End of the Jews

by Adam Mansbach

  “She wasn’t talking to him or anything, was she?”

  “Not that I heard.”

  Nina’s cell rang. She pulled it from her purse, looked at the incoming number, and rolled her eyes. “My father.”

  “At least he’s calling at a decent hour.” Miklos’s typical, tearful phone call was at five or six in the morning. That was when the demons seemed to come.

  “I really don’t feel like dealing with him right now.”

  “Here, give it to me. Otherwise, he’ll just keep calling.” Tris took the phone. “Hi, Miklos. Nina’s on the road right now. She left her phone by accident. I’ll tell her you called…. Okay, happy Thanksgiving to you, too.” He handed it back. “That ought to buy you a couple of days.”

  She dropped the phone in her purse. “I should call him more. But it’s always the same horrible conversation.”

  They stepped into the parking garage, unlocked the car, pulled on their seat belts with mirror-image synchronization. A pang of suburban mundanity jolted through Tris and he had a counterurge to pull out without checking his mirrors, ram somebody’s SUV with his rear bumper, and peel off at forty miles an hour. But he didn’t.

  Nina flipped down the vanity and scrutinized herself. For the last year, she’d been keeping a vigil on the three vertical lines running between her eyebrows, examining them in different kinds of light and at various times of day, as if hoping that under the right conditions their existence could be disproven.

  Tris paid the attendant, wheeled the car into the daylight. “I’m bringing my grandparents Pound Foolish.” He angled his chin at the glove compartment, where two bound galleys lay. “I get anxious even thinking about it.”

  “It’ll be fine,” Nina assured him for the thousandth time. “Your grandparents understand the concept of fiction.”

  Tris didn’t respond.

  “As long as you’re proud of it, that’s all that matters. And it’s the baddest shit you’ve ever written. Right?”

  He gave a derisive grunt and slapped his visor down. Nina studied him and felt her cheater’s guilt turn inside out, become hostility. For months, she’d listened to Tris fret over his novel—not the story he’d penned, but its fate in the world. What his grandparents would think. How the critics would treat it. Whether it would sell. The shit was unbecoming.

  She turned as far toward him as the seat belt would allow. “What do you want, Tris?”

  He dangled his right wrist over the wheel and looked across his shoulder, eyes wary. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean what do you want?” She took out a galley and thumbed through it. “To be famous? ‘Oh, look, there goes Tris Freedman, the novelist! I’m gonna get his autograph’?”

  Tris sucked his teeth. “Yes. Exactly.”

  She nodded. “Okay. I guess I didn’t know that. Good luck.”

  He accelerated.

  “No, seriously. If that’s what you think will make you happy, I hope you get it.”

  “Thanks.”

  “How will you know when you’re famous enough?”

  “When I win a Pulitzer. Can we talk about something else, please?” He reached for the radio dial, cranked the jazz station up loud.

  “I guess I’m just not accustomed to being around artists who want fame.”

  “That’s because they already have it.”

  “No, it’s because they do what they do out of a need to grapple with and stylize the human—”

  Tris lifted his hand. “Please, baby. If I want to hear what Devon Marbury thinks, I’ll turn on PBS.”

  Nina slouched in her seat and crossed her arms. They listened to the music. A pianist in a hard bop mode; Tris strained to dissect the technique and determine who it was, but he didn’t have a clue—never did, unless he happened to own the record. There were too many cats. Nina was no better.

  “I’m going to say Bobby Timmons,” he declared after a few choruses. Always a safe, respectable guess.

  “I was thinking Ahmad Jamal.” Nina always went with Ahmad Jamal.

  The tune ended and the DJ came on. It was Danilo Pérez; they were off by thirty years. Still a pair of dilettantes, Tris thought as the next song began.

  He pulled into the Brodskys’ driveway and Nina opened the passenger door. “That’s weird. We beat your parents. I figured Linda would have been here cooking since dawn.”

  Tris frowned at the front door, loped toward it, and read the note taped there. Penned in a frantic hand were the words Tris—Grandma blacked out & fell. We’re at the hospital on Brayburn. Mom.

