Bleeding Edge (10 page)

Well, they love him. What’s she supposed to do about that? She wants to lie down next to them, is what, and watch the rest of the movie, but they’ve taken up all available space. She goes in the living room and puts it on there, and falls asleep on the couch, though not before Chi Chi wins the 1964 Western Open by a stroke, over Gene Hackman in a cameo as Arnold Palmer.

If you were really as bitter as everybody—well, Heidi—thinks you should be about this, she tells herself just before nodding off, you’d get a restraining order and send them to camp in the Catskills . . .

Next day Horst takes Otis and Ziggy down to his new office at the
World Trade Center, and they eat lunch at Windows on the World, which has a dress code, so the boys wear jackets and ties. “Like going to Collegiate,” Ziggy mutters. There happens to be a more-than-moderate wind blowing that day, making the tower sway back and forth in five-, what feel like ten-foot excursions. On days of storm, according to Horst’s co-tenant Jake Pimento, it’s like being in the crow’s nest of a very tall ship, allowing you to look down at helicopters and private planes and neighboring high-rises. “Seems kind of flimsy up here,” to Ziggy.

“Nah,” sez Jake, “built like a battleship.”

S
aturday night at Kugelblitz, despite the lighting crew getting stoned and confusing or forgetting cues and the kids playing Sky and Sarah, who have been going steady in real life, breaking up loudly and publicly at the dress rehearsal,
Guys and Dolls
is a roaring success, which will look even better on the DVD Mr. Stonechat, the director, is shooting of it, given the many sight-line issues at the Scott and Nutella Vontz Auditorium, whose architect owing to some sort of mental condition kept changing his mind about such nuances of design as getting rows of seats to actually face the stage and so forth.

The grandparents holler bravos and take snapshots. “Come back to the apartment,” Elaine giving Horst the usual
shviger
evil eye, “we’ll have coffee.”

“I’ll walk you all to the corner,” sez Horst, “but then I have to go see about some business.”

“We hear you’re taking the boys out west?” sez Ernie.

“Midwest, where I grew up.”

“And you’re just going to hang around in the video arcades all day,” Elaine being as nice as pie.

“Nostalgia,” Horst tries to explain. “When I was a kid, it was the golden age of arcades then, and now I guess I can’t bring myself to admit
it’s over. All this home-computer gaming, Nintendo 64, PlayStation, now this Xbox thing, maybe I just want the boys to see what blowing aliens away was like in the olden days.”

“But . . . isn’t it technically kidnapping? Across state lines and whatever?”

“Ma,” Maxine surprising herself here, “he’s . . . their dad?”

“My gallbladder, Elaine, please,” advises Ernie.

The corner, mercifully. Horst waves. “See you guys later.”

“Call if you’re gonna be too late?” Maxine trying to remember what normal and married sounds like. Eye contact with Horst would be nice also, but no soap.

“This time of night?” Elaine wonders after Horst is out of earshot. “What kind of ‘business’ can that be, again?”

“If he came with us, you’d be complaining about that,” Maxine wondering why suddenly now she’s defending Horst. “Maybe he’s trying to be polite, you’ve heard of that?”

“Well, we bought enough pastry to feed an army, maybe I should just call—”

“No,” Maxine growls, “nobody else. No litigation lawyers, no drop-by ob-gyns in Harvard running shorts, none of that. Please.”

“She will never let that go,” sez Elaine, “one time. So paranoid, I swear.”

“Who does she get it from,” Ernie doesn’t exactly ask. Being a passage from a duet Maxine may possibly have heard once or twice in her life. Tonight, beginning as a temperate discussion of Frank Loesser as an operatic composer, the conversation soon unfocuses into general opera talk, including a spirited exchange about who sings the greatest “Nessun Dorma.” Ernie thinks it’s Jussi Björling, Elaine thinks it’s Deanna Durbin in
His Butler’s Sister
(1943), which was on television the other night. “That English lyric?” Ernie making a face, “sub–Tin Pan Alley. Awful. And she’s a lovely girl, but she’s got no squillo.”

“She’s a soprano, Ernie. And Björling, he should have his union card revoked, that Swedish lilt he puts on ‘
Tramontate, stelle
,’ unacceptable.”

And so forth. When Maxine was a kid, they kept trying to drag her along to the Met, but it never took, she never made the transition to Opera Person, for years she thought Jussi Björling was a campus in California. Not even dumbed-down kiddy matinees featuring TV celebs with horns out the sides of their helmet could get her interested. Fortunately it only skipped a generation, and both Ziggy and Otis now have turned into reliable opera dates for their grandparents, Ziggy partial to Verdi, Otis to Puccini, neither caring that much for Wagner.

“Actually, Grandma, Grandpa, all due respect,” it occurs to Otis now, “it’s Aretha Franklin, the time she filled in for Pavarotti at the Grammys back in ’98.”

