“You’re telling it, Dean,” Lila said. Alan stared at the director’s bedroom door, expecting him to burst out in a flaming hoop.
“He’s in his element up here,” Dean said. “He hates the whole LA scene.”
“Does he have a family?” Donna asked.
Dean put a finger to his lips. Alan strained to hear his answer. “Three children. Divorced twice.”
Then, as if on cue, Richard Riemann reappeared from his bedroom—showered, bare chested, and wearing a sarong around his waist, aqua with blue sea turtles. A joint in his hand. He offered it to them.
Theoretically, this was a wine tasting. And though Alan, recent heart attack victim, retired assistant building engineer and admittedly a cautious person, deduced the courteous thing was to accept the joint, despite having not smoked since, oh, forty-plus years ago in college, he still had trouble letting go of the idea that they were supposed to be urbanely and snobbishly sipping fine wine and not getting baked.
“Thanks,” Donna said, not hesitating. She looked at Alan, beseeching him with her eyes to join in and enjoy himself, loosen up, have fun. He knew that look. She had been giving it to him ever since his heart attack.
“I think I’ll pass,” Alan said.
Donna, Lila, Dean, and the auteur in his sarong all passed around the joint as if old friends. Alan knew none of the director’s movies, though he had read lots of Faulkner. At one time, he’d strongly considered becoming an English professor. But he’d given up on the idea after his father insisted he study engineering and refused to pay his son’s tuition for a career gamble as some ivory tower professor. Which was another way of saying he had no respect for Alan’s choices.
“I hear you like Faulkner,” Alan said out of the blue. It was all he could think to say. Everyone, including Donna, who had the joint in one hand and the newest wine—a Grenache—in the other, stared at him.
Richard Reimann raised one finger and disappeared back into the bedroom. When he returned he put a letter typed on cream-colored stationary in front of Alan. From the way Reimann handled the letter, holding only the very tips of the corners, it was clear Alan was not to touch it or even breathe on it. The single-spaced letter, with capital X’s over what looked like a few misspelled words, was written by William Faulkner, the great man himself, to a department store owner in Oxford, Mississippi. Something about money and a disputed bill (Alan, reading fast, tried to get the gist of it while Reimann hovered).
“Is this incredible or what?” Reimann said.
“It is,” Alan agreed, unsure of exactly what he was reading or why it might be incredible. In both content, a bill dispute, and form, those x’d out words, the letter appeared quite prosaic.
“Typical of Faulkner,” Reimann said.
“How so?”
“How so what?”
“You mean typical of Faulkner’s money problems?”
Reimann gave Alan a disappointed look. “Hmm,” he said, and picked up the letter by its corners and went back into the bedroom.
“I am so fucked up,” Donna said, rubbing her temples.
Lila was packing up the used glasses and the half empty bottles of wine. Alan felt he had failed any number of tests: he had not one intelligent thing to say about the wines, let alone the money to afford a single bottle; he had no doubt proved himself timid in front of Donna by failing to participate in the festivities. His father’s favorite word for his son, “pusillanimous,” came back to him—or maybe he was just feeling sorry for himself. And of course he’d somehow missed the deeper significance, assuming there was one, of Mr. William Faulkner’s complaint to a department store owner.
But he would not let a heart attack define him for the rest of his life. “Pass me that joint,” he said to Dean, who was sucking on it. “I just want a toke.” Did anybody say “toke” anymore?
He took a puff, then announced, “I’m going to have a last look outside before we go, if that’s okay.” He wanted to see the magnificent view below from the balcony, fill his lungs with the California air and imagine he was sleeping in the shade of endless grapevines, a boy again starting his life over.
“Absolutely,” Lila said. “Go enjoy. No rush.”
He walked around to Donna and squeezed her shoulder. “Happy anniversary.”
“You too, sweetie.” She patted his hand absently.
“Do you want to come outside with me?”
“I think I’ll just stay here.”
