The Waiting Room Read online

  "Oh," she cut in, "yes. Sorry. It's in Jackson Heights."

  "Thanks," said the driver, and pulled away from the curb.

  She nodded at me, once more repeated "Hi," and smiled congenially again. What impressed me most about her at that moment, as she smiled, were her teeth, which looked perfect, her high cheekbones--which suggested that she was Indian, though she isn't—her ruddy, even complexion, and the way her entire face got involved in her small, congenial smile, so I did not doubt for a moment that it was genuine. I found myself rapidly warming to her.

  "Hi," I said.

  She stuck her hand out. I took it. Her grip was very firm. She let go of my hand and gave me a quizzical look. "You've obviously got something on your mind," she said. "I didn't mean to intrude." She turned her head and looked out the window.

  I said nothing. Although I had been drawn to her almost at once, she was clearly very perceptive, as well as very attractive, and that's a combination I've always found intimidating. We rode in silence for several minutes. At last I said, surprising myself, "My snake died." I grinned an apology. "My snake died," I repeated, as if she hadn't heard me. "It was a boa constrictor. I was attached to it."

  She nodded. "Old age?"

  "I think so. It was hard to tell. He got . . . listless. He wouldn't eat. And he died."

  She said, "It could have been a virus. Boa constrictors in this climate are plagued by viruses. Did you get him to a vet?"

  I shrugged. I smiled. It was a nervous smile because, of all possible topics, my first conversation with this stunning, perceptive woman was about snake viruses. "He went too quickly," I said. I chuckled, embarrassed. "I sound like I'm talking about a favorite uncle.’He went too quickly.'" I chuckled again. I looked questioningly at her. "How do you know about boa constrictors?"

  She grinned. "I know about frogs, too, and toads, and salamanders. It's my job. I teach natural history." She paused. "And it's a . . . consuming interest, as well."

  "A naturalist in Manhattan, huh?" I said.

  She shrugged. It was a slow, graceful, enticing gesture. "Yes," she said. "No apologies."

  "None required," I said, which seemed to bring the conversation to an abrupt and uncomfortable halt. I stared straight ahead, through the Plexiglas partition, and grinned vapidly until the conversation resumed several minutes later.

  She asked, and I heard immediately that her air of quiet authority was gone, "Do you think we have to go through a tunnel?"

  I looked at her. "I think so," I said. "You're new to the city?"

  “Yes," she answered. "Relatively so." She paused. "Shit!" she breathed.

  "You don't like tunnels?" I asked.

  She shook her head. Her straight, shoulder-length, dark blond hair moved freely; she brushed it back from her face. It came to me then how strong and sensual she looked, and what a contradiction that was to the conversation we were having, to the vulnerability she was showing me. "No," she whispered, gaze straight ahead, "I don't like tunnels. I keep thinking they're going to ... cave in, especially with so much weight on them." She looked at me. She had very expressive dark blue eyes—expressive, at that moment, of gathering anguish—and every few seconds, as she talked, her mouth broke into a quick, nervous grin. She was sitting very straight in the seat, her hand clutching the armrest, and when she finished a sentence she turned her head away and appeared to focus on whatever was in front of the cab. "Haven't you ever thought that going through a tunnel, I mean"—she looked away—"that it was going to collapse?" She looked pleadingly at me. I wasn't sure if she wanted me to confirm her fear with a similar fear of my own, or if she wanted me to tell her she was being silly.

  I said, "No. Never."

  She turned away, grinned nervously, looked back, grinned again. She cocked her head a little, which made her look girlish. "Don't you think there's a bridge or something?"

  We headed down a ramp that led to the Queens Tunnel. "Too late," I said.

  "Shit!" she said. She sat doubly erect in the seat now as we entered the tunnel. Her hand gripping the armrest turned a bright red. Her other hand found mine and grabbed it as if in panic.

  I told her, "We'll be through the tunnel in a couple of minutes. And besides, it's been here for quite a few decades and it hasn't collapsed yet."

