Everything Happens Today (10 page)

“Oh yeah?”

“It's this book. It makes mommy hungry for Paris.”

“Paris is where your father and I took our honeymoon. You know the story.”

“I don't.”

“Let Bobby tell!”

“Okay Bobby, tell.”

“Momma and dada went to Paris, and they went to a romantic little restaurant with candles and red lampshades, a bis . . . a bis . . . ”

“Bistro.”

“A bistro. And momma couldn't understand anything on the menu ‘cause it was all in French except one thing, rice and veal, so she ordered that. Only it wasn't rice and veal.”

“It was
ris de veau
. Sweetbreads.”

“And dada was so proud of her for ordering it ‘cause it made her so so-phis-ti-cated. But when it came she almost puked. So when dada went to the bathroom she scraped the whole thing into her bag and pretended she'd eaten it. And she never told dada what she did.”

Wes could see what was going on here. Whenever his mother had a momentary upswing, its effect on Nora was like a sugar rush, she became overexcited and acted silly, which his mom would egg on, thrilled to be the center of anybody's attention. That explained the sweetbreads and the baby talk. Both of them would crash soon enough, leaving Wes to clean up the mess, but he could hardly begrudge his mom for feeling frisky.

“And now you're sorry for what you did. Twenty years later.”

His mother had closed her eyes, and her hand had slipped from his and was now groping, crablike, across the counterpane in a blind search for the remote. Nora turned her eyes to Wes in alarm, but his mother's face offered no sign that she had recognized the resentment in his voice.

“That's right. I'm sorry and I want to try it. How do you like them apples? It's never too late to learn something new.”

“Yeah,
Leslie
. How do you like them apples?”

Nora was too young to remember a time when their mother had been in full health, but Wes was not, and he found the ups and downs disorienting. He had been through this before, periods of rapid deterioration followed by gradual recovery that never fully returned her to what she had been before the latest attack, and the pneumonias and the bed sores and the incontinence, and he knew better than to allow himself to believe that she was getting better. It almost made him angry, as if she were playing a game with them, which of course she wasn't. Even in this light he could see Nora scanning their mother's face for signs of new growth, as if the spring had come, and he wanted to shout at her, at both of them, for making things more complicated than they needed to be. For the briefest moment, he suddenly saw the image of Prince André, pale and gaunt on his death bed, with a repentant Natasha at his side, all mystically aglow with the prospects of a new life. Nora had nothing to repent, she was only twelve, but Wes knew that she was consumed with fear and guilt—she herself didn't understand what she was feeling, but Wes did—and every time his mother seemed to be improving it was as if she had been reprieved, and she was momentarily, like Natasha, filled with naïve hopes for the future and the sense that she had been absolved and redeemed. Only she had never done anything wrong. She was the only one who never did anything wrong.

“You stay there, Nora. I'll take care of it. Let me have the phone, please.”

Crispy was still waiting by the front door, and wagged her tail in a despondent expression of optimism as Wes descended. He sat on the bottom step and returned to the iPedia entry on sweetbreads. At the foot of the page was a link to a “Top Chef” recipe, but when he followed the link he found that the very first ingredient was golden raisins, and his mother hated raisins. He stood up with a sigh and a groan and went into the kitchen, where he found his father standing in front of the refrigerator, peeling slices of cheese from a package of provolone, rolling them into cylinders and sliding them into this mouth. Wes ignored him and went to the row of cookbooks lined up on a warped shelf above the counter. There were a great many of them, thirty or forty, representing every ethnic group in Queens, but he could not recall when he had last seen anyone reach for one. Wes had been the chef of record at home for some time, and it was true that he could cook just about anything from a recipe, but with homework and SAT prep he tended to keep it simple these days, sticking to the dishes that he knew Nora would eat—macaroni and cheese, spaghetti with sautéed vegetables, breaded chicken cutlets, steak, the sort of food they might eat if they lived in Indiana, he imagined. His father was the better cook, but he rarely had the energy for it these days, and refused to descend to the children's standards.

“Can I have some money? I need to go shopping for dinner.”

With his free hand his father pulled his wallet from the back pocket of his shorts and handed it to Wes.

“Take what you need. What are you making?”

“Sweetbreads.”

