Chapter Twenty-One

The party was breaking up. Elizabeth accompanied her husband in the ambulance, the valets brought the guests their cars, and Derrick seemed to have disappeared.
Ben walked down the street and over to the bus stop. He waited about half an hour until the bus came. On the bus, he saw his reflection in the glass and realized he had a couple spots of blood on his face and that his white shirt had a red blood stripe across it like a sash. The other passengers avoided looking at Ben and tried not to notice the obvious bloodstains on his shirt.
He got off the bus in his neighborhood and walked quickly towards his apartment. When people saw him approaching, they walked to the other side of the street.
A police car slowed down and stopped next to him. The officer in the passenger’s seat shined a flashlight on Ben, examined his bloody shirt, and then shined the light on his face, causing Ben to shield his eyes.
“Are you hurt?” the officer asked.
“It’s not my blood,” Ben replied.
“Well, be careful,” the officer said. He turned off the flashlight and they drove away.
Ben walked into the lobby of his building and waited for the elevator. When the elevator door finally opened, Tyrone came out, carrying a toilet brush.
He looked at Ben and was silent.
“It’s not my blood,” Ben explained.
Tyrone grinned and waved his toilet brush dismissively.
“Don’t have to explain to me. None of my bidness how you got all bloody.” Tyrone giggled and grinned, his white teeth flashing. “Bloody. Oh BLOODY hell! Zat really a swear word over there in Britain? Bloody!”
“Yeah, I guess it is.”
“Hey Ben. You do me a favor? Teach me some other swear words? In British.”
“I shouldn’t.”
“Come on. Go ahead. Just us boys here.”
“I’m really tired.”
“Just a couple. The nastiest ones you know.”
Ben didn’t know any British swear words. Just bloody. But everyone knew that one. He tried to think of some filthy Briticisms, but couldn’t. He would have to make them up. Well, he was a poet. It was his job, sort of. He was more of a word organizer than a word inventor. Now he would have to invent words.
British. Ben had to think British. He thought British and the first thing that popped into his mind was croquet.
“Wicket,” Ben said.
“Wicket,” Tyrone repeated, savoring the feel of the word on his mouth. “What is a wicket?”
Ben thought that a wicket was that thing you hit the ball through in croquet. He said it was something else and Tyrone howled with glee.
“Tell me mo’!”
What proceeded was the filthiest conversation Ben had ever had in his life. He coined several new words and phrases, including: spulgers, vulvicy, minding the gap, squidge, thuffers, and javving. He also invented several lewd acts of depravity which included crumpeting (it didn’t involve pastries,) Hufflepuffing (had nothing whatsoever to do with the dorm in Harry Potter) and fox-hunting (its only relation to actual fox-hunting was that many in Britain wanted it banned.)
When he finally managed to shake Tyrone, and get up to his room, he felt that he had more than just blood to wash off.
***
The next morning, Ben got an earlier bus and arrived forty-five minutes early at the garden. He went around quietly, reading My Name is Higgs Boson to the flowers.
He sat on a wooden stool in the tropical greenhouse, reading to the chocolate tree when the door squeaked open, and Elizabeth walked in.
Ben closed his notebook so she wouldn’t see the bloodstains on the page.
“How are you?” she asked.
“Fine,” he said, standing up.
“I wanted to apologize,” she said. “I’m sorry that you weren’t able to perform your poem for us last night.”
“Oh, that’s okay.”
She seemed to be waiting for him to say something.
“I’m sorry I stabbed your husband in the windpipe last night,” Ben said.
“You didn’t stab him in the windpipe. You stabbed him in the voice-box.”
“Oh.”
“The doctor says he’ll heal, his voice will come back. Voice-boxes are very resilient.”
“That’s good.”
“Howard wants to speak to you.”
“Okay.”
“But he can’t. You stabbed him in the voice-box.”
“So how do I…”
“He has to communicate with a computer.”
“He has one of those talking computers, like Stephen Hawking?”
“No. He types what he wants to say, and you read it off the screen.”
They walked out of the greenhouse and towards the house together. There was a nice breeze outside.
“I should warn you,” Elizabeth said, “The painkillers have made him very emotional.”
“Okay.”
“So he’s using a lot of emoticons.”
They walked into the house, through the kitchen, and down a narrow hallway to professor Roseman’s study. Elizabeth rapped lightly on the wooden door. There was no answer. She gently slid open the door.
“Howard?”
They entered the room. Sunlight streamed through a circular window, casting a hazy, yellow light on the bookshelves stuffed with old books that lined every wall. The room smelled of mothballs and the old books.
