Survivor, Page 3

  When the speakerphone goes silent, then and only then do I start.

  I ask the speakerphone, Are you listening?

  I tell the speakerphone, Picture a dinner plate.

  Tonight, I say, the spinach soufflé will be at the one-o’clock position. The beets thing will be at four o’clock. A meat thing with slivered almonds was going to be on the other half of the plate in the nine-o’clock position. To eat it, the guests would have to use a knife. And there are going to be bones in the meat.

  This is the best posting I’ve ever had, no kids, no cats, no-wax floors, so I don’t want to botch it. If I didn’t care, I’d start telling who I work for to do any monkey business I could imagine. Like: You eat the sorbet by licking it out of the bowl, dog-dish fashion.

  Or: Pick up the lamb chop with your teeth and shake your head vigorously, side to side.

  And what’s terrible is they’d probably do this. It’s because I’ve never steered them wrong, they trust me.

  Except for teaching them etiquette, my toughest challenge is living down to their expectations.

  Ask me how to repair stab holes in nightgowns, tuxedos, and hats. My secret is a little clear nail polish on the inside of the puncture.

  Nobody teaches you all the job skills you need in Home Economics, but over enough time, you pick them up. In the church district where I grew up, they teach you the way to make candles drip less is soak them in strong salt water.

  Store candles in the freezer until ready to use. That’s their kind of household hint. Light candles with a strand of raw spaghetti. Sixteen years I’ve been cleaning for people in their homes, and never has anybody asked me to walk around with a piece of spaghetti on fire in my hand.

  No matter what they stress in Home Economics, it’s just not a priority in the outside world.

  For example, no one teaches you that green-tinted moisturizer will help hide red, slapped skin. And any gentleman who’s ever been backhanded by a lady with her diamond ring should know a styptic pencil will stop the bleeding. Close the gash with a dab of Super Glue and you can be photographed at a movie premier, smiling and without stitches or a scar.

  Always keep a red washcloth around for wiping up blood, and you’ll never have a stain to presoak.

  My daily planner tells me I’m sharpening a butcher knife.

  About the dinner tonight, I keep briefing who I work for about what to expect.

  The important part is not to panic. Yes, there’s going to be a lobster they’ll have to deal with.

  There’s going to be a single saltcellar. A game course will be served after the roast. The game is going to be squab. It’s a kind of bird, and if there’s anything more complicated to eat than a lobster, it’s a squab. All those little bones you have to dismantle, everybody dressed up for their dissection. Another wine will come after the aperitif, the sherry with the soup course, the white wine with the lobster, the red with the roast, another red wine with the greasy ordeal of the squab. By this time, the table will be spotted with everybody’s piddling island archipelagoes of dressings and sauces and wine sprayed across the white tablecloth.

  This is how my job goes. Even in a good posting, nobody wants to know where the male guest of honor is supposed to sit.

  That exquisite dinner your teachers in Home Economics talked about, the pause with fresh flowers and demitasse after a perfect day of poise and elegant living, well, nobody gives a rat’s ass about that.

  Tonight, at some moment between the soup course and the roast, everybody at the table will get to mutilate a big dead lobster. Thirty-four captains of industry, thirty-four successful monsters, thirty-four acclaimed savages in black tie will pretend they know how to eat.

  And after the lobster, the footmen will present hot finger bowls with floating slices of lemon, and these thirty-four botched autopsies will end with garlic and butter up to the elbow of every sleeve and every smiling greasy face will look up from sucking out meat from some cavity in the thorax.

  After seventeen years of working in private houses every day, the things I know the most about are slapped faces, creamed corn, black eyes, wrenched shoulders, beaten eggs, kicked shins, scratched corneas, chopped onions, bites of all sorts, nicotine stains, sexual lubricants, knocked-out teeth, split lips, whipped cream, twisted arms, vaginal tears, deviled ham, cigarette burns, crushed pineapple, hernias, terminated pregnancies, pet stains, shredded coconut, gouged eyes, sprains, and stretch marks.