  Her eyes seemed to be glued on the road ahead, and on the white tunnel walls zipping past. "It's like someone else's dream," she said. "Like someone's idea of a nightmare—a tunnel that keeps getting narrower and narrower, smaller and smaller, until you have to get smaller and smaller, too. But you can't. How can you? So the walls themselves make you smaller, the walls squash you like you're a bug some kid's discovered under a rock." She looked pleadingly at me. I wanted very much to hold her, to reassure her. She said, "I'm sorry."

  "This tunnel ends," I told her.

  "Yes. I know it does."

  A couple of minutes later we came out in Queens and I saw that the clouds had parted and that the sky was a cool, pale blue. "See?" I said.

  She nodded and let go of my hand.

  "My name's Sam," I told her.

  "Mine's Leslie Wirth," she said.

  "Good to meet you, Leslie." I shook her hand. Her grip was weaker than it had been twenty minutes before. I said, "Can I call you?"

  She smiled noncommittally. "Thanks for the moral support, Sam."

  "My pleasure."

  When she got out of the cab in front of her sister's house on Mission Boulevard in Jackson Heights, I called after her, "You didn't answer me."

  She looked back. "About what?"

  "About calling you."

  "Oh. You're right, I didn't."

  "Well," I said, "can I or can't I?"

  "I wish you would," she answered, smiled invitingly, and went up the walk to her sister's house.

  ~ * ~

  I called her three days later. We went to a Chinese restaurant called the Imperial Palace, on East 29th Street, where she made light conversation about an aquarium near our table. A cockroach climbed up the side of the aquarium and we both scowled at it. I didn't know what her feelings about cockroaches were then. For all I knew, she could have jumped up from her seat and run away screaming. But she didn't. She said that the cockroach was gone and that was good. I agreed. If she had jumped up and run screaming from the restaurant I don't believe I'd have anything to write now; I think the whole thing would have ended there. So our first agreement was about a cockroach.

  I've always thought that people in love should agree.

  After the restaurant we walked in a small park near Second Avenue. There were no streetlamps and the evening was pleasantly cool. My arm slipped easily around her waist, and her arm slipped easily around mine. There was no groping, no uncertainty. It was as easy as our conversation. She told me I had a belly and should get rid of it. I chuckled. I didn't like being told that I had a belly because I was constantly sucking it in and thought no one noticed.

  "No I don't," I said.

  "Yes, you do. You're out of shape."

  I shrugged. "I guess I am," I said, and I found that I didn't at all mind admitting my imperfections to her.

  FOUR

  The last time I saw Abner in Bangor, I thought he was a lot more than just another of my high school friends, more than merely someone who had written something stupid in my high school yearbook. I thought we'd shared quite a lot during our five years in school together. Hell, we'd grown up together, we had shared the torments and anxieties of the damned (the damned, of course, being those who have to live through the ages of thirteen to seventeen). I'd told him secrets that I'd never have told anyone else, and he had done the same with me. So, in the most important ways, we were like brothers.

  After I got shipped off to Viet Nam, I wrote him at least two dozen long, rambling, and drearily philosophical letters about what a "shitty place" it was and what a "shitty war" we were waging there, and he wrote long, newsy letters about goings-on in Bangor and goings-on in his life, his thoughts, his loves, h
is heartaches.

  When I came home, I learned that he'd gone to live in the Midwest. I wrote several letters to various addresses his father gave me, but only one was answered, briefly and brusquely, and the rest were returned marked "Addressee Unknown." Inexorably, we fell out of touch.

  But when I saw him come out of that little Greek restaurant in New York twenty years later, he was like a lifeline to my past, to a time when I was younger, and happier, more naive, less cynical, more hopeful—to a time when I was pretty much of a nerd, too. And the fact that I had such a short glimpse of him then, that first time, made it very dreamlike, almost romantic. Sort of, This is my brother and I haven't seen him in a long time and here in this big impersonal city we can prop each other up and give each other strength.

  So, when I saw him that second time, when that crazy cabbie roared past me, down East 42nd Street, I latched on to the first thing that might possibly get Abner and me back together again—the name of the cab company. The Wilson Cab Company. And the number of the cab. Number 432.

