by Tillie
Which never failed to get on Johnny’s nerves. And when Arthur got on Johnny’s nerves Johnny would begin to steam and mutter under his breath and then thrust his jaw and a curled lip in Arthur’s direction. This is an Italian gesture used to belittle someone behind his or her back without having to utter a single harsh word.
When at the breaking point and really irked, Johnny’s muttering became clearer and more voluble, the thrust of the jaw more scornful, and you could hear him saying to no one in particular, ‘Look at him, look at him playing the typewriter.’
Playing the typewriter. This was a code phrase of Johnny’s that only Frankie and I were in on. The cash register had big keys, as I have mentioned, and they looked like the keys of a giant typewriter. Playing the typewriter meant opening the cash drawer and pilfering the till.
I don’t think Johnny really meant it. It was just that, fed up with Arthur’s bragging and swagger, Johnny felt compelled to express the meanest thing he could think of. For my part, I doubt that Arthur was a crook. In fact, behind his back, we were all quite loyal to him, protective even. When Dave returned from his jaunts and asked us how Arthur had got on, we – and Johnny most of all – never gave the brother-in-law anything but full marks.
lv
Eve had a key to my place. We had a tacit agreement that she would never visit unless I wanted to see her and never ever for any reason drop in unannounced. I had given her the key because it excited me to lie waiting for her on the nights I knew she was coming and not have to go to the door to let her in. It meant that I could be dozing or sleeping and suddenly be wakened by a girl slipping naked into my bed. It was pure self-indulgence on my part.
Once, and once only, Eve took it into her head to break the arrangement. She came into the apartment one afternoon – and there was no way she could have known whether I was there or not – to measure the bedroom window because she wanted to surprise me with a pair of curtains. Did Eve think Thoreau had curtains on the windows of his cabin at Walden Pond? Would Lydia Emerson have just popped in out of the blue to size up Henry’s nest for drapery?
Eve’s secret visit took place on the very weekend I was entertaining Patricia. Patricia and I had slipped out on some errand, and she had left her handbag behind on the floor by the bed. Picture it. The near head-on collision. Eve comes in the door, all eager and innocent, tape measure in hand, and trips over Patricia’s bag. Hello, hello, what’s this? She opens the bag, and what is the first thing she finds in it?
Naturally, she reads my letter. I confess it was a very good letter. It was a love letter. It was all about Patricia’s beauty and my having touched eternity. The letter had my signature at the bottom.
I cannot begin to think what went through Eve’s head in that moment. It would pile on the cruelty even to speculate. We met several days later. She came to me by the terms of the usual arrangement, but this time it was late in the afternoon. When I heard the key turn in the lock I got up to greet her. Her face, her voice, gave nothing away. She approached me, placed the palm of her hand on my chest, and gently shoved me back into the bedroom.
‘I want to come,’ she said. ‘I want to come a lot of times. Do it to me, make it happen.’
I made it happen, and much later, when it was over, there was no longer any daylight in the window. Afterwards, coolly and calmly, she got up and got dressed. She must have rehearsed what followed, for, without a quaver in her voice or a tear in her eye, she told me what had happened.
She did not recriminate, she did not ask for an explanation. There were no dramatics. She just placed her key on the table by the Olivetti and walked out. I said nothing, did not follow her. There was nothing to say or do. At the door she turned. This is it, I thought. Instead, sweetly – Pollyanna for one last time – she said, ‘I hope someday someone will write me a letter like that.’
lvi
The experience should have shaken me, should have wrung my heart and unleashed a flood of sympathy, but I was unable to feel anything, only relief. I could not give Eve another thought. Thinking about her would have meant having to acknowledge and dwell on the pain I had caused her. To what avail?
Instead, I thought only about Patricia and what she had been spared. Only later did it occur to me what I had been spared.
lvii
Patricia had now driven everything else out of my mind. Somehow, without trying to, she had taken me over. I replayed that first night in New Haven a thousand times.
