We Are Still Married (43 page)

It surprised me that I didn't miss home, except a little bit on Sunday during a Redskins-Giants game, somehow a note in Brent Musburger's voice recalled the cozy Sunday afternoons we lumbermen piled in together around Butch Butcherson's color TV. Billy and Butch and Pete and Tom. We'd crank up the kerosene heater and pop popcorn and sit in that steamy room in the frozen woods, watching the Vikes, and now Brent's voice at halftime made me think of things I never said to those guys, like “Maybe we ought to get out of here and go someplace else. Maybe life can be better.” Third quarter, the game got lopsided. I fell asleep. When I awoke it was 6:00 A.M. The subway was peaceful so early, people sleeping on old No. K as she banged downtown, I even squeezed in some Zs myself.

It was my job to open up Grant S. Pierce at 7:30 and get the overnight orders off the answering machine. Previously, the addresses had gotten goofed up due to someone's dyslexia and Elayne got mad and threw the flowers in a ditch (which, if you know how far you got to drive to find one of those in this town, tells you how lost he was), so the day I started was the day they started to make a profit. The voices on the machine were guys phoning in at 3:00 and 4:00 A.M. and the only flower they could remember was the rose. We ordered six bales of roses every morning. Fluffed them up into bouquets and I ran around Manhattan laying them on the desks of tall wary women, not all of whom were bowled over by the gesture. “Take your lousy flowers back to that pitiful degenerate and stick them in his lap” was not such an unusual response. I drove the big green van around narrow streets as bumpy as dirt roads, not that you ever went so fast that you actually bumped, they were packed solid with traffic, so I learned to do what I had to do, to be nasty with the horn and to shove the next car aside and horn in and then—this is hard for a nice Wisconsin man to do—to park the van in the middle of the street in front of cars I had just horned in in front of and walk into a building and deliver flowers and not rush although as I wait for Miss Meyers in the thirty-first-floor reception room I can hear them calling to me from below, the forlorn long toots and anxious beeps of abandoned children, and I look out a window and see them bunched up behind the green van like ducks trying to scoot through a hole in the fence, but it's too small to squeeze through, I think, watching a black limo try to get around me, followed by a station wagon, an ambulance, a garbage truck. They look like toys. It's interesting to watch. A man gets out of the limo and walks twice around the van, fast, pounding on it with a tire iron. Furious, like Miss Meyers stabbing at the bouquet with a pencil. “I'm not even going to touch the
paper
around these,” she says. I tell her that Mr. Tom Tucker didn't wrap the roses, I did, but she makes a face. “I loathe and despise him and anything he paid for whether he touched it or not.” Her face brightens. “Do you sell thistles?” she asks. Honk honk, beep beep,
braaaagh.
“Do you sell and deliver bouquets of seaweed or big gobs of algae—would you deliver a bucket of green slime for me?” So much anger. It's hard for a Wisconsin man to deal with. Even in the sleepy jungle afternoons in the Grant S. Pierce greenhouse, hosing down rubber trees, pinching aphids, listening to Broadway stars reveal their thrilling lives on the “Midday Cavalcade with Adrian Adams Live from the Blue Room of the Hotel Hart High Above Eighth Avenue” and watching June bend over the tulips, there is anxiety. Angry phone calls from men wondering why the women didn't call to say thanks. A New York voice like a ratchet-tooth hacksaw: “Whaddaya mean she didn't accept the roses? You're telling me that my girl wouldn't take my roses? Is that what you're telling me? You're telling me that she doesn't think that I'm the best thing that ever happened to her? Is that it? That's what she told me two days ago. You're sayin' I'm deaf? Or stupid? Listen to me, you—” I never liked roses. Tulips beat roses anytime in my book. Once I took an armful of American Beauties to Vanelle Montage at the Hotel Hart prior to broadcast and wished it had been soft pink tulips, roses are so hard and cold. She was little and pink and talked in a tiny jewel-like voice. I whipped right past Adrian Adams and handed her the bouquet, sitting at a table for two with a clear crystal microphone, and him—he gave me the fish eye, but Miss Montage looked up and smiled a small perfect smile. “You have the kindest face, I wish that I knew you as a person and that it were possible to see you every afternoon, it would give me courage. God bless you,” she whispered. She gave me a ticket to her show (she was in
Play Ball!
at the Henry James) and was unable to draw her small cold hand immediately from mine but let it rest a second. I felt a pulse beat as rapid as a bird's in her little finger; then her producer Raoul Cassette put his big paw on my shoulder. “Beat eet,” he said in his fake French accent, “vi haff beezness to dô so ... eef yeu vil be so kindt.” His nose was two inches from mine and I could see that nothing in the man's face was real. I turned away. Something in Miss Montage's eyes said,
Help me please;
she blinked and again it said
Help me please.
I was triple-parked on Eighth and 43rd, the van sticking halfway into the intersection, I could hear screams and honks and glass breaking. I said, “Some other time, my dear. Goodbye.” This is hard for a Wisconsin man to do: turn away from the desperate pleas of a fine woman enslaved by a vicious creep. But I was in love with June, darling June, my little Junebug, her arms full of tulips, looking at me over the ferns in the mist from the greenhouse mister, her beautiful eyes and nose and arms and legs and all of her wanting me and me wanting her, it's that way when you're around flowers constantly.

