The Broken Teaglass (28 page)
My father called me just as
I was pouring bottled vodka sauce on my corkscrew pasta. I told him about my Christmas Eve plans.
“But William,” he insisted, “you have to come for Christmas Eve. This is the year.”
“The year for what?”
“For the flaming plum pudding. You were so helpful with the Thanksgiving dessert medley. I’ve decided that the flaming plum pudding would be a satisfying joint project.”
“So let’s do it Christmas Day.”
“No, William. I’m doing a torte and a cookie platter Christmas Day. Flaming plum pudding is definitely Christmas Eve fare. And we’ll be using real beef suet. The old-fashioned way. No Crisco substitutions.”
“What’s beef suet?”
“What are they teaching you there at your new job?
Suet
is fat from around the cow’s organs.”
“Hot damn, Dad. That sounds right up Mom’s alley.
She
can help you this time.”
“That’s ridiculous. Your mother has no interest in my yuletide culinary experiments.”
“Make it with Jen, then,” I said. “She’d love it.”
“She won’t help,” Dad said, sounding small and defeated. I thought of old Mr. Stephen Peterson, and felt a little sad. Maybe Jimmy was right. Maybe you turn into an old man quicker than you’d ever expect.
“No,” I admitted. “But she’d write a poem about it.”
My father sighed exaggeratedly into the phone.
“I can hear it now,” I said.
“‘The flames. THE FLAMES.’”
“Don’t be absurd. Your sister’s writing is highly restrained.”
“Do you think Jen ever writes poems about us?”
“I’m not sure,” my father answered. “She wrote this strange one about Nixon’s daughters a couple of years back. I couldn’t help but wonder what that one was really about.”
“Hmm. I’ll have to check it out sometime, if she’s ever willing to dig it up.”
“William. Why don’t you just bring this girl down to have Christmas with us?”
“That would be a little scary for this stage of the relationship. I mean, we’re not even
dating
.”
“Then why in heaven’s name are you spending Christmas Eve with her?”
A fairly logical question. I paused before answering.
“Well?” my father said.
“This girl isn’t a girlfriend,” I said carefully. “But she’s more like … a good investment. She’s the sort who might
grow into me someday. She’s the sort who might realize, maybe in a year or two, what kind of potential I have. She might recommend me to a friend.”
For a few moments, no more sounds came from my father’s end.
“That doesn’t sound very promising to me, William,” he said finally.
“Well—”
“Not promising enough to disappoint your mother like this.”
“How do you know she’ll be disappointed? She won’t care. As long as I’m there Christmas Day.”
“It’s really too bad you’re going to miss it. Your sister says she has an announcement. Another poetry prize, or something, I think. And what about Christmas morning?” Dad sounded a little peevish.
“How about this,” I said. “I have dinner with Mona. Did I mention I’m bringing dessert? I thought you’d at least like that part. Then I drive down home after. I’ll probably arrive around midnight. Just like Santa Claus.”
“Your mother wouldn’t want you driving in the middle of the night.”
“I think that’s what I’ll do. I’ll bet the highway will be empty then. Who drives around in the middle of the night Christmas Eve? I’ll fly down 91. Be there in an hour. We’ll all wake up together, and do the Christmas morning thing.”
“I’m not going to tell you what to do, William,” my father said. “But if that’s what you choose to do, then at the very least, don’t drive like a maniac. If you’re going to miss the meal anyway, there’s no sense
rushing
.”
“That’s the plan, then. I’ll come late Christmas Eve. You’ll save the cooking project till the next day?”
“We’ll see,” he said. “Uh … William …”
“Yeah?”
“I’ve been thinking. You’d better do your yearly checkup before long. It’s about that time, isn’t it?”
“I already did it,” I said. “A couple of weeks ago.”
“Oh? You went all the way down to Hartford and saw Dr. B.?”
“No,” I said. “I went and found a local doctor. Through my very own HMO.”
“And everything was …”
“Normal. Of course.”
“You should have called us. Just to let us know. And I’m sure we could’ve arranged for a way for you to see Dr. B. Your mother and I would have paid for it if it was a matter of cost …”
“Don’t worry about it. The guys up here are pretty good. After the crystal elixir and the colonic irrigation, I was feeling a hundred percent.”
