End of the Jews (36 page)

“It's flat-out treachery, Amalia.” He sounded helpless, hollow. “He used my life and made me out to be a monster.”

“
Pound Foolish
doesn't have monsters, Tristan. There are elements of you. And me. But Tris's characters aren't that simple. If you want my signature on your declaration of war, you can forget it.”

“Don't tell me,” he boomed. “I've done this my whole life—it's all I've done, as your grandson has been kind enough to point out. I know how writers think. They change the facts but not the people. The people but not the facts. They take things a step further, a step to the left, a step to the right. They do the shit-ass hokeypokey. Especially the hacks.”

“Like your first novel, about the other families living in your building?”

Tristan responded with a look no less infuriating for its familiarity, a grimace that meant,
Your lack of understanding is so profound that it is painful, tiring, to even speak to you.

“That book was shit. But it's completely different. I didn't know those people. I had a few facts and I made up the rest.”

“Just like Tris.” Amalia realized she had clenched her jaw, just like her daughter, and relaxed it. “I didn't sit for any interviews. I never told him what it was like to be married to you. Tris imagined. He invented. And he nailed it. He nailed it and you know it. Some of it is my truth. Some of it is yours. But all of it is his. So goddamn it, Tristan, let him have it. Lord knows, others have done as much for you. Including Tris.”

Tristan shook his head. “No. This is unforgivable. Our lives are known, Amalia. People will read this book and think I'm a drug addict. That I had an affair with Judy Pendergast, for Christ's sake. What kind of pseudo-Freudian bullshit is that?”

“Oh, come on, Tristan. The love scene in the country club bathroom? It's hilarious. There's no way that could be you—a hard-on for Judy? That scene
proves
the book is fiction.”

“Only to you.” He dropped his copy onto the coffee table and glowered down at it. “You know what our grandson is? He's a spoiled trust-fund brat with a fucking master's degree in fiction that we paid for, and nothing to write about except us and our lives. Some progress this family has made.” His eyes met hers and anger blared from them, anger Amalia saw was covering for hurt. But if Tristan wouldn't own up to that hurt, he'd get no sympathy from her.

“What gives him the right? What in the hell does he know about anything?”

“A hell of a lot,” Amalia snapped back. The dull tickle in her throat intensified. She swallowed hard against it, not wanting to cough. “If I had had the courage, I'd have written a book just like his—but instead I've got a desk drawer full of poems no one has ever seen.” She waited for a response, but he said nothing, and just like that the secret ceased to be a secret and floated weightlessly away, like a balloon nobody cared about. Amalia watched it drift off, stunned, and then remembered she was furious.

“Is that the only reason you came down? To talk about the book?”

“Yes.” His voice stiffened. “To talk about the book.”

“Well then, I think you'd better go back upstairs.” Amalia leaned forward and picked up her cards. Her husband stood before her, shocked, indignant, and Amalia pretended not to feel his eyes. Finally, he relented, turned, and disappeared.

         

By the time Tristan stood at the second-floor landing, with one hand clutching the bannister and the fingertips of the other splayed against the wall for balance, a sense of completion was settling over him. At long last, he was cut off from every other human being in the world. Unanimously betrayed. By his wife. His grandson. His daughter, who'd raised such a child—Tristan knew damn well what her agenda was. By the friends who had failed to provide better counsel, and the friends who'd been heartless enough to die. By the brain lollygagging in his head, the withered muscles of his body.

One way or another, everyone and everything had spoiled or faded, and now things were simple. He felt unburdened, and realized he had jettisoned two enormous weights he'd always carried: foreboding and hope. Things weren't going to get any worse or any better. Time had come to a standstill. Tristan could either struggle vainly as the resin encased him and hardened into amber or accept his fate and be still, perhaps spend the remaining time recalling happier occasions.

Perhaps this was why so many of the aged lost their minds. Capitulating to obsolescence was less painful if you couldn't tell your dick from a garden hose. But here he was intact, still full of anger at a time when anger was pathetic, useless. In eighty years, he'd neither earned the right to stand above the fray nor forfeited enough to fall below it. He had merely slowed down, and the other members of the pack had smelled his frailty and attacked. Soon they would fight over his bones, his legacy. But not before they'd gathered by his bedside to receive his benedictions.

