“I’m selfish. I couldn’t wait until tomorrow to see this gorgeous thing again.” He gives Vondra’s ready hand a suggestive squeeze.
She leads him over to me by the cuff of his jacket. “This is Heather.”
I force a hand out in greeting. “Glad to meet you.”
“The famous Heather,” he says after a shake.
Mahmoud is marquee material, with dark brown skin set off by green eyes and the long lashes that you hardly ever see outside of Disney animated films. His salt-and-pepper hair is styled neatly and expensively. And my God, that lusty voice. Deep. An Arabic variant on the graying leading man who still can get away with starring opposite the latest ingénue. No wonder he’s friends with Omar Sharif. He’s a younger version of him.
Vondra is peacock proud. “How did the French ambassador like Le Cirque? Was he as tough a critic as you’ve heard?”
“He gave the meal twenty-eight out of thirty stars, and the wine twenty-nine out of thirty stars. I said, ‘Thirty stars? Monsieur, what kind of system is that?’”
I force a lumpy smile as Vondra chuckles into Mahmoud’s neck. His appreciative laugh in return is throaty and likable.
After a lively conversation about the day that was at the U.N. Security Council, I cough and say, “I have to get home.” Anger and envy is clouding my brain.
Seconds after I shakily unlock my apartment door, Jake rings.
“She said no?” he says incredulously after I spill the gory details.
“Didn’t even consider it. She’s going to the Amazon to study with a medicine man.”
Jake pauses to digest my report. He knows my mother’s dilettantish comings and goings well enough to know that’s the God’s honest truth. “Well, okay, on the brighter side, Greg had a great idea. We should ask Gertie to pose as our grandmother.”
“You’re going to ask her?”
“Already did. Gertie loved the idea! She must have pinched my cheek ten times over the course of the day. I thought she had plenty of family. Turns out she has outlived everyone. All these years Gertie was alone on Passover!”
“That’s good.” I mumble. “But I’m really having second thoughts about this again. I can’t see pulling it off.”
“Heather, I know you can do it for me.” Jake is not above whimpering.
“I have my friend Vondra coming,” I say hesitatingly. “We just need a few more people now, maybe one or two.”
“Maybe we can pass her off as one of those Jews from Ethiopia, the falafels.”
“The Falashas.”
Jake laughs. “How dumb do you think I am?”
“Regardless, there was a woman in my Anthropology 101 class at Brown who was an Ethiopian Jew. I’ve forgotten what the better word is, but she told my study group that Falasha is a very disparaging name to the community. Anyhow, can’t Vondra just be my business partner? Friends come to seders, don’t they? Or is it always families only?”
“You’re asking me? The last time I was at a seder Jimmy Carter was in office.”
“Help me, Lord.”
“Who else? Who else?” Jake mutters to himself on the phone.
“I guess I could invite my new friend, Sukie. She’s half-Jewish and says she’s always wanted to go to a seder.”
“What’s the other half?” Jake asks.
“Tibetan.”
“Falashas. Tibetans. We’re in different circles, kiddo. That’s for sure. So tell me again about that mailman. I really think we’re going to need someone who can actually read Hebrew.”
“I’ll see if I can mention it to him,” I say nebulously. “He may be on vacation.” This is madness.
Before I call Bettina, I sneak a look in the makeup mirror in my pencil drawer. My eyes are red and bulging from my constant bouts of crying. I sigh and dial.
“You’re taking the easy way out,” Bettina says sternly.
“Excuse me?” I am thrown for a loop. Begging my mother isn’t trying hard?
“So your mother said no. Invite your father. Track him down in Amsterdam.”
My silence answers her.
“Are you going with my methodology or not? Why are you paying me?”
Why indeed? “I don’t have an address or phone number for him.”
“What about e-mail?”
“He said he’d send me his new e-mail address after he moved to Europe but he never did.”
“You can figure it out. Call the American consulate. Maybe he’s registered with them.”
