him. It was Wednesday afternoon. Tucker had dropped into Help Yourself to see how the place was shaping up.

Jingle said, “And say what you think, Tucker. Remember our discussion about style the other morning.”

Tucker set down his book bag and took off his gloves and his cap.

Jingle stretched out on the sleigh bed, lighting a Kent and smoking it through a long ivory holder.

“Tucker,” his father said, “if you were going into a health-food store, would you like it to look like a clean, modern, but quaint soda shop … or would you like it to look like an old, dusty-type antique shop?”

“Dear God!” Jingle groaned. “
Try
to pose the question fairly, Cal!”

“Tucker,” Tucker’s father said, “do you think this piece of furniture your uncle is reclining on should be in a health-food store?”

“Tucker, don’t answer that,” Jingle said, “until I tell you that I plan to do a whole wall in red velvet, with a Tiffany lamp hanging from the ceiling and this divine bed against the wall. People can just toddle over and rest their footsies while they’re tossing back a Tiger’s Milk. Do you see what I mean?”

“Well, Tucker?” said Tucker’s father.

“I don’t know,” Tucker said. “I’m not good at interior decorating.”

Tucker’s father said, “Would
you
toddle over and rest your footsies on that piece of furniture, or would you rather sit at a nice clean fountain?”

“I’d probably sit at a fountain,” Tucker said, “but I lack pizazz.”

“Your uncle’s going to have this place looking like a bordello!” said Tucker’s father.

“What’s that?” Tucker said.

“It’s a place where gracious ladies sell their favors to bashful gentlemen,” Jingle said.

“It’s a place where ignorant women sell themselves to desperate men,” said Tucker’s father.

“That’s all in your viewpoint,” Jingle said.

“You mean a whorehouse,” Tucker said. “I get it.”

“This sleigh bed is my inspiration couch,” Jingle said. “It’s always brought me luck.”

“With the kind of luck it’s brought you, you should sell it for junk,” said Tucker’s father.

“
I
have never been dismissed from a job,” said Jingle.

“You never held a job long enough to be canned,” said Tucker’s father.

The fight was on.

Tucker mumbled something about having homework to do and left.

He walked down Montague Street toward the East River, to the Promenade, which was built over the highway and looked out at the river and the harbor. There were benches where you could sit and think and stare at the Statue of Liberty in the distance. You could also see the big freighters docked in their berths, the Staten Island ferry making its runs, and a whole panorama of lower Manhattan.

Tucker sat down and took out his sketchbook. He was going to draw the view of Wall Street, but when his Pentel touched the paper, the sleigh bed began taking shape. He drew a mouth on the sleigh bed, and a balloon above it. He was going to show the sleigh bed ordering a Tiger’s Milk, the way Jingle ordered martinis in restaurants:
I’ll have a Tiger’s Milk as dry as a poor beached whale, with a teensy twist of lemon, over one lonesome and anxiety-ridden ice cube.

He had barely printed the words “I’ll have” when a voice behind him said, “I’ll have a seat?”

He looked around and saw Natalia. She was wearing the official St. Marie’s beret, and a camel’s-hair coat like all the St. Marie’s girls wore.

“Sure. Have a seat,” he said.

She sat down beside him, and he said, “I was sketching a cartoon.”

“A cartoon you’ll finish soon,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said, aware that she was rhyming.

He said, “I was going to call.”

“You didn’t call at all.”

“I would have,” he said.

“You could have,” she said. He was wondering if he was obliged to go along with it and say, “I should have” until they were all rhymed out. But he didn’t. He just sat trying to think why it was they couldn’t talk together anymore, and if it was his fault or hers.

They pretended a great, silent interest in the river. Then Natalia took the Pentel from his hand and wrote something in his sketchbook.

She handed it back to him. She’d drawn a balloon with the words “I’d like to—” inside it. Now she was waiting for Tucker to finish the sentence, smiling at him with her bright eyes, pleased with this little game which Tucker’s cartoon had inspired.

Tucker wrote, “be able to make conversation.”

She laughed and nodded her head up and down.

Then Tucker drew another balloon and wrote inside, “I’ve been thinking about—” and passed the sketchbook to her.

Natalia thought a moment and wrote, “lonely times when you’re laughing because you’re supposed to. It makes your face hurt.”

Tucker nodded. That was exactly what happened when Jingle was at a party, cracking jokes and wearing everyone out with his witticisms. Tucker’s mother always said that Jingle wasn’t funny—he was hysterical; the difference was you could relax around a funny person. Around Jingle sometimes your sides began to ache soon from laughing, and then no matter what he said it was a strain to keep reacting the same way. You began to wish he’d turn himself off, or someone would just pull his plug.

Natalia drew another balloon with these words inside: “We should—”

Then Tucker really cheated. He pretended to be thinking. What he was really doing was remembering parts of that Sylvia Plath poem he’d read over the weekend.

After a few seconds he wrote, “meet in another life. We should meet in air. Me and you.”

When Natalia read what he’d written, she drew in her breath and looked at him, and actually spoke. “Oh that’s beautiful.”

“It’s just a thought that came to my mind,” Tucker answered.

So what if he hadn’t said it wasn’t
his
thought: it got Natalia talking. She didn’t say a lot, but she didn’t rhyme, either. And she did invite him over to the Hockers’ that Friday night, for a demonstration Mrs. Hocker’s Encounter Group was giving.

In the middle of an all-vegetarian dinner on Friday night, some old business acquaintance of Tucker’s father called to tell him about a position opening up in the fund-raising field.

Tucker’s father kept saying, “No … no … I’m afraid not … I don’t think so,” while Tucker’s mother tried sign language first, and then scribbled across a piece of paper, “Tell him you’ll
consider
it.”

When Tucker’s father put down the phone, Tucker’s mother wailed, “Cal, why didn’t you at least say you’d
consider
it?”

“Because I couldn’t think with you waving your hands at me that way!” Tucker’s father snapped.

“It sounds like such a good opportunity, Cal.”

“It’s not
that
good,” Tucker’s father said. “Let me fill you in on all the details.”

That delayed dessert a good half hour. Because the whole discussion seemed too important for Tucker to interrupt, he sat it out, and he was forty minutes late getting over to the Hockers’.

P. John answered the doorbell.

“What’s all that noise?” Tucker asked.

“Junkies being reborn,” said P. John. “You won’t believe it.”

“Where’s Natalia?” Tucker said.

“She’s trapped between Susan’s parents.”

Mrs. Hocker had folding chairs set up in a circle around the living room, for guests. The members of her Encounter Group were lying in prone positions on the Oriental rug. Tucker saw the Hockers and Natalia at the center of the circle; Dinky was at the end.

There was silence in the room as Tucker and P. John sat down at the other end of the circle.