Sacrifices

“Hey Ed,” she said, standing near the sink in the small kitchen of the house perched on the hill right next to Narragansett Bay. “Can you hand me a rack for these water glasses?” Ellen was the “party leader,” although she didn’t know much about catering, but she was a good enough sort to not have it matter much. Ed put the empty green rack on the counter top and went back to drying the silverware.

The party was ostensibly over and the two other girls working the event were leaning against the counters in blue aprons chatting about their little ones and pleasantly bitching about the work they had to do, how much stuff they had to load into the truck, and who was working where, and when was the next party?

The few remaining guests were reclining in the living room by a fire.

A tall gentleman with a big mop of white hair came into the open-kitchen looking for red wine. Instead of doing the sensible thing and avoiding the whole situation, and partly due to his ingrained sense of hospitality, whether he was working or at home (this is when he had ‘a home’) Ed did the courteous thing and offered him a bottle from the host’s wine rack.

“I’m sure they wouldn’t mind,” Ed said.

“Well, they shouldn’t mind,” The white haired man said, “they’re rich enough.” Thanks for telling me something I didn’t know, buddy, Ed thought.

Ed selected a bottle he didn’t recognize, sensing from the label and the name that it was not the premium grape. Perfect for this guy.

“Let me take a look here,” the man said, and examined the label on the bottle.

He removed glasses from the breast pocket of his pink button down shirt.

“Never heard of it,” he said, and handed it to Ed.

Ed twisted the short blade of the wine key in a circle around the tip of the bottle slicing through the thin black plastic.

“I never knew how to do that,” he said, “I usually rip it off with my fingers.”

“It’s easy,” Ed said.

The cork came out of the bottle without a sound. Ed twisted it from the screw and lay it on the counter top, with the bottom of the cork up in the air, the classy way, the way he had been doing at various restaurant jobs for years.

“Mr. Martin,” Ed said, without knowing why, “I’m sure you don’t remember me, but I used to work at the Dunes Club.”

“Oh, really?” he said. “Forgive me for not recognizing you.”

“Oh no sir, I didn’t imagine you would. It was over ten years ago.”

Ellen and the girls hovered around the periphery observing the two men.

“Well,” he said, with a chuckle, “was I nice to you?”

“Sir, you were inexpressibly kind and courteous every single night.” Ed said, which was, of course, a complete lie, and the guy knew it. Years ago Ed worked as a busboy at the exclusive private club. One night a Hurricane was fast approaching. This man was eating dinner with his overly-medicated-under-weight-wife, 20 years his junior, and even as the windows were being boarded up and everyone everywhere was scurrying to batten down the hatches and evacuate the place, Mr. Martin refused to leave until he finished his dinner. Incredible, Ed mused, yet not incredibly unusual for the Old Money crowd.

Mr. Martin glanced at the girls leaning on the counter with their arms folded across their chests.  There was the slightest pause, a miniscule instant of awkward tension, a silence illuminating the two men’s different “classes” and roles: the gentleman, a guest at the party, Ed, a servant, working the party. He, a man of wealth and power and status, Ed, opening bottles of wine for idiots like him for a living.

Mr. Martin smiled weakly, and Ed was surprised he didn’t retort with something clever and witty, some Ivy League bullshit.

Instead, Mr. Martin smiled, a thin-lipped grin, that was almost one of concession. Ed handed him one of the upturned wine-globes drying on a towel on the counter and poured the cheap wine in.

The girls resumed bustling around with Tupperware containers and conducting all the necessary business to wind up one of those parties. Ed stared into the guy’s long blue blood face and waited. It was obvious the man wanted to talk.

He took a sip of the wine.

“What are you doing with yourself now, young man?” he said.

“This,” Ed replied, holding up the bottle. Mr. Martin leaned his big long red face to one side, almost into his shoulder, like a long necked bird.

“I mean, what else are you doing?”

“I’m a writer.” Ed said. It was the truth, and also an irritating response, because at times like this, it was a pure qualifier, something that people, most people and most people like this guy especially require in order to proceed in a conversation. A memory from Oxford flashed through Ed’s mind: Ed had just returned on one of his many post-student visits and was at a party of artists and scholars. People asked him, innocently, what he did for a living, and he answered, just as honestly, “Nothing. I live to live.” This answer was hard for most to swallow but one young lady found Ed compelling and he spent two weeks on her houseboat on the Cherwell River needing no definitions or qualifiers whatsoever.

“Oh yes, really?” Mr. Martin said, “A writer? What are you writing?”

Ed didn’t even hesitate, as he usually did, when faced with that most difficult of questions. Writing was his life not his livelihood, and to describe it was truly beyond him at this point in his life.

“I’m writing an amalgam of autobiographical travel stories that are impressions which incorporate philosophical observations and spiritual ruminations that express my own subjective human experience.”

“Hmm…” Mr. Martin said, his lips pressed together, little spots of red wine collected on either end, a perplexed look on his Yankee face.

“I am writing a novel,” he said.

“Oh yeah? Cool.” Ed said, he didn’t care. These were the guys that ruled the world. He had problems with them. Yes, them. The Elites, the Right Wingers who care more about the bottom line than the millions subsisting beneath the poverty line. Ed often wondered if this type of guy is this really the best America has to offer? Selfish, materialistic, greedy business guys who sold their souls? Shit, Ed had been on his way to becoming one of them. Get rich! That’s the American Dream, right? Focus all your energy on climbing that ladder to success, no matter that the rungs are made of real people, flesh and bone. In the meantime neglecting the magic and mystery of a creatively lived life because you’ve got to get more shit you don’t need? This was not for Ed. He didn’t know what he wanted but he knew what he didn’t and that is a good place to start even though this goes against conventional wisdom.

So this guy in his spare time is writing a novel, Ed thought, who gives a fuck? But then, all of a sudden, the animosity disappeared, and Ed’s haphazardly cultivated blend of Buddhist and Christian compassion unconsciously asserted itself. What’s the point? Ed thought. This guy will know the earth beetles someday just like the rest of us.

So Ed obliged him. “Do you have a writing schedule?” he asked.

The man said he gets up at 6 am and writes for two hours. It’s hard for him, he said. Of course its hard, Ed thought. Writing, like farming, seems romantic until you actually do it.

“How old are you?” Mr. Martin said.

“Twenty-seven.”

“Are you prepared to make sacrifices in order to further your writing?”

Ed stared into the side of his face, cause not once did the man look him in the eye, and

picked up the bottle from the counter.

“Do you think I’m doing this for fun?” he said.

Mr. Martin looked around blankly. That was it, the rapport was over. They both said “good luck” at the same time and shook hands.

“I hope to see you again,” the man said, staring at something truly beyond Ed. Ed poured him some more wine and handed him the bottle. Yeah right, he thought, maybe in hell; his secular humanist’s love and compassion vanishing as quickly as it appeared.

The girls were already packing the crates into the mini van parked outside. Ed picked up a heavy bin full of empty plates, sterno burners, cutting boards and left over food bound for the dumpster. “Ellen,” he said, “does this go in your car?” He lugged a few more heavy things out and said goodbye to the girls and got in his car. He drove up route 2 to 95 and back to Providence to his little garret on Fox Point with two choice bottles left over from the party in his knapsack on the passenger seat.