We were at the fortieth wedding anniversary celebration of Dr. Barr and his wife, Lynn. The Barrs lived in Great Neck. We’d driven from Manhattan just before the sun was beginning to set. As we crossed the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge, Roosevelt Island’s towers flashed, the shadows of Manhattan’s buildings just starting to climb their faces. By the time we arrived the sky was a buffed pink, with plenty of light for my younger brother, Oren, to name the make and model of every car parked in the driveway, ending with Dr. Barr’s Cadillac Seville. It was a vehicle whose cachet we associated with the bold gilt letters on the door of his Gramercy Park office, but the high esteem in which we held him did not change the fact that in our house, and on nights like these, he was known only by his first name: Elliott.
He was my father’s best friend and our family’s psychologist. All of us consulted with him: Mom midweek, Dad and Oren and me on Saturday mornings. My father had been Elliott’s patient since before he met my mother; she, the year after they married. Oren had only recently started therapy because his grades were sliding, but I’d been seeing Elliott since I was six, after a family death I’d caused. It never struck me as odd, the thinness of the membrane between patient and friend, between husband and wife, brother and brother, perhaps because Elliott had been such a ubiquitous presence for as long as I could remember. If anything, it made Elliott seem even wiser, able, as I imagined he was, to keep so many secrets from four people without judging them.
The Barrs’ home was so packed with guests it made me feel like we were standing in a closet, the men’s blazers and the women’s wraps and scarves muffling the music as we moved through zones of perfume, Scotch, and cigarette smoke. Oren and I made repeat trips to the buffet (the salmon soon only a head and a tail), watched some of ABC’s Wide World of Sports in the guest room (Elliott had one of the biggest TVs I’d ever seen, but the reception was terrible), and then checked out Elliott’s collection of masks mounted in the dining room’s display case, whose glass Oren tried to open: arrow-headed shamans, saber-toothed Kabuki demons, and our favorites from the Chinese opera, their designs like superhero masks and as colorful as pinball machines. But having exhausted ways of relieving our boredom, we split up.
This was when Naomi and I ended up alone together for the first time. She was sitting on the living room sofa. I sat on the coffee table, facing her. I was telling her about my acting career. She had asked me about playing Roy Scheider’s son in The Talon Effect.
“What was it like working with him?” she said.
“He was nice,” I said. “Roy and I ate lunch together my first day on the set, and when I opened my soda it sprayed his face, so he angled his can’s mouth toward mine, popped the tab, and got me back.”
“And Joan Collins,” she said. “Is she as pretty in person?”
“She is,” I said, “though one day during makeup the hairdresser stuck a teasing comb behind her ear and lifted a wig clean off her head.”
Naomi found this hysterical. She snorted when she laughed, pressing her fingernails to her chest. Between her rings and bracelets and her gold earrings shaped like cymbals, she clinked whenever she moved. She was a Great Neck Jewess. She had the classic up-Island accent, one I could mimic on command: “A vawhdville act, this kid is,” I said, imitating her, “a regular prawdigy.” She was wide-hipped; she wore sheer stockings beneath a wool skirt. Her blouse was a tailored silk, open at the neck, which revealed, when she leaned forward, a peek of collarbone and the lacy spray of her bra. On her cheek was a light brown birthmark, the texture and color of a burned egg white.
It was the heat of Naomi’s attention that got me so excited, plus the odd way we sat hidden in plain sight—how the party, by now well into its swing, domed us in a kind of privacy—because it was at this point that I did something remarkable and fateful: I got into character. She’d asked me about the Saturday morning TV series I’d been doing for several seasons, “the one,” she said, “that adults watch too.” She snapped her fingers, trying to conjure the title as if from the narrow space between us, and then laid her hand on my shoulder. “The Nuclear Family,” she said, remembering, and then leaned back to clap once. It was more spoof than superhero show, vaguely educational, each episode organized around a different scientific concept. An exposure to radiation had altered the DNA of my character, Peter Proton, along with that of his parents, Ellen Electron and Nate Neutron. Before we fought bad guys, we’d summon our powers by yelling, “Split up!” After Three Mile Island had nearly melted down, everyone called the show prophetic. Naomi wanted to know how we did the special effects—the atomic eye blasts and flying sequences. I was explaining chroma-keying to her, how we’d hang from wires in front of a green screen, when I suddenly stopped. My expression changed. I turned away and, through my nose, forced all the breath from my chest. It was a trick I’d learned in order to make myself tear up.
