We Are Still Married (31 page)

Silly, perhaps, but what's one day of silliness in behalf of your livelihood? And why should we try to justify it to persons outside the industry? Let them be amused, we don't care. Without the anonymous author, this country would be a poorer place. Great men would be speechless. Simple directions such as “Stop,” “Stir slowly over low heat,” “No Parking,” and “Use only as directed” would lose their authority if they carried bylines. Great editorials would seem less balanced and majestic, more like a long honk from a guy with a burr up his ass. Advertising would choke on all those royalty payments. We could go on and on, but just take our word for it, Sugar. You need copy to Keep America Sweet.

I
LIKE THE SUBWAY. I ride it. I believe in it as a democratic institution. When I ride, I imagine all the black and gray and white stretch limos that sit stuck in traffic on the street overhead and the anxious phantoms behind the smoked-glass windows cursing and steaming, rolling their bulbous red eyes. They sit on black kid leather, a reading lamp over the right shoulder, air-conditioned, a television screen and a bottle of bourbon within reach, but they aren't going anywhere, and meanwhile I roll along from stop to stop in the company of my fellow New Yorkers, a patient and humorous and classy people, to 42nd, 34th, 23rd, 14th, while the big mazumbo's palace inches a few feet now and then, packed into a narrow sidestreet at the bottom of a canyon, a herd of plutocrats trapped like swine.

Despite this comforting thought, the subway often tests your democratic resolve. You descend from the street into a basement smelling of urine and buy tokens from a black lady sitting in a thick glass-and-steel case strong enough to withstand artillery. Nonetheless, she looks a little scared. Her voice comes out through a tinny speaker, as do the track announcements, and you can't understand a word. You drop a token in the slot and push through the ancient heavy wood turnstile which, like the mosaic tile walls, suggests a glorious past, long vanished. Your fellow detainees line the long concrete platform in the gloom, staring glumly into the black pit where the rails lie, garbage strewn along the ties. A rat darts out and skitters around the wrappers and cans, sniffing.

Couples hold each other. Little children clutch at their parents; they don't tear around like they do in parks or in stores. It reminds you, if you're a man, of when you stood naked in a long line of naked men at the Armory, taking your draft-board physical, waiting for the army doctor to tell you to bend over to have your rectum inspected. Coldness. Pale dry uneasiness, dread. Complete separation from your fellows. You long for humor, for someone to make that simple brilliant wisecrack that breaks the ice and makes all men brothers—what would Jimmy Stewart say in this situation?
waalll,
gosh if I
know
—but your brain is stuck. You think, “This could be a dangerous place.” Far up the platform, a man sleeps on newspapers spread under a bench next to a door marked “MEN,” a door you'd never open, not even if ordered to by thugs. A room full of garbage, filth, killer bees, Nazis, crackheads, flies who carry AIDS, the works.

A distant screeching. It gets louder and louder until the train light appears in the dark, so loud that instinct tells you to plug your ears—your eardrums hurt, Mozart will never be so beautiful again, your wife's voice will sound flat after this: you are destroying your fabulous ears and getting a pair of nineteen-dollar ones instead—but putting fingers in your ears might mark you as a greenhorn, so you stand placid and afraid as the antique piles of spray-painted cars slide slowly past and stop, a door opens halfway, your fellows squeeze past, we all shove in, the voice in the speaker overhead says, “Watch for the closing doors,” and the doors shut on us packed in tight, lurching into each other as the train jerks forward.

