My Old Man

by Amy Sohn

  “Why? So she can bad-mouth me behind my back?”

  “Please? I’ll make it up to you.”

  “Oh yeah?” she said, raising one eyebrow in such a mischievous way I felt sick to my stomach.

  The back room had a pool table in it. All the tables were red Formica and my dad and I sat at one, out of view from the bar. A young Hispanic guy was shooting balls in a seemingly random order.

  “Rach,” my dad said, placing his hand on mine. “I feel so ashamed—”

  “Then dump her,” I said, yanking it away.

  “It’s not that easy. Look, I know this is wrong. I know that deceiving Mom is—but it’s just that—” He put his head in his hand and kneaded his brow. “I’m struggling here. I’m suffering and I’m working on—fixing this—but I can’t do it right away.” He sighed slowly, like he had the weight of the world on his shoulders instead of the weight of an anorexic ho on his tip. “I’m floundering. But I won’t be forever. So if you can keep quiet for a little while, I promise this will all work itself out.”

  “What do you mean ‘work itself out’? Are you going to leave Mom for Liz?”

  “I don’t know. I’m trying to figure it out.”

  “Oh my God! What if she winds up my stepmother?”

  “There’s a lot about Liz that you don’t know.”

  “Not really,” I said. “She pretty much lays it all out there for the world to see.”

  “Please just give me a little time.”

  “How long are we talking?”

  “A few weeks. I promise you it won’t be like this forever.” I stared at him morosely. “Come on, Rach. For me.” I sighed and shook my head. “Thank you,” he said, but I didn’t feel very generous.

  At the bar Liz was on her second Grey Goose grapefruit, and her cheeks were red. “How was the summit?” she said.

  “None of your business,” I said.

  “That’s a really sophisticated comeback, Racheleh,” she said. “I’m awed by the power of your discourse.”

  “I’m awed by the power of your discharge.”

  “Girls,” my dad said. I stared at her angular profile, that jaw jutting forward like a Neanderthal’s, the fake mole next to her lip. I wanted to reach inside and yank the ink out with my fingernails.

  I headed for the door and my dad said, “I’m going to walk Rachel home. I’ll be right back, OK?”

  “I don’t want to be near you,” I said.

  “Come on, Rach,” he said, coming over. “I want to make sure you’re OK.”

  “I’m not OK!” I yelled. “So just leave me alone!”

  He hung his head and said, “Just a little while longer, all right?” I wasn’t sure I believed him but I nodded like I did and pushed the door open against the wind.

  I MADE it to my apartment building but when I got there I found myself propelled toward Court. I went down a couple blocks, hung a right on Kane, and stood in front of the Kane Street Synagogue, the oldest one in all of Brooklyn. Every time I passed I got a warm feeling even though it was Conservative and not Reform and I’d only been there once, for the funeral of an elementary school friend’s mother. Reform Jews feel about as comfortable in Conservative temples as black people do in Vermont.

  I went up the stairs and into the lobby and pushed open the double doors to the sanctuary. A comforting musty smell, more New England than Cobble Hill, rushed into my nostrils as I raised my head to take it all in. The ceiling was breathtakingly high and there were narrow stained-glass windows in all the walls. I went up the aisle and took a pew about halfway in. I sat quietly for a while and stared up at the Ark, the pulpit, the Eternal Light.

  I hadn’t been inside a synagogue since services at school the week I dropped out, but I figured maybe it was time God and I had a talk. Pleading with my dad hadn’t worked so maybe I had to go one level higher. Maybe this whole affair had happened not because my dad went crazy but because God was trying to punish me for dropping out of school. He was sending me a message by ruining my life: I had done the wrong thing by leaving.

  But if that was true then God was even dumber and more misguided than I’d thought. Dropping out of rabbinical school was the single best thing I had ever done for the Jews. I had spared thousands of sick and dying people from early expiration. With me at a pulpit generations of young people would grow up morally bereft. Doubting religious school students would drop out before they even had their bar and bat mitzvahs. Synagogue membership would plummet and the national affiliation rate would sink even lower than it already was. If God was making my dad shtup Liz as some sort of cosmic symbol to me to return to the rabbinate, then the best thing I could do was ignore Him.

