Commuters (7 page)

“Toward the end, Luther let me mess around on my off hours. Obviously, I didn’t have much in the way of ingredients. He did let me use his knives, though. That was huge.”

“Because of rehab. The rules, and so on.”

“Because a chef doesn’t let anyone touch his knives!” It occurred to Avery that Luther himself would have scoffed at the term
chef
. “That’s sacred shit.”

“Boys and their toys,” Nona said. She lay back against a pillow. “So what are you going to do with all that?”

Avery leaned over and licked sugar off one of her palms, chasing it between her fingers with his tongue. “What am I going to do with all what?”

She grabbed his jaw and shook his face gently. “With food. With your cooking. What do you want?”

“You mean, do I have a ‘life plan’ or something?” The words came out harsh and scornful, despite himself.

Nona let go. “Yes, that’s what I mean, shithead.”

“I don’t have that kind of—it’s different for you, with your band. I—”

“That
band
is not what I do. That’s not my real work.” Nona drew herself up, an angry queen.

“Okay, all I meant was—”

“Avery. This is when you say, ‘so what is your real work, Nona?’”

“No, definitely. I mean, yeah. Of course I want to know.”

Nona hesitated.

“Please,” Avery said.

“All right. But you’ll want to back up some.” Avery, confused at first, scooted himself up against the wall on the far side of the bed. Nona closed both eyes and breathed deeply, humming. “Give me a minute, all right? I hate the way it sounds, when I describe it. I’ll just show you.”

He waited. Nona seemed to have gone deep inside herself, the way she sometimes did when they were fucking. Was she meditating? Was she getting ready to levitate? The seconds ticked past, and still she sat there, frowning now, with the effort of those long, thrumming breaths. Avery had no idea what was coming, but he understood two important things: first, that he didn’t care. At all. Anything she wanted to show him, he was open to. The second was that there were few better ways he could think of to spend a silent moment, than sitting here in this bed, across from this woman, strange and glorious and
naked
.

Then she opened her mouth and a blast of sound hit him. It was hard to understand how she had instantly summoned so much noise, or how it had erupted from her without warning, a low-toned foghorn that shifted into a series of undulating cries, before he had a chance to make sense of it. The sounds ping-ponged off the walls, as if Nona propelled each and then caught it—swallowed it—on the rebound. His heart pounded. While she sang—if that was what she was doing—she put her hands on various parts of her body: the sides of her waist, two fingers flat against the base of her throat, and then a fist pressed deeply into the hollow of her ribs. In their lovemaking, of course Avery had already noticed—had closely, carefully noticed—the tiny tattoos sprinkled in clusters of blue and black across Nona’s skin: the whorled fingerprints, the Roman numerals, one silver exclamation point. He hadn’t guessed they might have some other purpose than decoration, but now he saw where she beat gently upon them as a prompt, or a counterpoint, to her singing.

Hard to believe the sheer amount of sound that gushed around him, or how she could erase it all in one instant, the way she did
when the song was finished, although it wasn’t at all clear that what he’d just heard was a song. Avery felt like he’d been schooled. He was chastened, both then and—replaying the moment in his mind—on the train just now pulling into Hartfield. Everything she’d just shown him about desire lit up his own default mode of studied indifference, and now he glimpsed what the opposite looked like.

“Holy shit,” he had said, and Nona laughed. “That was…wow.”

“Wow?”

“Um…” He’d wanted to say something smart, something that would match the intensity of her performance. Something that would make him her equal. “I’ve never heard anything like that.”

“I don’t doubt it. It’s part of this longer piece I haven’t finished yet.”

Avery wanted to know everything. What was it called? Where did she learn to do that? Who
was
she? But instead of saying a thing, all he’d done was reach for her.

“Do you have any idea how much you stand to inherit?”

Jerry’s voice boomed in the study thick with heavy furniture, dark drapes, and whirling dust motes. Avery blinked; suddenly he was very, very tired. He’d hardly been in the house—Jesus, this house was huge—for more than a few minutes. Jerry’s wife (he couldn’t think of what to call her) had ushered him right upstairs, where his grandfather was waiting behind a desk, like he was there for an interview. And it turned out that maybe he was.

