Frozen in Time

by Joseph Epstein

  Modesty was not Irwin Isaac Meiselman’s problem. Nor did he need the world to concur with him in his high estimate of himself. He paused to take a large bite out of his club sandwich, a quarter of the contents of which fell onto his plate.

  After his father’s death, Meiselman went on to recount, he sold the appliance-parts business and went off to live for two years in Israel, but he didn’t find it to his liking. He moved to Los Angeles, hoping to write sitcoms, but nothing came of that. He worked for six months for Steppenwolf Theatre, in some vague capacity that he did not explain very well. He published a book of poems, privately printed, a copy of which he promised (I took it as a threat) to send to me. He thinks of himself, he tells me, as an observer, an unattached intellectual, or, as he puts it, his mouth full of french fries, “Chicago’s only full-time flâneur.”

  He scoffs up the remainder of his sandwich and orders a second Coke. He has a bit of mayonnaise on the right upper corner of his lips. I decide not to tell him about it; it adds to his charm.

  “To change the subject,” Meiselman says, and here I thought he was going to ask me about my life or my own writing, for I had after all published five works of fiction, and a book of literary criticism, “do you by any chance have an agent?”

  “I do, a woman in New York named Letitia Baumgartner.”

  “Think she might want to take me on as a client for my immigration book?”

  I think of Letitia, tall, thin, cool in judgment, utterly professional in bearing, phlegmatic, properly pessimistic. I try to imagine the letter I might write introducing Irwin Isaac Meiselman and his hopeless single-spaced manuscript to her. Impossible.

  Not a chance in the world, pal, I think, but instead say, “I know Letitia isn’t taking on any new clients at the moment. But this could change.”

  Meiselman orders rice pudding for dessert. He tells me an off-color joke about rice pudding, so gruesome that I tell myself to block out that I’d ever heard it. His own laughter at its punchline doesn’t travel up to his eyes.

  When the check arrives, he asks the waitress if the restaurant takes American Express, which it turns out it doesn’t. In other words, I am stuck for the bill, which isn’t for a great sum—$26.17, plus tip—but, given that I had read his manuscript and that he was coming to me for advice, shouldn’t have been mine to pay.

  As we leave the Golden Olympic, I resolve never to allow myself to be trapped into seeing Irwin Isaac Meiselman again. And I wouldn’t have, but for his reminding me, once we were out on the street, that I had forgotten his seventy-eight page (single-spaced, of course) chapter on the Jews, which we both go back into the restaurant to recover.

  Two days later, 10:15 in the morning, my phone rings. I see from caller ID the name I.I. Meiselman. What does that nudnik want now, I wonder, but not enough to pick up the phone. After a brief interval, I check my voice mail.

  “Irwin Isaac Meiselman here. Just wanted to let you know that I took the liberty of contacting your agent. I sent her an email. I told her we were friends and that you were nuts about my immigration book, at least of those parts that you’ve seen. I attached my chapter on the Italian immigration for her to read. Call once you’ve had the chance to read my Jewish chapter. Take care, Ed.”

  I made a mental note to call Letitia to explain that I scarcely knew this guy. But first to Irwin Isaac flamin’ Meiselman.

  “Hi, Ed,” Meiselman says when I telephone him.

  “Mr. Meiselman,” I say, not in the least having to feign anger, “you were out of bounds in using my name in writing to my agent about your manuscript. Way out of bounds. I never gave you permission to call my agent or use my name. I never even said that I liked what you had written, goddamit.”

  “Call me Irwin, please,” he says, calmly.

  “I prefer to call you Mr. Meiselman, and I distinctly prefer that you call me Mr. Kastell.”

  “I didn’t mean to give offense,” he says, without any note of apology in his voice that I can discern.

  “Give offense?” I say. “Mr. Meiselman, if I weren’t myself Jewish, I’d consider what you’ve done a one-man incitement to a pogrom.”

  “Calm down, Ed, please,” he says.

  “Kastell, Mr. Kastell,” I say, scream actually. “When I get off the phone, I’m going to call my agent to let her know that I am not in any way your sponsor. We’re quits, Meiselman, you got that?”

