A Changed Man

by Francine Prose

  Bonnie’s first impulse—to lock her door and turn off her phone—wars against her second impulse, which is to go home and lock the doors and turn off the phone. It’s after five. She’s been here since nine. She has every right to leave and try to beat the worst of the Tappan Zee traffic.

  Probably she should tell Meyer and Roberta that she’s going. But she doesn’t feel like being seen breezing out while they’re still hard at work.

  She’s glad the elevator is crowded, that it’s not just her and the lone obvious candidate for Mr. Mystery Caller. On the street, she spots a dozen guys who could be her phone friend. She keeps looking over her shoulder. How can you tell if you’re being followed when everyone’s walking in the same direction?

  By the time she gets to the garage, she’s so jittery that she considers asking the attendant to walk her to her car. But how would she explain it? Excuse me, I hate to bother you, but some pervert breathed into the phone.

  Bonnie finds the van, drives down the ramp, inches out into traffic, all of which requires so much concentration that she forgets the crank calls, or whatever they were—maybe just wrong numbers—until the blinking light on her dashboard reminds her of the blinking phone, and then makes her forget it again because, as she heads toward the West Side Highway, the dashboard light seems to be flashing faster.

  Maybe she’s imagining it. The light’s been going on intermittently since that first day she drove Vincent home. He’d said she had a thousand miles to go before she had to take it seriously. But the light on her dashboard doesn’t seem to know that.

  By the time she’s driven through Riverdale, there’s an ominous groaning, a tug of resistance every time she hits the gas. Then a disturbing clicking begins, several miles south of the bridge. Wouldn’t you know this would happen on the one day Vincent isn’t with her? Which is probably why it’s happening, just to punish Bonnie, who feels the same obscure guilt she feels when she lets her kids cut school. If she’d been tougher on Vincent this morning and made him go to work, he’d be here to help her.

  Meanwhile, what should Bonnie do? Pull over and call for help? Every time she puts on her blinker, the sound stops and she thinks she can make it home. How wonderful it would be to limp all the way to her driveway and cope with this from the comfort of her living room instead of some gas station in Yonkers. The van bides its time, it waits till she’s on to the approach to the bridge—no exit!—and then starts making noises that mean business.

  Bonnie prays, Just let me make it across the bridge. There are no atheists with car trouble on the Tappan Zee. She bargains with the god of breakdowns to give her ten more miles, in return for which she’ll do the right thing, she’ll stop at JZ’s garage on the way home. JZ knows her. He knows the car. He’ll be able to take one look at it and tell her how bad things are. Why didn’t she do this when the light started blinking? Why don’t people rush to the doctor with that first cough or skipped heartbeat? Because she’d hoped it would go away. Because she’d been busy.

  The car god hears her prayer. The noise doesn’t get any louder, though that funny tug of resistance seems to be growing more pronounced. But even that gives her enough slack to cross the bridge and head north on 9W until she reaches the garage. It’s a miracle she’s gotten here, and a double blessing that, by the time she pulls into JZ’s lot, the garage is still open and the sound is so loud that it summons JZ and his helper and eliminates the small talk they might otherwise have felt obliged to make.

  She’s known JZ, Jimmy Zagarella, ever since they moved up here. Bonnie always hated how Joel acted around Jimmy, as if they were close buddies, two guys into large engines. Once, when Bonnie needed to reach Joel, who was stopping by the garage, she called and asked for him by name, and Jimmy said, Uhh…what’s the guy driving? That’s how close they were. Jimmy figured out about the divorce. It didn’t take a genius to make the logical deduction when Joel disappeared and suddenly it was Bonnie bringing in the van for its annual inspection. Sometimes Bonnie sees Jimmy at the middle school. He’s got a son in Max’s class. Jimmy’s wife ditched him years ago, left him with two kids. He’s been doing a marvelous job. He’s Clairmont’s model single parent.

  Now the noises coming from under the hood make Jimmy grin and shake his head in awe and admiration. “Wow,” he says. “When did that start?” Bonnie smiles back. It’s an oddly congenial moment as Jimmy and Bonnie bond over how terrible her car sounds.

  “It just started,” Bonnie lies.

