At home I would sit listening to a few favorite albums, some Coltrane and late Beethoven and Big Joe Turner. Elisa had in fact disliked most of these. I probably should have taken more time to play certain passages over for her. She might have liked Dexter Gordon, I thought now. In the meantime Joe Turner sang about how blue the chains of love had made him feel. If Elisa happened to walk in the door while this was playing, she would hear me singing under it, in the low grunting voice that always amused her. If she came in without calling first, I might say to her, Oh, look who's here, as if she'd just gone out to shop. Where's my newspaper? I could say, gently. She would be glad that I was not angry and we could get ourselves to the bedroom in no time; no time at all.
Time after time I got up from the sofa, stirred by these musings, quickened and brightened and nourished too. It was for these thoughts I had come home, to be alone
with them. I felt better for them, I couldn't help it. They were a delicious vice of solitude, like smoking opium or talking to a pet. Every so often I caught myself, pining for this person who was absent on purpose, no matter how richly ardent she acted in my daydreams, and I felt foolish and lame and way, way off the right track.
I really did not want to be humiliated by hope. I waited for it to leave me, and I did my best to fight it off. Elisa herself helped me in this, in those phone calls when she humored me.
E
VERYONE AT THE
store thought I should be furious with Elisa, which I suppose I was, and that I should not hesitate too long before locating some other woman to solace me in bed. Charelle said, “Lots of very suitable ladies out there,” and Ed suggested that I not let the equipment go to rust.
This advice sounded ridiculous to me and made me wince. Certainly the last thing I had an appetite for was anything new. I had my long walks, my nights of reading, and the news at breakfast without headphones. My inclinations at the moment were toward stillness and order; my old habits were serving me. And I did not see any problem in being someone who did without. That was
how I saw my future as well. I thought there was a lot to be said for renunciation, only no one said it anymore. I wanted, after all, an honest life.
At night I would prepare eccentric meals of a sort that Elisa had never likedâherring on toast, salami omelettesâand then I would take up my book. I was working my way through the reports of Shackleton's expedition to the Antartic in 1914â16, which Ed had recommended. He said the matter-of-fact accounts of polar ice and near starvation had been distracting and soothing to read during his worst times. I couldn't read novels or stories but I had my interest in facts still.
On my days off I walked around in the sweet early summer sunshine, a regular person taking a regular walk outside. No one could have told from my stride that I was a man in bitter grief, and I took a natural pleasure in the buildings I passed. I went by the church of Saint Agnes, which looked as jewel-pretty as ever. During my first week without Elisa, they had called meâthat is, a woman from the committee hadâto help with fund-raising, but I couldn't picture myself having much success shaking down money from rich people, which was what they really needed. Better to let one of their own do that, one of the women in pastel suits whom Elisa had tittered over.
Things did look shoddy when I stepped inside the
church. The ceiling, with its gorgeous Byzantine dome, was half covered by tarpaulins, and somebody had done a really hideous job of plastering over a fissure in one of the lower walls. I was sorry for my church, although I had not gone there in a long time and had only been to one service and wasn't an adherent of its particular faith. But I was so suddenly outraged and sad about the bad plaster that I understood that I had walked in hungry, like any supplicant. What did I want? Something, badly, that had to do with elevation from my own pettiness and suffering. I wanted to find a space to hover above that, I wanted to be at a distance where I could enjoy seeing the dots of my own feelings become as small as ants.
The sight of the building's wounds made me want to come back to it. Perhaps if it had looked too spruce, I might not have had the impulse. I thought I would come back the next Sunday for the early service.
But I didn't come back. I forgot, or I didn't want to enough. I fell all at once into a very cranky phase, for me. At work I was weary and unhelpful with customers, one of those salesmen who can't imagine why you're bothering him. I was short-tempered with Ed (he didn't have to leave his coffee cup right on the shelf with the digital cameras) and humorless with Charelle when she wanted to goof with me about some customer's nose job.
