by Wizner, Jake
“I was surprised I got in.”
“Are you excited to graduate?”
I shrug. “I guess so.”
We don’t talk to each other for a while after that, and I drink some more wine. The more I drink and the more I look at her, the more preposterous it seems that she is going out with Eugene Gruber, and I begin to convince myself that she is only going out with him because she thinks I am not interested.
My brother has been watching me watch Jane, and when Meredith and Jane go off together into the kitchen, he leans over and tells me I should ask her out.
“What are you talking about?” I say.
“Jane. She likes you.”
I feel my heart leap. “Isn’t she going out with someone?” I ask.
“Who? Eugene Gruber? They’re just friends now. She told Meredith she wants you to ask her to the prom.”
The girls come back to the table, whispering and giggling, and I pour myself another glass of wine. Is Jane really waiting for me to ask her to the prom? How am I supposed to do it in a room with twenty other people, including her parents? I drink some more wine and plan my strategy. The bathroom is on the second floor. At some point before the end of the evening Jane will have to go. When I see her get up I will follow her upstairs, and when she comes out of the bathroom I will ask her. I finish my glass and pour another.
Gandhi begins to hum the Jeopardy! theme song again. “The category,” he says, “is holy numbers.”
Everyone smiles.
“The answer is sixty-nine.”
I nearly spit my wine out, and it goes up my nose.
“Now we’re talking,” Harvey says.
“No X-rated questions,” my mother warns. My brother looks temporarily confused, and then starts to laugh.
“I don’t get it,” Jane says to me.
“It’s stupid,” I say.
“How many bottles of wine will we finish tonight?” my father calls out.
Everybody laughs, and my brother shakes his head.
“When’s the last time the Mets won the World Series?” someone says.
People take a few more guesses, and then everyone gives up.
“The correct question is, on what page do we get to eat the festive meal?” he says.
“Festive meal, indeed,” Harvey Lessing says with a smirk.
My mother gives him an annoyed look.
The first half of the seder finally ends, and we begin to eat. I pile my plate high and shovel food into my mouth. Jane, I notice, eats only half her bowl of soup and picks daintily at a piece of brisket. At least she’s not a vegetarian.
The meal lasts over two hours, and I begin to wonder whether Jane will ever go to the bathroom and what I will do if she doesn’t. I’m feeling pretty light-headed by this point, and I’m starting to imagine scenarios in which I lead her back into the bathroom when she emerges, I close the door behind us, and we begin to make out. I realize, with a start, that I have an erection, and it’s at this moment that Jane gets up quietly and leaves the room.
I’ve had too much wine to be able to make a new plan, so I wait several seconds, then get up, walk upstairs, and hover outside the bathroom door. My heart is pounding, and I realize that I have had a lot to drink, because this is not something I would ever do sober and certainly not sober with an erection. It’s the weirdest thing just standing there, and I pray that nobody else comes upstairs and sees me. I look down at my pants and see they are still pushed out at the crotch. This is crazy, I think. What am I doing? Just turn around and go back downstairs.
The toilet flushes, I hear the sink run, there is a moment of silence, and then Jane opens the door.
“Oh,” she says, blushing. “I didn’t know you were waiting.” She steps past me, and I realize the moment is about to pass.
“Jane,” I say, and she stops and turns.
We stand there for a second, and I forget what it is I am supposed to be doing. I take a step toward her, put my hand on her shoulder, and lean forward to kiss her.
She turns her face so I end up kissing her cheek, then backs up two steps.
“I’m going to go downstairs,” she says quietly, and hurries off.
I stand there for a moment. Then I go into the bathroom and shut the door. “Idiot,” I hiss at myself in the mirror. “What were you thinking?”
I realize I have to go back downstairs and sit across from Jane for the rest of the evening. I doubt she will have told anyone what I did, but how will she act toward me? Should I apologize? What if she acts like nothing happened? Will she still want to go to the prom with me? Did she notice I had an erection?
By the time I get downstairs, the final part of the seder has begun. Jane looks up briefly from her Haggadah and gives me a tight smile before looking back down. She does not make eye contact with me for the rest of the night.
When the seder ends, there is a little milling about, and by 11:30 people are starting to say good night. I say good-bye to our guests as they leave and tell Jane I’ll see her in school.
That night I dream I am at an appointment with my therapist, except my therapist is Jane Blumeberg’s father.
“I asked Jane to the prom,” I tell him.
He nods. “How did it feel to ask her?”
“I don’t know. I was a little nervous, I guess. It’s hard to ask a girl out. You never know what she’s gonna say.”
“But you did it anyway. That takes courage.”
“I guess. It made it easier that I was a little drunk.”
“Well,” he says, smiling. “There’s no question that alcohol can break down some of our inhibitions.”
I sit quietly for a moment, wondering how much I should confess. “I did something stupid, though,” I say at last. “After I asked her, I tried to kiss her.”
His eyes open a bit wider at this. “Why do you suppose you did that?”
“I was kind of drunk.”
