Thy Neighbor Read online

  It was my turn to panic.

  “What did Miriam say?”

  “That’s just it,” Dave snarked, relieved to be back on the offensive. “She wouldn’t say anything. But she didn’t have to. When we came in from the kitchen, she was sitting in your lap. When we asked her about it later, all she would say was that it was your secret and you wouldn’t want her to tell.”

  “That’s funny, Dave, because that’s exactly what she said about you.”

  His face went slack then, and colorless, like a waxen mask.

  “What would she have to tell about me?”

  “What would she have to tell about you? Are you out of your mind? You’ve practically made her mother into your concubine and Miriam herself an accessory. It’s like an amateur porn set over there.”

  Yeah, Nicky boy, except who is the one doing the filming?

  And who is the one making notes?

  Quit while you’re ahead, why don’t you.

  And back the fuck off.

  “Look,” I said, appeasingly. “Just stop debauching those kids, and we’ll call it a truce, all right?”

  He considered this for a moment, and whether or not to press me on Gordon, but he was too rattled to dig deeper. He knew me well enough to know I didn’t make empty threats, and he also knew he wasn’t smart enough to outwrangle me. What I had, I had. I’d had it for a long time. He knew that, too. If I’d planned to use it, I would have done it years ago. Hell, the statute of limitations on egging your neighbors with what may or may not have been artwork in questionable taste had most likely run out anyway. What was I really going to do?

  Besides, I clearly had something of my own to hide, even if it was hidden from me, too.

  “Fine,” he said at last. “But only so long as you promise never to set foot in or near Dorris’s house again.”

  “Deal,” I said, too abruptly. I extended my hand.

  He didn’t shake it.

  “What’s done is done,” he mumbled, and something else I couldn’t hear. He shuffled into the hallway and took the front doorknob in his hand. As he pulled it, he turned to look at me one more time.

  His eyes were full and his lower lip was trembling.

  “Hasn’t enough happened?” he said.

  * * *

  * * *

  Dave was gone before I could answer, but what would I have answered anyway?

  Enough.

  That was not a word I could understand. Never had. The concept just didn’t have a value or a quantity attached to it, nothing that would blow the fuse or trip the switch and stop overload.

  Overload was the gig. It always had been.

  I could hear my father’s voice flaring out of the past.

  “Must you do everything to excess?”

  I never had an answer for that, either, because it was so patently true. Yes, I must do everything to excess. Yes, I must go overboard, beyond the pale, all out.

  It’s the way I am.

  It’s one of the many reasons why you don’t love me.

  I had never said those words to him, but I had thought them. I had thought about them a lot since his death.

  It was all just more illusion, the deeply held belief that parents love their children, as if it’s a law of nature or something.

  Not just how it’s supposed to be, but how it is.

  No matter what.

  That’s really how people see it. Children are sacrosanct. They can and often do hate their parents, maybe even all their lives, and that’s acceptable. Run of the mill. Their parents fucked them up. Their parents hurt them, neglected them, exercised inordinate influence. Psychotherapy is built on this principle.

  But what about the reverse? No one likes to talk about the reverse. No one can bear to think of it. Not as something normal anyway. Parents hating their children. Parents genuinely regretting their children, and maybe even with good reason.

  We’re always blown away by parents who kill their children, or rape and imprison them. They’re monsters, we say with a collective gasp. And maybe they are, but only in so much as all serial murderers and kidnapping rapists are monsters. The motives are no more or less common than any other. Greed, jealousy, rage, fear, psychosis. And the victims are just people.

  But it’s the child part we can’t accept. And why? Because the bond between a parent and child, the one that goes from parent to child and, in our minds, links the two beings as surely and undeniably as their shared DNA, that bond is brick and mortar to us. It’s one of those collective social lies like the solvency of banks that makes the world stand up and function. It’s a load-bearing wall. We can’t do without it. Relinquish that, and you’ve lost more than God and country. You’ve lost a bedrock organizing principle, and from there the rest is chaos.

  Parents passionately love, cherish, and instinctively prize their children.

  As a matter of course.

  They must.

  Right?

  Wrong.

  It came as a shock to me when I realized it. Not the part about my father not loving me. I pretty much knew that. There were signs. The shocking part was the second bit, my eventual response to this information, or I should say the more objective-minded part of me’s response to this information, the part of me that sympathized with him and thought—lightbulb going on—Yeah, he doesn’t love me. But why should he? Why inherently should he?

  And this part of my mind nodded sagely and went on with the argument.

  Okay, so I’m not the person my father would have chosen as his child. Not the blue-ribbon winner. Not his type. So what? Does that make him a bad man? A bad father? Or—and here’s the kicker—even a particularly unusual one?

  Well, that hardly seems fair.

  I mean, you have a kid and you raise him. You provide for him. You do your best. When he finds a worm in his raspberries, you try to assure him that the world’s not such a bad place. But beyond that, maybe you just don’t dig him. You don’t think he’s a gem. And maybe he isn’t. How is that your fault?

