After Warren passed out snoring, Nolan’s mom droned her Buddhist chant. She asked him to chant with her. There was so much he could chant for. True love. A real vocation. Finding his path, at last. He was sorry, but he couldn’t. It kills him that his mom has spent so long looking for things—a decent man, a home of her own. Peace. Love. God. Whatever. He doesn’t hold it against her. He hopes she finds it before she dies.
Nolan split after two days. He hasn’t been back since. He’d known better than to show up there with his shaved head and tattoos. His mom would think it was her fault for moving around so much when he was a kid. The other potential problem is that since the last time he saw his mother, Nolan has found out certain things about his father—about his father’s death—that she never told him. He guesses he would probably have to bring that up, sooner or later.
After he left his mother’s, he got hired for the night shift at the doughnut shop, and then after he was fired from that, at the Quik-Mart on Broadway in Middletown. The manager told him about a room he could sleep in at an old folks’ home if he slipped the janitor a ten.
That’s what Nolan had sunk to: working nights at a convenience store and sleeping during the day at a cockroach-infested Mafia-scam nursing home. You heard about losers falling through the cracks, through the safety net.
He fell.
Running into Raymond was his lucky break. After his little layover at the Quik-Mart and Lilyvale Manor, the chance to stay on Raymond’s couch and work at the tire shop seemed like an invitation from Saint Peter to pitch his tent in heaven. At first, Nolan hardly minded being woken every morning by the whine of the blender as Lucy made those nasty health shakes for the kids. He understood that the blender was Lucy’s way of sending him a big good-morning fuck-you.
Compared to that, Bonnie’s storage room—sorry, guest room—makes Nolan feel like Mick Jagger sipping tropical rum drinks in his Caribbean hacienda. How sad that what he likes best about his room at Bonnie’s is that the door shuts. That’s something you might not appreciate unless you’d had to stay up listening to Raymond and Ted Donnell and Frankie Most and Tommy Lehman have their beery conversations about how the white man is getting shafted. Nolan didn’t have to say much. They assumed he was one of them. And in some ways, he guesses, he was. He shaved his head and got the tattoos. He went to the Homeland Encampment and listened to the German marching songs and the speeches about how the Jewish sons of Satan were out to destroy the white race.
He can’t deny that it felt good to stop having to hide how angry he was, which was something he’d been taught to do ever since he could remember. That was what he learned about himself in anger management class. The best thing about ARM was that it gave you a place for the anger to go. Like a lightning rod, an electrical ground. You touched it, the tension discharged. Once he could have gotten a buzz off the fact that, all the time Nolan was homeless, Bonnie and her kids had a whole room they didn’t even use. Look who’s maintaining the swimming pools, and look who is swimming in them. But what good would those thoughts do him now?
Nolan shoves some boxes aside and lies on the bed and opens Crime and Punishment. Like the samurai book, like most of the books he’s read in the last few years, it came from a vehicle someone brought into the tire shop. Vincent started to see the place as his private lending library. No one ever missed the books, no one ever came back to find them, though they’d be calling every five minutes if some kid lost his mitten.
At Raymond’s he had no place to read, which was more annoying than Bonnie being shocked that he could read. It served her right that her kids got pissed at her for mentioning Nolan’s reading. Holding him up as some kind of adult role model must mean she wants them to hate his guts before they even get to know him.
Near the end of his stay at Raymond’s, Nolan spent lunch hours driving to an empty lot and sitting in the truck and reading. That was where he read Maslow’s books. And that was where his truck died. He couldn’t get it started. He’d had to call Raymond, and when Raymond asked what he was doing parked in an empty lot, Nolan said: Taking a piss.
Best not to think about that now. What better reason to lose himself in a book and forget all his troubles? He pages through Crime and Punishment, looking for his place. Past the murder, which was great, and up to the part where the guy thinks everyone’s talking about him. Someone else’s persecution complex is the last thing Nolan needs. He tries Pogo, but can’t focus, then opens The Way of the Warrior.
