Dinner at the Centre of the Earth

by Nathan Englander

  “I’m impressed,” he says, as she moves confidently about, stopping only to pass him her glass when it needs topping off.

  “This is nothing. A nice, easy pasta. A salad, so your Ashkenazi heart keeps pumping.”

  “You’re already worried about my health?”

  “From the instant you told me you crossed the city for chopped liver three weeks in a row.”

  It’s all moving along seamlessly but for the salt, which he doesn’t seem to have, and which she finds to be an astonishing testament to his sad bachelorhood. “Salt, olive oil,” she says. “These are basic things.”

  She grabs his keys without asking and nips out to the corner store.

  He looks out the window when she goes, following her down the block in that gloamy evening light.

  The dinner they share is as simple and homey and wonderful as the waitress promised. She grates bottarga atop his spaghetti, and, like all things related to this woman, when he tastes it, he falls instantly in love.

  “It’s my father’s favorite,” she tells him. When he asks her exactly what it is, she says it’s better just to eat and enjoy.

  Z does just that. Eating and enjoying while gazing across at a person whose giant curls fall perfectly into her face every time she looks down at her plate.

  When he tries to pour out the end of that second bottle of wine, it’s the first he senses how long they’ve been sitting and talking and drinking, and how fully besotted he is.

  Z has barely lifted the bottle when the waitress stays his hand. “An unmarried man should never pour out the last drops.”

  “Are you sure about that? I’d be shocked if there was a superstition we didn’t have in my house.”

  “This one is Italian, not Jewish,” she says, and she works so hard to empty the bottle, Z expects she’ll wring it out like a dish towel before she’s done.

  They take their glasses over to the sofa, which is set against the short wall between dining table and bedroom that, in Z’s rental, passes as a salon. The waitress sits with her back against the sofa’s arm, and her legs stretched across Z’s lap.

  “I can’t believe you’re in my apartment,” he says. “The beautiful waitress who brought me my lunch. And—if it’s not too creepy?” Z says, waiting for approval to potentially creep her out.

  The waitress nods, magnanimous.

  “When I walked into the restaurant you were at that front window, facing the street. I was already smitten before you turned around. Is that too weird to admit—the falling-for-your-back bit?”

  “For my back? That’s the part of me you fell for?”

  “It was all of you,” he says. “All your parts, fallen for equally.”

  “I’m sure,” the waitress says, with a raised eyebrow and a good long drink of her wine. Then, remembering something, she sits up and swings her legs off Z’s lap. “Oh my God!” she says. “Speaking of . . .”

  “Of your parts?”

  “Of the restaurant. There was another new waiter trying out that day.”

  “Yes,” Z says, his blood pressure—at mention of that waiter—already on the rise.

  “You remember him?”

  “I do, actually. I did not like the look of that guy.”

  “Right?” she says. “Something was off with him. He kept saying he had a lot of experience, but he couldn’t balance a tray.” The waitress switches to a conspiratorial whisper. “I don’t think he’d waited tables before.”

  “I guess he didn’t impress. Because he never came back either. They must have fired him after his audition too.”

  “The opposite. He’s the one who turned them down. I was so much better, and they offered him the job.”

  “How do you know? I thought you both only worked the one shift?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. When I went to get the salt, I forgot to say. I bumped into that waiter.”

  “You bumped into the Huguenot?” Z says. “Like a big, mean-looking waiter—a giant, handsome, mean-looking gay waiter? With sort of blondish hair, and an unnaturally strong chin. Like, maybe there is a horseshoe stuffed in there.”

  “You don’t need to describe him,” she says. “That’s who we were already talking about.”

  “I was confirming that we meant the same person,” Z says, really, really needing her to confirm that the man she just saw was, for sure, the same one he meant.

  “Yes, of course, it was him. And yes, he is very handsome—even more handsome with that chin. It fits his face well.”

  “Very handsome,” Z says. “And you’re saying he was also at the store?”

  “He was on the corner, here, having a chat with that vagrant who always sits on the end of your block.”

  “The bum? On the suitcase? They were chatting?”

  “Yes,” she says. “And you know what?”

  “No,” Z says. He does not know what. Not at all.

  “He was very friendly today. You would think he was a different person from how he was at the restaurant. So cocky.”

  “But was it a different person?”

  “No. It was him.” The waitress fetches her phone from the table and hands it to Z. “He gave me his number and said we should get a drink.”

  Z can feel his face twisting up, so distressing is her report.

  “It isn’t like that,” the waitress says, standing over him. “It was so clearly friendly. He wasn’t starting. I promise you, he’s not interested that way.”

  “Did you tell him you saw me?” Z hands her back the phone without even looking.

  “Did I tell him that I was having dinner with a man from a table that he didn’t serve, from the place he worked for one day? No, I did not.”

  “He remembers me, I promise. He saw me come in. I saw him see me! He made a call.”

  “Yes, I’m sure your lunch meant a lot. I’m sure he was downstairs because he wants to thank you for eating in his presence. A great honor.”

  “It’s not funny. I need to know, did he say anything about me at all?”

  “You’re serious? Is he supposed to be a spy too? Is he your enemy, the waiter that you never met?”

