Up, Down and Sideways

by Patton, Robert;

  I was careful: “At illicit companionship.”

  “Adultery, Philip. A mortal sin.”

  “Timmy did it first. An eye for an eye.”

  “That’s stupid. And that’s not why I’m here. I’m here for me, not him.”

  I nuzzled her in gratitude for what seemed a compliment. “Forget this God stuff. He forgets us, after all.”

  “I don’t believe that. I believe we’re watched and judged by a demanding God.”

  “Humbug.”

  “I can’t talk to you.”

  “Who needs talk when we have this?” But in her pique she’d turned on me the pale wall of her back.

  Our postcoital theosophy had aroused some unexpected pangs in me. From the bedside table I withdrew the old photograph of my grandfather that Father gave me at our last meeting, three years earlier. At that moment it seemed the man in the picture was more than my grandfather, more than a gray-visaged ghost named Philip Holscheimer. He was, in the apparent stern probity of what little I knew about him, a lofty saint of principle who’d disowned his son for reasons bigger than love, and who probably would have disowned me, too, for lying in this bed, with this woman, feeling this good.

  I hadn’t looked at the picture for quite a long time. Somehow in the interim it had become a spooky relic, a gothic icon to stir my fear and channel me toward moral improvement. The picture’s power lay in its mystery, in all it didn’t say. To thwart the mystery I now filled in the details for Carrie—of who the man was and what sort of people he came from, and what he’d done to my father. “He banished your dad because your dad changed his name? Wow.” I angled the photo to the neon-lighted window. My grandfather’s face went red, his pewter-colored pupils darkening. It scared me. I touched Carrie’s shoulder in a reflex of seeking rescue. She covered my hand, kissed me, turned her face away. I realized she was confronting her own inquisitors. I realized she wanted to leave. She said, “I gotta say, Philip. Your grandfather is the kind of man who disgusts me.”

  “He’s dead, in case you’re worried you’ll meet him.”

  “Good.”

  “Carrie!”

  “He was a shitty parent.”

  “He had his values and didn’t bend them. There’s something admirable in that.”

  “A parent should be a sap for their kid first and admirable second. A child depends on that, and deserves it. No wonder your dad is so messed up.”

  “My father is a lost, cowardly man. With no excuse for it.”

  “My mom’s hardcore Catholic and still the crazy things I’ve done I can always tell her and she’ll always try to understand. She’s true to me because I’m her child. I can tell her anything.”

  “Gonna tell her about us?” A cruel question. I crept to her ear. “Forgive me. I like you.”

  “You make me feel crummy.”

  “Feel good. God loves you.”

  “Hah.”

  “He’s your parent, isn’t he? Doesn’t the Bible say God forgives everything?”

  She turned to face me. “You should teach Sunday school.”

  I nuzzled my groin into hers, sliding under her like a baby under a blanket. “I like you as teacher better.”

  Which made her smile. As she pinned my wrists against the mattress her smile turned to a leer. “I dunno, kid. You bring out some sorta devil in me.”

  She lowered her breasts to me like a volunteer offloading care packages. “It’s a gift,” I sighed. I was twenty-two. She was twenty-five. We knew nothing, is my point.

  Our affair, Carrie’s and mine, put her husband through some classic changes. Timmy knew she was seeing someone, and he bent my ear at the brokerage wondering who it was. With his wife he was lost. Had he ranted and raved, hit her, she would only have found it easier to keep on hurting him; and pathetic displays generally provoke contempt before remorse. But open marriage had been his idea. Blaming himself for his dilemma, it was himself he tried to change. He jogged, weightlifted, resumed potsmoking and religion—together, that is, getting high then going to Mass, so the effects were canceled out.

  Carrie meanwhile blossomed. Laying Timmy waste fulfilled her somehow, graced her like a flattering scar. Her wit grew sharp and quick and dark. Her appetites grew—for sex and food and culture—while her talk of God and mother dropped almost to nil. Her occasional guilt pangs were ennobling and necessary to her growth from bimbo to queen, for there is no greatness without guilt, no depth without a bottom. One day I spied her staring at herself in a mirror with the implacable chill of a goddess sculpted in marble. “Timmy’s hurting pretty bad,” she said, partly to me and partly to her own reflection. Then she shrugged, “It has to be.” Impressive.