  “Just one thing,” he says. “My chapter on the Jews—you have my only copy. May I come by to pick it up?”

  “I’ll mail it to you,” I say.

  “I don’t trust the mail. Lots of work went into that chapter. How about we meet for coffee, and I take it from you then?”

  “I’ll FedEx it to you. It’ll go out today.” And I hang up.

  The next day I myself receive a small package from FedEx. It contains Meiselman’s slender book of privately printed poems and a letter. The letter, with its opening salutation of “Dear Mr. Kastell,” offers an abject apology, of an elaborateness that resembled the chapters I had seen of his immigration book, overwritten, though without the footnotes. Its postscript, presumptuous as always, reads: “I hope we can put all this behind us, Ed, and meet again soon for lunch.”

  As for the book of poems, it was inscribed “With affection and admiration.” Flinches is its title, a title much superior to the poems, every one of them spoiled by undistinguished social-science language that has no business winding up in poems. Glimpsing the poems in the book, I myself flinched at one line that read: “The hebetude of my lifestyle left her unwilling to interact.” The content was something else. Each of the poems registered a defeat or disappointment in its author’s life. The first disappointment is about his mother’s dying before he really got to know her. Another is about his failure to live up to his father’s expectations. Others are about different women, as he delicately puts it, “dumping” him. A poem called “Double-Cross” is about a boyhood friend who betrayed him, stealing his high-school girlfriend. One poem describes his disgust with his own body. Not exactly instructive or delightful, Irwin Isaac Meiselman’s poems, yet in their cumulative effect sad and strangely moving. What became clear from the poems is that Meiselman considered himself a loser but without the least clue about the appalling pushiness and insensitivity to others that helped make him so.

  When Meiselman’s book of poems arrived I knew its author would not take long to follow. One Wednesday morning, as I felt I was breaking through on a crucial chapter early in my new novel, the phone rang, and, without the aid of caller ID I was certain it was Meiselman. He may not have had much talent for writing, but his talent for calling at precisely the wrong time was unsurpassed.

  “Ed, Irwin Isaac Meiselman here.”

  “Yes?” I say, attempting to get as little welcome and as much disdain into my voice as possible. I decide to give up on the lost cause of telling him not to call me Ed.

  “Hope you received my book of poems.”

  “I did,” I say, and deliberately do not offer any even tepid compliments, lest they offer him an opening wedge. My intention is to treat this call as if it were from a charity rumored to be strongly anti-Semitic.

  “The reason I’m calling,” Meiselman says, “is that I have to ask a favor of you. A big favor, I’m afraid.”

  “What is it?”

  “I’d rather ask you in person,” he says. “Are you by any chance free for coffee this afternoon?”

  “Not this afternoon,” I hear myself saying. “Tomorrow afternoon is better.” Weakling, I think to myself. Enough of this jerk already.

  We agree to meet the next day at 4:00 p.m. at the Mozart Café coffee shop in Evanston. When I arrive, Meiselman is seated at an ice-cream table along the back wall. He looks up as I enter. Do I imagine it, or does he look thinner, grayer? He is unshaven; if he is going for the Don Johnson Miami Vice look, it’s not coming off.
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  “Hi, Ed,” he says, not getting up. He has a cup of coffee before him and a biscotti. He makes no offer to buy me a coffee, so I excuse myself to walk over to the counter and buy a coffee and biscotti for myself.

  When I return to the small table, I remark that biscotti is really nothing more than a $3 piece of mandel bread with a slight Italian accent. My small joke gets no response.

  “So what’s your big news?” I ask.

  “I have cancer,” he says, looking down at his coffee. “Pancreatic. A death sentence, I’m told.”

  I was expecting to hear that he had found a publisher. Or that he was planning to write a novel. Or had obtained another agent. I wasn’t expecting to hear cancer.

  “Shitty luck,” is all that I can think to say.