“Sweetie,” she asked, “are you all right?”
“I’m going to tell you a secret,” I said. “But you have to swear not to tell anyone.” I had a tear perfectly balanced—it was like palming a beach ball in the wind—and when I faced Naomi again, I let it fall down my cheek. “Will you swear?” I asked.
Naomi looked over her shoulder and then leaned forward and whispered, “Of course, honey.”
I told her that I’d lost my virginity to Liz, the director’s assistant. She was twenty-four. On set, she was everything from gofer to script girl, and because I was extra busy once school started—what with the tighter shooting schedule, I explained, and my homework on top of that—I’d struggled to memorize my lines. She and I often rehearsed together, and for several weeks straight we’d found ourselves alone in my dressing room. One night while going over a scene, it just happened. We’d been secretly dating ever since.
“She’s worried she’ll get in trouble,” I said.
“Because of your age, you mean?”
“You’re the first person I’ve told.”
Naomi shook her head in amazement.
“Is it wrong?” I asked.
“To be having…relations with her?” she said.
“To like older women so much.”
And while Naomi considered how to answer—struggling, through the fog of these details, to process my bald-faced lie—I leaned forward to kiss her. This was a ridiculous gesture, made more absurd by my open-mouthed, tongue-first nonchalance, plus my disregard for her status and our surroundings (the fact that she was married, for example, or that guests were standing five feet away). I briefly pressed my lips to hers. It’s possible she’d never moved so fast in her life, rocking back to laugh at my ludicrous bravado while simultaneously pressing her fingertips to my shoulder.
“Griffin,” she said, “you are something.”
I shrugged, then thanked her for the talk and went to go find my brother.
Oren was always worth seeking out at these parties, because he was a fearless explorer of other people’s rooms. Closed doors meant nothing to him. Closets were never off-limits. Bureaus begged to be opened, whether they belonged to strangers or to our parents, whose wall-length dresser he regularly raided with abandon. He’d found treasures there: rolls of quarters stacked like Lincoln Logs, reserved for the basement laundry machines but that we skimmed to play Missile Command at Stanley’s Stationery Store; my father’s dog tags, their gunmetal stamped with risen letters like Braille and revealing his given name, Hertzberg. (When Dad became an actor, he’d changed it to Hurt.) Buried beneath Mom’s underwear, Oren had also uncovered her diaphragm, waiting until I was present to pop its plastic container. He stretched its dome with his fingers to a near-porous transparency.
“I think it’s a yarmulke,” he theorized.
“For what,” I said, “the rain?” I sealed its ring over my lips and blew as hard as I could. “Plus,” I added after it failed to inflate, “Mom isn’t even Jewish.”
At the Barrs’ house, I found Oren in the twilit driveway with my father and Naomi’s husband, Sam Shah. One gull wing of his Bentley’s hood was raised so Oren could admire the engine. My father was already seated shotgun. When he spotted me, he made a hurry-up wave.
“Join us,” Sam said, clicking the hood’s panel back in place and walking toward the driver’s-side door. “We’re taking her for a spin.”
Sam Shah made a powerful impression standing beside his gorgeous machine. He was dark-skinned—Pakistani on his mother’s side, I’d learn later that year—with a head of luxuriant black hair that added at least an inch to his height. He was full-lipped, his fluffy mustache as dense as his brows, and his glasses had such thick lenses his eyes seemed to float in them. To use an expression from back then, his charisma was serious. Chin up, he watched me as I approached and then extended his arm toward the back seat. I always thought that Mr. Shah’s clothes were fantastic. This evening’s blazer was a buttery chestnut tweed, his silk tie brilliantly colored. His loafers’ tassels looked like tiny squid dipped in expensive chocolate. Shoes to shirt, these materials seemed to gather the fading light to them, as did the Bentley’s oyster-gray paint.