Tristan sighed, dropped his hands from the wall and bannister, and considered his options. He could turn right and walk into his study, sit behind his desk and pretend that he might write, flanked by leaning skyscrapers of wasted paper, with a jar of gefilte fish and a plastic fork and a paper plate by his elbow and no horseradish with which to flavor the soggy morsels he'd been masticating mindlessly since youth.
Still Life with Manuscript Pages, Manischewitz Jar, and Bitter Old Fart.
Or he could turn left and stumble into bed and give himself over to sleep, wake only to eat and piss and shit, perhaps read something. There was pleasure there. Respite. A life of sleep had tempted him before, but he had always had the fortitude to forgo it. Some men coped with crisis by springing into action, purposeful or purposeless—by grabbing a rifle and marching straight toward the banditos or by grabbing a rake and marching straight into the yard. Others coped by deactivating, shutting down. Or by taking that same rifle and blowing out their brains.

Tristan had worked through wars, through illnesses, even through the seven days in 1980 that had passed between the removal of the polyps from his lymph nodes and the finding that they were benign. But now the notion of somnolence was too seductive to resist. A long, strong nap. Perhaps he'd wake up refreshed, with some of his rage leached away and his perspective realigned. Or perhaps he'd stir to consciousness groggy and disappointed, wanting only to return to dreams, and turn back over like a speck of flotsam in the ocean and submerge himself in them again.

Either way was fine. He pulled back the mothball-scented quilt of the guest room bed and lay down on the cool, soft sheets and closed his eyes, and time began to fall away.

That was what happened when you jettisoned hope and foreboding, he supposed; the hours and the days lost meaning. It was an opaqueness Tristan had always steeled himself against. Compared to most men, he had lived a timeless life, free from schedules and punch cards, and so Tristan had learned to impose such things upon himself. They called it self-discipline, but really it was just a way for him to feel part of the world. He got up when the businessmen rose to remind himself that what he did was work. To subdue any lurking self-indulgence, any fey capitulation to the whimsies of the Muse. Let the other bozos bitch and whine about how they didn't
feel
like writing today, how they weren't
inspired.
Lawyers probably didn't feel like lawyering every day, either, but they didn't stay in bed. Garbagemen manned garbage whether they were in the mood or not. The very act of consuming a mug of coffee at 7:30
A.M
. was an affirmation, no less than imbibing a cocktail when the work was done.

But no more sensory Ping-Pong. No more ritual sharpening and dulling of the wits. Tristan slept. Not with abandon, but with diligence. Straight through the night, the morning, the beginning of the afternoon. When his body forced wakefulness upon him, Tristan dispensed with it as perfunctorily as he could, condescending only to a state of semiconsciousness as he stumbled to and from the bathroom, then returning to the business of slumber.

His stomach, rumbling, awakened him some hours later. He ignored it, turned onto his other side to fool it into shutting up, and dozed off. The next time he opened his eyes, it was to squint at the pale light behind the gauze curtains and wonder whether it was dawn or twilight. He spent a moment in speculation before deciding that it didn't matter, shutting his eyes again. He slept and he woke and it was dark and on the nightstand was a turkey sandwich. He ate it, drank the glass of milk beside it, considered getting up. But soon the food, and the promise of more dreams, won out. Tristan didn't remember his dreams during his brief bouts of consciousness, but he had the sense they were agreeable and mild.

In the days that followed, Tristan began to regard his new enterprise as elegant. For eighty years, sleep had merely been about refueling, and now at last he was granting this remarkable condition the kind of time and attention it deserved. In his reluctance to wake up, he found himself spending longer and longer each day suspended in a pleasant in-between state, with his eyes closed and his mind channeling both dream and thought. He had limited powers of control, and no desire to expand them. Bodily sensations, words, images, ideas, and essences swirled together, touching and eluding him. Each thing dancing through his brain was a liquid ribbon of color, and where they brushed or caromed off the walls, they left smudges, streaks, splatters.

Each time Tristan moved out of this limbo and into full awareness, he was left with an internal painting to admire and decode before it fell away. Often, some person he'd known seemed to be the subject. Most memorably, he'd awakened with a strong sense of Albert, a feeling of Albert, an urge to listen to some of Van Horn's music. But the LPs were downstairs, in the living room, so that was that. He played them in his head instead, all he remembered, until they soothed him back to sleep.