  “Out of nowhere?” asks Jimmy.

  “Well, there was this blinking light. I should have brought it in sooner—”

  “I figured that,” says Jimmy. How grateful Bonnie is to have reached this sweet, safe harbor where she can hand her troubles over to Jimmy. “The main thing is that you’re not stuck on the bridge.”

  That’s exactly what Bonnie thinks. How well Jimmy knows her. If Bonnie was determined to form some inappropriate and unrequited romantic attachment, why couldn’t she have picked a nice guy, a single dad like Jimmy, instead of a former Nazi she works with at the office? If she’d hit on Jimmy, he would have turned her down, too. Where is Bonnie going with this? This is about her car.

  “What’s wrong with it?” Appalled to hear her question trail off in a whine, Bonnie tries to recast her whiny neediness as jaunty and ironic. “How much damage are we looking at?” She’s trying to sound like a guy, when what she’d really like to do is burst into tears. How will she get to work? She absolutely cannot miss her lunch date tomorrow with Laura Ticknor! Wednesday is The Chandler Show. What if the van can’t be fixed?

  She can’t afford a new vehicle like, for example, the obscene, gasguzzling eco-criminal wet dream that Joel’s apparently driving. The thought of Joel cruising around in that while she’s nearly breaking down in the middle of the Tappan Zee is so maddening that it nearly undoes her resolve to be more sympathetic, the promise that she made to herself the last time she and Joel talked on the phone.

  “Let’s take a look,” says Jimmy. Does he really mean let’s? Is he suggesting that Bonnie watch over his shoulder like Joel used to? As if Joel knew jack about cars. Bonnie stands—close but not too close—behind Jimmy as he pokes around under the hood. Jimmy’s attractive, around Bonnie’s age, smallish, wiry, well built. And such a good father. Why has Bonnie never noticed? God help her, she’s turned into a sex maniac, fantasizing romance with every guy she meets. But shouldn’t she be grateful? Doesn’t this signal the return of some faint promptings from the life force that she’d assumed was gone forever?

  “What do you think it is?” Bonnie hears herself whining again.

  “Serious things, not-so-serious things. It’s hard to say right this minute.”

  “What are the not-so-serious things?”

  “Spark plug. The fan could be hitting its housing.”

  “And the serious things?”

  “I don’t know. A wheel bearing. Bonnie, do me a favor. Go wait in the office, okay? Let me check it out.”

  “Okay, sure.” Bonnie’s face is hot with shame. You’d think, from the way she feels now, that she’d grabbed Jimmy’s ass. Nothing happened to make Jimmy think that she was interested. Vincent’s the guy it happened with. Bonnie took off her glasses.

  The “office”—two chairs, a table—smells of motor oil and cigarettes. Bonnie eyes the coffeepot, the packets of creamer and sugar. She’d be awake all night. Plus she doesn’t have the hand-eye coordination required to pour and tap and stir. She drops into a chair, flips through the magazines, discarding the ones with Tim McVeigh’s face on the cover. She opens House Proud and reads about five women and their kitchens getting simultaneous beauty makeovers. She pages through a feature entitled “The 10 Most Important Things You Should Know About Your Child’s Food Allergies.” What malevolent spirit sent that helpful essay her way? She studies every word, then picks up a teen magazine and opens to “How Do You Know If He Likes You?” Guys are easier to figure out than most girls realize. She flings it
down, and so it goes until she’s worked her way through the stack in which each publication conveys a precisely targeted smart bomb of shame, curiosity, and horror.

  She feels the same vague anxiety she associates with the doctor’s office. So when Jimmy reappears, her apprehension spikes just as it does when the doctor enters with his nose in her chart.

  Jimmy smiles. “Which do you want first, the good news or the bad news?”

  “The good news.” Bonnie really wants the bad news first but wants to seem like the sort of person who asks for the good news first.

  “The good news is that it’s the fan belt. Like I said. Remember?”

  Excellent. Fan belt sounds fixable. But what about the bad news?

  “Now for the really good news,” Jimmy says. “I can fix it for you by tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Okay, so what’s the bad news?”

