The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town (Modern Library Paperbacks)

by Lillian Ross

  The smell seemed to have no center. Sometimes it stayed at the east end of the street, sometimes at the west end. Sometimes it left North Moore altogether and glided down to Franklin or up to Beach. It behaved more like a mist than like a smell, rising at odd hours of the night, clinging to cobblestones and loading docks, creeping over roofs, and settling in the breezeways behind people’s lofts. No one could say just what the smell was—only that it was certainly caused by putrefaction of some kind of flesh. Blaustein & Son, plumbers, at No. 32, thought that the smell might be rotting human flesh, and called the cops.

  Blaustein: “We get a lot of bad smells in this business, but I never smelled anything like that.”

  Son: “It was like blood.”

  Blaustein: “A very stale, musty smell, like something in an old closet.”

  James Herman, a painter who lives at No. 42: “I worked in a slaughterhouse as a kid, and this was worse than anything I ever smelled on the killing floor. I think there were actually two smells. One was a dank, very musty odor, and the other was this real pungent, acid odor. It was a very aggressive smell.”

  Ernie Lee, a caterer, who lives at No. 40: “At first, I thought my dog had peed in the house, so I went out and invested in a bunch of disinfectants. Then I went to see if the fire hydrant outside the building was the source of the smell. I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. It was like a phantom smell. You’d be doing something and suddenly it would just show up, like a person. You couldn’t do anything once it was there—couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t do any intimate acts.”

  Finally, someone had the idea of asking James, North Moore’s homeless person, who sleeps in the doorway of No. 37. James pointed to No. 31–33 and said, “The Chinese.”

  No. 31–33 is in the middle of the block and has a sign over the door that says “T. Chan Enterprises.” It turned out that the owner, Mr. Charlie Chan, had been exporting food from there for about a year. Recently, he had expanded into the shark-fin business, which is a good business to be in these days. Crates full of the dorsal fins of different species of shark were being brought to 31–33, processed, and shipped to Asia for use in shark-fin soup. The classical method of processing a shark fin is to leave it out in the sun until it rots. Mr. Chan, lacking the facilities for that, was blowing hot air onto the fins in two saunalike chambers he had installed in the basement. The exhaust was being vented from a grate on the ground floor, into the air of North Moore Street.

  A spell of humid August weather set in, and the smell on North Moore became unbearable. Pedestrians avoided the street. Cabdrivers wouldn’t stop there. James the homeless person left. The smell got into Bouley and the Tribeca Grill, two of the fashionable restaurants in the area. By the middle of the month, Rachel Friedman, who lives on North Moore, had plastered the street with notices urging neighbors to call Kathryn Freed, their City Council member, and to call the New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets, in Brooklyn. Ms. Friedman had already spent two weeks on the phone with an array of municipal authorities, trying to figure out which one was responsible for bad smells. She had discovered that government is not constituted to cope with smells—that, of all the senses, smell is the least susceptible to regulation. “You’d think that in this city there would be some kind of Smell Complaint Bureau, but there isn’t,” Ms. Friedman says. “The Department of Agriculture and Markets told me that if the shark fins inside the building were spoiled it could do something. The Department of Sanitation told me that if shark fins were lying out on the sidewalk it could help. The Bureau of Consumer Affairs would be interested if someone was charging too much for shark fins. The E.P.A. wanted to know whether breathing shark fin was harmful to your health. But no one would touch smell. When I called Kathryn Freed’s assistant, Stacy, and said ‘Bad smell,’ she wasn’t too interested. When I said ‘Rats,’ that changed everything.”

  Kathryn Freed came and smelled the street. “It was like something had died. Horrible. A carrion stench,” she said later. Then, a couple of weeks ago, Inspector Paul Feldman of Ag and Markets came and smelled the street, and decided to take a look at T. Chan Enterprises. (Inspector Feldman is the nearest thing this city has to an official nose.) On the way back to his office, he found that people were fleeing the subway car he was in, he smelled so bad. Soon afterward, Feldman returned, and confiscated some of the shark fins. He asked Mr. Chan to suspend his operation, and Mr. Chan did. Whether Mr. Chan will be cited for any violations depends on whether he ever had a license to process shark fins (apparently he didn’t), and on whether the Ag and Markets lab determines that the shark fins are fit to eat. “If our inspectors seized the product, something probably isn’t right with the fins,” Mary Ann Waters, of Ag and Markets’ public-affairs office, in Albany, said, explaining why the agency had the authority to shut Chan’s shark-fin operation down. “We have reports that some of the fins may be insect infested. Maybe the Chinese like their shark fins this way, but in our view it isn’t right.”

