Tell Me How This Ends Well

by David Samuel Levinson

  “I hope you don’t mind, but I took the liberty of ordering for you. It’s your usual—a Burnt Fuselage. You still like them, don’t you?”

  “Diet—Dietrich—doesn’t drink, so I haven’t had one in a while.”

  “A German?” Clarence asked, more surprised than his voice belied. “I can’t imagine Pa Jacobson’s too happy about that. But good for you! Revenge is sweetest when served with sauerkraut.”

  “My mom’s dying, Clarence,” Jacob confided, taking in his longtime, long-lost friend, the new shock of gray hair, the same pale green eyes, the sun-damaged skin. He looked exactly like himself and not at all like himself, if that were possible, a more deeply developed Clarence and also, at the same time, a more washed-out version, but even so Jacob could still see the boy he had once known, the boy he would have done and said anything for. He’d had a lifetime to memorialize him, to set him up only to knock him down, wish him ill, wish him well, and to sleep around trying to forget him.

  “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. I always liked Roz.”

  “It’s a nasty, progressive pulmonary disease that’s slowly suffocating her,” Jacob said, though Clarence hadn’t asked and Jacob wasn’t sure why he’d said it, perhaps merely to underscore the severity of it and to make sure Clarence understood. “She’s taking medication to slow it down, but her lungs aren’t responding as readily as the doctors had hoped. I was thinking she’d go the nontraditional route—Chinese holistic medicine, some radical herbal remedies—but I’ve been voted off the island, of course, by Pa Jacobson.” Saying all of this out loud, to someone who wasn’t his brother or sister, merely confirmed what he had already suspected—that he wasn’t quite ready for the pitying glances and sympathetic ears of others, not even Clarence, who dealt with death every day of his life.

  “And so you’d like to discuss options with me? Get my advice on arrangements for her afterlife?”

  “Not at all,” Jacob put in, taking a sip of the drink, which, on an empty stomach, he could practically feel shooting through him. “She only has a few months left, actually. But maybe it could be extended, depending on the quality of her care.” Jacob suspected that he was thinking magically, thinking wishfully.

  “What about the quality of her life?”

  Terrible, eerie questions to hear and to process and for a moment Jacob found himself in the clutches of an awful déjà vu, for hadn’t they been sitting in exactly the same spot, drinking exactly the same drinks when Clarence had posed the exact same questions about Thad, before Clarence talked him into coming out, insisting that Thad’s quality of life would improve greatly after he told his parents his big secret? “I don’t know. She doesn’t really like to talk about any of it. It all comes to me filtered through my brother and sister these days.”

  “And the illustrious Julian Jacobson? How’s he coping with it all? If I know your dad, not very well,” Clarence commented, raising his fingers and flagging down the waiter. “Something told me that this wasn’t going to be a run-of-the-mill, catch-up-with-cocktails kind of reunion. He’s the reason you’re here. Am I warm?” The waiter arrived promptly and set down a bowl of cold sesame noodles. “On second thought, we need this to go. Could you wrap it up, please?”

  “Very warm. Some might even say hot. Hellishly, third-degree-burn hot,” Jacob said. “Oh, my mom says he’s being incredibly wonderful and attentive and all that, and this might even be the case, but you and I both know it’s come a little too late.”

  “Yes, I suppose we do,” he stated. Both of them laid fifty-dollar bills on the table at the same time. Clarence slid Jacob’s back to him. “I’ve got this one. Think of it as a promise kept.”

  “No, I couldn’t.” Jacob slid Clarence’s bill back to him. “It’s my treat. A down payment on my mom’s future.”

  As Clarence pocketed his bill, Jacob got up and went outside. Clarence followed a moment later, carrying the boxed-up sesame noodles. “I am truly sorry to hear about your mom, Jacob. She…when all of that happened with Thad…I’ve never forgotten her kindness. My own mother couldn’t have been bothered. Did I ever tell you how she reacted when I told her? She went out shopping for French antiques and just never came back. My mother. Pillar of the community, head of the Junior League of Kansas City, and heartless cunt behind closed doors. Well, I always said you were the lucky one. I might have had a terrific relationship with my father, but of course it’s my mother I always longed for. Funny how that happens.” Jacob nodded. “You know I was only pretending not to remember you when you called. It was the shock, I guess. Part of me was hoping…well, a part of us always hopes, doesn’t it?” Clarence said.

