Tell Me How This Ends Well

by David Samuel Levinson

  “Yes, he did, but that’s not the point, is it,” Jacob said, lying back on the bed and giving Diet full access to his jeans, which Diet proceeded to unbutton, then tug off as gently as he had the shoes and socks. “Anyone can say anything, but it’s all in the tone and delivery. My dad has always had a peculiar way of communicating. Everything’s a veiled threat, and I mean everything. Everything’s tinged with guilt and obligation—and the trouble is, there’s just not an ounce of love behind any of it. The meaning isn’t in his message per se. The meaning is in the way I receive and interpret it.” Jacob felt as if he were bumbling the intention of his explanation, making it more about the way he and Diet interfaced rather than a critical analysis of his dad. “I suppose I should feel sorry for him, but he makes even that impossible.”

  “Quiet now,” Diet said, sliding up beside Jacob. “No more talk of meaning or of fathers.”

  He repositioned himself and dragged the blanket up and over his face, and after a moment his breathing deepened and his body relaxed, giving over to sleep. Jacob shut his eyes and tried not to think about his dad or about the rest of his family, whom he was going to have to face eventually. He tried not to think about his mom or the guilt he felt about having moved across an ocean—mainly to get away from all of them, the depressive, awful Jacobson clan, who had made growing up a nightmare of such extravagant proportions that he was sure that even if he did happen to write one play a year, he’d never be able to capture it all, to put it all down as it had happened, because no one would believe any of it.

  There was just too much heartache and sorrow and bad blood to account for, all of it leading back to his dad. His dad who was mowing the yard, the sound of which traveled up the walls of the house and through the windows to find Jacob lying wide awake, unable to let himself go under, although he’d been up for twenty-four hours straight. His attempts to reposition himself on the bed, which was lumpy and offered little in the way of back support—leave it to Mo to buy the cheapest, least comfortable sofa bed imaginable—were met with further and further frustration, until he sat up, absolutely stymied by his own inability to sleep.

  He climbed silently out of bed and went to the window, peering out to catch his dad standing in the middle of the front yard, staring up at the sky. He’d removed his shirt, which now dangled from his back pocket, and the sight of his hairy back with all of its moles and slippage of skin both saddened and disgusted Jacob. Oh, how he wanted to reverse time, to unwind it so that he’d never agreed to this trip. Yet here they were, here he was, and that said more about Jacob than it did about any of his siblings or his mom and dad, who had not been expecting him to show up, because for years now Jacob had been unreachable, too busy “being on vacation and writing in coffee shops,” according to his dad, to make anything but the minimally acceptable amount of time for any of them.

  Mainly because, Jacob reflected, putting his jeans back on, then his socks and shoes and padding to the door, he had never quite understood why, when he did relent and visit Dallas every couple of years, neither one of his parents seemed all that interested in him once he’d arrived. It was as if chasing him down produced far more excitement in them than his actually being there, for once he was in their house, he might as well have been a piece of furniture they’d ordered and had delivered—they moved him around the rooms but mostly just ignored him, his dad toiling out in the yard and his mom lying in bed with her tablet, scrolling through the news. And he always wanted to ask them, together and separately, what exactly they got out of these short, hurried, “required” visits.

  He’d come to suspect that it was merely to affirm their roles as parents, to be able to brag to their friends about their youngest, the budding Broadway playwright, and oh, what a lovely time they had had with him, which might not have been far off the mark for them but was wildly off the mark for him, for every second he spent with them was pure, unadulterated torture—from his having to behave in a certain way around his dad for fear of reprisal to pretending that when his mom leaned in to kiss him good night he didn’t feel the slightest spasm of fear. Yes, he loved her, but she herself would have been the first to say that she hadn’t always been the best parent, while in the same breath continuing to maintain that no one was perfect and that she and Julian had only done their best with the tools they’d been given.

  So what was going to happen once she was gone?

  How could he possibly be in that house without her to come between him and his dad?

  He glanced back at Diet, wondering again if he’d be able to see what Jacob saw, what his siblings had finally come to see on their own, although it had taken them a ghastly thirty years to come to the same conclusion Jacob had made when he was just a few years old—that they all would have been better off without Julian Jacobson.

