My Life Among the Apes (15 page)

THE CHAIR IS NOW OVER thirty years old.

Both his children slept in his arms as newborns in it, his daughter and then his younger son. When the daughter was in graduate school and the son was taking a year to travel, his marriage ended and he moved into a condominium with an extra bedroom for whichever child might wish to stay.

He placed the chair in the small living room by the bay window. Every day he sits there and reads. Bernie Aronson was right. With use, the paint and wood has become worn and smooth. Age has made it more beautiful.

The Little Underworld of Edison Wiese

EDISON THINKS:

How terrible is the morning rush, so many desperate faces, such weighty grief. And always we fail in our modest but honourable responsibilities.

Take it as evidence of Edison’s delusions, this fragment of the unrolling inner monologue. Edison fills a line of Styrofoam cups with boiled coffee, lids and then nestles them into paper bags beside muffins, croissants, bagels with slabs masquerading as cream cheese. He takes in bills, he gives change. It is the usual morning crush, if perhaps a bit more frantic owing to this being the last day of the year, and Edison’s thoughts would have to be considered exaggerated by any balanced person. Perhaps it is a good thing that he cannot get these thoughts out easily, for Edison stutters, an impediment since early childhood. Already he is on his third carafe of the morning and has to turn from the counter to fill a new filter with grounds. As the morning customers all want American coffee, the espresso machine sits
forlorn
(Edison’s word) on the adjacent counter, its brass dome reflecting the
gaunt visages
(Edison again) as they swarm and recede. Many of those customers are already pulling back the plastic tabs to take scalding swallows before they are even out of the café.

And this is how we should live out our days? Without comfort or consolation, or love, or even the pleasure of stillness? If only I, even in so humble a profession, could make their pain ease a little. But hardly do I have time to say “Good morning” before they are gone again. Am I not here to serve them in some more profound manner?

Yes, it is undoubtedly fortunate that the customers cannot hear, for a person simply does not have such thoughts in the café of an underground mall, with a sixty-three-storey building overhead. Several cellphones begin to chime at the same moment; hands reach into jackets, purses, briefcases.
To be an oasis in a desert of despair!
Edison moans inwardly, reaching for packets of Sweet ’N Low.
And each one of you a Job, proving — or disproving — His existence by your own trials.

THE WASP MAKES HER WAY to the counter. He calls her this because of the tightly fitted belt — a device for selfsuffocation — that the tiny woman wears banded round the waist of her dress. Her face, though, is large and tragic: pale as flour, with eyes and mouth painted to affect an artificial brightness. This morning her lipstick is smudged at one corner; how Edison longs to fix it with a napkin. The Wasp puts down exact change, picks up her coffee without a word, and wobbles away on impossible heels.

It’s the women I feel most sorry for. Does that make me a sentimentalist? How they look like corpses in the morning. And who knows what fears are a burden to their thoughts? Is a child home with fever? Are their husbands brutal or indifferent? Do they yearn for the strong hand, the warm touch in an empty bed? Such unhealthy, unreadable faces.

Already her place is taken by a man with a caterpillar moustache, bellowing his order.
I am not deaf, sir, not deaf.
The clock behind the counter shows a quarter to nine, the worst fifteen minutes of the day. Edison turns, pours, bags, punches the register.
I am not a waiter but an automaton
. If only Beatrice would help, but he knows she is already pressed to the phone in the back room, her world crumbling. So Edison works alone to keep the horrors at bay.

But wait. You need to know how Edison got here. How he became a waiter in a café under the ground, in the
heartless heart of the city
. Then you will see how ridiculous he is.

EVERY WEEKDAY EVENING, FOR THE past two-and-a-half months, Edison has set his alarm clock for five-thirty. He goes to sleep at nine, the same bedtime he knew as a child. He still closes the door on the same room, surrounded by his globe, his
World Book Encyclopedia
, his collection of miniature flags of the United Nations. He still lies on the same bed, looks at the wallpaper of dancers in traditional ethnic costumes as he grows drowsy.

