I try to see the world as it was and as it is now, try to find what used to be my home, what used to be my life, try to locate the Fourth Estate of my memory: a dry reporting of fact. You lived
here.
You slept
there.
You made love and you witnessed death and you mourned and you buried your wife in the simple plot Claxson provided and allowed behind your home and you carried your wife’s corpse—because that’s what it was; it wasn’t a body anymore, not with the dirt and the sand and absence of any kind of reality, any kind of relevance beyond what you’d emotionally ascribed to it—to the sea,
because that was what she asked of you, not to allow her to rot in the desert, but to give her a perpetual view of the sun and the water, to let her float free of the pain, because that’s what she wanted you to give her. That is
across the way
. And you see the end of your own life, don’t you? You feel the creeping dread that you’ve beaten that same slow poison yourself but have found another, more insidious invader. And what will you do about it, Morris Drew? Why did you bring that gun with you?
When I get back home I find Kim sitting on our back patio, her eyes buried in a magazine, golf carts moving in a steady stream past her as dusk has begun to fall. She doesn’t see me, so for a time I just stare at her. I imagine what she might look like with the fine lines around her eyes smooth, her gray hair blond, her skin thick and healthy instead of thin and stretched like parchment. The trauma of memory is that it never forgives you for aging. What would Katherine look like to me today? Would she be an old woman, or would she be young in my eyes, perpetually twenty-three years old? The other trauma of memory is that it can absolve you of reality if you let it, and the reality is that I’ve come to love other women, finally, a fact I’m not ashamed of.
“I’m home,” I say.
“I know,” Kim says, not looking up.
“I didn’t know if you heard me come in,” I say.
“Morris,” she says, turning pages, “your footfalls have the delicacy of a jackhammer. There are no secrets between tile floors and you.”
I sit down beside Kim and put my arm around her and pull her close. I see the young woman she must have been. I’ve
seen photos, of course, but you never truly see someone in a photo. You see what they looked like, but not who they were. Fear shows you all the colors in a person’s skin.
I reach down and lift up my pant leg and show her my empty holster. “I almost killed myself today. I’m not proud of that, but I wanted you to know that it won’t happen again.”
“Jesus, Morr is,” she says.
“I threw that gun into the Salton Sea,” I say. “Even said some prayers over it. I’m not gonna let it take me from you.”
I know that if I look down I’ ll find Kim crying, so I stare instead at the long shadows crawling into the bunkers on either side of the twelfth hole, at the last glimmers of sunlight that peek over the rim of the San Jacinto Mountains, at the green shards of grass that grow just beyond our patio. I watch as lights flicker on inside the condos across the fairway from us, and I think that where I am now, at this very moment, with my wife beside me, with a hint of cool in the breeze that has swept by me, the smell of jasmine light on its trail,
this
is the memory I want to live out the rest of my years with. A moment of silent perfection when I knew, finally knew, that I’d found a kind of contentment with who I was, who I’d been, and what I’d tried so desperately to forget. I am not surprised, then, when a strong gust of wind picks up from the east and I make out the faint scent of the Salton Sea, pungent and lost and so far, far away.
Mitzvah
T
hat Rabbi David Cohen wasn’t Jewish had ceased, over time, to be a problem. He hardly even thought of it anymore except when ordering breakfast down at the Bagel Café. He’d sit there across from Bennie Savone, that fat fuck, watching him wolf down ham and scrambled eggs, or French toast with a steaming side of greasy link sausage, and his mouth would actually start to water, like he was some kind of fucking golden retriever. He didn’t even think Bennie liked pork all that much—sometimes Bennie would order a cup of coffee and a side of bacon and would leave the bacon uneaten, David assumed, in not-so-benign mockery—but David knew Bennie liked letting him know who was in control of the situation.
But now, as he sat in his normal booth in the back corner facing the busy intersection of Buffalo and Westcliff, waiting for Bennie to roll up in his absurd black Mercedes that might as well have a personalized plate that said MOBSTER on it, he thought that he probably qualified as a Jew by now, if not in the eyes of God, then at least in his own eyes. It still wasn’t that he gave a fuck about religion—his personal motto, before all of this shit, had been “everybody dies”—but he probably knew far more about the Torah and the culture in general than the people who belonged to the Temple. And had
he grown up with it, David was fairly certain he would have appreciated the subtle nuance of kugel.
