Frozen in Time

by Joseph Epstein

  Sandy waits three days before calling Jeffrey at his office. When he calls back, she asks him where, precisely, things stand at the moment.

  “How are the kids?” he asks, avoiding the question.

  “They’re fine,” Sandy says. “I told them that you were in Honolulu at a dental convention. I wanted to give you time in case you decided to change your mind about all this.”

  “That’s not going to happen,” Jeffrey says, “at least not as long as things stand the way they do.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” she asks.

  “Look,” Jeffrey says, “maybe we would do better to talk about this face-to-face.”

  That night, at six o’clock, Sandy and Jeffrey meet at McCormick & Schmick’s, a seafood restaurant in Old Orchard, the shopping mall in whose professional building Jeffrey has his dental practice. They take a booth toward the back, where it is quiet.

  Jeffrey, wearing a black polo shirt and chino pants, looks tired. When the waitress asks them what they want to drink, he orders a martini—unusual for him, who is not much of a drinker. Sandy orders a glass of Reisling.

  “I assume that you have been living with Dr. Leibowitz,” she says, deciding not to waste time on small talk.

  “Why would you assume that?” Jeffrey asks.

  “A suspicion,” she says.

  “Lindsay Leibowitz is a lesbian, Sandy. I’ve met her partner, Stacy, on more than one occasion. The fact is that the last two nights I slept on the couch in my reception room. Tomorrow night I’m moving into the Doubletree.”

  “Who is it, then, that you’re leaving me for? Someone working in the office? A patient? I’m entitled to know.”

  “Another woman has nothing to do with it.”

  “Then what’s it all about?”

  “Your father,” he says.

  “Max?”

  “I’ve had enough of his contempt,” Jeffrey says.

  “Not this again,” she says.

  “He’s treated me as if I were the black sheep of the family from the get-go,” Jeffrey says. “I thought maybe over time it would ease up, but it hasn’t. I’ve told you this time and again.”

  “Look, my father may have a touch of snobbery, I’ve always given you that.”

  “Why against me? I made more than seven hundred grand last year. I save people’s teeth. I reduce their pain. What’s so terrible about that?”

  Once again, as at other times in her marriage, Sandy can’t bring herself to tell him that he is of course right, that her father does look down on him, always did, and probably always would.

  “What do you want me to do, Jeff? I can’t control my father.”

  “Maybe not. But I don’t think you ought to stand by and let him treat your husband as if he’s just come up out of steerage, which is what over the years you’ve consistently done. In the Bible somewhere it says a man shall leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife. Shouldn’t the same be true of a wife leaving her mother and father and cleaving to her husband? You’re not so hot at cleaving, Sandy.”

  “I love Max,” she says angrily.

  “As I understand cleaving, it means that in any conflict between your family and me, you’re supposed to side with me. I’ve never felt that you have—not ever.”

  “OK, I love you and I love Max. What am I supposed to do?”

  “Lindsay Leibowitz thinks maybe your father loves you too much. A reversal of the Elektra Complex, she calls it.”

  “What a perfectly stupid, utterly predictable thing for a shrink to say! What’re you doing in therapy anyhow? You’ve never really told me.”

  “Did you ask?” he said. “Your old man drove me to it. I thought I was doing all right in the world until I met him. He’s spent a fair amount of energy over the years letting me know I don’t measure up. The son of a bitch shot my confidence.” Sandy notes Jeffrey’s eyes begin to water. She’s glad her father isn’t here to see it.

  “My father has a high standard. I’m not sure that I measure up to it myself.”

  “Forgive me, Sandy, but you do measure up. In your father’s book you will always measure up. Just as I never will.”

  “I know he’s not an easy man, my father, but I also happen to think he is a pretty extraordinary one, too.”

  “What does he really have against me?” he says.

  “I suppose he feels you don’t come up to his standard.”

  “Who the hell does?”

  Sandy could think of only two people who did: Michael DeBakey, the Houston heart surgeon, and Walter Payton, the Chicago Bears running back. She mentions neither of them.

