Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [139]
“No, what?”
“He’s banging nails now.”
“What?”
“Yep, said he was fed up with it all. He had a very healthy practice, too.”
“Banging nails? I can’t believe it.”
“Yep, banging nails. Says he’s never been happier.”
As if the slang of that one phrase could begin to capture the painstaking geometry of building safe, long-lasting structures of concrete and wood and glass. But hearing this story pushed me further down the stream of my thinking, that those on the top were human beings too, and not all of them were happy, were they? Who was I to judge them?
ANOTHER EVENT, a midafternoon in late August, and my car wouldn’t start so I’d left Pop’s house early and walked down side streets, then under the railroad trestle and past the gas station up to the roller-skating rink and the train depot behind it. It was hot. I was sweating in my black nylon pants and white button-down shirt, my black bow tie stuffed into one of my front pockets. I carried my black vest tucked under my arm, and I could smell the river—rust and oil and dried mud. I was a week from leaving for Wisconsin and this would be my last job working for the warm bisexual Jew who made me laugh and told me once he was really an abstract painter, that he loved the work of a man named Rothko. I did not tell him I was trying to teach myself how to write, but I felt closer to him when he told me that, and I thought of creative people having to earn a living like everyone else. How you had to work but needed time to create. My catering boss seemed to have given up on finding that time. Jeb, too. What was I going to do about that? What was my plan?
Now I was reaching for my wallet to buy a round-trip ticket, but all my money was in the bank whose account I was just about to close and there was just enough in my wallet for the fare and a one-way ride on the T. They usually fed us at these parties, though. Before guests arrived, my boss would fix me a plate of whatever they were serving. He’d have me eat in the corner of a kitchen or out on a back porch where no one could see me.
On the train I dozed in the heat, woke up thinking how I was always leaving places. Two hours later I was standing behind a rented bar in the living room of two white doctors from South Africa. He was some kind of surgeon, and she was an anesthesiologist. They were both small-boned and ruddy-faced, and it was clear from framed photographs on the walls that they ran marathons together. I spent long periods against the wall between a lamp and a bookcase doing nothing. My boss and the others were serving dinner outside on a patio beneath the deck, and from where I stood I could see the early evening sky, streaks of coral and purple that were already becoming bottom-lit from the city below. I could hear conversations, too. This was a small party of no more than thirty people, and most of them seemed to be like their hosts, married and in shape and doctors of some sort. Many spoke in that Afrikaans accent I had at first mistaken for Australian. They talked a lot about work, about long hours and the difficulty of collecting on insurance claims, about hospital bureaucracy, the ever-present threat of malpractice suits, a dull conference in a fun city. They talked about where their kids would be going to school in the fall, the lessons they were taking in piano, dance, math, and horseback riding. Sometimes, there’d be a lowered voice, then laughter, and something vaguely sexual and extramarital would be in the air, but not once did I hear any talk of their home country, the one currently in flames; Mandela was withering away in prison, and the agents of apartheid were massacring children in schoolyards, injecting resistance leaders with lethal drugs and throwing them out of helicopters. Rape was being used as a form of mass torture, and in the townships black South Africans