  I felt a little bad myself, and tried to make amends by making Timmy money. I spent many gratis hours compiling stock recommendations for his clients’ portfolios. I moved more of my outside funds into my account at Timmy’s brokerage to put extra commissions in his pocket. The way he moped around, he hardly noticed all I did for him. The guy was sinking fast and his mother was concerned.

  “It’s his wife,” Thelma said one day. Everyone was there on the bench in the brokerage lobby. “She’s gotten too big for her britches.”

  “Which were big before,” Mr. Wilson cackled.

  “He should throw her out,” Charlie said. “That’s what my wife did to me.”

  “Except he loves her,” Mr. Epps said.

  Thelma said, “Carrie’s dragging him down just when he’s finding himself. My Timmy’s getting noticed, you know. I heard his boss talking. Timmy should divorce her—start fresh, buy a condominium. He needs a tax deduction with all the money he’s making. You should have one, too,” she told me. As my account manager’s mother, she knew my business too well.

  “Buy a house,” Charlie suggested. “You can deduct the taxes and mortgage interest.”

  “I’d prefer something more speculative. A couple of housing lots, maybe.”

  “You can’t depreciate land,” Mr. Wilson said. “Get some commercial property. My brother owns a filling station, pays not a dime to the government.”

  “Where they’re developing Washington Boulevard is where I would buy,” Mr. Epps said. “Near the university in the old Greek section. They’re fixing it up real nice.”

  “It’s gentrification,” Thelma argued. “They’re driving out the poor Greeks.”

  “It can’t be helped,” Mr. Wilson said, and Mr. Epps agreed:

  “It’s dog-eat-dog, I’m afraid.”

  “Cat-eat-mouse,” Charlie nodded. “Shark-eat-fish.”

  “Well, I think it’s tragic,” Thelma said, “and immoral.” Then to me: “Hit Raytheon, dear. They’re bidding on a missile guidance system.”

  I punched the Quotron code. “Up two points.”

  “Bull’s-eye,” she smiled.

  The area they were talking about, Washington Boulevard, was where I lived. And while I’d noticed the new development, it hadn’t dawned on me to participate. My bracket and my short-term gains were killing me taxwise, however, and real estate with its paper losses was a logical next step.

  I phoned a local realty office. The agent I spoke to was named Ms. Epstein-Graulig. She impressed me with her savvy and with the way her voice glazed over when we started discussing her commission; refreshingly (after Timmy and Carrie), she knew what she was worth. Before our meeting I got a haircut, shaved, broke an old suit out of mothballs. Real estate intimidated me, likewise white collar women. My earring I kept another day before that too was scrapped.

  At her office she introduced herself as Susan. She was a compact, sharp-dressed woman around thirty. Her pinned-back dark hair followed from the planes of her cheekbones like the sides of a ship’s hull following from the prow; my impression was of someone leaning into life, into a headwind created of forward motion, a resistance efficiently cleaved. Her nose, she later told me, had been fixed, and her lips with their hunting-bow curl proved adept at delivering barbs. You could say about Susan that if she
had a child who closely resembled her, it would be better off a boy. Her face (when I knew it; I can’t speak for the nose) was a fortunate harmony of potentially clashing parts. Alter the mix even slightly, and you’d get a girl with an uphill battle against unfair first impressions, seeming perhaps ratlike whereas her male twin might seem elfin; men have more room for error in these things. I make the point because Susan eventually did have a child. Mine. To this day I’ve never seen him, but I’m told he’s a dead ringer for his mom. Better, then, that he’s a boy, for Susan’s particular beauty would be hard to duplicate. We want our children to have every advantage, more so when they can’t have us.

