by Betsy Berne
“Mom? Wait . . .”
Silence.
When was the last time I’d told her anything personal that would cause her to worry? Too long ago to remember. Maybe she’d forgotten, too.
I went back to work. I called a griever, a German fashion photographer with a thick accent. Was he ever grieving! After a brief conversation exchanging mutual condolences and bemoaning the tragedy of a young life snuffed out, the griever paused for a moment. Then he continued brightly, “Ah, ya know wot. Dot’s da way da cookie crumble.”
•
The summons came in the next day around two-thirty, while I was on the phone with my groom-to-be sibling. I eased into the obvious subject at hand by way of shop talk.
“Did you watch yesterday?” I said casually.
“Kelly’s really gained, hasn’t she?”
“Funny, I was thinking the same thing.”
“Yeah, she’s fat. Her face is puffy like a crackhead’s. Her days are limited if she doesn’t act fast.”
The groom-to-be was slightly abashed to be running with the pack he had denigrated for so many years. To make it easier for him, I tried to express boundless enthusiasm over the upcoming nuptials, but I couldn’t keep it completely boundless.
“What actually happened with the cult?” I tried to be delicate. “Are we just going to put that behind us, pretend it didn’t happen?”
“Well, she was just screwed up about us, and I think her father’s a drug addict—don’t say anything—and she’d just gotten fired from her job. It wasn’t her fault.”
“Of course not.”
“And it wasn’t really a cult—” If the other line hadn’t rung, the excuses would have continued. It was clear that my brother shared my attraction to damaged merchandise, and I welcomed his company.
“It’s me,” Joseph Pendleton cooed. Me who? In less than twenty-four hours we’d gone from a cold “Returning your call” to a cooing “It’s me.”
“Oh, hold on,” I squeaked, and to my brother I said, “Listen, it’s Dr. Doom.”
“Oh, no, not Doom. Oh, Jesus, I thought we were over that. You’re crazy—”
“Could I call you back during the show?”
“It’s going to be a damn good episode, but I have a sneaking suspicion we won’t be in communication.”
•
Why are you still in town? I’m on furlough! I wanted to assault him with this when he arrived at my door. Instead I stuttered and squeaked. He was all disheveled. His shirt was coming untucked, everything was creased in all the wrong places, and his khaki suit jacket was crumpled under his arm along with the tabloid, so it was spotted with faint blurred ink stains. “I thought you were out of town.”
I didn’t hear his reply but nodded, pretending I had. We stood for a shy moment yards apart in the kitchen, the most unsightly room in the loft. Then I stumbled back and forth trying to be a hostess until he looked me into submission and we leaned together for a moment of relief and I asked him, muffled, what we should do, where we should go.
“I’m just tired,” he whispered, “sick of it all . . . tired of pretending. It was so relentless today.” He lifted his head. “You know what I mean.” I continued to hide. “Let’s not go anywhere. Let’s just stay here. It’s nice here.”
He made his preemptive strike as soon as we sat down.
“So you’re mad at me. Really mad, right? Isn’t that right?” He was spread out on his side on the couch, and what I could glimpse of his face revealed a perverse pleasure.
“Mad at you? God forbid . . .”
“You’re not getting religious on me now, are you?”
“Oh, yeah, I forgot to tell you. You’ve finally driven me to it.”
“See. You are mad at me.”
“No, not really. No, I’m more mad at myself.”
He straightened up to look at me. A deviation in the script always titillated him. I continued to look straight ahead, uncomfortably erect in the demarcation zone between my side and his side of the couch. It was loud outside on the streets: honking and beeping and cursing from the backed-up mess outside the tunnel to the west and the backed-up mess on Canal Street to the north. But the streets in the enclave were empty. Even the loser musicians downstairs had mercifully decamped. I’d planned to spend the day in the studio. There was nothing more satisfying than working in the studio while the rest of the city was out groaning and grunting and struggling to a destination where they would continue to grunt and groan and struggle in their efforts to have fun on a holiday.
