“Don’t ask,” my mother says in a controlled hysteria. I haven’t, but that’s not really the point. “Peter bought a car.”
It’s eight o’clock on Thursday morning, and her call has jolted me out of one of those sweaty dreams where it’s cocktail hour and everyone you ever knew in your whole life is there, and you’re searching in vain for a hiding place before they all notice that you’re not wearing any pants.
It takes me a minute to wrap my brain around what she’s just said. “What?”
“You heard me.”
“Who would sell Pete a car?” I say angrily. A good part of my childhood was spent watching out for Pete, and I still get the same instinctive surge of fury whenever someone mistreats him.
“That Bowhan character,” my mother says tiredly. “Satch. Who names their kid Satch, anyway?”
“Does he realize that Pete doesn’t drive?”
“Of course he does. He had the car delivered to our driveway this afternoon.”
“I’ll come out there today,” I say.
“I’m sorry to have to ask.” There is a lifetime of quiet pain in my mother’s voice. Someone has taken advantage of her baby, and she wasn’t there to stop it. You would never send your five-year-old out into the world unprotected, but having a grown, mentally retarded child feels like that every day.
“How did he pay for it?” I ask.
“He wrote a check.”
“Peter has a checking account?”
“He makes money,” my mother says defensively. “Why shouldn’t he have a checking account?”
“No,” I say. “You’re right.”
“Anyway,” she says. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore. It makes me sad. How are things with you?”
“Fine.” I’m wondering if I should mention Norm’s resurfacing.
“You didn’t look so good the other day,” she says.
“Gee, thanks.”
“I’m just saying.”
“What, Mom?” I say, irked. “What are you just saying?”
“Nothing,” she says tiredly. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to give you a hard time.”
“No, I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean to snap at you.”
“Peter wants to talk to you.”
There’s a whine of static and then Pete comes on the phone. “Hey, Zack,” he says. Pete has overactive salivary glands, and whenever he talks on the phone, he sucks up the excess saliva in the back of his throat. I got used to it a long time ago, but over the phone it’s more pronounced.
“Hey, Pete, what’s up?”
“I got a car.”
“So I hear,” I say, grinning. “What kind?”
“A ’95 Ford Mustang. Red. I got a great deal, a thousand bucks. It’s only got a hundred and sixty thousand miles on it. But Mom says I have to give it back.”
“Well, do you have a driver’s license?”
“Nope.”
“What’s the point of having a car like that without a license?”
Pete says, “Chicks,” and then convulses into a fit of hoarse, snorting laughter. I laugh along with him.
“Pete,” I say. “You don’t need a car to get chicks.”
“It helps,” he says.
“Look at me,” I say. “I don’t have a car.”
“Number one,” Pete says. “You don’t need to get chicks, because you’re engaged to Hope.” Pete debates in number form, and I can picture him standing there, with the phone tucked into his ear, ticking off the count on his hands. “And number two,” he says, and then pauses.
“Yeah?” I say.
“You’re not a retard.”
Norm is in the kitchen, in boxers and a wifebeater, scrambling eggs when I come downstairs. “Hey, Zack,” he says, full of urgent cheer. “I made you some breakfast.”
“Did you sleep here?” I ask incredulously.
“Onions and tomatoes, just like when you were a kid,” he says proudly, expertly sliding a heaping mound of eggs from the frying pan onto a waiting plate. “You still like it like that?”
“Can you answer my question?”
He looks at me. “I crashed on the couch. Jed said it would be fine. I wanted to clear it with you, but you were already sleeping.”
“So, what?” I say. “You’re moving in here now?”
“It’s just for a few days,” he says apologetically, placing the plate in front of me.
“I thought you were staying with friends.”
He shrugs. “I think I might have overstayed my welcome.”
“Go figure.”
He greets my sarcasm with the same nullifying smile he always uses, like he’s in on the joke rather than the butt of it. “So,” he says. “When do you leave for work?”
“I’m not going to work today,” I say. That raises his eyebrows, and I quickly lift my hand to shush him as he’s about to speak. “And if I were you,” I continue quickly, “I would carefully consider whatever it was you were about to say. It could mean the difference between your being welcome to stay here or not.”
