by Steve Israel
Just next to the television was a wobbly Lucite brochure holder, stuffed with helpful tourist tips, as if to lend the Bayview a sense of respectability. Because it was a good bet that after sex so illicit and so depraved that it had to be conducted in a cheap motel room, one would feel the sudden urge to “Visit Sagamore Hill, the Bucolic Estate of Theodore Roosevelt, our Twenty-sixth President.”
Morris had developed two scripts for this moment. There was “A horrible fire just destroyed my home but thank God my loving family is visiting relatives down in Trenton so I need a room just for the night” or “I’m an electronics salesman and I’m too tired to drive all the way home to Trenton so my loving wife suggested I take a little nap here because she thinks I’ll fall asleep at the wheel on the New Jersey Turnpike. Women are really something, aren’t they?” But before he could say a word, the clerk gave him a look that said, “Save your breath because I’ve heard them all and don’t give a damn.” Then, after returning his eyes to the moaning and groaning of the Food Channel or twenty-four-hour-sex network, or whatever it was, said to Morris, “Standard room forty-nine dollars plus tax. Deluxe, seventy-nine plus tax. Theme room ninety-nine plus tax. Honeymoon special, one forty-nine plus tax.”
Now what? No one told him there would be a menu.
“What’s the difference between the standard and the deluxe?”
“Jacuzzi. And the Throbomattress five thousand.”
“Standard! Please!” Morris plunked down three twenty-dollar bills and waited for the clerk to fish out his change and a key.
Meanwhile, from a control room at the FDA, William Sully was canvassing screens and snapping his fingers as if directing a live television reality show. He pitched his body toward the console of monitors and snapped commands for close-ups and wide shots. He listened to the transmitted chatter of agents reporting on every motion of the stars of their show: Morris Feldstein and Victoria D’Amico.
“Subject B exiting front office. Returning in the direction of Subject A. Over.”
“Subject A exiting her vehicle. Walking in the direction of Subject B. Over.”
“Both subjects proceeding on foot toward middle staircase. Over.”
“On stairs . . . proceeding up stairs . . . both subjects now on balcony of floor two. Repeat. Now on floor two. Over.”
“Unit Three: I got ’em. Subjects proceeding north on balcony. Passing room two-zero-three . . . two-zero-five . . . two-zero-seven . . . two-zero—hold it! Stand by . . . stand by . . . subjects now reversing . . . you see them, Unit Two? Over.”
“Unit Two, roger. Two-zero-seven . . . two-zero-five . . .”
Sully watched as Morris fumbled with the key in front of room 205.
“Now entering room two-zero-five. Repeat, two . . . zero . . . five. Over.”
The door closed, and Bill Sully smiled.
The door closed, and Morris Feldstein felt nauseous.
It wasn’t the room that sickened him. The décor was surprisingly pleasant, like the floor display in a furniture showroom. It was dominated by a king-sized bed draped with a pink-and-black floral spread and a mountain range of oversized pillows that might require a dynamite charge to remove. There was a gray carpet with signs of dropped cigarettes, a spilled drink, or the rubbing and chafing of bodies. And the walls featured gold-framed abstract art that represented—depending on your powers of observation and your insight into Freudian psychoanalysis—either the twin forks of Long Island or a woman in a pre-coital recline.
It wasn’t even the unique odor of the room that nauseated him—a sharp blend of antiseptic cleansers, furniture polish, stale tobacco, and cheap air freshener. What made Morris nauseous was the distance—about ten yards—between where he stood and the bed Victoria now occupied. She had made the trip, it seemed to Morris, the way a runner on first base steals second—charging without hesitation. Once there, she had draped her hair over the front of her shoulders, and flashed the most inviting smile that anyone had ever flashed at Morris Feldstein.
That’s what made him nauseous. And it wasn’t the mild, light-headed queasiness that one can manage with a few deep breaths of air and a gentle rubbing of the stomach. No, Morris sensed that this nausea could lead to the spewing of entire body organs. Which is why he conditionally accepted Victoria’s inviting smile by whimpering “Be right back” and turned into the bathroom with his lips sealed.
