by Judith Frank
“I’m going to encourage her to be something more innocuous,” Daniel said, “like a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle or something.”
“Dude, don’t,” Matt groaned. “That’s so twentieth century.”
“Or Pocahontas.”
“Please.”
“Then what? What’s an appropriate and benign cultural figure?”
“SpongeBob,” Matt said. “Any Harry Potter character. Batman. He’s a classic—he never goes out of style.”
“Okay,” Daniel said, standing and lifting Noam into Matt’s arms. “I’m going up. Wish me luck.”
He tapped gently on the bedroom door and waited, but didn’t hear anything. He opened it slowly and peered in to see Gal sitting cross-legged on her bed with her horses arranged around her.
“Hi,” he said. “I have an idea.” He came in and stood against the door frame, his arms crossed. “How about dressing up as one of the Harry Potter characters? You could be Hermione.”
She’d been waiting for him to come, hoping he would, and now she was torn by the impulses to draw him in and push him out. If she closed her eyes, she could hear her father’s voice, and it pained her to have this strange and difficult shadow-father instead of her real one. “I don’t want to be a Harry Potter character,” she said, pronouncing it scornfully with chewy American r’s, instead of the Israeli way with guttural r’s—“Herrie Poe-tair”—as if it were the English way that was bastardized. “I want to be a ghost.”
She eyed him as he lowered his backside to the floor and sat up against the wall. “Why is that so important?” he asked. “You can be anything you’d like.”
“I don’t know why, it just is,” she said. It was the one costume she knew for sure was appropriate, that was one thing. She feared that if she listened to one of his or Matt’s suggestions, she’d be dressed as something that would make grown-ups laugh but kids wouldn’t even know what she was supposed to be. And she’d looked forward to it! She had a vague but urgent sense that she’d be scary as a ghost, only scary in a way that was acceptable, even fun. Not scary as the girl with the accent, with no-heads parents. She imagined drifting through her school, Hannah looking at her with admiration for wearing something so much better than a white sheet.
“Can you explain why?” he asked. “If you could explain, I’d understand it better.”
A hitch of ire, of defeat. Takshivi la’milim sheli—Listen to my words—it was something Sari, her teacher in gan, used to say, stooping and turning her face toward hers. Why did she have to explain it to him? Hadn’t she already explained? She felt winded; talking to him was like trying to blow into a recorder, where you couldn’t get your breath to gather into a note and all you could hear was panting and spit. “You never listen!” she said. “Forget it, I don’t want your help!” She threw herself facedown on her pillow.
Daniel rubbed his mouth with two fingers, picked up a barrette from under his thigh, closed his hand over it, and looked at the cluster of totemic objects sitting on her desk among the messy piles of workbooks and the spray of pens and pencils: a tiny framed picture of herself with her parents, various rocks, beads, and small plastic animals, a flashlight powered by a hand crank, a coral bracelet Val had brought her back from a trip to Florida, a Lego helicopter. He wanted to help her, but everything he could think of he knew she’d reject. He proposed to himself that her difficulty was bigger than just one of arts and crafts, that it had to do with the concept of returning from the dead. Maybe it was his job to help release her from her painful fixation on that idea. That thought warmed in him and became pressing.
“You know that people don’t come back from the dead, right?” he said gently.
“Oof!” Gal shouted. She rose abruptly and kicked over the little stool she used as a side table; her clock and cup shot across the room and the clock burst open as it hit the wall, its batteries clattering to the floor. “Why you keep saying that?” she screamed. “You say you’re helping me but you’re not helping me, you never help me!”
“Fine,” Daniel said coldly. He got up and left the room, fuming, closing the door behind him, hearing her angry sobs as he went downstairs.
Matt had risen from the couch at the noise, and come to the bottom of the stairs. “What happened?”
Daniel moved past him and sank into an armchair, his face rigidly set. “Nothing. I’m a terrible person who refuses to help. A ghost? It’s not even original.”
“Did you say that?”
