Shakespeare's Kitchen (3 page)

“
Cohn
,” said Nathan. “Nathan
Cohn
.”

“Dinner is served,” the girl said, “and Alice is going to usher you.” It was the golden darling who took Nathan’s arm. Nathan experienced a small thrill of horror. He thought, I’m not up for this. This needs preparation. Young Alice hurried Nathan along at a smart pace. Nat, galumphing beside her, glimpsed the pure throat, the cheek outlined with a finely furred halo of light. Don’t, prayed Nathan Cohn, let me fall in love between here and “
Where
,” he asked the girl, “are you taking me?”

“Your table.”

“Quick! Tell me what they’re going to do to me!”

“They have a prizewinner for every table of twelve. Your hostess is Madame Forage.”

“Wait one little old moment,” said Nathan. “Is this a fund-raiser, or what?”

“I guess maybe how they pay for the prizes? Each table,” the girl spoke backwards as she preceded him up yet another stair, “has got a theme, a color scheme, and a logo. Your hostess is French, so you are red-white-and-blue, and your logo . . .”

“Don’t tell me! Wait wait wait wait wait wait! The Eiffel Tower!”

“
Right
!” cried young Alice.

“I’m not sure,” worried Nathan, “that there’s anything left of my poor old French!”

“She’s deaf anyway. But!” said Alice, “on your other side you get to sit next to Betsy Morrowell!”

“I do?” said Nathan. “Who is Betsy Morrowell?”

“Betsy Morrowell!” said Nathan’s usher. “You don’t know Betsy Morrowell? Don’t you watch TV?”

“Never miss my soap opera,” Nathan said stoutly.

“And you never saw
Betsy’s Bazaar
? It’s been around for absolutely ever! I’ve been watching since I was a child!”

“That long!” said Nathan.

“My mom let me watch with my supper.”

“Brief me! What’s it about?”

“It’s about this woman. Her husband gets sent to I guess some place like Arabia, I guess, as an ambassador or something. Betsy gets bored with ordering servants around, so she sets up a booth in the bazaar and all the things that happen every week with a different tourist.”

“I think I . . . I do remember,” said Nathan.

They stepped out into a dazzle of flowers and lights and Handel’s Water Music. Across the black river on the left moved the lights of New Jersey, and Manhattan’s Upper West Side on the right. Alice walked Nathan through a group of mimes. One knelt and bent her charming head over Nathan’s hand; one threw a garland of flowers over his shoulders. “Thank you! Thank you!” Nathan said to them. People sitting at a great round table rose at his approach. They applauded. Nathan, who had meant to continue cool and snotty to the end, felt his throat constrict. Out of a centerpiece of red roses grew the Eiffel Tower made of white sweetheart roses and blue ribbon. They seated themselves. The card at Nathan’s place read NATHAN H. CONES. “Well, this is very brilliant!” Nathan said to the noble-looking, very old woman on his right. He assisted her liver-spotted, gnarled, beringed hands in the unwrapping of the red-white-and-blue favor. She held it up: a lipstick in the shape of the Eiffel Tower. She pointed to the favor on Nathan’s golden plate. He unwrapped a white Eiffel Tower- shaped mechanical pencil with a little lever that could make it write in blue and in red. The large, blond male on madame’s other side was shouting French into her ear, and she turned to him.

Nathan was grateful to young Alice. He could imagine himself
asking his partner on the left, “Haven’t we met somewhere?” She looked familiar. “Did you and I go to Music and Arts together? Kenyon College? Not Kenyon. Have you been to Concordance?” She was a good-looking, bright redheaded woman between twenty-eight and fifty, with powerful jaws and more teeth than ordinary people carry inside their mouths. It was a brave and competent face. Nathan perfectly remembered watching her perform an athletic feat of slapstick. Nat remembered respecting or, remembering, respected the decades of work behind the mastery with which the actress had mugged and delivered her silly lines. Here she sat, next to Nathan, and seemed not to be going to waste her smile on his occasion. Nathan could imagine her life crowded with men and occasions. She had the right to look—irritated was what she looked, though not, probably, with him. Nathan didn’t think she was sufficiently conscious of his person to be irritated by it. She appeared to be irritated by her salad, at which she kept poking her fork. Nathan desired to impinge, to become real to Betsy Morrowell. While he busied himself in the formulation of something clever and ever so mildly impertinent with which to startle Betsy Morrowell’s attention, his eyes rested on his wife. Nancy sat on the far side of the Eiffel Tower. The man on Nancy’s left had turned so completely toward her, his back was turned against the woman in mauve who sat on his other side and looked cross, poor thing, unable to impinge.

