This was, of course, ridiculous, but then he was ridiculous and he knew it. He loved her. Her: the complicated curves and contours of her throat; the mobile, intelligent eyes scanning his; the mouth gathering in a wry half smile. He didn’t want to fuck her—he wanted to marry her, make her happy. Well, he wanted to fuck her, too, but that would happen as a result of the other stuff. One of the old men in the corner laid down three cards and puffed out his cheeks again—Len was like those old men, he realized; he’d always been old, though he’d tried now and then to impersonate a young person. Rachel interrupted this train of thought, saying, “I’m happy to see you.”
“Me too. You have no idea.”
“I have an idea. I’ve thought about you so much since last time. I haven’t stopped.”
At what should have been the best, most perfect moment of his life, Len was seized with a panic, like a cold hand reaching from the depths of his stomach up through his esophagus, squeezing his throat. I’ve been waiting for you to come back and fuck me, he remembered, in a flushed moment of panic. Jesus Christ, what had he been thinking? The note, which he’d somehow forgotten over dinner, had been a mistake, the toxic combination of stifled libido—his bored, questing prick overheated in the stale air of the hotel—and shame at the thought of previous failures. He said, “Me neither.”
“What’s wrong?” She brushed back a strand of tangled bangs from her left eye.
“Nothing. Just work stuff.”
“I thought you were off.”
“I’m never off.” He stood and said, “I’m sorry, it’s just that I remembered something I told my mother I’d do tonight. Will you meet me at the pool later?”
Her complicit smile, a flicker of pink tongue between bared lips, hummed his blood. “Sure. But hurry, I might get tired.”
He smiled back with as much naughtiness as he could muster, then dashed down the hall and up two flights of stairs, rubbing the set of master keys in his pocket like a magical totem that might keep the Fellmans out of the room for the next minute or so. When he ran into Mr. Javits straightening a supply closet across from the Fellmans’ suite, he found the smile had lingered stupidly on his face. Mr. Javits was a fidgety man, the kind who always had to have a project; since his actual job often required very little of him, he liked to “pitch in,” as he called it, relaxing by way of roving the grounds and setting himself to unnecessary tasks with relentless good cheer. He was also a chattering gossip and a meddlesome snoop, apt traits, maybe, given his duties at the hotel—monitoring employee behavior and the moral probity of guests—but nonetheless, Len had never liked him.
“What are you so happy about?” said Mr. Javits.
“Nothing.”
“Where are you going?”
“308. The Fellmans are out, and I remembered that I forgot to grab something from their room.”
“You remembered you forgot, huh?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Well, it’s a good thing you didn’t forget to remember you forgot, and it’s a good thing you ran into me, because I ran into Mrs. Fellman a little while ago, before she went in.”
“She’s in there?”
“She seemed a little schnockered, said she was going to sleep, and I’d be willing to bet she wouldn’t be so wild about getting woken up, even by such a young, strong, handsome buck such as yourself.”
“Crap.”
Mr. Javits tilted his head. “This thing can’t wait until morning?”
“Not really. Maybe if she’s asleep, I can just duck in.”
“Probably not such a good idea, what with the—you know.”
“The children?” There had been another a few weeks ago, one town over. Another fruitless search party. Len had read about it in the paper.
“Yes.”
Mr. Javits was unusually silent and Len found himself wanting, perversely, to press. “You have any theories on it? I was thinking, what if it was someone here? Like a deliveryman or something, someone who moves around the area a lot?”
“No!” Anger flashed across Mr. Javits’s face, and Len was afraid—he’d never seen the man close to upset, or in any mode other than rambling and fussing. “I’m tired of the talk around here. This kind of speculation is poisonous to the hotel, to the good people who work here. We cannot begin doubting each other, looking over our shoulders, thinking maybe this coworker is a murderer, this friend a monster. Do you understand?”
“Sure, yeah. Sorry.”
“Good.” The usual look of benign inanity reassembled itself on his face. “Okay, Lenny, I have to pitch in with setup for tonight’s show. I’ll see you.”
Mr. Javits walked away, and Len waited, then moved in front of the door, wavering. He knocked lightly, to no response. After a third knock went unanswered, he put the master key in the lock and turned it. “Hello?” he said.
The door sighed open, releasing musty trapped air. He closed the door behind him, pressing his towels—his alibi, however lame—to his chest, and peeked to the left, into the master. Seeing no one, he relaxed—nosy Mr. Javits had probably gone to scrub a toilet when Mrs. Fellman reemerged and went back down to the show. He walked into the guest room, retrieved the note from under the pillow with a sigh of relief, and was turning with it in his hand when someone walked in.
It was a woman. It was Mrs. Fellman. It was Mrs. Fellman naked. Not entirely naked—she still wore her eyeglasses, fogged over from the shower. He expected her to scream, but she just stood there.
“Lenny?” she said. Almost as an afterthought, she raised a forearm over her pendulous breasts and dropped a hand to fig-leaf her crotch, though it was already obscured by a thicket of dark hair. The effect of her nakedness was odd—she looked enough like Rachel to be easily superimposed over the image Len carried of her daughter in his head. She was Rachel accelerated and enlarged—Rachel plus twenty-five years and pounds.
