The Enthusiast

by Charlie Haas

  “Open the fucking door, Janice!”

  The pounding stopped, replaced by footsteps coming our way. She said, “Could I use your bathroom?”

  “Uh, yeah,” I said. “What should I—”

  She grabbed my hand, looked me in the eye with apology and panic for a third of a second, went into the bathroom, and closed the door just as the footsteps reached the top of the stairs.

  I opened the door. The guy was tall, in jeans and a green canvas shirt. I said, “Hello?” trying to sound like I thought he was selling something.

  “Is Janice here?”

  “No, I’m sorry,” I said. “This is the rental unit. I’m the tenant.” You steal electricity. You beat up women. I mean, I once kind of pushed a woman a few times, and I’ve yelled, you know, but Jesus. And what’s up with that shirt? Ranger McSquirrel? Folks, if we’ll all be quiet for a minute, we can hear the mating cry of the Battering Throwback. It should sound like, ‘Janice, Janice, I’m so sorry. Are you okay? I don’t know what comes over me sometimes. I can’t believe I would ever do something like that to you. I must have some crazy shit inside me.’ Crazy is subjective, but shit I think we can all get together on.

  “I can give her a message,” I said.

  “No, that’s okay. I’ll try back.” You do that, Romeo. Try back sometime when I’m making Rice-A-Roni with the lights on and this whole illegal unit goes up like a Presto Log. He was turning to leave when there was a soft clank from the bathroom, Janice managing to bump into something.

  He started toward it, but before I knew what I was doing I was blocking the doorway, meeting his eyes but trying to keep my expression plain. I wondered what my shoulder would feel like dislocated.

  The weird thing was that I’d always been happy to quit my jobs at the first sign of conflict. The weirder thing was that, looking into Herbert’s eyes, my second greatest desire was to talk to him, in a friendly way, about caulk. Yeah, I wanted to say, I tried putting some on there myself. It’s the angle, isn’t it? Getting yourself in there; and you’re tall, so it must have been a real tiger cage. Wouldn’t you think they could formulate it so you could control where it went, and how thick? If we can put a man on the moon, right?

  I got my first greatest desire, which was him leaving. He slammed the door in my face and a few seconds later his car peeled out. After a minute Janice came out of the bathroom and said, “That’s great what you did in there. The shower.”

  “Thanks,” I said, and a special thank-you for leaving me out here with him and making that noise. Is that part of the arrangement as far as rent? Did you know that the Poughkeepsie Goodwill put half your books straight into the free box? The self-help and the Matt Helm novels? The Poughkeepsie Goodwill! It’s a punch line, Janice. By the way, how were those self-help books? Any luck with that? On the road to a new life? Out of the shadows and into the self-assurance it takes to drag innocent bystanders into your domestic-disturbance theme park?

  “I should pay for the materials,” she said.

  “No, that’s okay,” I said. It is, I thought. It’s okay. I didn’t mean what I was thinking before. I can see it, the yelling and hitting fifteen minutes before sex and then fifteen minutes after, the emergency room, Vicodin for your shoulder, Herbert stealing the Vicodin, a lawyer from a bus-bench ad, you getting the restraining order and then driving blind into traffic from the courthouse and the horns blowing, dumb fucking bitch.

  “I should get back,” she said. “This is nice, with the jar.”

  That weekend, in the crowd at Richard and Agnes’s, there was a woman in expensive casual clothes—linen pants, a sweater in two subtle yellows, a blue velvet jacket—and a complex feathered haircut. She was talking to a guy with a shaved head and big black glasses, and she looked so sane and healthy I almost didn’t recognize her. I went over and said, “Hi, I’m Henry Bay.”

  “Hi,” she said. “Wendy Probst.”

  “I know,” I said. “We met once before.”

  “Were you at the opening? I’m sorry, I get so—”

  “No, it was a few years ago. I came to your house in Ohio. I was working for Crochet Life magazine. I came to take pictures of—”

  “Oh my God. Yes. Crochet Life.” She said to the shaved-head guy, “I used to make these throws with, you know, unicorns and Raggedy Anns and—”

  “Ironically?”

