B008J4PNHE EBOK

by Owen King

  The bouquet is deposited in the garbage and quickly buried beneath empty wine bottles . . .

  Furry dust lies on the keys of a typewriter. Marcel is blocked. Day after day, he slumps in the window seat of his apartment, sucking brown cigarettes.

  From the window seat, he sees a white shirt on a clothesline that traverses the air above the street, connecting his building with the building opposite. The garment grays and stretches through autumn, stiffens and freezes in the winter, thaws in the spring, and begins to fray as summer arrives.

  An anemic mustache has germinated across Marcel’s upper lip, and the dark circles under his eyes are pits. No matter how often he smoothes the hair at his temples, it fans up. He is transparently, quietly frazzled.

  One day men in white suits transport a body bag from the apartment building across the street. The clothesline’s owner apparently was deceased for months, but no one noticed . . .

  At the local grocery, Marcel gets a job bagging groceries.

  A queue develops on his first morning. Marcel arranges the contents of his grocery bags with artistic judiciousness. The baguettes are tucked into one corner of the bag and braced by the boxes of pasta; bricks of cheese are pieced together in another corner; potatoes fill in the center; parcels of sugar and flour are added; a carton of eggs tops off. Some people yell at him to pick up the pace. An outraged man actually uses a beret to strike Marcel. The blocked writer is so numbed by his own troubles that he ignores the abuse. Even when the beret briefly awakens him from his stupor and he invites the man to suck his ass, it’s obvious that his heart’s not in the insult.

  A few days later, Marcel realizes that a young woman—a customer we recognize from the grocery queue—is stalking him on the streets. She wears a yellow scarf knotted in her black hair. Her expression is fierce. When their eyes meet, she snarls, bares her pretty teeth and growls; a close-up shows her pupils dilating.

  Marcel, alarmed, tries to shake her. As he darts up a department store escalator, she darts up behind him. He slips into the second-to-last car of a Métro train, but she manages to dive into the last car. On the street again, Marcel dashes for a bus, grabs the back railing, and swings himself up just as the vehicle is accelerating, leaving the woman in the yellow scarf behind. She shoves a man from the seat of his Vespa—the man had been leering at her, flapping his tongue—and leaps aboard, and comes roaring after the bus.

  Marcel disembarks in front of his building. He steps out into the street to face the oncoming Vespa. In a gesture of absolute surrender, he shuts his eyes and spreads his arms. The Vespa shows no signs of slowing, its narrow wheels flickering around like snapped reels, its engine hum rising to a whine, the obsessed woman tucking low over the handlebars, scarf drawn out behind into a fluttering antenna. Marcel stands mere feet away, eyes tight, unmoving, and—

  —the film slam-cuts to the writer’s bedroom. He’s lying nude except for the yellow scarf, which is knotted around his neck. The young woman sits on the edge of the bed and slips on her stockings. She is very beautiful and tranquil; the unexpected range of freckles above her bare breasts make her appear unusually naked. Marcel asks, “Why me?” He’s forty-nine. He bags groceries. His most recent novel is already out of print. The view from his window is of a tattered shirt. “What about me attracted you?”

  “You’re a very good talker,” she says insensibly. Until that afternoon we know that Marcel has hardly ever spoken to her except to tell her how much she owes for her groceries. Quel beau parleur . . .

  The woman in the yellow scarf is the first in a patternless series of lovers—young and middle-aged and quite elderly, all female customers from the grocery store. The blocked writer is initially aroused, then annoyed, and finally exhausted by the stream of lovers. When he asks them to justify their attraction, they refer to his handsome face, which isn’t handsome—or his physique, which is scrawny—or his kind hands and gentle fingers, which are nicotine-stained and bitten to the quick. Most frequent are references to his verbal savoir faire.

  Much of the movie’s second act chronicles Marcel’s efforts to evade these ravenous females and, failing that, to convince them that they could make a far better match.

  “I’m not even a successful bagger of groceries,” he says to the willowy red-haired wife of a diplomat as she winds around the doorway of his bedroom. “Blah-blah-blah,” she says.