After fifteen years, though, he still couldn’t get used to the idea of baked noodles, raisins, apples, and cinnamon as a fucking entrée. Now pork loin. Pork loin was something he could get behind, especially this time of year, what with Christmas coming up. Back in the day, his wife Jennifer knew how to make it just how he liked. Brined in salt overnight, covered with juniper berries, a bit of garlic, maybe some thyme, and then slow roasted for three hours, until even the garage smelled like it.
Christ.
Fifteen fucking years and for what? He understood that his situation was fairly untenable these days, that those fucking Muslims had changed the way Family business was handled, particularly as it related to guys like David whose fake paperwork was fine in a company town like Las Vegas but wouldn’t pass muster even in Reno. David wasn’t inclined to give too much thought to the whole Israel-Palestine issue, but he had to keep abreast of shit in case someone dared ask his opinion, though he never could confide in anyone that he shared some anger issues with the Palestinians at least as it related to real estate, confined as he was to Las Vegas.
“Can I get you something, Rabbi?”
David looked up from his reverie and saw the smiling face of Shoshana Goldblatt. Her parents, Stan and Alta, were two of the biggest donors Temple Beth Israel had, and yet here she was busting her ass on a Tuesday morning running tables. And that was an ass, David had to admit. She was only eighteen and he’d known her since she was five, but . . . damn.
“A cup of coffee would be fine, Shoshana, ” David said. “I’m waiting on Mr. Savone, as usual, so maybe just a toasted onion bagel for now.”
Shoshana took down his order, but he could tell that something was bothering the girl. It was the way it took her nearly an entire minute to write the words “coffee” and “bagel” on her pad, her eyes welling up with tears the entire time. It was always like this. He’d go somewhere to just chill out, maybe smoke a cigar and catch a ballgame over at J.C. Wooloughan’s pub, and next thing he knew one of his fucking Israelites would pull up next to him with some metaphysical calamity.
“Is there something wrong, Shoshana?” he asked. When she slid into the booth across from him and deposited her head into her hands, thick phlegmy sobs spilling out of that beautiful mouth he’d just sort of imagined his dick in, he felt himself wince and hoped she didn’t notice. He’d spent the better part of his life avoiding crying women of all ages, never really knowing what to say to them other than “Shut the fuck up, you stupid whore,” and that hadn’t seemed to help anyone, least of all himself. Whatever was wrong with Shoshana Goldblatt would invariably ruin David’s whole fucking day. First there’d be the guilt he felt hearing her secrets, and then there’d be the guilt associated with him finding it all rather humorous.
“Oh, Rabbi,” she said. “I wanted to just come in and talk to you in private, but there’s always such a crowd, and my mom, you know, she’s always telling me to not bother you with my problems, that you’re a busy man and all, so I’m like, okay, I’ll just figure it out for myself, but then, like, you’re always saying that we should trust that the Torah has answers to all of our problems, right?”
“That’s right, Shoshana,” he said, though he wasn’t sure if he’d ever said such a thing. Most of the time, he just downloaded shit off the Internet now, but it seemed plausible that at some point he said something like that.
“I’m just so confused,” she said, before explaining to David a scenario that involved, as best as David could suss out, her having sex with three different black guys from the UNLV basketball team while a graduate assistant coach filmed the whole thing on his camera phone. It was hard for David to concentrate completely on the story since Bennie Savone had entered the restaurant about five minutes in and was stalking angrily about the bakery area, dragging his black attaché case against the pastry windows, like he was banging his cup against the prison bars. So when David sensed that Shoshana had come to the basic conclusion of the issue—that she’d liked it, that she wondered what was wrong with her, but that she wanted to do it again, and with more guys—he reached across the table and took both of her hands in his.
“There’s a part of the Midrash that says, essentially, we are all allowed to find enjoyment in the company of others,” David said. He’d found that if he simply dropped the Midrash into conversation, rejoined with the word “essentially,” and then paraphrased Neil Young or Bruce Springsteen, people left him feeling like they’d learned something. It was true that he knew a few things from the Midrash, had even read a great deal of it, but, in dealing with an eighteen-year-old girl just learning the joys of a filmed gangbang, he didn’t feel the need to reach too deep. “Is a dream a lie if it doesn’t come true, Shoshana? Of course not. It’s something far, far worse. Do you understand?”
