The Waiting Room Read online

  "Staten Island ferry," he said, and pushed a roll of film at me.

  "Thanks," I said, pocketed the film, and, after ten minutes' worth of trying, hailed a cab that would take me to the Staten Island ferry. I'd give the film to Abner as a gesture of apology for following him.

  ~ * ~

  It was the first time I'd ridden the ferry and I was amazed how crowded it was. I even speculated aloud, to a red-haired woman in her early twenties who was, out of necessity, standing shoulder to shoulder with me at the railing, that maybe it would sink with so many people and cars on it. She smiled thinly, said, "No, I don't think so," and looked away.

  I'd been able to spot Abner a couple of minutes before. He was on a lower deck, with his elbows on the rail, his hands folded, and his head down slightly, as if he were in thought. From above he looked less like a bum and more like someone who was just mildly eccentric, as, I think, half the people in New York are. He was standing very still, although every once in a while he unfolded his hands, interlocked his fingers, and brought his hands up, so his forefingers were at his lips. It seemed, at these times, that he didn't look so much in thought as lost, somehow.

  "I thought it would sink, too," said the woman standing next to me.

  I looked at her, surprised. "Sorry?" I said.

  "I said I thought it would sink once, too. When I first started riding it. It sits so low in the water, you know." She nodded toward the water. Her long red hair fell forward over her shoulders.

  "Yes," I said, "it does sit kind of low in the water, doesn't it?"

  She nodded, so more of her hair fell forward. "But it hasn't sunk yet, so I doubt that it ever will," she said.

  Her eyes were a light green, like the underside of a leaf, and they didn't linger long on me. She looked back, at the water. "My name's Serena," she said, and looked at me again.

  "Serena," I said noncommittally. "That's a nice name. "

  "And yours?" she asked.

  "Sam Feary," I answered.

  She looked away, nodded once, slowly, as if in thought, then looked back at me and said, "Hello, Sam." She looked away again.

  I focused on Abner. He was in the same spot, and in the same position, but after a couple of seconds he turned his head, looked directly at me, and appeared suddenly crestfallen, as if he had just gotten bad news. Reading his lips, I saw him mutter, "Dammit all to hell!" then he shook his head and mouthed the word "No!" emphatically at me.

  I whispered to myself, "My God, what's wrong with you, my friend?! What kind of trouble have you gotten yourself into?"

  "I beg your pardon?" said the red-haired woman with me at the railing.

  I looked quickly at her, embarrassed. "No, I'm sorry," I said. "I was talking about someone else, I was talking about him, down there," and I inclined my head to the right to indicate Abner on the deck below.

  A small grin appeared on her mouth, then vanished. "Oh," she said. "I understand."

  "You really don't," I said. "He's an old friend, he's someone I knew in high school—"

  She looked quizzically at me. "I don't know you, Sam. You don't know me. So there's nothing at all you have to explain." She was saying, Please, leave me alone. So I did.

  And when I looked back at Abner, he was looking up at me, grinning in a flat, sad way, a kind of "I told you so!" grin.

  I mouthed at him, "I'm coming with you."

  He mouthed back, "Of course you are," pointing stiffly back the way the ferry had come. "That way!"

  Twenty minutes later, when the ferry unloaded, I went to where he was still standing, on the lower deck. "I thought you lived on Long Island, Abner," I said.

  He nodded glumly. "I do."

  "Then why are you on the Staten Island ferry?"

  He shrugged. "I was trying to throw you off." He grinned weakly at me. "Stupid, huh?"

  I thought a moment. "Yes," I said. "Pretty stupid." I paused. "So what do we do now?"

  He shrugged again. "We go back, I guess. And we take the subway to Queens."

  "Oh," I said.

  And that's what we did.

  ~ * ~

  He had a car parked in Queens. It was a decade-old red Chevy Malibu two-door, with a bumper sticker on the back that read, "This Car Climbed Pike's Peak," and another beside it that read, next to the stylized drawing of a panda bear, "Animals Love You, Too."

  Abner nodded at the passenger door. "Get in, Sam."

