“Thank you, George,” he said, imitating Lazenby’s accent, which he’d perfected over the years and brought out on occasion to amuse the twins, who screamed with delight, or during auditions in which he was called to play “a man of a certain age.” It once amazed him that he’d be able to play men of a certain age one day, and now that he could play men of a certain age, he didn’t want to and found the whole idea discouraging. He was happy that being a man of forty-two in Hollywood was nothing like, say, being a woman of forty-two, or even of thirty-two, but parts for a strong male lead under forty, which he continued to try out for, were becoming scarcer and scarcer, especially for men who refused to have work done, who preferred the dignity of a timely decline. Moses’s smile was still his own and he was proud of that. No scalpel or knives or needles have gone into the making of you, he thought, glancing at himself in the rearview mirror, before stepping out of the car and heading across the street to 11217 Dilling—otherwise known as the Brady Bunch house.
Sometimes, instead of going to the gym, Moses came here just to eat his doughnuts and drink his coffee and watch the sunrise, recalling that fretful, disastrous trip he’d taken with his mom to L.A. when he was just a boy. Two days in a dingy, crappy hotel room in Hollywood, which sat right around the corner from Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, as it was still called back then. Two days during which he’d met with several agents and managers, all of whom liked him and none of whom wanted him, the Jewish boy from Dallas, with his operatic singing voice and ability to recite from memory a monologue from his favorite Neil Simon play, Brighton Beach Memoirs. Two days of traipsing across L.A., his mom as enthusiastic as he was about the next agent and the next, until there were no more agents to see and she told him she had a surprise for him and the next thing he knew they were at the drive-thru of In-N-Out Burger on Sunset Boulevard.
“This is my surprise?” he’d asked, confused and deflated, although he did have to admit that his love for a plain old hamburger—the bun and the meat, that is—knew no bounds. He could eat them for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, eat them standing on his head, eat enough of them to turn into one himself, his mom liked to joke.
“Partly,” she’d said. “I’ve heard they make the best hamburgers, even better than at McDonald’s. I’ll get you whatever you want, within reason.”
Yet what he wanted she couldn’t buy for him, not there, not at a stupid burger joint sitting next to his mom, who was trying to make him feel less lousy but only managing to make him feel lousier. These were their last moments in L.A. before they had to get on a plane back to Texas, back to the one place he dreaded more than any other—that ugly, awful cramped house on Persuasion Drive. Everything about it was just wrong, from the cracked foundation to the leaky roof; because his dad never saw the leak firsthand, it actually didn’t exist. The leak didn’t affect Julian directly, because it was in Moses’s room and Moses was a paranoid, schizophrenic, obsessive-compulsive liar, according to his dad, who liked to accuse him of such both behind his back and to his face, and so he naturally had to be lying about the rain that soaked his bed and led to his dad also accusing him of wetting himself in his sleep, which Julian said was far more likely. His mom, too, hated the house and sometimes on Sunday mornings, while his dad was at Maw-Maw’s for breakfast, she’d take Mo and his siblings on a drive through better neighborhoods, looking at houses with big, open, airy floor plans, lots of windows, a skylight in every room, like the houses in Bent Tree and Preston Hollow and Highland Park, like his best friend Gary Goldstein’s house.
Moses had tried to order a bunch of different things, but in the end his mom had said his eyes were bigger than his stomach and only ordered him a cheeseburger, French fries, and a large chocolate milkshake, which she said she would share with him. His mom was big into sharing, and whenever they all went out to dinner, which was rare, she asked if anyone wanted to split a bite with her. For a long time, Moses had assumed they didn’t have enough money for her to order her own meal, but really it was because she liked to watch her figure. Which made him laugh, because his mom was thin and gorgeous, though it also made him sad because he knew her unwillingness to order her own dinner had to do with his dad, who often made nasty cracks about how they were going to need an extra booth one of these days to accommodate her wide load. “Honey, don’t be mean to me,” she’d say, but that was all, saying it without force or resolve, so that it simply dissolved into nothing, a whisper.
