Between You and Me Read online

  Table of Contents

  Praise for Between You and Me

  Half-Title Page

  Also by Scott Nadelson

  Title Page

  Copyright Information

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Girl Made of Metal

  The Measure of a Man

  Nocture for left hand 1

  Old What's His Name

  Could Be Worse

  Nocturne for left hand 2

  Some Macher

  Grow or Sell

  Around the Cape of Good Hope

  Nocturne for left hand 3

  Wha' Happened

  A Complete Unknown

  Nocturne for left hand 4

  Between You and Me

  Anything Quite Like It

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise for Between You and Me

  “Scott Nadelson gives us a true Gogolian hero in Paul Haberman, a small, yearning, middle-aged suburbanite in New Jersey, beset by vague terrors and also by a trembling awareness of all the world has to offer, while not knowing how to ask, most of the time, for any of it. Haberman is a radiant character and Between You and Me is a hilarious, poignant, darkly glittering gem of a novel.”

  —Suzanne Berne, author of A Crime in the Neighborhood

  “What a wonderful and affecting novel Scott Nadelson has written. As is clear from the hilarious opening standoff in a New Jersey mall parking lot, the author has a talent for zooming in—with uncanny psychological precision—on the small, defining moments of individual experience. And yet the story that results, as we revisit Paul Haberman over two decades of his adulthood, becomes that of a universal everyman, whose equivocal life seems more and more resplendent as we follow him through the years.”

  —Frederick Reiken, author of Day For Night

  “Scott Nadelson’s novel, Between You and Me, grows on you, gains weight chapter by chapter as its hero, Paul Haberman—step-father, husband, lawyer, son and brother—stumbles his way through passive and passionless middle age to stand, finally, in his own skin as a man and to affirm his life. The ending is beautiful. The beginning and middle pieces add up, finally, like any good befuddling adventure, to something astounding. Something extraordinary. Yes, I said, when I’d read the last pages, yes.”

  —David Allan Cates, author of Tom Connor’s Gift

  Between

  You and Me

  Also by Scott Nadelson

  The Next Scott Nadelson: A Life in Progress

  Aftermath

  The Cantor’s Daughter: Stories

  Saving Stanley: The Brickman Stories

  Between

  You and Me

  Scott Nadelson

  Engine Books

  Indianapolis

  Engine Books

  PO Box 44167

  Indianapolis, IN 46244

  enginebooks.org

  Copyright © 2015 by Scott Nadelson

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify owners of copyright. Errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are

  either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.

  Also available in paperback from Engine Books.

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN: 978-1-938126-34-5

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2015953148

  For Marjorie, Tracy, and Ehud

  A man who headed no cause, fought in no wars, and passed his life unaware of the great public issues—it might be asked: why trouble with such a man at all?

  —Wright Morris

  Girl Made of Metal

  1981

  The Rockaway Mall movie theater still had only six screens, tucked between the Bamberger’s and the video arcade. It would be a few more years before another six were built, in a strip mall annex beside the Sizzler that dropouts from Morris Knolls High School would later accidentally burn down during a burglary. Those new screens would have plenty of parking spaces, separated as they were from the main complex, but this afternoon, a rainy Sunday in early July, Paul Haberman had to compete for spots with every shopper in Morris County, every teenager playing Asteroids and smoking cigarettes and trying to look fearsome.

  In the back seat of his Imperial sat his wife’s two children. Joy was nine, a fast-growing twig with surprisingly fair hair—both her mother’s and father’s were black—and an unfortunate habit of staring with her mouth open, which made her appear less intelligent than she was and less pretty than she wanted to be. Kyle, seven, was the slower of the two, a dark runt with Cynthia’s curly hair and dense eyebrows and a tendency to whine when he didn’t get what he wanted. When he didn’t know what he wanted, he invented illnesses for himself: stomachaches, dizzy spells, mysterious, invisible rashes. He was whining now—“Why don’t you park already?”—as Paul tried to pull into a spot just as another car nosed in.

  Sunday afternoon was Paul’s time to bond with the kids, while Cynthia attended Hadassah meetings at the synagogue in Morristown. They’d been married just over a month, and on five Sundays he’d taken the children to five different movies. He’d never had kids and didn’t know what else to do with them. Spending two hours in a darkened room without speaking seemed the safest option.

  In his younger days, during college and law school and his first years living on his own, when he was awkward and in debt and women weren’t attracted to him, he’d mourned the notion that he’d never have a family. He’d fantasized idly about his unborn children, thinking how fortunate they would have been to have him as a father. There was so much he could have taught them—how to ride the subway, how to score a baseball game, how to avoid panhandlers and men in trenchcoats selling fake or stolen Rolexes. He would have imparted wisdom and taste and culture, introduced them to books, music, film. In his imagination they were always grateful, full of the appreciation he felt he deserved but never received from anyone else.

