Stephen Dixon - What Is All This? - Uncollected Stories

He called Mr. Shalita at the candy store two blocks away, asking him — practically commanding him in his new, deep authoritative voice — to send over a carton of Camels, a cold Pepsi, bag of pretzels and the latest racing car magazines. Mr. Shalita said he couldn’t make deliveries till the boy got out of school — some three hours from now. Max said That’s sure a strange way of conducting a business,” and politely canceled the order. He next called the one neighborhood supermarket, and when the person who answered said she couldn’t take phone orders unless the customer had a charge account, he slammed down the receiver. His mother, he saw was now in the living room, grinning into the mirror she was wiping with some liquid from a spray bottle, though the mirror was as clean as anyone could get it.

“Hey, Ma,” he said, “you know the name of that grocery on Tremont?”

“What do you need in a grocery we haven’t got here?”

“Come on, you know the one. The store next to the Spotless Cleaners.”

“Spotless, I know, but no other store next to it.”

She knew all right. Maybe if he asked her nicely she’d order the carton from Mr. Shalita. That old guy would do anything for her, even lock the store and deliver the goods himself. But she’d only refuse and call him a nicotine addict and cigarette fiend. Forget the cigarettes and just read and sleep the next three hours, then phone Mr. Shalita and have him send the kid over with the order.

He went back to bed. That was the way to work things out: easily, decisively, using the brains God blessed you with. One day he’d look back at all this and have a fat laugh over it. He’d be sitting at some fancy poker table with a few business friends, and after winning a good-sized pot he’d tell them about this crazy smoking incident. It’d be a story to joke about with people who had the minds and experiences to understand. Didn’t Einstein laugh with the world about the time he flunked an important math exam? And what about Bernard Baruch, who bundled an easy stock market deal just a short time before he made off with his first million-dollar killing. Both of them laughing up a storm about the worst failure to hit them before they decided to really become somebody. “And the same with me with my cigarette urge,” he’d tell his cronies, as he picked up his second fantastic pot with four-of-a-kind — all kings.

He got out of bed a half-hour later and quickly showered, shaved, cleaned his teeth and brushed his hair. By the time he got back to his room the floor had been mopped, the bed stripped, his two pillows hung over the fire escape railing, and the place felt like an icebox from the airing his mother was giving it. All of it to create a symbol of sorts, he realized, but he could care less; he was only interested in dressing and collecting his wallet and change off the dresser and getting to the cigarette machine at the corner luncheonette. He stuck a tie and a waxpaper-wrapped schnecken and paper napkin into his overcoat pocket and, eyes down, walked past his mother as he left the apartment. He didn’t want her pumping him for answers he was in no mood to give. When he reached the second-story landing, she yelled down the stairway from two flights above “Max? I’m having your father bring home a silver-tip roast for supper, so you’ll try and be back by six?” He kept walking. When he got to the ground floor, she yelled “And don’t bring home the Post tonight, even if you buy it. Your father always gets it, and you know how he hates seeing two of the same papers in the House. Max, you still there? If you are: best of luck.”

“Must we go now?”

The man nodded.

“Since I’d much rather stay here.”

“So, stay.”

“Now please be sweet to me, Hank.”

“So, come. Because what do you want me to say? ‘Of course, my dear, I want you to accompany me. What would a jaunt be without you?’”

“It’s just I’ve always loved these small outdoorsy cafés — having nothing but strong black coffee, and maybe a dessert, and soaking up the afternoon sun. Oh, well.” She stood up, brushing crumbs off her lap. “Look!” and she pointed to the cobblestone street when a motorbike drove past — a goggled priest arched over the handlebars like a racer, an attaché case strapped to the luggage rack.

But Hank was fingering through a palmful of several countries’ coins.

“Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could transfer this exact setting to the heart of New York?”

“You’d still have lunch at the Brasserie three to four times a week.”

“No, I wouldn’t. We’ve nothing as quiet and quaint as this.”

“Jes hold it there for a second, ladies and gents,” and he put his hand over his eyes and waved the other in front of him: his tent-show swami routine. “I see a woman seated…at a restaurant table…why, it’s Mrs. Patricia Lincoln Kahn. Dressed to her pretty eye teeth in authentic suede and fur and now blotting her lips on a cloth napkin after consuming a five-dollar omelet.”

“I don’t think they run them that high.”

Then a five-dollar cottage cheese salad topped with an enormous prune. Now there’s a mouth-watering image if I ever created one. Enough. Bill’s paid with all sorts of denominations. What the hell, it’s one continent and they’re among friends. Let’s go.”

“Which direction?”

“Let’s see…Left, then another left to the river street and after a while through this cruddy old alley, which the guidebook refers to as ancient and historic. Till we get to the Drosselgasse — that main drag before, where we hit the third bierkellar up the street. I think it’s called the die or das Rheinlander or something.”

“Very original, since we’re practically floating on that river.”

The Chinese have been known as ingenious though unfathomable people for ages.”

The Chinese?” Her eyes were drawn to a third-floor window across the street, where someone’s bare arms reached through the curtains and drew in the shutters. She envied the woman, who she figured was about to settle down for a nap after a heavy German lunch. She turned to Hank to tell him she’d like to go back to the hotel and take a nap, and found him staring at her.

“Spying Nazi bastard,” he said.

“Excuse me?” She pretended to look for someone behind her.

That man you were looking at in the window there. You know what I mean,” when she continued looking at him skeptically—“all of them, then. Spying’s part of their precious Aryan blood.”

“Nonsense. You’re just going through some Jewish paranoia phase. Besides, that man up there was a woman.”

The women were just as bad. Because did I ever describe the Dutch museum photo of these German women laughing when a Kraut soldier pulled a rabbi’s beard?”

“Only a few times. But why this sudden rage at the Germans? Before, you always thought they were industrious and intellectual. And then you never even had a third to tenth cousin in Europe during the war. Both sides of your family have been in the States so long they’re almost considered Yankees. What nonsense.”

“Anti-Semite.”

“Oh, please — you’re really speaking to the right person. Maybe my folks a little, and certainly my grandparents, but don’t look at me.”

“ Shiksa anti-Semite. I still say it: you all are. But you can’t change. It’s in your precious Aryan blood also.”

“Okay. Did you leave a good tip? The waiter gave us an extra free coffee, and they usually charge for that.”

He snapped two more marks to the table. The waiter came up, took the check and the money off the table and said “ Danke schön ,” bobbing his head and smiling a bit too generously as most German waiters tend to do, Hank thought. He really couldn’t take their mannerisms or food or any of their customs and places of interest for that matter. After two months of touring Europe he didn’t know why they had to end up here, their first German town after boarding the excursion boat in Holland for a trip along the Rhine. Though he’d sworn to his father, who still grumbled every time he saw a German car and who couldn’t even stomach clicking the shutter of Hank’s Zeiss-Ikon, that he’d never set foot in Germany. It was one of his father’s stipulations for giving him the money to travel. The other was that on his return to New York he join his father’s law practice.