Did I tell you that she and I got married last Monday at City Hall and that we live in a $1.2-million place up in Connecticut, in the woods alongside a pond? It's a fine big house that reminds me a lot of Wisconsin houses, especially the fact that we plan to fill it with kids. When she and I stroll along under our beech and hickory trees after a busy day running our mail-order bulb business, YoYoCo, I can hear the voices of our children tearing around the woods (though she is only six days pregnant). It happened like this. Every day I got out of the Manhattan rat race by going over to the Hotel Oshkosh on West 48th for a bite of lunch, and there I got to be pals with an old guy with hair in his ears named Bob Bobson who ran a sausage factory in Queens and who hailed from Sheboygan. Everyone at the Oshkosh came from back home, it was known as “The Wisconsin Embassy” and outside on the marquee in red letters eighteen inches high was the motto “Arntcha Gladger a Badger!” which tended to keep out the uptown crowd and lure in Wisconsinites. Every day at noon the lobby filled up with men in immense plaid pants and vast yellow shirts and sportcoats in many patterns, sportcoats you could leave on a park bench and know that nobody would steal them. It doesn't take many of those gents to fill up a lobby, and they filled it with happiness and song. Their hearty voices whanged out one number after another as they patiently stood in line for a seat in the Rumpus Room and a good lunch of ham hocks and sauerkraut, songs such as “Hail Hail the Gang's All Here” and “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” and “I've Been Workin' on the Railroad” and “Let the Rest of the World Go By.” Bob sat and sang along in a tuneful bass voice and his little brother Rick who worked for him writing bus advertisements'd lean over my way and say, “Listen to those wahoos, they couldn't sing their way out of a paper bag.” He was only a size 46. He ate chicken wings and tuna salad, had a perm and a mustache, and wore blue shirts and gray slacks. He had been a jazz columnist in Duluth-Superior and knew the words to songs like “Stormy Weather.” His plan was to crank out sausage ads until he saved a wad and then move to Vermont and write essays. When he heard I had a ticket to see Vanelle Montage
(Play Ball!
was S.R.O. into the 1990s), resentment filled his tiny red eyes and he refused to dine with me again, which was a nice deal. I would've given him the ticket except his friendship was too high a price to pay. I gave it to Bob. Big tears welled up in his eyes, his hand shook, and he set down his forkful of knockwurst. He said, “Mister, nobody ever gave me something for nothing in this town since coffee was a nickel.” He swallowed. He said, “Son, I'm going to let you in on a very nice secret.”

It was the Midtown-LaGuardia tunnel, the fabulous underground route to the sky that millions have dreamt about as they sat locked in place on FDR Drive watching their plane sail away to Honolulu, the tunnel begun in 1946 and shut down two years later when the Manhattan end popped up in the wrong spot. Bob leaned forward and said softly, “Take the alley behind that old building with the lady lit up on top and go down the ramp to the door marked ‘RAMP' and honk twice. When it opens, go down to level 4 and through the door marked ‘DANG R' and there it is, son, in two minutes you're over to Queens and take the exit marked x and you're at the United terminal.”

I found it. “DANG R” opened to a dirt track through a black stone tube, a couple big puddles a quarter-mile in and a stretch of plank road but I shot through at 55 with my headlights on high beam and two minutes later was at LaGuardia, pondering the business possibilities. Starting the next week, I made eighteen runs daily and all of my best Grant S. Pierce customers were glad to climb in the back of my truck and be delivered to the airport so suddenly, and I started to sell more orchids and rare flowers, many of which were presented to me, their chauffeur and pal, and then I bought a used bus. With the bus, it was three tight turns driving down to level 4 but I never was one to get upset about a few scratches on a motor vehicle, it is meant to be used, not saved. I painted the windows for secrecy, carried eighteen full loads a day, screeched around those tight turns, saved my money, courted June, and quit Grant S. Pierce. They wept on my last day at work and the old man thrust immense sums of money at me, begging me to reconsider, fifties and hundreds, fistsful, his big green eyes dissolved in pools of tears. June quit too. We have five hundred grand in the bank, and headed for Connecticut and bought this ten-acre spread for $6,296 in back taxes that an old customer of mine put me onto, where we aim to be happy and raise our children, like they sing about at the Oshkosh. We put down the cash, strolled around our pasture and woods, our creek, our gentle hills, our virgin pond, and drove back that afternoon to New York to sell the bus and the tunnel was blocked.