  "Does this thing actually run?" I asked. He ignored me. I got in, watched him slide into the driver's seat, toss his raincoat into the back seat, fish in his pants pockets for his keys, which was difficult because he was sitting down, and start the car, after several tries.

  We rode silently for a while through Queens. At last, he said, "One day, Sam, you're going to look back on this day and you're going to say to yourself, ‘Why the hell didn't I just let him be?'"

  "That sounds pretty melodramatic, Abner."

  "Don't interrupt. I'm telling you the truth here. It will probably be something like the way you felt when you came home from Viet Nam. You probably said to yourself, 'God, why didn't I just go to Canada?' or, 'Why didn't I fake some kind of disease at the physical?' It'll probably be the same kind of thing, Sam."

  "I try not to look backward, Abner."

  "We all look backward." He took a right at Queens Boulevard and Cosco Street, pulled over to the curb, looked earnestly at me. "I'm going to give you the chance to get out now, Sam. I'd advise you to take it.

  "No way, Jose`," I said. "If you're in some kind of trouble—"

  He cut in, "Let me put it to you this way, Sam. What if you came across a box, some kind of box on the street—no, I'll amend that. Let's say someone mailed you a box with a note that said there was one of two things inside the box, that there was either a spider—" He stopped, apparently to search for the right words, went on, "A poisonous spider, a black widow spider, a brown recluse. Or, maybe, that there was a stack of thousand-dollar bills in the box. But the only way you could find out which one it was was to stick your hand inside. You couldn't just peek in with a flashlight; you couldn't prop the lid open and peek in with a flashlight, you actually had to stick your hand in and feel. Tell me, Sam, what do you think you'd do?"

  "I'd probably throw the box in the trash, Abner, because I don't know anyone who'd send me a box with a stack of thousand-dollar bills in it."

  He nodded. "That's good, Sam," he said, "because no one would." His earnest look changed dramatically to one of pleading and concern. "Please, Sam, get out of the car. For your own sake, for my sake, I'm begging you to get out of the car."

  I said again, "But, Abner, if you're in some kind of trouble, I want to help you. Just please, tell me, what the hell is going on."

  "Hell is a good word for it, Sam." He paused. "So you're not going to get out?"

  "No," I said.

  SIX

  We were on Highway 12 going east out of Queens when a motorcycle cop drew up alongside us and motioned to Abner to stop. Abner nodded, and pulled off the road into a little parking area that overlooked a housing complex under construction. The cop stopped behind the car, swaggered up to the driver's door, and leaned over. Abner rolled the window down. "Something wrong?" Abner asked.

  "I dunno," said the cop. "Mebbe, mebbe not." He was a typical New York cop. He had short black hair, a face that was flat, expressionless, and astoundingly average—except for a bright red J-shaped birthmark on the right side of his jaw—and his tone was clearly designed to announce that the only friend he had in this world was the .38 police special strapped on his hip. He nodded at me and said to Abner, "Who's that?"

  I began, "It's none—"

  Abner put his hand on my arm, glanced at me, and whispered, "Let me handle this, Sam. Please." Then he looked at the cop. "He's just a friend, Officer. Could I ask why you stopped me?"

  "Sure," said the cop. "You can ask. Go ahead and ask."

  I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I leaned forward, so the cop had to look
at me. "Hey, buddy, if you stopped my friend for a reason, then tell him the reason, but if you stopped him just for the hell of it—"

  Again Abner put his hand on my arm. "Sam, please—I know how to handle these people—"

  "What do you mean—‘these people'? This guy just wants to hassle us, Abner—"

  "Please, Sam, I'll handle it—"

  "You wanta get outta da car," said the cop. I looked at him. I saw that he'd straightened, unbuckled his holster, had his hand on his .38. I could see only his midsection, from his waist to the bottom of his neck. I looked at Abner. "What the hell's going on, Abner? What'd you do, murder someone?"

  "No," he said. "But I think we'd better get out of the car."

  "Abner," I said, "he's got no right—"

  "I know that, Sam. You know it. But he doesn't know it—"

  "Oh, Good Lord!"

  The cop bellowed, "Get out of the car. Now!"

  "Why?" I bellowed back.