Betsy Morrowell suddenly said, “I loathe mimes.”

Nathan laughed. “I don’t think,” he said, “that I have ever met anyone with enough passion on the subject of mimes to
loathe
them!”

“They’re elite!” Betsy Morrowell said, showing her teeth.

“Why should
their
being elite bother
you
?” Nathan asked her.

“Mimes!” spat Betsy. “How many people even know mimes even exist?”

“I see! I see! I’ll tell you what I see,” said Nathan, “and it’s sort
of wonderful: It bugs you that the few people who know that mimes exist mightn’t know that you exist. Just as it bugs me that the masses of people who watch
you
don’t know
I
exist!”

Here Betsy Morrowell looked at Nat. “What do you mean?” she said.

Nat saw Alice coming to fetch him and said, “I’ve got to go get me my prize. Don’t let it bug you—it’s all of five thousand bucks.” Nathan Cohn and Betsy Morrowell looked past each other’s eyes and their two smiles curled away from their teeth.

 

 

The exchange had not been even. When Betsy Morrowell’s manager, in the limousine on the drive home, asked her who she’d sat next to, she frowned and said, “Some man, I think.” But the Columbia Prize-winning poet, Nathan Cohn, mentioned to Celie, at the institute on Monday morning, that he’d sat next to that woman on TV—what’s her name? Morrowell. He said he hadn’t even known who she was. He said it in the kitchen to Joe’s assistant, Betty, and again to Mrs. Coots when she came to do out his office. He told Ilka Weisz at the Bernstines’ reception for the new director, Leslie Shakespeare, that he had sat next to Betsy Morrowell on the Crewbergs’ yacht, and that he hadn’t known who she was, and blushed when he remembered that he had told it to her on the Bernstines’ porch when she came to be interviewed for the junior appointment at the Concordance Institute.

Let Nathan explain and rant and demand to see the manager, the bank would not understand, would not cash, would not allow Nathan Cohn to deposit a check for $5,000 made out to Nathan H. Cones. The manager advised him to return it to the organization and have them issue him a check with his name correctly entered. This Nathan did. He waited a week and a day and then he called. He explained about the check. The girl said, “Let me switch you
to Accounts.” Accounts had an English voice. “Mixed you up, did we? Oh dear!” She thought she remembered sending this check up to Mr. Block, who was out to lunch, but would call as soon as he got back if Mr. Cones would leave his number.

“Not Cones!” Nathan said. “
Cohn
. I think, maybe
I
better call
him
.” Nathan called and explained. Mr. Block said he would look into it, give him till Monday. “I’ll even give him till Tuesday!” Nat said to Nancy, but Tuesday he was doing an out-of-town reading, Wednesday he plain forgot, and when he called Thursday, Accounts said, “Fact of the matter is half our files are on the twenty-first floor. We’re in the middle of moving and everything’s a bit of a shambles.”

“What’s your name, please?” it occurred to Nathan to ask her. It was Joyce. “Well, Joyce, you’ve been very helpful. Short of getting my money I’m glad to know it’s a shambles that’s holding it up.”

“You give us a week to get ourselves sorted out,” said Joyce.

“They’re moving to the twenty-first floor,” Nathan reported to Nancy.

