The Ask (15 page)

Bernie blew sugar across the table through a straw. Normally I would have snatched the straw away, admonished him loudly enough to demonstrate to the dining public my stern but fairminded parental manner. But now I just sat there, dazed, let Bernie blow sugar and shred napkins, pour ice water onto his ever-burgeoning heap of sugar and shredded napkins, tamp it with a coffee spoon.

“They needed to meet up with Denise’s friend Larry.”

“Larry, with the muscles?”

“You know him?”

“He once came to pick Aiden up at Christine’s.”

“Oh.”

“Aiden says that Larry is gone. He went to a land called Elmira. He got a pole of violets for it.”

“He what?”

“He … ladled his prole.”

“Violated his parole.”

“That’s it. You know, Daddy. You always know.”

“Aiden told you this?”

“His mommy cries a lot. Aiden saw Larry’s winky, too.”

“When did he see Larry’s winky?”

“In the kitchen. Aiden got up from a bad dream and went to the kitchen and Larry was drinking juice out of the carton, which you said is bad, but Larry does it.”

“It is bad,” I said. “It’s just really wrong to do that, Bernie.”

“Larry does it.”

“Larry got violated up to Elmira.”

“Did he have to go there because he drank from the carton?”

“Life can be very tough on people,” I said.

I hated to travel into Manhattan with Bernie. The boy figured the sidewalks for a snack spread. Old gum, cigarette butts, bottle caps, petrified turds, even the occasional crack vial or broken syringe—Bernie could work it all into his mouth. Of course he could find such ad hoc oral solace on the boulevards of Queens, but the trash seemed less virulent here. It was the home poison.

Still, I had to see Maura. We could surprise her, Bernie and I, maybe drink some lemonade on a bench in Bryant Park. I knew she took her salads there when the weather was good. Sometimes she told amusing stories about the scene, the ongoing mash-up of tourists, homeless drunks, street clowns, construction workers, and office temps reading their papers or calling their friends or playing bocce ball with the bocce ball hustlers.

I’d witnessed some odd things myself, the few times I’d met Maura for lunch or crossed through to the Public Library before getting back to Mediocre. I always seemed to bump into somebody I knew, people from work, old acquaintances. I’d once seen Maurice Gunderson deliver a lecture about the apocalypse to a large group gathered in the outdoor reading area. It was a warm spring day and he looked golden, prophetic, up at the lectern.

When his talk was over I stood in the autograph line with a copy of his book I’d taken from a display table.

He got into an argument with the man in front of me about crop circles. The man had proof they were pranks. Maurice
said the pranks and the proof of the pranks were both part of a cover-up. They went on for a while. I was about to slip away when Maurice looked past the man and called me over.

“Sir, what’s your feeling about all of this?”

I stood there, beamed, waited for Maurice to recognize me.

“No pressure,” said Maurice, looked back to the other man. “Maybe we can continue this at the party.”

“Love to,” said the man, and I realized that despite the spat the man was a friend and fan of the Gunderson project. Now Maurice held out his hand for my book, to sign it.

“Whom shall I make it out to?” he said. “Or do you just want the signature?”

“Signature’s fine,” I said.

“A collector,” said Gunderson. “Get it through your head. There’s no point in collecting anything, except maybe some good karma.”

Gunderson grinned and handed the book back, stared past me to the next pilgrim, a tawny teen in a cocktail dress of skimpy hemp.

Now Bernie and I walked hand-in-hand through the park. He did not wriggle, did not bolt, did not eat garbage from the ground. We strode together in perfect sunlight. I loved my family, my life. We passed a urine-scented lawn-sleeper with a swastika on the web of his cracked hand and I loved him, too. I even loved the bespoke-suited tool on his cell phone shouting at somebody about somebody else’s promise that he’d be “getting his beak wet.” But mostly I just loved my wife and my son. I almost wanted to shout it aloud, but the men I’d known who indulged in such gestures tended to be divorced.

There was maybe an immutable law about that.

But there were also maybe immutable laws about beautiful moods. Here was the love of my life on a shaded bench with her lunchtime greens. What a turkey wrap meant to me, a bowl of arugula and goat cheese meant to Maura. My heart was full of
tender wonder. Maura had a noonday luminescence. Beside her sat a handsome man who laughed and kneaded her thigh with a strong tan hand. It was Paul the Animator. I had a moment to decide: gay touch or straight touch? Before I could, Bernie broke from my grasp, galloped at them.

