A Changed Man (8 page)

Danny guesses he agrees. But it’s always so embarrassing when his mom gets fired up.

“Definitely,” Vincent says. “The government loves killing. What about those women and babies they gassed and burned at Waco? What about them sending in their crack SWAT team to murder Randy Weaver’s wife?”

“Yes, well…I don’t know…” Mom’s voice trails off. “Of course, I don’t believe in the death penalty to start with.”

Neither does Danny, exactly. But hasn’t Mom ever seen the clips of those bloody babies outside the Murragh Building? Sometimes Danny worries about terrorists blowing up the Tappan Zee Bridge when he and Mom and Max are crossing. He wishes he never thought like that. Other kids don’t seem to. And he wishes he didn’t suspect that he has these fears because he’s like Mom.

“Were you watching the news?” Mom says. “At least it’s the news. I hate the boys watching TV.”

“I try to stay away from TV,” says Vincent. “Toxic parasite mind rot.”

For all Danny knows, Vincent’s one of those guys who think that the government is beaming mind-control rays out of the TV screen. The last thing Danny needs around here is someone who, for whatever reason, is on his mother’s side about television.

“Actually, guys,” says Mom, “Vincent’s a reader.” Meaning
unlike you two.
“And guess what? He didn’t start really reading till he was twenty-five.”

Danny and Max will never forgive her for comparing them negatively to a Nazi. Though it’s possible that she’s just trying to reassure them that, underneath the lightning bolts, the guy is a harmless book nerd.

“He’s reading Dostoyevsky.”

Danny says, “Who the fuck is Dostoyevsky?” Even though he knows.

“Danny!” his mom says. “Language!”

Max says, “So what do you guys do? Like, beat up black people and Jews?”

Jesus, Danny loves Max sometimes. Right now he’s the perfect age. Still trading on his little-kid right to ask inappropriate questions, but grown up enough to know what the right questions are. When Dad and Mom announced they were splitting up, Max asked if they still loved each other. They both answered at the same moment. Mom said of course, Dad said not exactly, and then Dad said, I mean of course.

“
I
never did,” says Vincent. “But I knew guys who did.”

“You don’t know them now?” Max says.

“I don’t know them, and they don’t know me,” Vincent says.

“Good for you!” says Mom. “Boys, you can’t imagine the risk Vincent is taking. He says there are guys, his former friends, who won’t
like
his quitting—”

A familiar look comes over Mom’s face. She wishes she hadn’t said that, wishes she hadn’t given in to the impulse to share her fears with them. Danny wishes she hadn’t. Now he’s got one more thing to worry about.

They finish their pizza in silence. Danny and Max clear the table, which they wouldn’t usually do, but they can’t let Mom do it, not in front of a stranger. So maybe it’s good that she’s brought him home. It feels like those first weeks after Dad left, when everyone was practically tiptoeing around the house. Normal rules suspended. Like having a substitute teacher, except you act better instead of worse.

After dinner Danny and Max watch more TV. Homework isn’t mentioned. Danny surfs the channels. He keeps wondering what’s happening upstairs. The pressure is exhausting. Danny drifts off several times before he wakes up and finds Max asleep in front of boring Ted Koppel. Propping his little brother up, he half steers, half pushes him to his room, and dumps him on his bed.

In his own room, Danny lies awake, trying to ignore the noises that always start at night when the world stops pretending to be its harmless daytime self. As a kid, he’d been scared of the dark. Way past the age when he would admit it, he used to make Mom come to his room and stay with him till he fell asleep. He’d pretended that he’d just wanted to talk. Once he overheard Dad tell Mom that kids weren’t smart enough to know what to be scared of. The proof, he said, was that children were scared of the dark and not of death and airplanes. Now Danny’s old enough to be scared of all that and more.

How humiliating to be sixteen and still afraid of the dark. Maybe he should phone one of his friends, or go online and see if anyone’s awake. He’d like to talk to Chloe. She always makes him feel better. But what would he say? He can’t tell Chloe how nervous he is. So there’s nothing to do but lie here and listen to the noises that spooked him as a kid. Relax. It’s only the footsteps of the Nazi moving in.