No, what Moses hankered for was twofold—to move to Hollywood and act in bigger commercials (he’d starred in local commercials already), TV, and movies, and to make enough money to buy his mom the house of her dreams, a huge, sprawling, ten-room house on twenty acres of land or even an apartment in Manhattan; sometimes late at night he heard her in Jacob’s room, sobbing about how much she missed New York City and how much she hated Dallas. Moses could have taken or left Dallas, where his dad had been born and his dad before him and so on down the line, all true-blooded Texans, Moses the sixth generation.
After they got the bag of food, his mom told him to close his eyes and keep them closed. He told her that was silly and stupid but did it anyway, opening them once by accident, because doing it proved much harder than expected, so then she covered his eyes for him with her free hand, which couldn’t have been comfortable for her, but oh, well, it’s what she wanted, so he went with it. Ten minutes later, his mom let her hand go and when he opened his eyes, he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to be looking at: They were on an ordinary street that looked a lot like the street on which they lived back home. But then she was pointing and saying, “Look,” and he followed her finger and that’s when he saw the house.
“Whoa!” he exclaimed, already reaching for his Kodak disposable camera. “Cool!”
And it was cool, especially to the twelve-year-old Moses, who forgot all about the food in his lap. He climbed out of the car and stood at the curb, snapping one picture after another, thinking about Peter, Greg, and Bobby, about Cindy, Marcia, and Jan, those TV kids he saw almost every day in reruns and with whom he’d grown up, laughed, cried. Oh, he wasn’t so stupid or naive as to think the house wasn’t merely a set, or the show more than a sitcom; he knew none of it was real. He still marveled at the potential of it all, the love, make-believe or not, that lived within those rooms, so unlike the rooms of his dad’s house, where love, if it existed, happened sporadically and only if certain conditions were met, like good grades, like following orders, like being seen and not heard. “Do you like your surprise, Mosey?” his mom asked, climbing out with the food and sitting on the hood of the car, where he joined her a moment later.
“Very much!” He did, and he loved her all the more for it. “I have a great idea. When I make enough money, I’m going to buy it and we’ll all move in,” though of course by “all” he meant Edith, Jacob, his mom, and himself. His dad, as far as he cared, could go live in a fishing village in Mexico, for that’s how he liked to spend his time anyway, away from them, fishing, whenever he could.
They ate their meal and talked, as the afternoon turned to evening, until it was time to head back to the hotel to pack. On the plane, Moses imagined what might have happened if just one of the agents had said yes, how different his life—their lives—would have been. There was no way he wouldn’t have shared his riches with his sister and mom and baby brother, because Moses, the firstborn, felt an extraordinary obligation to keep them safe and at the same time an even greater obligation to himself to see his dreams fulfilled, whatever it took.
His watch cuckooed for 5:00 A.M., a sound that drove Pandora insane and that made the boys fall over with laughter. He loved it when they laughed, for it chased away any doubts he had that they hated and resented him as he did his own dad. And what a terrible thing it had been to admit, yet admit it he had, first to Pandora—his beautiful, savvy wife, who knew a thing or two about difficult people from her mom and her granddad, a real estate developer who’d made his fortune in the San Fernando Valley and
was the brains behind Edelweiss Estates, the first gated community built to attract the kind of resident who could both afford and want to live in a Swiss chalet–style villa—then to his siblings last month. They’d been discussing their mom’s quality of life—Edith in Atlanta, Jacob in Berlin, Moses here in L.A.—and he’d mentioned in passing just how great it would be if their dad weren’t around. “What are you suggesting?” Edith had said during that first call. Mo hadn’t been sure that he’d been suggesting anything, not then, but during a more recent call, when Jacob told them he and Diet had indeed decided to spend Passover in L.A., Mo had again brought up how great it would be if their dad weren’t around, this time adding, “If she only has four months, shouldn’t we make them the most amazing four months of her life?”
