Crazy Sorrow

by Vince Passaro

  I wish you hadn’t done that, she said.

  I didn’t! I didn’t finish! I stopped.

  Effectively, you did, I heard it.

  That’s so unfair, he said. Men are impulsive. You must know no one ever means it, not really, except maybe your grandparents. It was just, you know, a feeling I had. For a few seconds.

  She’d taken her hands off her face and now she looked at him. You know, she said, in your idiotic way, you’re brilliant.

  Paralysis is my revenge, he told her. What else have I got? What real power?

  And Anna thought: There, that explains it. Why the nice men bored her so. They never believed in their own power.

  22

  Nate had spent most of his early childhood in DC with Marina and various au pairs until he was ready for middle school and Marina had taken a job with State. He’d spent plenty of time in New York with George, liked New York, and was amenable to a move up. George’s job meant some travel and Marina became very busy too but they had Lourdes living in and she took good care of Nate when George was away and Marina couldn’t get up for a day or two. Sometimes when she did come up George would return to the smell of her perfume in his bed, even after a change of the sheets. Little things. A pair of panties in the bottom of the hamper. A long black hair.

  The school they sent Nate to was Darcy Prep, not quite as elite as Collegiate or Trinity but close enough and more modern in approach. Enlightened good intentions in schools turned out to be a heavier burden than the strop and the switch. The former, which George understood even if they pre-dated his own schooldays, were tools to force compliant behavior. What you believed, your worldview, made absolutely no difference to the school, the teachers, etc. Now the school wanted the children to actually believe what everyone else believed, which was a different matter. Nate was a not particularly popular dreamy near-genius, a bored student in most subjects but languages, music, and the complete works of Monty Python and J. R. R. Tolkien. In eighth grade, like any red-blooded male American of thirteen, Nate had started to explore pornography: it was just that his favorite works of filthy abandon happened to be in Latin. He built his own website devoted to the material. Until the school made him shut it down. What if his name’s not on it? George had said. The other students will still know, he was told.

  And so George found himself spending more time than he would have liked with assistant heads of school, inept psychologists, and Nate’s advisor and only advocate, a ghostly figure of monastic austerity, Dr. David Miterello, head of Darcy’s well-known classical languages department.

  Later in eighth grade, they called him in again to the school to discuss Nate.

  George called Marina and said, Why don’t you come up and deal with some of this bullshit.

  Oh no, she said. I dealt with the K-through-five bullshit.

  George said to Nate, What did you do? This time?

  I brought them apples, Nate said.

  You what?

  I brought each of them an apple. Like a living cliché. I put the apples on their desks and took pictures of them and I put the pictures up on Myspace. You know, with commentary. Quotes from the specific teachers and such.

  That’s very helpful, George said. I’m sure you painted them in the best and most subtle light.

  I’m not from fucking Delft, Nate said.

  At this George snapped his fingers, as if he were at a Village jazz club in 1957, appreciating a solo.

  Very good, he said. I’m glad all those visits to the Met have stuck with you. But watch your mouth.

  Later, George asked Nate, couldn’t you just fake being cooperative and sound? So I don’t have to go to any more of these meetings?

  I try, Nate said. Then I let my guard down, and boom!—I’ve said something kind of innocuous during social studies discussion, like If women want abortions so much and can’t get them why do they get pregnant? Next thing you know I’m waiting in the outer office looking at last week’s New Yorker.

  * * *

  BROWN & CO. The restrooms. Burke was obsessed with the bathrooms, the daily despoiling, the flow of street people through the stores morning and night to use his bathrooms, and the effete barista hipster wannabes who in general refused to clean up adequately after them. A constant problem—he was providing the fucking public bathrooms New York had been talking about for fifty fucking years; shit, he was indoor-plumbing the whole fucking country. Brown’s and McDonald’s. This wasn’t company he wanted to keep. He was toilet paper and running water for every down-and-out in the cities, he was Dorothy fucking Day for these people, and the shops were in constant danger of befoulments. He hated the old men and the women, these he saw frequently in his stores when he popped in for a macchiato and a look-see. People even slept sometimes, with their heads down on the tables. He never believed that the associates did anything about the incursions, the bathroom usage, the sleepers, despite twenty memos to store managers over the last three years, most of them written in a rage by him personally and toned down by the corporate comms people before they went out. The stores were supposed to be, and largely were, comforting upper-middle-class showrooms, workrooms, parlors, refuges, the dining room between mealtimes where you did your homework: they were governed entirely by a white aesthetic, hanging just between the urban and suburban brands. They morphed as your needs changed, regularly spaced across the landscape, retreats from the street—but the fucking street, which once they’d had running in defeat, was creeping back and Burke, keen as always, said he could smell it, even in his fucking office sometimes he claimed he could smell it. The stores were out there at the vanguard of civilization; hell, they’d brought civilization up to the front lines almost single-handedly, they were the fucking outposts of progress with the ivory piled high (except the ivory was coffee beans) and when the shit started to go bad again, as he knew it eventually would, he believed they were only two steps away from becoming the filthy junkie-ridden 14th Street doughnut shops of the ’70s and early ’80s… where Burke and George and their friends, drunk and high after the Mudd Club, had gone to sober up, where they’d watched the junkies pouring as much sugar as their takeout cups could hold and listened to the last of the old Lower East Side Jews in bad clothes and pockets stuffed with newspaper clippings arguing as always the cruel corruption of money versus the essential truth of classical, labor-empowered socialism. Their largest, most divisive arguments concerned whether the New York Times could ever, under any circumstances, even occasionally, be trusted to tell the truth.

