Between You and Me Read online

  “All right,” the Baron said, standing abruptly and waving the check at the door. “Now get back to your patients before they start thinking you skipped out to play golf.”

  He followed Paul out to the curb, watched as he opened the Imperial’s door and slid inside. The sunlight set him blinking, and he couldn’t seem to stop. He had Paul rev the engine several times, run the windshield wipers, press on the brakes while he checked the rear lights. Then he patted the trunk and said, “You’ve got a keeper here. We should all be so blessed.”

  He stayed where he was as Paul put the car in gear and rolled down the street. He was still there, in the rearview mirror, by the time Paul made it to the intersection and began to turn. There was no question the Baron was taking him for a ride. He’d known that for some time now. What bothered him wasn’t going along with it so much as realizing how badly he needed it. He couldn’t wait to hear the Baron say, “Your life sounds all right, doc,” only then believing it. It didn’t matter that the Baron knew nothing about him, not even what he did for a living. Why couldn’t he decide his life was all right for himself, without having to compare it to one that wasn’t?

  Nevertheless, he enjoyed gliding down the quiet, late-morning freeway, floating on rotated tires, all parts greased and slipping across each other without friction. Before he made it to the train station, he turned on the air conditioning and bathed in the cool breeze, knowing that for a short while—the rest of the day, the next week or two—he’d trust metal and rubber and the mostly smooth pavement underneath.

  Nocturne for left hand

  She grabs his hand and pulls him onto the dance floor before he can think to stop her. He has a glass in his other hand, the last sips of a Tom Collins Cynthia passed him more than an hour ago, the ice melted now, the gin and sweet-sour syrup watery and warm. He doesn’t know what to do with it so clamps it against his chest and tries to move as little as possible to keep its contents from sloshing over the sides onto his shirt. But this isn’t music that allows for stillness, with its hammering drums and barked lyrics, not to mention Joy thrashing in front of him, all sharp elbows and knees and shiny thick-soled boots stamping the floorboards by his feet. She might not mind a drink spilled on her shirt, black as it is and tattered, slices of skin showing through ragged slits over her belly, the sides drenched with sweat and stuck to her ribs. Her eyelids are black, too, bruised-looking, and so are the leather arm bands that circle both wrists and forearms. The only color she wears are patches of red, white, and blue on her skirt, which she has sewn together herself out of hacked wedges of a Union Jack. Her hair, recently clipped and dyed, is a dark shade of mauve.

  Paul is the only one on the dance floor not wearing black, though some of the others have words written in radioactive-bright lettering on their t-shirts—“The Exploited,” “Misfits”—along with screenprinted skulls. Most of the boys have hair spiked solid, with pomade, he guesses, or glue; a few have shaved heads or shaggy bowl cuts. The girls wear ripped tights and pointy silver rings on every finger, and they all stomp boots as heavy as Joy’s. He has seen this set of fashion choices for long enough now—glimpsing his first mohawk ten years ago, on Eighth Avenue—that they no longer seem strange to him, or dangerous, though he doesn’t know if he’ll ever get used to seeing them on Joy. Instead, the kids’ clothes and makeup strike him as quaintly earnest, as do their grunts and howls whenever the music stops.

  These are Joy’s new friends, accumulated over the past six months or so, but the party itself is a holdover from her days as a ponytailed cheerleader on the Morris Knolls freshman squad, when she wore high-heeled pumps, lace-trimmed socks, and polo shirts with the collar turned up. Last year—a different geologic epoch in teenage time—she begged her mother to throw her a sweet sixteen party like those to which she’d been invited by older girls she admired and envied, something as elaborate and expensive as her bat mitzvah three years before. And though Cynthia held out for a while, on both economic and feminist grounds—why should sixteen-year-old girls be told they’re sweet? she asked—she eventually relented, in part due to Paul’s intervention. “Is it really worth making her resent you for the rest of her life?” he asked, and assured her his annual bonus would cover all the costs.

  Joy since rejected, or abdicated, her old life and all its trappings, and a few months ago tried to get Cynthia to cancel the party. It’s so bourgie, she said, which Paul took to mean embarrassingly ordinary. But Cynthia wasn’t having any of it. Paul had already paid a deposit for the room and the catering. “You wanted it, now you’re going through with it.” Fights ensued, shouting and slammed doors, until they finally came to terms when Cynthia agreed to can the cheeseball deejay and let Joy and her friends take care of the music themselves.

