Three-Martini Lunch (15 page)

I
was more than a little shocked one morning when I arrived at Mister Gus's townhouse to drop off the usual stack of newspapers, only to find him downstairs in the kitchen fumbling with a coffee grinder over a pot of boiling water. I froze where I stood, the key to the servants' entrance still in my hand and the bundle of newspapers under my arm. An involuntary gasp escaped my lips. I had never so much as seen him out of his bed, much less standing and roaming about. He cut an eerie figure. Upon hearing my gasp, Mister Gus whirled about, his eyes flashing.

“Well?” he demanded.

Well, what?
I thought to myself. I was where
I
had promised to be;
he
was the one breaking with expectation. He attempted to work the grinder but his hands trembled and he fumbled it. “Do you need any help, sir?” I asked. He looked even frailer out of bed than in, if that was possible. His pin-striped pajamas drowned him; he was thinner than I'd thought, and I could see he was suffering from a slight hunchback.

“I'm trying to make some coffee,” he said in an impatient huff. “Some
decent
coffee, for a change! Greta's gone.”

Greta was the woman who brought Mister Gus his breakfast and cleared it away, changed his sheets, did his laundry. The manner in which he had pronounced those words,
Greta's gone
, made me think she was not coming back and that I ought not ask questions. If she was on an errand, he usually said:
Greta's out.
I had no idea what had happened, but I knew enough to intuit it had to do with Mister Gus's irritable tirades and her diminishing success in avoiding all contact with the man.

“Here,” I said, moving to help him. I took the coffee grinder out of his hands, and after a moment of hesitation he relented and sat down to watch me. I ground up several tablespoons of coffee, then dumped them into the boiling water and immediately switched the burner off. “Do you have . . . ?” I asked, but before I could finish my sentence I'd found a lid. I rummaged around some more as the coffee brewed and found a ladle. “And . . . here you are,” I said, ladling fresh coffee into a baroque-looking china teacup.

“Hmph,” Mister Gus said, glaring at me and reaching for the teacup. He continued to glare at me as he let the coffee cool down. After what seemed an eternity, he brought the cup to his lips and took a sip. “Hmph,” he repeated, but this time there was a slightly different tone in it. He sipped, then sipped again. “Hmph. Not bad. Not outstanding. But not bad.”

I knew I had won a small but sure victory.

I was still smiling when my eyes fell upon an automatic coffeemaker. It looked brand-new and state-of-the-art. It also was unplugged and coated in a fine layer of dust.

“But why . . .” I began. “Sir . . . why wouldn't you simply use
this
?” I moved to stand near the machine, pointing in disbelief as though I had just found a unicorn roaming the kitchen.

“
Tsk!”
Mister Gus hissed scornfully. “You sound like Greta! My niece in California sent that contraption to me. Don't know why I didn't put it straight into the bin, infernal thing! Why on earth would I use
that
? I said I wanted a
decent
cup of coffee!”

“Have you ever tried it?” I ventured.

“I don't need to,” he snapped.

“But if you use the machine, all you have to do is add the coffee and push a button.”

Mister Gus shot me a look that silenced me.

I sighed. “Would you like me to carry this upstairs on a tray for you?” I asked, meaning the coffee and the newspapers. He replied with a grumpy nod, and off I went, with Mister Gus trailing very slowly behind me, his feet shuffling softly over the rugs.

By the time I set the tray on his bed and arranged the papers the way he liked them, he still had not caught up, and I realized he was likely having trouble on the stairs. Nervous, I went to go check on his progress. I walked to the top of the sweeping half-circle staircase and looked down.

There he was, doggedly climbing one stair at a time and pausing, trying to conceal his heavy breathing. I knew if I offered to help him he would refuse. I padded down the stairs with a quiet, businesslike demeanor and slipped an arm under his armpit. To my surprise, he did not resist or chide me or even—as I'd worried he might—protest my touching him. Together, we worked our way up the stairs at a fairly efficient, steady pace.

“Thank you,” he said in a hoarse voice once we'd reached the top. It was the last thing I'd expected him to say; I thought, for a brief moment, that I was hearing things. I nodded and allowed him to shuffle the rest of the way into his room on his own, following him for fear he might yet fall.

