Flatscreen (16 page)

“Dude,” I said. “Big brother.”

Tried to hang an arm around his slim shoulders, comfort him. Or at least to share misery, be companions in the
drama of our fucked fam. But all I did was knock his hand from the wheel, causing the car to briefly swerve into oncoming traffic before Benjy instinctively fixed the situation, reeled us back from the precipice of death as he always did: with hard-won accuracy, ill humor, and lingering anger at his little bro.

“I was just…” I said.

Benjy said, “You were what?”

Must have been how he’d felt all these years when I’d rejected his futile affections, turned a deaf ear on the warmth beneath his cold concerns. Because truth is he could understand my predicament about as much as I understood his. We’d grown jaded in the same house, under the same rules, betrayed by the same slutty dad. But our insides were opposites, DNA mysteriously unmatched, problems unexplainable. Our discordant fraternity got to the root of the real human problem: the inability to express headspace content to one another, emerge empathetic, alleviated.

Not sure what upset him so—the fact of our immigration into Elm Condos? It was deeper than that. Maybe related to some Erin experience I didn’t understand, some force within the nature of relationships, and particularly his, that I would never understand, even if Benjy explained it in detail, shed public tears, recounted with stunning verisimilitude the exact words, gestures, and feelings they’d exchanged.

Then Benjy surprised me.

“You got any pot?”

“Since when do you smoke pot?”

“I don’t. But these things can be pretty unbearable sober.”

“I’ve been trying to tell you that for years.”

“You were right,” he said, like an admission of lifelong failure to attack the problem correctly. As if now he suddenly saw that we were the same, hopeless. That the only solution was to get high, giggle. Only solution: give up. Wanted to shout no, beg him to take it back, to restore confidence to the one person in my life who’d ever done anything right, the one person who gave me hope about myself, gave me someone to aspire to in my own way—less dickish than Benjy, but equally amour-skilled, equally esteemed in society’s eyes (our mother’s eyes, our father’s eyes). Felt like pleading, “I’m the one that’s wrong, I’m the fuckup in this family, no room for you, no space for two sniffling whiners—you keep rocking, let your momentum carry you over this spiky hurdle clear to the other side!”

Benjy looked at the clock, back at the road.

“We’re late.”

Stopped at Exxon to pee. Stood in line five minutes, got impatient, trekked back to the car with coffee.

“Not quite weed,” I said. “But caffeine is still a drug.”

A few minutes later, out of nowhere, Benjy asked if I’d ever fucked a woman.

“Yes. Just yesterday, in fact.”

Benjy scratched an imaginary goatee, adjusted the rearview, the heat, scratched his arm, touched his turn signal.

“You’ve never fucked a woman,” he said. “I can tell.”

He and Kahn sensed things about my sexual history that even I wasn’t aware of. They called me out, understood my pitiful past, my current wants.

“I’ve actually fucked two pretty recently. You’ll never believe who the last one was…”

“I’m not talking about making love,” Benjy said. “Not that weak sauce.”

“Weak sauce?”

“Everyone and their mother’s made love.”

“Even our mother?”

“Our mother makes love all the time.”

“Really?”

“It’s so obvious. We’ve seen it in movies. Imitated. That doesn’t count. Love is easy. Love is the default position.”

“Not that easy…”

“I mean really fucked a woman. Capital F.”

“As opposed to the other kind of fucking?”

Benjy couldn’t hear. Like Kahn, he was in monologue mode, intent only on getting the words in line and out his mouth.

“Really slammed her. Violently. Bitten her. Sucked her blood.”

“Brother, are you trying to tell me you’re a vampire? Because that would be too much.”

“What I mean is sex in which all your anger comes out, and after, you feel calm. But not during. You feel like a teapot that’s been sweating on low heat for hours and now, suddenly, you’ve come to boil.”

“Good metaphor, English major.”

“Smoke is coming out of you. You’re screaming. She’s just taking it, taking it. Taking it and screaming too. Not your name. Not out of pleasure. Just screaming for the goddamn hell of it. Because she can. Because human beings have bodies and are able to scream and can make these incredible noises if they really want to. Maybe because it hurts, too, hurts but also feels good, hurts because it’s life, and real, and you can feel it.”

“I guess not,” I said. “Definitely haven’t fucked.”

“Then you don’t know what I’m talking about.”

“Shit, dude,” I said. “Fuckin’ A, man,” I added, meaning, “I’m alone, you’re alone.”

Passed pastures that weren’t golf courses: real America. Trees bare, leaves everywhere.

“You brought the apple cake?” Benjy said.

“Forgot.”

Turned up the radio. Benjy turned it down, off, back on again.

“Erin’s room’s my old room,” he said.

Note About Architecture:

Men in the living room, though the area so spacious, the crowd so mesmerized by football on the 58-inch Panasonic HD plasma, that neither “living” nor “room” accurately described the situation. Women in the kitchen. Benjy and I sat with the men, even though I wanted to check out the food.

The men: Dad, Uncle Sal, Pam’s two brothers, Steve and Doug. Steve and Doug were jocks with firm handshakes, knuckles like large marbles. Co-owned a store that sold men’s big and tall suits, had one of those stupid local TV spots where they’d get an ex-Celtic to say the suits are a “real score!” The jingle: “Steve and Doug, big and tall, come see them in the Natick Mall… You’ll have a ball!”

Steve and Doug thought they were hot shit, decked out in matching gray double-breasted suits that accentuated the width of their shoulders and the fact that they didn’t have necks. First thing Steve did upon shaking my hand was pat me on the stomach, tell me I was ready for a big and tall. Come in for a measuring.

