Hollywood Animal (109 page)

“Very good,” he said. “You speak Hungarian perfect.”

“Thank you, Steffen,” Naomi said and held his hand.

My father’s eyes were suddenly frantic, his eyes like Luke’s when he woke up in the middle of the night and screamed for us.

“Isn’t there some way to make this go faster?” he asked me. “Isn’t there some way I can die faster?”

I shook my head. I noticed he wasn’t crying now.

“How much longer will it take?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Nobody knows.”

He nodded and looked away and shook his head.

“Are you scared, Pop?” I asked him.

“No,” he said, “I am ready for the next adventure.”

He dozed off then as we were holding his hand. He startled awake as I was kissing his forehead, saying goodbye.

“You’re going?” he said, panicked again.

“We’ll be back tomorrow, Steffen,” Naomi said.

“Ah.” He smiled at her. “Good.”

“My son,” he said to her, “married a beautiful woman.”

“Thank you, Steffen,” Naomi said, kissing his forehead.

“My son,” he said to Naomi, “was always a very good
bájgunár
.”

“What is
bájgunár?
” Naomi asked me.

“Cocksman,” I said.

“You, Steffen,” Naomi said, “like your son, are a very bad man.”

“Very true,” my father said, and laughed. We laughed with him.

We had come here to cheer him, but the final joke, as we were almost out the door
—bájgunár!
—was my father’s and meant to cheer
us
.

It was still snowing as we sat in a bar a few blocks from my father’s house. I was drinking a double Tanqueray gin straight and Naomi, who hardly drinks, was on her second glass of wine.

“Well,” I said, “we’re in Cleveland. We don’t have a whole lot of plans here except to see him. Do you want to look at some houses in Cleveland?”

“I wondered if we were coming back here,” Naomi said, “partly to do this?”

I said, “Subconsciously, you mean?”

Naomi told me a story: “We were living in downtown Mansfield when I was little and the downtown area was changing. More crime. Fights. Cops patrolling. Fights at the bars down the street. My dad wanted to get his kids out of there. He found a lot of land near Mifflin Lake that had small summer homes and cabins.
It
was part of the state conservancy. They told him that he could build a home out there, but only if he became the conservator and took care of the summer homes. So my dad built a home for us with his own hands on that plot of land on the shore of Mifflin Lake. It took him a year. We had no one to play with except from June to Labor Day when the summer home owners would come. We were out in the middle of nowhere, just our family, on the shore of an amazing lake that turned into our own ice-skating rink in the winter. Then, when my older brothers got married and had kids, my dad and my brothers built houses for
them
across the street. It was the greatest thing that my dad ever did for us. He took us away from the influences he feared would hurt us and built a fairy tale for us with his own hands.”

That night I prayed for my father to die—he wanted to die; it was the best thing for him—and the next morning we went to a real estate office in Chagrin Falls, a picture postcard village outside Cleveland that I’d always loved.

The area around Chagrin Falls is hilly and tree-lined, horsey and woodsy country. The houses vary from Tudor to French Normandy to Colonial, with sizable acreage around them.

On this day, as we drove along the Chagrin River, the sun gleamed off the fallen snow and the air was brisk and crystalline. We looked at houses with indoor pools and ballrooms and racquetball courts, estates with guesthouses and stables and corrals. At each stop, the real estate agent got his snow shovel out of the trunk of the limo and made a path to the door.

We had lunch with the agent in the heart of Chagrin, right next to the falls—at a little place called Rick’s, which served great cheeseburgers and where I could smoke. We looked at a couple more houses after lunch—one in a tiny township called Bainbridge—and called it a day.

Just outside Chagrin, we saw a place called the Coyote Moon Café and stopped for a drink. We were on the way to see my father again and we were cold, too.

This time I had a double tequila. We liked the feel of the place—a bar where you could drink and smoke, a bar which served great nachos … a friendly bar with a vintage jukebox where, when I sneezed hard, a guy on the barstool next to mine said, “Hey, pardner, I just wanna tell you if you need any help, I’m close by.”

But as I sipped my tequila to get ready to see my father, Naomi said, “You’re not thinking of coming back here because—” She couldn’t finish the sentence. She was choked up.

