The Enthusiast (11 page)

C
ozy
. This is Agnes,” the woman who answered the phone said. I'd expected an old lady's blown-speaker voice, but hers was strong. I told her how I'd heard about the job opening. “Oh, good,” she said. “How's Laura, is she painting?”

“Part time,” I said.

“And you're an editor?”

“Yes. I could send you my résumé, or—”

“No, no, that's okay. Do you want to come out here?”

I said I'd drive up, and she gave me directions from Philadelphia on. It took a while because she threw in stops for hero sandwiches, apple cake, waterfalls, a motel with Magic Fingers, and a Russian Orthodox church. “I'm just giving you highlights,” she said. “You'll probably find a whole other set of things. Just call us when you're close.”

I followed her directions through scrapyards outside New
York City and onto a green highway, where I glimpsed the river's palisades between beeches and maples. In her town, streets of old cottages crabbed their way up the steep riverbank and met in six-way intersections. I found her mailbox at midday on a two-lane road outside of town. Fifty yards up the driveway was a turnout with a
GUEST PARKING
sign and a wastebasket full of cane umbrellas.

I parked and walked from there. The woods gave way to a garden full of hot flower smells, and then a garage with an old Jeep, an old Vespa, and walls hung with garden tools and snow shovels. The house was a two-story bungalow, climbed by flowering vines, with long eaves and a wraparound porch.

Agnes was sitting in a sling chair on a sundeck that stuck out from the porch. She smiled and said, “Henry?” as I came up the steps. She was in her forties, with brown hair to her shoulders and a reddish round face, and wore a rose leotard, blue jeans, and wrecked purple espadrilles. On a table beside her were an iron teapot, a ceramic bowl of tea, a cordless phone, and a marble-covered schoolkid's notebook. “Tea?”

I said yes, though it seemed hot for it, and followed her into the house. I paused in the living room because it looked familiar, and then realized that it looked like the room I'd pictured when I first met Jillian, with a sunlit wooden floor, white walls, and plain maple wainscoting. “Richard?” Agnes called upstairs. “Henry's here.”

In the kitchen were six more iron teapots, a dozen ceramic bowls, and thirty steel canisters with labels like
DARJEELING SILVER TIPS
and
TAI PING MONKEY KING.
“There's Kemun in the samovar,” Agnes said, pointing to a big silver urn with an eagle on top of it, “but we can do anything you see there.”

“No, that sounds good,” I said.

“Oh, it is. I haven't left it alone all day.”

She filled a teapot from the samovar and waved at the bowls. As I picked a blue-and-gray one with red streaks, a tall thin man walked in carrying another teapot and a black glazed bowl. He was Agnes's age, in blue jeans, bare feet, and a white button-down shirt with a teaspoon in the pocket. He said, “I'm Richard,” and we shook hands.

Agnes pointed to my bowl and said, “Henry went right for the rising moon.”

“Henry's no fool,” Richard said. “I'm making the big move to Nilgiri here.” He put a kettle on, opened a canister, smelled the tea, said a silent “Oh,” and spooned some into a teapot. “So you're friends with Laura?”

“We used to work together,” I said.

“She seems very fond of you, Henry,” Agnes said.

“Ah,” Richard said.

“Laura did a series of paintings that were all scenes from jokes people told her,” Agnes said. “It was wonderful. Everyone does their dreams, but these were much weirder.”

Richard made his tea and we all backed through the screen door with our hands full. Agnes went back to her sling chair, I took a plastic one, and Richard carefully placed an Adirondack in a thin slice of sunshine between the shadows of a tree and a porch post.

“He loves to get that one ray of sunshine on his bowl,” Agnes said.

“I do,” he said. “Look at that. It's like it's splitting the atom.” He took the teaspoon from his pocket, filled it with tea, and slurped it loudly.

“You do that for the oxygen,” Agnes said. I tried to slurp mine. “What do you think of that?”

“It's good,” I said. It was like Chinese restaurant tea with three extra flavors and a gag reflex.

They asked about my previous jobs. I told them about
The Short Sheet
, with Laswell writing anti-Mason editorials and the paranoia pouring out of the radio.

“We should get some angry things like that in the magazine,” Richard said. “Tea is actually very violent and bloody. The Opium Wars were about tea. The English were getting their tea from China but they couldn't pay for it because they didn't have anything the Chinese wanted, so they brought in opium. Guys were lying around in opium dens, and the Chinese said, ‘What are you doing? You're turning our people into junkies.'

“But the
reason
the English did that was they were junkies too. All those ships burning up and guys in great naval uniforms getting shot in the face, that was all about the fifteen seconds when the civil servant has the first sip of tea and he goes, ‘
There
we are, few hours to go, nothing a chap can't handle.' They had a whole war over that fifteen seconds. Because otherwise, the civil servant, never mind, you know, the hapless guy that
picks
the tea, they weren't going to make it.”

“To even think about the hapless guy that picks the tea,” Agnes said, “you need the very finest in hapless-guy-picked tea.” She drank. “We should be careful. We're going to turn Henry off on the whole thing.”

“No, no,” I said. I did have reservations, though. It wasn't that the magazine was about something I couldn't believe there was a whole magazine about. That described most of my previous jobs. At those jobs, though, we were usually a week behind and panicking. “Is this kind of an off day here?” I said.

“We don't have off days, Henry,” Richard said. “That's how it is when you have your own business.” They both laughed. “You mean when do we work?”

“No, I just—”

“Have you seen the magazine?”

I nodded.

“That seems to be what people want. That isn't so hard. If people wanted something great, we'd be running around and yelling.”

“God damn it!” Agnes said experimentally.

