Frozen in Time

by Joseph Epstein

  By the time I got back to the apartment—having driven slowly, hoping the effect of the martinis would wear off—Lynne had long before arrived, pulled blankets and pillows off our bed, and taken up residence for the night in the room she kept for her brother, the Billysaleum, as Irwin Harris had called it and as I, too, now started to think of it. She had locked the door from the inside. When I knocked, apologizing, she refused to answer.

  She was gone when I woke Saturday morning. When she returned later in the day, I apologized again, told her how stupid I felt, it was the martinis doing the talking, that it would never happen again.

  “I’d rather not talk about it,” she said.

  And we didn’t ever again. But I always felt that that night was the first time I had failed her, shown my coarseness. She didn’t ever say so, but I always thought she was thinking that her brother Billy would never have done such a thing, not in a million years. Had he been alive, he might even have come around to straighten me out for talking that way to his little sister.

  Every so often, at a concert, or at High Holiday services at Temple Sholom, we’d run into someone who had gone to high school with Billy. When they would mention him to Lynne, she seemed to glow in a way that never resulted from my conversation nor anything else I did.

  A plumber came in one day to fix our back bathroom toilet, which had gone on the fritz, and he turned out to be a guy named Jack Mruk, who had played with Billy at Lane Tech. He was a big guy, maybe 6'4", dark, with a receding hairline, who looked as if he might have to shave three or four times a day.

  When Lynne remembered who he was, you could feel her excitement.

  “I’d heard your brother got killed in Nam,” he said. “Lousy luck! I never had to go because of my bum knees. Bad knees are my biggest gift from all of those years of basketball I guess.”

  “Weren’t you a year ahead of Billy?”

  “Yeah, but two years older. I’d had rheumatic fever as a kid and had to stay home from grade school for a year. Billy was the best I ever played with. Completely unselfish guy. He was always feeding me the ball. He made me look good.”

  Mruk told a story about the time Billy had dribbled out the clock with more than two minutes to go against a Chicago Vocational team. He told her about the time the two of them, he and Billy, each scored more than 30 points in a game against Von Steuben, the first time in the city any team had two players score in the 30s in the same game. Jack Mruk had Lynne’s absolutely full attention. As she listened to him talk about Billy, I ceased to exist.

  That night I had a dream in which I was playing a half-court basketball game with Billy Ross and Jack Mruk against me. We were all naked. I stood by helplessly as they scored basket after basket. My heart sank at my inadequacy.

  I might have had a chance against a living brother, but against a brother dead for decades, none whatsoever. I assume Billy Ross had had weaknesses, excesses, like the rest of us; or at least that, given enough knocks in life, some would eventually have shown up. Maybe he would have turned out to be a drinking man, or a gambler, or an impatient father, or a skirt chaser—something besides the perfect brother permanently fixed in his sister’s mind and memory.

  Around this time we went to a wedding of a younger cousin of Lynne’s at the Gold Room at the Drake. Until then I had never danced with my wife. I did my slow-dance box step, pleased that I had managed not to step on Lynne’s toes.

  “Hey, Lynne,” her Uncle Maury said when we got back to our table, “remember how you and Billy used to get up at deals like this and everyone would clear the floor to watch the two of you dance?

  “When they were kids they did everything from jitterbug to tango together,” Uncle Maury continued, turning to me. “You’d have loved it, Lou. They were a knockout.” I looked over at Lynne, who was looking off more than twenty years in the distance.

  I wished I’d meet someone who would tell me something really terrible about Billy: that he cheated at poker, or had a child-porno collection, or wore funny shoes. I started thinking so much about my wife’s relation with her dead brother that I did something I had earlier told myself I would never have to do as long as I lived. I saw a shrink.

  A little fellow, Dr. Levitas had no couch in his office, but two plush chairs, in which we sat facing each other. He wore a gold bracelet on his right wrist, and expensive shoes that rode up over his ankles. Odd touches of vanity, I thought, for a man of science. “Sometimes, you know, the Electra complex in young women is misplaced, attaching itself not to the father, as is normal and healthy, but to male siblings or uncles or even older cousins.”

