Elizabeth clearly thinks of Goldberg as some kind of fop, an advertising fruit, and Goldberg knows it, but still he presses on. He fastens the silver tongs to the little cucumber sandwich and lifts it to his plate, just as she has done.
Goldberg knows about tea, too, in his own way. Though he would not presume to challenge her to a tea shootout. He’s on her territory today. This is apparent to both of them.
He’s not about to give this day up for anything. Not for all the tea in China, as he said back at the agency. Ad guys usually get asked to tour hotdog processing plants or cookie factories, period. Ad guys don’t get personal walkarounds in places like the Commonwealth Bibliotheum, whose windows look out on the graves of many a Mayflower Pilgrim and more than a few Founding Fathers.
Goldberg even put on a handknotted bowtie for the occasion. He left the black turtleneck and Prada patent leathers at home. The fopwear.
The last time Goldberg met a lady of Elizabeth’s Brahmin pedigree - granted, she was a different generation, and octogenarian, and less coy, and less stylish, but still – she had this amazing comment to make about Goldberg’s personality, which she saw as devil-may-care and charming.
“It’s because you’re utterly unencumbered by background,” the octogenarian said, her teeth so clenched that the words whistled,
As if all those deserts and all those shtetls didn’t count, thought Goldberg. Not as background.
Elizabeth fits easily into Goldberg’s Ralph Lauren imagery. She is prim, slim, mousy in a sexy way. She wears fitted things of dark blue and white, and tortoise-shell glasses you want to tear off. She has million-dollar ankles and she appears to be divorced, like Goldberg.
As Development Director, Elizabeth presided over the raising of funds for the Bibliotheum’s top-to-bottom restoration and renovation project, a $50 million effort of premier historical, architectural and literary importance. Now that the project, at long last, had been completed and the facility reopened, those special people who selflessly lent their talents to the cause are being thanked in the time-honored Bibliotheum tradition - at an afternoon tea so gracious and grand it is even exceeding Goldberg’s Ralph Lauren imagery.
The ad agency Goldberg slaves for, owned by an ancient trustee of the Bibliotheum, was very willing to lend its talents selflessly to the cause. The owner cracked the whip and not a bill was sent for even one minute of Goldberg’s time. His creative labors on the fundraising brochure and ads, which had appeared weekly in all the Symphony Playbills, didn’t cost Elizabeth and her cadre a nickel. He was indeed entitled to as many scones as he could fit on his plate and stuff in his mouth, not to mention an afternoon in close sniffing range of her Shalimar pulse points.
“You just do what you do, Elizabeth,” says Goldberg, giving his hostess a wave of permission to move beyond the cucumber sandwiches. “I’ll do exactly the same. My strategy is just go with the flow.”
Elizabeth looks up at Goldberg and likes what she sees – at least more than she liked before. He’s past the fop stage, and into the pimp stage, a big step up. She enjoys his joshing over the ridiculous cucumber sandwich, a teeny wimp compared to the gigantic, steaming pastrami sandwiches she associates with Goldberg. No one told her about his days in the deli; she just has a sense of these things. She especially likes his Russian shoulders, and his height. Goldberg’s first name is Jon, but she keeps wanting to call him Jeff, as in Goldblum. They could be cousins, in her view, Goldberg and Goldblum, and maybe they are. An afternoon nibbling scones with Jeff Goldblum or his cousin would not be an afternoon wasted. Not at all.
But the scones, with their piece de resistance accompaniments of lemon curd and clotted cream, are still several stations away, and the tea procession is moving slowly. Elizabeth deftly slides the silver implement under an array of the thinnest slivers of yellow cake. She takes one sliver only, hands the implement to Goldberg, and he apes her exactly. “Go with the flow,” he says again. As he speaks, the corners of his mouth form a sly Jeff Goldblum smile, and Elizabeth reddens, just a smidge, but she never flinches or drops her gaze.
At last they arrive at the lady in the gray dress who officially pours the tea. She sits flanked by two silver sentries, their spouts wafting wisps of aromatic vapor into the erudite Bibliotheum air. “What do you have?” asks Goldberg, jumping the gun a bit - out of sheer hunger, having found it takes forty gridlocked minutes just to inch around the guest-besieged pastry table. His phrasing has cafeteria overtones. Elizabeth does not have to ask such a question. She informs him it’s English Breakfast and Lapsang Souchong.
