Kitabı oxu: «The Family Tabor», səhifə 6

Her weekends away with the imaginary Aaron Green, meant to uncover love, haven’t panned out, have instead become indulgent curatives she uses to try and settle into the truth: no one is going to show up—not the man to love, nor a child, a cooing baby in her arms, fairy-tale-named Annabelle or Daisy or Giselle. When the charges appear on her credit card statement, she is always surprised that she indeed spent that weekend eating, drinking, and treating herself at the hotel spas, and spending some amount of time researching on her laptop where she supposedly is with her lover, noting it all down, because her family always asks for detailed recitations of her trips.

Last month, at the Laguna Niguel Capri, she was impressed with how adept she has become at eating by herself in sumptuous hotel restaurants, sampling intricate cocktails perched on stools at burnished bars or outside under the stars, and found herself having impulsive relations, loud and uninhibited, with a Philadelphia heart surgeon there for a conference. He had been swimming laps in the hotel’s pool, and she, on her way to swim laps herself, was diverted by the whirlpool and by the pool boy asking if she would like a cocktail, and was lounging with a specialty drink in the hot bubbling water when the heart surgeon joined her and struck up a conversation. He was married, twenty years and counting, ten years older than she, with a nice build and manner, and she had gone with him to his room, engaged with him as she hasn’t with anyone else during these weekends away. He has since sent her several long romantic email missives, a poet misshaped as a doctor.

She responded only once because the love of her life will not take the form of a married man. When she received his latest email, she had nearly typed, Best to your wife!, then deleted it. Why raise his infidelity when it affected her not at all, when she had no intention of ever seeing him again? Who was she to judge another, when she had a pretend lover named Aaron Green?

Raquel hugs her tight, says, “Have a blasto time. Benny will be fine. He’ll be alive and happy when you come home. I promise I won’t lose your spare key.” Then she is gone from Phoebe’s apartment.

PHOEBE RINSES THEIR CUPS, locks the front door, snuggles Benny to her chest, and rubs her forehead against his. Then she is at the back door, hanging bag over her arm, wheeling her suitcase out, bumping her way down the stairs, along the concrete path bordered by the rubber trees that prosper, and the hapless, wilted flowers that struggle under the heavy shade, to the row of small single-car garages that belong to the building, where her own car is housed.

It isn’t that she, as the eldest Tabor child, expected to outshine her siblings—they all heard their father’s exhortations that success in life turns on elements more substantial than money. That fiery lesson he instilled when he burned the dollar bills she and Camille once fought over, saying with the force of paternal disappointment, “We do not fight about money in this family.” It seemed a fortune he sent up in smoke when she was nine, especially since he bellowed when they left lights on in rooms they had vacated. She’s learned Harry’s lesson, about money not being everything, although at that age she’d been confused—were they poor and in danger of the lights being permanently turned off, or rich if money could be burned? It was six years before she stopped worrying, learned they “had money in the bank,” as Harry said, dating back to his stockbroker days, the earnings accruing because of his deftness at trading for his own accounts, but that even with deftness, success in the market was mostly a matter of uncertain luck and the exercise of a discipline that forbade seeking out the big score. “Losing it all can happen so fast, it would make your head spin,” he told her during that same conversation. “I left the stock market behind in nineteen eighty-six and have never again ventured in. You are not to enter the market at all.” And she never has. She earns serious money these days heading up her own firm, and follows her father’s precepts and actions for a well-balanced, useful, and honest life, doing mitzvahs, like offering her legal services pro bono to talented, impoverished artists, but she has failed anyway. She was sure by now she would have attained what her parents attained, what Simon has, the natural additions to that well-balanced life: a beloved spouse, a child or two, road-trip vacations with the kids to places they would not otherwise see, just as Roma and Harry had done with the three of them.

Objectively, she isn’t, but there are times she feels like the loneliest girl in the world, and she refuses to emend the terminology, for a lonely woman seems infinitely more pathetic than a lonely girl rightfully still wrapped up in teenage angst and despair.

