“That’s the way the world is.” The lawyer cocked his head at Carla and twisted his small lips back and forth. “Corporations don’t volunteer to do the right thing. They have to be persuaded by the economics. Look at what the car companies tried to do to Ralph Nader.”
“What?” Manny asked eagerly.
The lawyer was taken aback momentarily. “Ralph Nader, the consumer advocate?”
“I don’t know about him,” Manny said freely. “What about him?”
“The car companies—he wrote a book about unsafe cars—and they sent girls, you know, ladies of the night, to his apartment, hoping to get him into trouble. They sent a couple of goons to threaten him—”
“They did that?” Manny shook his head. He seemed truly surprised and disappointed that American corporations would behave so badly. “What happened?”
“Didn’t work. That’s why we have seat belts and air bags and all—” the lawyer seemed to wind down. He came to a stop, small flat hand poised in midair, his nervous head still. “What am I talking about?” he asked the floor.
Brillstein was like a precocious little boy, Carla thought. His hair had thinned; his pale skin was tough and there were wrinkles around his eyes and mouth; but he had the nervous energy of a smart child, an intent, asexual creature pretending to be grown up.
“How are you?” Brillstein suddenly asked Carla, pivoting on his feet, pointing his small hands at her, a teacher calling on her to answer.
She didn’t. She looked back at him in a friendly way, she hoped, although she wasn’t going to smile. He didn’t care how she was, not really, so why answer?
“Carla…?” Manny said gently.
Brillstein held up a hand to stop her from answering. “I’m here to introduce myself. This is a horrible time for you. No money, nothing the law can do will change what’s happened. But you’re entitled, you deserve to be compensated for what’s happened. It could have been prevented. They could have been better prepared. If they had been more careful your son would still be alive.”
He seemed sincere. His small eyes were intent and dark with passion. She believed him. She nodded, to be encouraging, but she still said nothing, mostly because she wanted to be out of the room and back in bed. She didn’t want to look at her living room with it so clean and neat.
Brillstein sat on the love seat at an angle to the couch. He perched on its edge, head slightly bowed, hands together, an aging choirboy, although of course he was Jewish. “The airline, the plane manufacturer, all of them, they know they’re in the wrong and they already want to make things right. But they need to deal with a lawyer and you need to have someone who knows—”
“We need an expert, Carla,” Manny interrupted, exasperated by the gradual logic of the lawyer’s speech.
She gave Manny a dark, angry look. He obviously thought she had turned into an idiot. He talked to her as if she were retarded. “I know it’s cruel to have to talk about it, to tell”—Brillstein gestured to himself—“strangers about what happened to you and your boy. Why is it our business?” Brillstein stared down at the coffee table and shook his head. “It’s cruel.”
This is crap.
“I’m tired,” Carla said. She reached for her crutches.
“We have to have a lawyer!” Manny said and flopped his arms up and down, a frustrated bird trying to take off.
“I know,” she mumbled, annoyed.
“This is crazy,” the lawyer said and they both stared at him. “I know this is a crazy process. But I have to know, any lawyer would have to know, what happened to you during the crash. If you don’t want to tell me directly, that’s okay. I have a tape recorder”—he gestured toward the hall—“in my bag and I can leave it and you can tell it to the machine or you can tell your husband and he can tell it to the machine.”
“She doesn’t have to go to court?” Manny asked with wonder and hope.
“Oh, I don’t think we’ll go to court. I don’t think anybody’s going to want to go to court about this. They want to settle. They want to negotiate. But I have to have the facts—and that’s all that your telling me would be for—so I can know what the facts are before talking with them. If I don’t know what happened to you I can’t even start to have that conversation with them. I’m not promising you won’t have to give a deposition—do you know what that is?”
Carla nodded. She knew. “People in the neighborhood,” she said quietly, “have given depositions.”
Brillstein laughed suddenly and quite hard at that. “I bet they have,” he said. “You’re a funny person,” he said and then looked solemn. “I admire you for your strength.”
“I don’t remember what happened,” Carla said. “You can leave your tape recorder but there’s nothing I got to say.”
“You blanked out? You have no memory?” Brillstein came right to the edge of the love seat, his knees thrust forward. The glass table seemed about to cut them in half. “Have you told her doctors?” he asked Manny.
“Well…” he stammered.
“Why?” Carla asked. “Why do they have to know?”
“You know, I handle quite a few medical malpractice and accident cases. I know a little bit about medicine. Memory loss can be caused physiologically. Probably it’s not. But that should be checked.”
“Oh, they checked her brain!” Manny said with an enthusiasm that irritated Carla. “They gave her a scan, all that. She’s fine.”
He’s always saying you’re fine.
“You should check again,” Brillstein addressed Carla. He seemed to really care. “You know, those scans are accurate and yet there’s always the ability of the technician reading it and sometimes the scans can miss something. You may have developed a problem since then. I don’t mean to scare you,” the lawyer put a hand on Carla’s arms. He had to leave the love seat altogether to reach her, but he didn’t stand up, he remained squatting in the air on an invisible seat. “But you should have another CAT scan of the brain.”
Carla was scared. What did he think was happening to her? A brain tumor? Her heart pounded and she was afraid.
Of what? Not of death. She wanted to die.
But not because of a silent killer in her brain. Not of some cancer eating away at her, dissolving her into bone and dead skin, like her poor papa.
“What could it be?” she asked Brillstein.
“I don’t know,” Brillstein stood up and turned partly toward Manny. “But if you can’t remember anything—”
“I can remember!” Carla said, desperate to be released from the lawyer’s death sentence.
“What!” Manny said.
“Of course you can,” the lawyer nodded without surprise. “I’ll be right back.” He walked out to the hall.
He tricked you.
“Are you playing games, Carla?” Manny asked, so angry he was squinting, his eyes wanting to squeeze the truth out of her.
“I remember it happening,” she said nervously.
The lawyer was back. “Here’s the tape recorder. If you want me to be your lawyer—”
“You’re our lawyer,” Manny said, his voice deep and furious.
“Great,” Brillstein said without excitement. He put a red tape recorder on the glass table. “Tape’s loaded. Just press Play and that hole right there is a microphone. You don’t have to get that close to it, just talk in a normal tone, and say what you can remember. That’s all I need. And if it turns out you don’t feel like giving a deposition, we can talk about that. What you remember for me and what you remember for the world, who knows? Maybe they’re not the same thing. It’s not their right to know everything. You haven’t committed a crime. You didn’t crash that plane. You’re a victim. I’m your lawyer, whatever you say to me is in confidence. You know what that means. No one else has to know.”
“I don’t remember very much,” Carla sulked. “That’s all I meant.”
“And anything you remember and say on that tape is for me and me alone.” The lawyer pointed at Manny
. “Even your husband shouldn’t hear it.” He smiled widely at Manny, but only for a second.
“Why not?” Manny asked, frowning. “You said before she could tell me and I could tell the tape.”
“I did?” Brillstein was astonished. He stared at the glass table as if it were a mirror and he could check if the image reflected was his own. “Well, forget that. I was totally in error.” The lawyer looked up and said sternly at Carla, “For legal reasons you have to promise me that just you and I will know what you say on the tape. At least for now.” He stood waiting for an answer, folding his small hands at his groin, an attentive pupil.
This time she knew he was lying. There were no legal reasons. He wanted to fool her into feeling safe about talking. Carla nodded.
Brillstein turned to Manny. “I mean it. It’s important that you not hear it.”
Manny shrugged. “You’re the boss.”
“So—” the lawyer almost sang the word, releasing a puff of air and clapping his hands softly. “We’re settled?
Manny nodded gravely. “Yes, sir,” he said.
The two men walked together into the hall. Manny whispered something. Brillstein answered in a normal tone. Carla didn’t bother to eavesdrop. She stared at the tape recorder. Its plastic cover looked cheap. The red paint was laid on so thinly you could almost see through to the transistors inside. But Brillstein was nice and respectable, dressed in a beige suit and a tie. She knew he couldn’t be trusted but she didn’t feel he was dangerous to her.
