Stephan Clark - Sweetness #9

I staggered past her to the bar trolley, cringing at all of her questions: “What happened?” “But why?” “Are you serious?”

It was then that the lies began. “I’d never be happy there,” I said. “I should be mixing flavors, not feeding rats. I’m an artist.”

“Yes, but”

“But what?” We were out of brandy. I poured two fingers of white crème de menthe, then turned to her, wincing at the too-sweet taste. “Would you rather I make the break five years from now, when we’ve got kids and a mortgage? It was now or never.”

“So you just walked out?”

I moved around her toward the hallway. “What did I say?”

“I don’t know. You quit?”

“I walked out, yes. Now, don’t you want me to be happy?” I stopped at the door to the bedroom. Betty remained at the mouth of the hallway, staring at me incredulously. “If I make a mistake, one bad decision,” I said, “am I supposed to live with it for the rest of my life? It wasn’t the place for me. That simple. End of story.”

“I just can’t believe you’d do this without talking to me first. Should I cancel the check?”

She wore a pair of denim gaucho pants and a tight white T-shirt, neither of which I’d seen before.

“I signed up for a night class,” she said.

I groaned. “And this is your back-to-school outfit?”

“I wanted to look nice. Should I return it? I’ve still got the receipt.”

I set my drink down on the dresser inside the bedroom door, then started back toward her and began working at the metallic buttons of her pants. “Keep it,” I said. “It’s nice.”

“But can we afford it?”

I pushed my hand inside her jeans. “Let’s make a baby.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I had more than a dozen interviews this year. We’ll be fine.”

“Not now!” She hit me, first in the back, then the chest. “Stop it, I said!”

So I let her go, and she stepped away from me shaking her head.

“I can’t believe you just quit.”

I stood there, slump-shouldered and sexless, full of desire and confusion, a young man who’d had the world of flavor taken away from him on the same day he’d bowled no better than a 125.

“I guess this means no more Sweetness #9 in our coffee?” she said.

I turned back for the bedroom, telling her she wouldn’t have to wait too long. “It’ll probably be on the market in another year or two.”

THERE WAS NO SHORTAGE OF flavor houses in New Jersey. Though the American flavor industry had gotten its start on the edges of New York City’s garment district, soaring real estate prices had sent it scrambling into the Garden State shortly after the war. By the time I was hiring a typist to copy out my résumé and a telephone service to field my calls, there were no fewer than fifty flavor companies between the ocean and the Turnpike. In addition to its main research and production facility in Jupiter Park, Goldstein, Olivetti, and Dark had a manufacturing center off Exit 10 of the New Jersey Turnpike in Perth Amboy. The Dutch, meanwhile, the mighty, mighty Dutch, had long staked their claim to Teterboro in the north, just a short drive from which you can still find the pride of Passaic, Tanko-Shinju, the venerable Japanese firm whose name I’ve heard translated as both “pink pearl” and “two men commit suicide in a coal mine.” After that, there was Sensations, Inc., F. F. Schlosser & Company, and National Perfume and Chemical, one right after the other almost in South Plainfield, East Orange, and Jersey City. In all, two-thirds of the flavor additives consumed in this country originated in New Jersey, and yet by the end of September, I was thinking my home state must be more famous for manufacturing rejection.

“You have to understand,” Fleming Van Moorsel told me after I’d called the Dutch five or six times and he’d finally agreed to see me. “Times have changed. There’s no position for you anymore.”

His corner office was small and decorated tastefully with wooden tables and low-slung chairs that dipped and curved to meet the lines of your body. Dutch modern: hardly the thing for a display of rage.

I surged forward in my chair, my knees reaching almost as high as my ears. “Understand? I understand that not even a year ago you were falling over yourself to talk to me about the use of a company car, and now?”

He slumped back in his chair, throwing up his hands helplessly. “You talk as if I were a part of some great conspiracy.”

“Interesting to hear you put it that way.”

He looked at me for a long moment, testing the limits of a strained smile. “David, I like you, I do, and I wish I could help, but I can’t.”

I lowered my voice. “They were too rigid over there, Mr. Van Moorsel. I don’t know what you’ve heard, but that’s the whole story. They were forcing me to move into Breakfast Cereals, and I’ve always dreamed of being a generalist. It’s that simple.”

He nodded.

“I’ll conform,” I said. “I’m no trouble-maker. I’m a company man, but you have to understand: A company man is nothing without a company.”

“ You have to understand. It’s the economy, that simple. The weather’s bad, the crops are small, the price of food commodities is going through the roof.” His voice became a whisper. “I’m not even sure our side is winning anymore.”

“Sir?”

He reached for a magazine on his desk. “In Portland and Chicago there are stores selling horse meat — in the United States of America! Horse meat! Tell me, what can our industry do about that? Ten years from now a Communist might be sitting in this chair, reassigning you and me to a career in a factory. We could be given an axe and told to go fell trees.

“Read about Minneapolis.” He rolled the magazine up like a club and smacked it into his open hand. “There’s a black market for beef. People are selling ground round out of the boots of their cars. Could it be any worse in Moscow? In Kiev or Minsk?”

He tossed the copy of U.S. News & World Report up onto his desk. The cover’s headline spun round toward me: WHY A FOOD SCARE IN A LAND OF PLENTY?

“I’d love to hire you,” he said. “There’s no one I’d like to bring on board more. But if I did, I’d get a call in the middle of the night from my boss in Wageningen, and then we’d both be out of a job. It’s the economy, David. That simple.”

I left scratching my head and leaving a snowy wake. Dandruff. I’d developed a case so severe that in the coming days I sought the care of a doctor, fearing cancer of the scalp.

“Seborrheic dermatitis,” my doctor told me. I repeated his diagnosis ominously, prompting him to add, “A bad case of dandruff, nothing more.”

I got it in my eyebrows and mustache (which I’d grown thinking a change would do me good), and then my skin began to deteriorate as well. It was like I was a teenager again; when I wasn’t popping a pimple, I was marveling at the first splotches of eczema I’d ever seen. They appeared on and around my nose, and made the sides of my index and third fingers raw and painful. I couldn’t hide it. Soon a red scaly spot the size of a quarter had even appeared on the underside of my foot.

“It’s just stress,” Betty told me. “You’ll find work soon enough.”

I would have found these words more encouraging if I hadn’t felt the need to be no less encouraging to her. She was gaining weight, you see. She’d pulled out a muumuu I’d bought her as a gag gift on our honeymoon, and now she wore it while doing household chores and even running errands. I would have thought she was hiding herself from me if it weren’t for the fact that she’d corner me every now and then in the bedroom while we were changing into or out of our clothes. “Look at this,” she’d say. “Do you see?” And then she’d reach for those portions of her body that had changed, naming them as if she were a bombed-out Londoner marveling at the extent of Hitler’s blitzkrieg. Warsaw, Brussels, Paris. Her hips, her thighs, her ass. “Look at this.” But I would do everything I could to avoid just that, because seeing her like this, I couldn’t help but think of her as overinflated, the features and form of my beautiful young bride lost in the thickening folds of her flesh. The only thing worse than thinking all of this was realizing that if beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I was someone whose love was apparently skin-deep.