The Way of All Fish: A Novel (2 page)

Some of them would talk about it later and for a long time. The businessmen climbing into a cab, the girl with the LeSportsac bag, her Droid lost inside.

As if there’d been an eclipse of Apple, a sundering of Microsoft, a sirocco of swirling iPhones, BlackBerrys, Thunderbolts, Gravities, Galaxies, and all the other smartphones into the sweet hereafter; yes, as if all that had never been; nobody, nobody reached for his cell once the fish were saved and swimming. They were too taken up with watching the fish swimming, dizzy-like, in the wineglasses.

Nobody had e-mailed or texted.

Nobody had sent a tweet to Twitter.

Nobody had posted on Facebook.

Nobody had taken a picture.

They were shipwrecked on the shores of their own poor powers of description, a few of them actually getting out old diaries and writing the incident down.

Yes, they talked about that incident in the Clownfish Café the night they hadn’t gotten shot, told their friends, coworkers, pastors, waiters at their clubs, their partners, wives, husbands, and kids.

Their kids.

—Way cool. So where’re the photos?

—Remarkably, nobody took one.

—Wow. Neanderthal.

—But see, there were these neon-bright blue and orange and green and yellow fish, see, that we all scooped up and dropped in water glasses, and just imagine, imagine those colors, the water, the candlelight. Look, you can see it . . .

But the seer, seeing nothing, walked away.

C
indy Sella walked along Grub Street in the West Village with a clown fish in a big Ziploc bag that Frankie had furnished when she’d asked whether she could keep her fish, the one she had saved, and take it home with her. Yes, he had told her, my pleasure.

As many times as she’d eaten at the Clownfish Café, she could not remember coming across Frankie. He must have been there, somewhere behind the bar or in the kitchen or watching the fish, but she hadn’t been observant enough to see him.

That was the difference between today and yesterday.

She thought about the extraordinary episode at the Clownfish as she passed the stingy little trees set in their foot-square patches meant to beautify the streets of Manhattan. They were blooming thinly, their branches mere tendrils. She didn’t know what kind of trees they were. This, she thought, was shameful. If someone threatened to beat her with a poker until she named ten trees, she’d be dead on the Grub Street pavement.

Cindy had decided she was one of the least knowledgeable people she knew. And she was a writer. How did she ever manage to create a book without the most rudimentary knowledge of basic facts, such as what this little tree was right outside the door of her building? What reader would want to place himself in the hands of a writer who didn’t know that?

Didn’t she really know the names of ten trees? Apple cherry lemon orange peach banana. For God’s sake, if you were going to name fruit trees, any five-year-old could do it.

Speaking of which, there was one sitting on the stoop of the row house right
next door to her building. A five-year-old named Stella something. What was she doing out here at ten at night without her mother?

“Stena!”

Oh, there she was.

“Stena!”

Mrs. Rosini yelling from the doorway. Stena, not Stella, because Mrs. Rosini was adenoidal or perhaps had a cleft palate. You see, Cindy told herself, you don’t even know the difference between these physical maladies.

Stella stood up and gazed at Cindy, who said, “Hello.”

Stella stuck out her tongue.

“Stena, get in here!”

When Stella turned her back, Cindy stuck out her tongue, too. Then she entered her building.

Cindy liked her apartment building. It was painted white and was only eight stories high. It was dwarfed by the new high-rise co-op across the avenue, which was all metal and glass, glass at odd angles so that the sun staggered around it, drunk with its own light, setting off knifelike reflections. The building ran unsteadily upward to thirty or forty stories. The higher it got, the more it became the sun’s broken mirror.

The doorman, Mickey, caught the door as she pushed it. Mickey and his little mouse-brown terrier were standing guard. The dog was tiny enough to carry off in a spoon. With the light from one of the art deco–ish door sconces illuminating the dog, the little scene looked as if it were an illustration by Sempé. A
New Yorker
cover, surely. Sempé with his little cats and dogs.

Cindy said hello to the doorman and bent and patted the terrier. It barked once, and its stubby tail wagged frantically.

Mickey touched the worn shiny brim of his cap. His uniform jacket was not in the best of repair. “Miss. Was your evening full of laughter and music?”

He couldn’t just say “hello.” No, he seemed to feel he had to make up these things.

“Not unless you count gunfire in a restaurant music.”

Naturally, he thought she was joking and snickered and held the door for her.

In Prague or Marienbad or wherever he’d come from in Czechoslovakia, Mickey had been a dancing master—an improbably romantic occupation—and he missed it passionately, as he missed Prague (or Marienbad).

Cindy was from a small town near Topeka, Kansas, where she had been not a dancing mistress but a cashier in a Walmart, which she considered the most soul-depleting job in the universe. At night, she took classes at a community college, among them creative writing. She had discovered she could write. Short stories, then a novel. Naively, she had brought her novel to New York. Then she went back to Kansas and wrote another one.

After Mickey’s long good night that rivaled Raymond Chandler’s good-bye, Cindy stepped inside the elevator. It was always waiting as if it, too, had a tale to tell, and she rode, listening to its story of who’d gone up or come down that day before she landed at her floor.

She walked on the generic beige carpeting, along the corridor painted in Calamity White (a person at Duron with a sense of humor) to her own rent-controlled—
we will all get hammers and kill you dead
—apartment. Having a rent-controlled apartment in Manhattan was far more dangerous than owing huge sums of money to Visa or the Mafia.

Her cat, Gus, was sitting in the little entry hall, looking bored, waiting not for her but for some fresh hell. He blinked in his bored way, as if he’d been forced to listen to Justin Bieber all evening, until he saw what Cindy carried. He pounced.

