Giorgio's Masterpiece (fiction)
I would like to start writing some fiction again, so I'm posting the two stories I wrote for my college creative writing class in 2020 (this and "The Devil's Gonna Get You") with the hopes of inspiring some future work.
“Chronically,” I answered.
“As in every day.”
“Once a day?”
“No, many times.”
He scribbled some on the notepad. “In public?”
“Rarely,” I said, “but sometimes.”
He chewed on the tail end of his pen for a moment, thoughtfully. “Why don’t you hop up here,” he said, more than asked, padding the examination table with his open palm so the white clinical paper crinkled softly. Out came his penlight, and tilting my head back, he looked up into my nasal cavities.
Medical intimacy is a bizarre phenomenon. I had never met this man before, yet now his face was inches from mine. I could smell, and feel, his warm coffee breath, and from the tilted angle of my head, see with great detail his thinning crop of hair. I can’t say that I dislike this kind of intimacy. I find it somehow comforting to be poked and prodded by a stranger who, you know, mortgaged his whole youth to learn the ins and outs of the body, how it breaks and how it fixes. In a world that so often lacks it, the doctor’s touch can feel like a kind of care.
“Well as I see it,” he said, clicking off his penlight and letting my head drop, “there are two parts to this.” He placed the light back into his front coat pocket alongside an assortment of other medical instruments. “There is a quite legitimate physiological one. Your nostrils are an unusual shape. Their roundedness allows for the snot to collect and build up on the side walls. Unfortunately, short of a nose job, there’s not all that much we can do, though it’s possible that a daily decongestant could help.”
“And the other part?” I asked.
His eyes darted quickly to the side in discomfort. “Likely a compulsive or addictive behavior,” he said.
I didn’t flinch; I had been expecting a Freudian diagnosis. Doctors love to hand that stuff out like its candy on Halloween. “I can refer you to someone for that,” he said.
“Okay,” I replied ambivalently, knowing very well that this referral would wind up in the stack of papers I had on my counter that grew slowly in height until, becoming unmanageable, I would dump the whole lot into the recycling bin.
“Great!” said my once intimate companion, shaking my hand and seeming relieved. “A nurse will be right in with the paperwork.”
Alone in the room, I, on reflex, reached up towards my nose, but then caught myself. I walked over to the full length mirror that hung from the back of the door. Looking at it, it wasn’t that unusual of a nose. True, it was rounder than most, a bit like the nose of a baby, that, rather than elongating with age, simply grew in proportion to the rest of me. But it didn’t come out and hit you over the head with its bulbousness. It was not like the noses of those proboscis monkeys, dribbling down over their mouths, bouncing gravitationally as they plodded through the forest, providing a good laugh to children in grade school biology.
It felt ridiculous to visit the doctor for nose picking, but it had simply happened one too many times that my mother, or a girlfriend, or a boss, had walked into the room, and caught me with my index finger buried up a quarter inch. I naively thought that the medical establishment could offer me some explanation beyond the psychological, some solution beyond “get a grip.” I’d really hoped a doctor would tell me I had a rare nose disease, only one in a million cases. And he had, I suppose, offered some token consolation, noting the unusual curvature of my nostrils, even making slight reference to a nose job. But I could tell that his heart was not in these comments, that this was his weak attempt at consolation for what was, in his eyes, a juvenile dilemma.
I pushed a brown dish tub across the table, and hopped into the booth, stacking plates and glasses, then slipping them into the sudsy water. The pay at Luna Liena was almost good enough to make up for the tacky aprons Julianna made us wear. She was convinced that the canvas hipster look was very in, the height of service industry fashion, but I thought the aprons made us look like a pack of inept blacksmiths.
I’ve had all the kinds of managers there are, and though I can’t say I’ve really enjoyed any one of them, I have certainly found the enthusiastic, slap-you-on-the-back types the most insufferable. It’s preferable to have a real bastard at the helm of your restaurant-ship, for then at least you know where they stand and what they mean. With the Julianna types, you’re always having to decode smiling passive aggression. In addition to the aprons, Julianna expected us to wear big fat grins on our faces anytime we were in the front of the house. If you didn’t consistently look like we were on the cusp of squealing for joy, she would pull you aside and say something like, “Gerry, do you know who that is, over there at table twenty-three?!”
“No,” I’d say with as much earnestness as I could muster.
“That’s Beth Cook,” Julianna would whisper with undue glee, “council woman for the sixth district!”
I would nod silently, the tub of dishes in my hands getting heavier.
“Now isn’t that just a thrill?!” her words would drip with condescension. “Doesn’t that just perk your spirits right up?”
“Sure does,” I’d say, forcing a grin, the muscles in my arms begging me to drop the tub on the woman’s feet.
“I think it’s wonderful,” she’d say, patting my shoulder and thereby relinquishing me to the kitchen.
On the whole, though, bussing for Luna Liena wasn’t so bad. Not being a waiter, I didn’t have to interact much with the hoity toity diners, as they downed their ten dollar drinks and discussed the lengths of their yachts. I just wiped up their messes and ate their leftovers in the kitchen with Giorgio, the pastry chef.
I also had a secret to surviving that world, a secret that no doubt many a busser has uncovered on his umpteenth hour of stacking and splashing, spraying and wiping, heaving and shoving: I’d honed my ability to daydream. I’d done those rote tasks so many times, that my body would function as it was supposed to, automatically as it were—beaming smile and all—while my mind could wander freely. Once, over the course of a six hour shift, I replayed the entire film Saving Private Ryan, scene by scene. I vividly recounted every gruesome detail I could remember, not wanting to leave a single drop of blood unsplattered. It took me a solid hour just to storm the beaches at Normandy because I kept forgetting little things, and having to rewind. Over another long shift, I got started thinking about Gus, my best friend from grade school, and made up a whole life for him, what might have happened if he hadn’t drank himself to death. I made it a reasonable life, nothing too fantastic, but I did give him a nice little house in the country in my favorite shade of green.
