“Oh,” Susan waves his words away while scanning her computer screen. She types the way she eats — efficient as a robot. If he lingers in the office long enough, Charlie knows he’ll get the full story. There’s a curiosity nagging at him, but he’s not sure he cares enough to go through what has the potential to be an hour-long introspection. The staff have been getting regular updates on the abuse Susan suffers at the hands of her wife. She’ll come to work visibly upset, tight-lipped, begging everyone to leave her alone, but by the end of the night the entire story will have trickled out and suddenly you’re standing in a puddle of her gloom. Charlie saw Susan’s wife at the coffee shop last week, her arm in a sling. He’s guessing the punches are thrown from both sides. He’s expecting a divorce announcement any day now. “Sorry,” she says, turning in her swivel chair to face him, “who do you want fired?”
“Rose. Rose, once again. I wanted her fired last week and last month and last year.” The phone rings and Susan answers, “Marinacove, Susan speaking.” After a string of pleasantries she hands the phone to Charlie. “It’s Aisha.” Charlie grabs the phone, his foot already tapping impatiently. He doesn’t like calls at work. “What’s up?”
“Oh, not much.” Aisha’s voice floats through the line, high and soft, like a balloon disappearing in a blue sky. “Just called to say hi.”
“Aisha.” Charlie’s voice is a pin poised to deflate. “I’m in the middle of dinner prep.”
“Well, I was just feeling, oh, I don’t know…” She lists off a string of aches and pains, to which Charlie makes all the appropriate hums and grunts. “You’re pregnant,” he says finally, “you’re not supposed to feel well.”
“She okay?” Susan says, after he’s hung up the phone.
“She’s fickle right now. She’s all over the place. She’s driving me nuts.” Charlie leans back in his chair and rubs his temples. “I’m fucking tired.”
“She’s the one making the baby,” Susan says, angling her chair back and examining him. “You don’t even understand tired.” The fluorescent lights give her bruise a purplish sheen. The ugly eye, the office clutter, the bad lighting — it all makes Charlie suddenly feel a dark sadness, a wrench in his gut that makes him want to crawl back into bed and forget his life. He’s not in the mood for one of Susan’s lectures. What does Susan know? She’s never had a baby. He thinks about his beverage sitting above the pass-bar in the kitchen. He hasn’t figured out how to drink in front of her yet. She’s always sniffing around.
“There’s no firing today. I called everyone else off because of the storm.” The window behind Susan’s head is being pelted with rain and beyond the window the ocean lashes the beach and pier. Charlie can barely see the lights of the Lions Gate Bridge through the weather. “Unless you want to put on an apron tonight?”
“Do you think people want to look at this while they eat?” Charlie says, motioning from his sweaty brow down to his rotting shoes.
“No,” she says, giving him a stony once-over. He waits for her to laugh, but her gaze remains level. “Did you think I was serious?”
“Tomorrow then, immediately,” he says, stretching his neck from side to side, releasing a series of loud cracks. He indulges in an impressive yawn, loud and wide-mouthed, and thumbs one of his cookbooks, rubbing at sticky spots along the way. The staff are always in here, loitering, stealing pencils, gumming up things with their dirty fingers. He pinches his arm, using the pain to keep his eyes open. “Rose refuses to call me Chef, you know,” he adds, to strengthen his case. Sleep is trying to take over his body — it talks to him, tells him things like it’s okay to curl up in a corner under the desk, tells him no one will notice if he sleeps in his car for a half hour before the dinner service. He keeps asserting to himself that no, it is not okay, but his resolve is waning. Sleep may have a point.
“It looks bad, doesn’t it?” Susan says, fussing with her hair as though that will somehow take the swelling away from her eye. He’s been staring at it without realizing. He may have been sleeping with his eyes open.
“I’d give you a steak to put on it, but our food costs—”
“That’s why I don’t have a kid,” she says, examining her eye in the reflection off the computer screen. “She’d fuck it up. Do you worry about that, about fucking up this little person?”
“I don’t think about it much,” Charlie says, skimming a recipe for Bayonne ham with petits pois, allowing another exaggerated yawn.
“Don’t,” Susan says, gripping Charlie’s chair and swivelling it so they face each other, “fuck up your kid.” Charlie’s head swings around on his limp neck. “Christ, Susan.” He treads at the floor to try and release his chair from her grip, but she hangs on. The eye is worse up close, bloodshot and weepy. It shocks him out of his lethargy for a brief moment, the pain inching up his sternum once again, throbbing like a bad memory. He taps his index finger at the recipe, as though he’s found the answer to both of their problems. It’s right there in the Dijon mustard sauce. “I think I’ll do ham for a Christmas feature this year.”
Rose pops her head into the office. “I have one bloody table. All she wants is coffee and the entire cream shipment is spoiled. She’s banging her mug on the table.”
Susan releases Charlie’s chair and gets up to leave.
“I want to talk before dinner service begins,” he says. She’s going to make him wait for their sit-down. It’s probably part of her negotiating strategy. The longer she makes him wait, the happier he’ll be with anything, but he knows that game and he has a number in mind and nothing is going to convince him otherwise.
“Let me deal with this first,” she says, as she trots out the door.
Charlie lays his head down on the desk and lets his eyes blur. The wind howls outside. He pretends the wail is one of his mother’s French lullabies singing him into a deep sleep. Did she ever sing him lullabies? He can’t remember. His father would sing him French drinking songs but always got the words mixed up. The fatigue is worse today. Lately Charlie has been having trouble sleeping at night. He dreams of his teeth chipping, crumbling, falling out. Last night, as he got into bed at four in the morning, Aisha pulled his hand to her belly. He imagined a tiny, sharp-toothed raptor delicately clawing at the lining of her womb, plotting its escape. “Stay still. Pay attention,” she said, as though the fetus was about to deliver an astounding recital from her belly. She gripped his hand and moved it around, trying to anticipate the spot where a kick or punch might land, but he didn’t feel a thing. He told himself it was the baby’s cautious respect of his authority. “Do you want something to eat?” he said, getting out of bed.
“You have to be patient, Charlie,” she said, poking at her belly to try and wake the beast.
“There’s smoked duck with egg noodles in the fridge.” She had wanted duck for an entire week: confit, à l’orange, red-wine braised, seared with cherries and port sauce. “No duck,” she said. She stretched and gazed up at the ceiling, telepathizing with the barnacle. It was as though she was talking across worlds to the dead, the intensity she summoned to choose her next meal. “Pasta.” She untied and retied the bun on top of her head. “Something creamy. No tomatoes.”
“Pasta. Creamy,” he muttered, as he made his way into the kitchen.
They sat in bed to eat with linen napkins on their laps. He cradled the bowl, twirling the fork in the noodles and placing a generous bite in her sweet, pink mouth. Nothing rivalled the approval of a pregnant woman — if he got it right she bathed him in praise. “Oh, oh, oh.” She closed her eyes and sank back on the pillow. She was not difficult to please. She grabbed the bowl from him, balancing it on her belly. “You don’t want any,” she said, offering him a spoonful.