The Rich Man's Table

by Scott Spencer

  He shrugged. His eyes looked half angry, half sorrowful.

  “What do the doctors say?” Joe asked.

  “You try getting a straight word out of any of them.”

  He nodded. A lot of his life has been about not getting a straight word out of people—club owners, promoters, record- label execs, agents, lawyers. It had given him a sense of communication based on silences, lies, double-talk, and it made him, in his late middle age, taciturn.

  We stood there, keeping what was left of my mother company. The hospital, with its urgencies, its frustration, truculence, and small meannesses, faded behind us, and for a timeless time it was just the three of us, an aging soul singer, a comatose woman, and her son, there, silent, at the edge of some secret universe, in the washed-out faded unwholesome dying light of a hospital room.

  For years I had been grateful that Joe and my mother found each other and became friends; I thought he would keep a kindly eye on her. But it never quite dawned on me that he might look out for me as well. What would life had been for me if Joe was my father? What would I look like? How would I feel? The search for Luke would be taken away from me, and what would fill the great emptiness left in its wake?

  I had to a great extent ruined my life, defaced it. I was standing next to my mother, who right now might have taken the bait and was now slowly being reeled in by that great fisherman Death, and though I should have been thinking of her and her alone, these thoughts about myself and what I had done to myself continued to rain within me; that persistently gloomy inner weather would not stop. It was always inclement and I wanted to ask for some clemency. Very bad joke, but true.

  Finally, Joe put his arm around me and we left the hospital. He had to get back to High Falls, back to Little Joe’s, his restaurant, where, despite his many employees, he oversaw every detail.

  We had time for a coffee, which we took at a desultory little diner called Smitty’s, on Leyden’s small-town version of Broadway—Country Gal Clothiers, the Pipe and Pouch, Norma’s Notions, that sort of thing. The trees along the road were in bloom. The mountains to the west were pale green, the sky denim blue. How could a world in which my mother was dying be so beautiful?

  “Bring us a couple of cups of coffee, will you, Micky?” Joe said to the waitress. Joe called nearly everyone by name. He had taken a memory course advertised on TV and it really worked for him—he always had good luck responding to those late-night TV offers, the food dryer, the tummy flattener. He hoped to one day sell a Little Joe Washington’s Greatest Hits collection on TV, to do an ad in which he sang snippets of his songs while the titles scrolled by and an 800 number blinked off and on at the bottom of the screen.

  Joe brought his coffee cup to his nose, sniffed it professionally. The menu at Little Joe’s said “The Best Coffee in the Hudson Valley,” and Joe worried that someone would come up with a better tasting cup than his blend of chicory, French roast, Café Bustelo, Brown Gold, and Droste chocolate. Ah, but he was safe here. He took a noisy, aerated sip, put the cup down, dried his lips with his napkin. Aging had brought out some latent daintiness in Joe, he had become an Old Gent, and though he could still be counted on to tell stories of the road, the raunchy fifties, all-nighters in the colored motels throughout the South, bourbon right out of the barrel, marijuana so rich with resins you had to smoke it with the end stuck into flame to keep it lit, he recounted these tales now as if they had happened to somebody else, a wicked twin.

  “Do you think she’s going to live?” I suddenly said.

  Joe leaned back, gave some evidence of thinking about it—as if this were a matter of logic, or prescience, as if either of us could say.

  “She’s going to be all right,” he said. “She’s strong. She’s going to fight back. You’ll see.”

  I buried my face in my hands for a moment.

  “I called Luke, to tell him.”

  “You did?” said Joe. He looked truly surprised. “Why did you do that?”

  “We were talking about him, right before the accident, Mom and I. I don’t know. It just seemed the right thing to do.”

  “You have to cut him loose, Billy. Just cut the man loose.”

  “I know.”

  “What did he say?”

  “I left a message.”

  Joe shook his head. “That won’t do much good.”

  “What else can I do?”

  “He’s a million miles out of her life now. And if you want to know, you think about him more than she does.”

  I felt a sudden clumsy, clattering grief falling through me like an avalanche of cups and saucers. The sunlight that slanted through the Venetian blinds of Smitty’s Diner had moved from the dented tin cap of the sugar shaker to the tips of Joe’s fingers.

