A Changed Man

by Francine Prose

  Vincent’s vanishing act is easier for Meyer to comprehend than it must be for the others. Meyer understands disappearance. He owes his survival to how good he got at slipping through the cracks. So he has to respect Vincent for that, no matter how much trouble it causes, no matter how immature and self-involved and irresponsible Vincent’s being, no matter how inconvenient and damaging it is for the foundation.

  Meyer misses Vincent. He wishes he were here now. If he were, Meyer would give him hell for resorting to violence. But someone had to step in. Raymond was coming toward him. He wishes Vincent had stopped short of breaking his cousin’s jaw.

  Meyer’s surprised to see that he’s drawn a doodle on his pad, a childish sketch of an ear. A hieroglyphic message from his unconscious: He needs to get his hearing checked! Because he can only process fragments of what Elliot’s saying, thin peaks of anxiety and aggression surfacing through the steady stream of caution, catastrophe, and complaint.

  “Contusion…lacerations…” Elliot sees, in his crystal ball, a magical army of personal injury lawyers about to rise up, each one promising a fortune to Raymond and his wife. Already there have been threats to sue Chandler, the network, Brotherhood Watch. The sharks beginning to circle them are hungry and energetic.

  Maybe the reason Meyer can’t hear is that he doesn’t want to hear Elliot repeating, “As your attorney, I feel that I should warn you that this could get expensive.”

  Meaning what? Legal fees? Is some lawyer planning to buy another BMW suing a nonprofit foundation, or defending it from a punk Nazi claiming that a lumpy nose and broken jaw will spoil his handsome face and compromise his ability to make a living? No one made this guy come on Chandler and threaten Meyer.

  Finally Meyer rouses himself. “They haven’t got a case. Millions of people saw the guy go after me. Vincent was protecting me. A reformed skinhead saving a Holocaust survivor from his Nazi attacker. Come on. My God, Elliot, you’d think something like that would be an open-and-shut case. A case anyone could win.”

  After a silence Elliot says, “Right. Well…we plan to start reviewing the tapes soon. Because I know that’s what you saw, Meyer. And we plan to argue that’s what Vincent saw. But it’s not at all clear. The question is how close Raymond was to you, whether he meant to harm you. And then the minor related matter of whether shredding the guy’s face was excessive. And Vincent disappearing doesn’t exactly help our case.”

  Meyer knows beyond a doubt that Raymond intended to hit him. Only Meyer saw the look that Raymond meant especially for him. If only Vincent had waited till everyone saw what Meyer saw. If only he’d put his cousin in a headlock instead of beating him senseless in the time it took security to run over and pull them apart. Where the hell was security? Drinking rum in the Green Room. The same poison they’d plied Meyer and Vincent with. Maybe Vincent drank too much. Meyer hadn’t noticed. He’d been planning what he would say if Chandler asked about his book.

  “All right. Let’s take it one step at a time.” Elliot’s all business again, moving right along through his competent, professional, anal-retentive agenda. “I think we need to establish how much you guys knew about Vincent’s background. His history. Exactly when you learned what and where and when.”

  “Like what?” Roberta says warily. No wonder Roberta’s worried. She’s got the biggest mouth. If Roberta knew anything, she’s already shared it with the press.

  “Let’s start with tossing the old lady in the pool. The history of violence. The anger management class.”

  “All news to me,” says Roberta.

  Meyer winces and shakes his head. Why does no one understand? The old lady must have provoked him. Anyway, according to what Vincent said on Chandler—and even after all that’s happened, Meyer believes him—the woman is alive and well and perhaps a better person for the lesson Vincent taught her about how not to treat the pool guy. Vincent rescued her right away. And if that’s the worst thing he’s ever done, how does that stack up against the money he’s raised, the publicity he’s gotten, the good work he’s done for Brotherhood Watch? The good work he would have kept doing if this…incident hadn’t happened. Meyer should have listened to the instinct warning him that going on Chandler was a bad idea.

