by David Adjmi
“How is he?”
Debbie shook her head. “Not good.”
I looked at my father lying unconscious on the hospital bed. He was hooked to tubes that flowed endlessly with pale green mucus suctioned from his throat by a machine.
“You must be exhausted,” I said.
“It’s a lot with the engagement.”
Debbie was toggling my father’s unsteady demise with an engagement party she was preparing for her and Stevie’s daughter, Giselle—a huge deal, as a Syrian mother’s raison was to marry off her daughters; it was true for Claudia Terzi in 1980 and truer still for Debbie—but she was forced to multitask between planning the engagement and tending to my father. In a way, this was where she shone: hospitals, weddings—places where one needed to visibly assume some familial onus. Now that Dad was dying she swooped in for the final coup de grace, but I could sense a contrasting undulation, the pull of some wordless anxiety tugging at her—and ultimately, though she couldn’t speak openly about it, there was the underlying question of whether my father’s death would screw up Giselle’s engagement party. Because it was clear Dad was about to die any minute, and they’d already put down the requisite deposits: the banquet hall, the florists, the caterers. Richie told me Debbie had been to see a rabbi to get the exact ordinances straight: exactly how many days would they have to wait after my father’s death before they could have the engagement party? What was the minimum? Could they do it two days later? Three? If they had to, could they do it the day after the funeral—or was that crass? Every rabbi had a different take. She was lost in a farrago of conflicting details, and I could feel her pulled in different directions.
I realized I hadn’t acknowledged Giselle’s engagement, and now that it was mentioned as a subject, I offered a mealymouthed congratulations. “Thanks, Dave,” replied Debbie, whose eyes looked like they might explode from their sockets. “Did you get your invitation?”
“Not yet,” I said, though I suspected Debbie hadn’t actually sent me an invitation—but that night we each felt the obligation to support each other’s phoniness. There was something very cordial about it, actually.
Debbie left for a meeting she’d scheduled with one of the doctors, so I was suddenly alone with my father. I wasn’t sure what to do—I had no impulse to kiss or talk to him the way I’d seen people do in movies. After a few minutes I decided to go. Just as I was making my exit, a well-dressed, middle-aged man with curly hair and shiny black eyes entered the room. “David?!” he said. “It’s Ronnie!”
I had never seen this man before, and found his enthusiasm jolting.
“Oh, hi,” I said.
Ronnie laughed gruffly. “Whaddaya mean oh, hi? You don’t remembah me? I’m ya cousin, asshole! I used to change ya diaper!” He slapped me on the back and shook my hand. I got a huge whiff of his cologne—bright and citrusy, a real nostril cleaner. “I saw ya play.”
“Oh, you did?”
“I brought my wife. We liked it very much.”
“Thank you. Thanks a lot.”
“I mean, there were some problems,” he said. He cocked an eyebrow and swayed back and forth, like a boxer reading a punch. “There were problems, if you don’t mind my saying, in the third act.”
“Right,” I said.
“You need to do some rewriting in that part. But, ya know, it was overall well done.”
“Well, thanks again,” I said. “It’s good seeing you.”
“My wife’s a writer,” Ronnie said—and now I feared this might go on for a while. “She writes short stories. She takes classes at uh, whaddayou call it . . . not the New School, the othah one. She’s like you, very artistic. Not the norm. You two would like each othah.”
“I’d like to meet her.”
“She’s more mainstream than you,” he added. “You’re a controversial person.”
I took a deep breath. “Yeah, I’ve heard.”
“Some people are unhappy with you. But you wanted that, right?
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you wanted to be disturbing.”
“I wanted to be truthful,” I told him.
“But your truth is not everyone’s truth.”
“No, it’s not.”
“I’m just saying you’re controversial.”
“I’m just showing what’s in life,” I blurted, the anger rising up quite suddenly. “There’s a difference between being disturbing and exposing aspects of life that are disturbing.”
“It’s not a bad thing.”
“Obviously, you think it is!”
