by Steve Almond
But Mamu wasn’t angry. It would be no easier for me in the end. And so she came to me, stepped around the table and gathered me into her arms, and I buried my head in her bosom, which smelled of smoke and laundry soap and ten thousand meals, and began to sob, for Basha, for Mamu, for all of us in the suffering of our desires.
The Law of Sugar
The thing I had to realize was that all the laws kept changing. That was why Matesh was recommending Polish sugar. “Very unstable law,” he said, as if I had disagreed. “With all the elections. Ha! Politicians are shit. So why are you going to risk? If you cannot protect?”
“A good point,” I said again. “But now, I think, I must go.”
“With sugar there is an agreement,” Matesh said, pounding his fist on the table. “There is the guarantee.” He called out for more drinks, but the waiter ignored him. I reminded him that it was getting late, I had to go.
“Prague? Fuck Prague. Too much Germans already. Hungary? Too much mafias. Poland. This is the place! But not for buildings. Foreigners are not allowed to own the lands here. And with the elections, all the laws will change. So? So?” He looked at me with devout expectancy, like a child awaiting dessert.
“Sugar?”
“Yes! Sugar! Sugar!” He clinched with laughter. It seemed so obvious, so desirable.
The waiter made his way over with three more beers. Matesh clapped his tiny hands. “Good beer. Polish beer.” He muttered something to the waiter, who wiped his hands on his apron grumpily. I pulled another bill from my wallet, but Matesh shook his head. He picked coins from his pocket, one after another, and handed them to the waiter.
“Please,” I said. “Let me.”
“It is too late.” Matesh waved the waiter off.
“Yes,” I said. “That’s quite true.”
Matesh’s sister sipped her beer. She was lovely, as pale and smooth as new cobblestone.
Out beyond the cafe railing, girls strolled the square in short dresses and young men stumbled after them. Dusk was arriving and still everyone wore sunglasses. A man, apparently blind, played an eerie tune on his recorder. Dogs of indeterminate breed began swirling at the far edge of the plaza.
“You establish a fund for all this,” Matesh said. “To protect your monies.”
“I haven’t got any monies,” I said. “I’m a librarian.”
Matesh nodded. He was delighted at my disavowals, taking them as an indication of vast wealth and acumen. “Then there is one person who manages your fund, and you are sent dividends. Dividends, yes? The monies from your risk.”
“Yes,” I said. “That sounds quite good. I would like to think about it.”
“What is thinking?” Matesh said. “Thinking is shit. While you think, the Germans move in. They are awful. I have met them. They will make all the money in sugar. Our money.” Matesh fished for a cigarette, which seemed lit even as he drew it from the pack. He inhaled regally.
Matesh’s sister smiled. She had crooked teeth and splendid pink gums. I detected the hint of an apology in her expression. I gazed at my beer.
“People will always need sugar,” Matesh announced. “For cakes and candies and ice creams. The parliament knows this, so they have made an agreement.” He tapped his head. “This law never changes, the law of sugar. If they change this, then what? No sugar! No cakes! Nothing!”
“Yes,” I said, having a swallow of beer. “I see.”
“What is a world without sugar?”
I checked my watch and felt a great gladness I had left my bag back at the hotel.
“People need sugar. This will not go away. Even if the communists are elected again. The communists need sugar also!”
“Everyone needs sugar,” I said. “Let me think about it.”
“What is to think?” Matesh said sharply.
I felt something brush against my leg and noticed Matesh’s sister release into the air a delicate sigh.
A group of street performers had congregated at the center of the square, and one of them, obviously quite drunk, was spitting fire using a bottle of clear alcohol with an old wick. It was the fire that attracted the dogs, I think. That, or the blind man’s piping. I watched them establish flanks and begin a run.
“This doesn’t take long,” Matesh said. “A few months, no more. And then we are rich. Or, if you like, a year. Even richer. I have helped many men. There are others who would make you wait for many years. I do not. How it begins is what you call a wire transfer. ‘Wire transfer,’ yes? No one sees the wire. They are just numbers in a bank. Ha!”
