Language Arts (16 page)

Up next is a stack of postcards from Abe Kaparsky, one of my new crop of sixth-graders. From what I can tell so far, he has chosen to write to a long-deceased hamster named Houdini.

I mean, really: Who wouldn't love getting mail like this?

The phone rang. Charles let the machine pick up.

Hello, Mr. Marlow, sorry to trouble you so late, but this is Mike Bernauer from the
Seattle Times,
calling again to see if you got my earlier messages . . .

Charles muted the sound, turned off his office light, and headed to bed.

My father has always been deeply comforted by the sensory delights of office supplies—the smells of different kinds of paper; the feel of pens in hand, their varying weights, textures, mechanisms; the degree to which writing implements embrace or resist contact with the page. He's savored the dense resinous scent of wooden pencils, enjoying an across-time kinship with Henry David Thoreau for his entrepreneurial efforts on behalf of that homely instrument. He's relished the look of corrugated, flat-roofed tunnels formed by lengths of conjoined staples, the smooth, streamlined elegance of paper clips.

His well-stocked home-office cupboard provided my brother with some of his favorite playthings when he was small; one of Cody's early pastimes was building whimsical, rainbow-colored structures out of cellophaned stacks of Post-its mortared together with double-sided tape. He also loved arranging and rearranging unsharpened Ticonderoga no. 2s in intricate patterns on the floor.

Around the time of my birth, my brother (who had not yet lost his fine-motor skills) had begun to design and manufacture an impressive line of paper-clip jewelry.

On our last day at the hospital, before I was released into my parents' custody—

—Cody solemnly presented our father with a special gift. That was the moment he permanently retired his crucifix and began wearing an intricately assembled, beaded paper-clip necklace next to his heart. He never takes it off.

Should anyone ask, he'd testify to feeling far more solaced and protected by the powers of his Cody original than he ever felt by that fuddy-duddy symbol of Christ's suffering.

•♦•

It would be logical to trace a straight line from Charles's affection for office supplies to his life as a teacher. He often wished he could say that he'd felt called to his profession, that the idea of nurturing young minds came to him early and unbidden, but in truth it was a simple question from Alison on the night they met—followed by a conversation with a friend—that nudged him in that direction. Not toward becoming a Language Arts teacher specifically, but toward the radical notion that another version of himself—updated, improved, rebooted—might yet be possible, that his life story wasn't over yet.

He was thirty-five years old and happily living the unexamined life of a country-club bartender, work for which he'd always felt temperamentally well suited and to which he was still occasionally tempted to return.

But it wasn't just temperament that predisposed Charles to success as a mixologist; it was his early apprenticeship to Mrs. Eloise Braxton, Palmer penmanship zealot. By the time he was ten, Charles was able to execute a series of repetitive movements consistently, efficiently, and in a relaxed manner over long periods, often while experiencing substantial anxiety. Eight years later, casting about for a job that could keep him well stocked with weed while his parents funded four years of college and living expenses, he'd discovered that mixing one cocktail after another for the clientele of a happy-hour rush wasn't all that different from producing a long succession of lowercase
m'
s in the presence of the formidable Mrs. B. It certainly wasn't as stress-inducing.

So after graduating with a major in philosophy and a minor in linguistics, Charles decided that mixology was an excellent career match for both his academic interests and his recreational needs.

Early on the evening of Friday, April 1, 1988, he was sacked out on the sofa, looking forward to spending the weekend reading, watching movies, and smoking dope (his chief downtime occupations for the previous two decades), when the phone rang.

It was Zach Dennehy, the country club's head bartender, asking if there was any way Charles could fill in for him the next two days.

“I hate to ask, Charlie,” he said, “especially on such short notice, but I'm kind of in a bind.” He sounded terrible.

“Absolutely. No problem.” Zach never missed a shift, never called in sick. “What's up?”

“Oh, it's stupid, really. I'm in the hospital.”

“What happened? Are you okay?”

“Yeah, it's just that I finally went to see the doctor about this damn cough. They took a couple of x-rays and guess what—I've got pneumonia.”

“Holy shit.” Charles's heart gave an arrhythmic jump, and he experienced an odd, ill-defined panic that did not have the familiar feel of pot-induced paranoia.

In spite of the seven-year age difference (Zach was in his early forties), Charles considered Zach his best friend. They had a fair amount in common, neither of them aspirants to anything beyond earning a generous salary plus tips. As bartenders, they conversed with interesting, successful, and, for the most part, pleasant people, including attractive single women who were occasionally interested in commitment-free sex. Their camaraderie was founded on shared identities as affable, intelligent, middle-class slackers who'd successfully infiltrated Seattle's social stratosphere but had no ambition to rise through its ranks, much less attain full membership.

“Listen,” Charles said, detaching himself from the couch and shrugging into his jacket. “Why don't I come over?” Zach's gestalt was of the Clint Eastwood variety, lean, laconic, attractively rough-around-the-edges, and, above all,
invincible;
Charles's mental picture of him—alone and bedridden in a hospital room on a Friday night—violated world order in a deeply disturbing way. “Where are you? I'll get some takeout. I could even bring the VCR and we could watch a video.”

