It was a section from Bleak House, which Meyer has never read. And he might not have taken the time today, except that the minute he saw the chapter heading, his heart sank and kept sinking until he’d read to the end.
The chapter, “Telescopic Philanthropy,” recounts a visit to the messy home of a certain Mrs. Jellyby, who can’t be bothered cleaning house or looking after her filthy, miserable, neglected children, who are constantly falling downstairs and getting their heads stuck in railings. And why? Because Mrs. Jellyby is busy with her “African project,” establishing coffee plantations and teaching the natives of Borrioboola-Gha.
Meyer knows it wasn’t meant well. Someone is suggesting that he is a Mrs. Jellyby, practicing telescopic philanthropy, mistreating those closest to him in his efforts to save people on the other side of the planet. It’s unfair and untrue. Meyer is kind to his staff, to Irene. Maybe someone thought it was funny and assumed that Meyer would, too. But why the anonymity? Someone was being hostile. The gesture was so overcomplicated, when one word would have done. One word like fraud spelled out in letters scissored from the newspaper.
Why does Meyer think it’s someone who knows him well enough to know that the horror of being a telescopic philanthropist is among his worst fears? In fact, those worries have been multiplying, or maybe it’s just that Meyer more often thinks of those aspects of his character that make him feel small and depress him. His vanity and his ego. How can he be shallow enough to get his feelings hurt when Bonnie tells him that tickets to the dinner haven’t been selling? And neither has his new book….
It reminds him of how he felt, a few months ago, when he and Elie Wiesel attended a conference in Rennes, and the French paparazzi greeted Wiesel with a hail of flashbulbs that stopped when Meyer walked in behind him. Apparently it doesn’t bother them that Wiesel seems to believe that genocide is only genocide when it happens to Jews—and maybe Bosnians. But surely not gypsies or Africans. Their deaths are, at best, mass murder. All right, so Meyer’s not well known in France. That was never the point. The point is his minding that Wiesel gets all the flashes. But is that such a sin? Dictators torture children and never lose a minute of sleep while Meyer stays up nights in terror of being a tiny bit vain?
Today, just before lunch, he’d gotten a fax saying that an Iranian cartoonist had been jailed and was at risk of being tortured. The guy has a wife and kids. Meyer met him last fall when he’d come over to the United States with a delegation of Iranian writers and artists, apparatchik stooges the government sent as propaganda. A friend in the State Department talked Meyer into showing them around New York. Meyer owed his friend a favor, so he took the Iranians to a few parties and panels where they yakked about how free they were. They’d all read Salman Rushdie. Their wives all chose to go veiled. Only one guy, the cartoonist, never said a word. And now he’s the one in prison.
Meyer started making calls. Telescopic philanthropy. After that came the dreary talk with Bonnie about the ticket sales, and then Vincent Nolan walked in. Right away, Meyer saw, in Vincent, proof that he hadn’t lost it, that he still had the power to make miracles happen. And to see who people were—in Vincent’s case, a lost soul who could never have believed all the things he must have claimed to believe to belong to that hate group. He saw a nice-looking young man who truly wanted to change his life, to work for tolerance and justice. It wasn’t until Vincent and Bonnie left that Meyer remembered the Dickens chapter. At which point he had to go see Minna. Anything to prove that he wasn’t a Mrs. Jellyby.
“What’s new at the foundation?” asks Sol.
“Every day something,” says Meyer. “This morning I got a fax about an Iranian artist I know who just got locked up in jail. Iran is tough, but it’s worth a try. Maybe we can do something.”
“That’s marvelous!” says Sol. “The things you accomplish!”
Meyer nods, accepting the tribute. “The foundation does them,” he says. “And then this afternoon, back on the home front, Bonnie Kalen, our development director—”
“I know Bonnie,” says Sol.
“—walks into my office with this…skinhead. This former skinhead. Some upstate Hitler Jugend.”
“You let him in?” demands Sol. “Are we forgetting the sick bastard who shot up that preschool in California?”
“We welcomed him, actually. He’d had some sort of mystical vision at a rock concert. He told us he wanted to work with us.”
“Obviously, some cuckoo.” That’s Sol’s diagnosis. But what does Sol know? He’s a literature professor, not a psychiatric clinician. “I’d cut him loose in a minute. I mean, you’ve got to wonder what makes them racists in the first place.” How much does Meyer know about this guy after half an hour in his office? Maybe he should have figured out some alternative to sending him home with Bonnie.
