In the Night Café by Joyce Johnson Page B

for storage, burial purposes, plenty of room for whatever.” He got a flashlight and took us up to see them. The windows were gone, he told us, and that tended to make the whole building cold in the winter. Birds had gotten in up there, pigeons, you could hear them chortling in the dark. When Howard Stricker turned his flashlight on, a couple of them got scared and flapped up to the ceiling. I saw piles of white stones like fragments from some ancient ruin. After we started living in the studio, I never went up to those floors myself, though Tom rummaged around there all the time.
    The studio was two enormous rooms as gray as a cellar. You could see that at first Howard Stricker had tried to fix the place up, had even been ambitious. He’d constructed a high platform for a bed and built a big stone fireplace and there was a wall outside the bathroom made of dull-colored chunks of marble embedded in cement. At some point, though, he’d lost interest. There was an old three-burner stove and a refrigerator from the forties that hummed loudly above our conversation and a sink encrusted with whatever he was putting on his pontoons.
    We saw them that night—long, slender things. They did have a grace. Tom was quite taken with them. He told Howard Stricker they looked like Brancusi birds. But it worried me that you could see each seam in the wood. I thought they had an awfully homemade look.
    Howard Stricker said he’d hoped he’d be through by now, but he’d run out of money. He’d been advised to put many coats of some terribly expensive acrylic sealer on his pontoons and he had to buy more wood to make a deck and a small cabin by August. He said he’d seen such boats in the South Pacific when he was in the service, and it was beautiful the way they skimmed the waves; the tension between the pontoons made a perfect balance.
    He seemed to like having us there. I had the feeling he never had much company. He drew sketches for Tom of the pontoons’ inner structure and made us some muddy coffee that he poured out of a pot through a strainer. He said he’d invite us to the launching.
    Finally Tom asked, “Well, what would it take to reimburse you for all the improvements here?”
    Howard Stricker thought it over, staring at us. “Four hundred dollars,” he said. “I could get more, but that would be enough. Rent’s seventy dollars a month. No one’s supposed to live in this building. The health inspectors will come around and bother you, but don’t pay them any attention.” He left the room so Tom and I could talk about it.
    Tom was tremendously excited. He walked up and down in the front of the studio, trying to measure it off. “There’s so much space here, Joanna. Look at the length of those walls. You could paint anything, make something huge. This is our kind of luck, kiddo. Everything from now on is going to happen just like this.” I believed it, too, though I think part of me was skeptical. There was all that grayness. It was almost as if the walls were imbued with Howard Stricker, as if his loneliness and failure had somehow eaten their way inside them. But I believed in our luck.
    I had a dream one night after that in which I saw Howard Stricker’s catamaran floating quite nicely on a deep green sea as still and flat as a lake. It was sort of like an oversized sled with its deck high up on runners. People sat on the deck calmly drinking coffee. Then the sea boiled up into enormous waves. The boat was thrown about, tipped over onto its side. All the people on the deck spilled off like toy figurines and I found myself with them in the terrible water.
    Tom said what I’d seen in my dream was what sailors called white water. He’d run into it himself on a minesweeper in the Ligurian Sea. “It was like being trapped in a tin can with the hand of God shaking it. There were times you’d get real religious out there. That was