  “What, exactly, is the Electra complex?” I asked.

  “Like the Oedipus complex, but played out in the psychodrama of young girls.”

  Even I knew about the Oedipus complex. “Instead of wanting to sleep with her father,” I said, “my wife has never got over wanting to sleep with her dead brother? Is this what you’re telling me?”

  “To say this in an authoritative way, I would need to talk with your wife, which I should be pleased to do. But the question is, how do you feel about all this?”

  “I feel like a schmuck,” I said.

  “For entering into a marriage so fraught?”

  “No,” I said, “for paying you $175 to listen to this horseshit.” At which point, I got up from my chair and walked out of the office.

  The reasons for my resisting Levitas’s interpretation of my wife’s behavior aren’t very complicated. In business as in my life, I don’t like investigations of motives that go underwater beyond a certain level—so deep that you can’t deal with them. Because Lynne missed wanting to crawl into the sack with her old man she now wants to do so with her dead brother was about fifty fathoms deeper than I was prepared to go.

  Besides, it was difficult enough dealing with my marriage on the surface, which was that Lynne had had a brilliant and immensely attractive older brother, and because of him she had set her ideal of what a man ought to be inhumanly high. Two earlier husbands couldn’t make it; a third had had the good fortune to peg out before he disqualified himself; and I looked to be the next guy who wasn’t going to make it, either.

  We were dining at home on a Sunday night, after which we were going to watch a movie on television. I hadn’t planned to do so, but just before we were about to take our dishes into the kitchen, I found myself saying, “Babe, forgive me, but I have to tell you that I’m worried about us. I worry that I’m going to lose you because you don’t think I’m the man your brother was.”

  “Nobody could be,” she said. “I’ve long ago known that no one could replace Billy. But Billy was my brother. You are my husband. Big difference there, you know.”

  “But do you also know how tough on a husband it is knowing that your happiest memories are about a boy who has been dead for more than twenty-five years? The other night when Maury Grolnik was talking about you and your brother as a kid dance team, I felt you’d left the room on me, and for a much better place than my company could ever provide. Whenever Billy’s name comes up, I feel wiped out.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t mean for that to happen. You must believe me.”

  “It does happen, though, and it hurts. It hurts a lot.”

  “Oh, Lou, I wish you had known my brother. Everything about him seemed golden. He never said anything stupid. He was beautiful and kind, Lou, and so generous, you could feel his goodness.”

  “But he’s dead, babe, and he isn’t coming back. I know you know that better than anyone, but forgive me if I say it doesn’t always seem as if you act on that knowledge.”

  “I try, Lou, you have to believe that I really do. And now that I know how you feel, I’ll try harder. I promise.”

  We took a pass on the movie, went to bed early, and made love tenderly and lengthily. Lynne fell off to sleep before me, and as I held her in my arms I looked down
at her intelligent and tranquil face; she seemed even more beautiful in her sleep. Later in the night she turned over and, in an agonized voice in her sleep, called out, “Oh, Billy, Billy, where are you?”

  I woke the next morning defeated, hopeless. Much as I loved my wife, I felt I couldn’t go any further with things as they were. Lynne had gone to the university hospital early for grand rounds.

  I phoned the janitor, a sly Romanian who called himself Stefano, to ask his help in unlocking the door to the Billysaleum. After he had done so, I went inside and emptied out its contents: pictures, photo albums, medals, trophies, the works. It was a wild thing to do, but I figured, screw it. I piled everything neatly in the foyer to our apartment, six or so feet from our front door, and on top of it all left the following note:

  Lynne,

  I’ve decided to close up my office and work at home. I needed the room in which you’ve kept your brother’s things for my computer and a few file cabinets. We can put your brother’s stuff in our basement locker. Hope this doesn’t inconvenience you too much. I’ll be at the Bulls-Clippers game and probably won’t be back much before 11.

  Love, Lou

  Not very subtle, agreed, but I felt the time for subtlety had passed.

