Ira had been divorced six months and still couldn’t get his wedding ring off. His finger had swelled doughily around it—a combination of frustrated desire, unmitigated remorse, and misdirected ambition, he said to friends. “I’m going to have to have my entire finger surgically removed.” The ring (supposedly gold, though now that everything he had ever received from Marilyn had been thrown into doubt, who knew) cinched the blousy fat of his finger, which had grown around it like a fucking happy vine. “Maybe I should cut off the whole hand. And send it to her,” he said on the phone to his friend Mike, with whom he worked at the State Historical Society. “She’ll understand the reference.” Ira had already ceremoniously set fire to his wedding tux—hanging it on a tall stick in his backyard, scarecrow-style, and igniting it with a Bic lighter. “That sucker went up really fast,” he gasped apologetically to the fire marshal, after the hedge caught too, and before he was brought overnight to the local lockdown facility. “So fast. Maybe it was, I don’t know, like the residual dry-cleaning fluid.”
“You’ll remove that ring when you’re ready,” Mike said now. Mike’s job approving historical preservation projects on old houses left him time to take a lot of lenient parenting courses and to read all the lenient parenting books. “Here’s what you do for your depression. I’m not going to say lose yourself in charity work. I’m not going to say get some perspective by watching our country’s news each evening and by contemplating those worse off than yourself, those, say, who are about to be blown apart by bombs. I’m going to say this: Stop drinking, stop smoking. Eliminate coffee, sugar, dairy products. Do this for three days, then start everything back up again. Bam. I guarantee you, you will be so happy.”
“I’m afraid,” Ira said softly, “that the only thing that would make me happy right now is snipping the brake cables on Marilyn’s car.”
“Spring,” Mike said helplessly, though it was still only the end of winter. “It can really hang you up the most.”
“Hey. You should write songs. Just not too often.” Ira looked at his hands. Actually he had once gotten the ring off in a hot, soapy bath, but the sight of his denuded finger, naked as a child’s, had terrified him and he had shoved the ring back on.
On the other end of the phone Ira could hear Mike sighing and casting about. Cupboard doors closed loudly. The refrigerator puckered open, then whooshed shut. Ira knew that Mike and Kate had had their troubles—as the phrase went—but always their marriage had held. “I’d divorce Kate,” Mike had once confided to Ira, “but she’d kill me.” “Look,” Mike said now, “why don’t you come to our house Sunday for a little Lent dinner. We’re having some people by and who knows?”
“Who knows?” asked Ira.
“Yes—who knows?”
“What’s a Lent dinner?”
“We made it up. For Lent. We didn’t really want to do Mardi Gras. Too disrespectful, given the international situation.”
“So you’re doing Lent. I’m unclear on Lent. I mean, I know what Lent means to those of us in the Jewish faith. But we don’t usually commemorate these transactions with meals. Usually there’s just a lot of sighing.”
“It’s like a pre-Easter Prince of Peace dinner,” said Mike slowly.
There were no natural predators in this small, oblivious, and tolerant community, and so strange creatures and creations abounded. “Prince of Peace? Not—of Minneapolis?”
“You’re supposed to give things up for Lent. Last year we gave up our faith and reason; this year we are giving up our democratic voice, our hope.” Ira had already met most of Mike’s goyishe friends. Mike himself was low-key, tolerant, self-deprecating to a flaw. A self-described “ethnic Catholic,” he once complained dejectedly about not having been cute enough to have been molested by a priest. “They would just shake my hand very quickly,” he said. Mike’s friends, however, tended to be tense, intellectually earnest Protestants who drove new, metallic-hued cars and who within five minutes of light conversation could be counted on at least twice to use the phrase “strictly within the framework of.” “Kate has a divorcée friend she’s inviting,” Mike said. “I’m not trying to fix you up. I really hate that stuff. I’m just saying come. Eat some food. It’s the start of Eastertime and, well, hey: we could use a Jew over here.” Mike laughed heartily.
“Yeah, I’ll reenact the whole thing for you,” said Ira. He looked at his swollen ring finger again. “Yessirree. I’ll come over and show you all how it’s done.”
Ira’s new house, though it was in what his realtor referred to as “a lovely, pedestrian neighborhood,” abutting the streets named after presidents, boasting, instead, streets named after fishing flies (Caddis, Hendrickson, Gold-Ribbed Hare’s Ear Road), was full of slow drains, leaky burners, stopped-up pipes, and excellent dust for scrawling curse words. Marilyn blows sailors. The draftiest windows he duct-taped up with sheets of plastic on the inside, as instructed by Homeland Security; cold air billowed the plastic inward like sails on a boat. On a windy day it was quite something. “Your whole house could fly away,” said Mike, looking around.
“Not really,” said Ira. “But it is spinning. It’s very interesting, actually.”
The yard had already grown muddy with March and the flower beds were greening with the tiniest sprigs of stinkweed and quack grass. By June the chemical weapons of terrorism aimed at the heartland might prove effective in weeding the garden. “This may be the sort of war I could really use!” Ira said out loud to a neighbor. Mike and Kate’s house, on the other hand, with its perfect lines and friendly fussiness, reeking, he supposed, of historical preservation tax credits, seemed an impossible dream to him, something plucked from a magazine article about childhood memories conjured on a deathbed. Something seen through the window by the Little Match Girl. Outside, the soffits were perfectly squared. The crocuses were like bells and the Siberian violets like grape candies scattered in the grass. Inside, the smell of warm food almost made him weep, and with his coat still on he rushed past Kate to throw his arms around Mike, kissing him on both cheeks. “All the beautiful men must be kissed!” Ira exclaimed.
After he got his coat off, and had wandered into the dining room, he toasted with the champagne he himself had brought. There were eight guests there, most of whom he knew to some degree, but really that was enough. That was enough for everyone. Still, they raised their glasses with him. “To Lent!” Ira cried. “To the final days!” And in case that was too grim, he added, “And to the coming Resurrection! May it happen a little closer to home this time! Jesus Christ!” Soon he wandered back into the kitchen and, as he felt was required of him, shrieked at the pork. Then he began milling around again, apologizing for the Crucifixion: “We really didn’t intend it,” he murmured, “not really, not the killing part? We just kind of got carried away? You know how spring can get a little crazy, but believe me, we’re all really, really sorry.” Kate’s divorced friend was named Zora, and was a pediatrician. Although no one else did, she howled with laughter, and when her face wasn’t blasted apart with it or her jaw snapping mutely open and shut like a scissors (in what Ira recognized was postdivorce hysteria; “How long have you been divorced?” he later asked her. “Eleven years,” she replied), Ira could see she was very beautiful: short black hair; eyes a clear, reddish hazel, like orange pekoe tea; a strong aquiline nose, probably a snorer; thick lashes that spiked out wrought and black as the tines of a fireplace fork. Her body was a mix of thin and plump, her skin lined and unlined, in that rounding-the-corner-to-fifty way. Age and youth, he chanted silently, youth and age, sing their songs on the very same stage. Ira was working on a modest little volume of doggerel, its tentative title Women from Venus; Men from Penis. Either that, or Soccer Dad: The Musical.
Like everyone he knew, he could discern the hollowness in people’s charm only when it was directed at someone other than himself. When it was directed at him, the person just seemed so totally nice. And so Zora’s laughter, in conjunction with her beauty, doomed him a little, made him grateful beyond reason.
