A Cabinet of Curiosity

by Bradford Morrow

  He thought for a long time and gave me a heartfelt answer but, wouldn’t you know it, I’ve forgotten what he told me. It was one of the two options I’d offered, I think, but which? It was so frustrating trying to remember. I spent years leaning toward escaping and then switched for a decade toward searching, only to realize I just couldn’t definitively remember what he’d said. A sad thought, like a sour note from Lorel Manzo’s long-silenced cello—in another five years or so, what’s left of the story will have completely decomposed, fizzed away, fallen back into a big, dark hole.

  Waiting for Kizer

  Joyce Carol Oates

  1.

  Waiting for his friend Kizer on the outdoor terrace at the Purple Onion Café, Smith is beginning to be concerned.

  They are to meet for lunch at 1:00 p.m. on this day, Friday, June 9. Smith is certain. But already it is 1:26 p.m.

  Checks his cell phone another time: no email from Kizer, no call. Tries to call Kizer but call failed—not even a ring at the other end.

  Second time, unless it’s the third the teenaged-looking waitress with buzz-cut hair has approached him with an annoyingly cheerful smile Excuse me sir shall I bring you something to drink while you wait for— Smith cuts her off with a glare. Thanks, no! He’d rather wait for his friend.

  It is Smith’s custom to arrive early to secure a table on the outdoor terrace of the café and to sit facing the entrance so that he can observe strangers without their observing him; also, Smith wants to be in a position to see his friend Kizer approaching before Kizer sights him.

  That slight advantage. Inexplicable but unmistakable.

  Another time Smith checks his cell phone. Nothing.

  It isn’t like Kizer to be this late. In their many years of meeting together for lunch—or sometimes meeting for a game of squash beforehand at the university gym—in their many years of friendship, which began decades ago in grade school—Kizer has never been more than ten or fifteen minutes late, Smith is certain.

  Well, one distressing time—when Kizer didn’t show up at all. (A death in the family?—Smith vaguely recalls.)

  Smith leaves his table to inquire of the hostess who has been seating diners on the terrace: has a call come from his friend, for him?—his cell phone doesn’t seem to be working, and his friend is a half hour late. …

  “D’you mean Nate Kizer? No, Mr. Kizer has not called today.”

  “Kizer? Do you know him?”—Smith is taken by surprise.

  “No, I don’t know him,” the hostess says. “All I know about Mr. Kizer is that he has lunch here sometimes.”

  “You mean with me—Nate Kizer has lunch with me.”

  “Yes, sir. But with other parties too.”

  Parties. Not sure what this means.

  Tall, streaked-blonde hostess in long peasant skirt like a wraparound quilt smiling at Smith heedless that his heart has been lacerated.

  Ridiculous! Why should Smith care that his friend has lunch at the Purple Onion with others, not always him? Of course, Smith doesn’t care in the slightest.

  He has lunch with other people too. From time to time. At the faculty club at the university.

  “Are these ‘parties’ men? Women?”—Smith is innocently curious.

  “Men. Usually.” But the streaked-blonde hostess isn’t smiling so brightly, as if beginning to wonder if she has said too much.

  “Men! I see.” Somehow, it seems that Smith would have preferred to hear that Kizer has lunch at the Purple Onion with women.

  “But—sometimes women? You said?”

  The hostess has not said, exactly. “Well—not for a while. Yes, I think—not for a while. Excuse me, sir—” Clasping the oversized Purple Onion menus to her bosom, the hostess is eager to greet new customers.

  He has done it again, Smith thinks. Revealed his insecurity, his existential unease, in an imprudent exchange with a stranger. His shameless curiosity about the lives of others that are no business of his—he knows.

  Rebuked, Smith turns away. Returning to his table, he feels a light tap on his arm and there’s a man, a stranger, in olive-tinted glasses seated alone at another table—“Excuse me? Were you talking about Nate Kizer? I couldn’t help but overhear.”

  2.

  Where the hell is Kizer?—Smith, the most placid of men, the least impatient, is beginning to be annoyed.

  It’s 1:38 p.m. Kizer is almost forty minutes late. For the third time at least Smith checks his cell phone: no messages. Tries again to call Kizer’s cell. Not even a ring. Call failed.