  Abner shook his head as if in disbelief. "Sam, don't get him upset."

  The cop leaned over again. He patted his .38 slowly, menacingly. I saw that his face was very pale, as pale as snow, and that the J-shaped birthmark was bright red, as if it were actually a slit in the skin. "You bad-mouthin' me, boy?"

  I shook my head. "No, I'm just asking why we've got to get out of the car. You have to give us a reason for stopping us, don't you know that?"

  "Sam," Abner said urgently, "he doesn't know that. He doesn't know much at all. Now, if he wants us to get out of the car, I think we should get out of the car—"

  "Just him," the cop said, and nodded sharply to indicate me.

  I said again, "Oh, Good Lord."

  "Now!" the cop bellowed, and straightened once more, his grip hard on the .38.

  I got out of the car, slammed the door, peered over the roof at the cop. "Now what?" I said, and heard a tremor of fear in my voice.

  "I don't know," the cop said. "I don't know," he repeated, clearly confused now.

  "Huh?" I said, also confused.

  "I don't know," he repeated, appeared to be lost in thought for several moments, then swaggered back to his motorcycle, right hand slapping the holstered pistol again, head moving from side to side in time with his swagger. He got on the motorcycle and roared off west, toward Queens.

  ~ * ~

  "Next time," Abner began, and I interrupted, "Next time I'm going to get that asshole's badge number and I'm going to sue the goddamn city for goddamn harassment, that's what's going to happen next time!"

  "He could have killed you," Abner said.

  I stared disbelievingly at him. "What in the hell for?" I asked.

  "Because it's part of his job."

  We were well out on Long Island now on a narrow, all-but-deserted dirt road that paralleled the ocean. Although I couldn't see the water, I could smell salt air. Abner was driving very slowly. I said, "It's part of his job to kill me, Abner? What kind of crap is that? Cops don't just kill people without reason."

  "Yes, I know that, Sam. But sometimes they do kill people. Sometimes they have to."

  "In self-defense, sure, or to stop someone from killing someone else, sure—but it's always a judgment call, Abner—"

  "Precisely." He gave me another I told you so kind of grin. "You've got your hand in the box, Sam," he said. "You've got it in up to the elbow. But it's not too late to pull it out. I'll stop the car and we can say 'Good-bye, it's been nice seeing you again,' and that'll be it. You can go back to your apartment. You can go back to worrying about money, women, whatever it is you worry about, Sam, and you'll be okay. But you've got to get out of the car, and you've got to get out now."

  I shook my head.

  "Think about it first, Sam."

  I shook my head more briskly.

  "You're making a mistake," he said, and turned down a rutted lane then up a little rise. The ocean was in front of us. He brought the car to a halt and nodded to indicate a rambling, tumbledown beach house about a hundred feet in front of us. "We're here," he said.

  "Good," I said. "Now maybe I'll find out what kind of crap it is you've gotten yourself into."

  "Sam?" he said, and I noticed that his tone had changed, had become conciliatory.

  “Yes?"

  "I'm glad you're here, Sam. I need a friend. I really do desperately need a friend."

  ~ * ~

  The first kiss that Leslie and I shared was in the parking garage behind the Imperial Palace. I had tried for a first kiss in the restaurant. I had put my hands on the sides of her head and had drawn her closer to me over the table. But she'd turned gently away. I thought a couple of things then. One was that she didn't want to kiss me because I'd been eating Chicken Garlic. But so had she, so I discounted that possibility. Then I thought that she was simply being cautious, that the sort of kiss I wanted from her was the sort of kiss that she had reason to withhold unless and until the moment was right.

  The moment was right thirty minutes later, in the parking garage, as we walked hand in hand to my car. I stopped, turned to her, and we had a long, passionate, and hungry kiss. We were hungry for each other. That was clear then, as we kissed. It had been clear over the Chicken Garlic. It had been clear three days earlier in the taxi. But nothing, of course, happens instantaneously.

  She said, when we stopped kissing, "Our first kiss."

