The Xanthia T. Lasdun Memorial Ocean-View Manor & Garden was a thirty-six-chambered assisted-living facility in Bensonhurst, with that bleary, nicotine-stained shabbiness every neo-Tudor building in the world seems to exude. Its garden, as far as I could determine, was the condom-festooned median of lower Bay Parkway, and its ocean was the droning, alluvial parkway itself. I loved it there, Mrs. Haven, a fact I’ve never managed to explain. I worked at the Xanthia four days out of seven — more often than that, if I picked up some shifts — making beds and boiling catheters and playing endless games of Mastermind and Risk. My most frequent opponent was Abel Palladian, of the Bushwick Palladians: interregnum-period history buff, chocolate milk addict, and bona fide duration fetishist — the first outside of my family that I’d met.
Abel most likely had some mild neurological disorder — something like Asperger’s syndrome, but with a lower media profile — and the years had not been kind. What he suffered from most, however, was garden-variety loneliness: what some long-forgotten joker on the staff had christened Lasdun’s xanthoma. I’d no sooner introduced myself during salad hour in the Montmartre Lounge than he launched himself full-bore into his passion. My first thought was that he could smell it coming off me: the obsession my aunts had devoted their lives to, that my father had spent half a century resisting, and that I’d come to New York to extinguish at last. Later I found out that everyone got the same spiel.
He started with the life spans of the fishes.
“Haddock are found in deeper Atlantic waters than their relatives the cod, but they share the same life span: roughly fourteen years.”
“All right, Mr. Palladian. That’s a good thing to know.”
“What about the goby, Mr. Tolliver? Are you familiar?”
“I’m not, actually. Is that like a guppy?”
Palladian waved this aside. “The goby ranks among the shortest-lived animals of the vertebrate class. A goby is born, reproduces, and dies all within a single calendar year.”
“That’s fascinating. I’ve always wondered—”
“Sturgeons, now,” Palladian announced.
“I’m afraid I don’t—”
“The record for sturgeon longevity belongs to a thirteen-foot beluga that weighed one metric ton and was judged to be eighty-two years of age. A freshwater sturgeon caught in Lake Baikal in 1953, however, was believed by some ichthyologists to have attained a duration of one hundred and fifty years.”
The line was forming for the salad bar, but Palladian ignored it. He appeared to be in a fugue state of some kind.
“Trout?” I said.
“The life expectancy for a rainbow trout falls between seven and eleven years, depending on locality and species. Brook trout, the finest at table, thrive best in cold waters. In some Canadian lakes they live up to ten years, while elsewhere six years is considered senescent.”
“Good thing we’re not trout.”
Palladian’s eyes drifted back into focus. “One brook trout in captivity,” he said with a smile, as though I’d somehow played into his hands, “lived to seventeen years and twenty-seven days.”
We progressed, over time, from animate to inanimate forms: from earthworms (ten years max) to shallots (sixty to ninety days in a well-maintained fridge) to casino playing cards (two to five hours of regulation play) to the Milky Way galaxy (forty billion years, give or take). Once Stratego season started in earnest (each board game had its season at the Xanthia — Stratego in the summer, Scrabble in the fall, Monopoly through the winter, Risk sometime around Lent), the tenor of our talks shifted. We’d lost quite a few Xanthians during the recent heat wave, and I had more leisure time for a while. Incrementally, centripetally, our conversation drifted toward the personal.
“Who are your people, Mr. Tolliver?” Palladian asked me one evening, glowering down at the board. We’d been playing for an hour in absolute silence. I was winning for once.
“Excuse me, Mr. Palladian?”
“Your people,” Palladian barked. He had the wonky affect of somebody on the “spectrum,” often making him seem angry when he wasn’t; but this looked to be the genuine article. I’d just invaded the Sudetenland.
I shut my eyes and tried to dredge up a reply. I’d been asked this question more than once at the Xanthia, on account of what my father had liked to refer to as my “Hitlerjugend physiognomy,” and I’d been asked it no end of times growing up, because of my mother’s kraut-and-bratwurst accent. It never failed to make me ill at ease.
“My father’s half sisters, who raised him, sometimes took him to Orthodox temple—”
Palladian’s eyebrows twitched subtly. “Yes?”
“But he wasn’t Orthodox himself. He wasn’t anything. Both of his parents were goyim.”
Palladian shrugged and said nothing. The Stratego game seemed to have stalled.
“I am one-quarter Jewish, though. On my mother’s side.”
“Now I like you one-quarter better.” He watched me for a while, then cleared his throat. “The first incandescent bulb, tested by Thomas Edison, burned for forty hours exactly. Manufacturers today can and do make incandescent bulbs that will last, barring mishap, for a minimum of—”
“My grandfather’s brother was a war criminal, Mr. Palladian. He ran a camp in eastern Poland and experimented on human beings, the majority of them Jews. He was known as the Black Timekeeper of Czas.”
My mouth shut with a clack, like the jaw of a marionette. Palladian regarded me bleakly. Mabel Dimitrios, a Xanthia rookie, was unraveling a sweater on a nearby couch and watching me with rheumy-eyed alarm.
“Mr. Palladian?” I said. “If I’ve in any way caused you—”
Palladian made a pushing-away motion with both of his hands, as if he’d been brought a plate of food he hadn’t ordered.
“Old wash,” he said. “Very old wash, Mr. Tolliver.”
I nodded stupidly. “I don’t know why I said that, to be honest. The thing is—”
“Not interested.”
“Of course not. I don’t blame you.” I hesitated. “It’s just, you understand, that I’m trying to come to terms—”
“What terms?” Palladian rumbled. “What are you going to do, Mr. Tolliver? Go back in time and kill your father’s uncle?”
“That’s an interesting thought,” I said, with what must have seemed like an ironic smile. But nothing could have been farther from the truth, Mrs. Haven. It was an exceedingly interesting thought. I pushed my panzer division deeper into the Sudetenland.
* * *
There’s no other way to put this, Mrs. Haven: as the weeks passed, you receded from my thoughts. It was the law of conservation of energy, not to mention the abhorrence of a vacuum, since I’d followed every lead and come up empty. I’d just surrendered my last hope — surrendered it gladly, like a coat I’d always felt too warm inside of — when I saw you buying cheese in Union Square.
You wore a blood-colored parka trimmed with platinum fur, like some sort of Inuit heiress, and held a duck-shaped wicker basket in your fists. It was cold for October, below freezing already, and the breath left your body in tiny, immaculate puffs. You strolled from the cheese stand to a pickle stand to a stand that seemed to sell nothing but napkins. It was too much to take, hitting me like that without the slightest warning, and I had to sit down on the nearest bench. At one point you looked up abruptly, as though you’d heard some alarm, and I hid behind my mittens like a child.
Some manifestations of beauty are period-specific, expressive of the age that nurtures them; others seem to exist outside of history, warping each successive moment as they pass. Yours was the second kind of beauty, Mrs. Haven — at least in Union Square that day, at least to me. I managed to convince myself that I was waiting for an opening, a pretext of some kind; in fact I just stared, stuck to my bench like a barnacle, while you filled that ridiculous basket. It seemed cruel, as I watched you, that anyone should be privileged with such power, and it still seems unjust — though I’ve learned that the injustice cuts both ways. It sucks all moderation from the world.