CHAPTER
TWELVE

Nina tore down the crisp autumn block, leaves crunching underfoot, arms pumping, cheeks red, ignoring the prurient glances thrown her way by every male over twelve as she passed in her T-shirt and track pants. This was why she never jogged anymore. Her tits jounced all over the fucking place, painfully, no matter what she wore. But she had to do something, and pushing herself to the brink of physical exhaustion was it. A week had passed, and nobody had called. Most likely, Hunter College was trying to figure out what to do with her, just as she was trying to figure out what to do with herself.

This much was certain: she was fucked. Hunter might or might not make her give the money back—and it was money she didn’t have, so unless they planned to sue for it and garnish her wages, which seemed fairly ridiculous, they could chalk that one up, learn their lesson and make people prove they were what they claimed in the future. They might or might not expel her. Probably they would. She would if she were they. At a bare minimum, they’d put her on disciplinary probation and inform Columbia of what she’d done, and Columbia would revoke her acceptance to its graduate program. One way or another, her student visa was going to expire, rendering her illegal. As early as next week if they expelled her, in May if she were permitted to don a cap and gown.

That left two options, deportation and marriage. That was one option, really, and one option wasn’t an option, but a necessity. The simplest thing would be to declare her situation openly, tell Tris she could stay in America only if they got engaged. She wouldn’t even have to explain the lie and the scholarship and the consequences she’d brought tumbling down with that bout of truthfulness or moral reckoning or whatever it had been. She could just say she’d changed her mind about grad school and wanted to work instead, pay back her student loans.

But that was no good. If they were going to do it, they should do it for real. She couldn’t have Tris feeling that he was rescuing her. That would give him too much power.

And really, Nina didn’t feel as skeptical about marriage as she used to—didn’t see its futility confirmed by the wreckage of her parents’ union or Tris’s grandparents’, didn’t consider it the ludicrous, doomed proposition she once had. Perhaps it was love, or age. More likely, it was the creeping exhaustion that mounted in her with each year of going it alone, in a foreign country, with no asylum and no money and Marcus still treating her like his personal concubine and Miklos bawling out his distant pitch-black woes. Marriage had started to seem like an increasingly nice, calm, sturdy idea as far back as two years ago—and this wasn’t revisionism, Nina told herself, jogging in place as she waited for a red light to turn green. This wasn’t tricking herself into believing what she had to. This was legit.

It would come as a shock to Tris, because his knee-jerk antipathy toward the institution had stopped her from ever divulging her own evolving opinion of it. That had been a mistake. She’d have to ease him into the idea quickly, convince him that it didn’t mean what he thought it did, wasn’t an agreement to live a boring life, or a finish line that marked the end of everything vital in a relationship. That it wouldn’t turn them into his parents, grandparents, whatever suburban Hubby and Missus archetype he held in his mind. That it would be fun to have a big party, a public celebration of their love. Malik could DJ. It could be a hip-hop wedding. They’d get presents.

Nina turned onto Dekalb, the half-imagined seasonal aromas of pumpkin and hearth fire sharp in her nostrils, threw on a burst of speed, and crossed the street. Once more around the level rectangular route, three blocks long by five blocks wide, and then she’d go inside and shower and let Tris know she wanted him to marry her. No—she’d use wife as a verb, wife me up, the way he and Malik did. That would be nice and playful, convey the point that it was still her, that wanting to get hitched did not instantly transform her into some gross American sitcom harpie, waving her unadorned ring finger in the air and threatening to walk. The image made Nina think of the new wife her mother had conjured up for Miklos, the trashy, silicone-filled Californian broad. It was amazing how vividly Nina could still see the nonexistent woman in her mind.

         

How many hours have I just slept? Tristan wondered as he ruptured the surface of a bowl of minestrone with his spoon. He’d been awake now for an hour, mostly out of the desire to determine whether it was dusk or dawn. A hard urge to put down, that. He stirred only at ambiguous hours, it seemed to him. Or perhaps all light was beginning to take on the same wan hue. It was dusk, he had decided finally, and time he ate something. It had become a ritual of sorts—who knew why?—for Tristan to ignore the food left for him until he’d awakened to its company a second time. The spoon was halfway to his mouth when Linda barged through the door.

“Jesus, Dad, that’s been sitting there since last night. I’ll get you something fresh.”

