•
In the very few hours I slept, I dreamed I was watching a pas de trois at the Kennedy Center. Mr. Monti, the clown, and Count Dracula, all wearing oversized shoes, were doing a stylized dance-of-death ballet. I screamed, “You can’t get away with this,” and the terrible trio vanished from the stage. And now I was watching Nocturno, whose unabashedly erotic pas de deux was being performed by . . . a naked Louis and me.
The shame woke me up—the shame, that is, of dreaming of sexual pleasure when I should have been figuring out how to save my son. On the other hand, since Jake and I were currently making war instead of love, this was the only kind of sex I was getting. So enjoy it a little longer, I indulgently told myself. You’ll decide how to kill Mr. Monti later today. I snuggled under the blankets and—half-sleeping and half-awake—entirely gave myself over to sexual reverie.
Having banished shame, I let my mind drift drowsily, dreamily back to Louis. To satin-skinned, loose-limbed Louis, with his long narrow face and tell-me-about-it eyes. To Louis, whose close-cropped head seemed always cocked in the yes-I’m-listening-to-you position. To Louis, with the shade and sweetness of a Milky Way, and the strength of ten because his heart is pure. To Louis and March 18, when I’d removed my no-nonsense Jockey For Her pants and undershirt (yes, okay, I was making a statement), lain down beside him on his sofa bed, and in less than thirty seconds fallen . . . sound asleep.
It had been a hard day.
As you recall, I’d been up at six, dressed in my long-skirted Waspy Western ensemble, rushed to the corner and into the limousine, where from 6:48 A.M. till roughly 11:10 A.M. I’d—under the tutelage of Joseph Monti—revised a number of my newspaper columns. After which I’d rushed home, leaped into the shower, dressed in red undies and a suit très Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman (post, of course, not pre-Richard Gere), and cabbed to the Hay-Adams John Hay suite where, from noon till roughly 4:20 P.M., under the tutelage of Philip Eastlake, I’d deepened my knowledge of Oriental philosophy. After which I’d rushed home, leaped into the shower, put on my authentic equal-rights Jockeys (plus something authentically working class from the Gap), and promptly at 6 P.M. joined the board of Harmony House (and Chloe the social worker) for a very authentic brown-bag dinner meeting.
During the next three hours we heard reports on the various residents from Chloe—Ilona, for example, had just been hired by a bakery and would soon be ready to move to her own apartment; Alfred was back to beating up on Laverne. We heard from the head of our ever-harried maintenance committee that the furnace had been deemed beyond repair. We heard from our desperate treasurer: Would we give some serious thought to doubling our annual contribution? And we heard, at the end, from Louis, who—having written four grant proposals and lined up several more business groups to find jobs for the grownups and mentors for the kids and talked an orthodontist friend into doing Ilona’s daughter’s braces free and spent last Sunday helping repair the Harmony House front stairs and attending Sam’s sobriety celebration—wanted us all to know how terrific we were and what a wonderful job we were doing.
At nine, when the meeting broke up—it had been held at our treasurer’s house in Bethesda—Louis and I, in separate cars, drove down to his apartment in Adams-Morgan.
I mean, please, where else would you expect Louis to live?
It’s true that Adams-Morgan is just a five or six minute ride from Cleveland Park. And it’s true that some of the houses on some of the side streets harbor, behind their modest facades, dazzling no-expense-spared renovations. Nevertheless, Adams-Morgan—with its colorful ethnic and economic mix, its store-front abogados, its Ethiopian and other exotic cuisines, its dance clubs and bars, its antique shops and frame shops and wig shops—is a far, far funkier neighborhood than mine. (That is, if they’re still using words like “funky.”) There was plenty of action on Eighteenth Street as I cruised behind Louis that night—action and an edge, just an edge, of risk. Finally—it took quite a while—we managed to find two places to park and walked the three long blocks and the four long long long long flights of stairs to his top-floor apartment.
Where things did not, initially, go too well.
