The Return of Service

by Baumbach, Jonathan;

  No one stops me as I press through the mob to the door, all eyes elsewhere, attention riveted.

  One of my former colleagues, the dealer in the card game, is confessing his part in the heist or rather a self-serving version of it. Our eyes meet and he points an accusing finger at me, “There’s one of them,” he calls.

  I look behind me, gawk with the crowd at whoever it is at the moment going out the door. In a rush of activity, some benighted figure is dragged inside by the police and carried up to the podium where the television interview is being conducted,

  “Do you know each other?” the interviewer asks the two men. “That’s my long lost brother,” says my former partner in crime. “Louis,” says the other, “is it really you?” The two men embrace before the cameras, slap each other’s backs. “What a coincidence that we should meet in the middle of all this confusion.”

  “What have you been doing with yourself?”

  “The same old grind, export-import, Wall Street and the Potomac, Seoul and Sardinia. And you?”

  “A little of this, a little of that. I’ve been pretty much my own boss since Mother passed away. When you work for someone else your heart’s never really in it.”

  The interviewer interrupts, separating the microphone from the brothers, summing up the situation for the crowd. “Ladies and gentlemen, these two men have met here today after not having seen each other in the span of a decade. We are all witness to a privileged moment.”

  Applause. Some laughter. A handful of cheers.

  The woman who rode in the elevator with me takes my arm as if she had some claim on it. “We’re on next,” she whispers. “Straighten your hair before you go on.”

  “I don’t have a comb.”

  “Take mine.” She hands me a jewel-studded comb, which looks too valuable to use on one’s hair.

  Three policemen remove the brothers from the stage, cracking each a blow on the back of his head with a nightstick before leading them into a wagon parked outside the back door. The crowd separates to let them through. There are no protests.

  “A moment ago they were celebrities,” I say to my companion.

  “Now they’re police fodder. There’s no future in going on stage.”

  “I’d like to do it anyway,” she says. “How many shots at fame do you have?”

  She pulls me over to the podium and announces that we’re ready to go on. The announcer seems skeptical.

  “What’s your story?” he asks off microphone. “It’s got to be fresh or I can’t use you.”

  “I met this man in a closet,” she says, clasping my arm as I try to slip away. “In the beginning it didn’t seem as if we’d ever get together. Eventually, as you can see, we fell hopelessly in love.”

  “It’s been done,” says the announcer, “It’s been done to a turn.”

  “That’s not the whole story,” she says, desperately improvising.

  “This man you see here with me and I were childhood sweethearts who hadn’t seen each other in lo these eighteen years.”

  “There’s a credibility gap there, madam. You look old enough—don’t take offense—to be this man’s mother.”

  “Well!”

  “That’s unacceptable on national television. Please step down so I can talk to someone that might fire the public imagination.”

  “What if I told you that this man and I planned the heist together. It was the only way we could meet without my husband getting wise.”

  “Now you’re talking, big lady. Step closer to the microphone and I’ll introduce you to our national audience…Ladies and gentles, we have an unusual couple with us today. The man who plotted the penthouse heist and the lady he did it for.”

  “He didn’t do it for me; he did it to me,” she says, leaning toward the microphone, “This man had an irresistible longing for my jewels.”

  I can see that trouble awaits me here but for the moment all escape routes are blocked.

  “There’s something heroic about a crime of passion,” the announce intones. “Don’t you think so? Something movingly pathetic. A man risking his very freedom for the married woman he adores. What did you guys do with the old man? Did you waste him in a trail of blood? Put poison in his soup?”

  “We just forgot about him,” the lady says.

  The announcer claps his hands with pleasure. “One of your cases of benign neglect, am I right? If the mistreated husband is in the audience, would you please, sir, come to the microphone and give us your story.”

  I force my way to the microphone. “None of what this woman says has a grain of truth.”

  “Step right up, sir. Are you the neglected husband?”

  I can see that whatever I say this public whore will distort for his own uses, so I say nothing, merely clear my throat of the debris of irritation.

  “Is it possible,” he says with characteristic melodrama, “that you’re both the neglected husband and the enterprising and unscrupulous lover? Ladies and genitals, the plot thickens.”

  I am given the microphone and asked to tell my story, am about to put together a sentence when the woman I am with clamps a hand over my mouth.

  “This man has taken a vow of silence,” she announces. “I think it would be in bad taste to press him further. I’ll answer any questions you have concerning him.”

  The television cameras dolly over to another part of the lobby.

  The interviewer turns his back on my companion, looks around for something more to his taste.

  “This man holds the key to the heist,” she shouts after him.

  “You’re missing out on the biggest story of the decade.”

  “What did you mean by a vow of silence?” I ask her.

  She shakes her head at me and stomps off in the direction of the television cameras. “If we’ve blown it, I’ll never forgive myself,” she mutters.

  Last seen she is doing a seductive dance for the eye of one of the TV cameras, fixing her hair, shouting that she has been misunderstood.