Immediately, he sent her a postcard, one of newlyweds dragging empty Spam cans from the bumper of their car. He wrote: Dear Zora, Had such fun meeting you at Mike’s. And then he wrote his phone number. He kept it simple. In courtship he had a history of mistakes, beginning at sixteen with his first girlfriend, for whom he had bought at the local head shop the coolest thing he had then ever seen in his life: a beautifully carved wooden hand with its middle finger sticking up. He himself had coveted it tremulously for a year. How could she not love it? Her contempt for it, and then for him, had left him feeling baffled and betrayed. With Marilyn he had taken the other approach and played hard to get, which had turned their relationship into a never-ending Sadie Hawkins Day, with subsequent marriage to Sadie an inevitably doomed thing—a humiliating and interminable Dutch date.
But this, the Spam postcard and the note, he felt contained the correct mix of offhandedness and intent. This elusive mix—the geometric halfway point between stalker and Rip van Winkle—was important to get right in the world of middle-aged dating, he suspected, though what did he really know of this world? It had been so long, the whole thing seemed a kind of distant civilization, a planet of the apings!—graying, human flotsam with scorched internal landscapes mimicking the young, picking up where they had left off decades ago, if only they could recall where the hell that was. Ira had been a married man for fifteen years, a father for eight (poor little Bekka, now rudely transported between houses in a speedy, ritualistic manner resembling a hostage drop-off), only to find himself punished for an idle little nothing, nothing, nothing flirtation with a colleague, punished with his wife’s actual affair and false business trips (Montessori conventions that never existed), and finally a petition for divorce mailed from a motel. Observing others go through them, he used to admire midlife crises, the courage and shamelessness and existential daring of them, but after he’d watched his own wife, a respectable nursery school teacher, produce and star in a full-blown one of her own, he found the sufferers of such crises not only self-indulgent but greedy and demented, and he wished them all weird unnatural deaths with various contraptions easily found in garages.
He received a postcard from Zora in return. It was of Van Gogh’s room in Arles. Beneath the clockface of the local postmark her handwriting was big but careful, some curlicuing in the g’s and f’s. It read, Had such fun meeting you at Mike’s. Wasn’t that precisely, word for word, what he had written to her? There was no too, no emphasized you, just the exact same words thrown back at him like in some lunatic postal Ping-Pong. Either she was stupid or crazy or he was already being too hard on her. Not being hard on people—“You bark at them,” Marilyn used to say—was something he was trying to work on. When he pictured Zora’s lovely face, it helped his tenuous affections. She had written her phone number and signed off with a swashbuckling Z—as in Zorro. That was cute, he supposed. He guessed. Who knew. He had to lie down.
He had Bekka for the weekend. She sat in the living room, tuned to Cartoon Network. She liked Road Runner and Justice League. Ira would sometimes watch her mesmerized face, the cartoons flashing on the creamy screen of her skin, her eyes still and wide, bright with reflected shapes caught there like holograms in marbles. He felt inadequate as her father, but in general attempted his best: affection, wisdom, reliability, plus not ordering pizza every night, though tonight he had again caved in. Last week Bekka had said to him, “When you and Mommy were married we always had mashed potatoes for supper. Now you’re divorced and we always have spaghetti.”
“Which do you like better?” he had asked.
“Neither!” she had shouted, summing up her distaste for everything. “I hate them both.”
Tonight he had ordered the pizza half plain cheese, and half with banana peppers and jalapeños. The two of them sat together in front of Justice League, with TV trays, eating slices from their respective sides. Chesty, narrow-waisted heroes in bright colors battled their enemies with righteous confidence and, of course, laser guns. Bekka finally turned to him. “Mommy says that if her boyfriend Daniel moves in I can have a dog. A dog and a bunny.”
“And a bunny?” Ira said. When the family was still together, unbroken, the four-year-old Bekka, new to numbers and the passage of time, used to exclaim triumphantly to her friends, “Mommy and Daddy say I can have a dog! When I turn eighteen!” There’d been no talk of bunnies. But perhaps the imminence of Easter had brought this on. He knew Bekka loved animals. She had once, in a bathtime reverie, named her five favorite people, four of whom were dogs. The fifth was her own blue bike.
“A dog and a bunny,” Bekka repeated, and Ira had to repress images of the dog with the rabbit’s bloody head in its mouth.
“So, what do you think about that?” he asked cautiously, wanting to get her opinion on the whole Daniel thing.
Bekka shrugged and chewed. “Whatever,” she said, her new word for “You’re welcome,” “Hello,” “Good-bye,” and “I’m only eight.” “I really just don’t want all his stuff there. Already his car blocks our car in the driveway.”
“Bummer,” said Ira, his new word for “I must remain as neutral as possible” and “Your mother’s a whore.”
“I don’t want a stepfather,” Bekka said.
“Maybe he could just live on the steps,” Ira said, and Bekka smirked, her mouth full of mozzarella.
“Besides,” she said. “I like Larry better. He’s stronger.”
“Who’s Larry?” Ira said, instead of “Bummer.”
“He’s this other dude,” Bekka said. She sometimes referred to her mother as a “dudette.” “She’s a dudette, all right,” Ira would say.
“Bummer,” said Ira now. “Big, big bummer.”
He phoned Zora four days later, so as not to seem discouragingly eager. He summoned up his most confident acting. “Hi, Zora? This is Ira,” and then waited—narcissistically perhaps, but what else was there to say?—for her response.
“Ira?”
“Yes. Ira Milkins.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know who you are.”
Ira gripped the phone and looked down at himself, suddenly finding nothing there. He seemed to have vanished from the neck down. “We met last Sunday at Mike and Kate’s?” His voice quavered. If he ever actually succeeded in going out with her, he was going to have to take one of those date-rape drugs and just pass out on her couch.
“Ira? Ohhhhhhhhh—Ira. Yeah. The Jewish guy.”
“Yeah, the Jew. That was me.” Should he hang up now? He did not feel he could go on. But he must go on. There was a man of theater for you.
“That was a nice dinner,” she said.
“Yes, it was.”
“I usually skip Lent completely.”
“Me, too,” said Ira. “It’s just simpler. Who needs the fuss?”
“But sometimes I forget how reassuring and conjoining a meal with friends can be, especially at a time like this.”
Ira had to think about the way she’d used conjoining. It sounded New Agey and Amish, both.
“But Mike and Kate run that kind of house. It’s all warmth and good-heartedness.”
Ira thought about this. What other kind of home was there to run, if you were going to bother? Hard, cold, and mean: that had been his own home with Marilyn, at the end. It was like those experimental monkeys with the wire-monkey moms. What did the baby monkeys know? The wire mother was all they had, all they knew in their hearts, and so they clung to it, as had he, even if it was only a coat hanger. Mom. So much easier to carve the word into your arm. You were used to pain. You’d been imprinted. As a child, for a fifth-grade science project, in the basement of his house, he’d once tried to reproduce Konrad Lorenz’s experiment with baby ducks. But he had screwed up with the incubation lights and had cooked the ducks right in their eggs, stinking up the basement so much that his mother had screamed at him for days. Which was a science lesson of some sort—the emotional limits of the Homo sapiens working Jewish mom—but it was soft science, so less impressive.
“What kind of home do you run?” he asked.
“Home? Oh, I mean to get to one of those. Right now, actually, I’m talking to you from a pup tent.”
Oh, she was a funny one. Perhaps they would laugh and laugh their way into the sunset. “I love pup tents,” he said. What was a pup tent exactly? He’d forgotten.
“Actually, I have a teenage son, so I have no idea what kind of home I have anymore. Once you have a teenager, everything changes.”
