by John Gardner
Angelina was half sitting, half leaning on the barstool, one leg bent at the knee, as in a movie-ad, mocking by her very existence the enormous human brain. It came to me that she was listening, as interested as any of the rest of us, though she pretended not to be, and then it came to me that Arnold Deller knew it. I wondered if her father did.
The cook started counting things off on his fingers, never looking for as much as a second at Angelina. He sat mounded forward over the table, leaning on his elbows, urgent. “We’re social animals. We’re no good if we don’t run in packs, like you guys. Take one of you alone—even Benny the Butcher here—why a half-starved alleycat could knock him over! But it’s not only that. Even when we pretend to be otherwise—like you, Finnegan.” He pointed at me and closed one eye, very grim, lips trembling. “Even if we pretend it’s otherwise, we like to run in packs. We get lonely. We want something to love and protect.” He wagged his head toward Angelina and winked, not humorously, as he no doubt intended it, but somehow horribly, the way a severed head might wink. I shot a glance at her father, then another one at Arnold, startled. He raised his hand, palm out, all innocence. “Okay,” he said, “so, one, we’re social animals. We gotta live with that. It’s one of those big instincts you can’t get away from—comes of having babies that can’t fend for themselves. Parents gotta stick with ’em enough to take care of ’em, so little by little, through the centuries, as Mr. Darwin says—you should get somebody to read him to you, Finnegan—ha ha! ha ha!—little by little through the centuries human beings got more and more loving until now, the way we are, it’s almost like a sickness, all that anguish of love—but cheer up, it’s even worse with whales. Okay, so where was I? Okay.” Suddenly, like a fist closing, his face closed into a frown.
Benny the Butcher looked at me, suspecting something, then went back to looking at the table and shaking his head. There was nothing I could tell him. I wasn’t sure what was happening myself. The cook was always a little crazy, a little rhetorical and preachy, but something was going on that wasn’t quite usual, that was clear. The room was building up a charge, as if it were the furniture, the dark red walls that had slipped toward not-quite-sane. I felt restless, in need of space and air, but also I wanted Arnold Deller to keep talking. Even if he was making some kind of play for Angelina—it was a weird idea, but it crossed my mind—I had a feeling the talk was in some strange way getting at something. Angelina sat aloof, poised like a bird on a wire. Her father stood with his back to her, only his arms moving, mechanically washing glasses.
“Okay,” Arnold said, “but what else we know is, two, we got a war instinct, also on account of the baby.” He aimed a finger at me like a gun. “Any animal can fight—duck, wolf, bear—but human beings are serious about it. You ever wonder about that? It’s all on account of those babies, that’s what I figure. Ordinary mating fight, usually sooner or later one of the males will back off, except horses. Horses are nuts. But human babies, that changes things. You gotta protect the nest till the baby can walk and talk, learn to make fire, hunt and cook. That takes a long time. Ten years? Twelve? It’s no good just knocking off an enemy now and then. You gotta clean out that forest, make the whole place safe. So the baby that survives is the one with the parents that are the best at holding grudges, the ones that are implacable.” He looked at Lenny the Shadow, who had his mouth open, ready to break in. “Look it up, kid,” Arnold said. “Ask your priest.”
Lenny raised his eyebrows and his hands and looked at me, innocent and injured, surprised by the attack. “Is there no justice?” his look said. There was no justice.
Arnold was digging in, cutting rock. He leaned forward on his elbows again, sweat shining on his face, and looked straight at me as if he’d forgotten the others were there. “But ah,” he said, “that’s where the trouble starts, you can see that yourself! The parents love the baby, and love each other, of course, or they wouldn’t stay together and protect the baby, and pretty soon they learn to love their relatives and neighbors, since that also helps survival, and after a while, after centuries and centuries, they learn to love dead relatives and whatever bits of wisdom they may have scratched on pieces of wood or stone before they died. What a conspiracy! The family and neighbors both living and dead, all standing guard over the poor helpless baby! But they hate—repeat, hate—the enemy, the stranger.” He threw a sharp look at Joe behind the bar—Angelina looked at him too—but Joe, it seemed, noticed none of it.
