by Warren Adler
Awesome seemed to Al a bit exaggerated but it did appear to be a more civilized response than “cool.”
“Thanks, buddy.” Al said determined to appear casual. “Hence my invite. Hell, I’m entitled.”
Marvin continued to tap keys glancing at the computer screen. Al could tell he was mulling over his offer.
“A bit pricey. But what the hell. It’s a big one and I’m planning to pop open a bottle of champagne.”
“Big one?”
“Seven oh, pal.” Al lied. “Seven gun salute, one for each decade.”
“Awesome.”
“Fuckin’ a.”
Marvin looked up and they exchanged glances. It occurred to Al that he was using his own generational expression, long in disuse.
“Why not?” Marvin said. “It’s an offer I can’t refuse.” He hesitated a moment. “As long as I get back for my two o’clock tutorial.”
“With time to spare pal. I’ve reserved for noon.”
He was hoping Marvin would not take his remark as presumption. Marvin looked at his wristwatch.
“Let me work this out,” he mumbled tapping his keyboard.
“No sweat,” Al said, going back to reading his paper, relieved now. Hell, he thought, Marvin might be good company, although they hadn’t talked much to each other, their relationship, he assured himself, was more than a mere nodding acquaintance. They had, after all, exchanged dialogue but it did cross his mind that his invitation might be construed also as an act of desperation by a lonely old coot. Maybe not too far from the truth, Al chuckled, putting a humorous spin on the idea.
Aside from the bare facts Al didn’t know much about the kid, except that he was friendly, polite, and, for some reason, he had gravitated to sitting on the bench beside Al as if it were some gesture of camaraderie. After all, there were other benches and he could have chosen any one of them. Perhaps, Al contemplated, there was some unspoken, special bond between them.
They arrived at the restaurant early. It was half-filled at that hour but the lunch rush was just beginning, mostly executives from nearby office buildings and administrative officials and some professors from NYU. They were shown to a table in what Al determined was an obscure corner. Perhaps the headwaiter had made certain assumptions about their relationship and made the selection as if they were seeking a spot for intimate conversation.
“Fancy place Al,” Marvin commented, eyeballing the restaurant. Al was pleased with his comment.
“What the hell. Not too many shopping days left.”
“Seventy is not that old.”
It was, of course, the expected comment. How about seventy-five, kiddo, he wanted to say, but held off. He ordered a bottle of champagne, not vintage, but okay for the occasion. Actually it had been ten years, his sixty-fifth birthday, when he had last tasted champagne. He and Milly had gone to a restaurant on the Upper East Side, long gone.
“Awesome, Al?” Marvin mumbled.
“Hell, it’s a birthday,” Al said.
“Cool!”
The champagne came and the waiter popped the cork with skill, poured, and placed the bottle in an ice bucket. They lifted their glasses.
“Happy birthday, Al.”
“Thanks for coming,” Al said.
They drank, both upending their glasses. The champagne tasted tart and cold and triggered the earlier memory of his birthday dinner with Milly. He felt a sob begin to rise in his chest and to deflect it, he pulled the bottle from the ice bucket and refilled their glasses. Then they both studied the menu.
“I read a restaurant review that praised their duck à l’orange.”
“Sounds awesome,” Marvin said, apparently relieved that he did not have to make a choice.
“Appetizer?” Al asked, being the good host, but hoping Marvin would reject it out of consideration for the cost.
“You?”
“I’ll pass. But you can.”
“I’m okay,” Marvin said. Al had ordered some chocolate cake wedges, one with a candle, for dessert. He had calculated this lunch would go for about two hundred with the champagne and tip. Hell, he hadn’t spent so much money in a fancy restaurant since Milly was alive and even that was fairly rare. Milly would never have allowed the extravagance, except for very special occasions, like an important birthday. It’s for you too, doll, he told himself silently, thinking of his wife, stifling another upcoming sob, masked by clearing his throat.
When the waiter came back, Al gave the order, embellishing the duck with some vegetable sides.
