End of the Jews

by Adam Mansbach

  “Jesus, Dad, that’s been sitting there since last night. I’ll get you something fresh.”

  He chewed once and let the thick liquid slide down his throat. “Don’t you knock?”

  “What would be the point?” She sat on the edge of the bed, reached over and lifted the bowl out of his palm, then wrested the spoon from his grip and deposited both on the floor by her feet. He watched it happen, transfixed by his own inability to resist.

  “Enough is enough, Dad. Time to get up. You’ve got a bris to attend.”

  He blinked at her. “I do?”

  “Yup. Steven and Melissa had a boy. Nine pounds even. Kid’s a fucking moose.”

  “Name?”

  Linda dropped her chin and looked over her brow at him. “Prepare yourself. Thaddeus Carter Brodsky.”

  Tristan winced. “And they’re having a bris? Really?”

  “It would mean a tremendous amount to Steven, and his mother, and probably to your brother, if you went,” said Linda, acting in her official capacity as liaison between the two branches of the family, a job she had inherited from Amalia.

  “I don’t think I’m up to it.”

  “Bullshit. Look, Dad, you are not going to spend the rest of your life asleep. You’ve got to deal. You know that.”

  Tristan threw back the covers, and the warm, stale odor of his body floated up from the bed. “I don’t know anything,” he said, lifting himself to his feet. He shuffled to the bathroom, closed the door, and took a weak, dribbling piss. For the first time in days, he glanced into the mirror over the sink. Stubble did not flatter an old man; he looked like a hobo with his patchy gray-white beard. His daughter was right. There was no dignity in this.

  Linda rubbed the cuff of his desiccated bathrobe between two fingers as he climbed back into bed.

  “Eisenhower administration?”

  “Truman.” He reclined against the headboard, one house-slippered foot on the floor and the other laid out straight in front of him. “You’ve read your son’s book?”

  “I don’t read books written by relatives. Life is easier that way.”

  “I wasn’t aware that you had such a policy. I seem to recall discussing some of my own books with you.”

  “Not since the one about the musician with all the women.”

  “It’s pretty terrible.”

  Linda picked a piece of lint off his pajama top. “I’m sure it’s brilliant. I just got sick of wondering which character thought what you thought and which didn’t, and who was who, and which parts were real. The guy has all those affairs.”

  Her gaze meandered down the bedspread. “Sometimes I still read one of Mom’s poems, if it’s in The New Yorker or something. But I’m not going to read Tris’s book. I’ll buy twenty copies. I’ll tell everyone I know to read it. But not me. I’ve learned my lesson.”

  “I never knew you felt this way.”

  “I never told you.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you would have waved your hand at me and said I didn’t understand what you were doing. Which probably would’ve been true. And I would have felt even worse.”

  Tristan said nothing.

  “He got a starred review from Publishing Preview,” Linda offered. “They were hard on Contents Under Pressure, so it’s a good sign. Mom’s been raving about it, too.”

  “Because she thinks I’ve finally gotten my comeuppance.” Tristan crossed his arms. “She’s told you my opinion as well as her own?”

  “She has, and it upset me so much, I’ve barely slept all week. That’s the only reason I didn’t drag you out of bed days ago—I was hoping rest might calm you down. Before you said something to your grandson that would break his heart.”

  “I don’t intend to say anything to him. Ever.”

  “Don’t be a schmuck. If you think Tris meant to hurt you, or expose you, or whatever it is you think, you’re crazy. Everything isn’t always about you, Dad, as hard as that may be to comprehend.”

  Tristan bowed his brow into a scowl, looked away. “You’ve said what you came to say. I’d like some privacy.”

  Linda stood. “Clean yourself up. I’ll be here tomorrow at ten.”

  She left without waiting for a response. Tristan tried to fall asleep, but it was no good; that was over. His brain was back in gear, the memories flowing.

  He gazed at the door Linda had just slammed, and remembered that a poster of John Lennon had once hung from it. And then it was 1969 and Linda was facedown on this bed, arm crooked above her head, body racking as she cried into her elbow, and Tristan was standing at the threshold with a gin and tonic in his hand and a professor of economics by his side—the man staring expectantly at him, at her, at him again.

