Young Jane Young

by Gabrielle Zevin

  “Are you sure you’re okay? I think you’re bleeding,” she said.

  “Am I?” I laughed, as if my own blood was a great joke.

  She smiled at me. “Well, this was fun. So great that we could do this. We should . . . Yes, you’re definitely bleeding. Maybe I have a Band-Aid?” She began to dig through her handbag, a shiny leather pentagon with brass corners, the size of a small suitcase. In a pinch, the bag could double as a weapon.

  “You carry Band-Aids?” She didn’t strike me as a Band-Aid carrier.

  “I have sons,” she said. “I’m basically a registered nurse.” She continued searching through her bag.

  “It’s fine,” I say. “It’s probably best to let it breathe anyway. That way, it can dry out.”

  “No,” she said, “that’s an old wives’ tale. You keep a wound moist for the first five days and it heals faster and leaves fewer scars. Found it!” She handed me a Band-Aid with dinosaurs on it. “You really should wash it out first.”

  “I will,” I said.

  “Maybe I have some Neosporin?” She began to dig through her bag again.

  “It’s like a magician’s top hat, that bag,” I said.

  “Ha,” she said.

  “Enough!” I said. “You’ve done more than enough.”

  “Well,” she said, “we should do this again.”

  And I said, “Yes, we should.”

  And she said, “Was there something you wanted?”

  I knew it was now or never, but I was having trouble saying the words. There was no polite way to deliver such news and so I just said it. “Your husband is having an affair with my daughter, I’m sorry.”

  “Oh,” she said. The music of that syllable reminded me of the flat line of a heart monitor: shrill but final, dead sounding. She smoothed down her own St. John suit, which was navy blue and almost identical to the one I was wearing, and she ran her fingers through her straightened, scarecrow hair, which was growing frizzier every moment we stood in that infernal parking lot. “Why not go to him?”

  “Because . . .” Because my mother told me to go to you? Why hadn’t I gone to him? “Because I thought I should handle this woman to woman,” I said.

  “Because you don’t think he’ll end it without a push from me.”

  “Yes.”

  “Because you don’t want your daughter to know that you’re the one who betrayed her,” Embeth filled in. “Because you want her to love you, to think of you as her best friend.”

  “Yes.”

  “Because she’s a slut—”

  “Come on,” I said. “She’s just a mixed-up kid.”

  “Because she’s a slut,” she said, “and you’re a coward.”

  “Yes.”

  “Because you want it to end and you thought I would know what to do.”

  “Yes.”

  “Because you look at my husband and you look at me and you suspect I’ve been through this before. Is that right?”

  “I really am sorry.”

  “Sure you are. I’ll take care of it,” Embeth said. “And I’ll let Jorge know there isn’t going to be a fund-raiser. A Night of Jewish Goddamn Leaders! Next time you want to ruin someone’s marriage, do it over the effing phone.”

  I felt guilty, but lighter. I had turned my problem into someone else’s. I went back inside the restaurant and had a vodka tonic with Jorge. I asked him what it was like to work for the Levins.

  “They’re wonderful people,” he said. “Beautiful people. The best. We all think they’re a rocket ship. You see it, don’t you?”

  FIVE

  After Louis the asshole, I decide I’m done with online dating for a while and it’s fine to be a third wheel with Roz and Tony the glass guy. The glass guy says he likes having two women, and honestly, he’s the third wheel because Roz and I have a friendship that predates their relationship.

  Roz and Tony decide to subscribe to the Broadway series at the Kravis Center, and Roz wants me to subscribe with them. Three seats together? I say. That’ll make me an institutional third wheel. And she says, Why not? Tony says he’ll sit in the middle.

  So once a month, on theater nights, Tony and Roz pick me up, and we have early bird somewhere, and then we go to the theater. Tony starts calling me “Legs” after the first show, A Chorus Line. He says I’ve got dancer legs. I tell him I’ve got Pilates legs. Roz says she has turkey legs and a turkey neck, too. We have a good laugh over this. And that’s how it is with the three of us. Maybe it’s not particularly deep, but it’s pleasant and it passes the hours.