I suppose-in a way I started it when, having huffed and puffed up those endless stairs, I plopped down into the nearest chair and proceeded to use my pocketbook to fan myself, complaining as I fanned, “My God, I’m positively dripping with perspiration.”
“Yes, and your face is really red,” Louis said sympathetically. “How long do these episodes usually-last?”
“Excuse me?” I answered, mopping my brow with a Kleenex.
“It’s a normal, natural process, and I’m glad it’s come out of the closet,” Louis said “I’m glad that people like you and me can discuss it without embarrassment—frankly and openly.”
“Discuss what, Louis?” I didn’t quite catch his drift.
Louis sat down in the chair next to mine, took out a hankie, and finished. mopping my brow. “The night sweats. The irritability. The mood swings, insomnia, migraines. The—”
“You’ve lost me,” I said to Louis, but he marched on.
“—urinary incontinence. The short-term memory loss. The vaginal dryness. And, of course, the hot flashes, which I can see that you are experiencing right now.”
“Did you say hot flashes?” I asked, my face burning up all over again—with indignation. “What are you talking about?”
“The Change. The Big M. The Silent Passage,” Louis answered cheerfully. “Menopause.”
I was, as rarely happens to me, rendered speechless. Louis, now tenderly holding my hand, pressed on. “I’ve been reading up on the subject lately—it’s something we men need to know about—and I think I’m getting a sense of what it’s like.”
I still found myself with nothing to say, but Louis, it seemed, had plenty more to tell me. About hormone-replacement therapy. Osteoporosis. Menopause support groups. Vaginal lubricants, “And I just want to add, and then I’ll shut up—I get that you’re feeling uncomfortable with this, Brenda—that to me a woman in menopause is as vital and as sexy as one who is . . .”
While he cast about for a tasteful phrase (“ovulating”? “menstruating”?), I finally regained the capacity to speak.
“You promised to shut up,” I told him, “so shut up and listen to me. These aren’t hot flashes. I’ll say that again. These aren’t hot flashes, Louis. I’m not menopausal.”
“They aren’t—? You’re not—?” Louis fell silent, hanging his head and staring down at the rug, and then he started to laugh—a low rich sound—a low rich sound that grew louder and richer and wilder and so contagious that I quit being miffed and started laughing too.
“I was trying to be—” he began, but a new wave of laughter intervened.
“You were trying to be,” I helped out, “a sensitive male. I appreciate that, Louis, and I promise you that the minute the Big M strikes, I’m racing to the phone and letting you know.”
Louis tossed me a rueful glance and eased out of his chair. “What I’d really like to know,” he said, heading into the kitchen, “is whether you like your omelet well done or runny.”
He moved around the small kitchen with efficiency and grace while I watched from his book-lined minimally furnished living room, trying to act like I wasn’t pretending I wasn’t menopausal, which I wasn’t. I didn’t fully recover until Louis served up gorgeous platters of herb-flecked eggs, put something with mandolins on the CD, and began to probe my life as a girl, daughter, wife, mother, writer, and woman with such gently insightful questions and such rapt attention to my every reply that I practically forgot that I had come for sex, not eggs and understanding.
I didn’t doubt for a minute, as I talked nonstop about me me me me me, that Louis would totally understand what I’d done that day with Philip and Mr. Monti.
I didn’t doubt it. But I didn’t tell him.
“I really respect and admire you as a person,” said Louis, finally making his move—a slow, sweet kiss on each of my eyes, followed by a soft kiss at the edge of my mouth, followed shortly thereafter by a kiss upon my lips of such scorching intensity that I urgently needed to fan myself again. My whimpers of pleasure encouraged Louis to open the sofa bed, divest himself of his clothes, and climb under the sheets, from whence he warmly invited me—“though please don’t feel that there’s any pressure whatever”—to join him. Passion warred with exhaustion as I swiftly stripped and threw myself into his arms. Exhaustion won.
• • •
I woke to the ring ring ring of the phone. Louis reached out, picked it up, listened long, and frowned. “Okay, yes. I’ll hold. It’s Darryl” (the resident manager of Harmony House), he whispered. “There’s sort of an emergency. He first tried calling Chloe. She’s not around. So . . .”
I looked at my watch. It was almost one. “My God, it’s late,” I said,.“Jake is out of town tonight, but still . . .”
“You don’t want to go before we—” Louis caught himself and shuddered with embarrassment “Whoa, sorry. Don’t mean to lay expectations on you. Hey, just because you took off your clothes and got naked with me in bed doesn’t mean I’m entitled”—he tactfully covered himself with the sheet—“to make any kind of sexual assumptions.”
“Feel perfectly free,” I said to Louis, reaching under the sheet, “to make assumptions.”
Which, for the next several moments, he deftly did.
He kissed the hollow of my throat while one gentle hand took a leisurely trip down my body, stroking my breasts, my belly, my inner thighs. He had just established beyond any doubt that I wasn’t yet in need of commercial lubricants when Darryl was urgently back on the telephone.
Louis listened intently while caressing me firmly but gently. I returned the favor fervently. We were heading with all deliberate speed from separate but equal to total integration when Louis was called upon to respond to Darryl.
“Okay, let her stay in the bathroom,” he said, “while you try to get Paulie down to your apartment. Tell him I’m waiting to talk to him on the phone. Then while I’m talking to Paulie, go on back up”—he slipped on the royal-blue condom I handed him—“and say to Joan that she’s got to come out of the bathroom.”
Although I am ordinarily a woman of more than average curiosity—some have even called it nosiness—I was remarkably unconcerned about the current domestic problems of Paulie and Joan. I had other matters to contemplate when Darryl put down the phone and went to get Paulie, leaving Louis free to Inquire—as I lay panting beside him—whether penetration was permissible.
“You still could get up and walk away and there wouldn’t be any hard feelings,” he quickly added.
“Thank you,” I told him, “for reassuring me.”
“No matter how far things have gone, a woman always retains the right to change her mind.”
“Or not to change her mind, as the case may be.”
“Nor do I agree,” Louis said, “with those who hold that silence means assent.”
With every cell in my body warbling “I’m in the mood for love,” this dialogue was becoming just a tad tedious. Not to mention the fact that at my back time’s winged chariot was hurrying near.
For I could visualize Darryl running up the stairs at Harmony House and quickly getting Paulie away from Joan. And now he and Paulie were coming down the stairs to Darryl’s apartment, where Paulie—any minute, any second, any instant now—would be talking to Louis at length on the telephone. “Listen to me, Louis. You’ve got my assent. Believe me, you’ve got my assent,” I moaned. “I’ll put it in writing, Louis. I’ll get it, notarized.”
Too late. Alas, too late. For, just as I feared, there was Louis on the phone with Paulie. “You’re right. Yeah, that’s a bummer, man,” he said. So was this a bummer, I thought, and—seizing time by the forelock—I pushed Louis down on his back on the sofa bed. And I . . . impaled myself.
“Paulie, excuse me,” I heard Louis say as I began to undulate enticingly. “I’ll have to put you on hold for a little while.” Then, laying down the phone, he commenced to attend to the subject now under consideration with zest, imagination, and great style. He was on his way to the moon—I had already been there—when I stopped the proceedings and said with a sweet little smile, “You still could get up and walk away and there wouldn’t be any hard feelings. A man retains the right to change his mind. Hey, just because you took off your clothes and got naked with me in bed . . .”
Here’s what’s so great about Louis. A little bit later—not right at the moment, but later—he laughed.
• • •
On Saturday morning, before Rose left, we took a walk to Carolyn’s house so Rose could show me the finished work on the yard. “Can’t stay. I’m late for my facial,” said Carolyn, large and lush in her blue-and-white cash mere warm-up suit, blowing kisses as she rushed to her car. “But go see how divine.”
On Thursday I’d been too angry at Rose to notice what she had done. It indeed was divine.
“You never believed—now admit it, Bren,” Rosalie challenged me, as I lavishly admired the latticed tree house, the three-tiered lily pond, the delicate Japanese garden, the pebbled walkways, “that I was capable of doing this job. You thought I’d screw up.”
