Sputterpub's Blog

(You mean I never told you about Joel? He was one of the most colorful characters of my youth! He’s the source of the scalplock. The scalplock … Oh! I guess I’ve done such a good job keeping you out of my study that you haven’t examined its ornaments. The scalplock is this thin collection of suede, thread, feathers, and beads; it’s been dangling from this shutter knob for years).

Joel was a short, cute, feisty rabbinical student I met and briefly loved, in Israel in 1971. I was traveling with my friends Mary and Laura after college, and Mary knew several students at the rabbinate, so we sojourned at their dormitory in Jerusalem between our arrival and our assignment to a kibbutz.

It was a reform rabbinate, which is a little strange in a country that only recognizes orthodoxy. But if you wanted to be a reform rabbi in the US, then your three-year graduate program began with an academic term in Jerusalem. If nothing else, you’d learn Hebrew.

It felt like a graduate program. To the extent the students discussed their course work with us, it seemed like home. We’d just gotten our bachelor’s degrees and were all considering grad school, so the guys we encountered there were around our age.

Joel was one of the first I met. In fact we collided within hours. We were in someone’s room on the second floor, we three and at least a dozen young men, and restless Joel was the one with whom I most disagreed. I remember noting that he was rather cute and completely wrong. He wasn’t tall – maybe 5’10” – and he was wiry like a gymnast, with brown wavy hair to his shoulders, round brown eyes, broad nose, sensuous lips. He was strong-jawed and vehemently incorrect in just about everything he said. But he had energy, and we were some of the last awake, and we found a way to agree enough to take a walk which, as I was to learn would be typical with Joel, led to peril and excitement.

It was a balmy night in September, and we’d wandered in a large circle for some time, managing to forge a (no doubt political) compromise. We’d just sat ourselves on a lawn and were leaning in for what would be our first kiss, when we were interrupted by an unmistakably militant challenge. It wasn’t in English. It didn’t sound like Hebrew. It was coming from some soldier in dark clothes, and he was pointing a serious-looking weapon at us.

Immediately Joel had his hands up and instructed me to raise mine, which did nothing to calm me. Worse, he began to make reassuring sounds toward the guard, in what I later learned was his attempt at Arabic, while he muttered unreassuring remarks to me about how this type of gun had a tendency to accidental discharge. I later learned we were on the prime minister’s grounds; that’s why the guard. Apparently the fellow was so flustered about our presence that he reverted to his native tongue and forgot his Hebrew, which is what made our interview so awkward.

We got away, both awash with adrenaline. We supported each other back to the dormitory and then there seemed nothing better to do than to crawl together into Joel’s narrow bed. Our comforting became quite heated. He was very limber and vigorous and inventive. By the next morning we were still arguing but we were a couple.

He was more into it than I was. It’s difficult to believe that his conversation could overcome the great sex, but that’s what happened. Partly it was that he got us into trouble too often; it always turned out to be harmless but it was tiresome after awhile, and it invited me to figure that either Joel had obnoxious karma or he was on some level just plain stupid. Neither quality was attractive. But mostly it was that Joel told lies.

I used to say “pathological liar” to describe him, but I’m not sure it rose all the way to pathology. Maybe just habitual. Incorrigible. Automatic. Unconscious.

(continued tomorrow)

Troy arrived before Karen. He was warmly greeted by Deborah (“Hello, Mr. Campbell! Welcome back. Would you like to be seated, or will you wait here for your guest?”) and he opted to sit in the lounge, where he had the best view of Karen approaching him. She wore a gray suit with a short skirt, and her legs made him want her more than food certainly, even more than his cocktail. Karen in turn was looking at Troy and wondering.

Deborah watched them discreetly from her standing desk. She thought they were a handsome couple: he with his silver hair and firm body and she with her streaky blonde beauty. It had gotten to where Deborah thought about sex often, fantasized about Jorge the dishwasher, speculated even about men she saw on the street. She was fascinated with the energy between Troy Campbell and his friend.

Jake was the only one of the four not thinking about sex. He was doing his job in the understaffed kitchen, too agitated to notice the cockroach that slid with the dressing onto the salad he was preparing for Mr. Campbell’s date. Mixed green for her: Caesar for him. Jake set the plates on the counter and turned to attend to the fish and chicken he had on the grill, whisper-yelling at his assistant to check the pizzas in the wood oven.

