A Changed Man (19 page)

Try again. Still busy. It can’t be busy forever. She’ll give it a minute. For the moment, she can lie back and shut her eyes and think.

Meyer is the first to notice how long Bonnie has been gone. He gives her a few minutes, and when she doesn’t reappear, sends some freighted glances in Irene’s direction. But Irene’s so focused on Vincent that she ignores Meyer’s signals until everyone has registered Bonnie’s absence.

“Irene, darling,” says Meyer, “do we think you should go find Bonnie?”

“I’m sure she’s fine. She’s probably phoning her children.” Irene turns back to Vincent until the intensity between them lapses, and she says, “Meyer. Where’s Bonnie?”

Shouldn’t Irene go find her, or Roberta or Minna, in case it’s some sort of bathroom thing, some female situation? Everyone’s looking at Meyer. Their sun. Their leader. Dad. The way that Irene plants her elbow on the table and cups her chin in her hand is eloquently communicative. It means: Bonnie is Meyer’s problem. He works with her, he invited her, this dinner was their idea.

First he heads for the bathroom, imagining the grisly scenario in which Bonnie is ill or drunk. He’ll stand outside the bathroom door, listening to her retch, and thinking: I have to work with this woman tomorrow. This is why you should never mix business and social life.

But the bathroom door is wide open. Bonnie isn’t there. For a moment, Meyer is alarmed. Could she have gone home? Has she been acting strangely tonight? Meyer can’t recall. He remembers being bored by a conversation with Minna about the Cochin Jews.

Then Meyer sees Bonnie asleep on his bed. Even from a distance, he can tell: snoozing. Not in danger. Curled up on her side. Should Meyer wake her or let her sleep? What if she won’t get up? Where the hell is Irene? Meyer would rather be brokering a peace agreement between Arabs and Jews, he’d rather give a begging speech to five hundred New York bigwigs, he’d rather be speaking French on a crackly long-distance line with some sadistic Iranian prison warden, than deal with
this
in his own room, at the end of a long day. The last thing he’s in the mood for is coping with the problem of his passed-out development director. There is no hidden blessing in this. It’s a plain and simple pain in the ass. He wishes it weren’t happening.

But what choice does Meyer have? Run to Irene, to Mommy? Meyer approaches the bed. He clears his throat, then coughs and coughs again, louder.

Bonnie’s snoring lightly. Like a kid. Meyer stands above her, hoping she’ll sense his presence. He can’t bring himself to disturb her. Her knuckles are mashed into her cheek. Her glasses have slipped down her nose. Bizarrely, tears fill Meyer’s eyes. He’s becoming an old woman! Why didn’t he and Irene have children? The question was settled so long ago that he’s forgotten the answer. Back then, a woman of forty was old. God knows, they took enough chances. Irene never got pregnant. Both of them were busy. And everyone understood if a man with Meyer’s history chose not to bring children into the world. No one ever asked him why. Doesn’t Irene care?

Bonnie shifts in her sleep, rucking up her skirt and exposing a ragged ladder in her dark pantyhose. This hardworking, defenseless, admirable woman would do anything for him. How hard and lonely it must be, raising those sons alone. And now she’s taken on Vincent. Meyer told her to, and she did it.

Watching Bonnie sleep, Meyer sees her willingness for what it is: the simple desire to please, to do good, to make everything better. Watching her, Meyer no longer feels nostalgic for the young man he once was, or even for the healthy, middle-aged version of himself who at least might have considered the sexual implications of a not-unattractive woman curled up on his pillow.

Meyer feels like a different person. Purified. Washed clean. It’s as if he’s come through to the other side, and instead of grief or regret, he can experience pure love for a fellow human being—the sympathy that, he’d begun to fear, he could only feel from a distance. Telescopic philanthropy. Compassion is something that waxes and wanes, like closeness in a marriage. When you lose it, you think it will never return. But it always comes back. So far.

He wants to cover Bonnie with a blanket. He wants to cherish and protect her. Whoever sent him the Dickens chapter could not have been more deluded. This welling up of love for Bonnie is what he longs to feel for the world. This is what God gives you in return for trying to be conscious and do the right thing.

This sense of grace doesn’t falter, not even when Irene enters the room. How flushed and excited Irene looks! How much Meyer loves her. God bless Vincent for giving her the male attention she longs for. Meyer puts his arm around her. Irene leans lightly against him.

“Christ,” says Irene. “She can’t drive back to the suburbs like that. Vincent’s going to have to drive. Unless you want the two of them staying in the guest room. And I’ll tell you, Meyer, honestly, I’d rather jump out that window than have to face them tomorrow morning.”

