Checker and the Derailleurs

by Lionel Shriver

  Checker introduced the minister, a Quaker who saw Rahim as a persecuted political refugee and who was therefore feeling liberal and pleased with himself. He was elaborately understanding when Rahim began to carp: in a Muslim wedding, men and women should stand on opposite sides; though in the cramp of Plato’s basement it was more practical to divide them into separate layers. Wasn’t Syria going to sit the Seven Days, with seven different dresses, each more exquisite than the last?

  “No, we’ll do a variation,” Syria proposed. “For a week I’ll wear the same green work shirt, and every day it will get a little bit dirtier. Then finally the big night will come, just the two of us, and you can wash it.”

  Rahim didn’t laugh.

  As the minister began, mopping his forehead between vows, Checker didn’t look at the couple but down at the pop-top in his hands; by the time he offered the ring to Rahim, he’d twisted the tab off, leaving the aluminum jagged; slipped on Syria’s finger, it must have scratched. “Best man.” He thought about the term. It was a role he could tire of.

  Instead of “I do,” Syria said, “I suppose.”

  Rahim had finally stopped whining. Through the ceremony he kept slipping his gaze over to Syria, rippling his eyes up and down her lanky figure, darting incredulous glances at the wild Picasso angles of her face. Little by little he was starting to smile, until his small even teeth were spread so wide and white that he had to look down at the floor. He couldn’t have stopped smiling if he’d tried.

  When the minister said, “You may kiss the bride,” Rahim’s smile spread more extravagantly than ever, and Syria paused to examine her new husband; perhaps for the first time he was real to her, an attractive, exotic boy soon to be installed in her apartment. She leaned over with exploratory care and kissed him on the cheek; but Rahim reached over to that serpentine neck and kissed his new property on the lips with victorious possessiveness.

  Syria laughed, uneasily at first, but soon with real humor, and she tied her apron under her eyes like a hajab. They went upstairs to the club, closed in the afternoon, and drank beer out of plastic champagne glasses. Syria belly-danced to the refrain “Never gonna do it without the fez on” with Rahim, then to “The Sultans of Swing” with Checker, until, abruptly, she stopped in the middle of the song, untied the apron, and announced coldly that she had to get to work. She was such a strange combination of flamboyance and rigidity, Checker couldn’t figure her. Rahim called forlornly after her, “Don stay with husband?” but already he was making entreaties rather than firm Muslim demands. The two of them watched Syria stride away, her hair shooting by the yard behind her like a train, her big work shirt billowing like a gown, both wondering whether any bride in white lace could be more splendid.

  “Why are you so angry?”

  Syria threw the punty halfway across the studio like a javelin; it landed in the barrel with a clang. “I’m not angry,” she said, tossing the pieces she’d just made crashing into the trash. “I’m normal.”

  “Why are you normally so angry?”

  “Why aren’t you?”

  There was more tinkling and clattering; Syria slid the door of the furnace fully aside, the gas up high; it roared so that Checker couldn’t answer her question, which was fine—he didn’t understand it. When she’d finished swinging her glass around the shop, wielding punties in the big turns of a baton twirler, she reluctantly rolled the door shut again. He’d never seen her motions more graceful or more dreadful, either.

  “So,” she turned to him. “This is my wedding night.” She whipped off her apron and threw it up so it looped around a pipe over the ceiling. “Tell me,” she said, with the dark glasses still on, “you did everything for the license, didn’t you?” Checker shrugged. “And that kid isn’t going to know how to apply for a green card by himself, is he?”

  “Maybe not.”

  “But of course you’ve already found out how it’s done.”

  “Federal Plaza.”

  “That’ll take days, you know that. All the forms?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Why all this? Why everything?”

  “Why not?”

  He’d never seen her look so disgusted. The emotion suited her. The only thing he could imagine as more flattering was full-fledged disdain. “Are you always so good? Because it’s gross to be around. You still use that word, ‘gross’?”

  “Not much.”

  She couldn’t stand still, and kept ranging around the studio, throwing her coffee cup in the sink so the last sip splotched over the counter. She drank it strong and black. “Don’t know if I can stand you around here five nights a week. You annoy me.”