  Several days after the Ag and Markets action, we dropped in on T. Chan Enterprises and met Daniel Chan, the son of the owner. Daniel Chan said that the company was developing a new shark-fin-processing method, and hoped to resume operations soon, on the sixth floor. He took us to the basement. The smell at the top of the stairs was bad, and it became more awful with each step down. Maybe because smell is close to the center of fantasy, as we descended the stairs we had a vision of the shark-fin business from the shark’s point of view—being caught, definned, and tossed overboard still alive, unable to swim, to be eaten by other sharks.

  At the bottom of the stairs were two machines called ozone neutralizers, which Mr. Chan said the company had leased for two hundred dollars a month in order to improve the smell. Beyond the ozone neutralizers were the processing chambers. Mr. Chan inhaled the foul air deeply and smiled. “No smell,” he said. “See? No smell.”

  1992

  BEAUTIFUL DREAMER — Alison Rose

  FABIO was in his golden Jaguar gliding down Sunset Boulevard on his way to the Hotel Bel-Air. He’s powerful when he’s driving—even more powerful than he looks on the covers of over fifty million romance novels. He’s out of scale, not like a real person. His huge, smooth, tanned-to-dark-apricot forearms were on the steering wheel. His robust, long thighs were covered in loose-fitting navy-blue silk-cotton trousers. One of his navy suede cowboy boots was firmly on the gas pedal. Fabio, who is Italian, from Milan, is six feet three, and his below-the-shoulder bright-blond hair, parted on the side, was perhaps not freshly washed. Two women in a car next to him bounced up and down and screamed “Fabio!”

  Fabio’s behemothic presence—on paperback books with titles like “The Prince of Midnight” (he’s shirtless and alone on a horse)—has loomed from the shelves of supermarkets and drugstores since 1986. For this achievement, he is getting a special award this week at the Romantic Times Booklovers Convention, in San Diego. There will also be a Mr. Romance Paperback Cover Model Pageant. But, even if Fabio is dislodged by the winner of that contest as the most visible emblem of romantic fiction, he will not disappear altogether. He is writing three romance novels of his own, for Avon Books, and he’ll be seen on the covers of those, of course.

  At the hotel, Fabio sat at a table on a balcony overlooking a few waterfalls, a garden of pinkness (azaleas, hydrangeas, camellias), and three white swans. “They weigh between thirty-five and forty pounds apiece,” Fabio offered. There was nothing in the sky that day except blue. Fabio drank cranberry juice. (He said you can’t find it in Europe.) He ate a piece of olive bread with real olives in it. Birds chirped crazily. Fabio talked with his big hands. His fingernails were impeccably clean and the moons were perfect. He talked about his childhood in Milan.

  “I had a very masculine room, very boyish room. Blue was the sheets. Turquoise was the quilt. I had in front of my bed a nice-sized aquarium. I love tropical fish. When I grew up a little bit older, I start having the saltwater fish. I had clown fish an
d some imperator fish. And they’re like real pets, because, you know, they come and eat from your hand and you can caress them.”

  He caressed the fish?

  “Oh, yeahhh,” he said. “You know one of those fish that they’re like, you know, when you touch them they blow like a ball?”

  Blowfish?

  “Blowfish.” He said it as if all the world’s problems had been solved in one word. “I used to have that fish for close to five years. And this fish, every time I was feeding in the hand, and every time I was caressing his stomach, he was turning upside down. It was amazing. Ask my father. I was lifting him this fish off the water, and he will stay in my hand for probably about, I don’t know, fifteen or twenty seconds.” Fabio laughed, the way Yvette Mimieux did in “The Light in the Piazza.” He has smallish teeth. “And the way they look at you, they don’t look like fish. They’re more like a little dog’s eyes.”

  Between the ages of one and five, Fabio was parked at his grandmother’s, in a house by the sea near San Remo, two and a half hours away from his parents, in Milan. There, he said, he spent much of his time “escalating trees.”

