by Peter Orner
“A body can’t talk.” Walt’s standing there in shorts and shirttails. He’s still got his tie on, his Friday-night noose.
“Right,” Sarah says. “A body can’t talk.”
Walt watches Sarah in the mirror. Which is different from looking directly at someone. She’s looking back at him. It’s like they’re spying on each other. They’d both known the girl, seen her grow up. Walt had been noticing her downtown in recent years. Pale, almost translucent skin. Something furtive about her. But lately so many of them had that look. The dope, the boredom, too young to leave here, too old to have anything to do with their parents. Wandering in place. Miriam had taken the first boat out in the form of a young lawyer from Chicago. Used to bother him, and certainly it could be going better for her. Philip’s angry, all the time angry, Miriam says. What’s he got to be so angry about? God knows. As Sarah says, What hurts you, hurts you. A man’s angry, he’s going to be angry, whatever happens. Still, he couldn’t imagine Miriam having stayed in town, even if she hadn’t left so fast.
Sarah goes across the hall to the bathroom. Walt listens to her run the faucet as she relieves herself, as is her custom. Does she do this for his benefit or because she doesn’t want to listen to it herself? How many thousands of nights and he doesn’t know the answer to this basic question, either. But shouldn’t there be some things they’ll never know about each other, not out of shame, but simply because? Because because because.
A guy out walking his dog found the girl in the morning. There’d been a rock concert in Kennedy Park the night before. He’s heard people blame the music. Irv Pincus, for instance, that great thinker, ranting around the store about jungle music, as if an electric guitar had seized her by the throat. Three days later they arrested the kid in New Hampshire. Two years out of Durfee High School, lived with his mother in Mechanicsville, unemployed. Not Jewish, everybody so relieved.
Sarah’s still in the can. Walt knocks.
“Have you seen my slippers?”
“No.”
“What are you doing?”
“I’m doing what I’m doing.”
“So you think he just wanted to screw her and then decided to kill her after? Or he wanted both from the beginning?”
No answer. He waits.
Five minutes, he stands there. All’s quiet. The door opens. She’s wearing a robe. Her face is caked with the white goo again. The goo makes her eyes look different, heightens their intensity, big mummy eyes that stare out at him from a great distance. White goo means separate beds separately. Unusual for a Friday night. Walt steps aside to let her pass. You can’t touch the stuff, apparently ruins its effect. But when he returns to the bedroom, she’s lying on his bed, unrobed.
“The light?” Walt says.
“Leave it on,” Sarah says.
“Yeah?”
7
Gus’s Highland Spa
You want to know something?”
“Today,” Alf says. “Today, I just want to eat. Cheeseburger, Noreen. Extra cheese.”
Noreen on a stool beneath the TV. She’s watching a game show where one partner tries to get the other partner to say a word without saying the word. Like charades, with words, which defeats the purpose. It’s like when there’s water coming down on your head. Like it’s raining except it’s not. Raining out of the spout, you know, and you’ve got soap, a bar of soap—
A bath!
Right, right, but you’re standing up—
Shower!
“Did I say I was prepared to take your order?” Noreen says.
“And screw the salad,” Alf says. “Salad can go to hell.”
“How did you know?” Walt says.
“Know what?” Alf says.
“That I’ve been reading Dante.”
“Dante Palandri?”
“Dante Dante.”
“A writer. I’ve heard of him. You think I’m undereducated. An Italian poet of the Renaissance.”
Noreen says, “What kind of cheese?”
“Gorgonzola.”
“Late Middle Ages,” Walt says.
“Gorgonzola?” Noreen says. “On a cheeseburger?”
“Just before they’re about to enter the hellfire,” Walt says, “you know what Virgil says to Dante?”
“Don’t know, don’t care.”
“You two scholars need a little more time?”
“Okay, cheddar,” Alf says.
“Walt? What are you having?”
“Roast beef,” Walt says. “Please. Your cheeks are very rosy today, Norry. They are always rosy, but today the rosiness is more pronounced—”
“Hold the mayo?” Noreen says.