He looks at me for a long moment, then nods his head with a small grin. “I was just going to ask if the eggs need any more salt.”
I take a forkful into my mouth and chew it thoughtfully. “They do,” I say. “Thanks.”
He slides the saltshaker across the table. “Don’t mention it.”
“Did you catch up to Matt yesterday?” I ask.
“I did.”
“And?”
“I told him his father wasn’t perfect.”
“I hope he was sitting down when you dropped that bomb.”
Norm shrugs. “He wasn’t listening anyway.” He drops the pan into the sink, and then, as he’s turning, his erection inadvertently pops through the fly of his boxers and there I am, face-to-face with the instrument of my own humble origins, Norm’s purple, nascent member.
“And we’re done with breakfast,” I say, disgustedly pushing my plate across the table.
“Sorry about that,” he says, grinning sheepishly, but not without pride, as he tucks it back into his shorts.
“Okay,” I say. “I’ll ask. What is it with you and the Viagra?”
Norm sits down across from me. “I’m trying to condition myself.”
“Condition yourself.”
He nods and leans back in his chair. “When I was your age, it didn’t take very much to get me going. See a nice rack on someone, a good, firm ass, and I’d get so hard I could write my name with it, hang a towel on it, you know? But I’m sixty now, and my dick has let me down on more than one occasion. You wait until you’re my age—you’ll see. It’s not that easy. So what I’m doing is, I’m programming my body to believe that erections are a normal, everyday function again. This way, when the occasion does arise, then by God, so will I.”
“I see,” I say, much the way I would if I were talking to a rational person. “And you’re doing this under medical supervision?”
“Nah. It’s my own idea,” he says proudly.
“And you don’t see anything wrong with walking around all day with a hard-on?”
“On the contrary. It makes me feel young again. Alive.”
“I’m young,” I say. “I don’t walk around with a hard-on all day.”
He flashes his trademark grin. “You don’t know what you’re missing.”
Hope calls, still irked about my waking her up last night, but more concerned about my not being on the way to work already. “Why are you still home?” she says.
“My father dropped by,” I say.
“Oh. But you’re going to work today, right?”
“I’m not sure. I’m still feeling a little out of it.”
There’s a pregnant pause on the other end of the line as Hope considers her options. “Zack,” she says softly. “What’s going on? Do I need to come home early?”
“Of course not,” I say. “Everything’s fine. I’m just not feeling too well, that’s all.”
“What are your symptoms?”
“General malaise.”
“What does that mean, exactly?”
“I don’t know. I’m just feeling somewhat run-down.”
“Does this have anything to do with that procedure you had?”
“No.”
“You’re making me very nervous.” In the background, I can hear the discreet clatter of a keyboard abruptly stop as Hope quits multitasking.
“Why?”
“I don’t know. You’re acting strange. You don’t call me all day yesterday; then you wake me up sounding drunk, or stoned, or something. And now you’re skipping work for the second day in a row when there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with you. I mean, none of this is normal behavior for you. Are you having doubts about us? Because if you are, you should just come out and say so.”
“It’s nothing like that,” I say. “Jesus. Can’t a guy have an off day without the whole world coming down on him?”
“I’m not the whole world. I am your fiancée,” Hope says in a thin, icy voice that can go either way. She might burst into tears, or she might coldly eviscerate me.
“I know. I’m sorry.”
Our frustrated silence is punctuated by the twelve-cents-a-minute overseas static.
“Have you seen Tamara?” she finally asks me.
“What?”
“Tamara. I was just wondering if you’ve gone out to see her and Sophie lately.”
This is a trap, a trick question, and I don’t know the right answer. But waiting too long will be an automatic disqualification, so I have no choice but to hazard a guess. “I did,” I say. “On Monday.”
“You left work early?”
“Yeah.”
“You didn’t mention it.”
“It wasn’t a big deal. Tamara was going a little stir-crazy, so I took Sophie to the park for a few hours.”
Hope is aware that I check in with Tamara and Sophie from time to time. She’s less than thrilled with my retained connection to my best friend’s widow, but she’s never said anything about it, too proud to be unfairly cast in the role of the insensitive jealous girlfriend while Tamara and I nobly grapple with the larger, universally sympathetic themes of death and grief. And while this delicate dynamic grants me license, I make sure to keep the frequency of my calls and visits with Tamara a secret, because if Hope knew how often we speak and how much time we spend together, her instinct for self-preservation would override her pride, which would lead to a final, tearfully angry ultimatum. So I carry on my relationship with Tamara according to a nebulous formula being constantly recalculated to indicate the minimum amount of disclosure necessary to cover my ass while continuing the charade. Hope sees only the tip of the Tamara iceberg, its mammoth, faceted walls spreading out below the churning surface, lying in silent, deadly wait.
“It’s not a big deal at all,” Hope says. “I’m glad you’re able to help her out. I’m just wondering why you didn’t mention it.”
“I don’t know,” I say. “That night was Matt’s show and Jed and I got kind of drunk, and then my father showed up and I guess, in all the excitement, I forgot about it.”
“Fair enough,” Hope says, but her tone remains unconvinced. “Listen, I have to go into a meeting. I love you and I don’t want to be a nag, so I’m just going to ask you one last time, is everything okay? With you, with us, with work. Everything.”
I choose my words carefully. “Everything’s fine, Hope. Really. I’m just feeling exhausted, the kind of exhausted that movie stars get when they check into hospitals and their reps announce to everyone that they’re suffering from exhaustion. That kind of exhausted. Except I don’t have reps, so I’m just laying low for a day or two so that I can be well rested and happy at our engagement party. That’s all. Okay?”
“Okay,” she says, mollified by my reference to the party. “I love you, babe. Call me later.”
“I will.”
Hanging up feels portentous, the powerful sense of an opportunity missed, although I have no idea what that might have been.
The phone rings again a few minutes later, and, thinking it might be Hope, I pick it up.
“Where the hell are you?” Bill shouts hysterically into the phone.
Fuck. “I’m calling in sick,” I say.
“You can’t disappear for a day and then call in sick!” Bill protests. “Hodges is on the warpath!”
“Tell him I’m working on it,” I say. “As soon as I know something, I’ll call him.”
“I’m not your goddamn secretary!” he screams at me. “You call him right now, Zack. I mean it. I don’t know what’s gotten into you, but if you blow this, you’re finished here. Do you read me?”
“I’m already finished,” I say.
“Excuse me?”
“Okay,” I say, and hang up the phone. I’m thinking it might not be a bad idea to leave my cell phone home today.
It’s unseasonably warm for October and there I am, in the middle of the working day, cruising down Houston in a Lexus convertible, top town, blasting Elvis Costello through the Bose speakers, looking every inch like someone who has his shit together. I catch a glimpse of myself reflected in the window of an electronics shop and, for a moment there, I almost fool myself.
Matt’s waiting for me on the stoop of his Lower East Side building, dressed in jeans and a torn roll-neck sweater, his version of presentable, smoking a cigarette and fiddling with his iPod. “Hey,” he says, ambling over to the car.
“Where’s Elton?”
“Fuck.”
He runs back upstairs and returns a minute later carrying a small brown shopping bag. “Elton,” he says with a smirk, tossing the bag into the backseat.
The first time our mother saw Matt’s shaved head, she cried for days, telling him that nothing in her life had ever made her sadder than seeing her baby’s head like that. “Your husband cheated on you,” he pointed out. “Your sister died of breast cancer.”
“This is worse,” she insisted through her tears.
Matt shaved his head as a concession to his receding hairline, unbecoming for the front man of a punk pop band, and he refused to grow it back. But every time Lela saw him, she’d cry inconsolably. Matt’s girlfriend at the time worked in the costume department of Saturday Night Live, and in a moment of inspiration she brought home a wig created for an Elton John sketch that was bumped at the last minute. It was a near-perfect fit, and from then on, Matt would wear the wig when he went to visit Lela. They never discussed it, but somehow the Elton John hair was an acceptable surrogate and the issue was thus wordlessly resolved.
We hit the FDR at top speed and it feels good, two brothers on a midday road trip, the wind flowing over the windshield to kiss the tops of our heads, the sun-dappled surface of the East River shining like sequins, and it’s so easy to imagine us in another life, one in which we’re both successful and better adjusted, able to positively impact ourselves and each other, our ambitions and desires manifest, and not muted by the restive inner monologue of discontent that is our birthright.
