Memento Park Page 12

  We sat there for hours, Virgil, and I was never bored, not once. Not even watching them pray. I so wanted to understand what they were saying, what they were asking for, what they were feeling. They seemed rapt, transported, their eyes closed, bobbing ever so slightly as they offered themselves up to God, who, I assumed, was only too happy to receive them. My phone vibrated in my pocket. I ignored it and sat there, isolated, conspicuously the Other. See me, the Creature, all fangs and humps and cloven feet, the beast of fairy tales.

  After several minutes, Rachel concluded her prayer and held her finger to her lips. Her father had drifted off to sleep at the table. I helped her clear the plates, and we tiptoed around Bernie, his baritone rumbling reminding me of Tracy’s own rattling snores. I paused to look at my phone. A missed call from Tracy, and a voice mail. I slipped the phone back in my pocket and stood beside Rachel, helping her load the dishwasher. I cannot remember any time a chore has brought me such pleasure. I closed the dishwasher door and Rachel took my hands and washed and dried them. I felt the floor fall away as she patted my hands dry, felt my body begin to lift from the ground. She indicated I should follow her and we stepped into the sitting room, where we could whisper freely.

  “I’ll need to put him to bed, he’s out for the night. He’ll be sorry he didn’t say good night.”

  “I don’t think he liked me very much.”

  “He’s a father. You’re a man. He’s not supposed to like you.”

  We stood for a moment, before the Chagall, in silence.

  “So? Your first Sabbath dinner. What did you think?”

  I looked from Rachel to the painting before us. She could read the answer to her question in my eyes, I was quite certain, and so there was only one thing left for me, for us.

  Virgil, I kissed her.

  * * *

  WHEN I GOT BACK to my car I played the terse message from Tracy. As expected, the Texas Supreme Court had denied Ricky McCabe’s appeal. We had all moved one step closer to the end.

  IN THE WINTER OF 1939, Ágnes Kálmán left her husband. Her departure followed a ban on travel for Jews and the revocation of membership in all official organizations. Kálmán did not much mind the loss of travel. He’d been turning inward, away from the West, since his return from Paris and was happy to stay in Budapest. But the loss of his teaching position created unbearable financial strain. This newly constrained life, amid the terror of growing waves of anti-Semitism, caused Kálmán to relapse into his addictions, and by the time he was found delirious, feverish, half-naked on the Váci utca in the early hours of a freezing February morning, poor Ágnes had already returned to the Hungarian countryside, where she would be murdered sometime in April 1944.

  I think often about the rupture in their marriage. I wonder what changed in those last months, what would have become of them both if she had had the strength to stay on, if he had had the will to resist his addictions. It often seems to me that the stories of our lives are too easily reduced to single moments of decision, whether to stay or to leave. I suppose the Clash had it right, after all, but the wisdom of punk notwithstanding, I am consumed with this question.

  I built sand castles as a child. I always placed my damp, crumbling battlements close to the shoreline. For it wasn’t the pleasure of building that drew me back again and again. I rushed through the construction, my final product much like my familiar film-set facades. I would retreat to the rocks and sit there, shivering with anticipation, as the waves crept in and consumed my creation. There was a thrill, almost erotic, in watching how all evidence of my handiwork could be washed away, devoured by sizzling foam until not a trace remained. I was reassured by how completely my tracks could be made to disappear. Then I set about building another castle in its place, anticipating the next in an endless series of erasures.

  * * *

  TRACY HAD NOT YET RETURNED from her Texas sojourn with Brian when Rachel called me the following afternoon to express regret. She blamed the wine, though we both knew she’d had barely a glass. It was irresponsible, unforgivable, really. You are my client, it can’t happen again. I told her about the mezuzah. All of it, from her office to Sabbath night. I think perhaps she thought me a bit mad but she was moved, I could hear it, a thickening in her voice, like desire but purer, like honey, even as she insisted that the kiss would never happen again. Promise me you won’t do that again, she pleaded. I made no such promise. The misdirection of it would have been second nature days earlier. But it felt trivial and false following our Sabbath eve, and so I said, No, no, I cannot make that promise. I guess I’ll have to fire you. We laughed, at last. Was that all she wanted, all we needed? That laugh, that release?

