The Ask (20 page)

The applause started up again. The potato chip crumbled in my hand.

Back at my workstation I clutched the edge of my desk. It wasn’t the terrible feeling, the Maxim gun shudders. It was more what coursed through me the night of the burglary on Staley Street, actions of cost taken all around, me in a frozen state, nothing close to floating. A soft hand roamed my shoulder.

“Relieved?” said Vargina’s voice.

“I’m not sure what it all means,” I said.

“It means you’ve proved yourself.”

“But I never even … did you?”

“Shhh,” said Vargina.

“Who handled Purdy’s give? He was my ask and the whole deal was in a tailspin. Was it Cooley?”

“Purdy handled the Purdy give. Some things came together. There was a Chinese element involved. A few people did favors for other people. An international student, a young man of means, was instrumental.”

“The napper,” I said.

“This went up to the provost, the president, the board. It was beyond us really. It just fell together.”

“Why am I still here? Purdy?”

“It was a stipulation of Purdy’s give, yes. But I backed it up. I told Cooley we needed you.”

“You don’t need me.”

“I know that.”

“So, I get to stay?”

I didn’t really hear Vargina’s answer. I’d tried to stand, crumpled to the carpet. I came to with Vargina leaning over me, her breasts brushing up my chest.

“I’m sorry I undress you with my eyes,” I said.

“It’s okay, Milo. Just breathe.”

“I do a lot worse with my eyes. Am I the only one?”

“Of course not, Milo. You just lack subtlety. But breathe now.”

“Subtlety,” I said.

“Breathe.”

“I never wanted to hurt anyone. I just wanted to slide my dick between your breasts.”

“A Sabrett man,” said Vargina.

“What?”

“Breathe. You’re okay, but we’ve called for help.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said.

“I’m not offended, Milo.”

“Does that mean you are interested?”

“Not at all. Now keep breathing, baby.”

“Because I’m married?”

“Sure, because you’re married.”

“Because I’m white?”

Vargina laughed.

“I’m not very likable, am I?”

“You’re likable enough,” said Vargina.

“No, I mean, if I were the protagonist of a book or a movie, it would be hard to like me, to identify with me, right?”

“I would never read a book like that, Milo. I can’t think of anyone who would. There’s no reason for it.”

“Oh.”

“Hey, here come some friends. Look. Here they come. Look at them. Like angels.”

They looked more like muscular men in blue shirts. They laid a large kit next to my head, dug through it.

“What happened?”

“Well,” I heard Horace say. “He figured out the world wasn’t all about him and he fainted.”

“Seen it before,” said the other.

“By the way,” said Horace. “You guys make pretty good money, right?”

“It’s not great.”

“What’s the training process? I mean, like, if I did CPR in swim class, do I get to skip ahead?”

They took me to the emergency room for a few hours of observation. I lay on a gurney beside an old drunk woman with gangrene. She lifted some blackened fingers.

“I used to play piano,” she said. “Up in Utica. Up in the hotel there.”

“I’ve never been to Utica,” I said.

“Do yourself a favor. Don’t go up there. Look what happened to me. Utica spat me out.”

“Tough town.”

“Utica is pitiless. Used me up and spat me out. I was Piano Patty. Go up there and ask around, they’ll know.”

“I thought you told me not to go there.”

“Do what you think is right. I’m not your mommy.”

“You’re the second person I’ve heard say that this afternoon.”

“Must have been on the radio. Some kind of giveaway.”

The doctor stopped by my gurney with his clipboard.

“We’re ready to release you,” he said.

“So, everything’s fine?”

“I didn’t say that,” said the doctor. “I said we were ready to release you.”

That gangrenous wino from Utica was correct. She was not my mommy. My mommy was here in Nearmont, in her living room, sipping peppermint tea.

“When I was young,” she said now, “single, working in the city, that was something. Something hideous. But wonderful. I did things that would make your hair curl. The hair on your palms.”

“Mom,” I said.