He chewed once and let the thick liquid slide down his throat. “Don’t you knock?”

“What would be the point?” She sat on the edge of the bed, reached over and lifted the bowl out of his palm, then wrested the spoon from his grip and deposited both on the floor by her feet. He watched it happen, transfixed by his own inability to resist.

“Enough is enough, Dad. Time to get up. You’ve got a bris to attend.”

He blinked at her. “I do?”

“Yup. Steven and Melissa had a boy. Nine pounds even. Kid’s a fucking moose.”

“Name?”

Linda dropped her chin and looked over her brow at him. “Prepare yourself. Thaddeus Carter Brodsky.”

Tristan winced. “And they’re having a bris? Really?”

“It would mean a tremendous amount to Steven, and his mother, and probably to your brother, if you went,” said Linda, acting in her official capacity as liaison between the two branches of the family, a job she had inherited from Amalia.

“I don’t think I’m up to it.”

“Bullshit. Look, Dad, you are not going to spend the rest of your life asleep. You’ve got to deal. You know that.”

Tristan threw back the covers, and the warm, stale odor of his body floated up from the bed. “I don’t know anything,” he said, lifting himself to his feet. He shuffled to the bathroom, closed the door, and took a weak, dribbling piss. For the first time in days, he glanced into the mirror over the sink. Stubble did not flatter an old man; he looked like a hobo with his patchy gray-white beard. His daughter was right. There was no dignity in this.

Linda rubbed the cuff of his desiccated bathrobe between two fingers as he climbed back into bed.

“Eisenhower administration?”

“Truman.” He reclined against the headboard, one house-slippered foot on the floor and the other laid out straight in front of him. “You’ve read your son’s book?”

“I don’t read books written by relatives. Life is easier that way.”

“I wasn’t aware that you had such a policy. I seem to recall discussing some of my own books with you.”

“Not since the one about the musician with all the women.”

“It’s pretty terrible.”

Linda picked a piece of lint off his pajama top. “I’m sure it’s brilliant. I just got sick of wondering which character thought what you thought and which didn’t, and who was who, and which parts were real. The guy has all those affairs.”

Her gaze meandered down the bedspread. “Sometimes I still read one of Mom’s poems, if it’s in The New Yorker or something. But I’m not going to read Tris’s book. I’ll buy twenty copies. I’ll tell everyone I know to read it. But not me. I’ve learned my lesson.”

“I never knew you felt this way.”

“I never told you.”

“Why not?”

“Because you would have waved your hand at me and said I didn’t understand what you were doing. Which probably would’ve been true. And I would have felt even worse.”

Tristan said nothing.

“He got a starred review from Publishing Preview,” Linda offered. “They were hard on Contents Under Pressure, so it’s a good sign. Mom’s been raving about it, too.”

“Because she thinks I’ve finally gotten my comeuppance.” Tristan crossed his arms. “She’s told you my opinion as well as her own?”

“She has, and it upset me so much, I’ve barely slept all week. That’s the only reason I didn’t drag you out of bed days ago—I was hoping rest might calm you down. Before you said something to your grandson that would break his heart.”

“I don’t intend to say anything to him. Ever.”

“Don’t be a schmuck. If you think Tris meant to hurt you, or expose you, or whatever it is you think, you’re crazy. Everything isn’t always about you, Dad, as hard as that may be to comprehend.”

Tristan bowed his brow into a scowl, looked away. “You’ve said what you came to say. I’d like some privacy.”

Linda stood. “Clean yourself up. I’ll be here tomorrow at ten.”

She left without waiting for a response. Tristan tried to fall asleep, but it was no good; that was over. His brain was back in gear, the memories flowing.

He gazed at the door Linda had just slammed, and remembered that a poster of John Lennon had once hung from it. And then it was 1969 and Linda was facedown on this bed, arm crooked above her head, body racking as she cried into her elbow, and Tristan was standing at the threshold with a gin and tonic in his hand and a professor of economics by his side—the man staring expectantly at him, at her, at him again.

Tristan hadn’t done a thing, simply continued walking his guest through the house, as if a bawling teenager were part of the tour, a permanent exhibit. Downstairs, a cocktail party simmered: voices rising through the floor, filling the house. Minutes before, Tristan had watched his daughter race up the stairs, legs pumping, skirt flouncing around her thighs. And before that, he’d stood close enough to her, one conversational cluster away, to overhear the exchange that had routed her.