“If that’s what I thought,” I said, amazed and impressed by the beauty before me, “I take it all back.” I knelt to examine a bronze baby walrus that Rose had artfully set on a rock by the pond. “You’re a born landscape architect.”
Rosalie’s usually tense, alert face surrendered to a six-year-old’s blissful grin, a testament to the transforming power of praise. “You really think so?” she asked, reluctant to let the moment go. “You really think so?”
I unstintingly assured her that I did.
Rosalie twinkled with pleasure. “Thank you,” she said. “And thank you for letting me stay at your house. I know I’m not the easiest to live with.”
I was on a magnanimity roll. I shrugged my shoulders and quietly said, “So who is?”
Sisterhood sang in the treetops as we walked home.
Later, when Rose had packed the car and settled Hubert onto his velvety mattress, she buckled her seat belt and looked me straight in the eye. “I have to count on you, Brenda, being all alone in the world, and I want you to promise me that if I die—”
“You do,” I reminded her, “have a daughter.”
She waved a dismissive hand. “I want you to solemnly promise me, Bren, that if I die, I’ll be able to count on you to take care of Hubert.”
• • •
When Rose had roared happily off (I am now the designated guardian of a Great Dane), I sat on the porch in my wicker rocking chair. Rocking back and forth in the bracing late October air, I turned my thoughts to murdering Mr. Monti. I rocked and racked my brain. I rocked and I racked. I racked and I rocked. I came up with zilch.
Jake strolled out to the porch and sat across from me on the hammock. “You’re thinking,” he said. “I get nervous when you think.” Wearing a tight black turtleneck, a pair of soft khaki pants, and an amiable expression on his face, he crisply reviewed the sexual and the real estate revelations we’d been fighting and brooding about for almost a week. When he finished his review, he made a proposal.
“Suppose I forget what you did,” he said, “and you forget what I did, and both of us swear we’ll never do it again.”
“Not good enough.”
“Suppose I concede, in addition, that what I did was a lot worse than what you did.”
“Not good enough.”
“Suppose I add to the previous package a statement of deep remorse, accompanied by a genuine plea for forgiveness.”
“Not good enough.”
“Suppose I fall on my knees to the ground and kiss your fucking feet.”
“Now you’re talking.”
Jake had to leave for the hospital. He didn’t kiss my feet. But he did take my hand and plant a long kiss on the palm. “I’m sorry I slept with Sunny,” he said. “But now you know all my secrets.” He gazed deep into my eyes. “I hope I know yours.”
• • •
In the months that have passed since March 18 it has never once entered my mind to confess to Jake about my three adulteries. And whenever my readers ask, “If he tells about his, should I tell about mine?” I always say no. Presumably, what’s sauce for the gander ought to be sauce for the goose, but in sexual matters this simply isn’t so. “So of course,” I said to Carolyn on Saturday afternoon when she stopped off at my house to borrow a book, “when Jake made that crack about did he know all my secrets, I didn’t say a word.”
“Damn right you didn’t,” said Carolyn. “He’d never have forgiven you. There’s no such thing as equal-opportunity adultery.”
“I guess, But, God, that seems so unfair,” I complained. “It’s so unfair that Jake could feel entitled to not forgive me, and yet he’s just assuming that I’ll forgive him.”
Carolyn shook out her shining blond hair and said sure it was unfair but that’s how it was. “Because, when our husbands cheat on us, they only break our hearts,” was her explanation. “When we cheat on our husbands, we break their balls.”
Hearts, we both agreed, were far more resilient.
Carolyn left with her borrowed book, a novel by Rosellen Brown called Before and After, a novel that spoke to concerns that consumed my soul. How far—to what lengths—should a parent go on behalf of his or her child? the book inquired. I’d already answered that question for myself.
And so I sat down again and gave my full attention to implementing that answer. I needed to figure this out for once and for all. I needed to find a way, a safe and simple and foolproof way—a final way to murder Mr. Monti.
