My body played a bunch of points while my head thought again about all these lies I was telling everyone. The amount of explaining I’d have to do if I was ever caught just kept growing and growing. Then my thoughts made their first turn to You-ey. He’s innocent and in custody. I’m guilty and playing ping-pong. As my hand kept mechanically guiding the paddle toward the ball, I cooked up a stopgap rationalization, just something to hold me a while: Let the fucking Holocaust denier rot in jail.
Charlie put away the game-winning point with his rubbery-armed forehand, and I shifted right into off-the-meter enthusiasm. “Great shot, Charlissimo!”
Charlie did his hysterical impression of an NFL wide-receiver celebrating in the end zone. Then I told him I had to go to the bathroom and he says, “Mention my name. You’ll get a good seat!”
That’s a line my mother recently started saying to the kids. Where the hell did she come up with that?
On my way to the bathroom, I poked my head in on Alyse. She was working on her website. I was about to tell her Charlie seemed fine, and ask her if she had any theories on why Esme left out the words “buffalo-nosed” when telling me what You-ey said. But my eyes drifted to Alyse’s neck and to the tufts of hair that escaped her sloppy bun, pulled up inside a purple scrunchy. I just gazed at that little spot on her neck, kind of amazed there could still be such aesthetic miracles for me to catch for the first time. I guess another fascination was that, zoomed in on the one spot, I could have been looking at a fifty-year-old woman or a sixteen-year-old girl.
I went with the sixteen-year-old girl because, I think, I always felt a little cheated by not knowing Alyse for the first nineteen years of her life.
II.
Oh, shit. Sorry, Commie.
“Hello? Oh, hi, Phil. What’s up?’
“Oh. How is he?”
“Oy gevalt.”
“There’s nothing you can do.”
“Actually, I’m visiting a friend at a different hospital. Well, it’s not really a . . .”
“No.”
“No.”
“Okay Phil, I’ll catch up with you later. Thanks for the update.”
The great thing about not having a wife and kids would be the freedom to turn off my phone without feeling like a goddamn fugitive. Jesus, I remember when people started getting car phones. I used to say I’d never get one. Then I got one and said I would never walk around with a phone on my person. Now I’m tied to this fucking thing like you are to your colostomy bag.
Maybe a tad harsh on that analogy.
That was Phil Burton, a podiatrist from New Haven, an asshole I’ve met a bunch of times. He went to the hospital to see Richie Waddle, who is apparently delivering his seminar in an ICU psych ward without needing any notes.
Can you tell me why the fuck this Burton guy felt it necessary to call and tell me that? People love spreading bad news. I remember when Boris Yeltsin died. One of my patients blathered to me, “Did you hear Boris Yeltsin died?”
I said, “Yeah, I heard,” and the guy actually looked disappointed.
Anyway, my mind-blown gaze at the back of Alyse’s neck sent me to the bathroom with swirling thoughts.
Or, more accurately, it sent me to my bathroom.
For our twentieth anniversary, I had called Bennie Liotta, the contractor I mentioned before, and had him add on a separate bathroom for Alyse. It seemed like a great gift to her but, if I’m being honest with myself, it was a gift for me. I was reaching the point in life where my digestive system was starting to invent a whole new set of sounds and smells and, of course, I didn’t want Alyse to know I had the same repertoire of disgusting bodily functions as everyone else on Earth. So, a few months of construction, and I was happily quarantined in the old bathroom, a safe distance from Alyse’s brand new headquarters.
Again, my thoughts clicked off all I had to lose. All I had to do to ruin my life was follow the path my lifelong instincts would dictate: namely, wipe my ass, wash my hands, go to the police, confess my crime, and accept the life-toppling consequences. I could almost feel myself doing it, steeling my nerves, overriding my panic, and accepting my compulsion to be good. After all, how hard is it to do the right thing?
