“What I mean,” he tries, “is ‘aw, shit,’ as in, I thought you’d be out at the bank. Or shopping. Usually you’re out at the bank this time of day.”
No, she wants to say. Usually I’m right here watching Oprah, doing the receipts. This is usually how it goes. Thank you for noticing. “What’s in the box?” she says.
“Present.”
She figured. “For me?”
“For you. For the restaurant, but mainly for you.”
“Something I need?”
“Something you deserve.”
Good answer, she wants to shout back, the way Richard Dawson used to shout on Family Feud. She finds room in her confusion to remember that show, which she used to watch in the mornings before Oprah. Good answer. Something she deserves. “And where’d you get money for a present?” she says instead. “My deadbeat boyfriend.”
He smiles. “Been saving,” he says, motioning for her to cross the sidewalk to him. He’d go to her, but he doesn’t want to leave the box standing on its edge in such a precarious way. While the New York City truck driver sets up his ladder and tools and a drop-cloth, Harlan’s job, it seems, is to keep whatever it is in the box from falling flat. When Grace reaches him, he positions her so that she’s also straddling the long box, facing him, and then he pulls her close enough Grace can nearly taste the left-behind mayonnaise on his breath from a late morning lobster roll. “Those kids we catch,” he says, directly into Grace’s mouth, “for Catch of the Day? We hold ’em upside down and sometimes change drops from their pockets and then we clean up.”
He’s kidding, Grace thinks. He wouldn’t do that. Anyway, he couldn’t, not her Harlan. “With those claws?” she says. “Those Larry Lobster claws? You can pick up change?”
“One of the helper crabs, Gary, he’s working with me on it. Split everything down the middle.”
“Really?”
“Really,” he mock insists. “There’s not much opportunity for those bottom-feeders.”
She smiles. They turn their up-close talking into a kiss, and Grace pulls away from it licking her lips and making like she’s just kissed a bad lemon. “How many of those suckers you had already today, Harlan?” she asks.
“What?”
“Lobster roll. How many?”
“Just the one,” he lies.
“It’s ten in the morning.”
He wants to tell her they’re free, and he doesn’t always eat the bread, and they don’t stuff ’em as full as they do for the paying customers, so it’s probably not as bad as she thinks, but he realizes these are only small points. Anyway, she’s not through: “Who the hell eats lobster roll at ten in the morning? Who the hell is s’posed to be watching his cholesterol and eats lobster roll at ten in the morning? Tell me, Harlan.”
He won’t.
“They’re even open at ten?”
“Well, no,” he at last allows. “The stands, at ten, they’re still selling muffins and danish. Those shrink-wrapped danish from the factory?”
Grace nods to say she knows the ones he means. “But that still doesn’t explain the lobster roll, how it wound up in your mouth.”
“The lobster roll I get from the kitchen. They’re back there at sunrise, spreading that stuff into those frankfurter rolls. Two or three guys, friends of mine, you’ve probably seen ’em, they’re around, they run the whole operation, probably sell a couple thousand a day, easy, but not until eleven or so. They don’t wheel ’em out to the stands until later, but I get it fresh.”
Grace smacks her lips and wipes them against the back of her palm. “Yeah, well, from the way you taste,” she says, “you should probably check the date on their mayonnaise jar.” She kisses him again to shut him up a little bit, and also for the hell of it. It’s not as if she’s spent so much of her lifetime kissing that she can’t put up with a trace of turned mayonnaise. This time, when she comes up, she kicks gently at the standing-up cardboard at her feet. “What’s in the box?” she says.
“Ah,” he says, a little too theatrically. “The box.”
“Ah,” she mimics. “The box.”
He ignores her teasing and asks, “How lame would it be if I asked you to guess?”
“Lame.”
“One guess.”
“Still lame.”
“Humor me,” he says, defeated.
Grace shrugs, defeated too. “Okay,” she says. “One guess.” She looks at the box, and then up at Harlan, and then back at the box. Then she rests her head on her right fist and her right index finger on her cheek to indicate deep thought. Then she smiles. “Record album,” she says, not really playing. It’s a joke to her, this guessing. “Fiddler on the Roof. Original cast recording.”
“Grace,” he insists.
