Adverbs

by Daniel Handler

  Down the counter a ways were the two detectives, who automatically make a story get interesting, even though the only interesting thing they were doing was eating waffles, both of them, at five-thirty in the afternoon. They had taken off their hats and lined them up together on the counter like two very short additional customers. This was how it was, the five people, Andy and Mike and the woman who had been drinking, Andrea, and the two detectives, while the couple bickered in the back and the cook stared into space at the grill, thinking, Well, if I took my goddamn spatula and scraped at that piece of burnt cheese, if I scrape it right there it would look like the state of Nevada.

  This was that day, if you know what I mean. Outside it was dark, and what with the rain you might not even know Andy’s was open. This was when there was a power shortage in California. It turned out to be corporate greed but at the time it seemed like there might be something to it, so everybody tried to be careful. All the neon signs were quiet and it was hard to see what was open and what wasn’t. The Andy’s sign was off. It definitely wasn’t Christmas and yet the snowman and the wreath were still painted on the windows. Outside garbage blew, running stop signs and red lights. We’ve all had days like this. If you know what I mean it felt reckless, the rain and whatnot, but only if your idea of reckless is sitting at a diner and having whatever you felt like. There were limits to the menu, of course, and on days like this that hurt. You wanted to go do something and nobody would help you. It was a bad day for love. Andrea in particular was taking it hard.

  “I want an Angel’s Nipple,” she said to Andy. “It’s rum and heavy cream and an egg white with a floater of maraschino liqueur. I want a Louisiana Flip or a Neptune Fizz.”

  “We don’t have those party drinks,” Andy said. “You know that, honey. I’ll bring you another half carafe of the house red if you want.”

  “If I want,” Andrea sneered. She moved her hand down the counter like a spilled something, honey or milk. Mike watched her because it was a free country. “I want a Do Be Careful. I want a Pimm’s Cup. I want a Delmonico with a twist, served up.”

  “I’ll serve you up a half carafe of white or red,” Andy said patiently. “Come on now, Andrea. They don’t have those things at a diner. It’s not the end of the world.”

  “When they say it’s not the end of the world,” Andrea said, “it usually is.”

  “The world can only end once,” said one of the detectives, and then he raised a paper napkin to his mouth and wiped himself a false, hearty smile. “I know!” he said. “Here’s something we can do! What is your name, Andrea? You want to do something? You want to look at a picture?” He turned to the other detective, who was already taking a photograph out of his jacket. It was not in an envelope. “Let’s show her the picture,” he said, and put the photograph down on the counter where it would probably stick. Andy frowned even before he saw it.

  You love once and then maybe not again. Not on a day like this. The rain, the rain, the rain. You can’t even hear it outside the window but still it’s a sad thing. Rain, the grade school teachers say, makes the trees and flowers grow, but we’re not trees and flowers, and so many grade school teachers are single. Even Mike’s teacher got lonesome brokenhearted like this. Her husband left and took all the red wine and even the salt, on the grounds that it was his. No, if you loved once and then kaput, then it looks like rain in your life. At least an Angel’s Nipple would make it taste better, if you know what I mean. If you know what I mean the picture showed an old woman looking steadily at the camera in black-and-white, almost a formal portrait. Andy put a half carafe of red in front of Andrea.

  “Who are you guys?” Andrea said. “I think I’ll have a half carafe of red, Andy.”

  “We’re detectives,” the detective said. Mike looked up from the jukebox because it was interesting now. He looked at the picture. Murderer?

  “I thought you weren’t supposed to say ‘We’re detectives.’” She said “We’re detectives” in the tone of voice someone might use to say “Making you happy isn’t making me happy.”

  “You’re thinking of spies,” the detective said.

  “I’m thinking of leaving, is what I’m thinking of,” Andrea said.

  “Don’t leave, lady,” the detective said. “We’re just showing you a picture. We flew all the way out to San Fran and came to this diner.”

  “I hate when people call it San Fran,” Andrea said.

  “San Fran is what everyone calls it,” said the detective. “Like the song says, I guess when it rains it pours.”

