The Enthusiast

by Charlie Haas

  I woke up at eight with a suicide headache. On the way to my car I saw a klepto wire running from the base of a public lamppost to the back of Janice’s garage.

  I stopped at a 7-Eleven for a bear claw and a Daily Pak of vitamin pills, a product I remembered to buy about every six months. There were eight different pills, making me feel like the dying millionaire who summons the private eye. Please excuse these vials, sir. Kaff kaff. My children are vultures. I considered buying a quart cup of Silex coffee and bringing it to work as a subtle act of rebellion, but the smell made my stomach flare up. I bought a canned milkshake instead and drank it while looking at the magazine rack’s awesome abs, monster hot rods, and rampant Clean Page swooshes.

  Agnes was gardening when I got there. “Good morning,” she said. “Tea?” There were teapots and bowls sitting on a retaining wall. I gave in and drank some, and half my headache went away. “How was Janice’s?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Don’t stay there if it isn’t good. I’ve only seen it from the outside. I like how it’s up in the trees, though. Does it feel like a tree house?”

  I thought about it, and there had been some trees. “Kind of. Yeah.”

  Richard came down the gravel path wheeling a cart with six potted plants on it. He said, “Hey, Henry,” and told Agnes, “I’m going to put these in over there.”

  I drank more tea and said, “Should I help you with that?”

  “Sure, if you feel like it,” he said. “We should start on the magazine soon.”

  As we dug holes, Richard asked about Janice’s place and I told him about the electricity. “Yeah, worthless Herbert rigged all that up,” he said. “She’s got a restraining order on Herbert. He dislocated her shoulder.”

  We worked in the garden all morning, spreading gravel on a balding path, working soil amendment into a vegetable bed, and turning over a hundred pounds of fissioning compost. At ten we switched to iced Oolong, and at noon Agnes’s phone rang while she was pruning roses. She took it off her belt and said, “Cozy. This is Agnes…. Hi, how are you? Give me one second and I’ll bring that up on here.” She smiled at me as her imaginary computer found the data. “Here we go. I show you having half a page through January…. Sure, let me just—” She talked as if she were writing it down: “New…invoice…for Fran. Got it. You, too.” She rang off and said, “I guess we should do some work.”

  We made eggplant sandwiches for lunch and ate them on the deck. I had thorn gouges, a sunburn, and arms of throbbing rubber. The garden looked beautiful in a different way now, a map of temporary victories. Agnes made phone calls, Richard did layouts on his laptop, and I cleaned up “From the Strainer,” the front of the book. I had to ask a lot of questions, but they were happy to answer them, especially when the answer involved making me taste another tea.

  That night I knocked on Janice’s door. She opened it, smiled, and said, “Hi. Are you Henry?” She was in her thirties, short on chin but otherwise nice-looking.

  “Yes,” I said. “Hi. I was wondering, I was thinking of moving a few things around up there and maybe painting a little, but I wanted to ask you first.”

  “Sure,” she said. “That’s fine.”

  I’d left the dormer window open in the morning and the room was cooler this time. I didn’t actually know what I was planning to do to the place, or why. I’d lived in a lot of bad apartments by then, but it had never occurred to me to improve one.

  The next day we were tasting Indian teas on the porch when an old wood-trimmed Country Squire station wagon pulled up. The driver got out first, a guy my age in a western shirt. Then the passenger door opened and a thin man in his forties emerged, with curly hair, a creased wary face, black jeans, old boots, and a close-fitting black jacket over a seersucker shirt. I blinked, thinking it couldn’t be who I thought it was, as Agnes said, “Tom, hi.”

  I had eleven Tom Foley CDs back in my room. There’d been a time, after my last visit with Jillian, when I’d listened to nothing but the long songs from his fever-dream period, in which characters from old movies and American history, plus half the cast of the Bible, yelled cryptically at one another while doom and redemption slugged it out in the background. These songs were interpreted exhaustively in music magazines and on the Web pages of self-proclaimed “Foley-ologists.” When interviewed, Foley said things like “I’m just watching certain movies take place. Then I go out in the lobby by the popcorn stand, tear down the poster for next week’s attraction, turn it over, and write down what I just saw. Then I sing whatever it says on there.”

