Ecstatic Cahoots: Fifty Short Stories (11 page)

Brisket

Their pale, plump skins scorched almost to bursting, the Thuringers invited a plaster of brown mustard.

The stacked pastrami was decked out in zooty 1950s colors: blushing pink meat in a carapace of black pepper.

There was corned beef awaiting horseradish, kosher franks and kraut, dangling salamis,
tukus
, house hickory-smoked turkey, trout, sablefish, and two kinds of knishes—thin kasha and golden squares of potato—slaw, paprika-dusted potato salad, fried onions and schmaltz, green tomatoes, kaiser rolls, baguettes, pumpernickel. I’d been walking around all day in the cold and it all looked good. But finally, when my turn in line arrived, I decided to invest my last few dollars in the garlic-kissed brisket on rye.

“Young man, I’m going to make you a very nice sandwich,” murmured the old, bald server, wearing a stained white apron.

He said it conspiratorially, his lips barely moving, drawing me toward him in order to hear, as if it were something he’d rather the owners of the establishment not get wind of. A secret between the two of us, not for the ears of the others behind me in line.

He glanced up into my eyes and held them as if he’d taken a personal interest in me, which was more than I could say for the secretaries and interviewers in the personnel offices where I’d spent the last six weeks filling out applications for jobs while my money ran out and I moved from friend to friend, crashing from apartment to apartment, sleeping on sofas and floors as if I’d never grow up if I stayed poor. His face, crosshatched in lines, was set in the comically tragic expression he’d practiced until it had become his permanent physiognomy. He must have been making sandwiches for a long time, must have seen a lot of hungry faces staring back at him from the other side of the glass partition.

Maybe he’d learned to read faces at a glance and could read in mine that a desperation I’d never felt before was setting in. That I needed a helping hand. That I’d caught enough of a glimpse of what it meant to be down, homeless, jobless, walking the streets hungry to last a lifetime.

Or maybe to get through the day he allowed himself now and then to take a liking to the face of a perfect stranger. A face that perhaps reminded him of himself when he was young, or of someone in his past, the way that, riding the subway and watching all the people with jobs filing on, I’d sometimes see a woman who would remind me of an old girlfriend in another city, a city I should have stayed in, a girlfriend I should have stayed with. That same girlfriend who once told me, “You’ve got a working-class face.”

Maybe he thought so, too.

“See?” he said, surgically trimming off the fat with the tip of his carving knife, and then scraping the trimmings across the cutting-board counter, leaving a trail of grease. That’s when I noticed the numbers tattooed on his wrist. I’d seen the faded marks of the death camps on the wrists of tailors in that neighborhood before. Those tattooed numbers still shocked me into a sense of dislocation. The brutal reality of history crowded out the mundane present. I wondered what he thought when he looked at his wrist every day. What horrible memories did he overcome each morning? When I saw those numbers I felt ashamed. Here I was spending my last few bucks—big deal! I would survive.

“How about some nice scraps for your dog?” he asked, gesturing with his knife to the pile of trimmings that he’d been accumulating from mine and other sandwiches. Attached to the fat were hearty-looking ribbons of brisket. There was at least another meal there.

“Sure,” I said.

“Okay,” he said, still with that confidential tone as if something preferential were going on between us.

Working in a practiced methodical sequence, he wrapped the trimmings in waxed paper and the waxed paper in a sheet of brown butcher paper which he expertly folded into a neat, tight, easily concealed packet before taping it and handing it toward me. “Only two dollars.”

“Two dollars?”

“For your dog,” he said.

I thought he’d been offering to give them away and suddenly I felt like a total fool. All at once it struck me that whatever had made me naïve enough to think the scraps might be free was the same impulse that had landed me in my current situation: out of work, living from friend to friend, missing a woman in another city, a woman who’d already given up on me.

“I don’t have a dog,” I told him.

“You just said you had one.”

“I used to have one.”

“You forgot you don’t have a dog anymore?” He couldn’t get over that someone could make such a mistake.

“I had a dog but he died. I still say yes out of force of habit.”

“I’m sorry to hear about your dog.”

“Thanks,” I said. “He was a schnauzer named Yappy. Happy Yappy I used to call him. He sure would have liked those scraps.”

“Maybe you have a cat?”

“No cat,” I said.

“You sure now?”

“Positive.”