“Hell, no.”
“Alf, what kind of cheese on the burger?”
“I told you cheddar. No, make it Swiss now that you forgot the cheddar already.”
“Why can’t you be polite and gracious and have a sense of joie de vivre like Walt?”
“I didn’t almost die,” Alf says. “See, he almost died, or thinks he almost died, and now he’s Jesus’s little helper all of a sudden.”
Noreen saunters. First, she saunters in place, which is a nice trick. Then she saunters away. They could measure their lives in how many times Noreen’s done that little strut without moving before swinging around and walking away from their table, slow, that swingy walk—back to her post beneath the TV. Couldn’t they? It’s something she does with her knees as she walks, a slight bend followed by a tiny upward spring.
“What does Virgil say?” Alf says.
“He doesn’t say anything,” Walt says.
“What?”
“The old man smiles.”
“Why?” Alf says.
“Why?” Walt says.
“I just asked you why,” Alf says. “You always have to why my why?”
Walt reaches across the table and grips his old friend’s head and pulls it toward him across the table. When was the last time he touched Alf’s head? Has he ever?
“You going to kiss me?” Alf says.
Walt shouts: “Because other people’s suffering is a hoot!”
“Fat men,” Noreen says, “keep it down. The other patrons.”
“What other patrons?” Alf says.
“Okay,” Noreen says. “Business is a little slow. But there’s potentiality.”
From the kitchen, Gus says, “Business has been slow since 1953.”
“Hope springs eternal,” Noreen says.
On the TV, one player is shouting, “It’s like this thing, you know, that a woman puts on, you know, to hold up her—”
“Bra!” Alf shouts.
“You want to know something else?” Walt says.
“No,” Alf says.
“I’m on canto eight,” Walt says. “And already I’ve committed every sin there is to commit. Can you believe it? A monogamous, generally by choice, furniture salesman in a forgotten midsize American city, wife, daughter, two grandkids, no criminal record, a few smutty thoughts here and there, and I’ve committed them all? Gluttony, check. Greed, double-check. Sullen? Sullen’s a sin. When am I not sullen? Despair! That too. It’s a sin to despair. But the kicker, you know what the first one is? Guess what the first sin in the whole book is. Go ahead, guess.”
Alf sticks his tongue out. Little pink button of tongue. Doesn’t want to, who would willfully want to, but Walt thinks of the penis of a small dog they used to have. Porgie. Ran into Robeson Street one day when Miriam was seven, and that was the end of Porgie. Flattened by a Dodge. And yet somewhere in a murky corner of his brain, little Porgie’s dick lives. And now: it’s poking at him out of Alf’s mouth.
“Mediocrity,” Walt says. “First sin’s mediocrity.”
8
A Single Chair
The thing was, the more unsuccessful he became, the harder he worked at it. Everybody loved him, and this of course was the problem. Walt Kaplan was simply too likable. His father had warned him. Don’t get too chummy with people, they’ll fleece y
ou blind. And it’s not, old Max used to say, about selling any one thing. Don’t think of a chair as a chair. A chair is forty chairs. Get sentimental about selling a single chair, and you’re doomed. But for Walt that was exactly it. One chair was one chair. He couldn’t, for the life of him, look at a single chair and see forty’s worth. Because Walt Kaplan, unlike his blessed father, understood the poetry of furniture. A chair is a chair, and you sell one chair, you’re selling a harbor for one’s body, a chair that will, day after day, accept the exhaustion of loins, welcoming them back home, call it a kind of stand-in for a mother’s womb…
You still don’t see this, Poppa? I trade in small harbors.
And you wonder why you’re broke?