Still, the critical question remains: How does she keep hope alive when this solitary existence is stunting her as surely as the rubber trees stunt the flowers wriggling hard up through the dirt, only to find themselves in shade, their petals curling, browning, falling away. Death comes early to flowers, to most living things, when there is no sunlight. It’s not hard for her to imagine a similar outcome for herself if love and motherhood escape her forever.

She unlocks the garage door and pushes it up. She drops the suitcase in the trunk, hangs the bagged gown on the backseat hook, and backs out of the small garage. Then she is out of the car again, pulling down the door and locking it, strapping in, checking her rearview mirror, backing out into the street, shifting into drive, reaching the long traffic light, which has just turned red.

She tries casting away the momentary descent into darkness by listing her attributes: mildly eclectic, highly educated, the owner of a voluminous vocabulary, which she flexibly mines. Lovely smile employed frequently, contagious laugh. She knows her thoughts are self-absorbed, but if not she herself, who will consider her life? Not her parents or her siblings, or her clients, who range from amenable to misanthropic, whom she handles with a preternatural ease. Given her level of engagement in their singular worlds and the busyness of her firm, it would seem right to assume that her personal life is similarly riotously full. For bursts of time it is, or has been: hours racked up in weekend exercise; in classes where she has learned the rudiments of Chinese cooking, advanced conversational French, wine appreciation, the construction of crossword puzzles for beginners; and in a multitude of rounds of internet dating. In that vein, before she constructed Aaron Green, she toyed with the notion of hiring an old-fashioned Jewish matchmaker, and briefly considered dialing up the level of Judaism she was willing to accept—from Reform, as Phoebe and the rest of the Tabors are, to the more involved Conservative branch—to enlarge the pool of possibilities. Since her college days, she has tried to remember to light Shabbat candles when she is home on a Friday night, saying the prayer in Hebrew, speaking aloud the wishes she harbors inside. And she is a good holiday Jew, driving to Palm Springs to join her parents in the preparation of Rosh Hashanah dinners, attending services at the temple they’ve belonged to forever, returning ten days later for Yom Kippur dinner and services and the next endless day spent in temple hungry and thirsty, breaking the fast with bagels and cream cheese and the salty types of fish her father particularly likes from his childhood in the Bronx.

When the light turns, she makes a left onto Olympic. Not far from her apartment are two Jewish neighborhoods, one thick with Orthodox, black hats and beards and ear curls, and the other, Modern Orthodox, mostly clean-shaven, identifiable by their kippahs or baseball caps, the acceptable substitute for honoring God above, appearing otherwise normal, but who require a nearby temple within walking distance and are wholly unavailable from sunset on Friday nights until after sunset on Saturdays, rendering null romantic weekends. Studying those two subsets of religious men, she had retreated entirely from the thought of a Jewish matchmaker.

There’s a coven, a pride, a flock of the ultrareligious right now, walking on the otherwise empty sidewalk. The men with the sidelock curls, those dangling peyot, hands clasped behind their backs, bodies tilting forward, overdressed in their dully black coats that absorb the morning sun. Passing them, she uselessly admonishes herself to not dwell on what’s missing in her life.

A bright red car whizzes past. She is like that car, carrying herself with spangle and spark, but the strength that has long held her up is weakening. In Palm Springs, she’s going to disappoint everyone when she walks in alone, without Aaron Green. Should she throw out a few hints that the relationship may be experiencing a loss of acceleration?

God, no. Nothing has come of his supposed existence, except for the homework she must do and the need to keep everything straight, but she’s not ready to resume her old role as the Tabor offspring unloved outside the familial circle.

Is it wrong that she wants the warmth of her family’s attention, to retain their newly revived belief that love is not beyond her reach, that love has found her again?

Absolutely not.

And not telling the truth is kinder—she wouldn’t want to be responsible for torching Harry’s big award weekend.

That’s not the real reason.

She’s a coward, plain and simple, lacking the kind of bravery needed to come clean about her whale of a lie.

And that makes her think of the story from Hebrew school that she never got straight—was Jonah saved, regurgitated out of the whale’s massive mouth, and into the cleansing water, as she could be if she came clean, or did he die in there? He probably died in there.

