She set Alida to grating cheese. After the hysteria of the Finn affair, she needed to be returned to Earth. Alida babbled as she grated, while Lucy feigned a wise and airy cool about the whole business, though the pretense grew increasingly hard to maintain as her own hysteria about the recipe mounted. With every move she made, she foresaw the threat of Chinese takeout in the offing. Congealed lumps appeared in the roux; she fiercely mashed them out with a wooden spoon. Deseeding tomatoes was beyond her, so she substituted canned. Jalapeños, she thought, might be more than Alida’s palate could take, so she sprinkled the now-bubbling mixture with a dusting of cayenne instead. The water for the pasta — she had straight macaroni, not “elbows”—refused to come to a boil on time. The kitchen counter turned into a slovenly chaos of spilled tomato juice, nutmeg, pepper cores, seeds, and cheese that Alida had managed to grate almost everywhere except on the designated plate. Lucy scalded a knuckle when she tried to take a taste, said “Fuck!” then “Excuse me!” then “Fuck!” again when the wooden spoon slid unaided from the counter to the floor.
Alida was still going on about Finn and his famous Trojan horse, but Lucy had ceased to listen. She thought wistfully of all the varieties of macaroni and cheese that came frozen in containers, to which all you needed to do was prick the cellophane top and shove them in the microwave. With such drama around the stovetop, who needed news? Most of all, Lucy feared duplicating one of her mother’s culinary atrocities, and swore she’d stick to Stouffer’s in the future.
Eventually, the whole pinkish, greenish slumgullion made it into a casserole dish, was sprinkled with more cheese, and was placed under the broiler, with the timer set for fifteen minutes. Lucy rewarded herself with an extra-large glass of Oregon pinot noir.
The knock on the door came just when the timer started beeping.
“Oh, Jesus — Alida! Get the door, will you?”
It was the landlord. Bowing, smiling, he had a tape measure in one hand and a book in the other. Lucy, hair in her eyes, holding the heavy casserole in burned and greasy oven gloves, grimaced at him.
“Home cooking!” Mr. Lee said.
“S-S-S-Sorry, we’re just about to eat.”
“Came to measure up.” He pointed back at the door. “Video monitor.”
“What?”
“Like I told you — video monitor for security.”
“Oh, that.” She put the casserole on a mat on the table.
“Bring you the book.” He placed it beside the casserole. It was a small book, grown fat and soggy with rereading: Who Moved My Cheese?
“That’s funny. I was just making m-m-macaroni and cheese.”
“Lots of good tips — you’ll see.”
“Well…thank you.” She wished he’d get on with his measuring, though the last thing she wanted was a video monitor. The landlord appeared to be using her as a guinea pig for his projects: the lock on Tad’s door had remained unchanged. Why was her apartment being singled out for these experiments? And why did he always have to show up at such inconvenient hours? “Mr. Lee, do you mind if we just g-g-get on and eat?”
“No, no — smells good!” He didn’t budge from the table, just stood there, smiling expectantly.
Lucy gave up. “Alida? You’d better set another place for Mr. Lee.”
Alida was happy to welcome the landlord to the table, treating him as a fresh pair of ears to which she could tell her astounding news. She’d been deeply disappointed to find that Tad wasn’t home when they’d returned to the Acropolis, and now she had the captive audience she craved.
“You heard about the Freak virus?”
“Oh, yeah. My bank got hit — call me this morning.”
“You know who started it? It was a boy in my class! Finn—”
“Alida, I don’t think—”
“Finn Janeway! The FBI came to our school! He got arrested! They took him away, in two cars.”
“Janeway? Finn?” Mr. Lee’s overslung eyelids seemed for a moment to be working overtime. “He do all this with his home computer?”
“I think so — or maybe from the computer lab at school.”
“Big mistake,” the landlord said. “He shoulda gone to library or someplace. Kid smart enough to do that stuff, he should know better. Do it from his house…that’s crazy. Why he do that?”
“I think he like wanted to get caught.”
The landlord frowned and shook his head disbelievingly. “Like I say, this kid crazy.”
Lucy, annoyed by the landlord’s too-ready adoption of the criminal point of view — surely not the way to talk to Alida — said, “Do help yourself, Mr. Lee.”
He did so, generously. The golden crust on top made the dish look almost professionally respectable: Lucy thought it a pity that the landlord’s uninvited presence so detracted from what should have been her pride and pleasure in having successfully carried off the recipe.
Still, he praised the food lavishly. “Good cook, Lucy!”
“Thank you, Mr. Lee. Alida?”
“Yummy.”
Looking around the room, the landlord said, “You keep things nice. Real homey.”
“We like to think so.”
He quizzed Alida about her school, then said, “You think about college?”
“Sometimes I do. I want to be a math major.”
“Math, huh?”
“It’s hard to think seven years ahead when you’re eleven,” Lucy said. “People change. By the time you get to twelfth grade, who knows what you’ll want to major in? It might be math, it might be astrophysics, it might be anthropology.”
“Lot of good colleges in the U.S.,” Mr. Lee said. “What college you want to go to?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t like thought about it.”
“Harvard College. That’s good one. You heard of Harvard College?”
“Yeah,” Alida said, carefully forking the green bits out of her macaroni and cheese.
“You want an A-one education, you go to Harvard College.”
Alida shrugged. “Maybe.”
“You need big bucks to pay for Harvard College. Tuition!” He was speaking to Lucy now. “Costs a fortune.”
“So, you have children, Mr. Lee?”
“Me? No. No wife, no kids. Single man!” He reached for the casserole to give himself a second helping. He munched rather noisily for a while, then said, “Been reading what you wrote. Good writing, Lucy! Bill Gates, he knows what it takes to go from good to great. Can learn a lot from a guy like him.” To Alida, he said, “Bill Gates went to Harvard College.”
“He dropped out,” Lucy told him.
“What do you mean?” Alida said.
“He didn’t finish. He never got to graduate. He quit in his junior year there.”
“Like me.” The landlord eyed the casserole for the third time. “Never got to graduate from college!”
“So where were you, Mr. Lee?”
“Seattle Central Community College. Took class there once, Business Studies. Shoulda gone to Harvard.” He laughed. “But I was poor man then. Couldn’t pony up no tuition.”
The notion of him as a Harvard student was so absurd that Lucy giggled out loud.
“Is true!” Mr. Lee said, grinning. “Hey, I live like dirt once. Work my way up, right from the bottom. Not like Bill Gates. More like Sam Walton.” He turned to Alida. “Wal-Mart guy. When Sam a kid back in Depression time, his family didn’t have but just one cow. Every morning, five o’clock, this kid be out there milkin’ the cow. Then he bottle that milk and sell it all over Oklahoma on his bike. That how he got started. Know Wal-Mart’s turnover right now? Two hundred, eighty-five billion dollars!”