  So here they are, in the ballroom of the Madison Hotel, with forty-five of Joy’s sweating, scowling comrades, and a buffet table spread with sliced cheese and whitefish and marinated peppers and miniature bagels, now plundered of all but a few scattered pickings. Cynthia has spent the evening ducking out to the lobby bar and returning with drinks she half-drains on the way, asking Paul each time if he needs a refill, though until now he has been content to sip the same Tom Collins for much of the night. Why didn’t he ask for at least one more? He kept himself out of sight, or thought he did, in a corner of the ballroom, watching the fevered dancing, which has increasingly turned to groping, and admired Joy and her friends for their spirit, their willingness to turn what could have been a humiliating event into an ironic occasion, no opportunity for idealistic expressions of rage or defiance wasted.

  On the dance floor, he continues to admire them, is flattered to have been invited—or compelled—to join them, at least briefly, and when the song ends he pumps his fist in the air along with the others. He expects to see Cynthia laughing at him from the sidelines and plans to ham up his enthusiasm, sneering and stamping and bucking his head. But she’s slumped in a chair, chin on chest, her own cocktail glass, empty, on the floor beside bare feet. He makes a move to join her, but again Joy grabs his hand and holds him where he is, and this time another of her friends, a girl with two tiny orange pigtails sticking out like blunted horns from the sides of her head, stretches out her arms to block his way.

  The next song starts, even louder than the last, and somehow brasher, starting with a chant, “Hey, ho! Let’s go!” He begins to shuffle his feet again, but this time instead of thrashing arms and heads, the kids are all bouncing straight up and down, the floor thumping beneath him, nearly buckling his knees. Joy has a serious look, of concentration, maybe, or anticipation, her black eyelids half shut so that for a moment he imagines he’s looking through dark holes into the mysterious regions behind her skull. Why does she want him here? What is it about her life she hopes to show him? He gives a little hop or two of his own, forgetting his glass and the liquid inside, a few drops of which splash onto his fingers. But even then Joy doesn’t smile, her mouth set firmly as she springs not quite in rhythm with the chant, the mauve hair looking almost natural as it flops across forehead and brows.

  When the chant ends and the song starts in earnest, a fast simple beat and almost jauntily sung lyrics too rushed for him to understand, the kids keep leaping, only now rather than up and down, they’re bouncing to all sides. The girl with orange pigtails bumps into his arm, and this time he can’t keep the Tom Collins from spilling. Most of it lands on the leg of a kid who doesn’t seem to notice, too busy is he flinging himself toward another boy jumping from the opposite direction. They knock shoulders, twist, land unsteadily, and bounce away. Paul excuses himself to the girl, but she only bumps him again, harder, with her hip, sending him sideways into Joy, who, grinning madly now, gives him a rough shove with her forearm.

  “Excuse me,” he says again, though by now it has dawned on him that the bumps and shoves aren’t accidental. The kids are throwing themselves at each other on purpose, shoulders, chests, backsides colliding. Some of the boys and girls slam together and kiss a
t the same time, lips grazing or mashing, tongues sliding across cheeks and chins, and all Paul can think is that they have gone insane. He is standing amidst raving, violent, black-clad lunatics. He tries to leave once more, but this time a limber pimpled boy lurches into him, knocking him backward. He holds his balance and then loses it, going down on one knee. It’s all he can do to keep from dropping the glass. The last thing they need are shards scattered beneath them as they jostle one another. Worse than having kids barrel into him would be to spend the rest of the night explaining to an outraged mother how her child ended up with twelve stitches in her face.

  He isn’t down long before Joy yanks him up, and then it’s only a moment before the girl with orange pigtails comes crashing into him, this time chest to chest. And when she hits, her arms go around his neck, her legs in torn tights around his waist, her tongue flicking out and sweeping across his lips. He is so astonished that he reaches around to grip her to him, but just as quickly she bucks off and careens into someone else. His lips are sticky, tasting of some sweetened sharp alcohol, vodka, maybe, or rum, something cheap and diluted with cola. The girl is drunk, he recognizes that now. They are all drunk, of course they are, of course they’ve been sneaking sips from bottles hidden in backpacks lined up behind the buffet table. Yes, drunk, not crazy, though he can’t help believing still that they have willfully abandoned their senses, that he has been brought in to witness an ecstatic ceremony, primitive and mystifying. He doesn’t think Cynthia will believe him when—if—he describes it to her.

