Sputterpub's Blog

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.”

I never got the charm and I can’t remember who did. I never served a cake myself with a charm in it. But I was always pleased with the idea. Charmed, even. Like the concept of a cucumber stuffed with pearls, which I read about in one of the Arabian Nights tales. Useless but enchanting.

Many of my memories from that neighborhood are indistinct; my family moved away when I was barely ten, and Siesel left a year before that. But I have some true recollections – little scenes never captured by my father’s avid camera and therefore remembered as life instead of slides. The annual polio vaccines and the Halloween parties at Siesel’s are vivid points like moonbeams caught in a net.

The first year, the year of the yellow ballerina, Siesel’s mother outshone all the guests. I was in kindergarten; I had just begun to notice other people who weren’t family or kids, and I remember being fascinated with the bracelets and the melodic voice. Siesel was pretty and happy, but no one was as happy as her mother.

The second year Siesel wore a Southern belle costume. Her beautiful red hair was longer, and fashioned for that day into ringlets. I remember the amazing lace on her corseted gown. Gretel was a mature St. Bernard by then, but she trampled mud on Siesel’s hem, and I was surprised at how angry that made Siesel’s mom. I remember watching Siesel’s father lead her mother aside and talk to her, hug her, apparently calm her. I also remember learning that week that my own father wasn’t going to vote for the President. We had been visiting my grandparents, collecting the fallen maple leaves, and as we got ready to go my grandpa asked my father who he was going to vote for. My father answered with the question, “Have I ever voted Republican?” and that started a train of surprise and understanding in me.

The third Halloween party came at a tough time for me. I’d had a tonsillectomy early that month, and my throat was still sore. Worse than that, my spirit was sore from the ether and my attitude was sore from hospital treatment. Worse than those, my parents were fighting daily and my nights, already disturbed by a tender throat and anesthetic nightmares, were punctuated by the sounds of my parents’ quarrels and spiced with hallucinations about divorce.

I was not happy. I acted out in school, sassing my second-grade teacher, and my parents tried to discipline me with words and room arrest. They even said “Don’t do as I do; do as I say” and “Because I told you so.” They made me so angry that I scared them by coming home late, with my hair looking bloody because I had smeared wild berries in it in the field near my school. My mother yelled at me while she washed my hair, and didn’t seem to care when I got shampoo in my eyes. Not long after that, she took me to the beauty parlor and had my long hair cut.

I went as a hobo to the party that year. It was easy to fashion some raggedy clothes but I was jealous as a snake about Siesel’s fairy princess costume. She even had gossamer wings: glitter-spattered tissue over thin wire frames, made by her mother of course, who that year flitted from table to table in a belly-dancer outfit, purple, blue, and green, with yards of gold coins around her slim waist.

By the time of the fourth party, my mother was very pregnant. The baby that would be my second brother was only three weeks away from emerging. I would have rather had a dog. I really wanted a St. Bernard like Gretel, but I would have been happy with any shape of canine. I longed for a companion.

My parents weren’t quarreling at the time. In fact, my father appeared to be devoted to my mom, and my mother seemed reasonably content. They didn’t pay me much attention. My first brother made me seem more like a kid than a baby to them, and with a second infant on the way I took on relative maturity in my parents’ eyes.

The one time I remember doing anything with my father that season was the occasion he took to introduce me to opera. He loved Puccini, and he had me sit with him through an early television broadcast of Madame Butterfly.

Of course I didn’t “get” opera. I was accustomed to suspending my disbelief for “The Howdy Doody Show” or Crusader Rabbit cartoons, but those were for kids; they were supposed to be absurd. I knew opera was for grownups. I sat at my father’s right side on the green damask sofa, and I watched it very seriously. I thought the way the people sang so loudly at each other was silly. I found the story disturbingly, progressively, sad. But what stunned me, what smashed me like a board and flattened me like a falling piano, was the moment when the beautiful lady plunged the knife into her kimonoed breast. It didn’t matter to me whether the death made sense or not. I just couldn’t believe anyone would see such an act as any form of entertainment. It seemed to me, then and forever after, to be a poor choice for any performance. I’ve never understood the sad ending.