  Just then, someone rapped on the window. Startled, I looked out and saw a woman—familiar, good-looking, but who? I recognized her, but for an instant I couldn’t remember her name or where I had seen her before.

  She smiled, waved, her gestures jokey, exaggerated, shy.

  Rosa. What was different in this picture? She still wore the tights, the boots, the hoop earrings—ah: she held a child’s hand. A dark little Franz Kafka of a boy; I put him at four or five. His hair was long and wavy, his eyes almost black, curious, charged with irrepressible energy. He looked like what mothers call “a handful,” one of those turbo-tots for whom you need patience and a sense of humor. He was on his toes, trying to see for whom his mother had stopped.

  With more enthusiasm than I expected, I gestured for her to come in.

  “You know Rosa?” Little Joe asked.

  “A little. Is that her kid with her?”

  But before he could answer, she was there at our table. I was remarkably disturbed by her presence, but I wrote it off: my heart was a stray dog just then, liable to follow anyone home, especially if they slowed down, glanced at me.

  “Edgar!” Joe said, as Rosa’s boy scrambled into the booth next to him and patted Joe’s pockets as if he were quite used to finding treats in them.

  “Nice manners, Edgar,” Rosa said. Then, to me: “We meet again.”

  “I kind of like this small-town life,” I said. And I knew it was not just my imagination, she did look at me with a kind of full-throttle frankness, and I was seized by this vivid, carnal sense of her.

  She gestured toward my side of the booth and I slid over, making room. She was exhausted. She put her elbows on the table, ran her blunt, boyish fingers through her hair.

  “Two jobs and no life makes Rosa a dull girl,” she said.

  “What do you do?” I asked, a little too quickly, with some of that New York Prove-It in my voice.

  “Accounts receivable for this guy who sells blue algae pills mail-order—”

  “Algae!” shouted Edgar, still engrossed with patting down Joe.

  “And I work at the recycling center. I operate a backhoe.”

  “Really!” I said, with quite a bit of enthusiasm.

  “Knock knock,” Edgar was saying to Joe.

  “Who’s there?” answered Joe.

  “Edgar!!” Edgar shouted, his laughter rising like a flock of birds exploding from a tree.

  “Plus I freelance for the local papers.”

  “That’s three jobs, then,” I said, displaying my fabled ability to count one, two, three.

  After frisking him thoroughly, Edgar gave up on Joe as a source of hidden treasures and slid out of the booth—plucking a tuft of batting from the torn seat as he went—and began to roam the diner, greeting some of the other customers, and spinning the bright red stools along the counter. Rosa looked at him out of the corners of her eyes.

  I turned, gestured for the waitress. I didn’t want Rosa to leave; a cup of coffee would slow things down.

  “What’ll you have?” I asked her, as if this were my table and I was in charge.

  “Oh, Micky will know,” said Rosa.

  And sure enough she did. She appeared a few moments later with a cup of hot water and a slic
e of lemon. Rosa took a tea bag out of her purse, dropped it into the hot water.

  “I am now one of those women who carry their own tea bags. I never thought it would happen.” She poked at it with the tip of her spoon. It bloated and rose to the top like a corpse.

  “You pull that in my restaurant, I’ll charge you for the water,” said Joe.

  “I can’t afford your restaurant,” said Rosa.

  Joe reached for her, took her hand. “Hey, I was just kidding.”

  “Hey,” said Rosa, “so was I.”

  She linked her fingers through his and they smiled with the ease of old friends. It did not seem that they were lovers, or had ever been, but it was clear that they had shared secrets and late- night talks and meals and confessions and tears, and that they had toasted each other with cheap wine and at other times with wine so expensive it was really more than they could afford. They had traveled together, gone to funerals, tried and then given up on meditation, helped each other quit cigarettes, donated blood for a mutual friend in the hospital. They were part of a circle of friends, a family of their own choosing. I felt rapturously alone, ridiculously isolated.

  Rosa craned her neck, looked at someone sitting in a front booth.