• • •
On Sunday I thought about gas—perhaps I could turn on the jets in Mr. Monti’s kitchen and somehow persuade him to stick his head in the oven. Or perhaps I could get him to park in a shut-tight garage with the motor running in his car. On Monday I thought about plastic bags—I might, as he lay sleeping, ever so gently slip one over his face. On Monday I also recognized that—tidy and simple though they well might be—these were not the murder plans of a rational person.
You will note that it the head-in-the-oven plan as well as the plastic-bag-over-the-face plan, I presupposed access to Mr. Monti’s condo. I presupposed access because, when Jeff had handed over the keys, he forgot about mine. And of course I had a key—what Jewish mother would not have a key to her child’s condominium? In case of emergency. In case he’s too sick with the flu to open the door. In case she wants to murder the next tenant.
With no murder plan in sight by the end of a sleepless Monday night, and with time-running out, I made the desperate decision to let myself into the Watergate condo and look around. Somewhere on the premises there must be, had to be, would surely be found, some obvious opportunity for homicide. I was going to find it.
• • •
I needed to go unrecognized to the Watergate condominium. Once again I needed a disguise. Who should I be? I asked myself (I must admit I was getting into disguises). And after I had rejected dressing up as a police woman or a nun (though I loved both outfits), I had my answer. Three stops—at a hardware store, a uniform store, a costume shop near Dupont Circle—and I was (not too expensively) equipped. I had just tried everything on in a gas station ladies’ room to check out the effect when a woman walked in, gave a shriek, and fled out the door. My disguise was a triumph!
On Wednesday morning I put in a call to Mr. Monti’s office and established that he was already there and that he was expected to be there all day. I then called the Watergate desk—this time I spoke as Mr. Monti’s private secretary—and explained that Mr. Monti would be sending someone to work in his apartment. I then drove my car past the Watergate and parked it right next door, in the underground parking of the Kennedy Center. Finally I dialed Mr. Monti’s Watergate telephone number to make absolutely certain that no one was home.
No one was home.
Just a bit before noon a man with a small black Chaplinesque mustache walked over to the Watergate desk. Dressed in heavy work boots, a white peaked cap, and blue-and-white-striped industrial coveralls, he explained in broken English that he was Mr. Garcia Fuentes, here to do a job in apartment 10 C. He carried a bucket of paint, a paintbrush, a ladder. He said Mr. Monti had given him the key.
“We’re expecting you,” said the man at the desk, pointing him—I mean me—to the service elevator.
• • •
And here I was, in Mr. Monti’s—previously my poor son Jeff’s—condominium.
And a very nice place it was—two bedrooms, two baths, eat-in kitchen, huge living room, handy dining area, and a wraparound terrace reached through sliding glass doors. Though Mr. Monti’s furniture (which, I presume, he had rented) lacked the high-tech flash of Jeff’s former decor, I observed, as I put down my ladder and other equipment and wandered slowly through the rooms, that he had already settled himself in. Indeed there were paintings hung on his walls and photographs set on his tables, photographs of him and his family. A studio portrait of Birdie. Snapshots of his daughters and his grandchildren. A photo with his parents and his twin brother. A photo of—
O, my God! I gasped, as I suddenly saw, on a shelf in his bedroom, a picture that made the blood freeze in my veins. Smiling and festively dressed, there we were—Jeff and Wally, Jake and I—in a silver-plate frame, a brutal black X slashed across each of our faces. The photo had been taken on the night of April 4. The night of my birthday party. The night that was the beginning of the end.
• • •
Some people like to throw a big blast for the birthdays that mark their decades, but I never wanted a thirtieth or a fortieth. Yet, as you will recall, the year of my forty-sixth was deeply symbolic to me. Without telling Jake exactly why I wished to celebrate this particular birthday, I made it clear that was what I wished to do. Which was how come there were sixty-two guests at our house on Saturday evening, April 4, swearing that I was looking real good for my age.
In my tosh-hugging midnight-blue crepe, in honor of which I had lost five pounds, I had to agree with my guests: I was looking real good.