“You've gotta be kidding me.”

“That's what Mom asked for.”

“Count me out. I'll have cereal. Can't stand sweetbreads. Barely stand to look at them.”

“Mom wants it to be a family night. You have to.”

“Have my wallet back?”

His father left the room and Wes turned to the cookbooks. After coming up blank in the first half dozen, he finally found what he was looking for in
The Union Square Cookbook
—“seared sweetbreads with mushrooms and frisée”—although the idea of wilted frisée struck him as excessively gallic, and he thought he might substitute baby bok choy, if it was available. He typed the list of ingredients into a new memo on the notepad app of the iPhone. As he typed, his eyes wandered down the various steps of the recipe. The sweetbreads were to be soaked for an hour in ice water, which would have to be changed every fifteen minutes; they were then to be poached for three minutes, drained, cooled in fresh cold water, trimmed of fat and connective membranes, and pressed under a weighted plate for five hours. Only then were they to be dredged in flour and fried to a golden brown. Wes trudged back upstairs and leaned in at his mother's door.

“Mom, it's going to take about seven hours. Are you sure you . . . ?”

“Leslie, do I have to tell you . . . ”

“Okay, okay. Where's Nora?”

“I don't know, Leslie.”

Wes left the house and turned east, his hands buried deep in the pockets of his hoodie. The streets were crowded now, mostly with people Wes deemed to be tourists and daytrippers from the outer boroughs and the suburbs because they walked too slowly and did not look intelligent enough to live in Greenwich Village. The sidewalks were narrow, and even when the crowds were sparse they were strewn with obstacles—trees and fenced beds, garbage cans, fire hydrants—that had to be negotiated. Now they were lousy with invaders, all of whom imagined themselves to be an integral part of the life of the city; Wes had to turn sideways just to squeeze past them. How he hated them, with their high-tech strollers, their pristine sneakers and shopping bags and Jersey license plates, all converging on his neighborhood from places that no one would ever want to visit, let alone live in. They were all so puffed up and pleased with themselves because they had purchasing power and hard-to-secure reservations, but they were the kind of people who would never know what it's like to belong, to truly belong to a place the way Wes belonged to the Village. They were the kind of people who move whenever they can afford to buy a bigger house in a richer place. They thought of the city as a place that is impervious, a place to drive badly and behave rudely and give vent to their most basic acquisitive instincts; they consumed it as if it were both inexhaustible and disposable, but they would never know how tender and fragile the city really is because they were neither tender nor fragile themselves. How could they be, living in boxes surrounded by lawns like minefields, never rubbing shoulders, never looking strangers in the eye, never really understanding what it is to be living human beings? To know one small place like this one, and to know it as few others did, and to understand one's place in it without complication and doubt, seemed to him an almost blessed condition. Some jerk in his class had written a pretentious, pseudo-Marxist analysis of “The Wizard of Oz,” concluding that Dorothy was a reactionary know-nothing who preferred to return to the ignorance and squalor of her Bible Belt dirt farm, with its libertarian promise of individualism, than to lead the citizens of Emerald City out of the bonds of oppression. Wes had offered a furious counterargument and was, in turn, condemned as a reactionary, but his outrage had had nothing whatsoever to do with politics. The fact was, Dorothy's Kansas and Wes's Village had a great deal in common, and Dorothy's extended family had much in common with Wes's ideal of what family life should be. The class had taken a straw poll, and everyone but Wes had agreed that, in Dorothy's shoes (no pun intended), they would have chosen to remain in the land of Oz. But Wes had no patience for world travelers, for what is there to see outside one's own internal monologue, the infinity of one's own mind?

Wes turned right on Bleecker, encountering an even denser wave of tourists. A long line of happy people—European teenagers, Mid-Western families, Japanese tour groups—snaked from the entrance of the Magnolia Bakery and around the corner. Wes whistled the tune to “Bah Bah Black Sheep” as he sidled by them, but doubted that any of his targets would have the wit to understand they were being insulted.

