by Jenna Blum
“Grout?” said Peter doubtfully. “You eat wall paste?”
June laughed. “Now that I think of it, that’s probably why they named it that,” she said. “It has exactly the same consistency. No, it’s a flour and milk pudding. The legend is the Norwegian farm wives used to give birth, eat a bowl of rommegrot, and go back to work in the fields. And if that isn’t fortifying enough for you, there’s always lutefisk,” and she made a gagging noise.
“And what is this? Is it like gefilte fish?”
“I have no idea,” said June, “but I’m sure lutefisk is more repulsive. It’s cod boiled in lye—it stinks to high heaven, and it’s like eating an eyeball.”
“Lye,” said Peter thoughtfully. “I supposed it must originally have been a method of preservation . . .”
He took out his notebook to jot this down and looked up to find June watching him with a mixture of, he thought, fondness and exasperation. “Only you could find lutefisk interesting,” she said and ground out her cigarette. “Of course, you could always come with me and sample it for yourself.”
“I wish I could,” Peter said mildly. He picked up her nearest hand and kissed it. The orchestra had reassembled and was playing “Silent Night” with a swing tempo. Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht, sang a small voice in Peter’s head.
“I don’t have to go,” said June, squeezing his fingers. “I could visit at Easter instead, and you could come with me. But meanwhile, I could stay here with you.”
“Nothing would please me more,” said Peter, “but I fear you would be bored to tears. I’ll be so busy with the New Year’s Eve gala, you see—oh, did I tell you?” He lowered his voice and stage-whispered, from behind his palm, “I hired an ice sculptor. There will be statues at Masha’s! The Russian Tea Room’s owner will turn green with jealousy.”
June withdrew her hand from Peter’s and sat back. “That’s nice,” she said, gazing out over the dancing couples. Her dress had ridden up to nearly the tops of her thighs, and Peter couldn’t help noticing the interested glances in her direction.
“What is it?” he said.
“Nothing,” said June.
“It is my experience,” said Peter, “that when a woman says this, she means quite the opposite.”
June shook out another cigarette. “I just wish you were a little more . . .”
“What, June?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Into it?”
“Into . . . ,” said Peter. He struggled with the phrase. “Into what?”
June exhaled with frustration. “It means enthusiastic.”
“I am enthusiastic,” said Peter. “This is how I am when enthusiastic.”
“Okay, that’s nice,” said June. “I know not everybody makes a big song and dance out of everything. But I just wish . . .”
“What?” said Peter again. He was trying to modulate his irritation—it was like having a conversation with the caterpillar from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
“That we’d be together for New Year’s, for instance. That we’d made plans.”
“But that’s the biggest night of the year for the restaurant,” said Peter, “and you’ll be in—”
“Paris. I know.”
“A work assignment you accepted,” said Peter. “I don’t understand the problem.”
“The problem is, I invited you to come with me—on the magazine’s dime—and you won’t. Not even for a weekend.”
“June, I am a businessman. I cannot completely abandon Masha’s. Lena can run it for only so long.”
“That doesn’t really wash,” said June. “I’ve never known a chef to turn down the chance to go to Paris.”
Peter grappled with his temper. He had not told her—he had not told anyone—that he would never, ever set foot on the European continent again. Why should he have to? Anybody with an ounce of sensitivity would see it was self-explanatory.
“Well, you know one now,” he said. “And was I upset that you have chosen to go to France with Mademoiselle rather than stay with me? We both love our work, June. We are both career people. New Year’s Eve is just a night, a square on a calendar. Was I angry when you went to Lisbon for Halloween?”
He lowered his head bullishly and smiled up from beneath his brows, meaning to make a joke out of it, but June sighed.
“No,” she said. “That’s just it. You weren’t angry at all.”
She set her cigarette in the ashtray and stood up.
“I think I should go,” she said.
“What?” said Peter. “Before dessert?”