  Such clarity and such confusion residing on the head of the same pin, Virgil.

  Before we hung up, I asked her a question, one that had troubled me since the night before.

  “Rachel, do you think … is it … I don’t know, is it too late?” I hesitated, fumbling.

  “Too late for what?”

  I was almost ashamed to answer.

  “For me, I guess?”

  She was silent for a moment.

  “Oh, Matt.”

  Oh, Matt. How often I would hear this particular construction in the weeks ahead. I tried to make my peace with this dismissal, then she surprised me.

  “Why on earth would you think that? It’s never too late.”

  This golden thread of hope stayed with me all day, echoed in my brain and buzzed through my hours on the set. Despite my assurances to the director, my performances had continued to slip, and I could no longer even be accused of phoning it in. Try as I might, I found it impossible to stay engaged, and everything exploded when I stood there, stony and silent, following the director’s bark of “Action!”

  The line was mine, I knew, but I could not remember it. I held up my hand.

  “Sorry. Line?”

  The script supervisor glanced down at her bound script and robotically intoned:

  “‘That’s just a bit more reality than mankind can bear, boys.’”

  I nodded.

  “Just keep rolling,” the director said. I took a steadying breath.

  “That’s just…” I stopped speaking, stood there in frozen silence.

  I could not remember any of my lines. Nothing, not even with the prompt from the script supervisor. It had all washed away and every time I tried to remember a line, I could only hear the echo of Rachel’s whispered, fervent prayers.

  At this point, the director, as the kids say, lost his shit. He had been patient enough with me in the weeks leading to this moment, the dozens of tiny lapses and flat performances. But now he unleashed his full fury and shrieked obscenity after obscenity, lamenting wasted money, missed opportunities, calling me a hack. I stood there and took it all in with surprising equanimity. This only served to enrage him further. I thought he was about to take a swing at me when I said to him, “For fuck’s sake, Derek, it’s just a shitty TV show. Get a grip.” It all suddenly felt so trivial, so insulting, to pretend that I cared about what we were doing. Which was when Derek did, in fact, punch me with surprising force and accuracy, and the first assistant director wisely wrapped the day’s production.

  I think back now to that punch, Virgil. How it set me free. How much did it matter, does it matter, that Derek was a six-foot, blond-haired, blue-eyed Aryan sort? Or do I just remember him that way? Perhaps he was short, balding, and hairy-chested. My faith in my recall is shaken. I think, at moments like these, that I remember nothing, that my life is merely a script, a tale told, revised on the fly in a desperate attempt to retain the teller’s fading interest.

  * * *

  I WAS IN MY CAR, driving aimlessly, my cheek throbbing, when the phone rang. My agent, Simon. I pressed answer and his voice filled the car. I felt sorry for him. He’d never been less than exemplary, had launched my unlikely career and kept it aloft. Every call brought good news, a bigger role, a better offer. He’d never made a call to me like this befo
re.

  “How bad?” I asked. Simon’s protracted silence gave me an indication.

  Finally. “I’m sorry, Matt. They fired you. It’s all over social media.”

  Simon went on to detail the show’s frustration with me over the last few months, relaying the particulars of the network’s case against me. Derek wasn’t alone, the producers were also fed up. I had cost the show too much and was being written out. Plane crash, Simon was told. I tried not to laugh.

  I laughed.

  * * *

  I DROVE FOR HOURS, Los Angeles’s twisting freeways and long, open streets being well suited to aimless wandering. At least, I thought I had been wandering, but I once again pulled up in front of Solomon’s emporium of Judaica. Unlike my meek and quivering first visit, I strode into the store, acknowledged the surly boy at the register, and selected the sleek bronze mezuzah I’d been drawn to the last time. I paid for it and left the store, eager to return home and test its magic.

