Shakespeare's Kitchen (2 page)

“That’s very kind,” Nathan said.

“We
are
pleased,” Joe said.

“Have you any idea what I went and got this thing
for
? I haven’t had a book in three years.”

“Not
a
book. This is for your life’s work.”

“My oeuvre,” said Nathan and laughed.

“Ah, yes! Our oeuvres!”

“Oeuvres here, oeuvres there, oeuvres, oeuvres everywhere,” said Nathan. They laughed because they were pleased and fond of each other.

“Incidentally,” said Nathan, “nobody has actually informed me that I won the damn thing.”

 

 

Nathan turned into the Bernstines’ drive with time to spare, remembered he’d forgotten the bottle, and backed out. He had to drive way the hell into town, and as he drove, he quarreled with Nancy: it was her assumption that he would not remember that had made him forget. He arrived back in a rage.

“Sorry I’m so late,” Nathan said to Jenny. Nat could refuse to look, but he could not help seeing his wife standing by the fireplace—slender in black, black-stockinged legs. He was shocked that she was so handsome, but Nancy had always been handsome and, in the beginning, very good to him and—what? And nothing. Nathan Cohn had remained Nathan Cohn.

“Not to worry,” Jenny was saying. “Yvette called and will be even later!”

How could anyone be cross with the winner of the Columbia Prize for Poetry? They came and stood around Nat—his hosts, Joe and Jenny Bernstine, Alpha and Alfred Stone, Alvin and Alicia Aye, and Zachariah and Maria Zee. The men embraced and patted Nathan repeatedly on the shoulder and the women who had not been at the institute and had not got to kiss Nathan in the morning did it now.

Nancy’s eyes signaled her husband to come to her by the window. “I call you on the phone. You don’t think it worth your while to inform me that you won the Columbia Prize for Poetry?”

“I didn’t inform you because nobody informed me.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Has anybody called at the house to inform you that I’ve won something?”

“No.”

“Nobody called me.”

“How come everybody knows something of which you and I have not been informed?”

“Search me,” said Nathan. Nathan looked Nancy in the face. He said, “When I walked into this room it came to me that I’ve forgotten what you look like.” An emotion passed over Nancy’s face. If she had been going to speak Nathan preempted her. “The reason I have forgotten what you look like is that I avoid looking at you . . .”

“I’ve noticed,” said Nancy.

“Because,” went on Nathan, “it is unpleasant to be met with a perennial glare of exasperation.”

“Not exasperation. Disappointment.”

“Worse. What is nastier for a man than to be on perpetual notice that he is a disappointment!”

“Such a man might undertake to behave differently.”

“I’m going,” said Nathan, “to behave differently. From here on in I’m not going to let you spoil things. I’m going to enjoy my prize,” and he turned and walked away to join in the welcome of Yvette Gordot, who had brought a late edition of the
Times
. Everybody pored over the piece on the Columbia prizes in which the name of the winner of the prize for poetry was misspelled Nathan H. Cones!

“Why do we think this is me?” said Nathan. “Nobody has officially informed me that I’ve won anything. Maybe it’s not my prize at all?”

Yvette read, “‘The coveted prize for poetry goes to Nathan H. Cones.’
Is
there a poet name of Nathan H. Cones?”

“Not that anybody’s heard of.”

“So, there you are! It’s you!”

“Of course it is! It’s you!” everybody said, and Jenny Bernstine called them in to dinner.

Nathan and Nancy Cohn were seated at opposite ends of the table; their friends did not have to notice that they were not speaking or looking at each other. The talk was of prizes.

“They’re funny things,” Nathan said. “A prize is the world patting you on the back, and your friends patting you for having got patted.”

Joe said, “My mother used to buy us children chocolate when we brought a bad report card home, on the principle that we must need cheering up.”

“She sounds like a nice woman.”

“She was very nice,” said Jenny tenderly.

Alicia Aye said, “Everybody needs cheering up sometime,” to which nobody knew anything to say so nobody said anything until Nat declared himself very thoroughly cheered by his Columbia Prize. “The promise,” he said, and raised his glass, “of money, fame, and the love of beautiful women.”