  Maybe He wasn’t punishing me so much as trying to get my attention. He was feeling jilted after he’d heard the things I said to Neil Roth, the way I was feeling jilted by Powell, and He needed to know I still cared. Keeping my fingers over my eyes, I davened. As I moved I said in a quiet voice, “God, I’m really sorry I’ve been so down on you lately. A number of factors transpired to cause this but let me be clear. I’m not angry with you. You don’t cause these horrible things. I know that you are weeping with me as I am witnessing the complete wreck my father is making of his life.”

  “Despite the fact that the last few weeks have been the worst of my life, I should have counted my blessings more often and in general acted with a spirit of thankfulness. Thank you for providing me with a job even though it’s as a barmaid. Thank you for letting my family and me survive September eleventh. Though I don’t often stop to think about it, I am lucky. I could be some Iraqi child with no parents living on a steady diet of sewage water and gravel but instead I work in a bar in a neighborhood with an affluent clientele and I live in a fine although cramped one-bedroom apartment.”

  I started to feel a little better, like maybe I’d laid the groundwork. God was like anyone else; you had to pump Him up before you asked for His help. “But I need some things from you, God, and I think it’s important you not forsake me. I beg you: Please make my dad stop fucking Liz, please make my dad stop fucking Liz, please make my dad stop fucking Liz.” After I said it a few times I decided it might be a bad idea to swear, even if I wasn’t using God’s name in vain. So I did something the Jews are very good at: modified. “Please make him see that this is not the way. Please make him come back to my mother. Make him get his sanity back. If you do that I will be a better daughter to my mom, I will never again make friends with evil vixens like Liz, and I will look into the roots of my masochistic problem, go into therapy, and find a nice Jewish boy to marry.”

  I kept davening for a while without saying anything. I tried to feel the presence of God in the room, and I thought about my mom and how much I loved her, and how happy we’d all once been. Then I said the Shehecheyanu, the prayer for special occasions, because I figured it was a special occasion that I had stepped inside a shul, and opened my eyes. I started to go but as I turned I noticed something funny by the Ark. The Eternal Light had gone out.

  At first I thought I should just leave it but as a quasi-rabbi I felt it was my duty to right something so patently wrong. I went up onto the bimah and stood under the light. They were all electric nowadays; just a bulb in some fancy Magen David casing, plugged into the wall. I followed the trail of the wire to an extension cord in the back, but it was plugged in. I took it out, plugged it in again. Somewhere during my prayers God had decided to take five. He couldn’t be counted on. My people were masters of implausible miracles but even I couldn’t fix a bummy cord. I got off the bimah and hurried down the aisle.

  THE next night at work, I found myself checking out my clientele. It’s an embarrassing thing when you find yourself scoping your own customers. It’s like stealing a homeless guy’s change.

  A thin guy by the door had been sitting there for an hour, drinking Guinnesses. He had a shaved head and he kept running out of the bar every ten minutes to smoke hand-rolled American Spirits, which I could smell on him from twent
y feet away. But his eyes were sweet, with long, delicate lashes.

  I was remoting “Pale Blue Eyes” onto the jukebox for the third time that night when he leaned in and said, “That’s some thousand-yard stare. Are you OK?”

  “I’m fine,” I said. “Another Guinness?”

  He nodded and I loaded one up. As I set it before him he said, “So what’s the matter?” I wasn’t sure I wanted to open this door but I had four and a half more hours on my shift.

  “Have you ever loved someone who didn’t want to be with you?” His eyes turned black and filled with doom. “You know what?” I said, backing up. “Forget I said anything.”

  “No,” he said. “As a matter of fact I have some expertise in this area. My wife and I were together for twelve years and then I found out she’d been cheating on me.”

