A Changed Man (9 page)

Sol doesn’t get it. The joke is ruined, and worse yet, the knock has woken Minna. Traces of the recognizable Minna animate the waxy mannequin of the old woman in bed.

“Sol,” she says, delightedly. “Meyer. How lovely to see you.”

Meyer raises her papery hand to his lips, inhaling its faint scent of disinfectant. Soon he’ll be out of here, heading back to his apartment. He’ll go home, pour himself a stiff Scotch, and Irene—or Babu, their cook—will bring him a delicious dinner, which he’ll enjoy as he tries not to think of Minna peeling the plastic wrap off her hospital tray.

Sol and Minna’s faces swim up through Meyer’s reverie. What are they waiting for?

Meyer says, “Sorry. Where were we? Minna, you’re looking splendid.”

Babu opens the door. How happy Meyer is to be home! Meyer shakes Babu’s hand as he does every night, until Babu removes his limp palm and clasps both hands and bows. Babu is an Untouchable activist who was getting death threats in Hyderabad and needed a place to lay low until the crisis blew over. He liked it at Meyer’s and stayed. Isn’t that more or less what happened today with Vincent Nolan? Except that Meyer doubts that Vincent can cook, which means that Meyer got a better deal than Bonnie.

“Mrs. Maslow is starting dinner,” says Babu.

It’s not what Meyer imagined—first the leisurely drink in his study, then the meal. But he’s a big boy. He can adjust. Irene puts up with a lot.

The candles are lit. The table is set for two. Irene’s back is toward the door, and she doesn’t turn, not even when Meyer kisses the top of her head.

“Sorry I’m late,” says Meyer. “Minna’s in the hospital. I stopped by on my way home.”

Irene clutches Meyer’s forearm. “What is it? What’s wrong? Why didn’t someone call me?” In the early days of their marriage, when it turned out that Meyer wasn’t yet ready to give up the freedom he’d won at such cost, Irene used to confide her sorrows and jealousies in Minna. Everyone, including Meyer himself, had thought he would never get married. That was twenty years ago. Irene was almost forty, married to a multimillionaire businessman. She’d left Vienna just before Hitler, a different Europe from Meyer’s.

“An aneurysm,” says Meyer. “They fixed it. She’ll be good as new. I meant to call you. I—”

“Thank God.” Irene pauses, then looks down at her plate. “Thai soup with lemon grass. I wish you’d called. I would have waited five minutes.”

There’s no reproach in Irene’s voice. She means what she says. She would have waited five minutes. With another woman, the ease with which she’s segued from Minna’s illness to the subject of dinner might indicate a shallow character. But that’s not true of Irene, who cares deeply about Minna and whose insistence on a good meal in the face of—as a charm against—illness and pain is part of the reason Meyer married her, and why they have stayed together. Meyer takes his seat at the far end of the table and looks across at Irene. He still thinks she’s beautiful, even if she doesn’t. If there’s one thing he would change about her, it would be her inability to accept her aging, the way Meyer tries to accept his. He knows it’s easier for men. Or so Irene tells him.

Babu appears with another bowl of soup. Meyer thanks him, and Irene says, “Babu, you’re a genius.”

Babu bows. “It is my duty.” For all Babu’s formal subservience, his role in the household is more powerful than he lets on. He’s Irene’s second in command. Together, they keep the complicated domestic machinery oiled and running. Meyer sometimes feels like the indulged child of two loving but distant parents.

The soup is a tangle of cellophane noodles with basil and coconut milk. Irene knows that coconut’s bad for Meyer’s cholesterol. And she’s told Babu. Meyer realizes that Irene and the cook aren’t conspiring to kill him, but rather to give him pleasure. Meyer is glad that Irene isn’t one of those women who make you constantly aware of your diet, your health, your mortality. She’s careful, but she takes breaks in which they are free to enjoy themselves—and live.

Not until Babu clears the plates does Irene ask about Meyer’s day. A weaker man might tell his wife about the Dickens letter and the unsold benefit tickets, wanting reassurance, needing her to say: You’re not a telescopic philanthropist, dear! And the tickets will sell. But Meyer keeps it to himself, taking satisfaction in the fact that, after all these years, he and Irene still make an effort to preserve their own, and each other’s, dignity. Perhaps it’s because they’re European. They haven’t bought into a culture in which it’s considered normal to confess your secrets on a TV talk show.

Meyer says, “Irene, do you remember when those Iranians came for dinner?”

“Of course.” The sit-down dinner for twelve she arranged. She probably still knows the menu.

“Do you remember this one quiet guy, he didn’t say a word, a short guy with thick black glasses?”

Irene won’t remember. Because now Meyer recalls that she spent the dinner chatting with the most handsome Iranian, the leader of the group and, as far as Meyer could tell, the biggest stooge and spy. Why should Irene care what he did in his own country? He made her feel young. Should Meyer have been jealous? They give each other latitude. Which also seems European.

“What about him?” Irene says.

“He’s in jail,” says Meyer. “In Tehran.”

“That’s terrible,” says Irene. “Is there anything you can do?”

Something’s slightly off. Perhaps on the way to the disturbing thought of the jailed Iranian, Irene’s been sidetracked by the more pleasant thought of his handsome friend, so that her sympathy feels like an afterthought. Irene believes in the foundation’s work, but Meyer knows that the people they’ve helped blend in her mind into one battered prisoner crouched on a cold cement floor.

“Something else,” Meyer says. “Today, at the foundation. A neo-Nazi came into the office.”

“Oh my God,” says Irene. “Is everyone all right?”

“Nothing happened, darling. Relax. He wants to work with us. He claims to have had some kind of vision. So he’s come to Brotherhood Watch to—”

“Oh,” says Irene. “You mean like that skinhead in California? I saw him on that
Chandler
show. Now he’s become a big shot with the Wiesenthal Foundation.”

Meyer remembers Vincent saying something about a TV show. Meyer chose to ignore it. Again he feels vaguely like he felt when the flashbulbs popped for Wiesel. That something like this has happened before diminishes his own satisfaction, his sense of being special. Good God, how small is
that?
The ideal would be for
every
skinhead to work for tolerance and brotherhood. To convert the entire white supremacist world.

“Who knows what the truth is? Or if the guy knows his own mind. He wants us to believe that he’s already changed. That all of that is behind him. But I think he’s on the edge. He could go either way. That’s what interests me. So I thought we’d sign him on as…something like an intern. Bonnie Kalen offered to let him stay at her house—”

“Meyer,” says Irene. “Excuse me. I must have heard you wrong. You let poor Bonnie Kalen, who’s hanging on by her fingernails, if she
has
any fingernails she hasn’t bitten, you let that poor woman take in some…thug.”

“I didn’t
make
Bonnie do it. Bonnie volunteered.”
Is
he taking advantage of Bonnie? More telescopic philanthropy. He’ll call Bonnie later and see if everything is all right.

“How could you even let him into your office?”

“That’s what Sol asked,” says Meyer.

“Someone should have searched the guy. He could have had a gun! You need to hire a bodyguard, Meyer. I’ve been telling you that for years. But what good would a bodyguard do if you invite these criminals—”

“
Bonnie
invited him,” Meyer says.

“Oh, that poor woman,” says Irene. “How do you know the guy isn’t dangerous? He might be a serial killer, he—”

“Because I’m
sure,
is why.” Everyone knows that Meyer is a genius at judging character. So why doesn’t Irene believe that? No man is a hero to his valet. And now that there are no more valets, it’s become a code word for wife.

Only a woman would think first about what this means for Bonnie. It’s one of the reasons Meyer needs Irene, to keep his compassion sharp, to keep him focused on the Jellyby children as well as the African babies. But women also need men to tell them which men are dangerous, to reassure them that a guy like Vincent Nolan is harmless. How
does
Meyer know? He knows. Irene couldn’t do what he did today. Nor would Irene, for all her intuition, know that Bonnie wanted to be asked to take Vincent in.