  After a long chase, a cheerfully corpulent middle-aged woman tracks him to his hiding place in the showroom shower stall of a department store. “Okay, okay! But be careful!” cries Marcel as the enormous woman presses in on him, her bosom swallowing up his face, her hands digging into his hair. “I never could resist a sweet talker,” she confesses.

  A cut removes us to the exterior of the stall, where our perspective is largely occluded by the shower’s frosted door. What we can see is reminiscent of a lava lamp: through the pebbled glass, the woman’s paisley-print dress swells and heaves against the scarlet of Marcel’s grocery-store uniform.

  An elderly widow tricks Marcel into delivering groceries to her luxurious motel suite. Upon opening the door, he finds her seated in a wingback chair, nude and smoking a pipe. Marcel, startled, drops his armful of groceries, where they explode against the floor—eggs, milk, meat, apples. “Um,” says Marcel.

  The elderly widow uncrosses her legs. “Enough with the fancy chitchat! Tell it to the box, Don Juan!”

  Dutifully, he approaches . . .

  Marcel arrives home to find a skinny, mohawked, giggling stranger in his bathtub. He is unsurprised. “Whenever you’re ready,” he tells her.

  She is riding Marcel on the window seat—the ghost of a shirt fluttering in the background—when the pensioner bangs into the apartment, thudding down the hall with his walker.

  “Papa!” cries the woman.

  “I’ll kill him,” shrieks the pensioner. He is fumbling with an antique pistol.

  “I warned you, you old fart,” says Marcel.

  We cut to the apartment landing. The pensioner has a bloody nose. He’s on the floor, leaning against the wall, wheezing and clutching the pieces of his destroyed pistol. His granddaughter walks past him. “I’m not sorry for you,” she says . . .

  “What’s this?” asks Marcel’s ex-fiancée.

  Marcel has come to the art gallery she curates. He has the pensioner’s battered walker. “I thought you could use it for an installation.”

  The ex-fiancée asks, “Did you take this from a cripple?”

  “He was an asshole first and a cripple second,” says Marcel. “I want to understand what went wrong between us, Selene.”

  “So you bring me a walker?”

  “Everyone loves me except for you,” Marcel says plaintively.

  Selene shakes her head—and guides him to a nearby painting.

  Before the wall-size oil, Marcel’s ex-fiancée scans one way, then the other: no one is watching. She grabs the frame and hoists herself up and into the artwork. Marcel follows.

  They stroll around a cubist jungle scene, alive with boxy parrots and jumbled-looking monkeys, distorted palm trees and crooked clouds. The distances are unstable, single elements broken into close-up pieces and faraway pieces, as if seen through a shattered lens. Marcel isn’t interested, though. He doesn’t want to wander around the sweaty, jagged world of the painting. What he wants is their life back. They were comfortable. They made sense. “What is your problem?” he asks.

  “What is your problem?” Selene replies.

  Marcel becomes furious. He kicks the sharp grass and punches the sky; several blades snap, and one of the crooked clouds fissures. She smiles sadly. It’s evident that Marcel has spoiled any chance he might have had to win her back.

  Together, they do their best to repair the painting, gluing the grass, applying some powder from her handbag to the cracked cloud. Eventually, Marcel climbs out of the frame and offers a hand to help her down to the floor. The curator accepts it with a sigh. “Time,” Selene observes, “mak
es us imprudent with what we love.”

  “It’s because I’m mortal, isn’t it?” Marcel lights a dented cigarette.

  His ex shakes her head. She looks at him and manages a half-hearted smile. “No, you stupid man. You don’t see. That was my favorite thing about you.”

  At the door, he tells her she doesn’t have to take the walker if she doesn’t want it. Selene kisses him and says thank you. It was a thoughtful gift. She won’t use it for art, but maybe for magic . . .

  The next day the first young woman, the one with the yellow scarf who chased him on the Vespa, comes to the head of Marcel’s queue. “Marcel . . .” she whispers. He groans and shoves a bottle crunching down on a head of lettuce in her bag. The woman slaps him and dashes out, ignoring his belated cry that she should take another lettuce.

  That evening he walks home instead of using the Métro. His path carries him past a housing complex whose central feature is a wrecked fountain in a crumbling courtyard. There is a boy in the courtyard. He is a child of seven or eight, dressed in high-water overalls. The young fellow has collected an impressive pile of rubble, pieces snapped off of the fountain’s bowl, spout, and figures.

