by Joan Silber
It didn’t altogether help. But I could see that it might, in time, if I persevered; it might be my way not to go nuts. I went back to the church of Saint Agnes to look at its arches and see the mosaics in the spandrels. From a block away I could see a line of people—almost all men, and not in good shape, any of them—at the side entrance. I had come at eleven on a Monday morning, and they were lining up for the soup kitchen.
I was not feeling very good myself and I was annoyed at the sight of these guys, milling around the church, getting in the way of my curative aesthetic experience. There they were, slumped over with abject woe or jumping around and barking wisecracks at each other. Bad luck had broken their noses and scarred their faces and ripped the pockets of their pants. As I got closer, I found myself wanting to get in line with them. I was that sorry for myself.
What they reminded me of were the men in prison, and that thought made me not want to get in the line after all. Some of them, with their nicked scalps and bristling haircuts, probably were straight out of prison. How smooth and spoiled I must have looked next to them. I hoped, for their sake, that there was enough food and that it was decent, cooked with a little style. I wasn’t sure the committee women in pastel suits had any kind of flair with food.
Was this bigotry on my part, an Aunt-Angie-like assumption about who knew what to eat? I was pondering that when I saw Clorinda Braddox (Elisa used to call her Clora Clorox) waving at me from the entrance. “Long time, no see,” she said. “You don’t come to meetings anymore?”
“I made my job obsolete,” I said. “They don’t need me. That’s success for you.”
“Who doesn’t need you?” Clorinda said. “Who told you that hogwash? I need you right now in the kitchen, if you want to come.”
She was a birdlike woman, sharp and bright. “Well, no, I can’t,” I said.
“Another time?” she said. “You can do dishing out or you can do cleaning up. Or prep work, if you come earlier.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Everybody’s so busy. What are they doing? Shopping, primping, talking on the phone, spending money, and then they brag about it. Oh, Clorinda, I don’t have a minute. Oh, Clorinda, I’m so exhausted from walking around thinking about how busy I am.”
“Maybe now,” I said. “I could do a little now.”
THE KITCHEN IN the refectory was a pit of functional ugliness in that jewel box of a church. It had dismal brown and yellow tiles on the wall and maroon linoleum on the floor and it smelled of overcooked vegetables and chicken broth. At the stove was a fat man wrapped in a huge white apron and three women of various ages sweating into their blouses. I was told to carry a giant pot of steaming rice into the dining room, which I did, walking slowly and holding its smoldering bulk away from me. Then the line of eaters was suddenly swarming up to the sideboard, and I was ladling mounds of rice onto their plates.
A jumpy customer with a lot of teeth missing wanted to know why we didn’t have brown rice, and a man in a vinyl dress wanted ketchup with his turkey à la king. A girl of maybe ten kept running up and stealing the napkins. But by and large they were glad to be eating; of all the tasks I might have found myself doing, this was the most immediately cheering on both sides. Rarely have I been thanked so many times in an afternoon. I did not expect it to go on for as long as it did. I was manning the rice for two and a half hours. And after we stopped serving I was on cleanup, scrubbing the hardened rice kernels out of the same vats.
I did forget Elisa during this time. The ladling out and the pot scrubbing calmed me, as simple, monotonous work can do, and the tasks forced me to pay attention to what was in front of me. Also, for that time I ceased to be a pathetic, sniveling old man who’d been ditched by his younger lover, and was instead a fine and robust giver of bounty.
I smelled of chicken grease and sweat and old drains by the time I was through, and the pale blue shirt I was wearing was splotched and strewn with rice. Clorinda said, “Next time you’ll wear something more informal.”
“Clorinda,” I said. “You’ve got to get this organized better. You’ve got too many people in the kitchen and too few on the floor.”
“Get your rear end over here and fix it then,” she said. “Otherwise you’re just another male with an opinion.”
This fire-eating version of Clorinda—the glaring eye, the flashing tooth—was new to me. My amusement made me pause, and in that second she got me to sign up for kitchen duty on both my days off and to promise her a phone conversation about reapportioning the staff.
AND SO IT began, my eccentric hobby. I was in that church kitchen much more often than I meant to be. I spent hours scrubbing down the tiles, which were really disgusting with crusted frying oil, and I argued for lustier, more adult cuisine. In my spare moments at the camera store I called beverage distributors and I read books like Fabulous Feasts for Fifty or More. I made Saint Agnes feature arroz con pollo and barbecued wings and pasta e fagioli, and I made them cut out the fish sticks and the wax beans.
My ponytail was a real conversation starter for the lunch crowd. I couldn’t stand over a vat of greens without someone saying I looked like Steven Seagal or George Washington or Trigger. My old girlfriend Judy used to complain that people had this need to voice their observations at her on the street. In the church dining room too people were always piping up, looking for a way to get in some burst of personality, some proof they weren’t dust yet, and who could blame them? “This ponytail?” I’d say. “Chop it off and I lose all my superstrength.” “Don’t tell anyone but it’s a Dynel wig.” “Would you believe it makes women go frantic?”
