Corrections to my Memoirs

by Michael Kun

  “Sir, when do I ever leave the kitchen? I’m in here all evening long, preparing the meals, cooking, baking. I couldn’t possibly try on the customers’ coats unless I left the kitchen, and I don’t have time to do that.”

  He was right; he doesn’t leave the kitchen. Except when he goes home at night, of course, but there are no customers remaining then, so he couldn’t be the one. I said I was sorry and went back to my wife, and she agreed that we were stupid to think that it was Vincent. She had a hunch, though, that it was David, the bartender. David had always looked more than a bit suspicious from the day I first hired him.

  “Have you been trying on the customers’ coats?” I asked.

  “No, sir.”

  “Are you positive that you haven’t?”

  “Mr. Keeling, I don’t even step out from behind the bar once in the course of a normal evening. I’m busy all night mixing drinks and drawing beers, and when I’m not doing that, I’m cleaning glasses.”

  That was the truth. He doesn’t leave the bar except to go home when we close up, like Vincent. I don’t know what made me think it was him.

  Eventually I questioned the entire staff, one by one, even those who looked innocent. The maître d’. The chef’s assistants. The waiters. The waitresses. The dishwasher. The busboys. The woman at the cash register. They all denied it, and they all had alibis. And yet the complaints about the coats continued into November. And December.

  By January the situation was becoming unbearable. Our restaurant, at one time filled each and every evening of the week, was only half-filled—if that—even on Saturday nights. Customers no longer needed to make reservations in advance; they could just walk in and take one of the empty tables. Somebody was trying on the coats, and it was ruining business.

  It had to be Susan. There was no other logical explanation. I started peeking around corners hoping to spot her slipping on someone’s jacket. I snuck up on her when I thought that she must have believed that I was elsewhere in the hopes that I might catch her in the act, one arm in a sleeve, reaching back to get the other. Once, desperate, I unscrewed the ventilation cover over the kitchen, hoisted myself up, made my way through the crawl space, and peered down on her through the vent above the coat- room. But not once did I see her try on a coat, nor, for that matter, did she even touch one except to put it on a hanger or retrieve it for a departing customer. And, still, the problem persisted. Into February.

  Though it continued, the number of incidents began to decline, and that was heartening. My wife and I felt certain that it was coming to an end. By Valentine’s Day, word had gotten around town that the problem with the coats was nearly over, and some of our old customers returned. We were pleased. But when they came back, it started again, as frequent as ever. Four a week. And, again, the customers left. We hadn’t considered that the number of incidents might be related to the number of customers, that as fewer people ate in the restaurant, naturally fewer complaints would be lodged. It’s something of a mathematical equation, which is all quite logical and all quite unsettling for a restaurant owner.

  In March my wife insisted that we do something about the problem. The electric bill was overdue, we owed money to the butcher and the man who delivers the fresh vegetables, and people were making faces at us at church.

  “What can we do?” I asked her. “We can’t fire Susan. It wouldn’t be fair.”

  “I agree, but couldn’t we just give her another job in the restaurant and see what happens?”

  It was a good idea. We moved Susan out of the coat-check room and had her setting the tables, and the problem with the coats disappeared. There were no complaints. But within a week she was back in the coatroom; the customers were complaining about dirty silverware. And the problem returned.

  Well, it’s the fifth day of April as I write this, and, as I’ve said, someone is still trying on the coats and Susan is still working for us. But I don’t feel as bad about the whole situation as I once did. Soon it will be spring, and the beautiful birds will return to color the sky, and leaves will sprout from the trees, and happy children will toss balls on fields and in the streets, and young couples will braid their fingers as they walk and sit cross-legged on blankets as they picnic in the shade. And restaurant-goers will stop wearing coats.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  We just paid twenty-five grand for that story.

  Jesus Christ, this is getting ridiculous.

