Things We Nearly Knew Read online

  When the snows melted in early April and spring came, what we hoped would be the spring, it was Marcie who suggested we should take a short break. We don’t take vacations together as a rule. No reason why not. There are others we can trust to run the place. But we couldn’t afford to do it when we started, and now we’ve gotten into the habit. Marcie goes to Colorado once a year, on her own. In the middle of August. On the anniversary. She’s done it for each of the past fifteen years. I know she’d like me to go too. I don’t feel I can face it. I go fishing sometimes, maybe a couple of times a year. But one of us stays behind. Vacations, proper vacations together, will need to wait for retirement.

  Usually, on the nights when Arlene didn’t turn up, Davy stayed as long as it took to establish that she wasn’t coming and not much longer. During that time, he sat on his old stool at the bar, talking to me and whoever else was around. One night, Marcie and I were both there, and Marcie was agitating for her weekend break.

  ‘Go to Coney Island,’ said Davy.

  ‘Why should we want to do that?’ I said. ‘It’s a dump these days.’

  We had an animated discussion about whether Coney Island was now officially a dump or not. The majority opinion was that, even if it was a dump, it was still Coney Island. I found it hard to dispute this view. I wasn’t keen on going, but Davy was a strong advocate and Marcie became seized with the idea. The clincher came a few days later, when Davy announced that he and Arlene wanted to come too. Personally, I could resist the temptation of Coney Island, but I couldn’t resist the temptation of a few solid days attempting to decipher the enigma that was Arlene. I also wanted to know about Jack. However little she knew about him, she knew more than she’d told us and I wanted to find out what it was.

  The outing was arranged for a weekend in late April. We figured that Steve could cope with a weekend in the bar on his own, if a friend helped him on the Friday and Saturday nights. Marcie clucked around him like a mother hen, the way she always does with him, to make sure he knew what he needed to do. Marcie’s two part-timers could manage the lunches between them. Everything was fixed, until I got cold feet about the jaunt. But Marcie was not to be denied her holiday.

  ‘I’m going come hell or high water,’ she said.

  It rained for the next three weeks. The parking lot was a lake when we left.

  3

  A couple of hundred yards from the bar, going out of town, is a crossroads. There used to be a bench there, with a metal plaque to say it was in honour of E. A. Stuart. I don’t know who E. A. Stuart was. I asked around town years ago, and no one knew. He must have been pretty old, because the bench was old, and I suppose they put it there when he died. They must have done unless they were psychic, because the plaque gave the year of his death.

  When I was a kid, I used to sit on that bench, for hours on end sometimes. I watched the cars and trucks go by and wondered where they were headed. Perhaps E. A. Stuart did the same, watching the early Fords go by and wondering what the country was coming to if a horse and cart weren’t good enough for a man.

  Three of the roads led elsewhere: to some places I barely knew at the time, and to others I didn’t know at all. I must have wondered about those places, what they were like, who lived there, whether I would go there someday. I must have done. But I don’t remember that. What I remember was watching the cars go the fourth way, back into town. There is Dr Bruce, returning from a call to someone sick. Oh, and there is Mrs Keeley, who lives near us and teaches at the school. These people were real to me, not the ones who went straight across the junction, from here to there, wherever those places were, but places I didn’t know, and people I didn’t know either.

  I liked real people, familiar people. Mentally, I fitted them into their homes and workplaces as if I was tidying toys into the cupboard. I checked them out and I checked them in, making sure all was safe, all was well, that everyone was where they were meant to be. Maybe that’s why I got this particular bar. A town-centre bar would have made more sense, money wise. I wanted this one, down from the crossroads. When business is slow, I wander up to the corner and check the comings and goings like I did when I was a kid.

  The day before the expedition to Coney Island, I was standing on that corner, and I saw Franky Albertino drive by. At least, I thought it was Franky. He was driving fast and I didn’t lock on to him till he was nearly gone, so I couldn’t be sure. But people have an essence, something that is uniquely theirs. It’s not a physical thing, or not only a physical thing. It’s the way the figure’s set, the way the face is set. It’s an attitude thing. Anyone can mistake the looks of another person, especially if they don’t know them well or haven’t seen them in a while. I don’t think I’ve ever mistaken a person when I’ve sensed their essence. That’s how I knew it was Franky.

