My Old Man

by Amy Sohn

  “Really?” I squealed.

  “Hold the waterworks,” he said. “We’re not crossing the river.”

  WE ate at a Mediterranean place called Sam’s that had opened up in a greasy spoon on Henry. They didn’t have a liquor license so on the way over we bought a bottle of Chilean Merlot (he said Chilean was different from other Merlots) and as we ate he was tender and not elusive. He told me he was struggling a lot with Who Killed My Wife? and I realized that not all his writing came as easily as I’d thought. When we finished he said he’d walk me home, which I thought boded well for our future, and as we headed up Clinton he put his arm around my waist.

  As we passed Cobble Hill Park he said, “You wanna sit for a while?”

  “OK,” I said.

  The sky was glowing and blue and the trees were dark against it. In the day the park was like the town square but it quieted down early in the evenings, it was mostly couples and dog walkers. We sat on a bench under a tree, overlooking this huge grassy oval in the center, decorated with hedges and flower clusters, that kids played hide-and-seek on during the day. He put his arm around me and said, “You wanna sit on my lap?”

  I hopped on perpendicularly and draped my arm around his neck. He rubbed my lips with his thumb and I sucked it. “Were you a thumb-sucker when you were a child?” he said.

  “How did you know?”

  “It’s written all over you. You’re very oral.”

  “What were you?” I said. “A bedwetter?”

  “An insomniac,” he said. “Even as a kid I held the weight of the world on my shoulders.”

  “If I’d been your girlfriend when you were young,” I said, “you would have slept like a baby every night.”

  “Because your presence is so calming to the male species?”

  “Nope,” I said. “Because I’d deplete you of so much semen you’d never have any energy.” I couldn’t believe I was talking like this but with Powell it all came so naturally, like he’d turned some switch in me that no one else even knew was there.

  He smooched me softly and when we broke for air we both stared up at the sky. “Isn’t that your friend over there?” I heard him say. I looked across the way at the bench on the other side of the park, and saw Liz sitting in another guy’s lap, kissing him intently and blocking his face.

  “Yeah, it is,” I said.

  She was perpendicular too, facing the same way I was. I felt that if I lifted a foot hers would magically rise too. She broke off and stared not at the guy, but off toward the side, as though contemplating some grand truth. His face was still blocked but I could tell by his hands that he was white.

  “Is that her boyfriend?” said Powell.

  “Liz doesn’t have boyfriends.”

  The guy stroked the back of her hair and leaned forward into the moonlight to kiss her again. As I saw his face a wave of nausea rose from my belly to my tongue and I clamped my hand hard over my mouth.

  “What’s the matter?” Powell asked.

  “It’s my dad,” I said. “Without his beard.”

  Abandonment’s

  a Two-Lane Highway

  DO you wanna go over and say hello?” said Powell.

  “Are you kidding?” I hissed. “We gotta get outta here before they see us.”

  “Shouldn’t that be what they’re thinking?”

  I grabbed his hand and steered him out of the park briskly, like we were exiting a play before the curtain call to get our car out of the lot. He peeked over his shoulder to get another look but I yanked him down behind the oval mound of grass, and we squat-walked till we were out of their view.

  As soon as we got on the street I started sobbing. Hard and loud and mucusy. We walked up Clinton and he leaned me against the Tripoli, the Lebanese restaurant on the corner, as I snotted into his shirt.

  “Lemme buy you a soda pop,” he said. We headed west on Atlantic toward the water and as I watched the cars zoom down the expressway I felt relieved by the motion, like if the world could go on oblivious to my problem maybe it wasn’t so big.

  When we got to the Long Island Restaurant at the corner of Henry, I pulled him in. The place was frozen in its original décor, which was late forties. All the bars on the block used to be sailor bars and this one had four booths, one table, a bar, and no menus. The owner, a hostile Irish woman in her sixties, made different specials every night like lasagna and cheeseburgers, depending on her mood. The official closing time was nine but she locked the doors at eight-thirty and closed the kitchen whenever she felt like it. It was the only restaurant in the neighborhood where the customer came second.

