The Baker

by Paul Hond

  Shaw exhaled slowly. “I think you ought to know,” he said, “if you don’t already.” He paused, as if to decide the best way to tell it, and then, abruptly, said, “Cancer,” then exhaled and tapped his cigarette insistently until a finger of ash dropped off into his open palm. “Breast cancer,” he said, now pulling on the cigarette as though it contained his next words. The bald bronze head smoked, it seemed, from everywhere, even the eyes. “She was very sick. Very sick.” He nodded, his eyes fixed on the ashtray. “She wasn’t going to live.” He paused again, then brought the cigarette to his lips and inhaled slowly.

  Mickey felt his voice gurgle and die in his chest. There was no possible response to this. If he had questions, they were buried under the weight of his disbelief. Follow Shaw, he thought; keep your eye on him. Shaw looked up, and so did Mickey: the waiter had arrived with the tea. Steam rolled dizzily from the glasses, which were set down before them. Shaw stirred his tea with a spoon.

  “I take it,” Shaw said carefully, “that you didn’t know.” He glanced at Mickey.

  “Keep talking,” Mickey said.

  “Yes. I know this must come as a tremendous shock.” Shaw sipped his tea, the cigarette unraveling wildly between his fingers. “But please, let me explain. She confided in me. It’s been a terrible weight on my conscience, but I can now see that there was nothing to be done.”

  Mickey’s mind raced. Was Shaw telling him that Emi would have died anyway, that the shooting had simply hastened the inevitable, had in fact saved her from a slow and painful end? Or did he simply want to rid himself of an awful secret, pawn it off on its rightful owner, so that he, Shaw, could be free?

  “I urged her to tell you,” said Shaw. “ ‘Tell your family,’ I said. But you know how stubborn she can be.”

  “Yes,” said Mickey. Shaw’s nervousness brought out in him an eerie sobriety. “Now tell me what happened.”

  Shaw closed his eyes for a moment, opened them. He was verging on tears—he blinked rapidly, went for his cigarette—but Mickey felt no pity, only a detached fascination with the man’s humanity, which had always been kept from him, hidden behind the reputation, the loftiness of the name.

  “She found a lump in each breast,” Shaw said softly. “We were in Chicago. This was in May. She saw a doctor there. He did a biopsy.”

  “Cancer,” said Mickey. He could not get past the word: cancer. His own zodiac sign. He thought of a crab, a scavenging creature skittering sidewise through her blood. From there, he had to move backwards, from the texture of the word to the lumps themselves (a lump: why hadn’t he noticed?), two masses floating in those small round globes, tethered by sprouting capillaries, nourished by blood.

  “It was cancer,” said Shaw. “In both breasts.”

  Mickey shook his head. Some things made sense now, and yet he understood nothing. Why hadn’t she told him? He felt himself sinking into new depths of despair; he might crumble like ashes and blow away.

  “I don’t believe it,” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” said Shaw.

  Mickey’s hands turned to fists on the tabletop.

  “You can hate me,” said Shaw. “But don’t blame Emi. Or yourself.”

  “Hate you?” said Mickey. He stared at Shaw, whose face seemed darker than before, as though ripening with a full knowledge of the word. “Why would I hate you?”

  “For not telling you,” said Shaw. “But you must understand—there was nothing you could have done.”

  Mickey felt a chill. Had he missed something? What was that look in Shaw’s eyes?

  “What do you mean?” said Mickey.

  Shaw drew a long breath. “She was determined,” he said, “to beat the disease. But she did have one important option.” He fingered the cigarette, as if debating whether or not to pick it up. “At least, I saw it as an option.” He ground the burning tip into the eye of the ashtray. He said: “A double mastectomy.”

  There was a silence in which Mickey mumbled the horrible words. If he understood correctly, Emi was faced with the sort of radical surgery—and Mickey knew of a few of his customers who’d been through it—that would strip the muscle from her chest and shoulders (“It could take quite a while,” the doctor would tell her, “before you’ll regain your strength, and even then you may never have quite the endurance you had before”) and render her unable, for a time at least, to play the violin. Mickey could see it: Emi running to a dozen quacks and crackpots and acupuncturists in her will to avoid the knife.