“No.”
“The whole point of theatre is to reveal people to themselves. Not everyone has to like it!”
Ronnie’s eyes suddenly widened. He looked hurt. “But I did like it,” he said. “I think you’re so talented.” There was a sweetness in his voice that short-circuited my anger.
After I apologized for ranting and Ronnie apologized for busting my balls, I went back to the visitors’ area to find Richie—it was time for me to go—but he and Arlene had vanished. The room was packed now; it was a real scene. People were gabbing heatedly and I didn’t know a soul. I wanted to leave, but I was stuck. I sat in a small plastic chair and nibbled a slice of kosher pizza covered with a dull sheen of grayish cheese and waited. Cousin Linda appeared holding a Birkin and sipping from one of those sixty-ounce sodas they sold at the 7-Eleven. “Aren’t you hot in that shirt? I’m sweating ovah heeh!” She fanned herself briefly with her collar.
“Hey, do you know where Richie and Arlene went?”
“Ca-an,”* said Linda, “I thought they were with you!”
“Maybe I’m better off taking the train home.”
She checked her watch. “The last one leaves in a half hour.”
“You think I have enough time?”
“You gotta leave now. I’ll drive you to the station.”
I hurriedly got my stuff—I’d packed some clothes in a vinyl Target bag I’d been gifted with at some benefit. We walked over to the elevators together, when she turned to me. “Is that your fag bag?” asked Linda with her snaggletoothed smile.
I stopped in my tracks and glared coldly at her.
“Excuse me?”
Linda slapped me playfully on the shoulder, signaling a closeness she imagined we shared. “I’m just sketching!”
I was about to tell her off—I was going to storm off and call a cab—when I noticed the fear in her eyes. She was smiling but her eyes beamed terror. I recognized that fear. It was the fear I carried with me most of my life, the same unanchored terror that followed me everywhere. This recognition was so unexpected, it stemmed whatever outrage was brewing in me, and I felt a surge of empathy for my weird remote cousin. Linda couldn’t comfortably inhabit the world—and I knew what that was like. She was impersonating a woman who was cheerful and urbane and made cute in-jokes to gay people, but underneath all that she had no idea what she was doing, really. This made me feel for her. And as I stood gazing in my cousin’s eyes before the bank of mirrored elevators, under the dull hum of fluorescent long bulbs, fag bag slung over one shoulder, I felt a sudden parallax, a shift in my own conception of myself. Without really knowing it, I’d fought some crazy decades-long battle—and won. I knew I’d won because I no longer felt that terror, that queasy sense that I would always be an impostor in the world. I was able to accept some fundamental oddness in myself. I was a Lot Six—it was the essential, unchanging part of me. I’d grudgingly come to accept this about myself, but it wasn’t until that day in the hospital that I was able to embrace it, that I was able to see clearly how this queerness, this strangeness—which wasn’t just about being gay, because my alterity was deeper and weirder than that—had actually saved me. I’d always wanted a comfortable life where I could fit in, but I would never fit in, because I was a Lot Six: it was my suffering and my redemption. It made me a writer. It gave me a play at Lincoln Center. It gave me a life. It turned my nightmares into dreams.
; Arlene dug her fork into a tiny rectangle of pommes dauphinoises.
“And I’m hysterical crying in the middle of the street—”
“What street?”
“Ma,” said Arlene, “I’m trying to tell you.”
Mom’s cheeks were crimson. She had a gauzy expression from all the Sauvignon Blanc; she was stealthily working her way through a whole bottle.
“I thought you went to Stevie’s house?”
“Mommy, I ran out of the house, you’re not listening to me.”
“Uch, I’m busting,” said Mom, who interrupted everyone constantly and floated from subject to subject with no segue, it was just how she was. She pushed a pinkish hunk of meat to the edge of her plate. “You want to take the leftovers home, Dave?”
I lightly rolled my eyes. I’d eaten too much already.