  “See that guy sitting near the register?” she asked.

  I followed her eyes to a guy in his late forties, early fifties, a great gray brute of a man in a leather jacket, holding a carefully folded newspaper in one hand and a tall glass of neon-bright orange soda in the other. Joe didn’t bother to turn around.

  “He looks like that old Russian weightlifter friend of your father—s,” said Rosa. “Sergei Karpa-something.”

  “Karpanov,” I said. In fact, the man in the booth did bear a disturbing resemblance to Sergei. He was thickly muscled, rigid; his steely, close-cropped hair seemed to cover a brain that churned out simple commands: eat, fuck, kill, hide.

  “No way in the world that Russian is going to show his face in the U.S.A.,” said Joe, fixing the pockets that Rosa’s boy had pulled inside out.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t be talking about this,” said Rosa, looking at me with concern.

  “It’s okay. I’m surprised you remember it. It was a long time ago.”

  “I guess I know a lot about Luke Fairchild. Not like an insider or anything. But I just love his stuff. Did they ever find Sergei?”

  “Not yet,” I said. “Every once in a while a story surfaces about him being back. Why he’d want to come back here, that’s anybody’s guess. He had some good times here, but that’s hardly a reason to risk arrest. Then there’s the Luke as Victim school, which has it that Sergei wants to find Luke, rough him up, crush his skull, whatever. Me, I’d love to talk to him.”

  “Well, maybe this is your chance,” said Rosa.

  “I doubt it. Why would it be him? There’s no statute of limitations for murder.”

  “But I thought he was supposed to be innocent.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Well, I love the song,” she said. “The whole album was great.”

  We were silent for a moment, and then, to my horror, Rosa said his name in a kind of piercing, accosting whisper: “Sergei!” We watched, but the man in the front booth didn’t move a muscle. And then he put his orange soda down on the table, and moistened the tips of two of his fingers, and methodically turned one of the expertly folded pages of his newspaper.

  “Are you busy for dinner tonight?” I asked her.

  7

  ROSA drove Edgar to her mother’s house, and from there she was going to pick up a bottle of red wine and come back here to have dinner with me. I was in the kitchen, marinating the vegetables, squinting at the directions on the box of Texarkana Rice—no Minute Rice for Mama, no Indian River, no Carolina: only obscure brands with six extra steps in the preparation. There was nothing in her cupboard that could be purchased in a run-of-the-mill supermarket, and certainly nothing that was advertised on TV Bewildering varieties of Instant Karma soup, each costing nearly four dollars—Pumpkin Miso, Chinese Tree Ear, Oregon Fruit, Peruvian Potato and Cod. Bags of dried Japanese mushrooms. A jar of Austrian hazelnut butter. Boxes of risotto mix.

  On a corked bulletin board near the kitchen phone was a long scroll of adding-machine paper, upon which Esther had written important telephone numbers. Fire. Police. Ambulance. Suburban Propane. Billy. The Shoreview Home. And then, at least fifty friends, most of them unknown to me, though I did see Joe’s name, and Maya’s, and Rosa’s. There were a couple of churches, a synagogue across the river in Kingston, a women’s shelter, something called Family of Woodstock. I knew my mother did volunteer work. But who were the others in this tribe? I’d had no idea she was part of such a vast network. Nearly all of them were just first names, except where there were repeats, and then only the last initial was tacked on. So they must have been intimates, real friends. How had she done it? How had any of them pulled it off? What did they give to each other, and what were the thousand varieties of love they shared—love that was as odd to me as the soups in my mother’s cupboard? They had made themselves a family, a community, while all I had done was to perfect my solitude. My eyes scanned the list. Margie, Florida, Beth, Aaron, Annie L., Annie B., Dominick, Rudy, Marcus, Allen, Jorge, Debby V., Debby Z., Warren. The names sounded within me like an incomprehensible prayer. And then, in the middle of the list, I saw: Felix, Tess. My half-brother and half- sister. Their New York City numbers were crossed out and the new ones had an 802 area code. They were both in college at Bennington.