  He’s a person like anyone else. Average. Joe Dimwit on the street. But he’s your kid, so the love—the passionate, all-encompassing, I-would-die-for-you love—is supposed to follow. Must follow. Except in your case, and maybe in a whole lot of cases that nobody dares to talk about, it doesn’t follow. It just doesn’t.

  It can’t. Because love is spontaneous. It either is or it isn’t. You can’t build it out of good intentions or yeoman service. You can build solid fathership out of those things, and even a kind of love, love as in caritas or maybe even agape, something distant and noble and really hard to pull off in anything but name. But you can’t build the love that everyone is looking for, love as in eros, as in apple of my eye, blood of my blood and body given up for you.

  You just can’t.

  So don’t sweat it, because, like Gruber’s youngest son and his renegade bladder, you just can’t help it. And what’s more, you’re not alone. You’re not the only one.

  Far from it.

  It’s everywhere.

  Gruber’s sons were just people. People who were lesser than he wanted them to be, and the way he saw it, that lesserness reflected poorly on him. It didn’t, of course, but he was sure it did, because the narcissism of parenthood is impenetrable.

  As impenetrable as the solipsism of childhood. Children grow up trapped in their heads, thinking that the rest of the world disappears when they shutter their eyes. Parents, meanwhile, raise their children thinking that the kids are just extensions of themselves, prototypes, or prize pigs to be judged at the county fair.

  All Gruber could see in Eric was a bad grade, a lower score in the competition than his vanity had conditioned him to expect. It had nothing to do with love or lack of it, except love of self, preening of self, the unbridled arr
ogance of spreading seed.

  Dorris, on the other hand, was miserable and rejected and clobbered by conscience, and she was in over her head with Dave Alders. She didn’t have an ounce of extra left. Not even for herself.

  Is it a wonder her kids went begging?

  And I knew myself that Miriam was no specimen. She wasn’t a prodigy or a beauty, or even particularly polite. She was just a ten-year-old kid in cutoff shorts and sneakers. She just was. A fact. The middling yield of a failed marriage, and probably not a pleasant reminder thereof.

  It—all of it—was painful and sad and it was hard to watch, but it was nobody’s fault.

  Not really.

  Even Dave himself.

  A face—a man—that not even a mother could love.

  If you would be loved, be lovable.

  The poor frump walked out my door blubbering over the overbearing past and the persistence of wrong in the present despite all that had gone before.

  “Hasn’t enough happened?” he’d said.

  Well, now that I have found my voice, I say:

  What is enough?

  You have set a promise on my brow.

  You are mine.

  I have chosen.

  You have chosen.

  The occasion is auspicious.

  Today is the day of your namesake.

  Did you know?

  We are bonded in the word

  In the day, the single day,

  And in the hour.

  The last hour of that day

  Is ours.

  13

  Mrs. Bloom’s kitchen was green. All soft and garden-dwelling shades of green: sage, pea, olive, lettuce, and moss. Going into it was like coming into a peaceful forest glade after a long journey, as you might in a dream or a children’s story, and finding there a cottage and a kind old woman who makes you tea and tells you all is right with the world.

  I don’t know why I went there, except, I guess, in the desperate hope of finding exactly what I found.

  How rarely that happens.

  So rarely, that you think it could not have been an accident, that you must have been guided by something or someone, or drawn in by a presence of which you were unaware but that worked on you like a beacon, both beckoning and pointing the way.

  But I don’t really believe in any of that.

  The truth goes more like this.

  I keep waking to the same day over and over again. Always waking to an intrusion or an unexpected row. Usually both.

  Today, I wanted that to change.

  When I woke, I wanted something about the hours that lay ahead to be substantively, purposefully different from all the hours that had gone before. I wanted refuge from the grinding ring of time, and the exhausting, formulaic way that exposure to my fellow vulgar beings made me feel matted and wrung, like a piece of dirty laundry torturously washed but never made clean.

  I hadn’t spoken to Mrs. Bloom in years. Since before her husband died three years ago. Or was it four by now? Even five?

  Fuck’s sake, Nick, look it up.

  The synagogue would have a record. He was memorialized at Temple Israel, you may recall.

  You were there. Sort of. Hanging at the back and around the edges, too vagrant to approach.

  Man, the sources of shame are so many. So very, very many. And ongoing.

  Ah, so what?

  Go ahead.

  Ring the childless widow’s doorbell, why don’t you?

  And then run away, you worthless fink, just like the neighborhood hoodlums on Devil’s Night.

  Why not toilet paper one of her trees while you’re at it? That at least would be congruous. A petty deed follows a callow act.

  But don’t stand there with the audacity of your need hanging out like a hemorrhoid.

  Make one right choice.

  For once.

  Please?

  ’Course, I didn’t.

  I couldn’t.

  And I can’t say why.

  Unless you count my problem with enough. Or more specifically my problem with the placement of that all-important “is” between the angry repetitions of that word.

