Shakespeare's Kitchen (14 page)

Ilka and Leslie laughed. “That’s true! It does!” they said.

Leslie said, “You leave Zack alone. I never hear better sense than I do from Zachariah.”

“He has a mouth like a keyhole,” said Eliza.

Ilka grieved at the prospect, if Jimmy got hired, of having to share the Shakespeares and Eliza’s kitchen. “Will there be a battle?”

“Yes,” said Leslie.

“I haven’t been here long enough to understand what’s behind what everybody says,” Ilka said. “I wish somebody would tell me the stories of all the skeletons.”

Leslie said, “I don’t know what has been happening here for the last ten and more years, but I bet you’d be disappointed. The skeletons are not sinister.”

“And yet they reach their hands out of their closets and determine everything that everybody argues and how everybody votes.”

“That’s probably true.”

“Anyway,” Ilka had said, “we’re all of us guaranteed to do our usual numbers.”

 

 

Alvin’s number, at Monday morning’s meeting, was to get young Jimmy on board, Zachariah’s was to hold the strict line. Zack said, “For James to agree to organize our international conferences on genocide is worrisomely naive or, more worrisomely, misleading.” It was said with so much venom that Ilka looked up, intercepting the look Zack and Yvette refrained from exchanging with each other. Ilka understood that they were—“in cahoots” was putting it too strongly—that they had talked the matter over, as they had every right to do, or, rather, that they had no need to talk to come out on the same side of this and every other question that was put before them. Ilka deduced some naked old grand-daddy of a skeleton.

A pause in which the members turned the pages of the candidate’s vita. Those who had, for whatever reason, prejudged the matter on one side or the other wished to be observed being judicious,
or prepared new ammunition. Those who didn’t care one way or the other waited to see what they were going to think.

Alpha Stone said, “Perhaps the administrator should have clarified our requirements. The administrator goofed.” Everybody smiled. The goofer was Alpha.

Zachariah said, “I asked James what he knew about computers, and he said, and I quote, ‘Zilch.’”

“Which is par for the rest of us,” said Alvin.

“Zack’s point,” Yvette said, “Is that we need someone who does know.”

“So? The Computer Center people will come in and brief him.”

Leslie said, “I see Zack’s hand, I see Yvette, I see Alpha, I see Joe, whom I will take first because I’ve not heard from him yet.” He wrote the names in order on a piece of paper, “Joe?”

Joe Bernstine had no axe of his own unless it was to help Leslie get what Leslie wanted. Leslie had his own reason—all things being equal—for wanting Ilka’s young man hired. It would prevent himself from paying Ilka too much attention. Joe said, “How many of
us
have published four articles this year?”

“Yes, but where?” Yvette named a popular journal with the expression of one dangling a dead thing by its disagreeable tail.

“There are those among us,” Alpha said, and refrained from exchanging a look with Alvin, and neither looked at Yvette, “who have published nothing at all.”

A skeleton had put its foot in its mouth.

“He doesn’t have a book,” Zack said.

“He says it needs time to simmer.”

“Since when do we hire people who don’t have a book?”

“Since I was outvoted, on this very issue, in this very room, in the case of another candidate!” Everyone except Yvette knew Alpha meant Yvette.

“Ilka,” Leslie said.

Ilka’s number was to bring into the discussion what she believed to be the heart of every matter, and which, she knew, always seemed a given or an irrelevancy to everybody else: “Where is it written that everybody has to have a book?”

“Ilka, in our by-laws,” Joe Bernstine said.

“Who made the by-laws?”

“The board of governors did, Ilka!”

“Who empowered the board of governors to make by-laws?”

“Leslie and I did, Ilka, fifteen years ago,” Joe said.

“Aha! Who gave you and Leslie the power to empower the board?”

“Oy, Ilka!”

“No wait: Say my bell rings. Outside stands the policeman who might always be standing outside whenever a doorbell rings. The policeman has come to haul me to the police station, very appropriately—say that I have trashed the house I rent from the Rasmussens. Suppose I say, ‘I’ll go to the police station with you if you show me from whom you derive the power to haul me.’”

“They took it and everything else away from the Indians!” said Alvin.

“Wait! Who gave it to the Indians so it could be taken away from them?”

“Ilka!”

“Awoooooo,” suddenly howled Nathan Cohn. He had been jotting things in the margins of Jimmy Carl’s vita. He stood straight up and shouted, “What right do we think we have to pin down some poor sod’s thoughts that he should be sleeping nights under his pillow wrestling with all the while we’re chatting him up. I mean
what
in hell do we think we’re we talking
about
!” and, the purple draining from his face, Nat sat down and wrote himself a note in the bottom margin.

Leslie asked if there was any more discussion. Everybody looked at everybody else. Everybody seemed tired. Leslie asked
for a motion to vote, and the little blank papers were sent up each side of the table.

 

 

Jimmy Carl’s move to Concordance coincided with the return of Ilka’s landlords, the Rasmussens. Ilka had assumed she was going to buy a house but got frightened and rented from another couple on another sabbatical and Jimmy’s things moved right in along with Ilka’s. Ilka was not sorry. It was dear to wake with a male and human body asleep in her bed, on the window side, or not asleep after all. Submerged in this gorgeous commotion, Ilka forgot, for the moment, that other body—the one not available to her and which she had never nakedly so much as imagined—nor dared to want. Now she remembered how really fond she was of poor old actual Jimmy with his ribs and collarbone and too many elbows.

They were having a hilarious breakfast, deciding if the kitchen was the yellow of pure egg yolk or eggs scrambled, when Celie called from the office. Alpha had to catch the ten o’clock flight to New York. Could Jimmy make it to an eight-thirty meeting in Leslie’s office? Jimmy might want to bring the list they’d asked him to prepare of prospective participants for the Genocide Conference.