  Yet stubbornly Smith isn’t going to order his own grim lunch, eat alone, and depart. No. He has brought a book to read—An Anthropology of Time. Dog-eared paperback he’d picked up on campus, retiring professor (philosophy) emptying his office, stacks of books once diligently read, underlined, and annotated, “taught”—now abandoned on a table in a busy foyer.

  But Smith can’t concentrate on mere words. Peers again at the goddamned phone cupped in his hand like a talisman.

  (Has Smith, like virtually everyone he knows, become compulsive about checking his phone? Good that his family can’t know. Scolding fifteen-year-old Trevor for spending so much time on his phone or online, video games up in his room. …)

  Smith has to wonder if something happened between him and Kizer of which he isn’t aware. Longtime friendships can become strained, precarious. Tries to recall the last time they saw each other—in fact, here at the Purple Onion a few weeks ago—if Kizer was behaving strangely, Smith noticed nothing.

  Resents you. Feels inferior to you. Since you saved his life. No good deed goes unpunished.

  It’s a fact, no need to bring it up, when they were boys, Matt Smith saved Nate Kizer’s life. Smith rarely thinks of the incident but guesses that Kizer thinks of it often.

  Saving another’s life. How it reflects upon your own.

  Smith wonders: was his life altered, at eleven? Suffused with a sense of confidence as his friend’s life must have become suffused with a sense of unease, insecurity. Debt.

  For the past several years Smith and Kizer have been meeting for lunch at the Purple Onion Café, a relatively new restaurant located midway between Smith’s office at the university and Kizer’s office at the medical center. The café isn’t either man’s first choice but it is moderately priced, unpretentious, specializes in “organic” food, and in warm weather there is outdoor seating.

  Good too that the Purple Onion doesn’t have a liquor license.

  Today, Smith has driven his car to the Purple Onion. Very likely Kizer will drive too. Not long ago each was likely to bicycle, walk, or even jog to lunch. There’d been a subtle rivalry between them: who would take the easier course, by driving.

  Though he has become somewhat paunchy around the middle, and is sometimes short of breath climbing stairs, Smith considers himself more athletic than Kizer, overall. Taller than Kizer, just slightly. Leaner, more fit. More levelheaded. Less likely to brood, hold a grudge. He thinks so.

  Smith’s marriage, Smith’s children: on the whole, more satisfactory than Kizer’s. Possibly, Kizer’s career has been more impressive.

  Like (identical) twins, in a way. In such relationships there is inevitably the dominant, stronger twin.

  “Let’s play squash next week,” Smith plans to suggest to Kizer. Strange, it has been months since the men have played together. …

  It has become Smith’s custom to arrive a few minutes early at the Purple Onion. In this way, he has the advantage. Asks for a corner table shielded from the sidewalk by a wisteria trellis. Always brings a book with him, lowers his head as if reading while observing diners at other tables, arrivals at the entrance. In a familiar reverie fantasizing strangers stripped naked and at his mercy. … Boldly copulating with the (attractive) women, who never resist his advances; overpowering, humiliating the men. (Of course, Matt Smith is not like this at all. The most civilized of men, a gentlemanly man; in fact, embarrassed when strangers turn out to be known to him, w
omen friends of his wife’s, mothers of his children’s friends; the lewd fantasies dissolve at once.)

  And he is keen to sight Kizer before Kizer sights him—who can say why?

  Owes his life to me. Like no one else in the world. Every heartbeat, every breath—Kizer has to acknowledge.

  Born within a few months/miles of each other in San Rafael, California. Grade school, high school. Friends, rivals. Kizer was chess champion of the school district three years in a row but Smith was elected president of the class in their junior year; Kizer barely managed to get on the track team but Smith still recalls, with a smile, that amazing season when, on the junior varsity softball team, until then just an OK player, he’d hit a crucial home run—and earned the grudging admiration of Coach Fenner.

  True, both boys were attracted to the same girls. And true, the girls might’ve preferred Kizer except Kizer was too shy, socially maladroit, to take advantage.

  Who had fallen in love first? That remains unclear.

  Kizer graduated third in their class of four hundred twenty-two; Smith graduated twelfth, but was admitted to UC Santa Cruz with a full-tuition scholarship while Kizer had only a part-tuition scholarship at Stanford.

