When the Comets came upstage to bow, a skinny guy handed Hailey a bouquet of roses. She tossed them, one by one, into the audience.
During intermission, Aurora, Phoebe and Melody, wearing jeans and tank tops, claimed the seats in front of us. Aurora climbed into our row, hugged me. Then she put her arms around Ray and they kissed. He caressed one of her breasts. She laughed, pushed his hand away.
My disappointment must have been evident.
“Sit with Phoebe,” Aurora said.
Phoebe gave me an ugly look. “Roger told me you sucker-punched him.”
When Hailey arrived, she and the skinny guy embraced.
I said, “Who is he?”
Ray said, “That’s Angel. A frat brother. He’s okay.”
“Swell,” I said. “How old is he?”
Ray said, “He’s twenty-two.”
Angel’s arm was around Hailey’s waist; she was leaning into him.
“But Hailey’s sixteen,” I said.
Aurora said, “Everyone knows Hailey has a father complex.”
The lights dimmed. “JUST BACK FROM THEIR TOUR OF NEW ENGLAND, PLEASE WELCOME— GATHERS NO MOSS.”
A spotlight fell on a Keith Richards look-alike bent over his guitar. With a pick, he twanged a string causing a note to reverberate like machine-gun fire. The snares rolled, and a Mick Jagger look-alike pranced onto the stage, waving his arms above his head, swaying his skinny hips and torso, singing, “Gold Coast slave ship bound for cotton fields.”
Angel and Hailey bopped and rocked. Aurora and Ray kissed, grinding their hips. I tapped Phoebe on the shoulder, asking by gesture to trade seats. She looked at me disdainfully but climbed into my row and I climbed into hers.
Dancing, Melody grabbed my hand, but I just stood there, feeling like an idiot. Aurora offered me a joint. Ray had his hand in the waistband of her jeans. I took a cautious drag but coughed out the smoke.
Melody inhaled like a pro. Then, pressing her breasts against me, she covered my mouth with hers and exhaled. Shaking her head to the music, she tickled my face with her feathery hair.
After another mouth-to-mouth exchange of smoke, she shouted, “How do you feel?”
“Happy,” I said, stifling a titter.
Mick Jagger’s look-alike sang the final lyrics of “Brown Sugar,” dancing and waving. “Hello, Miami,” he said in a hilarious imitation of a British accent. I lost it, laughing.
Melody, pointing at me, laughed too. That made me laugh harder. Ray, Aurora, and Phoebe laughed. Then the Mick Jagger look-alike laughed, and I stopped laughing.
“What’s funny?” I said.
“That’s what we’re wondering,” Aurora said. I cracked up again.
When the lights went up, I didn’t remember where I was. I looked for Hailey, but she was gone.
“I’ll take you home,” Ray said.
In the parking lot, Melody, Phoebe, Aurora and I got into Ray’s VW Day-Glo-painted minibus. He drove us to the airport, parked on a side street.
In a field of wildflowers, we lay side by side and smoked another joint. Airplanes roared so close overhead I could read the instructions to the mechanics stenciled on the undercarriages of the fuselages.
Ray rolled on top of Aurora, his hips glued to hers, her mouth glued to his. Melody and Phoebe were talking about something they must have thought was amusing.
I stood up, intending to leave, but someone pressed her breasts against my back and put her arms around me.
I turned around. It was Hailey.
She kissed me, rubbed her nose on my earlobe. “Close your eyes,” she said.
When I did, she slid her tongue into my mouth.
I said, “What are you doing?”
“Making out with you,” she said.
A rush of heavy air – a jet, descending as if floating, its thunderous roar creating a silence of its own – crushed her against me. When its wheels screeched on the runway, I said, “Where’s Angel?”
“I fired him.” She slipped one hand under my T-shirt, running her fingers over my chest. Her other hand fingered my belt. She tried to kiss me again.
“We can’t,” I said. “You’re Bruce’s sister.”
“Not anymore,” she said. “When I was Bruce’s sister, you never noticed me.”
