For the first time in many weeks, Albie looks at his wife without feeling the need to close his eyes, and like a nine-year-old boy struck by love for the first time, he says, “You look like Snow White.”
“Really?” she asks. “I look okay?”
“Better than okay.” Albie gets up from the chair. “You look gorgeous.”
Although his tie needs no adjusting, Bunny nonetheless slides her hand over the heavy silk as if straightening it out, a decidedly wifely gesture, and then steps back to take in the full effect. “That is one handsome tie,” she says. “Where’d you get it?”
“My wife bought it for me,” Albie says, and Bunny says, “Your wife has good taste.” Then she asks, “Did you feed Jeffrey?”
After Albie says that of course he fed Jeffrey, there’s a pause that precedes the question. “You’re sure you want to go?”
Getting There
Yet another taxi passes them by, and Albie, who is hardly without dorky tendencies, croons, Baby, it’s cold outside, just the one line and it’s off-key. Bunny suggests that they walk instead. “We could be here all night before we get a cab.” She gets no argument from Albie. A native Manhattanite, he always prefers to walk, and Bunny is as comfortable in high heels as she would be in a pair of those Finnish nature shoes that her sister wears.
The wind is with them; that is, at their backs, wind that periodically gusts, hurrying them along as if they were fallen leaves or candy wrappers. They blow past revelers who are hunched over pushing into the wind, their heads lowered like battering rams. Forging ahead is a cluster of five young women wearing those occasional plastic eyeglasses, 2009, coated in silver glitter. The double zeroes are centered to look like the round-rim eyeglasses worn by Harry Potter. The girls shriek as the wind musses their hair and blows their dresses tight against their thighs, and Bunny predicts that before the night is over, one of them will have barfed on the sidewalk, another will be bent over a bathroom sink in a bar on Third Avenue, and the other three will weep with pity for themselves.
“How generous of you,” Albie notes, and Bunny says, “You want to bet I’m right?”
“You can’t bet when the outcome is impossible to know.”
“I was speaking rhetorically.”
“Right,” Albie says. “I knew that.”
“Sure you did.” Bunny taps the side of her head, and says, “You’re not all there.”
“Look who’s talking.” Albie puts his arm around Bunny and pulls her close to him.
Prompt: Two People Having Lunch
(300 words or less)
I’d selected the restaurant not for the food, but for the atmosphere. My mother, I knew, would like this place because it was what she would call charming. “Charming” was my mother’s word. “Quaint” was another of her words that set my teeth on edge. My mother was deeply enamored of all things charming and quaint. Charming and quaint is often hokey and fake. For family vacations we went to places like Williamsburg, Virginia and Stockbridge, Massachusetts, re-creations of Colonial American towns where we saw how candles were made and horseshoes forged. We bore witness to reenactments of battles between redcoats and blue coats. This restaurant, which I chose, was decorated to look like an old-fashioned ice cream parlor, and it specialized in quiche Lorraine. “Specialized” was yet another of my mother’s words.
Even then, an adult, at least in the eyes of the law, I was desperate for my mother’s love. Later, after I was married, Albie had said to me, “You need to quit trying to get what will never happen.”
Having arrived at the charming restaurant a few minutes early, I sat at a window-side table where I studied the menu. When my mother got there, I stood up and kissed her on the cheek. Age had not diminished my mother’s beauty. Before sitting down, she set her pocketbook on the far end of the table where it rested against the window, where it was out of the way, but decidedly there, to be seen. I stared at the bag, and my mother said, “You should’ve seen Janet’s face when she saw it.” Janet, one of her closest friends, was comfortable. Comfortable or very comfortable or well-off or well-to-do were her euphemisms for rich. According to my mother, only vulgar people said rich. Her ideas about the behavior and the lexicon of fine people, such as herself, were fixed. “Fine” was yet another one of her words that pained me. Janet wasn’t rich rich, but she was very comfortable.
Cupping her hand around her mouth and leaning in closer to me, my mother had a secret she was anxious to share. “It’s a reproduction,” she said.