They drank their second glasses and Al poured again until the bottle was emptied. He felt the sudden alcohol rush and noted that Marvin’s face had flushed.
“How does it feel to hit three score and ten?” Marvin asked, his speech slightly slurred by the alcohol. It occurred to Al that he was reaching for things to say, choosing the usual cliché. After all, Al reasoned, they had little in common.
“Feel?” Al said, contemplating a response. Instead of making him feel good, the effect of the champagne was somewhat disorienting and depressive. He felt the heavy weight of loneliness. He missed Milly. A wave of self-pity washed over him. He was sorry he had chosen to celebrate his birthday with this nineteen-year-old whom he barely knew. It seemed an act of desperation.
“I’m not sure,” he answered, his eyes inspecting Marvin’s face. It was a child’s face. He tried to imagine what the boy’s eyes were seeing, his wattled, spotted skin, tufts of gray hair thinning topside, a lined forehead, and patches of wrinkles around the eyes. What was he thinking? Al wondered, watching this lonely old fart springing for a fancy lunch.
“Life’s like a movie,” Al blurted, remembering his earlier thoughts about reading the movie section of the Times. He watched the boy’s expression look back at him with incomprehension.
“Yeah, a movie,” Marvin said as if he understood the reference. “You mean like a dream. A dream is like a movie.”
The waiter came with their duck à l’orange and sides of brussels sprouts and carrots. They ate for a while in silence.
“Good?” Al asked, signaling the waiter and ordering two glasses of white wine.
“Awesome!”
“That good,” Al said, noting the touch of sarcasm that had popped into his remark. The fatuous comment was beginning to grate on him.
They ate quietly for a few moments. Al’s thoughts had once again turned to movies.
“I made it, Ma. Top of the world,” Al suddenly blurted aloud in a Cagney imitation. People from surrounding tables turned around and Marvin looked at him curiously, obviously confused by the outburst. Al felt slightly embarrassed. He assumed the champagne was having an odd effect on him.
“Jimmy Cagney, from the movie White Heat.”
“Who?”
“Cagney, Jimmy Cagney.”
Marvin looked at him blankly.
“You know,” Al pressed making another try at the Cagney imitation. Marvin continued to look at him with mounting confusion.
“Never heard of James Cagney?” Al asked.
“Its sounds familiar,” Marvin replied, although it was obvious to Al that the name was not in the boy’s field of comprehension.
“How about Gary Cooper?”
Marvin shrugged.
“Who?”
“Okay then,” Al pressed, suddenly feeling irritated and combative. “Mae West?”
“Vaguely familiar.”
Al knew he was faking now.
“Myrna Loy and William Powell, The Thin Man.”
Again Marvin offered a blank look. Al felt increasingly irritated, not only at what he determined was Marvin’s ignorance but at his own aggressive attitude.
“Is this a game?” Marvin mumbled avoiding any eye contact, keeping his head down and eating perfunctorily.
“A game?” Al said, troubled by the comment. Where was the connection with this boy? Who was the alien here? He did not answer the question. Instead he picked up his wine glass and quickly emptied the content
s, as if he were trying to quench his anger.
“Fact is, Al,” Marvin said. “Why should I know who these people are?”
“Because,” Al said, drawing in a deep breath, his anger and frustration palpable. “Because everybody does.”
“Does what?”
“Know who these people are. They are famous goddammit. Everybody knows who James Cagney and Gary Cooper are. Everybody knows for crying out loud. Are you a fucking ostrich with your head in the sand?”
Again his voice rose and people turned at other tables. Al raised his eyebrows and shrugged in frustration. The maître d’ who had shown them their table looked at them and scowled.
A high flush developed on Marvin’s cheeks. He looked at Al with what seemed like total incomprehension.
“You’re a college boy,” Al muttered, trying unsuccessfully to mute his anger.
“I don’t know what this is all about Al,” Marvin said, his voice beginning to tremble. The people dining at the nearby tables turned away.
“Knowledge,” Al said.
