The Wonder Spot (33 page)

“How old were you?” my brother asked, looking at me.

I mouthed,
Seventeen?

“Seventeen,” she said. “I already had lots of suitors.”

On cue, my mother said, “Your grandmother was a very beautiful young woman.”

“Grandpop was very jealous,” she said. “He even followed me on a date once. He sat in the row behind us at the movies. Can you imagine?”

“He was in love with you,” my mother said.

“He said he couldn't stand to see me with other boys.”

My mother said, “How many years did you make Daddy wait?”

Five?
I mouthed to my mother.

“Five,” my grandmother said. “By then, he really was desperate. I felt sorry for him,” she said. “I really did.”

My mother asked, “What did you do?”

“I told him to write my parents a letter. And that won them over.”

“What did the letter say?” my brother asked.

“Mostly it was about what a good husband he would be.”

I waited a moment before I said, “Do you still have the letter?”

“Of course I do.”

I said, “Can I read it?”

“I have no idea where it is,” she said.

I asked my mother if she'd ever read the letter.

“I don't think I ever did,” she said. “I love that story.”

“Now I'd like to ask you something,” my grandmother said to Jack.

“Lay it on me.”

“How's . . . what's her name . . . Nora's child?”

Nora was my mother's oldest friend, but when she said, “Rebecca,” my grandmother seemed not to hear.

“Rebecca,” my brother said.

“That's right,” my grandmother said.

“She's great,” Jack said. “She has a new boyfriend.”

According to Jack, all of Rebecca's boyfriends were black, which seemed, if not racist, race-ish, and I wondered,
Why the black guys, Becky?
just as I wondered in the case of my friend Alex,
Why the Asian women?
Or in my own case,
Why the pirates?

My grandmother said, “Oh, that's a shame.”

Jack laughed. “I think she really likes him.”

“I meant for you.”

My mother said, “Jack has a girlfriend.”

“You met Mindy,” he said. “Blond. Bossy.”

My grandmother said, “She's no Rebecca.”

Jack said, “Rebecca's my cousin,” a rerun retort.

My grandmother said, “By marriage,” a rerun rebuttal.

“They're friends, Mother,” my mother said.

“Plus,” I said, “she's into black guys,” thereby changing the topic forever.

“Well,” my grandmother said. “I didn't know that.”

My mother glared at me and shook her head.

It was for her that I tried to repair the hole in the atmosphere, but when I said, “Granny, would you tell me about this bear?” my mother shook her head again.

Her mother described finding the bear in the closet and restitching his nose and paws. “Isn't he adorable?” she said. “I just thought he was so adorable.”

I said, “Does he have a name?”

“Of course not,” my grandmother said.

Jack said, “He's pretty cute.”

“Well,” she said. “You should probably go now. I don't want you to run into traffic.”

Traffic was the great looming fear of her life.

I
GOT
A RIDE
back to New York with Jack in his old Karmann Ghia convertible. It started to rain, and the roof leaked; every now and then I wiped the dashboard with a rag that I recognized as a former guest towel of my mother's, green with embroidered daisies, and I thought about the hard trip that towel had taken from the riches of the powder room to the rag of the dashboard.

On the Pennsylvania Turnpike, I asked Jack which screenplay he was turning into a pilot.

“The Judge,”
he said.

“The one about Dad.”

“It's not about Dad,” he said.

“Okay.” I asked what he would have to change, and how. I asked about the meeting and about the producers, and what he thought of Los Angeles. Then I said, “I was just noticing how you never ask me any questions.”

“Sorry,” he said. “What time is it?” He waited another exit before asking a real question: “How's work?”

“Sucky,” I said. “Suckeroo.”

He said, “Well, back to my life then.”

“I need a new job,” I said.

“Didn't you say a headhunter called you?”

“About writing advertorials.” I reminded him that I was trying to get out of advertising.

He was quiet. I hoped he was thinking of how to help me find a new career, but then he smiled, and I knew he wasn't.

I said, “What do you think I should do?”

“Maybe you should try publishing again,” he said. “You love to read.”

“I like to eat,” I said. “It doesn't mean I should work in a restaurant.”

He thought for a couple of minutes. “You'd be a good teacher.”

When I reminded him that I'd been a terrible student, he said, “You could teach retarded kids,” and laughed his head off.

“Seriously.”

He said, “What about real estate?”

I was about to say,
What about dogcatcher?
when I remembered that his girlfriend worked in real estate.

I said, “How is Mindy?” though what I really needed to ask was,
Who is Mindy?
I'd only met her a few times and hadn't paid much attention; as Robert said, in the romantic world of our older brother, all good things must end, as well as all bad things, usually inside of a year.

“I haven't seen her,” he said.

“No?”

He was quiet. “She gave me an ultimatum,” he said finally. “ ‘Shit or get off the pot.' ”

“That's what she said?”

He didn't answer, which meant yes.

“Very romantic,” I said.

He explained that she was ready to have a family, and a girl couldn't put off having babies indefinitely.

“How old is she?” I said. “I thought she was my age.”

“She is your age.”

A few exits later, I said, “Did she give you a deadline?”

