by John Gardner
So now, every other week or so, Arnold would come up with a new “Friday night chef’s special”—Peking duck, beef Wellington, rack of lamb, salmon mousse—which always ran out before the evening was half over and which gradually made Dellapicallo’s restaurant somewhat famous in and around our town, so that if somebody came home from Viet Nam, or cousins came in from Syracuse or somewhere, or a bunch of old ladies wanted a nice place to go, Dellapicallo’s was the first place they thought of.
I know now, looking back, that the food was more or less ordinary, at least by big-city standards. But our town, in those days, had only twenty thousand people, give or take a few thousand, depending on the weather and conditions on the lake, and so it didn’t really seem to us pretentious or deep-down stupid when Arnold began to describe himself as “an artist.” For one thing, it came on him gradually, so that none of us really noticed, except in passing. And for another, Arnold had a bookish way of speaking—he read a lot, as I’ve said; not just cookbooks but anything that fell into his hands. Any kind of print that came in front of his steel-rimmed spectacles he would read—license plates, the numbers on wallpaper seams—and a lot of times with a person like that, especially if the Beatles or the Jefferson Airplane are wailing in the background, you don’t really notice when what the person is saying has gotten odder. Anyway, the “we” I’m talking about now is the Scavengers gang, motorcycle hoods, or so we liked to think, really just a bunch of greaser kids in second-hand black jackets, fighting pimples, hanging around, waiting to get drafted and shot at. We weren’t exactly unaware that that was how it stood with us. Some of the kids in our town enlisted, ran out and joined up as quick as they could with the United States Marines; others went to college and tried to get out of it. We were the poor stupid animals in between: too smart to enlist, too dumb to run and hide in the revolution. “A pox on all your houses!” was our motto, or would have been if the phrase were one we’d ever heard. Our bikes bore no peace signs, no American flags, no LSD rainbows, Nazi swastikas or iron crosses. Their only symbolism was their dull black paint. For Romantic despair, invisibility. We drove third- or fourth-hand Harleys, mostly old flatheads with the pipes opened up—drove them or, more often, pushed them. Nonetheless Kings of the Road we were, with muscular grins. For the most part, whatever our anarchist dreams, we had to be good honest laboring citizens to keep our hogs rolling.
Usually it was sometime in the early afternoon that we’d drop in to rap with old Arnold. “Hey, let’s go rap with old Arnold,” one of us would say, maybe Tony Petrillo, making a kind of joke of it. The last thing anyone in the gang would have admitted was that it was actually interesting to hear Arnold talk. So far as I remember, nobody even admitted that it was interesting to sit in the terrible proximity of old Dellapicallo’s granddaughter Angelina. In the early afternoon Arnold the cook had nothing much to do. He’d have a pot or two simmering, things he’d go back into the kitchen to check on, from time to time; but at that time of day there was nothing urgent, nothing Ellis couldn’t have handled fine if Arnold had temporarily dropped dead. So Arnold would settle himself at one of the dark, round tables near the bar (the restaurant was separate) where Joe Dellapicallo, the owner’s son, was bartender and where sometimes, if we were lucky, Joe’s daughter Angelina worked as waitress. Arnold drank sherry; he’d pick up the glass with just his thumb and first finger and let the others sort of float. He allowed himself only one large glass all afternoon, though it was said that after work, when he went home, around midnight, he often got smashed, reading books and sipping whiskey while his wife and three daughters snored. It was dark in the bar, blurry with TV noise and the music of the juke that was fixed so it never shut off. We’d get ourselves draught beers and go to his table, turn the chairs around, and sit.
“Hey, Arnold.”
