Obligations of the Harp. Arthur Saltzman
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would soon reopen to the public “good as new, that is, if you can say that about a history museum.”
So robbery was not the point, which was some comfort in the wake of catastrophe. The instigators did not steal the lucre from the filth or load their every rift with irreplaceable ore. It seemed that their sole incentive had been the thrill of trespass itself. Breaking into and breaking down the Tri-State Mineral Museum might have been a logical extension of their alcoholic and sexual transgressions, nothing more.
On that latter subject, wistful citizens definitely had trouble appreciating the appeal of having intercourse in such glum and loveless confines. How plight troth amid the mangle or wrest pleasure in this subterranean context, where thoughts must eventually turn from carnal urgency to the somber way of all flesh? When in From Here to Eternity Burt Lancaster dropped knees first to the sand, paying no heed to military protocol and sharp coastal deposits, millions of women envied what Deborah Kerr was about to succumb to. (Some couples like it rough, they say, and we may remember Howard Nemerov’s “The Goose Fish,” a poem about another beachfront liaison, whose guilty lovers “had thought to understand / By violence upon the sand / The only way that could be known / To make a world their own.”) But Burt and Deborah suffered nothing compared to the injuries the anonymous guilty parties at the Tri-State Mineral Museum must have endured to exercise their desire among the rocky debris. What romance could flower in the dank and gravel there? “If kids are going to risk juvenile records for a little erotic adventure,” a neighbor commented to me, “why not break into a furniture store? At least there’d be mattresses. I mean . . . ouch! You know?” To which I could only reply that the course of true love never did run smooth.
The inside dope is that there is still at least one item missing from the museum inventory. They have yet to recover a shard of alexandrite, small enough to fit into a pocket—not the rarest or most expensive loss they might have incurred, but by no means negligible. The single souvenir of an evening’s ardor in the dark: perhaps it betokened a birthstone. The police should be advised to focus their investigation on the whereabouts of high school students born in June.
Hoarding can be its own reward. It can be its own indictment as well.
“Well, he left, see. And the secretary went out. I was all alone in the waiting-room. I don’t know what came over me, Hap. The next thing I know, I’m in his office—paneled walls, everything. I can’t explain it. I—Hap, I took his fountain pen.” This is from the testimony of Biff Loman in Death of a Salesman. Reduced to feckless, petty revenges for imagined slights against him, he cannot reason his own need. “That was an awful dumb—what did you do that for?” his brother asks. “I don’t know. I just—wanted to take something,” Biff replies, lost and foundering.
War, retribution, and romance—all come with spoils. But acquisition is not the only means of establishing a relationship between the taker and the taken. Witness the example of Alcee Arobin, that paragon of self-involvement in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. When Edna Pontellier, the novel’s heroine and his current paramour, calls his attention to a photograph, surely a memento of their affair, Arobin rejects it without sentiment or ceremony: “What do I want with it? Throw it away.” Thus dispossession may be self-possession on another plane.
“It was a part, at once of Mrs. Sparsit’s dignity and service, not to lunch. She supervised the meal officially, but implied that in her own stately person she considered lunch a weakness.” As an entrenched luncher myself, who for that reason views noon as the zenith of the day in more ways than one, I am stung by the self-righteous abnegation of this Dickens original, who turns up her nose at the very enticement that captivates mine. She maintained her pinched and disdainful manner as others indulged in eating, “looking quite cast down by the popular vices,” of which lunching struck her as among the more vulgar.
I can well imagine Mrs. Sparsit wincing as I dig in to my own midday meal, with her minatory expression tightening nearby as though someone had yanked a drawstring on her bag of a face. A world purged of lunch? Hard times, indeed!
The contrast between Mrs. Sparsit and me explains why I’d be the more sympathetic juror in the case of the elderly gentleman who, having never committed so much as a misdemeanor in his whole scrupulous, dutiful life, after the cafeteria he had frequented every day for so many years was scheduled for demolition, managed to unfasten the lock and smuggled his lunch onto the condemned premises. Passersby spied his humped figure through a soaped-over window and contacted the police.
When they arrived, the man was layering his daily bagel with sugar-free strawberry jam (a concession to his doctor’s advice about improving his diet). “Five minutes more, please,” he said, and they saw no harm in stepping back and allowing him the courtesy of finishing his lunch before taking him into custody.
As I would have. For I, too, customarily protect and prolong my lunch as much as possible and would elevate every lunch to the level of fetish or ritual if the workday permitted. I, too, expend loving attention upon the embellishment of my bagel and find trenchancy in the trifles that accompany the task. Just consider the cunning little tub of jelly that is given free of charge with each day’s selection. I find it touching to think that it is someone’s job to detach the packets from their frames, the orderly corpuscular networks in which they are shipped from Mason, Ohio (the home of PPI Corporation), and to position them in wire baskets (unless this second procedure is entrusted to a second employee), where they gleam like isolettes in a nursery for the delectation of lucky lunchers like me. Each plump packet has a simultaneous quality of sturdiness and give, a sensation at once agreeable and disquieting, with something of the heft and suppleness of a small toad resting squat in your palm. It makes a shearing sound as its epidermal seal is pulled away, like a rake’s screech against pavement or what I imagine the legendary mandrake root would cry if it were abruptly stripped from its bed. The silver underside of the cellophane gleams in the fluorescent light of the lunchroom, and there is always a translucent blood blister of jelly adhering there, a jellied ectoplasm, which gleams, too, and which, like the general experience of the jelly packet, is at once agreeable and disquieting as well. Such sweetness concentrated in a condiment! Such ingenuity and simple grace, free for the taking, for as long as one’s lunch allows. (Begging Mrs. Sparsit’s pardon for my dilations, but a lunch hurried is a lunch dishonored.) Had police denied that poor, hungry soul, not to mention any given luncher, so little as five minutes’ lingering to satisfy so modest and sublime an appetite as that, they’d have committed a crime worse than the one they’d been summoned to interrupt.
Recognizing that age only intensifies our addictions and that custom beds down so deeply in us that not even dementia can extinguish it, the corporation that had bought out the cafeteria decided not to press charges. For if lunch is a weakness, Mrs. Sparsit, lack of compassion is a greater one.
Any upscale store worth its standing recognizes that the first item to be manufactured and sold is desire. Before Sharper Image and other such companies brought esoteric needs into being and focus for us, who knew enough to want to want their products?
Bookended mid-row by a couple of massive, implacable sleepers during a flight from Austin to Tulsa, I paged through my complimentary copy of Sky Mall, one of those magazines dedicated to the proposition that passengers are so desperate for means of passing the claustrophobic span of their captivity that they’ll not only prolong and savor a bag of pretzels from the snack cart but will also read anything, even if it’s a magazine that’s 100% advertising. But as I thumbed through Sky Mall, I found myself authentically absorbed. If the chief quality of a perfect gift is that it is something one would never think to buy for himself, I’d hit the mother lode. I learned that a motorized Turbo-Groomer for trimming nose and ear hair and featuring rotary blades that whirl at over 6000 rpm goes for $59.95. A remote control for paging one’s keyrings, memo pads, and other elusive possessions, which the owner would electronically “tag,” can be had for $49.95; for that matter, a caddy for holding all of one’s remote controls (made of solid maple and available in either cherry or mahogany finish) costs $69.00. If that’s too dear a price for the coach passenger to afford, an automatic, silver-plated business card dispenser runs $37.95. A canister of