“Butter beans,” she says. “Grits, if you like grits.”
I nod the nod of a grits liker, though not a single grit has ever entered my mouth. I say, “Did you hang out at the luncheonette a lot growing up?”
“Yes.”
I say, “Was it fun?”
“No,” she says, making clear that she doesn’t want to talk about this or to talk to me or to talk. She says, “Excuse me,” and goes to the ladies’ room.
“What?” I say to Jack.
He says, “She can’t talk about her father.”
“Were we talking about her father?”
When she returns, Jack puts his arm around her.
I say, “I didn’t mean to pry.”
Mary Pat says a wounded, “Don’t worry about it.”
. . . . .
Jack does not call to ask what I think of Mary Pat, as he has with every other girlfriend he has ever introduced to me. He doesn’t call at all.
When I call him, he is in bed with a fever of 103.
I offer to bring him soup, and he says that he has soup and juice and everything he needs—left over from when he took care of Mary Pat.
. . . . .
A week later, when I call to ask if we’re meeting at Homer’s, he’s still in bed.
He says that his fever is down; he just doesn’t feel good.
I say, “What’s the matter, Buddy?” our father’s nickname for Jack.
“She hated my revision.”
“What?”
“I told you she gave me notes on my script,” he says. “She said I didn’t understand anything.”
I say, “You want me to come over?”
“Yeah,” he says, and I go.
His night table is a mess of drugs—NyQuil, DayQuil, Sudafed, Theraflu—a sticky dose cup, a mug, and a tea bag that looks like a mouse in rigor mortis. His bed is covered with screenplay pages and used Kleenexes, which, he says, are of equal value to Mary Pat.
“Does she know that your father died nine weeks ago?”
He says, “I asked her to be honest.”
It takes me a minute to understand that he is defending her against me.
I clean up, I take his temperature, I make tea. I am stirring soup when Mary Pat calls, apparently contrite.
“She’s coming over,” Jack says, which means I’m supposed to go.
. . . . .
Jack arrives at Homer’s, blurry with exhaustion and hobbling. He tells me that he’s been working out. “I just overdid it.” He says something indecipherable through a yawn, and, “. . . up really late.”
I ask if he was working on his screenplay.
“No.” He yawns. “No.”
I yawn.
“We stayed up late, talking,” he says.
“Do you babies ever sleep through the night?”
He says, “She was upset.”
I think of the work that Mary Pat does and the stories she must hear every day.
“I woke up,” Jack says, “and she was crying.”
I nod in sympathy.
His voice is cloudy with sleep. “She kept telling me how sorry she was.”
I say, “Why was she sorry?”
He seems suddenly to focus, and to realize that he might not want to tell me this story. He hesitates before going on, but he does go on, too tired to obey his instincts. “She’s still in love with her old boyfriend.”
The words seem to spell out The End, and yet I don’t hear The End in his voice or see The End in his face.
I say, “If she loves him so much, how come she broke up with him?”
I watch Jack try to remember. “She didn’t feel she deserved to be happy back then.”
What comes to mind is Jack’s rendition of the Talking Heads’ song he changed from “Psycho Killer” to “Psycho Babble,” and the refrain, “Run run run run run run run away.”
I say, “When didn’t she deserve to be happy?”
“Her freshman year,” he says. “He was a senior. Physics major. He played squash.”
I’m confused. “So, she’s been seeing him since her freshman year?”
“No,” he says.
“She ran into him?”
“No.”
“But she wants to get back together with him?”
“No,” he says. “He’s married with two kids. She doesn’t even know where he lives.”
It occurs to me that I might understand this story better if I were really, really tired.
My poor brother’s eyes are tiny and his skin clam-colored; his hand trembles as he returns his coffee cup to the puddle in his saucer. He says, “The good thing is . . .” and drifts off.
I say, “The good thing is . . .”
“She finally feels like she deserves to be happy.”
. . . . .
Jack calls and says that he wishes he hadn’t told me about M.P.’s old boyfriend.
I say, “I understand,” and I do. There are things that two people say in the middle of the night that don’t make sense to a third at breakfast.
. . . . .
The next few times I ask, Jack tells me that Mary Pat is great, and then she is good, and then she is fine, and then she is okay.
Saturday night, at four A.M., he calls me from her apartment. I know without asking that he is sitting in the dark; I can hear it in his voice.
“I blew it,” he says.
I say, “I’m sure you didn’t.”
“I did,” he says. “I blew it.”
“How?”
“I just blew it,” he says. “I blew it.”
“Try to remember that we’re having a conversation,” I say, “and your goal is to impart information.”
He says, “I should’ve proposed to her at the Boathouse.”
When I don’t answer, he says, “In Central Park,” as though to clarify. “That was the perfect moment.”
I force myself to say the consoling words: “I’m sure you’ll have another perfect moment.”
“No,” he says. “She said that was the perfect moment, and we can never get it back.”
“Hold on there,” I say. “You’ve known each other for, like, twenty minutes.”
