“My gallbladder, Elaine, please,” advises Ernie.
The corner, mercifully. Horst waves. “See you guys later.”
“Call if you’re gonna be too late?” Maxine trying to remember what normal and married sounds like. Eye contact with Horst would be nice also, but no soap.
“This time of night?” Elaine wonders after Horst is out of earshot. “What kind of ‘business’ can that be, again?”
“If he came with us, you’d be complaining about that,” Maxine wondering why suddenly now she’s defending Horst. “Maybe he’s trying to be polite, you’ve heard of that?”
“Well, we bought enough pastry to feed an army, maybe I should just call—”
“No,” Maxine growls, “nobody else. No litigation lawyers, no drop-by ob-gyns in Harvard running shorts, none of that. Please.”
“She will never let that go,” sez Elaine, “one time. So paranoid, I swear.”
“Who does she get it from,” Ernie doesn’t exactly ask. Being a passage from a duet Maxine may possibly have heard once or twice in her life. Tonight, beginning as a temperate discussion of Frank Loesser as an operatic composer, the conversation soon unfocuses into general opera talk, including a spirited exchange about who sings the greatest “Nessun Dorma.” Ernie thinks it’s Jussi Björling, Elaine thinks it’s Deanna Durbin in His Butler’s Sister (1943), which was on television the other night. “That English lyric?” Ernie making a face, “sub–Tin Pan Alley. Awful. And she’s a lovely girl, but she’s got no squillo.”
“She’s a soprano, Ernie. And Björling, he should have his union card revoked, that Swedish lilt he puts on ‘Tramontate, stelle,’ unacceptable.”
And so forth. When Maxine was a kid, they kept trying to drag her along to the Met, but it never took, she never made the transition to Opera Person, for years she thought Jussi Björling was a campus in California. Not even dumbed-down kiddy matinees featuring TV celebs with horns out the sides of their helmet could get her interested. Fortunately it only skipped a generation, and both Ziggy and Otis now have turned into reliable opera dates for their grandparents, Ziggy partial to Verdi, Otis to Puccini, neither caring that much for Wagner.
“Actually, Grandma, Grandpa, all due respect,” it occurs to Otis now, “it’s Aretha Franklin, the time she filled in for Pavarotti at the Grammys back in ’98.”
“‘Back in ’98.’ Long, long ago. Come here, you little bargain,” Elaine reaching to pinch his cheek, which he manages to slide away from.
Ernie and Elaine live in a rent-controlled prewar classic seven with ceilings comparable in height to a domed sports arena. Needless to say within easy walking distance of the Met.
Elaine waves a wand, and coffee and pastries materialize.
“Not enough!” Each kid holding a plate piled unhealthily high with danishes, cheesecake, strudel.
“You, I’ll give you such a frosk…” as the boys run into the next room to watch Space Ghost Coast to Coast, all of whose episodes their grandfather has thoughtfully taped. “And no crumbs in there!”
By reflex Maxine has a look into the bedrooms she and her sister, Brooke, used to occupy. In Brooke’s there now seems to be all new furniture, drapes, wallpaper also. “What’s this.”
“For Brooke and Avi when they get back.”
“Which is when?”
“What,” Ernie with an impish glint, “you missed the press conference? Latest word is sometime before Labor Day, though he probably calls it Likud Day.”
“Now, Ernie.”
“I said something? She wants to marry a zealot, her business, life is full of these nice surprises.”
“Avram is a decent husband,” Elaine shaking her head, “and I’ve got to say, he isn’t very political.”
“Software to annihilate Arabs, I’m sorry, that’s not political?”
“Trying to drink some coffee here,” Maxine puts in melodiously.
“It’s all right,” Ernie with his palms raised to heaven, “always the mother’s heart that falls out of the shoe box in the snow, nobody ever asks about a father, no, fathers don’t have hearts.”
“Oh, Ernie. He’s a computer nerd like everybody else his generation, he’s harmless, so cut him some slack.”
“He’s so harmless, why is the FBI always coming around to ask about him?”
“The what?” As a gong from a hitherto-unreleased Fu Manchu movie goes off, abrupt and strident, in some not-too-obscure brain lobe, Maxine, though long diagnosed with Chronic Chocolate Deficiency, sits now with her fork in midair arrest, still staring at a three-chocolate mousse cake from Soutine, but with a sudden redirection of interest.
“So maybe it’s the CIA,” Ernie shrugging, “the NSA, the KKK, who knows, ‘Just a few more details for our files,’ is how they like to put it. And then hours of these really embarrassing questions.”
“When did this start?”
“Just after Avi and Brooke went off to Israel,” Elaine is pretty sure.
“What kinds of questions?”
“Associates, employment former and current, family, and yes, since you’re about to ask, your name did come up, oh and,” Ernie now with a crafty look she knows well, “if you didn’t want that piece of cake there—”
“Long as you explain over at Lenox Hill about the fork wounds.”
“Here, one guy left you his card,” Ernie handing it over, “wants you to call him, no rush, just when you get a minute.”
She looks at the card. Nicholas Windust, Special Case Officer, and a phone number with a 202 area code, which is D.C., fine but nothing else on the card, no agency or bureau name, not even a logo of one.
“He dressed very nicely,” Elaine recalls, “not like they usually do. Very nice shoes. No wedding ring.”
“I don’t believe this, she’s trying to pimp me onto a fed? What am I saying, of course I believe it.”
“He was asking about you a lot,” continues Elaine.
“Rrrrr…”
“On the other hand,” tranquilly, “maybe you’re right, nobody should ever date a government agent, at least not till they’ve seen Tosca at least once. Which we had tickets for, but you made other plans that night.”
“Ma, that was 1985.”
“Plácido Domingo and Hildegard Behrens,” Ernie beaming. “Legendary. You’re not in trouble, are you?”
“Oh, Pop. I have maybe a dozen cases going at any one time, and there’s always a federal angle—a government contract, a bank regulation, a RICO beef, just extra paperwork and then it goes away till there’s something else.” Trying not to sound too much like she’s addressing anybody’s anxieties here.
“He looked…” Ernie squinting, “he didn’t look like a paper pusher. More like a field guy. But maybe my reflexes are off. He showed me my own dossier, did I mention that?”
“He what? Establishing trust with the interviewee, no doubt.”
“This is me?” Ernie said when he saw the photo. “I look like Sam Jaffe.”
“A friend of yours, Mr. Tarnow?”
“A movie actor.” Explaining to Efrem Zimbalist Jr. here how in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) Sam Jaffe, playing Professor Barnhardt, the smartest man in the world, Einstein only different, after writing some advanced equations all over a blackboard in his study, steps out for a minute. The extraterrestrial Klaatu shows up looking for him and finds this boardful of symbols, like the worst algebra class you were ever in, notices what seems to be a mistake down in the middle of it, erases something and writes something else in, then leaves. When the Professor comes back, he immediately spots the change to his equations and stands there kind of beaming at the blackboard. It was some such expression that had crossed Ernie’s face just as the covert federal shutter fell.