Chapter 2 #2
Trying to put this out of his mind—the holiday season, for Ben, has never been a particularly happy one, and he’d just as soon live in denial about the approach of another bone-chilling New York City winter—he occupies himself running errands for a while before swinging down to Union Square for the farmers market, peeking eagerly into the various booths and stalls.
He’s able to get a ham and cheese croissant for lunch, and eats it as he selects some gorgeous eggplants, a few bunches of scallions so bright and green that they could have been plucked from the earth that morning, and a variety of root vegetables, jams, and pastries.
He stops at his favorite butcher for a chicken and then rides the subway home laden down with bags, wishing as he does whenever this happens that he was smart enough to buy one of those personal pushcarts, even though he knows, to his bones, that he never will.
Roux is full of furious energy when Ben arrives back at his apartment, and he spends half an hour or so being batted at and gently scratched for her entertainment.
Then he roasts the chicken and eggplant, chars the scallions whole, and cuts them up.
It’s the work of a few minutes to use them to make a ginger-scallion slaw, and he slices the chicken, arranges it with the eggplant on two plates, heaps the slaw over it all, and takes both dishes up to the eleventh floor.
Mrs. C’s apartment door is always decorated for the season; she takes pride in it, insists that it brings the building together.
Ben’s not sure anything could bring the collection of New Yorkers under this roof together, far removed as they are from the forced friendliness he grew up with in the Midwest, but it’s nice that she cares about things like that.
She’s not totally wrong in any case—she and Ben only met because when he moved into this apartment six years ago, it was June, and she had a gigantic rainbow flag tacked to the door.
He’d been locked out of his apartment during his first week, and walked around the building looking for kindly souls who might give him the super’s number.
He knocked; she answered. They’ve been friends ever since.
There are things Ben doesn’t share with his parents when they call.
The fact that his closest friend in New York—really, his only friend in New York—is a sassy housebound octogenarian who would probably starve without him is close to the top of this list. He has a rotating cast of made-up people, largely based on characters from television shows he knows they’ll never see, that he talks about instead, because it’s easier.
Lord forbid he tell them he’s lonely and leave them to set him up on some kind of friend date with someone who knows someone who met one of their friends a few summers ago in Hilton Head.
The last time he’d let tried that, he’d ended up spending two hours at a bar in Midtown with a woman who explained to him, in great detail and with several enthusiastic, room-stopping demonstrations, her passionate love for ventriloquism. Never again.
Today, Mrs. C’s door has a banner hanging across it that says, Welcome, Autumn!
It looks like she ordered it, and probably the little dancing leaves and mushrooms tacked up beneath it, from a store for kindergarten teachers.
Ben shakes his head, grinning. Her doors always entertain him; they’re so bright and cheerful, at odds with her actual personality, and it tickles him that she insists on them anyway, even though she seems to loathe most of their shared neighbors.
He knocks; she answers. This is how the vast majority of Ben’s evenings go.
“Benjamin, darling,” she trills, beaming at him. Everything Mrs. C does is reminiscent of a Broadway actress aged out of the stage, and her greetings are no exception. “I see you’ve brought two plates up tonight—does that mean I am to be graced with your presence for the entirety of a meal?”
“Hi, Mrs. C,” Ben says, and leans forward for the requisite air kiss on both cheeks. “Yeah, I thought I’d join you for dinner, if that’s okay?”
“I would be only too delighted! Do come in.” She sweeps away from the door, throwing the mink stole she wears anytime it’s less than eighty degrees out over her shoulder, and Ben steps into the apartment.
The space is a little bit like a museum—as the old woman’s home for the last twenty-five years, it’s packed full of little pieces of New Yorks gone by.
Ben’s only lived in the city six years; it’s been enough time to absorb, if not fully understand, that the place he knows and loves will somehow be the same and utterly different six years from now.
There’s a comfort in that, the relentless entropy of so many souls crammed into such a small space, but there’s comfort too in Mrs. C’s apartment, proof that what was still is, somewhere.
Her walls are lined with old posters, local art from the sixties and seventies, one illegally obtained street sign.
On the shelves are beautifully maintained little collections of miscellany, things like sea glass and old subway tokens displayed next to tiny works of silver sculpture or obviously expensive jewelry intended to be admired.
That, of course, is the other thing about Mrs. C—though she’s never come out and said it, Ben knows she’s rich, and not low-key rich, either.
Mrs. C is rich enough that she once gave Ben an envelope with a cool two grand in it as a holiday present.
Mrs. C is rich enough that she owns her apartment, which is… not small.
Ben asked her, once, why she picked this building. He didn’t say, “You could obviously afford somewhere bigger and nicer,” but he didn’t have to; she gave him a shrewd look, then shrugged.
“I had three husbands in my time, darling,” she said that night, over a meal Ben’s forgotten now.
Something with mushrooms, maybe; it’s lost to the recollection of the ache in her voice.
“The first was a cad; the second, a brute; the third was married to someone else when I met him, so I suppose he was a cheat. Regardless, he was my favorite. This was our place, before I stole him from her, and when death stole him from me, I came home to it. I don’t suppose I’ll ever find anywhere else.
” She sighed, and dabbed at her eyes, and then, with false brightness, said, “Well! That’s enough of all that.
Haven’t you brought any dessert for me, dear child? ”
Ben took the hint, has been taking it ever since.
Every time he visits, he wonders if the agoraphobia is a recent development, or if, as he suspects, she walked back in here the day the third husband died and simply never found anything worth stepping outside for again.
He doesn’t mention it—she wouldn’t want him to—but it clings to him, the suspicion, a sharp-edged little burr of human tragedy.
“What sort of supper have you brought for me tonight?” she demands, wheeling on him in the living room.
She’s pretty spry for a lady of her years, but Ben still holds his breath for a second as he watches her sit down in her favorite chair, dangerously low to the ground and—like all of her other furniture—chintz.
“I do hope it’s not that terrible fish again. ”
“I served you tilapia one time,” Ben says, feigning outrage. They’ve had this conversation so many times that he almost finds it comforting. “Most people like my tilapia.”
“I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that most people have terrible taste,” Mrs. C says primly.
She sits, waiting, as Ben sets up a little folding tray table for her, then one for himself on the couch opposite.
“That’s one of the reasons I like you, darling; you know what’s good when you see it.
The fish, regrettably, is a blind spot.”
Ben laughs, shaking his head. “That’s a real backhanded compliment, but I’ll take it.”
“They’re my specialty, as you well know,” Mrs. C says.
Ben rolls his eyes, but not unhappily, and they eat in silence for a few minutes.
They do, sometimes; they’re both fairly solitary people by nature, and he thinks that’s why silence tends to fall so easily between them.
There’s also the fact that Ben didn’t grow up thinking of dinner as a time to sit and chat—the meal where that sort of thing occurred might have been called “family meal,” but it took place primarily between the restaurant staff, and it happened around 4 p.m., in the Trattoria Luciana kitchens, before dinner service started up.
Ben mostly missed it on school nights, often walking in as things were drawing to a close.
He typically ate his own dinner one of two places: either fighting with his sister for his share, generally in front of the television, in the upstairs apartment where they lived, or downstairs over the sink in the restaurant’s back of house, hunching and shoveling in a stolen manicotti or sausage as someone shouted, “Kid! Look alive! Behind!”