  “What do you want me to do?” she says.

  “I want you to find a way to get your father off my back. Have him show me at least minimal respect. And, if he’s feeling magnanimous, I wouldn’t mind his tossing in an apology while he’s at it.” Jeffrey pays the check. She goes home. He returns to the couch in his office.

  Sandy is back in her tub, soaking. The kids are asleep. Diana Krall is singing, softly, on a CD player on the bathroom counter. She has decided that she does indeed want Jeffrey back. She realizes, too, that she has been wrong in not attempting to curb her father’s treatment of her husband. Jeffrey is right; it is of course contempt, not snobbery, that Max had confronted him with from the very beginning. She feels more than a little guilty about trying to pass it off all these years, even to herself, as Max’s oddity. It’s been a failure of imagination on her part, and she feels terrible about it.

  On the CD player she keeps in her bathroom, Diana Krall is singing “The Night We Called It a Day.” What is it about songs, Sandy wonders? The appropriate sappy ones have a way of turning up just when they shouldn’t. She wasn’t raised to be sentimental. Clear thinking is called for. “There was nothing left to say,” Diana Krall moans, “the night we called it a day.” Bullshit, Sandy thinks. There’s a lot left to say. Jeffrey may be no Michael DeBakey or Walter Payton, but then neither is Max Lansky. Jeffrey is in many ways the perfect husband for her. He lets her work long hours at her firm when required. Allows her, so to speak, a controlling interest in raising their children, which was the way she wanted it. Gives her the freedom she needs without the least jealousy or resentment. Truth is, though it was important that Jeffrey loved her, she wasn’t raised to be a woman smothered by a husband’s love.

  Max has to be told to knock off the way he talked about, thought about, and acted in front of Jeffrey. He is her husband. He loves her, and she loves him. Cleaving; she has to learn to cleave, damnit. She decides to set up a meeting with Max tomorrow, and get this straightened out, or at least she hopes she can get it straightened out. Diana Krall, thank God, had gone on to sing “Dancing in the Dark.”

  Sandy is sitting in the cafeteria at Rush-Presbyterian. She has arrived ten minutes early for a morning coffee meeting with her father. Max never arrives anywhere early but always precisely on time. She has a cup of coffee before her and is studying the passing physicians, in their white or gray coats, trying to make out the names over their left upper breast pockets: Dr. Roger Lowenstein, Dr. Jennifer Kirkpatrick, Dr. Paul Krickstein, Dr. Burton Ginsburg, Dr. Carol Blumenthal, Dr. Sandeep Gupta, Dr. Kelly Isner . . .

  “I see you are watching my fellow physicians, the goniffim on parade,” says Max, coming up from behind. “I brought you a blueberry muffin, just to remind you to be glad that when you were a kid I never called you Muffy.”

  Max seats himself across from Sandy. He puts three Splendas in his coffee, no cream.

  “Now what’s the reason for this meeting, kid? I’ve got twenty minutes.” Sandy notices that Max’s Bruno Magli loafers are covered with plastic booties. For all she knows, he may be in the middle of a heart surgery and took a break to deal with his daughter.

  “I met with Jeffrey last night and he told me, in effect, that he is not so
much divorcing me as divorcing you.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning he’s been suffering under your lack of respect for him and can’t take it any longer.”

  “A joke, right?” Max asks.

  “’Fraid not, Max,” she says. “He means it.”

  “Sorry.” Max says, “I call ’em as I see ’em.”

  “You’ve got to learn to call ’em different—for my sake, and for the sake of your grandchildren. Turns out, whatever your view of Jeffrey, I love him. He’s my husband. And with three kids I’m not so re-marriageable as you might think.”

  Max doesn’t answer directly. Strangely for him, he looks slightly perplexed.

  “What exactly am I supposed to do?” he says.

  “You might call Jeffrey and tell him that you regret you have not respected him the way you should, and that you will be careful not to let it happen in the future.”

  “In other words,” says Max, “an apology. How about something less equivocal, like, ‘I’m sorry if I seem to have underrated you, now go fuck yourself’?”

