Old mail was strewn across his coffee table: a stack of bills, supermarket flyers announcing long-departed sales, a postcard mailed by his sister when she’d gone to England the summer before, a long brown envelope that said Mr. Thomas Tudbury might already have won three million dollars, and lots of other junk that he needed to deal with real soon now.
Underneath it all was the invitation.
He sipped his coffee and stared at the mail. How many months had it been sitting there? Three? Four? Too late to do anything about it now. Even an RSVP would be woefully inappropriate at this date. He remembered the way The Graduate had ended, and savored the fantasy. But he was no Dustin Hoffman.
Like a man picking at an old scab, Tom rummaged through the mail until he found that small square envelope once again. The card within was crisp and white.
MR. & MRS. STANLEY CASKO REQUEST THE HONOR OF YOUR PRESENCE AT THE WEDDING OF THEIR DAUGHTER, BARBARA, TO MR. STEPHEN BRUDER, OF WEEHAWKEN.
ST. HENRY’S CHURCH
2:00 P.M.; MARCH 8
RECEPTION TO FOLLOW AT THE TOP HAT LOUNGE
RSVP 555–6853
Tom fingered the embossed paper for a long time, then carefully set it back on the coffee table, dumped the junk mail into the wicker trash basket by the end of his couch, and went to stare out the window.
Across First Street, piles of black snow were heaped along the footpaths of the narrow little waterfront park. A freighter flying the Norwegian flag was making its way down the Kill van Kull toward the Bayonne Bridge and Port Newark, pushed along by a squat blue tugboat. Tom stood by his living-room window, one hand on the sill, the other shoved deep in his pocket, watching the kids in the park, watching the freighter’s stately progress, watching the cold green water of the Kill and the wharves and hills of Staten Island beyond.
A long long time ago, his family had lived in the federal housing projects down at the end of First Street, and their living-room window had looked out over the park and the Kill. Sometimes at night when his parents were asleep, he would get up and make himself a chocolate milk and stare out the window at the lights of Staten Island, which seemed so impossibly far away and full of promise. What did he know? He was a project kid who’d never left Bayonne.
The big ships passed even in the night, and in the night you couldn’t see the rust streaks on their sides or the oil they vented into the water; in the night the ships were magic, bound for high adventure and romance, for fabled cities where the streets shone dark with danger. In real live, even Jersey City was the land unknown as far as he was concerned, but in his dreams he knew the moors of Scotland, the alleys of Shanghai, the dust of Marrakesh. By the time he turned ten, Tom had learned to recognize the flags of more than thirty different nations.
But he wasn’t ten anymore. He would turn forty-two this year, and he’d come all of four blocks from the projects, to a small orange-brick house on First Street. In high school he’d worked summers fixing TV sets. He was still at the same shop, though he’d risen all the way to manager, and owned almost a third of the business; these days the place was called the Broadway ElectroMart, and it dealt in VCRs and CD players and computers as well as in television sets.
You’ve come a long way, Tommy, he thought bitterly to himself. And now Barbara Casko was going to marry Steve Bruder.
He couldn’t blame her. He couldn’t blame anyone but himself. And maybe Jetboy, and Dr. Tachyon … yeah, he could blame them a little too.
Tom turned away and let the drapes fall back across the window, feeling like shit. He walked to the kitchen, and opened a typical bachelor’s refrigerator. No beer, just an inch of flat Shop Rite cola at the bottom of a two-liter bottle. He stripped the foil off a bowl of tuna salad, intending to fix himself a sandwich for breakfast, but there was green stuff growing all over the top. Suddenly he lost his appetite.
Lifting the phone from its wall cradle, he punched in seven familiar numbers. On the third ring, a child answered. “Hewo?”
“Hey, Vito,” Tom said. “The old man home?”
There was the sound of another extension being lifted. “Hello?” a woman said. The child giggled. “I’ve got it, honey,” Gina said.
“G’bye, Vito,” Tom said, as the child hung up.
“Vito,” Gina said, sounding both aggravated and amused. “Tom, you’re crazy, you know that? Why do you want to confuse him all the time? Last time it was Guiseppe. The name is Derek.”