“W-w-one day,” Edison used to tell his mother and father, “I’m g-going to visit every great city in the world.” He had learned the names of each of those cities by the age of twelve yet now, at thirty-three, he has been nowhere but Niagara Falls and Miami Beach. For all his dreaming, Edison is terrified of going anywhere.

When he was in his mid-twenties, Mrs. Wiese gently suggested that her son try living in his own apartment, not far away. “But I l-l-like it here,” Edison answered, returning to the daily crossword spread out on the kitchen table. His mother had gone into the bathroom to cry — cry because her son hadn’t grown up properly, cry because she wouldn’t have to lose him as other mothers lose theirs.

The doctors had no answers for why Edison would not grow up properly. He was so late learning to walk that a battery of tests had been ordered. His stuttering had begun on his first day of school. The teachers reported him as “dreamy,” “distracted,” “gloomy,” “slow,” but also subject to unaccountable fits of laughter. On intelligence tests he scored so wildly and inconsistently that he was finally exempted from taking them to prevent his skewing the class results. Being held back a grade — a decision vigorously opposed by his father — marked the start of his falling behind his own year, who now had professions, houses, cars, children, divorces. One breakfast, looking up from a book on thermodynamics, he pronounced with a grin, “Better to be an idiot s-s-s-savant than just an idiot.” His father had banged his hand on the table and stood up. “You just don’t want to grow up, that’s your problem,” he said, heading down to the basement where he kept his collection of antique barbering equipment, including a reclining chair and striped pole from 1911 that had done service outside a shop in Tuscan, Arizona.

His mother smiled weakly. Perhaps their son was right. He liked to read Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
while watching
Gilligan’s Island.
She could see he was upset about his father storming out by the way he was humming “Ode to Joy” under his breath. He looked up and said, “I wish I had lived in P-P-Paris during the Commune. I could have been a waiter to Lafayette.” His mother had replied absentmindedly, “Don’t be foolish, Edison. I think you could have done a lot better than that.”

Now every morning Edison jumps out of bed, brushes his teeth ferociously, stands under an icy shower, shaves most of the bristles from his chin, and puts on the white shirt and black trousers that he insists on wearing even though Beatrice tells him that he has mistaken her place for the dining room of the Ritz. As he creeps down the stairs he can see the blue flicker of his parents’ television set, left on while they sleep. He sits in the kitchen eating a bowl of Cocoa Puffs and reading the morning comics.

In the mirrored front hall, Edison puts on his fat winter boots, wool mask, parka. Outside, the sky is a bruise over the houses. Edison kicks the dirty ridge of snow along the sidewalk and hums Schumann’s “Kreisleriana.” It takes him fifty minutes to reach the last suburban subway stop, where he descends into the earth, from which he will not emerge for another ten hours. At the King Street station he disembarks, taking a series of passageways, escalators, stairs, and revolving doors, passing the still-dark underground shops that line the tunnels beneath the office towers.
Like Aeneas, I descend with courage and fear
, he likes to tell himself.

And this is the extent of the travels that Edison has ventured to make. He is always the first to arrive at the café; he wears the key that Beatrice finally entrusted him with on a chain under his shirt. So you see: he has not lived, has been nowhere, has experienced almost nothing. What does Edison know about the happiness of human beings? Really, he is a fantastical joke.

And every morning he slides open the glass doors, turns on the espresso machine, puts up the first pot of drip coffee, and begins taking the plastic chairs from the tables. For a moment Edison can almost believe that he is in the café of his imaginings,
refuge of lost souls
.

And then, inevitably, Beatrice arrives.

AT FIVE AFTER NINE, THE crush begins to lessen. Most of the customers are men, senior executive types who can afford to drift into their offices at leisure. Admittedly they look better than the women —
unpummeled
— with their newspapers tucked under their arms and a grim but determined expression on their bluish jaws, as if they are using their full mental powers to keep up the buoyancy of the world’s stock exchanges. Here comes one whom Edison has named Mr. Blood because of his tendency to cut himself shaving; as usual there are bits of toilet paper stuck to his chin and neck where he has nicked himself. Ordering his jumbo coffee (
a revolting size; what does he do, soak his feet in it?
), he frowns at the pages of a Canadian Tire catalogue. Peeking, Edison sees a double-page colour spread of lawnmowers.

