Commuters (12 page)

A block or so later, he caught up with Nona.

“Listen. Just listen for a second, all right?” She wasn’t looking at him, but then she wasn’t racing ahead anymore, either. Avery couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a fight with a girlfriend—hell, with anyone—when he wasn’t fucked up already, or at least had the promise, the consolation, of getting that way afterward. He took a deep breath. “First of all, I apologize for the thing about office people, if that’s where this started. I did not, in any way, mean someone like your mom. Who I would love to meet, by the way. When you want me to, I mean—never mind. But, okay, I can see where that was a really shitty thing to say, and why you’d be pissed off and that it would make you all, you know, distant and stuff at the restaurant—” Nona tried to interrupt, but Avery hurried on. “Doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter. The point is that I should have thought before I spoke. So that’s one part.”

Nona was watching his face carefully.

“But I have to ask something. Well, two things. Here’s the first one, and I just have to know.” They were standing in front of a chain-link fence, freezing. “When we went to Maryland. Are you saying that was weird? I mean, me paying for all of it?”

It was going to kill him if she was now going to turn those two days and two nights, every one a strong candidate for Avery’s best
ever, into some kind of depressing
I-feel-cheap-when-you-pay-for-me
thing. The day after Avery had cashed the check Jerry had given him to buy a computer and printer, he’d spent an hour online at the coffee shop, rented a car, made some reservations, and told Nona to call in sick at Silkworm. Really sick. They’d driven a straight shot to Baltimore, and spent the next forty-eight hours in a salty, blurry haze: softshell crabs in red plastic baskets, one night at a skanky motel and the next at a fussy bed-and-breakfast where they pounded the rattly bed so hard that the proprietor avoided all eye contact the next day, plus one unforgettable blow-out meal at Le Finestrine, a tucked-away place where Avery ordered enough food to earn a hushed respect from the stiff-necked waiters and cause the chef to come join them at the table with a bottle of 1964 Latour. Avery didn’t need anything else in the world, in that moment where Nona raised the glass to her lips and he got to watch her face as she tasted the wine. Everything distilled itself—the food, the miles of highway, her body and what it did to him—into one perfect shimmering fusion, right then.

“‘Weird? You want to know if I felt
weird
?” Nona said. Was she making fun of his choice of words? Was she ready to stop being mad? “‘Weird’ is my middle name.”

Something wordless passed between them and whatever it was gave Avery the green light to pull her close. Nona shivered in his arms.

“What’s the second question?” she asked, face muffled against his chest.

“You don’t really want McDonald’s, do you?”

“Hell, no,” she said, pulling away. “Now, buy me a real lunch, moneybags.”

Well, so what if he wanted her approval? So what if trying to do something—the first thing ever, on his own—came as a direct result of wanting to have her see him in a new light, of wanting her to be proud of him? That was only the initial impulse, the image in his head of a new look of respect on Nona’s face, the way she could say to people,
My boyfriend? Yeah, he’s a chef. He owns his own place—you should really come by some night. Plus, he’s
awesome
in bed.
It wasn’t just that, though, the stupid fantasies that would run uncontrolled through his head while he chopped cucumber and fried falafel at Pita Pie. (The worst, the most embarrassing, involved flashbulbs going off at opening night, celebrities turned away at the door, and Nona in this tight red dress, perched at the bar and smiling at him as he sent out plate after plate of fabulousness to the ecstatic foodie crowds packing the tables. Really. Red dress. Flashbulbs!) First of all, Avery would argue to himself, what the fuck was wrong with wanting to make your lover proud of you? Was that, or was that not, something totally understandable and decent? But, just in case it was hugely uncool, he hastened to remind himself that there were several other recent factors that contributed to the idea of opening his own place. The plan.

