WOLF AND LAMB
His father was hardly listening to what he was saying now. What was terrifying and new for Buddy to present was turning out to be just more of the same story for his father. He knew that his father was thinking of the gambling — the gambling would always be with them now. To be his father’s son and to have fallen prey to gambling — the perverse humor of that mistake would never go away. To bet on luck and whim, without skill — to know nothing of handicapping or probability or statistics. To write bad checks to cover the debts, as if the numbers in the statement were just dreams you could make disappear by not looking at them. Twelve thousand dollars in jai alai debts he’d tried to pay off from a bank account his father had set up for him, as if his father wouldn’t notice, the plan so vaporous he decided to withdraw even more, a little extra to take Annette out to dinner that night, stone crabs and prime rib, then to a club to see Jackie Mason. Married to Annette, stepfather to Annette’s son, presumably an adult, a family man — the humiliation of being that defective had become his core, even all these years later. He could mount an argument now — I need fifteen hundred a month because I can’t take care of myself anymore — but the argument lacked force because he had long ago destroyed all his credibility, destroyed it over a lifetime of folly. To look back on the past was to understand that he had never once seen anything for what it was — even his suicide attempt was just a scene from a movie melodrama. Wake up and take yourself seriously. But he had never been able to do that. He had moved with all earnestness through a daydream without even knowing it, ever since he was born, because he was made that way, just as his father was made the other way.
THE PITCH
“They’re going to let me keep the room, but there won’t be any more paychecks coming,” he said. “I can’t do the work the way I am now. I can barely move my fingers sometimes. When it’s like that, I can’t move the chair.”
His father wasn’t looking at him. He seemed to pause, weighing his words, but then it became clear that he wasn’t pausing — he was just letting Buddy’s words sit there bare of consolation, as if after all these years he had finally decided to stop telling his son comforting lies. Buddy saw himself from a great distance then, wilting in the white sun with his thin legs at an angle, polished black shoes on the footrests. He wondered if his father had been testing him in this heat on purpose. Never take your jacket off, he used to say. If you’re hot, then calm down. He looked at the shiny brass buttons on the cuff of his blazer. The failed marriage, the aimlessness, the goofing off. All that instead of preparing for what was happening in his life now.
VERDICT
“It’s hot,” his father said. “I wanted to read the paper outside because your stepmother likes to talk, you know that, so I come out here sometimes because it’s quiet. There was a revolution in Nicaragua yesterday, did you hear about it? Just like the one in Cuba. The markets are off because of it. I don’t know how much you follow the news.”
“I heard about it. I saw something on TV.”
“It’s good to enjoy yourself. To go out to dinner, see a game. I always encouraged you to have a good time, to have friends. I wanted you to have a good life, I’ve always wanted that more than anything else. But I can’t keep taking care of you like this. You’re too old for it.”
“Dad.”
“I can give you eight hundred a month, that’s what I can do. I can’t give you fifteen hundred. I don’t have it.”
“But I need it.”
“I know you need it. I know that, Buddy.”
HOME
The valet watched while Booker rolled him under the archway to the opened passenger door of Booker’s uncle’s car, the big sedan still running, the air-conditioning on high. When the chair came close enough, Buddy leaned his weight toward the opening and Booker wrestled first a leg, then a buttock, then the other leg, then Buddy’s trunk onto the seat, Buddy grunting, limp, the slick blazer tangled around his midsection. It was like the thorax of an overturned beetle, he thought, and he was starting to laugh when Booker closed the door. But the look Booker gave him through the window came not just from his eyes but from his whole body, lank beneath an unbuttoned shirt with a broad collar. It was a gaze of wholly uninterested, damp-eyed boredom.
UNVEILING
The last occasion on which any number of the Lansky family gathered together in relative harmony was in 1985, for the unveiling of the gravestone of the first Mrs. Meyer Lansky. Somehow Anne… had survived to the age of seventy-four, alone in her West End Avenue apartment with her fur coats, dead birds, and cockroaches. The furs holed and shabby, her hair straggling and unkempt, Anne Lansky had so lost contact with the world that she would leave the door of her efficiency unlocked, to be raided and vandalized by the drug addicts of the seedy neighborhood in which she spent her declining years.
— Robert Lacey, Little Man: Meyer Lansky and
the Gangster Life
ERETZ YISRAEL
Teddy brought him an early dinner that he ate alone on a card table in his study, the blinds drawn, no light but the light of the TV. His breath was short, and after the visit with Buddy he needed to be alone before bed. Eggs, toast, the baseball game a tiring blur. Buddy with maybe a year with some motion in his fingers. Probably less. It was of course a judgment on himself. There was no other way to see it, even if you didn’t believe in those things, even if you weren’t a religious person.
In Tel Aviv, on Hanukkah, the children and their parents would parade at night with candles and flashlights, a blueness in the dark. There would be a smell of cooking oil, the frying of jelly-filled doughnuts, sufganiyot, people out walking, joking, singing, coarse, without self-consciousness. They were a people with their own food, their own dances, their own music, their own language, a people like any other people, at ease in their home. You didn’t realize how deformed you were until you saw all that and failed to become a part of it.
Prime Minister
Menachem Begin
Jerusalem, Israel.
Dear Sir:
I won’t go into too many overtures and will state my case as briefly as possible.
Mr. Begin, I have a very keen desire to live in Israel, but unfortunately I am verboten. To begin with, when I spent time in Israel, I fell more in love with the country than I was before. My one wish is to be able to spend the rest of my life — which, I presume, can’t be too long, as I am 75 yrs. old….
The carbon copies, the folded correspondence, hopes entertained, poorly articulated, doomed.
… how much harm can an elderly, sick man do to Israel…. I can enter, as I have, any other country without criticism, except the place of my heritage….