She pulled me to the ground, lay beside me, opened her mouth, kissed me and rhythmically moved against me. My erection rubbed against her and she pulled me even closer. “Don’t stop,” she said. “Do you know how long I’ve wanted this?”
“How long?”
“Forever,” she said.
We embraced beneath a sky of sparkling diamonds, crowded with planes clustered like galaxies in a constellation. Shockwaves of wind and sound, like currents of electricity, ran between us.
I said, “Forever?”
“Forever,” she said, holding me close, then saying between kisses again and again, “Forever. Forever. Forever.”
Aphelion
Phoebe toyed with her fork, sculpting her uneaten salad into a moonscape. If she’d been her usual self, she would have been kvetching about recidivism or soapboxing for transgender equality or going on and on and on about one of her daughters or the other – the Itzhak Perlman or the Albert Einstein. I chattered about global warming and the revolting political climate, trying to draw her out, but nothing was working.
Lunchtime we often met under the canopy of a banyan tree near the tennis courts where we frequently played in Douglas Park, about a half mile from Coral Gables Hospital, where she was the CFO, and just under a mile from Gables High, where I taught twelfth-grade English. But the wet heat of the South Florida day had driven us indoors. We were sitting in a booth at Highway 61, a “make love, not war” tribute luncheonette. That’s what I called the place because of its décor and the playlist on the jukebox. The posters on the walls had a ’60’s theme that made the current events of those times seem as if they were today’s news: Soviet tanks in Prague, Joan Baez at Woodstock, the Chicago Seven on trial, Martin Luther King Jr. at the Lincoln Memorial, and Vietnamese civilians hanging on to a helicopter lifting off the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. My father had said of this image that it captured our national shame, the United States lacking the backbone to stanch the spread of communism.
The jukebox had twice played “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” and was playing it again. Somebody, in bad taste or as a bad joke, had queued the song to play repeatedly.
I glanced at my watch. Fifth period began in twenty-two minutes. If I walked briskly, I’d make it to my classroom in fifteen. It was time to cut to the mustard. I freshened my lipstick and said, “Shall we go?”
Our server poured steaming coffee into our partially filled cups as Phoebe pushed her salad aside and said, “I told Manny to move out.”
My cell phone rang, but I ignored it.
I said, “I’ve been trying to get Al to move out for twenty years, what with the wet towels on the bathroom floor, clipping his toenails in bed. The man thinks peeing is like horseshoes?”
She scrunched her nose. “Hailey, that’s gross—.”
“And remembering to put down the toilet seat? Forget it. Lately, I’ve been hinting he should go to Schenectady—”
“Hailey!” she said, “stop. I’m not joking.”
Phoebe and Manny? No way. They were an institution, a monument to marriage.
She was one of my two best girlfriends. We’d known each other since elementary school. Why hadn’t I seen this coming? I reached across the table, took her hand, felt heat rising beneath my collar, up my neck. “Who’s he schtupping?”
“God, I hope it’s someone,” she said, “because if he is, she sure ain’t me.” She put her eyeglasses on the table, dabbed her eyes with a tissue. “He looks at TV the way he used to look at me, and he looks at me as if I were the furniture.” She sipped her coffee. “That’s when he bothers to look at me, when he isn’t looking at his smartphone.”
“Typical husband behavior,�
�� I said. “Have you suggested counseling?”
“Why are you leaving Al?”
“I said Schenectady, not Siberia.”
“A woman doesn’t joke about such a thing.”
“So now you’re Anna Freud? Let me tell you, Al’s as good as they come. Why not spice up the conjugal bed?” I said.
She held her coffee cup in both hands, turning it as if molding clay on a potter’s wheel. “It’s over between me and Manny.” She looked away, drumming her fingers on the table, keeping time with Dylan’s song. “I’m seeing someone,” she said. “We’re in love.”
Cold coffee washed over my tongue in bitter waves.
She leaned her head against the back of the booth and closed her eyes. “It’s Roger Knox.”
A name I hadn’t heard in a lifetime.