The pretend lover, the few relationship details she has coyly shared with her family about Aaron Green, illuminate what she tries to forget: the Phoebe who existed at twenty-three, in love with a long-haired boy named Elijah, who threw himself into life with abandon. The only former love who has never reached out to her.

Over the years, she has debated whether the way she let him go has been responsible for her perennial single status, the diminution, then disappearance, of that magnetism she once took for granted.

Sometimes late at night in her office she searches for Elijah’s name, but no engine finds him, not even one other person with his name seems to exist in the whole great world, and she wonders if he went off the grid, as he swore he wanted to do someday. Or if he is dead.

She was a foolish young woman back then, and did him wrong, did herself wrong, too. She had lacked the courage to face him and explain she didn’t possess his audacity to live an explorative life, that the idea of dropping out, even temporarily, frightened her, that the life she was living gave her the comfort and certainty she needed and desired. She had disappeared on him, shunned his calls, deleted his emails, hid in the tiny bathroom in the small apartment she then had, until he removed his finger from the buzzer, until his rapping against the door stopped—she imagined him putting his tongue to his knuckles and tasting the blood, inhaling the iron scent of confusion. It had taken four months before he gave up, before she sighed in relief, then flinched in horror, that she had murdered something so rare with silence.

It sounds like a bad country song, Phoebe thinks.

Then she thinks, no, it feels biblical, the resultant suffering she has endured since tossing away that long-ago love.

The mundane intrudes. Her car requires fuel and she swings into her regular station. At the pump, she listens to the rush of the gasoline, watches the gallons ratchet up. On the other side of the tanks, a man extracts himself from his low-slung convertible, runs his card through, and starts doing the same.

“Happy Saturday morning,” he says to Phoebe across the concrete divide. He is rather handsome. His smile is nice, so are his eyes. But drawing love to herself would never happen at a gas station.

“Bonjour,” she says.

“Are you French?”

“Oui.” And with that floating oui comes the thought that she’s wrong about where love could happen. It could happen here, but it’s too late, she’s declared herself French. Why didn’t she simply say hello in her native English?

“Are you visiting, or do you live here?”

This interest of his, surely it’s been triggered by the allure of her supposed foreignness. If she’d said, “Hello,” he would have said, “Lovely day, enjoy it,” filled his tank and driven away.

Because it’s a lost cause, she shakes her head and says, “Je suis désolée. Je ne parle pas l’anglais.”

“You don’t speak English?”

“Non.” She could backpedal the lie that she doesn’t speak English, but not the lie that she’s French.

She feels his eyes on her as she hangs up the hose, screws on the fuel cap, enters the car, shuts the door, and starts the engine. At the exit, she glances in her rearview mirror and the man is looking in her direction, his hand raised in what could be a wave.

When she’s back on the road, she yells at herself. He could have been the one, and what a story they could have told, about how their love ignited over premium unleaded at Shell. Real love, maybe, rather than the illusory love she shares with Aaron Green, whose invention was to find the real thing.

She cranks up the music and the first artist loud out of the speakers is like a finger wagging in her face. One of her favorites, with a stage name that’s a play on Chet Baker. She’s never listened to Chet Baker, but she likes Chet Faker, his cool, moody music, and she forces herself to sing along, to drown out how aptly his stage surname applies to her—faker, faker, faker.

EIGHT

HARRY CLICKS THE TEMPERATURE button on his watch. Still early, but the heat is inching up, the norm for August, when Labor Day is still a couple of weeks away. Yesterday at five, it peaked at 114. Today, it could reach 108 by noon. He reaches into his bag for a bottle. Forty-five minutes ago, it could have been a frozen weapon; now it’s just plastic holding cold water, which he swigs.

Levitt has gone out the gate, to the parking lot, has popped his trunk, seeking a dry shirt, then holds his phone up in the air. “Hey, Harry, I’ve got to make a call,” he yells.

“Do what you need to do,” Harry yells back, and sits down on the weather-worn bench on the court.

