Places We Ate with Z (Pt.2)
Here’s the finale of the first novella in my All Happy People project. As with Pt.1, I’m leaving a substantial section available for free, but I will ask for your $5 if you want to read it all.
Lots ahead in the coming month or so: my quarterly music-worth-hearing digest, a meditation on what feels like an epidemic of fellow insomniacs going to sleep to scary audiobooks…all kinds of things. A lot of that will be free. I’ll only ask for money if you want to read the fiction. It’s the work to which I’ve dedicated my life and my living.
Like what you see, and want to help me make this Substack a permanent thing? Please do say something to somebody, or somebodies.
Most of all, thank you for reading.
I’m including Jonas Yip’s cover art again, just because I love it so much. Pt. 2 below:
4. Macaroon
Really, Macaroon was never the gathering place of any particular epoch, or at least not the only place. It was always the place after, the two a.m. sanctuary, our blind pig and secret spot, though it was hardly just ours, never private, and no one’s secret. That amaretto cheesecake, those towering slices of chocolate raspberry truffle whose tempered coating winked like darkened windows reflecting the city’s night, they were for everyone in the East Village with taste buds.
Nevertheless, it was ours. Most of all, it was theirs. Z’s and Shannon’s. Whatever it was that happened between them happened in that space. By the time the rest of us arrived—even if we did so right behind them, following along from the Odessa or that grimy downstairs Cantonese place in Tribeca where we sometimes met to devour salt-and-pepper garlic squid and those potstickers, Jesus—they’d already ensconced themselves in their corner, that wedge of tables shoved at angles into the back of the back room by the window. Somehow, by the time we got seated, they already had hands around teacups, heads tilted just slightly toward one another so they could hear each other talking. We never saw Z wave his arms less during conversation, and while claiming he ever spoke quietly would be absurd, he was certainly quieter.
What did they talk about? Us, of course, at least when we were around. We were all in our early thirties during the Shannon time—except Ligia, who was only a few years younger but still seemed like our collective kid—and Gyda, who had to have been 50, but she wasn’t the late-night sort, had just met Z at that point, and rarely came. Our Parliament was starting its second decade, and yet only at Macaroon did we realize that we were the sole topic of discussion: our projects, Kat’s brewing marriage catastrophe, Rae’s out-of-nowhere Guggenheim to do more Yeats fests at more schools and her surprise elopement with the real estate developer she’d dated for years but never once brought to meet us. We were all a little hurt by that, though even now, it’s hard to articulate which aspect of it prickles, the elopement or the guy she picked. We never did meet him.
Z wasn’t hurt, though. That was yet another astonishing thing about him. To the extent that he pictured himself at all—and sometimes we suspect that he didn’t, ever, that that was the secret to his capacity to welcome and enfold and encourage anyone he deemed worthy, and also the reason his relentless attention never felt creepy—we think he saw himself as candlelight, evening sun, shade tree. He was the thing that drew you out of you, made you feel significant. But you owed—and he expected—nothing.
At least, he expected nothing from us. He did from Shannon, eventually. That’s what we gleaned, anyway, from the very little he let slip afterward. If it’s true, though, how could the Z we know be that dense or imperceptive? Shannon loved him, we’re positive of that. She loved us all. She loved being with us. But like all of us, she was also entirely herself in Z’s company, which in her case meant half-distracted, one eye always over our shoulders or out the window or turned inward. It’s just how she was, the artist in her. She had a bigger Parliament in mind, but she didn’t want to speak or act in it, just watch it. Maybe report on it. Reflect it to itself. The only way Shannon could be with anyone for any length of time is if she could also be alone.
We loved her for that. It was a new element, a quiet center and a clearer window on the larger world we were all trying, in our ways, to impact and be part of. But we weren’t trying to date or marry her.
Then again, maybe we have the Z and Shannon rupture entirely wrong. The way Z framed it—which he only did to one of us at a time, over a period of years, during late-night phone calls between Parliament gatherings when he suddenly seemed to awaken to the idea that he was alone— doesn’t really match the narrative we’ve pieced together. Mostly, his version boiled down to the fact that he “could have and should have, right when she asked. I should never even have thought about it. Now I’ll always think about it for the rest of my life.”
Could and should have… left the city with her? Married her? Backed the hell off for a while?
Whichever it is, that’s his version. We each have our own. We’ll never have hers.
