“So what does he want you to do? Live there with them forever?”
“Yup,” said Tal.
“No,” said Dave.
“Oh, yes,” said Tal, his grin growing wild. “He has it all planned out. I’ll live with them for three years and work at his firm”—Tal’s father did something mysterious having to do with the mergers of enormous companies—“and save enough money to buy a place. In Boston, of course.”
“Not Brookline,” Dave said.
“Of course Brookline. Or Newton. Or Cambridge. Though Cambridge”—he smirked—“isn’t really cost-efficient.”
Chewing on shumai and shreds of bean-curd skin, Dave began to pick out the threads of the restaurant’s din: individual voices gabbing in Mandarin, the plates clattering against each other or the sides of rubber bussing tubs, the hiss of steam from the dumpling carts that traversed the aisles. “I don’t get it,” Dave said finally. “They turned your room into an office. He’s not even speaking to you. But he wants you to live with him? For years?”
Tal laughed, a sad, hollow sound. He was tired. Dave should have taken him right home, let him get settled in. “It’s normal, right,” he asked Dave, who started nodding even before Tal had finished the question. “I mean, it’s normal for grown children to find their own apartments. I’m not doing something weird, right?”
“Um, yeah,” Dave said, with a grimace. “Tal, come on. It’s totally normal. You know that.”
Tal shrugged and gulped his Tsing Tao. “I don’t know,” he said. “He said I’m breaking her heart.”
“By not going to law school? By not living with them until you’re like thirty?” Dave rolled his eyes. “Trust me,” he said. “They’ll get over it.”
“I guess,” agreed Tal. “I went to synagogue with them yesterday—”
“Wait, they go to synagogue?” asked Dave.
“Yeah,” Tal told him. “Not so much when I was growing up, but now they’ve become weirdly religious. They go every Saturday. It’s good for Mom’s business.”
“Ohhhh, right,” said Dave.
“It all comes down to the bottom line with the family Morgenthal,” he said, raising his eyebrows, which were dark and thick and extraordinarily straight. “But, yeah, it was really weird to be back there. I don’t think I’ve been since my bar mitzvah. And, you know there’s that part where they, where you, you know, stand up and recite the mourner’s kaddish, if you’ve lost someone in the last year.” Dave nodded. He and Evelyn had been forced to attend daily services at their Zionist summer camp, albeit of the stapled-together-hippie-prayer-book variety. “Well, my dad stood, because, you know, Grandpa Harry—” Dave nodded again. Tal’s grandfather, a chain-smoking garmento, had died in December, during finals week, which meant Tal had missed the funeral. “And I couldn’t remember the prayer, so I tried to read it in Hebrew, and I couldn’t—I’d forgotten everything, so I just sort of pretended, but I just felt like such a loser.” Dave looked at him, unsure of his point. “My own grandfather and I can’t even say this little prayer for him.”
“Well, you could have—” Dave started, but Tal waved his words away. “What?” asked Dave. “What?”
“I don’t know,” said Tal. “I just, I don’t know.”
In Rochester, Dave’s plans for hard-core dating—not to mention any semblance of a normal social life—were quickly thwarted. There was no one even remotely datable. He spent nights on the phone with Beth, listening to tales of Milwaukee, a town that seemed vaguely more exciting than Rochester, which bothered him. In mid-December Beth obtained a “best friend,” named Glyn, a Brit who’d actually crossed the pond to write his dissertation on Gilligan’s Island or some other such absurdity. Suddenly Glyn’s name came up every five minutes—“Glyn’s mom came to visit and brought us Marmite. Marmite, Dave!”—and Dave decided it was over, Beth could no longer call him at four in the morning to tell him she was lonely. He was always wondering if Glyn was in the other room, sleeping, incapable of properly quelling the particular loneliness of a Jewish girl from Scarsdale. And he could not call her either. No, he most certainly could not. Dave’s mother worked for PBS, after all, so what was he doing mooning over a girl who sought meaning in, like, Hollywood Squares?
He started hanging around with the queens—who were, he saw, just like his Oberlin friends, cynical and bitter and frighteningly smart—and spent his weekends at Rochester’s gay clubs, of which there were surprisingly many. He took up smoking for real, buying cartons of Basics, and he ignored the messages that piled up on his machine, from his mother, from Tal, from Beth, and from Evelyn, who always managed to make him feel like an ass. “Dave, did you get my email,” she’d say, modulating her voice so as not to seem irritated. “I’m wondering if you’re coming home for Grandma’s eightieth birthday party in March.”
That summer—and the three that followed—he stayed at Tal’s place in Williamsburg and waited tables at a Southern restaurant on Cornelia Street. He tried to pretend his parents lived in a different city—half ashamed, half proud that he’d ignored them all year—and spent most of his time alone, actively not doing what he should have been doing, which was, of course, practicing. Some nights, half drunk from the staff round that commenced at midnight, after the kitchen closed, he’d walk home, across Houston, then Delancey, and up and over the Williamsburg Bridge, a fat roll of cash bulging in his pocket. At the dead center of the bridge, he’d stop and rest, his buzz worn off, and peer out over the railing at the tall buildings that lined the Manhattan bank of the East River, inside one of which lived Sadie’s aunt Minnie, an ancient, balding schoolteacher, fiercely devoted to Sadie, having never had any children of her own. He’d gone with Sadie to visit her a few times—she loved young people—in her boxy apartment, overfilled with Judaica and peeling, dark-veneered furniture, and left feeling virtuous and terribly, horribly alone. Later, when his grandmother died, he wondered why he’d never thought to bring Sadie out to visit her, or even to visit her at all, unaccompanied by his parents. And why hadn’t he gone home for her birthday in March?
Each August, his coffers replenished, he’d return to Rochester, sick with excitement and anxiety, certain the next semester would mark his triumph, his ascendance. Instead, he fell further and further behind, racking up record numbers of incompletes and incurring the wrath and, even worse, disappointment of his professors. After the fourth year of this, he drove back, once again, to Rochester, and instead of unloading his summer stuff, he silently packed up his winter stuff and his books and drove back to New York, steering his car to his parents’ apartment, rather than Tal’s, for this year, he knew, Tal had been glad to see him go, though their paths had barely crossed: Tal had been out of town half the time, on location in Vermont, and when he was in town, he was always making plans with Sadie, plans that didn’t include Dave, though, of course, they always said “Come along” as they headed out the door. It was the fall of 1998, a month before Lil’s wedding. His mother happened to be at the front window when he pulled up, and ran downstairs, he thought, to greet him. Instead, he received a look of cold fury, her thin lips pressed into an even thinner line. She knew. “This is just like you!” she said grimly. “To quit right before you’re finished. What is wrong with you?” He shouted something back—trying to ignore the fact that she was crying—something about never having wanted to go to Eastman, having done it for her and Dad, because everyone expected him to, though he didn’t know if this was true or not, he just knew it would hurt her. And, of course, it had. “Well, you’re not staying here,” she’d shouted. He’d gone around the corner to Sadie’s, though she didn’t seem particularly happy to see him either. A week later, he’d moved into Jake Martin’s dusty apartment, selling his car to cover the security deposit. Three months later, in January, he’d bought his place. Which meant, he supposed, that he was back for good. This was his life.