Z. Packer - Drinking Coffee Elsewhere

Petra and Zoltan loved each other in that dangerous Eastern European way of hard, sobbing sex and furniture-pounding fights. Dina had been living with Ari for a month and Petra and Zoltan for only two weeks when the couple had their third major fight. Zoltan had become so enraged that he’d stuck his hand on the orange-hot burner of the electric range. Dina had been adding edamame to the udon Ari was reheating from his employee lunch when Zoltan pushed between the two, throwing the bubbling pot aside and pressing his hand onto the lit burner as easily and noiselessly as if it were a Bible on which he was taking an oath.

“Zoltan!” Dina screamed. Ari muttered a few baffled words of Tagalog. The seared flesh smelled surprisingly familiar, like dumplings, forgotten and burning at the bottom of a pot. The burner left a bull’s-eye imprint on Zoltan’s palm, each concentric circle sprouting blisters that pussed and bled. Petra wailed when she saw; it took her two weeping hours to scour his melted fingerprints from the burner.

And still, they loved. That same night they shook the bamboo shades with their passion. When they settled down, they baby-talked to each other in Moldovan and Hungarian, though the first time Dina heard them speak this way it sounded to her as if they were reciting different brands of vodka.

After the hand-on-the-range incident, Zoltan maundered about with the look of a beast in his lair. The pictures from his bodybuilding days that he tacked on the walls showed him brown, oiled, and bulging, each muscle delineated as though he were constructed of hundreds of bags of hard-packed sugar. Though he was still a big man, he was no longer glorious, and since they’d all been subsisting on crackers and ramen, Zoltan looked even more deflated. For some reason he had given up bodybuilding once he stepped off the plane at Narita, though he maintained that he was winning prizes right up until then. If he was pressed further than that about his past, Petra, invariably orbiting Zoltan like a satellite, would begin to cry.

Petra cried a lot. If Dina asked Petra about life in Moldova or about modeling in Ginza, she cried. If Dina so much as offered her a carrot, this, too, was cause for sorrow. Dina had given up trying to understand Petra. Or any of them, for that matter. Even Ari. Once she’d asked him why he did it, why he let them stay. Ari held out his hand and said, “See this? Five fingers. One hand.” He then made a fist, signifying — she supposed — strength. She didn’t exactly understand what he was driving at: none of them helped out in any real way, though she, unlike Petra and Zoltan, had at least attempted to find a job. He looked to her, fist still clenched; she nodded as though she understood, though she felt she never would. Things simply made all of them cry and sigh. Things dredged from the bottoms of their souls brought them pain at the strangest moments.

THEN SAYEED came to live with them. He had a smile like a sealed envelope, had a way of eating as though he were horny. She didn’t know how Ari knew him, but one day, when Dina was practicing writing kanji characters and Petra was knitting an afghan with Zoltan at her feet, Ari came home from work, Sayeed following on his heels.

“We don’t have much,” Ari apologized to Sayeed after the introductions. Then he glared at the mess of blankets on the floor, “and as you can see, we are many people, sleeping in a tiny, six-tatami room.”

Sayeed didn’t seem to mind. They all shared two cans of a Japanese soft drink, Pocari Sweat, taking tiny sips from their sake cups. They shared a box of white chocolate Pokki, and a sandwich from Ari’s employee lunch. Sayeed stayed after the meal and passed around cigarettes that looked handmade, though they came from a box. He asked, occasionally gargling his words, what each of them did. Having no jobs, they told stories of their past: Petra told of Milan and the runways and dressing up for the opera at La Scala. But mostly she recalled what she ate: pan-seared foie gras with pickled apricot gribiche sauce; swordfish tangine served with stuffed cherries; gnocchi and lobster, swimming in brown butter.

“Of course,” she said, pertly ashing her cigarette, “we had to throw it all up.”

“Yes yes yes,” Sayeed said, as though this news delighted him.

Zoltan talked of Hungary, and how he was a close relation of Nagy, the folk hero of the ’56 revolution. He detailed his bodybuilding regime: how much he could bench-press, how much he could jerk, and what he would eat. Mainly they were heavy foods: soups with carp heads, bones, and fins; doughy breads cooked in rendered bacon fat; salads made of meat rather than lettuce. Some sounded downright inedible, but Zoltan recalled them as lovingly and wistfully as if they were dear departed relations.

Dina did not want to talk about food but found herself describing the salmon croquettes her mother made the week before she died. Vats of collards and kale, the small islands of grease floating atop the pot liquor, cornbread spotted with dashes of hot sauce. It was not the food she ate all the time, or even the kind she preferred, but it was the kind she wanted whenever she was sick or lonely; the kind of food that — when she got it — she stuffed in her mouth like a pacifier. Even recollecting food from the corner stores made her stomach constrict with pleasure and yearning: barbecue, Chong’s take-out, peach cobbler. All of it delicious in a lardy, fatty, condiment-heavy way. Miasmas of it so strong that they pushed through the styrofoam boxes bagged in brown paper.

“Well,” Ari said, when Dina finished speaking.

Since they had nothing else to eat, they smoked.

They waited to see what Sayeed would do, and as the hours passed, waited for him to leave. He never did. That night Ari gave him a blanket and Sayeed stretched out on a tatami, in the very middle of the room. Instead of pushing aside the low tea table, he simply arranged his blanket under it, and as he lay down, head under the tea table, he looked as though he had been trying to retrieve something from under it and had gotten stuck.

Over the next few days they found out that Sayeed had married a non-Moroccan woman instead of the woman he was arranged to marry. His family, her family, the whole country of Morocco, it seemed, disowned him. Then his wife left him. He had moved to Tokyo in the hope of opening a business, but the money that was supposed to have been sent to him was not sent.

“They know! They know!” he’d mutter while smoking or praying or boiling an egg. Dina assumed he meant that whoever was supposed to send Sayeed money knew about his non-Moroccan ex-wife, but she could never be sure. Whenever Sayeed mused over how life had gone wrong, how his wife had left him, how his family had refused to speak to him, he glared at Dina, as though she were responsible.

One night she awoke to find Sayeed panting over her, holding a knife at her throat. His chest was bare; his pajama bottoms glowed from the streetlights outside the window. Dina screamed, waking Petra, who turned on a light and promptly began to cry. Ari and Zoltan gradually turtled out of their sleep, saw Sayeed holding the knife at her throat, saw that she was still alive, and looked at her hopelessly, as though she were an actress failing to play her part and die on cue. When Zoltan saw that it had nothing to do with him, he went back to sleep. Sayeed rattled off accusingly at Dina in Arabic until Ari led him into the hallway.

She sat straight up in the one pair of jeans she hadn’t sold and a nearly threadbare green bra. Ari came back, exhausted. She didn’t know where Sayeed was, but she could hear Japanese voices in the hallway, their anger and complaints couched in vague, seemingly innocuous phrases. They have a lot of people living there, don’t they? meant, Those foreigners! Can’t they be quiet and leave us in peace! And I wonder if Roppongi would offer them more opportunities meant, They should go to Roppongi where their own kind live! Ari tried to slam the door shut, as if to defy the neighbors, as if to add a dramatic coda to the evening, but Zoltan had broken the door in one of his rages, and it barely closed at all.