Sneaky People: A Novel (23 page)

A
LONG WITH
Buddy’s saucer containing two preserved kumquats, and Naomi’s pineapple slice, the moon-faced waiter brought two fortune cookies.

Taking one and turning it idly in the light of the pagoda-shaped table lamp, Naomi asked: “Did you ever know anyone who actually ate these?”

This was typical of her conversational contribution.

Buddy smiled feebly. “Ever hear the one about the guy who opened it and found a slip that said, ‘Help, I’m being held prisoner in a Chinese bakery’?”

Gravely, Naomi said: “Yes, I have.”

His smile strengthened with wryness. “It’s a pretty old turkey, I guess. Time I was getting a new one.”

“I wonder,” said Naomi, “if the Chinese have their own form of wit.”

“They’re sure laughing over there,” said Buddy, nodding at a tableful of Orientals across the room.

“There are people who will roar when somebody slips on a banana peel.” Naomi seemed to be saying this to herself while looking at the teapot.

“Don’t they though.” Buddy had eaten his moo goo gai pan in a state of numbness. He could not endure Naomi’s presence, but neither could he depict in mind the eternal silence into which he had arranged to send her. It had been a mistake not to bring Ralph along: he would have relieved the situation by trying to use chopsticks and dropping food in his lap.

Ralph had something of the natural clown in him, which he did not get from either of them. When he was younger he stepped in dogshit a lot, and on the first day of the first grade he sat on his schoolbag, crushing the banana in the outside pocket thereof. Once when visiting some second cousin of Naomi’s who owned a farm, Ralph walked through a cowpie. Another time, leaning over to see a particular goldfish, he lost his balance and stepped into the little ornamental pond made by a neighbor from a discarded bathtub.

Buddy was startled from his reverie by the brutal sound of Naomi’s crushing her fortune cookie. She put the tiny slip of paper under the pagoda lamp and squinted, moving her head back to lengthen the focal range. She proceeded to search her purse.

“It seems I did not bring my reading glasses.”

Buddy put out his hand.

“How kind,” said Naomi, and gave him her fortune.

He put it under the lamp and read: “Confucius say, He who—” The rest was totally illegible. For an instant of terror Buddy thought his eyes, which had always been perfect, were at fault, but reason prevailed and he saw that the printing ink had run, the letters fusing into a continuous smear.

He explained and said: “Take mine.”

“No thank you,” said Naomi. “That’s the kind of fortune I prefer.” She seized the slip and dropped it in her purse. “They’re usually so silly.”

“They’re supposed to be,” said Buddy, succeeding in cracking his own cookie into two neat parts, the way he always tried, hating the mess; took the slip out; and cautiously read it first to himself. Then aloud: “See: ‘He who eats soup with chopsticks never gets stains on tie.’”

Naomi began to snicker, then went into a hearty if not coarse laugh.

“Hmm,” murmured Buddy. It was one of her tricks never to respond predictably to humor. He was tired of cooperating now, at the eleventh hour, and kept a straight face.

“There’s a moral there, if you examine it,” said she. “It’s not silly at all. I withdraw my statement.”

Buddy suddenly inhaled a whiff of freedom. She would be gone soon, taking with her his motive for years of diplomacy. And if he had had to boil down into one his reasons for wanting her dead, it would be: because of the way she talks.

“Why,” he asked, throwing caution to the winds at last, “can’t you say just: ‘I take it back.’ Why do you always talk in that phony way? You ain’t got no more education than me, and you know it, so why can’t you talk like a normal person?”

Naomi kept her aplomb though the attack was without precedent. “I apologize, Buddy. It was simply the way it came out, I assure you. It wasn’t planned.”

Buddy felt warm as well as damp around the collar. He put a finger there to confirm the feeling. He also felt giddy, and his feet tingled. “I think,” he said recklessly, “you are making fun of me. And furthermore, you been doing it for years.”

“I assure you that comes as a complete surprise,” said she.

“Oh yeah?” said Buddy, snarling now. “Well, I’m onto you. You think I’m garbage.”

