Immaculate Reception

Excerpt from Merely Average Lovers,

a forthcoming novel by Jason Graff

Judy tucked the front section of the paper under her arm and knocked on the door of Father’s study. “Come in, Boots,” he said. She could tell by the sound of his voice that this was done with his pipe clenched between his teeth. No one called her Boots anymore, a nickname left over from the days before she’d grown into her feet. He tapped his pipe out into the ashtray. The room, festooned with ribbons of smoke, smelled of tarred sweetness. Judy handed him the newspaper, which he spread over his leather blotter. He looked it over and turned the page, searching for the important stories, which he was fond of pointing out weren’t always on the front page. Judy wondered if they were always in the front section but knew Father could well turn it around and force her to spend half her weekend reading the entire paper.

“So? How’s Harry? Still alive?” he asked, starting as always with a softball question.

“President Truman’s still alive but in critical condition.”

“Think he’ll recover?”

“No Daddy,” she sighed, tired of it already, “this’s it for the president.”

Father insisted on quizzing her before she’d be allowed to go anywhere or see anyone on the weekends. He said he’d grown tired of people her age complaining about the global situation without having a sufficient grasp of the facts on the ground. Every Saturday and Sunday, he’d read the front section as soon as the boy brought it up from the lobby, then place it on Judy’s bureau as he simultaneously tried to wake her with an overloud clearing of his throat. A few wrongheaded remarks about the president had now robbed her of a chunk of her weekend mornings.

“Was that in the paper?” he asked.

“Not in so many words, but I didn’t have to read too much between the lines to grasp that. He is almost ninety.”

“Poor Harry,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “How about the latest Vietnam business, what do we make of it all?”

“Heavy bombing of the Hanoi area continued for the 5th or 6th straight day, I can’t keep track now…”

“Neither can Dick Nixon.”

“…and US command in Saigon is getting vaguer about the resistance being encountered.”

“Good, good. I’ll ask again, what do we make of it?”

“We’re desperate. President Nixon’s desperate. It seems he hopes to bomb the North into coming back to the negotiating table and get better conditions prior to withdrawal.”

She was supposed to read the paper as soon as she got up but had left it for after breakfast, hoping Father wouldn’t keep insisting on this little game but, of course, he did. She’d wearied of reading about the war and Nixon. They both appeared ugly to her in the same thoughtless way, though she couldn’t express that quite so bluntly. Father warned her against approaching the news in the same way a poet approached life. He wanted her to react to facts, not paper them over with fuzzy feelings. The two didn’t mix, he’d often said.

“Do you think Nixon’s right?” he asked.

“I don’t think this advances his victorious peace, no,” she said, having decided to omit the phrase ‘so-called’ from her description of his peace plan and stick to the facts as she understood them. “I think there are other ways to force the North back to the table besides indiscriminate bombing.”

“Hmmm…” Father hummed, picking up his pipe and smacking his palm with it. “But they have targets. How can you call it indiscriminate?”

“They’re dropping bombs from tens of thousands of feet in the air, how accurate can they be?”

“I guess you’re right.” Father took a pouch of tobacco from the desk drawer and reloaded his pipe. “Your young man coming to get you later?”

“I’m meeting him outside.”

“In this weather?” he said and turned in his chair to pull the curtain back for a look out the window.

“It’s not raining so hard right now. It’s supposed to be done by late afternoon.”

“I guess.” Father let the curtain fall and spun himself back in her direction. “Doesn’t look much like December out there. Why doesn’t he come up? Meet the family, if only to shake hands.”

“Because, I’m not serious enough with him to subject him to an interrogation.”

“Well, when you are, I’d love to meet him, Boots,” Father said, puffing his pipe back to life. “Have fun tonight.”

“Thank you Daddy,” she said.

Later that evening, when she was ready to leave, she put on her raincoat as quietly as she could without turning on the light in the foyer. She announced her departure just as she was stepping out of the door. Her parents let her go with some distracted-sounding good-byes shouted over Duke Ellington from the living room. The rain tapped the top of her umbrella with gentle persistence. She strolled up the block in case Mother happened to be glowering down from the window. Having passed Father’s quiz didn’t assure Judy of escaping her scrutiny. Remington drove a VW Bug, which was the exact model of car which would touch off question after question from Mother as well as stern warning from Father about beatniks and hippies being layabouts. The wind blew in her face. She wished she’d put on a hat but suspected it would make her look completely out of place in the Village.