“Why are you mad at yourself?” Joseph Pendleton was intrigued. He moved closer to the demarcation zone.
“Well, you’re the way you are and why would you change? Besides, you’re too old to change.”
“The other day you told me I wasn’t old.” He cackled, but his eyes didn’t let up.
“I was just trying to be nice. Look, I know you’re not going to call if you don’t feel like it. I’m mad at myself for imagining otherwise. It’s not even worth bringing up. I accept it, or I—”
“Your tone on that message. I didn’t call you back sooner because of that tone. God, I hate guilt.”
I’d been operating under the assumption that guilt was my department. Why would I presume to have the power to instill guilt when he had strongly suggested that he didn’t indulge in such foolishness?
“Then you asked me when we’d see each other again that last time. Just as I was leaving.” He sounded like a little boy unjustly accused of stealing candy. “It can’t be that way.”
“Oh, Christ, don’t you think I know that by now? I said it because it was getting late; I figured you’d run screaming for the door. I was just kidding. I couldn’t resist torturing you.”
“And then that message. That freaked-out message. I played it back a few times.”
“I had a bad week. I had time to think, a delayed reaction. You know, the baby thing. It doesn’t just go away.”
“So why didn’t you just call me and we could discuss it like adults?” He’d switched into his professorial mode, earnest and morally invincible.
“Since when have we behaved like adults? And how was I supposed to know I sounded freaked-out? Anyway, I hate calling you at that office. Maybe you haven’t noticed, but I try not to call you. Ever.”
“That’s crazy. It makes no sense!” He stayed on his side of the couch but he couldn’t keep still. “This involves two people.”
He used my name when he said that. He only used my name when he was extremely agitated or there was no alternative, which was something I tried not to dwell on; still I couldn’t help noticing it when he did.
“You’re this guy who’s doing eight billion things and you’re busy and—”
“You’re not making sense! Look, here’s the story. I really . . . I like you. But I can’t do this . . . this isn’t going to work between us if you can’t keep it between us.” Joseph Pendleton made clichés sound like sonnets. He had an uncanny ability to stun me into silence through his audacity. “I understand. It’s only natural. I mean, of course you would confide in your best friends. But your friend Rachel. I mean, she fucking leapt into my arms. I just met the woman, I’m doing her a favor—I can’t live like that, with my private life under scrutiny.”
“I don’t blame you. I won’t talk about it anymore. I had to before. I wish I hadn’t. You know how I feel about that. In fact we’ve been over it a million times, just so we can avoid talking about anything real—”
The phone rang. I ignored it.
“Answer your phone,” he ordered. Mama’s boys, especially only sons, are a specific, dangerous, bossy breed; they expect obedience and they have no shame. I obeyed.
“I was just calling you back,” said my neighbor. “What are you doing?”
“Oh, oh, nothing,” I squeaked.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, nothing. How about you? How are you?”
“Calm down, cracker, we talked an hour ago. I�
��m still in a bad mood, why wouldn’t I be? What’s wrong? You sound tense. Which reminds me—I got a message from another tense Jew, David Mendelsohn. I don’t know if I can handle it. It might be time to retire as a homosexual.”
“Maybe you need to investigate a new ethnic group instead. Anyway, let me think about it and call you back.”
“What is wrong with you? Oh, wait a minute. I get it. The black boulder has landed. He’s there, isn’t he?”
“I’ll call you later.”
Joseph Pendleton was just revving up. “That’s not enough. If this is going to continue between us, you have to tell your friend Rachel and your neighbor—when you call him back later, perhaps—that it’s over, finished, that we split up.”
“Okay, okay, I will.”
“Can you do that? Don’t say it unless you really can. I understand if you can’t.”
“I can.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“I said I can. I have incredible discipline, and it’ll be better that way—”
“It has nothing to do with discipline. You have to be comfortable with it, or it’s not going to work.”
“I am fucking comfortable with it. I am not a big mouth. You caught me at a weak moment. But you can’t go off brooding and sulking, you’ll have to talk to me. Wait a minute, why am I even trying to convince you?”
