The Baker

by Paul Hond

  “Shit!” Mickey whispered. He turned away and struggled with his prick.

  “Mom?” came Ben’s voice. “Can I come down?” He had stopped after a few steps; his view was still blocked.

  “Benjie!” Emi said. “Have you heard of knocking?”

  “I did. Nobody answered.”

  Emi sighed.

  “Is Dad down there too?”

  “What is it?” Mickey called, buttoning his pants. His prick had shrunk. Goddamned kid. Like a dog, he’d sensed something, a food, a danger, had intruded without fully knowing why. “Benjie?”

  “Can I come down?” said Ben, his voice betraying, to Mickey’s surprise, a respectful caution, a new awareness of things. In a flash, Mickey considered that the kid maybe had a girlfriend, was balling her during the day, right here in the house, or no, in her house—God forbid!—without a rubber, and with her parents—decent, respectable people—pulling up in the driveway, home early, unexpectedly.

  “What is it?” Mickey said.

  Ben seemed to take this as an invitation to enter the room, and Mickey did his best to look like a man in the midst of a serious discussion with his wife, who, for her part, pulled the music stand back to its original space and made a small production out of turning the pages.

  “Yes?” said Mickey.

  Ben stood at the bottom of the stairs, looking at his parents, at the room, as if for evidence of sexual conspiracy. He said, “I meant to tell you—I had to throw away all the onion bread. Mold all over the bottom. Luckily, no customers saw it.”

  It was, Mickey knew, a jab. He tended to go a little too far sometimes in stretching a product’s shelf life, and while he was happy to find that Ben was taking at least some interest in the bakery, the timing for this announcement was suspicious.

  “Thanks,” Mickey said, feeling a soft pearl roll down his hairy, trembling leg. “Now if you don’t mind, your mother and I are having a conversation.”

  “Okay,” Ben said, and lingered a moment before walking over to Emi and bending to kiss her cheek.

  This was notable, Mickey thought: Ben had always been shy with Emi, and even as a child had never been one to jump into her arms. But what was even more unusual was Emi’s reaction: she received the kiss without a hint of surprise, almost imperially, like an ancestress immobile in her chair; as if—and here Mickey allowed for something of the mystical—as if she had somehow drawn him to her, or as if Ben, alert, had intuited in her some obscure pulse of urgency. They were, after all, mother and child, filled with their own biological intrigues, and Mickey, his entire body anticipating the moment when Ben would go, disappear, be gone, could only stand there as Emi, watching as Ben moved toward the stairs, called out to him in a voice tense with purpose.

  “Benjie,” she said. “Your computer. Didn’t you tell me you had a new program, a game?”

  Ben turned to her. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s called Empire.” He seemed baffled by her interest, excited by it. “Why? You want to play?”

  “Well—”

  “It’s fun,” Ben said, and as he began to describe the game in a rapid, rambling speech, as though Emi’s attention were a scrap of paper that must be weighted down with words, with detail, and went on about the nations he had conquered, the provisions he had made, Mickey, his fists in his pockets, faded back into shadow, watching as Emi lavished the kid with a steady, prodding gaze and quick nods of understanding, eliciting wave upon wave of information.

  It was like a crime, an act of violence that Mickey was helpless to stop. He’d taken Emi to task enough times about her lack of involvement in Ben’s life—he’d alluded to it just this morning in the garden—and now he could do nothing. It was clear: she meant to avoid him at all costs. She was wriggling out of their date, and using Benjie to do it.

  Finally, Ben exhausted himself and went upstairs, but not before securing a promise from Emi to come up in a few minutes and see his game. Mickey noticed that Ben didn’t even acknowledge him as he left the room.

  He turned to Emi, who looked up at him as if wanting to be praised for her good works.

  She said, “I told you. He’s learning a lot with the computer. You make it sound like such a toy.”

  “Cut the bullshit,” Mickey said.

  “What bullshit?”

  “Cut it!” Mickey caught himself, lowered his voice. “What was that all about? All that nodding and fake interest?”

