A Gate at the Stairs

by Lorrie Moore

  My mother had taken slightly to her bed. Mrs. Miniver she wasn’t. The plants in her mirrored flowerbeds had crept out into the lawn itself, which was soon waist high in weeds, fuzzy and humid, which for ten days in mid-July revealed themselves to be not just sneezeweed but nightshade and phlox. A field of purple. A riot of violet—balloon flowers, foxglove, and sage. It was a weird and beautiful joke that her flower garden had never looked this good before. The hollyhocks stood bright and straight and as high as the windows, with only the slightest of lists. Ghettos of echinacea appeared, and fuchsia-hued tobacco and yarrow, as if it had all made a deliberate decision to do so. Only the unpruned hydrangeas missed her and had begun early their self-cannibalizing tinge to green; lit to the gills with chlorophyll, barren and virginal both, their branches drooped into the dirt with robust pustules of cream and lime. Only in their bowed and defeated eating of the soil did my mother’s absence show. Ordinarily she would never have allowed this.

  Sometimes in the afternoon, upstairs in my room and still with my hawk outfit on, I would get out Ole Upright Bob, the double bass, dust him off, his bow quiver clipped at the tail beneath the bridge, like a scrotum, and we would rustle up a tune. There was a kind of buoyancy in making these four low strings sing something that was not a dirge. It was a demanding instrument, the stand-up bass—by comparison, my guitar, with its buttery, mushy fingerings, was a toy—and sometimes I just played it with open strings, Miles’s “Nardis,” which was basic, and which spelled starry backwards in Latin, or something, and which I loved, and which didn’t take a lot out of me. I had once, in the state music tryouts, played a solo from a double bass concerto by Sergei Koussevitzky, who in 1930 had been on the cover of Time magazine. That’s about all I knew about him. But either I wasn’t that good or the sight of a girl standing beside this huge wooden creature, grabbing its neck and stroking its gut, pulling the music out of the strings by force, made them ill at ease, and I was not selected. The faces of the panel listening were the very embodiment of skepticism made flesh, as if they were all saying Get a load of this!, and I had never experienced the weaponry of such expressions before. Subsequently, I drifted away from classical entirely, needing to leave behind the memory of that event. It was an aspect of childhood adults forgot to think about when they encouraged their children to try new things.

  My mother came to the doorway once, seeing me winged and wrapped around my bass, one hand moving squidlike down the neck of him, the other bouncing the bow in a kind of staccato, and she said, “No wonder I couldn’t sleep. Look at you. What a sight.” There I was, I supposed, a bass-faced bird, embracing the sloped shoulders of another bird whose long-necked wooden crested head, like a knight in chess, hovered over my head as if it were a fellow creature advising me what to do. Still, she smiled. I was playing “Bye Bye Blackbird.” She thought that it was my own arrangement, but it was one I had copied, or tried to copy—if only I’d had beefier hands and more of them—from Christian McBride.

  “Your grandmother used to sing that song!” she exclaimed, and then went back to her room to rest.

  I sometimes took to smacking the back of the bass for rhythm. My playing was full of wanderings that would return to fetch back the melody, or maybe only a handful of its notes, before venturing off again. I played a Bach cello prelude I had learned only the year before. It was sometimes fun to do this, make the bass play cello, like making an old man sing a young man’s song. Ole Bob would complain and bellow but get through it in a slower, hobbling way, his occasional geezer spritelinesses a farewell embrace of lost youth. It moved me. I had never known my grandfathers, but if they had lived longer, I imagined them looking and sounding a lot like Bob. It was the family name, after all.

  I began to miss my Suzuki, and so with my parents’ permission I took a bus back into Troy to get it out of storage. My little rented storage bin—years ago a decomposing body had been found two units down, said the manager—was right next to the bus station. And yet after that bus ride I needed to walk somewhere, to stretch my legs. In the storage bin, in addition to my bike there was a box, and I looked in it to find my books from this past year and also the pearls my mother had given me for Christmas, which I quickly removed and shoved in my purse. Once I had locked up again and parked my bike in a public parking stall, I ventured out, making my stride long and purposeful. As I walked, I dug into my bag for my pearls and put them on.

