Ark (11 page)

“I haven't been thinking about it.”

“No?”

“No, Marcus.”

“How can you
not
think about it?”

“I just don't, Marcus.”

“What about your dad?”

“What about him?”

“Is he all right?”

“Yes. He's fine.”

“Have I offended you?”

“No. I'm sorry, Marcus. I won't get into it now.”

Rebecca crossed the dark green lawn. She could feel the heat radiating up from the grass. Her heels sunk into the earth, and she moved weight into the toe of her shoe. She didn't mean to reject her cousin. Why, she'd heard all the sense he'd just been making. She knew his intentions were good. But she couldn't afford him her energy at this moment. She had none to spare.

Now, in a patch of gravestones laid flat against the ground in an even grid, Rebecca was within earshot of her father and Emma. She heard Oliver speak to his friend of how he was worn out by death. And that for the first time he had no home in New York City. He said he and his wife were out of money, and that he'd lent his father half a million, and was waiting to get it back, as well as the house in Southampton, which Eliza had promised him.

“I can't leave New York until I get it all.”

Emma was a thin, blond ex-New Yorker now residing in Raleigh. Her gray-blue eyes were not the same shape. She was short and sturdy, athletic. She asked Oliver, “Can you stand being in the loft?”

“No,” he said. “It's not good for me there.”

“Where would you like to be?”

“In my old apartment,” he said. “If I'd known I was going to be spending all this time in New York, I never would have sold it.”

“Do you really feel that way, Dad?” Rebecca asked.

“Yes, Rebecca. Look at me. I'm homeless.”

“You're not homeless.”

“But I am.”

“No, you are not,” Rebecca said.

“Call it what you will, but I have no home!” Oliver shouted.

Emma's worried gaze locked on Oliver. Her cheeks were redder. In a quiet voice, she said she had a thought. Her father lived on West Eighty-Eighth Street and Riverside in the large apartment in which she'd been raised, and where she and Oliver had played as children. Bruce Barry was eighty-two but with it, a heavy socializer, a card player. He lived alone in the apartment, refusing a nurse. He still did fifty pushups a day, fifty crunches, did his own grocery shopping, and got himself to and from doctor appointments. But Emma worried about him. What if he were to hurt himself? Who would help him? Her point was that she would like it if someone were there in the apartment. Perhaps Oliver could take one of the four vacant bedrooms and live for free.

“I love your father,” Oliver said. “I've always loved him.”

“I would have to ask him first,” Emma cautioned. “But I don't see him saying no. He's always liked you, too. He'd enjoy having you around.”

Rebecca put up a hand in protest. For her father to live with an old man and serve in the role of nurse—no matter in how limited a capacity—was out of the question. She said, “You've spent the past four months taking care of your mother and father, Dad. I will give you money to rent an apartment before that happens. Thank you, Emma. But my father needs to start spending some more time with people his own age.”

Emma, feeling her friend's predicament very keenly now, said, “Of course. It was just a suggestion.”

“You know, my daughter makes big bucks,” Oliver said.

“Dad, please.”

“What?” Oliver didn't realize that he was screaming. “I'm proud to be able to say that. I never made money like you. She could put me up at the Plaza for a month, no problem.”

“The mortgage payments eat up everything I have,” Rebecca told Emma. “Things always feel tight.”

“She takes me out to the priciest restaurants.”

“Dad, stop.”

“But it's true. She'll make partner one day soon. She'll be rich.”

“Not true,” Rebecca said, to Emma.

“Oliver! Oliver!” Laura Saks, that bone-thin woman with the small, brittle nose, dark, penetrating eyes, and long wavy hair was walking right at them. She wasn't more than twenty feet away now. Perhaps she thought a big smile would make up for the fact that she didn't belong here.

Rebecca put her hand directly on her father's chest. “Did you invite Laura?”

“I don't remember.”

“You don't remember?”

“I don't know.”

“Dad, did you or didn't you?”

“No. I didn't.”

Rebecca searched his eyes for truth. “She's out of her mind, and she's obsessed with you.”

