Lot Six

by David Adjmi

  Old relatives started cropping up at the theatre—second cousins, long-lost aunts. Every so often, as I skulked up to the greenroom to hide, I’d hear a piercing cry of recognition that sent shivers of horror down my spine: IS THAT YOU, DAVID? REMEMBAH ME? And whoever it was would embark on a long, snaking genealogy that linked them in some thrice-removed way to my brother, or my aunt, or her ex-husband, or his father.

  The future had arrived—but like one of those process shots in Vertigo, I was sucked backward and forward at the same time. Like a spell I’d cast without knowing it, I summoned the very past I’d wanted to annihilate.

  Before I knew it, I was back in Midwood, touring a reporter from the New York Times past my old haunts as part of a profile they were doing on me. We had pizza at Di Fara’s, the unkosher place Howie and I used to sneak to on weekends. Later in the day, a photographer from the paper managed to sneak a quick photo of me on the outside steps of the yeshiva before a security guard chased us away.

  Howie saw the profile in the Times, and he called me. He was working at a snazzy law firm, and living on the Upper East Side with his boyfriend. “Well, Daaave,” he said, resuming his campy impersonation of my mother like it was a worn glove, “you finally became shahp.”

  My mother went to a late preview with Arlene and my uncle Ralph. I begged them not to go—I told them they’d hate it, that the play was bleak and painful—but this only stoked their curiosity. I also knew that my mother and sister were, in some sense, muses for this play: it wasn’t a roman à clef but there were aspects of their lives in it, and I was scared of what they’d think. I stayed away from the theatre that night. I wandered around Brooklyn Heights, worried, and feeling very exposed. Around 10:30 I started checking my phone, but no one texted or called. Nothing.

  The following day I had lunch with Arlene at a Chinese restaurant on Montague Street. I tried mining her for information.

  “What did Mommy say about the play?”

  Arlene picked at a plate of kung pao seitan with her chopsticks. “Your play made everyone kind of uncomfortable.”

  “Did she say if she liked it?”

  “She was very quiet afterwards.”

  “Did she hate it?”

  “She didn’t really say anything.” Arlene was being unusually pithy and withholding all afternoon, which led me to believe that she was hiding something—that I’d been subjected to some kind of scorching invective by my relatives, and she was trying to protect me.

  “What about Uncle Ralph?”

  “He was crying afterwards. Your play flipped him out.”

  I’d never seen my uncle Ralph cry. “Why was he so flipped out?”

  “I think Sammy is gay,” said Arlene. Sammy was Uncle Ralph’s son—he was a few years older than me. When we were kids, he used to get me to watch Playboy After Dark with him, and he had a poster in his room of a giant-breasted woman named Cherry Bomb. I told Arlene all this, and that it was highly unlikely that Sammy was gay, but she doubled down. “He’s gay, David—I’m telling you! He’s never had a girlfriend. He moved to Las Vegas, and now no one even mentions his name—it’s just like your play. And it freaked out Uncle Ralph.”

  She chugged her entire glass of iced green tea, then set the glass down.

  “The food here is unreal,” she said.

  There was a rattle of classical music in the background. I bit into my egg roll.

  “So what did you think?”

  “About the play?”

  “Yeah. Did you hate it?”

  “No,” she said, forcing a smile. “It was great.” Her voice was suddenly tiny, like a child’s voice. “It just made me really sad.” Arlene’s eyes filled with tears. She looked away from me, and out the huge domed window of the restaurant. When she finally opened her mouth to speak, her voice dwindled to a whisper: “Why is everything so fucked up?”

  Arlene wasn’t talking about the play, she was talking about life: the two were helixed together in some new unsavory way I hadn’t anticipated. I felt guilty for making her weep in the Chinese restaurant. I didn’t want to flip out my Uncle Ralph* or upset my mother, but art was a kind of violence. I was looking for some kind of wholeness from art, which was a dumb thing to want. Art didn’t make you whole, it broke things. Having this play out in the world was a nightmare.