The Warrior keeps occupied to build a fortress against enemy thoughts. But what could “occupied” possibly mean in his present situation, holed up in a spare room crammed with family garbage? Well, if he’s going to stay here, he needs to get his living quarters squared away.
Nolan grabs a pile of clothes, jams it into the closet, and slams the door on the surprisingly feisty heaps of old coats. Bonnie’s kids are a little like Raymond’s. It must be a generational thing. None of them see the payoff in even pretending to be polite. Nolan doesn’t blame Bonnie’s sons, coming home to find their new roommate at the kitchen table. Together, she and the kids are like some ultra-sick sitcom. The younger one’s got some twisted love affair happening with the mom. The older one’s scared of his shadow. Nolan could blow them both away just by looking at them funny. Maybe they were cooler before their father bailed.
Nolan was three when his father split. He doesn’t remember much. Apparently, the guy worked twenty-four hours a day and had money problems anyway. Nolan thinks he recalls the time when his father began having tax troubles, but the only image he can summon up is a light shining over a kitchen table. Bonnie’s kids are spoiled rotten. They don’t know how good they have it.
Nolan only left Raymond’s this morning. And look what he’s accomplished! A brand-new life, for starters. No wonder he’s tired. He’s earned the right to kick back. Just shove some more stuff aside and take a Vicodin and push the reset button when he wakes up tomorrow morning. Thinking of his drug stash makes him want to make sure it’s still there. And he’ll take just one little pill for the teensiest bumperino.
Nolan thinks, as he often does, that the medical and legal establishments have it all wrong about why a person might take drugs. They assume you want to get to that place where you’re falling off your chair with your eyes rolled back in your head. When really what Nolan wants is a reason to stay on the chair, that mini-shift of focus that makes everything seem more fun, smoother, less boring, and minus the jittery backbeat of impatience and paranoia.
Nolan reaches into his duffel bag, past the T-shirts and underwear. He slides out a couple of books and the latest issue of Soldier of Fortune that, on an impulse—even though it’s hardly his favorite magazine, and even though he knew that stealing it would enrage Raymond almost more than anything—he stole from Raymond’s kitchen table on his way out this morning.
By the time Nolan finds the pill bottles and the envelope full of money, he’s in such a sweat that he has to repeat the handy formula he learned in anger management: Relax. Stay calm. Take it easy. The plastic bottles feel good in his hands. Little vials of tranquillity. He’s got maybe enough Vicodin and Xanax to last a couple of months if strict old Mr. Super Ego helps him keep things under control.
Then he counts the fifteen hundred dollars, the end product of those seventy hits of Ex. Not the ticket to Tahiti, not exactly the golden parachute that will let him down easy.
Nolan slips the money inside The Way of the Warrior, then stuffs everything back in his duffel. Probably it will be safe. Surely Bonnie raised her kids not to root through other people’s belongings. Still, it seems like tempting fate to leave the bag in the middle of the room. He drags out enough stuff from under the bed to make space for the duffel. Computer keyboards, a printer. He piles them in a corner. What slobs.
One envelope turns out to contain a bunch of old tax returns. On top is a 1992 1040 form on which Dr. Joel Kalen, physician, declared a hundred and sixteen grand from his medical practice and Bonnie
Kalen, museum administrator, a more modest twenty-two thousand. What was Nolan doing that year? Laying carpet, maybe. Pulling in something around what Bonnie made. That scrap of arithmetic makes Nolan feel allied with Bonnie against the higher-earning Dr. Joel. So what if Nolan was surviving on that twenty-two thou, and Bonnie was spending her mad money on all those little fashion extras?
No point checking the other returns. Everyone cheats on their taxes, everyone gets away with it, everyone except poor bastards like Nolan’s dad. Putting away the envelope, Nolan wants a little credit for respecting the Kalens’ privacy.
He finds a box of folders from photo shops and for an instant lets himself dream that he’s stumbled on a treasure trove of Dr. Joel’s naked pictures of Bonnie. That would prove there was a God, and that God loved Nolan. He could probably jerk off and fall asleep. But having met Bonnie, Nolan doubts that such pictures exist.