  “How do you know about all these places?” he said, looking at the black-and-white wedding picture behind the bar. “You’re too young to be nostalgic.”

  “Not anymore,” I sniffled. “From this moment on I’ll be old.”

  He led me to a booth in the back. The owner was standing behind the bar, watching a movie on the TV above the door, along with a teenaged girl, who was overweight and unhappy. I craned my neck to see what it was and was disturbed to spot Sally Field in a burka. Not Without My Daughter. She was getting lost in a big group of Arabs and calling out her kid’s name. Her husband had a slick mysterious look on his face so you knew he had something to do with it. She was such an idiot. If Alfred Molina were my husband I would definitely know he was evil.

  After they cut to a commercial the owner came over. “How ya doing?” she asked.

  “OK,” I said quietly.

  “What can I getcha?”

  “A root beer float,” I said.

  “And a coffee,” said Powell.

  She nodded, grinned at him, and then me, and said, “This your father?”

  I collapsed into a fit of sobs so loud and pathetic even the truckers on the expressway could hear it. “Could we get a couple extra napkins?” Powell asked.

  “I’m going to kill the bitch,” I said, blowing my nose into the napkin on the table. I knew I sounded like Michael Douglas in Fatal Attraction but dire circumstances turn a girl misogynist.

  “What are you going to use as the murder weapon?” he asked.

  “What is this, Clue?”

  “I’m just trying to inject some levity into an otherwise gravitas-filled situation.”

  “I had a feeling he might be cheating,” I said, “but I never expected it to be with someone so attractive. I thought if anyone it would be one of my mother’s friends!”

  “Why would a man cheat with an unattractive woman?”

  “If he didn’t think he deserved any better. I just can’t understand what Liz could possibly see in him. My dad’s fifty-five, fat, and balding. Any girl who goes for a guy like that is doing charity.”

  “I see,” he said archly. “You consider me a trip to the Salvation Army. I understand completely.”

  “Of course not! You’re different! You’re an alpha male! My dad’s like…a zeta male. He doesn’t have enough cojones to initiate.”

  “Maybe your father’s got a trickster active in him that you don’t even know about.”

  The woman brought our drinks and laid my straw down on the table. I banged it up and down on the table a few times to break the paper but it wouldn’t give. “Gimme,” said Powell, like I was his kid. I took a deep sip but the straw was wedged against the ice cream and all I got was air.

  “Jewish men don’t cheat,” I said, stirring my root beer. “It’s not in their blood.”

  “What about Eddie Fisher?”

  “Celebrities are different. Jewish men cheat by reading, not by fucking. They’re a people of the book. The closest my dad’s ever gotten to something like infidelity was a few years ago when he got really into that V.I. Warshawski series.”

  “At the risk of stating the obvious,” Powell said, “maybe all we saw is all that’s happened. Maybe it’s not going to go any further.”

  I told him about the silent sounds from Liz’s apartment the other night. “With every other guy she’s made noise,�
�� I said. “Why on that night would it be so quiet?” It was like the fifth Passover question.

  I sighed and shook my head. “I just don’t know why he would do something like this at a time when he needs my mom the most.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I told him how he was out of a job and right away Powell said, “It makes perfect sense now! A man’s like an amphibian. He needs both air and water to live. His air and water are work and sex and your pop’s not getting either.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “Your mother’s reading The Silent Passage.”

  “So?”

  “She’s drying up!”

  “Women report the best sex of their lives between forty-five and fifty-five!”

  “That’s a load of crap. She’s not giving him anything to be home for. Your pop can’t solve both problems at once, so he’s doing what he can to solve one.”

  “So you think he’ll end the affair if he gets a job?”

  “Not necessarily, but let’s hope the market takes an upturn soon.”

  I spooned out some ice cream and swallowed it down. “Do you think I should tell my mom?”

