Tell Me How This Ends Well

by David Samuel Levinson

  “I like being closer to this guy right here,” he said, wrapping an arm around Moses’s shoulders. “Who would’ve guessed we’d end up here?”

  “I was shocked to hear about your divorce,” his dad said. “Just shocked. I was telling Roz the other day that out of all of Moses’s friends, I was sure you’d stay married.”

  “Dad,” he said. “I don’t think Gary—Gibbs—wants to talk about his divorce.”

  “I will discuss anything Dr. Jacobson throws my way. I am, as they say, an open book, but only for certain people.” Gibbs winked.

  “I watched that Spotted in Hollywood program the other day, and they reported that you were ‘romantically involved’ with a mystery lady,” he probed. “They even hinted that you’d moved to Calabasas to be closer to her. Roz and I were trying to guess who she was, but Roz is lousy with names. Is it that Israeli girl, the singer with one name?”

  “Bathsheba,” Moses said.

  “Right,” his dad said. “See, I’m not the only Jacobson who follows your life,” and he turned to Moses. “Maybe Gary will introduce you to his manager if you ask him nicely.”

  “Jesus, Dad, enough,” he said, too loudly, so that his dad took a step back. “I don’t need Gibbs introducing me to anyone. I’ve done perfectly well on my own, thanks.”

  “Oh, is that what they’re calling failure these days?” his dad sniped.

  “Now, c’mon, Dr. Jacobson, I think you’re being too hard on him.” Gibbs stepped in. “He might be in a bit of a slump, but we all go through that in the business. If there’s anyone who can pull himself back up, it’s Moses. He’s got the acting chops and the movie-star good looks, which, I must say, he got from you and your beautiful wife. I totally believe in him.”

  “Oh, I believe in him, too,” his dad said, swelling up. Moses wished he had a pin to pop him. “I believe he should have gone to law school, like I told him to twenty years ago. Then he wouldn’t be in the situation he’s in now—all this sneaking off to your house every night and creeping back before we all wake up. It’s shameful. You didn’t think your mom and I knew about that, did you?”

  But I’ve been so careful not to make a sound, Moses thought, wondering how his father had figured it out, if Pandora might have let it slip, though they’d both agreed to keep it a secret. No, the old man must have concluded it all on his own, for even when they were children he’d had an incredible knack for sniffing out and making the most of their fears and failures.

  Leave it to his dad to bring up the two most troubling chinks in his armor—the waning of his career and the implosion of his marriage. “I plead the fifth,” he said, because he couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  “The fifth?” his dad asked. “I think they teach it in law school, but you wouldn’t know that, would you?”

  “Mom’s calling you,” Moses said, sending him off to look for his wife.

  “I see things are still status quo with the old man,” Gibbs noted. “Maybe even worse?”

  “Far worse,” he agreed. “So, look, I was wondering if I could borrow your boat tonight,” and he explained that he and his siblings wanted to take his dad out fishing later. “You know how much he loves to fish.”

  It was a simple plan, and would be so easy to carry out—utter darkness, a mishap on the boat, an accident. He always did love fishing, their mother would tell the police later. And the three bedraggled, shocked siblings would agree, these three eyewitnesses who—choking up, aggrieved—couldn’t believe their father was gone.

  “Yeah, sure, you know where the keys are. I’ve got a date later, so I probably won’t be around. You have the run of chez Gould. There’s a stash of kosher for Passover beer in the fridge. Anything for Dr. Jacobson,” he consented. “And for you,” and again he wrapped an arm around Moses’s shoulders, the gesture of which felt both forced and spurious, as if Gibbs were drawing him close only to pick his pocket.

  “I think Pandora’s in the kitchen,” Moses said. “Go say hello,” then he left to take another call.

