As they were all sitting in the living room, drinking Folgers out of the good peach-blossom cups, Paul had trouble ignoring the photograph of his father on the mantelpiece. Jake Fleischer had never learned to smile like an American—there was too much tooth to it, or else they were the wrong sort of teeth, functional rather than ornamental. The picture had been taken at his father’s twenty-year anniversary at the department. He was wearing his dress blues, and he held his checker-banded cap in one gloved hand as if he were gesturing with it. The pictures had come back from the printer three months later, when the remnants of the family were still surviving on sympathy casseroles and Chinese takeout.
In an empty house, when he and Julian were caught up in conversation about immense abstract ideas, it had been possible to ignore the void left in his father’s wake. Surrounded by the rest of his family, though, Paul could no longer pretend the elision was an accident. Since his death his father’s absence had spilled far past the carefully drawn outlines his father had occupied when he was alive. It had flowed into every available space and settled there, and there was no chance Julian hadn’t noticed it. Paul had no idea, watching him, how he was managing to think about anything else.
“No, it’s all lovely, Mrs. Fleischer,” Julian was saying. He had been similarly effusive about the beet soup and white-bread sandwiches his mother cobbled together for lunch. Paul knew Julian was just trying to get her to stop making a spectacle of her self-disgust, but something about the politeness irritated him. Julian’s kindness toward his mother felt so deservedly patronizing that Paul was embarrassed for her—and even for Julian, a little, for deigning to give her what she clearly yearned for.
“Paul’s father always took care of most of the cooking,” his mother said, still apologetic and anxious. She nudged the cookie tin across the coffee table as she spoke. “He came from a restaurant family, he had a real gift for it.”
That was one of his parents’ old lies. It was strange that she would resurrect it now, for the sake of this stranger who could never guess what it was supposed to hide. It had been a nice story until Paul thought to do the math. He’d known for years now that the war began when his father was still young, and the bohemian café in Berlin was lost long before his father was tall enough to reach the counter. In his father’s stories the family restaurant stood on its own power, moving like clockwork, unaided by human hands. There were only the patrons, with their raucous conversations and pipe-smoke smells. There was winter-squash stew bubbling on the stove, its steam glazing the kitchen windows. There was bitter, soft rye bread and the sweet aroma of cinnamon coffee cakes. The woman who lifted them from the oven was such a deliberate afterthought that Paul never learned her name.
Perhaps Paul’s mother thought she could keep his father alive by telling his favorite lies for him. Paul knew better, but the story wasn’t for him anymore.
“Well, I would never have known,” said Julian. Paul saw something perilous behind his schoolboy manners—an interest, genuine and eager, in the details of Paul’s life that he was still holding back.
“It’s just hard.” Paul’s mother, as always, was unwilling to stop talking about his father once she’d started. She sat with her elbows on her knees, cradling her empty cup like a fallen bird. “You get used to things being a certain way, and then when they aren’t—”
“Ma,” Paul cut in, “it’s fine.”
She looked as if he had struck her. The silence that fell was ugly.
Julian’s hand grazed Paul’s shoulder; the touch didn’t last long enough for Paul to decide if it was meant to be reassuring. At his other side, Laurie was taut as a slingshot. She was playing joylessly with the cat, teasing it with an ostrich feather that had come free from the duster.
“I really ought to get better at cooking,” Julian said, brisk and bright, as if he weren’t taking control of the conversation. “Dining halls foment learned helplessness, I can barely boil an egg . . .”
The air no longer felt so thick. Laurie eventually let the cat run off with the feather and settled back into her seat, less irritable now than merely bored.
Paul’s mother didn’t seem to notice any false notes in Julian’s earnestness. Julian soon had her promising to teach him the basics of cooking, and assuring him that he was welcome to drop by whenever he wanted a hot meal. Julian handled her magnificently—flattering her without appearing to do it deliberately, steering her gently toward safer topics when she drifted too close again to the subject of Paul’s father. Paul watched the process with distant fascination, not unlike what he had felt during his fetal pig dissection in high school. This is being nice, he thought. This is what she wishes you were like.