Outside the air-conditioned comfort of Highway 61, the air was inordinately humid, the sky a gradation of blues streaked with pink and orange clouds, white oleander in bloom, coconut palm fronds hanging limp in the absence of a breeze.
When we hugged goodbye, I was thinking about Al. He was Gibraltar: a board member of our synagogue, a bank president, a man who brought home a handsome paycheck, a handsome husband who came home sober. A husband who would never cheat— on his wife, on his taxes, in business. He was a decorated military hero. A better father for my boy I couldn’t ask for.
As I hurried up the street, wishing I’d worn running shoes, thinking I could make it on time, my cell phone rang again. I grabbed it without breaking stride. The caller ID said: ma. I threw it back in my purse and quickened my pace. It rang again. I was breathing deeply; my blouse clung to my chest and back, but the exercise felt good. I was almost jogging when I answered the phone. “Ma, I’m late. I’ll call you.”
She was crying.
“Ma?” I came to a standstill at a crosswalk across the street from the school. “Ma?” I said again. A crush of students rushed passed me. “Melvin—” was all she could say.
“He’s in his classroom,” I said. “I saw him when I left for lunch. Call him.”
Her voice was soft. “He’s— dead. My Melvin. He’s dead.”
I’d been worrying about Ma. She was becoming more and more forgetful, sometimes disoriented, momentarily not knowing where she was. I’d urged Dad not to let her drive, to take her to her doctor for testing: for dementia, for Alzheimer’s, to find out what was going on. But Dad was in denial, assuring me that nothing was amiss, that Mom was herself, everything was fine. Bruce had promised that he’d be home soon to help me with the situation.
“No Ma, he’s not,” I said. “I’ll see him in a few minutes and tell him to call you.”
“He came home twenty minutes ago.” She was struggling for words. “He’s on the sofa. He’s dead. Call Bruce. Come home. Hailey, please come home.”
“I’m coming,” I said. “I’ll bring Dad with me.”
Now I was running. But I managed to call Dad on the way. There was no answer.
The bell rang just moments after I reached my classroom. I gave my students a ten-minute writing assignment and told them I was going to my father’s classroom and would be back in five minutes.
In Dad’s classroom, his students were restless, fidgeting in their seats. I called Dad’s cell again.
Ma answered. “Hailey, should I call the police or wait for you?”
I called the principal’s office, then walked slowly to my car. Every breath was distinct. The flora I’d loved since childhood – hibiscus, palmettos – seemed to be returning that love. I visualized the faces of the passengers in the jets soaring overhead. A man about my father’s age was teaching a boy to ride a bike. My hands shook. I wanted to call Dad yet again, to break through, finally to reach him, tell him about this outrageous mistake, share a laugh. But it was Bruce whom I called.
I couldn’t reach him on his cell, so I called him at the air base in Pensacola where he was stationed. I had to move up a chain of command, but it wasn’t long before I reached a senior officer who said he reported directly to Bruce and could deliver a message. I heard my voice, strained and formal, as if someone else were talking.
“Thank you, Captain Adler. It’s Hailey Rosen, Admiral Levine’s sister. Our father— our father has— Can you reach Admiral Levine for me, please?”
Moments later, Bruce was on the line. “Hailey?” he said. “Hailey? What happened? Is Dad okay?”
More than a hundred people gathered at the cemetery. Tears and mascara congealed beneath Ma’s eyes. She held the flag – folded like a napkin in a neat triangle – that moments before had draped the coffin.
Phoebe stood between Manny and Aurora. Manny touched Phoebe’s arm. She brushed his hand aside. Her rigid bearing reminded me of the way Dad stood when he was angry.
I thought of the year he wouldn’t speak to me, the year I’d lived in California with Georges, and I whispered in Ma’s ear, “Did anyone tell Georges about Dad?”
“Georges who?” she said.
Georges who? I thought, asking myself the same question. Georges Who? As if that were his name: Georges Who.
She put her arm through mine. “Georges Bohem?” she said. “Is that who?”
After high school, Georges was going to UCLA, and I was going to Gainesville. One night, about a week before he was to leave, we were making out and then I pushed him away.
