“Suit yourself,” I said out loud, and made thirteen free throws in a row before Elaine called me in for dinner.
IF ALEC WAS angry with me for the rest of the week, I was too busy to notice it. After a slow postholiday start to things, by Friday the New Year had reached normal levels of calamity, and that night I was in the hospital until just past ten. I came home and collapsed, balling my tie up in my fist and tossing it across the bedroom, then undoing all my buttons. The house was quiet, the rooms were dim, and I tilted my head up to the ceiling and thought about just passing out like that, still dressed, a Weejun dangling off my toe.
“You all right?”
“What?”
“You look like a corpse.” Elaine must have been holed up somewhere downstairs; she came into the bedroom with a smear of chocolate on her chin and sat down next to me on the bed. I licked my finger and wiped it off.
“I just had a little,” she said. “I shouldn’t even keep it in the house.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“I know what you’re thinking.” But she didn’t. The phone rang and I reached over her to pick it up. I was awake enough again. My wife’s whole face smelled like chocolate.
“Dr. Dizinoff? Pete? It’s Arnie Craig.”
“Arnie,” I said, wondering again what the point was of paying for an unlisted number. “How you doing?”
“I’m good, good,” Arnie said, although the embarrassment in his voice told me otherwise. “I’m sorry to be bothering you at home, Doc. On a weekend.” The necessary preamble; he wasn’t sorry so much as ashamed.
“It’s not the weekend yet, Arnie. What can I do for you?”
He let out his breath, relieved. When patients called me at home, I did my best to be cordial, knowing that their anxiety almost always outweighed the importance of whatever they were interrupting. Most of the time, there was at least a semijustifiable reason to worry, enough reason to call 911, in fact, but the home callers either had a pathological fear of ambulances or emergency rooms or were familiar enough with me to know that I’d treat them kindly. Spiking fevers, worrisome rashes, diarrhea, water in the ears.
“It’s Roseanne,” Arnie said. “She’s locked herself in her room, sobbing. She’s been sleeping all day — all week, actually. I don’t know, it’s not like her,” he said. “She’s just been so, so unlike herself lately. I’m worried,” he said. “I didn’t know who else to call.”
This was a matter for a psychiatrist, and I told him so. I used to be wary of suggesting mental health treatment, especially to burly guys with Jersey accents, à la Monsieur Craig—whatever general distrust these types had of doctors usually went triple for shrinks. But it was going on eleven, and I wanted to take my socks off. “A good psychiatrist will sort this all out.”
“There’s other things, too, though, Doc.” Arnie wouldn’t let me off so easily. “She lost a little more weight. I noticed because she doesn’t have much of an appetite — I was watching. I didn’t mean to interfere with her privacy, but we even brought in lobsters the other night, from John’s Fish, you know, and she wouldn’t touch them. It was strange. My girl always liked to eat.”
“Well, to be honest, it sounds like a bout of depression, Arnie,” I said. “Loss of appetite, mood swings, it’s all part of the game. But it’s very easily treatable — there are all sorts of medicines. Very fixable. I really recommend that you see —”
“But what does she have to be depressed about? Is it still that boyfriend?”
“It doesn’t necessarily have to be about anything, Arnie,” I said, wondering how there could be anyone left in Bergen County who hadn’t seen a Paxil commercial.
“I’m sorry?”
“Look, Roseanne’s a young girl in a transitional time. She doesn’t know what she wants to do with her life, just made a big move back to the East Coast when she thought she was going to build a career in California. She has a lot to worry about. It’s a difficult adjustment for her. But I think, with some counseling, she’ll really be fine. Call Round Hill Psychiatric in the morning. They’re a wonderful practice, all of them. Owen Kennedy specializes in young adults—maybe Roseanne will want to see him.”
“I thought about taking her to work with me,” Arnie said. “To the lot in Paramus tomorrow. Rosie’s good with business, you know, and I thought if I gave her something to do, something to focus on, but my wife said she wasn’t sure if that was the best thing. But I think I need to keep her busy, don’t you think so, Doc?”