Judy was pretty sure Remington was sort of playing at being bohemian. He’d always insisted people call him Rem, which seemed more practical than necessarily hip. Now, he’d grown his hair out and started dressing in denim and buckskin in a manner that to Judy seemed achingly typical among the young men in their set. They all felt obligated to try out various personalities before settling on the one he had all along. Of course, the girls did the same thing but usually when they were younger, so that it didn’t seem so ridiculous. Judy herself had gone about for a period of time wearing a beret and listening to discordant jazz by Charlie Parker and John Coltrane. Sons and daughters of their section of the city weren’t exactly trapped by their circumstances but enclosed, and it was only natural to try poking one’s head up for a breath of fresh air from time to time. Everyone of that set knew who they’d end up becoming as adults, if they looked at themselves with enough honesty. Now graduated from college and waiting to start her life, Judy began to see the whole purpose of being young was to try out personae which might offer comparison and contemplation later in life, when reflection rather than ambition would fuel most existential considerations.

Rem passed her going the other way. Judy put her umbrella down and twirled it as he went by. The car still slick and shiny from the rain resembled its namesake, not least when its brakes skittered. He pulled over to the curb and, opening his window, signaled for her to cross. He certainly seemed to be developing the manners of a bohemian type.

“How late am I?” he asked as she climbed in. “What’re you doing, walking? You’ll drown.”

“I was out yesterday, it was worse then. I didn’t want to wait any longer.” She hadn’t thought him late but never passed up an opportunity to play an advantage.

“I wanted to see the end of the football game.”

“I didn’t think you watched football.”

“I need to have some lowest common denominator things to talk about at work,” he said, “and football certainly qualifies.”

“Emphasis on lowest,” Judy said.

“It’s not so bad,” Rem said. “There’s a sort of animal grace to it.”

“I’m sorry to not be as alluring as a sports program,” she said in a way half-teasing, yet half-serious.

“Believe me, it was amazing. I saw something which defies logic and physics and any credible understanding I’ve ever had of the sport.”

“Don’t keep me in suspense. Did aliens land inside the stadium or something? Was a member of the crowd spotted reading a book? Tell me, we don’t watch football at our house.”

“Is it some kind of religious thing with you people?” he asked, though he well knew hers was a clan of semi-lapsed Protestants just like his.

She hadn’t known Rem long and didn’t care for his freshness. He made the mistake many a young man made of thinking himself clever when in fact, he was being rude and worse immature. Knowing the best manner in which to properly conduct oneself in mixed company was something Judy had been raised to prize, but so many of the boys she knew lacked the simplest understanding of how it was done. It had been that way in high school of course, then disappointingly so throughout college.

“You’re funny,” Rem said, warily as though her sense of humor was dangerous.

“Your car would indicate you cannot be without a sense of humor yourself.”

“What’s wrong with my car?” he asked.

“Nothing, except that in driving it you’re playing at being something, someone you are not. You or your family can surely afford something much nicer.”

“It’s doesn’t use much gas, and I can park it anywhere.”

“Are those the only things you require of a vehicle?”

“What else is there?” he asked.

“Don’t forget,” Judy said. “I’ve some idea of who your family is. Your friends in the Village might be fooled by the car, the hair, the fringe hanging off your jacket, but you don’t fool me. The Farquhars have long been a known quantity.”

“God, you sound like my mother.”

The rain spit a cobweb of moisture across the passenger side mirror. Holiday shoppers jostled each other with umbrellas, but their numbers were thin. Rem was right. Judy knew it. She sounded like a mother, his mother, her mother, any mother of that particular age and social milieu; passively defensive, putting up a wall meant to keep her and everyone she knew in and everyone else out, where they all definitively belonged. It was but a small piece of the cloth Judy would’ve liked to shed from time to time but seemed to cling to during the most inopportune moments, like when riding in an absurdly small car with her wannabe beatnik not quite boyfriend.

“Would you prefer I pick you up in a Porsche the next time I take you to the Village? I’ll have to make sure Father insures it fully of course.”

“No. Can’t I be funny more than once?” she asked. “I didn’t give you such a hard time over it.”

“Actually, you did,” Rem said, screeching to a stop as the traffic light went from yellow to red.