  Damn her! How could she be so reckless? So stupid? How?

  “But of course,” said Shaw, “to her mind, surgery was out of the question—it would damage her career.”

  Mickey’s fists shook under the table. It was suicide!

  “She had a lumpectomy in Chicago, then immediately sought alternative treatments. The doctor warned her that it was likely they hadn’t gotten it all, that it could spread, that they needed to remove the breasts, get it all before it was too late. But she wouldn’t hear of it. She took vitamins, shark cartilage, herbs, tonics. She meditated.”

  “Suicide.”

  “That’s why she wouldn’t tell you,” said Shaw. “She knew you would have that reaction—she knew you would do everything to see to it that she underwent surgery.”

  “That’s bullshit,” said Mickey. “I should have known. I should have known!”

  “She didn’t want to fight you—”

  “She was my wife!”

  “I—”

  “I should have noticed something, should have picked up on the signs—and there were signs, plenty of signs. I had to be blind!”

  “No,” said Shaw. “Don’t blame yourself. I should have told you, I should have said something!”

  “I didn’t read the signs, I didn’t even save her that night on the street. I failed her twice. How? How could it happen?” Mickey saw nothing, he was sailing headlong through a fog. “And to think”—he let out a mad, miserable laugh—“to think that I thought she was avoiding me because she was in love with someone else!” He struck himself in the head with the heels of his palms and fell away from the table and to his feet.

  “Please don’t go,” said Shaw. “There was no one else—she had what she needed!”

  Oh, but if only there had been someone, Mickey thought—if only there had been someone to save her! “I failed her!” Mickey said. He turned, staggered, groped for the door, the red room spinning, Shaw’s voice fading, and was smacked by the cold of the afternoon, the dull white light. He saw a wide, empty path of sidewalk and chased it.

  The storefronts blew past him like a train: windows: whole birds draped on ice, wings and eyes still wild with flight: pigs rotating slowly over fire: pink pianos of meat hanging heavy from hooks. Every human face seemed infinitely strange, every glance an attempt on his life. He was nothing, he was nowhere. People held baguettes on their shoulders like rifles and seemed to be marching. Mickey flung himself against them: they parted for him, they barely knew he existed. Where is she, he cried to himself; where is she? He came to a corner, turned blindly into another street. Cars sped past, blurs of color. The city was unforgiving in its design, streets radiating in all directions from whirling circles of traffic into which he saw himself charging and being swept under, rolled lifeless into the gutter. Bear with me, she had pleaded. How she had tried to make him understand! And God, how she’d taken his arm on that walk from Shaw’s—and how he’d felt her behind him when she was ordered out of the car, not seen her but felt her, the last he knew of her in this life, a heat behind him, the brush perhaps of her hand on his back.

  He was ready; he could do it. He was at the very edge of his life, a life that, aware it was threatened, surged forth: his entire body seemed to rise. His senses were heightened to a painful degree; he heard every footfall, the grind of every car, saw every red petal of the potted flowers on windowsills and latticed iron balconies. It was too much, too much! He must act: then it would be over, the universe in some minuscu
le way would be corrected, restored to a certain balance. He looked around. A bus was coming: Mickey stepped off the curb, poised himself for a sudden bolt into its path. The bus came nearer, nearer. Mickey took a breath—it was upon him, one more second, go!—and then a wind knocked him back. His fear thrilled him—he’d come that close! He felt as he had that day at the ocean, daring the crashing waves, raging at them, wanting them.

  He walked on, his terror deepening his resolve. He could go down into the metro, leap onto the tracks. It was strange: the impulse was within him now, he couldn’t shake it. He was like the nonbeliever who arrives at God through the mere repetition of a prayer. He’d flirted with it, and now it was real.

  But what awaited him? If there was some sort of hereafter, how would he be received? Would Emi be there? Would she forgive him?