“‘Back in ’98.’ Long, long ago. Come here, you little bargain,” Elaine reaching to pinch his cheek, which he manages to slide away from.

Ernie and Elaine live in a rent-controlled prewar classic seven with ceilings comparable in height to a domed sports arena. Needless to say within easy walking distance of the Met.

Elaine waves a wand, and coffee and pastries materialize.

“Not enough!” Each kid holding a plate piled unhealthily high with danishes, cheesecake, strudel.

“You, I’ll give you such a frosk . . .” as the boys run into the next room to watch
Space Ghost Coast to Coast
, all of whose episodes their grandfather has thoughtfully taped. “And no crumbs in there!”

By reflex Maxine has a look into the bedrooms she and her sister, Brooke, used to occupy. In Brooke’s there now seems to be all new furniture, drapes, wallpaper also. “What’s this.”

“For Brooke and Avi when they get back.”

“Which is when?”

“What,” Ernie with an impish glint, “you missed the press conference? Latest word is sometime before Labor Day, though he probably calls it Likud Day.”

“Now, Ernie.”

“I said something? She wants to marry a zealot, her business, life is full of these nice surprises.”

“Avram is a decent husband,” Elaine shaking her head, “and I’ve got to say, he isn’t very political.”

“Software to annihilate Arabs, I’m sorry, that’s not political?”

“Trying to drink some coffee here,” Maxine puts in melodiously.

“It’s all right,” Ernie with his palms raised to heaven, “always the mother’s heart that falls out of the shoe box in the snow, nobody ever asks about a father, no, fathers don’t have hearts.”

“Oh, Ernie. He’s a computer nerd like everybody else his generation, he’s harmless, so cut him some slack.”

“He’s so harmless, why is the FBI always coming around to ask about him?”

“The what?” As a gong from a hitherto-unreleased Fu Manchu movie goes off, abrupt and strident, in some not-too-obscure brain lobe, Maxine, though long diagnosed with Chronic Chocolate Deficiency, sits now with her fork in midair arrest, still staring at a three-chocolate mousse cake from Soutine, but with a sudden redirection of interest.

“So maybe it’s the CIA,” Ernie shrugging, “the NSA, the KKK, who knows, ‘Just a few more details for our files,’ is how they like to put it. And then hours of these really embarrassing questions.”

“When did this start?”

“Just after Avi and Brooke went off to Israel,” Elaine is pretty sure.

“What kinds of questions?”

“Associates, employment former and current, family, and yes, since you’re about to ask, your name did come up, oh and,” Ernie now with a crafty look she knows well, “if you didn’t want that piece of cake there—”

“Long as you explain over at Lenox Hill about the fork wounds.”

“Here, one guy left you his card,” Ernie handing it over, “wants you to call him, no rush, just when you get a minute.”

She looks at the card. Nicholas Windust, Special Case Officer, and a phone number with a 202 area code, which is D.C., fine but nothing else on the card, no agency or bureau name, not even a logo of one.

“He dressed very nicely,” Elaine recalls, “not like they usually do. Very nice shoes. No wedding ring.”

“I don’t believe this, she’s trying to pimp me onto a fed? What am I saying, of course I believe it.”

“He was asking about you a lot,” continues Elaine.

“Rrrrr . . .”

“On the other hand,” tranquilly, “maybe you’re right, nobody should ever date a government agent, at least not till they’ve seen
Tosca
at least once. Which we had tickets for, but you made other plans that night.”

“Ma, that was 1985.”

“Plácido Domingo and Hildegard Behrens,” Ernie beaming. “Legendary. You’re not in trouble, are you?”

“Oh, Pop. I have maybe a dozen cases going at any one time, and there’s always a federal angle—a government contract, a bank regulation, a RICO beef, just extra paperwork and then it goes away till there’s something else.” Trying not to sound too much like she’s addressing anybody’s anxieties here.

“He looked . . .” Ernie squinting, “he didn’t look like a paper pusher. More like a field guy. But maybe my reflexes are off. He showed me my own dossier, did I mention that?”

“He what? Establishing trust with the interviewee, no doubt.”

“This is me?” Ernie said when he saw the photo. “I look like Sam Jaffe.”

“A friend of yours, Mr. Tarnow?”

“A movie actor.” Explaining to Efrem Zimbalist Jr. here how in
The Day the Earth Stood Still
(1951) Sam Jaffe, playing Professor Barnhardt, the smartest man in the world, Einstein only different, after writing some advanced equations all over a blackboard in his study, steps out for a minute. The extraterrestrial Klaatu shows up looking for him and finds this boardful of symbols, like the worst algebra class you were ever in, notices what seems to be a mistake down in the middle of it, erases something and writes something else in, then leaves. When the Professor comes back, he immediately spots the change to his equations and stands
there kind of beaming at the blackboard. It was some such expression that had crossed Ernie’s face just as the covert federal shutter fell.