“Everyone buckled up?” Sam asked. He pulled on a pair of leather driving gloves, perforated above the clasp, which, when he snapped closed, I noticed my father admiring. Sam started the car and the needles jumped. He eased the Bentley out of its space, but the moment we were on the road he gave it gas, and the engine sang.
Oren was thrilled. He immediately pulled down the tray table—an act I copied—admiring the molten grain of polished walnut. Oren leaned forward, looking over Sam’s shoulder to regard the dash. The white-on-black gauges had stenciled abbreviations, the car’s major operations adjusted by silver knobs that looked pleasurable to touch. The only visible sign of wear surrounded the ignition switch, the key having chipped away the veneer each time it had missed the slot, but to me such scarring was a sign of use and meant only one thing: Sam drove this car everywhere.
“What’s the make and model?” my father asked.
“This is a 1960 S2 Continental,” Sam said.
“It’s beautifully appointed,” my father said. He often made such statements in his baritone, and the usual effect was that his words somehow attained a solemn authority that masked their obviousness. Earlier, I’d overheard him talking to some of Elliott and Lynn’s guests. Of the Iran hostage crisis, he’d intoned, “It’s a very, very complex situation,” and his audience vigorously nodded their heads, as if by saying so he’d explained Middle Eastern geopolitics. But Sam had no reaction to his comment, and this made my father fidget more than usual. He ran his fingers along the door’s wood grain and then checked them for dust. He turned the radio on, off, and, after adjusting the dial, left it on, as if this were his car.
“Where’d you get it?” my father asked.
“On the Cape,” Sam said.
“It must’ve been expensive.”
“It was sitting, uncovered, in the owner’s driveway, turning into a hunk of rust.”
“A bargain, then,” my father observed.
Sam leaned toward him while keeping his eyes on the road. He lowered his voice conspiratorially. “The restoration was what really cost me.”
We’d made our way out of the residential part of Great Neck and onto a four-lane road. Freer now, Sam stepped on it again, and the car accelerated effortlessly.
My father pointed to the speedometer. “Ever gotten it up to two hundred?” he asked.
Oren, shielding his eyes, shook his head miserably. “Those are kilometers.”
Dad, who liked to hurry past mistakes, shot him a look. “Still,” he said to Oren, and then to Sam, “it’s close.”
Over Sam’s shoulder, Oren said, “So it tops out at what, Mr. Shah? One-twenty?”
“Very good,” Sam replied. “And no,” he told Dad.
“It’s a V-8,” Oren continued, amazing me. “The S1 was a straight six.”
“I see you know your automobiles,” Sam said.
Oren shrugged and then sank back into his seat, crossing his arms, wearing a pained expression as he watched the darkened trees whip by. “I know a little,” he said.
I could tell Dad was uncomfortable in the presence of Sam’s material success, which baffled me. He sang on Broadway, and his voice was all over TV. Give, he said, to the United Negro College Fund. Because a mind is a terrible thing to waste. He had nothing to prove to me.
“What do you think of American cars?” Dad asked Sam. We’d just bought my grandfather’s Buick LeSabre for a dollar—an amount Grandpa had demanded to make the transaction, in his words, official.
“Not much,” Sam said.
“Elliott certainly loves his Cadillac,” my father observed.
Once again Sam leaned toward my father. “Even Dr. Barr has lapses in judgment.”
While Oren and I were recovering from this heresy, my father’s voice came on the radio—his commercial for Schlitz. It was suddenly obvious to me why he’d turned it on in the first place. Oren was so mortified he hid his face behind Sam’s seat, while I, being the more dutiful son, exclaimed, “Dad, it’s you!”
Sam raised the volume.
You only go around once in life, said my father, so you have to grab all the gusto you can!
Sam laughed, delighted. Dad shrugged like it was nothing. You drive a Bentley, he seemed to be saying. I am the voice of malt liquor.
