The Baker

by Paul Hond

  But whatever reason he had for throwing himself so feverishly into his work, be it to please his father or forget his mother, or both, the fact remained that the work was his, and when he left the house and strode proudly back to the bakery in his shirt and tie, he felt as grown up as he’d ever felt in his life, a young man of responsibility and accomplishment and vision, showing just the right trace of concern at the corners of his mouth to suggest a weighty matter of business lying unresolved on his office desk.

  The store was empty save for Morris, who looked unusually small and frail behind the counter. Ben shuddered at the thought of having left him there alone.

  “Everything okay?” said Ben, as the door closed behind him. “Go ahead and take a break.”

  “Benjie,” Morris said. “Looks like we got a small problem.”

  Ben froze. “What is it?”

  “Jay Rattner called.”

  Ben touched his tie.

  Morris took off his glasses. “He said that Nelson was late with his delivery, and when he said something to Nelson about it, Nelson used abusive language.” He put his glasses back on. “Jay said he’s going to take his business elsewhere if the situation doesn’t improve.”

  “What does he mean, improve?”

  “He doesn’t want Nelson coming into his place anymore,” said Morris.

  “Shit,” Ben muttered. He looked at his great-uncle. “So what are we supposed to do?”

  Morris took his glasses off again, rubbed the lenses with a paper napkin, and, in a voice whose grave matter-of-factness was tied in with the wisdom of his years, said, “It’ll be your decision, Benjie, your father left you in charge—but all things considered, I think you ought to let him go.”

  The words were barely out of Morris’s mouth when Ben spotted the van entering the lot.

  Ben cursed, but he knew Morris was right. Nelson was a goddamned time bomb.

  Morris faded toward the far end of the counter as Nelson entered the bakery carrying a stack of empty boxes.

  Ben’s throat went dry. To think that all the work he’d done had come down to this, that all the good things had mixed and stewed and somehow spawned this one horrible event. And for what? It wasn’t his bakery—not really. Why should he be put in this position? It would be easy—even satisfying, in a way—to let Nelson ride roughshod over clients and customers while Mickey frolicked in Europe; easy to blame Mickey for everything. But there was too much at stake: if the bakery suffered, it would impact on everyone. He thought of the bakers, and the old customers whose habits had hardened; where would they go, without Lerner’s? And then there was his own reputation to consider. He’d won a lot of praise lately, and had taken all the credit. What would people think if he were to screw it all up? His leadership had never really been tested until now, and he remembered something his father had once said—how he never considered the bakery his own until the fire, until he’d had to save its life.

  Nelson dropped the boxes on the floor and rubbed his hands together, the clipboard clamped under his arms. He acted as he always did, as though nothing unusual had happened during his route, and this darkened with possibility all the other times he’d behaved so nonchalantly.

  “Hey, Nelson,” Ben said. “I’ll take the clipboard. And the keys.” Nelson handed them over without a word—this was routine. He was still wearing his conscientious blue jacket and pressed oxford shirt. It would be harder to fire him in those clothes, Ben thought.

  Morris took up a broom.

  “Nelson?” Ben said. “I’d like to have a chat with you in my office.” The uttering of this phrase to a rogue employee had been foremost in his administrative fantasies, right up there with thwarting an armed-robbery attempt. Funny how little he relished it now. “Just for a minute,” he said, and ran his eyes quickly over Nelson’s person, checking for any bulges. There were none.

  Nelson glanced at Morris, who was sweeping the floor with inordinate gusto.

  Ben was aware of risks in performing the deed in a small, enclosed, out-of-view office, but he felt strongly that this was the only way to conduct affairs: man-to-man, in private.

  Nelson followed him through the office door. Ben decided not to close it.

  “Please, have a seat,” Ben said. He sat behind his desk and gripped the armrests of the chair. For some reason he thought he should offer something—a drink, a cigarette—but all he had at his disposal was a bag of chocolate candies in the shape of coins, wrapped in gold foil. A holiday gift from Shirley Finkle. He opened the desk drawer, where he had stashed the candy, and was startled by the sight of the gun. He grabbed the mesh bag and closed the drawer.

