We Are Still Married (30 page)

Short, fat men were superb: I could have watched them all morning. A typical fat man crossing the street would quicken his step when he saw the creek and, on his approach, do a little shuffle, arms out to the sides, and suddenly and with great concentration
spring
—a nimble step all the more graceful for the springer's bulk. Three fairly fat men jiggled and shambled across 23rd together, and then one poked another and they saw the water. They stepped forward, studying the angle, and just before the point man jumped for the curb his pals said something, undoubtedly discouraging, and he threw back his head and laughed over his shoulder and threw himself lightly, boyishly, across the water, followed—
boing boing
—by the others.

The women who hopped the water tended to stop and study the creek and find its narrows and measure the distance and then lurch across. They seemed dismayed that the creek was there at all, and one, in a beige suit, put her hands on her hips and glared upstream, as if to say, “Whose water is this? This is utterly unacceptable. I am not about to jump over this.” But then she made a good jump after all. She put her left toe on the edge of the curb, leaned forward with right arm outstretched—for a second, she looked as if she might take off and zoom up toward the Flatiron Building—and pushed off, landing easily on her right toe, her right arm raised. The longest leap was made by a young woman in a blue raincoat carrying a plastic Macy's bag and crossing west on Seventh. She gathered herself up in three long, accelerating strides and sailed, her coat billowing out behind her, over the water and five feet beyond, almost creaming a guy coming out of Radio Shack. He shrank back as she loped past, her long black hair and snow-white hands and face right
there
, then gone, vanished in the crowd.

And then it was my turn. I waited for the green light, crossed 23rd, stopped by the creek flowing around the bend of curb and heard faint voices of old schoolmates ahead in the woods, and jumped heavily across and marched after them.

S
UMMER MAKES ME RESTLESS- especially these clear, blue postcard days when the Chrysler Building rises in the 43rd Street canyon like a finger beckoning east toward Europe. But it isn't Europe I'm restless for. There's a cigarette ad I see in the subway showing a dazzling white terrace and a beautiful blue sea that I take to be the Aegean, and I can imagine draping myself and my skinny red swimsuit across a wicker chair in the sunshine of Greece and sipping a glass of retsina, and then I imagine sitting and looking across the blue and feeling restless. So Europe isn't the answer for this, any more than cigarette smoking would be. It's simply the old summer restlessness, which goes back to school days when I sat trapped in the classroom as innocent June lay nearby and murmured in the sunshine in the far-far-left margin of the English exam and its stupefying questions about Richard Cory and why he shot himself. He just did, that's all, and who can say why? The world is full of sadness. Being rich and thin isn't everything. I don't feel like talking about it now.

Restlessness makes me think about taking a white 1960 Cadillac convertible that I don't have and driving eighty-five miles an hour across the George Washington Bridge and into the Pocono Mountains with a can of Schlitz in one hand, the top down, and the radio playing C & W songs, and, when I come to the most beautiful stretch of blue-green forest, throwing the beer can into the trees. I have never dropped any trash anywhere—not on purpose—out of respect for others and also because I was afraid that if I did Thoreau would appear and pick up my jujube wrapper and put it in his pocket and say, his large, sad eyes meeting mine, “Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises?” I don't know the answer to that one, either.

Restlessness leads me over to the office window, where there is nothing new to look at, and that makes me restless to find a new window. I take the long walk to the end of the hall, drink a drink of water, and come back, hoping the exercise will shake down this looseness and jumpiness, and I sit again. But on one long walk last Monday I turned right and rode the elevator down to the ground and hit the street. I walked west toward the river and angled south and got my car out of storage. It runs pretty well, considering that I haven't driven it more than ten miles in the past three months. I aimed it toward the West Side Highway and up the Taconic State Parkway with the radio on. I have a license to drive, and on Monday I just felt like using it. Heading up the graceful old Parkway, its progression of sensuous turns and dips shaped in an era when driving was considered romantic and fun, like dancing, I was feeling considerably calmer when the Mills Brothers came over the air singing “Gentle on My Mind.” In a bright tempo, their inimitable honey-tone voices sang, “It's knowing that your door is always open and your path is free to walk that makes me tend to leave my sleeping bag rolled up and stashed behind your couch.” Except for the lyrics, it sounded like a swing standard from 1936.

