This morning I set out for a bit of light holiday shopping. As you know, my man Berkley normally executes my purchases, but as he’d fallen ill the week previous, it relied entirely upon me to see the list through. So, having dressed to the very pinnacle of perfection (having coordinated not only the shoes and coat, but the hair as well, gelled to the same midnight shade), I set out into the city.
It’s near enough Christmas that the city tree has been erected in the brick plaza near Taggert’s department store. You’ve seen it at some point, no doubt, on any one of the nightly news programs I know you’re so fond of, and I wonder if you’ve noticed that each of its bulbs are blue, not unlike the tree we decorated when I was a boy. It was, in fact, the same blue I remember from your hands as well, Mother, from the fine inlays running between your knuckles and along your fingers, the blood blue, they say, before meeting oxygen and spoiling red.
As you know, I’ve always found shopping rather dull, and as such, I endeavored to line my expedition with a bit of padding. Being sharply dressed, which I’ve already noted I was, served as an obvious boon (I rarely find a thing more satisfying than watching the casual passer-by nearly break his neck to catch a hint of my jacket’s label). A bit of espresso, too—ideally ensconced in a small nest of milk-foam—can do wonders to elevate one’s shopping experience, and so I popped into the local café.
“Welcome to MegaCafé,” the boy behind the register chimed, his voice the electronic sing-song of an automaton, “how can we help you?”
I ordered a double shot, twelve ounce cappuccino, bone dry, in a mug rather than a paper cup.
“One dry double-tall cap for here?”
Normally I let such banalities slide, but the verbal crippling administered to my order was, frankly, so emotionally devastating I couldn’t help but articulate my distress.
“I’m very sorry, but, I would like a twelve-ounce cappuccino, please.”
“Oh, tall means twelve-ounce,” he smiled, eyes sparkling. “That’s just how we say it.”
“Yes,” I said, cringing because he was forcing me to channel a sort of unpleasantness I was hoping not to exude, “I’m aware that your establishment has its Italian terminology for drink sizes, but, and—how best to put this? Perhaps a question, to start—Do you know much of the Italians?”
“I’m sorry?”
“The Italian race? I can tell by your expression that you don’t. Well, a lot gets said about certain painters and certain sculptors, but let me tell you this,” I leaned close enough to smell his metallic, twelve-dollar cologne, “the Italians are extremely dirty, as a people.”
“Okay!” he cried. “One twelve-ounce cappuccino, coming right up!”
I delivered a wink as I took my ceramic mug and exited the café—the boy may have exhibited a rigorous adherence to mediocrity, but damned if he didn’t know when the customer had his point. Cappuccino in hand, the hot ceramic stinging against the fingertips, I braved on toward Taggert’s, steeling myself as best I could against those humans insistent on displaying their unseemliness to the world. You know the type—the sallow, unemployed digenarians with the audacity to wear clothing political in nature, who openly advertise their drug use and debauchery, who wear, of all things, patches on their garments, and not just one or two, but dozens! Dozens, on one piece of clothing! And to what end did they sit, I wondered, shadowed beneath the spire of the city tree? Waiting for a visitor who would not arrive, I supposed, a sentiment that iced me to my core.
Having made it past that unfortunate crowd, I stepped into Taggert’s, my entrance facilitated by a very kind gentleman holding the door (though there was a slight confusion when a woman and I bumped shoulders trying to enter simultaneously). The soles of my shoes clicked along the marble floor, and the sound, as familiar as the Rolex’s pulse, instantly assuaged the nerves so recently riled outside.
“Hello sir,” said a blonde in a lint-spangled coat, “do you need help finding anything today?”
“Indeed,” I told her, “I’m looking to purchase a gift for my mother, what with the holidays approaching.” Here, I nudged her in the arm, the gesture looking quite classy with the coat thrown over the forearm, as mine happened to be.
“Absolutely,” she beamed, “do you have something in mind for your mother?”
I didn’t, I explained, and normally my man Berkley would offer a sliver of insight, an edge with which to crack the shell on the entire mystery to reveal, at its soft center, an appropriate gift.
“I see,” she replied, and I judged by the rather raw texture of her hair that she might be unaccustomed to anecdotes concerning one’s personal valet. “Well, what kind of person is your mother?”
