They went to a large, brightly lit restaurant with Cuban music and ordered the two sandwiches. Yoni wondered if he would gag or vomit on the pork. But he didn’t. He liked it. He didn’t love it. It didn’t taste extraordinarily different from anything he had ever tasted—kind of a cross between chicken and veal. But there were so many other foods to explore. Yoni decided that he “loved Cuban food.”
* * *
In South Miami, Rifka was getting back from a meeting about organizing the baking for the break-the-fast for a holiday fast the following week. It always took a lot more planning to break a fast than to fast. Rifka was always in charge of the desserts. But when she got home and got out of the car she noticed a strange smell. It was not an unpleasant smell but a bit heavy, musty, maybe meaty.
She had no idea, but it was Ka, the unknown god in the backyard. He was feeling good, feeling that he had found the right spot to set up his hole. He decided to make an official announcement that this was his hole and so he used the gland in his throat to emit the correct odor.
Carrying the leftover macaroons from her meeting, Rifka followed her excellent nose to the backyard, where the heel of her right shoe became caught in the mud and Rifka fell face-forward, landing on her enormous belly, partly submerged, actually much like an alligator.
The macaroons tumbled out and rolled down to within an inch of the alligator, and a few of them he barely had to move to eat.
* * *
Yoni Friedman had entered a fantasy world, a kind of dream in which everything that had been his life up until now, including his wife, didn’t exist anymore. He was not certain what Acacia thought about this. He could tell by the slight way she moved to music that she was a great dancer. What would it be like to dance with a Cuban woman? He had never danced with a woman. In his world, men danced only with men, holding hands in a circle, always moving counterclockwise. Why counterclockwise? He couldn’t say. He always avoided dancing, but this would be very different.
As they made their way out of the restaurant to a song Acacia called a bolero, sung by someone she called Benny something, his name almost sounding Jewish, Yoni saw something that shocked him. At first he thought he must be wrong, but he wasn’t.
In a quiet corner booth sat a Cuban woman sharing a lobster with a thin, dark, clean-shaven man. Yoni hoped to someday have the nerve to eat a lobster. There was something familiar but out of place about the man. Did he know him? It was Rabbi Herschel without a beard. He looked up at Yoni with fear in his eyes. But of course Yoni had the same fears, so neither man said anything. Herschel was wearing the exact same clothes as he was wearing—the same blue jeans and blue checked shirt. He must have found the Burdines sale, too. Yoni noted with pleasure that Herschel’s Cuban woman was not as attractive as his. But Herschel had completely shaved off his beard. How was he going to explain that?
Yoni looked forward to the prospect of chaos.
He turned to Acacia and proposed a lobster dinner.
“That would be really nice, Yoni. But where is this going?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, you’re married. Are you sure you don’t have children?”
“I’m sure,” he said, and then almost added “thank God,” an old habit that he never liked. He took her hand tenderly, a new gesture he had learned from her, and said, “Don’t worry. Ka will arrange everything.”
“Who is Ka?”
Yoni smiled. “An unknown god.”
Acacia slowly shook her head and thought, This man and his gods. She knew about such men, believers. Her father saw Yoruba gods everywhere—in the trunks of trees, on the tops of palms. He had dolls with whom he shared his smuggled cigars and a shot of every bottle of rum was spilled on the ground as an offering. So if Yoni put his faith in a god called Ka, Acacia could understand.
* * *
When Yoni got home he heard Rifka shouting from the “backyard.” The alligator had found her. Had he attacked? Was she in his huge toothy grip, being dragged into the swampy muck? Was there blood? A struggle? He wished he had come home just a little later. But then he realized that she wasn’t screaming. She was laughing.
He had heard his wife screaming many times but was much less familiar with the sound of her laughter. He went out and found her in the mud, too fat to get up. But the alligator looked as passive as ever. And then he realized—she was feeding him macaroons.
“Look,” she shouted gleefully. “He likes them.” She was tossing macaroons like a coach at practice, the chocolate-covered confections bouncing off the alligator’s dinosaur armor. He would occasionally eat one.