“You know,” he said, once he had settled himself back into his immense pile of pillows and blankets like some kind of bird roosting in a nest, “you could come round more often and do things like that—the coffee, I mean.
I've got a girl coming to drop off my meals, but I haven't found a full replacement for Greta yet.” I looked at him, taken off guard by him for the second time that morning. “I'd pay you,” he said.

I cocked my head, considering. I would have to cut back on the hours I worked as a messenger, but this only made practical sense, for my messenger work paid less than half as much. Mister Gus, for all his bluster and prickly edges, was beginning to grow on me.

“Fine. Never mind!” Mister Gus snapped, assuming my hesitation was leading to a declination.

“No,” I said. “I'll do it. I'd like that.”

He looked at me, his eyes opened wide and watering with tears. He gave a small, tight, grateful nod. Then he looked away.

A
s I soon learned, the list of neglected items that needed fixing in Mister Gus's house was endless. Over the years, he had become something of a recluse, and his interest in seeing to it that things were properly maintained had waned in equal proportion to his interest in welcoming strangers into his home.

“Sir . . . when you go downstairs, why don't you use the elevator?” I asked. Two days prior, I'd opened a Gothic wooden door at the far end of one hallway that led to what I thought was a closet and discovered a beautiful brass birdcage-like piece of machinery.

“It's broken,” Mister Gus snapped.

“I can call to have it repaired,” I offered.

“I'm sure whatever is the matter with it is quite complicated. And besides, I don't want some greasy
fix-it man
traipsing in here while I'm trying to read or nap,” he said. There was a note of anger in his voice, but the more closely I listened, the more I realized the anger was only a mask; beneath it was fear. Mister Gus, perhaps reasonably, was afraid he might
be taken advantage of. He was extremely leery of new acquaintances, and before Greta left, she had gossiped to me about an unfortunate incident involving a man who had visited the house on the pretext of representing the fund-raising committee for the Metropolitan Opera but who turned out to have no affiliation with the Met and ten sticky fingers. It wasn't until hours after he left that Greta noticed a pair of silver candlesticks and cut-crystal ashtrays from Tiffany's had gone missing. Greta was sure there were other things missing, too, but as she went through an itemization of objects she couldn't locate or account for, Mister Gus wouldn't directly acknowledge any of it. He was embarrassed, she reckoned.
Fund-raising, indeed . . .
was all he'd muttered under his breath.

“I can make sure the repairman only comes during a time I'm here, and I can monitor him if you like,” I said. Mister Gus regarded me warily from out of the corner of one eye.

“Fine,” he said, jutting out his chin and rolling his lips into a fine line. “If you're going to be stubborn about it.”

I telephoned several elevator repair companies—an act that represented a significant victory in and of itself, if only because Greta and her predecessors had all been barred from getting half as far—and hired the one that struck me as most reputable. In the meantime, I tinkered with other broken items in the house, replacing lightbulbs, ratcheting up a bit of leaky plumbing, and oiling hinges. Mister Gus treated all this work as though it were invisible. My main duties—according to Mister Gus—involved making coffee, bringing and clearing trays of food, fluffing the seemingly infinite number of pillows on his bed, and drawing his bath.

I was in the kitchen one morning when a slightly mischievous mood came over me. My gaze fell on the automatic coffeemaker, and on impulse I plugged it in. Would Mister Gus honestly be able to tell the difference? I filled the coffeemaker with water and grounds, and in a flash, lovely dark droplets of coffee began to dribble out. It smelled good. I tasted it, hoping it would be passable, and the flavor was absolutely fine. Perhaps even
better than the coffee I typically brewed. When I brought it upstairs and gave it to Mister Gus, he drank it and seemed pleased, evidently unable to detect any difference whatsoever.

“What's that smile for, boy?” he snapped.

“Nothing, sir. Only that it's a nice day out.”

“Hmph. I wouldn't know” was all he said. All the rest of that week, I continued to make his coffee in the automatic coffeemaker.

On the following morning, I got up the nerve to ask him about the person who had given him the automatic coffeemaker as a present. The longer I worked for Mister Gus, the more I wondered where his relations might be, for they seemed conspicuously absent from his life.

“You said your niece lives in California. Do you see her very often?”

