End of the Jews

by Adam Mansbach

  Since when are you into marriage? he’d asked, touching her cheek, and for a moment Nina thrilled, thinking perhaps she’d read him all wrong and Tris meant Me, too! I want it, too, but I’ve been scared to say so because I know how you feel! But it wasn’t that. It was a halting Um, sorry, not interested half apology, the other half not an apology at all, but passive-aggression. He was annoyed with her for putting him in the position of having to reject her, and for changing the rules, having an unsanctioned desire, one he couldn’t—no, wouldn’t—satisfy. It made Tris feel inadequate and at the same time in control, thought Nina; his refusal tipped the balance of power toward him, so far that it ceased to be a balance at all. She wanted something he’d denied, something perpetual that would stay wedged between them, keeping her on the high end of the seesaw, legs dangling in midair, and him on the heavy side, watching her flail for as long as he wanted. It even occurred to her that Tris knew more than he was letting on—had figured out, somehow, that she was in jeopardy and was punishing her for not telling him the truth. Or for something. Fuck.

  She was on the verge of laying out the facts now, the visa part anyway, had almost reached that point of desperation. But after all this, how could she? More shame for her, more power for him. Plus, everything she’d said—every declaration of love, every argument about how marriage represented just the kind of intentionality their life together lacked—would be sullied, struck through with black ink like the censored letters her father had held under her nose as a child.

  “Schmuck, huh?” Tris replied now, everything a game. “How you gonna speak Yiddish and be anticircumcision?” His knees creaked as he stooped to pull the cardboard shape-holders from a pair of shiny black split-toes he’d bought in Sicily while on tour with Albert. The guys in the band had all bought shoes, so Tris had, too. They’d sat at the back of the closet, unworn, for years, and then Nina had found them, told him they were slick. Now, they were his favorites.

  “You’ve still got time to change your mind and come,” he told her, crossing in front of the bed.

  “Hell no. Fuck that barbaric shit. Poor little Thaddeus.”

  “Five thousand years of history, baby,” Tris called from the bathroom. “Or six. Whatever. Abraham had to do his own with a sharp rock. You know what they say: ignorance is bris.”

  “It should be illegal. It’s mutilation. Infants are extremely sensitive. I bet it’s psychologically scarring, too.”

  He poked his head out. “Another theory to explain how fucked-up the Jews are?”

  “You didn’t have a bris.”

  “Yeah, but I was circumcised. Only difference is that nobody served lox and bagels afterward.”

  Nina hugged her knees to her chest as Tris rooted through the laundry strewn across the closet floor, looking for his belt. “If we had a son, would you want him circumcised?” she asked.

  Tris shrugged. “Yeah, I guess so. It’s like the most nonnegotiable, bare-minimum Jewish thing you can do.”

  Nina shook her head. “I’d never allow it.”

  He bent over the bed and kissed her forehead. “Then you’d better hope we have girls.”

  She propped herself up on her elbows, hands over her breasts. “I don’t understand how you can talk about kids like it’s nothing, and be so scared by marriage.”

  He fussed again with his tie, tightening, smoothing. She thought she caught the flicker of a smirk. “Yeah, I dunno. Just how it is, I guess.” He buttoned the top of his shirt, then tried to ease the constriction by sliding two fingers inside the collar and tugging. “I didn’t say I was scared. I ain’t never scared.”

  More cavalier bullshit, Nina thought. More jokes. She pouted for a moment, then tried to be funny. “I don’t think I’m so bad. Those Puerto Rican guys in front of the bodega all want to marry me.”

  He was back at the mirror now, preening. “Yeah?”

  “Sure. I get proposals every week.”

  “I bet you do. What time is it?”

  She slid halfway off the bed to peer at the ancient clock radio they kept underneath the frame because it was too ugly to look at. “Ten-fifteen.”

  “I gotta bounce.” He kissed her on the small of the back before she could turn, then lingered there a moment, brushing his lips up her spine. Nina shivered.

  “I love you. Don’t marry the Puerto Ricans while I’m gone, okay?”

