Bernard Boyce Bennington & The American Dream Read Online Free PDF Page B

against it. Instead, he turns up the volume again on his CD player, turns it up without hardly realizing he’s doing it, and the opening strains of ‘Self Portrait in Three Colors’, a song with no solos, the very same haunting music that graced John Cassevetes’s directorial debut movie, Shadows, fills the bar..
    Edgar Nornhoevan looks at Jim and then at McCoy, whose eyes are closed, his hands thrust deep into his pants pockets.
    And then Bernard Boyce Bennington speaks.
    “You didn’t hear her, did you?”
    The four men exchange glances and, silently, elect a spokesman.
    Shaking his head, the Working Day’s bartender says, “No, there was only you…only your voice we heard.”
    “ I heard her,” a new voice says.
    They turn around and come faces to face with the old man from the booth along the back wall. He must have come across while they were listening to the tape, come across real quiet so that nobody noticed him. And now here he is, sitting propped against the table right behind them, his battered valise by his feet. “ I heard her,” he says, shaking his head, a smile playing across his mouth.
    “She did me too,” the man says, and he reaches into his pocket, pulls out a small cardboard strip. “Did me in a train station down in Philly, late at night, in one of those booths where you can get four photographs for a dollar, behind a floor-length curtain oblivious to the world and the night. I fell asleep afterwards—right there in the booth, which was the only place we could find that offered any kind of privacy—and when I woke up, curled up on the floor like an abandoned child, there on top of my clothes was this.”
    He hands the strip across to McCoy who accepts it and takes a look.
    The strip has four photographs on it, each one with a man in the foreground, his back to the camera. The man appears to be naked, though the camera has only caught him to the small of his back, and his face, though it only appears in profile in just one of the shots, looks enraptured.
    But more than that, tufts of his hair are sticking up no matter which way he moves his head…like someone is holding them, tugging them. Only there’s nobody else in the photographs.
    Bernard Boyce Bennington lets out a stifled moan. “That’s her,” he says, “Oh my God, that is her .”
    As McCoy Brewer hands the strip across to Jack Fedogan, the old man says, “But you don’t see her, do you? You see only me.”
    “There isn’t anyone else on this except for you,” Jack says. “If it is you. Fella here looks a lot younger and, well…in a mite better shape than you look right now. No offense,” Jack says as he hands the strip across to Jim Leafman.
    “None taken,” the old man says. “It was a long time ago, almost 20 years. She left me with that-” He nods at the strip of photos. “-and she took everything else that I had. My job, my home…and my sanity.
    “I was getting a late train, going home after an all-day meeting that had gone on into one of those corporate dinners that offer only headaches and indigestion. I wasn’t looking for excitement, wasn’t looking for adventure—at least not right then, though I’d been getting a bit down, you know…lonely…wondering what life was all about. Maybe that was it: maybe I’d gotten the scent of vulnerability about me…because that’s what loneliness is, isn’t it? Being vulnerable.
    “Then, out of the shadows, she came up to me. There was hardly anyone else in the station, just a couple of bums sleeping off the booze, and a guy sweeping up the concourse way down away from me. And she says to me, ‘Mister Yordeau, where can we go to be private?’”
    “She knew your name, too?”
    The man nods to McCoy. “Knew everything about me. Said she usually hung out in bars and clubs and so on—here in New York—same thing she told him.” He nods to Bernard Boyce Bennington. “And that was it. I went with her, may God have mercy on my soul…I went with her,