by Tamas Dobozy
Finally, it was Nate who kicked me into action, with a phone call. He was silent for a second on the other end, stunned by the speed at which I’d picked up the phone. “Thomas?” he asked. When I responded, he took a deep breath. “Look, I’m sorry to call you at home, but you’re the only guy I knew for sure in the phone book.” He paused. “Not too many Corvins out there.” I laughed in relief, so happy just to hear from him, and he went on as if taking a cue: “We need to figure out the Laughing Cat. And you should be the one to call Vittorio.”
“Me? Why me?”I asked.
“Because you’re the quiet one. The guy who never talks. He likes that.”
“I talk,” I said.
“Not much you don’t,” he replied, “and never to tell stories.” I couldn’t help but hear a subtext in the statement, as if Nate were envious of my situation, or angry, as though he’d suddenly discovered I’d been withholding something, information that might have helped when he’d really needed it. “You’ve got no story,” he said, his voice so hard it was like a hammer hitting the receiver, and I realized this was the first time in a long time—as long as I could remember—that any of the men from the Laughing Cat had addressed me personally.
Once Nate supplied me with the addresses and phone numbers— excepting those of Mara, who was too well hidden, or too far out of the loop, for Nate’s resources—it still took six weeks to settle with Vittorio. Six weeks that started with him hemming and hawing— winding me up for the sum he had in mind—followed by multiple negotiations and renegotiations of what I came to call the “Laughing Cat Contract.” Every time Vittorio made a recommendation for our menu one or more of the guys—who were awkward on the phone, as if my calling them, however necessary, constituted a violation of the rules, as if my asking what they’d like to eat and drink at the Laughing Cat made them accessories to a crime—would want something else, which I would then have to take back to Vit-torio, who’d either reject it or multiply it by five or offer an alternative to. Looking back, it’s amazing that we ever managed to reach a consensus: four Americanos, one espresso, two slices of panini, three large pizzas topped with artichoke hearts, feta and anchovies (which nobody liked but which Vittorio insisted on because there’d been a mistake in ordering and he was overstocked), five Oranginas (which nobody liked either, though they were preferable to the Italian cola Vittorio had also overstocked), a basket of focaccia and a plate of balsamic vinegar mixed in olive oil, and, finally, in place of the large cake Vittorio wanted, one platter of Sushi Combo B from Sushi-Ya down the street, which Ludovico ordered in at considerable markup. The total came to about one hundred dollars every Saturday.
As it turned out, it didn’t matter, for we only met once more at the Laughing Cat.
Mara was absent that day, and that’s all the explanation I need for why the event was such a failure. The rest of us were there, as usual, though that’s all that was usual, as if the six weeks between Saturdays—the first break of any kind since we’d started meeting twenty years ago—had revealed how alien we were to one another, how our get-togethers had become a ritual emptied of all content. Or maybe it was the food sitting on the table, the coffees and sodas and pizzas and raw fish congealing in the warm air blowing from the overhead vents, reminding us of how artificial the set-up was, how far from the spontaneity of that night twenty years ago when we’d vowed to always meet here. And while none of us said anything, I knew our thoughts were the same, sitting around the table, awkward and halting in our speech, with the exception of Hank and Ben, who were even more awkward, still upset over their argument with one another. Of the five, only Nate and I tried to resurrect the old spirit, with me encouraging everyone to try the food, and Nate warming up to tell one of his kind of stories.
Nate’s stories were always of a type—filled with blue-collar workers and bars and cars and divorce. While the early stories, predictably, had been about the bitterness of marriages falling apart, and infidelity, always with the man being on the wounded end, as the years went by Nate seemed to be making a conscious effort to switch to the woman’s point of view. And though the stories always suggested the woman’s ultimate culpability—leaving the five year old in charge of “babysitting” so she could meet with a younger man living down the street; or disappearing from home for three days with a doctor she met at a funeral—over the years a tenderness had crept into the telling, so that when, at the end of the story, the woman looked back over the years, as she invariably did, trying to understand the loss of her moral and intellectual certainties, what I always got—though judging by the reactions of the others I was probably alone in this respect—was a sense of Nate trying to adopt a different attitude, as if to recognize how little he knew about these women was also to remind himself of perspectives other than his own. And what I loved about the stories, truly loved, was Nate’s striving for these perspectives in the face of his continual failure to achieve them. For, in the end, what the women of his stories always came to was an acknowledgment of how contradictory our motives are, of how the consequences of choice, in the long run, often turn out to be of no consequence whatsoever— except, of course, in the moment of the decision.
But not everyone, as I said, liked Nate’s stories as much as me. And they were not the kind of stories that should have been told that Saturday. What we really needed was Mara, another of his magical adventures, something to make us wonder and laugh and believe anything was possible. And when Nate finished, Ben shook his head and wondered why anyone would bother to tell a story, much less listen to one, where the “high point” is some woman looking back at her life and realizing that the only lesson she can take from it—”which is more of a non-lesson,” Ben added—is that “things just happen.”