He pauses, like a traveler at a fork in the road.
“I take the Lapsang,” she says, whispering very close to his ear. “It’s a wonderful afternoon tea. Smoky.”
“Lapsang it is,” says Goldberg, his mind savoring the word smoky, which he connects far more with Elizabeth’s whisper than any snort of tea.
Goodies in hand, Goldberg and Elizabeth wend their way through the merry chaos of the Bibliotheum’s first-floor hall, where tea has been served weekly since the War of 1812. She is a nimble guide, able to swivel through the narrowest passages of abutting tables with the bravado of a first-string tailback. The china and silver dessert-ware seem to be natural extensions of her demure, polished hands. No amount of clattering and tinkling, even at high speeds, comes close to causing an embarrassing fumble. But with Goldberg the tea novice it’s a most different picture. His rangy Russki physique tense and shaking, he grips his little Lapsang cup as though it’s a fifty-pound anvil, for fear of spilling the hot stuff down some dowager’s pearl-draped neck.
“Whew, we made it,” Goldberg says, as they finally enter the small book-lined room Elizabeth has reserved for her little coterie of guests and minions. It’s a choice spot, secluded yet accessible, one she has used often; whenever she’s wanted to have her own private fete within the bosom of the larger, official whoop-de-doo. There are eight empty spaces at the round table. She motions Goldberg into the spot directly to her left, and they brush jacket sleeves repeatedly as they get seated. He wonders if it will just be the two of them, and happily catches a fresh whiff of Shalimar as she turns in her creaky Windsor to point out the Perrier-Jouet chilling on the sideboard.
“First, tea,” she says. “Then our tour. Then the crowd will drift away, and we can have a toast.”
“Or two,” says Goldberg.
“Or three,” says Elizabeth.
Before long they are joined by three members of Elizabeth’s staff, young, single women either too ditzy or too dowdy, and one invited notable, a stern, executrix type whom Elizabeth introduces as Louise O’Boyle O’Rourke, Special Projects Director of the Boston Redevelopment Authority.
“Louise knows her P’s and Q’s about Washington,” says Elizabeth.
Can I call her Double O? Goldberg wants to say this, but bites his tongue, and then shuts himself up with a forkful of peach tart. He tells himself to maintain decorum. Yet he’s starting to feel like the fox in the hen-house, and can’t wait for the champagne.
As the clinking and clucking fills the air Goldberg gains confidence. He becomes more comfortable, even sentimental, about his pleb roots and commoner education. He’s thinking of noble-savage anecdotes with a Yiddish tilt. Tales from Goldberg as a deli youth. His eye roves from Elizabeth’s tea-moistened lips to the commanding chandelier to the columns of leather-bound books, and it dawns on him he doesn’t even know, really know, what a private library is. The phrase seems an oxymoron. The libraries of his days in the Boston school system all made a big deal about their public-ness, proclaiming it a triumph of democracy. He remembers such places as the dominions of ferocious spinsters – in temperament not unlike Louise O’Boyle O’Rourke – to whom he was always apologizing or paying fines. He remembers being accosted in the stacks and the bathroom stalls by the ever-present homeless denizens of the huge, fortress-like Boston Public Library. Wine-soaked tramps offering blowjobs for spare change.
Years of adroit hostessing have honed Elizabeth’s conversational GPS. She knows where the prattle wants to go before it goes there. Her antennae pick up little blips of Goldberg’s nostalgia. But since she can only be who she is, her mind’s eye renders it as something dreamy and Chagall, which is hardly what’s on Goldberg’s mental movie screen.
“Where did you grow up?” she asks him.
And he tells her. He tells her too much. Shock talk about the deli night crowd. Pimps beating up whores. Drunks pissing in the phone booth. Ugly four-letter words creep into Goldberg’s narrative. He never gets around to the sweet stuff, the daytime stuff, his regular shift after school. The old Russian rag-man stopping by every afternoon for a glass of tea, a glass mind you, and a heel of hard black bread and a raw onion. This is the Chagall part, and Goldberg has it in him, but it’s down too deep, stuck under the Howard Stern stuff.