“Very amusing. So you had a scan, then?”
“Yes
. But there’s nothing to worry about. It’ll be five years on the twenty-eighth. I’m even thinking of celebrating a little.”
Dad paused before speaking.
“William,” he said again.
“What, Dad?”
“If this Mona doesn’t already recognize your potential, then she’s probably not a very smart girl.”
“Oh
God
. I was only joking around about that.”
“I suspect that you weren’t. And if you really want to wow this girl, can I suggest a flaming dessert? I don’t know what would be more impressive than a dessert presented in flaming liquor.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I promised. “But I was thinking of doing some kind of soufflé.”
I heard my dad take in a breath.
“Well then,” he said. “Just remember to look for those soft, curled peaks when beating your whites.”
“Will do,” I said, chuckling inwardly. I’d mentioned the soufflé just to get him to say it.
Soft, curled peaks
. “See you soon.”
Soft, curled peaks
. The intensity and calm precision of his pronunciation made me think of the most common phrase from his old repertoire.
A dull, throbbing pain
.
My most vivid and consistent memory of my father in my junior high and high school years is of him sitting down nightly at the cleared kitchen table with his cordless phone and a gimlet. Every night he’d call to check on the people whose wisdom teeth he’d pulled that day.
You’ll feel a dull, throbbing pain, perhaps through most of the night. Take one of the codeine pills I prescribed. By morning, the worst should be behind you. If the pain gets worse, you should give me a call
.
Occasionally there was more:
Which one? The bottom right one? Yes. I thought so. That was the difficult one coming out
.
His tone usually softened if someone seemed to be really suffering. But there was always the ominous warning of the
dull, throbbing pain
.
As I entered high school, I was aware that about 75 percent of the time, the person on the line was one of my schoolmates. But usually I didn’t have any idea who he had on the phone. Rarely did I even wonder which bloody maw of which of my classmates he had stared down into that day.
Has the bleeding stopped? Amy, can you put your mother on? I can’t understand what you’re trying to say
.
Naturally, he used only first names most of the time. It didn’t occur to me then that he might be growing weary of
yanking out people’s teeth. He pulled his last tooth when I was about halfway through my treatments. About six months later, we were both ready to go back to school: me to college, he to culinary school. In between, we spent a lot of time at home together. We didn’t have many friends, he and I. We experimented with his new Cuisinart mixer. We counted the days.
The office was shifting uneasily
. Everybody wanted to head down to the Christmas party, but no one wanted to be the first to get up.
Mona drummed on the side of my cubicle.
“C’mon down, Billy,” she whispered. “Party’s starting.”
“Go ahead,” I said, picking up a new pile. “I’ll be right down. I’m just rounding off my last part of 1951.”
She nodded and took off. I glanced down at my work. The W’s of 1951 had been especially productive:
Inevitably, I would have to leave Scout with the rest. I regret this, because if there’s one thing for which I have a
warm spot
here, it’s him. I wish there were a path that included him, but that’s impossible. The day Brownlow chose me was the last day I really occupied this space. He wished to remove me from it, and in a sense, he succeeded. But any losses suffered by either Scout or me are significantly fewer in this version—the one where my elbow slipped and knocked over a glass. This is the best version either of us can probably conceive of, and the only one I care to imagine. Somewhere deep in the layers of remote possibility, there was a version that ended with me
telling him, over tea and pie. Instead of this way. But that version won’t ever be.
46
As we sat at my kitchen table, my mind would often wander from the conversation, and eventually settle me into a familiar image. It wasn’t a confused or disturbing one, as those of earlier weeks. It contained nothing rotten, nothing undead. It was me, floating on an inner tube in a lake, with him sitting on a dock nearby. He was reading a book, enjoying the breeze, only occasionally glancing up to smile at me. He didn’t seem to notice that I was slowly bobbing away from the dock, but still, I’d just look back at him and wave. The sight of him so content was comforting, but it felt pretty natural, even exhilarating, to drift away. But what was it I wanted to tell him? Bobbing lazily, often I couldn’t quite remember, until the last minute, when I was nearly out of hearing distance. By then, I’d need to shout it, if I was ever going to say it at all. It was that he shouldn’t ask himself later if he should have reached out and pulled me back. He shouldn’t think back and wonder what he might have done differently. He was, in his way, my
white knight
. That I would remember, even if the rest was too hard.
