The Dinner Party

  If the world had the good fortune of depriving me of vision and an army, that did not mean that I had left anything standing in my little city, from Valley Parkway to Lee Road. They should come for me, I thought. In my way, I merited it just as much as the tyrants.

  My reverie ended when I caught sight of the woman from the embassy. What was she doing here, at my hotel? She paused briefly at the front desk before proceeding out the door. I stood, confused. Should I run after her? But what made me think she was here for me? She wouldn’t want to see me again. Was she here to see Baxter? But that seemed just as unlikely. It had to be a coincidence of some kind. I returned down the stairs.

  “Has someone just left a message for me?” I inquired at the front desk.

  No message.

  I returned up the stairs and down the hallway to my room.

  I found the door unlocked. I pushed it open, slowly, and said, “Hello?” Later I realized that I had been expecting to find someone from housekeeping. But it was the giant—the gloom—who stood, frozen at the sight of me, on the other side of my bed.

  We stared at each other.

  They’re in it together, I thought. I don’t know why or how, but they must be. The woman from the embassy and the giant porter. What else explained it?

  “What are you doing here?”

  “What am I doing here?” I said. “What are you doing here?”

  “No, what are you doing here, in Czechoslovakia?”

  “Czechoslovakia? What are you doing in my room?”

  “I am changing ice bucket,” he said.

  I looked down at his enormous hands. They were empty. The metal ice bucket was sitting on the table behind him. The window beyond that was open, the curtain fluttering in a light breeze, the whole thing calling to mind the fate of the foreign minister Antonin had told me about that day, a man tossed to his death from an upper-floor balcony. Prague was the defenestration capital of the world. Could the giant lift me off the ground? Could I fit through that window? I felt my legs begin to buckle.

  “My ice bucket?” I said, clinging to our conversation. “My ice bucket is there.”

  I pointed.

  “I leave now,” he said. But he didn’t move.

  Was it my place of birth? My normal size? The protections I took for granted as a guest of the hotel? Or was it the impunity I enjoyed from my share of crimes? I will never know what he had in mind when he pointed at me with his long, bony finger and leveled his judgment of unpardonable hate. “You are lucky man,” he said. “Very lucky man.”

  A Fair Price

  Nothing sucked more than moving your stuff out of storage. Luckily Jack had a hand. Guy he’d never met before named Mike. Ryan, his yard guy, had hooked them up. Mike worked for Ryan or knew Ryan somehow. Jack didn’t ask. He was just glad to have the help. He did hope this Mike was more efficient than Ryan. Ryan—what a talker.

  Mike pulled up to the gate at the top of the hill and honked. Jack went over to the gooseneck post and keyed the code in, and the gate began to retract. Mike was twenty bucks an hour. A fair price. Worth every penny, too. But one more reason to hope he was efficient.

  Jack allowed his gaze to wander as Mike came toward him down the blacktop path. Boring place, the U-Stor-It. Ugly. The whole thing a chore.

  Totally reasonable, as Mike approached, to expect him to slow up, roll the window down, and introduce himself, shake hands, etc., before parking. But no, Mike blew right past. Well, all right. Fair enough. Jack undraped his arm from the post and followed after.

  When he reached the rental unit, Jack expected Mike to hop out so the two of them could get down to business. But Mike idled behind tinted windows for the next ten minutes. Texting a buddy in there, or updating a profile. Who knows what. Well, you couldn’t expect a younger man to have the same manners and priorities as a man of forty-two.

  But when he finally stepped foot from his pickup, Mike wasn’t a young man after all. Had to be fifty, at least. Paint-spattered work boots and a puffed-up face. Prickly sort of man—that was the impression, anyway. The neighbors would know to steer clear. The croissant and latte Jack had bought him that morning as a gesture of kindness seemed wrong now, real wrong, and would unfortunately go to waste.

  “Hey, you Mike?”

  Mike replied with a single nod. He fixed a can of chewing tobacco between his tiny teeth as he screwed on a Yankees cap and flicked the door shut. Didn’t say Jack’s name in return. Not there for names. There for a simple exchange: labor for cash.

  And that was okay. They could get straight to work that way.

  “Thanks for coming on such short notice, Mike. Did Ryan tell you what we’re up to today?”

  “Said you needed a hand moving,” Mike said.

  “I need to clear everything out of here and take it all down to Red Hook,” Jack said. “Moving in with my fiancée. We’re getting married in June. You married? No, you’d be wearing a ring. Then again, not everybody wears a ring these days. Lisa and I have been talking nothing but rings lately. Anyway, this friend of ours owns a vineyard in Livingston, looks out over the Hudson. Beautiful place. And he offered it to us, so why not? Hayrides for the kids afterward. And there’ll be dancing, of course. Getting a nice big tent for that.”

  Mike nodded once at the mention of Livingston and turned away again.

  “Anyway,” Jack continued, “this unit is a relic of the old life. I need it emptied out, need all my stuff in one place, need to be done paying the monthly fee. It’s sixty-nine bucks a month—adds up, you know? Every little bit counts these days. Nice people, though. In the front office, I mean. If you ever need a storage unit in the area, I’d recommend it. Anyway,” he said.

