City of Strangers (13 page)

'Ben.'

It can mean many different things, his own name. In this case, it has buried within it a gentle accusation of brotherly responsibility. During the first half of their marriage she leaned on him to include Paul in their lives. Time and again he acquiesced. It was she who made Ben invite him to their son's bar mitzvah. He wishes now that he hadn't lied to her about going to the hospital; he almost never keeps secrets from his wife – only those which are absolutely in her best interests. It's too late to tell her now. In any case, he isn't sure what he would tell her – that he can sense a decrease within himself of resolve; it began after a week of seeing his father's name alongside his own in the papers, when Paul came to see him on Sunday morning.

It may turn out to be nothing more than a stray product of the emotional untidiness he has felt since his son started college, which in time he will learn to control as he finds other vents for the surplus affection he's been left with. And it has nothing to do with his convictions about Frank. He'll continue to hold them, especially if he consents to a version of brotherhood: he must keep his grip on the firm thing, the thing he understands best, the one thing that has always been there. That can't be undone. His younger brother isn't going to undo it.

His wife's voice, again.

'I think you might not realize you regret it until it's too late.'

'I'm old enough to know what I will and won't regret.' He didn't intend it to come out that way – it leapt from his mouth – and he manages to force the beginning of a smile. He says: 'I just can't. I'd rather spend the day with you.'

'You'd better not try to charm me after your disappearing act this morning.'

'Want company?'

'Always.'

'Let me get my drink.'

He disappears from the room and returns to the study. To his eyes, accustomed now to the lights of the living room, the darkness is impossibly inky. He doesn't bother to turn on the lamp and instead feels his way to the desk, inching through the familiar space, stubbing his toe against the leg of a chair and breathing a single oath. He retrieves what's left of his Scotch, but doesn't yet turn to leave.

After the heart attack, during his recovery as he lay on the hospital bed – in a private room with a view of Manhattan as fine as that from many of the city's boardrooms and hotels – Beth and Jake sat with him. He breathed heavily, and never had much to say, but they stayed; they stayed while he slept. This was more than a year ago. On the second day, Jake had to go back to school and Beth left for several hours, and he recalls those hours as the worst of the whole ordeal – worse even than the first clenching agony in his chest, the first tingling in his left hand, the hot narrowing certainty that it was actually happening. He was in that room, alone. Hospital hours have a sluggish, garbled rhythm. IV tubes slithered around the bedclothes whenever he moved his arm, and he felt both very intimate with and very remote from his own body – he was listening to it closely, waiting for the next thing, but it had failed him, nearly irrevocably, and he knew he would never be able to trust it again. He was bored, anxious, terrified, and lonely. He spent a long time daydreaming about a girlfriend from college, trying to remember what mattered to them, what they talked about for so many hours. He was reading an article in
Sports Illustrated
about the upcoming football season when he burst into tears. Upon her return, he told Beth none of this, but stared at her until she asked him what he wanted. All he could say was that he wanted to come home as soon as possible. What those solitary hours in the hospital recalled to him, more than anything else, was that he was grateful for the family that was his. Those hours concentrated the idea into a serum, individual drops running warmly down his throat. His life began in a broken family, a fucked-up family, and he had managed to build one that wasn't. He knew precisely how much that was worth.

Almost out of the room, he pauses and returns to the desk, where he picks up the card his brother dropped off, a ring of moisture in the middle from the glass. Carefully he reads it once more. Calling out, he asks his wife if she wants a drink. He can't make out the reply, which he assumes was no; Beth's never been much of a drinker. He'll ask again when he returns to her. Before going, he opens his fingers and drops the card straight into the trash can, where it floats, an island of white upon the dark, mute sea.

For Paul to have agreed to drink a beer with Pirro means that he truly does not want to walk home, which in itself is even more worrisome than the prospect now of manufacturing conversation with a man who is, it must be said, a stranger. The silence is amicable enough, however, as Pirro steers around the cafe with the mop, occasionally stopping to make some remark about what's on the radio, or to point out some aspect of the store's operation he considers idiotic.

'The manager – he's Lebanese – he is a nice guy, but he doesn't know shit about running a business. I don't know why they don't fire him. First we run out of the hazelnut beans, then we run out of the orange-cranberry scones. Some people, that's their favorite! They want to know why we don't have them anymore.'

From time to time Paul looks out the window, but he never sees anyone, or at least no one who would concern him: just cars, young couples, old drunks wandering home from the corner bar.