  I headed downtown. Troy seemed quiet and empty without the usual bustle of students. It seemed sleepy, out of step. It seemed to be from the dopey, lovely past.

  Without realizing it, I was headed in the direction of Le Petit Moulin. It was Saturday at five, cocktail hour, and the summer sun glossed everything in sight, the tree leaves and the storefront glass; even the Baraboo granite in the sidewalk squares sent out a sparkle. At this hour shadows were cast, in a translucent, notional shale. Halftones shimmied when the breeze jostled the trees.

  I would go into the restaurant and see if Sarah was there. I felt the need not just to see her but in some strange way to see if I might work for her again, somehow, in the restaurant, in the fall when I came back to school, and so I went there to find her and to apply for a job. They would probably not be seating until six, so it would just be employees there now.

  I walked up past the front window, where cheeses were displayed in old-fashioned glass cheese preservers, which were like cake cases with vinegar at the bottom. I climbed the cement stoop that was the restaurant’s entrance. So much for handicapped access. I had never been in this place, ever, and so I couldn’t be sure exactly what my breathlessness was from. Near the top of the stairs there was a potted lantana tree, though I didn’t know what it was called then or that it cost nine hundred dollars. All I knew was that it looked like a tree from the pages of a fairy tale, its pink blossoms and yellow blossoms … How could it produce two different colors—both orderly and ethereal and alive? It had to have been done by grafting or hybridization. It was a preposterously pretty thing.

  “May I help you?” asked a young man coming out from behind the maître d’s lectern. There were no customers yet in the place, though a cook in a white jacket was seated at the bar, and behind it a bartender was rubbing glasses clean with a towel. Above them hung old mill wheels, collected from the countryside and bolted decoratively onto crosspieces in the ceiling.

  “I would like to apply for a job.”

  “We are not taking any applications,” said the young man at the maître d’s station.

  “May I just fill one out anyway? I’m looking for any kind of work. I’ll wash dishes—I’ll chase mice out of the salad! Anything!” My own remark amused me, and I chuckled a little to myself, but the young man looked troubled.

  “This is our last night.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “The restaurant is closing tomorrow.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  “I know.”

  “Is Sarah Brink here?”

  “Sarah?” This caught him by surprise, and he studied my face for something—either what I knew, or how I knew her. “No,” he said slowly. “Sarah’s not here.”

  I looked around. The tables were elegantly done up with woven mats and white napkins. There were peruvian lilies in glass vases on each table and an angle of sun coming in showed only a tiny astral float of dust. Soon, with everyone bustling around, it would be gone. “Well—do you have a free table?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “I’d like a table. For dinner. Dinner for one. Just myself.”

  “We don’t serve until five-thirty, but I’m happy to seat you, if you’d like.”

  “I would. I would like that,” I said.

  “Thank you,” I said. He led me to a far table and handed me the record album cover with the printed sheet that served as a menu. Sarah had recycled all her old album covers and placed adhesive photo corners inside so that new menus could be photocopied and slipped in and out. I was given Neil Young’s Harvest—pe
rhaps there was an agricultural theme to her record selection—and though the wine list and the menu were placed inside I tried to see who was playing bass on this album—was it Tim Drummond? Stanley Clarke? Mingus himself? I had to peek behind the wine list to see for sure. Drummond.

  I went back to studying the menu—was it not a kind of poetry? I sipped wine for a half hour, studying each word for its imagery and rightness of sound. There were ramps and fiddle-heads, vinaigrettes and roux—summer had not yet taken these away. Though only now did I realize that roux was not spelled rue, as surely it should be and would be soon, at least by Sarah. There were astonishing things: crab mousseline with a shellfish cappuccino. There were fennel-cured salmon noisettes with a champagne foam. Not a Chubby Mary in the house. There was bison carpaccio with wilted spring leaves—might these be my dad’s? There were salads of lambs quarters and mint and sorrel with beets and pea shoots and tomatoes that were heirloom, like brooches, and cheeses that had won prizes in shows, like dogs. Both soups and salads wore corsages of squash blossoms and pea flowers. And at last, as I looked down through some of the most amazing writing I have ever read, everything shaved, braised, truffled, and “finished with”—cipollini confit! beauty heart radish! horseradish aioli!—there were my father’s potatoes: roasted Bo Keltjin Farm butterballs and fingerlings. And there, with a roasted saddle of lamb, were the embezzled gourmet “Keltjin duck eggs”—egg-shaped and egg-sized, as perfect as new potatoes in a can, but with the flavor of sweet butter and apples and briary wine. But not loamy. The flavor was loamless, without loam.