“What list? Which conference is this?” Jimmy asked Ilka. “Where is Leslie’s office?”

 

 

Ilka stayed in to get the house moved into. She called Jimmy mid-morning. “Where, if you were the kind of person who had an egg-colored kitchen, would you be likely to keep your coffee filters?”

Jimmy said, “In the cupboard? Ilka,
I
don’t know.”

Ilka called ten minutes later. “They were in the drawer with the baby-bottle nipples, an expired card from the Forty-second Street library and negatives of somebody’s wedding . . .”

“Ilka . . .” said Jimmy.

Ilka said, “Do you think you get insight into someone’s soul by where they put things, where you would never think of putting them? Are there a sort of people who put all the jars—jam, honey, mustard, chutney—on the same shelf, and others who sort them according to sweet and savory?”

“I’ve got the computer man here.”

“Oh! Sorry! I’ll see you in the conference room at lunch.”

“I’ll see you, Ilka.”

 

 

The computer man was a giant—Nordic, shoulders like Thor, hair like sunshine, welkin-eyed, nervous tic at the left corner of his mouth. He said, “This is your manuals.”

Jimmy hefted them. He said, “I can’t start on my conference list until I’ve got my desk cleared of all these directories and papers, memos, whatnot. Will the computer be able to make me a list of prospective participants according to their disciplines, with names, addresses, and credentials?”

The computer giant said, “You’ll have to delimit the fields for your values, key in your codes, and enter your data.”

“What’s your name?” Jimmy asked the computer man.

“Sweng.”

“I’m Jimmy. Sweng,” Jimmy said, “can you translate from Turkish?”

“Turkish? No.”

Jimmy said, “And I can’t translate what you just said into what I am supposed to do.” Jimmy sat down in the chair still warm from the computer giant’s person and asked, “How do I enter?”

“You got to turn it on,” said Sweng.

Jimmy was encouraged to see a switch that looked like other switches in his life. He turned it on and the screen engendered a lower case “b” that repeated itself to the rightmost margin, skipped left, filled the next line also and continued down the screen like this:

“What did I do wrong?” cried Jimmy. “Did I ruin it?”

“Let me.” Jimmy got gratefully out of the hot seat. Sweng sat down and punched a button. The witchery ceased.

“What did you do?” cried Jimmy. “Should I have known how to do that?
Now
what are you doing?” But answer came there none. The computer man punched buttons, gazed into the responding screen, punched and gazed. Useless for Jimmy to cry to him out of our common world, “I wish you would tell me what you’re doing!” The computer man’s soul had entered the computer. Jimmy watched and waited till the man rejoined himself, rose, and said, “You’re O.K. now. Call the Computer Center if you have a question.”

“Don’t leave me!” cried Jimmy, but the computer giant ducked his head and cleared the door of Jimmy’s office.

 

 

“I like it!” Jimmy reported to the conference table, where the institute people brought their democratic lunches. “I’m typing in lights! Words stay forever malleable, changeable like the words in my head! I love it when the screen produces a ghost line. You know how you know it’s a ghost line?”

“It doesn’t throw a shadow?” asked Alpha.

“It can’t see itself in the mirror?” suggested Leslie.

“Little dogs bark at it?” proposed Ilka.

“Close! The little blinking cursor won’t move along the ghost line; it moves only along the true line. That’s sort of wonderful!”

Jimmy had mislaid his office, so Ilka walked him back. She laughed the third time they met on the stairs. It turned out that Jimmy was looking for the corridor that led to her office to ask her, “What’s the name of whats his name’s assistant?”

Martin Moses turned out to be whom Jimmy was looking for. “Which one is he?”

“Tall, funny. You talked with him for half an hour at the reception.”

“I talked with a lot of funny people. Whose assistant did you say he is?”

“Zack’s.”

“Which one is Zack?”

“Nose in the middle of the face. Mouth like a keyhole.”

“Ah. What does Zack do?”

“Jimmy, don’t you have a listing of the members?”

“Probably underneath all the papers on my desk.”

“Jimmy, there’s a list—with your name newly penciled in—pinned on the cork board in the little lounge outside the kitchen.”

“Which way is the kitchen?”

 

 

“Poor old Jimmy!” Eliza Shakespeare said to him. “It’s hell to be new in a place and not know your way around, not know how it works.” Eliza had dropped in shortly before five, and Leslie broke out a bottle of vodka. Someone got ice from the kitchen. Nobody felt like going home.

Ilka said, “My project is to not nag Jimmy.”

They said, “That’s right! You leave Jimmy alone!”

Ilka was surprised when, on their drive home, her mouth opened and said, “I was wondering, Jimmy, I mean, typing, is not exactly what you were hired to do, do you think?”

Jimmy said, “Not typing. Entering. I’ve got to get my desk cleared.”

“I was only wondering,” said Ilka and thought, wondering isn’t nagging, “when you’re going to get going on the conference?”

“When I’ve got my list entered in the computer.”

Ilka thought she must surely be going to stop, however, she said, “I was only wondering when you’ll finish getting it entered.”

“Me too,” Jimmy said. “That’s just what I’ve been only wondering.”

Ilka said nothing all the way up the narrow path to their front door. Poor Ilka! She came from a race of women who assumed that their men would drop things and fall over them, which the men generally went ahead and did. Ilka assumed that Jimmy was going to screw up and she minded for him. In the kitchen she ran herself a glass of water, swallowed it. Because of all Ilka did not say all the while they were undressing, she felt, when their paths crossed coming into, respectively out of, the bathroom, that she deserved a holiday from so much refraining and asked Jimmy, “When do you think you’ll have enough essays for the book?”

“I’ll let that simmer till I’ve got this conference under my belt.”