Atta boy, p.5
Atta Boy, page 5
They hugged for what felt like a long time. Despite being five foot seven he was really very big, Daddy. Hairy and full of life. The forearms with their tensile strength, olive-toned in summer, iconic in their way. Always with a beautiful watch and signet ring. She loved him so. Technically she loved Mom too, but her and Daddy’s love was different. Just melty love, no recoil to it.
After a minute he let go of her and said, “Everything’s perfect, baby.” It didn’t seem too perfect. He didn’t look good at all. He looked tired and rumpled, brutalized by work. Adrift in the charmlessness of his affairs. He was nearing the age when businessmen dropped dead on treadmills.
“Why won’t you tell me anything?” she said. They kept lying about whatever was happening with his work, or with their marriage. Outbursts and salty, ugly talk, and then all this backpedaling, saying everything was fine. As if Marley didn’t know by now it wasn’t all lollipops and roses out there. It wasn’t all lollipops and roses in here.
“I know there’ve been problems,” she said. “I know there are, because I hear you. And if you guys are trying to shelter me, well, frankly, you’re doing a half-ass job.” She couldn’t believe herself, that she’d said ass just now. “It’s just like, you’re always saying everything’s fine, and then running around, in like a panic—”
“You know what?” Daddy cut her off.
He knelt down and hooked his hands around her waist, like he used to do when she was small.
“Not everything’s great. Daddy’s tired. Daddy’s at his wits’ end some days. There are fires, and I’ve been doing my best to try and put them out. But I’m not panicked. Panicking is something critters in the woods do. I’m a man. And you’re a smart, wonderful kid, you know that? I’ve got guys in my Rolodex who aren’t half as intuitive as you. If they taught that stuff at Wharton, the world would be a better place.” Grown-ups always talked about “the world” like they weren’t the ones running it. “Now let me get myself cleaned up. You won’t blow my cover, will you, with the peanut gallery in there?”
“No. No, of course not, Daddy.”
“That’s a good girl. I just wanna know one thing . . . do you have any idea how loved you are?”
“Well, yes . . . I think so.” She knew it was a lot. But she didn’t know what it was worth.
“Well . . . okay. That’s good enough for me.”
Later he and Mom were talking in the living room. Marley spied on them from the hallway. They seemed to not be fighting, which was a surprise, frankly, with Daddy having been gone all night and missing the whole party. Mom was looking a little . . . a little bit loose. Her makeup smeared, leaning over in her chair and eating a pastrami sandwich.
“It sounds like a good fit for them,” she said, chewing. She must have been soused. She never ate. And definitely not pastrami sandwiches.
“That goy was always just a moonlighter,” said Daddy. “He’s not cut out for New York. He belongs back in Evanston, or wherever the hell he’s from.” Were they talking about Benny’s dad? “I’ll bet he’s got his lawn laid already. He’s not cut out for New York.”
“‘That goy’? Oh Jake . . . don’t flatter yourself.”
“What’s that mean?”
“You take the subway once a season on a lark, tip a barbershop quartet forty bucks a singer, your little farthing for the year to humankind, and then you go home to your palace on Park Avenue, saying ‘New York, gotta love it!’ Feeling like a man of the people. I’m not saying I’m any different. I just mean . . . if they could afford to live here the way you live here, on your own terms, they would probably stay too.” When did Mom get to be such a ballbuster? Since getting her GED? Marley kind of liked it. Sometimes. “I think Pelham sounds beautiful.”
“It’s the making it seem like it’s some victory that gets my goat,” said Daddy. “Such a charming downtown and oh, the choo-choo train museum. Like we’re the ones drinking the Kool-Aid. Wait until he sees the property taxes.”
She pictured Benny out there, next year, in the country . . . drinking forties on a football field at night, like Jason London in Dazed and Confused (which she’d just seen for the first time and completely lost her head over), or steaming up his Chevy on a lover’s lane, some cheerleader by his side, while meathook-wielding hitchhikers roamed the hillsides. Him drawing her closer to him in the backseat, against the darkness, kissing her tenderly . . . different indeed. The country was so primal. With fewer lights, you could really see the stars.