  “You’ve got to pick it up before two,” Jimmy says. “I’m closing early. For the weekend. Sean’s got a dirt bike meet all the way up in Cooperstown. We’ve got to leave Friday afternoon and stay over Friday night.”

  This isn’t bad news. Bonnie’s car can be fixed soon, and from the sound of Jimmy’s voice, she guesses it won’t be too expensive. She’ll have to leave work early, or better yet, take the day off and get the car. What’s wrong with this picture? Lunch with Laura Ticknor. That’s the bad news. Bonnie can’t reschedule. With Laura Ticknor’s social life, that might mean a delay of three months, by which point they will have lost whatever momentum they picked up at the benefit dinner. Good-bye new donors, farewell celebrity volunteers. Vincent will have almost died for nothing.

  Why should she go through this so that Jimmy’s son can ride a dangerous dirt bike too fast around a track? Can’t Jimmy’s helper stay late enough to exchange Bonnie’s car keys for money?

  “Can’t you leave the car and the key for me till I get home from work tomorrow night? And I’ll get you a check.”

  Jimmy says, “We’re not supposed to let this get out. But a car was stolen from the lot two weeks ago. So we’re being extra careful.”

  “Hey, I’ve got an idea,” Bonnie says. “There’s this guy I work with, I could send him to pick up the car tomorrow. And I’ll call you and send you a check. Or I could give it to him. But how will I know how much it is?”

  “I’ll trust you for it,” says Jimmy.

  HOW LONG HAS MEYER BEEN ASLEEP? Long enough for the light to have changed. The sky above the city has taken on a dusty lavender color, a color for which, he seems to recall, there was a Hungarian word. But he can’t remember it, and maybe there never was one, just an illusion left over from the dream state he’d slipped into at his desk. Has he missed anything? Probably. So much is happening every minute. The TV show coming up, and all the hullabaloo about Vincent…

  Every light on his phone is blinking. He rings Bonnie and gets her voice mail. Meyer calls the front desk. Has everyone gone home? He looks at his watch. It’s seven. No wonder they’re gone. How could he have slept so long? Why didn’t anyone wake him? Didn’t anyone care enough to see if he was alive?

  Meyer leaves his office and wanders down the halls lined with empty cubicles. How melancholy and alone he feels, like an abandoned child. On the morning of the day he came home from school to find that his mother had been taken away by the Germans, they’d had a fight because he’d refused to wear the scratchy new scarf she’d made him. The scarf was there. She wasn’t. Only then did he put it on. A lifetime later, he can still feel the coarse wool around his neck.

  Why think that now? Because he’s alone in the office? Because the elderly baby can’t be left on his own? Meyer’s being hard on himself. He’s not a pampered infant. His work is important. He just freed an innocent man from jail, halfway around the world. Meyer made some phone calls. He called in a couple of favors. But no one wants to hear about that. They all want to know about Vincent.

  Why should Meyer be surprised that Vincent’s story should be easier to market? It’s new. They’re tired of Meyer’s song and dance. The Holocaust is over. Please, no more Hitler, no more ovens, no more filthy, skeletal half-dead Jews in striped pajamas. It’s time to move on. Enough with the Hungarian kid who had unspeakable things done to him and survived. Let’s concentrate on this younger, handsomer model who once had a couple of racist thoughts and later changed his mind.

  What has it all added up to? How much time does Meyer have left? And what will he do with that time? Sit in this office, make calls. No one cares. No one buys his books.

  Meyer needs to snap out of it. He probably has plans for the evening, something Irene arranged. Some museum opening, opera, ballet. Why can’t Meyer remember? Because he never knows. When he gets home, Irene will give him the evening’s assignment, tell him when and where he will be playing Meyer Maslow.

  In any case, he needs to go. He hurries back to his office to grab his briefcase and keys. Isn’t there a security guard? It shames him that he doesn’t know how to lock up his own place of business. Every grocer can do that.

  The light on his phone blinks again. Obviously, it’s Irene, asking where he is, scolding him for being late. He dreads the sound of her voice. But there’s nothing to be gained by making Irene worry.

  “Hello,” says Meyer.

  There’s a silence. Then a man says, “Ah need to talk to Vincent.”

  The tone is low and menacing, and the southern drawl sounds even more threatening because it seems fake.

