A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (11 page)

A
NOTHER RESTAURANT
, on Saturday night a week later: Marshall arrived early to reconnoiter. The restaurant was small and softly lit, with bare walls and creamy linen tablecloths, and packed with diners, mostly couples. He found only six places had been reserved for Neal’s bachelor party—a miserable turnout for someone known for his friendliness and good humor, Marshall noted with pleasure. When Neal stepped through the door he waved at Marshall and, radiant in anticipation, was brought to the table by the hostess. The two men hugged, despite the sea of strangers around them. Again Marshall considered how little he knew the guy, and how pathetic it was that he might be considered his fifth best friend. Neal was accompanied by his brother, Joel, who managed to take the chair between them.

The other men arrived shortly and all at once, guys in their twenties. Marshall had met one of them before, Howie, who appeared to be Neal’s closest friend, though Marshall uncharitably intuited that Neal was probably not Howie’s. There was a Steve and somebody named either Alan or Albert; engaged in scheming, uncharitable thoughts, Marshall missed the name. Alan-Albert apparently worked with Neal. They were all
big-boned men in chinos and blazers, much too large for the restaurant, and they squeezed against the tables as they filed in. Neal, Joel, and Marshall rose to shake hands and then the men wondered, at length, about who should occupy which seat. One of the waiters hurried over to get them settled.

Steve turned in his seat and craned his neck, looking over the room. He said, “Where are the hookers? What kind of bachelor party is this without hookers?”

The men tittered and this appeared to break the ice. There were a few jokes about where they could go for hookers or lap dancing, or simply a bar where they could meet girls. A few murmurs of appreciation were elicited as the curvy hostess in a red sweater and tight slacks passed, gliding by on high heels. “Sweet,” Howie said. Marshall detected an undercurrent of uneasiness, the good humor forced by the occasion. These men weren’t accustomed to making suggestive remarks about women. “Red means go,” Steve said. “It’s your last chance, Neal.” This was passed over in silence, as if he had just revealed too much about his sexual preferences. As it happened, Marshall had originally hoped to hire an “escort” for the party and had begun doing the initial research in the yellow pages. He had made phone calls and discovered that bachelor parties and “deflowerings” were a popular specialty, but once he began discussing what he wanted the woman to do, he realized he would be paying several hundred dollars or more. Real sex would cost a fortune and a rebuffed seduction would be just as expensive as one that was carried through. He had thought better of it.

Joel made a big deal about ordering the wine for the table, and when it came he rolled it around in his glass and sniffed it hard. He swallowed a mouthful and looked vacantly across the restaurant. Finally, he nodded at the waiter. When the waiter left, Howie rolled his eyes and said, “A Jewish wine snob. God help us.”

“Jews make good wine snobs,” Joel shot back. “It’s all in
le nez
.”

They all laughed except Marshall, who knew that he did not have leave to laugh at Jewish noses. He wasn’t inclined to anyway, since Jews hardly held a monopoly on large noses—the curvy Italian hostess, for example, owned a wonderfully carnal prowlike schnozz he would have loved to kiss and caress—and he never understood the humor of self-deprecation. Jews thought it was funny simply to be Jewish; this mystified him. He couldn’t understand why being Jewish was any more humorous than being, say, Norwegian; but if you expressed this perplexity to a Jew, he’d be offended. These guys were all Jews. He studied Neal’s brother, Joel, who in fact did have a sizable nose, as well as a cropped black beard that might qualify as rabbinical, now that Marshall was thinking about it. His eyes were a deep nutlike brown and his expression, even when he made a weak joke, seemed aggressively intelligent. He hardly resembled his much fairer, easygoing brother.

Marshall pretended to be shy as the conversation circled the table, touching on their jobs and the war in Afghanistan. Relieved that the obligatory sex conversation had concluded, they debated the merits of a land invasion and the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. Neal told a very funny joke, perfectly delivered: bin Laden and Saddam Hussein walk into a bar…Marshall hardly laughed and didn’t speak. He studied the menu, listening for an opening. At some point he became aware that his reticence disturbed the other men, an unexpected but interesting effect. He prolonged it and moodily darted his eyes down at the table. Aspiring to be the live wire, Steve broke in on his reverie to ask how he knew Neal.

“My wife is Flora’s sister.”

