The Wonder Spot

by Melissa Bank

  Jack said, “Rebecca’s my cousin,” a rerun retort.

  My grandmother said, “By marriage,” a rerun rebuttal.

  “They’re friends, Mother,” my mother said.

  “Plus,” I said, “she’s into black guys,” thereby changing the topic forever.

  “Well,” my grandmother said. “I didn’t know that.”

  My mother glared at me and shook her head.

  It was for her that I tried to repair the hole in the atmosphere, but when I said, “Granny, would you tell me about this bear?” my mother shook her head again.

  Her mother described finding the bear in the closet and restitching his nose and paws. “Isn’t he adorable?” she said. “I just thought he was so adorable.”

  I said, “Does he have a name?”

  “Of course not,” my grandmother said.

  Jack said, “He’s pretty cute.”

  “Well,” she said. “You should probably go now. I don’t want you to run into traffic.”

  Traffic was the great looming fear of her life.

  2.

  I GOTA RIDE back to New York with Jack in his old Karmann Ghia convertible. It started to rain, and the roof leaked; every now and then I wiped the dashboard with a rag that I recognized as a former guest towel of my mother’s, green with embroidered daisies, and I thought about the hard trip that towel had taken from the riches of the powder room to the rag of the dashboard.

  On the Pennsylvania Turnpike, I asked Jack which screenplay he was turning into a pilot.

  “The Judge,” he said.

  “The one about Dad.”

  “It’s not about Dad,” he said.

  “Okay.” I asked what he would have to change, and how. I asked about the meeting and about the producers, and what he thought of Los Angeles. Then I said, “I was just noticing how you never ask me any questions.”

  “Sorry,” he said. “What time is it?” He waited another exit before asking a real question: “How’s work?”

  “Sucky,” I said. “Suckeroo.”

  He said, “Well, back to my life then.”

  “I need a new job,” I said.

  “Didn’t you say a headhunter called you?”

  “About writing advertorials.” I reminded him that I was trying to get out of advertising.

  He was quiet. I hoped he was thinking of how to help me find a new career, but then he smiled, and I knew he wasn’t.

  I said, “What do you think I should do?”

  “Maybe you should try publishing again,” he said. “You love to read.”

  “I like to eat,” I said. “It doesn’t mean I should work in a restaurant.”

  He thought for a couple of minutes. “You’d be a good teacher.”

  When I reminded him that I’d been a terrible student, he said, “You could teach retarded kids,” and laughed his head off.

  “Seriously.”

  He said, “What about real estate?”

  I was about to say, What about dogcatcher? when I remembered that his girlfriend worked in real estate.

  I said, “How is Mindy?” though what I really needed to ask was, Who is Mindy? I’d only met her a few times and hadn’t paid much attention; as Robert said, in the romantic world of our older brother, all good things must end, as well as all bad things, usually inside of a year.

  “I haven’t seen her,” he said.

  “No?”

  He was quiet. “She gave me an ultimatum,” he said finally. “ ‘Shit or get off the pot.’ ”

  “That’s what she said?”

  He didn’t answer, which meant yes.

  “Very romantic,” I said.

  He explained that she was ready to have a family, and a girl couldn’t put off having babies indefinitely.

  “How old is she?” I said. “I thought she was my age.”

  “She is your age.”

  A few exits later, I said, “Did she give you a deadline?”

  “She won’t see me until I decide,” he said. “I might actually have to shit.”

  . . . . .

  After I repeated what Jack had said about Mindy, Robert nodded in what appeared to be appreciation. When I said, “Don’t you think that’s sort of coarse?” he shrugged, as in, Never mind about that; unlike me, Robert never failed to distinguish between what was important and what wasn’t.

  “Did he sound serious?” he asked. “How did he say it?”