  ~ * ~

  She's not always beautiful. There are moods and personalities within her that transform her. But she is beautiful most of the time, and sometimes, for a minute or more, I find myself looking into her face and I hear myself saying at last, as if in awe, "You're so beautiful!" I think she doesn't know how to react when I say that. She likes it when I say it, and she has said of herself that she's "pretty nice to look at," but I think it's possible that I embarrass her with my spontaneous declarations of her beauty. So, occasionally, I want to snatch the words back.

  Once, when we were in the car and she was driving, I studied her profile. It was not the profile I expected after looking into her face. It was strong, and forward, and resolute, and if someone, I thought, were to make a caricature of it, that caricature would probably look much like the profile of an Easter Island stone. It was a contrast I hadn't expected.

  ~ * ~

  I don't think I grew to love Leslie. I think it happened all at once, and over time I grew to understand exactly why I loved her. The times we had together confirmed the good sense I had to love her in the first place. Which leaves the question of whether my love for her has grown deeper. I don't know if that's a legitimate question. I think love latches on and grows more tenacious, but I think that right from the beginning it is what it is, deep or not, and the deeper it is from the beginning, the more tenaciously it sticks.

  SEVEN

  When Abner and I were growing up, he never gave me good advice. It's true that I rarely asked for his advice; why ask for advice from a nerdish-but-lovable-little-brother type? That's the type I gave advice to. But there were a few times when, out of adolescent desperation, I did go to him for advice. Once I asked him which girl to ask to the freshman hop.

  "Belinda Becker," he said. "She likes you."

  That was what I wanted to hear, because I liked her and had all kinds of fantasies about her; but when I called her she said, "Drop dead, weasel!"

  Another time he advised me to see a movie called The Blob, which he swore was just about the greatest thing since ice cream. I paid good money to see it, and I thought it was the worst thing since visible nose hairs. So I didn't grow too fond of Abner's advice. That's one reason I stayed put when he advised me to get out of the Malibu—his advice had always been so lousy.

  He was also intriguing the hell out of me.

  He drove the last hundred feet to the house.

  "Yours?" I asked. We got out of the car and walked toward the beach house. It sat virtually alone on the beach, and though it did indeed look "tumbledown" it didn't look abandoned. It looked very comfortable, at least from the outside. The
wide, wraparound porch had something to do with that look. I've always liked porches; they're great places to sit and listen to crickets and peel apples.

  "No," Abner answered, "it's not mine, it's a friend's—it's Art DeGraff's. Do you remember him?"

  I nodded. "I remember he was an asshole. What's he doing these days?"

  Abner had his hands in the pockets of his shiny brown pants, and his head down. I saw him smile slightly, as if at some secret. "Looking backward," he said, and didn't elaborate.

  We were within fifty feet of the house then. My eyes were on Abner. I heard, "Hello, Abner." I looked toward the house. A tall woman in her early twenties was standing in the doorway. She was wearing very tight jeans, a loose-fitting long-sleeved white blouse which she filled wonderfully, and I said to Abner, my eyes glued to her, "Who's that?"

  "That's Al," he answered. ''

  “’Al’?”

  He nodded. "Her real name's Allison, but she likes to be called Al—I call her Al."

  She stepped back from the doorway and closed the door. I glanced at Abner. His head was still lowered. He stopped walking and looked sadly at me. "She's not what she appears to be, Sam."

  "Who is?" I asked.

  He continued looking at me for a few seconds, then he said, "No one. Not me, not her. No one."

  I smiled broadly, as if I knew he was trying to be coy and cryptic. "It sounds like you're lost in a world of confusion."

  "No," he said, "not quite yet. Soon, though. The signs are there, I'm making plans—I'll tell you about them sometime."

  "You worry me, Abner." I added, "Of course, you always did."

  He stared at me; his sad, pleading look changed to a look of resignation, as if he'd been expecting steak and potatoes all day but was getting carrot salad instead. Then he started walking again, his head down, hands in his pockets, and I said, as we stepped onto the porch, "We've got quite a bit to talk about, Abner. We've got a lot of years to catch up with." I spoke casually, cheerfully, the way I would have if we'd just that moment happened upon each other and were going to have dinner to hash over old times. "I mean, we haven't seen each other in twenty years—"