“My fault?”
“I hate you!” he said. “It’s your fault Mom left!”
In the mirror on the wall behind him I saw rage on my face.
I said, “Why is it my fault your mother left?”
“Because you’re always telling us what to do,” he said, “telling Mom not to drink, telling me: ‘clean your room, type your reports, do the extra credit.’”
He was sitting on his bed. His curly hair hung over his eyes.
“What else is my fault?” I said.
“Everything,” he whispered. His shoulders shook. “I thought I was going to see Mom this weekend. She was supposed to take me to the track meet.”
I sat next to him on the bed, letting him cry. Bea had cancelled with Dante so often I’d forgotten it was her weekend. She’d promised she’d have Dante home by noon Sunday so we could spend most of Father’s Day together. Why did Dante have to be caught in the web of complexity she threaded with her lies?
“Traffic should be light on Sunday. What time do we have to leave in the morning?” I said.
I worked past midnight, until the sentences in the casebooks blurred. Then I climbed into bed and picked up one of three books on my end table: Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, or Fitzgerald’s The Crack Up.
Before I began drafting Shirley’s appeal, I’d pulled these volumes off the shelf, intending to read them late at night after my brain had reached its saturation point. I read a chapter in one book, then moved on to a chapter in one of the others, rotating randomly among them. The further along I got, the more I fell into a compulsion – alternating among the books after reading a paragraph or two, rather than a chapter. Within a few days I couldn’t tell which book I was reading. One night I dreamt I was Scott Fitzgerald driving an ambulance off the side of a bridge during the Spanish Civil War. The next, I was Robert Jordan building Addie Bundren’s coffin or Hemingway consoling Zelda in the sanatorium. In sleep, I became the authors of the books I was reading and their characters, but I was always the wrong person in the wrong place.
Sunday, Father’s Day, as Dante eased the Jeep onto Pacific Coast Highway, a soft-blue morning light skipped across the whitecaps of a slow rolling surf. Santa Ana winds had pushed the smog out to sea. A horizon showcased views of sparkling high-rises and snow-capped mountains.
In his Hollywood days Faulkner had described smog as a vague high soft nebulous California haze. How would he describe it today, the pollution oxidizing our lungs?
On the Santa Monica Freeway, between the ocean and downtown, Dante pointed. “Those sea gulls followed us from home,” he said, and we laughed. We each wore blue-and-gold UCLA Bruins baseball caps. He’d had his learner’s permit for three months, but it was still hard to believe he was already driving.
“You’re doing great,” I said. “Not drifting in the lane.” His shoulders relaxed.
As we approached the Harbor Freeway interchange, we saw the tower where my firm had its Los Angeles offices. The skyscraper rose from the earth like purgatory, a bridge to the heavens.
Three months earlier, as I walked toward my corner office, the nameplate on the door looked like the engraving on a tombstone. Bea had left that weekend. Friday afternoon I’d come home to a dark house, her closet empty. Then came the text, “Georges: I can’t take it anymore. So LONG. B.” I hadn’t been able to reach her on her cell or at her office. I still didn’t know where she was.
And then, in the car, an explosion of understanding burned down my spine, setting my gonads on fire. Son of a bitch. Cuckold son of a bitch.
“Ennis Paulson,” I said.
Dante glanced at me sideways. “What about him?”
“Did your mother go to Vegas with him?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“Did she say he was her boyfriend?”
“If you saw them together, you’d understand,” he said.
Bea’s client, Ennis Paulson. The night before I’d been so concerned with Shirley and Dante, I hadn’t seen what had been plainly in my field of view for a long time. The chinchilla farm in Nevada was one of the properties – a failed tax shelter sitting on land worth millions – Bea had persuaded a judge to award to Paulson during the dissolution of one of his partnerships.
I could see Paulson’s weasel face, feel his greasy palm as he shook my hand, telling me how lucky I was to be married to the beautiful and brilliant Bea Bohem, who’d won his high-stakes case. When he started calling her cell at unusual hours, I’d assumed he was an incurable workaholic. I’d dismissed the clues, but now the truth burned through me like the blue flame of an acetylene torch.
