“Everything tastes good,” remarked George, taking a large forkful of smoked sturgeon and eating it with his bagel with schmear. “It’s like they’ve discovered some miracle seasoning that gives everything maximum flavor.”
“Maybe we’re in heaven,” noted Jordan.
“Or in that place in the Albert Brooks film, where everybody goes after they die and waits to be assigned their ultimate fate,” added George.
“Defending Your Life.”
“That’s it. Remember how the food was really good there, too? Is Albert Brooks Jewish?” He turned to Amy. “Maybe his parents live in Boca.”
It wasn’t long before the group had become extremely sought after by a certain segment of the Boca Festa population who enjoyed debating topics like affirmative action, rap music, and body piercing. These debates sometimes grew loud and intense, and the group soon learned to take comments made in the heat of argument in stride. Arguing, for Boca Festa residents, was not necessarily a sign of dislike—on the contrary, fifty-year marriages had been sustained on this foundation alone. Vigorous debate was even said to have health benefits, getting the blood circulating better than a good game of tennis.
The group had spent the first days of their stay collecting general background footage that could be used to add atmosphere and provide filler once the structure of the film was in place. There were panning shots of elderly men moving in procession in their golf carts like generals surveying a battlefield, and of jaunty septuagenarian tennis players in pleated skirts who appeared not to generate anything in the way of sweat despite hours of play. Amy told Flo that she had never seen tennis played so slowly, the ball moving back and forth as though underwater, or out of a scene from Elvira Madigan.
Some of the best footage involved the kind of spontaneous interchange that was likely to arise when one resident began expounding on a subject to the camera in a public place. The possibility for accumulating commentary was amazing, as talk grew with the rapid, combustible energy of brushfire. It was simply impossible for someone to say something without arousing the need for someone nearby to say something else. Nor was any question in itself a guarantee of the direction the conversation would take. The material emerging from any single question held to a very high level of improbability, as though the principle of chaos theory (that one interference would, over time, cause an outcome very far afield from the original direction of events) was that much greater than normal when the variables involved were elderly Jews with the leisure to indulge in a free play of mind.
At lunch on the Friday of the first week of filming, the group had positioned itself in what seemed to be relative seclusion at the end of the buffet table. George was holding the camera and Jordan the boom mike, and Amy had gotten hold of a man in pink Bermuda shorts and asked him to speak a little about his interests.
“Interests? What interests?” exclaimed the man irritably, as though he had been asked to discuss his bank account or his sex life. The group had learned not to take explosive reactions to seemingly innocuous questions too seriously. In the minds of the respondents the questions might harbor unforeseen depths and implications, or might simply serve as a convenient pretext to vent on a favorite subject.
“How can I have interests? Once Leona passed away, my interests were kaput.” The man snapped his fingers and continued in a less irritable tone. “We had interests together. We were best friends.” He sighed resignedly. “It’s like having your arm cut off. Not here”—he indicated the elbow—”but here”—he pointed to his shoulder. “It’s walking around without an arm.”
“Don’t I know,” noted a woman in a sequined jogging suit who had sidled into the conversation while getting herself more potato salad. “Jack and I did everything together. But you make do. The children are always asking: How do you spend your time? I tell them that I find occupation.”
“They’re running around getting degrees, networking,” continued the man, taking up from the jogger’s point about children. “I tell them: Find someone, settle down, you’ll be happier.”
“Marriage today is not such a big thing as it was,” explained the jogger philosophically. “Look at The New York Times. They’re all marrying in their thirties after running corporations; then they get tired and want to be artificially inseminated. It’s a gamble. Maybe it works, maybe not.”
“We did things the natural way.” The man nodded.
“And who says natural is better?” noted a tiny woman in a visor who had been waiting impatiently for a chance to enter the conversation. She had a reputation for stirring things up.
“Natural is nature. Nature is better,” spelled out the man.
“You’re not saying anything,” said the woman with the visor. “You’re speaking in circles.”