“Bundt cake.”
“You’re not playing?”
“I’m not playing.”
“Trask!” the overalls interrupt. “All set. Let’s get it up and get me out of here.” He throws his hands up in the air in a show of exasperation.
“Get what up?” Grace asks, working on some exasperation of her own.
“He’s got a long drive back to New York,” her Harlan explains feebly, not wanting to upset his hired hand. “How ’bout you step inside for a bit, and I’ll call you out when we’re through?”
“Through with what?” She looks down at the long box and up to the door of the coffee shop and figures out a piece of it. “You’re putting this up outside my restaurant? Whatever this is, you’re putting it on my restaurant?”
“It was supposed to be a surprise.”
“Yeah, well, surprise, surprise.” She stoops and starts to pull at the heavy-duty staples holding the cardboard together, and then the overalls step over and hand her a beaten-up X-Acto knife—warm, still, from its pocket—to help with the opening.
“Just cut it,” the overalls say.
“Fuck that,” Grace’s Harlan says, reaching for the knife. “It’s supposed to be a surprise.” He slides the blade back in its holder and slips it in his back pocket.
She has an idea. “Some kind of antennae?” she tries, unfolding to her full height. She can’t think what else would need to go on the top of her restaurant. “Box is the about the right size. Something for the reception?”
He shakes his head no.
“Satellite dish, then?” She thinks she’s onto something, won’t let it go. “DirecTV?”
“How ’bout it has nothing to do with your television?” he says. “How ’bout we move on to some other line of thinking?” He pulls her to him, but she pushes him away. “This from a girl who already gets every television station on the fucking planet.”
“Listen to me, Harlan,” she says. She means to be firm, but not ungrateful. No one’s ever gone to such elaborate lengths for her before, but no one is refacing her restaurant without her approval. “I can’t let you put something up on the storefront without my knowing what it is. On the roof, over the door, wherever. Right? I mean, there’s codes, there’s the local business district codes. If I’m not in compliance, I get hit with a fine. They could shut me down.”
“No one’s shutting you down,” he counters, quite reasonably. “They all eat here. All those business district assholes, where they gonna eat if they shut you down?”
She smiles, becomes somewhat less firm, tries another approach. “Well, what if it’s ugly? What if, whatever you’re putting up there on my restaurant, what if it’s so ugly it scares people away?”
“Place is pretty scary looking as it is, Gracie dear. People still come. There’s no place else.”
She’s thinking, as endorsements go, this one’s up there. Eat here. There’s no place else.
“Hey,” the guy in the overalls shouts. He points at his wristwatch, throws his arms up in the air. He’s big into hand gestures, this one.
“He’s a little anxious, your friend,” Grace says.
“Trust me,” her Harlan says back.
“That a question or a command?”
“Pi
ck one,” he says, “but you can let me do something nice for you, once in a while.”
“I can?” she says.
“You can.”
Beat. She shakes her head. “Apparently I can’t.”
“Fuck apparently,” he says gently. He turns her around as he says this and points her toward the coffee shop. “Just get your substantial ass back in there and start making these people some lunch.”
She notices, for the first time, that a crowd has gathered to see what the matter is. It’s not every day a truck from New York pulls into town and unloads a huge rectangular box into the middle of the street. When you add two overweight people kissing and groping and bumping uglies and talking heatedly astride the box it’s a rubbernecker’s picnic. “It’s not hideous?” she asks, meaning what’s in the box. “Whatever it is, it’s not too hideous?”
“You can always take it down, Gracious. You don’t like it, you can take it down.”
Oh. Right. She hadn’t thought of that.
The thing with Norman—on a drunk, or underway—is the zone. He can’t think how to explain it, what to call it even. A zone is about the best he can manage, a fold in his universe, a place in his thinking. A fractured pocket of weirdness transporting him to some other plane. How it finds him, he’s never sure, but, when he’s in it, he knows. When he’s in it, in a blinding instant, the whole world washes over him, lifts him in the tide. Transported, he considers himself in his apartment, in his building, in his neighborhood, in his citycountrycontinentplanetgalaxy. . . . Or maybe it’s like this: he’s on a rolling camera cart careening away out into space, looking back at himself in a rapid-fire unfolding of images to where he is reduced, exponentially, by his own circumstance. You are here! No, wait, you are here! No, here. Here. Hereherehere. Backbackbackback.
