Jonathan Tropper

by Everything Changes (v5)

  “It’s the PA,” I tell him.

  “She’s a cutie.”

  “Go for it,” I say sarcastically.

  “Do you remember her name?”

  I flash him an incredulous look. “What?” he says defensively.

  “Nothing,” I say. “Camille.”

  “Camille,” he repeats. “Thanks. Now, can you create a diversion?”

  I look pointedly at Norm, who has managed to yank the telephone receiver off Irina’s desk and is holding it out of her reach so that she can’t answer the incoming calls that are ringing on two or three different lines. She’s leaning over the desk, cursing in her native tongue as she grabs desperately for the receiver, but he spins in a lazy circle, holding the phone over his head while entangling himself in the cord as the waiting patients look on in horror at the unfolding drama. “Done,” I say.

  In a flash, Jed disappears down the hall, leaving me to stand alone in the center of the waiting room. “Norm,” I say, stepping in like a referee. “Give her back the phone.”

  “I’ll give it back,” he says, unwilling to break eye contact with the receptionist. “As soon as she tells me she’s going to call the doctor.”

  They stare at each other for a long moment while the phone lines continue to ring, and then Irina collapses back into her chair, breathing heavily. “You are crazy, fat man,” she says, shaking her head in disbelief.

  “I’m just a concerned father,” Norm says proudly.

  A door opens behind her and a tall, bearish man in a white doctor’s coat emerges, looking annoyed. “Irina, why are all the phones ringing?”

  “This crazy man won’t let me answer,” Irina says.

  The doctor fixes us with an angry stare. “What the hell is going on here?” he demands in a booming voice.

  Norm holds his ground. “It’s imperative that we get in touch with Dr. Sanderson immediately.”

  “He’s off today. Irina can leave a message with his service.”

  “I’m afraid that won’t be good enough.”

  “Well, it’s going to have to be,” the doctor says threateningly. He’s an imposing man in a Paul Bunyan sort of way, thick necked and broad shouldered, with ruddy, freckled skin that glows red beneath his beard as his ire is raised.

  “Can we speak privately?” Norm says, switching tacks.

  “Do you have an appointment?”

  “It’s okay, Norm,” I say, embarrassed. “Let’s just leave a message and get out of here.”

  Norm turns around and faces the waiting patients. “My son Zack is supposed to receive the results of his biopsy today,” he announces to them. “As you might imagine, this has been a very tense week for all of us.” The doctor steps forward and lunges for Norm’s shoulder, but Norm spins away from him and steps into the center of the room. “But his doctor took the day off, and so we’ll have to spend all weekend wondering whether or not Zack might have bladder cancer. Can you imagine that? And all because no one in this office has the common decency to break protocol and make a simple phone call on our behalf.”

  The patients look down into their laps, chagrined at being dragged out of their waiting cocoons and into this unseemly drama. The doctor’s face is now crimson, his fists clenched at his sides, and he looks ready to doff his white coat and jump Norm. For a moment, it truly appears as if the whole absurd situation is about to descend into actual violence, when Jed emerges from the inner offices.

  “Forget it, Norm,” he calls out from behind the reception desk. “Let’s go.”

  “What the hell are you doing back there?” the doctor sputters, spinning violently to face Jed.

  “It’s okay, Doc,” Jed says. “Everything’s under control.”

  “Who are you?”

  Unlike Norm, Jed is as tall as the doctor and he steps right into his face, meeting his glare with a breezy indifference. “I’m the guy who’s going to make this problem go away.”

  The doctor backs off and we head for the door, stopping only to yank Norm along with us when he launches into what sounds like the preamble to a lengthy apology to the waiting patients. On the elevator ride down, Jed proudly shows us a piece of paper torn off a prescription pad, on which Camille has scribbled the name of the country club in Westchester where, she is quite certain, Dr. Sanderson is trying to squeeze in as many rounds of golf as possible before winter.

  “The Larchmont Country Club,” Norm reads. “I know the place.”

  “Couldn’t we just call him?” I say, cringing at the thought of another incursion with Norm.