Matt names the bridges under his breath. The Brooklyn Bridge, the Queensboro, the Triboro, and, off in the distance, the Whitestone and the Throgs Neck. That was what Pete always did when we were kids in the back of Norm’s LeSabre, returning on Sunday evenings from visiting our grandmother in Brooklyn, heads on shoulders in the backseat, Norm and Lela singing along to Simon and Garfunkel and Frank Sinatra on WPAT-FM 93, the rhythmic bumping of the highway seams lulling us to sleep. It’s one of the only lingering memories I have of us as a family, of feeling insulated and complete.
We’re driving along the service road in Riverdale when Matt suddenly sits up in his seat. “I don’t believe it,” he says.
“What?”
He points. “Look.”
And there’s Norm, trudging up the service road, duffel bag over his shoulder, face flushed, panting lightly from his exertions. I slow down and we watch Norm from behind.
“For an absentee father,” Matt says, “he sure is around a lot.”
“He is rather ubiquitous,” I agree.
“It’s like he thinks everything can be fixed through sheer omnipresence,” Matt says.
“Like his erections,” I say. “He thinks he can condition us into accepting a new standard.”
Matt looks at me like a small, perfectly formed flower just sprouted from my nose. “Okay,” he says slowly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, but you need to come up with a better analogy, preferably one that doesn’t involve Dad’s schlong.”
“You just called him ‘Dad,’ ” I say.
“No I didn’t.”
“Sure you did. You said ‘Dad’s schlong.’ You see. His diabolical plan is succeeding.”
“It was contextual.”
I grin. “Whatever, man.”
“Fuck you. It was.”
I pull up alongside Norm, keeping pace with his trudging gait. He’s completely focused on his walking, eyes straight ahead, head bowed into the wind, and it takes a minute for him to realize he has company. “Hello, boys,” he says, beaming at us as he sucks wind. “Great to see you.”
“What are you doing here?” I say.
“I thought you might need a little backup.”
“What are you talking about, Norm?”
He steps off the sidewalk to lean forward over Matt’s door. He’s sweating in his decades-old Members Only windbreaker, and underneath it I can see the same red sweatshirt he wore yesterday. “I’m here to help you get Peter’s money back.”
“How do you even know about that?” I say.
“Now, don’t overreact to this,” he says. “I heard you on the phone with your mom.”
“I was upstairs in bed. How could you have heard anything?”
“He’s staying with you now?” Matt says incredulously.
I shush him. “Not now.”
“I listened in on the downstairs phone,” Norm says.
“You’re a guest in my house and you’re eavesdropping on my phone calls?” I say, furious.
“So he is staying with you,” Matt says huffily.
“I just wanted to hear her voice again.”
“Then you should have called her,” I say. “Jesus Christ! You’re out of control, Norm.”
“Let’s not overlook the larger issue here,” Norm says.
“Oh. And what’s that?”
“Someone screwed Peter.”
“Fuck off, Norm. Someone’s always screwing Peter,” Matt says. “And we’ll handle it, like we’ve always handled it. Without you.”
Norm stands up straight and looks down at us. “Boys,” he says. “I’m sure it hasn’t escaped your attention that I didn’t ask your permission to come with you today. The reason for that, in case you were wondering, is that I don’t need it. I’ll bottom-line it for you: it’s not your call. I took a subway and two buses to get here.” He leans all the way forward now, forearms pressed against the car door, his head hovering directly over Matt’s, his expression stark and determined. “I’m not turning back,” he declares emphatically. “So, having freed the two of you from the onus of that decision, you should now be able to make the one decision concerning me that you are, in fact, in the position to make.”
Matt looks at me, his eyes wide and smoldering with indignation. No fucking way, he mouths to me. I look at Norm, peaked and flushed from his walking, his features contorted into a rictus of grim purpose. I sigh. “Hop in.”
“I don’t fucking believe you,” Matt mutters to me.
Norm can’t fit in the Lexus’s backseat, so he sits up on the seat back like a returning hero at his parade, face turned pleasurably into the midday sun like a dog, while Matt slinks down in his seat sulking, and in this unsightly manner we leave the service road and navigate gracelessly through the business district of our old neighborhood, toward our childhood home.