  Andrea poured more from the carafe into the glass and then, less successfully, back again. “Why don’t you leave her alone?”

  “It’s Gladys,” Andy said, turning his head so he wouldn’t have to look at the picture upside down anymore.

  “Gladys, the man says.” The detective turned to the other detective, as if they were partners. “She’s calling herself Gladys now.” The partner took out a pen and then looked around. Their two hats were sitting in front of a paper place mat the diner used. He slid it on over and wrote Gladys, G-L-A-D-Y-S, in big pen letters.

  “You asshole,” Andrea said to the owner of the place. “You asshole jerk Andy.”

  Andy raised his hands very mildly and Mike blushed back by the jukebox. “She comes in here all the time,” he said to the detectives, and poured them more coffee.

  “Much obliged,” the detective said about the coffee, and then turned to his partner. “Man says she comes here all the time.” The other detective nodded and wrote “comes here all the time” below “Gladys” on the place mat.

  “Why’d you tell them that?” Andrea said. “God, I want a drink.” She slugged her wine down which didn’t take long. “I want a Hong Kong Cobbler. I want a Gypsy Rose. I want a Mother’s Ruin or a Singapore Sling, either one. They’re both gin-based although I forget which one has ginger beer.”

  “We don’t have those party drinks here,” Andy said patiently. “This is a diner. I thought about opening a bar but that was a long time ago.”

  “Seems like even a bar wouldn’t have drinks like that, more’s the pity,” the detective said. “Times have unfortunately changed.”

  Andrea stumbled up off her stool and went and sat closer to the detectives. She tried to pick up the picture but it stuck to the counter like I told you. “I’ve never seen this woman before in my life,” she said. “I come in here all the time.”

  “Usually drunk and sad,” Andy said.

  “When Andy said she comes in here all the time he meant me,” she said, tapping the place mat with a nail she broke on a man’s door. “I come here all the time and I’ve never seen Gladys in all my life.”

  “Don’t get like that,” the detective said. “This other guy and me, we’re detectives. Our client wants us to find the woman in the picture. There’s only one of them. We flew out here, we ask around, and she’s calling herself Gladys now and she comes here. We wait, she comes in, we got her and it’s kaput, kaput, kaput. Cake.”

  “Cake,” the partner said, also.

  “She always calls herself Gladys,” Andrea said, slouching back to her place.

  “Cake?” Andy said. A very bad covered cake was nearby, and some lonely doughnuts.

  “It’s an expression detectives use,” the detective said, “like easy as cake.”

  “Pie,” Mike said. At school he’d just had a test on expressions like “easy as pie” but he said it so quietly, only the jukebox heard.

  “Another one is ‘southside,’” the detective said. “It’s a detective expression if someone is, what’s-it-called, fleeing. If they’re fleeing, a detective will say ‘southside,’ because where do birds go?”

  “Southside,” Andy tried, and Mike murmured it to himself. “I wish all my troubles’d go southside.”

  “Southside,” the detective said. “All the birds end up in South America, not a lot of people know. Every bird in the world. They say in Peru you can scarcely walk in winter without st
epping on a bird of some kind. Of course some birds are evergreen but the rest are in South America.”

  “Is that so?” Andy said. He’d heard a lot of bullshit as part of owning and operating a diner but speaking of cake this took it.

  “No,” Mike whispered, and then turned around and said it. “No. Birds migrate according to a variety of patterns. I learned about it, and we saw some magpies on a field trip two and a half days ago, or we were supposed to but didn’t because of the rain. The yellow-billed magpie can be found exclusively in the coastal valleys south of San Francisco Bay, and there are three common words beginning with the letter A that describe it. The first is ‘attractive.’”

  “Don’t you have someplace to go?” the detective said.

  “No,” Mike said, and Andrea finished her wine and raised her fist in a salute. “It’s a free country.”

  “If you’re gonna tell my customers to leave,” Andy said, “I’ll have to ask you gentlemen to go southside.” But then Andy ruined it and winked at the boy, telling Mike there wasn’t anybody on his side after all.

