The Baker

by Paul Hond

  Later, as Glazer rubbed his back, praising his savagery, he’d been terrified (Childs had been taken to the hospital, that was all anyone knew), believing he’d tapped into something ungodly within himself, and that the only way to repent for his actions was to suppress the thing that seemed so central to what he was.

  He never fought again.

  Still, the memories haunted him. Two days after the fight he hopped into his father’s Pontiac (his car now) and drove down to West Saratoga Street, to Tommy’s row house, armed with some Marvel comic books and a bag of lollipops (sucking candy, easy on the jaw), the two things that he himself would most like to have received, had he been recovering in bed. At the door he was greeted by Tommy’s mother (she’d been curt on the phone, he’d thought, but now she seemed glad to see him), who led him to a back bedroom where Tommy, his face so swollen that Mickey hardly recognized him, lay shirtless in a bed, thumbing through the pages of a high school yearbook.

  “Tommy,” said his mother. “Somebody’s here to see you.” She smiled at Mickey, then turned and was gone.

  Tommy didn’t look up. “My mother told me you were coming,” he said. “Ain’t like I’m dyin’ or nothin’.”

  “That’s good,” said Mickey. These were the very first words between them, but it seemed to Mickey that they’d known each other for years.

  “What are you doin’ here then?”

  Mickey shrugged. “Happened to be in the neighborhood.” It was meant as a joke.

  “Heard your father died.”

  “Yeah.” Mickey had mentioned this on the phone to Tommy’s mother, hoping it would soften her. Evidently it had.

  “That’s rough,” said Tommy. He turned a page.

  “Well,” said Mickey. “Just dropped by to see how you were.”

  Tommy raised the book a little, as if to obscure his beaten face. He said, “If you’d’ve lost that fight? Your people would’ve come after both of us. We’d be two dead motherfuckers, strung up side by side.”

  “They weren’t my people,” Mickey said.

  Tommy didn’t seem to hear him. “That’s why I let you beat me,” he said. “I was more afraid of that crowd than I was of losing. Figured I could save both of us, you know?” He lowered the book and looked at Mickey for the first time, the puffed eyes gleaming with challenge. “Decided to go down,” he said. “Sacrifice.”

  Mickey waited for a sign, an indication that Tommy was only kidding, but none came, and Mickey was forced to confront the grisly spectacle of a pride so ravaged that it had, even more than the punches, turned the beaten fighter into a kind of monster, a brown, slit-eyed creature flat on its back, gone hideous with self-loathing and having no other recourse than to look daringly into the eyes of its enemy and with sheer roach defiance utter the most outrageous lies imaginable.

  Mickey was horrified: he’d never seen a shame laid so bare, a humiliation so artlessly concealed; his instinct was to go along with it, assist Tommy in his bitter quest to be believed, and could only hope that his own reaction to this incredible news—that Tommy had thrown the fight to avert a riot—was somewhat less transparent than the news itself. “Yeah,” Mickey said. “But next time you want to throw a fight, don’t make it so obvious.”

  The comment floated there like a still balloon, and any sarcasm it may have contained inflated it all the more, so that Tommy, lying punch-drunk in a camphorous vapor of balms and liniments, would be able to detect it; and when Mickey remained silent, as if allowing his meaning to sink in (though in fact he was speechless out of fear, of a lack of knowing what to say)—as he stood there at the foot of the bed, clutching the comics, the candy, he sensed that his pride had indeed reached Tommy, delivering its own pain, a pain made all the more apparent in its being expressed not, as Mickey might have expected, in a violent outburst, but, to Mickey’s mind, something far more disturbing: a smile, or rather an attempt at a smile, at once confessional and smug, innocent and sly; it told far too much, and Mickey could not face it: eyes lowered, he laid his gifts at the foot of the bed and mumbled a farewell. Tommy said nothing.