“I do wonder,” Meyer says. “Why would a guy who’s not stupid let himself get sucked into that? I’m sure there’s plenty he isn’t admitting. But I think he’s mostly telling the truth. He’s my scientific experiment. My golem. What can we extract from him to vaccinate the world with?”
“Today the foundation, tomorrow the world,” says Sol. “Be careful, is all I’m suggesting.” In the silence that falls between them, their focus drifts from an SUV commercial to the digital read-out of Minna’s heartbeat.
Finally Sol says, “So God tells Adam: I’m going to make you a wife, a helpmate, the most beautiful woman who ever lived, fabulous in bed, uncomplaining, ready to carry out your every wish and desire. But it’ll cost you.”
“‘How much?’ says Adam.
“‘An eye, an elbow, a collarbone, and your left ball.’
“Adam thinks for a minute, then says, ‘What can I get for a rib?’”
Meyer laughs, then thinks, How can a guy tell a joke like that over his wife’s sickbed? Isn’t Sol superstitious at all? Meyer tries to think of another joke, quick, something to counter that one. But what he thinks is: I need to call Irene. She has no idea he’ll be late. He hates to worry her.
Meyer says, “Two old guys in Miami. One says, ‘I forget everything lately. I go to the mall and forget how I got there.’ The other one says, ‘Not me. I never forget a thing.’”
Meyer stops. The punch line is, the guy knocks on wood for luck, and then forgets and says, “Come in!” But there’s no wood in Minna’s hospital room. Sol’s looking at Meyer, wondering if he’s forgotten the punch line of a joke about forgetting. Meyer knocks on Minna’s nightstand. “Come in,” he says, too late.
Sol doesn’t get it. The joke is ruined, and worse yet, the knock has woken Minna. Traces of the recognizable Minna animate the waxy mannequin of the old woman in bed.
“Sol,” she says, delightedly. “Meyer. How lovely to see you.”
Meyer raises her papery hand to his lips, inhaling its faint scent of disinfectant. Soon he’ll be out of here, heading back to his apartment. He’ll go home, pour himself a stiff Scotch, and Irene—or Babu, their cook—will bring him a delicious dinner, which he’ll enjoy as he tries not to think of Minna peeling the plastic wrap off her hospital tray.
Sol and Minna’s faces swim up through Meyer’s reverie. What are they waiting for?
Meyer says, “Sorry. Where were we? Minna, you’re looking splendid.”
Babu opens the door. How happy Meyer is to be home! Meyer shakes Babu’s hand as he does every night, until Babu removes his limp palm and clasps both hands and bows. Babu is an Untouchable activist who was getting death threats in Hyderabad and needed a place to lay low until the crisis blew over. He liked it at Meyer’s and stayed. Isn’t that more or less what happened today with Vincent Nolan? Except that Meyer doubts that Vincent can cook, which means that Meyer got a better deal than Bonnie.
“Mrs. Maslow is starting dinner,” says Babu.
It’s not what Meyer imagined—first the leisurely drink in his study, then the meal. But he’s a big boy. He can adjust. Irene puts up with a lot.
The candles are lit. The
table is set for two. Irene’s back is toward the door, and she doesn’t turn, not even when Meyer kisses the top of her head.
“Sorry I’m late,” says Meyer. “Minna’s in the hospital. I stopped by on my way home.”
Irene clutches Meyer’s forearm. “What is it? What’s wrong? Why didn’t someone call me?” In the early days of their marriage, when it turned out that Meyer wasn’t yet ready to give up the freedom he’d won at such cost, Irene used to confide her sorrows and jealousies in Minna. Everyone, including Meyer himself, had thought he would never get married. That was twenty years ago. Irene was almost forty, married to a multimillionaire businessman. She’d left Vienna just before Hitler, a different Europe from Meyer’s.
“An aneurysm,” says Meyer. “They fixed it. She’ll be good as new. I meant to call you. I—”
“Thank God.” Irene pauses, then looks down at her plate. “Thai soup with lemon grass. I wish you’d called. I would have waited five minutes.”
There’s no reproach in Irene’s voice. She means what she says. She would have waited five minutes. With another woman, the ease with which she’s segued from Minna’s illness to the subject of dinner might indicate a shallow character. But that’s not true of Irene, who cares deeply about Minna and whose insistence on a good meal in the face of—as a charm against—illness and pain is part of the reason Meyer married her, and why they have stayed together. Meyer takes his seat at the far end of the table and looks across at Irene. He still thinks she’s beautiful, even if she doesn’t. If there’s one thing he would change about her, it would be her inability to accept her aging, the way Meyer tries to accept his. He knows it’s easier for men. Or so Irene tells him.
Babu appears with another bowl of soup. Meyer thanks him, and Irene says, “Babu, you’re a genius.”
Babu bows. “It is my duty.” For all Babu’s formal subservience, his role in the household is more powerful than he lets on. He’s Irene’s second in command. Together, they keep the complicated domestic machinery oiled and running. Meyer sometimes feels like the indulged child of two loving but distant parents.
The soup is a tangle of cellophane noodles with basil and coconut milk. Irene knows that coconut’s bad for Meyer’s cholesterol. And she’s told Babu. Meyer realizes that Irene and the cook aren’t conspiring to kill him, but rather to give him pleasure. Meyer is glad that Irene isn’t one of those women who make you constantly aware of your diet, your health, your mortality. She’s careful, but she takes breaks in which they are free to enjoy themselves—and live.
Not until Babu clears the plates does Irene ask about Meyer’s day. A weaker man might tell his wife about the Dickens letter and the unsold benefit tickets, wanting reassurance, needing her to say: You’re not a telescopic philanthropist, dear! And the tickets will sell. But Meyer keeps it to himself, taking satisfaction in the fact that, after all these years, he and Irene still make an effort to preserve their own, and each other’s, dignity. Perhaps it’s because they’re European. They haven’t bought into a culture in which it’s considered normal to confess your secrets on a TV talk show.
Meyer says, “Irene, do you remember when those Iranians came for dinner?”
“Of course.” The sit-down dinner for twelve she arranged. She probably still knows the menu.
“Do you remember this one quiet guy, he didn’t say a word, a short guy with thick black glasses?”
Irene won’t remember. Because now Meyer recalls that she spent the dinner chatting with the most handsome Iranian, the leader of the group and, as far as Meyer could tell, the biggest stooge and spy. Why should Irene care what he did in his own country? He made her feel young. Should Meyer have been jealous? They give each other latitude. Which also seems European.
“What about him?” Irene says.
“He’s in jail,” says Meyer. “In Tehran.”
“That’s terrible,” says Irene. “Is there anything you can do?”
Something’s slightly off. Perhaps on the way to the disturbing thought of the jailed Iranian, Irene’s been sidetracked by the more pleasant thought of his handsome friend, so that her sympathy feels like an afterthought. Irene believes in the foundation’s work, but Meyer knows that the people they’ve helped blend in her mind into one battered prisoner crouched on a cold cement floor.
“Something else,” Meyer says. “Today, at the foundation. A neo-Nazi came into the office.”
“Oh my God,” says Irene. “Is everyone all right?”
“Nothing happened, darling. Relax. He wants to work with us. He claims to have had some kind of vision. So he’s come to Brotherhood Watch to—”
“Oh,” says Irene. “You mean like that skinhead in California? I saw him on that Chandler show. Now he’s become a big shot with the Wiesenthal Foundation.”
Meyer remembers Vincent saying something about a TV show. Meyer chose to ignore it. Again he feels vaguely like he felt when the flashbulbs popped for Wiesel. That something like this has happened before diminishes his own satisfaction, his sense of being special. Good God, how small is that? The ideal would be for every skinhead to work for tolerance and brotherhood. To convert the entire white supremacist world.
“Who knows what the truth is? Or if the guy knows his own mind. He wants us to believe that he’s already changed. That all of that is behind him. But I think he’s on the edge. He could go either way. That’s what interests me. So I thought we’d sign him on as…something like an intern. Bonnie Kalen offered to let him stay at her house—”
“Meyer,” says Irene. “Excuse me. I must have heard you wrong. You let poor Bonnie Kalen, who’s hanging on by her fingernails, if she has any fingernails she hasn’t bitten, you let that poor woman take in some…thug.”