“You’re the one with a circle,” noted the man angrily. “Your brain”—he made a circle with his fingers to indicate a round, empty space—”is a circle.”
“Do you have a boyfriend?” asked the jogger, turning to Amy in an effort to cut short what seemed to be escalating into a nasty confrontation. Amy indicated George. The group paused and contemplated this a moment.
“Modern,” said the man doubtfully. But after George had said a few words and been judged “not one of the angry ones,” there was a palpable warming of opinion toward him.
“He’s a nice boy,” the jogger whispered to Amy. “Maybe he’ll convert.”
“And who’s to say he’s not Jewish?” said the man in the pink shorts. “There are Ethiopian Jews, you know. Are you, by any chance”—he turned to George inquiringly—”an Ethiopian Jew?”
George said that he was afraid he wasn’t, and the man patted him on the back as though giving him credit for trying.
“And you?” The woman with the visor peered up at Jordan, her eyes taking particular note of the earring.
“I’m gay,” said Jordan, smiling down at her.
There was another moment of contemplative silence.
“My brother-in-law’s son is gay,” noted the man in the shorts. “You’d never know looking at him.”
“I’m just saying,” continued the jogger, returning to her point, “that marriage now is different. It used to be early, now it’s late; it used to be a nice Jewish girl or boy, now it’s gay or Ethiopian. I’m not saying it’s bad,” she noted, nodding at George and Jordan, “just different.”
“It’s the children who suffer,” noted the man.
“I don’t know,” continued the woman with the visor. “Too much yelling and screaming in a house—it’s better the parents divorce.”
“Leona and I never raised our voices,” protested the man.
“Better you should have,” said the visored woman. “It gets things out in the open. I knew a woman, never yelled, died of a stroke from bottling it up.”
“Ridiculous,” said the man. “Leona never yelled. But she smoked like a chimney. That’s what killed her.”
“Cut!” said Amy. “I think that’ll do.” She patted the Bermuda-shorted man on the back and nodded to the jogger. “Great stuff,” she called after them as they began to disperse, with the exception of the visored woman, who had cornered Jordan and was asking him about what she called “the gay scene.”
“We’ve got lots of material,” Amy told Flo later. “I mean, everyone talks and the visuals are really awesome. But we don’t have a structure. There’s no emotional center for the film, nothing to hang things on. I need something dramatic, something with narrative potential.”
They were sitting near the main clubhouse pool where a group of women with hair in various sculptural configurations were wading carefully into the water.
“It looks like the Normandy Invasion,” observed Flo to her niece. “You should get it on film. They come in together and then they begin to drop down slowly, until they’re up to their necks. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen one get her head wet.”
On the other side of the pool a couple had appeared: A pleasantly zaftig woman in h
er seventies wearing a pink sundress was looking up beatifically at a man dressed nattily in white pants and a striped, short-sleeved shirt. Flo noted with surprise that it was May and Norman Grafstein. She had not expected May’s return until next week, and she certainly had not expected to see her on the arm of Norman Grafstein. Clearly, something had happened during the time in North Jersey that had brought the couple together. It was evident, even at this distance, that the two were very happy and that the machinations of Stan Jacobs had been thwarted.
“Here comes my friend May,” said Flo to her niece, who had also turned to watch the handsome couple as they made their way in their direction. “I’ll introduce you.”
