They never even became boyfriend and girlfriend. They went to a couple of all-ages indie-rock shows together at the Seventh Street Entry. They attended several parties that were indistinguishable from the one where they met. Michael wanted to have sex, so did Jay. They practiced the pull-out method, which had worked for Jay with the ten or so partners she had racked up through high school and one year of college. In fact, Jay had started to wonder about her fertility—envisioning a future when she was thirty-five and unable to bear a child. It became one of many amorphous anxieties that plagued her in those days.
It turned out she needn’t have worried. She had sex with Michael three or four times, and she got pregnant. What rankled still was that the sex wasn’t very good at all. She’d had a lover at sixteen, her second, who with a total lack of carnal training had been better in the sack than Michael. Rookie luck, she supposed. The memory of Michael made her bitter—the way he pawed at her breasts with no recognition of the subtle nerve topography there, the way he seemed not to have heard of the clitoris, the way he mounted her and heaved in a middling fashion that brought neither the satisfaction of the subtle stroke or the aggressive joy of the animal fuck. He was the man who had fathered her child.
The restaurant where Jay worked was on a stretch of Lyndale that featured a bike shop, a brewpub, a rug store, and two coffeehouses. Back when Jay was in high school, she used to smoke pot with her friends and walk around this neighborhood. One time they snorted some crystal meth (obtained from a connection to the rural wastes of the Iron Range) and walked miles and miles for hours and hours around Uptown and the Wedge, in widening circles until they were all the way downtown at the doors of the City Center. In the late-morning wind, Jay could taste the methamphetamine in the back of her mouth as, six years after the fact, she prepared for her shift at the Cogito.
She tried to remember what the building had been in earlier incarnations, during her childhood and teenage years. Nothing came to mind. Time passed. Lewis was always going on about the mutability of things and, though she had never really doubted him, she was now seeing for herself. The Cogito had existed less than a year, and would undoubtedly vanish in a few more. Restaurants had their own reality: you leased a place with kitchen facilities, you cooked food, customers showed up and told their friends about a new cutting-edge eatery they had discovered. Maybe a reporter from the newspaper came and did a story. Then, after a while, the restaurant’s familiar presence, its reliable solidity, became a perfect excuse for never visiting it. That was when you went out of business. If you weren’t totally ruined, you could take a chance and open another one.
Jay went in through the back, hung up her jacket, and said Buenos días to Jorge, who washed dishes and chopped food for eight hours a day. He was half of an enthusiastically acrimonious duo with Fowler, the cook, who was short and slight and had perpetually bloodshot eyes. Though Jorge was taller, and stouter, the two men were like a pair of dogs who had established a pecking order in inverse order to their respective sizes. The Cogito’s other cook was a middle-aged woman called Giselle, who was pleasant and much easier to deal with than Fowler. It was by virtue of this agreeable personality that she generally got the dinner shifts, though in fact Fowler was the better cook.
Jay paused in the kitchen and took in the smells of garlic and saffron, the sizzle of oil in the pan and the warm, close air.
And then in came Phil, her boss. He was about thirty and so good-looking as to be an improbable heterosexual—though these credentials were firmly established by his constant advances toward Jay, usually couched in nice-guy camaraderie but unmistakable nonetheless. Putting on her apron, she sensed Phil’s eyes on her. His attractiveness was no problem—Michael Carmelov had obligingly cured her forever of mistaking good looks for appealing inner qualities—but Phil’s look added to a feeling she was coming to hate. She wanted to become invisible, she wanted to be left alone. It was like the look Stephen gave her, and Ramona. These hungry eyes stripped her down. Most of all she resented the one-sidedness of all these looks—when did she get her visual feast?
“Morning, Jay,” Phil said. “You’re a little late.”
“I had to drop Ramona off,” Jay told him, fixing her hair in the mirror. “Plus I fell into a space-time vortex and had a bitch of a time climbing out.”
