Tell Me How This Ends Well

by David Samuel Levinson

  Moses left Chandler the tech guy on the stepladder, installing the first of the four webcams, then headed for the door to the garage and went out to see if the dirt bike he’d run over could be salvaged. He’d reminded the boys time and again not to leave their bikes in the driveway, but they kept doing it anyway. At the height of their marital trouble a couple of months ago, when Pandora finally said she’d had enough and accused him of not caring about their marriage anymore, he’d turned to her and accused her of sabotage. “You tell them to do it, don’t you?” he asked. “You tell them to drop their bikes wherever they want.”

  “Oh, please,” she said, “give me a little credit. If I wanted to antagonize you through them, I’d be a lot craftier than that. And besides, I’d never put our boys in that position. I’d never use them the way you do.”

  “I have never used our boys to get back at you,” he said, thinking about his dad and how, when he and his mom were fighting, he often showed up at home with presents for each of them. Not that the presents ever reflected the slightest expenditure of thought or spirit on his part, for they were as generic and impersonal as if they’d come from a distant relative and not someone who lived among them, not someone who knew them—for Jacob another new chemistry set, though he never played with the old one; for Edith another new Nancy Drew mystery, though she’d already read the entire series, twice; for Moses another new model airplane kit, though he still had the one he’d gotten for Chanukah in his closet, untouched and unopened. Oh, Moses always thanked him and pretended he was happy, knowing that if he hesitated even slightly in ripping through the plastic, his dad would turn, not on Moses, but on his mom, screaming at her and blaming her for the way Moses had turned out. So they all feigned gratitude, although they hated what he gave them, and they all feigned love, because they knew better than to withhold it. And in this way Moses grew up learning three important facts—that his dad would always get it wrong, that his mom would spend her entire life trying to make it right, and that it didn’t matter anyway, because kids loved whom they loved. Moses saw through his dad and swore that when he had kids of his own, he’d never play such a sad, pathetic game with them, and he hadn’t, whatever Pandora might think.

  Moses had never wanted to re-create his parents’ marriage and had thought, when he’d met Pandora—this tattooed, free-spirited, buoyant, and affectionate woman—that he’d been spared this particular hardship. They were a combination that worked, until they stopped working, and if he didn’t get out of his own way, Pandora would leave him and take his kids with her. Thinking about her still managed to excite him and raise his pulse—the digital heart was racing—and he tugged at his shorts to hide his erection, which vanished the moment he heard his dad on the other side of the garage doors. He went over and pressed an ear against one of them, but whatever his dad was saying was too muffled to make out. He laughed at himself, the curiosity and paranoia still alive and well inside him. How many times had he stood outside their bedroom door, listening to his parents whispering about him or Jacob or Edith—about his poor performance at school, about Edith’s rigidity and moral self-righteousness, about Jacob’s constant snooping through their drawers? “You gave birth to a bunch of liars, dimwits, and thieves,” his dad used to say to his wife.

  “I’m sure they’ll all outgrow it,” his mom replied.

  “Schlemiels, the lot of them,” his dad had said, and that was enough for Moses, who went to shoot hoops until it got dark and he was called in for dinner, during which he sat in stony silence, imagining what it would be like to remove his dad’s larynx with his spoon, to carve out his eyes with his fork, to cut out his tongue with his butter knife.

  Moses worked on the bike for about half an hour before he got too warm and had to put up the doors to let in some fresh air. As the doors went up, he saw his dad hosing down the minivan. He wandered out of the garage into the day, which was like every other, like the last three hundred, full of nothing but sunshine and heat, as if they were living in a kind of upside-down Noah’s flood in which God was trying to desiccate rather than drown all that he’d created. He was baffled by his dad’s utter frivolity with the water, especially because Moses had reminded him only yesterday about the exorbitant fines and taxes after he’d taken a ten-minute shower that was going to cost them well over fifty dollars. Water was not to be used for anything cosmetic, not for watering the lawn or washing a car. “Hey, ever hear of something called a drought?” Moses tried for levity, though fearing the angry tone in his voice had given him away.

  “You ever hear of spousal privilege?” his dad sniped and kept hosing the minivan down.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” he said.

  “It means, genius, that your wife said it was okay.”

  “Pandora told you it was okay? Look, I don’t mean to be an asshole, but I doubt very seriously that my wife said this was okay. Water costs a fortune, Dad.”

  “Then why’s the pool full?”

  “Those little monsters,” Moses said, following the hose around the corner of the house. Across the gully and halfway between his backyard and the Rothmans’, he found his green hose connected to an orange one and followed the trail of this hose across his neighbors’ patchy, brown yard and there it was, the spigot out of which the water was flowing. Someone, most likely one of the trips, had married the Rothmans’ orange hose with his green one and was siphoning water from the Rothmans, God only knew how many gallons’ worth or the cost, though as he turned off the water and heard his dad yelling, he estimated that it was probably in the thousands of dollars and this didn’t include the steep fines Moses was going to have to pay, should the Rothmans ever find out, or the jail time, if it came down to that.

  Moses quickly detached his own hose, then hurried with it back across the gully and reconnected it to his spigot. Then he went into the backyard and there it was, that thing he couldn’t quite place that morning: water, lapping daintily against the sides of the pool, sloshing over onto the stones, wetting and darkening them, the sun touching the water and making it gleam like liquid lapis lazuli. For a moment, he looked around for the peacock, then remembered that he’d stashed it. With everything else going on, the peacock was the last of his worries and could wait, he reasoned, until tomorrow, after whatever was going to happen happened. The wind came along and blew a few white feathers into the air, where they twirled briefly before dropping into the otherwise pristine water. Someone had also switched on the saline pump and the Polaris, which was patrolling the bottom. The pool hadn’t been filled since before the show got canceled, before the city banned swimming pools outright and water became a luxury item, as expensive and as precious as oil. And before he knew what he was doing he jumped into the ice-cold water, sinking to the bottom, and while he was down there he had a chance to think: He thought about the last time he’d fucked his wife, some eight weeks ago, and the last time they sat out under the stars holding hands, and about the day they brought the trips home from the hospital and then later the twins, and how happy he had been because here was his family, and they were all going to live forever and no one was ever going to die and no one was ever going to grow old because this was California, where everyone aged in reverse, including his wife. She’d begun her injections shortly after the trips turned five, the collagen in her lips and the Botox in her forehead and around her mouth, and then the breast implants, after the twins turned two, until she was virtually unrecognizable as the woman he’d married. No less beautiful, just enhanced, more of who she was, not less, ravishing Pandora, who didn’t want for anything—a dream house in Calabasas, a dream marriage to a well-known actor, a dream life of leisure in which all that was required of her was that she never age. He imagined, as he bobbed along the glimmering surface, that he’d created her, this Pandora, out of the parts of himself that he felt needed the most improving, a projection of his own worst fears about aging and dying, about his mom.

  On his back, Moses floated from one end of the pool to
the other, gazing up at the swarm of helicopters hovering in the clear blue sky. Perhaps they were on their way to the site of the wreckage on the 101, where several jihadists had given their lives. Yes, the world was a new, shiny, and terrifying place, made up of the same foes as always, but they were closer now, tucked in among the good people of Edelweiss Estates. He hadn’t wanted to move into this house, not even when Pandora presented it as a golden opportunity to start afresh. They did need the extra room, yet he had learned from his dad not to be beholden to anyone, not even his eccentric father-in-law, whom he liked despite his womanizing ways.

