Stephan Clark - Sweetness #9

“He’s joking,” Betty said. “You know your father.”

I motioned to her pad with my burger, telling her to take this down. “That man on the radio was right. Symptoms of prolonged Sweetness #9 exposure include anxiety, obesity, selective mutism in monkeys, and a generalized dissatisfaction with life.”

She was writing with a just-playing-along look.

“Other possible side-effects include agenda journalism—”

She looked up.

“—Communism, the disparagement of Ronald McDonald.”

“Very funny, Dad.”

“Really, David.”

“What?” I was like a Bond villain. Once I’d started in on the exposition, I couldn’t stop. “This is a big story. Forget the high school paper, you may need to write a book. Have I told you about the monkeys?”

Ernest looked up from the last of his fries.

“It all begins with monkeys,” I said.

Betty poured salt over what remained of her Quarter Pounder, then placed a paper napkin over the corpse of her dinner. “Let the regret begin.”

Priscilla leaned back in her chair, her eyes not leaving mine. “So did you at least order the Albanian report?”

“I thought you would’ve forgotten about that by now.”

“Thought or hoped?”

“You should trust your father. Why don’t you trust your father?”

She pocketed her pencil and notebook, then stood and extended her hand. “Can I have the keys? It smells like a crematorium in here. I’d rather wait in the car.”

ON THROUGH THE SIXTIES, before the second wave of feminism crashed ashore and swept this life away, Ernst Eberhardt had a long string of secretaries who performed shorthand for him on either side of his desk. One of the last of these young women remained with him longer than most. Her name: Eliza Abigail FitzGerald. They remained together for three years, until Eliza came to his row house one Sunday morning, planning to surprise him with warm croissants. The key she used to let herself in had been a recent victory for her in their relationship, or so she thought before she reached his bedroom upstairs. It was there that she found Ernst in bed with a busty young blonde he’d met while thumping melons at a roadside stand. Eliza grabbed Miss Melons by the roots of her dyed blonde hair and dragged her kicking and screaming into the street, cursing Ernst the whole while for being too cowardly to tell her any other way.

A month later Miss Melons had passed out of season, and Eliza was simply gone — off to Downey, California, where she’d land a job with the Post Office and deliver the mail on the street of a young Karen Carpenter. For parts of four decades she remained away, long enough to marry a man and celebrate a silver anniversary and see all of the equity in her home of twenty-some years disappear after her husband fought and lost a protracted battle with cancer.

When Eliza reappeared in our front lobby in the summer of 1995, looking for a fresh start (and, I thought, a little money), Ernst met her with an awkward hug that became a friendly if uncoordinated kiss. An early lunch followed, and this spilled over into a candle-lit dinner. The next morning I was asked to apologize to Soon Bok, our quiet, respectful, and preternaturally organized receptionist, and inform her of our generous severance package. Minutes later, Eliza was taking her place at the front desk as if nothing had changed since LBJ was in the White House.

I didn’t like her — not the prunish looks she seemed to reserve for me, not the squeaky shoes and polyester slacks that she wore, not even the tiny wad of Kleenex she was constantly stashing up the sleeve of one of her many tiger-print blouses. But she made Ernst happy in his old age, and so in turn she lent me a sort of happiness as well.

It was because of Eliza that my dinner was interrupted at McDonald’s. Just moments after Priscilla left for the car, my phone rang, and when I reached for it and saw the name flashing on its screen— ERNST (Cell) —I knew it must be serious. Eliza had purchased the phone for him at some point in the last year or two, but Ernst had never taken to it. When he wasn’t forgetting it in his knick-knack drawer at home, he was puzzling over its unfamiliar buttons (“Why won’t it stop ringing when I set it down?”) or being reminded that it only worked if you first charged its battery.

I stepped away from our table to answer the call, but for a moment the conversation went nowhere, as Ernst and I struggled with a slight delay. When we weren’t talking at the same time, we were apologizing for doing so and telling the other person to go ahead — and then hearing the same thing in return.

“Where are you?” I finally managed to get in. “Are you all right?”

“I’m embarrassed,” he said. “That’s where I am.”

After dropping Betty and the kids at home, I drove out to the coast on Highway 18, wondering how Ernst could have gotten so far from his intended destination. He’d taken the bus to Edison after work, having decided to surprise Eliza with a new car. But after he pulled out of the lot in a blue Jetta GLX, the surprise was on him. He hadn’t had a driver’s license as long as I’d known him, and for every road he recognized from those years when he had owned a car, there were three or four new ones that got him turned around.

I finally found him near Edenville, parked in front of a wooden structure that had a crudely painted sign standing atop its slanted wood shingle roof. KEYS MADE, it read. PO BOXES.

I pulled in alongside him and stepped over to the driver’s window. Ernst was asleep, his mouth hanging open to reveal a jumble of stained teeth. He’d been in his late fifties when we first met, not much older than I was now, but even if he had already walked with a cane back then, he’d done so jauntily, always leading the way whenever we went on a long walk. Now, though, he looked as old and exhausted as his wrinkled suit.

I knocked gently, and then hard enough to wake him. Ernst reacted with a start, looking at me in his window as if I were a shaded figure coming for him in a bad dream.

“It’s David!” I said. “Open the door!”

His fear quickly transformed into confusion as he ran his hand down the door panel beneath the window. “There’s no handle!”

“The button!” I pointed. “It’s a button!”

He finally pushed one. The window lowered between us.

I reached in to pop the lock, and then he was stepping out, saying, “When did the world get taken over by buttons?” He didn’t wait for an answer; he hurried inside to use the facilities, going in through the front door just after a man with a handlebar mustache had walked out holding a clump of mail close to his leather vest. This man avoided my gaze, leaving me to think of all the dubious figures who must transact their business inside: those with hidden bank accounts and deviant mail-order pornography habits, shut-ins seeking meek Filipina wives, and tenured professors in search of romance through the personals ads in the New York Review of Books. Then it occurred to me: What better place to receive the Albanian report?

Inside, I filled out a form at the front counter, providing my contact information and specifying the size of the box I required. The clerk was almost as old as Ernst, but fiercer looking, with a buzz cut and a body as lean as a strip of beef jerky. He picked up my form and read it, pausing on the name.

“Jürgen Mockus,” he said. “Is that Swedish?”

I tried a smile. “Lithuanian, actually.”

He had a toothpick in his mouth, one he moved this way and that with his tongue. “I knew a Swedish gal once. A socialist.” He paused to judge my reaction. He looked like the type of person who could weaponize a ballpoint pen. “Can’t say I’ve ever met a Lithuanian. You were Communist, weren’t you?”