The Cobalt Weekly

#48: Fiction by Geoffrey Polk

PAWNSHOPS, DAYLIGHT MOONS

“Joe and I are getting married,” my mother said. We were making spaghetti, the two of us. I was opening cans for her, getting out plates and napkins, the bottle of no-year wine. I was divorced. She was a widow. We were statistics standing in her underlit kitchen.

“Tuxes, limos, flower girls?” I asked.

“Funny. Very funny,” she said, laughing at the thought of her as the blushing bride and rumpled Joe the eager knight.

Laughter was like wine for us. I poured my mother a glass. Our bond. I liked how she could eventually carve out a little corner of merriment in whatever situation she found herself in. I wasn’t there yet. I was still a novice. A show-off student.

“No tuxes,” she said. “But you can find your brother and tell him. And maybe help Joe buy the rings.”

“He can have mine. I won’t be needing it,” I said. She gave me a look. Watch the self-pity. At the stove, she blew the rising foam off the water. I poured another glass.

***

My brother was the easy one to find. He was never at home, but I could leave him a message through a network of assistants and he would call back in a day or two from New York or California. I wasn’t anxious to tell him the news. He thought Joe was a loser, a dreamer. Someone like our dad, he probably thought but never said to me.

Joe was harder to track down. He didn’t have a phone. He usually just appeared at my mother’s apartment, late, dressed for the wrong event. Not that they went to events. They made their own. Joe liked to count things. The number of aerobic walkers at the mall. The number of stuck traffic lights. My mother didn’t mind, she told me. It’s hypnotizing after a while, she said. Yeah, very Zen, I said. Svengali Joe.

We didn’t know what Joe did for a living. At first, we thought it had something to do with immigrants or exotic pets. When the three of us took a walk, people would stop Joe and exchange words with him in Chinese. Joe spoke quickly, forming rising and falling sounds that we couldn’t have imagined him speaking if we hadn’t heard it ourselves. And Joe would stop at pet stores and speak knowledgeably with the owners about ocelots and Adélie penguins. Penguins?  My mother and I looked at each other.

Later, we were sure that Joe was in books. Dealers would leave messages for him at my mother’s apartment, cryptic messages about first editions and errata (or did they say erotica?). Joe sometimes left books for me wrapped in newspaper and propped against my apartment door. They were smoothly worn, slim volumes of philosophy and world religion. It seemed important for me to know, although I could never ask him, whether Joe was sharing with me the treasured embodiments of his ideas and beliefs, or were they simply books he had no use for and wanted to dispose of.

The question of what Joe did became, in its elusiveness, the mystery of the world to me. I would leave the office at lunch and walk through the city, imagining dozens of scenarios, hoping to run into Joe somewhere that would finally reveal him. My mother was considerably less interested in Joe’s livelihood. She did ask him once, she said, but he gave her a vague reply, saying that he did a little something of everything but nothing too well. Very Zen, she said to me, playfully mimicking my words.

I pried her for clues. “Not to be nosy, but does Joe talk philosophy with you? Jesus? Bertrand Russell?”

“He hates Warhol, I know,” she said. “Thinks Machu Picchu is overrated. Learned the Lindy Hop from a B movie actress in New York. Beyond that?” She shrugged, her what-does-it-matter, let-it-be shrug. I gave her my exasperated look.

***

I knew a coffee shop Joe liked to go to, and after a couple of visits there, I found him one Saturday having lunch with a tall, thin man wearing a pale green suit. Joe motioned for me to join them at the counter. I congratulated him and offered to help him look for rings. He nodded his head, saying yes, he would value my opinion very highly. I told him I really didn’t know much about jewelry, but he brushed aside my disclaimer. Finding the right gift for someone is very important, he said. We made plans to meet on Thursday.

As we ate, I wondered if the thin man had a connection with Joe’s work. I casually asked him what he did.

“This and that. A little of everything,” the man said. “What do you do?”

“Filing. Routing. Coordinating,” I said. I could be vague, too.

“Sounds mysterious,” the man said with a smile.

Joe looked distracted, concentrating on something. I knew he was counting.

“Hats with feathers?” I asked.

“Roast beef sandwiches,” Joe said. The thin man and I both nodded sagely, as if it made perfect sense.

***

“What do we really know about him?” my brother asked me. He was in town on one of his rare visits. We sat at the kitchen table of my apartment, drinking beer like we used to at college together. He was successful, married, two children. I was divorced. We were statistics sitting in my brightly lit kitchen.

“He learned the Lindy Hop,” I said. “Mom said he lived in Mexico once. Maybe China.” I shrugged.

“Maybe he’s crazy,” my brother said. “Does he have insurance? We have to look out for her, you know.”

“She’s happy, I think. That’s enough.”  

My brother shook his head, as if to say, Happy? You’re like children, talking about happiness. He was right, of course.

“So how are you? Is everything okay?” he asked.

What could I tell him? That my life was a blank since the divorce? A blank like Joe’s but not a mystery. Just blank. Explain it to someone and it sounds like a cliché. A statistic. You don’t even believe it yourself. 

