City of Boys Page 19

  From the grocery bag he’s left on the counter, I take a box of cookies and a steak, tightly wrapped, but without a label. Teddy glances at me.

  —Second-day bonus, he says.

  —I don’t know how to cook a steak, I say. —I never cooked a steak.

  —You cook it like you cook anything else, he says, looking back to the TV. —Steak is basically just hamburger before you grind it up. He switches happily from channel to channel. —Basically, he says, —that’s what it is.

  —You can fry steak? I ask.

  —Sure, he says. —Fry it, bake it, whatever you want.

  He stops at the sports channel, and watches as two men discuss the day’s events in sports, then he changes the channel again, up and down the dial until he finds a baseball game, which he watches while I fry the steak. The steak turns brown as it cooks, and tiny balls of fat bead up on its surface.

  Teddy eats only a few bites. —It’s a little tough, he says finally, putting down his fork. —Maybe this isn’t how you’re supposed to cook it.

  —Don’t they tell you how to cook it there? I ask.

  —Of course not, he says. —I just cut it up. He stares into the living room, at the game, which plays as we eat.

  —So who’s winning? I ask.

  —What? he says.

  —The game. Who’s winning the game?

  —Oh, he says. —I don’t know. He thinks a moment.

  —I don’t know, he says. —They’ll have the score in a minute.

  —So, I say. —How do you like the meat department?

  —Oh, he says. —I guess it’s okay.

  He chews for a while and finally pushes his plate back, most of his steak uneaten. —Listen, he says. —Do you know what an abattoir is?

  I know I have heard this word before, and I think until it comes to me. —A bedroom, I say. —It’s a bedroom. In French.

  He stares at me, then shakes his head. —A bedroom. He laughs. —You don’t learn much from those magazines.

  I put a piece of steak in my mouth and chew until it’s soft enough to swallow. It tastes dark and unpleasant.

  —An abattoir, he says, —is the technical name for a slaughterhouse. He shakes his head. —A bedroom, he says again. He gazes at the television for a moment. The Yankees are scheduled to play a late game tonight, sometime after this ball game ends.

  —Anyways, he says, —my boss in the meat department says I can make more money if I transfer there. He says they always need people. I guess the store has one just out of town. Or something like that.

  He stares down at the flat black piece of steak on his plate. —It’s the same job, pretty much, just cutting up meat. Like I do now. I wouldn’t be killing them, he says, his eyes on the television. —Just cutting them up after they’re already dead.

  A score flashes on the screen to report that the Mets are winning their game. —Shit, Teddy says, then looks at me. —I don’t know. It might be a quicker way to the top.

  —Well, I say, —if it’s the same job.

  —I guess it is, he says. —Anyways, I’m going to check it out. What’s to lose? He smiles. —This could be the start of something. Really it could. You never know.

  He stands, leaving his steak on the table, and, with his future ahead of him, he lies in front of the television to wait patiently for the game. I chew my steak until my jaws grow tired, then wash the dishes and sit on the couch behind Teddy.

  —Well, I say, —so I guess everything’s looking up at work. But he says nothing.

  —I guess the meat department must be a lot cleaner than the produce section, I say. Teddy has complained about how bugs get into the produce, and once or twice I think I’ve seen them, tiny little black specks skimming speedily over the bright skins of the fruit.

  —Cleaner? he says. —I guess it’s cleaner.

  He looks at his hands. —It looks cleaner, he says. —On the outside, where the meat is sold. He glances at the game on the television. —But behind the glass, you know what they have? About a thousand hunks of animals. And I have to cut them up. You should see those things. Big huge cows. Pigs. Lambs. He sits up and looks at me. —They have lambs. And chickens.

  He lies back down. When the door to Madame Renalda’s slams, his head moves. He listens, staring at the window, and just as I lean back to look out the window, a man comes out onto the sidewalk. He looks up and down the street, but sees nothing familiar in a city in which he has lived his entire life; finally he sets off uncertainly up Broadway, going north. When I turn back to Teddy, he is watching me with round, hollow eyes.