Dressing-dazzled, the roach evaded Karen’s every fork stab. It lay comatose on a bit of frisee, beneath a twisted leaf of arugula, near the far edge of her plate, and by the time she got there her desire for salad had been assuaged, at least enough to eschew frisee, which she didn’t particularly like anyway. She pushed her plate away and the roach rested unseen on its far edge; when Paco tried to clear the salad plates Troy stopped him, because he was annoyed at how long it was taking for their entrees to arrive, and he thought leaving the plate would emphasize the problem. So the roach had time to wake up. Instead of riding down the disposal with the greens and the grease, the cockroach was permitted the necessary minutes to test-breathe breathe move-a-bit okay move-more, move-the-lettuce.

Karen let Troy hold her hand after his shy proposition. She was looking sideways at him with a smile, so at first she didn’t see the lettuce wobble. It was Troy in fact, swinging his eyes away from her for a second to gauge if anyone would notice before he put his other hand in her lap, whose glance skimmed the salad plates and picked up the moving arugula.

“Oh for chrissakes…” he started with a disgusted tone. The hand that wanted to caress Karen’s inner thigh forked the lettuce aside instead, exposing the roused roach. Karen emitted a little shriek.

Deborah was there in a moment, and Jake wasn’t far behind. Of course they comped the meal, but that wasn’t enough for Jake. He insisted on writing out a certificate for a complementary dinner for two. He used the occasion to introduce himself to Mr. Campbell. He took a moment to explain that with an infusion of capital, Jake would be able to add staff, clean more, open every night for dinner instead of just weekends, pay a return on a man’s investment.

Troy didn’t buy the investment concept, but he did note that Karen’s eyes sparkled at him during the conversation. He thought it might be convenient to have a bistro where he could get a meal any time. Where they could. He agreed to become a partner in the place.

Jake brought the salad plates into the kitchen. Before handing them over to Jorge, he opened the back door and shook a clump of frisee and arugula onto the stoop. Emerging from its soggy shelter, the cockroach slowly skittered off the concrete and into the brown garden dirt.

As usual, Deborah slept well and Jake didn’t. She argued that he’d rest better if he exercised like she did every night, but Jake insisted that he worked out enough while he worked. She spent half an hour on a stationary bike after their light dinner every evening, and sometimes she danced to an aerobics tape. Jake sipped Jack Daniels and stewed about their business problems. They retired together by nine, and they never made love any more because they never took the time off from work to travel, to stay in a hotel, to play.

Jake woke an hour before the alarm, and he worried. He stayed in bed but he didn’t return to sleep. He surveyed his body instead and found pain in his neck, on his brow, around his lower back. He thought about the bistro and admitted that they couldn’t keep pouring money into it; they couldn’t go more than another three months unless something changed. He resented Deborah’s peaceful rest, telling himself he’d be more comfortable without her leg diagonally across the bed, growing sticky where they touched. He tried a little roughly to nudge her away. She stirred and returned to quiet sleep. He thought about fucking her and wished he could get interested.

When his alarm beeped at five Troy Campbell had already been up for half an hour. He didn’t need much sleep: eleven to four or midnight to five did it for him. He usually spent his first hour thinking about business while exercising, but lately he had returned to lust.

He used to be a womanizer. From fourteen to fifty, he did as many women as he could. He had fans among his friends who kept count; most figured he’d bedded more than a hundred. He hounded women when he was single, and he fooled around as much as he could when he was married. Most of his conquests had been one-night stands, but nine women had been real affairs lasting eight to eighteen months. He’d been married six times.

He settled down when he was fifty. That was ten years ago. Married pretty happily to Sara, he decided to try fidelity. His chronic restlessness seemed to pass around then; he found it easier to stay home. And he and Sara had a decent sex life, at least for the first eight years. Then he grew bored with her. Then he became aware of all the prostate problems his friends were having, and he got to thinking that the life of his penis might be coming to an end. He started masturbating more. He tried some novelty with Sara but she resisted. He left home certain evenings and started catting around. But he no longer wanted bimbettes. He sought good sex with good company. He found Karen.

She was a junior partner at the law firm he’d used for twenty years. At first they met almost incidentally; then he noticed her and began requesting that she be assigned to his cases. They spent enough time together to take each other’s measure and like what they found.

Troy knew a sexual relationship would be totally inappropriate. He was married, twenty years older than she, and a client. He found the idea erotic, especially when they faced each other across the mahogany conference table with her senior partners. And he knew she did too; he saw the way her eyes found him, the way she blushed through those transparent cheeks. Their flirtation had grown obvious to them both. He thought he’d try to talk to her at the lunch they had scheduled for that noon.

