Shakespeare's Kitchen (13 page)

“
Something
has got to be done about the project,” Zachariah Zee said.

“I always wanted to fund a project project,” Joe said.

“Get the city fathers to cough up the funds for the upkeep,” said Alvin.

“What they’d like is to turn it into middle-income housing,” said the Man from Planning.

Zack Zee said, “Drug rings.”

“Parking,” Maria said.

“The garbage thief,” Eliza Shakespeare said.

“What’s wrong with picking something up for nothing and peddling it for something!” Ilka shouted.

“It makes a mess on the sidewalk,” Eliza said. “They take their shirts off,” she said. “The grass will never be the same.”

Parking, garbage, the garbage thief, drug rings, robberies at noon, walls, no walls. No glass embedded in cement, they argued back in Leslie’s office after Officer Right, Marvin the lawyer, and the Man from Planning had left.

“
D
o you want me to disqualify myself,” Ilka asked Director Leslie Shakespeare, “because I know Jimmy?”

The members of the Concordance Institute continued turning the pages of the candidate’s vita on the table before them, but their ears pricked up. The young man was understood to have stayed the night in Ilka’s little rented house, and they had been rather wondering.

 

 

Was Ilka sleeping with Jimmy Carl? Not any longer, and not yet.

Ilka had picked Jimmy up accidentally at her very first New York party to which she had come with another man with whom she had been falling in love. The man’s name was Carter—a large, stout, distinguished black man, in his fifties, and ill. When
he walked off to get his whiskey, Ilka stood and watched a bespectacled man who held his head at an excruciating angle, pretending to be reading the spines of the books on the glass shelving. He was, like Ilka herself, young, thin, Jewish, and embarrassed. He appeared to be alone. It was because he did not attract her that Ilka had smiled at him, and because she wanted to practice her English that she asked him if he was a friend of the bride or the groom. The young man’s brow contracted over his left eye, his nostrils dilated, his lips parted and he told Ilka the dates from and until which he and the groom had interned for which Washington congressman. Ilka was trying to remember whom the young man reminded her of—someone she didn’t much care for. She said, “I must go and search my friend,” but the young man had kept at her side and was never going to be lost again.

 

 

The first several times he called he had been obliged to identify himself. “Jimmy Carl. Jimmy. Remember me from Philip and Fanny’s wedding?”

He happened to call the day they took Carter away to the state hospital. Jimmy took Ilka to the corner Chinese restaurant. Ilka studied the oversized menu, looked up, and there, across the table from her, sat a young man! Jimmy Carl from Philip and Fanny’s wedding! His left brow contracted, his nostrils dilated, his lips parted: Ilka leaned all her attentive interest and then some across the table so the young man would not notice that she had forgotten him.

Jimmy Carl had just got fired from his job. “The president called me into his office. The president is my mother’s cousin.”

“And he fired you!”

“He had his reasons. There’s a man, Stackport—looks like he’s got a case of permanent morning mouth. He files at the file next to my file. He files a file, he files another file, another file. I
thought, I can go faster than that if I put the files on my lap, pick the top one up with my right hand while I get the next ready with my left, except that doesn’t leave a hand to scratch one’s nose with. Boredom is really interesting, actually: you have this stuffed head, pain between the shoulder, pins and needles in the right foot, your nose itches. I mean how do I know that that’s boredom? This is two minutes to eleven! Ninety-two minutes before I get to meet you for lunch.” Jimmy blushed. “I thought, if I file fifteen files without looking at the clock it’ll be eleven. Then I thought, I’ll file fifteen
more
files, and by then it’ll already be two minutes
after
eleven! I look. Clock says it’s
one
minute
to
eleven. Which is interesting. I’ve got as close as a human being gets to what eternity feels like: I can’t imagine a minute that doesn’t have an end, but I can imagine an endless number of minutes filing—a sneak preview of hell. Which is a fascinating concept for human beings to have come up to scare ourselves with. So I sort of tilt my head to rub my nose on my shoulder and feel my files going into a slide. Imagine an eternal moment of embarrassment: Mr. Stackport has stopped filing; Mrs. Winters—she’s the office manager, really nice woman—she swivels her chair and looks at me; the typewriters stop; somebody giggles. Mr. Stackport is on his knees—which is sort of wonderful, really—an adult male in his sixties, children, grandchildren, I wouldn’t wonder—takes home a fraction of what Cousin Robert makes, and he’s red in the face because Cousin Robert’s files are all over the office floor! He says, ‘How come you didn’t put a blue label on Kux, Bloch & Co? Kux, Bloch is inactive!’ And Cousin Robert! He
really minded
the inactive files being filed in the drawer with the active files!”

“But that’s awful—getting fired!”

“Yes. Well, no, actually, it was interesting. Poor Robert. I can talk rings around Cousin Robert.”

Carter came out of the hospital and went back into the hospital. Jimmy got a junior job writing reports for the American Civil Liberties Union, from which he did not get fired. Why was Ilka surprised? Jimmy said the reports were interesting. And whenever Carter was in trouble, Ilka called Jimmy Carl and they had long conversations. It was Jimmy who came to the station with Ilka, finally, to see Carter off to the West Coast.

