He sprinkled six or seven dollar bills onto the counter and flew into his parka. Before Orrin could do anything about the money, Eli was on his way, and though he had made a point to say he would be home for dinner, it would not have surprised Orrin to see him next a fortnight hence. He would bustle in, brimming over with cases and causes and half-told tales, and say he was back from the Gold Coast of Africa—certainly he had mentioned the trip, and hadn’t he sent the air-letters from Yaoundé?
The man was a whirlwind, even unto himself Orrin suspected, and could no more be pinned down or accounted for than any other gust of air. No matter. Now that a new decade was under way for him, Orrin felt up to life again. How fitting it should begin with such a glorious heart-lifting day as this, warm air from the Georgia Sea Islands combining with dry air down from Hudson Bay. The park grounds were swarming with optimistic spring birds, flickering brown sparrows, huge zooming blue-jays—even the hideous twitching pigeons looked slim and sprightly in this Warm Dry Air. Yes; everything mattered.
Recently he had read a paper on the shock of waking. The slowed-down sleeping heart was not at all ready for harsh alarm bells or the ingestive jolt of coffee, much less a program of vigorous “setting-up” exercises. Best to pamper the heart until it was up to speed, to flatter it with a leisurely aristocratic start.
It made sense. Orrin had flattered his heart this morning, and now it responded with a clean steady beat that carried him to Beacon Street in perfect tune. Why doubt it would carry him into the future, as it had carried him unfailingly in the past? In the silvery plate-glass going in, he saw a dapper almost handsome man and it did not surprise him to learn that the man was Orrin G. Summers. He almost expected as much.
16
It was just as lovely strolling home that evening, Warm Dry Air now cooled by cottony sea-breezes. Orrin stopped by the lagoon to hear a girl in tattered antique dress sing “The Wild Mountain Thyme” in a haunting soaring voice. Enchanted and benevolent, he floated a fiver into her guitar-case before moving along. There was none of the usual fatigue as he hit the stairs at Filbert Street. He opened his own door as though unclasping a box of delights: faded light on the cherry table, rich aromas wafting from the kitchen, Paperman singing soul ballads in the shower.
So Eli made it. In fact he had been in production for some time; a stunning disarray of pots bespoke his high seriousness. It was Orrin’s understanding that the best chef made the biggest mess. When Julia Child cooked on television she cut a swath like Sherman marching to the sea, and he always imagined an army of small men tidying up furiously in her wake. When he cooked, there was no detritus at all. Orrin heated food, primarily, at least that was his forte, whereas now the counter was littered with choppings—onions and cheese, red and green peppers, carrots and tomatoes—and the saucepans were thickly stacked, the spice-jars all uncorked. Mother Paperman’s Hyperactive Chili!
When the chef himself appeared, Orrin was rinsing a Boston lettuce in the colander; he would contribute a nice salad to the feast. “Fine,” said Eli, “but no need to rush. This business needs to simmer another half-hour. By the way, I hope you like chili?”
“Well, Mother Paperman’s Special Chili.…”
“Nothing too special. Chili’s one of those things. You toss in the good fresh stuff and keep it bubbling. It’s a can’t miss, really.”
“You say. And I say it smells—” Orrin paused, waiting for the appropriate conceit to present itself.
“—good enough to eat,” supplied Eli, when the silence felt adequately elongated and no poesie appeared en route. “Orrin, I want to thank you for calling me out this morning—on that disaster with the armored-car driver.”
“The Man Crushed By Quarters?”
“Yes. I spoke with his wife.”
“You did what?”
“I got hold of the man’s widow. I figured the least I could do was make certain the family was well fixed, so I did some looking into.”
“Impossible,” said Orrin, unable to forge a link between the squib in this morning’s Globe and the movements of actual persons, such as Eli Paperman, and the coin widow.
“Five K, all in quarters, from vending machines. Needless to say, it should never have happened. All he did was hit the brakes. They will have to come through very large on this one for the family.”
“Gee, I hope they don’t pay up in quarters, it could prove traumatic.”
“Hey, come on. You get to me on this and now you want to be making the jokes?”