First, aside from wanting to win Nona’s favorable opinion on everything about himself, Avery had to admit that hanging around her friends was good for something other than secret inward competitions he would set up all night long and then, naturally, always win:
MacArthur grant? Good for you, bro. But guess what? She’s going home with
me! Nona knew everyone and had plans almost every night: workshops, rehearsals, performances, readings. As for her own kind of music—the art-song stuff—Nona didn’t talk about it that much, with Avery at least, although he knew she was working
hard on some new series. But she took him to a midnight Beckett production under the Manhattan Bridge; she was a regular in this group of people learning how to play folk songs in Estonian or Peruvian or something; two nights ago he met her at a show where men were miming frenzied sex while someone intoned old radio advertisement jingles into a microphone. A lot of it was laughable, some of it was startling, but all of it reminded Avery that he wasn’t doing anything. Back home, he’d had drugs, and the galvanizing fear of getting caught. Out here, though, he didn’t have a goal or a dream or an agenda or a drive or a burning desire—other than Nona, of course. Not that he wanted to be in a body stocking up on stage, humping some guy, but after a while it started to get to you, all this art. Plus, he was tired of saying he was a cook at Pita Pie to Nona’s friends, after whatever performance, when they would politely ask him what he did. Actually, Avery was even tired of saying the
words
“Pita Pie.”

But it hadn’t been at some cutting-edge downtown performance that Avery’s plan had taken shape. No, that had occurred out in Hartfield, of all places. Avery was dutifully taking the train there every week, or almost, for the hour or so it would take his grandfather to talk himself tired while Avery squirmed and fidgeted and tried to look interested. There was always so little air in that study. Avery found himself yawning compulsively, and desperate to fight off sleep. After he’d blown the $2500 on the weekend in Maryland with Nona, he had shown up for their first session with an eighty-dollar used laptop from a junk electronics store on Forty-second Street. Jerry either hadn’t noticed the difference or wasn’t saying—and there’d been no further mention of a digital recorder. Mostly, Grandad was content to talk, on and on, while Avery pretended
to be getting it all down, hunting and pecking with two middle fingers. What did he talk about? Well, it was hard to say, since the busted laptop had one video game that still worked: cascading colored bricks that had to be arranged just so before they landed. Avery was up to the fourth level.

One day he was drafting what he liked to imagine was a scorching love letter, safe behind the open cover of the computer and the tapping of the keys. Grandad was going on and on; it didn’t matter much if Avery listened or not. Not that he didn’t sometimes listen! They were up to the year when Jerry and Frank, not content with their little paper packing company in 1950-whatever, mortgaged their houses and took out a loan worth four times the size of their entire business in order to buy a competitor’s firm. They had six months to turn a profit, or they would default. It wasn’t
completely
uninteresting. It just wasn’t where Avery was at in his life, this
on and on and on
about the past. He had things to do now.

“So you won’t need to make that mistake,” Grandad said, laughing at some memory. “No, I’d say we covered that one for you. But good.”

Avery looked up. His fingers hovered over the keyboard.
For me?
What was he talking about?

“I’m not blathering on for my own amusement,” Grandad said, serious now. “Not
just
for my own amusement. Don’t tell me you want to cook peanut sandwiches for someone else for the rest of your life.”

“Pita,” Avery corrected, but he was distracted. His grandfather took an envelope out from a desk drawer and slid it toward him. Occasionally this is how he would give Avery a little cash, for the train fare. But when Avery looked at the figure on the check in
side the envelope, what he saw there wasn’t a train-fare kind of amount.

“Now, I haven’t signed it yet,” Grandad said, taking the envelope back. “But you saw your name there, didn’t you? It’s waiting here for you, as soon as you’re ready.”

“Ready for what?”

Grandad waited a moment before answering, enjoying Avery’s confusion. “For your first investor to pony up,” he said.

Avery was silent, still stunned.
His own…restaurant? Could he really? What kind of place…what kind of
food? A thousand new thoughts began to form. Grandad watched him, then put the envelope away and shut the drawer firmly. And then he began to talk again, about business in the old days.

Later on, Avery had come downstairs, his head swimming. Had that just happened, with the money, with the idea of his own place? As usual, Winnie was reading on the couch in the living room. She put aside her library book right away—
The Plot Against America
by Philip Roth. Same book in his backpack.