  When Mike made no reply to any of this, Jack knew the man hated him. It was only an intuition, but it went bone deep. Mike had driven right past him when he should have stopped and introduced himself, and then made him wait ten minutes in the cold while he texted or whatever. A man like Mike would be terrible to Jack if given half the chance. He wouldn’t let Jack stop to relieve himself on a long car ride. He’d stop only to fill up on gas, saying to Jack, “If you’re not out here by the time I’m done, I will leave you.” And he wasn’t joking. Jack would run to and from the men’s room in terror.

  Mike turned and looked at Jack for the first time. He had startlingly wet, beautiful blue eyes. “Did Ryan tell you how much I charge?”

  “He said twenty an hour.”

  Mike nodded. “Twenty’s my hourly rate.”

  “I couldn’t do it without you, Mike, obviously, so to me twenty’s a steal. I’m sure you have better things to do with your time on a Sunday morning.”

  “Twenty’s my hourly rate,” Mike repeated.

  “Twenty it is, then,” said Jack. “Shall we get started?”

  Jack raised the gate on the rental unit, and he and Mike sized up its contents. He was reminded of just how many boxes there were, how much crap he owned. He had a fantasy of leaving it all behind.

  “Well, what do you think, Mike?” he said. “How should we do this?”

  “I think we just start moving it,” Mike said.

  He took two steps forward, picked a pair of boxes off the nearest stack, and strode up the ramp with them as if storming a castle. Before Jack could take hold of a box of his own, Mike was on his way back down again.

  You couldn’t win. If you said, “Let’s plan this out so we do it right,” a man like Mike looked at you like you were an idiot. “It ain’t brain science, boy,” he’d say, and then he’d just go at it. But if you said nothing of the kind, if you just went at it yourself, a man like Mike would stop you right away. “Whoa, whoa, whoa! Don’t be a fucking retard. You can’t just willy-nilly start throwing shit in when you’re moving a big load. Are you no brighter than a fucking lamppost?”

  Jack picked up two boxes of his own and headed after Mike in a hurry, but midway up the ramp he lost his balance. To steady himself he had to let the top box go as it began to slide off. A f
ew things went through his mind before it even hit the ground. Clumsy. Not up to the task. Never send a boy to do a man’s job. But when he looked back, Mike wasn’t even paying attention. He carried on into the van.

  Mike came up behind him in no time with two more boxes.

  “Sorry,” Jack said, hurrying to get out of the bigger man’s way.

  He retrieved the box that fell, and Mike headed to the storage unit for two more boxes. They met up again seconds later, Mike now at six boxes to Jack’s two.

  Why was he keeping score like that? It wasn’t a competition. And if Mike thought it was? Well, he’d hired Mike. If he wanted to, he could sit back and make Mike do all the work.

  They worked in silence to start with, but soon Jack made an attempt at some friendly conversation. The weather, and what a pain in the ass it was to move.

  “You live around here, Mike?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “Oh, I was just asking…do you live around here?”

  They were coming down the dull metal ramp, Jack first, his head thrown back. He thought he saw Mike nod. But he offered no further detail, and Jack didn’t pursue the matter. Some guys had a scruple about their privacy. And who could blame them? Mike might have taken a dislike for whatever reason, but Jack appreciated a man who didn’t feel the need to talk all the time.

  But could you imagine offering a man like that a latte and a croissant? There was no way! He shook his head at himself.

  He caught up with Mike a few seconds later. “So you’re a Yankees fan, huh?”

  “Huh?”

  “Yankees fan?”

  Jack gestured at the hat on Mike’s head. Mike removed it, looked at it cockeyed, and put it back on. Then he picked up two more boxes and took them into the van.

  The two men soon hit upon a rhythm. Jack picked up two boxes, walked them into the van, and returned down the ramp just as Mike was heading up the ramp with two boxes of his own. Then Mike came down the ramp as Jack was going up it, and on they went like that, back and forth, up and down, real companionable for twenty minutes.

  “Oh, hey, Mike, I almost forgot,” he said when Mike was still in the van. “I picked up a pastry for you. If you’re hungry. It’s in the cab of the truck. It’s from Le Perche.”

  Well, why not? Stupid just to let it go to waste. And stupid not to follow through on a gesture of kindness just because Mike had a mean-looking face.

  Mike came forward, pulling chewing tobacco from the can. Jack didn’t see how such a fat wad was going to fit inside Mike’s small, angry mouth, but Mike deposited it with a weird elegance, and it disappeared completely behind a lip. He wiped a glistening brown fingertip on his jeans and screwed the lid back on. “From where?” he asked. He spat to the ground.

  “Oh,” Jack said. “From Le Perche? You know it? The French place on Warren? With the good pastries?”

  Mike looked at him. “French place,” he said.

  He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, jumped down to the pavement, and that was that. He carried on to the unit and went ahead by two more boxes.

  What was only intuition a moment ago now seemed obvious. Mike hated him. It was strange. With an unreasonable hatred like Mike’s, you almost feared for your life. Not that he’d bash Jack’s head in with a table lamp for being annoying or for making the same mistake over and over again. But he’d certainly sooner watch him die than show him any kindness or respect.