The entrance at the airport was gone, filled up, paved over. There was no trap door where the entrance had been, just asphalt. I jumped up and down on it but the pavement didn't budge. She looked pretty well shut up for the time being. So if you're heading to the airport, you ought to allow extra time.

Meanwhile I'm okay, so is June, and the baby is due in July. Yvonne has a new boyfriend, the third after the sculptor, a urologist named Cid, and is in the Bahamas with him, he loves to scuba dive. I sail, which is so relaxing for a lumberjack, though once in a while I do dearly love to bring down a tree. She and I mainly keep in touch through answering machines, mine says: “This is Yon Yonson, I've gone to Wisconsin to visit my aunts in Racine. I'll come back—when I do, I'll get back to you. Tell me what is your name.”

E
D HAD READ SOMEWHERE that it's foolish to hit someone in the face because you can easily break your fingers and spend weeks unable to handle a fork, meanwhile the guy you hit suffers a small red mark on his cheek and sues you for the price of your house. Ed is forty-three, an age when bones are brittle, and yet the wisdom of having avoided injury didn't make him feel any better after the softball game the Rocks lost 18–4 on Sunday afternoon to a bunch of jerks from Coleman's Irish Lounge, and especially the play in the last inning, when one jerk ran over Megan Michael at third base.

Ed played left field, he saw it all: Megan didn't play often because she was scared of the ball, but she liked to play, so, ten runs behind, they stuck her at third and the jerk came up to bat looking grim and manly and got aboard with a bloop grounder down the third-base line that she missed completely and when it then leaked through Ed's legs the jerk took off like a runaway truck. He rounded second as Ed heaved the ball toward third—she
never
could have caught it—but instead of sliding, the jerk barreled in, his knees pumping, knocked her head over heels,
stepped
on her, and chugged home as all his fellow jerks jumped up and down and ran out to pound him on the back.

It was
deliberate.
He meant to cream her, it was
obvious,
but all the Rocks could muster was a few limp words of protest. Bill was the pitcher, he could've run at them fast, but he only stepped off the mound and said, “You're ahead by ten runs, for Pete's sake.” The jerk grinned and said, “Eleven!” Ed walked in from left field, saying, “Hey! What's the big idea? Cut it out!” and by the time he got to third and the little pile of Megan in her green sweatshirt, the jerk's colleagues were gathered around, asking her if she was okay. She was crying but said “Yeah,” thinking a real ballplayer would say that, and the jerk said, “Sorry if I hurt you but you were standing on the bag. The runner's got a right to the basepath.” And then he reached down and she took his hand and he hoisted her up, and right then and there the moment passed, the correct psychological moment for hurling yourself at the jerk in blind rage and ripping his flabby arm from its socket and beating him over the head with it and throwing him down to the ground and spitting him to death. The Rocks' chance for self-respect passed in the same moment.

He was an earnest little jerk with a mustache and no chin, watery eyes behind his horn rims, and his name was embroidered on his pocket: Nixon. He brushed some dirt off Megan's shirt. “Don't touch her,” Ed thought to himself, but didn't say it. Bill said, “You're sure you're okay? Maybe you better sit down,” so she did. The Rocks murmured a few more things, like “That was kind of rough, wasn't it?” and “You didn't have to do that, you know.” The jerk only shrugged and said, “Hey, you want me to go back to third? Fine.” “Hey, Nixon,” somebody said, “you had every right, man, you got it fair and square.” When the game ended, the jerk actually approached the Rocks' bench—
and the Rocks shook hands with him! Including Ed!
All except lovely Megan, who was now weeping from the pain and couldn't lift her arm. “Hey, hope you feel better,” called the jerk. Ed helped her to his car. The Irish Loungers were leaning around a white van, laughing, spraying beer at each other, and they all waved as Ed drove out, and yelled “Good game!” Ed didn't get really angry until after he took Megan to St. Joseph's, where the X-ray showed a broken collarbone, after he drove her to a drugstore to pick up pain pills and then dropped her at her apartment, and after she said, “Thanks for waiting around. It was really nice of you. I could've taken a cab or something. But, thanks.”