And I began to phone Elisa at the gallery where she worked. “I was wondering,” I would say, “whether you're ever going to come get that toaster oven you left behind. It's taking up room.” Or I'd say, “Just calling to let you know how much you still owe on the electric bill from last month.” After behaving so well, I lowered myself to sullen pettiness. I was full of proof of how badly she had acted and I couldn't keep it to myself. “Okay, okay,” Elisa would say. “Is that it? Are you done?”
And sometimes I pleaded with her to come back. In the middle of my refusal to provide board for her abandoned toaster, I would point out that she might, after all, want to come back to live here. She might. I would say this in a low, subdued voice, as the confession that it was. “Oh,” Elisa would say. “It could happen. I don't know. It's hard to say.” And we would be lost in phone space, dangling from our lines, nowhere to go but someplace worse. I didn't like it.
I
MADE MYSELF
unbearable to my friends too. I called Ed one night and I said, “Have you ever split up with someone and then gotten back with them?”
“No,” Ed said. “But it happens all the time. People are reunited, and it feels so good. They wrote a song about it.”
“It seems very close to happening,” I told him. “Not yet but sometime.”
“Could be,” Ed said.
Since Ed's lover was gone as in dead and gone, I was aware that my complaints were weightless, next to that, and were maybe not something he wanted to hear. This did not stop me. “She's very young,” I said. “She gets stubborn but she can change her mind fast too.”
“That's youth,” Ed said.
“One time she insisted that we needed to get a car, to go to the country on weekends. She read all the ads in the papers, she bought
Buy-Lines,
she even called dealers to find out about leases. Then all of a sudden she had a revelation about its not being practical and she never mentioned it again.”
“Leases are bad. Howard leased a Honda Civic,” Ed said. “I had a hard time getting out of the contract after he died. I had to get a copy of the death certificate.”
I made a sympathetic noise, but I went on. Nothing deflected me. “If she was a person who never changed her mind, I wouldn't be expecting any improvements in the situation.”
“When did she leave?”
“Early May. Going on seven weeks.”
“She can change. She's changeable,” he said. He was nice to me.
B
UT THE THIRD
time I called him, I could hear him turn silent when I got far along into my moaning and groaning and retelling yet another significant detail I had remembered about Elisa. He wanted the Gabe he'd always known to return. Who was this embarrassing mess of a poor bastard? I did appreciate the joke of that, me the straight friend turning out too much florid emotion for Ed to take. It didn't keep me from phoning him either. It was too late to stop any of it.
I
DIDN'T LIKE
being lovelorn; it didn't suit me. All that howling at the moon; I couldn't bear to hear it either. And it robbed me of my old peace. When I took my walks, everything I looked at on the street brought me back to my anguish. Kissing couples, miserable old men, sick people in wheelchairs: either they stung me with envy or they pulled me down with sorrow.
I tried to get myself out of this, out of the solipsistic monotony of heartbreak, by focusing very closely on the buildings I walked by. I would try to look at the ornamentation on a pediment or count the columns in a row as a way to get out of my inner ranting. I'd fix on these
details of cast iron or stone that were, at least, bits of matter that I had no longings for and no despair in. It was my way of meditating.
It didn't altogether help. But I could see that it might, in time, if I persevered; it might be my way not to go nuts. I went back to the church of Saint Agnes to look at its arches and see the mosaics in the spandrels. From a block away I could see a line of peopleâalmost all men, and not in good shape, any of themâat the side entrance. I had come at eleven on a Monday morning, and they were lining up for the soup kitchen.
I was not feeling very good myself and I was annoyed at the sight of these guys, milling around the church, getting in the way of my curative aesthetic experience. There they were, slumped over with abject woe or jumping around and barking wisecracks at each other. Bad luck had broken their noses and scarred their faces and ripped the pockets of their pants. As I got closer, I found myself wanting to get in line with them. I was that sorry for myself.
What they reminded me of were the men in prison, and that thought made me not want to get in the line after all. Some of them, with their nicked scalps and bristling haircuts, probably
were
straight out of prison. How smooth and spoiled I must have looked next to them. I
hoped, for their sake, that there was enough food and that it was decent, cooked with a little style. I wasn't sure the committee women in pastel suits had any kind of flair with food.
