Still Life With Bread Crumbs: A Novel Read online

  It had turned out that climbing a tree was more difficult than it looked. It was harder than warrior pose in yoga, than teaser in Pilates, than the elliptical or the Reformer. Rebecca thought that if no one had thought of it yet, soon enough someone in the city would spearhead a craze for tree climbing in Central and Prospect Parks, and it would become the talk of every cocktail party: have you tried that large oak by the Sheep Meadow? Oh, it’s completely changed my body.

  “You need a boost?” Jim Bates had asked.

  “I’m fine,” Rebecca said as she scrambled inelegantly onto the lowest branch, which was not low enough.

  He’d been parked in front of the cottage when she returned from her morning hike the week before. Sarah had said he was replacing the slate roof on an old church in Connecticut. “The man works!” Sarah said. The part in his pale hair was sunburnt.

  “I’ve got a proposition for you,” he’d said. “The state wildlife guy wants to put together something to get more money for his agency, and he thinks he’ll do better if I make up some maps and he’s got some pictures to go with them. I said I knew somebody who might take some pictures.”

  “Does he know who I am?” Rebecca had asked, and then felt foolish.

  “I just said I knew someone with experience. They’ll pay two hundred dollars a day. The catch is, I can only do it weekends because of this roofing job I’m doing.”

  The catch is, Rebecca thought, that that’s less than what I used to spend on car service. One way. It’s less than I once spent on film for a shoot when I still used film. Less than I would pay for an art school assistant on a busy day.

  “Will the rights to the photographs revert to me after they use them?”

  “Oh, man, you got me. Want me to ask and let you know?”

  She thought for a moment. 5800. 1000. 200. 200. “I’ll do it,” she said.

  Sitting in a tree, in a tree stand, a term of art with which she was also unfamiliar. “Did you build the tree house?” she had asked, her feet finally on solid ground, no longer feeling for purchase on a branch, and he’d laughed. “You’re not a hunter,” he said.

  The tree was at the edge of a small clearing with a stream running through it. A muddy trampled patch by a stand of rocks showed where the deer came to drink and then cross into the deeper woods. There were faded folding canvas stools in the tree stand. “Sometimes you have to sit here for hours before you get your buck,” Jim Bates said. “You might as well get comfortable.”

  “You wouldn’t attempt to shoot a deer while we’re waiting for the birds?”

  He smiled again. “Hunting season starts the Monday after Thanksgiving. You should figure on staying inside that week as much as you can, and wearing orange if you have to go out. Do you eat venison? I can bring you some.”

  Rebecca had never eaten venison, but her first thought was that it was free food, and her second that it was uniquely humiliating that that was the first thought to cross her mind. She brought her lips together and nodded. “That would be nice,” she said.

  “Don’t do me any favors,” he said.

  She felt herself redden, embarrassed. “No, I would appreciate that.”

  “Some people make it through the whole winter without buying meat at the market,” he said, standing up and lifting his tracking gun to the window of sky he’d created by sawing off a large branch. Rebecca rose next to him. There was a high cry, a single harsh complaining note, and a hawk soared over the trees on the other side of the clearing. Both of them pointed and shot.

  “I’m not very good at this sort of photography,” Rebecca said.

  He wrapped his hand around her arm, and Rebecca drew back slightly. But she realized he had only wanted her to keep still for a moment. The first cry faded, another grew louder, and the hawk landed hard by the stream. It turned its head as though it was looking at them. As she trained her camera on the bird it occurred to her that she had known much of life in two dimensions: raccoon, eagle. She had learned to know what things looked like but not what they really amounted to. This three-dimensional life was completely different. The hawk looked her right in the eye and it was as though she was seeing the bird, really seeing it, for the first time.

  Jim Bates scribbled in a notebook. “That one’s already tagged,” he said, reading his notes. “Male red-tailed hawk, at least three years old. Now we’ve got a picture of him, too. The state wildlife people are getting their money’s worth.”

  There was not much to see or photograph during the rest of the morning. The same hawk circled back. A Cooper’s hawk flew over. “Chicken hawks, they used to call them,” Jim said. “I don’t know why they picked on those guys, since all hawks will take a chicken, usually without even slowing down.”

  Rebecca looked at her camera. The Cooper’s hawk had an intricate geometric pattern to its dusky feathers, and in the photographs you could see it perfectly. Once again she had the odd sense that she had been missing something, seeing the world flat when everything was rounded. Sitting quietly in the tree stand, she wondered if that was what moved her about the cross photographs, that the crosses themselves and the suggestion of the person who’d placed them were more than images, more like a story. Maybe that was what people had seen in the Kitchen Counter series, a story. But it was their story, not her own.

  A big bird Jim thought was an osprey passed overhead, but there was no warning and neither of them got a clear shot. They shared some scones and a thermos of coffee. It was the first time she had had coffee with sugar since college. It was the first time she understood how the people who now lived around her seemed to feel about their surroundings. From up in the tree stand she felt as if she owned all of this, the land, the trees, the big stones caressed by the water of the stream, the birds, the deer, the squirrels, the chipmunks. You were just far enough above it to feel as though you held sway. Up in a plane you felt as though you weren’t even part of the land, the small commas of blue swimming pool, the big rectangles of cornfield, the flat Monopoly board vistas of housing developments. On the ground you felt like nothing, like just another bit of it all. But up here, you felt like you were in it, like you owned it even if you had no idea who did.

