AFTER ALMOST TWENTY hours of flying and sitting in the Paris airport, I neared home. Still wary of the stares of a teenage girl and her mother who boarded in Paris and sat beside me but had the grace to remain silently voyeuristic. I had assumed but never really understood the power of the media before, which I had learned too well in my “fifteen minutes” of notoriety. No matter that I had rejected it, many had seen my face, and even if they couldn’t place me, I was in the vast consciousness of faces that make up the celebrity gallery that has become the world’s common sign language.
My body creaky and weary, I inhaled and tensed my spine when the plane finally touched down at Kennedy Airport. Always before, when returning home, I felt invigorated. Revivified. Knowing Sarah and Castor awaited me were the best gifts in the world. No gifts awaited me that day, only the driver from the car service who Matt hired to pick up “Philip Nolan.” At least my changed visa status came in handy and I didn’t have to wait on any lines.
The car sped over the decaying roads leading out of Kennedy Airport to the great American highway that passes through the poorest areas, yet is built to blinker the poverty and squalor. The car radio, tuned to the all-news station, reported that there had been seven murders in the city during the New Year’s period. When Charlton Heston’s recorded voice began to bellow his defense of handguns, I asked the driver to change the station. He looked at me in the rearview mirror. “I got a CD for people coming in to New York. Should I play it?” The disc jockeys I’d listened to since childhood were spinning platters from radio heaven, so I said, “Sure.” He flipped in the CD and Leonard Cohen’s existential drone sang of taking Manhattan and what everybody knows.
The Van Wyck Expressway was empty on this New Year’s Day, unlike the rancorous trips in bumper-to-bumper traffic to relatives in Brooklyn on Jewish holidays when it seemed like all of New York was Jewish, and we showed up late and everyone sounded as bitter as horseradish. We whizzed by Shea Stadium and the Queens of my childhood filled with reddish-gray rows of apartment buildings, now housing thriving Korean neighborhoods, but the memory uprooted childhood ghosts where lived the quiet crimes of ugliness that surrounded us. Where the best, uninhibited ambitions lay crushed among a maze of fractured dreams, wasted marriages, and unwanted babies. I shut my eyes as we passed the Northern Boulevard exit, which could lead to where Castor and my parents lay under the ground. Past LaGuardia, and the excited Manhattan chill that always snaked up my spine when I glimpsed the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings, turned to the chill of terror as we crossed over the Triboro Bridge. Below, to the north, existed the shame of the cancerous marrows of shrunken buildings of the South Bronx, which worshiped the holy towers of the American heaven across the Harlem River. A heaven beyond the reach of my belief, if not my pocketbook.
We got off the FDR at 96th Street and headed over to the hotel in an elegant brownstone run by a family of French people on 84th between East End and York Avenues. The smell of croissants and coffee seeped out from the office decorated with posters by Manet and Cézanne as I registered under my pseudonym. The husband-owner gave me a message from Sarah, who’d called to say that her plane was delayed, but not canceled, because of a snowstorm in Chicago where she and Romey had to switch planes. She’d be in, she hoped, later that evening.
I fell into bed and watched the news. With reports warning of potentially unsafe drinking water, rolling blackouts on the entire West Coast from San Diego to Seattle, and a snippet of an interview with Hal Burden of Environ lecturing about the need for more oil drilling and nuclear power, I thought, Geeze, am I in India or America? I switched off the TV and dozed until Matt knocked on the door late that afternoon. He brought me warm clothes, a suitcase full of mail—he’d already sorted through the hate screeds—and pastrami sandwiches, potato knishes, and Doctor Brown’s cream sodas. I couldn’t finish my food, so Matt, who was five-seven and stocky with a mammoth appetite, knocked off my half-uneaten sandwich. While swilling the last of his Doctor Brown’s, he asked the question that had remained on his tongue for months, “So, Mr. Liberal, you still got people?”
“Yeah,” I shrugged, “no excuses but my hypocritical frail humanity.” My remembrance of my determination not to fall prey to the easy sense of deserving “people,” seemed so far away at the moment, when all I felt was humanly frail.
