FOR YEARS EUGENE lived alone, even when he had a boyfriend. Now he lives with Albert, an optometrist. Eugene works for the dog warden. Albert is educating him about movies: they rent old movies; they go to the movies. They went to the York Square to see Remains of the Day and then they argued about it. “How could you not like that movie?” said Albert, and Eugene said he did like it, he just didn’t love it.
“Anthony Hopkins was really like a butler in that movie,” he said. “He was so stiff.”
“That’s the idea,” said Albert. “They paid him to be stiff.” They had coffee. Albert had real coffee and Eugene had decaf.
Walking to the car, Eugene recognized two people he knew from volunteering at the soup kitchen. “Downtown is all street people,” he said.
“Yalies,” said Albert.
“Yalies and street people,” said Eugene. “That man crossing the street. Middle class looking, white, nice clothes. I see him eating at the soup kitchen all the time.”
“Maybe he is middle class and he just likes getting a free lunch,” said Albert.
“I don’t think so,” said Eugene. The man didn’t take care of his face the way middle-class people did. He thought of Anthony Hopkins’ careful face in the movie.
In the morning there were no juice glasses and Albert scolded him. “You are a person who breaks glasses. At least drinking glasses, not eyeglasses.” Albert patted the temple of his glasses.
“But I sweep up the glass.”
“This is true.” Albert paused. “The juice glasses I used to have were made of tempered glass,” he said. “They were harder to break, but when they did break, they broke into a million tiny chips. They made me nervous. They were holding themselves together too tightly.”
“Anthony Hopkins,” said Eugene. He didn’t say, “Who did you live with then?” because whoever it was—well, Albert had had one boyfriend who left him, and one who died.
It was Eugene’s day to go to the soup kitchen, where he had once broken a tray of mugs, which was serious, because there weren’t very many. Mugs walked out the door there, everyone said. Eugene had brought a tray of clean mugs from the kitchen into the dining room, and he had no place to put it because there were already mugs on the serving table, so he balanced the tray against the table with his body, taking mugs out. The mugs were white, with the words “First Constitution Bank” on them. The soup kitchen had received hundreds of them when the bank went under and changed its name, but there weren’t many left. The tray slipped and all the mugs fell. The noise made everyone look at him. Eugene bent down to look at the fallen mugs, but every one of them was broken in half, or had a big chip or no handle. Going for the broom, he was deeply ashamed.
This morning, before Eugene went to the soup kitchen he rinsed six large yogurt containers he’d saved. Albert liked yogurt and granola for breakfast, and Eugene had been storing the containers under the sink, trying to remember to take them with him. At the soup kitchen, leftover food was given away at the end of the meal in plastic containers. “Have fun,” called Albert as Eugene went out with his yogurt containers, and, in a way, working at the soup kitchen was fun. He had lived with Albert for just a few months; leaving him in the apartment, saying good-bye only casually because they would be together again soon, was like taking a cool bite of something smooth and sweet. Eugene touched the doorknob, the mailbox, and the porch railing as he passed, and then he was on his way.
The line of people waiting for lunch stretched out the door. Eugene squeezed past and went inside. He brought his yogurt containers to the bin where they were kept. Elizabeth, the dining room manager, walked up behind him as he was putting them into the bin. She wore purple skirts to her ankles, but had sense. “Here you are!” she said, smiling.
“The breaker of cups!” It had happened months ago. After a while, he had stopped apologizing.
“Break any more and I’ll break you,” she said in a friendly way. “Serve dessert, okay?”
Today there were all sort of pastries, somewhat squashed. Eugene took his place behind the serving table. Now the first server put a scoop of mashed potatoes onto the first stainless-steel tray. She handed it to an old man who was first in the line that stretched around the room and out the door.
“Potatoes make you sexy,” said the old man. He held out his tray to the next server for chicken stew. “Make you lose all control.”
“They do not,” said the server of the potatoes, a young black woman with highly organized hair. Eugene couldn’t remember her name. “That’s the first time I heard that.”
“What happened to ‘The customer is always right’?” said the second man in line, taking his tray. “If my uncle here says potatoes make you sexy, they make you sexy. I’m feeling sexy already.”
“He’s not your uncle,” said the server.
“How do you know?”