“What are you suggesting?” Edith had asked again, to which Jacob had replied, “Oh, for fuck’s sake, Thistle. Ethical cap off, unethical cap on. He’s suggesting that we kill him, as in off with his head.”
“As in off with his head,” Moses had repeated. “As in, ‘Shot through the heart, and you’re to blame, darling.’ As in ‘Will it be poison put in my glass?’ ”
From the hood on which he reclined, his ankles crossed, Moses made out the approach of a car, the headlights cutting thick triangular wedges through the solidified dark. In the distance, a dog barked once, and the air held the pleasant aroma of coffee and doughnuts and beyond that the faint fragrance of citrus and exhaust. For a moment, he turned his eyes from the street to the sky, where three or four helicopters hovered somewhere above him. These days, he couldn’t look up without seeing them, these whirlybirds, as his kids called them, that kept watch on and over them all, a police presence even up there in the L.A. skies. They were everywhere, at all times of the day and night, huge mechanical peace-keeping insects and the crews who flew them—the mayor trying to reassure her Jewish population, which numbered in the millions, the vast majority of them Israeli refugees, that they were being adequately protected. It was nice to know they had at least one ally, Moses thought, as the car crept past him, then parked, the night going completely still and black again. Then the ding of a door opening and the sound of footsteps on gravel, then another door, then another, which made him sit up and turn around and that’s when he saw not two but three shadows moving toward him and that’s when he said, “Fuck,” under his breath, though his voice carried in the sudden silence, the helicopters having departed for more interesting and dangerous skies.
The three planted themselves before him, Edith between Jacob and Dietrich, each of whom had an arm wrapped around her waist to keep her from falling. “Your hip still hurts, huh?” Moses asked. He thought she said yes, though it was hard to tell because Dietrich was speaking in his horrible language to Jacob. “What was that, Herr Krause?”
“Mo, just knock it off,” Edith snapped. “None of us wants to be here, wherever this is, so just get to the point.”
“Please don’t make me the enemy, Thistle,” Moses said, climbing down. He reached into the car for the Krispy Kreme box, the cups and napkins, all of which he set on the hood. “I thought it was just going to be the three of us. No offense, but why’d you bring him?”
“I’ve been teaching him how to drive,” Jacob explained. “And after we’re finished here, we’re going down to the beach to watch the sunrise. Then we’re going to fuck in one of the coves. That’s why he came along, Mo.” For whatever reason, this made Moses laugh, both with and at his little brother. “What’s so funny about that?” Jacob asked.
“Nothing. Everything,” Moses said, taking a doughnut and pouring himself a cup of coffee. “I’m assuming that his being here means you opened your big mouth and told him about our little plan.”
“Not even close,” Jacob said, also taking a doughnut and pouring a cup of coffee, which he handed to Dietrich before going back for his own and for Edith, who reluctantly took a seat on the hood.
“Jacob did tell me about that plan of yours,” Dietrich said, “but he did not mean to tell me.”
“What’d you do? Torture it out of him?” Moses shot at Dietrich. “Or did you use some kind of German mind game?”
“Mo, what the fuck is your problem?” Jacob glared at him. “Leave the guy alone already.”
“No, this is okay, Schatz,” Dietrich said. “Your brother is clearly uncomfortable with me being here.”
“Or anywhere,” Moses said. “Look, it’s nothing personal, but I have to agree with our dad on this—and I try very hard never to agree with our dad on anything—and just say that I find it utterly baffling that out of all the guys in the world you could have ended up with, Jacob, you chose him. I guess I’m just trying to make sense of what you find so irresistible about him that you couldn’t find in someone else, say, who wasn’t German.” As soon as he’d finished speaking, a light went on in the house across the street, drawing his attention away. “Do you know why I wanted you to meet me here, besides the obvious reason of discussing how to do away with you-know-who?”
“Mo, he knows who you-know-who is,” Jacob said. Moses hated when Jacob spoke down to him. It was a quality that came from the Jacobson side of the family that Moses luckily hadn’t inherited, and he found it extremely off-putting. Usually he just dismissed it, yet this morning, the superiority in Jacob’s voice infuriated him and made him want to pinch his head right off his neck. “And not to overstate the ludicrous, but we still don’t know where ‘here’ is,” Jacob continued. “Maybe you’d like to fill us in.”
