Ladies and Gentlemen (5 page)

“I imagine Alaska’s worse.”

The allusion didn’t register for a moment, then he said, “If I come with you, can I hang here afterward?”

“Sooner or later, you’re going to have to deal with your mother.”

“I’d prefer to put that off,” Zach said.

Applelow removed his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. He wished the boy was already gone; he wanted his place in order. But he remembered what Love had said about dealing with his anger, and he put his glasses back on. “Come along then,” he said. “But keep in mind, this is important business.”

Zach skipped the shower and brushed his teeth, but when he emerged from the bathroom in his baggy jeans, sweatshirt, and puffy down jacket, Applelow made him put on one of his overcoats.

“I feel old in this,” the boy said, pulling at the lapels. When he saw Applelow’s expression, he added, “I mean adult.” Down on the street, they walked into the glaring April sunshine that gave no warmth, lowering their eyes and leaning into the stiff wind that gusted off the river.

“Where are we going?” Zach asked.

“First I need a haircut. Then I’m going to look for work.”

“You mean like a job?”

“That’s right.”

He could tell there was an odd novelty to this that the boy relished: so this was how adults found work. They went to a barbershop on 48th Street, where Applelow had his hair trimmed while
Zach skimmed the magazines. Then he canvassed every restaurant in the neighborhood, Zach waiting outside while he filled out the applications (Availability: Immediately). At first the boy was patient, even curious, asking every time Applelow emerged, “How did it go?” or “Did you get the job?” or “What did they say?” But after an hour he grew impatient, distracted, and was dragging so annoyingly far behind that finally Applelow stopped at a market and bought him orange juice and a bagel.

“Is this all I get?” Zach said.

“I don’t know. Do you have money to buy something else?”

The boy’s face darkened, and he dawdled a good ten paces behind until he had to wait outside another restaurant. “Just so you know,” Applelow made sure to tell the managers he was able to meet with, “I can do anything. I can host. I can wait tables. I can bartend. I’ve even done some cooking” (this last a lie). Most of them were kind—business was bad, they told him—but they’d keep his résumé on file. Others were openly dismissive, and at these moments he allowed himself to fantasize about a total success on Monday, the job offered on the spot, and this possibility fortified him. “Thank you for your time,” Applelow told each one with an impregnable appreciativeness. Then, going out the door, he dreamed of stopping by for lunch next week with Ms. Samuel.

“Can we get some food now?” Zach said.

He sat slumped on an apartment stoop, head hung between his shoulders as if he’d just sprinted four hundred yards.

Applelow couldn’t help but feel disappointed; he’d overestimated the boy’s character, and now understood Marnie’s concerns. “There’s a pretzel man at the corner.”

“I don’t want a
pretzel
,” Zach said. “I want
real
food. And I want to eat inside.”

“Then go eat somewhere. We can meet at the apartment later.”

“I can’t,” Zach said slowly, “because I don’t have any money.”

The street was busy. Applelow sat next to him and looked him in the eye. “And how does that feel?”

“What?”

“To have nothing. To have to ask a stranger for help?”

“You’re not a stranger.”

“No?”

“No.”

“So what’s my last name?”

The boy looked startled, then turned away. His teeth began to chatter. “I just want to eat,” he said. “I don’t want a lecture.” He crossed his arms and stared straight ahead.

“All right,” Applelow said. “We’ll eat, and then we can go home.”

“Thank you,” Zach said, immediately brightening. He got up and started quickly down the sidewalk. “There’s a Greek place I saw up the street.”

At the restaurant, Zach ordered the dolmades (Twenty-two dollars! Applelow thought) and attacked it the minute the food arrived, shoveling it in his mouth and sitting back to chew between bites as he watched people walk by through the window. After finishing his stuffed cabbage, he filled his pita with rice and scarfed that down too. Then he pushed the plates back, slid down in his seat,
and put his feet up on Applelow’s side of the booth. He wiped his mouth dramatically, crumpled his napkin, and tossed a gentle hook shot that landed it in his water glass. “The crowd,” he said, “goes wild.”

Applelow pushed his soup bowl aside and, much to Zach’s amazement, pulled another fresh hundred-dollar bill from his wad when the check arrived.