“She’s quite terrible, really. She lives in an old mansion up on the hill—Dutch, I believe, built by wealthy fur-trappers in the early 1800s—and I’m beginning to fear that a specter of some kind has come to haunt her in her recent years. You see, she recently took a husband,” I looked over my shoulder to ensure we were among friends and patriots, “an Italian man, I’m afraid. Do you know much of Italy? A country where its men routinely wear white pants—” I was racked by a violent shudder, “—what else is there to say about such a place?” She shook her head dumbly and I continued. “Alas, I’m here for a gift, not a new brain for Mother!”
I laughed loudly, though I fear the attendant was lost entirely in the depths of my eloquence at this point, as she stood simply, blinking. I continued plainly, “You see, what I’m looking for is something unique, a collector’s item. Something rare, hand-crafted. Something entirely unexpected.”
After what appeared a tremendous effort, the girl’s sputtering mouth ushered forth a sentence. “And do you have something? In mind?”
“Not a clue, I’m afraid, save that the greatness of my purchase must, at the very least, triple her own efforts, lest I’m to be outdone by an old kook living on the hill who snatches up every Italian gigolo that strolls past!”
“Let me just find? Somebody? I’ll be right…” and she trailed off in both speech and person. I stood casually near a pair of mannequins, both handsomely dressed in sweater vests and slacks
(a look best executed on the links), and I couldn’t help but notice, in the faint reflection of the window, the striking similarities between their strong, perfectly symmetrical faces, and my own.
“You possess the nervous air of a man who doesn’t know what he’s looking for,” a voice boomed over my shoulder, “yet wishes desperately to find it.” I turned and saw a man in an ash-gray suit with wide lapels. His necktie, undoubtedly silk, shone the cold blue of ocean deep.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Chuck Barrington,” he said, extending a hand that was undoubtedly deft with a squash racquet. I introduced myself, though a little simply, I’m afraid, caught off-guard as I was by the sheer elegance of this stranger, Mr. Barrington. Whether it was the way he had materialized from what seemed the very essence of the store, or his thick, perfectly-combed head of hair, I cannot say. I excused my stutter with a compact cough into a closed fist, and continued, “Did the attendant see you over, then?”
“I’m afraid not. I’m from a different department altogether, an agent for our more refined customers. I’m afraid the young woman who regrettably intercepted you does little more than peddle Armani jackets to college students and the working poor. Tell me sir, how familiar are you with Italy?”
“I’ve only met a few of its ex-patriots,” I grumbled, “and those encounters have provided enough substance to avoid the country altogether.”
“Aha!” he cried, grin expanding to the very limit of physical possibility. A strong hand found my shoulder, and together we drifted past the displays and registers, to an unremarkable beige door in an unremarkable beige wall. I found the vast expanse of beige a bit unsettling, but beneath the door frame, an oasis: a blue light shimmering on the tile. “Italy has a reputation, as I’m sure you know, for fine products, its star designers: Gucci, Prada—I can discern from your expression that I need not continue.”
“Your point is made,” I said, smoothing an agitation from my coat.
“But this, as I’m sure you know, is a fallacy, for the finest, rarest, and most painstakingly crafted items in all the world can be found here, right beneath our noses.”
“Yes, yes, I’ve gone through something of an Amish phase. Fine furniture, if a little overly pragmatic.”
Mr. Barrington removed from his pocket a large key-ring, which, in a fashionable reversal of expectation, held only one key. Into the lock it went, and he pressed open the door. I followed him into the hallway, a cold stretch of blue concrete, at the end of which, a set of stairs descended into blackness.
“Not the Amish, I’m afraid, though I do respect your adventurous sense of commerce and your dedication to the American people.” I kept close as Barrington made the downstairs plunge, but even inches behind his voice, I could see not one hair on his head. “The products to which I’m alluding require a broader understanding, one that lies outside of economy altogether. You see, the novelties I’m about to present are not crafted for a wage. They are purities of the heart, jewels forged in the fire of the human soul. I present to you, good sir, the finest assembly of my existence.”