  Away at college they’d lost contact, or mostly. But each returned to San Rafael in their late twenties. Married within a few months of each other. Started families, established careers. Only just coincidental, each man has fathered three children: girl-girl-boy (Smith), boy-boy-girl (Kizer).

  At a short distance, the wives of Smith and Kizer might—almost—be mistaken for each other, but it’s strange, at least Smith thinks it’s strange, that Lisa (Smith) and Emma (Kizer) have never quite become friends despite their husbands’ urging.

  When Smith asks Lisa why, Lisa merely shrugs and insists that she likes Kizer’s wife well enough; possibly, Emma responds in a similar manner if Kizer asks her about Lisa.

  One of Smith’s (secret) fantasies is Kizer in love with Lisa, which leaves him breathless and excited as well as humiliated, emasculated, while, oddly, Smith feels little attraction for Kizer’s wife, Emma, who in turn seems indifferent to him, if not, unless Smith is imagining it, just slightly resentful. Of course, she is jealous. Her husband’s closest friend, to whom he owes his life.

  At the age of forty-nine Smith is beyond adolescent rivalries and so no longer measures himself against Kizer: wife, children, career. House, cars. Kizer is arguably better looking than Smith, as he’d been the better student in high school, but Smith is in better physical condition, he is sure, though stricken with sciatica last year, which is why he’d cut back on squash. Still, in better condition than Kizer, who has been afflicted since childhood by asthma. Surely still a stronger swimmer than Kizer, which was why, on the rain-swollen San Miguel River, Boy Scout camp, when the boys were eleven years old and their canoe overturned, it was Smith who (desperately) managed to drag (frantically struggling) Kizer back to the canoe so that each boy, skinny, shivering with cold and fear, could hold onto it until help came.

  Saved my life! Oh God thank you.

  Kizer has never quite said.

  Why, Smith can understand. Some memories are so traumatic it is wisest to forget. Amnesia like a spray-washed wall.

  Yet: Smith sometimes feels trapped in a dream he doesn’t (quite) realize is a dream in which he is trying again to swim to his struggling/drowning friend while simultaneously trying not to let go of the overturned canoe; then, trying to explain to Kizer something both elemental and obscure, crucial for both to comprehend so that Smith’s very brain aches with the effort, which is the mysterious effort of the dream: neurological, muscular. Even as his tongue is thick and clumsy, his words stumble and falter.

  Your name is called. You turn, and it is yourself—yet not you.

  In actual life if Smith were to stammer such nonsense Kizer would laugh in that soundless way of his, rocking with laughter as if it pained him. For over the years, decades, Kizer has been the one to deflate Smith’s existential quandaries. When Smith takes himself too seriously, count on Kizer to puncture the balloon.

  Dear God. If something has happened to Kizer, what will you do?

  Smith tries to think. Does not dare think.

  Looming over him is a waiter asking if he’d like a drink? while he’s waiting for his friend? Smith peers up at a tall, lanky-limbed young man, wispy beard, dreadlocks halfway down his back. White? Food server with (unwashed, oily) dreadlocks?

  Damned Purple Onion, hiring freaks. Hippie pretensions, health food and “gluten-free.” Smith glances around, searching for the waitress with the buzz-cut hair—or had that been another lunch?

  Anyway, the Purple Onion doesn’t serve drinks. Dreadlocks must mean one of their health-food concoctions—carrot-avocado-yogurt smoothie, pomegranate-lemon spritzer, “Green Rush” (kale, spinach, broccoli, seaweed liquefied). Next time Smith will insist that Kizer meet him somewhere else.

  Smith thanks the waiter but no. He will wait for his friend before ordering.

  Turning back to his book, rereading a passage already marked with yellow Magic Marker—Time is an illusion in which we “remember” the past but not the future. As quantum physicists have revealed— but distracted by the fact that Kizer is uncharacteristically late, and hasn’t called or texted; possibly Smith’s phone is malfunctioning, in which case if there’s an emergency Kizer won’t be able to reach him. Smith shoves back his chair, hurries to the hostess to explain the situation and ask if his friend might’ve called and whoever answered the phone inside the restaurant failed to relay the message to him out on the terrace. …

  The hostess listens with a little frown of sympathy. But no—“Mr. Kizer hasn’t called today, I’m sure.”