  Downstairs, all was quiet and subdued. A sleeping Mo was sprawled out on the white leather modular sofa, the script lying open on his flat stomach, his thick, muscular legs crossed at the ankles—there he was, his semifamous older brother, this out-of-work actor, frustrated inventor, and author of the self-help book Buff Bods, in which Mo outlined for out-of-shape dads and their out-of-shape kids everywhere his six-point plan for getting and staying trim and in shape.

  “You and you alone are the architect of your children’s well-being,” he wrote. “Overweight kids become overweight adults and overweight adults become a heavy liability—pun intended—on our country’s health-care system.”

  Jacob only remembered the line because he’d edited the manuscript before Mo had sent it off to agents. He’d added the “pun intended.”

  The twins were not in the house but playing somewhere outside, their voices carrying softly like the volume on a TV turned way down. Jacob went into the kitchen and grabbed the phone, then looked for and finally found a way into the backyard through the pneumatic door set into the wall of glass. The door breathed closed behind him as a slobbering, shaggy canine beset him, shoving its nose directly into his crotch.

  “And you must be the new rescue, Nieves,” Jacob said, rubbing the Scottish terrier’s filthy white snout.

  The dog glanced up at him with milky blue eyes and snorted hello, then pushed her head into the ground and yelped, clearly wanting to play. Jacob wound up his arm and threw a pretend ball into the air. The dog gave chase, skittering around the lip of the pool and losing her footing. For a moment, Jacob thought he’d sent the dog to her waterless death, but she righted herself and continued her high-speed pursuit of the “ball” to the far reaches of the yard, tumbling against the fence in a happy outburst of barks. While she sniffed and rooted around in the grass, Jacob made his call to Clarence Lee Chalmers, who eventually picked up on the fourth ring, his voice gravelly and phlegmatic.

  “Hello, Jacob,” Clarence said before Jacob could speak. But how did he know? “The wonders of modern technology. You’re in the Valley at your brother Moses’s, I assume, because you’re calling from an 818 number and his name popped up on my caller ID. Mystery solved. Now, what can I do you for? Funeral arrangements? You aren’t with the UCLA alumni association, are you? Because I swear those people can just suck it. I must get a call from them every week asking me to donate to—”

  “Um, you told me to call you about getting drinks. So I’m calling you about getting drinks,” Jacob said, flummoxed. Had Clarence forgotten his call from the apocalyptic gas station pay phone only a few hours previously?

  “How demented of me,” the other said. “I must have been astral-projecting again because I haven’t touched a drop of alcohol in ages, not since I woke up one morning on the beach in Santa Monica stark naked with peanut butter in my hair.”

  Nieves retrieved the invisible ball and dropped it at Jacob’s feet, then barked her piercing bark until he pretend-picked it up and pretend-tossed it into the air again.

  “Anyway, if you believe anything I just said, you’re still the same innocent you’ve always been, which is a remarkable coup,” Clarence continued, and th
e hyena in him emerged and cackled wildly. “Why don’t you meet me at Japón? Five o’clock sound about right?”

  “Clarence, I have an important issue to discuss with you.”

  “As do I, doll. As do I,” he said, serious all of a sudden, which gave Jacob pause. “Oh, Jay, it’s going to be just like old times, except we’re a decade and a half older and I’m a decade and a half richer. Now I have to go. The business of death waits for no man,” and with that, he clicked off.

  Somehow, Jacob found himself at the very edge of the pool without any recollection of how he’d gotten there. Clearly, though, he’d picked up his feet and put them down again, these feet that did not seem to belong to him, just as none of this—the house, the afternoon, the certain death of his mom—seemed to belong to him. As he stood there, his eyes blurry and burning, he braced himself for the inevitable approach of his dad, who came around the bend a moment later, utterly unaware of Jacob, who felt the same age-old tingling in his bones, the voice in his head that cautioned, Run. Take cover.

  Long ago and far away, in a distant galaxy known as Jacob’s childhood, he had kept a journal, many journals, that spanned more than a decade. From the time he started writing, at age five, to the last second of his tenure in his dad’s house, at age seventeen, he’d recounted in them every mean and nasty word and deed that anyone had ever said or done to him. He’d hid the one he was working on in a secret slot in one of his pillows, a carved-out recess he’d made with a paring knife. When he was finished filling one journal, he’d add it to the collection of others, which he’d stored in a garbage bag under the toolshed in the backyard.