I have said that I lay beside her without sleeping. We had kissed, long and often, open-mouthed, tongue to tongue, licking and sucking, fanning flame. From time to time I’d break it off, wanting just to hear and feel her breath, her racing heart. I was taking things to a height, then stopping and letting go and letting it all sink back to the starting point. I was a deliberate, self-condemned Sisyphus.
She gave nothing away. Said nothing. Neither purred nor whimpered nor mewed. Asked for nothing, refused nothing. I rested one cheek against the slight rise of her stomach, then the other, and, each time I turned, my tongue darted into her navel.
There was a hushed ‘Oh’ out of her when I worked my mouth down, having parted her legs and fixed my head between them. There, a century passed in an instant. Self-condemned Sisyphus she too when after a long while she took me under the arms and brought me back to her face so that we were staring into each other’s eyes. Still savoring the taste of her, I buried myself in her hair, one hand at the back of her neck, reveling, reveling, reveling.
‘I’ve never,’ she said. ‘I’ve never, I’ve never, I’ve never.’ She couldn’t finish it, and I didn’t want to ask or know what she meant. If I’d thought – if I’d been in a state to think – I might have sensed some mystery here, something hidden. But my brain was understandably absent.
That night something took place that until then I had never dreamed could happen. I did not penetrate Patricia. It was not a question either of wanting or not wanting to. No choice entered in. I’d been transported. I simply did not need to. What I sought without even knowing it was a higher goal – everlasting oneness with her. I wanted to lose myself in tenderness. I wanted the play to go on forever.
In the morning, she let me sleep. She got dressed and vanished. Beside her pillow lay a sprig of rosemary; under it a note. The pillow smelled of her.
lviii
Nothing so phallic as the display of an Italian pork butcher’s products. The multiplicity of sizes and shapes and colors. Salami long and short, salami thick and thin, salami hard and soft. Everything from the massive mortadella to the squat link sausage. Salame from Genoa, salame from Milan, salame from the Abruzzi. The slim, knobbly, dark-red peperoni; the slimmer, bony, black liver; the short, stubby white-sheathed Aquilano. Dried and fresh, straight and looped. No matter which form, which variety, all are blatantly phallic. At Uncle Dave’s we stocked close to every last one.
Behind the counter, radiating charm, Johnny would be dressed in an immaculate white apron, ready for the end-of-week trade and for giving one of his stylish Friday performances. He had a warm, kindly face, with chubby cheeks and a perpetual five-o’clock shadow. His voice was sweet and tenory in tone.
Johnny did not have customers as much as he had a following. The women loved him, sparking his wit and inviting him, prompting him, to be lewd and to tell lewd stories. They laughed at his jokes, which always began in English and ended in Italian so as to keep Arthur or Dave in the dark about the nature of our merriment.
A number of Johnny’s fans went out of their way to reciprocate. They’d barge in at the head of a patient, steadily-creeping queue and, all stealth and secrecy, draw something out of a brown paper bag and then push it Johnny’s way. Black coffee in a paper cup. Adding, sotto voce, ‘It’s flavored.’
‘Oh, thank you,’ Johnny would return with genuine pleasure as the customer retreated to her proper slot back down the line.
Sometimes he’d have as many as two or three of these whiskied coffees out of view in a queue of
their own behind his slicing machine. Sometimes he’d shoot me a nod, offering me one. I always refused. I was too scared of the machines and the harm they could cause your fingers if you were sloppy. In time, however, after I’d learned my trade, as the endless Friday crept on and the fatigue won over, I might slip out to the bar-room at the corner and down a quick ten-cent glass of beer or two.
When I first began my stint behind the counter, few of the women came to me, the newcomer. They all preferred Johnny’s service even if it meant queuing for half an hour. In time, he encouraged a number of them to switch to me. He’d wink, nod his head my way, and say to them, ‘Go ahead, go to him. He’s okay.’