“Not at all, Eli. I’m impressed—astonished, really—by the reach of your conscience and by your abilities. Who would conceive of such direct action?”
“Are you kidding? Plenty of my legal brethren conceived of it muy pronto—for a third of say two million buck-aroos? There was a quotation on the desk of my favorite law professor: ‘The law is a profession where much that is odious can be done without disgrace.’ It’s sad but true.”
“But you got her ear.”
“I did. By offering to oversee the settlement for no fee at all.”
“Now what kind of a con artist is that.” Orrin poked, but he did not wish to poke any more testy areas. He had instantly forgotten The Man Crushed By Quarters and had gone on down to the office to take six hundred quarters each from two unhappy women before lunch, and the same again from Sinclair-Fugard at two. Placing no limits on his self-indulgence, he had gone from there to The Club to read a few articles and sit by a birch-log fire with two sadistic young neurosurgeons, who were bitching about fees in the thousands per diem while Eli was out there doing good at his own expense.
Ted Neff had once had a conscience (in Orrin’s version, May had simply confiscated it) and often said he still would if he had the time. What about Eli? What would he be up to in twenty years: good works, still, or golf on Mondays and Wednesdays? Did a good man slide inevitably toward mediocrity, his will and best energies eroded by all the quotidian setbacks and pleasures? By what Orrin’s own profession (where also much that was odious could be done without disgrace) called “reality”.
They had finished their meal and were cleaning up when Marcy arrived. Orrin offered to crisp up the salad, and hot up the bread, but Marcy declined all save a can of beer. Had this girl taken Bud in a can with her previous beaux? Could she be a typical mere chameleon? To Orrin, it seemed unlikely. She was attractive in a refined way (even laboring within the slight affectation of green corduroy overalls, she was) and had a charming sense of humor, deprecating and self-deprecating. When he passed along Eli’s witticism about the lawyers, Marcy was ready with one of her own almost as good:
“‘The business of a solicitor is to conceal crime’. Oscar Wilde.”
“We’d better make a list of these,” said Orrin.
“Don’t mind me,” said Eli.
“You shouldn’t feel badly,” said Marcy. “Voltaire’s rule of thumb was that all people use words mainly to conceal their true thoughts. Not only lawyers, Eli.”
“I feel much better now, Marce. And it’s all thanks to Voltaire’s thumb.”
But Voltaire! Some girl, thought Orrin Summers. This is not your average chickadeedee. Now her eyes were alight with merriment when Eli, in all seriousness, stated an intention to read more of the classic writers.
“Eli’s reading habits are the most remarkable thing about him, I think. The way he devours things. He’s sort of a benign monster. You know what he means when he talks about reading a book in one sitting?”
Orrin did not. Eli was shaking his head as Orrin, with a sly grin and a palm, gave her the floor in continuation.
“It means he goes to the john, takes a seat, and reads. A minute later you hear the flush and he’s ready to read something else.”
“A benign monster. I do like that, Eli.”
Orrin was treading past a slight discomfort with Marcy’s frank toilet talk. Plus it somehow had not occurred to him that she and Eli were room-mates too, more so in fact than he and Eli. He eased to the stereo a
nd plucked Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto from the rack, and was monitoring the drop when he heard the telephone.
And here he realized something else for the first time. As rarely as it rang, the phone was never for Eli. Did he take his personal calls at Marcy’s? Had he been doing so for long? Meanwhile he excused himself to take this one in the bedroom.
“Hello?”
“Dad, is it you?”
“Is it me? Well yes it is, whoever I am. This cannot be my daughter Elspeth?”
“Yeah, hi.”
“Hello. Hello hello.”
“Hi. I was talking to old Clydesdale and he said you were having trouble getting hold of me, so—I called! He said you came to hear us at The Rat, but I assume that’s a gag.”
“Oh no, I did hear. Or at least I did come. There were so many obstacles to hearing, you know.”
“That’s not the reputation, exactly.”
“The volume was excellent, I didn’t mean that. Or yes. But a very interesting experience. Very.”
“Didn’t like us, huh? Can’t say I blame you. We were far from being sharp. Deado, in fact. That was consensus.”