  A similar feeling came over Mickey now: a need for air, a need to escape this drab little room. He rolled out of the bed, determined to stay in motion until Shaw’s noon concert. Moving, he would not be caught by memories, though even as he showered and dressed he could not help but recall the few occasions, after the fight, when he’d met up with Tommy Childs socially. He’d called him at Christmas, and though later they’d met a few times for burgers at a colored joint not far from Tommy’s called Papa Bell’s, it became clear to Mickey that they were too different to ever become close. Tommy now had a baby girl, was married, and in any case the fight had ruined any chance for a real friendship, seeing as how Tommy couldn’t let it alone, harping on it and embellishing until he’d arrived at the belief that he’d actually been ahead on points when the bout was stopped. It was then—and later Mickey would reflect how he’d seen it coming all along—that Tommy challenged him to a “friendly” fight right there on the parking lot in back of Papa Bell’s, in the presence of several young Negroes who gathered round the two with scavenger interest, hands deep in the pockets of their winter coats. As Tommy squared off, Mickey stepped back and waved his hand, a gesture which, Mickey knew, appeared to their audience—much to Tommy’s satisfaction—as a cowardly backing down; and though Mickey was in a sense happy to provide Tommy with this false redemption, he felt badly misused, so that when the Negroes had dispersed, lobbing laughter and taunts, Mickey knew that he and Tommy had come to the end of things. Tommy had tried to smooth it over—he sensed Mickey’s anger—but it was too late; the tension was too thick, it had become dangerous, and Mickey never called Tommy Childs again. The following Christmas, though, he did send a card, and a few days later got a call from Tommy’s mother, who told him that Tommy’s wife had left him and that Tommy had “gotten into some trouble” and was now living with an aunt in North Carolina. And then there was Tommy’s ex-wife, a pretty, full-figured girl whom Mickey’d met once, briefly, and who later began shopping at the bakery. She’d probably never have recognized him had he not introduced himself as an old friend of Tommy’s (“He’s probably mentioned me before, Mickey Lerner, we fought once, a few years back”), and if she was a little cool toward him—reasonable, Mickey thought, given what he’d done to Tommy—he at least had an admirer in her little daughter, to whom he’d often give a free éclair and a playful, fatherly tickle under the chin.

  Through the window, Mickey saw that the rain had stopped. He put on his coat, grabbed his wallet and street map and went down the steps to the lobby, where the same man who had checked him in was back on duty, seated at his desk. He looked at Mickey with some interest.

  “Good morning, my friend,” he said. “Ça va? Did you have a good night?”

  There was something knowing in the man’s voice that gave Mickey pause. “Yes,” he said. “Slept like a rock.” He wondered if he looked shady, leaving at such a furtive hour. The man was watching him.

  He said, “I have your answer, monsieur.”

  Mickey wasn’t sure what he meant. “My answer?”

  “Yes—what you asked me. About your wife.”

  “Yes,” Mickey said, snapping to attention. He bristled at his lapse, and feared that the man, in recognizing Mickey’s preoccupation with other things, would feel vaguely let down, even embarrassed for having made an effort to research the matter, and would now punish him by divulging the worst.

  What if Emi’s name were there, Mickey wondered, the signature right alongside that of a lover—what would he do? He wanted to stop the man, give himself time to prepare, but he couldn’t speak.

  “Emilie Lutter,” said the man. “I looked for this name in my books. And I must tell you that it appears in my records not at all.”

  “You mean she was never here?”

  The man shook his head.

  Mickey nodded. “Merci.” His relief faded into an odd disappointment: if E
mi were innocent, what did that make him?

  He walked out into the street, agonizing over his growing disloyalty to his wife. He’d come here to mourn the woman—so he’d told himself—and only after his thoughts had strayed toward Donna, where they were smartingly repelled by memories of Tommy, did they crawl, slither back to her. Terrible!

  He walked faster. Move, you don’t get hit, he told himself. Keep moving.

  He pulled out his map and slowed to read it as he passed under a street lamp. Shaw’s concert was at a cathedral on the other side of town. Mickey found the spot where he presently stood and traced a route with his finger. It was a long trek. He walked on, amazed that he had the streets of Paris to himself.