  Enough is enough.

  A tautology that is not.

  To other people it’s a phrase that means stop. Clear as day. To me it’s just some asshole repeating himself, like Gertrude fucking Stein spooling Shakespeare.

  Enough is enough is a rose by any other name is Tourette’s.

  So shut the fuck up.

  Against my own better judgment, weak and sarcastic as it was, I went. I went to Mrs. Bloom’s and rang the bell—buong—and stood there nervously on the step waiting, maybe half hoping she wouldn’t answer, but really just so thankfully relieved when she did.

  She looked years older. Many years older than the three, four, five years it had actually been. Yet in some eerie way she looked younger, too, a bit the way a yogi looks young after years of meditating in a cave, as if she’d shed the worldly burdens that make wrinkles groove themselves in a face and signal pain.

  Whatever pain there had been had washed through her and left a beautiful plainness behind. She was free. You could see that. Not afraid, and wholly ready for death when it would come—though not, as I had thought, waiting for it, resigned or in defeat, but with a fullness of mind and self-possession that was nothing short of astonishing.

  I saw her and I couldn’t say a word.

  “My goodness!” she cried, her faded denim blue eyes alight with surprise. “Nick Walsh. Lord, how wonderful to see you.”

  She stood there like some ecstatic maestro, with her white wispy bush of hair all standing on end, beaming with such unexpected warmth that I honestly didn’t know what to do. I had rehearsed this first exchange so thoroughly, or thought I had, but now when it came to it, the preparation was useless. It had nothing whatsoever to do with what was there in front of me or how I felt in the full glare of her generosity. To me—so down and low and derelict as I had become—her welcome was like a slice of sky as seen from the bottom of a well.

  I could not respond to it. Nothing in me would move or speak or make a sound.

  She saw this and did not flinch. Or even change her tack. She wouldn’t be thrown by my awkwardness. She reached through the door frame and took my hand.

  “Come in,” she said.

  And I let myself be led.

  Her foyer was similar to mine. Wide and open, it poured you into the house. Linoleum tile, also green, shaker sideboard, simple dendrite chandelier, four forty-watt teardrop bulbs.

  The living room was to the right, same as mine. No wall. Then a den or study or office to the left with wall. And then the kitchen, through a central funneling hall, back and to the right. All the houses on the block had been built at the same time by the same developer. The plans were uninventive. The Bloom house was pretty much the Walsh house, flipped on the other side of the street.

  We went straight back to the green kitchen, which was full of subtle shafts and shadows at that time of day, the sun hazed and gray-cast through the trees out back, and the windows not as clean as they could be.

  “Sit,” she said.

  And I did as I was told.

  She had that sort of command in her voice, but no animus.

  If I believed in any of that shamanist shite, I’d have said that Mrs. Bloom was a power animal, but maybe one that was off the beaten path—like, say, a giraffe, daunting but somehow disarming at the same time, an herbivore (so no worries there), and secure. Really solid. As if its size had given it authority, but perspective, too, and so had made it calm enough to be kind.

  “Coffee?” she said.

  I shook my head.

  “I’m having some,” she added, her back to me.<
br />
  She was pouring water into the machine.

  “Won’t you join me?”

  “Okay,” I said, blankly.

  She smiled, half turning toward me.

  “Good.”

  She put the paper filter in the basket and measured out six scoops. Her hand shook slightly and she spilled a few grains. With her free hand she brushed them casually onto the floor.

  I wondered if she was a tidy person but not a compulsive one, the kind who would sweep that up later. Or would she, like me, forget or not care until the bits became palpable underfoot and she had to shuffle the bottoms of her feet together before getting into bed? Was that the line of her cleanliness? Or was the whole house littered with small remains, crumbs, bits of paper, and mouse turds all fallen onto the carpet and ground slowly into the pile?

  Her place didn’t smell bad. Just stale, as if the windows were rarely opened and the sun was not allowed to penetrate.

  She brought milk and cream to the table with two mugs, an earthenware bowl of white sugar, a matching spoon, and two metal teaspoons. She slid one mug and spoon in front of me.

  “Do you like demerara?” she asked. “I think I have a bit if you do.”

  “No,” I said, too brusquely. “This is fine.”

  I smiled to myself. I hadn’t encountered that term for years. Demerara. I don’t think I’d ever heard it spoken aloud. She really was like someone out of a storybook.

  And here I was encroaching like a leech. I’m just here to suck your blood; don’t mind me. I mean, God, lady, slap me or something. I opened my mouth to say as much, but all that came out was, “I’m sorry.”

  The words hung there like a silent fart that you’re waiting for the other person to smell, hoping like mad that it will dissipate before they do.

  “I know you are,” she said at last, which I hadn’t at all expected. “But don’t say it.”

  Don’t say it.

  Don’t say it ever, or don’t say it again?

  I was confused.

  “Because it’s inadequate?” I asked.