Shakespeare's Kitchen

by Lore Segal

  The first several times he called he had been obliged to identify himself. “Jimmy Carl. Jimmy. Remember me from Philip and Fanny’s wedding?”

  He happened to call the day they took Carter away to the state hospital. Jimmy took Ilka to the corner Chinese restaurant. Ilka studied the oversized menu, looked up, and there, across the table from her, sat a young man! Jimmy Carl from Philip and Fanny’s wedding! His left brow contracted, his nostrils dilated, his lips parted: Ilka leaned all her attentive interest and then some across the table so the young man would not notice that she had forgotten him.

  Jimmy Carl had just got fired from his job. “The president called me into his office. The president is my mother’s cousin.”

  “And he fired you!”

  “He had his reasons. There’s a man, Stackport—looks like he’s got a case of permanent morning mouth. He files at the file next to my file. He files a file, he files another file, another file. I thought, I can go faster than that if I put the files on my lap, pick the top one up with my right hand while I get the next ready with my left, except that doesn’t leave a hand to scratch one’s nose with. Boredom is really interesting, actually: you have this stuffed head, pain between the shoulder, pins and needles in the right foot, your nose itches. I mean how do I know that that’s boredom? This is two minutes to eleven! Ninety-two minutes before I get to meet you for lunch.” Jimmy blushed. “I thought, if I file fifteen files without looking at the clock it’ll be eleven. Then I thought, I’ll file fifteen more files, and by then it’ll already be two minutes after eleven! I look. Clock says it’s one minute to eleven. Which is interesting. I’ve got as close as a human being gets to what eternity feels like: I can’t imagine a minute that doesn’t have an end, but I can imagine an endless number of minutes filing—a sneak preview of hell. Which is a fascinating concept for human beings to have come up to scare ourselves with. So I sort of tilt my head to rub my nose on my shoulder and feel my files going into a slide. Imagine an eternal moment of embarrassment: Mr. Stackport has stopped filing; Mrs. Winters—she’s the office manager, really nice woman—she swivels her chair and looks at me; the typewriters stop; somebody giggles. Mr. Stackport is on his knees—which is sort of wonderful, really—an adult male in his sixties, children, grandchildren, I wouldn’t wonder—takes home a fraction of what Cousin Robert makes, and he’s red in the face because Cousin Robert’s files are all over the office floor! He says, ‘How come you didn’t put a blue label on Kux, Bloch & Co? Kux, Bloch is inactive!’ And Cousin Robert! He really minded the inactive files being filed in the drawer with the active files!”

  “But that’s awful—getting fired!”

  “Yes. Well, no, actually, it was interesting. Poor Robert. I can talk rings around Cousin Robert.”

  Carter came out of the hospital and went back into the hospital. Jimmy got a junior job writing reports for the American Civil Liberties Union, from which he did not get fired. Why was Ilka surprised? Jimmy said the reports were interesting. And whenever Carter was in trouble, Ilka called Jimmy Carl and they had long conversations. It was Jimmy who came to the station with Ilka, finally, to see Carter off to the West Coast.

  For a time Ilka and Jimmy slept together. Jimmy was a friendly, enthusiastic lover. Ilka was surprised that inside his narrow suit he was nicely put together. It wasn’t his fault that her arms and heart were used to encompassing more bulk. When Jimmy got transferred to the office of the ACLU in Washington, he was shocked to understand that Ilka was not coming with him. His left brow frowned, his nostrils flared, his lips parted and he said, “Interesting how impossible it is to really believe one isn’t going to get something one wants!”

  Ilka suddenly asked him if he had ever been on TV.

  “Once. When I was a student at Columbia. One of those conscientious Sunday-morning dialogues.”

  “You sat on the left,” Ilka said.

  “This is weird. This is incredible! I mean this is way before I even knew you!”

  “I can’t remember what it was about,” said Ilka. What Ilka remembered was that the boy on the left, who turned out after all those years to have been Jimmy Carl, said all the things that Ilka herself would have said, and that they sounded tiresome. While the boy on the right spoke, the camera had panned to the disagreement expressed by the left boy. His face had taken up the screen, squared off above the left-sided frown and below the lips drawn apart by the unlucky trick the muscles of the cheek played on the wings of the nose. Ilka swore it in her heart: Jimmy would never, never, never know that years before she met him, Ilka had got out of bed and walked over to the television and turned Jimmy off.

