I’m A Believer

It was ten minutes to eight, and the record store was empty.  Everyone else had already gone home, and I was getting ready to close up when the phone rang.  It was Janice, whom I hadn’t seen or heard from in a few weeks.  A week earlier, however, her father had called me at five in the morning.  He was tearing his hair out because the police had just been at his house looking for her.  I told him—truthfully—that I had no idea where she was.

“Janice,” I said into the phone, as nonchalantly as I could, “what’s shaking?”

“I miss you, Gary,” she said.  “Do you want to buy me dinner?”

I watched one of the old Italian guys from the neighborhood walk right up to the store and peer in through the window.  He looked disgusted, then turned around and walked away.  He did that almost every day.

“Are the police still looking for you?” I asked Janice.

I could almost hear her carefully considering how to answer.  “Oh that,” she said, after a pause.  “That’s all blown over.”

“Your dad called me last week,” I said.  “He was pretty freaked out.”

“Jesus, Gary,” Janice said.  “I’m twenty-six years old.”

“I know, Janice.  I was at your last birthday party.”

Janice just laughed.  “So, should we go to Tommy’s then?”

I sighed.  “Why were the cops looking for you, Janice?”

“I was with this guy,” she said, her voice impatient.  “And we broke into, you know, that flower place, the conservatory.”

“You broke into where?”

“We wanted to see some flowers,” she said.  “Christ.”

“You’re completely nuts,” I said.

“After we left, we ran into this cop outside,” Janice continued.  “The fat bastard started asking us all these questions, like if we’d seen anybody.”

“Did he arrest you?”

“He didn’t have any proof it was us, so he couldn’t keep us there.  But then I guess they saw our picture on the security camera, and they had my name from when the cop was grilling us.  Fortunately, they only have my parents’ address, so fuck it.”

“So, who was this guy?”

“Let’s talk about this at Tommy’s,” she said, trying to turn on that smoky voice she used to convince me.  It was a little sad.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“I’ll wear that green dress,” she said.

“Shit,” I said, giving up.  “All right.  I’ll see you at nine.”  I was thinking that I’d get to Tommy Chang’s early and have a couple of drinks before Janice showed up.

Janice made a kissing sound and hung up.  I put the phone in its cradle and looked at the clock.  It was close to eight.  I moved to the door and locked it, taking one last look outside.  Two figures were shuffling toward the store.  I sighed and unlocked the door.  The latecomers were usually easier to get rid of if you opened up the door and confronted them, rather than just letting them stand there knocking.

“I’m just closing up,” I said, through the half-open door.  “Was there anything in particular you were looking for?”

It was two women, neither of them young.  The one in front was shorter, and she seemed to be the older one, as well.  She had wavy gray hair and thick glasses.  “I, well,” she said, her eyes flicking back to the larger woman behind her.  “We’ll come back tomorrow,” the older woman said then, nodding.  “Come on, Mary,” she said to her.

“Wait,” I said, “you can come in.”

The old woman turned.  “Well, we won’t take up much of your time,” she said, shuffling in to the store.  The big woman, who had a blank stare on her face, followed the older woman closely.  It wasn’t very cold, but the bigger woman was bundled in a winter coat. 

“I need to close up in a couple of minutes,” I said, going back behind the counter.

“This nice man at another store told me about your place.”  The woman held her hand up to her throat and glanced around the store quickly, as if to make sure she was in the right place.  “He told me you have rare records and collectibles, things like that.  Are you the owner of the store?”

“No, Ma’am,” I said, crossing my arms as a subtle gesture of impatience.  “The owner usually goes home early.”

“Oh,” she said, sounding a little disappointed, “well, I suppose you could help us, anyway.  You see, my Mary”—and again, her eyes flicked back to the big woman behind her—“she’s quite a fan of the Monkees.  When she was a girl, oh wow, she loved that show.”

“Well,” I said, already taking a step towards the racks, “I think we might have a Monkees greatest hits CD or something.”

“Oh no,” the woman said, holding up a wrinkled hand.  “We have all the records and all of the, what do you call them, the compact discs.  I think we have every song the Monkees ever made, don’t we Mary?”

Mary, the big woman in the winter coat, mumbled something that could have been a “yes.”  I focused on her for the first time.  Being the old woman’s daughter, she must have been in her forties or fifties, but her fat cheeks and empty stare made her look, even in the harsh light of the store, like a child.  Her breathing was very heavy.