He stepped onto the balcony, leaned over the railing, and took in the view a good thousand feet below. Dean, in his tutoring while in the Tesla, had said if you see birds on the vines, that’s a sign the grapes are ripe and ready to pick. And sure enough, staring down, Alan saw birds landing on the sweet plump bounty.
It was only an instant later—and he would remember it as maybe the most endless instant of his life, outdoing even that of his heart attack—the birds exploded into the air like a storm cloud. Alan felt a bump, followed by a sharp shaking, and then an abrupt hitch. The balcony had cracked at its threshold, an extensive deep fissure that separated him from the sliding glass door and interior of the house. Afraid to move, he heard shouts inside. He turned his head slowly to see everyone scurrying frantically, and then his loving wife of thirty years begging him with her hands out to stand absolutely motionless.
Earthquake, she mouthed.
He wouldn’t move, he told himself. Goodness, he was high—utterly and hopelessly high.
Somewhere south of Sonoma, the epicenter of a quake had set him here in mid air, as precarious a position as the gods could dream up for a mortal. The crack looked as threatening as the scar down the center of his chest. If he could ever take a step, he would have to inspire his heart to jump over it.
Donna was crying and alternately pleading for him to remain completely still, help was on the way. He could see she wouldn’t even open the sliding glass door for fear it might disturb the delicate balance. The wind whipped around his face and sirens wailed in the distance. Beneath him, rows and rows of vines stretched with ruler-like order in the afternoon sun, their sap flowing. Time passed through his fingertips like electromagnetic waves into the great oceanic blue and viridescent marriage of earth and sky.
He was free all right and nobody could tell him otherwise.
Q12081011
Mr. Chester told David he would not pass tenth grade unless he passed gymnastics. “You can do it, boy,” he said. “Just tuck your head under and let the momentum carry you.”
David shook his head. “I can’t.”
“Can do,” Mr. Chester said. “Repeat after me. Can do.”
“Can do.”
“Can do,” Mr. Chester said. Several girls from the other side of the gym looked over. Gymnastics was coed, which made the activity particularly embarrassing.
“Watch me first.” Mr. Chester crouched down on all fours to show David how to position himself for a forward roll.
The girls pranced around in their blue uniforms, locker keys dangling from their wrists on red and white lanyards. What soundless rhythm they moved to fascinated him—their easy laughter and the pleasure they took with their bodies turning somersaults and cartwheels in space.
“Pay attention, David,” Mr. Chester said. He rolled forward and hit the front of the mat with a heavy thud.
David crouched down but couldn’t make himself roll.
“I’ll give you a push,” Mr. Chester said. But as soon as he reached down, David jumped up and backed away.
“What’s the matter, son?”
“I don’t feel well,” David said. The thought of being pushed over by Mr. Chester was frightening.
“You’ll have to make the attempt,” Mr. Chester said. “I can’t pass you unless you make the attempt. There’s nothing wrong with you and no reason why you can’t do a forward roll. Everybody can do a forward roll.”
•
“I’ll go first,” David’s father said. Home from work for the first night all week, he had
bought a mat to help David practice his gymnastics. David’s mother stood against the wall in the rec room. His twelve-year-old sister, Tina, did flips, splits, cartwheels, handsprings. What a showoff, David thought.
Change fell out of his father’s pocket when he did a lumpy roll across the mat. He stood up, red faced, his neck swelling over his collar. He was out of breath. “See? Nothing to it.”
