Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (18 page)

Scarlatti, meanwhile, turned her face with some effort and gazed through the door.

There was a moment, just a flicker of a second, when Ezra dared to hope that she might approve after al . But looking past her, he realized that was impossible. The restaurant was a warehouse, a barn, a gymnasium—a total catastrophe. Tables and upended chairs huddled in one corner, underneath bald, barren windows. Buckling plank footbridges led across the varnished floor, which had somehow picked up a film of white dust, and the missing kitchen wal was as horrifying as a toothless smile. Only two broad, plaster pil ars separated the kitchen from the dining room. Everything was exposed—sinks and garbage cans, the blackened stove, the hanging pots with their tarnished bottoms, a calendar showing a girl in a sheer black nightgown, and a windowsil bearing two dead plants and a Bril o pad and Todd Duckett’s asthma inhalant.

“Oh, my God,” said Mrs. Scarlatti.

She looked up into his eyes. Her face seemed stripped.

“You might at least have waited til I died,” she said.

“Oh!” said Ezra. “No, you don’t understand; you don’t know. It wasn’t what you think. It was just … I can’t explain, I went wild somehow!”

But she raised that palm of hers and sailed up the stairs to her apartment. Even lying flat, she had an air of speed and power.

She didn’t refuse to see him again—nothing like that.

Every morning he paid her a visit, and was admitted by her day nurse. He sat on the edge of the ladylike chair in the bedroom and reported on bil s and health inspections and linen deliveries.

Mrs. Scarlatti was unfailingly polite, nodding in al the right places, but she never said much in return. Eventual y, she would close her eyes as a sign that the visit was finished.

Then Ezra would leave, often jostling her bed by accident or overturning his chair. He had always been a clumsy man, but now was more so than usual. It seemed to him his hands were too big, forever getting in the way. If only he could have done something with them! He would have liked to fix her a meal—a sustaining meal, with a depth of flavors, a complicated meal that would require a whole day of chopping things smal , and grinding, and blending. In the kitchen, as nowhere else, Ezra came into his own, like someone crippled on dry land but effortlessly graceful once he takes to water. However, Mrs. Scarlatti stil wasn’t eating. There was nothing he could offer her.

Or he would have liked to seize her by the shoulders and shout, “Listen! Listen!” But something closed-off about her face kept stopping him. Almost in plain words, she was tel ing him that she preferred he not do such a thing. So he didn’t.

After a visit, he would go downstairs and look in on the restaurant, which at this hour was vacant and echoing. He might check the freezer, or erase the blackboard, and then perhaps just wander a while, touching this and that. The wal paper in the back hal was too cluttered and he ripped it off the wal . He tore away the ornate gilt sconces beside the telephone. He yanked the old-fashioned silhouettes from the restroom doors. Sometimes he did so much damage that there was barely time to cover it up before opening, but everybody pitched in and it always got done somehow or other. By six o’clock, when the first customers arrived, the food was cooked and the tables were laid and the waitresses were calm and smiling.

Everything was smoothed over.

Mrs. Scarlatti died in March, on a bitter, icy afternoon.

When the nurse phoned Ezra, he felt a crushing sense of shock. You would think this death was unexpected. He said,

“Oh, no,” and hung up, and had to cal back to ask the proper questions. Had the end been peaceful? Had Mrs.

Scarlatti been awake? Had she said any words in particular? Nothing, said the nurse. Real y, nothing at al ; just slipped away, like. “But she mentioned you this morning,” she added. “I almost wondered, you know?

It was almost like she sensed it. She said, “Tel Ezra to change the sign.” his “Sign?” was “It’s not Scarlatti’s Restaurant any more,” she said. Or something like that. “It isn’t Scarlatti’s.” I think that’s what she said.” From the pain he felt, Mrs. Scarlatti might as wel have reached out from death and slapped him across the face. It made things easier, in a way. He was almost angry; he was almost relieved that she was gone. He noticed how the trees outside sparkled like something newly minted.

He was the one who made the arrangements, working from a list that Mrs. Scarlatti had given him months before.