“I was—” Len tried and failed to think what it was he was doing. Cleaning the room? Removing a dirty note some insane person had left behind? “—delivering towels.” He handed one to her from the stack and she wrapped it around herself.
“What is that?”
“What?” They looked together at the rectangle of paper in his hand. Mrs. Fellman walked unsteadily across the room, backing Len against the bed. Len held the note to his side, and Mrs. Fellman snatched at it.
“Leonard.” She pressed forward, mashing herself against him, forcing him half-backward onto the mattress. Len held the note behind him, the way he did when playing keepaway with some young visiting cousin. She grabbed again, two, three times, practically lying on top of him. He felt himself stiffen, God help him, and he surrendered the note. She backed away, primly adjusting her glasses to read.
As she did, the pool light outside came on. Under one of the new halogen lamps that Len had bought at great expense for Michael to install sat Rachel in a deck chair. Rachel, and Yogi, the young lifeguard he had instructed to leave her alone, to let her stay past the usual nine o’clock all clear. Watching her, he felt calm, detached from the situation. Ah, Rachel! She brushed her hair back and peered down at a book, probably a preparatory reading for one of her upcoming freshman classes at Vassar. A Vassar girl and him!
But no, it wouldn’t be now, it couldn’t be. Mrs. Fellman lowered the note and said, “Sit down,” though Len was sitting. She perched on the corner of the bed, still looking down at the filthy sentences.
“Do you want to maybe put on some clothes?” said Len.
“I assume this was meant for Rachel?” He couldn’t bring himself to answer, and Mrs. Fellman said, bitterly, “I’ll have to assume, if not, that it was meant for me.”
“Yes,” said Len.
“Yes, what?”
“Yes, it’s to Rachel.”
Mrs. Fellman looked at him with her usual expression, as though she were frozen midkvetch. She did complain a lot—about New York in the winter, Israel in the summer, the state of city schools (though Rachel and her older bro
ther had both gone to private yeshivas), an underheated dish in the restaurant, an overfirm cushion, or really anything that crossed her mind—but, despite this, Len had always liked her. He sensed a kindness under the crossness, and found the kvetching playful, somehow girlish, a transparent ploy for attention with the implicit understanding that she wasn’t really upset—unlike his own mother, who, on the rare occasions she complained about something, was to be taken seriously, with the source of displeasure dealt with pronto, in his father’s words.
Mrs. Fellman began to cry.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry. It was just a dumb note. A joke. I didn’t mean anything by it, I really like your daughter, and—”
“No, you don’t understand,” she said between sobs, then sobbed harder.
With a sense of great trepidation overwhelmed only by his regret at having upset her like this, he scooted beside her and gingerly patted her back. “What is it?”
She untucked the edge of the towel from over her left breast and moved it up to her eyes, and it came away with a smudge of mascara that had survived the shower. She took a deep breath and said, “Leaving the note for Rachel was foolish, but I don’t mind, Lenny. I’m not stupid, you know. You’re young, you have desires. It’s more that—I’m sorry, you don’t want to hear about this. Why don’t you go?”
“No, you can talk to me.”
“Ach. Harry hasn’t touched me in so long, I couldn’t even tell you. Two years, has it been? And only then when he’d had a little too much wine during Seder, and he went right to sleep afterward. He’s very busy, you know, the big doctor.” On the last word, her voice caught, and she took a few deep breaths. “So I look at this note,” she still held the damn thing in her hand, Len realized, “and it doesn’t make me angry. It makes me jealous. Not of you, Len, but of being wanted like that. And I wonder if I ever will be again.”
“Mrs. Fellman,” he said.
“Diane.”
“Okay,” he began. The familiar was like an unpleasant bite of food in his mouth, hard to chew, hard to swallow. Still, he managed it: “Diane—”
“Wait. And I know my daughter—I know Rachel is beautiful. But I was too, once. I was a great beauty, do you believe that?”
“Yes.”
“Do you? I was prom queen at my high school. I was the envy of them all. My neck used to be long—like a swan’s is the cliché, but it’s true. Not this fireplug I have now. I had to literally fight the boys off, Lenny. It seems so recent, and now. Now! Harry going on at the table like that, boring everyone. Oh, we have a nice life, I know I’m lucky, but still.”
Her back heaved twice more under his hand, and she shook her head. “Jealous of my daughter, what could be more ridiculous?”
“Diane, you have no reason to be jealous.”
“The old are always jealous of the young.”
“You shouldn’t be—it’s not that great.” She laughed, spurring him on. “And you’re still beautiful.”
She looked at him, checking, he saw, for sincerity, and finding it, he hoped. Because, at that moment, he meant it. Though he’d never seen her that way—had seen her only as a mother, a figure to be circumvented and appeased, a dark presence behind the bright light of her daughter—he did see it now. He saw her as a woman, a desirable woman, with dark hair and dark eyes that held forty-something years of a life’s secrets, erotic and otherwise. He felt the warm body beneath his hand, beneath the thin, damp fabric of the towel, and he felt the rushing blood of his heart. And in the same instant he saw Rachel, as she would be after twenty years of marriage, a vision of present and future merged into the person of the woman who had given birth to her, Rachel before Rachel, Brigitte in Paris.