  “She didn’t know his cell number,” Jed says.

  “So what’s that?”

  “Oh. That’s Camille’s number.”

  “I thought it might be something important, the way she underlined it twice like that.”

  Jed smiles and folds the paper into his pocket. “You see the things I do for you?”

  Chapter 27

  I fold myself into the minuscule backseat of Jed’s convertible and Norm rides shotgun, which is unfortunate, because he somehow mistakes this necessary accommodation as an invitation to take Jed under his wing.

  “What’d this car run you, sixty grand?” he asks.

  “Norm,” I say.

  “What? I’m just asking. He doesn’t have to answer.”

  “It’s rude.”

  “Why? We’re among friends.”

  “Sixty-three,” Jed says, grinning at me in the rearview mirror.

  Norm nods, affirmed. “And you haven’t worked in a few years, so my guess is you have more than a few million sitting in the bank.”

  “I’m okay.”

  “Okay,” Norm says. “So you’re a rich, good-looking guy, in the prime of your life. You can be doing anything you want, literally anything.”

  Jed nods, no longer smiling.

  “So why the hell are you sitting in your apartment all day watching television?”

  “Norm!” I say. “Leave him alone.”

  “If Jed wants me to shut up, all he has to do is say shut up, Norm.”

  “Shut up, Norm,” Jed says.

  “Oh, come on!” Norm says exasperatedly. “We’re men. We’re supposed to speak our minds. What’s with all the tiptoeing around here? You two amaze me with all this evasion and sensitivity, like a couple of uptight women. You want to know what I see?”

  “No,” Jed and I say in unison.

  “I see two young men living in the most exciting city in the world. Your prospects are literally infinite, and yet you choose to sulk around in your million-dollar apartment, you frying your brain with television like it’s heroin, and you”—he points a thumb back at me—“perfecting the art of general discontentment, too scared to take any positive steps to change anything. I’ve never seen a sorrier sight than the two of you. It’s a goddamn waste, is what it is. You think you’ll be this age forever? Let me tell you something, old age is coming faster than you think. It’s a fucking locomotive, gathering speed.”

  “I’m regrouping,” Jed says.

  “You’re hiding,” Norm says, not unkindly. “Both of you are scared of I don’t know what. Your friend died, and that’s certainly tragic, but along with mourning him, you should have come to appreciate what a precious gift life is and what a crime it is to be wasting it. I mean, look at me, for Christ’s sake. My family despises me, I’m a drunk, I’ve worked over fifteen jobs in my life, and I’ve got less than ten grand in the bank to show for it. If anyone should be scared to live, it’s me. But I’m out there every day, suiting up and showing up, doing my best. Some days I might get somewhere and some days I might not, but I go to sleep every night knowing that tomorrow is another chance for my life to get better. And you know what? I sleep just fine. Like a fucking baby. I might need a pill to make my dick stand up, but the two of you need a pill for your souls.” Norm nods, pleased with his analogy. “Yep, that’s what this is. Erectile dysfunction of the soul.” He opens up the glove compartment and rummages through it. “You have a pe
n in here? I want to write that down. That was pretty damn good. I should trademark it or something.”

  “Norm,” I say. “You’re one arrogant son of a bitch.”

  “It’s okay,” Jed says thoughtfully. “He’s right.”

  “No,” I say, overcome with a rage that materializes like a sudden storm. “Where do you get off, waltzing into people’s lives and psychoanalyzing them? If you’re such a wise man, why is your life such a wreck, huh?”

  “It’s okay, Zack,” Jed says. “Leave him alone.”

  “Come on, Norm,” I say, ignoring Jed. “How can you think you have any credibility at all? It’s just amazing to me that someone who has fucked up his life as thoroughly as you feels he can give any advice at all about living.”

  Norm turns in his seat to face me. “Sometimes it takes a blind man to teach you how to see.”

  “Oh my God!” I scream into the wind. “You and these fortune cookie expressions. That doesn’t even mean anything!”

  “Cool it, Zack!” Jed says. On some level, it registers in me that the Lexus is picking up speed.

