You would think everyone we know has already been over, but apparently not. The shiva calls start bright and early, people wanting to get their obligations over with in time to enjoy one of the last warm Sundays of the season. They sit visiting with us like they’ve got all the time in the world, while their golf clubs, tennis rackets, and swimsuits lie waiting for them in the trunks of their cars.
Boner shows up with a group of Paul’s old buddies, all ex-jocks. They talk about the Yankees and the Mets and their fantasy baseball league, while their wives sit quietly beside them with looks of bored indulgence. Better baseball than mistresses and hookers, their expressions say. Boner is in jeans, a T-shirt, and flip-flops, every inch the cool rabbi off duty. His wife, Emily, is pretty and quiet, with nervous eyes and a flickering smile that never quite achieves ignition. The other guys have this running joke of apologizing to him every time they swear or say something off-color, which is pretty much every other minute. You can tell he’d like to swear a blue streak right back at them, but he is surrounded by his congregants, and it would be bad for business.
“Hey, Judd,” Dan Reiss says to me. “How are things with Wade Boulanger?”
“What?”
“Man Up. Don’t you work on the show?”
“Not anymore.”
“That’s too bad. I love that guy.” He contorts his face and says, “Man up already!” in a hoarse, nasal voice.
“That’s a good impression.”
“You think?”
“Sure.”
“What’s he like off the air?”
“He’s an asshole.”
“Well, yeah. But is he a good guy?”
They talk about high school, relive their greatest triumphs on the baseball field. Everyone is careful not to mention college, but the specter of Paul’s injury looms large over the conversation. Their very avoidance of the topic is reminder enough, like the puffy scar that snakes up the side of his neck. You can see the muscles tightening in his face, the tautness of his lips in their neutral position. His life is a daily reminder of the life he might have had. I feel a surge of pity and tenderness toward him. I want to tell him that I understand, that I forgive him for being such a total prick to me.
I think about making a list of all the things I need to tell people before it’s too late.
10:32 a.m.
GREG POLLAN, AN old friend of mine from high school, comes by. Our friendship was based almost entirely on our mutual admiration of Clint Eastwood. We would talk to each other in Clint’s tough-guy rasp, and if we passed each other in the halls, we would squint and draw imaginary .357 Magnums. I know what you’re thinking; did he fire six shots, or only five? Go ahead, make my day. At some point we moved on to Sylvester Stallone. In high school, if you can find a girl who will kiss you and maybe let you touch her breasts and a guy who likes the same movies as you, your world is pretty much complete. Now Greg is fat and married and his eyes bulge in their sockets, threatening to pop out and shoot across the room. Triplets, he tells me. A goiter. He is unshaven and tired and he heard an old friend was sitting shiva in the neighborhood and made it his business to come. Even though he’s exhausted and probably could have used the time better just turning up the A.C. in his car and closing his eyes. I try to imagine a situation in which I’d have been equally decent.
“So, I hear you produce the Wade Boulanger show.”
“Yeah.”
“He’s very funny.”
“Sometimes.”
“I could do without all the farting though.”
“You and me both.”
“My wife hates him.”
“Mine loves him.”
“She thinks he’s a misogynist blowhard, calls him Rush Limbaugh with a boner.”
“That’s pretty accurate, I guess. What are you up to?”
“Well, I was doing risk assessment for a while, and now I’m kind of consulting, by which I mean I got laid off.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“So now I take care of the girls—they’re four—and Debbie sells medical supplies. Also, we have an Amway website. I’ll leave you my card.”
I wonder how he gets up in the morning.
He tells me about some of the other kids from our class he’s kept tabs on. Mike Salerno is divorced and drives a Ferrari. Jared Mathers is gay, to the surprise of absolutely no one. Randy Sawyer owns a string of bowling alleys. Julie Mehler is a state senator. Sandy Flynn’s house burned down, but they all got out. Gary Daley was arrested for having kiddie porn on his office computer. And so on. Judd Foxman’s pregnant wife left him for a popular misogynist blowhard radio personality. As a one-line update, I fit in quite nicely, actually. Better than I ever did back in the day.
