Mark Halliday

I Comstock stands in the densely odorous kitchen sniffing Mrs. Yapp’s squab pies. His hunger makes him wide awake and he can imagine Mrs. Yapp twenty years ago when she was a bouncing Evelina and I delight to see them there, Comstock and Mrs. Yapp, in the creaking steaming kitchen of darkly scarred wood beside the great black doubtless clang of the stove being human, in 1836, in the sure conviction that the human had better be fed. The pies bubble up— apples, bacon, onions, brown sugar and breast of pigeon— “A cork’s no good without the bottle, Mrs. Yapp!” She grins and kicks his shin and I turn the page. II It’s actually not a very good novel— over-invested in local color... And the same may be said about thee and me, in 2036, by the Supreme Kakutani. III Oh, once there was a lad named Marky who loved on his bread excessive cheese; oh, to write bright comments in a book’s margins was for him quite larky and his daughter referred to an elephant when she heard him sneeze. Ah, he felt the human mattered keenly, all un-cut and un-dried, though to the gods our tumult may seem a paltry flap— it was a human, after all, wrote Hardy’s “Hap”... This Marky lived a while, my braves, a while and then he died! Honor the cork of Comstock and the pies of Mrs. Yapp.

Five more books in a box to be carried out to the car; your office door closes behind you and at that moment you turn invisible—not even a ghost in that hall from the hall’s point of view. If the halls don’t know you, the halls and the rooms of the buildings where you worked for seven years— if the halls don’t know you, and they don’t— some new woman or two new men come clattering down these halls in the month after your departure, indeed just two days after you left forever they come clattering with ideas about the relation between mind and body or will and fate filled with hormones of being the chosen workers here and they feel as if the halls and rooms begin to recognize them, accept them, as if there is a belonging in the world— but these new workers are wrong, the halls don’t know who is working under the unobtrusive fluorescent panels: this is appalling and for a minute you are appalled though your being so now is not an event in the life of your new rented house or even your new condominium . . . So if they don’t, if they don’t know you, the halls, the walls, the fixtures, then what? Then there is for you no home in that rock, no home in the mere rock of where you work, where you briskly walk, not even in the bed where your body sleeps alone or not— so if there is to be a place for you, for you it must not be located in plaster and tile and space, it will have to be in that other house, the one whose door you felt opening just last night when you dialed from memory and your friend picked up the phone.

The connection between divorced fathers and pizza crusts is understandable. The divorced father does not cook confidently. He wants his kid to enjoy dinner. The entire weekend is supposed to be fun. Kids love pizza. For some reason involving soft warmth and malleability kids approve of melted cheese on pizza years before they will tolerate cheese in other situations. So the divorced father takes the kid and the kid's friend out for pizza. The kids eat much faster than the dad. Before the dad has finished his second slice, the kids are playing a video game or being Ace Ventura or blowing spitballs through straws, making this hail that can't quite be cleaned up. There are four slices left and the divorced father doesn't want them wasted, there has been enough waste already; he sits there in his windbreaker finishing the pizza. It's good except the crust is actually not so great— after the second slice the crust is basically a chore— so you leave it. You move on to the next loaded slice. Finally there you are amid rims of crust. All this is understandable. There's no dark conspiracy. Meanwhile the kids are having a pretty good time which is the whole point. So the entire evening makes clear sense. Now the divorced father gathers the sauce-stained napkins for the trash and dumps them and dumps the rims of crust which are not corpses on a battlefield. Understandability fills the pizza shop so thoroughly there's no room for anything else. Now he's at the door summoning the kids and they follow, of course they do, he's a dad.

The guys who drank quarts of Busch last night here by the backstop of this baseball diamond had names given them by their mothers and fathers— “Jack” and “Kenny” let us say. Jack might be a skinny guy in a black fake-leather jacket, he’s twenty-five, his gray pants are too loose on his hips, his jaws always have these little black extra hairs, his mother won’t talk to him on the phone, she lives on french fries and ketchup, he hasn’t been able to send her any cash in the last two years, ever since he lost his job unloading produce trucks at Pathmark; Jack’s father disappeared when he was ten. “No big deal,” Jack says, “he was a bastard anyway, he used to flatten beer cans on the top of my head.” Kenny offers a laugh-noise. He’s heard all that before. Kenny is forty-eight, a flabby man with reddened skin, he is employed at the Italian Market selling fish just four hours a day but his shirts hold the smell; his female companion Deena left him a note last month: “You owe me $12 chocolate $31 wine $55 cable TV plus donuts—I have had it—taking lamp and mirror they are mine.” Kenny hasn’t seen her since. He hangs with Jack because Jack talks loud as if the world of cops and people with full-time jobs could be kept at bay by talking, talking loud . . . (I’m talking gently and imaginatively here as if the world of bums and jerks could be kept far off—) Jack and Kenny. (Or two other guys dark to me with wounds oozing in Philadelphia ways less ready to narrate.) Last night at midnight they got cheesesteaks at Casseloni’s and bought four quarts at the Fireside Tavern and wandered into this park. After one quart of Busch Jack said he was Lenny Dykstra and found a stick for his bat. “Pitch to me asshole” he said so Kenny went to the mound and pitched his bottle for want of anything better and Jack swung in the dark and missed; Kenny’s bottle smashed on home plate and Jack heard in the sound the absurdity of all his desiring since seventh grade, absurdity of a skinny guy who blew everything since seventh when he hit home runs and chased Joan Rundle around the gym so Jack took his own empty bottle and smashed it down amid the brown shards of Kenny’s bottle. Then they leaned on the backstop to drink the other two quarts and they both grew glum and silent and when they smashed these bottles it was like what else would they do? Next morning Nick and I come to the park with a rubber ball and a miniature bat. Nick is not quite three but he knows the names of all the Phillies starters and he knows the area around home plate is not supposed to be covered with jagged pieces of brown glass. Like a good dad I warn him not to touch it and we decide to establish a new home plate closer to the mound (there’s no trash can handy). “Who put that glass there?” Nick wants to know and to make a long story short I say “Bad People.” Nick says “Bad? How come?”