Whatever it is, it happens in the time it takes to occur to him and before he can stop to think about it. When his perspective is pulled all the way back, it locks on Norman Wood as an infinitesimal speck on the universal landscape. He’s Vincent Price in that great last scene from The Fly, only more so. And yet, he’s not so small he can’t still see himself. He can’t even strain to hear himself, calling meekly for help. He’s there, a world away, so small he might as well be meaningless, and then he locks on to this one final picture until it falls to static and fades away.
There’re sound effects, too: a giant whooooooooooooooosh, a sucking sound he guesses is meant to draw him more dramatically into the fold, and then a staccato machine gun trilling, a chukka-chukka-chukka-chukka-chukka-chukka over and over until it becomes one sound, one long line of noise pulling him with it, inside it, all around. Whoooooooooooooooooosh! Chukka-chukka-chukka-chukka-chukka-chukka. . . .
He can go weeks, months, without locking onto this way of seeing himself, without hearing all this noise, and he can will himself into these folds without success. He’s got no control. It just grabs him, unprepared, and takes him with it, and rattles him with its staccato sounds and images and drops him back to where he was, shaking his head. Sometimes, at the other end of it, he has to cover his face with his hands and hold still, he’s so dizzy from the ride.
And it’s not just when he drinks, his getting this way. Norman remembers these sensations, or versions of these sensations, from when he was a kid, from before he ever climbed on his father’s lap to the great, good cheer of Wood’s famous friends, to sip from the Woodman’s vodka, rocks, no fruit. Out of nowhere, it would find him, and take him, and drop him back down, shaking his head, wondering what it meant. Whooooooooooooooosh! Boom! Here we go! Again! Lately, though, it finds him more frequently, this zone, and alongside of this Norman finds himself drinking more frequently, so he wonders if maybe they aren’t connected. It happens more often, he’s drinking more often, so maybe it’s just a boozy distillation of how he sees himself, and the world around him. Or maybe there’s no correlation. Maybe it’s just something that happens, some cosmic thing he can’t know about, some force outside himself.
Who the fuck knows? All he really knows, Norman, is that when he is picked up and pulled back and made to consider things in just this way, he is left in a deep despair, a fold of emptiness so overwhelming he is swallowed up by it, lost. He can’t see himself. He can’t know. He gets the same feeling—in a sustained way, an intellectual way—when he looks at those pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope, the blue-white spirals of the Antennae galaxies colliding, and, underneath the bursting, he imagines the planet Earth in its own display, five billion years from now, the houses he grew up in all lit up in brilliant colors. He does more than imagine; he actually sees. The New York Times finally prints color pictures, and they get these fuzzy splashes of color from galaxies colliding, light years away, and the images alone aren’t much more spectacular than the spin-art pictures Norman used to make at Disneyland at those fundraising photo opportunities he used to have to go to with his father, but it’s what the pictures represent that gets to him. It’s what they have to tell him about what will happen next.
He goes out five billion years and connects these pictures to how he is now, not really drunk, not really thinking. The pictures just take him there on their own. There can be a picture in the same newspaper, next column over, of a six-day-old baby abandoned on a Pittsburgh street corner by its twelve-year-old mother, or a story of some psycho charged with hacking up a busload of senior citizens, and this Hubble crap will be what gets him, this notion that someday, billions of years from now, our world will collide with some other and leave everything in a giant fireball. It’s more than he can grab onto. It gets him wondering about the point of his being here, the efficacy. He looks forward to the troubles he will undoubtedly face, the movies he will make, the children he might have someday, and they disappear. They fade from view before they even exist, and Norman is left thinking how small he must appear, how redundant. He gets to where he’s making a little progress in this area, to feeling like he matters, like he’s part of some giant plan, and then he locks into one of his zones and is left shaking his head and covering his face with his hands and not knowing a single fucking thing.
Roaming Charges
Wood has got his sign bolted to the brick facing outside Grace’s restaurant. All that’s left is for Jim, the maintenance guy from Maritime Merrytime, to run a line from the electric box and generator down in the basement, in exchange for which Wood has promised to make an appearance in his lobster costume at the birthday party of one of Jim’s kids.