“Ballpark figure, you mean?” Avery tried a smile. “Possibly…enough to buy a ballpark?”

“There are two things a man should never joke about, and one of them is money.”

Give me a break,
Avery thought. He was here, wasn’t he? He showed up, did his duty, was here for the chatting and the visiting and this whole forced
getting-to-know-you
scheme, so…
Come on, old man. Ease up.
Avery’s memories of his grandfather were few and scattered: endless childhood Christmas dinners, getting dragged to some big award presentation, watching Jerry on TV. Then he was in high school, caught up by those first waves of drinking and snorting, and what did grandparents have to do with anything? But now, in the hot study, he suddenly remembered one other night, just after his father had left them, when his grandfather had put his hand on his head—the two of them alone in the foyer—and called Avery’s dad a
low-down bastard
. Did that really happen? Avery had been barely seven when his parents split. Still, it lingered like the truth: the weight of that hand on his head, the whispered, confiding tone, man to man.
Low-down bastard.

Avery snorted, thinking about it.

“What’s that?” Jerry said. “Something funny?”

“Nothing.”

Through the big windows behind the desk, he could see workers moving around the yard. The
ping
of tools—sledgehammer on a metal stake—and the shouts from the men drifted faintly up into this stuffy room. Avery fidgeted in his high-backed chair. Hard to believe he’d traded Nona’s bed for
this
.

“Whatever happened to college? Didn’t like hitting the books? Wasn’t for you?”

“That’s right.” Jerry waited, but Avery stuck it out. He saw his grandfather soften a little.

“I’m not much for schooling, myself. When I was your age—what are you now, twenty-three?”

“Twenty.”

“By the time I was twenty-two I had been to war. And back, though no real credit to me there. Then, in three more years I had founded my first company.”

Avery nodded. He thought there was much more polite interest in his expression than the matter warranted; the fact of Nona—Nona in bed—made him indulgent.

“That was with your great-uncle, my brother. Frank was his name. He was two years older than me, but a lot of folks would have guessed the opposite. He was a joker, Frank. A lot like you, maybe.”

“Is that him?” Avery pointed to a small framed black-and-white photograph on the wall, of a stern young man in a bowler hat posed in front of a snowy brick wall. Jerry twisted himself around with effort.

“No, that’s my father. Only picture I have of him. Here’s Frank.” Jerry handed Avery another frame, this one from his desk, and Avery glanced quickly at the image of two brothers, each with one arm around the other’s shoulders. The shorter man was clearly Jerry, bullish and thickset. Frank was taller, a bit lanky, and he was grinning at something happening outside the frame, while Jerry stared dead straight at the camera.

“Frank was a college man. For a while. He did two years at Notre Dame, and we got a lot of Chicago contracts out of that. We never said he didn’t have the degree. We just never said.”

Avery set the photograph carefully back on the desk and turned it to face his grandfather. There was a resemblance in that photo that unnerved him. He scanned the rest of the photographs on the desk and realized, even through the faded, out-of-focus images,
that there had been—that there
were
—other men who looked like him. Who were related to him. It sparked a small shock of recognition, these old pictures, one that changed the old man sitting across from him:
there is blood here.

“Frank liked a good prank,” Jerry was saying. “One night in the dining hall, he and two fraternity brothers came in late, banged around loudly, pretending to be drunk. Everyone was shocked. Cleared out of their way. Well, the three of them sit down at a table and start to eat noisily, attracting lots of attention. Now, one fellow had somehow hidden a bag of beef stew inside his shirt, and all of a sudden he pushes away all his dishes and starts moaning, ‘I’m sick, I think I’m gonna be sick.’”

Avery nodded, as he seemed expected to do.

“Then—whack!” Jerry thumped at his chest with the flat of his hand. “He spills it all over the table and makes a big show of getting sick. There’s a horrified silence. Frank and the other fraternity man call out, ‘It’s all right! Don’t worry, folks, we’ll take care of it!’ Then they picked up their spoons and ate up every bite of that stew.”

“Oh, God,” Avery said, and laughed for real. “They were legends, right?”