The first sets of photos are, he knows right away, from the older kid’s bar mitzvah. Nolan recalls a debate between Raymond and some bonehead who’d insisted that Jews get circumcised at thirteen, in public, at their bar mitzvahs. Raymond-the-expert said no, they were cut at birth by a rabbi who dried the foreskins to make a date-rape powder for elderly Jews to put in white Christian girls’ drinks.
In the photos, everyone’s shined up and groomed. Bonnie’s wearing a navy blue suit with gold buttons. The tall guy with his arm around her must be Dr. Joel. How wrong the ARM cartoonists are, with their corny pictures of hunchbacked, hook-nosed, drooling trolls humping their money bags. The Jew you have to watch out for is the glossy overgrown boy, the Michael Eisners, the Steven Spielbergs, the former high school jocks like Dr. Joel, the chosen tribe destined from the cradle for some lucrative profession. At least that’s what the old Nolan thought. The new Nolan tells himself: Look beyond the big nose and the fancy suit to the guy who loves his wife and kids on this proud occasion. Or anyway, the guy who was trying. It must have been around that time that Dr. Feelbad walked.
In some of the pictures, older relatives—grandparents, Nolan assumes—shrink from children’s rough embraces. Most of the pictures show Bonnie and the doc and the younger kid grinning like maniacs, and the bar mitzvah boy scowling, as far from the others as he can get and still be in the same photo.
Next set of snapshots, same configuration: Mama Bear, Daddy Bear, Baby Bear clumped together, Sourpuss Bear on the side, all squinting into the camera, trying to look relaxed as they pose on a wharf surrounded by nautical tourist crap. The sticklike limbs of the kids angle out of their shorts and T-shirts. Here’s Bonnie in a swimsuit. She’s got a cute little body. The poor thing’s lost a ton of weight since the old man left. On her face is a fake-exasperated smile with an edge of panic. Apparently she didn’t want Dr. Shutterbug taking her picture.
With waning interest, Nolan flips through the packs of prints, watching everyone get progressively younger in a predictable series of Kodak moments: school plays, birthday parties, Thanksgivings, trips. Nolan can hardly stand this jolly time travel through the Leave It to Beaver life of the Kalen family. The part that really annoys him is: They take it all for granted. They think they don’t have enough!
The Warrior gathers knowledge concerning his surroundings. At the very bottom of the box is Bonnie’s wedding portrait. In her lacy white dress and veil, Bonnie just reaches Joel’s shoulder. The darkly handsome Jewish prince stares out of the photo, while Bonnie is staring up at him. Worshipful and adoring. Nolan could have told them the marriage wouldn’t last.
There seem to be no pictures beyond the kid’s bar mitzvah, so that must have been when the show got canceled. Nolan loads the envelopes back into the box. He feels like he does after he’s come and the porn tape is still running. He can’t remember the last time he watched porn, certainly not on Raymond’s couch with the kids running in and out. Just before he and Margaret split, she wouldn’t let him turn off the TV while they were having sex. Mostly it was the nightly news. That should have sent him a message. Obviously, they had turned a corner in a road that led a long way back to those nights when Margaret would get home from work and she’d be halfway out of her uniform by the time she walked in the door.
Enough housework for one night! Nolan thinks he could sleep. His mind is still jacked up from the day, but his body is cashing it in. But wait a second. What’s that sound? His chest tightens until he convinces himself: Raymond couldn’t possibly know where he is.
The comfort is so shocking—total darkness, a bed to himself, clean sheets against his bare skin—that for some reason it takes him a while to decide if it feels good. Well, it does and it doesn’t as he lies there, tense, determined to resist the seductive, treacherous noises of the house, the comfy nighttime creaks and sighs trying to sell him on that sweetness that the housefly thinks he’s found, one second before his legs give way and he drowns in the jar of honey.
