The Anglophile (22 page)

“S
o here we are, ten Jews, in a German restaurant at Christmas time,” Dr. Zuckerman says in Rolf's of Third Avenue after a gulp of wine. “And we've almost got us a
minyan
around here.” In one half hour he's cracked as many corny jokes as a gagwriter on the rubber chicken circuit.

The line for seats is long. In the same week, both
Time Out New York
and the
New York Times
gushed about the impossible number of decorations at Rolf's at holiday time. It was my mother's idea to check the place out for a fun family meet-up. (Although she's implored me to use my noodle and not drop the setting in any report to Dot.)

On my direct left is Owen's sister, Wendy. She takes it upon herself to offer Summer an explanation of her father's weak witticism. “You might not know the word
minyan.
Ten Jewish men are needed for a proper prayer session.”

Summer smiles at her: “I know the word. My last name is Moskowitz.”

Dr. Zuckerman is entertained. “
Summer
Moskowitz?”

“Leave it alone,” Owen says to his father. “Don't mock her name.”

“Who's mocking? Did I just offend you, Summer?”

Gene spins the Lazy Susan toward his sister-in-law. “Your first name was originally Barbara, right?

Summer smiles. “It's okay, Dr. Zuckerman. I hear it all. People find my name change very political. I was reborn the day I chose my own name.”

Gene kicks me under the table. I know the code: he's unnerved by flakes, even if he's related to them.

I'm glad Summer is finally joining in on the conversation. She had her hands full before when Noah, my tiny niece with a boy's name, screamed louder than anyone could imagine a little baby could. At least screaming herself silly silenced her to sleep.

And now, with her granddaughter calmed, Mom can finally talk to Becky, Gene's newest interior designer girlfriend. Gene cracks his neck nervously as they speak. With the new baby, and my engagement, I'm guessing he feels left out of the mix. I wouldn't be surprised if another engagement comes soon. His year with Becky is a miracle unit of commitment.

“So I hear you're giving my son's place a fresh look again.”

Becky's smile is proud. “Donna, I have awesome plans for the place in Queens.”

“Yes?” Mom nods.

“I'm a movie buff and I was thinking of recreating the lunar look of the old
Star Treks.
”

Gene coughs uncomfortably. I like Becky, even if she borders on loopy. I know that if Kit could hear the newest Forest Hills bachelor pad game plan, he'd have something funny to say. I shush my thoughts.

Kit's absence has been a bitter pill to swallow, but I've swallowed it. Haven't I? Can't I once, in this setting, finally stop thinking of him? A marriage is no place for dwelling on lost opportunities.

After all, who wouldn't trade places with me? My brilliant author-historian fiancé can broach the weather and the Great Mongol Cavalry with equal aplomb. His family wealth insures a life of ease, and his religion of birth means no long lecturing from Aunt Dot.

Yes, late at night, I sometimes still search Kit's name on the Internet. But there are an infinite number of hits in all the variations: Christopher Brown, Christopher T. Brown, Chris Brown and Kit Brown. I open each page, just to be sure, searching the cyber universe as determinedly as a treasure diver hoping to catch sight of a Spanish-era relic glinting in a seabed impossibly tangled over with watery weeds.

I sigh inwardly. Yesterday, Google's images option had a new face for me to investigate. An English Christopher T. Brown no less. But this one had a salt-and-pepper beard, and sunken eyes and dark rings around his eyes. Not a chance that it was
my
Kit.

When I heard Owen opening the front door of the
new apartment we share, I closed out of my telltale screen with lightning speed.

“Working on your dissertation?”

My stomach burned with my lie. “Yeah.”

“Did you get any interviews?”

“I have one with a temp agency near Wall Street. For a legal proofreading job. Pays pretty well.”

Owen tried to be nice. “It should. Proofreading is skill intensive.”

When he was peeing, I raced to check my name, too, my other daily masochistic ritual. Perhaps there was an orbiting fuck-you in cyberspace. I'd take anything from Kit.

I've only ever found one—from Kevin on his Manga blog. Since I'd checked his Web site last, he'd posted a chapter of a Manga novel with a villainess named Shari Dee.

Dr. Zuckerman taps my hand. “Did my son tell you about his uncle Mort and where he has to sit?”