He knew which funeral home to cal and which pastor, and which acquaintances she had wanted at the service. A peculiar thing: he thought of phoning the hospital and inviting that foreign family. Of course he didn’t, but it was true they would have made wonderful mourners. Certainly they’d have done better than those who did come, and who later stood stiffly around her frozen grave. Ezra, too, was stiff—a sad, tired man in a flapping coat, holding his mother’s arm. Something ached behind his eyes.

If he had cried, Mrs. Scarlatti would have said, “Jesus, Ezra. For God’s sake, sweetie.”

Afterward, he was glad to go to the restaurant. It helped to keep busy—stirring and seasoning and tasting, stumbling over the patch in the floor where the center counter had once stood. Later, he circulated among the diners as Mrs.

Scarlatti herself used to do. He urged upon them his oyster stew, his artichoke salad, his spinach bisque and his chili-bean soup and his gizzard soup that was made with love.

The Country Cook

Cody Tul always had a girlfriend, one girl after another, and al the girls were wild about him til they met his brother, Ezra. Something about Ezra just hooked their attention, it seemed. In his presence they took on a bright, sharp, arrested look, as if listening to a sound that others hadn’t caught yet. Ezra didn’t even notice this.

Cody did, of course. He would give an exaggerated sigh, pretending to be amused. Then the girl would col ect herself. It was already too late, though; Cody never al owed second chances. He had a talent for mental y withdrawing.

An Indian-faced man with smooth black hair, with level, balanced features, he could manage, when he tried, to seem perfectly blank, like a plaster clothing model.

Meanwhile, his ragged, dirty, unloved younger self, with failing grades, with a U in deportment, clenched his fists and howled, “Why? Why always Ezra? Why that sissy pale goody-goody Ezra?”

But Ezra just gazed into space from behind his clear gray eyes, from under his shock of soft, fair hair, and went on thinking his private thoughts. You could say this for Ezra: he seemed honestly unaware of the effect he had on women.

No one could accuse him of stealing them deliberately. But that made it al the worse, in a way.

Cody half believed that Ezra had some lack —a lack that worked in his favor, that made him immune, that set him apart from ordinary men. There was something almost monkish about him. Women never real y managed to penetrate his meditations, although he was unfailingly courteous to them, and considerate. He was likely to contemplate them in silence for an inappropriate length of time, and then ask something completely out of the blue.

For instance: “How did you get those little gold circles through your ears?” It was ridiculous—a man reaches the age of twenty-seven without having heard of pierced earrings. However, it must not have seemed ridiculous to the woman he was addressing. She raised a finger to an earlobe in a startled, mesmerized way. She was spel bound. Was it Ezra’s unexpectedness? The narrowness of his focus? (he’d passed up her low-cut dress, powdered cleavage, long silky legs.) Or his innocence, perhaps. He was a tourist on a female planet, was what he was saying. But he didn’t realize he was saying it, and failed to understand the look she gave him.

Or didn’t care, if he did understand.

Only one of Cody’s girlfriends had not been attracted to his brother. This was a social worker named Carol, or maybe Karen. Upon meeting Ezra, she had fixed him with a cool stare. Later, she had remarked to Cody that she disliked motherly men.

“Always feeding, hovering,” she said (for she’d met him at his restaurant), “but acting so clumsy and shy, in the end it’s you that takes care of them. Ever notice that?” However, she hardly counted; Cody had so soon afterward lost interest in her.

You might wonder why he went on making these introductions, considering his unfortunate experiences —

the earliest dating from the year he turned fourteen, the latest as recent as a month ago.

After al , he lived in New York City and his family lived in Baltimore; he didn’t real y have to bring these women home on weekends. In fact, he often swore that he would stop it.

He would meet somebody, marry her, and not mention her even to his mother. But that would mean a lifetime of suspense.

He’d keep watching his wife uncomfortably, suspiciously.

He’d keep waiting for the inevitable —like Sleeping Beauty’s parents, waiting for the needle that was bound to prick her finger in spite of their precautions.

He was thirty years old by now, successful in his business, certainly ready to marry. He considered his New York apartment temporary, a matter of minor convenience; he had recently purchased a farmhouse in Baltimore County with forty acres of land.

Weekends, he traded his slim gray suit for corduroys and he roamed his property, making plans. There was a sunny backyard where his wife could have her kitchen garden.

There were bedrooms waiting to be stocked with children.

He imagined them tumbling out to meet him every Friday afternoon when he came home.