“No,” Daniel said, indignant. “Why does everybody keep treating me like a monster?”
Matt regarded him thoughtfully. “I’ll tell you what,” he said. “I’ve been thinking, and I’ve made a decision.” He paused for dramatic effect. “I’m going to pull myself up by my bootstraps about this Halloween thing.”
“What?” Daniel said, mouth agape. He pounded himself on the ear. “I hear someone saying something, but it’s very faint, very foreign, I don’t know what language it’s in. Sprechen sie deutsch?”
“Are you finished?” Matt asked. “Are you pleased with yourself?”
“Kinda,” Daniel said.
“Okay, forget it then.”
“No, tell me. Tell me your decision.”
“Don’t condescend to me,” Matt said.
“I’m not. I really want to hear.”
Matt’s hands were on his hips. “Okay. I’ve decided to use the kids’ presence as an opportunity to get over my Halloween issues.”
“Really! Good for you, Matt,” Daniel said.
Matt shot him a look, a spot check for condescension, and when he saw none, his voice picked up with eagerness. “Don’t you think this is a good moment for it? I can honor Jay by channeling his spirit into the holiday. And what do you think about this? I’m thinking of calling Kendrick.”
Daniel’s eyes widened; this part took him entirely by surprise. “What for?”
“Just to get some closure on it. I ended things with him on such a bad note, and that bitterness isn’t a healthy thing for me to carry around. It taints Jay’s memory.”
Daniel was quiet. He was remembering Matt’s stories about Kendrick’s self-important bustle around Jay, the way he instructed visitors on how they should behave at Jay’s sickbed. Kendrick once gave Matt a list of topics he was not to raise—pets, parties, and the movie Terms of Endearment, to name just a few—and Matt had snorted, thinking he was joking, until Kendrick shot him a withering look. After hearing that, Daniel thought that the lengths Matt went to in order to stay close to Jay were nothing short of heroic.
“I know,” Matt said. “Risky, right?”
“I don’t know if it’s risky,” Daniel said. “It’s just that I don’t know if Kendrick’s the kind of guy you can get closure with. He’ll always say just a little something that’ll piss you off, put a little bit of poison out there.”
Matt nodded thoughtfully. “Maybe,” he said. “It’s just that I don’t think Jay would want his partner and his best friend to be estranged.”
“You’re a generous soul, sweetie pie. I just hope it doesn’t bite you in the ass.”
The next day Matt and Gal went to the craft store, after Matt made her promise that she would not scream at him even if she thought he was doing something wrong; instead, she would explain her objection in a regular tone of voice. They bought gauze, and washable white and black paints for the as-yet-undetermined way they would paint her face. They decided that she would wear white, but not a sheet, white tights and a white T-shirt, and that whiteness and sheerness together would make her seem invisible. They practiced draping after dinner till they had Gal wrapped in a way that she could make the fabric ripple a little, yet still move and not trip. Then Matt said, “Okay, let me paint your face.”
“What are you going to do?” she asked warily.
“Just let me do it.” He raised his eyebrows when she hesitated. “I’m a trained professional. Just let me.”
She came to him and lifted her beautiful face to him,
its normal stormy twists smoothing into an obedient expanse of creamy cheek, her mouth closed over the adult front teeth that had recently come in and that her face had yet to grow into, her eyes hooded by her dark lashes. He rubbed a delicate wash of white paint over it, letting some skin show through, used just a touch of black paint to hollow out her eyes. Then he said, “Okay, go,” and pushed her toward the mirror.
She opened her eyes and looked at him. “I scared to look!” she said.
He took her by the shoulders and marched her to the mirror and she opened her eyes and took in a breath. She lifted her gauze-covered arms, turned her whitened face this way and that. Her dark hair fell to her shoulders; she raked her fingers gently through the hair on one side and tucked it behind her ear, the first preening gesture Matt had ever seen her make. She turned and looked at him, nodded approvingly.
“Good, right?” he asked. “You look amazing. So much more sophisticated than your normal sheet-on-the-head ghost. Go show Daniel.”