Greg gets up from his chair. His skin is cratered and sallow. There are sweat marks on his polo shirt, under his flouncing man-breasts. One or two other visitors have to move their chairs to accommodate his exit. At some point in time, Greg gave up on things and accepted his fate to spend the rest of his life fat and exhausted and dull as a butter knife.
“Great to see you,” he says. His hand is thick and clammy.
“Thanks for coming, man. I appreciate it.”
“You bet.”
He lumbers out of the room with the unhurried gait of a circus elephant. He was once a funny kid, pleasant-faced and not repulsive. A certain type of girl liked him. I wonder if he remembers our Clint Eastwood and Stallone impressions, if he watches Rambo like I do when I come across it flipping through the cable channels late at night, when the world is spinning much too fast for me to sleep.
Chapter 35
11:22 a.m.
It’s a day for reunions. Some old girlfriends of Wendy’s show up. She hides her diamond rings and sits up straighter. She trots out her boys for a command performance of cuteness. Ryan sulks, but Cole obliges, letting the women lift him up, pointing out their ears and eyes. Ryan picks his nose and wipes it on his shorts. Everyone coos. Snapshots of children are passed around and exclaimed over. Everyone is adorable. Everyone is perfect. No one here has ever produced an ugly or even ordinary baby.
The women look each other over as they chat, measuring thighs, bellies, hips, and asses, taking into account body types and recent pregnancies. They silently evaluate and pass judgment, realigning themselves in the pecking order. It’s a brutal business, being a woman. Wendy sucks in her gut and crosses her legs, pointing her toes like a ballerina in a last-ditch effort to coax her calf muscle out of hiding. She has our mother’s legs, sheathed in thick, smooth skin that defies definition.
Someone procures an old yearbook and they all shriek like hyenas.
11:35 a.m.
PETER APPLEBAUM IS back to comfort my mother at close range. There are other people over, attempting to visit with her, but he doesn’t register them. He is a hammer, she is a nail, and the rest of them are screws. He’s had a haircut since we last saw him, almost military in its closeness, and he has shaved the dark, gangrenous fuzz off his earlobes. His cologne fills the room like bad news. He is pulling out all the stops, Applebaum is. He has not many more years of sexual function ahead of him, and there is no time for the subtlety of a slow flirtation. He pats Mom’s arms, takes her hand in both of his, and strokes it relentlessly. That’s just his way. Mom tries to draw some of the other visitors into the conversation, tries to retrieve her hand, but Applebaum holds the line, talking and stroking, his bushy eyebrows unfurling like caterpillars.
Linda steps out from the kitchen, her expression grim, and makes her way through the visitors. She whispers something into Applebaum’s ear, and his expression falls, his face turning red. He follows Linda back into the kitchen while Mom looks on, somewhat concerned. Behind the swinging door, slightly raised voices are drowned out by the sound of the Cuisinart. A few moments later, Applebaum shuffles down the front hall, stooped and deflated, pausing just long enough to leave a few bills on the tip plate next to the memorial candle. I feel sorry for him. There is some ba
sis for comparison between us, I think.
Linda reemerges at the kitchen door and she and my mother exchange a long, dense look over the heads of the shiva callers, decimating whatever lingering doubts I might have had. Wendy looks over at me, raising a drawn eyebrow into something like a question mark, but she’s not really asking.
11:45 a.m.
SOME DISTANT RELATIVES have driven up from Long Island to pay their respects: my mother’s first cousin Sandra, her husband, Calvin, and their twin teenage sex-kitten daughters. The girls are vacant and beautiful and wield their budding sexuality with a certain lack of control, like a toddler with a power tool. They stretch their long, ripe bodies out on the couch and look around the room with the dismayed air of the recently conned. It was a long way to come for a room full of irrelevant relatives.