  “Who owns this land?” she asked.

  “The water company,” Jim said.

  A couple hours in he put his hand over his heart and took out a cellphone. He peered at the screen, then muttered, “Sorry,” and turned his back. It was like being in an airplane before takeoff and pretending not to hear the phone conversation of the passenger in the next seat. “That’s because you leave the windows open,” he said at one juncture, and later, “I can’t get down there right now, but I’ll get there before dinner and take care of it. Just close the bathroom door. He’s more afraid of you than you are of him.”

  “Your wife?” Rebecca said after he hung up.

  “My sister. I’m not married. Not anymore. You?”

  “If I were married it would be a little peculiar if I were living here by myself.”

  “My father used to say the world is full of peculiar,” he said. “I think we’ll call it a day.”

  “I’ve only got good photographs of two birds,” she said.

  “They’re paying you by the day, not by the bird,” he said.

  Getting down was, in some fashion, more difficult than getting up. She sat on the last branch, looking at the ground below. It reminded her of swimming from the boat to the beach, but in reverse: the beach always looked closer than it really was, while here she was certain it could not be as far down as it appeared.

  “Just drop,” he said, and he caught her and lowered her to the ground.

  “You could use some venison,” he said, walking away into the forest while she pulled her shirt straight and pushed her hair behind her ears. “Or a grilled cheese sandwich. I make a good grilled cheese sandwich.”

  A GOOD GRILLED CHEESE SANDWICH

  “I make a good grilled cheese sandwich,” Jim Bates said again an hour later, Rebecca sitting
a little uneasily in his tidy kitchen, with its gold cabinets and flowered wallpaper and pale yellow Formica, a kitchen frozen in 1967. As was Jim Bates’s grilled cheese sandwich:

  Take two slices of Wonder bread.

  Spread each with a lot of butter.

  Put three slices of Velveeta between them.

  Cook in a frying pan on both sides until brown and oozing.

  “No wonder,” she said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Two tablespoons of butter?”

  “You don’t want it to stick to the pan.”

  “It’s a nonstick pan.”

  “Still,” he said, popping the tops off two beers.

  “What about your arteries?”

  “My arteries are fine. Your arteries are fine. Look at you. You want another one? I’m thinking of having another one.”

  “No. No thank you. Don’t you find it impossible to cook anything decent on an electric stove?”

  “Don’t you have an electric stove?”

  “There’s one in the house I’m renting. That’s why I ask.”

  “What about in your real place?” he asked.

  Your real place. That’s what it is, Rebecca thought. Isn’t it? My real place. Oh.

  “I have a gas stove there.” A six-burner cast-iron white-enameled gas stove that, at this moment in her life, Rebecca could not quite believe she had once paid six thousand dollars to acquire. And that figure did not include the cost of having it disassembled and then assembled again, since naturally it was too large to fit through the door of the kitchen. It was a common problem in Manhattan, the subject of many amused stories at parties and lunches. We bought this couch/​armoire/​desk/​stove. And it wouldn’t fit through the door.

  Using the lens of this place, much of her past seemed so improbable. She could imagine this man saying, “You can get a perfectly good stove for six hundred dollars. You can measure it first to make sure you can get it in the house. I’ve got a tape measure in the truck.”

  “My mother cooked pretty decent meals almost every night on an electric stove until I was eighteen,” Jim Bates said, flipping his second sandwich. “I’d put her meat loaf up against anybody’s.”

  “And after you were eighteen?”

  “She died. That’s when I started making grilled cheese for my sister.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Rebecca.

  “It was a long time ago,” Jim Bates said, sitting down. “You still have your parents?”

  “Yes.”

  “Both?”

  “Yes.” After a fashion, Rebecca wanted to add, picturing her mother playing “Für Elise” on a plastic cafeteria tray after sweeping the food to the floor amid the cries of the staff.

  “You’re lucky,” he said, with his mouth full.

  He seemed like a nice man, Rebecca thought, but she knew better than to use those words. Ever since Hallie Cohen—third of four, older brother and sister, younger brother who admittedly was a bit of a brat—had sat in Rebecca’s airless and noiseless bedroom and said, “You’re lucky,” Rebecca had been suspicious of the sentiment, and the intervening years had proved her correct. You’re so lucky, to the couple at an anniversary party who, in private, scarcely spoke. You’re so lucky, to the young mother who heard a stirring and cry at night from the crib and swore she would lose her mind. Lucky from the outside was an illusion. Jim Bates had lost his mother when she still walked upright, when she still took word retrieval and continence for granted, when she cared for him and not the other way around.

  Had all that feeling rippled across her still face? All she knew was that once he swallowed and swabbed his mouth with a paper towel, Jim Bates added, “I probably shouldn’t assume, right? My father used to say you should never assume.”

  “Because it makes an ass out of you and me,” Rebecca said.