  “Hope is a four-letter word,” Jacob muttered, heading for his car.

  Pulling out of the lot, he turned once again onto Santa Monica Boulevard, bracing himself against the night ahead by thinking of Diet and what was inside the other suitcase. This time of evening, the traffic was backed up for miles in each direction, the cars lurching to a stop and lunging forward like unsure toddlers on stubby, unsteady legs. It took Jacob half an hour to go a single mile, but then he was finally angling the car through the unadorned entrance of Eternal Hollywood, the ugly strip malls and uglier traffic dropping out of sight behind him. In Brooklyn, he and Diet had taken long afternoon strolls through the famed Green-Wood Cemetery, a vast system of hillside paths and roads that wound their way past ancient marble headstones, statuaries, crypts, and mausoleums, the graves crowded together to mirror, or mock, depending on how one saw it, the living arrangements of New York City itself—neighbor on top of neighbor, crammed into boxes, and lying side by side, a maze of underground tenants complaining unto eternity about the inflated prices of New York real estate.

  From what Jacob had read and seen online, Clarence’s cemetery sat on a hundred flat acres of land, the lawns superbly maintained and emerald green in the early evening sun. In the distance, Jacob made out the massive, white-marbled mausoleum and behind it, rising up in picturesque perfection, the equally white letters of the Hollywood sign. Jacob felt oddly compelled to go on a walk, for hundreds of famous actors, directors, and performers lay buried in Eternal Hollywood, though he figured he ought to wait for Clarence, who pulled up a few minutes later in his ancient sky-blue Scout, which, impossibly, he’d been driving since college. The two headed into the administration building, a beautifully restored Queen Anne with clinging ivy running up the sides.

  They took a back staircase, bypassing a hive of staffers. “Death is the only industry in America that continues to outgrow itself,” Clarence said proudly, leading Jacob to a door at the top of the stairs, which opened onto a vast empty space—a former chapel, at the far end of which sat Clarence’s office. “I meditate in here on most mornings. You should try it with me sometime. Superb way to start the day.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” Jacob replied, examining the room tricked out in Far East Asian decor replete with burning incense, pots of living bamboo, and several different statues of Buddha, ranging from the miniature to the enormous, some in carved wood, others in bronze.

  Four electrified Zen water fountains sat one to a corner, adding to the already soothing calm of the room. Jacob breathed in the jasmine-scented air and had to admit that Clarence might be onto something. “Mind taking off your shoes?” Clarence asked, removing his own, then bowing before one of the statues of Buddha. “I’ve been to Tibet several times in the last few years.” Jacob remembered his attachment to The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which he carried around with him in college, though picturing him in Tibet, chanting with the monks, only made him laugh. “You’re remembering the way I used to be, not the way I am. I don’t hold it against you, though. Western philosophy teaches us that the past informs the present and that we must look at it from every angle if we’re going to achieve spiritual enlightenment. Eastern philosophy tells us that it’s our desire to change the past that leads us to unhappiness. That’s why I meditate—to release the past and all the painful associations I’ve m
ade. My only job while I’m meditating is to let these thoughts and feelings float by and pass away, like clouds.”

  “I saw an accident on the 101 today,” Jacob announced. “Not while I was coming to meet you, but before that, when we were heading to the Valley. A burning car. A young guy trapped in the passenger seat. I can’t get him out of my head.”

  “Come out here with me,” he said, beckoning Jacob through a side door that led to a small, terrazzo-tiled balcony.

  Jacob stepped out onto the balcony and took in the view, the dark shades of green spreading out below him. Though it might have been the final resting place for thousands of souls, to him it was nothing more than the shape of things to come—beautiful and tranquil, yes, yet also distressingly unreal. Clarence had transformed the grounds, rebuilt the mausoleums and crypts, and installed freestanding “memorial kiosks,” which offered visitors virtual biographies of loved ones, all at the touch of a button and a swipe to the right or the left.

