Felix stood at the foot of the bunk and reached under where the two beds came together. "Help me with this, buddy." I took the other side and let Felix guide his top bunk directly beside mine. "Right here is cool."
"I'm afraid to ask what you're up to, shortstop." But not as afraid as I was about what was going through my mind like a fever.
"Trust me, Hitman."
The gleaming silver lights from the adjacent hotel flowed over both beds now. Satisfied with our new sleeping arrangements, Felix walked me by the arm to his desk, where he pulled a heavy manila business envelope out from the clutter. He held it up in front of him with a sober look. "This is from all of us."
"Jesus, Felix! You know your presents are at my house. Let's wait until you guys drop me off Sunday, and we can open them all together."
"No. I want to share this with you now."
I had no idea what could be in the envelope, remembering the one Nicolasha gave me earlier, still stuffed in my coat. I wondered if that was why we visited the record store. Gift certificates? That would be really cool. I slid my finger in the seam and pulled out an inexpensive card depicting a cute village scene filled with little kids playing in the snow and a short greeting embossed in gold and written in Cyrillic. I shook my head with a chuckle and opened the card, astounded into silence by the sight of an Eastern Airlines ticket to Fort Myers, Florida.
"We leave late Sunday night. You leave early Wednesday morning." Wham. The sinker hit the catcher's glove, and I was standing there with the bat on my shoulder. "We'll take the sailboat out every morning, play ball all day, and hang out at the beach until we go to bed." I must have looked pretty stupid, staring at the ticket with my mouth hanging open. "If you think your parents won't let you go, fuck 'em. Don't say anything, and just get to the airport. Ma says we can deal with it when we come back."
I have a solution. Let's not come back.
I tossed the card and ticket onto the desk and wrapped my arm around Felix's shoulders. He smiled and put an arm around my back. We stood there together, suddenly feeling the other one saying "Hey, you're my best friend, I love you!" without having to break down and say it out loud.
This was all very new to me.
Felix reached up and kissed me on the nose. "Happy Hanukah, Hitman." Jesus.
I pulled Felix into my arms and held him there for a few quiet seconds before I bent down and lifted him off of the floor from his waist, slinging him over my shoulder. His hands reached down my body, pulling my shirt and the elastic band of my shorts out from my jeans. I pressed my fingers into Felix' legs, triggering the tickling mechanism. We burst out laughing as I began to stagger and we fell onto the beds.
*
We laid close to each other, separated by the edge of the mattresses, our respective blankets, and the underwear we both left on that night. We went to sleep almost immediately after our pillow fight, but I was awake again, anxiously staring at the unfocused dark of the ceiling with my hands folded behind my head on the pillow. My mind was filled with warm images of Florida's Gulf Coast, while my heart was filled with emotion, thinking about Felix and his family.
I'd never been sailing. In fact, the only kinds of vehicles I usually liked were the ones with engines. Maybe Jason would teach me how to sail. I hoped we could find enough people to get a ball game going. Was Fort Myers close to Sarasota? Wonder if any Sox guys were down there yet? I couldn't wait to lie on the beach and talk all night until we saw the sun rise. Hopefully, the Gulf wouldn't be too cold to skinny-dip in. I tried to not get hard just thinking about it.
I'll bet Felix' grandparents were really cool. I was glad the Cromwells weren't religious. I could barely stand all my Catholic stuff by then, much less some other name-brand God stuff. If the Jewish holy days were half as depressing as their folk music...oy!
The next two weeks would be great, being a part of a real, live family. That was my idea of a Christmas present.
Felix faced me as he slept on his side, one arm under his pillow, the other hanging loose across his chest. I moved closer to him and touched his loose hand, which closed ever so slightly on my fingers. "You're my best friend, Felix." And my first, I realized. He moved a little bit. "I love you."
There. I said it.
I ran the back of my hand over his cheek very lightly. Felix began to stir and slid over onto his stomach, dropping his loose hand beside my bare shoulder. He moaned softly into his pillow.
"I hope we're friends forever, shortstop."
"Me, too, Hitman."