The old woman noticed me looking at her daughter.  “My Mary was always a little slow,” she said, the volume on her voice going way down on the word “slow.”  “Then, ten years ago this past March, she had her accident.”  The old woman said “accident” even more quietly.

“We don’t have any rare Monkees records,” I said to the woman, looking at my watch.

“Well, I just said we’re not looking for any records,” the woman said, in a slightly irritated tone.  “When I heard that you carried unusual records and such here, I thought you might also have, you know, what they call collector items.  That’s what we’re really looking for.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.  “Nothing like that.”

“And it was so hard to find this place,” the woman said.  “You know, a few months ago the man at the other store helped us find one of those big cardboard stand-ups”—she held her shaking hands apart as illustration—“you know, on the computer.  Sixty-five dollars, I had to send a check for.  When it finally arrived two months later, one of the fellows in the band—what’s his name, Mary, the one you like?  The funny looking one?”

“Peter,” Mary said, though you could barely make the word out through her slurred speech.

“That’s right, Peter Tork,” the old woman said.  “And when our sixty-five dollar piece of cardboard arrived, Mr. Peter’s hand was missing.  Can you believe that?  The man at the store said he was going to try to get our money back from the criminal who sold us the thing, but nothing happened, no good.  I knew it was a rip-off, dealing with that computer.”

“You have to be careful,” I said.  “Look, I’m sorry, but I have someplace to be.”

“Okay, then,” the woman said, but she didn’t move.  Her daughter stood behind her, the model of patient obliviousness.  The old woman focused her gray eyes on mine again.  “My Mary always loved that show,” she said to me.  “My husband, he always said she watched too much television.”

“I’m sorry we didn’t have what you were looking for,” I said, tapping the counter.

“When my Mary was hit by that bus,” the old woman continued, her voice dropping in volume again, “none of the doctors thought she would make it.  But I took this little tape machine to the hospital, and I played the songs by the Monkees.  I swear, that was what woke her up, hearing those songs.  I always tell people that the Monkees saved my Mary’s life, don’t I Mary?”

If Mary had any reaction to what the old lady was saying, I couldn’t see it.  She just stood there, breathing loudly.

I picked up one of our business cards from the box on the counter and held it out for the woman to take.  “Maybe you would want to call first next time,” I said, “before you make the trip.”

The old woman looked at the card for a moment, then took it from my hand.  Slowly, she removed a stained and cracked wallet from an equally ragged purse and put the card in one of its pockets.  Then she turned around and touched her daughter’s arm.  “Come on, Mary,” she said.  “Thanks for your time, young man,” she said to me.

They shuffled out of the store, and then I locked up.  I stood at the door for a moment and watched them walk away.  Mary lumbered behind her mother, in perfect step with the old woman.  “Lord in fucking heaven,” I said out loud to nobody, as I moved to turn off the store’s lights.  Right before I flicked the switch, I looked at the store’s clock.  It was quarter after eight.

I put the money from the register in a bag and hid it in the usual place.  I turned off the stereo and turned on the answering machine.  Then, I went to the sink in the store’s back room and splashed some water on my face.  I brushed my teeth and then wet my hair.  Then I dried it with a paper towel and combed it with my fingers.  Examining myself in the mirror, I realized that my efforts at cleaning up were futile.  If Janice was going to decide to sleep with me that evening, it wouldn’t have anything to do with what I looked like.

As I was walking to my car, I noticed the old woman and her daughter standing at the bus stop.  The old woman looked at me as I walked past.  “Have a good night,” I said.

“Thank you,” I heard her say, but I was already past the bus stop.  After I took a few more steps, though, I turned around to look at them.  The old woman and her daughter were both staring down the street, looking for the bus, I guessed. 

It seemed somehow wrong to just leave them there, so I walked back to the bus stop.  “Excuse me, ma’am,” I said, “would you and your daughter like a ride?”

The old woman gave me a look of surprise, like I had said something rude.  “No thank you, young man,” she said.  “We do just fine with the bus.”

“Look, I’m meeting somebody, but it wouldn’t be a problem to swing by your house,” I said.  “Where do you live?”

The old woman looked down at the ground, then back towards me, as if she were weighing the aching of her legs against the chance that I was a thief or worse.

“Okay, if you’re sure about this,” she said.  “We live on Modano Avenue.  It’s not a short trip, though.”

It took about five minutes to get Mary into the back seat.  She groaned and didn’t want to get into the car.  She wouldn’t bend her legs.  The old woman—Mrs. Lupinsky, she introduced herself—stroked her shoulder and talked to her quietly.  Finally, Mrs. Lupinsky coaxed her in.

