The Morels (20 page)

Arthur directed us with our market’s armload through the small triangle of park, into the chain toy store across the street. We traveled the slow escalators with the rest of the shoppers, stopping on each floor to audition games for Will. How lost Arthur seemed under the harsh fluorescents, gripping our shopping cart for dear life. He was truly a man from a different age. There had been a spate of movies around this time with a similar premise—one involving a man from Victorian England transported to contemporary Manhattan, another about a Neanderthal teenager thawed and released into the wilds of modern Los Angeles—and watching Arthur aisle after aisle puzzle through the bewildering maze of blinking beeping gadgets, I thought he seemed just as out of place. Although this has got to be something of an exaggeration, doesn’t it? He was, after all, the father of an eleven-year-old. This certainly wasn’t Arthur’s first time in a toy store. And yet, how was it possible for him to seem so unskilled still, after eleven years of practice?

The stuffed bags Arthur emerged with barely fit through the exit. We hailed a taxi and headed back to the apartment. For the first few stoplights on our way uptown, it hadn’t occurred to me that I lived elsewhere—and Arthur seemed too preoccupied to notice. When we came through the front door, Penelope was at the answering machine, playing a message that bore a distinctive grandmotherly voice I’d become well acquainted with two evenings before. This “grandmother” wanted to speak to the famous Mr. Morel—she had a
bone to pick
with him. Was he responsible for this
smut
she’d been hearing so much about? Well, it just made her want to reach into her purse and play with her
vibrating penile toy
!

“Three messages like this since you left,” she said to Arthur, who was stuffing the gifts up on a high shelf in the hall closet. “The third message is just screaming. It’s frightening. Who the hell is it?”

I asked where Will was.

“Spending the day with a friend,” she said.

I had gotten my mother a jade pendant necklace from the crafts market while shopping with Arthur, but when I got home and turned the thing over in my hands, it seemed all wrong—too intimate, the kind of jewelry one got for a lover, not a mother—so I put the necklace back in its box and wrapped it up, presenting it to whom it was really intended the next time I saw her, bench-side.

Penelope looked down at the little box I had just put in her hands and said, “Uh-oh. What’s this?”

“Just open it.”

She tore the ribbon off and lifted the lid to reveal the pendant sitting on a tuft of cotton. “It’s beautiful,” she said. “And who am I supposed to say gave this to me, when Art asks?”

“You can say I gave it to you.”

Penelope chuckled. “Okay, good idea.” She closed the box and handed it back to me. “Look, I’m flattered. Seriously, you have no idea. But I can’t.”

“It’s just a necklace,” I said. I put it back in my pocket.

She looked at me for a while, letting her gaze travel my face, and then took a deep drag of her cigarette and shook her head. “You’re sweet. But my life is very complicated.”

We sat for the rest of the time in silence, almost touching And when I got up to leave, she surprised me—herself as well, perhaps—by giving me a peck on the lips. “Now get out of here,” she said grinning, and slapped me on the butt.

I visited her every day for the next five days. We spoke less and less. I sat there and she sat beside me, both of us smoking, both of us seeming to feel through whatever this was between us. We sat
with our elbows touching, our knees touching, our shoes touching. On the fifth day, Penelope gave me a tour of the bakery, which shared its kitchen with its parent restaurant next door—a war zone of shouts and clangs, the flare-ups of small grease fires lighting the corners of my vision. Everybody knew her, but as she talked into my ear about the role each of these people played in the greater chain of command, she did not introduce me. I thought I might have detected a knowing glance pass between herself and a few of these people. About what? I wondered. About me? The thought set my body into a faint tremor that lasted the duration of the tour. It ended out the back door, in an alley by several enormous metal dumpsters. She had a seat on a milk crate and lit a cigarette. She stared at me frankly without talking for some time. I went for my pack, to give my nervous hands something to do, but my pockets came up empty.

Keeping her eyes on me, she took the cigarette out of her mouth and held it out. I put it to my lips, my every fiber aware of the dampness around the filter’s tip. She said that she wished she could stay out here all day but had to get back to work—afterward, I realized it was meant to be a joke, taken in the context of the trash bins and the gaseous stink around us, but at the time I said quite earnestly that I wished the same. She walked me down the narrow alley and gave me a hug. She pressed her ear against my chest, and I let my lips rest on the top of her head, breathing in the intimate smell of her hair. When I spoke, my whispered words tripped over hers, so that together we sounded something like
I wish we can’t I know me too
.

