Between You and Me Page 3

  This morning, he felt comfortable with his permissiveness. His own parenting instincts leaned toward allowing for freedom and self-discovery, he decided, though that was the opposite of how he himself had been raised. His mother had walked him to school until he was fourteen and had done his laundry—ironing even his underwear and socks—until he’d gone away to college, and again when he’d lived at home after graduating. He’d never had to fend for himself, and as a teenager he’d been an outcast, lonely and miserable, while his peers wreaked havoc all over the city.

  “Paul?” Joy asked. She gave him the same thoughtful but puzzled expression she’d had the night before, and again he was made uneasy by the dip in her ordinary confidence. “An iron maiden’s a girl made out of metal, right?”

  “That’s right,” he said, and immediately wondered if he should have told the truth. Why try to protect her from the ugliness of the world, from its cruelty, from knowledge she’d gain sooner or later? She seemed satisfied with his answer, wiping waffle grease from her fingers onto her pajamas. It amazed him to think she’d take his word so easily. He had too much power, too much capacity for harm. “I think that’s right,” he added. “But you might want to look it up.”

  The cat hissed and growled on the windowsill, its fur raised in a line down its back. Paul went to the window and found himself facing a deer, only inches away, its moist eyes taking him in with modest concern, its huge comical ears swiveling, flank twitching. When it saw that he and Franklin were safely contained, it went back to munching pansies in Cynthia’s planter.

  “Are they at it again?” Joy said behind him. “For crying out loud.”

  He couldn’t take his eyes from the creature, wondering how it carried such bulk on its twiggy legs, how something as insubstantial as flowers could sustain it. He heard Joy push back from the table and head for the door and knew he should stop her—this was a wild animal, after all, four times her size—but he didn’t move. Franklin hissed again, and the deer flicked its tail. When the back door slammed, it raised its head once more, looking first at Paul with something like accusation, as if the two of them had struck a bargain on which Paul had reneged. Then, glimpsing Joy running toward it, it sprang away with an impossible lightness, weighing no more, it seemed, than the blossoms it had swallowed.

  “Shoo,” Joy called, chasing it across the lawn, her lemon pajamas flapping around her, until it hopped a short fence into a neighbor’s yard. On her way back she turned a couple of cartwheels, her bare, oversized feet flinging into the air, and Paul felt himself, too, go light as those blossoms, dizzy and choked up to the point of tears.

  How could he have wasted so much time? How could he have so little left?

  In a few short years Joy would be a teenager herself, with hair in her eyes and demons on her clothes, and nothing he’d say would touch her at all.

  The Measure of a Man

  1983

  It was a mild Saturday in late October, and Paul was raking leaves. He’d never raked before. His previous experience with leaves was to watch them blow off the park and get sucked into mechanized street sweepers. In the two years since he’d moved to the suburbs, he’d consistently avoided outdoor chores, always finding an excuse to go to the office those weekends Cynthia decided it was time for spring clean-up or summer planting. He would have avoided them this time, too, except she’d caught him unprepared, saying at breakfast that she’d like his help cleaning the gutters. “You mean on the roof?” he’d asked from the counter, where he was pouring coffee. Dizziness came with a sudden chill in his groin, and he had to close his eyes. When he opened them, Cynthia was standing next to him, in her robe, giving the closed-lip smile that always flushed his head of reasonable thoughts. For that smile he’d moved to the sticks. He supposed he would have climbed roofs for it, too. Or jumped off of them.

  “No, I mean at the bowling alley,” she said, and flicked his earlobe with a finger. “You can stay on the lawn and pick up what I chuck down.”

  She was on the roof now, in a kerchief and a pair of faded overalls he hadn’t known she owned—holdovers from her emaciated counterculture days, maybe, though even now that her body had filled out, they drooped on her and left her shapeless—wielding a small shovel with which she tossed down soggy, half-rotted mounds of leaves that Paul raked along with those freshly fallen. And to his surprise, he enjoyed the movement of his arms, the sound of metal tines scraping earth, the sun on his neck, even the sweat dripping down his back. There was satisfaction in seeing grass reappear strip by strip, and in making multicolored heaps at the curb. He thought he could go on raking all day, pleasurably mindless, in a sort of half-trance, until Cynthia’s kids came home in the early evening. And if he weren’t thinking about the kids, off with their father God-knows-where, he might have felt as relaxed as he’d ever been.