  Franky was a good friend of mine when we were young. He had charm, bags of it, and at that age I thought charm was the best thing you could have, especially as I didn’t have much of it myself. It was later that I came to see it as a mixed blessing. Sure, it can often get you what you want, but what you want may not be what you need. As kids, none of us knew that. Franky got his own way too easily, for his own good or for anyone else’s. He was a leader and I was prepared to be led.

  Girls came to be his main problem. Not that Franky would have seen it that way then, and maybe still wouldn’t. Any more than the girls themselves did for a while. They weren’t old enough to see beyond the charm. In those days, they prostrated themselves before him like the acolytes of a religious cult before their guru. One girl who didn’t do that was Marcie. That’s possibly why I came to respect Marcie, and to trust her judgement. And, of course, to marry her, although that came a while later.

  Franky was flavour of the month for nearly five years, which was a pretty good run, you have to admit. Then he went the way of all flavours, except perhaps chocolate. It wasn’t simply that he fell out of fashion. There were more concrete reasons. Rumour had it that he’d got a girl pregnant. He borrowed money too. Not much, it must be said, but from lots of people, me among them, so it mounted up. He took care to repay some of it, which encouraged further loans. He never repaid all of it.

  Then he left town. People like Franky always leave town in the end. Charm wears off, or at any rate becomes insufficient to sustain a career. There came to be too many people who remembered things that Franky had done, and wished he hadn’t. You couldn’t say the town had become too hot to hold him. That would be an exaggeration. Let’s say there came to be a mutual, unspoken agreement between Franky and the people who had known Franky that it would be a good idea if he found some other place to practise his charm. In the olden times, it was the snake-oil salesmen and the preachers who moved on. These days, it’s the Frankys of this world, and there’s not a deal of difference. They’re all peddlers of some kind of faith, and they all disappoint.

  Franky must have left about thirty years earlier, and no one had seen hide nor hair of him since. He wasn’t forgotten. People like Franky don’t get forgotten. Sometimes we’d hear rumours of where he was, and what he was doing, and it was always something out of the ordinary, that made you think, ‘Wow, I wish I was doing that.’ There’s no point saying what those things were because I’ve no reason to believe they were true. That’s the other thing about people like Franky: they attract rumours. It’s irrelevant whether the rumours are true, and mostly they’re not.

  As time went by, Franky was spoken of less frequently, but with greater fondness. The pain he had caused began to be forgotten or overlooked. His behaviour came to be regarded as youthful high spirits, nothing more. What was remembered was that he’d been a character. Characters were two a dime when we were young. Now they’re at a premium. It was with some excitement that I thought I saw him driving into town.

  I told Marcie and she wasn’t impressed.

  ‘Wonder what he wants,’ was all she said. I expect we’d have discussed it more, but we were busy packing for our trip to Coney Islan
d, making sure everything was organized in the bar, and we got distracted.

  It was a Friday morning when we set off. A pale sun inched its way over the horizon, catching drops of dew on the long grass, dancing a spectrum of colours down the wayside. In the fields, stalks of green barley waved at us, like the President does. Davy took the wheel and I sat beside him, looking out the window. I drive around town, but prefer not to drive too much on the open road these days. The women were in the back seat, asleep.

  We were sitting there, four good people in a good old Ford, heading off to Coney Island. I shouldn’t say we were good people, because perhaps we weren’t. Maybe we were four middling people in a middling old Ford. There was a bartender and his wife, at least half their days behind them, unless there’s a major advance in cryogenics. Not much to look forward to except more of the same, and then gradual decrepitude and death. Remarkable how cheerful we keep in the circumstances. There were our two good friends, Davy and Arlene, except they weren’t especially good friends, more random people we’d happened to have encountered in life and liked well enough to take this trip with.

  Davy swerved to avoid a couple of cyclists, then jerked the sunshield down with his right hand. I looked the other way.