'It's late, huh? You have to go?'

Paul says he doesn't have to go.

'Do you have a wife?'

'No. I'm divorced.'

'Divorce, an ugly thing,' says Pirro. 'But maybe not always. Marriage can be a burden.' He sets aside the mop and retrieves a second beer; as he crooks it open, Paul notices the ring on his finger for the first time.

'Where do you live?'

'Gravesend. My wife is there. She cleans rooms at a hotel in Manhattan. If I stay here long enough she will be asleep by the time I get home!' He laughs and drinks lustily from his beer.

Paul closes his eyes. Gravity seems to draw him deeper into the chair: a sense of comfort stretches across him like an extra skin. His earlier drowsiness returns as a pleasurable lethargy. He has a cold beer in his hand, there's nowhere he needs to go, and talking with Pirro demands nothing great of him. A few minutes pass. Pirro speaks.

'I am always surprised Americans make such good beer.' They are drinking Brooklyn Lager. 'I used to think it was only Europeans who understood it.'

Paul eyes him. 'Aren't you Muslim?'

'Muslim, yes! I am from Bosnia. You know your stuff. But don't act surprised, my friend. Muslims drink. They say one mustn't take alcohol because it harms the body, but when you know all the other ways there are to harm the body, it doesn't seem so important. Besides,' he says, lifting the bottle to his lips, 'it is just so fucking good.'

Laughing, Paul takes a drink of his own.

'In Germany,' says Pirro, coming closer to Paul, 'they have a toast. When you touch your friend's glass, you say, "Prost." Then you lock eyes until each man takes a drink.'

Paul makes an expression of amusement.

'It brings luck, they say.'

In the present silence the woodpecker's clack of two bottlenecks is enough to split the air like a bell. He fixes Pirro's eyes in his own. Both men are slow to drink. An unexpected sensation falls through Paul, like the floor dropping away, as if a single taste of alcohol had the strength of a gallon. Pirro's eyes, small brown globes, hang suspended in his own, and for an uncomfortable instant the emotional traffic across the small space is much too heavy, much too dense.

Paul says, 'My father died today.' He meant yesterday, but it doesn't matter. 'He was alive for ninety-six years,' he adds absentmindedly. 'Doesn't that seem long enough to fit two lives?'

He isn't sure why he says this now; it causes Pirro to look away, embarrassed. He mutters something, an inaudible word, who knows. At last Paul coughs out a retraction: 'Don't worry. Forget I even mentioned it.' He waves his arm to dismiss the subject altogether. Pirro walks away and returns with a fresh beer for Paul, and he gratefully finishes the one in his hand. They listen to the news, which has moved on to sports. The Winter Olympics are underway in Italy; an American man took the gold in an Alpine skiing event. After that come the results from the cricket match between India and Pakistan.

Pirro, who has gone back to mopping, says, 'Did you leave your wife, or she left you?'

'In some ways, it was mutual.'

'What does that mean?'

'We both agreed to it.'

'But one of you must have wanted it more than the other?'

Paul shrugs. 'That's hard to say. Claire's so—'

'Claire is your wife's name?'

Nodding, he says no more. He feels a sudden, palpable reticence: Pirro shouldn't know too much about him; he shouldn't know of Claire. Paul can feel the alcohol patrolling his blood. His face is warm. Holding the bottle to his lips, he lets the beer slosh coolly across them, and a swallow fills his mouth. He should stop before he has too much. Tomorrow is the funeral. But by the time the thought reaches the deeper, more sensual part of his brain, it is simply soaked up: his lips seek more, and his hand brings the bottle to his mouth without his mind having to ask it. His thoughts are in a dangerous place for a man with a drink in his hand – he's thinking of his ex-wife. He's missing her, and even feels the stirrings of an erection.

Outside, a dog barks. Paul lets the bulb of desire dim; concentrating on Pirro and his dull march around the floor helps. He must be close to finishing. Pirro stops and reaches for his beer. He says, 'When I first came here, I knew no one. Surrounded by people I did not understand, who did not understand me. All alone in a strange land. I could trust no one but God.'

Paul hears the dog bark again.

Pirro asks, 'Do you believe in God?'

'No.'

Holding the mop like a flagpole, Pirro makes a knowing expression; it isn't quite a smile. It seems to say that he expected as much. He goes behind the counter and begins lobbing the uneaten pastries into a black garbage bag.