  Stunning made me a persona non grata with SYs. My sister said people were impugning me at the manicurist on Kings Highway; she said my mother went to some engagement party in Deal and was given the silent treatment. And I heard stories from my actors—how audience members heckled them, jeering and shouting fucking disgusting in the middle of scenes; how, in the middle of one performance, two SY women chanted “Dyke, dyke” during a love scene and had to be escorted out of the theatre.

  For some Syrians—particularly those who were Out of The Community—I was a minor celebrity. They were leaving notes for me at the theatre: closeted Syrians, Syrians who wanted to be writers—who were artists and, like me, decided to reinvent themselves. They were finding my email address and trying to set up coffee dates. They wanted to reconnect. They stalked the lobby looking for me. It never occurred to me that there would be this subculture inside my own marginal subculture, but there they were. I gave them a voice—people who were in some way like me. That felt good.

  One afternoon after a matinee, a cousin I barely knew found me outside the theatre. I was listening to music on my iPod. “It’s me!” she proclaimed. “LINDA!” Before I could take out my earbuds, she attacked me with the boundary-effacing affection I remembered from childhood. “YOU DON’T REMEMBA ME? I’M YA COUSIN!”

  “Oh, hi,” I said.

  “I knew you when you wa little!” she continued. “You used to go to Bradley Beach and weah ya bathing suit with the tic tac toe on it! HA HA HA!”

  Linda dragged me into the Pax Deli next door to say hi to Aunt Joyce, my father’s older sister whom I hadn’t seen in at least a decade. Linda presented me to her like an oblation: “Look what I found outside, Ma!” Then she took a few steps back like she was performing a magic trick. Aunt Joyce stood near a rack of Fritos. She wore a white tracksuit and white sneakers. She was still and eagle-faced, her features etched into an expression of such seething contempt it startled me. “Ma!” said Linda in a rousing voice. “It’s David! Uncle Ray’s son!” Linda was rapt and smiling her snaggletoothed smile—she kept saying MA! MA! as Joyce held my gaze unblinkingly, her mouth drawn down in a punishing scowl. “So great to see you,” I said, in an attempt to minimize the soul-crushing awfulness of the encounter. Then, I bent to give my frightening aunt a kiss on her cheek. It was cold and thin and had the powdery softness of an uninflated balloon. As I was backing away, she got close to my face. “Go see ya fathah,” she said in a menacing pianissimo.

  What Aunt Joyce meant was that my father was sick and I hadn’t been to see him. I hadn’t spoken to him since the day I berated him on the phone in Iowa City. A year or so earlier my father had a bad fall at his house in Turnberry, and since then it was all quickly downhill. X-rays revealed a growth in his brain; they needed to operate. The doctors were able to get it out, but after the surgery he was moved to hospice care in Cookie’s house. He walked with a cane—when he could walk—and even then it was only going up and down stairs. When I heard about all this, I felt only the tiniest prick of regret, but things accelerated quickly. A few weeks after my Pax Deli encounter, Arlene called. Dad was getting weaker, she said. He was probably dying, and he wanted to see me. I felt I had to go.

  Arlene and her boyfriend drove me to Cookie’s house, where my father was asleep in a hospice bed set up in the living room. Cookie was there, and some nurse who’d become close with everyone—the crisis of my father’s now-hastened demise had made them all family.

  Cookie wasn’t the fluttering, nervous bird I’d met eleven years earlier. She had on the same dark eyeshadow and mauve lipstick, but the subdermal wrinkles on her face had broken into a pattern of hard cracks. Her poufy hair was
now up in a sort of matronly bun. She, too, had become my father’s nurse, and though it appeared to exhaust her, she also seemed more self-possessed. She explained, in expurgated fashion, in between weary sighs and with gently depressive affect, the status of my father’s current medical situation. “I’m very tired,” she repeated again and again. “It’s a lot with your father.”

  After a few minutes she wanted me to go and talk to him.

  “I don’t want to wake him,” I said.

  “No, no—go wake him up. He wants to see you.”