We had to shout a bit above the loud, lunging minor chords Francine banged out on her organ. This recital, according to Claudia, was the new post-prandial routine. Francine claimed to have studied at a conservatory in Indiana, though all she ever played was this piece of her own composition, a meandering dirgey thing with sudden surges of dark joy. Francine’s performance varied, my mother said, with the quality of her stash.

“Very nice, Francie! Fortissimo!”

“Fortissimo,” I said. “You don’t know anything about music.”

“Fake it until you make it. Now where was I?”

“You were about to inflict me with the details of your youthful peccadilloes.”

“Peccadilloes? What are you, an old society dame? You kids today are so uptight.”

“I’m almost forty, Mom.”

“You must change your life.”

“Don’t give me your hippy crap.”

“That’s Rilke.”

“Rilke’s a hippy.”

“I’m not. The fifties were the sixties. For the people who mattered. Not that I mattered. But I wanted to.”

“And what were the sixties?”

“Boring. Of course, by the good part I was stuck out here.”

“With me.”

“Don’t sulk. You were an infant. It’s not your fault you weren’t stimulating.”

“Weren’t you happy just being a mother?”

“I was happy being a mother. Take out the ‘just.’”

“Well, you’re still in the suburbs, and I’m long gone, so I can’t take all the blame.”

“When did you ever take blame? You give blame. To me.”

“We’re not doing that tonight.”

“Right, I forgot. The suburbs are the new bohemia, anyway.”

“Judging by what we’re hearing right now, you could be right.”

“Don’t worry, I’m right. Fortissimo!”

Later I sat on the patio with a beer and a one-hitter I’d found in Francine’s sewing box. I kept calling Purdy. I kept calling Maura. I even called Don. Nobody was home, or near a phone, or answering. I sat out on the patio in a rubber-ribbed chair with the phone in one hand and the one-hitter and a lighter in the other and the beer like a throttle between my legs, and it seemed for a brief moment that I might be the pilot of something, something sleek and meaningful, but I was not the pilot of anything. The night was warm, the night sky blue, gluey. I could smell the neighbor’s fresh-mown lawn. New Jersey was a fresh-mown tomb.

Fool, I said to myself. Depressive, raw-eyeballed pansy. Is that all you’ve got? That’s what you had when you still lived on this street, when you were just a budding tristate artist manqué. Now what are you? A botch of corpuscles. A waste of quarks. A carbon-based fuckwad. Purdy is better, Maura more right. Someday you will be a fat, grinning embarrassment to Bernie. Will you still pretend to be a painter? Will you still pretend to be a person?

“Milo?”

My mother’s voice carried softly from the kitchen.

“Hey.”

“Everything okay out there?”

“Sure, why?”

“I just heard this, I don’t know, grumbling.”

“Oh, sorry. I stubbed my toe.”

“Sitting there?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh, okay.”

The door slid back and I stood.

“Wait!” I wailed.

It’s an odd sensation to weep in your mother’s lap for the first time in thirty years. It’s not the same lap. It’s smaller, more fragile. Bonier and tinier. I was afraid my head might hurt her lap. I was afraid her lap wouldn’t help my head.

But it did. Claudia cradled me, stroked my hair, cooed: “It’s all right, baby. It’s all right.” It was not all right, not really, but this hardly mattered. My mother was stroking my hair. My mother’s lover, at the end of the sofa, kneaded my feet.

“Thanks, Francine.”

“My pleasure, Milo.”

Soon I was all cried out. I remembered the sensation, felt it frequently as a child, each time I was denied a toy or a chance to play with somebody else’s toy or informed that another slice of pineapple pizza was not in the offing. You cried and you cried and then you really couldn’t cry anymore. You got wrung, husked. It was that voluptuous emptiness you read about in old books, or old-seeming books that would use the word “voluptuous” that way, a strange, soaring, dead puppet exultation I could never quite explain. I had last felt it a few months after my father died.

