Flatscreen (28 page)

Ate bagels, watched
Law and Order
, made jokes about Kahn that felt good and sad at the same time, looked at photos, did imitations, scanned selected scenes from his filmography. Mary told me how much I’d meant to Kahn. Wasn’t sure what to take from that.

Sheila was busy on the phone making arrangements—caterers, florists. Like throwing a party. Erin lay with her leg across Benjy’s, then moved to a wicker chair where she sat unstill, reminiscent of Mom, plucking hair from her arm, twitching her sockless toes. Everyone was always almost crying. But I was glad Benjy was back in good enough graces.

When I went to smoke a cigarette in front of the pool house, Erin came, took a few drags.

“He’d been basically dead for a while,” she said, looking at the pool house.

Wanted to tell her that you have to be alive to shoot yourself, alive enough to feel pain.

“My brother’s confused,” I said. “He means well.”

“I know that,” she said. “But what a fucker.”

“Yeah. It’s in the genes.”

“You mean his dad jeans?”

For a moment we weren’t aware of death. I smiled.

“Jesus,” Erin said.

“Christ,” I said.

Drove to the service with Benjy. He let me drive. Gorgeous day, two days to Christmas. Starbucks still hadn’t called. A small storm had blown through, whitened the streets with snow so light it was like pale dust. Thought how stupid it is that people think heaven is up there, that our invisible bodies are carried out of the earth’s orbit into some kingdom.

The woman who’d saved my life was there when we pulled into the lot. Not many people knew Kahn; figured they wouldn’t need a parking attendant. But she’d shown up, was wearing her orange mesh vest over a puffy down jacket.

“I’ll come in a sec,” I said to Benjy.

He walked toward the heavy doors. I stayed behind to say a few words to my secret guardian and fleeting (unreciprocating) love. Wearing a suit of my father’s. Pam had given it to me while I was staying at their house. Didn’t fit right—wide in the shoulders, long in the inseam—but expensive, too big rather than too small. First time I’d been to the synagogue without Mom. Old enough to have dead friends.

“Thought you’d be here,” she said.

“Wouldn’t miss it.”

“He’s the one who shot you, right?”

“The one and only.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Me too. Thanks for saving my life. I’ve been meaning to thank you.”

“It was nothing,” Jennifer said coolly, one knee bent, body slightly bouncing as she waved in another car.

“To me, it wasn’t nothing.”

“Just doing my job.”

The delivery guys from Domino’s stepped out of a Taurus. They supposedly smoked pot with their clientele. I wasn’t special. Probably one in a line of failed protégés, stoned, bitter at the world, amused by this man, his pain. Felt implicated in Kahn’s death. Like the pizza guys, egging him on, waiting for his next explosion to rattle my dull existence. And then of course the fact that I hadn’t forgiven, hadn’t held him in an afternoon hug, hadn’t said I’d understood even if I hadn’t.

“Actually, I saved your life twice,” Jennifer said.

“I think the first time you just saved my ass.”

“Same difference.”

Small crowd. Beth Cahill in back wearing a chaste blue dress she’d probably worn to graduation, not since. She sat alone, flicking the pages of her prayer book like it was written in another language. (It was.) No Alison in sight. Didn’t want to be worried about her but I was. Erin said he’d been alone when they’d found him.

No one big had shown, none of the names Kahn occasionally dropped. Just the pizza guys, some synagogue regulars.

Zarkoff said, “Seymour Kahn was an accomplished man. The ‘King of the Crossover,’ as he was often called, he holds the record for appearances on the most shows while playing the same character: the lovable Albert Stamn, who first appeared as a police captain on the short-lived NBC series
Guns and Tarts
.”

Zarkoff looked to the back of the room as he spoke, the way they teach you to in school, but it just seemed weird because only the front few rows were filled.

“That’s very similar to his IMDB page,” I whispered to
Erin. Her hair was pulled back, still wet. Goth-black eyeliner, apparently unafraid of tears.