There is an air of striving perfection about this family, evident in Sandra’s expensive-looking haircut and pedicure, Cal’s—for that’s what they call him—diamond-encrusted watch and expensive polo shirt with a golf club logo, in the girls’ smooth, tanned legs dipped into white canvas tennis shoes, their blown hair, their flawless complexions. This isn’t a family, it’s a Christmas card. You can picture the plush carpets of their home in Long Island with views of the Sound, the stonework around the front door, the marble and mirrors in the foyer, the perfectly manicured lawn, the sixty-inch plasma television and leather furniture in the den, the art deco living room that no one is allowed into with shoes, the two-year leases on their matching Lexuses.
I don’t like Cal. Cal’s friends, if he has any, probably don’t like him either. He has hairy forearms, showy biceps, a store-bought tan, and predatory eyes that seem to be looking for a conversation to interrupt, an argument to have. But Mom seems genuinely fond of Sandra, whose mother died when she was a young girl. Mom’s parents took her in for a few years. There’s a bond there.
“Cindy’s on the swim team, All-American,” Sandra tells mom. “And Dana’s captain of the lacrosse team.”
“We should send them equipment,” Mom says. “Paul, you’ll send them a package?”
“Sure, Mom.”
“I can’t believe Mort’s gone,” Sandra says, and then, unbelievably, starts to cry.
“He was a tough old guy,” Cal says. If I didn’t know this was his crude way of showing respect, I’d throw something at him. And then he’d probably beat the shit out of me.
“He was always very fond of you,” Mom says, taking Sandra’s hand, and I’m thinking, If he was so fond of her, why is this only the third time in my life I’ve seen these people?
“Wendy, where’s the wedding album?”
Wendy pulls out the album, which creaks like a rusty hinge, and Mom and Sandra start playing a game where they identify dead relatives I’ve never heard of: aunts and uncles, a cousin with polio, a family friend who went to jail for armed robbery. “Come here, girls,” Sandra says. The two girls slink over like cats. Phillip watches them a little too closely. Wendy smacks the back of his head.
“What?”
“You know what.”
Mom shows us all pictures of her wedding—the washed-out colors, the men with their mustaches, the cigarettes during dinner, the bad toupees, the black plastic spectacle frames that make every man look like he works for the CIA. “You see how pretty I was,” Mom says to the bored twins. She’s not bragging. She’s just looking at their dewy perfection and realizing that she’s so much older than she ever believed she’d be. In most of the photos, Dad looks worried in his borrowed tuxedo, like there might be all sorts of trouble brewing right outside the frame. But there’s one of the two of them, on the stairs of the catering hall; he’s carrying her in his arms and they’re laughing, at the photographer, at themselves in their ridiculous gown and tux, at the idea that they can do this thing, start a family. A lump forms in my throat and lodges there. You can kind of see who they were back then, innocent and in love; long before kids and a mortgage and rottweilers and cancer and possible (probable) lesbianism.
“He looks so handsome there,” Sandra says.
“I could barely walk the next morning,” Mom says.
The girls giggle loudly and shake like wind chimes. Wendy smacks Phillip’s head again. This time he doesn’t ask why.
12:10 p.m.
PAUL AND HIS friends have stepped outside into the side yard, where Paul’s old batting cage still stands. Boner, who played shortstop in high school, wonders if he can still hit Paul’s fastball. Paul wonders if he can still throw it. Horry, who lettered in football and played hockey in the county league, will don the musty catcher’s gear, and Dan, who played outfield, will call balls and strikes. The other guys will stand around spinning bats like swords and making asinine comments, and Phillip and I will watch to see who makes a fool of himself first. There’s simply no way to calculate the odds.
Paul pulls out his old glove and starts warming up, throwing lightly to Horry, rolling his shoulder around in its socket to loosen up. Even after all this time, his motion is graceful and assured, his body uncoiling precisely from his windup to launch each pitch. Boner tries out a few bats—we have no shortage of gear—and then steps into the netting, digging his flip-flops into the grass, settling down into his stance. He works the bat around for a little bit, and then Dan steps behind Horry, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, and says, “Batter up!”
Paul’s first pitch goes a little wide and Boner holds his swing in check. Dan calls it a ball. The second pitch is low, but Boner swings anyway and misses.
