It Won't Always Be This Great

by Peter Mehlman

  I answered with a lame joke to make it seem as though I wasn’t worried about anything. “Alyse, this family is crucial to national security. Clearly the FBI knows that.”

  “Really. What are they going to do, taste our food before we eat it?”

  “I doubt it. But Horton put the agent out there, so I’m just thinking we should let them know.”

  “If we don’t, will they think we’re trying to sneak out?”

  “It’s the FBI. Who the hell can understand what they think? Their job is to be paranoid so we don’t have to be. We are cooperating with, I guess they call it ‘an operation.’ So, let’s not look at it with suspicion.”

  “How should I look at it?”

  Commie, I came up with a good answer here, if I must say so myself: “Why don’t you look at it this way? Tonight will be the safest night we’ve ever had in our own home. The FBI is looking over us and nothing bad can happen.”

  Alyse bought it. “I like that.” Then, “I don’t know how you come up with such baloney, but I like it.”

  Of course, nothing bad did happen to us that night. Nothing. Bad. To. Us. Nothing. Bad. In. Our. Home. But even the FBI couldn’t stop the phone from ringing.

  I’m getting ahead of myself, which I really don’t want to do.

  I looked out the front window, saw the bland no-name car across the street with the silhouette of a man inside, and I quickly jogged out.

  Agent Foreman had taken over for Agent Brooks. He looked more like my conception of an FBI agent—dark, steady eyes, a certain calm edge to him.

  Actually, he looked like Lou Piniella.

  I told him we were going out to dinner. He asked where, then said, “Enjoy your meal.”

  I grinned and said, “So, you’re not going to tail us?”

  Foreman didn’t crack a smile. “No. Leave your cell on. You have my number if you need anything.”

  At the left turn lane onto Stratification, we pulled up behind a Maxima with a nasty slalom course crack down the middle of its rear window. From the back seat, Charlie said, “What kind of fish is that?”

  No one knew what he was talking about for a second, and then Alyse saw the Jesus fish above the Maxima’s right taillight. “It’s a symbol for Jesus, Charlie.”

  “Why would a symbol for Jesus be a fish?”

  “To be perfectly honest, I don’t know.”

  “Maybe it’s for good luck. Like Jesus is protecting your car.”

  “That’s a really good guess, Charlie. You’re probably right.”

  Then Esme says, “Jesus didn’t do a very good job. Look at the crack on that window. It’s majorly ugly.”

  “Maybe they put the Jesus fish on the car after the accident.”

  Esme, like an encouraging third parent, said, “You’re probably right, Chuckster. They had the accident and decided they needed help.”

  The light turned green and the Maxima pulled out, then made a u-turn a block later.

  Charlie said, “What do Jews put on their cars for protection?”

  I said, “Well . . .”

  But Esme interrupted. “Jews put on the Mercedes logo.”

  Alyse couldn’t help laughing, and said, “Ezzie, that’s a little cynical.”

  “Mom, do you ever see a Jesus fish on a shiny new Mercedes?”

  “No, I guess not.”

  “Maybe,” Esme said, pausing to collect her socioeconomic thoughts, “maybe religion is mostly for poor people.”

  Charlie said, “Mr. Uziel isn’t poor and he’s super religious.”

  “Good point, Chuckster.”

  Not a bad family discussion. It carried us most of the way to Bongo’s. Alyse and Esme ordered their Chinese chicken salads, I had a hot open-face turkey, and Charlie got a bacon cheeseburger “well done.” That order has some relevance. I’m not totally throwing shit out just to bore you to tears, although some tears at this point would be—

  Before our orders came, my cell rang. I looked down and whispered to Alyse, “It’s that Newsday reporter. I’ll be right back.”

  I walked toward the restrooms and Graydon supplied me a great little tidbit: “So, I was at the courthouse waiting for You-ey to be arraigned, but they got jammed up and had to push it back another day. But, on the way out, I chatted up You-ey’s public defender, who told me he was going to talk to You-ey later in the day, and then he mentions that the jail is so chaotic and crowded, he’s going to have to confer with his client in the prison recreation area. So, I told him he should take a tennis ball and see if You-ey can throw.”