The roach remained stun-still even after Jake took the lid off the vinaigrette at ten o’clock. It began slow stuttering movements thirty seconds later, but by then Jake had added his secret ingredient to the dressing, and he looked away from the vat while stirring the roach in with that splash of rice vinegar. The brown bug struggled in the eddy of sour liquid at first, then closed in on itself, mindless immobile, and became like a seed pod, like a big coffee bean, in the maelstrom the whisk made. Down at first, then spun into the sides of the empty tornado, riding up the outward-sloping walls of vinaigrette. As Jake removed the whisk the roach bobbed to the surface, put its legs out like catamaran runners, and scrabbled to the edge of the vat. It sheltered under the ladle that Jake left in place of the whisk.

“Rodents and roaches and flies: oh my! Rodents and roaches and flies …”

“Don’t even joke about it,” Jake growled. “It’s not funny. No one needs to hear.” He stood at the counter whisking olive oil into balsamic vinegar and garlic, and he glowered at Deborah over his shoulder while his left hand steadied the bowl and his right arm twirled from the elbow. He always started the next day’s vinaigrette before they shut down for the night. It was their closing ritual: Jake at the whisk while Deborah pushed the big broom.

“We’re practically alone now,” she said. The wait-staff was gone for the day; only Jorge and Paco were still around, and they were emptying the last load of dishes from the plastic trays to the open overhead shelves. Deborah glanced from the two young men to her aging grumpy partner. Paco was string-muscled and small but Jorge was a six and a half foot hunk, full-necked, broad-chested, fine-pored. Deborah thought about young masculine vigor, and she wondered. There was Jake, growing a slight paunch that pulled his weak lower spine forward so he stood sway-backed at the counter. Sprouting gray hair from his ears while he lost it off his head. Getting unrulier in the eyebrows while he got tamer in the pants. “Look,” she declared. “It could be worse. The exterminator told me some places have rats so bold they ride the broom! And roaches may creep people out, but they’re actually clean – they haul away their dead.”

“Tell that to the customers … No. Don’t,” Jake reconsidered quickly. Deborah was a good hostess, an outgoing warm hospitable greeter. But the same liveliness that charmed most of their patrons came with a directness that sometimes surprised them; he wouldn’t put it past his wife to actually joke about cockroaches while escorting a party to a table.

“I know we have a problem,” she said seriously. “But we’re viable. I mean, we’re working on the pest thing, and as soon as we get a stable staff …”

“Yeah. Sure.” Jake coughed out the words sardonically. “We are so far from okay that it isn’t even in sight.” His face showed disgusted despair. He turned from the steel work counter and didn’t notice the cockroach ambling toward the vat of vinaigrette. “If we don’t get our act together and start serving the main courses before the customers have forgotten the starters, we’re doomed. And the repeated inspections are disruptive; you can’t argue about that. We’re starting to get the wrong kind of rep.”

Jake turned to Deborah as he covered the vinaigrette, so he didn’t see the roach become an unwitting prisoner of the dressing container. He wasn’t aware of all the desperate scrabbling that went on beneath the cover, like the race-around of a decapitated chicken, and he didn’t notice when the insect finally stopped trying to push out of the heavy cover and went quiescent within the acetic fumes. He was aware instead of wiping his hands on the front of his apron, walking toward wife-with-broom, insisting: “If we could just get on the right side of that Daddy Warbucks dude: get him to invest enough so we could add staff…”

“He’s got a reservation for lunch tomorrow.”

“Really? With the blonde?”

“Uh-huh. And his name is Campbell.”

Troy Campbell was a big money man around town. He owned acres of real estate and made a hobby of investing in small businesses. He ate at their little bistro often, and Jake had the idea, the fantasy according to Deborah, that Campbell could be talked into investing in them. Deborah pointed out that Campbell put money in small companies, yes, but only the type that could go public and create more wealth for him. Their restaurant wasn’t that kind of venture.

“Well, I say we try to impress the guy tomorrow. We create an occasion to sell ourselves.”

“I don’t think we should count on it.” Deborah spoke without her customary optimism. “When he’s here with that woman he’s into her; he’s not going to be receptive to a business discussion.”

“Let’s see how it goes. Let’s try to get his meal served right.”

They closed up their kitchen and followed Jorge and Paco out of the place. Unknowingly they left the trapped roach to suffer alone in the vinaigrette vat, while all the other roaches and rats had the nighttime run of the place.

