The Baker

by Paul Hond

  “They’re beautiful,” Emi said. “Why do they bother you so much?”

  Mickey ignored that. Suddenly he thought of Ben; he should probably call the bakery, see how things were going.

  “Mookie.”

  Mickey turned at the sound of his pet name, his bedroom name.

  Emi pulled off her gloves. “Come downstairs tonight at ten o’clock,” she said. “I’ll move my music stand.”

  Mickey raised an eyebrow. It had been quite a while since he’d stood before her like that, buttocks tensed, his pants at his knees; and even longer since he’d knelt before her, his face wedged between her thighs as she sliced the strings with her bow.

  Looking up at her at that angle—he remembered—it appeared that she was severing her own neck.

  “Okay,” he said, his blood pumping. “Ten o’clock.”

  3

  The hour could not have arrived soon enough. Emi was down in the basement the rest of the afternoon, starting, stopping, cursing aloud when she missed a note. Around dinnertime Mickey prepared a bowl of salad and a slice of bread and took it downstairs, but instead of interrupting her in the middle of a long, tricky passage and demanding she put down the goddamned bow and eat, he left the food on the bottom step and tiptoed back up, lest he give her any reason to deny him what she had promised.

  As for himself, he decided to order carryout from Chen’s Garden. He phoned in his order, then drove to the bakery to check on Ben.

  He entered the parking lot that served the dozen or so stores that made up the shopping center in which the Lerner Bakery—the “new” Lerner Bakery, flanked at the moment by a hair salon and a drugstore (neighboring businesses came and went: only the Lerner Bakery was a constant)—had stood for nearly thirty years. The delivery van was parked at the far end of the lot, which meant that Nelson had finished his deliveries and taken the bus back home. Through the bakery window Mickey could see Benjie and Morris behind the counter, handling a line of customers. He watched his son for several minutes—the bagging of goods, the explanations to cranky customers—and lapsed for a moment into memories of his own first days on the job under Morris’s frowning eye. In a certain way, the world hadn’t really changed at all.

  Satisfied that things were okay, Mickey headed over to Chen’s Garden. He’d been going there forever, it seemed; he and his friends had consumed enough noodles and duck and wonton soup to feed a starving country, and Benjie had practically cut his teeth on the spareribs. But it had been a long while since he’d gone there to dine socially; Emi had never been too crazy about the gang—Joe, Marv, Buddy Grossman—and somewhere along the way Mickey had reluctantly withdrawn himself.

  He parked in front and went in. Ah, that warm, greasy smell. He took a seat on one of the red-cushioned benches, where several black customers were awaiting their food with bored expressions. Back in the dining room, which could be glimpsed through an entranceway festooned with garish Oriental tinsel, potted plants and long, contorted plaster dragons, Mickey could hear the din of voices, of forks, of the hot metal vessels that concealed, under hot domelike lids, a florid hodgepodge of ingredients, bright and gleaming, the ungodly combination of things.

  He then heard, from the depths of the restaurant, a familiar laugh. Joe? Mickey stood and walked to the threshold of the dining room, at the back of which he saw, sure enough, Joe Blank, seated at a table covered with steaming platters of food. Joining Joe were Buddy Grossman, Marv Kandel, Marv’s girlfriend Bernice Stein and another woman whom Mickey didn’t recognize. Mickey felt a start of excitement, and then, almost immediately, a sinking despair. He wanted to be with them, to share in their gossip, their dirty jokes. He felt lonely, weak. The past beckoned, just as it had this morning; it was as though he were on the verge of a dramatic life change—a move, an affair—and in his fear had gone rushing back to what he knew best. But what change? What fear? Granted, things weren’t great at home, but in a world of failed marriages, of estrangements and broken ties, he could hardly be said to be miserable. Still, there was a definite sense of crisis, and for the second time that day—it had happened this morning, driving Donna Childs downtown—Mickey found himself in something of a panic, wanting more than anything to get home to his wife.

  He returned to the red benches, wondering if he ought to forget the food and just hightail it home, but before he could make up his mind he heard his name, and a moment later Joe was standing over him, fingering a stained handkerchief.