“ ’Lo, boys.” He spoke with what he no doubt intended to seem dignified reserve, voice from the mountaintop, like Lyndon Baines Johnson when he talked on TV about controlled response; but Arnold’s voice never quite made it. He was fat and pink, the steel-rimmed glasses on his nose slightly steamy, the eyes behind them tiny and light blue, and even here, where it was dark and cool, his forehead and throat always glistened with a thin wash of sweat. The smell that came off him, if you sat downwind, was awesome. His hair was light reddish-brown, partly gray, and cut short, old-time army-style but with longish golden sideburns, which made him an anomaly at Dellapicallo’s, where just about everybody—at least until the dinner crowd arrived—was Italian. I too was, to some extent, exceptional: half-Irish.
“How’s the stock market?” one of us would say, maybe Benny Russo; years later he’d become a computer expert. Or maybe one of us would say, “Hey, what’s the secret of happiness, Arnold?” That would be Lenny the Shadow. He was into sensation—mired in it, I guess. In Viet Nam, he’d learn about drugs, and he’d be wasted from an overdose at twenty. It didn’t much matter what you said, it would get Arnold Deller rolling. Whatever we asked him, he always assumed we were more or less serious. Hippy sincerity was in, in those days, at least in certain circles, and that was more or less the tone we took, with just sufficient ironic edge that nobody could really pin us down, prove we actually existed.
“Ha, you punklets,” Arnold would say, just lifting the corners of his mouth and eyebrows, as if drawing his head back in disdain were too much work; but it wasn’t unfriendly. He knew us. Everybody knew us. Most of the people in town even liked us, I learned years later, though they hated the damn noise. “Listen, kid,” he said the afternoon this story begins. His eyes were narrowed more than usual and his voice was edgy. “Listen, kid, you’re talking to an artist, see? What does an artist know about a thing like that? You know what’s the matter with the world today? People are always asking the wrong people the big important questions. Like a football player, they want him to tell ’em about politics. Or a famous minister like Billy Graham, they want him to predict who’ll win the Super Bowl.” He shook his head, as if the whole thing depressed him more than words could say. “You kids had any brains, you’d ask me what to do with oregano. Educate yourself, learn a good honest trade, or, rather, art.” He smiled, big-chinned. His chin was like a big pink softball with two or three whiskers. “But I’ll tell you one thing. Better to ask me these grandiose questions than ask somebody thinks he knows the answers.” He looked over at Joe at the bar, as if that was who he meant.
Joe went on as always, wiping things with his cloth—bar-top, faucets, ashtrays, anything he couldn’t remember having wiped just a minute ago. The television was on above him, the latest news of who’d killed who, demonstrations, riots, helicopters hovering over Viet Nam or Berkeley, it was all the same. Lot of shouting, bearded commies, bearded Green Berets, one with a piece of Scotch tape on his glasses. It was hard to believe that outside the restaurant the sun was shining and dogs lay asleep on the sidewalk.
Joe never looked at the television. He had his own wars, undeclared, like the big one; mainly with Angelina. He had quick, nervous hands like a card player’s, and his black hair was slicked back so smooth you might have thought it was paint. Like Arnold, he was resisting the longer-locks look. Sometimes when his eye accidentally fell on my hair, which hung pretty far down my back in those days, his face would freeze out and for a minute or two it would look like he’d given up breathing. Of those who admired my ambling indifference to the world’s imperatives, Joe Dellapicallo, Angelina’s father, was not one. Sometimes today he would suddenly grin a little crossly, like a man hearing voices, but he was careful never to let on that he was hearing Arnold’s voice, or ours.