Watching Julian’s performance, Paul realized he had been wrong all along to imagine his family wanted him to metamorphose into something softer and kinder and more docile. It was much simpler than that. All they actually wanted him to do was lie.
Audrey was home, but she was in and out of the living room, and showed few signs of interest even when she was present. At their mother’s behest, she was washing a load of towels; once that task was complete, she had to get herself properly counterculture-looking before her shift at the record store. She only settled down toward the end of the visit, sitting in the chair by the window in her overcoat and boots. Paul thought he could feel her listening, and could even imagine the face she was wearing, but whenever he looked at her she appeared absorbed in her magazine.
“I hope you know I meant it, about being welcome at dinner,” his mother said to Julian as he and Paul gathered their coats. “What are you boys going to be up to tonight?”
Julian answered before Paul could speak. “I don’t know—get a soda, probably, maybe go bowling. Or see if anyone’s still playing The Godfather, it’s a crime Paul hasn’t seen it yet.”
He said it so casually that at first Paul doubted his own memory. Somehow it was easier to believe he’d forgotten an entire conversation than to accept that none of it was true. He couldn’t fathom why Julian would have lied, but the sheer pointlessness of it convinced him all the more that it had been deliberate.
As they were leaving, Paul heard his mother and Audrey in the front hallway, speaking as if they didn’t think he would overhear.
“He seems like a sweet boy.”
“Yeah,” said Audrey. There was a smile in her voice, but an arch one. “‘Seems.’ That kid’s trouble.”
He didn’t linger. He followed Julian into the snowy streets, sprinting to catch up. Julian didn’t stop walking as he lit himself a cigarette. For a moment he left the match lit, and he brushed his fingertips over the flame, one after the other, just quickly enough not to burn. Then he shook the match cold and flicked it into the gutter.
Julian’s hands were bare despite the chill, but he was wearing a new scarf, courtesy of a care package from his mother—camel-colored, some kind of exotic wool, softer than anything Paul had ever touched.
“I like them just fine,” he said, looking sideways at Paul with one of his sly, tilted smiles. “I don’t know what you were so worried about.”
Julian smoked in shallow inhales, holding the smoke in his mouth rather than drawing it into his lungs. Paul suspected it was a relatively new affectation for him, one he hadn’t yet learned to enjoy—but he’d already mastered the aesthetics of it, holding the cigarette between his fingers with the practiced, languorous grace of a film star.
“Listen—why did you lie?”
Julian raised his eyebrows in mild surprise. “When?”
“When you said we were going bowling or something instead of to the museum.”
“Oh.” Julian was unabashed. He shrugged and drew another mouthful from the cigarette. “I thought that sounded more likely, I suppose—more what she’d expect to hear. Going to the art museum sounds like a cover story, or else it just sounds queer. I thought you would prefer for me to lie.”
For a long while Paul couldn’t speak. Julian finished his cigarette at the bus
stop, leaning against the signpost in the dimming gray-blue light.
“So are you going to sulk all afternoon?” he asked suddenly as their bus drew near. “It’s so goddamn boring when you wallow in self-pity.”
The snap of cruelty didn’t surprise him. He’d been expecting it all along. Everything about Julian was shaded with the threat of it—even his affection felt dangerous, as if it might curdle at any moment into derision.
“I’m not here for your entertainment.”
When Julian grinned, Paul felt as if he’d passed a test he didn’t know he was taking.
“So I gathered.” Although he was smiling, there was an edge to his voice. “Still—try and make an effort. We’ll both be happier if I can find you as fascinating as you ought to be.”
Paul was almost relieved to feel the sting. It meant Julian saw every weakness in him and still thought he was worth the effort of hurting.
5.