And so all that’s left is our mind’s-eye snapshot of the Parliament at those white, plastic Macaroon tables heaped with plates full of cake. We look (and felt) like beloved guests of royalty in repose, of Victoria and Albert in their secret Sunday clothes (if they had such clothes) with their guards down. Sometimes Shannon is holding Z’s hand. He is asking after and teasing and regaling the rest of us, same as usual, but he’s happier about it, his enthusiasm quieter but even more intense.
He really thought it would never end. Any of it. We think he believed that so hard and so effortlessly that for a while—an amazingly long while—he had us all convinced.
When Shannon left him, us, the city, and the East Coast, we didn’t stop going to Macaroon. That’s one of the great Z life lessons, after all: no matter what happens in life, you keep going to Macaroon.
So we did. It just stopped tasting as good.
Wondrous
Why wasn’t Wondrous ever right? Well, it was their place, first of all—Z’s and the Warbler’s—and again, one reason it felt wrong is that the Warbler was so conscious and intentional about making it hers. Ours, but because of her. She was the only Parliament member who ever referred to any of our places as “our place” during the years we were going to it. She was the only one to chatter, constantly, about why we went there (“Oh my God, how do they do it? It’s frozen solid but burns like whisky going down! It’s the sweetest thing I’ve ever had on my tongue, but it’s gone before you even taste it, and what you’re left with is…salt?!”). That was the only cafe where we ever had a table, our table, complete with enough chairs and place settings, right in the middle of the giant circular middle room, so that no matter which seat you got, you could glance past whichever Parliament member you were facing into the Park or down 5th. We had that table, of course, because the Warbler reserved it. It was the only place we ever gathered that took reservations.
The food was of higher quality than at Roy Scheider’s coffee shop—obviously—and also most of the other places we ate. But everything looked and tasted a little too polished. Too much watercress. Lots of what Kat called “hyphen dishes” on the menu: “grass-fed”, “melon-mint.”
Possibly the whole place just radiated too much self-assurance. Wondrous knew what it was good at, and that it was good. Whereas, at a level we were only beginning to understand, members of the Parliament of Z never got all the way sure that we were good at anything. In a way, our constant mutual support stemmed from and reinforced the notion that we would never be quite impactful enough to pull off what we’d meant to. Not any of us.
One thing’s for sure and indisputable: that frozen cinnamon-salt Belgian hot chocolate was the shit. It really might have been the single most magnificent taste we ever experienced as a collective. Cold enough to induce brain freeze-ache if you sucked up too much at once, and then, yeah, burning as it went down. Sweet and soft as a kiss, and with no saltiness anywhere, so where did that sting on the back end come from? That tingling that tickled down gums and over lips for hours afterward? If the Roy Scheider place or anywhere in New York had ever learned how to make that drink with Fox’s u-bet, it could have brought the entire island to its knees.
So why do those memories taste so bad? We couldn’t even have explained to each other. Part of what we hate remembering is that we never even tried to explain it to the Warbler.
Except Rae. Rae tried.
Actually, in her quiet, graceful way, Rae skipped right past explaining and attempted to solve the problem. She started making a point of arriving at Wondrous first, before the Warbler and Z. She’d make sure she got the back-most chair at the top of the arc of our table—the Queen’s chair, with the most panoramic view out the window into the Park—so that the Warbler and Z either had to split up around her or settle together on one side or the other. The idea wasn’t to separate them but to keep them from resurrecting or even believing in their recreation of the Z-and-Shannon Balmoral-at-Macaroon feel. Because when Z and the Warbler did it, it felt more like state dinner at Buckingham Palace, with us as guests.
Or maybe, again, that was just the Wondrous effect.
Or else it was us. Shits that we were.
The thing is, they had to know what Rae was up to, or at least Z did. Z never missed anything that had to do with us or anyone to whom he’d devoted himself. We used to joke that the prescription on those glasses of his read X-RAY. He saw us all. But because this was Rae, even the Warbler never seemed affronted. Rae wouldn’t let her be. The Warbler would hesitate just a moment when she came in. Then she’d slip off those gloves that always seemed way too white for New York, settle to Rae’s right or left, and Rae would immediately take her hand, lean in, and start talking and laughing with her.
We love that Rae did that. Especially because Rae was so gaunt, then. Not haggard, exactly; this is Rae, don’t be ridiculous. But the missiles the world kept launching at her life had finally landed, detonated, and done damage. This was the era of endless testing on her daughter, which ended, two years and a climactic and erroneous six-week brain tumor scare later, with a generalized diagnosis of “limited cognitive capacities” and a recommendation that Rae institutionalize her “so she can be around others like her.” As if they’d found lots of other kids like Rae’s daughter.