Hello, Mr. Andrews, Linda had said, entering the man’s radius with two long, well-timed strides just as his previous conversation was concluding. In her right hand was a glass of white wine from which she had not sipped, from which she never would. I just wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed your novel. I thought you did a wonderful job with Christine; I really felt like I knew her. She raised her left hand to her temple, tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. Is it true that it’s going to be made into a movie? That’s so exciting!

Andrews drained his highball, staring around the glass at her as he brought it to his mouth, and then said, Who are you again?

She took the wineglass with her when she fled. It was sitting on her bedside table when Tristan passed her room and did nothing. Didn’t excuse himself, slip inside, and lay a hand across her shuddering back. Didn’t go downstairs and tell Andrews to get the hell out, or march him up there to apologize. He’d let her cry, let some prick humiliate his daughter in her own living room, and snuck past as if it wasn’t his problem. Assumed Amalia would track her down, handle it. Convinced himself he wouldn’t be able to help anyway.

The memory played on. Fifteen minutes later, he had turned, to see his wife guiding his daughter back down the stairs, an arm around her shoulders. Amalia was radiant—and realer to him, somehow, than she’d ever been. Whether this was what he’d felt then, Tristan did not know, but he felt it now. His daughter was the age his wife had been when they’d met, the same age Amalia had remained, in some ways, ever since. A part of her would always be that young, that beautiful, just blooming into brilliance. Tristan closed his eyes, and rivers of desire and regret gushed through him. He opened them and whispered his wife’s name.

Tristan walked to the bathroom, found a razor in the cabinet, twisted the faucet until steaming water splashed into the sink. He didn’t care about the world and how it would interpret the doppel-gänger his grandson had devised, the old man realized as he wet his face, applied the shaving cream. He’d tested out that argument with Amalia, thought then that he cared, but it was clear to Tristan now that he did not. What could the world do to him that it hadn’t already? He was ashamed, that was the truth. He was a selfish fuck, an absentee human being. All the battles he had fought had been for the wrong things, against the wrong people. And now all of it was set down in black and white, the essence of his failings abstracted, satirized, manipulated into goddamn art.

Tristan gripped the razor and slashed carelessly through the lather. The blade was dull, the bristles thick. Progress was slow and painful. Forgiveness was what he wanted, the old man thought as the basin filled up with hair. Even now, it was perhaps not out of reach—to be forgiven, to forgive—if only Tristan weren’t so thoroughly himself, so beholden to the conviction that forgiveness would wipe him clean away, destroy whatever was left. He tried to tell himself that was a good thing, tried to think of forgiveness as rebirth. But it sounded distinctly New Testament, and besides, who the hell was he to be reborn? He’d only fuck things up worse if he bucked the cycle of birth and death, traded his dignity for a few breaths of golem life.

You had to bury a man to make a man, that was what Ellison had said. And he had lived too long, and Tris had tired of waiting and decided to make himself a man by throwing six cubic feet of words over his grandfather’s shallow-breathing body. Perhaps Tristan would have done the same. He tried to sell himself on the idea. It didn’t take, but Tristan plundered on, probed every nook and cranny of his mind, plausible and otherwise, looking for a loophole, a trapdoor, a crawl space: any semblance of a path that might open up on some kind of absolution, for himself or for his grandson. He suspected that the two were one.

The quest was as exhausting as it was unaccustomed, and soon Tristan stepped back from it. To die stoic and alienated and brimming with anguish, yes, that had long been part of the plan. To die in the grip of some horribly earnest attempt to set things right—to expire in the midst of a paroxysm of rectification, with your pants around your ankles and your thumb jammed up your ass—that was another story. A man should die the way he’d lived, not recant in his final hours. Addiction, as a cause of death, was respectable. Withdrawal was not.

         

“Tristan ready to go,” Mariko reported, picking her way down the back stairs and joining Amalia at the sink. She took up a towel and rubbed it over one of the breakfast plates glistening on the drying rack. A perfectly functional dishwasher stood within arm’s reach, and yet here Amalia was, despite everything else she had to attend to, doing the dishes manually.

