Fraud (4 page)

Dos Más had nothing on us. Limbs were stroked, kisses were had, bodies were rubbed, people we hardly knew—in kitchens with the lights out—interrupted intermittently for the opening of the fridge door for a beer; in darkened rooms on piles of coats, one or two of which would invariably need to be retrieved midclutch, with sheepish, whispered apology; in the backs of cabs, hurtling drunkenly toward one or the other’s home, “the meter glaring like a moral owl,” to quote Elizabeth Bishop, ticking away money we could ill afford.
This
was the true spirit of Christmas, boys and girls.

A few weeks into my Psychic Secretary–hood, I sat in a movie theater packed to the rafters. Just before the lights went down, a woman marched up the aisle, looked at me, and asked: “Is that seat taken?”

I was nowhere near the end of the row, but trying to be helpful, I asked, “Which seat?”

Looking directly into my eyes, she said: “That seat.” She pointed. She was pointing to the center of my chest.

“Well . . .
I’m
sitting here,” I finally managed.

As if I were her college-age daughter who had suddenly announced that I was a vegetarian, she shrugged in a kind of “suit yourself” indulgence of my fantasy of existence and moved on. I looked up and down the row for some sort of laughter, some eye-rolling commiseration, or just plain corroboration that this had just happened, but I got no response. To this day I cannot explain it. Was this an emissary sent from on high at that time of year, not to trumpet the birth of the son of God, but to proclaim with heavenly proof my complete and utter insignificance? She’s right, I thought. This seat isn’t taken. It was the perfect moment for that time in my life. I mean that, of course, in the worst way possible.

The theater went dark. Up on the screen the camera zoomed past a huge close-up of the Statue of Liberty, swooping down to find the Staten Island ferry scudding along the water, transporting our Working Girl to her office job, where we already knew she would triumph, vanquish the harpy boss, and win the love of the man.

Sheila taught me a survival technique for getting through seemingly intolerable situations—boring lunches, stern lectures on attitude or time management, those necessary breakup conversations, and the like: maintaining eye contact, keep your face inscrutable and masklike, with the faintest hint at a Gioconda smile. Keep this up as long as you possibly can, and just as you feel you are about to crack and take a letter opener and plunge it into someone’s neck, fold your hands in your lap, one nestled inside the other, like those of a supplicant in a priory. Now, with the index finger of your inner hand, write on the palm of the other, very discreetly and undetectably, “I hate you. I hate you. I hate you . . .” over and over again as you pretend to listen. You will find that this brings a spontaneous look of interest and pleased engagement to your countenance. Continue and repeat as necessary.

In the dark of the theater, I write my message, pressing hard into the flesh of my hand. Although I don’t know who I’m writing to, I’m just glad to feel that it hurts.

BEFORE & AFTER SCIENCE

King Constantine II, the deposed monarch of Greece, was passionate about my French vanilla root beer floats. The French vanilla was definitely one of our better flavors; we charged five cents more per scoop. It was completely reasonable that this crowned head of Europe, with his highly developed taste for the finer things, would insist upon nothing less and insist upon no one but me to make them. This is my boxing Hemingway, my wooing Josephine Baker in a swan-shaped bed.

Not every ice-cream parlor in Toronto in the summer of
1982
came equipped with lapsed royalty. But Athos and Melina, the married couple who owned the shop where I worked, were old friends of the king. He spent his time at the front table, chatting with them in Greek, reminiscing about the good times, back when he was still ensconced in happy figurehead-hood, and when Athos and Melina were clearly at the tippy top of Athenian society, he a drug company executive, she a noted scientist in the perfume industry.

They remembered fondly those halcyon days before Constantine’s reign, however titular, was effectively ended by an outbreak of democracy. Before he threw his lot in with the slim ranks of perpetually tanned do-little European ex-royals, that shallow band of frivolous hemophiliacs who live out their days reading the yachting news, roaming the world, and dressing for dinner.

Athos and Melina had not been quite as leisurely in their travels. The sense one got was that this was a couple on the lam for some reason. From Athens they had fled to the Sudan, where they continued their rarefied lifestyle and where, a few years later, the volatile politics of that region would send them into flight yet again. Landing them in Toronto, exhausted and vaguely punch drunk, the stunned franchisees of a well-known ice-cream parlor that trafficked in an ersatz Barbary Coast saloon chic of faux Tiffany lamps, frosted mirrors, and wrought-iron chairs. It was an aesthetic so relentless and so forced in its attempt to evoke those bygone days in the City by the Bay that it even went so far as to name its biggest and most vulgar sundae after a civic disaster where thousands upon thousands of San Franciscans were killed.
I know a special birthday boy. Will you be having the Earthquake?