  “Chocolates?” he said, holding up the bag. To his surprise, Nelson reached out and took it.

  “Thanks,” Nelson mumbled, staring at the gold as though it might be real loot. Ben felt that his game had been thrown off; Nelson was supposed to refuse politely, an indication that he knew what was coming and was prepared. Ben now realized that Nelson was expecting not his walking papers, but an apology for the way he’d been treated lately—or worse, a bonus, or even a raise. It was, after all, the week before Christmas; everywhere in the business world employees were being invited behind closed doors to receive white envelopes. Ben watched with dread as Nelson unwrapped a chocolate.

  An idea then came to him. He saw a way out.

  “You know, I’ve been thinking,” he said. “All this stuff about putting you back on deliveries. You already know deliveries. And you know the counter. That’s half the business. What I was thinking was, why not learn the other half?”

  Nelson looked up with interest.

  Ben smiled and motioned with his eyes at the glass window, behind which the oven and mixers and tables were framed in a way that suggested exciting opportunities. “Right over there,” he said, and pointed toward the kitchen as though it were the Promised Land.

  Nelson looked there too.

  “You learn that end of things,” Ben said, “and you’ll be the one person here who knows the whole works. The one person who could start up his own business someday.”

  Nelson turned to him. “How much money would I get?”

  “Well, I’d assume you’d make what the other bakers make.”

  “How much is that?”

  Ben laughed automatically. “Money can be discussed,” he said.

  “I’m here.”

  Ben scratched his head. “I’m not really prepared to talk money at this exact moment,” he said. He could smell his own sour armpits. “I mean, I’ll have to think about it. But what I’m saying is, I think maybe we can come up with something fair.”

  Nelson bit into his chocolate coin and chewed with infinite patience, now a man of closed-door negotiations, of proffered candies and bargaining tables, of agreements hammered out. He said, “I don’t know about them nighttime hours.”

  Ben sighed; obviously Nelson wasn’t getting the picture. Time to be more direct.

  “Look,” he said, rubbing his temple to suggest hard battles fought on Nelson’s behalf. “I’m trying to do you a favor.”

  Nelson stopped chewing. He sensed a change.

  Out with it, Ben thought. Just pretend you’re in his corner and you’ll be okay. “What I mean is, I got a couple of phone calls.” He looked at Nelson to see if his meaning registered, but the face was a blank. “From Jay Rattner,” he said.

  Nelson glanced upward.

  “You want to tell me what happened?” said Ben.

  Nelson shrugged. “I don’t know what you talkin’ about.” His voice was higher than normal. He smacked an invisible insect on his head and looked angrily at his hand.

  “I’ll tell you then,” said Ben. “I got a message saying that you were maybe a little rude to him when you made your delivery today.”

  Nelson’s jaw dropped. “He called you up and said that? Accused me?” His face twisted into a scowl of righteous indignation. “Said I was rude? And you gonna believe him? Take his word over mine?”

/>   Ben sighed: the force of Nelson’s argument was too much for him. He knew that Nelson must have said something to Rattner, and in a way he couldn’t blame him. Ben had dealt with Rattner firsthand; he’d seen him in his tie and white shirt, pacing the slick floor, berating the cooks and dishwashers, his nerves pressed to the surface of his skin by all the complaints he received from the members. He’d even seen Rattner scold Chef Willie in front of Willie’s sweaty, grease-splattered men, their paper hats all slightly askew on their flashing heads. Rattner was a son of a bitch.

  Ben said, “Okay. Just tell me what happened.”

  “What?”

  “Just tell me what happened. What was said.”

  Nelson’s mouth gained that sly smile, and when he shook his head it was almost like pity. “Don’t matter what I say, ‘cause I know whose side you on.”

