Tell Me How This Ends Well

by David Samuel Levinson

  It was from Gibbs, asking Pandora about this evening and if she thought it was such a good idea for him to come. It seemed odd to Moses that he was expressing concern to his wife rather than to Moses himself. After all, Pandora had wanted to keep the evening small and exclusive to the family, whereas Moses understood that having Gibbs around would up the ratings. His appearance at the Jacobson table would surely draw millions of viewers, including industry heads, who, Moses was hoping, might see them interacting and offer them a new show, at least the chance of one. He had hoped Pandora would support him on this, as it was to her benefit as well. She hadn’t, and they’d fought. At the time, some weeks back, Moses had just assumed the fight had to do with Passover. This morning, however, while absently scrolling through a previous and surprisingly lengthy text exchange between Pandora and Gibbs from a couple of days ago, he realized something else—that while he’d been at an audition for a commercial for a new kind of hemorrhoid cream in downtown L.A., Pandora had taken the boys over to Gibbs’s house to go swimming. Gibbs could still afford the exorbitant pool tax. This meant nothing in and of itself, except for one small detail—neither Gibbs nor Pandora nor even the boys had mentioned it to him.

  Kneeling down, Moses set the locked phone on the floor, stood, backed up a few paces, walked toward the bed, then deliberately stepped on the phone. “Oh, crap,” he said in what he hoped was one of his best performances. He bent down and picked the phone back up, then roused Pandora, who was already in the process of waking. “Hey, honey, morning,” he said. She removed the mask and the earplugs and sat up, running a hand through her preternaturally coiffed platinum hair. She went to bed ravishing and woke up ravishing and it was all Moses could do not to climb into bed and fuck her between her delicious 34DDs. “Shoot, honey, I accidentally stepped on your phone. It must have fallen off the bed. You’ll need to get the glass replaced,” and he leaned in to kiss her as she reared back and away from him.

  “You what? What did you just say?” she asked, grabbing for the phone. He handed it to her gently, for he was trying to maintain his composure, to come to her with openness and light, trying to salvage what was left of the rubble of their marriage. Even from where he was, he could see that stepping on the phone had caused the initial crack to fissure even further into a veritable spiderweb. “Dammit, Mo. I don’t have time to deal with this today,” she whined. “I’ll just have to go buy another one after I take the kids to Krav Maga.”

  “Pandora, darling, that’s eleven hundred dollars we don’t have,” he said, feeling as though he were losing his shit, both literally and figuratively, for the anger was rising in his face and his bowels were clanging and bucking like radiators whose valves were stuck on off. He felt himself about to blow and rushed into the bathroom.

  “IBS acting up again?” she asked from the doorway, where she stood with what looked like a giant grin on her face, though he couldn’t be sure in the bathroom’s windowless gloom. “You know what they say—weak bowels, weak will.”

  “Is that what they say?” he said, flushing and rising.

  Though he’d just relieved himself, Moses felt worse, the pulleys of gravity tugging him down even further. He moved as if through quicksand toward the door, while behind him Pandora murmured about the bowels and souls of men, the noxious, sulfurous stink trailing him out into the hall, where he paused to consider the enormity of the situation and his own part in it—his part, and what was slowly dawning on him as Gibbs’s part, as well.

  Moses found the boys seated on the sofa, his dad in the middle telling them the story of Passover. “And then the angel of death came sweeping over the land of Egypt, but she ‘passed over’ the Jewish homes because they were smart and marked the lintels of the doors with the blood of a slaughtered spring lamb,” which, at the sound of blood, made them even more hyperactive than they already were and fall into one another, playing dead.

  “A slotted spring lamp?” asked Baxter, the wiseass of the two.

  “That doesn’t even make sense,” said Bran, rolling his eyes.

  “Why is the angel of death a girl?” asked Dexter, who sat at the far end, next to Brendan, who was deeply involved with his iMuse.

  “Because angels of death are always feminine,” his dad said, “or gay.”

  “Boys, disregard everything Paw-Paw just said,” Pandora said, appearing on the stairs. “Men are the true harbingers of death,” and she held up her phone and glared at Moses, who glared right back. “Julian, both my brothers are gay and contrary to how you feel about your own son, I love them and will not have them bashed in front of me or my children. Is that clear?”