9
TLAW Packaging
In 1972 Fall River elected an undertaker mayor. Walt voted for him. Why not? He figured a guy who knew his way around embalming fluid was the guy their beloved city needed. Enough already declaring Fall River dead only to resurrect it a few years later in order to declare it dead again. Let it be dead and stay dead. Now dress it up and make it look pretty. Driscoll turned out to be just another pol in a dark suit, empty promises growing like the hair out of his earholes. Four years later, this past January 1976, Driscoll presided over the opening of the new city hall as the cars and trucks zoomed by underneath, past Fall River, as Walt Kaplan hadn’t needed to be a clairvoyant to predict fifteen years earlier. You build a highway through a city, people aren’t going to pull over and shop in your stores. The only city hall in America constructed over an interstate. To build it they had to obtain special air rights from the federal government. Out of some cramped sense of nostalgia, the city fathers had insisted that this new city hall rise, more or less, where the old one had stood unmolested for 117 years. Even the Great Fire of 1928 couldn’t bring down the old granite city hall, and to this day whenever he stands on South Main looking northeast, Walt can’t help but see it still, sooty, ugly, gloomy, churchlike. The place always made him think of burning witches. They blasted it to bits in ’62. People now say it was elegant and stately. It wasn’t. It looked like a Transylvanian prison. But it was Fall River. It was us. What’s this new one? Floating over a highway? Already falling apart?
Not fair to blame this albatross on Mayor Driscoll. The thing was in the works long before he took office. But back in ’72, Walt was willing to put more than a little faith in the mortician, believing he’d put his experience to use. Walt had stood there in the crowd in front of the Hotel Mellen, the temporary city hall, where so many years earlier he’d fallen for a hatcheck girl, and listened to Wilfred C. Driscoll deliver, from the hotel steps, his inaugural address in a voice he must have used to console the family of the deceased. Even, measured, practical. The intonation of a man with capable hands and a touch of the poet. My fellow Fall Riverites, we find ourselves at a time in our history that is critical to our future. In my lifetime, Fall River has declined from a prosperous industrial center…I think it is apparent to all that our city cannot change its course without additional monies. That is not to say that with the acquisition of money all our problems will be solved, but I would suggest that without additional revenues we will be severely limited in what we can do. Money begets money. Investment begets investment. And progress begets progress…But there is no reason to accept these conditions if we have imagination, stamina, and resolve to look boldly into the future rather than regrettably into the past! Let us begin to dream broadly and guilelessly, if only to balance those who never dream at all.
Guilelessly? After the address, Walt had walked back to his small storefront office at 290 Columbia Street thinking over the undertaker’s choice of words. He’d recently opened his own packaging business, one of several businesses he’d founded since Kaplan’s Furniture closed for good in 1965. There’d been a short-lived candy store on Ferry Street. He tried to start a mail-order catalog business out of the house. He’d been a silent partner in a now-defunct sweater factory.
Walt called this new venture: Tlaw Packaging.
“Like it, Sar? Get it? ‘Tlaw’?”
“Is it supposed to mean something?”
“Think about it.”
“I’m thinking and there’s nothing—”
“Tlaw! Tlaw!”
“Walt, I don’t—”
“Right there. You’re close. You’re warm. Tlaw. T—L—A—W.”
“Coleslaw?”
“Forget it.”
“It just doesn’t have a ring.”
“Too late. I already printed up the stationery, the business cards, commissioned the sign. Bernard’s going to run an ad in the Herald on Tuesday.”
Business wasn’t booming. Friends tried to steer accounts his way. He called in a few chits from way back. Layaway plans he never collected on after the store shut down. “Keep the couch, Vic, but look, could you steer some orders my way? I’m sinking here…” But he needed to work the phones, expand his territory. Drum up some new clients, connect with some of the younger sales managers who lived out in Freetown, Swansea, Dighton. But the phone itself, the very sight of it sitting there cradled, waiting for his hot air to give it some life, exhausted him. And this was before he even dialed anybody. A pre-exhaustion, an anticipation of exhaustion. The thought of speaking into the mouthpiece for the express purpose of cajoling a stranger into parting with his money, to give it to Walt Kaplan as opposed to someone else offering roughly the same service for roughly the same price, had become intolerable. Face-to-face on the floor, you could look someone in the eye, tell a joke, complain about the wet snow, exchange a laugh. Something personal about furniture. You sold people an idea of who they thought they were, or who they wanted to turn into. Did they aspire to a classical look, to an idea of refinement? You strike me as Ethan Allen types. Or maybe they wanted to be more modern, up-to-date? Just received a shipment of Scandinavian-style recliners. They’re saying they’re ergonomic, whatever the hell this means. Sit and you tell me. Always better to play the rube than the know-it-all. Now he sold plastic wrap. Sarah said, “Hard to start a business in your fifties, Walt, just give it time.” He did give it time. He gave it nothing if not time. He’d sit there in that little office, visible from the street, and try to talk his fingers into a cold call. Unlike at the store, he had no employees, no salesmen, no upholsterers, no secretaries, no cashiers. He didn’t even do the packaging. He subcontracted to a company in Pawtucket. A solo middleman. Calls, not many. Now he talked so much in his head even he no longer paid attention.
