Waxwings

by Unknown

  David smiled, though his face was serious. “He could get in trouble.”

  Beth was in no mood to worry about Tom’s potential misfortunes. “Oh, he always muddles through. The absent-minded-professor act seems to get him out of everything.”

  David’s chopsticks hovered indecisively over the tomato and tofu, then pounced, like a raptor plummeting out of the sky to snatch a mouse. “He does commentaries. On ‘All Things Considered.’ ”

  “He used to write novels. Now he just does his radio things.”

  “I’ve heard him. He’s . . . quite funny.”

  The conversation had taken a seriously wrong turn, so Beth steered it firmly back in the direction of Julian and Emerson; the trials and adversities of remodeling were of no inherent interest to her, but David proved easy to steer. The builders were nine weeks behind, the cost-overruns vast, his Pioneer Square tenancy a kind of “exile,” and he missed his view of the lake—all very commonplace perhaps, but Beth preferred this to fan-talk about Tom.

  Munching on green beans, he talked of converting his bathroom into a personal spa, complete with hydrotherapy jets, sauna, Jacuzzi, and bidet. “This suite I had in the Tokyo Hilton last year was a revelation. Have you been to Japan?”

  “No, not yet.”

  Looking strangely relieved, he discussed tiles, at length. His personal spa apparently was to be tiled—ceiling, floor, and walls—in malachite.

  “Do you know about malachite?”

  “Well, you know, vaguely.”

  “Here . . .” He rummaged in the side-pocket of his brown silk jacket and produced a flat piece of stone about two-inches square, which he handed to her like some very fragile, precious object. “It’s a kind of copper ore.”

  Her first thought was that it was beautiful—a veined swirl of dark but lucent green that put her immediately in mind of Douglas firs seen in a low summer-sunset light. It was the precise color of the Pacific Northwest. It was brilliant of him to have—

  “It comes from Zambia,” he said. “They’ve been quarrying it there for centuries.”

  Out of left field came her second thought, which was that the tile was perfectly ridiculous. Zambia? This sly boasting about stuff being shipped halfway around the world only to adorn some Microsoftie’s palace! It was just like . . . and then she remembered this was one of Tom’s gibes after the fund-raiser. Everything has to travel—even the bloody grass.

  She was still collecting her feelings when David rose abruptly from his seat— “Excuse me,” he said, “I just have to go to the men’s room”— and she was grateful for this interval of solitude. Once he was gone, she ordered a second glass of wine—the level in his glass having sunk by, at most, a half-inch.

  She was furious at Tom for having barged, uninvited, into her date, annoyed at David for having laid himself open to his mockery, and angry at herself for thinking like this, with a cynicism that wasn’t hers at all, but his ghost intruding on her feast. She considered David’s work in the Central District. His impulses were generous and good, and if he felt like tiling his bathroom in Zambian copper ore, who was she to mock him for it? She looked at the square of stone in her palm, at the wavy, pale striations in the forest-green. It was beautiful. It was exactly right for this part of the world. It spoke for his taste, like his intelligent take on Sweet and Lowdown—even if he had cribbed some of it from the New York Times.

  But. Her wine came. She gulped at it, glad that David wasn’t there to observe her, and tried to name to herself the things she liked about him: the even, unaccented tone of his voice; his thatch of straw-colored hair, tamed by expensive layering (and did his barber use tints, or was it naturally so variegated?); his air of quiet, prosperous self-containment; the humorous glasses. There was, she told herself, more to David Ziegler than met the eye. She took another gulp of wine and glanced at her watch. He’d been gone at least five minutes.

  His absence had stretched well past ten when the waitress asked, “Do you think your friend’s finished?” Beth said she didn’t know, but that she was done, thank you. Staring into the rippled green depths of the malachite, she suddenly remembered Chad in Brooklyn, coming back jazzed and relentlessly talkative from restaurant bathrooms, having spent an age doing lines in there. Was that David’s game, too? Beth was more pleased than not that she had no idea at all; that he might be snorting-up in the men’s room only added to her sense of the unexplored largeness of his character. If he did have a habit, it was obviously under tight control. She prepared herself to be surprised.