Most nights the fifth chair in the dining room still sat empty. But even in its emptiness there was an absence occupying it that belonged there. Paul wished it would speak, in that soft-hard High German lilt that sounded almost nothing like his great-grandmother’s Yiddish accent. Paul still wanted to tuck in his right elbow to make way for a sweeping gesture that would never come, to grimace at a pun, roll his eyes at a prolonged explanation of a request to which he’d already assented. He wanted the silence to press hard enough that Audrey would remember how to argue with it, to throw down her fork and scream “You’re impossible” while their mother—always the more decisive disciplinarian—pointed sharply at the basement door. Paul wanted to feel the quiet at his side, to wait, keep waiting. He wanted to hate it for giving him nothing.
But two nights a week now the absence receded, replaced by an eager and chatty version of Julian, whose features were the only recognizable thing about him. Paul’s family hurried to make a place for him, the way people always did. His family had so many spaces to fill—some they’d spent the last year trying to ignore, others that had been there so long no one but Paul seemed to see them at all. Julian found each one in turn, and Paul’s family gave him little chance to hold anything back.
Julian’s presence chased away the grim hush that hung over the dinner table. Only Paul felt any discomfort now. Even Audrey—who didn’t think much of Julian—occasionally smirked into the back of her hand at one of his jokes. And he had won Laurie and his mother over so completely that it was hard for Paul to remember how guarded they usually were around outsiders. Julian wasn’t a worried aunt or a prying, tutting neighbor; he was a blank slate, easy to talk to, endlessly interested in what they had to say but never too curious. He patiently absorbed Laurie’s questions about France and her fondly cynical gossip about her friends. One day he surprised her with a few of his Dalida and Françoise Hardy LPs, and Paul knew right away he would conveniently forget to ask her to return them. At first Paul’s mother was nearly as quiet as when the family sat alone, but she observed Julian attentively, and occasionally even smiled. When he asked a few questions about the Bobby Kennedy biography she was reading, she picked it up the next day for the first time in months, as if she wanted to have more to tell him next time she saw him.
To Paul’s mother, Julian must seem less a human being than a miraculous apparition. Here at long last was a friend for her only son, one who could match all Paul’s intelligence but who showed none of the awkwardness or fragility that accompanied it in Paul. He was respectful and charming, sophisticated but deliberately uncondescending; when a siren screamed past the nearest intersection, he didn’t cringe and cover his ears like a child. She welcomed Julian with a shy, decisive warmth that made Paul feel almost as though something was being stolen from him.
Even before his father’s death, Paul would have been embarrassed for Julian to know her—her wringing anxious hands, her flowery homemade blouses, the way she sometimes talked with a mouthful of peanut-butter-and-sweet-pickle sandwich tucked into her cheek. But now she was just a sorry blot of gray, so far from Julian’s own energy and searing color that it was hard to believe he could even pity her. Whenever Julian spoke to her, Paul felt such a sick wave of humiliation that he could barely stand to look at either of them. And yet Julian seemed to seek her out, engaging her even when there was no need for him to acknowledge her at all. When Paul tried to slip straight out after greeting him at the door, Julian always leaned around his shoulder and called “Hi, Mrs. Fleischer!” into the entryway. More often than not that reeled her in, and the two of them would cycle through ten minutes of the same small talk they had the last time. Paul could do nothing but silently wait them out, one hand on the doorknob, army jacket zipped to the chin.
“I’m sorry she was still in her nightgown,” he told Julian once, when they finally managed to depart for their weekly visit to the art-house theater. “She’s so lazy sometimes, I hate it, I wish she’d—”
“She’s sweet to me, Pablo,” said Julian flatly. The defensive edge to his voice somehow made Paul remember that Julian wasn’t actually any older than he was.
