Thank You for the Music (13 page)

“Let's just stick to hot chocolate,” she finally said.

She walked up to the counter. The kid mumbled, “What's up, Lucy?” and she lifted her glasses and winked at him. “Two hot chocolates, darlin',” she told him. “No, make that four.”

The kid gave them the hot chocolates in a cardboard carrier. They walked out into the night and got back in the car.

“Wake up, kids, we got some hot chocolate here.”

The kids did not wake up.

“Desi could sleep through a train wreck,” Lucy said. “His father was an insomniac, and I hardly need five hours a night. I don't know where he came from.”

“Is that so?” He couldn't think of anything else to say. Shouldn't he have
more
to say; how many chances in life did you have to talk to Lucille Ball? Then he wanted to rap himself upside the head for thinking this could actually be Lucy.

It made no sense at all, but there it was, like everything else.

“You're so quiet,” Lucy said. “Cat got your tongue?”

She was headed back to the high school now, he saw, and he wished he could somehow think of an enticing detour, but already the huge brick building was looming closer. From a distance he saw his own solitary car parked in front of the school.

“The night is
still
young,” he tried, as she stopped the car beside his own.

“The young are zonked,” she said, nodding toward the sleepers in the back. “Better wake her up before I kidnap her. She reminds me of my own daughter.”

He reached over into the backseat and shook his daughter by the shoulder. For all he knew, she may have been stoned. She peeled her eyes open and looked at him as if she found him vaguely horrifying. “Time to go now,” he said, “Lucy's dropping us. I mean, she's dropping us off now.”

The girl opened her door and fell into the night, then steadied herself on Lucy's fender.

“Lucy,” he said, and suddenly grabbed her wrist, a very real wrist at the end of a satin shirt. “What's it all about? In a nutshell?” A memory with wings beat at the back of his neck: himself, younger, dancing in a gym.

“Oh hell, how should I know?” she said, and lifted her sunglasses quickly to wink before lowering them again. “I'm just a comedian, honey.”

He paused. He could feel his daughter standing behind him on the curb.

“Good night, sweets,” Lucy said. “Maybe we'll see ya again sometime.”

“Lucy,” he said.

“Or maybe not,” she said.

“Lucy.”

She waited, her eyebrows raised.

“What is it, Snookums?”

“Stay funny,” he finally blurted, baffled under the streetlight, blinking back what might have been tears of confusion.

“Oh, I always leave 'em laughing,” she said. “And you?”

Then she threw the car into gear, and moved off like warm silk into the cold night.

T
HE DAY HE FINDS A RAT
behind a bag of potatoes in the kitchen cupboard is the day he calls his brother.

It was the second rat of his life in the house on Ratchet Street. He knew he should have never consented to live on
Ratchet
Street, which one of the wanting-life-to-be-fancier neighbors pronounced “Ra-Chay” Street. It was not Ra-Chay Street! Please! On Ratchet Street, a porch was always collapsing, rotten wood the outward manifestation of spiritual demise. A fat child without a coat always seemed to be out on the sidewalk, scratching his head, wiping his nose on his sleeve. The loose dogs were mangy with cold gray eyes. That kind of street.

He'd lived there eight years. His brother imagined life was a dream for him. Compared to what? Wasn't that always the question? Well, compared to his brother's life in Fishtown, life was glorious. He had, for instance, someone to love named Johnny. Johnny was a decently outraged historian and often spontaneously ordered out for Thai food. Johnny gave people nicknames. For instance, he called the man next door Besotted because the man had once asked him, “Did you know that God is
besotted
with you, even if you are a homosexual?” Now he liked it when Johnny said, “Besotted is out there watering his garden” or “Besotted parked his ugly car in our spot.” It felt like enough, sometimes, to live with a man who had named another man Besotted.

When he sees the rat lurking behind the bag of potatoes, he runs out of the house with the telephone, and calls his brother. He's in his striped pajamas. He wants to tell his brother that he knows how he feels. The rat terrifies him and makes him feel defeated, as he imagines his brother must feel, always. Of course he can't use the words, “I know how you feel,” because they were offensive to the brother, as they are offensive to anyone who lives in Fishtown, where despair grows like old shoes from the twisted tree branches, where loneliness claws your bare ankles when you step out of shower stalls. And if you have a window in Fishtown, it will frame sickly lightning, or tattered black clouds, and thunder often takes on the voice of the president.

You have no real memories in Fishtown, and certainly no fish. The fish have been transformed into sparring knives of shame coming up from the darkness inside of you that delights in surprising you with its endless depths. It's hard to eat because of those knives! In Fishtown, your children are the children in other lands, the dying ones. You try to send them money sometimes, but mostly you're afraid to go outside.

And so, rather than “I know how you feel,” he tells his brother the story.

“I was in the kitchen, you know, just trying not to have ADD, wondering why I'd come downstairs in the first place, and I open this cupboard, and I think to myself, potatoes. Potatoes are good. Can't argue with the goodness of potatoes. Once a friend of mine made me a nice painting of a mountain of potatoes under a midnight sky. He's currently penniless but
so
good-hearted. So I bend down and start to pick out a few nice potatoes, figuring I'd make some hash browns or home fries and think of my friend the penniless painter, when suddenly the bag moves a little, and I'm face-to-face with this big old rat, and I'm talking
big,
brother, and I jump up, and I'm shaking, you
know
how I feel about rats, and the rat jumps out of the cupboard, and starts to run across the kitchen floor, and he's like bigger than that black Buick Dad used to drive, remember, the one where we'd sit in the backseat holding on for dear life singing Jackson Five songs too loudly because he was always under the influence? So then I grabbed the phone and ran out into the rain and called you, and I don't
ever
want to go back into that house again and I
would
go to a neighbor's house but nobody on Ratchet Street likes me they think I'm a commie on top of being gay and if they knew I had a rat they'd say it was my own fault, they'd say it with their eyes, and besides, everyone's at work and I'm laid off and standing out here in my pajamas in the rain, so it's quite the lonely landscape.”

