Shakespeare's Kitchen Read online

  “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 prizewinners 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?”


  “Cohn,” said Nathan. “Nathan Cohn.”

  “Dinner is served,” the girl said, “and Alice is going to usher you.” It was the golden darling who took Nathan’s arm. Nathan experienced a small thrill of horror. He thought, I’m not up for this. This needs preparation. Young Alice hurried Nathan along at a smart pace. Nat, galumphing beside her, glimpsed the pure throat, the cheek outlined with a finely furred halo of light. Don’t, prayed Nathan Cohn, let me fall in love between here and “Where,” he asked the girl, “are you taking me?”

  “Your table.”

  “Quick! Tell me what they’re going to do to me!”

  “They have a prizewinner for every table of twelve. Your hostess is Madame Forage.”

  “Wait one little old moment,” said Nathan. “Is this a fundraiser, or what?”

  “I guess maybe how they pay for the prizes? Each table,” the girl spoke backwards as she preceded him up yet another stair, “has got a theme, a color scheme, and a logo. Your hostess is French, so you are red-white-and-blue, and your logo …”

  “Don’t tell me! Wait wait wait wait wait wait! The Eiffel Tower!”

  “Right!” cried young Alice.

  “I’m not sure,” worried Nathan, “that there’s anything left of my poor old French!”

  “She’s deaf anyway. But!” said Alice, “on your other side you get to sit next to Betsy Morrowell!”

  “I do?” said Nathan. “Who is Betsy Morrowell?”

  “Betsy Morrowell!” said Nathan’s usher. “You don’t know Betsy Morrowell? Don’t you watch TV?”

  “Never miss my soap opera,” Nathan said stoutly.

  “And you never saw Betsy’s Bazaar? It’s been around for absolutely ever! I’ve been watching since I was a child!”

  “That long!” said Nathan.

  “My mom let me watch with my supper.”

  “Brief me! What’s it about?”

  “It’s about this woman. Her husband gets sent to I guess some place like Arabia, I guess, as an ambassador or something. Betsy gets bored with ordering servants around, so she sets up a booth in the bazaar and all the things that happen every week with a different tourist.”

  “I think I … I do remember,” said Nathan.

  They stepped out into a dazzle of flowers and lights and Handel’s Water Music. Across the black river on the left moved the lights of New Jersey, and Manhattan’s Upper West Side on the right. Alice walked Nathan through a group of mimes. One knelt and bent her charming head over Nathan’s hand; one threw a garland of flowers over his shoulders. “Thank you! Thank you!” Nathan said to them. People sitting at a great round table rose at his approach. They applauded. Nathan, who had meant to continue cool and snotty to the end, felt his throat constrict. Out of a centerpiece of red roses grew the Eiffel Tower made of white sweetheart roses and blue ribbon. They seated themselves. The card at Nathan’s place read NATHAN H. CONES. “Well, this is very brilliant!” Nathan said to the noble-looking, very old woman on his right. He assisted her liver-spotted, gnarled, beringed hands in the unwrapping of the red-white-and-blue favor. She held it up: a lipstick in the shape of the Eiffel Tower. She pointed to the favor on Nathan’s golden plate. He unwrapped a white Eiffel Tower-shaped mechanical pencil with a little lever that could make it write in blue and in red. The large, blond male on madame’s other side was shouting French into her ear, and she turned to him.

  Nathan was grateful to young Alice. He could imagine himself asking his partner on the left, “Haven’t we met somewhere?” She looked familiar. “Did you and I go to Music and Arts together? Kenyon College? Not Kenyon. Have you been to Concordance?” She was a good-looking, bright redheaded woman between twenty-eight and fifty, with powerful jaws and more teeth than ordinary people carry inside their mouths. It was a brave and competent face. Nathan perfectly remembered watching her perform an athletic feat of slapstick. Nat remembered respecting or, remembering, respected the decades of work behind the mastery with which the actress had mugged and delivered her silly lines. Here she sat, next to Nathan, and seemed not to be going to waste her smile on his occasion. Nathan could imagine her life crowded with men and occasions. She had the right to look—irritated was what she looked, though not, probably, with him. Nathan didn’t think she was sufficiently conscious of his person to be irritated by it. She appeared to be irritated by her salad, at which she kept poking her fork. Nathan desired to impinge, to become real to Betsy Morrowell. While he busied himself in the formulation of something clever and ever so mildly impertinent with which to startle Betsy Morrowell’s attention, his eyes rested on his wife. Nancy sat on the far side of the Eiffel Tower. The man on Nancy’s left had turned so completely toward her, his back was turned against the woman in mauve who sat on his other side and looked cross, poor thing, unable to impinge.

  Betsy Morrowell suddenly said, “I loathe mimes.”

  Nathan laughed. “I don’t think,” he said, “that I have ever met anyone with enough passion on the subject of mimes to loathe them!”