  What made it worse of course was that in some essential way Burke wasn’t even the boss anymore. The whole fucking thing ran without him. George and he would go into the shops and only rarely did anyone working there recognize Burke. People who read the society columns, mostly. He was one of the hundred richest men in the world (number 37 last year) and he went to the White House and he got on TV and they had no fucking clue. He told George to make a note—more pictures of him, just him, on the web page. He said, And let’s hire a publicist.

  You always fire them, George said.

  Yeah, well I can’t fire another one until we hire him. Or her. Maybe a her this time. Yeah.

  He ended up in the store in one of the two bathrooms terrifying the manager and the baristas after they did know who he was, cleaning one of them himself.

  You see, you see? I am not above this. He put on the gloves, he took the large sponge—George could tell he wished there were a camera crew there and made a note to have LeAnne the communications VP do something with it in the next profile of him, there being no actual lived reality that is not narrativized—he leaned over the toilet, and his tie swung out in front of him. Don’t wear a fucking tie, he said. They laughed. The frequency of Burke’s tie wearing had increased in tandem with the widening of his social and political ambitions. Here, tuck this in for me, he said to the manager and opened his arms to create an accessible plane of his chest. She dutifully did so. Between third and fourth button, with adept hands. Imme
diately George wanted to kiss her and take her clothes off. Surprising how little it took. Burke started slopping water over the toilet, squirted the cleanser, scrubbed it with the brush, swabbed with the sponge, did the sink and mirror with a separate set of cleaning cloths—never mix the toilet with the sink! he shouted—and then mopped the floor, rinsing the mop in the big tin pail and squeezing between wood dowels several times, again and again and one last time. When he said, Done, the staff applauded, which made George wince and Burke hold up his hand.

  Unless you’re gonna start applauding the poor schmucks among you who have to do this five times a fucking day, Burke said, don’t applaud me. He checked his watch. He said: Six minutes. Seven, okay, seven minutes. Did I do a perfect job? Far from it. But now, now it’s not a shithole. The kind of traffic you get, you’re going to have to do this every two hours. Make a schedule. Spread the pain.

  He peeled off his gloves. You need better gloves than these, he said.

  The manager looked at him.

  Is this what we send you?

  Yes, sir.

  I’ll look into it. For now, everybody, wear two pair. Double them up.

  * * *

  A WOMAN, A poet, George and Burke had known in the East Village was now making a name for herself with a literary blog: sexy-voiced reviews and commentary on books and authors and the general scene. She had several contributors besides herself but she was the spine of it and a growing mini-celebrity of the kind the Web was starting to produce.

  See the thing about Iris? George said. I emailed you.

  Yeah, Burke said. Did you ever fuck her? He was looking at the Mexico report, which bored him.

  Not my type, George said. He tried to imagine it: that wispy six-foot woman, hipless, with the fluttering eyes.

  It would have been like fucking a butterfly, he said. The wings beating wildly, this strange dust all over you.

  You’re a case, you know that?

  George’s father had used that expression: you’re a case.

  What she’s doing with the website is interesting, George said.

  Ah, the website. The website. Leading, as you clearly intended, to my asking what goes on with our own largely unimpressive website.

  It’s interesting how the Web rewards the individual over the corporate, George said.

  That won’t last, Burke said. A skeptic of late consumer capitalism, Burke nevertheless served it and foresaw only growing victories for it, against all ideas, all reactions, all entreaties for justice or even good sense. It would grow and win until it finally exploded, like a goat left alone in a grain silo. Eating until it died.

  Right now she can use all this dramatic photography and whatnot because she basically steals it and no one stops her, George said. We’d have to pay.

  You’re making excuses, Burke said.

  Yeah, well.

  So really, what’s happening?

  We’ve got editorial copy, nice graphics. Stories from plantations in Uganda, Mexico, Peru, worthy children of the earth finding nobility and meaning getting paid to grow coffee for Greenwich Village playwrights and the social workers of the Upper West Side.

  That’s nice, Burke said. You have a good attitude about our business model.

  I speak in jest, George said. Partial jest.

  And the traffic for such inspiring material?

  Minimal.

  What’s next?

  I don’t think we can use it for sales in any but a decorative way. The shipping costs make the price point prohibitive or force us to lose money on it. Or most likely both. We’re shaping the online shopping program to be for high-end coffee- and tea-makers and accessories and a couple of the really limited-edition brands. With a special price for four-pound bags of Mount Washington beans for fans of the everyday who’ll use a lot of it.