“It’s easy to use alcohol as an excuse. Did you want to kiss her?”
I look away. “I don’t know. I guess so.”
He waits until I look back at him. “How did she react?”
“She sort of turned away.”
He nods. “How did that make you feel?”
“I don’t know. Like an idiot, I guess.”
We are silent, and it seems like he is waiting for me to say more.
“Are you nervous about taking her to the prom?” he finally asks.
“I’m not really nervous. I just don’t know what’s going to happen. I can’t really tell if we’re going as friends, or if we’re going as a couple.”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “She seemed happy that I asked her, but she kind of freaked out when I tried to kiss her.”
“Turning away doesn’t sound like freaking out. Maybe she was just surprised.”
“Maybe. It’s kind of weird having this conversation with you.”
He smiles in a way that seems intended to convey complete understanding. “Listen, Shakespeare,” he says gently. “This is my job, and you’re my patient. You should feel free to talk about anything you want.”
We sit there for a while, not saying anything.
“What are you thinking?” he asks.
“I always imagined making out with my prom date in the back of a limo.”
His eyes narrow a bit, and he presses his lips together.
I feel myself gaining momentum. “I mean, if you can’t get your date to make out with you at the prom, it sort of seems like a waste to go through all the trouble of renting a tux and a limo and paying all that money to go.”
“It sounds like you’re less interested in going to the prom than in finding a girl who will make out with you, as you put it.”
“That’s true,” I say.
He taps his pencil on his desk. “Do you think Jane is aware of how you feel?”
“What, I’m supposed to tell her?”
“It seems to me that you would want
to make sure that you both feel the same way. Especially if just going is as much trouble as you say.”
“What, I’m just supposed to go to Jane and ask her if she’ll make out with me on prom night?” I laugh and roll my eyes. “I can’t do that.”
“What do you think you should do?”
“I don’t know. Maybe we just shouldn’t go.”
He raises his eyebrows but does not say anything.
“The whole thing just seems like such a hassle,” I say.
“Did you think about all this when you decided to ask her in the first place?” It seems there is a slight edge to his voice.
“I only asked her because my brother said she wanted to go with me.”
“You think this is your brother’s fault?”
“It’s true. I had a whole list of girls I was interested in. Jane was one of my safeties.”
His eyes open wide. “Your safeties?”
“Like with colleges. You apply to a few safety schools just in case you don’t get into any of the others.”
He considers this for a moment. “I see.” He looks at me, and I can tell he’s trying to make up his mind about something. “Shakespeare,” he says at last, “I’m going to talk to you for a minute, not as a therapist but as a father. I was happy when I heard you had asked Jane to the prom, because I saw that she was happy. But after this conversation, I have serious reservations about allowing her to go with you.”
“I understand,” I say a bit too quickly.
He holds up his hand. “Let me finish. I know that if I tell Jane she cannot go, I will also have to tell her why, and it would be devastating for her. I also know that if you try to back out, you will end up making things even worse. Since you’ve already asked her and she’s excited to go, you will take Jane to the prom, you will treat her with the respect and the dignity she deserves, and if I find out that you have hurt her in any way, I will exact a terrible vengeance, the likes of which you can only imagine.” He pauses and fixes me with his gaze. “Is all that clear enough for you?”
I work hard to avoid Jane in school after that, especially when I see from a distance that she and Eugene Gruber are indeed still a couple. I am furious with my brother for setting me up. I am furious with my parents for inviting the Blumebergs to our house in the first place. And I am furious with myself for getting so drunk and acting like a complete idiot.
Then again, getting drunk and acting like a complete idiot does run in the family. I know my parents both drank a lot before I was born, and some of the more disturbing stories they’ve told me about the origin of my name must have involved a considerable amount of alcohol consumption. They say they have cut back—which does make me wonder about the health of my father’s liver—but they still drink too much on occasion, and my father, in particular, has turned in a few staggering performances. I’m not saying that getting drunk and acting like a complete idiot is genetic, but I will say that my father has not always modeled appropriate behavior in my presence. And if I were to point to a single defining experience of questionable father-son bonding, it would have to be that summer night in Rome when I was sixteen.
THE TIME I SAW MY FATHER GET DRUNK AND ACT LIKE A COMPLETE IDIOT
I took a Valium and tried to relax. How my parents had gotten me on an airplane again was beyond me, but here I was, about to embark on a seven-hour flight thirty-five thousand feet above a shark-infested ocean.
My parents had insisted that I take the Valium and even suggested I take two. If they were going to be on an airplane with me, they wanted to make sure I was as relaxed as possible.
It was the summer after tenth grade, and we were on our way to Italy for a family vacation. Twenty years earlier my parents had spent their honeymoon in Venice, Florence, and Rome, and they were returning now for the first time to these cities that held such magical memories for them.
The thing about my parents is that neither of them can remember anything. My father speaks about the past with great conviction and authority, but according to my mother, everything he says is a fiction he has invented over the years that bears little semblance to what actually happened.
“Wait till you see Venice,” he said. “Your mother and I got so lost there on our honeymoon, we ended up walking around the city all night.”
