Page 126 of Playworld
They’d gone straight to verbal haymakers and weren’t even trying to keep it down for our sakes. They followed the argument, or it followed them, from their bathroom and back to the bedroom, where it was Naomi who went for the sword first. Sam wrestled for control of the saber back, their two sets of hands upraised and firmly gripping the handle, as if they were trying to touch their twelve-foot ceiling with the blade’s tip. Sam, who managed to wrench the weapon from his wife’s clutches, now raised it above his head; Naomi, reaching out in protest, backed toward the door, screaming at him, and then ran. Downstairs, Danny and Jackie were still dancing, the TV’s volume blasting the Pretenders’ “Tattooed Love Boys,” the pair of them headbanging in front of Chrissie Hynde’s face, before freezing at the sound of Naomi’s scream. As if practiced—as if they knew this was not a drill—the girls dashed behind the curtains, their backs visible to me in the windows. And into this room the husband and wife appeared: Sam still with sword in hand, marching patiently around the coffee table, which Naomi, also marching around, kept between them. She bolted, finally, out of the family wing, with Sam right behind her, shouting as he followed her through the dining room. Here she turned to fling some of their china in his direction, the plates gouging the wallpaper as they broke against the wall, and then made her way into the kitchen, where I next spotted her walking backward again, now brandishing a chef’s knife, which she clumsily threw at her husband, its blade dinging on the tile, before she raced into the sunroom and, using the same strategy as earlier, placed the tulip table between them. With one hand, Sam tossed this aside. Naomi, surrendering, fell to her knees. But Sam let the weapon fall at his side and covered his face. At this, Naomi stood. Over Sam’s shoulder she spotted me and, sensing rescue, made for the door to the yard. He too turned and, spotting me, yanked her collar and threw her to the floor and, picking up the saber, marched in my direction. He pushed the door open. Naomi screamed, “No!” When she tried to follow, he turned and shouldered the door closed on her pinkie, which got caught in the jamb. The top halfof her finger separated at the knuckle and bounced into the koi pond, where it floated for a second before one of those soft mouths rose to the surface, and ate it.
I ran.
Around to the front of the house, I fled, pursued by Naomi’s howl. I stopped on the street, looking at the other houses. I didn’t know any of the Shahs’ neighbors. I didn’t even know if the Shahs knew their neighbors.
The door of the garage was still up. I opened the door of the Ferrari, pulled the visor, and caught the keys before they landed in my lap. I dropped the car into gear and burned so much rubber I couldn’t see their house in my rearview mirror for the smoke.
I’d made the drive into the city so many times with both Sam and Naomi I knew it like a commuter.
And I knew the peace and quiet that attends the solo commuter’s trip—the time it gave me to collect my thoughts, which were, in my manner of coping back then, entirely unrelated to what had just happened. Passing Flushing Meadows, I spied the Unisphere, that giant globe, and considered how few places I’d been to in my life besides New York. The Observation Towers, topped with their flying saucers, these World’s Fair structures, run-down and rusting and in need of restoration. Manhattan came into view from the Queens side. When he was my age, did Dad marvel at its skyline as I did now? Is the city ever more wondrous than when seen from afar, at night? When the sky is black, when its buildings’ outlines are rendered invisible?There are more windows in New York than people,I thought. How to begin to calculate such a number? I turned on the radio. Dad’s commercial for Bell telephone played.Reach out,he said,and touch someone far away.Coming over the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge, the Roosevelt Island tram rose into view on my right, but the car was empty.
Was this how adults fought with each other?
At our building, I pulled into our empty parking space and cut the engine. The needles slammed shut against their pegs.
I said hi to Carlos, the night doorman, in the lobby. “Long time no see,” he said.
Standing before our apartment’s door, I reached between my shirt’s collar and, from where it hung on its ball chain, produced the key.
I had never been so happy to be back in my own bed, I thought later, lying in my top bunk. I had never been so happy to be home.
Dad shook me awake the next morning—I’d slept in, I could tell, by the angle of the sunlight on the building across the street. “What are you doing here?” he asked.
I hugged his neck, which seemed gargantuan and smelled of Skin Bracer. I let him carry all my weight, and when he tried to ease my grip, I clutched him harder.
“Craziest thing,” he said, as I held him. “I got in just now from D.C., and guess what? There’s a goddamn Ferrari in my spot.”
Morning in America
September. I sometimes believed that by simply speaking the month’s name aloud I might summon the cooler weather, set the leaves, just now beginning to change color on their branches, astir with chillier gusts. Back then, autumn still obeyed the school calendar, promptly arriving on the Tuesday after Labor Day. When it rained you felt droplets that were closer in temperature to ice. Central Park, that mood ring in the middle of Manhattan, began to tarnish, which the sun, wafer white, revealed in all of its ocher and saffron beauty.
September brought my family back together. Oren finally returned from Matt’s ahead of the holiday weekend and school’s start. To my amazement, he was nearly my height. He was also wearing eyeglasses with tortoiseshell frames. “Are those real?” I asked.
“Of course they’re real,” he said. “Want to come get beer with me at the Shopwell? I got a fake ID.”
At the supermarket, Oren got a six-pack and then crossed the street west, to the park above the Dead Street. We climbed the low brick wall and then stood with our arms hanging over the fence’s railing. Below, the great expanse before the West Side Highway was the color of black ice. Oren raised his beer. “To my first year of high school.”
“May it be better than mine,” I said.
We clinked cans.
I considered the parked cars below, Naomi’s Mercedes nowhere to be seen. Why didn’t I take that opportunity to tell him about living with the Shahs? About Naomi? The truth is that it would have never occurred to me then to share the things I’d seen and done, any more than discussing Kepplemen, because our lives were so atomized, because we lived so unattended, because we were already so strangely private, access to each other’s inner lives did not come naturally.
“Mom’s coming home tomorrow,” Oren said.
From the north, we watched an airplane bank over the city.
“When did you speak to her?” I asked.
“Yesterday. She said Grandma had to quit smoking because of her lungs.”
“That’s good news, I guess.”
“Where’s Dad?”
“He’s been rehearsing late.”
Because Dad was holed up at the St. James for final rehearsals ahead of opening night, he was not at the apartment upon Mom’s return. We heard her keys in the door and rushed from our bedroom to greet her. I let Oren hug her first. She swayed with him in her arms, his hair bunched in her fist while he shook. “Sweet boy,” she whispered, “how did you get so big so fast?” She waved me to her and hugged me while Oren took her suitcase to her room.