It Won't Always Be This Great Read online

  Lying there, in my little sliver of the American dream, at the end of a pretty long and weird day, I put my book down on the night table and tried not to think about my ankle, my crime, Audra Uziel, the cops or, especially, Ruth Kudrow.

  SATURDAY THEN

  I.

  Commie?

  I hope it’s not too late. It’s what? Ten-thirty-five.

  PM.

  God knows what kind of Circadian rhythm you’re on. I was thinking before about that woman in Florida who had the same thing as you. They tossed Bush into Air Force One to stop the doctors from removing the feeding tube. Everyone on the news going on and on about the feeding tube, the feeding tube, the feeding tube. You’d think the Carnegie Deli was catering her coma.

  I shouldn’t judge. I know your wife is still holding out . . .

  By the way, Alyse sends her love. I spoke to her before. And the kids. This is kind of funny: I told you how Alyse and I have the kids saying “I love you” to us and each other at the end of phone calls? A few hours ago, Charlie said it to his friend Ari Weprin. They’ve known each other since pre-school, and now they’re working on a class project together where they have to build something—I don’t know what. Probably a pipe bomb or something. Anyhow, after they finished discussing it on the phone, Ari said, “See you tomorrow” and reflexively, Charlie said, “Okay, bye, I love you.”

  Apparently, Ari had a brief brown-out then and said, “What did you say?” Charlie told me he explained to Ari about our family custom and how he’d just kind of spaced out on who he was talking to and apologized. I guess Ari bought it because Charlie laughed about it.

  My mom thinks all this “I-love-you-ing” diminishes the meaning of the phrase. Score one for her, I gu—

  Oh shit, excuse me. That banquet dinner’s killing me.

  Some banquet. Podiatrists can be pretty annoying when they’re sober. Imagine what they’re like when they’ve had a few and then have to listen to an entrepreneurial peer talking about his latest book on how foot, ankle, and back problems are skyrocketing due to flip-flops. Can you imagine someone getting a book published on that subject? Norman Mailer should have written a book about flip-flops. Even he could have figured out that a slice of rubber with no arch might not be great for an obese American public with a shockingly high rate of flat-footedness. The Executioner’s Fallen Arch Song by Norman Mailer.

  What was that guy’s name, the murderer from The Executioner’s Song? Forget it. I’ll never remember.

  So. If you’re wondering, the night nurse was cool with me breaking visitor’s hours to talk to you some more. I don’t know how cool you are with it, but I know I’m a good two hours from falling asleep. I only go to one or two of these conventions a year, but when you’ve been married your whole adult life, even a couple of days of flying solo can feel disorienting. Arnie tells me that, when he’s driving, sometimes he’ll see the Best Western just off our exit of the highway and dream of checking in under a fake name and sleeping for a week.

  Me? I’m like a goddamn orphan who just wants to be nestled in routine. I can’t stand holidays. Even Sundays bug me. Any day with no mail somehow gets on my nerves.

  But it’s now Saturday in the story I’ve been telling you. As Esme would say, “Nice segue, Dad.”

  By the way, Esme once asked me, “If you don’t have enough money to stay in the Best Western, is there a Second Best Western?” I think she was eight at the time. Kid’s a genius.

  Alyse got up at five-thirty the next morning, or so I assume. After sleeping right through to eight, I’m feeling pretty fresh. At the time, that didn’t seem significant.

  Actually, even now it doesn’t seem significant.

  Anyhow, I hobbled downstairs, my ankle in shades of yellow and purple that even Ralph Lauren never put together. I kissed Alyse, who smiled in a kookier way than I was used to and pointed to an article from Newsday she’d circled with a red Sharpie.

  Sharpie. Now, there’s a company to invest in, huh?

  Anti-Semitism Suspected

  In Long Island Vandalism

  The piece reported little I didn’t already now. In fact, it said a lot less than I already knew. The only new tidbit was a comment from Nat Uziel: “It’s deplorable that such senseless expressions of bigotry can still happen in this day and age.”

  Isn’t it incredible how just about everyone who comes face to face with a reporter these days can morph into a press secretary?