Imagine, if you will, the queen of France who, instead of succumbing to the decapitory charms of the guillotine, is safely spirited away from France to England, along with other fortunate aristocrats. Now resettled, she runs a fish-and-chips stand in Brighton, where daily the tiny golden ship perched in the frothy waves of her high, powdered wig regularly topples into the deep-fat fryer. This will give you a sense of how profoundly strange was Athos and Melina’s presence in our midst.

Athos looked like a latter-day Jean-Paul Belmondo, a formerly handsome man whose features have gone rubbery and heavy with age. He wore dress shirts and socks of the thinnest material I had ever seen. It would be years later before I would recognize these garments of dragonfly wings as the haberdashery of choice of the strip club bouncer, the penny-ante henchman, and the double-breasted thug. But to me, at that time, they indicated only his good breeding. He was, for the most part, a surly, taciturn man, constantly trying to bilk us out of our near minimum wages by pretending to suddenly understand less English than he actually did. But despite his gruff manner, Y chromosome, and ultimate control of our salaries, it was no secret who was truly in charge: Melina. Formidable, fire-hydrant-size Melina. If
she
had ever decided to withhold our payment, she would never have resorted to falsely broken English. She would have simply told us outright, and nobody, not the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, nobody, could have gotten our money out of her. I adored her. She was smart as a whip, was possessed of an appreciative and often bawdy sense of humor, and sounded not a little bit like Peter Lorre. She was also prone to moods so changeable—from borderline-inappropriate affection to homicidal seething rage in mere seconds—that one gave up trying to guess her mental state and surrendered to the hurricane of emotion that was Melina. Sometimes she simply abandoned decorum, as when wondering aloud, the store full of people, “Why do the blacks always order the rum raisin? Tell me. Is it the rum?” Or she might take a sudden dislike to a customer she found stupid: “Madam. You see before you two tubs of ice cream. One is brown and one is purple. There are two nameplates on the glass in front of them. So tell me, madam, HOW IS IT POSSIBLE THAT ONLY ONE OF THESE FLAVORS IN FRONT OF YOU WOULD BE NAMED CHOCOLATE FUDGE BROWNIE BLACKBERRY SHERBET?!? Hmmm? Use your head, madam, please.”

While Melina might have yelled at customers with impunity, I have no recollection of her yelling at Athos. In fact, I can barely remember them conversing at all beyond their talks with His Majesty. If you hadn’t known that they were actually married, you might never have guessed it. I thought this chilly estrangement, like Athos’s shirts, was more evidence of some aristocratic world beyond my comprehension.

Actually, Athos and Melina were not aristocrats. They were meritocrats. Their position in that world of Levantine glamour from which they had been lately cast out was earned by dint of study, expertise, and labor. They definitely knew the meaning of hard work. If anything, it was this new realm of pineapple syrup and rainbow jimmies that was not up to the challenge of them.

Take, for example, the light fare that was served in back. Sandwiches, potato skins, fried mozzarella sticks, and the like, all meant to be prepared according to the strict specifications of a menu book put out by number crunchers. A food service manual full of directives about the height from which pancake batter should be poured, the optimum diameter of said pancake, the respective number of slices of processed poultry in the turkey club, versus the sandwich, versus the platter, and so on. Food as utilitarian and unimaginative as that served from the galley of a
747
. Most franchisees left their kitchens in the lugubrious but sufficiently capable hands of a bunch of pot smokers who, a decade later, would find gainful, bleary-eyed employment at Kinko’s.

Not, however, Athos and Melina. To oversee things, they hired Benoît, an Alsatian of mercurial and easily affronted disposition who arrived each day with a leather carrying case of his own carbon-bladed kitchen knives. Many was the customer who ducked in order to avoid an enraged Benoît, who would emerge regularly from the kitchen, clutching an eleven-inch Sabatier in his wildly gesticulating fist, to scream at Melina over one of her cost-cutting measures or a difference of opinion over the finer points of the spicy Buffalo wings with blue cheese dip.
“J’en ai marre de ce bordel! Je ne peux pas faire la cuisine comme ça!”
Even holding weaponry, he was the unarmed party, thoroughly outmatched by the unmovable force that was Melina. A non-native speaker, she could still out-French him, her words flying like tracer bullets from her mouth. After a few minutes of Gallic fireworks, Benoît would return to the back, bested, seething with rage.

Despite Benoît’s pyrotechnics of temperament, the kitchen was still a haven for all of us. As anyone who’s ever worked in an ice-cream parlor can tell you, two things end up happening really quickly: you get sick of ice cream almost immediately, and soon thereafter you fall in love with the nitrous oxide used to make the whipped cream. You Heart Whippets. This ardor eventually cools when you realize that it’s been weeks since you’ve been able to subtract simple sums, use an adjective correctly, or spell your own last name. But at the first bloom of narcotic romance, you merely wonder where whippets have been all your life.