In the rearview, my firm’s high-rise receded. Beatrice wasn’t coming home. I slipped off my wedding band, feeling loss akin to death. I didn’t know what I was going to do. Figuring that out would have to wait.
“It’s great spending the day together,” I said to Dante.
“You can’t stay,” he said.
“Don’t you want me to see you run?”
“And if I lose? All you care about is winning,” he said.
“What gives you that idea?”
“All that pressure to get into a good college. I don’t care about college. I’m not going to college.”
“Were you going to ask your mother to stay?”
“That’s different. It doesn’t matter to her if I win or lose. She doesn’t ask about grades, doesn’t know I made varsity. I was going to surprise her.”
We drove on in silence, through a wasteland of strip malls and fast-food franchises. When we got to the Pomona College off-ramp, I reached over to squeeze his shoulder; he shrugged away.
A sudden gust rocked the Jeep. The Santa Ana winds were picking up.
Signs at the entrance to the parking lot near the stadium said: Lot Full. I was wondering where we’d park when Dante pulled onto the shoulder of the road.
“Bye, Dad,” he said. “Thanks for the lift.”
“Hold on,” I said.
“I’m going to be late.”
“I want to talk,” I said. “It’s Father’s Day.” There was so much I wanted to say, but I couldn’t find the words. We sat at the foot of the mountains that had glowed with promise when we’d passed through Santa Monica an hour earlier. Now the effluvium was so thick I could barely see them. My throat was raw; my eyes stung. I squinted to see other parents wearing shorts, T-shirts, hats, and sunglasses, carrying wicker picnic baskets and red-and-white Igloo coolers.
He handed me a Father’s Day card. He said nothing, staring straight ahead as if wearing blinders.
“I’ll talk to your mother,” I said, “ask her to take you to your next meet.”
“I’ll ask her myself,” he said, grabbing his gym bag. Then he was running, dodging through the crowd, headed for the field.
I thought about finding a place to park, then sneaking into the bleachers. If Dante saw me, he’d be angry. If I stayed, I’d have less time to finish the brief. My heart was a pendulum, vacillating between the possibilities until I turned the Jeep around and headed back to Malibu.
Traffic in both directions on the Santa Monica Freeway moved like tortoises. I checked the dashboard clock and thought of Dante running his race. What I couldn’t see I imagined. I imagined him winning; I imagined him losing. I imagined congratulating him; I imagined consoling him. Would he accept either? I was at a standstill and my son was running as fast as he could.
The westbound vehicles came to a halt. I put the Jeep in park and felt that odd sensation that comes over me when stuck in traffic. Instead of speeding along on its way to wherever it needs to be, my body – the heart pumping blood, the muscles in my shoulders contracting, the side of my head throbbing – sits there: a time-bomb of expectation. I wasn’t where I wanted to be. I wasn’t where I was. I was nowhere.
I turned on the radio. Bob Seger was singing he wished he didn’t know now what he didn’t know then, and I visualized Shirley gasping for each breath. One day soon she
wouldn’t have enough lung tissue to absorb oxygen, and she’d suffer death by suffocation unless, mercifully, the morphine took her first. I was her hope for justice, and her brief had to be filed in about thirty hours. Then Janis Joplin was singing “Down on Me.” I hadn’t heard one song end or the other begin.
I slumped in my seat, pierced by sunlight magnified by the windshield glass. What was I fighting? Everything. I was fighting where I was, who I was, where I was going. I’ll be here now, I thought. I’ll be here, not moving, going nowhere in gridlock on the Santa Monica Freeway. My heartbeat slowed, my muscles relaxed, and my mind, which had been working hard to be elsewhere, focused on where I was, alongside accumulated debris piled against the concrete barrier: a pair of torn trousers, a doll without a head, and a single sneaker that had lost its laces. The shoe had been run over until it was tire-black.