(Writing this now, years later, I think about Penelope—how young she was, in her late twenties, with an eleven-year-old and married to a man like Arthur, how she must have felt, hearing day after day her coworkers’ after-work exploits, their carefree couplings and uncouplings, the total ease with which they were able to live. How she must have longed to be as free—to call in sick because she felt like catching a movie or to punch out at the end of a shift and walk off into the night with everybody else to
a karaoke bar, to an all-night noodlery for
yakisoba
at three in the morning. Not to worry whether Art forgot to feed himself or let Will go through a box of Frosted Flakes for dinner. Not to worry what these two boys weren’t telling her, what she was so in the dark about.)

I stood out in the bright sun blinking into the mouth of the alley from which I’d emerged, disoriented. Where was I? It took a turn around the block to reconnect with the bakery’s main entrance. I walked on, past it, back to work.

I was loitering in the café with my sweep set toward the end of my shift when Penelope showed up. The nine o’clock crowd had just dispersed. She greeted me with a long look and a slow hug. Her puffy orange coat squished like a stuffed animal in my arms.

I took her on a wordless tour of the theater. Where were we going? I didn’t have a destination; I just let my feet take me places. Penelope followed, coat swish-swishing in my ear. I showed her through the swinging door behind the café counter to see fellow employees hurrying through their closing duties. I brought her down the escalator into the stockroom to see the hissing carbon-dioxide tanks that fed the soda machines. I brought her into the cement break pit, into the locker room, and up the narrow flight of stairs into the projection booth to see the great platters of spooled film feed each of the six flickering projectors. We held hands as we did this. Penelope’s hair was damp and freshly combed, her lips glistening, face flush with a recent application of makeup—something I noticed, I think, because she didn’t normally wear makeup, or this much of it. My heart leaped at the thought that she might have done this for me. We bumped into the general manager coming up the stairs, and we must have looked caught in the act of something, because he teasingly singsonged, “What are you two lovebirds doing?”

As anyone who has found themselves in a similar situation knows—or who has allowed such a situation to get as out of hand as this one had—I was not thinking about whom I might hurt. I
was not thinking of Arthur sitting at the dining room table, eating the dinner Penelope had prepared for him out of its Tupperware container. I was not thinking of Will in his room with his earphones on listening to the Jerky Boys while doing his homework. I was thinking only of Penelope’s hand in mine, of her arm brushing against my arm, hip brushing hip.

We took a seat in the back row of Theater 6, showing a new adaptation of a Thomas Hardy novel. It seemed, despite the period costumes and candlelit interiors, that those on-screen were enacting our story: unhappily married woman carrying on with another man. Knowing glances, long knowing silences, long lingering walks alone. Moments before the two on-screen gave in to their desires, our lips were feeling out for each other in the flickering darkness. I kissed the contours of her face, her eyelids, her ears, her nose with its tiny cold stud—and her mouth. Our teeth clicked, our tongues met, the musk of our shared saliva inhabited the air between each kiss. Her puffy coat was a hindrance, rustling loudly in the dark. I tried pulling it off.

Where can we go
, she breathed into my ear.

There was a place the ushers used for napping, one of those secret spots that nobody discussed but about which everyone knew, a folding canvas cot set up in the bowels of the stockroom behind a blind of stacked boxes. The spot was ideal, as the only access to it was down a long corridor, which gave you ample time to straighten your clothes, wipe the sleep from your eyes, and grab a sleeve of cups out of one of the boxes, the feigned object of your excursion to this out-of-the-way place. I led Penelope by the hand through the darkened theater, down the center aisle to the front row and out through the emergency side exit behind the screen. My teeth were chattering. We stumbled down two interconnecting passageways, through a back door into the stockroom, then farther, down the long corridor and around the corner wall of boxes.