He looked at me, startled by the question. For a moment I thought he was about to tell me to mind my own business. “Hmph,” he grunted finally. “Never,” he said. “I've never seen her!”

“Never?”

“No. Not even when I lived out in California myself,” he said. Then he looked at me with a sort of crooked smile. “You didn't know that, did you?—that I lived in California? Hah. Hollywood, as a matter of fact. Wrote scripts for the talkies! What a time that was! What a town.”

“But your niece moved to California and you never visited each other?”

He shot me a dry look. “Her father didn't approve of my having contact with her. He stopped speaking to me years ago.” I did not ask him why or what the falling-out had been about; I suspected I already knew the answer.

“Where does he live?”

“Manhattan,” he grunted.

I was stunned. All this time, Mister Gus had a brother who lived in town, yet he never saw him!

“Haven't the faintest what he's gotten up to,” he continued. “I assume he's still alive; I would've heard about it otherwise. Someday we
will
have
to deal with the sticky matter of our family trust, after all. My niece sends a Christmas present every year, though,” Mister Gus said. “Every year, without fail. Never met her, but still she does it. Must feel guilty.”

The light was draining out of his eyes, and he suddenly looked wan. “Now leave me in peace, boy. I'm tired,” he said. I obeyed, and he rolled over as though to sleep. I padded quietly out of the room, a tray of empty dishes clutched in my hands.

•   •   •

A
week or so later, after two visits from the repairman, the elevator was running again. It hadn't, according the repairman's best guess, been used in several years. At first Mister Gus pretended indifference to the elevator's revival, but it wasn't long before he began using it every day, sometimes twice a day. It was as though he had just gotten part of himself back, and in some ways perhaps this was an accurate assessment, for the elevator meant Mister Gus was able to visit floors of his own townhouse he had all but stopped living in.

It also meant it was not uncommon to come in during the mornings and find Mister Gus out of bed. Nonetheless, I was shocked again one morning when I found him standing in the kitchen. This time the surprise was not finding him out of bed; it was the fact that he appeared to be operating the automatic coffeemaker.

We regarded each other in silence for a solid minute, until finally he turned back to the machine and resumed his business.

“Don't think I don't know you've been using this all along,” he said, meaning the coffeemaker.

I'd been caught. I couldn't think of what to say. I wondered if this turn of events meant I was about to be fired. To my astonishment, he began to chuckle softly. I chuckled back, and we stood there in the kitchen, both of us amused with ourselves.

23

I
was staring into the terrible pure white space of my notebook when the electric buzzer sounded. The first time it sounded I ignored it and thought some kid was just pranking or else some shady type was trying to get into the building because that was always happening, but when the buzzer sounded again I understood someone was really at the door ringing for me. I went downstairs to check and there was Rusty standing on the stoop. Rusty cut a peculiar shape and I recognized his silhouette immediately. The thing about Rusty was he looked an awful lot like a rat. Later I found out he really was a rat, so this resemblance turned out to be fitting but even if he had turned out to be honorable it would've been hard to see that was the case because he bore such a strong resemblance to a rodent. He had the beady eyes of a rat and his ears stuck out from his narrow head. He was short and slight and always wore sports jackets that looked two sizes too big and hung in a funny way on his slouchy shoulders.

I was surprised by the unannounced visit but of course I was glad all the same because the second I saw Rusty I couldn't help but think about
the famous agent and fantasize about what he could do for me if Rusty ever introduced us. I didn't know what Rusty wanted but the last time I'd seen him at the Village Vanguard he had said he would like to read my stories sometime, which I thought was something you say to people to sound polite when really you are giving them the run-around. Now I considered that maybe Rusty wasn't as bad as I'd first thought because perhaps he had followed through and shown up on my doorstep that day on a mission to read my stories after all. I invited him upstairs and said I could put some coffee on and we could put some Irish in it if we wanted to and Rusty accepted.

Once we got upstairs I busied myself in front of the hot plate and set about boiling the coffee. Instead of sitting in the armchair I offered him, Rusty remained standing with his coat and gloves still on and poked around the apartment with a bizarrely uninhibited air, opening drawers and rifling through bookcases as though it were his job to find out what they contained. I realized he was making me feel jumpy; I felt like a Jew being visited by a Nazi officer sent to harass me on some sort of trumped-up state business.