  They arrived at the emergency room, only to be directed upstairs to a private suite. A right turn off the elevator, then a left, and then his parents were rising from their chairs to greet him. Tristan remained seated, legs bowed, ankles crossed. He glanced up momentarily, nodded, then returned to his contemplation of the floor. Abe reached Tris first and wrapped his son in a tight, hard hug. Tris stepped out of it, impatient. “What happened? Where’s Grandma?”

  “She’s in there.” Linda pointed to the closed door of the room outside which they were clustered. “Sleeping. It’s hypoglycemia. Low blood sugar. They gave her a shot in the ER and she revived. The good news is that she could easily have broken a hip when she fell, but she didn’t. Just contusions.”

  Tris darted his eyes toward Tristan’s slumped form and tapped his temple. “What about up here?”

  “They don’t know,” the old man said, grimacing up at his grandson. “These sons of bitches don’t know anything.”

  Linda glared at her father. “She should be fine. They’re going to do some tests when she wakes up, but the doctor said there was no reason to worry.”

  Tris walked over and peered in through the high, small window. There his grandmother lay, melting into the sheets, with a tube snaking into her nose, a needle taped to her arm. At the bedside sat Mariko, a Styrofoam cup in one hand, leaning forward, her elbows on her knees.

  Tris whirled. “Should she be in there?”

  Linda shrugged. “The doctor said it can be soothing to hear a voice after a trauma. Mariko was the only one who didn’t feel weird about talking to her.”

  Tris rested a hand on his grandfather’s shoulder. “Hey, Gramps.”

  The old man didn’t respond. He shook his head four or five times, as if trying to clear it, then raised his eyes and looked at each of them in turn. “If she doesn’t recover, we’re done for. I mean we’re really through.”

  No one answered. The mingled odor of medicines and disinfectants hung stagnant in the air, and Tris inhaled it, hating the hospital more each moment. Nina sat next to him and held his hand. Abe sat next to Linda and looked as if he wanted to hold hers. Linda held a People magazine, rolled tight enough to breathe through underwater.

  “Where the hell is the doctor?” Tristan demanded, turning to his daughter. “The man has vanished. She’s been alone for hours.”

  Just then, Mariko opened the door. “Amalia waking up! She say your name, Tristan.”

  “She did?” He pushed against the arms of his chair, struggling to rise. Nina moved to spot him, palm hovering an inch from Tristan’s back as he straightened. She, Tris, Abe, and Linda bottlenecked behind the old man, like cars waiting to pass a bicyclist on a narrow country road, as the patriarch advanced into the room.

  “Tristan,” Amalia whispered as the family fanned out around her bed. Her voice was scarcely audible and she stared straight ahead, not seeing him.

  “Amalia, my dear.” Tristan picked her hand up off the mattress. “Here I am.” At the touch, she rolled her head toward him and blinked her husband into focus. Tristan tried to smile, in spite of the tube, the needle. “You gave us quite a fright.”

  “Tristan.” She coughed, and her face crumpled with the exertion. They all winced. But coughing seemed to help. Amalia’s voice, when next she spoke, had recovered a dram of strength. With great effort, she lifted her head an inch off the pillow.

  “Tristan,” she said, “I want a
divorce.”

  He gaped at her, speechless, still holding her hand. The rest of them were gaping, too, but Amalia kept her eyes on Tristan, waited as he searched her face. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, and now the softness of her voice seemed more a matter of intent than of necessity.

  Tris had never seen anyone appear so broken as his grandfather did just then, looking up from his wife’s bed and turning his ashen face out toward his family. “She’s delirious,” the old man said. He glanced down at his wife, then back at them. “She’s in a bad way.”

  Finally, it was Linda who spoke.

  “Mom? Can you tell me what year it is?”

  Amalia cleared her throat. “It is the year 2000. I have been married to your father for fifty-seven years, Linda. And I have decided that I do not wish to die his wife. Does that sound like delirium to you?” She coughed again, and this time raised her intravenous-needled arm at the elbow, plucked a tissue from the box on the bed, and wiped it across her mouth, discreetly expelling a gob of mucus.

  Linda looked from her mother to her father, and then back at her mother. “No,” she said. “That—that sounds pretty rational to me.”