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
LESS THAN AN HOUR AFTER CAROL AND MAY HAD RETURNED from their outing to the mall, Norman Grafstein had called the Newman home. There are those who might believe that the entire train of events leading up to this call had in some bizarre way been orchestrated by Carol—that she had lured May up to Morristown, knowing (though May had not mentioned it and Carol, uncharacteristically, had not asked) of the stalled relationship; that while planning and hosting the child’s birthday party, Carol’s minions had been busy tracking down the whereabouts and plans of Norman Grafstein, drawing up a map that charted his progress through the diversionary pastimes of northern New Jersey until finally determining on the relative probability of his coming out of the Domain Furniture Store at the Short Hills mall at just the moment when May would be standing outside of Ann Taylor. Such people might be accused of an overly rich imagination and a tendency to embrace the conspiracy theories circulating in the cultural folklore. But Carol was, it must be noted, an Olympic-level planner, a woman for whom organizing the Home and School pancake breakfast in the morning and the 150-person sit-down kosher dinner for B’nai B’rith the same evening, while managing to chauffeur the kids to swimming, piano, and karate in between, was a piece of cake. In this context, the idea that she may have strategized the meeting of two elderly people, both known to be visiting within a space of twenty miles of each other, no longer seems quite so outlandish. It must also be noted that the Short Hills mall is the shopping mecca of North Jersey—Japanese tourists are said to be flown in on special luxury junkets twice a year—-and strolling through the mall on a blustery Sunday afternoon might be compared to strolling the grand boulevards of Paris in the nineteenth century at the height of the fashionable season. Indeed, upon further thought, it would have been more surprising if May and Norman had not run into each other in the Short Hills mall that day
When Norman called the Newman home and asked to speak to May, Carol told him she was napping. It was a lie. Her mother-in-law was actually in the other room watching Wishbone with Adam, but Carol’s orchestrating mind had jumped very far ahead of the situation. In the tradition of the great political machinators, from Machiavelli to Lenin, she was not above engaging in dubious means to produce larger, more beneficent ends.
“Can I give her a message?” she asked Norman innocently.
“Well, I was just curious to know when she’ll be returning to Boca,” he said.
“Oh, she’s planning to go back tomorrow,” proffered Carol (in fact, she had originally planned for May to stay through next week). “I was going to call in for the tickets right now. Would you like me to order one for you?” she asked with the mixture of insouciance and pointedness that she had perfected over the years. Carol had learned that it was always better to jump right in and ask something if you wanted to know it, but that there was an art to asking the question as though you weren’t aware of its significance and didn’t care about the answer as much as you really did. She had never understood the problem that some women had getting dates, for example, since she had always been able to ask men out in such a way that they thought they had asked her. With Alan, it had worked pretty much this way up through the marriage proposal.
“Well, I hadn’t really …” Norman stumbled.
“If you like,” Carol suggested in an offhand but gracious tone, “I could reserve one for you, too, while I’m at it. I have a travel agent discount and can get twenty percent off on the ticket.”
“Well,” said Norman, “it’s a thought…” He appeared to be pondering the issue and turning over the possible deterrents. Stan Jacobs, for example, would no doubt disapprove.
“Just an offer,” said Carol, as if she were about to change the subject, then added causally: “That way, of course, you and May would be able to sit together, which is always nice, especially this time of year, when the flights are crowded.”
“You know, you’re absolutely right,” responded Norman with more certainty as he remembered his discomfort on the flights back to Boca. He had often considered going first class for the legroom, but even though he could afford it, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. There were some things that a Brooklyn boyhood rendered impossible. The prospect of sitting next to May now struck him as a way of easing the strain of the flight, precisely as Carol intended. “Why don’t you go ahead and order me a ticket. I’ll mail you a check, and the twenty percent savings is a nice bonus. I appreciate the gesture.”
“Think nothing of it,” said Carol. Hanging up the phone, she went to inform her mother-in-law and become, once and for all, in May Newman’s eyes, the incarnation of a good fairy in the guise of a suburban yenta.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
“MAY, MY DEAR, I DIDN’T EXPECT YOU BACK SO SOON,” EXclaimed Flo, hugging her friend as May and Norman approached the table where she and Amy were sitting. “And you’ve brought a companion, I see—the delightful Norman Grafstein, without his less delightful sidekick.”
“Oh,” laughed Norman, “you mean Stan. Don’t be hard on him. He’s just a bit overprotective. Stan’s a cynic by nature, you know. He’s read too many books for his own good.”