  I decide—the confusion presents me with the opportunity—to return to the penthouse and finish what I had started. To avoid crowds, I go around the back and take the service elevator. An odd coincidence: two of my former partners appear in the same elevator. “We saw you on television,” they say with undisguised jealousy.

  “Where the hell do you think you’re going?” I ask.

  Gabbo says, “We’re returning to the scene of the crime, which is traditional. Is it the same with you?”

  I push another floor number but the elevator refuses to acknowledge my request, slides past my stop as if better informed of my intention than I am myself. We are caged in this pen together for the duration of the ride.

  I try to forgive them their betrayal of me but it is easier to say than feel. We reminisce about our last elevator ride together.

  “God, were we scared,” says Pinky. “I was afraid I would mess my pants I was so scared. I didn’t think we’d ever pull it off, did you?”

  I tell them how it was with me. “While we were riding in the elevator I couldn’t remember a single detail of the plan. The only image that came to mind was that when we got to the top the police would be waiting for us with handcuffs. What a humiliation that would have been.”

  “I was thinking about what I would do with the money,” recalls Pinky. “I thought I’d get the kid a pair of shoes and the rest of us would take a vacation.”

  “I was going to open a swank boutique,” says Gabbo. “Quit the 9 to 5 job and go into business for myself.”

  “What did you do with the money?” I ask.

  “Inflation ate it up,” says Pinky. “Debts and taxes got the rest. I don’t believe I spent a nickel of that loot on my own comforts.”

  “Still, we brought it off,” says Gabbo. “The success of the idea was the important thing.”

  I recall riding up in the elevator at the speed of eighty feet per second, the recollection as vivid as if it were being lived at the moment, fragments
of machine gun under, the coats of three of my colleagues. I recall trying to remember who had the various parts. There were six of us in the elevator, seven including the operator, an old man with a European accent who listened to English-speaking programs on the radio to improve his pronunciation.

  Pinky, Gabbo, and I got off at the penultimate floor, the other three electing to go all the way. There was nothing for us to do on the thirty-ninth floor, nothing serious or important. We disguised our disappointment.

  “It was our modesty,” says Gabbo, “that made us get off first.

  Why us and not the other three? When we finally got to the top, all the excitement was over.”

  The other three were playing cards when we finally arrived, a witless game of their own invention, our circumstantial hosts imprisoned in one of the closets.

  It was a relief to find that everything had been taken care of, but at the same time it meant that we were only of peripheral consequence in the affair. One wants to be of some use.

  The card playing seemed a reality-denying tactic. It was as if, having gotten this far successfully, they had willfully forgotten the point of it all. This is a heist, I had to remind them. I took charge since someone had to, got them up and moving, ordered them to collect whatever was of value. Our anonymous tipster had told us that the apartment was filled with priceless jewels.

  Gabbo’s version is different from mine. In Gabbo’s version, he is the central figure, the well-meaning if tragically limited hero. “As soon as I stepped into that upper-middle-class jungle, I knew it was a mistake. Why should we want what they had? It was only material wealth, nothing enduring or nourishing. Their lives were more impoverished than my own. I was prepared to go to the closet and release them. Then I thought it would not be a real favor, would only return them to the same empty life. It struck me that stripping them of their most valued possessions would force them into a new life. Was that presumptuous, do you think? At the same time, I didn’t want what they had, wanted none of it. I resolved to go along for the sake of my companions and for no other reason.”

  Pinky has no separate vision of the event. “I’ll do anything,” he says, “if it seems like fun.”

  Why was I in it? I am not like Pinky or Gabbo or the other three, men with limited respect for the integrity of others. I wanted to do something surprising for once, something no one would expect me to do. And the money was attractive. I won’t deny that I wanted the money, was in it for the quick killing. My share, if all went according to plan, was to be upwards of two years’ salary. And the people we were heisting were themselves reputed to be ethically suspect, fingers in the till here and there, eyes looking the other way. Perhaps I’m inventing reasons as a way of explaining to myself behavior that has no rational explanation. Frankly, I don’t understand my involvement in the heist. It was fitting that I ended up in the closet with our circumstantial hosts.

  We have five more floors to travel. “Tell you the truth, I’m more nervous this time,” says Pinky.

  “I want to see if it’s the way I remember it,” says Gabbo. “I expect to be disappointed.”

  It may be, I think, that it hasn’t happened yet. It may be that we imagined the heist the first time, a way of deflecting pressure, and when we enter the penthouse, as we will, our engagement in the actual caper begins. It is possible of course, no less possible perhaps than the notion that we are returning to the scene of the crime.

  It’s only the imagination that ever returns to the scene of a crime, erasing one’s guilt by canceling it out.

  The elevator will arrive at the penthouse floor in a matter of seconds. It will not open right away, but will wheeze to a stop before the sliding doors release us, the machine not without its own mechanical remorse.

  The penthouse will not be as we remember it, will not be the same in, a single significant detail. There will be no card players on the rug this time.