The faucet squeaked when he turned it, and a resistant dribble of tepid, rust-colored fluid trickled into his palms. Then, after several belches, the faucet spurted an unpleasant combination of stale air and brackish water, which turned after a few spurts into a cool and consistent stream. He splashed his cheeks and ran his wet palms behind his neck and under his collar. And when he looked in the mirror he could barely recognize himself. His skin was flushed and his eyes uncertain. His face shimmered from either tap water or sweat, he couldn’t tell. He wasn’t even certain who he was looking at. Was it the Morris Feldstein that he had stared at every morning for fifty-seven years—the one whom he could reliably depend on not to make waves? Or was this a new, lascivious, corrupt Morris Feldstein? Like that Star Trek episode, he thought. The one where the transporter malfunctions and accidentally divides William Shatner into the meek Captain Kirk and the maniacal bloody-lipped Captain Kirk. God, I think I forgot to TiVo that one, too!
He stared hard into the mirror. What am I doing? Who am I?
Nothing but the sound of water falling from the faucet and splattering against the sink.
He turned off the faucet and wiped his face with a towel, which he noticed was stained with faint splotches of brown and yellow. It had a musty scent. And just as he reached for the door, having accepted the humiliation of explaining to Victoria that he could not have sex with her because he was too nauseous and didn’t want to upset his long-standing record of not throwing up before, during, or even after sex, he heard a voice.
It was the last voice he thought would come to him under the circumstances. A voice from so far back in his life that it took him a moment to remember.
“Assistant Rabbi Kaplan?” he asked.
It was. Assistant Rabbi Marc Kaplan, who had coached Morris through his bar mitzvah forty-four years earlier at the Hillel Torah Hebrew Academy of Bayside. Then, as now, the voice was heavy and solemn, suffused with years of accumulated rabbinic study.
Assistant Rabbi Kaplan’s voice said:
“Class, today we will study the teachings of Judaism’s vision of the ideal human. The great scholar and ancient Rabbi, Rabbi Hillel. Who taught tikkun olam, the repair of an imperfect world. The Rabbi said—and repeat after me, class—‘If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? And if not now, when?’ ”
Morris repeated the words, watching his lips move in the bathroom mirror.
“If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” he whispered.
“And if not now, when?”
“That’s correct, Morris!” Morris looked in the mirror and saw the ethereal reflection of an ancient figure, dressed in black, with a long white beard cascading down his chest like a frothy waterfall.
“Is that you, God?” he asked.
“Sure. God appears as a burning bush to some people, and in the bathroom mirrors of seedy motel rooms to others. No, I’m not God. But close. I’m Hillel. Rabbi Hillel.”
“This is a dream,” Morris mumbled.
“Dream. Vision. Prophecy. What’s the difference? My question is this: Are you going to go through with it? With the shikse outside? If not, why not? If you are, when already?”
“You think it’s okay?” asked Morris.
“Whoa! Not up to me. That’s a higher pay grade. I’m just saying—your whole life has been about not making waves. Not causing trouble, right?”
“Well, that’s how I feel sometimes.”
“Sometimes? This is Hillel talkin
g. From a bathroom mirror. It’s kind of hard to put one over on me, Morris. My point is that you shouldn’t feel guilty when you feel the need to do something for Morris, Morris. You know, show a little chutzpah. Stand up for yourself. Make a wave every now and then!” Rabbi Hillel gave Morris a thumbs-up in the mirror, which is something Morris never would have imagined the great scholar doing.
It was a sign.
Prayer heals. And at that moment, Morris’s communing with the ancient sage cured his nausea and strengthened his spirit. He opened the bathroom with a click of the latch, and headed straight for Victoria, across the ten-yard expanse that had earlier sent him scurrying in the opposite direction. A journey of many miles begins with a single step, he thought. But he was certain that didn’t come from Rabbi Hillel.
“Are you okay?” Victoria asked from the bed. Her hands were folded on her lap, and her knees and lower thighs peeked out from under her skirt. Morris noticed that her lips had a fresh gloss, her hair had been brushed to a lustrous sheen, and her cheeks had a pink glow. This transformation had happened while he was in the bathroom, studying Hillel.
