by Peter Orner
By the early ’80s, we stopped seeing Aunt Ruth in person, though once or twice she guest-starred on Fantasy Island. But the time I’m talking about—those days when she’d stay at our house for a night or two—I think of the preparations. My father would scour the upstairs bathroom on his hands and knees with Ajax. We breathed up that gritty powder for weeks. My father would shout: Ruthie’s coming, Ruthie’s coming! And my mother, who couldn’t wait to get out of that house, even she looked forward to Aunt Ruth’s visits, maybe because they gave her a taste of what she’d once thought life might hold. When she and her swashbuckling lawyer husband were welcomed on board the USS Who Knows on a hot night in Miami Beach.
Ruth and my mother sitting on the back patio in the morning, smoking and laughing as my father slept in, and Aunt Ruth says, “So, this is the suburbs. How dreadful, such beautiful flowers.”
And my mother cackling so hard she choked on her cigarette. The blue-gray morning, the tall trees in our backyard—
When my father woke up, he’d come down in unfamiliar silk-looking pajamas, and the three of them would drink and smoke and laugh into the afternoon. My brother and I would make cameos. Aunt Ruth would critique us. Project! Project to the back of the theater!
I have always wondered what was in it for her. Why did she keep coming back to us, year after year? Who were we? As far as I know, neither my father nor my mother ever had an affair with Ruth Roman. That wasn’t it. What I’m getting at here is that it may have been one of those rare friendships that was just that, pure and simple enjoyment of one another’s company. That’s all. You forget such a thing is possible.
Ruthie’s coming! Cut your toenails!
It passed, it passed. Maybe laughter always vanishes first?
In September of 1999, Aunt Ruth’s New York Times obituary headline read: “Ruth Roman, 75, Glamorous and Wholesome Star, Dies.” The piece mentioned her appearances in Champion opposite Kirk Douglas, The Far Country opposite Jimmy Stewart, Strangers on a Train opposite Robert Walker, and Dallas opposite Gary Cooper. She’d once dated Ronald Reagan. She had a kittenish warmth on-screen. “Few of her films are studied in film schools today,” wrote the New York Times. “But in their time they made box office cash registers ring like sleigh bells and in 1951 Ms. Roman was receiving 500 letters a week from around the world.” The obituary listed her three or four husbands and also retold the Andrea Doria story, her only son drifting away into the ocean dark. There’s no mention of my parents, but why would there be?
The Language of That Year
The time Mr. Leopardi burst through our always-open front door, shouting gibberish at the top of his lungs. Not words exactly, at least not any words I could make out, because they all ran together. Nobody else was home. I was a sixth grader, up in my room, under my bed, whacking off like there was no tomorrow. My sad, furious, happy ritual. It brought no relief. That didn’t mean I didn’t live for it. And, of course, I was completely freaked out and thought that whatever the hell’s going on in the front hall it’s got to have something to do with the private party I’m having up here under my bed. Had somebody been tipped off and come over to bust my ass in the name of common decency? I stopped in midecstasy and listened to that incoherent ranting until I heard the front door open again and Mrs. Leopardi say, “Oh, here you are, Father.”
Mr. Leopardi, before he retired and lost his mind, sold cars. He sold my mother our K-car. (Later that year, my brother would total it in Milwaukee.) This was before Alzheimer’s became a thing. We just thought Mr. Leopardi was unhinged. Lots of people were in 1982. He’d wander around the neighborhood bellowing in a combination of Italian and English. But that was the first afternoon he’d come into anybody’s house, and anyway I was much too in the throes to make the connection, under the bed with my pants down, more ashamed than terrified, and I was plenty terrified. And even after Mrs. Leopardi came and took him home, I couldn’t shake the thought that, whatever he’d been saying, he absolutely intended the tirade for me personally. A message from hell concerning my lonely deviance. A Jew, I still sure as hell believed in hell. It only happened once. But in my memory of that time, it happens often, weekly, me under the bed and every time I’m about to reach the point where my efforts will temporarily pay off, the front door flings open and in charges Mr. Leopardi.
