One Last Thing Before I Go (4 page)

CHAPTER 8

“W
hen was th
e last time you emptied this fridge?” his mother, Elaine, says, holding a plastic covered tin of what looks like congealed brain at arm’s length.

“I don’t know, last week maybe?”

“I don’t think so,” she says, tossing the container into the garbage. Once the fridge is cleaned to her satisfaction, she will fill it with fruits and vegetables that will slowly go bad until her next visit.

“Please, Mom, you don’t have to do that.”

“I don’t mind.”

Elaine disappears into the fridge, leaving his father and him to make small talk.

“You getting enough gigs?” his father says.

“Yeah.”

“That’s good.”

“How are things at the temple?”

“The God business is pretty much recession-proof.”

“If it wasn’t, that would raise some pretty interesting theological questions.”

“Would it?”

Someday his father will be gone, and Silver will still be able to have these conversations, word for word, from memory.

* * *

His father, Ruben Silver, is the rabbi of Temple B’nai Israel. When Silver was a boy, he and his younger brother, Chuck, would sit up on the stage with their father during the Sabbath services, facing the congregation. Silver would pretend that his father was their king, and he and Chuck their esteemed princes. Ruben would sing along with the cantor—he had a gruff but melodic voice—and he would put his arm around his boys, pointing to random Hebrew words in the
siddur
, which they would dutifully read aloud to him. At some point, as his encroaching maturity bred a certain self-consciousness, Silver stopped sitting up there with them, he can’t remember exactly when. It wasn’t something they ever talked about. It was just one of those things you quietly outgrow and only realize it after the fact.

* * *

His father whistles “Penny Lane.”

“Whistling,” Elaine says unconsciously. He stops. They’ve been married for forty-seven years.

Ruben knows many other songs, but if he’s whistling, it’s “Penny Lane.” For all Silver knows, he’s been doing it ever since
Magical Mystery Tour
came out. The first time Ruben heard the song, the opening bars wrapped themselves around his cerebral cortex and that was that.

* * *

They come by every other Sunday, Elaine and Ruben, because he is their son and they love him, and because they think he’s lonely. These visits kill him, because he loves them too, and because he knows his sad little life hurts them, maybe even more profoundly than it sometimes hurts him, which means these visits probably kill them too. So every other weekend they spend an hour or so together that leaves them all depressed and depleted, but they never miss it, and if that’s not the best definition of family, then he doesn’t know what is.

“So,” his father says, somewhat awkwardly, while Elaine is out in the hall on her third or fourth trip to the incinerator. Silver generally refrigerates his Chinese leftovers and subsequently forgets about them until they’ve congealed into something beyond the help of his microwave. “Any women worth writing home about?”

“Have you gotten any letters from me?” Silver says.

His father shrugs, ignoring his sarcasm. “You should come to temple.”

“Dad.”

Ruben raises his hands defensively. “I’m not selling. I’m just saying, plenty of single women.”

“Are you really pitching temple as a dating service?”

“Best one there is. Do you really think all those people are coming to pray? I pray. The cantor prays. They mingle. Welcome to organized religion.”

“And what about God?”

“God doesn’t want you to be alone any more than I do.”

“I’m trying, Dad.”

Ruben nods. “If that’s true, I’d hate to see what happens when you stop.”

Silver is about to retort, something unnecessarily biting, and so he is relieved when his mother reenters, cutting off the conversation. She looks at them inquisitively, Silver sprawled on the couch, his father perched on the edge of the kitchen table, and can tell she’s interrupted something. “What are you boys talking about?”

“Women,” Ruben says.

Elaine nods meaningfully. “Any worth writing home about?”

* * *

When his parents leave here, they’ll swing by Chuck’s house for a barbecue. There, amid the aroma of homemade marinade, the shouting of boys and pissing of babies and dogs, life will reassert itself around them, and they will be whole again.

When they leave here, Silver will go down to the Blitz and drink himself numb, then fall asleep in front of the comforting flicker of his television. Hopefully, he’ll remember to take off his shoes. There’s nothing more depressing than waking up in your shoes.

C
HAPTER 9

T
he Lockwoods had been Casey and Denise’s neighbors for about ten years. Denise and Valerie played tennis together twice a week, and once Rich arrived on the scene, he and Steve Lockwood would sometimes sit out in the backyard in the evenings and have a scotch together. Casey, who had lettered in swim, was given carte blanche to swim her laps in the Lockwoods’ pool whenever she wanted, which was what she’d been doing on the night in question. She was feeling anxious about Princeton, and she’d always found something soothing about night swimming.

Around fifteen laps in, she realized she was no longer alone. She looked up to see Jeremy Lockwood sitting on one of the lounge chairs, drinking from a silver flask as he watched her swim.