  Sometimes, as luck would have it, there would be a day that he did not have to record a single episode and thus got to leave a page blank, though usually each day held more than one entry, sometimes several. When he read back over the journals later, after his parents had sold the dingy, cramped ranch house that Jacob and his siblings had grown up in and built their new dream home, a spacious, bright, seven-room, cookie-cutter monstrosity in a gated community, he made a startling discovery—the blank pages corresponded directly to his dad’s being out of town, when he was either down at the coast on a fishing expedition or at some medical conference. This revelation ought not to have surprised him, yet it did, and he shared it, however reluctantly, with his siblings, who were aghast at first at the very notion of the journals, which he dubbed My Manifest of Meanness, then even more aghast at what Jacob was insinuating.

  “Wait, are you saying what I think you’re saying?” Mo had asked Jacob, who had joined his siblings at Canter’s Deli on North Fairfax after taking the last final exam of his college career.

  “He’s saying Daddy was a monster,” Edith said, taking a bite of her blueberry-filled blintz and smiling wildly, incongruously, as if she couldn’t get a good blintz anywhere in D.C., which was where she was in grad school at the time and only in L.A. for a quick breather of a weekend. “He’s saying that, episodically, Daddy accounts for most of the entries.”

  “No, I’m…Is that…? Yes, I guess that’s what I’m saying,” Jacob said, attacked and on the defensive. “Are you guys going to sit there and tell me that you can’t see it?”

  “Oh, pray tell, supreme and worldly undergraduate brother of ours,” Edith said condescendingly, “what exactly are we supposed to see?”

  “That he’s a sociopath. That he took great delight in being mean to me,” Jacob said, which made his siblings smirk. “That he hit you in the head with a baseball, Mo, and that he never had his precious fig tree removed, Edith, although you were deathly allergic to it. Can’t you see what all this means?”

  “The baseball was an accident,” Mo said.

  “I ate the figs all on my own. No one forced them down my throat,” she said. “You can’t blame Daddy for what happened.”

  “Jesus, you really just don’t get it, do you?” Jacob said, finally laying his cards on the table: “He wanted us gone, so that he could have Mom to himself again, because then it was checkmate. Because then he could take control of her entirely.”

  “Gone, as in…dead?” Mo asked, chortling again and dribbling his coffee all over himself.

  “Jacob, I love that you have such a vivid imagination,” Edith said, “but I think I speak for Mo as well when I say that while you present a compelling theory of Daddy’s past—or is it his present?—indiscretions, need I remind you that a few scattered, empty holes in those…journals are hardly sufficient evidence to accuse him of what you’re accusing him of? I mean, for fuck’s sake, Jacob, you’re talking about our dad. You need to let it go. It’s not healthy to hold on to this negativity.”

  “Fine, just fine,” Jacob said, getting up in a huff and stomping away.

  Jacob, who loved his siblings, didn’t speak to either of them again for well over a year and even then it was with some reluctance and trepidation that he took Mo’s call. By then he was living in a tiny studio apartment in New York City and working at the legendary Chelsea Gym, which was more of a bathhouse than a real gym, although he didn’t tell Mo this. He was twenty-two years old, a fresh, pretty face in a predominantly gay neighborhood, and while neither the job of being towel boy nor the hours he had to work was ideal, the men who came and went from the gym made it all worthwhile. Some of them were close to his dad’s age and showered the most compliments on him. Though the men who dished them out made him fiercely uncomfortable to the point of feeling nauseated, Jacob took the compliments and ran with them anyway, for he had never in his life had so much positive attention heaped on him. Having grown up with a dad who never said I love you, never flattered or offered anything even remotely like a compliment, Jacob was unused to hearing how handsome, bright, and funny he was.

  “I know it’s too late to say I’m sorry, but, well, I’m sorry,” Mo said. Then he told Jacob how he’d just suffered from what was apparently his first panic attack. “At least that’s what the doctors called it. I thought I was going to die, Jay. That’s how bad it felt. Came out of the fucking blue, too. Uncontrollable sweating, racing heart. Woke me up in the middle of the night.”