The garland wrapped around the post drooped. At least the rain had washed it the grey patina of soot from it. The weather made it hard to remember Christmas was only a couple of days away. It had been the first year Judy hadn’t gone with her parents to see the tree lighting at Rockefeller Center. She’d claimed she had other plans, and they didn’t press her. She stayed home alone, trying to read but couldn’t concentrate. Naturally, there was nothing on TV. She watched from her window for them to come home as anxiously as she had when she was a little girl. They hadn’t stayed out late, which pleased her.

“Are you going to tell me about your game or not?” she asked as they came upon a knot of traffic, where a honking Buick was trying to turn on red but was blocked by another honking Buick, both as big as harbor tugboats, if not as stylish.

“You’ll give me stick, if I show more than the least amount of enthusiasm possible,” he said, turning down the radio.

Normally Judy wouldn’t have minded but “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard” had come on. She’d loved that song the whole summer. There was no telling how Rem’s hippie friends might react should they find it out, but she had a vague inclination they wouldn’t entirely approve. It seemed the work not to seem square, when she so probably was, might not be worth the effort.

“Try not to be no more than appropriately enthusiastic, then,” she said.

“You do find enthusiasm suspect,” he said. “I knew it.”

“Not necessarily.”

“Then you tell me, Judy,” Rem said, “what’re you most enthusiastic about?”

“Mr. Farquhar, isn’t that something you’d rather learn on your own?”

He laughed in a way which soon got out of his control, a silly high sound he punctuated by slapping the steering wheel as they crawled up Greenwich Avenue. Outside, honks mixed with shouting and the peel of tires on wet pavement. The rain suddenly went from fingers tapping on the roof to nails being dropped upon it, before letting up almost completely like the last of the moisture had been wrung from the clouds in a single, sodden squeeze of the clouds. The car skidded after they’d turned on Bank Street, fishtailing around the bend and coming perilously close to clipping a parked yellow cab.

“Like I said, the great advantage of this car is that it’s easy to park,” Rem said, maneuvering it between two sedans the size of PT boats. “And I’m not worried about it getting dinged up.”

“Good thing. The way you drive,” Judy said, monitoring his progress in the mirrors.

The entranceway of the building stunk of moldy chalk and something being burned which did not give easily to flame. Bubbling voices and bursts of music Judy couldn’t identify wafted down the stairs. It sounded like the kind of jazz she’d once annoyed her parents with but included strange electronic bleeps and blips. At the top of the stairs, the door at the end of the hall stood wide open. Billowing smoke enveloped them. It smelled skunky. Judy thought it probably was marijuana, exactly the sort of thing her parents would’ve feared her coming into contact with in the Village.

She and Rem hadn’t made it far inside before being set upon by a couple sharing what was beyond a doubt a doobie cigarette. The man, who had hair down to his shoulders, seemed to know Rem. He introduced himself as Max. His girlfriend’s name was Tuesday, but Judy was told she could call her Tue. Feeling out of place in her sweater vest and check skirt, Judy took the smoke when it was offered. She’d already tried dope with Brooke Glenoff. After cracking the huge window in Brooke’s loft-like bedroom, they both pressed their lips into the gap and expelled the smoke outside. Each giggled at the pouty face the other made for far longer than seemed warranted. Judy hoped to keep a better hold of herself this time, touching the stout joint to her lips and inhaling while Rem looked on with something like amazement. Judy coughed and coughed, feeling that her eyeballs might shoot out of her skull. It came as a betrayal when Rem passed on it. Here he was in his buckskin vest and greasy hippie hair trying to look the part, and yet, he refused to smoke grass. Judy knew what Rem had yet to figure out, between the two of them they’d never truly make that scene.

“Glad you came with Rem,” Max shouted over the music which had suddenly been turned up. “He talks about you.”

“Does he? How do you know him?” Judy asked, taking another pull of the joint. Her lungs were still stinging, but she felt she needed to make up for her Davey Boone of a date.

“We met at the coffee house down the street,” Max said.

“Remington’s out of sight when it comes to verse,” Tue told her.

“Is that right?” Judy asked and gave her date a quizzical look. This was the first she’d heard of her young ad man’s artistic aspirations.

Rem shrugged and again passed on the joint. His self-satisfied smile should’ve annoyed her, but whether it was the pot or how nice he looked in profile or just the sense of having escaped briefly from her life, it pleased Judy in the moment. She even considered that the shell Rem was trying to escape from might well have fewer facets than the new one he was apparently in the process of building for himself. She’d judged him too quickly, she now thought and, as was often the case when such things were done with haste, much too harshly.