  DID SHE JUMP OR WAS SHE PUSHED

  Though it fit as if it were, Jules Matthewman’s argyle vest was not his own. Nor was his Burberry overcoat for that matter. They used to be Mackie’s, and their father’s before that, and he’d noticed that evening, as he buttoned the coat up against the February wind, that two of the buttons were missing, the top one and the second one from the bottom. The top one was the more troublesome, and he held the coat closed at the collar with his left hand to keep from getting a chill. His right hand he stuck in the coat’s huge side pocket, and, surprised to learn that it wasn’t empty, he removed the contents to find the two brown buttons and a ticket stub for the Brooklyn Symphony Orchestra, November 28, 1979. The buttons he put back in his pocket, and he dropped the stub into the snow, as dark and watery as oatmeal, burying it with the toes of his loafers. He checked his watch: 6:25.

  There were a half dozen other people at the bus stop, all wrapped up against the cold, all having done a better job of it than Jules, and he’d been paying only the slightest attention to them, thinking instead of his phone call from his father and of Trace, who was to meet him at the Port Authority building at 8:15.

  “Trace,” he’d said, calling her at work, “I need a place to stay tonight. Just one night, I promise. It’s my father.” There was no one else to call in New York since Mackie and Kate had moved to Cincinnati, no one he knew well enough to ask, and he had neither the money to afford one of the better hotels nor the patience to tolerate the seedier ones downtown. Plus, it had been nearly six weeks since he’d seen her last, since she came to pick up her furniture.

  “Of course, Jules. Let me know where I should pick you up.” He’d been surprised that she’d said yes, and he didn’t know whether it was because she wanted to see him or because he’d said it was about his father.

  Jules shook his head side to side in an exaggerated way, then let out a laugh almost girlish in its pitch, wondering about it.

  An old woman with crazy, white hair, her face sympathetic and neatly round, was nearest Jules. With navy yarn, she was knitting what looked to be a scarf, and one of the same color was turned twice around her own neck. Concentrating on the movement of her needles, the woman lifted her head on occasion to inspect the traffic. A grandmother, Jules guessed, going to visit her son and daughter-in-law. He liked to do that. He liked to try to figure out who people were, piecing together little clues like a detective. The navy yarn was what made him think that she had a son, not a daughter, though the scarf could be for a grandson.

  Not that it mattered. She was a grandmother, that was for sure, and it was the scarves now that Jules was interested in, eyeing them greedily, consciously tightening his grip on the overcoat. He couldn’t remember ever owning a scarf. No, that was wrong; there had been a scarf, a plaid one. Trace had given it to him on his nineteenth birthday. Or maybe it had been his twentieth. He’d lost it somewhere.

  Jules tried to remember how Trace had dressed in this kind of weather, and, though they’d lived together for nearly two and a half years, though he’d known her since Freshman Week at Duke, he thought it strange that he could only remember her in white shorts and summer dresses, or, better, the cheerleader uniform. The white-and-blue skirt that cut across her thighs, the white sweater with the script “Blue Devils” cutting through the outline of a megaphone. Even when there were puffs of cold breath coming out of her mouth, her legs were bare. There were no coats that he could remember, either in her dorm room or, later, in their closet. She must have had one, though. She must have had dozens. If he cou
ldn’t think of her wardrobe, it was just because that wasn’t what had stuck with him about her.

  At the curb was a man in a camel hair coat and gray fedora holding the Wall Street Journal in front of him, the paper folded into thirds like a letter. To Jules, he had the look of an advertising executive. Clean, sharp, smooth, scary. He was probably going into the city to take a client to a show, maybe to meet one of the ladies from the secretarial pool at the Waldorf. The one who laughs at his jokes. Probably the same one who’d complimented him on the hat, said it made him look dapper. It didn’t. It made him look dated. Warm, though.

  Behind the advertising executive, two teenage girls stood in the gutter, knapsacks slung over their shoulders, each smoking a cigarette, each trying to make the act look so natural as to make it that much more unnatural.

  He let go of his collar, trying to hold it closed with his chin as he reached into the back pocket of his slacks to get a cigarette himself. Trace had always hated it when he smoked, hiding all of his ashtrays beneath the sink, and he had only started smoking again recently, around Christmas. He was already back up to three packs a day.