“Seymour, Kahn to his friends, of whom I was lucky enough to call myself one, was famous throughout Hollywood for his outlandish personality and romantic liaisons. He was the life of the party. The life of many parties.”

Zarkoff continued, tiptoed, tempo increasing.

“But behind the veil, behind the mask, Kahn was a tender man with a soft heart. He was troubled, certainly, at times ill. But inside him was a shining soul that touched everyone around him on a personal level. I do not exclude myself. Sometimes he would regale me with tales of his days in the spotlight, and as a young man on the streets of Boston. Though my main role is one of teacher, in Seymour’s court I was always student.”

Mary stroked Natasha’s neck. Sheila, in Jackie O. shades and black, played widow, fair enough. Her face looked calm, as though she’d been expecting this for a long time, from the day they’d met, when he’d slipped his arm around her waist, smiled stained teeth. Her whole life had become a reaction to Kahn’s death drive. That’s what the health food was about, the yoga, the shining varnish of her wood floors. She wanted to ignore death, ignore death’s spectator, who lived in her pool house, played along, not willfully, but acceptingly, knowing there was no other option. But she couldn’t ignore it with his DNA in one daughter, demeanor in the other, couldn’t ignore it with him needing her the way he did, the way maybe she needed him when no one else was around. Sheila crossed her arms over her chest. Must have been glad to get him out of her life.

Natasha picked something out of her teeth. Mary kept rubbing her neck, expressionless. Benjy cried. He hadn’t liked Kahn, but it’s easy to cry at funerals. Erin took a
Kleenex, ran it across his face without looking, as if she’d been doing it for years.

“Seymour Kahn was a great man: a wonderful actor, a loving husband and father. He will be remembered fondly by all of us. If anyone else wishes to share words or memories, he or she may come to the podium and do so.”

Mary volunteered.

“Most of you don’t know me,” she said. “And the ones who do probably think I’m a home-wrecker. After all, I’m the one who stole his wife. But Seymour never blamed me. He never played the role of jealous ex. When Sheila and I first began to experiment, he was actually pretty encouraging. Some might even say he was too encouraging.”

Light laughter from the audience. Mary smiled, showing bleached teeth. Blinked, wiped her brow, found Sheila’s face in the crowd. Sheila nodded. Mary continued.

“I remember when I first started seeing Sheila. We were all living in L.A. then. Natasha had just turned six. I still had my own place, but I spent most of my time at their house in Laurel Canyon. Seymour knew what was going on; we weren’t trying to hide it. I would sleep with Sheila in their bed, and Seymour slept in one of the guest rooms. It was a tough time for him for a lot of reasons. He was finding out how hard it was to get acting jobs if you were in a chair. The only parts he could get were as homeless beggars, and he didn’t want those parts. ‘I want to dance,’ he would say, ‘I want to be Fred Astaire on wheels! The legless torso of Apollo! I want to wear a bowtie, drink martinis, seduce young girls with my eyes!’”

Her imitation was on. She had his cadence, dramatic pauses, slightly increasing pitch as he became excited. Audience wasn’t sure whether to laugh or not, but Sheila was smiling. For a moment Mary had channeled Kahn, the Kahn we all liked.

“I remember I’d come out late at night, to go to the bathroom or get a glass of water. The girls were asleep, and Sheila was asleep, but I’d hear John Coltrane or Mingus coming up from the living room, and I knew we were the only ones awake in the house, and that he was down there battling alone, and there was nothing I, or any of us, could do to help. But especially me. I was just making things worse. In the morning we’d see the empty bottles, so we knew, and we knew he was probably doing other stuff too. But he waited until we were asleep, until the girls were asleep. He didn’t want them to see. Eventually I moved into the house. My lease was up and it seemed the obvious thing to do. Seymour was actually the one who suggested it, said I basically lived there anyway. I knew it killed him, but he didn’t say anything, just sang, ‘Mary, Mary, quite contrary,’ and watched as I carried my things up the stairs into his bedroom, then carried his things into the guest room. One day I came home from work—it was spring, early spring, but it already felt like summer. That’s what it’s like in L.A. ‘Always too hot,’ Seymour would say, ‘just like Hades. We live here because we’re masochists.’”