  “Sorry,” said Check, and a quiver ran through him, a ripple of distortion like a wave of heat.

  She turned fast enough to catch it. “Don’t wilt! Say, fuck you! You’re a mess, you know that?”

  Another ripple.

  “Say, I am not. Say, Leave me alone. Say, I do my work and this is none of your business.”

  “It’s your business if I annoy you.”

  “God!” She looked around the studio and, finding nothing to smash, turned on Checker—he would learn not to clean up so well. “Those friends of yours,” she said. “They’re sickening.”

  “Why?”

  “The way they coo and prate over you. Really, it makes me want to puke. But they ever do anything for you, mister?”

  “They’re good musicians. They make me laugh—”

  “I’m not impressed.” She cut him off. “And what’s this about your being so happy all the time?”

  “I get pretty—worked up. They like it.”

  “You don’t seem that happy to me.”

  “At the moment I’m having trouble.”

  Checker was sitting on a bench; she glared down at him. “Why don’t you tell me to cram it? Why don’t you say, Leave my friends out of this?”

  Checker was frantically sifting through everything he’d done in the last few hours for what could possibly have offended her. “I’m sorry I got you involved with Hijack—”

  “You damned well better be. And sorry now? Just you wait.”

  “I’ll do what I can to make it easy—”

  Syria pushed the bench with her boot and it toppled over, Check with it. He picked himself up and dusted his hands of glass slivers. “You’ll do what you can! Tell me, You said you’d marry him, no one forced you! Say, You accepted, it’s not my problem!”

  “You did say yes,” Check conceded.

  “Oh, that’s powerful,” she taunted him. “And do you have anything to say about being thrown on the floor just now? That was fine, you just pick yourself up and clear your throat?”

  Checker decided that doing anything she told him to do, saying anything she told him to say, would drive her all the more into a rage from his sheer obedience. He stood, then, quietly. She breathed at him, and if there had been fire shooting from her nostrils, not hard to imagine, it would have been in the ensuing silence gradually reduced to smoke.

  “Do you,” said Check with perfect gentleness, “ever do anything else at night? Anything but glass?”

  “Why?”

  “Answer me.”

  “…No.”

  “Do you ever wish you did something else, once in a while?”

  “Like what?”

  “Just go to a bar. To a movie. Go dancing.”

  “I’ve done those things before,” she said warily. “I need glass now.”

  “Every night?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s just I was wondering,” Check proposed carefully, “if you’d take one night off. You see, the band would like to celebrate. And it would help Hijack’s case with the INS if we had a real reception. You’re supposed to bring wedding pictures to the interview—”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No, and maybe a reception would do. I was wondering, even though it’s not a real weddin
g exactly, if we had a party, would you come?”

  “Is that right.” She seemed disarmed.

  “I’d like you to hear me play,” Check admitted.

  “That’s the most egocentric thing I’ve ever heard you say. It’s a relief.”

  “Would you?”

  She smiled, a little. “Where?”

  “Plato’s, I guess.”

  “No,” she said, her eyes shining. “The Olympic Pavilion.”

  Check laughed. “Money—”

  “I told you, I have money.”

  Once the Pavilion was mentioned, nothing else would do.

  6 / Simply Red

  Astoria Boulevard stretches through the least fetching part of the neighborhood, lined with the sorts of stores facing so many small-town American streets, tiny miracles of capitalism: the kind that open promptly every morning and no one goes in. The Pasta-Mat shelves four big cans of tomato puree and a few boxes of yellowed ziti. Bakeries will keep one crusty box of anisettes under the counter and three or four loaves of overbrowned semolina bread in the window—one sometimes suspects, the same bread. The shoe store solves the problem of keeping up with changing styles by displaying pumps that have never been in style, and so can’t go out, and never will be in style, either, barring the fall of Western civilization. In abundant pizza parlors on each corner, whole pies stiffen under ineffectual heat lamps, recipes with so little sauce, even less cheese, and such thin crusts that it’s a wonder the slices exist at all.

