Taste of Garbage

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I went to the lawyer’s estate sale to see what kind of freak shit you accumulate when you have the money and the dedication to the life of the mind. The lawyer left behind 100,000 books, shelved on every floor of his Rittenhouse Square mansion. I had just moved to Philly from Portland, and what I needed was furniture (bookshelf, bed frame, surfaces to pile things on top). Instead, I went out to buy more books.

The estate sale started at 2pm on Thursday, and since I was no rare book collector, I came at 4, to avoid the crush.

Reader, I didn’t avoid the crush. I walked in and was greeted by a snaking line. The floors teemed with hot nerds wearing wool coats better than mine. My coat was a wool blend, much less wool than plastic. Could I get a date at the estate sale? I wanted a man whose coat I could steal.

The lawyer’s collection contained classics, poetry, cookbooks, and volumes on lichen and fungi. I skipped the first fungal floor and went up to the second for poetry. The carpeted stairs smelled like wet kitchen rag. I walked by the lawyer’s closet, looking away from paper bags filled with boxer briefs faded and fraying from over-wash—why not pack away the dead man’s underwear before unleashing the literary public on the house?

On the poetry floor, I stared at the gray, woolen back of a strange man. The back radiated warmth and kindness—but when he turned around, I saw a face as worn as the row homes in my neighborhood. I was a West Coaster, used to newness, air, light. I didn’t expect to be so weighed down by the drabness of an older world. I’d moved to Philly stupidly. I wanted a new life in a dense city with many colleges, and here it was. It didn’t help that the first day I moved into my apartment the garbage workers went on strike, and I saw glossy, skittering roaches as I walked the streets. This—I thought—was it. The roaches were exactly like my ugly thoughts (do I have cancer from quitting smoking too late in life? what’s the point of making art in this dumbass age? why does the celeb lookalike app always say I look like Sylvester Stallone?). With roach spray, I sprayed the shit out of the perimeter of my studio to keep both the roaches and the bad thoughts out of my living quarters.

I looked through volumes of poetry—Wallace Stevens, Ted Hughes, Robert Lowell. The dead lawyer had my college poetry professor’s taste—the kind of stuffy reader who’d only allow, if contemporary, Anne Carson into his home. I still talked to Professor Robert on the phone, even though he had lymphoma and the liquid chemo he drank made him confuse me with other students. I didn’t mind; any compliments he gave I took as my own.

The room was too warm from all the bodies in it, and a mother and son talked loudly, drowning out everyone else’s muttering.

“Is that someone Greek, Dee ooh nee soos?” her voice floated above the bookshelves, from somewhere in the corner.

“That’s Dionysus, mom.” The son launched into a long explanation of bacchanalia in a pedant’s nasally voice. Everyone in the room knew how to pronounce Dionysus, and I wondered if the son had the self-awareness to understand that. But even if he did, could he have controlled himself from explaining something to his mother?

I backed up from the crowded bookshelf and bumped into a man my height wearing just the kind of coat I wanted—long, wool, belted at the waist.

He apologized, ducking his head. We continued browsing the same row of books, and standing close to him made my neck hot. Though he was short, he had the kind of face I liked: high forehead, big nose, swimmy eyes behind glasses. I was looking at a long essay on Dante when he reached for it, flipping it open. I took another copy of the same book, thanks to the lawyer’s penchant for buying doubles. My copy had a cracked spine, and I let out a sigh as I put it back on the shelf. Just my luck. I read exclusively in the bath, so books with cracked spines simply disintegrated in the humid environment.

“You can have my copy, if you want it,” the man said, obligingly spreading his long-fingered palms.

“No no, I couldn’t possibly.” I looked at him, vaguely doe eyed.

He was balding slightly, which put me on the fence: balding men were especially strict with their women. But they were not a monolith! I was willing to give this one a chance.

“Here.” He cracked open the book and scribbled a number underneath the title, Dante: Poet of the Secular World. “Coincidentally, my name is Dante. Has anybody told you that you look a little like Rocky? Like in a girl way though.”

“Uh, no,” I said, becoming aware that we were being listened to just as Dionysus mother and son had been.

“Sorry, I’m not usually this forward. You just have such a weary sigh.” He rubbed his bald spot with his palm.

“Thanks?”

“Anyway, see you soon,” he winked at me and went down a floor.