  Tristan hadn’t done a thing, simply continued walking his guest through the house, as if a bawling teenager were part of the tour, a permanent exhibit. Downstairs, a cocktail party simmered: voices rising through the floor, filling the house. Minutes before, Tristan had watched his daughter race up the stairs, legs pumping, skirt flouncing around her thighs. And before that, he’d stood close enough to her, one conversational cluster away, to overhear the exchange that had routed her.

  Hello, Mr. Andrews, Linda had said, entering the man’s radius with two long, well-timed strides just as his previous conversation was concluding. In her right hand was a glass of white wine from which she had not sipped, from which she never would. I just wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed your novel. I thought you did a wonderful job with Christine; I really felt like I knew her. She raised her left hand to her temple, tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. Is it true that it’s going to be made into a movie? That’s so exciting!

  Andrews drained his highball, staring around the glass at her as he brought it to his mouth, and then said, Who are you again?

  She took the wineglass with her when she fled. It was sitting on her bedside table when Tristan passed her room and did nothing. Didn’t excuse himself, slip inside, and lay a hand across her shuddering back. Didn’t go downstairs and tell Andrews to get the hell out, or march him up there to apologize. He’d let her cry, let some prick humiliate his daughter in her own living room, and snuck past as if it wasn’t his problem. Assumed Amalia would track her down, handle it. Convinced himself he wouldn’t be able to help anyway.

  The memory played on. Fifteen minutes later, he had turned, to see his wife guiding his daughter back down the stairs, an arm around her shoulders. Amalia was radiant—and realer to him, somehow, than she’d ever been. Whether this was what he’d felt then, Tristan did not know, but he felt it now. His daughter was the age his wife had been when they’d met, the same age Amalia had remained, in some ways, ever since. A part of her would always be that young, that beautiful, just blooming into brilliance. Tristan closed his eyes, and rivers of desire and regret gushed through him. He opened them and whispered his wife’s name.

  Tristan walked to the bathroom, found a razor in the cabinet, twisted the faucet until steaming water splashed into the sink. He didn’t care about the world and how it would interpret the doppel-gänger his grandson had devised, the old man realized as he wet his face, applied the shaving cream. He’d tested out that argument with Amalia, thought then that he cared, but it was clear to Tristan now that he did not. What could the world do to him that it hadn’t already? He was ashamed, that was the truth. He was a selfish fuck, an absentee human being. All the battles he had fought had been for the wrong things, against the wrong people. And now all of it was set down in black and white, the essence of his failings abstracted, satirized, manipulated into goddamn art.

  Tristan gripped the razor and slashed carelessly through the lather. The blade was dull, the bristles thick. Progress was slow and painful. Forgiveness was what he wanted, the old man thought as the basin filled up with hair. Even now, it was perhaps not out of reach—to be forgiven, to forgive—if only Tristan weren’t so thoroughly himself, so beholden to the conviction that forgiveness would wipe him clean away,
destroy whatever was left. He tried to tell himself that was a good thing, tried to think of forgiveness as rebirth. But it sounded distinctly New Testament, and besides, who the hell was he to be reborn? He’d only fuck things up worse if he bucked the cycle of birth and death, traded his dignity for a few breaths of golem life.

  You had to bury a man to make a man, that was what Ellison had said. And he had lived too long, and Tris had tired of waiting and decided to make himself a man by throwing six cubic feet of words over his grandfather’s shallow-breathing body. Perhaps Tristan would have done the same. He tried to sell himself on the idea. It didn’t take, but Tristan plundered on, probed every nook and cranny of his mind, plausible and otherwise, looking for a loophole, a trapdoor, a crawl space: any semblance of a path that might open up on some kind of absolution, for himself or for his grandson. He suspected that the two were one.

