My Life Among the Apes

by Cary Fagan

  His mother smiled weakly. Perhaps their son was right. He liked to read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire while watching Gilligan’s Island. She could see he was upset about his father storming out by the way he was humming “Ode to Joy” under his breath. He looked up and said, “I wish I had lived in P-P-Paris during the Commune. I could have been a waiter to Lafayette.” His mother had replied absentmindedly, “Don’t be foolish, Edison. I think you could have done a lot better than that.”

  Now every morning Edison jumps out of bed, brushes his teeth ferociously, stands under an icy shower, shaves most of the bristles from his chin, and puts on the white shirt and black trousers that he insists on wearing even though Beatrice tells him that he has mistaken her place for the dining room of the Ritz. As he creeps down the stairs he can see the blue flicker of his parents’ television set, left on while they sleep. He sits in the kitchen eating a bowl of Cocoa Puffs and reading the morning comics.

  In the mirrored front hall, Edison puts on his fat winter boots, wool mask, parka. Outside, the sky is a bruise over the houses. Edison kicks the dirty ridge of snow along the sidewalk and hums Schumann’s “Kreisleriana.” It takes him fifty minutes to reach the last suburban subway stop, where he descends into the earth, from which he will not emerge for another ten hours. At the King Street station he disembarks, taking a series of passageways, escalators, stairs, and revolving doors, passing the still-dark underground shops that line the tunnels beneath the office towers. Like Aeneas, I descend with courage and fear, he likes to tell himself.

  And this is the extent of the travels that Edison has ventured to make. He is always the first to arrive at the café; he wears the key that Beatrice finally entrusted him with on a chain under his shirt. So you see: he has not lived, has been nowhere, has experienced almost nothing. What does Edison know about the happiness of human beings? Really, he is a fantastical joke.

  And every morning he slides open the glass doors, turns on the espresso machine, puts up the first pot of drip coffee, and begins taking the plastic chairs from the tables. For a moment Edison can almost believe that he is in the café of his imaginings, refuge of lost souls.

  And then, inevitably, Beatrice arrives.

  AT FIVE AFTER NINE, THE crush begins to lessen. Most of the customers are men, senior executive types who can afford to drift into their offices at leisure. Admittedly they look better than the women — unpummeled — with their newspapers tucked under their arms and a grim but determined expression on their bluish jaws, as if they are using their full mental powers to keep up the buoyancy of the world’s stock exchanges. Here comes one whom Edison has named Mr. Blood because of his tendency to cut himself shaving; as usual there are bits of toilet paper stuck to his chin and neck where he has nicked himself. Ordering his jumbo coffee (a revolting size; what does he do, soak his feet in it?), he frowns at the pages of a Canadian Tire catalogue. Peeking, Edison sees a double-page colour spread of lawnmowers.

  Outside the ground is frozen and Mr. Blood dreams of cutting the grass! Like a soldier in the trenches of Verdun who holds on to the memory of life back home. I am a medic behind the front lines, doing inadequate patch-up jobs so that the soldiers can go forth and fight again. Yes, the analogy suits ...

  Mr. Blood leaves a tip, a quarter, which Edison pockets regretfully.

  The stream of customers is slower, but steady. Beatrice is fortunate that no Starbucks or Second Cup exists at this turn in the tunnel. As Edison crouches to retrieve a Danish from under the counter, he turns to see her punching the phone buttons. She ought to be calling the bakery for shorting their muffin order this morning. She ought to be finding a new bakery altogether. The pastries look edible enough, with their white glazes and swirls of cherry goop, but they taste like theatrical props. To Edison, who thinks too much about these things, it seems a crime that a customer should bite into one of those sweet consolations and receive a mouthful of sawdust. Yet another sign of the decline of all civilized values. But Beatrice makes a hearty profit on them and who is to say the customers are dissatisfied? They never complain, but eat the pastries all the same.

  In any case, he knows very well that Beatrice isn’t phoning the bakery. She is making her first call of the day to Marcus. Marcus carries a phone on the construction site and so cannot get away from Beatrice’s tormenting calls. Edison hears a greeting and looks over the counter to see Alfonso coming up with his mop and pail. His is the first cheerful face that Edison has seen today and the sight of him eases Edison’s heart a little.