It seemed to Yoni that the alligator was tolerating this because Yoni regularly fed him meat. But what would happen if he didn’t feed him meat anymore? He might just leave, but he had a nice hole full of water, and according to the case as presented by the opposing side, alligators were leaving the Everglades because of a lack of water. If she kept feeding him macaroons and nothing else he would look for something bigger to eat. He realized that there was a moral issue here. Though he could not recall any specific commentary on the subject, it would be immoral to feed your wife to an alligator. He should warn her. There was no risk that she would stop. He could not remember one instance of her heeding his advice. In fact, the more he persisted, the more determined she was to do the exact opposite.
“Rifka,” he warned. “You should be careful. This is a dangerous wild animal.”
“What dangerous?” she said. “He eats macaroons. He’s a landsman.”
Yoni had tried his best. But just to make sure, he told her again, “Rifka, what you are doing is very dangerous.” Now she was certain to ignore him. He started to walk away.
“Wait a minute.” Rifka suddenly shot a distrustful glare at her husband.
“What?”
“What’s with your beard? You look like modern orthodox,” she said with a sneer.
“Maybe.” He shrugged.
“They’re not Jewish,” she opined. “I mean, sure, they’re Jewish, but it’s not real Jewish practice.”
“But suppose they eat macaroons?” he wanted to say but didn’t.
* * *
Yoni was a lawyer and he understood that it was important right now that no one see him out with another woman. So he went to pray at the morning minyan, something he hadn’t done in more than a year. He wanted to hear what was being said about Herschel’s clean-shaven chin.
But when he got there Rabbi Herschel was already dovening, muttering and bobbing his head, and he had the same long, scraggily beard he always wore.
Could he grow it overnight? Perhaps from some hormone treatment. No, Yoni realized, it must be fake! Rabbi Herschel had a fake beard. And that meant that Rabbi Herschel was a big fake!
This thought made Yoni very happy. Maybe there were others with fake beards and Cuban girlfriends. He looked around the shul at the bearded enraptured men, wrapped in prayer shawls, mumbling their Hebrew prayers. Yoni looked for telltale signs of fake beards. Perhaps Manny Kaufman over there, who shouted rather than mumbled his prayers so that no one could tell he was faking. Yoni dreamed of what special moment, perhaps during the high holidays, he would reach over and expose Herschel with a tug on the beard. Or, maybe even more enjoyable, have a long, candid conversation with the rabbi about what a fraud it was. The whole thing was fake. His marriage was fake. But none of this would ever happen because he and the rabbi had struck an unspoken bargain of silence. Each would be silent as long as the other was silent. Religions were built on such bargains, Yoni thought.
Still, he avoided Acacia. At first he reduced the food he gave the alligator so he would be hungry. He did not want to completely stop feeding him because he was afraid the alligator would leave. But he had no results. When he came home each afternoon he would hear Rifka down there, giggling and tossing macaroons. He would shout in a loud voice, “You have to stop
this, Rifka. It’s dangerous.” In so shouting he established his alibi and at the same time guaranteed that Rifka would not stop. Every day he reduced the amount of chicken he fed the alligator until finally he fed him nothing at all.
But she was still out there every afternoon, giggling and tossing macaroons. Could an alligator live on macaroons? Finally he came home to a silent, empty house. He cautiously walked out into the “backyard.” The yard at first looked like it had been covered with litter as though blown in from somewhere. Then he realized it was macaroons strewn around the yard and two empty boxes with their plastic dividers. The alligator was there, making a deep, soft moan. There was a round muddy spot where Rifka usually stood and a long muddy trough down to the alligator hole.
It was all clear. The alligator had grabbed her, dragged her to his hole, held her under the water until she was drowned, and then eaten her whole. There were probably not even any screams. Yoni could see that there was no blood—a merciful end—except for the poor alligator. How could he swallow all of her at once? He was moaning softly. He had eaten too much fat.
* * *
Acacia was not sure how she felt about Yoni now that he was not married, not religious, bareheaded, just a guy, this lawyer she was going out with. She would have to decide, which never occurred to Yoni, because he had never been in a relationship that involved choice.