Then the front door opened, letting in a blast of light, and Angelina came in. School had let out. She was a senior. Joe glanced up and noticed, that was all. He was always like that, so cool he was ice. You’d have thought he hated her or didn’t know her, but if anybody’d touched her on one of those beautiful brown bare-naked legs he’d’ve been out from behind that bar like a shot, and for the man with the
traveling fingers it would have been Doomsday. I thought a lot about that, usually lying on my back with my hands behind my head, in my bed at my parents’ house at night. It was supposed to be the age of the sexual revolution, love for free, just ask—it was in all the magazines, and sometimes I was sure it was happening all around me, every party I didn’t get to, every lighted-up farmhouse. It probably was, in fact, even in our town—people painting flowers on one another’s bodies, giving gang-bang massages, one eye cocked over toward the instruction book; but it wasn’t happening where I was or, apparently, where Angelina was. I was fairly sure of that. I had a habit, to tell the truth, of checking up on her nights. I’d idle past her house, sort of coasting, almost silent, to see if the light in her room was on, and if it wasn’t, and I couldn’t catch a glimpse of her downstairs, I’d tool around checking out parties from a distance. Once for something like an hour and a half, I followed a car she was riding in, I thought—hanging back with my lights out, keeping down the noise—but when they finally got up their nerve and pulled under some trees down by the lake, and I zoomed in and zapped the headlights on, all three of them at once, on high-beam, the terrified face that looked out at me wasn’t Angelina’s; some girl with blond hair. I beeped and waved, let ’em know I was a friendly. Suffice it to say that, between her father’s watchfulness and mine, Angelina could hardly move a finger.
She came in walking fast, long-legged, sailing, her expression intense, as if expecting a fight and hoping this once she might get out of it. “Hi, Pop,” she said, chewing gum, not meeting his eyes, pulling her coat off. She had her outfit on, black with white around the collar and the hem of the skirt. She wore these push-up bras, and the collar was as low as the skirt was high. She couldn’t be blamed for it, that was what waitresses wore in such places; but when she came to your table she liked to lean way over and make you nervous, and that I did blame her for, a little—as did her father, watching—not that I wanted her to stop. It didn’t mean a thing, though, or meant the opposite from what it said. I’d figured out long since that in her heart of hearts she was a nun, maybe a physicist. I guess the real truth is, Angelina hardly knew what she wanted herself. She was a straight-A student, a virgin, a tease—church-scared, father-scared; the usual business. In the days of Playboys right out in the livingroom, she might as well have been back in Calabria, winking at goatherds, warning them back with a knife.
“Hi, Arnold,” she’d always say, smiling. Not a word to us.
He would smile back, blissful, squeezing his eyes shut. “Hi, Angelina.” It was obscene. But he’d known her since she was zero, of course. He had uncle’s rights.
She would say, jabbing out at us with the filthy wet rag she wiped the table with and maybe tossing a quick look at her father, “You guys should pay rent. You ever try walking around outside in the sunshine?” Big smile, eyes like dark jade. I used to wonder if it ever occurred to her that one of these days, for all her glory, she’d have to marry one of us and have babies and get fat. I took it for granted that that was how it would end. Who could have believed, in a town like ours, that a little more than a year from then, Angelina would be trying to close down Cornell University, shouting angry slogans in doggerel verse, and firing windy, ranting letters at me—“Dear Finnegan”—in some Asian swamp?
As soon as she’d left us, Arnold would wipe his forehead and start up again, folding his pink hands on the tabletop, smiling like a pink-faced priest in the direction of Angelina.
This day he said, “You wonder why she’s so attracted to me, right? Maturity, boys. Maybe I can give you some pointers.” He tapped the tips of his fingers together.
“Hey, Mr. Deller, do that,” Lenny Cervone said, holding his hands out to Arnold and wiggling the fingers as if to lure out words. Lenny—Lenny the Shadow—was the toughest of us, at least he looked it. Even right after he shaved, before he stopped doing that, he had five-o’clock shadow. We all leered and waited.
