“Fabulous. You admit it,” I said, still clinging to the pole. “Now we’re finally getting somewhere. You’ve been sleeping with the rabbi. Or are you only apologizing because you found out your movie isn’t going to sell? Are you here as Plan B, looking to become Mrs. David Melman so you don’t have to move to LA?”
Laurel decided to defend her good name rather than address my questions. “I was in a relationship with the rabbi before David and I started sleeping together,” she said to Rachel. “So technically, I was cheating on the rabbi with David, not the other way around—and not that I intended to share any of this with you. However, since I’ll probably never see any of you again, I’ll set the record straight.” She slung the messenger bag over her shoulder. It added to her already special look.
“You were sleeping with a rabbi’s girl?” my father asked me.
There was a chance I was going to pass out—vodka mixed with family sex talks are lethal. But I held firm. “Don’t twist this around on me. I had no idea that you were mixin’ it up with Rabbi Eric when you mauled me during Schindler’s List. Or when you propositioned me in your apartment.” I looked at Rachel. “Isn’t adultery an intent crime?”
“Don’t play dumb, David,” Laurel said. “You knew perfectly well.” Her voice, I noticed, had slipped into her teacher persona, her own defensive position. Non-emotional. Commanding. Persuasive. I didn’t stand a chance. “Marcy told you I was sleeping with him.”
Now everyone turned toward Marcy—except my mother, who was busy herding the boys into the family room. This conversation, apparently, was not meant for their ears.
I rotated my eyeballs toward Marcy. The rest of me was paralyzed. “You knew this? For a fact? You said it was just a rumor.”
“I told you to stay away from her,” she said.
“You told me she had issues to work out. You might have wanted to mention she was in a relationship with a rabbi of all people, a man of fucking God.”
“I told you to stay away from her as a trick, and it worked. If I’d told you I wanted to set you guys up, you wouldn’t have listened to me. So instead I told you to stay away from her, knowing that you’d do the opposite.” She looked at me. “It’s called reverse psychology.”
“I actually think it sounds more like manipulation,” Broc said.
“I’m sorry. I apologize to both of you,” Marcy said. She put her hands in prayer position and looked to the ceiling. “May God forgive me for the sin I committed by not telling the truth to my brother about my girlfriend because I thought the two of them would make a great couple.”
“Good call,” Rachel said. “They’re adorable.”
While the attention was diverted to Marcy, I said to Laurel, “Regardless of how our relationship started, I would have thought you would have cut it off with the rabbi after the banana boat lecture. After you told the whole class that I loved you.”
Laurel gave a frustrated, tired sigh. She stuffed the box of donuts from Marcy into her bag and pulled the shawl tighter around her shoulders, as if she was heading into the hinterlands instead of Union Square. “We’ve been through this, David. I was making a point to the class. I wasn’t talking about us.” She opened the door and, with a foot in the hallway, said, “And if you did love me, you could have been a stand-up guy and just said so yourself, instead of hiding your feelings behind my words.”
With that, she was gone and all eyes were on me. Just the opposite of how the evening began. And just the opposite of how Christmas dinner 1977 ended, with folks cleaning up and moving on, forgiving and forgetting. The Day of Atonement ’02 ended with a pall over it, with my head pounding and comments flying.
“How could he behave this way?” Marcy was saying to my mother. “Especially after he just got done atoning and promising to be a better person. What a way to kick off the new year. Mar the slates with a family feud.”
“Well, if he loves her,” my mother said. She was at the buffet now, assembling a platter of jelly donuts and mini meringues. Nothing interferes with the Melmans’ dessert.
“Do you love her?” Rachel asked.
I moved my head up and down.
“How wonderful!” my mother said, her mouth filled with cookie.
“If you love her,” Marcy said, “you’re not only a drunk you’re an idiot, too.”
“Well if that’s not the pot calling the kettle black,” I slurred. “This whole situation, all my grief for the last month, is your fault. Isn’t that swell.” And ironic, I thought as I held onto the pole and the world swayed ’round. “She was the one who made me go to class in the first place,” I said, now tattling to my father. “She said it would be good for me, that it would help me find myself. Well nice work, sis. Look at me now.” I slumped down in the spot I was standing in between the kitchen and the dining room.