Naomi’s forehead disappeared into her hat, which she wore low anyway, old-lady style, the veil swept back over the crown.

“You figured,” said Buddy, “that I was too dumb to figure that out.”

She shook her head. “No, Buddy, I certainly wouldn’t ever call you stupid. I don’t know why you’re saying this, unless you were unsettled by that morbid atmosphere at Leo’s. I have often worried about all the responsibilities you have. When Leo returns to normal, and I’m sure he will, why don’t you take a vacation?”

She had thrown Buddy for a loss. “What, what?” he cried.

“A weekend in Atlantic City might do you a world of good, or better yet, Tampa, Florida.”

Buddy had never traveled anywhere. He cited the suggestion as another example of her incessant disparagement of him. “You know I can’t swim.”

Naomi smiled sanctimoniously. “You can sit on the warm sand and watch the bathing beauties.”

He was genuinely shocked. “How dare you say that to me?”

Naomi’s smile stayed in place while her head turned at an angle. “That’s harmless enough.”

“You calling me a sex fiend?” He turned to see whether the Chinese had overheard him, but they were greedily chopsticking rice into their mouths from little bowls held just under the chin.

Naomi got her cigarettes from the purse. Over the years her eyes seemed to move closer to her nose and the diameter of her nostrils had diminished. Her features were gathering together into one central vertical line. But the phenomenon was short-lived; when the cigarette was lighted they came back to normal.

Buddy was seeing things. He gulped a mouthful of cold tea from the handleless cup and got more than one bitter leaf.

He must not allow his attack to falter. “Next you’ll say I been running around, is that it? You sit home there all the time, nursing a grudge. I’m onto you, though.” He tapped his temple. “I’m not as dumb as you think.”

Naomi was reluctant to part with the lungful of smoke she had inhaled. Little wisps lurked from time to time at the corners of her mouth and finally a slow and thin blue stream emerged from her nose.

She said: “I really am convinced the situation calls for a change of scenery. Leo can manage for a week or so on his own.”

Buddy could not help going on the defensive. “I’m letting Leo go, for your information. He’s lost his marbles completely. He shot his parrot and he sold all his furniture. I don’t even want him on the lot when I’m there, let alone behind my back. He turned out to be some kind of mama’s boy.” He drew back in his chair. “I got nobody to trust, let me tell you. I even caught Ralph the other night, busting some store window and making his getaway. Haha! How about that? Little smart aleck. He’ll end up in reform school one of these days. That’s how Baby Face Nelson started, huh?”

Naomi looked amazed, but not, as it turned out, at the information. “This exaggeration is something quite new, Buddy. And your face is flushed. Do you feel all right?”

Again she had nailed him. In fact he had a terrible heart-burn. He put a hand on the resilient flesh that covered his solar plexus and gulped. The aftertaste, though he had not belched, was like the smell of smoldering celluloid. The slimy chicken fragments in the moo goo gai pan had looked weird, too white, as he chased them through the bean pods, like pieces left over from making Frankenstein.

“I’m fit as a fiddle,” he however said defiantly, his eyes protruding from the effort required. He tried to relieve the pressure with a bitter joke. “But they should change the name to Ptomaine Terrace.”

Rejecting as always his suggestion that she go whole hog for once, Naomi had had her usual four-course special with chop suey, into which she stirred the ball of gummy rice molded in an ice cream dipper and then had eaten it with dedication. Buddy on the other hand had tried to stimulate his nonexistent appetite by resorting to the tactic, typical of his style and also notoriously effective sometimes in Chinese restaurants, of ordering a profusion of dishes: three oval platters flanked his plate. Along with the moo goo had come sweet and sour pork, and a heaped mélange of those chewy little vegetables you never saw anywhere else. The result was the reverse of what he expected: he was nauseated by the presence of so much food and merely tasted here and there. The inscrutable waiter took it all away at length, no doubt to return it to the pot.