From two blocks away and at night, you’d spot that pocketbook as a knockoff. One of those achingly cheap knockoffs, the kind with tin hardware or crooked seams or the poop-brown leather embossed with LW instead of LV. “You’d never know it was a copy, would you?” my mother said, and she waited for me to agree.
The thing is, it’s not as if my mother had been longing for a Louis Vuitton pocketbook, but what she did want, what she ached for, was to give the impression that my father’s business was more successful than it was, that he was a big earner, a man much admired by his own standards of admiration, a man who could afford to buy his wife a Louis Vuitton pocketbook. Because my father believed that dignity was measured in dollars, my mother believed that her twenty-dollar knockoff Louis Vuitton pocketbook lent her husband stature on his terms, which also happened to be the terms of her friend Janet.
By this point in time, I had learned to say, “You’re right. No one would ever know.”
Long before this point in time, my mother was flipping through one of her magazines—Family Circle or Redbook, an issue dedicated to home decorating tips. In the section on Kitchens, she was overcome by the incomparable charm of an exposed brick wall. Even without an exposed brick wall, our kitchen was gagging on charm: yellow calico potholders trimmed with red bric-a-brac and matching dishtowels, ceramic salt and pepper shakers in the guise of Amish children, the radio fashioned as an old-time telephone, the sort with a hand-crank, and more decorative roosters than any kitchen should have to bear. Unfortunately our house had no brick wall to expose, and racing through the article for the information she was after, my mother learned that it would be prohibitively expensive to lay brick on sheetrock. However, the magazine, aware that the price tag for the incomparable charm of an exposed brick wall was steep, suggested to their readers the affordable alternative: a faux-brick veneer. Sheets of clay-red, brick-shaped molded polymer, the edges darkened as if weathered by time and smoke and soot, and it was as easy to install as it was to hang wallpaper.
All day, while my sisters and I were at school, she was at it, pausing only now and then to stretch and rub the small of her back. At ten minutes past three, when Nicole and Dawn got home, our mother was nearly done installing her faux-brick veneer. Nearly done, but not quite, and because she wanted her daughters to get the full effect that would be best appreciated when the job was completed, she called out, “Don’t come in.” Nicole and Dawn plopped down on the couch. A few minutes later, I arrived home—I was a dawdler—to find Nicole drawing a picture of a lake surrounded by mountains, a hawk flying overhead. Dawn, picking at the eczema on her elbow, without looking up, said, “Don’t go in the kitchen.”
Before I got the chance to ask why, our mother called out, “Okay, girls.” Like a game show hostess calling attention to the grand prize, she extended her arm with a flourish to usher us into the kitchen. “Ta-da,” she said, and then she asked, “Doesn’t it look exactly like real brick?”
Dawn nodded like a bobble-head and said, “It looks just like the fireplace where those ladies made candles,” and Nicole said, “It looks exactly like real brick to me,” and I said, “Are you blind?” I said, “It’s totally fake. Not in a million years would anyone think this is real brick.”
The same as after a sucker punch or the flash between an aneurysm and death, there was that split second of incomprehension followed by incredulity, and then our mother sw
iftly left the room. Swiftly, but not before I got a good look at the expression on her face. Dawn ran after her, calling out, “Mommy, no!” Nicole glared at me, and as if that weren’t enough unhappiness for one day, she asked, “And you wonder why no one in the family likes you?”
Until then, I had wondered no such thing; until then, I’d assumed they all liked me just fine, but once Nicole put it into words, spelled it out for me, it made sense; as much sense a nine-year-old girl could fathom of no one in the family likes you.
Fantails
A forcible blast of frigid wind sweeps them through the door where Albie parts a heavy red curtain, a buffer against the cold. On the other side of the curtain, Bunny looks around slowly, and like a puppet come to life, deliberately, as if the only way to take in this room is through the sum of its parts.
That the Red Monkey has managed to retain its cachet long after its Asian-fusion expiration date can be credited, in large part, to the fact that—thank you Susan Sontag—camp is forever, and the Red Monkey is up to its monkey neck in Hollywood Regency chinoiserie: glossy black wallpaper flocked eponymously with red velveteen monkeys in a variety of monkey poses, red silk lanterns hanging from the ceiling, and Art Deco wall sconces lit with brothel-red bulbs. Mirrors are framed in faux bamboo. Call it camp or call it a tribute to French colonialism aiming to evoke an air of romance for a time and place, which maybe had a certain glamour to it if you had no objection to oppression, subjugation, forced labor and the depletion of natural resources, which included people as well as rubber trees.