“I’d worry more about Marley,” Mom said. “Benny’s practically her only friend.” Well now, that was just—“except for this Daniela Friedman person. Honestly, I think she’s infatuated with him. It’s unnatural.”
Well! Okay. Okay. Well! Okay.
Was it, though? Was it so unnatural? In the old country, in Silesia or wherever, she and Benny would be married to each other with three kids by now, and statistically only one of those kids would be, you know, not right. When Mom was one for two. And what was her excuse? Oh, but that was mean. . . .
In the hotel folks were still up, some of them just starting out their nights apparently. On the twelfth-floor corner a bald, divorced-looking man was shaking a cocktail shaker and dancing along to “Blurred Lines”—you could hear the pilfered bass notes floating across 81st Street—a real happening guy. The super was looking out the window with his bottle. He scratched himself, then drew the blinds.
Marley lay upon her coverlet, time dragging, racing forward. Time itself seemed different nowadays. More threadbare in its progress, the objects shifting, losing magnetism. But maybe that was just growing up, the brain maturing in its casement. Like, she used to think her and Benny having the same birthday was the most insane mind-boggling celestially ordained thing ever, the hand of God plainly at work, but maybe it wasn’t that big of a deal. Maybe the brain made myths of things like that, and people, to coddle you against the spareness of your passage. Maybe there was nothing too, too special about anyone.
But no, that wasn’t quite right either.
In any case, Benny was right: it was pretty goddamn pink in here. She ought to talk to Mom about, you know, changing it up some.
3
UP AND AT ’EM! No excuses. He needed to get out today, stay out. Enough of this sitting around and licking wounds. There was lead in his apartment, and his phone was doing him grave harm.
Rudy didn’t mean to sound alarmist about this—he’d seen one too many puff-piece headlines about screens and the internet changing people’s brains, transforming the whole social fabric, and he’d never cared too much for the philosophizing. Big whoop, he’d thought. Folks had probably felt the same unease about their TV sets back in the day. Maybe some beatnik wrote a pretty deep poem about it. But these last few days, cooped up in his apartment, scrolling, scrolling, waiting for a sign, he’d felt it too—that thing would be the death of him. The point of no return.
Now you almost missed the Man on the TV, trying to sell you things—at least he was a man, and had a face. At least the things were things. Now he opened up his phone and what he saw were lives, lives, lives, lives, lives, whole epochs compressed into the tilework on his Instagram. There’d be a picture of Kate Moss and Johnny Depp in the ’90s, looking sexual in a way that made you wonder if the fucking you’d been doing in your life had even counted, then a picture from The New York Times of somebody in Yemen yesterday cradling her son’s dead body, wailing, and you felt terrible for the woman, and grateful for your life and safety, but only for about three seconds, ’cause then it was more pictures, of more crap, some girl from his high school and her baby at Santaland (had she airbrushed her kid? Its eyes looked weird) and his friend Christian with his girlfriend looking like a couple of Staten Island tryhards at Carbone’s for their anniversary the other night, the caption all your my rock, your my queen, I put you on a pedistle, when Rudy had it on pretty good authority the guy’d had a restraining order taken out against him by a dancer at the Hustler Club named Paige, then a picture from eighty years ago of some kids in London playing hopscotch in the wreckage of the Blitz, and Teddy Roosevelt as a young swashbuckler in Mexico, all of it, the times, the styles, the wars, the glam, the T&A, the suffering, friends and strangers, near and far, scourges, babies, the legends and the no-names, the ’60s and the 1890s and last Wednesday night too, all of it hitting his brain in a symphony of total noneventness, like the more pictures he saw, the less he believed that anything besides his thumb had ever really happened.
It was no wonder then that the truthers and conspiracy kooks were having a field day out there—they had their work cut out for them. There must be people all over whose brains had turned to jelly, their circuitry fouled up, numbed by the pictures, confused by life’s variety, sick of their own selves and in dear-god-awful need of some beliefs. Some angle on the swarming world, however wrong and crazy. Rudy wasn’t gonna fall into the trap, though. Not today.
