Checker and the Derailleurs

“Is it always like this?” Checker ventured.

  “No, no,” Rahim assured him, throwing the scrub brush at a shard of plate and breaking it in half. “Sometimes much worse.” He brushed the chips off a chair and spread his apron on the seat for Checker. Slumping into an armchair opposite, Rahim picked slivers one by one off his jeans and pitched them sulkily into the wreckage.

  “So this isn’t the first time.”

  “First time?” Rahim laughed dejectedly. “Every day, like in border trenches back home. Why I bother run from army? At least there I kick-ass Khomeini crazy with roaches in his head. Here, fight all day wonky lady, like old man stuck in village, too weak for war.” He kicked at the carpet and it tinkled. “Syria say I don crawl on hands and knees, she turn me in. Send me back to my country. Is not possible, no?”

  “She could. Besides, you have that interview coming up for your green card. You better stay on her good side.”

  “This woman don have no good side!”

  They heard a key in the lock. Whether to please her or to protect himself, Rahim shot out of his seat and grabbed the broom. When Syria walked in, he held its handle like a stave. She glared. “Haven’t gotten very far, darling. And I see we have a guest for dinner. Hope you’ve got something special planned.” She sauntered to the kitchen. “Like our new decor?” she asked, tossing Check a beer and taking Rahim’s cleaned-off chair. “We’ve done the living room over in Early Divorce.”

  “Throwing plates. Very Greek.”

  She toasted. “Opa.” Syria looked at Rahim with complicitous affection. “Teaching your buddy to scrub porcelain is like getting Helen Keller to fold her napkin.”

  Rahim swept ineffectually at the glass, unamused.

  “How about a beer for Hijack?”

  “You’re just the sort of softie who’d let Helen eat off other people’s plates, aren’t you? No, this kid’s been on a break all day. I’m tired and I want some dinner, and look what I come home to. Besides, this is all your fault to begin with, so don’t interfere.”

  Checker looked around the room, studying Syria’s walls. They were covered with volcanoes. In some pictures steam trailed over lazy, crusting flows; in others the craters spewed luminescent lava, the color of molten glass. Her volcanoes reduced the furnace, with its small square door and dull contained roar, to the infant child of a race of fire giants, a tiny glowing ember from a worldwide inferno. Checker felt intrigued but uneasy. The photos were hung edge to edge, walling the whole room with a volatile, incendiary light. In the corner hot orange globs bobbed in the liquid of a lava lamp, whose glow infused the photos with immanent eruption. Broken shattered femurs and disjointed hip sockets at his feet flashed red. As the sun set luridly outside, the whole room took on a sinister crimson. Once more his intestines turned, rumbled; the dragon yawned in its sleep.

  For distraction he reached for one of the funny black lumps on the table beside him. Frothy and porous, glinting with purple highlights, the rock was labeled Etna—’84. Next to it was a white one, with a crumbly texture like dried bread, labeled Krakatoa—’79.

  “I go on pilgrimages,” Syria explained. “Hawaii, Italy, Japan, Costa Rica. Alaska is next.”

  “Pretty cold for you.”

  “Never gets too cold around me.” She smiled. “Mount Saint Helens erupted on my birthday.” She said this as if taking credit. “I think that’s how I’d like to die, actually. Like in Pompeii. Fried in rock. Quietly rotting away to leave a perfect hollow half a mile down. Wouldn’t that be wild?” She looked around at her own posters, and Checker sensed she never tired of studying the steam, the crags, the splurts of red earth; he knew she came home at two, three, even four in the morning, and he could see her sprawling out on the couch with only the lava lamp on, images of bright bones and trailing drips of glass still burned on her retinas, and in her tiredness the whole room surging under her, all red and afloat and melting, steam coming off her sweaty shirt, her hair black and strangled like something charred.

  “I might have been a volcanologist,” she supposed, “but I hated school. So I kick around flows when I take vacations. The smell of sulfur; a rumble under my feet—that’s my idea of a good time.”

