The Queen and I (6 page)

Chapter Nine: Ups and Downs

Peaks and valleys, ups and downs, highs and lows—whatever your choice of words were, that is how best to describe the meteoric rise of Jacob Stone while trying to accurately depict the plight of Jeffrey David Rothstein.

Where Jacob was the toast of the town, being invited to one party after another, the favorite target of the paparazzi, and the object of desire for a new legion of adoring fans, Jeffrey was as low as a man could possibly be in the short period of time that it took to send his career into a tailspin. He was unable to find a new venue for
A Dreidel Spins in Yonkers
, so his latest masterpiece quietly went away and out of the thoughts of even the most avid Broadway enthusiasts. He tried to find backers to help him keep the show running as a national production, touring from one city to another, but the same people who had backed him on every other venture now mysteriously wanted nothing to do with him or his future projects.

Whatever it was that he sought and wherever he did it, he was met with the same negative responses and treated as if he were carrying a communicable disease with no cure. He was the proverbial pickled herring in the punch bowl, and it felt terrible. His only bright spot was that Rachel had not left him.

He had briefly been certain of the possibility that she would do as every other girlfriend had, discard him in favor of being with the new flavor of the month named Jacob Stone.

Just the thought of Jacob made him sick to his stomach, but not as bad as the people whom his former assistant had now associated himself with. Heinrich and Mendel had been very thorough in their dismantling of Jeffrey’s reputation and career options. There was even a story floating around in some circles that implied Jeffrey had a secret double life as a transvestite-reformed rabbi named Esther Jacobovits. The more Jeffrey protested, the more people believed the lie.

While Jacob was busy appearing on talk show after talk show, Jeffrey struggled to get his accountant on the phone to find out where and how his money had been vanishing. He had never been one to spend a lot of his earnings, as he lived a very simple life considering his fame, but not having his money where it was supposed to be was driving him to the bottle, and that was not like him.

Guest appearances and signings of the novelizations of his plays were cancelled; the press wanted nothing to do with him other than the sordid stories being manufactured about him regarding late night visits from Chinese delivery boys and long hours behind closed doors from visiting Jehovah’s Witnesses who left looking the worse for the wear.

He began staying up later than he usually did and was becoming an addict to the late night infomercials that transfixed his attention and left him selling off shares of various stocks so that he could supplement his bank account in order to purchase items that he did not need or use. His ability to set the timer on his chicken and forget it did not help him fight his way out of his depression or get him back to the writing that had made him so happy for the better part of his life.

He watched Jacob appear on late night talk shows and imagined dragging his half-naked body through a pool of elephant excrement and covering him with half-starved dung beetles. He always smiled when he had thoughts like that and wondered if that was wrong or if he was just being childish, and that is when it hit him; he was going about things all wrong.

He was spending too much time trying to maintain the higher moral code and not dropping to the depths of cruelty and vindictiveness that he was now victim to; he was attempting to be the better man, the bigger man, but what he truly needed to do was feed on that little something inside of him that was craving the cruel and unusual. The person he had always believed he was, perhaps, was not the man he should be. What was needed was to feed the beast, nurture the demon, and find out what the hell was planned for him next so that he could prevent it.

He continued to think about ways to accomplish this and determined that if it was evil and cruelty that his enemies wanted, then that was exactly what they were going to get. Jeffrey was nothing if not cunning, and he was more than capable of tapping his own inner necromancer to eliminate his foes and bring them to their knees.

He spent the large part of his free time watching old Hitchcock films, reading Stephen King, and scouring the Internet for ideas of ways to get back at his foes and to elevate his career at the same time, when it occurred to him that he would once again get back to his writing. It made all the sense in the world. It was his best weapon and one that he had honed since childhood. He could wield it with the depth skill of a neurosurgeon, he could fire it with pinpoint accuracy, and when he hit his target, none could withstand the damage that ensued.

Jeffrey’s biggest problem was finding a way to get back to his writing again; he still was suffering from an extreme case of writer’s block and nothing that he tried seemed to work. He tried a change of scenery; writing in the park, at the New York Public Library, even on the subway, but none of it helped. It was not until a late night of watching infomercials and scanning the Internet that he came across the possible solution to his problems—a cabin on a lake in upstate New York.