“Paul!” he shouted. “Hi, Paul! Do you have my superhero cartoon?”

A Spandexed man on a unicycle sliced past me.

“Watch it, fatty,” he said.

“Fuck you, clown,” I snarled.

The man’s arm shot back. A spray of daisies sprouted in his fist.

We ate dinner in silence, or near silence, as Bernie, naked, wet from the bath, speared disks of Not Dog with his fork and chuckled knowingly at something he most likely knew nothing about. Maura kept her eyes down, sipped her wine. I pretended to relish my Swedish meatballs, which I’d picked up with some other groceries after leaving Paul and Maura in the park.

It had been nothing but pleasantries among us, but the flustered way they had gathered themselves after Bernie called to them charged our exchange. Paul had tried to excuse himself but Maura insisted he stay. They could walk back to the office together. Lunch hour was over anyway. Why hadn’t I called? Maura wanted to know. I told her about Happy Salamander, the defection of the Newts. But why hadn’t I called? Paul looked shaken, though still wonderfully tan. He promised Bernie he’d finish his animation soon, led Maura away.

“Paul’s my grown-up friend,” said Bernie.

“What about me?”

But I’m not sure he heard. He’d already darted away, disappeared into a throng of Russian tourists, then just disappeared.

“Bernie!” I dipped into that familiar parental trot, the one that covers more ground than walking but does not yet reek of pure panic. It’s important to smile a lot while you maintain a steady pace and call out your child’s name in an almost jovial manner, as though it could be a game, and even if it’s not a game, you
still aren’t worried, it’s happened before, though not too often, and besides, it’s age appropriate, so you don’t consider it an issue requiring therapy or, heaven help us, a pharmaceutical regimen. This is no big deal, the trot and the smile signal, though it sure would be great to locate the little scamp. But hey, the kid gives back a lot of love, and usually you’re a bit more in control of the situation, though you understand child-rearing throws its curve-balls, its cutters and sinkers, too, but still, this is nothing compared to the hard work the parents of, for example, Down kids must put in, or even the folks with autistic children, where you’re doing all that special needs slogging and not even getting those sloppy Down kisses, no, your kid, he’s a regular kid, maybe with some impulse-control deficiencies, or dealies, as you laughingly call them with your wife, or maybe, and you’re definitely willing to entertain this notion, especially in this era of so much entitled helicopter coddling, or whatever the term is where the children are literally enfolded in cocoons of helicopters that entitle them to do whatever they want, because of the culture, maybe this very normal, regular, active boy, who happens to live in a social strata that condemns masculine energies in all its children, maybe he just needs to have his coat pulled, to be briefed, as it were, in an energetic masculine way, to be boxed or cuffed or whacked upside some part of him in that no-nonsense, simple folkways folk way (because throttling and such, it’s worked for thousands of years, no?), or at least persuaded in a compelling and lasting fashion that it is not okay to just dash off into a throng of Russian (gas-rich, reassembling their rabid empire) tourists and ignore his father’s cries, yes, it could be that he needs to be squared away on that score in a more visceral sense, though certainly not in the sense of a spanking or a hiding, such tactics, alas, never work, but anyway that is a separate discussion. Really, right now, you just need to get a visual on the little shit, pronto.

After the trot comes the flat-out run, all heaves and stumbles, the smile long vanished, but it never came to that, because
I found Bernie, or he found me, his wrist in the grip of a stout woman in a business suit.

“Yours?”

“Bernie,” I said. “You are in big trouble. Thanks.”

“No worries,” said the woman. “He was just chasing a pigeon.”

“Thanks again. I really appreciate it.”

“I’ve got three at home.”

“Pigeons?”

“No, kids. Here.”

She handed me Bernie’s wrist.

“He’s a fast one. But I know how to sneak up on them.”

“I owe you,” I said, dragged Bernie away.

We stood behind a tree near the edge of the park.

“What are you doing, Daddy?”

“I think I’m going to cry,” I said.

“Don’t do that,” said Bernie.

“Okay,” I said, picked up him up, laid my cheek on his shoulder.

“Bernie,” I said. “I love you so much.”

“That’s nice, Daddy.”

“Yes,” I said. “It is nice.”

“You want to know something else nice?”

“I sure do, Bernie.”

“I love mommy’s friend Paul. Do you think Paul loves me, Daddy?”