“Pfah,” Tom replied. “Derek, what kind of wop name is that? Two nice dago kids like you and Joey, and you name him after some clown in a soap opera. Dom would’ve had a fit. Derek DiAngelis—sounds like a walking identity crisis.”
“So have one of your own and name him Vito,” Gina said.
It was just a joke. Gina was just kidding around, she didn’t mean anything by it. But the knowledge didn’t help. He still felt like he’d been kicked in the gut. “Joey there?” he asked brusquely.
“He’s in San Diego,” she said. “Tom, are you all right? You sound funny.”
“I’m okay. Just wanted to say hello.” Of course Joey was in San Diego. Joey traveled a lot these days, the lucky stiff. Junkyard Joey DiAngelis was a star driver on the demolition derby circuit, and in winter the circuit went to warmer climes. It was sort of ironic. When they were kids, even their parents had figured Tom was the one who’d go places while Joey stayed on in Bayonne and ran his old man’s junkyard. And now Joey was almost a household word, while his old family junkyard belonged to Tom. Should have figured it; even in grade school, Joey was a demon on the bumper cars. “Well, tell him I called.”
“I’ve got the number of the motel they’re at,” she offered.
“Thanks anyway. It’s not that important. Catch you later, Gina. Take care of Vito.” Tom set the phone back in its cradle.
His car keys were on the kitchen counter. He zipped up a shapeless brown suede jacket, and went down to the basement garage. The door slid closed automatically behind his dark green Honda. He headed east on First Street, past the projects, and turned up Lexington. On Fifth Street, he hung a right, and left the residential neighborhoods behind.
It was a cold gray Saturday in March, with snow on the ground and winter’s chill in the air. He was forty-one years old and Barbara was getting married, and Thomas Tudbury needed to crawl into his shell.
They met in Junior Achievement, seniors from two different high schools.
Tommy had little interest in learning how the free-enterprise system worked, but he had a lot of interest in girls. His prep school was all boys, but JA drew from all the local high schools, and Tom had joined first as a junior.
He had a hard enough time making friends with boys, and girls terrified him. He didn’t know what to say to them, and he was scared of saying something stupid, so he said nothing at all. After a few weeks, some of the girls began to tease him. Most just ignored him. The Tuesday-night meetings became something he dreaded all through his junior year.
Senior year was different. The difference was a girl named Barbara Casko.
At the very first meeting, Tom was sitting in the corner, feeling pudgy and glum, when Barbara came over and introduced herself. She was honestly friendly; Tom was astonished. The really incredible thing, even more astonishing than this girl going out of her way to be nice to him, was that she was the prettiest girl in the company, and maybe the prettiest girl in Bayonne. She had dark blond hair that fell to her shoulders and flipped up at the ends, and pale blue eyes, and the warmest smile in the world. She wore angora sweaters, nothing too tight but they showed her cute little figure to good advantage. She was pretty enough to be a cheerleader.
Tommy wasn’t the only one who was impressed with Barbara Casko. In no time at all, she was president of the JA company. And when her term ran out, after Christmas, and it was time for new elections, she nominated him to succeed her as president, and she was so popular that they actually elected him.
“Ask her out,” Joey DiAngelis said in October, w
hen Tom worked up the nerve to tell him about her. Joey had dropped out of school the year before. He was training as a mechanic in a service station on Avenue E. “She likes you, shithead.”
“C’mon,” Tom said. “Why would she go out with me? You ought to see her, Joey, she could go out with anybody she wanted.” Thomas Tudbury had never had a date in his life.
“Maybe she’s got shitty taste,” Joey said, grinning.
But Barbara’s name came up again. Joey was the only one Tom could talk to, and Barbara was all he could talk about that year. “Gimme a break, Tuds,” Joey said one December night when they were drinking beer inside the old ruined Packard by the bay. “If you don’t ask her out, I will.”
Tommy hated that idea. “She’s not your type, you dumb wop.”
Joey grinned. “I thought you said she was a girl?”