“I’m a librarian,” I said. “I work in a library.”
“Yes,” Matesh said. “Like in the library. But not taking books. Taking sugar!”
The dogs were making noise now. Not barks, or snarls, but a kind of a throttled hum. “In the last year, the beets were excellent. But this year, not enough beets. Not much beets, not much sugar! You see? The prices go up up up.”
Matesh’s sister had caught sight of the dogs. She had sunglasses on, but you could see she wasn’t happy about it. She whispered to Matesh, but he waved his cigarette, erasing her with smoke. The waiter stationed at the entrance of the cafe adopted a look of slight concern and began stacking the thick wooden chairs. He shouted at the blind man to stop playing. The blind man nodded in acknowledgment, and began playing louder.
The dogs had reached the street performers. One clamped on to the leg of the master of ceremonies and the tumblers circled them, leaping and yipping pointlessly. The couples who had gathered around began edging backward. Only the intervention of the man breathing fire brought the attack to an end.
“Once you are in with the sugar,” Matesh said, leaning toward me, “this can lead to other risks. Good risks.”
“The dogs,” I said. “They seem to be heading this direction.”
“It is not worth waiting,” Matesh assured me. “Some risks are too good. If you wait, they are gone. With the wheat, during the time of Jimmy Carter, it was like this. You wait and it is over. Gone. Poof.”
The dogs were moving now with real assurance, carving a path across the plaza. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t even know how I had wound up here. I wanted to tell someone there had been a mistake. Rather a large one. But in these situations who does one tell? The waiter stepped inside and bolted the door, locking us out. The young men and women of the plaza dispersed. The blind fellow continued to play, but falteringly, dipping his chin, as if someone were yanking at his beard. I began casting about for a nearby corner.
“This is where connections become necessary,” Matesh said. He was back to tapping his head. “Not for the law, because this does not change. But to make sure that we have the position we need. There are, perhaps, others who would like our position.”
The dogs had set upon someone, or something. You could see their muzzles knifing in, tattering a bright fabric. They sounded serious and awfully happy. I strained for a better look, but Matesh kept his head in front of mine. His nose was the color of wet brick.
“Really,” I said. “I think it best if we go.”
“There is no need for a contract,” Matesh decided. “Perhaps if you were German, but we are gentlemen here.”
“The dogs,” I said.
“A contract is shit,” Matesh said.
I stood and held out my hand. “So, really—.” Matesh finished his beer, frowning.
The dogs were through with whatever it had been and were now scouring the cafe two down from ours. I could see their fangs and a bit of froth. I stood for a moment longer, offering my hand, but Matesh seemed downcast. An air of tragedy descended onto him. His suit, which had looked so shiny an hour ago, now appeared dull and uninhabited. One of the smaller dogs, a kind of terrier, leaped onto the railing a few tables away. My hand hung in the air. And hung. It felt dead, felt connected to other dead parts.
And then, as these things sometimes happen, it did: Matesh’s sister reached out and took my hand and rose to her feet, like a
long stem. Quite quickly, we were gone. It was the first time I had run in weeks, months, and her hand, in mine, felt new and alive. Behind us we could hear Matesh. He was scolding the dogs. “What are you?” he shouted. “You are dogs. You know nothing of risks.”
Matesh’s sister was fleet and she knew the streets and I feel confident in saying there is no man on this green, green earth who could have kept me from following her, just then.
The Pass
A man in a bar makes a pass at a woman. It’s not a good era for passes, but he’s giving it his all. His eyebrows have been laying groundwork for hours. His voice—a nice voice he’s been told, a radio voice—lingers on her name. She’s on her third drink and she’s here, isn’t she, with him, and not somewhere else and she’s finally removed the purse from her lap, on which it had sat like a small guard dog.
They’re downtown someplace, some downtown, some place, the skyscrapers blazing like exorbitant lamps, subway trains hurling their human cargo past, lakewind breathing concrete and car exhaust, dusk punching out.