“Are you coming for the wedding?” I asked. Sure, my brother said. He’d check the date with his assistant.

We were silent as I drove him to the airport. The car was dark and warm inside. I felt sleepy. I glanced over at him. Did he look older than the last time I saw him? I couldn’t tell.

“Do you miss dad?” I asked his shadowed face. “Like every day?”

His shoulders tightened, almost imperceptibly. Unfair question. Fair question. He looked at me. His throat seemed to move, but he didn’t say anything. A streetlight lit up his face for a brief moment. 

***

On Thursday, Joe and I went looking for rings. No chain stores, he said. Something with character. At Liberal Loan & Jewelry, we found what he was looking for. The ring he chose for my mother had delicate swirls of lines and shapes, something from the Jazz Age or the `60s. Joe’s ring had two small red stones and a deep scratch. The man behind the counter said it could be polished out.

“No, it’s fine like this,” Joe said. “Don’t you think so?” he asked me. His eyes were shining. 

“Yes, it’s exactly right,” I said. I remembered the new ring I never felt comfortable wearing.

“How long have you been divorced?” he said, reading my mind.

“Four months.” As if I were counting them.

Joe looked distracted. He asked the man to see the guitar hanging on the wall. He took it in his hands and played a chord or two. It needed tuning. I asked him if he played. 

“Years ago. In Mexico,” he said. “I lived there with my first wife. We were young then, about your age.” Joe placed the guitar on the counter. “I’ll take it,” he said. The man looked surprised. Who buys guitars anymore?

***

Outside the store, Joe handed me the guitar. To hold, to keep? The wood felt awkward in my grasp, as if it was the wrong size. I didn’t know what to say. We stood uncomfortably in front of the store for a minute. Then Joe was gone, a blur of mumbled words, something about an appointment.

I started walking. It started raining. Pouring. I tried to fit the guitar under my jacket. Which end to protect: the pear-like body or the delicate network of strings? It was hopeless.

I kept walking. A passing car slowed, then stopped. The window unrolled. It looked like my ex-wife, asking if I needed a ride. I looked again. It was her. My wife. Ex. What were the odds? Would Joe know?

I got into the car, a wet mass of angles sticking out here, there. She looked at the guitar neck sticking out of my jacket like a hydra and at my wide belly. If she had second thoughts, she bravely dissolved them in a weak smile.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

Her question threw me. “I don’t know,” I said. “Where are you? I mean, just drop me anywhere.” She looked at me. Right, indecisive.

The ride was tense and amicable. I gestured at the guitar and told her my mother was getting married, as if one explained the other. I was doing fine, I said. So was she. We mentioned lunch. The red lights were endless.

It took three tries to get myself and the guitar out of the car. After the second try, she and I exchanged looks. Then she lost it. Started laughing, politely trying to hold it in at first, but then it broke loose, clear and free. I started laughing, too, struggling with the guitar, wet, divorced, standing in the rain with a gift from my mom’s boyfriend. I finally got the door closed. Closed. I waved at her through the steamy glass.

***

My apartment had that half-dark, half-light look of a rainy afternoon and too few windows. I felt my heart beat against the hollow body of the guitar as I opened the door. I was exhausted. I laid the guitar down. I slept. I dreamed of my father.

He wore purple pants and a gold-tasseled Mexican hat. I was ten, eleven, twenty-five. The purple pants scared me. The hat made me laugh. His voice sounded like wind rustling through trees. Grieve, grieve, he said, making it a prayer, a song. Then he smiled. But not too much.

I slept a long time. Days. I woke up. The sun was out. Across the room, the guitar was shining like a smooth, polished wood floor, like a Sunday morning. I remembered a film showing people throughout the city playing a piece by Bach – a gigue, a sarabande – on dozens of instruments, in unlikely places. Guitars, whistles, ocarinas, harmonicas. Rooftops, kitchens, fire escapes. I realized I didn’t have to know what Joe did for a living, or know when my life would be in tune again.

***

The wedding was set for the following week. Although my mother feigned nonchalance, she was clearly excited. A new dress. Flowers on the table when I had dinner with them. And Joe turned into a mad costumer with his sudden flurry of clothing changes. Berets, silk scarves, penny loafers. Canes, wingtips, moustaches. A monocle.

I got caught up in the general giddiness in the air. I started thinking about guitar lessons. Or counting daylight moons. How many did I really remember? Two, three?

***

On the day of the wedding, my brother and I were squeezed shoulder to shoulder in back of the crowded, dusty office in city hall. Thursday was a good day for weddings, Joe had told us. The room was filled, mostly with teenagers and retirees.

“Did you ever find out what Joe does?” my brother asked.

“Yes,” I said. I watched Joe and my mother hold hands as the justice pronounced them man and wife. “Joe repairs things.”

***

Geoffrey Polk (geoffpolk.com) is a writer, musician, and teacher living in Cleveland. He edited Whiskey Island in which he interviewed Ken Kesey and David Foster Wallace. His stories and poems have appeared in several publications.