  “I’m on your side,” Ben said, and some real passion came out in his voice, causing Nelson to squirm. “I want to keep you here, but I’ve got to do business at the same time. Don’t you see the position this puts me in?” It was the worst thing he could have done—appeal to Nelson for sympathy. Had he been firm and forthright, he’d at least have gained some respect. Nelson was now looking at him with sheer contempt. “Can’t you see?” Ben said. He was pleading now, he couldn’t help it. “I’ve got people threatening to stop doing business with me. I’ve got people talking about the Health Department, and who the hell knows what else. What am I supposed to do?”

  Nelson said nothing.

  Ben’s undershirt was soaked. He struggled to keep his voice even. “Will you accept the position I’ve offered you?”

  Nelson said nothing.

  Ben tried again. “Will you?”

  Nelson sniffed. “S’pose I say no?” he said. “Then what?”

  “Then,” Ben said, and he felt the words rise in his throat like a meal he could no longer keep down, “I think …” His throat seemed to close up. “I think I’ll have to”—he pulled words from the air—“make a decision.” Fearing the sound of that, he added, “But this is stupid. I told you, I want to keep you. It’s just that—” He felt all his resolve drain out of him, felt the almost pleasurable gush of failure. “Look,” he said. “How about we forget this whole conversation. I’ll talk to Rattner. Maybe the three of us can sit down and talk it over.”

  “Keep me?” Nelson muttered. He was looking at his hands. “What you mean, keep me.”

  Ben had a flash vision of Mickey relaxing in a hotel room. Strolling a park.

  His hands turned to fists under the desk. “Then it’s your choice,” he said.

  Nelson laughed, shook his head.

  Ben’s neck felt hot, tight. He thought he might choke.

  Nelson dropped the laugh. “I want to talk with your father,” he said. He nodded at the phone. “That’s what I want.”

  It would have been easy, at that moment, to lay all of it at Mickey’s feet, but Nelson’s appeal struck a nerve. “My father has nothing to do with this,” Ben said, and some of Nelson’s righteousness found its way into his own voice. “Okay? I’m in charge here. This is my business.” No, he couldn’t call Mickey: something larger was at stake. “I’m running things here,” he said. He felt as though he had just committed Mickey to an overseas death. “This is my show. Understand? Mine. So if you want to stick around, you’ll do things my way. I don’t give a shit about what’s fair. Nothing’s fair. You can do what you want.” He was shaking. “Do we understand each other?”

  Incredibly, Nelson seemed unnerved by Ben’s passion. In a voice laden with defeat he said, “So you tellin’ me I’m fired.”

  The word was too harsh, too charged with consequences: Ben refused to recognize it. “You bake, you stay,” he said, determined to leave it in Nelson’s hands. “You don’t, you walk.” He shrugged to express the absurd but undeniable fact of his own power.

  “So,” Nelson said. “You givin’ me the option to quit.”

  “Or to stay. However you want.”

  “Why don’t you just say it?”

  “I’ve said what I had to say.”

  “Go ahead, Crumb.”

  Ben hooked a finger around the handle of the desk drawer. He said, “Do you stay or not?”

  As Nelson raised his hands, Ben’s finger tightened on the handle. Nelson appeared as he had on that night of the eggs, hands above his head as he stepped out of the van: hands renouncing everything, hands clean of sin. “You the boss,” he said.

  Ben ground his teeth, and in a sudden burst of anger in which he saw his parents’ faces rise up from the depths and distances in which they’d placed themselves, he blurted it out: “You’re fired. Okay? You’re goddamned fired!”

  There was a silence. Ben’s finger was white and bloodless on the drawer handle.

  Nelson grinned, shook his head. “Breadcrumb.” He tossed the bag of chocolates onto the desk and stood up.

  Ben couldn’t speak.

  Nelson went to the door, and as he placed his hand on the knob he turned. “Watch your back, Little Man,” he said, and then he was gone.

  Ben was numb. What had happened? What had he done?

  Hands fumbling, he opened the bottom drawer and retrieved the strongbox, which held over three hundred dollars in cash. He took all of it and went to the front, where, through the window, he could see Nelson walking across the lot in a slow, proud, wounded way, almost limping.