He’s Bill or Mike or Chuck. She’s Rachel, Liz, Michele with one l. She has a beautiful name. He’s told her so and now leans in, close enough to smell the Clamato on her breath. He hopes to appear smooth and audacious. Like Brando, or Valentino. She stirs her Bloody Mary with an odd precision, as if being evaluated.
He touches her arm with just his fingertips. Will she consent to the pleasure they might take in all this: the lifting of their bodies, the lying of them down, the pale revelations, wetness dispatched outward, all of it? With his hand and mouth, both, he asks her to share in the complicated electricity of the moment.
They have met before, these two—or two very much like them—at a costume party several years ago. She was dressed as Salome, with seven veils and a wispy black bra. He was a caveman. She lowered her painted eyes and spoke in the way of a biblical moll. He said unga-bunga-bunga. She swung her hips and made her veils flutter. He dragged her by the hair to a dark back room; wishes he had.
But why a bad era for the pass?
Because the pass is what semioticians would call a lapsed signifier. That which once defined the act—an attempted breach of the culture’s sexual mores—has been overrun by the horny course of human affairs. It is not that nothing is sacred anymore. On the contrary. More is sacred than ever before, because more of the self is hidden away than ever before. But the pass no longer aims in the direction of anything hidden. It has become overt, incurably so.
A woman awaits her flight to Denver; efficiently rouged, screwed into a stylish black pantsuit. But thunderheads have kicked up and those ninnies at the FAA have the incomings circling and God knows how long this will take, so she repairs to the eager banter of the terminal bar. She is a woman slightly older than her initial impression, shrewd in the matter of lighting. She settles in at the dim end of the teakwood bar, next to a man in a rumpled suit, another captive, and orders a screwdriver.
They are not drinkers, but they have time on their hands, and now the communion of ill tempers. Judgment is passed on the vagaries of their airline, the bartender’s chest hair, the focus-group decor. Intolerances line up nicely. Together, they listen to a New York matron bellow into a pay phone, sounding like a motherless calf. He makes a gentle observation about the indolence of the janitorial staff.
On the wall above them: a poster of Casablanca, Bogie and Ingrid on that backlot tarmac, draped in pink fog, doing their utmost to dignify lurid hope. And outside, in the crowded bay beyond the X-ray machines: couples trapped in farewell holding patterns, wearing travel outfits and travel hairdos and lip gloss, the women smudgy, the men guarding good-bye erections.
He has a certain gangster handsomeness, Mr. Rumpled Suit, his broad face pressed back, a nose she imagines has been broken, clear brown eyes. His hands are large and pleasantly scarred. Around his ring finger, not a ring, but a pale band. She orders another screwdriver. He hurries off in search of information about departure times. (He has a deposition to oversee in Pittsburgh.)
She finds that she misses him. Odd. Yet there can be no other way to explain the elation she feels when she spots him edging past the luggage cart return rack, his rumpled trousers and, inside them, his thick legs.
“Bad news,” he says. “I have a wife.”
Or: “We will only hurt one another.”
Or, just possibly: “No more outgoing flights.” In this third case, her hand will slip onto his thigh for the joy of feeling astonished movement under her fingers, flesh awaiting further instruction.
But these are strangers and the possibilities of the pass tempt them with no afterthought.
At a party in a suburb renowned for its outdoor sculpture, a group of coworkers share red wine and veggie dip. They know one another in the way modern workers do, a forced animation of concern. Some are married and others single and each group covets the other. A life too full of choices has rendered them indecisive. They are prosperous on the scale of their parents, but lack the rootedness that might fortify their hopes. They live in apartments and spend hours on the phone, deciding things. Where to eat. What movie to see. They enter into relationships that feel, as much as anything, like arrangements. They are poorly versed in the mechanics of regret.
In this domain the pass acquires something of a darkling’s charm. The man about to make the pass, Geoff, is seated at the center of a comfy living room. The woman, Elena, is on the couch above him. She has the face of a Modigliani, exotically crooked, long and pale, cow-eyed. There has been speculation about her breasts in the office—they sit suspiciously high—but he is more taken by her backside, which is plump, cupidinous.