He had come across it on one of those auction sites, and the place looked perfect. It was just outside of a small town named Zion, was nestled in the woods on the shore of a perfectly peaceful-looking lake, and the price appeared to be too good to be true, way below market value. This could be the answer to his dilemma.

He quickly checked his accounts, made a phone call to his broker to dump some stocks for extra cash purposes, and contacted the real estate agent showing the house. With any luck, he would move in within the next couple of weeks and be back at work doing what he did best—writing the kind of play that left the audience wanting more and feeling like they had just been in the presence of greatness. The subjects of his new masterpiece would be the treacherous Heinrich Schultz and Mendel Fujikawa. If they thought they had gotten the best out of Jeffrey, they were sorely mistaken and were about to learn this the hard way. You know what they say about revenge, Jeffrey was already savoring the flavor, and he had not even tasted it yet.

In the morning, he contacted his real estate agent and quickly and quietly saw to the arrangements of getting out of the city so as not to arouse any attention from the trio who were trying to destroy his life. He was single minded in purpose now, and it felt good. He knew what needed to be done and how to see it through. He could practically feel the creative juices flowing again, and it was almost orgasmic.

* * *

Richard Kearney walked back into the house that had almost driven him mad and wandered through its hallways and rooms looking for any personal possessions that he might have left behind. The home had sold quickly, and he was grateful for that. What made the sale even better was that the buyer had not personally inspected the place himself. Rather, he sent an appraiser to inspect the property for him and to make a counteroffer that Richard was only too happy to settle for. If he wanted the house, Richard would have practically given it to him.

Even now, as he wandered through its empty rooms, he knew for a fact that he was not alone; he could sense the eyes watching him, could hear the footsteps fall in behind him, and if he listened closely enough, he could hear the soft humming of
Shall We Dance?

The presence that insisted on staying in this house even after Richard had pleaded and threatened with spiritual intervention was the ultimate winner and would soon have a new fool to torment and to grace with his own special kind of perverse haunting. Fortunately for the ghost, the new owner was apparently some kind of playwright, so they would obviously have something to talk about.

He locked the door behind himself as he left for the last time and left the key in the mailbox as he said he would do. He took one last look at the house on the lake and at the second floor where his bedroom had once been and saw that the windows had been fogged over. Inscribed in the steamy film were the words,
Good night, sweet prince.

Chapter Ten: The Phone Is Not Ringing

There was still time to be put to good use before Jeffrey vanished to his self-imposed exile in little Zion, New York. He had former colleagues to contact, actors to speak to, and the all-important task of telling Rachel that he had purchased the house to begin with.

He had avoided this conversation because he knew what her reaction would be—that he was a coward and that he was running away instead of facing the problem head on. Rachel was a very driven person, much more so than Jeffrey, and she was the typical type-A personality who bowed to no one and made you understand exactly what a mistake it was to cross her. The mere mention of Jeffrey fleeing the city to clear his mind and get back to work would appear to her as nothing more than another attempt of his to avoid confrontation at all costs.

Rachel would most likely insist that he continue to make phone calls and to continue his work here in the city where he was both in the middle of the action and close enough to her for her to keep both eyes on him.

What she didn’t realize yet, because they hadn’t spoken in a couple of days, was that Jeffrey had already made those phone calls, some of them repeatedly, and the fact was that the phone simply was not ringing. No matter how he sounded when he left the message, no matter how he went about seeing to its delivery, the phone was not ringing.

He was a pariah in the Broadway community, a cancer to be avoided. Schultz and his friends had been very thorough in their systematic dissection of his career and life. They had thought of everything, and there seemed to be little that Jeffrey could do to fight it except get back to work. In order for him to get back to work, he needed to be as far away from this
mishegas
as possible.

He laughed to himself. Why was it whenever he faced dire situations or complicated social interactions that he always turned to speaking Yiddish to himself?

