“So you two are what—shopping for diamonds? maybe… the diamond? Oh! What’s that… dingdong sound I hear? Could it be…” No. She didn’t actually say this out loud. Did she? is she really turning into Elaine, nonconsensually as Larry Talbot into the Wolf Man, for example?
Naftali, the ex-Mossad boyfriend, works security for a diamond merchant here on the street. “You’d think we’d’ve met years ago on the job, field guy in on a visit to the office, kaplotz! Magic! but no, it was a fixer-upper. Same lightning bolt, however…”
“Ziggy’s been bringing home Naftali stories since he started krav maga. Big impression, which on Ziggy it’s hard to make.”
“There he is. My dreamboat.” Naftali is pretending to lounge against a storefront, a flaneur who can be triggered silently, instantly into the wrath of God. According to Ziggy, the first time Naftali visited the studio, Nigel immediately asked him how many people he’d killed, and he shrugged, “I lost count,” and when Emma glared, added, “I mean… I can’t remember?” Maybe a case of kidding a kidder, but Maxine wouldn’t want to have to find out. Flabless and close-cropped, a black suit, a face amiable from half a block away reacquiring as it comes into focus its history of laceration and breakage and feelings kept at a professional distance. Though for Emma Levin he makes exceptions. They smile, they embrace, and for a second they’re the two brightest sparklers on the block.
“Ah, you’re Ziggy’s mom. The tough guy. How’s his summer going?”
Tough? her little Ziggurat? “He’s somewhere off in Iowa, Illinois, one of them. Practicing his moves every day, I’m sure.”
“Good place to be,” Naftali speeding his beat a little, and Emma flashing him the look.
As an ex-blurter, Maxine can relate, but still, wondering what he’s almost saying, she tries, “Wish I could figure a way to get out of town for a while.”
He’s watching her intently, not exactly smiling but pleased, like somebody who’s been in on enough interrogations to appreciate the etiquette. “Out here in the open, you know, you get all these stories. The problem is, most of it’s garbage.”
“Which doesn’t help that much, if you’re a worrier.”
“You’re a worrier? I wouldn’t have thought.”
“Naftali Perlman,” Emma growls, “now you stop hustling her, she’s married.”
“Separated,” Maxine batting her eyelashes.
“See, how possessive,” Naftali beaming. “We’re going to lunch, you want to join us?”
“I’m due back at work, but thanks.”
“Your work… you’re… a model?”
In a very precise way, Emma Levin draws one foot to the side, cocks an elbow, puts on her kung fu–movie face.
“My kinda woman!” An explicit squeeze which Emma cannot be said to avoid.
“Behave, guys. Shalom.”
27
The boys call in one night from Prairie du Chien or Fond du Lac or someplace to tell her they’ll be home in two days.
All, as Ace Ventura sez, and even sings, righty then. Maxine wanders uneasily around the place, convinced she has left evidence of misbehavior out in glaringly plain sight that will, not exactly get her in trouble with Horst, but oblige her to be heedful of his feelings, which despite appearances, he may actually have. She runs through the company she’s kept—aside from Windust—since Horst left town. Conkling, Rocky, Eric, Reg. In every case she can claim legitimate work reasons, which would be fine if Horst was the IRS.
Though Heidi is likely to be less than helpful, “Maybe you and Carmine could drop by, say, accidentally?” Maxine wonders.
“You’re expecting trouble?”
“Emotions, maybe.”
“Mm-hmm?… so what you’re really saying is you want Horst to see me in a relationship with another person, because you’re paranoid Horst and I may still be an item? Maxi, insecure Maxi, when will you be able to just let it go?”
Heidi seems on edge these days, even for Heidi, so Maxine isn’t too surprised when her girlhood chum makes a point of not showing up, with Carmine or without, when the Loeffler menfolk at last come roughhousing home again, loud and sugar-high, down the hall and through the door.
“Hey Mom. Missed you.”
“Oh, guys.” She kneels on the floor and holds the boys till everybody gets too embarrassed.
They’re all wearing red Kum & Go ball caps and have brought Maxine one too, which she puts on. They’ve been everywhere. Floyd’s Knobs, Indiana. Duck Creek Plaza in Bettendorf. Chuck E. Cheese and Loco Joe’s. They sing her the Hy-Vee commercial. More than once.
Arriving in Chicago, they promptly got a tour down memory lane, which for Horst was the LaSalle Street canyon, his first and oldest home turf, where he’d been one of those handjiving adventurers who dared the pit every trading day. Started at the Merc trading three-month Eurodollar futures, both for clients and for himself, wearing a custom trader’s jacket with tastefully muted green and magenta stripes and a three-letter name tag pinned to it. After the pits closed around three in the afternoon, he shifted to civvies and walked over to the Chicago Board of Trade and checked in at the Ceres Cafe. When the CME decided to ban double trading, Horst joined a good-size migration over to the CBOT, where no such qualms existed, though Eurodollar activity was noticeably less intense. For a while he shifted to Treasuries, but soon, as if answering some call from deep in the tidy iterations of Midwest DNA, he had found his way into the agricultural pits, and next thing he knew, he was out in deep American countryside, inhaling the aroma from handfuls of wheat, scrutinizing soybeans for purple seed stain, walking through fields of spring barley squeezing kernels and inspecting glumes and peduncles, talking to farmers and weather oracles and insurance adjusters—or, as he put it to himself, rediscovering his roots.
Still, farm fields Kum & farm fields Go, but it’s Chicago that really pulls you back. Horst took his sons to the traders’ cafeteria at the CBOT, and to the Brokers Inn, where they ate the legendary giant fish sandwich, and to old-school steak houses in the Loop where the beef is hung aging in the front window and the staff address the boys as “Gentlemen.” Where the steak knife next to your plate is not some flimsy little serrated blade with a plastic handle but whetstoned steel riveted into custom-hewn oak. Solid.
The Loeffler grandfolks, all through their visit, were over the moon, the specifically Iowa moon, which from the front porch was bigger than any moon the boys had ever seen, rising over little trees whose silhouettes were shaped like lollipops, making everybody forget about what they might’ve been missing on the tube, which was on inside but more as an accent light than anything.
They ate at malls all across Iowa, at Villa Pizza and Bishop’s Buffet, and Horst introduced them to Maid-Rites as well as to local variations on the Louisville Hot Brown. Further into the summer and days to the west, they watched the wind in different wheat fields and waited through the countywide silences when it grows dark in the middle of the afternoon and lightning appears at the horizon. They went looking for arcade games, in derelict shopping plazas, in riverside pool halls, in college-town hangouts, in ice-cream parlors tucked into midblock micromalls. Horst couldn’t help noticing how the places had, most of them, grown more ragged since his time, floors less swept, air-conditioning not as intense, smoke thicker than in the midwestern summers of long ago. They played ancient machines from faraway California said to be custom-programmed by Nolan Bushnell himself. They played Arkanoid in Ames and Zaxxon in Sioux City. They played Road Blasters and Galaga and Galaga 88, Tempest and Rampage and Robotron 2084, which Horst believes to be the greatest arcade game of all time. Mostly, wherever they could find it, they seemed to be playing Time Crisis 2.