When I was in a relationship, I wrote about being single; when I was single, I wrote about being in a relationship. The other side just became more interesting to inhabit. I had abandoned a novel about a bad marriage, because I realized I was out of my depth. My parents had been happily married for thirty years. Instead, I had started rewriting Flaubert’s unfinished masterpiece Bouvard and Pécuchet. In the novel, two middle-aged men who move to the French countryside and fail at everything they try—pickling, medicine, collecting antiques, amateur archeology, art, even love. In my retelling, the book was set in Portland, and two best friends named Bora and Petunia attempt pretty much everything the two Frenchmen do, to the same results. Portland girls love pickling, faux-medicine, antiques, amateur archeology, polyamory, you name it. Maybe this book was a stinker too, but at least I was having the time of my life satirizing the Pacific Northwest. It reminded me why I wanted to leave it in the first place. So, since my current project avoided the problem of romance by focusing on friendship, was I free to date Dante without it interfering with my art?

I was on the third floor now, a hodgepodge of poetry, continued. I noticed a crouched woman with an Art Forum tote bag—what a mistake I’d made, not bringing a bag. It announced me as a dilettante at the estate sale.

When she stood up, I recognized her.

“Ella?” I asked.

“Kelly hiiii,” she blinked at me, adjusting her tote bag over her shoulder, her face blank despite her chipper tone. She had to be more surprised to see me than I her—I found out she moved here from Instagram, while I maintained geographical anonymity on social media. Ella had delicate features except for bushy eyebrows, the surprise of which made her face extra beautiful.

The last time I saw Ella we worked together at a grocery store in Portland. Her boyfriend made a pass at our mutual friend, and I had told her about it. Instead of blaming the boyfriend, she blamed me and the mutual friend and disappeared from our lives, conveniently quitting the job just in time to never talk to us again.

“How are you?” I asked

“Well, I’m hanging in there. I’m unemployed,” she said.

“Oh,” I said. The people behind bristled at us for not doing the work of the estate sale, the work of browsing quietly. “I guess I knew you lived in Philly but didn’t think to text you.”

“Why are you here?”

When I knew Ella, she had been a secret poet. This united us at the grocery store—that we were above the fray of wrapping cheese, slicing meat, and obliging haughty customers.

I tapped my nose with my pointer finger, a habit I had picked up from our manager at the grocery store and kept ever since. The manger always did it when she started talking about herself.

“It’s a long story. Let’s get coffee, yeah?” I hated this pattern of speech I developed, the self-conscious yeah? plunked at the end of sentences. I had been teaching college composition for only one semester, and already this yeah? became my way to combat the empty stares of my students. I shuddered to think how personalities were hewed by daily labor. Did all teachers become pedantic? All poker players conniving? All book collectors hoarders? All writers neurotic? Maybe I was getting into a chicken-or-the-egg situation. Were pedants more likely to become teachers? Or would they remain nasally sons?

We exchanged numbers, even though I still had her number. Had she deleted mine? I went downstairs, because this was enough. I didn’t want to run into Ella or Dante as I browsed books of poetry I should’ve owned already. My meager stack included For the Union Dead, The Collected Works of Derek Walcott, and that stupid book-length essay on Dante that facilitated my meet cute with Dante.

After working at the grocery store, I’d dreamt of seasonal work, and adjuncting at a college was such. I was off most of December. I submitted my grades and now had the wide expanse of time to myself—my parents were gone on a month-long cruise.

I took a deep breath in my studio apartment. I thought about getting in the bath, but it had started smelling sulfuric sometime in October, my personal haunting. I paid 1k a month for a shoebox with little light, and it had been a reach, but at least I lived on a street called Tulip, a flower famous for its involvement in the first economic bubble in history. I had moved and paid all this money, and now I was here: without sun, without trees, but with an occupation legitimate to outsiders. Now, my parents at parties were no longer embarrassed answering the question, what does your daughter do? Even if, really, instead of slicing meat, I now sliced knowledge into digestible parts and sold it for exorbitant sums to students who deemed this knowledge inedible. At least the rich people had wanted the food they bought.

I texted Ella: hey girl, so good to c u. let’s hang! I’m not going anywhere for the holidays.

Then, I texted Dante: hey, thx for that book today. we’ve got a limited time window, with the holidays and all, but wanna get a drink next week at El Bar?

I sighed and called Professor Robert. I had been pretending to apply to PhD programs to have an excuse to talk to him. His other students went with other recommenders because he missed their deadlines. My fake deadlines were still far off on the horizon, in January.

“Hello, my dear,” he answered.