44
Warm spot
nagged at me. Mona had wondered if Mary Anne had ever told anyone, and this felt like an answer—probably
no
. Mary Anne longed for a “version” of the story in which she told it to Dan. Maybe her silence was getting to her. Maybe she desperately wished she could tell it. But if they were truly lovers, and if it was truly self-defense—which seemed all but certain now—why
couldn’t
she tell him?
I had just a few more to go on the W’s. I looked through a couple of piles. Then the lights went out. Someone must have thought the editorial office had completely emptied, and decided to save electricity. Maybe Dan. He struck me as the frugal sort. But there was enough dull winter light from the high windows that I could still squint at the corners of the cits. A cit from the
New Yorker
. One from a book called
Interventions. Reader’s Digest. Glamour. The Broken Teaglass
. Another. I held the cit up to the light to read it.
Before the final
wrap-up
, Red, I should explain about your book. But doesn’t this just beat all? I have no idea what happened to it, in the end. We both know now that I dropped it sometime during that twelve-second stretch between there and here. But after that? Maybe the police found it. But why, then, wouldn’t they mention it in the newspapers? An odd finding, wouldn’t you think? Maybe it still sits there now, in a plastic bag at the police department, in a file drawer. A kind of shibboleth to distinguish the real girl from the hoaxes, should anyone ever come forward. The real girl will know the title of the lost history.
47
I threw the cits down and made my way around the cubicles till I found the stairwell.
The cafeteria was barely recognizable. Someone had moved the tables from their usual mess-hall lineup. Now they lined the sides of the room, covered with red paper tablecloths. Each one displayed a different elegant option for consumption: a punch bowl surrounded by plastic glasses, a wine spread, an elaborate tower of fruit. The room was lit
solely by little white Christmas lights and a few strategically placed candles. A jazzy version of “Jingle Bells” was playing softly against the subdued chatter of the celebrants.
So here it was again—the holidays. December 28 was almost upon me, and without much warning. I had none of the usual rhythm of the academic semester to remind me what month it was. Aside from the occasional Christmas carol in the grocery store, I’d had few seasonal cues. No Christmas tree, no Christmas cards, no trips to the mall.
Mr. Phillips swept by me, wearing a red ribbed turtleneck sweater. It looked new and youthful. Metrosexual, even.
“Billy’s here,” he said to no one in particular. “The party can commence.”
He was holding a wineglass in his loosely upturned palm. Without waiting for a response from me, he approached one of the typists, a redheaded lady in a brown dress. She laughed gaily at whatever he was saying, which I didn’t quite hear.
People were huddled in front of the tables in mostly predictable combinations: little clusters of typists, George and the older etymologist chatting together, a crowd of editors in their thirties knotted in front of the finger desserts. Grace was weaving her way in and out of the groups, carrying around somebody’s thickly bundled and impressively tasseled baby.
My eye eventually caught Dan and Mona, who were standing over by the hors d’oeuvres. Dan was examining some phyllo-wrapped concoction with casual interest. After a moment, he pushed the whole thing into his mouth with one deliberate and tortoiselike motion. As he chewed, Mona pointed to an object on her own little plate and said something. He nodded, still chewing, and scanned the contents of the table in front of them. Mona gazed around the room for a moment. When she saw me, she grinned, waved, and made
a little
sip sip
motion with her curled hand at her mouth. Since she didn’t wave me over, I decided to check out the cheese table.
I sampled a few cheese cubes. None of them tasted exactly like cheddar, but none of them tasted distinctly like any other type of cheese. The variegated colors were maybe just a ruse to give the vague experience of variety. Or maybe the cubes were just too small to give a full taste experience. I started holding the cheese cubes up to examine their colors in the meager light, and to push them into little pyramids on my paper plate. When I had four of the lightest-color cubes, I popped them all in my mouth at once. Definitely mozzarella.