  She flipped over, smiled, and gave him the finger as he walked toward the door. He smiled back, and for a moment Nina forgot why they were having this argument, and everything seemed casual and loose and normal. Then she remembered, and panic snapped at her with the force of a real living thing—a big-ass crab, an alligator. “I’m not making any promises,” she called out as he slammed the door. She lay there awhile, staring at the ceiling, listening to Brooklyn breathe, then decided she needed to talk to someone, and picked up the phone.

  The other guests rose from their chairs and drifted toward the dining room. Tristan sat still, too affected to stand, and hoped everyone would leave him be, allow him the few minutes he needed to shake off this remarkable, unexpected fragility. Then he would rise and find his brother, and seek to determine whether Benjamin had been similarly touched. Tristan suspected so. Ben had seemed on the verge of tears as he stood up there next to his grandson, hands folded in front of him, mouthing the Hebrew prayers along with the mohel. Tristan had been amazed that Benjamin remembered, but not as amazed as he’d been a moment later when he realized that he, too, was whispering along.

  “Dad? Don’t you want some lunch?”

  “No, no.” Tristan waved his daughter off. “I’m not hungry. Go ahead. I’ll be with you in a minute.”

  “I’ll fix you a plate,” said Linda, and merged into the gregarious shuffle toward the buffet.

  Tristan stared after her receding torso with unfocused eyes. Under his breath, almost against his will, he began to recite snippets of prayers he’d once memorized: great strange strings of syllables, faintly endowed with meaning, whose declamation required very little of his attention. The Sabbath blessing. The mourner’s Kaddish. The Shema. They’d hidden themselves in the remotest caverns of his memory, and there they had remained for nearly seven decades. Now they ran toward the summons for which they’d always waited, and stood proudly at attention.

  The sound of a body settling into the chair beside him brought the old man back.

  “Pretty horrifying, huh?” his grandson said. He speared a length of asparagus, crammed half of it into his mouth.

  Tristan bounced a glance off him. “I was quite moved. This is what millions have died for. The right to hold a simple ceremony.”

  Tris set his fork down, chewed, and swallowed.

  “The Jews are less than one percent of the world’s people,” Tristan said. “Do you realize that? Less than one percent. Yet we’ve been blamed for everything, since the very beginning. Entire populations have been wiped out. There’s never been anything like it in the history of the world. But here we are.”

  “Here we are. In Great Neck, Long Island.”

  “Yes.” His grandfather fixed him with a scythe of a stare. “And you’re lucky I’m speaking to you at all.”

  Tris frowned, hoping to evince innocence. His stomach took evasive action, curled into a ball. “Whoa—what?”

  “That novel of yours, sonny. Why don’t you tell me what it’s about?”

  Tris bit into his lower lip. “The struggles of a great man,” he said after a moment.

  “And who is that great man, pray tell?” Tristan asked, the old urge to combat mounting, unbidden, in him. This same trickle of adrenaline had been coursing in and out of his bloodstream for eighty years now, he thought. Why hadn’t it gone stagnant, like standing water in a fountain?

  “What do you mean? He’s Irving Gold.”

  “Is he, for instance, your grandfather? Look at me, sonny. Is that loathsome, cowardly fool me?”

  Guests were streaming past them now, en route to the tables set
up in the next room. Abe and Amalia walked by, then Linda and Benjamin. Good, the old man thought. Keep your distance. He hoped his grandson noticed they were staying away, realized the family all knew what he had done.

  Tris waited until they’d gone, then faced his grandfather. His tone was measured and cautious, like the footsteps of a man approaching a lion. “First of all,” he said, “Irving Gold is not a coward or a fool, and if you think he is, you missed the point. I love Irving Gold. And yes, there are similarities. Many. But no, he’s not you—not just you. He’s me, too. A version of me. And you and I, whether we like it or not, have a lot of ugly shit in common.”

  Tristan narrowed his eyes to a wince. “You must have balls the size of watermelons. I mean, you must have to carry them around in a fucking wheelbarrow. Irving Gold is me with a raging hard-on, me in a funhouse mirror. He’s my fucking age. He’s married to my wife.”