  Tristan laid his wife’s hand on the bed, turned his back, and shuffled from the room. The door clicked shut, and the family watched him sink into a hallway chair.

  Tris leaned forward into the narrow hallway until his knees were inches from his grandfather’s. Tristan’s head was thrown back, his eyes closed. Every few moments, a hard sigh shuddered through him. He looked so fragile that Tris hardly dared move; the slightest disruption to the old man’s equilibrium seemed liable to send him toppling sideways onto the hospital floor.

  The chair’s hard molded plastic creaked beneath Tris, and his grandfather opened his eyes. “I’ve made some bad choices,” he said after a moment, his voice pale and distant. “I don’t know how to talk to her.” Another head shake. “This is the goddamn end.”

  This is the goddamn end was exactly what had run through Irving Gold’s mind when his wife tossed him out. Tris didn’t know what to do with that.

  “Talk to her now. Apologize. Tell her you’ll change.” There had been nobody around to say that to Irving Gold.

  Tristan shut his eyes and squeezed the bridge of his nose with a thumb and forefinger. “Change,” he muttered. “Who do you think I am? Change. I don’t know a thing about that.”

  Tris cupped his right fist with his left hand. He wanted to stand up, to shout and throw his arms around, but he didn’t dare. Nobody did.

  “Things are going to change one way or another, Grandpa. If Grandma leaves you, it’s going to be one hell of a change, so maybe you’d better give some thought to—”

  Tristan winced, and raised his hand as if about to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. “Calm yourself. I thank you for coming after me, but you’d better go. I’d like some privacy.” Tristan leaned back, resumed his half-dead pose.

  “Grandpa?” The old man didn’t respond.

  “Hey, Grandpa!” Panic seized him, and Tris bent over his grandfather, only to hear a quiet wheeze of inhalation. His stomach unclenched. He straightened, stared down at the old man’s fine white hair and through it to the pink, vulnerable scalp as his head lolled onto his left shoulder. Tristan was out cold; his body had shut down. Tris stood over him like a sentry, unsure what he was guarding.

  CHAPTER

  ELEVEN

  Tris’s cell phone lay in the middle of the table, trapped amid water glasses, coffee mugs, the deep square plates containing his wild mushroom frittata, Zone’s smoked salmon scramble, Nina’s ginger-lemon pancakes. He reached for it, flipped the screen to check the time, and dropped it again, as he’d been doing every few minutes since they’d arrived.

  “Dog, you’re making me nervous,” said Zone, fork in hand, looking anything but. “If you guys gotta go, just go. Otherwise, cool out and enjoy your fourteen-dollar eggs.” He turned to Nina. “Of course he had to pick the most expensive place in the neighborhood. If I had won, we’d be at Academy Diner. You know that, right?”

  Nina said she knew it well, and Tris smiled with the pleasure of having his girl and his best friend team up against him. Zone’s protests were bullshit. His culinary standards had skyrocketed alongside his income, and this was the only brunch spot in Fort Greene that met with his approval.

  Tris drank the last of his coffee, and immediately scanned the room for the waitress, the affront of an empty mug too much to bear. “Shoulda known better than to bet against me,” he counseled. “I’m crazy hip-hop, son. Act like you know.” The wager—stemming from a nerds’ debate over the first song to use the “Substitution” breakbeat that had flared up when a car bumping “Don’t Believe the Hype” rolled down Fulton Street while Tris and Zone were walking to the Cambodian take-out joint—had been decided weeks ago, minutes after it was made. The payoff had been delayed until now because Zone’s much-reviled gig as a financial consultant stranded him anyplace there was a client, sometimes for months at a stretch. Paying Fort Greene rent to live here part-time seemed like a waste of money to Tris, but Zone could afford it as easily as he could these eggs.

  “We should leave in fifteen minutes.” Before Tris could check his phone again, it rang.

  “Hello?” he said, pretending not to know it was his mother.

  “Tris. Where are you?” Always her first question, whether she called him or he called her. Asked with a stiff urgency that suggested Linda was half-expecting the answer to be “Jail, Mom. I’m in jail.”

