Funeral Platter

by Greg Ames

  “What?” I said and cinched the knot of my plaid flannel bathrobe. “Stand up. Say that again.”

  I’d been in scraps before. In high school I fought at least once a week, surrounded by a ring of leering bitter faces, knowing the up-front cruelty of kids, and there was a period in my life when I began to look forward to the afternoon’s final bell. Even though I hadn’t chosen this identity for myself, I had become a brawler. At 3:30, I stood in the center of the circle with a bloody lip, refusing to go down. A perfectly landed punch to the jaw would end it. I loved that feeling. Somebody was definitely going to lose. The best thing ever was when a bigger guy charged at you, growling threats and curses, and you smoothly turned his own momentum against him. I had brought my right knee down on more than one blood-spurting nose. I had elbowed people, hard, in their kidneys. I’d also been choked out and made to eat dirt.

  “I’ll throw down right now,” I said to Trang. Even though it had been almost a decade since I’d last landed a punch, I warmed instantly to the idea. “Stand up. Let’s have some fun.”

  “Holy cow.” He smiled. “Don’t shoot the messenger, guy.”

  At that moment I wanted to grab Trang by the shoulders and throw him out the door. I wanted to smash his face in with my fist. But I remembered what Karen had said about reconstructive surgery, and about how Trang had once kicked a man in the mouth, repeatedly. I wondered if a confrontation was worth it. I took another look at that bowie knife sheathed on his belt.

  “Let’s examine your relationship with Karen,” he said. “You’re playing this thing all wrong, my friend. I’m just trying to help you here.”

  “I don’t need your help.”

  “Women,” he said, “want to believe that we—men—are much more unpredictable and dangerous than we really are.” He lowered his voice. “Usually I try not to disavow them of this misconception, if you know what I mean.”

  I felt tired, lightheaded. “What are you talking about?” I sat down across from him.

  “Beat your chest a little, Warren. You’re too nice and she’ll walk all over you.” He leaned forward on his elbows. “They’re like little rabbits. Sometimes you gotta jack up their heartbeats. Make them think their life is in jeopardy, and then you rush in and save the day. They’re so relieved, so aroused, they forget you put them in peril in the first place.”

  I rose to my feet and put my mug in the sink. “You don’t deserve Karen,” I said and walked out of the kitchen.

  Later that night, when I returned home from work, I found the living room windows all steamed up again.

  “I made baked ziti,” Trang said and emerged from the kitchen carrying a steaming casserole dish. He wore an apron that read COOKIN’ WITH GAS. His bowie knife was strapped, as always, to his hip. “Get it while it’s hot, kiddos. Mama’s famous red sauce.”

  I joined Karen by the washer/dryer combo. She was frantically adding figures on a small notepad. “Yes, sir. Have it for you by tomorrow,” she said into the phone. “That’s thirteen-fifty, total. Okay. Yes. Bye.” She hung up. “Hi, hon.” She stepped forward for a kiss. “How was work?”

  Before I could reply, the phone rang again. She flipped her hair to the side and lifted the phone to her ear. “Karen’s Anytime Laundry. This is Karen speaking.”

  “Hey,” I said. “We need to have a serious talk.”

  “Watch your foot.”

  I looked down. My toes had grazed Trang’s steel briefcase. “Jesus,” I said. “Why doesn’t he store that in a safer place?”

  After dinner, I overheard Trang talking long distance to a snow globe collector out in Vancouver. He described the delicate hand-blown glass of his collectibles. He talked about the subpar quality of the glitter in the newer models—shaved porcelain and bone chips had, of course, been the industry standard for decades—and he reminded the man that distilled water, which could be found in the best globes, did not turn yellow or leave any residue on the inside of the glass.

  I still had a hard time believing that he was serious.

  Soon Trang was shouting, pacing in the living room. Enraged, he gesticulated with his free hand and called the man an ignoramus, a world-class shithead. The snow globes from Graceland and Alcatraz were from his dead grandmother’s private collection; he wouldn’t let them go for cheap. They were exceedingly rare. “Go look them up in the red book,” he said. “Stop wasting my time, you clown.”

