Between You and Me Page 4

  The kids had reappeared. Kyle dove at the leaf pile again, this time scattering it halfway across the street. Joy made a show of helping Paul carry the pumpkin, but mostly she wanted to examine it more closely, moving from one side to the other, and in the process added extra weight that nearly yanked it out of his hands. “Isn’t it beautiful?” she asked, flinging a braid out of her face, and answered herself before he could respond. “I think it’s a particularly nice pumpkin.” Paul didn’t blame her for wanting to throw herself at it. Russell’s gifts were sporadic—they almost never came on birthdays or Hanukkah—but were usually elaborate, in questionable taste, and often didn’t fit anywhere except in the garage. Where Paul would have parked his car, there was a prancing carousel horse, bought from the owner of a defunct amusement park in western Pennsylvania and shipped on a flatbed truck. It mostly collected dust, though every so often Joy would go out and polish it, petting its mane and flanks as if they were hair and flesh. She touched the pumpkin with the same reverence, no longer pretending to help as they got closer to the door. “I think the face should go on this side,” she said, sticking her hand between the pumpkin and Paul’s chest. “Don’t you agree?”

  “I hope you paid for those,” Cynthia called from the roof. She was standing at the edge, leaning casually on the shovel’s handle without any thought, it seemed, that it might slip out from under her arm and send her crashing down. Paul didn’t like the smile she gave Russell, which looked too much like the one she’d given him this morning, head cocked, lips pulled to one side.

  “Rosie the Roofer,” Russell said.

  “You didn’t steal them, I hope,” Cynthia said. “You’re not turning my children into criminals.”

  “Liberated, babe. Remember? Liberated. I never stole anything in my life.”

  “They cost twenty dollars,” Joy said.

  “Dad said he’d carve mine with fangs,” Kyle said.

  “Staying for dinner?” Cynthia asked.

  “Only if you cook it,” Russell said.

  “After I shower.”

  Russell closed his eyes, raised his chin, and smiled a dreamy smile. “That I can picture,” he said, and his boat shoes scraped their way inside.

  At the door Paul had to readjust the pumpkin, propping it up with his knee to keep it from slipping out of his hands. Joy made a move to help again, this time giving a look of sympathy that made him turn away. “Do you want to carve mine?” she asked. “I don’t care about fangs.”

  “Your dad’ll do it,” Paul said. “I’ve got to finish raking the leaves.”

  In the kitchen, Kyle was waiting for them, holding up two knives, one as long as his forearm, the other brand new, with a glinting edge. “Which do you want to use?” he asked, and even before Russell answered, Paul knew it would be the sharper one, the easier to cut out his heart.

  He stayed outside until the sun dropped behind the hills, taking his time clearing stray leaves and remolding his piles. From the kitchen he heard the kids’ laughter, and then Cynthia’s. No one came to check on him. The ladder was still propped against the house, giving burglars easy access to the skylights, but he couldn’t move it on his own. The blunt handle of Cynthia’s shovel peeked over the edge of the gutter. If it rained, the blade might rust, and though the morning’s weather report predicted clear skies for another day, he took hold of the ladder’s rails and put his foot on the first rung. One step up was easy. Five made sweat leak onto his forehead. Soon he was on a level with the bedroom windows, and his breath came quicker, but he didn’t stop. Another bout of dizziness made him close his eyes as he turned and lowered himself onto the roof shingles. The kids didn’t appreciate him. Cynthia had married him only because she didn’t have to worry he’d shack up with another woman. He could rake leaves all day, and still people told him to get off his ass.

  There was enough light on the horizon to make out other rooftops and the crowns of oaks sloping away on the western flank of Union Knoll, a kidney-shaped section of Lenape Lake peeking through a gap, the water a flat silver in the dusk, reflecting nothing. Far below were the plains of Dover and Rockaway, marked by a haphazard array of streetlights, nothing grid-like or orderly about it, and beyond, the hills of Sussex County rising toward High Point and the Water Gap, the wilderness into which Russell and the kids disappeared most summer Saturdays. Paul had spent the better part of his life higher off the ground than this, in apartments above Crown Street and West End Avenue, in his office south of Columbus Circle. But without walls or windows to hold him in, he felt as if he were dangling over the vista that surrounded him, as if the world could tip at any moment and roll him off the roof. He tossed the shovel down, hoping to spear it blade-first into the grass. But he couldn’t bring himself to look over the edge as he let go, and after a moment metal clanged on concrete.

  Yes, he was the one who saw Cynthia’s wry smile every day, her impatient frown, her naked body, no longer a stick, stepping out of the shower. He was the one who knew that Kyle had flunked two of his last five math quizzes and that Joy had recently replaced the kitten posters on her walls with figures carefully cut from magazines: not only movie stars but politicians, criminals, models from fashion advertisements, all arranged in a clever tableau, Faye Dunaway carrying on a conversation with Henry Kissinger, a bikini-clad model shaking a finger at a mobster in handcuffs. Russell could charm them all he wanted, but in a few hours he’d be gone, and Paul would have them for the rest of the week, with their complaints of boredom, their fights, their demands on his time and energy, their indifference and ingratitude. He didn’t have the luxury of driving off to the hills in a convertible, not today or ever. The light had faded now, the trees and rooftops losing their shape, and any moment Paul expected someone to come looking for him. The moment passed, and so did the next. No one did.

  When he went inside, potatoes were boiling on the stove, the sink was full of pumpkin guts, and Russell was wiping the Patek Philippe with a dishtowel. “Forgot to take it off,” he said. “Only cost me three months’ profit.” The two pumpkins sat on the counter, one with sharp fangs, as promised, the other with a gap-toothed smile and curlicues spinning out from its eyes. Kyle had put on his Halloween costume, a tattered shirt stuffed with rags and a rubber Frankenstein mask whose eye-holes didn’t quite line up with his sockets. He stomped around the kitchen, groaning and flailing his arms, bumping into a chair and then into Paul’s legs. At the kitchen table, Joy, who was going to her first co-ed party the next weekend, practiced her apple-bobbing skills with an orange sunk in a salad bowl. She winced every time she bit into the rind. Cynthia chopped vegetables at the counter, only a foot or so separating her from Russell. Her hair was wet, the skin of her neck pink from the shower, the smell of her shampoo strong even across the room. Russell watched her and grinned.

  “The leaves are done,” Paul said. “Just need to bag them. We should move the ladder before it’s too dark to see.” No one seemed to hear him but Kyle, who roared and stomped close enough that Paul had to do a little shuffle to save his toes. He made a break for the hallway, where he announced, louder than he meant to, “I’ll get the nice tablecloth.” When he turned back, Cynthia was holding up a spoonful of gravy for Russell to taste, and Russell’s mouth—wide and slick, lips lewdly spread—was heading in the direction of her chest. Paul hurried away.

  At dinner, he tried to describe Halloweens in Brooklyn, where Jewish kids scoured the neighborhood for gentile households, gathering homemade cookies and cakes without worrying they were filled with poison or baked with razor blades inside. But before he got very far, Russell cut him off with a story of his own. “Speaking of cookies,” Russell said, and then, after a long dramatic pause, started telling about a gang fight he’d witnessed one Halloween, between Italian boys in baseball outfits and Irish boys dressed as pirates. The story was violent and unseemly, and Paul didn’t believe a word. “Those pirates had little swords,” Russell said. “But they were really only kitchen knives. Couldn’t do mu
ch against baseball bats.”

  Paul didn’t see where cookies came into it, but before he could ask, Russell moved on to a new story, this one about sneaking into Yankee Stadium for a Sunday double-header. “Tickets cost a buck fifty then,” he said. “That doesn’t sound like much to you, but for me, it was a whole week’s lunches, and a dinner, too.” It was a convoluted story involving incredible risks and close-calls, run-ins with menacing ushers, encounters with beautiful women, connections to organized crime. Kyle, whose mask was now propped on top of his head, was so rapt he forgot to bring food up with his fork and instead bit down on metal. Cynthia smiled nostalgically, and when Paul caught her eye and winked at one of Russell’s more outrageous embellishments, she seemed startled to see him there, first blinking and then giving him a puzzled, impatient look before turning back to Russell. Only Joy was indifferent, baseball being a subject for boys, and Paul admired her independence as she made patterns in her potatoes by pressing them with the back of her fork. The whole time Russell spoke, Paul was aware of the gold watch flashing on his wrist, the radioactive face already glowing faintly in the dim light. Its presence, more than anything, offended him enough to make him break into the story for clarification. “What did you say the guard looked like?” he asked.