  I tried to imitate Jack: “ ‘I might actually have to shit.’ ”

  Robert and I were having lunch around the corner from his office at a new Chinese restaurant. GRAND OPENING flags adorned the awning, and it seemed possible that the Jade Garden would close with those very flags waving good-bye: My mixed vegetables in brown sauce looked like a diorama of a swamp; Robert’s lobster sauce reminded him of a placenta. We had just finished, or given up, when Robert said, “Hey, Neil,” to another hapless diner who’d wandered in.

  He was tall and gangly in his white lab coat, boyish, with black-rimmed glasses that gave the impression that he was looking inward instead of at us.

  “This is my sister, Sophie,” Robert said. “Neil Resnick.”

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Have a seat,” my brother said.

  For all of Neil’s height and angular skinniness, he had a button nose and puffy cheeks, and when he took his glasses off to clean them, I saw dark eyes so enormous and soft they reminded me of one of those portraits of children painted on velvet. His hair was youthfully thick and hippishly long, but this seemed to be more a matter of neglect than style.

  He picked up the menu and said that this was his first time here, and what should he order?

  “I’d stick with these,” Robert said, passing over the patchwork wooden bowl of crunchy noodles.

  “The water is good,” I said.

  Neil ordered wonton soup.

  Robert told the waiter we’d finished, and added, “It was delicious, thank you,” probably because the waiter looked depressed.

  “You’re a doctor?” I asked Neil.

  “A neurologist,” he said. “And you?”

  I told him I was thinking of going into neurosurgery; meanwhile I worked in advertising.

  “You work nearby?”

  I told him I worked in the most stressful part of midtown, in the mid–East Forties, where crisis radiated from every building and anxiety lurked around every corner.

  Neil said that it was pretty bad here, too, in the hospitalville of the high Sixties and the low Seventies, where sickness and worry prevailed. “What do you think it’s like in the Fifties?”

  “You know,” I said, “butterflies, ponies, freshly baked bread, young lovers.”

  When Robert said that he had to get back to the hospital, I got up, too.

  Neil said, “Do you have to go?”

  I did; I had a meeting I could be late for only if I left now.

  “Would you . . .” Neil began. “Maybe we could have lunch in the Fifties some time.”

  “Sure,” I said, and I gave him my work number.

  Outside, my brother said, “Divorced, one daughter.”

  I said, “Cute.”

  “He is cute,” Robert said.

  . . . . .

  Joe, the art director I worked with, was waiting for me in my office. We were already a few minutes late for the meeting, but his “We should go” was all doom and no drive.

  The red light on my telephone was blinking, and he didn’t object when I said my standard, “I just want to . . .”

  I listened to my message; it was “Neil”—hesitation—“Resnick.”

  I didn’t think in French, but the word frisson presented itself; I’d never taken Ecstasy, but from what I’d heard I was on two hits.

  Joe registered this—possibly his eyes widened a thousandth of an inch—and I acknowledged it with a prolonged blink; from working together we’d achieved the symbiosis of conjoined twins.

  We ambled over to the conference room at a quitter’s
pace. There were empty chairs at the table, but Joe and I joined the Bad Attitudes along the wall.

  Gary, our creative director, today’s master of ceremonies, stood, marker in hand, by the easel. He was saying, “What is synergy?”

  It was unclear whether his question was rhetorical, and no one spoke until he said, “Anybody?”

  The room came alive with definitions—“All on the same page”; “Coordination”; “Well-oiled machine”—and Gary wrote each one down on the easel. Then he turned around and shook his head, apparently awed by the brainpower assembled in the room.

  Meetings like this usually made me feel the clocks had stopped and all beauty had gone out of the world; now, in my Neil-induced state, the meeting struck me as a musical farce, and I was rapt, even though I didn’t like musicals or farces.

  I put Gary’s “Imagine every department working together synergistically” to the tune of John Lennon’s “Imagine.”

  In his, “Now, how are we going to make it happen?” I heard, Let’s put on a show!

  “Bulletin board?” one gal called out.

  “Newsletter,” an aspiring suck-up sang.