The sign itself is draped in sheets and bungee cords—Wood’s version of “under wraps”—but there’s no longer any mistaking it for something else. It’s mounted/bracketed into the brick at precisely the spot for a significant sign, occupying precisely the area a restaurant sign is meant to occupy. It’s the right shape. It is, very clearly, what it is, and there’s no fooling Grace at this point. She’s stepped out of the restaurant every couple hours, at first under some pretense or other, but by now she’s got it figured. “Not a record album?” she asked, last time out.
Wood nodded. “Not a record album.”
“Good, then,” she said, turning back for the door. “Good we cleared that up.”
He wanted her to ask what it said, the sign, but he didn’t want to tell her. He liked what was left of surprising her. He liked that she knew, but that she didn’t push it on him, her knowing.
Gracie’s regulars haven’t been showing the same consideration, but Wood guesses he doesn’t really mind. As the work drags, their constant steppings-out to imagine the sign’s message are a tonic, a distraction. Plus, he likes the attention, that this is a big deal, that something he’s doing is once again something to talk about. Been a while. He hadn’t realized, fully, how strongly his being at the center of things had informed his perspective. He teeters atop his ladder getting the wires ready for Jim, wondering what’s keeping him, collecting the speculation of Grace’s chowderheads, and relishing in the small thought that what he’s doing seems to matter to all these peopl
e, that the stuff of their days seems at last to hinge on the stuff of his.
“Over ninety-nine served,” Chester jokes, hollering up to Wood. “Get it? Like the McDonald’s sign?”
Wood gets it.
“You know, like, business is good, but it’s not all that good.”
He still gets it.
The rest of them have their own ideas.
Lem: “Free winter tune-ups.”
Acky: “Fine antiques.”
The guy who fixes the snowblowers and leafblowers down at Best Hardware (Wood can never remember his name): “Griswold’s Emporium and Shake Shack.” Smitty. Smith. Smithy. Something generic.
Joe Scapsi, who claims credit for the place’s sanctioned nickname: “I should get a royalty, you put Two Stools up there. Free coffee. Something.”
“Tourists go home!” suggests Jimmy Salamander, behind a giant laugh.
“Yeah, but not before you give us all your money!” offers Lem, back outside for another look-see, with a giant laugh of his own.
“Fuckin’ tourists,” Salamander says.
This is turning out to be great sport to Grace’s regulars, this guessing at the sign, and with each entry Wood is reminded of the forces that had driven him from his past life into this one right here. These new friends of his are something, he thinks. That he even has friends to consider is something. His entire fucking life is something—brand new!—but he’s never had friends like these. He’s never known people who can find something to get excited about in a storefront sign; people who measure themselves by what they’ve built, or hauled, or caught, or sold; people who keep to yellowing the presentimented Hallmark cards they hand out to each other on birthdays and holidays. He still thinks he can get used to these people. Hopefully. He can get to appreciating people who don’t wake up early Monday mornings to consider the weekend box office or think any less of him because he dresses in a synthetic lobster costume to earn his meager living.
Yes, these are his people, he convinces himself, now, definitely, and he’s nearly right in the middle of being the same way. In convincing himself of this, it occurs to him he’s put about as much of the continental United States between himself and the life he used to live as geographically possible. He hardly recognizes the man he was, the people he once knew, the choices he made. Out there, in L.A., it was like he was being pulled along by a giant momentum, and there was never any thought to where he was going or where he might have to go next or what the fuck he was doing when he got there. He was just pulled along, and kept moving, and pulled along, and just like everyone else and everything had to be up and up and up and bigger and bigger and bigger. He was either up or out, and the people around him were either up or out, and everyone was too busy grabbing at the same prize to even think what they’d become. Here, though, in Maine, he’s filled with thoughts of what will happen next, where his decisions will take him. Here, there’s no such thing as momentum. There’s nothing but time: to think, to argue a small point, to act on a crazy whim like putting up a new sign outside Grace’s restaurant. To take up with someone like Grace in the first place.
Mourning Wood Page 26