  “We’re detectives,” the partner said.

  “What do detectives,” Andrea said, using the word detectives like she had used the word your wife Helena not so long ago, “want with Gladys anyway? She’s a nice old lady and she doesn’t have any money probably. She used to be an actress.”

  “She works I think at a store someplace,” Andy volunteered. “I heard her say ‘the store’ once, or ‘back at the store.’ She’s not bothering anyone, or you.”

  “What business do you have?” Andrea asked.

  The detectives looked at one another like this was their least favorite part of the job. “Our client,” said the one who keeps talking, “says this woman Gladys is the Snow Queen.”

  “The Snow Queen?” Andy said. “Who the fuck is the Snow Queen? Excuse my language, kid.”

  “It’s okay,” Mike said. “I’ve heard people say fuck a bunch of times.”

  “Don’t say fuck,” Andrea said. “Once you say fuck it’s all over and your life has changed. Andy, how come you don’t say excuse me to me? I’m a lady, with your language.”

  “How’bout you give me another soda,” said bold bold Mike, to Andy, “for swearing.” Andy set him up, of the opinion that sugar didn’t hurt kids one bit. That was a rare commodity and Mike was learning to appreciate such people.

  “The Snow Queen, if anybody cares,” said the detective, “is an agent of the netherworld of Kata. In human form, she takes the human form of a woman. As her name implies, she can control all types of weather especially snow.”

  “Gladys is making it rain,” Andy said, thinking, And I didn’t even open a bar to hear this kind of crazy talk.

  “That’s what the man says,” said the detective.

  “And what man is that?” Andy said.

  “My client,” the detective said. “Our client, my partner and me.”

  “And what does your client,” Andy said, “want with the Snow Queen?” and cleared the waffles.

  “He’s in love with her,” the detective said. “We get paid by the hour.”

  Love is hourly, too. There are stories about people who have loved someone forever after laying eyes on them for a few minutes and then nevermore, but these stories have not happened to anyone we know. No, when you love someone you spend hours and hours with them, and even the mightiest forces in the netherworld could not say whether the hours you spend increase your love or if you simply spend more hours with someone as your love increases. And when the love is over, when the diner of love seems closed from the outside, you want all those hours back, along with anything you left at the lover’s house and maybe a couple of things which aren’t technically yours on the grounds that you wasted a portion of your life and those hours have all gone southside. Nobody can make this better, it seems, nothing on the menu. It’s like what the stewardess offers, even in first class. They come with towels, with drinks, mints, but they never say, “Here’s the five hours we took from you when you flew across the country to New York to live with your boyfriend and then one day he got in a taxicab and he never came back, and also you flew back, another five hours, to San Francisco, just in time for a catastrophe.” And so you sit like a spilled drink, those missing hours in you like an ache, and you hear stories that aren’t true and won’t bring anyone back. Things happen and you never get over them, and through the door came Gladys, the woman in the picture, and this is something none of the five people would ever get over. She was older than you might think but she looked good, and she did not look around, but went straight to the counter and sat down and put an arm around Andrea.

  “It’s good to see you, Andrea,” she said. “I thought I might not see you. This place doesn’t even look open, what with the sign dark.”

  “Hello, Nancy,” Andrea said, and Andy poured half a cup of coffee.

  “You’re drinking more than usual if I’m Nancy,” Gladys said. “Well, never you mind, dear. I know you’re sad. What you need is a Gene Ahern Gloom Chaser. It’s two kinds of rum, and cognac, Cointreau, lemon juice, and a bit of sugar, all stirred up and served in a highball glass with cola.”

  “That sounds terrible,” Andrea said, “but I guess it might be good.”

  “It’s delicious,” Gladys said. “If I were you I’d order one.”

  “We don’t have those party drinks,” Andy said, breaking someone’s heart every day. “This is a diner.”

