Assisted Loving
Page 17
“Look, I swear to you, Dad, she was just joking.”
“I’m not an extra man for her to drag around.”
“Of course you aren’t, Dad. And she didn’t mean anything by it.”
This is not good, and not at all what I had in mind for his new life. All the hard pimp work I’ve done on his behalf, all the effort I’ve made to find someone perfect for him who is also perfect for me, and it’s come to this? No! I won’t have it. I won’t allow it! I’m speeding now past all the other cars on the highway, mind and rental car racing.
“Listen, Dad, I’m sure this is all just a misunderstanding. I know Florence likes you. Maybe we should go out to dinner tonight. I want to meet her anyway. Then if I decide she’s wrong for you, you can break it off, okay?”
“So you’ll be my second opinion?”
“Exactly. And make sure to reserve at a nice restaurant, okay?”
I arrive at his apartment just in time to get ready for dinner. Dad looks tired tonight, not his usual buoyant, boyish self, as he steps out of his bedroom in a nonstarter jacket and tie.
“Do you have any other pants, Dad?” I have to ask.
“Why? Are these dirty?”
“Olive green isn’t good with a blue blazer. Khaki would be better.”
“You’re right,” he says. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”
With a sigh, he returns to his closet and struggles into another pair of pants. I can see that even though his hip surgery is behind him, he’s still in convalescence. It makes him look older than I’d like to see, a little more worn out than I’d expected.
“And do me a favor—at dinner tonight,” I tell him as we’re driving from his apartment building into the precious little city of Palm Beach, “don’t make me recite all the things I’ve been doing for work lately. It makes me feel like I’m on display.”
Typically he’d argue with me, even erupt in anger at my being too critical of him, then tell me to go back to New York. Tonight, he just nods in agreement.
“Whatever you say,” he tells me.
He perks up when we get to the restaurant. It’s a lively scene. Tabu, the in place for social snowbirds, is on Worth Avenue, the town’s window-shopping mecca. Every table is full, and everyone looks intent on getting a good meal for the money, their faces serious as they ask waiters to turn down the air-conditioning or bring them more bread. There’s a pianist at a baby grand with a pinky ring and toupee. He’s attacking the keys with abandon. I’m glad we got dressed up. It’s a dressy kind of place, with little tasseled lamps on each table throwing off pools of flattering pink light that (along with the easily detectable plastic surgery in the room) erases years from every face.
Florence is already at our table. She extends a hand to say hello without getting up. Dad kisses her deferentially on the cheek, then retreats to his seat, as if he’s just made a ceremonial bow before a queen. She’s younger than I thought, not more than halfway through sixty, I’d guess. Not pretty exactly, put well put together. Auburn hair gently coiffed, face and lips done just so. She’s in a charcoal cashmere twinset, with charcoal slacks to match. Ralph Lauren, probably. Or maybe Michael Kors. Very smart looking, far classier than anyone I’d imagine for my father. While they make chitchat about the bridge game she had just played that afternoon, I find myself fantasizing about her various homes in Palm Beach, Sun Valley, and Manhattan. Wouldn’t it be nice to have holiday meals with her?
“How high is Sun Valley at?” Dad is asking.
“I’m not sure,” she says. “High enough.”
“Just wondering how the altitude is.”
Oh, Dad, I’m thinking. I wish he wouldn’t talk with his mouth full of food. And he should have unbuttoned his blazer when he sat down. He looks so stiff, sitting there, like a child cowed at a grown-ups’ table. He orders linguine. A mistake. He has no idea how to eat it properly. The way he’s using that fork, it might as well be a tennis racket. I gesture for him to wipe the red sauce from his chin. He doesn’t notice.
“Any plans for New Year’s Eve, Bob?” she asks.