  He found himself on a familiar street; he’d come this way with Shaw. Dulac’s bakery should be just down the road—and yes, there it was. It was hard to believe that only an hour before he was inside that moth-eaten old shop, lecturing on his business with such confidence, such desire to grind Dulac, with his sad stone bowl and odes to round peasant loaves, into dust. Poor Dulac, he thought, alone in his humble little bakery, crushed by the foreigner. Mickey’s heart went out to him.

  I must apologize to the man, Mickey felt; make that one last gesture. If I could undo one bad thing, he thought, if I could set one thing right.

  He opened the door of the bakery. Again, there was no one there. Mickey looked at the round breads, the faces of which seemed to be watching him.

  “Dulac?” Mickey called. There was no answer.

  Mickey ducked under the counter. There were no more barriers in this world, he was beyond them now. He went through a doorway into a dark corridor, off of which he discovered an ancient stone staircase.

  “Hello?”

  Again there was no response.

  The steps wound down into blackness. Might Dulac be down there? Mickey perceived that warmth again, as of fire; and as he descended, round and round, the heat grew, and he could smell burning wood and the earthy savor of yeast and grain. He touched the massive stones of the walls. They were cool despite the heat. Mickey reached the bottom—it was still too dark to make anything out—and turned a corner to find what seemed to him the source, somehow, of all awful things: a large brick oven that seemed to be built into the stone wall, a roiling furnace around the edges of whose closed door burned a steady orange glow.

  “Hello?” he called again, though it was clear there was no one around. “Monsieur Dulac?”

  The room, he now noticed, was very hot. There was a single worktable covered in flour; it held a half-filled glass of water and the old stone bowl and had a look of grave permanence, as of the workstation of some solitary prisoner. Cloth-lined wicker baskets were stacked here and there on the dusty stone floor; dozens of jugs of water lined two walls. A lightbulb directly overhead, from which a long string hung motionless in the heat, marked, along with the large mixer, the only nod to modernity: its meager light dropped Mickey’s shadow like a ball before his feet. There were no windows, no sense of the world above.

  “Yes?” came a voice.

  Mickey looked up: there, standing near the bottom of the stairs, half in shadow, was Dulac.

  “You have come to speak with me?” said Dulac. “To continue our talk?”

  Mickey wasn’t sure if it was an invitation. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re probably busy.”

  “Ah yes, busy, busy.” Dulac walked around to the oven. “So you have seen my—how do you say it?—my pride and joy. Yes?” He opened the chamber door: Mickey’s eyes widened at the sight of fire and bricks. He could smell the fire, could hear its gallop. Dulac shut the door.

  Mickey felt the sweat break out over his skin; and as Dulac held forth on the benefits of fire (the heat did not seem to affect him), Mickey removed his coat and slung it over his shoulder, his mind reaching toward a vision fed not only by the flames of the oven and the passion of Dulac’s homily (“All of life springs from fire: we are but the dust of exploded stars: only where there is heat can there be life”), but the force of his desire to mortify himself to the core of his being, that he might finally be good enough for death. Yes: a sentence of fire and darkness and isolation, of hard labor as an inmate right here in Dulac’s cellar. He wanted to sweat, to suffer, to deny himself all pleasure until the pain was so great that even a death by burning would seem a godsend. This was what he deserved.

  When Dulac paused for a breath, Mickey came out with it. “If you need a baker,” he said, “I think I can help you.”

  “Help me?” said Dulac.

  “Help you bake.”

  “Ah, but we have had this discussion. You are not a baker.”

  Mickey understood the game: Dulac required total submission. Mickey saw it as part of his own martyrdom. “Yes,” he said, “but I’m willing to train.” He thought of Glazer in his white smock, wearing him down with orders, working him to the point of exhaustion. He’d been at Glazer’s mercy. Why not Dulac’s?

  “So,” said Dulac, still guarded. “My words today convinced you?”

  “Yes,” said Mickey. He felt the lie pass into Dulac’s belly.

  Dulac, lips puckered, looked Mickey over as he might a piece of machinery, nodding as if to the whispered judgments of bakers past. “I suppose,” he said, “that we can make a try.”