“Another soda?”

“No, I’m good. I should be heading back. What’s the latest out there?”

Winnie sighed and glanced out at the lawn, where several stakes and red plastic tape hung, wet and abandoned, in the downpour. “A big old mess,” she said cheerfully. “Rachel’s tree man went out of town for three weeks—and you should see all the customer complaints I found on the Web, about that one pool company that I’d been interested in. So it’s back to the drawing board. That tree’s spared—for the moment, anyway.”

From where he stood, Avery had a full view of the doomed
sycamore; it was almost as if it had been planted exactly there in order to be seen from the living room’s main window. It
was
a pretty beautiful tree, not that he was a nature freak, or anything. He glanced away guiltily, but Winnie caught him—and she had that mischievious smile, the one that said
I’ll do what I want
.

Avery hated to put this into words, even in the privacy of his own head, but at times like this he could see what his grandfather saw in Winnie. And then, inevitably—like now—he would find himself appraising her lithe, trim figure as she moved across the room. Or wondering how much action his grandfather was getting. What did old people actually
do
, when it came time to get it on? Did the same standards and rules apply? Or was there a whole new order of business?

“Avery? What do you think?”

He snapped out of it. “I…what were you saying?”

“About these visits. We love them, of course. But…are they causing problems between you and your mother?”

His mother? “Why would they? I mean, she’s the one who made me swear to come out here. I mean, not that I don’t want to, or anything.”

Winnie brightened. “Good, good. I’ll run you right over to the station—but would you mind doing a little heavy lifting first? Rachel dropped off more boxes. You’d think, working in the kind of store she does, that she wouldn’t need to
save
all these old things of the girls’, but—”

Avery hoisted up a box and headed down to the basement. He didn’t really need to hear all the details, and as usual by the end of a Hartfield visit, he was dying to get out of there. But there was something long-ago familiar about the brown-and-cream color of
the children’s book he glimpsed inside, and when he pulled apart the box flaps and saw the cover of Maurice Sendak’s
In the Night Kitchen
, Avery was hit with such a powerful sense memory that he had to sit down on the cold basement floor.
Exactly like my old copy,
he thought, turning the worn pages of the illustrated paperback with a pleasure so intense and unexpected it was actually painful. Maybe it
was
his old copy? An unreasonable thought, but unshakable, since every single picture—a naked little boy tumbling out of his bed into the starlit world of the night kitchen, those fleshy titan bakers alternately terrifying and pathetic, the city made of flour-can buildings and milk-bottle skyscrapers, all set against an inky blue-black sky—every one, Avery knew by heart. All of a sudden he was eight, lying flat on his back in his bed, in the old house in Evanston. If he held the book high enough overhead, arms straight, and angled it just right, he could catch enough light from the window to see the pictures. Occasionally, the strained sound of his mother’s laughter would float up from downstairs. He was supposed to be asleep. His father had left them—
gone for good,
is how he’d overheard his mother put it—the summer before.

“Milk in the batter! Milk in the batter! We bake cake! And nothing’s the matter!”

In the shadows of his grandfather’s basement, Avery allowed himself another moment, sitting there alone. He already knew he’d steal the book and that this theft would be stupid and unnecessary. Of course Winnie would let him have it, if he asked. But he wasn’t going to ask. He was going to slip
In the Night Kitchen
into his pack and carry it onto the train, where he could savor Mickey’s triumph—soaring up and up, in his bread-dough plane, to pour the milk and save the day—in private. These extra moments, then,
here in his grandfather’s basement, weren’t so that he could finish reading the book. They were to quell sudden hot tears that had caught him off guard.

“I don’t get it,” Nona was saying to the guy behind the counter at Kennedy Chicken. She had been studying the plastic overhead menu with the utter concentration of someone determined to crack a code. ‘ “Quarter chicken, comes with bread or salsa’? That doesn’t make sense. I mean, because the two things aren’t equal. Salsa is more like a sauce, like something that should already be a part of the order, whereas bread—that’s kind of like a side.”

“You want both? That’s extra.”