  “Moses, tell your wife she needs to lighten up,” his dad said.

  “Tell her yourself,” Moses said, turning to the boys. “Go and grab your backpacks and head to the car. I don’t want you to be late to Krav Maga again. So…chop-chop.”

  “But I want to stay and hear Paw-Paw tell us about the plagues!” Baxter said, screaming and throwing what Moses knew was to be merely his first tantrum of the day.

  “I’ll tell you all about them when you get home later,” his dad said, reaching out and hugging Baxter, to Moses’s horror and chagrin, for he’d never seen his dad hug any of the kids before, nor could he recall a single memory of his dad ever hugging him.

  Moses was about to call the network to ask what time the technician would be at the house when his phone rang—a prerecorded message from the Lost Hills Sheriff Station asking him to accept a collect call from Jacob Jacobson. “Um, yes,” he said uncertainly, heading into the hall toward the bathroom, for he felt another clench and jangle in his intestines.

  “Mo, you need to come here and bail us out,” Jacob said, his voice barely recognizable for the shame and anguish in it.

  “What the—what are you talking about?” he asked, confounded.

  “Later. I’ll explain it all later,” Jacob said.

  “Jesus H. Christ,” Moses said, the clenching and jangling subsiding. “How much is the bail?” When Jacob told him it was going to be ten thousand dollars—five thousand apiece—Moses laughed, because the only other alternative was to cry. “What in the hell did you do?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Jacob said. “Can you do it? We’ll pay you back.”

  “With what?” he asked. “Your good looks and his—”

  But the line crackled and went dead. Un-fucking-believable, he thought. So now on top of all the other stuff he had to take care of that day, he also had to figure out where he was going to get ten thousand dollars, then drive to the Lost Hills Sheriff Station and bail his incompetent younger brother and his anti-Semite boyfriend out of jail, while also trying to come up with an appropriate time and place to ambush his dad, convince him to pull up stakes and disappear for good. The only thing Moses wanted was to go back to Gibbs’s house, jump into his pool, sink to the bottom, and never come up again—not that he’d ever do anything like that to his sons or give Pandora the satisfaction.

  Speaking of Pandora, he thought, rushing into the garage to find her scolding the boys. Moses tapped on the glass with his wedding band, thinking of the first time he met her fourteen years ago for a date at Jerry’s Famous Deli, in Thousand Oaks. They’d found each other on www.modernyenta.com, a dating site for Jews founded by a meddling grandma cum media mogul. He recalled driving away from the date, which had lasted all of forty-five minutes, and calling his mom and dad in Dallas to tell them he’d just met his future ex-wife, laughing at his own joke, because he’d never imagined Pandora marrying him, much less ever seeing him again. Yet Pandora had surprised him the same night by texting him to invite him to Shabbat dinner at her dad’s apartment in Beverly Hills. Two years later, they were married, she was pregnant with the triplets, and a billboard of them went up on Sunset Boulevard, proclaiming them another perfect union and Modern Yenta an undeniable success. Sadly, after a skinhead posing as a Jew raped and tortured a young woman in Tarzana, the site had to be shuttered and was no more, just as
Moses feared he and Pandora were soon to be no more.

  “What?” Pandora asked, rolling down her window. As Moses explained the situation to her, her eyes went wide and wild, first with shock, then with knowing. “We’ll never recoup a single penny, you know that, right? But do what you’ve got to do, Mo. It’s not like you care what I think anyway.”

  “Pandora, that’s not fair,” he said. “I’m asking you now: What do you think I should do?”

  “If you have to ask me what to do about your brother, I think it says something pretty sad about you, doesn’t it?” And with that, she rolled up the window and reversed out of the garage.

  The game between them was simple, yet it was a game Moses kept finding himself losing because the rules kept changing. Marriage was like this, he understood, a dance that drove everyone crazy at times, yet this dance with Pandora was wearing him out, until what he thought he’d always wanted—a reconciliation, a new beginning—made about as much sense as finding Gibbs’s texts on her phone. Or too much sense, for he was starting to realize that perhaps Pandora was cheating on him with his best friend. Impossible, thought Moses. Even Pandora had better scruples than that, at least the Pandora he used to know. Yet this was a new Pandora, less likely to laugh with him, less likely to stand up for him, less likely to sit with him, drink wine coolers, and watch the sunset from the roof of the house. He missed her. He missed the people they’d been, the people who’d promised each other they’d never turn into their parents—she a child of divorce, he a child of untold emotional abuse. He had kept his promise, while she had banged around the house like a poltergeist, threatening and shrieking and lodging complaints, as if he were the innkeeper and she an unhappy, dissatisfied guest. He wondered if Pandora knew how good she actually had it, if anyone ever did.