But then a weird, new feeling surfaced in me. You ever hear those stories about some guy who gets shot in the head and all the bullet does is change his behavior? In fact, I think I read about some kid who had that OCD thing, where he washed his hands ninety times a day, and then, when he finally couldn’t take it anymore, he put a gun to his head, pulled the trigger, and woke up with his whole world intact minus the OCD. Wild, huh? Anyhow, without the hassle of putting a bullet in my head, the human instinct of resentment resurfaced in me.
Suddenly, I’m sitting there staring down at the Turkish Kilim throw rug on the blue and green tile floor: Fuck it. I’m not throwing over my life for this. So I chucked a bottle through a plate glass window and someone else got blamed for it. The someone else is a rabidly anti-Semitic Holocaust denier. Let him have his karma shoved up his ass. What do I care?
See? When it’s convenient, I can really get into being Jewish. Another funny thing is, you don’t tend to feel as bad about screwing over some Eastern European as you would if he was black or Latino or Asian or even Arab. At least no one can accuse you of being racist. Those Slavs and Serbs provide a big service. They supply everyone else a guilt-free victim.
The phone rang while I was on the toilet which, for some reason, I find incredibly invasive, exacerbated by Alyse letting it ring three times before grabbing the phone two inches away from her. I heard the words, “Oh my God,” and turned the water on in the sink.
My definition of “a moment’s peace” gets narrower and narrower.
Anyway, the second I got out of the bathroom, Alyse appeared to tell me that Meri Katzen had called.
“What couldn’t wait for dinner tonight?”
“She had some news.”
“Of course she did.”
“Word got out about You-ey, and a bunch of Orthodox were waiting at the police station for the cops to take him in. When they pulled him out of the police car, they started chanting ‘Never Again! Never Again!’”
“Oh my God. It was one store window—that’s it!”
“Apparently, someone threw a bottle of horseradish at You-ey.”
“Mossad?”
“Stop grooming fleas. I didn’t ask the brand.”
“Did they arrest the guy—or woman—who threw it?”
“They took someone into custody for like ten minutes.”
“I’m sure the synagogue will deal with the perpetrator in its own way. Throwing things on Shabbat has to be some kind of infraction, don’t you think?”
That’s when a look came over Alyse that I’d hardly ever seen. Her left eyelid shuddered on its own, her facial muscles ticked to atrophied places. Her complete control over her world was wobbling for the first time in forty years.
On the other hand, I felt calmer than I could remember. Flat and fluid, I asked, “What’s wrong, hon?”
“I don’t know. You find all this funny, but I’m a little freaked. All this stuff is happening; cops, arrests, riots.”
“Riots? Alyse, I don’t know what Reuters said, but it doesn’t sound like what happened at the police station was a riot.”
“If a bunch of people get together and chant and throw things, then it’s a riot.”
“Come on, Alyse. Rodney King was a riot. This is . . . it’s nothing.”
“It’s not nothing. It might be nothing if we weren’t involved, but we are. We’re part of this, this incident, whatever, and it feels like it’s getting bigger and bigger and closer and closer.”
“You’re really taking this too personally.”
“I can’t help it! I got off the phone with Meri, and it all just came rushing down on me. Cops are showi
ng up at our house, questioning us, making accusations, scaring Charlie. Esme hears her first anti-Semitic slur. The slur comes out of the mouth of my client, who makes everyone in this whole quiet town suddenly out for blood. These things start swirling around and, I’m telling you, this is how innocent people get . . .”
Without a wisp of concern in my voice, I said, “What? Get what? Put in jail and finally exonerated eighteen years later because of DNA evidence? No, Alyse, it’s not going to happen to us. This isn’t Mississippi in the ’50s. We’re not going to wind up in ‘To Kill a Kosher Mockingbird.’ We live in Long Island, where people like us run things. This is nothing, and it’ll all fade away before you know it. Just take it easy.”