“Not so fast!” She’d raised the Ziploc bag quickly out of reach. She went directly to her kitchen cupboard and took down a big glass bowl some flowers once were delivered in, filled it halfway with tepid water, and carefully slid the clown fish, together with the old water, into the new bowl.

Gus was up on the counter, his paw nearly in the bowl, until Cindy pushed him and he fell like a sack of grain.

Cindy removed an armful of books from a sturdy shelf on the living room wall that was isolated enough from the other furniture that Gus couldn’t get to it. Tomorrow she would get a proper tank and maybe another fish; she could ask Frankie or someone at a fish supply place if a clown fish would be okay with a strange fish. She could always get a
second clown fish, or the pink skunk was nice. Frankie had pointed it out in one of the glasses.

Only now did she take off her down vest and her shoes and sink into one of the armchairs that matched the small sofa. They were all covered in a cream twill with dark brown piping. They came as a group, together with the glass and wood coffee table around which they “grouped.” (“Shame to split ’em up,” the salesperson had said, as if the sofa and chairs were three lost kittens.)

Finally, Cindy looked around the room painted in Calamity White. Last year, when the halls were painted, she decided to paint her apartment and asked the jack-of-all-trades manager if there was a gallon left over, and could she buy it? He said he had two gallons that he’d let her have at a discount, or better, he’d throw the paint in for free if she gave him the job.

The only reason she wanted the paint was because it was called Calamity, and looking at it now, she didn’t see what had invited the name. It was just another shade of white, “A Whiter Shade of Pale” was what she thought of, and she reached over to a little stack of CDs by her Bose unit. She sorted through them and put on that song, Joe Cocker’s version. She’d listened to several different singers and still didn’t understand some of the words, which she counted as a plus, for it made the whole song, mysterious enough as it was, even more mysterious. They were dancers dancing a fandango, then turning cartwheels. There was a story Cindy didn’t understand, involving a woman who was listening to a miller tell a tale, and her face “till then just ghostly, turned a whiter shade of pale.”

Cindy didn’t think she had ever written a line, not a single line, that was as good as that line. It was a startling line, the way Emily Dickinson wrote startling lines, lines that hit you like a slap across the face.

Gus was sitting beside her on the sofa, both of them looking at the fish bowl (for widely different reasons). The clown fish was proof of the events of the night. It had really happened. She thought that if she woke in the morning without her fish there, she’d put the whole thing down to dreams.

The two dark-coated men who’d marched into the café must have been Mob guys. But they shot the fish tank, not the other two (probably Mob guys also) eating in the restaurant. The ones who’d pulled guns and
probably saved the lives of the other diners. The first two hadn’t been aiming at the customers, either.

“They tried to murder the fish,” she said to Gus, who kept his eyes on the bowl.

Did anyone call the police? No cops came. Of course, no one was shot, and they were all busy saving the fish. There’d been around thirty fish and twenty diners; some had saved more than one.

Frankie was too busy calling the emergency fish service to call the police. And when the fish were safely swimming in their separate goblet seas, Frankie had hurried around the room hugging and shaking hands and talking so fast in Italian or Spanish that it should have crippled his tongue.

Then it struck Cindy that she hadn’t the faintest notion, the least idea, nor did anyone else in the Clownfish Café, what had been happening. If they’d all started turning cartwheels on the floor while the ceiling flew away, it couldn’t have been stranger. A calamitous evening: Like the paint, like the song, it had made no sense.

Only one fish had gone missing: an albino clown fish. “Ghost fish,” Frankie called it. “My poor ghost fish.”

Had it been swept away by the water into some dark corner where it had lain, flopping back and forth, suffocating, turning even ghostlier, turning a whiter shade of pale?

That night she dreamed she was Dorothy (without pigtails), and in place of the dog, Toto, stood Gus.

They were in their small house when the tornado came waltzing—literally—into Kansas, “Tales from the Vienna Woods” playing in the background.

Everything was blowing to kingdom come; the winds were sawing and sawing away on the reedy marsh. But where had there ever been a marsh in Kansas? Even in dreams, she couldn’t stop editing. This marsh had ducks bobbing and rising and flying and guns going off, missing everything they aimed at. The little house pinwheeled, floor to ceiling, ceiling to floor, and they went head over heels with it, doing cartwheels in the sky.

Awake, Cindy smiled and watched the ceiling fly away.

Really awake this time, she saw the ceiling was (sadly) intact. Gus wasn’t on the bed, so he was out there in—

She rolled out of bed and ran to the living room.

The bowl was still on its shelf, clown fish intact. Gus was lying below it with his paws encircling his chest, watching.

She went back to the bedroom and drew on her blue chenille bathrobe and trailed its sash into the kitchen.

On the white (well, white-ish, though no calamity) Formica counter lay yesterday’s mail, topped by a letter from her lawyers telling her more about her crazy ex-agent’s unfolding plot, the fifty-page complaint he had filed with the New York state court, his convoluted plan to get his commission out of her for a book he hadn’t agented. She’d fired him years before.

She put water and Dunkin’ Donuts regular coffee into her Mr. Coffee machine and switched it on. She shoved the letter aside, not wanting to know what act this was in L. Bass Hess’s play, though really, it had never gotten beyond Act One, had it? It had never really gotten out of rehearsals. The same old stuff was sorted through and moved around and mulled, argued, intrigued over.

Finally, Mr. Coffee dispensed his brew, and she filled one of her thick white mugs. This she took into the living room to join Gus. She sat down on the sofa as she had the night before. But she found herself thinking about the L. Bass Hess charade, and she would have to short-circuit such thinking. How she dealt with things she didn’t want to think about was either to get down Proust and read a few pages, or allow herself a definite, limited time period in which to think. This morning she decided on sixty—no, thirty—thirty seconds. She watched the second hand on her watch as she thought: