Not Me (18 page)

The next day I decided to drive down to Miami. I threw on my favorite Hawaiian shirt and pair of beachcomber shorts, filled up the tank with Super, and jumped on the highway. I still had much to do in the apartment, but I had a friend there I’d been meaning to see anyway and I was swept along on impulse. We’d met in Vegas when he was opening for a fifties comeback band and I was doing the lounge at the Hilton. Our relationship was simple and clean. I gave him funny jokes when he was dry, which was almost all the time, and in return, he could score just about anything I needed to keep me being funny. I never really went on stoned, but afterwards, it helped me relax. It’s hard to sleep on the road. But we liked each other, and I needed a change of pace, a friendly face, and a little help.

I met him in a Cuban bar called Julio’s. He himself wasn’t Cuban, he was Puerto Rican, but he liked calling Julio’s “his office.” He laughed at this every time he said it. I thought it was a good thing he had gotten out of comedy.

We sat at “his table.”

“You’re not going to carry that out to the car like that, are you, man?” He had not the slightest Latin accent in real life, though on stage he put it on so thick, even Latinos couldn’t understand him.

I unfolded a little green gym bag. Its fiber sparkled under the spotlights that illuminated the table. “I thought this.”

“That’s good,” he said.

“You think it’s too obvious?”

“Don’t worry about it. Have some sangria.”

He poured himself a glass.

“You seem different,” he said. “Normally you’re a nervous wreck.”

“I am?”

“Well, yeah. Only now you’re even worse. It’s like freezing in here with the air on, and you’re sweating like a pig.”

“I am?” I touched my forehead. “It’s just this fucking Florida.”

“Yeah,” he said rather philosophically, “you either love it or it hates you.” He laughed at his own joke. “So, what’s this thing about clues? Is it a bit or something you’re working on?”

“I told you about the clues?”

“What’s the matter with you? Just about two seconds ago. So is it a new bit?”

“Yeah. I think so.”

“Yeah,” he nodded, mulling it over, “I like that. Clues. Like before I broke up with Sylvia, there were clues everywhere, man. I was just a blind motherfucker. But you could make a great bit about that. Like when you notice she is always falling asleep just at the moment you go down on her. That’s a clue.” He thought that was funny, and he smacked the table. “Or when you come home and she’s wearing these huge, like, diamond and ruby earrings, and you say, where did you get those? and she says
Sears
—that’s a clue. Actually,” he added, “any time they say Sears it’s a clue.” He looked up at me. “Feel free to use any of my material.”

“I will,” I said.

In a little while we made our good-byes and I zipped up the gym bag. He walked me to the door, his arm around my shoulder, the stale smell of last night’s beer corrosive in the damp, semidark air of Julio’s Hi Hat. When he pushed open the door, it was like a hydrogen bomb had just gone off on Collins Avenue, it was so bright. I could no longer make out his features, but just his presence comforted me. For one thing, he reminded me that, at least by comparison, I was actually a pretty funny comedian. For another he was maybe the only person in the world right now who would actually come through for me.

“Clues!” he said in parting. “It’s a great idea.”

“It’s not just clues,” I told him, “it’s proof. I want proof.”

“Proof of what?”

I thought about it. “Proof of everything.”

“Funny!” he bellowed. “You are
funny,
man! See you on
Letterman
!”

The drive up from Miami was uneventful. I drove just over the limit. The bag was in the trunk, under the beach chairs that hadn’t been used in ten years. By the time I pulled into the lot of my father’s building, evening was settling in and the sun was casting long, lethargic shadows along the asphalt. As I reached the end of the front walk, the elevator, screaming and complaining the whole time, reached the ground floor and painfully slid open its door. Two old couples emerged, the ladies first, the gentlemen after. They were nicely dressed. The men wore suits—dark ones, not pastel for a change—and the women wore pretty dresses.

“Gut Yontif,”
one of the men said to me.

“What?” I said.

“Happy New Year,” interpreted his wife.

“It’s
Erev Rosh Hashanah,
” the second woman explained. They all smiled at me.

“Oh my gosh,” I said. “I didn’t realize. Already?”

“It’s early this year,” she said. “Perhaps you’d like to come to shul with us? There’s always room for another!”

The first woman took me by the arm. I inhaled her sweet, expensive perfume mixed with the scent of discount hairspray. For some reason, I liked how she smelled. Perhaps it reminded me of my mother. “It must be hard for you,” she said, “to be away from your family this time of year. Look, we could wait. You could change.”

“I’m not religious,” I said. “But thank you.”

I put out my hand to stop the elevator door from closing.

“Have a good holiday,” I said.

“There are services tomorrow, too, you know,” one of the women replied. “Come if you like. We’re Gitlin, 316…” and the door closed, locking me in.

The elevator creaked upward, lurching and bouncing, finally delivering me on the third floor. Down below, they were still making their way through the parking lot. “His name is David,” I heard one of them say. “No, no, I think it’s Joel or Jake…something with a J.”

Then they got in their cars and drove away.