  Considering all that had come before on the menu, I tried not to feel that the family potatoes seemed rather minimally described—set forth without the words spring or buttery or meaty or milky or golden or crisp, not even smuggled, not even grown in rich stiff mud to help condense the taste. Still, there they were, apparently just speaking for themselves. That was something. My father’s name had been on this menu all this time, perhaps for years, without my knowing. And since it was just a printed sheet I asked: “May I keep the menu?”

  “Of course,” said the waiter, who not only refilled my wine-glass with Prairie Fumé but offered me a black napkin. “I notice you are wearing black,” he said.

  I didn’t understand. “So I can match?” My jeans were black, but my shirt was actually navy.

  “Well, you might not want to get the white napkin lint on your outfit.” He backed away a little. “It’s up to you.”

  “Oh, of course,” I said. Eating was serious business here, I knew. “It’s a good thing I brought my black dental floss!” Maybe I was crazy; he certainly looked at me as if I were.

  “Dental floss comes in black? Or it just gets black?” Perhaps he hated me.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. I stared back at the menu. “How are the potatoes?” I asked without looking up.

  “Very good.” He smiled. “And there are two things not on the menu that I can tell you about if you want. The first is an almond-encrusted lake trout for thirty-four dollars.” Thirty-four dollars for a fish probably caught in the pond across the road from Dellacrosse High seemed, well, high. (And here, silly us, we’d called it high school because everyone seemed so stoned!) Oh, the wine: the wine was plummy like juice. Now, here was some real red wine research!

  “Thank you.” I nodded and put my black napkin in my lap, setting the white one on the side of my seat, in case I had to blow my nose. “And what is the second?”

  “Oh. Sorry. It’s a skirt steak served with shiitake mushrooms and its own jew.”

  “Its own jew?”

  The boy looked startled. “Yes,” he said. “I think so.” He looked quickly at the jottings on his notepad he had jammed in his pocket.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Thank you.” I tried to smile. The sound of Delton County was never terribly far away. “I thought for a second there you were going to say, ‘a skirt steak with its own skirt.’”

  “No,” he said, turning and rushing away.

  The angle of the sun slowly lowered and heated the room, then lowered some more so that the room began to fall into shadow.

  The waiter brought me a baby cup of parsnip puree with watercress and crème fraîche. “What is this?” I asked, and he explained. An amuse-bouche.

  Would it poison me as the tapenade did Murph? Who cared?

  “Right,” I said, and lifted the tiny handled cup to my mouth and slurped. I was like a giant raiding a dollhouse. A huge Goldilocks among teeny tiny bears. I felt monstrous to myself. The stem of watercress went up my nose.

  I was then brought another tiny thing for a doll: a fig with caramelized phyllo and pine nuts. A candy bar for the gods.

  I had never eaten such intricately prepared food before, and doing so in this kind of mournful, prayerful solitude, in a public place, where by this time no one but I was seated without a companion, made each bite sing and roar in my mouth. Still, it was an odd experience for me to have the palate so cared for and the spirit so untouched. It was a condition of prayerless worship. Endless communion. Gospel-less church.