  “At the end of the Second World War, my mother won a big beauty contest in Milan,” he said. “She was very young at the time. My grandmother wanted her to enter. She won a refrigerator, washing machine, dishwasher. My grandmother took them back to her place and used them.”

  Did he look like his mother?

  “Yeah, I look like her. I look like my mother.”

  Nowadays, he lives in a big house on a hill in Hollywood, where he has finished writing his first novel. Its title is “Pirate.” “I have a deck with a swimming pool overviewing Los Angeles,” he said. “I write there beside my swimming pool with my three dogs around me. Three Great Danes. Because I like a powerful dog, and they’re the biggest. And at the same time they’re very gentle. Most of the time they don’t let me write because they keep licking me or kissing me, you know, or try to chew a pen.” Fabio pushed some blond hair away from an extra-blue eye. “You know, it’s like sometime when I’m by myself I love to have my dogs around me because it’s just beautiful, you know? Sometimes I’m just laying on the deck looking over Los Angeles and I caress them.”

  Were there any movie stars he admired?

  “When I was twelve, I fell in love with Candice Berger.”

  Bergen?

  “Bergen. I remember that movie she was in, that ‘Soldier Blue.’ She was playing the Indian. She was my perfect girl.”

  1993

  INTENSIVE CARE — Susan Orlean

  THESE are the questions I’ve been asked since I worked on Show No. 6079 of “All My Children,” which will be broadcast on Tuesday, June 29th:

  Q: What’s Susan Lucci like?

  A: Perky, sharp, thin, underappreciated—but I’m just speculating, since she wasn’t in my episode.

  Q: What was your part?

  A: I was a nurse. I appear in Act III, in the hospital-sun-porch scene, and I say, in a mean voice, “Intensive-care patients are only allowed two visitors per hour,” and then “We don’t want to overtax him,” and, finally, “Rules are rules.” I say this to Hayley, to stop her from seeing Adam, who is in intensive care after he and Natalie are in a car wreck while speeding to someone’s wedding—I forget whose—after Natalie has had a big fight with Trevor, who has recently discovered he was duped by Laurel Banning, who then mysteriously disappears, although she—Laurel—has just sent a note to Natalie’s son Timmy, which he reads to An Li, Tom, Trevor, and Myrtle, who are sitting around keeping each other company and are beginning to suspect that Jack and Laurel might have eloped.

  Q: Wait a minute—what were Adam and Natalie doing in a car together? They hate each other!

  A: I have no idea. I’d never seen the show.

  Q: What did you wear?

  A: A white pinafore, a white blouse with big shoulder pads, homely white oxfords, white panty hose, tasteful jewelry, no hat. I was hoping I’d be dressed in something skimpy, but the costume department informed me that only one nurse on the show is ever allowed to wear something really tight and short, and that’s Nurse Gloria.

  Q: Why?

  A: I have no idea. I’d never seen the show.

  Q: What’s going to happen to Adam and Natalie?

  A: The powerful and mercurial Adam, who is married to Nurse Gloria, and is the twin of shy, gentle Stuart, discovers he can’t move his legs, although in real life he went jogging between the morning camera blocking and the afternoon dress rehearsal. I get the feeling he will recover. Natalie, on the other hand, is definitely going to die. I was told this by Natalie herself while I was having my hair done and she was getting her head bruise applied. “I’m flat-lining either this Thursday or next—I can’t remember which,” she said. “Natalie’s sweet, so she’s got to die. If you’re on a soap, you want to be a bitch or be miserable, because then you’ll last forever.”

  Q: How were you?

  A: Really good. In fact, Conal O’Brien, the director, told me that I was “very steady” and that the sixteen million people who watch the show will probably appreciate my work. And this is a guy who can be tough: for instance, during camera blocking, he told Christopher Lawford—Charlie—that he was giving the camera “too much tush.”

  Q: How did you prepare?

  A: I studied my script, I practiced my lines, I got to the studio at 7 A.M. for all the rehearsals and dry blocking, and during lunch I called my doctor for some authentic insight on nursing.

  Q: What did she say?

  A: She recommended that I consider my character’s back story; avoid wearing my hair in a bun, because nurses don’t do that anymore; work on understanding my motivation; and forget about a tight uniform, because only Nurse Gloria gets to wear one.