“How `bout a drink?” Max asked.

He didn’t wait for them to answer and led them further into the apartment. Judy felt the gazes of strangers. It seemed hardly possible that such a small space could hold so many eyes. Through a beaded curtain, they came to a tiny but bright kitchen with a shower next to the sink. Its curtain was glazed with a mixture of grease and soap scum. An old Norge refrigerator buzzed from a corner thick with cobwebs. It was cozy there and quieter, the honking, surging, jazz, which sounded like the intro music to some bizarre game show, had faded into the background.

“I dig Zappa but sometimes he gives me a large type headache, you know?” Max asked.

“Is that what it was?” Rem asked.

“The Grand Wazoo Studio Sessions by The Mothers of Invention, a bootleg,” said Tue as she took the glass of red wine Max offered her. “Isn’t Zappa just the most?”

Judy pursed her lips and tilted her head. Her body felt like it might melt or sprout wings or do something equally amazing at any moment. It was an absurd sensation which frightened her the moment she began to enjoy it. She wondered why these people asked questions in such a leading way. But then most people she encountered seemed to be talking to talk. No one appeared to care. No one was actually listening to what anyone else thought. It was like the news quizzes with Father. He had no actual idea what was going on and preferred it if Judy pretended she didn’t either. The thing she’d come to hate most about the whole affair was the creeping suspicion no one at all knew what was going on. Even more, the people in power, supposedly in control, seemed not merely ignorant but indifferent. Not that she sided wholly with those her own age, because Father was right to assume how little they truly understood about how the real world works.

“An early Christmas gift from this one,” Max was saying when Judy managed to focus on the conversation again. “To the holiday.”

“My brother works for the radio station at KU,” Tue said. “He gets some real groovy hard to find stuff. Even here in the city, you can’t find some of it.”

“What is Kay You?” Judy asked, laughing for no reason she could discern. It got the others to laugh, except for Rem, who for the first time since they’d arrived, didn’t seem to be putting up so much of a front.

“Kansas University,” Tue said. “I’m from out there.”

“Check it out, her parents are real farmers. Real dust-bowl-surviving farmers. Doesn’t it blow your minds?” Max asked.

“Farmers,” Judy said, trying not to laugh and taking a sip of the wine Max had handed her.

“I’ve never known any actual farmers,” Rem said.

“That’s me,” Tue said giggling, “a regular farmer’s daughter.”

“What brought you to the city?” Judy asked.

“The theater,” she said, “I’m studying acting with this groovy teacher. He once smoked a joint with Dennis Hopper.”

Judy was familiar with the name but not sure enough about the actor to risk whatever credibility her joint smoking had earned her to speak up. She felt the warmth of a broad smile coming to her face as Tue talked further about her experiences in acting class. The pot had rendered Judy incapable of making out any of the words falling from Tue’s lips. It was as if her eyes insisted she stop everything to appreciate Tue’s golden hair, the rosy hue lingering across the alabaster of her skin and the sublimity of the architecture of her face with cheekbones and chin and nose all placed with almost cruel geometric precision. They grew into such beautiful creatures out there in the rest of America and then came to the city to be devoured. Transplants were always bent on taking on the city, whereas the people born there like Judy, knew to enjoy what she could of it. It was far too big and unruly a beast to ever be conquered.

Sitting on the floor of what she took to be the living room sometime later, Judy realized she’d lost track of Rem. She heard his voice coming from somewhere, but then it changed back into the same strange music which had been playing when they’d come in. Tue was squatting over her from atop an ottoman, smiling and talking about something Judy was, at the moment, foggy on. The night had turned into a kind of succession of dreams whose beginnings and endings Judy couldn’t be sure of. Lightly, she placed her palms on Tue’s knees to steady herself.

“I don’t know if I ever want to get married,” Tue was saying. “I don’t need, like, a piece of paper to prove I love someone.”

“There’re tax benefits,” replied Judy, sharply aware of how proud this answer would’ve made her father and glad for the way the practicality of it offered a toehold in sober reality. “Rather significant ones you should be aware of.”

“Can’t be worried about that. Max and I believe in minimalism. We don’t care about money or possessions. We’ve come to life to live it,” Tue said and made a sweeping gesture with her arms. “Can’t you tell?”