  “Bonnie would have known about it. She knows Vincent best.” Meyer means it as a compliment. Bonnie got closest to Vincent. She’s given most of herself. So why does she look as if he’s slapped her? Bonnie must think he’s accusing her of not having been awake, of falling down on the job. Or of getting too close to Vincent. That’s a possibility, too.

  “I never heard about the pool incident until Chandler.” Bonnie sounds a little dreamy. Tranquilized, perhaps. “Are we sure it happened?”

  “It happened,” Elliot says. “I tracked down Nolan’s former employer, who put me onto a Mrs. Regina Browner. No charges were ever filed. He wrote her some cockamamie letter about an allergy to chlorine, and she went for it. But look, it’s good you didn’t know, Bonnie. The less you all knew, the better. I mean, if you ask me, you should have had a record of every time the guy raised his arm and said Heil Hitler. But now that this has happened, it looks better if you didn’t know. Which, I gather, you didn’t. Right?”

  “Right,” says Bonnie.

  “He’s an unstable guy,” Elliot says. “That much should have been clear.”

  “Is there more we didn’t know?” asks Bonnie.

  “Not that I’m aware of. For now,” says Elliot. “Just what Raymond mentioned on Chandler. The money, the drugs, the truck, the old lady.” He holds up his palm. “Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know if you knew more. No one needs to hear about it.”

  “What kind of lawyerly ethics are those, Elliot?” says Meyer. “Are you telling us to lie?”

  “Of course not,” Elliot says. “I’ve got my career to consider. You think I want to get disbarred because you let some skinhead sell you a bill of goods? I’m not counseling you to lie. You just don’t have to say everything.”

  “Which is lying.” Why is Meyer debating Elliot?

  “Which is being smart.” Let Elliot have the last word. It’s part of Meyer’s penance. But what is he repenting for? For devoting his life to peace, for saving innocent people? For never relaxing, for working himself to the bone, when he could have done nothing? He could have done other things. Years ago he turned down an endowed chair at Brandeis. They offered him a fortune for teaching three months a year.

  “Look,” says Elliot. “Let’s talk about ends instead of means. Let’s say it comes down to our feeding someone to the wolves. And let’s say that someone is Nolan.”

  “Feeding someone to the wolves to save ourselves is not what our work is about.” Meyer hates how preachy he sounds, but he needs to be clear.

  Elliot pauses to acknowledge that Meyer has spoken, but he doesn’t seem to have listened. “So the important question is: Do we cut our Nazi friend loose? Do we let him take the heat? Or do we jeopardize the work and the financial health—the survival, maybe—of the entire foundation? We don’t have to decide right now. But let’s agree it could happen.”

  Meyer’s problem isn’t Elliot. Meyer’s problem is slippage. His problem is what he is doing with the rest of his one and only life. People are being imprisoned and tortured for their beliefs, and Meyer is sitting on his behind and discussing theoreticals with shysters like Elliot.

  Thinking of prison reminds him of something he read this morning, a news release in the stack of papers he’d found on his desk. The story concerned a Turkish jail where there are now nineteen Kurdish leaders in custody, men and women, young and old….

  So fine, let Elliot drone on. At the end of the day Meyer’s real work will be finding a way to free those nineteen prisoners. Which means what? Raising money, making phone calls, hosting dinners. A cycle of wasted hours and days and, if he’s lucky, years. Which brings him full circle back to Elliot and this room.

  That’s where Meyer has gone wrong. He’s strayed too far from the h
eart of his work.

  The idea that lodges itself in his mind is so seductive that he hears himself groan aloud.

  “Meyer, are you all right?” asks Roberta.

  “I’m fine,” Meyer says.

  Whether he really is fine will depend on what he does about this seductive idea. Whether he has the nerve and resolve to act on what he is thinking. What good is the moral bungee jump if someone else jumps for you?

  He’s not too old to get on a plane. He can find his way to the prison. Hang around, make a pest of himself. Maybe take some reporters with him. Or go alone, pester the warden, convince him the whole world is watching.