 

 

Nancy got into the car beside Nathan. “Nat, I’m happy for you. It’s terrific and you deserve it. Shall we have a lovely time in New York?”

Nathan said, “We can’t both go. It’s too expensive.”

“But you’ll have the hotel room,” said Nancy, “and the round-trip isn’t as if it were the West Coast. Doesn’t the prize come with some money?”

“Five thousand dollars,” said Nathan, “which we’re not spending on clothes!”

“I have some money,” said Nancy.

Nathan would have preferred his wife to buy the notion that a sensible economy was to keep her home, but he meant to keep Nancy and her disappointments away from this prize of his. “You’re not coming to New York.”

Nancy was silent. Silently they got out of the car, unlocked the
back door in silence. They stood in the kitchen and Nancy said, “Being your wife has been no bowl of cherries, but it’s had its compensations. I’m not a poet or a scholar . . .” Here Nat laughed, but Nancy was going to say her say. “Without you I wouldn’t be at Concordance, wouldn’t have our friends, wouldn’t have gone on the junket to the White House. So, if there’s any fun going to happen, I’m going to get a piece of it. I’m coming with you.”

“I can’t stop you from going anywhere you please, but I don’t have to talk to you.”

“That’s true,” said his wife, “you don’t have to talk to me.” After a moment she said, “You are a louse, Nathan.”

“True,” said Nathan.

 

 

Nat put his suitcase in the trunk and shut it. Nancy had to come round the driver’s side, open the door, reach across Nat’s lap to take the key out of the ignition so that she could unlock the trunk and put her suitcase in. She shut the trunk, got into the passenger seat and handed Nat the keys without a word. Nat took them without a word.

Celie had booked adjacent places for them, but Nat went and sat in an empty seat in the bulkhead. In New York he was among the first passengers to leave the plane and Nancy saw nothing of him in the airport. She took a cab to the hotel. The beds were twin. Nancy hung the evening gown she had borrowed from Jenny Bernstine into the utterly empty closet and lay in a long bath. No bath is as long and luxurious as the bath in a hotel bathroom.

Nancy catapulted into the New York street. Let the heart be breaking, let life’s hope of prosperous love be draining drop by drop, Fifty-seventh Street on a clear June day is a turn-on. Nancy Cohn walked down Fifth Avenue with the noon crowd, and the rich old women and the working young women wore their clothes with style that, high or low, had an idea behind it.

Nathan’s cab set him down amid the noise and to-do at the foot of the gangway to the Crewbergs’ yacht, water-lapped, beflagged, garlanded—a floating party. Thousands of little lights swung their gentle halos in the blue air. The bluish air. Grayish-blue air? Smoke blue, except smoky was what it wasn’t. Electric-blue air? Poetry’s business is to name what the language has not identified and has no ready words for: what’s the blue moment that a summer’s day holds against the oncoming dark? This festive dark. Every porthole was lit. Nat thought he made out scraps—wraiths—of internal music.

Nathan Cohn joined the end of the queue and set the suitcase he had been lugging all day down on the corn of a stout woman in jeans, who yelped. “Sorry,” Nat said. “I’m sorry!”

The stout woman’s tall friend said, “That’s—what was her name—Lana Turner, is who that is. I thought she was dead?”

“Jesus god,” the woman with the corn said, “That looks like—that
is
Redford!”

It came to Nathan that the reason he was getting no closer to the entrance of the gangway, up which moved the evening-dressed people, was that he had got himself ensconced behind the police barrier with the gawkers. Nat picked his suitcase up and said, “I’m supposed to be inside. Sorry.”

Nathan set his foot on red carpet wishing he had Nancy’s eye here to catch. He felt the gawks on his old mackintosh. A bottleneck at the entrance gave him a chance to put his suitcase down. Nathan peeled the coat off the rented tux he had got his regrettably heavy person into with maximum—with memorable—difficulty in an undersized stall in the men’s toilet at the Forty-second Street library. The young woman with the clipboard was probably pretty when she wasn’t so harried. She looked down her roster and up it and back down. She asked Nathan if he had RSVP’d his invitation.

