The Hazards of Good Fortune

by Seth Greenland

  The players nodded, called out “No need” and “We got your back,” and “Fuck Moochie, man,” which caused general laughter. Dag was relieved to see his popularity with his teammates had not waned.

  Jay looked on in awe at the organism that was a team. He had been around enough of them to know that they were not alike, but this year’s group seemed to have genuine affection for one another. One of the marvelous aspects of sports, he reflected, was its capacity to bring participants to psychological states resembling those of childhood.

  “We got games to play, games to win,” Dag continued, volume rising. “We’re gonna make the playoffs, and when we get there, we’re gonna make some noise!”

  The players clapped and yelled, and their supportive cheers merged with Dag’s clarion voice to create a shield that for a brief instant protected them all: from the expectations of sportswriters and fans, from the demands of girlfriends and wives, from the still distant notion that the day would come when they would cease to be members of this charmed circle.

  Jay thought a solitary walk around the perimeter of the training facility would lower his blood pressure, so he asked Boris to wait for him in the car. He strongly disliked being put in this situation, but he tempered the displeasure he felt toward Dag because he knew it would cloud his thinking. One of them may have been a superhuman physical specimen, but in the world in which they lived, of bills and spreadsheets, and obligations, it was the man that wielded the capital who moved mountains. Strangely, he admired Dag’s boldness. It was the quality that allowed him to rise above the smog-choked streets of Houston, command millions, demand the ball when the game was on the line. When other highly remunerated players quailed and ran for cover, Dag declared he was The Man and took over. Jay rationalized that it was natural for someone like Dag to want to destroy a pissant like Moochie Collins. The team had traded assets to get him (three rotation players and a first round draft pick), but his tenure with the franchise had been disappointing, and the championship he had guaranteed upon signing had not come close to materializing. The fan base was restive. Jay didn’t want to suspend Dag; he had wanted Church to do it, at least for a single game. But Church was not going to step into that breach, so if Jay wanted to set the tone for the organization, he would have to act. But the team was struggling to make the playoffs and by suspending Dag wouldn’t he be working against the team’s interests? And would he then have to rescind his invitation to the Obama dinner? It was a quandary.

  An hour later Jay, Boris, and Bebe met Mayor Major House at the Amiri Baraka Junior High School in Newark where they honored twenty Gladstone Scholars. After the beaming students accepted their certificates in front of a small gathering of proud parents and faculty, Bebe gave a short speech in which she pledged that the Gladstone Foundation would provide college scholarships to every one of them who finished high school. There was a photographer from the Newark Star-Ledger there, but only because Mayor House insisted.

  As Jay was leaving the school, his phone vibrated. A text from Aviva: Arriving this afternoon from Israel. Ok if I put a cab from the airport on my AmEx? For all of the problems in their relationship, Jay controlled the finances, and their arrangement called for his approval of any credit card charge over fifty dollars. Still, he was pleased to hear from her.

  It occurred to him: Wasn’t she supposed to be home the following week?

  He texted back: I’m coming to pick you up.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The International Terminal was a flurry of saris, kurtas, salwar kameezes, dashikis, niqabs, djeballahs, jeans, and sweatshirts. A harried Pakistani patriarch herded his exhausted family toward the check-in counters. Two Nigerians reached into trouser pockets for passports and boarding passes that would allow them to go through security and board a flight back to Lagos. Globetrotting Belgian backpackers in tie-dyed T-shirts double-checked luggage to make sure their hemp-positive lifestyles did not cause them to forget they were carrying substances that could get them beheaded in certain third world countries.

  “Are you ever going to visit Ukraine?” Jay asked.

  “Only if someone kidnaps me,” Boris said, chewing a Cinnabon.

  Beneath the vaulting ceiling, Jay and Boris stood behind the barrier and watched as a group of women in multihued chadors appeared like an assortment of Fiestaware saltshakers, trailing their luggage behind them. This vibrant gaggle peeled off to reveal Aviva, who was striding out of the tunnel in a sleeveless dress with a sweater tied around her waist. “You didn’t have to come,” she said. Jay embraced her, and she patted his back with one hand, the other remaining at her side.