  And was. He came back to the table, his face white and papery-looking, with a desperate glued-on smile. “Sorry,” he said. “A case of the runs. I sometimes get them. The wine, I think . . .”

  So Beth turned from date to mom. She walked alone up to Fifth to get her car from the garage, picked up the limp and ailing non-profit from Wild Ginger, drove him to where his car stood at a meter on Seventh, and not until she got back to the condo did she realize the square of malachite was still in her bag.

  It was only nine forty-five, not too late to call Debra, who was just back from Dubrovnik, working on an Oroonoko.com feature about the revival of tourism in the new Croatia. Beth reported that her evening had been a wash, and moments later they were drinking Slivovitz nightcaps in the fifteenth-floor studio. Debra inspected the malachite tile. Having already taken her contacts out, she had to find her old reading glasses to see the patterning in the stone.

  “The whole bathroom, in this? You know, that’s so unbelievably tacky.”

  Beth knew that she’d known as much all along.

  News of Tom’s contractor spread fast and far. Entreaties began to arrive on his answering machine—the first from Pam Lendau, the asthmatic deconstructionist and gender-theorist. Since he barely knew her, that call was easy enough not to return. More worryingly, Chick showed up one morning in a new truck, which turned out to be his old truck transformed. The rust-holes in its bodywork had been filled, it had been resprayed black, and stenciled red lettering along the sides announced EXCELLENT CONSTRUCTION, with the pager number nakedly advertised below in white.

  Tom had now paid out $3,700—money for which no receipt was forthcoming. “No paper, no tax,” Chick said, with a crafty you-and-me grin, as if they were arranging to hold up a liquor store together. Although there was still work to do on the roof, the Mexicans had already demolished the porch, leaving the house with the appearance of having had its face bashed in and its front teeth scattered to the winds. A cement-stained builder’s plank was propped at a 45-degree angle between the front door and the yard below, but the only safe means of access was around the back, through the laundry room. A plastic mailbox, attached to a two-by-four stake, stood just in front of where the porch steps used to end, though Olin preferred to walk the risky plank and stuff the mail through the letter-slot in the door. The yard was a muddy devastation, and the tall holly tree beyond Tom’s study window—once the resort of bluejays and bushtits—was lavishly decorated with discarded roofing tiles.

  The place looked irreparable. Tom knew that he was now entirely at Chick’s mercy. One wrong word, and he’d be left helpless and alone with his ruins. Whenever possible, he’d heap insincere praise on the contractor’s progress for fear of losing him, but Chick gazed back at him with a morose, noncommital stare. Sometimes, Tom was certain that he was reading his mind, and despising what he found there.

  On December 22nd, he took out $300 from the bank, in fifties. When the men were assembled in the kitchen for their lunch break, he distributed the bills between the six of them. “For Christmas . . . like a bonus, you know? To thank you for your work . . .”

  Lázaro gave him a laconic smile. The others shrugged and stuffed the money in the back pockets of their jeans, while Chick held up his bill against the light, evidently doubting its authenticity. The scene hadn’t gone off quite as Tom had planned, and he blamed it on his poor arithmetic. He should’ve given them hundreds, with at least two hundred for Chick. The
fifties had made him seem a cheapskate: Ebenezer Janeway, counting his pennies in the season of goodwill. But to make it up to them now would look like plain bribery, which of course it was.

  Pissed-off with himself, Tom went to buy a last-minute Christmas tree—a dwarfish noble fir, one of the few left in the outdoor lot of Chubby & Tubby’s hardware store. He rode back with it tied to the roof of the VW and spent the rest of the afternoon scouring the house for the string of lights, the ornaments, and the stand. Beth must have pinched them. He called her at Belgrave Pointe, or Pointé, as he riled her by pronouncing it. When she picked up, he could hear Finn in the background, talking to someone else. The condo sounded Christmassy—peopled, convivial, with his son’s voice the loudest and happiest in the room.

