And why was it that they always portrayed judges as portly mountains of flesh? He was always as skinny as they came. A beanpole. A scarecrow. More fat, said Eileen, on a butcher’s knife. But the cartoonists and even the courtroom artists insisted on giving him a bit of jowl, or a touch of paunch. It annoyed Eileen no end. She even started cutting back on the calories until he could hardly see himself sideways in the mirror. He used to think that the great grace of old age would be the giving up of vanity, but it is apparent even more these days: the sag of skin, the wrinkles, the eyes surprised by the sight of himself. He caught a glimpse in the mirror the other day, and how in tarnation did I acquire the face of my father’s father? The years don’t so much arrive, they gatecrash, they breeze through the door and leave their devastation, all the empty crockery, the broken veins, sunken eyepools, aching gums, but who is he to complain, he’s had plenty of years to get used to it, he was hardly a handsome Harry in the first place, and anyway he got the girl, he bowled her over, he won her heart, snagged her, yes, I was born in the middle of my first great love.
He lets his arm fall over to the other side of the bed. Saudade. A good word that. Portuguese. Get you close, Eileen. Come snuggle in here beside me. Never a truer word. The longing for what has become absent.
She always said that his early court performances in Brooklyn were full of patience, guile, and cunning. A literary reference somehow — she was a fan of Joyce. Silence and exile. At home every morning she ironed his shirts and starched his collars and, with each case he won, she bought him a volume of poetry and a brand-new tie from the shop on Montague Street. He could have strung them from here to the Asian sweatshop: the ties, that is, not the poems. Eileen must have kept the Gucci factory girls alive, the number of cravats he had hanging in his closet, perfectly arranged, neatly coded and layered. Her dark hair, her pert little nose, the single mole on the rim of her cheek. She was lovely once and always, like the girl from the song. Lovely once and always, moonlight in her hair. There are times he still spritzes a tiny bit of perfume in her pillow, just to inhale and pretend she’s still there. Sentimental, of course, but what’s life without sentiment? And let’s face it, when is the last time he had a bout of good old-fashioned lust?
Consult the BlackBerry, it will know. It does, after all, seem to know everything else: wayward sons, broken-hearted daughters, another spill in the Gulf.
He can hear Sally, already up and at it in the kitchen. The rattle of the spoons. The slide of the saucer. The touch of the teacup. The ping of the orange glass. The juicer being yanked from the cupboard. The soft sigh of the fridge’s rubber tubing. The creak of the bottom drawer. The carrots coming out, the strawberries, the pineapple, the oranges, and then a serious clank of ice. The juice. Sally says he should call it a smoothie, but he doesn’t like the word, simple as that, nothing smooth about it. He was on a shuffle in the park the other day — no other word, every day a shuffle now — and he saw a young woman at the park benches near the reservoir with the word Juicy scrawled in pink across her rear end, and he had to admit, even at his age, that it wasn’t far from the truth. With all apologies to Eileen, of course, and Sally too, and Rachel, and Riva, and Denise, and MaryBeth, and Ava, no doubt, and Oprah, and Brigitte, and even Simone de Beauvoir, why not, and all the other women of the world, sorry all, but it was indeed rather juicy, the way it bounced, with the little boundary of dark skin above, and the territory of shake below, and there was a time, long ago, when he could’ve squeezed a thing or two out of that, oh don’t talk to me of smoothies. He had a reputation, but it was nothing but harmless fun. He never strayed, though he had to admit he leaned a little. Sorry, Eileen, I leaned, I leaned, I leaned. It was his more conservative colleagues in the court who gave him the evil eye. A bunch of shriveled-up prunes, or prudes, or both — how in the world, beyond party politics, did they ever get elected? What did they think, that a man must hide his life in the judge’s shroud? That he has to pop the errant head back under the shell? That the only noise he’d make was the gavel? No, no, no, it was all about taking the rind of life. Extract the liquid. Forget the pulp. Juice it up. The Jew’s Juice. A smoothie.
Oh, the whirl of the mind. Sorry, Eileen. I was passionate once, and that’s the word. Flirtatious maybe even. Nothing more. Never one to harass. That was something he passed on to young Elliot instead. More’s the pity. Look at that poor boy now. But enough of all that. It’s no way to start the day, with his errant son, his wandering eyes, hands, ears, throat, wallet.
He can hear the faint ticking begin. Come, heat, hurry. Rise up the pipes.
Why is it that New York never produced some boy genius to solve the heating problem? You’d think that with all the children born in this thumping metropolis that at least one of them would get miffed about the clank of pipes and the hiss of steam? That they’d solve their everyday dilemma? But no, no, no. Off they go and make their millions on Wall Street and Broadway and in Palo Alto and Los Alamos and wherever else, and still they come home to an apartment designed for cavemen.
What is this godforsaken apartment worth anyway? Half a million twenty-seven years ago. Sold the brownstone on Willow Street and made the trek to the Upper East Side. All to make Eileen happy. She loved strolling by the Great Lawn, taking her ease around the reservoir, going on jaunts down to Greenberg’s bakery. She even put a mezuzah by the front door. To protect the investment as much as anything else. Two million dollars now, they say, two point two maybe, two point four, but they can’t get the heating on before five in the morning? We can put a black man in the White House but we still can’t get toasty? We can send a mission to Mars but we have to freeze a good man’s cojones off on East Eighty-sixth Street? We can fit our BlackBerrys into our heart-side pajama pockets, but we can’t guide the steam up through the walls without a racket?
Oh, but here it comes, here it comes. The first click of the day. As if there’s a man down there wrenching open the pipes. A second tick. A third. And then a whack. Crash bang wallop. Good man, Dante. A divine comedy indeed. Abandon all hope. Jazz in the heating pipes. If only. Wake me up, Thelonious Monk. Come dwell a while in my steampipes. Visit the basement while you’re at it.
— Sally!
He can hear the juicer crunching through the ice, the stammer of the blades, and the clack against the glass container.
— Sally!
The juicer gradually slows down, the sounds softening into silence.
— Sally, I’m up!
Which, quite plainly, he is not. Neither one way or the other. They have installed a hanging white bar at the side of the bed and a few other gadgets to help him levitate in the morning. Elliot even wanted to put a hoist in at one stage. Like he was some sort of giant shipping container. You need a hoist, Dad. A hoist, my ass, dear son. A hoist needs hoisters and not just for the oysters. Eileen, quite clearly, would not be impressed: she liked poetry of an altogether different order and she never quite cottoned to his cheap little rhymes. She was a fan of that Irishman, Heaney, and she had a penchant for another wild head of hair named Muldoon. She would go to their readings every chance she got. Chasing down the boisterous bards, it always made him smile. He himself saw both poets at a Waldorf dinner once: they should have written a rhyme about the rubbery chicken and the slippety-slop waiters. He crossed the room, stood in line, took out his good fountain pen, got the poets to sign a cloth napkin, and tucked it away — he was afraid that he’d get caught white-handed, a judge to be judged — and he brought it home to Eileen who clutched it to her nightgown and then kissed him a worthy goodnight: I’ll see you in my dreams.