If you put your face very close to the window, you sense through the glass the coldness outside. I went upstairs to go the bathroom and was amazed by how magnificently cool our bedroom was. Claire got up to pee and she said, sleepily, “I set up the coffee for you.”
“I know, I’m terribly sorry.”
“You threw it out.”
“I did, I’m sorry.”
“We’ll just have to order Chinese,” she murmured, falling asleep.
I asked her if she had a need for anything I might have stowed away in my pajamas.
“All set for the moment, thanks,” she said.
I keep thinking of a knee operation I had years ago, when I watched the arthroscopic probe on a small screen and saw my kneecap from underneath, like an ice floe from the perspective of a deep-diving seal, with a few bubbles that looked like air but were, said the surgeon, bubbles of fat. He sewed up my torn meniscus and I was better, having read eight murder mysteries, none of which I can remember. No, I can remember one. There was a Perry Mason novel, by Erle Stanley Gardner, in which a character in a ship goes up on deck because he wants “a lungful of storm.” That’s what I want — a lungful of storm.
26
Good morning, it’s 4:21 a.m. and the birch bark is burning well. I can pick up a pair of underwear with my toes. There are two ways to do this. Most people would grab a bunch of fabric by using all of their short, stubby, “normal” toes to clamp it against the ball of their foot and lift it, but because of my unusual middle toes, which are long and aquiline — distinguished — I can lift up the underwear by scissoring my middle toe and my big toe together onto the waistband: then I lift the underpants and hand them off to my hand and flip them towards the dirty-clothes bin. By then I’m ready to fall over, but I catch myself by planting my underpant-grasping foot back down on the floor. If you throw underpants in a particular way, the waistband assumes its full circular shape in the air, slowly rotating, on its way towards the dirty clothes.
Yesterday, having thus dealt with my underclothing, I had my shower, which was uneventful but for a moment near the middle. I was replacing the soap in the rubber-covered wire soap holder that hangs over the showerhead. It’s a helpful holder because the soap dries out between mornings, whereas soap that sits in the corner of the shower or in a ridged cubby or a built-in ledge does not. I use Basis soap because it has no brain-shriveling perfumes. It is filled with very dense heavy soap materiaclass="underline" it’s harder and heavier than, say, Ivory soap. And it is a beautiful smooth oval shape, an egglike shape almost. But it’s as heavy as a paperweight, as hard as travertine when dry or newly wetted, and extremely slippery. More than once I have lost control of a bar of this soap. And yesterday when I dropped it I noticed that as soon as the soap squirted out of my fingers, my toes lifted, arching up from the tub as high as they could go, while the rest of my feet stayed where they were. Both sets of toes did this immediately, as soon as the soap left my grip. My toes had evidently learned something in life, ever since the chilblains that I got one winter. What they have learned is that if they are touching the floor of the tub and a bar of soap drops on them, it is going to hurt a lot; however if the toes are lifted up half an inch in the air, much of the energy of the collision will be absorbed as the egg of soap forces the tightly stretched toe-tendons to elongate, and the impact on chilblains or healing toe-bones won’t be nearly as painful. They learned this by trial and error, over many years, all by themselves, and now each time I fumble a bar of soap they arch up, on alert, braced for possible impact. My eyes are closed during all this, so I have no idea where the soap is falling; after it hits the tub, making a bowling-alley sound, they relax.
One of my middle toes has, as my coccyx does, an Old Injury. At seventeen, in the summer, I was the night cook at a busy place called Benny’s: I cleaned the kitchen after closing, wiping down all the surfaces, pouring bleach on the cutting boards and draining the fryers and, last of all, mopping the floor. At first the cleaning took me until four in the morning, and my ankles swelled from standing for twelve hours; later I got faster, and I began cleaning our own home kitchen for pleasure, shaking out the toaster and going in under the burners on the stove. I was promoted to night cook when the head cook walked out on beer-batter-fish Friday, our biggest night. The manager and the assistant manager took up stations at the fryers — I specialized in onion rings. Too forcefully I pulled out a metal drawer filled with half-gallon cartons of semi-frozen clams; the drawer came out and fell on my toe. The pain was tremendous. I hum-whispered a long quavery moan to myself, but the show had to go on — I began making the icy clams dance around in the breadcrumbs.
Before he quit, the head cook passed on two pieces of information that I haven’t forgotten. The first was in response to my insistence that the kitchen had to be clean. “It’s all food anyway,” he said. The second came when I forgot that an order was for a cheeseburger and not a hamburger. “Watch,” the cook said. He took a square of American cheese and dipped it for a moment in the hot water in the steam table. The cheese melted a little and, when flopped down on the burger, looked deliciously semi-molten. The steam-table water was not clean, however; I almost dipped a piece of cheese into it myself but didn’t.
I liked a waitress with a wide pretty face and a mouth whose many teeth forced her to smile generously. We took a break together once; she said that she wanted to be a poet. Her favorite poet was Rod McKuen, she said.
Benny’s Restaurant is gone now: now there is a drugstore on that corner with fake dormer windows in its roof that are lit from inside by recessed fluorescence to create the impression that there are cozy upstairs bedrooms behind them. Few now can testify, as I can, to the wondrously bad smell that came from the Benny’s Dumpster out back. What a marvelous, piercingly awful smell it had. People sometimes wanted breakfast very late at night, and I could never master over-easy eggs; they often broke when I flipped them, and I tried to hide the broken one with a piece of careless toast. I got compliments on my onion rings, though.
27
Good morning, it’s 5:42 a.m. — I thought I was being clever last night by setting the fire up with paper, cardboard, and logs, so that I could just strike a match and begin this morning. Deep in the coals, however, the heat had persisted, and it lit my preset fire prematurely, sometime in the middle of the night, so that by the time I arrived fifteen minutes ago, the logs had coaled down to an orange skeleton crew. Start building. On Jeopardy, when someone turns out not to be as smart as he thought, and he bets everything and loses, and goes down to nothing while the others are in the thousands, Alex Trebek, the master of ceremonies, will say to him, “Start building.”