He was a small man with a gaunt face. His eyes were saucered by two half circles that drooped down to his cheeks. He wasn’t the sort of salesman to go out of his way to sell you anything on his lot. My mother picked out the K-car because, according to chalk on the windshield, it was the cheapest. Mr. Leopardi just shrugged. It was you who had to prove you were worthy of the car, not the other way around. And just because you happened to live next door to him didn’t mean you got any discount. My mother and I got in the car. She asked me if I wanted to “drive,” and I reached over from the passenger’s seat and wiggled the steering wheel a little and made some growling car noises. I was a little old to be acting this way, but it was the first car my mother bought after the divorce, a moment of great independence, and I had to make a show that I understood the significance. I remember looking out the window at Mr. Leopardi as we drove away, how he stood there with his arms folded, not smiling, gazing at me.
Doesn’t this kid have a father?
Also that year, I broke my collarbone playing King of the Mountain at recess. I’ve never been much of an athlete, but I did reach a kind of pinnacle as champion of King of the Mountain. The game was ruthless, glorious. Elm Place School field, the hill that abutted St. Johns Avenue, across the street from Marcy Feldsher’s condo. In the winter, the hill got icy. It’s still there. Every time I drive by it, I relive past triumphs. I shoved a lot of bigger guys down that hill. Bob Glickman, Toby Crenshaw, even Michael Zamost once. Because for a time that fucking hill was mine. The object was not just to defend your rights to be on top of the hill by repelling invaders. You didn’t just shove. You punched, you kicked, you bit. The point was to humiliate—and maim. When Eddy Loiseau got me in a headlock and kneed me in the groin before throwing me down so hard on the ice I heard my bones crack, I was in such pain I couldn’t muster any sounds. Eddy and a couple of other guys carried me inside, dumped me in front of Nurse Kellner’s office, and ran like hell. After she found me out there, Nurse Kellner called my mother. This seemed a serious case. Nurse Kellner, God love her, but her medical expertise was limited to ice packs and chocolate.
My mother picked me up and drove me to the hospital. I was, in spite of feeling like someone was repeatedly stabbing me in the neck, somehow able to walk to the car. We drove, I remember, in silence. My mother has always been unflappable in the face of sickness and injury. I’d been knocked around pretty bad, okay, but what else did I have to say for myself? Did I have any new thoughts about the nature of the universe today? How about any insights into what our country, collectively, had done to deserve Ronald Reagan? She didn’t say this out loud, and I didn’t answer. That’s sometimes how we talked. I remember the sound of my mother and me not speaking as she was about to turn left on Vine Street. She was driving another car that day. Because I broke my collarbone after my brother wrecked the K-car in Milwaukee. All the useless chronologies I wander around with. My mother replaced the K-car with a used baby-blue VW bug, and I remember as if listening to it right now that the sound of its blinker was direct and forceful, like a loud clock ticking.
Crimes of Opportunity
When I went to make a report, the cop told me it must have been a crime of opportunity. When I asked what he meant, he said there are crimes of opportunity and there are crimes of premeditation. The opportunists are the ones you have to worry about because they can turn on a dime. Less than a dime. Careerists, you know where they stand. Nothing false about a careerist. But an opportunist?
Officer Montez looked down at his shiny plastic shoes as if even the thought of an opportunist made him want to spit on shoes, didn’t matter if they were his. We were side by side in the only chairs i
n the waiting room. These two chairs were bolted to the floor, and so close together that his right knee touched my left knee. I wondered who’d steal chairs from a police station. Our proximity made the conversation not only conspiratorial but possibly, in a different time and place, romantic. Officer Montez turned 180 degrees to face me and said that he spent part of his day doing his rounds, filing nonsense paperwork, and occasionally solving crimes and arresting people, but the bulk of his time, especially his brain time, if I knew what he meant, was spent examining people’s faces to determine whether they were opportunists or careerists.
I asked: But what if a person’s neither?
Officer Montez’s laugh echoed off the walls of the little waiting room.
