End of the Jews

by Adam Mansbach

  Tristan heaved himself up out of the cracked leather chair, slammed his office door behind him, and grabbed hold of the staircase bannister as if it were an old friend’s wrist. He dipped his left foot over the edge of the first step, then brought his weight down. Tristan’s hand slid farther along the railing, and the right foot joined the left. He thought of a passage from one of his books, in which a man was described by his usurper: He went from taking the steps two at a time to taking each step twice. The words were jubilant and scornful in the young man’s mouth.

  Tristan was in the pantry, filching a cookie, when the doorbell rang. The sound was an anomaly. The Brodskys’ home was never locked, for reasons of both hospitality and convenience, and everyone knew it. Guests admitted themselves, hollered greetings, followed the sounds of the replies until they located a resident.

  “Who could that be?” he said aloud, on the off chance that his wife might be within earshot. Or his daughter; he could hear Linda and Abe bustling around in the kitchen, which was why he had steered clear of it.

  Amalia appeared behind him. “It’s Mariko.”

  He turned. “Van Horn? What is she doing here?”

  “Your grandson invited her to Thanksgiving—you are aware that it’s Thanksgiving, I hope. That was him on the phone.”

  “Well, let her in, let her in!” Tristan shuffled past her and Amalia followed him into the foyer, astounded by the simplicity of her husband’s response. Did he not remember that she had just last month declined to accompany him to Albert’s funeral so as to avoid this woman—Albert, whom she’d loved, whose death had prompted her to set aside the manuscript she had due so that she might compose an elegy for him? Did Tristan not recall or simply not care that Amalia had refused to invite Mariko into this house for decades, that the two of them had fought about it and she had held firm for once, told him, I don’t like the way she treats people, Tristan. Especially Albert, and he had leaned forward, all chin, and said, Who are you to judge?

  But what was there to say now, with Mari standing at the threshold? It was Amalia who’d squandered the hour since Tris’s phone call, standing in the bathroom dolling herself up instead of walking down the hall and telling her husband who was coming to dinner. The only thing to do now was open the door and try to summon up some grace.

  “Mari. Welcome.” The way Tristan’s hug engulfed the tiny woman reminded Amalia of a hawk descending on a field mouse.

  “So good to see you, Tristan,” Mari said when he released her. She reached back to grab the handle of her suitcase, still festooned with baggage-claim tickets. Tris had said she’d be coming straight from the airport. “I moving in,” she joked, wheeling the mammoth thing over the welcome mat.

  Tristan boomed a laugh. His public laugh. Amalia took a step forward and smiled. “Hello, Mariko.”

  “Ama!” Mariko shrugged free of her wrap and rushed over to embrace her. She still had her nimbleness, Amalia thought, her coiled, catlike energy. She was still the woman who’d heaved drum cases as big as she was into vans, the woman who’d carried Albert on her back. But my God, it was like hugging a dead sapling.

  The two women pulled back, and Amalia wondered how she looked to Mari after all this time. Her eyes were not what they’d once been to look at; the pupils were cloudy, crossed with broken capillaries, and the flesh around them sagged away, so that, Amalia sometimes joked, she seemed to have regained her wide-eyed innocence.

  Mariko’s face, when Amalia got the chance to really look at it, was fascinating in its devastation. Her hair was still teased into the same black mane, but from the forehead down, Mari was bones and makeup. The black felt pantsuit hanging from her smelled of Albert: a rich, warm greasiness that conjured thoughts of a big southern meal. Amalia resolved to feed Mari, if Mari would let herself be fed. She had not expected to feel such sympathy, but how could you be angry at hardness when that hardness had so savaged its possessor?

  “What are you drinking, Mariko?” asked Tristan from the fold-down wet bar built into the near wall of the living room.

  “What you having, Amalia?” It was an odd gesture of deference, letting the hostess set the terms of consumption, but Amalia appreciated it.

  “I’m going to have a very light gin and tonic,” she said, unable to remember the last time she’d taken a drink so early in the day.