  But by the time he hit his mid-thirties, he’d settled into a comfortable bachelor’s life, with a job as in-house legal counsel—one of a dozen—for a mid-sized insurance firm in Midtown and an apartment on the Upper West Side he shared with his cat Franklin, a docile tabby content to sit in the window all day, staring down onto 79th Street. He flew around the world and ate dinner at four-star restaurants and always had more money than he knew how to spend, tossing it at extravagances like the Imperial, which, before moving to New Jersey, he’d hardly ever driven. Age suited his face, which had become, if not handsome, at least dignified, with a stately widow’s peak and a neatly trimmed mustache that partly compensated for his sunken chin. He’d discovered a means of appearing confident even when he wasn’t, cloaking self-consciousness in a façade of cool indifference. To his surprise, women now found him appealing, responding easily to his advances, and sometimes the uncomfortable notion came into his mind that it could have been this way all along, that he’d wasted years of opportunity. But mostly he was grateful. He no longer thought much about having a family, content with sex, which, having eluded him for so long, he finally enjoyed in abundance.

  He met Cynthia a week after his fortieth birthday, at a Passover seder his cousin hosted at her house in Randolph. His cousin was also a member of the Morristown Hadassah and had been talking to him about Cynthia for nearly a year, though nothing she’d said had sparked his interest. What did h
e want with a suburban divorcée, the mother of two kids, a woman nearly as old as himself, when he regularly went to bed with girls in their early twenties, carefree and unfettered, who often as not would disappear from Paul’s life before he knew where they were born, how many siblings they had, what college they’d attended?

  But his cousin was right. Cynthia was far sexier than most of those twenty-three-year-olds, who hadn’t yet grown into their beautiful bodies, didn’t know how to move them, as Cynthia did, in a way that made him gawk as she carried trays of food into his cousin’s dining room, her loose dress sashaying around her hips, bare shoulders pearly under his cousin’s gaudy chandelier. Her voice had a hint of rasp in it, especially when she laughed, and she asked questions about Paul’s job in a direct, probing manner that startled him, her arms crossed on the table, eyes locked on his. When he described how he spent his days—negotiating contracts and filing briefs—she winced and shook her head. “God, that sounds deadly.” She told him about her own job as a counselor at Morris Knolls, writing letters of recommendation for half the population, bound for college, recommending drug rehab programs for the other half, bound for prison. “It’s pretty deadly, too,” she said.

  At the end of the evening, after they’d eaten their fill of matzah and horseradish and drank their four glasses of wine, Paul walked her to her car. He asked for her number and shook her hand, thinking it would be too forward to kiss her cheek—she was the mother of young children, after all, who were at a seder with their father—and in response she gave him a look of confusion, and maybe insult. “Aren’t you following me home?” she asked. “Isn’t that what all this was about?”

  He found himself deeply, heedlessly in love. It astonished him to think he could have been content with anything else, and again he had the feeling that he’d wasted time, that he could have had what he’d wanted all along, if only he’d been brave enough to decide what that was. It astonished him, too, to find himself happily spending Saturdays in New Jersey, a place that before had been nothing but a wall of cliffs and dock cranes glimpsed through his office window. Cynthia’s kids spent Saturdays with their father, a burly man with a military bearing, who, to Paul’s surprise, had been a shaggy hippie when he and Cynthia had gotten together. “We were such kids,” Cynthia said whenever she talked about her marriage, and though she said it to explain what a mistake it had been, her voice carried a longing that made Paul envious. He wished they could have been wild kids together, too—though he hadn’t been much of a wild kid on his own—and not these adults with so many responsibilities, jobs and mortgages and car payments and children.

  Children. Did he want them, after all this time?

  When they discussed marriage, Cynthia was quick to say that she didn’t expect him to be a father to Joy and Kyle. “They already have one reluctant dad. They don’t need a second.”

  He just had to be himself, she told him, and whatever developed between them was fine with her. And this, he supposed, was what he’d really wanted all along. A family with no obligation, no responsibilities other than those he already had.

  He proposed.

  But now, more than a month after he’d rented out his apartment and moved Franklin into Cynthia’s rambling suburban house, where the cat was made suddenly anxious by the choice of so many windows to sit in, pacing all night and crying for no reason, Paul faced these Sunday afternoons with trepidation. If he wasn’t supposed to be the children’s father, what was he supposed to be? He didn’t want to be their friend, exactly, or some benevolent uncle figure. He wanted them to look up to him, to benefit from his experience and taste. On their first outing to the movies he’d taken them to see Kramer vs. Kramer—checking ahead to make sure it was rated PG—at a second-run theater in Montclair. Kyle fell asleep after the first fifteen minutes and was cranky for the rest of the evening. Joy said afterward that she thought the movie was “hyper,” which Paul took to mean she found it melodramatic. She was the child of a divorce, she reminded him; she knew about these things firsthand. Plus, she didn’t think it was an appropriate choice for someone her age.