They could barely stop her relieved chattering to get her to bed; she made use of every adjective she knew in both English and Hebrew in an attempt to describe the effect of the costume. “It’s spooky but not scary,” she said, and then repeated that, enjoying the fine distinction. “It’s sophisticated, don’t you think? How do you say sophisticated in Hebrew? Where’s Dani? How do you say sophisticated in Hebrew?”
MATT DECIDED TO DRESS Noam as Mr. Potato Head. “Did you know,” he’d said to Daniel as he boned up on Mr. Potato Head on the Web, using the laptop they kept in the kitchen, “that on Mr. Potato Head’s fortieth birthday, they announced that he would no longer be a ‘couch potato’ ”—he made ostentatious air quotes with his fingers—“and he received a special award from the President’s Council on Physical Fitness? That’s awesome. I wonder if he had to do little pull-ups.”
Matt spent the day on Noam’s costume, sewing elastic into an old brown sheet to close at Noam’s neck and thighs, gluing paper plates on for ears, and colored felt and cotton for the facial features. He went to three different stores looking for blue socks to put over Noam’s sneakers. He bought a kid-sized hard hat and spray-painted it black. He worked in a swirl of quiet satisfaction, diligent problem solving, and blistering self-irony. He was spending the day making a little kid’s Halloween costume. He was a stay-at-home mom—in the lingo of the blogs and message boards, a SAHM! It blew his mind that his life had led him to this point. Not that he was the most ambitious guy in the world. What was his ambition? For a while, at the New York firm among the design hotshots, he’d entertained the fantasy of becoming the next Carson or Sagmeister. But over time, working among incredibly single-minded and talented people, he was forced to admit to himself that while he was good, very good, he wasn’t a design genius, and didn’t quite have the drive and focus to convincingly fake it. The realization pained him, but it didn’t devastate him. He liked his work, a lot, liked the quiet focus of it, the visual pleasure of something falling into place and the pride of submitting work that was clean and stylish and impeccable.
And let’s face it, he thought, moving away from New York to live with Daniel, who had the talent to be a great musician and writer but who viewed ambition as frivolous and crass, pretty much put the nail in that coffin.
Still, what would he tell Kendrick about what he was doing these days? He gingerly peeled back one of the paper-plate ears, testing the dryness of the glue, wondering if he should put in a few staples for good measure. When identifying himself, should he say, “It’s Matt,” or “It’s Matt Greene”? Should he just catch up with him, or should he actually say that he’d called to bury the hatchet? He reminded himself to stick to “I” statements, as he had been instructed to do in a brief and irritating couples therapy with a short-lived boyfriend. And if Kendrick was an officious fuck, what would he say? His mind ran over various options, honing their wit and cuttingness. Then he grabbed the phone before he could think anymore and dialed.
Kendrick answered on the second ring with a quick and intimate “Hi.”
“Hi,” Matt said uncertainly, thinking that Kendrick couldn’t have recognized him from the caller ID, because their phone was listed under Daniel’s name. “It’s Matt. Greene.”
There was a long pause.
“Jay’s friend.”
“I know who you are. I thought you were someone else.” The voice was slightly peevish, slightly congested.
“How’s it going?”
“It’s going well,” Kendrick said.
“That’s great,” Matt said. “I’m glad to hear that.”
Kendrick didn’t reciprocate, but then again, Matt remembered, he’d never acquired the skill of saying “And how are you?” If you wanted to say anything about yourself, you had to put a stick of dynamite in the conversation and blast right through it.
“Are you waiting for another call?” Matt asked.
“Yeah, I’m fighting with my credit card company about a finance charge,” Kendrick said, “and we got disconnected.”
Matt smiled, remembering how Kendrick made a point of keeping excellent medical and financial records, and making sure he didn’t get overcharged or double-charged; he checked his credit rating obsessively for errors, and reported everything. “Because otherwise how will they learn?” Matt and Jay loved to use his mantra in their conversations.