  He pulled a pack of Winstons out, tapped it against the heel of his palm until the brownish tip of a single cigarette slid out, brought that to his mouth, and dragged the cigarette from the pack with his lips. He put the pack back, drew a thin, silver lighter from one of his front slacks pockets, and lit the cigarette. His coat collar popped open when he did this, and he winced, anticipating the cold. He put the lighter in the coat pocket where the buttons were and pinched his collar closed, trying to remember what had made him think of pulling this coat from the closet in the first place. The London Fog he’d picked up at O’Donnell’s last winter was still in fine shape, all of the buttons secure, and, in fact, he’d worn it to work just this morning.

  “Which way is this one going?” someone asked. “The tunnel or the bridge?”

  “The next one’s going by the tunnel,” Jules answered, cordially, though he didn’t turn to see who’d asked.

  “That’s good news. The last time I went in, I didn’t even think of asking anyone, and wouldn’t you know that I got on the wrong bus. Ended up on One-seventy-eighth.”

  Jules drew deeply from the cigarette and turned to face the speaker. He was fiftyish, with deep wrinkles on his forehead and dead capillaries on the bulb of his nose. A drinker, and a heavy one at that. “Yeah, that’s happened to me a couple times.”

  “Then you know what a pain in the ass it is. It’s not bad enough that you wind up an hour or two late for wherever you were supposed to be, but then you have to take the A-train down to the Port Authority. Might as well take a ride straight through Africa, if you know what I mean.” The man smiled widely, looking for Jules’s approval, and, had he been closer, he might have nudged him with his elbow.

  “I’m not sure I do.”

  “Blackies,” the man said, dipping his head toward Jules as if sharing a secret, but not lowering his voice accordingly, “by the boatload. Black as my shoes and enough to start their own planet for chrissakes.”

  Jules puffed again on his cigarette, exhaled, and drew the smoke up into his nostrils. “I’m married to a black woman,” he said, matter-of-factly, and he looked down the avenue past the bank as if he were looking for their bus. It turned the corner and came into view.

  The man was preparing to explain himself when Jules turned back. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I know what you meant.”

  Jules picked up his gym bag and moved closer to the curb as the bus pulled in.

  The bus was nearly empty when Jules climbed on, kicking his shoes against the metal steps to free the snow. He chose a seat near the middle, sliding in beside the window. He put his gym bag on the seat next to him, then unbuttoned his coat and rubbed at the stubble on his neck until the area was pink and irritated. The air in the bus was stale and warm, and Jules wiped the condensation off the window with his palm, watching the rest climb on.

  When everyone had taken a seat—the grandmother in the seat behind Jules, the ad executive three seats up on the opposite side, the drinker behind the sheet of plexiglass that separated the driver from the passengers—the driver asked the two girls to put out their cigarettes. They protested, “Hey, what about the skinny guy?” and tried to find Jules on the bus. Before they did, he crushed his cigarette against the armrest. There was still half an inch of tobacco left, and he dropped it to the floor, unzipped his gym bag, and searched its contents until he found a legal pad and a ballpoint pen.

  Mackie—

  he wrote. He stopped to shake the pen to bring ink to the tip. Writing to Mackie had once been a habit, one he’d fallen out of when Mackie and Kate lived so close to him, in New York City, just across the river. He’d written Mackie twice a week when Mackie went off to Boston College, and, three years later, when he moved out of the house to go to school at Duke, he kept writing, the letters dropping to one or two a month.

  Mackie had been the first one he’d told about Trace. “Trace Sain is attractive,” he’d written in his first letter from college, “in a stunning sort of way. Like Natalie Wood in Splendor in the Grass.” He’d met her at a mixer in the dormitory cafeteria, even danced with her once, and he’d stayed up to write Mackie about her, writing on notebook paper at his desk as his roommate slept.

  This very minute I’m on a bus bound for the city—God only knows why I’m on a bus bound for the city—and I thought I’d pass the time writing the letter I’ve owed you for three months. Or is it four? Let’s not be nitpicky about this, okay? Just be thankful and don’t complain.