  And just as he thinks so, he glimpses movement in his periphery, black and mauve and the white of pale skin. It’s Joy, charging at him, not for a kiss but a tackle. Head down, shoulder cocked, boots lifting high. He doesn’t have time to brace himself. He catches the blow on the ribs. The glass flies out of his hand, and he waits for it to shatter. But if it does, he can’t hear it over a new round of shouting as the song abruptly cuts off.

  In its wake comes relative quiet, talking and laughter and clomping feet. He is on his back on the hard floor. Joy is on top of him, head resting on his chest. Her breath is boozy, her speech slurred. “You know what I always dug about you?” she asks. “You’re game for whatever.” He’s mostly sure she has mistaken him for someone else.

  The lights come on. Waiters are clearing the buffet. He sees Cynthia’s feet move, then hears her groan. “Paul?” she calls, groggily. “Are you still here?” Joy stays where she is. Maybe asleep, maybe just enjoying the movement of her head, lifting and dropping as he breathes. Where her hair separates along a jagged seam, he can see sandy roots. The party, a success, is over.

  Some Macher

  1989

  Paul was coughing into his napkin when the comedian singled him out. “Excuse me? Sir? Would you please die of consumption on your own time?” At first Paul didn’t register the comment, or at least didn’t register that it was directed at him. He’d just gulped a mouthful of white wine—not cold enough and far too sweet—and some had gone down the wrong way. Several people at his table pressed water glasses on him, and he waved them off. He closed his eyes, mashed the cloth hard against his lips, and almost had the cough under control, when Cynthia, sitting to his right, elbowed him in the ribs. This set him coughing harder. “Sir? Sir? Excuse me? Should I call 911?” Now that his eyes were open, Paul realized the comedian—and everyone else in the room—was looking straight at him. With two fingers, Cynthia made an urgent slicing motion across her neck. “This is an emergency!” the comedian shouted into his hand, thumb and pinky spread to make it look like a phone receiver. “Come quick! Some macher’s choking on a chicken bone and ruining my show!”

  Paul occasionally had dreams like this, though in them he was always at a business conference and not the annual fundraising gala of the local Jewish Federation, harangued not by a comedian but an enraged executive. And of course he was always missing an important article of clothing—socks, tie, belt, pants. In the best of them, those he didn’t consider nightmares, he managed to wish himself invisible and sneak out through a hotel kitchen. In others, the desire to disappear ended in nothing but desperation, which usually woke him with a gasp and often, to his puzzlement, an erection.

  Already he felt the stirrings of panic, though at least now he was fully dressed. Too fully. He swallowed the next cough before it escaped and felt it stick in his throat, tickling, as did sweat that seeped onto his forehead. He shot Cynthia a glance. If she’d listened to him, they would have been sitting at the back of the room, out of view, where he could have coughed in peace. It was her fault he was left so exposed, just to the side of the stage. It was her fault, too, that he was one of only three men in the entire place dressed in a tuxedo. For that matter, it was her fault he was here at all, in the gym of a suburban synagogue decorated to look like a Harlem nightclub, with red curtains hanging from basketball hoops.

  What else could he blame her for? That he lived in New Jersey and commuted an hour each way to work. That he’d vacationed the last three winters in Fort Lauderdale so her kids could visit their grandfather, who made Paul sit through Yankees spring training games and claimed that sunburns were good for the immune system. He wanted his look to remind her how much she owed him.

  But if that was the effect it had—or if it had any effect—he’d find out only later. At the moment, her bottom lip puffed out, eyes bulged, cheeks reddened, as she tried to keep from busting up. Laughter stabbed him from the front, back, and both sides. All the way around the table, nothing but teeth and tongue.

  “I could wait him out,” the comedian said, still speaking, it seemed, to the imaginary dispatcher on the other end of his hand. “But they only gave me a half-hour slot. I know, I know. They wanted Joan Rivers but couldn’t afford her.”