“I didn’t make Bonnie do it. Bonnie volunteered.” Is he taking advantage of Bonnie? More telescopic philanthropy. He’ll call Bonnie later and see if everything is all right.
“How could you even let him into your office?”
“That’s what Sol asked,” says Meyer.
“Someone should have searched the guy. He could have had a gun! You need to hire a bodyguard, Meyer. I’ve been telling you that for years. But what good would a bodyguard do if you invite these criminals—”
“Bonnie invited him,” Meyer says.
“Oh, that poor woman,” says Irene. “How do you know the guy isn’t dangerous? He might be a serial killer, he—”
“Because I’m sure, is why.” Everyone knows that Meyer is a genius at judging character. So why doesn’t Irene believe that? No man is a hero to his valet. And now that there are no more valets, it’s become a code word for wife.
Only a woman would think first about what this means for Bonnie. It’s one of the reasons Meyer needs Irene, to keep his compassion sharp, to keep him focused on the Jellyby children as well as the African babies. But women also need men to tell them which men are dangerous, to reassure them that a guy like Vincent Nolan is harmless. How does Meyer know? He knows. Irene couldn’t do what he did today. Nor would Irene, for all her intuition, know that Bonnie wanted to be asked to take Vincent in.
ONLY NOW THAT HE’S LIFTING THE JUNK off the bed where Bonnie said he could sleep can Nolan afford to ask himself: How messed up has he been? Now that the previous stage in his life is over, or practically over, or temporarily—and temporarily is the operative word—over, only now can he face the fact that he’s been basically homeless. Sleeping on Raymond’s living room couch is not what you’d call a life. Nolan could never decide for himself when to hit the sack. Nights, while Raymond and his friends watched TV, Nolan had to wait until some show that wasn’t about Nazis came on the all-Hitler Channel, or until Raymond got bored or too drunk and called it a night, or until Lucy stomped in.
He’d never said it was a life. The word he’d thought then was transition. He’d had a life. A job, a girlfriend, a home. And the next day, he didn’t. Flip-flip, like a domino chain. One thing falls, then another. First he got fired. Which turned out
to be a disaster, but he doesn’t blame Skip. Friendship aside, you can’t afford to have your employees dumping old ladies in pools.
Margaret carried on as if he’d been screwing up ever since they met and the incident with Regina Browner was the last straw. But he hadn’t been screwing up. He’d come straight home every evening and had mostly cut down drinking. Dunking Mrs. Browner was his first step off the straight and narrow.
That was Margaret’s big break. Her ticket out of his life. And Margaret jumped right on it. She told him their relationship wasn’t going anywhere. Relationship. Their relationship. She’d never used that word before. He wouldn’t have been with a woman who talked that talk-show trash. Maybe that’s what hurt most: that he’d spent two years with a woman who could break his heart because their relationship wasn’t going anywhere. And Margaret is going somewhere. By the time she’s forty, she’ll be running UPS instead of just driving one of their trucks. Nolan used to think it was sexy, the brown uniform, the clipboard, the friendly little wave Margaret always gave him, pulling away in her truck. Only a fool would be turned on by how happy a woman looked to be rolling out of the driveway.
It was Margaret’s apartment in Saugerties, so the breakup took care of the home part. Then it turned out that Vincent had less money saved up than he’d thought. He had some unemployment coming, so he stayed around Kingston. He found a weekly rental at the Streamside Motel. No one could blame him for heading straight to the beer and TV and pills. Right around the corner from the motel was one of those Doc-in-the-Boxes, walk-in medical clinics where the personnel were remarkably understanding about his work-related, intractable back pain.
Eventually, he stopped paying the motel owner, Mr. Derjani. The guy never fixed the hot water heater. In Nolan’s mind they were even. But the word on Nolan must have gone out over the Paki-landlord grapevine. Every time Nolan walked through a door, the No Vacancy light flickered on.
Finally, he’d gone to his mom’s, as if he’d forgotten that his mom was now—had been, for a decade or so—married to Warren the Warthog. As if it had slipped his mind that Warren was newly retired from the electric-fan factory and had too much time on his hands. The happy couple live in a trailer near Beacon, which Warren had gotten years ago in his divorce settlement. Warren made Nolan feel at home by asking him several times daily how long he planned on staying.
A Changed Man Page 8