A different old man, whom Eugene had seen here often, was coming along the line. While Eugene served the guests ahead of the second old man, he tried to figure out how the old man had changed. Eugene had once told Albert about him. He was lame and blind and had no teeth. “Remember that sign in the hardware store?” he’d said to Albert. “‘Lost dog—three legs, no ear, one eye, half a tail, answers to Lucky’? Something like that? Well, this must be Lucky.” Lucky reached Eugene and pointed to a doughnut, and Eugene said hello and gave it to him. The old man was less old or less something. He wasn’t blind. Maybe it was a different man, not Lucky.
Eugene couldn’t remember whether Lucky was black or white. This man was a light-skinned black man. Many people who ate here and worked here were black, but not all by any means. Eugene, who was white, liked forgetting about race and having to think. And so many people weren’t exactly black or white, anyway; they were just light brown people. Eugene went for more pastries, and when he came back nobody was serving salad, so for a while he did both; then a woman named Shirley took over the dessert, and Eugene served salad. A lot of people didn’t like salad, but the ones who did liked it a lot.
It was a day on which people burst out with things. One man said to Shirley, “Look at that plain cake you gave me. No icing. No sugar. You are always mean to me.”
“Joey, I’m not mean to you!” Shirley said. “Which one do you want?”
“I don’t want none, now. You know what I wanted, Shirley.”
“Oh, stop,” said Shirley. Eugene didn’t know if she was angry or only pretending.
“You made me so unhappy!” said the man. Now his voice rose sharply, and people stopped talking and looked at him. “I loved you!” the man shouted. “What did that mean to you? Nothing!” It was remarkable shouting.
“Oh, you never loved me,” Shirley said.
“Oh, I did love you.” He paused, and his voice dropped. “I do love you.” He faced the room. “I love her!” His voice boomed. At last he took his tray—without dessert—and went to a table.
“Was he serious?” Eugene asked Shirley. She shook her head and smiled. “I thought he was,” said Eugene.
“What do you know about it?” said the man serving stew, a tall man Eugene hadn’t seen before. The staff was people on city welfare—they came and went. Sometimes there were other volunteers like Eugene, often not. “You wouldn’t know.”
“I guess not,” said Eugene.
Shirley looked at Eugene. “Because you’re white or because of something else?”
“I mean something else,” said the tall man.
“Oh, leave him alone,” said Shirley.
“Nah, I didn’t mean nothing,” said the man. Eugene wondered if the man meant because he was gay—or because he was a baby. “You’re such a baby!” people said. An innocent. The line had slowed, but now there was a burst of new people and the servers were too busy to talk for a long time. When the salad was gone, Eugene went back to serving dessert; Shirley took a break. He emptied the dessert tray twice more and refilled it with pastries from donated Entenmann’s boxes.
Then it was the cook’s turn to burst out. Ten minutes before quitting time, she stuck her head out of the kitchen. “Bring the food in!” she called.
“It’s way too early,” said Eugene, surprised.
Marjorie, the cook, came out of the kitchen. She could be grumpy and Eugene was a little afraid of her. The day he broke the tray of mugs, Marjorie hadn’t said anything, but she’d looked at him without any expression in her eyes at all, as if she’d stuck dull nickels into her eye sockets. He had thought that if he were black, like her, she’d have yelled. Now she said, “I said, last tray, Eugene!”
“It’s too early.”
“It’s twenty past,” said Marjorie.
“It’s only eight past on my watch.”
Marjorie said, “It’s twenty past in the kitchen and I said last tray!” She went back to the kitchen. No one was waiting on line, but if they carried the food in, five people would turn up.
Eugene shouted, “No, Marjorie, it doesn’t make sense!” He had never shouted there. Everyone shouted except Eugene.
“You’re right, man,” said the tall man—whose name had turned out to be Graham. “That clock they got in there stinks. Sometimes it goes backwards.”
Shirley and the woman with the organized hair laughed. “Oh, it doesn’t go backwards!” Shirley said. Now she was serving green beans.
“Time for fireworks,” said Graham, looking toward the kitchen. But Marjorie didn’t come out, and when they finally carried the food in, ten minutes later, she shouted at Eugene, who was leading the way, “Who told you to bring that food in?” So they backed up and served another man who had just come in and was already shouting at them for not serving him. “You white guys,” he said to Eugene, choosing a doughnut. “You don’t know what it’s like.”