There was something meditative about standing with your hands under the warm running water, something pure and useful to the act of cleaning. But Mariko was the real reason she labored so. The woman had never owned a dishwasher in her life, and she wasn’t about to put her trust in one now, so after meals the two of them became a small assembly line, rinsing and drying. Tristan’s dishes, Mariko did alone. The dishwasher was still full of the knives and spoons and bowls he’d used before he’d stopped coming downstairs. Mariko probably didn’t realize they were in there, festering. Amalia was almost constantly aware of it, but she had no intention of running the machine herself.

She rinsed the last fork, turned it in her hands, and waited for Mariko’s eyes to give up and flit elsewhere. The past few days had been like this: Mariko feinting and fluttering, looking for an opening, and Amalia refusing to give her one, shutting down the moment Mariko opened her mouth to plead Tristan’s case.

Yesterday, things had come to a head. Mariko had been a hair more caustic, Amalia a hair more resistant, and that had been enough to make everything flare up, then curl and char and blacken.

Amalia, Mariko had said, walking into the living room wide-eyed and coltish, hands clasped in front of her, your husband gonna wither away up there. He barely eats. You gotta do something.

Amalia had squeezed her blanket and continued reading, forced herself not to reply. Only after Mariko had given up and returned to the kitchen, shaking her head, had it occurred to Amalia that she’d behaved just as Tristan would have. She finished her chapter, closed the book, and followed Mariko. Not to apologize, but to be fair.

Amalia found her sitting at the kitchen table, holding a mug of black tea, staring at her own reflection in the dusty television screen. Amalia stood to one side, out of Mariko’s sight line, and rested part of her weight against the back of a chair. She was giving Mariko the opportunity to repay her rudeness by ignoring her back, but Mariko looked up immediately. She didn’t know that game.

He’ll come down when he’s ready, said Amalia, softer than she meant it.

Mariko sat for a moment with her lips pinched tight. Tristan a good man.

The sentence hit Amalia like a bucket of ice water. It was a declaration of allegiance, a formal withdrawl of sympathy. How foolish she had been to ever believe this woman loyal. It didn’t matter how many card games they played, how many dishes they cooked or cleaned together. Whatever existed between them was secondary. Mariko served genius. Male genius. She understood nothing. She was as cold as she’d ever been.

You marry him, then, Amalia said, and turned to leave—cheated out of a quick, angry exit by her own frailty. Nature’s way of telling the aged that they shouldn’t be embroiled in such drama, she supposed.

Why you so mad? Mariko said before Amalia had made it three feet. The younger woman’s arm uncoiled, shot toward the ceiling like the body of an exclamation point. What he ever do to you? She let it fall back to her lap, clenched her hand into a fist like a period, and shook her head. He don’t deserve this.

He deserves every second. That man has given me hell.

Mariko pushed back her chair, stood up as if she’d been waiting all week for this chance. What hell? You want hell, try being married to Albert. My husband get high and then walk straight into the ocean! Until waves hitting him in the forehead, knocking him down! I have to rescue, Ama! My husband spend all our money on dope, and I gotta convince landlord not to throw us out into the street! Middle December! You hear me complain? Never! I take responsibility!

She drew herself up, held out a palm as if checking the air for rain. What you ever do for Tristan? What he ever do to hold you back? Nothing! So what, he got temper? He writer! You know that when you marry him. She threw up her arms. This bullshit! You wanted to be poet, you fucking poet!

Mariko’s fists dropped to her hips and stayed there. The two of them stood for a moment gauging themselves and each other.

Oh, Mari, Amalia said at last, shaking her head. You don’t know the first thing about marriage, do you?

I know the first thing. I know you don’t abandon, Ama. That the first thing and the last. Mariko’s face went blank, and she carried her teacup to the sink to empty, rinse, wash, dry it. Amalia stood and watched. Mariko moistened a sponge and wiped crumbs off the table, into a cupped palm. She pushed in chairs, shuffled newspaper sections into a neat stack. When there was nothing more to do, she strode out of the room, eyes trained on her path, and turned onto the back stairs. Amalia listened for a door to slam, but she got no such satisfaction.