A moment later, Sam asked, “How do they pay you for that?”
“What do you mean?”
“Is it a one-time thing?” Sam said. “You do the commercial, get a check, and you’re done?”
“Not exactly,” my father said. He sat up straight, then pinched his thumb and index finger together as if to make a fine point. “They also pay you for a thirteen-week cycle. After that, if they want to renew the commercial, they pay you again.” He sat back and crossed his arms, satisfied.
Sam appeared to do a quick calculation. “So during that period, they could play the ad a million times and you wouldn’t see an extra cent?”
My father opened his mouth and then closed it. “In theory, yes.”
Sam smiled, blinking. “Someone’s union needs to renegotiate.”
Dad had had it with his unions. They’d been on strike since late July, the walkout over cable TV and videocassette revenue, which made me happy—finally, I wasn’t on set shooting my show over the summer. My father hated being out of work, but he took Sam’s observation as a more personal affront: he suddenly also felt underappreciated. Now it was he who faced the window to watch the world unspool past him.
“I’ll talk to them,” he replied, as if his SAG and AFTRA reps were just waiting for his call. He was distracted now, but when we took a sharp curve and Sam accelerated through its apex, he managed to step back into character. “The handling is just remarkable.”
“Yes,” said Sam, “but it’s nothing like my Ferrari GT.”
“You have a Lusso?” my brother asked. “That’s the rarest car they ever made.”
“It’s a 365,” Sam corrected, and then rolled his eyes at my father. “I’m not that rich.”
“Is it red or black?” Oren asked.
“My dear boy,” Sam said, tilting the rearview mirror so he could look my brother in the eye, “I think we both know the Ferrari only comes in one color.”
Confused, Oren said, “What’s that?”
“Fast.”
Evening had descended during our drive, the pines black against the night-blue sky. Upon our return to the Barrs’ house—the very moment Sam cut the engine—the front door opened, throwing on the driveway’s gravel the interior’s yellow light and the party’s din. Though the foyer was crowded, the first person I saw was Naomi.
She kissed her husband and asked my father and brother in passing if they’d enjoyed the drive, but when we faced each other, I had the distinct impression she’d been on the lookout for me, because she gave a slight start when we made eye contact, and then her expression softened into something more than affection. I hadn’t given her a thought since we’d parted. My attempt to kiss her earlier had been so spontaneous, and so impulsive, it seemed to have been perpetrated by an impostor; it had been merely an opportunity for me to flex a familiar muscle, to perform for her, for someone—anyone—and been thereafter forgotten at the end of the scene. Now, however, I suddenly felt ashamed by my behavior. This was coupled with a terrifying realization that I’d won her fondness, but for no good reason. In response, I hurried inside—I spotted Mom and called to her, as if excited to tell her about what we’d just done—though not quickly enough that I failed to notice Naomi’s head tilt ever so slightly when I passed, her expression at once plaintive and perplexed.
My subsequent efforts to avoid her were not successful. Every time I looked up, she was there, waiting to catch my eye and remind me of what had transpired between us. It didn’t matter where I positioned myself. Even later, when my father sat down at the Barrs’ grand piano and played, when the chords rippled out and silenced conversations one by one—a hypnotic, softening effect as the guests, having suddenly noticed something very beautiful was occurring, turned to give him their full attention—I spotted her staring at me. I feigned devotion, smiling appreciatively at the ghosts of my father’s hands reflected on the piano’s fallboard, which was as black as the faces of the Bentley’s dials. The parallax view of his hands, at once crablike and blurred, made his virtuosity seem effortless and all the more remarkable. I knew that she knew I wasn’t fooling her, or myself.