  I added my own voice: “Memos by e-mail!” and a chorus of approval followed.

  “Good idea,” Joe said, naysayer to naysayer.

  . . . . .

  When I returned Neil’s call, he asked if I would have dinner with him Friday, three nights hence. As he’d eliminated all coyness from our repertoire, I said an immediate, “Okay.”

  “Really?” he said.

  I was hanging up when Joe appeared at my door and asked if I was ready to work on baby wipes.

  I repeated the first lines of the soap opera I’d watched when I’d stayed home sick from school: “Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives.”

  . . . . .

  When I asked my mother about Lev Polikoff, she spoke so softly I had to mash my ear against the receiver.

  The information she gave up wasn’t worth straining for: Lev Polikoff lived in Lambertville, New Jersey, just across the river from New Hope; he still painted; he made his living as an illustrator.

  I didn’t realize just how much she did not want to talk about Lev Polikoff until she said, “I should let you go,” and hung up first, a first.

  In the weeks that followed, the only question I would ask was if she’d spoken to him, and she always had.

  . . . . .

  Jack had presented Mindy to me with less fanfare than her predecessors; he hadn’t, for example, told me how much I’d love her. He’d hardly talked about her at all, which gave me the impression that she was peripheral and ephemeral. But the opposite was true, as I found out when he called to tell me they were engaged.

  He asked if I had any objections.

  “I have no idea,” I said. “I don’t know her.”

  He told me that Mindy was exactly who she seemed to be. “What you see is what you get.”

  “Okay,” I said, “but I’ve barely seen her.”

  We agreed to meet at a restaurant around the corner from Mindy’s apartment on the Upper East Side, roughly a day’s journey from mine in the West Village. The restaurant was elegant and casual, and there at the bar was my elegant and casual brother in jeans, a dark-blue blazer, white shirt, and an exquisite green tie with tiny orange giraffes on it.

  “You’re getting married,” I said, and he said, “I am.”

  He was drinking a martini, which went with his tie, and he ordered one for me, too.

  Placing the drink in front of me, the bartender told Jack that Debbie had called to say Mindy would be a few minutes late.

  “Who’s Debbie?” I said.

  Jack said, “Her P.A.”

  “Her P.A.?”

  “Her personal assistant.”

  I said, “Will she be your P.A. when you get married?”

  He said, “I’ll probably be her P.A.’s P.A.’s P.A.” Then he swiveled his stool around to face outward so he’d see Mindy as soon as she arrived. I swiveled with him, and noticed a huge arrangement of gorgeous blue flowers. I said, “Do you know what those are called?”

  He said, “I’m pretty sure they’re called flowers.”

  Then Mindy walked in, and he went over to her.

  They kissed, and he helped her off with what I saw was a real fur coat, one she hadn’t found in a thrift shop or in her grandmother’s closet. She was very pretty in her work clothes—a pale suit and chiffon blouse—and she walked in high heels with more grace than I did barefoot.

  We said hello and held hands for a moment and looked at each other as the sisters-in-law we were to become.

  Once we were seated at a table by the window, Mindy apologized for being late and apologized in advance for a phone call she would have to take during dinner; she was in the middle of a big deal. She worked in her family’s real-estate business—The Bronstein Group—along with her father and two of her brothers and about a thousand employees.

  A waiter told us the specials, noting which he thought Mindy would enjoy, and we ordered.

  She caught Jack up on her deal, and I noticed that he was really listening to her, as opposed to pretending to listen or making a show of what a good listener he was.

  I asked if she liked her work, and she said, “I love it.”

  “What do you do, exactly?”

  “It’s different every day.” I could tell by the way she said, “You don’t like what you do?” that she already knew.

  I explained that I’d sort of fallen into advertising and now I couldn’t get out.

