Is this a guy I would leave my purse unattended with? Gretchen wondered as he guided her with a touch of the elbow up the steps. Absolutely! If I had one with me...
Maximus passed a dollar to a homeless woman outside the subway exit, and they walked past perfume stores with Chinese names to Confucius Kung Lucky Duck, she could see he moved with an ease, an elegance and grace, that was more martial arts than artsy-fartsy. A man so confident in his sexuality that he could afford to be lithe and sprite, a man, she imagined, who could kiss his gay friends on the lips on New Year's Eve without compunction. Yes, she could see that. Spending New Year's Eve with him. And it was April.
He opened the door to the restaurant for her with a little bow, “Milady,” he said. She smiled and rolled her eyes a bit and stepped inside. Confucius Kung Lucky Duck was all hanging red lanterns and mechanical cats with waving paws, and when the woman at the front saw Maximus, her wrinkled face broke into a smile. It took years off her. She shrieked things in a language Gretchen couldn't understand and wrapped her arms around him.
He laughed and, once he had pried himself from her, greetings were exchanged all around. He introduced Gretchen in a mixture of English and, she guessed, Chinese, to not only the hostess, but the manager, the owner, the owner's wife, the bartender, his little son and daughter, the busboy and several of the kitchen staff behind the swinging doors. He greeted them all with a kiss or a hug or a touch or a shake of the hand, and the children he threw up in the air. Maximus seemed tactile, feeling his way around the world. Gretchen didn't want to be left out.
They were given the window booth, and Gretchen almost laughed as he pulled out the chair for her to get to the bench. This was like dating in the Eisenhower era but, she suspected, it would have more sex. She hid her shopping bags under the table, and told him to order for her.
“But no pork,” she said. “I have a problem with pork.”
He gave her a look, on the verge, she supposed, of asking her if she were Jewish or Muslim—she was used to this response—but she laughed and said, “That's not it. I just can't stand pork. Childhood trauma.”
He ordered, rattling off strange things, and the waitress nodded and smiled, and then she backed away from the table as if she had bestowed her first born on the feudal lord.
Maximus leaned across the table at Gretchen and said, “Don't be too impressed. I don't know that much Mandarin. And no Cantonese at all. I hope you like what I ordered.”
“Do you know many languages?”
“A few.” He slid around beside her and put his arm casually on her shoulder. She let him keep it there. “Now tell me all about you!”
“Ah! My life. It's quite a mouthful. I was born in Thailand, I kid you not, but it doesn't really matter much where I was born. I was four when we left. I don't remember much, maybe a golden temple with pointy tops and a water buffalo in a field. My dad was in the military, and my mom is from Ireland, and didn't really want to stay in the States. My dad was always offered at least one foreign country for his next tour of duty, so that's where we went. From Thailand, we moved to Northern Ireland, then Istanbul, Peru, Korea and Guam. That's where I graduated. Then I moved here to New York. That's it.”
For obvious reasons, Gretchen always kept secret from any new beau the fact of her parents' lottery win a few years before. Gold diggers came in both sexes, after all. And her mother's family had done enough money-grabbing after the win; it had torn Gretchen's heart and forced her parents, Ursula and Jed, to flee her mother's hometown of Derry and carve a new life for themselves in Wisconsin. There her parents owned a store for fish bait, firearms, hot sauce and their own beef jerky. Gretchen also kept quiet the fact that her father was the 'Jed' of SlimJed Jerky. It was the most popular jerky in the US at the moment, thanks to an appearance on Attack of the Killer Investors, the popular Shark Tank-like show.
“What do you consider your home?”
“I don't really have a home. Except maybe New York now. I've been here long enough. I guess I'm like a, a child of the world. There's my dad's brother, my aunt and uncle, in Wisconsin, but I’ve barely met them. Every summer we used to go visit mother's family in Northern Ireland, and there are plenty of them. You know, Irish Catholic. Every time we visited, there seemed to be a few new baby cousins I had to meet. They're the family I grew up with, but only during the summers. I used to babysit them, and then they got older as the years went on, and then we started going out to pubs together. There doesn't seem to be a drinking age in Ireland, from what I can tell. But then...then...something happened. And...and... Well, we don't speak anymore. Unfortunately. So now I have no family except my mom, my dad and my two brothers. What about you? Where are you from?”
