Page 138 of Playworld
“Oh,” he said, “why’s that?”
“Because,” I said, “I switched my elective. To studio art.”
He narrowed his eyes. “What do you mean?”
“I quit.”
His expression darkened. “We’ve already started rehearsals.”
I let go and hopped down. Walked backward. Raised my arms.
“You selfish piece of shit,” he said. “I knew you might pull something like this.”
“Be that as it may,” I said, and began to skip, “I have other priorities.”
To get in shape for wrestling season, Cliffnotes, Tanner, and I had joined the cross-country team. On this particular afternoon, we ran two laps of the reservoir for time and then gathered at the gatehouse facing the Met and did last-man sprints for another lap: we ran in single file, and the runner at the back of the line had to sprint all the way to the front, resting at pace once he caught the leader, sprinting once he was at the back of the line again. We ran so fast the chain-link fence around the water was blurred to scrim. My mind was emptied of all thoughts, and my ears filled with the sound of the cinder track scuffing my sneakers’ soles, a calm that lasted until I was walking past Juilliard on my way home and spotted Naomi’s Mercedes.
I came around to the driver’s-side door and did not even have to knock on the window before it hummed down.
“I was hoping we could talk,” she said.
On the drive to the Dead Street, we did not speak. She found a space and we parked, and before Naomi cut the engine, I cracked the window and the gusts whistled. For a long time, I kept my eyes focused on the highway, on the great expanse’s tall grasses waving in the breezes, darkening like fur combed backward. I was afraid of what Naomi might say. I was afraid she might reach out and take my hand in her injured one (she had shown me the prosthetic after I took my seat). I was afraid because I no more had it in me to resist her now than I did when she’d asked me to get in the car with her.
“I have a present for you.” She fished in her purse.
It was a small box wrapped with a bow.
Inside was a small griffin figurine. Its head feathers were painted white, its beak gold, its wings and lion’s body tawny. Before I got out, we kept our attention focused on this creature, which I turned around to consider from every angle, and it protected us from doing anything we might regret.
“You can use it,” she said, “to play your game.”
—
In 1992, Elliott lost a brief fight with late-diagnosed lymphoma. When he took ill, he abruptly discontinued his practice, and my mother and father and Al all complained how shut out they felt by Deborah and Eli, how the Barrs gave no one access to him while he was in hospice, how the family circled around him, denying his friends closure. But I confess I was not surprised by Elliott’s desire for privacy, any more than I was by my parents’ reaction or by Al’s. They all felt denied, abandoned, but Elliott owed them nothing, so far as I was concerned. The relationship was more than professional, but it was professional first.
The memorial was held at Plaza Jewish Community Chapel. The mourners had spilled out onto Amsterdam Avenue and their talk competed with the traffic noise—all the tumult of New York’s thoroughfares continuing indifferently, energetically, the bright September sun flashing like cymbals off windshields while motorists leaned on their horns to make a music that seemed to cry,Move on! Move on!In the crush of people leaving, Naomi had offered to drive me out to Long Island for the burial. She was with her new husband, Brian, the same therapistwho’d shared office space with Elliott for years and who I knew only as the giant who ducked his head beneath his doorjamb’s top half like some long-necked creature to wave in his next patient. Brian sat in the passenger seat, palming his knees, his hands draped over them. He was soft-spoken. He had a full head of curly golden hair. His near-permanent grin revealed his top row of teeth and conferred an expression so guileless and canine it wouldn’t have surprised me to hear him pant. I’d seated myself behind him. It allowed Naomi and me to play the same game we used to when I was a boy—to look at each other in the rearview mirror privately among the unwitting passengers. Not that I gave Naomi the satisfaction. I wanted her to feel some discomfort, to withhold myself. And yet to be so close to her again was overwhelming. In her presence, yet again, it was as if I’d never grown up.
Driving now on the Long Island Expressway, Naomi caught me staring at her finger, and when we glanced at each other in the mirror she smiled at me—it seemed she had something she wanted to tell me too—but I shifted my focus back to the road. My remoteness, I was sure, was making her less confident behind the wheel. To break the silence, she said, “Your brother left, I saw.”
“He was pretty upset.”
“He and Elliott, they were close?” she asked.
The question annoyed me. She knew the answer and was trying to lure me into conversation.
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“So what’s with the storming off?”
I stared out the window at Queens scrolling past: its storefronts shunted against the expressway, the bodegas and nail salons with their brightly colored signs and snapping pennants; its squat two-story homes insulated by begrimed siding and fortified by window bars. After the service, Oren and I had stood in front of the chapel, amid the crowd. We spied Dad, for maybe the first time in our lives, wearing a yarmulke. I too had been struck by how moved Oren was at Elliott’s passing. He stood before me in a double-breasted suit the color of eggplant, his hands jammed into his pockets. He was crying freely. His tie’s tongue hung from his coat’s pocket, and he’d undone one too many of his shirt’stop buttons, so that I was tempted to wrap my scarf around his neck to protect him from the wind. For six months he’d been going to culinary school during the day and working as a pastry chef at an East Side bistro at night. All those hours on his feet, all that time spent indoors, had drained the color from his face and ringed his eyes with dark circles, although these were also signs of struggles beyond fatigue. What he needed was love and tending to, someone to tell him a story that ended with a rosy future beyond the holes out of which he was trying to dig himself.
Were there someone there for him, she might also get him to a doctor to have his thumb looked at. The gauze bandage he wore, yellow at its tip, was so fat he couldn’t fit it in his pocket. He’d burned himself torching crème brûlée a few nights ago, a serious injury that he showed me with something close to pride. (“How about that?” he’d said, his expression mildly accusatory as he turned his wrist from side to side so that I could observe the digit from every angle.) The wound was as black as charcoal, the skin so flaked and fragile it appeared as if any pressure on the blistered edges might powder it to ash. Oren was always like that when it came to pain: the heavier it was, the more he made light of it. That was why his show of feeling now was so unusual. Not that I was unaware of its source. He’d stopped seeing Elliott the same year he started working. His sorrow at Elliott’s death was shaded, I realized, by disappointment, by regret, I guessed now, at a missed opportunity that might have helped him then (and thereby allayed his suffering now), but which his cutthroat instincts had revealed wasn’t safe. When I urged him to come with the family to the burial, he simply said, “I need to be alone.” Then he turned and hurried downtown, fleeing us because he didn’t trust us, which was, since he was a boy, what he’d wanted to be able to do most of all.
“Everybody deals with grief differently” was my answer to Naomi.
She shrugged at this pat truth and, keeping her eyes on the road, offered another. “Or doesn’t.”
Her utterance was tinged with melancholy, and for a second I wondered if she was referring to us. Brian, who was a psychologist, perked up at this mention of repression. He offered me his profile and, in a sage and slightly weary tone, said, “It’s often the case.”