It Won't Always Be This Great

by Peter Mehlman

  Arnie paused. “Anyway, you asked how Fumi is. Well, she can’t even talk between whatever anesthesia they’ve got her on and whatever the tube did when they stuck it down her throat. But the second she saw me, she was trying to tell me something, so I gave her a pen and a pad. She writes down, ‘They cut my dress.’

  “They cut her dress? Oh, you mean the doctors. They just cut through clothes when they’re in a hurry—”

  “Exactly. And it was a Junya Watanabe dress. It cost like a grand.”

  “Oh, sorry, I didn’t notice.”

  “Of course you didn’t notice. You’re a guy. But it was a Junya Watanabe dress and Fumi’s writing like a lunatic on the pad that she can’t replace it, they don’t make it anymore, it’s her favorite dress, and then, get this: She wants me to call our lawyer Monday morning and sue the hospital for the cost of the dress plus emotional pain and suffering.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me right.”

  “Jesus. Must be some, you know, dress.”

  “It’s a Junya Watanabe.”

  It was about then that Alyse came back and said, “Am I hallucinating or did I hear you two talking about Junya Watanabe?”

  We explained the situation and Alyse, trying desperately to show some sisterhood with Fumi, said, “It is a shame they’d cut through such a gorgeous dress. They couldn’t just slip it off her?”

  “Oh, hi. Back on your shift, huh?”

  “Yeah, I’m back. Boring Commie to dea—I mean, tears.”

  “Oh, in college we called him Commie. You know, his last name is Moscow, so . . . It’s not important. Let me grab my jacket and I’ll take a walk so you can tend to him.”

  “Really? I don’t know . . .”

  “Oh, okay. I guess.”

  “Oh man . . .”

  “No, it’s just . . . Commie used to do 200 sit-ups a day so . . . Forget it.”

  “Yeah, you too. Have a good one.”

  Seems like a pretty competent health care professional, Commie. Anyway, let’s see. Oh: Another kid was wheeled into the ER then. He’d flipped his car, but he was still conscious, and I overheard one of the EMTs say, “Probably just whiplash.”

  Arnie hugged Alyse and me. We left. And I guess that’s it for that day.

  What am I saying? There is one more thing.

  IX.

  Driving home, we stopped at a light. It was about one o’clock. I know because I had WINS playing low on the radio and, at the top of the hour, they led with an item about the cloned dog that bit off the little kid’s finger. It was the report saying how the local pet shelter had finally been green-lighted to put the dog down until, at the last second, two teenaged Latino kids came forward to adopt it. As you know, the guy at the shelter suspected the kids were gangbangers, so the kids called a lawyer, who called another lawyer, who called a third lawyer, and that’s when everything was put on hold until a judge decided what would be best for the dog: Latinos or death. I remember thinking, Fucking case will probably wind up in the Supreme Court. The kid’s pinkie will have grown back by the time those embalmed judges make a decision.

  At the end of the report, I caught the correspondent say, “Reporting from Hilton Head, South Carolina, I’m . . .” And it crossed my mind then that Clonegate was happening in your neck of the woods but, you know, so what? I just shook my head and was about to tell Alyse I’d been following this dog story, when I saw that she’d fallen asleep. She looked good in the red of the stoplight—sweet, you know? But, as I looked at her, I realized that not all of the red was from the traffic light. Looking around, I found that, from the headlight of a SUV waiting across from us, there was this laser beam that had zoomed in on her face as she slept in the passenger seat, all curled up—her mouth was even hanging open and a droplet of spittle was shining on her lip. I just froze for a minute. This girl I’d spun my entire adult life around was ambushed by a halogen spotlight at the most unattractive moment of her life and I swear, she just looked so goddamn beautiful, I got choked up. That was really big for me, just being in that moment and knowing I was feeling something I was supposed to feel.

  Shit. I mean, don’t you think that, for most guys our age, the deepest feeling of love we feel anymore is, I don’t know, the love we feel for someone who pulls out just when we really need a parking spot?

  Did I mention that I drive a Saab station wagon now? I like it. It’s a non-statement car. I don’t need to have a car that says something about me. I’ll talk. Let the fucking car shut up and drive.

  Anyway, that moment in the car with Alyse sleeping is a moment I go back to a lot now. It steadies me, tells me I’m kind of emotionally healthy. Or, at least, emotionally intact. In a weird way, that moment for me has become something like the one when I saw Jenji’s nipple at the pool—the fifty-year-old’s version.

  The radio didn’t wake Alyse, but her eyes popped open when my cellphone’s little text message alert started beeping.

  She asked, blearily, “Who’s texting you at this hour?”

  Turns out it was Don Graydon, the Newsday reporter, saying, “Your doubtful detective was helpful/interesting. Thanks for the tip. I owe you one.”

  Without looking at Alyse, I told her the text was a wrong number.

  SUNDAY THEN

  I.

