Jacob's Ladder (12 page)

I"d originally chosen Los Angeles because it was near my brother but not in his pocket. I knew his wife wouldn"t countenance a close relationship, but I felt close enough, here on the West Coast, a few hundred miles away. Living there had always held the possibility, however remote, of our closing the gap between us and recapturing the bond we"d shared as children.

I"d loved him so much. Looked up to him. Laughed and cried with him. He"d taken more than one beating for me, and we"d taken on our dad together, united in our determination to protect our mom. I knew the vibrant yet invisible tie that bound us couldn"t be broken ever, not by time, not by distance, and not at the hands of a woman who didn"t approve of it.

I"d heard it in his voice, even as recently as the last time I"d called, when he"d waffled so completely about coming to get me. Daniel would be strong; he"d be a lion in his determination to take care of me if I asked it of him. He"d be torn to ribbons by it, but he"d be there for me if I only asked, and that was precisely why I never would.

Knowing was enough. It nurtured me in ways I would never be able to put into words. Like having a home to go to, even if I never did. The way Zeyde felt about Israel, choosing in the twilight years to make his way back to his spiritual beginnings, to spend his final days in contemplation and prayer on the same earth where the prophets walked.

For me, although I never told him, there was no real connection. I went because Zeyde was my safe place. I did my service for his country, protecting his homeland. I would have been perfectly at home wherever he chose to be.

I"d never really felt at home anywhere since. Until now maybe.

When I finally reached the SeaView, the little light in the office still glowed in that welcoming way motels have. I had a notion to say hello to Carl, maybe born of my longing for my grandfather. They were similar in the way they studied and teased me. They had a dry wit in common. Maybe it was meeting Carl that had made me dream of Zeyde. Whatever it was, I felt it here—that connection to home in this town that time forgot.

Muse had told me that no one could see St. Nacho"s if the place didn"t choose to allow it. Right then, in that brisk, chilly darkness, I believed she was right, and I felt absurdly grateful that for some reason St. Nacho"s had chosen me.

I was chuckling when I opened the door and walked into the office, trying to shake off my mood.

Carl sat behind the desktop computer, and he took his time looking up. “I"ll be with you in a minute.”

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Z. A. Maxfield

I smiled. I thought it possible he hadn"t planned a life running a motel in St.

Nacho"s, and every time he made a customer wait, it was a minor rebellion against fate. Hadn"t he said just that when I remarked that he must have liked it here to stay so long? He"d answered, “
Not exactly, no. But it didn’t let me go
.” How odd, in retrospect, because already I felt the town"s tentacles beginning to latch on to me.

Carl finally looked up from his work. “Hello, Yasha. Where are you headed so late? Nacho"s Bar?”

“I"ve just come from there actually.”

“Did you see JT? He"s often there, I think.”

Did I ever. I saw him, touched him, kissed him. Shit
. “Yes. He was there when I left. I imagine he"ll spend the evening with Linda.”

“Oh, Linda. She"s a nice girl. He"s quite a Romeo. He can never seem to date just one girl at a time.”

“A player.” I forced myself to smile. “He mentioned he"s in a Jewish singles"

group.”

“Yes. And the girls are fairly determined. I"m sure I don"t have to tell you!

They"re nothing like girls were when I was young. They"re like alien predators from the movies these days.”

“Well, I"m not—”

“I know. You"re not in the market for a girlfriend, but does that stop them?” I thought about the women I"d met in LA. “Not really, no. I can"t say that it"s a bad thing, though. For those who swing that way.” Carl laughed. “You want a beer? I have some in the fridge, and I doubt we"ll get any more traffic through here tonight.”

“Okay. Yeah, my buzz wore off on the walk home.” Carl took off his reading glasses and placed them in his shirt pocket. The act itself was like a sigh. As if when it was complete, he was technically off the clock.

His aging features relaxed, and he put a hand through hair that was still full and soft looking. Badly cut. He had on a button-down shirt and a pair of Dockers. Over that he wore a Fred Rogers sweater. He pulled up the part of the counter that lifted like a bridge, and allowed me back behind the desk, then led me into the office"s inner sanctum. It was a small room, jumbled with books and papers. It looked like the break room in a department store—calendar on the wall, a place for mail, and a time clock. There was a door at the back I thought must lead to a private exit.