  “I didn’t,” Russell said, squinting at him, his square head tilted slightly to the side, his scalp, where the hair had receded, red and waxy. “Big guy. Like a guard.”

  “Dark hair? Light?”

  “He was wearing a hat. More importantly, he was carrying a night stick.”

  “Did guards really carry night sticks then?”

  “This one did,” Russell said. “Can I finish, please?”

  When young Russell finally made it into the stadium, he didn’t sit just anywhere, but right above the dugout. During the bottom of the sixth inning, he had a long conversation with Joe DiMaggio, telling Joe that his grandmother was sick, but that he was sure she’d get better if Joe hit a good one for him. And Joe did, a double that knocked in the winning run. “Best day of my life,” he said, and reached an arm in Cynthia’s direction, leaning so far forward his chest hair nearly dunked in his gravy. “That is, until I met your mother.”

  “Didn’t DiMaggio retire in ’51?” Paul asked.

  Russell turned to him slowly. “I don’t memorize statistics,” he said.

  “And you’re younger than me, right? Born in what, ’44, ’45?”

  “And? What’s your point?” This time he turned to Kyle, raised his eyebrows, and jerked a thumb in Paul’s direction. “Is this guy a lawyer or what?”

  Paul knew he shouldn’t go on. It wasn’t his place to shatter the children’s illusions about their father. But he was tired of illusions, especially the one that made him invisible. “So you must have been only six or seven when it happened,” he said.

  “I was mature for my age,” Russell said, sitting up straighter, forcing a smile no one could have mistaken for genuine.

  “And isn’t the Yankees dugout on the first base side?” This time Russell didn’t answer. He had his arms crossed in front of his plate, wrist bulging around watchband. Cynthia’s look now wasn’t impatient but plainly irritated, and Kyle pushed food around his plate, his eyes growing red. Joy went on eating her food as if the conversation still didn’t concern her, and now Paul wished her independence would give way to a newly adjusted loyalty. Why couldn’t they all see he was doing this for their benefit, exposing the emptiness of Russell’s charm, the danger of his influence? Didn’t Cynthia know the harm he was capable of better than anyone? Didn’t she want Joy to avoid her mistakes, when she finally did blossom into womanhood? “You said Berra waved to you when he rounded third,” he went on, in a casual, musing voice, as if he were in the process of puzzling out a significant mystery. “But if you were behind the dugout, you must have been on the other side of the field…”

  He waited for Russell to admit his lies. Or better yet, to deny them and disclose the depth of his deceit. But Russell just stuck a bite of chicken in his mouth and chewed. Kyle left the table without being excused, and soon TV voices replaced the protracted silence. After a minute, Joy started telling her father about her Halloween costume, which she was making herself out of old curtains. She was going as Miss Havisham from Great Expectations, an abridged version of which she’d read in school. “I’m going to be just like her when I grow up,” she said. “Rich and powerful, and I’m never going to get married.”

  Cynthia’s eyes flicked up to Paul and then down to her plate. “That’s the best idea I’ve heard all day,” she said.

  Soon Joy joined Kyle in front of the TV, and Cynthia began clearing plates. “Delicious as always,” Russell said, following close behind. “Let me do the washing.”

  Paul returned the good cloth to the hall closet, and when he came back into the kitchen, Cynthia and Russell stood close together at the sink, hardly enough space between them to see the cabinet behind. Both their feet were bare, Russell’s boat shoes left behind under the dining room table, and there was something inappropriately intimate about their nearly mingled toes. Dishes were piled on the counter, but the water wasn’t running yet. A few feet away the two jack-o’-lanterns alternately scowled and laughed.