Then—typical—my car wouldn’t start.  I pumped the gas pedal.  The engine struggled, but it wouldn’t turn over.

“Come on, fucker,” I said, hitting the steering wheel.

Mrs. Lupinsky cleared her throat.

“Sorry,” I said.  “Maybe I flooded the engine.”  I waited about twenty seconds and tried again.  Sputtering, the car finally started.

“All right, here we go,” I said, pulling out.  I could hear Mary’s heavy breathing in back.

Mrs. Lupinsky and her daughter lived, as she had warned me, all the way across town, and the old woman turned out to be not that good with directions.  She talked on and on about her apparently dead husband and her daughter’s brain damage.  I wondered what I had been thinking.  At a red light, I looked at my watch.  It was almost nine.

When I reached their neighborhood, I realized that I had driven through it before, though it wasn’t the kind of place I would stop if I didn’t have to.  We drove by two check cashing places and lots of closed businesses, though it was a decent bet that a couple of the boarded-up buildings were crackhouses.

“You live around here?” I said, looking over at Mrs. Lupinsky.

“For almost fifty years,” she said.

“It looks kind of rough.”

“We live where we live.  Where else would we go?  Right up here you turn left and we’ll get out.”

I turned where she told me.  There were teenage boys in parkas standing on the corner, which made me think of Mary sitting in the back seat in her big winter coat.

“Right here,” Mrs. Lupinsky said, pointing to a red brick house that looked a little less run-down than those around it.

I parked and got out to help haul Mary out of the back seat.  “Can you come in for a minute, young man?” Mrs. Lupinsky asked me.  “There’s something I’d like to give you for your trouble.”

I thought about Janice, probably already at Tommy’s, ordering saki and starting to get pissed off, but I had grown pretty curious about old Mrs. Lupinsky and her crazy daughter.  “Sure,” I said, “but I’m kind of in a hurry.”

I followed them into their house.  While the old woman fussed with Mary, taking off her coat, I glanced around the living room.  The furniture was ragged, decades and decades old, but everything was clean.

There was some typical old lady stuff in the room, framed photos and little ceramic things.  It was nothing, though, compared to all of the Monkees paraphernalia—posters, shelves with records and CDs, and even little statues of the band members.  And, of course, in the corner was the life-size cardboard stand-up of the band.  It was produced—it seemed—some years ago as a promotional item for a reissue campaign of the band’s catalog.  There they were, the Monkees, as tall as life and frozen in cardboard, with poor Peter Tork’s hand missing.  The way the cardboard was frayed there it almost looked like it had been violently ripped off.

How does someone live with these goony grins staring at them all day long, I thought to myself.  A snatch of the television show’s them song ran through my head then.  Hey hey we’re the Monkees, we sure do love to monkey around…or something like that.  For a second, I remembered sitting on my grandparents’ couch, watching an old rerun of the show.

I was knocked out of my reverie by the sound of Mary getting upset.  She was moaning in an alarmed way.  When I turned around to look, I saw her shifting her weight from one foot to another, like she was doing a really awful dance.  She blocked her mother’s attempts to touch her with awkward thrusts of her arms.

“Honey, Mary,” Mrs. Lupinsky said over and over, as she moved around her daughter.  The old woman almost looked like she was dancing, too, trying to hug Mary while at the same time trying to stay out of the way of Mary’s swinging arms.  Mary, stamping around, knocked something off a nearby endtable.  “She gets this way when she’s tired,” Mrs. Lupinsky said, apparently for my benefit.  Finally—coaxing and corralling her daughter like you might a large animal—the old woman managed to take Mary away to a room in another part of the house.  I still heard, softly now, Mary’s moans and her mother’s continuing efforts to comfort her.

I looked at my watch.  It was twenty minutes after nine.  Janice had probably already polished off her first little pitcher of saki and was well into whatever scene she was causing.

As I stood there, making up my mind to leave, I heard something different.  Mary’s moaning was gone, and I realized that now the old woman was singing to her.  A Monkees hit, of course.  “Then I saw her face,” the old woman sang, “now I’m a believer.”  Mrs. Lupinsky’s cracked, wavery voice turned that cheesy song into some kind of strange folk ballad.  “Not a trace,” the old woman sang, “of doubt in my mind.”

I waited and listened.  Looking down, I saw the framed photograph Mary had knocked to the floor during her fit.  I walked over and picked it up.  It had to be Mr. Lupinsky.  It was a very old photograph of a young man in a military uniform.  It reminded me of pictures I’d seen of my grandfather.  That old-fashioned tough guy look.

