Brunch with a writer
JM opened the fridge & saw half a big white onion in a ziplock bag. There was also a package of English muffins. One left. On the next shelf was his jar of peanut butter. It was one- quarter full. In the fridge door there was half a bottle of hot ‘n sweet mustard. “That is good,” he said aloud. His voice intruded on the silence of his house. He did not speak again. He always stored his egg cartons full end toward the fridge door. The carton's lid was half open. There were still two eggs left
JM brewed a cup of coffee on the Gaggia. Extra strong, spiked with additional espresso. That's how his daughter taught him to do it. He smiled after the first sip. He cut a thick slice of white onion, split an English muffin, browned both pieces under the broiler.
He slathered each side, still hot from the broiler, with peanut butter and watched the cold peanut butter warm and melt down into the nooks and crannies. When that was done he spread the mustard on top of the peanut butter. He made abstract swirls of arterial red mustard on the glistening peanut butter. Catherine would have noticed that the swirls counter rotated with each other, and asked why. He did not ask.
He finished his coffee. The last of it was bitter.
He brewed another cup. This time he did not add espresso.
He squeezed the onion slice between the two halves of muffin and deliberately took a bite. As he thought “This is good,”
JM realized he was having brunch with Nick Adams, beside Hemingway's “Big Two-Hearted River,” whose real name in the story is the Black River. In Wikipedia it is the Fox River which flows past the actual town of Seney, MI. In the story, Seney looks like a California Paradise: “There was no town, nothing but the rails and the burned over country…The foundations of the Mansion House hotel stuck up above the ground. The stone was chipped and split by the fire. It was all that was left of the town of Seney. Even the surface had been burned off the ground.”
JM rummaged his failing memory and this time found what he was looking for: “'Chrise,' Nick said, ‘Geezus Chrise, [as Hemingway was able to publish around 1921,] he said happily.” JMthought of Norman
Mailer, who invented “fug” so he could publish The Naked
and the Dead in 1948. JM's editor does not allow fug's avatar to appear in the UDJ in 2020. “Frick” meets her accurate sense of community standard English. The day before, JMhad tried to pay a bill at a small business. “I'm losing my frickin' mind,” said the owner, snowplowing papers on a desk. “Would it be so frickin' hard for that frickin' girl to keep frickin' accounts payable frickin' visible?” JM felt sympathy for the frickin' girl.
JM returned to rummaging. Something was not quite right with Nick and Geezus Chrise. Geezuz Chrise did not fit with onion sandwiches. JM went to his office to get a copy of The Complete Short Stories of Ear
nest Hemingway. to make the fit. He made the fit with a can of pork and beans and a can of spaghetti. Nick emptied them into his frying pan. He said, “I've got a right to eat this kind of stuff, if I'mwilling to carry it.
That was it.
Geezus Chrise graced Nick's canned spaghetti and pork and and beans, not JM's onion sandwich.
“In the pack found a big onion. He sliced it in two and peeled the silky outer skin. Then he cut one half into slices and made onion sandwiches. He wrapped them in oiled paper and buttoned them in the other pocket of his khaki shirt.”
JM noted that Hemingway does not let Nick eat his onion sandwiches.
JM's search for the fit of quotation to situation rewarded him with two more memories.
He was a tenderfoot Boy Scout in Manhattan. The troop camped overnight up the river on Bear Mountain. JM put his unopened can of Chef Boyardee on the campfire coals. It burst.
JM also remembered backpacking in the MokeIumne Wilderness with a pack-light fanatic and the gait of a mountain goat. He went on to head the NIH and later, Sloan-Kettering. JM bore a 50-pound pack and the mountain goat’s mockery for packing a fifth of bourbon in its glass bottle. Also 4 actual potatoes, a garlic bulb, small jar of sesame oil, lamb chops, green beans and a glass jar of dill. After dinner JM passed the bottle and the mountain goat significantly drank of it. We told stories.