  “I put them down in the basement,” Beth shouted. “In a box marked ‘Christmas Stuff.’ ”

  Tom heard a male voice saying, “Who’s the Tickle Monster, then?”

  “I was wondering . . .”

  “I can’t talk now. We’re kind of busy here,” Beth said, and hung up.

  We. The small word stung.

  He got the flashlight from the tool-drawer in the kitchen and found the key to the basement padlock on his ring. Stepping outside, he saw the pert, striped, foxy face of a raccoon, standing on its hind legs with its paws on the lid of the garbage can. In the beam of the flashlight, the animal’s eyes were bright scarlet. Ostentatiously unhurried, it eased itself on to four feet, and shuffled off into the bushes, back arched, head low; striking, Tom thought, a conscious attitude of resentful pique. Treading softly, listening for the movements of the raccoon, he went down the brick steps to the basement and undid the padlock on the door.

  For a moment, he couldn’t think why everything was in sharp silhouette—the lawnmower, the cot where Finn had slept when he was a baby, his changing-table, a leaning tower of cardboard boxes, the dangerous stepladder from which Beth had fallen in her second trimester. Past the junk, beyond the black rectangle of the furnace, rose another, mobile silhouette. Chick.

  “Sorry,” Tom said, half-blinded by the glare of the halogen lamp that hung from a nail on one of the joists. Feeling his way cautiously across the uneven floor, he reached the furnace and stood there blinking, fazed, slow to take in what he saw.

  “Is good, right? Must be close to the work!”

  With Christmas so much on his mind, Tom’s first thought was of an illuminated nativity scene in a dark church—oxen, sheep, wise men, manger. A sleeping bag was spread on the earth beside two carpet remnants, one maroon, the other pale blue. A hanging spiderweb of wires connected a toaster-oven, a fan-heater, a telephone. A television—much bigger than the one upstairs—was on at low volume, and hooked up, apparently, to the cable system. Clothes were tidily piled on a familiar yard-sale couch. Finn’s cast-off board books—Goodnight Moon and Green Eggs and Ham—lay on the sleeping bag beside a copy of People magazine.

  “You don’t have no beef with it? Is cool with you, huh?”

  This was a new note: the contractor was pleading with him. In the cone of sterile light cast by the halogen lamp, Chick’s face was as white, knobbly, and protuberant as a freshly-dug root vegetable. He was wearing a black T-shirt with a photograph of Madonna screen-printed on its front.

  “No, you can camp out here.”

  “For the job,” Chick said.

  Tom was light-headed with relief at his discovery of the contractor’s living arrangements. They meant that he was not about to be deserted, as he’d feared. He nodded amiably at the TV screen. “What are you watching?”

  “ ‘Ohio Five-O.’ ”

  “Hawaii.”

  “Hawaii,” Chick said, in his new submissive voice.

  At the edge of the cone of light stood a rusty bucket—the only clue as to how the contractor managed things in the plumbing department.

  “You can use the bathroom upstairs,” Tom said.

  “T’anks.”

  “No problem.”

  Palm trees, in bright sunshine, flashed past on the screen. McGarrett was on a car chase.

  “I was just looking for a box of ornaments for the Christmas tree . . .”

  “I find for you.” Chick walked confidently into the darkness and came back bearing the box labeled CHRISTMAS STUFF in thick red marker-pen letters. The i had a circle above it, not a dot—Beth’s signature.

  “I make ornaments. Long time ago. Work in ornament factory. Shit job. Real bad money.”

  “Really? Where was that, Chick?”

  “Fuzhou.” His soft pronunciation of the name made it sound like a confidence exchanged in the dark of night.

  “Not Everett, then.”

  “No. Fuzhou.”

  All menace had left him. For a moment as brief as the opening and closing of a camera shutter, Tom saw a picture of Chick as a scrawny kid on an assembly line, putting little wire loops into the heads of spun-glass angels, and thought: All I have to do is remember this. When he took the box, it felt empty. They made things light in China.

  “Goodnight, Chick.”

  “Goodnight . . . Mister Tom.”

  Goodnight Moon.