Paul read once of a 'god module,' a quirk in the human design that inclines people in the direction of religion. The idea appeals to Paul – God hasn't ever been
out there
; instead he originates
in here
– but long ago, after giving up on faith, he decided that his own god module was broken. The intricacy of existence begs for a creator to explain it, but if there is a god, his only act was to manufacture this astonishing contraption, the universe, with all its tiny rules and hidden symmetries, before setting it in motion. Human beings, like grass or planets, are derivatives of that universe: flakes of incidental matter, complicated clay and nothing more. God isn't watching.

He finishes his beer. The last swallow is quite warm. Behind the counter, Pirro's elbows flap as he makes a fat knot out of the ends of the garbage bag, and then he looks at Paul and smiles, holding up the whole thing for him to see as if it is something he has hunted and killed.

Seeing the three girls, teenagers, in front of the funeral parlor, he recalls Bruegel's
Icarus
: the ploughman, his face turned away, easing the cart's dull weight downhill; the ship's sail billowing into a triumphant breast as it leaves the harbor. These girls don't care about the death behind the white curtains. They are unaware of their own ghostly contours in the window, where the glass has leached the color from their dresses. They don't see. Every day, after school, they wait on the same block for the same bus, and the funeral home means as much to them as a parking meter. Laughing, the girls lean out from the curb into the street as the bus arrives, its brakes wailing, its horn piping one abrupt warning. They jump back, just in time. The driver hardly notices as they board, still in giggles, and Paul watches the bus pull away before he goes inside.

The entrance greets him with practical smells, ammonia and potpourri, which he failed to notice on his first visit, when he was ushered along with such haste into the building's more modern offices. The wholesome decor in the front hall wants to suggest the house of a favorite grandmother – stately furniture, thick carpet. But that smell kills the effect. The aromas of cooking, of life, are missing. Wolff waits for him, wearing an expression that he has obviously refined over the years, a blend of geniality, pity, and professional distance. His suit is nicer than Paul's. The cuffs sit exactly where they ought to. The tie keeps its knot without complaint. Wolff's suit betrays no loose threads, no flatness of tone. Of course; he wears one every day.

Instead of shaking, Wolff claps a hand on Paul's shoulder, a rehearsed gesture of fraternity; the physical sensation jolts him. He has a mild hangover – after leaving Pirro last night he couldn't sleep and had a few more in the stuffy, embryonic darkness of his apartment, and he never drinks enough water anyway – which fades from one corner of his brain only to relight itself in another.

'Paul? It's time.'

In the rows of otherwise empty chairs sit two old men whose faces mean nothing to Paul. This comes as a surprise. They both wear rumpled brown suits, and one actually has a hat in his lap. He wonders briefly if a cult of funeral attendance exists among the elderly. It would serve as a kind of rehearsal, an enactment of that old wish: to witness one's own memorial and hear one's own eulogies, to see the women's tears. But, no, these must be men who knew his father. They turn: one flashes a mouthful of false teeth; the other closes his eyes and tucks his lips inward in an expression of condolence. They know he's the son. He should greet them now, thank them for coming, but he can't. Strangers would upset his mind's fragile silence. He quickly inserts himself in a seat at the front, and only then does he notice the urn that holds his father's ashes, elevated on a pedestal and pinned down by two beams of yellow light. It's simple, as requested. He asked for the most basic model on the market.

At the back of the room the door opens. Someone enters and then abruptly halts. The footsteps belong to a man, and before he turns Paul is certain who it is. This, too, comes as a surprise.

Ben takes a seat in the last row. The two old men dwell upon the sight of him, but neither says anything. They don't even smile. He's dressed in an impeccable suit and makes clear his disdain for the surroundings, disclosing it with a flicker of his eyes. He blinks in Paul's direction, as much of a greeting as he's willing to offer.

The minister enters, a man with a benevolent, unmemorable face, topped by a puff of white hair like meringue. He establishes himself at the lectern and clears his throat. Unitarian. He was hired at Wolff's late urging, in spite of Paul's insistence that religion be denied a place at the ceremony. But somebody had to speak, and Paul declined to perform the eulogy himself; he could not imagine finding words that expressed that difficult mixture of candor and fondness.

'I would like to begin with a psalm,' the minister says. The room is quiet as he finds his place. He starts: 'I lift up my eyes to the hills – from where will my help come?'