  We chatted briefly in her office. I told her my needs, my price range. With a selection of listings in hand, we toured the area in her car. Our tour was enlightening to say the least. On occasion I’ve sat down with friends who knew nothing about the stock market, who dismissed it as grubby and arcane, and I’ve elicited from them the reflex envy that even rich kids feel upon learning they could be richer. Regarding real estate I was the uninformed skeptic. It seemed too tangible to me, like sweaty coins and wadded dollar bills; I prefer my money computerized. But Susan made a believer of me, explaining how real estate’s loopholes and capital growth are treasures in the grime.

  We drove by a string of retail stores that Susan explained was an investor’s dream. Rents covered taxes, mortgage interest, and maintenance costs; and, in those days before the tax-reform bill of Reagan’s second term, accelerated depreciation could create a loss on paper applicable to other income—and money saved is money earned. “My boss owns that property,” Susan said of one place. “Neil Gray, Gray Realtors. He’s also my father-in-law.”

  “If he’s Neil Gray, how did ‘Epstein-Graulig’ come about?”

  “Epstein’s my maiden name. My husband, Neil’s son, changed his name from Gray to Graulig. A Jewish roots thing.”

  “My father went the other way. I should have been someone named Philip Holscheimer. But I was raised, you know—”

  “A goy. It’s no crime.”

  “Oh? Sometimes I feel robbed. Not of being Jewish. I mean, how much can I care, never having been? But things do feel pretty arbitrary to me, generally.”

  “Things are arbitrary,” she said with a sudden vehemence that took me aback. “Everyone has to learn that eventually.”

  Her implication was that I hadn’t learned it yet. My cover was blown, I thought. No executive here, just a kid with cash. I wilted in my suit.

  She pulled the car to the curb and pointed out my window. “For you.” I was surprised to see we were in front of my pizza-parlor home. The building was for sale, she said. In fact there were quirks to the deal that made it ideal for a man like me (her words). Youth, apparently, could stand the little ugliness the purchase would involve. The building was owned by two brothers, Frank and Nick Bakes. (I knew this; they were my landlords.) Frank had controlling interest and now was dissolving the partnership to force sale of the building. “His wife ran off with Nick,” Susan said.

  I hadn’t seen Frank around for weeks. His brother Nick, who owned the pizza business downstairs, had indeed, come to think of it, lately borne the gallows look of a man messed up in love. “Is this pertinent?” I asked.

  “You want background or not?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said, instantly adopting the good-boy persona Carrie’s sexual tastes had schooled into me.

  “Well, Frank is on a vendetta and wants out of the property at any price. Meet him, and in five minutes you’ll get the whole sorry saga about his faithless wife and brother, tears and all. It’s pathetic the way these macho men revert.”

  “Such is love.” Again her response jolted me:

  “People in love should want to leave their lovers! Staying should be an option weighed against other options of independence and selfishness, a choice made new, from the heart, every day.” Her eyes blazed; there could be no argument to this theory clearly dear to her. “Clinging kills a relationship!”

  “You’ve had experience in the matter?”

  “You could say that,” with an off-key laugh. At her evident frazzlement my confidence gained:

  “With your husband?”

  “My soon-to-be ex. We’re separated now.”

  “And the separation was your idea?” This was forward of me. But after two years of chastity, my afternoons with Carrie had crowned me king of love. It seemed my privilege to presume.

  She nodded. “I’m the bad guy, yes.”

  “I’m separated, too.”

  “How long were you married?”

  “I wasn’t married, exactly. It was a different kind of thing.”

  “I see.” She gave a twinkly look that threw me. Warily, I changed the subject:

  “So how come your father-in-law hasn’t fired you? Wouldn’t that be the least he could do for his son?”

  “Well, Neil—Mr. Gray, my boss—he prefers me to Gershom. My husband.”

  “Prefers you to his own son?”

  “Yes. To be frank.”

  “How nice for—Gershom, did you say?”

  “Changed from Gerald. Hebraized, same as Graulig from Gray. And Gershom’s doing fine, believe me. He has a martyr need which is being incredibly stroked by all this. Between him and his father I’m the battlefield. They’ve been warring for years.”

  “Boys and their dads.”

  “Exactly. Girls with their mothers, we want equality, equal time—that’s fair at least. Men don’t want fair, they don’t want a middle ground. They have to look up or down. They have to take it or dish it out.”