So she cuts him off nicely, spooning a puddle of marmalade onto his plate, and entices him to hear her “naughty” story of summer midnights at Squam.
“Can I get a refill of the Lapsang first?” Goldberg asks. “So smoky. That smokiness …like a single malt.” He tosses back the dregs of his cup, swishes it through his teeth and ponders. “Laphroiag,” he concludes.
Elizabeth views this alcoholic name-dropping as a little overmuch. And she’s still peeved when he finally returns from the tea station. So much so it colors her story, the whole picture she paints behind the picture. She can’t resist telling it as though she’s wearing white cotillion gloves, and he’s toting a rake and a hoe. There’s this tone in her voice - she knows what it is - and everything comes out more clannish, much more, than originally intended. The subject itself is common enough. Skinnydipping at the lake. But Elizabeth frames it to sound multi-generational, as though she were talking legacy with her trust officer at Bessemer.
She speaks of this wondrous hulk of a boathouse that’s been part of girlhoods and boyhoods in her family “forever and ever.” She purposely spins it into a domain Goldberg feels he might not be allowed to enter, not without a weekend pass from the purebred elders - a clubby mausoleum where the embalming fluid is boat varnish, the spicy reek of it oozing from the spruce ribs and mahogany gunwales of ancestral canoes, rows and rows of them. Elizabeth finds herself concocting both a snub and a tease, just to see what he’ll do with it. And she likes what she sees him do. Instead of faltering, Goldberg gives her the rakish Goldblum closeup, and he seems quite more aroused than put off.
“Can you imagine?” she says. “Midnight strikes and fifteen of us race into the boathouse. Aunts and nieces, mothers and daughters. The youngest is eleven, the oldest is sixty two. And we peel off everything.”
Goldberg-Goldblum raises an eyebrow. Arch and lustful. Elizabeth sees it as an eyebrow erect, and warms to her tale. She depicts the tittering bare-assed run from the boathouse to the lake, the dash and splash, as a spiky blend of Marquand and Boccaccio, and Goldberg gulps the bait. What snags him is the sheer volume of nudity, the flesh-rich tonnage of it all. So many matriarchs and debs and great-aunts and maiden-aunts heaving and jiggling as they prance into the moonlit waters. He imagines them as seven Harriet Beecher Stowes and Louisa May Alcotts. And eight Gwyneth Paltrows, Cate Blanchetts and Kate Winslets. Thirty breasts and thirty cheeks. Elizabeth grooves on his erect eyebrow, and layers detail into the scene - the dames and damsels sporting and squealing, wet and shiny as dolphins.
For the raciest part she moves her lips even closer to his ear, drops her voice and double-checks the other side of the table, because Louise O’Boyle O’Rourke has begun to stir and stare. She’s tall and casts a shadow of discipline, the capitalist Mother Superior, straight out of Southie. The ever-ready minions pick up a vibe from Elizabeth and hit O’Boyle O’Rourke with an ambush of distracting sound. They’re all over her, chirping torrents of flatter-chatter.
A zap of amplified static yanks Elizabeth and Goldberg back to real time. It’s the P.A. system, booming with awards and announcements. When it subsides Elizabeth cheerily pipes up that it’s walkaround time. Louise O’Boyle O’Rourke snaps to attention and rushes to be first in line.
Goldberg, still in his boathouse reverie, dawdles at the table and leaves his Lapsang slowly.
And instead of walking with him, Elizabeth makes a beeline for O’Boyle O’Rourke. They set out together, heels clicking on the new Italian marble.
Next in the little parade come the minions, falling in like ducklings.
Goldberg is mildly surprised, but sees it as something neither here nor there. Guarding the rear is a male thing to do. As they proceed from statue to statue and stack to stack, he has a chance to study Elizabeth from a new angle, and he finds her as comely as ever.
For her part, Elizabeth is solidly in her element, playing her best role. The ultimate tour guide, fluent and assured. To her audience she seems to know the story behind every plinth and page.
She calls attention to a particularly ancient European book, a volume the size of a small tabletop, which she dates at 1483.
“The heat and moisture around this book are under very sophisticated climate control,” she observes. “You’ll note the floor, in this section, doesn’t even have tile. The chemicals in tile are too harsh.You’re standing on a specially-engineered linoleum.”