“She’s going to college to be a teacher.”
“Ah, never mind that shit. How big are her tits?”
Tom punched him in the shoulder.
By March, when he still hadn’t asked her out, Joey said, “What the hell are you waiting for? She nominated you to be president of your fuckin’ candyass company, didn’t she? She likes you, dork.”
“Just cause she knew I’d make a good company president doesn’t mean she’d go out with me.”
“Ask her, shithead.”
“Maybe I will,” Tom said uncomfortably. Two weeks later, on a Wednesday night after a meeting where Barbara had been especially friendly, he got as far as trying to look up her number in the phone book. But he never made the call. “There are nine different Caskos listed,” he told Joey the next time he saw him. “I wasn’t sure which one was her.”
“Call ’em all, Tuds. Fuck, they’re all related.”
“I’d feel like an idiot,” Tom said.
“You are an idiot,” Joey told him. “So look, if that’s so hard, next time you see her, ask for her phone number.”
Tom swallowed. “Then she’d think I wanted to ask her out.”
Joey laughed. “So? You do want to ask her out!”
“I’m just not ready yet, that’s all. I don’t know how.” Tom was miserable.
“It’s easy. You phone, and when she answers you say, ‘Hey it’s Tom, you want to go out with me?’”
“Then what if she says no?”
Joey shrugged. “Then we’ll phone every pizza place in town and have pies delivered to her house all night long. Anchovy. No one can eat anchovy pizza.”
By the time May had rolled around, Tom had figured out which Casko family Barbara belonged to. She’d made a casual comment about her neighborhood, and he’d noted it in the obsessive way he noted everything she said. He went home and tore that page from the phone book and circled her phone number with his Bic. He even began to dial it. Five or six times. But he never completed the call.
“Why the fuck not?” Joey demanded.
“It’s too late,” Tom said glumly. “I mean, we’ve known each other since September, and I haven’t asked her out; if I ask her out now, she’ll think I was chickenshit or something.”
“You are chickenshit,” Joey said.
“What’s the use? We’re going to different colleges. We’ll probably never see each other again after June.”
Joey crushed a beer can in his fist, and said two words. “Senior prom.”
“What about it?”
“Ask her to your senior prom. You want to go to your senior prom, don’t you?”
“I dunno,” Tom said. “I mean, I can’t dance. What the fuck is this? You never went to no goddamned prom!”
“Proms are shit,” Joey said. “When I go out with a girl, I’d rather drive her out on Route Four-forty and see if I can get bare tittie than hold her fuckin’ hand in some gym, you know? But you ain’t me, Tuds. Don’t shit me. You want to go to that stupid prom and we both know it, and if you walked in with the prettiest date in the place, you’d be in fuckin’ heaven.”
“It’s May,” Tom said sullenly. “Barbara’s the cutest girl in Bayonne, no way she doesn’t have a prom date already.”
“Tuds, you go to different schools. She’s probably got a date to her prom, yeah, but what are the fuckin’ odds that she’s got one to your prom? Girls love that prom horseshit, dressing up and wearing corsages and dancing. Go for it, Tuds. You got nothing to lose.” He grinned. “Unless you count your cherry.”
In the week that followed, Tom thought about nothing but that conversation. Time was running out. Junior Achievement was wrapping up, and once it was over he’d never see Barbara again, unless he did something. Joey was right; he had to try.
On Tuesday night, his stomach was tied in a knot all during the long bus ride uptown, and he kept rehearsing the conversation in his head. The words wouldn’t come out right, no matter how many times he rearranged them, but he was determined that he would get something out, somehow. He was terrified that she would say no to him, and even more terrified that she might say yes. But he had to try. He couldn’t just let her go without letting her know how much he liked her.
His biggest worry was how in the world he could possibly get her aside, away from all the other kids. He certainly didn’t want to have to ask her in front of everybody. The thought gave him goose bumps. The other girls thought he was hilarious enough as is, the presumption of him asking Barbara Casko to the prom would double them up with laughter. He just hoped she wouldn’t tell them, after. He didn’t think she would.
