The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (25 page)

Patty had assumed, until this night, that she’d been drawn to New York by a lodestone buried at the core of her unexplored life. And images had seemed to shimmer out from the direction of its pull—images, for instance, of gleaming white drafting tables accoutred with complex systems of shallow drawers; a wineglass, held in a powerful, manicured (ringless) hand, which cast a bouncing patch of brightness on table linen; the balcony of a brownstone where a marvelous man lounged while he waited in the surging twilight for the woman inside to finish dressing.

But now, as Patty lay in bed, what she saw was herself—herself as Mrs. Jorgenson, distended and bleary from poverty’s starchy diet; herself weeping into her gin at a darkened bar while some grimy bore expatiated incoherently into her ear; herself standing over the stove while she ate, straight from the pan, her scrambled eggs. Oh,
were
they scrambled eggs? Dear Lord, she prayed,
let
that stuff be scrambled eggs. And all around Patty’s little bed circled the terror that perhaps those former shimmering lures had not been signs of some central imperative but were instead the snares of a mocking siren; that perhaps she was soon to be dashed, like Mrs. Jorgenson, against the rocks (so to speak) of the hall floor.

The weeks that followed were truly disheartening. By August, Patty had exhausted the heady sensation of exerting mastery over a new apartment, the temperature fluctuated between ninety-eight and a hundred and two degrees, and she had sat through numbers of futile interviews and sent out numbers of futile résumés. The city, in fact, appeared to be quite overstocked with women, each more ornamental and accomplished than any nineteenth-century young lady, huge quantities of whom, Patty noticed with growing terror, were waitresses.

It would be a temporary necessity, she reasoned; she would have to support her job hunt by waiting on tables. And soon her days were occupied with getting rejected for two entire lines of work, one of which she had recently despised. So in the evenings she was glad when either Stuart or Mr. Martinez would open his door to her, expanding the city that seemed to have no room for her by day.

Often Stuart was eager to share his views and his casseroles of vegetarian oddments with Patty. On other occasions, Mr. Martinez would hear her footsteps in the hall and invite her in. He would alternately extol and revile the United States while he and Patty sat together at his kitchen table eating slabs of a gelatinous confection with a plantlike undertaste and drinking a clear, stinging beverage that implied unregulated domestic production. Patty suspected it was this beverage, rather than his heavy accent, uneven grasp of English, or discursive approach to conversation, that made Mr. Martinez so difficult to understand, but after she’d had several glasses herself she could easily follow his tortuous Delphic outbursts. And she would watch, rapt, when he became agitated, either with despair or with gaiety, and swelled slightly, turning a deep translucent red, like a plastic bag filling with wine.

One evening Mr. Martinez, unsteady in his doorway, beckoned to Patty. “Miss, miss,” he whispered. His apartment was dark except for the flickering of a few candles, and it was saturated with the fragrance of his arcane beverage. “Come, missy,” Mr. Martinez said, drawing Patty over to a photograph that was propped up on a shelf between two candles.

She glanced at Mr. Martinez, but he only stared at the picture, breathing heavily and holding her hand in both of his. She peered back through the darkness and scaled herself down to enter the picture. Oh—there was a field, a great golden sweep of field distantly edged by tiny pointed mountains, and there were people sitting at a table in the foreground: an elderly couple, a young woman, and four or five children. They all had broad, appealing faces, like Mr. Martinez’s, and black hair that gleamed in the sunlight. Sunlight poured down. The people smiled into the sunlight—dazzled, yielding smiles. Sunlight poured down on them and out from the picture into the dark room where Patty’s hand, in Mr. Martinez’s, was beginning to register discomfort.

“Mr. Martinez,” she said, but he was transfixed, and tears ran down his face in rivulets. “What is it, Mr. Martinez? What is that picture?”

“But this is—” His eyebrows flew up, his arms dropped to his sides in helpless incredulity. “You do not know this? This is…
Colombia.
” He sat down at the kitchen table, and, laying his head upon his folded arms, he sobbed. “This is
my wife
…”

The next day Patty filled out yet another job application and waited in a line of girls that snaked up several flights of stairs. Clearly her chances were poor. But she didn’t really care—she was back in the dark room where she’d stood the night before next to Mr. Martinez. She had remained with him for a time, patting him on the head, but the rhythm of his sobs did not alter, and eventually she tiptoed out, closing the door behind her.