“All very well,” Arnold said, “as long as people stay in tight little groups. But what happens when Italians and Irishmen start trying to live in the same town? Or Englishmen and Welshmen, Germans, Jews, Chinamen, black men? When that begins to happen we’ve gotta expand our horizons, retrain our instincts a little.” He lowered his head and pointed at my nose. “We invent civilization and law courts, even figure out ways of loving the dead relatives of those other guys—dead relatives who said terrible things about our own dead relatives. That’s when you’ve gotta use your head—you see? Love by policy, not just instinct. That’s the Art of Living. Not just instinct; something you do on purpose. Art!” He was practically shouting.
It may be clear to you by now what was happening, part of it anyway, but it wasn’t clear to me. My heart was pounding and I could feel the blood rushing up, stinging my cheeks, though I managed to keep my cool muscle-smile. It didn’t quite seem to me that the cook had gone really, literally insane, and I was sure he wasn’t drunk, but why he was yelling at me, apparently trying to make a fool of me, I was in too much of a panic to understand. Even the weird things Tony Petrillo said seemed to make more sense.
“You got it all figured out,” I said. “I gotta hand it to you, Arnold.” Smiling; voice soft, as if I weren’t actually there, just a projection beamed down from a spaceship. I had a feeling Angelina was looking at me, but when I glanced over at her, she wasn’t. Her partly turned-away face was dark, as if she too were blushing.
It must finally have occurred to Arnold Deller that none of us was getting it, with the possible exception of Joe, behind the bar. Arnold suddenly grinned and drew back. “Crazy talk from a cook, eh?” he said, and gave a laugh.
“Hey, listen, man,” Lenny the Shadow began, but then, whatever he’d meant to say, he forgot it, just sort of faded back into the darkness.
“I’ll tell you this,” the cook said. “Art’s where it all comes together, that’s what we’re talking about. You take a good Chinese dinner, something very special.” He shot a quick nervous look over at Joe and Angelina. The way he was rolling his eyes, it was like one of those old-time Eisenstein movies. “My boy Rinehart, over there in Viet Nam—”
Quickly, we all nailed our eyes to the table. It was the worst trick he had, that way of talking about his son as if everything were fine. He’d always fake a smile and raise his eyebrows—he didn’t even know he was doing it—and his lips would tremble and his voice would cloud over and more often than not his eyes would fill with tears. It should have made us sad, theoretically, but I guess the truth is it made us feel creepy, crowded in on, a little disgusted. If he’d done it any oftener, we’d have quit going by.
“My boy Rinehart had a certain dish over there in Asia, a certain dish you might think no American would touch, given our prejudices. But it was made so perfectly, it was so downright outstanding, sooner or later you just had to give in to it. That’s what he wrote. I’ve got the letter. It wasn’t just food, it was an occasion. It was one of the oldest dishes known in Asia. Sit down to that dinner—this is what he wrote, and he was right, dead right—you could imagine you were eating with the earliest wisemen in the world.”
We went on staring at the table, maybe all of us thinking about that slip, “dead right.”
Arnold said, talking more quietly all at once, “Art, ya see, art stirs up emotion that people can get together on. Universal humanness, you know what I mean? It’s one of those centers of order I was talking about. It doesn’t matter whether you’re the arti
st or one of the serious appreciators, one of those people that gets a big crowd together and goes to listen to, ha ha, Ol’ Blue Eyes every time he comes to town. Life’s full of drift. Everything. Drift.” His voice was shaky. We all breathed shallowly, as if to steady the room, keep him from breaking out in sobs. I was thinking dark thoughts—I suspect we all were. I was sorry for him, sure, and I knew you couldn’t blame him; but I wished he’d get the hell ahold of himself. No doubt that was programmed too, I thought—the inclination to pull away, leaving the dying to the wolves.
“Listen,” I said, “nobody’s down on art, okay? Artists are beautiful.”
Angelina was staring into the mirror, no doubt thinking, correctly, that she was art. Accidentally, our eyes met.
The cook was wringing his hands, moving his shoulders back and forth as if his back ached. Instead of taking the out I’d offered him, he felt, apparently, a compulsion to be honest and exact. “It may not be they all are,” he said, sort of whining. “I guess there are some that cut their ears off and shoot themselves, maybe even a few that shoot other people.” He jerked his mouth, then leaned forward, quickly and guiltily licking his lips. His cheeks were wet, tears oozing out in a thin wash below the steel-rimmed glasses. I agreed with Benny the Butcher, shaking his head. There wasn’t much hope. Maybe the floor would open up and the cook would vanish.