They weren’t like dolls, because dolls had no feelings. Kids had feelings, just not any remotely related to yours.

Now we sat at dinner saying nothing. Some families did this every night. Hollywood made poignant movies about them. But we’d always been blabbermouths.

Bernie chuckled again.

“What’s so funny?” I said.

He looked up at me with odd fervency. He was holding his miniature half-on between his fingers, thwacking it against the chair seat.

“Daddy,” he said.

“Yes, Bern.”

“This isn’t a winky.”

“It’s not?”

“It’s a video game.”

I looked down at my son’s lap. An odd benevolence surged through me. I had maybe made peace with Bernie’s foreskin. His freak flap, let it fly. If he ever wanted to be a real Jew he could have it snipped. Nobody would ever be able to question his commitment after that. Besides, if he wanted to be a real Jew, he’d probably have to renounce me. Because I was a fake Jew who spent a lot of time on the fake internet rubbing my video game. Because the real Jews scared the hell out of me, same as the real Muslims and the real Christians, the real Hindus. Because they believed. How could they believe? Fine, come kill me as a Jew, flog me to death in a desert quarry, bayonet me in the Pale, gas me in your Polish camp, behead me on your camcorder, I still would not believe. To me that was the true test of courage: to not submit to the faith they assume you possess and will kill you for. So now I loved Bernie’s foreskin. Or at least I’d made peace with it.

“I’ve made peace with it,” I whispered.

“Excuse me?” said Maura.

“I said I’ve made peace with it.”

“That was quick.”

“What do you mean?”

“Wait a minute,” said Maura. “What have you made peace with?”

“You tell me.”

“Not so fast.”

“What do you think I’ve made peace with?”

“That’s what I’m asking you.”

“You tell me,” I said.

“I think we’re going around in a circle.”

“Which means what?”

“What do you mean which means what?”

“It could mean there is something you don’t want to tell me.”

“No, Milo, it’s you who won’t do the telling. Don’t you see? You won’t tell me what you’ve made peace with. So, I can’t tell you what I don’t want to tell you until I know what it is that you’ve made peace with.”

“I’m no longer at peace.”

“Good. You probably shouldn’t be.”

This is how I knew my wife was having an affair with Paul. The knowledge arrived with a pressured sensation, a pallet of wood on my chest. Deck wood. For a Mission-style deck. I stood, moved to the door.

“Where are you going?”

“I’m going to get some air.”

“Daddy, will you get me some?”

“Air?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll try, Bern.”

“You can’t go out now,” said Maura.

It was true. We had the evening ritual ahead of us—the dishes, Bernie’s books, his teethbrushing, his pre-tuck-in piss, which often required some degree of cajolement, his stories, his songs. It would be a kind of betrayal of the ideals of co-parenting to walk out now. Then again, sliding your tongue along the seam of Paul the Animator’s smooth and perfumed scrotum had to hold formidable rank in the hierarchies of betrayal. Maybe someday a civil court judge would sort through the equivalencies. Most of me hoped not.

“I need some air,” I said.

A walk around the block convinced me I could not return home tonight.

I headed for the doughnut shop. I wanted doughnut-scented air. My pain had earned me both a Bavarian cream and a coconut chocolate flake. I was the only customer and I sat and ate my doughnuts, pictured myself that lonely diner at the counter in the famous painting. I’d always studied it from the artist’s perspective, the stark play of shadow and light. But to be the fucker on the stool was another kind of stark entirely.

Now the door opened and the kiddie-diddler, his herringbone blazer twined shut with twists of electrical tape, wheeled a plaid suitcase into the shop.

“Good evening, Predrag,” he said in that radio voice.

The counter kid nodded.

The kiddie-diddler sidled up, tapped a finger on the napkin dispenser. Predrag slid the old man coffee in a paper cup.

“Predrag, my strapping friend, what are the specials tonight?”

“No specials. Doughnuts.”

“What about those croissant sandwiches? With the eggs and sausage?”

“What about them?”

“I’m in the mood for one of those delectable concoctions.”

“Microwave’s broken.”

“Yes?”

“They’re frozen. You need a microwave.”

“Surely you have a conventional oven back there,” said the kiddie-diddler.

“These are for the microwave only.”