He doesn’t answer, and I hear how irrelevant these words are to him. I’m worried that he’s going to hang up and propose now. “Just bear with me,” I say. “Forget about perfect moments for a minute. Do you really want Mary Pat to be your wife? You want Mary Pat to be the mother of your children?”
“Yes,” he says.
I do not ask him if he thinks he would be happy with Mary Pat. Happiness, I realize, is beside the point. I realize, too, that he doesn’t want to figure anything out or to feel better. He wants me to help him win Mary Pat.
“Okay,” I say. “Here’s what I think you should do. Don’t ask her to marry you. Give her room. Try not to need anything from her for a little while.”
How can I tell that I have said something he wants to hear? The silence is just the same, but I know.
I imitate our father’s calm authority: “We’ll figure the rest out in the morning.”
. . . . .
I’ve only called Pete a few times in my life, and as soon as I hear his hello, I remember why. He has settled in for the night, his feet by the fire, Dostoyevsky in hand, Lila’s head on his lap; a phone call is breaking and entering.
We talk, but only about one percent of Pete comes to the phone. You get close to Pete by swimming or clamming or fishing, by weeding his garden or singing while he plays guitar.
Every exchange is more strained than the last until I get to the emergency of my brother’s love. When I finish, Pete says, “I don’t think there’s anything you can do, Soph.” He is sympathetic but resolute; I imagine this is the voice he uses to tell clients a house is beyond restoration.
“You don’t understand,” I say. “I think he’s going to propose to her.”
“They all propose,” he says.
For myself, I say, “Did you propose?”
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He laughs. “No.” It occurs to me that I have never known Pete to have a girlfriend.
I say, “How are you?”
“You know,” he says. “Okay.”
“How’s Lila?”
He says, “How are you, Lila?”
What I hear in the moment of quiet that follows is Martha’s Vineyard in winter—the clouds in the sky, the wind on the beach, and the cold that stays on your clothes even inside.
. . . . .
Jack does not return my calls. I ask my mother if she’s heard from him. She has. She says, “I can’t wait to meet Mary Pat.”
. . . . .
I know how hard my little brother is working, and I am reluctant to worry him. But when he asks me what I think of Mary Pat, I tell him everything. “He’s losing weight,” I say. “He doesn’t sleep anymore.” It occurs to me that this is how cults weaken the will of initiates.
Robert says, “It sounds like he’s in love,” and adds that the world’s most coveted state is characterized by unrelieved insecurity and almost constant pain.
The effect of his words is to remind me that it has been a long time since I have been in love.
“What about you?” Robert says. “Have you met anyone?”
He always asks, and I always have to say no, and I say no now. For the first time, he says he wants to introduce me to someone he knows, a pediatric heart surgeon.
“That’s good,” I say. “I have a pediatric heart.”
He says, “Don’t talk about my sister that way.”
Before we hang up, I say, “Are you in love?”
“No,” he says.
I ask if his wife knows.
“Of course,” he says. “Naomi’s the one who told me.”
. . . . .
When Jack finally calls me, at work, he says, “Can you meet me?” instead of Hello.
I say, “When?”
He says, “Now.”
Before I can ask where, he hangs up.
Even though it’s six P.M. on a weekday, I assume Homer’s, and I’m right. Jack’s at the counter, his head bowed.
His face looks haggard, but his body is surprisingly buff.
He says that he can’t sleep or eat or think or write.
“Apparently you can work out, though,” I say.
“She won’t call me back,” he says.
“I know how that feels.”
He misses the jibe. “We had a fight,” he says.
“About what?”
“It wasn’t really a fight.” He tells the waiter, “Just coffee.”
“He’ll have pancakes and bacon with that.” To Jack, I say, “Or do you want eggs?”
“I don’t want anything,” he says.
I tell the waiter, “He’ll have the pancakes.”
Jack doesn’t even seem to hear.
“You seem like you’re in a coma,” I say, and as soon as I say it, I feel sick. Our father was in a coma for days, and I have said coma the way people who don’t know anything about it do, which is like calling out, Can we get another coma over here?
I say, “I meant stupor,” but Jack is in such a stupor, he didn’t even notice my coma.
When his pancakes come, he pushes the plate aside. He sighs, and sighs again. His voice is so quiet, it’s as though he’s talking to himself when he says, “I can’t hit her.”
“Sorry?”
“I can’t hit her,” he says, and I realize how tired and desperate he must be to say these words to me.
“And you want to hit her?”
He shrugs. “She wants me to.”
“In bed,” I say.
“Of course in bed,” he says. “Where else?”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I say. “Of course, she wants you to hit her in bed. And you can’t. Go on.”
“She thinks it means I don’t love her.”
I say, “Can I hit her?”
“Sophie.” His voice is a reprimand. “Her father used to beat her.”
I think, She probably deserved it, but then I turn back into a human being.
My brother’s face is so tired and so sad it makes my face tired and sad. “Buddy.” But even as I say, “If I were you, I’d try to get out of this thing,” I know that nothing I say, no matter how wise or well put, will separate him from this woman.
“It’s not like I have a choice,” he says.
I say, “Of course you do.”