A tall man with long filthy hair, dressed in ripped jeans and dirty sneakers, on crutches, carrying an empty Crisco can. He says loudly: “PEOPLE. I'M A WOUNDED VIETNAM VETERAN. I FOUGHT FOR YOU, PEOPLE. I DON'T HAVE A HOME OR FOOD OR ANYTHING. IT ISN'T RIGHT, PEOPLE.” You look at your shoes as the train bangs along and we careen from side to side. You sneak a look: he's unshaven, red eyes, cuts on his forehead and cheek. Will he shoot us? He says, “PLEASE, PEOPLE.” He shakes the coins in his can. Some people reach into their pockets. Sitting, they hoist up an inch and fish change out of their jeans, dig down deep. He limps through the crowd, swinging on the crutches, the train sways, he almost tumbles, holding out the can. “I GOT NOTHING, PEOPLE, AND YOU GOT EVERYTHING. IT ISN'T RIGHT AND YOU KNOW IT. JESUS SAID TO HELP THE POOR AND THE HOMELESS. DO YOU KNOW WHAT IT'S LIKE TO GET SHOT DEFENDING YOUR COUNTRY AND THEN HAVE TO SLEEP ON A FLOOR IN THE BUS STATION? PEOPLE! I NEED YOU!” His voice breaks. “GODDAMN IT, I'VE JUST ABOUT COME TO THE END OF MY ROPE!” Change clinks in the can. People drop in a pinch of change here, a pinch there. You reach into your tweed jacket pocket and touch bills and fish out three singles, and after two seconds' thought, you stuff them in the passing can and immediately turn red and feel dumb, feel pity and anger at the same time. Pity for the man and anger at him for manipulating us like this. All of us good middle-class folk, black and white, brought up to respond to suffering with compassion, trapped in a hot car banging and screeching through the black cave, afraid (“VIET VET RUNS AMOK ON K TRAIN, LIMOUSINE LIBERAL AMONG THOSE SLAIN”), and, worst of all, embarrassed by your own lack of humor and ingenuity in the face of fear. You dimly recall an old movie about a wounded veteran (played by Jimmy Stewart?) who wanders the city streets, homeless, when one day the plain kindness of a tall stranger in a brown suit (“Son, here's a dollar and here's my phone number if you want a job”) restores his faith in the goodness of people. You wish you could be that stranger. The train comes into a lighted station, stops, and you push out the door, up the stairs, and into sunshine.

Y
ESTERDAY WAS MY wife's birthday, and, according to our custom, I woke up before dawn and sneaked out of bed. Our custom is that the birthday person sleeps until the family tiptoes in and wakes her up with singing and banging on pans and hauls her smiling to the table and sits her down to a perfect candlelit breakfast next to a stack of gifts. It was 6 A.M. I put on water for tea and sliced some nectarines, which she likes to eat with goat yogurt, and got out a block of her favorite cheese, which gives off an aroma like yesterday's hiking socks. The kids had baked rolls the night before. I set the glass-top table on the terrace with white plates, wineglasses for the orange juice, candles, and American-flag napkins, and then, because it was too early to wake the household and also because I am a cook who believes that too much is just barely enough, I decided to go out and find fresh bagels and lox and some more fruit. Also because that's a sweet time for a Midwesterner to walk around town. New York at six o'clock on Saturday morning is as close to being like Minneapolis as New York ever gets.

I headed toward a bagel bakery on Broadway around 81st, thinking I would come across an all-night fruit market along the way, and I was swinging down Amsterdam Avenue when a man called to me from behind. He said, “Mister? Sir?” I've lived in New York long enough to be able to ignore panhandlers when I want to: the New Testament doesn't say a person has to be at the beck and call of the needy every waking moment, you know. But, feeling Midwesternly, I turned, and he came up to make his pitch. “I'm not bad,” he was saying. “I'm not going to rob you, or anything.” A young black man in an old tweed coat, torn sneakers, jeans; his hair was long, and tangled in long snarls. He smiled at me sweetly. He smelled slightly rancid, and he spoke fast, with a Southern accent and a slight lisp. He said, “I'm sorry. I don't like to do this. But I didn't have anyplace to sleep last night. I spent the night in the Park. Today is my twenty-ninth birthday. It really is. I'm from North Carolina, and I've been trying to get into a shelter—you know where the cathedral is? I tried up there, but they were full. There's another one on Ward's Island I'm trying to get to. My grandpa is in Bellevue. He's dying with cancer, and I want to be with him—that's why I'm here. My name is Kevin. I have this aunt who lives in Hoboken. If I had five or six dollars, I could go over there and look her up and stay with her until I can get back on my feet. I'm sorry to take your time like this, but I just need some help. Now, I've got these books.” He brought out a handful of paperbacks from under his coat. “If you'd like to buy one, I'd sure appreciate it.”

Incredibly, one of the books was by me. I saw it right away, of course. One was a romance in a pinkish cover, and one was a Danielle Steel, and one was my book. The cover was torn off, but not the inside cover, which had my picture on it, with me in clear-rim glasses, squinting, in jeans and a green sweater, sitting on the white steps of a house on West 22nd Street, where we used to live. He was telling me how he'd come by these books honestly. I reached into my pocket and pulled out all the money I had—about twenty-eight dollars. I had to do this. I gave it to him. “That's my book,” I said. He handed it to me. “No, you keep it,” I said. “I just meant that it's my book. I wrote it.” He looked at the photograph: it was me.