Now there was silence. He couldn’t imagine Bekka as a teenager. Or rather, he could, sort of, since she often acted like one already, full of rage at the incompetent waitstaff that life had hired to take and bring her order.
“Well, would you like to meet for a drink?” Zora asked finally, as if she had asked it many times before, her tone a mingling of both weariness and the cheery, pseudoprofessionalism of someone in the dully familiar and official position of being single and dating.
“Yes,” said Ira. “That’s exactly why I called.”
“You can’t imagine the daily dreariness of routine pediatrics,” said Zora, not touching her wine. “Ear infection, ear infection, ear infection. Whoa. Here’s an exciting one: juvenile onset diabetes. Day after day you just have to look into the parents’ eyes and repeat the same exciting thing: ‘There are a lot of viruses going around.’ I had thought about going into pediatric oncology, because when I asked other doctors why they’d gone into such a seemingly depressing thing, they said, ‘Because the kids don’t get depressed.’ That seemed interesting to me. And hopeful. But then when I asked doctors in the same field why they were retiring early, they said they were sick of seeing kids die. The kids don’t get depressed, they just die! These were my choices in med school. As an undergraduate I took a lot of art classes and did sculpture, which I still do a little, to keep those creative juices flowing! But what I would really like to do now is write children’s books. I look at some of those books out in the waiting room and I want to throw them in the fish tank. I think, I could do better than that. I started one about a hedgehog.”
“Now what’s a hedgehog exactly?” Ira was eyeing her full glass and his own empty one. “I get them mixed up with groundhogs and gophers.”
“They’re— Well, what does it matter if they are all wearing little polka-dotted clothes, vests and hats and things,” she said irritably.
“I suppose,” he said, now a little frightened. What was wrong with her? He did not like stressful moments in restaurants. They caused his mind to wander strangely to random thoughts like Why are these things called napkins rather than lapkins? or I’ll bet God really loves butter. He tried to focus on the visuals, what she was wearing, which was a silk, pumpkin-colored blouse he hesitated complimenting her on lest she think he was gay. Marilyn had once threatened to call off their wedding because he had strenuously complimented the fabric of her gown and then had shopped too long and discontentedly for his own tuxedo, failing to find just the right shade of “mourning dove,” a color he had read of in a wedding magazine. “Are you homosexual?” she had asked. “You must tell me now. I won’t make the same mistake my sister did.”
Perhaps Zora’s irritability was only creative frustration. Ira understood. Though his position was with the Historical Society’s Human Resources Office, he liked to help with the society’s exhibitions, doing posters and dioramas and once even making a puppet for a little show the society had put on about the first governor. Thank God for meaningful work! He understood those small, diaphanous artistic ambitions that overtook people and could look like nervous breakdowns.
“What happens in your hedgehog tale?” Ira asked, then settled in to finish up his dinner, eggplant parmesan that he wished now he hadn’t ordered. He was coveting Zora’s wodge of steak. Perhaps he had an iron deficiency. Or perhaps it was just a desire for the taste of metal and blood in his mouth. Zora, he knew, was committed to meat. While everyone else’s cars were busy protesting the prospect of war or supporting the summoned troops, Zora’s Honda had a bumper sticker that said, RED MEAT IS NOT BAD FOR YOU. FUZZY, GREENISH BLUE MEAT IS BAD FOR YOU.
“The hedgehog tale? Well,” Zora began. “The hedgehog goes for a walk, because he is feeling sad—it’s based on a story I used to tell my son. The hedgehog goes for a walk and comes upon this strange yellow house that has a sign on it that says, WELCOME, HEDGEHOG: THIS COULD BE YOUR NEW HOME, and because he’s been feeling sad, the thought of a new home appeals. So he goes in and inside is a family of alligators— Well, I’ll spare you the rest, but you can get the general flavor of it from that.”
“I don’t know about that family of alligators.”
She was quiet for a minute, chewing her beautiful ruby steak. “Every family is a family of alligators,” she said.
“Well—that’s certainly one way of looking at it.” Ira glanced at his watch.
“Yeah. To get back to the book. It gives me an outlet. I mean, my job’s not terrible. Some of the kids are cute. But some are impossible, of course, some are disturbed, some are just spoiled and ill-behaved. It’s hard to know what to do. We’re not allowed to hit them.”
“You’re ‘not allowed to hit them’?” He could see she had now made some progress with her wine.
“I’m from Kentucky,” she said.
“Ah.” He drank from his water glass, stalling.
She chewed thoughtfully. Merlot was beginning to etch a ragged, scabby line in the dead skin of her bottom lip. “It’s like Ireland but with more horses and guns.”
“Not a lot of Jews down there.” He had no idea why he said half the things he said. Perhaps this time it was because he had once been a community-based historian, digging in archives for the genealogies and iconographies of various ethnic groups, not realizing that other historians generally thought this a sentimental form of history, shedding light on nothing; and though shedding light on nothing seemed not a bad idea to him, when it became available, he had taken the human resources job.
“Not too many,” she said. “I did know an Armenian family growing up. At least I think they were Armenian.”
When the check came, she ignored it, as if it were some fly that had landed and would soon be taking off again. So much for feminism. Ira pulled out his state-workers credit card and the waitress came by and whisked it away. There were, he was once told, four seven-word sentences that generally signaled the end of a relationship. The first was “I think we should see other people.” (Which always meant another seven-word sentence: “I am already sleeping with someone else.”) The second seven-word sentence was, reputedly, “Maybe you could just leave the tip.” The third was “How could you again forget your wallet?” And the fourth, the killer of all killers, was “Oh, look, I’ve forgotten my wallet, too!”
He did not imagine they would ever see each other again. But when he dropped her off at her house, walking her to her door, Zora suddenly grabbed his face with both hands, and her mouth became its own wet creature exploring his. She opened up his jacket, pushing her body inside it, against his, the pumpkin-colored silk of her blouse slid upon his shirt. Her lips came away in a slurp. “I’m going to call you,” she said, smiling. Her eyes were wild, as if with gin, though she had only been drinking wine.
“OK,” he mumbled, walking backward down her steps, in the dark, his car still running, its headlights bright along her street.
He was in her living room the following week. It was beige and white with cranberry accents. On the walls were black-framed photos of her son, Bruno, from all ages, including now. There were pictures of Bruno lying prone on the ground. There were pictures of Bruno and Zora together, he hidden in the folds of her skirt, and she hanging her then-long hair down into his face, covering him completely. There he was again, leaning in between her knees, naked as a cello. There were pictures of him in the bath, though in some he was clearly already at the start of puberty. In the corner stood perhaps a dozen wooden sculptures of naked boys she had carved herself. “One of my hobbies, which I was telling you about,” she said. They were astounding little things. She had drilled holes in their penises with a brace and bit to allow for water in case she could someday sell them as garden fountains. “These are winged boys. The beautiful adolescent boy who flies away. It’s from mythology. I forget what they’re called. I just love their little rumps.” He nodded, studying the tight, sculpted buttocks, the spouted, mushroomy phalluses, the long backs and limbs. So: this was the sort of woman he’d been missing out on not being single all these years. What had he been thinking of staying married for so long?
He sat down and asked for wine. “You know, I’m just a little gun-shy romantically,” he said apologetically. “I don’t have the confidence I used to. I don’t think I can even take my clothes off in front of another person. Not even at the gym, frankly. I’ve been changing in the toilet stalls. After divorce and all.”