  “No, no. That was my work then. No one believes me about this. I used to sell them at crafts fairs. It was wonderful. There were women who made little people out of Ivory Snow bottles.”

  “That is wonderful.”

  “And this magazine that he was from was like a ladies’ craft thing, which as far as I’m concerned is still what I do. The whole point of using this medium is that it’s a quote ladies’ craft, so it carries that whole—”

  “No, absolutely,” the guy said.

  “People always put them on the wall,” she said, “and I say, you know, they’re throws. You can put them on your couch and get under them when you watch TV. Anyway, and—I’m sorry…?”

  “Henry.”

  “And Henry came and took pictures of these unicorns and things, that’s…”

  “Actually, I think it was the first ones you had people in.”

  “Oh. Yes. Oh, that poor lady, what was her…?”

  “Cerise Lander?”

  “Cerise. Yes. She was nice. So that was when I was just starting to show.”

  I said, “To show?”

  “In galleries. My first show was in Chicago. It must have been right around then.”

  The shaved-head guy said, “Have you seen her show that’s up in New York now? It’s amazing. It’s called Throes, with an e. It’s a great name.”

  “Do you think it’s great?” Wendy said. “I don’t know. They wanted…anyway.” She turned to me. “So what are you doing now?”

  “I work for Richard and Agnes. On their magazine.”

  “Oh, that’s terrific.” She smiled and lowered her voice. “I knew them before it was tea. I love it that they’re these upstanding country people now.”

  Some new people came in. Half of them already knew Wendy and the rest were excited to meet her.

  I wasn’t surprised she’d forgotten me. I was feeling like I’d blundered in with a race of people who actually had something to offer, and sooner or later they’d wonder what I was doing there. As I edged to the back of the circle around her, Agnes came in and said, “Wendy!” They hugged, and then Agnes saw me and said, “Did you meet Henry?”

  “Oh, Henry and I go way back,” Wendy said. “Remind me to tell you. It’s funny.”

  On Monday Richard asked me if I wanted to go to New York the next day. A tea importer named Randolph had bought an ad at the last minute and someone had to show him the layout, take a picture of his showroom, and bring it back that night to get it into the issue. “It’s down on West Broadway,” Agnes said.

  “Okay,” I said. I paused. “I haven’t been there before. To New York.”

  “Wow,” Agnes said.

  “That’s great,” Richard said. “You should take the whole day. Go through Times Square. See a museum. Dance with a lamppost like Gene Kelly. Henry steps out.”

  Agnes called Randolph and made the appointment for 4:15 the next day. I went home at lunch, found Gerald’s card, and left him a message. Two hours later, on the porch, Agnes answered the phone and handed it to me. Gerald said, “Hey, baby! Did that woman say, ‘Cozy’?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s where I work. How are you?”

  “Cozy! I would never leave the premises. But you are. You’re coming tomorrow. I’m wall to wall tomorrow. I’m broadloom. I’m plump fat polyester. I tell you what, though. Take coffee with me.” He did his Russian voice. “Palm Court of Plaza Hotel. Special hotel, Henry! Famous! Everyone love this! You can come to there at three ten?” I said yes.

  In the morning I rushed to the train without making tea, and by the time I got to the station an invisible C clamp was
squeezing my head like a melon. The Grab ’n’ Go next to the station had supermarket teabags and hot water. I bought a cup and drank it on the platform, tasting sweepings from the tea-withering room—the sponsoring beverage of all-day bathrobes and cracked-linoleum kitchens—but with the first sip my jaw unclenched and my eye stopped jumping.

  I hadn’t realized how serious my habit was. I got on the train picturing the Manhattan of a made-for-cable movie, with the camera panning from a sidewalk full of hurrying extras to a doorway where I crouched sucking on a bag of Red Rose, its tag hanging from my mouth like a small animal’s tail. I had a week’s beard and a filthy overcoat that had gotten too big for me. A man in a spotless suit walked two steps past me, stopped, and turned around. We’d been business executives together. “Henry?” he said. “Henry Bay? Oh my God.”

  I sat on the west side of the train and stared out at the wide green river, sculls and sailboats, erector-set bridges, and trees massed on the high bank of the opposite shore. After an hour the river narrowed, the trees gave way to smokestacks and storage yards, and I saw a few long streets of brick and traffic before a tunnel swallowed us up.