  The ladies who you work for, after they sob for hours on end, make them use blue or mauve eyeliner to make their bloodshot eyes look whiter. The next time someone socks a tooth out of her husband’s mouth, save the tooth in a glass of milk until he can see the dentist. In the meantime, mix zinc oxide and oil of cloves into a white paste. Rinse the empty socket and pack it with the paste for a quick and easy filling that hardens lickety-split.

  For tear stains in a pillow case, treat them the same way you would a perspiration stain. Dissolve five aspirin in water and daub the stain until it’s gone. Even if there’s a mascara stain, the problem’s solved.

  If you could call it solved.

  Whether you clean a stain, a fish, a house, you want to think you’re making the world a better place, but really you’re just letting things get worse. You think maybe if you just work harder and faster, you can hold off the chaos, but then one day you’re changing a patio lightbulb with a five-year life span and you realize how you’ll only be changing this light maybe ten more times before you’ll be dead.

  Time is running out. There isn’t the kind of energy you used to have. You start to slow down.

  You start to give in.

  This year there’s hair on my back, and my nose keeps getting bigger. How my face looks every morning is more and more what you’d call a mug.

  After working in these rich houses, I know the best way to get blood out of the trunk of a car is not to ask any questions.

  The speakerphone is saying, “Hello?”

  The best way to keep a good job is just do what they want.

  The speakerphone is saying, “Hello?”

  To get lipstick out of a collar, rub in a little white vinegar.

  For stubborn protein-based stains, like semen, try rinsing with cold salt water, then wash as usual.

  This is valuable on-the-job training. Feel free to take notes.

  To pick up broken glass from that jimmied bedroom window or smashed highball, you can blot up even the tiniest shards with a slice of bread.

  Stop me if you already know all this.

  The speakerphone is saying, “Hello?”

  Been there. Done that.

  What else they teach you in Home Economics is the correct way to respond to a wedding invitation. How to address the Pope. The right way to monogram silver.

  In the Creedish church school, they teach how the world can be a perfect elegant little stage play of perfect manners where you’re the director. The teachers, they paint a picture of dinner parties where everyone will already know how to eat a lobster.

  Then it’s not.

  Then all you can do is get lost in the tiny details of every day doing the same tasks over and over.

  There’s the fireplace to clean.

  There’s the lawn to mow.

  Turn all the bottles in the wine cellar.

  There’s the lawn to mow, again.

  There’s the silver to polish.

  Repeat.

  Still, just one time, I’d like to prove I know something better. I can do more than just cover up. The world can be a lot better than we settle for. All you have to do is ask.

  No, really, go ahead. Ask me.

  How do you eat an artichoke?

  How do you eat asparagus?

  Ask me.

  How do you eat a lobster?

  The lobsters in the pot look dead enough so I lift one out. I tell the speakerphone, First, twist off each of the big front claws.

  The other lobsters I’ll put in the refrigerator for them to p
ractice taking apart. To the speakerphone I say, Take notes.

  I crack the claws and eat the meat inside.

  Then bend the lobster backward until its tail snaps away from its body. Snap off the tip of the tail, the Telson, and use a seafood fork to push out the tail meat. Remove the intestinal vein that runs the length of the tail. If the vein is clear, the lobster hasn’t eaten anything for a while. A thick dark vein is fresh and still full of dung.

  I eat the tail meat.

  The seafood fork, I tell the speakerphone with my mouth full, the seafood fork is the little baby fork with three prongs.

  Next, you unhinge the back shell, the carapace, from the body, and eat the green digestive gland called the Tomalley. Eat the copper-based blood that congeals into white gunk. Eat the coral-colored immature egg masses.

  I eat them all.

  Lobsters have what you’d call an ‘open’ circulatory system where the blood just sloshes around inside their cavities, bathing the different organs.