  On Teddy’s first day at the abattoir, I practice the word all afternoon.

  —Abattoir, I say to the men on the street, and they look up, watching my lips move, wondering what I might be saying to them. —Abattoir, I say, and they look off to watch the long legs of girls bending to get in and out of cars. Their faces register nothing, their minds move for a moment against the smooth skin of the girls’ legs, then return without interest to my face, my lips, the words they can’t hear. The door to Madame Renalda’s opens and closes, and they step in and out. Longing for the simple legs of the young girls, they move instead toward the beautiful women inside. —Abattoir, I whisper to them as they enter, and for a moment they pause, then go inside.

  By the time Teddy comes home from work, his shirt damp, his black tie unknotted, the word is mine. —So, I say carelessly, —how was your day at the abattoir?

  I stir the spaghetti on the stove to show my nonchalance. He walks to the counter, but when he gets there, he realizes he has no grocery bag, so he just stands and watches me stir. Finally he turns on the water in the sink and holds his hands under it.

  —Abattoir, he says, and laughs. He dries his hands and pulls from his pocket a small jar of something red.

  —Here, he says, and holds it up. —It’s caviar. It was on sale. I couldn’t pass it up. He reads the label. —It’s from Russia. Russian caviar. That’s the best kind.

  He puts the jar on the table and looks around, as if he is expecting more. —I don’t want that job, he says. —I’m not going to take it. That’s the dirtiest place I ever saw.

  He picks up the caviar and looks at it closely. —You’d never know these were fish eggs, he says. —I wonder how they even lay eggs in the water. You’d think they’d float away.

  He puts the jar down and watches me drain the spaghetti. —I’m not going to tell you how they kill the animals, he says. —No one should have to know that.

  He leans against the counter and watches me while I finish cooking, while I set out plates, while I sit to eat. He opens the jar of caviar and puts it on the table between us. It smells fishy, and when I take a bite of it, I can feel all the tiny eggs burst open between my teeth, a thousand fish loosed in my mouth.

  —You don’t have to eat it if you don’t like it, Teddy says.

  —I like it, I say. —It would just be better on crackers or something.

  Teddy picks up the jar. —I mean, he says, —how do they even catch all these little eggs? They must have to use tiny nets.

  —Maybe they stick to rocks, I say. —Or maybe they lay them in little sacs, and they stick to the rocks.

  He nods. —Little sacs, he says. —That’s probably it.

  He pushes his plate away and gazes over at the television. Now that his schedule has changed, he says it’s harder to keep up with the games. The Yankees are in California tonight and they don’t play until later, but Teddy lies down in front of the television, turns it on, and flicks the switch up and down the cable box, stopping at a horse race, which he watches while I clean up our dishes. I sit behind him on the couch just as another race is about to start. Teddy watches closely, as though he cares anything about horse racing.

  —Listen, he says abruptly, not looking back at me. In front of him, the jockeys raise up on their horses. —You should see this place.

  The horses come out of the gates and one pulls ahead quickly, but just as another comes
up beside it, Teddy changes the channel, running the switch up and down, so fast all the stations come through only as a blur of images; then he goes back through them, more slowly this time, and from what I can tell, there are at least five channels playing sports, all different. Teddy passes by a tennis match, bowling, some sort of track event, golf, and finally pauses at a hockey game.

  —Hockey, he says. —What a stupid sport. But he leans back on his elbows to watch it. On the screen, two of the hockey players, dressed in bulky clownish uniforms, have squared off to fight, but because each has hold of the other’s shirt, they can only spin around and around, almost gracefully, locked together. When the referee skates over to break up the fight, Teddy leans forward and changes the channel. He passes right by a fashion show, which I would like to watch, and finally stops at the station that broadcasts only weather reports. He turns the sound down and sits back.

  —They herd the cows in a long line right into this building, he says, —into this big room. They call it the kill room.