  He turned to me and took my face in both of his hands. “Absolutely not. I understand the instinct to tell. You’re a truth seeker, like me. We like the truth. But just because you seek it for yasself doesn’t mean you gotta share it. It’s like tossing a stone into a pond. Eventually the stone’ll sink but you never know how far the ripples will go.”

  “That’s very poetic,” I said, rolling my eyes.

  “Good,” he said, “’cause I think I’m gonna use it in this diner scene for Who Killed My Wife?” I gritted my teeth. Here I was having the biggest familial crisis of my life and he was testing out his latest draft. It was so not the time.

  “If ya fatha’s gonna do this, he’s gonna do it,” he said. “Like it says in the Bible, ‘And this too shall pass.’ ”

  “The Torah says, ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.’ ”

  “That’s why you got so many problems in the Middle East,” he said. He took a napkin and wiped some ice cream off my mouth. “Even if it doesn’t,” he said, “and ya parents split up, what do you care?”

  “They’re my parents! I don’t want them divorcing!”

  “You’re acting the way a child would and you’re an adult. The fact that you’re so invested is proof that you’re shackled to the parental chains.”

  “Just because I want them to stay together doesn’t mean I’m shackled.”

  “It does. I’ve never met anyone so stagnant.”

  He was like a reverse motivational speaker. “I just don’t understand how he could do this to her. I mean I knew they were struggling; I just didn’t know how much.”

  “Abandonment’s a two-lane highway. That’s Aphorism Number Three of Powell’s Aphorisms. I once dated a girl who had psoriasis. She had scales all over her body but she wore skintight sleeveless dresses and made no attempt to hide her lesions. I found this brave and exciting instead of repulsive. To soothe her itching, she liked to take oatmeal baths and together every night we would bathe together. Afterwards our lovemaking would be scored by the sound of my stomach growling as I recalled being a child in Jackson Heights and my castrating mother forcing me to eat Irish oatmeal every morn—”

  “Get to the point!”

  “After I’d been dating this girl a couple months her skin began to heal for the first time in twenty years. She told me it was because I loved her for who she was. I became so entranced with this change in her that I began to watch her less closely. When she came home late from work and said the trains had been delayed I believed her. One day I woke up and on the pillow there was a box of oatmeal with a note stuck to it that said, ‘An ugly girl can be happy in the company of just one man, but a beautiful girl needs diversification.’ I realized then that I had orchestrated her abandonment. I had made her beautiful because I hated myself too much to believe I deserved her. So you see, abandonment’s a two-lane highway.” He smiled and raised his head as though expecting me to applaud.

  “I don’t think my mom brought this on,” I said.

  “She had to! You said your mother is involved in many causes. Maybe that was her way of indicating that it was time for him to sniff other fish.” I didn’t agree but one thing I was learning with Powell was that it was futile to argue on the subject of men and women.

  “Did you ever cheat on your wife?”

  “That’s a conversation we should have another time.”

  I couldn’t count on anybody. “Oh my God! How many women did you cheat with?” He looked straight ahead and didn’t say anything. “Was it less than a dozen?”

  “Baker’s?”

  “I thought you said you had anima. I thought you were like a woman. Women don’t cheat.”

  “Number one, wrong! Number two, if you must know, I was not the first member of my marriage to violate the matrimony.” Every man in the world was a dog, even the one I was with. “But even if I hadn’t strayed the marriage was a mistake to begin with. When Nora was two my wife and I would wake up every morning and begin fighting, like we had scheduled it. We would fight in the bed, then as we dressed, then in the bathroom as we bathed, and in the kitchen as we ate. Each morning ended the same way: she would throw appliances at me and I would cower in the corner. Eventually she would leave for work and I would go to my desk and write movies that critics dubbed woman-hating but which to me were just reflections of my reality.”

  “What did she do?”