  The article concluded with Nat saying there would be a rally outside his store at noon on Saturday.

  “Can they have a rally on Shabbat?”

  Alyse shrugged. “I guess if they don’t drive to the rally and they don’t use a microphone during the rally and keep it restful.”

  “Maybe they got some kind of waiver.”

  “A waiver? From who?”

  “Good question. It’s funny that the Jews don’t have a pope, you know? Someone calling the shots. I guess Alan Greenspan is as close as we get.”

  “Pope Alan Greenspan. Pope Eggs Benedict. Not too comparable.”

  “No, I guess not. But then again, Jews don’t really need a pope. All of us—Reform, Conservative, Orthodox—we’re good at making up rules as we go along.”

  Alyse almost smiled, but her face stopped at, “Isn’t this is a lively discussion for eight AM?”

  I grabbed a coffee and said, “We should go.”

  “Go where?”

  Alyse is usually somewhere between two and fifteen steps ahead of me, so I was a surprised by her question. “To the rally.”

  She looked at me as if I’d said, “You should drink Drano.”

  I said, “Why not? How often do you get to see a pack of psyched up Jews go off on alleged anti-Semitism? In fact, we should take the kids. Expose them to their God-given right to paranoia now, so they can reject it at a younger age than we did.”

  I know, I know. I sounded like someone else. As if my usual inhibitions flew through the glass with the horseradish.

  “That ankle sprain really set something off in you,” Alyse said, wanting to believe it. “Pheromones, or whatever that chemical is in chocolate.”

  I shrugged like the cause was unimportant, so Alyse shrugged back and said, “Whatever. Sure, let’s go to the Jew rally. But bringing the kids?”

  “We have time to decide.”

  The whole flip reggae in my voice had my wife confused. She was going along with me, but I could tell part of her was also thinking I should be held for observation. Most wives, noting a change in their husbands, assume there’s an affair going on. Maybe I should’ve been bugged that the possibility never seemed to enter Alyse’s mind, but I wasn’t. I started reading the paper, a sort of non-verbal cue that I was perfectly normal. Alyse headed upstairs to do something or other.

  II.

  Flipping through the paper, I caught an item about the cloned Australian Shepherd that ate the kid’s finger. The animal shelter ran the odds of finding a new home for a dog with a rap sheet and decided to euthanize it, but PETA filed for an injunction.

  If they were going to euthanize the kid, the PETA freaks wouldn’t say boo.

  The dog was remanded to the shelter pending legal maneuvers. I was blown away by the story, but again, Commie, I did not note the dateline. Clonegate was taking place somewhere in America. That’s all I knew.

  I bet when you were in law school, they didn’t have classes in animal jurisprudence. Of course, when you were a public defender, you probably wished some of your clients would morph into family pets. I remember your telling me about that woman you represented who confessed to bludgeoning her husband to death because “he was an asshole.” What did you try as a defense? Justifiable homicide because the guy really was an asshole? The judge must have loved that.

  Actually, I bet he did love it, bored out of his mind as judges always
seem to be. At least the ones on TV. Maybe the real life ones are more engaged. I don’t know. The actresses they use on Law & Order for the DA’s office, one’s more gorgeous than the next. But whenever you see a public defender on the show, it’s some roly-poly, bald guy oozing so much personality you want to dunk him in your milk. If you were an actor, Commie, you’d have never been cast for the job.

  I can’t really gauge attractiveness in men. Let me clarify that: I can’t gauge attractiveness in white men. Black guys, I can look at and say, “Oh yeah, Billy Dee Williams, he must have to beat women off with a stick.” Derek Jeter too. But white guys? Other than Johnny Depp or maybe Paul McCartney, I don’t see it. And maybe George Clooney, though he looks like he has a huge head. But whenever women talk about some white guy as being really handsome—Tom Cruise, Sting, that Viggo guy—I’m like, “Really?” But, you know, girls are working on a whole other level.

