Chapter 5
Shaping
It was a specific face. Dave had known Mabel two years and could read her whole editorial position from across the room, and the face said: you two are being idiots, and I am enjoying it, and I am also, on some level, embarrassed for you.
She wasn't wrong. There was a new architecture to the mornings now, a load Dave was carrying and pretending not to — the memory of the six inches, the come here, the sound Albert made over the rye — and Albert was carrying his own version of it, careful, bright, and underneath the bright a heaviness that hadn't lifted since the night of the sketchbook and that Dave kept clocking and kept mislabeling.
He assumed it was the same thing weighting his own chest: the ordinary terror of a man who'd cracked a door he'd nailed shut for a reason.
He was half right. Most people are, most mornings.
The mornings had gone formal in a way that would have been funny if it weren't slowly killing him.
Albert would come in and say good morning and Dave would say it back, and there'd be a held half-second where the whole unspoken thing stood up in the room between them, and then Albert would order a croissant in a slightly-too-even voice and go sit and draw and not look over, and Dave would make the coffee and not look over, and Mabel would stand at the register giving off the energy of a woman watching two grown men lose a fight to a door they'd both left open.
"You could just talk to him," she said on the second morning, after Albert had gone.
"I talk to him every day."
"You hand him bread every day. Different verb." She snapped the lid onto the pastry case like a period at the end of a sentence. "He won't make the first move, that one. He makes everybody else's move for them. Somebody's got to make it safe for him to want one of his own."
Dave didn't answer. But he heard it.
He wasn't going to chase it. That wasn't in him; he'd said the only thing he had in him to say, come here, and Mabel had come in for her keys, and the moment had gone, and Dave had decided — standing there in his own shop with the fog going out of the windows — that if it came back he wasn't going to be the one to talk it to death.
He'd hold the door. He'd learned exactly one thing worth knowing in forty-five years and it was that you couldn't force a rise.
You built the conditions and you left it alone and you trusted the thing to know what it was.
It had taken him a bankruptcy of the soul and a gurney and eleven days' notice to learn that much, and he'd learned it about bread.
He was only now, at forty-five, in the middle of the night, starting to suspect it might hold for people too — that you couldn't force a person open any more than you could force a loaf up, that all the pushing in the world only got you something dense and closed that never came to anything, and that the one move that ever worked was warmth, and patience, and getting out of the way.
So he built the conditions, which in Dave's case meant he kept the shop warm and the coffee decent and his mouth shut, and he waited, and on the third night, at half past midnight, someone knocked on the glass.
***
Albert was on the wrong side of the locked door in a hoodie and no beanie, hair flat on one side like he'd been failing to sleep in a serious and dedicated way, and when Dave threw the bolt the cold and the fog came in with him.
"I couldn't sleep," Albert said, which Dave could see. "And your light was on. I know that's — I know it's the middle of the night, I can go, I just. I was walking. And your light was on."
"I'm always up." Dave stepped back to let him in. "You want coffee, it'll keep you up worse."
"I don't want coffee." Albert stopped just inside, in the amber light and the flour-smell, and something in him came down off a ledge just from being in the room.
Dave watched it happen. He'd felt it himself, the first winter — the way the shop took a wound-up person and set them, gently, on the floor.
"I don't know what I want. That's kind of my whole — that's the thing you already figured out about me, isn't it. That's the thing you asked."
"You want to talk about it?" Dave asked, which cost him something, because Dave did not invite talking.
"No." Albert huffed a laugh. "God, no — that's the last thing I want. No offense, you're the least talk-about-it person I've ever met, and it's one of the best things about you. Please don't start now on my account."
"Suits me." It did. He'd made the offer because it was decent; he was relieved past saying that Albert had turned it down.
Of all the ways this could go sideways, they'd at least found the one shape of person the other could stand to be in a room with at midnight — two men who'd both rather do a thing with their hands than say it with their mouths.
"It's late for the big questions, anyway.