“I've been meaning to read this,” he said, holding up a nice hardback copy of Emerson and looking at me expectantly. It was pretty quiet except for the burbling of the coffee on the hot plate and I wished I'd thought to put some bop on the record player just to have something blowing in the background. Rusty was still holding the book as I thought this, displaying the cover to me in a possessive way and waiting for my approval.

“You can borrow it if you like,” I heard myself offer. I don't really know why I said it except maybe I do know because I wouldn't have said it before finding out who Rusty worked for. He did not appear very surprised by this offer and he slipped the hardback into the funny little blue bag he always carried around with him and I knew by the way he did it that was going to be the last I'd ever see of old Ralph Waldo and his take on self-reliance.

“
Some
place you got here,” he said. It was the kind of remark that could've been a compliment as easily as a slight, but there was no confusion about the way Rusty meant it when he said it now. I didn't reply. Instead I put two mismatched mugs of coffee on the table and poured a little whiskey into each. Rusty picked up the mug that didn't have a chip at the lip and sniffed the contents and then reached for the bottle of whiskey to pour some more. When his mug was finally full of greater parts whiskey than coffee he sat in the chair and inspected me over the rim of the mug. I felt his eyes raking over the contours of my face and did my best not to make eye contact. Finally, he spoke.

“You're not exactly good-looking,” he said in a matter-of-fact tone. Before I could reply he took another slurp from the mug and continued. “But you're not exactly wretched-looking either, are ya?” If anything was ever a rhetorical question, I figured this was it. Increasingly uncomfortable, I sipped my own coffee and turned a vague, polite smile in Rusty's direction.

“You're one of those neither-here-nor-there guys,” he finally diagnosed. An awkward silence ensued.

“Say,” I said, when my patience could take me no further. I suddenly felt very shy. “I think I've got some copies of those stories I mentioned around here somewhere.” I got up and went over to the stack of milk crates where my typewriter was set up in front of a little folding chair and pretended to rifle through an old shoe box filled with papers. The truth was I had recently typed up fresh copies of my stories for the express purpose of bumping into Rusty again and I knew exactly where they were. I set the copies down on the table in front of Rusty. They were originals and not carbons, because I thought on the off chance Rusty liked them enough to give them to the famous literary agent it would be a poor thing if the man had to read carbons and in the worst-case scenario might lessen the literary agent's opinion of the content itself.

“Swell,” Rusty said, leveling a lazy stare at the pile of papers on the
table. He did not pick them up right away and instead sat there staring into his mug and swirling the dregs of the Irish coffee around. He had finished the coffee and whiskey in record time and I resisted offering him another mugful. Like all writers, I wanted him to read the stories and see how strong they were and I didn't mind if he was buzzed because I wanted him to feel good while he was reading them, but not so stoned he wouldn't be able to pay attention as the stories deserved.

If you know any writers at all, then you know writers are funny about the conditions under which their work is read. But as of that moment Rusty did not appear to be interested in reading anything. The copies were on the table and I was feeling sicker with every second that passed when his hand did not make a single twitch to pick them up. I could not think what he had come for if not for the stories, although I
could
think what, and I did not want to imagine it in any detail. Rusty helped himself to another drink and make snide observations about my apartment and habits. The afternoon pressed on with a dogged atmosphere. The clock was ticking and all around us the air was going stale.

Suddenly Rusty got up from his chair at the kitchenette table—which was really just a card table with a bedsheet thrown over it—and made a big show of rolling his eyes and stretching and yawning. “It's rather boring here, don't you feel?”

“Now, hold on just a minute—” I started to say, feeling pretty sure I'd just been insulted: first about my crummy apartment, then about my looks, and now about my supposed lack of stimulating entertainment. But the objection halted on my lips the moment Rusty picked up the typed copies from the kitchen table. He rolled them up until they were tight as a baton and put them in his blue bag. I was working up the nerve to ask if that meant he planned to read them later but Rusty paid me no mind as I began coughing and switching my weight over my feet like a nervous boxer and instead he was already digging through the pile of clothing on the floor by the mattress, looking for my jacket.