  The lungs are spongy and tough, but you can eat them, I tell the speakerphone and lick my fingers. The stomach is the tough sack of what look like teeth just behind the head. Don’t eat the stomach.

  I dig around inside the body. I suck the little meat out of each walking leg. I bite off the tiny gill bailers. I bypass the ganglia of the brain.

  I stop.

  What I find is impossible.

  The speakerphone is yelling, “Okay, now what? Was that everything? What’s there left to eat?”

  This can’t be happening because according to my daily planner, it’s almost three o’clock. I’m supposed to be outside digging up the garden. At four, I’ll rearrange the flower beds. At five-thirty, I’ll pull up the salvia and replace them with Dutch iris, roses, snapdragons, ferns, ground cover.

  The speakerphone is yelling, “What is happening there? Answer me! What’s gone wrong?”

  I check my schedule, and it says I’m happy. I’m productive. I work hard. It’s all right down here in black and white. I’m getting things done.

  The speakerphone yells, “What do we do next?”

  Today is just one of those days the sun comes out to really humiliate you.

  The speakerphone yells, “What’s there left to do?”

  I ignore the speakerphone because there’s nothing left to do. Almost nothing’s left.

  And maybe this is just a trick of the light, but I’ve eaten almost the whole lobster before I notice the heart beat.

  ∨ Survivor ∧

  Chapter 2

  According to my daily planner, I’m trying to keep my balance. I’m up at the top of a ladder with my arms full of fake flowers: roses, daisies, delphiniums, stock. I’m trying to keep from falling, my toes curled up tight in my shoes. I’m collecting another polyester bouquet, an obituary from last week all folded up in my shirt pocket.

  The man I killed last week is around here somewhere. What’s left of him. The one with the shotgun under his chin, sitting alone in his empty apartment, asking over the phone for me to give him just one good reason not to pull the trigger, I’m sure enough going to find him. Trevor Hollis.

  Gone But Not Forgotten.

  Resting in Peace.

  Called from This Life.

  Or he’s going to find me. That’s what I always hope.

  Up at the top of a ladder, I must be twenty, twenty-five, thirty feet above the gallery floor while I pretend to catalog another artificial flower, my glasses pinching at the end of my nose. My pen leaves words in my notebook. Specimen Number 786, I’m writing, is a red rose around a hundred years old.

  What I hope is everybody else here is dead.

  Part of my job is I have to arrange fresh flowers around the house where I work.

  I have to pick flowers out of the garden I’m supposed to tend.

  What you need to understand is I’m not a ghoul.

  The petals and calyx (sepals) of the rose are red celluloid. First created in 1863, celluloid is the oldest and least stable form of plastic. I’m writing in my notebook, the leaves of the rose are green-tinted celluloid.

  I stop writing and look over my glasses. Down at the end of the gallery and so far away she’s just a tiny black outline against a huge stained-glass window is somebody. The stained glass is a picture of somewhere, Sodom or Jericho or the Temple of Solomon being destroyed by fire in the Old Testament, silent and blazing. Twisted feathers of orange and red flame twist around falling blocks of stone, pillars, friezes, and out of this walks a figure in a little black dress getting bigger as she gets close.

  And what I hope is she’s dead. My secret wish is right now to be romancing this dead girl. A dead girl. Any dead girl. I’m not what you’d call choosy.

  The lie I tell people is I’m doing research into the evolution of artificial flowers during the Industrial Revolution. All this is supposed to be my thesis for Nature and Design 456. Why I’m so old is I’m a graduate student.

  The girl has long red hair that women only have these days if it’s part of some orthodox religion. From up so high on my ladder, the thin bendable little arms and legs of the girl make me look again and again and wonder if someday I could be a pedophile.

  Although not the oldest specimen in my study, this rose I pretend to examine is the most fragile. The female sex organ, the Pistil, including the Stigma, the Style, and the Ovary, are cast jet. The male sex organs, the Stamen, include a wire Filament topped with a tiny glass Anther.