Marshall said it lightly, but a shadow crossed Neal’s face. He had evidently told himself that his friendship with Marshall
had nothing to do with the two sisters. Marshall’s reply had reminded him of the serious recriminations he risked in extending an invitation to the dinner.

Steve pushed on unawares. “How long have you been married?”

“Seven years.”

“That’s great!”

“Actually, we’re getting divorced now. We’re litigating, we’re counterlitigating…”

Marshall smiled. Steve smiled too, as if Marshall had just told him something optimistic. None of these men were married, so they knew nothing about women. Probably few of them understood divorce; perhaps they simply equated it with being single again, which was like equating death with being unborn. But the word “divorced” had electrified Neal. He was already imagining his own divorce, wondering if it would be as awful as Marshall and Joyce’s. Marshall guessed their divorce cast a pall on the wedding preparations in Canaan. Good.

The moment passed and the men dug into their dinners, their bonhomie returning. Two more bottles of wine were ordered. Marshall wondered how he could return to his divorce, but the conversation had drifted away. Now Joel, a microbiologist at Stanford, was holding their attention with an amusing story about how he had nearly missed the events of September 11. He had slept late that morning and had driven off to the university listening to a CD. On the highway he had noticed that nearly every driver was talking into his cell phone. Students were standing in clusters on the campus, also with cell phones. No one seemed to be in their classes. As a scientist, he drew from the empirical evidence the only possible conclusion: cell phones had become ubiquitous. He was in his lab for more than an hour before a postdoc from New York stopped by, nearly in tears. Joel told the table, “I was the last person in America to find out about the attacks.” He paused
for a beat, his eyes sparkling. “I mean, not counting the FBI.”

The men snickered, all except Marshall.

Neal noticed that he held back. He explained, “Marshall worked at the World Trade Center.”

They looked appalled. Joel said quickly, “Sorry.”

Marshall laughed and waved away the apology. “No, no, don’t worry, I’m not traumatized or anything like that.”

“He hadn’t reached work yet,” Neal said, recalling their telephone conversation. “You were delayed, right?”

Marshall winced and made an embarrassed little smile. “Actually, I
was
in the building when the second plane hit, in an elevator on the way to my office—which had just been obliterated. Never heard the first plane. The elevator stopped for a while and then left us off in the lobby on the forty-fourth floor. We had to walk down the stairwell. It was chaos, let me tell you: smoke and dust, people bloodied, people crying. I saw the firemen going in. I saw dead bodies in the plaza, people falling…Yeah, it was awful,” he concluded.

These words, spoken matter-of-factly, had been enough to stop the other men from eating, some of them with their forks in midair. “Wow,” Alan-Albert said at last. “Jeez,” said Howie. Neal beamed, aware that his bachelor party had suddenly been swept within the circumference of contemporary world events.

Joel said, “My God, what were you thinking?”

Marshall chuckled. “Mostly about how to get out of the building.”

“Did you know what it was?”

“A plane? No,” Marshall said. What
had
he been thinking? His recollection of that morning was like the underground lobby in which he had seemed trapped: murky, smoky, dangerous. He remembered making a friend in the plaza and then losing him. It had also been the morning he realized that Miss Naomi was a babe. “I guess we thought it was some kind of
bomb. I wasn’t working there in 1993, when they blew up the parking garage. Six people were killed then. But everyone thought of that. It was part of the building’s memory.”

“So you didn’t think it was an accident. You knew it was terrorists,” Joel confirmed.

“Right, sure,” Marshall said. He observed Joel’s satisfaction. Neal’s brother was driving at something. “Of course it was terrorists. No one thought it could be anything else,” he added. The other men grimly shook their heads, as if he were speaking of a greater truth. He ventured, “Look at the world today. I knew it was Middle East terrorism come home.”

Joel murmured, “That’s what it was, all right.”

Marshall allowed himself to be egged on. “I felt like
I
was in the Middle East. I was looking for an exit, looking for daylight, and I was trying not to get hit by falling debris, and all these thoughts were going through my head. Why am
I
in this fucking war?—that’s what I asked myself.” Marshall looked around the table: five Jews. They were letting their pasta get cold. They shared his anger and grief, as if they had been in the World Trade Center with him, as if they had lost a friend in the plaza too. “Why was this happening?”