Moses reached out, grabbed his brother’s chin, and turned it forty-five degrees to the right, until they were all staring at the house.
“No fucking way,” Jacob said, “4222 Clinton Way! How the hell did you do it?”
“Magic,” Moses said, “and Mom.”
“That house belongs to someone famous?” Dietrich asked. “Why did you just say ‘4222 Clinton Way’? I thought this was Dilling Street?”
“Edith, be a peach and pull up Wikipedia, please,” Jacob said. Edith brought Wikipedia up on her iPhone. “Now type in ‘the Brady Bunch house’ and hand the phone to Dietrich.”
“Yes, I know that show,” Dietrich said, “but I never watched it. My parents did not allow it. They believed TV was the curse of the modern world and that what came out of Hollywood was evil.”
“Not evil. Just tacky, hilarious, quintessential America,” Jacob said. “The three of us grew up on the reruns,” and without having to say another word, the siblings took a few steps closer to one another and to the iconic house, where they stood in awed silence, each knowing the details of it inside and out.
About as well as we knew our own childhood home, Moses thought. And he recalled both with fondness and resentment how often he’d rearranged the living room and dining room furniture to match the layout of the Brady floor plan, knowing the hell he’d get for it later when his dad returned home from work. But it was all worth it, for there was nothing like leaving one world for that other one, however briefly, nothing like banishing himself from the dark-paneled prison of his dad’s house to emerge reconfigured in the brightly lit, Technicolor rooms of Mr. and Mrs. Brady. He craved those rooms and the love that existed among them, especially after he grew up and discovered that some families interacted, if not exactly as they did in the Brady house, then as close to it as he could find. The Goldstein family did, of course, and he spent as much time as possible with them when he was a boy, loving Gary’s parents and his sister, the laughter that rose from the dinner table, the kind words they spoke to and about one another—the exact opposite experience of dinner with Roz and Julian Jacobson. Oh, his mom tried, yet she was often told she was being too chatty and to shut up. And he’d sit there across from his dad, fuming, not only for his mom, who he wished would pick up her steak knife and stab it through his dad’s windpipe, but also for his brother and sister, who didn’t know what Moses knew—that life inside the four walls of the Jacobson house was fraught and terrifying, though it did not have to be,
that life was full of all kinds of people who behaved nothing like their mean, viperous, and unpredictable dad. Because what was the point of being a family if four out of five members of it wanted you dead?
“So how should we do it?” Jacob asked matter-of-factly. “It doesn’t make that much difference to me as long as he suffers. An old-fashioned stoning works, though. What about you guys? I mean, it’s very wrath of God and sort of in keeping with the Passover theme.”
“If we were keeping with the Passover theme, then we’d drop him off in the middle of the desert without food or water,” Moses said. “He wouldn’t last forty hours, much less forty days in that heat.”
“But given his luck, it’d start raining and manna would start falling from the sky,” Jacob quipped.
“You’re both sick. You know that?” Edith said. “How can you discuss this here out in the open before God and the ghosts of the Brady family? It’s indecent,” and she pushed off the hood to take a seat inside the car.
Moses glanced at Jacob, who shrugged and turned to follow Edith. Behind him, he heard Jacob tell Dietrich to go and practice his driving. “Remember: The small pedal is the gas and the big pedal is the brake. And quit using both feet, Diet. Just your right one. Also, try to keep both hands on the wheel at twenty-two and fourteen hundred o’clock, like I taught you. Now come here and smooch me,” and the two kissed deeply, which sickened Moses, not the kissing of another man, but the kissing of this man, who had such an unfortunate provenance and history.
“Maybe Dietrich should join us,” Moses said once he’d grabbed the doughnuts and coffee and settled in the front seat. “I mean, it is in his blood to murder innocent Jews and all.”
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