“What’s up with all the coin?” Zach said.

Applelow shrugged. “I’m more comfortable when I have cash on hand.”

“At least you’re prepared for a rainy day.”

He was so furious at the meal’s cost he couldn’t bring himself to look at the boy. “Yes, well, it’s important to think about the future,” he said.

The two of them sat quietly for a time, Zach flushed from eating so quickly, staring into space in what seemed like a trance. Applelow wanted to be rid of him, to have some time alone, but he recalled admonitions about anger. “So,” he said, “what’s next?”

“What do you mean?”

“For you. After this visit. What’s your plan?”

Zach made a huge, cartoonish shrug and wiped his nose with the back of his hand, snorting. “I’ve got a friend in Los Angeles whose dad owns a painting company. They paint houses and shit. He said I could get a job there if I came out. So that’s what I’m thinking. Might leave soon, on Monday or Tuesday.”

“I liked the crab-fishing idea better.”

“Yeah, but … I don’t know. Where do you start?”

“By finishing school.”

“Please.”

“Get a job and save some money.” He sounded just like his father, speaking in the paternal version of cliché. All of it true, of course.

“Since you bought me a good lunch, I’m pretending to listen.”

“How will you get out there?”

“LA? I guess the bus. Do you know how long that’ll take?”

“I mean how to pay for it.”

“Mom will help me. She hates the idea, but she’ll cave. She always does.”

“Is that right?”

“Yup.”

“Lucky you.”

Zach pressed a finger to some spilled rice on the table, then flicked the grains away. “Never been to LA, though,” he said. “I’ll need to learn my way around. Probably need a car, too.”

Applelow, now in a trance himself, watched people strolling by on the sidewalk. It was Saturday afternoon, the traffic on Seventh Avenue light, men and women singly or in pairs heading to a matinee, perhaps, or to nowhere in particular, Monday seeming so far off. What would
that
be like? he wondered, to have no pressing worries or obligations?

“Did
you
finish school?” Zach said.

“Excuse me?”

“College.”

“Yes. In St. Louis. I’m from there.”

The boy nodded. “St. Louis,” he said. The place obviously meant nothing to him. “When did you come to New York?”

“When I was twenty-three. A little older than you.”

Zach pressed more rice against his finger, rolling the grains into
a small ball. He regarded this creation as if it were fascinating, then glanced up. “What was your first job?”

Applelow turned to the side, crossed his legs, and stared at the boy, who again was examining his rice ball. There was something animal in Zach’s hesitance, he thought, a sense of random malignancy so strong it was almost palpable. Was this what Love meant by auras? Or his sensitivity to others an example of latent ability? He tried to detect a color emanating from the boy, but there was nothing.

“I was a park superintendent,” he said at last.

“What’s that?”

“I was employed by the city’s park service to open and close a playground on the Upper West Side.”

Zach appeared as impressed with this as he would’ve been if Applelow had just said he was an astronaut. “You serious?”

“Very.”

“A park?”

“That’s right. A park surrounded by a high fence, with a couple basketball courts and a baseball diamond painted on the concrete. There was a jungle gym and some swings, with black rubber safety mats beneath them. And a see-saw, too.”

“So what did you do?”

“I told you. I opened and closed the park. I unlocked the gate in the morning, then sat down on one of the benches and watched the place. The park service gave me a tan uniform with a patch on the sleeve and a whistle to blow if I needed help or thought the kids were playing too rough. But I never did. Nothing ever happened there.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“That was it?”

He cleared his throat. “They gave me a log to record the number of people who visited each day, and to list any repairs that needed to be made month to month. Also, I had to turn a sprinkler on at ten in the morning and turn it off at six, unless it was raining. I had a small office next to the bathrooms with a desk and a chair, and that’s where I sat when the weather was bad.”

He could see Zach picturing himself as a park superintendent, with the hours, days, and weeks passing by relentlessly.

“But what did you do all day?”

Applelow took off his glasses and cleaned them. The shame was making his head throb. “Mostly I read. I sat on the bench or sometimes in the office, though it got very hot in there. I packed a lunch every day and brought books I took out from the library and read from the moment I got there in the morning until I left at night. I don’t think I’ve ever read so many books in my life.”