  “What happened?” said Morris. He was at the far end of the counter, gripping the broom handle as though it were the one sturdy thing in the world.

  Ben ignored him. He stood there and pictured himself running after Nelson and handing him the money, insisting he take it. But somehow he knew, standing there, watching Nelson, that maybe it wasn’t the best idea.

  19

  The chill passed with the recollection of how he had gotten there (had it really been three weeks?), and Mickey, his eyes burning from the brightness of the fire, grabbed the long wooden peel, shoveled in another naked ball of dough and closed the chamber door. Three weeks, he knew, because he’d been paid three times, despite his insistence that he didn’t need the money (“Merci,” he’d said, “but really, it isn’t necessary”), which Dulac seemed to take as the patronizing refusal of a wealthy industrialist who was slumming it in an “authentic” bakery, insisting for his own part that it was a point of honor to pay a man a wage for services rendered. So Mickey took the money—it was so extravagantly useless in his hands, this silken stuff, the bills like the leaves of some mighty fallen argument for living—and kept it under his mattress. If nothing else, it was a way to keep track of the days, which ought by now to be lurching toward Christmas, though Mickey could not say for sure how many, no more than he could recall the sights and sounds out in the streets, whose shop windows must now be decked with garlands, pinecones, red and gold tinsel, the occasional string of lights. It was a dark, solitary existence indeed, a daily communion with fire and water, with grain, a life of monastic ritual whose laws of repetition had given him a strange unthinking contentedness. All thoughts, all passion, had been forwarded to his hands, so that, watching them work, he felt relieved of emotion, the hands now the carriers of his burden, the twin writhing animals of his soul. In the pure act of doing, of making, he had entered a state from which he had no desire to emerge.

  Only once did he break the spell, having gone out to buy some food—apples, olives, dates, a big bag of nuts—that he kept in his sparsely furnished room (“The room is good?” Dulac had said, turning on the light, and yes, it was good), though mostly he subsisted on bread and water. After marketing, he stopped in a tobacco shop and purchased a phone card, then went to a phone booth and called the answering machine at the bakery, on which he left Ben a number where he could be reached (in his room the telephone tended to explode at ungodly hours, Dulac bright and alert on the other line, making sure Mickey was up and ready to work), adding that international calls were expensive and not to call him there unless it was a ge
nuine emergency. In making contact, he had put at stake his very solitude, the splendid anonymity for which he’d traded his life. To be without name or country, to exist solely through his work; this was a fragile mode, one that, now threatened by a call from home, seemed even more precious, and that he sought to further imperil (it seemed necessary, somehow, to hold a knife to the throat of that which he valued most—a way of earning it, he felt); and so he searched his wallet for Detective Flemke’s number and called him, too, leaving a message similar to the one he’d left Ben, telling Flemke to contact him only in the event of an extraordinary development.

  So far, though, he had not heard from either party; the threat to his seclusion seemed to have passed.

  He scooped out another blob of dough from the mixer and slapped it on the table. In the silence he could hear the faint snap of the fire.

  Outside, the night sky was beginning to change. Mickey thought of it as a kind of reverse ripening, the dark fading to light; or better, a heavenly fermentation, a rising of the celestial batter. Whenever he saw the first hint of light at the bottom of the stone stairs—it was like a human presence—he stopped what he was doing and rushed up them so that he could watch this hopeful sight from the bakery window: the arrival of another day, the gradual emergence of color, the soft conversion of things that made him feel, if but for a moment, the imperceptible rotation of the planet. Often he studied his reflection in the window: his bare chest and belly dusted with flour and spores of yeast and rivuleted with sweat, forming vertical stripes that reminded him of a prisoner’s linen.

  He would skip today’s sunrise, however; there was too much work to be done. He wiped the sweat off his chin and looked at the tall pyramid—taller than himself—of cloth-lined wicker baskets by the wall farthest from the oven, where the air was a few critical degrees cooler, allowing the dough inside the baskets to ferment more slowly. Still, the room was hot as blazes, and Mickey, as he often did, stripped down to his boxers and sprinkled himself with water.