New Jersey Noir Part 19

"Oh, yes," she said, not tripping over my shift into past tense. "Sometimes I think that's why he insisted we move to Asbury ... I would almost even say he was in love!"

My sweet, dopey grin curdled into something more tart. "I had no idea!"

"Oh, yes!"

I tried listening to some of the lyrics he was warbling and wailing. I had no idea what he was singing. The transience of idols, I thought, maybe not as transient as human lives. I had no idea what we were doing here-we were getting nothing done, not saying anything to curtail Scott's plight. Neither of us was enjoying ourselves, yet I bobbed my head along to the horn-rich rhythm, as though I were back in a seedy bar on Fire Island in the '60s, dancing to race music with other sweater queens amid the required smattering of lesbians whose presence kept the place from getting raided. I wanted a gla.s.s of pinot noir, or something inky and gagging, a Bordeaux-I wouldn't give Dita the satisfaction.

"Catchy words," I said, imagining a double bourbon on the rocks. There was no reason not to have one. Soon we would hear that the body had been recovered-and I'd never have to look at this woman again or hear her scratchy words seeking out vulnerable places, the soft bruises from nighttime b.u.mps in my bathroom, to grind their way into my flesh forever. I pointed up, saying, "I guess it's not for nothing that the guy got famous!"

"What?!"

I was glad that she couldn't hear my joshy, Damon Runyon way of expressing a thought so trivial and insincere, and I leaned forward as the music switched to a syrupy, more hushed ballad. "I'm getting worried. Sitting here, I feel sort of ashamed of us ..."

"I know," she said, blinking rapidly, "but first I want to show you Ocean Grove."

"Would you like anything," she said when we got to the house, "w-w-water, whiskey?"

"I wouldn't," I lied. "I need to get back this afternoon, to teach an evening cla.s.s."

"Creative writing," she said drily, keeping a steady gaze on me, "on Hallowe'en?"

"Haw. Not even ghosts and goblins have a holiday on Hallowe'en. And you'd be surprised at how many of those want a master's degree and end up taking my workshop."

"Hang on, I think I'll go up and get more comfortable, slip into my pajama jeans."

After tarry double espressos, she had walked me through a covered pa.s.sage that cut through the abandoned casino and led to the adjoining community of Ocean Grove where the Methodists still had their summer camps. Along the boardwalk there, hideous condos littered the waterfront in a solid tawdry vinyl-sided wall, yet just in back of them rose the colorful turrets and cyclopean gables of the original Victorian mansions, all kept spit-spot and averting their dignified, make that mortified, stares away from cra.s.s modernity.

We half-circled the block then had come upon the modest and charming dollhouse rows where the town's mere middle-cla.s.s mortals got a slice of the pie. Narrow and all of wood, they were twee; simple keyhole-saw gingerbread latticed the shallow porches. We halted to take it all in. The block was shady, with sun peeking through the elms, and even considering the chill of the advancing day a sense of tranquility hung in the air.

"There's just enough room for two to live civilly and harmoniously together," said Dita, "depending on which two. That one, with the vulgar, superfluous fairy lights strung up, and those dumb crystals getting ready to blind whoever pa.s.ses by, is where she lives."

"She."

"The girl Scott met," she said, and when I shrugged, then for added effect dropped my jaw, we eased back into a stroll. "In truth, I wasn't angry. He met her one summer or the spring before when I was on sabbatical. Anyway, I was in Europe the whole time."

"In Poland, with your mother and family."

"But all over Europe. Not the point. I wasn't angry, not even the least bit. Not even jealous. He thought I was both. I figured he might have called and told you."

"Absolutely not," I said. "And was it a tortured, pa.s.sionate, doomed affair?"

"Not at all, Scott was happy. Very happy. And I was happy for him. I thought he might have called you to work it up into some big melodrama in his mind between us, but in fact I was supportive. He wanted me to be jealous, but I was thrilled. He only became angry when I suggested he try living with her. It wasn't necessary-but he could, I said."

"I think I follow you," I responded, lightly chuckling. "That sounds like my Scott too."

"It was the same summer he and his buddy from old times, Kenny, were going to get their duo going. They played on the boardwalk and Kenny, according to Scott, said Scott's songs were the real thing. They hoped to play clubs next. And so on. I met her. Scott was too proud not to introduce us. I really didn't like the idea, I thought it was unnecessary, no good for anybody, but he insisted, and when Scott insists-yes, you get it, no? Should we go up to the house and knock and ask her?"

"You mean if she's seen Scott?"

"No, I suppose not. You're right. If she was hiding him, I would already know. I gave the address to the police and the Monmouth County Sheriff's Department and put it all in their hands. If they can't find it in one of these crackerboxes it's probably not there. Where would she put him, under the floor? He's claustrophobic. And hates the mother."