“Do you want to sit down, Morris?”
“Yes. I’ll sit,” he said, with all the officiousness of a diplomat accepting his chair on the United Nations Security Council. As he pressed down on the mattress, it caved in with the fatigued squeak of some springs, and the laws of physics pulled Victoria’s body against his. “Oooops,” she giggled, as she scrunched up against him.
Now what? he thought. The last time he was in similar circumstances was with Rona, two years before they got married. It was after their fifteenth, or maybe it was their twentieth, date. They had been roller-skating. Or bowling. Or it might have been the movies. Well, it doesn’t matter, he thought. All he could remember was that he had forgotten all the rules of the first kiss. And even if he had remembered, Morris reasoned, it wouldn’t make much difference. Rules change. It’s not like baseball, which you could have watched forty years ago, then watched again forty years later, and understand the intricacies of every play. Except for the designated hitter rule. But now is not the time to debate the designated hitter rule, thought Morris.
Now what? Should I just kiss her? Do I ask permission? Is there a disclaimer? A fair warning? Do I say, “Now I am going to kiss you but you have five seconds to opt out?” Is there a form? Maybe we should talk first. Or maybe turn on the TV. That would be a good icebreaker. Turn on the TV and find the Mets pregame show. Except that I’d probably have to flip through all the porn channels to get there. How awkward would that be? I mean, if you’re gonna watch porn with someone on a motel bed you might as well just kiss her . . .
Victoria could tell Morris was nervous. She gave him a gentle pat on his thigh and cooed, “Are you sure this is okay?”
Where lovemaking is concerned, men like Morris—hesitant men, insecure men, but ordinarily decent men—require clear and unmistakable signals. Aggressive, insensitive men believe the appropriate signal is that a woman is breathing and her pupils aren’t dilated. Morris, however, needed something more explicit.
He now had three such signs.
First, Victoria was leaning against him in a demonstration of “joined at the hip” in a motel room. On a bed.
Second, Rabbi Hillel had blessed it. It was the Rabbi himself who preached to Morris, “If not now, when?”—a rabbinic way of saying, “Go for it, dude.”
And third, Victoria’s hand patted his thigh, in the geographic center between his knee and his crotch.
The convergence of these signs lit Morris up like a firecracker. His instincts took over, hijacking his body from his good senses and sending it into a frenzy. Whoooooa, his mind screamed, but his arms didn’t listen. They wrapped themselves around Victoria’s shoulders like a snake around its prey. Morris had experienced the pleasure of having his arms around only one other pair of shoulders in his life, Rona’s. These seemed narrower, and sturdier. And as he adjusted to this change in circumstances, he screamed at himself a second time: Wait! But his fingers moved through her silky strands of hair, and then down her neck.
And before he could summon the strength and the discipline to stop, Victoria was falling into the mattress, and pulling Morris with her.
Gottenyu, he thought.
Earlier, as he walked to Victoria in the Bayview parking lot, Morris had learned that there are forces that propel men to do things they will regret. And now, with Victoria’s skirt somewhere in the vicinity of her knees and heading south, he learned that there are forces even more powerful. Supernaturally deflating forces.
Like guilt. Guilt, when dispensed in the circumstances Morris occupied, is the anti-Viagra. It is what some people call “a mood killer.”
He felt his body grow limp (like one of those high-speed films of a flower wilting). But he wasn’t sure whether he and Victoria had finished what they had started out to do. He was pretty sure nothing had happened to him. He thought he had detected a satisfied moan from Victoria. And so he looked at her, smiled, and offered a polite “Is everything okay?”
She narrowed her eyes, bit her lip as if to chew over the question, and whisked some stray blond hairs away from her face. “Yes. That was nice. It was very nice.”
Which didn’t tell Morris much of anything, except that whatever “that” was, or wasn’t, it was nice.