  But the thought of Kyle and Joy hurtling down country roads in Russell Demsky’s Mustang convertible distracted him, and more than once he found himself staring up Lenape Road when a car came racing down. “That rake isn’t going to move itself,” Cynthia called, and for the next fifteen minutes he fixed his gaze on the ground. It wasn’t that he believed the kids were in danger—not physically, at least—but Russell’s influence troubled him. They were with their father most Saturdays, when he took them on excursions in the opposite direction from those Paul preferred, fishing in Lake Hopatcong, hiking at High Point, canoeing in the Delaware Water Gap. Kyle and Joy came home sunburned and so exhausted that half an hour of TV and a bowl of ice cream were all it took to get them to sleep, when normally they’d negotiate for hours, promising to keep their rooms clean and make their beds every day for the rest of their lives if only this once they could stay up till midnight.

  Their enthusiasm for Russell’s outings stirred unexpected jealousy, and to make himself feel better, Paul organized Sunday trips to the circus or the Ice Capades or the Museum of Natural History, where Kyle gawked at dinosaur bones and Joy scrutinized gems in the hall of minerals. He waited for them to express excitement, and even more, gratitude, and always found himself dejected when they weren’t forthcoming. His stepkids went strangely silent when they emerged from the Lincoln Tunnel to find the world so altered in front of them: sharp angles of stone and brick, steel and glass, framing segmented patches of sky and clouds. Neat containers, Paul had always thought, for childhood dreams. He wanted to take their silence for awe, but he knew fear too well not to recognize it in their faces as they stepped over sleeping bodies in the Port Authority or grabbed onto his coat as they crossed Eighth Avenue. He hoped, at least, that they were impressed with the energy and grit, or if nothing else, with his ease in navigating the crowded sidewalks. But only when a streetwalker in red vinyl shorts waved a lit cigarette at him, asking if he wanted a date, did the kids look up from their shoes. He knew better than to make eye contact, but still the woman followed them to the end of the block. Joy giggled into her sleeve, and Kyle kept asking what she wanted. Eventually Paul answered, “Money for clothes. Wouldn’t you be cold out here without long pants?”

  Joy, who knew too much for her age, mimicked the woman’s sultry voice, her own just above a whisper. “Looking for love, honey?” Then she laughed so hard she doubled over and lost her grip on Paul’s coat. He walked on a few steps without her, and when she realized it, her face went white with panic. He held his hand out to her, and though she ran to it, she also gave him a look of such injury, lower lip sucked into her mouth, brows pinched together, that he knew it would take days for her to forgive him this moment of abandonment. To make up for it, he bought each of them a hot dog and cotton candy the moment they stepped into the Garden, and on the drive home he was gratified when Joy laughed with him over one of the figure skaters’ outfits—“She looked like a rotten strawberry”—and even more so when Kyle fell asleep just shy of the Meadowlands.

  Still, the next morning, when he asked if they’d like to visit South Street Seaport the following Sunday, or ride to the top of the Emp
ire State Building, neither of them responded, and he left for work in a sour mood. On the train, he tried to reassure himself that, looking back later in life, they’d appreciate his effort and value these adventures together at least as much as those with their father—though jostling his way onto the overcrowded Path, he had his doubts. One day, when they were old enough, he’d ask outright.

  •

  In the two years he’d been married to Cynthia he’d come to accept the complex role he played in the kids’ lives. He spent far more time with them than Russell did, and his presence—assuming it lasted—would inevitably color their view of the world and impact their future. But he had to work with a light and steady hand. If he tried too hard, they’d rebel; if he feigned indifference, they’d drift in the direction of their father, an amiable though inconsistent figure in their lives, who spun elaborate stories about his travels and brushes with the law but who often canceled visits at the last minute or, when he didn’t cancel, occasionally forgot to feed them lunch.

