Flatscreen

by Adam Wilson

  “Yes. Just yesterday, in fact.”

  Benjy scratched an imaginary goatee, adjusted the rearview, the heat, scratched his arm, touched his turn signal.

  “You’ve never fucked a woman,” he said. “I can tell.”

  He and Kahn sensed things about my sexual history that even I wasn’t aware of. They called me out, understood my pitiful past, my current wants.

  “I’ve actually fucked two pretty recently. You’ll never believe who the last one was…”

  “I’m not talking about making love,” Benjy said. “Not that weak sauce.”

  “Weak sauce?”

  “Everyone and their mother’s made love.”

  “Even our mother?”

  “Our mother makes love all the time.”

  “Really?”

  “It’s so obvious. We’ve seen it in movies. Imitated. That doesn’t count. Love is easy. Love is the default position.”

  “Not that easy…”

  “I mean really fucked a woman. Capital F.”

  “As opposed to the other kind of fucking?”

  Benjy couldn’t hear. Like Kahn, he was in monologue mode, intent only on getting the words in line and out his mouth.

  “Really slammed her. Violently. Bitten her. Sucked her blood.”

  “Brother, are you trying to tell me you’re a vampire? Because that would be too much.”

  “What I mean is sex in which all your anger comes out, and after, you feel calm. But not during. You feel like a teapot that’s been sweating on low heat for hours and now, suddenly, you’ve come to boil.”

  “Good metaphor, English major.”

  “Smoke is coming out of you. You’re screaming. She’s just taking it, taking it. Taking it and screaming too. Not your name. Not out of pleasure. Just screaming for the goddamn hell of it. Because she can. Because human beings have bodies and are able to scream and can make these incredible noises if they really want to. Maybe because it hurts, too, hurts but also feels good, hurts because it’s life, and real, and you can feel it.”

  “I guess not,” I said. “Definitely haven’t fucked.”

  “Then you don’t know what I’m talking about.”

  “Shit, dude,” I said. “Fuckin’ A, man,” I added, meaning, “I’m alone, you’re alone.”

  Passed pastures that weren’t golf courses: real America. Trees bare, leaves everywhere.

  “You brought the apple cake?” Benjy said.

  “Forgot.”

  Turned up the radio. Benjy turned it down, off, back on again.

  “Erin’s room’s my old room,” he said.

  nineteen

  Note About Architecture:

  • When he got remarried they bought property out in Sudbury. Dad designed the new house himself, like the old one. Something in the architecture gave the impression that the two had been sprung from the same DNA, siblings.

  • First house was a first child—possibly a mistake, but born from tremendous passion.

  • Second house was a second child. More money pumped in, less undivided affection.

  • One is a ranch home backdropped by Jewish suburbia, the other a five-level villa nouveau in the heart of goyish, pastoral New England.

  • Look closely, you’ll see they hold themselves the same: layout, location of bathrooms, height of sinks, etc.

  • First time I went it was like being in one of those dreams where you’re in your house, but it’s not your house.

  twenty

  Men in the living room, though the area so spacious, the crowd so mesmerized by football on the 58-inch Panasonic HD plasma, that neither “living” nor “room” accurately described the situation. Women in the kitchen. Benjy and I sat with the men, even though I wanted to check out the food.

  The men: Dad, Uncle Sal, Pam’s two brothers, Steve and Doug. Steve and Doug were jocks with firm handshakes, knuckles like large marbles. Co-owned a store that sold men’s big and tall suits, had one of those stupid local TV spots where they’d get an ex-Celtic to say the suits are a “real score!” The jingle: “Steve and Doug, big and tall, come see them in the Natick Mall… You’ll have a ball!”

  Steve and Doug thought they were hot shit, decked out in matching gray double-breasted suits that accentuated the width of their shoulders and the fact that they didn’t have necks. First thing Steve did upon shaking my hand was pat me on the stomach, tell me I was ready for a big and tall. Come in for a measuring.

  Dad asked if we wanted anything from the kitchen.

  “I’ll take a beer,” I said.

  Steve smacked me on the stomach again. Doug laughed. Pam came back with apps, beers, said, “Hi, Eli.”