  Lynne usually got home by 6:00 p.m. I decided it would be best not to call but to wait for her to call me. The day dragged on and seemed longer than two bad fiscal quarters. I couldn’t concentrate. I drove around the city, had lunch alone in Chinatown, dropped into the East Bank for a sauna and soak in the Jacuzzi, grabbed a sandwich, and drove off to the game. I couldn’t concentrate on it, either. Watching these multimillionaire kids run up and down the floor, all I could think was that one ball wasn’t enough for these guys; they needed six or seven balls on the court to cover everyone’s selfishness.

  I struggled to stay for the full game, a blow-out, Bulls 109, Clippers 86. To delay my return, I stopped at the Bagel on Broadway and had a plate of scrambled eggs, toast, and a pot of tea. It was well past midnight when I turned the key in the door. The pile of Billy’s stuff had been removed from the foyer. I turned down the hall to the Billysaleum to see if it had all been put back and found that the door was locked. Lynne was nowhere in the apartment.

  In our bathroom, I found a light blue envelope taped to the mirror. I put down the top of the commode, sat down, withdrew three sheets of notepaper within written in Lynne’s good-student girlish hand, and read:

  Dear Lou,

  When I came home earlier this evening to find my brother’s things on the floor in the hallway, I felt first dazed, then angry, then enraged. Why would you do such a thing? I asked myself, but of course I knew. You are not the first man I’ve been married to who has complained about my brother’s being his rival—an unbeatable rival, they claimed. But I had thought of you as different, more independent, less likely to worry about false rivals, beyond all that. I guess I was wrong.

  I loved my brother and love the memory of him even now, so long after his death. I can’t help it. I had hoped that you would have understood this and been able to live with it, and not feel in some sort of empty competition with a dead man. I took you for a larger man than you apparently are. My mistake again.

  I have moved into the Seneca Hotel and plan to stay there for the next three days. That should give you plenty of time to clear your own things from the apartment. Please don’t try to get in touch. There really isn’t anything that we have to say to each other. I regret that things haven’t worked out. I regret it more than you can possibly know.

  Lynne

  I read it twice, brushed my teeth, put on my pajamas, and slipped into the bed that had Lynne’s clean, vaguely perfumed, understatedly sexy scent, which I would never smell again. Eventually I drifted off into a dream in which I was playing basketball, this time one-on-one against my dead brother-in-law. We were in a large empty gym in which the bounce of the ball echoed loudly. I was in gray, rumpled sweat clothes, needing a shave, toting a middle-aged man’s potbelly, wearing black wing tips and silky black socks with clocks on them. Billy was in his sleek blue-and-gold University of Michigan uniform. I had the ball. I feinted to my right, he lunged, and I dribbled behind my back and through my legs, and slipped easily around him to the left. At the free-throw line, I leapt and soared, in slow motion, and slammed the ball authoritatively in the hoop. I looked back to see what Billy thought of my move, but he, along with all the hopes of my marriage, had vanished.

  Dad’s Gay

  My kid sister Ellie calls infrequently, and never at my office, so when my secretary told me she was on the line, I became immediately apprehensive. She’s a bit of a hippie, Ellie, with no good habits but a kind and trusting heart. She’s in her late thirties, and never married, though, I gather, with lots of men in her past. She’s stayed in Chicago and keeps an eye—an unsteady and inconstant one, I’ve always assumed—out for our father since our mother died three years ago. Straight out of law school, I moved to New York, where I live today.

  “Ellie,” I said. “Everything all right?”

  “I’m calling about Dad,” she said.

  “What about Dad?”

  “You sitting down, Steven?” she asked. “I have something amazing to tell you.”

  “What? What is it?”

  “Dad’s gay,” she said.

  “A joke, right?” I said.

  “No joke,” she said. “When I visited him earlier today I discovered that he has a roommate, a guy in his late twenties or early thirties named Randy. I didn’t quite get his last name. But I was there long enough to recognize that Dad and Randy are more than friends.”

