Jernigan (26 page)

When I got out on the street I couldn’t remember where I’d left the car. Right, 105th. Which was actually easy to remember because a five was like a two: Penny and Fred lived on 102nd, therefore the car was on 105th. What do you mean, a five is like a two? Like a two reflected upside down.

Boy, did I not want to go home. I drove a few blocks down West End, intending to go to 96th and get on the West Side Highway the opposite way from all the happy weekenders coming back bumper-to-bumper from their happy weekends at fucking two miles an hour. Then I just pulled over and double-parked by a pay phone. I couldn’t leave the city without giving old Miranda one last shot. Stupid, I grant you: You see Miranda and then what? You see Miranda and, one chance in a million, spend the
night
with Miranda and then what? I tried to make up a joke in my head with the name Miranda. Everything worked: Miranda decision, Miranda warning. Miranda rights, there was another one, something about how every man should have his Miranda rights. Oh, not in order to use such a joke on Miranda herself. It was just something I was doing in my head. If your name was Miranda, that stuff was probably like the old
Are you Upjohn?
to somebody named Upjohn. If there was really such a name as
Upjohn, which sounded improbable to me just then. Well, Upjohn Laboratories.

I got the number from Information again, and this time she picked up the phone herself. “Are you Upjohn?” I said, giving the whole thing probably one twist too many.

“What number are you calling?” she said.

“Miranda,” I said. “Just joking. Peter Jernigan again. God, Jernigan again—sounds like Irish time here. Listen, how are you? I left you a kind of confused message before.”

“Right,” she said. “I was sort of half asleep when you called. How are you?”

“Oh, I’m, you know—” Get it together, I thought. When somebody says
How are you?
it’s not a real question. “Couldn’t be better,” I said. “Listen, I happen to be in your, well, I was visiting friends right in your neighborhood, and I was wondering if, I mean this is very spur-of-the-moment stuff, but if you weren’t doing anything I thought I’d invite you out for a quick drink or whatever. If there’s, you know, someplace in the neighborhood.”

“Well, that’s nice of you,” she said. “The thing is, I’m supposed to do something later on.”

“Oh, well, look,” I said.

“It was really sweet of you to call,” she said. “I hope you’re doing well.”

“Yeah, relaxing, little of this, little of that,” I said. “I actually find that if things are going well, that you’re actually more creative rather than—”

The telephone went clunk. My quarter dropping from somewhere inside to somewhere else inside.

“Hello?” I said.

“Are you calling from a pay phone?” she said. She made it sound disreputable.

“Yeah,” I said. “Well, listen, I shouldn’t keep you. Why don’t I, the next time I get to town, call you at work or something and maybe we can get together for lunch or whatnot.”

“Well, the thing is,” she said, “I’m not going to be there much longer because I decided to go to business school.”

“You’re kidding,” I said. “I think that’s splendid. We’ll have to get together and hoist one to your success.”

Silence.

“Well,” she said, “the thing is that once classes get going I’m not sure I’m going to have an awful lot of time.”

“Listen,” I said, “I know exactly how it is. The important thing is to get your work done. So anyway, I should be getting along. It was good to talk to you, and—good luck, right?”

“I’m glad you understand,” she said.

I got back in the car and went right into the dash after that Walkman. Megadeth, Webb Pierce, any fucking thing, whatever was in there, just get it going. I put the ear things on and turned the music up so loud it hurt. Then I turned it up louder, until I couldn’t tell what it was.

VIII

1

When I came in, the house was dark. And cold. Again. Always. I pulled the string and the kitchen light came on. On the counter next to the toaster sat a Christmas tree stand. Like a big spider: red metal bowl up on green metal legs. Under one foot, a note:
IF YOU CARE.
I tried to think back. Hadn’t we left things in reasonably decent shape? So what was the new offense? I wasn’t crazy enough to think Martha could have known by spooky mind power about my calling what’s-her-name, which I just wasn’t going to think about. (Miranda.) One of those disgraces best dealt with by putting off thinking about it.
Once you’d moved on in time a little bit—making an analogy here between time and distance, though I’m not sure you can—it would be back in the past and therefore smaller. The law of perspective, as in
Jon Nagy’s Television Art Book
. Like an A-bomb blast, which seared you less the farther away you stood, in a featureless Jon Nagy landscape. I’m not explaining this right.