Sandwiches and soup, water and tea continued to materialize. Only once was he awake when Mari entered with the tray. It was absurdly frightening: the sight of her, the anticipation of even the smallest interaction. Tristan shut his eyes and tried to mimic slumber, but he was too slow and she spoke.

“You have to get up, Tristan.”

He regarded her through half-masted eyelids. “No,” Tristan replied, his voice sludgy with disuse and surprisingly fearsome, “I don't.” Mariko set down the tray and left without another word.

That, Tristan knew had happened. Whether Linda had banged on his door in a dream or in reality, or both, he couldn't be sure. In any case, he'd muttered
Go away
and heaved a box of tissues at the sound, and she'd obeyed. The box was back on the nightstand now, but that didn't prove anything. No one else had come around, not to his knowledge. Least of all the newest goddamned writer in the family. No fool he. The devious little shit was staying out of range.

CHAPTER
TWELVE

N
ina tore down the crisp autumn block, leaves crunching underfoot, arms pumping, cheeks red, ignoring the prurient glances thrown her way by every male over twelve as she passed in her T-shirt and track pants. This was why she never jogged anymore. Her tits jounced all over the fucking place, painfully, no matter what she wore. But she had to do something, and pushing herself to the brink of physical exhaustion was it. A week had passed, and nobody had called. Most likely, Hunter College was trying to figure out what to do with her, just as she was trying to figure out what to do with herself.

This much was certain: she was fucked. Hunter might or might not make her give the money back—and it was money she didn't have, so unless they planned to sue for it and garnish her wages, which seemed fairly ridiculous, they could chalk that one up, learn their lesson and make people prove they were what they claimed in the future. They might or might not expel her. Probably they would. She would if she were they. At a bare minimum, they'd put her on disciplinary probation and inform Columbia of what she'd done, and Columbia would revoke her acceptance to its graduate program. One way or another, her student visa was going to expire, rendering her illegal. As early as next week if they expelled her, in May if she were permitted to don a cap and gown.

That left two options, deportation and marriage. That was one option, really, and one option wasn't an option, but a necessity. The simplest thing would be to declare her situation openly, tell Tris she could stay in America only if they got engaged. She wouldn't even have to explain the lie and the scholarship and the consequences she'd brought tumbling down with that bout of truthfulness or moral reckoning or whatever it had been. She could just say she'd changed her mind about grad school and wanted to work instead, pay back her student loans.

But that was no good. If they were going to do it, they should do it for real. She couldn't have Tris feeling that he was rescuing her. That would give him too much power.

And really, Nina didn't feel as skeptical about marriage as she used to—didn't see its futility confirmed by the wreckage of her parents' union or Tris's grandparents', didn't consider it the ludicrous, doomed proposition she once had. Perhaps it was love, or age. More likely, it was the creeping exhaustion that mounted in her with each year of going it alone, in a foreign country, with no asylum and no money and Marcus still treating her like his personal concubine and Miklos bawling out his distant pitch-black woes. Marriage had started to seem like an increasingly nice, calm, sturdy idea as far back as two years ago—and this wasn't revisionism, Nina told herself, jogging in place as she waited for a red light to turn green. This wasn't tricking herself into believing what she had to. This was legit.

It would come as a shock to Tris, because his knee-jerk antipathy toward the institution had stopped her from ever divulging her own evolving opinion of it. That had been a mistake. She'd have to ease him into the idea quickly, convince him that it didn't mean what he thought it did, wasn't an agreement to live a boring life, or a finish line that marked the end of everything vital in a relationship. That it wouldn't turn them into his parents, grandparents, whatever suburban Hubby and Missus archetype he held in his mind. That it would be fun to have a big party, a public celebration of their love. Malik could DJ. It could be a hip-hop wedding. They'd get presents.

Nina turned onto Dekalb, the half-imagined seasonal aromas of pumpkin and hearth fire sharp in her nostrils, threw on a burst of speed, and crossed the street. Once more around the level rectangular route, three blocks long by five blocks wide, and then she'd go inside and shower and let Tris know she wanted him to marry her. No—she'd use
wife
as a verb,
wife me up,
the way he and Malik did. That would be nice and playful, convey the point that it was still her, that wanting to get hitched did not instantly transform her into some gross American sitcom harpie, waving her unadorned ring finger in the air and threatening to walk. The image made Nina think of the new wife her mother had conjured up for Miklos, the trashy, silicone-filled Californian broad. It was amazing how vividly Nina could still see the nonexistent woman in her mind.