  “Fake? How can you say that?”

  “You could give a crap, and now, all of a sudden—”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “Forget what’s fair. You’re avoiding me. Why?”

  “How am I avoiding you?” said Emi. “I’m right here.”

  “Are you?”

  “I promised him I’d look at his game. What am I supposed to do?”

  “Nothing. You’re absolutely right. Go. Go up now.”

  “Mickey.”

  “Go ahead, he’s waiting. Been waiting all his life.”

  “You’re being unreasonable.”

  “Oh. I see,” said Mickey. “I’m the unreasonable one.”

  “You’re being absolutely selfish.”

  Mickey laughed, a wretched, maniacal laugh. Selfish! Who was she kidding? He felt insane with laughter; he was dealing with a lunatic, and she was making him crazy too.

  Emi picked up her violin, began turning pages. “I think,” she said, “that you’d better go.”

  Mickey stopped laughing. He was not about to be ordered from a room in his own house. “Tell me,” he said.

  “Tell you what?”

  Mickey felt himself shaking. “Who. Tell me who you’re screwing.”

  “Mickey.”

  “Who!”

  “Calm down.”

  “So it’s true?”

  “You’re not calm.”

  Mickey touched his head. “I don’t believe this.” He felt sick, weak; he thought he might fall to his knees.

  “I told you this morning,” Emi said. “I told you what was wrong. Or weren’t you listening?”

  “What,” said Mickey. “The concerts? David Shaw? That’s the cause of all this? I’m supposed to believe that?”

  Emi said nothing.

  “Why can’t I touch you?” said Mickey. “Why? Why don’t you want me?”

  He watched her, sitting there, tight-lipped as a frightened girl. He knew. She was bored, she was dissatisfied, in need of new validation, however temporary. Or maybe she had fallen in love—“one of those things,” no one to blame; or had fallen out of it, again no one’s fault. These were the potential hazards Mickey had lived with all his married life. Why, then, should it come as such a shock?

  He hung his head. She was his chief accomplishment in life; her love had distinguished him. He was headed for loneliness, oblivion, and already he could hear the talk, the whispers around the table at Chen’s Garden.

  “It’s not what you think,” Emi said.

  Mickey looked at her: her face was in her hands, the violin on her lap.

  “What do I think?” Mickey said.

  “I’m not,” Emi said, “in love. That’s ridiculous.”

  “You don’t have to be in love.”

  “There’s no one else. I’m just not happy with myself right now. My playing. It’s shit. And I can’t do anything until I fix it.”

  Mickey considered this. There had, he conceded, been times over the years when she’d become so frustrated—a flaw in her technique, her intonation—that she began to see herself as undesirable, or at least unworthy of affection. But now it sounded more like an excuse for something else.

  “I want the truth,” Mickey said. “You owe me that much.”

  Emi closed her eyes. “I owe you everything,” she said, without irony; and then, as if in finality: “I’m tired.”

  Mickey nodded. In a certain way, the details didn’t matter. She was—she’d just said it—tired. Of him, of everything. Oh, there was probably someone else; she had her share of a
dmirers. Mickey considered that her resistance to him was rooted less in a lack of desire than in a fear that, in bed, she’d give herself away, reveal with her body what she didn’t want him to know. And in her sudden interest in Ben, which she claimed was sincere, Mickey saw more than just a way for her to avoid her husband: it seemed to confirm his fear that she was planning to leave, to go away forever.

  Mickey felt nauseated. “Goddamn you!” he shouted. His fists were clenched so tight at his sides that the fingernails had dug into the palms. “Goddamn you!”

  Emi began to weep softly into her hands, as though in confession of her sins. Mickey awaited her defense, but none came: there was nothing more to say. Mickey couldn’t bear to look at her. He turned and ran upstairs, propelled himself through the rooms to the back door and out into the cold, starry night, and knelt by the stems whose heads had been cut off, his mind reeling back to the day he met her, a day that he now cursed, even as he cherished it as the sweetest in all his years.