  “One es-p-p-p-resso coming up, Alfonso!”

  “I’m no in a hurry. No matter how much I mop, the floor stays wet. People say outside it is snowing.”

  “Again!”

  Edison turns to the machine. As a child he developed the habit of silently addressing inanimate objects around him, from the tube of toothpaste to his bedside lamp. When he bumped into a table he apologized; he patted fire hydrants on the way to school in order to make friends of them so that they wouldn’t shift about to confuse him on his way home again. It is a sign of an insufficient maturation that Edison refuses to give up. When do we stop loving the things around us? Surely there is no moment when we receive proof positive that they do not know of their faithful service to our well- being. It makes no more sense than that we should cease caring for one another. In like fashion does he address Beatrice’s third-hand Gaggia with its antiquated array of levers and valves. The machine is temperamental and Beatrice gave up using it, but Edison has gently persuaded it back into operation. Warmed up, it has impressive steam power and could deliver cup after cup of magnificent espresso, fifty, a hundred at a time, in some flourishing café — Florian’s, say, on St. Mark’s Square, or Café Reggio in Greenwich Village. But here, alas, there is only Alfonso and his cup.

  Edison places the cup on its saucer, with a small spoon and a sugar cube wrapped in paper, a box of which he has purchased himself. He slides it to Alfonso, who has already drawn his hometown Sicilian newspaper from his pocket. Just the sight of the man swirling his spoon does Edison good. He thinks of all this place might be — and is interrupted by Beatrice, screaming into the phone.

  “You want us to stay home? On New Year’s Eve? I knew it, you don’t love me — no, no, admit it! I feel sick. That’s right, Marcus, you are making me ill. I might have to phone an ambulance. You swear? Then prove it. Get those tickets. You think it’s my fault? Then screw you!”

  She slams the receiver. “What did I do?” she wails, picking it up again and frantically hitting the buttons.

  Poor Beatrice. Even the oppressor suffers.

  EDISON MET BEATRICE ON THE evening of his job interview. It was after closing and she was sitting at one of the small round tables, the surface tacky with spilled Coke, lighting up a cigarillo despite the bylaw and flipping through a copy of People although there was a sink full of dishes behind the counter, scrunched napkins on the floor, lipsticked cups on the other tables. Immediately Edison took up a broom and began to whisk the debris into the dustpan.

  “Eager little beaver, aren’t you.”

  Edison turned crimson. “I’ve come f-for the job of w-w-w-w-waiter.”

  “No kidding. Well, it isn’t for a waiter. It’s for a server. You know the difference? Minimum wage, almost no tips, and you have to do every shit job in the place. Sit down and show me your resumé.”

  From his pocket, he drew a sheet of paper folded eight times. Beatrice raised an eyebrow and opened it flat on the table. Strands of hair fell into her eyes as she read. “You have something of a checkered career. The number of jobs in which you have lasted for less than a week is impressive.”

  “I didn’t like them.”

  “What makes you think you’ll like this.”

  “I want to work in a café.”

  “Uh-huh?” She chain-lit another cigarillo. “You find all this glamorous?”

  Vaguely she waved her hand. Edison looked at the chipped counter-top, the finger
print-marked glass wall separating the café’s small space from the tunnel, the cheap plastic furniture, the scrawled No Credit sign taped to the cash register. His heart sank. But he said, “I want to s-s-serve people.”

  “Very commendable. So it’s this or the Peace Corps.”

  Edison laughed, or rather brayed. He didn’t disagree. He just said, “People need a b-break.”

  “You said it.” Beatrice inhaled and curled her bottom lip to send a plume of smoke over their heads. “And I’m one of them. Listen, what I need is reliability. Slavish devotion. I’ve lost three servers in a row. They all went stir-crazy under the ground here, or found better jobs, or couldn’t put up with me. You still interested?”

  A flashing diamond of light made Edison squint. He saw the reflecting arc of the brass dome on the counter. “Do I get to work the es-s-s-presso m-m-m-machine?”

  She narrowed her eyes. “You must have been one of those kids who got a thrill riding in the front of the streetcar. Sure, if you can make the damn thing work. You also get to wash the dishes, take out the garbage, unstop the sink, and throw out customers when they sit too long.”