  Twelve years? How old was this guy anyway? I’d had him pegged for early thirties but he had to be late, which made it even more pathetic that he was sitting in a bar alone. “How’d you find out?”

  “We were going through this rough patch where we never had sex and never spoke to each other. I knew something was wrong but I thought it was just one of those distant phases that’s part of a marriage. We were doing Dr. Phil’s Relationship Rescue Workbook at the time, this self-analysis thing to go with his seven-step strategy.” He must have seen the look on my face because he added, “He’s actually really good on male-female stuff. Anyway, you’re supposed to record a lot of different things you’re going through and for weeks she left her workbook right out on the kitchen table, open. Every day I walked past it and didn’t look—”

  A fat black guy from the projects named Blimp came in and raised his head to order. I moved to his stool. I always felt bad when I had to cut people off in the middle of their stories but I was working; they couldn’t expect me to just drop everything.

  “How you doing, Blimp?”

  “Crazy. Last night my girlfriend and I were fighting and this picture of the two of us fell off the wall.” He made a heebie-jeebies face. “I think it’s a sign.”

  “A sign of what?”

  “I gotta cut the bitch loose.” Guinness nodded encouragingly even though they’d just met.

  “What are you having?”

  “A Henny and a Heiny,” Blimp said. All the PJ guys ordered this, a shot of Hennessey and a Heineken. I always got excited when someone ordered one because the shots were expensive, eight dollars, which meant better tips.

  When I came back to Guinness his eyes were needy and wild like he was going to die if he didn’t finish the story. “So anyway, she used to leave her workbook out all the time and one day I was feeling so alone that I looked. Under the part where you had to list your regrets she had written, ‘I regret my affairs.’ Plural.”

  “Jesus,” I said. Every time I started thinking my situation was worse than anyone else’s I found out I was wrong. “What did you do?”

  “I locked myself in the closet, curled into a fetal position and cried for three hours.” I wondered what therapists did between seeing patients, how they refrained from shooting themselves in the brain. “When she came home I told her I’d read it. I said, ‘Affairs? Affairs?’ She said it was only one affair, she’d written ‘affairs’ because she wanted to make me angry, but later in the conversation she broke down and said it was two. She had one about seven years into the marriage, and another one that had ended a year before.”

  “So did you kick her out?”

  “I didn’t have to. She slept on the couch that night and packed the next day.”

  His gaunt cheeks seemed to sink even deeper. He tossed down the rest of his beer and started rolling another cigarette. “I’m Buddhist,” he said, “and they say it’s really bad to hold on to any kind of baggage, so I try not to be angry, but it’s hard.”

  Every man I met was dying over some terrible woman. I had always assumed men were the original sadists but maybe it was the other way around. Maybe I was a man inside and that was the reason I could never put any man under the bridge. “Do you wish you’d never married her?” I asked.

  “No,” he said, like he was offended by the question. “We had a lot of good years. But I wish I wasn’t thirty-eight and single. The chances of me ever falling in love again are very slim.”

  “Don’t be so pessimistic,” I said.

  “I know what I’m talking about,” he said. “I do databases for big corporations. Did you know that if you stand outside any Seven-Eleven in the country from eight o’clock on a Friday night till eight o’clock on Sunday night, there’s a seventy percent chance that a male customer in his twenties will come out with a bag of Pampers and a six-pack of Bud?”

  “Could you excuse me?” I said, and went to the phone. I turned my back and dialed my machine. This was the fourth time I had done it this shift. The phone rang, rang again, and rang a third time, which meant no Powell. In the mirror I could see Guinness watching me from the bar. If I hung up quickly he’d know I had no messages so I put on a fake listening face, pressed a few buttons on the phone, listened for about thirty seconds, and hung up.

  “So who’s the guy who doesn’t want to be with you?” he said.

  Immediately I regretted opening my trap. “I probably shouldn’t have brought it up.”

  “Any guy who doesn’t see how wonderful you are is an idiot.”

  “But you don’t even know me,” I said.

