All that summer he attempted to avoid speaking to Beth, who was holed up at her parents’ house, thirty miles north, reading Victorian novels and swimming in her neighbor’s pool. Once a week or so, she’d train into the city on some errand and call him from Soho, where she was having her hair cut, or midtown, at a matinee with her grandmother. “Come over,” he always found himself saying. And she always agreed to, with studied nonchalance, and made her way, hesitantly, to Brooklyn. He’d throw on stained khakis, stained T-shirt, and flip-flops and meet her at the Bergen Street F stop, as she had a suburbanite’s sense of distance and always got turned around on the way to his parents’ apartment, thinking she’d gone too far when she wasn’t even halfway there. Through the station’s wrought-iron bars, Dave watched the smatterings of people getting off the trains—mostly studenty types, like himself, for who else would be at liberty to wander the city at three in the afternoon?—mesmerized by the flow of the metal cars, sleepy with heat, longing for a cigarette. Just when he was beginning to worry that she was lost, Beth would appear, hair lank around her soft, pliant cheeks. Her eyes were the exact same shade as her hair—the color of weak tea—which lent her the look of a forest creature, perhaps a fawn. She was such a Beth, he thought. What if her mother had named her Jo?
As they sat drinking iced coffee at the new bistro on Smith Street (three months earlier it had been a crack bodega that his mother crossed the street to avoid), the sweat slowly drying under their arms and along the sides of their spines, Beth detailing the horror of a Scarsdale summer (“I think every guy I went to high school with is going to medical school in the fall”) and the advances made upon her person by the manager of the local Banana Republic, where she’d recently bought a maroon dress that her mother hated, Dave would be thinking of the moment when they would walk the three blocks back to his childhood room and he would give her a glass of his dad’s white wine, and Beth would stop her nervous chatter. He would put his arms around her—her body soft and white, smooth and unmuscled, like fabric—and lead her to his small bed, the fan blowing on them as they sweated and sweated the already damp sheets. Afterward, Beth would sleep, thick from wine, and he’d wake her for dinner with his parents, an event she loved and hated. She knew—she certainly knew—that it was over, that he didn’t love her enough, or that he did, but she wasn’t quite the person he wanted to love, and that he invited her to Brooklyn because she loved him—for her, he was the one, the end, the thing in itself—and he knew, he knew, he should love her with equal devotion, should embrace some semblance of their future, their contributions to the Oberlin scholarship fund, but he couldn’t, he just couldn’t. And neither could he say “No, don’t come” when she called and said “I’m here.” At dinner, she told funny stories, complimented his mother’s chicken paillard, and laughed at his father’s stupid jokes. Dave sat silently, in a semisulk, avoiding his mother’s serious blue gaze. She knew, too, of course, that Dave had closed himself off to Beth, who was pretty rather than beautiful, sweet rather than dangerous, devoted rather than confused, and she tried to avoid saying “You’re making a mistake,” though she didn’t need to, really, which annoyed him, as everything seemed to annoy him that summer.
Even Tal. Who, at that point, wasn’t faring much better. Over commencement weekend, he’d confessed to his parents that not only had he not been accepted at any of the law schools—Harvard, Yale, Columbia—they’d simply assumed he’d attend, but he hadn’t actually even sent in any of the applications. “But you’ve always wanted to be a lawyer,” his mother kept saying, “ever since you were a little boy.” If Dave were in Tal’s place, he would have said, “No, Mom, you wanted me to be a lawyer. I wanted to be an actor.” But Tal was Tal and he just smiled and shook his head.
Still, when the Morgenthals got back to Brookline, he and his father had it out. Tal called Dave a few days after commencement. “Things are pretty dire here,” he said, in a sharp, ironic tone that did little to mask his very real anguish. “My mother won’t come out of their bedroom. My father says I’ve broken her heart.” To add insult to injury, they’d transformed his childhood room into a blank, Formica-filled office for his mother’s kosher-style catering company—Ella’s Edibles—which had expanded tremendously in the four years since Tal left home, the Jews of Brookline (not to mention Newton) having entered into a Renaissance period and being in need of an endless supply of salmon puffs and mock sushi.
“Oh, man, I’m sorry,” Dave told him. “What are you going to do?”
“I’m leaving,” he said, to Dave’s surprise. “I’m just going to come to New York. Carson said he’d put me in touch with agents.” There was a brief silence. “Do you think your parents would mind if I stayed with you for a few days?”
“Um, no,” said Dave, who was sure his parents wouldn’t mind, but suddenly, confusingly, felt that he might.
“It’ll just be a few days,” Tal said. “I’ve just got to get out of here.”
“Do you have a job?” asked Dave, feeling like an asshole.
“No,” said Tal, his voice ragged, “I don’t have a fucking job, Dave. How could I have a fucking job? Who are you, my fucking dad?”
“It’s just, you know,” said Dave sullenly. Why was he annoyed by the idea of Tal moving to New York? Because he would be going to Rochester in two months and Tal would stay and at Christmas, when Dave came home to visit, Tal would be wanting to take Dave to his favorite Chinese place and his favorite coffee shop and it would all just be too much for Dave. Or because Tal was actually doing the thing he wanted to do, rather than hiding in some dumb graduate program where he’d learn nothing he hadn’t learned already. “It’s expensive here. It’s, you know, there are broker’s fees and stuff. Sorry. I was just, you know—” Dave heard a sharp intake of breath: Tal willing himself to be calm. Dave had heard him do it a thousand times while on the phone with his dad.
“I know,” he told Dave. “I have bar mitzvah money. It’ll float me for a while. I just need a place to stay while I find an apartment, but I can ask Sadie if I can stay with—”
“No, man, that sounds great.” A strange sensation had overtaken Dave, which he quickly recognized as relief. Tal was coming. He loved Tal. “Come whenever. You can stay as long as you need to. My mom loves you.”
He arrived the next day, Sunday, on the Chinatown bus, his fraying army duffel slung over one shoulder. Dave met him on East Broadway, under the Manhattan Bridge overpass, and took him to the dim sum place in the mall built into the bridge’s northern buttress. “Did you tell them you were going?” Dave asked. Tal gave him an odd look.
“Of course I told them.”
“And your dad didn’t go ballistic?”
Tal shook his shaggy head and laughed. “No,” he said, “it was weird. He was completely calm.” Dave thought, but did not say, that this was not, somehow, all that weird. Tal’s father, like Tal, could be torturous in his restraint.
“What did he say?” asked Dave. Tal smirked and adopted the posture of his father—spine flat against the back of his chair, mouth turned down at the corners, glasses dangling from one hand. “‘Tal, I don’t understand why you’re being so irrational,’” he intoned. “‘If you don’t want to go to law school, fine. But renting a place in New York? It doesn’t make any sense. When you pay rent, you’re just throwing money down the toilet.’” Dave laughed.