"She lives with her mother?"

As though she'd been rehearsing for days, yet without much talent for this kind of thing-the contemptuous, continental "nonjealous" bit-Dita droned on at quite a clip.

"How else would she survive? She's too stupid to work, I think in fact r.e.t.a.r.ded."

It came to me: Asperger Girl. I'd come in at the end, having been away in France for the summer. But of course there were other reasons to tuck it out of my memory too.

At the corner of the next block I saw the skeletons of the camp meeting's tent city. As I understood it-Dita was too busy cycling through her own spiritual cleansing to stop and enlighten me otherwise-the Methodists used these frames and foundations to throw their canvas tarps over to serve as roof and walls. At the backs, fully enclosed structures housed kitchen and bathroom. They slept with only a layer of cloth between themselves and the stars, and it was such a model of goodness and decency, fresh air, cold plunges in the Atlantic followed by a round of singing and revival, that I was saddened. I knew that Stephen Crane, the sickly and slight son of stalwart Methodists, had been trundled about New Jersey among relatives as a small boy after his father's death, and that he'd fetched up in Asbury Park and as a young reporter had walked these streets. At least as much as a writer is made, or has been given in life, he also grabs and molds his material. Crane had been handed an early death sentence with his chronic lung ailments and he was dead from tuberculosis before turning thirty. But before that he'd traveled on freighters and covered revolutions, and he wrote one certifiable masterpiece, The Red Badge of Courage, about a war that ended six years before he was born, convincing everyone including his betters in England, from James and Wells to Conrad and Ford, that since "Stevie" couldn't possibly be a veteran of the bloodiest conflict in American history, the only reasonable conclusion to draw was that he must be a genius. In Suss.e.x, where Crane was dying and in hock to creditors back home, the greatest English writers of the previous generation had doted on an undersized giant. But no one was going to dote on Scott. I'd once sinned against him, it was true. I'd touched him the wrong way in private, caressing his neck and monitoring his confusion with my dumb puppy eyes, insulting not so much his manhood as his talent and intelligence. I regretted it immediately, and wondered if he'd ever told Dita about it.

"No," she was saying, "let's not bother her. You're right, leave her to the church."

"It's getting cold," I said. "Aren't you cold?"

And we walked back to the car, each embarra.s.sed into silence in our way.

She then waited halfway through the drive to the house before saying, "A-a-after that, I gave him a deadline for moving out. Wr-wr-writers like deadlines, I told him. I thought it would light a little fire under his seat. I wasn't mean about it-you know about the difficulties of dealing with Scott. They had a demo, Songs for Andi, so okay, you won't work, get a proper job, but I'm not going to be around forever, mister."

I shifted in my seat to get a fuller view of her face, but Dita did not turn. She was keeping her eyes on the road, chin raised, looking out for a calming object in the distance, and I said, "Well, you've carried the bulk of the burden with Scott, I know."

"All of it," I'd insisted.

I snooped a bit in the downstairs, impressed by the Martha Stewart comfort and carefully coordinated colors that read "mutedly tasteful but unsnooty," a composition which Scott had brought off. Dita descended the stairs, slinking almost, while rolling up the sleeves of a neatly pressed white b.u.t.ton-down-and wearing a type of pants I'd never seen before. They had the color and st.i.tchedlooking design of jeans, but were made of a soft, stretchy material that clung flatteringly to her hips and thighs. Only at that moment did I begin to believe what Scott had always said, that Dita was full of s.e.xy surprises.

"A-a-and I know, even from what Scott said, but also from reading some of your books-yes, you're shocked that a computer scientist can read words?-but I know that you're a great teacher. I'm ready for a drink. The rest of the day and the evening, I will go back to my funk, and wait by the phone like a good wife. You know, Scott really could not marry me because, irresponsible as ever, he never saw to it to divorce the j.a.panese."

"So that was it," I said.

"That was it," she said, and wagged her finger in the air and led me to the kitchen. "I will wait for the mister, but only for so long. He has us as he wants us, on the end of a string. But in time, maybe we learn"-she exhibited a maniacal looseness under her own roof, and her language had rounded another bend-"we can let go. Mister doesn't count on that, does he? Maybe he'll be back, maybe not, to see we hold our end of them too?" She swung open a cabinet full of liquor and added, "Please say you'll join me."

Some might have called it tempting fate, but judging from Scott's description of Dita-yes, he was here with me still-she had undoubtedly surveyed the situation and looked at it realistically. Only Americans, he might have said she would say, insisted on the sunniest, most optimistic view, and cleared the fleet of bottles from his thirsty eyes.