  It was Ronnie, the producer of the show, calling to tell Moses that they’d be going live in ten minutes and to remind him about the list of items to plug. “This is live TV. No commercial breaks, no ad revenue, Mo,” the producer said. “Be doubly aware of that. And remember: You’re not trying to teach anyone about Judaism, so not too much explaining. We’ll direct viewers to our own Wiki page, where they can find myriad information about Passover, et cetera. And when you mention the angel of death, please use the gender-neutral pronoun ‘it.’ The audience development team feels the use of ‘he’ or ‘she’ might alienate certain viewers. And also when you get to the plagues, we’d prefer that you say ‘The unfortunate and unfair slaying of the firstborn son’ rather than just ‘The slaying of the firstborn son.’ ”

  “But that changes the entire meaning,” Moses protested. “Besides, it wasn’t unfortunate or unfair. It’s in the Torah, in black and white. It was used as a threat against Pharaoh. It was supposed to soften his heart.”

  “This is focus-group-tested, and we’d like it if you complied,” the producer stressed.

  After Moses hung up, he announced that it was “go time” and that they were live, giving everyone the thumbs-up and calling them to gather together to light the Sabbath candles. Thus, the entire Jacobson clan, as well as Dietrich, who had apparently decided not to leave after all, and Gibson Gould, hovered around Pandora, who’d covered her head with a shawl. Bronson struck a match and handed it to her, then she touched the flame to the candlewicks, reciting the blessing over them. Moses stood just behind his wife and beside his mom, who held on to his arm for support. He could feel her grip through his shirtsleeve, the solidness of it, yet also the frailty, the clinging. His dad spoke over Pandora, reciting the Passover add-on—líhadlik ner shel Yom Tov—then they all said “Amen,” the boys scattering away as everyone else shuffled into the dining room to take his or her place at the table.

  Moses was still miffed about his conversation with the producer, but what could he do? The only person who’d probably notice the change anyway was his dad and he just prayed he got it past him without enduring the usual high dudgeon and self-righteousness. This was his hope as he took his chair at the head of the table, Pandora to his left—Pandora, who looked stunning in her short black crepe de chine dress and black patent-leather heels, the Jewish star necklace draped lusciously around her throat. His mom, too, looked beautiful in a black pantsuit and flats, the black pearl earrings accenting her eyes, her face rubicund in the soft light, looking far healthier than he’d seen it in ages. Edith was in a knee-length black herringbone skirt, a white blouse, and a heather-gray bolero, which showed off her hourglass figure. A choker and bracelet gave her the appearance of a 1950s starlet, for the makeup artist had even penciled a mole, à la Marilyn Monroe, right above her lip. She looked amazing and everyone except their dad had told her so.

  Moses glanced lovingly around the Passover table, his eyes falling on the five empty seats that should have contained his sons, who, he imagined, were upstairs playing videogames. He was about to head upstairs to fetch them when they all burst through the door in the glass wall en masse, huffing and puffing and taking their seats at the far end of the table near Jacob and Dietrich and Gibbs, Jacob looking as if he hadn’t showered in days and so over it all that Moses wondered if he’d even make it through the entire hour before getting up and leaving. Well, the main attraction wasn’t his brother or his lover, but Gibson Gould, who sat exactly opposite Moses at the foot of the table. Moses glanced at his boys, who were looking everywhere else than at him, and noticed that their faces were splashed with what looked like red freckles. Their hair was messy and their ties askew. “So glad you could join us, boys,” he said, smiling avidly at them. “Before I tell you the story of Passover, I just want to thank my parents, Roz and Julian, my brother, Jacob, his boyfriend, Dietrich, and my sister, Edith, for coming all this way to celebrate the holiday with us,” Moses cont
inued. “I also want to wish my best friend, Gibson Gould, a big welcome. So happy you’re all here.”

  The trick with reality TV was to act as natural as possible, and Mo relaxed into his groove about ten minutes into the show—after he’d explained the significance of Passover and what it meant to the Jews. Like the actor he was, he never once looked at the webcams, though he did enunciate his words slowly and carefully. “Boys, can you tell your maw-maw and paw-paw what the definition of Seder is?” he asked, adjusting his yarmulke in the hopes that his sons would take the hint and put theirs on. No such luck.

  The boys gazed sheepishly across the table at him as he waited for one of them to make him a proud Jewish papa. It was messianic Bronson, with the most abundant of the red freckles splattered across his cheeks and nose and chin, who said, “Order. Seder means order.”