O
NLY NOW THAT HE’S LIFTING THE JUNK
off the bed
where Bonnie said he could sleep can Nolan afford to ask himself: How messed up has he been? Now that the previous stage in his life is over, or practically over, or temporarily—and
temporarily
is the operative word—over, only now can he face the fact that he’s been basically homeless. Sleeping on Raymond’s living room couch is not what you’d call a life. Nolan could never decide for himself when to hit the sack. Nights, while Raymond and his friends watched TV, Nolan had to wait until some show that
wasn’t
about Nazis came on the all-Hitler Channel, or until Raymond got bored or too drunk and called it a night, or until Lucy stomped in.

He’d never said it was a life. The word he’d thought then was
transition.
He’d had a life. A job, a girlfriend, a home. And the next day, he didn’t. Flip-flip, like a domino chain. One thing falls, then another. First he got fired. Which turned out to be a disaster, but he doesn’t blame Skip. Friendship aside, you can’t afford to have your employees dumping old ladies in pools.

Margaret carried on as if he’d been screwing up ever since they met and the incident with Regina Browner was the last straw. But he hadn’t been screwing up. He’d come straight home every evening and had mostly cut down drinking. Dunking Mrs. Browner was his first step off the straight and narrow.

That was Margaret’s big break. Her ticket out of his life. And Margaret jumped right on it. She told him their relationship wasn’t going anywhere. Relationship. Their
relationship.
She’d never used that word before. He wouldn’t have been with a woman who talked that talk-show trash. Maybe that’s what hurt most: that he’d spent two years with a woman who could break his heart because
their relationship wasn’t going anywhere.
And Margaret
is
going somewhere. By the time she’s forty, she’ll be running UPS instead of just driving one of their trucks. Nolan used to think it was sexy, the brown uniform, the clipboard, the friendly little wave Margaret always gave him, pulling away in her truck. Only a fool would be turned on by how happy a woman looked to be rolling out of the driveway.

It was Margaret’s apartment in Saugerties, so the breakup took care of the home part. Then it turned out that Vincent had less money saved up than he’d thought. He had some unemployment coming, so he stayed around Kingston. He found a weekly rental at the Streamside Motel. No one could blame him for heading straight to the beer and TV and pills. Right around the corner from the motel was one of those Doc-in-the-Boxes, walk-in medical clinics where the personnel were remarkably understanding about his work-related, intractable back pain.

Eventually, he stopped paying the motel owner, Mr. Derjani. The guy never fixed the hot water heater. In Nolan’s mind they were even. But the word on Nolan must have gone out over the Paki-landlord grapevine. Every time Nolan walked through a door, the No Vacancy light flickered on.

Finally, he’d gone to his mom’s, as if he’d forgotten that his mom was now—had been, for a decade or so—married to Warren the Warthog. As if it had slipped his mind that Warren was newly retired from the electric-fan factory and had too much time on his hands. The happy couple live in a trailer near Beacon, which Warren had gotten years ago in his divorce settlement. Warren made Nolan feel at home by asking him several times daily how long he planned on staying.

After Warren passed out snoring, Nolan’s mom droned her Buddhist chant. She asked him to chant with her. There was so much he could chant for. True love. A real vocation. Finding his path, at last. He was sorry, but he couldn’t. It kills him that his mom has spent so long looking for things—a decent man, a home of her own. Peace. Love. God. Whatever. He doesn’t hold it against her. He hopes she finds it before she dies.

Nolan split after two days. He hasn’t been back since. He’d known better than to show up there with his shaved head and tattoos. His mom would think it was her fault for moving around so much when he was a kid. The other potential problem is that since the last time he saw his mother, Nolan has found out certain things about his father—about his father’s death—that she never told him. He guesses he would probably have to bring that up, sooner or later.

After he left his mother’s, he got hired for the night shift at the doughnut shop, and then after he was fired from that, at the Quik-Mart on Broadway in Middletown. The manager told him about a room he could sleep in at an old folks’ home if he slipped the janitor a ten.

That’s what Nolan had sunk to: working nights at a convenience store and sleeping during the day at a cockroach-infested Mafia-scam nursing home. You heard about losers falling through the cracks, through the safety net.

He fell.