“Hey,” he said when she stopped, waving to her with the flask. “Don’t stop on my account.”

He was two years older, had just gotten back from Emory to work at his dad’s firm for the summer.

“I heard you were back,” she said, climbing out of the pool. With anyone else, she might have been self-conscious in her bikini, but she’d known Jeremy long enough to have dared each other to show their privates in his basement back in second grade, and so the rules were different.

Casey grabbed a towel and sat down at the foot of his chair. He leaned over to kiss her cheek, a method of greeting he’d picked up in college that still felt a little strange to her. “Look at you,” he said appreciatively.

“What?”

“You got hot.”

“Shut up.”

“I heard you got into Princeton.”

“I heard you changed your major.”

“I heard you were valedictorian.”

“I heard you broke up with Hailey.”

“Hadley.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter now, does it?”

Jeremy smiled and took a sip from the flask. “With moms like ours, who needs Facebook?”

“I know, right?”

He offered her the flask, and she took a sip. He had filled it with some of his father’s scotch. The good stuff, Steve called it, even though to Casey it tasted like acid, burning her throat but warming her belly. When she handed it back, Jeremy took another long swallow.

“She broke up with me, actually.”

She looked at his face, trying to determine if he was starting a conversation or just stating a fact. In all the years their families had been friendly, she and Jeremy had never had a serious talk. They were more like cousins than friends.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

He shrugged. “It was just sex, anyway. And not even that good, really.”

Something in the offhanded way he talked about sex thrilled her. In the booze, the sex talk, the kiss on the cheek, she sensed the ways in which her world would be expanding in a few months. When he passed her the flask, she drank two swallows.

“Easy there, tiger,” he said, grinning.

It was, quite suddenly, and for no real reason, a sexy grin.

Jeremy had always been good-looking in a bland, generic way—tall, lean, with thick dark hair that he wore short and unbrushed. Handsome, Casey thought, rather than hot. But now there was an edge to him, something a little darker and jaded, and it occurred to her that if they were strangers, she’d be checking him out. And the steam was rising off the water and swirling in the glow of the pool lights, and the moon was full and low, and Jeremy was giving her this look, maybe, over his whiskey flask, and the whiskey was making her feel flushed and tingly, and suddenly, everything felt electric.

Jeremy told her about his breakup, and Casey told him about hers, and then he showed her Hadley’s Facebook page on his iPhone. She wasn’t exactly pretty, Hadley, but you could see why guys would think she was hot. Hadley had updated her status to read “blissfully single,” and had posted photos of herself partying with all these greasy
Jersey Shore
–looking guys. Jeremy thought the “blissfully” was uncalled for, so they went to Jeremy’s page and changed his status to read “Free at last.” It was Casey’s idea to add a picture of him and her canoodling. Hadley and Jeremy were still Facebook friends, and she’d have no idea that Casey was just his neighbor. So they started clowning around, doing a whole photo shoot with his phone, and somewhere in there Jeremy took off his shirt, and his skin was hot against hers, like the scotch in her stomach, and a few minutes later they were making out like there was no tomorrow. And somewhere in there, when they were coming up for air, gasping and grinding against each other, he mentioned that his parents were away for the weekend.

And the moon, the hot summer air, this boy she’d known for her entire life, it all just felt right to her. And so, when the moment of decision arrived and he pulled back a little to say
Are you sure
, she reached down decisively, sliding her hand between the slick wetness of their crotches, grabbed hold of him, and guided him into her.

Afterward they skinny-dipped and horsed around in the pool, the moonlight bathing them in a silvery hue, and she thought to herself that she couldn’t have planned a better way to lose her virginity if she’d tried.

CH
APTER 10

S
ad Todd is in the lobby, trying to get his twin boys to simmer down. They are five-year-old terrors with flaming red hair and plastic lightsabers, which they are swinging wildly as they jump on and off one of the leather lobby couches. They have spent the weekend mainlining all the sugared crap that is forbidden in their mother’s house, the cereals and ice cream and soda and candy that Sad Todd stocks his shelves with so that they’ll love him back. And so now they run circles around their hapless dad, performing dropkicks off the couch, clambering up and down the two stairs that bisect the lobby into two levels, caroming off passersby, and knocking over the potted ficus trees that grudgingly stand in every unfurnished corner. They bounce frenetically around the room like a couple of Jedi houseflies, standing still only long enough for everyone to see their unbrushed hair, mismatched shirts, and the white stains on their faces that Todd will try to pass off to his ex-wife as milk, but which are obviously the remnants of the boxful of powdered doughnuts they had for dinner.