“Oh, quit it,” said Eugene. He felt disorderly, a little excited. He had yelled and been yelled at. One more person was coming, an old man. “I already ate,” said the old man. “I came back for another doughnut.” Of course—it was Lucky again. How could Eugene not have recognized him? He remembered that once he’d carried Lucky’s tray to a table for him, because Lucky obviously couldn’t see. But this man could see. Now the angry man said to Lucky, “You eat too many sweets, Kent.” So Lucky’s name was Kent.
Eugene carried the rest of the pastries into the kitchen. He was still fascinated that he’d yelled, though nobody else seemed to have noticed. He took the least ratty broom. Shirley and the woman with the organized hair were wiping the tables, and Graham was sweeping at the other end of the dining room, so Eugene went over to sweep near the door. His eyes were on the floor, and as he swept, the feet of the last people went out of the dining room past him.
And then suddenly he was not sweeping. The broom clattered to the floor (but he was aware of having made it clatter in a safe direction) and Eugene’s arms were clutching a woman he had seized, it seemed, before seeing her.
“Let’s take it easy,” he was saying. His arms were around a small, thin black woman. He was holding her up, and holding her close to him as if they were friends or lovers. A last woman had come in late, he began to understand, and collapsed as she walked past Eugene, and he had knocked the broom aside and caught her just before she fell, and now he was supporting her light body—it was delicate and spare—and they were walking together to the nearest chair in the dining room. Graham pulled the chair away from the table, and Eugene eased the woman into it and knelt to make sure she didn’t topple off, releasing her slowly and then laying his hand lightly on her arm.
“It’s just my medication,” said the woman. She had a dark, still, intelligent face.
Elizabeth hurried in. “Isabel, shall I call 911?”
“No, thanks,” said the woman clearly. “I’ll be fine. I hurried to get here before you closed.”
Graham brought her two of Eugene’s yogurt containers, filled with food. The woman was saying, “They wouldn’t see me at the health center. They said I didn’t have an appointment.”
“Shall I call them?” Eugene asked her.
“They gave me an appointment for Monday. That’s all they’ll do for me.”
Elizabeth said, “Isabel, I want to call the EMTs.”
“Oh, I don’t want to go to the hospital,” said the woman. “I’ll walk home slowly. This happened because I hurried.”
“I hate hospitals, too,” said Eugene. He said to Elizabeth, “Shall I walk her home?”
“And what will you do if she collapses in the street?” said Elizabeth.
Eugene was embarrassed. He was not thinking. He knelt. “Let her call,” he said, stroking Isabel’s arm, as though because he’d held her, he was allowed to touch her.
“Well, I’m calling,” said Elizabeth. She strode into the other room, her long skirt swaying.
“Do you have a cigarette?” Isabel asked Eugene.
“A cigarette!” said Eugene. “Of course not!” He stayed with her, neither of them speaking, until the EMTs, two earnest men he’d seen there before, arrived. He didn’t move away when they asked Isabel questions. “Date of birth?”
She was thirty-four, Eugene’s age.
“She’s on medication,” said Eugene.
“Have any liquor today, Isabel?” said one of the EMTs.
“A couple.”
“Smoke?”
“Yes.”
He took her blood pressure. Sixty over forty. Eugene hadn’t known blood pressure could be so low.
“Isabel, I want you to go to the hospital,” said the EMT.
“I hate the hospital,” said Isabel.
“I know, I know.”
“Go,” said Eugene. “I thought you shouldn’t, but now I think you should.”
“Where’s my purse?” said Isabel. “What happened to my purse?”
She had no purse. “I don’t think you brought it,” said Eugene.
“Of course I did. It’s brown. One of you took it.”
“Isabel,” said the EMT.
“All right, I’ll go, but I want my purse.”
And now she insisted on a cigarette. She walked out to the driveway, just a little wobbly, carrying her containers of food. Eugene followed. The EMTs stood nearby, waiting for the ambulance. Isabel asked everyone standing there for a cigarette. Eugene went back to say good-bye to Elizabeth. He found her at her table in the corner, writing numbers on the charts she kept. He watched for a moment. “How many did we serve today?” she said.
