I see your father all the time, Nikos said.
Oh, John said.
He comes for breakfast. Pretty girl with him.
Yeah.
She sits over there, though, and he sits over here. A real gentleman.
She’s his helper.
A nice girl, Erica. She’s been coming in since she was … Nikos held his palm out at table height.
Sure. She’s a nice girl, John said.
For years she came in with her grandmother. Always helping out with the old ones.
Yes, John said.
But for a week or so now I don’t see them. Usually every morning but Mondays. But I think I haven’t seen them for a week. They finally run off together?
John smiled.
No, of course not, Nikos said. They don’t even sit in the same booth! But your father, he is okay?
He’s fine, John said. I’m sure he’s fine.
I think he has a touch of … Nikos tapped his head and frowned. Happens to the old. Happens to all of us.
I think I’ll check out the movie, John said, pointing at the TV on a wall mount near the kitchen slot. He straightened up to his full five feet nine and three-quarters inches. He was rabid about those three-quarters of an inch. It was bad enough being a lyric tenor sharing the stage with basses who could play tackle for the Giants.
Even still, Nikos had to look up at him. John shook his hand for the third time that afternoon.
All right, then, Nikos said.
All right, John said, and dropped back into the booth. Nikos went back to the wait station, and John sipped his Dr Pepper and watched the promo for a Vincent Price flick on The 4:30 Movie.
The trailer faded and one of the regulars shouted, Sound! The counterman, without looking up from his story in the Post, reached above his head to the volume knob with the assurance of a pilot setting a toggle switch on the ceiling panel. The Weather 7 graphic faded to the meteorologist, a comb-over in a turtleneck, blazer, plaid pants. He slid his flock of cardboard snowflakes and clouds across the magnetized map, pulled up some more from down south, then more from the north. Pivoting to a second map, he swept his arms across the greater metropolitan area, conjuring the storm. A cloud fell off and clattered faintly on the studio floor. He liberally exercised his right to bestow massive upon every noun he uttered. Massive storm. Massive fronts colliding. Massive snowfall. Twenty inches in New York. Thirty in Boston. Massive drifts. Massive tides! P. T. Barnum pitching meteorological disaster.
John closed his eyes to the miraculous banality of the world, the flat world on the black-and-white screen, the pointlessness of prediction. Massive, massive. Apocalypse and destruction. A hysterical troll two inches high trapped in a brown box, a herald of electric prophesy. A day was marked by the accumulation of dread. It drove him like a spike into the earth. In the morning he got out of bed and felt it plinking at his skull like rain. By the time he fell asleep, it was a sledgehammer. Maybe tomorrow he could allow himself to be crushed, maybe tomorrow he could give up.
He decided to stay for the beginning of the movie, and gathered up his coat and scarf and hat and dumped them onto a swivel stool nearer the TV. The counterman shifted down the counter like a great hairy animal grudgingly making room in his den, sliding his paper with his thick forearms, cutting his eyes, sizing up the intruder who dared trespass his habitat. John went back to retrieve his glass from the table. Returned, he settled in and lifted his face to the Sylvania screen.
The counterman closed his paper, and reordered its pages with the care of a priest arranging his vestments. I’ll leave the sound on for you, he said, lingering, inviting a smart-ass remark, but John said nothing.
Sure, you could get stabbed to death in broad daylight in your apartment lobby, but it was the incessant attitude that really killed you. The endless stream of commentary that piled up inside his head, glop clogging all the drains, the never-ending frustration of being in the way, of everyone else being in your way, of never being first, of telling yourself you’re all right with the elbow in your back but not with the boot on your toe. Remarks, always with the remarks. Some bitch in a fur flinging open a shop door and charging headfirst into the oncoming throng, expecting the sea to part before her glory. A cigar-chewing slob sprawled over the steps, gruntingly ceding passage with a You’re Welcome. On the subway, old women in pillbox hats, embalmed and powdered, motionless, then inexplicably viperous. High school kids whose faces were already closed for business. Not a spark of light anywhere. Everyone an enemy. Most days John wanted to kill someone; rarely did a day pass that he didn’t expect to be killed himself. He had not been bothered by these things before his son died.
His heart was a fist. It took nothing to set him off. A subway turnstile eating his token. Some cabbie cutting a corner too close to where he was standing. The kids slouching all over everything, cigarettes tucked behind an ear, blocking the sidewalk, clogging things up for sport, just like everyone else jockeying for a little attention, poor babies. Cry me a fucking river.
He hated wiseass countermen with shellacked hair and dirty white T-shirts, toothpicks rolling across the craggy range of their misbegotten dentation, a fading tattoo of a pair of tits as doleful as Dopey’s eyes on one forearm. Yet John didn’t rise to the bait. Not today. He wished to be anywhere but New York. To fall into a battle with the counterman, to have the standard-issue verbal altercation over this