  He’d dragged the cemetery into the twenty-first century by offering movie nights in which he projected Hollywood classics and popular cult favorites onto a large screen set up on one of the lawns. He invited famous singers to perform in the Rotunda of Reverences and created Shakespeare in the Tombs—a couple of years ago, Mo had been Macbeth to a packed house in the most-frequented summer event.

  And standing there with him, as if Clarence were king and this his kingdom, Jacob realized that his old friend had remade the business of dying into yet another form of entertainment, a vastly lucrative sideshow. It had not surprised him to learn that the cemetery shared a wall with an empty backlot, a permeable membrane, his dad would have said, in which Clarence offered those on the other side of the wall further immortality on this side, his side, of it: death as spectacle, as the continuance of life. It’s not what Jacob wanted, and it certainly wasn’t what he and his siblings had planned for their dad. Moreover, he didn’t understand the morbid appeal of any of it, the ritualized process of embalming, dressing the dead, the viewing, the wake. Jews were planted in the earth in a cedar or pine box and left to rot. Many Jews did not believe in an afterlife. And if there was one, he hoped by the time they met again his dad would have been through decades of postlife analysis.

  “He was so young,” Jacob continued, picking up the thread of the hellish freeway accident, which of course wasn’t an accident at all but another suicide bombing. All that fire and smoke belching up from the wreckage and the young guy trapped inside it, this guy whom Jacob would never be able to get out of his head. “It reminded me of when I flipped my mom’s station wagon when I was sixteen.” Except I was lucky enough to walk away from it, he wanted to add. I was lucky enough to live another day. He’d been speeding through Hidden Glen, a subdivision in north Dallas, hit a patch of water, and hydroplaned, the car skidding out of control, the back end fishtailing, rolling over and over again, he and the car skittering to a stop and ending up in the middle of someone’s front lawn upside down. “You can only imagine what my dad had to say when he saw what I’d done to ‘his beloved vehicle.’ ”

  “Do you have any good memories of him at all?” Clarence asked.

  “Would you believe me if I told you I don’t?” he replied.

  “That’s a shame, and not only for you,” he said, taking a step closer to Jacob, the air shifting slightly and filling his nose with Clarence’s scent, a mixture of deodorant and gasoline and beyond that the ripe and heady smell of his sweat. “You can’t see it from here, but the crematorium is behind the mausoleum,” he said. “I had it refurbished in 2017, everything state-of-the-art. You’ll have to give me a day’s notice, at least, but I don’t foresee any problems.”

  Jacob reached into his jeans and extracted the euros. “I didn’t have time to exchange them,” he said, handing the wad to Clarence. “It’s around seven thousand dollars, give or take.”

  This was Jacob’s part in the plan—to make contact with Clarence again—and though he’d known this day had been coming, when he’d have to hand over every dime he had in the world, he felt as if he were losing so much more than merely money.

  “Are you sure this is how you want it to go?” Clarence asked, pocketing the cash. Jacob said that it was how he, Jacob, wanted it to go, but that of course he needed to speak to his siblings. “Then you’re going to need to choose an urn.”

  “I was thinking a used bedpan, or maybe a plastic cup like they make you pee in at the doctor’s,” he said, the sun sinking behind the hills and darkening the cemetery.

  Suddenly, a clarion cry rose up from the grounds below, matched by several answering cries that echoed the pitch and sorrow of the first; when Jacob saw the source of the cries at last—a flock of pure white peacocks calling out to one another—he let out a hiccup of wonder. Is it my imagination or are they actually levitating across the grass? he wanted to ask. “They’re exquisite,” he breathed.

  “Every day around sunset, they call out to the dead to let them know it’s time to rise,” Clarence said. “I love those birds. They’re the pride of the cemetery.”

  “And do they? Rise, I mean,” Jacob said, turning to leave, for it was time to make his way back to the Valley.

  “I only bury the dead,” he said. “I tend not to have too much to do with them after that.”

  Yet as they embraced and Jacob asked him for one final request, he got the distinct impression that Clarence was lying, that he might not have communed with the likes of Rudolph Valentino, Tyrone Power, or Bugsy Siegel, all of whom were interred in his cemetery, but that he might at least commune with the spirit of their lost, unfortunate friend, whose death ought not to have happened but had.

