A Changed Man (30 page)
Authors: Francine Prose
A
FEW DAYS LATER,
Bonnie dials Joel’s number, hangs up,
then picks up the phone again as she calculates the odds that Joel will answer. She’s got a one-in-three chance. There’s always the possibility that he and Lorraine won’t be home, in which case she’ll have to listen to the first bars of “Kind of Blue,” which Bonnie always loved until Lorraine turned it into her chic answering-machine message, with Miles Davis as Lorraine’s sideman, playing backup for the perfect assurance with which Lorraine croons, “Joel and I aren’t home right now.”
The other possibility is that Lorraine will pick up. The one useful thing Bonnie learned in couples counseling was to stop hanging up when that happened, and to speak civilly to the woman who stole her husband. That, too, was about the children, as Joel and Dr. Steinweiss so often pointed out. Bonnie couldn’t help feeling that Joel and the psychologist he’d hired were allied against her, except for a few times, when the therapist said something so jargon-laden and predictable—
I’m hearing a little hostility here
—that Bonnie and Joel looked at each other and rolled their eyes and laughed. Those were the cruelest moments. That sudden feeling of closeness, of sharing a secret from this stranger, almost tricked them into wondering why they didn’t give up this charade and get back together where they belonged.
“Hi, Bonnie, how are you?” Joel says.
“Fine. And you?”
“Fine. Okay. I guess.”
That “I guess” is an invitation that Bonnie declines. She’s practicing her own private anger management program. Breathe, count to ten. If she starts off by blaming Joel and Lorraine for having made Max unhappy, she will destroy any chance—however slim—that Joel might help her find out what’s troubling her son.
Their
son.
“Actually,” she says, “I’m worried about Max. He hasn’t seemed…himself since he got back from staying with you and Lorraine. What happened? What set him off? What…”
What did you and Lorraine do to him?
Joel sighs deeply, and in that sigh Bonnie hears the reasons why she knew, before she called, that she probably shouldn’t bother. Joel is not an intuitive or reflective person. He will not be able to tell her anything about her child that she couldn’t have figured out on her own. She remembers how glad she used to feel that she wasn’t one of Joel’s patients. Suppose she’d asked him if she would survive, and he’d sighed like that?
“How much did the boys tell you?” Joel’s testing the waters.
“Oh, my God,” says Bonnie. “I forgot to congratulate you about all your good news. That’s wonderful about you and Lorraine getting married. And that lucky Romanian baby!”
“Bulgarian,” says Joel. “And that’s very generous of you to say so.”
Bonnie feels like they’re back in the therapist’s office, being instructed to compliment the other person whenever someone seemed to be making a particular effort.
Joel, why don’t you tell Bonnie what you liked about what she just said?
It hurt Bonnie that Joel took to therapy-speak like a duck to water. Who
was
this person she’d been married to, the father of her children? But she never blamed Joel, really. He was suffering, too. She understood that, though technically it was his fault for choosing Lorraine over her.
Another sigh. Then Joel says, “To tell you the truth, it’s a little much. Everything’s happening so fast. So much of it seems, frankly, out of my control…”
Is he saying that Lorraine has hijacked him? Bonnie could have told him that would happen. But it’s more than that, she knows. Joel lives in a high-functioning trance from which he awakes every so often, shocked to see where life has brought him. Once she and Joel loved each other. Bonnie needs to keep that in mind.
Joel says, “You want to hear something ironic? Sometimes, these days, I feel like you.”
“Meaning what?”
“I don’t know. I’m worried all the time.”
“Thanks a lot,” says Bonnie. Joel once claimed he was leaving her to get out from under her anxieties. But how can she be annoyed now? There’s grief in Joel’s voice. He’ll never be happy. He has no gift for happiness of even the simplest sort. According to the boys, he’s driving a Lincoln Navigator. And that still doesn’t do it. He can’t help it, that’s who he is. Bonnie resolves to remember that and to be more sympathetic.
“It’s not just that,” says Joel. “Not just the high anxiety. Listen. When Lorraine first brought it up, about adopting the baby, believe it or not, I found myself wondering, What would Bonnie do? I knew you would have said yes. Which is partly why I
did
say yes.
I
would have said no. Because I know the problems involved. Health issues, heredity, poverty. God only knows what you’re getting. It was all so much easier when we had our own kids!”