This story cries out for some moral lesson—something about God and man, about religious hypocrisy or keeping and breaking covenants or about the sanctity of marriage, not to mention human life. But this is not the Talmud. It is not an allegory. It is a story and this is just what happened. If there is any lesson to be learned, it is never feed macaroons to an alligator.
THE GLOUCESTER WHALE COD
There are very many aquatic animals that are even larger than land animals. The obvious reason for this is the rich nature of water.
—Pliny the Elder, Natural History
The macaroni doesn’t lie,” hissed Bonagia in her raspy voice. Angela nodded in agreement, though she never really saw how macaroni could lie.
“I see ngustia,” Bonagia cautioned in Sicilian dialect. She saw worries ahead.
Angela had inherited Bonagia from her mother, who also asserted that macaroni always told the truth. Once a week, more on holy weeks, Bonagia would roll into their house and toss dried macaroni on the kitchen table. Bonagia seemed to roll, not walk, since there was never a visible leg movement. She was four feet tall, possibly that wide, though it was not certain, since she was always covered in floral prints to her ankles that revealed only a general roundness.
The macaroni tinkled like wind chimes on the green-spotted Formica table, and then Bonagia would poke at it and say, “I see ngustia, big prublema. I see trouble.”
Angela’s mother believed Bonagia had predicted her husband’s death. But Angela’s mother was married to a fisherman and there is always ngustia and prublema in a fisherman’s life. If he isn’t lost at sea he will lose his mortgage, have bad catches, need boat repairs he can’t pay for, lose nets, receive a new round of regulations further restricting his days, his miles, or his catch, and if none of that destroys him, the oil prices will go up or a force-9 gale will blow for the next three days. Any of those things and Bonagia would nod and say, “The macaroni doesn’t lie.” But Angela, also married to a fisherman, didn’t need macaroni to see where life was headed.
Angela let her come over out of respect to her mother. While they sat, staring at dried pasta and drinking red wine, Beverly Boston was next door, staring into her computer and sipping a martini. Angela could see her through the window and noticed with a small degree of pleasure that some unpleasant age thing was developing under Beverly’s chin. The light from the screen revealed it.
Angela had married Salvy Tatoli, and in any other town, Beverly Boston and Salvy Tatoli probably wouldn’t have known each other. But this was Gloucester and they were next-door neighbors on Smith Cove, an inlet in the lee of the wind on the east side of Gloucester Harbor. It was named for Captain John Smith, who in the early seventeenth century, charting the Massachusetts coastline, had recommended the spot for anchoring. That was why the Tatolis happened to settle there more than three hundred years later.
Salvy’s grandfather came over in 1927 on a salt bark from Trapani, Sicily. Although more a sailor than a fisherman, he saw the tremendous cod catches in Gloucester and he settled there and bought an eastern side trawler, a schooner with its masts sawed off and an inboard engine. He bought a house on Smith Cove, really more of a shack until he married and they fixed it up. The view was beautiful, but the smell kept real estate prices down. The splayed and salted codfish laid out to dry in the nearby fish flakes of the Gorton-Pew company made the neighborhood too redolent for anyone but fishermen. His wife, Salvy’s grandmother, complained about it, but she, too, got used to it. The Tatolis could see the white building with the tower across the harbor, where a company was learning how to freeze fish. In time there were no more flakes for fish drying and this cleared the air in the neighborhood for people like Beverly Boston.
Beverly was not as different from Salvy as she appeared. Her family, the Bastanics, had arrived twenty years later than the Tatolis and opened a hardware store downtown. They sent their daughter Beverly to college in Boston and she came back a different girl. She wore fashionable clothes and shoes with dangerously high heels that made her long legs look perfect.
“Beverly sure has great legs,” Salvy once commented to his father while they were sorting the cod and haddock from a net off Georges Bank. His father said nothing and his grandfather laughed and Salvy knew not to bring her up again. But it was true that she had very nice legs.
