“When your family gets here, they will want for nothing,” she’d say. But on this subject, he wouldn’t be budged. And despite her soothing tone, she hardly believed her own words.
O
N A
T
UESDAY AFTERNOON
, one week after the
New Yorker
ran its piece, Simon was working in his office, his head down as usual. There was a panel of glass in his office that ran from the ceiling to the floor and was about four feet wide. Although it was there for purely decorative reasons, there were those who thought that he had it installed so he could watch his employees. Nothing could be further from the truth. If anything, Simon could be faulted for keeping his door shut and not looking up long enough to know half the people who worked for him. But on this day, there was some commotion outside his
door as a copy of
Time
was being passed around and read out loud. Someone in the art department painted a sign in crimson that said the puzzle king and tacked it up on Simon’s door. Simon was on deadline creating an ad for Sapolin Paints, but he took time to look out at the hullabaloo. Several people noticed him watching through the window and gave him the thumbs up. Someone began chanting, “All hail to the Puzzle King,” and the others joined in. Someone held up a copy of
Time
. There was a picture of Simon with a caption underneath that read: “Simon Phelps, America’s Puzzle King.” Simon recognized that this was a big deal; it was great for the company, great for him. He wished he could feel the excitement that everyone else did, but he would join in the celebration and make the effort. He pushed his chair away from his desk and was about to go outside when he spotted something that made him sit back down again.
A slim man wearing a coat whose hem had come undone and was ragged around the edge was walking toward him. The man’s hair was thinning and he was so pale that not even his lips had color. He was carrying a paper shopping bag spilling over with envelopes, little boxes, and pages torn out of old magazines and newspapers. Something about the way the man moved and how his eyes kept shifting from one person to another as if he was worried about being noticed held Simon’s attention. The man came closer and Simon could see by the way his skin seemed to melt around his chin that he had once been very fat. He walked with a slight limp, but that’s not why Simon couldn’t take his eyes off of him. He had a hunch that the man was there to see him, and when his secretary knocked on his door and said, “There’s a gentleman here who says you go way back,” Simon shook his head and said, “Of course, show him in,” without knowing why.
The man stood before him. His eyes traveled the room, taking
in the silver framed photographs on the desk and the leather-bound volumes on the shelf. As Simon stared at him, he peeled away age until he had excavated the face of a boy he once knew.
“I’ll be damned. Aaron Eisendraft? Pissboy? Is it really you?”
“So it is,” said Pissboy, who seemed an old man now, made older by some missing teeth and his tentative demeanor. “Forgive me for barging in on you like this.”
“Don’t be silly,” said Simon. “After all these years, I’ve often wondered what happened to you.”
Pissboy looked away. “Yeah, well
there’s
a story for
Time
magazine.”
Simon waited for his old friend to continue. When he didn’t, he knew not to pry. “Have a seat,” he said. “Let me take your coat.”
“That’s okay,” said Pissboy, “I’ll keep it on.” He was much smaller than Simon remembered and cut a curious figure, sitting on the couch wrapped in his shabby coat with the shopping bag on his lap. “Let me not take up too much of your valuable time. The purpose of my visit is twofold.” He pulled an envelope from his bag and laid it on the coffee table that sat between them. “As you can see, I’m not a young man anymore. I could say that life hasn’t been kind to me, but the truth is, I haven’t been so kind to life.” Here he paused to make sure that Simon caught his turn of phrase. “I’ll tell you this, my friend, my past weighs heavy on me. I can’t undo what’s been done, but in the time I have left, I can try to make some of it right, if you know what I mean. Which is why I’ve brought you this.” He handed Simon the envelope. “Go on, open it.”
Inside the envelope were brittle pieces of yellowed paper. Simon unfolded each sheet and spread them out on the table. His
heart beat fast and he covered his mouth with his hand when he realized what they were: drawings of the Fatsos, of Strongman, of Mrs. O’Mara, his first-grade teacher. His drawings. They were exuberant and romantic and so filled with feeling. The boy who had drawn them had promise.
“Where did you get these?” he asked Pissboy.