Outside the ground is frozen and Mr. Blood dreams of cutting the grass! Like a soldier in the trenches of Verdun who holds on to the memory of life back home. I am a medic behind the front lines, doing inadequate patch-up jobs so that the soldiers can go forth and fight again. Yes, the analogy suits ...

Mr. Blood leaves a tip, a quarter, which Edison pockets regretfully.

The stream of customers is slower, but steady. Beatrice is fortunate that no Starbucks or Second Cup exists at this turn in the tunnel. As Edison crouches to retrieve a Danish from under the counter, he turns to see her punching the phone buttons. She ought to be calling the bakery for shorting their muffin order this morning. She ought to be finding a new bakery altogether. The pastries look edible enough, with their white glazes and swirls of cherry goop, but they taste like theatrical props. To Edison, who thinks too much about these things, it seems a crime that a customer should bite into one of those sweet consolations and receive a mouthful of sawdust.
Yet another sign of the decline of all civilized values
. But Beatrice makes a hearty profit on them and who is to say the customers are dissatisfied? They never complain, but eat the pastries all the same.

In any case, he knows very well that Beatrice isn’t phoning the bakery. She is making her first call of the day to Marcus. Marcus carries a phone on the construction site and so cannot get away from Beatrice’s tormenting calls. Edison hears a greeting and looks over the counter to see Alfonso coming up with his mop and pail. His is the first cheerful face that Edison has seen today and the sight of him eases Edison’s heart a little.

“One es-p-p-p-resso coming up, Alfonso!”

“I’m no in a hurry. No matter how much I mop, the floor stays wet. People say outside it is snowing.”

“Again!”

Edison turns to the machine. As a child he developed the habit of silently addressing inanimate objects around him, from the tube of toothpaste to his bedside lamp. When he bumped into a table he apologized; he patted fire hydrants on the way to school in order to make friends of them so that they wouldn’t shift about to confuse him on his way home again. It is a sign of an insufficient maturation that Edison refuses to give up.
When do we stop loving the things around us? Surely there is no moment when we receive proof positive that they do not know of their faithful service to our well- being. It makes no more sense than that we should cease caring for one another
. In like fashion does he address Beatrice’s third-hand Gaggia with its antiquated array of levers and valves. The machine is temperamental and Beatrice gave up using it, but Edison has gently persuaded it back into operation. Warmed up, it has impressive steam power and could deliver cup after cup of magnificent espresso, fifty, a hundred at a time, in some flourishing café — Florian’s, say, on St. Mark’s Square, or Café Reggio in Greenwich Village. But here, alas, there is only Alfonso and his cup.

Edison places the cup on its saucer, with a small spoon and a sugar cube wrapped in paper, a box of which he has purchased himself. He slides it to Alfonso, who has already drawn his hometown Sicilian newspaper from his pocket. Just the sight of the man swirling his spoon does Edison good. He thinks of all this place might be — and is interrupted by Beatrice, screaming into the phone.

“You want us to stay home? On New Year’s Eve? I knew it, you don’t love me — no, no, admit it! I feel sick. That’s right, Marcus, you are making me ill. I might have to phone an ambulance. You swear? Then prove it. Get those tickets. You think it’s my fault? Then screw you!”

She slams the receiver. “What did I do?” she wails, picking it up again and frantically hitting the buttons.

Poor Beatrice. Even the oppressor suffers
.

EDISON MET BEATRICE ON THE evening of his job interview. It was after closing and she was sitting at one of the small round tables, the surface tacky with spilled Coke, lighting up a cigarillo despite the bylaw and flipping through a copy of
People
although there was a sink full of dishes behind the counter, scrunched napkins on the floor, lipsticked cups on the other tables. Immediately Edison took up a broom and began to whisk the debris into the dustpan.

