by Tad Crawford
“What happened?” I asked, gesturing toward the splint.
“I had a fall. What’s it to you?”
I decided to ignore his tone. “I hope it heals quickly.”
“Do you mind keeping your sentiments to yourself?” he asked. “Just because my arm got broken doesn’t mean I’ve lost my pride.”
I noticed that the chef fell silent. The Mafia ran this resort, not just the restaurant, but the casino and hotel too. Even in my heat-induced daze, I suspected the man before me to be a capo, perhaps the boss of the whole complex. He looked to be between thirty-five and forty, my equal in age if little else. I didn’t reply to him. The heat had sapped me, and I had no idea what I might say that would please him.
“So,” the man continued, looking me up and down, “you’re the one who scammed the power company?”
I nodded my head. Hard as it may be to believe, I’d forgotten that I had gone undercover to help the authorities. I couldn’t remember which authorities, but they had connections to the power company and had helped me to lower the electric bills for the entire resort. This ploy had led directly to my interview. If I could get the position as sous-chef, there would be no end to the useful information I could gather and pass on to the authorities. Why I would want to do this I couldn’t say, after such a long sweat in the steam room. What benefit I would gain also eluded me. At least I would be taking the side of established order, the rule of reason and morality, against men such as the one who stood before me.
“I could make you a lot of money,” he said. “I have plenty of friends, big men in business. If I say the word, they’d jump to be your clients. They’ll pay me a third of what they save in power bills. I’ll pass a quarter of that on to you. You could be a very rich man.”
He frightened me, a visceral chill that made me shiver in spite of the heat. He cared nothing for the law, only for himself and his will to have power and pleasure. To him I might as well be an insect, something to let live if useful and crush underfoot if not. If I didn’t want to help, he might kill me without a second thought. If I did help him, I knew I would move in a downward spiral through scheme after scheme of his devising.
He reached out his hands to rest on my shoulders. As he drew closer, I could see the points of golden fire in his green-gray irises. He ran his hands up my slippery skin and began to rub the tops and then the bottoms of my ears between his thumbs and forefingers.
“He’s afraid,” the man called to the chef.
The words relieved me. Not what they meant, but simply to have sound in the room. I couldn’t remember hearing with such clarity and intensity, but the heat had obviously altered my senses. He caressed my lobes a few moments longer. His gentle touch made the shells of my ears tingle with a pleasure that reached into the canals.
Stepping back, the man shook his head. I knew then that I wouldn’t be offered the position as sous-chef. But to me his gesture meant more than that, as if he’d made some comment on my life and who I had become. Feeling his rejection, I lost my fear of him. Suddenly I wanted to enter his world and feel again that pleasurable touch on my ears. For a moment I believed that the authorities, with their familiar demands, offered nothing compared to his criminal schemes.
“Did you really think you could fool us?” he asked.
My usual glibness vanished. “I … I … ”
“We have informants. We know more than you could ever imagine. And we have our ways of handling matters.”
“I just want to change careers,” I finally managed to say, uncertain how this naked man might harm me but convinced that I faced the gravest peril.
“I’m sure you want that. You probably want to fix your little marriage too, almost as much as you want to break it up. But I’m talking about what you did to me.” He tapped an index finger to his chest. “We murder for less than that. So what do you say? The big companies pay a third of what they save, and I pay you a quarter of that. Have we got a deal?”
I had been so compliant—eager to help the authorities, hopeful to be given the position of sous-chef. But I had had enough of taking sides. Suddenly I just wanted to be left alone.
“No,” I answered.
His expression didn’t change. He picked up a towel and wrapped it around his waist with a gravitas worthy of a Roman senator being draped in his toga.
“Get out,” he said, then turned abruptly and exited through the frosted glass door.
The chef and I looked at one another. He had shrunk and looked more like a normal man of six feet or a little under. He rose and wrapped himself in his towel.
“What a shame,” the chef said. “I was ready to ask for your references and have you fill in a W-9. We could have run a quick background check and made you the offer. You’d have been one of us.”
I took my towel and tucked one end over the other to hold it around my soft middle.
“Thanks,” I said, “for everything.”
“He took it badly when you said you liked ships.”
“Hasn’t he ever gone on a cruise?” I asked, trying to remember where I left my clothes. I wanted to leave as soon as I could, but I’d need my clothes. I tried to recall what I’d put on that morning, but I couldn’t.
“I don’t hate ships all that much, but I had to put on a good show for him.” The chef said this and stood to face me just as the man had. If anything, I looked down slightly into that dark and contemplative eye of his. He blinked and kept on looking at me. At last he seemed to have made up his mind. “If you don’t find it intrusive, I’d like to make a suggestion.”
“You said I would be second-in-command, but you’re not in command yourself. He’s in command.” I pointed an accusing finger toward the door where the man had exited.
“He commands the complex, but I command the kitchen. Anyway, may I make a suggestion?”