At this point, Alyse lost it. I mean, she went into uranium-enriched yelling: “I don’t want to take it easy! I want all this to stop! I don’t like what the fuck’s going on! Since you got home Friday night, the whole world has flipped over. You, the one who was getting panic attacks from the sight of the Grand Central Parkway, are suddenly Mr. Calm when there’s a real reason to panic. Is this the new you? Your middle-aged Zoloft phase where nothing bothers you anymore? Well, I’m sorry. It’s a little late for you to be test-driving new personalities, and I don’t want any part of them. I’m scared shitless about everything’s that’s going on, and it’s sure as hell not helping me to know that I’m totally alone now.”
Alyse started crying in a spastically pained way I’d never seen before. Alyse doesn’t cry much, and so it was doubly affecting. Seeing her so, I don’t know, pathetic . . . right then and there, I switched gears and confessed to Alyse that I threw the bottle through the window.
III.
Jesus, Commie. Can I at least get a lifted eyebrow on that twist of the story?
If you would just raise your eyebrow out of some tiny nod to our presence on this Earth and how surprises keep happening even when your life is built around the concept of “the same old shit,” then I’d be more willing to tell you the truth: I did not tell Alyse that I threw the bottle.
I told you I never told this story to anyone right from the get-go and I haven’t. I don’t even know why I told you I told Alyse the truth. Maybe just to throw in a left turn that would blow the whole story for you and make you wake up and tell me to get the fuck out of your hospital room. Or maybe, in my own head, that moment of Alyse, crying in my arm, was the one moment when I could have or should have shared this secret with her instead of just shlepping it around with me all alone for the rest of my life.
So, I repeat, Commie: I did not tell Alyse I threw the bottle. You still have the exclusive.
Instead, I just told her to cry. “It’s okay. Go ahead and cry. Let it out. Just keep on crying. It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.”
It’s rare that my first instincts are correct, but that was an inspired choice. Alyse hugged me in a way more desperate than I could have ever imagined, her head in my chest, her hands flush on my back, frothing tears.
I tightened my grip to assure her I wasn’t the emotionally flat-lined zombie she accused me of being. In a weird way, the biggest emotion I was feeling at that moment was—well, I felt kind of good. Remember, I told you how great it’s been to know this secret that no one else knows? How it makes me feel vaguely above it all? Holding her like that was the first time I really felt it. The poised superiority of knowing.
When we finally let each other go, Alyse seemed a little embarrassed by her, what? Outburst? And who could blame her? It wasn’t a role she was used to playing. With little pleats in her face I’d never noticed before, she apologized and said that she didn’t “mean what I said about the middle-aged Zoloft phase.” I, of course, told her it wasn’t necessary to apologize and then I apologized “if I sounded flip about your feelings.” And she said, “Flip? You even have a new vocabulary.” And I said, “Alyse, I’m not—”
She cut me off, saying, “I’m kidding. You’ve said ‘flip’ before, and even if you haven’t, I’m just a little hyper-everything right now, and I think I’ll take a bath.” I told her to take her time. She smiled and, as she walked to her bathroom, she said over her shoulder, “We should have lived in Louisville.”
You wouldn’t get the Louisville reference but, you know what? I’m gonna get back to the Louisville thing a little later. Let me just take a second here to talk about Alyse crying. It seems to me, and this is something I’ve noticed for a long time, that ninety-nine percent of the time an adult cries, it’s all about time gone by. You’re crying because you miss those days when the deceased relative was hale and hearty and filling out his or her airspace on this planet. Maybe you wish you’d appreciated them more. I hug my kids sometimes, stop and look at them, and try to feel the moment, try to appreciate the greatness of that one totally ordinary second and, I gotta say, I never feel what I think I should feel. I mean, smelling the roses or sharing a perfect sunset with the ones you love just never gets me where I want to go or where I think I ought to be going. If you told me I had a week to live, I wouldn’t have the first clue what to do. Maybe I’d just want to die sooner so I wouldn’t have to torture myself over wasting the last week of my life.
Anyway, what I wanted to say was, Alyse was not crying over a long lost past. She was crying about the present, which I found really refreshing. You know, she’s just really alive. That’s one of the big things I love about her.
IV.