  “On my way. Just leaving Brooklyn now.” He flagged the waitress with his free hand and attempted to make, in rapid sequence, the check, please and more coffee signs.

  “You said you’d be here when your grandmother got discharged. I’m leaving to pick her up in five minutes.”

  “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  “I can’t be upstairs and downstairs at the same time, Tris.”

  “I’m on my way, Mom.”

  “All right. Hurry. But don’t speed.”

  “Bye, Mom.” Tris snapped the phone shut. “Jesus. Like the world is gonna end if we’re not there for the grand reentry of Amalia the Destroyer.”

  Nina doused her last pancake in syrup and sliced it into strips. She ate each pancake separately, rather than cutting through the stack—so each one got an equal amount of syrup, she’d told Tris years ago, when he’d asked, looking at him as if he were an absolute moron.

  Zone dropped his chin into his palm. “My boss, his mother died a week after his dad. Couldn’t handle being alone. It happens all the time with old people.”

  “Nobody’s gonna be alone. My grandmother’s just pissed. It will pass.”

  Nina popped a doughy bite into her mouth. “Like Tristan said, he made certain choices. Maybe he’s finally paying the price.”

  “It’s not that simple, Nina. I’m sick of everybody just summing my grandfather up like ‘Oh, he only cares about his work, he neglects everybody.’”

  “Sounds familiar.”

  “Fuck you. I’m nowhere near as bad as he is.”

  “Oh yeah? When’s the last time you took me out dancing? When’s the last time you even took a day off?”

  “Look, the point is, it’s complicated. My great-uncle Ben told me once that Tristan never had to do chores when he was a kid. His family isolated him, because his brain was supposed to make him a fortune and lift everybody out of the ghetto. But instead, he decided to write books with it.”

  Zone slid his credit card onto the plastic tray the waitress had dropped off. Nina thrust a folded bill at him; he waved it away. “That’s gotta be some Jewish shit or some immigrant shit or something. Black parents, they don’t give a fuck how smart you are. ‘But Mom, I’m a genius!’ ‘Oh yeah? Then bring your smart ass in here and do these dishes before I cut a switch, make your ass really smart.’”

  “What the hell are you talking about, dude?” Tris beckoned the waitress back, still intent on a refill. “Your mom
’s a Buddhist. She never hit you in your life. ‘Cut a switch?’ What are you, from Alabama?”

  Zone pushed the heels of his hands against his eyes, removed them, blinked the world back into focus. “You know what that was? That was the type of down-home bullshit I kick when I want a client to feel like I’m authentically black.”

  “I thought the idea was to make them forget you were black. Isn’t that why you cut off your locks?”

  “A little from column A, a little from column B. Corporate America’s a bitch, boy.”

  Tris slung his arm over Nina’s shoulder. “Well, you know Nina here is Creole three generations back.” The boys laughed, as usual.

  “I never should have told you that story.”

  “Don’t sweat it,” said Zone. “You’re black enough for me.”

  “Gee, thanks, Malik.”

  “No doubt.” He thumped his fist against his chest and pocketed his receipt.

  Five minutes later, Tris and Nina were in their car, rolling through South Williamsburg’s Hasidic enclave, en route to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Tris peered out the windshield like a man on safari, distracted from his thoughts by the herds of bearded natives in black hats and bottle-bottom glasses scurrying alongside his car, shepherding identically costumed young. He drove slowly, considering the bits of trivia that comprised his knowledge of the people he regarded as real Jews. No man would touch a woman other than his spouse, not even to shake hands. If a woman was barren, her husband was obligated to divorce her. At certain times of the month, you had to fuck through a bedsheet to minimize bodily contact. Every aspect of an Orthodox life was prescribed; a man knew at all times where to be, what to be doing. Maybe there was something to that.

  Tris could never simply wonder about the Hasidim. As he passed through their parts of town, his curiosity invariably turned inward, and he ached to know what they might think of him. Would a Hasid even acknowledge Tris as Jewish, or would he be considered an abomination, held at greater distance than an outright Gentile because he was of the Chosen and had turned away?

  The bray of Nina’s cell ended his speculation. She stared at the screen as the phone continued to fill the car with noise.