“I’ve heard of that movie,” recalled this Windust party, “pacifist propaganda in the depths of the Cold War, I believe it was flagged as potentially Communist-inspired.”

“Yeah, you people blacklisted Sam Jaffe too. He wasn’t a Communist, but he refused to testify. For years no studio would hire him. He made a living teaching math in high school. Strangely enough.”

“He taught high school? Who would’ve been disloyal enough to hire him?”

“This is 2001, Maxeleh,” Ernie now shaking his head back and forth, “the Cold War is supposed to be over, how can these people not have changed or moved on, where is such a terrible inertia coming from?”

“You always used to say their time hasn’t passed, it’s yet to come.”

At bedtime Ernie used to tell his daughters scary blacklist stories. Some kids had the Seven Dwarfs, Maxine and Brooke had the Hollywood Ten. The trolls and wicked sorcerers and so forth were usually Republicans of the 1950s, toxic with hate, stuck back around 1925 in almost bodily revulsion from anything leftward of “capitalism,” by which they usually meant keeping an increasing pile of money safe from the depredations of the IRS. Growing up on the Upper West Side, it was impossible not to hear about people like this. Maxine often wonders if it didn’t help steer her toward fraud investigation, as much as maybe it’s steered Brooke toward Avi and his techie version of politics.

“So you’ll call him back?”

“You sound like what’s-her-name in there. No, Pop, I have no plans to do that.”

•   •   •

IT DOESN’T SEEM
to be up to Maxine, however. Next day, evening rush hour, it’s just starting to rain . . . sometimes she can’t resist, she needs to be out in the street. What might only be a simple point on the workday
cycle, a reconvergence of what the day scattered as Sappho said someplace back in some college course, Maxine forgets, becomes a million pedestrian dramas, each one charged with mystery, more intense than high-barometer daylight can ever allow. Everything changes. There’s that clean, rained-on smell. The traffic noise gets liquefied. Reflections from the street into the windows of city buses fill the bus interiors with unreadable 3-D images, as surface unaccountably transforms to volume. Average pushy Manhattan schmucks crowding the sidewalks also pick up some depth, some purpose—they smile, they slow down, even with a cellular phone stuck in their ear they are more apt to be singing to somebody than yakking. Some are observed taking houseplants for walks in the rain. Even the lightest umbrella-to-umbrella contact can be erotic.

“If it’s the right umbrella, you’re saying,” Heidi once sought to clarify.

“Picky Heidi, any umbrella, what would it matter?”

“Airhead Maxi, it could be Ted Bundy.”

Which this evening turns out to be something like that, actually. Maxine’s under some scaffolding waiting out a brief intensity in the downpour when she becomes aware of some kind of male presence. Umbrellas touch. Strangers in the night, exchanging— No wait, that’s something else.

“Evening, Ms. Tarnow.” He’s holding out a business card, which she recognizes as a copy of the same one Ernie passed on to her last night. This one she doesn’t take. “It’s OK, no GPS chip or anything.”

Oboy. The fucking voice, sonorous, overcoached, phony as a cold call on an answering machine. She flicks a sidelong glance. Fiftyish, midnight-brown shoes, Elaine’s idea of nice, trench coat with a high polyester content, ever since grade school exactly the kind of person everybody including herself has warned her to stay away from. So of course she starts in with the blurting.

“Already have one of these. This is you in person, Nicholas Windust, I don’t suppose you carry a federal ID, warrant or something? just being a careful citizen, understand, trying to do my part to fight crime?” When
will she learn to dummy up? No wonder the Borderline Personality folks keep after her, their seasonal noodges are in fact paranoia-calibration updates and she ignores them at her peril. So what’s wrong with me, she wonders, am I some kind of a make-nice compulsive? Am I as desperate as Heidi always tells me I am?

He has flipped open meanwhile some pocket-size item of leather goods, flipped it shut again, it could be a Costco membership card, anything. “Look, you can really help us. If you wouldn’t mind coming down to the Federal Building, it shouldn’t take—”

“Are you fuckin insane?”

“OK, then how about La Cibaeña over on Amsterdam? I mean, you could still get drugged and abducted, but the coffee’s got to be better than it is downtown.”

“Five minutes,” she mutters. “Think of it as speed interrogating.” Why is she even allowing him that much? Need for parental approval, thirty, forty years down the line? Swell. Of course Ernie still believes the Rosenbergs were innocent and loathes the FBI and all clones thereof, while Elaine suffers from undiagnosed OY, or Obsessive Yenta syndrome. Besides which, something about him, relentless as a car alarm, is screaming Not Acceptable. James Bond has it easy, Brits can always fall back on accents, where you got your tux, a multivolume set of class signifiers. In New York all you have really is shoes.