“Oh, divorce will do that to you totally,” she said reassuringly. She poured him some wine. “It’s like a trick. It’s like someone puts a rug over a trapdoor and says, ‘Stand there.’ And so you do. Then boom.” She took out a hashish pipe, lit it, sucking, then gave it to him.
“I’ve never seen a pediatrician smoke hashish before.”
“Really?” she said, with some difficulty, her breath still sucked in.
The nipples of her breasts were long, cylindrical, and stiff, so that her chest looked somewhat as if two small sink plungers had flown across the room and suctioned themselves there. His mouth opened hungrily to kiss them.
“Perhaps you would like to take off your shoes,” she whispered.
“Oh, not really,” he said.
There was sex where you were looked in the eye and beautiful things were said to you, and then there was what Ira used to think of as yoo-hoo sex: where the other person seemed spirited away, not quite there, their pleasure mysterious and crazy and only accidentally involving you. “Yoo-hoo?” was what his grandmother always called before entering a house where she knew someone but not well enough to know whether they were actually home.
“Where are you?” Ira said in the dark. He decided in a case such as this he could feel a chaste and sanctifying distance. It wasn’t he who was having sex. The condom was having sex and he was just trying to stop it. Zora’s candles on the nightstand were heated to clear pools in their tins. They flickered smokily. He would try not to think about how before she had even lit them and pulled back the bedcovers he had noticed the candles were already melted down to the size of buttons, their wicks blackened to a crisp. It was not good to think about the previous burning of the bedroom candles of a woman who had just unzipped your pants. Besides, he was too grateful for the fact of those candles—especially with all those little wonder boys in the living room. Perhaps his whitening chest hair would not look so white. This was what candles were made for: the sad, sexually shy, out-of-shape, middle-aged him. How had he not understood this in marriage? Zora herself looked ageless, like a nymph with her short hair, although once she got Ira’s glasses off, she became a blur of dim and shifting shapes and might as well have been Dick Cheney or Lon Chaney or Lee Marvin or the Blob, except that she smelled good and but for the occasional rough patch had the satiny skin of a girl.
She let out a long, spent sigh.
“Where did you go?” he asked again anxiously.
“I’ve been right here, silly,” she said and pinched his hip. She lifted one of her long legs up and down outside the covers. “Did you get off?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Did you get off?”
“ ‘Get off’?” Someone else had once asked him the same question, when he’d stopped in the jetway to tie his shoe after debarking from a plane.
“Have an orgasm? With some men it’s not always clear.”
“Yes, thank you, I mean, it was—to me—very clear.”
“You’re still wearing your wedding ring,” she said.
“It’s stuck, I don’t know why—”
“Let me get at that thing,” she said and pulled hard on his finger, but the loose skin around his knuckle bunched up and blocked it.
“Ow,” he finally said. His skin was abraded.
“Perhaps later with soap,” she said. She lay back and swung her legs up in the air again.
“Do you like to dance?” he asked.
“Sometimes,” she said.
“I’ll bet you’re a wonderful dancer,” said Ira.
“Not really,” she said. “But I can always think of things to do.”
“That’s a nice trait.”
“You think so?” she asked, and she leaned in and began tickling him.
“I don’t think I’m that ticklish,” he said.
“Oh.” She stopped.
“I mean, I’m probably a little,” he added, “just not a lot.”
“I would like you to meet my son,” she said.
“He’s under the bed. Bruny?” Oh, these funny ones were funny.
“What is his name?”
“Bruno. I call him Bruny. He’s with his dad this week.”
The extended families of divorce. Ira tried not to feel jealous. It was quite possible he was not mature enough to date a divorced woman. “Tell me about his dad.”
“His dad? His dad is another pediatrician, but he was really into English country dancing. Where eventually he met a lass. Alas.”
Ira would write that down in his book. Alas, a lass. “I don’t think anyone should dance in a way that’s not just regular dancing,” said Ira. “It’s not normal. That’s just my opinion.”
“Well, he left a long time ago. He said he’d made a terrible mistake getting married. He said that he just wasn’t capable of intimacy. I know that’s true for some people, but I had never actually heard anyone say that out loud about themselves.”
“I know!” said Ira. “Even Hitler never said that! I mean, I don’t mean to compare your ex to Hitler as a leader. Only as a man.”
Zora stroked his arm. “Do you feel ready to meet Bruno? I mean, he didn’t care for my last boyfriend at all. That’s why we broke up.”
“Really?” This silenced Ira for a moment. “If I left those matters to my daughter, I’d be dating a beagle.”
“I believe children come first.” Her voice now had a steely edge.
“Oh, yes, yes, so do I,” he said quickly. He felt suddenly paralyzed and cold.
She reached into the nightstand drawer, took out a vial, and bit into a pill. “Here, take half,” she said. “Otherwise we won’t get any sleep at all. Sometimes I snore. Probably you do, too.”
“This is so cute,” Ira said warmly. “Our taking these pills together.”
He staggered through his days, tired and unsure. At the office he misplaced files. Sometimes he knocked things over by accident—a glass of water or the benefits manual. News of the coming war, too, was taking its toll. He lay in bed at night, the moments before sleep a kind of stark acquaintance with death. What had happened to the world? March still did not look completely like spring, especially with the plastic sheeting duct-taped to his windows. When he tried to look out, the trees seemed to be pasted onto the waxy dinge of a wintry-looking sky. He wished this month had a less military verb for a name. Why March? How about a month named Skip? That could work.
He got two cats from the pound so that Bekka could have some live pet action at his house, too. He and Bekka went to the store and stocked up on litter and cat food.
“Provisions!” exclaimed Ira.
“In case the war comes here, we can eat the cat food,” suggested Bekka.
“Cat food, heck. We can eat the cats,” said Ira.
“That’s disgusting, Dad.”
Ira shrugged.
“You see, that’s one of the things Mom didn’t like about you!” she added.
“Sort of.”
“Mom likes me. She’s just very busy.”
“Whatever.”
He got back to the cats. “What should we name them?” One should always name food.
“I don’t know.” Bekka studied the cats.
Ira hated the precious literary names people gave pets—characters from opera and Proust. When he’d first met Marilyn, she had a cat named Portia, but Ira had insisted on calling it Fang.
“I think we should name them Snowball and Snowflake,” said Bekka, looking glassy-eyed at the two golden tabbies.
“They don’t look like a snowball or a snowflake,” said Ira, trying not to let his disappointment show. Sometimes Bekka seemed completely banal to him. She had spells of inexplicable and vapid conventionality. He had always wanted to name a cat Bowser. “How about Bowser?” In the pound someone with name tag duty had named them “Jake” and “Fake Jake,” but the quotation marks around their names seemed an invitation to change them.
“Fireball and Fireflake,” Bekka tried again.
Ira looked at her, he hoped, beseechingly and persuasively. “Really? Fireball and Fireflake don’t really sound like cats that would belong to you.”
Bekka’s face clenched tearily. “You don’t know me! I live with you only part-time! The other part of the time I live with Mom, and she doesn’t know me either! The only person who knows me is me!”
“OK, OK,” said Ira. The cats were eyeing him warily. In time of war never argue with a fireball or a fireflake. Never argue with the food. “Fireball and Fireflake.” What were those? Two lonely middle-aged people on a date.
“Why don’t you come to dinner?” Zora phoned one afternoon. “I’m making spring spaghetti, Bruny’s favorite, and you can come over and meet him. Unless you have Bekka tonight.”
“No, I don’t,” Ira said mournfully. “What is spring spaghetti?”