  “She was a nurse.” I laughed. “It’s not a coincidence. She worked in the caregiving industry because she had a craving for blood but was so ashamed of this she had to devote her life to saving people. She wanted me dead and I realized it was only a matter of time before she killed me. One morning I came home to find her whacking a mouse with a broom and it hit me that I had married a murderess. That was when I came up with Aphorism Number Four of Powell’s Aphorisms: ‘Never marry death.’ ”

  “I’m not death,” I said. “I’m life.”

  “The story wasn’t about you,” he said. “Why are you always trying to paint yasself into the picture?”

  If there was any part of me that believed Powell might be a comfort in this strange time given his age and married past, that part died a quick and painless death. “It’s been a rough day,” I said.

  “You gotta stop these histrionics,” he said. “Jung would tell you to look at the symbols in the story. Who is your mother and how does this event make you feel about your relationship to her? Who is Liz—a part of you that you’re afraid of? Who is your father? Is he me?”

  “No!” I cried. “There’s nothing to read into here! There aren’t any symbols! My family’s fucked.” I started to snot up again. “Oh God,” I said. “What if he comes over to her apartment again? Can I stay at your place tonight?”

  “I know these are extenuating circumstances,” he said, looking at his watch, “but Nora’s mother’s dropping her off at my place in half an hour. And I don’t usually have ladies stay over when she’s—”

  “Please?” I said.

  “I told you from the get-go,” he said. “The mother figure in me is dead right now. You got two choices with me—the devil or the trickster—and the last time I checked neither one of those guys was running a boardinghouse.”

  “Have fun with your kid,” I said, and raced out.

  AS I walked down Atlantic Avenue I kept replaying the park scene in my head, wishing it had all been a dream. It was one thing for me to take the downward path, but why did he have to? I wanted to flip backwards in my own personal Choose Your Own Adventure to the moment of me hearing Liz fucking the Laundromat guy that very first time. Instead of knocking on her door I would know instinctively that she was the devil in the form of a Chappaqua JAP and I wouldn’t have gone upstairs to complain. Then she never would have met him and it never would have happened.

  But since I knew I couldn�
�t rewind, instead I started thinking about how Liz could die. I pictured her crossing Atlantic Avenue and getting flattened by an eighteen-wheeler. I knew if she croaked my dad would only be a little sad, not a lot. Once he identified her black and bruised body he’d see her death as a necessary God intervention, not When Bad Things Happen to Good People, but When Bad Things Happen to Bad People. As he nodded to the coroner and Liz got shoved back in the body drawer he’d realize how much he really loved my mom and go back to her with a conviction and purpose he hadn’t felt in twenty years.

  How had all this started? Was all his common sense inside his shaved-off beard? As much as I wanted to believe this had been Liz’s idea, was it possible he’d initiated this—my nebbishy, bad-posture, total failure of a father? It wasn’t the moral corruption I had trouble comprehending; it was the drive. He was passive when it came to everything, content to be mediocre as long as I wasn’t. It was like that joke about why there are so few Jewish drug addicts: they just can’t trust feeling that good.

  It had to have been Liz’s doing. He’d come by my apartment to wrangle me into a bike ride and when he accidentally rang her buzzer she buzzed him up. After hearing his pounding on the floor below she came down one landing to inspect. “Mr. Block,” she said. “I thought you were Special Delivery. Rachel’s not here.”

  “Oh,” he replied dorkily, checking out her measurements. “Well, I guess I’d better get going.”

  Taking in his Homer Simpsonesque gut, yet sensing an opportunity to ruin my life completely, she cooed, “Why don’t you come in for a bit, and I’ll fix you a cup of Darjeeling.”

  Confused, lost, and stunned by his recent job loss, he went up, and while he was sitting on her couch waiting for the water to boil, she noticed him eyeing A Clock Strikes Bizarre on Butt Row sitting on top of the TV. “Have you ever heard of Joey Silvera?” she trilled, and when he shook his head no she gave him bedroom eyes and popped it in. As he watched, open-mouthed, she got down on her knees, waddled across the Flokati, and unzipped him with the cool authority of that Oval Office Jew.