Clearing table seven, I was knee deep in one such reverie. I had read that orca whales were polygamist in their mating habits, and I was imagining how strange it would be to have multiple lovers in a vast, dark ocean when suddenly, and with sharpness, I felt a violent tearing away of that dream world and a flushing of heat to my face.
I looked around slowly, confused. For some reason I could not fathom, the word “picking” was at the forefront of my mind. I repeated it to myself several times silently, seeking its meaning.
“Picking, picking, picking.”
I felt only more confused.
Shrugging, I reached for the last glass on the table, only to freeze. “Picking,” I heard the word float out from the din of otherwise unintelligible restaurant chatter, and felt my face flush again. Though I was alert with an eerie feeling of familiarity, I could not place its origin. What was this that had penetrated through my daydreaming apparatus, and its musing on aquatic mammalian sexuality, straight to my subconscious?
Hearing laughter, I turned around in the booth of table seven. My eyes were met with the back of a thinning head of hair that I would recognize anywhere. I’d had the chance to examine that head in such intimate proximity that I could not possibly be mistaken.
Evidently, my doctor was out for dinner with his friends. Empty martini glasses were strewn across the table, and neat piles of pasta sat in dishes, still only partially eaten.
The pieces of what my subconscious had so quickly recognized were coming together, though slowly. So deep had I been in that other, pleasanter place, that though of course it should have been obvious, I still felt myself bamboozled. I leaned over the back of the booth, straining to hear, to find the source of my blushing cheeks.
By now, the doctor’s table, the whole lot of them, were going to pieces with laughter. Their faces were red, their mouths dropped open, some of their heads tilted back. One woman even had tears streaming down her cheeks.
“He really—” she paused, gasping for intra-laugh breath, “said chronically?!”
The group’s laughter exploded once more, and only after it somewhat subsided, could I make out the doctor, his voice despite the circumstances maintaining an air of refined expertise, saying, “Yes, he was my first chronic nose-picking patient.”
Giorgio approached me as I stood with my forehead against the walk-in cooler, letting out a kind of primordial moan.
“Julianna?” he asked, his mind running straight to the most logical cause of great suffering under the roof of Luna Lienna
I shook my head but did not stop the moan. In truth, I would have taken a dozen, patronizing Julianna pats on the shoulder over my current embarrassed misery.
“What then?” he asked, with genuine concern.
I had no interest in confiding in Giorgio, though he was about as close a friend as I had. A year before, Luna Piena had hired him away from another upscale Italian place downtown. In the world of Italian confections, he was a pretty big deal. He could make cannoli that blew anything I’d ever had out of the water, and he did a house made gelato on the weekends that sold out every single time. Both being older, single, and fairly depressed about the state of our lives, we’d naturally fallen in together. He’d probably even caught me in the act of picking once or twice, though I could not recall. But I didn’t want to talk to him about it, or anyone.
“If there was someone out there,” I said at last stopping my moan and gesticulating towards the front of the house, “that you absolutely hated, what would you do?”
Julianna, keeping true to form, chose this moment to pop her head around the corner and take in the scene.
“Everything alright, gentlemen?” she asked, her eyes all aglitter with the deepest of empathies.
“Lovely,” I nearly yelled, lacking my usual restraint.
While any reasonable person would have known a clearly emotional state when they saw it, and given a little privacy, and while even a heartless manager type would have told us to suck it up, and get back to it, Julianna just stood there gleaming at us expectantly.
Giorgio glared back at her, but she did not budge, and so he turned to me, and under his breath answered my question.
“I’d make them a very special dessert.”
Never before had I served so much as a glass of water at Luna Liena, but there is always a first for everything. Back straight, head held high, I carried Giorgio's masterpiece before me as I’d seen our waiters carry our most delicate dishes. I walked around the back of table thirteen, so I could approach the doctor face on.
“This one is on the house,” I said, laying the platter, with grace, in the center of the table. The party’s chatter slowly fizzled as the tipsy diners took in the new arrival. Its semblance slowly taking shape in their little minds, they began to gawk, to chuckle, to nudge each other in happy confusion.
I stood staring the doctor down, though he did not at first see me. The rich rarely pay mind to their servant class. Dress their own child up in one of our stupid blacksmith aprons, and I’m sure the child too would become invisible to them. But stare at someone long enough, and they’ll notice you, as did the doctor.
Now, it was his turn to flush. His table mates were beginning anew a cacophony of gleeful giggling, yet he did not partake. He looked at the plate, then at me, then back at the plate.
The dessert before him looked remarkably like a chocolate replica of a human nose—not your typical, run of the mill nose, however. No, this one was round like a baby’s, only much larger. Perhaps, if you saw a nose like this on a person, and were feeling quite cruel, you’d say something like, “Ho!Ho! You’ve got the nose of a proboscis monkey!”
The doctor’s reaction to seeing my special dessert was one of absolute silence, which pleased me well enough. He did not try a defense, nor an attack, but instead sat in his crimson toned flesh quietly. He knew, as well as I, that he had tonight violated the doctor’s sacred creed, penned oh so long ago, in Greek, by Hippocrates himself, “First, do no harm.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Julianna’s effervescent frame approaching, and I knew my moment was over. Bowing away from the table, I pushed towards the kitchen, towards my hero, Giorgio. As I pressed through the double-swinging doors, I reached my tongue up to the base of my nose and licked off a bit of the fine Italian chocolate residue that still clung there, warm from the casting.