  That “six-pack” of girls in AEPHI asked me about you like eighty-five times—What’s he like? Does he have a girlfriend at home?—before it hit me that they all were hot for you. Not that it was just that group of girls. SDT, DPhiE. I was like your press secretary. On that one account, your getting the boot from the frat was a blessing. Maybe it wasn’t a coincidence that I got together with Alyse right after.

  It probably wasn’t a coincidence that you didn’t meet her for a long time. Sorry about that. Yet another apology. Although it wasn’t just you. At that time, I’d look at a fucking housefly as competition. Look, you know when I first felt like Alyse was truly mine? Not when we got engaged or married. When Esme was born. Having a child together at least made me know I was going to be a part of Alyse’s life forever. In fact, here’s another thing I’ve never told anyone: After each of Alyse’s miscarriages, my emotions were split between grief over the baby and fear that there would be nothing holding Alyse and me together. Alyse would be sleeping off her sadness and I’d look at her, visualizing a bleak night in the future where she was on a third date with some senior buyer from Saks, taking a sip of her Perrier and saying, Yeah, I was married once. Kind of a schmuck, but a nice guy. I sort of lost track of him . . .

  Alyse didn’t know the extent of my insecurity, but she sensed some of it right from the start. She literally bent over backwards to reassure me.

  She didn’t literally bend over backwards. I hate when people say that. In fact, she was pretty subtle about it. At parties, she’d maintain light contact with my arm, air kiss other guys hello, little shit like that. Finally, one day when we were recounting our first seven or eight dates for the 30th time, she said, “I immediately knew you were exactly my type.” I wanted to say, Are you nuts? I swear, Commie, even when I was about to propose, I asked myself: You’re going to ask her to spend her whole life with you? How arrogant is that?

  So with all that off-the-meter insecurity, you can see why, consciously or unconsciously, I kept you at a distance. Not that I didn’t tell her about you. I told her a lot about you. I remember when I told her you were kicked out of the frat for refusing to pay your room and board after the house rejected that black kid as a pledge. That impressed Alyse a lot. Too much. In fact she was so impressed, I remember kicking myself for telling her the story. Even after I told her that you paid the black guy to pledge, Alyse was still impressed. Believe me, it took me a few years before I got around to telling her how you wrote on your law school applications that you’d have to miss a bunch of classes if the Braves reached the World Series.

  By the way, I’ve never told anyone except Alyse the whole black pledge story. You gotta give me that much credit: I can keep a secret. If nothing else, I’m one of the few people who has trouble telling a secret. Obviously. Why I didn’t dump out of the frat with you . . . ? Jesus.

  Esme woke up around eight-thirty, spilling out of bed and heading right to her laptop. An email from another of her friends, Sophie Malkin, inquired as to whether Esme wanted to accompany the Malkins to the Whitney. Being her mother’s daughter, Esme replied yes first and then ran down the stairs to ask us if she could go. Maintaining at least comparable excitement levels between our two kids is a continual struggle for Alyse and me. Esme has her mother’s gift of making anything she’s doing sound like the coolest thing in the world. When Charlie hears the details of her adventures, he gets this look on his face like life is passing him by. Already. You don’t have to ask where he gets that from.

  At the end of our sophomore year at Maryland, I remember feeling heartsick that college was half over. That may not be exactly how Charlie feels, but it’s definitely the same species of melancholy.

  Anyway, we gave Esme the nod on the Whitney visit partly because it spared our having to ask her if she’d like to go to the rally and partly because it made the decision for us on Charlie since he was still a year or two away from being allowed to stay home alone for a few hours. Maybe that was another area in which we were over-careful. Charlie was fully capable of amusing himself alone and, if need be, picking up the phone and calling us on our cell phones. In fact, after the encounter with the police the night before, he was probably comfortable enough to dial 911. I almost said as much to Alyse but doubted my own motives. I wondered if I wanted Charlie to stay home on the off-chance that the Orthodox God would swoop down in the middle of the rally, point at me, and bellow, “J’accuse!” Then I wondered if God even spoke French.

  Okay. I didn’t wonder that. I just threw that out there for your amusement. You know, Commie, it would be nice if you’d give me a sign that I’m not wasting what I think are some funny lines on you. Your weirdly life-like eyelash flutters seem less and less encouraging.