Was this bigotry on my part, an Aunt-Angie-like assumption about who knew what to eat? I was pondering that when I saw Clorinda Braddox (Elisa used to call her Clora Clorox) waving at me from the entrance. “Long time, no see,” she said. “You don't come to meetings anymore?”
“I made my job obsolete,” I said. “They don't need me. That's success for you.”
“Who doesn't need you?” Clorinda said. “Who told you that hogwash? I need you right now in the kitchen, if you want to come.”
She was a birdlike woman, sharp and bright. “Well, no, I can't,” I said.
“Another time?” she said. “You can do dishing out or you can do cleaning up. Or prep work, if you come earlier.”
“I don't think so.”
“Everybody's so busy. What are they doing? Shopping, primping, talking on the phone, spending money, and then they brag about it. Oh, Clorinda, I don't have a minute. Oh, Clorinda, I'm so exhausted from walking around thinking about how busy I am.”
“Maybe now,” I said. “I could do a little now.”
T
HE KITCHEN IN
the refectory was a pit of functional ugliness in that jewel box of a church. It had dismal brown and yellow tiles on the wall and maroon linoleum on the floor and it smelled of overcooked vegetables and chicken broth. At the stove was a fat man wrapped in a huge white apron and three women of various ages sweating into their blouses. I was told to carry a giant pot of steaming rice into the dining room, which I did, walking slowly and holding its smoldering bulk away from me. Then the line of eaters was suddenly swarming up to the sideboard, and I was ladling mounds of rice onto their plates.
A jumpy customer with a lot of teeth missing wanted to know why we didn't have brown rice, and a man in a vinyl dress wanted ketchup with his turkey à la king. A girl of maybe ten kept running up and stealing the napkins. But by and large they were glad to be eating; of all the tasks I might have found myself doing, this was the most immediately cheering on both sides. Rarely have I been thanked so many times in an afternoon. I did not expect it to go on for as long as it did. I was manning the rice for two and a half hours. And after we stopped serving I was on cleanup, scrubbing the hardened rice kernels out of the same vats.
I did forget Elisa during this time. The ladling out and
the pot scrubbing calmed me, as simple, monotonous work can do, and the tasks forced me to pay attention to what was in front of me. Also, for that time I ceased to be a pathetic, sniveling old man who'd been ditched by his younger lover, and was instead a fine and robust giver of bounty.
I smelled of chicken grease and sweat and old drains by the time I was through, and the pale blue shirt I was wearing was splotched and strewn with rice. Clorinda said, “Next time you'll wear something more informal.”
“Clorinda,” I said. “You've got to get this organized better. You've got too many people in the kitchen and too few on the floor.”
“Get your rear end over here and fix it then,” she said. “Otherwise you're just another male with an opinion.”
This fire-eating version of Clorindaâthe glaring eye, the flashing toothâwas new to me. My amusement made me pause, and in that second she got me to sign up for kitchen duty on both my days off and to promise her a phone conversation about reapportioning the staff.
A
ND SO IT
began, my eccentric hobby. I was in that church kitchen much more often than I meant to be. I spent hours scrubbing down the tiles, which were really disgusting with crusted frying oil, and I argued for
lustier, more adult cuisine. In my spare moments at the camera store I called beverage distributors and I read books like
Fabulous Feasts for Fifty or More
. I made Saint Agnes feature
arroz con pollo
and barbecued wings and
pasta e fagioli,
and I made them cut out the fish sticks and the wax beans.
My ponytail was a real conversation starter for the lunch crowd. I couldn't stand over a vat of greens without someone saying I looked like Steven Seagal or George Washington or Trigger. My old girlfriend Judy used to complain that people had this
need
to voice their observations at her on the street. In the church dining room too people were always piping up, looking for a way to get in some burst of personality, some proof they weren't dust yet, and who could blame them? “This ponytail?” I'd say. “Chop it off and I lose all my superstrength.” “Don't tell anyone but it's a Dynel wig.” “Would you believe it makes women go frantic?”