Thirteen Phantasms (27 page)

“As a sort of
joke?
” He stared at her. It was unbelievable. His own wife, telling him this. The rottenest sort of betrayal. He poured another glass of champagne, then shoved the bottle back into the ice bucket.

“I was wondering if you’d go searching through my car again,” she said, “looking for evidence.”

He blinked at her. “I
didn’t
go searching through you car.”

“This morning you didn’t?”

“This morning I was looking for a scissors jack, to build my … my prototype.”

“Your prototype.” She nodded. “And this afternoon? The prototype again?”

“I was putting it
back
.” Without another word he set his glass down and walked away, out of the kitchen and up the stairs. He wasn’t hungry anyway. Methodically he got undressed and put on his pajamas, then found his book and climbed into bed, flopping back down onto his pillow in order to stare at the ceiling. There was the sound of paper crackling under his head, and he jerked back up again, scrabbled around, and looked into his pillow case.

Puzzled at what he saw, he dumped it out, over the edge of the bed. About a hundred white paper bags fell out, each one with the logo from Lew’s All-Niter on the front. “What the hell?” he wondered, getting up. Then he knew what it was, the stash from under the front seat of his car, the bags he had been stuffing under there for months.

He closed his eyes for a moment. It had come to this, had it?—open season on him. He picked up the pile of bags and went quietly back downstairs. Amanda was sitting at the kitchen table sipping champagne, her book open in in front of her. She glanced up at him and smiled, apparently still thinking it was all a grand joke, that they could laugh at it together.

“I was looking for my prototype,” she said, seeing what it was he was carrying.

Silently, he dumped the bags on the table, dusted sugar crumbs off his hands, and walked away again, up the stairs.

•

He lay there alone all evening, trying to read. He wasn’t going to budge. By God if there was an apology due, it wasn’t due from him. He had been set up, ridiculed. Amanda had thrown the doughnut business into his face, kicked him when he was already down. And his conversation with Sue, out at the curb, him carrying on like some kind of damned Pinnochio … it didn’t bear thinking about.

He was suddenly hungry. He smelled the steaks searing now, on the Farberware grill. Well, Amanda could eat his, for all he cared. To hell with food. The thought of her eating without even inviting him down, though …

He heard Sue come in shortly after that, the two of them whispering down there, no doubt discussing him. There was the sound of laughter. For a moment he thought about storming downstairs and setting them straight. He actually got out of bed. But then he caught sight of himself in the mirror and saw that his pajamas made him look like a fool. He didn’t have the energy to get
dressed.

At ten he began to wonder whether she meant to sleep on the downstairs couch. Maybe she was already asleep, or had gone out. There was no sound at all below. He turned the light off and lay there thinking, listening to his stomach growl, unable to sleep. He wondered if it was the end of his marrriage, and toyed with the idea of calling a lawyer in the morning, rig it so that Amanda would overhear the call. He wasn’t serious about the lawyer, but a prank like that would serve her right after her trick with the shoes.

He began to think about the prototype, assembling it piece by piece in his head so that he could picture the web of ropes and pulleys and counterweights and springs, all of it tugging and spinning, windows opening and closing like the workings of his brain, which right then was an overactive mess. It seemed unlikely that he would ever sleep normally again. He was monumentally hungry, too, but he was damned if he was going downstairs after a snack. Amanda would just have to live with the idea of him alone and starving upstairs. He got up finally and put on his robe and slippers. Nothing made him madder than being unable to sleep.

As quietly as he could he tip-toed downstairs. She was probably asleep in the den, but he decided against looking in. If she were awake she would think he had come down to make amends, and that wouldn’t do. This time
she
would be the one to apologize.

It was a warm night outside, the sky clear and full of stars. He wondered if the possum were somewhere around as be eased open the garage door and flipped on the light. He felt a certain affinity to it, to its solitary nocturnal habits. The garage was a comforting place to be late at night like this. It was as if he were getting away with something by being out there, as if he were hoodwinking time.

He opened the doughnut box and sorted through the few that remained. The glazed didn’t appeal to him, maybe because he’d got sick after eating the last two. They were leathery-stiff, too, like old road kill. There was a good chance the jelly doughnuts would have held up, though, with the jelly inside to keep them moist. He pulled one out, leaned his elbows on the bench, and took a bite, chewing moodily while his eyes traced the avenues of holes in the pegboard on the wall.