“Dad—” Wendy cries preemptively.

Dr. Zuckerman looks at her firmly. “This is your family. Let's bring it up now.”

“Mort is a handful,” Owen explains.

“He's been half-deaf since he was a little kid and poured ten peppercorns in his ear and had to be operated on.”

Owen laughs with a bit of goose in his mouth. “Have you been taking a continuing ed memoir class again?”

My mother turns to me. “So should we sit Mort near Eric?”

“I don't think you sit two half-deaf people next to each other,” says Gene. “It's not like they both like model building.”

Owen's father cuts in again. “Shari, you look a little tired, have you been taking the Levothroid every day?”

“Yes,” I lie.

“It's great to have a doctor in the family,” Mom says flirtatiously.

Dr. Zuckerman beams. “Well, with Owen's successful dissertation last year, you have two.”

There is notable silence from my blood relatives. When and if I will ever finish that Volapük dissertation is one big question mark.

 

Professor David Mitchell's glowing report on Kit's presentation was published two weeks after the Chicago conference in the online newsletter that
Journal for Constructed Language
subscribers all receive.

Dr. Cox called me in for a much-needed powwow the week after I returned from the U.K.

I brought in a vanity pressing of Scot Gaelic proverbs I bought for a buck off a bargain bin bookrack outside the Strand.

“Maybe I can switch my expertise to Scot Gaelic,” I said lamely.

“Nonsense. Stay with Volapük. You think no one can write about Shakespeare anymore? Every topic has a new angle if you think hard enough. Have you considered a dissertation addressing religious persecution as a reason the universal language was started? A Jew started Esperanto because he was sick of nationalism. You could explore the persecution of the Jew as it relates to Volapük…”

I have an appointment to see Dr. Cox on Monday, I
realize. I need to write that on a wall calendar somewhere, before I forget.

 

“Bread?” Gene says, and I'm back with the table.

The table next to us is done with their meal. The waiters sweep in for a fast turnover during the high season of this restaurant. The host in a Santa suit announces on the loudspeaker: “Lowenstein Party of Six, please. Benjamin Lowenstein party of six.”

The Christmas jingles resume with the first bells of “Santa Claus is Coming to Town.”

“So how long have you been a widower?” my mother says to Dr. Zuckerman. She has rarely been so forward.

“Fifteen years.”

She catches his eye with the empathy of a single parent who has suffered intense loss. “That's almost as long as my stretch.”

“Did you ever remarry?” Dr. Zuckerman says kindly.

She breathes. “The right man never came along.”

“Well, I remarried.”

“The wrong woman came along,” Wendy says after a sip of ice water.

“She sure did,” Owen says.

Dr. Zuckerman eyes them intently and refocuses on my mother. “It was a record-short marriage. Vicki was too young to understand how precious marriage was.”

“Twenty years his junior,” Wendy says with obvious distaste.

“Okay, Wendy, that's enough,” Dr. Zuckerman says piercingly. At the knowing looks from his two kids, he breaks down laughing. “Okay, she was a mistake.”

“Thank you,” Wendy says. “Finally.”

“Why was she so awful?” I ask.

“For one, she was an awful snob about Queens. It was beneath her to live in her husband's house. She kept pressing me to move into Manhattan.”

“A snob about Jamaica Estates?” Mom says. “Your part of Queens is extraordinary—leafy and lovely.”

Dr. Zuckerman glows. “Well, to tell you the truth,
you're lovely.
If I knew such an extraordinary and beautiful woman lived so close, I might never have gone out with her.”

Gene kicks me under the table again and I kick him back. Of course. Why hadn't the thought even crossed my mind before? Dr. Zuckerman is her quintessential type. Jewish. Funny. Warm.

“Anyone ever have the Starbucks maple scone?” Wendy asks out of the blue.

“What about it?” Owen asks his sister. “I eat that about once a week.”

It's true, he does,
thinks me, his fiancée.

“Perfection.”

“At Starbucks?” Alan doubts.

Wendy shrugs. “I know. I feel so guilty buying it.” She and Alan start a private conversation about capitalism I can only hear the odd word of. Now and then Alan stops to cherrypick the things he will actually eat in any given side salad, cucumbers and lettuce. Tomatoes, onions and peppers are strictly verboten to his precious palate.