The shiva for Dad ended that day, and to help along our convalescence, Mom took Arlene and me for dinner at the swanky Minetta Tavern in the West Village. We all shared a giant platter of côte de boeuf—a splurge, but my mother could afford the indulgence now. She sold the house—Dad did ultimately take her to court, but she won it as part of the settlement—and was renting a sweet one-bedroom on the Upper West Side, where she had all the culture she wanted. She was near the museums, Zabar’s. She quit her receptionist job and joined the Reebok gym. She bought a swanky computer and took classes at the Apple Store to learn how to work the internet. She found some Canadian black-market operation online that sold cartons of cigarettes at a discount. She fed birds in Central Park with bread she crumbed by hand. The birds fluttered to her, they adored her—they festooned her limbs, fringed the length of her outstretched arms like she was a statue of St. Francis.
My mother found peace, the peace she’d been searching for all her life.
Mom paid her respects to Dad; she went to the shiva a few days earlier with her sisters, but I skipped out on all of it. The funeral was held in Jersey the morning he died at nine sharp, and I’d only woken up at eight thirty, and they refused to wait for me. Once I missed the funeral, it seemed pointless to go down for the rest. I didn’t want to publicly grieve a father I barely knew with a bunch of people I barely knew. And what would I even grieve? In some sense my father was still alive for me when he died; he was still the same phantom self, living in his same phantom zone. His death wasn’t really final—it was more a nonexponential decay, like radioactive chemicals undergoing half-life.
Arlene had been there for all of it, though, and the details she shared about the funeral over dinner were harrowing.
An hour or so before the ceremony my father’s immediate family convened at Stevie’s house to drive over together. I didn’t know these people, but Arlene did—she was expecting a bittersweet reunion, but everyone was cold and distant. No one hugged, or consoled, or even spoke to her. For comfort, she tried turning to Debbie, but Debbie was in her own private hell, for after all her hand-wringing and preemptive courses of action, as if by some diabolical postscript of his existence, my father died the very morning of Giselle’s engagement party. The deposits were forfeited, everything was wasted—the flowers, the food. Debbie was too emotionally distraught to comfort Arlene, so she was really on her own. At one point she caught Aunt Joyce standing behind her, laughing and making corkscrew spirals with her index finger to indicate that Arlene was insane—a gesture so shocking and hurtful to my sister that she ran from Stevie’s house to some semiprivate area outside near the curb to sob, at which point Claudia Terzi’s daughter, Betty (who ended up marrying some other guy but was now divorced and single with kids she couldn’t support, stresses she couldn’t really sustain) spotted her, and after my sister, in between convulsive sobs, explained what had happened, Betty marched into my brother’s house and raised hell: “This woman’s father just died,” she said. “She needs solace, not ridicule!” Betty put them all in their places,* and Arlene thought that would be the end of it. She drove to the funeral home without incident—but when she arrived, more Syrians clustered around her to critique her for being a bad daughter and a rotten person.† Our cousin Sherry adjured her to “beg your father’s corpse for forgiveness.” Sherry’s mother joined in, urging Arlene to “kiss your father’s casket” because it’s “not too late to atone.” Arlene was too weak to respond—she couldn’t tell them she had a horrible pathological lying father who cut her out of his life because she was divorced and had shitty clothes. She just sobbed and nodded. But the very instant the funeral ended she bolted from the funeral home—she had to get away from these people. A small phalanx of cousins and aunts chased after her shouting, “Arlene! Arlene!” but she outran them.
At the shiva Arlene shakily navigated people’s under-the-breath obloquy, braced for the judgmental once-overs as she prepared crudité platters or made radial cuts in a cantaloupe, for she was the much bruited-about “bad daughter” who lacked solicitude and filial warmth and treated her father like shit. She said that when anyone asked of my whereabouts, Debbie violently denounced me, loudly decrying that my PLAY WAS DISGUSTING and that she HOPED I FAILED and to NEVAH MENTION MY NAME IN HER HOUSE AGAIN! I knew she was exhausted, and traumatized from the botched engagement, and that she felt an overarching compulsion to police the respects people did or didn’t pay to my father, but it hurt to hear.