The young woman who checks their coats is wearing a formfitting áo dài that is the same shade of poppy red as her lipstick, her nail polish and the red silk flower pinned behind her ear. Her hair is done up in a French twist. Bunny knows that her red silk tunic is called an áo dài because in high school she had to write a paper for geography class on Asia, and Bunny wrote about the various traditional costumes, for which she got a C, along with the teacher’s explanation for the poor grade: Frivolous. Mild criticism, all criticisms considered.
Albie takes the coat-check chip, red on one side, black on the other, and slips it into his jacket pocket. Scanning the room, he sees Julian at the bar waving to them. Julian is aiming for nonchalance, but if you knew Julian, you’d know he’s slightly hysterical because Bunny and Albie are late.
“We couldn’t get a cab,” Albie apologizes. “We walked,” he says.
“No problem.” Julian claps him on the back, and Trudy fingers the sleeve of Bunny’s dress. “Vintage?” she asks. Trudy is wearing an austere black dress. She’s got a closet full of these black dresses, and each one costs more than a car. Elliot is wearing his usual shaved head and black-frame eyeglasses. As a couple, Trudy and Elliot have got that whole Berlin minimalist thing down pat, although their daughter, who is seven, refuses to wear anything that isn’t lavender, which they find ironic and amusing. At first glance, it looks as if Lydia shopped for her outfit in a laundry basket: a gray sweater buttoned incorrectly rendering it asymmetrical, a teal-blue tulip skirt, lemon colored tights that sag and pink ballet flats. The overall effect is of a middle-aged woman dressed like the kind of goofy twelve-year-old girl who gets overly excited about origami. But look carefully, because every four weeks she drops four hundred and fifty dollars to get her hair cut to look as if she never gets a haircut, and the sagging yellow tights and pink flats were featured in last month’s Vogue. Her steel-frame eyeglasses, which you might reasonably assume came free with a group insurance plan, are Prada.
Now that they’ve finished sizing each other up, they make their way to the podium at the entrance to the dining room, where the hostess, also wearing a formfitting poppy-red áo dài, tells them their table is being cleared, it’ll just be a moment, and where Julian instructs them to take note of the floor. Glass tiles set contiguously; thick glass tiles, scratch resistant and artificially lit, cover a nearly wall-to-wall pool where red, black and gold ornamental fish swim below and around lily pads. As if it might not be recognized for what it is, Julian says, “It’s a koi pond. Isn’t that too much?”
“Yes,” Bunny says. “It is. It’s too much.”
Lydia informs them that the smaller fish are the males. “The male koi are smaller and their tails are more elaborate,” she explains, “to attract the females.”
“Actually, those are goldfish,” Albie corrects her. “The smaller ones are goldfish. Shubunkin fantails,” he says.
“Really?” Lydia’s eyes go wide as if she were a child, and Albie has just plucked a quarter from her ear.
“They can grow up to a foot long, but they’re still goldfish.”
Bunny never could figure out how Albie does that, how he can correct ignorance and stupidity without giving offense.
Their table is ready, and the three couples follow the hostess as she leads them through the dining room. Her formfitting poppy-red áo dài shimmers like the fantail of a shubunkin goldfish.
Hanoi Holiday
The chairs are black lacquer with red damask cushions that match the red damask tablecloth. Bunny takes a seat alongside Albie, which is sort of against dinner party rules, but no one says anything about it because of how Bunny is mental. Julian sits to her left. As if to avoid her gaze, he busies himself with his napkin, shaking it free of the intricate folds of a lotus flower, or perhaps it is meant to be an artichoke. Western silverware is set alongside the napkins, and black lacquered chopsticks rest on a diagonal across white plates. Each table setting also comes with a red paper party hat, conical, and dusted with gold glitter, and one of those party favors, the kind that unfurl like a snake’s tongue. Because the proximity of the paper hat disturbs Bunny, she slides it away, closer to Albie’s paper hat. Lydia is at Albie’s right, which he doesn’t mind, really. He is fond of her, although he does wish she wouldn’t try to engage him in discussions about the Oort cloud or game theory or string theory, subjects about which Albie is not particularly knowledgeable, and about which Lydia, despite being a devoted reader of the Science section of the Times, understands nothing. Lydia is determined to be an egghead, but as Trudy has put it, “Soft-boiled, at best,” as opposed to her husband, Elliot, whom Trudy considers to be a genuine genius, in a way that inspires Bunny to imagine him as a giant brain equipped with spindly arms and legs and a pair of black glasses. Something like Mr. Potato Head.
