Lucky Us (16 page)

I got to know the regulars—Tomas, who was six six and always wore shorts, and Reginald, who had a pouched and creased face of great dignity, and Maxwell, who liked to recite the latest Mets scores to everyone. Some of the others moved through the line without speaking and without changing expression; they sat at the tables, looking straight ahead, watching their own
internal TV, chewing. At least we gave them something to chew.

One of them, a heavy young woman with red-rimmed eyes, threw up one day, and I ran out with newspaper and a mop to clean it up. I could see she was terribly embarrassed, and I kept saying, “No problem, what's a little barfing among friends?” and the others, who had been struck silent, got heartier and nicer to her. I was pleased with how that went. In the kitchen Jose, the cook, said, “You handled that fine,” and the praise sat very well with me.

When Aunt Angie got wind of all this volunteering I was suddenly doing, she said, “Very nice. Maybe you'll meet another woman in this work.”

“I don't think so.”

“Someone nice. Not like that other nut job, even though I liked her.”

“I'm there to serve lunch, actually.”

“Where did she go, what happened to her?”

“She's around.”

“She was too silly, even though I liked her. And you know what? She doesn't know what she's missing.”

“You're right,” I said. “She doesn't know.”

“She gets a few more years on her, she'll get banged into shape. Youth is something she'll get over.”

“Maybe,” I said.

A
T THE CAMERA
store everybody started telling me that I looked better. My coworkers there started guessing, right to my face, that I was now on Prozac or I was seeing this hot new number named Clorinda or I was thriving on church meals instead of wasting away on bachelor Chee-tos and popcorn. My own theory was that I was getting endorphins into my system from driving my carcass to exhaustion and putting it to some sort of service, and that most of the depressed people in the city could use a few stints in the church kitchen to get out of their own loops.

Not that I was altogether out. Sometimes I thought I saw Elisa in line at the church, ruined and wasted and strung out. Why would I wish that on her? I had her confused more than once with some very ill women. In these mistaken sightings, while I stood over a vat of noodles, I dreamed my same lovely dream in which she was always much reduced, frail and ailing and no longer able to care for herself, and thrilled at the sight of me, thrilled.

The people who came to the soup kitchen—our guests, Clorinda called them—had more troubles than you could shake a stick at and pasts like crudely drawn scenes from hell. I didn't want to hear too much, but details floated up in their talk—a broken elevator had crushed Tomas's wife and son, Trudy had once tried to kill herself by drinking bleach, Maxwell had lost his eye in a fight over a Hostess snack cake. Loss and more loss. And a lot of what they knew about themselves wasn't good news—you could see from their expressions. As a group, they weren't gloating over their grace under pressure.

Some days it seemed that everyone who lined up in
that basement needed to tell me at once that he or she would not have been there at all if just a few things had been different. In this they were exactly like all the men I had known in prison.

Sometimes the lunch eaters asked me questions like, “So how come you're here doing this, man?” I didn't say it was the Law of Karma. I didn't say, if my girlfriend hadn't done something ten years ago that got her this virus and if the test hadn't made her perversely defiant and if she hadn't run off with a jerk with a stud in his chin and left me in anguish, I couldn't have been talked into spending my off hours dishing out turkey chili to guys like you. I said, “I don't have a clue how I got here.” Reginald, who was old but maybe not as old as he looked, shook his head over me. “A nice summer day, and you're in here with these losers?”

“I like it,” I said. “So sue me.”

“What's your problem?” he said. “I don't get it.”

A
T THE STORE
we were having a big promotion—in July, when no one wanted to buy anything—for this digital video camera that Ed said did everything but make your family better looking. You could see every facial flaw in instant replay on its swivel-screen monitor, with unbelievably high resolution and a zoom lens and an
index titler and digital stereo and all that crap. “It's too good,” Ed said. “It's ridiculous for regular people. Whose dick is so small that he needs this kind of item?”