He smirked with uncensored satisfaction. “C’mon, let’s walk.” We headed out for a twilight stroll in Carl Schurz Park beside the East River. The icy wind ripped off the river and my ears felt like they were being sawed off, and I wished I’d worn the hat Matt brought for me. We walked north toward Gracie Mansion. I asked how much extra this shvartz-gelt unveiling was going to cost me. Matt smiled churlishly, “Not a cent. We struck a deal with a guy I know from BCA Rugs. The temple’s getting all new rugs and draperies.”
“That’s it?”
“The ‘temple,’” he cleared his throat histrionically, “includes the rabbi’s house at no extra cost.”
I laughed at his affable relationship with human corruption. Then Matt asked the only question that seemed to matter to everyone but me.
“So, you still love her?”
“Yeah, but you got a discount for trusting duplicitous spouses?”
“Nope. Can’t afford to.”
Matt proudly and rightly proclaimed himself one of the great skirt chasers and catchers of his time. On his gravestone he wanted this epitaph: For a little guy he had the biggest thing and the most money. When he got married he and his wife understood the unwritten clause in their prenuptial agreement: he’d screw around quietly, and she’d spend his money lavishly.
“Want to hear why?”
“Nope, I know why.” My answer made no impression on his wheeler-dealer mentality, where “no” only meant, “Keep going.”
“When I turned forty, which you’ll see is no fun, I got myself the gift of two two-hundred-buck-an-hour hookers for the night.”
“And your point?”
“Lust never sleeps. It only closes its eyes.”
“Who’re you, Neil Young’s rewrite man?” Behind my flippancy, the toughness of the statement burned.
“Sorry, man.”
“No need.”
“Sarah called me a bunch of times so she could talk to me to be near you. She always sounded like she wanted to confess something but she never did. I believe that she did it once and only once.”
“Sometimes I believe, sometimes I don’t.”
We strolled on, passing dog walkers, lonely solo walkers, and couples holding hands. A tall blond woman smiled flirtatiously at Matt and he shot a slanted half-smile back. If he hadn’t been with me, he would’ve talked to her. He couldn’t help himself. He didn’t bother to try to hide his lusts the way most married people repress their secret desires. I’d seen glimpses and more in so many of our friends and acquaintances relaxing boozily in restaurants or lolling down the street. My own infrequent hot flashes passed in and out of my blood without a serious desire to act on them. I was satisfied with Sarah. And Sarah—I figured the same went for her with me. As we walked on I thought about the time when we went to see that movie where the woman screwed Redford for a million bucks. During dinner with another couple, Sarah joked she’d “do him in a second for free.” I’d laughed. We all did. Big deal, I thought, everyone fantasizes and what woman wouldn’t fantasize about him or someone like him? As Matt stopped, and I stopped alongside him, I decided that it was no joke and I should’ve seen Jeremy Riegle coming. He was the Redford of the art world.
Matt leaned against the iron hand rail and pointed to Roosevelt Island.
“Look. What do you see?”
I thought not of what I saw but of what Castor would’ve seen: a land, pristine and unbuilt. Once we walked through an American Indian exhibit at the Museum of Natural History with the proudly sculpted Indians in their canoes, welcoming Mr. Hudson. Castor looked at me and not Sarah, “Dad, did you ever imagine how beautiful Manhattan must have been when there were no buildings and it was all green and forest?” Came my embarrassed answer, “No, I haven’t.”
“I see a dirty polluted river with damn scary currents and a run-down island with putrid buildings. You?”
“Possibility. New buildings. Hotels on the island. That’s my dream.” He spit over the handrail into the river. “I don’t claim to be any damn psychologist or understand human nature beyond greed and ambition, but you gotta come to terms with Sarah so you can dream about saving the fucking poor people of the world from early death.”