  As if a compote were a chauffeur, every dish seemed richly to have one. I ordered the homemade asparagus ravioli—ravioluses!—with thyme and asparagus and chopped herbs, a vegetable tag-teaming itself. Gradually, I felt I had started to ascend into some kind of low-level paradise. It was astonishing to eat food that tasted like this. Was there ever a time on the planet before now when people had eaten this well? Surely people were eating in a way that evolution had no preparation or reason for. It was a miracle, gratuitous, dizzying and lovely. A “celeriac puree” could no doubt mend all cracks, remove all stains, but what was a “torchon”? A “ganache”? A “soffrito”? A “rillette”? Even the tenderly braised escarole offered up a phrase in a seemingly new tongue, familiar words reshaped in the high-scoring points and busy luck of Scrabble or Dutch.

  I ordered a side of the Keltjin Farm potatoes.

  “With the ravioli?” asked the waiter coldly.

  “I’m related,” I said.

  “To the ravioli?”

  “To the potatoes.” I would spare him the conversations I’d sometimes had with Sarah—about the terroir, the key element being sand that would move and let them push out but not too far.

  “Oho!” he said, as if this were even funnier.

  I ordered a kind of fish called kona kampachi. Was that not the name of an exotic starlet from the 1940s? Did she not wear a one-piece skirted bathing suit, her breasts like pointed party hats? She came served with a lemon half wrapped in a beribboned little net. I squeezed and sprayed and dripped and did not have to pick out the seeds. I’d never before seen a lemon in a beribboned net. A lemon dressed like a fairy princess. Bring this to the homeless shelter, I heard one of the Wednesday-night voices exclaim. The potatoes arrived perfectly parboiled and could have been strung as a necklace for Barbara Bush.

  I found myself eating slowly, ordering more, and staying late. The waitstaff had begun cleaning as I sat there in an almost deserted dining room. “Don’t worry. Though we’re shutting down early, as it’s our last night, there’s no need to hurry.” I ordered some sherry and dessert cheeses, with their lingering taste of rot, ammonia, and adhesive bandages. There were truffle cheese with specks, twelve-year-old cheddar with crystals of salty sugar, slivers of goat cheese with the consistency of dried toothpaste. Cow cheese, sheep cheese, goat cheese—all the animals of childhood were here. Except for a pig. Where was the pig cheese? I refrained from asking, despite the wine.

  I ate a bowl of fresh strawberries drizzled with a balsamic vinegar so rich it had the viscosity of honey. The berries were garnished with the same carmelized sage I’d once tasted in Sarah’s kitchen. Every serving I’d had so far, however, seemed tiny and delicate, so that it seemed less like dinner than a metaphor for dinner. I began to order more. I ordered a second dessert of homemade sorbets herbally accessorized with chocolate mint, and lavender and raspberries, their little sacs burst
and smeared across the dish like bloody bugs. I’d heard Sarah speak of these sorbets: last February she’d said that she would make them in various flavors and colors and put them out on the fire escape to keep them cold and there they would sit in their little dishes, sparkling all evening outside beneath the winter moon. When I mentioned this to the waiter, that I’d heard these sorbets were homemade and chilled out on the fire escape in cold weather, under the moon, his face pinched inward, as if there were a small stink in the room. “Who told you that?” he asked.

  My scooter was not really intended for a sixty-mile journey at night, but it would have to do. I gunned it past a slow city bus that was wheezing its way along, spewing exhaust. Once I was outside of Troy the smell of manure rose up on either side of me in the thickening dusk. The sky, which had begun looking the deep color of a plum, had now opened up in places to a plum’s eerie gold-green flesh. The winds were switching in a way that made me edgy. Rain moved in like a pattering animal. Riding home like this—was this stupid of me to do?

  Was the pope Catholic?

  Was water wet?

  Leaves flicked up their silvery undersides. The sky had the gilded look of storm. Some of the clouds had caught the light of the receding city, and I could see there was rotation in them. I went as fast as I could. I sometimes felt my tires skid and would then have to slow in order to straighten them in time. During one long stretch between two endless cornfields it seemed as if I were just standing still, going nowhere, the landscape was so tire-somely the same. And then the road began to roll and there were trees but the air remained motionless yet with sudden loud gusts. In the dark, one had to swerve to avoid the roadkill—the possums were smashed to slipperiness and the raccoons were large and often stiff with rigor mortis; even in death they could topple you. An unfortunate porcupine on the center line looked like a decorative but treacherous cactus.