Arnold smiled and stretched his chin. “Your trouble is,” he said, “you just circle. That’s for goldfish. No offense! Listen, the world’s in chaos, right?” He leaned forward over his elbows, eyebrows lowered, wincing a little, as if thinking hard made his head ache. “War, revolution, students rioting, police rioting, drugs and promiscuity … Let me tell you something: it will pass. Nobody believes that, nobody thinks about afterward—hell no!—but let me tell you, it will pass! After the world-wide glorious high there’s going to be a crash like the world never dreamed of. Things will be changed, even here, in a backwater hick-town like this one, but whatever the world’s like afterward, we’re gonna be stuck with ourselves again—ourselves! It’s a gloomy prospect. A person could go crazy!” He smiled and pushed out his chin in the direction of Tony Petrillo. “It’s easy to throw yourself at grand ideals, and it’s also easy to cut out, call everything nonsense. It’s even natural, right now: the world’s in the middle of a big noisy party; but eventually the party will be over, you mark my words. All this wild scrambling, all this floundering and screaming, people killing each other, making love in the street—one of these days you’ll wake up and it’s gonna be quiet out. Maybe a few storm-troopers or black-suited businessmen keeping order. But quiet, everywhere. Nothing moving. People will be stuck with themselves again.” He drew back and wiped his mouth. His hands were shaking, though he grinned and tried to hide it. “It’s no good, this backing off from things. Don’t worry, I know what you’re up to, you guys. I know what everybody’s up to.” He looked over at Joe. “You think I’m not tempted to back off, just throw up my hands and say the hell with it? But it’s no good, leads straight into craziness. The thing a person’s gotta have—a human being—is some kind of center to his life, some one thing he’s good at that other people need from him, like, for instance, shoemaking. I mean something ordinary but at the same time holy, if you know what I mean. Very special. Something ritual—like, better yet, cooking!” He stretched back his lips—no doubt he meant it for a smile—and closed his eyes.
It made us all uneasy, the way he’d plunged straight into it, no fooling around, no glancing back. Then Lenny the Shadow snapped his fingers and said, “That’s it! Pass me the stove!”
We all pretended it was funnier than it was, hitting each other on the shoulders lightly, saying “Hoo!” and “Shit!” (Sometimes it was a lot of work, just hanging around.) Angelina glanced at us from her barstool, letting us know we were deep-down boring. Joe went on mechanically wiping things, one small muscle in his jaw working. Only the cook showed any mercy. He looked away from Lenny and, without raising the heel of his hand from the tabletop, pointed at Benny the Butcher—that was what we called him, nobody remembers why. He had a bushy long black beard, Indian headband, little gold-rimmed glasses.
“You smile,” the cook said, mostly for rhetoric, since Benny the Butcher was always smiling, his look faintly rueful, staring at the table or the wall or the floor, slightly moving his head as if slowly and thoughtfully saying “No.” He had something a little bit wrong with his eyes. “You smile,” Arnold said, “but you’ll see, believe me! People can get the idea life’s just instinct, no trick to it. But we’re not animals, that’s our great virtue and our terrible dilemma.” He raised one finger, solemn, a kind of ironic apology for the super-fancy talk. “We’ve got to think things out, understand our human nature, figure out how to become what we are.”
“Plan a head,” Tony Petrillo broke in. “Plan a head!” He smacked his right fist into his left hand, almost missing though he was watching so hard his eyes crossed. Nobody paid any attention to him. Nothing Tony ever said made any sense. He claimed he’d gone crazy from watching Walter Cronkite. He always tried to get the channel turned before Cronkite said, “That’s the way it is.” Tony was gangly-armed, swing-headed, clumsy. He was so out of it that one time when we stopped for a redlight he forgot to put his feet down and tipped over, damn near caught the bike on fire. His ambition in life was to run a skull-crusher in some big city. It was a scary
idea. Actually he ended up working in a V.A. hospital.
“What are we?” Arnold said, moving his hands across the tabletop, palms up, toward me. I was always the one that paid the closest attention and made the fewest jokes. I don’t brag about it. I was just never very funny. “Big super-apes with enormous brains,” Arnold said. He suddenly looked angry, as if it were the fault of the Scavengers gang that people were just apes. “Enormous brains relatively speaking, I mean,” he said. “Half-wit morons compared to whales, but never mind. Big brains relatively—anyway big enough that they’ve tuned out the body, if you know what I mean. What animals know by instinct has a hard time getting through to us, except for the really big instincts, the ones that knock your block off. So what are we? What can we deduce about, to coin a phrase, the Art of Living?” His lips shook.