  “It means that you can learn from my mistakes,” Norm says hotly. “The reason wisdom is meant to be imparted is because you acquire it only after it’s too late to apply to yourself.”

  “That’s pretty fucking convenient,” I say. “You’re sixty years old without a damn thing to show for it, but it hasn’t been a thorough waste of life, because you’ve got your wisdom.”

  “My life will never be a waste, Zack, thanks to my wonderful kids.”

  “And has it ever occurred to you that your wonderful kids are all hopelessly fucked-up because of you?”

  Norm nods somberly, his hair flapping crazily in the wind. “Not all,” he says mysteriously. “Not yet. That’s why I’m here.”

  “To save us with your wisdom.”

  “Shut up, Zack!” Jed shouts above the engine. I peer over his shoulder and see that we’re doing ninety-five on the West Side Highway.

  “Slow down, Jed,” I say. But instead, he accelerates and starts weaving through cars on the parkway.

  “Whoa,” Norm says, turning back to sit straight in his seat.

  “Both of you need to shut the fuck up,” Jed says grimly. He pulls past an SUV and comes within inches of rear-ending a gray BMW before swerving onto the shoulder to pass it, the warning grooves deafeningly masticating the convertible’s tires. “Jed!” I scream.

  “We’re here to help Zack find his doctor. So leave the other stuff alone for now, okay? You’re depressing the shit out of me.”

  “Okay,” Norm says.

  “Fine,” I say. “Just slow down, okay?”

  Jed swerves off the shoulder and back onto the highway. The speedometer needle holds steady at one hundred miles per hour as we tear through the traffic, passing cars that appear parked as we flash by them. But instead of asking him to slow down again, we just sit back and give in to the speed, melding into our seats to become one with it. We barrel up the highway like a bullet, the engine’s howl drowned out by the screaming wind crashing over the windshield and battering our bodies as we cut through the atmosphere, three lost men allowing the cacophony of velocity to drown out, at least temporarily, the wounded raging of our own heads.

  Chapter 28

  The Larchmont Country Club’s main building is a red brick Colonial mansion with high white columns that sits on Westlake Avenue, a major thoroughfare. To establish distance, there are thick, eight-foot-high hedges, and then an expansive parking lot. To maintain exclusivity, there is a guard booth and motorized gate at the foot of the driveway.

  “This place is restricted,” Norm says, shaking his head disgustedly. Norm is one of those Jews who only embrace their Judaism when it can be done heroically in the face of anti-Semitism. He gazes at the building suspiciously, envisioning all manner of Aryan rituals and high-level racist meetings taking place behind closed doors in plush conference rooms. “Fucking Nazis.”

  “How do you know?” I say.

  “I know,” Norm says enigmatically, his tone reflecting some past trauma that, like his supposed alcoholism, probably bears a highly tenuous relationship with reality.

  “Well, with two Jews like you, we’ll never get through the front door,” Jed says, pulling away from the curb. He’s joking, but Norm nods somberly, as if they really might have Jew detectors in the lobby.

  Restricted or not, it’s easier to sneak into a country club than you might think. The key is the golf course, whose porous borders extend into the residential neighborhood, abutting the backyards of the massive Tudors and Colonials of Larchmont Estates. Jed takes the first right past the club, surveying the houses we pass, peering intently down their driveways and into their yards until he finds one that suits our purpose, and then parks the Lexus. “When I was a kid,” he says, leading us authoritatively down the driveway of an impressive Dutch Colonial, white as a wedding cake, and up the stone stairs to the backyard, “we used to sneak onto the golf courses to steal the balls. Then we’d stand down the block and sell them for half price.”

  Behind the shrubbery of the yard is a five-foot-high chain-link fence, easily scaled, and beyond that is the open green expanse of the golf course, glowing emerald beneath the early-afternoon sun.

  “You see,” Norm says appreciatively. “Even as a kid, you were an entrepreneur.”

  “And a thief,” I point out.

