Between You and Me

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Between You and Me Page 10

by Scott Nadelson


  He managed to wiggle a finger between collar and neck, giving him just enough room to breathe. The comedian asked his name and held the microphone in his direction. He didn’t want to answer, but neither did he think he had a choice. “So, seriously,” the comedian said, not looking at all serious with his big phony smile and dancing eyebrows, “what is it you do, Paul?” When Paul answered, the comedian threw up his arms and made a horrified sound. “Worse than mafia! I’ll wake up with a lawsuit in my bed!”

  He wondered how long this would go on and even more, how he’d ever escape from it. The comedian kept asking questions, each of which provided a new opportunity for jokes at his expense. Where did he grow up? “Brooklyn! I got shot there once!” Was that his beautiful wife beside him? “How’d you propose? Let me guess. Handed her a subpoena?” Did he have any kids? “Just stepkids, huh? What’s the matter, Paul, too lazy to make your own? Shooting blanks in your pistol? Maybe you’re wearing that cummerbund too low.”

  Cynthia hooted. The comedian winked.

  What else could he do but play along, laughing and nodding, acting as if he couldn’t wait for more? The comedian had him stand and show off his tux. Called him Daddy Warbucks. Said all the donation envelopes should go to him. “What sort of law do you practice, Paul?” When he answered, there came another horrified sound, eyebrows bouncing into and out of view. “Insurance! For the love of HaShem! Did you read the Robin Hood story wrong when you were a kid? Think you were supposed to steal from the poor and give to the rich? It’s the other way around, Paul!”

  There were few moments in his life when he found himself at such a loss that his mind emptied of all thought but the simplest sort. He was conscious only of a single phrase ricocheting in his head: don’t cough, don’t cough, don’t cough. His cheeks ached from smiling. He kept feeling for pockets to stick his hands in, but the tux jacket didn’t have any, so finally he hooked his thumbs together behind his back. The comedian’s mouth was still moving, but Paul didn’t hear a word now. Nor did he take in the laughter as anything more than flickering static whose volume rose and fell unpredictably. Later he’d wonder if this was what a stroke might feel like, or a seizure, and he’d remember the odd bliss that overtook him as he swayed in front of two hundred and fifty patrons of the Jewish Federation of Morris County, the unexpected flood of camaraderie and goodwill. All these lovely people, he thought. All these kind, generous souls.

  But then Cynthia was tugging at his pants, and his senses returned to him. For a moment it was too much: the comedian’s voice booming through speakers, the laughter and clinking of glasses, the fluttering red curtains, the smell of smoke and wax from an extinguished candle. “Seriously, Paul, you can sit now,” the comedian said. “Don’t make me call 911 again.”

  The chair was lower than he expected, and he fell into it with a grunt. He was no longer sweating. In fact, he felt a touch of chill on his neck, a prickle on his scalp. To his left, the bald husband—was his name Lowengard? Allen Lowengard?—had trouble catching his breath. He heaved and gasped as his wife pounded her bony fingers and bulging rings against his back. Paul pulled the tuxedo jacket tight around his middle and re-buttoned it at the waist. The gravy stain sneered from his sleeve, and he stuffed it down in his lap.

  By then the comedian had returned to center stage. “How about a round of applause for our friend, Paul?” he said. “He’s a good sport. And you know what? He saved the show. I had only like fifteen minutes of jokes ready. The rest of the time I would have just stood up here talking about world events. Nothing funny at all.”

  The clapping was brief and perfunctory. Cynthia looked away. Whatever instinct—or momentary illness—had made Paul magnanimous had vanished. The chill had seeped beneath his skin, maybe into his blood, and he glanced around the room with cold scrutiny. Tacky women draped with oversized necklaces dwarfed by oversized bosoms. Men with toupées and sagging jowls, some wearing open butterfly collars ten years out of date. Who were they to laugh at him? He straightened his bow tie. Maybe it was for the best that he’d worn his tux. Maybe he’d never go anywhere without it.

