The German Money, page 8
“I don’t know. I don’t know what I had with her. Maybe we had too much.” I felt my throat drying out and I slugged back some more Coke. I wasn’t sure how much more I wanted to know about Simon’s personal life, but I’d never been this comfortable around him, and I was honestly curious, so I continued.
“How is it different?” I asked. “With one sex versus the other?”
“I don’t do it with a whole sex, I do it with a person. Everybody’s different.”
“I know that, but there has to be more.”
He closed his eyes as if calling a scene forth. Eyelids shut, he said, “Okay, with a man, at least for me, you never know for sure where you’re going, what you’re going to do. It could be anything.” He didn’t elaborate. “With a woman, no matter where we start, I always look forward to sliding inside of her—”
“Yeah, that’s it. But doing it with a guy?” I shook my head. “I can’t see that. Isn’t it a little gross? All that hair. . . .”
He sighed, fixing me with his striking eyes. “Come on, Paul, don’t you admire other guys’ bodies at the gym when you’re working out, or other men in the pool?”
“Of course. Sort of. When somebody’s in good shape, it’s like we’re on the same team. It makes me feel good.”
“Okay. So why is it so hard to imagine going further?” He struggled to put it together for me. “Like you’re not just looking at him, and you, I don’t know, mentally note he’s buffed or whatever, but when you look, you don’t want to stop. It’s not just that you, like, admire his shoulders, but you’re all the way into really checking out the different parts of his deltoids, the tie-in with his biceps, the vascularity when he raises his arm. You haven’t touched him, but somehow he’s touched you. And you want to run your hands across the muscles, feel their shape, how hard they are, smell his skin. See?”
“I got it. Taking inventory. That’s how I feel checking out a woman.”
“There you go.” He nodded decisively. “I get drawn to women, I get drawn to men. It’s different, but it’s the same. That’s just my nature,” he added, peering at me to see if I got the joke.
Of course I did, and I laughed because it was a line Dad often used that was his way of shrugging off complaints or criticism.
Simon seemed pleased, but then his face changed and he looked almost wary. “And before you ask, yes, I’ve been tested and I’m negative. I never have unsafe sex.”
I hesitated. “I guess I do. I hate using condoms.”
Simon frowned. “And your girlfriends let you?”
“Most of the time. Hey, I’m a Menkus man, right? I make ‘em an offer they can’t refuse.” And we basked in our father’s remembered crudeness for a while. He’d often said, “Women have always liked the men in the Menkus family, because we’re big.”
Talking about sex made me think again of how much Camilla had enjoyed nibbling on my foreskin. I’d been her first uncut lover. “Like a curtain going up,” she sometimes said, watching it slowly retract while blood rushed pleasingly on stage. I liked entering her only partway before I was fully hard, so that she could feel my foreskin still bunched near the head of my cock, and then teasing her as I slid back and forth. An all-natural tickler that made her growl, “You bastard.”
It was a natural question, so I asked Simon, “Do your lovers like that you’re not cut?”
Simon frowned. “But I am.”
“What!”
“I got circumcised a long time ago. I never told anyone, not even Dina.”
“By a—” I hunted for the word.
Simon supplied it: “A mohel? No. It was at the health center at Tucson. Janet kept getting infections and this doctor said it was because I wasn’t ‘clean.’ ”
Simon never mentioned his ex-wife. They’d met in Tucson at the University when he was twenty-three and finishing college for the third time.
I started to object because we’d been well-educated as kids on washing ourselves “down there,” but he said, “I wasn’t clean enough. I was so coked up those days I didn’t really think it through. But now I’m glad, because it makes me feel like I’m really Jewish. It hurt—for weeks. And I was swollen up like a bat. A baseball bat, I mean.”
“Did it help Janet?”
“It seemed to.”
It felt very disorienting to think that Simon was—even haphazardly—closer to our father and all the Jewish men in our family than I was. I definitely wanted to change the subject, so I asked him where he would go if he had the German money.
No hesitation. “Thailand, for sure.”
“To see the temples?”
“No. For the sex.”
I tried again. “You said there wasn’t much stuff in Mom’s strong box—did you look anywhere else?”
“Not really.”
We spent the evening searching the apartment for something, anything that might provide a clue to Mom’s bequest. But there was no diary among all her bills and receipts, no letters, not even any check stubs with her papers. Even more puzzling, we couldn’t find any independent record of the German money besides the bank books and statements from her investment firm. There was no safe in the house, no key to a safety deposit box, nothing. It was not at all what I expected. Shouldn’t there have been a welter of personal papers? I thought of my own desk drawers at home crammed with letters and notes and memos—all of it filed and labeled.
“It’s like she never even applied for the German money,” I said. Never applied, never visited the German consulate, never had witnesses testify to her identity, never had a single argument with Dad about it. Did that mean she hated it?
But the money was waiting, untouched, growing year-by-year.
We had agreed to sleep over there that night, so Simon took Dina’s room. We found plenty of linens, and washing up, we could almost have been twenty years younger getting ready for bed.
I could hear Simon’s rattling gloppy snoring soon after he hit the sheets, but if I slept in my old bed, it was restlessly, and I woke thinking I’d heard my mother’s voice. Dazed, wondering for a moment if I were in Michigan, my whole body pulsing with alarm, it began to sink in that I’d only been dreaming, or perhaps I was half-wakefully drifting in and out of memories of Mom’s own nightmares.
