I Pity the Poor Immigrant

by Zachary Lazar

  COLLINS AVENUE

  His father was out when they arrived, so they sat in the kitchenette, Buddy inclined in the wheelchair with his head back so that Booker could feed him, a bird with its chick, Booker cutting the peanut butter sandwich into little triangles and forking them into the chick’s upturned mouth. His stepmother, Teddy, stood watching curiously at the counter as she told Buddy the kind of story she liked to tell, a story about a friend’s daughter who had recurring fibroids. The story grew increasingly morbid. It was almost gratifying to hear it with Booker there, a kind of triumph to have Booker witness it, to see that she was really like this. Her friend’s daughter was thirty-nine, Teddy was saying, and had never had children. Suddenly at age thirty-nine, after a first surgery had failed to cure her, her fibroids returned—“very, very serious,” Teddy said—and they’d had to give the friend’s daughter a total hysterectomy. It made her so despondent that she’d stopped going out, could hardly even go to work. Then the daughter’s close friend got pregnant and she decided she would try to help her plan a baby shower. The friend’s pregnancy brought the sick woman out of her despair for a while. She bought decorations and special paper plates and matching plastic silverware and she arranged for the caterers to bring platters of different kinds of sandwiches and a carrot cake, her friend’s favorite. All this planning and decorating helped her forget about her hysterectomy, helped her feel alive again, but then on the day of the shower, just when everything was going so well, the reality of it all hit her again. She drove to her friend’s house with her nicely wrapped gift and realized she couldn’t go in. She just stood outside the door for a minute and then turned around and got back into the car.

  “She couldn’t face it,” Teddy told them. “It just broke her heart. What got to her was that she’d never had any children of her own.”

  Booker cut the last of the sandwich into two little pieces and brought one on the fork to Buddy’s mouth. What got to her was that she’d never had any children of her own. Of course Buddy had no children of his own either. Of course that was what his stepmother was telling him. She was telling him that he was so obtuse that he’d never even realized that the one basic truth in life was children.

  CAREGIVER

  “She didn’t like me in her kitchen,” Booker said.

  Buddy grimaced and closed his eyes while Booker wiped his face roughly with the wet cloth. “She doesn’t like me in it either,” he said.

  “How long they been married?”

  “Thirty years. It was secret for a while. He kept it secret for about two years.”

  “Why?”

  “Why not? That was more the thinking.”

  AUDIENCE

  His father was waiting by the pool, sitting at an umbrella table by himself with a folded newspaper in the oval of shade. Booker wheeled him out and Buddy did his best to sit up straight, hands dead in his lap, glad that at least now he was thin and not pudgy, not so coddled looking. He wore a blue blazer in the summer heat. His father wore a golf shirt and pale cotton slacks. He had lost all the color in his face and his hair was gray but still thick, still slicked back in the pompadour, his eyebrows full. He didn’t say anything when Buddy introduced Booker. There was all kinds of awkward clatter around the table, and then his father insisted that they sit somewhere else, beneath the veranda where Buddy would be out of the sun, and they made their way over there slowly, Buddy soaking wet beneath his clothes now, his breathing tight. You could feel your skin, you could feel the sweat, even feel the muscle and bone beneath the skin, but you couldn’t move any of it. It was the same as the embarrassed grin that always came to his face. Like the embarrassed grin, the stillness was involuntary but also seemed the truest possible reflection of who he was.

  “Teddy will bring out something for us to drink,” his father said. “You didn’t have to wear a jacket. You know that.”

  “I wanted to make the effort.”

  “It’s July.”

  “Where is everyone? Where’s the gang?”

  “It’s hot out. They’re inside. I just came out to get some fresh air.”

  His father looked off far into the distance, breathing in and out slowly. The way he breathed, it was as if it hurt him in various, small increments. The pupils of his eyes had contracted into two black disks that gave him a helpless, even sightless look at times. He didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands since he’d quit smoking.

  Buddy craned his head up and back to try to catch Booker’s eye, but he couldn’t manage it, so instead he gave his sheepish laugh. Now that he’d come dressed in slacks and a blazer, he felt the same stilted discomfort he’d felt when he was ten years old and made to sit for a photograph in such clothes. He heard Booker’s shoes scuffing softly away on the concrete. Don’t say anything. Don’t say that you’re fine either. Just stick to the practical issue, the fifty dollars a day for your basic needs.

  “The drinks,” his father said. “How are you going to manage?”

  “I’m not thirsty,” Buddy said.

  “You need to stay hydrated. What’s his name?”

  “Booker.”

  “Booker. We’ll get him to come back to the pool. Teddy will send him back.”

  RIVIERA

  The iced teas sat in their condensation puddles on the white fiberglass table, neither of them drinking, Booker not coming back. There was a feeling of being suspended in time, lulled by the heat and the rilled water of the unused pool. He remembered his father’s penthouse in the Havana Riviera, doves outside on the balcony, his father standing there at the window in his black tuxedo, the view of the Malecón. At dusk, there would be a special intensity of gray light, a kind of anticipation of what would unfold that evening, each evening like the one before it, the waves breaking on the jetty. The fountain with its seahorse shapes, the lobby with its low-slung chairs, the women in white gloves, men in dinner jackets. Even on the top floor, you would feel the vastness of the spaces below—the casino, the Copa Bar—the city’s lights outside the window, the traffic passing before night fell. He remembered they’d had a talk in the dim light about his new fiancée, Annette, and Buddy had explained that she was the right one, as if his father would understand at last and give him his blessing.