“I just . . . I don’t think you’re cut out for this . . . at all.” He clasped his hands on his knees and leaned forward on his side of the couch.
“Look, if I can’t do it, we’ll just stop.”
“You don’t know; it’s not that easy to control.”
“But you can’t keep bringing this up over and over because it’s really miserable. You make me feel like a criminal.”
“You are a criminal.”
“Look who’s talking.”
When the phone rang I grabbed it on the first ring.
“I hear you decided to make an appearance in Florida,” said the King. “You fucking spoiled brat. What’s she doing, flying you down in a Lear jet?”
“I thought you were out of town. I haven’t decided if I’m going yet, but listen, I can’t talk now—”
“What the fuck do you mean you haven’t decided yet? Too busy writing that crap? How long can it take? The kids want to see you. Don’t be an asshole. Hey, what’s the story on the foreigner—does she have a brain, or is she all tits and ass?”
“She’s nice, but I can’t talk now.”
“Hey, did you hear, Audrey won her tennis tournament, fourteen and under, and she’s only eleven. She’s unreal. Do you want to talk to her? Hey, Audrey, your snotty aunt is on the phone.”
“Now listen, try to listen. Try your best. Ready? I can’t talk now, do you hear me? Tell Audrey I’ll call her later. I have a friend over. Good-bye.”
“My brother,” I said, and before he could speak, hurriedly, without fanfare, I crossed the demarcation zone.
“You’re close to your family,” he murmured.
“Too close. My mother suspects something, but I can’t tell her, so she’s upset.”
“Your parents have morals. How come you don’t have morals?” he said softly, and I struggled to get up.
“Me?! That’s the pot calling the kettle black, wouldn’t you say?”
He cackled and then he used his mouth insistently, wordlessly, to make his point, and I guess I was immoral because I didn’t argue. The sounds of the storm provided a cushion that smothered the street noise, but when I opened my eyes I saw the rain was coming in and got up to close the fire-escape door.
“No, no, it’s nice with the rain coming down. Don’t close it.”
I sat right back down like a dazed robot. The gray mist floated into the room and hung over the couch like solace.
“How long can you stay?”
He looked at his watch. “Another forty-five minutes.” He closed his eyes. I pinned him down with my arms until he had to open them.
“What are you doing still in town anyway?”
“I told you, I’m going to that concert.”
“What?”
“I told you when I came in.”
“I didn’t hear you.”
“Someone sent me comps.”
“I’m the one who should have the comps. You hardly even like them. Why are you going? To ruin it for me?” I forced him to keep looking at me. “Who are you going with?”
“I’m going with . . . well . . . my wife.” We locked eyes. “We haven’t talked about my wife yet. Talk about miserable; that’s going to be miserable.”
“I was looking forward to that concert.” I started to move toward the demarcation zone, but he wouldn’t let me. He diverted me with stories, some that I’d already heard secondhand. I moved closer to search his face for the subtle flickerings that heralded his deceit. He really wasn’t a very good liar. His was a skittish conscience, but it was a conscience. His real expertise lay in lie detection. Eventually he rendered every story I’d heard inconsequential or slanderous. I’m not sure what prompted Joseph Pendleton to choose the truth, but more often than not, the truth he chose to tell was the truth I was as loath to hear as he was to tell.
“My mother and I, we moved to Paris when I was fourteen. She got a teaching gig, and she wanted to get away from her family. At fourteen, Paris was your worst nightmare—there was no action. I went back to Chicago as soon as I could. That’s when I really started playing. I quit school . . . my mother never let me live it down. Everybody was in Chicago then. But the singer, you know, the singer—God, we met when we were so young, babies really—she was the only person who had a pulse in that town. And my mother, well, she was alone, and when she gets low, it’s bad, you know, she wouldn’t ever say so, but I knew she was in bad shape. So I went back then and I stayed. In the States jazz musicians aren’t shit. In Europe they’re gods.