  Norm shakes his head. “That’s just a technicality. He identified a need in the marketplace, and figured out how to become the low-cost provider.”

  “We didn’t make any money,” Jed says, flipping himself easily over the fence. “We were just fucking around.”

  “Are you sure about this?” I say to him, hesitantly brushing the fence with my fingers. His brazen manner is making me nervous. “It’s trespassing.”

  “You’re already trespassing,” he points out to me, turning to scan the golf course. “Come on. It’s a victimless crime.”

  I give Norm a boost and Jed helps him down on the other side. Then I climb over. As I land, I feel Norm’s hands on my back, unnecessarily assuring my upright landing, and it triggers a faded memory in me, something sweet and nebulous, from a time when I still thought of him as my father, and my legs go weak for a moment. “You okay?” Norm says, steadying me.

  I shake my head and shrug. “Just got a little dizzy. I’m fine.”

  “Okay, kid.”

  Daddy.

  We’ve come in at the third hole, and the fairway is empty, so we walk up the sloping hill to the next tee. It’s a clear, gusty day, and we close our jackets against the chilly wind blowing in loud waves across the lawn, scattering dead, washed-out leaves in its wake. The grass, still wet from a recent watering, clings in a slippery layer to my soles, the wetness darkening the tips of my suede shoes. I exhale into my jacket, tasting the metal of my zipper, feeling cold and acutely alone, wondering what the hell I’m doing here at all. At the top, the course takes a sharp left, and from our vantage point we can see a handful of fairways. There are scattered golfers and golf carts visible now. As we head down the fairway toward them, something occurs to me. “They’re all wearing white sweatshirts,” I say. “And slacks.”

  Jed nods. “Club dress code.”

  Jed and I are dressed in jeans and leather jackets, and Norm’s got his ridiculous red sweatshirt on. “We’re going to stand out,” I say.

  Norm shrugs, already panting from the walk. “We would have stood out anyway.”

  “Just act like you belong,” Jed says.

  “That’s going to be a bit of a stretch,” I grumble.

  We are now coming within range of the first foursome, two middle-aged men and their wives. “See anyone you know?” Jed says.

  “I hope you’ll recognize him,” Norm says.

  “The man stuck a tube up my dick,” I say. “You never forget your first.”

  The golfers stop to look at us. The women are slim, coiffed, and unnaturally tanned, their disc
reet jewelry shimmering in the sun when they move. The men are potbellied and silver haired, with gold diver’s watches and scrawny, bowed legs. Jed waves and Norm says good afternoon. They nod back in greeting and then, as we pass, hold a muted conference about us. A cell phone is produced. “And . . . we’re screwed,” Jed pronounces, although he doesn’t seem terribly concerned. “Let’s split up,” he says.

  “I’ll go this way,” Norm says, heading down the paved golf cart path that disappears behind some trees. “I’ll call you if I find him.”

  Jed and I continue past the green of the third hole and across the lawn to the fourth tee. “Nice day,” he observes exactly as if we’re not about to be busted for trespassing on the grounds of an exclusive country club. It’s quite a gift, I think, to be so comfortable anywhere you are, so unconcerned about the outcome. “What is it that you and Norm have that I don’t?” I say. “The two of you never seem to worry about consequences.”

  “What sort of consequences?”

  “I don’t know, the consequences that come from disregarding basic social boundaries. Norm makes a scene at the doctor’s office; you run into the back hall like you own the place. Now we’re sneaking into a private club, and you know we’re going to get caught.”

  “I’m still not hearing any dire consequences,” Jed says.

  “We could be arrested,” I say.

  Jed shrugs. “You got arrested yesterday, didn’t you? And here you are today, consequence free.”

  “That was a fluke.”

  “Really, Zack,” he says. “What’s the worst that can happen? You get arrested, issued a summons, pay a fine, maybe. Either way, the sun goes down with you still sleeping in your own bed.”

  I nod, agreeing. “And yet, I’m nervous, and you guys are fearless.”

  “I’m fearless,” Jed says, smiling bitterly. “That probably explains why I haven’t left my apartment in almost two years.”