“Just be nice!”

However, all at once, the attention moved off Laura. For Doris was approaching the gravesite, with Julia Raines a step behind her. Doris saw Sondra at the grave, and the youngest Arkin daughter immediately had a fit. She screamed, in her tight black strapless dress, among the group of mourners, that Sondra could not be here.

“You better leave!”

Marcus, standing in front of his mother, said, “She has as much a right to be here as anyone. And she will pay her respects.”

Doris said, “Shut up, you know-it-all twerp.”

“Do not talk to my son that way!” shouted Sondra.

“My grandfather is dead,” Marcus said. With his dimpled chin and the broad forehead, the upper half of his face so clearly resembled Ben's. He said, “I loved him. My mother loved him too.”

“That's just fucking bullshit,” said Doris, turning to Rebecca for support.

The rabbi stepped forward with one arthritic hand lifted in the air. His gray beard was spotty, except at the mustache, which curled downward at the ends. His yarmulke, covering a bald head, was black, his eyeglasses gold wire-framed. He began to say, “Sons and daughters, sons and daughters, please be quiet. This is not the time for argument. Be quiet. Everyone quiet.”

“She sued her parents and me and her brother.” Julia's hands held Doris at the shoulders, and she was telling her to be calm.

“That,” said the rabbi, “is not important now. A man is dead. It is our job to bury him properly.”

“That's not going to be possible with her here!” Doris interjected.

“Screw you,” Sondra flailed.

“Fuck off!” said Doris.

“I'll kill you!”

The rabbi said, “You must honor your parent.”

“Neither one of them ever could,” said Oliver, in a hushed voice.

Then Doris went, “Hah! Yes.”

She had spotted a police car with two officers seated inside it near the black gates of the cemetery. She was walking straight toward the vehicle, her determined steps pounding the grass. Everyone watched. Where was she going? Emma asked. What was happening now? Doris was talking to the officers. Then they got out of their car, and were now following Doris back to Ben's gravesite. The officers quietly wished the mourners their condolences. They nodded at the rabbi.

“That woman,” Doris shouted, “that woman is not allowed at this funeral and should be removed from the premises.”

They were short, stocky men. They squinted under their hats, the sun strong above them. “Has a restraining order been issued?”

Doris, with her hands on her hips and her shoulders turned inward, said, “Yes, a restraining order has been issued.” But after a moment she changed her answer. She said, “I mean, no. No, not exactly.”

The police explained to her that nothing could be done, then.

Sondra said, “Can she be arrested for making a false arrest?”

“Afraid not,” said one of the officers. “We wish you all a good day.”

The policemen left, and, for a moment, no one moved or spoke. The rabbi lifted the small prayer book in his hand and asked if he could continue. But then, Doris was, all of a sudden, sprinting across her father's plot. She dove at Sondra. Sondra tumbled backwards into the dirt under her sister's weight. Releasing a violent shriek that carried far across the cemetery, Doris pulled Sondra's hair, her knees locked tightly around her sister's wide hips. “I'll kill you. I'll kill you. I'll kill you,” she said.

But Sondra, thick-armed and strong, delivered a blow to her sister's jaw, popping back her head. She connected a second time, and a third. Doris, her bloody lips quivering, her swelling eyes wet with tears, was at once screaming for Sondra to get off her. Marcus and Oliver and his ex-fiancée, Laura Saks, all tried pulling them apart.

Oliver cried, “Stop, Sondra. You're hurting her, stop!”

Yet the older sister would not let go. Her nails were sunk into Doris's neck. She had Doris's nose in the other hand and was twisting it. The sisters' feet, searching for leverage, kicked at the ground where Eliza's parents, Ruth and Karl, were buried. At last, they were separated.

“You fucking cunt,” Doris whimpered. Julia had her in her arms. “I'll kill you. You don't deserve this life. How could you come here and ruin this day for me! This was my father's funeral. How could you!” Weeping, she fell to her knees.

Sondra stood with her head dropped forward between her shoulders, heaving. She said, “You will pay for this. I am going to the law. There are witnesses. You attacked me. I will put you in jail. I will make sure you get the highest penalty.”