It couldn’t have been a more nondescript room, and yet I still think of it. Once, on a Eurail pass, I went to the Sistine Chapel. I even got down on the floor and stared up at the ceiling until a security guard had a conniption. I thought, This guy’s going to report me direct to the pontiff. I remember not a single detail of Michelangelo’s frescoes. But I can tell you that the walls of a certain suburban police station in 1982 were the color of urine when you’re dehydrated. How in a locked glass cabinet—you know the type of lock I mean? works like a zipper?—were dusty softball championship trophies and public service awards. How in the corner was a furled banner that, if extended (I extended it while I was waiting for Officer Montez to emerge from the bowels of the station), read: CHARACTER MATTERS. The officers brought it with them when they visited schools and delivered passionate antidrug lectures designed ineffectively to scare the shit of out us. Hmmm, I got to try me some of that. The ceiling? Chalk-white asbestos, little moonlike craters I wished I could reach so I could run my fingers over the bumps.
Officer Montez handed me a form. Pretty hands, not just pretty for a cop, pretty for anybody, and bright, translucent fingernails. Did he get manicures? Did he wonder if his manicurist was an opportunist or a careerist? As I started to fill out the form, he made notes in a small spiral notebook. He asked me the make and model of the bike.
“Model?”
“Was it a Junior Varsity? Varsity? Continental?”
“It was brown.”
“Okay, a brown bike. But a Schwinn, right? All you guys ride—”
“I ride a Huffy,” I said. “My parents are divorced.”
“Serial number?”
“Serial number?”
“Some people write it down,” Officer Montez said. “You know, file it in a drawer with other important numbers, birth certificates, social security cards, that sort of—”
I tried to comport myself like I was the type of seventh grader who would, under normal circumstances, have written down my bike’s serial number and filed it in a drawer. I just hadn’t in this particular case.
I returned, all business, to my form. Time of the Incident: Sometime after lunch. Location of the Incident: In front of the Dannon Yogurt, Central Avenue. Summary of the Incident: Someone stole my fucking bike.
I looked up at Officer Montez. He was staring into my soul as I sat there like I was the unsullied lamb who’d been wronged. An easy case. A goddamn opportunist right here at headquarters. A plump little faker in Stan Smiths, ready and willing to take the moment a taking presented itself. I considered turning myself in to his virile custody right then.
Officer Montez in his plastic shoes and day-and-a-half-old beard. He’d worked the night shift, and now it was well into the following afternoon, and the man was tired, but not too tired to give a dumbass who’d left his bike unlocked the time of day, and—and—to recognize an opportunist when he saw one. I am grateful for the attention you paid, Officer. Our encounter provided me with some rare clarity.
Eddy Loiseau and I were inside playing Frogger. Eddy was trying to explain to me that the point was not to get hit by traffic, but I got a kick out of watching the frog get run over.
“You’re losing. Every time you—”
“I’m good at getting hit,” I said.
And outside, someone walking by, just passing the time, maybe whistling a little ditty, minding his own business, and there it was, a brown bike, a Huffy but in decent shape, some stickers, leaning nonchalant against the window. Beckoning him. Or her. Maybe it was a her who stole my bike. Pass it up? So that someone else can come along and take it, or, worse, nobody gets that booty, and the putz who left it unlocked rides it home, no harm, no foul? A gift is offered. It’s yours for the pilfer. File charges against another someone like me who happened to be striding down Central Avenue that day, bikeless and able? You read me right, Officer Montez. Even then I was sneaky. Opportunities for thefts and every other sin, I’ve always done my best to honor them.
In the Lobby
After my parents split up, I went on trips with my father. I didn’t have a choice. Vacations were codified in the decree. My brother, being older and already in high school, was exempt from this judicial fiat, so I went it alone. My father was rich then. He didn’t die rich. He died without much. That’s another story. But, in those years, he considered it almost an obligation to fly off to places most people only read about in magazines.