“So, what do you do?”
He seemed not to have heard her, but the Chinese pop music was so loud, as was the chattering and clacking of chopsticks all around them, so maybe she could understand that.
“I'm a flight attendant.”
“Sweet! What air—?”
“Believe it or not, I just flew in from São Paulo last night!”
“Brazil! Fantastic! It's always hot down there, right?”
“Oh, it's always gorgeous! Tropical, you know. When I fly there, which is sort of often, I guess, there's an amazing park I love to sit in. The airline always puts us up in hotels, but I have a friend there called Cassio. A platonic friend. I always hang out with him, and go to that park. It's called Tenente Siqueira Campos. We sit there on the benches in the shade of the palm trees and drink caipirinhas. You can drink outside in Brazil. I swear, when you sit there, you would think you were in the middle of the rain forest and not in a thriving metropolis of over 11 million people! And speaking of people, the Brazilians are so friendly, even if you don't speak the language. Well, except for the winos and drug addicts, and there are a quite a few of those around. But I keep my belongings close to me, never look them in the eye, and there are plenty of police patrolling the streets, and the paths of the park, so I guess it's alright. I've been everywhere. Paris, Moscow, Dubai, Istanbul, Cairo...”
She was disgraced at how easily the lies spilled out of her mouth! Ohh, how could she lie to this dreamboat? But once she had opened her mouth and begun speaking, she couldn't stop!
How could she tell him the sad truth? That she was slogging for the no-frills, in-flight hell that was Nickel And Dime Airlines, America's most-flown but most-despised budget airline. A company so tight, so penny-pinching that it made their employees pay for the five week training course. And sent out a monthly bill for the 'privilege' of wearing their uniforms, annually voted Most Sick-Inducing Of The Industry. A bright orange t-shirt with the N&D logo, a jeans jacket bejeweled with actual nickels and dimes, which had them clanking down the aisles like Ironman, and flat denim caps. For the women, a big Air-France-like bow, but on the backs of their red micro-skirts, the skirts which had male passengers leering, 'dropping' their napkins in the aisles, so that the unfortunate, harried flight attendant would bend over and they could take up-skirt photos.
“Fly The Cheap Skies!” was Nickel and Dime's motto, though the company seemed cheaper than its flights.
They were the first American airline to dispense with in-flight complimentary beverages, having installed, like one of their budget European counterparts, a vending machine next to the back lavatories. The machines were stocked with soft drinks and snacks, as well as amenities/necessities like toilet roll, inflatable pillows and condoms. “Ten bucks for a Cup-O-Noodles?!” was a common exclamation, and expletives followed when the passengers learned it was an extra dollar for the hot water to make the noodles.
Worse, Nickel and Dime was the first airline in the world to install the much-ridiculed and -reviled 'standing seats.’ This meant the greedy airline could shove more passengers into a plane. Nickel and Dime had taken out the last five rows and installed ten rows of these 'steats.' They had a high back, and passengers perched their bottom on a foot-long slanted ledge. There was no recline. These s
teats retailed for half the price of a sitting seat. Nickel and Dime had unveiled them with great fanfare to a startled public the year before. “Like sitting on a bar stool!” they had enthused in their ads, but if this was the wave of the future, most passengers, except the desperate, would be having staycations. Sales of steats were meager.
Gretchen couldn't bring herself to reveal to Maximus that she had flown in from Falmouth, Kentucky, which was N&D's 'Cleveland.' That she held bags of garbage while greeting the passengers. That she dragged herself out of bed every morning and trudged to the subway, took it to Penn Station, took the train to Linden, and the bus to the airport. That Linden, NJ, 20 miles away from New York, was actually the airline's “New York” stop. Remote airports were cheaper to fly into and out of. And these airports were far from showcases of their country's affluence and strength. That every work day she knew she'd be greeted by enraged, shrieking, furious passengers, while she herself was exhausted from weeks of stress at high altitude.