Perhaps it was because it was a soothing language to think about; it always seemed to have the right word for the right situation. Maybe it was because the way the language rolled off of the tongue it made the message sound harsher than it really was. Or perhaps it was because it was the language that his grandmother, or
bubbe
, had used, and as she said, there was not a situation in the world that could not be explained with a single word in Yiddish.

His bubbe was a remarkable woman. She was a survivor of the Holocaust and a woman who had every right to be bitter toward society; but instead, she faced every situation as just another hiccup that life threw at you and always dismissed the big problems, as well as the small, with a clever word or phrase in Yiddish that made the problem go away. Jeffrey wondered what she would say about what he was going through right now.

Nisht geferlich.
That’s what she would probably say;
I’ve seen worse.
That is how his bubbe would easily sum up his current situation, and she would be right. Being a survivor of Nazi atrocities, she had indeed seen worse.

He knew that he would have to get in touch with her before he left the city; she was the one person he never wanted to anger, and thought about how protective she had always been of him since he was her only grandchild. He owed her a phone call and knew that at least she would call back.

He got her answering machine; “Hello, this is Zelda Rothstein, I’m not going to tell you where I am because it’s none of your business, so leave a message, and I will call you back if I like you.”

That was his bubbe all right, straight and to the point. He sometimes wondered if she knew how charming she was in her old-world ways, or if maybe she was putting on a show to hide the pain that she had experienced in her lifetime; perhaps she was just getting old and had learned a long time ago that people by nature were
farcockt
,
and the less time you spent worrying about them, the happier you wound up being.

He decided that after he packed a few more of his things, he would head over to Brooklyn to drop in on her before going to see Rachel.

He came across a few finished plays while going through his personal effects that he had forgotten about due to the sheer volume of what he had written, and decided that he would also send them off to a couple of backers, in the event that he could still sell one of them and supplement his income while in exile.

Life was moving a bit too fast in ways that he could not control for his liking, and he desperately needed to find a way to slow things down. The sooner he could feel as if he were in control of his situation, the happier he would be, and then he would be the one in position to dictate terms of what would happen next in this little game of chess that he was playing.

Jeffrey loved returning to Brooklyn to see his bubbe; there was something about the borough of his birth that always made him feel welcomed and at home in a way that no other place on earth could. He suspected that his bubbe was screening her calls again, so he took the chance and grabbed a cab to bring him to her Borough Park neighborhood.

Borough Park was one of the last true enclaves of Jewish life in Brooklyn, and the majority of the Jews who lived there were very religious, but Jeffrey’s bubbe, Zelda, was not. Yes, she went to temple every Saturday, and yes, she observed the Sabbath, but she wasn’t much for standing on ceremony, and she certainly was not about to wear a
shadel
, or wig, for anyone.

Her house was a quaint little two story that looked much the same as the other homes on her block, and the residents of her little corner of the world had known each other for decades and were as tightly knit as any family of blood relations. They also practiced the very same idiosyncrasies that were not uncommon to both actual family and the Jewish people; gossip flowed freer than water in her neck of the woods, and nobody was exempt from it. Just by showing up to her home unannounced, he knew, by the end of the day, the entire neighborhood would be commenting on the various possible reasons for his visit, as well as the reports that have been circulating about him in the papers.

He rang the doorbell and waited. He knew that she was home because the string was not in the doorpost. His bubbe was slightly paranoid due to her childhood and made a habit of leaving a small black string in the door whenever she went out, so that if someone broke in through the front door while she was away, she would know that someone was possibly still in her house. “I’m not going to let some sex fiend have his way with me,” she said.

He rang the bell again and now heard her coming to the door, yelling, “I have my own religion!”

“Open the door, Bubbe. It’s Jeffrey.”

The door opened and Jeffrey’s ninety-year-old grandmother stood in front of him, all five and a half feet of wrinkles and smile, wearing a housecoat, and holding a glass of prune juice spiked with vodka.

“Oy, Mr. Big Time Broadway man comes all the way to Brooklyn to see his bubbe,” she said to no one in particular as she licked her parched lips before asking for her hello kiss. “Come in,
bubbeleh
.”