“Well I thought it was good. I wanted to hear the words, though, and I just couldn’t catch many.”
“Words can be tough.”
“Yes. I thought so.”
Orrin was dazed. Astounded. That she had called and that they were talking. Awkwardly, to be sure, gropingly—yet almost casually too, as though they talked together all the time. As though they were old friends, with familiar tones and timbres, easing past all intervening wounds and the measureless gaps in time.
“In a club gig,” she was saying, “you don’t really get lyrics as such. I mean, you aren’t there for that, there.”
“I’m sure you’re right.”
“What was it, though, did you want to analyze me from the lyrics—like, do an exegesis?”
“No, Elspie, nothing like that. Nothing to do with Jesus. I just wanted to hear what you were doing. I was your father, you know, and took a kindly interest in your progress. Remember?”
“Yes, Dad,” she said, with the same weary irony that had crept into her voice around fourteen.
“You would show me your science projects and I would marvel at the achievement, and you would be simultaneously pleased and detached. More like that, what I had in mind.”
“Like, catch up on my work.”
“Yes, exactly. And I thought, Who knows, maybe I’ll find I like it.”
“No way, Dad. You don’t like loud. No one did in that house. Even old Clydesdale was forever upon my case about the radio. This would be, like, prior to the onset of walkman technology, of course.
“I’m sure you’re right about the technology. But you shouldn’t assume I didn’t care for it. I really might have. It was hard to know. I was coping with a whole environment too—that Rat, I mean.”
“Not a place for the faint of heart. Anyway, Clyde said you were trying to get me, so I thought I’d call.”
“I can’t express how glad I am that you did. But tell me how things are with you. Maybe we should get together for a bite to eat?”
“Now?”
Elspeth sounded truly alarmed at such a radical imminence. “If you like. Or anytime. Whenever it suits your schedule.”
“Tell you what, Dad. Why don’t I—when we get back—see, we are going out on the road for a few weeks, starting soon, and we are having to rehearse very heavily just now. But when we get back, I get back to you and we make a definite plan, to eat a bite.”
Orrin could respond neither honestly nor with dishonest assent to this transparent scrambling evasion. Slammed by it, at a loss to mitigate or alter it, he stood listening to his own breath in the receiver. What an extraordinary relationship, he thought: and how sad, for me. For her sake he searched after any trite phrase of farewell, to let her off the hook if that was what she needed, and yet when the power of speech did return to him, he spoke with a gentle directness,
“El, doesn’t it make you feel sad to be so far off, from your mother and me? It’s so unnecessary—” He faltered, close to sobbing, and to the boundary of pure wordless emotion. “—so unnecessary, you know. We really love you, you know, and I miss you so very much.”
Was she crying too at the other end, or was it only more of his own distress echoing in the receiver? Once again the absurdity of a life conducted over the phone! Was it symbolic of the age, that this was as close as he could get?
“Got to run, Dad,” she finally spoke into the blooming silence. Orrin knew he had blown it, had left her nowhere to stand. What was she supposed to say—Oh yes, I miss you too? Elspeth? Never. Nor could she hardline it and just punch his ticket: hard cheese, old chap, good riddance to bad rubbish. What could she do but cut and run?
“But I will be getting back to you as soon as we come off this tour.”
“To eat the bite,” he said. In a pig’s valise, he thought. He was wearing the expression sometimes termed a shit-eating grin.
“Yeah. Or maybe a few bites. Whatever, right? We’ll get together. And meanwhile take care, okay?”
Gone. As pleasantly impersonal as a cashier at the Seven-Eleven: have a good day. Remarkable.
He sat a moment longer with the dead line, then stood and wandered toward the bedroom door. He would wait himself out, allowing the blood and air to make their way around a few times, making sure the brain had cleared itself for takeoff. Eli and Marcy had moved together on the sofa and were talking energetically at close quarters, words Orrin could not make out. The Mendelssohn had just concluded for in heightened sensitivity he could hear the gentle deceleration of the turntable to stasis, louder to his ear than the two ebullient voices.