  As if I were a child trapped in a mine, she said, “We’ll get you out,” and I heard her “we” not as she and Jack and I, but the entire Bronstein Group, as well as all of their buyers and renters, some of whom were probably celebrities, and all of their independent contractors, some of whom were probably teamsters; her “we” seemed to include everyone who had any power—political, financial, or physical—in Manhattan, on Earth, and in Heaven. She sounded so strong and so sure and so steadfast, I believed I would get out of advertising, and I thought, This is what Jack loves about her.

  When our salads came, I asked how Jack had proposed. I was really curious because he never said the expected thing, or if he did, it was always with irony, which would be all wrong and even unkind in a proposal.

  He turned to Mindy and re-proprosed: “Will you marry me, please?” He spoke without any irony at all, even now, when he could’ve gotten away with some. “Then I gave her the ring.”

  I realized I’d been remiss in not asking to see the ring earlier, which seemed to explain in part why I didn’t have one myself.

  Jack had designed the ring with a jeweler, a diamond set deep into a square-shaped platinum band, and I was trying it on when Mindy’s phone rang. She took the call outside.

  I held my hand away and said that if it didn’t work out with Mindy, he could give me the ring for my birthday.

  Jack said, “You really like it?” just as he did after I’d admired one of his screenplays.

  “Don’t be needy,” I said.

  When I asked if Mindy was going to change her name, he said no, but he might change his; “I’d keep my maiden name.” In a Monty Python voice, high-pitched and English, he said, “Jack Applebaum Bronstein.”

  I asked if they had a date for the wedding, and they did, almost a year and a half away.

  “People will talk,” I said.

  He was looking out the window at Mindy, and I looked, too. She was pacing the sidewalk. She lit a cigarette. She nodded, she nodded, and then she stopped; her eyes narrowed, her mouth turned down, and, as we watched, she began to argue.

  I could see that Mindy was tougher than I was and tougher than Jack; I imagined him on the other side of that call.

  Then she spotted us in the window, and she waved her pinky at us.

  Jack said, “That’s my mogul.”

  . . . . .

  As though sensing my fear of being stood up, Neil called me the
day before our date, and the morning of. He asked me to meet him at Jules, which I’d heard of; it had just opened and was impossible to get into—unless, he told me, Jules was the son of a patient of yours.

  When my cab pulled up to the restaurant, Neil was waiting outside.

  He wore a navy blue duffel coat—the kind with toggles—and was taller than I remembered and ganglier; he held himself like an adolescent, like his body was a rambling mansion he’d inherited and was just now moving into.

  “Hi,” he said, and he took my hand and led me inside. The hostess ignored Neil until his words, spoken pleasantly, reached her ears: “Would you please tell Jules that Dr. Resnick is here?”

  A moment later, Jules appeared. He said, “Hey,” to Neil and, “Glad to meet you,” to me, and led us through the restaurant, past the many models and the lay beautiful, children all.

  I was shaking my head inside, until Neil offered the spectator seat to me and seated himself with his back to the runway.

  He said, “Is red wine okay?” and I said it was.

  I already knew that Neil was Jewish, like me; like me, he’d gone to public school; like me, he’d grown up in the suburbs, though his was Shaker Heights, outside Cleveland.

  When we both ordered the steak frites, I remembered reading a study that showed that the more similar a couple was, the better their chance of staying together.

  Neil had gotten a haircut, and was wearing a tie tucked into a V-neck sweater, a look last seen circa 1947 on Main Street, USA, or so I thought. When I complimented him on it, he said that he’d been talked into it at a store I knew to be a hip man’s clothier based in London.

  I’d liked the ensemble better when it had seemed sincere, but then Neil said that he’d bought it especially for our date and also that he was pretty sure he’d worn exactly the same outfit in junior high. He told me he’d been the dorkiest dork through high school, college, and med school.

  I hadn’t been cool or popular or even close to cool or popular in high school, and yet no matter what I said I could tell that was how he saw me. When I told him about advertising, he said that he thought that was where the cool kids wound up.

  I said that it was, and they were as callow as ever. “The dorks from high school are the people you want to know now.”