“Want a garlicky pickle with that?”

“How much?” I asked. I’d learned my lesson.

“Comes with the sandwich.”

Alms

After Mr. Kronner’s daily constitutional down Eighty-sixth to the river and back, Mattie wheeled him under the scaffolding and into the lobby. Workmen had been refurbishing the building for months and the dark scaffolding had come to seem a permanent feature. At least they’d installed an automatic door and a ramp so that Mattie no longer needed help pushing the chair through the entrance and up the short flight of stairs to the elevator. Valentine, the doorman, still would usually push the chair along with her as if the incline required his added muscle. She and Valentine had a running conversation going in which Valentine would tell her new places in Astoria where he’d find fruits and fish from the islands.

“Hey, Chicken Legs, guess what I find at the market?” he’d ask. “Old wife! Fresh on ice, not smelling, not frozen. Never thought I’d see old wife in this city, me son.”

Valentine was from St. Croix. Back home she’d heard that the Crucians thought they were better than Tortolans. “Just because they on Uncle Sammy’s dole,” her mother used to say. But here in New York, it was as if she and Valentine had been childhood friends. Mattie didn’t mind that he called her Chicken Legs; she knew that it was his way of giving a compliment.

Today, Valentine merely waved from where he stood at the curb tugging at the leashes of three shivering whippets while hailing a cab for Mrs. Takamura so that she could take her dogs for a run in Central Park.

At the service elevator, which Mattie always used when she was pushing the chair, one of the men working on the building held the elevator door while Mattie wheeled in Mr. Kronner.

“Excuse us, sorry, thank you,” Mattie said as she accidentally rolled the chair over the man’s foot.

The man nodded, as if apologizing for not speaking because his mouth was full—he was chewing a sandwich. He squeezed on behind Mattie and the door closed.

He was wearing a Glidden’s paper painter’s cap and jeans that looked clean even though there were spots from faded white paint or maybe from bleach along the thighs. In the loop below his right pocket, a claw hammer hung. Otherwise, he was nondescript, one of those mutt-like guys with a stubbly beard and an acne-pitted face who could have been Hispanic or black or Mideastern or even white. It wasn’t how he looked that was important so much as how he didn’t look—not one of the homeless that you couldn’t walk down Eighty-sixth without being accosted by, begging for a handout or trying to sell you
StreetWise
, or some paperback book or magazine they’d fished out of the trash and spread out in a sidewalk display. Did anyone ever buy any of those books? There was a homeless man who stood at the intersection on Third with a spray bottle and a rag and would wash windshields, and a little man called Pygmy with a bag and a whisk broom wired to a stick who followed people walking their dogs and offered, for a dollar, to clean up after them. Yesterday, over by the park along the river, a homeless man had come up to her, holding in his hand a green parakeet that must have escaped somebody’s house, and tried to sell it. The bird looked so luminescent and delicate in the man’s dirty fist that Mattie would have liked it, if only to release it again, but Mr. Kronner made it clear that they were to give nothing to people he considered bums. The man on the elevator wasn’t a bum and he wasn’t some gangster like the kid with dreadlocks she’d just seen on Eighty-sixth, prying in broad daylight with a piece of pipe at the lock on a delivery bike chained to a stop sign and cursing passersby aloud as if it were their fault he couldn’t snap the chain. Instead of work boots, the man on the elevator wore tennis shoes—but they weren’t high-tops. And he was eating, like a workingman too busy to break for lunch, tearing at a croissant sandwich wrapped in foil so that his dirty hand wouldn’t soil his food. That simple act of gobbling lunch on the fly made him seem unthreatening, and he’d held the door open so politely, too. He smiled at her.

“Thank you,” Mattie said again. She was always saying thank you around Mr. Kronner, as if trying to make up for the fierce, angry way he stared at everyone, not that he could help it. His face was stuck in that expression. If Mr. Kronner had not been there she might have said what she was thinking, which was to warn the man to be careful not to accidentally bite off a piece of foil that would then touch one of his fillings.

“No problem,” the man said between chews.

Mr. Kronner stabbed the 25 button with his cane, as was his habit. It was the only time he used the cane. Certainly he couldn’t walk or even use it to help him stand. He was like a child about wanting to press the elevator buttons. The doors closed and the car ascended.

“What floor you want?” Mattie asked. “He’ll press it for you.”