He brushed at the wetness on his cheeks with both hands, then bent his head and rolled his eyes up, still guilty but also cross now, damned annoyed at our daring to pull away on him. Maybe he sensed that his talking of himself as an artist was beginning to grate. His tone became stubborn, petulant. “But it’s not as artists they do those things,” he said, “or anyway the crazy things aren’t what makes ’em artists, though maybe it all goes together, maybe artists are children, impractical and so on.” He stretched his chin out, warning us not to agree with him too boldly. “But you gotta consider the end result,” he said. He poked the table, hard, with his finger. “If he’s an artist, what a man does, or a woman, is make things—objects which nobody asked him to make or even wanted him to make, in fact maybe they wanted him not to. But he makes them, and once people have them in their hands or standing there in front of them, people for some reason feel they would like to take them home with them or eat them, or if the object’s too big to take home or eat, have it hauled to some museum. That’s what it’s all about. Making life startling and interesting again, bringing families together, or lovers, what-not.”
Suddenly Joe leaned over the bar, hands out to each side on the bartop, eyebrows arching out like blackbird wings. “No!” he shouted, apparently at Arnold. “I don’t give a damn about all your crazy talk. No, black, dog!”
Angelina’s face went pale with anger. She glanced at her father, then came over and put her hands on the table and said, “Why don’t you hoods get out of here? Why don’t you just beat it and leave him alone?”
“Jesus Christ, Angelina!” Lenny said. He looked like he might fall over from purest amazement.
“It’s all right, Angie,” the cook said. His face was dark red, his eyes murderous. “I gotta go back and check on things.” He pushed back from the table, then leaned forward and stood up—big as a house, tattoo of a blue-and-red dragon on his arm. He grinned, lips trembling. “It’s not you guys. Don’t worry.” He pointed at me. “What I said, Finnegan. Take it to heart!”
With our mouths open, we watched him waddle to the kitchen, then we got the hell out.
After we left Dellapicallo’s we cruised awhile, as usual. With the wind in my ears and hair, right away my head felt clearer, though what had happened was as baffling as ever. The others had no more understood it than I did. “What the fuck did we do, man?” Crazy Tony said as soon as we were out on the sidewalk, blinking in the light. “Yeah, what did we do?” the others said. We threw our arms out to the sides and jerked our heads as if to shake off dizziness, all the age-old gestures of the falsely accused poor misunderstood hood, but this time it was for real. So now we rode in somewhat closer formation than we usually did, geared down, making all the noise we could.
Despite my feelings of guilt and confusion, riding with the pack felt beautiful, maybe more so that afternoon than at other times, since the ride was charged—must have been charged—with the poignancy of things one has intuited to be passing. It was good hearing that deep chug-chug only Harleys make, or used to make, and looking at Benny the Butcher’s black-jacketed back, solid as a wall there in front of me, Lenny the Shadow to the left of him, both hogs fat-wheeled, borne down by taillights, big-piped as classy small-town whores. Tony Petrillo rode to the left of me, old-time coontails streaming from his handgrips. When I glanced at him he raised a black gauntlet, with such elegance I wondered if all the spastic clumsiness was just play. I grinned and gave him back his sign.
Ah, that too was love, of course; part of the vastly complex genetic plan. Kings of the Road we were, vrooming the throttle, backing down the spark to shoot a fart at the ladies and gentlemen on the curb. We came to the edge of town and we began to lean in, cut rock. Twilight was upon us. Benny, then Lenny, turned his lights on, bank on bank of them. The lake was still, as smooth as a mirror, every corner from end to echoing end accepting our wild young animal racket as if pleased that we’d swung by.
I was still feeling aftershocks of guilt and confusion—though also I was beginning to incline toward a theory—when I went out to the garage that night and hunkered down to work on my motorcycle, trying to get it fine-tuned. Part of the anguish I was feeling was hope. At supper my mother had told me I looked sick, and my sister had said as if stating a fact, “Finnegan’s in love.”
