Still Life with Bread Crumbs (11 page)

“Guy can take care of himself,” Kevin said, lying back on the sofa, balancing turkey on a croissant on his belly. “Can’t a guy ever get a plain piece of bread around here?” he said sometimes.

Sarah loved Jim Bates, but not in a romantic fashion, since she had an undoubted thing for unpleasant men who treated her badly. Jim had been just the opposite. He’d been the only person
willing to sit her down and tell her why her business was failing, and he did it soon enough that she could turn things around. She’d set up as an English tearoom, which had been her dream since she was a little girl and had read a series of books about three children who lived in an English manor house and had adventures with talking animals. Trifle, treacle, toad-in-the-hole—Sarah never forgot the foods they had at tea, or the fact that they had tea at all, and that it wasn’t something to drink but an entire meal. Her mother had made her major in marketing at the state university so she would be able to support herself—“instead of assuming some man will do it,” said her mother, who never got over her bitterness at her divorce.

But what Sarah really wanted to do was move to England, where everything was better: china, gardens, accents, Shakespeare plays. Then she met Kevin her senior year, and decided what she would do instead was be a mother who read those books about the English children to her own, and ran an English business of some kind or another. After she spent a summer working at a bakery near campus she decided on an English tearoom. Kevin got a job selling cars in a lot off the interstate, and they settled in Squamash, which everyone said was going to be the next place the city people came to spend the weekend. Only they didn’t, not really, although there were a few of them who bought houses on the outskirts with plenty of land because it was cheaper than the more popular places.

Sarah got herself some tiered porcelain serving dishes with flowers twining around the fluted edges, and some teapots with cozies made to look like little old women, and a small business loan that she figured she could manage each month with the marketing plan she’d learned in her advanced marketing class. She gave away free samples the first week and people sniffed the air outside the shop appreciatively and smiled and told her they’d be back. And they were, for about two weeks, and then they weren’t.

“What’d I tell you about a burger place?” Kevin said. “Everybody likes a burger.”

“I don’t care about burgers,” Sarah replied.

Week three and Jim Bates came in and sat in one of her little spindly bentwood chairs. She’d seen him twice before, but she’d never noticed how big he was, or how inadequate the chairs looked holding a person of his size. He was a man who liked sugar; he ordered cocoa and a maple pecan scone. “You make a good scone,” he said.

“Thank you,” she said, and her dimpled chin quivered, and tears began to run down her face.

“It’s like that, huh?” he said, looking around at the little tables and tiny chairs, all empty.

It wasn’t what he said, that’s for sure. It was his tone of voice, kind of even, soothing. “You know why, right?” Kevin said that night, thinking like he always did that any man who was nice to a woman wanted to sleep with her, and would stop being nice as soon as he had. But Jim Bates wasn’t like that. He was just a nice man who told her that Squamash wasn’t ready for cucumber and watercress sandwiches or oolong tea, that if she could see her way clear to making good strong coffee and even offering it in take-out cups, that if she could learn to make a cheese Danish and a sticky bun, there would be lines at the register first thing in the morning. He told her that there was no reason she couldn’t make nice sandwiches, but that they’d have to be bigger than a pack of matches and the bread not spread with unsalted butter. He told her that maybe there was room on her menu for a section called English Specialties, and that if she explained what bangers and mash were she could even sell some because he knew for a fact that there were plenty of guys in the area who liked both sausages and mashed potatoes as long as they knew that’s what they were ordering.

He’d been right about everything. She thought he was the kindest guy she’d ever known. Much much nicer than her father,
who never even bothered with a birthday card after he left, or her brother, who referred to her as “fat ass” when they were young and called only when he wanted to borrow money. Much nicer, although she would be the last to admit it, than Kevin, who always had to go out at night and meet with someone or other now that he had quit the car lot—“bunch of losers”—and become what he called an entrepreneur, buying truckloads of firewood and reselling it in overpriced cords to flower shops and gourmet stores in neighboring towns (who then marked the price up even further for the weekend people).

Kevin didn’t like Jim Bates and Sarah couldn’t figure out why, but that’s because she hadn’t been at Ralph’s the night Kevin was playing pool and making jokes about Sarah. They all sounded like old jokes, the kind that seventy-five-year-old comedians made on television: my wife is so fat she has her own zip code. My wife is so fat that when she wears yellow in New York people try to hail her. My wife is so fat she brought a spoon to the Super Bowl. Kevin was the only guy laughing at the jokes, laughing hard, like a cross between a cough and a bark, and he was in midlaugh when Jim Bates, who had been having a beer with a siding guy and working out a schedule on a building project, walked by and said, “It would be good if you stopped insulting your wife in front of strangers.”

“Who the hell do you think you are?” Kevin had said, looking down the length of the bar and then at the bartender, who was stocking the beer fridge and didn’t look up.

“It would be good,” Jim said.

“Mind your own damn business,” Kevin said, and from one of the tables in the dim back of the bar someone muttered, “At least he’s got a business.”

“What?” But everyone was looking innocent and Jim Bates was walking out. Not everyone liked him, mainly because they recognized in him a man who didn’t cut corners or do deals under the table. But virtually all of them had roofs on their houses,
which meant Jim was indispensable, while Kevin was an outsider and a known scamster.

“Hey!” Kevin called, and finally the bartender looked up. “Leave it alone,” said the bartender, who had played catcher in high school when Jim Bates was shortstop.

“Asshole.”

“Pay your tab and call it a night,” the bartender said.

Kevin had stopped making comments about Sarah’s weight, and her hair, and her chin and her conversation, when other people were around. But it didn’t stop him from doing it at home. Jim Bates sometimes thought he should have the kind of conversation with Sarah about her marriage that he’d had with her about her business, but he was smart enough to know that downing watercress sandwiches and downing a woman’s husband were two different things. He, too, had once been married to someone to whom he had felt mysteriously and irrationally attached, until she’d unattached herself.