Standing there, leaning over the railing, I watched the cars disappear down the long, palm-lined drive. At this very moment, and three thousand miles sunward, I knew Ella had already begun the arduous task of getting Josh ready for services. She had to do it in stages, giving him plenty of time to refuse to go, argue about what to wear, allow him to walk around in one sock and one shoe, grow panicky because he couldn’t find his favorite tie (he only had one), stop everything to e-mail several friends on important matters, and call his friend Sam to arrange where to meet and how best to sneak out and be back in time for the blast of the shofar. All this would slide off Ella’s back as if it were actually some sort of fragrant oil. She would be amused by him, and he would be edified by her, and in the end Ella would glow with hope for the new year. “Isn’t it nice to have a fresh start?” she would be saying, placing a jar of honey on the table, and an apple, so that when they got home it would be ready for them. For the sweetness of a new year, she’d tell him, the same words every year.

I looked down at my shorts and sneakers. How was it this new year came without me?

I closed my eyes and tried to wish them a sweet, good year, but what was a good year? The year I lost Karen, which also meant losing my father as I knew him and watching my mother turn into an old woman before my eyes? The year Ella walked out of my life and took Josh with her, and I didn’t do anything about it, anything that made any difference? The year my mother died, and I got a phone call just before I was supposed to do a matinee in Cleveland, and had to go on anyway, and had one of my best shows ever? The year the doctor said the word
Alzheimer’s
? “Al’s what?” I asked.

And now
this
?

Exactly which year was it that was a good year?

I set my gym bag inside the door and went back outside. I didn’t want to be in the apartment. Everywhere I looked in that apartment screamed
Jewish
. I strolled around to the town houses, which were on the other side of the golf course. The parking lots were virtually empty. I wondered which of these units was April’s mother’s. The two of them would already be at temple. They would have driven over together, made their way down the aisle, her mother introducing April to all her friends—Yes! The Poet!—How wonderful she could be here! they’d say, Happy New Year! they’d say, feeling perhaps a twinge of remorse that they had once again failed to read her books. Then the chanting would begin, the rabbi would step forward, the prayer books would fall open, and the sound of Hebrew would fill the room with its strange, unsettling powers.

I continued down a little flower-lined path. The town houses were nice, but they were all the same. And except for the few Gentiles who lived there, all were dark. Even the nonpracticing Jews seemed to be hiding. I alone walked down the garden lanes.

Everything was so good before! With Ella. With Josh.

I tried to recall how Ella and I sat beside each other in synagogue, I dozing off, she fervently singing, but in the end turning to each other and offering that blissful New Year’s kiss—
L’shana Tova!
—
For a good year!
But it was hazy, hazy. Then suddenly I remembered something else—as if it were yesterday!—playing with Josh in the living room when he was, what? no more than two—no he wasn’t even speaking yet—I couldn’t be sure. Funny to remember that, I thought. It wasn’t even that it was so much fun to pile up blocks and knock them down, and pile them up again and knock them down again, or watch Josh tear out pages of magazines and crumple them in his little fists, or read to him the same six pages of that alphabet book over and over and over again, but I felt good when I thought about it, so good.

I laughed. Why did I suddenly remember that? Why that? And like a sword thrust, the rest of it came to me.

I had come home and found Ella lying on the kitchen floor—frozen except for the thrashing of her arms and the rapid blinking of her eyes—and the baby, Josh, screaming his head off, his bowl of mashed carrots spread out beside him like splattered orange paint.

She came out of it as soon as I took her in my arms.

“Oh my God!” she cried. “Where’s the baby?”

I was terrified. I ran to dial the ambulance.

“I don’t need an ambulance,” she said. “I just need my pills.”

“Pills?”

She told me where they were. Sobbing, she explained. She had “a mild case” of epilepsy. I was flabbergasted.

“Epilepsy?”

“I’m a horrible mother!” she sobbed.

What was it that made her hide it from me? I now wondered. At the time I thought she must have been ashamed, like a person with a venereal disease. I didn’t want to embarrass her about it. So I just said to her, “But don’t the pills keep you from having seizures?”

She said they made her feel depressed. She had been feeling strangely disconnected. She thought she might feel better if she stopped taking them.

The town houses disappeared behind me as I rounded the swimming pool.

I had remembered it as a moment of supreme happiness, one of those rare and special interludes with Josh. But actually I had just led Ella, weeping and inconsolable, back to the bedroom, laid her down and watched as she turned her back to me, much as Mr. Antonelli had done. Then I ran back to calm Josh, who was still howling in terror.

Karen was right. There were clues everywhere I looked.

For the first time the heat broke, if only just a little. There was the hint of a breeze coming in from the east, and I accepted it with gratitude. Darkness also began to cover the sky, and I was grateful, too, for the balm of invisibility it gave me.

The prayer book says that on Rosh Hashanah the Book of Life and Death is opened. On Yom Kippur it is closed, and our fates are sealed. Between the one and the other we have ten days to repent, change our ways, make restitution. Then they blow the shofar—and, well—either you made it or you didn’t.

So today my father’s book was opened, and my book was opened, and so was Josh’s and Ella’s and April’s. I did wonder about those few Italians I noticed down on the eighth tee getting in one last round before the sun dropped its ball into the Gulf. Maybe they were in a different book.

When I got home, I dialed Ella to wish her and Josh a Happy New Year. I knew they wouldn’t be in. They’d already be over at her mom and dad’s. They’d all be going to temple together. I left a message. I told them I loved them. For Josh’s sake I lied and said I had to run off to services. I’m going with the neighbors, I said, the Gitlins in 316.