I change the topic. Politics. The 2004 election. We’re into the second year in Iraq and things aren’t going well at all. It’s starting to fray Dad’s nerves, tried-and-true Republican that he is. So while a war is raging abroad, he is fighting his own war down here with Democrats all around him, going at him like green flies in June. It wouldn’t be so bad if he didn’t feel he had to make it his mission to straighten everyone out about the reason for the war. But every time anyone at any dinner party or bridge table says anything disparaging about the administration, he rips into them. Florence, I can tell, is tired of it. He has embarrassed her more than a few times in front of her friends.
“Your father’s quite opinionated about all kinds of complicated things,” she tells me, as if he weren’t sitting right here. “It can make for very heated conversations.”
“I know you’re thinking I don’t know what I’m talking about, but I do,” he says.
“You don’t know what I’m thinking, Joe,” she says. “You’re not enough of a listener.”
She’s right about that. And I can’t help admiring her for being well read, well dressed, and politically appropriate. For once my father is with someone plugged in and witty, and I’m feeling intoxicated with the refinement of her outfit. So instead of defending him, as a good son should, I gang up with her and shoot down everything he says. And when he tries to get me to trade some of my lamb for his linguini by foisting his plate at me (something he does as a reflex at restaurants), I dismiss him.
“You know what I call trading each other’s food like that?” I ask her.
“No, but your father does it all the time,” she says, with a roll of her eyes.
“Jewish Ping-Pong,” I say.
“Exactly! That’s hilarious,” she replies.
Then we both start cackling. And between the two of us, he looks like a little Mel Tormé voodoo doll in dress-up clothes, strapped to his chair. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him looking so helpless. He quietly excuses himself and hobbles off to the men’s room. He looks wobbly on his feet, like a toddler just learning to walk on his new hip, and I suddenly feel tender for him. He is a man, after all, who means no harm to anyone. She leans in and takes my hand with hers, which I can’t help noticing is very cold and kind of like a claw. Her red nails (they match her lipstick) are like talons, her nose a little beak.
“Your father’s a real piece of work,” she says. “Isn’t he?”
I down the rest of my merlot and nod. I suddenly feel hot inside. What gives her the right to call my father a piece of work? His quirkiness is his charm. Or part of it anyway. How dare she tease him about being her walker? How dare she toy with him, trot him around in front of her friends without having any feeling for him at all? And is there a man in all the Palm Beaches more eligible? I doubt it. He looks ten years younger than he is, and he’s utterly self-sufficient and economically secure.
But I can see now that she is so not right for him. From the hauteur of her hairdo down to the tasteful clasp on her Hermès bag and the bow on her Belgian loafer, it’s clear this is no match. I don’t know what I was thinking, pushing her on him. She makes him look so small, like a wriggling insect in her beak. It makes me grateful for the comfort he had with my mother, despite the tension, despite his urge to be away from the nest so much. Maybe she wasn’t sophisticated, but she had grace and ease, and they had something lovely as a couple, even as he would rage, then apologize sweetly to her later. It was a good-enough marriage. Not easy, but worthy. And there was an acceptance between them that had to do with sharing a life together—kids, songs, the thrill of tulips and Passover macaroons. Best of all, Mom found his quirkiness funny and charming. Her laugh was a trill. Everything they did, even when she was unwell, had a Steve and Edie quality (sauntering across the suburban stage of life) that made them blend in harmony. This Florence, with all the wit and taste, has none of that.
“Isn’t that a little lowbrow?” she asks.
“What would you recommend instead?” he asks.
“Well,” she says as she gets up, “you’ll have to forgive me. I’m a little tired. I’m going to call it a day. Thank you for a lovely dinner.”
“Are you sure, Florence?” Dad says. “The night is young.”
I want to nudge him under the table, tell him, Let her go, Dad. I was wrong. She’s no good for you. You have to want who wants you, who gets you, revels in you. But who am I to give anyone advice about love? I stand up, pull his chair out. He struggles to his feet, using the table and me for balance.
“So then,” she says, “good night.”
Then she turns and leaves us there, with the bill to pay.
A half hour later we are sitting in the living room of his very white apartment in a very black mood. It’s chilly out. He wants the sliding doors closed. I want them open but defer to his will. We’re both a bit stunned, breathing hard like two wildebeests that just escaped the claws of a lioness. Bereft, alone, and feeling over the hill.