  He passed two or three streets when he was hit by a smell: fresh bread, so strong that he could almost feel on the back of his neck the wavy breath of ovens. As he walked on—as the buildings became older, more elegant, more of what he had imagined the city would be—the smell grew in its intensity; the entire city was undergoing a secret mutation, giving off its scent like a bush at a crisis in its life cycle. Everywhere he looked he saw the source: bakeries and pastry shops, one after the next, street by street. Mickey stopped by the window of a pâtisserie and peered in at the glass cases, but it was too dark to make out what was inside.

  Around him, the city was coming to life; the traffic picked up on the boulevard (the headlights of the cars the color of egg custard), and people—white people, French people—appeared on sidewalks with dogs or shop keys. Darkness was fading, now a deep blue that was indistinguishable from nightfall. Before him, the pâtisserie lights went on, and he saw, through the window, a display of pastries—rows of them in crinkly boats of paper—that triggered in him an alarm which sounded from the depths of his professional pride. This was pastry as Michelangelo must have dreamed it. When the woman inside unlocked the door, Mickey rushed in. His eyes and nostrils widened. Strawberries, chocolate, peaches, almond cream; jewels of blueberries, cherries. And then: lemon meringue, vanilla, hazelnut. The golden butter of apples, of milk.

  Mickey looked up at the woman behind the counter. She was big and broad-shouldered, with a wide, masculine face and large, fleshy hands. Her bosom, piled high under a sexless white smock, resembled in shape the round loaves of bread that lined a wooden shelf behind her. She looked down at Mickey and, with a smile that may only have been a grimace of impatience, said, “Monsieur?”

  Mickey straightened up and scratched his head. “I speak English,” he said.

  The woman nodded. “Yes,” she said. “What can I help for you, please?”

  Her accent, her way of speaking, stirred memories of Emi’s accent, when she’d first come into the bakery. The improvement in her English during the first year of their marriage had been, for Mickey, a measure of the life she led away from the house; she’d come home from trips with new words and phrases, revealed to him in conversation like new bedroom tricks that she had learned from someone else; it got so that he could no longer locate his own influence in her speech.

  “Monsieur.”

  “Yes,” said Mickey. He pointed to a plain, chocolate-covered éclair, curious to know how it stacked up against his own éclairs, which enjoyed a reputation back home. “S’il vous plaît,” he added. He placed some coins on the counter; the woman took what she needed and handed Mickey an éclair wrapped in wax paper. Slowly he pulled it apart: the pastry was thick, not too soft, and the inside was a smooth, cold, creamy yellow, a color painful to the teeth. Mickey’s heart sank. This was an éclair. Too often the shells of Lerner éclairs would harden, and the custard inside would lie shyly in the hollow, a dried, quivering curd, instead of melding with the dough, stretching gooily with the pull of it. Words failed him: his tongue was stunned, just as his ears had been stunned so many years ago, when he first heard the sound of Emi’s violin.

  Other customers arrived, and Mickey stood back and observed the commerce. There was no friendly conversation flying across the counter; just an exchange of greetings and the transaction itself. Food was serious business, Mickey saw. It was respected. People waited in line. The woman behind the counter was crucial to the way of life here, and with her polite efficiency—the weighing, the wrapping, the making of change—she seemed to control the tempo of the entire city.

  Mickey wondered if he ought to approach her and introduce himself as a colleague. Though wouldn’t that be disingenuous somehow? For he couldn’t deny it: he’d never felt any real passion for his bakery; and as a baker he’d never had any sense of his place in the world. And now that he saw that there might be something more to what he had been doing all along, that he may have figured in a spiritual way in the life of his community, somewhat as Emi had in hers, he found that it was too late: the past refused to light up and become something different than it was. There was no reviving it.

  The woman behind the counter, by contrast, appeared to be animated by an unwavering knowledge of her purpose. Mickey yearned for that understanding. For Emi, there had never been any question. Her purpose was clear. Mickey knew it was too late for him to become something else. He had to make sense of what he already was. But he felt ashamed in the face of the woman; he felt small, even fraudulent. Sure, he did a decent business. Sure, the bakery had been recognized, cited. But what about him? What was he?