What he needed now was people, action, life, the city. To get his head out of his ass. To see things for himself. That’s what he’d decided anyway. But all this pounding the pavement wasn’t going all that well so far. The real world was no picnic either, see. Everybody looked like shit, tired. They dressed like shit. Nobody had any style. And the ones out here who did, who could afford to, they were all the worst kinds of people.
He had said “Good day, miss” to a lady just now coming out of the subway, on 28th Street. It wasn’t a come-on, not at all—he knew better than that—it was just to be friendly. Just ’cause it was a nice day, brisk and Christmassy, and he hadn’t been out this early in like seven years, and she looked like a cool person and it seemed like a cool thing to say—whatever, it was stupid—and anyway she’d scoffed at him. She had straight-up groaned, like she’d been shot. Way over-the-top, like ugh, ugggghhhh, how dare he, how dare he be so patronizing and old-fashioned and intrusive as to even look at her, and she’d stormed off down the street.
He felt like such a dummy now. Absolutely breathless with how dumb he felt. Puzzled by the whole exchange, if you could even call it that. “Good day, miss”? What kind of a line was that? Like some lunkhead out of Midnight Cowboy, doffing his cap, bewildered at the modern ladies.
Well, screw her and her grinchy ass. Let her moan about it to her friends at The Wing later, how some inked-up outer-borough Joe schmo who wouldn’t be fit, or would only be fit, to fix her freezer had dared look in her direction. Let her fix her own fucking freezer. Screw her. No, no, that wasn’t right. There was no need to be cruel about it. He didn’t know her story any more than she knew his. Screw himself, screw himself, that after twenty-six years of living, many blows and blessings, long talks, deep thoughts, still he lacked the inner resources to take in stride the total nothing that had been that interaction. He was losing his edge—too much time among the old folks at the bar. He was losing his looks too, maybe. Otherwise, that might’ve all gone differently.
You could see the changes in just the last five years, his face getting puffy and poached-looking, with the pre-jowls. That saline, past-prime Mickey Rourke look to the skin over his cheeks. Too many drinks and smokes. Some days women would stare at him on the street, men too, and he’d think, eat your heart out, people, convinced they were all just dying to fuck him, then he’d catch himself in a storefront window and realize what he’d seen in all their eyes was maybe not so much lust as . . . concern.
It was a city lost. Lost to him, and the mad market of the streets made it clear.
He’d been all over town this morning. He’d looked at an apartment out in Bushwick, a godforsaken hovel. He had no choice but to move, though. They were raising the rent in his building. About a year ago they’d offered him five thousand dollars to break his lease. Sitting pretty in his love nest, a rent-stabilized walk-up on 3rd Street, with a steady pipeline from his baby’s parents covering half, he had told those slumlords where to shove it. But then they’d gotten more aggressive. Turning off the heat in winter, nerve-grinding construction day and night, no peace, no quiet, and this ex-cop henchman of the owners’ stealing people’s mail, threatening undocumented immigrants he’d blab on them to ICE. Prowling the hallways in a beard and glasses he probably got at the spy store, posing as “Inspector”—inspector who, Gadget? He’d planted a dead rat on one Korean family’s doormat when they wouldn’t take a buyout. And the live rats, well, those came standard.
Rudy was sure what they were doing was totally illegal, but they had ins, these people. They had probably greased the palms of however many civic bureaucrats to look the other way. And what was he gonna do, go Mr. Smith on the Department of Buildings? Fine print was not his thing at all. He had no money for a lawyer. He would take the buyout in a second now, if they wouldn’t bust his kneecaps just for asking. . . . Thinking he would never need it—those were the days. In love and invincible. Thinking on the zero percent chance that things went south between him and his lady fair he could always move back in with Dad to get his footing. Ha. Those were the days.
Onward. He was starving. His stomach was making crazy dial-up noises. He had a little time to kill before seeing another apartment in Kips Bay.
He went into a diner on 38th Street. Usually he felt jumpy and self-conscious sitting alone, but in dumps like these all bets were off.
“It’s just me,” he told the waitress. Was it ever.
“Sit anywhere you want, doll,” she said.
He sat down in a booth near the back. He appreciated being called “doll,” actually. Very much. He knew some girls who got pissed off when people called them “doll” and “sweetheart,” like it was condescending to them, but for a certain kind of man at a certain point in life, “doll” was music to your ears. “Doll” meant you weren’t a total creep.