It was just an overimproved version of something we had been selling for a long time, but Ed was having a good time hating it. The model name was the super-trooper and he kept calling it the superpooper. It was priced so much higher than the other models that no one bought it anyway. Occasionally we would pick out some guy in a linen suit and deep tan as the perfect pooper buyer, but when we told people the price they made sour-lemon faces.

So at the end of a long dull day in the store's musty air-conditioning, when I saw some couple nosing around the display, I didn't even bother to go over. “Anyone working here?” the man said.

The man was gauntly tan and crisply dressed, in his khakis and his pastel tennis shirt, and the woman had the bright, careful makeup that Elisa would have said was suburban technicolor. “What can I help you with?” I said.

“This has picture stabilization?” the man said. Ed was in earshot and I could almost hear him chuckling.

“It does indeed,” I said.

“Is it sturdy?” the woman said. And from her voice I
had the idea it was my old crazy girlfriend Maureen, whom I had not seen in twenty-seven years. I looked again. She had not aged badly at all—underneath the trim little haircut there was the same vivid mouth, the same handsome bones. Her skin was older, but I saw her more clearly the more I looked.

“Maureen?” I said. “It's Gabe.”

“Oh, my God,” she said. “Can it be?” She threw her arms around me, and she laughed, as if our mutual history was pretty hilarious, which it was.

Her husband, this lean, wolfish guy with a mustache, shook his head at us, a gesture of very mild amazement. Maureen said, “You remember Alan?”

“He knew me as Zorro,” Alan said. He did smile a little at that.

“Zorro,” I said. He had been one of my subcontractors, one of those whose full names I had declined to give to the police when they were doing what I later called picking on me.

“You're looking good,” I said. Not really. The skinny, pink-cheeked boy he had been was carved pretty thoroughly now.

“I can't believe it,” Maureen said. “Where the fuck have you been all this time?”

“Not far,” I said. “And yourself?”

“In Tenafly, New Jersey,” Maureen said. “Which is better than it sounds.”

“We're right across the river. I have a real estate agency with a couple of offices around there,” Alan said.

“The two of us,” Maureen said, “have this agency.”

“It's a very up and down business,” Alan said. “Somewhat like our old line of work.” He squinted at me in what he must have thought was a friendly way.

“You're looking very dapper,” Maureen said to me. “I have a son who would love that jacket.”

“You look the same as ever,” I said.

“Is this your store?” Alan said. “It's quite a booming place.”

“It's not my store,” I said. It wasn't booming at the moment either. “I'm happy to say I only work here.”

They were silent, it was an awkward moment that surprised me. Never, never had it occurred to me to want to own this place, not for a second.

“It's a great store,” Maureen said. “I always see their ads.”

“Have you been here long?” Alan asked.

“Twenty-one years,” I said.

It seemed to embarrass them that I had less money than they did. They were having trouble with this particular life fact. For my part, it amused me to think of
Maureen selling real estate to the unwitting public. Hey, you want this or not? she would say, but perhaps not in those words.
It's up to you, don't let me rush you but
.

“The reason we want the video camera,” Alan said, “is that we're going to Bali for two weeks. I don't know if you've ever been there but it's unbelievably beautiful. When we went before, we didn't bring back any videos and we were sorry later.”

“This is the best camcorder around,” I said. “I wouldn't get anything less than this.”

“Whatever you say, Gabe,” Maureen said. “You're our man.”

I sold them a three-year service contract they didn't need either. They seemed perfectly thrilled about the whole thing. They loved this camera, they were so glad they had run into me.

“It's a real New York coincidence, isn't it?” Alan said.

“Oh! Look at your ponytail,” Maureen said. “How great.”

“I can't,” I said. “But thanks.”

And when Formerly Known as Zorro took out his wallet, he did what I knew he was going to do. He gave me his business card and said, “I don't know how long you've been working here, but you could make more money working for me. Maybe not right away, you'd have
to get your Realtor's license, but you could do a lot better. A lot.”

