Like everyone he knew, he could discern the hollowness in people’s charm only when it was directed at someone other than himself. When it was directed at him, the person just seemed so totally nice. And so Zora’s laughter, in conjunction with her beauty, doomed him a little, made him grateful beyond reason.
Immediately, he sent her a postcard, one of newlyweds dragging empty Spam cans from the bumper of their car. He wrote: Dear Zora, Had such fun meeting you at Mike’s. And then he wrote his phone number. He kept it simple. In courtship he had a history of mistakes, beginning at sixteen with his first girlfriend, for whom he had bought at the local head shop the coolest thing he had then ever seen in his life: a beautifully carved wooden hand with its middle finger sticking up. He himself had coveted it tremulously for a year. How could she not love it? Her contempt for it, and then for him, had left him feeling baffled and betrayed. With Marilyn he had taken the other approach and played hard to get, which had turned their relationship into a never-ending Sadie Hawkins Day, with subsequent marriage to Sadie an inevitably doomed thing — a humiliating and interminable Dutch date.
But this, the Spam postcard and the note, he felt contained the correct mix of offhandedness and intent. This elusive mix — the geometric halfway point between stalker and Rip van Winkle — was important to get right in the world of middle-aged dating, he suspected, though what did he really know of this world? It had been so long, the whole thing seemed a kind of distant civilization, a planet of the apings! — graying, human flotsam with scorched internal landscapes mimicking the young, picking up where they had left off decades ago, if only they could recall where the hell that was. Ira had been a married man for fifteen years, a father for eight (poor little Bekka, now rudely transported between houses in a speedy, ritualistic manner resembling a hostage drop-off), only to find himself punished for an idle little nothing, nothing, nothing flirtation with a colleague, punished with his wife’s actual affair and false business trips (Montessori conventions that never existed), and finally a petition for divorce mailed from a motel. Observing others go through them, he used to admire midlife crises, the courage and shamelessness and existential daring of them, but after he’d watched his own wife, a respectable nursery school teacher, produce and star in a full-blown one of her own, he found the sufferers of such crises not only self-indulgent but greedy and demented, and he wished them all weird unnatural deaths with various contraptions easily found in garages.
He received a postcard from Zora in return. It was of Van Gogh’s room in Arles. Beneath the clockface of the local postmark her handwriting was big but careful, some curlicuing in the g’s and f’s. It read, Had such fun meeting you at Mike’s. Wasn’t that precisely, word for word, what he had written to her? There was no too, no emphasized you, just the exact same words thrown back at him like in some lunatic postal Ping-Pong. Either she was stupid or crazy or he was already being too hard on her. Not being hard on people—“You bark at them,” Marilyn used to say — was something he was trying to work on. When he pictured Zora’s lovely face, it helped his tenuous affections. She had written her phone number and signed off with a swashbuckling Z—as in Zorro. That was cute, he supposed. He guessed. Who knew. He had to lie down.
He had Bekka for the weekend. She sat in the living room, tuned to Cartoon Network. She liked Road Runner and Justice League. Ira would sometimes watch her mesmerized face, the cartoons flashing on the creamy screen of her skin, her eyes still and wide, bright with reflected shapes caught there like holograms in marbles. He felt inadequate as her father, but in general attempted his best: affection, wisdom, reliability, plus not ordering pizza every night, though tonight he had again caved in. Last week Bekka had said to him, “When you and Mommy were married we always had mashed potatoes for supper. Now you’re divorced and we always have spaghetti.”
“Which do you like better?” he had asked.
“Neither!” she had shouted, summing up her distaste for everything. “I hate them both.”
Tonight he had ordered the pizza half plain cheese, and half with banana peppers and jalapeños. The two of them sat together in front of Justice League, with TV trays, eating slices from their respective sides. Chesty, narrow-waisted heroes in bright colors battled their enemies with righteous confidence and, of course, laser guns. Bekka finally turned to him. “Mommy says that if her boyfriend Daniel moves in I can have a dog. A dog and a bunny.”
“And a bunny?” Ira said. When the family was still together, unbroken, the four-year-old Bekka, new to numbers and the passage of time, used to exclaim triumphantly to her friends, “Mommy and Daddy say I can have a dog! When I turn eighteen!” There’d been no talk of bunnies. But perhaps the imminence of Easter had brought this on. He knew Bekka loved animals. She had once, in a bathtime reverie, named her five favorite people, four of whom were dogs. The fifth was her own blue bike.
“A dog and a bunny,” Bekka repeated, and Ira had to repress images of the dog with the rabbit’s bloody head in its mouth.
“So, what do you think about that?” he asked cautiously, wanting to get her opinion on the whole Daniel thing.
Bekka shrugged and chewed. “Whatever,” she said, her new word for “You’re welcome,” “Hello,” “Good-bye,” and “I’m only eight.” “I really just don’t want all his stuff there. Already his car blocks our car in the driveway.”
“Bummer,” said Ira, his new word for “I must remain as neutral as possible” and “Your mother’s a whore.”
“I don’t want a stepfather,” Bekka said.
“Maybe he could just live on the steps,” Ira said, and Bekka smirked, her mouth full of mozzarella.
“Besides,” she said. “I like Larry better. He’s stronger.”
“Who’s Larry?” Ira said, instead of “Bummer.”