He rose as well, automatically, and the waiter, who was bringing forth their Floating Island, backpedaled in some confusion. June kissed her fingers and touched Peter’s cheek.
“I’ll be in touch,” she said. “Happy Christmas.”
Off she floated through the whirling couples—the band was playing a Strauss waltz. Peter watched June thread between the tables and the dancers. He held up one finger at their waiter—Wait, please—and caught up with June at the hallway coat check. She was digging through her silver clutch, and Peter took their chit out of his wallet.
“Is this what you’re looking for?” he asked.
June held out her hand. “Please,” she said.
Peter closed his fingers over the chit. “Not until I wish you Happy Christmas.”
“Go ahead.”
Peter took the jeweler’s box from his pocket. “Happy Christmas,” he said.
June eyed the box but made no move to take it. Her face was very still except for a tiny muscle that jumped like a minnow near her left eye.
“What is this,” said June finally, “a bribe?”
“I suppose that depends upon whether you like it.”
Peter gave the box a little shake. The coat check girl peeked from behind her curtain.
“Go on,” said Peter, “it won’t bite you. What do you think will pop out, a jack-in-the-box?”
“More like something from a Cracker Jack box,” said June.
But she took the box and flipped open the lid. Her expression shifted—Peter couldn’t quite read it in the dim red light of the hall: Surprise? Disappointment? The coat check girl nearly broke her stomach in half leaning over the counter to see.
June lifted the necklace out of its satin nest. “It’s beautiful,” she said, in what Peter thought was a curiously toneless voice. What had he done wrong now?
“I hope you like it,” he said. “Because if not I’ll have a devil of a time finding some other June to give it to.”
June said nothing, but she presented the back of her neck to Peter, who took this as a signal to fasten the necklace around it. Once he had secured the clasp, he kissed her nape, where the point of her hair was just visible beneath the white turban. June turned and touched her collarbone, where on silver mesh tiny diamonds spelled out her name.
“There,” said Peter. “Happy Christmas, love. Now let’s have dessert.”
“What did you say?” June said.
“Dessert,” said Peter, “a Floating Island—”
“Not that. You called me ‘love.’”
Peter inclined his head. He hadn’t intended to say this, it had slipped out of its own accord, but he found he didn’t want to rescind it, either. “If the name fits,” he said.
June put her hands on either side of his face and kissed him.
“I love you, too,” she said. “Now prove it, mister. Dance with me.”
“Dance!” said Peter in mock horror. “Have you forgotten my ice-skating disaster? Wait until you see me on the dance floor.”
“I have,” said June. “At the Copa, the Factory . . . Not a pretty sight.”
She smiled at the coat check girl, who withdrew into her window like a cuckoo into a clock. They returned to the dining room. The orchestra was in full swing, the bandleader singing Bing Crosby: “Iiiiiii’m dreaming of a whiiiiiiiiiite Christmas . . .” June led Peter, mock-protesting, onto the parquet floor. People smiled at Peter sn
apping his fingers and stomping out of rhythm. “Like this?” he said. “Can you help me?” June put her arms around his neck and told him no, he was hopeless. They stood in place, swaying.
* * *
“You know, you really could use a decorator in here,” June said.
They were in the living room of Peter’s apartment, sitting on the floor on either side of a wok full of scrambled eggs. The sun was just coming up over the East River; the room was filling with gold. It was Christmas Eve morning and June had an early flight to Minnesota; she wouldn’t let Peter accompany her to Teterboro. No, too much trouble, she said, and didn’t he have to work? But Peter had gotten up with her and made some breakfast. It was the least he could do, even if she wouldn’t eat it.
He looked around his living room and said, “You don’t like my minimalist style?”
June jabbed the air with her chopsticks, which she preferred to regular cutlery because, she said, they helped her eat less.
“It’s very Breakfast at Peter’s,” she said, referencing one of her favorite films. “It would be charming if you were Audrey Hepburn. As it is, it just screams bachelor.”