She kept poking at the edges of his mind. His ex. Popping up. He’d have to hash it out at some point, get the facts straight in his head before they curdled any more on him. She’d just moved to the city when they met, twenty-one years old. He must’ve seemed to her like a steady pair of hands at first, a city boy, a few years older. Tougher than the rest. Not like these straw fedora film majors and milquetoasts from her college dorm. And him, well, he had put up no resistance. It was like some dream of teenage love he’d not gotten right the first time, the first renditions wasted in mediocre company, the mall rats and trash-talkers of his misspent high school years in Maspeth, the Dinahs and Rachelles, landlubbers all, with their spray tans and their strappy heels, so bound and tethered to their womanhood, peaking at eighteen.
This girl was something else. An open book, smart and kind and interested. Small breasts, and untroubled by them, her hair untouched by dyes or goops, the same strong God-made auburn hair she’d had as a horse-crazed kid in the Midwest with buckteeth and a sweet smile in a picture on her dresser.
But time went on, and she showed her innocence. She was not long for the city. Fucking shaking crying when a homeless woman called her a cunt once on the street. She was a college girl, through and through, full of principles but wispy at her core. And so bright-eyed all the time, so easy to impress, so moved, not even in a phony way, ’cause she really meant the things she said. All, My semester abroad in Florence was so, so enriching, probably one of the most enriching, eye-opening experiences of my life and making him watch this unbelievably boring independent film from Ghana ’cause her friend who interned for the Criterion Collection told her it was good, and she was so completely owned by other people’s opinions, and so new to anything cool or different, and so primed by a lifetime of guilt for being white and well protected and from Lincoln, Nebraska, that she couldn’t even get it through her head that not liking this movie from Ghana was even allowed, then spending an hour of his Friday night when he could’ve been out getting loaded or making bank trying to convince him that him not liking this movie was actually ’cause he was culturally programmed not to, when he just hadn’t liked it, and why was she so mad at him about it, what the hell was she trying to prove? And after a while he kind of missed the girls from his old stomping grounds in Queens, who had their hang-ups but at least had some pride of place about them. Some attitude. Who at least would call things as they saw them. Who weren’t secretly terrified of Black and brown people while always giving little lectures on the richness of their cultures. He had started off thinking he was the provincial one, but then he realized she was.
So the bloom came off the rose, in her eyes too. His bad-boy-with-a-heart-of-gold routine not holding up so well, taking on a darkness in her eyes. Almost a doom. He’d gotten totally, completely, almost hall-of-fame-level smashed at one of her friends’ birthday parties toward the end, another barely-a-party party in Brooklyn Heights where you had to take your shoes off at the door, and no one got fucked up at all or fought or said anything remotely aggressive or off-key, just talked about work and their summer travel plans, all the girls with weird short bangs and tiny tasteful tattoos sipping red wine, and he made a scene, which was just as well, to give them all something to remember him by. She’d been pissed off after that but they’d hung on for a bit, her coming home one night spewing some shit her therapist had told her about how he was really a narcissist and you couldn’t love a narcissist and he was just a stand-in for her numbskull socially regressive stick-in-the-mud alcoholic father and she’d been trying to please men like him her whole life and she never would and she should stop trying blah blah blah.
He was nothing like her dad, anyway. That guy? Her parents had come to the city once, to have lunch with her and Rudy before their matinee of Beautiful: The Carole King Musical. A geography teacher, who wore pants with the zips that turned them into shorts if it got too hot. Rudy didn’t know what the hell her therapist was talking about.
She had loved him, though—that was a fact. (Wasn’t it?) And he’d definitely loved her. That he knew. And he had gotten through to her, awhile. Almost two years. Not nothing. (Though it sure as hell felt like nothing now.) And that he’d been able to get through to somebody like her, somebody so different from him, to make her laugh and cry, and come, had once seemed like a minor miracle, like a message from the gods that he still had it, that the light of life was still in him, and he could still surprise himself. But that all seemed very dusky now, and very much in doubt. And had she really come? Really? She was a little over-the-top about it, sometimes, and nothing if not suggestible. . . .