  An hour later I learned that Trang had invited some folks over. Strangers passed through the living room with their hands buried in potato chip bags. Others arrived and peered into the fridge. Were they friends of Karen, too? I couldn’t keep up. They seemed to know where to find everything: the various soups and spaghettis; the paper plates and plastic ware; the remote control.

  An elderly woman with a small dog in her arms exited my bathroom and informed me that we needed more toilet paper.

  Shaken, I called my former ally, Diamond Doug, even though I knew he couldn’t hang out with me anymore. He had a child on the way. Long gone were the days when the two of us could just spontaneously head off to the bar together, throw darts all night or watch SportsCenter on the TV suspended above the bar.

  I began to tell Doug about my bizarre houseguest but he interrupted me and launched into a story of his own. His in-laws were visiting from Illinois. They were outrageously tall Midwesterners who stayed for stretches of up to ten days at a time. They slept on the pullout couch, ate all his food, complimented him and smiled incessantly.

  “It makes my life a living hell,” he said. “Consider yourself lucky, bro.”

  “It’s way worse over here.”

  “You’ll get used to it,” he said.

  “There’s this crazy guy named Trang who’s always—”

  “Dude, I’ve heard all this from you before. ‘Her ankles are too thick.’ Or: ‘She doesn’t read enough books.’ You want to be alone forever? That’s cool. Be alone. You’ll be another Saint Francis of Assisi tossing seeds to all the birds.”

  “This one is different. She—”

  “Nothing surprises me anymore. I have seen it all. Trust me on this one. What?” Now he was talking to his wife in the background. “No, it’s not Frannie. It’s Wayne. Okay, okay. Okay.”

  “Doug,” I said, my voice cracking. “I need help.”

  “Gotta go. Liz is waiting for a phone call. We’re sharing my phone because hers—Long story. Anyway, hang in there.”

  Trang flipped through a nylon case of my old CDs and pulled out The Very Best of Cream. He played it at full volume. His favorite track evidently was “I Feel Free.” He stood at the stereo and pressed repeat each time it ended. There was a time when I had really enjoyed that album, too. Jack Bruce had a wonderful singing voice. But my musical tastes had changed radically in the eighteen years since I’d first purchased the CD. In fact, I didn’t even listen to CDs anymore. Hearing the same Cream tune over and over was an insidious form of torture.

  “Slowhand,” Trang said, bobbing his head. We were home alone together on a Friday night. Karen was out returning clothes to her many customers around the city. “Slowhand was in this band.”

  I averted my eyes from an air guitar solo and took out my meditation journal. I still hoped that one day I, like Tolstoy, would write something beautiful, something profound and illuminating about human nature. With a tiny pencil I scribbled: Trang likes Cream.

  I sat there staring at my words.

  Trang stood next to one of the speakers, cocked his head to the side, and pressed his ear to the woofer. “Cream was a power trio. Bass, drums, guitar. Man, those suckers rocked the sixties into oblivion. Case closed.”

  I shut my journal. “Where are you from, Trang?”

  “What?”

  “Where. Are. You. From?” I shouted.

  “Canada,” he hollered back.

  “How long have you been in New York?”

  “Feels like forever.” He was getting ready to press Repeat.

  “You were b
orn in Canada?”

  “Not exactly.” He turned up the volume.

  We said nothing after that. I listened to “I Feel Free” four more times, then I retreated to the bedroom, shut the door behind me, and inserted foam ear plugs into my head.

  Toward the end of his life, Tolstoy moved away from his beloved Yasnaya Polyana, his sprawling family estate, to live an ascetic life in a monastery. He renounced his birthright as a member of the aristocracy. “I will live simply,” he proclaimed. “Without resources. God will guide me.” Ten days later, he died of heart failure in a railroad station in Astapovo. A porter found him dead on a rickety cot. “He looked just like any other corpse,” the porter said to a journalist. “Sort of desiccated, like an old pear. We get corpses here all the time. At the time I didn’t know he was Lev Tolstoy, God rest his soul.”

  An hour later, when I came out of the bedroom for a snack, I found Trang standing on my loveseat holding a hairbrush to his lips. The stereo was cranked as high as it could go. Even with the foam plugs jammed into my ears, I felt Jack Bruce’s voice thumping on my sternum like a fist.

