The Other Side of the World (10 page)

“But I didn't
make
a promise—I said I
might
try to write a
book about me and Nick. But you
promised
to marry him some day…”

“So?”

“So be careful, that's all. He's not like other kids. He's not…”

“He's not what?” Seana asked, loud enough for Gabe to hear.

“Forget it,” I said. “Jesus, but you're a case sometimes. You should be more careful, that's all.”

“If I were careful all the time, I wouldn't be Seana,” she said.

“That's true, Charlie, and you shouldn't forget it,” Trish said. “And also, didn't we agree last night that it's important to believe in a
future
—to believe there'll actually be one?”

“I recall that we did,” Seana said.

“In my opinion, that's what last night was about,” Trish said. “Otherwise, why are we here?”

“We're here because Nick's dead,” I said.

“That's merely the proximate cause of our visit,” Seana said, and she walked to the stove, where, while glaring at me with eyes devoid of anything resembling affection, she kissed the back of Trish's neck in a way that made Trish shiver.

Gabe leaned toward me from across the table. “In less than eight years I'll be eighteen,” he said.

I felt a pale whooshing and clicking inside my head then, as if the fumes from what we'd smoked the night before were drifting away into dark rooms, the doors to these rooms closing one behind the other, after which a voice rose up from the floor of my brain and called to me:
Hey Charlie
—
don't you think you're getting in just a little bit over your head this time?

“
All
done!” Anna said. Trish wiped Anna's face with a washcloth, lifted her from the high-chair, and told Gabe that in fifteen minutes he had to be ready for school. Gabe got down on the floor next to Anna, and the two of them began playing a game that involved moving clothespins in and out of empty yogurt cups. “I'll be ready on time,” he said. “I always am.”

“After Gabe leaves, I can tell you about Nick if you want,” Trish said.

“Whenever,” Seana said, and she turned to me. “Will you take notes?”

“For somebody so smart you can be pretty stupid sometimes,” I said.

“Oh yeah?” she said, her voice pure Brooklyn.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Well then, chuck you, Farley.”

“Hey you two—we're all friends here, remember?” Trish said. “None of this nasty stuff allowed, especially in the morning. You'll send me straight back to my caves of gloom, and I'm hell to be around when that happens. Charlie can vouch.”

“I can vouch,” I said.

 

It was past ten in the morning, and we were still sitting around the kitchen table, drinking coffee, Anna on the floor playing with her clothespins and yogurt cups—Gabe had been picked up by the school bus more than an hour before—and Trish was telling Seana about her and Nick: how they met on our infamous double-date, me with her, and Nick with a hot, young Israeli student named Shoshana. What happened, Trish explained, was that she and Nick couldn't keep their eyes off each other all night—we'd gone bowling, and then to a late night drinking spot in Hadley called The Rusty Nail, where they had punk-rock bands and access to a smorgasbrod of drugs—and how, afterwards—the next morning, in fact—Nick had asked my permission to call her.

“He acted honorably toward you in doing that—in not just going after me,” Trish said, “and I was thrilled.”

“That he acted honorably?” I asked.

“That he acted honorably toward you and that he wanted to go out with me.”

“You had it wrong,” I corrected. “He wanted to get
into
you.”

“Well that was okay with me,” Trish said. “And with you too, Charlie, so don't deny it.”

I shrugged, and Trish began telling Seana about the first time the three of us got it on together, which happened a week later in a hotel Nick took us to on the coast of Maine, near Ogunquit. It was off-season, and we stayed in a large room in a place straight out of a Hopper painting, with an in-room fireplace and a spectacular view of the ocean, and waves crashing in on rocks all night long. Nick brought along a stash of Golden Montana—‘the champagne of Mary Jane,' he called it—and before long we were sky-high happy and doing things you only fantasize doing most of your life, or read about other people doing.

