The Enthusiast

by Charlie Haas

  We walked by the river as the sun went down. “Do you realize where Jim Rensselaer is now?” Jillian said. “The Washington bureau of the Kansas City Star. It’s hilarious. He goes to cocktail parties on Embassy Row.”

  “That’s great,” I said, and stopped walking. “That time we went to the Thai restaurant and you kissed me afterward. Do you remember that?”

  “Of course.”

  “What was that about?”

  “It’s when a man and a lady like each other very much.”

  “Did you?”

  “Yes,” she said. “You know that.”

  “No I don’t.”

  “Well, I did.”

  “Me, too,” I said.

  She started walking again. “I mean, it’s not like I planned it. You know those things where they give the spiders all different drugs and they try to make their spider webs and the webs are hopelessly screwed up? That’s what my plans are like.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “I don’t know, Henry, it’s…if you sleep with people you don’t care about, you don’t feel so springtime fresh afterward, and if you sleep with people you do care about, it’s like, how do you steer this thing?”

  “Maybe you don’t.”

  “I definitely don’t. That’s what I’m saying.” She stopped walking and took my hand as the sunset blazed over the fine hairs on her neck. “You’re making me do the part I can’t do,” she said.

  “I can’t, either,” I said. “We could build on that.”

  “Build on that? Henry, you’re a bigger spider on drugs than I am.”

  “No, I’m not,” I said. “Why do you think I drove up here?”

  I put my hand behind her head and tried to kiss her. She pulled away so sharply that I felt like some kind of abuser. For a minute we looked at each other as if we were on opposite sides of the river.

  “I don’t think we better,” she said. “I’m sorry. I don’t think we can.”

  “Should I still call you?”

  “Of course. And I still want to see Bakersfield.” The change of subject steadied her voice. “Look at their personal lives. And yet they soldier on.”

  “Who soldiers on?”

  “Buck and Merle and everyone. I think that’s why I look up to them.” The copper gleams from the river were blinding. As I turned back toward the car she touched my arm and said, “Everyone liked you here.”

  It took me all night to drive back. The Flurry’s radio was working for once and I got an all-news station from Jefferson City. A family planning researcher in Maryland, heating up soup while his wife and kids slept, had been shot through his kitchen window. The authorities had no leads. When I got back to Silica the band with the patch-cord problems was singing, “Brandy, you’re a fine girl.” I only got a few hours’ sleep, but I was glad I had a job to go to in the morning.

  Except that I didn’t. Spelunk had been bought by Clean Page, the company in San Jose, as Geoff predicted. Larry was right too: Geoff survived the transition and I didn’t.

  I went home and started calling around. Laura O’Connor, the art director of Row! when I worked there, said she thought a friend of hers named Agnes in the Hudson River Valley might want help with Cozy, The Magazine of Tea.

  “Tea like you drink?” I said. “Like at Chinese restaurants?”

  “It’s better tea than that,” Laura said. “But yes.”

  Two hours later, at the biggest newsstand in St. Louis, I read the want ads in Editor and Publisher. All the job openings required a knowledge of news, politics, or the kind of sports that people leave their homes to watch. I put it back and moved on to the enthusiast titles. The Clean Page logo, a smugly meaningless swoosh, was on every sixth one.

  I bought a copy of Cozy and took it home. It had photos of chintz-filled tearooms and people walking around Kenya with baskets on their heads, and a list of places you could call to book a six-hour Japanese tea ceremony. It didn’t seem any crazier than anyplace else I’d worked, and I called them in the morning.

  7

  Cozy. This is Agnes,” the woman who answered the phone said. I’d expected an old lady’s blown-speaker voice, but hers was strong. I told her how I’d heard about the job opening. “Oh, good,” she said. “How’s Laura, is she painting?”

  “Part time,” I said.

  “And you’re an editor?”

  “Yes. I could send you my résumé, or—”

  “No, no, that’s okay. Do you want to come out here?”