  “Same for me, please.”

  Tristan passed the drinks over, hands slightly shaky, then raised his glass of Glenlivet, neat, chest-high.

  “To old friends.” The liquor’s warmth trickled through him and the sensation, combined with Mariko’s adoring gaze, carried Tristan back in time, reminded him of himself forty years ago, when the words had simply flowed onto the page. Before he knew it, he’d poured the whole glass of scotch down his throat. Amalia gave him a sharp look, What do you think you’re doing?, and for a moment Tristan was cowed because he didn’t know. Then he realized that his wife thought he was showing off for Mariko, proving he was still the man of violent intake and vicious insight she’d always considered him. All geniuses were crazy to Mariko, beginning with her husband. Sure enough, her face was lifted to his, lit with affectionate shock.

  Tristan turned back to the bar and refilled his glass, more out of custom than desire, then joined the women on the living room couch. He crossed his legs, placed his drink on his thigh, and leaned over to tap Mariko on the knee.

  “How are you holding up, old girl?”

  She closed her eyes and nodded several times before she answered. “Better. Every day, better. I want to thank you again, Tristan. Your speech so beautiful.” She smiled at Amalia. “When he finish, whole church crying. You gotta make a copy for me.”

  “It sounds like it was a beautiful service,” said Amalia. “I’m so sorry I couldn’t make it.”

  Why couldn’t she? wondered Tristan. Had Amalia been ill? And then, as he sat and watched his wife and Albert’s widow chat about the florist and the caterer, a long-forgotten string of words hit Tristan in the chest: I will not have that woman in my house.

  “I don’t know,” Mariko was saying when Tristan tuned back in, returning to a present seemingly unrelated to that past. Amalia’s face was tilted toward her guest’s, trying to coax Mari’s eyes up from her lap. “I so used to the road, I probably go crazy at home. And somebody gotta keep Albert’s music alive. But you can see, Ama”—Mariko deposited her gin and tonic on the coffee table, then laid her arms out straight, as if about to donate blood—“I not young woman no more.”

  “Neither am I,” Amalia said, and wondered what she meant. I’m older and wiser than I was the night you broke my heart? Age and time mean nothing; we are who we’ve always been? She willed Mariko to get it, and a flush of heat spread over her as Amalia remembered this sensation. She had felt it lying in Mari’s bed that morning: an urgent desire to be understood better than she understood herself. And for the kindness that, surely, came with it. She had not received it then—or anytime since—but as soon as she recognized the longing, Amalia realized she felt it still.

  “I don’t think you have to worry, Mariko,” said Tristan, and at the sound of his voice, Amalia started. During the few moments it had taken her to unravel her emotions, her husband had vanished from the world. “Albert’s music will be here long after we’re all dead and buried.”

  Mariko nodded. “Like your novels,” she responded. “And your poems, Ama.” She didn’t quite seem to connect his comment to the question of her future. But that was Mariko; she could embrace both the belief that Albert’s music was eternal and the notion that it was her obligation to work herself to death ensuring it lived on.

  “I think it’s nice that Tris went with you,” Amalia offered, desperate to say something pedestrian. “I hope he was a comfort.”

  “Tris grow up into a man! Albert and I so proud of him. Second book supposed to be the hardest, no?”

  “They’re all the hardest,” Tristan grunted. “It’s a rotten business.”

  �
�Well,” Amalia began, though it felt ridiculous somehow, grotesque, to have a prim domestic conversation, a little chat about family, in front of Mariko, “maybe we can do more to help him, this time.”

  Mariko’s lipstick had left a perfect impression on her glass, Amalia noticed. It was the same bright stuff she’d always worn. The shade and viscosity would have overwhelmed Amalia’s face, reduced her to constant self-consciousness, but on Mari it was garishly beautiful.

  Amalia felt the sudden need to escape, and stood. “I think I’ll see if I can help the kids cook.” It occurred to her, too late, that Mari might offer to follow, that it would be the polite thing to do. But the moment passed and Mariko stayed where she was.