  Yet there is something encouraging about this array, made impervious to the whims of the national economy by generating a permanent depression of its own. These heroic entrepreneurs are the urban equivalent of hocked Midwestern farmers still sowing their crops or tiny drought-withered African villagers carving little wooden animals every morning and refusing to die. Astoria Boulevard is a monument to Faulknerian endurance, real Southern perversity flourishing in the Northeast. Meanwhile, the Athenaiki Pitta Company bathes the western end with the smell of warm bread like a blessing, an infusion of life. And shining smack in the middle of this commercial wasteland, across from Black Jack’s Coffee Shop and the Cephalonian Association, down from Dominick’s Buy-Rite and the United Cyprians of America, sandwiched between Louise and Ralph’s Sweet Shoppee and Terry’s Beauty Cage, and catty-corner to the New York Greek-American Athletic Club, attracting incongruous fleets of silver limousines and packing in enormous shipments of liquor like an actual business, the Olympic Pavilion casts its rejuvenating light down the whole street.

  Slatted with ten-foot mirrors over its façade, the Pavilion catches the late-afternoon sun and throws gold over the drying semolina loaves as they drop their sesame seeds one by one across the way, multiplying the overweight plaster statuettes under its cursive marquee. Blowsy and bloated with a bit too much cannelloni, the castings lift their skirts to expose thighs like Corinthian columns, with the blurred, vacantly affable expressions of lonely aunts at the end of a party with an open bar. Often enough Checker had padded up to the window to peer between a crack in the drapes, watching live versions of these statues fork roast beef in a room where every single appointment was miraculously the same dusty powder blue.

  The afternoon Mr. Diamond showed him around inside, even Checker realized that from a sophisticated point of view the Olympic Pavilion, with its gold-and-white trim, huge brass cigarette urns, and loud floral carpeting, was a gaudy, even ridiculous place. But good taste denies certain forms of magnificence. Mr. Diamond was serious and quietly proud; Checker admired his “life of celebration.”

  The manager liked that way of looking at his job, which he often found tedious, with gobs of icing hardened on the parquet dance floors and grisly edges of prime rib wedged into seat cushions; he tired of drunks and garter belts and withered pink bouquets. Mr. Diamond often spoke of marriage as “an industry” he and the maître d’ placed bets on couples, how long they’d last. Divorce, of course, was good for the Pavilion since clients might return here three or four times. But a “life of celebration”—that was refreshing.

  A massive converted movie theater, the Pavilion had ten different halls, each a different color, reminding Checker of fairy tales in which castled princesses wandered dolefully from the “green room” to the “pink room,” waiting for a spell to break or a man to appear. Princesses in those stories were never happy.

  Checker purred at each new room, with its scrupulously coordinated colors, but when Mr. Diamond opened the last door Check said, “We’ll take this one.”

  It was red. Not just any red, but a voluptuous, violent red, ignited by three nine-foot chandeliers. It was in this room more than any other that the sincere quality of the Olympic Pavilion shone through. However condescending you might feel toward the chintz of a catering palace, this one was older than most, and surprisingly solid, even heartfelt. Its ceilings were high, floors hardwood, cushions real velvet. The three chandeliers were genuine crystal and clattered softly as Checker circled in the shatter of their light—glass and this color followed him everywhere.

  “I’m so glad we’ve found what you wanted!”

  And it was the strangest thing. How many times had Mr. Diamond given this tour? How many times had he said he was glad? How entirely sick was he, after thirty years, of the Olympic Pavilion? And how suspicious had he been of a black kid in sneakers wanting to rent out a hall? But watching Checker do a turn on the well-waxed dance floor, Diamond beamed at the boy as if he were his own son.

  “And you’ll have steak and baby carrots and cake!” Check exclaimed, echoing through the hall.

  “Yes, and exquisite new potatoes, with paprika!” cried Mr. Diamond, almost wishing he could attend.

  Checker turned quickly. “Would you come?”

  “Oh no, policy—”

  “I won’t tell. We’ll cover your plate. And you can hear me drum.”

  “But surely you’ll be seated at the head table—?”

  “No, I’ll be in the band.”

  “Aren’t you the bridegroom?”

  “No,” said Check, and he stopped dancing.

