End of the Jews (33 page)

Abe was standing at the stove and Linda at the sink when Amalia crossed the threshold. “What can I do?” she announced herself.

“Nothing,” said Linda, without looking up from the potato and the peeler in her hands. “We've got it all under control.”

“I've no doubt. Come have a drink and say hello to Mariko, then—not that either of you drinks, but still.”

“I'll be out in a minute,” said Linda, true to form. Ever since her teenage years, she'd spent their parties in the kitchen, talking to the caterers and putting off entreaties to emerge, aggressively indifferent to her parents' world.

Abe stooped and peered into the oven, and Amalia glimpsed the pale, puckered skin of the turkey and looked away. A flash of dizziness came with the turning of her head, as if the liquid in which her brain floated had sloshed high and hard against the walls. It had been happening for several months now, and for minutes afterward her eardrums throbbed with a staccato pulse Amalia couldn't imagine was her heart. It felt more like the wing beating of a tiny insect trapped behind her cochlea.

Abe and Linda went on cooking as Amalia pulled a chair out and sank into it. She leaned forward, pressed her thumbs against the inner ridges of her ears to stop the thrumming. The kitchen's orange walls persisted in her field of vision even after Amalia closed her eyes, breaking into pinpricks and then fading to pale yellow.

“Mom?” Linda's voice, above her. “Are you all right?”

Amalia dropped her hands, opened her eyes, and looked up at her daughter. “What, sweetheart?”

“Are you all right?”

“I will be. Just a little dizzy.”

“I'll get you some club soda.”

Amalia cradled her head in the L of her thumb and forefinger. “That would be lovely,” she said, in a voice so faint it startled her. The notion of club soda was alarming: ingesting something so cold, so effervescent, lifting such a heavy, thick glass to her mouth. Her hand, her arm, her tongue, tingled with apprehension.

Clunk. “Here. Have a sip, Mom. It will help.” Linda brushed aside her mother's hair and pressed an inner wrist to Amalia's forehead. “You don't feel warm.”

With great effort, Amalia reached forward and grasped the glass of club soda in both hands. She pulled it across the plastic wood-grained tabletop, and when it was aligned with her chin, she picked it up and brought it toward her lips. She felt the bubbles fizz beneath her nose, heard the sound of glass shattering against the floor, felt coldness in her lap. Then everything went black.

         

Nina made a beeline through Arrivals, dodging the reunions of strangers, and stepped into Tris's arms. “Welcome home,” he whispered.

“You're my home,” she told him. Which would make Marcus what, she wondered as they kissed. A vacation condo?

The first two or three times this had happened, Nina had feared, above and beyond all the guilt and shame and fury, that her actions were proof of impending insanity, heralded some disease of the brain in its early stages. That's how fucking demented it was to keep screwing Marcus.

Now she knew better. Nina wasn't deteriorating; she was simply flawed in this sector of life, weak for her manipulative jerk of a first lover. Her career happened to throw them together frequently, and always far from home, and so once or twice a year, Nina capitulated to history, under circumstances that could never lead to consequences. Some people went off their diets and devoured chocolate cakes at Christmas. Others got shit-faced, vowed never to drink again, and went barhopping the next weekend. Nina's vice was like that, only much less fun.

She needed to work on it, and she was. But no more autoflagellation; no more calling herself slut, whore, liar. Life was complicated, and such words were simple. Devon's voice sounded in her mind,
Keep it simple, Pigfoot. The most complicated thing is to keep it simple and keep it moving
, and she ignored it. Three hundred and sixty days a year, Nina was a blameless girlfriend. She and Tris had built something special together, something solid—the only solid thing she'd ever had. They were family, and she would never do anything to hurt him. Not
to
hurt him.

So when's your boyfriend gonna give me a tour of the hood?
Marcus had asked her yesterday, naked in the hotel bed, apropos of nothing but his own assholishness.
I got all kinds of questions, you know? I wanna be a graffiti guy, yo. I wanna be down.

Don't talk about him,
Nina snapped.
You don't get to talk about him.
They'd been through this before.