  Abe was standing at the stove and Linda at the sink when Amalia crossed the threshold. “What can I do?” she announced herself.

  “Nothing,” said Linda, without looking up from the potato and the peeler in her hands. “We’ve got it all under control.”

  “I’ve no doubt. Come have a drink and say hello to Mariko, then—not that either of you drinks, but still.”

  “I’ll be out in a minute,” said Linda, true to form. Ever since her teenage years, she’d spent their parties in the kitchen, talking to the caterers and putting off entreaties to emerge, aggressively indifferent to her parents’ world.

  Abe stooped and peered into the oven, and Amalia glimpsed the pale, puckered skin of the turkey and looked away. A flash of dizziness came with the turning of her head, as if the liquid in which her brain floated had sloshed high and hard against the walls. It had been happening for several months now, and for minutes afterward her eardrums throbbed with a staccato pulse Amalia couldn’t imagine was her heart. It felt more like the wing beating of a tiny insect trapped behind her cochlea.

  Abe and Linda went on cooking as Amalia pulled a chair out and sank into it. She leaned forward, pressed her thumbs against the inner ridges of her ears to stop the thrumming. The kitchen’s orange walls persisted in her field of vision even after Amalia closed her eyes, breaking into pinpricks and then fading to pale yellow.

  “Mom?” Linda’s voice, above her. “Are you all right?”

  Amalia dropped her hands, opened her eyes, and looked up at her daughter. “What, sweetheart?”

  “Are you all right?”

  “I will be. Just a little dizzy.”

  “I’ll get you some club soda.”

  Amalia cradled her head in the L of her thumb and forefinger. “That would be lovely,” she said, in a voice so faint it startled her. The notion of club soda was alarming: ingesting something so cold, so effervescent, lifting such a heavy, thick glass to her mouth. Her hand, her arm, her tongue, tingled with apprehension.

  Clunk. “Here. Have a sip, Mom. It will help.” Linda brushed aside her mother’s hair and pressed an inner wrist to Amalia’s forehead. “You don’t feel warm.”

  With great effort, Amalia reached forward and grasped the glass of club soda in both hands. She pulled it across the plastic wood-grained tabletop, and when it was aligned with her chin, she picked it up and brought it toward her lips. She felt the bubbles fizz beneath her nose, heard the sound of glass shattering against the floor, felt coldness in her lap. Then everything went black.

  Nina made a beeline through Arrivals, dodging the reunions of strangers, and stepped into Tris’s arms. “Welcome home,” he whispered.

  “You’re my home,” she told him. Which would make Marcus what, she wondered as they kissed. A vacation condo?

  The first two or three times this had happened, Nina had feared, above and beyond all the guilt and shame and fury, that her actions were proof of impending insanity, heralded some disease of the brain in its early stages. That’s how fucking demented it was to keep screwing Marcus.

  Now she knew better. Nina wasn’t deteriorating; she was simply flawed in this sector of life, weak for her manipulative jerk of a first lover. Her career happened to throw them together frequently, and always far from home, and so once or twice a year, Nina capitulated to history, under circumstances that could never lead to consequences. Some people went off their diets and devoured chocolate cakes at Christmas. Others got shit-faced, vowed never to drink again, and went barhopping the next weekend. Nina’s vice was like that, only much less fun.

  She needed to work on it, and she was. But no more autoflagellation; no more calling herself slut, whore, liar. Life was complicated, and such words were simple. Devon’s voice sounded in her mind, Keep it simple, Pigfoot. The most complicated thing is to keep it simple and keep it moving, and she ignored it. Three hundred and sixty days a year, Nina was a blameless girlfriend. She and Tris had built something special together, something solid—the only solid thing she’d ever had. They were family, and she would never do anything to hurt him. Not to hurt him.

  So when’s your boyfriend gonna give me a tour of the hood? Marcus had asked her yesterday, naked in the hotel bed, apropos of nothing but his own assholishness. I got all kinds of questions, you know? I wanna be a graffiti guy, yo. I wanna be down.