“We're fucked. We're
fucked!
” Richard said. “That's fun.”

“No, but we run around and yell sometimes,” Agnes said.

“Like the thing a few years ago. We have a feature every month, pictures of tearooms, because a lot of our readers are these ladies—”

“Let me get it,” Richard said, and went inside.

“We found this guy who's a caterer-slash-florist in Mississippi,” Agnes said, “in an area where that's about the only thing a gay guy can do, and he was supposed to take the pictures that month. We sent him some antique teapots, and he was going to give a party and shoot the teapots with people—”

Richard returned with a manila folder. “The deadline comes and goes,” he said, “and the pictures aren't coming, and we keep calling him—”

“—not realizing that he's an alcoholic and he's gone into a complete—”

“—just shitfaced—”

“—implosion, but he sounded great on the phone. He'd say, ‘I'm just waiting on this cake, there's this woman in,' you know, Dred Scott County—”

“Because they know now that alcoholism is genetic,” Richard said, “and apparently the gene for alcoholism and the gene for sounding good on the phone are right next to each other. And then finally the pictures come.” He opened the folder and handed me an eight-by-ten print. “The best thing is this macaroni salad,” he said. “It's not from a deli—”

“It's not even from a deli
department
—”

“It's like from the refrigerator case in the liquor store, and it's still in the shape from the plastic container, he didn't even take a fork and—”

“—with this radioactive color from the mayonnaise being left out—”

“—and I'm staring at these things, and I realize, these are Slim Jims—”

“But the
people
are what's—”

“We think he found the people at the liquor store in the middle of the night and put hats on them. As long as he's there buying the salad—”

“This poor woman—”

“—acute alcohol poisoning, but the hat makes all the—”

“So we had no backup, and it's getting dark out, and we realize we're going to have to disguise our living room as one of these places—”

“—three
A.M.
and we're baking scones and waking up all the women we know up here and making them dress like—”

“—and it hits us that we're just reliving what he did twenty-four hours earlier,” Agnes said. “And at that point you just feel for him. I mean living there, and he's like their pet, but really having to toe the line—”

“—and the possibility of his getting stomped by other segments of the community is always there,” Richard said. “I would drink.”

He poured more tea and opened a back issue of
Cozy
to a two-page photo of their living room. The furniture had been covered in vertigo fabric and the tables were crowded with teapots, cozies, fancy tableware, and pastries, their glazes liquid in the faked streaming-in sunlight. Women held teacups and mimed gala-planning conversation in hats with wildlife
on them. I wasn't the market but I could see how someone, say Cerise Lander, would feel a perfect welcome. The picture was credited to the guy in Mississippi.

We talked and drank tea all afternoon, rotating from kitchen to bathroom to deck. Sometime after my sixth cup I realized I'd been staring into the garden for twenty minutes. I discovered that focusing on one spot and then another, a flower to a leaf to a branch, felt like flying. I wondered why I'd worried about Richard and Agnes not working, and why I ever worried about time at all. There was plenty. Bees and butterflies, slow in the sun, drank from the flowers as we laughed about ice climbers and tea traders. At six Agnes said, “Is anyone hungry?”

Richard went inside while I followed Agnes to the vegetable garden and helped her pick lettuce, tomatoes, corn, and onions. When we went in, Richard had water boiling and was getting ready to grill fish. I cleaned the corn while Agnes made a salad.

“So, Henry,” Richard said over dinner, “are you in?”

“No, we have to agree on money,” Agnes said.

“Oh, right. We haven't really hired anyone before. What was the last place paying you?” I told him. “Thirty a week more?”

I said yes. Alice opened her notebook and wrote, “
CONTRACT
,” in decorative letters with a fountain pen. “I'm saying either party can terminate at any time,” she said, “and when you leave, we'll give you some extra money and a suit. Like getting out of jail.”

“I should find a place to stay,” I said.

“A friend of ours in town has a room over her garage,” Agnes said. “Janice. You'd have privacy and a basketball thing. Should I call her?”

I said yes and we went back to eating. I hadn't stopped for
lunch on the way there. I had seconds of everything and three glasses of iced Lapsang Souchong.

 

I
t was eight thirty, just cooling down, when I parked on Janice's street. She lived in the flats by the tracks, ten blocks below the Fourth of July–looking town center with its gazebos and clock tower. There were no sidewalks down here, just small houses with fading shingles and blistered siding. Some kids were running under a sprinkler on a weedy lawn and a teenager cruised by on his bike, advancing a tennis ball with a hockey stick.

The garage next to Janice's house had a second story with a peaked roof and a dormer window. I climbed the back stairs and found a key under the flowerpot she'd told Agnes about.

The room was a stoop-ceilinged oven, its air a sour concentrate of old wood and fabric. There were scorch marks around the electric outlets on the dirty walls. Sallow bedclothes were folded on a steel cot's thin mattress. There was a hot plate, a mini refrigerator, and a bookcase full of Zane Grey,
Your Erroneous Zones
, and other discards from the house. On the cot was a handwritten note:

In the shower I heard the water drip through the lumpy caulk and into the garage as soon as I turned it on. I made up the cot and tried to sleep but spent most of the night getting up to go to the bathroom and then lying awake, wondering what I was doing at this job. Three hots and a cot, yes, but this actually
was
a cot. Barney had a wife, a house, two kids now, and a job doing things so scientific they made Controlled Dynamics look like a pottery class, while I was working for people whose hearts opened like parachutes for gay caterer-slash-florists but who'd packed me off to Janice's hell garage without a second thought. Sleep wouldn't come, and at 3:00
A.M.
I realized it was the tea, that my sweats and insomnia were blowback from my fit of contentment on the porch twelve hours earlier.