Levitt usually receives and returns one or two during their matches, always a patient querying him about her recent mammoplasty, or blepharoplasty, or rhinoplasty, or rhytidoplasty, or platysmaplasty, or abdominoplasty, or gluteal augmentation—the medical terms Levitt has taught him for breast implants, eyelidlifts, nose jobs, face-lifts, neck-lifts, tummy tucks, and rounding buttocks that have fallen down or flattened with age. Levitt’s features are slightly simian and he sweats like the hairy beast that he is not, and having some of the work he performs on others executed on his own visage and body would not be amiss, but it is impossible to feel sorry for the plastic surgeon in such demand that he is located on the court for matters involving not life or death, but vanity. He is the most pleasant doctor Harry has ever known and Levitt says it’s because the work he does is nearly 100 percent elective, only a tiny smattering medically required, and as a result, he rarely tangles with insurance companies: he’s paid up front and in full before he ever numbs an area or puts someone under and lifts the finest of scalpels, ready to perform his surgical-artiste magic. As Levitt’s Maserati demonstrates, he is cleaning up in his business of smoothing and sanding and defatting and plumping Palm Springs women of a certain age, of which there are many. Men, too, more and more, as Levitt always reminds him.

Harry swigs again, feeling pleased with the way he’s playing, keeping Levitt running, even if the memory of those dachshunds is still rolling around in his head. That might be the worst thing he’s done in his life, leaving those dogs behind, tearing out his young daughters’ hearts. Still, the girls survived, and all his children are healthy and happy, frequently phoning to fill him in on the progress of their lives, visiting regularly. He’s done right by his children, whom he loves so much, done right by them all of the time, except for that lapse in judgment regarding King David and Queen Esther.

Levitt, leaning against his car, is speaking into his phone, one hand moving slowly up and down, as if compressing the air, a gesture Harry recognizes as Calm down. Some matron is worried about something. From what Levitt has told him, he’s never botched a procedure or a surgery or been sued for malpractice; the toughest thing about what he does is convincing people they need to be patient, that swelling requires time to subside, that stitches will dissolve as they should, that bruising will fade, leaving behind vulnerable pink skin as unblemished as a baby’s, that they will, eventually, be exactly as they desire.

Harry understands that need people have for reassurance, to be told many times that everything will be okay.

And that’s exactly what he told that young Owen Kaufmann from the Palm Times.

That dealing with closed countries, secretive emigration quotas, malfunctioning airports, armed military, corrupt officials, extreme weather, and all the other details that attend moving Jews from around the globe to this patch of arid heaven is often easier than providing the necessary calm to families breathlessly checking off days until they have the proper paperwork in hand, are boarding a plane, stretching their necks to view the despised countries they are finally leaving behind, itching to begin their new lives awaiting them here in Palm Springs. No matter the education provided about what to expect and no matter how clear Harry’s people on the ground have been, he must calm them again when they land, are taken to their new home, and discover it is not the sprawling house plus pool of their dreams, but an acceptable apartment near to the very decent first jobs he has found them. And that when they were told they would be living in the desert, it meant a dry place that is usually hot or hotter or hottest, and the items they’ve packed into their bulging, double-strapped suitcases, like snowsuits and fleece-lined boots, would no longer be required. Acclimating to the heat takes time, they are all repeatedly told when still in Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Romania, Lithuania, Hungary, Slovakia, Belarus, Moldova, Bulgaria, Czechia, Slovakia, and, lately, China. And he tells them again when they arrive, but they can’t really understand the notion of desert heat until they have lived here a while. With time comes an increase in physical stamina, the skin and vital organs recalibrating to the new temperatures. They all always do adjust, and then become happy, and then happier, and many end up with those large houses with pools, but in the beginning there is an enormous need to calm them down. The only transplants happy immediately were the Ethiopian Jews, who were used to the heat. In his thirty years of resettling Jews here, his own track record is nearly as unblemished as Levitt’s. Only one family has ever returned from whence they came. And each year they send Harry a multipage letter, telling him how everyone in the family is doing, that they were hasty in turning back from their future, that one day they might give it another go, try better, harder, do it right, the second time around.