  “That was my idea!” I said, stupidly excited.

  “I know, I know. That’s why I’m telling you. Anyhow, he has a witness come along with him and he videos the throw off his cell phone and, sure enough, You-ey is a total spazz. He couldn’t throw a horseradish bottle through a wet paper bag from ten feet away.”

  “Why didn’t You-ey say that? That he can’t throw?”

  “For the same reason he can’t throw—he never played sports. He has no idea of his capabilities. Or lack thereof.”

  “Wow, that’s great.”

  “I’ve got to write this up. And I’m also working on the racist horseradish company story. That’ll probably come out Wednesday.”

  “I’m making you into a star, Graydon.”

  “I know. Of course, the big question now is: Who did throw the bottle through the window?”

  “God only knows.”

  “Someone other than God must know.”

  “Sure,” I said, “the guy who did it knows.”

  XII.

  I hung up and, on the way back to our table, I cursed myself for saying “the ‘guy’ who did it knows.” I imagined Graydon leaning back in his chair and thinking, Hmm, why did he say guy? How does he know it was a guy?

  The food was on the table, the kids gobbling away.

  “What did the Newsday reporter want?”

  “I’ll tell you more later, but, suffice to say, the case against You-ey is getting weaker by the moment.”

  “Good,” she said, though, on second thought, she added, “If You-ey is really innocent, just imagine the person who really did it. Whoever he or she is, they’re just sitting back and laughing.”

  Jesus. Even Alyse went gender-neutral. What an idiot I am. Luckily, I’m not a paranoid idiot. That two people wondered about the true culprit of the crime within a minute of each other might have led a less stable person to break down and confess. Not me. I chose to focus on being a high-functioning idiot and ate my dinner, over-tipped, and went along on my merry way.

  We piled out of the restaurant, Charlie with a giant jawbreaker pushing out his cheeks. In the parking lot, I watched an old couple negotiate their way into their Lexus 3-series. The wife got behind the wheel, grim-faced, and obviously on a mission. The jack-knifed husband slumped in the passenger seat, helplessness dotting his face like the mumps. Job obsolescence to go along with all the other obsolescence. It just got to me.

  Alyse, omniscient as ever, took my hand and, with a ribbing smile, said, “You drive, honey.”

  “You don’t miss a thing when it comes to me, do you?”

  “I’ve been a little off my game lately, but I feel it coming back.”

  “Good.”

  Actually, I can’t exactly pinpoint what about that scene had gotten to me. I can’t say the sight of that—what’s the right word? Vanquished? I can’t say the sight of that vanquished man was something I could relate to or foresee for myself. Not any time soon, anyway. And it wasn’t that the whole scene instilled me with a sense of dread. It was just strange that the kind of depressing sight I can usually look away from and delete from my hard drive altogether was suddenly haunting me. Even that’s too strong a word. It wasn’t haunting me. It was just there. Remember the music in Love Story, when Oliver is w
alking the streets after the doctor tells him Jenny is dying? Weight-of-the-world music. Sometimes I feel that music, a low bumping rhythm. I felt it on the way home.

  Alyse studied me as I drove and turned on the satellite radio to ’70s pop as if hoping that it would repel whatever was settling inside me. That all sounds like syrupy melodrama, I know. In hindsight, I’d probably like to go even further and say that I had a sense of foreboding. But that would just be morbidly melodramatic.

  Before we pulled into our garage, I saw Foreman sitting in his car. I wondered if he saw this as one of his lamer assignments. And, if so, did he resent it or did he welcome the relative safety of the mission? What did he do in that car? What did he think about? Did some random sound from outside make him realize he’d been dozing off for the last half hour? Trying to get inside Foreman’s head based on my observations of fictional detectives suddenly made me feel a little sick about how many hours I’d spent watching Law & Order.

  The Statistical God: “You spent the equivalent of 27 days of your life watching Law & Order, 1.5472 times more than you spent reading books . . .”