  Russell and Cynthia were speaking in low tones, eyes fixed on each other. They seemed to be in some kind of communion: a married couple, Paul thought, who knew each other better than anyone and whom no one could pull apart. They were discussing something that went beyond words, that rose up from their deepest well of desire, that encompassed their long past together, that projected all their hopes for the future. Paul was quite certain that he and Cynthia had never had a conversation like this and never would. After two years, they weren’t much more than acquaintances who shared a bed, and he decided, not for the first time, that everything he did was a mistake, every step he’d taken in his life a wrong turn.

  They didn’t face him when he came in, not even when he cleared his throat. He took a step closer, but still their eyes didn’t leave each other’s faces. Impending loss gripped him, at once dark and enlightening, and with it came an odd curiosity. What would it feel like to fall from a roof? How many times would he tumble? On what vital organ would he land?

  He was close enough now to hear their words: “You told me you would,” Cynthia said. “And now you’re saying you won’t.”

  “That’s not what I said.” Russell did glance at him then. He gave a surprising little grin—a look of collusion, it seemed, one that asked for sympathy, that anticipated a mutual understanding. In his confusion all Paul could do was stare back blankly. Russell turned to the counter and started moving dishes into the sink. “I said I’d have to check the books and make some arrangements. It might take some time.”

  “I’m not paying late again,” Cynthia said. “I did it last year with their Hebrew school fees. It’s embarrassing.”

  “Hey,” Russell said, turning on the faucet and giving Paul another look over his shoulder, this one desperate, a plea for help. “Ask not what Demsky can do—”

  “Your watch!” Paul cried, just as Russell was about to plunge it into the suds.

  For a moment Russell froze above the water, his hands clawed, shoulders hunched, and Paul thought he could see the outlaw in him, or the petty thief sneaking through a moonlit field stuffing a pillowcase with squash. The look of relief on his face went beyond antique watches. He thanked himself every day, Paul guessed, for having unburdened himself of family and obligation, for having freed himself from one trap after another. But the question remained: why did he always find new things to trap him? He thanked Paul and handed him the Patek Philippe. “Saved me some bucks,” he said. “I owe you one.”

  Cynthia had moved to the stove, where she scrubbed a spot of gravy beside the largest burner, her feet now closer to Paul’s—in socks—than Russell’s. “You know this isn’t about money,” she said. “We can afford to do it ourselves. But she’s your daughter, too.”

 
“I know she is,” Russell said. “Didn’t I just get her a pumpkin?”

  “It’s not the same as paying for bat mitzvah lessons.”

  “It’s Beth,” he said, quieter now, his voice going hoarse. “The wedding. The goddamn dress. She’s bleeding me dry.”

  “People who don’t have money for their kids don’t honeymoon in Fiji.”

  “Give me a break, Cyn,” he said, all the swagger gone from his voice, his arm stripped of gold and radium, covered in nothing but soap bubbles.

  “You’ve had more breaks than one person deserves. I don’t have any left to give. Not to you,” she said, and shot Paul a quick, furious glance, “or anyone else.”

  Paul had done enough work for one day. His leg muscles were sore from raking, his hands beginning to cramp. He joined the kids in the family room, where they were watching The Godfather, edited for television. The scene cut away just before Sonny’s assassination, and Paul said, “They ruin it with the advertisements,” but neither of the kids looked up. They were both asleep, Kyle stretched out on the floor, Joy with one long leg dangling off the couch.

  From the armchair he watched a car speeding along winding mountain roads, then a family eating fast food burgers, then a man shaving: two blades, apparently, were more effective than one. Moments later James Caan pulled up to the toll booth. Paul was still holding the watch. It was a pleasant weight, smooth to touch, glowing eerily when he cupped his hands around it and peeked between his fingers. Bullets rained on Sonny’s car. Joy stirred but didn’t open her eyes. The Patek Philippe slipped easily into Paul’s pocket. For bat mitzvah lessons, he thought, picturing a pawn shop and a roll of cash, hearing his wife’s and stepdaughter’s words of gratitude.