         

How many hours have I just slept? Tristan wondered as he ruptured the surface of a bowl of minestrone with his spoon. He'd been awake now for an hour, mostly out of the desire to determine whether it was dusk or dawn. A hard urge to put down, that. He stirred only at ambiguous hours, it seemed to him. Or perhaps all light was beginning to take on the same wan hue. It was dusk, he had decided finally, and time he ate something. It had become a ritual of sorts—who knew why?—for Tristan to ignore the food left for him until he'd awakened to its company a second time. The spoon was halfway to his mouth when Linda barged through the door.

“Jesus, Dad, that's been sitting there since last night. I'll get you something fresh.”

He chewed once and let the thick liquid slide down his throat. “Don't you knock?”

“What would be the point?” She sat on the edge of the bed, reached over and lifted the bowl out of his palm, then wrested the spoon from his grip and deposited both on the floor by her feet. He watched it happen, transfixed by his own inability to resist.

“Enough is enough, Dad. Time to get up. You've got a bris to attend.”

He blinked at her. “I do?”

“Yup. Steven and Melissa had a boy. Nine pounds even. Kid's a fucking moose.”

“Name?”

Linda dropped her chin and looked over her brow at him. “Prepare yourself. Thaddeus Carter Brodsky.”

Tristan winced. “And they're having a
bris
? Really?”

“It would mean a tremendous amount to Steven, and his mother, and probably to your brother, if you went,” said Linda, acting in her official capacity as liaison between the two branches of the family, a job she had inherited from Amalia.

“I don't think I'm up to it.”

“Bullshit. Look, Dad, you are not going to spend the rest of your life asleep. You've got to deal. You know that.”

Tristan threw back the covers, and the warm, stale odor of his body floated up from the bed. “I don't know anything,” he said, lifting himself to his feet. He shuffled to the bathroom, closed the door, and took a weak, dribbling piss. For the first time in days, he glanced into the mirror over the sink. Stubble did not flatter an old man; he looked like a hobo with his patchy gray-white beard. His daughter was right. There was no dignity in this.

Linda rubbed the cuff of his desiccated bathrobe between two fingers as he climbed back into bed.

“Eisenhower administration?”

“Truman.” He reclined against the headboard, one house-slippered foot on the floor and the other laid out straight in front of him. “You've read your son's book?”

“I don't read books written by relatives. Life is easier that way.”

“I wasn't aware that you had such a policy. I seem to recall discussing some of my own books with you.”

“Not since the one about the musician with all the women.”

“It's pretty terrible.”

Linda picked a piece of lint off his pajama top. “I'm sure it's brilliant. I just got sick of wondering which character thought what you thought and which didn't, and who was who, and which parts were real. The guy has all those affairs.”

Her gaze meandered down the bedspread. “Sometimes I still read one of Mom's poems, if it's in
The New Yorker
or something. But I'm not going to read Tris's book. I'll buy twenty copies. I'll tell everyone I know to read it. But not me. I've learned my lesson.”

“I never knew you felt this way.”

“I never told you.”

“Why not?”

“Because you would have waved your hand at me and said I didn't understand what you were doing. Which probably would've been true. And I would have felt even worse.”

Tristan said nothing.

“He got a starred review from
Publishing Preview,”
Linda offered. “They were hard on
Contents Under Pressure
, so it's a good sign. Mom's been raving about it, too.”

“Because she thinks I've finally gotten my comeuppance.” Tristan crossed his arms. “She's told you my opinion as well as her own?”

“She has, and it upset me so much, I've barely slept all week. That's the only reason I didn't drag you out of bed days ago—I was hoping rest might calm you down. Before you said something to your grandson that would break his heart.”

“I don't intend to say anything to him. Ever.”

“Don't be a schmuck. If you think Tris meant to hurt you, or expose you, or whatever it is you think, you're crazy. Everything isn't always about you, Dad, as hard as that may be to comprehend.”

Tristan bowed his brow into a scowl, looked away. “You've said what you came to say. I'd like some privacy.”