  Irene will have to deal with it. Give her dinners without him. Maybe things will change for the better. Maybe she’ll gain some new respect for the man she married. But Meyer’s not doing this for Irene. He’s not doing it for himself. He’s doing it for the prisoners. All right. He’s doing it for himself.

  But what a thing to do for yourself! It’s not what Elliot would do to make himself feel better. Elliot would go for the new Lexus. The beach house in Amagansett. Only Meyer—and maybe a few like-minded individuals—would choose this particular path, would elect of their own free will to spend what funds and resources and time they have left on a trip to a Turkish jail.

  Meyer wants it. He wants it all. He wants the airport waits, the rude desk clerks, he wants to fly coach, to fight for space, he wants the hours of riding with his knees up to his chin, the bad food, the bumpy landing, he wants the sudden stab of anxiety on the third-world tarmac, he wants to be the Jewish stranger in the Muslim airport, searching for the exit, the lost luggage, he wants the suspicious immigration officials. Whose suspicions will be justified, considering where Meyer will be headed.

  That is exactly what Meyer wants. He wants to get lost on the way to the jail, he wants the heat, the dank smell of the prison, the screams, the creeping doubts about how much he can trust his translator, the loneliness, the homesickness, he wants the sick terror that wakes him in the middle of the night, alone in some frightful hotel room.

  He wants to leave this conference table, this office, this life, he wants to be brought face-to-face with the reality of what he is doing, of what he can do. He wants to buy the ticket himself. Will it free the Kurds any sooner than the phone calls and dinners? Maybe, maybe not. Meyer wants to find out. Is this some old man’s fantasy? Many old men have had worse.

  Meyer’s determination grows as the meeting draws to a close, and it strikes him again that this conversation was about nothing. No lawsuits have been brought. No damages have been filed. Elliot just thought they all should get together and talk about what might go wrong.

  A waste of time. But nothing’s a waste. Look for the hidden blessing. Miracles always happen when you least expect them. This pointless meeting with Elliot Green has shown Meyer the light.

  AMERCIFUL SWIPE OF AMNESIA GIVES Bonnie a moment of respite until she wakes up and remembers: Graduation day! The advice to take things one step at a time was invented for mornings like this. All Bonnie has to do is get out of bed and shower and get dressed and try not to panic about what she is going to say, about the fact that she has nothing to say, and about how much easier this would be if only Vincent were here.

  Bonnie likes to think in the shower. Today, beneath the hot water, she should be writing the speech in her head. But instead, she keeps dropping the soap and bumping into the shower stall. Bonnie’s talked to groups before. But never at Danny’s high school, with her son in the audience, and never with the painful knowledge that this is something she was supposed to do with Vincent.

  Standing in front of the disorderly closet that she will never in her life have the time or energy to straighten, Bonnie tries to decide which of her basically identical suits to wear. Everything has to match and be presentable and sufficiently stylish without calling the slightest attention to itself, or to her. She settles on the tan suit that always felt lucky. Except that, Bonnie remembers now, it was what she was wearing that first day Vincent showed up at the office. Not long after that, she’d decided that it was unflattering and retired it completely. Unflattering? What does that mean? And what does that matter now?

  Bonnie stares in the mirror, struggling to see the woman in the tan suit as the same person who came out to reception that day to see why Anita Shu kept ringing her line. What would she have done differently if she had known that whatever she did that afternoon would lead to what she is suffering now? She would have done exactly the same. It was entirely worth it. She needs to stop thinking about herself and concentrate on what Vincent did for the foundation. He nearly gave up his life for them. What more could Bonnie ask?

  She shouldn’t have taken her glasses off. That was excessive, and foolish. Still, Bonnie knows that whatever she did, or didn’t do, paled beside what happened on Chandler between Vincent and his cousin. How sad that this should seem like a relief, and a consolation. But none of that matters now. The only thing that counts is saying something halfway intelligible and getting off the stage without ruining Danny’s life.