  “Yeah,” he replies. “It comes at a time when I was closing in on my chapter on Asian immigration to the West Coast. Anyhow I’ve agreed to undergo chemotherapy in the hope of lasting another eight or ten months, which I hope will give me time to finish my book.”

  “Is the chemo rough?”

  “Very,” he says. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

  What’s next? What’s he going to ask of me? Pancreatic cancer, I think, doesn’t involve bone marrow transplant, thank God, or I’m sure he’d ask me for that.

  “I’m exhausted after my chemo sessions. I can get to St. Francis Hospital here in Evanston on my own. But can I ask you to take me home after? I’m too zonked to call and wait for a cab.”

  “How often do you go?”

  “Three times a week, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, two weeks on, one off. It’s a lot to ask, I know.”

  Meiselman had shown up at my Cather lecture unaccompanied; at our lunch he never mentioned friends. The poems in Flinches are as much about loneliness as they are about disappointment. Not that I have any difficulty understanding why, but he must be utterly friendless. How else explain his turning to me, whom he barely knows, to help him out in this crisis?

  Better not to get involved, I tell myself. Time to jump this ship on which I never booked passage.

  “What time are your chemo sessions?” I hear myself ask.

  “From ten to eleven in the morning,” he says.

  If I pick him up outside the hospital and drive him over to his apartment on Bell, then allow another twenty minutes or so to get back, I can make this entire trip in under an hour. God knows I waste at least an hour most mornings on the phone with friends or futzing around on the internet.

  I arrange to pick Meiselman up the following Monday in front of St. Francis, on the Ridge Avenue side. He is standing there, not far back from the curb, as I drive up. When he gets into my Honda, I note his color is drained, his eyes have a slight glint of terror. He pulls the seatbelt around him, sets the seat back, and closes his eyes.

  “Thanks for doing this,” he says. “If I had to wait for a cab, I’m not sure I could make it. Mondays are the worst, especially after a week off.”

  “It’s poison, chemo,” I say, just to make conversation, “poison meant to counteract the poison of the cancer,” which exhausts my knowledge of the subject.

  “That’s what they say,” Meiselman replies. “They also say that a person can die from the chemo.” He lets his head turn toward the window.

  As we climb the three flights to his apartment, Meiselman leans against me. This is the apartment in which he had grown up, the apartment he lived in with his parents and shared with his father after his mother’s death. Walking into it I feel I am returning to the early 1960s. A lime-colored green shag rug, wall-to-wall, covers the floor. A white couch is against one wall, under a painting of a girl in profile with a large tear falling from her eye and holding a pet rabbit. A glass coffee table sits before the couch, a bowl filled with hard candies upon it. A large ornate lamp is on a table between two red velour chairs at the front window. On the mantle over the sealed-up fireplace is a shadow box, in whose many inserts are different kinds of tea cups and saucers, a collection doubtless of Meiselman’s long-dead mother.

  This living room is not so different from the one I had grown up in, though Meiselman’s is, from age, shabbier. I note lots of dust everywhere. Another difference is that every flat surface in the room is covered by papers or books and magazines, a mark of the bachelor intellectual, even, as in Meiselman’s case, the failed one.

  Meiselman flops on the white couch, without bothering to take off his New Balance running shoes. “If my mother saw me like this on her couch,” he says, “she would have three conniptions and four heart attacks.”

  “Mine, too,” I say, “except our white couch had plastic covers. You and I are the children of the white-couch brigade.”

  Meiselman’s eyes are closed. He doesn’t hear me. He is falling asleep.

  “Excuse me if I’m not more sociable,” he says.

  “Don’t worry about it, Irwin,” I say. It strikes me that I have not before now called him by his first name. “I’ll pick you same time, same place, on Wednesday.”

  “Thanks, Ed,” I hear him mutter, as I close the front door behind me.

  Driving back to Evanston I think about what it was that had given Meiselman first his artistic and now his scholarly aspirations. How does it come about that a guy like Meiselman can think he is able to write poems that anyone in the world is likely to care in the least about? In his sleep right now, it occurs to me, he may well be dreaming of the acclaim his book on immigration will earn.