(to be concluded tomorrow)

The first thing I noticed about Siesel was her dog. Gretel was still a puppy when we all moved in, but even at six months a St. Bernard is hard to ignore. And she was a perfect example of her breed. Heavy-footed, rounded of back, cotton-white with fields of auburn and umber. She was too young for the characteristic loose lip – it would be a little while before she began spraying us all with clear mucus when she shook her big head or sneezed – but she made opaque messes with big-puppy energy.

The second thing I noticed was Siesel’s hair. It was naturally curly and the color of buffed copper. I hadn’t seen a redhead before, and I would never after meet one of better hue. My books all pictured blonde princesses, which made my brunette self feel second-string, but something about the color of Siesel’s hair moved her out of the arena of normal for me, and into the epic.

Siesel, for her part, probably wasn’t feeling epic. She was nearly nine years old and she had just moved away from all of her friends in New Orleans, yanked with her mother from their homey humid delta to the suburbs of Long Island. She knew the move had something to do with her father’s job; she heard her parents fighting late into the night, and she must have believed what her mother told mine: that her dad wanted to get them out of the South, back to the area where he was raised. She acted lonely. She didn’t like appearing exotic. She considered altering her name, to Cecile or Cecily. Even those were too odd. She paid no attention to the younger kids on the block. I was only five.

The neighborhood in Glen Cove was hewn out of an old berry and clover farm. The developers took pasture two acres at a time, carving streets and cul-de-sacs, laying sewer and water lines, basing and framing and finishing blocks of ranch and split-level houses with rail-fenced backyards. A year after our block was settled, a draft horse broke through the fence into my backyard and caused my visiting cousin to have hysterics. Three years after, all of the farm had been turned into single-family first-time homes, everything except the original two-story wood-frame farmhouse, where the big O’Neill family lived, with the twins Shelly and Stephen and seven other kids.

The way tract homes were developed, entire initial neighborhoods moved in at once. The houses were in such demand that they sold immediately upon completion, and approximately sixty days later the street became narrow with moving vans, and nuclear families ranged around in relocation chaos. There followed additional periods of shelf-building, lawn seeding, and patio development, during which the neighbors took each other’s material and cooperative measure.

My household was friendly. My mother was always outgoing and energetic, my father was competent and cordial, and my baby brother was adorable.

Siesel’s family was exuberant. They weren’t from the Northeast; they couldn’t help but be interesting. Her father was enthusiastic and her mother was vivacious. She wore bright flowing clothes and almost sang instead of speaking. She stacked a dozen gold bangles on her wrists, like a princess from the Arabian Nights. She made a big decorative deal out of every holiday. Especially Halloween.

The neighborhood was completed in August and no one was set up properly for Labor Day; Halloween was the first big holiday after the houses filled. It happened that Siesel’s birthday was on the 30^th of October and their family tradition had always celebrated it with Halloween, so Siesel’s mother threw the first of what would be an annual party, and invited every kid on the block.

That seemed extraordinary. Siesel was a few years ahead of the post-war tsunami, and most of the neighbor kids were four or five or six to her nine, but all of us were invited and Siesel was gracious.

They decked the house out like it was haunted. Cobwebs and strange lights played on the flat back yard and eerie music whined from inside the study. Siesel’s father greeted everyone dressed like Dracula, whose movie wouldn’t be out for two years and would then be deemed so terrifying that I for one, and several other guests as well, would not be permitted to see it. Siesel’s mother appeared as a beautiful Gypsy. Siesel herself was a ballerina that first year; I condensed with envy at the sight of her yellow satin toe shoes and horizontal tulle skirt.

There were lanterns and crepe paper strung from the back of the house to the edges of the fence, and several wooden tables with attached benches and matching cloths. I was seated at the table farthest from the house and the rituals, but Siesel’s mother made sure all of the guests saw the big cake before she cut into it. It was iced in orange and chocolate-so-dark-it-was-nearly-black, and it looked like a flattened pumpkin. It was moist dark devilsfood beneath buttercream frosting, and there was a charm baked into it. That was a tradition in Siesel’s family; the guest who found the charm would receive a prize.

(to be continued on Wednesday)