  Well, if that was how he wanted it, and if he couldn’t say thanks or keep up his end of a little conversation, Jack would just stay silent, too. Why make any more effort trying to befriend him or reassure him? You couldn’t reassure a man like Mike, not of your competence or your kindness or your membership in the fraternity of men. You just had to go about your business, keeping your guard up, and part ways as soon as possible, to protect yourself. What better way to do that than by keeping silent? Jack vowed not to say another word unless and until Mike said something first.

  “I’m sorry about all these boxes,” Jack said the next pass up the ramp.

  Mike just shrugged. What did he care? It was twenty bucks an hour for him either way.

  Mike had the misfortune of resembling Donnie. The thing was, just very recently Donnie had turned sentimental. Didn’t understand why Jack wasn’t inviting him to his wedding. “Then your mother’s not going, either, then, forget it,” Donnie told him over the phone. It was just like Donnie to be on the line when Jack was trying to talk to his mom. Well, okay, fine, stay home, both of you. It wasn’t like his mom was some great hero. What had she ever done to keep Donnie in check when he was a kid?

  But Lisa’s complaint was: If you don’t invite anybody from your family, who’s going to be sitting on your side of the aisle? We can’t have a wedding where all the guests are on one side.

  Like the wedding was some kind of boat and it would capsize if Jack didn’t invite every single person he’d ever known.

  “I’m not saying you have to invite every single person you’ve ever known,” Lisa said whenever the topic came up. “I’m just saying, why not let bygones be bygones?”

  Well, a wedding wasn’t a boat, was it? He wasn’t going to invite Donnie just to put butts in seats.

  But this guy Mike wasn’t Donnie. Mike was a friend or an associate of Ryan’s, out here in the cold on a Sunday morning for a measly twenty bucks an hour. Jack didn’t hate him. To be honest, he felt sorry for the guy. Must fucking suck to be so old and still be making your living with your back.

  “Give me a hand with this, Mike, will you?”

  Mike looked at the leather sofa Jack had taken hold of. “You want that in the van now?”

  “Let’s just get it over with,” Jack said.

  “Okay,” he said, squatting low. “Your call.”

  A man like Mike usually had some kind of nickname. Jack couldn’t say just what it would be. He thought it might come out at the wedding. “Call me Griff,” Mike would say. Both men would have knocked back more than a few by then. “We sure had fun moving all that stuff of yours down to Red Hook, didn’t we, Jack?” There was nothing like a day of manual labor to forge a bond between two guys. “Hey, and by the way. Thanks for inviting me. I’m real honored.” Lisa would have to pull him away. “I do love how easily you make new friends,” she’d say. He’d circle back before the night was through and part from Griff with a hug. Griff turning to his date afterward, saying, “Love that guy.”

  So it didn’t work out that way. So what? It had always been a long shot.

  Once Mike warmed up, he started to spurn the ramp. With a load in hand he leapt from the blacktop to the metal bumper and into the van. He wrangled extension cords like a ranch hand. And even when you thought a load was too heavy and his hands were all full, on his way out he reached for a standing lamp and took that, too. He was impressive. But it was laughable just how little he said.

  When Jack brought in his next load, he found Mike in there talking on the phone. Turned away, muttering low, filling the back of the van completely, so that Jack was forced to go around him.

  So he did talk, just not to Jack.

  Jack wouldn’t have minded talking on the phone. One more conversation with Lisa about the goddamn invite list would have been preferable to moving boxes out of storage and into a moving van.

  He took out his cell phone. How was Mike getting service? Discount carrier, probably. They had weird coverage. Oh, well. Jack put his phone away and returned to the unit.

  He dropped off another load and went back for more. He made a second trip and then another. Mike was on the phone that whole time.

  Well, you know what? People call, they need your help, nobody can time an emergency. All Jack needed was a little gesture. “Sorry about this,” Mike might have whispered while cupping the mouthpiece. “Off in a minute.”

  But another five minutes went by, and still no such gesture. He had even taken a seat on one of the boxes in there!

  Once you disdain someone, once yo
u decide they’re not worth your respect, you do whatever you damn well please, even if he’s paying you twenty bucks an hour.

  “It’s 27–24, just so you know,” Jack said to him.

  Mike looked up from his call. “What’s that?”

  “Oh, I was just saying that I’ve brought in twenty-seven boxes to your twenty-four.”

  Mike’s dark monobrow furrowed. “You’re keeping score?”

  Jack left the van. Yeah, like Mike hadn’t been keeping score, too, until he found it more important to talk on the damn phone.

  He expected an apology when Mike got off at last, but Mike didn’t offer one. He simply came down the ramp and carried a new load into the van.

  What are we here for? Jack wondered. The question had started running through his mind before Mike was even off the phone. What are we here for? It obviously wasn’t mutual respect. It wasn’t to make new friends. So what was it? Was it just lifting and moving things in exchange for cash? Was that it? Squatting and lifting and climbing and digging and kneeling and hammering things in for a payday and nothing more?