“What kind of books?”

“Good books. Great ones, actually. Shakespeare, Conrad. Homer, Virgil. Austen and Chekhov, Brontë and Bellow.” The boy was listening intently. “I had a notion that summer to read all the classics. The five-foot shelf.” Putting his glasses back on, he could see Zach had no idea what he meant. “Have you ever read Shakespeare?”

“I don’t like it.”

“Well, I liked
him
. So much that I read all of it.
Romeo and Juliet. King Lear. The Merchant of Venice. Richard III. Richard II.
” He shook his finger at the boy, thinking of The Peanut Gallery’s production. “Now there’s a great play. Anyway, there was usually a terrific racket in that park, but when I was reading that summer I could concentrate better than I’ve ever been able to. It was
uncanny, actually. It was like the words were life and death to me.” Remembering, he spun his spoon around once, then looked at Zach. None of this was making any sense to him, though Applelow could tell he was still listening. “So after a few weeks, I got so involved with the reading that I stopped keeping my log. I just made the numbers up. Not that anyone checked. Which is my point. No one checked. Do you understand?”

“No.”

“I had a free pass that summer,” Applelow said. “I had
time
, and that’s a rare opportunity. Like the one you have now. Because I could’ve been
doing
something for myself. Studying for the LSAT or becoming a CPA, even joining the military. I could’ve done something
practical
. Gotten something solid under my feet. No one ever does that for you.” He shook his head, frustrated at his inarticulateness. “But it didn’t occur to me. Do you understand?”

Zach stared at him, waiting. “No,” he admitted.

Applelow steepled his fingers, rested his chin on his thumbs, and, after a moment, spread his hands wide. “I threw myself on the world.” He watched Zach after he said this to see if it registered. He wanted to reach out and grab his hand or hold his face and make him look into his eyes until he admitted that he understood. But that would only scare everything Applelow had said straight out of his mind.

“So what happened?” Zach asked after a while.

“What do you mean?”

“With the job?”

“I quit,” Applelow said. “I got tired of reading. It started to make me anxious—just
words, words, words
. One day I suddenly couldn’t concentrate at all. I don’t even know when it happened. I
hit some kind of wall. It got so bad I couldn’t bring myself to read another thing.”

Zach nodded seriously. “I’m like that,” he said.

“So one evening at the end of the summer I just left the park open and didn’t go back. And I got paid for two months after that. It took them that long to figure out nobody was watching the place.”

Zach’s mouth dropped open at this. “That’s awesome.”

“No,” Applelow said. “It was like being invisible. It was like not existing. I didn’t even cash the checks.”

“What?”

“I couldn’t bring myself to.” For a moment, he thought about this. He wished he had those checks now.

“But you got paid for doing nothing,” Zach said.

“That’s right.”

“I want to get a job like that.”

Applelow uncrossed his legs and turned to face him, folding his hands on the table and leaning forward. “If you’re not careful,” he said, “you will.”

Back at Appelow’s apartment, Zach changed his clothes, then nodded toward his mother’s place across the hall. “The moment of truth,” he said, and held out his hand. “Thanks for feeding me, for letting me sleep here, for rapping. Thanks … Applelow.”

Laughing, David clenched his fist, which Zach appreciatively bumped with his own.

“I checked the name on the buzzer when we came in,” Zach said, then let himself out.

Hearing him knock on Marnie’s door, Applelow couldn’t help looking through the peephole. The boy was hanging his head even before the door opened, and when his mother opened the door and regarded him, Applelow could see her react to his expression, mimicking it by turning down her mouth. Then she spread her arms and pulled him to her chest, kissing his hair.

“I’m sorry, Mom,” he said. “I’m really sorry.” At this, he felt something stir inside him, and he quietly slid the peephole closed.

He prayed on Sunday before going to bed. Though it made him self-conscious, he folded his hands and bowed his head and said in his mind:
Lord, please give me this job, whatever it is. Please, give me this job and I will work to improve myself. I will live from here on out in a straight line and never subject myself to uncertainty and promise You not to fail myself. I will work harder than I have ever in my life and will address all my weaknesses if You grant me this. Please, I have things to contribute if I could only break through to a place where I can. And I promise to if You will let me
.