I considered slapping him silly with my pillow, but his warm hand closed over my shoulder, and I went back to sleep with a smile on my face.
* * *
I X
A little more than kin,
and less than kind!
Hamlet
Outsiders used to have a hard time keeping track of our family tree, but I didn't, since most of the branches have long since been pruned by the tall, hooded guy with the scythe. With the singular exception of Uncle Alex, the branches that were left would make some fine kindling wood.
I specifically refer to the trio of carrion, also known as A) Dad's stepmother / aunt's sisters, B) Uncle Alex's mom's sisters, and C) my great vulture aunts, great when they sent me five or ten dollars on my birthday, vultures the rest of the time. The proper word hasn't been invented to describe these predators when we would spend yet another torturous Christmas Eve at one their homes, straddling the tangled, barbed wire of their malicious gossip, innuendos, suggestions, put-downs, cut-downs, and manipulations.
Aunt Dutch was the oldest, a cold, near-psychotic spinster with an oversized bank account amassed by her dead (luckily for him) husband, who spent her free time hatching attitudes with her submissive shrew of a little sister, Aunt Melody, an alcoholic fool whose singular life achievement had been to bear two children with her oblivious bartender husband, Dad's Uncle Albert. Julia was the oldest. She was an over-educated, fast-talking slut, who bounced from companion to companion {always accruing something tangible from the split, like condos, cars, that sort of thing} and career to career {stock broker, photographer, tennis pro, teacher, consultant, and who the hell knows what else}, while little Matt was an untalented ex-college jock and failed National Hockey League forward, who trailed along behind his sister, landing jobs and insider scams in her peripatetic wake.)
Which brings us to the baby hydra, dear Aunt Hilly, a brittle, ruthless personality with a good intellect and a better mean streak, two qualities she used to dominate the emotionally-trodden lives of her husband, George, an inept tradesman, and her once-handsome son, Lawrence, the big fish mayor of the little upscale suburban pond we all fled to from our old neighborhood in the city.
Ah, Christmas Eve. Wake me when it's over.
Our entire day had been strung like piano wire. Dad stayed in his room and continued to pack his clothes and belongings, Mom stayed downstairs and decorated our huge artificial tree, and I entertained the household with a particularly bombastic collection of orchestral greats, carefully selected from my Thanksgiving buying spree. We all ignored the fact that the sun would eventually go down, our vampire relatives would rise from their graves, and we would be off to Aunt Hilly's lair, an oversized, faux-antebellum home for our family's Christmas Eve masque.
I was glad Aunt Hilly drew the short stick that year, though. She was the only good cook I was related to, and had a stern, unyielding air about her that I kind of liked. Oh, she was a vile bitch, through and through, but Aunt Hilly always let me get away with murder when I was a younger brat (something she never did for the rest of her nieces and nephews), while I enjoyed watching the rest of the family scatter like pigeons when she came into a room.
(I think it was my tenth birthday, when I eavesdropped and heard Aunt Hilly tell Uncle George she thought Dad was a bully and a shyster, Mom was a horseshit cook and housekeeper, Uncle Alex was a pretentious, flaky wannabe artist, and I was the only good thing left out of her dead sister's family. Well, Da
d still was, Mom always had been, but Uncle Alex wasn't a wannabe anything. That was his problem. I think the real reason Aunt Hilly liked me because I wasn't afraid of her.)
I hadn't seen my Uncle since last year. I wondered if he had hooked up with another wife?
The volume on my stereo was so loud, I could hear it through my bedroom wall, the shower curtain, and the running water. It was kind of like taking a bath offstage at the Concertgebouw, with their Orchestra in full swing. Every time I heard Prelude to Act Three of Lohengrin, I pictured Stukas sweeping out of the sky and panzers bursting across the plain. Wow. I pondered those real-life images in terms of my family's blood and couldn't keep from smirking.
Oh, I forgot, Mom, you don't like Wagner.
I dried off in my locked bedroom. Why I locked the door was anyone's guess. I don't remember the last time either of them tried to come in once my music started playing. The record moved on to the Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde. Its passion and devastation filled the dark and my thoughts. The damp towel fell to the carpet as I stood in front of the icy window, reaching a hand out to press my fingertips against the frozen glass.