  I stood there, stunned, my cheeks scalding. What were they doing on her list? How did they know each other? Why did they stay in touch? Whenever I tried to hook up with the twins, they avoided me; I could only have a word with them when I took them by surprise, when I lurked, and stalked. What language of connection was I missing? How had I gone so many years and remained emotionally illiterate?

  The lid on the pot of steaming rice began to shake and clatter. I turned off the stove, checked the time. Rosa would be here very soon—Rosa with whom I had contrived to bypass conversation and head straight for sex.

  I took a quick shower to get rid of the sharp smell of the hospital. My mother’s tub had a rubber shower attachment. The window sill was filled with fragrant soaps, bottles of lotion, purple geodes, pink crystals, a big red sponge like Satan’s brain. The water was barely warm; the drain was sluggish, and by the time I was finished I was standing in water above my ankles.

  I had been wearing the same clothes since leaving Father Parker, and now that I was clean I felt there was no choice but to dress in my mother’s clothes. I realized it was not a good sign when a son nearing thirty gets himself decked out in Mom’s duds, but my mother and I were similarly built, and many of her clothes were boyish. I chose a white turtleneck, a blue cotton sweater, Gap jeans. I checked myself out in Mom’s bedroom mirror. I looked fabulous. Her clothes fit me better than my own.

  Rosa arrived a few minutes later, carrying two bottles of wine, looking nervous. I sensed in her excitement, in her jokiness, her playful, pushy, teasing manner, in her slightly too loud laughter, in the feverish glitter of her eyes, that some time while she was shopping she had made the decision to sleep with me.

  Yet something happened while we were eating dinner that almost completely derailed the Erotica Express. Rosa gave me one of those squinting hey-wait-a-minute looks and said, “Are those Esther’s clothes you’re wearing?”

  “Well, as a matter of fact, they are.”

  “May I ask a follow-up question?”

  “I’m counting on it.”

  “Is it meant to be exciting?”

  “To me?”

  “Or me. Either of us. Anyone.”

  I shook my head, reached across the table, and touched Rosa’s hand. I had a little hedgerow of humor to hide behind. “No part of me considers dressing up in my mother’s clothing exciting.”

  Wine. More wine. And wishing for still more. I was aware, very aware that my mother was
swathed in antiseptic bandages just a few miles away and I was here in the meanwhile flirting with a woman whose acquaintance I had just barely made, and this awareness burned in me like a yellow light, not stop, not go, but caution, watch it, look both ways, consider your life.

  Why do we take off our clothes and introduce our sexual organs into those of people we barely know? Is it the mating urge? Hardly, I would say, since most of these moments of congress, were they to result in the beginnings of a new life, would cause us boundless misery, and we therefore generally take precautions against procreation and even go so far as to root the little bugger out, if it comes to that. Is it, then, a failure of wit that sends us racing into the sack, a sinking feeling that we cannot keep the conversation going another minute? I confess to having had sex because I couldn’t think of anything else to say. Is it loneliness, a need to curl up like a child next to a warm body? Is it some sinister desire for power over another, a clammy curiosity over whether or not we can get so-and-so into bed with us? Is it boredom, is it anxiety, is it that lowliest of desires that expresses itself with a shrugging “Why not”? I was attracted to Rosa, liked her haircut, her shoes. She smelled nice, asked good questions, listened well, spoke well, cracked a couple of jokes—but could that possibly add up to our committing acts that others wait years to consummate, and even then only after long courtships, arrangements of dowries, familial negotiations, ceremonies that last all day and half the night, and then up to the conjugal bed, and next morning rip off the wedding sheets and hang them over the sunstruck cobblestone courtyard, where the children play and the hens cluck and the neighbors let out with a loud, good-natured, slightly smutty cheer to see the bloody red stain in the sheet’s center, the hymen’s maidenly evidence?

  My being so adept at these hasty couplings might well have been inherited from Dad, who was (and probably remained) one of the champs of the quick seduction. He was—well, men have a phrase for it and It’s rather embarrassing, but we say “successful with women,” which casts a rather cold and unflattering light on the enterprise, revealing the empirical core of our sexual self-assessments: how many attempted, how many completed, a quick calculation and voilà, a passing average. According to Luke: