A Night at the Operation

by JEFFREY COHEN

  Sophie noticed me walking in and waved at me as she finished selling some popcorn to a little boy who immediately dropped large portions of it on the carpet as he walked back to the auditorium. “Elliot!” she shouted, and beckoned me over. I walked to the snack bar.

  “What’s up?”

  “I got my SAT scores, and guess what I got!” Sophie grinned.

  “Let me think.” I made a show of looking serious, and put my hand to my forehead. “Twenty-two sixty.”

  Her face fell, and I immediately felt bad about it. “You heard,” Sophie said.

  “I’m sorry. Yes, I heard when your parents were here. That’s really great, Sophie. I’m proud of you.”

  She let slip from one side of her mouth, “So am I.”

  “Congratulations, Sophie. I mean it. I hope you get into every college in the world, and pick the one you want most.”

  I patted her on the shoulder—Sophie and I haven’t reached the kiss-on-the-cheek level of familiarity yet, but we’re ahead of a handshake, for sure—and turned to head back to my office, the converted broom closet I was considering giving back to the brooms for all the good it was doing me.

  “Are you kidding?” Sophie said. Her tone made me turn back around and face her. “Do you know what I have left to do? I haven’t even started applying to schools yet, and I have to write an essay, and get letters of recommendation . . .”

  “I’ll be happy to write you one, Sophie,” I said, smiling.

  “No, I mean from, like, people who’ll impress them,” she said.

  I nodded and turned away. I knew what she meant. She wasn’t trying to insult me. Not really. I hoped she hadn’t seen the tiny hurt on my face.

  “Elliot!” Sophie called again. Maybe she had seen it.

  “Sophie, don’t worry about—” I turned back to face her and made a point of smiling warmly.

  “Your mother’s here,” she said, pointing at the office door.

  And I’d thought the day couldn’t get worse.

  5

  “WHERE is she?” my mother wailed. “Where’s my Sharon?”

  “Your Sharon?” I asked. “What am I, chopped liver?” A classic.

  My father gave me a stern look from the farthest reaches of my office, which weren’t at all far. “Don’t sass your mother,” he said.

  “Sharon,” my mother emphasized, trying to remind us of her anguish. “Where is she?”

  Seeing as how my mother was occupying the desk chair, and that between the chair and the desk, virtually all of the space in the room was filled, I could barely move. While the theatre was undergoing what we refer to as “renovation,” I’d actually paid a carpenter to reverse the hinges on the office door and make it swing out instead of in, just to save space—that’s how small the room is. I stood in the doorway, trying to keep the volume level low enough that entering customers wouldn’t be treated to a revival of vaudeville on their way in to the movie.

  “Mom,” I said, “how did you find out that Sharon is . . . late in getting back to me?”

  “Gregory called,” my father interjected.

  “Gregory called you? Since when does Gregory have your number?”

  My mother looked wearily at me. “You think we’d let Sharon marry just anybody and not make sure he could get in touch if something . . . happened?” She sniffed.

  “The man plays a hell of a game of pinochle,” my father added, once again unprompted. Arthur Freed is nothing if not charitable in his assessment of pretty much everybody. Apparently including the man who broke up my marriage.

  “You play cards with him?” My head was swimming, and I couldn’t even sit down.

  “Once every couple weeks,” my father said. “It’s nothing.”

  “Sharon,” my mother reminded us, and put her head in her hands.

  “She’s fine,” I said. “She’ll call by tomorrow. Stop worrying.”

  Gloria Sperber Freed is not a woman to be denied under any circumstances. When Sharon and I married, my mother had mentally adopted Sharon. I believe she sincerely thinks of my ex as her own daughter. Which I tried to ignore during our marriage, because it would have taken a lot of fun out of it for me.

  In the best of times, navigating my mother is tricky, but worthwhile. She is a great source of common sense, whereas my father will plunge in and worry about it later. But Mom also has an unparalleled talent for passive aggression. By seeming to be completely pliant, my mother could convince Osama bin Laden to drive her to a Passover seder, and probably to come in and have a cup of wine instead of waiting in the car.