  My own case, was it all that different? I wrote novels. A firm in New York agreed to publish five of them, though I couldn’t be sure how many more they might want. The novels were respectfully reviewed, but sold in modest numbers. The small advances I got for them supplemented the income from my teaching job at Northeastern Illinois and lent me cachet as a teacher of creative writing. They also allowed me to think of myself as a writer.

  We’d both swallowed the Kool-Aid, Irwin Isaac and I, both believed that writing elevated us above our backgrounds, making us more than guys hustling appliance parts like Meiselman’s father or doing other people’s taxes like my own. Writers were grander than that, mind-workers, artists. Meiselman, scribbling away, was of course kidding himself. What about me?

  I made seven more trips to pick up Meiselman in front of St. Francis and drop him off at his apartment. In my mind they all blur into the same trip. He would get in my car; scarcely say more than hello; fall asleep on the short trip to his Bell Avenue apartment; struggle up the stairs, leaning against me; flop on the white couch in his living room, mumble a thank you as I departed his apartment. The only difference is that after my third trip he began wearing a wool pea-cap, which he didn’t take off in the car or in his apartment. The hat was there to cover up the loss of what little hair he had to begin with. He was notably thinner, and the look of terror in his eyes—a premonition of death?—seemed intensified. Because at fifty-six he was relatively young, they filled him with powerful potions of chemotherapy. “With pancreatic cancer,” he told me, “they figure what do I have to lose, except for my sideburns, my appetite, and my energy?”

  Three weeks later, Meiselman called to say that he wouldn’t need to be picked up any longer. His oncologist at St. Francis, a Dr. Mutchnik, had determined that the chemo wasn’t doing any good, and he would be checking him into the hospice section of the hospital.

  “Is there anything I can do?” I ask.

  “Yeah,” Meiselman says, “you can find a cure for cancer. But in my case you better make it quick.” I feel a tinge of relief when he doesn’t ask me to run any errands or visit him in the hospice at St. Francis.

  Truth is I didn’t think much about Irwin Isaac Meiselman after that last call. I don’t read a Chicago paper, and therefore had no exact notion when he died. In such matters, what difference does exactitude make? All I knew was that I would receive no more mid-morning Meiselman call
s; have no more single-spaced manuscripts thrust upon me; with luck would for the last time in my life be called Ed.

  Then, one day, mid-morning, my phone rings, and my caller ID displays the names Frankel & Berman.

  “Mr. Kastell, my name is Sidney Frankel, and I represent the estate of the late Irwin Isaac Meiselman. Mr. Meiselman mentions you in his will.”

  “Really?” was all I can think to say.

  “Yes,” this Frankel says, in a lubricious voice. “His will stipulates that you are to receive $30,000 in return for services to be rendered.”

  “What services?”

  “The sum of $30,000 is to be paid out to you for editing and completing Irwin Isaac Meiselman’s work in progress on the subject of immigration to America.”

  A joke, right? I think. Someone’s pulling my chain. Yet I never told anyone but my wife about Meiselman.

  “There are other stipulations,” Frankel continued. “The completed book is to bear the name Irwin Isaac Meiselman alone on the title page. The book is also to be copyrighted in his name, with all royalties going to the Irwin Isaac Meiselman Estate.”

  “Mr. Frankel,” I say, “I think you should know that I scarcely knew Mr. Meiselman. I also know nothing out of the ordinary about immigration, to America or anywhere else. Much as I’d like to have the thirty grand, I am in no position to undertake the work needed to collect it.”

  “Interesting,” said Frankel. “In my meetings with him at the St. Francis hospice, Mr. Meiselman led me to believe that you were friends and that you have had a deep interest in his book.”

  “I was not a friend of Mr. Meiselman’s, and it is more precise to say that I had—and continue to have—a nearly complete lack of interest in his book.”

  “Maybe before you make a final decision you do best to visit my office, where Mr. Meiselman’s unfinished manuscript and notes reside in three large boxes. This book, as you must know Mr. Kastell, was everything to Mr. Meiselman.”