Running into Raymond was his lucky break. After his little layover at the Quik-Mart and Lilyvale Manor, the chance to stay on Raymond’s couch and work at the tire shop seemed like an invitation from Saint Peter to pitch his tent in heaven. At first, Nolan hardly minded being woken every morning by the whine of the blender as Lucy made those nasty health shakes for the kids. He understood that the blender was Lucy’s way of sending him a big good-morning fuck-you.

Compared to that, Bonnie’s storage room—sorry,
guest
room—makes Nolan feel like Mick Jagger sipping tropical rum drinks in his Caribbean hacienda. How sad that what he likes best about his room at Bonnie’s is that the door shuts. That’s something you might not appreciate unless you’d had to stay up listening to Raymond and Ted Donnell and Frankie Most and Tommy Lehman have their beery conversations about how the white man is getting shafted. Nolan didn’t have to say much. They assumed he was one of them. And in some ways, he guesses, he was. He shaved his head and got the tattoos. He went to the Homeland Encampment and listened to the German marching songs and the speeches about how the Jewish sons of Satan were out to destroy the white race.

He can’t deny that it felt good to stop having to hide how angry he was, which was something he’d been taught to do ever since he could remember. That was what he learned about himself in anger management class. The best thing about ARM was that it gave you a place for the anger to go. Like a lightning rod, an electrical ground. You touched it, the tension discharged. Once he could have gotten a buzz off the fact that, all the time Nolan was homeless, Bonnie and her kids had a whole room they didn’t even use.
Look who’s maintaining the swimming pools, and look who is swimming in them.
But what good would those thoughts do him now?

Nolan shoves some boxes aside and lies on the bed and opens
Crime and Punishment.
Like the samurai book, like most of the books he’s read in the last few years, it came from a vehicle someone brought into the tire shop. Vincent started to see the place as his private lending library. No one ever missed the books, no one ever came back to find them, though they’d be calling every five minutes if some kid lost his mitten.

At Raymond’s he had no place to read, which was more annoying than Bonnie being shocked that he
could
read. It served her right that her kids got pissed at her for mentioning Nolan’s reading. Holding him up as some kind of adult role model must mean she wants them to hate his guts before they even get to know him.

Near the end of his stay at Raymond’s, Nolan spent lunch hours driving to an empty lot and sitting in the truck and reading. That was where he read Maslow’s books. And that was where his truck died. He couldn’t get it started. He’d had to call Raymond, and when Raymond asked what he was doing parked in an empty lot, Nolan said: Taking a piss.

Best not to think about that now. What better reason to lose himself in a book and forget all his troubles? He pages through
Crime and Punishment,
looking for his place. Past the murder, which was great, and up to the part where the guy thinks everyone’s talking about him. Someone else’s persecution complex is the last thing Nolan needs. He tries Pogo, but can’t focus, then opens
The Way of the Warrior.

The Warrior keeps occupied to build a fortress against enemy thoughts. But what could “occupied” possibly mean in his present situation, holed up in a spare room crammed with family garbage? Well, if he’s going to stay here, he needs to get his living quarters squared away.

Nolan grabs a pile of clothes, jams it into the closet, and slams the door on the surprisingly feisty heaps of old coats. Bonnie’s kids are a little like Raymond’s. It must be a generational thing. None of them see the payoff in even pretending to be polite. Nolan doesn’t blame Bonnie’s sons, coming home to find their new roommate at the kitchen table. Together, she and the kids are like some ultra-sick sitcom. The younger one’s got some twisted love affair happening with the mom. The older one’s scared of his shadow. Nolan could blow them both away just by looking at them funny. Maybe they were cooler before their father bailed.

Nolan was three when his father split. He doesn’t remember much. Apparently, the guy worked twenty-four hours a day and had money problems anyway. Nolan thinks he recalls the time when his father began having tax troubles, but the only image he can summon up is a light shining over a kitchen table. Bonnie’s kids are spoiled rotten. They don’t know how good they have it.

Nolan only left Raymond’s this morning. And look what he’s accomplished! A brand-new life, for starters. No wonder he’s tired. He’s earned the right to kick back. Just shove some more stuff aside and take a Vicodin and push the reset button when he wakes up tomorrow morning. Thinking of his drug stash makes him want to make sure it’s still there. And he’ll take just one little pill for the teensiest bumperino.