  “Why won’t you marry me?” whined Jimmy whenever he flew in from Washington.

  “Because,” Ilka routinely answered, “you don’t ask me if I will but why I won’t.”

  “So will you?”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  Jimmy then told Ilka what was wrong with his latest Washington date, and Ilka was bemused to diagnose in herself the ghost of jealousy. Ilka tended to like the women Jimmy brought to New York to meet her, and to be surprised that these conversable women should like Jimmy, till she remembered that she, Ilka, liked Jimmy. Over the next several years Jimmy expanded. The shoulders gained in consequence. There was more of Jimmy front to back. Why was Ilka surprised when Jimmy began to publish his articles and essays?

  At a certain time after Ilka received her appointment as a junior associate at the Concordance Institute and moved to Connecticut, Jimmy phoned. He’d seen the institute’s ad for a director of projects. How would Ilka feel if he applied?

  “But you like it at the ACLU.”

  “Why wouldn’t I love it at the Concordance Institute?”

  “Jimmy, what do you know about developing conferences? What do you know about organizing things? And what do you know about ‘Who’s Who in Scholarship’?”

  “Zilch, zilch, and zilch,” said Jimmy.

  When Jimmy drove up from Washington to be interviewed, the Shakespeares had a reception for him. From across the room Ilka watched Leslie introduce Jimmy around, saw Jimmy’s brows contract and his nostrils dilate, and walked out into the kitchen.

  “We like your friend,” Eliza Shakespeare said.

  “You do?” marveled Ilka.

  “He lives such an interesting life,” Eliza said. “At the moment of his death Jimmy will be thinking, Fascinating concept—dying!”

  Leslie said, “I like Jimmy. He talks a lot like you do.”

  “I know it!” cried Ilka, “I know,” and understood that it was herself whom, at that wedding to which Carter had taken her, Jimmy had reminded her.

  Ilka took Jimmy to a party at Martin Moses’s. Jimmy drove, Ilka held the map. “I was at a party at his house once, but there is no DeKalb Avenue this side of town.”

  “DeKalb Street?”

  “No DeKalb Street. Maybe this map is wrong. The road we’re on doesn’t have a name.”

  “Has to have a name.”

  “Has no signs. Carter used to say they don’t want you to know. If you belonged there you would know the name of the street. If you don’t belong, go away. He said in the war, the British took down the street signs to confuse the enemy.”

  Jimmy stopped the car. “What’s the number of this house?”

  “It doesn’t have a number.”

  “Could you get out and take a look?”

  Ilka came back and reported, “They don’t want us to know the number.” There was a light on in an upstairs window. “There must be a person. Ilka, go and ring the bell.” The upstairs light went out. A light had came on downstairs. The person must have walked down the stairs. “That’s so interesting,” Jimmy said, “people in houses everywhere leaving one room to go into another room to do what?”

  “Tidy up? Sit down? Look for something they have lost?”

  “A book. A phone number.”

  “That might be the kitchen. To look what’s in the refrigerator?”

 
; “Go and ring the bell and ask where the hell we are.”

  Ilka walked up the path and the three steps. She rang the bell and peered through the frosted glass at an approaching person acquiring size and bulk. The person turned the handle inside on the inside of the door and opened. It was Gerti Gruner, who said, “You have come!”

  It would be dastardly to stand in the way of a friend’s career because one preferred to have him in Washington. Recognizing the conflict of her interest, Ilka had asked Leslie if she should disqualify herself.

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” replied Leslie. “What do you say, Joe?”

  “I say that you and I didn’t disqualify ourselves from co-opting each other.”

  “Zack?” Leslie said.

  Zack said, “What makes this candidate think he knows how to run projects like ours?”

  “Nobody knows how to run projects like ours,” said Alvin.

  “I pass Alvin in the corridor and there’s this cheerful whoosh,” Ilka had said to the Shakespeares at Sunday breakfast in Eliza’s kitchen which was suffused with green garden light.