“People register when they travel in Pakistan. I’ve heard the only thing an American has to fear in Amsterdam is getting fat on beer or Indonesian food.”
“Not true. I spent a month in Amsterdam. I had to register after I had spacecake and got my wallet stolen.”
Spacecake? I can’t imagine Bettina stoned. She’s wacky enough without hunger giggles. What other therapist in New York has a nude painting of herself in the hallway?
“Try the Internet too. There can’t be too many Greenblotzes in the U.S., let alone Holland. You’re a documentary producer. I don’t have to tell you how to find someone.”
I want the woman I’m paying to get on my back off my back. “I’ll think about it, Bettina.”
When Dad abruptly moved to Bali six months after my college graduation, and one month after Mom agreed to a separation, Jake invited me to dinner.
Where was Siobhan, his new Irish girlfriend that went everywhere with him?
Before the waiter could take our order, Jake took a breath and said, “Don’t say anything to your mother, but your father is a bisexual.” Jake may not be hip, but he has two parents who were killed in gory circumstances, and he is not one to mince words. “I’m the only one in the family he’s told. And that’s about all he told me, so don’t bother asking for details. He has also given me the temporary go-ahead to run things until the summer board meeting. He’s giving you his vote.”
I desperately wanted to talk to my father about this bold-type news. I had suspected there were men or a man involved with my parents’ final breakup. Maybe we could finally clear the air. But Dad was either mortified or shackle free: he was simply not returning messages I’d left with some houseboy with a heavy Balinese accent. Indeed, it was my shaken mother who finally returned my call: “I’m not sure why he left. Your father got strange after you left home.”
She had to know what Jake had revealed to me. “Strange?” I prodded, hoping she’d start elaborating on her own before I would have to say “Dad” and “bisexual” in the same sentence.
She burked the unmentionable issue with a laundry list of faults: “There are only so many years you can hear a man say pit-sa instead of pizza.” And: “The nose pads on his eyeglasses are always broken.” This was apparently as annoying to her as his obsession with his natural fibers, which got to the point where he wrote SOL GREENBLOTZ on his buckwheat pillows with a black laundry pen, so the maid would stop making up his (separate) bedroom with Mom’s low-allergen polyester-fiber pillows.
“Is that all?” I asked with sheeplike docility, eyes screwed up. “Why the separate bedrooms?” For God’s sake, don’t make me say the obvious.
“I snore. If you ever talk to the idiot, tell him to get his rock collection out of my closet. I’m going to throw them out soon. They’ve been sitting there for twenty years.”
Alone in my bedroom, still mulling over Bettina’s suggestion about tracking Dad down, more memories stir inside my brain.
Dad still has never spoken to me about his marital problems or his typical day abroad. During my PBS research days, I talked out some of my theories about him to an empathetic gay co-worker who had once been married to a nurse and raised two children with her. He told me that Bali, where Dad was living at the time, made perfect sense to him as a hideaway for an American in sexual transition. “Maybe your father is seeking an Eden he can be free in,” my co-worker suggested, passing me Cheez Doodles.
“Is Bali a gay Eden?” I said.
“B
alinese men walk down the street hand in hand with their male friends, oblivious to Western disgust at the sight.” If my old co-worker is right about my father’s Eden-seeking, then Dad’s recent move to Amsterdam would fit the pattern. I heard recently on NPR that the Netherlands was the first country to recognize same-sex marriages. And Dad moved before Canada followed suit.
Dad forgot to specify whether this Dutch new luv he’s sharing a house with is male or female. Like I can’t guess. I’m sure he’ll fly in for a weekend soon with a boy-toy and an impressive bouquet of pink roses and give me a big kiss on the cheek, and ask, “How’s my pumpkin?” He’ll probably want me to join him for yet another Broadway musical, even though Dad spoiled Broadway musicals for me in 1982 when he treated me to a summer matinee of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Right around the time Joseph was telling his treacherous brothers about his dream of their stacks of wheat bowing down to his stack of wheat, Dad whispered to me that his friend Timmy who had come with us to the Royale Theater was a “very special friend.” Then he tacked on that it was extremely important to him that I like Timmy even though he’d leaned right over me and my freshly cast broken arm to say to Dad, “Andrew LloydWebber is going to be huge. He’s like Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. He gives the public what they want.”
