Authors: Bel Canto
“It’s nothing as formal as that,” Gen said. “I’m
happy to speak to Miss Coss. We can go now. I’ll tell her whatever you want to
say.”
At that the
great
Russian paled and took three nervous puffs off his cigarette. So massive were
this man’s lungs that the little cigarette was all but finished off by his
sudden burst of attention. “There is no rush for this, my friend.”
“Unless we’re released tomorrow.”
He nodded and smiled. “You let me escape from
nothing.” He pointed his smoked-out cigarette at Gen. “You are thinking. You
are telling me it is time to declare myself.”
Gen thought he might have misunderstood the
verb
to declare
. It could have other meanings. He
could speak Russian, but his understanding lacked nuance. “I’m not telling you
anything other than that Miss Coss is right there if you want to speak to her.”
“Let’s call it tomorrow, shall we? I’ll speak
in the morning”—he clapped a hand down on Gen’s shoulder—“in case we are so
fortunate. Is the morning fine with you?”
“I’ll be here.”
“Just after she sings,” he said. Then he added,
“But without rushing her any.”
Gen told him that sounded reasonable.
“Good, good. That will give me time to prepare
my thoughts. I will be awake all night. You are very good. Your Russian is very
good.”
“Thank you,” Gen said. He had hoped that maybe
they could talk for a while about Pushkin. There were things he wanted to know
about
Eugene Onegin
and
The
Queen of Spades,
but Fyodorov was gone, lumbering back to his corner
like a fighter ready for the second round. The other two Russians were waiting
for him, smoking.
The Vice President was standing in the kitchen
looking into a box of vegetables, crookneck squash and dark purple eggplants,
tomatoes and sweet yellow onions. He took this as a bad sign that the people
who surrounded the house were growing bored with their kidnapping. How long did
these crises ever last? Six hours? Two days? After that they lobbed in some
tear gas and everyone surrendered. But somehow these cut-rate terrorists had
thwarted any rescue. Maybe it was because there were so many hostages. Maybe it
was the wall around the vice-presidential house, or their fear of accidentally
killing Roxane Coss. For whatever reason, their situation had already crawled
past its second week. It was completely conceivable that they were no longer on
the front page of the paper or that they had already fallen to the second or
even the third story on the evening news. People had gotten on with their
lives. A more practical stand was being taken, as evidenced by the food in
front of him. The Vice President imagined his group the survivors of a
shipwreck who watched helplessly while the last search-and-rescue helicopter
spun north towards the mainland. The evidence was in the food. At first it had
all been prepared, sandwiches or casseroles of pulled chicken and rice. Then it
came in needing some assembly, bread and meat and cheese wrapped on separate
trays. But this, this was something else entirely. Fifteen raw chickens, pink
and cold, their stomachs greasing the counter, boxes of vegetables, bags of
dried beans, tins of shortening. Certainly it was enough food, the chickens
appeared to have been robust, but the question was how did one effect the
transformation? How
did what
was here become dinner?
Ruben believed the question was his responsibility to answer but he knew
nothing of his own kitchen. He did not know where the colander was. He did not
know marjoram from thyme. He wondered if his wife would have known. Truthfully,
they had been taken care of for too long. He had realized that in these past
weeks as he swept the floors and folded up the bedding. Perhaps he had been
useful in society, but as far as household matters were concerned he had become
some kind of fancy lapdog. As a boy he had received no domestic training. He
had never once been asked to set a table or peel a carrot. His sisters made his
bed and folded his clothes. It had taken a state of captivity to force him to
figure out the operation of his own washer and dryer. Every day there was a
never-ending list of things that needed to be attended to. If he worked without
stop from the moment he woke up in the morning until he fell into an exhausted
heap on his pile of blankets, he could not keep the house in the manner to
which he had been accustomed to seeing it. How this house had sung just a short
while ago! There was no telling how many girls came and went, dusting and
buffing, ironing shirts and handkerchiefs, mopping the most imperceptible
cobwebs from the corners of his ceiling. They polished the brass strips at the
base of the front door. They kept the pantry filled with sweet cakes and
pickled beets. They left the vaguest scent of their own bath powder (which his
wife bought each of them for their birthdays every year, a generous round
container with a fat down puff on top) behind them in the rooms and so
everything smelled like a fistful of hyacinth sprinkled with talc. Not one
thing in the house demanded his attention, not one object asked for his
intercession. Even his own children were bathed and brushed and put to bed by
lovely hired hands. It was perfect, always and completely perfect.
And his guests! Who were these men who never
took their dishes to the sink? At least the terrorists he could forgive. They
were for the most part children, and besides, they had been raised in the
jungle. (At this he thought of his own mother, who would call to him when he
forgot to close the front door, “I should send you to live in the jungle where
you wouldn’t be bothered by things like doors!”) The hostages were accustomed
to valets and secretaries, and while they had cooks and maids they probably
never saw them. Not only were their households run for them, they were run so
silently, so efficiently, that they never had to encounter the operations.
Of course Ruben could have let it all go. It
wasn’t really his house, after all. He could have watched the carpets molder in
pools of spilled soda pop and stepped around the trash that circled the
overfull wastebaskets, but he was first and foremost the host. He felt a sense
of responsibility to keep some semblance of a party running. But what he soon
found was that he enjoyed it. Not only did he enjoy it he believed, with all
modesty, that he had a certain knack for it. When he got on his hands and knees
and waxed the floors, the floors did shine in response to his attentions. Of
all the many jobs there were to do, the one he liked the best was ironing. It
was amazing to him that they hadn’t taken the iron away.
If
properly wielded he was sure it was as deadly as a gun, so heavy, so incredibly
hot.