Mrs. Lupinsky walked back into the room as I was placing the photograph back on the endtable.  “Him,” she said in a strange tone.

“Your husband,” I said.

“Yes,” she said, nodding her head.

“Did he fight in a war?” I asked her.

Again, the old woman nodded.  “Korean War.”

I wanted to say something nice about the old man.  “It looks like he was pretty brave.”

 Mrs. Lupinsky, her legs wobbling a little, eased herself down on the couch.  “That man left us twenty-five years ago,” she said.  “He wasn’t brave.  He died in another woman’s house.”

I wanted to ask her why she talked about him all the time, then.  And why she didn’t just throw the bastard’s picture away.  “How’s your daughter?” I asked her, instead.

“My Mary’s okay now,” she said, almost to herself.  “She has these fits.  The doctor says it’s emotional.  She never could express herself very well.”

“Oh,” I said.  I felt sort of helpless.

“I have a son who lives in Texas,” Mrs. Lupinsky said.  “I have a great-granddaughter down there, too.”  She looked at me carefully, in case I didn’t get the fact that her life extended beyond this house and her zombie daughter and this spirit-sapping search for cardboard depictions of washed-up childhood idols.

I tried to smile to show I understood.

Then, Mrs. Lupinsky started crying.  She brought her hands up to her face and just started weeping.  Watching her, I realized that I had never really seen an old woman—someone older than my mother—break down and cry like this before.  This was different than young tears—it seemed like the last little bit of old Mrs. Lupinsky’s reserves were flowing out of her.  It stunned me how sad it was.  I willed myself to be unmoved, though, because it felt like the kind of moment that if I started feeling sad, I might not feel happy again for a long time.

“Mrs. Lupinsky,” I said, after a few moments.

“I’m sorry,” she said, slowly wiping her eyes with the back of her hand.  She was shaking all over.

“Mrs. Lupinsky,” I said.  “ I have to get going.”

“Wait a second,” she said, pushing herself off the couch.  She looked at me strangely, then.  “I didn’t ask your name.”

“Gary,” I said, again trying to smile.

“Wait a second, Gary,” she said, moving to a table near the front door where her purse sat.  First, she pulled out a piece of balled-up tissue and wiped her nose.  Then she pulled out her ratty wallet and with some effort, extracted a five-dollar bill from its folds.  She held this out towards me.

“No, don’t,” I said.  “You don’t need to do that.”

“Please,” she said, still holding out the bill.  “Thank you for all of your time.”

I took it and pushed it down into my pocket.  “I hope your daughter’s okay,” I said.

“You better go see whoever’s waiting for you,” Mrs. Lupinsky said.

Walking to my car, I noticed that the teenagers in parkas were gone from the corner.  There was now a single figure, a large man who paced in and out of the circle of light from the street lamp.

I got into my car, praying it would start.  I pumped the gas and turned the key.  The engine struggled but wouldn’t start.  I turned the key again.  Nothing.

“Fuck,” I screamed and slapped the dashboard as hard as I could.  “Goddamn shit,” I yelled.

I sat there and took a deep breath.  In my rearview mirror I saw that the man who was standing on the corner walking towards the car.

He stopped next to the driver’s window.  Feeling nervous, I cracked the window.  He leaned down and looked at me through the crack.

“You got a problem, chief?” he asked.

“No,” I said, looking down.  “My car just takes a while to start.”

The man squinted at me again through the crack.  “You friends with that old lady?” he asked.

“I guess,” I said.

“She’s nice,” he said.  “Her daughter is loopy as shit, had some sort of accident.  Shame what some people have to deal with.”

“Yeah,” I said.  I was embarrassed now that I had only cracked the window.  But rolling it down now seemed even more shameful.

“Look,” the man said, “you need help?”

I shook my head.  “Thanks,” I said.  “It just needs a minute.”  Then, thinking of something, I reached into my pocket and took out the wrinkled five dollar bill Mrs. Lupinsky had given me.  “Here,” I said, holding it through the gap in the window.

The man took a step back.  “What’s that?” he said.

I wondered then, too.  “Here,” I said again.  Like the window, it was too late to take it back. 

“Don’t be an asshole,” the man said.  He tapped the window angrily a few times, as if to emphasize his point.  Then he walked away, shaking his head.