  Paul saw himself as an antidote to Russell Demsky: serious, predictable, conscientious, and forthright where Russell was silly, erratic, thoughtless, and dissembling. He didn’t intend to undermine their father, or make them love him less, but he hoped to guide the children toward adulthoods in which they weren’t scarred by Russell’s influence, always wishing for some alternate model of male responsibility. For Kyle, the danger was less a threat to himself than to his future family. More worrisome was the possibility that Joy might marry an asshole.

  At dinner he told stories about growing up in Brooklyn. Not at length, and not every night, but just often enough to give them a sense of what they were missing in this placid neighborhood where sidewalks led only from one lawn to another, and where the closest newspaper was a ten-minute drive away. He tried to provide enough details for them to visualize: his family’s apartment five stories above Crown Street, stickball games in a lot behind Empire Boulevard, his father Manny—born Menachem, and whom the children called Papi—standing at the counter of his pharmacy on Utica Avenue, or on the sidewalk out front, greeting neighbors, arguing about baseball—“Ruth never coulda hit Newcombe. Not with a bat the size of a tennis racket”—yelling at drivers to slow down. But he purposely left out anything unsavory, including the two times his father had been robbed coming out of his store, once with a knife, once at gunpoint. He didn’t tell them about the friend who, chasing a rubber ball into traffic, ran straight into a Ford Deluxe and died in the hospital two days later. Nor did he describe the way his mother bullied the local grocers, questioning the accuracy of their scales, in order to get discounts on produce for which she could afford to pay full price. If his version of Brooklyn was idealized, it was at least honest in its broad strokes, and it accomplished what he hoped: giving Joy and Kyle a picture of childhood that didn’t include constant complaints of boredom and fights over who would sit in the front seat of the car.

  The problem was, their father had had a similar childhood, but in the Bronx, where he’d gone to the nefarious Yankee Stadium instead of Ebbets Field, and he told similar stories, except that rather than leave things out, Russell embellished. Not even the toughest neighborhoods in the ’50s had as many fights or gangs or underworld criminals as the kids reported hearing from their father, and the Demskys couldn’t have been so poor that Russell went one entire winter wearing a scavenged bathrobe as a coat. But that was how Russell told it, and that was what the children believed. Most afternoons they didn’t want to leave the backyard, where Kyle searched for salamanders under rocks and Joy practiced moves she’d learned in dance class, kicking up her legs, flinging her arms over her head, landing in splits—none of it quite graceful, with her long bony limbs and big wobbly head, a body that would soon, Cynthia kept warning him, explode into puberty. “Don’t you mean blossom into womanhood?” Paul asked, to which Cynthia replied, “That won’t happen until she gets her first vibrator.”

  Paul had heard enough stories about Russell to know that lying wasn’t beyond him. Nor was crime. When they were in their early twenties, living upstate with friends who’d bought a dilapidated farm, Cynthia and Russell had been so broke they’d sold their car and record player and the few pieces of jewelry Cynthia had inherited from her grandmother. But they burned through that money—dope, dope, and more dope, Cynthia said—and could afford to eat only once a day. The friends owned six acres, but all they managed to grow was a handful of peas and a field of wormy potatoes. “I thought about turning tricks,” Cynthia said, in a sardonic voice that left Paul wondering whether or not she was pulling his leg. “I kind of liked the idea, but Russ wasn’t too keen. Why do I always end up with such possessive men?”

  Late one night Russell snuck out with a pillowcase over his shoulder. An hour later he returned with a load of beans and squash. The next night he came back with a bucket full of eggs, and a week later, a slaughtered chicken. He wouldn’t tell where he’d gotten any of it. Their friends started calling him Russell Hood, and then just The Hood. “He kept us from starving,” Cynthia said. “But I swear I’ll never eat squash again.” She said it with a short, dismissive laugh, but Paul heard the wistfulness in it, the nostalgia for the craziness and freedom of youth, and admiration for the man who’d shared her bed for a dozen years. “He could surprise you, that’s for sure,” she said. “Most of the surprises I could have done without. But every once in a while he’d just make you scratch your head and go along. It was best not to do too much thinking.” When the farm was foreclosed, Russell borrowed the friends’ car, siphoned gas from a neighbor, and took off—without Cynthia. She caught up to him a month later, in Virginia Beach, where he was living with another woman. Three years later she was pregnant with Joy.