  Even with the red curtains, the flower vases and candles in glass globes, the portable stage draped with glittery streamers, the gym still looked like a gym, Paul’s table set on a free throw line, the nearest hoop, netless, a short toss to his right. Only the comedian was dressed for the space, wearing high-top sneakers, purple, under black jeans. Covering much of his face was a pair of glasses as big as motorcycle goggles, thick black frames hiding his eyebrows. They were as much a part of his costume as the purple shoes and the silver sport coat he wore over an orange t-shirt, the outfit of a clown. And already Paul could see what purpose they served: every so often, without warning, the eyebrows would leap up from behind the frames, startlingly bushy, belonging, it seemed, to someone heavier, gruffer, more cruel. Behind the absurd getup lurked a secret, mean-spirited self who’d occasionally step out of the comedian’s shadow to select an unsuspecting victim—whichever innocent dope made the mistake of coughing or sneezing or scratching his scalp.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” the comedian said now, eyebrows popping, “the Surgeon General warns that interrupting the show is hazardous to your dignity and may result in copious humiliation.”

  One last cough came ripping through Paul’s chest, so quickly he didn’t have a chance to clap the napkin over his mouth. It rocked him against the table, and he had to reach out to keep his wine glass from toppling. Ice jounced in water pitchers. Another roar of laughter filled the gym, and now even Cynthia couldn’t hold back, head tipping up, two silver crowns showing, eyelids closed and squeezing out tears. The tickle had disappeared, but Paul picked up his water glass anyway and took a long drink. His collar had constricted around his neck. His jacket felt tight, too, though he’d already unbuttoned it.

  “You’re wearing that?” Cynthia had asked earlier, when she’d come downstairs to find him in the same suit he’d worn to work, light gray, with pinstripes so subtle you could see them only in sunlight, plenty of room in the shoulders. “It’s the gala. The biggest event of the year.” She hustled him to his closet and made him put on the tux, though he hadn’t had it cleaned or pressed since Kyle’s bar mitzvah. On the left sleeve was a smear of gravy, still sticky after nearly two years, but he had no time to rinse it off. Wh
en they arrived, twenty minutes late, the Federation’s president already in the middle of his opening remarks, most people finished with their salads, he saw that maybe a third of the men in the room weren’t even wearing ties. Cynthia towed him through the center of the gym, ignoring his whispered objections. Her dress, green and sleek to her calves, managed to be at once elegant and casual, equally appropriate for a ballroom or a backyard barbecue.

  “Sir, I can tell you’re used to being the center of attention,” the comedian said, giving him a conspiratorial smile, head cocked, as if they were in cahoots. “But please, this is my job.” He stood at the edge of the stage closest to Paul, leaning forward far enough that his glasses slipped down his nose and revealed the eyebrows in their resting position, just as bushy and out of place under his high, creaseless forehead. “You’re a pretty big deal around here, from the looks of it,” he said. “Don’t tell me: you’re the one writing my check. Oh boy. Sorry kids, no Hanukkah this year. Daddy messed up big time, offended the Chairman of the Board.” He waited a beat for Paul to respond, and when Paul didn’t, tilted his head like a curious dog. “No? Jewish mafia? Am I going to wake up with a pot roast in my bed?”

  The laughter had an edge of hysteria now, wicked-sounding, the accompaniment to a public beheading. The couple to his left was particularly stricken, both husband and wife unable to get themselves together even when the rest of the room began to settle down. Paul had met them before, at some other function Cynthia had dragged him to, but couldn’t remember their names. The Meltzners? Freimauers? Because he and Cynthia had come in late, she hadn’t had a chance to re-introduce them, though she’d made an exchange of little waves and mouthed greetings across Paul’s lap when they’d sat down. Now the wife, a skeletal woman with a long neck and no lips, slapped her dessert plate—apple tart untouched—with bony fingers and sparkling rings. Her portly husband wheezed and sputtered, ears enflamed. They were the only other people at the table dressed for a black-tie event, and given how much the wife stood out in her sequins, how uncomfortably the husband, bald and bearded, was stuffed into his tux, Paul might have expected their sympathy. Didn’t they see how easily they could have been in his place?