  “On whom he cheats. And who—”

  “Don’t hide behind your goddamn facts! How dare you bullshit me!”

  Tristan blinked and sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose, and for an instant Tris thought his grandfather would cry. But when the old man opened his eyes, they were dry.

  “You’re ambitious,” he said. “Cop to it. You knew what you wanted to do, so you did it, and everyone else be damned—that, I can understand. There, you and I are similar. So stop conning me. Be a man and cop to it.”

  They stared at each other, oblivious of the noise and bustle all around. Finally, Tris bowed his head.

  “You’re right,” he said, low. “I took what I wanted from your life without regard. I made things up without regard. I found all kinds of darkness—in you, in me—and I used it all. If I’ve hurt you, I’m sorry. But you have to believe me, Grandpa. It was never malicious. It just was.”

  Tristan looked sharply at him. “That’s not a sentence. Just was what?”

  Tris blinked. “True.”

  Tristan slid his hands down his thighs, clutched vaguely at his knees. The fight was draining from him; he felt a grim kind of relief. “Let’s cut bait,” he said. “I will forgive you for writing this character if you will forgive me for being this character.”

  “But Grandpa, he’s—”

  The old man raised his hand. “Leave it alone. I know who I am better than you do. I’m going to accept your apology on good faith, the same way you’re going to accept mine. You can tell the rest to my tomb.” He paused, shook his head the way he had outside Amalia’s hospital door. “And if you really see yourself in Gold, you’d better make some changes, quick,” he added gravely.

  Tris shut his mouth and mulled that over. Both of them tracked the progress of a grinning two-year-old, a cream cheese–coated spoon clutched in her hand. She’d almost made it to the foyer when her mother caught up, swooped down, took her in her arms, and carried her back to the party. The toddler’s face fell as soon as she was lifted, and the shrieking began. Her mother shot them a harried, apologetic glance as she passed. It went unacknowledged.

  Tris picked up his plastic fork and snapped off the middle tines. “If you want, I’ll have your name stricken from all my press stuff. Nobody who doesn’t already know we’re related will find out.”

  “I would say yes, but it’s too late now. I’ve already had a message on my office telephone from some dame at the Times magazine. The word is out.”

  A balloon of excitement swelled in Tris’s chest. His publicist’s biggest long shot had come off: to convince a freelancer she’d played field hockey against in high school to pitch a grandfather and grandson piece to the New York Times Magazine, a dual profile of the literary giant and the young writer who had grown up in his shadow. An article like that was priceless, sat on millions of coffee tables for months. It made you, whether you deserved it or not.

  “When was this?”

  “Sometime last week. I only checked the machine yesterday.” He eyed his grandson. “I don’t imagine I’ll call back.”

  Tris had forgotten what it was like to feel as young as he did now—this hideous with ambition, this single-minded in desire, this frantic in pursuit. This dependent on a decision utterly beyond his control.

  “Isn’t there any way you can, Grandpa? We can use the interview to set the record straight. I’ll tell them Irving Gold’s not you. We’ll take that off the table forever.”

  “You can’t control what they write. I learned that long ago. I’m sorry, I don’t want anything to do with it.”

  Tris ground his teeth, trying to summon the grace to accept the answer. Instead, one thought blinked on and off, on and off, like the sign outside a bar. His grandfather was fucking him over.

  Tris glanced over his shoulder at the clot of women bunched around Melissa, cooing at the screeching, mutilated infant in her arms. He bent forward. “You know, Grandpa, I could tell them that Irving Gold is you. I could tell everybody that.”

  The astonishment slapped across the old man’s face was as vivid as a handprint. “That, I would never forgive.”

  Tris made fists of his hands, dropped his chin to his chest. The treacly smell of noodle kugel wasn’t what made him want to vomit, but it wasn’t helping. “And I don’t think I could forgive you if you didn’t call the lady at the Times back.”