Marcus lifted his hands in surrender.
My bad, my bad. Just being friendly.

Well, don't be.

He stood up, trying to hide his smirk, and walked toward the bathroom palming his balls. She watched him go, seething at his arrogance and her stupidity. Why did she put herself through this, again and again? She and Marcus were family, too, Nina supposed. In the sense of can't-choose-yours, and with all the helpless get me-away-from-here connotations of her childhood.

Marcus must have felt her eyes. He turned in the doorway.
Yes? Can I help you?

What was the most hurtful thing she could say to him right now? Words lacked credibility between them. Verbs of intent, anyway.

He's got a bigger dick than you.
She crossed her arms over her breasts.
And he's a better lover.

Marcus laughed.
So marry the white boy already. The two of you can raise some beautiful wanna-be-black babies together. Who knows, when they're old enough, maybe they can get through college on some bullshit scholarships of their own.

Fuck you, Marcus. Shut up. And it's only five thousand a year.

As you wish, Pigfoot. As you wish.
He closed the door and ran the shower. A moment later, the first lines of “My Funny Valentine” rose over the rush of water.

Nina pulled the covers to her chin, then kicked them off in frustration. Marcus never took a shot in the dark. When he wanted to do damage, he used an infrared scope, aimed carefully, and hit her with a tiny bullet of truth that penetrated precisely, burrowed, burned. It wasn't enough that they were living their own dirty secret. He had to bring up another, remind Nina that he knew something else her boyfriend didn't, wouldn't, couldn't.

If Tris found out she'd checked that box, taken that money, he'd be disgusted. She could see the whole conversation playing out in her mind: Nina explaining that blackness had truly been something she'd believed was hers to claim four years ago—he knew that, she'd said as much the night they met. Tris not buying it:
I never dreamed you'd actually act on that, that…entitlement.
Nina trying to make him believe she hadn't had the means, back then, to correlate blackness with disadvantage, or understand how fraught it was to claim it. All the black people she'd met in her life had been educated, glamorous, successful—she was from fucking Czechoslovakia, for God's sake, what did she know? Devon and the rest had given her permission to be black, to stand apart from the undifferentiated mainstream that they and she and all artists, she'd thought, were trying to—

Around there is where Tris would cut her off.
Even if that's true, why are you still taking the money? Why didn't you stop when you realized it was wrong?

Checkmate. Fuck Marcus for making this the present when Nina had resigned it to the past, decided it was something she had done as a young, naïve, less principled, and much more desperate person, something regrettable but over, bricked up, forgotten. Now it would take her a month to banish it again.

“How was the festival?” Tris asked. He reached around Nina to grab the handle of her carry-on. She took his other hand in hers and they strode away from the gate, suitcase wheels clicking over linoleum and plastic.

“It was cool. Nothing special. Another T-shirt.”

They stepped onto an escalator and Tris straddled two steps, leaned back against the handrail, eyed her. For a moment, Nina panicked—
he knows
—but then her boyfriend glanced left and right, reached inside her coat, slid his hand as far down the back of her jeans as he could, and squeezed her ass.

“How was your trip?” Nina asked when his body fell away from hers, back into its casual pose, the look on his face like a mischievous third grader's. “Could Mariko play?”

“Yup. Every night, she'd sit down at the piano, cry for about five minutes, and then swing her ass off.”

“Wow.”

“Right. And then we'd get high in the dressing room.”

“Holy shit.”

“She canned the bass player two nights in. He sounded fine to me. I think she did it just for old times' sake. Picked up a local Dutch cat and did Paris and Brussels with him. He didn't know half the tunes and he smelled like he hadn't showered in a decade, but Mariko loved him.”

“Devon said his dad called a few weeks back to check on her, and Mariko told him that Albert had been talking to her. That he was in the apartment with her.”

“Where else would he go?”

“She wasn't talking to him or anything, was she?”

“Not that I heard.”

Nina's cell rang. She pulled it from her purse, looked at the incoming number, and rolled her eyes. “My father.”

“At least he's calling at a decent hour.” Miklos's typical, tearful phone call was at five or six in the morning. That was when the demons seemed to come.