  Put the tray down, kissed my cheek, winked, tried for my affection, which I somehow couldn’t give, though I wanted to, knew she was kind, innocent, a real person who also happened to be married to my father.

  Watched the game. Sal sat silent. He’d been a commie, lone employee of Journal Rouge. Then his daughter Julie was killed on 9/11. She’d become a stockbroker to rebel against her hippie parents, taken a job at the World Trade: the ultimate fuck-you to Uncle Sal. Aunt Erica left Sal shortly after Julie was killed, because a marriage can rarely survive the life of a child, let alone the death of one. Sal retired the newsletter. He now approved of Bush’s war on terror.

  These days Sal didn’t do much of anything. My father supported him financially. He sat with his head in the newspaper; couldn’t look at the house’s interior, a paean to materialism, paid for by the same capitalist blood money he now accepted and I had been severed from.

  My uncle Ned had been the star of earlier Thanksgivings. My coconspirator, telling me stories about taking peyote with Indians in Arizona, smoking hash with Indians in India. Sometimes brought lady friends, called them “lady friends.” Gave me a Playboy for my bar mitzvah. Then he got diagnosed, started dying. I biked to his house every Thursday to watch Discovery Channel.

  Didn’t go to the funeral. Too much of a pussy—afraid of coffins, crying, not crying, bodies buried under dirt for eternity. Everyone said it was so nice, Ned would have liked it, etc. Dad came back to the house for the first time since he’d left. Hung around for a bit eating lox, looking at Mom, nothing he could do, though he could have held her, kissed her, made coffee, made love (The Sharp Points of a Flower, Dreamworks, 2002), and maybe he did when no one else was around.

  Did go to Julie’s funeral, though I hadn’t really known her, and she’d locked me in a closet when I was five. Drove out to Albany a week after the towers came down. When a plane flew overhead thought I could see all the cars veer a tiny bit, drivers’ eyes following the flight pattern.

  At the funeral Benjy whispered she’d flashed him a tit once at Passover. Couldn’t help imagining her tits even though she was my cousin, dead. Crowd was filled with old lefties who knew less of what to make of 9/11 than I did, but one thing was clear: death is the same in all forms. Cancer, terrorists, suicide, etc.—dead remain dead, grieving remain grieving.

  Doorbell rang.

  “Who else is…” I started to whisper to Benjy, stopped short when I heard that voice, ringing like a siren.

  “Pamela Weiss-Schwartz,” Mrs. Sacks said. “Look at you.”

  Pam led the Sackses into the living room, all three. Had no idea they’d been invited. But Dad and Mark were poker buds, old pals, the kind of new-money Jews who posed on sailboats and coughed cigar smoke just to prove that in post-ethnic America, everyone had the right to act like a WASP. Plus Pam and Mrs. S. were pals, shared a personal trainer with titty-pecs and garish tats that they could gawk over together on girls’ night.

  Mark more imposing than ever in an adroitly tailored Steve and Doug big and tall. Grinned like a guy who’d spent a summer at sex camp, called my father “big guy,” ruffled his hair. In a swift motion, he scooped a pig in a blanket with one hand, held out the other for high-fives.

  “Score?”

  “Pats up twenty-one seven,” Doug said.

  “
Shit,” Mark said. “I got fifty bucks on Dallas to cover.”

  “You bet against the Pats?” Dad said.

  “Gotta go where the money is, my friend. No way the Cowboys aren’t coming within ten in Dallas on Thanksgiving Day.”

  “Smart man,” Steve said, high-fiving Mark for the second time in a minute.

  “Beer me,” Mark said to Dad, who looked at Pam, who went to get Mark a beer.

  Table could have accommodated twice as many. Dad sat at the head. Mark at the other end between Doug’s wife Kathleen and Steve’s wife Judy.

  The twins, Paul and Cole (named after Pam’s favorite singer, Paula Cole), were alone at the kids’ table, no doubt preparing to crawl under the grown-ups’ table, tie everyone’s shoelaces together. Beautiful children in a way Benjy and I had never been. We’d been handsome, adorable even: dark curls, pudgy cheeks. But they were gentile beautiful: blond, confident. As if the stork—confused by Dad’s Sudbury palace—had screwed up, dropped Aryan babies on the doorstep.