“Yeah, why?” Joel said bitterly. “What’s wrong with these people? Why—”

“I was just furious,” Marshall continued, “thinking of everything that had put us at war with the Arab world: irrational Islamic fundamentalism, oil lust, fanatics from Brooklyn, Third World poverty—the list of reasons goes on, and meanwhile bodies were dropping into the plaza. That’s what I was thinking.”

Howie sighed and began cutting his steak. Steve and Neal looked sorrowful. At the next table a middle-aged couple had heard at least part of the exchange and had paused in their own conversation.

Joel smiled, as if in mild incomprehension. But Marshall
guessed he did comprehend. Joel said, “Brooklyn? What do you mean?”

Marshall nodded, conceding, “Well, perhaps they’re not all from Brooklyn, but many of those Jewish settlers on the West Bank are American. And they go to Israel specifically intending to build settlements—knowing they’re illegal under international law, knowing they’re an impediment to peace, knowing they hugely complicate our relations with other countries in the Middle East.”

“I think if you met them,” Joel said gently, “you would discover that they’re not fanatics. Most are well educated, and many are professionals who commute to work in Jerusalem. Many are not even religious. They simply want better lives for themselves and their families, living as Jews in peace with the world.”

“On Arab land,” Marshall declared, and he saw a flash of anger in Joel’s eyes, quickly suppressed. The other men looked uncomfortable. Marshall brought a little heat into his voice. “They bring small children to these ugly outposts in a place where the people want to kill them. They take the land by force, they take the water, and then they claim the Bible as their authority. I call that fanaticism. And somehow the U.S. has made its entire foreign policy hostage to these few thousand dickheads.”

Joel grinned in a friendly way. He pushed out a little chuckle. “Perhaps you could be better informed, but this reflects the bias of the American news media. First of all, if you look at bin Laden’s statements before September 11, there’s no evidence that he ever cared about the Palestinians; his complaint is with the American military presence in Saudi Arabia.”

“Yeah, right.” Marshall let his sarcasm congeal for a few moments in the garlic-laced steam over their table. “The settlers have nothing to do with Arab anger at the U.S.—”

“Second,” Joel said more firmly, locking his eyes on
Marshall’s, “the concept of this so-called Arab land. What does this mean? Jews have settled in what you call the West Bank for millennia. This was the center of Jewish civilization, this is where our patriarchs are buried. This was always part of Palestine, under the Ottomans and under the British Mandate, always Jewish territory, Judea and Samaria. Now the settlers are developing the land, irrigating it and farming it and making jobs for everybody. The Arabs want to ethnically cleanse the land—while a million of their people maintain full citizenship in Israel, freer than they would be in any other country of the Mideast, and better educated and better paid!”

Neal broke in, his smile good-natured. “Hey, guys, ease up. What is this,
Crossfire
? I invite you to my bachelor party and I get
Crossfire
?” The other men chuckled.

“C’mon,” Marshall replied. Sneering, he raised his voice to reach the other tables. “Something like three million Palestinians live on the West Bank and in Gaza. Do you really think you can keep them down forever? And when the Arabs see Israeli soldiers killing Palestinian civilians—Palestinian
children
—to protect the settlers, they blame America! That’s why the World Trade Center was attacked!”

Joel rapped his knuckles on the table. “This is scapegoating. The Arabs are mad at Israel and America because they’re the only things their corrupt, repressive governments allow them to be mad at. Their anger is unjustified. To appease it would be craven.”

Marshall shrugged, as if the argument weren’t important to him, and as if Joel had been the first to get angry. “Perhaps, but this is what most of the world thinks. This is what most of America thinks. The Israelis have their country, why can’t they leave the Palestinians alone in theirs?”

“What Palestinians? Did you ever wonder why there wasn’t a clamor for a Palestinian state all over the world in the nineteen years when the West Bank was held by Jordan and Gaza
was held by Egypt? I’ll tell you: no one ever thought of the Palestinians as a distinct nationality until after the territory was captured in the Six-Day War—a war that Israel fought defensively, for its own survival. These so-called Palestinians are only a tool that the Arabs are using in the pursuit of their ultimate goal: the total destruction of Israel. That’s obvious to anyone who knows the first thing about the history of Israel.”