  There will be a family this time around the dining table, a mother, father, grandmother, and three sons, eating what looks like a Sunday dinner. The father is slicing the roast beef with an electric carving knife when we come in from the elevator.

  “This is a heist,” Gabbo will say. “If everyone behaves himself, no one will get punished. I hope I’ve made myself understood.”

  “Where are the bloody jewels?” Pinky will ask.

  I will construct the machine gun from its parts, set it up so that everyone at that table is in its sights.

  The family will go about their business, eating and drinking, laughing about this and that, untouched by the impact of our presence.

  Their blind unconcern, which I don’t believe for a moment, which I refuse to believe, puts the whole daring enterprise into perspective.

  The Return of Service

  I am in a tennis match against my father. He is also the umpire and comes to my side of the court to advise me of the rules. “You have only one serve,” he says. “My advice is not to miss.” I thank him—we have always been a polite family—and wait for his return to the opposing side. Waiting for him to take his place in the sun, I grow to resent the limitation imposed on my game. (Why should he have two serves, twice as many chances, more margin for error?) I bounce the ball, waiting for him—he takes his sweet time, always has—and plan to strike my first service deep to his forehand. And what if I miss, what if ambition overreaches skill? The ordinary decencies of a second chance have been denied me.

  “Play is in,” says the umpire.

  The irreversibility of error gives me pause. It may be the height of folly to attempt the corner of his service box—my shoulder a bit stiff from the delay—and risk losing the point without a contest. The moral imperative in a challenge match is to keep the ball in play. If I aim the service for the optical center of his box, margin for error will move it right or left, shallow or deep, some small or remarkable distance from its failed intention. Easily enough done. Yet there is a crowd watching and an unimaginative, riskless service will lower their regard for me. My opponent’s contempt, as the night the day, would follow.

  I can feel the restiveness of the crowd. The umpire holds his pocket watch to his ear. “Play is in,” he says again. “Play is in, but alas it is not in.”

  It is my father, the umpire, a man with a longstanding commitment to paradox.

  Paradox will take a man only so far. How can my father be in the judge’s chair and on the other side of the net at the same time? One of the men resembling my father is an imposter. Imposture is an old game with him. No matter the role he takes, he has the trick of showing the same face.

  I rush my first serve and fault, a victim of disorientation, the ball landing two, perhaps three, inches deep. I plan to take a second serve as a form of protest—a near miss rates a second chance in my view—and ready myself for the toss.

  The umpire blows his whistle. “Over and done,” he says. “Next point.”

  This one seems much too laconic to be my father, a man who tends to carry his case beyond a listener’s capacity to suffer his words. (Sometimes it is hard to recognize people outside the context in which you generally experience them.) I indicate confusion, a failed sense of direction, showing my irony to the few sophisticates in the audience, disguising it from the rest.

  My latest intuition is that neither man is my father, but that both, either by circumstance or design, are stand-ins for him, conventional surrogates.

  I protest to the umpire the injustice of being allowed only a single service.

  “I’m sorry life isn’t fair,” he says.

  I can tell he isn’t sorry, or if he is, it is no great burden of sorrow.

  The toss is a measure low and somewhat behind me. Concentrated to a fine degree, I slice the ball into the backhand corner of my father’s box. The old man, coming out of his characteristic crouch, slides gracefully to his left and though the ball is by him, he somehow manages to get it back. A short lob, which I put away, smashing the overhead at an acute angle, leaving no possibility
of accidental return.

  A gratifying shot. I replay it in the imagination. The ball in the air, a lovely arc. The player, myself, stepping back to let it bounce, then, racket back, waiting for the ball to rise again, uncharacteristically patient, feeling it lift off the ground, swelling, rising, feeling myself rise with the ball. My racket, that extension of myself, meets the ball at its penultimate height as if they had arranged in advance to meet at that moment and place, the racket delivering the message, the ball the message itself. I am the agent of their coming together, the orchestrator of their perfect conjunction.

  I didn’t want to leave that point to play another, hated to go on to what, at its best, would be something less. I offered to play the point again. There was some conversation about my request, a huddle of heads at the umpire’s chair. The crowd, in traditional confusion, applauded.

  The decision was to go on. My father advised, and I appreciated his belated concern, against living in the past.

  What a strange man! I wondered if he thought the same about me, and if he did—strange men hold strange opinions—was there basis in fact for his view of my strangeness?

  We were positioned to play the third point of the first game.

  It was getting dark and I expected that time would be called after this exchange or after the next. If I won the first of what I had reason to believe would be the last two points, I was assured of at least a draw. Not losing had always been my main objective. Winning was merely a more affirmative statement of the same principle. I took refuge in strategy, thought to tame the old man at his own game. (I kept forgetting that it wasn’t really him, only somebody curiously like him.)

  I took a practice toss, which drew a reprimand from the umpire’s chair. I said I was sorry, mumbled my excuses. It’s not something, the toss of a ball, you have any hope of undoing when done. “This is for real,” I said.

  My credibility was not what it had been. I could feel the murmurs of disbelief whistling through the stands, an ill wind.