“I wanted to call,” Matt said, picking up a pen and starting to doodle on the little pad of paper sitting on the kitchen table, “because it’s Halloween, which always makes me think of Jay.”
“Oh, right,” Kendrick said. “So where are you living again? Elmira?”
Matt smiled at the snobbery of the New Yorker. “Northampton. Massachusetts.”
“Oh yeah, where all the lesbians are,” Kendrick said.
“Right,” Matt said. “I’m basically a lesbian now.”
Kendrick laughed.
“Listen,” Matt said, warmed by that, always a sucker for anybody who laughed at his jokes, “I just wanted to touch base, maybe bury the hatchet. I think Jay would want that.”
Kendrick was quiet for a few moments. “Well, I appreciate that, I do,” he finally said. “He wished we could get along better; it was painful to him that we couldn’t.”
“I know,” Matt said, and continued to the line he’d practiced before calling: “It’s just that—I think that we both loved him so much, and were in so much pain, that we weren’t at our best with each other.”
There was another pause, and then Kendrick said, “True.”
“So I’m sorry for my part,” Matt said, thinking that this was easier than he’d thought it would be.
“Thanks, Matt,” Kendrick said. “Me too. It’s just that—I don’t know if I should even say this. No, never mind.”
Matt’s head rolled back on his neck and he closed his eyes. Here we go, he thought.
“It’s just that—this may be a fault of mine, but I just can’t pretend to be nice to people who hurt the people I love.”
“What are you talking about?” Matt said while Kendrick continued, “And it really bothered me how bitchy you were to him for making money and being successful. It was like the minute he stopped being your sidekick, you couldn’t handle it anymore. That really hurt his feelings, Matt.”
“What are you talking about?” Matt repeated.
“Calling him a corporate tool . . .”
Matt cast his mind back, stunned. “That was a joke!” Matt said. “Jay called himself a corporate tool!” He worked in the finance department of Goldman Sachs, a job he had landed straight from college and been incredibly successful at.
“He didn’t think it was funny.”
“You’re so full of shit,” Matt said heatedly, propelled to his feet, pacing. “He never said anything to me about it, and believe me, he was no shrinking violet when it came to telling me my flaws.”
“Forget it. I thought you wanted to have a genuine conversation, but apparently I was wrong.”
�
�I sincerely wanted to make amends,” Matt said. “I didn’t call to get attacked by you. Jay and I handled our relationship just fine.”
“He was dying, Matt! He wasn’t about to start some huge drama with you.”
Matt’s mind was spinning. “Look, I don’t have time for this. I’m living with a family that’s been devastated by a terrorist attack, raising two orphaned children.” He winced as he uttered the word orphaned.
“Whoa,” Kendrick said.
In Kendrick style, as though devoid of the slightest bit of curiosity, he failed to follow up, leaving Matt to wonder if he was undignified enough to throw more unsolicited details out there himself. You probably read about the Peace Train bombing in Jerusalem earlier this year. It was all over the papers.
He hung up, sickened. The thought of trick-or-treating had been drained of all its energy and color. Once, he’d loved the huddle of citizens at dusk scurrying from house to house. So what if the occasional house got pelted with eggs, its trees draped with toilet paper? It was a day when Americans answered the door for other American strangers, which seemed marvelous to him. But now: he’d wanted to honor Jay this Halloween, but now he didn’t feel like honoring him at all; he was furious at him for hanging on to that hurt and not telling him about it. It was so stupid—it felt petty and vindictive for him to play the game of calling himself a corporate tool and then turn around and complain to Kendrick about it. They’d both seen the absurdity of Jay’s huge success at Goldman. Both of them had! This was the guy who had to ask his professors for extensions for almost every paper he wrote, who got behind in his bills, whose house was always a total mess. Then he turned around and got this high-paying job, and lived in the West Village in a building with a doorman, while Matt, in his first design job, lived in a studio sublet all the way over on Ninth Avenue, surrounded by someone else’s crappy, tasteless things.