  A couple of years before I came to Cozy, though, he’d abruptly started releasing bafflingly straightforward songs about the pleasures of walking around woods and towns, watching streams go by over stones, and going home to fix lunch. The reactions in the music magazines had ranged from “his deepest riddles yet” to “full frontal lobotomy.” I liked music, and one of the few things I’d ever known better than to do was to work at a music magazine.

  He came up the porch steps. I shook his hand and managed to say my name. He shoulder-hugged Richard and Agnes and introduced the guy in the western shirt as James. Richard said, “You guys are just in time for some south Darjeeling.”

  I went to the kitchen to get bowls for them. When I came back everyone but James was sitting down. Foley was in the chair where the sun split the atom. I held a bowl out to James, who said, “Oh, no thanks.”

  Richard, pouring, said, “What you’re going to taste here is changing weather. Where this tea is grown, the frost happens at only the highest altitudes on the ten coldest nights of the year. By noon the temperature is tropical. It’s that change that produces the flavor.”

  “Change in the weather,” Foley said. He tasted the tea, closed his eyes, slowly lowered the cup, opened his eyes, and said, “Richard, that’s…hoo.”

  Richard laughed. “You might notice a note of eucalyptus,” he said. “The eucalyptus trees actually spread their molecules through the soil to the tea bushes.”

  Foley said, “Have you been there? Where they grow this?”

  Agnes nodded and said, “In India. The most beautiful mornings. There are tigers and elephants walking through the tea bushes.”

  Foley took another sip and said, “Yeah, I think there’s a note of elephant in there too.” Everyone laughed. He drank again. “No, that’s great tea. You know what that does, Richard?” He put a finger to his temple. “It makes you twice as right here.” Richard nodded. I drank more, trying to see what Foley was talking about.

  “I was over there in India one time,” he said. “I had quite an unusual experience. I was reading this book on my way there—” He frowned. “James, have I got anything to read tonight?”

  “I don’t think so,” James said.

  “Can you go into the local town here and get something?”

  “What kind of thing?”

  “I don’t know, James. Disused poetry. Reckless true criminals.”

  “I’ve been reading something wonderful,” Agnes said. “The March of Folly. Military history. The Trojan War and the Boston Tea Party are both in there.”

  “Get that,” Foley said. “And anything else they have like that.”

  James got his keys out and said to me, “You want to show me where it is?”

  It could have been the fact that I’d gone to get the bowls, or just the underling gas I gave off. I wanted to stay and listen to Foley, but I got in the car.

  In town James bought The March of Folly and eight other books. On the way back I said, “That story Tom was starting to tell sounded interesting. About India.”

  “They lost his luggage,” James said.

  “Oh,” I said. “Has he been interested in tea for a while?”

  “Couple years. Since he stopped everything else. Except incense. You should hear people talk about different kinds of incense for an hour and a half sometime. Jesus Christ.”

  I was still hoping to hear the end of Foley’s India story, but whe
n we got back he was saying, “What kind of gas mileage does that car of yours get, Richard?”

  “I’m not sure,” Richard said. “Twenty-five?”

  “That’s pretty good gas mileage,” Foley said. “This Country Squire here gets terrible mileage. I think about trading it in sometimes.”

  “But the wood and everything,” Agnes said.

  “That’s not real wood. I just keep it for the name. The Country Squire. The country squire checks his tires.”

  “There you go,” Richard said.

  “We may be present for something here,” Agnes said.

  “Naah,” Foley said, and stood up. “We should get going, James.”

  He picked up a few bags of tea from the table, hugged Agnes, shook hands with Richard, nodded at me, and got into the car with James. When they were gone, Richard said, “He seems good.”

  “Pretty good,” Agnes said. I asked her how they knew him. She said, “Oh, we all lived in New York at the same time.”