Bonnie doesn’t remember anything about it being easy. In fact it still isn’t easy. Which is why she’s calling. Bonnie is working hard to see this from Joel’s point of view. That’s what Meyer would suggest. What would Meyer see in Joel? A guy living with a woman he doesn’t love in a highrise apartment. A guy about to adopt a child whose mother will be Lorraine.
“Come on, it’s always a crapshoot,” she says. “What kind of kid you’ll get. Even when it’s your own child, all kinds of stuff can happen.” Which is not exactly what Joel means. But any consolation will help. Comfort, even empty comfort, isn’t Lorraine’s style.
“I guess you’re right,” says Joel. In the past, Bonnie could always cheer him up with the most banal reassurance. Is she supposed to despise him for that? It made her feel protective.
“So what
did
happen with Max?” she says.
“I think all the changes were too much for him, too. But I think he’ll be fine.”
No matter how little Joel actually knows, it’s a relief to hear that. And it’s an achievement for Joel not to hint that something will go seriously wrong with the kids, and that it will be Bonnie’s fault.
“How was the benefit?” Joel asks. Bonnie’s surprised he knows about it, until she remembers: That’s why the kids stayed at his house.
“A huge success, I think,” is all she can say. If she mentions Vincent and his speech, it will lead to so much that she would rather not reveal.
Bonnie has been banking—correctly, it seems—on the likelihood that Lorraine would never lower herself to read
People
magazine. Because there is an article in the most recent issue that makes it clear that Vincent is living with Bonnie and the kids. It even has a corny shot of them making pasta in the kitchen. They never cook together, but the photographer insisted. Joel will never see it unless Lorraine brings it home. The magazines in his waiting room all have titles like
Healthy Heart.
Bonnie’s omitting an important detail, but she’s telling the truth. The benefit dinner
was
a success. A mood of excitement and optimism suffuses the whole office. Bonnie wishes she could be like Meyer and her coworkers, full of faith in the future. She wants everything to go smoothly but cannot shake off the suspicion that something will go wrong. Suddenly, Bonnie feels tired. The energy draining from her leaves a void that fills with unwelcome images of herself standing in front of Vincent and taking off her glasses.
Joel says, “It’s so great you’re doing what you’re doing. With the foundation and whatever. I’m really proud. What an…admirable job.”
“Thanks,” says Bonnie. “Talk to you soon. Give Lorraine my congratulations.”
R
AYMOND’S AFRAID TO CLOSE HIS
eyes because when he
does, he can look back through his eyeballs and see the viscous puddle of blood forming in the creases of his brain, the massive stroke he’s about to have from the G-force of his rage, the boiling steam valve he could release by blowing up at Lucy. But that would mean admitting that a grown man, married, the father of two, is so tapped out that his head is imploding because his old lady spent three bucks on
People
magazine.
He’s better off not mentioning it. Lucy works as hard as he does, maybe harder. It’s not like she’s screwing other guys. Or running up credit card debt. Or blowing their money—
what
money?—on the slots in Atlantic City. She just wants to read a magazine in which fat-cat Jews write about other fat-cat Jews and sell it to hardworking white Christian women who don’t know any better.
Raymond would never have seen the magazine, he would never have had the time, if he hadn’t called in sick to the tire place. It’s not a lie, exactly, but it depends how you mean
sick.
He’s got a wicked hangover. Last night, he and his buddies tied one on for poor Tim McVeigh, who couldn’t have one frigging beer, not even with his last meal. Which the poor bastard hardly got to enjoy, what with those animal-rights PETA freaks mounting a vicious publicity campaign to make sure that his last meal would be vegetarian. According to them, he’d shed enough blood already. Even the government had to admit that was cruel and unusual punishment. By those rules—kill someone, and you’re looking at tofu—not one of those Washington bastards would ever see another steak. And what did McVeigh eat? Two pints of mint chocolate chip ice cream. What a giant fuck-you that was, the all-dessert last meal. The thought is almost too pitiful for Raymond to endure.
Just to give the guy some respect, Raymond and his friends had started off their private memorial service by reciting that poem McVeigh liked. “I am the master of my fate…” And things got rolling from there.