“You attacked me!”

“Oh, right. Sure I did. You're going to rot in prison,” Sondra replied.

The rabbi began to read the kaddish. Sondra and Doris continued screaming at one another. Rebecca saw her father close his eyes. He was searching for a place to hide, thought Rebecca. He believed that he didn't belong among his siblings, that he wasn't one of those for whom conflict and chaos were the stuff of life.

The funeral ended just moments later, with a dump truck pushing dirt into Ben's grave.

VI. IT'S ALL GONE

 

Rebecca said: “Jerome, old friend, you missed the funeral. How's it been for you? I know this must be hard. Are you okay?”

They were in Jerome's black two-door Civic, tucked away on a quiet dead-end street in Tudor City where only a dry cleaner and a deli interrupted the strictly residential quarter. Straight above, where the surrounding tall brown brick buildings quit rising, a clear sky was visible. No one walked the sidewalks, save for a doorman in a gray uniform who was hosing down the concrete.

Jerome shut off the car engine, but at the next moment, a black sedan with powder-blue diplomatic plates pulled in behind them, honking. They were in a restricted spot. Jerome turned the car on again and rolled the car forward, making room for an ambassador. His wide neck stiffened, and he pushed out his chest. He said he had wanted to be at the service, but he'd been too sad to go, he missed Ben, it hurt so much.

Rebecca lowered her head and folded her hands in her lap, wondering why she felt nothing. Even now, with Jerome telling her how Ben had loved her and talked about her all the time, that he was proud, that he always used her as an example. “Rebecca has her head on straight. Rebecca's smart as hell.”

She grinned. “What you mean is that he used me to put you down.”

“Pretty much.”

“Sometimes I think I became a lawyer because of him. You know, when I was a kid, and the idea came to me, I asked him what he thought, and he hugged me.”

“Strange.”

“It was, Jerome. But now I know why he came on so strong. He was probably thinking, be a lawyer. As a lawyer, the chances that someone will screw you are less. Because people will always try and screw you.
Everyone
is looking to screw you.”

“Sounds like him.”

“Your friends, your family, there's everyone to be suspicious of, to expect the worst of. So, be a lawyer, and when the time comes when that someone tries to screw you, you won't need to rely on anyone else for protection.”

“Feel like I'm talking to him right now.”

“Because even your lawyer is trying to screw you. You must be the primary representative of your own interests. And as the client of a lawyer, you are not
that
, and you will ultimately be screwed. See legal bill.”

Jerome was shaking his head, a smile teetered on his lips. Then he looked up at Rebecca. “Can I ask you something?”

“Of course. What is it?”

“Do you ever think about refrigerators?”

“Refrigerators?” Rebecca thought Jerome was making a joke.

But he said, “Yes. Refrigerators. Ben spent a lot of time thinking about them toward the end of his life. He bought eight General Electrics at the Salvation Army right before Eliza died. They're in his studio.”

“Are you asking me if you should throw them away?”

Jerome said, “No. I'm not.”

“So what, then?”

“They're part of Ben's final masterpiece.
The Refrigerated Library
, that's the title. I want to get into the loft and finish working on it.”

“Why would you do that?”

“Because I have to.”

“Right.”

“I mean it, Rebecca. Ask your father or your aunt if I can spend some time at the loft.”

“They'll never go for it.”

“They might.”

But Rebecca shook her head. She told him her father had been asleep in the loft for the last week. Ever since Ben's death, she had been riding down to Wooster in a taxi at night and looking in on him. She would find Oliver asleep in bed. She would tidy up the kitchen, put tulips in a vase by the bed, and stock the refrigerator with prepared foods. The next day, she would see how none of the tuna or egg salad or fruit had been touched. Had he eaten at all? She had wondered how long she could let him go on like this. Another week? Another two? What if a month passed, and he continued to spend every day in this dark room, asleep and disconnected from people? What would she do then?

“I can't ask this person if you can go into the loft and work on his father's art.”