  Now, strong in her belief that “her” Sharon was in grave danger, my mother was in no mood for reassurance.

  “Why didn’t you tell us?” she shot at me.

  “Because I didn’t know. I just got back from the police station myself.” Oops. Maybe she’d overlook . . .

  “The police station!” A man walking into the theatre stopped, adjusted his jacket, and turned around to exit.

  “Mom, I’ve got customers. Do you mind?” Closing the office door was out of the question. I hadn’t sat in my mother’s lap since I was six. “Why are you guys here, anyway? Why didn’t you just call me?”

  “It’s a crisis,” my mother said, her tone indicating that I was an idiot to have asked. “In a crisis, family has to be there for each other.”

  “Couldn’t you have been there for me from home?”

  Luckily, the debate didn’t get a chance to progress, as Jonathan appeared behind me. “Mr. Freed?” I’ll never get him to call me Elliot.

  I turned to face him. “Some of the customers are complaining,” Jonathan said.

  I sucked in some air. “I’ll keep the shouting down in here,” I said.

  “Okay,” Jonathan said, looking confused. He started to turn away, then thought better of it. “Um, that’s not why they’re complaining.”

  The three Freeds stared at him for a while, until I asked, “Okay, then, what is it?”

  “Some of the customers said there’s water all over the men’s room floor.”

  I resisted the impulse to roll my eyes. “So go get the mop and take care of it.”

  “Okay.” He did the turn-away-and-turn-back thing again. “They said it’s, like, a lot of water.”

  Before I could react, my father stood up. “I’ll take a look,” he said. He was out the door in a blink.

  My mother and I spent a long moment staring at each other. It’s not that I don’t love her, or even that I don’t like her, but my mother and I have always had a less relaxed relationship than I have with Dad. When I was growing up, she was the tough parent.

  Gloria Freed is something of a contradiction: she’ll never publicly admit that anything I do is less than perfect, because that would reflect on her skills as a parent. So when someone asks, I am a successful businessman, a responsible son, and, no doubt, a joy to behold.

  But she’s also a devoted realist, without the romantic streak my father and I share, and she—without so much as a word spoken aloud—maintained that my purchase of the Rialto to create Comedy Tonight would eventually lead to financial ruin, heartbreak, and possibly the end of civilization as we know it (assuming you think that would be a bad thing).

  I’d bought the Rialto with money from three sources: The first was the sale of my first—and let’s be clear, only—novel, Woman at Risk, to a production company in Hollywood that turned it into a movie called Split Personality, only because calling it A Bastardization of Elliot Freed’s Novel That Doesn’t Make Any Sense probably would have been bad at the box office. Probably.

  Because I didn’t want to have a mortgage on the theatre, I’d used all the cash from the movie sale, and had also sold my childhood home, which I’d been living in at the time, having inherited it from my parents when they moved to an “active adult community” in Monmouth County. I wasn’t aware that they were active, but the community board hadn’t blocked their entry, so I guess they passed the test.

  Tha
t money, plus the book money, plus the alimony I get from Sharon—about which she never complains, most of the time—paid for the Rialto, which I now call Comedy Tonight. But the purchase had left a razor-thin margin of error in my profit margin, which is a euphemism for the amount of money I lose each week by showing classic comedies to audiences in the Judd Apatow era.

  But I was talking about my mother, wasn’t I? The thing you really need to know about Gloria Freed is that she was never happier than the day I married Sharon. If your son can’t be a doctor, what could be better than being married to one! When Sharon and I (mostly Sharon, although I filed the papers) decided to divorce so she could be with Gregory, I was less concerned about my own emotional well-being than that of my mother.

  Now, there were real tears in her eyes, and I started to see her as something more than my mother: she was a woman who was scared to death.

  “Close the door,” she suggested, but I shook my head.

  “It gets too tight in here. With just two of us, we’re already re-creating the stateroom scene from A Night at the Opera.”