  * * *

  I ARRIVED just as the sun was vanishing behind the hills to find several boxes on my doorstep containing the contents of my trailer. I couldn’t help being impressed by the studio’s ruthless efficiency. I felt the mezuzah pressing against my leg in my pocket. I opened the door, kicked the boxes inside, and fired up my laptop.

  I navigated to a popular gossip blog. The post headline said C-LIST MELTDOWN. Fucking bloggers. Not even my name? Parasites, Virgil. If you’d like to put your dusty nightstick to good use, first let’s kill all the bloggers. A grainy cell phone video showed Derek screaming at me, then throwing his punch. I was gratified to have stayed on my feet.

  I suppose I should have cared more. But I took a mental inventory and found I cared about many things, about Rachel, about the mezuzah in my pocket, even about Budapest Street Scene, about Tracy, and, very possibly, though not conclusively, about my father. But about this, no. I did not care. That much was clear to me.

  I have never been good with my hands. As a child, it was my rickety model airplanes. As an adult, I avoided anything that required a sharp eye and steady hand. I kept a minimal supply of tools, not much more than a few screwdrivers, a hammer, and pliers. I would think with shame of the macho assortment of tools cultivated by other men and sensed one more deformity, one more measure of unmanliness to confirm my father’s disappointment. I remember his workshop in the basement of our home, wall-mounted pegboards arrayed with tools of every conceivable size and purpose. Last year, I bought a bookcase and Tracy insisted on building it. “If you do it, it will collapse in the first breeze,” she said.

  This, however, was a job that only I could do, and so I pulled the small plastic orange toolbox from under the sink and set to work at the front door. I took unusual care, sketching out a line with a ruler, a hypotenuse of an otherwise invisible right triangle, and predrilling holes in the doorframe. I felt intense gratification with each turn of the screw, the grain of the wood offering pleasant resistance to each twist. I, who had spent my entire life standing around saying things, now felt the visceral pleasure of doing something. The screw crunched satisfyingly into place and I slid the mezuzah into position along the pencil mark I had made, and fastened the bottom.

  I stepped back and admired my handiwork. My heart was beating hard as I reached my finger out once more, as I had seen Rachel do in her office. I traced a line along the mezuzah and was startled to feel its whispered reply—a mere murmur, but something there. Inarguable. Palpable. As that tiny flare sighed into life, a taxi pulled up and discharged Tracy, roller bag clattering along behind her.

  She smiled a weak smile as she approached me. I was taken aback by how pale and drawn she looked. Raccoon circles beneath her bloodshot eyes. She fell into my arms and hugged me tightly.

  “Hey,” I whispered in her ear. I was consumed by guilt, relieved to have my face hidden.

  “Hi,” she sighed. “What a nightmare.”

  I nodded. “I’m so sorry.”

  She shrugged her thanks. “Anything exciting happen here?”

  Where could I possibly begin? I had gotten as far as a falsetto “Um…” when she raised her head from my shoulder and noticed the mezuzah.

  “What’s this?” she asked, stepping around for a closer look.

  “It’s a mezuzah. You know. For doorways.”

  She looked from me to the mezuzah and back again, momentarily perplexed. Then she nodded, picked up her bag, and headed inside.

  “Okay,” she said with a bemused smile, and stepped through the door. I followed her in as she paused before the boxes.

  “What are these?”

  More explaining. I sighed and told her of the day’s events, showed her the blog posting and the video. She sank into her chair, exhausted, and I watched for a reaction. Finally, she spoke:

  “I never liked that director.” She touched my arm. “You okay?”

  Again a wave of guilt. I debated telling her, but the thought of so unprecedented a display of Santos honesty reared its head, only to scurry back into its hole like a cold February groundhog.

  “Yeah,” I said. “You?”

  She shrugged.

  “It was a long shot. But…” She trailed off, rubbing her eyes and taking in the boxes. “Shit, before this is all over we might both be looking for work.”

  I looked at her with curiosity. She rarely swore.