ON A NORMAL MORNING, Bonnie would tap on the boys’ doors and begin the delicate task of prying them loose from their dreams. She starts with Max, who’s easier. Her voice and a sliver of light are usually all it takes to persuade him to stretch out his arms. The hug is a promise that Max will be getting out of bed even as she moves on to Danny’s room, where the sound of her voice will have the opposite effect. Danny will roll away from her, a mummy wedged in the corner. Bonnie hadn’t liked it when he’d put his mattress on the floor. But at sixteen you’re old enough to decide how you want to sleep, old enough so that a mother (these days!) knows how little can be asked, knows to be grateful (he’s not mainlining heroin or shooting up his high school cafeteria!) when, every morning, her darling says, Would you shut up? Would you go a-way?
Bonnie feels her shoulders stiffen before she gets to Danny’s door. At least there’s no one else around—like Joel, for example—to accuse her of spoiling the boys and letting them bully her. What if Joel had wanted custody? What will happen when Joel finds out about their skinhead houseguest? These mornings, hard as they are, could have been—could still be—stolen from her. Bonnie knows how soon it will end. A few brief years, and the boys will be gone.
On a normal morning, she would yell from the kitchen, hurling empty threats at Danny until she’s almost hoarse. No wonder the kid hates the sound of her voice. Anyway, it’s all theater. Danny and Bonnie both know he will sleep until exactly ten minutes before the school bus comes, ten minutes of frantic racing around, looking for the homework that he will accuse her of throwing out. Until he grabs his coat in a rage and leaves just as the bus driver honks a final warning.
That’s what Bonnie has to look forward to as she grimly soldiers on with her own morning, showers, dresses, brews coffee, finds Max’s lost homework, the papers she needs to take to the office, whirling through her house in a dervishlike frenzy spiked by jolts of adrenaline whenever she wonders how long it’s been since she tried to wake up Danny. Until at last she loses it and begins to scream.
But this isn’t a normal morning. Bonnie will not yell at her children with a stranger in the house. How depressing that the presence of a neo-Nazi could make a person behave more like a civilized adult. But if that’s how it is, so be it. It’s one more benefit of Vincent’s presence, of her having done what Meyer suggested. Now if only Vincent stays in his room until the boys leave for school. Bonnie puts on a longer skirt than she had planned on wearing.
She was proud of her kids last night. They handled the situation like grown-ups. But how will their maturity stand the test of seeing him this morning? Shielding them from the awkwardness of meeting a strange man at breakfast is one of the things that’s kept her from dating since Joel left. Not that anyone’s asked her, so it’s theoretical. She did endure a few sad dinners with the lonely-guy friends of friends, plus one blind date with an entertainment lawyer who spent dinner describing, in detail, what twenty years of bulimia had done to his ex-wife’s dental health.
Bonnie’s been awake since five, fully present and alert for a three-hour dark night of the soul that began with a
dream so disgusting that she can hardly stand to recall it. She dreamed she was having a party and went into the bathroom and saw that the guests had been urinating in the tub, leaving those little puddles that dogs (you hope it’s dogs) leave on city streets. Stuck in one of the puddles was a pubic hair that, on closer inspection, turned out to be a micro Loch Ness monster with melancholy eyes and a tiny triangular head.
No need to wake up Dr. Freud. Bonnie knows what the dream means—her unconscious has found a way to punish her for being squeamish about Vincent sharing her children’s bathroom—without the years of expensive psychotherapy that, at the end, Joel offered to pay for. Joel always claimed she was paranoid, but as it turned out, she wasn’t.
In any case, they’ve made it through the night. Bonnie checks on the boys and is overjoyed to find them in their beds. It delights her when Danny says, “Get lost.” Look for the hidden blessing: Vincent’s presence has made her treasure the most difficult part of her day.
For once, Danny doesn’t stay in bed until the very last minute but rather comes down early and stands in the kitchen doorway, glowering at her coffee cup and at Max’s half-eaten corn muffin.
“Please tell me the Nazi’s not still here,” he says.
“As far as I know he is,” says Bonnie. “Let’s hope. That is, if you have any interest in your mom keeping her job.”
“Are you insane?” says Danny. “Bring that creep home? Was this that sick bastard Meyer’s idea?”
“Language,” says Bonnie.
A Changed Man Page 9