  WOLF AND LAMB

  His father was hardly listening to what he was saying now. What was terrifying and new for Buddy to present was turning out to be just more of the same story for his father. He knew that his father was thinking of the gambling—the gambling would always be with them now. To be his father’s son and to have fallen prey to gambling—the perverse humor of that mistake would never go away. To bet on luck and whim, without skill—to know nothing of handicapping or probability or statistics. To write bad checks to cover the debts, as if the numbers in the statement were just dreams you could make disappear by not looking at them. Twelve thousand dollars in jai alai debts he’d tried to pay off from a bank account his father had set up for him, as if his father wouldn’t notice, the plan so vaporous he decided to withdraw even more, a little extra to take Annette out to dinner that night, stone crabs and prime rib, then to a club to see Jackie Mason. Married to Annette, stepfather to Annette’s son, presumably an adult, a family man—the humiliation of being that defective had become his core, even all these years later. He could mount an argument now—I need fifteen hundred a month because I can’t take care of myself anymore—but the argument lacked force because he had long ago destroyed all his credibility, destroyed it over a lifetime of folly. To look back on the past was to understand that he had never once seen anything for what it was—even his suicide attempt was just a scene from a movie melodrama. Wake up and take yourself seriously. But he had never been able to do that. He had moved with all earnestness through a daydream without even knowing it, ever since he was born, because he was made that way, just as his father was made the other way.

  THE PITCH

  “They’re going to let me keep the room, but there won’t be any more paychecks co
ming,” he said. “I can’t do the work the way I am now. I can barely move my fingers sometimes. When it’s like that, I can’t move the chair.”

  His father wasn’t looking at him. He seemed to pause, weighing his words, but then it became clear that he wasn’t pausing—he was just letting Buddy’s words sit there bare of consolation, as if after all these years he had finally decided to stop telling his son comforting lies. Buddy saw himself from a great distance then, wilting in the white sun with his thin legs at an angle, polished black shoes on the footrests. He wondered if his father had been testing him in this heat on purpose. Never take your jacket off, he used to say. If you’re hot, then calm down. He looked at the shiny brass buttons on the cuff of his blazer. The failed marriage, the aimlessness, the goofing off. All that instead of preparing for what was happening in his life now.

  VERDICT

  “It’s hot,” his father said. “I wanted to read the paper outside because your stepmother likes to talk, you know that, so I come out here sometimes because it’s quiet. There was a revolution in Nicaragua yesterday, did you hear about it? Just like the one in Cuba. The markets are off because of it. I don’t know how much you follow the news.”

  “I heard about it. I saw something on TV.”

  “It’s good to enjoy yourself. To go out to dinner, see a game. I always encouraged you to have a good time, to have friends. I wanted you to have a good life, I’ve always wanted that more than anything else. But I can’t keep taking care of you like this. You’re too old for it.”

  “Dad.”

  “I can give you eight hundred a month, that’s what I can do. I can’t give you fifteen hundred. I don’t have it.”

  “But I need it.”

  “I know you need it. I know that, Buddy.”

  HOME

  The valet watched while Booker rolled him under the archway to the opened passenger door of Booker’s uncle’s car, the big sedan still running, the air-conditioning on high. When the chair came close enough, Buddy leaned his weight toward the opening and Booker wrestled first a leg, then a buttock, then the other leg, then Buddy’s trunk onto the seat, Buddy grunting, limp, the slick blazer tangled around his midsection. It was like the thorax of an overturned beetle, he thought, and he was starting to laugh when Booker closed the door. But the look Booker gave him through the window came not just from his eyes but from his whole body, lank beneath an unbuttoned shirt with a broad collar. It was a gaze of wholly uninterested, damp-eyed boredom.

  UNVEILING

  The last occasion on which any number of the Lansky family gathered together in relative harmony was in 1985, for the unveiling of the gravestone of the first Mrs. Meyer Lansky. Somehow Anne… had survived to the age of seventy-four, alone in her West End Avenue apartment with her fur coats, dead birds, and cockroaches. The furs holed and shabby, her hair straggling and unkempt, Anne Lansky had so lost contact with the world that she would leave the door of her efficiency unlocked, to be raided and vandalized by the drug addicts of the seedy neighborhood in which she spent her declining years.

  —Robert Lacey, Little Man: Meyer Lansky and

  the Gangster Life

  ERETZ YISRAEL

  Teddy brought him an early dinner that he ate alone on a card table in his study, the blinds drawn, no light but the light of the TV. His breath was short, and after the visit with Buddy he needed to be alone before bed. Eggs, toast, the baseball game a tiring blur. Buddy with maybe a year with some motion in his fingers. Probably less. It was of course a judgment on himself. There was no other way to see it, even if you didn’t believe in those things, even if you weren’t a religious person.