  I stood in the doorway and watched. Karen emerged from the bathroom still wearing her slick yellow raincoat, her hair in a ponytail. She emptied her pockets on the coffee table, spilling out clumps of wet bills. She looked beautiful and flushed from the exertion of carrying hundreds of pounds of laundry around Brooklyn. Her forehead and cheeks were wet with rain.

  Trang swayed his hips from side to side, the hairbrush clutched in both hands. He lip-synched lyrics about two lovers who move like the sea and therefore feel free.

  A smile bloomed on Karen’s face, spreading from her mouth to her eyes. She stripped off her soaked raincoat and flung it on the floor.

  Trang serenaded her, his eyes clamped shut, the hairbrush now gripped in his left fist. His right hand was pressed, fingers splayed, against his chest. It was a moving display.

  Karen looked at Trang as she had never once looked at me. She smoothed a few wet curls back from her forehead and watched him with intense focus. Trang turned his body fully toward her and made a circular motion with his hips.

  I kept the earplugs in. I didn’t even need to watch his lips to know what he was singing. I knew the lyrics by heart.

  Trang, still standing on my couch, smiled down at her and let her know, through the medium of Cream, that she was the sun shining on him and because of that he felt free.

  When the song was over, Karen laughed and blew kisses at him.

  It was a humid night, the streets still slick from an earlier rain. Karen and Trang sat out on the stoop, drinking malt liquor from forty-ounce bottles. He’d dragged the stereo over to the sill, so that they could listen to his song from outside. I think he also had the remote control because the song kept repeating when it ended.

  I thought about calling Mariana, my ex in New Orleans. I practiced the message I would leave if I reached her voicemail. “Oh, hey there, Riana. Wayne here. Just hanging out in Brooklyn, enjoying a night in with my amazing new girlfriend. Hope you’re doing well.” But I decided against it. Mariana was probably busy with wedding preparations.

  It was time for dinner anyway. The kitchen light, I noticed, had been left on again. Nobody appeared too concerned about my electric bills.

  There was no ham, cheese, or tuna in the kitchen. No bread or mayo. Karen hadn’t gone shopping in over a week. The vodka and gin bottles were both empty. The music pounded out into the street, the speakers facing the open window.

  On the breakfast table was the steel briefcase, its lid open. I stepped closer and looked. Inside were eight pristine glass orbs, each one snug inside its purple foam cut out. The case alone was worth a grand or two, Trang had once claimed. He took great pleasure in detailing the history behind its acquisition. He’d spotted it in a Niagara Falls pawnshop. The proprietor had no idea what he held in his possession. Trang paid him fifty bucks and laughed all the way to the casino. According to Trang, the steel briefcase had once been owned by Umberto Granaglia, the world famous Bocce master. Oval scoops in the purple foam interior once held the superstitious Granaglia’s lucky balls; now they cradled Trang’s vintage collectibles.

  I bent over the case. A yellow tack cloth was folded lengthwise and rested on a Paris Art Deco globe. I pulled out one of the prettiest ones—a pre-fire Cocoanut Grove, circa 1941—and inspected it closely, turning it under the light. I shook it, flipped it upside down. The more I looked at it, the better I understood. I understood why he loved it so.

  I smashed it on the kitchen floor. The glass shattered so beautifully. Distilled water dribbled out. Silently I stared down at this mess at my feet. I felt guilty for about a second or two. Then I pulled out each of the remaining seven globes and repeated the process again and again. Giggling, I lifted my arm over my head and heaved one down on the peeling linoleum. “Oops,” I said. I chucked one at the spice rack and another against the ugly wallpaper. I felt exalted. It was an orgy of demolition. God must feel like this every day, I thought, striking down innocent people and animals, destroying entire villages.

  A few of the spheres—Plexiglas ones—would not break. They bounced and skidded into the baseboards. No matter how many times I struck them down they remained intact. So I had to shatter them with a rolling pin.

  Only the RMS Lusitania, the oldest globe in the collection, remained. I captured it and swept the empty briefcase off the table. My face was damp with sweat. I walked over to the window and stopped the CD. No more Slowhand.