I also was feeling good, though a little peculiar because beneath my roof that night were all the men with whom I had slept in my lifetime. Jake was there, of course, and so were Wally’s future in-laws, Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Augustus Monti. Louis had been invited as my colleague at Harmony House and as my pal. And then, at the very last minute, I got a telephone call from Nora telling me that her husband had fallen ill and could she please bring Philip Eastlake.
At one point I watched as all four of my lovers converged upon the Design Cuisine buffet and attacked the sirloin filet and grilled baby vegetables. A question came to mind: Was I a star on a Donahue show called “My Mom Is a Slut”? or was I Lady Brett in The Sun Also Rises? But then I told myself that I was allowed not to answer that question on my birthday.
Our guests took their plates to the tables for eight set up all over the house, filling the rooms with laughter and conversation, I heard Hillary . . . lowered the interest rates . . . CDF . . . CEO . . . NBC . . . great pedicure . . . they still don’t get it . . . the Vineyard. I heard carjacking . . . cut the defense budget . . . Jack Nicholson always plays Jack Nicholson . . . EEOC. Philip, having lobbed a couple of soulful glances at me, was pontificating on the Middle East peace talks, while Marvin was demanding proof from the woman on his right that a sixty-five-dollar silk tie was really superior to the beauty he was wearing—“nine-fifty, two for eighteen bucks.”
Josephine, with the camera that Wally had bought her and taught her to use, was shyly photographing the happy event, posing us four cute Kovners for a couple of family shots before we drifted off to our separate tables. When she held up the camera to shoot, however, her hands were shaking so hard that she couldn’t, at first, even manage to push down the button. No matter what she does, that girl turns into a nervous wreck, I said to myself impatiently—and unfairly. For later that evening I learned that it wasn’t photography that was making Josephine tremble.
Later, after our guests had finished their meal and crowded together in the dining room to watch me blow out the candles on my cake. Later, after Philip had bent to deposit a birthday kiss upon my cheek, murmuring a throaty “I want you. I need you.” Later, after Louis had whispered, “Best-looking premenopausal woman I know,” as he wrapped me in a warm but platonic embrace. Later, when people had started to leave, though several still remained, one of whom was Gilda, who happened to be not only our neighbor but our rabbi Emmanuel Silverman’s assistant rabbi.
Wally, Jo, her parents, and I were standing off to one side, sipping coffee and chatting, when Gilda—bright-eyed and bouncy, broad in the beam and beaming broadly—presented herself to Joseph and Birdie Monti.
“I didn’t want to go without meeting Josephine’s mom and dad,” she said, a warm rabbinical hand on Birdie’s arm. “This is not the time and place for a whole big discussion—”
“That’s right. It’s not,” my son interrupted.
“—but I’d just like to reassure you that conversion doesn’t mean you lose your daughter.”
All of us stared at Gilda. “What?” asked Mr. Monti. “What was that you said?”
“That just because your daughter’s converting to Judaism,” said Gilda, “doesn’t mean she’s any less your daughter.”
Our stunned little group collectively gasped. Jo’s cup and saucer dropped from her trembling fingers. Birdie Monti, bending to pick up the pieces, looked up to scan the clouded face of her mate.
“We were going to t-t-tell you all t-t-tonight,” Jo stuttered, utterly undone. “It was Wally’s b-b-b-birthday surprise for his mother.”
“And mighty surprised I am,” I said, with a desperate please-don’t-blame-this-on-me heartfeltedness. “When”—I turned to Jo—“did you decide?”
“Decide? What did she decide?” Mr. Monti demanded in a voice that silenced all conversation at the party.
“I think the rabbi just told you, sir,” said Wally.
“Let Josephine tell me,” Mr. Monti replied.
Gilda, red in the face and gasping apologies far breaking the news too soon, began to back away from our shell-shocked group. “I guess I first ought to let you all discuss this among yourselves,” she whispered nervously. “But please feel free to call if you have any questions. You know, like about the conversion classes”—Gilda kept backing away—“the Hebrew lessons, Leon Uris, the mikva . . .”
