How to Fall (9 page)

Inez carried a basket of leeks. Her eyes were pennies. Dark curls were silvered here and there. Only the scar interfered with her careless beauty; the scar and also the crooked upper teeth, too many of them, forced to slant backwards into the mouth. The large straight canines looked like fence posts. But her smile was warm despite the unruliness within, or maybe because of it.

“This is Pinky,” said Marvin. “Our new associate.”

 

The trifle didn't require the oven. It did require the whole of the supplemental refrigerator, a box the height of a bedside table, the kind of thing that college kids used for beer. This refrigerator had been bought especially for the trifle, though it was home also to Kazuki's insulin and the breast milk for Fogg's infant child. Fogg had to bring the baby to work whenever his wife, a hospital chaplain, was on call. Sometimes this happened on a Thursday night. The child had a name, but everybody followed Marvin's example and called him Blessed Event. Blessed Event usually slept placidly in a wicker basket underneath the bar, but sometimes
he did wake up; then someone would plunge the bottle into a cup of very hot water, and then whoever was least in demand would feed the little fellow—Fogg himself, or Marvin, or Inez, or Pinky, or Kazuki; occasionally a trusted guest took on the job.

The trifle was made in two stainless twenty-portion pans. Now Pinky put them side by side on the wooden trestle table. She pressed cake into the bottom of the pans. She poured on rum. She opened the glass preserving jar. The purple jam shivered.

Trout—forty of them currently occupied a wooden ice chest—patiently awaited Kazuki's attention. Tomatoes, now in a basket, would soon offer their smooth cheeks to Inez's knife... “Know what I think?” Pinky said to Marvin, who had put on his quilted vest and taken chopping board and onions onto the back porch to avoid scenting the trifle.

“What do you think?” he amiably asked.

“I think God created potatoes on behalf of our
Patate in Tegame.”
She spread jam on top of the soaked cake.

“You are a sentimental goose,” he replied. “Goose, goose—shall we do a goose one of these days?”

“Oh, Lord, yes, with prune dressing.” Her mind skidded helplessly back to the Christmas before last; meanwhile she dropped custard onto the layer of jam, spoonful by spoonful. Her mothers had given a holiday party for twenty people. She had roasted a goose. “You have a rare talent,” said one of the guests, rising from the crowded table and lifting his glass, his dyed hair greenish under the cruel light of the chandelier. “Pinky we love you,” and he probably did, they probably all did, those couples, some tender, some uneasy, some disappointed . . . She was still covering jam with custard. “My parents are
embarazo grande,”
her
best eighth-grade friend Evangelista had once confessed. “Five years in this country, maybe fifty words of English. Yet they're
muy
intelligent,” she added fiercely, as if Pinky might suggest otherwise.

“The custard is depleted,” said Marvin. “You are spooning air.”

Pinky stored the two pans of trifle in the little refrigerator. This past Christmas she had feasted with Marvin and Inez and the others in their narrow brick house just on the border of Boston. On holidays and Sundays the staff always gathered for supper at the Fiores'. Attendance seemed to be one of the terms of employment.

On Sundays Kazuki brought his ancient mother. On Sundays cheerful, freckled Fogg brought his cheerful, freckled wife, who always wore a turtleneck as if it approximated a priest's collar; or maybe she too bore a scar, located, unlike Inez's, in a place of concealment. She carried Blessed Event. Inez cooked a new dish—a thick soup, maybe, or a ragout, testing it out; and they all dined together at a round table, shoulder to shoulder, an experience impossible at the busy Local; and Marvin toasted Our Family; and the dark unused bedrooms upstairs weighed on Pinky's spirits which were never high on Sundays anyway—for what were they doing back in Providence without Pinky to interpret the news to, or to drag along to a dreary art film, or to hold the sign at a demonstration while they shouted: the two of them in similar but not identical long ash-colored coats and cropped pewter hair; really, home with its pale walls and engravings and vases of eucalyptus was composed of hundreds of shades of gray.