  The world spun around him as Moses plunged through the water, weightless, somersaulting and doing handstands and ten years old again. Then he swam laps, feeling his muscles stretch and tighten, the exertion a miracle, the water a baptismal font in which he was reborn—not as Moses Jacobson, son of Rosalyn and Julian Jacobson, but as Moses come to lead his people out of Egypt. Go down, Moses, he thought, imagining the world free of those people who kept getting in his way and holding him back, the parts he didn’t land because he was “too old,” “not old enough,” “too muscular,” “not muscular enough” (and certainly because he was “too Jewish” rather than “not Jewish enough”). Had it really come to this? Here, in America, where Jews had been living peaceably for almost two hundred and fifty years? It was terrifying to confront, and he pushed the thought away as he pushed himself up and out of the pool. He grabbed a towel from the cabana to dry himself off. Then he covered the pool with the solar-paneled tarp, which would heat the water nicely, although what he really wanted to do was to drain the pool just to teach the boys a lesson.

  It was closing in on 2:30 P.M., but he thought he’d pay a visit to the Rothmans, to check on Milton and maybe mention the purloined water. He was halfway down the sidewalk when he recalled his mom’s request for him to take his dad fishing. Though the last thing he needed was to spend time he didn’t have entertaining a man he didn’t like, a plan, still rudimentary, bloomed in the back of his mind, guaranteeing, he hoped, that if his dad wouldn’t leave voluntarily, that these next few hours would be the old man’s last on Earth. The idea both cheered and fortified him.

  He approached his dad, who was wiping down the inside of the minivan with a skin-colored chamois. His dad took meticulous care of all of his cars, washing them and detailing them by hand, running the sponge over the paint with the loving, soothing attention of a masseur. “Hey, Pop, think you might want to do a little fishing later with me? I was thinking we’d go into Malibu and fish off the pier. There’s a bait stand and all.”

  “Do I look like a low-rent Mexican to you, boy? Because that’s who fishes off piers where I come from,” he scoffed, exactly the response Moses had expected to lay the groundwork for the next phase of his plan. Introduce the idea of fishing. Check. Then later offer up an alternative that was more in keeping with his father’s sense of self-importance. “By the way, you’re lucky I’d already finished rinsing down my vehicle, or else you and I’d have a serious problem.”

  “You know about the water situation here,” Moses reiterated. “Besides, I didn’t come out here to argue with you.”

  “No one’s arguing. I’m just saying,” his dad said. “Now, let me get back to work. I’m not driving home tomorrow with all this dust hanging around. It aggravates your mom’s condition.”

  “Then I guess you’re also not interested in fishing with Gibbs later, either,” he blurted out without thinking. He hadn’t checked with Gibbs to see if this was even a possibility. But from the look on his dad’s face, he’d found a way in, hitting the sweet spot he’d been hoping for. Now he just had to reel the old man in. “He invited us out on his boat this evening. He says the flounder are running. What do you think?”

  “Well, why in hell didn’t you lead with that? Now that’s what I call a plan,” his dad said, brightening. “Fishing with the Gibbs.”

  “And all of your children,” Moses said. “He invited Edith and Jacob, too.”

  “Just so long as they keep their mouths shut and don’t scare the fish, I’m game,” he said. “I haven’t been night fishing in years. Probably the last time was with you out on Canyon Lake. Remember that? The Evinrude conked out on us and we had to row to shore.”

  “Yeah, good times,” Moses said, although it hadn’t been a good time, because no time with his dad was a good time. “Well, I’ll leave you to it,” he said, turning to go. He’d only taken a couple of steps when his dad snapped him on the back of the neck with the moist chamois. Moses paused, his heart galloping. He shut his eyes and clenched his teeth. “Why did you do that?” he asked, an angry, red welt already forming.

  “Do what?” his dad said innocently, the chamois dangling in his fingers. He was smirking that awful smirk of his, the lower half of his jaw thrust out, which Moses wanted to slam shut, and by slam shut he meant slam his dad’s face into the dashboard.

  “You got me,” he said. “Very funny,” and he turned once more, but before he could take another step, his dad snapped him again, stinging him on the back of his right arm.