“Just about,” Jerry said. He straightened the photo of Frank, aligning it with all the other frames. “That was one of his favorite stories, for years and years.”

But the story, and the awkward silence that followed, brought a new feeling into the room.

Avery said slowly, “So I’ll miss out on all that. College hijinks, and stuff.” He waited to see what Jerry would say. Was this little tale about drinking more loaded than it seemed? Would he now be subjected to probing questions about his city activities and an
old-school lecture about sobriety? Obviously, his grandfather had to know about his stint in rehab, although they’d never directly discussed it. They’d never directly spoken about anything, Avery thought, that he could remember. At least since that childhood moment in the foyer.
Low-down bastard.

Avery set his face, hard and still, but Jerry was frowning at something else, and didn’t answer right away.

“What?” he said. “So, you been talking to your mother about all this?”

“About what?”

“TrevisCorp. What she’s up to. She tell you to come by and make nice? She figures you have a better shot now?”

“I don’t really know what you’re talking about, Grandad.”

“You don’t.” Jerry fixed him with a look. “What did she tell you to say to me?”

Avery was baffled. “Nothing, she just—” Wasn’t he
supposed
to be here? Wasn’t that the deal?

“Eight hundred, forty-five thousand.” Jerry rested his elbows on the chair’s arms, and his hands on his stomach.

“What?”

“That’s what goes to you, when I die. Doesn’t include your shares of stock, the futures, or various other holdings. But that’s the picture as it stands right now.”

“Okay. But…that’s a long way off. Right?” Avery wasn’t sure if he was supposed to say thank you, or what. “Maybe I should get going.”

“This all gives me an idea,” Jerry said. “You and I should get to know each other, even if your mother—I mean, especially since your mother…”

Avery nodded, half out of his chair. “Sure. That sounds great.” He wasn’t sure what Grandad was talking about, but his ever-closer exit was buoying his spirits.

“Talking about Frank, to you just now. Well, it’s a little…” His grandfather paused. Avery sat down again. “It brings me back. I’d forgotten that, about the beef stew.”

“Good story.” There was a steady drilling noise coming from outside the window, but Avery couldn’t see the workers anymore. He felt a surprise surge of empathy and goodwill for this older man. Its driving force was Nona, although in the moment Avery could only half recognize that. Suddenly, he found himself wanting to be a comfort to Jerry. Suddenly, he wanted to be
there for him
. “And that other thing? You know, the two things a man can’t joke about?” Jerry was blank. “Women. Right? I mean, it has to be.”

“Women,” Jerry echoed, agreeing. He let a small grin slip free.

This is good,
Avery thought.
I can do this. Yeah: we’ll be all close and shit.
Now just get him back to Nona.

Then Jerry thumped the desk. “All right then.” Avery realized they had just sealed some kind of deal. “So, we’ll get started. Same time next week?”

“Uh—actually I work, and Sundays are usually pretty busy, so…”

“Your office is open on weekends?”

“It’s a restaurant. Called Pita Pie. On lower Broadway.” Each thing he said made Jerry look less pleased. “I’m doing some prep cooking there.”

“Well, it doesn’t have to be on the weekend. My schedule’s wide
open now, as you can see.” In response, Avery smiled weakly. “You can call me and say what day’s best. And bring some kind of recorder.”

“Recorder?”

“Tape recorder, something like that. For a long time, I’ve been wanting to get some things down on paper. About the company—about my life. It’ll be important for you, down the road.”

“Oh,” Avery said unhappily.

“You can type up whatever we record and we’ll just take it week by week. All right, then?” Jerry slapped the desk, both hands.

“I don’t have a computer, or anything like that.”

“What?”

“It’s true.” Avery feverishly hoped this would be a big enough obstacle to the whole
you-can-type-it-up
plan, but Jerry was opening a desk drawer. He watched his grandfather write out a check and slide it across the desk to him. Twenty-five hundred.

“That should buy one of those small digital recorders, too. Like journalists use. Let me know what day next week.” Jerry walked Avery to the door, and nodded him toward the stairs. Avery was still holding the blue piece of paper that said
$2500
. Just to the right of his own name.