“I really don't feel like dealing with him right now.”

“Here, give it to me. Otherwise, he'll just keep calling.” Tris took the phone. “Hi, Miklos. Nina's on the road right now. She left her phone by accident. I'll tell her you called…. Okay, happy Thanksgiving to you, too.” He handed it back. “That ought to buy you a couple of days.”

She dropped the phone in her purse. “I should call him more. But it's always the same horrible conversation.”

They stepped into the parking garage, unlocked the car, pulled on their seat belts with mirror-image synchronization. A pang of suburban mundanity jolted through Tris and he had a counterurge to pull out without checking his mirrors, ram somebody's SUV with his rear bumper, and peel off at forty miles an hour. But he didn't.

Nina flipped down the vanity and scrutinized herself. For the last year, she'd been keeping a vigil on the three vertical lines running between her eyebrows, examining them in different kinds of light and at various times of day, as if hoping that under the right conditions their existence could be disproven.

Tris paid the attendant, wheeled the car into the daylight. “I'm bringing my grandparents
Pound Foolish.
” He angled his chin at the glove compartment, where two bound galleys lay. “I get anxious even thinking about it.”

“It'll be fine,” Nina assured him for the thousandth time. “Your grandparents understand the concept of fiction.”

Tris didn't respond.

“As long as you're proud of it, that's all that matters. And it's the baddest shit you've ever written. Right?”

He gave a derisive grunt and slapped his visor down. Nina studied him and felt her cheater's guilt turn inside out, become hostility. For months, she'd listened to Tris fret over his novel—not the story he'd penned, but its fate in the world. What his grandparents would think. How the critics would treat it. Whether it would sell. The shit was unbecoming.

She turned as far toward him as the seat belt would allow. “What do you want, Tris?”

He dangled his right wrist over the wheel and looked across his shoulder, eyes wary. “What do you mean?”

“I mean what do you want?” She took out a galley and thumbed through it. “To be famous? ‘Oh, look, there goes Tris Freedman, the novelist! I'm gonna get his autograph'?”

Tris sucked his teeth. “Yes. Exactly.”

She nodded. “Okay. I guess I didn't know that. Good luck.”

He accelerated.

“No, seriously. If that's what you think will make you happy, I hope you get it.”

“Thanks.”

“How will you know when you're famous enough?”

“When I win a Pulitzer. Can we talk about something else, please?” He reached for the radio dial, cranked the jazz station up loud.

“I guess I'm just not accustomed to being around artists who want fame.”

“That's because they already have it.”

“No, it's because they do what they do out of a need to grapple with and stylize the human—”

Tris lifted his hand. “Please, baby. If I want to hear what Devon Marbury thinks, I'll turn on PBS.”

Nina slouched in her seat and crossed her arms. They listened to the music. A pianist in a hard bop mode; Tris strained to dissect the technique and determine who it was, but he didn't have a clue—never did, unless he happened to own the record. There were too many cats. Nina was no better.

“I'm going to say Bobby Timmons,” he declared after a few choruses. Always a safe, respectable guess.

“I was thinking Ahmad Jamal.” Nina always went with Ahmad Jamal.

The tune ended and the DJ came on. It was Danilo Pérez; they were off by thirty years. Still a pair of dilettantes, Tris thought as the next song began.

         

He pulled into the Brodskys' driveway and Nina opened the passenger door. “That's weird. We beat your parents. I figured Linda would have been here cooking since dawn.”

Tris frowned at the front door, loped toward it, and read the note taped there. Penned in a frantic hand were the words
Tris—Grandma blacked out & fell. We're at the hospital on Brayburn. Mom.

They arrived at the emergency room, only to be directed upstairs to a private suite. A right turn off the elevator, then a left, and then his parents were rising from their chairs to greet him. Tristan remained seated, legs bowed, ankles crossed. He glanced up momentarily, nodded, then returned to his contemplation of the floor. Abe reached Tris first and wrapped his son in a tight, hard hug. Tris stepped out of it, impatient. “What happened? Where's Grandma?”