  Rahim had been pinging the debris toward them until he swept a wave of variegated cullet right over Syria’s boot. She sprayed the glass against his jeans; Rahim kicked it back. Syria swung up from the chair and slapped him across the face; Rahim slapped Syria; she hit him back even harder, and then they froze. All this happened in a matter of seconds, the three volleys of glass, the three slaps—right-left-right, left-right-left, like drum exercises.

  “It’s time for supper now,” said Syria.

  Rahim marched coolly to the kitchen. Syria sat back down as if nothing had happened.

  Soon smoke billowed across the volcanic posters like a Sen-surround disaster movie. Regularly the smoke alarm in the adjoining bedroom would emit a piercing screech, and Rahim would hurry out to wave a newspaper under the sensor to cut it off. At last he announced that dinner was ready, and Syria, who’d been sniffing the air suspiciously since he began to cook, strode warily into the kitchen. She picked the lid off a pot and slammed it down again. “I said spaghetti.”

  “For Sheckair,” said Rahim defiantly, “Netional Deesh.”

  “Netional Deesh,” said Syria between her teeth, “tastes like Dinty Moore beef stew.”

  “I make food from my country,” said Rahim, rolling his r’s majestically.

  “Your country,” said Syria, her voice ominously level, “is a squalid little sandbox where wizened old men sit around a fire with meat on a stick. It is the last place in the world I would go for recipes.”

  Meanwhile, Checker diffidently looked into the pot himself, finding a few gristly chunks of meat with potatoes and heavily cooked vegetables.

  “All Amedican know is pizza,” Rahim muttered, serving up the stew. “I make real food.”

  “I was hungry!” Syria scooped the entire helping in her hand and flung it at the sink, thwap. Rahim catapulted the mound of Netional Deesh on his spoon at Syria’s shirt; Syria commandeered the pot and flung a wad of stew smack in the boy’s face. Checker found himself looking down at what was not long ago a dubious dinner, now turned scarce and valuable ammunition. Hijack looked enviously over at Checker’s serving. Once again, this whole interchange had taken no time at all, and was executed with a bizarre, almost mechanical immediacy—splat, splat, splat—they seemed stoic, or at least normal.

  Syria turned the pot upside down, and its contents lumped reluctantly off the bottom to thunk on the floor. “Now, is that the sound of something you would eat? I’m going out for a slice and back to work. Ta-ta, darling.” With one finger she raised Rahim’s chin and kissed his gravied lips with a surprising tenderness. “Tastes terrible,” she said softly, and strolled out of the apartment, glass shattering in her wake.

  Checker and Rahim sat at the table and didn’t say anything. Rahim dabbed gravy from his nose. They looked around, at the globs on the floor, the smoke still drifting through the air, the bits of carrot in Rahim’s hair.

  Finally Rahim looked at Checker and asked, “How you make—spaghetti?”

  They spent the next two hours cleaning the kitchen, then sautéing onions, pressing garlic, tossing in basil and oregano. Rahim seemed intrigued by the concept of al dente, and leaned over the pot as Checker spiced the sauce. They sat down to eat, and Rahim twirled the pasta on his fork, debating whether another splash of red wine would have given the tomatoes more body. When Checker described a variation with sweet Italian sausage, the Iraqi asked where to buy it.

  As Check pulled on his jacket to go clean Syria’s studio, Rahim surveyed the disheveled apartment with a shy, incongruous pleasure. “She is vedy beautiful, no?”

  “Your wife,” said Checker with effort, “is very beautiful, no.” While the whole evening might have been a drain, it was that one word which fatigued him; Checker left the Carver Arms noticeably pale.

  ??
?So you and Hijack are getting along—smashingly.”

  “I haven’t enjoyed myself more in years.”

  “Then you like him.”

  “I adore him.”

  Checker washed out Syria’s mugs at the sink, pensively scraping the dried black rims of coffee. “Have you always been such a terror?”

  “As a child. But later…” She slipped a bone into the furnace and twirled. “At your age, or a bit older, I was quite contained.”

  “That’s hard to imagine.”

  “My father died.”

  There was a long silence; Syria inspected the joint on her bone; Checker dried the dishes, though he hardly had to in this heat.

  “…Are you over it?”

