He took out a fistful of something and then in his other fist the same, brought both fists together and joined the two items into one with twisting motions. What resulted he placed on the felt, no more than a thick, nutted bolt to judge by its appearance. Whatever it was, it disappeared when becoming obscured by a pair of tan slacks worn over narrow male hips, which had come between her and the repairman at work.
“So I found it,” Neer Shabazi said.
“My directions were all right?” she said.
“I have a map,” he said. He slipped between the opposite seat and the table. She pushed upwards.
He leaned in. She extended her arm.
He kept leaning in. His forehead, finely lined above the brows, neared and neared until it could be only that his habit of greeting was to kiss the face. If this wasn’t the custom around here still there was no reason she couldn’t cooperate except for blind panic, which she wrested down just as he canceled his motion, attempting to disguise it. He was tall and made a long descent to sitting. When the seat stopped him, his bowed trunk straightened slowly in its collared shirt of gray tricot. She watched the phases as he settled on the other side. He smelled good, if somewhat too powerfully, of lemon cologne. She guessed he was someone for whom to feel fresh and clean was a festive high point. More exciting to her, more promising of an enduring chapter, would have been a man careful to walk around with rips in his pants and enjoying a tipple. Could there still be hope? Neer was holding a brown bottle of beer, a Budweiser. He lowered the bottle to the table and spun it slowly on its base, one half of a full rotation, so the insignia faced him while she remained in view of the ingredients and warning. Nevertheless she went on to picture his legs, hoping them not entirely smooth. The more thought she gave the legs the more hair she added, aspiring ever closer to the density of bear pelt. Such man fur would have shocked her in the past but with every year now she was finding she wanted more hair. He arranged his legs under the table and prepared to plant an elbow on top. Next he would cup his chin in his hand.
He stiffened and glanced impatiently away, as if she and not gravity had brought him down. She snapped alert, mortified. These after all were Neer Shabazi’s legs she had been furring in her mind, legs of a savior, not some guy in his clothes. He looked back. He cupped his chin in his hand. His brows were not wing-shaped but rather straight.
“It was hard to get the cranberry people to admit you were even here,” she said.
“Admit?” he said. “I’m no secret.”
“You’re telling me you’re not,” she said. “You’re in the paper.”
“I was in mid-interaction when we spoke on the phone,” he said. “I thought, but then I dismissed. Really? The New York Times? The Wall Street Journal?” Even in this heightened state of interest it seemed he was distractible. He peered up at the TV and back. “The Globe.”
“The local Crier. This was my point to the receptionist. They release a statement, I call, and they deny it.”
“They denied our award?”
“We never got that far. I asked for you.”
“You expected the person at the telephone to know my name?” he said.
“I expected? I assumed. You were in the paper.”
“Have you been to the plant?”
“Big?”
“Not every level is equally engaged by my visit.”
“I misunderstood then,” she said.
“You never know.”
“How do you mean?”
But he only flipped his palm up to dismiss his last remark. He raised his beer to his mouth. He drank in a manner that suggested he wouldn’t drink many more than one. He appeared to be listening to what he drank, the sound neither pleasant nor unpleasant. Having made the observation, she found she resented him, as if this right now were an insult in a series. Distant neighbors before, closemouthed strangers here. She was surprised at how quickly her mission had switched to sour corroboration.
He was not handsome. He was very narrow-headed. She imagined the trait had made it easier on his mother in birthing but she couldn’t go any farther to picture him as a child without altering his features too improbably. Big eyes, big wise dark eyes, she had remembered beneath the gracefully shaped brows, which indeed were here today, if unwinglike, but his eyes were small and sunken and tending to flit. Perhaps she had been recalling his older brother, Yiftah, or his little sister, Kineret. She remembered Kineret, her own age, on a bike looping among the stucco pillars in the building’s parking lot. She remembered pretending not to see her, although she herself would have been playing alone by the tough oleander where the cats hid. Why hadn’t they hit it off, two girls in one lot? Above them four floors, eight porches, and not to mention the posterior flats: sixteen families to a building. Bonds couldn’t be established among everyone. Her family was religious, the Shabazis not. The children wouldn’t attend the same schools. They would never meet in synagogue. Their conventions of greeting would differ. If you were short an egg you would knock on a nearer door.
Everything could have been different had his family kept a strictly kosher kitchen and scaled the stairs to ring the Poresch bell. Hers would have climbed down for a meal every so often on Shabbat and would have reciprocated. But yes, first genialities on the Shabazis’ part would have been required, the outreach, because in that country her family had been checked, mannered too mildly, correct by the norms of another place, correct or conserved, newcomers and their kids waiting for a handle on the scene. The Shabazis on the other hand, parents and children, would have been two native-born generations since the grandparents had newly come, though to think back on their demeanor, perhaps newcoming wasn’t bound to lift away on schedule.
So, a balance if not a relationship. The Poresch family the guarded Americans on the top floor, the Shabazis the guarded Yemenis downstairs.