As she relayed the events of the week, my sister looked like she’d been in a catastrophic accident. Every so often while speaking she’d freeze—the muscles in her face would constrict like she was about to sneeze—then she’d burst into hysterical sobs. The sobbing would last a few seconds, then the anguish would disappear completely, and she’d continue where she left off, as though nothing happened. It went on like that all night, the alternating currents pulsing and shifting inside her like a botched electrical system. The narrative branded upon her by her family was so punishing, so unfair, but at the same time she couldn’t help but see herself as this rancid piece-of-shit daughter. Arlene’s entire sense of self was still bound up with my father. She was even living in his old apartment—the one on Kings Highway he’d given her before moving to Deal—and it still had the phantasmal trace of his presence: the 80s mirrored closets, the then-modish marble floors, palimpsests of the era, but now it was falling apart like the rest of her life. The elevators were teeming with roaches, doors were coming off hinges, squares of marble bulged up from the floor. Arlene had become a ghost of a life he’d built for her—but this was in some way true of all my siblings.
Stevie had become a facsimile of my father. Richie was still working to be obedient and pious: he’d slipped into that numbingly predictable pattern of men who became religious when their fathers died. He was being hectored to grow a beard and join a group of men from the synagogue, where Stevie was still president, to pray for my father’s soul to “ascend to heaven.” (Some rabbi told them the soul was stuck in some interim cosmic layer, and that without continual chants and prayers, it would stay stuck for all eternity.)
My feelings about my father were complicated, but listening to her, I was grateful that I’d removed myself from that cycle. I felt badly for my sister, though. By the time Arlene was finished unpacking for us all the horrible anecdotes and details around the shiva, she was drained. She excused herself to go to the restroom. My mother shook her head. “A girl’s father dies and this is how her own family treats her?”
“I dodged a bullet, I guess.”
“You did, honey,” she said. “You never belonged with these people. That’s why I kept you away from them. I wanted you to have a good childhood.”
“Well, we know how that turned out,” I said, snickering at my little joke—but when I looked up at my mother she wore a stolid expression. Without taking her eyes off me, she drew herself majestically up in her seat. She sat with her absurdly perfect posture, staring at me from across the table. “You had a good childhood,” she said, with an odd sternness in her tone.
“No, I didn’t.”
I was still smiling from my joke, b
ut the smile felt like a relic from some other conversation. We sat in silence for a moment, just looking at each other.
Then, in a sudden mutinous burst, she mashed her fists against the table: “It was a great childhood!”
My mother’s face shone a pale lunar white. There was a strange mixture of alacrity and deadness in her eyes.
“Mom,” I said, “I did not have a great childhood.”
“You were very happy,” she insisted.
“I wasn’t happy.”
“Yes you were.”
“No, I was suicidal from the age of eight. I thought about killing myself all the time.”
“You did?”
“And remember in college I bought all those sleeping pills?”
She was anxiously fingering her necklace, rolling one of the coral stones between her thumb and forefinger. “I don’t remember that,” she said. There was a compelling gloss of self-reproach in her expression. Then a hint of a smile broke through—and, as if obeying some inscrutable maternal instinct, she leaned toward me: “Well, you know how I am,” she said. “I block things out.” She began to laugh. The laugh felt disarmingly intimate—an inside joke between us from some long-buried past. There was something so charming about her ability to poke fun at herself. Even though I was upset, I found myself laughing along with her, I couldn’t help it.
She took a sip of wine, gazed at the grid of caricatures above our booth. Her smile dissipated slowly but not completely. She looked around the room. I could sense her uprooting the parts of the night she wanted to keep as memories, editing and retouching like they did in the movies: captionless photographs of smiles and dim light. Black specks of Tahitian vanilla in rich custard. The pleasant din of voices. A feeling of contentment and beauty and pleasure.