Suddenly, I sympathized with Share, who’d called the day after the dinner with Bailey Pierce to apologize for her horrible behavior. She’d been so overwhelmed by the presence of Bailey, her idol, so worried she wouldn’t know what to say to her, so frightened that Bailey wouldn’t give her the time of day, that she’d overdone it with the alcohol. I’d told Share not to worry, that the best of us abuse the booze every now and again, and I wouldn’t hold it against her. Somehow I doubted that Laurel was going to be as forgiving. My family, for certain, was not.
CHAPTER 15:
Dialogue
Proceedings were held in Marcy’s family room after we finished our Yom Kippur dessert. The issue at hand was the status of my relationship with Laurel in the wake of the evening’s events. Specifically, was it possible to restore it? Rachel, perched on the arm of the couch, presided. She hovered over my father, who sat on the cushion below her winding a napkin around his fingers, preparing to pull a tooth. Rachel’s seven-year-old son, Connor, stood, mouth wide open, in front of my father. Connor was numbing his gum with an ice cube. Rachel’s five-year-old son, Bradley, crowded in, waiting for the action to start.
My brothers-in-law sat together on the love seat watching the Eagles trounce the Redskins. My mother was in the kitchen with Julia and Estie, teaching them to play mah-jongg. I was sprawled on Marcy’s carpet eating cookies, drinking coffee, and pretending to watch the game while I listened and sobered up. Conversation circled around me as if I didn’t exist, which I didn’t mind. I felt like I’d tuned into a call-in radio show and was getting solid cautionary tale advice based on some other pathetic soul’s story.
“Here she was, looking to make up and move on. She gave him a chance and what does he do? He blows it. He waits until she leaves to announce that he loves her,” Marcy said as she wrapped leftovers. A lot was being made of the fact that I’d said I loved her.
Rachel took a sip of tea and pulled Bradley on her lap to give my father more room to maneuver. “Yes, I agree. She had the decency—the balls, actually—to show up here dressed for some kind of Hebrew Halloween, and he had the nerve to shut her down. It was appalling. And she couldn’t have been more clear about what she wanted.”
I ran my hands through the brown and gold pile carpet and silently begged to differ. What Laurel wanted hadn’t been clear to me. I waited, hoping Rachel would elaborate.
Marcy spoke instead: “He could’ve at least gone after her.” I could tell she was genuinely upset because she was eating a meringue cookie. She never eats her own sweets. “A stupid move, especially now that we know he loves her.”
My father told Connor to remove the ice; he was ready to go in for the tooth.
“‘Y’all need to go easy on David,” Broc said.
“Please,” Rachel said as my father announced that Connor’s tooth wasn’t ready to come out. It was still attached to a piece of his gum and had to be further loosened. “Going easy on him his whole life is what’s caused all his issues.”
“What issues?” my mother hollered from the kitchen.
I propped my head up onto my hand, bolstered by the emergence of several allies. If anything, I was ge
tting a solid feel for who my supporters were, which family members should be tapped to speak on my behalf, if and when I should go the way of the original Mort Chuckerman and die.
My mind must have still been under the influence of alcohol, because I was gripped by a sudden mesmerization with Mort Chuckerman. How profound and ironic that a cadaver, a dead body, had become a moniker, a term of endearment, for me. Talk about subtext. I might have shared this realization with Laurel had I not just chased her out the door.
“So what if David has issues,” my mother was now saying. “We all have our issues.”
As my father told my mother to speak for herself, I decided to speak for me.
“Any issues I may have come from being tortured by the two of you my whole life,” I said, pointing at Rachel and at Marcy. “You’re lucky I’m still alive.”
“Clearly, he’s still drunk,” Marcy said. She looked to Rachel for support, but her head was too far into Connor’s mouth, trying to see the piece of gum at issue, to notice.
“I would be, too,” Peter said. “That was a pressure cooker situation. I don’t know many guys who would have handled themselves any better.”