“Oh, it’s the same as regular spaghetti, you just serve it kind of lukewarm. Room temperature. With a little fresh basil.”
“What should I bring?”
“Oh, perhaps you could just bring a small appetizer and some dessert,” she said. “And maybe a salad, some bread if you’re close to a bakery, and a bottle of wine. Also an extra chair, if you have one. We’ll need an extra chair.”
“OK,” he said.
He was a litttle loaded down at the door. She stepped outside, he thought to help him, but she simply put her arms around him and kissed him. “I have to kiss you now here outdoors. Bruny doesn’t like to see that sort of thing.” She kissed Ira in a sweet, rubbery way on the mouth. Then she stepped back in, smiling, holding the door open for him. Oh, the beautiful smiles of the insane. Soon, he was sure, there would be a study that showed that the mentally ill were actually more attractive than other people. Dating proved it! The aluminum foil over his salad was sliding off and the brownies he had made for dessert were still warm and underneath the salad bowl were probably heating and wilting the lettuce. He attempted a familiar and proprietary stride through her living room, though he felt neither, then dumped everything on her kitchen table.
“Oh, thank you,” she said and placed her hand on the small of his back. He was deeply attracted to her. There was nothing he could do about that.
“It smells good,” he said. “You smell good.” Some mix of garlic and citrus and baby powder overlaid with nutmeg. Her hand wandered down and stroked his behind. “I’ve got to run out to the car and get the appetizer and the chair,” he said and made a quick dash. When he came back in, handed her the appetizer—a dish of herbed olives (he knew nothing about food; someone at work had told him you could never go wrong with herbed olives: “Spell it out—h-e-r b-e-d. Get it?”)—and then set the chair up at Zora’s little dining table for two (he’d never seen one not set up for at least four), Zora looked brightly at him and whispered, “Are you ready to meet Bruny?”
Ready. He did not know precisely what she meant by that. It seemed she had reversed everything, that she should be asking Bruno, or Bruny, or Brune, if he was ready to meet him. “Ready,” he said.
There was wavery flute music from behind a closed door down the hallway. “Bruny?” Zora called. The music stopped. Suddenly a barking, howling voice called “What?”
“Come out and meet Ira, please.”
There was silence. There was nothing. Nobody moved at all for a very long time. Ira smiled politely. “Oh, let him play,” he said.
“I’ll be right back,” said Zora, and she headed down the hall to Bruno’s room, knocked on the door, then went in, closing it behind her. Ira stood there for a while, then he picked up the Screwpull, opened the bottle of wine, and began to drink. After several minutes Zora returned to the kitchen, sighing. “Bruny’s in a bit of a mood.” Suddenly a door slammed and loud, trudging footsteps brought Bruno, the boy himself, into the kitchen. He was barefoot and in a T-shirt and gym shorts, his legs already darkening with hair. His eyebrows sprouted in a manly black V over the bridge of his nose. He was not tall, but he was muscular already, broad-shouldered and thick-limbed, and he folded his arms across his chest and leaned against the wall in weary belligerence.
“Bruny, this is Ira,” said Zora. Ira put his wineglass down and thrust out his hand to introduce himself. Bruno unfolded his arms but did not shake hands. Instead, he thrust out his chin and scowled. Ira picked up his wineglass again.
“So, good to meet you. Your mother has said a lot of wonderful things about you.” He tried to remember one.
Bruno looked at the appetizer bowl. “What’s this grassy gunk all over the olives.” It was not really a question, so no one answered it. Bruno turned back to his mother. “May I go back to my room now?”
“Yes, dear,” said Zora. She looked at Ira. “He’s practicing for the woodwind competition next Saturday. He’s very serious.”
When Bruno had tramped back down to his room, Ira leaned in to kiss Zora, but she pulled away. “Bruny might hear us,” she whispered.
“Let’s go to a restaurant. Just you and me. My salad’s no good.”
“Oh, we couldn’t leave Bruno here alone. He’s only sixteen.”
“I was working in a steel factory when I was sixteen!” Ira decided not to say. Instead he said, “Doesn’t he have friends?”
“He’s between social groups right now,” Zora said defensively. “It’s difficult for him to find other kids who are as intellectually serious as he is.”
“We’ll rent him a movie,” said Ira. “Excuse me, a film. A foreign film, since he’s serious. A documentary. We’ll rent him a foreign documentary!”
“We don’t have a VCR.”
“You don’t have a VCR?” At this point Ira found the silverware and helped set the table. When they sat down to eat and poured more wine in their glasses, Bruno suddenly came out and joined them, with no beckoning. The spring spaghetti was tossed in a large glass bowl with grated cheese. “Just how you like it, Brune,” said Zora.
“So, Bruno. What grade are you in?”
Bruno rolled his eyes. “Tenth,” he said.
“So college is a ways off,” said Ira, accidentally thinking out loud.
“I guess,” said Bruno, who then tucked into the spring spaghetti.
“So—what classes are you taking in school, besides music?” asked Ira, after a long awkward spell.
“I don’t take music,” he said with his mouth full. “I’m in All-State Woodwinds.”
“All-State Woodwinds! Interesting! Do you take any courses in like, say, American history?”
“They’re studying the Amazon rain forest yet again,” said Zora. “They’ve been studying it since preschool.”
Ira slurped with morose heartiness at his wine—he had spent too much of his life wandering about in the desert of his own drool, oh, the mealtime assaults he had made on his own fragile consciousness—and some dribbled on his shirt. “For Pete’s sake, look at this.” He dabbed at the wine spot with his napkin and looked up at Bruno, with an ingratiating grin. “Someday this could happen to you,” Ira said, twinkling in Bruno’s direction.
“That would never happen to me,” muttered Bruno.
Ira continued dabbing at his shirt. He began thinking of his book. Though I be your mother’s beau, no rival I, no foe, faux foe. He loved rhymes. Fum! Thumb! Dumb! They were harmonious and joyous in the face of total crap.
Bruno began gently kicking his mother under the table. Zora began playfully to nudge him back, and soon they were both kicking away, their energetic footsie causing them to slip in their chairs a little, while Ira pretended not to notice, cutting his salad with the edge of his fork, too frightened to look up very much. After a few minutes—when the footsie had stopped and Ira had exclaimed, “Great dinner, Zora!”—they all stood and cleared their places, taking the dishes into the kitchen, putting them in a messy pile in the sink. Ira started halfheartedly to run warm water over them, and Zora and Bruno, some distance behind him, began to jostle up against each other, ramming lightly into each other’s sides. Ira glanced over his shoulder and saw Zora now step back and assume a wrestler’s starting stance, as Bruno leaped toward her, heaving her over his shoulder, then running her into the living room, where, Ira could see, Bruno dumped her, laughing, on the couch.
Should Ira join in? Should he leave?
“I can still pin you, Brune, when we’re on the bed,” Zora said.
“Yeah, right,” said Bruno.
Perhaps it was time to go. Next time Ira would bring over a VCR for Bruno and just take Zora out to eat. “Well, look at the time! Good to meet you, Bruno,” he said, shaking the kid’s large, limp hand. Zora stood breathlessly. She walked Ira out to his car, helping to carry his chair and salad bowl. “It was a lovely dinner,” said Ira. “And you are a lovely woman. And your son seems so bright and the two of you are adorable together.”
Zora beamed, seemingly mute with happiness. If only Ira had known how to speak such fanciful baubles during his marriage, surely Marilyn would never have left him.