After reaching the front of the line she entered a room, where a man sitting at a wide desk took her application and put it aside without glancing at it. “What do you want,” he said, looking all the way up, then all the way back down, her, “days or nights?”

“Nights,” she said.

“I don’t have nights,” he said.

“Days,” she said.

He looked up, then down, her again. “I don’t have days,” he said, and turned away.

Maybe she’d had enough. The thing to do was to sit down, get a bite to eat, and think rationally about her next step. It had come as a jolt that life was something to be waged, rather than relied on. And yet, Patty reminded herself, everyone on earth must have the wherewithal for it. Even Mrs. Jorgenson had the presence of mind to exist; Mrs. Jorgenson, in fact, had so developed the knack of being herself that she could fall down on the floor and lie there snoring. Whereas if she, Patty, were to fall down on the floor, Patty thought resentfully, she would only have to pick herself up again, feeling foolish.

Just who were all these people in this city? And how did they survive? The stakes were so high, the margin of comfort so slim, and yet Patty was surrounded by people who had managed to find a place for themselves here. Look at Mr. Martinez. How incredible that he was in New York, Patty thought as she entered a restaurant that had just opened up near her apartment. Something was working in the depths of her brain, churning up disturbances that broke as they surfaced, like muddy bubbles rising from a swamp. Yes, how incredible that all of them were here: herself, Mrs. Jorgenson, Stuart, the girls waiting in the line today, Mr. Martinez, the bulky, bearded, pear-shaped man with tiny feet who stood near the jukebox now, in the otherwise unpopulated restaurant, staring at her. Here they all were, an entire—well…
confraternity
, sort of, of strangers, all brought together here by…by what? What was it they had in common? Was it something fundamental—something too profound to be grasped? Or was it something…
extrinsic
, manifest in, for example, er—she studied the bulky man, who was ambling toward her—frayed belt loops?

“Want something to eat?” the man asked. “Or did you just drop by to admire me?”

“Oops,” Patty said, shifting her gaze to the menu he offered. “I’d like—” Right. Who cared why they were there? They were there because…because they were there. “O.K. A beer and a medium-rare Jarlsburger.”

“I haven’t got my liquor license yet,” the man said. “And the meat hasn’t been delivered today.”

“Uh-huh,” she said. “Well, how about orange juice and scrambled eggs with bacon?”

“Meat,” the man said, poking his large haunch. “Have an omelette. You’ll like the Chive ’n’ Chèvre.” He wandered off through a swinging door, from behind which awful metallic crashings began to issue, and returned to Patty’s table at a rather faster rate. “He says I’ve wrecked his pans,” the man announced cryptically just as a shockingly tall and starved-looking man burst through the swinging door.

“And what else, Arnold,” the tall man raged, “is where’s my check, huh? Where’s my check? You promised! Can I have it? Are you going to give it to me? No? O.K. That’s it.” He paused on his way out to kick the jukebox.

Arnold watched the door close before sitting down at Patty’s table. “Always in a hurry,” he said. “I would have had it for him tomorrow.” He regarded Patty, chin in hands. “Can you cook?”

“No,” Patty said. “But I’m not really hungry.”

“Too bad,” Arnold said. “I need a cook.”

“I can waitress,” Patty said. “Do you need a waitress?”

“What don’t I need?” Arnold rubbed his eyes. “Do you have a lot of experience?”

“Actually—” It was futility that kept Patty honest. “I don’t have any experience.”

“So what?” Arnold rubbed his eyes again. “I don’t have any business.”

That was not an idle boast, as it turned out. Arnold kept the restaurant open all night in hopes of compensating for his lack of a liquor license by scooping up, while his competitors slept, the restless wanderers disgorged from the bars at closing time. Thus far, however, Arnold’s business had remained conceptual, and Patty had emerged virtually empty-handed every morning at six o’clock after a long night of staring toward the door. Occasionally, of course, someone would come in, causing both Patty and Buddy, the new cook, to panic from overexcitement and inexperience. Errors leapt from them like sparks from struck flint, and they would soon exhaust the self-conscious customer with nervous attentions.