  As he passed the wall of glass on his way to find Edith, Moses glanced at the backyard again, and again was unsettled by some detail about it. Yet he had no time to figure out what it was, for he was already in the kitchen, telling his sister about Jacob and the German.

  “Keep the parental units busy and don’t tell them,” he said. “It’ll kill Mom.”

  “Unless you-know-who beats me to it,” she said. “That was a joke, Mo. Jeez, lighten up,” and she grabbed hold of his arm and smooched him on the cheek. “Are you sure you don’t want me to come with you?”

  “Negative,” he said. “Just keep your phone on you and text me when the tech guy arrives.”

  “Roger that,” she said, holding up one of the soggy, wilted pancakes. “Did you have one of these? Like sawdust,” she added as she ripped it in half. “And, Mo, don’t you be mean to Dietrich. Jacob loves him. And, well, he’s as good as family now, if you know what I mean.”

  Moses thought this over in the car, speeding down Mulholland Drive. He thought about this when he came to a flashing police cruiser blocking the entrance to the 101, the cop directing traffic onto the frontage road, which meant there’d been another major accident or another suicide bombing, both of which filled him with anger and pathos. He thought about this while he inched along like a little worm behind all the other little worms, then thought about this some more when he finally arrived at the sheriff’s station some 7.2 miles and two hours later. He thought about this as he paid their bail and thought about this while he waited for them to walk through the security doors. He thought about this as he studied the list of the FBI’s Most Wanted, tacked up on a corkboard near the door, trying his best to avert his eyes from one face in particular—a young woman who was wanted in connection with the maiming and subsequent death by arson of several residents at a Jewish assisted-living facility in Encino. He thought about this while he composed a text to Pandora in which he asked her if the man she’d been having an “emotional affair” with since their separation—he knew there was someone, though she’d refused to give Moses a name—was Gibbs and thought about this some more as he deleted the text, then composed a new one to Gibbs, asking him the same thing, which he then also deleted. He was distraught. He was floundering. He was unable to think about anything else but the idea of Gibbs and his wife together. But then that other thought crept back in, the thought his sister had planted in his brain, about the German being as good as family now—and Moses was still looking at his phone, at the frantic message he’d just received from Edith, who texted him that their mom had taken a tumble, when Jacob and Dietrich pushed through the security doors at last. He was replying to Edith—Is she all right? WTF happened?—when he glanced up at Jacob and Dietrich making their way toward him, but something about them wasn’t right. What wasn’t right was so wrong, so utterly, horribly, disgustingly wrong, that it was nearly indescribable, nearly but not quite, for there was Jacob in the schmatte with the yellow Star of David embroidered into the pocket and there was Dietrich in the SS uniform, shiny black leather boots and all. Just like that, Moses didn’t want to know anything about any of it.

  The drive back to the beach to get Jacob’s rental car took a supremely long time. To drown out the suffocating silence, Moses put on the radio, while Jacob sat beside him, gazing out the window, just as he used to do when they were kids, and Dietrich tried his best to make conversation with Moses, who refused to engage him. “You’re being rude,” Jacob said at one point and Moses just grimaced, turning the volume up.

  One bad song passed into another, then the disc jockeys broke in for a news and traffic update, alerting any and all drivers that many miles of the 101, which included several exits in Agoura Hills, were closed to traffic in both directions until further notice due to terrorist activity. This time, three cars had exploded simultaneously, two on the northbound side, one on the southbound, and while no one except the drivers had been killed, the shrapnel from the exploding cars was scattered for miles all across the Ventura Freeway. “No one has claimed responsibility for the incident yet, but Daesh released another video late last night denouncing the abhorrent portrayal of Muslims on TV and in the movies and accusing corrupt Jewish politicians and businessmen of colluding with ‘the evil Jews of Hollywood who own all of Los Angeles,’ ” one of the disc jockeys reported.