  I said I’d drive up, and she gave me directions from Philadelphia on. It took a while because she threw in stops for hero sandwiches, apple cake, waterfalls, a motel with Magic Fingers, and a Russian Orthodox church. “I’m just giving you highlights,” she said. “You’ll probably find a whole other set of things. Just call us when you’re close.”

  I followed her directions through scrapyards outside New York City and onto a green highway, where I glimpsed the river’s palisades between beeches and maples. In her town, streets of old cottages crabbed their way up the steep riverbank and met in six-way intersections. I found her mailbox at midday on a two-lane road outside of town. Fifty yards up the driveway was a turnout with a GUEST PARKING sign and a wastebasket full of cane umbrellas.

  I parked and walked from there. The woods gave way to a garden full of hot flower smells, and then a garage with an old Jeep, an old Vespa, and walls hung with garden tools and snow shovels. The house was a two-story bungalow, climbed by flowering vines, with long eaves and a wraparound porch.

  Agnes was sitting in a sling chair on a sundeck that stuck out from the porch. She smiled and said, “Henry?” as I came up the steps. She was in her forties, with brown hair to her shoulders and a reddish round face, and wore a rose leotard, blue jeans, and wrecked purple espadrilles. On a table beside her were an iron teapot, a ceramic bowl of tea, a cordless phone, and a marble-covered schoolkid’s notebook. “Tea?”

  I said yes, though it seemed hot for it, and followed her into the house. I paused in the living room because it looked familiar, and then realized that it looked like the room I’d pictured when I first met Jillian, with a sunlit wooden floor, white walls, and plain maple wainscoting. “Richard?” Agnes called upstairs. “Henry’s here.”

  In the kitchen were six more iron teapots, a dozen ceramic bowls, and thirty steel canisters with labels like DARJEELING SILVER TIPS and TAI PING MONKEY KING. “There’s Kemun in the samovar,” Agnes said, pointing to a big silver urn with an eagle on top of it, “but we can do anything you see there.”

  “No, that sounds good,” I said.

  “Oh, it is. I haven’t left it alone all day.”

  She filled a teapot from the samovar and waved at the bowls. As I picked a blue-and-gray one with red streaks, a tall thin man walked in carrying another teapot and a black glazed bowl. He was Agnes’s age, in blue jeans, bare feet, and a white button-down shirt with a teaspoon in the pocket. He said, “I’m Richard,” and we shook hands.

  Agnes pointed to my bowl and said, “Henry went right for the rising moon.”

  “Henry’s no fool,” Richard said. “I’m making the big move to Nilgiri here.” He put a kettle on, opened a canister, smelled the tea, said a silent “Oh,” and spooned some into a teapot. “So you’re friends with Laura?”

  “We used to work together,” I said.

  “She seems very fond of you, Henry,” Agnes said.

  “Ah,” Richard said.

  “Laura did a series of paintings that were all scenes from jokes people told her,” Agnes said. “It was wonderful. Everyone does their dreams, but these were much weirder.”

  Richard made his tea and we all backed through the screen door with our hands full. Agnes went back to her sling chair, I took a plastic one, and Richard carefully placed an Adirondack in a thin slice of sunshine between the shadows of a tree and a porch post.

  “He loves to get that one ray of sunshine on his bowl,” Agnes said.

  “I do,” he said. “Look at th
at. It’s like it’s splitting the atom.” He took the teaspoon from his pocket, filled it with tea, and slurped it loudly.

  “You do that for the oxygen,” Agnes said. I tried to slurp mine. “What do you think of that?”

  “It’s good,” I said. It was like Chinese restaurant tea with three extra flavors and a gag reflex.

  They asked about my previous jobs. I told them about The Short Sheet, with Laswell writing anti-Mason editorials and the paranoia pouring out of the radio.

  “We should get some angry things like that in the magazine,” Richard said. “Tea is actually very violent and bloody. The Opium Wars were about tea. The English were getting their tea from China but they couldn’t pay for it because they didn’t have anything the Chinese wanted, so they brought in opium. Guys were lying around in opium dens, and the Chinese said, ‘What are you doing? You’re turning our people into junkies.’