“We wouldn’t want that,” says Meyer. “Your jumping out the window. Anyway, Bonnie’s got children. A babysitter, I’ll bet. She probably needs to get back. And as for Vincent driving—”

“Fabulous,” says Irene. “That simplifies things. Meyer, dear, give me the phone.”

Watching Irene call car service and make arrangements for Bonnie and Vincent to be picked up and driven to Clairmont, Meyer feels nearly faint with gratitude and admiration. Maybe he’s also drunk too much. It’s been quite an evening.

Meyer follows Irene into the dining room. How smoothly they work together, switching seats so Meyer can confer with Vincent. No need to tell Vincent that Bonnie’s drunk. He can figure that out on his own. Meyer says that she isn’t feeling well and that they have called car service.

“I could have driven her home,” says Vincent.

Vincent has probably had as much as Bonnie. He just handles it better.

“That’s all right,” says Meyer. “These things happen. What can you do?”

By the time the doorman rings to say the car has arrived, Bonnie is up and walking. The other guests form a phalanx and, with quick social kisses, take Bonnie off their hands.

Meyer and Irene’s relief is so intense that they hug each other, a joyous embrace observed by Babu, who has appeared at the dining room door and whose presence stops Meyer’s hand in its instinctive migration toward Irene’s ass. Irene detaches herself and heads toward the kitchen to oversee a few details, while Meyer goes off to wait for her over a brandy, in his study.

He places his palm in the impression that Bonnie left on the bedspread, then smoothes out the bed. He can’t decide where he wants to be—in bed, in his favorite chair, drink, no drink, looking out the window. What he can’t decide is how he wants Irene to find him.

They could be going on their first date, that’s how jittery Meyer feels. Except that there was no first date. There was only that New York dinner party, not unlike the one tonight, except that, at the end of it, Irene got Meyer his coat and, with her millionaire husband standing not three feet away, told Meyer she wanted to see him again.

Some of that came back to him when they embraced in the hall. In addition, the pure love he had felt as he’d watched Bonnie sleep has focused, like a beam of light, on his wife and her body.

Meyer decides on his favorite chair. What book should he be reading? He checks in fiction, under
D.
Here’s
Bleak House.
Could Irene have sent the chapter? Or could it have been Babu? Do they read Dickens in India? Meyer goes through the stack of books he plans to read.
IBM and the Jews.
Let Irene find him reading that, swirling a snifter of brandy. A successful, powerful, caring man…

As it turns out, a miscalculation. Meyer can tell at once that what Irene is seeing is not Dick Powell, Ronald Colman, the suave movie-hero husband. What she’s seeing is some jerk who has been sitting on his fanny all the time she’s been working with Babu, overseeing mountains of dishes and details while her lord and master relaxes.

“Irene, dear, would you like a drink?” How he wants her to say yes! If they can’t be passionate young lovers again, at least they can be partners, fellow soldiers who have survived another skirmish, and who in the calm after the battle can enjoy a moment of peace.

“No, thanks,” says Irene.

Irene slips into the second-best chair and consents to sit beside him in that companionable silence that takes decades to achieve. Somewhere, on Randall’s Island, a window reflects the moon, and the light of the bridge is draped like a bright ribbon across the East River. How still and beautiful everything is, this lovely panorama paid for with so much suffering, so much hard work, and with the mysterious grace of God, who has given this to Meyer and not to so many others who suffered more and worked harder.

Irene says, “I’ll bet you fifty dollars she’ll be fucking him in two weeks. If she isn’t already.”

Meyer says, “Who are we talking about?”

“Bonnie and your Nazi. Did you see how she looked at him? And the way she was looking at
me?
She would have killed me if she could, just for talking to the guy.”

Why is Irene doing this? Taking the best part of his evening—the swell of agreeable emotions he’s had ever since he watched Bonnie sleep—and reducing it to bitchy gossip. But Irene’s not doing anything to
him.
This is not about Meyer, as Irene so often says. She’s just reporting an observation.
Is
something going on between Bonnie and Vincent? How could Meyer not have noticed? The same way Mrs. Jellyby doesn’t hear her children falling downstairs and getting their heads stuck in railings.

Instantly Meyer’s good mood is gone, all that love and empathy distilled to a puddle of ill-will. Is it envy? Envy of what? He doesn’t want Bonnie. He wants that lost-forever world of romance, surprise, and adventure. Bonnie and Vincent are young and alive. Or, at any rate, younger.

He knows that Irene is feeling this too, perhaps more strongly than he is. She’s depleted by the energy she’s expended flirting with a man who is going home with Bonnie, a woman less attractive in every way except that she’s twenty years younger. Once more he wants to take Irene’s hand, but he fears that his sympathy might enrage her.

Anyway, who says that Irene is right about Bonnie and Vincent? Men assume that women have some ESP for romance and personal situations. Bonnie isn’t stupid. She doesn’t need to get involved with a man like Vincent Nolan. Even though he does have many excellent qualities. What was it he said this evening? Faith cells were like fat cells, you developed them when you were young….

“Irene, darling, excuse me.” Meyer goes into his study and finds the notebook in which he has been jotting phrases for his speech at the benefit dinner. He writes, “Faith cells—like fat cells.” Then he leafs back through the book. He reads: “Moral bungee jump. The courage to change.” This is Meyer’s real work. This is what matters, not a trivial misunderstanding with his wife, or some possible hanky-panky between two colleagues on his staff.

By the time he goes back in the other room, Irene has gone to the bathroom, from which he hears the clinks of jars on porcelain, the buzz of her sonic toothbrush, the rush of water, and the sounds of her ritualistic preparations for sleep, the transfixed application of magic creams and time-reversing concoctions, useless and costing the earth.

A
HUGE EXPLOSION RATTLES
the house.

“What was
that?
” says Max.

“Thunder, idiot,” says Danny. “What the hell do you think?” For Max’s sake, impatience and insult are the best way to go. Keep it real, keep it normal.

“Thunder and lightning,” Max says.

Rain stampedes the roof. Danny says, “It’s a fucking hurricane. Mom would shit if she knew. How come she didn’t tell us what to do if the house gets hit by lightning? Could you believe the crap she put us through before she’d let us stay alone? Telling us not to bleed to death if we, like, cut a bagel.”

“Give her a break,” says Max. “She keeps it pretty together.”

Max is always defending Mom. But this time, Max is wrong. Mom should have it more together. She should be able to leave two competent teenagers home for one night without the major drama. Though she should have told them what to do in case of a tornado. Do they have a flashlight? Probably not. Making sure there’s a flashlight is something fathers do. Something
other
fathers do.

That was thunder. But what was
that?
All night, Danny’s been hearing strange noises, footsteps, slamming doors. Mom’s turned him into a wimp. It’s her fault that every floor creak makes his heart slam around in his chest.

He’s actually considered the strategic advantages of being down in the basement in case the house does get hit by lightning or someone does break in. Mom kept saying: I know I can trust you guys. Well, she’s right. She can trust Danny not to get high tonight. And he’s glad he didn’t. By now, he’d be so paranoid he’d be phoning the Clairmont police, which would only make him more paranoid. He’d have to flush the minuscule pot stash he keeps in an espresso can on a shelf in his bedroom behind his dictionary.

It’s strange that his mom hasn’t called. To interrogate whoever is stupid enough to pick up the phone. No, Max hasn’t fallen down the stairs. Nobody’s running a fever.

By the time Danny remembers his computer and runs up to his room to unplug it—a kid at his school had his hard disk fried by lightning—the thunder is down to a growl. And the rain’s stopped. Excellent. Danny can go online. Which means that his mother can’t call. Maybe this will make her spring for a dedicated phone line.

Danny’s e-mail consists of three offers to sell him sleeping pills and enlarge his penis and a group message from Chloe that says: “Emergency! Any of you guys know anything about Nelson Mandela?”

Emergency?
Pathetic! The paper’s not due for ages, beside which it annoys him that Chloe’s doing Nelson Mandela. Does that mean that she is going over to the other side, writing a paper guaranteed to get an A from Linda Graber? Chloe swore that wasn’t why. She admires Nelson Mandela. So does Danny, actually—another reason not to write about him. Instead of which he’s doing Hitler, an automatic D-minus.

Danny’s ahead of schedule. He’s already checked Hitler’s biography out of the school library, at which point he discovered that Hitler’s face on a book jacket was not something he wanted to flash as he walked down the hall to class. That’s all he needs: the whole school calling him Hitler Boy. Even at home, where there’s no one to see, the book feels embarrassing, somehow. Danny turns the front cover facedown.

If Danny takes the Hitler bio downstairs and reads it while he watches television, he’ll be doing his schoolwork, minus the boredom. The boring book and the boring TV will cancel each other out. He logs off and heads down to Dad’s room, where he finds Max.

“Wanna watch Howard Stern?” Max asks.

“Go for it.” Danny stretches out on the couch and tosses the book on the rug.

Howard’s talking to two identical twins: Gen and Jess. He’s asking how often they have three-ways with guys. He asks if their breasts are identical. The women strip off their bikini tops, and four tiny digital fuzzballs dance on the screen.

Within seconds, Max is asleep. Howard Stern always puts him right out. Maybe he’s too young for it. Maybe it makes him nervous.

Danny hears a noise and hits the mute button. Definitely a car. Definitely not his mom’s car. Not pulling into the driveway. Stopping in front of the house.

Two male voices. Holy shit.
Not
his Mom and Vincent. Two men talking loudly as they approach the door.

Maybe it
is
the police. Maybe Danny should flush his stash. Or maybe it’s two serial killers. Should he and Max hide somewhere or go out the back door? Some unfamiliar instinct makes Danny run up the stairs and fling open the front door.

A black Lincoln Town Car is parked at the end of the driveway, down which Mom is walking, propped up by Vincent and a uniformed driver. His mother is weaving unsteadily, dipping every so often. Totally hammered. That explains the Town Car. At least it’s not still pouring. Why couldn’t Vincent drive them home? How could Mom let this happen?

Danny knows plenty of kids whose parents are stone alcoholics. He’s lucky. His dad hardly drinks, and he’s never seen his mom plastered, or maybe just a couple of times right after his dad left. And she was good. You could hardly tell. She’d take the bourbon to her room. She’d be normal the next morning.

It’s pitiful to watch Mom lurch up the front walk. But Danny can understand how she might have folded under the pressure of taking Vincent to dinner at Maslow’s.

Danny’s just so glad that it’s them, and not cops or psycho killers.

Somehow Mom pulls her act together enough to sign the driver’s receipt.

“Did it rain here?” she asks him. “It didn’t, in the city.” She’s so wrecked she’s asking the driver who came up with them.

Vincent says, “Thanks, man. Have a good evening. We can take it from here.”

Danny thinks, Who’s this
we?

Danny’s mom swoops toward him and crooks her arm around his neck. She’s apparently sober enough to land a big gloppy kiss on his cheek, but not enough to notice when Danny wipes it off with the back of his hand.

“Is everything all right?” she asks.

“Fucking fantastic,” he says.

“Language!” she says. “Where’s Max?”

“Asleep, I guess.”

“Honey, I’m so glad to
see
you!” she says.

“Whatever,” Danny says.

Mom sways past him, heading for the stairs and, he hopes, her room. Danny goes down to the TV room, gets Max, and walks him up to his bed. Then he goes to his own room and lies down on top of his bed, unmade for two weeks, since the last time his Mom did the laundry.

Danny’s jacked up. He’ll never sleep. He should read the Hitler book. One page, and he’ll be unconscious. But he left the book downstairs. He needs to go and get it.

From the hall, he hears the TV. Danny’s sure he turned it off. It’s not his mom, not Max. Which leaves Vincent. Nothing could be more annoying than dealing with Vincent right now. But Danny wants his book back. He doesn’t want Vincent to touch it.

Downstairs, he finds Vincent lying on the couch, reading the Hitler book and watching
Nightline.
At least it’s not Howard Stern. Vincent sits up and makes room for him on the couch.

“Floor’s good,” Danny says.

Danny sits cross-legged on the carpet like a guest in his own TV room—Dad’s room—and watches thirty-second interviews with Oklahoma City bombing survivors and the victims’ relatives. Three words flash onto the screen—
Vengeance or forgiveness—
over a shot of a weeping family laying flowers on a grave. Cut to commercial break.

“I thought you never watched TV,” Danny says. “I thought that’s what my mom said.”

“When did she say that?”

“The first night you got here. I thought you were such a big reader.”

“Man, I wish I were your age and could remember the stuff you remember. Anyhow, it’s true. Look at me. What am I doing? Reading or watching TV?”

“Both,” says Danny.

“Multitasking. I recommend it.”

“But you
are
watching TV. Which means that you lied to my mother.”

“Which you never do,” says Vincent.

Danny refuses to go there. After a pause, he says, “What was up with Mom tonight? Is she okay, or what?” Is Danny asking this loser’s opinion on his mother’s sobriety and mental health?

“I don’t blame her,” Vincent says. “I would have done the same. Drunk myself blotto. I mean, I practically did do the same. Fortunately, I’ve done more serious drinking in my time. I’ve got calluses on my liver. It’s got to have been rough on her, taking Godzilla to dinner at Meyer Maslow’s.”

“How did it go?” Danny’s glad to be at least partly off the subject of Mom.

“Great, man. Really. Terrific. Maslow’s wife was practically blowing me under the table. Jesus, what would your mom say if she knew I was saying stuff like that around you?”

Danny can’t help laughing out loud. He’s never liked Irene Maslow, or her light perfumy kisses. “Yuck. She’s around ninety.”

“Not exactly,” Vincent says. “And she’s got a certain…something. I guess it’s invisible to a guy your age. You’ve got to take my word for it.”

On TV, a woman is saying that it isn’t fair. Tim McVeigh will die in less than two minutes, and she will have to deal with her loss for a lifetime.

“Actually, that’s not true,” Vincent says. “They’re not telling us the truth about how long it takes to die from lethal injection. More like eight to ten minutes, and it isn’t pretty. But does America want to hear that? No sir, it does not. Anyway, I have a better idea. After they kill the guy they should chop him in pieces and sell them, like they used to sell real estate on the moon. Or the bones of saints. Then everybody who wants a piece of him could have an
actual
piece. Wait. I take that back. You know what they should do? Auction the pieces on e-Bay.”

Has Vincent got into Danny’s stash? Danny says, “What would they do with the money?”

“I don’t know,” says Vincent. “Build a new Murragh Building memorial. Something better than those cheesy chairs. Or give the cash to the survivors.”

“Creepy,” Danny says.

“Speaking of creepy, how come you’re reading
this?
”

Danny wants to say, Not because of you. “I have to write a paper. For school.”

“They assign you to write about Hitler? What are you going to write?”

“I’ll think of something,” says Danny. “It’s hard to come up with anything new. Or something that doesn’t sound stupid. Like, I think it really sucks that the guy killed six million Jews.”

On TV, a rescue worker is running through the parking lot with a bundled-up, bleeding baby.

“That is, if you believe that,” Danny says. “Or are you one of those guys who claims that Auschwitz never happened?”

“Where did you hear about that?” Vincent says.

“My mom made me go to this two-week nerd camp. They told us all this stuff about hate groups.”

Vincent looks over the top of the Hitler book. It’s a freaky juxta-position, Vincent’s face growing out of Hitler’s face. Vincent follows Danny’s glance, and looks down at the cover and laughs.

“My man, do you really think that I would be working with Meyer Maslow and your mom if I thought that the Holocaust never happened? You think I’m busting my balls for the two hundred bills a week?”

Danny can almost hear his mom say: Don’t answer a question with a question. “Two hundred bucks is money.”

“Look,” says Vincent. “Between you and me and the wall. I’ll tell you something about Hitler. Put it in your paper. The guy was a flamer. All his staff was in love with him. Even the married guys. He never had normal relations with a woman. He didn’t marry Eva Braun till the day they killed themselves. And you won’t find that in the books. Supposedly, you can’t prove it. The evidence died with him—”

How strange that Danny never saw that before. How stupid has he been? That weird little mustache, that high hoarse voice, that Woody Woodpecker jumping.

“Wait a minute,” says Danny. “Back up. Let me get this straight. Are you saying that Hitler killed six million Jews because he was
gay?
”

Vincent taps the side of his head and lets his jaw go slack. “Excuse me? Did I say that? That’s your conclusion, my man. Personally, I don’t care what the guy did behind closed doors. I don’t even want to think about what Hitler did or didn’t do. In bed. My point was something else. My point was: all these guys I used to hang with…you couldn’t even bring it up. They’d kick your ass if you hinted that Hitler was a little light in the loafers. Because they dug Hitler and hated fags. They couldn’t handle the contradictions. That was their number-one problem. They couldn’t deal with the gray areas. They couldn’t get beyond the point where everything has to be black or white, one way or the other.”

“
That
was their problem?” Danny says. “I thought their problem was they liked to beat up black people and Jews and torch synagogues and shit.”

Vincent flinches. “They liked to
think
about it. Which was also their problem. They were always saying, Let’s slug down a couple of brewskies and go beat up some fags. But in my experience, the brewskies were the issue. The fags were not the issue. Three forty-ouncers later, they’d have forgotten the fags and just be telling dirty jokes or passing out in front of the History Channel.”

“The History Channel,” says Danny. “How funny is that? Everyone calls it the All-Hitler Channel. You always wonder who watches that—”

“Think about it,” says Vincent. “It always struck me as weird that they could hate homosexuals and worship this dude who was one. That was an inconsistency right there. And their whole thing was logic. You bought into one part of their program, and then the rest followed logically. So say if you mentioned that somebody in your family had income tax problems, that always led logically to the international Bolshevik Talmudist conspiracy. Let me ask you something. Do you believe in God?”

No one’s asked Danny an annoying question like that since he was in second grade. Even Chloe, who can get metaphysical, tends to stick with the Buddhists and Hindus. Do you believe in enlightenment? What about reincarnation? Max always used to ask Danny: Who created the universe? Where do we go after we die? The universe created itself. We go in the ground, retard.