Things she could have said to crush Mariko careened through Amalia’s mind. You weren’t a wife to Albert, she might have whispered. You were a manager, a bodyguard, and a groupie rolled into one, and he exploited you for forty-five years. And now he’s gone, and what are you without him? Nothing. But what would have been the point? Mariko had made her peace ages ago, and each lie she’d told herself since then had glazed her like pottery, layer upon layer, until she was impervious to the winds of the world and trapped inside. Each lie Amalia had told herself had been a tiny tap against the sculptor’s chisel boring its way into the crown of her skull, threatening to split her in two.

She’d nestled back into the couch and tried to read, and a few hours later, Mariko had walked into the living room and handed her an egg salad sandwich and a glass of orange juice. Amalia took them wordlessly, bewildered, and Mariko turned and walked away. Was this an act of self-assertion or negation? Apology or spite? It was as if with every gesture, Mariko wanted to prove she was the stronger of the two. That even her anger was not the master of her will.

Now, Amalia laid the fork on the dish rack and turned off the faucet. “I’ll wait in my study,” she said over her shoulder, as if speaking to a servant, and walked away from Mariko.

The new room was no less oppressive. Amalia slumped back in her work chair until her chest was level with the broad mahogany desk she’d inherited from her father, and found herself listening for Tristan’s footsteps above her. Perhaps she would have done nothing without him, been nothing. Her best poems would not exist, that much was certain.

         

“So let me get this straight,” said Tris, limbo-bending to check the knot of his tie. The mirror hung too low for such appraisals, but it provided a clear view of the queen-size bed abutting the opposite wall. Nina lay there now, vertically half-covered by a tan down comforter, listless and naked. “You’re saying that if we get married, we can remake the concept of marriage into anything we want, and it doesn’t have to be the same basically oppressive, deluded, mundane thing it’s always been throughout history.”

Nina cat-stretched, arms and legs going momentarily rigid, then crossed her hands behind her head and tried to summon patience. “Right.”

“But why bother? Why don’t we reinvent, say, slavery? Check it out, we’ll sign some paperwork and officially you’ll be my slave, but we’ll reinvent the whole institution and make it what we want, and it’ll be really cool.” He frowned, undid the tie, and started over.

“Why do you have to be such a schmuck all the time?”

Nina had floated the idea of marriage yesterday, as planned. She’d traipsed into the bedroom and plopped herself down on his lap after her shower, dressed only in a towel, smiled and wrapped an arm around his neck and said, I think you should wife me up—light, playful, sexy.

Tris had stiffened instantly, smiled back but not really and said, Oh yeah? instead of what he was really thinking, what his body told her by clenching up—not the muscles, exactly, but something deeper in: the mind, soul, heart, whatever. One of those things, maybe all of them, had blared Hell no!, and Tris had tried to be polite, and blink at her as if she was sweet and he was happily surprised, but she could see his brain whirring. She imagined it as a computer screen, filled with number columns scrolling furiously down as he searched for some way to joke himself out of this, put her off gently, and then suspected that there was none and sighed inwardly, resigned to a failed gentleness and the likelihood of his day disappearing in an argument. And such an absurd, depressing thing to argue over.

Since when are you into marriage? he’d asked, touching her cheek, and for a moment Nina thrilled, thinking perhaps she’d read him all wrong and Tris meant Me, too! I want it, too, but I’ve been scared to say so because I know how you feel! But it wasn’t that. It was a halting Um, sorry, not interested half apology, the other half not an apology at all, but passive-aggression. He was annoyed with her for putting him in the position of having to reject her, and for changing the rules, having an unsanctioned desire, one he couldn’t—no, wouldn’t—satisfy. It made Tris feel inadequate and at the same time in control, thought Nina; his refusal tipped the balance of power toward him, so far that it ceased to be a balance at all. She wanted something he’d denied, something perpetual that would stay wedged between them, keeping her on the high end of the seesaw, legs dangling in midair, and him on the heavy side, watching her flail for as long as he wanted. It even occurred to her that Tris knew more than he was letting on—had figured out, somehow, that she was in jeopardy and was punishing her for not telling him the truth. Or for something. Fuck.

She was on the verge of laying out the facts now, the visa part anyway, had almost reached that point of desperation. But after all this, how could she? More shame for her, more power for him. Plus, everything she’d said—every declaration of love, every argument about how marriage represented just the kind of intentionality their life together lacked—would be sullied, struck through with black ink like the censored letters her father had held under her nose as a child.