  Jay inhaled his daughter’s scent of rosehips, lemon, and mint. He recalled when she was fourteen and just home from summer camp. That day Aviva learned her parents were getting divorced. She took it exceptionally well. Jay was impressed with her strength, although he did not always appreciate when it manifested as a lack of reluctance to disagree with him.

  “I can’t pass up an airport reunion,” he said, relieved to have her home.

  Aviva and Boris greeted each other familiarly.

  “Did you solve the problems of the Middle East?” Boris asked. Before Aviva could answer, another voice drew her attention.

  “We just got here, baby! The subway took forever!”

  A black woman, college-age and breathless from running, threw her arms around Aviva. They embraced, briefly drew back to gaze into each other’s eyes, then kissed on the mouth. Holding a cell phone up to record this encounter was a tall young man with blond, shoulder-length hair gathered in a loose ponytail.

  Turning to her father, Aviva said, “You remember Imani.”

  “Of course,” Jay said, while he shook her hand and tried to decipher what, exactly, he had just witnessed. He hadn’t thought of Imani since briefly meeting her during Aviva’s freshman year.

  “And my cousin Boris,” Aviva said.

  Boris, equally puzzled, nodded in the new arrival’s direction.

  “What up, Boris?” Imani said.

  Aviva then hugged the ponytailed man with far more enthusiasm than she had shown her father. Stepping back, she turned to Jay and said, “This guy who’s shooting us—he’s Axel.” The young man shook Jay’s hand. “His father was a famous historian.”

  Axel said, “Yo, Pops. What up?” His voice was deep and full of false bravado. Jay nodded at him and pictured the Bob Marley tattoo he probably had somewhere.

  While Aviva introduced Axel to Boris, Imani turned to Jay. “So, you’re the owner.” There was lightness in her voice, a friendly bounce. But he was not quite sure how to interpret what she said. Was she impressed with his lofty position or had she just offered a subtle critique of his status? She could have said “So, you’re Aviva’s father,” but to Jay, her declaration seemed to imply an agenda.

  “Are you a basketball fan?” he asked.

  “Other than a ticket out of the hood for a tiny minority, I’m not sure what professional basketball provides, but, hey, go Knicks!”

  “Glad we got that settled,” Boris said.

  Jay grimaced at the mention of the more prominent franchise and informed her that someone else owned the Knicks.

  “I know,” Imani said.

  If Aviva’s friend was trying to create a positive impression, she was operating counterintuitively. The daughter offered the father another desultory pat on the back. Axel was wielding his camera phone again, aiming it at Jay.

  Imani looked at Boris, sizing him up.

  “I’m not sure we did get that settled, actually,” Imani said.

  Sensing that this person he just met was spoiling for an argument, Boris chose to not pursue the topic.

  Aviva said, “I told Mom I was going to stay at her place. Is it all right if Imani and Axel ride back to the city with us? They came all the way to the airport to meet me.”

  When Jay and hi
s ex-wife divorced, Aviva’s mother bought a duplex apartment on Central Park West. Jay said he would be happy to drop them off there. He then requested that Axel stop recording.

  “Sure, Pops,” Axel said, and put his phone away.

  Boris was at the wheel of the Mercedes as they rode into Manhattan, Jay in the passenger seat, and Axel and Imani in the back with Aviva between them. It was late afternoon, and the Van Wyck Expressway was jammed. Jay had hoped that he could debrief his daughter about her Israel trip without a stranger in the immediate vicinity, but the presence of her two friends made this impossible. A bit of small talk revealed that Imani Mayfield was still Aviva’s classmate at Tate, concentrating in gender studies, a red flag for the already suspicious senior Gladstone, suggesting as it did the twin bugaboos (to him at least) of radical politics and sexual fluidity. Jay learned that her father was a letter carrier, her mother an elementary school teacher, and she was going to be staying with Aviva at Jay’s ex-wife’s Upper West Side apartment until the end of their spring vacation. Axel reported that he had dropped out of Tate and was vague about what he did to support himself. “Right now, I’m helping Aviva and Imani with their senior project.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Jay discerned movement in the backseat. Aviva appeared to have drawn Imani’s hand toward her lap. Were they holding hands? Given that Imani was doing gender studies, he concluded the answer was obvious.