What he means to say is,

Rain needles his face. To bring up their childhood would be to take his brother's hand and press it to a hot burner. The empty neighborhood gets emptier, as if one of the houses has just jumped off a cliff. His brother is breathing on the other end of the phone. He tells him he loves the sound of his breathing.

His brother says he's glad it's good for something.

He looks back at his house, and the rat is upstairs, framed in his bedroom window. It is all his fault for being a man afraid like this. Afraid of a fucking rodent! All his fault. The rat sticks his head through a hole in the screen. He stares down at him. The rat looks interested, patient. He tells the brother this is happening. He tells him it feels like a sign. He tells him please, please, stay here on earth with me, you'll find your way out of Fishtown sometime, I promise. He looks over at Besotted's house. Closed up, curtains drawn. Where is Besotted when you need him? He tells his brother, “We have this neighbor named Besotted who wears a toupee and dates a woman who is so fat she can't walk anymore. They say in America we'll all be too fat to walk in about forty years, at the rate we're going. I'm really looking forward to that. Really. It'll be nicely surreal. And it'll be the truth, right? I mean, we're already gluttons, so why not look the part? Right? Why should a country of hogs look svelte? No matter how much you work out, you're still an American hog, am I right?”

(He knows his brother feels accompanied when he talks like this.) His brother laughs a little. He is flooded with a warm feeling of gratitude for that small laughter.

The rat has squeezed its fat rat body through the screen. It is growing. Surprise! It is changing. We are all changing. But it is changing faster than we are. It is now a
winged
rat. That's two syllables ringing in his mind. Wing-ed. It is wasting no time. It is flying toward him in the rainy air. It is landing on his heart. Such a grip it has. How hungry it appears to be as it burrows. It is gnawing on the bones of his heart. Johnny is nowhere. The sky is racing away. He's forgotten every childhood prayer he ever knew. He is sprawled on the street now. Is this how you feel in Fishtown, he asks his brother, like a rat has landed on your heart and is gnawing on the bones and won't stop, ever again, and nothing can pry it away, and his brother comes to life and says yes, sort of, you're getting closer now, you're getting closer.

“I
BET YOU
'
D STOP LOVING ME IF
I
GOT FAT
,” Kate said, standing in the darkened room above the Deluxe Luncheonette in Newark, Delaware. The long mirror was a silver lake on the wall. Kate rented this room and liked the place; it seemed severely romantic, and she was sick with love and fear.

And next door the clown from Baltimore was practicing his juggling act; once again the pins crashed down like thunder, and afterward the clown said, “Shit.” Kate's boyfriend Thomas laughed at this. “That clown is so predictable!” he said. Now they could hear how the clown had started his act all over again.

“I wish
you
were predictable,” Kate said.

“No. No you don't. You like how I bring music from Taiwan and sausages to this room. You like my bells, you like how I read you Nietzschean bedtime stories.”

Kate shrugged. She thought of her father for no apparent reason. Then her mother. How small and fragile they seemed now, those people from the suburbs with their lawn pride. How sad they would be to see her in this room with a pale philosophy major who hated television.

The clown was angry again. “Shit! I'm going back to Baltee-more!”

Baltimore. The clown's city of origin. He couldn't help the way he pronounced it. It was how the grown-ups had taught him to say it, forty-odd years ago. The clown's real name was Rudy, and he lived on fried chicken, and so smelled like chicken, as did his entire room, his wife, Judy, and the hallway. He bought this chicken daily from Roy Rogers, which was down on the main street of that small college town where Kate and Thomas studied and grew. Tonight was Kate and Tom's four-month anniversary; they had eaten in a Chinese restaurant, then raced home to make love, drink cheap wine, smoke clove cigarettes, and make love again.

Thomas lit a candle.

“I think we should kindly tell the clown that he was not meant to be a clown,” Thomas said, because the pins came crashing down once again and startled him.

“You would,” Kate said, “You
would
stop loving me if I gained thirty pounds. Wouldn't you?”

“Is that a comment on my shallowness, or yours?” Thomas said. “Can't seem to figure out the source of these pathetic questions.”

“Don't torture me with your clever elusiveness! Just tell me. Would you dump me if my butt suddenly inflated to ten times the size it is now?”

He laughed. The clown's pins crashed and the clown shouted, “Pray for me!”

“Come here,” Thomas said. He held her. “I would love you no matter what.”

“What if I gained a hundred pounds?”

“More of you to hold.”

“One seventy-five?”

“Even more. You'd be luscious.”

The pins crashed and the clown said, “Damn it all!”

“Luscious? Really?”

“Really.”

“What if I was so fat I couldn't fit through the door? So fat when I laid on the bed the bed just cracked right in half? Would you still love me then?”

“Absolutely. Your soul would still be inside you, wouldn't it?”

A knock came at the door. It was the clown's wife.

“Look, can you keep it down? You have these bizarre conversations, and he can't help but listen, and it's really fuckin' up his act. Excuse my mud mask.”

They closed the door after assuring the clown's wife that they would try to speak more quietly. The two of them walked over to the window and peered down at the parade of pedestrians—festive tonight, moonlit, long strides eager to get somewhere, clothing bright with the colors of autumn, almost quaint, as if doom didn't rule the world.