“This kind of knowledge,” Marvin began. He had put his fork down, leaving his duck à l’orange half finished. “Is it so important?”
“It’s a question of awareness. It underlines your ignorance.”
“My ignorance! You’re wacko, man.”
Al felt a rising sense of rage.
“You take my hospitality and insult me on my seventy-fifth birthday,” Al fumed.
Marvin shook his head, threw his napkin on the table and stood up.
“Seventy-five. You lying old asshole.”
Shaking his head, he turned and walked out of the restaurant. Again, people nearby turned to look at him. Al imagined they saw him as a ridiculous old crank or worse. He wanted to make some caustic comment to the observing crowd, characterizing Marvin as a freeloading, ungrateful young jackass, but he held off and turned away, reaching for Marvin’s half-filled wineglass, which he quickly upended.
He was unable to quell his feelings of loss and futility. He missed Milly, missed her presence across the table. He felt abandoned and misplaced, and the world he had known seemed to be crashing around him. He looked at his food, grown cold and unpalatable, his mind groping in a haze to make some sense out of the incident. He was deeply conscious of his own impotence and felt old and withered, a broken man confronting the abyss.
He needed to leave this place and swiveled around the restaurant to signal his waiter for the check. Suddenly the waiter emerged from the kitchen with a wedge of chocolate cake embedded with a lighted candle. He wished he could stop the ritual, but it was obviously too late. The waiter placed the cake with the lighted candle in front of him on the table and two additional waiters joined the group and began to sing “Happy birthday to you.”
Some of the people in the nearby tables joined in, eyeing the ceremony with humor and, Al suspected, ridicule. He wanted the earth to open and swallow him up, hoping that what the image portended would come soon, very soon.
He started to sob. His shoulders shook and he could not muster the strength to blow out the candle. All he could do was to look at the flame, reminding him again of that last scene in White Heat when Cagney’s character was shot dead.
“Made it, Ma. Top of the world.”
He did not say the words but he sensed that, like Cagney’s demise in the movie, the end was on its way.
The Cherry Tree
by Warren Adler
“There, turn left,” Howard, her grandfather, said, instructing his granddaughter, who was driving, where to make the left. He was obviously remembering the names of the Brownsville streets, where he had grown up, whispering them as he viewed the signs. Saratoga, Herzl, Amboy. “Comes back.”
Helen could tell that his mind was immersed in memory and she let it happen because it apparently meant so much to him to go back to the scenes of his youth. She was unmoved, but felt the obligation to be granddaughterly since she hardly ever saw him these days.
He had been an accountant, then retired and moved to Florida in the nineties with her grandmother, who had died a few years back. He had returned periodically to New York visiting his only son, her father, who lived now in Huntington, Long Island. In her mid-twenties, Helen was working on Wall Street for a hedge fund, living in Tribeca, considering herself part of the New York scene, pretty, hip, cool, and, for her age, rich.
“Must I?” she asked her father, who had called her to do him the favor. He had a golf date.
“Why not. Go early Saturday morning while the muggers are still in bed.”
“Brownsville? In Brooklyn. Supposed to be a sewer, full of gangs, drugs, and trouble. Shit.”
“Just don’t get out of the car.”
The fact was she hardly knew her grandfather. He was not in her radar range. Even when she was younger her grandparents, although pleasant enough and, in their way, loving and interested, were sort of in the outer circle of her life. There was, of course, an obligatory affinity and respect and the necessity of exhibiting familial affection, but beyond that, there was a kind of generational distance, an unbridgeable gap.
Her grandfather, whom she called Grampa, was in his early seventies and looked a lot younger, one of those seventy types who looked fifty and acted maybe forty. He had told her father he had lots of ladies banging down his door in his widowerhood. She could not imagine going to bed with someone that old.
In the car he asked her what she characterized as grandfatherly questions. “Do you like your job? Any serious boyfriends? You like your apartment?” And the usual compliments. “We are all very proud of your success. When will you come down to Florida to visit?” And the familiar reminiscences. “You were the cutest little baby girl I ever saw.” And on and on in that vein. Then there was a long silence. She was his only grandchild.