  The third show in the series is Camelot, and Roz gets a cough, so she can’t go. Roz says she doesn’t want to be coughing through the whole show. I tell her this is South Florida and a musical in South Florida is more coughs than notes anyway. Be that as it may, Roz says, she’d rather not be in the South Florida Senior Citizens’ Cough Chorus.

  Tony and I end up going alone, and at dinner, what we talk about is Roz. He says how lucky he was to find her, how she fixed his whole life. And I say there isn’t a better person in the world than Roz Horowitz. And he says he feels grateful to have made friends with Roz’s friends.

  During the show, during Guinevere’s number “The Lusty Month of May,” his elbow makes its way across our shared armrest, and I nudge it back to his side. The elbow returns during Guinevere’s act 2 number, “I Loved You Once in Silence.” This time, I push it into his seat. He smiles at me. “Sorry,” he whispers. “Guess I’m too big for the theater.”

  On the walk back to his car, he says, “Did anyone ever tell you, you’re a ringer for Yvonne De Carlo?”

  “You mean Mrs. Munster?” I say. “Is she still alive?”

  He says she was in a lot of things before that. “Wasn’t she Gomorrah in The Ten Commandments?”

  “Gomorrah’s not a character,” I say. “It’s a city.”

  “I’m pretty sure she was Gomorrah,” he says. “I’ve seen that movie a thousand times.”

  “It’s a city,” I say. “It’s a disgusting, violent city where people are terrible to strangers and have all kinds of crazy sex.”

  “What kinds of crazy sex?” he says.

  I’m not going to get into that with him. “Fine,” I say. “Have it your way.”

  “Why can’t you be nice to me, Rachel?” he says. “I like it when you’re nice to me.”

  When he drops me off at my apartment, the glass guy makes a big show of walking me to my door. “This is unnecessary,” I say. “I know how to get to my door.”

  “You deserve full-service treatment,” he says.

  “I’m fine,” I say.

  “I promised Roz I’d see you home,” he says.

  We walk to my front door, and when we get there I say, “Good night, Tony. Give my love to Roz.”

  He puts his hand on my wrist and he pulls me toward him. His red, corpulent lips leech on to my own. “Aren’t you going to invite me in?”

  “No,” I say, pulling my lips and my wrist away. “You’ve got the wrong idea. Roz is my best friend.”

  “Come on,” he says. “You’ve been flirting with me for months. Don’t deny it.”

  “I strenuously deny it!”

  “I think I know when a woman is flirting with me. I’m not usually wrong about these things.”

  “You’re dead wrong this time, Tony.” I dig out my keys from my purse, but my hands are shaking—anger, not fear—and I have trouble opening my door.

  “What was all that talk about ‘teaching Pilates’?” he says.

  “It’s my job,” I say. “And I do think strengthening your core would help with your sciatica.”

  “Let’s start on my core tonight,” he says.

  “I think you need to leave,” I say.

  “Okay, relax,” Tony says. He starts massaging my shoulders with his thick, lumpy hands. It feels good, but I do not want his hands there. “Don’t be so tense. Roz and I have an understanding about these things.”

  “You do not. She
is not that kind of person.”

  “There’s a lot you don’t know about Roz,” the glass guy says.

  “There is nothing I don’t know about Roz. Even if you do have an ‘arrangement,’ which I highly doubt, I do not want you!”

  I get the key in the lock, and he tries to follow me inside. I push him away, and I kick his foot off the threshold. I close my door and I put on the dead bolt.

  I hear him breathing, and then he says, “I hope we’re not going to be little children about this, Rachel.” He means that he doesn’t want me to tell Roz and he means that he wants Broadway nights to go on as usual.

  Finally, the glass guy leaves, and I want to call Roz and tell her about it, but I don’t. Nothing happened, not really. The key to happiness in life is knowing when to keep your mouth shut.

  BEING SIXTY-FOUR YEARS old is like being in high school again.

  IT’S NOT SO much the betrayal I want to report—the betrayal is depressing and makes me sad for my friend. It’s that I want to tell her the story.