“Anyway, the singer, she flipped out, and I met my ex-wife. She got pregnant . . . we were cursed, cursed from the start. She came from money, a real princess. Still is, but we get along now. I was on the road, she had the gallery, and she never really wanted our kid. Then I got this record deal, you know, I thought I had it made, I still believed what they said. I should have known—bass players just don’t get big record deals. It was amazing. Too amazing. When it fell through, my marriage was a mess, and the singer, she showed up again. Incredible timing, that woman did have incredible timing.
“But the music was good in Paris then. It was before . . . but you probably know all this from your brother. Or maybe he’s too young—”
“No, I know all about—”
“Hey, what does he really think about my place?” He didn’t look at me.
“You know, I’ve only been to Paris once. I never really got the appeal.”
He picked up my cue easily, relieved. “You just don’t know the town. It’s a silly town if you don’t know it. I’ll show you sometime. So after my marriage broke up, the princess—she got really angry and high and mighty—we’d gone through a lot of money, a lot of money. Anyway, I had to support my son. My son . . . he’ll barely speak to me now. I blew it.”
“How old is he?”
“Early twenties.”
“Oh, he’ll get over it. It’s just that age.”
“It’s been ‘that age’ for a pretty long time.”
“No, no, really—that age will end. It happens all of a sudden. It’ll end. I remember, with my father and my brothers. I promise.”
“You promise?”
“Well, yeah . . .”
“That’s sweet. You promise. That is too damn sweet; you are just too damn sweet.”
The thought went through my mind that I could sit here listening forever, and I reprimanded myself. I did keep listening though. I listened until he told me how the club in New York had fallen in his lap around that time and he took it as a sign to get the hell out of Paris. He never said we. He always said I. “I did this,” “I did that,” “I’m doing this.”
And the way he said it sounded natural.
“Last month when I was in Paris, you know, I started thinking about playing again; I talked to some people . . .” He was looking toward the fire escape, and I could hardly hear him. “Yeah, I was thinking . . .” Then he closed his eyes and I assumed he was falling asleep until I heard him whisper more softly, “You know, right? You know you don’t deserve this.”
•
It was no forty-five minutes when he finally left. It was dark, and he got up to go reluctantly. During the ten o’clock cop show, I tried not to focus on what he’d whispered and tried not to again when I woke up at two A.M. While I fumbled around for a sleeping potion at four, something else occurred to me. He envied how I lived, where I lived—he imagined it was glamorous, romantic, the real thing. His gilded perception of my life intruded on what he was fighting so hard to forget and what he was fighting so hard to be. I guess it was a relief to be with someone who’d bailed out early on. But I was starting to look back, too, and I was entertaining some regrets. I didn’t bring them up, though, and he didn’t dare inquire. I never got around to asking about her, either.
C H A P T E R
12
NO DOUBT THE train windows had originally been clear glass, but now they were covered with a silver-gray sheen. It didn’t bother me. I preferred the train to the haughty buses that traveled caravan-style to Long Island. I liked to stand between the cars where the wind propelled you forward with promise and hope even when the train was just inching along. The city can shrink into a four- or five-block cage if you don’t get out in time. Sometimes you lose the ability to see beyond those bars, so that even simple errands become major hurdles. Lately, if I hadn’t gathered my daily provisions by early morning when I could still see beyond the bars, I’d just as soon go without nutrition. I could see more clearly through the silver-gray sheen of the train windows than I could through the illusory bars in the city.
Aaron’s house was near the end of the island. It was not a gleaming white, sunny beach house but a dark, tacky ranch house deep in the woods. It was square, with only a few pieces of oversized bamboo furniture strategically placed inside it, so that what little light did get in had room to move around. The pièce de résistance was the grand bamboo canopy bed in the living room, piled with sumptuous fabrics, that was just crying out for a collapsed body. Aaron enjoyed the finer things in life. She didn’t consider food an inconvenience, and she drank good wine, more than enough good wine.