  The conclusion of the deal became oddly funereal; Mr. Diamond spoke in hushed tones, as if to the bereaved. “I’m so sorry,” Mr. Diamond felt compelled to add, though he had no idea for what.

  “That’s all right,” said Checker, bucking up. “And you have to come. I’ll put you on the list.”

  “Perhaps,” said Mr. Diamond, and as he watched Checker bound off down Astoria Boulevard he decided that, for the Pyramus affair, he would lower the price a tad.

  Syria had been in no mood for the arrival of her new roommate the day of the ceremony, leaving her husband angry and confused. Why on his wedding night had he once again slept above the fruit stand on his bunchy mattress and mildewed pillow, to wake damp and sour, boil his own Turkish coffee, and gnaw on an old crust of pita, too tired and depressed to buy fresh only across the street? This was better than Plato’s basement, but only barely. What about bringing the stained sheet out to the old women for inspection (what old women, Hijack?); when were The Derailleurs going to pile into cars and blow horns around New York, while passersby would halahal?

  While Rahim did not actually expect these rituals in America, still he and Syria were in accord: a great day had been defiled. When Checker pressed Rahim to choose between prime ribs and stuffed flounder, the Iraqi could only reminisce about whole slaughtered sheep, trays of rice with almonds and raisins, parallelograms of baklava and piles of doughy zlabia glistening with grease and powdered sugar.

  Yet as the party drew near, Rahim had to admit that even in his hometown of Almahtani they could not have drawn a finer crowd to a feast. Checker invited all of Plato’s regulars and more: the waitresses at the Neptune, the foot patrolmen from Astoria Park, all the commissioners and councilmen listed on the sign in Ralph DeMarco, including, by mistake, Donald Manes, who had gutted himself with a kitchen knife the year before. Check invited the doctor who did the blood tests and the Quaker minister
, Howard’s boss at Baskin-Robbins, Caldwell’s whole karate class, and the salesman at Drum World who was always trying to buy Checker’s Leedys for his percussion museum. Checker remembered the girl at Terry’s Beauty Cage who trimmed the band for free; the postman who delivered the invitations without stamps; Claude, who read the gas meters in Checker’s apartment; Al, who repaired Lena’s hunching old Crosley Shelvador twice a year and charged only for parts; and certainly Gus, from Astoria Bicycle, where Check had often discussed the merits of oval chain wheels while he helped adjust brakes and change kids’ flat tires. Checker invited all the djs from WNEW—Maxanne Sartori, Donna Fiducia, Scott Muni, Dave Herman, Mr. Marty-Hale-and-Hearty-Never-Tardy-Rock-and-Roll-Smarty, and of course from the Late Show the great Danno himself. He invited Mrs. Carlton, Mr. Diamond, Gary Kaypro, and, last but not least, a whole slew of his old girlfriends, just to give them the pleasure of turning him down.

  The band rented tuxedos. Rachel dress-shopped for a week. The bride blew glass.

  “Are you going to wear Levi’s?” asked Check one evening.

  “You don’t trust me.”

  “No, I love you in Levi’s. Wear them if you want.”

  “What do you look like in a tuxedo?”

  Checker just smiled.

  While you might expect a tuxedo to divide its tenants by class—those who do and don’t look at home in it—this is not the case. All men look at home in tuxedos if they’ve been measured right. The Derailleurs turned up at the door of the Olympic Pavilion, then, looking passably like members of the White House staff. As always, before the first creases have cut behind the knee, before anyone has loosened a bow tie or cummerbund, the costume produced astonishing changes in bearing. Postures rose. Chests expanded. Strides lengthened and straightened, and all kinds of behavioral tics disappeared.

  Taking up a whole lane of Astoria Boulevard, a fleet of carriers from Sprint arrived astride beaten, high-seated ten speeds, Zefal’s old friends. Gravely the leggy black legion dismounted, releasing the right ankles of their tuxedo trousers, carefully clipped from the viscous chains, unstrapping bouquets bungee-corded to back racks, and locking up with enormous thick-shanked Kryptonites on parking signs for blocks around. As the messengers filed in, they shot Checker wry little salutes and delivered slightly greasy wedding presents from purple canvas bags.