Hatched (23 page)

It was beautiful, so beautiful. Stan handed it to John in a scene akin to one in which young lovers allow the first touch, gentle, quiet, in a kind of precious disbelief that remains throughout lovers’ lives, rekindled from time to time when drugs or profound lust reignites that familiar feeling. For John, that familiar feeling was brought on by these regular purchases, purchases that literally warmed his aging sex to stimulation, even as they created that sickening, sinking feeling in the pit of Doris’s well-worn, acid-reflux infested, bookkeeper’s stomach.

John examined his prey, carefully. It was a platinum-colored egg, with a gorgeous hinged lid, adorned with colored enamel, and mounted on a base of pure onyx. Preposterously, indeed preposterously enough for a man like John, Peter Carl Fabergé had somehow managed to engrave a map of Russia, illustrated with the route of the Trans-Siberian Railway on the central silver section. Etched upon that map of ambition fulfilled was an inscription:

“The route of the Grand Siberian Railway in the year 1900.”

Magnificent.

Like the original, the copy that John held in his hot hands had elements, although not as many as the original, made of onyx, silver, gold, quarts, and vitreous enamel, and each station was marked upon the map with a (semi) precious stone. As such, it was “precious” enough to be of interest to John, and in its gaudy detail it replicated the preposterously wild ambitions of its original. But it was also, as its namesake suggests, “semi.” This semi was an issue for Doris, because over and above the empty bank account from which John was to draw for this inevitable purchase, there was the knowledge that only a real fetishist would buy a work of this nature. And no matter how much he appreciated its workmanship, he couldn’t really hope that someone might someday want to possess a similar collection. Furthermore, given that it was but a collection of copies, it wouldn’t satisfy someone’s related obsessions for precious stones, original artwork, or the chance to own a one-of-a-kind design. Everything John had purchased over the many years of his mania was beautiful and invaluable, but only to him, and in bankruptcy nobody would care how much he had paid for them. On the other hand, Doris mused, maybe that was part of his plan. Somebody might conceivably purchase the used pots, pans, and knives with which John had built his Fabergé Restaurant, but nobody would want his trinkets, and so he’d be able to save them from creditors.

“Did he ever think this way? Is this part of the master plan?” wondered Doris to herself.

John’s piercing, blue eyes took in the scene, and he seemed to grin with satisfaction and lust as he undertook his inspection of this precious commodity, attentive, perhaps, to Doris’s silent ruminations.

The Fabergé egg in his possession was held up by three carefully cast griffins, in gold-plated silver, just like the original, and each griffin brandished, menacingly, a sword and a shield. Once again, like a memory of early love and lust in which each lover knew that the other hid untold, sweet secrets beneath precious cotton or silk and amidst tufts of soft and unexpectedly silken hairs, John knew that the egg contained a locomotive, inserted section by section into its innards. The very thought of this machine creation, built in the most rugged of materials to withstand the strain of screaming through Siberia’s frigid temperatures, was brought to a higher climax since it was rendered in the original in pure platinum, with lanterns of deep—red rubies, rosette headlights, and five ornate, gold coaches with windows made of rock crystal.

John rotated the egg and its contents in his skilled hands and looked carefully for the famed inscriptions, and, in a deal-maker, found them; the coaches, as he assembled them, bore inscribed labels: “Mail,” “For Ladies Only,” “Smoking,” and “Non-Smoking.” With fingers as rugged as they are ductile, he then reached into the egg and withdrew the last coach for the little assembly, a coach labeled “Chapel,” and, almost shockingly, found a tiny gold key with which the train was wound up. This action and its amazing locomotive result was a kind of miracle that recalls Nate’s kitchen experiments, but rather than sentient beings coerced through silverware obstacles, this movement was affected by a precious train that could be made to chug along upon the wooden Fabergé Restaurant table. Had he been of that ilk, John would have gasped. As it was, he simply stared at the little creation that chugged along silently before him, in all of its miniature and imitative glory. But his grey-blue eyes seemed to twinkle, blue and platinum.