M
EYER AND HIS FRIEND
S
OL STAND OVER
Sol’s wife,
Minna, watching her chest rise and fall. You’d think it was fascinating. And in a way, it is. The distance Minna has traveled in a couple of days! Her face has that chalky pallor hospital patients get, camouflaged to match the walls, their doctors’ coats, the skim milk on their trays, as if they’re trying to disappear, fade into the woodwork so Death can’t find them. But Minna isn’t dying. The operation went well. She may look embalmed, but according to Sol, she’ll be back on her feet in no time, hosting her famous Sunday brunches.

Those oily bounties of cheese and smoked fish will never seem the same now that Meyer has watched Minna snore in her puckered flowery pajamas. Their mutual embarrassment will be the geriatric version of how Meyer used to feel when he ran into girls he’d slept with when he first came to this country. Those sweet, warm-hearted American girls, so eager to help him
forget. Mercy fuck
was the first American slang phrase Meyer learned. But that awkwardness was about sex, and this is about death, about watching himself and his friends race each other to the grave, a race no one wants to win.

Meyer’s got no cause for complaint. At seventy-one, he’s in excellent health. Seventy-one? That’s reason enough for self-pity. Often Meyer finds himself staring at men his age, wondering how they get through the day without lashing out in a jealous rage at everyone younger than they are. Meanwhile he’s ashamed of himself for questioning the will of God, for worrying about how much time he has left when he knows he’s supposed to be thinking of higher things: his work, his foundation.

Sol’s describing Minna’s symptoms. The pesky cough. The X ray on which they accidentally picked up the aneurysm that would have blown her artery wide apart if they hadn’t caught it in time.

“How lucky was
that?
” asks Sol.

“A miracle. Miracles happen.” Dear God, don’t let Sol remember that’s the title of the second section of Meyer’s new book. But would he think it was less sincere? No, he’d think Meyer
meant
it. He’d put it in a book.

Meyer does mean it. What else but miracles can explain what happens in one lifetime? Consider the arc that took him from the hayloft in Hungary to here. He doesn’t like to think about it, not so much because the memory is still painful, which it is, but because he is conscious of using it, or of using his distance
from
it, to make himself feel better about why he was spared and what he has done with his life. How shameless to use the Holocaust as an analgesic. But even that is better than using it as your trump card, to win every argument, to establish your credentials in the field of suffering. But the truth is, it
is
a trump card. And soon there will be no one left alive with the indisputable right to play it.

“Meyer,” Sol’s saying. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. You were telling me about Minna.”

“I made her go to the hospital,” said Sol.

“Lucky thing she has you,” Meyer says. Sol’s a good husband, one of the fortunate few who’s satisfied with what he’s got. He wants nothing more than his Minna, his library, his tenured job teaching comparative literature at Queens College. Unlike Meyer, Sol has lots of male friends: confident, athletic, expensively maintained professionals who clump together, telling jokes at Minna’s brunches. Meyer has known Sol since Meyer first came to this country and supported himself by giving language lessons. Meyer tutored Sol’s students. Meyer slept with them. Sol didn’t.

Minna’s stomach gurgles. “She looks terrific,” Meyer says.

“Your nose just grew,” says Sol.

“She’ll be fine.” Meyer turns his palm outward, a stop sign for doubts.

“So they tell me,” says Sol.

Minna’s pink pajamas make her sudden spasm seem like the ropy stretching of a sleeping child. She pushes the blanket down, revealing a gap between her shirt buttons. Meyer glimpses a curve of breast before he turns away.

“Sit down,” says Sol. Meyer sinks into a chair, a motion Sol mirrors on the opposite side of the bed. Peering down from the TV, Tom Brokaw chants above footage of Tim McVeigh being led out in leg irons, squinting into the flashbulbs. Meyer sighs. If only Vincent Nolan looked a little less like McVeigh.

Sol says, “Imagine, the guy calling those babies
collateral damage!
That’s what I can’t get past. Half the time I think, Go ahead and fry the sick bastard. But then again—”

“I’ve got a better plan,” Meyer says. “Make McVeigh
think
he’s going to be killed. Then save him at the last minute. Like Dostoyevsky.”

“Like you,” says Sol.

“Like me,” Meyer concedes. “And let me tell you, it changes you. Televise his life after that. It’s the reality TV that we all want to watch.”

“That’s brilliant,” says Sol. “Have you written about that? Maybe for the op-ed page.” An almost lustful enthusiasm glimmers in Sol’s eyes as he flings his idea, without envy, at the shrine of Meyer’s importance. Sol wishes he could write anything for the op-ed page.