What I was supposed to do now, to show I
cared
, was get the tree set up. So I dragged it into the kitchen, laid it on its side and unscrewed the thumbscrews on the Christmas tree stand so I could slip the collar over the sawed-off end. Then I tightened them again, going around and around, three turns each screw, so as to keep the trunk dead center. The screws bit into the soft wood and I clenched my teeth. When it hurt my fingers to turn the screws anymore, I stood the tree up. Son of a bitch was cockeyed anyway. So fuck it. I carried it stand-first into the living room, as if it were a battering ram, and set it in the corner, between the end of the sofa and the window. My idea was to keep it away from the woodstove. If that wasn’t where she wanted the thing, she could move it. I filled a saucepan and poured water into the metal bowl so the tree could drink. Then I got the woodstove going and huddled on the sofa in my overcoat. What was it, Sunday? So
60
Minutes
was on, unless it was over.

I tried to think when Christmas must be. Late in the week, wasn’t it? Friday? Saturday? Not enough information to think with: you’d need today’s date and then you could go on from there. I hadn’t bought anybody anything, assuming that we were exchanging gifts, as on a normal Christmas, and in what sense was this Christmas not normal? Technically speaking. There were grownups, kids and a tree: nothing to suggest an exemption. I thought, You could drive over to the mall right now and get that old Christmas shopping
done
, boy. Tomorrow the crowds would only be worse, and worse still the next day and even worse than that the day after.

But Christ, I just got the God damn stove going.

True, but you’ve still got your coat on. And now that the sun is over the yardarm you could work the old Diet Coke can trick with some gin, make the drive to the mall into a little adventure. All that old sun-over-the-yardarm shit, that’s the way your real drunks talk.

I was proud to have remembered how to talk like that. I mean, it was all just an impersonation.

So let’s hit it.

The vast lots around the mall had parking places galore. Even the video game arcade just inside South Entrance was deserted except for a black teenager wearing a turned-around Mets cap, his nose to the screen, and a girl sitting on the floor beside him, hugging her knees. Sunday before Christmas. Either I’d hit it just right or the stock market thing really
had
hurt business.

Now, the thing to do was keep it simple. Obviously you had to spend more on Danny than on Clarissa, though Clarissa’s gift must still be substantial, because. So: fifty-dollar gift certificate at Record Town for Danny, fifty-dollar gift certificate at something like Benetton or The Gap for Clarissa, and maybe a hundred-dollar gift certificate at Sam Ash Music for Danny, assuming Sam Ash Music did that and why wouldn’t they. And then maybe a few little crappo things so they’d have stuff to open, though I couldn’t think what. Hickory Farms might have some kind of food. Well obviously. What I mean is, maybe the kids would like sausage and cheese and shit to eat in their room. Or some kind of silly toys from someplace. Puzzles where you had to roll BBs into holes, or one of those water-filled things where you had to spear drifting rings with a swordfish’s nose. I mean, since they were in there getting stoned anyway, right?

Which left Martha. What might she like? A box of .22 shells? That was ugly, scratch that. I thought she’d said something once about Margaret Drabble, unless it was Margaret Atwood. Or Iris Murdoch. So maybe Waldenbooks was the best idea, except wasn’t giving her books a way of saying, Keep your face in these and leave me the fuck alone? Although when things were in this kind of shape, any gift short of crotchless panties pretty much said the same thing.

It wasn’t really much of a stand against disorder, I know, but I did do a good job of organizing my stops: getting the gift certificates first and saving the heaviest things to lug around, the books and all, for last. I found the perfect place for Clarissa, better even than The Gap: this place Mandee. You see their ads sometimes, where slutty girls talk in rhyme. Probably all her girlfriends went to Mandee, if she had
any girlfriends, and she felt left out because there was never any money. The thought of it made me sorry enough for her to kick her gift certificate up to seventy-five. With Danny’s hundred at Sam Ash Music plus fifty at Record Town, that was saying she was half to me what Danny was. Hey, Christmas, right? After I got the gift certificates squared away I went looking for the little toys. Couldn’t find one of those swordfish deals, but they did have an underwater penguin standing before a sylvan backdrop. (Why a penguin among green trees? Why, for that matter, green trees under water?) Five little plastic rings that you had to get over the penguin by tilting the thing just right. Also a sliding-squares puzzle that, when slid together correctly, showed Superman in flight. And two decks of Bicycle playing cards and a paperback Hoyle. Oh, not that I really pictured our little family learning canasta together, but at least the stuff would be on hand if things should ever get straightened out. Hey, if nothing else, it would be evidence that everything had been tried. Then on to Hickory Farms. I might as well admit that, due to the disposition of the stores, this rational and orderly scheme of going from lighter burdens to heavier in fact required going back and forth and back and forth. So again and again I walked past Bedford Falls Video, with old Entrepreneurial Steve probably in there radiating disapproval of me, and past the exhibit of snowblowers out in the center of the mall, where a salesman in a maroon blazer sat behind stacks of brochures. Through a bullhorn he prophesied an early winter.