  “So, you’re back early,” Jay said, choosing an oblique approach to the abortive nature of Aviva’s trip. He craned his neck to look at her.

  “Kind of,” she said.

  Aviva radiated confidence. As a child, she experienced what her mother coined “threshold anxiety,” a reluctance to go into new rooms alone. She refused to climb a staircase by herself. The backyard might as well have been Timbuktu. How everything had changed.

  “Thanks for all the emails,” Imani said to Aviva. “It’s like I was in Palestine with you.”

  Palestine? The word was a cudgel to Jay. Did she employ it to smite him? Imani obviously knew who Aviva’s father was. A simple Internet search would have revealed his Anti-Defamation League Man of the Year Award and consistent support of Israel. But perhaps she only bore the mark of the current American campus zeitgeist—where support for immediate Palestinian nationhood was the litmus test for anyone who did not want to be considered a right-wing troglodyte—and had no idea what his views were. He would give her a pass on that for now. More important, and distressing, Aviva had sent multiple emails to Imani. Jay received none. Who was Imani Mayfield to Aviva anyway? Was this dynamic young woman simply a college comrade of his daughter’s, or was Aviva going through some sociologically mandated lesbian phase? Like many people of his acquaintance, he was forward thinking on matters of sexuality, supported gay marriage and LGBT equality, but harbored a deeply held wish to not have a gay child, mostly because Jay suspected that homosexuality would likely make that child’s life more challenging. But also, since no one who was openly gay crossed his path until college, gay people to Jay were always somewhat like Bulgarians or Fiji Islanders, perfectly acceptable, but undeniably exotic. He ascribed this vestigial prejudice to his era, chose not to be tortured about it, and contributed annually to Gay Men’s Health Crisis. But what was that kiss on the lips back in the terminal? If his daughter was gay (which was fine!), her lover was a black woman. While there was nothing wrong with either of those things, to a man born in the Sputnik era, it was—he didn’t exactly know what it was. Upsetting? No, that was too strong. Disconcert­ing? That was close, but not exact either because to admit being disconcerted would be to acknowledge something off the beam about it. Either way, he was going to have to recalibrate his perceptions. Whatever he felt, it was not anything he wanted to say into a microphone. And where did Axel fit into the equation?

  “I’m curious to hear about how the trip went,” Jay said.

  He had planned on waiting until they were alone but had been thrown off by the invocation of the word “Palestine” in the context of his daughter’s return from the Middle East.

  “It was okay,” Aviva said.

  “Why are you home early?” He tried to disguise the implied displeasure but was not successful.

  “The whole thing is entirely one sided,” Aviva said. “Rah-rah Israel, and I wanted to see the other perspective.”

  “That is why they bring you there,” Jay pointed out. “It isn’t to tell you that things are better in Syria or Yemen.”

  “It’s a great country,” she assured him, “but the Palestinians are getting screwed.”

  “Big-time,” Imani chimed.

  “Word,” Axel said. “They need their own country, like, yesterday.”

  “We don’t have to get into that right now,” Jay said, in as pleasant a way as he could manage. Trying to keep the internal tension at bay was only heightening it. He had teed off on people who refused to acknowledge the complexity of the situation between the Israelis and the Palestinians, and as they drove past skeletal remains of the 1964 World’s Fair, he was laboring not to let that occur today. “Tell me what happened.” Intended to sound casual, Jay worried that his request would be perceived more as a demand.

  Imani held Aviva’s hand (there was no mistaking it) as if to fortify her friend for the clash with the oppressive forces represented by mondo-Zionist, incontrovertibly cisgender, heteronormative Jay.

  The lacuna after Jay’s appeal for an explanation expanded. It felt like a peach pit had suddenly formed at the base of his neck, and he kneaded it with two fingers.