  In the one photograph Paul had seen from that time, Cynthia was a stick in a short, flimsy sack, her body hardly more developed than Joy’s, long fingers gripping a trowel, dirty feet turned inward like an infant’s. Russell’s hair was a woolly mass that fell past his shoulders, and his long mustache cut his entire face in half, flaring out from his nostrils and connecting to his sideburns. He wore fringed leather trousers and cowboy boots. If not for the loose embroidered shirt and string of beads around his neck, he could have played an outlaw in a Peckinpah bloodbath.

  Now, aside from the Mustang—a ’67, which he’d bought in ’79—and his irritating habit of quoting, or misquoting, famous figures of the era—“Ask not what Demsky can do for you, but what you can get Demsky to drink”—Russell had left the sixties behind. The mass of hair was cut almost as short as a Marine’s, receding in front and thinning at the crown, and he’d traded leather trousers and cowboy boots for golf slacks and boat shoes, beads for an outrageously expensive antique Swiss watch: a 1929 Patek Philippe, he liked to tell everyone, with a solid gold base and a porcelain dial painted with radium. “Some poor girl in Geneva nuked herself so I can tell time in the dark,” he’d say, and laugh. He’d been married and divorced once more since he and Cynthia had split, and now he was engaged to a woman Joy referred to as Her Highness, the Princess of Roxbury, whom Paul had glimpsed only once, from the bedroom window, sitting stiffly in the Mustang, wearing sunglasses and a silk headscarf. Russell had traded his part in a Western for one in a film noir.

  But as much as Paul wanted to ridicule him, he couldn’t help being fascinated by Russell, or at least by the idea of Russell, who lived a life unencumbered by ordinary notions of right and wrong. He made his living as a dealer in antique oriental rugs, and most of his stock came into the country illegally from Isfahan. “The blessed State Department,” he’d say, when new sanctions were imposed on Iran. “They just doubled the value of my stock.” Then he’d start a lecture about the history of Persia, explaining, as if anyone cared, that the Islamists had co-opted what had started as a Marxist revolution. “They did me a big favor,” he’d say. “If the Commies had taken over, I’d be out of business. They’d be using kilims to cover the floors of factories.”

  By late afte
rnoon, when the lawn was nearly free of leaves, Paul was anxious to know that the Mustang wasn’t overturned in a ditch or at the bottom of a ravine. But mostly he was picturing the kids’ wide eyes as Russell paddled a canoe through rapids or reeled in a flailing fish. There was no reason to be envious; he was the one married to Cynthia, the one living in the house with Joy and Kyle. Still, he had to work hard to keep himself from pacing in the yard as the time Russell had promised to return the kids approached, arrived, and passed.

  “He’s always late,” Cynthia called from the roof, her overalls filthy now, her neck and face spotted with muck. The slope pitched her at an impossible angle, and two stories up she loomed against the bright sky, the ends of her kerchief sticking up like horns. “You should be used to it by now.”

  When the Mustang did finally pull to the curb, it rolled over one of his leaf piles. The kids poured out of the front and jumped in another pile, and then tore into the house, trailing leaves across the lawn. “Hey!” Paul cried, but before he could say anything else, Russell clapped and called to him.

  “The measure of a man,” he said, raising a hand triumphantly over his head, “is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience. So get off your ass and help me unload the goods.”

  Paul took his time setting aside the rake. The words weren’t accurate—he hadn’t been on his ass at all—but they bothered him most because “measure of a man” sounded like a crack about his height. Russell had four inches on him, and at least two neck sizes, though as far as Paul knew Russell never buttoned a collar or wore a tie. His clients wanted what he had to sell badly enough that they put up with his open shirt and tufts of chest hair, which were a good inch longer than the hair on his head. In the back seat were two enormous pumpkins, leaning together like an additional pair of fat, warty children. “Watch the leather,” Russell said as Paul got his arms around one. It was heavier than he’d expected and knocked against the door before he could pull it free. “That stem’s got sharp edges.”