  The quest was as exhausting as it was unaccustomed, and soon Tristan stepped back from it. To die stoic and alienated and brimming with anguish, yes, that had long been part of the plan. To die in the grip of some horribly earnest attempt to set things right—to expire in the midst of a paroxysm of rectification, with your pants around your ankles and your thumb jammed up your ass—that was another story. A man should die the way he’d lived, not recant in his final hours. Addiction, as a cause of death, was respectable. Withdrawal was not.

  “Tristan ready to go,” Mariko reported, picking her way down the back stairs and joining Amalia at the sink. She took up a towel and rubbed it over one of the breakfast plates glistening on the drying rack. A perfectly functional dishwasher stood within arm’s reach, and yet here Amalia was, despite everything else she had to attend to, doing the dishes manually.

  There was something meditative about standing with your hands under the warm running water, something pure and useful to the act of cleaning. But Mariko was the real reason she labored so. The woman had never owned a dishwasher in her life, and she wasn’t about to put her trust in one now, so after meals the two of them became a small assembly line, rinsing and drying. Tristan’s dishes, Mariko did alone. The dishwasher was still full of the knives and spoons and bowls he’d used before he’d stopped coming downstairs. Mariko probably didn’t realize they were in there, festering. Amalia was almost constantly aware of it, but she had no intention of running the machine herself.

  She rinsed the last fork, turned it in her hands, and waited for Mariko’s eyes to give up and flit elsewhere. The past few days had been like this: Mariko feinting and fluttering, looking for an opening, and Amalia refusing to give her one, shutting down the moment Mariko opened her mouth to plead Tristan’s case.

  Yesterday, things had come to a head. Mariko had been a hair more caustic, Amalia a hair more resistant, and that had been enough to make everything flare up, then curl and char and blacken.

  Amalia, Mariko had said, walking into the living room wide-eyed and coltish, hands clasped in front of her, your husband gonna wither away up there. He barely eats. You gotta do something.

  Amalia had squeezed her blanket and continued reading, forced herself not to reply. Only after Mariko had given up and returned to the kitchen, shaking her head, had it occurred to Amalia that she’d behaved just as Tristan would have. She finished her chapter, closed the book, and followed Mariko. Not to apologize, but to be fair.

  Amalia found her sitting at the kitchen table, holding a mug of black tea, staring at her own reflection in the dusty television screen. Amalia stood to one side, out of Mariko’s sight line, and rested part of her weight against the back of a chair. She was giving Mariko the opportunity to repay her rudeness by ignoring her back, but Mariko looked up immediately. She didn’t know that game.

  He’ll come down when he’s ready, said Amalia, softer than she meant it.

  Mariko sat for a moment with her lips pinched tight. Tristan a good man.

  The sentence hit Amalia like a bucket of ice water. It was a declaration of allegiance, a formal withdrawl of sympathy. How foolish she had been to ever believe this woman loyal. It didn’t matter how many card games they played, how many dishes they cooked or cleaned together. Whatever existed between them was secondary. Mariko served genius. Male genius. She understood nothing. She was as cold as she’d ever been.

  You marry him, then, Amalia said, and turned to leave—cheated out of a quick, angry exit by her own frailty. Nature’s way of telling the aged that they shouldn’t be embroiled in such drama, she supposed.

  Why you so mad? Mariko said before Amalia had made it three feet. The younger woman’s arm uncoiled, shot toward the ceiling like the body of an exclamation point. What he ever do to you? She let it fall back to her lap, clenched her hand into a fist like a period, and shook her head. He don’t deserve this.

  He deserves every second. That man has given me hell.

  Mariko pushed back her chair, stood up as if she’d been waiting all week for this chance. What hell? You want hell, try being married to Albert. My husband get high and then walk straight into the ocean! Until waves hitting him in the forehead, knocking him down! I have to rescue, Ama! My husband spend all our money on dope, and I gotta convince landlord not to throw us out into the street! Middle December! You hear me complain? Never! I take responsibility!

  She drew herself up, held out a palm as if checking the air for rain. What you ever do for Tristan? What he ever do to hold you back? Nothing! So what, he got temper? He writer! You know that when you marry him. She threw up her arms. This bullshit! You wanted to be poet, you fucking poet!