He followed her into the house, and the smell of stewed meat hit him immediately. It was as if his grandmother always had one cut or another stewing away in an aromatic broth of vegetables and raisins. The smell was always intoxicating and made Jeffrey feel bad that he didn’t visit more often.

His parents had moved to Europe about fifteen years earlier because his father was offered a curator job at the US Embassy in Prague, and Bubbe had refused to go with them, even though she had been invited. “The Germans had their chance,” she said. “No way I’m giving them another shot.”

“So, what brings you all the way to Brooklyn?” she asked, looking for someone else as she asked the question.

“She didn’t come with me, Bubbe.”

“Who didn’t come with you?”

“You know who. Rachel. She did not come with me; she doesn’t even know that I’m here.”

His bubbe smiled, shook her head, and muttered under her breath, “He has to sneak around so the
golem
doesn’t know where he is.” She chuckled softly. “You would have been an interesting man, if the
moyel
hadn’t taken offtoo much.”

Bubbe loved to break his chops over Rachel. The two of them had met at a
Shabbas
about two years earlier, and Bubbe had immediately taken a dislike to his girlfriend. Part of the reason was that she caught Rachel on her cell phone in the backyard during the Sabbath, and that was a major no-no, especially in an ultra-religious neighborhood like Borough Park where the streets have eyes. When she asked for an apology, Rachel thought the old woman was being ridiculous, and the two of them had not spoken since. It didn’t really bother Bubbe at all; she took more pleasure in watching how uncomfortable it made her grandson whenever her name came up.

“I wanted to let you know that I am going away for a little while and was wondering if you would like to come with me?” Jeffrey asked.

“Go? Where are you going?”

“Upstate, near the Finger Lakes.”

“Why would I want to go live near a finger?” Bubbe asked, slightly confused.

“That’s just the name of the lakes, Bubbe; they aren’t real fingers.”

“Why are you in such a hurry to leave? Is it that
goniff
girlfriend of yours?”

Jeffrey had almost forgotten about that. Bubbe had accused Rachel of stealing a single spoon from her silverware set, hence the nickname
goniff,
or thief.

“It has nothing to do with Rachel, Bubbe. I’m having some problems with work, and I just need to get away for a little while.”

Bubbe shook her head disapprovingly and said, “It’s those horrible, disrespectful plays that you write for the
goyim.
The Gentiles have never appreciated the hard work we Jews do for them, but they have no problem blaming us for everything when something goes wrong.” Not this argument again. One of the great pleasures that Jews, especially older Jews, took out of life was playing the tortured soul card, and Bubbe had been a member since the day she was born. She had her reasons, of course, watching your family get hunted down by the Nazis had that kind of effect on you, but she played the card more often the older she got.

“I’m not being blamed for anything. I just feel that I could get more work done if I left town for a little while, and I hate the thought of you being here all by yourself.”

“What by myself? I have friends.”

Jeffrey stood and said exasperatedly, “Not that crazy Zena Glassman woman.”

“Zena is not crazy. She is just an old woman with a schmuck for a grandson.” She smiled at Jeffrey, “We have a lot in common.”

Zena Glassman was an eccentric old woman who lived in Marine Park, who had become friends with Bubbe years ago. In all the years Jeffrey had known her through Bubbe, she had never changed, never aged a day. And her grandson, Izzy was it? He was a nice enough guy, but a bit neurotic. Let’s face it, the man was about Jeffrey’s age and was still living with his grandmother and mother in the same house.

“Will you at least think about it?” Jeffrey pleaded.

“Think, think, yes I’ll think. Always thinking with this one,” Bubbe said as she took another sip of her drink. “Are you eating?” she asked.

Jeffrey smiled and knew that this was bubbe’s way of ending the conversation and changing it in the direction she wanted it to go. “I could eat some of that stew,” he answered.

“Come, you look terrible,” she said as she led him to the kitchen. This was what the old woman lived for, feeding her beloved grandson. Jeffrey would make arrangements for someone to drop in and check on her a couple of times a week. Maybe before he went back to Manhattan he would stop by Marine Park and ask Mrs. Glassman if she would mind.