I put on a fresh t-shirt and a black corduroy shirt, thermal socks, long underwear, a new pair of jeans, and my hiking shoes, just in case Uncle Alex wanted to get away from the party and have one of his famous long conversations outside in the cold. We took Mom's Mercury station wagon over to Aunt Hilly's. It was as old as I was. I think she kept it just to aggravate her husband, successfully. Dad did the driving, without turning on the radio or the heat, but that was OK, because Mom's matter-of-fact Season's Greetings was quite enough comforting entertainment for me, thank you. You see, my parents, in the grip of a heightened state of seasonal dementia, decided to announce their divorce to what was left of the family tonight.
I remembered me and Felix sitting very close to each other in the dark back seat of his dad's Lincoln while his parents drove me home the previous day, and how happy I felt just being in the same vehicle with the Cromwells. Well. I guess I must have fallen out of the car and been run over by a train or something and died and went to hell and just didn't realize it yet.
Was she still talking? Were we moving then? I always thought hell would be a lot warmer than the wagon was at that point. I should jump out of the car when we pass over a bridge, I thought. But there weren't any bridges on the way to Aunt Hilly's. If there were, I'm sure Mom or Dad would have set fire to them by now.
Fuck, when did my flight leave?
*
Everyone got their kisses and phony compliments before fanning out into the nest of vipers. Uncle Albert and Uncle George exchanged opinionated misinformation on the college football scene while watching some lesser Bowl game on TV, Aunt Dutch clawed her way through Matthew's outer defenses in her undisguised effort to make him look bad in front of his pale and dumpy fiancée (his third, I was pretty sure), Aunt Melody was drooling her way through a self-justifying homily with Julia's opaque acquiescence, there were some cousins with bad accents who I didn't even know running around being friends with everyone, Uncle Alex hadn't arrived yet (probably sitting in his rent-a-car a block away, smoking a bag) and Aunt Hilly, while conducting the preparation of her ten-course feast like it was the landing at Inch'on, decided to open up two more fronts, attacking Mom (“No time to be a real wife or mother, in between your vacuous, overpriced social circuit and your save-the-world, you hard-headed queeny...”) and Dad (“And you call yourself a husband, a father, a man, letting your family dissolve like an Alka Seltzer you wolf down to get through another day of high class duplicity?!).
Aunt Hilly didn't believe in divorce, apparently.
"What about your son? Did either of you selfish blockheads ever stop and think what this might do to him? Or what it already may have done?"
A playwright could not have timed it better. I walked into the warm, over-lit kitchen, playing with one of Aunt Hilly's old black cats, just as she began to pose these questions to my ashen-faced and disoriented parents. My unexpected presence gave a palpable justification to Aunt Hilly's sneering assault.
"Their son doesn't give a damn, anymore."
"No, and I don't blame you." She dismissed them with the singular act of putting out her cigarette. "Here," she handed me a large bowl of red cabbage and a basket of homemade bread, "help me bring the food in."
*
Uncle Alex barged into the house in the middle of the meal, accompanied by a Veronica, some young woman with short hair, sleepy eyes, no make-up, and perfectly formed lips. She looked more like my older sister than his latest wife. She greeted Mom and Dad as if she knew them (the only moment Dad took a break from glaring furiously at me), and gave me a hug before sitting down on Uncle Alex's lap. She smelt like a pine tree after a rainfall, and was dressed like Morticia Addams.
Of course, everyone acted as if they weren't appalled by the latest addition to our gathering, and the desultory conversation hardly missed a beat, until it wound its way to me.
"So, are you still going to that expensive university school your father always complains about, nephew?" Uncle Alex's fur-lined trench coat looked to be worth stealing.
"Uh huh." I took a mouthful of sweet potatoes and stuffing.
"Learn anything interesting for all that litigation money?"