  The man on the weather channel gestures cheerfully up at a chart, smiling as he uses a stick to trace the path of a big white blur across a map of New York.

  —Then they kill them, Teddy says. —Well, first they knock them out. Then they kill them. This guy stands there while they come down the line, and he hits them in the head.

  He watches intently as the blur travels toward New York, and I pick up my magazine. —He knocks most of them out with just one hit, Teddy says. —Just like that. Wham. Right between the eyes.

  He looks around at me. —This guy must do fifty cows an hour. You should see his arms. I guess, he says, turning back to the television, —I guess it’s the cheapest way.

  I try to concentrate on the article I am reading, about how to love again after an unhappy affair.

  —This one cow, Teddy says, —he didn’t knock out right away.

  He is silent as the weather report shows a chart giving the temperatures in cities all over the world: Paris, Moscow, Berlin. I try to imagine what it would be like to live in one of these cities, what I would wear, how my voice would sound in a different language.

  —It just kind of kept on trying to move, Teddy says. —But it couldn’t really go anywhere.

  In Frankfurt it is sixty-five degrees, but I don’t remember what country Frankfurt is in. I close my eyes and try to remember. Germany, it comes to me. I go back to my magazine.

  —So he hit him again. Wham.

  After a loss or a breakup, the article says, it is natural never to want to love again.

  —There was nothing I could do, Teddy says. —Nothing. A commercial comes on, selling some kind of car wax especially made for rainy weather, and Teddy watches it with interest. —I need that, he says, though we do not have a car.

  —Anyways, he says, —then this big chain comes down and hoists them up.

  He is quiet, watching the rest of the commercials until the weather report comes back on. —Then they cut their throats, he says. —And they bleed to death.

  He switches the channel and stops at a cartoon. —Look, he says. —Cartoons.

  He sits back and watches two little men work frantically to stop a leaky pipe; predictably the pipe explodes, and Teddy laughs. I look back at my article. In the picture that accompanies it, a beautiful woman is staring at a photograph of a man, touching his paper cheek with her long paper fingers.

  —It’s incredible, Teddy says, and I look up. He has switched back to the horse race; all the horses are clumped up coming around a curve, their sharp fragile hooves beating into the dirt.

  —You should see their eyes, Teddy says. —And they make the weirdest noises. Especially when they get closer and they see what’s going to happen. I guess they can smell it, too. It’s like, and he pauses. —I don’t know what it’s like. It’s like a dream. They just keep on coming.

  I turn the page of my magazine; the woman in the picture is now in the arms of a different man; the photograph of the first man is on the ground at her feet. Abattoir, she whispers in her new lover’s ear.

  —There’s blood everywhere, Teddy says. —You wouldn’t believe the blood. It’s up to your ankles. I don’t know how those guys stand it. They have to wear rubber boots.

  He sits back on his heels and watches the announcers discuss the horse race.

  —I don’t know, he says thoughtfully, as though he is responding to a question I’ve asked him. —I guess the worst thing is the smell.

  He finally turns to me, his blue eyes gone white and empty. —But you don’t want to hear this, he says. —No one should have to hear this.

  He turns back and switches to the Yankees station, where the game is already under way. It is a slow, late game, and I go to bed before it’s half over. Just as I am falling asleep, I hear Teddy turn it off. He moves slowly across the floor to my door, and I lie still until he walks away. The door to our apartment opens, closes; the lock turns. There is no window in my bedroom, so I try to hear him through the walls, but I lose the sound of his footsteps in the general shuffle of men downstairs and outside on the street. When I fall asleep, I dream of a room full of animals, with white simple eyes; they are all circled around my bed, and each holds up a paw, a leg, a piece of flesh for me to cook.

  I wake when Teddy comes home and I listen to him move through the tiny rooms of our apartment. Finally he goes to bed, but in the dark I can feel him start at each noise; he sits up and stares into the corners of his room, but there is nothing there except the simple empty eyes of animals.