  Before I forget, please say hello to Kate for me. Tell her thanks, but Trace and I won’t be able to come out for a visit since Trace and I aren’t “Trace and I” anymore, if you catch my drift. Suffice it to say, things didn’t work out as I, we, and everyone else had expected. A million reasons, all of them small. The funny thing is that I’ll be seeing her tonight, sort of out of necessity.

  It was beginning to snow again, lightly, and, Jules imagined, wetly. He watched people running along the sidewalks with their umbrellas, pulling their knees up high as they sloshed through the mess that had been a perfect layer of snow-white snow only a dozen hours earlier.

  The bus stopped every half mile or so to take on more passengers, all with umbrellas it seemed, and Jules was surprised at the short time it had taken for the bus to fill with people and packages. He could smell the dampness of their clothes, the sharp, warm smell of wet burlap, and he was consumed by the smell of their body heat, the perspiration from their armpits and collars.

  Jules took his bag off the seat and placed it on the floor, squeezing it between his loafers. There was a tickle rising in his throat, and he made himself cough to get rid of it, then wiped his lips with the back of his hand.

  I guess the big news is that I’ve become a terrible liar of late, “terrible” meaning that I’m actually quite good at it. Even worse than when we were kids, Mackie, if you can believe it. At work they all think that I dine regularly with William F. Buckley Jr. And I can’t even count the number of times William Styron and his wife have dropped by the apartment to chat—and they don’t even call first. How rude. I should think a Southern gentleman like Will (Styron, not Buckley) would know better.

  It’s horrible, and I can’t stop. Not ten minutes ago, for no reason at all, I told this guy at the bus stop that I was married to a black woman. No, that’s not true—I had a good reason for doing it. The guy was so goddam casual about thinking that all blacks are like the ones who’ve harassed him on the subway, and I felt like throwing him off balance a bit. You know the way I get sometimes. Used to drive Trace up a wall. One of the million reasons, I suppose. She said I was always trying to teach people lessons and what was I, pious or something? Anyway, maybe it was a rotten thing to do to the guy. I mean, he seemed like a nice guy, and maybe he has good reason to be afraid. Maybe he’s been mugged a couple times or his wife was beaten up or something like tha
t. Who knows. I’m a horrible human being, aren’t I? Don’t feel compelled to answer that.

  As Jules finished the paragraph and thought of another, a heavy man in a navy trench coat dropped into the seat next to him, both of their seats jumping when he did. Jules turned the corners of his mouth up and nodded to acknowledge the man’s presence, then leaned forward awkwardly and tried to pull his Winstons out of his back pocket without standing. When he’d finally wriggled the pack out from beneath his overcoat, he spotted the NO SMOKING sign at the front of the bus, remembered the girls, and writhed in his seat once again as he pushed the pack into his pocket.

  The man next to him frowned and pulled a copy of the New York Daily News out from beneath his coat, throwing the paper open in front of him. Before the man turned to the horoscopes, Jules caught the headline on the front page, DID SHE JUMP OR WAS SHE PUSHED.

  What can I tell you about work except that nothing’s changed a bit since the last time you heard from me, three (or four) months ago. I’m still writing articles for that old witch about the company picnic and about so-and-so being selected “Shithead of the Year” by the Kiwanis Club because he cuts his yard twice a week or took the Boy Scouts camping or something stupid like that. I have learned something useful, though, and that’s that if I take the cap of my pen and practically engrave the word SEX into my copy, the old witch’ll come in and tell me what a wonderful article it is. No kidding. Works every time.

  That had been another reason Trace had moved out, that he hated his job. He hated his job, and, worse, he never stopped talking about how much he hated it. Every night over dinner, every night in bed. He hated his boss. She was rude and condescending. He hated what he did. It was demeaning. He could do it in his sleep. He hated his office, too small. He hated everything about it, but he wouldn’t leave. Jules had tried to explain to her that everyone hated their job and that it did him good to talk to her about it, but she’d said that it didn’t matter, that it was just one of a million reasons for leaving anyway.