“I’d be surprised if you couldn’t defrost them in a conventional oven. You know, Predrag, and I grant that you may be too young to remember this, but there was a time before the microwave. A better time, some would argue, though I wouldn’t. That would be silly. No time is better than another time. It’s preposterous.
There are always people doing kindnesses and there are always people smearing each other into the earth. To think otherwise is foolish. But I dare say it’s not so foolish to suppose one could circumvent the problem of the broken microwave and heat the croissant sandwich in the conventional oven, probably to better overall effect. What say you, my Serbian prince? Couldn’t be that much of a hardship, could it? Not compared to the Battle of the Blackbirds, I’d wager. What say you, son?”

“I say you don’t have any money to buy a croissant, you old queer. Not a dime.”

“The Slavs are a brainy lot,” said the kiddie-diddler, swiveled toward me on his stool. “Absolutely crazy, as history bears out, but very smart, very courageous, marvelous poets, and also fine logicians.”

“The fuck you talking about?” said Predrag.

“Any coarsening effect, as witnessed here, can be blamed on the West, I assure you. What’s good in them comes from their Oriental influences, a notion they detest, but understand in their hearts to be the truth.”

“Here,” said Predrag, threw a frozen croissant in its wrapper at the kiddie-diddler. The old man ripped it open, sucked on the crystals.

“That’s right,” said Predrag. “Now give me five dollars.”

The kiddie-diddler lowered his pastry.

“Young man, you know I never carry that kind of cash around.”

“Damn it,” said Predrag. “Do I have to call Tommy?”

“No,” said the old man, looked at me again. “We won’t have to call Thomas, will we?”

“Excuse me?” I said.

“Sir, I recognize you as a man of this neighborhood. A frequenter of this counter. Surely you could find it in your heart to advance the cost of this sandwich. I am good for it.”

“Right,” said Predrag.

“I am!” said the kiddie-diddler. “Is there no dignity allowed an old man?”

I threw five dollars on the counter. The kiddie-diddler rose, fixed me with his runny blue eyes.

“Sir, so that I may promptly repay you, with interest, may I enquire as to where you reside?”

“In a fabulous and secret universe of the mind.”

The diddler blinked, smiled, patted my arm.

“Lifelong resident myself,” he said, walked out.

“Jesus,” said Predrag. “Every day with that old homo. I hate him.”

“Because of the kids?” I said.

“What kids?”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t be spreading shit like that,” said Predrag. “People get their throats cut, you start talking like that. He never hurt anybody. He’s a good man. I just hate him. That’s all. He gets in the way of my lie. My lie for myself.”

“Your lie?”

“That in America, things can be okay.”

“Why do you let him back?” I asked.

“It’s his store.”

“His store?”

“Well, was. Till he went nuts. Now his brother Tommy runs it. Not a very nice guy, Tommy. Lets his brother roam the streets. That’s not America.”

“Actually, that is America,” I said.

“True,” said Predrag, “but I don’t want to hear it.”

He had his tongs up, somewhat martially.

Out in the night again, below the N tracks, I still didn’t want to go home. To slink back into the apartment, yank a blanket around my shoulders on the sofa, it seemed a kind of death.

It was too late for Claudia’s house in New Jersey. A hotel in Manhattan would be ruinous. To call Purdy stood for another
kind of undoing. It would be a mistake to owe him any more than I did. I still hadn’t touched the money in the envelope.

Don Charboneau lived the closest, but he and Sasha just had the one room. I couldn’t picture us in a group spoon. Maybe it was time to look into that Cypriot let. Still, I needed a place for tonight. Horace bunked with his mother in Armonk. Or had he not mentioned something about some roommates, a new place in Bushwick?

I called him, was at his door in Brooklyn in an hour.

“Milo,” said Horace, shirtless, in dirty corduroys. “Welcome to the coop.”

He scratched at his chest, led me into his new home.

Horace lived in a huge room filled with cages. Inside each cage was a young person, a futon or cot, a footlocker, a few milk crates. Bare bulbs on wires hung from fixtures in the high ceiling. I’d read about these places. Kids moved to the city, but there were no apartments left to rent to them, or none they could afford. But on a starting salary, or no salary, you could maybe manage a cage. Several dozen people resided here among the drum kits and guitar amps, the antique film editing deck, a few long tables and spindly chairs, a minifridge. Power cables streaked the floor under mounds of black and silver tape. Laptops glowed from the cages. Voices rose and fell, rippled about the room, a dozen conversations going at once, or maybe one conversation replicated over and over by feral and beautiful children.