“Nowadays, it's all on
You Tube
,” Trish said. “Everything you can imagine, and in all possible combinations and permutations. It makes me sad.”

“Because it leaves so little to the imagination?” Seana said.

“Maybe,” Trish said. “But for a more personal reason. I mean, a lot of our friends were doing what we did, but it makes me sad because it turns what we did, which I thought was special, into something common.”

“Oh yes,” Seana said, and was about to say something else—about things she'd done in
her
earlier years?—when the doorbell rang—a buzzing instead of a ringing—followed by a loud, insistent rapping. Trish went to the door and let in a state trooper, and for an instant, my bourgeois conscience back on the job, I thought he might have come to tell us we'd violated some state law.
We don't allow things like that up here
,
mister
, I imagined him saying.

The trooper, built like a tight end—about six-five and two-forty—had taken off his hat and had his arm around Trish. From the soft, polite way he was talking with her, and from the way she rested her head against his chest, and then from the way her eyes filled up when she turned to us, I was suddenly afraid something had happened to Gabe.

Trish walked toward us slowly, tears streaming down her cheeks, and I opened my arms wide, for a hug, but she stopped when she was a few feet away. “Officer Guardi—Richard—needs to talk with you, Charlie,” she said. “I'm sorry. Really sorry. Really, really, Charlie…”

“Shit,” I said.

“Fuck,” Seana said. “Fuck and double-fuck.”

“It's my father, isn't it,” I said to the trooper.

He nodded. “I'm awfully sorry, Mister Eisner,” he said.

“I knew it,” I said. “I just knew it. “We shouldn't have left him alone.”

“Nonsense,” Seana said.

“We
shouldn't
,” I insisted. “We shouldn't have—even if he wanted us to.”

“And we're being punished for having done so, right?” Seana said. “Punished for our pleasures.”

“I didn't say that. I just said we shouldn't have left him alone.”

“Can it, Charlie,” she said. “He's gone. End-of-story, as young people say these days.”

Then she turned to Trish, who opened her arms wide for her. Seana held to Trish, let her head rest on Trish's shoulder, and I was suddenly confused. Why was she embracing Trish when it was
my
father who had died? Why was she shutting me out? And if I went to her, and tried to pry her from Trish's embrace…

“I'm awfully sorry, Mister Eisner,” the trooper said again. “We received a request from the Northampton police to try to locate you. I checked hotels and motels in the area—we had the license plate number of your father's car—and at the Ocean House, in Port Clyde, they said you'd mentioned visiting some one in Thomaston.”

“Did he—did he do it himself?” I asked.

“I don't have details, sir. For that you'll have to call Northampton. I have a number for you—two numbers, in fact.” He tore off a piece of paper from the kind of pad you use for
giving out speeding tickets, and handed it to me. “Officer Burke. Michael Burke. He said he'd be there all morning, and that you can call him on his cell phone anytime—the number's there. He said he went to high school with you.”

I turned and saw that Trish was sitting in a chair now, sobbing away, Seana next to her, stroking Trish's hair while Anna clung to Trish's leg and told her not to cry. “Don't cry, Mommy,” she kept saying. “Please don't cry, Mommy. Don't cry, Mommy Mommy Mommy…”

The floor, tilted up at a forty-five degree angle, was rapidly approaching my nose, squiggles of black dots swirling in its path. I sat down, bent over so that my head was lower than my heart, and after about thirty seconds I sat up straight again.

None of us spoke for a while, which made the room much too quiet—the trooper was gone, though I hadn't noticed him leaving—so I picked up the telephone and called Michael Burke, and when I identified myself, he said he was sorry for my loss, and assured me he would take care of everything until I was back in Northampton. My father had died peacefully in his sleep, of heart failure, he said—that was the initial finding by the doctor, and he didn't expect it to change. When the lights in much of the house had stayed on for more than twenty-four hours, a neighbor became concerned, and rang the doorbell and banged on the door and, receiving no response, had called the police. I thanked Michael and told him we should arrive back in town by early evening.