Nobody had died just now. The stuff had just welled up in me, up to the eyes, as they used to say, not that I was sure anymore who “they” were.

Who’s on first? Self-Pitying Twit. Third base.

More than anything it was just so very good to be stroked and kneaded by my mother and Francine. It was just so very nice to be kneaded in Nearmont. Too bad I couldn’t live here with them. But I was not welcome here forever. That’s what made me welcome now. I was being readied for release. I would have to
drag my botched ass back into the world. Francine was Claudia’s family. Bernie, and maybe Maura, was mine.

“I love you,” I mumbled into my mother’s jeans.

“I know that, honey.”

“I’m sorry.”

“What are you sorry about?”

“Me. Spidercunt. Everything.”

“I forgave you a long time ago.”

“And I forgive you, Mom.”

“But I don’t want your forgiveness, silly boy.”

Francine dug lint out from under my pinky toe.

Purdy’s chef wore the sideburns of a Vegas legend. They poked down below his purple toque. He lurched around Purdy’s enormous Tribeca kitchen with some kind of digital cleaver, shouted into a wire that fell from his ear. He cursed himself, his food, the kitchen, his crew. He castigated various assistants en route with ingredients, though I wondered how much these outbursts counted as theater for the half-dozen party guests gathered near the cutting boards.

“Leave it to a fucking Turk to forget the tarragon!” he said into his wire. “Soon as you get here I’m handing you a ticket back to Istanbul. Freight. You can go back to work in that fusion nightmare I found you in, though perhaps you’d be better off sterno-braising anchovies for the smugglers in stir, you greasy bastard.”

“Must be gunning for his own show,” said the man beside me, a handsome silver-haired fellow in a pink polo shirt. He had the collar of his polo shirt up. Maybe he liked it that way, or else it was some kind of comment about people who liked it that way. When it came to sartorial irony, the rich had it tough.

“A cooking show?” I said.

“A screaming show,” said the man.

“I have an idea for a cooking show,” I said.

“Good for you,” said the man, and walked away.

A few more moments of baster-based antics and I followed the
him into a space the size of a small ballroom. Purdy’s parlor was a design-porn paradise. Here twinkled every chrome and leather marvel Maura had ever circled with affecting sanguinity in her catalogs, all the sofas and chaises and cabinets and floor lamps we could never afford. That was half the room. The other brimmed with mahogany bookshelves and gleaming antique credenzas and Persian rugs. One end was for high-tech pleasures, the other for reading Gibbon while getting blown in a wingback chair.

I walked over to the liquor table, to a young barman in a braided jacket.

“Scotch rocks,” I said.

It was not my drink, but then again, this was not my world.

“Okay?” said the barman, pointed to a handle of inexpensive blended whisky beside the silver ice bucket.

“No,” I said. “It’s not okay.”

Always it had been okay, but not tonight. Something had changed. I had demands. Certain people might have called it personal growth. These were the scumbags the new me would learn to admire.

The barman shrugged, squatted, came up with a bottle by the same distiller. The label was another color. This was the good stuff. The better stuff. The kid poured me an important man’s pour.

“Thanks,” I said.

“You’re welcome, sir.”

“Do you do this full-time?”

“I’m still a student.”

“What do you study?”

“Bartending.”

“Oh.”

“Mr. Stuart always hires student bartenders.”

“What a saint.”

“I guess it’s a lot cheaper, yeah,” said the barman. “But it gives us a chance to practice in an LLS.”

“A what?”

“A live liquor situation.”

“Right.”

“Milo!” called a voice. “Over here!”

Here it was, here
they
were, for to see them stand together, even as they beckoned, made it clear for all time how much I was not of them. There was Purdy, tall, becalmed, nothing like the fiendish candy-store man or the late-night dialer I’d come to know, his taut arm slung over the shoulder of an even taller fellow, bald, with fringes of curly hair: Billy Raskov. Billy looked better bald. Others I did not recognize stood with them, Purdy still the nucleus, the germ seed, the one who could somehow corral us all into a mood of sweet boisterousness, private pangs be damned.