Paul tried to grow accustomed to the visits. He tried to enjoy this other version of Julian, if only for the flashes of humor and wry grace that managed to break through the false earnestness. He tried to think of the dinner-table chatter as a reprieve from his father’s absence instead of an affront to it. Still he caught himself resenting this half-familiar boy at his side, making his little sister laugh and his mother smile, talking through the silence as if he didn’t know or care that it was there at all. Paul knew he was unsuited to this place he’d claimed, no matter how easily he made himself fit.
Paul’s grandparents made a point of whisking him and his sisters out of the house on Sundays. The custom had begun not long after the shiva, back when it was ostensibly intended to allow Paul’s mother a few quiet hours to give widowhood her undivided attention. Nowadays, as their daughter made it clear nothing else would ever hold her attention again, his grandparents seemed to make the overture more toward the Fleischer children themselves—a chance, however brief, to pretend nothing had changed at all.
It was such a beloved reprieve for them that even Audrey still participated. At their grandparents’ house, all the unnatural seriousness would leave her. Paul liked Audrey better there, where she laughed as loudly as she wanted and told outrageous stories about her musician friends. She wasn’t back to normal—none of them were—but it was enough of an improvement that they always dreaded having to go home again.
Sunday’s entertainments were never elaborate. Lunch was usually Shabbat leftovers and oddments from the freezer; as far as Paul could tell, his grandparents’ music collection was comprised of the same thirty jazz standards, recorded in slightly different orders and styles. But the very monotony was soothing in a way that few things in his world managed to be.
Nothing ever changed at his grandparents’ house. The two of them scarcely even seemed to age, and had remained robust well into their sixties. His grandmother was a restless hummingbird of a woman, shorter even than his mother, with a cloud of steel-gray hair and a rapid Brooklyn patois. His grandfather was her opposite, tall and somber-faced; he carried himself with the lumbering deliberation of a draft horse. They liked to tell the story of their first meeting in the back of a police van in the twenties—a pair of restless idealists pouring their lives into labor activism. But in their old age they shared an idyllic stasis. They filled in each other’s gaps so thoroughly that it felt inconceivable that they could exist separately; at lunch they always sat elbow-to-elbow, speaking in overlap and borrowing freely from each other’s plates. Paul believed in his own death far more conclusively than he believed in theirs. He knew it must have occurred to them that one day the stasis would have to end—that one would have to go before the other, that the wallpaper would be torn down and the house sold, Ella Fitzgerald and Benny Goodman divided between their daughters’ basements. But they gave no indication that they believed in endings at all, for themselves
or for anything outside of them, and that was nearly enough to forget he believed, either. He remembered his parents bringing them here during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The house had had the same effect then—it could dull a cataclysm into background noise.
“. . . not as if I didn’t think he had it coming.” Paul was only half listening to Audrey’s story. “But all I’m saying, you can’t kick a chair out from under some drunk yutz and claim that’s a ‘revolutionary action against the bourgeoisie.’”
“Never heard that one before,” said Paul’s grandmother as she brought her teacup to her lips. She exchanged a wry look with his grandfather, who raised his eyebrows and said nothing. “I thought your generation wanted to liberate the proletariat through peace and love?”
“No one I’d hang out with,” said Audrey airily. “I have no patience for that self-righteous do-nothing flower power bullshit—sorry, Bubbe.”
“Such language, Audrey,” said his grandmother, unfazed. “You’ll burn your Zayde’s ears.”
Paul let his attention fade again. His family allowed him to be quiet, which was a rare mercy, especially now. While the others picked at the crumbs of their meal, Paul worked aimlessly in his sketchbook. He was trying to plot out a painting—he had the image in his head of a human figure overtaken by flora, the torso erupting with ferns and wildflowers. But whenever he started in on the details, he decided he didn’t like the composition. He sketched and erased until the paper was ragged, but he couldn’t seem to force himself to give up and turn the page.
Eventually his grandmother recruited Laurie and Audrey to help her put the kitchen in order. “Let’s not get underfoot,” his grandfather said to him; he spoke so casually that Paul didn’t detect any cause for concern until it was too late.
These Violent Delights Page 5