  Horseradish Incident Sparks Protest; Suspect Held

  By Don Graydon

  Commie, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen Newsday. It’s a somewhat hifalutin tabloid, but a tabloid nonetheless. The front page has the obligatory headline trying to out-scream the other tabloids, and the local news doesn’t start until about page 20. Graydon’s story was buried at the bottom of the first local page. It wasn’t a particularly long piece, but it felt like forever until it mentioned anything new, like that the police had delved into You-ey’s computer. “Despite an unusually high amount of time spent online, no visits to any anti-Semite-oriented websites were found in his browser history.”

  One police officer—clearly Chris McNeill—anonymously said, “It’s unusual for someone committing a hate crime to not frequent like-minded websites.”

  The only other interesting tidbit was that a seventy-six-year-old woman, Elsie Koppel, had stepped forward to say that she’d dropped a bag of groceries at the scene of the crime around four o’clock and, upon arriving home, had realized she was short a bottle of horseradish. Mrs. Koppel apparently tried to reclaim the bottle and had to be told by police that the condiment to her gefilte fish was evidence in a criminal investigation.

  We had three kids for breakfast that morning. Chelsea Gotbaum had ended up sleeping on the couch. Esme and Charlie asked why she spent the night and, without going into too much detail, Alyse recounted the events of the night before. As Alyse generically described the ER scene, I grabbed the phone. The all-seeing Alyse said, “Honey, maybe you should wait before you call Arnie. It’s only ten and he had a long night.” She was right, of course, so I held off even though I was excited to call him. My entirely new, actually social, best friend role was giving me a big kick.

  We get the Sunday New York Times and so I picked it up (which used to take some effort, though now it’s way thin and the pages are smaller and depressingly manageable). We get an edition with a separate section devoted to Long Island and, apparently, they sent a reporter to the rally:

  Anti-Semitism Finds Chi-Chi Shopping Mecca

  Playing up their angle, the story cited (another) anonymous cop quoting You-ey’s “buffalo-nosed bagel-biters” line. I glanced at Esme happily eating a bagel with cream cheese and nova. Laughing, she grinned in the faces of Chelsea and Charlie, and exhaled: “Don’t you love my fish breath?”

  This sweet little girl’s first in-person brush with the endlessly nasty adult world made our national newspaper. Damn, I thought, just give me one little variety of grown-up poison I can keep my kids shielded
from. Just one.

  Alyse noticed my jaw clench, so I gave her my well-established not-in-front-of-the-kids look. “More coffee, hon?” she said, and got up without waiting for my answer. She grabbed the Krups and poured while reading over my shoulder. If it were a movie, she’d have poured the coffee all over my lap.

  “What’s wrong?” Charlie has hair-trigger anxiety sensors. A tickle of tension in our house and his head whirls like a radar dish.

  “Nothing, kiddo. Why?” I grabbed the sports section. “Huh. The Knicks didn’t even sell out last night for LeBron.”

  “Who wants to see losers? And Dad, you know, even with LeBron, the Cavs aren’t such an exciting team. There are teams in the West who won’t even make the playoffs and they’re more fun than any team in the East. Don’t you think, Dad?”

  Charlie already knew the defusing value of sports. Whenever the shit gets too thick, talk sports. It’s the demilitarized zone for the American male.

  Then Chelsea piped up: “My dad talks about sports whenever I want to talk about . . .”

  That’s when Chelsea saw me stab her with stop signs in my eyes. She did an admirable job rerouting herself. “Well, you know, movies and stuff. Whenever I want to talk about movies or TV shows, my dad wants to talk sports.”

  Charlie went for it: “Your dad’s into sports too? That’s cool.”

  Chelsea gave me a little smile like, Kick-save and a beauty!

  But then Esme picked up on Chelsea’s angle and said, “Sports are the sandbox of life.”

  Charlie shot her a look, then turned to me for help.

  “Ezzie,” I said, “you know what’s the sandbox of life? The beach.”

  Okay. One of my lamer parental moments.

  When breakfast broke up and Chelsea went home with $200 in her pocket, Alyse shook her head and said, “Between Charlie’s sensitivity and innocence and Esme’s growing rebelliousness and false sense of sophistication, this whole balancing act is getting pretty shaky.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “we have to watch every word we say.”

  “I guess.”

  “You guess?”

  “Maybe we’d be better off just going with the truth. Then they won’t be so shocked when the rest of the world just blurts out stuff.”

  “You might have a point there. I mean, just stopping myself from saying fuck or shit in front of them is exhausting.”

  “I’d rather they hear it from us. Or at least with us present. Maybe we should just sit them down and have them watch Taxi Driver, Clockwork Orange, and Last Tango. Just throw them in the deep end of the sex and violence pool.”

  “Gee, honey, you really should write a parenting book.”

  “At least with Last Tango they’d learn some French.”

  “Maybe you’re experiencing some kind of right brain rebellion.”

  “That’s the crazier side of the brain, right?”

  Alyse smiled through an exaggerated exhale.

  I had a thought. When changes are gradual and expected, Alyse, like most people, can handle them with ease. But the sudden ad-libs of life are not her thing.