“So, that letter, yeah?” I said, miming an anxiety I didn’t feel by gesturing my free hand in big circles.

“Oh, I know. Are you applying to residencies too? Artist colonies? You know I met Grace Paley at Provincetown. She was just lovely, but her husband was a pill.”

“I love her writing,” I said. He’d told me this before, but I was too big-hearted to remind him. “So, my deadline is January 2^nd, yeah?”

“I’ve got three weeks.”

Robert got grumpy with me when I insisted. He launched into a long story about writing a script for a movie starring Mick Jagger. The gist of it: he got fired halfway into production, had to hire a lawyer to get paid for his work, and never met Mick Jagger.

My phone buzzed. Dante responded: LUV El Bar! How about Friday at 6 pm?

“Kelly?” Robert caught that my attention was waning.

“Do you need anything from me, for the letter? I sent you my CV and my sample.” I wasn’t proud of it, but this whole con started because I wanted Robert to read an excerpt of my new Bora and Petunia novel. Though he was a Southern boomer, I felt that he would have the right distance to ascertain how my satire landed. I wasn’t a monster; he had initially played off his cancer as cured. I thought I was corresponding with a recovering man, not an ailing one. I knew I couldn’t get him to read my work under normal circumstances. He was adamant about pushing his ducklings into the world—fly on your own, etc. I had the perfect plan too—if Robert sent his letter to the dossier service called Interfolio, he’d never know that I never forwarded his letter to actual institutions.

“I’ll send it to Interfolio by Friday. I must go—Barbara just got home and she’s wearing the most darling trench!” Robert hung up.

I left Dante’s text floating, unread. I had always wanted a love like Robert and Barbara’s, both poets, but their life wasn’t all sunshine and darling trenches. Robert had an estranged daughter from college who didn’t want anything to do with him, and he hadn’t had kids since. I think that’s why he was so ready to talk to me on the phone and to write us, his students, letters of recommendation. It was the only fathering his life allowed. Sometimes I’d wondered if I would be invited to his funeral. How many books would be there?

I walked outside for a coffee, for a new perspective on the world, and saw that Ella had hearted my text. The other night I had a nightmare about a twelve-year-old who couldn’t read and only used voice text to send messages and Siri to read the messages she received—which probably was happening somewhere already! Secret poets were hearting texts instead of crafting responses. We were fucked. On the street, I saw two mattresses piled on top of each other, a plastic food container half-full of peas on top of them. I thought about giving up, lying on top of them, catching bedbugs, and becoming the Princess and the Pea with Fleas.

Ella texted: Sure, how about Friday at 5?

I responded: Can we do 4:30? I have a date at 6 lol

I thought about my students while I sat at the Christian coffee shop where I was meeting Ella. I told my students they needed to combat the bullshit of the world, yeah? And they stared at me like I had just uttered more bullshit. Back in October, the college had a bomb scare, because one student sent the Dean of Engineering a note, which I saved on my phone like a poem:

my friend and i were playing around with making little explosive

devices, nothign malicious just experimenting n stuff. we remembered

just now we accidentally left one behind in the library @ University

Park. i would come forward directly but will i be charged? it culd

explode randomly so i wanted to let everyone know.

I had considered whether this was one of my students, and whether I’d properly succeeded in teaching the student about audience, purpose, genre, and context if this was the bomb threat they wrote. No bomb was found at the library, which might’ve pointed to my success—the student had successfully gotten out of something, since all classes had been cancelled that day. The student had truly understood the power of the written word.

According to neighborhood lore, the owner of the Christian coffee shop where I sat had a dream in which God told her that she should open a coffee shop in Philly, so she moved here from San Francisco. I wish God told me what to do. No god had told me to move to Philly; it only felt right to escape Portland right before I turned thirty. In Portland, thirty felt positively ancient, certainly much older than the boxy condos overrunning the city.

“Hey, sorry I’m late,” Ella came in, panting in a darling beige wool coat, exactly the kind I wanted.

We did our catching up, talking jobs. Ella had been translating content online only to be replaced by AI.

“At first, they at least let me quality check the translations, but then they decided they didn’t need me for that either.” She sighed. Her Art Forum tote hung mouth open on our third unused chair. In it, I saw a slim New Directions novel, keys, a gel pen, and a spiral notebook.

“It’s stupid that something that can’t even piss or shit is replacing our jobs.”