  ~ * ~

  The Wilson Cab Company was in a cramped and seedy garage on West 61st Street. I talked to the dispatcher, a skinny white-haired black woman named Iris, who was in her late fifties, I guessed, and who kept an unlighted Tiparillo sticking out of the corner of her mouth as she spoke. I asked her about cab number 432.

  She asked if I was a cop, gave me a quick once-over, which was the first time she'd looked at me, decided I wasn't a cop, and said that the Wilson Cab Company didn't have a cab number 432. "Used to," she said. "Ten years ago, till it went into the Harlem River one night, and that's the last anybody seen of it in this world.''

  I told her that I'd seen it the day before.

  She let the corner of her mouth that was free of the Tiparillo rise in a half grin. "Then it was somebody else's cab, mister," she said.

  "Back to square one," I said.

  ~ * ~

  When I take a long look backward, I think that Abner's been into the grim and grisly for quite a while. Like it's a hobby. He used to write poems about it, about death. He used to talk about it, used to hold séances (though I'll have to be fair about that—I think he held those fruity séances because he was trying to make it with some of the women he'd conned into coming along), and I swear that when he talked about death—about going to someone's funeral, for instance, or about what might be going on over there, on the Other Side—he got this tiny, contented gleam in his eye, as if he were eating warm chocolate pudding. And all of his sentences, no matter what grisly thing he was talking about, would end on a little, wispy high note, like someone who lives in Buffalo talking about going to Florida for the winter. There were plenty of times that he spooked the hell out of me.

  ~ * ~

  I was into the grim and grisly, too. Especially that night twenty years ago that Abner and I broke into the Hammet Mausoleum. Hell, I enjoyed it just as much as he did. I got a real kick out of putting Flora's bleached skull in the center of the cement floor, and setting candles around it, and making ghostly noises at it, as if it were some kind of link to somewhere.

  We all get into death at one time or another. Some of us shrug it off, or put it in a back pocket, or we lock it up tight in one of the billion tiny rooms the brain has, and some of us don't. Some of us pick at it like it's a scab.

  ~ * ~

  I caught Abner the third time I saw him. I got him by the arm, wheeled him around, and said loudly and happily to him, "Damn, Abner, it's me, Sam! Don't you remember me?"

  Then I focused on his face. The way I had when he'd peered at me from the back seat of cab number 432 a couple of weeks earlier. And I said, my voice low and tight, "Good Lord, Abner, have you been doing drugs or what?"

  He smiled crookedly, as if it hurt. "Sure, Sam," he said, "something like that."

  As I said, Abner's kind of odd-looking. He's not a Quasimodo clone, people don't run screaming from him, but he's no threat to Tom Selleck or Robert Redford, either. It's mostly his eyes. They're too deeply set, and his brow shades them well so he looks like he's been brooding in a cellar for a long time. And his head is large and angular, a little too large and angular, in fact, to look comfortably balanced on top of his long, lean frame. In high school he was into long-distance running for a while and it toned him up, made him look healthy. But he fell, broke his ankle, decided that running wasn't very interesting anyway, and soon got back that sick and brooding look. Some women find it attractive. Stacy did. And Phyllis did, of course. But I always thought he looked like he needed sunlight, and air.

  And that third time I saw him in New York, when I caught him, he looked like he'd been on speed for a year or two. His skin was a light gray-pink, his eyes were nearly puffed shut, and he looked like he could have used another fifty pounds spread out evenly on his body. Which is why I asked him if he'd been doing drugs.

  "Sure, Sam," he said. "Something like that."

  Then I did something impulsive; I tried to hug him—My nerdish little brother, Gee I haven't seen you in a long time, and all that. And in return I got an "Uhn" of surprise and a quizzical, put-upon look when I let him go. I shrugged. "Sorry," I said.

  "Sure," he said.

  He had been coming out of the same Greek restaurant I'd seen him come out of twice before, and I noticed the vague smell of clam sauce lingering around him. I nodded to indicate the restaurant, a half a block behind us. "You've already had lunch, Abner?"

  He nodded. "Yeah, lunch," he said just above a whisper, as if his throat were sore. We were standing in front of one of those tiny newsstands that are maybe twice the size of an outhouse and have various men's magazines clipped up under the roof edge. The man behind the counter—short, chubby, and balding—waved us away: "Hey, don't stand right there, yer blockin' my customers, go talk somewhere else."