Even my father had an opinion. “Let me just throw this idea out there: Has it dawned on any of you dummies that you are wasting your breath? Maybe Laurel doesn’t love David.” He looked at us, his forehead crinkled. “Maybe she left the meal early because she didn’t give a damn, and this whole conversation here is for nothing.”
There was a pause while everyone considered my father’s perspective and my father instructed Connor to bite down on one of my cookies to help loosen up his tooth.
I handed Connor an oatmeal raisin and mourned the loss of my Chuckerman name while everyone else continued to analyze my life.
Rachel was all over my father’s remark. “I disagree. She obviously loves him or at least cares about him a lot. Why else would she have shown up here?”
Surprisingly, Estie took her on. “Maybe because I invited her and she didn’t want to say no to a kid. Or because she really just wanted to experience a traditional Yom Kippur dinner.”
Broc repeated his sentiment that if one’s goal is to experience anything traditional, she should not be wasting time with the Melman family.
“You can talk all you want about love, but the real question is, does he hear bells?”
There was a communal groan from the family room, including one from me, as we all knew my mother’s position on bells.
“Call me old-fashioned, but if you ask me, no bells is a red flag. When that girl walked into the room this evening, Davy’s heart needed to stop, the room should have lit up. He needed to hear bells. Even if she was dressed like my great-grandmother.”
“Trust me, you are all wasting your time,” my father said. “I’ll bet that poor girl took one look at this family and headed back to Utah. If it makes you feel any better, Davy, I think we are all responsible for chasing her away.”
At this, bickering began at a heightened register, with my mother yelling at my father for letting me off the hook, Rachel yelling at my mother for raising the bar too high with the bells, Marcy yelling at Ryan for not doing his reading homework, Connor whining at Rachel for not letting him have the cookie that might be the key to losing his tooth, and Broc yelling at everyone for drowning out the TV.
“Don’t listen to her,” Marcy whispered to me on her way to the kitchen. “Love is enough.”
But was it? “Love matters a little but luck matters more,” my grandma had told me that day on the pool deck. How could you make a decision about the rest of your life when luck was the linchpin between you and happily ever after? I looked at my father, who was again icing Connor’s tooth.
Was it luck or bells or the fact that my father was out of the house for most of my parents’ marriage that had made it so successful? On the other hand, Rachel and Peter spent almost all day every day together, and Rachel was the bossiest person I knew. Yet they seemed happy. So did Broc and Marcy, and Broc had never intended to marry Marcy at all. Had they just gotten lucky? Or were they all just acting? Maybe everyone was waiting for just the right moment to do as Laurel just did—as my Grandma Estelle longed to do—and head for the hills.
I didn’t know and I didn’t have time to ask, because at this point Rachel announced that she knew how to make the situation with Laurel right again.
My father, ready to try again with Conner’s tooth, told her to give it up already. “That ship,” he said, pausing long enough to take out the tooth, “has sailed.” I was happy to have him on my side, though sad to hear that he thought I had no hope. I guess I wanted hope, which was why when Rachel said, “You need to track her down and beg for forgiveness,” I propped myself up on my elbows and injected myself back into the conversation.
“What do you mean by beg?” I asked as Connor displayed the tooth to the rest of the family.
“You should have gone after her when she left,” Marcy declared.
“He couldn’t walk,” Estie reminded her.
“Well, Laurel’s class is tomorrow. He could go to that,” Marcy said.
Rachel’s eyes lit up.
“I’m not going to show up to Laurel’s class and beg,” I said.
“Yes, you are,” Marcy said.
Rachel told me that not only was I going to show up, I was going to dress up too. “I want you to look disheveled and distraught.”
“The way you look now,” Julia shouted in from the kitchen.
“Exactly,” Rachel said. She tucked her hair behind her ears and leaned forward, her typical witness preparation position. “You’re going to walk into class looking like you haven’t slept. Then you’re going to go straight up to her, look her in the eye, and say something simple, honest, and from the heart.”