Needless to say, Ray rejected that, declined her latest NEA grant, quit half her jobs, gave a press conference so eloquent and quiet that no reporter asked a single question—in New York—and retreated into her home life. There she stayed even as her legendarily peaceful, gentle marriage—legendary because Rae never talked about it, only smiled and looked peaceful when we asked—exploded in a series of screaming fights about what to do with the child. Then Rae’s family, who’d already threatened Rae with banishment over her husband the bai gui, cut her off completely.
“Over your daughter?” Kev straight-up asked once, as we stood together under the royal blue Wondrous awning one suffocating August afternoon, waiting for a thundershower to pass so we could leave. “Because you decided to love her and be her mom instead of abandoning her?”
For answer, Rae smiled distractedly, sweeping the fan of suddenly graying hair out of her eyes. Unlike everything else on Rae’s person, the gray looked garish, splotchy and streaky, as though some punk kid had just rocketed by and tagged her.
“Give us their number,” Kat snarled, grabbing Kev’s elbow. “Rae, I’m not kidding, give us their fucking phone number.”
“Give me their address,” Ligia said, looking straight at Rae, and even Kat shuddered.
“They’re gone,” murmured Rae. “Moved back to Hong Kong.”
“So?” said Ligia.
Kev touched Ligia’s sparrow-thin, leather-jacketed arm. “Hon.”
Ligia glanced down at Kev’s finger, then up into her face. Every single of one us said a little prayer, right there, that Ligia never, ever found out where Rae’s parents lived.
But Rae went right on ghost-smiling, being Rae. “They’ll come around some day. It’s…hard for them. They groomed us for more than they had. They believe so fiercely in us. They just want…”
“Address,” Ligia said.
The Warbler, misreading the cue as usual, laughed.
Actually, maybe there were only a couple of us at Wondrous that day. We were rarely in full session there, because we had too many misgivings about coming. Also, we were busy saving our marriages or breaking them, caring for parents or saying goodbye to them, launching new projects we already understood would fail or salvaging what we could from efforts that had already failed. Kev was in the midst of another run of endometriosis surgeries that never helped. Ligia had gone to war with the entire rest of the District Attorney’s office for not being aggressive enough on pursuing maximum sentences for domestic rape. She didn’t know yet what losing that fight was going to cost her, but most of the rest of us did.
More hard years.
In retrospect, it amazes us that we kept going there as long as we did. We’d never quit a place before, not on purpose. Our home bases either closed or changed management, or else events in one or more of our lives necessitated adjourning to a more convenient location. Most often, Z just called up one day and announced he’d found another of the world’s great secret tastes, and we had to come try it with him.
But we broke up with Wondrous. Ligia finally did it for us.
It happened on a wintry Saturday when the snow was new and the park white and the buses all sighing and steaming out on 5th like beasts of burden conveying the city’s twenty million nomads up and down the avenues and over the rivers. For once, all of us had arrived early, before our hosts. Rae was in the queen’s chair. Ligia had claimed the seat next to her, leaning back into the crook of Rae’s arm and actually letting Rae comfort her, as though Rae was her mom. Which, we all realized--and then forgot for a long time, because it seemed so unlikely then and seems that way still— was exactly what Rae had become. In fact, except for the pugnaciousness, Ligia was probably a pretty fair approximation of the relentless, impassioned, accomplished daughter Rae’s family (and also probably Rae) had imagined she would have. And Rae was the one soft, safe place into which Ligia would ever let herself collapse.
“What happened?” one of us asked as we settled around them, though we knew, already. We’d heard from Z. Ligia had mouthed off one too many times to thirty too many powerful people. She’d also ignored instructions on what sentence to pursue for a four-time wife rapist who’d recently started going after his daughter. And now she was no longer an assistant district attorney.
Neither Rae nor Ligia answered, and the world outside was too beautiful for talking, anyway. So we watched that, snatching occasional glances at the miracle of Rae holding Ligia, who might have been crying but had her eyes closed. Then the Warbler appeared. Her hair glistened, and her white boots shone despite the slush out there. Her smile was toothy and wide. So beautiful. She started her white-gloved wave, and Ligia opened her eyes.
“Jesus Christ,” she said. It was her gaze even more than her tone that turned the Warbler to stone. “It’s like eating with an escaped carriage horse. Could you just once, for five minutes, stop fucking prancing?”
That was the end of Wondrous.