  "Okay," I said, and because I was still holding Abner's arm, I led him to the edge of the curb. "Are you living here, in New York, Abner?"

  He shook his head. "No. Long Island."

  "Long Island," I said. "You know you look like hell?"

  He nodded. "Yes, I know."

  I was getting embarrassed. It was clear that he didn't want to talk to me. But I wasn't about to be put off again. "Are you in some kind of trouble, Abner?"

  He ignored that. He said, "I thought you died. In Viet Nam."

  I put on a big false smile. "Do I look like I died in Viet Nam, Abner?"

  He shook his head. "No." He gave me a long once-over. "No, you don't."

  "Besides, I wrote you when I got back."

  He thought a moment, then nodded vaguely. "Oh, yes. I remember."

  "Why'd you drop out of sight, Abner?"

  He grinned, again as if embarrassed. "I don't know. I guess I was trying to find myself. Wasn't everyone trying to find themselves back then?"

  "Sure. But hell, Abner, I thought we were friends—"

  "We were," he cut in, and looked pleadingly at me. "We still are. It's just that, back then—" Another pause; he looked very much at sea. "It's just that I was trying to break away—"

  "From what?"

  He shrugged. "I don't know. Attachments, I guess. People. I'm sorry."

  I studied him for a few moments. He was clearly in discomfort over seeing me, clearly wanted to be somewhere else. "Hell," I said, "that was twenty years ago, Abner. This is now."

  "Sure," he said, trying hard to sound enthusiastic.

  He was dressed badly. In Bangor he had never dressed well; he sometimes wore striped pants with checked shirts, or forgot to remove tags from new jeans, or wore colors that clashed, and I realized then that it was because he was usually preoccupied or, at least, that he was trying to convince people that he was preoccupied, so he couldn't care less about style. Now, on the corner of 38th Street and Second Avenue that chilly mid-March afternoon, it wasn't a matter of taste or style. He looked like a bum. His faded, shiny brown pants hung from him like paper bags. He carried a soiled and threadbare green cloth raincoat over his arm, hi
s pink long-sleeved shirt had its two middle buttons missing, and his aged Wallabees were separating at the seams. I nodded to indicate all this: "You know, Abner," I said, "if this were Bangor, they'd send you to the Salvation Army for the night."

  He ignored me again. "I'm glad you didn't die in Viet Nam. I'm glad you're alive," he said.

  "Thanks. So am I."

  Around us knots of people moved quickly and efficiently about, jaywalked with mechanical precision, stepped hurriedly into cabs. New Yorkers move as if they're in a tunnel whose walls crowd their shoulders and whose ceiling is an inch too low.

  Abner said, "I've got to get going. There are people waiting for me."

  "Sure," I said, and let go of his arm. "Sorry. Maybe you could tell me where you're living, Abner. I'd like us to get together, if that's possible."

  He shook his head. "It isn't possible. I wish it were—God, I wish it were, but it isn't."

  I got jostled a bit by a woman who used her umbrella as a kind of prod. "Move, please," she commanded, and I stepped away from her. I nodded at her as she bustled on, across 38th Street, using her umbrella in the gathering crowd every few seconds. "Lively city, isn't it, Abner?"

  "Don't follow me, please, Sam," he said.

  "Follow you? Why would I follow you?"

  He shook his head briskly. "I don't know. Of course you wouldn't," and without another word, he hurried across 38th Street, against the light, so several cars had to screech to a halt.

  I kept my eye on him. I saw him turn down 39th Street, toward Third Avenue. I followed him.

  FIVE

  He never looked back. He moved easily through the crowds, as if he'd been doing it all his life. And although I lost track of him now and then, he was easy to spot again because he's at least a head taller than most New Yorkers.

  He walked to Fifth Avenue and 25th Street, where he caught a bus. I was a street block behind him, and when I got to the bus stop I asked a young man giving away twelve-exposure rolls of Kodak film—along with invitations to use it at Nash's Nudes in the West Village—where the bus was going.