  ‘Darned sun,’ he said; ‘can’t see where the hell I’m going.’

  We made our approach to Coney Island via Staten Island and the Brooklyn Bridge. I saw skyscrapers in the distance and wondered what planet they came from. Not my planet anyway. I had wanted to go to Manhattan over the weekend. It seemed a waste to come all this way and not see the city. But Davy said we didn’t have the time, and Marcie said we didn’t have the money, and Arlene didn’t want to go anyplace except Coney Island, so I shut up.

  Marcie was the only one of us who had been there before, so she was appointed tour guide. A visit made forty years or so earlier was not much preparation for the role. The place had slid downhill since then. Not literally, or it would have disappeared into the sea. Metaphorically. On second thoughts, perhaps I do mean literally.

  We stayed at the Coney Island Hotel, where Marcie had stayed before. We arrived in the dark, which was the best time to see the place. Through flimsy curtains, a red-and-green neon sign jittered against the sky, flashing sporadic wattage into the room in which we half slept. Sometimes it was a red light, sometimes a green light, sometimes no light at all. ‘CONEY IS AN H EL’, it spelled to the world. The place was so broken, it couldn’t get its own name right anymore. Or, again, maybe it did.

  We’d agreed to meet the others in the breakfast room at eight. Arlene and Davy were already sitting there, looking more like a long-married couple than two people who’d got the hots for each other, which wasn’t a good omen. We fetched our breakfasts from the buffet and sat on white plastic chairs, facing each other across a white plastic table. None of us said anything for a while.

  ‘Tacky or what?’ said Davy.

  ‘I like tacky,’ said Arlene. ‘Every once in a while.’

  ‘Tacky doesn’t last,’ said Davy.

  ‘I don’t expect any of it will last much longer,’ I said. ‘You don’t get the impression this place is doing good business.’

  ‘It’s out of season,’ said Marcie.

  ‘How do you tell the difference?’ asked Davy.

  ‘Another twenty years and the whole lot will be gone,’ I said.

  ‘So will we,’ said Arlene.

  ‘I hope not,’ I said. ‘I’m planning on being around. You’re not, Arlene?’ Arlene said nothing.

  After that, we decided to cheer up. It was a crap hotel in a crap location and outside it was pouring with rain but, hey, it was a vacation. Unappetizing though it was, it was something other than the daily grind.

  ‘What plans has the tour guide made for us?’ asked Davy.

  ‘The tour guide hasn’t made any definite plans,’ said Marcie. ‘The tour guide has more sense than to waste time making plans that everyone will want to change. However, we could go look at the amusement park . . .’

  ‘. . . what’s left of the amusement park,’ said Davy, who’d been doing his homework.

  ‘And go on some of the rides . . .’

  ‘. . . if they’re still open.’

  ‘And take a stroll down the boardwalk, and have a dog at Nathan’s. We should do that, if nothing else.’

  ‘Sounds like a plan,’ I said. ‘Why don’t we hit the boardwalk?’

  When we got outside and saw the relentless wind and rain, we decided to postpone our visit to the boardwalk. Instead, we explored the hinterland of Coney Island. We paced Brighton Avenue, where delicatessens, law offices, tattoo parlours, groceries, dime stores, pawnbrokers, nail salons, loan shops, second-hand furniture emporia and fast-food outlets jostled cheek by jowl. The street itself lay under the blanket of the elevated subway tracks, the F-trains rumbling overhead through the morning. Although it was at ground level, it felt like a subterranean world where every known form of commercial enterprise competed for the same dollar.

  When the weather eased, when we mistakenly thought it had eased, we emerged from this warren into the daylight of Surf Avenue. Sun pierced cloud fleetingly, brilliantly, and was then occluded. The rain began to fall again. Not heavy nor light, but in a steady, determined fall that looked as if it was settled in for centuries. Most people abandoned the sidewalk for shelter. We kept going, beneath umbrellas. This was a unanimous decision, taken without a vote.

  ‘I like it when it rains,’ said Arlene.