  The platform at Grand Central was gritty and stifling, but a few yards away was a marble concourse, cool and strangely clean for the foot traffic it was handling. Every beam on the ceiling was edged in cream filigree, every light bulb set in an inverted bowl of plaster foliage. Any one of those bowls could have been glass-cased in a Clayton museum, but there were hundreds here, dropping soft light on the food stalls and two-hundred-title newsstands while the conversations of hundreds of people, baffled by the high ceilings, made the sound of the continental switchboard in an old movie montage, and all this was before I even got upstairs.

  Upstairs was much grander, as if to say, “You thought that was it? Puh, give us a break, something better is always coming. The ceiling up here is so far over your head we’ve painted constellations on it, and the windows are framed with ruinous man hours of bas-relief birds, branches, globes, and ship’s wheels, because this is the compass everyone has to pass through, and the bustle of a thousand people is as calm as a mountainside because you’re finally here, your ticket punched at last, although what kind of shadowy hick existence did you get yourself into that you’ve put it off this long?”

  I pushed through a door into the wet air outside and was pressed into a sidewalk army that was ass-deep in purpose. Everyone, happy or miserable, well dressed or in Air Clown sneakers and sex-boast T-shirts, had the most know-where-they’re-going faces I’d ever seen. All of them could tell you what was coming next and the five things after that, because on the most real and official of American streets that knowledge was the minimum. The rest of the country, people like me, were the dim relations these people kept having to break it down for, a nation of Henries holding a city of Barneys back. Even the mumbling schizophrenics here were the best in the country at what they did.

  I went south on Madison Avenue, trying not to gawk but unable to resist the buildings’ upward pull, the old ones climbing to gargoyles and gold ziggurats, the new ones so tall I pictured catapults instead of elevators. Soon I was passing Gerald’s leafy side streets, with doormen, songbirds, and trees in wrought-iron cages with brass plaques that said THANK YOU FOR CARING TO CURB YOUR DOG.

  Wendy Probst’s art gallery shared a building on West Twenty-eighth Street with twelve others, all with white walls, track lighting, attractive women at big-screen Macintoshes, and shaved-head guys like Wendy’s friend talking on phones. The throws in Throes were thirty thousand dollars and up. She’d branched out from the miseries of Belton, Ohio, to crochet couples falling from the World Trade Center and the stoning of Afghan adulteresses. She had all the material she could use now. The ratty horizon was on world tour.

  I spent an hour there, then walked over to Fifth Avenue and north to the Plaza Hotel in a pedestrian traffic jam. People walked here like they drove elsewhere, cutting each other off with shoulders and using briefcases for bumpers. I felt the pressure. There was too much of everything, signs and faces racing at me, the subway’s damp breath blowing from caves with stairs, and an untenable anarchy of fake vendors, flyer-thrusters, and marauding plaid school kids.

  I wanted in. I wanted to be offhand, to lean on a building with one foot up on the wall behind me and one hand at the small of my back, having a smoke and nodding half an inch at people I knew, in a muscle shirt, with muscles. I wasn’t going to get it, though. New York put out the strongest could-I-live-here I’d ever felt, and the answer was no, not if I’d never once worked for a business that could afford the rent. Even if they could, who had the bulletproof morale to put out Frisbee Golf with Sports Illustrated three blocks away?

  Half the sidewalk army was on cell phones. When I stopped for DON’T WALK signs I kept hearing guys Dad’s age, with tired musical voices, saying things like Don’t let it get to you, I can’t see the point, At a certain point it’s not worth it, It’s worth your life these days, Life is too short, Don’t make yourself crazy, Okay take care of yourself, Okay it’s good to talk to you, Okay. I loved these guys. I felt like it was me they were talking to, their resigned sweetness my lullaby, but then the light would change and I’d lose them.