“Sure, and then tell me where my clothes are.” I realized the room had cooled despite the mists that still hung in the air.
“You must never reveal me as the source of this information. It would be,” he paused, his eye fixed on me, “indelicate for me, prejudicial. Will you promise?”
“I promise.” After all, whom could I tell?
“There is a shop that sells model ships. It’s run by a man whom it would be worthwhile for you to meet.”
“Worthwhile in what way?”
The chef smiled. “I can’t say. It’s just a feeling I have. Maybe you’ll even get a ship for yourself. If anyone asks how you found the shop, just say you discovered it on the Internet. Don’t mention me. Will you do that?”
“Maybe.”
“Do it as an adventure, for fun. What do you say?”
“Okay, I’ll go.”
“Let me tell you where to find it.” He came forward and whispered in my ear. Although my body had cooled and I felt better, the heat had affected my senses. The air from his lips touched my ear, but instead of words I heard modulations of a high-pitched tone. I don’t know how to describe it better, but it possessed a beauty that I opened to and let enter me. As the tone vibrated in my ear, my spine began to vibrate in sympathy until an intense pleasure flowed up into the chamber of my skull. When the chef stepped back, I heard the skin of his feet brushing on the tiles of the damp floor.
“But where is it?” I asked.
He studied me.
“Are you always so literal?” he finally asked.
“I didn’t hear—that’s all.”
“I’m going to ask you a riddle.”
“I don’t like riddles.”
“In any case, I don’t want you to give me an answer. If you want the key to a riddle, just think of a recipe with a missing ingredient. That’s the mystery of it. If you think you know the answer, don’t be so certain. If you’re in doubt, try to taste the answer. I’m sure that makes no sense, right?”
“Yes, you’re right.”
“Good. In the end, every riddle works in a similar way. It supplies what is missing. It discovers a new part a
nd makes a whole.”
“I’m not really up to it.”
“As I said, I don’t want you to give me an answer. It’s merely something to think about.”
“Then shoot away,” I conceded, since he seemed determined to tell me.
“What number is even and odd—”
“That’s ridiculous.” I cut him off. “There is no such number.”
“I’m not done yet.” He looked offended. “What number is even and odd, and zero as well? If you can answer this riddle, be careful at crossroads.”
“Are you kidding? I live in a city. Every intersection is a crossroads. Anyway, I’m already careful. I watch the lights. I wait my turn. I let cars go first.”
“By the way,” he went on, “you said on the questionnaire that you have a great sense of humor. I wouldn’t quarrel with most of your answers, but I’m dubious about that one. I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but I haven’t seen any evidence of it.”
“I’m not getting the job, so it can’t make much difference.”
“I’m going to have to start all over again with the interviewing process. It’s an annoyance, a distraction from proper management of the kitchen. A bit of humor might smooth things over. It’s so unpredictable. It might take us in any direction.”
“Once,” I said, “I knew a woman who looked at leaves and saw the faces of people.”
“Is that funny?”
“Maybe she was crazy,” I said.
“Did it amuse you at the time?”
“At the time I thought she could see the invisible. She seemed to see so much more than I did. I admired her for that. Now I think she might have been lonely, imagining people who never existed. But she saw the face of the sun and animals. No matter how long I looked, I only saw leaves, sunlit on one side, darker green on the other, clustered close like shingles on a roof, or sometimes alone and silhouetted against the blue sky and the sun-pierced white of drifting clouds.”
The chef pursed his lips. “For myself, I’m sorry you didn’t get the job. I would have liked to have you around. Maybe we could have been friends.”
I felt an obscure sadness at his words, but I didn’t know why or how to respond.
“Can you get my clothes now?”
“Follow me,” he said as we stepped back into the hallway.
We entered a room next to the steam room, full of tall gray lockers. I didn’t remember having been in there, but the chef opened a locker and I could see familiar clothes. I rubbed the towel back and forth on my head to dry my hair, then quickly ran it over the rest of my body. Khaki pants, a long-sleeved blue shirt with a button-down collar, beige canvas sneakers that I treasured because I had worn ones like them as a kid—quickly I slipped into my clothes.
The chef opened another locker and dressed himself completely in white: white underclothes, white pants and shirt, a long white apron, and another towering white hat. Only his boots, which looked like army issue, were black. He found a pen and wrote studiously on a small card.
“This is the address.”
He meant for the shop with the model ships.
“But what is the name of the man you want me to meet? How do you know him?” I asked these questions as we walked back along the corridor decorated with the wallpaper of Venetian scenes. I wondered how the chef and his boss could tolerate these watery vistas of lagoons and canals.
“His name has changed since I knew him, and it doesn’t matter anyway. He knew my father. Once, a long time ago, he and my father did something very brave—or perhaps very foolish—together. If he takes a liking to you, you’ll probably hear the story.”
We passed through the dining room, quiet now in the afternoon, the round tables draped with peach-colored tablecloths and the silver and crystal set in readiness for the rush of the evening meal.