  Mariko’s fists dropped to her hips and stayed there. The two of them stood for a moment gauging themselves and each other.

  Oh, Mari, Amalia said at last, shaking her head. You don’t know the first thing about marriage, do you?

  I know the first thing. I know you don’t abandon, Ama. That the first thing and the last. Mariko’s face went blank, and she carried her teacup to the sink to empty, rinse, wash, dry it. Amalia stood and watched. Mariko moistened a sponge and wiped crumbs off the table, into a cupped palm. She pushed in chairs, shuffled newspaper sections into a neat stack. When there was nothing more to do, she strode out of the room, eyes trained on her path, and turned onto the back stairs. Amalia listened for a door to slam, but she got no such satisfaction.

  Things she could have said to crush Mariko careened through Amalia’s mind. You weren’t a wife to Albert, she might have whispered. You were a manager, a bodyguard, and a groupie rolled into one, and he exploited you for forty-five years. And now he’s gone, and what are you without him? Nothing. But what would have been the point? Mariko had made her peace ages ago, and each lie she’d told herself since then had glazed her like pottery, layer upon layer, until she was impervious to the winds of the world and trapped inside. Each lie Amalia had told herself had been a tiny tap against the sculptor’s chisel boring its way into the crown of her skull, threatening to split her in two.

  She’d nestled back into the couch and tried to read, and a few hours later, Mariko had walked into the living room and handed her an egg salad sandwich and a glass of orange juice. Amalia took them wordlessly, bewildered, and Mariko turned and walked away. Was this an act of self-assertion or negation? Apology or spite? It was as if with every gesture, Mariko wanted to prove she was the stronger of the two. That even her anger was not the master of her will.

  Now, Amalia laid the fork on the dish rack and turned off the faucet. “I’ll wait in my study,” she said over her shoulder, as if speaking to a servant, and walked away from Mariko.

  The new room was no less oppressive. Amalia slumped back in her work chair until her chest was level with the broad mahogany desk she’d inherited from her father, and found herself listening for Tristan’s footsteps above her. Perhaps she would have done nothing without him, been nothing. Her best poems would not exist, that much was certain.

  “So let me get this straight,” said Tris, limbo-bending to check the knot of his tie. The mirror hung too low for such appraisal
s, but it provided a clear view of the queen-size bed abutting the opposite wall. Nina lay there now, vertically half-covered by a tan down comforter, listless and naked. “You’re saying that if we get married, we can remake the concept of marriage into anything we want, and it doesn’t have to be the same basically oppressive, deluded, mundane thing it’s always been throughout history.”

  Nina cat-stretched, arms and legs going momentarily rigid, then crossed her hands behind her head and tried to summon patience. “Right.”

  “But why bother? Why don’t we reinvent, say, slavery? Check it out, we’ll sign some paperwork and officially you’ll be my slave, but we’ll reinvent the whole institution and make it what we want, and it’ll be really cool.” He frowned, undid the tie, and started over.

  “Why do you have to be such a schmuck all the time?”

  Nina had floated the idea of marriage yesterday, as planned. She’d traipsed into the bedroom and plopped herself down on his lap after her shower, dressed only in a towel, smiled and wrapped an arm around his neck and said, I think you should wife me up—light, playful, sexy.

  Tris had stiffened instantly, smiled back but not really and said, Oh yeah? instead of what he was really thinking, what his body told her by clenching up—not the muscles, exactly, but something deeper in: the mind, soul, heart, whatever. One of those things, maybe all of them, had blared Hell no!, and Tris had tried to be polite, and blink at her as if she was sweet and he was happily surprised, but she could see his brain whirring. She imagined it as a computer screen, filled with number columns scrolling furiously down as he searched for some way to joke himself out of this, put her off gently, and then suspected that there was none and sighed inwardly, resigned to a failed gentleness and the likelihood of his day disappearing in an argument. And such an absurd, depressing thing to argue over.