  Since then he’d let the kids choose the films, and they’d seen two inane pictures about a Volkswagen Beetle with a mind of its own and a ridiculous comedy about cavemen—with Ringo Starr, of all people, in the lead role—which, despite himself, Paul enjoyed. Now they were on their way to the new Muppets movie, running late because Joy decided to change her shoes just before they walked out the door, and because Kyle spent five minutes arguing about putting on his raincoat. Paul had circled the parking lot for another fifteen, squinting through his fogged windshield, occasionally glimpsing a spot the next aisle over and winging too fast around a corner, only to find it taken by the time he got there. His window was open a crack, but still he found it hard to breathe, and rain sputtered against his neck. He felt a touch of panic at the thought of Cynthia’s exasperation when she came home from Hadassah to find everyone miserable and desperate for her attention. When he saw the empty spot only a few aisles from the theater’s entrance, he jammed on the gas in spite of the car gunning for it from the opposite direction.

  Neither car could get into the spot. Both Paul and the other driver leaned on their horns. In the backseat, Kyle whined louder, the only distinguishable words being “Muppets” and “promise.”

  Joy said, “This is just terrific.”

  The other car was a Camaro, with flames painted on its hood, and the kid who stuck his head out the driver’s window had lank hair to his shoulders and a long pointed face, like a possum’s. Paul had seen a possum for the first time earlier this month, pulling into the driveway late one evening after work. It had been flat on the pavement, dead, he thought, until he approached and nudged it with his foot. Then it hissed at him, baring its needle teeth, eyes hollow and chilling. Paul stifled a shriek as it ran away, its tail longer and more naked than any rat’s, of which he’d seen plenty during his forty years riding New York subways. A week later he saw a raccoon while taking out the trash, and early one morning soon after, a deer defoliating one of the backyard shrubs. How he’d gotten himself into the wilderness he had no idea. The place was overrun with—or run by—animals and teenagers. In comparison, Manhattan was the tamest, most civilized place on earth.

  In the Camaro’s passenger seat was a pale, pimpled girl with a cigarette dangling from one corner of her mouth and hair that swooped in front of her eyes before feathering over her ears. He couldn’t be sure she could even see him, until she lifted a hand lazily and gave him the finger. “Beat it, man,” the kid beside her said, waving a hairless arm that was almost as slender as Joy’s. “This one’s mine.”

  “We missed the start,” Joy said. “We might as well go home.”

  “I want Kermit,” Kyle said, beginning to cry. He tried clambering over the front seat, but Paul blocked his way with an arm.

  “We’ve got time,” he said. “Sit until we’re parked.”

  “You better find another spot, then,” Joy said. “This could take all day.”

  “I was here first. I had my blinker on.”

  Paul hit the horn again, which sent the kid into a fury of throwing open his door, shouting, tapping himself on the chest. A possum playing ape. He wore a t-shirt with the sleeves cut off, the words “Iron Maiden” at the top, some kind of neon demon wielding a hatchet beneath. When he stood, he was taller than Paul expected, half a head taller than himself, though narrow across the shoulders, with almost dainty hands.

  “Paul,” Joy said, leaning over the front seat. “I think you should let him have it.”

  What did she want him to have, the spot or a punch in the nose? From her tone he couldn’t tell, and he didn’t ask. Instead he jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Down,” he said.

  Kyle whimpered. “I want to go home.”

  “Get the fuck outta my way,” the kid shouted, coming toward them. The rain made hair stick to his face, and now he looked like a wet possum, only his teeth were blunt and yellowe
d. “Or get outta the car.”

  Paul rolled up his window, locked the door, and hit the horn. The kid’s nose and chin were red, eyes slits.

  “This isn’t getting us anywhere,” Joy said.

  “I was here first,” Paul said again. He knew he was supposed to do something now, and that whatever he did would be a lesson for the children. But what lesson was the appropriate one? It was strange to think his actions could have consequences for anyone outside of himself. If he backed the car away, as he wanted to, wouldn’t that teach them meekness, that the aggressor always wins? If he got out of the car and shouted the kid down, as Cynthia would have, or pummeled him, as the children’s father might, they’d turn into loud, thoughtless brutes. Maybe the best course was to let the kid pummel him—likely, if he did get out of the car—and then lecture the children about Ghandi and nonviolent resistance and tell them stories about the protests of the sixties, which he’d watched on TV.

  The one thing he knew they shouldn’t learn was how petrified he was, though he suspected they could smell it on him as dogs did. He decided against doing anything, except to sit there with his hands locked on the steering wheel, eyes set straight ahead. The girl in the passenger seat of the Camaro looked bored or asleep, head resting against the window, cigarette still burning.

  “I’ll kick your fucking ass,” the kid said. He pressed his possum face to the window, palms flat against the glass.

  “My bladder hurts,” Kyle said. “And I have a fever.”

  The demon on the black t-shirt was meant to be menacing, but if anything Paul found it mesmerizing. Its eyes were empty holes, glowing in their centers, its mouth set in an enormous skeletal sneer above a cleft, skinless chin. Hands grabbed its shirt from below, and its hatchet dripped blood, but there was a soft chartreuse shimmer to its teased hair, and behind it floated pearly clouds. He knew what an iron maiden was and supposed it was a clever name for a rock and roll outfit—it was no sillier, really, than The Beatles—but it seemed to have nothing to do with the demon, which was as lanky and feminine as the kid himself, who backed away a step now, and crossed his arms. It took Paul a moment to realize why.