Even at the age of eleven I understood enough to know that other fathers don’t talk about their “very special friends” to their little girls. But I never said anything to my mother.
Whenever Dad gets back to New York next, and he’s once again raving about the brave new musical he read about that we should really see, I’m not about to remind him of my preference for meaty Pulitzer-worthy dramas. Reminding my parents of anything important to me is opening a Pandora’s box and liberating thirty-plus years of venom and anomie.
My day doorman, Verne, buzzes to tell me there’s a deliveryman on his way up with flowers. Verne is always sending people up without checking if it’s okay, but my annoyance quickly subsides. The bouquet of irises and hyacinths is huge and gorgeously blue.
The card reads: Forgive me for my shocking lack of tact. Please let me see those Greenblotz blue eyes again.
From that creep! I lay in bed again like a rabbit hiding in the brush until danger passes. But danger isn’t passing. I can save Izzy Greenblotz’s dream, but I’ll have to sacrifice my self-respect.
I dial Steve’s cell-phone number.
“Hel-lo.”
I take a breath and speak, “It’s Heather.”
“Hey. You’re talking to me?”
My voice is treacle sweet. “Yes. I want to apologize for kicking you out.”
“You do? I figured you have my picture up on the wall as a dartboard. My timing is not so great, huh?”
“Well, no. But let’s talk seder first. I think it’s a great idea. My family would enjoy doing the broadcast, and frankly it would be good for business.”
Steve pauses, perhaps considering how to read my directness. “I spoke to my boss. I told him I’d spoken to you and you were, uh, undecided. He’s incredibly gung ho. He wanted me to approach you again, but I didn’t know how. This is uncomfortable for me—I wanted to see you on a personal basis again too.”
The flowers. The rhetoric. Yecch. But before I can tell this snake to slither out of my life, Steve says, “Do you want to play with the piano or the felt?”
“Excuse me?”
“Sorry, not you. I’m baby-sitting my niece.” Several ivory keys are hit loudly and discordantly. “Now Charlotte’s using more technique,” he says after a laugh. “What a pro. The little girl breaks my heart she’s so beautiful.”
There’s something about men talking to and about small children. Catnip. “How old is she?” I say despite my plan to get what I need from Steve and get off the phone.
“Fourteen months. My sister’s ready to kill me because the baby’s just got over a urinary tract infection, and I messed up, big-time.”
“What did you do?”
“The doctor attached a teeny pee bag to skin under her diaper for a sample. But Charlotte didn’t pee when Mommy was home, so I was supposed to remove the bag when it was full and keep it fresh. I thought my sister meant keep it fresh in the freezer, not the fridge.”
“Yikes. Be careful not to eat the yellow Popsicle.”
“You mean the peesicle.”
I laugh loudly—that was funny—and Steve’s voice brightens even more. “So when can we meet to discuss all this? How about in two hours?”
“Okay,” I say, interested again, defeated.
As I sit waiting near the dog run in Tompkins Square Park for Steve, the sight of him launches a battle between my brain and my libido. I don’t think anyone this attractive has ever given me the time of day.
He extends a hand and bends his knee in front of his bench. “Forgiveness, milady.”
“Let’s talk seder first, and then I’ll bust your chops.”
Steve laughs and rises. He sits extremely close to me on the bench. “Thanks for coming downtown. So do you want to go over what will happen at a live feed?”
“Yes. I’ve only ever taped video for my films.”
Two pugs hump vigorously behind the bars of the dog park. A bear-size black Newfoundland, the dog park’s gentle giant, is roused out of his sleep to chase the female pup.
“We’d keep it small and intimate,” Steve says after the ensuing melee between the respective dog owners settles down. “There’ll be a remote truck parked outside your apartment—”
“We’d do it at my cousin’s house in West Orange.”