"Just one, then," I said. "I'll have-"

"This is what we make at home in my family," she said, unsquatting and coming up with an old Gallo jug filled with a clear yellowish fluid. "Apricot brandy, only it's not really brandy, it's just what we say, and it's peaches. You can't get good apricots: for that you have to be somewhere else-the closest out in California in a grove, but more ideally someplace in Europe, and most ideally in Galicia," and hauled down two juice gla.s.ses.

She explained the process, involving soaking the fruit in vodka for months before straining off the liquor, and said that of course it was more of a schnapps. "You like it?"

There was that blessed snap, a lick from the first belt of the day. I'd been careful that morning to have only coffee, half a pot, and for some hours had even believed in the fiction that I might extend that practice as a short-term habit, experiment, ease back into a routine I'd eschewed as equally hopeless years ago, bowing before the muse humbly as a man wishing to reform, and sweet-talking her and seeing if that got me anywhere. All of it sank foolishly away, my resolve, my hangover logic. Stupid idea. This was lots better, felt a lot more like inspiration. Seduce yourself and screw the muse. Fickle tramp!

We went down to the bas.e.m.e.nt.

"I-I'm afraid I couldn't look at it the way it was," said Dita. "I cleaned it a bit."

Everything had been straightened-the clothes I knew Scott to drop anywhere he pleased and the things he would pick up and look at before tossing them aside, his books, CDs, had all been put away, returned to place. And the area resembled the dorm room of an unusually finicky and fastidious college student. Dita stepped aside. When I turned to look at her with an ambiguously approving sniff that said either she'd done the right thing or I wouldn't have known the difference to begin with, she folded her arms over her chest and, blinking rapidly, arranged her face tentatively, as though issuing a meek challenge or opening herself up to polite suggestions for how she might do better the next time.

"He always was a terrible slob," I allowed, "in that hole down on Rivington."

"I've kept the heat on the whole time," she said, "in case he comes back."

Taped to one painted cinder-block wall was the worn Smiths poster he'd kept as a souvenir of his only transatlantic trip, to London. Once Scott and I had argued about the poetic value of rock lyrics (the Smiths had been his first artistic inspiration when he was still rotting in the "juvie bughouse," as he called it), and guess who'd argued against it.

Our last argument had occurred the fall following that summer he'd described to me over the phone as magical and idyllic, the same sorts of adjectives I'd urged him for years to chase from his writing, though I hadn't begrudged him them then-when he had been in love and was getting back to his music, right before both enterprises had crashed, and he'd argued with Andi for thinking she might be pregnant (she wasn't) and Kenny for sabotaging their chances at getting their duo off the ground (I knew who the real saboteur had to be). Ever paranoid, he'd accused me and some of his cla.s.smates of a cabal. He'd cooked up a conspiracy theory in which all of us were envious of his upcoming book, I'm So Sorry-and we'd seen to it that it had gotten nothing more than an "In Brief" notice in the Sunday Times. Never mind that it was enthusiastic, that the book was still in print on a small rock press, and that all of mine were out of print and had never been regarded by any reviewer at the Times as anything beyond entertaining oddities at best and stubbornly extruded excrescences, to cite the cruelest review, at worst. And that I'd sat up night after night with him editing and honing the ma.n.u.script, wanting to stroke and congratulate him for work we'd done together but that nonetheless had come from his once-tender heart, in order to prepare it for the first eyes in the business that I knew would take a shine to it.

"You're a pretty ungrateful little b.a.s.t.a.r.d," I'd said before easing the receiver onto the cradle, never to pick it up on him again. "You whine and complain while everyone all around you marches in lockstep to see a hint of the sun, before the inevitable black cloud comes racing up to cover it over again. You suck blood and all you give back is bile. I'm sick of you, and I'm sick of trying to help you. You don't want help. You want pity, or I don't know what you want but neither do you, it's something no human is capable of ever giving another because it hasn't been invented-which mean it's absurd, and so are you!"

I smelled the sweetness of mildew-not even Pine-Sol and Air Wick could get rid of it-and I went over to the high ledge of the window above the washing machine where he kept his few books, and where I saw the cracked spines of some of my t.i.tles.

"There," Dita rasped. "He was proud, always proud of his friendship with you."

When the call came, it was early on a Sunday morning. The strangest thing. I'd been to a play I enjoyed with friends the night before, and after two gla.s.ses of wine with dinner and a single digestif returned home and gone straight to bed-all as though to get me ready. Drinking coffee, I sat in my chair reading, just paces from the answering machine.

When it picked up, I thought after she said her name that she'd begun giggling.

"So he's finally done it," said Dita, composing herself, "our Scott killed himself."

