“Excuse me, is there cheese in the potato
Lenny momentarily put his thoughts on hold. Or rather, they came to a short stop on their own. The source of that high piping voice — and remarkably screwy pronunciation of “knish”—had been a woman in a window booth to his right, and he couldn’t resist tossing an inconspicuous glance over at her.
It took perhaps a second for his curiosity to be satisfied. Young, blond, and blue-eyed, she was definitely a Gentile, and just as surely an out-of-towner. In fact, she seemed as if she ought to have been wearing a shiny Wisconsin State Fair Beauty Queen tiara on her head. The guy opposite her in the booth had a similar scrubbed, fair-haired look. Together they sort of reminded Lenny of Barbie and Ken.
Their waitress, a thickset Latin woman, was eyeing Barbie over her pad with apparent shock and horror.
“This is a kosher restaurant,” she said.
Barbie didn’t get it.
“Oh, I see,” she said. Her blank stare indicating the contrary. “But is there cheese in the potato
The waitress tapped her pen against her pad, rolled her eyes. Surely she’d gotten stuck with a simpleton.
“No cheese with meat,” she huffed.
“Oh.” Poor squeaky Barbie’s confusion had deepened. Could the waitress have misunderstood her question? She glanced down at her menu as if seeking enlightenment there, found none, looked back up. “Does that mean the
Glad for the distraction from his own problems, Lenny continued to casually eavesdrop above the energetic gabbing and lip smacking of his fellow deli-goers. In this ethnic hodgepodge of a city, you’d have to scour the streets for a month to find a longtime resident unacquainted with the orthodox Jewish dietary prohibition against serving meat and dairy products together in any form, cooking them in the same pots and pans, or eating them with the same utensils. But did Barbie truly deserve to be faulted for her ignorance? Lenny guessed that she typified a form of New York snobbery and felt kind of bad for her. On the other hand, a blind person could have seen the word kosher on the sign above the entrance. How oblivious to other cultural traditions could you be? Maybe it was Barbie who was guilty of being a snob, and the waitress who deserved his sympathy. And so much fuss over an appetizer, how much worse would things get once Barbie got around to selecting her main course? Besides, this couple had “dud” written all over them as far as leaving a decent tip.
It was, Lenny decided, important to look at both sides before jumping to an opinion.
Now he saw the swing doors from the kitchen fly open, watched his own waitress shoulder through, identified his food on the dishes she was carrying, and eagerly waited for her to put them down in front of him — farewell Barbie and company, hello lunch. This suddenly tyrannical appetite of his really was nuts, he thought. But then Lenny wondered if something other than a need to fill his stomach might have awakened it. A different sort of emptiness within him that he’d subconsciously wanted to stifle. He didn’t want to go deep into psychoanalysis here, but wasn’t that what comfort food was about? He’d slipped into a funk, no question, and it occurred to him there were plenty of contributing reasons. Mary Sullivan’s pained features, her struggle to keep from falling apart in his office that morning. Noriko Cousins’s unassailable indifference. And then the capper, Yan’s sternly uttered words of advice at Snow Mountain.
Lenny lifted the top slice of club roll off his sandwich, reached for the mustard dispenser, spooned, smeared, bit in. Tasty. He forked a couple of kasha varnishkes into his mouth. Delicious. Lenny ate some more, felt the gloom that had been hanging over his head begin to lighten. Barbie and Ken’s waitress stormed past him toward the kitchen, grumbling under her breath: “
Lenny decided his reservoir of sympathy was deep enough for everyone there, and silently wished them well. He ate, savoring each scrumptious mouthful of food. Nothing was as bad as it seemed if you gave it a little consideration. Look at his problem, for example. A few bites of sandwich ago it had looked hopeless. Insurmountable. A few bites later, and he had a feeling he’d come upon a solution.
“Gord,” he said to the waitress’s wide, receding back. “I’m calling Gordian.”
Hasul stood at his office window and watched the Durango enter the parking lot five stories below. The slide of its headlights over the pavement, pale yellow on black, was a small observational pleasure that did not escape his appreciation, as few such pleasures would.
Only the shielding on his plate glass window allowed it.
At this late hour his regular employees were gone, driven off to the comforts of home and family, leaving the expansive lot unoccupied except for a handful of vehicles used by Hasul and his inner cadre. The 4?4 went straight up to where they were lined perpendicular to the building entrance and slipped into the first vacant stall at the end of the row. Then its headlamps went out, a door swung open, and its driver emerged into the blue-white radiance of mercury vapor lights at the far side of the lot. Arranged in a single bank, they shone down from almost a hundred feet in the air like the lights of an outdoor sports arena. With Hasul’s direct exposure to them restricted, their height and distance mitigated any threat from ultraviolet emissions.
Out in the lot, the driver leaned against the front of his 4?4 and finished a half-smoked cigarette. Hasul noted how its tip flared orange with his deep inhalations, bright specks of not-quite-spent tobacco scattering into the wind as he tapped at the head of ash.
After a minute the driver flicked his stub to the blacktop, crushed it out with his shoe bottom, took a quick look around, and started toward the building entrance. A tall whip of a man, he moved with loose-legged, almost bouncing strides, his shadow stretched long in front of him.
Hasul did not leave the window at once. Instead he reached out to touch the smooth glass, his fingertips meeting their own faint reflections. Darkness had swallowed the countryside mere yards beyond the paved rectangle illuminated by the arc lights. The ice-chandelier treetops of its surrounding woods, the snow-encrusted ground between them, the roadway that wound uphill toward the building… he could see none of them under the starless sky and felt something close to the separation, the otherness that normally marked his daylight periods. It was a drastic contrast from the exhilarated feeling Hasul had known hours before, but as one who fancied himself a collector of rare moments, capturing and preserving them as some did exotic butterflies, he realized the lows that gripped him the hardest were often a price he must pay for his memorable highs.
Hasul kept his fingers pressed against the glass now, remembering his walk beneath dusk’s heavy overcast. He had left the office building hooded and gloved, a face guard draping down from bridge of his nose, protective sunglasses with side panels over his eyes. His pulse had raced with expectancy. As he did on the rarest occasions — no more than twice, perhaps three times a year — Hasul had decided in his approximate way to know the world as one who was altogether part of it.
For a while he had paused on a hammock near the edge of the trees and looked west in the direction of the expiring sun. At the distant limit of his vision, the clouds above the mountain humps were stained the color of old bruises. Hasul had seen the vapor of his rapid breaths puff into the winter air through his face guard’s mesh ventilation panel, his excitement increasing as the latest precious moment to be caught in hand raced up on him.
It was no sudden urge, that wish to feel the cold against his skin. Indeed, Hasul’s earliest memories consisted of the excruciating lessons of impulsiveness. The constant forethought and rigorous preparation for which he was lauded in the scientific research community were not, in his eyes, points of pride but absolute necessity.
As he stood out in the gloaming, Hasul had unclipped his portable dosimeter from his coat pocket, held it before him to determine that the UV level was within a comparably tolerable range, and set its timer function for thirty seconds. Caution relaxing its leash on him just so far, he had worn 100 SPF sunblock makeup tinted to match his flesh tone and applied a thick layer of cream to his lips.
His physicians would have crowed in disapproval regardless, not to fault them. Their job was to butler his