“No, thanks. But thank you,” I said. Maureen looked mournful then, probably thinking how stubborn and depressing I was.

A
FTER THEY LEFT,
I did not feel wonderful. Ed said, “Mister Gabe. Go spend that commission on wild women in clean underwear. You dog.”

“Right,” I said. “One martini with an extra olive and it's all gone.”

I didn't want all that much more money than I had, although Maureen and Zorro would not have believed that. Could not have believed it, of anyone.

“What's Bali like?” I said to Ed. “Is it all touristed now?”

“I heard it's beautiful,” Ed said. “It's always given as an example of a culture where art is part of daily life.”

And Alan the gentleman goon would be getting it all down on his video. It made me kind of sick to think of, and I never wanted to be a sour person.

“You know anyone who's been there?” I said.

“Howard. Before I knew him. I have a shadow puppet he brought back. It's quite exquisite.”

I didn't have to go to the bookstore and read all about
Bali to torture myself, but I did. It was the Island of Ten Thousand Temples, except there were really twenty thousand, the guidebook said. Balinese women prepared small offerings to Hindu deities and demons and local ancestors every day. While parts of the island had been overtaken by luxury resorts, an elaborate purification ritual took place every year on the most crowded beach, cleansing the year's misdeeds and protecting the island from unwholesome change. Dance and gamelan music had not suffered from exposure to foreign audiences, and the quality of woodcarving and painting was very high. There were many excellent walks through rain forest and fishing village but the gray monkeys, regarded as sacred, could be aggressive.

I had forgotten about wanting to go to places like that. Most people don't get to go anywhere, what was I complaining about? But I walked home from the bookstore not liking my city anymore. It was a hot summer evening, moist and sticky with no breeze. And that night, in the cubicle of my bedroom, with the electric fan thrumming in my ear, I dreamed that I was in a boat, floating on a sea of orchids, feeding fruit to a monkey (in my dream he was quite docile). When I woke up I thought, that's the boat I missed.

The next day, when I got home and saw the message
light on my phone machine blinking, I was sure it was Elisa, but the voice on the tape was Maureen's.

“Gabe, it was so great to see you. I just have a quick question I wanted to ask you. Call me back.”

I wasn't eager to speak to Alan again, so I was glad when the guy who answered sounded very much like a postadolescent interrupted in the middle of a really good TV show. “Yes,” he said, when I asked if Maureen was there. And the phone went silent while he got her.

“You don't have kids, do you?” Maureen asked me.

“Nope.”

“Are you married? I forgot to ask all that when I saw you.”

“I'm engaged,” I said.

“Are you? Congratulations. Engaged! How formal. Maybe you'll have a whole late crop of little Gabelets. Is she young enough?”

“She is, but I don't think so,” I said.

“My son is in college,” Maureen said. “That's like taking your entire life savings and throwing it off the Brooklyn Bridge.”

“We went for free,” I said, “and we didn't even finish.”

“A whole other era,” Maureen said. “Jeremy doesn't even have a summer job yet. Do you believe that? It's what he needs, I hold firmly to that opinon.”

“It's July,” I said. “Late for that.”

“Do you think you could find him something in your store? Some of the other salesmen looked as young as him.”

“It's not my store,” I said.

“I know that,” Maureen said. “Are they hiring? Do you know?”

“Not in sales. Maybe the stockroom,” I said.

“I think he would find that too menial,” she said. “I hate to tell you what total snot-noses kids are now.”

“I know it,” I said. “I wait on young people all the time.”

“If you were a parent, you'd know.”

“I spend a lot of time volunteering in this soup kitchen in a church and I see a lot of teenagers there. I've met a kid or two in my life.”

“What church?” Maureen said.

I knew I had slipped this information in on purpose, so I suppose I was glad when she said how “wonderful” it was of me to be a soup server. I did expect her to ask if the church was hiring a new pastor or a new architect, some post her son might fill.