That story had impressed the young reporter, as did Harry’s three-armed expansion of CST fourteen months ago, which formalized its informal dabbling in real estate, education, and lending. Now, CST Property provides affordable housing at below-market prices for the desert’s newest inhabitants, and CST Educate! grants no-string funds for higher education, requiring only that the schools attended are accredited and that grantees maintain a B average each year, and CST Lend offers better and more elastic terms and rates on mortgages and business loans than any bank in California. He’d recruited new division presidents smartly, hiring a former property manager of midpriced developments in Texas, Florida, and Arizona, a former high-level administrator in the California community college system, and a former banker who retired early from a premiere asset-management firm and was looking for a new challenge. Owen Kaufmann had scribbled fiercely in his notebook, the red light on his phone steady as Harry’s every word was also recorded.

And Harry had waited happily for the next interview question, pleased he’d finally heeded the advice of his new presidents about a campaign for CST, to publicize that the doors of CST Property, Educate!, and Lend were open not only to Jews who had availed themselves of the relocation services CST provides, but to anyone, whether or not strictly defined as a refugee, who was in need and newly arrived in the valley from a problematic country. He was pleased, too, that after additional meetings with his new presidents and several of his underling hires—second-generation gogetters whose Jewish-naming ceremonies and circumcisions Harry had witnessed, born to those he had brought to the new world as teenagers—he’d finally conceded that the campaign should feature its openhearted founder as the centerpiece.

How wary, hesitant, and unsure he’d been about that.

He had kept a deliberately low profile since uprooting his family from Connecticut. That long meandering journey allowing him and Roma to adjust to the realization that what they had planned for themselves was, as it never had been before, up in the air, needing those three traveling weeks to adapt to the changing nature of their future. And when they settled in Palm Springs, and he founded CST, he had still maintained that deliberately low profile, and kept his organization’s mission quiet, “under the shade of a bushel,” as his father, Mordy, might have said.

But his people convinced him and he finally said, “Okay, but we’re going to go slow. I’m only going to dip one toe at a time into the spotlight.”

He’d put one toe in, and it felt warm in the glow, and so he put in another toe, and enjoyed the meetings with deep-pocketed contributors and national businesses with large local presences about increasing their conservative donations up to seven figures, and he knew he had them when their final inquiry was whether CST might put up a wall in the lobby of its adobe building, etch donor names in stone or marble, to which Harry answered, “I think we can manage that.”

And damn, it was gratifying having CST’s works out there for all to admire, albeit in small articles printed in local magazines, and he wondered why he had waited, when public recognition all at once felt like his due.

He was seventy, so honestly what had he been waiting for? For his philanthropic works to be summarized in his eventual obituary?

That notion had filled him with unalloyed fear, and that was his state of mind when the Palm Times began aggressively pursuing him after the Man of the Decade announcement. He’d taken his time thinking about it, then relented, and in walked fervent Owen Kaufmann, a cub with acne on his cheeks, and an overly starched shirt wearing him, and the too-wide tie probably handed down by his father, but with colorless eyes that shone with a fervor no longer seen much in the young, who said, “Mr. Tabor. I can’t thank you enough. This is terrific. I have to admit I never thought you’d agree.”

He swigs again and thinks how he relaxed into the new sensation of being sought after, and he’d extended his hand and, with a huge Harry Tabor smile, said, “Happy to finally meet you, Owen, after all the phone calls. Begin anywhere. I am, as they say, an open book.”

Owen had asked the perfect first question: “Why did you decide to bring attention to yourself and the work you do now?”

Harry had leaned back in his chair, steepled his hands, and told a tiny white lie: “This isn’t at all about me.”

When Owen gave him an encouraging nod, Harry continued. “Indeed, I have never wanted our work to be public, but there comes a time to bring mitzvot into the light, and given the dire circumstances of refugees around the globe, it seemed appropriate to highlight the work we do here, to encourage others to reach out and help those in need. As is being done for the Syrians and other refugees by Mormon missionaries in Utah, by helpful citizens in Idaho, by groups of Canadians, and even, surprisingly, by the Germans. Each has different reasons for their compassionate aid, but bottom line, they are saving people. There are so many living in appalling conditions, throwing themselves into the ocean and drowning when their overcrowded boats sink or are sunk by despicable people profiting on these people’s struggles and misery, that it was time to send out a call, a wish that others would step up and do what is right.”