  Went into the kitchen to check on the food. Pam poured wine from a bottle into a crystal chalice.

  “Hi, Eli.”

  “Anything I can do?”

  “If you could take the sweet potatoes out of the oven and put them in a serving bowl that would be great.”

  “No prob.”

  Opened the oven. Sweet potatoes weren’t done. Secretly bumped the temp to 475, so they’d char on the outside how I liked them. Pam walked back with the wine.

  I hit booze gold. Literally: full bottle of Goldschläger. Swigged.

  Pam tapped her wineglass.

  “I just wanted to say a few words about how nice it is to have everyone here, under one roof, in this house. All the people who are so important to us.”

  “Cheers to Pam,” Steve said, raising his glass. “Now let’s get to the noshing.”

  “Noshing means snacking,” Benjy said. “We already did that with the pigs in blankets.”

  “Whatever,” Steve said.

  “Let Pam talk,” Dad said.

  “The food will come in a minute,” Pam said. “But I just thought since it is, after all, Thanksgiving, that we could all go around and say one thing that we’re thankful for.”

  “But we’re Jews,” Mark said. “We don’t do this sort of thing.”

  “It does seem a bit goyish,” Judy added.

  “I’ll start,” Dad said. “I’m thankful for my sweet wife and our two wonderful sons.”

  “You have four sons,” Mark reminded him.

  “The other two I’m not so thankful for,” Dad said, laughed, so everyone would know he was joking.

  “He’s joking,” Pam said, concerned.

  “I’m joking,” Dad said, insincere.

  “I’ll joke you,” Steve said, idiotically.

  Doug picked his nose.

  “Well, I’m thankful for the fifty bucks I’m about to win on this football game,” Mark said.

  “And I’m thankful for the fifty bucks you’re about to lose when the Pats win,” Steve said.

  “Boys,” Pam said, like she would say it to the twins.

  “Doug and I are thankful for having such wonderful relatives to invite us over for Thanksgiving,” Kathleen said.

  “And I’m just thankful for everything,” Judy said. “With all that’s going on in the world these days, in the Middle East, and Iraq.”

  Everyone got somber. Or at least, with the exception of Uncle Sal, who was already somber, they pretended to.

  “Maybe we should have a moment of silence,” Kathleen said.

  We did. Figured Mrs. Sacks was thinking about Eddie Barash, Benjy about Erin, Dad about Pam. Already drunk, imagining the body that lay in wait when the guests had dispersed, twins gone to bed. He’d been such a good husband, backing her up on the thank-yous, not letting Steve be an ass. No one was thinking about the dead and dying in Iraq. And what about Israel—our own people—Tay-Sachs carriers the lot of us: killing, dying?

  “Now can we eat?” Mark said.

  “Yes,” Pam said, forgetting we were still supposed to be offering thanks.

  “Wait,” Sherri interrupted. “I still haven’t said what I’m thankful for.”

  I thought: Oh, fuck.

  “Well, go ahead, sweetie,” Pam said.

  Mrs. S. and I made brief, brow-raised eye contact.

  “I’m thankful I have two wonderful parents who love each other so much that they can look past each other’s shortcomings, and make their marriage work even after…”

  “Thanks, sweetie,” Mark cut her off.

  “The sweet potatoes,” I said, got up to go check.

  On my way, I said, “Hey, guys,” to the twins.

  “Hey, pothead,” Paul said.

  “Hey, stoner,” Cole said. “Gotten stoned lately?”

  “He’s stoned now.”

  “You guys don’t even know what stoned means.”

  “You’re a drug addict.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Everyone.”

  “Fuck,” I said.

  “You said fuck,” they said.

  “Shh…”

  “Eli said fuck,” they screamed. The table turned to look at us.

  “Eli!” Pam said.

  “Eli’s an expert on fucking,” Sherri said.

  “Sher, please,” Mrs. Sacks said.

  “Eli, you big dog,” Steve said.

  “I’m not an expert,” I said.

  “Got that right,” I imagined Mrs. Sacks mumbling.

  “Yup,” Sherri said. “He’ll fuck just about anything. Just like you, Dad.”