  “Abby chewed on me for thirty straight minutes. Harvest Moon isn’t happy with my work for Ricky. I guess they sell a lot of bathing suits in Texas. They’re making some noise.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake. Really?” I remembered Abby’s dark mien on the beach.

  She shrugged. “It’ll be all right.”

  Tracy was exhausted, so tired she skipped her nightly ritual of cleansing creams. I followed her up the stairs, carrying her suitcase. I set it in the corner of our bedroom and watched her glide fully clothed into bed. I was about to leave her when she mumbled something.

  “Oh. Present … side pocket.”

  Tracy always brought me home a small present from each of her many trips. They were usually silly trinkets, standard airport gift shop fare—shot glasses and paperweights and teddy bears—but it was another of our rituals, one Tracy had adopted from her parents. I reached into the side pouch of her roller bag and pulled out a tennis ball–sized snow globe bearing the legend REMEMBER THE ALAMO around a miniature model of the doomed fort. An absurd, tacky keepsake and yet I was moved and assailed by guilt again. I kissed her forehead and headed back down to the living room to attend to the boxes still scattered across the entryway. I spent the next hour returning my books to their shelves, except for one of my illustrated Kálmán biographies. I dropped onto the couch and settled in, opening the book to its gallery of photographic plates. There was a grainy picture of Kálmán at his bar mitzvah, posed with his family. I was struck by the Mitteleuropa sternness of the tableau, no smiles, no physical contact, just four serious, erect figures. Perhaps this is mere indulgence, but it seemed to me there was something present in young Ervin’s eyes that the cold distance of his family could neither apprehend nor extinguish. Did he already know how different he was from those around him? It saddened me as it hadn’t before, looking at this young boy, knowing that within only a few decades, he would die by his own hand. I realized that I was angry at his father for failing to protect him from what was gathering to consume them all.

  I sat there on the couch, surrounded by my books, until a sodden sleep overtook me. I slept fitfully that night, in scattershot repose, and dreamt that a raven was tearing at my throat. I wrestled with it, could feel its sinewy wings fighting my grasp as it plunged its bloody beak again and again into my neck. I pleaded wordlessly with its angry, forbidding eyes for it to stop. I awoke terrified before dawn, my neck raw from what must have been my own frenzied scratching.

  AND THEN, ALL AT ONCE, with almost obscene ease, Budapest Street Scene was mine. Well, nominally mine. Possessives, I have learned, cause us no end of trouble. Tracy was mine, I wa
s hers. My lawyer. My faith. My father. In spite of which, all these chasms remain.

  Still, for the moment, at least, it appeared that my ship had arrived. I am aware of how unlikely that sounds, absent years of motions and appeals and legal maneuvering, the painting moldering in a vault deep in the bowels of the National Gallery. Instead, the panel had reviewed the evidence, found it convincing, and, in the face of no counterclaims, ordered the immediate transfer of Budapest Street Scene to me. A day after Tracy left for a ten-day location shoot in Bali, Rachel e-mailed me the panel’s decision. I could not make any sense of the welter of legal counterpoint that passes for English. The point, she exclaimed over a celebratory drink later that evening, was that the painting was on its way to Los Angeles, would be here within the week, and was mine to do with as I pleased. Given its value, she added, the firm would be happy to store it in their vault until I had made any decisions regarding its disposition.

  “There’s still a lot of paperwork and the tax implications are a whole other matter but Matt … we did it. It’s yours.”

  We did it.

  I did nothing, of course, and I knew it. You surely knew it as well, Rachel. I was a beneficiary of circumstance and connections. Nothing more. You were so pleased that night in the bar, champagne between us, proud of your hard work. I listened to you, tried hard to share your enthusiasm, but couldn’t escape a feeling of incompleteness. There were still too many questions, old ones and new ones. How could I, who knew so little about my father, his father, their lost worlds, take meaningful ownership of this object? Something tugged at me as we sat there. Perhaps I understood that our time together was going to come to an end. All of the above, no doubt. And so I nursed my champagne, lost in the trail of disappearing bubbles.