“I used to love shitting on the clock at the grocery store. It really felt like getting away with something,” Ella said. “Maybe I’ll go back to service after Christmas. Anyway, I’m doing fine for now, because I have free rent.”

“What?”

“I’m kind of squatting… The landlord was renting out the building with no license, so to kick us out he’d have to pay back years and years of rent.”

I felt angry at Ella, irrationally. Free rent? Was she even writing anymore? Poetry took much less time to write than fiction. “I actually have a date right after our coffee…”

“Oh.”

“His name is Dante, like the inferno.”

“I broke up with Max.”

I almost said good but stopped myself. Ella had iced me out in Portland because I told her about Max’s cheating. I’d long since promised myself to not get involved in friends’ relationships—even if my intentions were good. “When did it happen?”

“A year ago. We did long distance for a while, open relationship, yadda yadda yadda. He was my first love, my first real relationship.”

I nodded. I still never had a relationship I would deem real. “I’m teaching at the community college now. I really hate this wedge that AI has created between me and my students. They have no shame about lying to me, yeah?”

“So what’s the deal with your Dante?” Ella asked.

“I met him at the estate sale, too.” I swallowed a lump in my throat.

 Ella nodded. She tore the paper sleeve of her coffee cup. “I’m sorry I flipped out on you over the Max stuff. We were so young… And Max and I, we hurt each other so much.”        

“You know you hurt me too, when you disappeared. It was shitty.”

Ella sneezed into her elbow. I couldn’t tell if she was more surprised by the sneeze or by what I said.

She said, “You had so many friends in Portland. I didn’t think it was that big of a deal.”

Suddenly I didn’t want to go on a date with Dante at all, but I had an expanse of evening to fill. I considered forging an excuse and canceling, but then I would have to face my stinky bathtub, my unfinished novel drafts and, worse still, myself. “I’m reading this book right now, Divorcing by Susan Taubes. She killed herself after a bad review of the novel came out in the New York Times; Susan Sontag identified her body. The Susans were best friends.”

Ella furrowed her eyebrows at me. “Kelly, are you OK?”

I laughed. “What does it mean to be OK? Culture is dying, yeah? All those people in Portland making their corny balloon art and going on naked bike rides are ostriches hiding their heads in the sand.”

“I like to think that culture is going underground.”

We sat there quietly. I wanted to believe Ella was right, that the novel I was writing, on Portland, on friendship, would matter to Ella and to all of our Portland friends. Selfishly, it was what mattered to me most.

“I guess I’ll let you get to your date,” Ella said. “So good to catch up! I’ll invite you to the next poetry reading I’m doing.”

“I’d love that.”

On my walk to El Bar, I noticed my hands were shaking. I stopped and bought a pack of cigarettes, even though I had quit once I moved to Philly. I had made it a whole six months! I felt irrationally nervous—even though I had low expectations for the date. I always wondered before every date, is this the one to change my life?  I tried to let this hope transform the world—the last of the sun leaving a line of gold on the sidewalk, the skinny leafless trees shivering in the wind, the lit-up Christmas trees in strangers’ living rooms. But I still couldn’t swallow how ugly the Fishtown streets looked compared to any street in Portland. I missed the tree line in the distance. I missed the blue houses with their little gardens up front. I missed how the streets smelled like plants, not garbage. Six months into living here, I let myself admit it.

I sat outside, lighting a cigarette. I tried to remember what Dante had looked like. My heart lurched when the door to the courtyard opened, but it was just the bartender letting the bar cat out, who was gray except for his white paws and belly. I played Wordle on my phone with cold fingers.

“Hey there,” Dante waddled out holding a PBR. I hadn’t noticed at the estate sale that he walked like a duck. He was wearing the coat I’d lusted over at the estate sale and a knit hat. “El Bar has heaters now, huh?”

“Yeah, it’s nice,” I said.

“So, like, what’s your deal?” he said, adjusting his knit hat over his ears.

“Uh, I don’t know. I write, I teach, I read, whatever. People tell me I look a little like Rocky? Maybe that’s why I moved here, like it’s my calling, yeah?”

“You really do.” Dante giggled.

It was my turn to ask a question. “How about you, what’s your deal?”

It was just the two of us sitting in the courtyard. The bar cat walked over to sniff Dante’s boots. He smelled something strange and shook his white paw at Dante, slinking away. I watched the cat look yearningly at the world beyond El Bar’s courtyard. Maybe Dante had stepped in shit.

“Ugh, I hate cats. They just go everywhere, you know?” he said.