“Here,” he said, holding my jacket out to me now that he'd located it. “Put this on. I feel like seeing a matinee.” When he mentioned the matinee there was something imperial in his manner and I realized arguing with him was futile. He had declared what we would do and he hadn't even asked me about it because he already was secure he didn't have to ask me about it. I knew who he worked for and he knew what I wanted from him and even though it had never been openly discussed, the arrangement couldn't be clearer.

Of course I paid for our two tickets to see the matinee. And a round of drinks at the bar next to the movie house. And another round of drinks at a funny little bar on the West Side that was full of sailors whose ship had just pulled into the docks in Hell's Kitchen and who were whooping it up over the fact they'd been out to sea for four months straight and they only had one week of shore leave before they had to go back out. It was getting late—almost two in the morning—but the evening roared on and I found myself obliged to buy drinks for Rusty and myself and also for the occasional merchant marine or longshoreman Rusty insisted merited a free pint of beer. I was spending all the money I had and there wasn't going to be enough left over for my rent and I knew this was not good, but by then the aura of Rusty's boss had gotten a hold over me and I was powerless to break it. Rusty was attentive about mentioning the famous agent's name just enough to keep me in the game. A few times he took the baton of rolled-up manuscript pages out of his bag and set it on a bar table here or there, as though to remind me he might read them. Or perhaps to remind me he might abandon them. Every time he did this I looked at the tight roll of Eaton's bond paper I had worked so diligently to type as it unfurled like a bird trying to work a broken wing and I disliked Rusty a little more. Twice I watched from across the room as someone set a beer down on it like it was a curling coaster. When a fight broke out between two sailors I nearly joined in just to release some of the steam inside me.

It was turning into a doozy of a night. Rusty, for his part, showed no
signs of slowing up. Frequently during the course of the evening I saw him open a little tin case he kept on a chain around his neck and each time he opened it he extracted a little balled-up scrap of paper and I knew then I would probably be seeing the sun come up over Manhattan before the time finally came when I could make my way home. I found out later he had an aunt who was an asthmatic and he'd been regularly stealing the paper strips out of her inhalers ever since he was fourteen and then it made a little more sense why Rusty was the way he was because you had to wonder what taking bennies for all those years straight could do to a person.

Sure enough, the sun was yawning over the top of the Empire State Building with the cold blue light of dawn when Rusty and I finally found ourselves in the back of a taxicab headed home. We rolled down the windows and lit a couple of cigarettes and quickly finished them. Some drivers minded and some drivers didn't and when the driver didn't seem to mind we lit a couple more. Rusty started talking about the famous agent again and what it was like to work for him and as he talked his hand slid onto my knee and I let it rest there, cold as his fingers were. There was a sort of soggy lightness to Rusty's hand that made me sick to my stomach—not because I disliked homosexuals per se, because if I'm being honest I will tell you at that point in my life I'd already been to bed with a man before and I knew what it could be like when it was good—but rather because I had a flash of the kind of lecherous old-man homosexual Rusty was destined to be later in life. It was all as clear as if I had just seen it in a crystal ball and I gave a shiver and looked out the cab window and tried to focus on the tops of the buildings that were now belching steam in preparation for another busy city morning.

When we pulled up in front of my apartment building Rusty was continuing on because he lived across the bridge in Astoria and as I got out of the cab he leaned over and tugged on the tail of my shirt and said, “Be a
pal and spot me a dollar for the cab, will ya?” He was drunk and you could hear it in his voice.

“I only have a five.”

“Spot me a fiver, then.”

By that point I had ceased to be thrown by his blatant requests and with a weary automatic mind I reached into the worn lining of my back pocket and extracted the very last five-dollar bill I had and handed it to him. I knew it was more than the taxi ride would cost but I also knew if I saw him again he wouldn't bring it up and neither would I and this way I would never ask Rusty for my change back.

“Thanks,” he said, and for the first time that night I thought I detected an actual note of gratitude. He patted the rolled up baton of paper that had miraculously managed to find its way back into his bag. “Let's talk some more about your writing soon. I see great things happening.” This was the first direct mention of my writing he'd ever made to me and I stood there blinking. “Great things!” he shouted, and with that he pulled the taxi door shut and waved and the driver pulled away in the direction of the East River and everything that lay beyond its dun-colored shores.