Because the idea of a silent vigil terrified him – it would have been absurd to sit and wait for the clock to shave off a certain number of minutes before he could stand, collect his father's ashes, and leave – Paul now sits compliantly and listens to a man of God recite from the Bible. He idly recalls the amount of money this sermon has cost him. But since others have come he's glad to have agreed to this one conventional chapter of a funeral. Like few other rites, funerals demand the upkeep of appearances, and even a man who does not believe in God can occasionally be grateful that the belief in God exists to shelter the most difficult moments. 'The sun shall not strike you by day, nor the moon by night.' He turns briefly to look at Ben, who this time does not return the glance, and who otherwise gives no sign of what inspired this change of heart. 'The Lord will keep you from all evil; he will keep your life.'

One of the old men plays with his rings, turning them around his fingers like dials.

The minister finishes: 'The Lord will keep your going out and your coming in from this time on and forevermore.'

He looks out at the four men in the audience, then says: 'Let us bow our heads and think of Frank, and of Frank's life.' Paul does so, and wonders if Ben does the same. The minister lifts his head and offers the lectern to anyone who wants to say a few words about the deceased, and one of the elderly men, leaning heavily on a cane, struggles up from his chair.

'I barely knew him,' the man begins, his speech halting and his eyes scrunched up behind heavy glasses, a case of extreme myopia. 'Frank's lived two floors above me for years. Can't even remember how long it's been anymore. And I never heard a peep out of him until maybe six or seven years ago, when I was laid up after back surgery. Couldn't move a muscle. A nurse came two hours every day, but she was no good, she didn't give a damn about me. Frank said he'd pick up the newspaper and some groceries for me every morning. Frank had his own health problems – it wasn't easy for him to get around, either. He offered. I never asked him to do it. For a year he brought me the newspaper. Otherwise, I can tell you, I'd of gone mad in that apartment by myself. Keeping up to date on what the president was saying, on the craziness in the world, made me feel like I was still a human being, like my seat was still saved. If not for Frank I'd of lost every marble.'

The man steps down from the lectern, his hands shaking, and returns to his seat. No one else volunteers to speak. The minister returns to the dais and, after loudly clearing his throat, opens to another psalm.

Ben is still there at the end of the ceremony, his posture a bit sunken but firm, the suit across his shoulders as hard as pavement. Paul half expected his brother to have slipped out partway through, once he'd proved his point, whatever that was. His eyes are closed and his head is bowed. He looks as stony and distant as a figure in a photograph. Paul is about to say hello before realizing what is happening. He steps back and waits for his brother to finish praying.

A hand catches his elbow. It's the man who spoke. He leans on his cane, his back bent into the curve of a scythe, his body shrunken like a leaf of paper curled in the fire; his eyes have withered to slits. Paul wonders how he moves around without constantly crashing into the furniture.

'You're Frank's son.'

'Paul.'

'He was a good man, your father.'

'I appreciate that. Not many people would get up there and say what you did.'

'About Frank? Quietest man I ever knew. Not a mean bone in his body.'

He shoves out his hand and Paul takes it, surprised by the firmness of the grip.

'Shel Greenberg.'

'Mr Greenberg – it's a pleasure to meet you. I'm sure my father would have been glad to know you were here.'

Paul fits himself into the passenger's seat of Ben's car. In the backseat, propped in the corner, is the urn; Wolff assured him that the lid was fastened tightly and wouldn't come off, even if it fell over. Ben's eyes hold the road ahead in a fixed stare, and he doesn't speak, just as he hasn't spoken since they left the funeral parlor. He drives with one arm, extended perfectly straight like a running back's. They merge with traffic onto the Williamsburg Bridge. It isn't yet six; at Ben's suggestion they are going to have dinner. The first meal the brothers will have shared in years.

'Thank you,' says Paul. 'For coming.' He hopes to prompt Ben into an explanation, but Ben offers none, nothing at all, and the brothers sit in silence the rest of the way.

Ben takes them to an Italian restaurant on the Upper West Side. He seems to know the maître d', who seats them at a table in a back corner, away from the general drift of early-evening diners; only the candles on each table interrupt the crepuscular mood of the room, sunken below street level, walls the color of eggplant. Ben orders a bottle of red wine while Paul absentmindedly glances at the menu. He asks for the first thing his eyes settle on. His attention returns to his brother – his stern, mute brother, whose face the candlelight holds in a severe shadow. The candle's own shadow creates a shivering meniscus on the wall.