I looked at my mother, and she shook her head.
“Your mother doesn’t remember anything,” my dad said.
I had mixed feelings about this trip. On the one hand, I was excited to see Italy and to stay in Italian hotels and to eat at Italian restaurants and to stare at Italian women. On the other hand, I was dreading spending two weeks alone with my family. My father would be taking us on forced marches through each city, my mother would be worrying all the time that we looked like tourists, and I would have to share a room with Gandhi, which would mean no privacy to masturbate, except in the bathroom.
For the most part the trip ended up being about what I expected. Without going into all the lurid details, here are some of the highlights:
1. We ordered calves’ liver our first night in Venice because my mother forgot her dictionary and was too embarrassed to ask for an English menu.
2. A pigeon shat on me in Piazza San Marco.
3. We stood in the pouring rain outside a museum in Florence to see Michelangelo’s David, which is a statue of a naked man with an uncircumcised penis.
4. My father nearly got us killed driving on the Autostrada between Florence and Rome because he kept looking at the map, even though all he had to do was stay on the same highway the whole time.
5. My brother put on a yarmulke as we walked through the Vatican, and asked our guide whether the Pope had any Jewish friends.
6. My parents spent a lot of time reminiscing about their honeymoon and showed up at breakfast each morning with smiles on their faces.
7. I became constipated.
What really makes this story worth telling, though, is the night we spent with Robert in Rome.
Robert Sweeney had been a classmate of my father’s in graduate school. According to my mother, he was the kind of friend you are supposed to outgrow by the time you are ready to settle down and have a family. Both he and my father liked to drink, and when the two of them got together, they always managed to achieve staggering levels of intoxication. I had only met Robert a couple of times; after I was born, my mother had pushed my father to reform some of his ways, and that meant much less contact with his old friend.
We ran into Robert, quite by chance, the day before we were supposed to return to the States. I remember walking down the street and suddenly hearing a booming voice that made everyone around stop and stare.
“SHAPIRO!”
We all turned and saw a small, round man who looked like a troll.
“Sweeney, you old rascal,” my father said, smiling broadly.
“Oh shit,” I heard my mother mutter.
Robert was living in Rome for the year, on sabbatical. He and his third wife had recently been divorced, and he had decided that a change of scenery would be good for him.
“We’ll all have dinner together,” he said. “My treat. Are you boys drinking?”
My father laughed. “Don’t corrupt them yet.”
“Remember we’re leaving early tomorrow,” my mother said, and I detected a note of despair in her voice.
“Don’t worry,” Robert said. “I’ll make sure he behaves.”
My father and Robert made the arrangements, and we met later that night at a large, popular restaurant, which was still relatively empty at 8:00.
“A toast,” Robert said as we all held up our drinks—Cokes for Gandhi and me, a glass of wine for my mother, and scotch for the two men. “To many more happy reunions.”
I had watched my dad drink my entire life, so at first I paid little attention to the amount of alcohol he was consuming. It was only toward the end of the meal, when he began banging on his water glass with his spoon, that I realized he was more drunk than usual.
“Hey, boys,” Robert said. “Try this.” He stuck the prongs of his fork up his nostrils.
I smiled and thought to myself what an idiot this guy was.
“Cool,” Gandhi said, and imitated Robert.
“Stop it,” my mother said. “You’re making a scene.”
In fact, nobody was paying us the least bit of attention. It was after 10:00 by this point, and the restaurant had become crowded and boisterous. This was a good thing because my father and Robert were just getting warmed up.
“A toast,” my father sang out, pouring what must have been his tenth glass of wine.
“To fucking Italy.”
“Fucking Italy,” Robert said, and they smashed their glasses together, shattering both of them.
Robert pulled his chair to the table next to ours and looked around, wild-eyed. “Does anybody have an extra glass? All I need is one glass. Two glasses, I need. Hey, are you using your glass? What’s the matter, you don’t speak English? Glass. The thing you drink out of.”
“Don’t you think you’ve had enough?” my mother hissed at my father.
My father brandished his spoon. “Never!” he yelled.
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, but when the restaurant manager came over and asked if there was a problem, I wanted to hide under the table.
“They’re just drunk,” my brother said. Why wasn’t he as embarrassed as I was?
“DRUNK?” Robert shouted, wheeling back to our table. “WHO’S DRUNK?”
“Il conto, per favore,” my mother said, miming writing a check to the manager. “I’m so sorry.”
“What are you sorry about?” my father slurred. “You don’t have to apologize for me. I’m going to take a leak. Come on, Robert.”
The two of them staggered away, and my mother said she was sorry we had to see this.
“It’s funny,” my brother said.
I shook my head. “No, it’s not. It’s sad.”
“Well,” my mother said. “If I divorce your father, you’ll understand why.”
She must have seen the stricken look on my face. “I’m just kidding,” she said. “Listen, if your father insists on staying out with his friend, I want you to go with them. If you’re along, at least they won’t try to pick up women.”