Barrington flipped a switch, and a pair of monstrous blue lights flickered to life above us, joined then by an adjacent pair, and then another, until the space in which we stood revealed itself a warehouse one hundred yards in length. Running perpendicular to the lights, dozens of wood tables spanned from our end of the room to the other, their legs carved into thick, snake-like corkscrews. Barrington gave an approving nod as I stepped forward, and I discerned that the tables contained thousands of items, and that as far as I could perceive, no item appeared twice. There were crude clay sculptures, hand-knit garments, frames composed of cardboard and glue and an abundance of uncooked macaroni. I pressed my hand to a rainbow-striped wooden board, its exact purpose unapparent, and found the ink fresh enough to seep into my skin. And, on the corner of the next table, I beheld a folded paper card, its face drawn in blue ballpoint pen. “Merry Christmas Mom,” its exterior read, while, on its interior, two stick figures, one taller and with significantly longer hair, embraced between hearth and blue-baubled tree. “All I want for Christmas is you,” it explained.
“Anything you can imagine, and everything you cannot,” said Mr. Barrington, as he came to a respectful distance. “These materials are obtained from children ages six to fourteen, a period our department has defined as critical in production. I must point out, of course, that our means of procurement are rather clandestine—.”
“You mean to say that you steal these from children?” I cut in, uncharacteristically.
“I do, sir.”
I took a deep breath and dabbed the welling of emotion from my eye with a silk kerchief, “They’re so… pathetic.”
Barrington, without so much as a flourish, produced a fresh kerchief in exchange for my soiled one. His grin had diminished, but still his glossy whites were revealed, soft blue in the room’s reflected light. “It seems you’ve found your gift, have you not?”
I held the card in my hands, unbelieving. Hesitated to set if down for fear I would never see it again, sure, as I was, it held the allure of something lost forever.
“Very well,” he said. “You can leave the way you came in.”
.&.
By now, dear mother, I’m sure it’s quite obvious I never sent that card or this letter, as nothing came for you in the post last Christmas. I’m also sure you’re aware of the unfortunate events that plagued me these past twelve months, and while I do not desire to rehash their ugly details, I feel compelled to explain, in some small way, the effect they’ve had on me since. When notified of the family stock taking its oft-discussed nosedive, I scrambled to sell my shares, learning only afterward that you, under your second husband’s advice, had traded your shares years ago. It was not embarrassment that prohibited me from returning your correspondences—a rumor sloughed off from various social circles which were, for months, abuzz with the news—as much as it was betrayal. This was the same sentiment that informed my decision to ignore the flurry of letters you sent when, after several weeks of bickering with various members of the board, I was expelled from Father’s company (left only with a pittance sufficient enough to retain my condominium and Berkley’s services), and it’s in the same vein that I’m responding to your request I visit you and your suitor.
While I am rigorous to my own standards, I am not without heart; with this letter I send my respectful condolences at the news that Aldo has fallen ill. If he does manage to pull through, I understand a great relief will wash over you, and your lives will appear both blessed and entirely new. However, I also understand your strength as a woman (a strength you seem too willing to forget) and I know that when Aldo does pass, you will continue to survive, and in a better fashion than you are now. It seems to me, in re-reading your letters from this past year, that you remember very little of what it was like to lose Father, but I remember that time quite well, and of all the incidents of that period, I can recall with startling clarity that first Christmas without him.
We didn’t erect the tree until Christmas Eve, if you remember. You told me in confidence that the very sight of the tree would be too much, and not wanting to upset my distraught mother any further, I told you, in my hushed boyish tone, that I felt the same way. But when that night arrived, you explained that the stark emptiness of the room was more terrible than any reminder of Father, and so you asked me if I would mind were someone to deliver a tree (imagine that—you asking me, when all I had wanted was to please you in the first place!). Though the hour was late and the minute, to cite a common colloquialism, the last, thunderous knocking struck our home and a large, brown-bearded man hoisted a pine into our living room, needles falling from his shirt and into the carpet. And so, by the flickering light of our hearth, we strung the tree with garland, brightened it with blue bulbs, and, my small torso held high above your head, we rested a gold star upon its crown.
But I fear that I am digressing, suffice to say that no matter what occurs over these next few weeks, there is something pure in your blood (that bond which we will always share, you and I alone now) on which you can draw from and rely. As for myself, I have found suitable pastimes with which to occupy my free hours. Most recently, I’ve taken to sitting in that same shopping center of downtown, where they’ve re-erected their holiday décor. It sounds a bit unrefined, I’m sure, but I’ve been content to sit and sip a black coffee, to nibble at a MegaCafé pastry, my collar turned against the wind sweeping in from the street. I tell you this for when you do find yourself alone, dear mother, so that you’ll know where I’ll be—quiet beneath the second hand, the blue shadow of the city tree.
With respectful condolences, best wishes, etc.,
Your son,
-Per