“Because—”

I knew what she was thinking and finished it for her.

“Because when I’m gone, this will be a good place for you and the kids?”

“Yes,” she said.

“No,” I said, “I’m not thinking of that.”

“Do you promise me?” Naomi said.

“I promise you,” I said.

It’s not easy to find a good place open for lunch on Sunday in Cleveland and we wound up at an Irish pub called the Harp on 44th and Detroit Avenue, just a few blocks from where I’d grown up on Lorain Avenue.

We sat there watching the snow fall outside, ate a great Irish bacon quiche, drank a Guinness, and listened to Van Morrison and the Chieftains. A blazing fireplace nearby warmed us.

Neither Naomi nor I had really talked about it yesterday, but it came up here now in this warm and cozy place with the fireplace crackling … the
house in Bainbridge Township
.

It was the last house we had looked at before our talk about death at the Coyote Moon. It was a white colonial with a porch and a screened indoor gazebo room. It was 8,900 square feet. Its basement ran the length of the house, perfect for four little boys to raise havoc in. Its skylighted attic ran the length of the house, too, a perfect room for writing. Six bedrooms, formal dining and living rooms, a large kitchen, and, best of all, five acres surrounded by woods, ponds, and a private lake with a large private dock. It was out in the country, but only ten minutes from the town of Chagrin Falls, only forty minutes from downtown Cleveland on the freeway.

As we talked about it, Naomi and I could hear screen doors slamming, inner tubes hitting the lake, crickets chirping. We could see little boys free to ride around the neighborhood cul-de-sacs on their bikes, free to jump into the lake, to explore the woods for treasures.

“Let’s go back to see it again,” Naomi said.

“I thought we’d decided against this.”

“Let’s go back and see it anyway.”

We called the real estate agent, who very graciously canceled his plans, and we went to see the house again. It was everything that we had remembered from the day before and more (the lake was stocked with bass and the snow on the ground was covering two sweeping lawns that led to the lake and an outdoor, red-brick patio).

We thanked the agent when we were finished and told him we’d get back to him. My feeling was that he was beginning to think that we were lunatics, but liked us anyway. We were given photographs of the house in winter, summer, and fall and took them with us.

We talked about the house and the effect on our family if we moved here—until we got on the plane to California the next day.

What we kept getting back to, over and over again, was
the house itself
. We were housebound, home-oriented people. I wrote and read much of each day. Naomi loved to cook and I favored her cooking over Wolfgang Puck’s. We hung out at home much of the time in the kitchen and this house had a stunning kitchen with its own breakfast nook overlooking the dock and the lake. We didn’t go out much at night. After seven years of marriage, we were still crazy in love and wanted to spend nighttime with each other, not with others.

So the truth was that if we moved to Cleveland, we’d really be moving
to this house
, this cocoon, this fortress.

Our family would be our community. With four growing boys and with my two grown children and with work and with our love for each other, we wouldn’t have much time for too much else.

That night I had a dream that I was jogging down a street that led through thick black woods. It was a bright, sun-kissed, clear day, and as I jogged I was exhilarated and happy.

When I woke from the dream, its memory made me smile: I didn’t and couldn’t jog. I even had trouble hurrying through an airport to catch a flight. Thanks, no doubt, to the four packs of Salems I smoked each day.

As we pulled into Cleveland Hopkins International Airport heading back to Malibu, the last thing we saw before we pulled into the terminal was a factory, its torch afire in a leaden, gray sky.

Looking at it in horror, I whispered, “No way we’re moving here.”

As we got on the plane, I was wearing a brown fur Hungarian peasant hat my father had given me before we left his house.

But in exchange for the hat, I reflected, my father had taken my voice. I had shouted into his ear so often during this visit, straining my polyped vocal cords so badly, that I couldn’t speak at all.

Struck dumb in Cleveland by my own father!

As we pulled onto the Pacific Coast Highway and saw the sun glistening off the sea, I said, “We can’t ever leave here!”

I noticed that Naomi had the photographs of the house in Bainbridge Township in her lap.