“Milo!”

Another man joined Purdy’s group just as I did. We shook hands, but somebody nearby squealed and I caught only the end of Purdy’s introduction.

“ … farb.”

“Farb?” I said.

“Goldfarb.”

“Of course,” I said.

He’d been a messy gangle back on Staley Street. Now he was lean, handsome, with the mien of a racing animal.

“Goldfarb,” said the man.

“I know,” I said. “Charles Goldfarb.”

“That’s right, Milo. I’m surprised. I figured if you ever saw me again you’d want to deck me.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You don’t know?”

“No,” I said.

“Come on, Charlie,” said Purdy. “Stop teasing. Charlie, Milo, this is Lisa and Ginny. They’re friends from the building.”

We did our dips, our pivots, our mock-bashful waves. Purdy raised his glass.

“I’m glad we’re all here. Dinner is going to be great.”

“It better be,” said Lisa. “That man in your kitchen is a dick.”

“Nice to see you, Milo,” said Billy Raskov. His trademark slur was gone. It made me wonder if it ever existed. Maybe I’d imagined it all these years. Maybe that’s why I’d always gotten odd looks whenever I brought up his feigned Parkinson’s.

“You too, Billy,” I said, glanced back at Goldfarb. “I’m sorry, I guess I’m confused.”

“Don’t worry about it,” said Goldfarb.

“Okay, I’ll try not to. So, Charles, I think I saw somewhere you wrote a book?”

“Thanks, I appreciate the kind words.”

“What kind words?”

“Sorry,” said Goldfarb. “Embarrassing reflex.”

“Poor Chuck,” said Purdy. “He suffers from Post-Praise Stress Disorder. It’s left him a wreck. I saw your thing in the paper last Sunday, by the way. Fantastic. Blistering. And thoughtful. Speaking of blisters, did you guys notice what’s hanging over the fireplace?”

“Come on, Purd,” said Billy.

“Check it out,” said Purdy, pointed across the room to a large canvas, a luminous twilit landscape. “The latest Raskov.”

A river coursed through a verdant gorge. The sky bled rich reds and blues. In the mossy foreground, a nude woman tongued the anus of an elk. Nearby, a figure in a shepherd’s tunic lay disemboweled. A fawn fed on his viscera.

“It’s called
Renewable, Sustainable
,” said Purdy. “Can’t take my eyes off it. Billy’s gallerist killed me, but I had to have it.”

“I’m impressed,” I said. “I didn’t know you could paint like that.”

“Thanks, buddy. I’ll admit I still can’t touch your technique, at least as I remember it, but I’ve been getting better.”

“Billy’s having another big show next month,” said Purdy.

“That’s great,” I said.

“You should come to the opening.”

“I’d like that.”

“I was thinking,” said Billy. “Are you in contact with Lena? I haven’t talked to her in a long time, I’d really like to—”

“Yeah, I really haven’t been in contact.”

“Not since it was full contact, right, bro?”

“Excuse me?” I said.

“Just joking.”

“I think it’s hot,” said Purdy. “Milo, could I have a word with you?”

“Sure.”

“Over here.”

Purdy led me away from the group. We passed the barman, who nodded. Maybe this private audience with Purdy confirmed my top-shelf status.

Purdy wheeled near the corner of the room, clasped my shoulders.

“Well?”

“A pavilion,” I said.

“Not bad, huh?”

“I can’t thank you enough,” I said. “Really. It’s so amazing. I’m still processing it.”

“What’s the matter with you?”

“What do you mean?”

“It doesn’t seem like a very happy process, judging by your face.”

“I am happy. I really am. I’m just spent. You know I collapsed? I collapsed from happiness. I had to be hospitalized.”

“No shit.”

“So …”

“Don’t tell me,” said Purdy.

“Don’t tell you what?”

“You’re pissed.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You’re pissed I went over your head.”

“No, I’m really not.”