Nolan thinks, as he often does, that the medical and legal establishments have it all wrong about why a person might take drugs. They assume you want to get to that place where you’re falling off your chair with your eyes rolled back in your head. When really what Nolan wants is a reason to stay
on
the chair, that mini-shift of focus that makes everything seem more fun, smoother, less boring, and minus the jittery backbeat of impatience and paranoia.

Nolan reaches into his duffel bag, past the T-shirts and underwear. He slides out a couple of books and the latest issue of
Soldier of Fortune
that, on an impulse—even though it’s hardly his favorite magazine, and even though he knew that stealing it would enrage Raymond almost more than anything—he stole from Raymond’s kitchen table on his way out this morning.

By the time Nolan finds the pill bottles and the envelope full of money, he’s in such a sweat that he has to repeat the handy formula he learned in anger management: Relax. Stay calm. Take it easy. The plastic bottles feel good in his hands. Little vials of tranquillity. He’s got maybe enough Vicodin and Xanax to last a couple of months if strict old Mr. Super Ego helps him keep things under control.

Then he counts the fifteen hundred dollars, the end product of those seventy hits of Ex. Not the ticket to Tahiti, not exactly the golden parachute that will let him down easy.

Nolan slips the money inside
The Way of the Warrior,
then stuffs everything back in his duffel. Probably it will be safe. Surely Bonnie raised her kids not to root through other people’s belongings. Still, it seems like tempting fate to leave the bag in the middle of the room. He drags out enough stuff from under the bed to make space for the duffel. Computer keyboards, a printer. He piles them in a corner. What slobs.

One envelope turns out to contain a bunch of old tax returns. On top is a 1992 1040 form on which Dr. Joel Kalen, physician, declared a hundred and sixteen grand from his medical practice and Bonnie Kalen, museum administrator, a more modest twenty-two thousand. What was Nolan doing that year? Laying carpet, maybe. Pulling in something around what Bonnie made. That scrap of arithmetic makes Nolan feel allied with Bonnie against the higher-earning Dr. Joel. So what if Nolan was
surviving
on that twenty-two thou, and Bonnie was spending her mad money on all those little fashion extras?

No point checking the other returns. Everyone cheats on their taxes, everyone gets away with it, everyone except poor bastards like Nolan’s dad. Putting away the envelope, Nolan wants a little credit for respecting the Kalens’ privacy.

He finds a box of folders from photo shops and for an instant lets himself dream that he’s stumbled on a treasure trove of Dr. Joel’s naked pictures of Bonnie. That would prove there was a God, and that God loved Nolan. He could probably jerk off and fall asleep. But having met Bonnie, Nolan doubts that such pictures exist.

The first sets of photos are, he knows right away, from the older kid’s bar mitzvah. Nolan recalls a debate between Raymond and some bonehead who’d insisted that Jews get circumcised at thirteen, in public, at their bar mitzvahs. Raymond-the-expert said no, they were cut at birth by a rabbi who dried the foreskins to make a date-rape powder for elderly Jews to put in white Christian girls’ drinks.

In the photos, everyone’s shined up and groomed. Bonnie’s wearing a navy blue suit with gold buttons. The tall guy with his arm around her must be Dr. Joel. How wrong the ARM cartoonists are, with their corny pictures of hunchbacked, hook-nosed, drooling trolls humping their money bags. The Jew you have to watch out for is the glossy overgrown boy, the Michael Eisners, the Steven Spielbergs, the former high school jocks like Dr. Joel, the chosen tribe destined from the cradle for some lucrative profession. At least that’s what the old Nolan thought. The new Nolan tells himself: Look beyond the big nose and the fancy suit to the guy who loves his wife and kids on this proud occasion. Or anyway, the guy who was trying. It must have been around that time that Dr. Feelbad walked.

In some of the pictures, older relatives—grandparents, Nolan assumes—shrink from children’s rough embraces. Most of the pictures show Bonnie and the doc and the younger kid grinning like maniacs, and the bar mitzvah boy scowling, as far from the others as he can get and still be in the same photo.