“Schmuck, huh?” Tris replied now, everything a game. “How you gonna speak Yiddish and be anticircumcision?” His knees creaked as he stooped to pull the cardboard shape-holders from a pair of shiny black split-toes he’d bought in Sicily while on tour with Albert. The guys in the band had all bought shoes, so Tris had, too. They’d sat at the back of the closet, unworn, for years, and then Nina had found them, told him they were slick. Now, they were his favorites.

“You’ve still got time to change your mind and come,” he told her, crossing in front of the bed.

“Hell no. Fuck that barbaric shit. Poor little Thaddeus.”

“Five thousand years of history, baby,” Tris called from the bathroom. “Or six. Whatever. Abraham had to do his own with a sharp rock. You know what they say: ignorance is bris.”

“It should be illegal. It’s mutilation. Infants are extremely sensitive. I bet it’s psychologically scarring, too.”

He poked his head out. “Another theory to explain how fucked-up the Jews are?”

“You didn’t have a bris.”

“Yeah, but I was circumcised. Only difference is that nobody served lox and bagels afterward.”

Nina hugged her knees to her chest as Tris rooted through the laundry strewn across the closet floor, looking for his belt. “If we had a son, would you want him circumcised?” she asked.

Tris shrugged. “Yeah, I guess so. It’s like the most nonnegotiable, bare-minimum Jewish thing you can do.”

Nina shook her head. “I’d never allow it.”

He bent over the bed and kissed her forehead. “Then you’d better hope we have girls.”

She propped herself up on her elbows, hands over her breasts. “I don’t understand how you can talk about kids like it’s nothing, and be so scared by marriage.”

He fussed again with his tie, tightening, smoothing. She thought she caught the flicker of a smirk. “Yeah, I dunno. Just how it is, I guess.” He buttoned the top of his shirt, then tried to ease the constriction by sliding two fingers inside the collar and tugging. “I didn’t say I was scared. I ain’t never scared.”

More cavalier bullshit, Nina thought. More jokes. She pouted for a moment, then tried to be funny. “I don’t think I’m so bad. Those Puerto Rican guys in front of the bodega all want to marry me.”

He was back at the mirror now, preening. “Yeah?”

“Sure. I get proposals every week.”

“I bet you do. What time is it?”

She slid halfway off the bed to peer at the ancient clock radio they kept underneath the frame because it was too ugly to look at. “Ten-fifteen.”

“I gotta bounce.” He kissed her on the small of the back before she could turn, then lingered there a moment, brushing his lips up her spine. Nina shivered.

“I love you. Don’t marry the Puerto Ricans while I’m gone, okay?”

She flipped over, smiled, and gave him the finger as he walked toward the door. He smiled back, and for a moment Nina forgot why they were having this argument, and everything seemed casual and loose and normal. Then she remembered, and panic snapped at her with the force of a real living thing—a big-ass crab, an alligator. “I’m not making any promises,” she called out as he slammed the door. She lay there awhile, staring at the ceiling, listening to Brooklyn breathe, then decided she needed to talk to someone, and picked up the phone.

         

The other guests rose from their chairs and drifted toward the dining room. Tristan sat still, too affected to stand, and hoped everyone would leave him be, allow him the few minutes he needed to shake off this remarkable, unexpected fragility. Then he would rise and find his brother, and seek to determine whether Benjamin had been similarly touched. Tristan suspected so. Ben had seemed on the verge of tears as he stood up there next to his grandson, hands folded in front of him, mouthing the Hebrew prayers along with the mohel. Tristan had been amazed that Benjamin remembered, but not as amazed as he’d been a moment later when he realized that he, too, was whispering along.

“Dad? Don’t you want some lunch?”

“No, no.” Tristan waved his daughter off. “I’m not hungry. Go ahead. I’ll be with you in a minute.”

“I’ll fix you a plate,” said Linda, and merged into the gregarious shuffle toward the buffet.

Tristan stared after her receding torso with unfocused eyes. Under his breath, almost against his will, he began to recite snippets of prayers he’d once memorized: great strange strings of syllables, faintly endowed with meaning, whose declamation required very little of his attention. The Sabbath blessing. The mourner’s Kaddish. The Shema. They’d hidden themselves in the remotest caverns of his memory, and there they had remained for nearly seven decades. Now they ran toward the summons for which they’d always waited, and stood proudly at attention.