Flat Four, southwest. Flat One, southwest. Draftswoman and pharmacist. Nursery school assistant, courthouse guard. Eldest a daughter, middle child a son, the younger daughter by the oleander looking for cats. Eldest and middle both sons, and the youngest riding solitary through the pillars on her bike.
She raised her glass and tipped it. Oily threads of vodka twirled through the cranberry juice. “Congratulations on your accomplishment.”
“Mine?” Neer Shabazi said. “Not mine. It’s a whole team.” But anyway he slanted the neck of his bottle without touching her rim, shrugged and drank.
What else to say? Eighteen years had elapsed since that day when she had barely known him and after which nothing had changed. She would have passed him on the block with even more haste than her disposition prescribed, a sneaking horror now, though by some tacit covenant of children she had never told her parents, and he had never reported, her lapse of judgment, his presence of mind.
“Do you still find yourself on twenty Mendeleh Shapira Street?” she asked.
“Nu sure,” he said. “Sabbaths and holidays. Supper sometimes.”
She supposed this meant his parents were still alive. She smiled. “Are the Livyatans still there?”
“No.”
“Handsome kids, the girls more than the boys, boys on the portly side. I liked their hair.”
“They moved,” he said. “A few years after you.”
“Lovely hair,” she said. “Each one of them, thick like honey. But that endless piano practice, all of the time the same mistakes, each sibling exactly as bad as the other. And that dog of theirs,” she said. “Of.”
“A tan chow chow.”
“You remember!” she said. “That dog.”
“She made a lot of noise.”
“Nu sure,” she said. “With them leaving her so often on her own, the howling, but besides.”
“I don’t know what else I would remember her for.”
“The tensions,” she said.
“Someone protested the howling?”
“No,” she said. “The waste. Mr. Tzadka.”
Behind Neer the repairman had step
ped away from the pool table and affixed the implement with the coral handle to the underside of the jukebox where it projected like a lobster claw. The door of the jukebox cabinet was open now, the man concealed behind it. A nutmeg-colored sideburn remained visible through the window, a ruddy cheek and the sun-bleached fringe of a mustache, framed by the printed flames.
“The air traffic controller,” Neer said. “Seamstress wife, two girls, a boy my age, Oded. Iraqis.”
“That’s right!” she said. “That’s what he was. At Ben Gurion Airport. I had forgotten that. His ears were shot from the jets.”
“The howling wouldn’t have bothered him then.”
“On the contrary!” she said. “His hearing came in and out and he hated noise I guess for both reasons. The wavering effect drove him mad. I had forgotten that. When the Livyatans practiced the piano he would go berserk. He would shout down the dog. To me he was never anything but polite. I was very quiet. How could I have forgotten that? He lived on our floor. My mother did business with the wife. Their porch was next to ours. The dog was in the porch beneath, Three southwest.”
“We heard her very well on One. But the tensions you say concerned waste?”
“That’s what I said. Now I don’t know. How could the ears have fallen out? I remember knowing about them. His wife would have filled my mother in. My mother would have told our father and we’d have heard.”
“But the matter was the Livyatan dog waste and not her noise, this was your impression?”
“One day he smeared her shit on their flat door.”
Again Neer Shabazi rotated his bottle on the table. The repairman continued to fuss with the interior of the jukebox, his booted feet shifting as if he too were embarrassed. Why the bad language? Of all the anecdotes she could have chosen for a sentimental journey. A neighbor boy to whom she owes a debt of gratitude turns up for the first time in her adulthood and she talks shit, literal shit. Television may have influenced her. Another skit was wrapping up, the cast members endeavoring to sound much older than they were as well as drunk. The dialogue was thin and they had lost it for hysterics.
“Where had he collected the shit in order to smear it?” Neer said.
“How do you mean, where?”
“Dog shit in the hallways I would have thought would get around. I’d expect even downstairs occupants would have been aware of the infraction.”
“Outside. He collected it outside.”
“The dog was soiling the exterior common areas?”
“Dog shit on the street is enough of a problem. The path and garden I remember clean.”
“How then could he have attributed the waste with any certainty to the chow chow?”
“I don’t know,” she said. She was growing sad. “Watching from the porch?”
“One way or another his behavior seems extreme.”
“Yes,” she said. “That’s I suppose what I was getting at, extremely humorous, I must have thought.”
“Rather I’m puzzled that this story in particular should have come to mind.”
“I was puzzled before you,” she said.
She considered coming clean about her state of being. Shorter shifts would help, a few more chances to clear the head. Could she raise this with her employers? A live-in position meant accessibility. And how to put across to them that, nearing his fourth decade, their son’s mind no longer was infantile but rather that of a very old infant tired of pain and wanting a quiet corner, where he found lust continually new, with any source of friction? The ottoman today, yesterday the carpet, the giant exercise ball, and more and more household items as every day she generated less and less chatter, since he couldn’t talk. They had trained her in a slew of rehabilitative drills but the man had been this way from birth. Joy came pouring out of him at the slightest prompt. His teeth were shortened from constant grinding.
Neer raised his bottle and drank.