“It had to be that way. For your benefit. Shit, in a way this whole thing has become about you. I care about you. Don’t you get that?”

“I do.”

“You’ve got to stop resenting me. It’s foolish.”

“I know. And really, thank you.”

“You’re welcome, asshole.”

“I deserve that,” I said.

Purdy took a breath, gazed past my shoulder.

“Lee Moss died yesterday.”

“Oh, man. I’m sorry. I just saw him.”

“I know. He took a bad turn that evening.”

“I’m really sorry, Purdy.”

“He was an old man with cancer.”

“I know he was close to you. Like family.”

“Let’s not get too sentimental. He helped my father defraud the government. Because of that my father had more money to leave to me, the boy he liked to beat senseless. Moss was the old breed. Took care of business. Ethics were for the Sabbath. Just a hardworking shark, a true Jew lawyer. No offense.”

A tall woman in white walked up, tilted her Bellini in greeting.

“Oh, hi, Jane.”

“Hello, Purdy.”

“Jane, you remember Milo Burke.”

The gray eyes of the governor’s daughter seemed to sparkle as they surveyed the damage.

“Yes, of course, how are you?”

“Great,” I said.

“Wonderful. What have you been doing with yourself?”

“Working.”

“Very nice,” she said.

“Be right back,” said Purdy, pecked Jane’s cheek.

“How about you?” I said.

“I’ve been working, too. On a few projects.”

This woman’s power had always resided in her courage. She’d defied her father, defied him still. She made her films to destroy his beliefs. Whether he also helped fund them was not the point. She’d been given an out at birth, a frictionless existence, refused it. I did admire her for this. But she’d taken my knife. Worse, she probably had no recollection of this fact.

“What kind of projects?” I said.

“I just finished a film about a family in a refugee camp in Chad. And I’m doing something about health care, the uninsured.”

“They’re being murdered,” I said.

“It’s true,” said Jane.

“There was one woman upstate, our age. She was in a coma in a hospital, but her … carrier cut her off. She died in transit to the state ward.”

“That’s terrible. Did you know her?”

“Not really. Some of her relatives.”

“Really? Would they speak to me? We’re doing a lot of interviews before we start.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t think so. They’re pretty private.”

“Well, let me know if you think they would. These stories need to be told.”

“I will.”

“It was nice to see you again,” said Jane.

“Wait,” I said.

“Yeah?”

Here was my moment to ask about that night, the party. I didn’t want the knife back. I just wanted to know if she remembered, to understand how one event could mean so little and so much.

“No, I just was going to ask …”

“Yes?”

“I have an idea for a TV show.”

“That’s nice.”

“Well, it’s really my friend Nick’s idea, but we’re collabo-rating.”

“Nick?”

“Nick Papadopoulos.”

“I don’t know his work.”

“You might. You might have sat on his work. Though probably not.”

“I’m not sure where you’re going with this.”

“He’s a builder. A contractor. Builds decks.”

“Is it some kind of home repair thing? I don’t really do that sort of—”

“No, no,” I said. “It’s a cooking show.”

“Cooking? I think we’re full up on those. See that guy in there?”

“Right. So, take that guy in there, Mr. Kitchen Badass. Now put him on death row.”

“Pardon?”

“I mean not him. I mean he’s there, but he’s not on death row. But he’s going to cook a last meal for somebody about to die.
Dead Man Dining
. You know why those last meals are so crappy?”

“Because they all eat crappy food in those parts of the country.”

“Yes, bingo. Now bring on the Kobe beef.”

“Excuse me?”

“I mean … wow, Nick is much better at this. It sounded different when … oh, forget it.”

“No,” said Jane. “I’m intrigued. Let me see if I’ve got you right. America’s best chefs come to America’s worst prisons to cook lavish last meals for condemned convicts.”

“Yes. That’s what I was trying to say. Perfectly put.”