  * * *

  Teddy has decided to stay at the meat department in the Safeway, despite the raise he’s offered to go to the abattoir. Every night he brings home meat instead of discarded fruits and vegetables; the meat seems to breed roaches, or at least attract them, and because I cannot seem to learn to cook it well, we end up throwing most of it away. It smells like something rotting in the heat, and I would like to take the garbage out after every meal, but Teddy says it would be a waste of plastic bags, so I just add whatever we don’t eat to the garbage, sliding it on top of what we didn’t eat the night before, and the night before that; sometimes I think I see little dark things moving around under all the big chunks of brown and gray, although it could be a trick of the light. Along with the meat, Teddy brings home odd things, like hearts of palm and pomegranates, foods we never eat. I put them in little bowls that sit on the table between us as we chew at our steak.

  Tonight, Teddy has brought home a coconut, which he rolls toward me on the table. —You have to poke it in one of these holes before you can crack it, he says. —Those are the eyes. He stares at the television set; the VCR is recording a Yankees game right now; he has missed the first few innings, but, as usual, he wants to see the whole game all at once, so he watches the little red arrows run forward, and wonders when it will be safe to turn on the TV. I put the coconut in the icebox.

  —So, I say. —Maybe I can come to see the store tomorrow. He looks up at me. —The store? he says. —No, I don’t think so. He looks back at the television. —I don’t think you’d like it. It’s not very clean.

  He rubs at an oily spot on his pants. —It’s really not very clean at all.

  * * *

  From the outside the store looks clean and pleasant. I go first to the produce section, to see if it has changed in Teddy’s absence. It looks different somehow, although the bananas seem to be where they were before, next to the apples. Donny stands in a corner and watches a woman as she looks quickly around and breaks two bananas off a bunch. Just as he is about to approach her, his yellow eyes fall on me. He smiles a kind of smile and wipes his hands on his apron, but before he reaches me, I turn and walk toward the back of the store.

  I stand in the middle of the cookie aisle, where I can watch the meat department. From here the meat case looks clean and orderly: shiny rows of red steak, white pork, yellowish halves of chicken; behind it, through the window, the butcher’s area looks almost surgical, all white walls and poli
shed metal. There are no people back there, no one anywhere, until Teddy comes through the steel doors, carrying several packages of meat. He arranges them all carefully in the meat case, and turns, wiping his hands on his apron, which has become bright pink in front. He looks around, and his eyes meet mine; even at this distance I can see that he has not shaved today. He looks away immediately, and goes back through the steel doors. I turn and there is Donny, watching me with yellow eyes, smiling his yellow smile.

  —Yo, a voice calls from the street. —Yo, Ted.

  Teddy looks up from his steak and glances at the television.

  A game is starting soon, in just a few minutes.

  —Don’t let him in, Teddy says. —He’ll talk all the way through the game.

  I go to the window and look down onto the sidewalk; Donny smiles up at me.

  —Yo, he says. He holds up a six-pack in one hand and in the other a bunch of flowers. I go to the door to let him in, and Teddy slips his steak into the garbage. By the time Donny reaches the top of the stairs, Teddy is on his knees in front of the television. Donny smiles at me over the flowers, the kind they keep cold in a huge bin of ice at the Safeway. He pushes them at me as he comes in, and I bring them to my face, but they have no smell, only a kind of cold supermarket chill.

  —Teddy, he says. —How’s it going? He sniffs the air. —Smells like steak in here.

  He winks at me. —Coming up in the world? he says, and pulls a beer from the six-pack. —Teddy, how about a beer? Teddy shakes his head, not looking away from the television, though it’s only showing a car commercial.

  —Okay, Donny says. —Just thought I’d stop by and say hello, see if you were watching the game. Just like old times, he says, and winks again. —Huh?

  He pops his beer open and sits on the couch. I sit beside him and the three of us stare at the television, but none of us is really watching the game. Donny drapes his arm like a wet towel across the back of the couch, and Teddy draws figure eights with his finger in the carpet beside his knees.