They call him Sad Todd because he has been living in the Versailles for more than two years and no one has ever seen him smile. He has still not bought a stick of furniture or hung a picture in his apartment, has not been on a date or made a friend. He suffers from what Jack refers to as Little Orphan Annie syndrome. He still believes his family is going to come for him one day, so there’s no point in getting comfortable.

It’s Sunday evening, and Sad Todd looks like something so much more than exhausted. He is unshaven, unkempt, and borderline suicidal. He has brought the twins down to the lobby well in advance of their mandated pickup time, probably because they’ve already laid waste to his apartment and he didn’t know what else to do.

“This could be the day that Sad Todd finally snaps,” Jack says, his voice conveying that unique mixture of sympathy and contempt they all feel for one another here.

“Someone should buy that man a coke habit,” Oliver says, nodding sadly.

It’s Sunday evening, and they are on their way out to have dinner and too many drinks at the Blitz, a rundown sports bar on Route 9 famous for its overstuffed burgers and its absurdly attractive waitresses. Sunday nights are particularly depressing; you either didn’t have your kids for the weekend and you feel lost and alone, or you had your kids and now they’re gone and you feel exhausted and inadequate. Either way, drinks and ogling are called for and, this being America, both are within walking distance. Jack, as usual, is overdressed, in a black blazer and dress shirt, taking his cues from whatever he last saw George Clooney wearing. Oliver is wearing inadvisable cargo pants and a baseball cap. Silver would like to think he falls somewhere in between, in jeans and a dark knit polo shirt, but next to Jack, he just fades into the background like a passing extra.

Out in the driveway, Jack and Oliver sit down at the edge of the fountain to smoke cigars, which is more complicated than it sounds. First, Oliver takes two tin tubes out off his shirt pocket and cracks the seals. Then Jack pulls out a little guillotine and studies the cigars, under Oliver’s watchful eye, making sure to circumcise them properly. All the while, Oliver prattles on about where he got these particular cigars, about their relative superiority to certain other cigar brands, about their overall relevance in the cigar world, if you will. This never fails to prompt Jack to tell one of his Best-Cigars-I-Ever-Smoked stories, complete with names, dates, and locations that mean nothing to anyone else, while Oliver lights up with the blue jet from his monogrammed butane lighter and Silver tears his hair out, going quietly insane with boredom.

Cigars are all the rage these days, on both sides of the marital divide. The married men smoke them to somehow feel less fenced in by their lives, the divorced men smoke them to stave off the encroaching desolation on sad Sunday evenings, and neither group can shut up about it. Because of a tossed salad of latent Freudian inadequacy issues, middle-aged men will perform fellatio on a clump of cured leaves and somehow feel more like men because of it, which, if nothing else, is a colossal triumph of marketing. And you would think that, phallic or not, a habit that involves plugging your mouth would be a quieter affair, but you would be wrong.

Great works are written and empires crumble in the time it takes for these two to finish with the cigar bullshit, so they are all still there in the driveway to witness the arrival of Sad Todd’s ex-wife, who pulls up in a silver minivan. She is a drab sliver of a woman, with paper-thin lips and the harried expression of someone who has long since resigned herself to being the only competent person on the planet. She inspects the twins while haranguing Todd at the same time.

Look at them! They’re a wreck! How can you let them out of your apartment like this? Is that powder on their faces? You gave them doughnuts? Did it occur to you to bathe them, even once in three days? Jesus Christ, Todd, I could leave them at a kennel and they’d be better cared for!

Sad Todd does not respond. He stands there with his head bowed, absorbing the abuse like a tree in a storm. When she finishes chewing him out, she shakes her head for a moment, then leans in and straightens his folded collar, and, to Silver’s great surprise, gives him a quick peck on the cheek before getting back into her minivan and driving off. Love, Silver thinks. The twins wave to their father from the back window of the van, and Sad Todd stands in the middle of the driveway, waving back absently until they turn a corner, his face twisted with a grief so raw that Silver has to look away.

* * *

He loved a girl named Megan Donahue. She had a tiny waist, feline eyes, and was a passionate vegetarian. They wrote each other long love letters, citing proofs from the lyrics of lesser-known rock bands, which they would slip into each other’s lockers. When she wore white turtleneck sweaters, the fuzzy kind, she looked like Christmas morning. They were seventeen, juniors in high school, both virgins, and she was the first person he said “I love you” to. Actually, what he said was, “I love you, too,” but that’s just semantics. They were doomed by the endocrine system. His hormones, which were doing all of the heavy lifting back then, would not be denied. She wanted to stay a virgin every bit as much as he didn’t. Or maybe he just wanted to enjoy a burger now and then without being made to feel like a murderer.