Home from the Vinyl Cafe

by Stuart McLean

  Emil looked up at her, and for an instant he was clear and she could see him—the real person.

  “Yes,” he said softly.

  “I want to see your garden,” she said. “Will you show me your garden tomorrow?”

  Emil blinked and said, “Oh.” Then he hung his head and said, “Yes.”

  Morley drew her robe tighter around her and said, “Good night,” and turned to walk across the street, noticing for the first time that she wasn’t wearing shoes.

  The next day at lunch, Morley went to the stairwell beside the Heart of Christ Religious Supplies and Fax Services.

  “I have come to see your garden, Emil,” she said.

  “There,” Emil replied.

  He was pointing at one of the large concrete boxes lining the street. Sure enough, nestled around the trunk of the stunted ginkgo tree that the city planted, and occasionally watered, were Morley’s hens-and-chickens.

  “I have another box,” said Emil.

  “Near the TV store,” said Morley.

  “At night I take the plants with me,” said Emil.

  “You can keep your eye on them that way,” said Morley.

  “So no one can touch them,” said Emil.

  At supper that night, Morley told everyone what had happened to her plants.

  “What would you do about that?” she asked.

  Sam said, “Call the police. Call the police and send him to jail. He stole.”

  Stephanie said, “He’s retarded—just take the plants back.”

  Dave said, “What did you do?”

  Morley said, “The ornamental cabbages have aphids. I took him stuff for the aphids.”

  All June, Emil kept busy with his garden—moving his plants back and forth among various concrete boxes around the city. He moved the smoke bush twelve times. He carefully noted each move in his book.

  The garden, however, was not the biggest thing that happened to Emil that spring. The biggest thing happened on the last Saturday of June, when Emil won the lottery, not the big prize, but big enough—ten thousand dollars.

  Emil went to the lottery offices on Monday morning with Peter from the Laundromat where he had bought his ticket. But they wouldn’t give him a check because he didn’t have two pieces of identification.

  “I don’t want a check,” said Emil. “I want the money.”

  It took several weeks for Emil to get a social security number. When he got it, he took it to the lottery office, and they gave him the check.

  When he took the check to the bank, the teller, Kathy, took him into the manager’s office and tried to talk him into opening an account. She said maybe it was not a wise decision to walk around with that much cash. “Why don’t you take forty dollars?” she said. “You could come here anytime you wanted and get more money.” All the time Emil was in the manager’s office, the assistant manager was watching warily from the door.

  It took Emil half an hour to convince them to give him his money—they said they were worried that people would take advantage of him. He said he knew what he was going to do. He left at noon with ten thousand dollars in twenty-dollar bills. They put it in a vinyl burgundy pouch.

  He took it to his spot in front of the Heart of Christ Religious Supplies and Fax Services, and he gave away seven thousand dollars—actually, he misplaced two thousand five hundred dollars, so he ended up giving away four thousand five hundred dollars. He had three thousand left at the end of the day.

  He didn’t hand the money to just anyone who walked by. He gave it to his regulars—people who gave him money. Or stopped to talk to him.

  They were awkward transactions. Emil tried to slip them the money surreptitiously, the way you might tip a headwaiter who had led you to a good table. Most people didn’t like being that close to Emil, and as he tried to give them the money, they would back away. When they realized what he was trying to do—he was trying to give them money!—every one of them tried to refuse it … backed away as if he were offering them a religious tract. But Emil was persistent.

  He gave Morley five hundred dollars.

  “It would have been patronizing not to take it,” she told Dave. “It would have been an insult.” They were across the street in the record store. “I had to take it. But I know what I’m going to do with it.”

  “What?” asked Dave.

  “I’m going to give it back to him,” said Morley, “bit by bit.”

  “It’ll just go back to the lottery,” said Dave.

  “Dust to dust,” said Morley. “It’s his money.”

  As soon as Morley left, Dave phoned Dorothy.

  “He gave me five hundred dollars,” said Dorothy. “Kenny Wong got seven hundred and fifty.”