He dozed and woke up only when he reached what she supposed were the outer limits of Brownsville. In fact, he became instantly alert. Up until then he had paid no attention to the female voice on the navigational system, but when the car hit familiar streets he contradicted all her directions and became a nonstop travel guide.
“On every corner there was a candy store where you could get a charlotte russe.” He explained what that was. “A piece of cake, a glob of whipped cream topped by a cherry, all in a white cardboard container shaped like a crown. And a cigarette was a penny apiece and for three cents you could get an egg cream, which had in it neither egg nor cream.” He laughed and shook his head. “There were delicatessens everywhere. You could get stuffed derma for a nickel.” She didn’t know what that was and didn’t enquire.
“A shtikl for a nickel. And hot dogs you could die for and probably did.” He laughed again. “The man behind the counter would say mustard, sauerkraut, and relish as if it was a knee-jerk reaction. Like you would say, ‘How are you, Jake?’ and he would say, ‘Mustard, sauerkraut, and relish.’” He laughed again. The best she could muster was a thin smile.
Helen was being tolerant. The drive in from Manhattan, where she had met him at Penn Station, was long and difficult. Brooklyn streets were impossible to navigate. There was no rhyme or reason to them.
“Make a right here on Saratoga, but go slow,” he said, and she obeyed while he pointed out the sights that were no longer his sights.
“I was bar mitzvahed somewhere around here. One of those little houses that was converted to a synagogue. It was a Monday, which was allowed. I did my haftorah in a place that was less than half filled with smelly old men who used snuff and spat into spittoons. Where the hell was it? Dammit, everything is changed, but then I’m going back sixty years.”
“A long time,” Helen said, half listening. It was too remote from her world. She was thinking about Jack, who was dating her that night. Jack worked for a mutual fund and was witty and really good looking. They’d go to one of the clubs and shake all night, then pop back to her place, hopefully still energized for sex. Getting up this early to take Grampa on his trip through memory lane would
have its impact. On Saturdays she usually slept until noon.
She looked at her watch. It was barely eight, but at least it was a bright, early summer’s day and the streets were pretty empty. Everybody she saw was black. She checked the door locks to make sure the buttons were down.
This was no place for white people, especially a white person driving a new car. Thankfully it was a Toyota Corolla in need of a good washing. For the moment, she was happy it wasn’t a Jag, which she very nearly bought, but was talked out of by one of her boyfriends. Uncool, he had told her. Conspicuous-consumption cars are déclassé. Don’t look too polished. Make believe you were born with it and didn’t need to flaunt it, especially in Brownsville.
Not that she was prejudiced against black people. She had many black friends who wouldn’t be caught dead in Brownsville. She was surprised that it didn’t seem dangerous, not on this sun-dappled morning. What people she saw were going about their business quite peacefully. Perhaps the media had exaggerated.
“There was a little grocery store there,” Grampa was saying, pointing. Her own thoughts had disrupted her attention and she had missed some of his commentary. “My mother used to send me out daily to get groceries. Usually bagels, cream cheese, butter, and lox. The bagels were real, not like the lousy imitations you get nowadays. There were two kinds, regular and egg bagels. They sliced the cream cheese with a wire cutter, which came out of a long wooden box, and the butter came in big tubs. The grocer totaled up the cost on the side of a brown bag with a much-used short pencil, which he wet with his tongue before making the additions. He was never wrong. In those days they taught people to add in their head.” He looked at his granddaughter. “Can you add in your head?”
It was as if he was challenging her whole generation. She didn’t bite.
“Suppose so,” she said, although most of her additions were done by machine.
“Over there,” he said, paying little attention to her answer, “were two movie houses: The Ambassador and the People’s Cinema.” He chuckled. “For ten cents on a Saturday you could see three movies, three comedies, a chapter, but then you don’t know what a chapter is, and they would have drawings for prizes based on your ticket number. I once won a pair of roller skates.”