  Actually, without God telling me the exact number, I’d say ninety percent of my lifetime news-watching took place before I hit thirty. The news now, with all those baritones who know just enough to be ignorant, shouting their opinions at each other . . . I can’t even stand listening to people I agree with anymore.

  Walter Cronkite, buddy. Still the only guy with a mustache I ever trusted.

  After we all got inside, the kids ran upstairs to finish their homework. I thought about grabbing Alyse and watching more Law & Order but, you know, you can’t force the magic. So, as I imagine it’s become with most American nuclear families, Alyse and I meandered to our separate computers and did whatever we do on them. I still don’t totally get the recreational value of the Internet. Surfing from site to site, buying stuff without getting out of your chair, reading blogs—isn’t blogging just for people who can’t get paid to write?

  Alright. That was when it happened.

  XIII.

  I’d met Danielle a few times, but I never knew her maiden name was Lyonne. Later in our conversation, she told me that some of the cases you’d worked on at the Southern Poverty Law Center made it unsafe for her to use your last name—hence the dummy surnames. And, no offense, but she got the better deal there, I think—Lyonne beats the crap out of Moscow.

  So, when my cell rang and the Caller ID read “Danielle Lyonne,” I drew a blank for a second until I noticed that the area code was the same as yours.

  Commie, Danielle apologized profusely for calling me with the news, but there was no need for apology. About the only thing less than cataclysmic about the call was when she said, “David was going on and on the last two days about how happy he was that you’d called and how you two were laughing like old times…and I just couldn’t reason out the protocol on whom to call at a time like this, and so, when I looked at his cellphone and saw that you were the last person he’d spoken to, I . . .”

  I got the feeling Danielle was recounting what had happened, to the best of her knowledge, as much for herself as for me. I swear, my heart palpitated when she told me that the local news noted the time you were struck as 3:37. Just three minutes after we’d hung up.

  If only there hadn’t been a big bang, then there wouldn’t have been any planets, any America, any dogs, any money, any Hilton Head, any horseradish, any ESPN, any BMWs, or any reason to rewind the tapes of a day to find moments that could have been edited down or dragged out in order to have nudged the non-existent universe into sidestepping one Godless, freak tragedy . . .

  Danielle told me everything the doctors had said. She described them as being “agonizingly forthright.” That word forthright sounded so genteel.

  Your odds of surviving a plane crash are ____ times better than being hit by lightning.

  Your odds of winning the lottery are ____ times better than being hit by lightning.

  Your odds of being hit by lightning while walking a dog in December and being knocked into a bottomless coma, combined with the dog being utterly unharmed and running off without ever being seen again, are roughly equivalent to . . .

  I snapped back into full focus on Danielle’s voice when she said, “I got the call from the police as I was teaching my last class of the day. The Dean of Arts and Humanities quite kindly assigned a campus police officer to drive me down to Hilton Head with the sirens on and everything. Nonetheless, as I was entering the hospital, there was already a klatch of reporters hovering about, and one of them asked me if I thought David’s being hit by lightning had anything to do with his having married a black woman.”

  “Oh, God, Danielle, I’m so sorry.”

  And then, Commie, you want to laugh? Your wife said, “Oh, no need to be sorry. Believe me, I’m used to these meshugenuhs.”

  Remember when you got engaged and I kept kidding you, asking, “What kind of gorgeous black girl with a Ph.D. would volunteer to convert for you?” Jesus.

  Alyse was on her computer. She looked up. None of our parents had ever called us on our cellphones, and the house phone hadn’t rung. And yet, Alyse still said, “Who?”

  “Commie.”

  Alyse’s face threw off disjointed question marks: Commie? What could have . . . Commie? Something happened to . . . What?

  I was about to give her the headlines of what happened and nothing more, knowing we’d be dealing with getting the kids to sleep before long, and so it seemed like it would be best to wait for a solid chunk of time before sinking too deeply into the subject. Tragedy. Grotesquery. Whatever. On cue, Charlie came in. His dinner had left him too logy to notice his parents’ distress. “I’m going to sleep now,” he said.