I’ve never felt so close to him, so wrapped up in his life. And I’ve got my own love mess, too, making me spin. Love is a minefield, a war. And we’re two buddies in this disaster movie. Or maybe it’s a Comedy of Eros. How did it come to this?
“My God, Dad. You were right! She’s no good for you.”
“That’s what I was trying to tell you, Bobby.”
“Why did you put up with her so long?”
“Because you told me to. I thought you might know something I don’t know about all this.”
“Me? What the hell do I know about any of this? I know nothing about love. I need a drink. You got anything?”
“Check the cabinet by the kitchen.”
I race across his living room. I wish I could fix things for both of us, but I feel so helpless. I open a mirrored cabinet. You never know what you’ll find in my father’s liquor cabinet. While growing up, I discovered all kinds of bottles, as if it were a laboratory rather than a bar. Bottles full of brightly colored liqueurs that only Jews would have instead of hard booze. Lime green, sunny yellow. Sabra, which is a chocolate-and-orange Israeli liqueur in an “I Dream of Jeannie” bottle, consumed by Zionists and pre-diabetics. Adult parties in our home when I was a kid were never about drinking. They were about bridge. Sometimes charades. I have a photograph of my mother taken in the 1970s. She’s in a psychedelic maxi skirt and purple blouse, on her knees, hands in the air, acting out a title of some book or movie. Her hair is unusually soft looking, the color just right. A Jewish Dinah Shore. Although she isn’t young, she is exuberant and beautiful, the buoyant suburban sweetheart, laughing. She drank only the sweetest concoctions, crazy combinations for nondrinkers that my father mixed for her. Grand Marnier and ginger ale. Loganberry wine and apple juice.
“What’s this?” I say as I pull out a bottle of calcified Irish Cream that leaves a sticky residue on my palm. “My God, how old is this?”
“I don’t know, but it doesn’t go bad,” Dad says. “The alcohol acts as a preservative. I use it on my yogurt all the time.”
“Ech!”
I wipe my hands on a cocktail napkin as if I’ve just touched battery acid. Then I pull out some Manischewitz, also unpleasantly sticky. There’s something scrawled across the label of the half-empty bottle in his illegible handwriting.
“What’s this, Dad? What’s in here? I can’t read this. What does it say?”
“Concord grape vodka.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“It’s a little experiment. Try some. And pour one for me while you’re at it.”
“Certainly!” I say. “Coming right up!”
I pull a couple glasses from his tiny lemon yellow kitchen and pour us drinks on the rocks. He sips his slowly. I slam mine down. Kosher cough syrup. I pour another.
He is sitting in his big chair by the TV. I sit on the couch next to him.
“Okay, I was wrong about Florence, totally wrong,” I sigh.
“But I was glad to get a second opinion. I wasn’t sure if it was me or her.”
“So now what are you going to do? Anyone else on deck?”
“No. I’m a little at a loss right now, I’m sad to say.”
“You usually have them lined up like fashion models on a runway.”
“Lately every woman I meet seems to be trouble,” he sighs. “And they all have something to complain about. Depressed children, ADD grandchildren, reflux, varicose veins, or some other unappealing thing.”
“Not everyone can be happy living on the surface of things like you.”
“I’m not asking for superficial,” he sighs. “Just pleasant. But pleasant is in very short supply around here. Now Edie, she’s a pleasant woman. I still have a thing for her, you know. But it’s impossible. She’s got both her other boyfriends down here right now from Philly, so I haven’t heard from her in weeks.”
“Dad, that woman is a seventy-five-year-old Jezebel.”
“Seventy-five? Try eighty-six!”
Oh my God. I had no idea this woman jerking him around is that old. I pop up off the couch and lunge at his glass to get him a refill. I’d like to shake him to get some sense into him, get him to stop his pining. And while I’m at it, maybe I can get him to clean up this apartment. It’s just such a mess.