  “But the reason the English did that was they were junkies too. All those ships burning up and guys in great naval uniforms getting shot in the face, that was all about the fifteen seconds when the civil servant has the first sip of tea and he goes, ‘There we are, few hours to go, nothing a chap can’t handle.’ They had a whole war over that fifteen seconds. Because otherwise, the civil servant, never mind, you know, the hapless guy that picks the tea, they weren’t going to make it.”

  “To even think about the hapless guy that picks the tea,” Agnes said, “you need the very finest in hapless-guy-picked tea.” She drank. “We should be careful. We’re going to turn Henry off on the whole thing.”

  “No, no,” I said. I did have reservations, though. It wasn’t that the magazine was about something I couldn’t believe there was a whole magazine about. That described most of my previous jobs. At those jobs, though, we were usually a week behind and panicking. “Is this kind of an off day here?” I said.

  “We don’t have off days, Henry,” Richard said. “That’s how it is when you have your own business.” They both laughed. “You mean when do we work?”

  “No, I just—”

  “Have you seen the magazine?”

  I nodded.

  “That seems to be what people want. That isn’t so hard. If people wanted something great, we’d be running around and yelling.”

  “God damn it!” Agnes said experimentally.

  “We’re fucked. We’re fucked!” Richard said. “That’s fun.”

  “No, but we run around and yell sometimes,” Agnes said.

  “Like the thing a few years ago. We have a feature every month, pictures of tearooms, because a lot of our readers are these ladies—”

  “Let me get it,” Richard said, and went inside.

  “We found this guy who’s a caterer-slash-florist in Mississippi,” Agnes said, “in an area where that’s about the only thing a gay guy can do, and he was supposed to take the pictures that month. We sent him some antique teapots, and he was going to give a party and shoot the teapots with people—”

  Richard returned with a manila folder. “The deadline comes and goes,” he said, “and the pictures aren’t coming, and we keep calling him—”

  “—not realizing that he’s an alcoholic and he’s gone into a complete—”

  “—just shitfaced—”

  “—implosion, but he sounded great on the phone. He’d say, ‘I’m just waiting on this cake, there’s this woman in,’ you know, Dred Scott County—”

  “Because they know now that alcoholism is genetic,” Richard said, “and apparently the gene for alcoholism and the gene for sounding good on the phone are right next to each other. And then finally the pictures come.” He opened the folder and handed me an eight-by-ten print. “The best thing is this macaroni salad,” he said. “It’s not from a deli—”

  “It’s not even from a deli department—”

  “It’s like from the refrigerator case in the liquor store, and it’s still in the shape from the plastic container, he didn’t even take a fork and—”

  “—with this radioactive color from the mayonnaise being left out—”

  “—and I’m staring at these things, and I realize, these are Slim Jims—”

  “But the people are what’s—”

  “We think he found the people at the liquor store in the middle of the night and put hats on them. As long as he’s there buying the salad—”

  “This poor woman—”

  “—acute alcohol poisoning, but the hat makes all the—”

  “So we had no backup, and it’s getting dark out, and we realize we’re going to have to disguise our living room as one of these places—”

  “—three A.M. and we’re baking scones and waking up all the women we know up here and making them dress like—”

  “—and it hits us that we’re just reliving what he did twenty-four hours earlier,” Agnes said. “And at that point you just feel for him. I mean living there, and he’s like their pet, but really having to toe the line—”

  “—and the possibility of his getting stomped by other segments of the community is always there,” Richard said. “I would drink.”

  He poured more tea and opened a back issue of Cozy to a two-page photo of their living room. The furniture had been covered in vertigo fabric and the tables were crowded with teapots, cozies, fancy tableware, and pastries, their glazes liquid in the faked streaming-in sunlight. Women held teacups and mimed gala-planning conversation in hats with wildlife on them. I wasn’t the market but I could see how someone, say Cerise Lander, would feel a perfect welcome. The picture was credited to the guy in Mississippi.