  “I am life-and-death serious.”

  “This is why I never date the Jewish men. Not because there are too few in Rome. It’s because of this. Because of how you act right now. You all seem very cute for a day or two, and then end up being crazy. Crazy mama’s boys, every last one. It’s the Gentile girls that get raised thinking you make good husbands.”

  “I’m really sorry,” Z says. “I’ll calm down,” he says, without calming at all. “Just tell me what he said, exactly. I wasn’t kidding about the trouble I’m in.”

  She looks at him with hooded eyes and sits back down next to him, but, he notes, they no longer touch. The waitress reports the rest to Z, somewhat jokingly, though he can tell she is giving an accurate account.

  “He said hello. He said, ‘Tiens, quelle surprise!’ Or maybe I said that—”

  “Who said it?”

  “Him,” the waitress says, reflecting. “Then I asked what he was doing around here. And he said, meeting a friend for a movie. Then he asked me—”

  “Exactly what did he ask, and how did he ask it?”

  “That’s what I’m telling you. He asked me if I lived here. I told him, no. I told him that I was having dinner with a friend—a friend who has no salt. Then I showed him the salt, because I didn’t take a bag at the shop, and the salt was in my hand, and because I guess I thought that it would be funny to present it right then.”

  “That’s it?”

  The waitress sighs, exasperated.

  “He told me his friend lives on this block too. Then he asked me what building I was going to, because maybe it was the same one.”

  “Was it?”

  “It was. But on the other side.”

  “At the back, the-other-side? Or the opposite entrance, at the front?”

  “The front,” she says. “The other front stairs.”
>
  “How do you know?”

  “Seriously? I know because I told him I was in the front but on this side, when he asked me.”

  “And you answered?”

  “Is it a secret? He doesn’t even know I’m with you.”

  “It kind of, sort of, was.”

  Z gets up and starts pacing, because this somehow feels like it will help him think. “Where is he now?”

  “Now? I assume not where I left him.”

  “I’m saying, which way did he go?”

  “No way. He went to his friend’s. They’re probably in some hot French movie theater watching balloons float across the screen.”

  Z stops, frozen.

  “He picked up his friend? In this building? Did he get buzzed up?”

  “Of course not. I let him in. I just told you that we were going to the same place.”

  Z shakes his head, fully disappointed. In her. In himself. His mind then split between dark scenarios unfurling at lightning speed, as well as a slow-motion remorse as he remembers the waitress picking up his keys on her way out for salt. He has added himself to the image so that, in recalling, he is also looking down upon his own dumb, doting smile.

  He can see from the waitress’s own pitched-browed, wide-eyed response that she, in a non-teasing way, really thinks that he’s maybe mad as a hatter.

  He will fix that later, if he can. But he’s already in the bedroom, grabbing a leather satchel in which he drops his favorite of the books he’s bought. He stuffs in a Patagonia shell from the pile of clothes in the bottom of the cabinet, and he does all this very self-consciously—as the waitress, now leaning back against the deep solid archway that separates the rooms, gawks at his frantic running around.

  Z sticks a hand under the mattress and pulls out a flip knife. It is a large and stupid-looking thing that he bought from a cutlery stand at the open-air market, a table set with cheese slicers and nail clippers and faux-hinged steak knives that don’t really fold, as well as a few implements of violence.

  Z opens the knife with one hand, and, looking over at the waitress, he can see that she’s not the least bit afraid of him, even like this. Her trust touches him deeply and is also disheartening, for making clear how absolutely un-terrifying a man he seems.

  Z passes her by and grabs a chair that he takes over to the bathroom. He steps up and works the knife blade into the top edge of the flimsy bathroom door, prying off the strip of wood between the panels.

  With that strip popped loose, Z holds the knife in his teeth and, hand over hand, pulls up a string that hangs in the narrow hollow.

  Attached to the end of the string is a ziploc bag, sealed with packing tape. He hops down and heads to the dining table to cut it open.

  Inside are a passport and three fat stacks of bills, two in euros and one in dollars, rubber bands stretched around.

  “Good,” the waitress says. “That’s an improvement.”

  “What?” Z says, his face tight, a sweaty seriousness about him.

  “Now you seem less crazy, and more like a dangerous spy.”

  “Do I really seem more dangerous?”

  “Not really. I was trying to be nice because it seems like it matters to you.”

  “It does. If I were a bit more threatening now, it would help.”

  “To scare the waiter who has come to kill you?”

  “Yes, because of him.”

  “You still don’t seem very scary. But you do seem legitimate. The passport and the money, they make you seem authentic. But shouldn’t you have maybe five passports, or a gun?”

  “The passport thing is only in the movies, and the gun for a different kind of spy. If the French came in here to arrest me, how guilty do I look with a half dozen identities lying around? How do you talk your way out of that?”

  “How do you explain a passport inside a door?”

  “One is odd, the other is criminal.”

  “Well, either way, I’m much more likely to believe whatever it is you’re about to tell me you’re caught up in.”

  “And you?” Z says, as he breaks up the money. Some in each pocket, some in the leather bag. He gets on his knees and pulls another ziploc from where it’s taped under the couch.