“The near total lack of furniture does make the room more spacious,” Judy said, effort was required to unstick her tongue from the roof of her mouth.

“Some clothes, a sleeping bag and music. That’s all you need.”

“You sleep on the floor?” Judy asked, laughing through her question and hoping she sounded stunned rather than mean.

“Love’s all you need,” Tue said, as she started swaying in place and looking all the more graceful for being on a little footstool while doing so. “We don’t need anything more than a sleeping bag. The floor’s fine for us. All those possessions, those things society wants you to have? It all weighs you down. Getting robbed was the best thing to happen to us.”

“You were robbed?” This time Judy didn’t care how her laughter sounded, as it burst forth too spontaneously for her to consider its source. “You live on the top floor of a walk up and were robbed?’

“They took everything. Carried it out down the fire escape, I guess. The windows don’t lock. None of our neighbors noticed,” Tue said, still swaying though the music had stopped. “When my pa gave us some bread to redecorate, we took a look at our priorities and asked ourselves what was important to us. We found there wasn’t much we needed. Some records, something to play them on, a place or two to sit and listen to music or talk or make love.”

By the time Rem came to get her, Judy had come back to herself, more or less. The eerie sensations which had been toying with her for most of the night had been reduced to a buzz in the background of her thoughts. Outside the rain had quit completely but the wind was picking up. Winter’s chill rode atop the gusts, as if to remind the city what lay ahead. They sat shivering as they waited for the car to warm up. The wind had kissed Rem’s face pink. She wanted to reach out, run her hand through his magnificent curly mane but was unsure how such forwardness would be received. It’d vexed her at first, but she had to admire how he nearly fit in with those people, who were so far removed from theirs, it might as well have been a different culture entirely.

“You never told me about your game,” she said as he tried the heater. The blast of cold air made him cry out.

The streets were fuller than when they’d arrived. Late night revelers were braving the coming chill with hands in pockets and faces creased against the wind. The commotion they made as they rambled about was almost enough to drown out the steady drone of Manhattan traffic.

“The football game, you mean? You don’t care about that,” Rem said. “You only want a chance to hassle me some more.”

“But why were you watching?” she asked.

“I like the Steelers,” Rem said. “They’re my favorite team.”

“Not the Giants or the Jets?”

“At the agency I’m on the account team for Heinz Ketchup, so I go to Pittsburgh a lot.”

“Sorry,” Judy said.

“It’s not so bad. It’s a little blue collar, sure. A little gritty and industrial, I guess but the people are nice and strangely attached to this terrible football team who’s never won a thing in its whole history, which dates back to `33.”

“And today they won the championship?” she asked.

“No. Forget it. It’s not a big deal,” Rem said. “I got sucked in. You’re right. It’s odd. My enthusiasm is odd. Okay? Is that what you want to hear?”

“I want to hear about the game. Maybe its pointlessness will help your car warm up more quickly.”

“Just because you had to get snobby about it,” he said, “I’m going to tell you in excruciating detail. The game was between the Steelers and the Oakland Raiders. There were seconds left and Oakland was winning 7-3. Pittsburgh’s quarterback, the only player who can throw the ball forward, goes back to pass. The Raiders are all over him. But he gets free somehow and with time almost up, lets fly downfield. The ball’s deflected by a Raider and for a good half-second it seems like the game is over but then one of the Steelers comes from absolutely out of nowhere, grabs the ball before it hits the ground and runs it down the field to win the game.”

“Wow,” said Judy, “I didn’t follow that at all.”

“Anyway that was it. That was my game.”

He reached down and put the heat on again. This time it was like a furnace. Judy couldn’t have wiped the smile from her face, if she’d wanted to. He looked at her with what seemed an equally undeniable expression, then tilted his head towards her. She swept her hand through his hair. They clacked teeth at first but then everything went smoothly soon enough. The feeling was so good, so right, so what Judy had expected to feel with other boys but had begun to fear she’d never experience. She didn’t mind when later they got stuck in traffic. Judy was in no hurry to get home.

***

Jason Graff’s debut novel Stray Our Pieces, published in the fall of 2019, concerns a woman extricating herself from motherhood. In early 2020, heckler, about lives colliding at a struggling hotel, was released by Unsolicited Press. He lives in Plano, TX with his wife and their son.