  In Tel Aviv, on Hanukkah, the children and their parents would parade at night with candles and flashlights, a blueness in the dark. There would be a smell of cooking oil, the frying of jelly-filled doughnuts, sufganiyot, people out walking, joking, singing, coarse, without self-consciousness. They were a people with their own food, their own dances, their own music, their own language, a people like any other people, at ease in their home. You didn’t realize how deformed you were until you saw all that and failed to become a part of it.

  Prime Minister

  Menachem Begin

  Jerusalem, Israel.

  Dear Sir:

  I won’t go into too many overtures and will state my case as briefly as possible.

  Mr. Begin, I have a very keen desire to live in Israel, but unfortunately I am verboten. To begin with, when I spent time in Israel, I fell more in love with the country than I was before. My one wish is to be able to spend the rest of my life—which, I presume, can’t be too long, as I am 75 yrs. old….

  The carbon copies, the folded correspondence, hopes entertained, poorly articulated, doomed.

  … how much harm can an elderly, sick man do to Israel…. I can enter, as I have, any other country without criticism, except the place of my heritage….

  If they could see him in the apartment in Miami Beach—Teddy’s bed, his bed, the matching nightstands, the wax fruit, the kitchenette. A building of old Jews, waiting with the blinds drawn. After two months of silence, the ministry had responded with another form letter telling him no. He understood by then how much they needed him to be their monster, how secure it made them feel in their righteousness.

  I can give you eight hundred a month, that’s what I can do.

  ANNE

  She came to him in a dream as he was sleeping. She perched on his bed and reached down and felt the side of his hip, the angle of the bone, the lip of fat where his waist met his belly. He knew who it was from the smell of her hair, rich with oil, an almost burnt smell. She lay on top of him in her homemade dress, lips pressed shut, breath coming in stabs through her nose.

  ANCIENT OF DAYS

  The first pass was with torches, the light rising purplish over the red clay ground, cook fires smoldering from the night before. The Israelites came on stolen horses, riding low and at a rearward slouch, braying and screaming, coming out of the hills with the flames in their wide-spread hands. The Philistine camp was tents and houses more like stables, made of stone and mud, crooked tree limbs holding up the thatched roofs. They used dry thatch screens to block the desert sunlight, and all you had to do was brush them once and the structure collapsed in flames.

  The shrieking of women, children, goats, mules. The Philistines begging on their knees. The boys rode through them, trampling and then encircling the ruins so no one escaped. Some dismounted their horses and set about hacking at the villagers with their swords. Those still mounted rounded them up and then the boys on foot slashed backhanded, like harvesters, while the horses reared before them. The farm animals brayed behind the wattle and sticks of their corral. The sun burned more brightly. You could see the pale yellow grass growing up over the red clay. One of the boys could not stop hacking at the head of a corpse, the cheekbone shattered, dark blood running from the nose and eyes. He attacked it with a personal rage until someone finally pulled him away.

  PSALM

  David saw the green hillside, the distant sheep, the clouds low in the sky casting their giant, slow-moving shadows.

  The Lord is my shepherd,

  I shall not be in want

  He makes me lie down in green pastures,

  He leads me beside quiet waters,

  He restores my soul.

  He guides me in paths of righteousness

  For His name’s sake.

  Even though I walk

  Through the valley of the shadow of death

  I will fear no evil,

  For You are with me;

  Your rod and your staff,

  They comfort me.

  You prepare a table for me

  In the presence of my enemies.

  You anoint my head with oil;

  My cup overflows.

  Surely goodness and love will follow me

  All the days of my life,

  And I will dwell in the house of the Lord

  Forever.


  WISDOM

  It’s 2005—a temporary cease-fire—the Intifada going into its fifth year. We meet at my ex-wife’s house in Jerusalem, lantana growing around the iron gates that lead inside. There is chicken shawarma, my son Eliav’s childhood favorite, but he doesn’t eat much. He’s clean and cleanly shaven, and dressed in new jeans and a T-shirt and a gray linen sport coat that is unstructured, as if made of paper. His close-cropped hair gives him a look of intelligent severity. He says it’s over for real this time, though as we know now it never really ends. Hamas will launch rockets out of Gaza. Soon, there will be another suicide bomber in Netanya. Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. We already know the cease-fire will not last long.

  My son’s treatment has persuaded him that his addiction has no meaning. It makes no sense to look for causes—to look for causes is to overlook the real cause, which is the addiction itself, and this is to invite relapse. “Don’t look for some romance,” he tells me. He means don’t look for a story, a narrative, a sense of coherence. If this view is what’s helpful to him, then it’s unhelpful for me to keep probing for more. Even to blame myself, according to this logic, is simply egotistical. But this outlook, so useful in terms of my son’s health, is perversely a reinforcement of what for so long has seemed his essential emptiness. When I touch him, he doesn’t shrink away or flinch and sometimes he even hugs me back, but he does it consciously—conscientiously—without feeling.