“Eighty-six? Eighty-six? That’s older than you, Dad! And the demographics are supposed to be in your favor! You’re cute. You’re fun. You should have your pick of the litter.”
“Tell me about it,” he says as he slurps his drink.
“Drink it down,” I bark. “Don’t be such a teetotaler.”
He chuckles and does as he is told, like a good son wanting to please.
“Have you ever met her other two boyfriends?”
“Yes, and they’re both in their nineties. There should be no competition from what I can see. None! But she won’t let them go. She isn’t the kind of lady who wants to disappoint people. I guess it’s not in her nature to reject anyone.”
I kick off my shoes and flop back on the couch. “But it’s in her nature to jerk you around?”
“Look, I can’t explain it. I never thought I’d end up like this.”
“I hear you, Dad,” I say.
“Dating is a headache. There are just too many agendas and opinions. The other day I thought I was doing my friend Kal a favor setting him up on a double date with me and two ladies from downstairs for New Year’s Eve.”
“That’s asking for trouble, no?”
“But you don’t want to be caught short without a date for New Year’s Eve around here, that’s all I was thinking. It’s the one time everyone needs a date.”
“True,” I say, as I lie back on his couch. The fortified Manischewitz is kicking in now. The rest of the world is falling away in this puddle of an alcoholic sugar stupor.
“So, to get things going, I arranged for us to have a pre-dinner, meet and greet the other morning, the four of us together for a nice brunch. Kal sees the woman I brought for him and decides right away she’s too old. He wants someone twenty years younger. I was so irritated, I lost my temper. Now I’ve got nobody for New Year’s Eve.”
“I’m sorry to hear it.”
“I am so close to giving up, Bobby, you have no idea.”
Oh, yes, I do. But I don’t say that. I’m not going to tell him about what I just went through with Ira. Yet in the buddy-movie version of what our lives have become here, I should be reaching out to him now, putting my arm around him, pulling him in tight like the son I’ll never have, and telling him that, as messed up as it seems, he’s on the right track because he’s putting his heart out there, where it belongs. But how can I say anything like that when I’m so
cynical about romance? I’ve given up on it. It’s not worth the drama and humiliation.
“Okay, enough for now,” I say. “I think we should just call it a night, pack it in, take a break from the love shredder. I’m going to bed.”
I pull myself up, a little woozy. It’s one in the morning.
“The cleaning lady changed the sheets for you,” he says. “Towels are laid out.”
“Okay. And Dad, would you mind closing your door tonight? The last time I was here, your snoring was louder than The Ring Cycle.”
“Your mother never minded my snoring. “
“I know. She was a patient wife. I’m an impatient son.”
“Who’s going to want to put up with my snoring now?”
“I don’t know, Dad. Just close your door tonight, okay? Good night.”
When I get into the pullout bed in his guest room, it occurs to me that I snore, too. Would Ira put up with that? Would anybody ever want to put up with me? Outside, a lone cricket sings in the Florida night, or maybe it’s a tree frog, calling out for a mate, desperate and shrill, repeating itself over and over. A freight train on the other side of Lake Worth whistles softly, a lovesick sigh.
There’s a book by the guest bed, and I have to smile when I pick it up. It’s a self-help bestseller about romance. Dad has been studying, I guess. I dislike self-help books, but I open it, and I page through. The author, a shrink who makes a lot of TV appearances, is bringing the act of falling in love down to earth. Hers is a bullying and authoritative tone: Why aren’t you happily married or partnered now? Older people are not good at dating because they are set in their ways. Head over heels isn’t necessarily the best thing for love. Think about all the people you have dismissed! You never know what lurks within a person unless you give yourself time to find out.
The message is clear, but my head is not from all the drinking.
Soon I’m asleep. In the middle of the night I sit up in bed and drink some water. Dad’s door is open. He’s not in his bed. On my way to the bathroom, I peer down the hallway into the living room and see him, watching TV. He’s been an insomniac his whole life, a lonely affliction. For a moment, I think about going in and sitting with him, staying up with him until he’s ready for bed. But I’m too tired for that.