  He walked out of the place, chewing sorrowfully on the last bite of éclair. Everywhere, now, he saw boulangeries, all of them open for business. They were not set at the back of a parking lot, like his own; they were an aggressive presence on the street, an essential part of things.

  He walked faster, impatient for the start of Shaw’s concert. Maybe the music would calm him, ease his troubled mind. He had to go back to his boxing days, to those workouts at Glazer’s Gym, to recall a time when he’d been able to create his own peace.

  15

  David Shaw’s fingers pressed into the lungs of the piano as though reviving it from a drowning, and the cathedral flooded with the sound of Schumann. Mickey stared up at the stained glass and frescoes and ghastly iconography. He was seated at the back, having arrived a few minutes late, but he supposed he would have chosen a seat at the back anyway. Far from calming him, the music and the awesome architecture of the cathedral made him feel even smaller. He turned his gaze to the massive crucifix that dominated the backdrop for Shaw’s piano: a slumped, bloodied Christ. Emi herself had performed in many cathedrals. Mickey had attended a recital of hers at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York some years ago—his first time in a church—and had found that the acoustics and imagery had given rise, within the music, to voices.

  And it was the New York concerts he remembered best. Most poignantly he remembered a concert she had played a few years back at Avery Fisher Hall as part of the fall concert series, and how he had driven up on a last-minute whim (she had no idea he’d be there) and been lucky enough to find a man in the lobby who was selling a single ticket to a concert that had, to Mickey’s mild surprise, been sold out well in advance. Even more lucky, he’d brought his opera glasses (a birthday gift from Emi some years before), which, because Emi had always arranged for him a seat close up, he’d never used, but which now came in handy, as he’d ended up sitting in the very back row of the highest balcony.

  Through the glasses, he was able to experience his wife in a new and unusual way. It seemed he had captured her, isolated her in this secret circle, in this tunnel of perverse and artificial nearness at the end of which she became a documented subject, a target. There was something inescapably exciting and predatory about seeing it: he felt he was seeing her for the first time, a woman with whom one becomes instantly obsessed. There she was, coming onto the stage amid applause like spilled diamonds, clad in a long black gown, hair braided at the sides and pulled back and tied invisibly together behind her, lips uncharacteristically painted and surrendering a small smile as she acknowledged the nods of the principals and the first violinist and shook hands with the conductor. It was a viol
in concerto—Beethoven, if Mickey remembered correctly. Emi had the full power of an orchestra behind her, but the world for Mickey had been reduced to a single face—a face that was innocent of his presence, but which had made itself beautiful nonetheless: it was the face he never saw while she was gone, the face of other cities, other rooms. In observing her in this detached yet intimate way, he imagined that afterwards he, a stranger, would pursue her past the fountain outside, call her name, and that she would turn, and that in the instant before recognition, when either of them could be anyone, he would discover in her eyes some essential, elusive quality, the individual herself, unguarded, stunned for a flicker of a moment into her youth, into the girl she once was, before she knew him, before she was known, some aspect of her that he feared was gone from his sight forever.

  And now here he was, in Paris, attending a concert in which she was supposed to perform, but which now (as he read in the program notes, which were written in French and English) had been altered drastically. Today’s recital is lovingly dedicated to the memory of Emilie Lutter. Mickey wanted to be moved by the gesture, but the reduction of Emi’s memory to a line of small print on a cheap piece of paper depressed him. And yet wasn’t it a damn sight more than he himself had managed to offer?

  Watching Shaw, Mickey recalled the memory lapses that Emi had spoken about that day in the garden. What if Shaw were to suddenly black out? Mickey looked around. All these unsuspecting people! He felt in possession of an explosive secret, like knowing about the presence of a bomb. Shaw’s hands: how much longer could they go on? Mickey felt the mounting of an unbearable tension, and just when he thought he might have to get up and run breathless from the cathedral, the music stopped, and applause rained down.