“That’s fine. Anyhow, as I was saying, inside the room it will feel less intrusive. I’ll get Jared as the DP. You liked Jared, right?”
“Yes,” I say.
“The beauty of Jared is that he understands lighting as well as the lens. There’s nothing he can’t do. Tonia told me he developed this crazy method when he couldn’t change the lighting in a room. He floated a teeny battery-powered light over the interviewer’s head with helium balloons.”
“Isn’t that a fire danger?”
“It worked, what can I say? He’s insane, but he’s creative.”
I laugh a little. “I wished everything floated in helium, imagine books on a string. You could really get use out of it.”
“I love the way your mind works,” Steve says with a large white smile.
Steve’s as smooth as Muhammad Ali during his finest hour. He always knows the exact thing to say to keep himself in the ring.
“We’ll have Tonia there. She’s a great girl.”
I study his face. Did he have a fling with Tonia? Steve’s a pro. Nothing revealed.
“When this seder is over, how are we going to celebrate?”
“Any suggestions?” I say.
“Have you ever been ballooning?”
“No.”
“With all this helium talk, I’m thinking we could pack a champagne lunch and go ballooning.”
“That sounds unusual,” I say, even though my mind says to run the other way.
“So,” he picks up. “Back to the seder. Can you give me the names of who’s going to be there, and how they are related to you?”
“Let’s start with my father’s mother, Grandma Gertie. She’s the one who runs our little store.”
“She’s your grandmother? I thought you said during the tour that she died a while back. Is this your mother’s mother?”
I panic. “Did I say grandmother? I meant that she’s like a grandmother. She was my father’s mother’s sister.”
After more initial planning, we leave on patched terms. He plants a kiss on my lips before he rushes off to his shoot of East Village coffeehouses.
A Google search gets me to Telefoongids, the Dutch White Pages, in a twenty-first-century second, but I have no such luck with Dad’s Telefoonnummer. Plenty of Ganesvoort and Groesbeck but no Greenblotz. I try other search engines, looking for any correspondence he might have written in newsgroups, but come up cold.
Then, taking Bettina’s suggestion, I call the American consulate general in Amsterdam. As I suspected, Dad isn’t registered.
Jake calls. “I got my intern, Dimple, to buy me Judaism for Dummies.”
“Oh, please. That’s going to save us?”
“They’re really good, those Dummies books. That’s how I learned Excel. Remember how condescending you were when you tried to teach me?”
“I wasn’t condescending. Everything was a joke to you. You wouldn’t buckle down and listen.”
“Anyhow, I’ve got the whole seder memorized. Go ahead—test me.”
“I remember there’s something bitter we serve, right? Horseradish or beets or something like that.”
“Yup. That’s the maror. To remind us of the pain of our ancestors even as we have a big meal. You can grate it yourself, but with all we have to do, a jar of Silver’s horseradish is fine for the maror. It’s balanced with haroset—the sweet stuff. Siobhan found a great recipe for haroset—with walnuts, prunes and apricots. She’s got the wine for the kiddush and the menu planned already for the main meal. We’re having—wait, I wrote it down for you—chopped liver and sliced tomato, hot borscht, smothered chicken, piquant carrots, a mixed-vegetable salad and lemon pie.”
“Isn’t the pie against the Passover rules?”
“Not if it firms through refrigeration, and not rising.”
“I’m impressed.”
“All we needed to get our engines going was Judaism for Dummies. I ordered you your own copy.”
I laugh. “Are you getting a commission from the Dummies publisher?”
“That’s a good idea. Maybe we even make some immediate money off our airtime with Jewish-product placement.”
“It would defeat the purpose of the whole thing. We want to look like we know what the hell we’re talking about. Now listen, don’t forget to tell Siobhan she’s a lifesaver for pulling that menu together.”
“Will do. I was going to get it catered but Siobhan wants to learn the meaning of the seder by cooking it.”
The Matzo Ball Heiress Page 10