Elena’s boyfriend is in the kitchen. He is a nice fellow with a large mole on his chin. He sometimes makes the mistakes of his small-town rearing, a certain misguided exuberance in dressing or off-color joke. Geoff’s girlfriend, on the stairs, is a sophisticate, versed in city tropes, an unembarrassed practitioner of seduction. When Geoff first started sleeping with her, her fierce scatology, the way she demanded to be slapped, thrilled him. More recently, he finds her vehemence frightening. They are a happy couple, Geoff supposes, as happy as couples tend to be.
But there is an innocence about Elena that pricks his vanity, makes him jumpy for what he doesn’t have. She is tipsy and agreeable and words are his allies. He steers the conversation toward intimate topics: massages, body piercing, sensual ambition.
I think you know some things, he tells her. I watch you move through the office and I think you know some things that most people wouldn’t think you know.
She rolls her eyes.
So many guys talk about your chest. I’m sorry. I don’t mean to embarrass you. Please don’t be embarrassed. There’s a loveliness there that makes them curious. That’s all. You can’t blame them for that. But I think they’re missing it, Elena. I think with you it’s the lower body, the nalgas. I’ve been meaning to tell you this for a while. I know it’s not right, but I watch you walk through the office, the way you move, and I think: I’m not sure I can go through my life without knowing.
And there are provinces in which everyone does go about finding out, clusters of college graduates knotted at the bottom of tall cities, trying to invent community. Everyone has slept with everyone and they all drink together, hoping the alcohol and the music will restore some previously eluded glamour, or obscure its dissipation. Those few who haven’t coupled operate at a disadvantage, edgy and prideful, untrammeled by ease. They watch the others sweat and sway, and imagine a daisy chain of limbs, themselves missing out. In this stewing lies the seed of future passes.
But what lies ahead is not our concern. Our concern is the present, the glorious now, the moment of erotic transfer—isotopic, dangling, a question mark awaiting exclamation.
* * *
In a rundown Stuttgart nightclub, two privates in the U.S. Army have arrived to hear jazz, arrived separately. They are from different divisions, have never met. The club is in the historic district,
miles from the biergartens where their comrades fill themselves with liters of pale pilsner and oily sausage, counting colored bills for later descent on the hookers of this drizzled ashen city.
Technically, it’s not even jazz on display in this blue-lit club. It’s cabaret, the music of campy self-announcement, feather boas and top hats and tulle stockings and whorish makeup, and each of the privates drinks in the burly innuendo, sipping at sophisticated drinks, sneaking glances at each other, wondering. Between acts, the one named Shane spots the other leaning against the bar, uniform neatly tucked, back curving gracefully, the muscles under his shirt shifting like dunes.
Shane bites a piece of ice, moves to join him. They talk about where they are stationed, what their hitch is—awkward, beginning things. The lights vanish and another round of drinks gets drunk and another set of skits begins, more good-time tunes set against a black velvet curtain, a tall tenor with pasted-on mustache and a chanteuse treated rather sadly by the years (though, they agree, surely lovely as a maiden).
The hours roll by and the drinks loosen them and soon they are confessing which high school shows they were in, bursting into stagy refrains. The hour is close to curfew, but the closing spectacle is more than either private could have expected. The old singer is up on the bar flashing her fallen thighs and the tenor is leaping from table to table in patent-leather wing tips and the two privates are suddenly at the center of a spotlight with a microphone under their chins, thrown together in voice, led laughing through a wobbly chorus of Auf Widersahn by the older patrons.
Shane turns to his new companion and breathes the hot breath of want and with nothing so much as this asks to be folded into this stranger’s body and kept there for the night.
This is what the whole business is about: night. Without night, its hungering canvas, its needy musk and daring sediments, without all this, the amorous among us would fold our tents and, like Long-fellow’s Arabs, as silently steal away.