  “Well, the trip is super-controlled,” Aviva began. “You’re always with the group, whether you’re hearing lectures or touring sites, or schlepping up Masada. And the leaders are always telling you how awesome Israel is. You know, ‘Israel invented this, Israel built that, Israel high-tech, blah blah blah.’ It’s a lot to take in.”

  “What they don’t talk about is the Palestinians,” Imani informed Jay.

  “Really?” Jay said. This Imani person was getting on his nerves. “I didn’t realize you were on the trip.” He kept his eyes on the road.

  “Sorry, you’re right,” Imani said with a zipping motion across her lips. “This is your daughter’s story.” She massaged Aviva’s shoulder and waited for her to resume.

  “Another kid and I traveled to the West Bank,” Aviva reported.

  Jay’s head whipped around. “Did you tell anyone you were going?”

  “Of course not. The ‘authority figures’ wouldn’t have let us. Anyway, the Israeli government was planning to destroy this house because a guy who lived there set off a bomb and the—”

  “Stop right there,” Jay said. “Set off a bomb? It was the house of a terrorist?” He noticed Axel was taking video of him with his phone.

  “It’s where his family lived,” Imani said, information no doubt gleaned from one of the emails Aviva could not be bothered to send her father.

  It was an effort for Jay to contain himself. He faced front again. Let the Aryan-looking kid shoot all the footage that he wanted.

  “Anyway,” Aviva continued, “There’s this international student group that was going to coordinate with the villagers to see what they could do to stop it. You know, protest, get the media there, and then, if it came to a head, lie down in front of the bulldozers.”

  Once again, Jay twisted his body to look at Aviva’s face. Axel was still filming.

  “Tell me you didn’t lie down in front of any bulldozers,” Jay implored, mindful of a young American activist that, in similar circumstances, had been crushed to death.

  “That would’ve been the shit,” Axel said. “I hope you did.”

  “No, no, no, we didn’t lie down in front of bulldozers,” she assured her father. “The army wound up cancelling the operation, I’m not sure why. Anyway, some of us hung out with the little kids there. They have, like, nothing. We brought th
em pinwheels to play with, they love pinwheels, and we took a bunch of pictures. I posted them on Instagram if you want to see.” She held her phone out to her father. Its plastic case was a polka-dot pattern. “Oh, and we spent the night in the West Bank.”

  “In a Palestinian village?” Jay asked. This jolt blinded him to the phone now suspended in Aviva’s hand between the front and back seats.

  “In a Bedouin tent,” she said. “The Bedouins, by the way, are amazing. And that was kind of it.”

  Jay nodded, relieved. “What happened?”

  “Nothing.”

  It was hard to know whether to believe her. “Really?”

  Axel took the phone from Aviva and began scrolling through the pictures.

  “But when I got back to the hotel the next day the group leaders were kind of pissed.”

  Boris commented, “Just because you snuck into the territories to bait the IDF and spent the night with Bedouins?” like it was nothing.

  Only Jay heard the irony and he did not share Boris’s sly sense of comedy. This wasn’t funny to him.

  “Dad, the phone,” Aviva said. “Look at the pictures.”

  She grabbed the phone from Axel and handed it to her father.

  “I wish I had been there,” Imani said.

  “Oh, girl, it was so your scene,” Aviva said. “Anyway, I asked if I could talk to our group. The kids are, like, all over the map politically. Some are Peace Now two states and others are prejudiced against Arabs. And that’s when the group leader told me to pack my bag because they were sending me home early which kind of sucked because I didn’t get to see Tel Aviv and I heard the club scene there is awesome.”

  “How can the Israelis party with all that suffering going on?” Axel asked.

  Jay had no idea where to begin. He didn’t want to get into a protracted discussion of Middle Eastern policy. He also was not going to point out that if, as he suspected, Aviva was in a temporarily gay phase and her new Muslim friends found out about it, they might have stoned her to death. Jay scrolled through the pictures taken in the village. The children indeed looked happy with their new pinwheels but it was hard to concentrate on the images. He handed the phone back.