“I’ll help you get back to the bedroom,” Manny said when he returned alone. He nodded at the tape recorder. “Or you can talk to it here.”
“Not now,” Carla moaned. A reflex. She should have said nothing; pretended to agree.
“Honey,” Manny whined. He twisted his body, wriggling with irritation. “It’s just so Mr. Brillstein can get started. He’s the only one’s gonna hear it. It’s like talking to a priest.”
Talking to Father Conti after the funeral: he had bowed his head and covered her hand with his soft doughy palms, mumbled something about pain, and said, “You know, He also lost a son.”
“But I’m not God,” Carla had answered and then cried so hard she couldn’t hear what else the priest said.
She hadn’t answered Manny and he stamped his foot, not very hard, but hard enough to make the glass coffee table vibrate. “Listen to me, Carla! If you don’t tell him what he needs to know then he can’t do his job!”
“Manny…” She meant to shout back at him, but her voice was weak and trembling. “Just—” she lost her breath she was so upset. “Just—” she sighed to let out the nervous air and take in something calmer to keep her going. “Just let me rest a little. You go out. I need you to go out.”
“I gotta go back to work anyway. It’s the middle of the day. I’m gonna get fired the way I’m fucking up.” He moved to go and then hesitated. “You need anything? I’ll tell your mother on my way out.”
“Tell her to leave me alone for a while.”
Manny nodded solemnly. He kissed her on the forehead. His lips were wet.
Their moist impression dried slowly and coldly in the air-conditioned room. She kept a close watch on the orderliness around her, as if it might spontaneously change.
Her mother came in to ask if Carla wanted something to eat or drink. Manny must have told her about the meeting with the lawyer on his way out because she glanced at the tape recorder immediately and yet didn’t ask about it. Carla told her she didn’t want anything and sent her away. Again, she studied the dead room.
She remembered a newborn Bubble by the window, being shown off to all the relatives, wrapped in a blanket and half-buried in a big clumsy carriage.
She remembered carrying him in for middle-of-night feedings so he wouldn’t disturb Manny. Not often. Only when Bubble was restless. In the bedroom his crying could pierce through the door, cross the hall, and wail in their room. Besides there was nothing as comfortable as the couch.
She had held her baby so close: hot and wriggling against her in the quiet apartment. His hunger pulled at her breast. The drapes were tinted amber by the streetlights and only an occasional drunken song or mysterious explosion would startle Bubble. They were so alone and so safe.
She didn’t cry at the vivid memory.
She couldn’t tell the truth but she could tell them what they needed. She pressed the Play button and talked.
AN
UNEXAMINED
LIFE
13
Max answered the television reporter’s question, asked by Ellen Kaku, the same Japanese-American woman who had blocked his way home the day before, while something that had bothered him all night, percolating underneath his duties as a survivor, continued to worry him. He talked into the microphone without energy: “I didn’t have time to think. I just got Byron here,” he gestured down to the eager dirty blond head of hair leaning against his arm, “out of his seat—”
“I was upside down!” Byron interrupted with enthusiasm.
“Were you stuck?” Kaku moved the mike from Max’s mouth down to the little boy’s level.
“I had the seat belt on! It was stuck!”
“So you did save his life?” Kaku demanded of Max with a stern look and sharp tone. She had obviously decided he could not be trusted to tell all.
It was at that moment, standing on the corner of Eighty-fourth and West End, surrounded by two interrogating television crews and a crowd of eavesdropping neighbors, that Max realized what had bothered him all through the sleepless night, his first night home after the crash.
“Is that right, Mr. Klein?” another reporter called out. “You saved both this little boy’s life and also the baby’s?”