Gilda was out of there.
“Talk!” Mr. Monti bellowed to Jo. He cast a glowering glance around the room, where the guests who remained were maintaining a gape-mouthed silence. “Please,” he said oleaginously, smiling his sharky smile, “don’t let us interrupt your conversations.”
When the room started buzzing again, Joseph Monti turned to Josephine. “Okay,” he said to her, “you decided what?”
“To convert”—her voice could barely be heard—“to Judaism.”
“And why? Why are you doing this to me?”
“She isn’t doing it to you, sir,” Wally interceded.
Mr. Monti ignored him and imperiously repeated his question to Jo.
Jo, who had just finished chewing off all her fingernails one by one, now directed her small, perfect teeth to her cuticles. “It’s because of what you said about conversion,” she replied in a hoarse whisper.
Her father threw up his hands. “What did I say?”
Josephine opened her mouth to explain. Not a word emerged. She tried again. No words. Wally came to her rescue.
“You told us,” he said, “that conversion was the kind of accommodation, perhaps even sacrifice, that people in love should be more than willing to make.” He swept his expressive Mel Gibson eyes from Jo to Birdie to me. “That’s what he said.”
“And so beautifully put,” I added in an effort at a constructive intervention.
Mr. Monti ignored me.
“You knew what I meant,” he told Wally and Jo. “You both knew who was supposed to convert to what. I made”—his voice grew louder—“my wishes clear.”
Wally and Jo said nothing. Mr. Monti, his voice still louder, pressed his point. “Did I or didn’t I make my wishes clear?”
“Yes, Daddy,” Jo whispered. “You did. But then we decided—”
Wally and Jo explained that they had decided that if Jo converted to Judaism, and if Wally joined her in her Jewish studies, it would be a truly meaningful experience. Plus good for the marriage, not to mention the soul. Even if it involved, on Josephine’s part, some accommodation, even sacrifice.
Unfortunately, I was forced, though I could hardly bear to do it, to excuse myself and tear myself away. The rest of the guests were leaving and I was obliged to say some very long goodbyes. What was I missing? I wondered. What were they telling one another? Was Mr. Monti adjusting to the news? The occasional phrases that I could hear—like “mocking and disdaining me”—suggested that Mr. Monti wasn’t adjusting.
Indeed, by the time I rejoined the group, the man was taking exception most unattractively. Throughout the whole diatribe, Birdie Monti stood mute. “I’m sure it’ll all work out,” I warbled, hoping to soothe an acutely strained situation. But everyone’s eyes were on Wally, who (in a sensitive, sweet, not one bit defiant way—that boy was born to be a social worker) had embarked upon a response to Mr. Monti.
“You know,” he said, “Rabbi Gilda was wrong. You’re going to lose your daughter.”
“Losing isn’t my thing,” Joseph Monti replied.
“But you aren’t going to lose her because she’s converting,” Wally persisted.
“I’m not losing—period,” he replied.
“You’re going to lose your daughter because she’ll be leaving you,” said Wally. “She’ll be leaving you to cleave to another man.”
“That’s not,” Mr. Monti said, “how it’s done in our family.”
For a couple of endless moments no one spoke.
“Daddy, please,” Jo whispered, breaking the silence.
“Not now, Josephine,” her father replied. “It’s getting late. It’s time for us to go home.”
He turned to Wally and me and, once more mobilizing that sinister sharky smile, placed one arm on my shoulder, the other on Wally’s. “A decision gets made,” he said. “It can get unmade, especially when that decision is making certain people real unhappy.”
“I’m sorry you’re unhappy,” Wally replied.
Mr. Monti sighed. “When I’m unhappy,” he said, “everyone’s unhappy.”
He pressed on our shoulders, forcing the three of us into a tight, tense embrace.
“Talk to your son, Mrs. Kovner,” he said to me softly.
“Listen to your mother,” he said to my son.
“And in case you forgot what I mentioned before, I’ll mention it again. Losing”—his dark eyes glistened—“isn’t my thing.”