Read Online Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt - Free Book Online Page B

with such easy grace that I did not fully realize until I got home that in the course of saying goodbye he had borrowed twenty dollars from me.

Chapter 4

SETTLING IN

    Having made what I took to be a promising, if unorthodox, start on a social life, I set about arranging my apartment so I could live and work in it comfortably. For essential things like bookshelves, file cabinets, and reading lamps, I visited a junk shop on the edge of town. It was a cluttered, barnlike warehouse that extended back into a series of rooms filled with Formica dinette sets, sofas, office furniture, and all manner of machinery from washer-dryers to apple corers. The owner sat like a Buddha behind a desk, barking hellos to customers and instructions to his salesman.
    The salesman was an expressionless man in his mid-thirties. He had mousy brown hair parted at the center, and his arms hung loosely at his sides. His clothes were clean but faded, like the suits and shirts on a rack in one corner of the store. I was immediately impressed by the man’s instant recall of the store’s vast inventory. “We have seven of that type item,” he would say. “One’s like new, four work pretty good, one’s broke but could be fixed, and the other’s on lay-away.” In addition to having a mental catalog of the place, the salesman was a virtuoso on the strengths and weaknesses of practically any brand of appliance, particularly brands no longer in existence. “Kelvinator made agood one in the early fifties,” he’d say. “It had five speeds. It was real easy to clean, and you could get replacement parts right quick.”
    Impressed as I was by all of that, I was struck even more by something else—a carefully applied arc of purple eye shadow that blazed like a lurid sunset on his left eyelid.
    At first I found it difficult to listen to what he was saying, distracted as I was by the eye shadow. I wondered what nocturnal transformation was built around this painted eye. I envisioned a tiara and a strapless gown, a fluttering ostrich fan at the end of a long white glove. Or was this something quite different? Was it, perhaps, the war paint of punk? Did this mild-mannered man spend his secret hours in jackboots, ripped T-shirts, and spiked hair?
    Eventually, my attention wandered back to what the man was saying, and I bought what it was he was showing me. The next week, I dropped in at the shop again, and this time I tried very hard not to stare at the purple eye shadow on the man’s left eye.
    From time to time, while he was waiting on me, the boss would shout questions from his desk about whether such-and-such an item was in stock. The salesman would cock an ear and call out the answer over his shoulder without looking directly at his boss. After one such exchange, the salesman said in a low voice, “What the boss don’t know won’t hurt him.”
    “What do you mean?” I said.
    “He didn’t like this,” the salesman said, pointing to his left eye. “I don’t do drag or anything sick like that. I just do my eyes. I used to do my other eye the same way too. The boss told me to stop, and I was all set to walk out the door and never come back. But then I figured, ‘Wait a minute. He never gets out of that chair, see, and my desk is over by his left side. If I only do the eye away from him, maybe he’ll never notice.’ That was two years ago and he ain’t said nothin’ about it since.”
    On my next visit to the shop, the salesman was out to lunch but due back soon. The boss and I chatted. “Jack’s a good man,” he said, speaking of his salesman. “Best I’ve ever seen.He’s a strange one, though. He’s a loner. This shop and everything in it is his whole life. I call him ‘Jack the One-eyed Jill’—not to his face, of course. He used to put that eye makeup on both eyes, you know. God, it looked awful. I told him,
‘I can’t have this in my shop! No more or you’re out!’
So what did he do? Came in the next day not wearin’ any