The problem was solved for him. It was the last meeting, and the advisers were interviewing the presidents of all the different companies. They gave a bond to the kid picked as president of the year. Barbara had been president of their company for the first half-year, Tom for the second; they found themselves waiting outside in a hallway, just the two of them, alone together, while the other kids were in at the meeting and the advisers were off doing interviews.
“I hope you win,” Tom said as they waited.
Barbara smiled at him. She was wearing a pale blue sweater and a pleated skirt that fell to just below her knees, and around her neck was a heart-shaped locket on a slender gold chain. Her blond hair looked so soft that he wanted to touch it, but of course he didn’t dare. She was standing quite close to him, and he could smell how clean and fresh it was.
“You look really nice,” he blurted awkwardly.
He felt like an idiot, but Barbara seemed not to notice. She looked at him with those blue, blue eyes. “Thank you,” she said. “I wish they’d hurry.” And then she did something that startled him—she reached out and touched him, put her hand on his arm, and said, “Tommy, can I ask you a question?”
“A question,” he repeated. “Sure.”
“About your senior prom,” Barbara said.
He stood like a zombie for a long moment, aware of the chill in the hall, of distant laughter from the classroom, of the advisers’ voices coming through the frosted-glass door, of the slight pressure of Barbara’s hand, and above all, of the nearness of her, those deep blue eyes looking at him, the locket hanging down between the small round bumps of her breasts, the clean, fresh-washed smell of her. For once, she wasn’t smiling. The expression on her face might almost have been nervousness. It only made her prettier. He wanted to hug her and kiss her. He was desperately afraid.
“The prom,” he finally managed. Weakly. Absurdly, he was suddenly aware of a huge erection pressing against the inside of his pants. He only hoped it didn’t show.
“Do you know Steve Bruder?” she asked.
Tom had known Steve Bruder since second grade. He was the class president, and played forward on the basketball team. Back in grammar school, Stevie and his friends used to humiliate Tom with their fists. Now they were sophisticated seniors, and they just used words.
Barbara didn’t wait for his answer. “We’ve been going out together,” she told him. “I thought he was going to ask me to his prom, but he hasn’t.”
You could go with me! Tom thought wildly, b
ut all he said was, “He hasn’t?”
“No,” she said. “Do you know, I mean, has he asked somebody else? Is he going to ask me, do you think?”
“I don’t know,” Tom said dully. “We don’t talk much.”
“Oh,” Barbara said. Her hand fell away, and then the door opened and they called his name.
That night Tom won a $50 savings bond as Junior Achievement President of the Year. His mother never understood why he seemed so unhappy.
The junkyard was on the Hook, between the sprawl of an abandoned oil refinery and the cold green waters of New York Bay. The ten-foot-high chain-link fence was sagging, and there was rust on the sign to the right of the gate that warned trespassers to keep out. Tom climbed from his car, opened the padlock and undid the heavy chains, and pulled inside.
The shack where Joey and his father Dom had lived was far gone in decay now. The paint on the rooftop sign had faded to illegibility, but Tom could still make out the faint lettering: DI ANGELIS SCRAP METAL & AUTO PARTS. Tom had bought and closed the junkyard ten years ago, when Joey got married. Gina hadn’t wanted to live in a junkyard, and besides, Tom had been tired of all the people who prowled around for hours looking for a DeSoto transmission or a bumper for a 1957 Edsel. None of them had ever stumbled on his secrets, but there had been close calls, and more than once he’d been forced to spend the night on some dingy rooftop in Jokertown because the coast wasn’t clear at home.
Now, after a decade of benign neglect, the junkyard was a sprawling wasteland of rust and desolation, and no one ever bothered driving all the way out there.
Tom parked his Honda behind the shack, and strode off into the junkyard with his hands shoved into his pockets and his cap pulled down against the cold salt wind off the bay. No one had shoveled the snow here, and there had been no traffic to turn it into filthy brown slush. The hills of scrap and trash looked as though they’d been sprinkled with powdered sugar, and he walked past drifts taller than he was, frozen white waves that would come crashing down when the temperatures rose in the spring.