He let go of the girl’s hands then and handed her the handkerchief from the breast pocket of his sport coat. She wiped her eyes, blew her nose, and smiled wanly at David, though now he couldn’t even look her in the eye. “Thank you so much, Rabbi Cohen. I think I see that path now,” she said and slid out of the booth, not even bothering to return his hanky to him.
Bennie, unfortunately, took her spot. “Fuck’s wrong with her?”
“Confused about love,” David said.
Bennie nodded. “Who isn’t?”
It was weird. Over the course of their rather unconventional business relationship, Bennie Savone had found it necessary to use David as his father confessor, too, even though he knew that Rabbi David Cohen was previously Sal Cupertine; that before he was a fake rabbi, he was a Chicago “associate” who’d accidentally killed three undercover Donnie Brasco motherfuckers on the same botched contract, and that, barring a sudden religious experience the likes of which only happened in prison movies, David’s moral center was still pretty opaque. Still, David reasoned that Bennie needed to talk to someone, particularly since the one person Bennie could depend on previously had been the rabbi David replaced three years ago, Rabbi Ronald Kales, who also happened to be Bennie’s father-in-law . . . or was, until that unfortunate “boating accident” on Lake Meade claimed his life.
David knew that Bennie’s decision not to fish out of the same shallow, polluted pond of local and loyal Italian women or coke-whore strippers most of his friends and co-workers had, opting instead to get connected with the real
Las Vegas money—the Summerlin Jews—was still a source of some lingering organizational shame; an issue David was certainly intimate with.
“Yes, well,” David said. “She’s still young.”
“My daughter tells me Shoshana likes black guys,” Bennie says.
Sometimes David tried to imagine what his life would be like if he were still in Chicago, but he’d somehow had a different kind of upbringing, so that now he was selling real estate on the North Shore or running a sports bar or deli or was just a fucking Culligan Man, his ends meeting, his life happy. Would he still end up on Tuesday mornings gossiping about whom eighteen-year-old girls were or were not fucking?
“I have to prepare for a talk at the Senior Center this afternoon,” David said, “so I’m afraid I don’t have much time to chat. Can we get down to business?”
“Of course, Rabbi,” Bennie said. “I’d hate to get in the way of your busy schedule of dick and ribbon cuttings.” Bennie reached into his attaché and pulled out a manila envelope and slid it across the table. “You got a funeral on Thursday and one coming up next week, too. Maybe two. Have to see how that one shakes out. Got a very sick relative. Could go anytime.”
David just nodded. The holidays tended to be Bennie’s busy season with murder, and now that they were flying bodies (or at least parts of them) in on private jets periodically from Chicago or driving them up from Los Angeles, David expected the news. Plus, David sort of marveled at Bennie’s ingenuity; the guy seemed like a dumb crook from the outside, but on the inside Bennie had a real aptitude for business. Stan and Alta Goldblatt might have been big donors, but Bennie Savone,
with his Jewish wife and three Jewish children, was like fucking UNICEF to Temple Beth Israel. He single-handedly financed the building of Summerlin’s first Jewish mortuary and cemetery behind the Temple’s expansive campus on Hillpointe, championed the new high school that was breaking ground in the spring, and, of course, regularly met with the Temple’s esteemed rabbi over at the Bagel Café to discuss the livelihood of the Jewish faith (or whatever the fuck that shit rag mob columnist John L. Smith in the
Review-Journal
said in one of his weekly innuendo-fests. If David ever had the desire to start killing people again, he’d start with that hack) and issues related to the regular laundering of over fifteen million dollars every year through the Temple’s coffers. David imagined that Bennie’s long-range foresight could help a lot of Fortune 500 companies—it’s not like any other mobsters had the fucking chutzpah to bury their enemies and war dead in a cemetery, nor the willingness to put all the pieces in place years before they’d even see them in action. That Bennie earned most of his living from strip clubs didn’t bother anyone at the Temple. That’s where everyone did business anyway.