“Those are nasty,” Phil admitted. He gave a brunch order to Fowler—verbally, of course, because Phil took pride in never writing anything down. He had asked Jay to do the same, in the name of some amorphous sense of elegance, but it proved impossible. She’d inevitably forget the order, then be forced to return to the table to take it again. Sometimes when she came back, the customers couldn’t remember what they had ordered, and the whole process had to begin again.
“This fish isn’t good,” Fowler said, pointing with a wooden spoon at a ceramic dish of fillets on the counter.
“Dress it up,” Phil said. “Put lemon slices over it.”
“Where are we getting this shit?” Fowler’s mustache folded with distaste.
“I don’t even know,” Phil replied. “Talk to Bjorn or Jenny about it if you have a problem.”
“Just cook it,” Jorge muttered.
“Hey, go fuck yourself, Jorge,” Phil said over the divider that bisected the kitchen.
“You are bitching too much,” Jorge said.
Fowler put his nose close to the fillets. “Smell it,” he said to no one in particular. “Someone’s going to get sick. If no one else is, I’m going to, just from being around this trash. It smells like mercury.”
“No one’s going to get sick,” Phil pronounced, as though he willed it to be so. “Just make sure it’s cooked all the way through.”
“I know how to cook a fucking fish,” Fowler said. “I’m just saying it smells like a garbage barge.”
Phil threw up his hands. “Then prove it, Great One. Cook the fucking fish.”
“All he does is bitch,” said Jorge. “It’s making me insane.”
Jay had worked her share of crap jobs—clerking in a mall music store, scooping ice cream, ringing up orders in a fast-food joint—all through high school. Since leaving college she’d become a waitress. In her excursions into the service sector, she had come to sort her co-workers into two categories: those who belonged at their level of employment, and those who didn’t. Fowler was firmly in the former category—he cooked food, and would presumably do so as long as he was able. Jorge was among the latter—he was unskilled, his English wasn’t great, but he had a presence that belied the fact of his menial job. He was probably consigned permanently to such tasks, but there was a Jorgeness about him untouched by soap suds, cutting boards, and any future trash cans that would need to be emptied. Phil occupied a special place—he was one of the former who believed himself to be among the latter. He managed the day shift at a small restaurant in south Minneapolis. Within a few years he would have lived more than half his days.
The question, naturally: Of which type was Jay? The youthful-promise thing had worked fine so far. She could schlep pasta and uncork Chianti while polishing the gem of her yet-unlined face and destiny, which surely was to get it together and become a viable adult with a good job and a household in which Ramona could become one of those self-possessed little genius children rather than a life-scarred ragamuffin.
Right? She wasn’t going to be waiting tables in ten years, was she?
Jay liked the first part of any shift best. The dining room looked fresh with its undersized tables, rough floor, and austere lighting. Later the room would seem tawdry and worn out, when she felt the same, and Jay would inevitably wonder when this unadorned decorating thing would go out of style—because, honestly, wasn’t rough and raw the same as ugly, and when had it become déclassé to want to sit in a comfortable chair or have art on the wall that represented something, or to play music with heart and emotion rather than merely a detached manipulation of . . .
Whoa. That sounded exactly like Lewis.
She
wore a path between the dining room and the kitchen, bringing forth garnished sandwiches, dressed-up hamburgers, and complicated salads. She got hungry and Fowler made her some scrambled eggs, which she ate standing up.
Not a day passed without Jay pondering her decision to quit college. It was a lot of work, college, despite all the good-times propaganda, but she would have been a graduate by now instead of chewing eggs in a drafty kitchen.
“Good eggs?” Fowler asked, looking up from a Mephistophelean fire that was making his forehead sweat.
“The best,” said Jay.
“People put too much spice in ’em,” Fowler said. “Fucks them up. Eggs taste good. They don’t need help.”
