Vinyl Cafe Unplugged (28 page)

Figs

On a rainy night in April, Dave sat down to write a letter he knew was going to be difficult.

Dear Tony,
he began—that part was easy enough.
Dear Tony,
he wrote, his heart sinking as he stared at the expanse of white left on the page. Now what do you say?

You say it straight, that’s what you do.

He began again.
Dear Tony, I am worried about your father
. Dave stared at those six words. He crumpled the page, threw it in the air, caught it, and without turning to look, he drifted it over his shoulder toward a wicker wastepaper basket on the far side of the room. He turned to see how he had done. Not even close. He sighed, stood up and retrieved the paper, came back to his chair and started again on a fresh page.

He stopped and stared at the ceiling.
This is ridiculous,
he thought.
Who cares about the weather? What do birds have to do with anything?
He crumpled
that
page up and threw it at the wastepaper basket, looking this time, missing again. He slipped his favorite Stan Getz album on the record player, but as soon as the warm sax filled the room Dave stood up and began pacing. He walked into the kitchen and stared out the kitchen window. It was quarter to nine. It was already as dark as the night would get. He poured himself a drink. He sat down at the kitchen table. He was there fifteen minutes later, staring at the kitchen clock as the second hand swept around to the hour, counting it down under his breath—five, four, three, two . . . one.

When 8:59 became exactly nine o’clock he turned and ges tured grandly toward the window, toward his neighbors’ house, waving his arms like a magician who was about to produce a cage of doves out of thin air, waving like an orchestra conductor who wanted his orchestra to begin. When nothing happened, Dave waved a third time, impatiently. This time, as if on his cue, his neighbors’ lights snapped off, plunging their house into abrupt darkness. A thin smile settled on Dave’s face.

“Voilà,”
he muttered.

Dear Tony
. . . He was writing the letter in his head now.

Sheesh.

Dave ran his hand through his hair and stood up. This was like treason. He poured himself another drink. It was none of his business. No, it was his business.

Tony lives in London, England—he is in insurance. With Lloyd’s. Tony’s parents, Eugene and Maria, are Dave and Morley’s next-door neighbors.

Tony had left home and moved to London well before Dave and Morley moved into the neighborhood. Until Tony’s anxious autumn visit, sitting right there, right in their kitchen, no, standing over there, by the kitchen door, getting right to the point—
I am worried about my parents
—Dave had seldom seen Tony. They had shaken hands over the backyard fence. They had talked briefly in the driveway and once on the sidewalk.

But for all that, Dave felt he knew Tony—because Dave has lived beside Eugene and Maria for almost twenty years. And when you are good neighbors, you know all about each other’s family, regardless of where everyone lives. And Eugene and Maria are good neighbors.

Eugene, the eighty-nine-year-old vegetable gardener. Maria, the ninety-two-year-old cook. Maria, whose happiness when she is cooking for people is only surpassed by the happiness she feels when she’s feeding them. It’s a feeling of contentment that settles upon her like God’s mercy, a feeling that arrives whenever there are hungry people sitting at her table, whenever she is carrying plates and platters back and forth across her kitchen.

Maria, who is living proof of the benefits of the Mediterranean diet, loves, more than anything, to prepare big lunches of sharp cheeses and fresh bread, sliced tomatoes and potatoes, onions and red bell peppers sautéed in olive oil and garlic. And chocolate. Squares of dark chocolate wrapped in white paper.

Maria, who loves to cook, was born with a twisted right leg. When she walks, her right knee brushes her left knee—her legs briefly forming the letter
K
with every step, her body pitching from left to right as if she were on the deck of a ship. Maria.

And Eugene, her husband, Eugene. The gardener. There isn’t a square of sod left in Maria and Eugene’s backyard. The whole yard has been turned for Eugene’s vegetables. This is where Maria gets everything she cooks. Fat red tomatoes and large yellow potatoes. Sweet and hot peppers in every color you could imagine: yellows, reds and greens. Long skinny beans. Rough chard and rapini. Sweet basil and pungent rosemary; mint and dandelions for salads; and vines of soft, juicy grapes.

Eugene harvests the grapes in late September, his hands purple and sticky. They are his secret ingredient. He mixes them lovingly with the boxes of grapes he buys from California and uses for the wine he and Maria barrel and store in juice bottles and pop bottles and old vodka bottles and any bottles they can get their hands on. Every autumn Eugene makes a red wine with a mysterious bouquet of a distant field of violets. He ages it in his collection of mismatched bottles in a cellar he dug under the back stairs thirty-seven years ago.