Nat gave them
two
weeks. Accounts asked him what she could do for him. Nat said, “Could I speak to Mr. Block, please?” Mr. Block was in a meeting, but if he would leave his number, Mr. Block would call as soon as he got out. “Could I speak to Joyce, please?”

“Joyce is no longer with us,” said Accounts.

“What is your name?” Nathan asked the girl, and her name was Tracy. Nathan explained to Tracy, who said, “Hold on.”

“What’s happening?” Nancy asked Nathan.

“I’m holding on,” said Nathan.

Tracy came back and said, “We don’t have a check for Nathan Cohn. We have a check for Mr. Nathan H. Cones.”

“Thanks,” said Nathan, “I better speak to Mr. Block.”

When Nathan called some minutes before five, Mr. Block had left for the day. The following morning Nathan logged the time, 10:14, when Mr. Block had not yet come in, in the margin of the
long poem on which he was then at work. Later he kept a regular notebook logging the day and hour when Mr. Block was lunching with a client; was out sick; had returned but was in conference in the president’s office but would call back if Mr. Cones would leave his number.

“CohnCohnCohnCohn,” shouted Nathan.

Nathan called Winterneet and asked him if he had heard of a poet name of Nathan H. Cones.

“No,” said Winterneet. “Is he any good?”

“I think he won my Columbia Prize,” said Nathan.

“Speaking of Columbia Prizes,” said Winterneet, “didn’t poor Barret Winburg get one the same year as you?”

“Why ‘poor’ Winburg? Didn’t he get
his
five thousand?”

“Dead, isn’t he?”

“Dead! Winburg? No way!” Nathan meant, How could Winburg be dead and I not know it! Nathan was tremendously upset.

Winterneet said, “I thought I read an obituary in the
Times
a couple of weeks back, but my memory is like the old gray mare: she ain’t what she used to be.”

“Nancy, what happened to my old batch of the
Times
?” hollered Nathan.

“Threw them out so you can start a new batch,” shouted Nancy.

“Thanks a whole heap!” yelled Nathan. He called a friend on the Book Review and said, “Listen, Winburg didn’t die, did he?”

“Not that I know,” said the friend. “We ran a review of something of his last Sunday—”

“If the
Times
ran a review of Winburg, he is not dead. Thanks.”

 

 

After lunching with the president on November 30 at 1:44, Mr. Block suffered a massive heart attack and never regained consciousness.

“Shit. Sorry,” said Nathan. “Let me talk with Tracy, please.”

Tracy had got married Saturday and had taken time off to go on her honeymoon. “She won’t be back till the New Year,” said a Southern voice that might or might not be black.

“What is your name?” asked Nathan.

“Miss Martin.” Miss Martin said she knew how these mix-ups go. “The longer they go on, the more people get to mess up.”

 

 

“It’s become a sort of fever with Nathan,” Nancy told Jenny Bernstine over lunch early in the spring. “He calls on the dot of ten and again at eleven and every hour on the hour.”

“I can see how maddening it would be.”

“What I’m afraid of,” said Nancy, “is they’ve put him down for a madman.”

Fevers burn themselves out. Nathan’s rampage passed. He still called, perhaps once a month and tried to explain to the several men and one woman who came and went in Mr. Block’s old job. He chatted with the sympathetic Miss Martin, who was thinking of going back to school. Nathan encouraged her.

 

 

In the years that followed Nathan Cohn published three books and obtained, if not fame, a degree of eminence among his peers. He got grants of money. He slept with several women—one of them beautiful—mostly, but not always, during the times he and Nancy lived apart. These times grew fewer and briefer. The virulence of their angers and disappointments had not resolved so much as retired. Nathan put on more weight, but his hair remained black. Then he became ill and was very ill for some years, and got better and had ten years in which he did what many thought, and Winterneet said, was his best work. There were blessed months in which the long poem on which he had been stuck for half a
decade spun itself out of a place in his head over which he had no say: He played words like a juggler, phrases rhymed in rhythms. Nathan was master of the English tongue—Nat Cohn owned the language in the year before his illness caught up with him.