I got out of the Jeep to get a better look. How did these things get there? Did they just fly out of cars? Fall off the back of a truck? Did someone throw them? Was the head of the doll in a station wagon in Pico Rivera? Pacoima? Pasadena? The discarded items took on a life of their own, as if they were a collection of Duchamp’s found objects.
I picked up the shoe. It was just a running shoe, but I held it tenderly, examining it in one hand and then turning it over to examine it in the other. I felt every wound as car after car had run over it, crushing its beauty, rending it into a vague semblance of charcoal canvas.
The guy in the car behind me honked his horn. Traffic was inching forward. I made my way back to the Jeep still holding the shoe.
Tires screeched. A Highway Patrol car – its emergency lights flashing – barreled down the service lane, engulfing me in a vortex of dust that whipped behind the cruiser like a comet’s tail.
I was going to toss the shoe back but changed my mind. When I got back in the car, I laid it on the front passenger seat, put the Jeep in drive, and resumed the tortuous odyssey home.
The Tallis
Cars and trucks inched along bumper to bumper on the Santa Monica Freeway. Our minivan, black, just a year old, lurched, stopped, and then did it again like a toddler learning to walk. My hands trembled, my whole body quaked, my heart raced. I was numb to my core. Overwhelmed by grief, guilt, and an unmistakable and unshakable awareness of irony, I was virtually helpless. It was Father’s Day and we were going to be late for the unveiling of Steven’s headstone. But my wife, Nettie, sitting beside me was calm.
She was embroidering a tallis for Steven. She’d begun working on it soon after sitting shiva. These days she rarely spoke to me, as if conversation would interrupt her concentration. The balls of silk, the embroidery needles, the tallis were always in her hands. She didn’t take it to bed. She didn’t have to. It was her reason for staying up until it was too late to make love.
Nettie had cut the tallis from the finest white silk cloth. She’d knitted and then sewn on fringes. Above the fringes with blue thread she’d embroidered the Twenty-Third Psalm in Hebrew. And she’d sewn Stars of David on the tallis where they would have lain over the suit collar of a thirteen-year-old boy. I suppose they were there to bestow blessings, prayers passed from mother to son, protection in death from harm she couldn’t shield him from in life.
The tallis was soft as a baby’s breath she would say.
There was something special about the fringes. They didn’t just fall from the ends like afterthoughts— they had an energy of their own, bounce, zeal.
She was forever perfecting it, taking out stitches, putting in new ones, and now I understood that it wouldn’t be finished until we reached the cemetery. Steven would have been a bar mitzvah this year. Today, Nettie was going to lay the tallis on his grave.
A year ago, there was an accident on the San Diego Freeway. We were going 45 or 50 and I was driving, taking Steven and four of his friends home from soccer practice. The boys were rowdy, nothing out of the ordinary, but I’d had a rough day and had left fires burning at the store when Nettie had called to say she couldn’t pick them up. When they didn’t calm down after I’d told them twice to stop cutting up, I yelled, “God damn it.”
Four or five car lengths ahead a crate fell from a truck. Tumbling and splintering it crashed into us. A steel rod hurtled through the windshield, impaling my boy. No one else was seriously hurt.
Before the impact I hadn’t taken my eyes off the road. Yet if I’d been more focused, paying closer attention, thinking more about driving than problems at the store, if I hadn’t cursed, I could have avoided the collision.
It wasn’t my fault according to the Highway Patrol, according to our attorney. The truck driver was cited and his employer’s insurance company paid the policy limits. Still I blame myself.
Nettie never said it was my fault. She didn’t have to. The tallis said it all.
Traffic eastbound and westbound gridlocked. The towers of Century City loomed through the smog. Litter was scattered along the center divider: discarded clothing reduced to rags, a skateboard without wheels, a bent bicycle wheel. And in the emergency lane, in front of a fire-engine-red Jeep, a man with a loose screw, wearing a UCLA Bruins baseball cap, was scavenging in the junk. He picked up a torn, blackened tennis shoe, then he held it up to the sky as if inspecting a jewel or an object of art.
The vehicles in his lane began to move, and still holding the shoe, he got back in the Jeep. A moment later, a highway patrol cruiser, siren blaring, sped down the westbound emergency lane right past where the man had stood only a moment before.