Idly, he fished out one of the glazed, laid it on the benchtop, and mashed it flat with a piece of wood. He mashed the three other glazed the same way, remembering the day his father had broken up all his smoking pipes on his anvil, all the time smoking one last pipeful of tobacco.

He had come out with some vague notion of assembling the prototype, putting in a couple of hours out there. But the bits of rope and the wooden pulleys scattered on the bench didn’t speak to him. They were so much sad junk now. And of course the
scissors
jack was lying in the trunk of the Toyota again.

He picked out the last jelly doughnut. One for the road. That was absolutely it. He had been riding the doughnut train, but now it was the end of the line. He could see the terminal, rushing at him out of the night. He bit deeply into the thing, hitting the pocket of jelly just as a knock sounded at the nearly-closed door. Jumping in surprise, he smeared the doughnut up his face, a glop of jelly filling one of his nostrils. He spun around, trying to hide the doughnut.

Amanda stood at the half open door, still dressed, but in her bedroom slippers. He could feel the jelly dripping down his upper lip, and he tried to clean it off with his tongue. She had started to speak, but apparently couldn’t get the words out, and her eyes shifted away from his jelly-smeared face to the bench top where the weirdly flattened doughnuts lay amid the refuse of the prototype.

She looked at his face again, without, he thought, any humor in her eyes at all. “Why don’t you come to bed?” she asked. “I’m sorry about the shoes and the doughnut bags and all. I didn’t know you were that … serious.”

Even then he wanted to protest. Serious how? No sense of humor? A serious doughnut habit? He started to point to the flattened doughnuts, to show her just how serious he really was, but then abruptly he saw the futility in it, and he flipped off the light and followed her into the house.

•

They took Walt’s car next morning, but Amanda drove. Walt felt foggy and subdued. He couldn’t argue with her suggestion that they find him a new pair of shoes before Saturday night. Apparently, there was a firestorm of sales raging at the mall. And as a concession to him they were stopping at Le Wing’s Shoe Repair on the way. Amanda had no problem with his putting new soles on the old shoes, which were lying now on the backseat. You could patch nearly anything, no matter how shabby and worn out it had become.

He realized suddenly that she was turning north up the boulevard, past Lew’s All-Niter. He sat on his hands and stared out the windshield, conscious of her glancing at him. What did she expect, the shakes? Doughnut withdrawal?

Cut it out, he told himself. It had been his decision to go on the wagon. He hadn’t said anything about it to her. She had caught him with the jelly doughnuts at midnight, hiding in the garage, but even so it had been her that had apologized—for the shoe trick and for the bags in the pillow. Walt had felt like a four-year-old. This morning there had been no mention of any of it, only the new shoes suggestion, the visit to the mall.

Without warning she turned into the lot, past Lew’s Packard, and pulled into a space. “I wouldn’t mind a couple of crullers,” she said.

He blinked at her. “Crullers? You’re kidding?”

“Why would I be kidding? I never said I hated doughnuts.
You’re
the one who said that. Let’s get a couple to go.”

“It’s not … It’s not that. It’s just that crullers aren’t …” He realized that he was jabbering, that he had no real idea what he wanted to say, what he wanted.

“Aren’t what? What on earth are you talking about?”

“Never mind,” he said, getting out of the car. “Chocolate, strawberry, or … white?

“Chocolate, thanks.”

Except for Walt, Lew’s was empty of customers. There were plenty of doughnuts left, including a rack of glazed, just out of the back room.

“What’ll it be?” Lew asked, swabbing down the top of the counter with a rag.

“Two crullers,” Walt said. “Chocolate.”

Lew squinted at him, cocking his head to the side as if his hearing had abruptly gone bad.

“For the wife,” Walt said, gesturing toward the parking lot.

Lew nodded, satisfied with that, and put the crullers in a bag. “What else?” he asked. “Couple of sinkers for you?”

Walt hesitated for a second, lost in thought, looking over the doughnuts—the glazed twists, the jellies, the chocolate and maple bars, the apple fritters. … Somehow the assortment of multi-colored frosteds reminded him of the shoes on the bottom of Amanda’s closet.

“Two glazed,” he said, making up his mind. “A crumb, too. And cut that crumb doughnut in half, right down the center.” Walt paid him and went out through the aluminum door, back into the morning sunshine, carrying his and Amanda’s doughnuts in a paper bag.