Wes was put in mind of
The War Between New York and New Jersey
. About four years earlier, his father had rented a car and the entire family had taken a day trip to a no-kill shelter in southern Jersey where they hoped to adopt a dog. They had found Crispy within the first five minutes, an adorable eight-week-old white puppy with black spots and a patch over one eye—maybe a pointer mix but maybe also an Australian cattle dog, no one seemed to know which. On the way home they had stopped outside a picturesque river town for a picnic on the banks of the Delaware, and it was there that the entire plot for
The War Between New York and New Jersey
had come to Wes in a flash of inspiration. It was to be set in the midst of a civil conflict that had broken out over the secession of Staten Island, and New York's militia now occupied most of New Jersey and was closing in on the capital. The character based on Wes was a teenage volunteer from Manhattan who had been posted to a farmhouse on the banks of the river outside a pretty village just like the one where they were picnicking. His job was to monitor traffic on the river and prevent smugglers from ferrying relief supplies to besieged Trenton. The boy would be a thoughtful, intellectual type but a true believer in New York's cause—the triumph of liberal urban civilization over suburban ignorance and conformity—but then he would fall in love with the milkmaid daughter of the dairy farmer whose house he was occupying, and his certainties would be thrown into confusion. There would also be an evil realtor who had set his sights on the milkmaid, and Wes's character would have to shoot him to protect his beloved's honor, but even though his valor and courage would bring them close together, tragically he would still not get the girl because there was too much cultural distance between them. Of course, Wes had never written more than the first three pages, but it was the first time that he had ever imagined what it would be like to be a writer. The idea of the book had lingered with him long after he had dismissed it as childish and didactic, and it lingered with him still, or at least the title did, along with the feeling that there were irreconcilable differences between people who chose to live in suburbs and those who remained loyal to the city, the birthplace of civilization.

Wes raised his head to find himself on the corner of Seventh Avenue. Even here, half a mile from the entrance to the Holland Tunnel, the weekend traffic was backed up almost to a standstill. As Wes felt another wave of irritation building within him, he remembered to be mindful, as Delia had taught him, and by focusing his attention on his emotions he was able to calm them. A good Buddhist would not allow himself to be tied up in knots by negative energy. Wasn't it just possible that each of these people, as mediocre as they appeared to be, was an ocean of fear and blind suffering every bit as real and valid as Wes's own? In place of peevishness Wes now felt a welling of platonic love for all these suburbanites filling his city's streets with noise and stink, because being benighted and blinkered was a condition that called for compassion and sorrow, not impatience and disdain. As he waited for the light to change, Wes tried to reconstruct the string of thoughts that had led him to this revelation, but finding it hopeless he mentally shrugged his shoulders, quite mindful of what he was doing, and decided that it had not been a string of thoughts at all, but a moment of pure insight. He crossed the avenue and tried to keep his mind blank, but when he reached the guitar shop he stopped and felt a pang of acquisitive envy, and instead focused his mind on admiring the objective beauty of the instruments, and felt himself suffused with love for the guitars, their makers and their eventual purchasers, not despite but because of the fact that he would probably never be one of them.

He turned left on Jones Street and a minute later found himself at the butcher, a tiny wedge of a shopfront that had been there for generations and that made him feel like an insider because there were never any tourists there and it was not in any guidebook and had sawdust on the floor. When there was a line here, it was composed of locals like him who knew something other people did not and called to the butchers by name, and when you ordered something they didn't just pull it from the glass display case but cut it for you right there on heavy butcherblock pedestals that were worn and smooth with age and use. They were always busy, but you never minded waiting because the butchers at their work were something beautiful and Zen-like. If Buddhists ate meat, they would shop here, Wes thought, but then he grew nervous and shy as his turn to order came. The compact Hispanic lady in the white coat behind the counter who took the customers' orders was called Teresa. Wes knew her name but was pretty sure she didn't know his, and he could never figure out how to address her. He wasn't even convinced that she recognized him from one visit to the next. Wes wondered how the other customers had first made their names known to Teresa. He wanted her to know his name because he and his father were lifelong customers and he knew how gratifying it would feel to be welcomed personally in front of the other customers, and before coming to the store he often rehearsed scenarios in his head of ways that he could lead the conversation in a manner that would require her to ask his name, but there didn't seem to be such a way. If he simply said “Hi there, Teresa, how are you today?” she would be unlikely to respond “I'm fine, thank you, and what's your name?”, even if she didn't find it impertinent that a boy his age would address her by name.