Then the cars ahead of us began to move, and I took an off ramp. The light was green, so I accelerated. Against the traffic light, a boy on a bicycle jumped the curb, popping a wheelie just a few yards in front of the minivan. I hit the brakes; the van fishtailed. We were going 35 when we hit the bike and just a moment before we did, the boy jumped off. The bike was crushed.
On the pavement, I held him. His shattered ulna and radius pierced his arm like prongs of a pitchfork. Blood pooled on the street, soaking the boy and drenching me too. He was bleeding to death.
Nettie got out of the Jeep calling 911. I cradled the boy, struggling with one hand to rip off my necktie.
A blue Prius stopped behind us. The driver got out of his car. He was at least six feet two, hair closely cropped, young, heavyset, black as ebony, wearing a white lab coat. He hurried over to us and said in a pronounced accent I couldn’t place, “I’m a doctor.” A name was embroidered in blue thread on the lab coat: Ras Demeke, MD. The face of an immigrant.
Nettie handed the tallis to the doctor. He took it from her, kissed the fringes, and then, kneeling, he used it to tighten a tourniquet around the boy’s upper arm. The bleeding stopped.
The doctor traced his fingers over the embroidered Hebrew letters.
“The Lord is my shepherd . . .” he said. “Gam ki elech be'gei tzalmavet, lo ira ra ki ata imadi,” he continued, in Hebrew. Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death.
A sound of sirens grew louder.
Nettie sat in the street and held me.
Dressed to Kill
It was the first anniversary of Jake’s death. In the morning he’d been standing on his front lawn reading the L.A. Times when a Chevy Suburban jumped the curb. Jake – his head shaved, his bearing military, his athleticism at 62 (we were evenly matched in tennis), in one of his elegant suits, a contrast to the earring he wore like a pirate, he said, to instill fear in his enemies – in perfect health during the last moment of his life, had no way to know he’d drawn his last breath. He was here, and then, in a heartbeat, he wasn’t.
The day before Jake was killed, we’d filed an amicus curiae brief in the Supreme Court supporting the Patient Protection Affordable Care Act, the Obama healthcare law. That evening we talked about it in my office, sitting on antique armchairs, a gift from Beatrice, my ex. Each chair was crowned with a carved cornice framing a cameo: one of the Queen, the other of her prince.
“That’s us,” Bea had said, “Victoria and Al
bert.”
Tempus fugit. Looking through the floor-to-ceiling windows in my office that were meant to provide views of Los Angeles, white sands from Malibu to Huntington Beach, the cliffs of Palos Verdes, Santa Catalina Island, and the sun sinking beneath the Pacific with a flash across the spectrum of light reflecting on the ocean, the last breath of day heralding the falling night, but all I could see was smog.
In one hour, in the Jacob Marley Memorial Conference Room on the next floor, I had a meeting to negotiate the terms of a multi-billion-dollar, multi-bank loan to finance the construction of a transnational undersea fiber-optic-cable network. I directed phone calls to voice mail and locked my office door.
I’d made a New Year’s resolution, still unfulfilled, to resume dating. There was no connection between Jake’s death and my subsequent self-imposed solitude, they were unrelated events occurring, coincidentally, with near simultaneity. To think otherwise would require psychological analysis, the words meaning literally, an examination of the soul, a province of faith, the work of theologians; for the rest of us, contemplation of this sort is likely to obscure reality and very unlikely to be worthwhile.
Once, early in our relationship, after we’d received a counter to a client’s offer, Jake had said, “Georges, what do you think they really want?”
“If we question their intentions, we’ll never close the deal because there are infinite possibilities.”
He settled into his chair, his elbows resting on its arms, the corresponding fingers of his right and left hands touching at their tips, forming the shape of a steeple. “How does a former graduate student of divinity,” he’d said, closing his hands with his fingers entwined, “become indifferent to allegory, immune to allusion, become a man who says he’s never met a stereotype or a cliché he didn’t like?”
The Speed of Life Page 14