“We might as well break up now,” I said. “I’m moving back to Coral Gables after college and you’ll probably fall in love with California.”
He kissed my neck, brushed his fingers over the front of my blouse and whispered, “Perihelion,” as if the word would seduce me. But it had the opposite effect.
“Coral Gables is my perihelion,” he said, “and you’re my sun.”
“Peri what?”
“Perihelion. The point in the orbit of a comet or a planet—”
I caught his hand on my thigh. “The point what?”
“The point when it’s nearest the sun,” he said. “Los Angeles is my aphelion.”
I tried suppressing the memory. It was disrespectful thinking of Georges at Dad’s funeral.
Al and I would never have had that conversation because Al never met a metaphor he understood. What I didn’t want and didn’t get with Al was subtext. Dad and Georges had provided me with enough complexity to last a lifetime. Georges could have put everything in perspective, but I hadn’t heard from him in decades.
“It would have made your father happy if Georges were here,” Ma said. She must have seen confusion on my grieving face. “Sometimes,” she said, “we become the angriest with those we love the most.”
Had Dad changed his mind about Georges? Al took my arm, and following my mother, Bruce and his family, and followed by our son we led a line of mourners, who tossed earth on the coffin, saying good-bye to my father.
After the funeral I felt more crowded in my parents’ home than I had in Times Square on New Year’s Eve. In The Great Gatsby, Jordan Baker confides to Nick Carraway, “I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties, there isn’t any privacy.”
I felt no intimacy. The press of bodies, the clamor of conversation, the onslaught of friends and strangers deprived me of what I needed most.
Al and I huddled.
“Jacob’s suffering texting withdrawal,” I said.
“Good,” he said. “He spends too much time in hyperspace.”
“Cyberspace,” I said. “He’s got homework.”
“It’s Sunday afternoon.”
“Al, I need space.”
Crossing the threshold of Dad’s study was like traversing a time warp. Tchotchkes and memorabilia were neatly arranged. The high school-baseball décor – mounted bats and balls, newspaper clippings and photos of his teams – hadn’t changed. But there were more bookshelves. The library was still devoted primarily to science and sports. And although Dad had said there was no way to compare the experience of combat with reading about it, he’d read a wide array of books abou
t war. So I wasn’t surprised to see several shelves marked “Vietnam.” I was surprised to see books authored by Ellsberg, McNamara, Kovic, and Kerry: cold warriors who’d later opposed the war. I took several volumes off the shelves and thumbed through them. “Damn it,” I said, remembering the times he’d grounded me for protesting.
A framed photograph of one of his championship teams hung on the wall above his desk. In the front row the smaller boys crouched on their right knees in a semicircle. The coaches and taller players stood behind them where Dad stood with an arm around Bruce, the other around Georges.
I didn’t hear Phoebe and Aurora when they came in.
“Old stuff coming up today,” Aurora said, slipping an arm around my waist and staring at the photo with me. “Al said you and your mom talked about Georges at the cemetery.”
“It was nothing,” I said, sinking into Dad’s desk chair.
Phoebe had a bottle of wine and three glasses. She poured a glass for each of us. Then she said, “Why were you thinking about Georges?”
I didn’t answer her right away, just sipped the wine. Then we each had another glass, polishing off the bottle. When I swirled the few remaining drops of wine over dregs of sediment, I said, “In the cemetery, I remembered a promise I’d made to Georges.”
“What promise?” Aurora said.
“It doesn’t matter anymore.”
Phoebe browsed through the books on the shelves, Aurora picked up McNamara’s memoir, and I read Dad’s copious marginalia in The Pentagon Papers. As if in a dream, I said, “There’s something I never told you. When I was a junior in college, I had a fight with Dad.” I shut my eyes, the memory washing over the levee that had kept it at bay.
I’d been asleep at dawn on a Sunday morning when the doorbell rang, though at first I didn’t recognize the sound. I pulled a pillow over my head, hoping it would stop. It didn’t. So I got out of bed and slipped into a pair of sweats, intending to give the schmuck ringing the bell a swift kick in his privates.
The Speed of Life Page 11