Stuart reassured Patty over a celebratory sunrise supper he prepared for her during her first week of work. “Listen,” he said. “By the time the place gets busy, you’ll be an ace.” As he reached over to pour her a glass of fancy fizzy grape juice that had set him back substantially, Patty noticed the tiny trucks emblazoned on his matted flannel pajamas.

“Stuart,” she said fondly. “But you shouldn’t be so proud of me—I can’t even make enough to live on, you know.”

“Well, you can’t interpret that as a personal shortcoming,” Stuart said. “It’s just the fiscal structure of the city these days—Manhattan isn’t going to just hand itself over for any little bag of beads now. All these rich bastards driving up the property values have kind of made it impossible for everyone else. I used to be able to scratch up a living with enough left over to do stuff—go to movies, eat out, spend the day observing humanity. Now you want to sit someplace for more than five minutes you got to slap down forty bucks for some kind of noodles with duck feet and grapefruit.”

“I don’t know.” Patty was a bit irritated by Stuart’s display of sourness just at the moment she was beginning to feel up to New York’s idiosyncratic rigors and to adapt to the glare of its treasures. “Actually, I’m getting to like it.”

“It’s still New York,” Stuart said. “But it’s changed. You’re practically a kid, so you don’t know. Besides, you’ve just gotten here. And, believe me, you’re lucky, because you’re one of the last. No one except millionaires can afford to come here. Or stay, if they get here. Manhattan’s just a playpen for rich people now, but it used to be paradise, Patty, I’m telling you—a haven for the dispossessed. People used to come here who couldn’t go anyplace else on earth—stainless, great-souled, fucked-up fugitives, who woke up somewhere one morning and said, ‘Hey, who are these people who call themselves my parents? These people are not my parents.’ ‘What is this place that’s supposed to be my home? This is not my home.’ This city was populated by a race of changelings, Patty, who kept things new, people who can’t be replicated, who are really alive while they’re alive—a dying race. And now it’s being overrun by gangs of plundering plutocrats, the living dead, who clone themselves in bank vaults.”

“Stuart—that is completely illogical. You want something that’s always new but you don’t want anything to change. And I think you’re being horribly unfair to all businessmen and professionals on the basis of a few overeager examples.”

“‘Examples,’” Stuart said. “‘Overeager.’ ‘Examples of a few overeager Storm Troopers.’ Listen, I’m not talking about Ben and Jerry, I’m not talking about Jonas Salk, I’m not talking about responsible ‘businessmen and professionals.’ I’m talking about tunnel-visioned profiteers and parasites—and they’re surrounding us right now, munching mâche with walnut oil. You think it takes Alaric or a fleet of nuclear submarines to destroy a city? I’m telling you, Patty—destruction is irreversible, I don’t care what its source is. You’re very casual about this because you don’t remember anything.”

“Of course I remember things, Stuart. I’m not an infant. And I’m not as ignorant as you think, either.”

“You don’t remember anything,” Stuart insisted. “How could you? You don’t remember Jean Seberg, you don’t remember Joris-Karl Huysmans. I bet you don’t even remember semiotics—”

“Everything changes, Stuart. It’s not a tragedy if something changes—”

“As to particulars, not as to value! We were
proud
to be wretched refuse. We had bookstores. In the fall old men sat under the gray sky on benches littered with gold leaves and played chess. Girls wearing plaid skirts carried flutes and sheet music. Back then people thought about sex—”

“People still think about sex,” Patty objected involuntarily.

“You call that sex?” Stuart said with bitter, preoccupied opacity. “And you could drink O.K. cheap wine at tables with checked cloths.”

“So what! Who cares what kind of tablecloths were in fashion when you were my age? All I’m saying is that after two months of crawling through the streets I’m a waitress in a restaurant with no customers!”

“And you should be unbelievably Goddamned grateful,” Stuart shouted, “to have been blessed with a job that won’t cheapen your mind!”

But business remained slow, Arnold was no more forthcoming with his paychecks than formerly, and the paychecks that law obliged him to dispense to a waitress were close to meaningless anyway. The restaurant had acquired one steady customer, George, but George was too poor to leave much of a tip. Still, Patty was pleased to wait on someone who endured with unsatirical equanimity the storms of cutlery that rained from her hands. And Buddy was thrilled to have a subject of refined tastes on whom to perform culinary experiments (gratis, when Arnold wasn’t around).