Beverly’s parents thought she had become too fancy at college, and to tease her about it, they started calling her Beverly Boston. But she didn’t mind. She liked the name, in part because when you got on the highway to leave town the sign said: “Beverly Boston,” two of the upcoming towns, so the name was about leaving.
But then she came back and bought a house on Smith Cove. Nobody was surprised. They always come back. No one ever escapes Gloucester. Kids go off to college and settle somewhere else. But they always come back. If Gloucester is all you know, every place else seems a little phony. Beverly still wore great shoes—shoes unlike anything the broken streets of Gloucester had ever seen—long, sleek, handcrafted shoes by Garolini, Paul Mayer, and Stuart Weitzman—her three favorites. Salvy never cared about the shoes but was glad to have her long legs next door even though she seemed to have brought a husband with her.
He was a quiet man who wore herringbone sport jackets and was said to be a professor in Boston. No one knew him in Gloucester. Some said he was a history professor, others science. Some said he was a poet. He may have been a genius or he may have been a fool, but the important thing was that he wasn’t Gloucester. Salvy’s cousin described him as a “gewgaw she brought back from college.” Salvy agreed even without knowing what a gewgaw was.
Salvy had not gotten married for years and a lot of people had thought it was because he was thinking about Beverly Boston and her long legs. Finally he married Angela, a Sicilian girl, like he was supposed to.
Angela had heard the rumors about Salvy and Beverly. It didn’t worry her. Angela, with her thick black hair and burning black eyes, was, according to many, the most striking woman in Gloucester. Her mother had been beautiful, too, but Angela always thought it was wasted beauty because her husband had died and she spent her life around only women, Sicilian widows and the wives of fishermen and her. It was not the life Angela wanted, but of course her mother hadn’t chosen it, either.
Angela always secretly thought that fishing would soon die out, they would be forced out of Gloucester, and it would be taken over by the Beverly Bostons. That would be their escape route.
The next year, just like Angela would have predicted if anyone had asked her, Beverly ran for mayor.
Many people run for mayor, especially in years when there was no incumbent. Incumbents usually won because it was believed that anyone who had been mayor and still wanted the job deserved it. The pay for being mayor was so low that it represented a considerable loss to anyone who already had a job. The leading contenders that year were a Sicilian ex-fisherman and an Irish ex-fisherman. Fishing was going so badly now that fishermen were willing to come in and be mayor.
Beverly Boston said that fishing was over and that Gloucester should be a tourist attraction. This was enough to make half the town hate her. But the fishermen vote was split between the Sicilian and the Irishman. Beverly Boston got all the people who didn’t think the mayor should be a fisherman. Secretly, she also got Angela’s vote. Her escape plan. Just as secretly, she also got Salvy’s vote. The legs. Angela and Salvy told each other and everyone else that they voted for the Sicilian.
* * *
The Tatolis had sold their eastern side trawler and bought a steel-hulled bottom dragger with a net that ran off the big spool on the stern. Those days when Salvy first went to sea with his father and his grandfather and they hauled in tremendous catches of huge fish and laughed and made money and Salvy stood on the bow as his father brought her into Gloucester harbor to the downtown dock where the lumpers lined up to unload the great catch on the deck, the gulls following them in screeching a salute and Salvy feeling proud because all the land people could see him and his family triumphantly back from sea—those were the days Salvy remembered as the best of his life.
Now it was just him and his cousin, who was married to Angela’s childhood friend Mena. Like Angela, Mena secretly wished the fishing would end and her husband would move into the real estate business like a number of fishermen they knew.
The catch was barely enough. They weren’t allowed to catch all they could, and instead of lumpers the officials from New England Fishery Management were waiting at the dock to inspect their small catch. How could you feel proud now? But he continued so that his son, Domingo, born on their best Sunday, would someday know the joy of working at sea with his father. He was still too young, although Salvy had already taught him knots. Domingo had a lobster pot that he baited and dropped and hauled from their dock in Smith Cove, and he proudly supplied the family with two or three clicking, shiny, dark monsters every week. Soon Salvy would take him to sea.
City Beasts Page 6