“Twenty-six,” the man mumbled, his mouth stuffed.

“Only goes to twenty-five,” Mattie said.

He’d balled up the foil and stuffed what was left of the sandwich into his mouth and put his hand out as if to say, Sorry, can’t talk just now.

They rode in silence to twenty-five and when they reached it, the man stepped out to hold the door open again, barring her way at the same time. He took out his hammer and braced it between the elevator door and the doorjamb.

“I got a knife,” he said to Mattie. “You need to see it?”

“What?” she asked.

“You heard me. You need to see it or do you believe me that this is happening?”

“I believe you,” she said quietly.

“You should. This is the Big Apple, babe.”

“What you want? He’s old,” Mattie said, looking down at Mr. Kronner. His eyes were wild-looking, the left one bulged and roved about seemingly with a will of its own that made it appear even more furious-looking than his right eye, which was watering. Above his eyes, his eyebrows perched like gray wings of some bird of prey. He refused to let Mattie or anyone trim those eyebrows. His hawk nose was like a peeling beak. He leaned forward on his cane.

“What’s his problem?” the man asked.

“Had a stroke.”

“He shouldn’t be looking like that at me. Crabby old motherfuck.”

“He don’t mean nothing.”

“Empty the purse, gimme the old man’s wallet. Gimme the watch.”

“No wallet,” Mattie said. “I carry the money in my purse.”

“Where you get that accent, girl?” the man said, falling into a mocking accent.

“Tortola,” she said.

“What you do for this nasty old piece of white cheese, Tortola, besides wheel him around like a baby?”

Mattie said nothing.

“You play with his old pud?”

She said nothing.

“A fucking Timex! And there’s only twenty fucking dollars in here,” he said, throwing down the purse.

“That’s all we ever carry.”

“Who’s in his apartment besides you two?”

“His son, Val,” Mattie lied. “Home from college.”

“Pull your dress up.”

“Please,” she said.

“Don’t argue with a knife, stupid Tortola.” He slipped a thick black-handled jackknife out of his pocket and opened it up. The blade looked tarnished and dull, dirty like the hand that held it. “See, you didn’t believe me.”

“I believed you.”

“Nice skinny legs. Shaving them, I see. They don’t shave their legs down in Tortola, do they? You come here to New York and get trendy, girl?”

Mattie was crying, silently. She glanced at Mr. Kronner, who sat with his usual impassively fierce expression but his left eye roving and gleaming as if out of control.

“Pull down the panties. Maybe you be shaving your pussy, too.”

She stared at him.

“Listen, Tortola, I’m taking a chance taking extra time to fuck with you, so don’t mess around or I’m gonna have to be mean. What I tell you to do you fucking do, crybaby. It’s Mr. Crabby Cheapass’s lucky day. He’s gonna get a little show for his money.”

*   *   *

Two weeks later, when Mattie was wheeling Mr. Kronner across Eighty-sixth Street at Second Avenue, the old man suddenly stuck his cane into the spokes of a delivery bike and sent the Asian kid riding it flying headlong over the handlebars into the back of a cab. The kid lay dazed on the street, his arms flailing in a mess of crushed white cartons spilling soup, noodles, and sauce. He was trying to get up, swearing or pleading for help in a language Mattie didn’t understand a word of, while the cabbie, a Hindu in a turban, stood by his open door on the driver’s side waving traffic by and shouting after his passenger, who was fleeing the cab through the other door, apparently without paying his fare.

“Not my fault, not my fault!” the cabbie repeated.

A homeless man who’d been waiting by the light, the only person besides her, as far as Mattie could see, who’d witnessed what Mr. Kronner had done, stared at Mr. Kronner, who sat in his chair looking impassively fierce, but his left eye roving and gleaming in a way that Mattie had seen only once before—on the elevator that day they’d been assaulted. She thought the roving of his eye had been a symptom of panic then, but now it somehow suggested a crazed mirth. The homeless man had retrieved Mr. Kronner’s cane from the street, handed it back to him, and was now staring Mattie in the eyes. She recognized him from among the other homeless men she passed each day. He was the man who had tried to sell her the parakeet he’d caught. He nodded hello, then stretched out his hand, and Mattie opened her purse and gently laid a crisp twenty-dollar bill onto his dirty, trembling palm.