•

On Going Home Again

For the couple of years that I was a graduate student, and for a few years when I was out of college, I earned a living as a construction laborer working for a company called Kent’s Construction Services. It was at that stage in my life that I learned most of what I know about doughnuts and about knocking things to pieces. Kent’s Construction Services would tear down and clean up anything. We demolished old garages out in Eagle Rock, mucked out goat pens in Anaheim, excavated collapsed sewer pipes in Cypress, shoveled and swept mud-flooded streets in Huntington Beach. On one cheerful summer morning we found ourselves yanking clapboards off the side of a house in Long Beach when an astonished old woman, carrying her half empty coffee cup, came out through the kitchen door and informed us that the house we wanted to tear down was in fact the abandoned house next door. It struck us even then that we were damned lucky she had been at home that morning, and not down at Albertson’s buying the week’s groceries. You can picture her getting off the bus on the distant corner, already hearing the thud of the sledgehammer beating her chimney apart, the whine of the chain saw hacking through her eaves …

The only consistent theme to any of these odd jobs were morning doughnuts. We did a lot of freeway flying in those days, in an old Ford truck that had somewhere over three hundred thousand miles on it. We fired that truck up early, pre-breakfast, and although we sometimes hit a liquor store for Hostess Cupcakes and Cokes, the food of choice in the morning was doughnuts. In the story you’re holding in your hands, when Walt shoves the doughnut bag under the front seat of his car along with all the rest of the empties, what I was thinking about was the seat of that old Ford. Every once in a while, when we pulled in at the dump out in Brea or Capistrano or Whittier, we’d sweep the paper trash and smashed cups and aluminum cans out through the open door, but on any given day there was a startling amount of trash crammed under there, mostly doughnut bags, always white, printed with a wide array of doughnut shop logos. It wasn’t until later that it dawned on me that I might have made a serious collection of those bags, like people do with matchbooks or menus or theater ticket stubs.

There was a place out in Huntington Beach that had so-so doughnuts, and yet was elevated, so to speak, because it served them so delicately—nestled in wax paper in those pastel-colored plastic baskets. There was a tremendously old Winchell’s out in Anaheim that was rumored to be a haven for dope dealers who worked the counter and would listen for obscure and telltale doughnut-and-dope orders—”carry out” instead of “to go” for instance, or “bag, no box.” We hit the place regularly because of its so-called Kona coffee. This was in the days when Yuban was pretty much the best coffee money could buy, and the very idea of exotic coffee was worth the trip across town. It would be years yet before I’d drink pure Kona coffee in Hawaii and eat what is arguably the best doughnut in the world, the Hawaiian malasada, a globe-shaped glazed doughnut that is quite possibly superior even to the astonishing New Orleans beignet.

Sadly, what happened over the years, at least in southern California, is that most of the independent doughnut shops disappeared, one by one, or were bought up by Winchell’s or Donut Star and the other super chains. Nostalgia aside, I’m not sure that a mom and pop doughnut was really any better than a chain doughnut, but I miss a few of those long-departed shops, and I find that these twenty years later I have a surprisingly good recollection of the doughnuts of my youth. The king (or queen) of southern California doughnut shops was Mrs. Chapman’s out on 7th Street and Pacific Coast Highway in Long Beach. Mrs. Chapman’s had one of those once-ubiquitous doughnut signs that were six times the size of a truck tire and could be seen hovering like a halo in the early morning smog from six or eight blocks away. The shop itself had a long counter as well as about twenty booths, and in front of every revolving counter stool, and at the window edge of every booth, there was a miniature juke box—songs ten cents a throw or three for a quarter. You never actually heard the songs you punched in, because the machinery was already loaded with dimes and quarters, but there was some satisfaction in the idea that other customers, half an hour or an hour hence, would have to listen to your favorite songs instead of their own. Mrs. Chapman’s doughnuts were mostly pretty good, but their glazed doughnut was perfection—very puffy, crisp with sugar—probably the only doughnut that could climb shamelessly into the ring with a malasada or a beignet, to cripple a metaphor from Hemingway. It was worth a five mile detour, even on a busy morning, and the sad decline of Mrs. Chapman’s was one of the great doughnut tragedies of the second half of the twentieth century.