  In return for the promise of a few extra minutes of sleep, Danny and Max have agreed to let Bonnie drive them to school. She should be satisfied with that and not hope for the impossible—the chance that, on the way there, they will have a conversation. How enjoyable it would be to chat like three old friends, to talk the way they used to in those lost, idyllic days when the motion of the car seemed to shake something loose, and the boys would open up and tell her what was in their hearts. It was always in the car that the Big Subjects—life and death, the afterlife, God—came up. How cruel that she cannot remember even one thing they said. They never did have that Big Conversation about Vincent’s fight with Raymond. It was almost as if what they saw on TV was what actually happened. But this is probably not the ideal morning for that. Bonnie needs to conserve her energy for the speech.

  When Danny appears in the kitchen, Bonnie decides not to mention the fact that he hasn’t combed his hair. It’s not his graduation. That’s not for another year. A year is nothing. Nothing. Other families have started thinking about college, but Bonnie’s still not ready to face the prospect of Danny leaving. She cannot imagine daily life, rocky as it is, without him. Once someone told her that there is a word in Chinese that means the kind of pain you can produce by probing a sore tooth with your tongue. Bonnie uses a stab of that tongue-in-sore-tooth pain—her grief over Danny’s departure—to distract her from the more imminent ordeal before her.

  Last night, Danny asked her about her speech in a tone that implied that nothing she could say could be anything but appalling. She’d told him she was planning a brief, straightforward description of what the foundation does. The facts, an outline, her job description. That seemed acceptable.

  “Don’t bring up those kids that got busted last summer at the conference in Maine, okay? And no preaching. No inspirational bullshit. No advice for the future.”

  “Fine, no advice.” That was easy enough. Given Bonnie’s present state, what advice could she give? If they wanted a sermon, she’d thought disloyally, they should have asked Meyer. But Meyer doesn’t have a son in the school. He’s immune to blackmail. Or at least to the kind that makes you agree to do anything for anyone who promises to make your child’s life a little less gruesome.

  At the same time Bonnie can’t help thinking that, regardless of what Danny wants, she should take advantage of this opportunity to tell these young people something useful. Useful? What would that be? Love one another. Be good. Be kind. Danny would never talk to her as long as they live.

  Probably this was how Vincent felt before he spoke at the benefit dinner. And he did a spectacular job. And he was practically dying. Vincent isn’t just a guy who beat up his cousin and split. Vincent is a beacon of light to guide her through these rocky straits.

  “Good morning, honey,” Bonnie says.

  Danny grunts but doesn’t speak.

  By now Max has come downstairs, gr
asped the whole situation, and gotten himself a bowl of cereal. His older brother glares at him for committing the kiss-ass crime of putting the milk back in the refrigerator.

  “I’ll wait in the car,” Max says.

  “I’ve got shotgun,” Danny says.

  “Sure,” Max says. “It’s all yours.”

  Danny goes to get his backpack. Or that’s what Bonnie hopes he’s doing.

  “I can’t be late, you know that!” she calls weakly in his direction. And then because there’s nothing else to be done, she goes out to the car, where Max is waiting in the backseat.

  Bonnie watches the minutes flip by. Should she call the school and say she might be late? It’s graduation. You can never reach anyone on a regular school day.

  Just when she’s sure that her head is about to explode, Danny opens the passenger door and flings himself in, as far from her as he can sit and still be in the same car.

  “Let’s go,” he says. “We’re going to be late.”

  Bonnie says, “You’re kidding.”

  Pulling out of the driveway, she can tell that Danny has something to say.

  “What is it?” The usual signal for Danny to say, “Nothing.”

  But now he says, “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Ask me anything.” Odds are it’s a question Bonnie doesn’t want to be asked. How come you chased Vincent away? How come you chased Dad away? What are you saying in your speech?

  Danny says, “Do you think that Vincent is coming back?”

  “Good question.” But before Bonnie can answer, she has to start breathing again. “I don’t know. I can’t believe he’s gone for good.”