The waiter comes to the table to ask if they’d like to start with a cocktail, and Julian says, “Six Hanoi Holidays.”
Trudy quips that a Hanoi Holiday sounds like it should come with a Happy Ending, to which Elliot says, “That’s funny.” Elliot never laughs, but when he is amused, he will say, “That’s funny.” His voice is permanently pitched in a dry tone, as if every word he utters is sardonic even when he means to be genuine, which is an affect Albie chalks up to a touch of Asperger’s. Bunny, never as generous as Albie, chalks it up to further indication that Elliot is a fraud. Elliot is something of a fraud, and his fraudulence is perpetuated by other frauds in service of their own fraudulence. Elliot is, like Bunny, a writer, but unlike Bunny, Elliot is taken seriously. Seriously seriously. Elliot is money in Bunny’s piggy bank of self-debasement.
The Hanoi Holidays come in large goblets garnished with wedges of lime, sprigs of lemongrass and a plastic monkey that dangles on the edge of each glass by its tail or an arm. There was a time when Bunny might’ve slipped her blue plastic monkey into her purse, but not now. Trudy raises her goblet. “To happy endings,” she toasts, “and new beginnings.” Glasses clink all the way around.
“And to President-Elect Barack Obama.” Lydia lifts her glass in a way closer to a salute than a toast, and they pay tribute to America’s first black president.
“And next time,” Trudy adds, “a woman.”
Stalwart liberal Democrats, Julian, Lydia, Trudy, and Elliot are passionate, at least in terms of lip service, about issues like illegal wars, global climate change,
and saving the Chelsea Hotel. Bunny and Albie do not define themselves as good liberal Democrats. Albie is a far-left Democrat. Bunny refers to herself a right-of-center Marxist. Nonetheless, they, too, toast Barack Obama because they are proud that America, that they elected a black man for president. They. Even now, Albie does not know that instead of going out to vote, Bunny stayed home and cried.
The conversation at their table buzzes with talk of the Iraq War and thank God Obama is going to bring it to an end and about his vow to close Guantanamo. Albie notes Obama’s promise to take on climate change, and Julian signals the busboy to clear away their empty glasses. Trudy is thrilled that the First Lady plans to tackle childhood obesity.
Julian tells the busboy to let their waiter know that they are ready to order their appetizers.
“I’d have preferred she get involved with the arts,” Lydia says, “but don’t get me wrong. She is amazing.”
“I’m not ready to order,” Elliot says. “I haven’t even looked at the menu.”
“Trust me.” Julian assures Elliot that he will chose well and wisely.
Trudy and Elliot exchange a look.
When the waiter appears, as unobtrusively as an apparition, at their table, Julian orders: roasted aubergines, shiitake croquettes, garlic shrimp wrapped in sugarcane, confit of charred octopus. “And we’ll start with a bottle of, make that two bottles of Sancerre,” he says. “The Vacheron. You can bring the menus back after we’re done with our appetizers.”
The waiter collects their menus, and Albie, because he is a decent person, says, “Thank you,” and Bunny says, “Octopus?”
It’s a gesture of affection, the way Albie closes his hand over Bunny’s forearm, but also it’s a signal for her to stop right there, to refrain from the lecture on the intelligence of octopuses and their pronounced nerve endings. To know that an octopus experiences pain in the extreme is the sort of thing that causes Bunny pain, too. It is also the sort of thing she uses as a weapon, an arrow of reproach at the insensitivity of others.
Rabbits for Food Page 10