“Sounds like you, Aunt Flo,” laughed Amy, who was watching the encounter with interest. “I’m Flo’s great-niece, Amy Runcie-Slotkin.” She put out her hand to Norman and May. “And don’t laugh at the name. It’s really an accurate reflection of who I am; a real point-counterpoint sort of thing: My father’s a Jew who wants to be a Wasp and my mother’s a Wasp who wants to be a Jew. It’s the perfect marriage—they sort of cancel each other out—but it’s left me a little confused; hyphenated, you might say. Fortunately, I have Aunt Flo to keep me on the right track.”
“Not: according to your parents,” said Flo. “They think I’m a corrupter of youth. If they had their way, they’d have given me hemlock years ago.”
“Well, thank God they didn’t,” said Amy, “or I’d never have found this great subject for my documentary, which I know your friends will want to be in so they, too, can go to the Academy Awards.”
“What’s this?” asked Norman. “You want to get us on film and take us to the Academy Awards?” May looked nervous.
“That’s the gist of it,” said Amy, “although the Oscars are kind of hypothetical at this point. We’re projecting ahead in case you need a lot of lead time to get your wardrobe together. But, seriously, will you do it?” She used her best wheedling tone. “It’s just a school project, really. I’d want to follow you around for a few hours every day, me and my crew. We’d be very unobtrusive. Just getting you in characteristic settings, doing some of the things you’d normally do, with some interview footage in between.”
“But why do you want to film us?” asked May suspiciously.
“Because you’re in love,” pronounced Amy.
Norman laughed and May looked taken aback. Even Flo was a bit shocked by her niece’s pronouncement.
“What makes you say that?” asked Norman, smiling.
“Well, it’s nothing in particular. It’s just obvious. I don’t know how long you’ve been married or if you’re married at all. That’s not the point. It’s the feeling I’m after. I want this film to be kind of heartwarming—not soppy, but uplifting in a way. I know my aunt Flo secretly wants me to do a send-up of the place—a kind of Frede
rick Wiseman in a retirement community—but, I hate to break it to her, I really dig the people here. You’re all really adorable. I want the film to show what I think is so neat about this place: that relationships are alive, that they continue to be preserved and renewed even as people grow older and their longtime loves die. I want to show the zest for life that I see here.”
Flo never ceased to be amazed at Amy’s unique ability to combine sincere emotion with schmaltzy promotional savvy. No one could disarm people like Amy in order to get what she wanted. But it was her sincerity and her generous vision that were the key to her success.
“What a lovely way of putting things,” said May, who was moved by Amy’s words, though still embarrassed to have her relationship with Norman made the object of public display.
“I agree,” said Norman, who didn’t seem in the least embarrassed. “I’ve always wanted to go to the Academy Awards, and I’m vain enough to let you film me all you want. I’m not sure about May, though.” He turned to her. “How do you feel about having our budding romance recorded for posterity?”
“I don’t know,” said May shyly “Is it a budding romance?” “You better believe it,” said Norman. He put his arm around May and looked down at her. “And if you don’t like it, you better get away fast, because once it’s on film, it’ll be a lot harder. I haven’t been this happy in a long time, and I don’t intend to let anyone or anything stop it. So you better have dinner with me tonight and tomorrow.night, and you better make me that kugel you promised.” Norman turned to Amy: “And you can get that on film, if you like.”
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
THE RESUMPTION OF NORMAN GRAFSTEIN AND MAY NEWMAN’S romance put Flo back into the role of May’s chauffeur whenever there was a call for her friend to visit Broken Arrow. Although they spent more of their time at Boca Festa, given the greater convenience for May, there were the special evenings when Norman wanted May to visit him (though not, given the propriety of both parties, to stay overnight). Flo was always willing to provide her services as a driver. She liked being around Norman and May, and while this often brought her into contact with Stan Jacobs, this no longer troubled her. Seeing Stan so often (he sometimes accompanied Norman to Boca Festa as well) had turned what was once a source of discomfort into something more routine. He was always quietly polite when they were together. Although she thought that he looked at her too much, as though hoping to find fault, he was easy enough to ignore. They had never broached the topic of Mel Shirmer again. Flo continued to suspect that Stan had treated Mel shabbily, but her realization that Mel was no paragon had softened her outrage on this score.
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