Everyone kept telling me to try to understand, be generous, make peace. Was I prepared? No, I thought, no fucking way. So I told myself until the second Sarah knocked on my door and I felt her agonized shiver as she awaited my greeting, as I felt Castor so much in her and I hugged her with a wild flood of joy and remorse and … All talk, all thought of talk vanished. We stripped and fell into the king-sized bed as if somehow this merging would erase all doubt. Her cherished soul smell, her body, her sweet-honey taste—her love smothered me. I nestled my head against her body, nestled between her breasts. I moved to enter her, drive the past into oblivion, and emerge into a future, a renewed, forgiven NeilSarah, and then the fleshy tip of my hard cock touched her wet vagina—and my cock collapsed. Without hesitation she slipped down my body, taking me inside her warm mouth and I got hard again but she did not make me come. We needed me to be inside her—and then, my cock fainted again.
I started to move to go down on her to see and hear her pleasure, but she stopped me with a tug on my hair. Shook her head. This was no macho, drug- or alcohol-induced failure.
I rolled over and tried to cradle her in my arms, but she pulled away from me and lay on her back.
“Sorry.” I muttered feebly. I held her hand in mine. With the other hand I wiped the salty tears leaking from her eyes.
“I guess you were right not to want to see me yet.”
“No. It’s not …” No words could alter my inability to enter her.
“I suppose we need to talk … but, can you listen?”
“Yeah.”
“I made an appointment with Debbie for tomorrow morning. I need you to come with me.”
The unorthodoxy of a couple seeing the same therapist who cared for one of the spouses didn’t bother me. I’d met Debbie and thought she could be semi-impartial. Her presence might inhibit words, once said, never to be taken back, from spewing unguarded from our ids.
“OK. Whatever you need.”
Sarah got up, dressed, and went to her room where she unpacked and showered. My body clock was way off, but she wanted to get some food, so we trudged to a coffee shop on the corner of York and 86th. I’d been there hundreds of times with my parents, then with Sarah and Castor. As if time had not progressed, Sarah and I ordered a turkey burger and a Greek salad sans anchovies, on which we went halfsies.
For the first time she asked me about Levi. Until now, for reasons I didn’t know, she hadn’t wanted to hear about him. When I mentioned going to the Delhi temple, she perked up. She knew how distasteful I had found the idea of organized religion.
“It was crazy—I almost liked being there with all those people. But I’m not going back. I see Levi outside the temple.”
“So you two are buddies now?”
“I wouldn’t go that far. But we share something and he has shared his insight with me. What I’ve discovered is what I call my ‘inner Levi,’” I half-laughed and she raised her eyebrows at the corniness of the phrase and knowing my cynicism about half-baked pop therapies, “my need to understand my basest instincts and accept them. We talked about the caste system and he equated it with how, in some ways, the Untouchables were treated in India with how others have used Jews and how the Israelis and the Palestinians use each other. How everyone needs a scapegoat.”
“You mean those kids or us?”
“I mean me.”
“And I am yours?”
“Maybe, yes, you were. Sometimes. Sarah, I know you have not one second of blame for what happened to Castor.”
She didn’t look at me but at her food. As she played with her salad more than she ate it, and I wondered if she were going to mention Riegle, she hit me with more unexpected news.
“I decided to have a show at the beginning of March.”
I listened as she explained the gallery owner, Barbara Kugliani, arranged the show as a benefit for Women Against Guns. Before I could even attempt to object, she stopped me cold. “I need to do my art. I have to fill this emptiness with something. I’m not my mother who fills herself up by shopping.” Sarah never fell into the consumerist trap that the more shoes you owned, the better your shot for inner peace. “I have nothing else now. I need to do more than just feel terrible.” How could I argue against that reasoning? She understood the consequences of the attention as clearly as I did. “Maybe,” she opened her eyes wider, blue with a wash of inconsolable red, “I have to use this tragedy to help. Somehow.”
She did not ask, knowing the answer, for me to come back for the opening.
“Done?” She nodded and I paid the check. We walked back to the hotel and quietly, awkwardly, without a kiss or a hug, parted with only a fleeting touch of our hands.