  Don’t talk about him, Nina snapped. You don’t get to talk about him. They’d been through this before.

  Marcus lifted his hands in surrender. My bad, my bad. Just being friendly.

  Well, don’t be.

  He stood up, trying to hide his smirk, and walked toward the bathroom palming his balls. She watched him go, seething at his arrogance and her stupidity. Why did she put herself through this, again and again? She and Marcus were family, too, Nina supposed. In the sense of can’t-choose-yours, and with all the helpless get me-away-from-here connotations of her childhood.

  Marcus must have felt her eyes. He turned in the doorway. Yes? Can I help you?

  What was the most hurtful thing she could say to him right now? Words lacked credibility between them. Verbs of intent, anyway.

  He’s got a bigger dick than you. She crossed her arms over her breasts. And he’s a better lover.

  Marcus laughed. So marry the white boy already. The two of you can raise some beautiful wanna-be-black babies together. Who knows, when they’re old enough, maybe they can get through college on some bullshit scholarships of their own.

  Fuck you, Marcus. Shut up. And it’s only five thousand a year.

  As you wish, Pigfoot. As you wish. He closed the door and ran the shower. A moment later, the first lines of “My Funny Valentine” rose over the rush of water.

  Nina pulled the covers to her chin, then kicked them off in frustration. Marcus never took a shot in the dark. When he wanted to do damage, he used an infrared scope, aimed carefully, and hit her with a tiny bullet of truth that penetrated precisely, burrowed, burned. It wasn’t enough that they were living their own dirty secret. He had to bring up another, remind Nina that he knew something else her boyfriend didn’t, wouldn’t, couldn’t.

  If Tris found out she’d checked that box, taken that money, he’d be disgusted. She could see the whole conversation playing out in her mind: Nina explaining that blackness had truly been something she’d believed was hers to claim four years ago—he knew that, she’d said as much the night they met. Tris not buying it: I never dreamed you’d actually act on that, that…entitlement. Nina trying to make him believe she hadn’t had the means, back then, to correlate blackness with disadvantage, or understand how fraught it was to claim it. All the black people she’d met in her life had been educated, glamorous, successful—she was from fucking Czechoslovakia, for God’s sake, what did she know? Devon and the rest had given her permission to be black, to stand apart from the undifferentiated mainstream that they and she and all artists, she’d thought, were trying to—

  Around there is where Tris would cut her off. Even if that’s true, why are you still taking the money? Why didn’t you stop when you realized it was wrong?

  Checkmate. Fuck Marcus for making this the present when Nina had resigned it to the past, decided it was something she had done as a young, naïve, less principled, and much more desperate person, something
regrettable but over, bricked up, forgotten. Now it would take her a month to banish it again.

  “How was the festival?” Tris asked. He reached around Nina to grab the handle of her carry-on. She took his other hand in hers and they strode away from the gate, suitcase wheels clicking over linoleum and plastic.

  “It was cool. Nothing special. Another T-shirt.”

  They stepped onto an escalator and Tris straddled two steps, leaned back against the handrail, eyed her. For a moment, Nina panicked—he knows—but then her boyfriend glanced left and right, reached inside her coat, slid his hand as far down the back of her jeans as he could, and squeezed her ass.

  “How was your trip?” Nina asked when his body fell away from hers, back into its casual pose, the look on his face like a mischievous third grader’s. “Could Mariko play?”

  “Yup. Every night, she’d sit down at the piano, cry for about five minutes, and then swing her ass off.”

  “Wow.”

  “Right. And then we’d get high in the dressing room.”

  “Holy shit.”

  “She canned the bass player two nights in. He sounded fine to me. I think she did it just for old times’ sake. Picked up a local Dutch cat and did Paris and Brussels with him. He didn’t know half the tunes and he smelled like he hadn’t showered in a decade, but Mariko loved him.”

  “Devon said his dad called a few weeks back to check on her, and Mariko told him that Albert had been talking to her. That he was in the apartment with her.”

  “Where else would he go?”