I told Trish and Seana what Michael had told me—that it seemed Max had died peacefully in his sleep—and I added that he would have turned seventy-three on his next birthday, but that, as I'd often heard him say, he believed that everything past the proverbial three score and ten was considered extra—a gift—so that seventy-two wasn't a bad run.

“Still,” Seana said, “when you're seventy-two, seventy-three doesn't look so good.”

We were quiet again, and after a minute or two I decided to fill the silence with words by telling a story about my father, though it was a shame, it occurred to me, that I'd already told Seana the one about him and the man in the subway. Still, with Max, I knew, if you used up one story, another usually arrived pretty quickly to take its place.

“You know who my father's hero was?” I asked.

“Barney Ross?” Seana said.

“No,” I said.

“Jackie Robinson?”

“Not that kind of hero.”

“Primo Levi?”

I shook my head again.

“Henry James?

“Only until he found out what an anti-Semite James was.”

“I forgot about that,” Seana said. “So I give up. Who was your father's hero?”

“My father's hero,” I said, “was a baggage guy at Bradley Airport. He met him when he and a colleague were going to a convention together. The colleague—his name was Friedman, Wolf Friedman, or maybe it was Freeman without the ‘d'—was a guy who got off on being snide to everybody. He'd published a few books of poems, and wrote about Frank O'Hara and that crowd, and was the kind of New York guy—I think of him as being from New York, though it turned out he came from Omaha, Nebraska, where his father was a kosher butcher—but he was the kind of guy who has to make a joke out of everything. And he used to brag about the critiques he laid on grad students—on their writing—and how under his
tutelage
—that's the word I remember Max said he used—he could get them to break down in class and cry.”

“That was Freeman—without the ‘d'—all right,” Seana said. “A schmuck-with-earlaps, first class. I got him good, though, at least twice. Remember, in
Plain Jane
, the butcher who gets
castrated by a group of Algerian men for raping one of their daughters? I named him Freeman Woolf. But that was just an old-fashioned novelist's revenge.”

“And in real life?” I asked.

“Freeman was famous among grad students for being a stinker,” Seana said, “and he was after me all semester to meet him for this or for that, so once grades were in—ever the practical young woman,
moi
—I agreed to meet him in a bar in Holyoke, and we were in a booth, and it was dark, and he was breathing hard. He put a hand on my lap and leaned close, and I blew on his ear and kept my eyes on his crotch. As soon as he was ripe, I reached over and grabbed his teeny-weeny and squeezed until he begged me to stop or to unzip him, and when I let go, I said I was curious about something—that I'd been wondering what his pecker got like when he had a hard-on.”

“Though I doubt my father used a similar tactic,” I said, “he probably said clever things to Freeman too. But Max never bragged to me about ways he put people down.”

“Your father was a man of elegance and discretion,” Seana said. “A
mensch
of
mensches
, as we say in Gaelic. He could be playful in unpredictably inventive ways. But he was rarely mean.”

“
Rarely?
” I asked.

“Nick could be mean,” Trish said. “Like his father. But Eugenia and I get along well—she comes here when I have my down times, and she's great with the children. And a lot tougher than she seems. But even so, I want you to know about a decision I made this morning.”

“Go for it,” Seana said.

“As Charlie knows, my parents are both dead,” Trish began, “and I don't talk to my brothers and sisters anymore.”

“I have no brothers,” Seana said. “But same story here.”

“That's sad, isn't it?” Trish said.

“Not if you knew my sisters,” Seana said.

“I'm like Nick,” I said. “Neither of us had brothers or sisters to not talk to. Friends like you two were always my family.”

“Lucky guy,” Seana said. “In my book, the idealization of family does as much harm as believing that falling-in-love with a one-and-only being the be-all and end-all of life. Friendship—having good friends you can count on, like you two—like Max—always trumps family.”