  “You know my friend’s name?” Smith is taken aback for (he is sure) he hadn’t (yet) given it.

  3.

  Returning to his table, Smith feels a light tap on his arm.

  “Excuse me? Were you talking about Nate Kizer? I couldn’t help but overhear.”

  Smith is confounded: here is an individual he has never seen before, he’s sure, who yet seems familiar to him.

  A stranger in his late forties perhaps, in olive-tinted glasses, peering intently, quizzically, at Smith.

  “Y-yes. Nate Kizer. We’re having lunch together, today.”

  “We’re having lunch together, today. Nate and me.”

  Strained smiles. Stares of disbelief, suspicion.

  How is this possible? Smith is thinking—obviously, there is some simple explanation. A mistake.

  “Obviously, there is some explanation. A mistake.” The stranger speaks slowly with a clenched jaw.

  Such a situation would call for levity, one might think. Yet Smith and the man in the olive-tinted glasses exude an air of hostility, distrust.

  Carefully Smith says: “If this is Friday, June 9, there’s no mistake. Kizer and I are having lunch today; we were supposed to meet at 1:00 p.m.”

  “We were supposed to meet at 1:00 p.m. Kizer and me.”

  The two men stare at each other, perplexed and resentful.

  Smith sees that the other, the stranger, is gripping his cell phone. No doubt he too has been trying to call Kizer without success.

  “Possibly a joke? Or—”

  “—a mistake. Kizer’s —”

  “—he wants us to meet?”

  No! Can’t believe this. Kizer would’ve alerted Smith he’d invited someone else to join them.

  Something disturbingly familiar about the man who has dared to touch Smith’s arm, to stop him on his way back to his table. His voice is nasal, sounding like Smith’s own voice when he has a stuffed head; his manner is awkward, as if his limbs are poorly coordinated, or he has back pain. His not very attractive face is asymmetrical as if there were an uneven crack down the center and half the face has resettled, as after a seismic shift.

  His (coarse, sand-colored, graying) hair is receding sharply from his forehead, his eyes appear to be deep socketed, glistening. Unlike S
mith, who is wearing, as he often does, a fresh tattersall shirt, clean khakis, and running shoes in reasonably good condition, the other is wearing a not-fresh shirt of no distinction, jeans beginning to fray at the knee, sandals that expose bony white toes. His forehead is furrowed and mildly blemished, or scarred, from adolescent acne. His mouth is a smirk that disguises (Smith guesses) an underlying unease.

  “And you are—?”

  “Matt Smith.”

  “Matt Smith? Well—I’m Matthew.”

  Staring at each other. Slow blinking. Is this a joke?

  “Well! What’s your middle name?” (Matt) Smith steels himself.

  “‘Maynard.’ You?”

  “‘Maynard.’”

  “You’re joking, right?”

  “You’re joking. Right?”

  Surge of belligerence between the men. Rush of adrenaline. One is obviously an impostor, but—which?

  “No. I am not joking. If you’d like to see ID …”

  “If you’d like to see ID …”

  Now (Matt) Smith realizes: the other’s olive-tinted glasses with metallic frames are near identical to a pair of glasses he’d once had, replaced with the black plastic frames and bifocal lenses he is now wearing.

  Smith, that’s to say (Matt) Smith, feels a wave of dizziness. As if the terrace floor is beginning to shift beneath his feet. (Earthquake? San Rafael? Not unknown.) He is thinking that something like this has happened before. He has survived, previously. Or had it been a dream, and not real? Is this a dream, and not real?

  A name is called; it is your name. You turn, you approach—it is yourself, though not (literally) you. He feels a rush of curiosity about the other man that leaves him weak, sickened.

  Seeing the expression in (Matt) Smith’s face, (Matthew) Smith pulls out a chair at his table. “Hey, man—you’re looking kind of pale. Better sit down.”

  “I—I don’t think that—”

  “Yeah. You’d better.”

  (Matthew) Smith is brusque, bullying. (Matt) Smith feels a surge of repugnance for the man, a sensation of dread deep in the gut. Just as he’d felt often as a boy, confronted with older, more dominant boys. Wanting to scream at them, Go to hell. Leave me alone. Don’t touch me! Yet, (Matt) Smith sits at the table as bidden.