  “Didn’t you see us back there? Jesus, you look like hell.”

  “Joe.”

  “Christ, what’s it been, a month? Two months?”

  “About that.”

  “You used to look like a Greek god,” Joe said. “Now you look like a goddamned Greek.”

  Mickey laughed; it was an old joke between them.

  “Come on back to the table, we got dragon turds and pigeon chow mein.”

  Mickey stood up, surprised at how glad he was to see his childhood friend. “Thanks,” he said, “but I’m waiting for some carryout.”

  “You okay?” said Joe, studying Mickey with his small black eyes. He had a horseshoe of dark hair left on his head and a terse black mustache that he dyed. He’d been a handsome kid, tough and wiry, a good athlete. Now his forehead shone with the pent-up anger of a man beaten down to spousal obedience, a man who could be spotted at the grocery store, the mall, standing by in dark sunglasses while his wife talked on and on to one of her many friends, some of whom smiled at Joe with luridly painted mouths. Across his brow, a long vein raged like lightning.

  “I’m fine,” said Mickey. “Just a little tired. Trying to get the store ready for the holidays.”

  “How’s everyone? Morris?”

  “They’re fine. Emi’s going to Paris next month.” Despite his age-old resentment over Emi’s travels—the names of cities were like the names of other men—Mickey took a secret pleasure in describing her itinerary to friends and customers, most of whom responded eagerly to the sounds of distant places, and tended to lavish their awe on the speaker.

  “Paris, huh?” said Joe, trying hard not to betray his wonder. He looked straight into Mickey’s eyes, as if challenging him to draw comparisons between their wives. “Well,” he said, softening his features into a picture of sad resignation, of surrender, “must be nice, having a wife who’s gone half the time.” He laughed, as if at his own comic misery—the endless nagging, the motherly reminders (“Put a hat on, you’ll catch a cold!”), the same old heap of flesh snoring and farting beside him in bed each and every morning—but Mickey heard, beneath the surface of this, a distinct pity, the slow shake of the head for the emptiness in Mickey’s life, an emptiness that should have been filled, as Joe’s was filled, with the homely pleasures of one’s autumn years: breakfast on Sunday, the groceries carried in.

  Mickey scoffed inwardly at this notion; the litany of workaday blessings struck him as bleakly conventional. Yet he submitted, nodding in agreement like a defeated man (“Yes, it’s true,” he seemed to be saying, “your life is better than mine”), not so much to gratify his friend as to enjoy the spectacle of his delusions. Poor Joe. Time and again, and in so many carefully chosen words, he’d denounced Emi as a subversive, an elitist, the original duplicitous woman; and the only thing that stopped Mickey from defending her—aside from his sense that Joe was trying to provoke him into exactly the sort of inelegant response (a punch in the mouth?) to which his marriage purported him superior—was his even greater sense that Joe, in some dark, ailing region of his heart, was and always had been painfully in love with her.

  “You going with her?” Joe said, his tone intimate, concerned, nudging gently at the idea of Emi’s infidelity. “To Paris?”

  Mickey laughed: Joe had him there. Mickey Lerner never went anywhere; the bakery couldn’t run without him, at least not for any extended period of time. He was needed here; he had a business to run. “Maybe next time,” he said, and shrugged carelessly to demonstrate an unshakable tr
ust in his wife.

  Joe looked askance. “So how you been?” he said.

  “Good,” said Mickey. He felt like talking. “Well, maybe not so good. This is always a crazy time of year. After the garden dries up, I hardly know what to do with my hands.” He became aware of those hands—stupid, useless things! He put them in his pockets. “It’s strange. I don’t know.”

  “Take up smoking,” Joe said.

  “Maybe I will.”

  “Think I’ll step out for one now.” Joe pulled a pack of Kents from his shirt pocket. “Join me?”

  They went outside and stood under the red neon sign, gazing at the traffic, the stars, the lights of service stations and fast-food huts. Then came a sound of sirens approaching from the east, the sources of which sped past in a shriek of metal—one, two, three squad cars—and diminished into tiny lights shooting off in the wide sea of road. The men turned their heads in unison, watched until the cars were out of sight.