  1993

  WORD PERFECT — David Handelman

  IN 1988, not long after they started dating, Peter Chatzky, a Manhattan computer consultant, told Jean Sherman, a writer, that if he was ever to marry not only would the woman have to do the proposing but she would have to do it in an original and creative manner. Since they were both Times crossword enthusiasts, Ms. Sherman wrote in November of that year to the newspaper’s puzzle editor, Eugene T. Maleska, to ask if it would be possible for her to make a marriage proposal in a Times crossword. “I’m writing several months in advance of being totally ready to make this move (Valentine’s Day would be terrific),” she added.

  Mr. Maleska, who was the editor of the puzzles from 1977 until his death, last month, replied a few days later. “Dear Ms. Sherman,” he wrote. “What an interesting letter! As you may have suspected, I cannot grant your request. My puzzles are syndicated to hundreds of newspapers.” But then he offered a way around this difficulty. “I can disguise it in a June, 1989, daily puzzle. The entries would include JEAN PROPOSES MARRIAGE and THOU ART PETER, a quotation from Matthew 16:18. I’m sending a copy of your letter to one of my best constructors.” The letter went on, “Incidentally, my first puzzle was a personal one, created for a beautiful co-ed in the same college that I attended. Her name was Jean, and I knew she liked crosswords. I sent her a puzzle. JEAN was 1 Across. The clue was ‘Most beautiful girl on campus.’ Later we married and had 43 happy years together until cancer took her away from me in 1983. May you and Peter have the same joy for many years to come. Pax, amor et felicitas.”

  Five months later, in May of 1989, Ms. Sherman wrote to Mr. Maleska to ask on what date in June the crossword would be published, but his answer indicated that he had forgotten all about his promise. She thereupon sent him copies of their previous correspondence, and was quickly rewarded with this reply: “This is really embarrassing! . . . I cannot recall what constructor was asked to create your ‘proposal’ puzzle. At any rate, it never arrived! I have just sent a letter to another constructor named Albert Klaus. He will probably take a few weeks to put the puzzle together. Another problem is that I have already edited puzzles through August. Hence, it looks as if publication of your cr
ossword will take place in September. Does this mean that my ineptitude has caused your marriage to Peter to be delayed?” Two weeks later, Mr. Maleska wrote again to say that the puzzle would run on September 11, 1989.

  Early on September 11th, Ms. Sherman picked up the Times from the doormat, and told Mr. Chatzky to do the puzzle. He went pale, she says, as he deciphered the key clues: 1 Across, “Actress Arthur or Simmons”; 5 Across, the Matthew citation; 49 Across, “Tank or Civil War General”; 10 Down, “Declares intention to wed”; 39 Down, “Love and ———, 1955 Emmy-award song”; and 36 Down, “Wedding ceremony response.” Mr. Chatzky says, “I put the paper down, and said, ‘Uh, I don’t think I’m ready to do this puzzle.’ ” But, ultimately, in June, 1991, they married, in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Although they had invited Mr. Maleska, he demurred, writing that the wedding was too far from his home, in Wareham, Massachusetts. Ms. Sherman arranged their correspondence and the puzzle in a frame, and the frame now hangs over the couple’s bed.

  1993

  CYBERSPACE HAS A V.I.P. LOUNGE, TOO — John Seabrook

  STACY HORN is the founder and owner of Echo, the city’s largest elec-tronic bulletin board, and she runs it out of her home, a small, fifth-floor West Village walkup. She has two personal computers, and running into the apartment are thirty-five telephone lines that connect to thirty-five modems. Red lights on the modems blink to announce incoming calls; the modems are arranged on shelves at one end of Horn’s place in the manner of an art piece. Horn is a friendly, petite woman in her mid-thirties, with thick black hair that frames her face Cleopatra style. “Echo is an electronic salon,” she said one recent evening, sitting in front of the modems, and describing the mix of topics—arts, politics, New York life—that the members of Echo (there are approximately two thousand of them) talk about via computer and modem. At the moment, the most active of Echo’s members, all of whom pay $19.95 a month to engage in ongoing electronic conversations called conferences, live in downtown Manhattan, but Horn is ambitious and wants to expand to other cities on the East Coast. “It’s like Donald Trump puts up this building that sticks way up in the air, whereas I’m building all these little connections you can’t see,” she said.