  We didn’t even ask him if he’d brushed his teeth or washed up. We just followed him to his room. He oozed into the comfort of his Serta offset coil mattress.

  Charlie fell asleep before we closed the door to his room. Alyse took my hand and we walked down the hall from Charlie’s room to Esme’s. That little touching of flesh kept the bad news both present and at bay while we put up a just-another-night front for the kids.

  Unfortunately—in the what, five-step walk down the hall?—Alyse’s cellphone also rang. I don’t know who said that thing about “fresh hell” whenever the phone rings, but Jesus Christ!

  The caller was Janis Binder. Remember I told you that with all her previous-life wackiness, I really like her? Well, now she went up another notch because she was calling to profusely apologize for “my fucking idiot husband.” She went on about how “the douche bag” had had no right to mention Esme to the police and even less right to “call you a self-hating Jew.” She said, “I’m just mortified.”

  Alyse said, “Janis, you believe in reincarnation, so feeling mortified shouldn’t be so bad.”

  Janis cracked up so loud, Alyse held the phone out toward me so I could hear.

  I took the phone and said, “Janis, we totally appreciate the call and we both think you’re a great girl.”

  Commie, if we hadn’t found out earlier about your being waxed by lightning, we’d have probably felt some very deep satisfaction from Janis’ gesture.

  XIX.

  By the way, Janis and Gil are still married. Amazing, isn’t it? I mean, once you refer to your husband as a “fucking idiot” and a “douche bag” with no hint of insincerity, how do you stick together? Then again, it probably wasn’t the first time Janis had called her husband those things, and it certainly wasn’t the first time she’d thought them. When she married him, I’m sure he was more palatable than he is now. Alyse had dated him once, after all, so he must have been okay at some point. That’s what I tell myself anyway. But to turn into what he is? That’s a mystery. He did pretty well in custom electronics during the ’80s. Through some snaky connections, Gil wound up handling all home entertainment systems for Bon
Jovi. Every time we’d see Gil, he’d be going on about how “Bon said” this, “Bon has a gig in the Meadowlands,” “Bon ba-da-ba-da-ba-da . . .”

  I wanted to tell him, “You know, Gil, wiring Bon Jovi’s TiVo to his plasma TV is not the same thing as actually being Bon Jovi.”

  Maybe he realized that on his own, and maybe that’s what made him become Orthodox? I don’t know. The guy turned into a complete tool. Let’s leave it at that.

  The funny thing is, when I talk to people from Maryland I haven’t seen in a long time, I almost always like them much more than I did when I’d first met them. I bumped into Rickie Strumpf in the city once and it was nice talking to him. We had a drink, we laughed, and I almost forgot that the guy had been a vile, nebbish prick in college. It produced one of the few reassuring thoughts I’ve ever had about humanity: Often, people turn out okay.

  Esme was wrapping up her biology homework. On the top of her notebook page was the name Gregor Mendel, with a double underline. All the genetics stuff with the fruit flies and the peas and the recessive genes—I’m just happy they’re still teaching it and not telling kids that God decided that brown eyes, baldness, and manic depression should be passed on from generation to generation.

  (Alyse once said that if God was smart, he’d have made pregnant women lose weight.)

  Esme takes homework dead seriously. Her wrist, thin as fettuccine, tenses up as she writes in her notebook. Talk about recessive genes. I swear, entire years passed when she never asked me for help with her homework. Perhaps that’s why I was worried she’d think I was a schmuck.

  As Alyse and I sat with Esme on her bed, I mentioned that I’d gotten the only perfect score in my class on a genetics test in the eighth grade. I didn’t mention that I’d cheated off Joey Annunziata on at least five of the 25 multiple choice answers. (Yes, the same Joey Annunziata who’d felt up two girls at my Bar Mitzvah a year before, but that hardly evened the score in my book, but that’s neither here nor there.) The funny thing is that—and it’s amazing how you can delude yourself—at Maryland, I’d signed up for a class in genetics as if I’d had some true aptitude for it. My chutzpah lasted less than a week. By the end of the second class, I’d already begun the process of dropping the course and signing up for that gut class on the Baby Boom.