  “Speaking of world events,” the comedian said, his strut across the stage full of triumph and swagger. His eyebrows were most likely hidden again, waiting to spring, but with his back turned Paul could see only how narrow his shoulders were under the silver jacket, how frayed the cuffs of his jeans. “Looks like the Berlin Wall’s coming down any day now…”

  Even rarer than moments when Paul’s head emptied were those in which he felt in full possession of his thoughts, unclouded by caution and self-doubt. The urgency he’d felt earlier crystallized now, but not as panic or flight. Words formed clearly and firmly in his mind, and in the briefest instant he managed to consider them carefully, weighing each until he was satisfied. He brought his hands to his mouth, cupped them around it. He cleared his throat without making a sound. The whole thing felt leisurely, or at least seemed so in retrospect, though not a moment had passed. The comedian turned slightly to face the audience, microphone pressed to his lips. Whatever joke he’d planned about the Berlin Wall he hadn’t yet begun.

  “What do you care, Stalin?”

  Paul was more aware of his breath moving through his hands, warming them as it passed, than of the sound of his voice. But the comedian’s startled expression, eyebrows frozen high on his forehead, and then another eruption of laughter, confirmed that he’d actually let the words out. And just then he recalled the names of the couple to his left. Kestenbaum. Arnie and Beryl Kestenbaum. Cynthia had pointed them out during a high holidays service, when they were called up to the bimah, Arnie to lift the Torah out of the ark, Beryl to say the prayer before the first reading. Big donors, she’d told him. They’d paid for the new carpet in the sanctuary upstairs, as well as for the expansion of the parking lot out back. Cynthia, recently elected treasurer of the local Hadassah, was angling to hit them up for a gift to support the chapter’s new lecture series. No wonder she’d insisted on taking a seat at their table, cutting through the middle of the gym while the Federation president was speaking. Paul remembered the smug look of beneficence on both their faces when she’d made him shake their hands after the service, the expectation that they’d be recognized and thanked for their deeds.

  Now Arnie was wheezing again, Beryl once more pounding his back, and since they were no longer laughing at him, Paul reached for the water pitcher and filled Arnie’s glass. When the noise died down, the comedian muttered, “Enough from you, Paul,” and then continued with his joke, which received a few titters in response. He went on to the next one, and that, too, elicited only mild reaction. His forehead shone in competition with his silver jacket. His eyebrows stayed where they were, stuck above the rims of his glasses. Stillness deprived them of their surprise and menace. He moved haltingly across the stage, bracing, it seemed, for another outburst. Cynthia, too, expected more, giving Paul an uneasy glance followed quickly by a second one, as if she saw something in his face she didn’t recognize. Or else she saw what she’d always seen, except she’d remembered it wrong, or until now hadn’t looked closely enough.

  For his part, Paul eased back in the chair, hands in his lap. He had no intention of cupping them around his mouth again, no intention of calling out. He listened politely to the rest of the comedian’s act, chuckling once or twice, and clapped vigorously when he finished. He drank several more gulps of warm white wine. The comedian left through a door behind the stage. Soon after, the Federation’s executive director took the microphone and made his pitch for support, describing various programs and benefits to the community. Donation envelopes appeared at each table, passing from hand to hand.

  “I didn’t know your husband was so funny,” Beryl Kestenbaum said, speaking to Cynthia but giving Paul’s shoulder a gentle shove. Her eyes, reflecting candlelight, were as bright as her rings. In her voice was a note of something like envy.

  “A riot,” Cynthia agreed, and then quickly changed the subject, describi
ng the first lecture in her Hadassah chapter’s new series. “I hope you can make it.”

  “Will you be there,” Beryl asked, leaning back to take Paul in, “causing more trouble?”

  Cynthia took Paul’s hand and yanked it onto her lap. “I’ll make sure he behaves himself next time.”

  Arnie Kestenbaum, breathing evenly now, took out a checkbook and propped a pair of reading glasses on his nose. He was once more smugly venerable, as if a few minutes earlier he hadn’t been laughing so hard he’d drooled onto his lapel. Any kind of attention was just fine with him. He folded his check twice, tucked it in the envelope, and slid the flap along the tip of his tongue. Paul asked to borrow his pen, and Arnie handed it over with a closed-lip grin of approval. The gravy stain was in plain view, but Paul made no attempt to hide it. His own check he filled in as he usually did at charity events—$100—and then, after considering a moment, added another zero.