  Mom stared at me, not understanding. I got the classic comedy gene from my father.

  “It’s the Marx Brothers. Groucho is on this ocean liner, and he gets a really tiny stateroom. Then Chico and Harpo and Allan Jones emerge from his trunk, and more and more people come in, crowding the room beyond anything that seems physically possible, until Margaret Dumont opens the door and everyone falls out.”

  She stared at me some more. “That’s funny?”

  “Let’s leave the door open. Maybe Sharon will come in, and we’ll see her.”

  “Sharon!” my mother cried. On his best day, William Shatner couldn’t overact this blatantly.

  I took her hands in mine. “Mom,” I said. “She’s fine. I promise.”

  “You really think so?”

  “I’m sure of it.” As I put my arms around her, I glanced over her shoulder and made a quick check of the answering machine on the desk. The light wasn’t blinking.

  We stayed that way for a few seconds, until I felt my mother look up in the direction of the door. I turned to see Dad standing in the doorway, his pants rolled up to the knees and his shoes soaked through with water. For a guy who could wear a white suit and manage to paint an entire room without getting a drop of color on his clothes, this was the equivalent of showing up naked on the pitcher’s mound in Yankee Stadium.

  “Dad . . .” I began.

  But he didn’t let me get too far. “I think you have a burst pipe,” he said. “You could film an Esther Williams movie in your men’s room.”

  This was turning out to be a swell day. “What can we do?” I asked. “Can you fix it?”

  “Fix it? Merlin the Magician couldn’t fix it. It needs to be replaced, and it’s possible there are more rusted-out pipes in there. This is an old building.”

  “I noticed,” I grumbled. “So . . .”

  “I turned off the water, so you won’t get any more flooding, but I couldn’t trace the pipe back—those things go into the floor, set in cement. So I had to turn off the main supply to the whole building.”

  I winced. “Which means I have no water in either bathroom,” I said.

  “Worse than that,” Dad piled on. “There’s no water to the snack bar and no hot water going into the heating system.”

  That one took a moment to sink in. “Am I going to have to shut down?” I asked Dad.

  “I think you already have,” he said.

  I held out for as long as I could, but the lack of heat, more than anything else, made it obvious that Comedy Tonight would be on hiatus until I could guarantee working toilets and dry floors. After Joel McCrae’s John Sullivan was finished learning that comedy is necessary during bad times (and getting Veronica Lake—whose character is called “the Girl”—to fall in love with him), I made an announcement to the audience and sent everyone home. Seventeen people asked for their money back, and got it.

  This really wasn’t what I needed just at the moment. I reassured Mom seven or eight more times, each time crossing my fingers just a little tighter behind my back, and sent my parents to thaw out in the car on their way home. I called the emergency line for a plumbing contractor I found in the Yellow Pages, and outlined the problem to the answering service, which promised to get back to me in the morning. Then I sent the staff home, rewound the film, and closed up shop.

  The ride home was, as I’d feared, cold and unforgiving, with a wind that would have caused a normal man to ponder why he’d taken up this whole bicycle idea to begin with. But then, a normal man probably would have been in a car, thus rendering the entire exercise moot. It did, however, lead one to question whether the whole “saving the planet” thing was really pressing. Tonight, global warming was a more difficult concept to believe in than it was on most evenings.

  I was looking at an indefinite period with a closed theatre and I still hadn’t heard from my ex-wife. That didn’t help me feel any warmer, either.

  At the door to my town house (which the real estate people, I was told, were now calling a town home), I got off the bike and exhaled. They say physical exercise helps clear the brain, but I was not finding that to be the case. Endorphins be damned, I was in just as much of a funk now as I had been when I mounted up, and my lips were chapped on top of it.

  The bike seemed heavier in the cold weather. I can’t explain why, but it did. I picked it up and carried it up the four steps to the brightly painted green door to the town home, and unlocked the door.