Now Raymond’s reward is that he’s missing a day of work and giving up the overtime that he and Lucy so desperately need, which they wouldn’t need so desperately if his bloodsucking cousin hadn’t stolen his truck and his money and his prescription medication. And the latest issue of
Soldier of Fortune,
which Raymond hadn’t read, and which Vincent never liked anyway. So that was just pure meanness, which hurt. And this was after Raymond and Lucy took the sick puppy into their home and cared for him like a son.
Raymond wouldn’t be worried about the cost of a lousy copy of
People
magazine if he’d given the go-ahead to Eitan and Avi, the Israelis he bought the Ex from. If he’d let them, they would have found Vincent by now, and gotten their money back. At first, Raymond had felt uneasy about doing business with Jews. But Eitan and Avi didn’t seem like Jews. They were hard-asses. They’d been in the military. They’d wanted to go after Vincent. Teach the guy a lesson. So did Raymond’s brothers in ARM. It’s their money, too. But Raymond said no thank you. He’ll handle it himself.
Vincent is family. How would it look if Raymond went to the mat for the white race and green-lighted a pair of Israelis to whack his own first cousin? It’s lucky for Vincent that the two Jews care more about money than about justice or retribution. They were reasonable about the terms on which Raymond agreed to pay them back, payments added to the monthly nut for the replacement truck.
Raymond
will
find Vincent, when he gets the time, which right now is in short supply, what with working double shifts to repay the money and make payments on a truck that runs worse than the one Vincent stole. Raymond doesn’t know what he’ll do when he sees Vincent again. Maybe he
will
wind up killing him. He’ll just have to go with his gut.
Raymond can thank his mother for this. Watching out for Vincent was one of the laundry list of promises that Raymond’s mom extracted from him on her deathbed. Who would have thought that a dying woman would remember the nephew whom everyone in the family spoiled because his tree-hugging hippie mother had been stupid enough to marry a loser who’d let the Infernal Revenue Service jack him around until he blew his brains out?
Right now, while Raymond is stressing over the cost of a magazine, Vincent is probably in Florida. That was something he used to say:
Maybe I should go down to Disney World and put on a Goofy suit and let toddlers fuck with my head.
Talk about hiding in plain sight. What a brilliant cover. Raymond can’t see himself hightailing it down to Orlando and roughing up every pervert in a dog nose and floppy ears. Raymond always knew that Vincent was one flaky son of a bitch. But somehow he never would have predicted that the guy would clean him out and split without having the simple decency to say thank you or even good-bye.
Last night’s gathering began with solemn toasts to McVeigh and to the Murragh Building victims, innocent casualties of the war that the federal government—working in collusion with the United Nations, NATO, the Council on Foreign Relations, Mossad—is waging against its own God-fearing white citizens. At some point it was decided that each of the guys would drink one shot of vodka for each martyr killed at Waco. The last thing Raymond remembers is going out to the backyard. One of the guys wrote the names of Janet Reno, Bill Clinton, Michael Eisner, and Steven Spielberg on Post-its they stuck on beer cans and shot at with Raymond’s deer-hunting rifle until a neighbor phoned the cops. By then they were too shitfaced to see. It’s a miracle no one got shot.
Raymond holds the magazine at arm’s length. You never know who handled these things, how many people picked their nose and…Which is why, if you’ve got the bucks, a subscription is preferable to buying these rags on the newsstand. He shudders and drops the magazine and has to fight off a lurch of nausea before he can open it again.
Okay, let’s see how many Jews have pushed their way to the top and hogged a hundred and fifty percent of national press attention. Here’s Billy Joel and Jerry Seinfeld partying in the Hamptons. And there’s Jennifer Aniston. Does she think that nose job fools anyone? And Al Gore. Raymond has it on good authority that Gore is part negroid, like Bill Clinton and Rosalind Carter. All these mud-race slimeballs sucking down the caviar and champagne while white guys like Raymond are blowing a blood vessel because their old ladies spent good money to read what some Zionist press agent wants them to believe.
The hangover isn’t helping. Another swell of nausea almost makes Raymond quit, but he gives the magazine one more look, and this time…Hey, what’s this?
What is this?
What the
fuck
is this?