“Nah, thanks, I'm okay, really, but thanks. I'm kind of worn-out. I'm just gonna get some rest, take advantage of the weekend off.” He coughed hoarsely. “You should rest up too. You'll need it.”

Zach went on to remind Charles about the Stanford/Bettencourt wedding reception, a supersize fête scheduled the next day from four until midnight in the Broadmoor's largest party room. It would be a huge amount of work, pouring and mixing drinks, supervising two rookie bartenders, and overseeing a cadre of over-hire waitstaff who'd be roaming the room serving pre-dinner hors d'oeuvres.

“I can't believe Meghan Stanford is getting married,” Zach said. “I was working poolside the summer she had her first swimming lesson; she must have been two, three. She was a funny little kid, comical, I mean, her daddy's girl from the very beginning.” Zach adopted a mock grandfatherly tone, something he did whenever he started sounding like a senior citizen. “Of course, my son, that was
way
before your time.”

“Right,” Charles said, trying to laugh, sinking back down on the sofa without taking off his coat. Suddenly, he felt exhausted. “Hey, are you sure this whole hospital story isn't an April Fools' joke?”

Zach emitted a single, hollow sound, more cough than chuckle. “Ah, bro. I wish. Good luck tomorrow. Let me know how it goes.”

That was how, on the chilly first weekend of April 1988, Charles ended up managing the no-host bar for the Stanford/Bettencourt wedding reception. Among the three hundred and fifty guests was a twenty-five-year-old law student named Alison Forché.

•♦•

Around seven thirty, there was enough of a lull that Charles felt comfortable entrusting the bar to his less experienced colleagues, a pair of overcaffeinated, undernourished graduate students with the hollow-eyed seriousness Charles associated with overachievers (pity the poor kids): Pre-Law Patrick and Biochemistry Kate.

He left a message at the hospital for Zach letting him know that everything was going well (a nurse informed him with obvious irritation that the patient was already asleep), and then—because he considered it important to enforce a strict boundary between his dual identities (Charles the Pothead and Charles the Barkeep)—he removed his monogrammed, country-club-issue jacket and took a brisk walk to the sixteenth green to smoke a joint.

By seven forty-five—as the toasts were wrapping up and the cake-cutting was about to begin—Charles had taken a piss, freshened his breath with mouthwash, renewed the whites of his eyes with Visine, and resumed his place behind the bar before any of the guests noticed he'd been gone. At least, that's what he thought.

After announcing his return to his battle-weary subordinates—neither of them had worked an event of this size before, and both of them looked exhausted—Charles added, “Why don't you take a break for half an hour, get some dinner. I can handle things.”

“Are you sure?” Patrick asked.

“Tell you what,” Charles went on. “Take forty-five minutes. Just come back when you hear the band start up, okay?”

Kate began gathering up her things with such rapidity and desperation that Charles wondered if she intended to bolt. “Sure,” she blurted. “You bet. Thanks. Bye.”

Reaching for his jacket, Charles noticed what looked like a small handkerchief tucked into the chest pocket. “What's this?”

“One of the waiters left it.” Patrick raised an arm and pointed. “That one. A guest asked him to deliver it to you. See you later.”

It was a gold-lettered cocktail napkin—the first of its kind Charles had seen that day. Supple and soft, feeling more like cloth than paper, it was the same warm persimmon color as the bridesmaids' gowns and had probably cost almost as much:

On the non-lettered side, in black ink, someone had written:

BARTENDING EXAM

1. Name the ingredients in a Moscow mule.

Charles was no graphologist, but given a reasonable-size writing sample, he did have the ability to make assumptions about a person's penmanship background and training. And in the same way that an elocution teacher can detect the slightest trace of a regional accent in even the most neutrally executed speech, Charles could locate vestigial influences in the script of anyone who had come into contact (however briefly) with the penmanship techniques of Austin Norman Palmer.

The woman who wrote this message—and Charles knew it was a woman, not because of the handwriting but because of the perfume—used a combination of print and cursive, a sure sign that she was younger than Charles, schooled at a time when learning cursive was no longer a priority. And yet somewhere along the way she'd been exposed to the Palmer Method; the words
bartending
and
Moscow
made use of Mr. Palmer's distinct, special variants for the letters
g
and
w
located in a terminal position.

Charles perched on a stool behind the bar, assumed the position, and began to write.

2 oz. vodka

It had been years since he'd written with a consciousness of technique—

juice of
½ lime

1 split ginger beer or ale

—and being so out of practice, he was nervous—

Combine and serve in beer mug with two cubes of ice.

—but at least he didn't have to improvise the content of his reply.

Drop in lime shell.

Charles examined his penmanship as if judging a blind submission to the national Palmer system handwriting competition. Muscle memory had served him well; it was an acceptable effort, so he flagged down the waiter Patrick had pointed out and asked him to deliver the napkin to its original sender. Charles tried to follow his figure through the crowd, but there were too many people and the postdinner drink orders were starting to come.