“You punch a clock?” I said, surprised.

“Nah. That was in the old days. My father-in-law used to make my wife, Margaret, and her sister, Mary, clock in and out when they worked. At the time they were teenagers, and he thought he"d give them some of what he called „real business experience."”

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67

“I"m having a hard time picturing Jewish girls. Margaret maybe. But Margaret and Mary? I can only imagine nuns.”

“They were Irish Catholics. The girls went to a parochial school in a town just south of here. I can assure you, my Margaret had probably never dated a Jew before I came along. It didn"t go over real well with her folks.”

“What about yours?”

Carl opened the door to a dorm-sized refrigerator and pulled out two Coors bottles. He handed one to me, and I twisted off the cap. “Mine expected me to take over the farm with a nice Jewish girl. They weren"t happy either. What about your parents, Yasha? What did they expect?”

“I can"t really say. My father left when I was a kid, and my mom passed away pretty suddenly after I came back from Israel. I guess in the long run she expected me to bring home a girl and have a family.”

“Did she ever know that wasn"t in the cards?”

“Yes,” I answered, worried that the conversation would head—however obliquely—toward JT. “She wasn"t happy, but it wasn"t something I could change.”

“No, I don"t suppose so.” Carl took a long pull of his beer. “How old were you when you knew?”

“For sure? I think”—I tried to remember back—“maybe twelve?” Carl shook his head. “That"s got to be tough. I had a cousin… He never said, but we all thought maybe… It was harder back then; nobody ever said anything.”

“It"s never been easy. Even though the world is more open, people have expectations.”

“I didn"t mean that it was easy now. No. I can see… What about religion? Did you worry about that? Did it make you feel like a sinner?” I was starting to feel the beer in my toes, like a wave of warmth flooding beneath my skin, relaxing me. “I don"t know. We weren"t such great Jews. We went to Hebrew school and synagogue, and my brother and I celebrated our bar mitzvahs, but…” I fingered the label on my beer, scratching it off while I thought about what I wanted to say. “For me religion had more to do with family. We all looked to Zeyde.

If my zeyde said something was good, it was good. He didn"t keep kosher, and that was that. We ate bacon because he liked it. My mother tried a Christmas tree one year to see what it felt like, and we started having it every year because it was pretty. We took pictures with Santa Claus. We knew what real Jews did. We just weren"t that bothered by what we did that was different.”

“That"s interesting.” Carl nodded as if he understood. “I think it was like that for us too. Of course, there weren"t that many of us in town so our culture wasn"t exactly reinforced.”

I nodded. “I grew up in New York, and we were definitely the oddballs in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood. People were fairly strict, and they thought we ran wild to no good end. But when Zeyde got old, he wanted to make aliyah, and once we were in Israel, he grew more fundamental in his beliefs. He started talking 68

Z. A. Maxfield

about dietary laws and the ancestors. Maybe he was trying to live up to their standards because…” I trailed off. It was still hard for me to believe that my zeyde was gone.

“Because he was looking forward to joining them,” Carl finished for me.

“Yes.”

“JT worries about religion too much. We were never observant, and because my wife was Catholic, he wasn"t even really considered a Jew by Jewish law. He had to go through a formal conversion process. I don"t get that really, where that drive came from to belong. We didn"t go to synagogue. We never had a Passover seder. In fact, he often went to St. Ignatius for Mass with his grandmother. I don"t know where he gets his determination to study the Torah and join groups.”

“Some people have a more spiritual nature. I think it helps them. I don"t.”

“Me neither.” Carl grinned behind his beer before he put it to his lips and finished it off. He tossed it into the trash. “But JT"s been trying to get me to join one of the groups to meet ladies.”

I grinned. “Watch out. A guy like you: handsome, still young, a business owner.

It"ll be open season once the ladies get a load of you. Prepare yourself for the chicken-soup brigade.”

“There are a lot of ladies out there. I can see why JT hasn"t settled down.”
So can I
. “Well.” I put my beer bottle into the same bin where Carl had put his, and then I rose. “I have to get up early to bake pies. I"m helping Mary Catherine Jensen until Friday when—I hope—my brother comes to get me.”