  Dave hung up and headed across the street. He was sure Emil would offer him money, too. After all, he had known him as long as anyone else. By the time he was out the door, he knew what he was going to do with his share. You could still find things that paid eight percent. If everyone did that, Emil could have fifty or sixty dollars a month.

  Emil was standing in the middle of the sidewalk looking around as if he was supposed to meet someone; as if this person were late.

  “Congratulations, Emil,” said Dave. “I hear you’re a big winner. When do I get my share?”

  He meant it as a joke, but Emil took him seriously.

  “No share for you, Dave,” he said. “You still owe your library fine.”

  Dave and Morley aren’t sure what happened to the money Emil didn’t give away. They know he had a haircut and a shave. He looked great for a week. So good that Dave didn’t recognize him the first time he saw him. Emil bought himself a portable battery-powered television and a chair, and all July he sat on the chair in his stairwell and watched his TV. The chair was eventually stolen, and he lost the TV, or someone took it from him. Or maybe he gave it away.

  Emil wasn’t sure, when Morley asked him about it. “It’s okay,” he said. “The battery was going anyway, and it only got Canadian channels. You can’t get cable on those small sets.”

  It was all gone by the end of July. Well, not all gone. Because Morley still had four hundred and twenty-five dollars that belonged to him. She kept it in a glass in the kitchen, in the back of the cupboard behind the canned soups. She had already given him fifty dollars in cash. Spent twenty on sandwiches and coffee, which she left on the newspaper box on the corner. And she bought some feverfew and gave it to him to plant in his box. It’s an herb that looks like a daisy, and people say it can cure fevers—it’s a pretty plant, and the leaves smell good when you work around them, and best of all, it seeds itself, which means it will grow again next summer. It would need to be tough to live in a concrete box all winter—along with the Coke bottles and the straws—but the feverfew is a tough little thing and not without dignity.

  On the last weekend in September, Morley will spend another five dollars while she is grocery-shopping. She’ll buy a box of grape hyacinth bulbs, and she will plant them one night when Emil has left—thinking as she scrapes at the hard dirt in Emil’s box that they will sprout in the spring and surprise him.

  When she finishes, she will lift the watering can she has carried all the way from home and drain the last of it onto the dry soil. Then she will button her sweater and set off down the street, savoring the thin chill of the night air, the feel of earth on her fingers.

  The Birthday Party

  On Thursday morning, on his way to work, Dave passed Emil standing in the doorway of the Heart of Christ Religious Supplies and Fax Services. Emil was rocking back and forth with a vacant expression until Dave said, “Hello,” and Emil stopped rocking and cheerfully said, “Morning.” Dave was headed across the street to his store. He was halfway there when he remembered he was supposed to buy a bottle of wine. He frowned and slowed down as he tried to remember why—there was an occasion, but he couldn’t remember what it was. All he could remember was that he wanted to buy something special.

  This had been happening fre
quently to Dave. Often in the morning as he was about to leave for work. One moment he’d be standing by the front door; the next, galloping up the stairs on some vitally important mission, the purpose of which escaped him once he was standing in the bedroom. All he could do was stand by his bureau like one of those poor dumb moose who wander into subdivisions, moving his eyes woefully around the room, looking for a clue to the urge that had sent him there.

  The moose end up in the suburbs when a parasite moves into their brain. As far as Dave could figure, whatever had moved into his brain had been marching around with a clipboard and a ladder unscrewing lightbulbs. More than once, in the evenings, Dave had stood up abruptly—right in the middle of a television commercial—and walked into the den because … well, that was the problem. He couldn’t remember why he was in the den. The dog followed Dave around at night—in case it might be time for a walk—so the two of them would stand there, Dave and the dog, both of them staring at Dave’s desk with the same perplexed expression.

  It was five past ten when Dave saw Emil and remembered that he was supposed to buy the wine. He hesitated in front of his record store. He couldn’t remember what the wine was for, but maybe, he thought, he should go and buy it before he forgot altogether.