  “Good job, Bronson,” he said. “Now, the first order of business is the Kiddush. I’m going to let my dad lead us in the blessings, while I prep you boys for the Four Questions,” and he rose and motioned for his sons to follow him. “We’ll be right back.”

  He marched them through the kitchen and into the bathroom, where they all crammed in together, then flipped on the light and shut the door. He wasn’t sure if the bathroom was a hot spot. He glanced up and sure enough found a single webcam, its red light blinking, which meant it was recording, though Moses had no idea if they’d cut to follow him in here with his sons.

  “Okay, spill it,” he said. “What did you do?” He turned Baxter around and studied his face, which looked as if one of his brothers had taken a red felt-tipped marker to his cheeks. “Will one of you tell me what’s on your faces, please?”

  Again, it was Bronson, fearless and determined, who stepped out of the huddle and right up to Moses and spoke for them all, saying, “It’s blood.”

  “Blood? As in…blood?” he asked, horrified. “Whose? Yours? Is one of you hurt?”

  “No, it’s from the…opossum,” he explained. “We needed a sacrifice, and there weren’t any lambs around to slaughter, so we settled.”

  “I want you to tell me exactly what you and your brothers did with the opossum.”

  “We didn’t want anyone to die when the angel of death came down,” Bronson mumbled. “So we painted the front doors with blood.”

  “You painted the front doors with blood,” Moses repeated and pushed through his brood to slump down on the toilet, no longer caring if the webcam picked any of this up or not. “Let me get this straight: You killed the opossum, sliced it open, then used the blood to ward off the angel of death?”

  “It was already dead,” Bronson said. “We found it in the grass. Think it’ll work? Think he’ll pass over?” he asked.

  “It,” Moses corrected him. “From now on, let’s use the gender-neutral pronoun ‘it,’ when discussing the angel of death,” looking up at the webcam beseechingly.

  “You and me and Paw-Paw…we’re all firstborns,” Bronson said, wrapping his arms around his brothers. It was true—Bronson had been born first.

  “You said front doors, though,” Moses realized. “What other doors are we talking about besides ours?” Suspecting the extent of what they’d done, he shut his eyes, leaning his head against the wall, his bowels bucking like a pissed-off bull. “How many doors?”

  “We kind of ran out of blood after we did ours and the Rothmans’,” Bron admitted.

  The Rothmans, Moses thought. Perfect. Just perfect. “Where’s the opossum right now? What did you do with it?” he asked.

  “We pitched it over the fence.”

  “Our fence?” Moses asked as the room went swirling around him. The Orenstein-Jacobson fence backed up onto a slight declination that ended in a plateau on which sat a mobile-home park.

  “Our fence.”

  “Okay, well, there’s nothing we can do about it right now. Wash your faces and let’s practice the Four Questions.”

  Traditionally, the twins, who were the youngest, were supposed to recite the Four Questions—Why is this night different from all other nights? Why do we eat matzo? Why all the dipping of bitter herbs? Why do we recline?—but Moses and Pandora had agreed that it would be better television if they all did it.

  Once they’d gone through the Four Questions, which didn’t sound half bad, thought Moses, they filed out of the bathroom and returned to the table, where his dad was incanting, “Salt water to remind us of the bitter tears we cried when we were slaves in Egypt.” Moses and the boys resettled themselves, while the rest of the table dipped the bitter parsley in salt water, everyone making the same sour face as they chewed. Moses glanced down the table, surprised to see a new addition—Elias Plunkett, who sat beside Edith. He’d wondered about the two empty seats and the two empty place settings—growing up, they’d always reserved one chair for the prophet Elijah, who was welcomed in by an open door at the end of the meal. The boys, especially Bronson, loved this tradition. While it was true that there was absolutely nothing in the liturgy about saving a seat for Elijah, the tradition had passed itself down, as Jewish traditions did, and Moses had kept it, though he wondered why Elijah would ever want to join them for Passover considering how unlikable three-fourths of the table was.