  Mickey said, “Guess where I went this morning?”

  Joe put a cigarette in his mouth, cupped the lighter around his hands. There was a click, a spark; smoke leaked from between his fingers. “Where?”

  “Down Percy Street.”

  Joe blew smoke from the side of his mouth. “What the hell for?”

  “Had some business to take care of.”

  “Selling crack?”

  “How’d you guess?”

  “That’s the only business they got down there.”

  Mickey laughed. “I wouldn’t go that far,” he said. It was an old conversation, one for which Mickey was often grateful: if ever he felt himself lapsing into the popular attitudes to which he’d always believed himself immune—the fear and hatred of the blacks—he had only to chat with Joe to regain his footing. “They’re not all teenage mothers and criminals,” he said, referring to Joe’s favorite depictions. “Some of them actually have jobs.”

  “Hold on now,” said Joe. “Remember who you’re talking to. I had shvartzes working for me thirty years ago, long before you did.”

  “Sure, thirty years ago. What about now?”

  “Now? You kidding?” Joe shook his head. “These shvartzes today—once you hire one, you’re stuck, for better or worse. Mostly worse. You know how it is. Don’t you got one driving the van? Young fella?”

  “Know how what is?” Mickey said.

  “You know—telling ‘em what to do. Being their goddamned boss.” Joe examined the bright tip of his cigarette. “They all got a chip on their shoulder, you know that as well as I do. You can’t even make a criticism without the NAACP jumping in. And God forbid you should fire one of these characters—it could mean your life.”

  There was a silence, in which Mickey tried to imagine what might happen if he did in fact fire Nelson. He could hardly picture it; he’d never fired anyone in his entire career.

  “Remember that fella from the Quickee Mart?” Joe said. “The manager, white fella? And how the bastard he fired came back the next morning and shot him in the head, right in front of his three-year-old kid? Remember?”

  “Things happen,” Mickey said. “What can you do?”

  “They’ll shoot you for nothing,” said Joe. “In a heartbeat they’ll shoot.” The vein in his head was pulsing, lighting up; he sipped his cigarette, seeking relief, then watched calmly as the wisdom of his smoke was torn apart by the chill night air. “So,” he said. “What exactly were you doing down on Percy? What kind of business?”

  “Business?” Mickey rubbed his chin. Joe wasn’t too familiar with Nelson, with Donna; nor did he know the details about the match with Thomas Childs: he’d been away that summer, working for his uncle in Jersey, and by the time he returned, Mickey was firmly entrenched at the Lerner Bakery, and was trying his best—it wasn’t easy—to put the memory of the fight behind him. It was, Mickey now decided, too long a story: Tommy Childs, Donna, the situation with Nelson and Ben; he wouldn’t have even known where to start. He said, “Well, not business, exactly. I just—I don’t know. I just wanted to go down there, see what it was like. It’s been years. I mean, that’s where we grew up. Lot of memories there.”

  “Memories?” Joe drew smoke, blew two angry tusks through his nostrils. “Those days are gone. Let ‘em go, is what I say. We got what, ten good years left, fifteen if we’re lucky? Who’s got time for memories? Christ, the doctor could stick his finger up my ass next week and tell me it’s all over. You been checked lately?”

  “Last month.”

  “Listen, forget Percy Street,” said Joe. He dropped his cigarette to the ground, crushed it with his white tennis shoe. “We’ve got enough problems here already. I can’t even walk out of my own house anymore.”

  “I walk out of mine every day.”

  “Sure. At your own risk.”

  “You can’t live in fear,” Mickey said.

  Joe looked at Mickey, narrowed his eyes. “I used to think you just had your head in the clouds,” he said. “But now I’m not so sure.”

  “No?”

  “I think you’re afraid to admit your true feelings,” Joe said. “Scared to. What do you think of that?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Me?” Joe spat on the pavement. “I think there’s nothing wrong with being pissed off. You go to work, you bust your ass, you pay your taxes. You didn’t ask for this. All this crap going on. You go about your life in an honest way, and the next thing you know, some shvartze jumps from behind a car, puts a gun to your head and pulls the trigger. This is unheard of in other countries.”