Howard Roseman sat on a worn leather chair and tapped his fingers gently against the arm rest. A thick white bandage covered his throat. He picked up his laptop from a low glass coffee-table and waved Ben over, indicating a wooden rocking-chair for Ben to sit on. Ben sat in the rocking-chair, but didn’t rock; he wanted to stay alert, in case Roseman attacked him again.
There were no sharp objects in view, but there were some dangerous looking paperweights on the coffee table. Dangerous and beautiful: tropical fish frozen in lumps of smooth glass.
“I’ll leave you two alone,” Elizabeth said and closed the door softly behind her.
“How are you?” Ben asked.
Howard Roseman punched at the keyboard with his index finger. He hit just two keys and turned the monitor towards Ben. It was an emoticon:
;(
A frown. But not a normal frown. Professor Roseman used a semicolon instead of a regular colon for the eyes. The frowning face winked at Ben.
What did the wink mean? Ben had dropped out of college before they could teach him how to use semicolons. He just knew it was the punctuation of the bourgeoisie, winking at each other, enjoying the knowledge that they would never have to do any real work; that they could just coast along on the sweat of the workingman. Ben preferred simple periods and honest commas. When he could, he avoided punctuation altogether.
Ben looked at Roseman, frowned, and winked. Roseman glared back at him, audibly grinding his teeth. He turned the laptop, pounded the keyboard with his thumb.
Maybe Ben was wrong. Maybe it wasn’t a wink. It was one of those complex old-man emotions. Possibly nostalgia. And Professor Roseman thought that Ben was mocking his nostalgia.
The professor turned the screen back, the font size was only four-point and Ben couldn’t read it.
“I can’t see it,” he said. “It’s too small.”
The professor waved him closer to the screen.
“No.” Ben shook his head. “I’m not falling for that one.”
Roseman raised his hands innocently, but Ben wasn’t fooled. The professor just wanted Ben to lean closer so he could slam the laptop shut on his face and then hit him on the top of the head with a tropical fish paperweight.
“Enlarge it,” Ben said.
Roseman shrugged and squeezed his eyebrows together. He was an old man and didn’t understand all these newfangled computers. But Ben wasn’t fooled.
“You shrunk it. If you know how to shrink it, you know how to enlarge it.”
Roseman ground his teeth and turned the laptop back towards him. He stabbed angrily at the keys. When he turned the screen back towards Ben, the font was one-hundred-point. It said: GET OUT!!!
***
“Poor Howard,” Elizabeth said. “I wish there was some way to cheer him up. But he doesn’t like anything.”
Ben and Elizabeth sat in the gazebo, sipping ice tea. Birds sang to each other in the trees and the sprinklers sprayed the soil. It was like this for a while, until finally Elizabeth broke the silence.
“How was the party,” she asked. “I mean, aside from the choking incident. How do you think it went?”
“Honestly?”
Ben took a swig of iced tea and cleared his throat.
“There were two many semicolons,” he said.
Elizabeth squinted up her forehead and looked perplexed.
“Everyone was winking at each other,” Ben explained. “It was a party for rich people. How come only rich people can come to the garden? Why don’t you let the downtrodden in?”
“I wanted to inspire my friends with the beauty of flowers.”
“Poor people like flowers too,” Ben said.
“I suppose you’re right. I suppose I could have a garden party for them.”
Elizabeth stood up and started to pace around the gazebo. She did this whenever she got inspiration. Ben knew what it felt like. He sometimes had to pace when the idea for a new poem came to him. It was like every neuron in the body was set off. Finally, Elizabeth stopped pacing, walked up to the glass table, and leaned over it towards Ben.
“I have a great idea,” she said. “Howard’s birthday is in a couple weeks. We’ll have a surprise party for him.”
Ben nodded. It was the worst idea he had ever heard.
“It’ll be here, in the garden. This time, everything will be perfect. We’ll invite all your downtrodden friends. And this time, you’ll get to read your poem for sure.”
“Great idea,” Ben said.
“You’ll bring the downtrodden people?”
Ben nodded, but realized that he didn’t really know many actual downtrodden people. Despite being their poet, he hadn’t managed to meet many of them. He supposed he could ask Tyrone to bring some friends. Tyrone knew lots of downtrodden people.
He wondered how Professor Howard Roseman would react when Tyrone and his friends jumped out from behind the bushes and yelled, “Surprise!”
Probably surprised; the professor didn’t even know his birthday was coming up.
Ben wondered what the emoticon for surprise looked like.
***
ד בתשרי תשס''ח
ירושלים
September 16, 2007
Jerusalem