At Hickory Farms I bought a shrink-wrapped box the size of a Monopoly set, with summer sausage and assorted cheeses. Cheshire and I forget what else. It was probably all the same Wisconsin cheddar with different food dyes. Right, the kids were really fucking likely to know the difference. Then back all the way in the other direction to Waldenbooks. By that time I was about ready to bag it. There wasn’t any Iris Murdoch, and there really
was
a difference between Margaret Drabble and Margaret Atwood, though I couldn’t have told you what, and I would probably pick the wrong one. When the only Jane Austen I could find was fucking
Pride and Prejudice
, I figured, Hey, end of expedition. Get Martha a gift certificate too, and you’re out of here. Hundred dollars, bringing her main gift up even with Danny’s, though his fifty at Record Town still put him ahead. So: Danny one fifty,
Martha a hundred, Clarissa seventy-five. Plus the small stuff. I hoped this all made the right statements. Though of course the overarching statement was that I didn’t know these people. As I walked back to South Entrance the snowblower man was putting his brochures away in a cardboard box and stores were shutting off overhead lights. At The Gap a salesgirl ducked in under the half-lowered metal-link gate.

Back at the house, I hid the toys and the Hickory Farms box under the bed, then filled a water glass halfway up with gin and worked away on that until I “fell asleep” on the sofa, I think sometime during
Star Trek
. Before Martha rolled in, at any rate. The
Star Trek
was the Joan Collins one, where Joan Collins is the pacifist back during the Depression who has to be hit by a car and die so that all subsequent history won’t be changed. See, if Joan Collins lives, America doesn’t enter World War II and so forth and so on. It’s the one where Bones is on some drug that makes him crazed, which is how the whole problem gets started in the first place, and they all jump through the time portal.

I woke up with a nightmare. Robert Stack was in it, and when the terror let up enough I tried to think why Robert Stack. It actually took me a couple of minutes to get
The Untouchables
. Oh for Christ’s sake, I thought, tell me something I don’t already know. The tv had been turned off, and the tablecloth draped back over it. I had a wicked headache, of course, and my hand was throbbing like a bastard. I went into the bathroom, pissed and took five Advils from a brand-new bottle—she’d noticed we were out—then went to the kitchen and drank some cold water out of the refrigerator. Mouth dry. Of course. I swore I wasn’t going to drink tomorrow, tomorrow meaning whenever I woke up again. I went into the bedroom and found Martha there asleep, or pretending to be. And then I was asleep again too, though I can’t imagine how. What with the hand and the head and, always, the thoughts going.

2

I woke up at noon or whatever the hell it was and she was gone again. On the way back from the kitchen, where I’d put water on for coffee, I looked over and saw the tree had been trimmed. Cruddy bunch of ornaments: metallic plastic with a line down the middle where the molded halves had been joined. Although it was cruel to judge her taste harshly just because she couldn’t afford better. Or maybe it
was
just lousy taste. Certainly she’d used too God damn much tinsel. Unless one of the kids had done it. (Little joke.) I picked off maybe a third of it—any more than that would’ve been obvious—and hid it in a generic cornflakes box I found in the garbage. Another thing I didn’t like was grocery bags on the kitchen floor for garbage, although because it wasn’t
your
kitchen you couldn’t say so. Then I rearranged the garbage to get a dripping can on top of the generic cornflakes box. By this time the water was boiling. Say, what a day
this
promised to be: everything just going snap snap snap. I chose the blue cup instead of the white one and spooned in my three spoonfuls. Blue suggested the sky and, therefore, transcendence. Though white also suggested transcendence, so there you were.