I stuffed the five dollars back in my pocket and watched him in the rear view mirror.  I am an asshole, I thought.  I assumed everyone was out to get something from me.  Finally, I figured I’d try to start the car again.  The engine came to life—like it usually did on the second try—clanking and sputtering like an old lawnmower.

I was almost at Tommy Chang’s when I thought to look at my watch again.  It was quarter after ten.  Janice had surely left the restaurant by now, but I thought that I should still make sure.  Maybe, if Janice hadn’t caused too much of a scene and Tommy wasn’t too pissed, I could still get a beer and a bowl of hot and sour soup.

When I walked into the restaurant, though, I could tell from the look on Tommy’s face that Janice was still there.

“I’m sorry, Tommy,” I said, walking up to him.

“An hour and a half she’s been here,” he said.  “She’s been making us a little uncomfortable.”

“This won’t happen again,” I said.

“Well, come on, then,” he said, winking at me and then handing me a menu.

I followed Tommy to the table.  Janice was sitting there in that short green dress, with her long legs crossed.  She had her caged animal look.

“Thanks for showing up, asshole,” she said, before I had sat down.

I exhaled loudly.  Tommy smiled at me briefly and then walked away.

“Janice,” I said, “I’m sorry.  I got stuck doing something I didn’t plan on.”

“Asshole, asshole, asshole,” Janice said.

“I’ve been called that a lot tonight,” I said.

“I bet,” Janice said, looking like she wanted to spit on me.

I sat down.  “You should have figured out something was wrong and gone home,” I said.

“Oh, of course, perfect Gary.  So it’s my fault you were late.”  She shifted her chair and crossed her legs in the other direction.  “Besides, I had three sakis and I don’t have any money to pay.”

I recognized this as the opening Janice usually gave me.  Every time we had a fight, there was this moment, this chance to get out of it.  If I was tender, she would be tender back.  And I’d learned the exact amount of tenderness it took, so I portioned it out.  It was just like with that guy on the corner back in Mrs. Lupinsky’s neighborhood.  I would crack a window and hand Janice five bucks.  Janice was so starved for some morsel of kindness, that sort of thing worked on her.

“Janice, I’m sick of this,” I said.

“I have money sometimes, jerk,” she said.

“That’s not what I mean,” I said.  “Look, there’s like this edge of desperation to every single conversation we have.”

She looked at me, her eyes blazing.  “You are so goddamn smug.”

“And who was that guy you were with the other night?”

“It’s none of your fucking business.”

“All right, I’m just trying to talk to you here,” I said.  I took a deep breath and decided to start over.  “Let me tell you why I was late.”

Janice crossed her arms in front of her.  “Okay.  I’m listening.”

“So this old woman comes in the store just as I’m closing up, and she has her daughter with her.  And her daughter’s kind of, I don’t know, slow.  She was hit by a bus, I think.  And the funny thing is the daughter’s really into the Monkees.  Like, really into them.”

“The Monkees?” Janice asked.  She looked confused but possibly less angry.

“It’s her life,” I said.  “So they’re going all over town, I guess, looking for all this crazy Monkees paraphernalia.  And, of course, we didn’t have anything and they left.  But then I saw them at the bus stop and offered to give them a ride home.”

“You kept me waiting for that?” Janice said.  I could tell she was trying to decide if she should just get up and leave.  She’d done that enough times.

“I know, I know,” I said.  “I know it sounds nuts.  But you should have seen them at the bus stop.  They looked so fucking pathetic.”

The waitress stopped by the table.  From the frazzled look on her face, I could tell she’d been Janice’s waitress all night.  “Do you want to order something?” she said.  “We’re closing in a half an hour.”

“I’ll have a bowl of hot and sour soup and a Tsing Tao,” I said.  I looked at Janice.

“If I let you buy me dinner, it doesn’t mean that I forgive you for being late,” she said.

“Okay,” I said.

“I’ll have some shrimp fried rice,” she said, looking at me, not the waitress.  “And another saki.”

“Terrific,” the waitress said, and then she left.

“So I drove the old lady and her daughter home,” I continued, before Janice could say anything.  “And then the daughter had some kind of fit, and the old lady had to sing to her to get her calmed down.”

“And you couldn’t leave while this was going on because?” Janice asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.  “I mean, the weird thing is I sort of felt jealous of the old lady while she was singing to her daughter.  Her daughter, I hate to say this, but she’s like this freak, but the old lady, she just loves her so much.  The old lady’s husband left her years ago, and she probably hates all this Monkees shit, but it doesn’t matter, you know?  She just sees through all that, and underneath it all, she still sees her daughter.  She still sees a real human being where nobody else could.  Meanwhile, I’m just this miserable asshole all the time.”