  Pulling the car onto the road, Jacob pictured that regrettable evening all over again, finding Thad strung up with one of Clarence’s club ties, and so preoccupied was he by the memory that he was completely unaware of the large white shape hovering directly in front of him until it was too late. He tried to swerve out of the way but to no avail, the tires riding up and over the peacock, crushing it. He braked, rolled down his window, and peered back at the snowy heap, which had exploded like a pimple, the feathers stained with blood and spread out against the asphalt, the once-unblemished body branded with a wide, black stripe from the tread of the tires. It fluttered a shattered wing, the eyes rotating ghoulishly, then it gave one last shudder and went still. Jacob wasn’t sure what to do and sat there, feeling flattened himself, the blood draining from his fingers, which tingled with this horrible thing he’d done, as if he’d wrung the life out of the bird with his own hands. While part of him wanted to put the car into drive and speed away, deny what had happened in the last minute, and cut it out of his memory, the other part of him, the kinder, gentler, better part of him that Diet had fallen in love with, refused to leave things as they were—untidy, bloody, smashed to smithereens. He determined a quick and impulsive course of action: When he was sure no one was watching, he popped the trunk, raced over to the bird, lifted it into his arms—it weighed far more than he could have imagined, as if made of sculpted marble—then laid it down gently in the trunk, shut the lid, and returned to the car, all of this in a matter of seconds.

  He sped back onto Santa Monica, taking a right when he should have gone left, but he didn’t care, because he simply had to drive—yet no amount of distance he put between himself and the cemetery could stifle the shrieking peacocks, which saturated the air around him. He fiddled with the radio, trying to find a new station—maddeningly, KJEW was still playing The Death of Klinghoffer—and inadvertently ran a red light, proving to himself once again that whenever and wherever his family was involved, Jacob was sure to go wrong.

  Moments later, a police car drew up behind him, the officer flashing his headlights, turning on his siren, and getting on his bullhorn to order Jacob to pull over. Overkill, thy name is the LAPD, he thought. (If he and Diet had been back in Berlin, he might have joked that he was DWJ, Driving While Jewish, which Diet would have taken umbrage at, a
lthough the Polizei were infamous profilers, rumored to be able to spot a Jew simply by the shape and protuberance of his nose. “I bet they take classes on the assorted varieties of the proboscis Judaicus,” he liked to say. Understandably, Diet found this in utterly poor taste, though it never stopped him from making his own tasteless Jewish jokes.)

  The officer took a hellishly sweet time approaching, which only ratcheted up Jacob’s panic and fear. He had gone through life with an irrational terror of the police, though this time his terror was not unfounded, for he had been involved in a hit-and-run and had fled the scene, albeit with the body stowed in the trunk. An absurd idea popped into his head that someone, perhaps Clarence himself, had reported him to the cops. Were white peacocks on the list of rare and endangered species?

  The officer demanded Jacob’s license and registration in a voice that was steady and cold, uninflected, devoid of friendliness, and reminded Jacob of the cops who’d pulled him over in college, all the sweating he’d done while the cop wrote him up for speeding, for rolling through a stop sign, for a busted taillight. His mom had paid each fine, which totaled in the thousands of dollars, telling Jacob never to tell his dad, not that he needed reminding, because he knew exactly how his dad would have reacted if he ever found out—with shocking fury—but thanks to his mom he never did. At least that’s what Jacob had thought, until, on Clarence’s advice, he came out to the entire family during winter break of his senior year. And it was as if his dad had just discovered the storehouse of secrets and used them all against him in one fell swoop, a spectacular shit show of righteous indignation and moral superiority.

  “I suppose you knew about this, too, huh, Roz? Is this another one of the secrets you two have been keeping from me?” his dad had asked, roaring at his mom, who shrank away, then glanced at Jacob, her face wounded and bruised as if Jacob had hit her. “So you really are a…faggot?” his dad had grunted, turning to Jacob. “Well, I can’t say I’m surprised. But you sure as hell didn’t get it from me.” He’d made it sound as if it were something to catch, like a cold, and turned to his wife, shaking his head at her, his disgust made manifest in the wretched grimace on his face. “Don’t blame me for making you a queer. You can thank your mother and her weak genes for that.”