  I’M STARING AT the phone, willing myself not to call Roz, when the phone rings.

  “Roz?” I say.

  It’s Louis the asshole. “I thought about it for the longest time,” he says. “I know what I did. I know what I said, and I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that thing about your picture.”

  “What thing about my picture?” I say.

  “I don’t want to repeat it,” he says.

  “You’re going to have to repeat it,” I say. I have no idea what he’s talking about.

  “That thing where I said you were so much better looking than your picture. It was stupid of me,” he says. “I mean, how are you supposed to respond to that? Maybe you think I’m insulting your judgment? Maybe you think I’m saying your picture is ugly? And your picture isn’t ugly, Rachel. Your picture is dynamite.”

  I tell him that wasn’t it.

  “Then what was it?” he wants to know. “It was something, I know it was something.”

  I say to him, “Is it possible that I just don’t like you?”

  “Impossible,” he says.

  “Goodnight, Louis,” I say.

  “Wait,” he says. “Whatever I did, whatever I said, can you try to forgive me?”

  “Goodnight, Louis,” I say.

  I thought literature professors were supposed to be more astute.

  The way I see it, I am glad he said what he said about Aviva. It is better to know what someone is like up front.

  SIX

  I waited for Aviva to call me, wailing that the wife had found out and the congressman had broken up with her.

  When she did not call, I thought, Perhaps she is working through this on her own, perhaps this is what maturity looks like. I knew the stereotype of an overbearing Jewish mother—as aforementioned, I am a Philip Roth fan—and I probably met some of those criteria. But honestly, I wasn’t one and I’m still not one. I had a job that fulfilled me. I had friends. My daughter was my love, but she was not my life.

  So I decided to leave her be. I sent her lavender-scented hand lotion from Crabtree & Evelyn, but that was all. Lavender was her favorite.

  I did not hear from Aviva, not even a thank-you. But that next week, I did hear from Jorge. “Well, Rachel,” he said, “summer’s coming quick. We probably need to get moving if we want to do this before the end of the school year.”

  “Didn’t Embeth speak to you?” I said.

  “Uh-oh,” he said. “Are you having cold feet?”

  “No, nothing like that,” I said. “It’s . . . Well, maybe it’s my misunderstanding, but I thought Embeth had decided the fund-raiser wasn’t a good idea.”

  “Nope, I spoke to her this morning,” Jorge said. “She was still completely on board. She said she was pumped for it.”

  “ ‘Pumped’?” I said. “Embeth said she was pumped?”

  “I don’t know if those were her exact words. One second, Rachel—yes, I’ll be off soon,” Jorge called to someone in the other room. “It’s madness here today,” he apologized.

  “Something exciting happening?”

  “It’s always madness. So, Rachel, if you’re still good to go, we’re still good to go.”

  I don’t know why I didn’t say no. In my defense, I was confused. I think it’s like when you’re on a cell phone call with someone and the reception goes bad and you continue to pretend as if you can hear for a bit, hoping that the cell phone reception will work itself out before the person catches on that you haven’t been hearing her for five minutes. Why don’t you immediately say, I can’t hear you? Why does it feel shameful?

  “I’m good to go,” I said, “but I will need to talk to my board.” Of course, I had no intention of going to the board. There was no way they would let me host a political fund-raiser at the school. Politics was a landmine at BRJA. God forbid Levin bring up, for instance, the Rabin assassination!

  “Yes, of course. How’s the second Thursday in May? That’s May eleventh.”

  “May eleventh,” I repeated. I made an imaginary mark in my calendar. I’d call Jorge back in a couple of days to tell him that the board was unwilling to approve a political fund-raiser, and that would be the end of that.

  The thing that left me disquieted was Embeth’s behavior and what it meant about Aviva’s silence.

  I phoned Aviva and I asked her how she was and how it was going and did she get the lotion.

  “It’s a little thin,” she said. “The lotion. I think they changed the formulation since the last time you bought it.”

  “No,” I said. “Last time, I bought the hand cream and that’s thicker. This time I got the body lotion.”