  It was a fifteen-minute walk to the wine store. It was a beautiful morning. The idea of staying outside pleased Dave. The walk would do him good.

  There were no other customers when he got there. Just three clerks leisurely restocking the shelves and chatting among themselves.

  Dave was feeling pretty leisurely himself as he wandered around the aisles. He still couldn’t remember why he wanted wine, so he read a lot of labels and, to be safe, chose four bottles—two white and two red. Two Canadian, a Californian cabernet, and an Australian merlot.

  There were four cash registers at the front of the store, but nothing to indicate which one was open. There wasn’t a clerk at any of them and no signs or gates to suggest a course of action. Dave chose the cash register nearest the door.

  He set his four bottles of wine on the counter and got out his wallet and put down his credit card beside them. Sometimes when you aren’t in a hurry, waiting can be a pleasant experience. An opportunity to prove how mellow you can be. Dave wasn’t in a hurry. He thought of the different kinds of people who came into his record store. He was pleased that he hadn’t begun tapping his credit card on the counter, or clearing his throat, or shuffling his feet, or any of the other irritating strategies customers resort to when they are trying to attract attention. By standing quietly at the counter, Dave was displaying his solidarity with his fellow retail workers. After a moment, his patience was rewarded. Dave saw one of the three clerks stand up. Then he watched the clerk languidly drift to the cash register farthest from where he was standing.

  Dave didn’t move.

  The clerk looked over at him and, in a tone Dave would later describe as a combination of disinterest and aggression, said, “Over here.”

  Dave said, “I have four bottles of wine and my credit card. Could you come over to this one?”

  The clerk shook his head. He said, “This is the one that’s open.”

  Dave felt all the goodness that had accrued to him during the morning evaporate. He felt his mellowness fade away. Felt himself slip into an elbows-up mood. Indignant that he, of all people, should be treated like this. Dave felt himself switching from compatriot to customer. He heard himself say, “Well, I’ll come back when this one is open.” He walked out of the store and into the sunshine. He squinted at the men and women walking to and fro on both sides of the street, wishing they knew what he knew—what he had just done for them. He was feeling pretty darn good about himself. Pleased because the line had come out so fast, and pleased because he had not been rude, and pleased, most of all, because he had struck a blow for all customers looking for good service and courtesy. He didn’t have the wine he had come for, but he had something else—a good feeling—and it stayed with him until he got a block and a half away from his record store.

  It stayed until the little voice inside his head that had been so busy congratulating him suddenly said, I don’t think you have your credit card, Dave.

  Dave froze in midstride. He knew right away that he hadn’t put the card back in his wallet. He thought perhaps he had slipped it into one of his pockets, and hope flared. He stood on the street patting himself. He checked all of his pockets twice, even the pocket in his shirt where he never put anything. Knowing he should turn around and go back to the liquor store, he walked, with a sinking heart, in the other direction. He knew he should retrieve his card. But how could he face the clerk?

  A few moments ago Dave had felt so sure that the clerk had been rude to him. So sure that he had been courteous. Now he wasn’t so certain. Had he really been courteous?

  Instead of going back and claiming his card, he walked to the Vinyl Cafe. When he got there, he took off his jacket and sat down behind the counter. He had to think about this. The more he thought about it, the more he realized that he was far more tense about what awaited him at the liquor store than he was about losing his credit card. He could imagine himself standing in front of the liquor-store clerk with his baseball cap in hand. He got up and walked slowly toward the front of his store, trailing his hand along the piles of records. He gazed at the little mound of handwritten notes Scotch-taped to the back of the front door. He pulled off one that read, Back in thirty minutes. He winced. He was too proud to do it. So he did the only sensible thing he could think of doing. He picked up the telephone and called the bank.

  “I would like to report a stolen credit card,” he said.

  He should have said “lost,” a lost credit card, but theft seemed to have more dignity, and Dave was feeling woefully low on dignity.