The passengers would be even angrier if they knew other dirty little Nickle and Dime secrets: their lives were in the hands of an under-trained, non-security checked crew, who had all passed an open-book safety procedures exam and had only had one afternoon of on-plane training. (They had been given a quick safety demo, then allowed to file into the cockpit to sit there for a moment and open the captain's window).
Gretchen realized she was strangling her glass, the stem threatening to snap. She took a deep breath, composed herself, and grinned into Maximus’ smiling eyes. If she had those eyes to wake up next to every morning at 5:30 AM (as she had to), maybe trudging down the stairs, her wheelie case banging on the steps behind her, wouldn't be so bad.
Thankfully, the food arrived, and they began to eat. It looked to Gretchen like they would be gorging on Kung Po Chicken, Happy Family, Beef Yat Gaw Mein, Sesame Shrimp, Egg Foo Yung, Crab Rangoon and some pineapple chunks.
Maximus pointed his chopsticks at a bowl of steaming something. “I got the recipe for this from Chang, he was the head cook you met, and I make it at home sometimes. I have to go shopping here in the Chinese market for the ingredients because I can't find them in Key Foods. Mine tastes good, but never as lip-smackingly delicious as Chang's.”
“You cook, too?” Oh, he really was a keeper!
“I have a man-crush on Gordon Ramsay! I watch his show all the time, I mean the cooking one, not Hell's Kitchen. And I've tried and tried, but I can't quite get his Beef Stroganoff right. That's his signature dish, you know, with fluffy rice, red onion and parsley pickle, cooked with mushrooms and a splash of brandy. But it makes sense that I can't get it right; he's the master, after all. I'll make my own knock-off version for you one day. If you'll allow me.”
“My mouth's watering already. I'll hold you to that. Gordon Ramsay's Beef Stroganoff. I can't wait.”
This implied a second date, and that flew up in the air and settled back down on them, making her more comfortable, though the words hadn't been said.
“Go ahead and tell me something,” Gretchen said, biting into a broccoli spear. “I'll just sit here and eat and listen. God, they're going to have to knock down the door to get me back out onto the street after all this.”
So he talked. And he had plenty to talk about. All of it fascinated Gretchen. At her job, all they seemed to talk about were the plots of movies. Or episodes of TV shows. Or the latest video game or hip-hop song. Maximus didn't talk about about any of that. She let him speak excitedly on, and he jumped from topic to topic, as she lifted chicken and shrimp and bean sprouts and bok choy to her lips, and phased in and out.
“While most everybody else was unwrapping their presents, I spent Christmas Day a few years ago celebrating, of all things, the first detection of a Higgs Boson particle from CERN! What a great day for them to release the data, Christmas! It was the best gift ever, don't you think? A better insight into the world around us. Who needs an X-Box when you can have that instead? The discovery of that particle was amazing. It shows that the Standard Model of particle physics is indeed the real version. Don't you think there's something strange about quantum mechanics?” (Gretchen wasn’t quite sure how to answer this.) “How can some subatomic particles be a wave and a particle at the same time? How can one particle know what is happening to another, no matter how far away it is? It's creepy! If we live in this world, we ought to know what it's made of. What do you think?”
And...
“...Ancient Egypt, too, Anubis, with the head of a jackal. I wanted to be an archaeologist, you know, but it was when I was small, and there was no internet, and I couldn't stand the thought of being on a dig, unearthing history, yes, but being in the middle of nowhere and not knowing what was going on in the world.”
“Hold on, now!” Gretchen finally said. “Chinese, cooking, physics, ancient Egypt.” She nudged him playfully. “Mr. Renaissance Man.”
He blinked wildly.
“I hope you don't think I'm showing off?”
“I think you're being who you are. And I love it!”
When the bill came, Gretchen was relieved, delighted to see he paid. Which showed the sorry state of her dating life.
“This place has great food,” Maximus said, reaching under the table to gather Gretchen's plastic bags, “but let's go somewhere else for a drink. If you want to?”
“Sure,” Gretchen said as he led her to the door. She stood shyly next to the toothpicks as he hugged, kissed, shook hands with everyone and bid them farewell.
They were just walking out the door when an older woman, one of four perched around a table with Peking Duck, called to him.