Peter put his hand over his heart. “Guilty as charged . . . until now.”
June leaned over the wok and kissed him, then unfolded her long limbs to prowl the room. She was wearing only one of Peter’s white button-down shirts, and he watched her with pleasure. She ran her fingers over the dark-green leather couch, the Steinway grand piano—the only furniture, besides his bed, that Peter had accumulated in fifteen years. Even these were donations from Sol, castoffs from the estate of a client who’d had to leave the country, Sol had said, rather quickly.
June lifted the lid of the piano and peeked beneath it at the keys. “I’ve never heard you play anything.”
“No coincidence. I don’t play.”
June laughed. “Then why do you have it?”
“Because it’s beautiful,” Peter said.
“Doesn’t it bother you, to live with so little?”
Peter thought of his parents’ home in Charlottenburg, crammed to the rafters with cherished items that had belonged not only to them but to four previous generations. The walnut dining table, capable of seating twenty. His grandmother’s silver that the scullery maid, Berte, polished every week. The Belgian lace tablecloths; the sheets hand-stitched by French nuns. His mother’s Oriental rugs. His father’s prized humidor and five antique Daimlers. What good had any of those things done them? Where were they now?
“I like to travel light,” he said.
He would have added that he was rarely here, that before June he had spent all his time at Masha’s, but he didn’t want to resuscitate the previous night’s discussion about his work habits. Instead he said, “You should talk—that garret you live in, with the bathtub in the kitchen. With a roommate, yet!”
June made a face. “That’s not a home. It’s more like a bus station. I can’t wait to have my own place someday.”
She beckoned for her cigarettes and Peter got up, stiffly—one difference between forty-five and twenty-five was that twenty-five didn’t ache from sitting on the floor. He took her cigarettes from the mantel and shot the pack to her across the bare floor.
“You need at least a few rugs,” said June. “And some lamps, maybe a pair in the foyer, on a demilune table?” She frowned, hands on hips. “A mirror on that far wall would amplify that spectacular view of the river . . . Did you know I wanted to be a decorator when I was little?”
“Not a farm wife with six children, like all the other girls?” Peter teased.
“Please. I killed every baby doll I ever had.”
“And not a world-famous supermodel?”
“I would have liked that better, but I wouldn’t’ve dreamed it’d happen in a million years. I was eight feet tall by the time I was six, and so skinny—my mother thought I had a tapeworm, and all the boys called me Stilts.”
Peter smiled. It was a sign of June’s youth that she didn’t think she wanted marriage and children—all women did, eventually; it was tucked into their biology. Perhaps June just hadn’t reached that stage yet. Peter pictured her as a girl, all elbows and knees and braids sticking out at awkward angles, scowling as she rearranged a dollhouse.
“I’m sure you were adorable,” he said.
“Only to a discerning eye,” said June absently. She held her hands up in a square, framing the east window. “All I ever wanted was to make things beautiful.”
“Which you do,” said Peter, “simply by existing.”
She flashed him a quick grin. “Thanks, you’re a doll,” she said in her girl-about-town voice. “But really, I don’t want to just be decorative—I want to create decorative settings. Beauty doesn’t last forever. Beautiful places do.”
Peter could have told her otherwise, that nothing on earth was exempt from its own demise, not a king, clerk, bird, or tree; no matter if it were a modern skyscraper, a stolid row of burghers’ apartments, a castle that had stood for a millennium—all could be reduced in a flash to stones. But why spoil her Christmas Eve–morning reverie? “Well, Stilts,” he said, “how about this: when you get back from Minnesota, you can decorate this place.”
June looked at him. “Really?”
“Really and truly.”
She came to him and threw her arms around him. “Thank you! That’s the best Christmas gift I’ve ever had!”
“You mean besides the necklace?” said Peter.
June touched it, the diamonds glittering on her clavicle; last night, when they’d come back from the Rainbow Room, it was the only thing she’d worn. “Of course.”