  We talked and drank tea all afternoon, rotating from kitchen to bathroom to deck. Sometime after my sixth cup I realized I’d been staring into the garden for twenty minutes. I discovered that focusing on one spot and then another, a flower to a leaf to a branch, felt like flying. I wondered why I’d worried about Richard and Agnes not working, and why I ever worried about time at all. There was plenty. Bees and butterflies, slow in the sun, drank from the flowers as we laughed about ice climbers and tea traders. At six Agnes said, “Is anyone hungry?”

  Richard went inside while I followed Agnes to the vegetable garden and helped her pick lettuce, tomatoes, corn, and onions. When we went in, Richard had water boiling and was getting ready to grill fish. I cleaned the corn while Agnes made a salad.

  “So, Henry,” Richard said over dinner, “are you in?”

  “No, we have to agree on money,” Agnes said.

  “Oh, right. We haven’t really hired anyone before. What was the last place paying you?” I told him. “Thirty a week more?”

  I said yes. Alice opened her notebook and wrote, “CONTRACT,” in decorative letters with a fountain pen. “I’m saying either party can terminate at any time,” she said, “and when you leave, we’ll give you some extra money and a suit. Like getting out of jail.”

  “I should find a place to stay,” I said.

  “A friend of ours in town has a room over her garage,” Agnes said. “Janice. You’d have privacy and a basketball thing. Should I call her?”

  I said yes and we went back to eating. I hadn’t stopped for lunch on the way there. I had seconds of everything and three glasses of iced Lapsang Souchong.

  It was eight thirty, just cooling down, when I parked on Janice’s street. She lived in the flats by the tracks, ten blocks below the Fourth of July–looking town center with its gazebos and clock tower. There were no sidewalks down here, just small houses with fading shingles and blistered siding. Some kids were running under a sprinkler on a weedy lawn and a teenager cruised by on his bike, advancing a tennis ball with a hockey stick.

  The garage next to Janice’s house had a second story with a peaked roof and a dormer window. I climbed the back stairs and found a key under the flowerpot she’d told Agnes about.

  The room was a stoop-ceilinged oven, its air a sour concentrate of old wood and fabric. There were scorch marks around the electric outlets on the dirty walls. Sallow bedclothes we
re folded on a steel cot’s thin mattress. There was a hot plate, a mini refrigerator, and a bookcase full of Zane Grey, Your Erroneous Zones, and other discards from the house. On the cot was a handwritten note:

  Welcome Henry!

  This room has always been a special place to me, a place to think and dream. I hope you enjoy it!

  Please be careful as far as using the electric things, if you use more than two at once the wiring acts weird! If you’re using the hot plate, ONLY use the hot plate, no other electric things. Using overhead light and fan at the same time is usually alright.

  Please keep showers short so floor doesn’t leak. We are working on this one (grin)!

  I know Agnes explained the arrangements to you as far as rent, but if you have any questions, you can come over and knock until about 9PM at night.

  Janice

  In the shower I heard the water drip through the lumpy caulk and into the garage as soon as I turned it on. I made up the cot and tried to sleep but spent most of the night getting up to go to the bathroom and then lying awake, wondering what I was doing at this job. Three hots and a cot, yes, but this actually was a cot. Barney had a wife, a house, two kids now, and a job doing things so scientific they made Controlled Dynamics look like a pottery class, while I was working for people whose hearts opened like parachutes for gay caterer-slash-florists but who’d packed me off to Janice’s hell garage without a second thought. Sleep wouldn’t come, and at 3:00 A.M. I realized it was the tea, that my sweats and insomnia were blowback from my fit of contentment on the porch twelve hours earlier.

  My urine foamed in the rusty toilet, a bubble bath of exploited-Asian bile. Richard and Agnes just wanted someone to get high with, like Rensselaer, who’d traded Freddy Pasco for Orrin Hatch and left me holding the tertiary bag. I pictured a news photo of Rensselaer and a senator in overcoats on the Capitol steps, leaning their heads together, the senator chopping the air for emphasis while Rensselaer took notes. Then I saw it on the front page of the Clayton Herald, and Dobey picking it up in his driveway and looking like he’d been punched, and finally I got a few hours’ sleep.