“But how do you know?” Janice said.  “How do you know this old lady really sees all this in her kid?  Maybe she’s just lonely and the retard is like the only person she has in the world.  Maybe the old lady is just scared.”

“Don’t call her that,” I said.  “Don’t call her a retard.”

“Jesus, Gary, you just called her a freak.”

“If you could have just heard the old lady sing.  I mean, it doesn’t even really matter if she is just scared.  The point is I want to think better.  I want to see the good in things.  I’m so fucking sick of everything being ugly.  It’s ugly because that’s how I see it.  Don’t you understand?

Janice looked at the table.  “I don’t know, Gary,” she said.  “Whatever.”  She looked around then.  “I’m hungry, I wish our food would come.”

I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned to see it was Tommy.  “So how’s everything here?” he said, smiling, but he didn’t wait for an answer.  “Hey, you work at a record store, right?”

“Yes,” I said.

He made piano-playing motions with his hands.  “You like jazz then?” he asked.  “That’s good stuff, right?”

“Sure,” I said.  “I like some.”

“You should come check out this guy we have in the bar every Friday,” Tommy said.  “Good stuff.  Better than Mose Allison.”

“I’ll try and do that some time,” I said, nodding.

“Bring your girlfriend,” he said.  Then he looked at Janice.  “But easy on the saki, okay?  I have to pay my waitress extra for waiting on you tonight, huh?”  There was an edge to his voice, but turned to me and winked.

Janice, to my utter surprise, smiled, a little contritely even.  “I’ll take it easy,” she said.

“Very good,” Tommy said.  He patted me on the shoulder and left.  I saw him move on to another table.  He was making the rounds, schmoozing with the few remaining customers.

“I’m surprised you’re not pissed,” I said.

“For what?” Janice said.

“He was being pretty patronizing,” I said.  “Usually that sends you right off.”

Janice shrugged.  “Maybe I’m just sick of being pissed off tonight, too.”

I leaned across the table and brushed my hand against Janice’s cheek.  It seemed like a good time to do something like that.  I got a full look, too, at Janice in that green dress.  God, she looked nice in it.  Her legs always made me a little weak.

I sat back, but I kept on looking at Janice.  Running with the momentary good vibe, I checked her out without hiding it.  “You’re looking really sexy tonight,” I said.

Janice tilted her head to the side, the way she does when she’s pleased.  “I’ll try to pretend that’s not all you like about me,” she said.

“Janice, come on.”

“All right.”  She held her hands upside down on the table, meaning I should take them.  I did.  “You know, that might be fun.”

“What?”

“Coming here to check out the piano guy.”  She squeezed my hands.  “We could get dressed up or something.  Well, not like you own any nice clothes, but I’ll get dressed up.  I’m sure the piano guy sucks, and we’ll probably feel like queers sitting here, but I don’t know, it could be fun.”

I looked at Janice.  I thought for sure she was joking, making fun of me somehow, but just looked straight at me and squeezed my hands again.  Maybe she wasn’t joking.

And then, for a couple of seconds, I believed.  I believed that after we ate, I could get Janice home instead of going to a bar for more drinks.  I believed that Janice wouldn’t throw up in my bathroom, and we would spend some time talking, saying nice things to each other.  I believed that maybe I loved Janice for more than her legs and that I wanted to help her straighten herself out.  I believed that maybe Janice loved me and thought I was interesting and wasn’t just sticking around the restaurant because she was starving and was too crazy to figure out another way to get food.  I believed that Mrs. Lupinsky thought her daughter was beautiful and loved her exactly for who she was and not because of some sad mix of responsibility and desperate loneliness.  I believed that on Friday night Janice and I really would come here to Tommy’s to hear some lousy lounge singer do awful Mose Allison covers.  We would request some Monkees song as a private joke and the piano guy would look at us like we were idiots and we would sit there and laugh to ourselves, holding hands and touching each other under the table.  I believed that all of this would happen, and that Janice would not disappear just as I was going to pick her up and I wouldn’t find out later that Janice met some biker on the street and in exchange for drugs, was blowing him and his friends at the exact same time I was sitting at Tommy’s by myself.

I squeezed Janice’s hands back and looked into her bloodshot eyes, trying my best to find some reason—beyond Janice’s green dress and suggestive smile—to hold on to this rickety and unfamiliar faith.