Outside the front door, beneath the downward gaze of the gargoyles guarding the golden doorway, he extended his hand to me.
I gave him a firm grip, wondering what the frame would look like if he ever needed an eyeglass for his single eye. Perhaps he could wear a monocle, like a miner’s light piercing ahead into the darkness.
“Good luck.”
“Thanks,” I replied.
“Let me know what happens,” he said, as I turned away to go down the flight of wide steps leading to the boulevard.
When I heard him say that, I had a moment of outrage. After all, I had come here for a job, not empathy. I had an urge to turn both him and his boss in to the authorities. I could imagine what kind of corruption had made this organization rich enough to buy the restaurant, hotel, and casino, and how they skimmed cash off the top and ran illegal scams to line their pockets even further. No doubt they owned other resorts in other cities, even in other countries. Their influence spread like cancer, outlaw cells that cared for nothing but their own triumph.
But which authorities would I turn them in to, and for what? With my foot in midair above the next step, I felt a frisson, like the painful pleasure of a little shock, palpate my heart. Suddenly I wanted the chef to know what would become of me. I turned to wave, but he had already vanished into the interior of the complex.
3
“I wrote him a letter,” the strange woman said to me. She looked in her late thirties, about my age, slender and smallish. When she spoke, she emphasized every word and her gray eyes took on a steely gleam behind her horn-rimmed glasses. “I told him exactly what I thought of him. No edits. No prisoners. Nothing left out.”
I had no idea who she was or who she was talking about. In the large room around us a storm of people moved turbulently back and forth, a lot of them dressed up in tuxes and glittering gowns. They carried presents, and I had the feeling I must be at a birthday party. But for whom?
“I left the letter on the dining room table. He won’t know what hit him. It’ll be like going from grade school to college. No high school in between. Or trying to speak English when you don’t know a word of it. You get it?”
I nodded, wondering why she had focused on me.
“Because a marriage isn’t like a date. It’s not like ten years of dating. You know that, right?”
Why did she keep probing me and making me lift my head up and down in agreement? If she continued, my neck muscles would tire and my head would droop to my chest.
“In the end, I told him, everything is about expectations. What we wanted at one time. What we hoped for but didn’t happen. What we hope for now. That’s the truth, isn’t it?”
My head nodded. I gave a sidelong glance to watch the elegantly dressed people piling gifts on a long table covered with a scarlet tablecloth. The packages had been beautifully wrapped with expensive papers and multicolored ribbons tied in elaborate knots. I wanted to ask her whose celebration this was, but she rushed ahead.
“You know why I wrote to him? Because I can’t fully express myself if I speak. Or I should say he doesn’t listen to me, not to the most important things. He has no ear for nuance. But he can come back to the letter as many times as he needs to. If he wants to, that is.”
I didn’t remember having said a word in this conversation. She could certainly speak, but she wanted to be better understood. I had the sudden fear that I might fail her in the same way he had.
“I said to him that once I dreamed of what could happen between us. How I wanted to unfold from within myself and wanted him to do the same. Only that didn’t happen. I could blame myself or blame him. You think it makes any difference who’s wrong?”
“In a relationship—” I started, eager to hear my own voice.
“A letter is more permanent,” she interrupted, repeating herself. “A letter can be read again and again. He can think about the subtleties of what I wrote, of our life together. I told him how I had cared for him. How I had loved him. That what I wanted when we met I still want today.” She placed a hand on my forearm and held it tightly. Her eyes looked intently into mine. “I want a lover. I want someone to confide in, someone to explor
e with, a father for my children, a life mate whose passion ignites mine as we go forward together. Do you think I’ll ever have any of that with him?”
“I don’t—”
“I won’t,” she answered herself with a twisting of her lips. “You know what I say? Remember to remember. I don’t want to forget that he and I had good times together, especially at the start. I don’t want to feel sad. I don’t want to think of our time together as the unhappy decade, the wasted years. Much better to say that we drifted apart.”
“That happens,” I managed to say.
“No,” she said.
“No?”
“You’d like it if I said he and I were equally guilty, equally innocent. But that’s not how I feel.”
She’d trapped me. I had to admire the way she had maneuvered me so I appeared to take his side against her.
“We married in our late twenties. As the years passed, I felt myself changing. I looked inside myself. Who was I? What parts of me might develop? How would I grow? But he remained the man I married. Exactly, unchangingly the same. People don’t grow apart if one of them isn’t growing. Then, sometime in the last year, I began to have the peculiar feeling that I had married someone much younger than myself. That I had reached the age of thirty-seven and would continue to grow older, but my husband would always be twentysomething. No matter how many years or decades would pass. If his face wrinkled and his hair turned white, he’d still be a youth. Happy with repetition—a dinner out at a nice restaurant now and again, an occasional show, the opera once a year, sex on Sunday mornings, and then the sports channel in the afternoon.”