  I thought a moment. “It’s possible.”

  “My husband,” she continued, the subject still raw, “quit law school, which he actually liked, for urban sociology—big money there, let me tell you. Then he pulls the name change. Now he’s studying Talmud, Hebrew, keeps kosher. He created this whole left-wing, pseudo-rabbinical identity just to bug his father!”

  “Did it work?”

  “Did it work! Neil’s a Republican, a self-made millionaire. Loves spending money, loves Israel, dislikes Jewy Jews. He’s the total opposite of Gershom. Gershom likes old things. His father likes—” She groped for a word.

  “Young things?”

  Susan smiled. “Very good. Neil’s been a widower for years, but he just got remarried. To Dominique.”

  “Not exactly Old Testament.”

  “She’s pure Viking. It put Gershom over the edge.”

  “It’s hardly his business.”

  “He can’t help it. He says Dominique’s a closet Nazi and a gold digger, too. He insisted they have a prenuptial agreement to protect Neil’s assets. But Neil’s a romantic. He said no way.”

  “Gershom has his greedy side. I like him better.”

  “He’s thinking of our children, he says.”

  “Oh. You have kids.”

  She shook her head. “It’s a vain wish, at this point. Yet he hopes.”

  “Even now?”

  “We haven’t been separated very long.”

  “Since yesterday, right?” This was a joke. Not funny:

  “How’d you guess?”

  “You split up yesterday!”

  “He moved his stuff out last night, yeah.”

  I almost laughed. “That explains a lot.”

  “Explains what?” In answer, I tapped two fingers together in imitation of flapping jaws. Her face colored. “God, you’re right. I’m sorry. I’m usually much sharper.” She proceeded to prove it: Her eyes that had faltered in embarrassment at my remark fixed on me coldly, her tone bright as a new straight razor. “It’s just that you’re such a good listener, Philip. Gay guys have that gift, I know. I have a gay friend, and he and I share everything. He’s so accepting, so wise. I should introduce you.”

  I should have laughed off this lame attack. But believing her to be sincere, I responded sincerely, an unformed young man cut where it counts by a recurring misconception. “I am not gay! I have no
particular prejudice against homosexuality, still it’s important to me that not every bitch I meet thinks I’m queer! What possible thing about me gives you that impression?”

  “Guess I hit a nerve. Well, there’s what you said about being separated but not married. And there’s the earring.”

  “The earring! Don’t you know the earring is hip? The earring says I’m unfettered by bourgeois poses and aspirations. Everybody wears an earring!”

  “To me it says you’re a trust fund rebel who lives in the suburbs somewhere, a lawnmowing man.” She was laughing now.

  “But straight,” I insisted.

  “But straight.”

  “Damn right.” A moment passed. “Actually,” I said, pointing out the car window, “I live here. Upstairs. Alone.”

  “You’re the other tenant? We knew about the woman.”

  “Mrs. Bakes. She’s my neighbor.”

  “She’s history. Her lease is up and there’s no renewal option. We did a best-use study of the property and what’s indicated upstairs is medical offices. Unless she’s a doctor,” Susan said, “she’s got to vacate. We had no record of the second upstairs tenant, of you. We assumed the lease had been lost.”

  “I never had a lease. I’m renting month to month. No chains, get it? Listen,” I proposed, “we’re here, we’ve got a parking spot—let’s have a pizza.”

  “Bad idea. Nick Bakes is probably inside. He knows I’m trying to sell the building.”

  “So?”

  “The ground floor is zoned for retail, but a pizza joint is not desirable. I see a boutique here, something upscale.”

  “He must have a lease.”

  “Nope. He and his brother own the building as Bakes Partners. Nick rents from the partnership. There was a lease once, but they never bothered to renew since it’s all been buddy-buddy, till now. Now Frank wants blood. See, without a lease, Nick loses double. He can’t keep his business here, but he can’t sell it either because without a lease he’s got nothing to sell. Everything he’s worked for will be lost. Nick’s screwed, basically.”

  “For love.”

  She shrugged. “If he sees me, he’ll think I’m involved.”

  “Which of course you’re not.”