" Dave went back to the bench, where the night's dough sat in its tub, risen and ready, past due for shaping.
He'd been about to start when the knock came.
"You want to be useful or you want to sit? "
Albert looked at the dough. "Useful. God. Please. Give me a job, I'll do anything, I'll be so good at it."
"Wash your hands. Take off the hoodie, you'll cook."
Albert washed his hands and pulled the hoodie over his head and came around to the working side of the bench in a thin gray t-shirt, and Dave got a flour bin and a bench knife and did not think about the thin gray t-shirt, and turned the dough out onto the bench in one soft heavy fall.
"Okay." Dave cut it. Six pieces, by eye, each one landing on the scale within a few grams because his hands had done this ten thousand times.
"First you pre-shape. Loose. You're not building anything yet, you're just — getting it round, getting it organized, so it relaxes and you can do the real shape in a bit. Watch."
He took a piece and worked it on the unfloured bench, dragging it toward himself in a quick tight circle under a cupped hand, and it went from a shapeless slack thing to a taut little round in three motions, and he set it aside and nodded at the next piece. "You."
Albert tried. It was terrible. He mashed it, flattened it, chased it around the bench while it stuck to everything, and swore at it with real feeling.
"It's fighting me. Dave, it's fighting back, this is a sentient — okay, no, I respect it now, I've fully changed my position.
" He peeled a strand off his wrist and it took a little arm hair with it.
"How do you make it just go round? You did it in three seconds.
Mine looks like roadkill. It looks like a croissant that lost a fight. "
"You're using it like a gym. It's not a gym."
"I contain a large amount of stress and it is evidently coming out through my hands—"
Dave watched a man who designed load paths for six-story buildings get comprehensively defeated by two hundred grams of flour and water, and something in his chest that had been clenched for three days eased into something dangerously close to happiness.
"You're strangling it," Dave said. "It's not a negotiation. Less hand. Let the bench do it."
"The bench isn't doing anything, the bench is just a bench—"
"Here." And that was the whole hinge of the night, that one word, here, because Dave stepped in behind him — close, closer than instruction needed, close enough to feel the heat come off him — and put his hands over Albert's hands, and stilled them.
Albert went very quiet. The chatter stopped, all of it, at once, the way it did the one time in a hundred when a thing was real.
"Cup your hand," Dave said, low, near his ear, guiding it.
"Like this. You're not pressing down, you're just — making a wall, and you drag it, and the friction on the bench pulls the surface tight.
" He moved Albert's hand with his own, that quick tight circle, and under both their hands the dough drew itself taut and smooth, a skin coming up on it, and he heard Albert's breath change.
"There. Feel that? That's tension. You build the skin so it can hold the rise.
Tight enough to hold, not so tight it tears. "
He should have let go then. The shape was made; the lesson was over.
He kept his hands where they were, over Albert's, and felt the small tremor come up in them that had nothing to do with dough, and neither of them said one word about it.
The lamp buzzed faintly overhead. Out past the black windows the ocean did its slow work on the sand, and the fog held the whole neighborhood still, and there was no one awake for a mile, no timer running, nothing anywhere that needed either of them for the length of one held breath.
"Not so tight it tears," Albert repeated. His voice had gone somewhere lower. Dave's hands were still over his; neither of them had moved to change that.
"Then you leave it alone." Dave should have stepped back.
He'd made the point; the dough was shaped; the lesson was over.
He didn't step back. His hands stayed over Albert's on the cool bench and the whole warm length of the man was an inch from his chest and the fog pressed the windows black and the shop held them in its one lamp of light.
"That's the part nobody wants to do. You build the tension and then you have to walk away and trust it to rise on its own time.
You can't rush it. Push it and you get a dense sad loaf that never came up.
Everybody wants to rush it." He was not, at this point, entirely talking about bread, and he knew it, and he'd never in his life been the kind of man who said a thing like that on purpose.
"Slow's the whole trick. Slow, and then you leave it be. "
Albert turned around.