“Not puzzled!” she said. “No, to think of it. In my line of work I deal on and off with anything that comes out of a living body. The friend I see most often does the same thing, my weekend relief. The worst cleanups are a natural part of the conversation. You could say we compete.”
“You’re a nurse?”
“A live-in caretaker,” she said. “But you’re not. I apologize.”
“No need,” he said. “I’ve considered secretions myself. You do lose sight of other sensibilities.” He drank thoughtfully. “But returning to our conversation I remain most puzzled that I don’t remember the bad smell. It would have bothered me.” He set his bottle down, not rotating it this time. He seemed to expect them to return to the previous topic. It appeared he might stick to it as long as they had here, less than an hour left before each of them must resume his and her work.
“Good beer?” she said.
“It’s fine.”
“I can recommend a local brew if it’s just fine,” she said. “Let me buy you a drink.” She prepared to rise, turning one shoulder a little more towards him than away.
“Thank you,” he said. “This is fine.”
“Or one of these,” she said, brandishing her glass. “In honor of your accomplishment. What’s your vodka?” She smiled again, thinking back to herself at seven years of age, when he had saved her. Instead of more demonstrative she grew violently shy, the smile stretching like a surgical mask. She looked to her drink, watery pink around the liquefying ice, ruby red elsewhere.
“Thank you,” he said. “I don’t enjoy the juice other than medically.”
She returned her shoulders to where they had been. “The stuff has to be sweetened and they sweeten it too much.”
“On its own it’s terrifically tart,” he said.
“You’re the authority.” She tapped her drink to indicate again that she had chosen it in his honor. He would confirm this and she would confess.
“The tartness is not my finding,” he said. He shifted his elbow on the table by the lottery cards and clamped his narrow jaw between his thumb and pointer. “Unless you mean beyond the sensation, the underlying nature.”
“Exactly,” she said.
“The anti-adhesion properties in this particular astringency.”
“Yes.”
“Or rather what we found to be a very certain compound in the berry which inhibits the adhesions present on the pili of the surface of pathogens, effectively disabling their cling.”
“Yes!” she said.
“To one another as well as the teeth.”
“What they put in the new red toothpaste!”
He took a swig of beer, sitting nearly languorous, but the eyes prowling. “No paste yet,” he said. “So far just a dentist-administered glaze. The color soon fades.”
“I for one look forward to your product very much,” she said. “Red teeth or not.”
He held the bottleneck by his lips without drinking, head still propped as on a tripod, his small eyes darting to the chattering TV again and again. He loosened his lips and released the bottle. “The name on the final product you can be sure will not be mine.”
The old-seeming displeasure surfaced again, curling her nostrils. Did he take her for such a nitwit as to think his name would be the brand? Shabazident! on polka-dotted squeazy tubes, authorized by the ADA. The TV ad depicts knee-padded cyclists in a ruby-toothed stream, grinning, invigorated by the voices of a gospel chorus, thundering hope: Bring out the Shabazi in your smile.
The man was simply unable to cull theories of personal intention from the length of sentences, not even as short as, I look forward to your product. She says this to encourage me? No, not even, An interested consumer! At the jukebox the repairman cranked the coral handle once, twice. Something clicked.
“My mistake,” she said. The repairman moved slowly back and emerged from behind the open jukebox, drawing out with him a wide cartridge, painted white but of metal, judging by the heavy scrape and slide of many coins against it from inside. She checked the time flashing, gold on blue on the Ken
o screen.
“Not on the pending patent,” Neer said. “Not even the latest grant proposal.” He squeezed his small eyes shut. He opened them. “I’m astonished I made it even to the local sheet.”
“Team Honored,” she said. “You’re on the team.” She stared at the seat beside her. She was losing interest in this personality across, this Neer Shabazi of the cranberry dissection squad, zealously dry, maniacally factual and now revealing himself also a disgruntled employee. Altogether a joy. What had possessed her to arrange this? Perhaps this was the time to say, I owe you my life, and wrap things up. Neer remained silent, seemed not to mind that the conversation had died. She examined the black vinyl of her seat, then the chipboard wainscot, the different ways in which the chips had aged, the remnants of a bumper sticker, and in a rush returned to the vinyl. “My bag!”
Neer checked his own seat, hoisted her backpack by the hanging loop and passed it high over the table. The canvas bulged strangely where it stretched over the new orthosis, showing the one-of-a-kind outline of Clarence’s calf and heel. She set the backpack by her hip and knocked through the canvas. The polymer responded with a hollow sound. The dread retreated. This wasn’t the time to fail in the eyes of the mother. The mother was alert to a worker’s fading investment. She was familiar with it, she could tell, therefore the mounting tests, antiseptics misplaced, the surgical gloves missing, ointments and powders gone, the electric toothbrush, the super calorific shakes. If Adi didn’t ask for a replacement right away the mother would magically find what had been lost, and wonder how the aide could have done without.
“I don’t need a little plaque for my office!” Neer said suddenly. “Only proper credit and accurate placement in the group. This is important much less to my pride and pocket than my lasting impact in the field!”
The Place Will Comfort You Page 20