He gave Zora a quick kiss on the cheek—the heat of her wrestling had heightened her beautiful nutmeg smell—then kissed her again on the neck, near her ear. Alone in the car on the way home he thought of all the deeply wrong erotic attachments made in wartime, all the crazy romances cooked up quickly by the species to offset death. He turned the radio on: the news of the Mideast was so surreal and bleak that when he heard the tonnage of the bombs planned for Baghdad, he could feel his jaw fall slack in astonishment. He pulled the car over, turned on the interior light, and gazed in the rearview mirror just to see what his face looked like in this particular state. He had felt his face drop in this manner once before—when he got the divorce papers from Marilyn, now there was shock and awe for you; there was decapitation—but he had never actually seen what he looked like this way. So. Now he knew. Not good: stunned, pale, and not all that bright. It wasn’t the same as self-knowledge, but life was long and not that edifying, and one sometimes had to make do with randomly seized tidbits.
He started up again, slowly; outside it had begun to rain, and at a brightly lit intersection of two gas stations, one QuikTrip, and a KFC, half a dozen young people in hooded yellow slickers were holding up signs that read HONK FOR PEACE. Ira fell upon his horn, first bouncing his hand there, then just leaning his whole arm into it. Other cars began to do the same, and soon no one was going anywhere, a congregation of mourning doves! but honking like geese in a wild chorus of futility, windshield wipers clearing their fan-shaped spaces on the drizzled night glass. No car went anywhere for the change of two lights. For all its stupidity and solipsism and scenic civic grief, it was something like a gorgeous moment.
Despite her reading difficulties, despite the witless naming of the cats, Ira knew Bekka was highly intelligent. He knew from the time she spent lying around the house, bored and sighing, saying, “Dad? When will childhood be over?” This was a sign of genius! As were other things. Her complete imperviousness to the adult male voice, for instance. Her scrutiny of all food. With interest and hesitancy, she studied the antiwar lawn signs that bestrewed the neighborhood. WAR IS NOT THE PATH TO PEACE, she read slowly aloud. Then added, “Well duh.”
WAR IS NOT THE ANSWER, she read on another. “Well that doesn’t make sense,” she said to Ira. “War is the answer,” she said. “It’s the answer to the question What’s George Bush going to do real soon?”
The times Bekka stayed at Ira’s house, she woke up in the morning and told him her dreams. “I had a dream last night that I was walking with two of my friends and we met a wolf. But I made a deal with the wolf. I said, ‘Don’t eat me. These other two have more meat on them.’ And the wolf said, ‘OK,’ and we shook on it and I got away.”
Or “I had a strange dream last night that I was a bad little fairy.”
She was in contact with her turmoil and with her ability to survive. How could that be anything less than emotional brilliance?
One morning she said, “I had a really scary dream. There was this tornado with a face inside? And I married it.” Ira smiled. “It may sound funny to you, Dad, but it was really scary.”
He stole a look at her school writing journal once and found this poem:
Time moving.
Time standing still.
What is the difference?
Time standing still is the difference.
He had no idea what it meant, but he knew it was awesome. He had given her the middle name Clio, after the muse of History, so of course she would know very well that time standing still was the difference—whatever that meant. He himself felt he was watching history from the dimmest of backwaters, a land of beer and golf, the horizon peacefully fish-gray, the sky a suicide silver, the windows duct-taped with plastic sheeting so that he felt he was observing life from a plastic container, like a leftover, peering into the tallow fog of the world. Time moving. Time standing still.
The major bombing started on the first day of spring. “It’s happening,” Ira said into Mike’s answering machine. “The whole thing is starting now.”
Zora called and asked him to the movies. “Sure,” Ira said. “I’d love to.”
“Well, we were thinking of this Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, but Bruno would also be willing to see the Mel Gibson one.” We. He was dating a tenth grader now. Even in tenth grade he’d never done that. Well, now he’d see what he’d been missing.
They picked him up at six-forty, and, as Bruno made no move to cede the front seat, Ira sat in the back of Zora’s Honda, his long legs wedged together at a diagonal like a lady riding sidesaddle. Zora drove carefully, not like a mad hellcat at all, which for some reason he’d thought she would. As a result they were late for the Mel Gibson movie and had to make do with the Arnold Schwarzenegger one. Ira thrust money at the ticket taker saying, “Three please,” and they all wordlessly went in, their computerized stubs in hand. “So you like Arnold Schwarzenegger?” Ira said to Bruno as they headed down one of the red-carpeted corridors.
“Not really,” muttered Bruno. Bruno sat between Zora and Ira, and together they all passed a small container of popcorn back and forth. Ira jumped up twice to refill it back out in the lobby, a kind of relief for him from Arnold, whose line readings were less brutish than they used to be, but not less brutish enough. Afterward, heading out into the parking lot, Bruno and Zora reenacted body-bouncing scenes from the film, throwing themselves against each other’s backs and shoulders with great, giggling force. When they reached the car, Ira was again relegated to the backseat.
“Shall we go to dinner?” he called up to the front.
Both Zora and Bruno were silent.
“Shall we?” he tried again cheerfully.
“Would you like to, Bruno?” asked Zora. “Are you hungry?”
“I don’t know,” Bruno said, peering gloomily out the window.
“Did you like the movie?” asked Ira.
Bruno shrugged. “I dunno.”
They went to a barbecue place and got ribs and chicken. “Let me pay for this,” said Ira, though Zora had never offered. He would spare them the awkwardness.
“Oh, OK,” she said.
Afterward, Zora dropped Ira at the curb, where Ira stood for a minute, waving, in front of his house. Bruno flung the back of his hand toward him, not actually looking. Zora waved vigorously through the open window over the top of the car. He watched them roll down the end of the block and disappear around the corner. He went inside and made himself a drink with cranberry juice and rum. He turned on the TV news and watched the bombing. Night bombing, so you could not really see.
A few mornings later was the first of a new month, his birthday month. The illusion of time flying, he knew, was to make people think life could have more in it than it actually could. Actually, time flying could make human lives seem victorious over time itself. Time flew so fast that in ways it failed to make an impact. People’s lives fell between its stabbing powers like insects between raindrops. “We cheat the power of time with our very brevity!” he said aloud to Bekka, feeling confident she would understand, but she only just kept petting the cats. The house had already begun to fill with the acrid-honey smell of cat pee, though neither he nor Bekka seemed to mind. Spring! One more month and it would be May, his least favorite. Why not a month named Can? Or Must! Well, maybe not Must. Zora phoned him early, with a dour tone. “I don’t know. I think we should break up,” she said.
“You do?”
“Yes, I don’t see that this is going anywhere. Things aren’t really moving forward in any way I can understand. And I don’t think we should waste each other’s time.”
“Really?” Desperation washed through him.
“It may be fine for some, but dinner, movie, then sex is not my idea of a relationship.”
“Maybe we could eliminate the movie?”
“We’re adults—”
“True. I mean, we are?”
“—and what is the point, if there are clear obstacles or any unclear idea of where this is headed, of continuing? It becomes difficult to maintain faith. We’ve hardly begun seeing each other, I realize, but already I just don’t envision us as a couple.”
“I’m sorry to hear you say that.” He was now sitting down in his kitchen. He could feel himself trying not to cry.
“Let’s just move on,” she said with gentle firmness.
“Really? Is that honestly what you think? I feel terrible.”
“April Fools’!” she cried out into the phone.
His heart rose to his throat, then sank to his colon, then bobbed back up close to the surface of his rib cage, where his right hand was clutching at it. Were there paddles somewhere close by that could be applied to his chest?