Again, when she did the imitation—speaking from her throat to create the Kahn bark—it seemed, for a second, that Kahn was in the room, calming us, claiming us.

“Actually,” Mary said, “when he moved into our pool house in Boston, he said the same thing—that we’re masochists because we live in the cold. I guess he thought everyone was a masochist deep down. Also sadists, I think, which is the story I’m trying to get to. This one time shortly after I moved in, on this really hot day, I came home from work, really wiped out. I was in the kitchen making myself a cup of tea, and I happened to see through the window Natasha in the backyard, essentially—sorry, Natasha,
you’re going to hate me for telling this story—essentially she was torturing our golden retriever, Randall. She had managed to leash him to a tree—this is a six-year-old girl, mind you—and she was whacking him with a stick. Just beating him with all the force her little body could muster. Randall was going crazy, crying and barking, which is why I looked out the window in the first place. I didn’t know what to do. I mean, this was California. What if the neighbors saw and complained and our PETA membership was revoked? We would be ostracized from our community, forced to attend sensitivity training! Without really thinking I ran out to the yard, picked up Natasha, and carried her inside, all the while trying to come up with something to say to this child who wasn’t mine, but whose mother I was in love with, and whose poor dog I was trying to save. As I was carrying her back across the patio I noticed that Seymour had been out there the whole time, just watching, sipping a beer, and not saying a word. Once I got Natasha inside and banished her to her bedroom to screams of ‘You’re not my mother,’ I went back out to the patio to talk to Seymour. I asked him why he’d sat there silent. ‘What could I have said?’ he said in a pathetic voice, this really soft whisper, different than his usual singsong. This was the first time I’d ever confronted him, and I wondered what he thought about me parenting his daughter, not to mention sleeping with his wife. ‘You could have said stop,’ I said. I thought he might unleash on me, spit the type of venom I’d heard about—‘His tongue is a knife,’ Sheila had warned me—but he just said, ‘I have no authority,’ then looked me up and down for a long time, assessing me, not like he was checking me out, but like he was trying to understand who I was. ‘You’ll make a good father someday,’ he said. At first I was offended by him referring to me as a father, but later
I came to realize it was a compliment. He was essentially saying that I would make a good replacement for him. And I think this story illustrates, well, either that he hated dogs, which I don’t think he did, or something more essential to his character. Namely that he understood his limitations. I know a lot of people think Seymour was a selfish man. But he wasn’t selfish. He gave his daughters to Sheila and me to raise even though it pained him more than anything else in his life—more than losing the use of his legs, more than the loss of his career. He gave them up because he knew we’d take better care of them, that he was a terrible father, that he was very sick and very troubled, and couldn’t raise his children in the way he wanted to, because his own worldview had become so skewed by his health problems and his physical limitations, which had exacerbated his bad habits and fueled his addictions. He understood this, and he accepted it, which takes a brave man. Instead of mourning the loss of his family, he tried to accept us as a new kind of family, one in which he and I could both play a part. He left Sheila and me to raise his daughters, not because he didn’t love them, but because it was the right thing to do.”

After Mary, other people said words, what you’d expect, what a party that guy could throw, what a crazy character. Neither Erin nor Sheila stepped up. Natasha was the last to speak.

“My father was an asshole,” she said. “I loved him.”

Zarkoff led the mourner’s Kaddish. I remembered the first line, mumbled the rest. A handful made it to the burial. Beth was there, off to the side like a mistress in a movie. A machine lowered the casket. When it dipped below the surface, Sheila, who’d been so composed, fell to her knees, pressed her hands into the earth as though she could reach in and pull him back up, like those mothers
who lift cars to save their babies. She made a low sound, somewhere between an “om” and an orgasmic moan. The sound seemed to come from a different part of her body, not even her stomach, but all the way from her calves and bent knees. Mary just let her, didn’t touch her. Said the Kaddish again. This time it sounded like a song, slow pulse set to the rhythm of lightly chattering teeth.