  “Max, I need you to save my marriage.”

  “I have to think about this,” Max says.

  “Don’t think too long, Daddy, please.” Sandy realizes that she has called him Daddy. The word slipped out. If Max notices—and he doesn’t miss much—he pretends not to have.

  Max looks at his watch. He reminds Sandy that the Bears are playing the Packers at home, it’s a Monday night game, and so he probably won’t have the boys home until past midnight. Sandy asks how Marsha is.

  “Look, kid, I better return to work. I’ll get back to you in a day or two about this Jeffrey business.” He gets up, comes around the table, kisses her on the top of the head, grips her hand in his, squeezes it gently, and walks off.

  That night, 11:23 p.m. on the digital clock in the bathroom, Sandy is in her tub, her nightly soak. Brooding over her meeting earlier in the day with Max at the hospital, she has decided that there is no chance he is going to apologize. She must have been nuts even to ask him. Still, she had to try. A big decision awaits: whether to give up her husband or her father—a lose-lose deal.

  A knock at the door. Ardis should be asleep by now. She is in no mood for one of her daughter’s weepy sessions.

  “Who’s there?” she asks, a touch of petulance in her voice.

  No answer, but the door opens and it is Jeffrey. He is wearing a dark gray suit and red-and-blue rep tie.

  “I’ve some news for you,” he says. “I had a call late this afternoon.”

  “From my father?”

  “The great Max Lansky himself.”

  “Wanting?”

  “Wanting to know if I care to go to the Packers game with him and the boys Monday night. He has an extra ticket.”

  “Really,” says Sandy, sitting up in the tub.

  “There’s more,” Jeffrey says. “He tells me that he has been suffering some sensitivity in his gums on the upper right portion of his mouth, and he’d like to make an appointment to have me look at it.”

  “Did he make one?”

  “He did, for two weeks from today. But your father, being your father, couldn’t hang up without saying, ‘I assume you know what you’re doing.’”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said what I do may not be rocket science, but then neither is cardiac surgery.”

  “And he answered?”

  “He answered, ‘Touché. Pick you and the kids up at 5:30 Monday.’ And hung up.”

  “Well,” says Sandy, “it’s not exactly an apology, but it isn’t too bad for a start.”

  Then Jeffrey kicks off his shoes, removes his jacket, and gets in the tub with Sandy, all slouchy 6'3" of him, socks, shirt, trousers, necktie, wristwatch, and who knows what he has in his pockets.

  “What’re you doing, you moron?” she says, leaning over to touch his cheek.

  “I’m back,” he says, “back for good,” loosening his tie, the old goofy smile on his face.

  Arnheim & Sons

  Arnheim & Sons Optical, Inc., is in its fourth generation. The fraternal twins Eugene and Paul Arnheim took the business over from their father, Chaim, who had learned the craft of lens-making from his father and grandfather in Amsterdam. Having fled the Nazis, Chaim reopened the firm in Chicago in 1938, and it now operates in two floors of a building on North Avenue just west of Damen. His sons greatly expanded the business and eventually came to supply many of the lenses for such large firms as For Eyes and Lenscrafters.

  Spinoza was a lens grinder, Chaim told his sons, emphasizing the historical tradition and honorableness of the work. He kept a large portrait in oil of the philosopher in his office. After their father’s death, Eugene and Paul commissioned a portrait of Chaim Arnheim, which they hung next to that of Spinoza in the same office, which they came to share. They occupied, between them, a large antique partners desk acquired from an antique dealer on Wells Street and at which they worked, facing each other.

  For as far back as either could remember, the twins were never in the least rivalrous. They felt themselves lucky to have each other’s full-time company and support. Their talents and temperaments were different. Eugene was an exceptional athlete during his high-school years and somewhat introverted; Paul was more attractive to women and more outgoing generally. Knowing they were destined for their father’s business, neither took education all that seriously.