  “Throw them out?”

  “Suggest they leave. Is that better? Can you use an electronic cash?”

  Edison said, “I can start tomorrow.”

  Beatrice ground out her cigarillo in a dish. Edison noticed ash on her shirt and marked her for a slovenly nature. When she rose, he jumped up from his chair. She was heavy, her shirt half-tucked in, a rivulet of sweat running above her lip. This is a tormented soul. Maybe I have been brought here to make her day a little lighter. He gave a tentative smile.

  She looked at him hard. “Don’t you try anything. I’ve got a boyfriend named Marcus and he’s built like a stevedore. If you’re going to start tomorrow I might as well show you the basics now. This isn’t paid time, just so as we’re clear. First of all, no long chit-chats with the customers. This is a high turnover business and with the way you t-t-t-talk it’ll take ten minutes just to ask about the goddamn weather.”

  After ten minutes on the microwave, the bagel toaster, the packets of instant hot chocolate, she confessed to him the disaster that was her life. The first marriage gone bad. The abortion. How she was afraid that Marcus too would leave on account of her moods. “I ask too much of him. The guys at work call him pussy-whipped. But if he loved me he’d tell them where to go! If only I could let up. I’ve tried shrinks, pills. Nothing works. I guess I’m an all-or-nothing personality.”

  Beatrice lifted a greasy plastic dome from the counter and picked up a slice of carrot cake. She stuffed the front of the wedge into her mouth, leaving a smear of icing on her lip. How little we can see from the outside of the turmoil within, he thought. Suddenly she looked at him hard, as if sorry to have opened her mouth. “My advice to you is to start off on the right foot. Be here at 7:30 sharp. Twice late and you’re fired.”

  The next morning was the first and only time that Edison’s mother got up with him. “You never took this much trouble to get a decent job,” she sighed, watching him from the bathroom door as he stood in his underwear and shaved. “This is a dead end, sweetie. Besides, what if someone we know sees you?” But Edison did not answer. As he pulled on his galoshes she said, “Go. I hope something good comes of it. You’re a strange boy.” She kissed his forehead, a blessing of sorts.

  THE STREAM TOWARDS THE COUNTER diminishes and the customers still arriving stop for a few minutes at the tables to hastily consume their purchases. Edison wipes spilled sugar and cream from the counter, tosses away stir sticks, mourns the absence of spoons. Music from the mall’s hidden speakers seeps in, treacly leftover Christmas tunes, overlaid with the more barbaric thumping from the shoe store across the way. Nearby are a tobacco shop, a walk-in dental clinic, a hair salon, a stand with men’s ties and, in the passageway, a bench and stunted Ginkgo tree in a pot. Ersatz outdoors, not a real street at all but a non-place leading to other non-places. What sort of destination is this? We ought to be a warm light in the darkness, a sapphire amidst the dross. But look at us! We are dross ourselves. Disposable. Sham. Without love.

  But even as he wipes, Edison’s thoughts are not so hopeless. When he sees the Hand Woman squinting into the café, her breath clouding the glass, he feels a renewal of purpose. Even something made without proper motive can be a receptacle for good. People have a need. They unknowingly conjure us, and so we are here. What fantasy and arrogance in unhealthy combination.

  The Hand Woman makes sure that Beatrice is not visible before taking a few nimble steps to the nearest table. She gives Edison her scarecrow grin: missing teeth. Edison nods. He calls her the Hand Woman because of the glorious pathos of her shawl, stitched like a quilt from dozens of gloves and mittens. During Edison’s time it has grown two feet and drags along the ground behind her, the mantle of an exiled queen. At night she sleeps in one of the storage rooms which Alfonso leaves unlocked, an ease to his conscience for throwing out all the others. He always comes in for a fortifying espresso after tossing some bum caught huddling over a heating vent. “Letting in one, okay. But two, ten, a hundred? Is impossible. I lose my job.”

  Edison peeks into the back room to see Beatrice still on the telephone and then brings the Hand Woman a tuna sandwich and a double-double coffee. Bowing slightly he retreats, Viennese fashion. A waiter is a true democrat; he treats all patrons the same. The Hand Woman settles her bulk deeper into the plastic chair, causing the legs to splay, and slurps her coffee.