“I beg your pardon?” he asked faintly.
“April Fools’,” she said again, laughing. “It’s April Fools’ Day.”
“I guess,” he said, gasping a little, “I guess that’s the kind of joke that gets better the longer you think about it.”
He had never been involved with the mentally ill before, but he now felt more than ever that there should be strong international laws against them being too good-looking.
“How are you liking Zora?” asked Mike over a beer, after work, after they’d mulled over the war and Dick Cheney’s tax return, which had just been reprinted in the paper. Why wasn’t there a revolution? Was everyone too distracted with tennis and sex and iris bulbs? Marxism in the spring lacked oomph. Ira had just hired someone to paint his house, so that now in his front lawn he had two signs: WAR IS NOT THE ANSWER in blue and on the other side, in black and yellow, JENKINS PAINTING IS THE ANSWER.
“Oh, Zora’s great.” Ira paused. “Great. Just great. In fact, do you perhaps know any other single women?”
“Really?”
“Well, it’s just that she might not be all that mentally well.” Ira thought about the moment, just last night, at dinner, when she’d said, “I love your mouth most when it does that odd grimace in the middle of sex,” and then she contorted her face so hideously, Ira felt he had been struck. Later in the evening she had said, “Watch this,” and she took her collapsible umbrella, placed its handle on the crotch of her trousers, then pressed the button that sent it rocketing out, unfurled, like a cartoon erection. Ira did not know who or what she was, though he wanted to cut her slack, give her a break, bestow upon her the benefit of the doubt—all those paradoxical clichés of supposed generosity, most of which he had denied his wife. He tried not to think that the only happiness he might have been fated for had already occurred, had been with Bekka and Marilyn, when the three of them were together. A hike, a bike ride—he tried not to think that his crazy dream of family had shown its sweet face only long enough to torment him for the rest of his life though scarcely long enough to sustain him through a meal. To torture oneself with this idea of family happiness while not actually having a family, he decided, might be a fairly new circumstance in social history. People were probably not like this a hundred years ago. He imagined an exhibit at the society. He imagined the puppets.
“Sanity’s conjectural,” said Mike. His brow furrowed thoughtfully. “Zora’s very attractive, don’t you think?”
Ira thought of her beautiful, slippery skin, the dark, sweet hair, the lithe sylph’s body, the mad, hysterical laugh. She had once, though only briefly, insisted that Man Ray and Ray Charles were brothers. “She is attractive,” Ira said. “But you say that like it’s a good thing.”
“Right now,” said Mike, “I feel like anything that isn’t about killing people is a good thing.”
“This may be about that,” said Ira.
“Oh, I see. Now we’re entering the callow, glib part of spring.”
“She’s wack, as the kids say.”
Mike looked confused. “Is that like wacko?”
“It’s like wacko, but not like Waco—at least I don’t think so. At least not yet. I would stop seeing her, but I don’t seem to be able to. Especially now with all that’s happening in the world, I can’t live without some intimacy, companionship, whatever you want to call it, to face down this global craziness.”
“You shouldn’t use people as human shields.” Mike paused. “Or—I don’t know—maybe you should.”
“I can’t let go of hope, of the illusion of something coming out of this romance, I’m sorry. Divorce is a trauma, believe me, I know. Its pain is a national secret! But that’s not it. I can’t let go of love. I can’t live without love in my life. Hold my hand,” said Ira. His eyes were starting to water. Once when he was a small child he had gotten lost, and when his mother had finally found him, four blocks from home, she had asked him if he had been scared. “Not really,” he had said, sniffling pridefully. “But then my eyes just suddenly started to water.”
“I beg your pardon?” asked Mike.
“I can’t believe I just asked you to hold my hand,” said Ira, but Mike had already taken it.
The hashish was good. The sleeping pills were good. He was walking slowly around the halls at work in what was a combination of serene energy and a nap. With his birthday coming up, he went to the doctor for his triennial annual physical and, mentioning a short list of nebulous symptoms, he was given dismissive diagnoses of “benign vertigo,” “pseudo gout,” and perhaps “migraine aura,” the names, no doubt, of rock bands. “You’ve got the pulse of a boy, and the mind of a boy, too,” said his doctor, an old golfing friend.
Health, Ira decided, was notional. Palm Sunday—all these goyim festivals were preprinted on his calendar—was his birthday, and when Zora called he blurted out that information. “It is?” she said. “You old man! Are you feeling undernookied? I’ll come over Sunday and read your palm. If you know what I mean.” Wasn’t she cute? Dammit, she was cute. She arrived with Bruno and a chocolate cake in tow. “Happy birthday,” she said. “Bruno helped me make the frosting.”
“Did you now,” Ira said to Bruno, patting him on the back in a brotherly embrace that the boy attempted to duck and slide out from under.
They ordered Chinese food and talked about high school, Advanced Placement courses, homeroom teachers, and James Galway (soulful mick or soulless dork, who could decide?). Zora brought out the cake. There were no candles so Ira lit a match, stuck it upright in the frosting, and blew it out. His wish had been a vague and general one of good health for Bekka. No one but her. He had put nobody else in his damn wish. Not the Iraqi people; not the GIs; not Mike, who had held his hand; not Zora. This kind of focused intensity was bad for the planet.
“Shall we sit on Bruno?” Zora was laughing and backing her sweet tush into Bruno, who was now sprawled out on Ira’s sofa, resting. “Come on!” she called to Ira. “Let’s sit on Bruno.” She was now sitting on the boy’s hip while Bruno protested in a laughing, grunting manner.
At this point Ira was making his way toward the liquor cabinet. He believed there was some bourbon there. He would not need ice. “Would you care for some bourbon?” he called over to Zora, who was now wrestling with Bruno and looked up at Ira and said nothing. Bruno, too, looked at him and said nothing.
Ira continued to pour. Zora straightened up and walked over to him. He was both drinking bourbon and eating cake. He had a pancreas like a rock. “We should probably go,” said Zora. “It’s a school night.”
“Oh, OK,” said Ira, swallowing. “I mean, I wish you didn’t have to.”
“School. What can you do? I’m going to take the rest of the cake home for Bruny’s lunch tomorrow. It’s his favorite.”
Heat and sorrow filled Ira. The cake had been her only present to him. He closed his eyes and nuzzled his face into hers. “Not now,” she whispered. “He gets upset.”
“Oh,” Ira said. “Well, then I’ll walk you out to the car.” And there he gave her a quick hug. She walked around the car and got in on the driver’s side. He stepped back up on the curb and knocked on the window of the passenger’s side to say good-bye to Bruno. But the boy would not turn. He flipped his hand up, showing Ira the back of it.
“Bye! Thank you for sharing my birthday with me!” Ira called out. Where affection fell on its ass, politeness could step up. But then there was the heat and sorrow again just filling his face. Zora’s Honda lights went on, then the engine, then the whole vehicle flew down the street.
At Bekka’s coo-coo private school, to which Marilyn had years ago insisted on sending her, the students and teachers were assiduously avoiding talk of the war. In Bekka’s class they were doing finger-knitting while simultaneously discussing their hypothetical stock market investments. The class was doing best with preferred stock in Kraft, GE, and GM; watching their investments move slightly every morning on the Dow Jones was also helping their little knitted scarves. It was a right-brain, left-brain thing. For this, Ira forked over nine thousand dollars a year. Not that he really cared. As long as she was in a place safe from war—the alerts were moving from orange to red to orange; no information, just duct tape and bright, mind-wrecking colors—turning Bekka into a knitting stockbroker was OK with him. Exploit the system, man! he himself used to say, in college. He could, however, no longer watch TV. He packed it up, along with the VCR, and brought the whole thing over to Zora’s. “Here,” he said. “This is for Bruno.”