“I already told you: I don't know why they never had children,” Kazuki had snapped. “I suppose you're always asking
them
why I never got married.” No, she wasn't. She'd met plenty of Kazukis,
comfortable solitaries, not yearning after men, not yearning after women.

“Marvin and I discussed it only once,” Fogg told her. “They kept trying, you know, well maybe you don't, anyway it got too late and not everyone wants to go to Romania, who can tell what you'd come back with; and not everyone wants to hire a surrogate or have a blind date with a sperm bank.” She'd looked at him sharply; but his expression was innocent. “I think they've adjusted. They like our son.” And so Pinky, cold with fear, imagined Inez snatching up Blessed Event one Thursday night, running with him into the black street, leaping onto a trolley, then a train, then a bus, finally crossing the Mexican border... Fogg, not party to this vision, serenely polished wineglasses.

Christmas—two months ago now; turkey stuffed with olives—had turned out to be like Sunday suppers, only longer. There was a tree and there were presents. Marvin and Inez gave Pinky earrings, which she guessed she'd have to wear. Fogg and his wife gave her a book about the South Pole, which she guessed she'd have to read. Kazuki and his mother gave her a framed print of Hokusai's
The Great Wave.
She liked it. Her mothers sent a red bathrobe.

After dinner they sang carols. Kazuki—whose father had been Irish, though no one could tell by looking at him—sang “Mither Machree” in a strong tenor. “I inherited two cuisines,” he said. “They cannot be folded into each other,” he lamented.

Pinky amused the baby. Marvin beat Fogg's wife at chess. Everybody played poker. Kazuki's mother won three dollars. There was no talk about animal rights, same sex marriage, the National Endowment for the Arts, or the work of Djuna Barnes.

Now Pinky turned her attention to odd jobs—grating horseradish for the salad dressing, slicing potatoes for the
Patate,
trundling the barrow over to the cleaners to pick up the white tablecloths that were used only on Thursdays. She had to wait while a guy who looked like Albert Einstein left an old tweed suit to be cleaned. The thing was shredding. He was an absent-minded physicist, for sure—but too old, and much too short.

Then it was six o'clock. She went upstairs to put on her waitress's black dress and her earrings.

The room and bathroom over the kitchen had been scrubbed and painted before she moved in. Striped curtains beautified the single window—curtains run up by Inez on one of the gloomy days when she stayed home. On the floor lay a woven rug Fogg found in a yard sale.
The Great Wave
hung over the bed.

Among the new things Pinky had discovered two pieces of old evidence.

One was a vial of pills lying on its side in a back corner of a bookshelf. The vial was dusty, its label long since curled off; and the pills were various shapes and sizes and pastel tints; and some were capsules, the slow-acting enteric kinds; and some were little halfovals, sliced by a razor.

The other item was a photograph, stuck behind the middle drawer of the bureau. Three people smiled from the snapshot: Inez and Marvin, about ten years earlier, and an unidentified young man. His gold-rimmed glasses reflected light away from eyes and eyebrows. His hairline receded gently. His lips were drawn back into a sad smile.

Not hard to figure out who he was. He was Marvin's business
partner. He was Inez's lover. He had turned a knife against Inez when she refused to leave Marvin for him. He had been banished.

Where was he now?

How was he faring without his pills?

 

Patrons began to arrive at seven forty-five, and by a few minutes past the hour almost all the tables were filled. Conversation strummed, laughter twanged. Kazuki stirred the soup and sang “Rose of Tralee” under his breath.

Pinky and Fogg brought tall glasses of champagne to each guest. “My disappointment is profound,” Pinky heard an elegant man saying to Inez; and as he spoke he rose on the tips of his polished shoes. “I heard about The Local across the waters, in Paris.”

“I am sorry you didn't hear about the need for reservations,” Inez said smoothly. “Please come tomorrow for lunch; we may have some trifle left.”

He bowed over her fingers.