  I stood up and tiptoed over to my father’s bed. The baseball cap was slumped on his bald head at an infelicitous angle, presumably to cover his scar from the surgery. “Hi, Dad,” I whispered, softly, so it wouldn’t wake him—I was hoping to avoid an actual encounter and use his illness as an excuse—but his eyes opened right away. He was suddenly completely alert, looking at me very intently, like he was going to jump from a burning building into my arms. He was small, smaller than I ever saw him, like a tiny flicked ash. His lips were thin and whitish. The hollows around his eyes gaped, and the whites of the eyeballs had a feverish yellow gleam. He really was dying, I could see it. “David?” he said, and I replied, “Yes, it’s me, Dad, I’m here,” and then my father reached out and clasped one of my hands. He said he knew about my play, that he’d read about me in the paper and was proud of me. I knew he’d despise the play if he saw it but I just clenched his hand and let him talk. He wasn’t fully capable of a conversation, he was on pain medication that made him fade in and out, but he never took his eyes off me. We talked for about five minutes. It felt rushed, like we were already out of time and had to hurry up and reconnect before he passed out again. Near the end of the five or so minutes I noticed his yellow eyes get watery.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know what I did, but whatever it was, I’m sorry.”

  It was the first time my father ever said he was sorry to me—and though the apology was vague, it was more than I ever expected from him. He really was sorry; I’d never seen a person look as sorry as my father did in that moment. The vulnerability in those beseeching eyes filled me with hideous, awful pain, a pain that welled up from some hidden font in me. I didn’t know I had any feeling left for my father. I tried to break away but he wouldn’t let my hand go; he was clasping it tightly and gazing at me with those jaundiced, gleaming eyes. They were filled with despair—a despair he’d always masked, but the mask suddenly dropped away. I almost couldn’t recognize him. There was another person living inside the person I knew as my father, and he emerged quite suddenly as a sad, lost child. The jolting intimacy I felt with this small, terrified orphan boy frightened me. I wanted his bravado back, I wanted the numbed, deadened person that wouldn’t make me feel anything for him. I said, “It’s fine, it’s okay”—I said anything I could to stop him from looking at me. It was terrible to see him so raw, so nakedly sorry.

  When he lost consciousness moments later I slipped away to Cookie’s bathroom down the hall. There was a hand towel hanging from a bar and I pushed it into my mouth. Once the towel was safely in I unleashed a torrent of sobs—sobs that came from a place of grief so fathomless I couldn’t recognize it in myself, just as I couldn’t recognize the small, frightened child looking at me through my father’s eyes. I was practically screaming into the towel. I was so weak I could barely keep upright. When it was over I took the towel out of my mouth. I could taste the penetrative scent of attar of roses in my mouth. There was a dotted-line horseshoe on the towel where my teeth bit down. I looked at my tearstained reflection in the bathroom mirror. My vision blurred through the glaze of tears. The pink splotches, the sadness and wetness communicated my own feeling back to me in a way that felt consoling—just as I’d felt consoled as a small child playing scenes of loss and death, when I sputtered “Wake up, champ,” and fused with the small blond archetype of Ricky Schroder. But I wasn’t preemptively mourning my father’s death. I was sobbing because he would never know me. His apology was moving, but it was like he’d given me a blank check. He didn’t know what went wrong, or what the apology was for, and now he would never know. He erased his life as he was living it, and I’d been erased along with the rest of it. Now I was just a weird phantom presence in his wife’s bathroom. After I stopped crying I continued staring at myself in the mirror until I stopped seeing myself. I looked disembodied: a series of pentimenti, curves and angles. I stared at myself like this for a long while, until the pink, indistinct outlines filled themselves in, and I began to resemble a person again.

  Two weeks after my opening, Dad was back in the hospital; they’d hooked him up to machines and tubes. He told Arlene he wanted to see us together as a family one last time. Richie said I could stay at his place for the night—he was living in Jersey now, he owned his own furniture store—so I quickly packed a few things and took the train back down to Jersey. I had to go, I knew that, but I knew I’d have to see my extended family, and by this point I was widely considered the Benedict Arnold of Syrians. I worried they might attack me openly—who knew what these people would do to me? On the train I shuffled nightmare scenarios in my mind. I envisioned something like the end of Dangerous Liaisons when everyone at the opera booed Glenn Close—she was banished from society, her life was ruined, a single tear cascaded down her cheek and we faded to black.