He considered. The soup kitchen owned 204 regular trays, and 75 had been washed and used again. And they’d used most of the kids’ trays, which were smaller. Nobody ever seemed to know how many kids’ trays there were. Thirteen? They agreed on a total of 288.
“It felt like more,” he said. “Oh, and Isabel. One more.”
“Two eighty-nine. A quiet day.” She was joking. Two eighty-nine was a lot, not the most they’d ever had, but a lot.
“I thought it was a hard day,” he said.
“So did I.”
“Wild.”
“A little wild.”
“Sometimes I like wild,” he admitted. “Letting loose.”
She nodded. “It has pleasures and pains.”
“I never heard of blood pressure so low,” he said.
“Oh, sure.”
He turned away and turned back. “I thought she just had the flu or something. How did you know?” If Elizabeth hadn’t been there, he’d have tried to walk the woman home and anything might have happened.
“I know. And I know her. I think she has AIDS.”
“She’s trying to bum a cigarette,” he said. It hadn’t occurred to him that Isabel might have AIDS. Of course he should have thought of it.
“Of course she is.”
“I guess she can’t stop smoking.”
“I guess not.”
Eugene went outside. The ambulance had backed into the driveway. Isabel was lying on the stretcher with her containers of food propped next to her; “Stop & Shop 100% Natural Plain Lowfat Yogurt,” they said—as if one could know that much about anything. The stretcher was a terribly clean, tightly made bed on wheels, and the woman lying on it looked dark and ordinary in her street clothes, and very thin. She looked self-conscious. Eugene wanted to go to her but he didn’t. After all, she might not exactly have noticed him. The woman looked completely different from Eugene’s lover, Albert, but as if Albert had come in smiling from the grocery store with his arms around two big yogurt containers and had suddenly lain down to rest, Eugene imagined him lying there on the stretcher, smiling, and the containers in the crook of Albert’s arm, not Isabel’s. Now the ambulance workers wheeled the stretcher to the ambulance.
Eugene stood in the doorway. His arms felt light and strange from holding Isabel, and he thought he might cry if anybody touched him. Then he saw the man he’d thought was blind, the man called Kent, formerly Lucky. “I know what’s different about you,” Eugene said. “You have new glasses.”
“That’s right,” said Kent. Now Eugene remembered. One lens of the old glasses had been covered with Scotch tape. It must have been broken. These new ones were bifocals with thick lenses.
“They’re great.” Maybe Albert had prescribed them. It was possible.
“Thank you,” said Kent. The old man sat down on a low wall near the driveway and Eugene sat with him. The doors of the ambulance closed and it drove slowly down the driveway past them and moved into the street. Eugene thought of leaning over and crying on the old man’s shoulder, but of course he didn’t. It helped to sit there. A man passed and looked at Kent. “Hey, pal,” he said.
“You got a cigarette for me?” said Kent.
“Not today,” said the man. “I’m fresh out.” He waved at both of them, as if they were two panhandlers.
Then Kent told Eugene a story. One night he’d been panhandling in front of the Store 24. He’d lost a button from his shirt cuff. He had a coffee cup for money, and when he held it up his cuff fell away and his arm was cold. But the cup was not comfortable in the other hand; that was for his cane. A man in a denim jacket walked up Broadway and Kent said, “Change?” though what he wanted was a cigarette. The man touched his pants pocket and said, “In a minute.”
It was a good night—just a little cool. The lights in the parking lot dazzled into lines. It wasn’t rain; it was the tape on his glasses. Soon Kent would walk home. Not a good idea to walk too late.
A car double-parked in front of the Store 24 and a man got out. “Hey, would you watch my car?” he said to Kent. “No problem,” said the old man. He liked facing a different way for a change. Kent moved across the sidewalk and between the parked cars, and he leaned on the man’s car. He saw the man in the denim jacket come out of the Store 24 carrying a container of milk. The man stopped and looked around. “Here!” called Kent. Then the man came over to him and gave him a twenty. And the second man, the owner of the car, came out and gave him a five. Kent just had time to buy liquor before the store closed. All the way home, holding the package of booze, leaning on the cane, he thought about what had happened. He had cigarettes, too. He thought, “Maybe it will happen again,” but he knew it wouldn’t. He went home and got drunk and smoked, and finally he went to bed. It was hard to go to bed, because until he went to bed he was living in the same day with his luck, and leaving it was like leaving a room with a friend in it.