With the benefit of a few years’ experience in the world, Jay understood that her choice of a history major might have been quixotic. If she didn’t complete grad school, her degree would have guaranteed prospects little more appetizing than teaching school or, maybe, writing for some organization. She still had the option of returning to school to earn some kind of practical degree—business, or communications. But what then? Work for a corporation? Lewis had done that for decades, and made plenty of money, but he never claimed to like it. The Lewis that Jay saw going off to work Mondays barely resembled the laughing, subversive father of Saturday morning. He turned buttoned-up, stiff, and in some automatic mode in which he killed off part of himself. He seemed happier selling shirts. Well, not happier—how to use that word, with a man like Lewis—but at least more authentic.
So what was she going to do? When she tried to talk to Stephen, he told her to read Marx. She’d already read Marx, back in high school. Sure, we were all alienated from our work—point granted. Capitalism sucks? Sure, why not. It was all well and good for a dead bearded guy. But what about her?
She wished her mother were alive.
At least Anna died at home, which was all she had asked for in her final days. Lewis had called in the morning while Jay was making Ramona her toast and juice, and told her that Anna had died an hour before in the first light of dawn. He waited until Jay came over before calling the paramedics to take the body away.
The way it worked was, you said good-bye to someone, and then you thought about them all the time. You knew they weren’t coming back, yet still you held each new event and possibility for them to examine, to comment upon. But they never did. Dead people were stupid, with their stubborn inability to keep up with current events.
Jay had an armload of dishes as she wove through the nearly full dining room. The Cogito was going through its growth phase, too innocent yet to look ahead to its decline. Everyone who came in was rubbing their hands together, blowing their noses, their eyes full of the unexpected cold. The street through the window had that browned-out colorless hue of winter before the snow.
She laid out the plates for a trio next to the window—a woman in black, and two bearded men wearing the earnest earth tones of Unitarians. Jay had pegged them as local theater types, or maybe small-time real-estate entrepreneurs. She knew they had her pegged as a waitress.
“Miss?” said one of the men, kindly eyed through glasses. “Excuse me?”
Jay was halfway gone, and had to stop and turn. “Did I forget something?”
“No, it’s just that we didn’t order this.” His companions looked down at their plates as though they had arrived from another galaxy.
“We haven’t ordered anything,” said the woman in black. “Can we see some menus?”
Wrong table. Jay picked up the plates again. She sensed everyone in the place looking at her. She wavered for a moment and then decided to brazen it out. The rightful owners of the three dishes looked at them warily, glancing over at the other table as though gauging how much they had contaminated the food during their brief ownership of it. Jay smiled as though nothing had happened.
Only a few more hours to go.
7. THE POINT OF FEAR, BEYOND ITS UTILITY AS A WARNING.
There comes a point at which the sweating man begins to feel a chill rather than the heat of his exertion. It’s a nauseating feeling, accompanied by a threat of loosening from the bowels and a general blurring of vision. The whole thing was downright ominous. It made a man think of how he might feel in the final moments before a catastrophic physical breakdown.
Stephen stood panting and dripping, watching a man almost ten years his junior line up for a free throw and, inevitably, miss it. These were, after all, graduate students in the humanities. They could toss around a little Kant and Hegel, but they were hopeless with a basketball in their hands.
The game resumed. Stephen had long since stopped caring about the score, his main ambition now being to keep moving without passing out, or dying, or suffering an involuntary explosion from his innards that would embarrassingly soil the court at the university gym. He jogged across half-court, his knees aching, one arm held up for the ball.
Of course he shouldn’t have done that. He was the sole faculty member on the court, and the students kept one eye on him at all times—in part to divine whether he favored any of them, also in sheer curiosity over whether he could keep his feet. As soon as he indicated an interest in the ball, it was duly passed to him. And here it was, orange and pimpled, requiring a dismaying amount of arm strength to keep it bouncing.
He was being guarded by Francis, a second-year kid from Brown who went to great pains to convince people how unguarded and guileless he was. Stephen bounced the ball and tried to keep his eyes in focus. Francis was giving him plenty of space, not poking at the ball, for which Stephen was both grateful and abstractly irritated. He took a couple of lateral steps, and Francis followed a step behind. Surely he wasn’t going to lay off so much—Stephen was only thirty-two, after all. Did they have him placed in another generation?