  I finger rolled the last remaining globe over the sill and heard it shatter between them on the stoop.

  “Trang,” I called out, standing serenely by the crime scene. “I think I dropped something of yours. Better come look.”

  The front door banged open. I listened to the drumbeat of approaching footsteps. Karen preceded him into the room. “Oh my God,” she said, staring wide-eyed at the floor. “What have you done?”

  Trang followed. He gawked at the wreckage, his hands snapping into fists.

  “My God.” Karen looked up at me with pity and tenderness. “Wayne,” she said. “Are you crazy, honey?” She took a step toward me. “This is so bad. He’s going to kill you.”

  Grinning, I leaned back against the counter, and waited. Goose bumps pebbled my forearms.

  Something had to happen soon. Everyone in the house could feel it.

  FAMILY ALBUM

  My father runs naked through the underbrush. We can hear him grunting and yelping as the brambles slap his bare skin. We are gaining on him, following the trail of blood, but we’re leery. A wounded father is a dangerous creature. And canny. He may be luring us into an ambush. We would gladly beat in his brains out in the open, under the hoary night sky, but nobody is foolish enough to—

  —roar at a joke he’s just told at the dinner table. He repeats the punch line, as if we hadn’t heard it the first time. “That’s good,” he says, twirling angel hair on the tines of his fork. He’s drinking booze again. The ice cubes clinking in his lowball glass sound like teeth falling from a cartoon character’s mouth, and you turn to him and say—

  —his gentility has ossified into fear. He is nervous, that’s all, which you have misconstrued as anger. You have never understood him. But you want him to know that despite all the differences of opinion, all the arguments, you love him and—

  —he’s struggling under the weight of the couch you’re both carrying down the stairs. “Pick up your end, goddammit,” he says. “Jesus Christ.” His face is flushed, an artery pulsing in his forehead. Your end of the couch is not the problem. “Should we take a break?” you ask him. He glares at you over the flowery armrest. “Nonsense, boy. I’ve been moving furniture since you—”

  —haven’t said a word in ten minutes. You don’t feel like talking any more. The kiddie psychologist, a skinny-armed whisperer in a beige turtleneck, plays bumper pool with you in his office on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Courts you with cold Sprites. Probes for Insights and True
Feelings. He sincerely wants to know how your mother’s death has affected you, and you shrug and can’t even remember the last time you—

  —are crying in the garage loft, after school, punching the splintered wooden crossbeam with abraded knuckles, and your father stands below, hands on hips, racking his brains for something comforting to say. “I know how you feel,” he says at last. “I miss her too, boy, but it will get better, and you can’t keep—”

  —pulling your pants down in class to show Kristen Thomas your penis. You are the most disruptive third grader in the class. Mrs. Hendricks has her back to the students, she’s scrawling multiplication problems on the blackboard, and Kristen raises her hand, saying, “Mrs. Hendricks, Mrs. Hendricks,” and—

  —hairy-legged men are loitering in the driveway, drinking keg beer from red plastic cups. Your father, sunburned and jovial in sunglasses, likes his team’s chances in the upcoming season. “That’s a solid defense,” he says. “Great linebackers. Best in football.” You wrap your chubby arms around his legs and he gently pushes you away. “You’re too old for that now,” he says. “Men shake hands with other men.” He squeezes your little hand. “Good, that’s a good strong—”

  —bag of marijuana. Grudgingly, your father slips it into his pocket. He had been called away from work again to deal with his delinquent son. The middle school principal, Mr. Markbright, returns to the office. “He had nothing in his pockets,” your father lies for you. “My son is innocent of all charges.” On the drive home, he glares out the windshield, silent. At last, he turns to you and says—

  —no matter how many times you end up in detention, you continue to fight after school with Luis and Eric and Glenn. Nothing personal. You’ve all got the energy and the time. Sometimes you pretend you’re a TV wrestler who has metal chairs smashed over his head with regularity, and you fall backward into a pile of leaves, pretending to be knocked out cold, and Glenn picks up a twig and rams it into Luis’s left ear, a harmless act you’ve seen performed countless times on TV. Luis doesn’t cry or scream at first, but—