  She had come into the bakery wearing a burgundy scarf around her forehead, a large silver hoop in one ear, a short zebra-striped dress and black boots to her knees. Mickey watched her, not too critically. The Lerner Bakery normally didn’t attract her type—hipsters, mods, or whatever they called them—but Mickey had learned from his father that when someone walked through that door, all the things that tended to set people apart remained outside in the street: that person was no longer Jew or Gentile, black or white, this or that. He was a customer. A friend.

  “May I please have six poppy-seed rolls?” the young woman said. Her voice told Mickey she wasn’t from around here; there was an accent, he thought, foreign, something she was losing, or else taking up, affecting. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-five.

  “Where are you from?” Mickey said. His back was to her as he bagged the rolls.

  “France,” she said.

  “France.” Now that was something. A French girl in the Lerner Bakery. This was an event, a first. Mickey wished he had something to add to the idea—an anecdote, a little fact to flaunt—but he’d never been to her country and had no real impressions of it, though certainly he was aware—acutely aware, now—of the reputation of Paris as a world capital of baking. He welcomed the challenge. “So,” he said. “What are you doing here in Baltimore?” In the face of her worldliness it seemed he could do nothing but play the cheerful yokel. “Don’t you know they call this place Nickel Town? Mob Town?” He felt loose, proud, full of pluck and good humor. “Sure you didn’t take a wrong turn somewhere?”

  “I’m here to study music,” she said. “The Wurther Conservatory?”

  “Ah.” Mickey nodded. The Wurther. That explained it. The Wurther was one of the city’s jewels, drawing people from all corners of the globe. “What instrument?” he said, turning to place the bag on the glass counter. “Wait, don’t tell me.” He set his elbows on the glass and pretended to appraise her. “Let’s see. The violin?”

  She flashed a look of surprise, delight. “Yes,” she said. “How did you know?”

  “How?” Mickey stood up straight; he was now a man of subtlety, of keen observation. “You just—look like it,” he said, and though he didn’t quite know how to explain it (what did a violinist look like, after all?) he could nevertheless picture her in a chair, her feet planted aggressively in a kind of musical stride. He noted her small hands and the strange exposed quality—the eye was drawn to it—of her long white neck, with its faint veins branching up to the tiny fruit of her chin, her nose, her red mouth. Her face was round as a moon and she had shiny, silvery coins for eyes; you could almost hear them jingle when she smiled.

  “I look like it?” she said. “Why?”

  “You just do.”

  “Looks cannot always be trusted,” she said. She reached out and took one of his hands in her own, his right hand, examined it as though it were apart from him. Mickey dared not move, and hoped to God that none of his regular customers came in. No telling what they’d make of it. “These,” she said. “The hands. They tell the real story, I think. You have a beautiful hand.”

  Mickey got the picture. The hoop earring, the schmatte around the head; she was a palm reader. But “beautiful”? Mickey thought his hands downright ugly, a regular road map of bumps and calluses and scars from oven burns. Hers meanwhile looked smooth, intelligent, skilled, and bore no rings at all. At twenty-eight, Mickey had made it his business to notice rings. “I guess I could never be a musician with these jobs,” he said. He displayed his fingers, his fat knuckles. “Fact is, I messed them up pretty good from boxing.”

  “Boxing?”

  “You know, like these guys.” He hooked his thumb behind him to indicate the framed pictures of the old-time fighters on the wall: Jackie Fields, Maxie Rosenbloom, Barney Ross. And of course Benny Leonard. Many of his customers got a big kick out of the pictures—those fighters had been their boyhood heroes: they could remember a time when Jewish fighters dominated the sport.

  “You see?” she said. “Looks are deceptive. You don’t have a face like a fighter.”

  Mickey laughed: it was true: his nose was on straight as a light switch. “I haven’t fought in years,” he said. “I trained a lot, but I quit after one fight.”

  “Why?” she said. “Were you hurt?”

  Mickey shrugged one shoulder. “A little.”

  “And your opponent?”