“It"s been a pleasure. I hope you"ll stop by anytime you feel like it until you leave.”

“I will. Thank you.” I held out my hand, and he shook it warmly. “You remind me of my zeyde.”

Carl shook his head. “From what JT tells me, there"s a lot of that going around.”

I laughed. “I probably have him on my mind because…St. Nacho"s feels like home. That"s weird, huh?”

“Not really,” Carl said as he pulled up the counter, and I passed through. I opened the door, and he was right behind me to lock it when I left the office. He turned the sign from OPEN to CLOSED, which had a phone number to call if he was needed, then walked back behind the counter again.

I rounded the corner to head for my room and was unsurprised to see JT"s truck there. Some things you just know. I knew that Linda wanted a husband. I knew that Carl wanted someone to talk to. And when I approached JT"s attractive old Flareside truck—before he saw me coming—I saw him drumming his fingers impatiently on the steering wheel and I knew he wanted
me
.

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69

Chapter Ten

Sometimes I sit on a decision, maybe waiting for some kind of confirmation, maybe thinking things through. Sometimes I savor the anticipation of something fine, or I take a minute out to worry about remorse or regret. I stopped when I saw JT"s truck. I simply stopped and let time pass for a second or two as I allowed what I knew was about to happen wash over me. I put my hands in my pockets and felt for my motel key.

Was this what I wanted? A guy who needed to experiment? Someone who didn"t want me but sat in his car waiting for me just the same, beating time on the steering wheel because he was nervous as hell?

I could tell he was scared by the way those soft white hands stilled when he saw me, then gripped the wheel tight, until the knuckles looked pale against the rest of his skin in the dashboard light. It looked like it took a conscious effort for him to let go, as if he were dropping a lifeline and swimming into shark-infested waters.

Such drama.

The first time I had sex with a man, I was fifteen. It was wrong, and we both knew it. I remember exactly the way shadows played over his face beneath the light of the mercury vapor lamp in his church parking lot. I remember the feel of his skin, the pebbles of his nipples in the cold autumn air. I remember gooseflesh and whiskers and the deep and heady knowledge that he wanted me more than I wanted him. I made his hands shake and his breath come in gasps and groans.

Sometimes he uttered explosive grunts of pleasure as if he was helpless against me.

He despised my religion, and he deplored my nature—our nature—but I owned him.

Even so, he was gentle and careful and kind, and I liked him despite the fact that now, if I caught him with a kid brother or a younger cousin, I"d have to kill him. I don"t know where he is, and I don"t care. Maybe that"s not consistent, but maybe I"d swum with some sharks of my own.

I watched JT as he got out of the car, wringing his keys. I thought maybe I was his first man, and it scared him. It scared me too. While I stood with my hands in my pockets, the fast-moving clouds revealed the moon, and light limned JT"s face.

He wanted me, and he hated me for it. I was no stranger to those twins: desire and distaste. JT looked reckless enough to throw them both at me; plenty of men I knew had been beaten by one twin after they"d slept with its brother.

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I trusted—in that moment—the gentle hand I"d kissed in my worst, most vulnerable memory, and moved forward.

JT let out the breath he was holding.

When I passed him to open the door of my room, he slipped his hands around my waist and clasped just above my belt buckle. JT hadn"t come for a grope of the quick and raunchy variety. There was no grab for my balls or scrabble to get my zipper down. He twined his arms around me and held on, unaware that I could probably handle the situation better if I couldn"t feel his cheek pressed against my shoulder.

His breath sighed against my hair, and he finally said, “Hello,” with his lips pressed to my skin.

I thought then that JT was a man with no sense of self-preservation. His father owned the motel. He could see us from his office if he was looking out the window. JT"s family, his friends, his girlfriends—anyone—could drive by and see him clinging to me like a limpet. They"d see that remarkably unique truck outside my door from the street and the highway.

I ushered him into the room and closed the door behind us. The silence seemed complete. Neither of us dared to breathe. I think I cocked my head to the side, asking without words,
Are you certain
? He held his hands out to his sides, palms up.