Raymond’s so shocked to see someone he knows staring up at him from the page that it takes him a few seconds to figure out who it is. Even then it’s a strange sensation. Probably because he’s been thinking about Vincent, it’s almost as if he hallucinated him, imagined him into the magazine. It must be a bad dream. Because here’s Vincent standing on some kind of stage with his arm around a little old Jew under the headline: “A Changed Man. Former Skinhead Finds Brotherhood with Holocaust Survivor.”
“In Trouble” says the line above that.
In trouble
is putting it mildly. Where does Vincent get the nerve to show his face? Does he think that Raymond will see his photo and think, Oh, how
nice
for Cousin Vince! How
lovely
that someone in the family has finally hit the big time!
Vincent must have thought that Raymond was making it up about the mud people and the Jews helping themselves to what belongs to the white man. He must have thought that everything Raymond holds sacred, everything ARM stands for, is some scam that every sleazy race traitor can exploit for fame and fortune when he sells out his white brothers and goes over to the side with more cash and clout. And not just his white brothers. How about the cousin who took him in, who picked him up and dusted him off and gave him something to believe in?
Raymond reads a sentence or two of the article, then has to stop and fight the urge to puke. And that’s how it goes from there: Read, stop, almost puke, read, stop, almost puke.
Somehow in the middle of this, Raymond gets the picture:
Vincent sought those fuckers
out.
He went there straight from Raymond’s, after making off with his drugs. Which must come in handy. You’d need a shitload of Xanax and Vicodin to stand there with that old Jew’s arm around you and smile for the camera. You’d have to be pretty tranked to hang out with that shyster cult leader, to watch him convincing people that he wants to save the world and meanwhile raking in the chips, minus a cut for Israel.
Vincent’s become a part of that. He’s pitching in, doing his best to keep the circle jerk going. Meanwhile Moron is so screwed up he eats nuts at the fancy dinner and has to be rushed to the emergency room. Raymond remembers the family picnics turned to shit, the mad dashes to the hospital because Allergy Boy got into the Pee Bee and Jay and was turning blue while the adults fought over who was sober enough to drive.
Dumbo had an allergy attack. That’s their idea of
in trouble?
Raymond should show them what
in trouble
really means. He turns the page and there, sure enough, is the standard
People
shot of the losers in the kitchen. Laughing and whooping it up. That’s how “In Trouble” always ends, with that kitchen scene, everybody feeling better now, or at least in remission. Usually it’s some bald chick cooking for her friends.
But now it’s Vincent yukking it up at the stove with the middle-aged soccer mom grinning so tightly you can practically hear her face rip. Obviously, Vincent’s fucking her. Women always liked Vincent, who always managed to seem so
surprised
that they did. The phony bastard’s probably telling that same story about that Polish broad who ditched him at the senior prom. What is Vincent pretending to cook? Raymond would like to know. He lived with Raymond and Lucy for years and never lifted a finger.
This is why Raymond wasn’t in more of a hurry to track Vincent down. He knew something like this would happen. Obviously, not
this.
He never expected an article in a national magazine. But he knew that help would come his way, some piece of information. Vincent would reveal himself, not because of who Vincent is, but because some force in the universe believes in justice and retribution and facing up to the evil you’ve done.
Sometimes Raymond sees ARM that way, as an agent of payback, a crusade against the powers that could make a guy like Vincent’s father kill himself, that would murder Randy Weaver’s wife and those babies at Waco, that would throw hardworking white citizens out of their jobs and fill them with mud people just so rich Jews can prosper and thrive.
It’s as if Vincent is reaching out through the media and punching Raymond in the nose. Is Raymond supposed to roll over and let his cousin abuse his family’s hospitality? Vincent must have felt guilty to have made himself so easy to find. He might as well have phoned Raymond and given him his address. Brotherhood Watch must have a Web site. It’s probably listed in the phone book.
But is that the way to go? Raymond doesn’t want to tip Vincent off. As if Raymond knew what he’d be tipping him off
about.
Is Raymond planning to kill him? Somehow he thinks not. Something is called for, that’s for sure. He wishes he knew what it was.
Has Lucy read the magazine? Did she see the article while she was standing in line at the supermarket? Is that why she bought it? If the answer to any of these questions is yes, it’s doubly important for Raymond to act. If Lucy knows, everyone knows. Everyone is watching.