I got to know the regulars—Tomas, who was six six and always wore shorts, and Reginald, who had a pouched and creased face of great dignity, and Maxwell, who liked to recite the latest Mets scores to everyone. Some of the others moved through the line without speaking and without changing expression; they sat at the tables, looking straight ahead, watching their own internal TV, chewing. At least we gave them something to chew.
One of them, a heavy young woman with red-rimmed eyes, threw up one day, and I ran out with newspaper and a mop to clean it up. I could see she was terribly embarrassed, and I kept saying, “No problem, what’s a little barfing among friends?” and the others, who had been struck silent, got heartier and nicer to her. I was pleased with how that went. In the kitchen Jose, the cook, said, “You handled that fine,” and the praise sat very well with me.
When Aunt Angie got wind of all this volunteering I was suddenly doing, she said, “Very nice. Maybe you’ll meet another woman in this work.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Someone nice. Not like that other nut job, even though I liked her.”
“I’m there to serve lunch, actually.”
“Where did she go, what happened to her?”
“She’s around.”
“She was too silly, even though I liked her. And you know what? She doesn’t know what she’s missing.”
“You’re right,” I said. “She doesn’t know.”
“She gets a few more years on her, she’ll get banged into shape. Youth is something she’ll get over.”
“Maybe,” I said.
AT THE CAMERA store everybody started telling me that I looked better. My coworkers there started guessing, right to my face, that I was now on Prozac or I was seeing this hot new number named Clorinda or I was thriving on church meals instead of wasting away on bachelor Chee-tos and popcorn. My own theory was that I was getting endorphins into my system from driving my carcass to exhaustion and putting it to some sort of service, and that most of the depressed people in the city could use a few stints in the church kitchen to get out of their own loops.
Not that I was altogether out. Sometimes I thought I saw Elisa in line at the church, ruined and wasted and strung out. Why would I wish that on her? I had her confused more than once with some very ill women. In these mistaken sightings, while I stood over a vat of noodles, I dreamed my same lov
ely dream in which she was always much reduced, frail and ailing and no longer able to care for herself, and thrilled at the sight of me, thrilled.
10
Gabe
The people who came to the soup kitchen—our guests, Clorinda called them—had more troubles than you could shake a stick at and pasts like crudely drawn scenes from hell. I didn’t want to hear too much, but details floated up in their talk—a broken elevator had crushed Tomas’s wife and son, Trudy had once tried to kill herself by drinking bleach, Maxwell had lost his eye in a fight over a Hostess snack cake. Loss and more loss. And a lot of what they knew about themselves wasn’t good news—you could see from their expressions. As a group, they weren’t gloating over their grace under pressure.
Some days it seemed that everyone who lined up in that basement needed to tell me at once that he or she would not have been there at all if just a few things had been different. In this they were exactly like all the men I had known in prison.
Sometimes the lunch eaters asked me questions like, “So how come you’re here doing this, man?” I didn’t say it was the Law of Karma. I didn’t say, if my girlfriend hadn’t done something ten years ago that got her this virus and if the test hadn’t made her perversely defiant and if she hadn’t run off with a jerk with a stud in his chin and left me in anguish, I couldn’t have been talked into spending my off hours dishing out turkey chili to guys like you. I said, “I don’t have a clue how I got here.” Reginald, who was old but maybe not as old as he looked, shook his head over me. “A nice summer day, and you’re in here with these losers?”
“I like it,” I said. “So sue me.”
“What’s your problem?” he said. “I don’t get it.”
AT THE STORE we were having a big promotion—in July, when no one wanted to buy anything—for this digital video camera that Ed said did everything but make your family better looking. You could see every facial flaw in instant replay on its swivel-screen monitor, with unbelievably high resolution and a zoom lens and an index titler and digital stereo and all that crap. “It’s too good,” Ed said. “It’s ridiculous for regular people. Whose dick is so small that he needs this kind of item?”
It was just an overimproved version of something we had been selling for a long time, but Ed was having a good time hating it. The model name was the super-trooper and he kept calling it the superpooper. It was priced so much higher than the other models that no one bought it anyway. Occasionally we would pick out some guy in a linen suit and deep tan as the perfect pooper buyer, but when we told people the price they made sour-lemon faces.
So at the end of a long dull day in the store’s musty air-conditioning, when I saw some couple nosing around the display, I didn’t even bother to go over. “Anyone working here?” the man said.
The man was gauntly tan and crisply dressed, in his khakis and his pastel tennis shirt, and the woman had the bright, careful makeup that Elisa would have said was suburban technicolor. “What can I help you with?” I said.
“This has picture stabilization?” the man said. Ed was in earshot and I could almost hear him chuckling.
“It does indeed,” I said.
“Is it sturdy?” the woman said. And from her voice I had the idea it was my old crazy girlfriend Maureen, whom I had not seen in twenty-seven years. I looked again. She had not aged badly at all—underneath the trim little haircut there was the same vivid mouth, the same handsome bones. Her skin was older, but I saw her more clearly the more I looked.
“Maureen?” I said. “It’s Gabe.”
“Oh, my God,” she said. “Can it be?” She threw her arms around me, and she laughed, as if our mutual history was pretty hilarious, which it was.