  “Mom used to get them,” Jacob said. “Bet you didn’t know that.”

  “You mean they’re, like, inherited?” he asked, dubious.

  “Everything’s inherited,” Jacob said. “It’s in our blood, unfortunately.”

  “You ever have them?” he asked.

  Did Jacob tell his brother that his anxiety manifested in a completely different way, that to combat it he found himself having random sex with strangers in the steam room of the gym, even once or twice on the roof deck after closing? Of course, back then he didn’t think about anxiety at all or link it to his wanton sexual appetite. Back then, he just thought of himself as a randy budding writer who was racking up experiences the way others racked up debt.

  “I mean I couldn’t get out of bed for two days, Jay. I had to skip an important audition because I couldn’t even leave my apartment.”

  “So you called to apologize and tell me you had a debilitating panic attack. While I sympathize, Mo, I can’t say I’m surprised,” Jacob told him without sympathy.

  “Sometimes you sound just like him, you know that?” Mo snapped.

  “And sometimes you should listen to me because I’m right, I’ve always been right about him. It’s not my fault you and Thistle never saw what I did. What I still do. You mark my words: One day, we’re going to be burying Ma because of him.”

  And look, here we are, Jacob thought, hating that he’d clocked it all those years ago during that fateful phone call with Mo. He turned to go back into the house before his dad spotted him, but it was too late; he let the mower die and joined Jacob at the pool. His face glistened with sweat, and he had grass shavings stuck both in his abundant albino-white chest hair and in the tousled crown of thick near-white hair of which he was quite proud; he’d only lost a small amount on top. The tonsure gave him the appearance of a monk, though he was about as holy as a desecrated, de
filed temple, Jacob thought.

  “The prodigal son doth returneth,” his dad said, the moniker he inevitably threw around whenever he saw Jacob. (Technically, this wasn’t Jacob’s home, so he couldn’t have been a prodigal, but he let it go. What good would it do to correct a man who was always right?) Swiping at his sweaty face with the back of his hand, he shook it off, some of the drops splattering Jacob. “Glad you could join us.” This seemingly harmless welcome dripped with his usual acid. “Pandora and your mother are back from shopping at the Commons. I should go check on her and make sure she didn’t do too much damage on my credit card. Be useful and finish up the yard.”

  “Yeah, sure, whatever,” Jacob said, feeling unsafe and taking a step back, not out of fear of standing too close to the edge but of being just too close to the old man himself, who turned and strode away.

  As if she sensed the passing of danger or just a rotten smell, Nieves returned, tearing graceless circles around Jacob, yapping and snarling in good fun, her ears standing at attention one moment, only to droop the next. You hear things I never will, thought Jacob, just as I’ll hear things this weekend you can’t, and he kneeled in the grass and stroked the dog’s belly, picturing the turbulent days ahead and wondering which of them—if any—would make it out alive.

  Jacob had wondered the same thing during that ghastly vacation to Disneyland when he was a boy, what proved to be the last Jacobson road trip, when his parents had climbed back into the car after a pit stop at Point Dume, his dad saying that once they got back to Dallas he was moving out.

  “Your mom and I are getting a divorce,” he had said. While Edith and Mo had reacted with surprise and shock, the normal response to such an announcement, Jacob had gone rigid and sat as still as he could, for he had been afraid of moving even a single eyelash and breaking the spell that he himself thought he’d cast. Hadn’t he been wishing for this forever, for at least as long as he could remember, having only just turned seven? Hadn’t he prayed each day for a miracle to take his dad away? Not his death per se, just to remove him from their lives and, oh, what lives they would live now that he was going, now that his mom had finally awoken to what Jacob had always known—that the man in the front seat could not have cared less about any of them. But then, when they had gotten home and his dad had packed his bags, he had just never left. Their mother could, in fact, withstand another straw and another without breaking, not because his dad had promised he’d change and stop being as mean, but because his mother had a heart and she loved the man and that was that—she recanted and he stayed. And in recanting, in overturning the decree of divorce, she had betrayed them all, although the saddest thing of all, thought Jacob, was that she had only ended up betraying herself.