While he pressed the shirts of shirtless men who stood waiting, he
thought of the damage he could do. Certainly, he couldn’t take them all out
(Could an iron deflect bullets? he wondered), but he could clank down two or
three before they shot him. With an iron, Ruben could go down fighting and the
thought of it made him feel less passive, more like a man. He nosed the pointy
silver tip into a pocket and then slid it down a sleeve. He puffed out clouds
of steam that made him pour with sweat. The collar, he had quickly come to
realize, was the key to everything.
Ironing was one thing. Ironing was within his
grasp. But where raw food was concerned he was at a loss, and he stood and he
stared at all that now lay before him. He decided to put the chickens in the
refrigerator. Avoid warm
meat, that
much he was sure
about. Then he went to look for help.
“Gen,” he said. “Gen, I need to speak to
Señorita Coss.”
“You, too?”
Gen asked.
“Me, too,” the Vice President said. “
What,
is there a line? Shall I take a number?”
Gen shook his head and together they walked
over to see Roxane. “Gen,” she said, and held out her hands as if she hadn’t
seen them in days. “Mr. Vice President.” She had changed since the music had
arrived, or she had changed back. She now more closely resembled the famous
soprano who had been brought to a party at enormous expense to sing six arias. She
once again put out a kind of light that belongs only to the very famous. Ruben
always felt slightly weak when he stood this close to her. She was wearing his
wife’s sweater and his wife’s black silk scarf covered in jewel-colored birds
tied around her throat. (Oh, how his wife adored that scarf, which had come
from
never wore it more than once or twice a year and she kept it carefully folded
in its original box. How quickly Ruben had served up this treasure to Roxane!) He
was overcome by the sudden need to tell her how he felt about her. How much her
music meant to him. He controlled himself by calling those bare chickens to
mind. “You must forgive me,” the Vice President said, his voice breaking with
emotion. “You do so much for all of us as it is. Your practicing has been a
godsend, though how you can call it practicing I don’t know. It implies that
your singing could improve.” He touched his fingers to his eyes and shook his
head. He was tired. “This isn’t what I came to say to you. I wonder if I may
bother you for a
favor?
”
“Is there something you would like me to sing?”
Roxane stroked the edges of the scarf.
“That I would never presume to know.
Whatever song you choose is the
song I have
been wanting
to hear.”
“Very impressive,” Gen said to him in Spanish.
Ruben gave him a look that made it clear he had
no interest in editorials. “I need some advice in the kitchen. Some help. Don’t
mistake me, I would never ask you to do any work, but if you could give me the
smallest amount of guidance in the preparation of our dinner, I would be
greatly indebted to you.”
Roxane looked at Gen and blinked. “You
misunderstood him.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Try again.”
Spanish was to linguists what hopscotch was to
triathletes. If he was managing in Russian and Greek, chances were he would not
have misunderstood a sentence of Spanish.
A sentence
regarding the preparation of food and not the state of the human soul.
Spanish
was, after all, what he was translating in and out of all day. It was the
closest thing available to a common language. “Pardon me,” Gen said to Ruben.
“Tell her I need some help with dinner.”
“Cooking dinner?” Roxane asked.
Ruben thought about this for a moment, assuming
he was not asking for help serving dinner or eating dinner,
then
yes, cooking dinner was what was left.
“Cooking.”
“Why would he think I know how to cook?” she
asked Gen.
Ruben,
whose
English
was bad but not hopeless, pointed out that she was a woman. “The two girls, I
can’t imagine they would know a thing except for native dishes that might not
be to others’ liking,” he said through Gen.
“This is some sort of Latin thing, don’t you
think?” she said to Gen. “I can’t even really be offended. It’s important to
bear the cultural differences in mind.” She gave Ruben a smile that was kind
but relayed no information.
“I think that’s wise,” Gen said, and then he
told Ruben, “She doesn’t cook.”
“She cooks a little,” Ruben said.
Gen shook his head. “I would think not at all.”
“She wasn’t born singing opera,” the Vice
President said. “She must have had a childhood.” Even his wife, who had grown
up rich, who was a pampered girl with most available luxuries, was taught to
cook.
“Possibly, but I imagine someone cooked her
food for her.”
Roxane, now out of the conversational loop,
leaned back against the gold silk cushions of the sofa, held her hands up, and
shrugged. It was a charming gesture.
Such smooth hands that
had never washed a dish or shelled a pea.
“Tell him his scar is looking
so much better,” she said to Gen. “I want to say something nice. Thank God that
girl of his was still around when it happened. Otherwise he might have asked me
to sew his face up for him, too.”
“Should I tell him you don’t sew?” Gen said.
“Better he hears it now.” The soprano smiled
again and waved good-bye to the Vice President.
“Do you know how to cook?” Ruben asked Gen.
Gen ignored the question. “I’ve heard Simon
Thibault complain a great deal about the food. He sounds like he knows what
he’s talking about. Anyway, he’s French. The French know how to cook.”
“Two minutes ago I would have said the same
thing about women,” Ruben said.
But Simon Thibault proved to be a better bet. His
face lit up at the mention of raw chickens. “And vegetables?” he said. “Praise
God, something that hasn’t already been ruined.”
“This is your man,” Gen said.
Together the three of them walked to the
kitchen, making their way through the maze of men and boys who loitered in the
great hall of the living room. Thibault immediately went to the vegetables. He
took an eggplant out of the box and rolled it in his hands. He could almost
make out his own reflection in its shiny skin. He put his nose to the deep
purple patent leather. It didn’t smell like much and yet there was something
vaguely dark and loamy, something alive that made him want to bite down. “This
is a good kitchen,” he said. “Let me see your pans.”