His grapevines—there are three—twist out of the ground by the garage. They come out of the ground as thick as Eugene’s calf and wind down the back fence and over a grape arbor. This is where Eugene sits during the long summer afternoons when the sun is high and his back hurts from weeding. This is where he sits when all he has to do in the world is wait for his vegetables, tilting back on an old kitchen chair, watching the wasps dive-bomb the grapes that he breaks open and rests on his knees, smoking his
Parodis
—small, dark-leafed Tuscano-styled cigars that are no bigger than a pencil stub, but can last him over an hour. The cigars come in a red, green and white box—all the way from Italy. Eugene’s dentist brings him a case every fall, in return for a trunkful of Eugene’s homemade wine, which he drives home and carefully rebottles, corks and pastes with labels he has printed at a wine store. The dentist, who undercharges Eugene for all his dental work, has served the wine with great success at dinner parties—always describing it offhandedly, whenever he has been asked, as a private Italian bottling he has had luck with. He has only confessed its true source once—to a retired surgeon who knows about wine and keeps a cellar in France, and who wasn’t satisfied with the dentist’s vague explanation. He kept phoning and phoning until he finally wore him down.

Now every fall the surgeon drives to Buffalo to visit a tobacconist by the art museum who carries
Parodis,
which he buys by the case, and smuggles into Canada under the spare tire, and presents to Eugene proudly, in return for
his
trunk of wine, which
he
only serves to his family and best friends.

But it is not the grapevines that hold the place of honor in Eugene’s garden. Halfway down the yard, halfway between the garage and the back door, within easy spitting distance of his chair under the grape arbor, is Eugene’s pride and joy: his fig tree.

His fig tree is easily twenty feet high and produces real figs, right in the middle of the city—figs that are soft, green, pulpy and sweet. In late August and any day in September, Dave can look out his window and see Eugene—with his white moustache, and his white shirt rolled to the elbows, and his dark blue vest, and his old suit pants, and his small cigar—standing on a ladder, picking fresh figs. He leaves the ones on the lower branches for Maria, who can’t climb the ladder anymore. Or for children who come into the yard.

“Mangia. Mangia,”
he says. “Good. It’s good.”

There is nothing, nothing in the world, that makes Eugene happier than the opportunity to invite a visitor into his yard to pick a fig and eat it while it is still warm from the sun.

Sometimes Dave has stood across the fence with the buzz of the summer cicada filling his head, and he has stopped what he was doing to watch Eugene on his ladder. Watching him, he has thought that the garden and the man were one—a piece of landscape torn out of the Italian countryside and dropped beside his yard, as if by magic. Looking over the fence, Dave has thought that the view from his backyard was as good as the view from any Umbrian hillside, that watching Eugene was as good as sitting on a hillside in Umbria with a headful of wine and a piece of soft cheese wrapped in brown paper for a companion.

Eugene’s fig tree is the best-known tree in the neighborhood.

Everyone knows about his tree because at one time or another everyone has bitten into one of his warm figs while Eugene stood beside them, watching carefully, smiling proudly.

Everyone knows Eugene grew the tree from a cutting he brought from his father’s farm in Calabria, wrapped in a piece of linen, hidden in the bottom of his trunk.

Everyone knows that every October—before the first frost—Eugene digs a trench in his backyard, three feet deep and three feet wide and thirty feet long. When he has finished digging the hole, he carefully bends the branches of the tree close to the trunk and ties them in place. Then he digs around the roots until they are loose and free of the earth, pushes the tree over and lowers it into the trench with ropes. The leafless, bound tree looks like a skeleton lying in the hole—the root ball looks like a giant head, Eugene like a grieving relative as he covers it, first with planks and then with earth.

He buries the tree.

If he left it standing it wouldn’t survive the frost. When Eugene has finished, except for the disturbed earth, you wouldn’t know anything was there. That is where his fig tree spends the winter—bound and buried, underground and out of sight, until the warm April afternoon Eugene digs it out, and stands it up, and cuts the branches loose.

The burial and resurrection of Eugene’s tree have marked the seasons in Dave’s neighborhood for nearly fifty years.