  I assumed Charlie had never heard the word rally outside of a sports context. “Jeter started the Yankee rally.” To control his anticipation, we delayed telling him until just before we left.

  The Malkins picked up Esme, Alyse went upstairs with Charlie, and I went online in the den. Just as I was about to check my email, a detour had me Googling the living shit out of Mossad Kosher Horseradish.

  “Mossad Kosher Horseradish Brand, established in 2008 in White Plains, NY, is the finest hand-prepared, coarse-ground horseradish in the world! Its roots come from the horseradish capital of the world, Collinsville, Illinois, and are transported in seventy-five-pound burlap bags, dirt and all! Each root is washed, cut, and peeled according to kosher dietary laws under the supervision of Rabbi Hedrick Pearl. All retail outlets carrying the Mossad Kosher Horseradish brand are subject to rigorous background checks to ensure that no proceeds from this product wind up in the coffers of any group active in, or affiliated with, philosophies or attitudes contrary to the interests of Israel, the rightful homeland of the Jewish people.”

  My first thought was, who writes this stuff? People probably sat down and had meetings and arguments about that text. Then there were rewrites and re-rewrites. Amazing.

  My second thought was, lawyers had to be involved in drafting the text. Why did they keep referring to the Mossad Kosher Horseradish brand? That word has gotten totally out of control. When did branding stop being something you did to cattle?

  Third thought: Commie, you know I have no business acumen. But really, can a horseradish business turn a profit with overhead that includes paying for a rabbi’s supervision and running background checks on potential clients? With my mind wandering around on its own, I surfed for websites about different kinds of glass. It seemed a little odd that the whole window shattered, as opposed to say, the bottle just flying through and leaving a hole. The shattering was certainly more dramatic than just a hole at the time of the incident, but was less so after. You know what I mean?

  Come on, Commie. Picture it a second. Imagine if the next morning there was just a nice-sized hole in the window. You know what Uziel would have done. Exactly. Now we’re getting on the same wavelength: He would have left the hole there in perpetuity, just like that deli in Paris with the bullet holes. The place would have been anothe
r stop on the landmarks tour of worldwide anti-Semitism. Dachau, the Paris deli, Nu? Girl Fashions Outerwear for Teens.

  “Outerwear for Teens” isn’t really part of the name of the place but, for the purpose of the tour, it sounds more tragic, don’t you think? The right publicist could turn the whole thing into the Long Island version of Kristalnacht.

  Reading about various types of glass and their properties was pretty fascinating, but I wasn’t finding out much about the different ways they absorb damage. I was actually writing down a few of the manufacturers’ phone numbers when the phone rang. My mother’s name came up on Caller ID, so I waited for Alyse to get the phone. It was—

  Oh: If Alyse and I are home and my mother calls, it’s Alyse’s job to pick up. If her parents call, I pick up. After the calls alerting us to my father’s cancer and Alyse’s mother’s broken hip from a fall in Florida, we set up that system, figuring we could do a more sensitive job of telling each other bad news. Whoever isn’t holding the phone darkly says to the other: “Who?” The phone is hell. Alyse and I have aged parents. We know so much more than we care to know about Cumadin, stents, and Synthroid. Every ring of our phone sparks a hop of arrhythmia in both of us.

  “I got arrhythmia, I got . . .”

  Funny huh? You didn’t know I could sing, eh?

  Two minutes later, Alyse calls down and passes the call over to me. My mother, now living in a one-bedroom in Forest Hills, had read about the horseradish affair in the Times, which she somehow subscribes to at about a quarter of the price we pay for Newsday.

  “Yeah, Mom. I read about it. In fact, the police questioned me because I was near the scene of the crime when it happened.”

  I explained how I was walking home and then I immediately dove headlong into a pack of lies, telling her I took the cab because I was cold instead of telling her about the ankle. I mean, really, who needs three weeks of two calls a day from his mother asking about his ankle? And she would too. Three weeks at least of her asking if I’d seen a battery of doctors. Shouldn’t you have it x-rayed? Ba-da-ba-da-ba-da.