Max heard the question. He did not answer because the implication of Jeff’s scam with the tickets had finished brewing in his head. When their presentation to Nutty Nick was postponed a week Jeff had switched the plans so they would arrive on the day of the appointment. He said he was being considerate of Nan, that it shortened how long she would be stuck with their two kids. The truth was: Jeff had picked that flight because he had gotten a deal on it. They were traveling to a meeting that over the course of a few years could be worth a million dollars in fees and Jeff had arranged that they would arrive with only two hours to spare for the sake of a couple hundred bucks.
That’s why Jeff had been killed. God had severed his head for his small-mindedness and he deserved it too and there was nothing to feel bad about.
“I didn’t save anybody,” Max said to the reporter, pissed off that they were presenting him to the public as a hero.
It had begun the night before, without his knowledge, after he got back from delivering his bad news to Nan. He had been home five minutes when Byron’s parents phoned to say the boy needed to see him. Byron’s father had gotten his number through somebody who knew somebody at TransCon. He introduced himself as Peter Hummel and apologized for the intrusion but explained that his son was still in a state of terror, unable to sleep or eat. What Byron demanded over and over was to be with the man who saved his life. Naturally Max agreed to their request that they bring him by.
Again Debby was annoyed, now at the late hour (it was past eleven at night) as well as by Max’s willingness to give up time with her for others. She wouldn’t admit that was the reason; she claimed she was thinking of Max, that he needed to rest. He had just gotten home from Nan’s, she pointed out; he had not had a minute to himself.
“Dr. Perlman said you need peace and quiet,” she said. Max laughed. Debby flushed, embarrassed. “You’re laughing at me.”
“I’m sorry, but that sounds ridiculous.”
“Don’t you want to be left alone?” Debby demanded.
“When did you talk to Dr. Perlman?”
“He called while you were at Nan’s. He’s nice. He’s trying to help.”
Max shook his head, dismayed by her eagerness to accept help without studying the giver’s motive. That was her vu
lnerable point. The back injury that threatened and eventually ended her fledgling ballet career was his prime example: she was too willing and too grateful to Max for nursing her through her attempted comebacks and finally comforting her over the death of her ambition. You’re so kind, she used to say. Actually he had been full of lust and selfishness. “Perlman is around to make the airline seem compassionate,” Max told her. “He’s paid to be nice.”
There was only half an hour to argue about it, or rather to sulk (Debby disappeared to take a bath), since Byron and his parents lived in Greenwich Village and were leaving immediately. Max went into Jonah’s room. He was still awake, lying under the covers fully dressed, a recent fetish that used to worry Max but now seemed unimportant, even benign. Max suggested they move into the living room and watch the end of the game on television. Jonah was surprised by this violation of normal bedtime regulations and happily agreed. Debby appeared in a huge terry-cloth bathrobe just as the doorman buzzed that Byron and his parents were coming up. She stayed in it, with her hair wet, an obvious statement that she didn’t want guests.
Max introduced Byron to Jonah, who had to be coaxed even to mumble a hello, and they shook hands with his parents, Peter and Diane Hummel. Both families sat down together and listened to Byron’s excited account of the crash. Some of it wasn’t accurate, Max thought; Byron was exaggerating Max’s actions. He said Max had wrested him out of a stuck seat belt and pulled him through flames and billowing smoke and “gross dead bodies” and found a way out when there didn’t seem to be one. He also claimed that Max had called to others in the plane and they had followed him to safety. “He saved at least twenty people!” Byron insisted. The child’s story dissipated Debby’s lingering anger at Max. She teared up, came by the couch where Max, Byron and Jonah were seated, and kissed Max on the top of his head, a hand squeezing his shoulder. Jonah reacted less sentimentally, at least on the surface. Although his face did flush, his shy brown eyes were clear; he watched Byron from under lowered and suspicious brows. Of course at that hour and given the tension of the past day and a half, maybe Jonah was just tired. As for Byron, he interrupted his narrative to hug Max several times with a kind of showy affection. He leaned his head against Max’s chest, bright face smiling back at his parents, posed for their benefit as if Max and he were a postcard he wanted to send home.
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