  Eliza had said, “It comes from believing the world is going to shape up, and Alvin knows the shape it ought to be. Alvin knows the revolution that would do it if Zachariah weren’t standing in the way. Poor Zack! His nose grows right in the middle of his face.”

  Ilka and Leslie laughed. “That’s true! It does!” they said.

  Leslie said, “You leave Zack alone. I never hear better sense than I do from Zachariah.”

  “He has a mouth like a keyhole,” said Eliza.

  Ilka grieved at the prospect, if Jimmy got hired, of having to share the Shakespeares and Eliza’s kitchen. “Will there be a battle?”

  “Yes,” said Leslie.

  “I haven’t been here long enough to understand what’s behind what everybody says,” Ilka said. “I wish somebody would tell me the stories of all the skeletons.”

  Leslie said, “I don’t know what has been happening here for the last ten and more years, but I bet you’d be disappointed. The skeletons are not sinister.”

  “And yet they reach their hands out of their closets and determine everything that everybody argues and how everybody votes.”

  “That’s probably true.”

  “Anyway,” Ilka had said, “we’re all of us guaranteed to do our usual numbers.”

  Alvin’s number, at Monday morning’s meeting, was to get young Jimmy on board, Zachariah’s was to hold the strict line. Zack said, “For James to agree to organize our international conferences on genocide is worrisomely naive or, more worrisomely, misleading.” It was said with so much venom that Ilka looked up, intercepting the look Zack and Yvette refrained from exchanging with each other. Ilka understood that they were—“in cahoots” was putting it too strongly—that they had talked the matter over, as they had every right to do, or, rather, that they had no need to talk to come out on the same side of this and every other question that was put before them. Ilka deduced some naked old grand-daddy of a skeleton.

  A pause in which the members turned the pages of the candidate’s vita. Those who had, for whatever reason, prejudged the matter on one side or the other wished to be observed being judicious, or prepared new ammunition. Those who didn’t care one way or the other waited to see what they were going to think.

  Alpha Stone said, “Perhaps the administrator should have clarified our requirements. The administrator goofed.” Everybody smiled. The goofer was Alpha.

  Zachariah said, “I asked James what he knew about computers, and he said, and I quote, ‘Zilch.’”

  “Which is par for the rest of us,” said Alvin.

  “Zack’s point,” Yvette said, “Is that we need someone who does know.”

  “So? The Computer Center people will come in and brief him.”

  Leslie said, “I see Zack’s hand, I see Yvette, I see Alpha, I see Joe, whom I will take first because I’ve not heard from him yet.” He wrote the names in order on a piece of paper, “Joe?”

  Joe Bernstine had no axe of his own unless it was to help Leslie get what Leslie wanted. Leslie had his own reason—all things being equal—for wanting Ilka’s young man hired. It would prevent himself from paying Ilka too much attention. Joe said, “How many of us have published four articles this year?”

  “Yes, but where?” Yvette named a popular journal with the expression of one dangling a dead thing by its disagreeable tail.

  “There are those among us,” Alpha said, and refrained from exchanging a look with Alvin, and neither looked at Yvette, “who have published nothing at all.”

  A skeleton had put its foot in its mouth.

  “He doesn’t have a book,” Zack said.

  “He says it needs time to simmer.”

  “Since when do we hire people who don’t have a book?”

  “Since I was outvoted, on this very issue, in this very room, in the case of another candidate!” Everyone except Yvette knew Alpha meant Yvette.

  “Ilka,” Leslie said.

  Ilka’s number was to bring into the discussion what she believed to be the heart of every matter, and which, she knew, always seemed a given or an irrelevancy to everybody else: “Where is it written that everybody has to have a book?”

  “Ilka, in our by-laws,” Joe Bernstine said.

  “Who made the by-laws?”

  “The board of governors did, Ilka!”

  “Who empowered the board of governors to make by-laws?”

  “Leslie and I did, Ilka, fifteen years ago,” Joe said.

  “Aha! Who gave you and Leslie the power to empower the board?”

  “Oy, Ilka!”