He felt rich and lordly. Poor Ezra: al he had was that disorganized restaurant, in the cramped, stunted center of the city.

Once, Cody invited Ezra to hunt rabbits with him in the woods behind the farm. It wasn’t a success. First Ezra fel into a yel ow jackets’ nest. Then he got his rifle wet in the stream. And when they paused on a hil top for lunch, he whipped out his battered recorder and commenced to tooting “Greensleeves,” scaring off al living creatures within a five-mile radius —which may have been his intention.

Cody wasn’t even talking to him, at the end; Ezra had to chatter on by himself. Cody stalked wel ahead of him in total silence, trying to remember why this outing had seemed such a good idea. Ezra sang “Mister Rabbit.”

“Every little soul,” he sang, blissful y off-key, “must shine, shine…”

No wonder Cody was a cuticle chewer, a floor pacer, a hair rummager. No wonder, when he slept at night, he ground his teeth so hard that his jaws ached every morning.

Early in the spring of 1960, his sister, Jenny, wrote him a letter. Her divorce was coming through in June, she said—

two more months, and then she’d be free to marry Sam Wiley. Cody didn’t think much of Wiley, and he flicked this news aside like a gnat and read on. Though it looks, she said, as if Ezra might beat me down the aisle. Her name is Ruth but I don’t know any more than that. Then she said she was seriously considering dropping out of medical school.

The complications of her personal life, she said, were using up so much energy that she had none left over for anything else. Also, she had gained three pounds in the last six weeks and was perfectly obese, a whale, living now on lettuce leaves and lemon water. Cody was accustomed to Jenny’s crazy diets (she was painful y thin), so he skimmed that part. He finished the letter and folded it.

Ruth?

He opened it again.

… as if Ezra might beat me down the aisle, he read. He tried to think of some other kind of aisle—airplane, supermarket, movie house—but in the end, he had to believe it: Ezra was getting married. Wel , at least now Cody could keep his own girls. (this gave him, for some reason, a little twinge of uneasiness.) But Ezra! Married?

That walking accident? Imagine him in a formal wedding—

forgetting license, ring, and responses, losing track of the service while smiling out the window at a hummingbird.

Imagine him in bed with a woman. (cody snorted.) He pictured the woman as dark and Biblical, because of her name: Ruth. Shadowed eyes and creamy skin.

Torrents of loose black hair. Cody had a weakness for black-haired women; he didn’t like blondes at al . He pictured her bare shouldered, in a red satin nightgown, and he crumpled Jenny’s letter roughly and dropped it in the wastebasket.

The next day at work, Ruth’s image hung over him. He was doing a time-and-motion study of a power-dril factory in New Jersey, a dinosaur of a place. It would take him weeks to sort it out. Joining object K to object L: right-hand transport unloaded, search, grasp, transport loaded… He passed down the assembly line with his clipboard, attracting hostile glances. Ruth’s black hair bil owed in the rafters. Unavoidable delays: 3.

Avoidable delays:.. No doubt her eyes were plum shaped, slightly tilted. No doubt her hands were heavily ringed, with long, oval fingernails painted scarlet.

When he returned to his apartment that evening, there was a letter from Ezra. It was an invitation to his restaurant this coming Saturday night. You are cordial y invited was centered on the page like something engraved—Ezra’s idea of a joke. (or maybe not; maybe he meant it in earnest.) Oh, Lord, not another one of Ezra’s dinners. There would be toasts and a fumbling, sentimental speech leading up to some weighty announcement—in this case, his engagement. Cody thought of declining, but what good would that do? Ezra would be desolate if a single person was missing. He’d cancel the whole affair and reschedule it for later, and keep on rescheduling til Cody accepted.

Cody might as wel go and be done with it. Besides, he wouldn’t at al mind meeting this Ruth.

Ezra was listening to a customer—or a one-time customer, from the sound of it. “Used to be,” the man was saying, “this place had class. You fol ow me?” Ezra nodded, watching him with such a sympathetic, kindly expression that Cody wondered if his mind weren’t somewhere else altogether. “Used to be there was fine French cuisine, flamed at the tables and al ,” said the man.

“And chandeliers. And a hat-check girl.

And waiters in black tie. What happened to your waiters?”