If the look on his face had not confirmed his sincerity, the tent in his pants did. Mrs. Fellman looked at it, and he hunched over, mock-casual, with his arms crossed. She briskly pulled his arm away, and as though addressing a very good dog, she patted his crotch fondly—once, twice, three times. “You’re a sweet boy, Lenny. I’m going to sleep.”
She got into the master bed and reached for the bedside light, but Len had already grabbed the note and stuffed it into his back pocket, already fled the room, already moved into the bright hall, the clean, blameless hall still smelling of lemon bleach from the day’s cleaning, already clamored down the stairs, already moved outside, past the locked gate and onto the wet concrete of the pool, where Rachel was just getting up from her chair. Yogi had left; there was no one around.
“I didn’t think you were coming,” she said.
“I wanted to come earlier; I just got stuck on that job.”
“No rest, huh?”
“No.”
They embraced, were kissing, and she felt him against her, and he felt her feel him. He had brought the erection downstairs with him, like a family heirloom being handed down from one generation to the next.
“Come on,” he said, his voice thick with urgency, and led her into the thatched shadows of the newly re-roofed cabana bar.
Afterward, pants rolled to the knee, he sat beside her on the lip of the pool, lightly kicking his bare legs in the cool water. A leaf floated past, tilting up and down on the ripples. She put her hand on his, and he sighed in amazed contentment. There was no question now, no parsing needed. He was a man, finally, his bar mitzvah notwithstanding. He’d performed admirably, and he indulged himself in looking, a little magisterially, at Rachel and the Neversink, the Neversink and Rachel.
How strange, he thought, to have everything you wanted by twenty-three. In a way, perhaps, disappointing. And yet, how great—how great to know this would be your life, to have only to live it. As though in emulation of his soaring spirit, a summer wind blew through, bothering the water, tossing Rachel’s hair, stirring the dark trees that surrounded them, witnesses to their love and to what he would later know to be the happiest moment of his life.
7. Alice
1973
It was the most boring moment of Alice’s life. She couldn’t remember ever being so bored. Sitting with her parents and the older couple who had joined them for dinner, the boredom was so intense that it manifested as physical discomfort, a feeling of such overwhelming restlessness that she rubbed her hands on the itchy cloth arms of the chair and repeatedly kicked the table leg. Her mother put her arm on Alice’s to tell her to stop, and she knew she was annoying the adults, but this knowledge did not help; in fact, it made her angry—they should try being her and listening to them, to whatever it was they were talking about, dreadful nonsubjects from the distant, gray, obscure world of adulthood: annuities, commutes, the pros and cons of tile roofing versus shingles.
She knew she was being childish, and she hated being childish, though she was a child and, at nine years old, would continue being one for at least another two or three years. Even before your bat mitzvah, by eleven or twelve, you were nearly a teenager, which was something different. She’d recently watched her older sister, Elise—installed for the week at a cousin’s house in White Plains after a pitched family battle, during which she’d expressed the sentiment that the Catskills were stupid and tried out a new word that Alice knew, given her father’s guffaw, Elise must have read and never spoken out loud: borjeeoyce—pass into this realm.
Alice wished she could have stayed home too. They came twice a year, July and December, and would keep coming for the rest of time. The Neversink was, after all, in the family, as her father liked to say, though it wasn’t his family. His name was Fred Emmenthaler. Her mother, Rose, was Joey Sikorsky’s daughter—the infamous Joey Shvetz, who, as Catskills lore went, had suffered a breakdown on the Neversink main stage. Joey was the family’s black sheep, and, Alice dimly understood, her parents’ tireless allegiance to the Neversink was partly an attempt to ingratiate their line back into the fold. Even at nine, she sensed it would never work—Great-Aunt Jeanie reserved them the same nice room and greeted them warmly upon arrival, but she never lingered long, and soon they were alone again,
sitting with other boring people from New Jersey.
She kicked the table again, harder. Her mother leaned over and whispered, “Stop being a child.” Her mother’s favorite tactic for controlling her daughter’s childishness was to point it out, which usually resulted in Alice at least being quiet—a behavior that was nonchildish, if not especially grown-up. But now, sitting at this table, she did not care, she needed to break free and run, shake off the dullness that had settled on her like the dust in their unfinished basement back home. She felt like she might actually die if she had to sit here another minute.
Mr. Schenkman tilted a bald head that reflected light from the dining room’s large chandelier toward her and said, “Is it past your bedtime?”
“No,” said Alice. “Is it past yours?”
Her father said, “Alice! What has gotten into you?”
“Can I go?”
Mrs. Schenkman said, “There’s still dessert and coffee.”
Alice’s mother said, “I don’t think she needs any coffee.”
“Can I go, please?”
“No,” her mother said.
Her father said, “Where do you want to go?”
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