  “I’ll never be over it. A funeral isn’t like a lousy party and then you go home. It’s not a bum movie that’s over and the lights go up. When people are dead they’re dead for the rest of your life.”

  She talked so little about herself, Checker didn’t want to say the wrong thing and so said nothing.

  “With a father,” she said, “your world has a top. It’s like sleeping with enough blankets.”

  “I don’t know,” said Checker. “I don’t think about mine much.”

  “You don’t have to. He’s alive.”

  He was so pleased she was talking. He loved it so much when she was talking.

  “See, it doesn’t matter, the thinking,” she continued. “You don’t have to talk to the guy. Visit. My father drilled wells for loaded film types with out-of-the-way ranch houses near the Mojave. We could both talk about heat, but besides that, he didn’t understand about glass. Then all that stuff, profession—it’s overrated, isn’t it? Just keeping busy…Point is, months, even years went by; lived on different coasts, didn’t phone much, write. Fact, practically, my life hasn’t changed much. But all that time I knew he was somewhere. Know that feeling in a house when there’s someone reading in the next room? You can’t even see them and they don’t say a word? Know the difference between that and being there by yourself? That’s what I mean. The day my mother told me, it was like hearing the door open, and close. A little cold breeze. Nothing else, except that everything suddenly felt totally different. The next room was empty. Pages of the book were flapping in the wind.”

  She was quiet for a long time.

  “You know, ordinary people have a reputation for leading dumb little lives,” she went on after a while. “Aluminum siding, plastic seat covers, TV Guide. But it knocks me out what just about everyone goes through. Did you know that every schmo’s father dies? That didn’t occur to me until years later. For a long time I thought it was only me.”

  “‘Ordinary’ is a dangerous word. I avoid it.”

  “Well, yes. Did you know—” She turned to him, startlingly sincere, straight; rage seemed to clear her out, for her air had the clean, crisp quality of after a thunderstorm. “Did you know that everyone was born from a woman’s body? That everyone dreams? Makes up stories every night and thinks they’re real?”

  Checker nodded. “If you tried to describe a dream to someone who’d never had one, they’d think you were crazy.”

  “Everyone gets old. Dies—”

  “Has kids—”

  “Some days I’m not disgusted, I’m blown away. So that who makes headlines and who has Jaguars and who’s a movie star seems so—”

  “Beside the point.”

  “Yes! Because it’s tempting to condescend, isn’t it? Toward those people. But what’s really hard, and really good, everyone does.”

  As the drummer and the glassblower finished their work, Astoria twisted in its sleep, astir with quixotic and demanding lives. A retired schoolteacher with a son in jail wrung her sheet. A two-week-old child who had no names for any separate object opened her eyes to a benevolent pastel blur, their only neighbor who saw the universe tonight as a coherent bubble. A carpenter with uterine cancer hunched on a toilet in Astoria General, bravely preparing for a life of leaky yellow bags. An accountant was dreaming he could fly. And just across the street a young man and woman wrestled with each other, in love, then not, in love again, all under a bedspread the most alarming color of blue.

  “What about your father?” Syria asked the next night. “He’s Italian?”

  “Black. Secretti’s my mother’s name.”

  “What does he look like?”

  “Good, I guess.”

  “Come on. Talk.”

  “D.C.”

  “Divorced?”

  “And married. Divorced. Married. My mother was an early mistake. She says he used to be real different.”

  “How?”

  “Kind of a wild man. Impulsive. It was even weirder back then for him to marry a poor white girl. His family’s pretty well off. But he worshipped her. Even took her last name. More musical than Jones, he said. His parents were furious. So’s his new wife, actually.”

  “Why?”

  “‘Secretti’ is his souvenir. See, my mother was a riot. Still is.”

  “You like her?”

  “Oh yeah. She’s like a little kid. My father sends her enough money to get by on, and she—plays. All day. Makes things, for no reason. Lately it’s pillows. She’s just coming out of a quilting phase. The quilt on my bed is a retrospective of my favorite shirts through the ages. I wake up, and there’s the corduroy from fifth grade, the velour from third. It’s nice. The mobile thing was a pain, though. She hung them too low.”

  “You’ve managed to change the subject from your father.”