  For a while Marcel watches as, with great precision, the boy in the overalls sets one piece of broken masonry after another back into place, using wads of chewed bubble gum for adhesive. A crowd of young girls standing nearby provide the chewed gum. When signaled, the girl whose turn it is steps forward and drops her wad into the boy’s waiting palm.

  Before the unhappy man’s eyes, the fountain gradually, impossibly reforms.

  Marcel breaks into a full sprint toward home.

  Instead of returning to his own building, he enters the apartment building opposite. Marcel careens up the stairs and finds his way to the apartment that parallels his own. He bangs on the door. A dark-skinned man in a dashiki answers. Marcel lurches around him, through the kitchen, and out onto the balcony. By turning the rusted pulley attached to the railing, Marcel reels in the remains of the dead man’s shirt. He takes it down and carefully folds it.

  When he steps back into the kitchen, the immigrant family—mother, father, two daughters—is huddled in a corner. Marcel’s mouth moves, but he can’t seem to find the words. He is finally crying.

  The patriarch of the immigrant family steps forward. He gestures to the table, where there are platters of food and an empty seat. “Will you stay and share our dinner?”

  As the credits roll, the camera adjourns to a stationary position to watch the family eat. The father asks his daughters about their day. While the children begin to relate the details of several interlocking neighborhood conflicts and scandals, the three adults circulate the platters, and listen and nod, and are still listening when the screen blacks out.

  ■ ■ ■

  Afterward, Sam walked with his father out to Tom’s truck.

  Sam admired the movie, particularly the lead performance of his former collaborator Rick Savini. Besides speaking in what was not his native language, Savini played his part with a degree of outrage that Sam wouldn’t have thought the actor had in him. While the film’s subtext—that what women want above all else is a man who is careful with their groceries—seemed to him both dubious and too cute, he thought it was a heartfelt attempt. It was interesting that his father liked it so much. No one could ever accuse Booth of being careful with the groceries.

  “Tremendous,” said Booth. “Simply tremendous. Did you enjoy it?”

  Sam said he did. They had come to the driver’s side of the truck. The air was cold enough to make Sam wish for a coat; the summer was really over. The CINEMA sign above the theater doors cast a red nimbus.

  “What do you suppose happened next, Samuel?”

  “They had dinner?”

  “Smart-ass. After that.”

  “I honestly don’t have any idea,” said Sam.

  “I would like to believe that Marcel took a chance at redemption, at change. I would like to think that he did something marvelous for the woman he loved. His great gift was for organization, wasn’t it? Maybe he organized something for her, made it so she could access it in a way that made her very happy, and won her back that way.”

  Sam thought of the women he knew and the wildernesses of their closets. “Maybe,” he said, “but I think they ended it in the right place.”

  Booth assented. He blew a puff of white steam. Sirens burbled somewhere in the dark. “Welles cut me.”

  “Say again?” Sam had no clue what his father was referring to.

  “I won’t bore you with the grubby details, but a couple of years ago I managed to finagle a viewing of the assembly of Yorick. The Welles movie. I wasn’t in it. He cut me out.”

  His father glanced at him with a raised eyebrow. Sam didn’t know whether to read the expression as a challenge or a bid for sympathy or what. He was momentarily tempted to ask for “the grubby details,” but in the next instant, he decided it might be better not to know.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  Booth shook his head. “You shouldn’t be.”

  “I shouldn’t?”

  “No, you shouldn’t. It hurt terribly because I loved Orson. He was my idol, and he told me I was great. He took me seriously. When the takes were over, he clapped for me. So when I saw the picture and I never appeared, not even for a frame, it felt almost as if I’d been edited out of my own life.

  “And that scared me terribly. For then, if indeed that was my history, what had been filmed, then what was this”—Booth circled around with his index finger pointing, indicating the cavernous parking lot, the cement box of the movie theater, the distant interstate, and beyond—“what was it that happened here, with your mother? With you? With Mina and with Sandra? That was the start of my Awakening.

  “Then I had a toothache.”

  “You had a toothache,” repeated Sam.

