The bar at twilight, p.1
The Bar at Twilight, page 1
ALSO BY FREDERIC TUTEN
My Young Life: A Memoir
Self Portraits: Fictions
The Green Hour
Van Gogh’s Bad Café
Tintin in the New World
Tallien: A Brief Romance
The Adventures of Mao on the Long March
The Bar at Twilight
FREDERIC TUTEN
Bellevue Literary Press
NEW YORK
First published in the United States in 2022
by Bellevue Literary Press, New York
For information, contact:
Bellevue Literary Press
90 Broad Street
Suite 2100
New York, NY 10004
www.blpress.org
© 2022 by Frederic Tuten
The painting on the front cover is Encounter in the Mountains by Frederic Tuten.
This is a work of fiction. Characters, organizations, events, and places (even those that are actual) are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Tuten, Frederic, author.
Title: The bar at twilight / Frederic Tuten.
Description: First Edition. | New York : Bellevue Literary Press, 2022.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021033774 | ISBN 9781954276031 (paperback) | ISBN 9781954276048 (ebook)
Subjects: LCGFT: Short stories.
Classification: LCC PS3570.U78 B37 2022 | DDC 813/.54--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021033774
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a print, online, or broadcast review.
Bellevue Literary Press would like to thank all its generous donors—individuals and foundations—for their support.
This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
This publication is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
Book design and composition by Mulberry Tree Press, Inc.
Bellevue Literary Press is committed to ecological stewardship in our book production practices, working to reduce our impact on the natural environment.
♾ This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Manufactured in the United States of America.
First Edition
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
paperback ISBN: 978-1-954276-03-1
ebook ISBN: 978-1-954276-04-8
For Iris Smyles
Let the candle shine for the beauty of shining.
—WALLACE STEVENS,
Three Travelers Watch a Sunrise
Contents
Winter, 1965
The Veranda
The Snow on Tompkins Square Park
The Bar at Twilight
The Tower
In the Borghese Gardens
The Café, the Sea, Deauville, 1966
Lives of the Artists
Allegory: A Parable
The Phantom Tower
Delacroix in Love
Nine Flowers
The Garden Party
The Restaurant. The Concert. The Bar. The Bed. Le Petit Déjeuner.
L’Odyssée
CODA: Some Episodes in the History of My Reading
Story Dedications
Acknowledgments
Previous Publication History and Prizes
About the Author
Winter, 1965
IN THE FEW MONTHS BEFORE his story was to appear, he was treated differently at work and at his usual hangouts. The bartender at the White Horse Tavern, himself a yet unpublished novelist, called out his name when he entered the bar and had twice bought him a double shot of rye with a beer back. He had changed in everyone’s eyes: He was soon to be a published writer.
And soon a serious editor at a distinguished literary publishing house who had read the story would write him, asking if he had a novel in the works. Which he had. And another one, as well, in a cardboard box on his closet shelf that had made the tour of slush piles as far away as Boston. Only twenty-three, and soon, with the publication of his story in Partisan Review, he would enter the inner circle of New York intellectual life and be invited to cocktail parties where he, the youngster, and Bellow and Mary McCarthy, Lowell and Delmore would huddle together, getting brilliantly drunk and arguing the future of American literature.
On the day the magazine was supposed to be on the stands, he rushed, heart pounding, to the newspaper shop on Sixth Avenue and Twelfth that carried most of the major American literary magazines, pulled the issue of PR from the rack, opened it to the table of contents, and found his name was not there. Then, turning the pages one by one, he found that not only was his story not there but neither was there any breath of him.
Maybe he was mistaken; maybe he had come on the wrong day. Maybe the delivery truck had gotten stuck in New Jersey. Maybe he had picked up an old issue. He scrutinized the magazine again: Winter, 1965—the date was right. He went up to the shop owner perched on a high stool, better to see who was pilfering the magazines or reading them from cover to cover and call out, “This is not a library!” He asked the man if this was the most recent issue of Partisan Review, and it was, having arrived that morning in DeBoer’s truck, along with bundles of other quarterlies that in not too many months would be riding back on that same truck—bound in stacks, magazines no one would ever read.
He took a day to compose himself, to find the right tone before phoning the editor. Should he be casual? “Hi, I just happened to pick up a copy of PR and noticed that my story isn’t there.” Or very casual? “I was browsing through a rack of magazines and remembered that there was supposed to be a story of mine in the recent issue, but it doesn’t seem to be there, so I wondered if I had the pub date wrong.”
With the distinguished editor’s letter in hand—typed and signed and with the praising addendum, “Bravo”—he finally got the courage to call. The phone rang a long time. He hung up and tried again, getting an annoyed, don’t-bother-us busy signal. He considered walking over to the office but then imagined how embarrassed he would be, asking, “Excuse me, but I was wondering whatever happened to my story?” Maybe Edmund Wilson would be there behind a desk with a martini in each fist, or maybe the critics Philip Rahv and Dwight Macdonald would be hanging out at the watercooler arguing over the respective merits of Dreiser and Trotsky. What would they make of him and the unimportant matter of his story?