  “A nice evening,” he said to Cynthia as they made their way through the parking lot, newly blacktopped thanks to the Kestenbaums, white lines crisp between each car. She looked at him strangely again, seemed about to say something, and then stopped herself. He gave her his most innocent smile.

  When they reached his car, he opened the passenger door, helped her in, and circled around slowly, pausing for a moment to catch his reflection in the back window. He could hear the words he’d shouted, but only as they’d sounded in his head, hardly more than a whisper. He lifted his eyebrows and let them drop. Big shot, he thought, trying to decide if the tux made him look like someone other than he was, or if he was still himself in spite of it.

  Grow or Sell

  1991

  When Kyle asked for help with a school project, Paul agreed without hesitation. He took the request as affirmation of his importance in Kyle’s life, of the trust that had built between them over the past ten years. “Glad to,” he said, not waiting to hear what the project entailed, and experienced such a flood of gratitude he nearly thanked Kyle for asking. Kyle, for his part, only nodded.

  If Paul had thought about it for a moment first, wariness might have tempered his enthusiasm. Kyle was a senior in high school with a solid B average, which to Paul meant his teachers didn’t take grades seriously. From time to time he’d glance at Kyle’s papers and homework assignments, the best of which were full of spelling errors, meandering sentences, unfinished thoughts, and red ink. The worst were simply illegible. How he managed to pass any of his classes, much less to meet the requirements for graduation, Paul had no idea, except to believe that failing marks were reserved only for those students who didn’t turn in any work at all.

  To everyone’s surprise, though, Kyle had actually studied for the SATs, and a few weeks earlier he’d received an acceptance letter from Rutgers, the only school to which he’d applied on time. Since the letter had arrived he’d hardly picked up a school book, instead heading out every evening in the car Paul and Cynthia had bought him for his seventeenth birthday, a used Volkswagen Rabbit, silver, with a black stripe the previous owner had hand-painted down the side. It’s a chick car, Kyle had said when Paul first brought it home from the lot. Why can’t I get a pickup truck? Soon enough, though, he began rolling it through the car wash every week, changing its oil after every five hundred miles, throwing a fit when Paul, clearing the driveway following a light snowfall, accidentally nicked its passenger door with the corner of his shovel.

  Where he drove after dinner neither Cynthia nor Paul knew. He had a part-time job as a bagger at a supermarket but kept his hours to Saturday and Sunday afternoons. Did he have a girlfriend? they asked, and Kyle only shrugged and said, “I get some sometimes.” Paul would have liked to probe further, but as long as he was home before his curfew—ten o’clock on weekdays, midnight on weekends—Cynthia insisted they allow him his privacy. He usually pulled into the driveway with forty-five seconds to spare.

  “In five months he’ll be gone, and we won’t have any idea what he’s up to,” she said. “It’s time to start getting used to it.”

  And if, in the meantime, he flunked his classes and didn’t graduate? Paul asked.

  “Then he’ll learn something about independence. And the consequences of fucking around.”

  Unlike most teenagers Paul knew—and unlike himself at the same age—Kyle wasn’t the sullen, angry type, but rather dopey and remote, always snickering at some private thought, or trying to make jokes out of things that weren’t funny. Paul would sometimes forget to be careful after putting a fresh blade in his safety razor, and when he came downstairs with a red mark on his Adam’s apple, Kyle would say, “Trying to off yourself again?” Or Paul would come home from a difficult day at work, one of his briefs having failed to stop a suit against his firm, and Kyle, catching his look of frustration, would smile sympathetically before asking, “Hemorrhoids acting up?”