  Moses said hello to Elias, then reclaimed the reins of his table, noting that his dad had made remarkably good progress on the service—they only had an hour to cram in what usually took four or five hours, for Passover was full of bawdy songs and four glasses of wine, although there’d never been any singing when Moses had been a boy and the four glasses of wine only made everyone even meaner. They moved on to Yachatz, the breaking of the matzo, in which the middle matzo was broken in half, one piece to be eaten later, the other used as the Afikoman and hidden somewhere in the house for the children to hunt for and find. When they were children, whoever found the Afikoman was given a silver dollar. Correcting for inflation, that silver dollar had become a twenty-dollar bill. This was a highlight for the boys, who chomped at the bit every year, waiting for permission to get up and search. It usually ended in tears, for his dad inevitably hid it in the same place, which meant a beeline for the familiar spot, and that the fastest boy, usually Brendan, got to it first.

  “Do me a favor and hide it somewhere else,” Moses muttered to his dad, handing the broken matzo to him.

  “Don’t you worry about that,” his dad said. “You just focus on steering the Seder ship to shore.”

  “Boys, are you ready?” Moses asked, for it was time to recite the Four Questions.

  They stood up and gathered against the wall of glass, the trips in the middle, with the twins bookending them. Their singing was indescribably beautiful, the melody coming up and out of them as if they all had the lungs of opera singers and the talent to boot. Perhaps it was the shape of the room or the acoustics or the love that Moses was beaming out to them with his eyes and his smile, but the song moved Pandora to reach under the table and grab his hand, as if to say, Look at what we made. There was joy, a copious amount of it, and it dripped off everything and went ringing through every room in the house, trembling the air. The caterers poked their heads out of the kitchen to listen to Moses’s cherubs with their angelic voices, drawing Moses out of himself and into the holiday. If he shut his eyes, he might not have been sitting at a table in Calabasas but in an ancient house with sand floors and fire pits and baked mud for walls. Then the singing ended, yet Moses wanted it to go on and on, for it had paused time for him—in those few minutes nothing evil had happened in the world, not here, not anywhere. But then it all came whooshing back and his phone was vibrating and Pandora let go of his hand to return to her texting, and he noticed that every time she texted, Gibbs glanced down at the phone sitting next to his plate. The joy fizzled.

  “Stunning, guys. Just stunning. Thank you,” Moses said, clapping.

  “Encore, encore,” Jacob called.

  “I think you two might have the next big boy band on your hands,” Gibbs said. “In the tradition of the Jacksons
and the Jonases, I give you the Jacobson Five.”

  Moses looked down at the text he’d received. It was from the producer, who wanted him to speed things along. “Okay, now it’s time for the telling of the Passover tale, so please remove the iPad minis, which you’ll find under your plates, open iBooks, click on the Haggadah icon, and flip to page twenty-seven. I want to thank the folks at Apple for being one of tonight’s sponsors,” he said. “And that goes for all of our sponsors,” and he rattled off the list. “Okay, let’s just go around the table and everyone can read for a bit,” which was what they did. And when they came to the ten plagues, “which King Pharaoh brought upon himself by refusing to let the Israelites go,” Moses said, the boys lit up and watched him with rapt attention.

  Moses recited them in the order he found them:

  “1) And God turned the Nile to blood,

  2) And sent frogs to rain from the sky,

  3) And he sent bugs up from the earth to torment the Egyptians,

  4) And wild beasts to ravage the lands,

  5) And a pestilence to destroy all of the Egyptian livestock,

  6) And boils to burst out upon man and beast,

  7) And hail to pulverize and crush all of those who did not believe,

  8) And swarms of locusts to blot out the sun and ruin what was left of the crops,

  9) And a teeming darkness to blind the Egyptians and fill them with terror,

  10) And the worst of them all, the unfortunate and unfair slaying of the firstborn son.”

  “What was that?” his dad asked after Moses had finished. “The last one. That’s not the way it goes.”

  “Leave it alone, Dad,” Moses whispered.

  “I will not leave it alone,” he said.

  “You have to admit that it was pretty unfortunate and unfair,” said Gibbs.

  “Have all of you lost your minds?” his dad asked, pushing away from the table and huffing out of the room.