“Lino,” says Goldberg, showing off that he’s been to London.
“Without regulation of the air and surrounding materials, the book would keep trying to revert to its natural shape. Every part of it is animal skin.”
O’Boyle O’Rourke looms over the book in hushed reverence. The minions, who must know this tour by heart, provide the requisite ooohs and ahhhs. Just loud enough to add excitement without distracting.
Goldberg offers comedy-club irony. “Does that mean if you turn off the air conditioner it will start to look like a sheep?”
When they reach the round peach-walled room that houses George Washington’s papers, Goldberg notices a visual quirk, a coincidence. In her facial bone structure, in her imposing height as well, Louise O’Boyle O’Rourke bears no small resemblance to General Washington – at the time when he was still being painted with brown hair.
Like a hyena, Goldberg skulks on the perimeter of the group as Elizabeth directs O’Boyle O’Rourke’s attention to three empty pedestals.
“Such faces. By Houdon, the French Huguenot sculptor. All three of them busts of children, and charming. They’ve been out for ages, wouldn’t you know it? For a cleaning. They left us months ago.”
Murmurs of disappointment from the minions. O’Boyle O’Rourke lightly touches Elizabeth’s jacketed elbow to show sympathy. Her fingers are long as candles. Goldberg stares blankly at the pedestals.
The tour takes even longer, considerably so, than the trip around the jam-packed pastry table. They dutifully climb every staircase, snoop in every alcove, pry open casements and marvel over the views from every balcony. As evening falls they wend their way back to their little V.I.P. tea room, and Elizabeth, deft as a cruise ship steward, uncorks the first Perrier-Jouet.
Everyone is still standing, milling around in the new nocturnal atmosphere, their own little cocktail party, tres private. Outside in the greater hall it’s a vast emptiness. The tea sippers have gone home. Only a few janitorials are left; methodically clearing and sweeping.
Elizabeth raises her slender glass and opens her lips to speak, but Goldberg blitzes in with a pre-emptive toast.
“To the literary event of the year,” he says, in his brashest Goldblum. Years of headline brainstorming at the agency have taught him that he who speaks fastest and first usually wins the battle of ideas.
Elizabeth nods graciously and takes a dutiful sip. For the whole length of the swallow she averts her eyes from him. A moment later she sips again. And then she throws down another and another, in rapid fire. The minions follow suit. By the end of the second glass the chatter is at the feverish pitch of an aviary.
But now that the revelers are standing and moving instead of fixed in their seats, the positions have shifted. Elizabeth hones in on O’Boyle O’Rourke the way a gull tracks a returning codfish boat. And, inexorably, the two of them float into a semi-secluded corner behind a torchier. Out of nowhere, the minions flutter around Goldberg like magpies, beseeching him for his views on the “commercial” world of branding and guerrilla marketing. Their three-on-one attack steadily pushes him into the opposite corner, his back brushing a gargantuan vase from the China Trade.
Cock his ear as he might, through the din Goldberg can hear next to nothing from the corner that unites Elizabeth and Louise O’Boyle O’Rourke. He does pick up two or three words, though, because it’s what they keep calling each other. “Lou,”says Elizabeth. “Why, Betsy,” says O’Boyle O’Rourke, her once-icy voice now strong and musical, like the left hand notes of a grand piano.
What Goldberg can’t hear, or see, is his own hard fall from grace, the grace of Goldblum, as Elizabeth mentally dumps him like a trash can. She leans close and invites O’Boyle O’Rourke to a private viewing of the Jefferson Davis papers, Boston’s most outrageous heist ever from the trounced and helpless Confederates.
They exchange knowing looks and off they go to the stacks.
Goldberg, by now high as a kite himself, watches their arm-in-arm departure, staring gaunt-eyed from the depths of his Russian despair. Physically he can do nothing to intercede and reverse the jilting, jammed as he is between the Chinese vase at his back and the forward wall of clamoring minions. But with the champagne and the kiss-off he has finally found his Chagall, his muse of tea… and he turns and feigns interest in the pattern of the vase, just to get a little dreaming room…
…He is back years and years ago, back behind the counter with his well-used cloth. Wiping the counter surface at the point where the rising aroma from the tray of just-cooked pastrami creates plumes of greasy steam that cloud the glass and shroud the entire food display. The heat from the long silver steamtable has a hearthlike effect on the frozen, bustling world on the sidewalk outside the glass door. Stung by the record cold, people tromp in, kick snow off their boots and barge up to the counter. They seem to derive nourishment just standing near the simmering trays and breathing. They breathe hungrily; the air is so filled with food.