Realizing all eyes were on him, my father glanced over his shoulder, raising his brows and then jerking his head back as if startled, a gesture that elicited laughs from nearly everyone, even my mother, who listened with one palm pressed to her chest, a wineglass cradled in the other. When my father performed, her expression was always an odd combination of admiration and melancholy, as if the melody reminded her of something from long ago, or a place to which you were sure, upon leaving, you’d never return. Sam Shah stood at my mother’s side. He leaned toward her in that stiff-backed way of his, bending from the hips, his hands clasped behind his back, and said something, whether flattering or witty, I couldn’t be sure, because she barely acknowledged his remark, as if to underscore that my father had the stage, and the time had come for everyone in the audience to please be silent. Elliott and Lynn joined Dad by the piano, and in a moment so perfect it seemed rehearsed, my father gestured toward the couple with an outstretched arm, the guests applauded, and, returning both hands to the keys, he sang in their honor:
If we only have love
Then tomorrow will dawn
And the days of our years
Will rise on that morn
If we only have love
To embrace without fears
We will kiss with our eyes
We will sleep without tears
If we only have love
With our arms open wide
Then the young and the old
Will stand at our side
He played for another several verses and, upon concluding, stood to bow as the gathered guests applauded. Naomi began to walk in my direction but stopped when Al Moretti, tapping a spoon to his highball, seized the chance to make a toast.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “you’re gonna have to indulge me for a sec, ’cause I gotta speak from the heart.”
A hairdresser and part-time social worker, Al liked to describe himself as a “Jew-Woppie.” He was my parents’ close friend and another of Elliott’s patients. Tonight he was wearing an orange shirt unbuttoned to the sternum, tight white pants, a white leather belt and shoes, both with gold buckles. His complexion, always red, now appeared closer to boiled. He had that familiar Queens inflection and idiom, the direct object of his sentences occasionally preceding their verb like a caboose pulling a train.
“Elliott, Lynn, this speech I didn’t carefully prepare or nothing, so please bear with. I know I’m not alone in saying that when we first met, I was a fucking mess.” Everyone whooped at this, including Al. “But the pair of you”—he draped his arms around their necks and pulled them in to his sides—“you picked me up and took me under your wing. Ten years ago, Elliott, we started therapy together, and what can I say? With your able hands you wrung every drop of mishegoss out of my mind, while Lynn, you filled me up with a mother’s milk.” He took a moment to blow his nose with his cocktail napkin, stuffing it in his back pocket afterward. “Just the other day, Elliott, you said something that was such genius I thought about it on the whole train back to Astoria. ‘Friends,’ you said, ‘are the family you get to choose.’ But you’re the family that chose us. So thank you for that and for sharing this blessed day. May the Lord God see fit you enjoy many more.” He raised his glass. “You’re fucking gorgeous.”
Everyone else’s glasses went up. But before a single guest could say “mazel tov” or Naomi could make her way to me, I’d escaped into Elliott and Lynn’s room, where I found Oren. He’d managed to fix the television and was watching Charlie’s Angels.
When any evening at the Barrs’ home concluded and the guests were seen off, a core group that included Al Moretti and my parents always remained behind. It made me feel like we were special. If their son, Matthew, was in attendance, as well as their daughter, Deborah, and her husband, Eli, they too could be expected to hang back—it made all of us feel like we were nearly family. Imagine my surprise, then, when Oren and I emerged from the bedroom, and I noticed Sam and Naomi had been welcomed into this cohort. The grown-ups, still talking, tarried at the front door. Elliott and Sam were arguing heatedly. “If it moves,” Sam said, “they tax it. If it keeps moving, they regulate it. And if it stops moving, they subsidize it. But not Reagan, I guarantee it.” In response to which Elliott shook his head and said, “The only authentic form of trickle-down economics is the president’s character.” And then I noticed Naomi wave my parents over to her.
“That boy of yours,” she said, either mischievously or vindictively, I couldn’t tell, and then shot me a look that promised revenge. She gathered my parents into a huddle, resting her hands on their shoulders as she whispered to them, which built toward, I was sure, the embarrassing conclusion of my attempted kiss, upon which they all burst out laughing. “I mean,” Naomi said, and touched her fingernails to her chest, rolling her eyes, “I nevah.”