“You may remember that I had a certain, ahem, talent. I could pilfer ‘souvenirs’ from anybody practically right under their nose and they never knew. I took these from your sketchbook. I chose ones that were near duplicates because I thought you wouldn’t notice. Guess I was right about that, huh? Anyway, that was then and now is now. Certain events have occurred that made me realize I no longer want to be in possession of possessions that are not rightfully mine. For the past few years my movements have been, shall we say, restricted, but now that they’re not I’m making it my business to return every souvenir that I have, ah, borrowed. You were a cinch to track down. It helps that you’re still alive.” He pointed to his shopping bag. “I have all the articles that have been written about you. But finding all the others?” He shook his head. “Believe you me it’s not been easy. Know what I mean?
“The second reason for my visit here is of a less pleasant matter. To put it bluntly, I’m broke. I need a job. I don’t have many skills but I have quick fingers and I’ll work them to the bone. I’d rather not get into the particulars of my situation, but suffice it to say I’ll take anything you might have.”
Simon, overwhelmed by his drawings, and by seeing the down-and-out state of his old friend, raised his hands. “You don’t have to say another word. Of course I’ll give you a job. You’d make a perfect cutter.” He explained the work of a cutter and Pissboy
exercised his fingers as if he were playing the piano. “Sounds like just the thing for these nimble hands,” he said.
Simon could see the uncertainty behind his friend’s show of bravado and tried to reassure him. “Don’t worry, it’s not as complicated as it sounds. Oh, and one more thing,” he said, desperate to lighten this impromptu reunion. “A puzzle isn’t a puzzle without all of its pieces. So if one goes missing, and I find you’ve pilfered it?” He shrugged. “Know what I’m saying?”
“I get your drift,” said Pissboy. “I promise I won’t mess up. I owe you big for this.”
“It’s my pleasure,” said Simon. “And you can keep the drawings.”
T
HAT NIGHT,
F
LORA
was giddy when she greeted Simon at the door. “The King is home, long live the King. Does everyone in the world read
Time
magazine? I’ve gotten phone calls from people I hardly know. Say, if you’re the Puzzle King, does that make me the Puzzle Queen?”
“It’s good to be here,” he said, taking her hands. His own were cold.
Lately, when Simon came home, all he wanted to do was to collapse into his leather chair, put his feet up on the ottoman, and read the paper. Sometimes he’d have a drink, but more often than not, by the time Flora brought it to him, his head would be inclined to one side, the paper would have fallen to the floor, and he would be fast asleep.
“Floramor, you will always be
my
queen, you know that.” He held her hands tighter. “I am so very tired. Will you come upstairs and lie down with me?” He never called her Floramor except right after they’d made love, and then his voice would get
childlike, as he lay curled up on his side with his arm around her belly and his head resting on her breast. “My Floramor I do adore her, do anything in the world just for her.” He’d say it three or four times, like a nursery rhyme, and often those would be his last words of the evening.
They went upstairs and he fell onto the bed without bothering to remove his clothes. Flora pulled off his shoes and lay down next to him. He stared at the ceiling while she massaged his head. Simon had told her that when he was a little boy, his mother would rub his head before he went to sleep. She would tell him she was rubbing away everything bad so that he would only have good dreams and wake up with happy thoughts. Now, as Flora stroked her husband’s graying temples and balding head, she hoped his mother was right. “Did something happen today?” she asked.
“No,” he said, too worn out to tell her about Pissboy. “Today was a fine day. We made lots of puzzles and lots of money and we got a nice write up in
Time
magazine. Things couldn’t be better.”
“So then, it’s life as usual. Right?”
“Life as usual, I guess. I’m just so tired I feel it in my bones.”
“Well, then, maybe you need to get some sleep,” she said.
“It isn’t that kind of tired, Flora. Do you realize that in less than a month I’ll be fifty years old? I’m probably twice the age my father was when he died. A half a century old. Does that seem possible? I’m not a young man anymore. I feel like I’m eighty. And for what?”
“Oh Simon, look at what you’ve achieved. More than you ever expected or imagined. I am so proud of you. Your family will be so proud of you.” She kneaded the place above his eyebrows where she could feel the ropes of tension.
“I’ve made a lot of money,” he said. “And don’t get me wrong, I love how we live: our house, the beautiful clothes you wear. We have a wonderful life. But sometimes I feel as if we’re living in a bubble. If all I do in my lifetime is make a million dollars and more puzzles than anyone else, what does that mean? I still have no idea what happened to my family. This country’s in the pit of a depression, Europe is even worse, and I’m making premiums for toothpaste? This can’t be all.”