“Eager little beaver, aren’t you.”

Edison turned crimson. “I’ve come f-for the job of w-w-w-w-waiter.”

“No kidding. Well, it isn’t for a waiter. It’s for a server. You know the difference? Minimum wage, almost no tips, and you have to do every shit job in the place. Sit down and show me your resumé.”

From his pocket, he drew a sheet of paper folded eight times. Beatrice raised an eyebrow and opened it flat on the table. Strands of hair fell into her eyes as she read. “You have something of a checkered career. The number of jobs in which you have lasted for less than a week is impressive.”

“I didn’t like them.”

“What makes you think you’ll like this.”

“I want to work in a café.”

“Uh-huh?” She chain-lit another cigarillo. “You find all this glamorous?”

Vaguely she waved her hand. Edison looked at the chipped counter-top, the fingerprint-marked glass wall separating the café’s small space from the tunnel, the cheap plastic furniture, the scrawled
No Credit
sign taped to the cash register. His heart sank. But he said, “I want to s-s-serve people.”

“Very commendable. So it’s this or the Peace Corps.”

Edison laughed, or rather brayed. He didn’t disagree. He just said, “People need a b-break.”

“You said it.” Beatrice inhaled and curled her bottom lip to send a plume of smoke over their heads. “And I’m one of them. Listen, what I need is reliability. Slavish devotion. I’ve lost three servers in a row. They all went stir-crazy under the ground here, or found better jobs, or couldn’t put up with me. You still interested?”

A flashing diamond of light made Edison squint. He saw the reflecting arc of the brass dome on the counter. “Do I get to work the es-s-s-presso m-m-m-machine?”

She narrowed her eyes. “You must have been one of those kids who got a thrill riding in the front of the streetcar. Sure, if you can make the damn thing work. You also get to wash the dishes, take out the garbage, unstop the sink, and throw out customers when they sit too long.”

“Throw them out?”

“Suggest they leave. Is that better? Can you use an electronic cash?”

Edison said, “I can start tomorrow.”

Beatrice ground out her cigarillo in a dish. Edison noticed ash on her shirt and marked her for a slovenly nature. When she rose, he jumped up from his chair. She was heavy, her shirt half-tucked in, a rivulet of sweat running above her lip.
This is a tormented soul. Maybe I have been brought here to make her day a little lighter
. He gave a tentative smile.

She looked at him hard. “Don’t you try anything. I’ve got a boyfriend named Marcus and he’s built like a stevedore. If you’re going to start tomorrow I might as well show you the basics now. This isn’t paid time, just so as we’re clear. First of all, no long chit-chats with the customers. This is a high turnover business and with the way you t-t-t-talk it’ll take ten minutes just to ask about the goddamn weather.”

After ten minutes on the microwave, the bagel toaster, the packets of instant hot chocolate, she confessed to him the disaster that was her life. The first marriage gone bad. The abortion. How she was afraid that Marcus too would leave on account of her moods. “I ask too much of him. The guys at work call him pussy-whipped. But if he loved me he’d tell them where to go! If only I could let up. I’ve tried shrinks, pills. Nothing works. I guess I’m an all-or-nothing personality.”

Beatrice lifted a greasy plastic dome from the counter and picked up a slice of carrot cake. She stuffed the front of the wedge into her mouth, leaving a smear of icing on her lip.
How little we can see from the outside of the turmoil within
, he thought. Suddenly she looked at him hard, as if sorry to have opened her mouth. “My advice to you is to start off on the right foot. Be here at 7:30 sharp. Twice late and you’re fired.”

The next morning was the first and only time that Edison’s mother got up with him. “You never took this much trouble to get a decent job,” she sighed, watching him from the bathroom door as he stood in his underwear and shaved. “This is a dead end, sweetie. Besides, what if someone we know sees you?” But Edison did not answer. As he pulled on his galoshes she said, “Go. I hope something good comes of it. You’re a strange boy.” She kissed his forehead, a blessing of sorts.