Уолтер Тевис - The Steps of the Sun

Instead, I started fussing with the peas and managed to spill a third of them down into the wood fire, where they hissed at me in derision. I could feel the inanimate world gathering itself for one of its attacks on my person. I began to feel like hunting down the black cat and strangling him. I reached for the oven door and burned my hand. Instead of shouting, I gritted my teeth. Stoicism. It gives you blue balls in the soul.

But I did manage to control myself enough to get the peas into a bowl and then to get the lamb out of the stove and onto a big plate for cooling. It looked terrific. Very professional. I felt a lot better. I spooned out the carrots and circled the leg of lamb with them. It was shaping up like a sculpture. I was cheerful again despite the tight feeling in my stomach. I remembered we had fresh parsley in the bin. I got some and put it at one end of the plate. Voilà.

Isabel had pulled on a pair of jeans and set the table by the window. I was standing by my masterwork, waiting for praise.

And then my stomach sank. Somebody had to carve this fucker, and I’d never carved anything in my life. When I was a kid my mother managed to roast a turkey once a year, on Thanksgiving, with a kind of cold, hungover resentment. She always carved it herself, while my father sat around looking bored. I think that, down deep, I was waiting for Isabel to get up and carve, like Mother. She came into the kitchen, in fact, and I felt a sigh of relief in myself. But what she did was exclaim over how beautiful the lamb was. And then she said, “Hurry up and carve it, Ben. I’m hungry!”

Jesus, did I want to throttle a cat just then! If I could have just done it—or just kicked a cat around the living room for a minute, I could have sliced up that roast the way an orchestra leader slices air with his baton. With a pinky sticking out as the slices fell with gentle plops on the serving platter, arranging themselves prettily between disks of carrot. But what did I do? I gritted my teeth, stuck a fork into the roast, took a big kitchen knife and started slicing as though the lamb were a loaf of bread. Immediately I hit a bone. I tried the other end. Another bone. I slipped the lamb, greasy now and still too fucking hot, over on its side in the plate, which was now filling with juice, soaking about half the carrots and giving them the color of wet orange socks. Burning grease was sticking to my fingers. I shook it off. Some of it landed in the peas. I began slicing at the first end of the roast, but from a different angle. There was another bone. How could a white, furry lamb walk around with so many goddamned bones in its legs? How could the bones be coming from so many different directions ? My cheeks were burning as though rubbed with Brillo; Isabel was watching every move in tactful silence.

And then, as I stood ready to turn my knife against anything that lived, there was an abrupt, loud plop , as though someone had dropped a fish on the kitchen counter. It was William, the normally shy cat. He must have jumped down off an overhead shelf where he’d been hiding since I’d scared him away with the saucepan. I stood frozen, staring. During my carving I had managed to get loose a piece of lamb the size of a poker chip. William took that piece demurely between his teeth, leaped to the floor and scampered across the room. I gripped my Sabatier, visualizing the mess in the apartment from feline decapitation. William huddled with his find in the corner, under Isabel’s bronze urn of pussywillows. The black cat slinked over to join him. Clearly a coconspirator. I picked up the roast, plate and carrots and all, held it over my head the way King Kong would hold a subway car, and threw it at them with all my strength. It whammed into the bronze pot with a thud that enriched my soul with relief. The plate-Isabel’s best Delft—flew apart like a comic-strip firecracker. And the carrots spread themselves over the white floor like abstract expressionism. Like the perfectly placed rocks in a Japanese garden.

But Isabel ! The poor dear woman. She stared at me in terror, and then she began to cry great rolling tears of grief. “My cats!” she sobbed. “My Delft platter.” She ran into the bathroom, slammed the door and locked it. I stood motionless, staring at the carrots on the floor, at the chips of china. The cats had disappeared. I shrugged, got a can of cat food from a shelf and opened it.

We were civil with one another after that one, walking on eggshells for about three days. Once, for no apparent reason, Isabel began to cry while reading her Hamlet . The air of the little apartment was thick with grief; I had no idea how to cut through it. On the fourth day I told Isabel I was going to move to the Pierre. She smiled faintly and said, “That might be best.”

It was early May when I moved out, packing up all I had lived with during the winter into one Synlon bag, paying off a few of Isabel’s major bills—her rent, the telephone bill, the winter assessment—before I left. She was at a rehearsal at the time. When I signed the checks my hand shook and I cursed at it for shaking. Another goddamned unreliable member. I looked around the place, nodded with controlled civility to the sleeping cats, bent down to pick up a two-dollar piece I had dropped on the floor probably a week before, sighed melodramatically, and left.

It was a surprisingly warm day and I had my heavy mackinaw unbuttoned as I walked up Park Avenue. There was a nice sense of life and bustle, with a lot of horses and a few methane taxis in the streets and people bicycling happily. My spirits picked up. I began to whistle.

Half the people on the street were Chinese. By midsummer New York always seems to be a Chinese city, a kind of cultural suburb of Peking. The Russians are ahead of everybody else at heavy industry; the art comes from Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro; the political life in Aberdeen and Hangchow is far more lively than New York’s; and if you want to make a really big business arrangement you go to Peking, the world’s richest city. But New York is still New York, even with its elevators not working and a total of one hundred fifty taxis permitted to operate (Peking has thousands, they are electric powered and have leather upholstery). But Peking is still a stodgy businessman’s city, with all the old China erased from its neoclassical architecture. The Chinese come to New York for the civilized life. New York is the major city of a second-rank power, of a country whose time is slipping away; but it still has a bounce you don’t find anywhere else. There are restaurants with white tablecloths, with waiters in tuxedos that look like they came from the last century, and, however they beer-feed and hand-rub their fat old steers in Japan, the Kansas City steak served in a New York restaurant, with the dim lights and the polished wooden bar and the tuxedoed waiters, is still one of the delights of the world. And New York theater is the only theater to hold anybody’s interest for long; American music is the most sophisticated in the world. The Chinese are still, behind those stuffy facades, the greatest gamblers on earth and the trickiest businessmen; they’ve accommodated their ideology and their asceticism of the last century to their present wealth with the ease of the Renaissance Popes; they are Communists the way Cesare Borgia was a Christian. And they love New York.

The Pierre is a grand place and I know its people well. I moved in there first when I was twenty-three and working on downhill mergers; the same man still tends bar in the afternoons and he calls me Ben. His name’s Dennis. I always ask about his kids. He has a son in the wood business in North Carolina; his daughter runs the office at the Jane Fonda Theatre. The manager says they’re going to name my suite the Belson Suite someday and I tell him I’m all for it, that it’ll make it easier to get my mail if there’s a plaque on the door. They always have fresh flowers for me when I move in. What the hell, something deep in me likes to live in hotels, to be ready to check out at any time. To live by the day and pay by the day.