  The world seemed to contrive to keep them close. They married pledge sisters from Alpha Epsilon Phi at the University of Illinois; the girls were good friends and grew even closer after marriage. At Arnheim & Sons, Eugene was the inside man, running the day-to-day operations, while Paul hustled up new business and kept current accounts satisfied. Arnheim & Sons prospered under their control, and it made the brothers wealthy men.

  The trouble began when Eugene’s son Charlie was brought into the business.

  Eugene and his wife Susan had had difficulty conceiving. They put themselves through the nightmare of a fertility clinic without result and were about to adopt when Susan, miraculously, or so it seemed, at last became pregnant and stayed pregnant in their twelfth year of marriage.

  Paul remembered Charlie as an attractive child, affectionate, nice-looking. He was a little wild as an adolescent, true, once having been suspended for a week from Highland Park High School for kicking in a locker and then telling off a teacher. Paul never said anything to his brother at the time, but he thought that Eugene was maybe a little too easy on Charlie. The kid seemed to keep pretty much his own hours through high school; there were rumors that he was a heavy pot smoker. Eugene bought him a small BMW to drive in from Glencoe, the suburb where his family lived, to the Chicago campus of the University of Illinois west of the Loop. He didn’t insist the kid work summers as Paul’s daughters did without having to be asked. But, then, Paul recognized that he was fortunate in his girls, both of whom were good students and disciplined self-starters—Miriam had gone to Radcliffe, Rachael to the Rhode Island School of Design. They were a decade older than Charlie, and it seemed to Paul that kids, boys especially, had grown more irresponsible, more childish, during those ten years. Why should Charlie have been any different?

  Upon his graduation, Charlie made some noises about hoping to make it on his own. His first year out of college he entered an executive training program at Marshall Field’s, but things didn’t work out. Retailing didn’t interest him all that much, he said. Eugene and Susan offered him a summer-long trip to Europe to explore new possibilities. But he lasted less than a month, remarking that Europe no longer felt like where the action was; America had the ball now, he said, and America was the place to be. He also said that he had reconsidered the prospect of working for Arnheim & Sons and would like to give it a shot. “My best shot,” he added.

  Charlie seemed to work hard at learning the bus
iness, at least for seven months or so. He did monthly shifts with his father and then with his uncle, so that he could learn the business inside and out. He worked with his father in the shop, as Eugene called their small factory, among their thirty-eight employees. He applied himself to understanding payrolls, budgets, accounting worksheets. When Paul took him out with him to introduce himself to customers, Charlie made himself genial, which wasn’t the least difficult for him, for he had more than his share of natural charm: tall, slender, wore clothes well, had a nice smile. Paul never put it in words to any of these customers, but it was clear that he was introducing his clients to the heir apparent, the last male Arnheim.

  And then one morning, across their partners desk, Eugene announced that Charlie was leaving. He had a girlfriend, an Argentine, who had gone to medical school at the University of Chicago, and he was following her home to Buenos Aires. When Paul asked if Charlie was planning to marry this young woman, Eugene said he didn’t know for certain; he wasn’t sure if things had gone quite so far, but he assumed that this must be what his son had in mind.

  “I see,” said Paul, who really didn’t see at all. His first reaction was annoyance at all those months wasted teaching his nephew the business. But he was not about to criticize Charlie, lest it seem in some way a criticism of Eugene.

  “It’s a generation thing,” Paul’s wife Marilyn said. “Nowadays kids don’t get serious until thirty, sometimes later. I’m always hearing stories of some kid deciding at forty-two that he or she wants to go to law or even medical school. Maybe they’re all planning to live to a hundred, when they will die while out jogging. Go figure.”

  Paul couldn’t, quite. He wasn’t sure, either, whether he was pleased or disappointed when, three months later, Charlie came home from Argentina, his relationship over, and decided he wanted to return to Arnheim & Sons.

  “According to Charlie,” Eugene told Paul, “the girl’s family are what passes for upper-class in Argentina, and he didn’t, as he put it, ‘make the social-class cut’ with them. Argentine daughters, unlike American ones, apparently still obey their parents, if you can imagine that.”