The sound of a body settling into the chair beside him brought the old man back.

“Pretty horrifying, huh?” his grandson said. He speared a length of asparagus, crammed half of it into his mouth.

Tristan bounced a glance off him. “I was quite moved. This is what millions have died for. The right to hold a simple ceremony.”

Tris set his fork down, chewed, and swallowed.

“The Jews are less than one percent of the world’s people,” Tristan said. “Do you realize that? Less than one percent. Yet we’ve been blamed for everything, since the very beginning. Entire populations have been wiped out. There’s never been anything like it in the history of the world. But here we are.”

“Here we are. In Great Neck, Long Island.”

“Yes.” His grandfather fixed him with a scythe of a stare. “And you’re lucky I’m speaking to you at all.”

Tris frowned, hoping to evince innocence. His stomach took evasive action, curled into a ball. “Whoa—what?”

“That novel of yours, sonny. Why don’t you tell me what it’s about?”

Tris bit into his lower lip. “The struggles of a great man,” he said after a moment.

“And who is that great man, pray tell?” Tristan asked, the old urge to combat mounting, unbidden, in him. This same trickle of adrenaline had been coursing in and out of his bloodstream for eighty years now, he thought. Why hadn’t it gone stagnant, like standing water in a fountain?

“What do you mean? He’s Irving Gold.”

“Is he, for instance, your grandfather? Look at me, sonny. Is that loathsome, cowardly fool me?”

Guests were streaming past them now, en route to the tables set up in the next room. Abe and Amalia walked by, then Linda and Benjamin. Good, the old man thought. Keep your distance. He hoped his grandson noticed they were staying away, realized the family all knew what he had done.

Tris waited until they’d gone, then faced his grandfather. His tone was measured and cautious, like the footsteps of a man approaching a lion. “First of all,” he said, “Irving Gold is not a coward or a fool, and if you think he is, you missed the point. I love Irving Gold. And yes, there are similarities. Many. But no, he’s not you—not just you. He’s me, too. A version of me. And you and I, whether we like it or not, have a lot of ugly shit in common.”

Tristan narrowed his eyes to a wince. “You must have balls the size of watermelons. I mean, you must have to carry them around in a fucking wheelbarrow. Irving Gold is me with a raging hard-on, me in a funhouse mirror. He’s my fucking age. He’s married to my wife.”

“On whom he cheats. And who—”

“Don’t hide behind your goddamn facts! How dare you bullshit me!”

Tristan blinked and sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose, and for an instant Tris thought his grandfather would cry. But when the old man opened his eyes, they were dry.

“You’re ambitious,” he said. “Cop to it. You knew what you wanted to do, so you did it, and everyone else be damned—that, I can understand. There, you and I are similar. So stop conning me. Be a man and cop to it.”

They stared at each other, oblivious of the noise and bustle all around. Finally, Tris bowed his head.

“You’re right,” he said, low. “I took what I wanted from your life without regard. I made things up without regard. I found all kinds of darkness—in you, in me—and I used it all. If I’ve hurt you, I’m sorry. But you have to believe me, Grandpa. It was never malicious. It just was.”

Tristan looked sharply at him. “That’s not a sentence. Just was what?”

Tris blinked. “True.”

Tristan slid his hands down his thighs, clutched vaguely at his knees. The fight was draining from him; he felt a grim kind of relief. “Let’s cut bait,” he said. “I will forgive you for writing this character if you will forgive me for being this character.”

“But Grandpa, he’s—”

The old man raised his hand. “Leave it alone. I know who I am better than you do. I’m going to accept your apology on good faith, the same way you’re going to accept mine. You can tell the rest to my tomb.” He paused, shook his head the way he had outside Amalia’s hospital door. “And if you really see yourself in Gold, you’d better make some changes, quick,” he added gravely.

Tris shut his mouth and mulled that over. Both of them tracked the progress of a grinning two-year-old, a cream cheese–coated spoon clutched in her hand. She’d almost made it to the foyer when her mother caught up, swooped down, took her in her arms, and carried her back to the party. The toddler’s face fell as soon as she was lifted, and the shrieking began. Her mother shot them a harried, apologetic glance as she passed. It went unacknowledged.

Tris picked up his plastic fork and snapped off the middle tines. “If you want, I’ll have your name stricken from all my press stuff. Nobody who doesn’t already know we’re related will find out.”