Coming back now—reawakened to the world by his curiosity about their talk and by a fine needle of thirst in his throat which might require immediate attention. It was not his desire to make any mention of the call, except that Paperman put a finger right on it, unerringly: “Orrin, my man, you look like you just saw a ghost.”
“More likely heard one,” corrected Marcy, and while they quibbled good-naturedly about the specific gravity of clichéd phrasing, Orrin was quietly decanting a Fudd to the post-orbital torus and slapping it down.
“I did,” he said.
“Gail?”
“No. Her daughter. My daughter.”
“How nice. Unless there’s some kind of difficulty?”
“No. No difficulty. She called to say hello—and not much else. God knows why tonight.”
He did not even detect himself at topping up the glass, the call of this thirst being quite subterranean, like the functioning of unseen reliable glands.
“Marce, I have never properly introduced you to my room-mate here. You see he is Dr. Orrin G. Summers, as advertised, but he is also secretly the father of Elspeth Summers.”
“You don’t say. But who is Elspeth Summers?”
“The rock chanteuse. You must have heard Air Force Two?”
“Not to my knowledge. Can I congratulate you anyway?”
“On having a daughter, or on having a rock star in the family?”
“On getting a phone call!” said Paperman.
“Daughters are a world unto themselves. You, Marcy Green, are a daughter.”
“Yes I are.”
“But whose? If I may ask.”
“My father’s. Whoops—he got me, Eli. My mother’s too. But I can stop being silly if you really want to know. My mother lives in New York and designs advertising layouts. My father lives in Connecticut and is a judge, believe it or not.”
“You like him?”
“I love him.”
“Because he is your father.”
“I suppose that’s where it all began. He is a very nice man, very considerate.”
“He and your mother split, yet you find him considerate and you love him.”
“Sure. But why do you assume that he left her?”
“I don’t. Did he?”
“No. But you’re probably right. I love him simply because he’s my father. What the hell, I’m sure I wouldn’t love him if he weren’t my father.”
“Yes, I agree, it’s all pretty silly. I was just using available materials for a little spurious research.”
The conversation drifted to other subjects and Orrin conducted it pellucidly despite the systematic dispatch of multiple Fudds. Something so deeply sobering had occurred that he might have diluted his blood by half and still glided through on cruise control. He was surprised when they suddenly got up to go—it had all been so pleasant, why cut it short? But he hid his disappointment beautifully, and took a hearty line as the night absorbed them: “Drop me a card from Yaounde.”
Such graciousness may have been necessary pretense and yet why not “improve the occasion” by getting on to the desk, tinkering together some of his notes on luck, or on habit. Though the theme of luck (along with its philosophical subtext) was more current, the topic of habit had become almost a habit with him, a fallback, ever since the time of his thesis. His conclusion then (that a habit was “essentially a self-indulgence which tripped stimuli to create a comfortable state of mind”) seemed even at the time imbecilic, or sufficiently transparent as to require no formal statement. Yet he continued to get mileage out of that paper almost thirty years later.
He tuned the gooseneck, adjusted the swivel chair, shuffled and spread the note-cards, and then went quite blank. He had inadvertently absorbed enough hooch to stun a horse after all, and by now the rising tide of whiskey was going to erode the shores of intellectual ferment. Orrin rushed some strong French coffee into production and added it to the mix—too little too late.
The delayed effects were suddenly dramatic. He could see his hands fumble with a sheaf of papers but had to watch them helplessly, as though they were hands in a movie, shown closeup. He was leaning forward when his head cracked like a gunshot on the desk and for a time, maybe a minute, he just left it there, wondering why it felt wet.
When he finally touched his forehead, he found cooling coffee—or was there a trace of blood as well? Starting to the mirror to make sure, he hooked the jutting chairbase and went sprawling. Comedy, he thought, but not funny. Notes on Comedy? Notes on Notes and fuck-all-notes, he thought, and pushed himself on to a viewing of the coffee pompadour. The only blood was in his eyes, laced with the fine lines of a fury that focussed not on the problems of comedy, or scholarship, or drink, but on Eli.
Postcards from Pinsk Page 14