Victoria pulled herself up from the bed. Morris tried not to stare at her while she pulled her blouse down and her skirt up. He distracted himself by staring at the artwork on the wall and wondered if it was indeed a map of Long Island, where Great Neck was. That’s where Rona was waiting for him.
“The bathroom is right there?” Victoria asked.
“Yes,” Morris said. And then thought, If you meet Rabbi Hillel in there, don’t listen to him!
Morris made the bed.
Maybe it was a nostalgic tribute to Rona, who was obsessive about prepping their hotel rooms for the maids each morning. (“Why are you bothering, Rona, let the maid do that,” he would insist. “Why should the maid see our filth? What would she think?” was her response.) Or, it might have been a guilt-induced homage to his wife: “Yes, I did go to bed with another woman, but don’t I get any credit for making the bed when we were finished? Isn’t that what you would have wanted?”
Whatever motivated Morris to neaten the bed was irrelevant. Neatness counts, but in this case it would count against him.
Sully checked his watch and smirked. Twenty-two minutes. It took twenty-two minutes for Subject A and Subject B to enter room 205, occupy it, exit it, return to their vehicles, engage in an awkward and hesitant hug, and drive, as fast as seemingly possible, in opposite directions on Merrick Road.
Twenty-two minutes.
Sully had spent an entire career observing criminal behavior and the darkest possibilities of human nature. He could time his watch to fifty separate felonies. He knew how long it took for a person to be murdered, a drug deal consummated, a politician bribed, a currency forged, an illegal substance smuggled. Any of these could be performed easily within twenty-two minutes.
But sneaking into a motel room and having sex? Not so fast.
Not at $49 for an entire night.
This encounter was not about pleasure, Sully thought. This was business. And if his hunch was correct, this little meet and greet in the Bayview Motor Inn could lead to multiple charges of drug dealing, money laundering, and tax fraud, and ultimately lead him directly to the king of medical counterfeiting, Ricardo Xavier Montoyez.
NICK was aroused. He purred with curiosity.
He may have been the triumphant integration of microcircuits and silicon wafers, but NICK understood human nature better than any human being. Show NICK a covert stay in a cheap motel, and NICK’s programming could show you a behavior pattern that could turn against the interests of the United States government. A reckless pursuit of self-gratification. A vulnerabili
ty to blackmail. A predictor of even greater perfidy. So, once Morris inserted the key in the motel door, NICK unlocked his grand sweep of keywords embedded in websites that Morris may have visited, movies he may have rented, novelties he may have purchased.
And it was all a matter of record.
A subject of interest to NICK may have accidentally and innocently visited www.buxomcoedcheerleaders.com on the way to, let’s say, www.nationalpublicradio.org. They may have visited that site in the blink of an eye and a frantic and embarrassed click of the mouse, but that fleeting moment was forever recorded in NICK’s hard drive. A hotel pay-per-view title might, as promised, “not appear on your room bill,” but it was permanently burned into NICK’s memory.
Not Morris Feldstein. NICK couldn’t find a single salacious website visited. No wicked pay-per-view titles ordered. Not even sex at the Bayview Motor Inn.
Morris Feldstein. Rated G.
Hmmmmm, gurgled NICK. If Feldstein wasn’t guilty of adultery at the Bayview Motor Inn, what was he doing there? What was Mister Clean doing with the girlfriend of a known medical counterfeiter?
Suspicious, NICK calculated. And then NICK upgraded the threat assessment on Morris Feldstein.
Agent Russell pitched forward in his seat, hugged the steering wheel to his chest, and watched the sudden evacuation of the Bayview parking lot. The groaning of engines and the burst of headlights. D’Amico’s car rolling forward, then turning left into the harsh glare of Merrick Road. Feldstein turning right. Then the black sedans, pulling away like a presidential motorcade. A covert convoy, leaving the old neon BAYVIEW MOTOR INN sign behind, winking knowingly at them in the steamy August night.
BREAKING UP IS HARD TO DO
FRIDAY, AUGUST 20, 2004
“Morris! Morris! Are you sick?”
Morris heard Rona, and he felt her hands shaking his body in bed. “I’m fine,” he grunted. But he wasn’t fine. Not at all.