Little by little they did. And little by little, as my following built up, the fun increased. Once I’d caught on to the requisite banter, I too began to star, mostly as straight man, in the little shows that Johnny put on.
lix
It was a lovely thing to see Johnny at work. I mean at work now, not at play, not quipping. The way with one hand he would swoop a fat mortadella out of the refrigerated case and with a flourish toss it in the air to the other, then plop it into the slicing tray. Then a fast resetting of the mechanism for thickness. Then a sheet of wax paper whisked up into his left hand and quickly into it would peel a great sliver of the pink, fat-studded meat. Then, his nimble fingers folding back the edges of wax paper like some old origami hand, the packet’s contents would be proffered to his customer for tasting. All this took bare seconds.
Before him, chewing away and nodding her head, the woman would say, ‘Gee, I don’t know, Johnny. Say a pound. No, make it an even fifteen or twenty slices.’
And the fifteen or twenty slices would slither out from beneath the lethal blade onto the wax paper held at the ready in his left hand. The slices would not fall one on top of the other but as each emerged Johnny would shift the waiting paper a fraction so that the cuts were laid out in an overlapping row. This made for neater, slimmer packets. And then in a twinkle, with another sweeping flourish, the waxy packet would be whisked to a set of nearby scales, after which he enclosed it in a large sheet of thin brown paper, whose edges were folded and tucked in like an envelope. He’d then call out ‘And next?’ as he penciled the price on the packet and seemed at the same time to have shifted the mortadella back onto its cool shelf and plucked out a salame or a squared loaf of American cheese.
Sometimes the customer, all dithering and vacillation, would ask him how his salame was today.
And, with a leer, Johnny to me, feigned sotto voce: ‘Hear that, author, she wants to know how my salame is. I hardly know her and she wants to know how my salame is.’ He called me author because he knew what I was attempting to do upstairs with my Olivetti.
A new salame required a preliminary operation. Its rounded or pointed end would first have to be hacked off with a knife before it could be properly sliced in our machines. These fore and aft butts were set aside, and favorite customers – chronic flavored-coffee providers, say – were given them free of charge with a special little wink that said I’m looking after you. Some salami would be sliced at right angles, thereby making perfect rings. Others were cut on the diagonal, providing a longer, fuller slice.
The boiled ham came in big sealed tins, encased in a greasy gelatin. It took a bit of time to open one of these. To get the top off, a thin strip of curling metal would have to be prized away. Then, plunging your hands deep into the clear, slimy jelly, you had to pluck out the slippery ham and work the excess gelatin off with an almost kneading motion. Only then was the meat ready for slicing. Of course, you had to give your greasy hands a good scrubbing afterwards. For this, in one corner, we had our own sink.
Occasionally on opening a tin we found the meat had somehow gone off and there would be a great commotion as Dave was called over to pronounce a verdict. If he gave the thumbs down, he’d summon Frankie to snatch off the shelves a bottle of a disinfectant that smelled like creosote, and the offending ham would be thoroughly doused before getting tipped into the garbage can. The purpose of this little operation was not to kill germs but to render the ham useless to any of the neighborhood’s hoboes, the winos who might otherwise have been tempted to dine on it.
lx
So they would queue up, our customers, one row facing Johnny, one me, from early morning to late in the day, rank after endless rank of them, stepping forward, being served, moving off, coming and going, coming and going. The same operations would be repeated hundreds of times as myriad salami and hams and cheeses were sacrificed at our altars, only to be replenished and the sacrifice once more unleashed in endless successive waves. And yet for all the monotony, it was never monotonous.
Johnny and I made sure of that.
Customer, woman, taking her turn, steps up to our glass-fronted cabinet, peers inside, says to Johnny, ‘Johnny, how’s your salame today? Is it nice and hard?’ Johnny to customer, taking the bait and making certain the whole waiting line can hear: ‘Oh, it’s hard, all right. Would you like to feel it? Would you like me to take it out for you?’
Then Johnny to me: ‘Did you hear that, author, she wants to know if my salame’s hard.’
And me back to Johnny: ‘Well, if yours isn’t, Johnny, mine certainly is. Maybe she’d like to feel mine.’
