The Entire Predicament (8 page)

A sphere, even if it is only one body wide, can be comfortable. Shannon gave me a good fuck, and I’m sure he will give many others, and better. He’ll draw tenderness from the cluttered world and let it spill, making other people feel as I felt. The weight of the world can rise, history all fog and ghosts. I lift my eyes from the cul-de-sac and take a jaunt around my own place.Years ago, I threw a yard sale and relieved myself of the furniture my parents left behind, pieces too big and cumbersome in design or content to move. I look at what I brought to this house on my own, what space is taken or empty. I look
at what I see and what I know. I think about war, how it can make a person feel half a unity, and I grow frigid with my fear. I repaint the guest room a careful shade of neutral. I build a shelf in my kitchen and line it with empty jars.

In due course Mother and Dad Craven go out of town. Amie and Jeff throw a rockin’ shindig. Kids come from all over the county, and the cops hang up when I call. They recognize my voice.

Vivian slaps the shit out of her little daughter for walking in on her and the heroin addict. The girl, dumb in this country, finds the addict’s stash and mixes it with roach poison.

Spliff sneaks up on Goody and one night Goody births a litter of spotty, baying puppies. The homosexuals creep into their backyard in the dark, dig a hole, take one puppy at a time by the hind legs and slam it against the wall of their garden office, drop each into the hole and cover it up.

I am old, after all, and plenty dead. I’ve barely begun to work out the angles in my scheme, ridden as it is, still, with sloppy thinking, hypocrisy, and logistic impracticalities. As it is, with nothing new, there is too much work to be done.

I’m with the caterers, a one-time job, a borrowed bow tie, old sneakers I’ve spray lacquered black. It was that or heels. Fifty bucks, four hours.

White turned rails swoop up the lawn and curve around the verandah. What’s a verandah? It’s what I think I’m seeing. There’s a funny white statue of a lithe angel holding a lamp at the walkway entrance, and then later, up nearer the house where the stairs start toward the entrance, nothing you could call a stoop, a baby one, what do you call it, a cherub? Like going in reverse, back in time. Next, great lion-headed knockers looking nothing like boobs, I think, annoying myself, scanning for a back entrance, somewhere I must be supposed to be going.There is one. Around back.You go in a door built into a hill and it’s a tunnel left over from slave days. I heard of these somewhere, in a class, maybe, this way to pretend you don’t have slaves, like it’s magic everything is so nice, but this place might be old or it might be replica. It doesn’t look old. What looks old and not dirty? This looks clean, a clean hill of
grass, nice trees, a clean door in the hill, and inside, chunky rock walls. It could be a rich crazy lady’s delusional obsession. She could have built it for her demons. I don’t know enough to tell.

Either way I feel dumpy and defensive. Inside it’s an underground kitchen and the company is using it to do final prep. Long metal tables fold out from the walls on insectlike legs and people, mostly dropout-looking kids, are lined along it in narrow cook’s hats making piles of dices and squeezing butter into ramekins with pastry bags. Piles of baskets for rolls, buckets of utensils, trays of four kinds of glasses, mounds of grapes, and eight hams pegged with fruit, and platters of strung-up little birds, and supersized crosshatched pies . . . I don’t know anything about food, but I’m for it.

“Hi Amy, hi Jacob, hi Tandy, hi Joe.” These are kids I know from other sucky jobs.

“You should see upstairs,” Becky says. I like Becky and miss her sometimes. She’s holding a cleaver and there’s band-aids around the center three knuckles of her hand. Something is always happening with her. “Go upstairs and check in with Matt. Tell him you’re here. Wait til you see upstairs.” Becky got me the job. I did catering once before, a bar mitzvah with globes of gumballs instead of flowers on the tables. Gumballs all over the floor like marbles as soon as the boys landed.

Okay, upstairs. How do I get there? I can’t remember. I’ll tell you what else I don’t remember, is how I know how to say what I saw. But I know.

Upstairs first it’s all about chandeliers, then it’s about mosaic tile, then it’s inlaid wood all through the ballroom, marquetry borders, and walls of mirrors in gilt frames surrounded with
ornate probably silk wallpaper, and dark carved wooden trim around everything and enormous arching glass doors, window seats lined with tasseled cushions, giant oil paintings of old men and bustled ladies with lace-up dress fronts, tables, tables, tables, with white cloths and centerpieces made from rosebuds and pearl beads. No metal folding chairs at this shindig.All six-tops waiting for six tops. I’m about to throw up from looking when server after server emerges from behind a staircase in a fashion so orderly I cannot believe I will ever blend in. These people who I might, a moment before, have recognized, weave like a mass of ants among the tables, surround them, cover the space, and then disappear in a wave back behind the stairs, leaving six place settings at each table where before there were none. In fact, as I watch, I begin to believe I am watching one person, over and over, as if time is stuttering and indeed there is only one person setting one table. But then somehow the whole place is set and I suspect I’ve seen dozens of servers, maybe hundreds. It feels like hundreds. How does it feel to see a hundred servers? I might have seen hundreds of servers over the plodding course of my idiotic life. But at once they’re not men and not women, and not kids, some of whom I know; they’re elements of the décor swooping in and returning like a living curtain.

I go back downstairs. I’m shaking, all the bits of me rattling like they’re strung together or just tossed in one bag. “I don’t know who Matt is,” I tell Becky. She’s there with the cleaver. She might have been one of the servers upstairs, but now she is herself again.

How will I possibly become one of them? I will stick out. My shoes will chip. I’ll fall. She tells me something. For a
moment I remember what she looks like naked. I also remember what she looked like when she said, “I can’t take it anymore!” and I said, “Take what?” and she said, “It! It, it, it!” and started throwing her things around her crappy apartment. She didn’t mean me. She meant everything. I remember she broke this ceramic frog she’d kept from childhood that she had on her dresser and it held her rings in its mouth at night.