Peter kissed her. “It’s getting late. Why don’t I take a quick shower, and then we’ll get you a cab.”
He walked down the hall to his bathroom, whistling “Silver Bells,” and shaved while he waited for the water to run hot. He would miss June, he thought with relief as he stepped into the shower. Five days seemed suddenly too long. Maybe he would surprise her by meeting her return plane—
“Hey, got room in there for me?”
Peter jumped and reached for his robe, but it was not in its usual place on the back of the door. “I’m just about to get out,” he said, “if you’d hand me a towel—”
But he was too late: the curtain rattled back on its metal rings, and then she was in there with him, naked. At least Peter assumed she was, from the warm length of her pressed behind him. The water poured over them. It would have been erotic, if only—
“You don’t have to hide your scars, you know,” said June. “I’ve seen them.”
Peter stood dumbly. “When?” he asked finally.
“Just glimpses here and there,” said June. “But I’ve felt them all along.”
Peter sighed. And he had been so careful! He never came to bed without pajamas. He never swam without a shirt. And he never left the bathroom door unlocked when he bathed. Happiness, today, had made him careless. But he should have suspected June would have felt them. They were thick, raised, the size of ropes. They would be tactile even through a layer of cloth.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “They’re grotesque.”
“Oh, Peter! Please, don’t apologize. They’re just . . . How did you get them?”
“From an SS sergeant,” Peter said, “at Auschwitz, with a whip and a bad temper.”
“Jesus,” said June.
“No,” said Peter. “Just a fat man named Stultz.”
He got out of the shower and pulled on his robe—there it was, the traitorous thing, on the lid of the hamper. He started combing his hair, automatically, with no real idea what he was doing. So now June had seen them—the braille of Peter’s humiliation and helplessness. Next she would want to know what it had been like. Americans always wanted to know—they were like children that way, well-meaning, insatiably curious. What was it like? What was it like, Ruth had demanded the first months Peter had lived in Larchmont, following him around with Life and Time, their lurid covers
proclaiming, new nazi horror discovered! thousands of corpses unearthed in pit! “Did you see anything like this? Or this? What about this? My poor, poor Bubbie! How did you get through it? What was it like?” There had been no way to tell her, even if Peter had wanted to. About the perversity of luck, for instance, so that the whipping Stultz gave Peter on the Appellplatz for no reason one icy January day had laid Peter’s back open to the bone, which was why Peter had passed out and been taken to the infirmary, which was where he had in his delirium called out recipes for sauerbraten and schnitzel, which was why when he came out of it he had been reassigned, was no longer on pickup detail, on which Peter had loaded corpses no heavier than box kites on the crematorium wagon, but on kitchen duty, which was where he was working two months later when the Allies liberated the camp. So really, the whipping Stultz had given him was what had saved him. There was no way to tell anyone who hadn’t been there any of that, how your very concept of luck turned inside out and upside down, so that when you found yourself alive at the end of it, you were no longer sure whether that was a good thing.
Peter watched June in the mirror as she emerged from the shower, her admirable but too-thin body glistening. She wrapped herself in a towel and came up behind him, and Peter waited for her to ask: What was it like? Instead, she said, “What happened to him? Was he hanged at Nuremberg?”
“Who, Stultz?” said Peter, and June nodded. “No, he was a pretty small fish.”
“I wish we could find him,” said June. “I’d kill him.”
“Would you now?” said Peter. “How would you do that?”
“I’d shoot him.”
“Ah. You have a license to kill, like 007?”
“I’d push him out the window,” said June. Her eyes were red, but she was starting to smile.
“And I’d hold it open for you,” said Peter. He looked at his watch, which covered his other set of scars—this one he would bet the restaurant June didn’t know about. Nobody did, not Sol and Ruth, not his staff. Peter never, ever removed his watch; one of the best days of his life had been when the Swiss Army had offered their waterproof timepiece for sale.