“I don’t know,” says Meyer. It might not be helpful, at this point, for Brotherhood Watch to support the country’s most hated homegrown terrorist. A piece like that would hardly sell more benefit tickets. As if the
New York Times
would print such garbage in the first place. But shouldn’t Meyer do something? Isn’t McVeigh’s life worth saving?

Meyer says, “Ever seen anyone hung?”

“No,” says Sol. “Thank God.”

“I have,” says Meyer.

“I know.” Of course Sol knows. Meyer described it in both of his first two books. For a guy whose mission—whose raison d’être—is remembrance, Meyer is getting forgetful. Sometimes, when someone asks a question about his war experience, he has to look it up in his memoirs. If he had to get through the war now, he probably wouldn’t survive. He hates the idea that everything depended on his having been young. He wants to believe he’s the same person. The same soul in a different body.

Meyer and Sol watch two men in dark suits, huddled and scowling.
McVeigh’s lawyers say their client is reviewing his options.

“What options?” says Sol. “To die or to die.”

“Same options everyone gets,” Meyer says.

“Thanks, I needed that,” says Sol. “Okay. Listen. What did the blind man say the first time he touched a matzoh?”

Meyer shrugs. He’s waiting.

“Who wrote this shit?” Sol says.

Meyer laughs out loud, then says, “I never get to laugh like that at my job.”

“Poor you,” says Sol. “All you have to do is keep a straight face and you get to fly the Concorde. Hey, what did I say wrong? Your face got the strangest look—”

A loud gurgle from Minna’s intestines reclaims their attention.

“Great of you to come,” Sol says. “Considering all you’ve got on your plate.”

“I said I would come. I couldn’t
not
come.” It’s not only that Meyer has known Sol and Minna for so long, that he cares about them, that it means something to them that he’s here. Whether he likes it or not, and despite how lonely it makes him feel, Meyer Maslow showing up means a little something extra.

Beyond that, there’s a raft of reasons he’s not about to discuss with Sol, reasons why he had to come, some of which have to do with a letter Meyer received this morning.

A hate letter, as it happens.

Meyer gets plenty of hate mail. Thank God, he rarely sees it. His staff makes the first cut and passes the rest of his correspondence along to Roberta or Bonnie. But like the secretaries, Roberta had thought it was
nice
that someone had sent him, anonymously, a chapter from Charles Dickens.

It was a section from
Bleak House,
which Meyer has never read. And he might not have taken the time today, except that the minute he saw the chapter heading, his heart sank and kept sinking until he’d read to the end.

The chapter, “Telescopic Philanthropy,” recounts a visit to the messy home of a certain Mrs. Jellyby, who can’t be bothered cleaning house or looking after her filthy, miserable, neglected children, who are constantly falling downstairs and getting their heads stuck in railings. And why? Because Mrs. Jellyby is busy with her “African project,” establishing coffee plantations and teaching the natives of Borrioboola-Gha.

Meyer knows it wasn’t meant well. Someone is suggesting that he is a Mrs. Jellyby, practicing telescopic philanthropy, mistreating those closest to him in his efforts to save people on the other side of the planet. It’s unfair and untrue. Meyer is kind to his staff, to Irene. Maybe someone thought it was funny and assumed that Meyer would, too. But why the anonymity? Someone was being hostile. The gesture was so overcomplicated, when one word would have done. One word like
fraud
spelled out in letters scissored from the newspaper.

Why does Meyer think it’s someone who knows him well enough to know that the horror of being a telescopic philanthropist is among his worst fears? In fact, those worries have been multiplying, or maybe it’s just that Meyer more often thinks of those aspects of his character that make him feel small and depress him. His vanity and his ego. How can he be shallow enough to get his feelings hurt when Bonnie tells him that tickets to the dinner haven’t been selling? And neither has his new book….

It reminds him of how he felt, a few months ago, when he and Elie Wiesel attended a conference in Rennes, and the French paparazzi greeted Wiesel with a hail of flashbulbs that stopped when Meyer walked in behind him. Apparently it doesn’t bother them that Wiesel seems to believe that genocide is only genocide when it happens to Jews—and maybe Bosnians. But surely not gypsies or Africans. Their deaths are, at best, mass murder. All right, so Meyer’s not well known in France. That was never the point. The point is his
minding
that Wiesel gets all the flashes. But is that such a sin? Dictators torture children and never lose a minute of sleep while Meyer stays up nights in terror of being a tiny bit vain?