  This time Moses didn’t stop or say a word. He just kept walking toward the garage, even as his dad called out, laughing, “Damn them mosquitoes! They sure sting. Just another reason not to live in California!”

  In the garage, Moses grabbed the hammer, which was hanging on a hook on the wall above his worktable, and stood there, peering under hooded eyes at his dad, the welts on his neck and arm red and painful, though not nearly as red and painful as his dad’s head was going to be after he bashed it in. He held the hammer in one hand and tapped the clawed end of it on the palm of the other. His dad never looked at him, never glanced up from the dashboard, but Moses knew that he must have seen him and the hammer. There were so many ways to hurt him without inflicting an ounce of physical pain—like putting a big dent in the minivan or smashing the headlights. But he knew his dad would call the police, he’d done it before—not to him but to Jacob, who’d once borrowed the car and stayed out past curfew, and when he came home the cops were waiting for him. His dad spun a tale about how Jacob had taken the car without permission—“He stole my vehicle!”—and how he wanted him arrested to teach him a lesson.

  He remembered the night of Jacob’s accident, when he flipped the car, and how hysterical his mom was when they got the call, although Jacob was okay. Moses went with his dad to the site of the accident, not because he wanted to, but because he was afraid of what his dad was going to do and say to Jacob, who had just turned sixteen and had only been driving for a week. That didn’t matter to the old man, who, the second he saw the extent of the damage—the car was totaled; it was a miracle Jacob walked away unscathed—announced to all of the bystanders who had gathered, “Look at what that moron did to my vehicle!”

  He screamed at Jacob, who was sitting on the curb, sobbing. No display of compassion, or love, or even gratitude that his younger son was still alive, just contempt piled on top of more contempt.

  Moses tapped the hammer in his palm, thinking about all the hurt his dad had inflicted on them, and he yearned to smash the smirk off his face forever, until he was pulp, chum for the fish in the deep blue sea. But they had a plan and he was going to stick to it, and the plan, he thought, is coalescing nicely. That thing about fishing with Gibbs tonight was a stroke of genius, he had to admit, returning the hammer to the wall, then going inside to grab his car keys. He poked his head into the guest room and asked his mom if she wanted to come with him to pick up her grandsons from Krav Maga.

  “No, thank you, dear,” she said. “I’m still recovering, but I should be fine for tonight.”

  “You didn’t see the boys tampering with the hose, did you? I think one of them, or all of them, filled the pool.”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” she said. “I thought you weren’t allowed to use water for that.”

  “We’re not,” he confirmed, omitting where the water had come from. Then he told her abou
t taking his dad floundering later, with Gibbs.

  “Oh, he’ll enjoy that so much,” she exclaimed. “It’ll be nice to see Gary again. It’s a shame about his divorce. No one stays married anymore. Except your father and me.” She glanced down at her wedding ring, then back up at Moses, who thought he imagined tears in her eyes. “You and your brother and sister still think I should have divorced him, don’t you?”

  “Why didn’t you?” he asked hesitantly, for they’d never discussed it, and he worried she might suspect something, bringing it up now.

  “I think I wanted to prove everyone wrong,” she said, turning her oxygen up a notch, which meant her discomfort with this conversation was increasing her heart rate. “Of course, that’s a lousy reason for staying married. I also wanted you kids to grow up with a father. Better a dad like yours than none at all. That was my reasoning, like it or lump it.”

  “I see,” he said.

  “Do you? Do you see that I only had all of my children’s best interests at heart?” she asked, her eyes now definitely moist.

  “I do, Ma, yes. I don’t blame you,” he said. Not like Jacob does, he thought. “I’m going to get the boys now. I’ll see you later,” and with that, he shut the door behind him, wondering if he shouldn’t ask Jacob and the German if they wanted to come along, but he was still too incensed with his brother and worried that he’d only say something he’d regret.