“I would say yes, but it’s too late now. I’ve already had a message on my office telephone from some dame at the Times magazine. The word is out.”

A balloon of excitement swelled in Tris’s chest. His publicist’s biggest long shot had come off: to convince a freelancer she’d played field hockey against in high school to pitch a grandfather and grandson piece to the New York Times Magazine, a dual profile of the literary giant and the young writer who had grown up in his shadow. An article like that was priceless, sat on millions of coffee tables for months. It made you, whether you deserved it or not.

“When was this?”

“Sometime last week. I only checked the machine yesterday.” He eyed his grandson. “I don’t imagine I’ll call back.”

Tris had forgotten what it was like to feel as young as he did now—this hideous with ambition, this single-minded in desire, this frantic in pursuit. This dependent on a decision utterly beyond his control.

“Isn’t there any way you can, Grandpa? We can use the interview to set the record straight. I’ll tell them Irving Gold’s not you. We’ll take that off the table forever.”

“You can’t control what they write. I learned that long ago. I’m sorry, I don’t want anything to do with it.”

Tris ground his teeth, trying to summon the grace to accept the answer. Instead, one thought blinked on and off, on and off, like the sign outside a bar. His grandfather was fucking him over.

Tris glanced over his shoulder at the clot of women bunched around Melissa, cooing at the screeching, mutilated infant in her arms. He bent forward. “You know, Grandpa, I could tell them that Irving Gold is you. I could tell everybody that.”

The astonishment slapped across the old man’s face was as vivid as a handprint. “That, I would never forgive.”

Tris made fists of his hands, dropped his chin to his chest. The treacly smell of noodle kugel wasn’t what made him want to vomit, but it wasn’t helping. “And I don’t think I could forgive you if you didn’t call the lady at the Times back.”

Tris’s skin crawled under the old man’s glare, but he couldn’t dodge it any longer. Their eyes met, and Tristan pounced.

“I’m not to be intimidated,” he spat. “Not by the likes of you. I’m more important to them than you’ll ever be. If I throw my weight around, they’ll kill your story just like that.” He snapped his fingers weakly, producing no sound. “Hell, I could call Meredith Rabinowitz at Frontier and scare her into putting your book through a complete legal vetting. I could threaten a lawsuit and tie you up forever.” He leaned back, crossed his arms. “How dare you.”

The venom of the old man’s words burned Tris’s shame away. Fuck begging and apologizing and weak, vile threats. There was a truth they shared that superseded all of this, and he would hold his grandfather to it.

“No. How dare you? This is my fucking story. Mine. Your life is part of who I am. Everything is part of who I am. That’s how this works. Novels don’t bend for the world—you taught me that. Now you wanna talk about prayer and survival and the history of the Jews, but you’re the guy who put them at the helms of slave ships before the camps went cold. That’s the story you needed to tell, and that’s why it was great. You did whatever you had to do to survive, claimed what you needed, made it all yours—that’s the fucking story of the Jews, of hip-hop, of everything. So don’t you tell me I can’t do the same.” Tris could barely force himself to remain still; his body throbbed with the urge to punch something, kick something, throw a chair. He squeezed his hands into fists so tight they ached, and tried to breathe.

They sat and stared at each other. Tristan looked into his grandson’s blazing, jittery eyes, took in his flushed, frightened face. If ever he was going to break with himself, the old man thought, now was the time. What did he owe Tris? What did they owe each other? Were old men supposed to immolate themselves so young might prosper? Was that the way of the world, the way of family, the way of redemption? How could redemption come on the heels of betrayal; how could it come at the hands of this self-righteous, calculating putz?

“I’ll do the interview,” he said. “Not because I buy any of that bullshit. But because you’re my grandson, you impudent little prick. And I owe you that much. For the good of this family. What’s left of it.”

Tris unclenched his fists. “Thank you.”

“Don’t you thank me.” Tristan labored to his feet. “I thought you were willing to fuck me over for the sake of a book, but I was wrong. You’ll do it for much less. For a few pages of publicity. A little taste of success. So have it your way, Tristan Freedman. I’ll do the piece, and that’s the last thing I will ever do for you. Good luck. I hope you take the best-seller list by storm.”

And with that, the old man walked away.