“It’s as afraid of us as we are of it,” Isaac replied. It had the quality of a set piece, a scene they’d acted before. Abbie hugged him, drew his slim child against his hugeness and cupped his head briefly with a soft hand. “I’m glad you came,” he said.
“All right, Abbie. Christ.”
Abbie turned to Isabel briefly. “You’re the girlfriend,” he said.
“I—”
“Oh, don’t look so pinched. I know he’s gay. Girlfriends. Friends who are girls. My wife has girlfriends. My son has girlfriends. I have only colleagues and a set of bizarre and probably meaningless visions placed into my head by the Divine. You tell me, who got the better deal? Did you ever try to be a prophet in the twenty-first century? It’s like being a cardiologist in the ancient world. Your knowledge is fundamentally inconsistent with the available tools of the time and therefore useless. In any case, Isaac says you’re working for Barry Fitzgerald. How’s his house? Still look like a bad catalog?”
“Actually, yes.”
“Well, welcome to The Gamelands, which does not.” He leaned forward and kissed Isabel on both cheeks, placing his hands on her shoulders and swiftly sizing her up. He nodded as if he approved. She frowned. His manner made her feel like livestock. He ran his hands through his hair. “Well,” he said. “I suppose I’ll go make pasta instead.”
At that moment, the headlights mercifully and automatically blinked off.
Isabel had imagined that making pasta would consist of a pack of dried—though probably expensive—spaghetti and a hasty red sauce, but when Abbie said that he would make pasta, he meant it. He’d bounced into the kitchen, tossed his coat over a chair, replaced it with a well-stained apron, and began mixing flour and eggs for the noodles. “Someone turn on Rigoletto,” he commanded.
“Which one?” asked Eli.
“The RCA Victor, the Solti, with Moffo and Ezio Flagello.” He swirled the flour into the eggs with a fork, already operatic. He smiled broadly at Isabel, who was still frowning. “If one is going to make pasta, one should listen to music with an Ezio Flagello.” He pronounced it again with an exaggerated Italian accent. “Ayyyy-tseeoh!”
Isabel looked at Isaac.
“Yes,” Isaac said. “It’s always like this.”
“I went into the woods to live deliberately,” Abbie proclaimed, sing-song.
“I’m not sure this is what Henry had in mind, Dad.”
Somewhere, everywhere, the music came on, those ominous fanfares.
Abbie had magically acquired a glass of wine. He took a moment away from kneading to sip it. “Ach. Terrible! Sarah, why do you buy this swill?”
“It’s fine,” she protested.
Abbie was looking at Isabel when he answered, already drawing her in as a helpless accomplice. That was the nature of the Mayer men. She saw where Isaac had got it from. “A fine wine is fine, but a wine that’s only fine?” Still, he took another sip. Then, improvising to match the melodic line of the overture, he sang, “Baruch ata Adonai Eloheinu, melech haOlam, borei pri haGafen.”
“You’re laying it on a little thick, Dad,” said Isaac, who’d nosed back into his phone.
“Seriously,” said Sarah.
“Your friend forgives me,” he said. “Don’t you, my dear? What’s your name?”
“Isabel.”
“Eees-ah-bayyylaah! E’ un bellissimo nome così! Presumably not a Jewess?”
“No,” she said. She added carefully, “Catholic, nominally. We weren’t especially religious.”
“Neither were we,” said Abbie. “Which of course makes the predicament of my life the more absurd. Sarah’s family were great believers, but when I told her I’d had a chit-chat with Hashem, she looked stricken.”
“It,” she paused and then said something other than what she was going to say, “was a difficult period.”
“Excuse me,” Isaac said. He pocketed his phone and headed toward the other room.
“These phones,” said Sarah.
“Were we really so different? Remember the opening scene of Bye Bye Birdie?” Abbie had wrapped the pale yellow oblong of dough in plastic and was chopping onions into a fine dice.
“I remember that Isaac was in Bye Bye Birdie in high school, but I’ve blocked out the particulars.”