Oh. I almost forgot to mention something. While taking my dump, I had a thought: How fast would you have to throw a bottle of horseradish for it to shatter a glass like the one at Nu? Girl Fashions? If you remember from intra-frat softball, I had a fairly strong arm. Not overly accurate—my throws home from center field tended to tail up the third baseline—but I could zing it. So even if my arm was only seventy-five percent of what it was thirty years ago, I could still put some mustard on a throw. And—and!—let’s assume some of the speed I’ve lost on my throws was made up for by the adrenaline rush I felt as I threw the horseradish. My point is, I figured I must have whipped that bottle at least sixty miles an hour.
Well, it turns out, it’s altogether possible I threw the bottle in the low seventies. After Alyse’s meltdown and bath, she took a nap—which she’s really good at—while I dropped Charlie off at Ari Weprin’s house. So, instead of coming straight home, I decided to take a drive. I went south, then west, then north to avoid the yarmulkes, and stopped at a batting cage called “Blew By You Baseball.” Without a thought, I had ended up driving fourteen miles to get to a place maybe three miles from the house. The batting cage is a pretty amazing facility where kids can work on their skills all year round with private instructors. Then again, what the fuck don’t kids have private instructors for these days?
I went there and talked to guy who runs the place, a weathered chunk of humanity named Pete Preston.
“What can I do for you, sir?”
Not wanting to arouse any suspicion, I went into another boring story.
“I was watching some old baseball game on the Classic Sports Channel and I felt this weird nostalgia for baseball. I played as a kid and I wasn’t Reggie or Catfish Hunter, but I wasn’t bad. So anyway, I’ve had this hankering just to hit and throw a few pitches.”
“Just so you can tell yourself that you played baseball again after the age of sixteen?”
“Something like that.”
“Don’t feel weird. I get lots of guys in here like you.”
Wow, I thought, my ability to come up with good lies is starting to seem like a hidden talent.
The place was fairly empty—just four or five kids getting hitting instructions from their coaches. Every kid had the exact same stance and swing. They teach the kids to hardly stride at all nowadays. With my ankle throbbing, I didn’t do much striding either.
I got in the batter’s box and hit against one of those pitching machines. I’ll just tell you that if you ever thought
you could get a hit in a hundred at-bats in the Major Leagues, I assure you, you couldn’t.
“Don’t feel bad, sir. You actually made more contact than most guys your age.”
Then I pitched. I threw easy for a while, coming down lightly on my bum leg. The pain was manageable, so I picked it up, putting more heat on my pitches. The target was a tarp hanging off the back of a cage with a taped strike zone. At my request, Preston clocked my pitches with a radar gun. About ten minutes in, I rocked back and let loose with one that really went thwap! against the tarp. Caught the outside corner too, I might add.
“Whoa!” Preston said, looking down at his gun. “Sir, you hit eighty with that one.”
Of course, my first thought was: Really? I figured that one was at least 95.
Preston said, “Eighty is awesome. Most guys top out somewhere around sixty- five.”
I shrugged and said, “You don’t even get pulled over for that.”
Preston squeezed out a Yeah, like I’ve never heard that joke before smile. But I was happy for that reaction. I didn’t want to stand out in this guy’s my mind. Otherwise, I could just see the court scene: “The defendant came to my batting range and insisted on my using a radar gun to clock how fast he could throw. So, yes, I did have a sense that, in the days prior, he had thrown a small bottle through a rich Jew’s window.”
Commie, I assume you’ve gleaned where I’m going with all this.
Jesus, do I have to spell it out for you?
You-ey Brushstroke is Eastern European. He’s probably never played baseball in his life and, hence, probably throws like a girl. If I could find out the minimum speed it would take to heave a bottle through that window, I could prove that he couldn’t do it, and then he’d be off the hook. That dick cop would have to start all over.
Yes, Commie, I realize it was a little dicey of me to put out any effort toward exonerating You-ey. I thought about that too. I came up with a way of doing it on the sly. If I found exculpatory evidence, I would leak it to Don Graydon at Newsday, off the record on deep background. A privileged source! Nothing could come back to me.
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