Well, I thought, let's see. I could tell you all about the Manchu Dynasty, or discuss Nietzsche, or fake my way through some geometry, or have a few opinions on Buddhism, or respond non capisco cos'e che non va when you asked about my parents, or make you swim in lines from Much Ado About Nothing, or even what records to buy if you went on a mad shopping binge, Unc. And a little about Judaism. Oh, yes, and a little about modern photography. I have this album at home. Would you like to see it?
I washed my food down with a sip of tart New York white wine. "I'm learning a lot about classical music." I smiled at Aunt Hilly. I bet she liked Wagner.
"That's it?" Uncle Alex grabbed a drumstick from my plate.
"I'm learning how to make friends, too." My face was blank as I stared back at Dad.
"Good. That's more important than the rest of the crap these schools push, lately." Uncle Alex kissed Veronica. "What are your plans for the next couple of days?"
I shifted uneasily in my seat, glancing between Mom and Dad, and took another sip of the dour wine. "I'm going to Florida."
Veronica touched Mom's unmoving hand. "That sounds fun."
"I'm going alone." Dad sat back in his chair, his bitter gaze locked on me. Mom nibbled on her lower lip, and tried to avoid everyone's inquiring look. "My best friend invited me." I said that as if it explained everything.
A few seconds elapsed, but they might as well have been minutes, or hours. Or days, if the pit of my stomach was any gauge. The silence soon grew deafening.
Veronica tried to put a good face on it. "I'm sure you'll have a wonderful time." Honey, when you're at ground zero, there's only one direction you can go.
"Maybe we should talk about this at home, baby." For some reason, Mom looked genuinely hurt. I couldn't imagine why.
"What, and interrupt your divorce?"
That wasn't meant to be thought out loud.
Uncle Alex looked to his beloved Rika and Simon for something in the way of an elucidation. Mom began to cry as she got up and hurried out of the crowded dining room. Dad's eyes continued to burn into me as he hurled his chair backwards and stormed away. A few of the displaced-person cousins, undoubtedly starved from their long voyage on the canned ham boat, tucked back into their meals. Nobody seemed ready to chime in and play referee, and, one by one, they fell back into the morass of their own private skirmishes.
My uncle looked at me in complete dismay and confusion. I looked back in outrage. Sure, my family had a near Olympian skill for papering over and lying about their troubles, but I still could not believe Dad hadn't mentioned a single word to Uncle Alex about their split. Talk about ground zero.
Mom practically screamed out my name f
rom the front door. I finished my wine as Uncle Alex took me by the arm, pulling me down to his lips. "I don't know what the hell is going on, but we'll come over tomorrow morning, to try and sort this out. Stay cool until then, huh?"
"Yeah, right. The funeral parlor opens at nine."
Aunt Hilly let a long sigh out through her nose as I walked away to Santa's Detroit sleigh.
*
Dad swung me into the back seat by my collar. The wheels of the station wagon squealed as we spun out of the icy driveway onto the empty suburban avenue. I heard Mom sniffling and gasping, trying to keep the flood gates at bay, staring into some unknown space outside of her window. The further we got from Aunt Hilly's house, the faster Dad accelerated. His hands were wrapped like coil around the steering wheel. I closed my eyes, trying to picture a silver and blue Eastern jet rumbling down the runway and screaming off into the December morning sky. It was almost nine p.m. Only thirty six hours to go.
Suddenly, I jolted forward as the wagon skidded to a noisy, barely controlled halt. Before I could get my bearings, Dad's hard palms began to rain on me, bouncing my face from his hands to the car window. Mom cried out and lunged sideways at him, but he knocked her out cold with a swing of his arm across her chin.
I flung my door open and scrambled on my hands and knees onto the wet road and up a small, weed-covered incline that led to the train tracks. I heard him coming and panicked, stumbling in some mud as I tried to get up and run. Dad pulled me to my feet with his shaking hands, clawing at my ears and mouth to hold me still only to slap me back down into the muddy snow when he did, before finally dragging me by my hair back to the car.
"Get in, you little bastard!" He slapped me to the pavement again. I landed near the belching exhaust pipe. I could taste blood inside of my mouth. I forced myself to stand up and face him directly, even as my legs seemed weak under my weight as I shivered from the cold and the adrenaline shooting through me.
Miles Page 8