He seemed astonished to be holding a book with a picture of a man who had just given him a small wad of money. Then he touched my arm and said, “I want you to sign it for me.” He dug in his pockets and got out a ballpoint. He said, “Make it out to Kevin and Anthony—he's my best friend. Oh, he's not going to believe this! This is incredible!” But the pen didn't work. “Oh, no, this is terrible!” he cried. He looked up and down the street. He moaned, “I got to find a pen.” He approached a woman walking toward us—“Lady, could I borrow your pen?”—and she glanced away from him and walked on.

I had never seen panhandling from that perspective, and it struck me as genteel the way the beggar shut up when there was no eye contact. He didn't press his case even slightly. Kevin tried to borrow a pen from two more passersby, with no luck. I believe that if you were out walking at 6 A.M. in Minneapolis and a panhandler asked to borrow a pen you'd be interested—but never mind. We finally went into a deli a block away and got a pen from the clerk. I signed the book “With every good wish for a long & happy life,” thinking that perhaps I should give him my phone number. Twenty-eight dollars doesn't go far in New York. But I didn't.

Back home, I made tea and woke up the kids, and we paraded into the bedroom, where she was still asleep, and rattled our pans and sang “Happy Birthday.” It was cool and still on the terrace. We lit the candles. The city out beyond our little potted trees looked serene, though hazy. She opened her gifts: a poster, a scarf, a book of pictures, and a green balloon that inflated so big you couldn't get your arms around it. It looked like a giant grape. We also had individual balloons, with whistles in their necks, which when the balloons exhaled made loud cawing sounds. The day bounced along; we drove to Bear Mountain for a long hike, came home, slept, and took a major dinner that night at a restaurant. I thought several times, in a sentimental way, about Kevin out there in the city, as if somehow I could have made things right for him. He is, after all, my only homeless reader as far as I am aware. I've thought of him often since. Whatever his reason for getting my autograph, my signing the book means just one thing to me, and that is that I know his name: Kevin. Two years in this city, and finally I have
met
a homeless person.

I
DROVE DOWN TO GETTYSBURG the weekend of the Fourth, the anniversary of the battle, along with my wife, who grew up on different books than I and doesn't care two cents about the Civil War. She is crazy about fiction, especially Gabriel Garcia Márquez whose latest she happened to have in her bag, and after we walked around the battlefield monuments for a half-hour that Saturday afternoon and ate a hot dog and watched a Union battery demonstrate artillery firing, she found a place in the shade back behind the crowds near the Gettysburg Volunteer Fire Department's refreshment tent and sat and read. All around us on Cemetery Ridge were men and scenes out of books I passionately loved as a boy. Row after row of cream-colored pup tents straight out of Brady photographs. Bearded sunburned men bundled up in wool uniforms, baggy pants, the caved-in caps and worn-out shoes, leather ammo bags and tin drinking cups on their belts, carrying single-shot carbines six feet long with narrow steel bayonets, and among them some teen-agers, one with long blond ringlets who looked exhausted. They had camped on the ridge for a week, part of the National Park Service's 125th anniversary commemoration, all volunteers. I watched two hundred Union troops fire a volley and charge across a meadow toward Plum Run, re-enacting the charge of the First Minnesota Regiment on July 2,1863, realizing a moment vivid in my imagination since I was twelve or so. I stood by the road along the crest of the ridge as a regiment of Confederates swung along in ragged formation singing “Bonny Blue Flag” in tender and weary voices, brave fellows in motley gray-and-butternut outfits with scraps of uniform laced together, like a band of old deer-poachers. I saw it all clear in my mind, not seeing the other tourists in their red shorts and yellow haltertops, men in dazzling green pants shooting pictures, just the blue and gray. If General George Meade had walked up to say hello, I'd've just reached out and shaken his hand. Fifty yards away, under the trees where the Pennsylvania reserves must've sat on July 3 waiting Pickett's charge, my wife in white jumpsuit reclined on the grass, so absorbed in the passions of a man on the Colombian coast that she didn't answer when I came over and said hello to her. Eyes on the page, she just reached out and took me by the ankle.