Watching John, Doris knew that this little creation, a feeble but, honestly, really remarkable, little facsimile, would never return to its warm, leather home, but would rather be itself an egg within John’s own Fabergé egg. As such, this facsimile of a locomotive had found its next stop and would join the collection of Fabergé miniatures that John had purchased over the many years of his work in that restaurant. The train route depicted by this egg had many stops, but for John this marked the end of a trail that had led him from Waltham all the way to the lust, greed, decadence, and waste of Wall Street. In that regard, this moment recalled a century ago, 1917, when in spite of the wealth and magnificent possessions of the few, famine threatened the gigantic country of Russia. While the czar and the wealthy aristocrats chose from the plethora of beautiful bounty, riots and strikes of common people demanding bread rose, like butter-drenched soufflés. Marie Antoinette had once said, “Let them eat cake,” by which she actually meant soufflé, and now trickle-down capitalism was sending but crumbs to the vast majority, and masterpieces to the few. John held in his hand an egg commemorating a great engineering achievement of the czarist era, but he also held the very symbol of the waste, corruption, and greed that made such masterful achievements possible.

John wasn’t a czar, though, and Stan was hardly the great Peter Carl Fabergé, offering his wares for his own advancement and wealth. But there were, nevertheless, some eerie coincidences between that era and this Manhattan eve. This was not the pre-dawn massacre of Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, and Alexei in a basement by the Bolshoi henchman on that fateful July 17, 1918. And Doris, watching the ongoing transaction with horror and concern, was certainly not Nicholas’s mother, Dowager Empress Maria Fedorovna, who miraculously escaped the assassins’ bullets. And this beautiful facsimile of the egg honoring the completion of the Trans-Siberian Railway was not the order of St. George egg, the last Fabergé imperial Easter egg that the empress would ever receive from her son Nicholas, the one-time czar of all the Russians. No, this was New York City, Saturday evening. This was 101 years after the assassination of the ruling family of Russia, the end of an entire system by which inherited wealth was maintained through oppression and rugged institutional norms.

Looking back one century from this New York night brings to bear other revolutionary anniversaries. Neither John-the-Owner nor Doris-the-Bookkeeper were aware of it, but their meeting with Stan was almost exactly one hundred years after Sir Frank Watson Dyson’s landmark experiment to observe a total solar eclipse that would happen just as the sun was crossing the bright Hyades star cluster. Dyson knew that the light from the stars would have to pass through the sun’s gravitational field on its way to Earth, but would be still visible due to the darkness of the eclipse, permitting accurate measurements of the stars’ gravity-shifted positions in the sky. And so, near the remote island of Príncipe in the Gulf of Guinea, just off the west coast of Africa, Dyson was able to measure the stars’ positions as viewed through the sun’s gravitational lens, and confirmed predictions from a then-obscure physicist named Albert Einstein.

From jeweled eggs to mass starvation, from revolution to assassination, from Stan’s stash to John’s eggy collection, paradigms were exploding.

Doris decided that if no words were uttered by either Stan or John, it was because there was quite literally nothing more to say. Maybe, there never was. And so she remained silent, contemplating some of the final figures that would define her decades-long relationship with John. She had been wondering all week long how she could possibly break the news to John that they were broke, irrevocably broke, their shell was not just cracked, it was broken. The enormous debt that was weighing down upon Fabergé Restaurant had finally become too much to bear. But maybe, she thought as she watched him admire this ornate trinket, it was appropriate that she not emphasize the lugubriousness of the situation. Instead, she just watched as John lived out the last hours of his Fabergé Restaurant dream. To watch him gleefully handle another Fabergé creation, she realized that he looked like a man who was successfully completing his life’s work, rather than throwing away the last few resources he had at yet another facsimile of bygone success.

At that moment, Doris felt old, and tired, and for the first time she felt a degree of warm-heartedness for this slimy salesman Stan, who now extended his hand to John in order to secure a handshake that would bring eternity to its knees. Stan grinned, and John seemed to scowl in profound approval. And then, with a final swig of the few remnants of that delectable eggnog, Stan walked out the door, and, unbeknownst to anyone present for the occasion, out of John’s life—forever.

