A Strange Commonplace Read Free Page B

were, fucking his wife. His wife. Jesus Christ Almighty, what a horse’s ass he’d turned out to be. He stood in the brutal sun, sweating in his oxford gray suit and gray homburg and black wing-tip shoes; in his black silk socks and black garters and white shirt; in his dark-blue tie and gold tie clasp. He smiled cheerfully and waved at the wonderful gang of carefree youths. He couldn’t wait to join the fun! Off came his homburg as he started toward them. It would be a cinch to throw her off the roof, but not today. Not today.

A Familiar Woman
    I F HE SHOULD OCCASIONALLY GO INTO A SALOON ON THE way home from work, he’d often see her at the bar or at a table, in a purple velvet dress or a black gabardine suit. On the subway, she’d be standing, holding onto a pole, reading The Sacred Fount. She’d turn up on the street, in shorts, or in a suede jacket over a long flowered skirt. She’d be everywhere, although, as you may guess, she was but existent in his imagination. That’s the wrong word, one that is often used when the uncanny must be brought to heel. Perhaps madness, brief and flickering, is the word that covers these phenomena more accurately. Perhaps not. When he’d arrive home, there she really, as they say, really would be, in her actual, solid flesh. He would not look at her, but would change his clothes prior to making drinks for both of them. And although she had possessed, in the ruckus of their lives together, a purple velvet dress, a black gabardine suit, and a suede jacket, as well as more than one long flowered skirt, and many pairs of shorts, he would refuse to remember this fact, refuse to remember her owning or wearing these clothes. And the next day or week or month he’d find her again as he always found her, in a saloon, on the subway, turning into him as she rounded some corner, both of them far from home.

In the Diner
    I N THE DINER, THE THREE YOUNG MEN EAT—STUFF THEIR faces, is an apt phrase—and patronize the waitress with happily disingenuous compliments on her pink polyester uniform, her hairdo and the net that covers it, her white crepesoled shoes. They ask her opinions on pop stars, hip-hop artists and grunge bands, her thoughts on music and clubs of which this exhausted fifty-three-year-old woman has never heard. And so she stands dumb before them, smiling the smile of the impotent insulted everywhere. These remarks and questions are delivered with a ponderous seriousness tempered by candid grins and occasional unsuccessfully stifled bursts of laughter. When they finish, they walk outside into the night and their interesting and valuable lives, and as one steps off the curb to look for a cab, he is, for somebody’s reason, or on somebody’s whim, or by somebody’s mistake, shot to death from the rear window of a car that is slowly moving down the street. His two friends, terrified, look at him sprawled in the wet, bloody gutter, his head half shot away. One says, “Jesus, Ray, Jesus,” over and over. The waitress picks up a paper napkin at their vacated table and finds beneath it her quarter tip. A nice touch for the morrow’s story in the Daily News.

Happy Days
    I N THE PARLANCE OF THE ANONYMOUS YOUNG MEN WHO hung out, for years and wasted years, on the corner in front of the candy store, he’s the sort who thinks who the devil he is. He was born of Anglo-Saxon stock into an old exhausted and corrupted family with its roots in New England since before Napoleon was a cadet—another quaint locution much bruited about on the corner. He went to excellent prep schools, from which he was never in the least danger of being expelled, although for the rest of his life he obliquely suggested that he had been a wild student. From these he went on to Yale. Many of these years were spent ingesting drugs, if he is to be believed, the sly rogue. He was almost like the young men on the corner, for he understood them so well; he might as well have been one of them—tough, flexible, and