As we resumed our Malibu routine, we found that the house in Bainbridge Township had snaked its way into our brains. We kept thinking and talking about it.

“It’s exactly like where I grew up,” Naomi said, “the house on Mifflin Lake that my dad built. There’s even a road you can see in the distance across the lake. The kitchen even faces the lake like my mother’s kitchen did.”

We talked about how happy our little boys would be there, fishing in the lake, sledding down the hill that led to it. Bainbridge Township, Ohio, we agreed, was the real America. High school football on Friday night, not a party at Kenny G’s house. Burgers and hot dogs in the backyard on Sundays, not a walk down the bluff, boogie board in hand, to the beach. A wasp’s nest on Show and Tell Day in kindergarten, not Dad’s Oscar.

But
… Ohio
instead of
Malibu?
Thermal underwear instead of bikini shorts? Maple syrup instead of soy sauce? Pancakes at the high school gym instead of sushi at Nobu? Lake Erie perch and walleye instead of Santa Barbara mussels?

Moving to Bainbridge Township was madness
… no
, moving to Bainbridge Township was real life
… no
, it was an act of nostalgia and masochism
… no
, it was a selfless and loving gift to our boys
… no
, our boys would be better off as surfers than as redneck hicks
… no
, Ohioans were good, solid, decent people, not redneck hicks.

I went back and forth, back and forth, driving myself and Naomi nuts.

We didn’t know what to do.

So we put our Point Dume house up for sale and left the move to Ohio in the hands of God.

If our house sold fast, we decided, we’d move.

But Malibu houses sometimes took years to sell at their full asking price. The sale, we thought, would be further complicated by the construction which had begun in the lot next door. Whoever bought our house would be harassed by construction noise for years.

We also put an absolutely top-of-the-line, stretched-to-the-max list price on the house, hundreds of thousands of dollars more than our real estate agent said would be a fair price.

We weren’t interested in fair; we were testing God.

It’s in Your hands, yes, but we have to be sure You’ll be making the right decision.

Michael Huffington, the ex-Senate candidate, looked at our house and its exorbitant price and passed. So did the actress Catherine Oxenberg, who, for a heartbeat, had been married to my great friend Robert Evans. So did Jack Nicholson’s daughter. So did pro basketball coach Larry Brown.

And then a young
dot.com
couple came and looked at it and bought it.
At full list price
.

Our house had been on the market for a week.

We had six weeks to get out.

We had left it in God’s hands and God had made the decision for us.

Boychik, God said, go home!

Three days after we bought our house in Bainbridge Township, Ohio, we heard Brian Williams on
MSNBC Nightly News
say that Cleveland had been hit by a 3.7 earthquake, its epicenter just offshore in Lake Erie.

“If Steffen doesn’t die before we move back there,” Naomi said, “will you let him see the boys?”

“He’ll die,” I said, “he is ready to go any day.”

“What if he doesn’t?”

“Sure,” I said, “they’re his grandchildren. He can see them.”

“Will you let them kiss him?”

“Of course I will. I kiss him myself.”

“Steffen won’t die,” Naomi said, “until he sees the boys.”

Naomi said, “Will you tell the boys what he did in Hungary?”

“Now?”

“You know what I mean. When they’re older?”

“I think it’s important to tell them. I told Steve and Suzi, too.”

“Why? Because you can’t forgive him and you want to destroy him in the boys’ eyes?”

“No,” I said, “because I think all my children have to know what their family members have done, good or bad.”

“Why inflict that on them?” Naomi said. “They don’t deserve it.”

“So they spend the rest of their lives,” I said, “trying to make up for what their grandfather did.”

“They’ll hate him for it when they’re older,” Naomi said.

“No they won’t. Not if we raise them right. They’ll understand that this particular horror can be orchestrated even by a benign-looking grandpa who loves his grandchildren.”

We told the boys we were moving and showed them pictures of the house in Bainbridge Township. They ran around the room whooping and hollering at decibels even louder than their routine ear-shattering levels.

They would have their own lake! And they could fish and swim! And in the winter they could ice-skate! And sled! They could ride their bikes
on the street!
Their rec room was the length of the house! We would build snowmen! We could watch thunderstorms!