  “We haven’t broken up,” she said. “I know that’s what you really want to know.”

  I did want to know that, but I also wanted to know if Embeth had spoken to the congressman. “Aviva, what will you do if his wife finds out?”

  “Why would she find out?” Aviva said. “Who’s going to tell her?”

  “There are a lot of eyes on the congressman,” I said. “He’s a public person.”

  “I’m careful,” Aviva said. “We’re both careful.”

  “I want you to have the kind of man where you don’t have to be careful,” I said.

  “Mom, he’s not like other men. He’s worth it. He’s—”

  “He’s too old for you, Aviva. He’s married. He has children. I didn’t think I raised you to have such terrible judgment.”

  “How many times are we going to do this?” Aviva said.

  “I don’t understand his interest in you,” I said.

  “Nice, Mom. Is it so hard to believe that a man like him could be interested in a girl like me?”

  “That’s not what I meant. I mean, he’s a grown man, Aviva. He’s my age. What do you two have in common?”

  “This is why I don’t call you anymore.”

  “But what if she does find out? Will you end it then? Will he?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Good-bye, Mom.”

  “Aviva, I—” I heard her hang up the phone.

  MAYBE A WEEK later, Rabbi Barney, the head of the school’s board, came into my office without knocking.

  “What’s this about us doing a fund-raiser for Congressman Levin? A man named Jorge Rodriguez says he spoke to you.”

  Jorge had left word for me three times in the past week, and I had ignored him. This was a mistake on my part. A man in Jorge’s job was used to being blown off and used to doing whatever it took to get someone to pay attention to him. Of course he would have gone over my head.

  I laughed to give myself time. “Oh, it’s nothing. You know how pushy those political people can be, always looking for money. I took a courtesy meeting with Embeth Levin—she used to be my neighbor in Forestgreen. I couldn’t get out of it—Aviva’s working for the congressman now, I don’t remember if I told you.”

  “That’s not what Jorge Rodriguez said. Jorge said that you pitched them on the idea o
f a Night of Jewish Leaders, and now it’s on the congressman’s public schedule.”

  “No,” I said. “I specifically did not agree to anything. I was having a discussion with them out of courtesy.”

  “Politicians.” Rabbi Barney sighed. “Well, the local press has picked up on the event. I don’t see how we can not do it now.”

  Why the hell not? “Why not?” I said.

  “If we cancel the event, it will look as if we were supporting Levin and now we aren’t supporting Levin. We don’t want to appear to be supporting Levin, but we don’t want to appear to not be supporting Levin either. It’s an extremely awkward position, Rachel. I don’t blame you for what happened, but you must be careful about who you agree to meet with. You’re the principal of BRJA now.”

  It was clear that he did blame me. On some level, I was offended. If it had happened as I had described it, then it wasn’t my fault. Of course, it had not happened this way—and so it was my fault—but he didn’t know that.

  Rabbi Barney instructed me to plan the event but to try to keep it as low-key as possible. “Let’s all try to keep our jobs, Rachel,” he said.

  As soon as Rabbi Barney left, I called Jorge.

  “I was starting to get hurt feelings. I thought you were ignoring me on purpose,” he said.

  AVIVA PHONED ME that evening. “What are you trying to do to me?” she yelled.

  “Did I raise you to be this self-centered?” I said. “Not everything has to do with you. Knowing what I know about the congressman, you think I want this fund-raiser at my school? I have nothing to do with this.”

  “Then why did you call the congressman’s office?”

  “No, Aviva.” I expected God to strike me dead, I had never lied so much in my life. “I called them months ago, before you even went to work for Levin. Someone at the school had an idea for a Night of Jewish Leaders. I called the Levins because the school asked me to, because I knew them, because your father had operated on his mother, because Levin is the most prominent Jewish leader I know. It is a coincidence, my love, nothing more. Maybe Embeth had the idea to turn it into a fund-raising event? But it did not come from me.”

  “Then end it,” she said. “You’re the principal. You can end this. Nothing happens at that school without your say-so.”