  Actually, that thought hit me later, after the main events of this story were long over. The alarm on my cell phone chimed in then, a daily reminder to take my Lipitor and Zetia. I have a mental block against taking all these pills, so I need the reminder. Anyway, it dawned on me that, since we’d gotten home so late, I hadn’t recharged my cell. I checked out the battery strength and saw Graydon’s text again. As I hit delete, I noticed it’d been sent at 1:30 AM. That made me wonder, when did he interview that cop, McNeill? Did he meet him in a parking garage, like Woodward and Deep Throat? But, mostly, I thought about how some people—not many, but some—live for their jobs. They sleep and eat just so they can work more.

  You hear these soft rock stations on the radio sell themselves by saying, “We make your workday go faster.” That’s most of the world: people just trying to get through another work day so they can get to whatever it is they like doing. How do guys like Graydon get so possessed? Maybe they don’t have families, so work becomes their whole lives. Come to think of it, Woodward and Bernstein were both divorced during Watergate. Still, even if that were my situation, I’d hate to think of what I’d do with all that solitary time. Or, more to the point, what I wouldn’t do with it. I guess what I’m saying is, I just don’t see myself joining Podiatrists Without Borders.

  Going off and tending to the feet of freedom fighters in some Third World hell hole? I don’t think so. Maybe in college I would have been appalled to know that I would one day be content in a less-than-thrilling life. Even now, when these wars break out in Iraq or Afghanistan, I get a tinge of envy seeing photographers and correspondents reporting from the front. Then they get taken hostage by fanatics with Russian AK-47s who, if they don’t chop their fucking heads off, move them around from one dump of a safe house to another for God knows how long before releasing them thirty-five pounds thinner, and for what? So they can go right back to work.

  What drives these people to take these risks? They act like dying is just another way of re-inventing themselves. Tell me: What makes someone believe their work is worth dying for? Even if they explained it to me, I don’t think I’d grasp it on any kind of meaningful level. I can’t convince myself that death is any better for Martin Luther King Jr. than it is for my father or Ted Bundy.

  So, that’s what I was thinking about that morning. Which was what made me think of you. Which was what led me to call you that morning. The second-to-last time we spoke.

  Or the second-to-last time I spoke and you responded.

  I always thought you lived your life like those kind of people, totally into your work. And, at least for that little chunk of time, I felt similarly neck-deep in something. I know it wasn’t my job, but it was something. I was talking to cops, investigating different kinds of glass, tracking people on the Internet. Of course, I didn’t tell you anything about that on the phone, but at least that feeling was in me. In some small way, I felt like we’d finally be operating on a similar level of passion.

  I’m not explaining this well, but I just felt like calling you.

  And it’s funny, because two minutes into the conversation, you said to me, “Hey, you sound great.”

  That made me feel great. And when you told me that Nick was an awesome nine-year-old b-ball player and we started laughing about having a father-son two-on-two grudge match, it was great. Just catching up and giving each other shit. It was a hell of a lot better than walking around College Park sniffing for memories of a previous life.

  I asked you what you’d been up to work-wise and that’s when you told me you’d just gotten involved in a case in which you were representing a cloned Australian Shepherd. I have to say, I felt great that I was so up on the case. Then you told me that lots of law schools had classes in “non-human animal” rights.

  The only bummer of that conversation is that I wasn’t totally focused on the details of the case you were making on behalf of the dog. And it had nothing to do with your telling me that you could be disbarred for divulging so many details. I was just totally focused on how excited you sounded talking about it. I mean, fifty-whatever and still into it like that.

  I remember thinking: Wouldn’t it be great if enthusiasm really was infectious?

  It reminds me of when you won that moped in a campus-wide raffle and then won $400 in the frat NCAA pool. Everyone told you to buy a lottery ticket because you were on a hot streak, so you bought a ticket but ripped it up on the day of the drawing and never checked the winning numbers, all because you were worried that if you won a million dollars, you’d lose your motivation to accomplish all the things you wanted in life. Everyone thought you were nuts. I thought you were nuts. But now I’m thinking, maybe that’s what genius is: thinking stuff at nineteen that most people don’t know or think about until th
ey’re forty or fifty or whatever age is too late.

  II.

  Anyway, it was a fun conversation we had. Remember we were talking about all the guys from college who were on their second and third wives? You told me that Jeff Silver’s wife dumped him after she caught him doing a black girl, and I said that if you cheat with someone from a different race, it shouldn’t count as adultery and you cracked up, saying, “Only you would say that.” That stuck with me. Only I would say that? I didn’t know you saw me as having a unique point of view. It’s funny how you can spend your whole life without a clue about your own personality. It felt like the best compliment I’d gotten in a long time. I was so happy I’d called you.

  I’m sorry we never got the families together in the Cayman Islands. It would have been great. I meant it when I told you I was definitely up for it. I even told Alyse about it. Yeah. I think I’d have done it.

  Anyway, you should just know that our phone conversation affected me and the story I’m telling you.

  Maybe fifteen minutes after we hung up, there was a knock on the door. Alyse and I got to the door at the same time. I opened it. Nat Uziel, looking more robust than he had since I’d first met him, stood there with his long coat open in the cold weather, holding a bunch of papers on a clipboard.

  “Nat, what a surprise. You met Alyse at the rally.”