To follow his scent-memory, Goldberg needs peace and quiet. He makes a restroom plea to the minions and they let him stagger away. And why not; Elizabeth and O’Boyle O’Rourke have safely vanished, eloped into the labyrinth of books and nooks. With all the ducts, cubbies and passages, it could take a search party all night to find even a wisp of Elizabeth’s Shalimar.
Alone at last, Goldberg plunges into a vortex of silence. He reaches the center of the great hall of tea and talk, now a mute sea of oak and marble. The tables have been broken down, the last cup put away. Like a skiff in a squall, the ad man lurches towards the far end, and pushes through the same dark doors the help used when they were clearing the saucers and crumbs. In the shadows he makes out the familiar shapes of a commercial kitchen. Even though his eyes are fuddled, his hands see precisely. They take him to an island of butcher block, and quickly locate the spot where years of slicing and dicing have worn a trough. This is where he rests his elbows and shuts his eyes completely.
And the instant the eyes shut, the steamed-up deli door opens; letting in a swift howl of arctic cold, a whip-snap of tundra air that may have come all the way from Siberia. With the swoop of wind comes a person, the old rag-man’s wife, huddling into her black coat, moving slow as a dirge.
The wife was not a regular like the rag-man himself, who was in the deli every day for his peasant’s meal. Goldberg saw him as the only man in America whose snack of choice was a whole uncut onion, an axe-hard heel of black bread and tea in a glass. Tea, not in a dainty cup pinched by two fingertips. But in a glass, a big, scalding glass; around which you wrap both hands, to warm them from the bitter cold, the Tolstoy winters of the rag-man’s youth.
When the rag-man came in for his usual snack – and he had not been in for a good two weeks – it was always the slow part of the day. “Sit,” he would say, and Goldberg would take a load off, light up and join the old bastard. “How do you eat those fucking onions, Mr. Karpovich?” Goldberg would say, blowing Lucky Strike smoke all around the words.
“Good,” is all Mr. Karpovich would answer, grunting the word and smacking his lips. And he would pick up the onion like an apple, chomp it, tear off some bread and wash it down with scalding tea.
To actually watch this onion eater do his rag-gathering work, Goldberg had to resort to imagination. Use it as a pictorial tool, a mental paintbrush. There were no huge, snorting draft horses anymore, no more grizzled men in wagons rolling through the cobbled street calling out, “Rags, rags.” The cobblestones had been paved over. The rag-man was a retiree. Karpovich rode to the deli each day in the street car. It was the only place he ever went, his wife tells Goldberg - on that frozen day she plods in alone, ushered by the wind, and wraps her thick work-hands around the steaming glass of tea Goldberg pours for her. A bag of orange pekoe. A twist of the handle on the stainless steel urn, tall as a boiler. Tea in a glass, which holds twice as much as a cup.
They sit a table in the deli slow hour, the twilight before the dinner rush, and she blurts out whatever comes to her mind about the rag-man’s burial, how the diggers had to break the hard snow to find a little dirt; a handful of it for her to throw on the pine box. She speaks a Yiddish English, a language in itself, and undoes her tight kerchief – perhaps to let the words come more freely, perhaps to simply wipe the steam from her glasses.Watching her swollen fingers fold around the tea glass and clutch it, Goldberg remembers marveling at the sheer size of the rag-man’s hands. How they seemed to be from another time and place, big as anvils and hard as hooves. Hands of a monument; but not carved or cast, nothing so elaborate. Merely born.
As Goldberg sits with the widow, mourning the rag-man, thinking of the big hands on the reins, he feels a cloudy connection with other reins and other hands, all the rag-men who preceded Mr. Karpovich. He sees a vast wagon train of rag-men and huge horses, stretching back into measureless time.
This is the image Goldberg takes with him as he finds his way out of the Bibliotheum and heads home to his high-rise condo. It is what he knows about tea.