  “Stop saying fuck,” Pam said.

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” the twins said.

  “You fucked my daughter?” Mark said.

  Uncle Sal stared out the window.

  “Are you kidding?” Sherri said.

  “This is awesome,” Steve said. Doug nodded.

  “He fucked your wife, you schmuck,” Sherri said.

  “You fucked Eli?” Steve said to Judy.

  “I did no such thing,” Judy said.

  “She didn’t,” I offered.

  “Not her—Mom,” Sherri said.

  Mrs. Sacks clutched her chest the way Jewish women do when they want you to think they’re having heart attacks.

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” the twins said.

  “Enough!” Pam yelled.

  Too late. Mark had walked over to my side of the table.

  “You ruined the sanctity of my marriage,” he said, punched me in the face.

  Fell backward, taking Sherri along with me, who then knocked over one of the twins. My uncles held Mark back. Twins were still on the ground, wincing in pain or faking it. Sherri on the ground too, sitting, laughing like it was the funniest thing she’d ever seen. Pam crouched above her boys, kissed their boo-boos. Sal sipped water, inspected the chandelier.

  “That fucking hurt,” I said.

  “There’s more where that came from, you little shit,” Mark said.

  Mrs. Sacks was crying. No one made a move to comfort her.

  Benjy stood in the corner on his cell, talking to Erin, telling her about his insane family, it wasn’t his fault, nothing was his fault, nurture had ruined his nature. A different kind of brother would have had my back, punched Mark’s mug until it spurted beet-red blood.

  “This is insane,” I said, walked away, through the kitchen, out to the yard. Swimming pool tarp covered in leaves like a booby trap. Yard was huge: trees, tree house. Wondered if he’d built the tree house himself, if the twins had handed him tools, worn toy hard hats.

  I deserved the black eye.

  Dad came outside, looked around at his own property as if he’d never seen it before. Looked at me with the same expression.

  “I’m trying not to be angry at you,” he said.

  “And I’m trying not to be angry at you.”

  Dad shrugged. Not the confrontational type.

  “I told Mark Sack
s he had to leave.”

  “Probably a good idea.”

  Pause.

  “So you…” He looked back down at the ground.

  “What?

  “So you had sex with his wife?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Sort of?”

  “I guess I did.”

  “She’s a beautiful woman.”

  “I guess.”

  “A bit old for you maybe.”

  He almost chuckled. Reminded me of being a kid, when he wanted to punish me but found my act-outs too amusing. Like when I peed on Mom’s satin pumps, semi-on-purpose.

  “And married,” I said.

  “And married.”

  Kicked the dirt, thought about what my character would say if we were in a movie. Tell his father he was so fucking sad. Talk about Mom, the divorce, how these things affected him, insulated him. Plus the drugs, computer screen, hours upon hours of TV that shaped an alternative reality in which he existed. But ready. Ready now to face the real world, with a clear head and empty, open heart. Ready but he needed help. Ready to decide to be ready. He wouldn’t use those exact words. Good actor could convey that stuff with a nod, flick of the eyes. Audience gets the gist, sympathizes. Father reaches over, pats his shoulder, hugs, cries, kisses the swelling bruise above his eye. In an indie, Dad might not touch him at all. He reaches his hand, lets it linger above the boy’s shoulder as the boy faces the horizon (in the film it is sunset, summer), lingers with the intention of consolation, not the ability to provide it.

  Dad and I weren’t actors. I did want his hand on my back. More so, wanted to ask about money, could I have some. Didn’t seem like the right moment.

  “Well, you really fucked up Thanksgiving,” he said.

  “I fuck everything up.”

  Dad paused, all calculated, trying to act, shimmer in the spotlight, like moonlight, which was actually the automatic security light. Or maybe he didn’t. Maybe I just wanted him to—wanted him to have depth, wanted his physical actions to hint at complex interiority, torn-apart insides, longing for a lost family that, in reality, he must have hardly missed with his better life, better wife, Hallmark-quality spawn.

  He said, “I don’t know. I don’t fucking know. I mean I know and I don’t, but mostly I don’t.” Looked at the sky like someone was up there, steering.