  The deal was that Finn would spend Christmas Eve with Tom—Beth had a party to go to—and all three would lunch en famille at the Queen Anne house on Christmas Day, then Beth would take Finn back to the condo.

  Tom was in the bathroom shaving on Christmas morning when he heard Finn pound across the floor downstairs to catch the shrilling phone. He patted his face dry, in no hurry to spoil Finn’s proprietary satisfaction with his skill as a telephonist. God knows where he’d picked up the expression, but he had lately taken to saying “This is the Janeway residence” in as gruff a voice as he could muster.

  The living room was awash in scraps of wrapping paper from Finn’s stocking-stuffers. Santa’s footsteps, planted by Tom the night before with a Wellington boot dipped in flour, had spread across the carpet like a patchy hoar-frost.

  Finn held out the phone. “She wants to talk to you.”

  “Don’t say ‘she,’ ” Tom said, reaching for the receiver. “Hullo—Beth?”

  “Tamás—”

  “Ma! Happy Christmas!”

  “Tamás, what is a ‘karndow’?”

  “I can’t think,” Tom said, struggling to think. “Why?”

  “Finn say he and Beth have got a new karn—”

  “Oh, I know. Of course.Yes, Beth bought a new car.” He lowered his voice and shielded the phone from Finn, who was on his hands and knees playing with a Tonka Toy fire-truck. “It’s a Honda,” he said. “You must have misheard.”

  “But he say that he and Beth are living in it, Tamás.”

  “Pardonable exaggeration.” He hoped that the grindingly artificial ring of his laughter would be lost in its satellite transmission to England. “You know how people are with new cars, Ma.”

  A note of doubt persisted in her voice as she went on to thank Tom for the case of wine he’d sent her via the Internet. She’d taken a bottle with her to Christmas lunch at the Nagys’, and Andras Nagy had said that it was a very good wine. “Andras is a—oh, how you say it? Inyenc . . .”

  “Wine buff . . . gourmet . . . connoisseur?”

  “Tamás, I am sure Finn say ‘karndow.’ ”

  “Honda,” Tom said, making it sound as much like ‘condo’ as he could. “We haven’t unwrapped your parcels yet, Ma. We’re going to unwrap all the big presents at lunchtime. It’s not yet ten in the morning here—can we call you back at about nine this evening, your time?”

  “I just want to say ‘Happy Christmas’ to your Beth—”

  “Well, she’ll be back any moment now, she’s just slipped out . . . How’s the weather over there?”

  “Windy,” she said.

  When Tom put the phone down, Finn looked up at him. “Daddy, why were you talking funny?”

  “Funny how, Finbow?”

  “ ‘Vee unwrap all zee beeg prezentz . . .’ ” He sounded like a monocled Nazi in a 19
50s war movie.

  “Oh, I don’t know. When I talk to my mom, I sort of pick up her accent.”

  “Granny Katalin don’t talk that funny.”

  “I know. It’s very bad of me. It just seems to happen.”

  Shortly after eleven, Beth arrived at the back door carrying a single large, beribboned parcel. She had rain in her hair, and her black pants were splashed with mud. Embracing Finn, she said to Tom: “It looks like the bomb went off out there.”

  The happy-family charade began. Finn was given the go-ahead to burgle the pile of “big presents” around the tree, and Tom caught the look in Beth’s eye when he unwrapped his electronic dog: it was the look of someone at an auction sizing up a rival bidder on the far side of the room. When the outer casing of Beth’s large parcel was ripped apart to reveal a cunningly-assembled cube of smaller parcels, Tom felt a spasm of reciprocal anxiety that he’d been outclassed by the stuffed moose, the creative construction kit, the Math Shark, and the Pokémon Battle Stadium. By the time the magic kit (top hat, wand, and cloak included) made its appearance, Tom saw the gifts as a cruel and unusual punishment that he and Beth were visiting on Finn, with whom the roofing-felt dog Anthony had been a bigger hit than anything he’d been given for Christmas. Unwrapping, exclaiming, and laying each present carefully aside, Finn bore the infliction with a dignity that it did not deserve.