  Mickey wanted to laugh—as if Dulac were doing him the favor! “Thank you,” he said, wincing inwardly. Already he could taste the further humiliations in store for him: the fanatical Dulac harrassing him, intruding on his solitude, peering over his shoulder, testing water temperatures, poking at the dough, becoming angry when something wasn’t perfect.

  “Bon,” said Dulac. “How much time will you have?”

  “I don’t know,” said Mickey. “I’ll have to see—”

  “Do you have a place to stay?”

  “I—”

  “You can stay here,” said Dulac. “In the back.” He pointed to a passageway opposite the staircase. “I have a room there, it is empty now. It is small, but it contains everything you will need. A bed, a bath. Even a telephone.”

  Mickey shuddered at Dulac’s efficiency, his resolve; he was like a little scheming demon, a fisher of bad men. He had it all worked out so prettily: it was as if he’d planned for Mickey’s arrival years ago and had been waiting in the dark ever since.

  “It’s good?” said Dulac.

  “Yes,” said Mickey. “It’s good.” This was it, he thought, the final act. He would give himself to Dulac, would surrender the small remainder of his life to this infernal place.

  Already he looked forward to the end.

  18

  Ben stood behind the counter next to Morris. He’d barely slept the night before, worrying about his decision to hand Nelson the keys to the van, but now he could breathe a little: it was three in the afternoon, and the phone had yet to ring. Ben had instructed his contacts to call him if there were any problems with deliveries, any problems at all, wanting to send a message to everyone that here was a hands-on manager who was on top of things, doing his job.

  Customers came and went; there was little pizzazz or excitement to things, and Ben gained a new appreciation for the work that Nelson had done. He could see how sales might slip, but on the other hand, the atmosphere was much more relaxed; without Nelson behind the counter, customers were able to assert their old, fussy, demanding selves, were more likely to confuse themselves into purchasing more than they intended. Six of one, a half dozen of the other, Ben thought.

  When things slowed down around lunchtime, Ben told Morris he was going out for an hour or so. It was a mild, sunny day; a caravan of white clouds was stalled in a blue sky. Ben walked home coatless through the broad alleys, which seemed dirtier than he remembered. Neighbors of different colors, some of whom he’d never seen before, reached up to the long banners of drying laundry that divided their yards in two. Aside fr
om the usual Orthodox, there were now Indians, blacks, Mexicans. FOR SALE signs had been popping up like dandelions. People were dying, moving away, even the Finkles next door were talking about going to Florida. Ben wondered if Mickey would want to move some day.

  He opened the gate and entered the backyard, indulging a small fantasy of ownership. He stepped onto the yellowish lawn, paced it slowly, enjoying the feel of property beneath his feet. The bird feeders were empty—Ben made a mental note to fill them later with some old bread. And the garden—maybe he ought to do a little digging on Saturday, turn the soil over.

  He went inside and fixed himself a tuna sandwich from one of the cans that Mickey had left for him. Then he went upstairs and jerked himself off into a wad of toilet paper, doing it fast and without fantasizing, as though it were any other hurried bathroom act. Who had time to make a big production out of it? He had a business to run.

  Girls would come in time, he told himself. He looked forward to the day when all the college grads would come home to find the Lerner Bakery expanded into the biggest bread manufacturer in the state. Let them have their business schools, Ben thought, let them have their ivory towers; he lived and worked in the real world. The bakery was his university. When those kids came home with their useless degrees, they’d be coming to him for a job.

  He washed his hands and paused in front of the door to his parents’ room, which he’d kept shut since Mickey’s departure. At first he’d shut it because he didn’t want to be reminded of his mother—it was bad enough having to go through her studio to get to the laundry room—but now, with Mickey gone for nearly a month, it was fun (well, maybe not fun, exactly, but interesting, amusing) to pretend that they were both dead, pretend that everything—the house, the bakery—was now his and his alone. Keeping the door closed facilitated the illusion, which was not to say that he couldn’t open it if he wanted, since he was pretty much over Emi’s death, though it was also true—no sense denying it—that he’d been too busy with the bakery to give her much thought, which after all was maybe the whole idea to begin with.