  There was company almost every day, including tea traders and importers who drank twelve cups of matcha or yerba maté a day and walked around six inches off the ground, speaking in giggles and sighs. Foley was the only visitor I’d heard of, but there were others I should have, artists, musicians, and writers. Old Volvos and taxis from the train station came up the driveway all week long, especially on Friday nights. Some guests drank tea, while others brought liquor even when they came for breakfast.

  These people came to get away from their work, but that was impossible. They’d talk for forty-five minutes about what they were doing, and then say, “I guess I can’t really talk about it.” A musician came up one Friday, excited about a new song cycle he was composing. “It’s unbelievable,” he said. “I work on it for twelve hours and then I go stand in the street and just feel my brain growing.” Two weeks later he came back, fell into a chair, put his head in his hands, and said, “It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s this fucking song cycle.” Their work kept them sleepless for days, sucked them into rival camps, and caused them to wake up divorced and leave things on the subway. They made all the other enthusiasts I’d met look like rank beginners.

  Some of them lived in a reverse world, where hit movies and TV shows were esoteric. One night a woman who translated Spanish fiction said, “Yes, there’s one now, I don’t know what it’s called, but there’s a group of cops and they let them say ‘asshole.’”

  “NYPD Blue,” a sculptor said.

  “That’s terrific that you know that,” the translator said.

  “That’s not terrific. I have it on when I’m welding. It’s not like it’s something you have to go to Bern and study.”

  “It is to me,” the translator said. “The Blue P.D. That’s wonderful.”

  Work on Cozy fell into gaps between gardening, cooking, and the ongoing party. Sometimes, close to deadline, the visitors would help. An article on doilies was illustrated by a photo of a ballerina from Beacon wearing two of them as a bra. A New York poet slipped the phrase “an unmistakable hint of cirrus clouds passing over Melina Mercouri’s head” into a review of some Harmutty Assam tea.

  On a Friday night in September, with warm rain outside and a crowd growing in the living room, Richard welcomed a carload of people at the screen door: the sculptor, the ballerina, the guy who’d taken her picture, and a woman I hadn’t seen before. She was in her thirties and skinny, in red pants, black Keds, and a black sweater, with an “unconventionally” pretty face, the kind they didn’t usually put in movies until the seventies, although those little disproportions must have been making people horny for centuries beforehand. Richard said, “Hey,” when he saw her, a soft exclamation. She hugged him, folded her umbrella, shook my hand, and said, “Hi, I’m Carol.”

  “This is Henry,” Richard said. “He does the magazine with us. Carol plays saxophone. How’s it going?”

  “Good,” she said. “I’m doing some things at the Difficult Listening Festival. You should come.”

  “Yeah, we should get down there,” Richard said, as Agnes came over. She and Carol said hello to each other with measured smiles.

  I remembered I’d left a fax unsent, went upstairs to the office, and found the song cycle guy lying on the floor, his eyes closed, a half-full rocks glass on his chest. Classical music, a solo piano, played on the bookshelf stereo. He heard me come in, opened his eyes, and said, “Richard Goode. He says, ‘Look, I can get you in the room with Bach, and the two of you work it out.’ Not many people can make that offer.” He closed his eyes again. I listened to the music for a few minutes and went back downstairs.

  A Japanese American guy who taught the tea ceremony in New York had arrived, and there were a few conversations going on in the living room. See, but there’s a straight line from the teahouse in Japan to the tearoom in America, She was living with some people in a house in Tangiers, Oh I know who you are, because you have all these stories about the Japanese leaders coming to the teahouse and bowing through the low doorway, I’m trying to lose a pound, everyone talking but Agnes, and who are the leaders in the Biggest Little City in America type of town, I saw Clayton’s stunted skyline, is it the idiot nephew mayor? You’d better hope not, Richard took a sip of Carol’s wine, No, it’s the ladies, You can go down to the marketplace and buy opium, the hospital and the museum would go broke if the ladies didn’t put on a, Carol looked at Agnes but Agnes didn’t look back, the one perfect morning glory in Kyoto or the big vomit flower arrangement in Atlanta somewhere, it’s the same deal. I’d tried to hear the guy leaving me in the room with Bach, like I’d tried to be twice as right there when Foley talked about it, but I didn’t know how. I’d had poor skills at my other jobs too, but this time it seemed to matter. The tea ceremony, though; I could never do all that inching around. That was Carol, inching toward Richard to demonstrate.