  If he had remembered at that moment that Saturday was Sam’s birthday, and the reason he had wanted the wine in the first place was so when everyone was in bed, he and Morley could quietly toast the anniversary of the birth of their second child—if he had remembered these things, Dave might have acted differently.

  But he had forgotten the birthday. He had forgotten that ten of Sam’s friends had been invited for supper and a sleep-over that very night. Forgotten that he had agreed to run the party, to order the pizza, to buy a cake, and to get a video. Forgotten that Morley was going shopping for presents that morning.

  In fact, at the very moment Dave was reporting his stolen card, Morley was wheeling a shopping cart containing the Bat Cave Deluxe toward the cash registers at a suburban toy store. Five dollars’ worth of extruded plastic that was about to cost her forty.

  Birthdays have always been a problem for Morley. She finds it stressful to have her house full of children expecting to be entertained. She has tried, over the years, to cope with her anxiety by careful planning. When Sam and Stephanie were little, Morley spent days preparing prizes for games and wandering around stores, loading up on cheap but interesting things to put in loot bags.

  But no matter how hard she tried, there was always a kid who did not want to play the games she had planned, a kid who thought the prizes were stupid, a kid who hated the food. And for all her efforts, at some point the strain of the party inevitably rendered her children, the same children she was doing this for, tearful.

  Morley was a scarred birthday mom. So when Sam said that for his ninth birthday party he wanted “a major sleep-over, with all my friends, with pizza and a movie,” Morley blanched. She knew there was no reason not to have ten boys ransack her house for twelve hours, but she didn’t know if she was up to it.

  Dave had agreed to run the party. Morley would organize things, but when it was time to man the battle stations, she was, for the first time in sixteen years, stepping aside. She was going to a movie with Gerta Lowbeer while the kids had supper—this was Dave’s idea—and he was in charge.

  If Dave had remembered any of this, he might have, probably would have, certainly would have, swallowed his pride and returned to
the liquor store and retrieved his credit card. But he didn’t. So he reported the card stolen, and the woman on the phone typed his report into the bank’s computer.

  It is amazing how fast computers work these days. Morley, who was feeling both pleased and slightly resentful about the Bat Cave, had just begun to unload her shopping cart when Dave hung up the phone.

  Morley didn’t notice that the clerk was having difficulty with her purchase. Didn’t notice anything was amiss until a man materialized and invited her to accompany him to the security office.

  It took twenty minutes and two phone calls before Morley convinced the manager that she had not stolen the credit card. After twenty minutes he apologized to her. But he didn’t give back the card. Morley had to watch him take a pair of scissors from his desk and cut up her credit card in front of her.

  “Policy,” he said.

  When Morley got home, there was a message from Dave. It said, “Phone me before you use the credit card.”

  Because she loved her husband, Morley decided to wait until after lunch to call him.

  In fact, she didn’t call until late in the afternoon.

  Dave said, “Of course I remembered the birthday party. Why do you think I was at the liquor store?”

  Then Dave said, “Of course not for the kids. I was getting the wine for us.”

  And then he said, “Of course I’ll get the pizza … Yes, and the movie … Yes, and the Bat Cave.”

  Then the line went dead, and he looked around and said, “Of course, I have no money.”

  Which wasn’t completely true. Dave had nearly twelve dollars in his wallet. And forty-seven dollars in the store’s till.

  Dave looked at his watch. It was four-fifteen. His bank was closed. He realized that without his credit card, he had no little plastic key to any more money. He had to move fast. He went outside and unlocked the six-foot wooden kangaroo that stood on the sidewalk in front of his store. HOP ON IN, it said on the pouch. Dave wrestled the kangaroo in and then carried out a chair and unscrewed the two speakers that hung over the front door. He was moving so fast that he hadn’t turned off the record player. Frank Sinatra began to sing “I Get a Kick Out of You” as Dave lifted the first speaker out of its brackets. It was an odd sensation to cradle the speaker in his arms as Sinatra sang. The speaker, thought Dave, was probably about the size of Sinatra’s head.