  ‘Of course you do,’ said Davy. ‘You like everything that’s perverse. You’d like a nuclear war.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ said Arlene. ‘But I do like the rain. I like everything about it. I like the gentle drizzle of grey days. I like the pelting of storms.’

  ‘And getting wet,’ said Davy.

  ‘That too. I don’t mind that. It’s better in the city, I think. I like rain in the countryside too, but it’s better in the city.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You leave no footprints,’ said Arlene. ‘I mean, you do, but only for a few seconds. Then they’re gone. Each footprint stays a moment, then it’s gone.’

  ‘There speaks a city girl,’ I said.

  Arlene ignored my subtle attempt to get her to reveal her origins.

  ‘It can’t always have been raining when I was small,’ she said, ‘but it feels that way. I think the rain must have entered my soul a long time ago. Now it kind of belongs there and I like it. I wouldn’t want it any other way.’

  ‘I’m going to take you to Florida,’ said Davy.

  ‘No thanks,’ said Arlene. ‘I prefer it here.’

  Davy was right: Arlene was perverse. No one in their right mind would prefer this dump to Florida. The way I see it, Coney Island has lived in the collective memory like an ancient, comatose relative, incontinent and amnesiac, resident in the care home for longer than anyone can remember, but needing to be visited from time to time. Forget it. This was my first visit, and it will also be my last.

  We were walking along Surf Avenue, a couple of hundred yards back from the shore. The stores were mostly closed, protected by metal roller-blinds covered in graffiti. That was the trouble with coming here at the start of the season: you couldn’t tell how much of it was still closed for the winter, and how much was just closed. There were signs advertising premises to let. Grass sprouted between the slabs of the sidewalk. Abandoned premises bore Jewish names, or had signs in Cyrillic. Jews from before the state of Israel; Russians from the Revolution. Out there was the ocean that our families had crossed: the ocean that connected us to every other country, whose outcasts and misfits had created this one.

  This was where we washed up, and at that point we were simultaneously different and the same. How far did we now push on? It was a question of restlessness, I reckon. For some, that first voyage was enough: the coast of New York or New England was as far as they would get. Some pushed on till they reached the plains of the Midwest and made them their home. For others, that
wasn’t far enough. Nowhere was far enough until the Pacific imposed a last frontier. Or the Mexican border. Where you finally came to rest in your restlessness determined what sort of American you were. If you were on the east coast, the dust of Europe was on the soles of your feet. If you were on the west coast, or anywhere near it, you were living in a country of your own creation. Living where we do, I’m not sure to which country I belong.

  ‘Darned gulls,’ Davy said. ‘Why don’t they shut up? Why do they make that noise the whole time? Jesus. Can’t even find peace at the seaside.’

  No one else said anything.

  ‘Don’t you hate the screeching?’ he said. ‘Arlene? Aren’t you fed up with it?’

  ‘I sort of don’t hear it,’ she said.

  ‘What do you mean, you don’t hear it? How can you not hear it?’

  ‘Well, I suppose I hear it. I just don’t listen to it. There’s lots of stuff I hear without listening.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like people getting wound up about gulls,’ said Arlene.

  ‘That’s normal.’

  ‘If you say so, Davy. I’ve no idea what normal is.’

  We ate our hot dogs at Nathan’s, the way everyone does. It’s a compulsory experience. Afterwards, Marcie wanted to stroll and I didn’t. Nothing unusual in that. You could tell the story of our married life through the subterfuges Marcie has adopted to get me to take some exercise, and the excuses I’ve invented to avoid it. It’s not that I’m against exercise on principle. I used to play plenty of sports when I was younger. Nowadays, I’m on my feet most of the time I’m working, so I appreciate the opportunity to sit down.

  ‘We went for a walk this morning,’ I said.

  ‘That lasted ten minutes,’ said Marcie. Not true. It must have been a good two hours. ‘I want to go along Brighton Beach and back.’

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ said Davy.

  That left Arlene. If she voted for a stroll, I’d have to go too. I never cared much for this winner-take-all democracy. Give me a pork barrel any time.