  Mr. Lapidarius comes in.

  He drops his enormous case beside his regular table, places his fedora carefully on a chair. To Edison, the sight of Mr. Lapidarius is always welcome. If nothing else, Edison likes the way he sits so pleasantly at his table, as if he, at least, has all the time in the world. Mr. Lapidarius is the café’s only regular in the genuine sense, accepting it as a second home. Absolutely bald, with a greenish scalp and impressive eyebrows, he wears the same suit every day, discreetly mended and well-brushed. Now Edison formally presents the menu, which most customers don’t know the existence of, but which Mr. Lapidarius scans with interest despite the fact it never changes.

  “Thank you, dear boy. I’ll have tea and a scone. Have you got Irish Breakfast today?”

  Edison’s face darkens in shame; he still has not managed to convince Beatrice to buy anything other than discount orange pekoe.

  “No matter, friend,” Mr. Lapidarius says quickly. “Anything will do. I picked up the tea habit in London, you know. Never been able to get over it. Of course that was forty years ago. I hear they all drink coffee nowadays, like everyone else.”

  Because Mr. Lapidarius is the only customer who treats the café with respect, Edison always becomes self-conscious in his presence. He warms a small teapot, then puts in the bag and fills the pot with boiling water. Arms tucked in, chin held up, he brings the tray to Mr. Lapidarius’s table. The bill is tucked beneath the rim of the cup, for Beatrice demands that customers pay up front.

  “Ah, the warmth alone makes one feel jolly, doesn’t it?” Mr. Lapidarius says. “I feel expansive today. After all, tonight is New Year’s Eve and another year always brings hope for better times. Perhaps you would care to sit for a few minutes?” “I sh-sh-shouldn’t.”

  “Yes, of course. But a fellow likes a little company now and then.”

  “Well, I’ll ask.”

  As a matter of principle, Edison believes that waiters ought not to fraternize with customers, but somehow Mr. Lapidarius is different. He pokes his head into the back room where Beatrice is pleading into the telephone.

  “I swear I’ll never ask you to do anything again. What do you mean, you don’t believe me?”

  “Pardon me, B-B-Beatrice. May I take my break? Mr. Lap-p-p-pidarius is here.”

  “What, that Arab? Or is he Greek. All right, but only ten minutes. The salt shakers need filling.”

  Edison has already replenished them but says nothing, happy to take a seat beside Mr. Lapidar
ius. “Very companionable,” the man says and smiles. “There’s no need for me to hurry. It is still too early to begin. I will confide to you a secret of my trade. Never approach people first thing in the morning. They’re still in a foul mood for having to get out of bed. It is a salesman’s commandment.”

  “I’m sure you are a v-v-very good salesman,” Edison says.

  “Well, one mustn’t blow one’s own trumpet, eh? But it has kept body and soul together all these years. Of course, when I began it was a real profession, even an art form in its small way. Everything’s changed, but I’m too old a dog to teach new tricks. Each day I go from office to office, presenting my wares. There are so many buildings and so many floors I never go to the same office twice in six months. My suppliers say that I would do better selling the new gadgets — calculators, pocket video games, electronic calorie counters. But I stick to the old. Pen sets, imitation pearl earrings, watches with hands. Little indulgences, pleasant gifts. I admit lately business has taken something of a downturn, as they say of the stock market, but then I’ve known too many rises and falls to count. In Cairo, Madrid, San Francisco. Do you know what King Nebuchadnezzar had engraved on his ring? ‘All things change.’ If times are bad they are sure to get better. And if they are good — well, they are certain to get worse again. In the meantime, one enjoys oneself as one can.”

  “Yes,” Edison says. “I better get back to work. Would you like some hot w-w-w-water?”

  “Very kind of you. And you have been good to keep me company. Here, I want to give you something.”

  He unclasps the latch on his case and takes out a brightly coloured tube on a little cardboard stand, which he places on the table. It looks to Edison like a toy cannon. “This is out of my usual range, but given the date I couldn’t resist. You see this fuse? All you need do is light it. In a few seconds a burst of confetti fills the air. So lovely and useless, its only purpose is to make a moment of delight. How is that for a festive New Year? I expect to sell out completely. You take this one.”