“He played the Paul Lynde role. We ought to have known, I suppose. Anyway, my point is that we spent plenty of time on the phone when we were teens, even if they were all landlines.”
“He’s not a teenager.”
“Be that as it may.” Abbie waved the knife loosely and moved on to garlic. “I think it’s healthy, the constant contact. Imagine if we were still living in tribal groups, close kinship networks. We’d be picking each others’ nits and stumbling into each others’ tents all the time.”
“He hardly speaks to us!”
Abbie momentarily lost his air of playful bonhomie, his Falstaffian clownishness, so committedly performed. A pained look passed over his face, and this time he made no effort to look at Isabel. He looked at his wife. “Let’s not,” he said.
Eli had never returned from the record player. He was sitting near it, drinking the bad wine, showing every indication of listening to the music.
Sarah looked at Isabel slyly, as if somehow the other woman wouldn’t notice, though they weren’t ten feet apart. “All right,” she said. She twisted a bracelet and took a deep gulp of wine, which she held in her cheeks like a chipmunk, like a college girl who’s taken a shot without quite knowing how to swallow it, before swallowing with a convulsive, canine shake of the head and a small sneeze. “How was the meeting?”
“Awful. Sherri didn’t show, and Don spent the whole time unsubtly suggesting that that poor boy accountant who took Jack Schaffer’s seat sucks cock for a living. The Lion of Lemonwood, that one.”
“The Lion of Lemonwood?” Isabel said.
“Don is a county commissioner,” Sarah told her.
“She knows that,” said Abbie, although of course, at the time, she didn’t. “Don Cavignac, during a prior campaign for his primogenitured portion of this glorious barony we call Fayette County, had a campaign aide, in a press conference, float the nickname. It wouldn’t have stuck, except the publisher of the Herald-Standard, or, as I like to call it, the Herald-Substandard, the Herald-No-Standards, is Cavignac’s brother-in-law’s father-in-law. In the more civilized portions of the world, wherever those may be, that would mean bupkiss, but here, such connections are a veritable staff of life. Now”—he paused for a moment to look around for a can of tomatoes that was sitting right in front of him—“Lemonwood Acres is a housing project, Section 8, of ill repute, which is ironically located just across the parking lot from Isaac’s high-school alma mater. Don likes to claim that he grew up there, as if that confers upon him some sort of plebeian authenticity. Well, he did grow up there, in a manner of speaking: before it became a project. His father, who was a county commissioner before him—it’s a venerable tradition in their family—owned half the property, and the other half was a landfill. So when they went to build the new high school, they covered the landfill. The school district bought up a small piece of the Cavignac property in order to extend the parking lots, and the Cavignacs worked a classic real estate scheme to sell their land at inflated prices to a housing authority controlled by their own cronies, who then threw up a lot of crap frame-and-drywall townhouses, into which they herded the town’s most restive blacks.”
“Abbie,” said Sarah.
“I don’t endorse the racial attitudes; I merely describe them, my dear. You can imagine, there’s something poetically correct about building a high school and prison on top of a garbage dump. It speaks to the underlying nature of our swiftly dying civilization. Anyway, Cavignac gave that poor kid a public wedgie for about half an hour during regular business. Then some minion of Art’s made a glossy presentation about the locations of new wells and the environmental remediation and effect mitigation plans. So many Latinate words. Everyone was
nodding off, which was the point, surely. Until someone started yelling about his well water catching on fire because of all the fracking. Needless to say, when we got right down to it, it wasn’t his well water. He has city water. It was a friend of a neighbor of a cousin, who probably just saw it in that documentary, you know the one. He proceeded to demand ‘One ah them BP-style paydays for ahr eekanawmic inj-ree.’”
“I read about the flammable tap water,” Isabel said.
“It’s true, actually,” Abbie told her, looking pained at having his story interrupted. “How’s that for your End Times? Our water literally catching on fire. But these people are all confabulators; they don’t understand the distinction between fact, fable, and myth, and they have no concept of the difference between a thing happening to them directly and a thing happening to a friend who actually just heard about it from someone who saw it on Inside Edition the other night. And where, pray tell, is the broccoli rape?” He pronounced rape with relish, and his eyes dared the women in the room to take foolish, inexcusable, feminine offense.
“I threw it out,” Sarah told him. “It was wilted.”
“You threw it out? Lord, forgive us for our waste. The water is on fire, our towns are sinking into piles of garbage, and you’d waste food? Eli!”
“Yo!” Eli called back from across the room.
“Is there any rape left in the garden?”
Eli (bless him, Isabel thought) didn’t rise to it. “There are mustard greens.”
“Si. Pronto!”
Eli left through a patio door. The temperature had dropped after sunset, and the cool night came quickly through the open door. “Well,” said Abbie, unwrapping the pasta dough and throwing it onto the counter with a thwack, then wiggling his chubby, floury fingers at Isabel: “Isabellissima. Have you got strong hands?”
• • •
You’d wonder—Isabel wondered—how she could possibly have remained enamored after actually meeting the miserable, fat old fuck. Well, she had an ulterior motive. But beyond a desire to discover if what her mother said about him was true, she was also independently fascinated by him. They were alone after dinner. Isaac had returned just before they’d all eaten with his friend Jake in tow. Jake was a striking, young, light-skinned black man; Isabel had imagined that he’d look just like Isaac, even though Isaac had already described him, and she chastised herself for it. He wore his hair in a modest Afro that had a bit of the seventies to it. He wore thick, plastic-framed glasses like men wore in the control room when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, but they were merely fashionable, not necessary. He joined them at the table. Strozzapreti with tomato and mustard greens and flecks of red pepper. “And cacio de Roma,” Abbie yelled at them. “Not Parmigiano!” Abbie ate voraciously. Like a lot of good cooks, he hardly paused to taste his own food. Eli and Isaac both ate like Europeans, fork in left hand and knife in right. Jake was left-handed and ate without the knife. Sarah didn’t eat much but occasionally moved the pile of noodles weakly around the plate. Isaac and Jake told Isabel how they’d met.
“We had English together. And then gym. And health class. With that racist pedo Eddie Milano.”
“Isaac,” said Sarah.
For someone who claimed to have hated his childhood, to have, as he said, “barely escaped alive,” Isaac inhabited a state of perpetual nostalgia for the country of his youth. Maybe it had really been terrible, and the passage of time alone had whittled it down to a skein of grotesque but funny anecdotes, or maybe it had never been so bad and he only claimed it to excuse some of his worse habits. Or maybe a bit of both. Contra the truism, we don’t look backward with perfect vision. We drive relentlessly forward into the dark, and when we glance occasionally into the rearview mirror, the objects are never so clearly positioned, and they are closer than they appear.
After they ate, Sarah did the dishes, or anyway made a pantomime of doing the dishes. She’d eaten practically nothing and drank a good deal more, and she stood at the sink, staring off absently and rubbing a sponge weakly around one dish, over and over. Eli disappeared; he’d learned to vanish as quickly and quietly as a cat, slipping off to one of his private retreats around the house to be left alone. Isaac and Jake went back to Isaac’s outpost to get stoned; they announced this at the table, but no one else seemed to care. Isabel imagined that she was supposed to join them, but Isaac waved her off. “Catch up with us later,” he said. “I brought you to meet Abbie.” He gestured to his father like a man presenting a new product on television. “Meet Abbie.”
“Perhaps Abbie wishes to retire to his study with a cigar,” Abbie said.
“Isabel likes cigars,” Isaac said.
“Not especially.”
“Take a digestif with me on the patio,” Abbie said.
On the patio, Abbie asked if she was cold. She said she wasn’t, although she was. He appeared to contemplate putting his arm around her but to think the better of it. Isabel shouldn’t have felt grateful for this minor decency, but she’d spent her life awkwardly shrugging off the hands of men who thought they were doing her a favor, and if minor decency was insufficient, then at least it salved for just a moment the general indecency of living in a world with so many men.