“She won't see me until I decide,” he said. “I might actually have to shit.”

. . . . .

After I repeated what Jack had said about Mindy, Robert nodded in what appeared to be appreciation. When I said, “Don't you think that's sort of coarse?” he shrugged, as in,
Never mind about that;
unlike me, Robert never failed to distinguish between what was important and what wasn't.

“Did he sound serious?” he asked. “How did he say it?”

I tried to imitate Jack: “ ‘I might actually have to shit.' ”

Robert and I were having lunch around the corner from his office at a new Chinese restaurant.
GRAND OPENING
flags adorned the
awning, and it seemed possible that the Jade Garden would close with those very flags waving good-bye: My mixed vegetables in brown sauce looked like a diorama of a swamp; Robert's lobster sauce reminded him of a placenta. We had just finished, or given up, when Robert said, “Hey, Neil,” to another hapless diner who'd wandered in.

He was tall and gangly in his white lab coat, boyish, with black-rimmed glasses that gave the impression that he was looking inward instead of at us.

“This is my sister, Sophie,” Robert said. “Neil Resnick.”

“Hi,” I said.

“Have a seat,” my brother said.

For all of Neil's height and angular skinniness, he had a button nose and puffy cheeks, and when he took his glasses off to clean them, I saw dark eyes so enormous and soft they reminded me of one of those portraits of children painted on velvet. His hair was youthfully thick and hippishly long, but this seemed to be more a matter of neglect than style.

He picked up the menu and said that this was his first time here, and what should he order?

“I'd stick with these,” Robert said, passing over the patchwork wooden bowl of crunchy noodles.

“The water is good,” I said.

Neil ordered wonton soup.

Robert told the waiter we'd finished, and added, “It was delicious, thank you,” probably because the waiter looked depressed.

“You're a doctor?” I asked Neil.

“A neurologist,” he said. “And you?”

I told him I was thinking of going into neurosurgery; meanwhile I worked in advertising.

“You work nearby?”

I told him I worked in the most stressful part of midtown, in the mid–East Forties, where crisis radiated from every building and anxiety lurked around every corner.

Neil said that it was pretty bad here, too, in the hospitalville of the
high Sixties and the low Seventies, where sickness and worry prevailed. “What do you think it's like in the Fifties?”

“You know,” I said, “butterflies, ponies, freshly baked bread, young lovers.”

When Robert said that he had to get back to the hospital, I got up, too.

Neil said, “Do you have to go?”

I did; I had a meeting I could be late for only if I left now.

“Would you . . .” Neil began. “Maybe we could have lunch in the Fifties some time.”

“Sure,” I said, and I gave him my work number.

Outside, my brother said, “Divorced, one daughter.”

I said, “Cute.”

“He is cute,” Robert said.

. . . . .

Joe, the art director I worked with, was waiting for me in my office. We were already a few minutes late for the meeting, but his “We should go” was all doom and no drive.

The red light on my telephone was blinking, and he didn't object when I said my standard, “I just want to . . .”

I listened to my message; it was “Neil”—hesitation—“Resnick.”

I didn't think in French, but the word
frisson
presented itself; I'd never taken Ecstasy, but from what I'd heard I was on two hits.

Joe registered this—possibly his eyes widened a thousandth of an inch—and I acknowledged it with a prolonged blink; from working together we'd achieved the symbiosis of conjoined twins.

We ambled over to the conference room at a quitter's pace. There were empty chairs at the table, but Joe and I joined the Bad Attitudes along the wall.

Gary, our creative director, today's master of ceremonies, stood, marker in hand, by the easel. He was saying, “What is synergy?”

It was unclear whether his question was rhetorical, and no one spoke until he said, “Anybody?”

The room came alive with definitions—“All on the same page”;
“Coordination”; “Well-oiled machine”—and Gary wrote each one down on the easel. Then he turned around and shook his head, apparently awed by the brainpower assembled in the room.

Meetings like this usually made me feel the clocks had stopped and all beauty had gone out of the world; now, in my Neil-induced state, the meeting struck me as a musical farce, and I was rapt, even though I didn't like musicals or farces.

I put Gary's “Imagine every department working together synergistically” to the tune of John Lennon's “Imagine.”

In his, “Now, how are we going to make it happen?” I heard,
Let's put on a show!

“Bulletin board?” one gal called out.

“Newsletter,” an aspiring suck-up sang.

I added my own voice: “Memos by e-mail!” and a chorus of approval followed.

“Good idea,” Joe said, naysayer to naysayer.

. . . . .

When I returned Neil's call, he asked if I would have dinner with him Friday, three nights hence. As he'd eliminated all coyness from our repertoire, I said an immediate, “Okay.”

“Really?” he said.

I was hanging up when Joe appeared at my door and asked if I was ready to work on baby wipes.

I repeated the first lines of the soap opera I'd watched when I'd stayed home sick from school: “Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives.”

. . . . .

When I asked my mother about Lev Polikoff, she spoke so softly I had to mash my ear against the receiver.

The information she gave up wasn't worth straining for: Lev Polikoff lived in Lambertville, New Jersey, just across the river from New Hope; he still painted; he made his living as an illustrator.