  “They’re elite!” Betsy Morrowell said, showing her teeth.

  “Why should their being elite bother you?” Nathan asked her.

  “Mimes!” spat Betsy. “How many people even know mimes even exist?”

  “I see! I see! I’ll tell you what I see,” said Nathan, “and it’s sort of wonderful: It bugs you that the few people who know that mimes exist mightn’t know that you exist. Just as it bugs me that the masses of people who watch you don’t know I exist!”

  Here Betsy Morrowell looked at Nat. “What do you mean?” she said.

  Nat saw Alice coming to fetch him and said, “I’ve got to go get me my prize. Don’t let it bug you—it’s all of five thousand bucks.” Nathan Cohn and Betsy Morrowell looked past each other’s eyes and their two smiles curled away from their teeth.

  The exchange had not been even. When Betsy Morrowell’s manager, in the limousine on the drive home, asked her who she’d sat next to, she frowned and said, “Some man, I think.” But the Columbia Prizewinning poet, Nathan Cohn, mentioned to Celie, at the institute on Monday morning, that he’d sat next to that woman on TV—what’s her name? Morrowell. He said he hadn’t even known who she was. He said it in the kitchen to Joe’s assistant, Betty, and again to Mrs. Coots when she came to do out his office. He told Ilka Weisz at the Bernstines’ reception for the new director, Leslie Shakespeare, that he had sat next to Betsy Morrowell on the Crewbergs’ yacht, and that he hadn’t known who she was, and blushed when he remembered that he had told it to her on the Bernstines’ porch when she came to be interviewed for the junior appointment at the Concordance Institute.

  Let Nathan explain and rant and demand to see the manager, the bank would not understand, would not cash, would not allow Nathan Cohn to deposit a check for $5,000 made out to Nathan H. Cones. The manager advised him to return it to the organization and have them issue him a check with his name correctly entered. This Nathan did. He waited a week and a day and then he called. He explained about the check. The girl said, “Let me switch you to Accounts.” Accounts had an English voice. “Mixed you up, did we? Oh dear!” She thought she remembered sending this check up to Mr. Block, who was out to lunch, but would call as soon as he got back if Mr. Cones would leave his number.

  “Not Cones!” Nathan said. “Cohn. I think, maybe I better call him.” Nathan called and explained. Mr. Block said he would look into it, give him till Monday. “I’ll even give him till Tuesday!” Nat said to Nancy, but Tuesday he was doing an out-of-town reading, Wednesday he plain forgot, and when he called Thursday, Accounts said, “Fact of the matter is half our files are on the twenty-first floor. We’re in the middle of moving and everything’s a bit of a shambles.”

  “What’s your name, please?” it occurred to Nathan to ask her. It was Joyce. “Well, Joyce, you’ve been very helpful. Short of getting my money I’m glad to know it’s a shambles that’s holding it up.”

  “You give us a week to get ourselves sorted o
ut,” said Joyce.

  “They’re moving to the twenty-first floor,” Nathan reported to Nancy.

  Nat gave them two weeks. Accounts asked him what she could do for him. Nat said, “Could I speak to Mr. Block, please?” Mr. Block was in a meeting, but if he would leave his number, Mr. Block would call as soon as he got out. “Could I speak to Joyce, please?”

  “Joyce is no longer with us,” said Accounts.

  “What is your name?” Nathan asked the girl, and her name was Tracy. Nathan explained to Tracy, who said, “Hold on.”

  “What’s happening?” Nancy asked Nathan.

  “I’m holding on,” said Nathan.

  Tracy came back and said, “We don’t have a check for Nathan Cohn. We have a check for Mr. Nathan H. Cones.”

  “Thanks,” said Nathan, “I better speak to Mr. Block.”

  When Nathan called some minutes before five, Mr. Block had left for the day. The following morning Nathan logged the time, 10:14, when Mr. Block had not yet come in, in the margin of the long poem on which he was then at work. Later he kept a regular notebook logging the day and hour when Mr. Block was lunching with a client; was out sick; had returned but was in conference in the president’s office but would call back if Mr. Cones would leave his number.

  “CohnCohnCohnCohn,” shouted Nathan.

  Nathan called Winterneet and asked him if he had heard of a poet name of Nathan H. Cones.

  “No,” said Winterneet. “Is he any good?”

  “I think he won my Columbia Prize,” said Nathan.

  “Speaking of Columbia Prizes,” said Winterneet, “didn’t poor Barret Winburg get one the same year as you?”

  “Why ‘poor’ Winburg? Didn’t he get his five thousand?”

  “Dead, isn’t he?”

  “Dead! Winburg? No way!” Nathan meant, How could Winburg be dead and I not know it! Nathan was tremendously upset.

  Winterneet said, “I thought I read an obituary in the Times a couple of weeks back, but my memory is like the old gray mare: she ain’t what she used to be.”