We were frequently joined in our daily worship at the nozzle by Melina and Athos’s son, Nick. I was desperate to be Nick. In
1982
I was sporting pegged trousers so tight at the ankles that by day’s end my feet were numb. I was trying valiantly to look alternative, eccentric. Devo. With my hair in a short-back-and-sides ’do with a long and floppy New Romantic quiff on top, framing a face of such poorly concealed sweetness and naiveté, I looked about as threatening and alternative as a baby poodle—as complicated as one of the ice-cream cones I spent my days scooping.

But Nick! Nick had perfected that epoch’s brand of sullen anomie, with his eyelids at the perpetual half-mast of weary disdain, his two-tone spiky hair and tapered jeans. If the front of the store was Athos and Melina’s putative living room, where they didn’t feel the need to talk to each other except in the presence of company, then the kitchen in back was Nick’s domain, where they almost never ventured. The teenage bedroom of one’s dreams, namely, one with a working refrigerator, a six-foot-tall tank of pressurized mind-altering gas, and a gaggle of stoners to laugh at everything you say.

Aside from working the register occasionally, Nick slouched about curating the music, a seemingly constant running loop of
Big Science
by Laurie Anderson, giving special play to its hit song, “O Superman,” with its obligato of metronomic, aspirating laughter. But his true pride and joy was his self-published magazine,
Before & After Science.
This was years prior to the term
’zine
and the widespread use of computers. Like most every homegrown publication from the Punk/New Wave heyday of the early
1980
s,
Before & After Science
was a samizdat, cut-and-paste affair of snippets of William Burroughs, Sex Pistols lyrics, black-and-white checkerboard backgrounds, lots of ransom note typography, old cheesecake photographs of women in bullet bras, and the ubiquitous image of that Ska Everyman: the porkpie-hatted Teddy Boy, limbs akimbo in a crazy running dance.
Before & After Science
was available for sale at the front of the store at a cost of five dollars for the premiere—and what was to regrettably be the only—issue.

Still, the pile of magazines provided a welcome counterpoint to the saccharine boosterism that invaded the store that summer. It was dubbed the Summer of
Annie
by proclamation of the Head Office, in honor of the release of the musical film adaptation of the Broadway show. Franchisees had been encouraged to invest in
Annie
ice cream, a special tie-in flavor.
Annie
ice cream was a noxious combination of strawberry and marshmallow of such a vile and diabetic coma–inducing nature that it was too cloying even for its target market of little girls, a demographic not known for its sophisticated palate. Seven- and eight-year-old angels would skip into the store, all pigtails and horse love, and the scales would fall from their eyes as they spied the pink and white of the tubs of
Annie,
seeing them for what they were: blatant marketing; a pernicious inducement to submit to the patriarchy. These apple-cheeked youngsters became suddenly hardened and cynical. They took up smoking right there on line, laughing bitterly like baby Piafs, derisively ordering Futility Shakes and double scoops of Alienation Chip.

Available, along with the ice cream, and stacked into a doomed, unpurchased pyramid, were the
Annie
glasses. Drinking glasses emblazoned with the movie’s logo and the likeness of Aileen Quinn, the little girl chosen in a nationwide search to portray the plucky, iris- and pupil-deprived orphan. Sales of these would benefit local charities. Even this altruism was not enough to move a single tumbler. Melina employed her usual insinuating tricks.

“Are you wearing Anaïs Anaïs, madam?” she would coo. “Ah yes, it’s a lovely fragrance. I was one of the chemists who created it in Paris. . . . Yes, thank you so much. Can I interest you in one of our
Annie
glasses? Of course, it’s for charity. . . . No? That’s perfectly fine. I thank you, madam. Good day.”

Wheeling around the instant the door closed, she would hiss at us, “Did you
see
the jewels dripping off of that woman, and she could not even buy one
Annie
glass. This is a film directed by John Huston, the man who made
The Maltese Falcon.
What is wrong with you people?”

We just laughed at her, imitating her anger behind her back. What I could not have known, at age seventeen, was that Melina’s rages had nothing to do with a lack of appreciation for cinematic auteurism. I was too young to smell in the shop air the definite tang of flop sweat. That smell of exertion at keeping away the wolves of failure. It must have seemed so foolproof to them: an American ice-cream parlor . . . and so close to America! And how perfect, too, that summer’s thematic undercurrent: the unloved cartoon urchin with her little mongrel, delivered from abandonment and privation to a life of love and untold riches. What a tale of the New World, what fortunate augury under which to begin one’s life fresh, for the third time. Nick’s magazine might almost have been the story of their family. Before and After Science. “Before” was their tenure in the reliable field of chemistry, where something as ethereal as fragrance—even a fragrance so indescribably heady and complex that its mysteries could be approximated only with images of women lying by swimming pools as shadows of airplanes passed up and across phallic architecture—could be created through the sober logic of a recipe. “After” was this random, anarchic world of business. A world that was failing them—a mapless, unchartable landscape. Looking back, I can see in the pendulum swings of affect the desperation of a woman running out of ground beneath her feet where she could resettle and start over yet again.