Thinking of the four stately black gentlemen in their shiny show-suits, their hair slicked back with pomade, swaying and snapping their fingers, their steady smiles and smooth voices, I had trouble imagining that any of the Mills Brothers had ever owned a sleeping bag, let alone stashed it behind somebody's couch. Their lives always appeared to be sedentary and committed lives, devoted to entertaining us. No Mills ever shared his problems with us on stage or his concerns about the environment. No Mills gave an interview in which he confessed a dread of fame, a confusion about his musical goals, or a fear that his vision had gone stale. When they sang on the Perry Como show, they never struck me as the least bit restless or dissatisfied, any more than Perry himself did. So it was revealing to hear them sing about not being “shackled by forgotten words and bonds and the ink stains that have dried upon some line” and the verse about wandering across the wheat fields and junkyards and highways and the train yards and the back roads. They made restlessness sound like a song they had to sing in order to have the album seem contemporary enough to satisfy their record producer. Hunkering in a train yard feeling free and waiting for a freight to come along was not part of the Mills Brothers' mystery of life, which had little to do with highways, either, and much to do with standing in a close semicircle and making pure four-part harmony. Same here, I thought. Restlessness doesn't suit me, either. I like to be squeezed a little, like a middle Mills, and hear my voice gently throbbing and bending in long, tender parallels with the others, not out here on a limb alone. An hour's run up the Taconic seemed to settle me down pretty well, and I turned around and came back to the beautiful city.

I
FLEW SOUTH TO FIND SPRING not long ago and changed planes in Atlanta, hiking from Gate C-8 to Gate C-18 and carrying the blue gym bag I've learned to stuff everything in since the day a brown suitcase of mine left me in Dallas and flew off to spend a week by itself. Airline terminals, as everyone knows, are designed to make people happy to board planes, and I was looking forward to mine as I approached the gate, and then I heard music. Cheerful music, tooting, like a mechanical ocarina. “Easter Parade”—the chorus. It came from a small pink plush rabbit standing on a glass display case in a souvenir shop across Concourse C from C-18. The rabbit, who could also march, had come to a dead end against a stack of boxes and stood there kicking it. I sat in the lounge by the gate and looked out the window across the dock and the taxi strip, and heard about twenty choruses of “Easter Parade” before I realized that the rabbit was battery-powered and wouldn't wind down anytime soon. My watch showed 2:40. My plane was scheduled to go at 3:00.

The effect of a short musical selection endlessly repeated is maddening, of course—an effect not contemplated by Irving Berlin when he penned the number for the Broadway revue
As Thousands Cheer
, to be first warbled by Marilyn Miller and Clifton Webb (September 30, 1933), whence it scored big and became the title song of an M-G-M Garland-and-Astaire cinemusical, whence it became the pop Easter standard in America. It never was my favorite Irving Berlin song. As the rabbit kept plugging it, I thought of others I liked more—“Puttin' On the Ritz” and “All Alone,” and even “White Christmas” —but with the “E. P. ” loop going round and round, bonnet after bonnet with all the frills upon it, I couldn't hum even “Have you seen the well-to-do up and down Park Avenue,” from “Puttin' On the Ritz”; even the notes of “I'm dreaming of a” left me.

I wasn't alone in the lounge. About half the fifty or so blue vinyl seats were occupied by three o'clock, when a woman at the check-in counter announced that the plane had not arrived yet and so would be late in departing. Most of my fellow waiters seemed to be aware of the song and to have traced it to the rabbit. Many of them, to judge from the looks they gave the rabbit and the clerk at the souvenir stand, seemed to know that they were going quietly, politely berserk. Conversation dried up. At 3:20, the woman said the plane still had not arrived but would, momentarily. When I left “Easter Parade” and boarded the plane, it was 3:45. I guessed that I had heard more than 250 choruses.