Dream guilelessly? Sure, that I can do, Mr. Mayor. And so all that afternoon in 1972, he did; in honor of the newly minted funeral director, Walt dreamed guilelessly. Gross profits? Net profits? Investment begets investment? No, as the mayor so profoundly noted, money will not solve all our problems, oh no, he dreamed, daydreamed, guilelessly, as he often did, about the Great Fire of 1928 and how his father took him downtown the morning after. (Apologies, Mayor Driscoll, but I only dream of the past, regrettably and otherwise.) As he stared at the stillborn phone, Walt thought of how his mother woke him up before dawn. He was around ten. His mother dressed him up in three coats. It was that cold. And you could smell the smoke all the way up the hill, even inside their house on Dudley Street with all their windows closed. He walked with his father straight down icy President Avenue. And there it was. Or rather there it wasn’t. Where’s downtown? From Bank Street to Pocasset, annihilated. A descent into a frozen hell. Charred ruins of all that had been so familiar were caked with white crust. The night before had been so frigid that the water froze moments after it left the firemen’s hoses. Where buildings had once stood were tall, hanging pillars, stalactites, of ice. When the sun comes out, if the sun comes out, stand beneath one of those and it will melt and stab you to death, his father said. The Rialto Theater, the Hotel Mohican, Granite Block (where his father got his hair cut and visited his accountant and saw his doctor and his dentist), the Buffington Building—gone. Temple Beth El—gone. The banks: the Metacomet, the
Union (where his father kept his money), the Mattapoissett-Pocasset—all gone.
Fire companies had come from as far away as Newport, Boston, Hartford. And in the morning, there they stood, the firemen, in their black coats and pointy hats. They looked like giant leprechauns. Of special interest to his father and the other businessmen who’d come to survey the ruins were the safes that survived. He remembered their distinguished names. One was an Underwriters; another was a Herring-Hall-Marvin. You’d think it would have been a mournful morning, but the fact was the men were so giddy they could hardly contain themselves. Extraordinary! The safes are hardly scorched! And in the spirit of Underwriters and Herring-Hall-Marvin, Fall River, they proclaimed, will rise up once again, strong out of the ashes. Better than before! Two little girls, the Sullivan sisters, the fire chief’s daughters, handed out pink carnations. The men all put them in the lapels of their long coats. The Sullivan sisters, one was Mary, and the other—
The phone rang.
“Tlaw Packaging. You make it, we seal the deal.”
“Mr. Tlaw, please.”
“Speaking.”
“What sort of packaging do you do, Mr. Tlaw?”
“Industrial.”
“Industrial. It sounds—how shall I put it?—quite a manly undertaking.”
“You don’t know the half of it. And you are?”
“Oh, me? It’s Mrs. Nalpak.”
“Mrs. Nalpak! Now there’s a name for a packaging company. Why didn’t I—do you have any widgets I might package for you, Mrs. Nalpak? Say in the two-to-three-hundred range.”
“Aren’t you the one with the widget, Mr. Tlaw?”
“I’m not even sure of that anymore.”
“Now, that’s just not true. I can testify—you forgot your lunch.”
“I know.”
“You want me to—”
“It’s all right.”