  “I’m very intuitive.” Jasper was sitting a few seats down in his usual spot and he raised his eyebrows like I needed his protection.

  “Thanks for the advice,” I said, moving away to check on Blimp. He’d burned through his drinks already. “One more?” He nodded.

  “That guy bothering you?” he said. “’Cause I’ll whup him.”

  “No, that’s really OK.”

  When I finished with Blimp Guinness beckoned me over. I moved, reluctantly. “Do you want to get dinner with me sometime?” Guinness said. “It wouldn’t be a date, it’s just—you seem like a really bright girl.”

  “That’s nice of you,” I said, my standard line, “but no.”

  “If you’re pining over some jerk who doesn’t love you, I just—wish you wouldn’t.”

  “I’m really sorry I opened my mouth about it.”

  “It’s just that the way the light’s falling on your hair, and your top lip, the way it hangs over your…” He trailed off and hung his head.

  “Leave her alone, man,” Jasper said.

  “It’s cool, man,” he said, waving him off. “I’m just chilling. I’m all right.” They always got macho when they got called on their act.

  I checked on the other customers, refilled a few beers. Guinness left me alone for the rest of the shift but he stayed, which was a sign. By Last Call the only customers left were Jasper, Guinness, and a hipster couple that had started sucking face on the chairs by the pool table. I had to give the guy credit for one thing: longevity. He was skinny and pathetic but I felt like maybe if I hooked up with him it would help me forget.

  I went over and told the couple I was closing. They walked out, glued to each other. Jasper helped me carry beer up from the basement for the cooler, and liquor that needed to be restocked. On the way up he said in a low voice, “You need a walk home?”

  “No, I’m all right,” I said.

  “Are you going to go home with him?”

  “Why is everybody in this goddamn bar so nosy?”

  “Suit yourself,” he said, “But remember, he knows where you work.”

  He was right. I had to think this through a little. I wiped down the bar and took down the trash. Then I locked the door, and cashed out. Jasper gave me a look of warning and left. I locked the door behind him and when I turned around Guinness was grinning like he’d just won a lottery.

  He smoked a cigarette on the way over and when we got to my building he leaned in and went for it. His breath reeked of nicotine and I missed Powell’s clean adult smell. “You’re so beautiful,” Guinness s
aid.

  “What’s your name?” I said.

  “Tony.” It could have been worse. He could have been a Rick, or a Gary. “What’s yours?”

  “Rachel.” This was terrific. Now he could call it when he came to the bar.

  “I really want to be with you,” he said, kissing me again. “I just want to be with you tonight.” And despite the fact that he had used the word “be,” despite the fact that I had a suspicion this was a big mistake, I turned the key and took him up.

  We went right to the bed and Tony ground around on top of me, with our clothes on. “You’re so beautiful,” he moaned. “You’re soooo beautiful.” They were the right words from the wrong mouth.

  I undid his belt buckle and took his dick in my hand. It was small and slender like a musician’s finger. I pumped it for a while, got up, and said, “I’ll be right back.” I went into the bathroom and brought out a LifeStyle from under my sink, left over from David.

  “Good brand,” Tony said when I handed it to him. It meant something that he didn’t have a problem with condoms, made me think Powell’s aversion was totally unfair. He rolled it on and I took off some clothes. He put his finger in me but I wasn’t very wet so he started squiggling down my body.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “Can I taste her?”

  I had never been with a guy who felt the need to use the third person to describe it. I wanted to call Powell and tell him so we could laugh about it, but the whole reason this guy was here was because I couldn’t call Powell at all.

  “No, that’s really OK,” I said, looping my fingers under his armpits.

  “But I want to,” he said. “I want to make her happy. Please?”

  “She’s in kind of a weird mood right now,” I said, lifting him up and kissing him firmly on the mouth. We rolled around a little more and then I tried to angle it in. It didn’t go easily so I had to hold my legs out with my hands. When he was finally in he said “Ahhhh!” with such jubilation it made me nervous.