Linda stood. “Clean yourself up. I'll be here tomorrow at ten.”

She left without waiting for a response. Tristan tried to fall asleep, but it was no good; that was over. His brain was back in gear, the memories flowing.

He gazed at the door Linda had just slammed, and remembered that a poster of John Lennon had once hung from it. And then it was 1969 and Linda was facedown on this bed, arm crooked above her head, body racking as she cried into her elbow, and Tristan was standing at the threshold with a gin and tonic in his hand and a professor of economics by his side—the man staring expectantly at him, at her, at him again.

Tristan hadn't done a thing, simply continued walking his guest through the house, as if a bawling teenager were part of the tour, a permanent exhibit. Downstairs, a cocktail party simmered: voices rising through the floor, filling the house. Minutes before, Tristan had watched his daughter race up the stairs, legs pumping, skirt flouncing around her thighs. And before that, he'd stood close enough to her, one conversational cluster away, to overhear the exchange that had routed her.

Hello, Mr. Andrews,
Linda had said, entering the man's radius with two long, well-timed strides just as his previous conversation was concluding. In her right hand was a glass of white wine from which she had not sipped, from which she never would.
I just wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed your novel. I thought you did a wonderful job with Christine; I really felt like I knew her
. She raised her left hand to her temple, tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.
Is it true that it's going to be made into a movie? That's so exciting!

Andrews drained his highball, staring around the glass at her as he brought it to his mouth, and then said,
Who are you again
?

She took the wineglass with her when she fled. It was sitting on her bedside table when Tristan passed her room and did nothing. Didn't excuse himself, slip inside, and lay a hand across her shuddering back. Didn't go downstairs and tell Andrews to get the hell out, or march him up there to apologize. He'd let her cry, let some prick humiliate his daughter in her own living room, and snuck past as if it wasn't his problem. Assumed Amalia would track her down, handle it. Convinced himself he wouldn't be able to help anyway.

The memory played on. Fifteen minutes later, he had turned, to see his wife guiding his daughter back down the stairs, an arm around her shoulders. Amalia was radiant—and realer to him, somehow, than she'd ever been. Whether this was what he'd felt then, Tristan did not know, but he felt it now. His daughter was the age his wife had been when they'd met, the same age Amalia had remained, in some ways, ever since. A part of her would always be that young, that beautiful, just blooming into brilliance. Tristan closed his eyes, and rivers of desire and regret gushed through him. He opened them and whispered his wife's name.

Tristan walked to the bathroom, found a razor in the cabinet, twisted the faucet until steaming water splashed into the sink. He didn't care about the world and how it would interpret the doppel-gänger his grandson had devised, the old man realized as he wet his face, applied the shaving cream. He'd tested out that argument with Amalia, thought then that he cared, but it was clear to Tristan now that he did not. What could the world do to him that it hadn't already? He was ashamed, that was the truth. He was a selfish fuck, an absentee human being. All the battles he had fought had been for the wrong things, against the wrong people. And now all of it was set down in black and white, the essence of his failings abstracted, satirized, manipulated into goddamn art.

Tristan gripped the razor and slashed carelessly through the lather. The blade was dull, the bristles thick. Progress was slow and painful. Forgiveness was what he wanted, the old man thought as the basin filled up with hair. Even now, it was perhaps not out of reach—to be forgiven, to forgive—if only Tristan weren't so thoroughly himself, so beholden to the conviction that forgiveness would wipe him clean away, destroy whatever was left. He tried to tell himself that was a good thing, tried to think of forgiveness as rebirth. But it sounded distinctly New Testament, and besides, who the hell was he to be reborn? He'd only fuck things up worse if he bucked the cycle of birth and death, traded his dignity for a few breaths of golem life.

You had to bury a man to make a man, that was what Ellison had said. And he had lived too long, and Tris had tired of waiting and decided to make himself a man by throwing six cubic feet of words over his grandfather's shallow-breathing body. Perhaps Tristan would have done the same. He tried to sell himself on the idea. It didn't take, but Tristan plundered on, probed every nook and cranny of his mind, plausible and otherwise, looking for a loophole, a trapdoor, a crawl space: any semblance of a path that might open up on some kind of absolution, for himself or for his grandson. He suspected that the two were one.