  I don’t recall the rest of our conversation before I hung up the phone. Ellie’s phrase “Dad’s gay” refused, as they used to say when I was a kid, to compute; the two words, Dad and gay, felt like opposed magnets, each fiercely repelling the other. I won’t say that my father is the last man I should have expected to be secretly homosexual, but he was pretty low on the list. Besides, he’s sixty-seven years old.

  He was not without his charm, our father, though he didn’t waste much of it on Ellie and me when we were growing up. Until his retirement four years ago, he was the vice-president for community relations at the University of Chicago, which meant that he often represented the university at public functions, both intra and extramural. He dresses with care, is well-spoken, tactful.

  He never said so outright, but I don’t think he cared much for his job. The problem was the University of Chicago. If you weren’t a great scholar or scientist, you were viewed there as little more than a servant. And my father, who is more than a bit of a snob, couldn’t bear thinking of himself as anyone’s servant.

  As a younger man, in his mid-thirties, working for the Chicago Sun-Times, my father won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of articles on racial segregation in Chicago real estate. He used to say that journalism was a young man’s game, which was why he got out of it in his early forties to take the University of Chicago job. Whenever anyone ever mentioned his Pulitzer, my father would almost invariably answer, “Pulitzer Prizes go to two kinds of people: those who don’t need them and those who don’t deserve them.” No one, at least in my presence, ever asked him into which category he fell.

  My mother idolized him. She was a good soul, my mother, but, as became evident to my sister and me before we reached the age of ten, a bit of a ditz. She wasn’t much of a cook, often burning things or forgetting to include essential ingredients in complex dishes she probably shouldn’t have attempted in the first place. She was wildly disorganized and forgetful, so that often, when we expected her to pick us up after piano lessons or little-league games, she would show up an hour or more late.

  She also labored under the misapprehension that she was an amusing raconteur. She could take a full fifteen minutes to tell one of her supposedly riotous stories—about, say, a large toothbrush attached to the key to the lad
ies’ room that her dentist gave his patients, or the confusions of a bookseller on Michigan Avenue who gave her a hard time—whose punchline never failed to fizzle. Ellie and I were both embarrassed for her when she set off on one of those stories before company. But our father, usually so tough on bores and boors alike, at least when recounting their behavior to us at our dinner table, showed infinite tolerance for our mother’s lengthy and ill-told stories.

  I cannot say that I loved my father. I suppose I never really connected with him. There was something a bit distant about him, something a little cold; it was as if he had something very important on his mind that my sister and I weren’t worthy of being let in on.

  Someone once said that the reason master bedrooms in American homes and apartments do not have locks on their doors is so that children can enter their parents’ bedroom, catch them making love, and later in life have something to tell their psychiatrists. I never caught my parents in the act of lovemaking, nor can I easily imagine it now. My father was always kind, even courtly, to my mother. I cannot recall them ever arguing in any serious way, at least in front of Ellie and me. But I don’t have many memories of them kissing or embracing, either. The element of intimacy, at least physical intimacy, between them didn’t seem to be there. Still, credit where credit is due, my father stood by my mother through the four-year torture of her Parkinson’s disease, nights and weekends performing all the functions of a practical nurse, and doing so in the most affectionately solicitous way, right up until her death.

  Not one of those full-court-press dads, my father never attended my little-league games, never took me to sports events or concerts or spent much time alone with me generally. Somehow I didn’t mind. Strange though it may seem to say, I didn’t miss his attention. I worried mainly about his disapproval. I didn’t fear my father, exactly, but I did worry about being the target of his contempt, which I knew, from hearing him talk about faculty at the university, could be withering.

  Every family has room for only one non-conformist, and in our family that place was reserved for my sister, who through her adolescence and college years—Ellie dropped out of five different colleges and ended up without a degree—drove our parents, but especially my father, crazy. I was the good kid: excellent at school, no trouble at home, the very model of a bright and obedient Jewish boy. I could do without my father’s approval, I suppose, because I received all I needed in the classroom.