Why I didn't walk across the concourse, pick up the rabbit, open the hatch on its back, and remove the batteries is a question I ask, too, and why I didn't at least say, out loud, “That is driving me crazy,” so my companions would know for certain that the rabbit was a shared, not a personal, rabbit. I only point out that passengers are an obedient lot, and airline passengers are the most pliable of all, tending to believe that the plane is kept aloft by their karma, that an angry word or thought might create engine trouble. I have sat on planes parked at gates for more than an hour with no sensible explanation from the crew and no questions asked from the tourist cabin. People who fly are in a delicate position—prayerful, even penitential—which makes personal desires seem immaterial. When a steward says, “Care for a drink?” I think, Sure, fine, whatever's best— you decide. I don't like to make demands so high in the air; and even in the terminal, with my feet on the beige carpeting, I'm in a mood to go along.

But don't think I'll sit still the next time. In fact, I'm waiting for the next time
right now
. I'm ready. Next time, look out! I'm going to move. Any one of a dozen things might set me off. Nobody knows what the others might be, and I'm not going to say. I know I speak for a number of persons—who knows how many? Tens of thousands. One of these days, someone is going to take simple, direct action against a simple, idiotic object. He or she may be you or me. We are going to yank the plug and restore peace.

P
ROBABLY WE ARE NOT GOING TO New Iberia, Louisiana, for the forty-third Louisiana Sugar Cane Festival, the last weekend of September, but we are looking at the brochure (entitled
Hi Sugar
!) that a friend in New Orleans sent us, and are imagining all the events we'll miss, beginning on Friday the 28th (“Farmer's Day—All Day in City of New Iberia—Dress Farmer Attire”) and including the “Blessing of the 1984 Sugar Cane Crop and Harvest Season in the Fields,” the High Sugar Cane Yield Awards Luncheon, the coronation of Queen Sugar XLIII, who reigns over the festival with King Sucrose XLIII, and the “Queen's Parade of the Sugar Producing Parishes of Louisiana,” with the Queen and her Sugar Lumps riding a float down Main Street. “Keep America Sweet,” the brochure says.

Knowing our friend, we figure that we are supposed to be amused at this, and maybe we were at first, but then, seeing all the people whom the Festival will honor at luncheons and a dinner and a reception—the high-yield farmers, the parish Sugar Queens, former Sugar Kings and their wives, and the wife of King Sucrose XLIII—we wondered why New York, where people regularly whoop it up for national origin, has so few celebrations of livelihood. Making a living is the best reason for celebration we can think of, and yet not only does our own industry, the unsigned-writing trade, have no annual festival to throw bouquets at itself, but we ourself have actually
looked at our feet
when someone asked, “What do you do?” and we have
stuck our hands in our pockets
and said, “
Oh, we do a lot of different things,”
or
“It's kind of hard to explain,”
as if we were a thief. A New Iberia cane-grower wouldn't hang his head—he would look a person straight in the eye and say, “I raise sugar. Here's my card. You ever come to Louisiana, be sure to stop in, and I'll show you how it's done.” He knows that sugarcane is nothing to sneeze at. It has its own festival. We envy that sort of pride. So we are already looking forward to the first Copy Carnival, on September 28, a Friday (All Day in City of New York—Dress Casual Attire), and imagining all the events we'll attend, including the Blessing of the Photocopiers and the coronation of Queen Anonymity, and the Sunday Night Deadline Dance and, especially, the big Prose Parade down Fifth Avenue.

A fine autumn day in busy Midtown, the smell of burning pretzels in the air, and as we trudge east on 44th, slightly slumped from months of bending over the crop, the sight of crowds behind police barricades and of television crews and the strains of journal music put a spring in our step, we run a comb through our hair, we begin to walk tall: our day of days, come at last. The honor guard of editors swings by, carrying ceremonial carbines and Old Glory (with a few stars and stripes deleted), and the Newsstand Band, playing the “Washington
Post
March,” followed by crack typing-drill squads, their Underwoods draped with fresh ribbons. Then come dozens of marching units from all segments of the anonymous-print industry: advertising men and women jogging
hup-hup-hup-hup
in their smart gray parachute pants and name-brand T-shirts; authors of catalogue copy, instruction manuals, form letters, autobiographies of famous illiterates;
Times
editorial writers, in their familiar long black robes rented by the hour; an army of editorial assistants and researchers; the Obituary Guild; the book-jacket brigade; the bumper-sticker battalion; the press-release regiment; and, toward the tail end of the procession, us, our bunch, the tiny Talk of the Town squad, marching triple-spaced and chanting, “Roses are red, so are balloons. We write the gray stuff around the cartoons!”