  Cookie picked me up from the train station and we drove to the hospital. When we got there, I spotted Stevie in the parking lot walking toward us. I’d only seen him a handful of times in the past thirty years. He was balder than I remembered; he’d lost a lot of weight. More than anyone in my family, Stevie had become Syrianized.* He and Debbie lived in Jersey, just a short drive from Cookie’s house. He drove a flashy sports car, was president of his synagogue, probably a Republican. “Hello, brother,” he said, with a slight trace of what appeared to be warmth but upon closer inspection edged something like regret. “How ya doin?”

  I’d come out in the Times profile, and I could see in his eyes that I disgusted him with my now-public gayness, with my off-Broadway play that mocked and critiqued his life. I could see he didn’t want to feel the disgust, that he was at bottom a caring person, yet I’d stretched his capacity for caring to a breaking point. I violated everything my brother held sacred: his religion, his community. We were at odds in life, and there was no way for me to finesse it. My play was a large speaker that broadcast my identity. It made me visible to these people—people who’d known me all my life—for the first time. Now that people could see me, they could have opinions about me, they could judge and hate me. But there was something so phlegmatic in his hatred of me; it didn’t feel like hatred, it felt like pity. “I’m good,” I replied, feeling like the awkwardness of the whole thing might kill me right there in the parking lot. My brother went to hug me, and as I stood momentarily in that flaccid embrace, I felt a wave of self-loathing wash over me; it was a reflex, a magnetic pull. I hated the way he saw me. I hated the way he touched me, like I was contaminated. I wanted to say something, to fight back, but I hadn’t been attacked.

  Stevie walked to his car, and Cookie took the elevator up with me. She seemed to know where she was going; I followed her down a long hall littered with Stevie’s friends—he seemed to be hosting everyone in the hospital, even in absentia. His friend Moe was there, and Eddie Azrak, and Debbie, who stood watch outside Dad’s room, half concierge, half traffic cop (“Joey’s in the waiting room, they’re ordering kosher pizza!” “The bathroom is down the hall to the right!”). Debbie’s mother was there with her drapey rayon shirt, and my cousin Linda (with whom Stevie was close) and a bunch of others who seemed chagrined or at best mildly indifferent to my presence.

  Cookie led me to a large visitors’ room, where I was relieved to spot Arlene and Richie splayed out on adjacent sofas. They seemed strangely relaxed, like they were at the beach. I picked a spot on the floor between them. “Hi, Dave,” said Richie.

  Arlene thrust a bag of popcorn a
t me. “Can you believe how nauseous I look?”

  “You look fine,” I said, scooping some popcorn with my hand.

  “Ert,” said Arlene. “My whole face is broken out in cystic acne. But the male nurse hit on me anyway—isn’t that insane?”

  “Maybe the male nurse has a cystic acne fetish,” joked Richie, which made Arlene laugh like crazy.

  Cookie landed across the room and was speaking with an older woman with dyed blond hair whom I vaguely recognized as one of my father’s sisters. The woman gave me a strange look, and when I noticed her staring she didn’t look away. She looked like she might walk over and punch me in the face. “Should we go and see Daddy?” I said.

  “Daddy is completely out of it now,” said Richie. “He’s unconscious.”

  “Daddy’s in bad shape,” said Arlene.

  “Maybe he’ll wake up again,” I said, but the truth was I didn’t want my father to wake up. I wanted to remember him the way I’d seen him when he apologized. It was a last-minute linchpin in our relationship, and the moment stayed with me, like the one great scene in an otherwise forgettable play. I replayed the scene over and over in my mind, and with each inscription it got more removed from the actual event, like a laser burning a holographic image. The moment became a ghostly replica of itself; a live encounter only would diminish it.

  But because he was unconscious—and I wouldn’t have to risk anything—I decided to go over to Dad’s room. Debbie was inside, interrogating one of the nurses. “His finger is green,” she said. “Is that normal? I don’t like the look of this finger!” When she saw me, her face sort of blew up; her features all expanded like she’d been inflated with an air pump. “How ya doin, Dave?” she said. “Look at you with the shaved head: cute!” Debbie was smiling, but the smile felt like it might crack at the edges. I tentatively went to hug her, but stopped myself. I could still feel the phantom chill of my brother’s hug moments earlier.