Johnny to customer: ‘You heard what the young man said. Would you like to feel his?’
By this time, the whole queue cracking up, the customer at last twigs. She gags, she’s swallowed hook, line, and sinker, and she laughs.
This sort of thing went on all day as we rang the changes, got bolder and bolder, tickled some, embarrassed others, entertained them all. We left no variation untried, no possibility untested. And all accompanied with an exaggeration of nudging and winking.
lxi
Another tale of old Michigan pecked out on the Olivetti. In these sketches I wanted to pin down some of the ignorance and cruelty the immigrants had brought with them from the old country. I wanted to capture the way they spoke – part English, part Italian, and part Italian in English words. Out of these little pieces my hope was to find an anecdote, a thread, that would lead to a novel.
Aurelio D’Innocenzo, orphaned at eleven, was leaving the Upper Peninsula to join his married sister in Massachusetts.
It was the dead of winter. In the woods and on the hills snow lay three feet deep. The boy, in a pair of corduroy knickers already thin and gray at the knees, wore a brand-new mackinaw that was so big he could put his hands in the pockets and turn the front around to the back without tangling his arms. His uncle had bought it for him – big so it couldn’t be outgrown. Rosie Long-Long, his aunt, had provisioned him with a bundle of thick sandwiches wrapped in newspaper. Peppers fried in garlic and cheap olive oil.
They left him on the station platform, handing him a ticket at the last minute, and withdrew without a word or gesture of farewell. Then, suddenly turning back, his uncle approached and slipped thirty-five cents into Aurelio’s pocket. He did it, the boy noted, in a way that Rosie Long-Long couldn’t see. The uncle said nothing but he tugged the collar of the mackinaw up around Aurelio’s ears and gave one of them a playful box. Rejoining his wife farther down the platform, the uncle had just two words to say to her. ‘Shut up!’
He said them loudly and in English and in such a way that Rosie Long-Long dared not answer.
The boy was called Rilly, sometimes Bill. He traveled alone on the train, comforted by what his right hand held tight and tirelessly in the mackinaw pocket – an old .38 automatic, stolen or gained in shrewd trading months before. The sandwiches oozed grease that stained the seat and went stale before he reached Chicago. With the thirty-five cents Rilly bought oranges and ate them all, one after another, careful always to keep one hand in his pocket on the handle of the loaded .38.
The train was cold, so cold that the boy could see his breath frozen before his face like a branch of coral. There were few other passengers. The emptiness, the black and white monotony outside the window, gnawe
d away and gave something dark inside him room to grow. He turned at every sound, all ears, all eyes, with no will to let sleep take him, and always with his sweaty right hand gripping the old .38.
On the evening of the first day – trains changed at Chicago and the smell of garlic displaced by the scent of oranges – there was an unscheduled stop in the middle of nowhere. It was dark and they were trapped in a snowstorm. A conductor came through announcing there was a diner nearby where they could eat, and he helped off the few other passengers. Rilly stayed behind, his heart running circles in his chest.
The silence was perfect, then after a long time a hawker came into the car. He moved sideways and box-first, clumping his way down the aisle. He was laden with pencils, chewing gum, candy, and razor blades. At least, those were the things he called out.
‘Razor blades,’ the hawker called, ‘razor blades.’ He was a crooked, leering man, not old but somehow too pale and with too much interest in selling razor blades.
Rilly recoiled. He thought, ‘Look, mister, I’m just a kid. What do I want with razor blades?’ And drawing the gun out of his pocket, holding it for action where the hawker could not see it, he attempted to call out, ‘Watch yourself, mister, I’ve got a gun here. Don’t come any nearer.’
The hawker shambled up the aisle.
‘Better not take another step there, mister.’
The hawker came forward and Rilly shoved the automatic back in his pocket for fear the man would see it. Rilly’s head was light and empty and he had to tilt his face up to see over the seats, to see the man hawking razor blades.
‘For what are you bothering a kid eleven years old with razor blades for?’ The words refused to come out. Rilly trembled with fear, maybe with cold.