“Excuse me. Excuse me, young man.”
“Yes?” Maximus stopped and smiled brilliantly, inquisitively, at her, as if he couldn't wait to hear what she wanted to say.
“Are you an actor? And, no, I don't mean Johnny Depp, though you've got that look. But haven't we,” she nodded to her friends at the table, “seen you in something before?”
He looked pained with regret. He sighed, a hand on his heart and a bow of the head.
“If only I were talented enough! But...playing fake people? I only play myself, and this is All. Our. Stage!” He threw out his arms to encompass, well, everything, Gretchen supposed. “We've only got one chance, ladies! It's best to do it right. As I think you've all done...?”
They nodded their heads in agreement. One fanned herself with a napkin.
“Please tell your mother she did a marvelous job of raising you!”
“Mmm, yes.”
“Indeed.”
He had the courtesy to blush.
Pushing through the crowds of people Chinese and otherwise on the street, trying to hail a cab, they walked past fish market after fish market. There were fish in plastic tubs as far as the eye could see, along with crabs, CRAPS the sign said, $15.99/doz, and LOPSTERS, $7.99/pound, and other sea creatures unknown to Gretchen.
“Do you have any place you'd like to go for a drink?” Maximus asked.
“Not really. You choose.”
“How about Betty's Speakeasy. Over on the Lower East Side. Do you know it?”
“No, but—”
He grabbed her arm. “I—I—” he gasped, fighting the urge to gag. He disappeared around a lamppost and reappeared almost immediately.
“The fish...!” he said, eyes watering, clutching his chest. “The smell...!” He was breathing through his nose. Gretchen, who was used to a childhood of fish every Friday, wasn't phased. It was sweet, seeing him vulnerable like that. She wanted to protect him.
“Let's run,” Gretchen suggested, grabbing hold of his hand. “The fish section is only one block long. Those look like vegetables down there on the next block. What I think are vegetables, anyway.” She'd never seen anything like them, stalls piled high with misshapen gourd-like things, like disabled vegetables, with roots sticking out in colors she didn't know existed. “Here, let me help you.”
“Thanks, but no biggie,” he said, taking huge
breaths through his mouth, “I'll live.”
He yelped as two fish flipped and flopped in the tub beside him.
“They're alive!”
“Ah-aww!” Gretchen said, clutching his arm and pointing down at her feet. “And some of those crabs are still moving too! And the lobsters! Poor things!”
They looked anything like 'poor things,' their pincers and claws snapping at the cold spring air, their antennae and eyes-on-stalks swiveling around, staring up at them.
“Look at their claws,” Maximus said, “as if they're begging, 'Save me! Save me!'” He said it in a high-pitched cartoon-voice.
Gretchen threw back her head and laughed. It felt strange to laugh. How rare to find someone who could do that to her. Lord knew, in her life, there was precious little to laugh about.
“Let’s save them!” Maximus suggested. He reached his hand in his pocket and drew out some bills. He motioned to the man behind the stall and rattled off in Chinese. The man grabbed a few lobsters and shoved them into a bag.
“Gently! Gently! They're living creatures!” Maximus said, then apparently the same thing in Chinese. The vendor wound up the bag and handed it over as Gretchen jumped up and down and clapped at Maxim's side. She pecked him on the cheek. He seemed to go into overdrive. “And I think the crabs need to be saved just like the lobsters. Let's save some fish too. They're not as grand as the lobsters and crabs, who I think of as the kings and queens of the sea, but they deserve to live too. No matter what they smell like.”
Soon they were laden with fish, crabs and lobsters, three bulky, squirming bags. Sam seemed like a long time ago. On the next corner there was a taxi.
“Our chariot awaits!” Maxim said. He held his hand up like he was blowing a trumpet. “Dah dah dah dah daaaah!”
He was corny, strange and wonderful in equal measures.
“You're so silly,” she said. She loved it.
They clambered inside.
“Driver! To the river!” Maxim called out. “Quickly! We've rescued some kings and queens of the sea! Drive us to the Hudson River before they suffocate!”
Emergency Exit (The Irish Lottery Series Book 6) Page 3