“That could be good.” I sighed. Keep her busy. Just try to relax. Put on the Barry White and let nature take its course. “But first she needs some mental health attention, she really does. It doesn’t mean she’s crazy if she goes to a psychiatrist,” I said, doing my best to soothe without condescending. “It only means she needs a little bit of help.”
Elaine gave me an “another crazy patient?” look; I shrugged at her and felt a surprising stab of sadness for spunky, miserable Roseanne and her confused galoot of a father.
“I don’t know much about shrinks,” Arnie confessed.
“They’re nice guys, Arnie. They’ll take great care of her.”
“Okay,” he said. “We’ll call tomorrow.”
Elaine was still looking at me. I looked away. “You take it easy, Arnie, okay? Roseanne’s gonna be all right.”
“Thanks, Doc. You, too.” And we hung up, and I closed my eyes, and exhaustion washed back over me like a tide.
Elaine lay down next to me and I could feel her warm body along the length of mine, feel her gearing up to say something. Any chance I could pass out before she opened her mouth?
“The car’s making funny noises.”
“The car?” I kept my eyes closed. Elaine drove a three-year-old Saab 9000 for which she’d gamely learned to handle a clutch, but the thing was a sled, useless in snow, rain, even distant thunder.
“Like this sputtering noise all week. Like a sort of—” She pressed her lips together and made a floppy sound with her tongue.
“I just had Arnie Craig on the phone. I could have asked him about it.”
“He’s a mechanic?”
“A car dealer.”
“So what does he know?”
“He knows cars.”
“I’ll take it in to the mechanic on Monday,” Elaine said.
“Good idea.” We were reconciled. I felt her remove my shoes, my socks, unbuckle my belt. We still hadn’t made love in this New Year. Which was dangerous: ever since her illness, no matter the other distractions in my life, I’d tried to be as conscientious as a Boy Scout about having sex with my wife. I didn’t want her to feel unattractive, in any way less than desirable, when she was so prone to feeling that way without any interference from me. If I told her I was really too tired to do it, I’d set off a night of recriminatory panic. Not worth it. But still, as she lifted my undershirt and rubbed her manicure up and down my chest, I couldn’t imagine how I was going to gird myself.
“You wanna?” she whispered, easing me out of my boxer shorts.
“Elaine,” I whispered back, noncommittal.
She kissed me. My wife approached sex with the same competence and enthusiasm with which she approached throwing dinner parties, as a taxing but ultimately pleasurable chore, and something that should be done regularly for the sake of a healthy marriage. “Is that a yes?”
“Sure,” I said, mustering whatever energy I could dig.
“Have you been good?” she asked me.
I nodded. This would help. “I’ve been very good,” I answered chastely.
She smiled and shrugged out of her utilitarian underwear. For some reason, when making love to my wife, I liked to retreat to a little boy persona and often came within ten seconds whenever she started cooing that I was a “good boy.” “Good boy,” she would whisper, as I thrust and pumped on top of her (or behind her, or underneath; Elaine was as cheerful as a cheerleader about assuming whatever position I wanted). “Good boy,” she would
murmur into my hair. “Good boy.” And she would sigh and draw a finger down my back.
“I want to be a good boy, I want to be a good boy.” Which was true, which was all I’d ever wanted.
“Help me be good,” I would beg her. “Please, please, help me—” And then blast, it was over.
But tonight, after she’d sat astride me for all of five minutes, I considered attempting to fake it—did she really have to know? — and then to my surprise I sputtered out a small orgasm; satisfied, my wife climbed off me. She and I made love like the sexual revolution had never happened; my satisfaction supported her sense of herself as a woman, and even if only one of us came (that would be me), we could usually both go to sleep content.
“I love you,” she whispered, kissing my sandpapery neck.
“Me, too,” I said, and I fell asleep, my clothing piled like sandbags all around my spent body.
