In the Night Café by Joyce Johnson

incredibly spindly and gnarled and I kept picking off the dried leaves and putting them in my ashtray. There was a window that looked out on a wall and a sliver of Park Avenue South. If you’d see someone with an umbrella, you’d know that it was raining. Across the avenue there was a parking lot that always looked empty with a sign that said Park Fast in enormous yellow and black letters. Now and then I’d look up from my typing and just stare at the word Fast.
    It was orderly and mild at Lester and Leaper. I’d said I wanted to be out in the world, but I never felt I was. You could spend an entire lifetime in that office with your birthday party to look forward to every year and nothing too great or too bad would ever happen to you. I liked it more than I expected to. I liked it uneasily.
    You’d get up when I did every morning. You’d walk me to the stop for the Third Avenue bus. Sometimes we’d go to Rappaport’s­ first to have coffee. You’d buy a newspaper on St. Marks Place to take back with you. Later you told me you read the want ads every day—it shamed you to see me go off on the bus. When the Third Avenue bus came, sometimes you wouldn’t let go of my arm. You’d say, jokingly, “Oh, don’t take that one.” Once you rode all the way uptown with me. You were on your way to a gallery on Madison Avenue that had advertised for someone part-time. But when you saw what paintings they were selling, you just walked out.
    I’d sit on my typist’s chair and little pictures of you would flash up in my imagination. I’d see the empty rooms of the apartment, but then the door would open and you’d walk in with the paper under your arm. Or you’d be standing in front of one of the paintings, smoking, your eyes narrowed on something unresolved. Once a day, in the afternoon, I’d call you. There were times when the phone would ring and ring. My mind would start searching for you, trying to force up other pictures. I’d suddenly think you could be anywhere. I think I knew you were in danger, that I’d somehow left you exposed to yourself. But it wasn’t a conscious thought yet at all.
    You used to say, “Don’t I always tell you everything?” But you didn’t. You said things to me about the children you didn’t believe yourself. You’d see a little kid on a two-wheeler, and you’d say, “Tommy has a bike like that. He wants to stay on it all day. He wouldn’t like it up here.” Mostly you didn’t talk about them, though.
    If the subject came up, there was a word you always used: surgical. You’d made a surgical break; it would leave no scar tissue. You said you either had to live with your kids or be strong enough to allow them to forget you. That was the way you were about everything: either/or. I didn’t try to make you change your mind. I told myself you knew more than I did about kids. I was scared that if you ever went down to Florida to see them, you wouldn’t leave them a second time.
    I asked you once if you thought about what would happen when they were older. “When they’re sixteen or seventeen they’ll want to know you.”
    â€œYeah, it’ll happen,” you said. “They’ll come looking for me. By then they’ll be able to handle it.”
    We both failed, we both were lying all the time when we were so sure we were being honest.
    On those long afternoons when I couldn’t find you, were you thinking of them?
    You turned up one day at Lester and Leaper. The receptionist said, “There’s someone at the desk to see you,” and when I walked into the waiting room, it was you. It was a shock to see you there, so threatening to all that mildness. For some reason you were wearing a strange, wrinkled tan suit that didn’t fit you very well. You stepped forward and kissed me right on the mouth and because the receptionist was