  When he returned from his evening excursions, Kyle would go straight for the refrigerator, tossing a few grapes into his mouth, unwrapping a block of cheddar and taking a nip from the corner, tipping the orange juice carton to his lips. If he noticed Paul watching, he didn’t let on, which gave Paul the opportunity to assess his appearance. Was his hair messier than when he’d left? His clothes more rumpled? Paul tried to get a glimpse of his eyes and a whiff of his breath—if he was driving the Rabbit after drinking, surely Cynthia would have to ask questions then—but he never caught anything more than Kyle’s ordinary look of glazed indifference and a smell somewhere between body odor and the fresh mud tracked in on his shoes.

  “You’ll burn out the motor if you keep the door open,” he said.

  “C’est la vie,” Kyle said.

  “A new fridge isn’t cheap. Say goodbye to your paycheck for the next three months.”

  “Que sera sera,” Kyle said.

  “Have a nice time tonight? Anything interesting going on?”

  “Murder and mayhem,” Kyle said. “Mysteries and illuminations. Sex, drugs, and rock and roll.”

  “Appreciate it while you can,” Paul said. But Kyle’s head was back in the fridge, and Paul couldn’t be sure he’d heard.

  What Paul really wanted to know was whether or not Kyle was conscious of the approaching transition, if the thought of leaving home caused him any turmoil. He paid close attention to the way Kyle acted around his mother, looking for signs of clinginess, and when he saw none, tried to determine whether apathy might be a mask for unspoken fears. When Cynthia tweaked his ear on her way past, Kyle smacked her hand away. Was there more than irritation in the gesture? Could he be making up for the grief he felt, pushing away what would soon be lost?

  Only with Paul’s ailing cat did Kyle show any affection. Every morning he lifted Franklin from the living room ottoman on which he spent most of his time sleeping, draped him over a shoulder, and scratched his rump with one hand while shoveling cereal into his mouth with the other. Franklin was eighteen now, with thyroid problems and bad eyesight, and Paul didn’t expect him to live out the year. To his surprise, though, he wasn’t anguished by this expectation as much as resigned to it, as if Franklin’s fate had been sealed long before he’d even come into the cat’s life. In fact, the vet had already suggested more than once that they might consider putting Franklin to sleep, given how little he ate, how much weight he’d lost, how much pain it caused him to stand and stretch his paws. But Paul determined not take any action until Kyle was gone. Wasn’t it hard enough that he had to say goodbye to everything he knew, to ready himself for a brand new life?

  Yes, he was only going an hour away, and at least two dozen kids from his high school would accompany him. But unlike Joy, who, to Paul’s astonishment, had transformed from girl to full-blown woman during high school, Kyle seemed hardly to have matured at all. True, after being undersized his entire childhood he’d shot up more than a foot over the past four years, giving him three inches on Paul, but his face was still a little boy’s, round and hairless, cheeks always the slightest bit flushed. It didn’t help th
at he had his hair buzz cut every month and wore almost nothing but sports jerseys or t-shirts with the logos of his favorite teams: the Jets in the fall, Knicks and Rangers through the winter, and as if to punish Paul for undetermined crimes, the Yankees all spring and summer.

  Even if he managed to keep his grades up, he didn’t look like a kid ready for college, and for this Paul suffered on his behalf. He remembered too well his own last months in Brooklyn, before heading upstate, the hours he’d spent looking out the windows of his parents’ apartment, trying to memorize details of the streets below. For weeks stomach-aches tormented him, and in school flashes of panic made him gasp for air. To make things worse, his mother looked as stricken as he did the last few weeks before his departure, if not more so, retreating to bed for most of every day. One night, late, she woke him with loud sobs and a cry through the thin wall separating their bedrooms: “My baby!” The next morning she was up early, singing to herself, cutting bread for breakfast, frying eggs and onions. “I don’t want you to forget where you came from,” she said, placing a full plate in front of him. All month her meals had grown increasingly extravagant, which likely contributed to Paul’s stomach troubles. Reggie, two years younger, asked if she’d also get eggs every morning before heading off to college. “Aren’t I your baby too?” she asked, with a smirk not so different, now that Paul thought about it, than the one Kyle turned on him from the refrigerator. His mother, red-eyed and exhausted, replied only, “You going away? I should be so lucky, I’d cook you an elephant.”

 

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