Looking around, trying to remember which players were on his team—Tim Rappel? King? That cipher from Urban Planning?—Stephen felt a spasm somewhere in his midsection and half-coughed, half-belched up something that tasted like . . . like . . . last night’s three whiskey and sodas. He kept the ball bouncing and tried not to think about it. From the waist down he was all pain. Above that was an entire mountain range of trouble, peaks of nausea and valleys of abdominal insubordination. Breaking into a run seemed out of the question.
But it appeared he had to do something. He had been dribbling the ball for a long time. Someone said something about Gary Payton that may or may not have been directed at him. He was too flustered and spent to try passing the ball, so he put his head down and stepped past Francis, who stared in surprise and made little attempt to stop him. A couple of opponents closed in on him now, but moving forward with perhaps the final reserves of his legs and heart, he burst to within about eight feet of the basket and let loose a one-handed floater.
Stephen’s momentum carried him into the Urban Planning guy, who shunted him aside torero-style. As he tumbled to the floor, already adoring the sweet relief of lying down, he watched the ball reach the altitude of the basket like a wounded bird. God, what an embarrassing shot—he had sort of pitched it up there, like an end-of-the-bench sub in a high-school girls’ game. Now, improbably, almost apologetically, it sort of slid into the net with barely enough force to make it through. It landed on the floor with an exhausted thud, right next to him.
“Nice one,” said Francis, who was going to be attending one of Stephen’s critical theory seminars next semester.
“That was George Gervin shit,” said the Urban Planning guy in the requisite pseudo-insulting manner in which they all felt compelled to communicate.
“Thank . . . you,” Stephen gasped. He glanced at his watch as he peeled himself off the floor, leaving a big sweat stain where he had fallen. They’d been playing for half an hour. But full-court, he reminded himself. “And now . . . that I’ve taken you all to school . . . ahg . . . so to speak . . . I have to make . . . a phone call.”
Stephen staggered across midcourt to the bench at the other end. There were protests about him leaving his
team shorthanded, but finally the younger men allowed him to salvage some dignity. His chest burned and his guts growled, but he thought he might be able to ride it out. He fought off an overpowering urge to go outside and curl up in the grass, knowing it was too damn cold for that.
He had said something about making a call. To save face as the game resumed, he rooted around in his jacket for his phone. He dialed Jay’s apartment out of reflex. There really wasn’t anyone else for him to call, anyway. She answered with a tone of tired self-defense.
“Where are you?” she asked.
“At the gym,” he said in an approximation of his usual speaking voice. “Playing basketball with a bunch of students. Trying not to drop dead.”
Jay laughed. “Yeah, you’re such an old man.”
“All evidence points in that direction,” Stephen said. “I think I almost passed out.”
“Then we may have a problem. I’m not sure how much I want to be your nursemaid.”
“How was work?” he asked.
“Fantastic. Brilliant. I cured cancer and healed the Republic. Plus I brokered a peace between the Twin Cities.”
“Something’s bothering you, then,” Stephen said.
“Look, don’t start—”
“Because whenever I hear this woe-is-me stuff—”
“Didn’t I just say not to—”
“You should listen to yourself,” he told her. “You sound like you’re under attack. And that can only mean one thing.”
“Oh, fuck, Stephen.”
“How long has it been since you talked to him?”
“I hung up about a minute before you called,” Jay said. She was laughing.
“They do call me doctor,” Stephen told her. “And I do love you, Jaybird. I don’t like hearing you in these moods.”
The Urban Planning guy drove the lane and tossed in a smooth layup. Stephen hadn’t made such a graceful shot since his blacktop preteen days.
“You know what?” Jay said, flashing back to her default mode of defensive hostility. “I don’t like being in a bad mood. But it doesn’t help to have it pointed out to me when I’m crabby. They call you doctor, Stephen, but I don’t.”
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