There was a moment of silence during which I could hear the cracking of the cooling pizza crust. Nate stared at the floor and shifted his feet. “It’s not really about the woman,” he said after a while. “It’s about me. But I don’t know what the point is,” he said, not lifting his head. And, then, after a moment he did lift it: “I bet Alvin Parker could tell us.” It was a comment that would have appeared sarcastic only to those who hadn’t been sitting with Nate for twenty years. And his face lit up with something like hope, though it only took Hank a moment to respond.
“Forget it,” he said.
“But why?” asked Nate. “He could help me … help us get out of …” He waved his hands around, not so much indicating the world as the room, as if the Laughing Cat was a trap Nate had been struggling to get free of, or transform.
“I don’t think you get it,” said Hank, standing up. “Alvin was shook up by what happened here. He doesn’t want anything more to do with us.”
Hank reached for his coat. “I think I have to go now,” he said, though he was not referring to this particular Saturday. “It’s not so much fun without Mara, is it?” he said, and there was that same guilty undertone to his words as there had been to my thinking about Mara five weeks ago.
“Mara will be back,” I yelled, and I was amazed to discover how desperate I was, my language as full of struggle as Nate’s. “I think you should stay,” I said. “I really do. I mean, we’ve been meeting for twenty years!” And once I’d begun there was no way of preventing myself from begging. “This is just a lull! Our first one! I mean, we made a vow! You’re not going to break it over something as minor as this?”
“Our first lull?” He looked at me. “Where have you been? You know how many times I’ve driven here wondering why I bother coming? I brought Alvin along to inject some life into this place!”
I stood up. “What are you talking about? You love it here,” I said. “It’s the only break you get from your wife and kids.”
Hank put on his jacket and shook his head. “You’re whacked,” he murmured. “I don’t have any wife and kids. Not anymore.” And Hank looked away from me then, though I did not know whether it was because locking eyes would have forced him to vent his anger, or because he couldn�
��t endure the pity it would have inspired. “This hasn’t been fun for a long time,” he said. And with that he put on his coat and walked out the door. And I would have reached after him, or yelled something, except I caught sight of Vittorio standing in the doorway to the kitchen, arms folded, gazing warily at us, and I found myself standing, hands in fists, caring about Hank’s departure to the point of violence.
Within ten minutes we’d paid up and left, and when I got outside I looked both ways, watching the backs of my friends receding down the street, and I wanted to yell at them, to say something to make them turn, though in the end I didn’t, partly because they were too far off to hear and partly because I paused, and waited too long, wondering whether maybe, just maybe, they might not recognize my voice at that distance. You see, in all the years we’d been meeting I had never told a story, and thus had never needed to lower my voice to a whisper, or raise it to a shout, or do any of the things required to dramatize an incident. The only voice they’d heard me use was dead-flat, going on about some point of politics or sports, or turning to Vittorio and his nephews to order coffee.
…
I spent the better part of the next two weeks either at work or on the streets, searching for Mara, dreaming up ways to entice him back to the Laughing Cat, thinking that if I could persuade him then everyone else would return as well. It was only when I found him— entirely by accident—that I realized why it had been suddenly so hard to locate a man who’d once been omnipresent downtown and in Little Italy, a man you had to go out of your way to avoid.
Mara was wearing a sweatshirt hood, its strings pulling the fabric so tightly around his face that only the rhythm of coffee mug and cigarette—the one-two, one-two motion with which they disappeared into the darkness shading his face—gave him away. When I approached he jumped.
“Jesus, Thomas,” he said. “We can’t talk here!” He grabbed my shoulder and pulled me into an alley that ran between buildings, crammed with overflowing crates and dumpsters and the occasional sleeping body.
“Mara, I’ve been looking for you everywhere.”
“Yeah, well, I’m travelling incognito these days.” He drained his mug, and then lit a new cigarette off the butt of the old one. “You didn’t see Nate out there?”
I shook my head. “We missed you at the Laughing Cat last time,” I said.
“Hey, I don’t break my vows easily,” he replied. “But he was there.” And when I asked who, he replied, “Nate! Nathan Soames!” “Mara, what are you talking about?”
And then Mara told me what had been happening over the eight weeks since his last appearance at the Laughing Cat. It seemed Nate had taken to keeping Mara company during his rambles along the streets of Toronto, the two of them chatting away between stops at greasy spoons and coffee shops, the whole thing so natural it took Mara several weeks to realize Nate’s “company” was actually a form of stalking, at which point, in a moment of panic, he began actively avoiding him, until their game of hide-and-seek grew so desperate Mara turned paranoid, a man in hiding. The worst of it, he said, was his inability to relax, which in turn made it impossible for him to fall into the easy stroll that had been his way on these streets, a lolly-gagging shuffle that was less an activity than a way of insulating himself from the environment, less a motion than a home. And this walk, Mara admitted, its ease, was what had always led him to the stories he recounted at the Laughing Cat.