  Part of my job is I have to grow fresh flowers in the garden, but I can’t. I can’t grow a weed.

  The lie I tell myself is I’m here to gather flowers, fresh ones for inside the house. I steal the fake flowers for sticking out in the garden. The people I work for only look at their garden from inside so I stick the bare dirt full of fake greenery, ferns or needlepoint ivy, then I stick in fake seasonal flowers.

  The landscaping is beautiful as long as you don’t look too close.

  The flowers look so lifelike. So natural. So peaceful.

  The best place to find bulbs for forcing is in the Dumpster behind the mausoleum. Thrown away are plastic pots of dormant bulbs, hyacinths and tulips, tiger and stargazer lilies, daffodils and crocus ready to take home and bring back to life.

  Specimen Number 786, I write, occurs in the vase of Crypt 2387, in the highest tier of Crypts, in the lesser south gallery, on the seventh floor of the Serenity wing. This location, I write, thirty feet above the floor of the gallery, might account for the almost perfect condition of this rose, found on one of the oldest crypts in one of the original wings of the Columbia Memorial Mausoleum.

  Then I steal the rose.

  What I tell people who see me here is another story.

  The official version for why I’m here is this mausoleum provides the best examples of artificial flowers dating back into the mid nineteenth century. Each of the six main wings, the Serenity wing, the Contentment wing, the Eternity, Tranquillity, Harmony, and New Hope wings, is five to eighteen stories tall. The concrete honeycomb of every wall is nine feet thick so it can accommodate even the longest casket inserted lengthwise. Air doesn’t circulate in the miles of galleries. Visitors seldom visit. Their typical visit is short. The average year-round temperature and humidity are low and constant.

  The oldest specimens derive from the culture of Victorian flower language. Based on the 1840 classic Le langage des fleurs by Madame de la Tour, purple lilacs meant death. White lilacs, the genus Syringa, meant the first discovery of love.

  The geranium meant gentility.

  The buttercup, childishness.

  Because most artificial flowers were made to decorate hats, a mausoleum provides the best specimens that still exist.

  That’s what I tell people. My official version of the truth.

  During the day, if people see me with my notebook and my pen, most times I’m at the top of a ladder swiping some bunch of fake pansies left at a crypt high in the wall. It’s for a college class is what I cup my hand around my m
outh and whisper down to them.

  I’m conducting a study.

  Sometimes I’ll be here late at night. This is after everyone’s gone. Then I’ll be walking around alone after midnight and my dream is that some night around the next corner will be an open crypt in the wall and near it will be a desiccated cadaver, the skin wilted on its face and its dress suit stiff and blotched with the fluids dripping and leaked out of its body. I’ll come across this carcass in some dim gallery, silent except for the buzz of a single fluorescent tube flashing strobes of lightning in the last few moments before it will leave me in the dark, forever, with this dead monster.

  The cadaver eyes should be collapsed into dark sockets, and I want it to stumble blind and clutching the cold marble walls with smears of rotted paste that expose the bones inside each hand. The tired mouth of it hanging open, the lost nose of it just two dark holes, the loose shirt of it resting low on the exposed collarbones.

  I’ll be looking for names I know from the obituaries. Carved here forever are the names of people who took my advice.

  Go ahead. Kill yourself.

  Beloved Son. Gentle Daughter. Devoted Friend.

  Pull the trigger.

  Exalted soul.

  Here I am. It’s payback time. I dare you to.

  Come and get me.

  I want to be chased by flesh-eating zombies.

  I want to be walking past the marble slab covering a crypt and hear something scratching and struggling inside. At night, I flatten my ear cold against the marble and wait. This is why I’m really here.

  Specimen Number 786, I write in my notebook, has a main stem of green cotton-covered 30-gauge millinery wire. Each leaf stem appears to be 20-gauge.