“Don’t talk with your mouth full!” I’d told her—just the helpful big brother.
“Oh, Finnegan’s always in love,” my mother said, and waved it away.
But my father the sly one, crafty old Calabrian, looked over at me, his head down near his plate, level with the hurrying fork, and grinned. “Can she cook?” he said. The innuendo was faint, but when I saw my mother and father exchange looks, I knew they were on to me. Suddenly—three or four seconds had passed—Shannon, my sister, got the joke and cackled, both hands up to her mouth.
“Finnegan’s in love with Angeleeena!” she sang.
“Shannon, stop teasing your brother,” my mother said. She turned to me, reaching for my plate to heap on more food. “You should invite her over sometime, Finnegan.”
“She wouldn’t come,” I said.
“Don’t be silly,” she said. She said it with such instant and absolute conviction that I suddenly got a whole new vision of what had happened at Dellapicallo’s—what was happening every minute, everywhere in the world.
When I’d been working on my bike for an hour or so, I heard a knock at the door behind me—a knock merely of politeness, since the door was wide open, looking out at the street. I turned but at first saw nothing, just a blurry outline, my eyes loosened by the glare of the trouble-light. Then the blur, like an image through heat-waves, settled down, and I saw that it was, as I’d thought it just might possibly be, Angelina. I looked at my watch: 10 p.m. She should still be at the restaurant.
“Hey, Angelina,” I said.
She looked small, as if huddled against cold, though it wasn’t cold. She didn’t even look all that pretty, just tired, though my heart was whamming. She stayed by the door, leaning against the frame.
“Hi,” she said. Then, after a moment, “Finnegan, could I talk to you?”
“Sure. Why not?” I couldn’t decide whether or not to stand up. If I stood up, that would be nice, a sign of welcome; but it might seem aggressive or threatening or something, and anyway maybe I looked better hunkered down by my bike. Nor could I think what to say. “You look terrific,” I might have said, which was true and not true. No matter what I said, even if I said something honest, she’d catch me out. I knew her. She hadn’t even apologized for yelling at us, like she was the Queen and she had the right.
”That’s a beautiful motorcycle,” she said. She pronounced it “sigh-kull,” not as we did, “sickle.” It was glorious that she did that. Don’t ask me why.
“Yeah. It doesn’t always run so good,” I said.
“Is something wrong with it?”
The question seemed thoughtful, loaded with overtones, as if maybe she were making fine distinctions too complex for me to dream of working out. My heart soared. What a face! What eyes! It was true, as I’ve said, that she was supposed to be smart in school.
“Well, it just doesn’t work so good,” I said, and shrugged. “I’m sort of tuning it.” I smiled. “Like a piano.” Now I did stand up, but stoop-shouldered and loose, so anybody could see I wasn’t dangerous. I wiped my hands on the rag over the seat.
“Like a piano,” she said, almost but not quite smiling, looking for just an instant into my eyes, then away. After a minute she came a few feet into the garage, sort of looking at the machine, not me, and leaned on the workbench. Hesitantly, carefully, she raised one foot onto the grease-can I kept oil and parts in. It struck me that the pose was the same one she’d got into when she was leaning on the barstool, one foot raised on a rung, but it didn’t look like a movie-ad pose now, just tired and natural. I said, “What did you want to talk about?”
I thought how far it was from her house to mine, then remembered she had a car, a red convertible. When I turned I found I could see it, shiny under the streetlight.
“You won’t be mad if it seems a little … funny?
“Me?” I suddenly grinned, forgetting myself. “I don’t think so.”
She thought about it, getting up her nerve, once or twice glancing up at me. At last she said, “Did you ever hear of something called ‘Imperial Dog’?”
I pursed my lips, making myself look thoughtful, then shook my head.
She pushed off from the bench and walked to the narrow back door of the garage. She opened it to look out. She could see the lake from there, I knew, very still in the moonlight, maybe two miles away, though it looked a lot nearer. I thought of going to stand with her, but I didn’t. “There’s this ancient Chinese recipe Arnold found, called ‘Imperial Dog,’ ” she said. She spoke as if to the darkness, the lake. “According to the book, it’s supposed to be the absolutely most elegant dish in the world.” She half turned her head, checking my reaction.