  “My opponent,” said Mickey. He grinned. “Ah, my opponent.” The ghost of sexual possibility—more than a ghost: a fragrance, a pollen—had stirred the braggart in him, and he regretted his words even as he spoke them. “Ever seen a hamburger before it’s cooked?” he said, leaning closer to her. “That’s what his face looked like by the end of the fight. Meat. Raw, ground beef.”

  “Aw nooo,” she said.

  “Aw yes,” said Mickey. He smacked a fist into his hand to demonstrate the lightning of his attack. “Knocked him into another world.” Forgive me, Tommy, he thought, I’m dizzy from her perfume. It was as if the finest lavender were boiling softly under her skin.

  “If you were so good,” she said, “then why did you quit?”

  “Quit?” Mickey had a feeling she didn’t believe him; probably she figured he’d been beaten, bloodied, chased out of the game. Good, he thought. Maybe that absolved him somehow. He said, “Well, there’s a few reasons.”

  “Tell me.”

  “It’s not very interesting.”

  “I want to hear,” she said.

  Mickey felt his nerves clanging. He wasn’t used to this kind of attention. He gathered himself. “For one thing,” he said, “my father died. Three days before my fight, believe it or not.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I should have never fought that day,” Mickey said, and ten years after the fact he could not be sure which guilt weighed more heavily upon him—the guilt over his father, or the guilt over what happened in the ring. “I thought I was being brave. But if I could do it over …” He gazed out the store window at the cars passing on North Avenue.

  The young woman looked up at him. “Yes,” she said, as if she understood everything, even the things he had yet to tell her. “But you know, you cannot change the past.”

  Mickey met her eyes. Her sympathy seemed so pure, so rich with the promise of consolation that Mickey had a mind to tell her everything. Despite himself (he hated to add to the gloom, already he missed her smile) he went on, in hopes of drawing her further into his history. “He started this bakery twenty-five years ago,” he said. “From nothing. He took the money he and my mother got for their wedding and opened a business. This was during the war. It was his dream to pass the business on to me, and for me to pass it on to my children. And so when he died I had to choose right then and there. To keep the business or sell it. Boxing or baking.” He shrugged. “I couldn’t sell it. And so here I am.”

  He could hardly believe that he’d just given his life story to a total stranger, but then maybe that’s what a yokel s
hopkeeper was supposed to do.

  “And your children?” she said. “You will pass it to them?”

  “That’s a little ways down the road yet,” said Mickey. “I’m not even married.”

  “No?” The young woman tilted her head slightly, as if to find the flaw in him, the clue. “And why is that?”

  “Circumstances,” Mickey said. But why go into it? It had always stung him that the girls he’d longed for in high school—the tennis princesses, the college-bound pants-wearers—had written him off as a baker’s son, a hunk, unmarriageable; and Mickey, who for years had watched these beauties from the lesser corners of diner parking lots and gymnasium dance floors, was relieved to find, when one of them came into his store, that what had attracted him most at sixteen—their tanned, lean bodies, their laughter, the leggy confidence with which they strode onto athletic fields in their jouncy light-blue uniforms—had now, ten and twelve years later, all but vanished into the creases and folds of motherhood. How they flirted with him, now!

  “Circumstances, you say?” said the young woman. “Perhaps it is just bad luck?”

  “Perhaps. How about you?”

  “Me?” She averted her eyes. “Oh, very bad luck. I was with a man very crazy. One reason I am here: to get away. You cannot change the past, but that does not mean you must be a slave to it. I do not look back; only forward.”

  “You mean you ran away from home?”

  “What home? I do not believe in this idea of home. Home is something inside of you.” All at once she seemed too tough, as if covering fear. “A home,” she said, “can be anywhere.”

  “Do your parents know where you are?”

  “I do not have parents,” she said, and sighed, as if reluctant to go further but feeling obligated to meet his candor with her own. “My mother died when I was a young girl,” she began, “and my father—” she raised her eyebrows and blew air from her lower lip—“my father does not exist for me.”

  “Why?” Mickey said. “Why doesn’t he exist?”