“You are so nice,” she said, and kissed him near his ear and then on his ear. Possibly he was madly in love with her.
“The TV’s broken,” said Ira, when Bekka came that weekend and asked about it. “It’s in the shop.”
“Whatever,” Bekka said, pulling her scarf yarn along the floor so the cats could play.
When next he picked Zora up to go out, she said, “Come on in. Bruno’s watching a movie on your VCR.”
“Does he like it? Should I say hello to him?”
Zora shrugged. “If you want.”
He stepped into the house, but the TV was not in the living room. It was in Zora’s bedroom, where, spread out half-naked on Zora’s bedspread, as he himself had been just a few evenings before, lay Bruno. He was watching Bergman’s The Magic Flute.
“Hi, Brune,” he said. The boy said nothing, transfixed, perhaps not hearing him. Zora came in and pressed a cold glass of water against the back of Bruno’s thigh.
“Yow!” cried Bruno.
“Here’s your water,” said Zora, walking her fingers up one of his legs.
Bruno took the glass and placed it on the floor. The singing on the same television screen that had so recently brought Ira the fiery bombing of Baghdad seemed athletic and absurd, perhaps a kind of joke. But Bruno remained riveted. “Well, enjoy the show,” said Ira, who didn’t really expect to be thanked for the TV, though now actually knowing he wouldn’t be made him feel a little crestfallen.
On the way back out Ira again noticed the sculptures in the corner of the living room. Zora had added two new ones. They were more abstract, made entirely out of old recorders and other woodwinds, but were recognizably boys, priapic with piccolos. “A flute would have been too big,” explained Zora, shortly after Ira had said, “So … you’ve been doing some new work!”
At the restaurant the sound system was playing Nancy Wilson singing “For All We Know.” The walls, like love, were trompe l’oeil—walls painted as viewful windows, though only a fool wouldn’t know they were walls. The menu, like love, was full of delicate, gruesome things—cheeks, tongues, thymus glands. The candle, like love, flickered—in the brass tops of the sugar bowl and salt and pepper shakers. He tried to capture Zora’s gaze, which seemed to be darting around the room. “It’s so nice to be here with you,” he said. She turned and fixed him with a smile, repaired him with it. She was a gentle, lovely woman. Something in him kept coming stubbornly back to that. Here they were two lonely adults in a crazy world lucky to have found each other even if it was just for the time being. But now tears were drizzling down her face. Her mouth, collecting them in its corners, was retreating into a pinch.
“Oh, no, what’s the matter?” He reached for her hand, but she pulled it away to hide her eyes behind it.
“I just miss Bruny,” she said.
He could feel his heart go cold, despite himself. Oh, well. Tomorrow was Easter. All would rise from the dead.
“Don’t you think he’s fine?”
“It’s just—I don’t know. It’s probably just me coming off my antidepressants.”
“You’ve been on antidepressants?” he asked sympathetically.
“Yes, I was.”
“You were on them when I first met you?” Maybe he had wandered into a whole Flowers for Algernon thing.
“Yes, indeedy. I went on them two years ago, after my so-called ‘nervous breakdown.’ ” And here she put two fingers in the air, to do quotation marks, but all of her fingers inadvertently sprang up and her hands clawed the air.
He didn’t know what he should say. “Would you like me to take you home?”
“No, no, no. Oh, maybe you should. I’m sorry. It’s just I feel I have so little time with him now. He’s growing up so fast. I just wish I could go back in time.” She blew her nose.
“I know what you mean.”
“You know, once I was listening to some friends talk about traveling in the Pacific. They left Australia early one morning and arrived in California the evening of the day before. And I thought, I’d like to do that—keep crossing the international date line and get all the way back to when Bruno was a little boy again.”
“Yeah,” said Ira. “I’d like to get back to that moment where I signed my divorce agreement. I have a few changes I’d like to make.”
“You’d have to bring a pen,” she said strangely.
He studied her, to memorize her face. “I would never time-travel without a pen,” he said.
She paused. “You look worried,” she said. “You shouldn’t do that with your forehead. It makes you look old.” Then she began to sob.
He found her coat and took her home and walked her to the door. Above the house the hammered nickel of the moon gave off its murky shine. “It’s a hard time in the world right now,” Ira said. “It’s hard on everybody. Go in and make yourself a good stiff drink. People don’t drink the way they used to. That’s what started this whole Iraq thing to begin with: it’s a war of teetotalers. People have got to get off their wagons and their high horses and—” He kissed her forehead. “I’ll call you tomorrow,” he said, though he wouldn’t. She squeezed his arm and said, “Sleep well.” As he backed out of her driveway, he could see through her front bedroom window, where the TV was firing its colorful fire and Bruno was laid out in a shirtless stupor. Ira could see Zora come in, sit down, cuddle close to Bruno, put her arm around him, and rest her head on his shoulder.
Ira brusquely swung the car away, down the street. Was this his problem? Was he too old-fashioned? He had always thought he was a modern man. He knew, for instance, how to stop and ask for directions! And he did it a lot! Of course, afterward, he would sometimes stare at the guy and say, “Who the hell told you that bullshit?”
He had his limitations.
He had not gone to a single seder this week, for which he was glad. It seemed a bad time to attend a ceremony that gave thanks in any way for the slaughter of Middle Eastern boys. He had done that last year. He headed instead to the nearest bar, a dank, noisy dive called Sparky’s, where he used to go just after Marilyn left him. When he was married he never drank, but after he was divorced, he used to come in even in the mornings for beer, toast, and fried side meat. All his tin-penny miseries and chickenshit joys would lead him once again to Sparky’s. Those half-dozen times he had run into Marilyn at a store—this small town!—he had felt like a dog seeing its owner. Here was the person he knew best in life, squeezing an avocado and acting like she didn’t see him. Oh, here I am, oh, here I am! But in Sparky’s, he knew, he was safe from such unexpected encounters, and after any such unexpected encounters he had often come here. He could sit alone and moan to Sparky. Some people consulted Marcus Aurelius for philosophy about the pain of existence. Ira consulted Sparky. Sparky himself didn’t actually have that much to say about the pain of existence. He mostly leaned across the bar, drying a smudgy glass with a dingy towel, and said, “Choose life!” then guffawed.
“Bourbon straight up,” said Ira, picking the bar stool closest to the TV so that war news would be hardest to watch from there. Or so he hoped. He let the sharp, buttery elixir of the bourbon warm his mouth, then swallowed its neat, sweet heat. He did this over and over, ordering drink after drink, until he was lit to the gills. At which point he looked up and saw there were other people gathered at the bar, each alone on a chrome-and-vinyl stool, doing the same. “Happy Easter,” Ira said to them, lifting his glass with his left hand, the one with the wedding ring still jammed on. “The dead shall rise! The dead are risen! The damages will be mitigated! The Messiah is back among us squeezing the flesh—that nap went by quickly, eh? May all the dead arise! No one has really been killed at all—OK, God looked away for a second to watch some I Love Lucy reruns, but he is back now. Nothing has been lost. All is restored. He watching over Israel, slumbers not nor sleeps!”
“Somebody slap that guy,” said the man in the blue shirt at the end.