Sarah kept trying to fix Jim Bates up. She’d write names and phone numbers on paper napkins and tuck them into the little flowered folder with his lunch check inside. He’d put the napkins in his pockets, and then on Sunday afternoons, when he did the laundry, he’d toss them in the trash, along with the occasional Sheetrock nail.

But Sarah never thought of fixing him up with Rebecca.

“One, she’s too famous and sophisticated, and, two, she’s too old for him.”

“Maybe the old ones are more willing to go along,” Kevin said. “Besides, she doesn’t look that old. She looks better than most of the forty-year-olds around here. She probably does one of those exercise deals.” Sarah hoped he wasn’t going to start in on her again. She knew she should work out but she started baking every morning at five. She figured they were never going to have children because Kevin never wanted to have sex.

(At least not with Sarah. Jim had wadded up the napkin with
the skanky weekend bartender’s number on it with particular venom and lobbed it into the toilet by the washer because he knew she and Kevin hooked up at her apartment at least once a week.)

“She isn’t good-looking, I gotta say,” Kevin added. “She’s got that long face and that weird mouth.”

“Oh, you’re so wrong. She’s beautiful. Not in that kind of cheerleader way, but she has such a strong face. The mouth is the best part of it.”

Kevin shrugged. “I don’t see it, but what do I know? Maybe it’s one of those things women like and guys don’t, like, I don’t know, sweaters?”

“Guys don’t like sweaters?” Sarah said.

“Nah. Guys like shirts. Girls like sweaters.”

It so happened that while Jim Bates did not like sweaters—he always found them itchy and preferred flannel shirts and old T-shirts laundered to near-tissue—he had come to admire Rebecca’s mouth. At first he had found it strange. It was very wide, with a strongly delineated upper lip that looked as though it had been drawn with a sharp pencil. The lower lip was completely different, thick and slightly drooping, and in recent years young female photographers had speculated about whether Rebecca had had it plumped up for reasons of vanity. In fact she had had it all her life; in baby pictures it made her look a little simple-minded, and her mother had told everyone that she had no idea what part of the family had a mouth like that but she assumed it must be her husband’s.

When Rebecca was in art school one of her classmates had
asked to paint her, and he had made her mouth the centerpiece of the painting, enormous and epicene. It was cruel, her small eyes and slightly pointed nose crowded to the center of what was, after all, a rather long face, all completely obliterated by the huge lips across the center of the canvas. But Rebecca was forced to be of two minds about the painting, which showed her in a yellow turtleneck—although of course the one she had worn for the sittings was black—with a long braid of hair slithering down one shoulder, reminiscent of the Modigliani
Girl with Braids.
As a personal matter she was slightly insulted and repelled by it, but as a professional one she knew it was very fine, and the young painter, Josef Gourdon, would go on to become as famous a portraitist as Rebecca was a photographer. “My muse!” he would cry extravagantly at a gallery or a gala, his arm around whichever young male escort he was painting nude at the time, usually exaggerating the genitalia as he had Rebecca’s mouth.

Over the years it developed that the painting was especially cruel because her mouth seemed to promise something Rebecca did not deliver, a kind of louche attitude that drew men to her when her face was in repose. It made you attend to her lips, and her lips made you attend to what her lips might do. In this way she had been importuned by a number of imaginative men in the two decades since her divorce—although not before it, when she was inclined to keep her lower lip tucked under the upper in a gesture that was characteristic of her youth. She had spent about a year halfheartedly seeing an intellectual property lawyer, who in his insistence on talking only about himself finally reminded her so much of a cut-rate Peter that she had simply stopped returning his calls and messages. She and another photographer with whom she had always had an easy friendship became a couple for a while, but then he moved to San Francisco and married a nice Chinese woman young enough to give him children. She had broken the heart of a short story writer to whom Dorothea had introduced her; he was good-looking, in an odd and
arresting way, and smart, too, but he was crazy about her, even talked about moving in together. This made her both suspicious and claustrophobic, and after a while he just gave up. “You’re making a terrible mistake,” he told her, and in the abstract she thought he was probably right.

She was bad at breaking up with people once she got involved, and so now she was less and less likely to get involved. It was always so difficult to put into words exactly what was wrong without sounding mean or trivial. She remembered one evening so vividly that she could see the food in front of her—rosy tuna tartare, with some elaborate radish decoration around the rim of the white plate—and a handsomish man who had begun a long disquisition on the German character, on how there was a certain order and linear thinking that prefigured so much that had happened in literature, music, and of course world affairs. And as he raised his fork and said, “The rise of fascism was inevitable,” she had heard a sort of click in her head that said, “No. Absolutely not.”

“May I come up?” he’d said nicely as the doorman pretended not to eavesdrop.

“No,” Rebecca replied. “But thank you for dinner.”

That was her last date. Unless you counted sharing coffee from a thermos in a tree stand at dawn and eating a nine-hundred-calorie grilled cheese sandwich. Which she most certainly did not. That thought had not seriously crossed her mind, nor the suspicion that every time Jim Bates looked at her lower lip he had an impulse to take it gingerly between his front teeth. She had seen him flush more than once in the tree stand, and had wondered a little, then finally concluded that because of his fair complexion he was especially sensitive to changes in temperature. But actually he was especially sensitive to Rebecca Winter’s lower lip. Luckily she hadn’t a clue. Like the deer, you had to sneak up slowly on Rebecca or else she would bolt. Considering her marriage, that wasn’t surprising.

From
The New York Times
Society section, October 2, 1980: