A Changed Man (5 page)

But the really incredible part, the part that gives her the chills, started an hour or so before Meyer and Vincent got around to comparing tattoos.

Bonnie’s day had begun with a string of disturbing phone calls; first the PR firm, then the events planner, then the accountant, all wanting to discuss the disappointing ticket sales for the Brotherhood Watch Annual Gala Benefit Dinner coming up in June. Nobody knew what the problem was. The economy? Everyone holding tight to see what happens with the estate tax? Their inability, so far, to find a big-draw celebrity speaker? The Middle East? That disastrous interview in which Meyer told the
Times
reporter that the Palestinians and the Israelis could
both
do more toward practicing forgiveness without forgetting? She’d thought enough time had lapsed since the article ran, but maybe she’d been wrong.

Everyone wanted Bonnie to know what she already knew: they’re looking at the Temple of Dendur, the most popular party venue at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, rented for the evening with half the tables unsold, which will translate not only into a major morale problem but a black hole in the annual budget. She’d waited to tell Meyer until after lunch, when he was often sleepy and consequently more mellow.

When Bonnie mentioned the calls, Meyer seemed annoyed, then saddened. She hoped he wasn’t connecting this to the modest sales of his new book,
One Heart at a Time.
Though he never mentioned it, she knew that it upset him. But finally Meyer shrugged, his personal shorthand for: It is all in God’s hands. Compared to what he’d lived through, what were book sales, what was a budget, what were tickets to a dinner?

“Anyway,” Meyer told Bonnie, “I have a…funny feeling. The faintest blip on my radar. Someone is coming. Something’s going to happen. How many times have I told you, no problem is too large or small for God to fix. The important thing is to stay open to the miracle when it occurs.”

It’s not Bonnie’s favorite side of Meyer, the part that can make him sound like some cheeseball New Age guru. Meyer insists on having it all at once: history, God, and expensive clothes. He demands his right to wear Armani while using a mystical tale from Rabbi Nachman to make a point about former Soviet bloc politics or hunger in Rwanda. Bonnie knows the contradictions make some people uneasy. But Bonnie respects him for that. Meyer’s a complex person, and after all this time, there’s still something mysterious and unpredictable about him that keeps her slightly off balance, guessing, impressed.

What’s bothering her is the growing suspicion that he might be slipping. Not losing it so much as phoning it in, going on automatic: the Meyer Maslow Show. She’s concerned about his fondness for repeating his trademark phrases: Forgive, not forget. One heart at a time. Lately, he’s got a new one: the moral bungee jump. Bonnie suspects he’s trying it out for his speech at the gala.

But whenever Bonnie has doubts, something amazing happens. Meyer not only talks about miracles, he actually seems to create them, or at least to be around when miracles occur. Foreign dissidents get sprung from jail, whole populations are allowed to emigrate to freedom. Meyer is, after all, a man plucked five times from the clutches of death. What was he supposed to do? Outgrow it after the war? Just today, for example, he’d begun to tell her one of those stories about the poor couple who welcome the beggar who knocks on the door and who turns out to be God’s messenger and—

Meyer got a phone call and left the story unfinished. And before he was off the phone, the beggar messenger arrived, disguised as Vincent Nolan.

Ask for something, God sends it. A typical day with Meyer. Was it chance or God’s will that the receptionist, Anita Shu, couldn’t reach building security? How lucky it was that Anita didn’t call Roberta Dwyer, their chief publicist. Had Roberta seen Meyer do that thing with the tattoos, she would have tried to commodify it and turn it into a photo op they could repeat on demand for the press. Bonnie wants attention for Brotherhood Watch. But she’d rather avoid the tabloid centerfold of the two men’s arms. Not that Meyer would have allowed it.

Thank God it was Bonnie who answered, Bonnie and Meyer who recognized that Vincent could pump new energy into the foundation. When Vincent referred to how much the media might go for the story of his leaving the white power movement and coming to work for Brotherhood Watch, something clicked for Bonnie. She’d turned to Meyer and seen that, as always, he was light-years ahead.

So once more Bonnie finds herself responsible for the small stuff. So what if Meyer isn’t offering Vincent
his
apartment?
Everyone has room.
Meyer has more room, plus a whole domestic staff and a powerhouse wife, Irene, who could handle all this with one hand tied behind her back, a thousand times better than Bonnie, who has a tiny guest room crammed with junk. Just enough space for Vincent and a duffel bag stuffed with guns and ammo.

The traffic starts, then stops again. “Jesus Christ,” Bonnie mutters.

“How long have you worked for the guy?” Vincent asks.

“With Meyer? Three years. Almost four.” It seems like another lifetime, that first day she met Meyer. She’d been a wreck, a ghost of a woman whose husband of thirteen years, the father of her children, had just left her for a gold-digging slut named Lorraine.

At that time, Bonnie had been working in development at the Clairmont Museum. A few weeks after Joel left, an old friend from college e-mailed her about a job opening at Brotherhood Watch. That e-mail from the long-lost friend was the first of Meyer’s miracles—that is, the first one Bonnie experienced. Of course she had known who Meyer Maslow was. In her opinion, the greatest Holocaust witness. The saintliest and most selfless.

Bonnie had read Meyer’s first book and had been moved almost as powerfully as she had when she’d read Anne Frank’s diary, back when she was Anne Frank’s age. She remembers herself, as a girl, feeling almost regretful that these tragic historic events hadn’t so much as brushed against her life. Her family came to America half a century before the war. To Bonnie’s father, an atheist, a lawyer, a man with only a sentimental and culinary attachment to Judaism, the Holocaust had seemed like a warning, evidence that, for Jews, just crossing the street was more dangerous than it was for other people. Look both ways. Never let down your guard. Take nothing for granted.

What would her parents have said if they had lived to see her bring home a neo-Nazi? Her mother would have worried. But perhaps her father would have seen Vincent—that is, Bonnie’s freedom to take Vincent home if she wanted, even if it
was
Meyer’s idea—as a prison break from the jail of her life with Joel, whom he never liked. How naive Bonnie was, that her father’s opposition should have made her love Joel more.

Bonnie’s parents had raised her to think there was nothing she couldn’t do. Her mother read aloud to her, nineteenth-century classics she was too young to understand; her father drove her from White Plains into the city to visit museums, where he showed a preference for paintings with some legal connection—the murder of Holofernes, the judgment of Solomon. Bonnie always thought that those Sundays had something to do with the reason she majored in art history at Cornell. After college, she got a few museum intern jobs, then a couple of small jobs: assistant assistant curator.

And then that part of her life stopped, and she changed, with shocking ease, into Joel’s idea of what a successful cardiologist’s wife should be. Now, half the time, Bonnie can’t understand how she became that unrecognizable person, and half the time, she thinks it could happen to anyone. Anyone female.

She quit working when the kids were born. After they started school, she took an entry-level position at the local museum, where she was rapidly transferred from curating into development, because there was nothing to curate, and because no one else wanted the job of raising money for more etchings of the Old Clairmont Ferry Landing. Meanwhile, on the home front, every meal had to be perfect, or Joel would
disapprove.
Where was the real Bonnie hiding? The Stockholm syndrome took over. Bonnie could have been Patty Hearst, falling in love with her captors. That is, if it
was
love. Or captivity, for that matter. Joel’s departure saved her life. She should send Lorraine flowers.

That first day she came to apply for the job, Meyer never inquired about Bonnie’s qualifications. He’d asked: Do you want to change your life? She’d wanted a life to change.

“And you?” Bonnie asks Vincent.

“And me what?” Vincent says.

“How long have you worked at the tire place?”

“The same. Three years. Little longer.” Bonnie has no clue how to read this guy. What is he after? Did he think that she and Meyer were too stupid to figure out that he must have been on drugs for his big conversion? Does he imagine that Meyer fell into his arms because Vincent read his books? Or that every punk with a duffel bag who wanders into Brotherhood Watch gets whisked straight to Meyer Maslow’s office? Bonnie almost wishes there were some way to tell him about her conversation with Meyer before he arrived. Meyer’s story about the beggar messenger sent by God. Does Vincent think he’s scamming them? Who’s scamming whom, exactly?

“Amazing,” Bonnie says to herself.

“What is?” Vincent asks.

“Nothing,” Bonnie says, just as Vincent reflexively lifts his chin to indicate that a patch of road has opened up. Male passenger body language. Ultimately, he can’t help it. Not much of a patch, as it turns out. Bonnie pulls up, then stops. “And before that?”

“Before what?”

“Before the job you have now. Had now. Had.” Bonnie spends her days chatting up the city’s richest, most hard-nosed donors, powerful men and women who are very good at—who secretly
like
—turning down shuffling, hat-in-hand donation requests. But somehow Bonnie talks the talk. She gets them to give money. And now she’s tongue-tied, almost unable to speak to a recovering skinhead. “Before you worked at the tire shop.”

“Swimming pool maintenance. Did that for a while. Worked in a doughnut shop. For a while. Nothing worth talking about.”

Nothing worth talking about. Conversational homicide. Euthanasia, more like it. How could Bonnie be taking this on? She’s got enough trouble with her kids. Danny watches hours of TV and chats with his friends online and does no homework, as far as she can tell. When she presses him for simple information, he rolls his eyes and leaves the room, tricks he learned from his father. Bonnie has smelled pot on Danny’s hair when he’s come home from a party. She knows about zero tolerance, but it would just push him further away if she made a fuss about a sixteen-year-old smoking on the occasional Saturday night. Probably she should tell Joel, but unlikely as it seems, she’s always afraid he might ask for custody, even though he originally gave it up without a fight. He and Lorraine rarely take the boys, even for the alternate weekends and holidays he got in the settlement. It upsets Lorraine to be reminded that Joel had another life, one not orchestrated by her.

Traffic starts moving and keeps up for long enough to persuade Bonnie that the problem (accident? construction?) has been solved, long enough so that her blood pressure spikes when everything stops again. Bonnie should ask what that dashboard light means. But she’s not going to play the helpless female asking the alpha male for car-repair advice. If Vincent thought the car was in trouble, he would say so. Maybe.

As usual, Bonnie’s stuck in the slowest lane. She used to hate it when Joel whined and raged as if the sluggish lane he’d picked were a personal judgment against him. The line beside them stops, and they’re practically rubbing mirrors with a car full of Hispanic kids.

Bonnie likes the salsa bass pumping through the open windows. Or she would if she were alone. Being with a white supremacist makes it way too freighted.

“Ricky Martin,” Vincent says. “Is that guy supposed to be straight?”

“Compared to Marc Anthony, I guess.” Great, so Bonnie and the Nazi agree, all Latin singers are gay. Not all. Not Tito Puente.

“The weird thing is, it takes balls for a Latin dude. I read where when Rican parents think a kid is going to turn queer, they lock him in his room until he swears to go straight.”

Where did Vincent read
that?
Does this mean that every five minutes she’s going to have to decide if something’s worth arguing about, and whether or not to mention that you shouldn’t say
Rican?

“I don’t think that’s necessarily true,” she says.

“Look, their culture isn’t exactly breaking out the champagne and tequila when the
muchacho
turns
maricon,
right?”

“I guess not,” Bonnie says.

“Well, then,” says Vincent.

“But there are lots of gay Latin men.”

“More and more,” says Vincent. “It’s scary.”

After a silence, Bonnie says, “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure,” he says. “No problaymo.”

“How come you joined ARM?” Bonnie knows she’s being nosy. They’ve practically just met. But she also knows, from experience with her kids, that sometimes being in the car, looking at the road, not having to make eye contact, is the ideal opportunity for heavy conversation. And she’d better be nosy. She needs to find out what she’s dealing with. Not that she expects him to tell the truth—if he even knows what it is.

Vincent rolls up his window to shut out the salsa beat. The temperature in the car spikes. He rolls it down again.

“Sorry about the air conditioner,” Bonnie says. “I meant to have it fixed. But who would have thought I’d need it yet. It’s only April—”

“Global warming,” says Vincent. “Anyhow, I hate air-conditioning. I read where those coolant systems are like petri dishes for respiratory viruses.”

“So you were saying, why you joined ARM?” Bonnie’s not letting it go.

Staring out the windshield, Vincent says, “I was having a hard time.”

A hard time. Next, he’ll be telling her how he suffered from low self-esteem and was abused as a child.