I can see the blade of her cleaver moving and flashing, just as beyond her I can see other hands on singing tongs and other hands spinning wooden salad bowls that clack like castanets, and even though I know Becky is talking, time shifts—it shifts because of memory—and even though I am a terrible server, I feel it: all I have to do is
move
and I am caught up in exactly what surrounds me. So I do, and there I am. I am one in a line of precisely undulating bodies from a long line of long lines, moving up twisting basement stairs that become increasingly shiny as I near the surface, and I am balancing an enormous silver tray of twenty glasses of champagne as if the glasses and the liquid in them are suspended over my palm as weightless as any idea I’ve ever had. I look for Becky; I want to mouth to her how elated I am, how okay I feel, how light I feel, and graceful, but everyone is blurred together and when I try to glance in the mirrors I’m moving past I cannot catch my own image, which bothers me for a moment. But then I see that my free hand is guiding glass after glass onto the tables as I pass with exquisite timing; I never stop moving my feet and yet each guest’s elbow shifts out of the way as I approach and each baubled dandy catches my eye to accept or pass as if we are breathing together, and just as I cannot tell one server from another I cannot tell one guest from another; I simply know
as if by rhythm, yes or no, I want, I don’t, or yes, but here, or no, but soon. Their happy noises ring and hover, rumble and soar, and utensils punctuate, and behind me, Becky, or anyone, is slipping them pâté and crudité (what, did I pick this up in construction? did I learn it landscaping?) and golden bouncy bits of fish and vegetables. I’ve glided in figure eights so balanced I’m breathless, I’m elated, I’m gliding back down the stairs, and although the damp basement walls remain distant, somewhere I sense that if I slow down, moisture from the stones will begin to cling to the fragrant hairs on my arms. Luckily my friends in their crimped white hats fill my tray with meat pastries; the tray, in fact, seems to levee, and it guides me back around and up the stairs, the funny flaky bundles tugging along like a tiny pack of sleigh dogs until I’m sailing again among the tables, the nods, the orchestra of motion and sound, the pulsing colors, and light that ranges from staccato sparkle to low humming glow.

I loop down into the kitchen, the kitchen streams by, and when I next rise from the basement I pause at the entrance, to see if I can, of my own volition, and it turns out I can. I feel like a rock in a river, but it’s because I’m still that I am able to notice what I notice:

It’s a breath I’m taking, a breath like I have never taken before, one so discrete I can tell that it
comes from somewhere
. I am of the collective of servers, but then I take this breath that feels like an icy ribbon of vapor is being fed to me in this hotly buzzing room of kaleidoscopic bodies. It’s a breath that is coming from
someone.
As I take it, I can almost trace it, and then I do, I trace it back toward the kite it’s come from; I’m paused at the foot of the room and the other servers bend
away from me convexly; I feel them pull, elastic, but I am held there with my tray; I am breathing the ribbon that has been sent to me. In the pause, I remember that I used to draw pictures as a child, something I stopped doing, I only now suspect, for some
reason
. In the pause, I remember drawing a picture of a road going into the distance. Did I draw it accidentally or is this something I learned? I remember that moment in my history when I discovered, just as some time in human history it was discovered, that a triangle in two dimensions can make two feel like three. It was sort of great, but it also ruined everything.

I stretch my neck and close my eyes, and I am being pulled by the center line of this perspective. Have I ever used the word
perspective
? Would Becky, Jacob, Tandy use that word? I am being wrenched, I am being dragged, and then I feel the last tendrils of my connection to the serving corpus plucked away like nerves in a surgical amputation—plink, pluck—although it appears I’ve been properly numbed or stung or filled via breath with druggy distance for this ordeal. I’m so loopy.Time is wobbly around me, and space is, too, and the thing that’s going to happen is about to happen.

I almost know I am on my way to being unimaginably blissed-out.

At the top of the room, a woman, the kite herself, has risen and she stands at her table at the head of everything. She is dinging her glass with a fork. Her gown is yellow with silver threads. I know it from way back here, hot gold and cold silver. Her pale hair swoops around the back of her head, loose enough to form a halo. She’s got diamonds on. I am dumb and I am awed. One is worse.

She looks wise, like an excellent actress.

I don’t know what happens, but she speaks.

There are bells, or applause.

She is as if born of the room, molten, but then her tone shifts and the room turns moony, or her tone shifts and everyone’s cheeks glow like roses at once and light dapples their spotty heads. It’s true she’s too far away to see but that doesn’t seem to be the point of this experience. Luckily I have no idea how time moves here.All I know is it’s not mine. Not my time, not my place. And thank God. Mine sucks. Luckily I don’t have to wait. Luckily as I stand there and her voice reaches and feeds me I am stunned as if by certain kinds of insects I have never studied. What’s sharp? What’s smooth? This is sharp and smooth. She’s done dinging, and finished speaking, and now it’s a banquet peopled with playing cards, jacks, queens, kings, and jokers that simply fall away from the grid of round tables and who knows where the rest of the deck went; back below, long ago.

Light pulses and spasms from the mirrors and the gilded ceiling. Then the light quiets and cools. The hall is a field of strewn white napkins. I see them blow away like petals. I see the tables take to their legs and scurry off stage. I see me at the foot of the hall. I see her at the head in her gown, dinging her glass and taking a breath to speak, but luckily I do not have to live through dessert or whatever social thing the mounds of guests might insist upon next because time here has moved as if for me and now they’re gone and now she’s laughing at them but she’s still exhausted and happy that the night was—what—swell? It was something. It was all right. It was exactly what we wanted. She throws her arm across my shoulder.

She’d looked very tall but up close she’s my size.