  “Yes, a toothache.” His father slumped slightly. He peered into the middle distance. His beard jutted. “I went to the dentist, and while I was waiting, I picked up a wrinkled old issue of The New Yorker, and I read a poem. It was about our obligation to enjoy ourselves and engage in frivolity in spite of the world’s many cruelties. And when I read it, I suddenly felt validated, Sam. I felt that my work meant something. Would you like me to recite it to you, the poem? I have it memorized.”

  Sam had to bite back a smile. The ruthless fire of this world consumed everything—everything except dentist-office back issues of The New Yorker. “If you’d like.”

  “‘Sorrow everywhere,’” Booth began, and the poem unreeled. There was horror and there was joy, and before the fire consumed us, the sufferers obligated us to our joy. Sam’s father spoke the words without a lilt, without projection. He let them be. At the end, after the oars drew through the water, Sam clapped politely. It was a pretty poem. The sound echoed faintly in the parking lot.

  Booth responded with a dip of his head and finished the story. “And so, feeling greatly reassured, I decided to hang up my pistols and to return home for good to reacquaint myself with my family and perhaps, in some minor way, make amends.”

  “I’m happy for you, Booth.” Sam stuck out his hand, and they shook.

  ■ ■ ■

  An hour later, there was no sign of Tess, Wesley, and Farah, and the projectionist needed to lock up the movie theater. Sam called for a taxi to return him to the hotel in Quentinville.

  Booth had invited them to a party the next day; an old mutual friend, none other than bilingual actor and Westchester resident Rick Savini, was holding a celebration for the end of summer. It sounded like a decent time, particularly for a Sunday—and it so happened that Sam had something belonging to their old mutual friend that was long overdue to be returned. He said he’d talk to the others, promising to do his best to convince them to put off the drive back to the city in favor of the get-together.

  They’d left it in a good place, Sam thought, probably as good a place as they’d ever left it—maybe as good as th
ey ever could. The exchange had somehow diminished his father, shrunk him down to a size such that Sam could see all his edges. It seemed amazing that he had spent so many years brooding over Booth, over what he had and hadn’t done, over what was true and what was untrue. He had long believed that his father was full of shit, but he had never comprehended what was as obvious as his own nose: Booth was as confused as anyone.

  In the backseat of the taxi, while the interstate carved between rock walls and fields, Sam conceived of a movie: about a man—call him, Jim—who finds himself stranded in his Chevy Malibu in a vast parking lot. Jim goes out on a quick trip to pick up an extension cord only to find, when he tries to leave, that his car won’t start; it’s out of gas. Jim then waits—surreally, obstinately—through several seasons for his no-account brother to bring gas so he can return to his apartment. Sam thought the idea had potential; God knew there must be a parking lot somewhere that could be used for short money. A few scenes sprang up: the marooned driver using the demonstration barbecue set up on the sidewalk in front of the Lowe’s to cook a pigeon he’d caught; the mailman bringing Jim’s mail to the window of the disabled vehicle; the kindly checkout girl from the Dollar Store across the parking lot coming over one night with some chintzy battery-powered Christmas lights to make the car more homey. The castaway Jim, when Sam saw his face, he saw Wyatt Smithson. Wyatt had that flummoxed yet resolute look. Maybe he’d be willing to give it another go. Maybe Sam could convince Anthony to quit his father’s lobster boat and give it one more shot, too. In his mind, he was pulling them all back in, his old crew, and this time it was better, it was fun.

  Then again, it was also possible that he was still a bit high, and in the light of day, the parking lot movie would present itself as somewhat less promising.

  In a single long afternoon, he had observed as Las Vegas fell into the ground, as an IRS agent coolly murdered several bankers and traders, as a potbellied pig helped a little girl, and as an aggrieved man learned that consideration was romance. His head felt dopey with fantasy lives. There were worse ways to kill a day. Polly asked him once what it was that drove him to want to make movies, if it was about his father, and he told her that he wanted to surprise people with a movie the way they were surprised in real life—something along those lines. He didn’t know about that anymore. It seemed overly ambitious. If he ever made another film, Sam thought he could settle a bit. The movie would just need to be fun enough and good enough for a few laughs and maybe a moment or two of grace. Fun enough and good enough to chip a few hours off a day.