The Thomas Berryman Number

The downpour didn’t let up once until I was getting off the New London ferry back on Long Island. I began to feel like that L’il Abner character with the personal rain-cloud that follows him everywhere he goes.

Every light in Berryman’s house was burning. Floodlights on top of the garages showed up large patches of white dune grass.

I eased up the driveway, crunching gravel, fantasizing either a party or a suicide.

Oona was sitting all by herself in the front room. She was wrapped up in a red star quilt on the couch, bare feet and head showing, watching the TV.

“Ochs?” she looked at the dark screen door and called. “Is that Ochs?”

I stood on the porch, wondering who else it could be. Then I started to rap on the wood frame around the door. “Anybody home?” I called out. I was acting like I was fresh back from a ten-duck shoot. I was psyched up to talk with her about Tennessee.

She wasn’t in the mood for that, though.

“We can talk tomorrow,” she said. “Tomorrow’s soon enough. You’ve had enough for tonight, little man.”

I sat down in a musty easy chair. “Little man?” I laughed.

She sat across the width of the room wrapped up in her ball of red quilt. She was looking at me kind of funny. Boy-girl funny, I thought.

All scrunched up on the couch, she seemed to be freezing cold. She looked like she wanted someone to cuddle.

Both of us sat there not saying anything.

Easy Rider

was playing on TV, but it was already past the Jack Nicholson part. I was thinking that Oona reminded me of those high-paid and basically overwhelming photographic models … only this was the way they were behind the scenes: high-strung, and strung-out.

She watched me with a troubled look on her face. Then she smiled. “I’m going up now,” she said.

She made cocoa in the kitchen. Then she slipped up the creaky stairs with a pewter cup sticking out of her quilt like a candle. “Ochs,” she called from the top of the stairs, “Tom Berryman isn’t going to show up here.”

I sat downstairs trying to figure out what she had meant by that. Finally, after another ten minutes or so, I went upstairs to the room I was using.

I sprawled flat-out on a six-foot-long spring bed. My feet were sticking out the iron rungs.

I lay there in my white shirt and boxer shorts, smoking, watching the man in the moon, going a little crazy inside.

It’s not my favorite way to relax after a long day, but it’s a way.

I tried thinking about some of the things I had to ask her the next day. I couldn’t organize those thoughts, though.

I reached back and pulled the chain lamp over my bed.

I took off my shirt and brought a crinkly sheet up around my chin. Itchy new beard. Sandy sheets. Man in the moon looking puffy—like he’d been in a fistfight.

I heard bare feet padding out in the hall.

The bathroom door opened. Sound of the chain lamp in there. Bottles, Charlie and Pot Pourri, tinkling.

She ran herself a tub, and didn’t come out again until after I was asleep.

In the morning it was business as usual. The gardener out in the yard. Toes wiggling in wool socks. Her nervousness before the microphone. My nervousness with her.

Oona said she would tell me anything I wanted to know. She also said that she got a kick out of my 1930s Bible Belt morality. She wasn’t being mean, just truthful.

New York City, June 21

Lying around outside Berryman’s largest garage, just collecting seagull shit and other natural indignities, there is a black Porsche Targa, a Cadillac, and a mint-condition tan Mercedes 450SE convertible.

Early one morning in the last week of June, Berryman drove Oona into midtown Manhattan in the convertible. The air was thick, gauzy, which was good for hiding housing tracts and cigarette billboards.

The two of them jabbered and kidded for the entire two-hour commute. Hollering over wind and WABC, she told him that she’d become aware she was straightening her hair before mirrors some twenty or twenty-five times a day. But she told the story as a very funny joke.

He finally dropped her off to shop on Fifth Avenue. Watched her floppy yellow skimmer go through the waves of sleepy office workers like an umbrella. Disappear into Lord & Taylor.

Then Berryman used the sluggish blocking of a growling city bus to inch his way up to Central Park South, and (he was hoping) Ben Toy.

Ben Toy wasn’t at the Central Park apartment, so Berryman tried to call him at his own apartment. He tried to call him at the Flower & Toy, and at the apartments of lady friends.

He lighted a cigarillo and sat at his work desk, wondering what had happened to Toy. He couldn’t remember passing a month without seeing the funniest man in America.

After thinking about Toy for a while, getting as depressed as he allowed himself to get, he went to his wall safe. He took out fifteen fifty-dollar bills and he copied an address from a small red pad kept in with the cash. The address was 88 East End Avenue. Berryman was back in business. The business was Jimmie Horn.

Doubleparked on East 87th Street, he sat on the trunk of the Mercedes, thinking.