  “I think my order’s ready,” Mickey said.

  “Know what I did last week? Applied for a gun license.”

  “A gun?”

  “Goddamned right.”

  “Well, it’s a constitutional privilege.”

  “Ever thought about it?”

  Mickey laughed. “Your food’s getting cold.”

  “Have you?”

  “Sure. Every day.”

  “You never learn.”

  “I’ve learned plenty.”

  They went into the restaurant. A big brown bag with a receipt stapled to it lay on the carryout counter.

  “Come back and say hello,” Joe said.

  “That’s okay,” said Mickey. “I’d better get home.”

  Joe nodded his understanding. “Well. If you ever wanna mix with us ‘common people,’ you know where to find us.”

  “Ha, ha.”

  “So long,” Joe said. He turned and headed back to his table.

  Mickey paid for his food. Expensive. Had prices gone up? He received his change, refusing to glance back at Joe’s table. The bag was heavy, warm. He could hear their laughter.

  He clutched the bag to his chest and inhaled.

  Back home, he removed the contents of the bag and dumped them onto a plate, thinking that if Joe’s attempt to seduce him into some sort of outburst against the blacks was any indication of what he’d have had to endure had he joined the whole crowd back at their table, he was sure glad to be in his own house, even if it meant eating alone. And wasn’t that proof enough of where he stood on the race question, that he’d sooner eat alone than listen to a bunch of loudmouths?

  Still, he wished he’d have defended his position more strongly. But to what end? People like Joe, they never changed. No: they bought guns. They moved to the wilderness. Mickey concluded that it would have been a waste of breath.

  He was almost finished eating when Ben came through the kitchen door. Mickey sat up.

  “How’d it go?” he said.

  “Fine,” said Ben.

  “No problems?”

  “No.”

  “Everything go okay with Nelson? He get all his deliveries done okay?”

  “As far as I know.”

  “Good.” In the wake of Joe’s rantings, Mickey felt inclined to be more generous with regard to Nelson. “Good,” he said again. He decided not to press for any more details—it was enough that no emergencies had cropped up
, no disasters. And best of all, Benjie didn’t even seem resentful; you’d even have thought, by looking at him, that he’d actually enjoyed his day at work, had actually taken a little pride in what he’d done.

  “G’night,” said Ben. He walked out of the kitchen.

  Mickey listened to the kid’s footfalls on the stairs, the closing of his door. In a moment, he figured, the computer would go on, and Ben would lose himself in the druggy depths of the screen.

  By 9:45, Mickey was champing at the bit. The dishes were washed, the newspaper was in pieces. He couldn’t wait much longer. Emi’s playing seemed to be winding down; she always ended her sessions with exercises, and Mickey could recognize one of them now. He opened the basement door.

  The music stopped. She had heard him coming. When he arrived at the bottom step, he found that the salad bowl he’d set out earlier was empty.

  “All gone,” Emi said.

  Mickey looked at her. She was seated in her chair, luminous with the hours she’d put in. He could tell that it had been a good session.

  She smiled at him. “You’re early,” she said.

  “Am I?”

  “What did you do?”

  “Not much. Got some carryout from the Garden.” He approached her. “Benjie’s home.”

  “What did you have?”

  “The usual.”

  Emi put down her bow and pushed the music stand away.

  “You sure about this?” Mickey said. “I mean, we could go upstairs.”

  “Hush.”

  Mickey laughed. He stood in front of her, watched as her fingers unbuckled his belt. This would be good, he thought, just what the doctor ordered. She unbuttoned his trousers, pulled on the zipper. He closed his eyes and felt her reach in, heard her spit into her palms and rub them together. Those hands: such valuable things, reduced to this! Instantly he was hard.

  “Hey,” she said. “Ve-ry nice.”

  She gripped him, brought him toward her. With her tongue she teased the tip.

  “Jesus,” Mickey said. His mind scrambled for a fantasy image, a woman, someone he’d seen, someone he’d thought of once, a celebrity, a customer, but before he could think of anyone there came a noise from the top of the stairs.