I took off Penelope’s coat and spread it out on the cot. I unzipped her fleece and peeled it off, pulled her T-shirt up over her head. I unhooked her bra and held the miracle of her bare breasts in my
hands. She kicked off her clogs. I unbuckled her belt and stripped off her pants. “My turn,” she murmured. I watched her tattooed arm, that chain mail of snake scales, pull off my bow tie and work its way down the buttons of my white work shirt. Her fingers trembled through this, her arm a stucco of dark blue goose bumps. Her normally green eyes were dilated black. Her cheeks burned, bringing to the surface the tiny all-over scarring of teenage acne. Through our fucking—the warm damp press of naked bodies, the penetration, the rocking and rocking and rocking to climax—she breathed hard into my ear but didn’t say a word.

In the drowsy afterward, she lay curled against my chest. Pulling back, I saw that she was crying.

Writers have the luxury of elision. They can excise what causes too much discomfort to relate. And were I to take such luxury here, I would skip over the moments that followed, pick up the next morning with Suriyaarachchi and Dave and a fresh cup of coffee. Cut away, avoid the pain of waking from our lust. Because, as we sorted through the aftermath of shed clothing, with each article redonned, it was as though we were clothing ourselves in the terrible wrongness of what we had done. We walked a long slow march back down the corridor, not holding hands and not speaking, avoiding a brush against the shoulder or a hip as though a force field had come down between us. We emerged from the stockroom into the salty popcorn air of the empty lobby. I walked her over to the exit doors. She stepped out into the cold and before walking away looked back at me briefly, bleary eyed, and shook her head.

In my dream, Arthur held a shotgun. He pointed it at me and told me that he knew what I had done. I apologized, I broke down weeping, and woke with the sound of the blast ringing in my ears, the cry still stuck in my throat.

Leaving for lunch, I heard Arthur in the hallway with Will and ducked into the stairwell to travel the fourteen flights on foot rather than stand with him and his son in the elevator. A part of
me wanted to come clean, to get it off my chest. Another part of me reasoned that it wasn’t my decision alone to make. I needed to speak with Penelope. But Penelope remained unreachable through the swinging door behind the bakery’s counter. I waited on the bench outside for an hour. I went through most of a pack of cigarettes. I pretended to look at the menu and watched for her red bandanna. I went inside and asked to speak with her. The cashier disappeared for a few moments and returned to tell me that she was busy.

Penelope showed up later at the theater. I invited her to sit at one of the café tables, but she didn’t want to sit. She said it would be best if I stopped coming by the bakery. And, while I was at it, the apartment. Just avoid that end of the hall altogether. It was best. I suggested we tell Arthur. Absolutely not, she said. This was not something to hash out. It was something to box up, to toss out as though it never happened.

But I felt terrible, I said.

“Well,” Penelope said, “keep it to yourself.” And then she did sit down. And put her face in her hands and wept. “What have I done? I am so fucking stupid!”

I sat down and put my hand on her knee, but she jerked it away. “No, don’t touch me.” She dug in her pocket for a tissue and blew her nose. “I thought I could get back at him—balance things between us. But all I did was make it worse.”

I respected Penelope’s wishes. In the days that followed, I avoided the Morels’ end of the hallway. A part of me was relieved. How could I face Will? He would take one look at me and know. I used the same stairwell, across from the garbage chute just past Dave’s apartment, that I’d ducked into earlier to avoid Arthur and Will. The long jog down led me to the side exit by the loading dock, which allowed me to steer clear of the revolving door.

Suriyaarachchi had begun sleeping at Dave’s, I noticed. I would come in to find him on the editing-room couch covered in a blanket or exiting the bathroom with a toothbrush in his mouth. At first
I thought it had something to do with the long nights of drinking they were always inviting me to participate in and I was always sheepishly though firmly declining. To be their
wingman
—or I think it was used as an enticement, that they would be my wing-
men
. The bars they liked were all of a piece: the former beauty salon, the former pharmacy, the former grocery store. Rather than gut these places, the proprietors thought it better to polish the fixtures, dust off the wares, and restore the signage to simulate a heyday, circa 1957. The girls who got drunk here were pierced and tattooed and wore dresses carefully curated off the racks of the Goodwill. Like Penelope. They did their hair up in the styles of an era to match the décor.