  Walking into my front hall, warmth enveloped me, and that did everything those miserable endorphins couldn’t accomplish. My mood immediately lightened, and my natural optimism (stop laughing!) returned. Sharon was just off licking her wounds, and I would certainly hear from her in the morning.

  My buoyant mood lasted the entire length of the walk from the front door to the living room entrance, which was roughly five steps. Once I got a look at the living room, even a blazing fire in my nonexistent fireplace wouldn’t have been able to warm my heart.

  The floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, which I’d had installed to accommodate my admittedly enormous collection of comedy films on DVD and videotape, were empty. But that was only because every single one of the 2,394 films I had so carefully catalogued, categorized, and cross-referenced was on the floor of the living room, scattered to the four corners. The discs had been taken out of the boxes and strewn around, so that repairing and replacing them would take at least twice as long, assuming they hadn’t been damaged beyond repair. And some of those titles were irreplaceable.

  The miserable little futon I was pretending was a sofa had been slashed with a very sharp blade, perhaps a box cutter or a razor. Stuffing was everywhere. If there had been other furniture in the room, I was sure it would have been equally ripped apart. Even the answering machine—a cassette-tape relic I’d inherited from my parents when I took over their house—was ripped from the wall and dashed to the floor.

  My eyes searched frantically for Harry Lillis’s guitar, which the brilliant comic had sort of left me when he died, but thankfully it was still on a guitar stand in a corner of the room. It had not been damaged.

  I didn’t know what someone had been looking for, but it sure seemed like they hadn’t found it.

  And immediately, I began to worry about Sharon.

  6

  THE New Brunswick police officers who arrived at my town home at eleven thirty at night were used to dealing with gang violence, armed robberies, the occasional murder, and at the very least, drunken college students. So a DVD collection in disarray did not especially excite them.

  They did, however, ask me the same two questions (“Was this the way you found the room?” and “Can you think of anyone who might do this?”) until past three in the morning, and were threatening to do so until three the next morning, when my phone rang.

  I hadn’t called Dutton at home, but had left a message for him at Midland Heights police headquarters
. Clearly, the chief didn’t have much need for sleep, or had been out late, because he returned the call just as I was calculating how many hours in a row I had been awake.

  I asked the two cops to excuse me and picked up the phone. “Get me out of here,” I hissed into the handset.

  Dutton took a second, then said, “How did you know it was me?”

  “I didn’t. Get me out of here.”

  “I don’t have any jurisdiction there, Elliot. I can’t tell the officers to leave. Now, what happened?”

  Much more loudly, I said, “I can’t come to the station now, Chief. The New Brunswick police officers aren’t done with me yet.” I put my hand over the mouthpiece and looked at the two cops. “It’s Barry Dutton from Midland Heights. Do you know the chief?”

  They shook their heads, no.

  Back into the phone, I said, “How urgent is the matter, Barry?”

  “Barry?” I heard Dutton ask. “When did I give you permission . . .”

  “That bad, huh?” I asked.

  “All right, Elliot,” Dutton sounded tired. After all, he’d probably been up five or six hours longer than I had. “Put them on.”

  I gestured to one of the cops. “He wants to talk to you,” I said.

  “Me?” the cop, who was maybe twenty-five, asked.

  “Yes,” I told him. “He asked for you specifically.”

  The cop appeared flustered, but took the phone out of my hand. He listened for a good few moments. “Yes sir, Chief,” he said, and handed me the phone.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “You owe me big time,” Dutton said. “You’re lucky I was due at the office in three hours anyway. They’re going to drive you over. Now, tell me why it is I want to see you.”

  “I think you’re wrong,” I told him quietly. “I think Sharon is in danger.”

  THERE aren’t a lot of cars on the road at three fifteen in the morning, so the New Brunswick cops got me to Dutton’s office before Dutton himself arrived. They spoke quietly to the overnight dispatcher, a Latino who looked like he’d been doing this job a long time and was still appalled at the hours. He nodded slowly, said something to them out of my earshot, and then the two cops left.