Most guests were not tourists. Guidebooks ignored The Local—it served dinner only on Thursdays, and it didn't advertise. A recent newspaper review—newspapers did grudgingly pay attention—praised the food and then complained about the lack of choice.

“Choice: what an overvalued commodity,” Marvin remarked.

The early arrivals were finishing their champagne cocktails. Later ones were beginning theirs. The very latest were entering. The folding glass doors, now affixed with storm panes, were drawn together. The next-to-last customer entered, a furred woman—and how warm that gleaming longhaired collar looked against the windchapped face. Kazuki showed her to a table for one. A table for one
was a financial loss, but The Local did not discriminate against isolates. The last foursome came in now, smiling at people here and there; and the door shut for good.

Inez, serving champagne, paused to greet a pair of frequent patrons. Tonight they occupied the best place in the house—the crescent table in the far corner made by glass and wall, a table where two people side by side could observe the bar, and the kitchen, and the other guests. If they turned leftwards they could see the sidewalk glowing under golden street lights, and parked cars crusted with snow.

Pinky cleared the champagne glasses. In the kitchen Kazuki ladled out the soup—puree of kale and broccoli. He put a spoonful of vinegary tomatoes in each bowl. Fogg uncorked bottles at this table, at that. Inez and Pinky served soup. Fogg poured wine. Fogg served soup. Marvin served soup. Inez ladled soup. Kazuki ladled soup. Blessed Event cheeped. Pinky served soup, and then stepped behind the bar. “Not yet,” she soothed. The baby smiled.

A murmur of voices. A gentle slurping. The mild clatter of dishes being removed.

A few minutes of repose.

The salad, now, with horseradish dressing.

Forks clinked against plates. Voices caressed voices. Pinky filled the dishwasher. Kazuki slid trays of
Patate
out of the oven and replaced them with trays of trout, which he had butterflied and lightly oiled and sprinkled with his private herb mixture. Inez stirred lemongrass carrots and caramelized onions. Pinky warmed the baby's bottle. The five workers formed an assembly line: Kazuki at trout and
Patate
, Pinky at carrots and onions, Marvin and Inez and Fogg without apparent haste whisking the dishes to the
patrons. The final two tables were served only by Marvin and Fogg. Inez, seated on a low stool behind the bar, had taken the now noisy baby in her arms; and only someone standing in the back corner near the restrooms could see her in the bar mirror, crouched over the little thing. Could see her, though not her scar. Could see her, though not her prominent canines.

Pinky unloaded the soup plates from the dishwasher, put in the salad plates.

Kazuki went into the back yard to smoke a narrow cigar.

Fogg glided from table to table, adding wine to wine, mineral water to mineral water.

Marvin stood in the corner near the restrooms, almost invisible. But Pinky in the archway of the kitchen knew what to look for. A metallic curve catching a gleam of light—his mustache. A starched wedge—the shirt under his tuxedo jacket. Four small triangles of pale blue neon—the whites of his eyes. He was watching, through the mirror: the gentle motherly crouch; the chin which had once been slashed; the mouthful of muddled teeth guarded by fangs.

Peace descended upon Pinky—the contentment of the nourisher. The kid she'd been, preparing splashy meals, had never felt such satisfaction, though her skinny mothers tried to be appreciative. But they would have preferred suppers of soy butter and Granny Smiths. When she served okroshka they liked the pickles best. Trifle? They would have gagged.

A newcomer to The Local lit a cigarette.

Marvin moved forward. “I'm sorry—at the bar only.”

The stranger took his habit to the bar and sat down. Marvin placed the house ashtray within reach. The smoker could not see Inez and Inez could not see him.

Peace descended upon the customers too. They bent forward toward each other across their messy plates—or, in the case of the woman alone, bent forward toward an invisible companion. They conferred—about business, about art, about the neighbors. Pinky heard the baby's pleased burp, but only because she was listening for it. The smoking customer heard it too—she saw his face turn confusedly toward the kitchen, some funny noise, oh well. He stubbed out his cigarette and returned to his table.