I’d just turned fifteen when he took me and Cindy Roo to St. Moritz at the height of ski season. None of us knew how to ski, or had any interest in learning to ski, although Cindy Roo may have ended up taking some lessons. She certainly brought a lot of ski outfits. But I wouldn’t know for sure. I didn’t much care then, and I don’t much care now. Still, it’s amazing to me that Cindy Roo is dead also. You’d have thought her name alone would have kept her alive forever.
On these trips, my father and Cindy Roo would vanish immediately. I’d hang out in the lobby of the hotel. And the lobby of the Palace Hotel in St. Moritz—where to even begin? First off, it was like a public park, or a public zoo. The lobby was open to anybody and everybody, day and night, an untamed labyrinth, a country of motley sofas, love seats, ottomans, old ladies in worn-out mink coats reading week-old newspapers, small dogs, bigger dogs, card tables with tiny drawers (inside were notepads with scores from card games played during the Hapsburg Empire), grandfather clocks displaying wildly different times, duck decoys, roaring fireplaces, wardrobes, china cabinets, high-back chairs that I could stand on in my socks and not see over the top, bookshelves full of racy (I imagined) French novels, mirrors that were more like black holes than mirrors (when you looked in them you only saw your face in ghostly outline), Siamese cats in baskets, loose, renegade squirrels. And those brass lamps. In every direction on wobbly tables were those green-eyeshade lamps so that the whole place glowed green, nightlike by day, daylike by night. And all of it, every living and inanimate object, belonged there and nowhere else, as if every dog, every cat, every minked old lady, every piece of furniture, had grown up out of the thick black carpet and taken permanent root. And every day I found something I could have sworn wasn’t there the day before. Where did this locked sea chest come from? Yet overcrowded as it was with things to investigate, there was a languid paddedness about the lobby, and I’d sink into one of the creaky leather couches, the hair of the cow that had sacrificed itself for my leisure still clinging to it, and sleep to the sweet ping of the elevators.
I remember gawking out the big plate-glass windows, but I’m not sure I ever left the hotel. I was a lobby rat. I ordered Cokes; I ordered sundaes. I ordered fat sandwiches and thick fries and shrimp cocktails and beers. My last name and room number were talismans that opened any door. I’d chat with the concierge, Pascal. All concierges are named Pascal. He never left his post behind his tiny desk that was like my grandmother’s dressing table. There wasn’t a thing on the planet Pascal didn’t know. He never consulted a book or the phone. He just knew every train timetable from Zurich to Zagreb. What did I chat with him about? The tribulations of a brotherless kid on his own in the Alps. Pascal was well aware of my sort of dilemma. Well-heeled abandoned kids were a subspecialty. And he never scoffed or judged, only commiserated with simpatico eyes.
>
Unburdening myself to Pascal wearied me. Wouldn’t it anybody? I was napping peaceably under an afghan, a plate of coagulating ketchup on the floor beside my shoes being lapped up by a couple of elegant cats, when something pointy jabbed me in the gut.
“What the fuck?”
“You don’t ski?”
“Huh?”
“Not even the bunny hill?”
I opened my eyes. Hovering over me was a girl wielding a ski pole. She was dressed head to toe in white but for a big red ball dangling off the top of her white hat. She looked like an elf dressed as an ambulance.
About to prod me again, this time in the nuts, she said, “Do you or don’t you even ski?”
“Look, I’m sleeping.”
“You came all the way across the ocean to snooze?”
“Yes.”
Asinine as this was, it also seemed to make a certain amount of sense to her. I wouldn’t be the first person she ever met who flew nine hours to sleep someplace else.
My tab was under the ketchup plate. She knelt down and shoved a cat out of the way, read the name and room number.
“How old are you?” she said.
“Sixteen and a half.”
“Right. And I’m Golda Meir.”
“Who?”
“You’re a MOT?”
“A what?”
“Member of the tribe, dummy.”
“What tribe?”
“The Navajos.”
“Sure,” I said.
“The ancient wandering band of the circumscribed.”
“Circumcised?”
“Yeah, I mean that.”
“Them, too,” I said.