Dad asked if we wanted anything from the kitchen.

“I’ll take a beer,” I said.

Steve smacked me on the stomach again. Doug laughed. Pam came back with apps, beers, said, “Hi, Eli.”

Put the tray down, kissed my cheek, winked, tried for my affection, which I somehow couldn’t give, though I wanted to, knew she was kind, innocent, a real person who also happened to be married to my father.

Watched the game. Sal sat silent. He’d been a commie, lone employee of
Journal Rouge
. Then his daughter Julie was killed on 9/11. She’d become a stockbroker to rebel against her hippie parents, taken a job at the World Trade: the ultimate fuck-you to Uncle Sal. Aunt Erica left Sal shortly after Julie was killed, because a marriage can rarely survive the life of a child, let alone the death of one. Sal retired the newsletter. He now approved of Bush’s war on terror.

These days Sal didn’t do much of anything. My father supported him financially. He sat with his head in the newspaper; couldn’t look at the house’s interior, a paean to materialism, paid for by the same capitalist blood money he now accepted and I had been severed from.

My uncle Ned had been the star of earlier Thanksgivings. My coconspirator, telling me stories about taking peyote with Indians in Arizona, smoking hash with Indians in India. Sometimes brought lady friends, called them “lady friends.” Gave me a
Playboy
for my bar mitzvah. Then he got diagnosed, started dying. I biked to his house every Thursday to watch Discovery Channel.

Didn’t go to the funeral. Too much of a pussy—afraid of coffins, crying, not crying, bodies buried under dirt for eternity. Everyone said it was so nice, Ned would have liked it, etc. Dad came back to the house for the first time since he’d left. Hung around for a bit eating lox, looking at Mom, nothing he could do, though he could have held her,
kissed her, made coffee, made love
(The Sharp Points of a Flower
, Dreamworks, 2002), and maybe he did when no one else was around.

Did go to Julie’s funeral, though I hadn’t really known her, and she’d locked me in a closet when I was five. Drove out to Albany a week after the towers came down. When a plane flew overhead thought I could see all the cars veer a tiny bit, drivers’ eyes following the flight pattern.

At the funeral Benjy whispered she’d flashed him a tit once at Passover. Couldn’t help imagining her tits even though she was my cousin, dead. Crowd was filled with old lefties who knew less of what to make of 9/11 than I did, but one thing was clear: death is the same in all forms. Cancer, terrorists, suicide, etc.—dead remain dead, grieving remain grieving.

Doorbell rang.

“Who else is…” I started to whisper to Benjy, stopped short when I heard that voice, ringing like a siren.

“Pamela Weiss-Schwartz,” Mrs. Sacks said. “Look at you.”

Pam led the Sackses into the living room, all three. Had no idea they’d been invited. But Dad and Mark were poker buds, old pals, the kind of new-money Jews who posed on sailboats and coughed cigar smoke just to prove that in post-ethnic America, everyone had the right to act like a WASP. Plus Pam and Mrs. S. were pals, shared a personal trainer with titty-pecs and garish tats that they could gawk over together on girls’ night.

Mark more imposing than ever in an adroitly tailored Steve and Doug big and tall. Grinned like a guy who’d spent a summer at sex camp, called my father “big guy,” ruffled his hair. In a swift motion, he scooped a pig in a blanket with one hand, held out the other for high-fives.

“Score?”

“Pats up twenty-one seven,” Doug said.

“Shit,” Mark said. “I got fifty bucks on Dallas to cover.”

“You bet against the Pats?” Dad said.

“Gotta go where the money is, my friend. No way the Cowboys aren’t coming within ten in Dallas on Thanksgiving Day.”

“Smart man,” Steve said, high-fiving Mark for the second time in a minute.

“Beer me,” Mark said to Dad, who looked at Pam, who went to get Mark a beer.

Table could have accommodated twice as many. Dad sat at the head. Mark at the other end between Doug’s wife Kathleen and Steve’s wife Judy.

The twins, Paul and Cole (named after Pam’s favorite singer, Paula Cole), were alone at the kids’ table, no doubt preparing to crawl under the grown-ups’ table, tie everyone’s shoelaces together. Beautiful children in a way Benjy and I had never been. We’d been handsome, adorable even: dark curls, pudgy cheeks. But they were gentile beautiful: blond, confident. As if the stork—confused by Dad’s Sudbury palace—had screwed up, dropped Aryan babies on the doorstep.

Went into the kitchen to check on the food. Pam poured wine from a bottle into a crystal chalice.

“Hi, Eli.”

“Anything I can do?”

“If you could take the sweet potatoes out of the oven and put them in a serving bowl that would be great.”

“No prob.”

Opened the oven. Sweet potatoes weren’t done. Secretly bumped the temp to 475, so they’d char on the outside how I liked them. Pam walked back with the wine.

I hit booze gold. Literally: full bottle of Goldschläger. Swigged.

Pam tapped her wineglass.

“I just wanted to say a few words about how nice it is to have everyone here, under one roof, in this house. All the people who are so important to us.”

“Cheers to Pam,” Steve said, raising his glass. “Now let’s get to the noshing.”

“Noshing means snacking,” Benjy said. “We already did that with the pigs in blankets.”

“Whatever,” Steve said.

“Let Pam talk,” Dad said.

“The food will come in a minute,” Pam said. “But I just thought since it is, after all, Thanksgiving, that we could all go around and say one thing that we’re thankful for.”

“But we’re Jews,” Mark said. “We don’t do this sort of thing.”

“It does seem a bit goyish,” Judy added.

“I’ll start,” Dad said. “I’m thankful for my sweet wife and our two wonderful sons.”