  And grind it themselves?

  Yeah.

  No, Burke said. No. Four-pound bags of beans or four individual pound bags of ground. The market, whatever it is, quintuples once you grind it.

  Cost, George said.

  Try it, Burke said. Tally the losses. Then we’ll revisit. Same with the LEs. Make sure nobody clicks off the page because they don’t use a coffee grinder. Convince them to buy a fucking grinder sure but sell the ground to the schmendricks who will never bother to grind it themselves.

  The LEs, it’s a shame, George said. These coffee beans should be ground and brewed immediately thereafter.

  Tell them that. Explain it. Better, do a video showing how it should be done. Flash them a good cheap basic grinder. In fact tell them we’re selling the grinder at cost just to introduce them to the beauty of the thing.

  I’m making a note, George said.

  Burke stood and began his stretches. Once an hour, when he was in the office, he did seven or eight minutes of stretching.

  You should stretch, he said to George.

  I’m going to the gym later, George said.

  Burke’s head was between his knees. That’s not the same, he said. He rose slowly, like a giraffe standing for the first time. Spread his arms. He brought his hands back to meet behind him.

  You can’t go to the gym for an hour to undo the damage of sitting all fucking day, he said. He sat down again, took up a sales sheet.

  So did you? George said, when Burke raised his head. Fuck her?

  Who?

  Iris.

  Yeah, a couple of times, Burke said. And you’re right. It was like fucking a butterfly. Why are we selling Ecuadoran coffee in Mexico? Shouldn’t the house blend in Mexico be Mexican? Wouldn’t this make sense?

  Costs less, George said. It would cost us more to sell the Mexican blend in Mexico than it costs us to sell it here. Don’t ask. They have all kinds of red tape for selling there and all kinds of rule-waiving and subsidies you get when you export it. For the currency. We export theirs they make money, we import Ecuadoran they make money. See?

  Too bad, Burke said. The Chiapas beans are good quality at the price point. All the fucking plantations are closing. But you know this. Your friends down there are running short of money, I presume.

  They never had money, George said.

  How much have you given them, I wonder, Burke said.

  George said nothing.

  Hm? said Burke.

  Yes, you wonder, George said. I heard you.

  Ha, Burke said. Well, I hope you’re hiding it well from the old U.S. government.

  I take it off my taxes as a charitable deduction, George said. It’s a purloined letter thing—hide the secret in open view.

  Have you ever FOIA’d your FBI files?

  God no.

  You don’t want to know?

  Never. I never want to know.

  I got mine, Burke said.

  When?

  About a year ago. Your shenanigans were in there.

  I don’t want to hear about it, George said.

  The girl was in there.

  They always are, George said. Those guys are nothing if not condom-sniffers.

  Ah, so you slept with her?

  Never. The matter never even—

  Don’t say entered your mind that’s always a lie. It always enters the mind. Other places it doesn’t enter maybe but the mind, always.

  It was never even remotely something I would have done or could have done, George said. It was never in the realm of possibility.

  Isn’t that romantic? Those might be the most romantic kinds of encounters.

  Fuck you.

  Okay, never mind.

  In Chiapas there were few sons or daughters who wanted to take over these businesses, which were difficult, subject to wild fluctuations of weather and totally unpredictable pricing, based on a market dominated by a dozen large global sellers—Brown was now one—whose volatility was hardly comprehensible even to them.

  Burke looked up, closed the Mexico report.

  She had a thing about her ass, he said.

  George said, What?

  Iris, Burke said.


  Oh yes, George said.

  She was terrified you’d try to go there, she’d jump ten feet if your finger even got near it or if your cock was pulled from home and wandered south on the next thrust—

  You mean her asshole, George said.

  Yeah. It happened not once but several times, said Burke. Enough to know it was a thing. He looked at the report again, picked it up, and threw it across the room. Her asshole, he said. Yes. That sweet puckered little coin. I’m getting to the point I can’t run this company anymore except as some sort of Zen exercise. I should quit, sell out, open a little tea-and-coffee place in the countryside somewhere. Like in the Sonoran Desert, near some old copper mining town on the road the tourists take. Fuck the waitresses if they’re willing. Sit and watch the lizards.

  I’m not seeing this, George said.

  It’s been another bad year for love, Burke said. I’ve just had my chart done. Yeah, don’t look that way. You should do it. And yes, this is to be a bad year for love.

  Perhaps he meant with the various girlfriends; or he meant with Marta, his wife, she with the matte black hair. Eight years married to her. Knowing Burke well and Marta somewhat, George often wondered how they’d possibly stayed together even that long.

  George asked him directly: How have you managed to stay married, considering… you know.

  How much I fuck around?

  There’s that, George said.

  Tolerance unto blindness, he said. Who can distinguish all the reasons behind marital longevity? Self-punishment. A kind of cruel stasis. A fight to the death. The comfort of being known, and not alone. What was the Hassan-i Sabbah expression Burroughs used all the time? Nothing is true, everything is permitted. Something like that.