In the Night Café by Joyce Johnson Page A

staring, I laughed and said, “I know this person.” You said, “Let me see where you work.”
    I didn’t really want to take you inside. We passed two desks and I had to introduce you: “This is my friend, Tom Murphy.”
    â€œ Friend? ”you said loudly.
    I hated that you had caught me in my office personality.
    You wouldn’t sit on the visitor’s chair in my little cubicle. You went to the window and frowned out at the view. You wanted to get me out of there, to have me come downstairs.
    I tried to explain I couldn’t do that. Secretaries didn’t just leave the premises unless it was lunch hour. It’s a rule everyone understands about work, but as I tried to explain it to you that day, I suddenly felt you were right. It made no sense. Why couldn’t a person go where they wanted to?
    â€œCome on,” you said roughly and pulled me up off my chair and I had to walk out with you. We went down in the elevator to some hamburger place off the lobby where there were no customers because it wasn’t lunch hour. We sat in a torn, gloomy booth and you said very sadly, “I feel terrible. I put you in that place. Wasn’t it me that put you there?” By then I’d realized that you’d been drinking. I asked you what was going on. I said, “Where did you get that awful suit?”
    â€œOn the Bowery,” you said. “For seven dollars.”
    â€œForgive me,” you said, taking my hand, though I didn’t know what I was supposed to forgive you for. “This has been a significant day,” you said, and when I asked you why, you told me it was because you’d finally gotten yourself a job, just like me. Market research. “You didn’t think I’d do it, did you?”
    So that was the reason you got the suit. “All us working fuckers got to look the same.”

IV
Chrystie Street
Summer 1962

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    A T THE CEDAR , everyone was talking about a sculptor who was quitting, giving up art. Others had quit, always very quietly, but the way Howard Stricker was going about it was odd and spectacular. He’d been building a boat in his studio, a twenty-five-foot catamaran. He planned to launch it in the East River in a few weeks’ time. Then he was going to sail it by himself all the way down to Key West. He said he would live on rice and fresh fish. What he was going to do with his life after he reached Key West he never told anyone. People hadn’t paid much attention to Howard Stricker before. They didn’t exactly admire him now, but they were awed by his craziness. No one believed the boat would float. A bullet would be faster, one painter said.
    Leon said we should definitely look at Howard Stricker’s studio, which was downtown on Chrystie Street between Grand and Hester, just around the corner from the Bowery. He said he’d seen it and it was cheap and big and that Howard Stricker was said to be looking for key money so he could finish his pontoons and leave on schedule. Tom called him one evening and he told us to come over.
    Howard Stricker had worked in stone and had stubbornly kept sculpting the human figure as if he lived in some century of his own. He was forty years old and it was said he’d never sold one piece. I don’t know whether his work was good or bad, because when he’d decided to build his boat, he’d taken a sledgehammer and a power drill and broken up everything he’d done. When we met him, he referred to this with a kind of pride. “It took three days,” he said, “but of course that was much less time than it took to make them.” The broken pieces were all upstairs, so no one who took the studio would have to deal with them. “It seemed better to put them there,” he said, “than out on the street.”
    Above the studio were two empty floors where there’d been a fire thirty years ago. Howard Stricker said, “You can use them