His answer was honest and ardent, and he had just a moment to bask in its fine qualities, thinking that if Owen Kaufmann said something like, “You’re sort of a saint,” Harry would deny that appellation forcefully, would say, “Not at all. Human nature is such that we give lip service to helping others, and then turn back to our own lives which, of course, are our priorities, but since I was in a position to do so, I simply made up my mind to follow through.” But he did not have a chance to vocalize that well-formed response because Owen Kaufmann changed direction on Harry.

“Did you come to your work because you have always lived a moral, ethical life, or did you come to your work so that you would live a moral, ethical life?”

Harry had needed a moment to digest the distinction.

“Oh, I see. You’re asking have I always been a principled man, or was I seeking to become such.”

“Right,” Owen Kaufmann said.

He’d never considered his life in those terms, and he said as much, then said, “You’re still very young, but in every man’s life, inevitably there are a few missteps that don’t bear recollecting, so long as one has learned from those mistakes.”

“Can you give an example of a mistake you’ve made and learned from?”

“I stole a pack of gum when I was a kid. My mother forced me back into the store, to apologize to the manager, and when we returned home, I was sent to my room and forbidden from watching my favorite cowboy show on TV. So that taught me if I took what wasn’t mine, I’d end up losing something else that was dear to me. But Owen, that’s off the record. My misdeeds, minor as they may have been, are not something to be shared with your readers.”

Owen said, “Sure, I understand, no problem,” and Harry felt they were in sync.

“So my next question is this: Is your religious faith the reason you’ve made it your mission to help Jews?”

Harry had swiveled his chair around and stared out at the high blue of the desert sky and thought about how he was born on May 14, 1948, the very day and year the State of Israel came into being, and how his family attended Palm Springs Synagogue’s Reform High Holiday services, and the occasional Saturday morning Shabbat service, but not much more than that, and how each of his children had attended Hebrew school there, but he hadn’t required they publicly attain their Jewish maturity, as he had once done under the banner of God and in view of family and friends, and how, until stepping down last year, he sat on the PSS board, helping orchestrate Jewish life for its congregants, but when he was too busy to attend a bimonthly meeting, the blast of freedom was enormous.

He had felt the young reporter’s fervent stare, his restraint waiting, and he’d thought, My religious faith, such as it is, is not the reason I resettle wandering Jews in my desert.

Then he’d thought, But what is the reason?

He tried unearthing the instigating factor for his life’s work these last thirty years, and couldn’t find it, but found incipient panic that he tamped down hard. An answer was expected and so he had spoken a truth he realized last night he should have expanded upon: “Religious faith has nothing to do with my organization’s mission. I am a historical Jew.”

Owen Kaufmann had nodded again, and said, “So, I’ve tried researching this, Mr. Tabor, but I can’t find any background on my next question. What does the acronym CST stand for?”

That Owen Kaufmann had been researching Harry before this interview was his first thought, quickly subsumed by the second: What did CST stand for? And the panic fluttered higher, because he was sure his strong brain retained every important piece of information about his life.

He’d rallied with, “It has a personal meaning, that’s all, but not for public consumption.”

Owen had smiled in a way that struck Harry as a little wolfish, that made him question the sort of young man Owen Kaufmann actually was, and the interview had continued, the small silver hoop in Owen’s right ear winking under the lights, and when he was finally gone, Harry walked down the short white hallway to the file room. Faced with rows and rows of gray cabinets, containing information about every single person he has saved, along with his foreign on-the-ground staff, he wasn’t sure where to look for anything that might tell him why he had named his organization CST. He stood and stared and then returned to his office and sat mulling that mystery with its heft of importance, combing through his life and coming up with zilch. When he took himself home, he poured a glass of smoky scotch and drank it with his feet in the courtyard pool, the water purpling as the sun lowered itself to the horizon, his eyes fixed on a cactus with one hanging red bloom, debating whether his inability to recall what those letters represented was a first sign of something going wrong, like Alzheimer’s.