Flora stopped rubbing his head. She wanted to say,
You have everything in life a man could want, why can’t you just be happy with that?
But she knew better than to try to argue with him when he got into one of these moods. So she lay next to him perplexed at how seriously he took the world. They were different that way. When he was burdened, it was never about not being invited to one party or another or that there might be mice in the basement. It was more momentous than that. Her anxieties lived closer to home. Most of the time, she didn’t even tell Simon about them for fear he’d find them silly.
L
ATELY, IT WAS
S
EEMA
who shaped Flora’s worries. Seema showed no signs of coming home and Flora feared she would be swallowed up by Germany. There were letters, typical Seema letters: “darling” this and “marvelous” that, but really, Flora had little sense of what was going on in her life. She knew there were men, maybe even one man, as she dropped “we” off-handedly: “We went to Berlin for the weekend. We were hoping to go to Paris for a few days, but there seems to be no time for anything but work, work, work” or “We simply love the opera.” In one letter, Seema asked Flora to address her mail to Seema Glass from now on. “It’s much easier that way and takes up much
less room than big old Grossman. You were smart to get rid of it when you did.”
Flora recoiled at the memory of having to tell Oliver that Seema wasn’t coming back. He’d rung her up just after Christmas, the year their mother died. “Your sister’s pulled a Houdini,” he’d said. “Any idea when she’s coming back?” When Flora told him Seema wasn’t coming back, he laughed. “Of course she’s coming back. Everything’s here: her apartment, her jewelry, her clothes, me. She told me she was only staying a couple of weeks. Said she didn’t think she could take more than that.”
“Well, I’m telling you,” Flora said, “she’s still in Germany. She claims she’s never coming back.”
“That’s ridiculous.” His voice grew louder. “You’re pulling my leg, aren’t you? Oh, wait a minute. I get it, of course you are. She wants me to come find her, hunt her down? Okay, I’ll play. But you tell that sister of yours that she’s playing hide-and-seek with the big boys. I’ll find her, and when I do, she’s not getting away again. You tell her that for me, will you?”
“I’ll put it in a letter,” Flora said icily. To which Oliver replied, “You Glass girls are a hoot, you really are.”
She never told Simon about that conversation.
S
IMON’S MOOD STAYED GLOOMY
well beyond his fiftieth birthday in March. As they did every year, they went to Passover dinner at Aunt Hannah and Uncle Paul’s. Simon barely spoke through dinner, and afterward, when Flora and Hannah were doing the dishes, Hannah whispered to Flora, “Is Simon all right? He’s unusually quiet tonight.” Flora pressed her lips together and wondered how much to tell. “He’s working like a dog,” she said. “He worries about work, about the country, always
about his family. About our family. You know him, he takes everything so seriously.”
“Are you giving him enough attention?” Hannah raised her eyebrows to signify that this was a serious question. She was of a generation that believed there was a direct correlation between wifely duties and masculine woes. Flora took a deep breath, hoping her aunt would not repeat her favorite and oft-quoted piece of wisdom from
Good Housekeeping
magazine: “The woman who is as proficient in the kitchen as she is in the bedroom has a happy husband indeed.” The last thing Flora wanted to do was to imagine Aunt Hannah and Uncle Paul in the bedroom, but what else was she supposed to think about when Hannah said things like that? Rather than risk hearing any more of her aunt’s views, Flora volunteered, “I try to make him laugh. I’ve cooked him plenty of romantic candlelit dinners. We’ve gone out to the movies or a night on the town and it’s always the same.”
Flora shrugged, not knowing what more to say or how to describe the heaviness in Simon’s step or the way his eyes would focus on something that seemed out of her sight. She didn’t tell Aunt Hannah how she watched his moods and gauged his disposition, and how, when she’d ask him if he was okay, he’d say things like: “You read the papers, Flora. Nobody’s okay.” Nor did she admit that she and Simon had always had a playful and unrestrained sex life. Even when he worked long hours and they hadn’t spoken much to one another, their lovemaking would always bring them back together again. But lately, even that seemed tired.