“Like, I’m sorry I’m a schmuck, but I love you,” Marcy said. “Please take me back.”
Rachel told her not quite. “Leave off the schmuck part, that speaks for itself. And leave off the please take me back. That, too, is implied by your actions. Basically, your job boils down to delivering one line, which I think you can handle. ‘Laurel, I am so sorry. I regret my behavior, and I love you.’”
“He’s trying to win back a girl, not apologize to his parents,” Peter said. “It needs some dressing up.”
My father agreed. He thought I should take Laurel’s hands as I spoke. But Rachel felt that given the gravity of the evening’s screw-up, less was more—“As long as his words are delivered with the proper level of sincerity.” To ensure this, she asked me to repeat after her: “I’m so sorry. I regret my behavior, and I love you.”
I told her I wasn’t doing it. My nephews, on the other hand, were. Rachel should have seen that coming. They began to recite the line, pounding their thighs to the rhythm of the sentence. Then Broc joined in and bedlam broke out in the family room, with every Melman under fifteen, plus my brothers-in-law, chanting along. I didn’t participate, but the sentence did stick in my brain so when I walked into class the next night as instructed—unshaven and in a dirty T-shirt—I was ready to deliver.
“What’s with you?” the Mormon Rodeo said when she saw me. “You look like Judd.” Gone was the Orthodox peasant girl. In her place seemed to be a younger version of Mrs. Martin, my first grade teacher, who believed in dunce caps and pulling loose teeth with a string and a door. Laurel wore a pale pink button-down and a khaki skirt to her knees, and her stick-straight hair was pulled off her face in a bun, tight like a ballerina. I’d never seen her look this way. She looked hot. She also looked intense.
I couldn’t figure out if her hairdo or the debacle of the previous night accounted for her standoffishness. If she’d have looked this old-school on the first day of class, I’d never have had the nerve to talk to her. I didn’t have the nerve now, either. Immediately, the lines rehearsed in Marcy’s apartment went out the window. Instead of “Laurel, I’m really sorry about last night, I was an idiot and I love you,” I mumbled, “Hey, how yo
u doing?” And I took a seat.
“I think the better question is, how are you?” She stopped organizing her papers and looked at me. “I’m actually shocked, if not slightly disappointed, to see you are still alive.”
I nodded in confirmation of my existence and tried to make sense of her nonchalance. Earlier that day, when I’d reviewed Rachel’s game plan with Ezmerelda, she had speculated that I might not even be let back into the classroom.
But Laurel just continued to organize papers into bundles. Maybe my father was right, she doesn’t care, I thought as I glanced around the room to avoid looking her. The television, the one she’d used to show Schindler’s List, was in the corner. I asked her if we were seeing a clip today. She said no, she’d shown The Godfather during last week’s class on Hallmarks of a Great Conflict. “Tonight’s class,” she said, “is about dialogue. No visuals. We’re going to talk it out.”
“Well, that works out well. There’s some stuff I want to say to you.”
“You don’t say.” She put down the stapler she was about to start using on the papers she’d been organizing. “I’m not sure I’m interested. However, I am curious. There is a difference, you know, between interest and curiosity. Interest is genuine. Curiosity is dangerous.” She paused to ponder. “I shouldn’t give in to curiosity. We all know it killed the cat. On the other hand, you look so pathetic.” She threw up her hands in defeat. “Fine, I’ll hear you out.” She looked at me expectantly. So did the few others who had trickled into class.
I nodded toward the other folks. “Maybe after class.”
“Whatever you want. In the meantime, why don’t you make yourself useful,” she said without looking up from her stapler.
“You mean, why don’t you make yourself useful, Chuckerman,” I said, trying to test the waters, figure out if I had any hope of a revival.
She didn’t give me much. She rolled her eyes. “Whatever, David. Just get up and help pass these out.”
I felt dizzy as I stood. Probably vertigo from the extremes of my day. That morning, I’d been sitting in a conference room, all oak and austerity, at the law firm that was handling the licensing of Omnipotence. Conversing. Negotiating. Making things happen. Now, I was distributing handouts and groveling.
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