“So what do you do for fun?” Gene says to Owen. “You fish?”

“Me? God no. Who has time to do that? I prefer my fish already dead and buttered.”

“I'm hyper-busy,” Gene says congenially, “but I find it relaxing. Maybe you can go with me some weekend.”

“Thanks, but I don't really have time for play, I have a book coming out.”

Gene can hardly hide his disdain as he sneaks a look at his expensive banker-on-the-rise watch. I wince. When I got back from my disastrous trip to England, Gene was eager to see if I could bring Kit over for a weeklong brown trout and fly-casting extravaganza. He'd gotten so giddy at the thought he'd already gone online and bought the three of us Buzz Off wide-brimmed hats from Orvis.com at fifty dollars a pop.

“So we need to decide, kids. Whose rabbi? What synagogue to go to? You like Rabbi Grossman, Owen?”

“Dad, can we do this later? This is just a family meet-and-greet.”

“You don't like Grossman?”

“He is a comedian, not a clergyman. Who brings up Bob and Ray sketches in a service?”

“A rabbi who knows his comedy, that's who. Bob and Ray are geniuses.”

My mother looks at Gene, who winks at her. My father lived for the old Bob and Ray sketches. He had every Bob and Ray record, and knew their routines backward. “Do you know
Matt Nuffer, Boy Spotwelder?
” she says to Dr. Zuckerman warmly.

Dr. Zuckerman scans her thin face. “You know
Matt Nuffer, Boy Spotwelder?
” He picks up my mother's hand. “By the way, Donna, I know a woman's family some
times pays for the wedding, but I have to let you know, we will pick up the full cost.”

Owen gapes at his dad. The current plan now is for the wedding to be paid for by him via a loan taken out against his trust fund, which will kick in when he's forty. We were never going to ask my mother for anything except her organizing skills that she's perfected as a secretary.

I'm sure Owen's surprise at his father's offer is genuine, and I am just as shocked. But I'm not feeling especially guilty about the bighearted proposal. Mom is ridiculously insisting that a bride's family should pay for a wedding and wants to cash in her retirement savings for her only daughter.

Yesterday I almost brought up eloping to Vegas on a supersaver fare to Owen as a way to remedy the conflict.

Owen insisted his sister would never talk to him again if we eloped. He said he'd talk to my mother and ensure her that in the long run he wouldn't even feel the wedding bills.

I shook my head in shame and said, “I can't imagine what it would be like to grow up with that kind of safety net underneath you, finance-wise—when Gene lost thirty-nine dollars out of his pocket once my mom reacted like he'd dropped thirty-nine hundred dollars.” Maybe Owen had repeated my reaction to his father.

Another astonishment: “I'll pay for my sister's wedding,” Gene says pointedly, proudly.

Now it's my turn to gape.

I suspect that even with Gene's portfolio in shipshape,
his net worth must be chickenfeed compared to Dr. Zuckerman's holdings. Owen briefly mentioned a summer spread in the Hamptons, and when my fiancé says the word spread, that worries me.

“Gene,” Dr. Zuckerman says adamantly, “we have a lot of cousins, and they would be very insulted if they were not invited.”

“How many is a lot?” Gene responds coolly.

“I have nine brothers and sisters. And my deceased wife had five, four of whom are still living.”

“And they have kids,” Wendy says.

His father takes a sip of red wine. “Defeats the law of averages. They all had girls. Owen is the only boy among thirteen girl cousins and a sister.”

Gene keeps a poker face, but he can't be too happy.

“Our Owen is the prince in our family,” Wendy says. “If any of them are left out, there'll be hell to pay.”

Prince Zuckerman smiles as he admonishes his father. “You're being amazingly generous, but we just got engaged this week. Give us a minute to plan things out. You're not the bride.”

“Eat your wienerschnitzel,” Dr. Zuckerman says to Gene congenially. “We'll duke it out later.”

“My dad's going to win out,” Wendy says. “When he says he'll pay, he'll pay.”

I smile as I eat another mouthful of trout. I really like Owen's father. He's a warm man, born into poverty but who advanced by sheer intellect (and continued luck with the stock market). I got the sense that big display of financial wealth was more about an assurance to my mom than a self-worth boosting brag.