'If I'd known you were going to have that,' says Ben, 'I'd have told you to get something else. The calamari here is good.'

Paul nods. If all Ben has in mind is criticizing his dining habits, they can eat in silence.

'Beth says you stopped by the apartment.'

'Just to leave the card. I tried calling first. You didn't answer.' Paul takes a sip of water. After a long pause, he says, 'You haven't been in the same room with Dad for decades.'

'I wasn't going to come,' his brother says quickly. 'I haven't forgiven Frank, and I won't, ever. That's not why I came.'

The waiter returns with the wine. Ben swallows the first taste and nods tersely. The glasses are poured, the waiter leaves. Neither man speaks. Ben pinches the neck of the bottle between thumb and forefinger and rotates it so that he can read the writing on the back of the label.

He says, 'My wife thought it was a good idea. She thought it would give me closure.'

Ben is not a man who casually uses terms like 'closure.' He speaks the word with a certain halting pronunciation.

'In Judaism, the laws of mourning apply to the father's son,' he adds. 'No matter who the father was.'

'I saw you praying.'

'That wasn't for him.'

Ben takes an intemperate drink from his wineglass.

Paul says, 'You wouldn't have been wrong to pray for him, you know. He was an old man. He suffered.'

'That man got ninety-six years of life,' says Ben, his voice softening. 'Ninety-six years. More than most. More than almost all. That man got the lion's share of life.'

In poor light his face has the firmness of granite. Time for Ben has not mollified his hatred or made it a fossil: it remains a living, changing part of his inner geology, growing, deepening, hardening. Whatever his reasons for coming to the funeral, they do not include a wish for a posthumous rapprochement with their father.

'Prayer just seems unlike you,' says Paul.

'Of course I pray,' snaps Ben. 'I'm a Jew. I pray.'

At the time, Ben's conversion seemed no more than a blunt renunciation of the name Metzger. Paul always assumed that his brother's enthusiasm for the endeavor was a secular one, a family affair, and had nothing to do with holding God in esteem.

'I just never thought you had that kind of weakness.'

'Weakness?' Ben snorts as he takes another drink. 'Faith in God is a weakness? Then why is it such a struggle? Believing, continuing to believe in the face of the shit life throws at you requires strength.'

He drinks again.

'You, for one, couldn't believe in God.'

Paul drinks from his wine. He says, 'Maybe it does take strength to believe in God, but it takes just as much to forgive a bad father his mistakes.'

'This has nothing to do with being a bad father.'

'That's because he wasn't a bad father to you. He loved you. You're the son he wanted.' He drinks; the wine tastes dense and earthy. 'What better proof than that he waited so long to take you out of the will?'

Seemingly indifferent to Paul's words, Ben takes a piece of bread from the basket and tears it apart. 'I spoke to my lawyer again,' he says, chewing. 'And, for the record, Frank was a lousy father to me, too.'

'But you still insist on taking his money.'

'I've explained this to you. I've got no intention of keeping the damned money. It isn't his to have, or to give – it's got to be taken from him.'

'Bullshit, Ben. That's bullshit. All this about – about what, exactly? Reparations? Extracted from the estate of Frank Metzger, by you, on behalf of the Jewish people?'

'Whether you believe me or not is irrelevant. You're the second-born.'

'Then you're the never-born! The only reason he waited so long to take you out of the will was that he kept hoping you'd come back. He kept hoping you'd forgive him.'

'I wasn't ever going to forgive him. He understood that. He knew that, at least.'

'You talk about believing in God, and here you are, robbing a dead man.'

'The point here is you, Paul. You want the little money Frank managed not to squander in your bank account.'

'I'm thirty-six years old and I'm broke. Of course I want it. Look at you – you manage a hedge fund. You fucking print money for a living.'

'I've told you, I'm not
keeping
his goddamned money. This has nothing to do with money. If you want me to give you a loan, I'll do it.'

'Would you even be able to, in the current climate?' Paul, on the verge of saying more, restrains himself. 'This isn't the point.'

'No, it isn't.'

'You left. I stayed behind. I stayed his son. Hate me for that if you want, but the fact is that when he died he had only one living heir.'

'You've already been to a lawyer, haven't you? What did he tell you? I know what he told you – that you can't beat this in court. Anybody's going to tell you that.'

'I'm not taking you to court.'

'I know you aren't.' He pauses. Paul sees a mouthful of purplish wine-stained teeth. 'We're family.'