  “So my old man wasn’t the only guy who said that, huh?”

  “Until this very moment, I assumed—oh, goodness, there I go, see?—I assumed my father was the only person on earth who actually used that expression. In fact when I was a child I may have even assumed he invented it.”

  “I’m pretty sure not. We were in one of those tourist shops by Niagara Falls and we saw some kind of plaque that had it on it. I wanted to buy it but my mom said it was too expensive. Your father ever tell you there’s no I in team? My father loved that one, too.”

  Rebecca shook her head. “No. But sometimes he would whisper, ‘Mann tracht und Gott lacht.’ ‘Man plans, God laughs.’ ”

  “Your father spoke German?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “Right,” Jim Bates said, eating the end of his sandwich. “You sure you don’t want another one?”

  CUCUMBER SANDWICHES

  Sarah was always trying to fix Jim Bates up. She’d tried to fix him up with the woman who drove the truck that brought her bulk flour and shortening, and the woman who ran the print shop out of her house and printed Sarah’s menus, and even the weekend bartender at Ralph’s, a beautician who was kind of skanky, with her cutoffs and halter tops, but by that time Sarah was down to saying to Kevin, “Maybe the poor guy just needs a one-night stand.”

  “Guy can take care of himself,” Kevin said, lying back on the sofa, balancing turkey on a croissant on his belly. “Can’t a guy ever get a plain piece of bread around here?” he said sometimes.

  Sarah loved Jim Bates, but not in a romantic fashion, since she had an undoubted thing for unpleasant men who treated her badly. Jim had been just the opposite. He’d been the only person willing to sit her down and tell her why her business was failing, and he did it soon enough that she could turn things around. She’d set up as an English tearoom, which had been her dream since she was a little girl and had read a series of books about three children who lived in an English manor house and had adventures with talking animals. Trifle, treacle, toad-in-the-hole—Sarah never forgot the foods they had at tea, or the fact that they had tea at all, and that it wasn’t something to drink but an entire meal. Her mother had made her major in marketing at the state university so she would be able to support herself—“instead of assuming some man will do it,” said her mother, who never got over her bitterness at her divorce.

  But what Sarah really wanted to do was move to England, where everything was better: china, gardens, accents, Shakespeare plays. Then she met Kevin her senior year, and decided what she would do instead was be a mother who read those books about the English children to her own, and ran an English business of some kind or another. After she spent a summer working at a bakery near campus she decided on an English tearoom. Kevin got a job selling cars in a lot off the interstate, and they settled in Squamash, which everyone said was going to be the next place the city people came to spend the weekend. Only they didn’t, not really, although there were a few of them who bought houses on the outskirts with plenty of land because it was cheaper than the more popular places.

  Sarah got herself some tiered porcelain serving dishes with flowers twining around the fluted edges, and some teapots with cozies made to look like little old women, and a small business loan that she figured she could manage each month with the marketing plan she’d learned in her advanced marketing class. She gave away free samples the first week and people sniffed the air outside the shop appreciatively and smiled and told her they’d be back. And they were, for about two weeks, and then they weren’t.

  “What’d I tell you about a burger place?” Kevin said. “Everybody likes a burger.”

  “I don’t care about burgers,” Sarah replied.

  Week three and Jim Bates came in and sat in one of her little spindly bentwood chairs. She’d seen him twice before, but she’d never noticed how big he was, or how inadequate the chairs looked holding a person of his size. He was a man who liked sugar; he ordered cocoa and a maple pecan scone. “You make a good scone,” he said.

  “Thank you,” she said, and her dimpled chin quivered, and tears began to run down her face.


  “It’s like that, huh?” he said, looking around at the little tables and tiny chairs, all empty.

  It wasn’t what he said, that’s for sure. It was his tone of voice, kind of even, soothing. “You know why, right?” Kevin said that night, thinking like he always did that any man who was nice to a woman wanted to sleep with her, and would stop being nice as soon as he had. But Jim Bates wasn’t like that. He was just a nice man who told her that Squamash wasn’t ready for cucumber and watercress sandwiches or oolong tea, that if she could see her way clear to making good strong coffee and even offering it in take-out cups, that if she could learn to make a cheese Danish and a sticky bun, there would be lines at the register first thing in the morning. He told her that there was no reason she couldn’t make nice sandwiches, but that they’d have to be bigger than a pack of matches and the bread not spread with unsalted butter. He told her that maybe there was room on her menu for a section called English Specialties, and that if she explained what bangers and mash were she could even sell some because he knew for a fact that there were plenty of guys in the area who liked both sausages and mashed potatoes as long as they knew that’s what they were ordering.

  He’d been right about everything. She thought he was the kindest guy she’d ever known. Much much nicer than her father, who never even bothered with a birthday card after he left, or her brother, who referred to her as “fat ass” when they were young and called only when he wanted to borrow money. Much nicer, although she would be the last to admit it, than Kevin, who always had to go out at night and meet with someone or other now that he had quit the car lot—“bunch of losers”—and become what he called an entrepreneur, buying truckloads of firewood and reselling it in overpriced cords to flower shops and gourmet stores in neighboring towns (who then marked the price up even further for the weekend people).