  “And me, what?”

  “Are you caught up in it too?” he says, standing.

  “You think, because we spent the week together? Because we had sex and took some baths and I made you dinner and bought salt?”

  “Sort of, because of all that, yes. Because I think, new as it is—we have something good.”

  “So, what you said before, it’s the opposite. Your troubles are contagious. And now, because I’ve been exposed, it’s like I have a kind of espionage-STD? That doesn’t make much sense.”

  “You could go home.”

  “Will I get home?”

  “I bet you will. I bet it will be fine.”

  “You ‘bet’?”

  “You’re linked to me now, and, unfortunately, you’re also now marked in some way.”

  “‘Marked’?” she says, looking rattled for the first time. “I don’t like that at all.”

  “I’m just saying, it would make sense to keep tabs on you. But you haven’t done anything. They will see that you’re innocent and a waste of resources.”

  “When will they see that?”

  Z stands there, trying to wait her out, to be patient, but things are feeling really pressing. The Huguenot, if he’s still in the building, has had ample time to prepare whatever terribleness he’s been sent to deliver. Every extra instant is in the waiter’s favor.

  “I need to go somewhere,” Z says, “to a hotel, or a hostel, or something. Even just for a night. Just until I can figure out a next step. But it has to happen now.”

  “And you want me to join?”

  “I want you to do whatever you want.”

  “If I do go home, and forget about you, you promise I’m not going to end up getting tortured? I don’t want to be dunked in water and made to talk. That’s a nightmare I’ve had since I was a little girl.”

  “I’d be very surprised if that happened.”

  “You’re quite the salesman,” she says.

  “Then, I promise,” he says. “It won’t happen. You’ll be safe. Your roommates will be safe. I’m sorry if I said it wrong.”

  The waitress purses her lips, first aiming them left and then right, her perfect nose wrinkling in the sexiest of concerned manners.

  “This is the moment, traditionally,” Z says, “where you decide if you’re on board.”

  The waitress thinks about this and taps at that broken tooth with a fingernail, as if she’s checking to see if it’s grown back on its own.

  “Well, if I come along. Where do we go?”

  “Pretty much anywhere that’s not here.”

  Giving that tooth three more thoughtful taps, the waitress lowers her hand and says, “If I do come?”

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t do hostels. There’s only so much sacrifice I can make, even for adventure.”

  “You can pick the place.”

  “And you’re really not going to get me killed?”

  “And not dunked in water either. If we get out of here, absolutely not. If they don’t have to surprise us and can see, in public, that we are two, it will be fine. It’s very clear that who wants to talk to me wants only me.”

  “To talk to you?”

  “To capture me, to torture me, to maybe kill me if options one and two aren’t feasible.”

  “One more thing, then, before my first-ever escape. Answer that and I’ll join you.”

  “Like in a fable.”

  “Sort of.”

  Z straightens his back, shakes out his arms, and nods.

  “I’m ready. Ask away.”

  “This is really more to make my father happy. It’s how he raised me. But still, even to rebellious, sleeping-with-strangers, socialist me, I admit, it matters.”

  “I can respect that.”


  “So tell me, operative. Is what you’re doing good for the Jews?”

  2014, Limbo

  Oh, how it torments him, the sound of that shot. The General practically leaps from his chair.

  He drops the newspaper on the side table. But the paper keeps dropping. The table isn’t there.

  The General finds it behind him, beneath Lily’s weaving, pushed up against the wall. Atop it, in place of the tea he was drinking, sits a small clay menorah, caked with wax. It is wonderfully misshapen, with pencil-bored wells spaced too closely together, ready for the candles that will burn too quick. A masterpiece one of his grandchildren made in school.

  This makes the General smile, doubly so, as he spies, between the feet of the table, the crumpled foil from a chocolate coin.

  He can’t understand why the menorah is still out, the floor still unswept, all the way to October, almost a year after the holiday fell.

  And if the calendar really stands at 1967, then who are these grandchildren he already loves, so far from being ushered into this world?

  It is not right, the General knows. It has been, for some time, not right.

  The General does not run to the road to find his ghost of a son. He does not call for Lily, already gone. He will look for a mirror, is what he decides. For it cannot be both present and past, and the General wants to see which face he wears. He wants to know if he is old or if he’s young.

  On his way to the foyer, where the closest mirror stands, the General pinches himself—hard. He feels the pinch and feels sure that he’s not dreaming.

  He follows the pinch with a deep, deep breath, and he knows too that this must mean he is not, himself, yet dead.

  But that shot, then, how can it keep on shooting?

  None of it makes any sense. Unless, unless.

  The front hall mirror is covered with a sheet, as if the General inhabits a house of mourning. He wiggles his toes and looks down at his feet. He’s not surprised to find himself padding around in socks, as if newly bereaved.

  Nobody wants that, the General thinks. And the General closes his eyes tight-tight.

  Reopening them, the General is relieved. Yes, he must have been dozing. It is the simplest explanation—for he is seated again, the copper tray table that Lily made back at his side. On it stands his mug of mint tea, the steam twisting off in a wisp.