  “Who is this?” Meyer asks.

  “Who wants to know?” says the voice.

  “This is Meyer Maslow.”

  “This is Meyer Maslow.” The man imitates him, several registers higher. “Vincent Nolan will know who I am.”

  “He’s not here,” says Meyer.

  “Tell him I called.” The line goes dead. Meyer stands there with the phone to his ear, listening to the silence.

  Meyer has enough instinct left to know that the guy isn’t kidding. The guy means Vincent harm. That sixth sense that enabled him to read a person’s true intentions must still be functioning. There’s no ESP required. Just common sense, and anyway, Vincent said as much that first day. The guys in ARM were after him. That’s why he needed to stay at Bonnie’s. And now at last they’ve found him.

  Meyer knew something like this would happen. But he chose to ignore it, because Vincent was useful to him. That’s how low Meyer has sunk. He’s put someone else’s life in danger. And for what? To publicize his book? No, it’s not about that. It’s to support the foundation.

  Meanwhile Vincent’s a sitting duck. That’s what Meyer and Bonnie have made him. They’ve bred the instinct out of him: the impulse to take off running. Meyer recognized that reflex. That’s why he made Bonnie watch him. To change Vincent that way, to denature him, is like handling a baby bird, like domesticating a wild beast and setting it loose in the forest.

  The phone lights again. Meyer picks up.

  “Hello?” he says. “Hello?”

  “Meyer,” Irene says. “Where are you? Do you have any i-dee-a?”

  GETTING HIGH WAS A HUGE MISTAKE. Danny’s got to stop it. He promises himself that he’ll cut down as soon as school is over. He knows it’s a promise he only makes at the very worst moments, like now, when Mrs. Graber is looming over his desk, asking him to look at his schedule and see what period he has free to meet with her and Mr. Armstrong. That’s the assistant principal. And Mrs. Graber doesn’t sound friendly. The pot is giving her voice a kind of echoey reverb. Danny takes out his schedule. There’s no way he can pretend not to have the next two periods free. Doesn’t Graber have to teach? This must be important if Linda Graber’s blowing off a class for a conference about whatever Danny supposedly did.

  “Next period then,” Mrs. Graber says. “We’ll expect you in David Armstrong’s office.”

  “Can I ask what this is about?” Danny hates the wimpy sound of his voice. The whole class is watching. He’ll never live this down. Can I ask what this is about? wi
ll dog him all the way to next year’s graduation. Anyway, he doesn’t have to ask. He already knows.

  “I think you know,” Mrs. Graber says.

  “My Hitler paper?” Danny says.

  “Good guess, Danny,” says Graber.

  But there’s nothing wrong with his paper. It was a fairly straightforward biography of Hitler plus some information about how he might have been gay. Which he put in to make it more interesting. He was trying to say something new.

  “What’s the problem?” Danny stalls. Mrs. Graber’s supposed to tell him together with the assistant principal. But she can hardly wait. She’s dying to break the news herself.

  “Frankly, Danny, there was some concern that your paper might be…homophobic.”

  Homophobic? Danny wasn’t saying that being gay meant you were Hitler, or that Hitler was Hitler because he was gay, or that all gay guys are like Hitler. How could Graber and Armstrong get it so wrong? Armstrong’s famously touchy about this, being as how he is gay, the only out administrator in the Lower Hudson Valley system. Ever since Armstrong came to the school, they’ve had a week of sensitivity training every fall, five days of nonstop embarrassment, of making the few black and Hispanic kids want to kill themselves on the spot as the homeroom teachers read from a script that lists the nasty prejudices you might have about other races. The teachers ask the kids who believe it to raise their hands. No kid is that stupid. A school joke is that Armstrong’s initials, DGA, stand for Definitely Gay Astronaut. He could be the first gay astronaut. He looks like one. He’s got an astronaut name.

  Next period. Let’s get it over with. At least Graber won’t expect him to listen as she drones on for the rest of class. He’s too busy trying to remember exactly what he said in his paper. He knows Mrs. Graber won’t call on him because today, even if it’s obvious that he hasn’t done the reading, it’s no fun for her. She can’t get him in trouble. He’s already in trouble.