Over the years, Stan had brought John a collection of nearly worthless trinkets that added up to a world, and now he was done. Perhaps that’s what everybody did, in the tiny amount of time allotted to them to enjoy the pleasures of this life. They gather together the memories of loves loved, orgasms felt, kisses enjoyed, children born, smiles smiled, hands grasped, nights passed, drinks swallowed, tastes savored, and finally, in one last moment, unforeseen or not, the entire artifice reveals itself as such, a delicious, passionate, climactic, forceful, magnificent sensation comprised of everything, and nothing.

John’s father remembered precise instruments and the power that is the birth and nurturing of a child. So, too, had John assembled the little eggs of a natural world and turned them into this place of dreams, depth, and death. Maybe John had succeeded, however, because his own creation, his Fabergé Restaurant, was in fact an egg, and it had grown into a place that Jessica and Tina had nourished, that Nate had elaborated, and inside of which Ted and Tom and Steve had laid a plan for another world, a better place. In the end, Jude would of course betray the entire enterprise, and thereby make way for a resurrection.

For myself, I felt a pang of sadness, as the world worked up to its inevitable climax, and felt, too, as those young lovers who, having found their dream, their implosion, their explosion, and their breathless aftermath, were, in those few moments, the culmination and the finale of every symbolic, supernatural, and spiritual idea with which they had invested that experience, and that what lay ahead was the consequences of what they’d hatched, and smashed, as the shell lay shattered between the sheets, and the yolk dribbled down each of their once-pulsating, and now quietly sweating and anxious, thighs.

Chapter 19

Jessica walked into the Yolk and saw Boris-the-Pinch-Hitter behind the broad set of ranges and scowled. He was from bloody Shucks and Shells. She didn’t even have to ask anyone to realize that. Shucks and Shells, that loud, aggressive, assembly line that the stupid bastard Tommy had started up in the mid-1980s with his father’s money.

Jessica knew Tommy, because she had been fucked by him once, fucked, she knew, not made love to, not seduced: fucked. This unpleasant event had occurred in one of her first restaurant jobs, when he had kept her after the closing of his restaurant to bestow upon her the sacred job of what he called “steam chef,” the one who had that right to place the lobsters and corn upon the white porcelain plates for which Shucks and Shells was famous. Those microwaveable plates, available for sale in the restaurant entrance, bore images of the food already ingested upon their very surface in the form of painted renditions of corn and lobster. Microwaveable! Tommy had converted to microwave ovens, and not steamers, which Tommy’s father had used in his own restaurant. Microwave ovens, those sacrilege molecule-rubbers that render food piping-hot, for a short time, and then perversely warm on the inside, and cold on the outside. Because restaurants use them even despite their obvious flaws, waiters and waitresses set timers, wait for the friction process to finish, and then withdraw the plates from the “ovens” for immediate delivery to clients who are encouraged, by the perversion that is American eating habits, to “work on” consuming everything expeditiously. Delays in the process result in food that is as unevenly heated as intercourse with a rubber doll.

Tommy wanted to ward off the costs of real cooks and chefs, and so he took the shortcuts that his father had refused, most notably the employment of a device that offers to stale bread the promise of rebirth, but instead delivers false pleasures. Carefully kneaded baguettes hint at supple softness, but then transform themselves into a sponge not even worthy of cleaning the rim of a toilet bowl, all within a matter of 120 seconds. To ensure that his clients wouldn’t notice the difference, Tommy also fostered the idea of eating as an accomplishment that was to be undertaken quickly, and with due diligence. The end result was, from a pecuniary standpoint, pure genius. He had among the highest turnovers of clients of any restaurant in the city, including many of the fast-food horror shows.

Tommy also sold more desserts than almost any other “fine-dining” institution, because clients’ brains had not even the time to register their satiation, given the speed at which they were inspired to eat in Shucks and Shells. And finally, because he had inspired this idea of eating-as-accomplishment, Tommy also managed to convince his clients that since they’d done their “work” of eating well, they deserved a drink; and so after-dinner drinks, such as cheap brandy poured into horrible New York City coffee and covered with “nutrafill,” the chemical and “edible oil” version of whipped cream, became a “local favorite” for which “natives” and “non-natives” alike would stand in line.