In the Night Café Read Online Free PDF Page B

platform, making blurry gray faces at the camera. Tommy asked me if he could do it alone. “This time I’ll be getting on my spaceship and you watch me out there on all the TVs.”
    I went out through the revolving doors and stood at the window as the line moved slowly forward. When Tommy climbed up on the platform, he waved to me with great solemnity, his arms making wide intersecting arcs above his head. He stretched his mouth into “Good-bye … good-bye… . ”
    The day was running out when we got to the zoo. Most people were keeping their children home that day. Bored tigers paced and yawned in their cages; tropical birds on dead branches picked at their feathers or went fluttering at light bulbs. It all seemed shabbier than when I was a child or when I’d walked through there with Tom one day only last spring. Flotillas of babies were out in strollers then, and I’d looked at them with secret hunger, wanting to be pregnant, wanting to be filled with baby—not daring to say it, of course—telling myself, Someday, maybe next year. “Why the hell did we end up here?” Tom had asked me.
    I bought Tommy a blue balloon, a box of Cracker Jacks, a plastic samurai sword. Tom would have bought him that sword, I thought. I kept trying to conjure him up, put him here with us.
    The seals were enjoying themselves that day. They shot through their pond, flipping themselves over as they chased each other in their brown water; they splashed off their rocks like clowns. When it was cold like this, I told Tommy, and there was nobody much around, maybe they were at their best, because they felt so much more at home.
    â€œI think nobody knows but us,” Tommy whispered.
    He leaned against me a little, and for a while we watched them, standing together by the black railing with its sign that warned you not to throw foreign objects in the water. “I’d never do anything dumb like that,” Tommy said.
    All of a sudden he stopped looking at the seals. A man was slowly approaching us, holding a tiny boy by the hand, holding him up, really. The child had just learned to walk and his legs, wadded into his red snowsuit, were still so uncertain that he seemed always on the verge of sitting down. Every few steps the man would have to stop and steady him, stooping because he was so tall.
    When they reached the pond, the man swung the child up and sat him on his shoulders. “Seals,” he announced to his son. He smiled at us. “That’s quite a show they’re putting on.”
    Tommy tried to keep the conversation going. “They’re not afraid of us because we’re quiet. Animals like it. When you’re so quiet, they forget you’re looking.” He couldn’t take his eyes off the two of them.
    The man laughed and gave his son a bounce. “The seals like us,” he said to his son in his announcer’s voice. But there were other things to see and he moved on.
    â€œDid my daddy ever think of me?” Tommy asked.
    That was the question he’d been keeping inside him—the one he’d been saving for me, for anyone who could answer. Not Did my daddy love me?, you understand. Nothing as abstract, as adult, as that. What’s love after all but a kind of thinking? We hold to each other in our thoughts, we can’t let go.
    I did the best I could. I said some things that seemed quite inadequate. “Tommy, he thought about you every day. Your dad always talked about you and your sister. I know about all the things you and he used to do.”
    â€œTell me about the things !”Tommy demanded. “Tell me all the things!”
    What I told him about was fishing, Tom taking him fishing when he was very little, a story I remembered about how he’d caught his first fish off a pier when he was only five. And his dad had rubbed it with black ink to make a print with it, as Japanese fishermen do for their sons, to mark the day