I sat there and listened, keeping my place in the book with my index finger. Then I realized that this was something the callous Scott would tell on himself, laughing, and I let the book fall to the floor in a restrainedly cinematic moment that suggested Bergman.

They'd found him in the Raritan near South Amboy. When he was being cavalier and enumerating his upcoming attempts, he'd listed everything from sticking his head in a gas oven to a rematch with the old razor blade in the bath or sedatives and Amaretto to a witches' brew of every pill he could collect from Dita's medicine cabinet chased down with a c.o.c.ktail of household chemicals. "Very funny," I'd said. "Now shut the f.u.c.k up." But he'd very specifically pointed out that it would not be death by drowning-since he violently disagreed with my taste for Virginia Woolf: "Anything Woolfian's too corny."

Of course, I didn't pick up or call her back. I poured myself another cup of coffee and went into my study and began going through student thesis work.

I was busy all of the following week serving on selection committees and I stayed dry until Friday night, when I went to the movies, where I began crying from the opening credits and heard the first tw.a.n.gs of plaintive pioneer theme music. I wept at the national landscape, and I wept unabashedly when a thief in the story was hanged and townspeople played by extras cheered. When the lights were turned on, I got up and left the theater. I didn't cry for the rest of the weekend.

A few months later, a package from Dita containing a CDROM with all of Scott's writings arrived, but it made no difference. I'd already decided what to do in just such an emergency.

LONG BRANCH UNDERGROUND.

BY ROBERT PINSKY.

Long Branch Wheel of the tides, wheel of the surf, hot nights.

The clean chrome arms of the taffy-pulling machine Folding it over and over in figure eights.

Because the politicians decreed all gambling Illegal without some element of skill, The Wheel of Fortune got a new name: Skil-O.

Carousel waltzes and polkas, Vito Genovese On television in his yellow gla.s.ses Denying it all. The shooting of p.u.s.s.y Russo.

The players who put money on a number Would get to press a little Skil-O b.u.t.ton That slowed the ticking wheel down, just a little.

Herringbone boardwalk. At night, flourishes of light: The manic neon chicken in spasms dashing Into the neon basket, and rising again.

I knew a man whose body wouldn't start breathing Again the way his doctors expected, after They pulled their plastic tube back out of his throat.

Crosswise to Ocean Avenue and the boardwalk, Under the traffic, a tunnel of perpetual shade Ran from the beach to the pool across the street.

The two young surgeons couldn't get the tube Back into the guy. By chance, a skilled old doc Pa.s.sed by and got it back in, and so he breathed.

Down in the tunnel, the bare light bulbs protected By their steel cages, sand gritty underfoot- Conduit shaft between brightness and brightness by day Or darkness and darkness by night, a pa.s.sage of shades Enduring after the boardwalk was destroyed With its merry-go-round, its wheels and sweets and music.

RUN KISS DADY.

BY JOYCE CAROL OATES.

Kittatinny Mountains Tell Daddy h.e.l.lo! Run kiss Daddy."

He'd been gone from the lake less than an hour but in this new family each parting and each return signaled a sort of antic improvised celebration-he didn't want to think it was the obverse of what must have happened before he'd arrived in their lives-the Daddy departing, and the Daddy not returning.

"Sweetie, h'lo! C'mere."

He dropped to one knee as the boy ran at him to be hugged. A rough wet kiss on Kevin's forehead.

The little girl hesitated. Only when the mother pushed more firmly at her small shoulders did she spring forward and run-wild-blue-eyed suddenly, with a high-pitched squeal like a mouse being squeezed-into his arms. He laughed-he was startled by the heat of the little body-flattered and deeply moved, kissing the excited child on the delicate soft skin at her temple where-he'd only just noticed recently-a pale blue vein pulsed.

"What do you say to Daddy when Daddy comes back?"

The mother clapped her hands to make a game of it. This new family was so new to her too, weekends at Paraquarry Lake were best borne as a game, as play.

"Say Hi Daddy!-Kiss-kiss Daddy!"

Obediently the children cried what sounded like Hi Daddy! Kiss-kiss Daddy!

Little fish-mouths pursed for kisses against Daddy's cheek.

Reno had only driven into the village of Paraquarry Falls to bring back semi-emergency supplies: toilet paper, flashlight batteries, mosquito repellant, mouse traps, a gallon container of milk, a shiny new garden shovel to replace the badly rusted shovel that had come with the camp. Also, small sweet-fruit yogurts for the children though both he and the mother weren't happy about them developing a taste for sugary foods-but there wasn't much of a selection at the convenience store.

In this new-Daddy phase in which unexpected treats are the very coinage of love.

"Who wants to help Daddy dig?"

Both children cried Me!-thrilled at the very prospect of working with Daddy on the exciting new terrace overlooking the lake.