  Tris’s skin crawled under the old man’s glare, but he couldn’t dodge it any longer. Their eyes met, and Tristan pounced.

  “I’m not to be intimidated,” he spat. “Not by the likes of you. I’m more important to them than you’ll ever be. If I throw my weight around, they’ll kill your story just like that.” He snapped his fingers weakly, producing no sound. “Hell, I could call Meredith Rabinowitz at Frontier and scare her into putting your book through a complete legal vetting. I could threaten a lawsuit and tie you up forever.” He leaned back, crossed his arms. “How dare you.”

  The venom of the old man’s words burned Tris’s shame away. Fuck begging and apologizing and weak, vile threats. There was a truth they shared that superseded all of this, and he would hold his grandfather to it.

  “No. How dare you? This is my fucking story. Mine. Your life is part of who I am. Everything is part of who I am. That’s how this works. Novels don’t bend for the world—you taught me that. Now you wanna talk about prayer and survival and the history of the Jews, but you’re the guy who put them at the helms of slave ships before the camps went cold. That’s the story you needed to tell, and that’s why it was great. You did whatever you had to do to survive, claimed what you needed, made it all yours—that’s the fucking story of the Jews, of hip-hop, of everything. So don’t you tell me I can’t do the same.” Tris could barely force himself to remain still; his body throbbed with the urge to punch something, kick something, throw a chair. He squeezed his hands into fists so tight they ached, and tried to breathe.

  They sat and stared at each other. Tristan looked into his grandson’s blazing, jittery eyes, took in his flushed, frightened face. If ever he was going to break with himself, the old man thought, now was the time. What did he owe Tris? What did they owe each other? Were old men supposed to immolate themselves so young might prosper? Was that the way of the world, the way of family, the way of redemption? How could redemption come on the heels of betrayal; how could it come at the hands of this self-righteous, calculating putz?

  “I’ll do the interview,” he said. “Not because I buy any of that bullshit. But because you’re my grandson, you impudent little prick. And I owe you that much. For the good of this family. What’s left of it.”

  Tris unclenched his fists. “Thank you.”

  “Don’t you thank me.” Tristan labored to his feet. “I thought you were willing to fuck me over for the sake of a book, but I was wrong. You’ll do it for much less. For a few pages of publicity. A little taste of success. So have it your way, Tristan Freedman. I’ll do the piece, and that’s the last thing I will ever do for you. Good luck. I hope you take the best-seller list by storm.”

  And with that, the old man walke
d away.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTEEN

  Tris bounded up the stoop and swung open the tall wooden door.

  “Babe? You home? Hello?”

  “I’ll call you back,” Nina said into the phone. “Was it gross?” she shouted from the bed, turning toward his voice.

  Tris appeared in the doorway, suit jacket slung over his shoulder. He leaned against the wall, crossed his ankles, and sheathed his free hand in the pocket of his pants.

  Nina propped her head against her fist. “Well?”

  “Well what, my love?”

  “Well, why are you acting all cool and grinning like a lunatic, for starters?”

  Tris shook out the jacket, folded it lengthwise, and tossed it at the bed. It slid onto the floor.

  “Because I’m going to be in the fucking New York Times Magazine, that’s why.”

  Nina threw her legs over the side of the bed. “No!”

  “Yup.”

  “Holy shit! They went for it?”

  “They did. It’s a whole new ball game.”

  She jumped to her feet and pressed herself against him. “Tris, that’s unbelievable. We have to celebrate.”

  “Yeah.” He laid his palm against her cheek and Nina pulled back, beaming at him. “Absolutely.”

  “What do you wanna do?”

  “I’m thinking we jump in the car, drive over to Atlantic City, and get married. How’s that strike you?”

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously. Right now. I mean, you should probably throw some pants on first. But after that.”

  She stared at him, the water rising to her eyes. “You’d do that for me?”

  “I need you,” Tris whispered.

  “Do you?” She whispered, too, voice reverent and afraid.

  “More than ever, Nina.” He touched a finger to her chin and raised her mouth to his. They kissed.