  “Welcome to L.A.,” Moses said, shutting off the radio and glancing into the rearview mirror at Dietrich in his preposterous outfit.

  “They gave Israel back, and still it’s not enough for them?” Jacob asked. “What the fuck do they want?”

  “They didn’t give Israel back,” Moses said. “It was stolen.”

  “I think what Jacob means is—”

  “I know what Jacob means,” Moses said. “And to answer your question—they want what they’ve always wanted: to drive us into the sea. Apparently any old sea will do, even the Pacific.”

  “I have read that those attacks happen there in America much more often than anywhere else currently,” Dietrich said. “It is bad for the Jews everywhere, but there it is even worse, I think.”

  “Yes, Dietrich, but you mean here it is even worse,” Moses said. “Thanks for overstating the obvious.”

  “Shut up, Mo,” Jacob said. “He was only trying to make conversation.”

  “This is okay, Schatz,” Dietrich said. “But, Moses, I want to say directly to you now: You can hold a grudge against me for what my country did a long time ago and you are completely within your rights to despise me, but I will not sit there and let you come between Jacob and me. Do not make him choose you or me. It is unfair.”

  “That was a pretty little speech,” Moses said, “but let me tell you what’s unfair—what’s unfair is that I just had to shell out ten thousand dollars to bail your stupid, sorry asses out of jail and now, to add insult to injury, I have to sit here with you dressed in a fucking Nazi uniform. Does that even remotely register at all with you? And as for you, Jacob, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. You better hope Ma’s still at the doc-in-the-box when we get home because if she sees you in that, it will kill her. And I can only imagine what the old man’s going to say. Maybe, just maybe, it’ll kill him and all of
our problems will be solved. We can only pray. Shall we pray?”

  “What do you mean ‘still at the doc-in-the-box’?” Jacob asked with alarm.

  “She fell. It doesn’t sound serious, but who knows because Thistle won’t return my texts.”

  “Have you tried calling her?” Jacob asked.

  “Have you seen me call her? You walked out in that getup right when I got the news.”

  Some thirty utterly silent minutes later, they arrived at the beach, where Jacob and Dietrich hopped out without a word and Moses watched them go, still so disgusted that he wasn’t sure he’d ever be able to look his brother in the eye again. It was one thing for Jacob to practice his perverted sexual rituals in the privacy of his own home, yet it was another thing altogether to make someone else a witness to it. The idea that his brother found excitement in demeaning himself and that Dietrich found equal if not more excitement in demeaning him only helped further clarify something that had been on his mind for quite some time—that in some way, their dad was responsible, that in some way Jacob had discovered the perfect partner in Dietrich. Still, he had to admit he’d never seen his brother this happy.

  Moses drove quickly and beat Jacob and Dietrich back to the house, arriving just as his watch let out twelve cuckoos, tolling noon. Somewhere between the police station and here, it had begun keeping time and tracking his heartbeat again, both of which reappeared on the small black screen, though the color of the digital heart had changed—instead of a fiery, incandescent red, it was fainter and softer, as if he’d left his heart out in the rain one too many times. Which would have worried him if he let it, but he had no time to worry about such things, for he had realized a monumental thing about himself—that after this was all over, after the TV special, after confronting his dad, after making sure his dad was never seen or heard from again, after he either reconciled with Pandora or they went their separate ways, he would have no reason to worry again, for all of his reasons for worrying were caught up in these relationships. He could start acting more like the man he used to be. For as long as he could remember, Moses had been the guiding force within the Jacobson family, the ever do-gooding brother and son. He’d tried and tried and tried to get his dad’s attention and approval, yet the more he tried to secure it, the more elusive it was. He’d known that his dad had no respect for him or for his career, his objections showing up in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, movies Moses starred in that went unseen and unremarked upon. He’d spent many hours of his day thinking about how his dad saw him, because, although he might not have respected Moses’s choices, Moses understood that out of all of his siblings, he was his dad’s favorite, which was often made clear in how he bad-mouthed Jacob and Edith to him behind their backs—Jacob a ne’er-do-well, lazy queer, Edith a cobwebbed-womb spinster.