CHAPTER FIVE
IF YOU HAD asked me a week or two previous, I would have told you there were very few things I’d be less likely to do on a perfectly reasonable Saturday than shlep to Manhattan and spend twenty dollars on art, especially since (and whether I’m saying this out of fatherly pride or ignorance I’d rather not examine) I could see the same sort of stuff or better just by heading over to the studio above my very own garage.
“Twenty dollars,” Iris marveled as we lined up behind a tour group of Swedes. “Is it just me, or does that take nerve?”
“What do they do about tourists who come from countries where twenty dollars is, like, a week’s worth of wages?” The Red Menace, dressed entirely in camouflage, a flak jacket and a tight little miniskirt, scowled at the entire lobby.
“Those kinds of tourists probably don’t make it all the way to New York,” said Laura gently. “Or if they do, they’re not the ones who only make twenty dollars a week.”
Amy turned her scowl to Laura, but she was already floating away to an art installation near the coat check. Thirty years old, but her father was going to pay her way—well, I suppose that was the family dynamic and I shouldn’t notice, but … I watched her tilt her head, purse her lips at a canvas streaked with red, green, a constellation of sparkling gold bullets. Laura was dressed in dark cords and a dark, long-sleeved T-shirt, her hair back—again, she reminded me of a graduate student, astigmatic, poverty-stricken, pale from too much time in the stacks. I watched as she considered the bullet painting, and I wondered what she saw. I would have turned to ask my son, the expert, but he had already gone to stand next to her. Evidently I was buying his ticket, too.
“I think they like each other,” Iris said to me as she pocketed her credit card.
I shrugged and turned to the lip-pierced kid behind the register. “Two, please.”
The first few floors of MOMA — a building, by the way, designed to make the average shlub from New Jersey feel like the average shlub from New Jersey, all vertiginous white walls and odd angles and don’t-even-think-about-it-buster guards idling along the doorways—were jammed with the sort of exhibits I would have made fun of if it had been just Joe and me, if everyone else had stayed home. A group of paintings called The Four Seasons, which looked, each of them, like the floor of a sloppy nursery school. Some kind of oil painting that turned out to be only partly an oil painting, and partly an octopus shape made out of—wait for it—elephant dung. A canoe hanging from the ceiling stuck with five thousand arrows.
“What do you think of that?” I whispered to Joe, pointing upward to the canoe. The seven of us were all still doing our best to stick together, moving as a slack cohesive unit from one baffling artwork to the next.
“I think it’s—”
“Commentary,” said Amy, who’d overheard.
“On?”
“Well, it’s a canoe, right? Transportation for indigenous people from the Eskimos to the Polynesians.”
“Yes,” Joe agreed.
“But it’s hanging above us. And it’s pierced with arrows,” she said. “What do you think all those arrows represent?” Ah, the Socratic method; I remembered it from medical school.
“Modernity?” Joe guessed.
“White people?” I asked.
“Colonialism.” Amy triumphed, putting her left hand on her narrow hip. “The destruction of traditional cultures, cultures native to the ground they were found on, by mostly European forces bent on stealing wealth and kidnapping labor to promote their own imperial ends, and fill their war chests, too. So they could battle their European neighbors, you know? England versus Spain, the Dutch versus the English, the French versus the English. Did you ever really consider where the tools and the wealth to fight the Armada came from?”
“I guess I didn’t,” Joe said. He sounded guilty.
“Exactly,” Amy said. We went quiet then, the three of us, staring at the canoe. I couldn’t help thinking what it would feel like if one of those arrows dropped down and boinked me on the head. It would probably smart like nobody’s business.
“I suppose now it would be a decent analogy for the war in Iraq,” Amy reflected. “This canoe, I mean.”
“Really? They use canoes in Iraq?”
She shook her head at me, but pityingly: I was only a shlub from New Jersey worried about being boinked on the head.
“Haven’t you heard of the Iraqi marshes?” she asked. “One of the treasures of the Middle East? A nature preserve for dozens of types of fish, and birds, the sacred ibis, the African darter? The homeland of the Marsh Arab people? It was drained by Saddam during the war with Iran, and with the ongoing warfare there, efforts to restore the wetlands have proved totally unsuccessful.”