  “You bet.”

  “You don’t get along.”

  “I bug him.”

  “Why?”

  “He wants me to be something. Go to school, all that. He thinks I’m happy-go-lucky, and later I’ll be sorry.”

  “You don’t like him.”

  “I think he was probably terrific when he was my age. But then he—decided something.”

  “What does he do?”

  Checker shrugged. “Government.”

  “You can’t have that dumb an idea of your father’s job.”

  “An appointed position,” Checker dodged.

  “Covers anything from attorney general to janitor.”

  Check flickered a smile. “It’s just—Syria, I’d rather the band didn’t know. They treat me—”

  “They idolize you.”

  “Whatever. It’s bad enough. So I’d rather keep my father out of it.”

  “He’s a big shot.”

  “You could say that.”

  “If he’s so connected, why couldn’t he help you with my wife?”

  “I tried,” Check groaned. “He said he wished the United States would deport all the riffraff I hang around with. And my father had something to do with Carter, so he’s not so hot on Middle Easterners.”

  “You see him much?”

  “Three, four times a year. I sit in big poofy chairs in a nice sweater and meet his new wife. He lectures me. I look around the room, play with the flower arrangement. By the time he’s finished, there are petals scattered all over the carpet. I measure how bad it was by whether there are any roses left in one piece at the end of the night. I think he’s just about given up. He says my mother’s ruined me. And he’s right.” Checker smiled. “I think he misses her. He asks about her when the wife goes to the bathroom. I tell him about the mobiles and he rolls his eyes, but I bet later he thinks about it and smiles a little and looks around his own living room and feels tired. They’re always stiff, those places, like hotels—nothing kills the character of a room faster than money. I feel sorry for him. He feels sorry for me. We’ve got it worked out.

  “I have a theory, though. I think if I walked in there one day and said, Dad, I’m going to Yale. And, Dad, I’m going to make something of myself. Music is a crapshoot and Mom’s a crackpot and I’ve got to stop daydreaming over the Triborough and tackle some long-range goals. If I came in and said, Dad, bike’s gotta go, I want a subcompact for my birthday, with great gas mileage
—God, Syr, I think he’d burst into tears. Because he pushes me hard as he can, and then when I don’t budge I can see he’s relieved. Sometimes it gets real late and the wife goes to bed and it’s just us over a bottle of vodka, and he asks me about Plato’s and my friends and how I feel and—the look on his face. I don’t know.”

  Check roused himself. “Sorry, I don’t usually talk about my father.”

  “He’s one of your secrets, isn’t he?”

  “He’s a shortcut.”

  “How?”

  “It’s easier to decide you don’t want a swimming pool if there’s a bulldozer in the back yard about to dig the hole.”

  “What?”

  “A lot of people get so hung up on what they can’t have that they don’t think for a second about whether they really want it. They have to win the lottery to find out they like to work, after all; that they like their little houses. You know, what we were talking about last night, ordinariness, that it’s crap. Well, I know I can have Yale and D.C., so I know I like my mother and the quilt on my bed and Plato’s and Howard and Hijack and Caldwell. Like I said, Dad’s a shortcut.”

  “And you walk around knowing that your father’s important, like having a hundred-dollar bill in your back pocket.”

  “Oh no. My mother is my hundred-dollar bill.”

  Before they finally got down to work, Syria asked, “Could you get into Yale? If you wanted?”

  Check laughed. “I have no idea. I never checked my test scores. Threw out most of my report cards. I used one of them, unopened, as a coaster for a month. It got rings on the envelope—coffee, beer, Coke. Collected dust and bugs, and the address blurred. Interesting experiment.”

  “Did you ever open it?”

  “Finally Romaine did, my brother. He was furious. ‘How you get a A in English if you never went?’ So I know one grade. Not surprising, though. Ms. Carlton was—well, we had a good time.” Checker smiled and seemed to be keeping a great deal to himself.

  “Did you ever have affairs with your teachers?”

  “Affairs!” Check exclaimed, not answering. “We talked. We talked a lot.”

  Later that night he asked her, “Would you like it if I went to Yale? Would I seem better?”