On my walk two days ago, I had encountered a road-killed cat. It looked like a toy, lying on its back with splayed limbs. The shock of seeing it made me cry, but I didn’t look too close to see if I recognized it from a lost cat poster. Now, I thought of my date as being the same as the dead cat.

We went inside to get more drinks, and Dante asked me to hold his coat while he used the bathroom. The bathroom line was long, and he turned around and winked at me. I blushed, because the wink was the corny gesture of a stepdad. I fiddled with my phone and didn’t resist looking Dante up on Instagram. And there he was—his profile was all flyers of different readings he’d done in town. On his website, I saw that his writing had been published in BOMB and The Baffler. I looked up to see Dante going into the bathroom. I was seized by a fit of jealousy.

I took off my shitty synthetic coat and put on Dante’s. It fit like a glove, like the coat of my dreams, like it should’ve belonged to me anyway. I draped my coat over the bar stool, switched the contents of his coat with mine, and walked out of the bar, picking up my pace as soon as I was out the door.

I shoved my phone in my new coat’s pocket and almost ran back to my house, scared that Dante would chase me down. My phone started buzzing. I took it out of my pocket as if it were a bomb—it was Robert calling me.

I picked up the phone. “Hey, I’m sorry, I’m in a loud place and can’t talk for long.”

“Remind me how many schools you’re applying to?”

“Three,” I said. In the fiction I crafted for him, I was only applying to the top three PhD programs. It streamlined the process, and my lie.

“Why do I have seven emails for you, requesting the letter?”

My heart pounded. This kept happening; he kept confusing me for somebody else. My phone showed Dante calling me too, and I let his call go to voice mail. “No, Robert, it’s just three, remember? Have you had a chance to look over my sample?”

 “In the future, I really recommend getting Interfolio.”

“Robert, I did.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, dear. This chemo. I really struggle with computer work. I’m still writing poems and reviews, but something about sending emails is tough. I’m lethargic. Four of my students told me they didn’t want a letter from me anymore.” His voice cracked.

My palms were sweating even though the air outside stung from the cold. I saw myself from above: a beige woolen speck on a gray street. I could keep up the lie, for the sake of Robert’s pride. Or, fuck it all—I was on a roll today, I had called out Ella and stolen Dante’s coat. Anyway, this whole time I’d hated faking a sense of urgency.

I took a deep breath and said, “It’s OK. We still have a little bit of time before the deadline. Just get it in by next Monday, yeah?” I hoped the frantic quality of my lying gave me urgency’s affect. In the end, I couldn’t disappoint him.

Back on my block, I almost tripped on a bag of trash. In the safety of my tiny apartment on fragrant Tulip Street, I regretted stealing Dante’s coat. Now we would never be friends! I deleted all the text message he sent me without reading them and blocked his number. Here I was, bemoaning the state of culture and refusing to make a genuine connection with a man of culture. For once, on this gray December day, it all felt abstract to me.

Because the bath smelled too bad for me to read in it, I watched Taste of Cherry, a film by Abbas Kiarostami I’d seen at Robert’s house when he’d screened his favorite films for his students. He showed us all kinds of movies that I fell in love with, but Taste of Cherry I didn’t really get. The movie was about a man who wants to commit suicide, so he drives around Tehran looking for someone to bury him in a grave hole he’s made for himself.

On my first watch, I was offended by how the film ended—was Kiarostami deliberately undermining the poignancy of his own images? The shadow of a tree overlaid like lace over a lit window. The sound of a car rumbling up a hill in the darkness, the constellation of city below. The storm clouds from the grave hole revealing a shining full moon.

But tonight, I was moved. We don’t know why the suicidal man is suicidal. What we know is that he’s given up on something. Maybe he’s lost his job or his family. Maybe the political situation has ground him down to hopelessness. Maybe he’s a writer who no longer sees the point of writing in a stupid world. I thought about it and decided that if I really wanted, I could leave Philadelphia after my lease was up. I didn’t need to stay if I didn’t want to live here. Nothing was making me.

I smoked a cigarette on the roof of my building. I could see the Ben Franklin bridge in the distance, lit up red and green for Christmas. I wondered again what the taste of cherry meant to Kiarostami when he made the movie—had it been enough, making the movie, to help him keep going? I fell asleep with the blue light of the computer on my face. In the morning, I saw that the trash on my block had been cleared. I stared at the blank expanse of it, filled as it was with new taste and light.