  “I know what it is,” Gladys said and drank her half coffee in one gulp. “As you well know, Andrea, the Gene Ahern Gloom Chaser was invented by Gene Ahern, the author of the comic strip—”

  “I don’t know it,” Andrea said, with a shrug and an empty carafe. “Why do you say that, as you well know?”

  “As you well know,” Gladys said. “It’s an affectation of mine.”

  “What is the comic strip?” Mike asked. Even Mike had recognized Gladys but maybe could not believe it, that something so interesting would happen after all this jukebox, after waiting for that guy to show up who never did, and the detectives. He had given up the day for lousy, and now, the woman they were looking for? Now?

  “The comic strip,” Gladys said, moving her coffee cup to Andy like a chess piece, “was called Room and Board, and as you well know it was not funny at all. There was one I remember, a man in a clown suit, big red nose, big long beard, big tall hat with a tassel like they do. He is looking in the mirror and the speech bubble says, ‘I can’t go to the masked ball like this! I need a shave’—something like that. Not funny, as you well know, but for a while there was talk of a movie, and I was going to be the ingenue.”

  “What’s the ingenue, Nancy?” Mike asked. He got the code, the Nancy strategy, even though it would not work.

  “An ingenue,” Gladys said, “is an innocent woman. It doesn’t surprise me that a boy your age hasn’t seen one, and I’m Gladys, dear. Comic strips is about the only place you see them, comic strips and private homes.”

  “I agree with a man I know,” said the detective suddenly.

  “Beg pardon?” Gladys said.

  “Man says innocence is the rarest of commodities in the known world,” the detective said. Gladys’s face changed, and it was a shame to see.

  “Could you repeat yourself, please?” Gladys said. “Sir?”

  The detective took his lazy time. “My partner and I,” he said, and his sweeping palm said and our hats, “we know a man, says innocence is the rarest of commodities in the known world. Says when you find it, grab it, no matter who you have to hire.”

  “And how do you know this man?” Gladys said sadly. “Sitting next to you, maybe?”

  “I know him the same way I know that you drink your coffee in half cups,” the detective said, and his partner lifted the place mat from the table. Gladys looked down for the first time and saw a picture of herself, and then the message in ink: “Gladys comes here all the time.” It was true.

  “Gladys, pay no attent
ion to these guys,” Andy said. “These bad guys are dumb. They think South America is crawling with birds, and I’m going to call the police.”

  The partner put the place mat down and spread his hands on it like he was healing the sick, which he was not doing. He began to speak. “If someone pours you a full cup,” he said, “Gladys, the bottom half is freezing cold before you can drink it, on account of your deadly breath of ice. Isn’t that right, Your Highness?”

  “Kaatu,” Gladys said in a mysterious howl, and here we could skip ahead if you know what I mean. It is always tempting to skip past words we do not understand, the parts of a relationship which confuse us, and arrive at a nice clear sentence—“They clearly weren’t in love anymore,” or “The yellow-billed magpie can be found exclusively in the coastal valleys south of San Francisco Bay, and there are three common words beginning with the letter A that describe it,” or “She was wearing some sort of cape,” all of which appeared in the report filed by the surviving and more talkative detective. But we cannot skip to that or it wouldn’t be a love story. We cannot skip the way we look in photographs, or our own affectations, or the way we like our coffee, or the way the people we love like their coffee, even though they like it some bad, bad way. We must suffer through all of it, without skipping any tiny thing, and anyway it was a shawl she was wearing. She spread it out high so it drooped down her arms and kept saying things we cannot understand. “Kaatu maka, ebbery ebbery fingersauce!”

  She stood up from her place, her shawl like bat’s wings, and stared down the detective’s partner with an elegant disgust we’ve all unfortunately seen. “I don’t love you anymore,” she howled, “kaatu kaatu maka!” and she spun out of Andy’s diner. When the doors opened the rush sound of the rain came through, like those doors had been soundproof all this time. A blast of cold air gave everyone its fierce attention. It felt colder than it had been outside, but none of the people in the diner had been outside for a while and it had grown dark. It could have been anything, so cold. It could have been the rain maybe. Or—