Cockroach dreams. No words. Stiff like a carapace, brown like balsamic vinaigrette. No thoughts. Legs moving antenna ranging pushing pulling agitating no-escape quiet-now. While Jake and Deborah sexless shared a bed, the roach in the vinaigrette vat bided under the rim of the cover. While Troy Campbell smoked a cigar in his study and considered forty year-old Karen Montgomery, and wondered how after their tantalizing phone conversations and recent provocative e-mails he could take it to the next phase, the cockroach waited unaware that it waited, for morning and the restaurant preparations.

(continued on Wednesday)

I was a mature eight-year old then. I was aware of time’s passage and even had my own version of calendar; to me we had passed through the seasons of fireflies and of hurricanes, and were moving through crunchy fallen maple and oak leaves to Halloween time. A week later I went to the party filled with opinion about tragedy and dressed as a ghost. But no other guest had watched Madame Butterfly. The closest empathetic ears belonged to those who had wept at “Old Yeller,” but even though my father wouldn’t let me see that movie, I knew that at least there was a real reason the dog had to be destroyed.

Siesel was dressed as Marie Antoinette. I had to have that explained to me because history was not my subject. I disliked the hair; I loved her natural curls so much that I didn’t approve of pushing them under a wig, no matter how elaborate the wig. But I was very impressed with the satin brocade and the amazing ribbon-tied high-heeled shoes.

That year Siesel seemed older than her mother. With her heels, her towering wig of curls, and the empire-wasted gown pushing up what there was to push up, Siesel looked more like sixteen than twelve. And her mother chose to wear an itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny yellow polka-dot bikini. She had a beach cover-up over it, but that was unbuttoned, and in the lantern light of the party she looked like a teenager. She wore all her gold bangles, and they tinkled with the ice in her glass when she raised her arm for repeated speeches and toasts. Her eyes had a funny panicked appearance, like a rabbit caught in headlights, and I noticed that Siesel’s father kept trying to get her to go inside and leave the party to him.

There was no fifth party. The next year the neighborhood kids just grabbed bags and went trick-or-treating, and then winnowed out the unwrapped items and traded away the unwanted items and tried to make the collection last till Thanksgiving. A few months after the fourth party, Siesel’s family shrank and then moved away.

It was early January. There had been enough snow to layer the sidewalks with a thin sheet of ice but not enough to close school. I came home one Wednesday, pulled off my boots as required in the small entry area, draped my parka as preferred on the second-lowest hook, and walked into the kitchen. I was quiet because it was likely my baby brother was sleeping. I knew my other brother was outside building a fort and sneak-eating snow.

My mother stood at the sink, probably washing dishes. Her platinum rings sparkled in the tiny blue glass dish on the windowsill, and her cigarette rested in a U-slot of the brown ashtray, its smoke ribboning upward in the sunlight. She spoke immediately, quietly, without turning around. That was uncharacteristic behavior, so I paid attention.

“Honey, something very sad happened today.” I knew instinctively that Mom should have turned then and let me see her eyes, but she kept facing the sink, back stiff and arms moving. “Siesel’s mother died.”

“How …” I started to ask, but she continued. “It’s very terrible,” she said, and “Apparently she took too many sleeping pills and isn’t going to wake up. Siesel’s father found her when he came home for lunch today. Thank God for that. At least Siesel wasn’t the one to discover it.”

I wondered if the “it” meant Siesel’s mother, if you became an “it” that soon after death. I was shocked and had questions about the death, but not about the suicide. After all, I had seen Madame Butterfly. I knew when I watched the opera that suicide must happen, because no one would include such a concept in a production if it were fiction, because who would believe that anyone would kill herself? If it didn’t really happen …

Siesel and her father and Gretel moved soon after that. I never knew where they went. The last thing I noticed about them was a hideous lethargy that seemed to pull their muscles closer to the ground, so it was an effort for each of them to climb into their Buick the day they drove away.

Their images remained in me. They lurked with the memories of child ideas and occasionally twinkled in peripheral revision. Almost half a century later I mentioned the family to my parents. Dad swept his recollections slowly, like a St. Bernard’s big head, and after a lag said, “The father wrote for television.” Mom declared with strange satisfaction, “All I know is that you came home from those parties to use our bathroom. You said their’s was dirty.”

“Don’t you remember the mother killing herself?” I asked, surprised at my own surprise.

“Did she?” Dad’s face looked puzzled.

“Oh yeah. I think she did die,” my mother said. She took Dad’s elbow. “But I don’t remember how.” She looked vacant, recollecting. “He was pretty funny. She was a ditzy blonde. She used to say there was no point in making the bed if you were just going to use it again that night. Their bathroom wasn’t clean.”