Yet Buddy’s stomach burned as if he had swallowed gluttonously. His fingers had gone cold from the terminal joints to the tips, and an excruciating cramp had manifested itself in his right thigh.

Seeing Naomi’s dead-white face, framed in dead black and exuding smoke from its orifices like an inanimate incense burner, he trembled with the sudden apprehension that she had poisoned him, deftly dosed the teapot while he was looking elsewhere. One, the tea tasted excessively bitter; two, she avoided it and drank ice water; three, reaching for the tiny saucer of mustard, she had overturned his water glass, which the negligent and, now that he thought of him, treacherous-looking waiter had not refilled. Thus he had no means with which to dilute the venom.

He pried himself from the narrow booth, a constricted situation that now also seemed suspicious, and went towards the men’s room, to reach which at Wong’s Gardens you had to use the same corridor as the laden waiters and at one point to pass through an edge of the kitchen with its horde of sweating glossy-black heads, fanatically barking at one another in a heathen tongue and bobbing through clouds of steam.

The toilet was closet-sized. To close its door he had to elevate a buttock over the washbasin. There was just the regular sit-down can, no urinal, and Buddy leaned over it, his hand on the wall above covering the legend saying,
SOME COME HERE TO SIT AND THINK, SOME TO SHIT AND STINK
, written purplish with an indelible pencil dipped in water. Whoever had been there last had taken the second alternative and was well remembered for it. Buddy had no trouble in bringing up the small supper he had eaten.

Contrary to standard opinion, he felt no better for it. He needed water, but not from the basin, which was glazed with a lavender slime, suggesting that the poet and recent defecator were one and the same, a degraded braggart, unless, as was too possible, the sink had not been scoured since the pencil point had been dampened in it weeks before.

Buddy lurched through the Asiatic hell of the kitchen, reached the table, and seized Naomi’s water glass, which had been refilled though his own was yet empty. In his first draught he got an ice cube, hurting his teeth with chill. He spat it back. The water had a pronounced chemical taste, but she would not have doped what she herself drank.

He took a grip on himself and remembered: “They get city water here. It’s full of chlorine. Fooey.”

“That is why,” said Naomi, “I never drink the tea, which tastes even worse.”

Buddy made himself S-shaped and reclaimed his seat. “What a dump this has got to be, Kee-rist.”

Naomi crushed out the cigarette in her unused teacup, though a Bakelite ashtray, with slotted book of paper matches, lay nearby. Buddy grinned in a kind of general chagrin.

Naomi said: “I’m delighted to see you’re feeling better. That’s the old happy-go-lucky Buddy I have always known.”

He squinted. “By God,” he said, “you never let up, do you?” But as usual he was the prisoner of her assumptions about him, and even shrugged happy-go-luckily and said: “But I got to hand it to you, Nay.”

“Well thank you, Buddy.”

“I mean it. You can’t be fazed. You live like you’re all alone in the world.”

“That’s an interesting concept.”

“No,” said Buddy, “in fact it ain’t. And it ain’t living, either, for my money.” There, it was out at last, horrifying but also relieving him strangely.

“But it’s odd,” said Naomi. “Because in addition to you and Ralph I have a sister, two aunts, one uncle, and a number of cousins.”

“I didn’t mean being alone in that way. It’s your personality.”

She laughed merrily. “I suppose I’m stuck with that.”

“No,” Buddy said again. “
I
am.”

With a distressed look she reached across the table and scraped thin, spidery fingers across the back of Buddy’s hand. “Oh, Buddy, you shouldn’t ever feel that sort of burden.”

“You’re mocking me, you know that?” He wanted to snatch his hand away from under that claw, but lacked the will.

“I do wish you would consider taking that vacation I suggested.”

Buddy said fearfully: “I don’t want your pity.”

Naomi brought her fingers back and put one into her cheek. “I think I have got it,” she said with spirit. “Why don’t you get yourself a girl?” Under the old-lady hat her face was radiant as a child’s.

Buddy gripped the edge of the table with both thumbs, to keep from rising on the thrill that swooped up from the small of his back.