Months earlier, he had written the editor, thanking him, and now he wrote him again: “Might I expect to see my story in the next issue?” To be sure his letter would not go astray, he mailed it at the post office on Fourteenth and Avenue A. And for the next two weeks, he rushed home every day after work to check his mailbox but found no response, just bills and flyers from the supermarket. He knew no one to ask, having no one in his circle remotely connected to PR or to any of its writers. For those at the White Horse, he was their ticket to the larger world.
The news that his story had not appeared quickly got around. His colleagues at the Welfare Department—avant-garde filmmakers, artists without galleries, and waiting-to-be-published poets and novelists—where he had been an investigator since graduating from City College in ’63, gave him sly, sympathetic looks. “That’s a tough break,” a poet in his unit said, letting drop that he had just gotten a poem accepted in The Hudson Review.
His failure made him want to slink away from his desk the instant he sat down. It was painful enough that he had to go to work there, as it was. It made him queasy the moment he got to East 112th and saw the beige concrete hulk of the Welfare Department with its grimy windows and its clients lining up—eviction notices, termination of utilities letters in hand. His supervisor, who had been at the Welfare Department ever since the Great Depression and who now was unemployable elsewhere, tried to console him, saying he was lucky to be on a secure job track and with a job where he could meet so many different kinds of people with a range of stories, some of which could find their way into his books.
But he didn’t need stories. What he needed was the time to tell them. And he had worked out a system to do that. He rose at five, made fresh coffee or drank what was left from the day before, cut two thick slices from a loaf of dark rye, which he bought at that place on Eighth off Second Avenue that sold great day-old bread at half price, and had his breakfast. Sometimes he would shower after breakfast. But the bathtub in the kitchen had no shower, so he had to use a handheld sprinkler, which left a dispiriting wet mess on the linoleum floor, adding cleanup time to the shower itself. Thus, he had a good excuse to cut down on the showers and to use that time at his desk to write.
Usually, by 5:45 A.M., he was dressed and at his desk, the kitchen table he made from crate wood that almost broke the saw in the cutting. He sat at his typewriter for two hours and no matter what had or had not resulted from it, he did not leave the table. At 7:45, he was at the crosstown bus stop on Tenth and Avenue D, and if all went well, he was at the Astor Place station before 8:15 and, if all still went well, he would catch the local and transfer for the express at Four teenth, get off at Ninety-sixth Street, and take another local to 114th. Then he’d race to clock in—usually a minute or two before nine. It was not good to be late by even a minute. He was still a provisional and had to make a good impression on the Personnel Department.
When he got upstairs to his desk and had joined his unit, he’d look over the list of calls to see if any were urgent. They were all urgent: Someone never got her check because the mailbox had been broken into. Someone was pregnant again. Someone needed more blankets. Someone had had just enough and jumped off the roof on 116th and Park Avenue—her children were at her grandmother’s.
Today, he finished all his desk work and phone calls by noon and clocked out for lunch, which he decided to skip. Instead, he finished four field visits very quickly, with just enough time to solicit the information needed to file his reports. He had looked forward all morning to his final, special visit.
He was alarmed when he saw a cop car parked in front of her building. An ambulance, too, with its back doors wide open. He was worried that something bad had happened to her, blind and alone. But the medics were bringing a man down in a stretcher. He was in his eighties, drunk and laughing. The cop spotted his black field book and came over, asking, “Is he one of yours?”
“Not mine,” he said.
“Maybe not even God’s,” the cop said. “His girlfriend shot him in the hand,” he added. “Jealousy, at that age!” He laughed. As he was being lifted into the ambulance, the wounded man laughed and said, “Hey! Take me back. I haven’t finished my homework.”
He rang her doorbell only once before he heard footsteps and then the “Who is it?”
“Investigator,” he answered. She opened the door, smiling. She wore white gloves worn at the tips and a long blue dress that smelled of clothes ripening in an airless closet. Her arm extended, her hand brushing along the wall, she led him through a narrow, unlit hall. From her file, which he had reviewed that morning for this visit, he knew it was her birthday. She was eighty-five.
“It’s your birthday,” he said.
She laughed. “Is that so! I guess I forgot,” saying it in a way that meant she hadn’t. “I have tea ready,” she said.
She poured tea from a porcelain teapot blooming with pink roses on a white sky. Its lip was chipped and stained brown, but the cups and sugar bowl that matched the teapot were flawless and looked newly washed. So, too, the creamy white oilcloth that bounced a dull light into his eyes. It was hot in the kitchen; the oven was on with the door open, though he had told her several times how dangerous that could be. A fat roach, drunk from the heat, made a jagged journey along the sink wall.