“So Barry Fitzgerald,” Abbie said.
“Barry Fitzgerald.”
“The Future Cities Institute. It has a science-fictional quality that I wouldn’t expect in him. It conjures up flying cars and endless rain, George Jetson amongst the Bladerunners.”
“No flying cars,” Isabel said. “We’re much more mundane. Our biggest project is the Race to 2050. I didn’t come up with the name.” She smiled ruefully. “We get all the big property owners in town, the universities and the big corporate landlords downtown and the hospitals and such to pledge to reduce energy use in their buildings by fifty percent by twenty-fifty.” She laughed. “It’s a, quote, voluntary, non-binding pledge. So you can imagine.”
“Oh, I know all about your employer. He stole the idea from me.” Abbie sounded proud rather than aggrieved. “Whole cloth.” He rattled the ice in his glass and smiled. “Not the name, though. What a thoroughly queer name. Yes, I used to give a talk in which I pointed out that while the general focus of energy-savings programs was vehicular efficiency, in fact the largest consumers of energy were commercial and industrial buildings, followed by homes. The amount of carbon you burn to keep the lights on in a typical American house significantly exceeds the output of an automobile. And you can imagine”—he gestured behind him—“how much this thing takes. I designed it to be geothermal and solar powered, of course. When the world’s wells run dry and the oil is gone and the vast human herds get moving once again, I intended to be right here burning the eternal flame. I actually got sued by the utility, the fucks. Yes, it is illegal to be a net contributor to the grid. I could’ve gone entirely off, of course, but Sarah worried, and I acquiesced. The key to a good marriage is acquiescence, in large quantities.”
“I would have thought honesty.”
“Lord, no.”
Now Isabel smiled, and she allowed a needle in her voice. “Would you say yours was a good marriage?”
“Ahhh,” Abbie sucked more whiskey. “She’s sharper than she looks. I thought that must be the case. I took one look at you, and I thought, video et taceo.”
“I don’t know that one.”
“Elizabeth I. ‘I see, and I am silent.’ You even share the name.”
“That’s a flattering comparison.”
“The answer to your question is yes, actually. Sarah tolerates my outrageousness, and I tolerate her purposeful decline. We both aspire to the dutiful eccentricities of our respective sexes. I will be a grandiose old kook, and she will be a dotty old lady with a fondness for gin. You young folks think that sounds like an awful settlement, but great dynasties have been built on less.”
“I probably shouldn’t argue that latter point.”
“Regarding your employer, to get back to it: it’s a noble effort, actu
ally. I’m a fatalist, but that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate a good try, however destined to fail. Look down there.” Isabel looked where he was pointing, out over the dark, descending forest to Uniontown, twelve hundred feet below and miles away, glowing against the dark ground like the luminescent creatures sparkling in the wash of the waves of a nighttime ocean. “One day,” Abbie said, “the lights are going to go out. This is a popular topic in fiction, these days. The scuttling about of humans in the immediate post-apocalypse. The dull horror stories of surviving in the wreck of civilization. But they make the same error that we make in anticipating our own end, whether that leads us to welcome it or to try to forestall it. That is the failure to look at the longue durée.”
“Lucien Febvre,” Isabel said. She was proud of herself for remembering.
“Marc Bloch, really. I’ve always thought. But they never went far enough. They still thought in terms of history and economy. But history and economy are nothing in the long run. Let me tell you about the long run. In the long run, the story of the survivors of the carbon age is even briefer and less significant than the age itself. Whether we make it another hundred years or a hundred thousand. The lights will go off, and the tall grasses and vines will grow over it all, and the continents will move into unfamiliar arrangements, and should God ever see fit to curse another animal with our terrible, pandemic self-consciousness, all they’ll ever find of all of this will be a thin layer in the geologic strata that suggests sometime, millions of years before, a befuddling environmental catastrophe occurred, a strange outpouring of carbon into the atmosphere, a swift extinction of a strange number of species. They’ll argue whether it was an asteroid or a volcano.”
The Doorposts of Your House and on Your Gates Page 15