After evenings such as these, during the drive home, my parents often asked me, “Well, Griffin, what did you think?” Both considered me perceptive, they regularly told me as much, and I found I could intensify this effect—could get them to exchange that knowing look—by withholding half of what I’d noticed or framing my observations as questions. The trick was to be just off point. “How come everyone checks with Elliott after they say something?” I might ask, or “Do you think Al’s laugh sounded lonely?” But I dreaded this discussion now, for I was sure Naomi had exposed me, and I wanted to avoid the topic at all costs, especially in front of Oren, lest I combust with shame.
Surprisingly, it was he who broached the subject. “Why does Mr. Shah think lower taxes will save the country?”
“Because it’s an election year,” Mom said. “And for some people politics is only about how much you pay the government.”
“He just wants to keep more of the money he makes,” Dad added.
“Doesn’t everybody?” Oren asked.
“Yes,” Dad said, shaken by the question’s obviousness, “but it’s not that simple.”
“Mr. Shah said,” Oren continued, “that reducing top rates would incentivize investment, which would spur the economy and bring down unemployment—take the ‘stag’ out of ‘stagflation.’ ”
“What’s your point?” Dad asked.
“It sounds straightforward to me.”
Dad, anxious to change the subject, said to Mom, “I think Sam was quite taken with you.”
“Ugh,” she replied, “he just went on and on about his orchids and his wine cellar.”
“If you’d married a man like that,” Dad said, “he’d’ve given you the royal treatment.”
“You’d definitely be going home in a nicer ride,” Oren said.
“A man like that,” Mom countered, “treats his cars like women and his women like cars.”
Oren wouldn’t have it, but Dad was delighted by her turn of phrase. That her witticisms might get a rise out of anyone, let alone my father, always surprised her, and this always made me slightly sad for her.
When Oren asked what Mr. Shah did for a living, Dad said, “He’s in the schmatta business.” And then more bafflingly, added: “Rags. Seconds.” He often alluded to further explanations that he never supplied. Because my brother and I had inherited his fear of not seeming in the know, Oren refused to press, although I could tell he’d filed this away for further investigation. In my mind, I pictured Mr. Shah as a dealer in washcloths or, somehow, time.
Dad, who’d noticed my silence, eyed me in the rearview mirror. “Naomi said you two had quite the conversation.” He glanced at Mom, barely suppressing a smile. “She said you told her all about the people you’d worked with. Several of the actors and…crew.”
Oren, smelling blood, gave me a sharky grin.
“And?” I said.
Mom turned around. “She said you struck her as being exceptionally mature.”
I glanced at Dad in the rearview mirror, then back at Mom. “That’s it?” I asked.
After a shrug, she added, “That’s all.”
Mom never lied to us. This characteristic cut two ways: you had to be careful what you asked her. I faced out my window so that only I could see myself smile.
We were crossing the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge on the lower roadway. Its traffic was often worse than the Midtown Tunnel, but Dad preferred this artery into Manhattan, partly because there was no toll. I did too, especially at night. After you passed Roosevelt Island and traversed the East River, you descended from many stories toward Second Avenue, so that it seemed you were a pigeon come flying between the skyscrapers’ twinkling lights. Up here, I caught glimpses into corner offices and onto rooftop gardens, of the tenants in their luxurious apartments. They were each a promise of some greater future in which you might revel in height, in roominess, from a purchase wherein you might regard all you had achieved, once you’d decided where to land. Even now, when I find myself returning to New York after a long absence, I feel that same thrill, that sense of ownership that I did then, and one that particular view conferred.
And then a tram rose toward us. Within its hospital-bright interior, there stood a woman, alone, leaning on the railing and facing the bridge. Right before we flashed past each other, in that stilled clarity conferred by speed, she caught my eye and, I was certain of it, smiled at me. And in that instant, when one stranger notices another and somehow agrees they’ll keep that glance to themselves, I swear it was as if Naomi had sent a telepathic message through her that said, We’re safe. It came so loud and clear, this confidence between us and the mercy she’d showed, that I was overwhelmed with gratitude. So this is how adults communicate. I pressed my temple to the window, my breath fogging the glass. When, I wondered, would I see Naomi again?
Oren nudged my arm. In the streetlights’ flash, he flapped something on the seat between us: Sam Shah’s driving gloves.