“I can see it,” said Jane, snatched another drink from a passing tray. “First we film the chef on the way to the airport, nervous but excited, and also moved by the gravity of the event. He reflects on crime and fate and society, how lucky his own life has been. Then he arrives at the prison and meets with the warden, who explains in somewhat disturbing detail what the condemned man did. Whether you agree with capital punishment or not, there’s no getting around the fact that a court of law found this hick guilty of hacking the girl up in the forest, or mowing down the returns line at the shoe outlet. A sober few minutes. Then the fun. Our chef sits down with the maniac. They talk about food. While the unschooled but unquestionably bright killer talks about the staples he was raised on—chicken fingers, hamburgers, onion rings, cola, processed bread, and peanut butter laced with rat shit, we start to feel for him, his crime recedes, and what we are watching is a boy who never had a chance to taste the better things, to know possibility, to see a way out. It’s sad, but a quick cut to the warden will remind us that we should be careful about where our sympathies lie. And what are the families of the victims eating tonight? Commercial.”

“Holy shit,” I said. “That’s it. You’re good.”

“When we return from the break,” said Jane, “we’re with our celebrity chef in the prison kitchen. The prison cooks watch with bemusement as the chef’s shock at the meagerness of utensils mounts. Don’t they even have a paring knife? A goddamn strainer? Yuckety-yuck. So now the chef speaks to the camera about his philosophy of food. Food doesn’t need to be fancy. It just needs to taste good. Especially in bad times. It’s all about simplicity. Fresh fruit, fresh vegetables, good bread, cruelty-free meats. It’s sad how out of reach these things are for so many Americans. As to the prisoner’s last meal, well, the chef has been doing a lot of soul-searching. The worst thing would be to take too big a gamble, to prepare something wonderful but too foreign
to his taste. Those of us not about to be executed can afford an adventurous though vaguely disappointing dining experience, the ostrich steaks and persimmon spaetzle not nearly as scrumptious as advertised. But this one has to be right on the money. So, we will work with all the tastes and textures that Clarence— Clarence, right?—already craves. The only purpose of this meal is to take him back to maybe the one brief moment in his sorry life he felt loved. We may have a little fun with presentation, but the grub will be solid, familiar, though much fresher, juicier, more savory, than this food-court castoff could ever have imagined. Now come the snafus. The hurdles, the drama. What do you mean we have to go all the way to Lubbock for thyme? I said Syrah, not Shiraz! No, they’re not the same! The usual diva hilarity, but with this incredibly compelling undertone of impending death. We intercut the chef in the kitchen with the prisoner penning his final thoughts in his diary, or kneeling with his prayer group. The executioners test the straps on the gurney. The warden stares out his office window at the new moon, ponders the price of justice. And then the moment we’ve been waiting for. The prisoner sits at a cute little table set up in, no, not his cell, but in a little conference room near the warden’s office. White tablecloth. A rose in a vase. Our chef brings out the meal, explains what he’s prepared and why. The prisoner takes a bite, begins to cry. He had a mommy once. The chef begins to cry. He still has a mommy, but he’s so busy chasing those Michelin stars he doesn’t get to visit her enough. The warden stares. His mommy used to lock him in a manure bin. We cut away. We’ll let the man eat his last meal in peace. Commercial. Come back to final thoughts from the chef, back in his restaurant now. The whole experience has changed him. But he hasn’t forgotten the victim or the families. He thinks about them, too. He thinks about the whole sad tragedy of it all. Maybe if everybody could eat well there wouldn’t be so much hate in the world. But he will keep doing what he’s doing, cooking meals with love, doing his little
part to bring peace to the planet, dish by dish. Fade out to words on the screen: Clarence Howard O’Grady was executed on blah blah for the murder of blah blah and blah blah. His last words were these: ‘I am sorry for what I did and the pain I caused. I wish I’d had Jesus in my life sooner, and more omega-3s. In my next life I’ll wash dishes in Chef Gary’s fancy restaurant in New York, so I can have artisanal baloney every day. Sleep tight, you world, you motherfucker.”