  Two hours later, when people had left, Richard and Agnes were upstairs and I was in the kitchen washing teacups and glasses. Richard’s voice cut through the running water: “It was six fucking years ago.” A door slammed. “Seven years.”

  I had acid stomach. I didn’t need my missed years of college to know that this was supposed to be like Mom and Dad having a fight, but there was something else. When Richard and Agnes worked for hours in the garden, or brewed tea like they were sending up the space shuttle, the end product was supposed to be a kind of equilibrium, and if they could have it, then others could too, but where was it now?

  I almost slipped out before Richard got downstairs, but I had to rinse my hands. He said, “Henry, hey. Are you cleaning up? You don’t have to clean up.” He gestured upstairs, shook his head, and said, “It’s fine.”

  I followed him into the living room and we sat down. “Is this weird for you?” he said.

  “Is what weird?”

  “All these people in and out of here. I realized, I haven’t thought about it from your point of view.” He picked up a glass I hadn’t gotten to, examined the half-inch of amber liquid in it, and put it down. “Or just the way we do things here. That could easily be weird.”

  I reminded him about the other places I’d worked. “So, really, no place is weird for you,” he said.

  “I was going to say everyplace is.”

  He thought about that and said, “See you Monday?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  The next morning I got up early, made a thermos of Genmaicha, and drove to Poughkeepsie. At Color Tile I bought caulk, Caulk-Be-Gone, mildew remover, a putty knife, a breathing mask, a spreader, and an instruction book. At Sherwin-Williams I got white paint, blue tape, turpentine, brushes, scrapers, stirrers, rollers, a pan, and a hat. At the Goodwill store I got rid of the books from the bookcase and bought a wooden plant stand like the one in Richard and Agnes’s living room. Theirs had a ceramic urn on it, sitting on a piece of fringed fabric. I bought a blue pillowcase and a green glass canning jar.

  On Sunday I put Caulk-Be-Gone on the nine ugly layers that worthless Herbert had applied in
the golden days before Janice’s restraining order. I let it soak for hours while I scraped paint off the walls, but the caulk wouldn’t be gone. I bent under the slanting shower wall, hacking at it with the putty knife, and stuck myself twice. At 7:00 P.M. I got the last of it out, applied the mildew remover, spilled some of it where I’d stuck myself, screamed, washed it, went out for sandwich ingredients, and barked at the grocery cashier. When I put the new caulk on, my hands were shaking and my back was lit up with pain. My one layer looked worse than all of Herbert’s and there was no reason to think it would leak any less. All I wanted was a shower, but I couldn’t take one till the caulk dried at 4:00 A.M. I lay down for a minute and passed out till morning. When I got to work, Richard and Agnes were on the deck drinking Dragonwell and laughing.

  One hot Saturday I washed my sheets in the bathroom sink and hung them on the clothesline in Janice’s backyard. I started to go back upstairs but then turned around to stare at them. It was their least dingy moment of the week, but that wasn’t what stopped me. They were a movie screen for the sunlight, pregnant with rest, making a sine wave out of the breeze from the river. By the time I stopped looking they were halfway dry.

  I was making Rice-A-Roni on the hot plate one evening when Janice knocked on the door. “I was just curious to see what you’ve done up here,” she said. “If it’s a good time.”

  I said yes. She came in and shielded her eyes as though there were glare coming through the window, which was strange because the sun was on the other side of the sky. “That’s bright,” she said. “Do you mind if I close this?” She pulled the curtains, looked around, and said, “Wow, you’ve done a lot.”

  A car pulled up outside and its door slammed. Then there was pounding on Janice’s front door and a guy’s voice yelling, “Janice! Hey! Janice!”

  “The white paint looks so much cleaner,” she said.