David’s mother remained silent. His father loved to watch sports on TV. He couldn’t understand David’s lack of interest and two years ago had forced David to try out for the junior high basketball team. After everyone did a set of layups, the coach took David aside and said he could be a manager. “A player manager?” David’s father asked that evening when David told him what had happened. “That’s terrific. Like Pete Rose—only in basketball, right?” David nodded because he didn’t want to disappoint his father. But when the first game came and his father arrived wearing a red sweater, the school color, with a scorecard in hand, and sat in the second row behind the team, all he saw was his son conked on the head by one of the basketballs that David hustled to collect after the players’ warmup. “You don’t even suit up,” his father said on the way home. He sounded disgusted. David sat with the players’ sweaty towels in a gym bag on his lap. Part of his job was to take the smelly towels home after the game and wash them. He thought about how wringing wet they were, the ten pounds of sweat he had to lug back with him. “They don’t let you suit up?”
“I’m not a player. I’m just a manager.”
“Christ, they don’t even let you suit up,” his father repeated. “Maybe you could at least ask them to let you suit up.”
The following summer he went to work as an errand boy in the accounting firm where his father was a senior partner. Fran, the head secretary, was always polite and respectful and called him Mr. Lorber, like his father. Bringing his father back a corned beef sandwich one day, he walked in on the two of them embracing and it was so upsetting for everyone that David began to laugh ghoulishly, the kind of laugh he had when he watched Creeper Feature by himself on Friday nights and was scared out of his wits, and then he ran out of the office until his father chased him down.
“Your mother and I…we have some problems,” he said to David, out of breath. “It isn’t anything that can be helped.”
“I don’t want to work with you anymore,” David said. “I don’t want you to push me anymore.”
“Of course, of course,” his father said and David knew they had struck some kind of bargain, a bribe. His father could be made to squirm like everyone else. It was a sad revelation, the sudden power he had over him that made his father a frightened giant. “We don’t need to tell anyone about this,” his father said. David kept his face blank. He’d traded a piece of something solid and clean clutched deep inside him, something he had started out with, something everyone started out with. Gone now. “Promise?” David put his head down and nodded.
His father was on his hands and knees now, trying to align David’s limbs for a forward roll. His mother stood above them, her hands spread over David’s head, as though in a tense prayer. She couldn’t stand noise of any kind—anyone else’s noise. David was embarrassed to have friends over because she would shout down at them to “Shut up, your yelling is driving me crazy!”—when they weren’t yelling at all, when they were playing quietly. The least disturbance from David or his sister produced hysterics way out of proportion to the wet towel left on the bathroom floor or the radio turned up too loud. He was frightened of his mother and tried always to be in a different part of the house than she was. In the morning he made sure he woke before she began slamming drawers or banging pots around in the kitchen, which happened all the time like some deranged percussion symphony. His sister, meanwhile, frozen with fear that she was somehow responsible for such rage, tried even harder to please, but would collapse at the slightest criticism or disappointment—if the peach in her lunch had a bruise on it. At twelve, she had already started wearing makeup and would stand in front of the mirror in the morning dabbing at her one or two pimples with cotton and alcohol. “That isn’t good for your skin,” David had warned her, trying to be helpful. Bad skin was an adolescent affliction he had been spared. “Please,” she said with unbearable frustration at the intrusion. “I have to get this done.” She was convinced if she only worked hard enough on the pimples she’d shrink them out of sight. David’s heart went out to her, but his own frustration took the form of a chronic passivity and he just shrugged and walked past.
“Make your body into a tight ball and just roll.” His father gripped David’s shoulders, ready to throw him forward. At the other end of the mat was Wayne, their basset hound, his MY NAME IS WAYNE. PLEASE RETURN ME TO…and other tags jiggling from his collar as he tried to come forward, restrained by Tina, to slobber on David for good luck. The will of the entire family pressed down on him. He had to do this for them. If he failed gym, he failed tenth grade, he failed his family, he failed God, whose latest incarnation for David had taken the form of Q12081011, a newly discovered quasar seventy-three billion trillion miles from earth. He tried to picture how far away that was—as far as he would have to roll.
“One…two…”
He grabbed onto his father’s knees. He grabbed on with such force that his father cried out in pain.
“So,” Rabbi Greenberg said. “You’re wondering why I wanted to see you, David.”