“Strike one! One and one.”
Paul shakes his head, not pleased with the pitch. He rolls his head around on his neck and shrugs his shoulders a few times. Then he settles and stares down the batter. He winds up and unleashes a straight fast-ball that lands in Horry’s glove before Boner’s swing has even crossed the plate.
“Strike two!”
The other guys applaud and cheer. They are all meatheads, their best years behind them. Tracy and Alice join us in the yard, along with Boner’s wife and a few random shiva callers who are happy for the diversion. Paul bangs his mitt against his shoulder and grimaces a little, like it’s tender. His next pitch is a changeup, and Boner manages to catch the edge of it, fouling it up into the net.
“Strike two!”
“Come on,” Boner says. “Now I got you.”
Paul removes his mitt to rub his pitching shoulder for a minute, trying to mask the pain he’s feeling.
“Paul,” Alice says. “It’s enough.”
His ligaments were shredded like cheese, the muscle ripped right off the bone. They did what they could to reassemble the working parts, but the lumpy patchwork mess of surgically spliced tissue beneath his skin cannot support the strain he’s putting on it with these pitches.
“It’s fine. I just need one more pitch.”
“The hell you do,” Boner says.
Alice shakes her head sadly.
That’s the thing about jocks. They’re wired to compete, regardless of angry wives or busted shoulders. They will not back down. If Paul strikes him out, Boner will leave here bruised and bitter. If Boner hits off Paul, Paul will brood about it for days. Whoever wins will gloat and talk some supposedly good-natured trash to rub it in. There can be no draw. Someone’s going down.
Paul steps back onto the rubber mound, shaking his shoulder and rolling his neck. He leans forward onto his front knee and takes a deep, measured breath. Horry pounds his mitt. Boner swings his bat, squares up his stance, and settles down. Everyone is sweating and deadly serious, the fact of the shiva completely forgotten. “If it reaches the point where I think you’re being a fucking idiot,” Phillip says under his breath, “then you’re probably being a fucking idiot.”
Paul winds up and something goes wrong on his release. Three-quarters of the way through, he lets out an anguished cry and prematurely releases the ball, which flies hard and fast and right into Boner’s face. Both men fall to their knees at the same time, Paul clutching hi
s shoulder in pain, Boner’s nose bleeding through his fingers, staining his white batting gloves. Boner’s wife shrieks and runs to his side. Alice stands her ground outside the cage, willing herself to be unmoved, but then caves and runs to Paul, helping him to his feet, asking him whispered questions. It occurs to me that there’s a deep and genuine love between them, and I wonder why I should find that so surprising. Dan and Emily help Boner to his feet, and Horry pulls off his mask and says, “Whose bright idea was this anyway?”
Paul walks gingerly over to Boner to apologize. They say some macho things to each other, bang fists, and slap asses, and in this manner, all is forgiven. Someone procures an ice pack from the freezer to press on Boner’s bruised face. They may be over-the-hill idiot jocks, but you have to admire their code. If only all our conflicts could be resolved with a few grunts and a smack on the ass.
Chapter 36
12:45 p.m.
The parade of weathered flesh continues. Sitting in our shiva chairs, we develop a sad infatuation with the bared legs of our visitors. Some of the men wear pants, and for that we are eternally grateful. But this being late August, we get our fair share of men in shorts, showing off pale, hairless legs with withered calves and thick, raised veins like earthworms trapped beneath their flesh who died burrowing their way out. The more genetically gifted men still show some musculature in the calf and thigh areas, but it is more often than not marred by the surgical scars of multiple knee operations or heart bypasses that appropriated veins from the leg. And there’s a special place in shiva hell reserved for men in sandals, their cracked, hardened toenails, dark with fungus, proudly on display. The women are more of a mixed bag. Some of them have managed to hold it together, but on others, skin hangs loosely off the bone, crinkled like cellophane; ankles disappear beneath mounds of flesh; and spider veins stretch out like bruises just below the skin. There really should be a dress code.
This Is Where I Leave You: A Novel Page 21