“Do you need anything today?” he asked. “Maybe something special?” He wanted to add “for your birthday,” but he did not want to press the obvious point. He could put in for a clothes or blanket supplement for her; deep winter was days away. Or a portable electric heater she could carry from one room to another, so she would not have to use the stove. But how would she locate the electric sockets? “Oh! Nothing at all,” she said, as if surprised by the question. “Thank you, but what would I need?”
Not to be blind, he thought. Not to be old. Not to be poor. “Well, if anything comes to mind, just call me at the office,” he said, remembering then that she had no phone.
“Well,” she said shyly. “If you have time, would you read me that poem again?”
She already had the book in hand before he could reply “I’m very glad to.” She had bookmarked the Long-fellow poem he had read to her during his previous visits. He read slowly, with a gravity that he thought gave weight to the lines. He paused briefly to see her expression, which remained fixed, serene.
When he finished, she asked him to repeat the opening stanza. “‘Tell me not in mournful numbers, / Life is but an empty dream! / For the soul is dead that slumbers, / And things are not what they seem. / Life is real! Life is earnest! / And the grave is not its goal …’”
She thanked him and asked, “Do you like the poem?”
“Yes,” he said, to please her. But he disliked the poem because of what he thought of as its cloying, sentimental uplift. He did not want to be sentimental but he had to admit how much the lines had moved him anyway.
They sipped tea in silence. He did not like tea but accepted a second cup, commenting on how perfectly she had brewed it. “Come anytime,” she said, “It’s always nicer to drink tea in company.”
She walked him to the door, picking up a cane along the way. He had never seen her use a cane before. He suddenly worried that should she fall and break her hip, alone in the apartment, she could not phone for help. He made a note in his black notebook to requisition a phone for her.
“The cane is very distinguished,” he said.
“It helps me hop along.” She smiled. “Thank you for reading to me. You have a pleasing voice. Do you sing?”
“My voice is a deadly weapon,” he said, surprised by his unusual familiarity. “Birds fall from the sky on my first note.”
“Does it kill rats?” She laughed. “I hear families of them eating in the hall at night.”
He fled down the stairs, having once been caught between floors by three young men with kitchen knives who demanded his money, but when they saw his investigator’s black notebook, they laughed and said they’d let him slide this time—everyone knew that investigators never carried cash in the field. He sped to the subway, where he squeezed himself into a seat so tight that he could not retrieve his book, Malamud’s The Assistant, from his briefcase. He tried to imagine the book and where he had left off reading. It was about an old Jewish man who ran a failing grocery store and his assistant, a young Gentile who lugged milk crates and did other small jobs and who stole from him. It was a depressing novel that pained him, but which had, for all its grimness, made him feel he had climbed out of the grocery store’s dank cellar and into a healthy sunlight.
The train halted three times. The fourth might be the one where the train got stuck in the blackness for hours, and he thought to get off at the next station and take a bus or run home or, better, close his eyes and magically be there. But, finally, the train lurched ahead, and when he exited at Astor Place, a lovely light early snow had powdered the subway steps. He waited for the bus.
He waited only eight minutes by his watch, but it seemed an hour, two hours—that he had been waiting his whole life. Finally, he decided to walk and hope to catch the bus along its route. But he still did not see it by the time he got to First Avenue, so he decided to save the fare and walk the rest of the way home to Eighth between C and D. By Avenue A, it began to be slippery underfoot and the snow came down in fists. Now the thought of going home and leaving again in the snowy evening to travel all the way on the snail’s pace bus to the White Horse Tavern for dinner seemed a weak idea. Anyway, he was still smarting from the bartender’s faraway look and the wisecracks from the bar regulars when he walked in. He decided to eat closer to home, a big late lunch that would keep him through the evening and keep him at home, writing.
Stanley’s on Twelfth and B was almost empty, the sawdust still spotless beige. It was early and quiet, with just a few old-timers, regulars from the neighborhood—the crowds his age came after eleven, when he would be in bed. He ordered a liverwurst sandwich on rye with raw onions and a bowl of rich mushroom soup, made in the matchbox kitchen by a Polish refugee from behind the Iron Curtain, an engineer who had to turn cook. A juniper berry topped the soup. That, the engineer told him, was the way you could tell it was authentically Polish. He always searched for the berry after that—like a pearl hiding in the fungus. Stanley, the owner, balder than the week before, brought him a draft beer without his asking. “It’s snowing hard,” he announced. “Should I salt the street now or later?” He did not wait for an answer and went back to the kitchen to shout at the cook in Polish.
He took two books from his briefcase, so that he could change the mood should he wish: Journey to the End of the Night—for the third time—and Under the Volcano, which he had underlined and made notes in the margins. “No one writes the sky as does Lowry, with its acid blues and clouds soaked in mescal.” He was proud of that note. One day he would write a book of just such notes. Note upon note building to a grand symphony. Then he voted against ever writing such a book, pretentious to its core—worse, it was facile, a cheat. He wanted to write the long narrative, with each sentence flowing seamlessly into another, each line with its own wisdom and mystery, each character a fascination, a novel that stirred and soared. But what was the point of that? What had become of his story?