Her husband, this lean, wolfish guy with a mustache, shook his head at us, a gesture of very mild amazement. Maureen said, “You remember Alan?”
“He knew me as Zorro,” Alan said. He did smile a little at that.
“Zorro,” I said. He had been one of my subcontractors, one of those whose full names I had declined to give to the police when they were doing what I later called picking on me.
“You’re looking good,” I said. Not really. The skinny, pink-cheeked boy he had been was carved pretty thoroughly now.
“I can’t believe it,” Maureen said. “Where the fuck have you been all this time?”
“Not far,” I said. “And yourself?”
“In Tenafly, New Jersey,” Maureen said. “Which is better than it sounds.”
“We’re right across the river. I have a real estate agency with a couple of offices around there,” Alan said.
“The two of us,” Maureen said, “have this agency.”
“It’s a very up and down business,” Alan said. “Somewhat like our old line of work.” He squinted at me in what he must have thought was a friendly way.
“You’re looking very dapper,” Maureen said to me. “I have a son who would love that jacket.”
“You look the same as ever,” I said.
“Is this your store?” Alan said. “It’s quite a booming place.”
“It’s not my store,” I said. It wasn’t booming at the moment either. “I’m happy to say I only work here.”
They were silent, it was an awkward moment that surprised me. Never, never had it occurred to me to want to own this place, not for a second.
“It’s a great store,” Maureen said. “I always see their ads.”
“Have you been here long?” Alan asked.
“Twenty-one years,” I said.
It seemed to embarrass them that I had less money than they did. They were having trouble with this particular life fact. For my part, it amused me to think of Maureen selling real estate to the unwitting public. Hey, you want this or not? she would say, but perhaps not in those words. It’s up to you, don’t let me rush you but.
“The reason we want the video camera,” Alan said, “is that we’re going to Bali for two weeks. I don’t know if you’ve ever been there but it’s unbelievably beautiful. When we went before, we didn’t bring back any videos and we were sorry later.”
“This is the best camcorder around,” I said. “I wouldn’t get anything less than this.”
“Whatever you say, Gabe,” Maureen said. “You’re our man.”
I sold them a three-year service contract they didn’t need either. They seemed perfectly thrilled about the whole thing. They loved this camera, they were so glad they had run into me.
“It’s a real New York coincidence, isn’t it?” Alan said.
“Oh! Look at your ponytail,” Maureen said. “How great.”
“I can’t,” I said. “But thanks.”
And when Formerly Known as Zorro took out his wallet, he did what I knew he was going to do. He gave me his business card and said, “I don’t know how long you’ve been working here, but you could make more money working for me. Maybe not right away, you’d have to get your Realtor’s license, but you could do a lot better. A lot.”
“No, thanks. But thank you,” I said. Maureen looked mournful then, probably thinking how stubborn and depressing I was.
AFTER THEY LEFT, I did not feel wonderful. Ed said, “Mister Gabe. Go spend that commission on wild women in clean underwear. You dog.”
“Right,” I said. “One martini with an extra olive and it’s all gone.”
I didn’t want all that much more money than I had, although Maureen and Zorro would not have believed that. Could not have believed it, of anyone.
“What’s Bali like?” I said to Ed. “Is it all touristed now?”
“I heard it’s beautiful,” Ed said. “It’s always given as an example of a culture where art is part of daily life.”
And Alan the gentleman goon would be getting it all down on his video. It made me kind of sick to think of, and I never wanted to be a sour person.
“You know anyone who’s been there?” I said.
“Howard. Before I knew him. I have a shadow puppet he brought back. It’s quite exquisite.
”
I didn’t have to go to the bookstore and read all about Bali to torture myself, but I did. It was the Island of Ten Thousand Temples, except there were really twenty thousand, the guidebook said. Balinese women prepared small offerings to Hindu deities and demons and local ancestors every day. While parts of the island had been overtaken by luxury resorts, an elaborate purification ritual took place every year on the most crowded beach, cleansing the year’s misdeeds and protecting the island from unwholesome change. Dance and gamelan music had not suffered from exposure to foreign audiences, and the quality of woodcarving and painting was very high. There were many excellent walks through rain forest and fishing village but the gray monkeys, regarded as sacred, could be aggressive.
I had forgotten about wanting to go to places like that. Most people don’t get to go anywhere, what was I complaining about? But I walked home from the bookstore not liking my city anymore. It was a hot summer evening, moist and sticky with no breeze. And that night, in the cubicle of my bedroom, with the electric fan thrumming in my ear, I dreamed that I was in a boat, floating on a sea of orchids, feeding fruit to a monkey (in my dream he was quite docile). When I woke up I thought, that’s the boat I missed.
The next day, when I got home and saw the message light on my phone machine blinking, I was sure it was Elisa, but the voice on the tape was Maureen’s.
“Gabe, it was so great to see you. I just have a quick question I wanted to ask you. Call me back.”
I wasn’t eager to speak to Alan again, so I was glad when the guy who answered sounded very much like a postadolescent interrupted in the middle of a really good TV show. “Yes,” he said, when I asked if Maureen was there. And the phone went silent while he got her.
“You don’t have kids, do you?” Maureen asked me.