For a time Ilka and Jimmy slept together. Jimmy was a friendly, enthusiastic lover. Ilka was surprised that inside his narrow suit he was nicely put together. It wasn’t his fault that her arms and heart were used to encompassing more bulk. When Jimmy got transferred to the office of the ACLU in Washington, he was shocked to understand that Ilka was not coming with him. His left brow frowned, his nostrils flared, his lips parted and he said, “Interesting how impossible it is to really believe one isn’t going to get something one wants!”

Ilka suddenly asked him if he had ever been on TV.

“Once. When I was a student at Columbia. One of those conscientious Sunday-morning dialogues.”

“You sat on the left,” Ilka said.

“This is weird. This is incredible! I mean this is way before I even knew you!”

“I can’t remember what it was about,” said Ilka. What Ilka remembered was that the boy on the left, who turned out after all those years to have been Jimmy Carl, said all the things that Ilka herself would have said, and that they sounded tiresome. While the boy on the right spoke, the camera had panned to the disagreement expressed by the left boy. His face had taken up the screen, squared off above the left-sided frown and below the lips drawn apart by the unlucky trick the muscles of the cheek played on the wings of the nose. Ilka swore it in her heart: Jimmy would never, never, never know that years before she met him, Ilka had got out of bed and walked over to the television and turned Jimmy off.

“Why won’t you marry me?” whined Jimmy whenever he flew in from Washington.

“Because,” Ilka routinely answered, “you don’t ask me if I will but why I won’t.”

“So will you?”

“Don’t be silly.”

Jimmy then told Ilka what was wrong with his latest Washington date, and Ilka was bemused to diagnose in herself the ghost of jealousy. Ilka tended to like the women Jimmy brought to New York to meet her, and to be surprised that these conversable women should like Jimmy, till she remembered that she, Ilka, liked Jimmy. Over the next several years Jimmy expanded. The shoulders gained in consequence. There was more
of
Jimmy front to back. Why was Ilka surprised when Jimmy began to publish his articles and essays?

 

 

At a certain time after Ilka received her appointment as a junior associate at the Concordance Institute and moved to Connecticut, Jimmy phoned. He’d seen the institute’s ad for a director of projects. How would Ilka feel if he applied?

“But you like it at the ACLU.”

“Why wouldn’t I love it at the Concordance Institute?”

“Jimmy, what do you know about developing conferences? What do you know about organizing things? And what do you know about ‘Who’s Who in Scholarship’?”

“Zilch, zilch, and zilch,” said Jimmy.

When Jimmy drove up from Washington to be interviewed, the Shakespeares had a reception for him. From across the room Ilka watched Leslie introduce Jimmy around, saw Jimmy’s brows contract and his nostrils dilate, and walked out into the kitchen.

“We like your friend,” Eliza Shakespeare said.

“You do?” marveled Ilka.

“He lives such an interesting life,” Eliza said. “At the moment of his death Jimmy will be thinking, Fascinating concept—dying!”

Leslie said, “I like Jimmy. He talks a lot like you do.”

“I know it!” cried Ilka, “I know,” and understood that it was herself whom, at that wedding to which Carter had taken her, Jimmy had reminded her.

 

 

Ilka took Jimmy to a party at Martin Moses’s. Jimmy drove, Ilka held the map. “I was at a party at his house once, but there
is
no DeKalb Avenue this side of town.”

“DeKalb Street?”

“No DeKalb Street. Maybe this map is wrong. The road we’re on doesn’t have a name.”

“Has to have a name.”

“Has no signs. Carter used to say they don’t want you to know. If you belonged there you would know the name of the street. If you don’t belong, go away. He said in the war, the British took down the street signs to confuse the enemy.”

Jimmy stopped the car. “What’s the number of this house?”

“It doesn’t have a number.”

“Could you get out and take a look?”

Ilka came back and reported, “They don’t want us to know the number.” There was a light on in an upstairs window. “There must be a person. Ilka, go and ring the bell.” The upstairs light went out. A light had came on downstairs. The person must have walked down the stairs. “That’s so interesting,” Jimmy said, “people in houses everywhere leaving one room to go into another room to do what?”

“Tidy up? Sit down? Look for something they have lost?”

“A book. A phone number.”

“That might be the kitchen. To look what’s in the refrigerator?”

“Go and ring the bell and ask where the hell we are.”

Ilka walked up the path and the three steps. She rang the bell and peered through the frosted glass at an approaching person acquiring size and bulk. The person turned the handle inside on the inside of the door and opened. It was Gerti Gruner, who said, “You have come!”

 

 

It would be dastardly to stand in the way of a friend’s career because one preferred to have him in Washington. Recognizing the conflict of her interest, Ilka had asked Leslie if she should disqualify herself.

“Oh, I don’t think so,” replied Leslie. “What do you say, Joe?”

“I say that you and I didn’t disqualify ourselves from co-opting each other.”

“Zack?” Leslie said.

Zack said, “What makes this candidate think he knows how to run projects like ours?”

“Nobody knows how to run projects like ours,” said Alvin.

 

 

“I pass Alvin in the corridor and there’s this cheerful whoosh,” Ilka had said to the Shakespeares at Sunday breakfast in Eliza’s kitchen which was suffused with green garden light.

Eliza had said, “It comes from believing the world is going to shape up, and Alvin knows the shape it ought to be. Alvin knows the revolution that would do it if Zachariah weren’t standing in the way. Poor Zack! His nose grows right in the middle of his face.”