  “No wait: Say my bell rings. Outside stands the policeman who might always be standing outside whenever a doorbell rings. The policeman has come to haul me to the police station, very appropriately—say that I have trashed the house I rent from the Rasmussens. Suppose I say, ‘I’ll go to the police station with you if you show me from whom you derive the power to haul me.’”

  “They took it and everything else away from the Indians!” said Alvin.

  “Wait! Who gave it to the Indians so it could be taken away from them?”

  “Ilka!”

  “Awoooooo,” suddenly howled Nathan Cohn. He had been jotting things in the margins of Jimmy Carl’s vita. He stood straight up and shouted, “What right do we think we have to pin down some poor sod’s thoughts that he should be sleeping nights under his pillow wrestling with all the while we’re chatting him up. I mean what in hell do we think we’re we talking about!” and, the purple draining from his face, Nat sat down and wrote himself a note in the bottom margin.

  Leslie asked if there was any more discussion. Everybody looked at everybody else. Everybody seemed tired. Leslie asked for a motion to vote, and the little blank papers were sent up each side of the table.

  Jimmy Carl’s move to Concordance coincided with the return of Ilka’s landlords, the Rasmussens. Ilka had assumed she was going to buy a house but got frightened and rented from another couple on another sabbatical and Jimmy’s things moved right in along with Ilka’s. Ilka was not sorry. It was dear to wake with a male and human body asleep in her bed, on the window side, or not asleep after all. Submerged in this gorgeous commotion, Ilka forgot, for the moment, that other body—the one not available to her and which she had never nakedly so much as imagined—nor dared to want. Now she remembered how really fond she was of poor old actual Jimmy with his ribs and collarbone and too many elbows.

  They were having a hilarious breakfast, deciding if the kitchen was the yellow of pure egg yolk or eggs scrambled, when Celie called from the office. Alpha had to catch the ten o’clock flight to New York. Could Jimmy make it to an eight-thirty meeting in Leslie’s office? Jimmy might want to bring the list they’d asked him to prepare of prospective participants for the Genocide Conference.

  “What list? Which conference is this?” Jimmy asked Ilka. “Where is Leslie’s office?”

  Ilka sta
yed in to get the house moved into. She called Jimmy mid-morning. “Where, if you were the kind of person who had an egg-colored kitchen, would you be likely to keep your coffee filters?”

  Jimmy said, “In the cupboard? Ilka, I don’t know.”

  Ilka called ten minutes later. “They were in the drawer with the baby-bottle nipples, an expired card from the Forty-second Street library and negatives of somebody’s wedding …”

  “Ilka …” said Jimmy.

  Ilka said, “Do you think you get insight into someone’s soul by where they put things, where you would never think of putting them? Are there a sort of people who put all the jars—jam, honey, mustard, chutney—on the same shelf, and others who sort them according to sweet and savory?”

  “I’ve got the computer man here.”

  “Oh! Sorry! I’ll see you in the conference room at lunch.”

  “I’ll see you, Ilka.”

  The computer man was a giant—Nordic, shoulders like Thor, hair like sunshine, welkin-eyed, nervous tic at the left corner of his mouth. He said, “This is your manuals.”

  Jimmy hefted them. He said, “I can’t start on my conference list until I’ve got my desk cleared of all these directories and papers, memos, whatnot. Will the computer be able to make me a list of prospective participants according to their disciplines, with names, addresses, and credentials?”

  The computer giant said, “You’ll have to delimit the fields for your values, key in your codes, and enter your data.”

  “What’s your name?” Jimmy asked the computer man.

  “Sweng.”

  “I’m Jimmy. Sweng,” Jimmy said, “can you translate from Turkish?”

  “Turkish? No.”

  Jimmy said, “And I can’t translate what you just said into what I am supposed to do.” Jimmy sat down in the chair still warm from the computer giant’s person and asked, “How do I enter?”

  “You got to turn it on,” said Sweng.

  Jimmy was encouraged to see a switch that looked like other switches in his life. He turned it on and the screen engendered a lower case “b” that repeated itself to the rightmost margin, skipped left, filled the next line also and continued down the screen like this: