Lorrie Moore - A Gate at the Stairs

Sometimes in the afternoon, upstairs in my room and still with my hawk outfit on, I would get out Ole Upright Bob, the double bass, dust him off, his bow quiver clipped at the tail beneath the bridge, like a scrotum, and we would rustle up a tune. There was a kind of buoyancy in making these four low strings sing something that was not a dirge. It was a demanding instrument, the stand-up bass — by comparison, my guitar, with its buttery, mushy fingerings, was a toy — and sometimes I just played it with open strings, Miles’s “Nardis,” which was basic, and which spelled starry backwards in Latin, or something, and which I loved, and which didn’t take a lot out of me. I had once, in the state music tryouts, played a solo from a double bass concerto by Sergei Koussevitzky, who in 1930 had been on the cover of Time magazine. That’s about all I knew about him. But either I wasn’t that good or the sight of a girl standing beside this huge wooden creature, grabbing its neck and stroking its gut, pulling the music out of the strings by force, made them ill at ease, and I was not selected. The faces of the panel listening were the very embodiment of skepticism made flesh, as if they were all saying Get a load of this! , and I had never experienced the weaponry of such expressions before. Subsequently, I drifted away from classical entirely, needing to leave behind the memory of that event. It was an aspect of childhood adults forgot to think about when they encouraged their children to try new things.

My mother came to the doorway once, seeing me winged and wrapped around my bass, one hand moving squidlike down the neck of him, the other bouncing the bow in a kind of staccato, and she said, “No wonder I couldn’t sleep. Look at you. What a sight.” There I was, I supposed, a bass-faced bird, embracing the sloped shoulders of another bird whose long-necked wooden crested head, like a knight in chess, hovered over my head as if it were a fellow creature advising me what to do. Still, she smiled. I was playing “Bye Bye Blackbird.” She thought that it was my own arrangement, but it was one I had copied, or tried to copy — if only I’d had beefier hands and more of them — from Christian McBride.

“Your grandmother used to sing that song!” she exclaimed, and then went back to her room to rest.

I sometimes took to smacking the back of the bass for rhythm. My playing was full of wanderings that would return to fetch back the melody, or maybe only a handful of its notes, before venturing off again. I played a Bach cello prelude I had learned only the year before. It was sometimes fun to do this, make the bass play cello, like making an old man sing a young man’s song. Ole Bob would complain and bellow but get through it in a slower, hobbling way, his occasional geezer spritelinesses a farewell embrace of lost youth. It moved me. I had never known my grandfathers, but if they had lived longer, I imagined them looking and sounding a lot like Bob. It was the family name, after all.

I began to miss my Suzuki, and so with my parents’ permission I took a bus back into Troy to get it out of storage. My little rented storage bin — years ago a decomposing body had been found two units down, said the manager — was right next to the bus station. And yet after that bus ride I needed to walk somewhere, to stretch my legs. In the storage bin, in addition to my bike there was a box, and I looked in it to find my books from this past year and also the pearls my mother had given me for Christmas, which I quickly removed and shoved in my purse. Once I had locked up again and parked my bike in a public parking stall, I ventured out, making my stride long and purposeful. As I walked, I dug into my bag for my pearls and put them on.

I headed downtown. Troy seemed quiet and empty without the usual bustle of students. It seemed sleepy, out of step. It seemed to be from the dopey, lovely past.

Without realizing it, I was headed in the direction of Le Petit Moulin. It was Saturday at five, cocktail hour, and the summer sun glossed everything in sight, the tree leaves and the storefront glass; even the Baraboo granite in the sidewalk squares sent out a sparkle. At this hour shadows were cast, in a translucent, notional shale. Halftones shimmied when the breeze jostled the trees.

I would go into the restaurant and see if Sarah was there. I felt the need not just to see her but in some strange way to see if I might work for her again, somehow, in the restaurant, in the fall when I came back to school, and so I went there to find her and to apply for a job. They would probably not be seating until six, so it would just be employees there now.

I walked up past the front window, where cheeses were displayed in old-fashioned glass cheese preservers, which were like cake cases with vinegar at the bottom. I climbed the cement stoop that was the restaurant’s entrance. So much for handicapped access. I had never been in this place, ever, and so I couldn’t be sure exactly what my breathlessness was from. Near the top of the stairs there was a potted lantana tree, though I didn’t know what it was called then or that it cost nine hundred dollars. All I knew was that it looked like a tree from the pages of a fairy tale, its pink blossoms and yellow blossoms … How could it produce two different colors — both orderly and ethereal and alive? It had to have been done by grafting or hybridization. It was a preposterously pretty thing.

“May I help you?” asked a young man coming out from behind the maître d’s lectern. There were no customers yet in the place, though a cook in a white jacket was seated at the bar, and behind it a bartender was rubbing glasses clean with a towel. Above them hung old mill wheels, collected from the countryside and bolted decoratively onto crosspieces in the ceiling.

“I would like to apply for a job.”

“We are not taking any applications,” said the young man at the maître d’s station.

“May I just fill one out anyway? I’m looking for any kind of work. I’ll wash dishes — I’ll chase mice out of the salad! Anything!” My own remark amused me, and I chuckled a little to myself, but the young man looked troubled.

“This is our last night.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“The restaurant is closing tomorrow.”

“Oh, my God.”

“I know.”

“Is Sarah Brink here?”

“Sarah?” This caught him by surprise, and he studied my face for something — either what I knew, or how I knew her. “No,” he said slowly. “Sarah’s not here.”

I looked around. The tables were elegantly done up with woven mats and white napkins. There were peruvian lilies in glass vases on each table and an angle of sun coming in showed only a tiny astral float of dust. Soon, with everyone bustling around, it would be gone. “Well — do you have a free table?”

“Pardon me?”

“I’d like a table. For dinner. Dinner for one. Just myself.”

“We don’t serve until five-thirty, but I’m happy to seat you, if you’d like.”

“I would. I would like that,” I said.

“Thank you,” I said. He led me to a far table and handed me the record album cover with the printed sheet that served as a menu. Sarah had recycled all her old album covers and placed adhesive photo corners inside so that new menus could be photocopied and slipped in and out. I was given Neil Young’s Harvest —perhaps there was an agricultural theme to her record selection — and though the wine list and the menu were placed inside I tried to see who was playing bass on this album — was it Tim Drummond? Stanley Clarke? Mingus himself? I had to peek behind the wine list to see for sure. Drummond.

I went back to studying the menu — was it not a kind of poetry? I sipped wine for a half hour, studying each word for its imagery and rightness of sound. There were ramps and fiddleheads, vinaigrettes and roux — summer had not yet taken these away. Though only now did I realize that roux was not spelled rue , as surely it should be and would be soon, at least by Sarah. There were astonishing things: crab mousseline with a shellfish cappuccino. There were fennel-cured salmon noisettes with a champagne foam. Not a Chubby Mary in the house. There was bison carpaccio with wilted spring leaves — might these be my dad’s? There were salads of lambs quarters and mint and sorrel with beets and pea shoots and tomatoes that were heirloom, like brooches, and cheeses that had won prizes in shows, like dogs. Both soups and salads wore corsages of squash blossoms and pea flowers. And at last, as I looked down through some of the most amazing writing I have ever read, everything shaved, braised, truffled, and “finished with”—cipollini confit! beauty heart radish! horseradish aioli! — there were my father’s potatoes: roasted Bo Keltjin Farm butterballs and fingerlings. And there, with a roasted saddle of lamb, were the embezzled gourmet “Keltjin duck eggs”—egg-shaped and egg-sized, as perfect as new potatoes in a can, but with the flavor of sweet butter and apples and briary wine. But not loamy. The flavor was loamless, without loam.