“She’s been seeing someone else,” he says. “Some guy she works with.”
I am about to say, A victim? but I correct myself in time: “A survivor?”
He defends Mary Pat even now: “She would never go out with a patient.”
There are so many things I could say about Mary Pat. I could call her the one word you save for occasions such as this, the only sacred profanity. But my brother loves this woman, whoever she is, and deriding her would only deride him for loving her.
What else is there to say? I tell him that I’ve been editing a celebrity diet book at work. I say, “News flash: Eat less, exercise more.”
When I slide the plate of pancakes in front of him, he says, “I’m not hungry.”
“Do you think I care if you’re hungry?” I say. “This has nothing to do with hunger. Hunger is beside the point. Hunger is a luxury you can’t afford.”
I pour syrup over the pancakes. When I cut into the stack, he says, drily, “Leggo my Eggo,” repeating a commercial circa our childhood.
“You need a nap,” I say.
He eats one bite, and then another.
While he finishes his pancakes, I plan the future. I will walk him home, and up the stairs to his apartment. He’ll lie down. I’ll shop for groceries. I will take him to a movie and out to dinner. In case my father is listening, I think, We will look after each other.
DENA BLUMENTHAL +
BOBBY ORR FORREVER
MYMOTHER is at her bereavement group, and I am on the phone with a distant relative I don’t know, an ancient guiltress, who says she’s sorry about my father but turns out to be a lot sorrier that no one bothered to let her know at the time, so she could’ve come to his funeral. She keeps saying things like, “Is it so hard to pick up the phone and dial?”
I am saved by the beep of Call Waiting and ask her to hold on a minute, please. She says, “This is long distance.”
A second beep. “Well, nice talking to you,” I say, and, “I’ll give my mother your message,” though I don’t think I will. “Good-bye.”
The other call is Dena, and I launch into an instant replay of the guilt festival I’ve just attended, which fascinates me now that it’s over, but not Dena. I hear indulgence in her, “Uh-huh.”
I say, “She didn’t even know my name. It was like the guilt equivalent of anonymous sex—”
Dena says, “How are you?”
She is asking big, but I answer little: “Fine,” I say. “How are you?”
This she treats as a digression, as though I am a patient inquiring after my doctor’s health. She allows only a few questions about her life before switching back to mine. “Have you talked to Demetri?”
I haven’t.
“Good,” she says. “When are you coming back to New York?”
I make my voice casual: “I don’t know.”
I expect her to laugh when I tell her that I have an interview at Shalom, the newsletter we grew up not reading.
She doesn’t say anything.
I wait and then say, “I should get ready,” even though my interview isn’t for another three hours.
She says, “Bob,” her nickname for me and mine for her since high school, “you’re living in Surrey,” and she says these words with the sympathetic authority of one familiar with Surrey’s social opportunities—the kids smoking cigarettes outside the skating rink; the housewife returning a nylon nightie at Strawbridge & Clothier; the mustached neighbor walking a miniature schnauzer named Pepper.
I say, “The good thing about being nowhere in your career is
that you can do it anywhere.”
She says, “Bob.”
“Yeah?”
She hesitates. “Good luck.”
. . . . .
I’d only been with Demetri for a few months when he asked me to go to Los Angeles with him.
“Come with me,” he said, and my heart stopped hurting for the first time since my father’s death.
I was thrilled quitting my job, thrilled giving up my apartment. It seemed like the first real risk I’d ever taken. I felt like I was kissing life right on the lips.
I started to panic the week before we were supposed to leave. Suddenly I heard everything everybody had been saying and not saying about Demetri: Dena had called him a pathological narcissist; my older brother had said, “There’s no there there”; my younger brother had sighed.
But it was the idea of my father that I couldn’t shake. I knew what he would’ve thought of Demetri—not that he would’ve said so. He would’ve said, What are you going to do in Los Angeles?
“What am I going to do in Los Angeles?” I said to Demetri.
He didn’t know I was saying the Dear of Dear John. He told me I would spend my days fantasizing about the sex we’d have that night, and then that night we’d have it.
. . . . .
All my life, I’ve seen Shalom on our mail table, and now that I want to read it, it’s gone. My mother threw it away, and the garbage men have come and gone. Everyone she calls has thrown theirs out, too. She’s sure she saved the issues announcing my brothers’ bar mitzvahs: We spend the hour before my interview fruitlessly rummaging through drawers stuffed with the memorabilia of childhood—sponge paintings of snowmen, compositions with sentences like, “The bird hops across the lawn.”
My mother feels terrible about throwing out Shalom and insists on driving me to my interview. Lately, she’s been giving me career pep talks, though she herself has not held a job since before my thirty-three-year-old brother was born. If I’m interested in journalism, she says now, Shalom is as good a place as any to start. “It’s all about networking,” she says. “And expanding your skill set.”
“Well,” I say, “you would know.”
She starts to apologize, and I stop her. I tell her that I know she’s trying to help, though her advice seems to be cutting off the air supply in the car and that’s giving me brain damage.
I change the topic: Does she know Elaine Brodsky, the publisher I’m about to meet?