  When I got to the Plaza at three they were serving Orchid Oolong in the lobby, but I went outside and waited while taxis and horse-drawn carriages dropped off everyone in the world but Gerald. By 3:40 I was embarrassed in front of the doormen. At 3:55 a black Crown Victoria pulled up and Gerald, in a blue blazer and gray pants, got out of the backseat, came toward me smiling, saw my face, looked contrite, and said, “Really sorry. Please.” He waved me into the backseat, got in next to me, and told the driver, a foreign guy in a black suit and shades, “We need to get my man to…”

  “West Broadway and Grand Street,” I said.

  “We don’t have a lot of time,” Gerald said. “Seventh Avenue might be good.”

  The driver said, “I take a try, my friend,” as we pulled into traffic.

  “Thanks,” Gerald said, and turned to me. “That’s a great thing here. If you don’t know someone, you say ‘my friend.’ It’s like, ‘For purposes of this discussion, we grew up together, we went in the woods and smoked cigarettes, we enlisted the same day, we got laid on twin beds in a motel room that one time, and I lied to the FBI for you. You don’t remember all that? No problem. Thirty-eight cents is your change, my friend.’” The car turned west. “Can you forgive me? My friend? At least tell me how you are.”

  “I’m okay,” I said. “How are things going with the metals?”

  “Yeah, that’s a funny business,” Gerald said, looking away for a second and then turning back to me. “It’s good to see you.”

  “It’s good to see you, too,” I said. “I just have to do this thing for work.”

  “Hey, I understand. You got your mind on your money and your money on your mind. Same reason I’m late. I was talking to a guy, and then I was just listening to him talk, and then I was faking appendicitis to get out of there, but you know how people are these days.”

  We were ten minutes late downtown. Gerald asked if he should wait and I said, “No, come in with me. I have to go back after this.” He sent the driver away.

  The showroom was like Wendy Probst’s gallery, but with spotlit mounds of tea leaves on stone columns instead of art. A short thin man in his thirties came out of the back, wearing the pants and vest of a pinstripe suit and a Julius Caesar haircut. “Good afternoon,” he said. “Stephen Randolph.”

  “I’m Henry Bay,” I said. “From Cozy.”

  “Oh. Okay, so not Richard. And you’re?”

  “Gerald.”

  “Hi, Gerald. Tea?”

  We said yes and he put a kettle on. I read a price list, letterpress on deckled paper. Nothing cost less than seventy dollars a pound. Randolph said, “People say the prices are obscene, but in fact they’re not. They’re the price of having one thing in your life that isn’t a compromise”—a sentence I nev
er got tired of hearing from people who sold things to enthusiasts.

  He swirled tea and water in a clear glass pot. “So Richard and Agnes are at the point where they’re hiring people? That’s nice. What do you think about what they’re doing?”

  “I think it’s good,” I said. “I mean—”

  “Because I like them personally, but is it unfair to ask you that? It’s like, here’s a girl with doilies on her tits. Okay, but could we have something about tea for people who actually know about it?”

  “I know what you mean about the doily thing,” I said.

  “She didn’t have the tits for it, either. Not that it’s my business.” He served the tea. “This is the first Indian tea we did, and I’ll keep importing it no matter how ridiculous it gets.”

  “How about that rupee?” Gerald said.

  “Fuck me,” Randolph said. “The year I’ve just had. What do you do?”

  “Strategic metal trading.”

  “Oh, interesting. You trade for a company, or…?”

  “A few investors.”

  “Okay. Wow, so nerves of steel. Good for you.”

  Gerald tasted his tea and did an “Oh” of appreciation exactly like Richard’s. “I get that a lot on this tea,” Randolph said. He turned to me. “Your thoughts?”

  “It’s really good.”

  “I’m relieved to hear that, but what do you think of it?”

  “Well, it seems like an Assam, from the…body, and—”

  “You think so? You want to get back to me on that? It’s Satrupa Kama Black. Reasonably basic. See, this is what I’m talking about.” He clapped his hands once. “Okay, can we get this picture taken?”

  We walked north. “Clients,” Gerald said.

  I didn’t answer.

  He said, “What?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “It’s fine.”

  “Are you pissed that I was talking to him? I was just trying to be the color guy.”

  “No, it’s fine.” We walked for a minute. “You know the thing you said to me when you came to Albany?”

  “I don’t know where I was this morning. What did I say in Albany?”