“Right, right, right,” I said, but Neal ushered her away before she could tell us anything else, leaving Joe and me to feel oddly delighted by her imperial little dressing-down. “That’s one heck of a girl there, huh?”
“And have you noticed how short her skirt is?”
“Amazing.”
“Truly.”
We wandered over to the next piece of art.
Minutes later, as we moved into a room full of video screens and desecrated American flags, my twitchy eye found Alec and Laura. They were standing together as they moved from piece to piece, but they weren’t really saying much, and I couldn’t tell, from the respectful distance I tried to keep, whether their silence was awkward or familiar, a mutual understanding that in the presence of great art, it’s better not to say a word, or a simple lack of any idea what to say to each other. Alec, every so often, would mutter something, and Laura would tilt her head at her grandfather’s angle, but they really didn’t seem to be sharing too much, and they certainly weren’t touching, which seemed meaningful.
After forty minutes or so of pretending to understand the first-floor installations (at twenty bucks, we weren’t about to dismiss a single exhibit), we meandered upstairs to the deco furniture and modernist housewares. In the front part of the first room, by the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Fifty-third Street, a Jaguar E-Type sat on a platform, shiny like glass and absolutely useless in the middle of all this wacky art. It was like seeing an embalmed thoroughbred. The four gentleman in our company stood in front of the car and mourned.
“One day,” Neal said. “Seriously. One day I’m gonna have a car just like that. How much do you think that baby costs? Like, half a mil?”
Half a mil?
“What’s the point?” Alec prickled. “It’s not like there are any roads you can drive something like that on. That car’s meant for speedways and the autobahn and that’s it. If you can’t drive it ninety, don’t bother.”
“Or,” I suggested, “maybe you’re supposed to drive it really slow, preferably somewhere like Rodeo Drive or Monte Carlo, so that everyone can admire it. Like James Bond.”
“That’s ridiculous. What’s the horsepower on this thing?” Alec seemed to be getting mad; I patted his arm, but he shrugged me away. I supposed he was getting nowhere fast with Laura. “If you’re gonna have a car like this, you should
drive it like it’s supposed to be driven,” he said. “Otherwise you might as well stick it in a museum.”
“I really am gonna have one of those things one day,” Neal murmured.
“Will you take your old man for a ride?” Joe asked. “Especially if you’re gonna go spinning through Monte Carlo like James Bond?”
“Sure,” Neal said. The kid was impossible to tease. He wanted to touch the car, I could tell. He wanted to bend over and lick the glassy paint job.
“You’ll never drive a car like that, no offense, Neal,” Alec said. “I don’t even think they make them anymore.”
He shrugged. “So then I’ll find one,” he said, “on the Internet. On eBay.”
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
“Dude,” Neal said. “They sell everything on eBay.”
At this, Joe and I grinned at each other and left to turn one more 360 around the gallery. I didn’t know how Joe could have spawned a kid quite as unlike himself as Neal—what odd coupling of helixes had produced such an equal and opposite reaction. And still, sometimes at my late-night darkest, I thought of Neal and Joe and felt a twinge of something like—well, something close enough to envy. To yearning. Neal Stern was brilliant, a good kid with a profitable career in front of him, and a foxy little girlfriend, and never once had he been busted for drugs, nor had his friends stolen a pair of opal brooches from his mother for no apparent reason. And even if he could be a little hard to take sometimes, I couldn’t help admiring his drive, his preternatural assurance about what his life would bring him. But it’s fine, it’s fine, I told myself. Alec will be fine. Lavish a little more patience on him, a little more time, and soon enough he’ll return to school, finish a degree, meet a nice girl, and forge a career, and by the time Elaine and I have traded in the Pearl Street Victorian for an expanded water-view bungalow on Lake George, Alec will be investing in a minivan to bring up the grandbabies for the summer.
(I shouldn’t be so cavalier about it. This was — and is — my truest, most deeply longed-for fantasy. It’s so simple. It shouldn’t be so hard. It’s what everyone we know wants, too.)
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