“It’s really terrible, Thomas,” said Mara. “I used to run into the most amazing people. And I’m not just talking eccentrics,” he said, waggling a finger in my face. “Composers, politicians, actors, you name it. But now, ever since Nate’s been following me around, well… you’d be amazed at the ordinariness of that guy’s life!”And Mara recounted to me the days and weeks they’d spent together, following commuters with birthmarks, twitches, inappropriate clothing, details that had once led Mara to stories, but which now led them nowhere: to corporate buildings, ferny lobbies, the bland hiss of elevators going up and down. Nothing ever happened, and for the first time Mara understood what it was like to live in Nate’s world, a place empty of magic, where the ticks and nuances of men and women were indicators only of malaise and desperation, where it seemed as if the city’s streets and buildings, because they determined the routes and spaces available to commuters, also determined their stories. It was the same story, over and over, and totally unlike the tales Mara had come upon up to now—incidents so rare they seemed to operate against the odds by which we measured the ordinary.
“I don’t know a lot,” said Mara. “No, no, no,” he shook his head so frantically. “But I know this: I would not want my life to look anything like the story Nate’s living. And I’m getting out of his trap!” He poked me in the chest as he spoke this last bit of sentence, then peeked out of the alley, and quickly stormed off.
Despite the fact that I had taken Mara’s hint on “stalking” him, and resolutely avoided setting foot anywhere in downtown or Little Italy, I still found my eyes wandering to the windows of taxicabs and streetcars, hoping I’d see him standing beside an accident involving a taxi and a stretch limousine, his hand on his chin as he negotiated a truce between a cabbie and a deposed king, or something equally unlikely. I wanted to see Mara back in the scenes he’d described to us at the Laughing Cat. And every time I had to force my face from the window, I would be disturbed by the thought that it was not Mara’s walk but rather his stories that had insulated him from the city, and from himself, from the fact that sometime during the last twenty years he’d gone crazy.
At night I sat in front of my stack of papers, the books on the shelves crowding around like a tomb of paper, portals to worlds I was barred from, to which entry demanded my transformation into ink. It never occurred to me, even then, that maybe Nate was experiencing similar difficulties, but from the other side, from within the story—desperate for an exit from the plot, from his status as a character.
The sad part, of course, is that knowing this still wouldn’t have made me contact Nate had Alvin Parker not called first. “This is Thomas Corvin?” he asked, a few nights after my meeting with Mara. “Professor Thomas Corvin? Seventeen peer-reviewed articles in the MLA bibliography? Two books? Tenured in the Department of English at the University of Toronto? That’s you, isn’t it?”
There was such accusation in his voice that it emerged from the phone more as a physical presence than a sound, and it took me a second, even after I’d figured out who was calling me, to find the courage to respond. When I told him yes, it was me, Parker’s voice grew even angrier, as if my admission should have come earlier, two months earlier, when he was wilting under Ben’s rage. “Don’t worry,” he said, “your secret’s safe with me.” I waited a moment to respond to this because Parker’s breath seemed withheld, on the verge of adding something further, but in the end I heard nothing except a soft click, perhaps the sound of a wristwatch tapping on the receiver, or an open mouth that, wanting to say more but not knowing what, had shut with a quiet setting of teeth. And I realized right then that Alvin Parker, beyond the revealing or safeguarding of my secret—that I was an academic—had, like me, nothing to say, and that he had understood this in the instant of Ben’s reaction, when it was made clear that being a literary critic was an occupation best kept hidden in the company of men telling stories.
When Parker spoke again, it was not about me, but Nate. “Your friend—Soames—he’s been calling me constantly the last three weeks. I’m getting scared to pick up the receiver.”
This time, it was Parker’s turn to wait for a response, because I had taken a breath, but no words were forthcoming. Parker laughed. “You know what? He wanted to know if he could take one of my courses! Especially interested in metafiction, he tells me.” Parker laughed again. “When he speaks about it it’s like listening to a man making his last confession. There’s this spiritual aspect to what he’s saying, this faith. Like he believes that by thinking about stories from the outside he’ll be able to
get outside his shitty life.” There was another spot of silence, then more clicking, and I realized Parker was not setting his teeth but grinding them. “I thought you should know, because he sounds more and more disturbed all the time.”
“What did you tell him?” I asked, scanning the room for my coat and keys, wanting to depart for Nate’s place even before getting off the phone with Parker.
“I said,” Parker whispered, “that he could have my knowledge, all ofit, for what it’s worth. In return, I’ll take his story. I also told him there’s nothing worse than the kind of escape he’s dreaming of. It’s no escape at all”
I nodded into the receiver, resisting the urge to turn my back to the books still leering at me from the shelves.