Today, just before lunch, he’d gotten a fax saying that an Iranian cartoonist had been jailed and was at risk of being tortured. The guy has a wife and kids. Meyer met him last fall when he’d come over to the United States with a delegation of Iranian writers and artists, apparatchik stooges the government sent as propaganda. A friend in the State Department talked Meyer into showing them around New York. Meyer owed his friend a favor, so he took the Iranians to a few parties and panels where they yakked about how free they were. They’d all read Salman Rushdie. Their wives all chose to go veiled. Only one guy, the cartoonist, never said a word. And now he’s the one in prison.

Meyer started making calls. Telescopic philanthropy. After that came the dreary talk with Bonnie about the ticket sales, and then Vincent Nolan walked in. Right away, Meyer saw, in Vincent, proof that he hadn’t lost it, that he still had the power to make miracles happen. And to see who people
were
—in Vincent’s case, a lost soul who could never have believed all the things he must have claimed to believe to belong to that hate group. He saw a nice-looking young man who truly wanted to change his life, to work for tolerance and justice. It wasn’t until Vincent and Bonnie left that Meyer remembered the Dickens chapter. At which point he
had
to go see Minna. Anything to prove that he wasn’t a Mrs. Jellyby.

“What’s new at the foundation?” asks Sol.

“Every day something,” says Meyer. “This morning I got a fax about an Iranian artist I know who just got locked up in jail. Iran is tough, but it’s worth a try. Maybe we can do something.”

“That’s marvelous!” says Sol. “The things you accomplish!”

Meyer nods, accepting the tribute. “The foundation does them,” he says. “And then this afternoon, back on the home front, Bonnie Kalen, our development director—”

“I know Bonnie,” says Sol.

“—walks into my office with this…skinhead. This former skinhead. Some upstate Hitler Jugend.”

“You let him in?” demands Sol. “Are we forgetting the sick bastard who shot up that preschool in California?”

“We welcomed him, actually. He’d had some sort of mystical vision at a rock concert. He told us he wanted to work with us.”

“Obviously, some cuckoo.” That’s Sol’s diagnosis. But what does Sol know? He’s a literature professor, not a psychiatric clinician. “I’d cut him loose in a minute. I mean, you’ve got to wonder what makes them racists in the first place.” How much does Meyer know about this guy after half an hour in his office? Maybe he should have figured out some alternative to sending him home with Bonnie.

“I do wonder,” Meyer says. “Why would a guy who’s not stupid let himself get sucked into that? I’m sure there’s plenty he isn’t admitting. But I think he’s mostly telling the truth. He’s my scientific experiment. My golem. What can we extract from him to vaccinate the world with?”

“Today the foundation, tomorrow the world,” says Sol. “Be careful, is all I’m suggesting.” In the silence that falls between them, their focus drifts from an SUV commercial to the digital read-out of Minna’s heartbeat.

Finally Sol says, “So God tells Adam: I’m going to make you a wife, a helpmate, the most beautiful woman who ever lived, fabulous in bed, uncomplaining, ready to carry out your every wish and desire. But it’ll cost you.”

“‘How much?’ says Adam.

“‘An eye, an elbow, a collarbone, and your left ball.’

“Adam thinks for a minute, then says, ‘What can I get for a rib?’”

Meyer laughs, then thinks, How can a guy tell a joke like that over his wife’s sickbed? Isn’t Sol superstitious at all? Meyer tries to think of another joke, quick, something to counter that one. But what he thinks is: I need to call Irene. She has no idea he’ll be late. He hates to worry her.

Meyer says, “Two old guys in Miami. One says, ‘I forget everything lately. I go to the mall and forget how I got there.’ The other one says, ‘Not me. I never forget a thing.’”

Meyer stops. The punch line is, the guy knocks on wood for luck, and then forgets and says, “Come in!” But there’s no wood in Minna’s hospital room. Sol’s looking at Meyer, wondering if he’s forgotten the punch line of a joke about forgetting. Meyer knocks on Minna’s nightstand. “Come in,” he says, too late.