MATTHEW ARRIVES HOME from work in a terrible mood. Christmas is coming, and it makes him nervous, even more nervous than it makes most people, because it’s the time of year when all his ideas are put to the test. He’s vice-president for new product development at Manning & Rafter Toys, where he is sometimes referred to, even to his face, as Vice-President for Sensible Toys. Every year, before the year is out, he must present his proposals for next year’s line. The time for that ordeal is only a couple of weeks away, and Matthew fears it. He spent the afternoon in toy stores, checking to see how the toys he championed last year are doing, and they don’t seem to be doing well.
Tonight he’ll be reviewing the Alley View Grill. He knows he shouldn’t arrive in a bad mood. The wise thing to do would be to shower and change his clothes right away. That really would be the wise thing to do. Fresh clothes, a shave — that might change his outlook. Instead he makes a drink, a martini, a Bombay martini. He sits in his living room with the lights out and drinks his drink and just looks out over the city for a while.
He has a beautiful view. It was the reason he bought this apartment. His living room looks out over the poorest sections of the city. He knows nothing about these areas at first hand; the newspapers tell him that black people live there, the illiteracy rate is high, children sell crack from their front steps, banks try to avoid writing mortgages there, many of the adults are unemployed or have jobs that don’t pay well — food-service jobs, for instance — but from his living room it looks beautiful. The buildings are old, many of them brick Victorian town houses, and their roofscape is charming, by day or by night, but especially at sunset, when the red sun makes the red brick glow. A woman once told Matthew that it reminded her of Paris. He’d like to get Liz, his ex-wife, up here to take a look at the view sometime. He’s sure she still thinks of him as Mr. Suburbanite, still the man he was until she left him fourteen months ago, but this apartment would be quite an eye-opener for her, a penthouse, the best apartment in the whole building, with lots of glass, a Parisian view. The building is new. It “wraps traditional elegance in a contemporary package,” according to the sales brochure. That’s me, thinks Matthew. Traditional elegance in snazzy socks. Everything in the apartment is black or white or glass or chrome. Matthew sits here at night with jazz playing and he feels like Fred Astaire in an old movie. Liz would be amazed to find him living here. She’d be amazed.
The apartment isn’t perfect. There’s a mysterious odor. The black lacquer cabinets that lined one wall have been moved to the opposite wall, in front of another bunch of black lacquer cabinets, the dining table has been pushed against them, and a hole, about three feet long and a foot high, has been cut in the wall so that workers can search for the source of this offensive odor.
Sitting there, looking out, he can’t stop thinking about the toy stores, where his offspring seemed to sit forlornly on the shelves, as unwanted as ugly orphans. He can’t understand why parents are so stupid about the toys they buy for their children, why they buy the junk they do, especially those video games, why they don’t buy toys that do something more than just shut the kids up for a while, why they don’t buy sensible toys, like the building sets he dreamed about when he was a boy. He once suggested that Manning & Rafter use guilt in their advertising, but the suggestion was taken as a joke and he laughed along with everyone else.
Matthew lets himself start feeling blue, encourages himself to feel blue. He hasn’t done this to himself for quite a while, but he’s a past master. He cultivated this kind of self-abuse in high school, when he used to sit in the dark, evening after evening, listening to jazz and learning to feel blue. He got good at it, and he thinks the skill served him well in college. He felt intimidated by his roommates because he didn’t seem to have any talents that measured up to theirs. He began to brood. His roommates would come home from the library late at night and find him sitting in the dark, in a corner, listening to jazz and brooding. They began to think that he was deeply troubled, possibly dangerous. He enjoyed something like respect for this moodiness. He has brought with him from that period a bittersweet affection for the big, breathy saxophones of Coleman Hawkins, Chu Berry, and Ben Webster.
He’s finished his drink. He hops up and dresses in a hurry. He’s a little late.
In Topical Guide 410, Mark Dorset considers Drinking: Cocktails: Martini;Places, Real and Fictional: “Boston,” “The South End”; and Music: Jazz from this episode.
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🎧 410: Matthew arrives . .