“No,” Nathan said, “because I never
got
an invitation.”

The girl looked at him. She might be said to be giving him a look which was not pretty.

Nat said, “I’m one of the prizewinners—the prize for poetry. Nathan Cohn.”

The girl turned away—looking for a bouncer? This was the fortunate moment when Barret Winburg, an old New York acquaintance of Nat’s, stepped on board. Barret, the winner of the prize for fiction, had his name promptly identified in its alphabetical place on the roster and vouched for Nathan Cohn’s not only being Nathan Cohn, but being indeed the winner of the prize for poetry. “And long overdue, too,” Barret told the girl. “You’re looking at a poet as good as the best or better, who might well be
the
poet of our generation.”

“Jeez,” Nat said, “I just wish I were sure I’m
the
Nathan Cohn.”

The girl, relieved, smiled prettily and pointed the two prize-winners toward a table where they must, please, pick up their name tags. Nat had cause to be sorry he hadn’t stuck with Barret. He’d asked to be shown to the cloakroom, where he stowed his mackintosh and suitcase. By the time he got to the table, Barret was nowhere in sight. Unwilling to hassle the two smiling, middle-aged volunteers, one in pink, one in silver, he accepted the name tag that read “Nathan H. Cones” and carried it round the corner, where a trio of talented, tuxedoed youngsters from Julliard were playing Mozart. Nat took the card out of its plastic and, using the wall as support, wrote NATHAN COHN on the back, returned it to its holder and pinned it on his lapel.

Nat walked into glamour. Mozart dropped gracefully away before a jazz combo at the foot of a stair. The smallest, blackest of the three musicians exposed his throat and blew a long, high note of unregenerate and seditious joy. Neither the laughing, slender couple, who skittered by, nor the glittering old woman, who passed Nat on the bright stair, looked like writers. The rich people.

Nathan trailed his hand along a gleaming banister of rubbed wood. The brass fittings flashed needle points of light. In a white-and-crimson space he was offered champagne. A waiter put a glass in Nathan’s hand. How, if Nancy’s name wasn’t on the roster, would she make it on board? Where’d Barret got to? The impressive, unsmiling man with his back against the wall had nobody to talk to, either—one of the newer poets Nat hadn’t met? Oughtn’t two lone poets make common cause against fortune and indifference? Nat took a swallow of his drink, turned to the unsmiling man and said, “Before I moved to Connecticut, I couldn’t have walked into a New York party without knowing two-thirds of the guests. Eight years change the scene. Or are these the rich people?”

The man did not smile, but, in response to an infinitesimal beeping, produced a walkie-talkie from behind his back, brought it to his lips, and, speaking low, said, “Not on the roster? What does she say her name is? Hold her there, I’ll be right down. Excuse me,” he said to Nathan, and made for the stairs.

Nat opened the nearest door into a mauve bathroom. The stool was marble, the lid rosewood. Nat sat on it and sipped his champagne. The flusher was a 14-carat gold dolphin.

Nathan walked down another stairway, looked through a glass wall and there they were—the beautiful women and the famous people—Q and X and Y, and Winterneet. Wasn’t that where Nathan was supposed to be? He approached his face to the glass, he knocked on the glass, on the other side of which Winterneet’s back was turned to Nathan. Winterneet was talking with two beautiful women, one black on black, one white and gold, and sweet and twenty, both. The black one had eyes so lustrous they looked as if they had been shined to a high gloss with an extra layer of polish. The other one had pale hair cut short and ruler straight, which swung in a single movement with the movement of her head. Her head kept moving on the other side of the glass, on a level with Nathan’s eye. Nathan could not hear what Winterneet
was saying that made the two young women’s mouths open. They laughed with their tongues and their white teeth. Nathan saw, behind the glass, in the far corner, Nancy laughing with Barret Winburg, and here came the young person with the clipboard calling Mr. Nathan H. Cones? “Is Mr. Cones here, please?”