“No,” David said. He knew why. His father had asked the rabbi to speak with him. He heard his father making the call after they gave up practicing gymnastics. We can’t do anything with him. He stays up all night and plays with that telescope we should never have given him. He mumbles when you ask him a question. And he’s got some kind of phobia about gym class. Maybe you could just talk with him. He respects you. See what’s up with him. We’re ready to take him to a doctor, a psychiatrist, you know. David had crept away from the closed bedroom door. He was becoming an expert at moving around the house with stealth. No one knew where he was, whether he was even home; no one could see him, he had become so adept at slipping around corners. Not bad for a mortal, he would say to himself as he disappeared behind a doorway, just missing being seen by his mother, father, or sister.
There were pictures on the wall of Rabbi Greenberg accepting an award from the United Jewish Appeal. Pictures of the rabbi, his wife, and daughter Lynn in Israel. Pictures of the rabbi at a Purim celebration in the synagogue, waving a noisemaker, a huge smile jumping out from his gray beard. David remembered a conversation he’d had with the rabbi two years ago, right before he was bar mitzvahed and was reading obsessively about the Holocaust, a subject that haunted him until astronomy became a more abstract yet purer contemplation of heaven and hell.
“What would happen,” the rabbi had said, making time to talk with him, the first adult who took him seriously, “if there were neither one?”
“You mean nothing afterward?”
“No. That I didn’t say. Not nothing. I said if there were neither heaven nor hell.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t understand the question.”
He didn’t. It was hard enough to imagine nothing—like trying to take an egg apart, empty out the yolk, and put the shell back together. Inside there was not nothing but rather the missing egg…which still existed, even if it wasn’t inside anymore; it was an egg missing its insides, an eggless egg.
“What else could there be then?”
“Let me put it to you this way,” the rabbi said. “Suppose you have two rooms. One is blue. The other is blue. One has good, comfortable furniture. So does the other. One has a nice fruit basket on the coffee table. Funny thing, so does the other. You look closer, you see these two rooms are exactly the same, same color, same furniture, same size, same fruit basket, same temperature, same scratch on the wall. But you know one is heaven and one is hell! You’ve been told this. How do you know when you’re in one you’re not, in fact, sitting in the other?”
“That�
��s easy,” David said. There was a knock at the rabbi’s door. He was glad when the rabbi told the person just a minute. “You tie a string from one to the other and follow it back and forth. Two objects can’t occupy the same space at the same time. This proves their separate existence.”
“Ah,” the rabbi said and stood up to answer the door. He had put his hand on David’s shoulder. “Maybe you’re right.” But David had gotten the impression that his response was the correct wrong answer, the one the rabbi had expected but not wanted.
“What have you been reading?” the rabbi said now.
“Astronomy.”
“No more Holocaust literature?”
“Not right now.”
“You have anyone to tell your thoughts? Teachers at school? Any smart friends?”
“No.”
“I would have been interested.”
“I didn’t want to bother you,” David said.
“You mean you didn’t want me to bother you.”
He supposed that was true. Everything he did now he thought of as secret. As soon as he came home from school, he locked his bedroom door, read his astronomy books until late at night and then took the lens cap off his telescope and tracked the progression of Sirius or Canopus or Arcturus and the loneliness vanished.
“So what’s doing with you? You’re going to let some nudnik gym teacher keep you from passing this year?”
He told the rabbi about the gymnastics class.
“Let me understand,” he said. “He won’t pass you in gym because you won’t do a forward roll?”
“Can’t. Yes.”
“What kind of Minnie Mouse business is this!”
Rabbi Greenberg stood up and stormed around the office. David had never seen him so upset. Finally, he told David to go home, he would take care of this personally. David left a little in awe of the rabbi’s wrath.
But later that evening, the rabbi called and told him the gym teacher just wanted to see David try, he was refusing even to try—or he would need a medical excuse, which might be arranged also.
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