But this, the Spam postcard and the note, he felt contained the correct combination 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? 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 full-blown affair and false business trips (credit-union conventions that never took place) 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 produce and star in a fabulous 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 Aries. Beneath the clock face 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 exactly the same words thrown back at him like 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 the Cartoon Network. Ira would sometimes watch her mesmerized face, as the cartoons flashed on the creamy screen of her skin, her eyes bright with reflected shapes caught there like holograms in marbles. He felt inadequate as her father, but he tried his best: affection, wisdom, reliability, plus not ordering pizza every visit, 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'd asked.
"Neither!" she'd shouted, summing up her distaste for everything, marriage and divorce. "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, 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, 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 that Bekka loved animals. She had once, in a bath-time 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,"
"Goodbye," and "I'm only eight."
"I really just don't want all his stuff there. His car already blocks our car in the driveway."
"Bummer," Ira said, 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."
"He's this other dude," Bekka said. She sometimes referred to her mother as a "dudette."
"Bummer," Ira said. "Big, big bummer."
he phoned zora four days later, so as not to seem pathetically eager. He summoned up his most confident acting. "Hi, Zora? This is Ira," he said, and then waited — narcissistically perhaps, but what else was there to say? — for her response.
"Ira?"
"Yes. Ira Milkins."
"I'm sorry," she said. "I don't know who you are."
Ira gripped the phone and looked down at himself, suddenly finding nothing there. He seemed to have vanished from the neck down. "We met last Sunday at Mike and Kate's?" His voice quavered. If he ever actually succeeded in going out with her, he was going to have to take one of those date-rape drugs and just pass out on her couch.
"Ira? Ohhhhhhhhh — Ira. Yeah. The Jewish guy."
"Yeah, the Jew. That was me." Should he hang up now? He did not feel he could go on. But he must go on. There was a man of theatre for you.
"That was a nice dinner," she said.
"Yes, it was."
"I usually skip Lent completely."
"Me, too," Ira said. "It's just simpler. Who needs the fuss?"
"But sometimes I forget how reassuring and conjoining a meal with friends can be, especially at a time like this."
Ira had to think about the way she'd used "conjoining." It sounded New Age-y and Amish, both.
"But Mike and Kate run that kind of home," she went on. "It's all warmth and good-heartedness."
Ira thought about this. What other kind of home was there to run, if you were going to bother? Hard, cold, and mean: that had been his home with Marilyn, at the end. It was like those experimental monkeys with the wire-monkey moms. What did the baby monkeys know? The wire mother was all they had, all they knew in their hearts, and so they clung to it, even if it was only a coat hanger. Mom. So much easier to carve the word into your arm. As a child, for a fifth-grade science project, in the basement of his house he'd tried to reproduce Konrad Lorenz's imprinting experiment with baby ducks. But he had screwed up the incubation lights and cooked the ducks right in their eggs, stinking up the basement so much that his mother had screamed at him for days. Which was a science lesson of some sort — the emotional limits of the Homo sapiens working Jewish mother — but it was soft science, and therefore less impressive.
"What kind of home do you run?" he asked.
"Home? Yeah, I mean to get to one of those. Right now, actually, I'm talking to you from a pup tent."
Oh, she was a funny one. Perhaps they would laugh and laugh their way into the sunset. "I love pup tents," he said. What was a pup tent, exactly? He'd forgotten.
"Actually, I have a teenage son, so I have no idea what kind of home I have anymore. Once you have a teenager, everything changes."
Now there was silence. He couldn't imagine Bekka as a teenager. Or, rather, he could, sort of, since she often acted like one already, full of rage at the second-rate servants whom life had hired to take and bring her order.