For years, perhaps until I was in high school, my mother would cry out in her sleep unexpectedly, sometimes as often as twice a month: wordless heavy animal anguish. In the violated darkness of our apartment, Dina, Simon and I would cluster together in the hallway, waiting for more, but of course Dad would wake and hold her and the next day he’d look at us in warning not to mention the nightmare whose terrible shape we never learned.
And sometimes the terror hit my mother when she was napping and one of us had to shake her where she slept in the living room. The first time I remembered doing it, I was only ten or so, reading Bomba the Jungle Boy in my room when her cry seemed to slap the book from my hand and shove me to my feet. I crept down the hall to find her on her back on the gold-threaded overstuffed red couch. Her face was foreign, squeezed, and she moaned in some language I didn’t recognize. Beginning to cry, I poked at her leg and she rolled onto her side away from me. I ran to the bathroom to wash and wash my hands as if they were stained by her fear.
Now I was fully awake, and I began to think that what had really woken me up was the unfamiliar smell of cigarette smoke. I pulled on shorts and followed its bite out to Dina’s dark silent bedroom. The door was open.
“I smoke when I can’t sleep,” came Simon’s invitation. I walked to his bed and sat at the end. He was clearly nude under the sheets; he had a slim, naturally lean body, molded by exercise, and was more handsome than I could ever be, I thought, unless it was just that the darkness was kinder to him. You couldn’t see the anxiousness that creased the corners of his eyes and made his mouth rigid. Simon offered me a cigarette, but I passed because I usually smoke only when I’ve been drinking Seven and Sevens heavily. Simon moved an enormous, green alabaster ashtray onto the bed between us, and sat up more, the sheets dipping a little. I wonder if Dina ever commented on his abs, too.
“Janet gave me that,” he said, pointing at the ashtray with his free hand. “Sometimes I miss her. Do you miss Val?”
The question was rhetorical. He wanted me to say yes, to share his loneliness. That wasn’t hard to do, so I said “Yes.” But missing Valerie hardly described what giving her up had meant to me. Somehow I’d imagined, in part anyway, that moving on, moving to Michigan, trying to forget her, was being mature, was like a private ceremonial, a rite of passage. But all I’d achieved was a change of scene. I had the scarification (inside), but I had not been transformed. Deformed was more like it.
“Janet made me laugh. No one else did. But that wasn’t enough.”
“So what is?”
“Fuck if I know.” He sounded stronger, less tentative, as if the night freed him. “Remember bisexuality was cool in the 70s, and now it’s cool again? People think you have twice as much fun. But for me, it means I have twice as much chance of screwing up a relationship. And I do.”
I suddenly felt torn by an urge to pull back, to retreat to my room, to force myself asleep. This wasn’t us, this wasn’t how we talked to each other. Instead, I told him about breaking up with Camilla, partly because I had to tell someone, partly because I didn’t want to think about Valerie any more.
Simon took it all in as intently as a jury. “If the sex was phony, and you weren’t that crazy about her,” he asked at the end of my recital, “Why’d you date her?”
“Fuck if I know,” I echoed. “Why date anybody?”
“God, we are so messed up, you and me and Dina. What’s going to happen to us?” he asked, the way you’d wonder if a plane was about to crash.
I thought of Old Mission.
Simon put out his cigarette, shifted Janet’s ashtray to the floor.
“Paul? Stay till I fall back asleep?”
I took his hand and squeezed it. He smiled, squeezed back and let mine go, closing those strangely troubled eyes. I was glad his eyes were closed because I must have been blushing and there was enough light leaking through the window shades from outside to see that. To my surprise, I found myself feeling that I loved him, loved my gentle soft confusing brother, betrayed by his own complexities. I sat there peacefully while he withdrew into a safer world, his body twitching, then shifting into sleep, possessed by darkness now and ease.
Heading back to my bed, I tried to remember when I’d held anyone’s hand and it meant so much.
I slept late and found Simon making blueberry pancakes in the kitchen. “I found some old sweats of mine, and shoes, so I went running,” he said. “And I picked up some groceries on the way back.”
I ate several helpings, but before I could head off to shower, Simon told me that he’d called Dina in Queens. “I think it’s time to go see Dad,” he murmured after a while. And I knew there was no way to avoid it. I was too exhausted to try. We had spent the last couple days together deliberately not talking about Dad, delaying this moment.
“We’ll pick up Dina in Queens and all go out there together,” Simon explained, clearly having worked this out in advance. I didn’t argue. There was no point.
Nine years before, we had all urged my mother to put Dad in a nursing home—Simon and Dina on the spot, me over the phone. A series of strokes had brought on something very like Alzheimer’s called multi-infarct dementia, which I had never heard of before. I had seen an x-ray showing that his brain was dotted with tiny white spots, little explosions. “All those dots,” my mother kept repeating, as if amazed that something so innocuous-looking had destroyed his mind.
At first he was just very forgetful, leaving his keys in the car, or inside the apartment. Then it got worse. He couldn’t remember dates, and kept circling them on newspapers and in magazines, as if throwing out one tiny lifeline after another. He was a dapper dresser before, with a fondness for expensive ties and cufflinks, but now he was putting on striped shirts and hound’s tooth trousers, forgetting to wear a belt or tie his shoes. He’d watch television shows he’d never been able to stomach before, like nature specials, shaking his head, “It’s very sad, very sad.”
No doctor, no test offered hope. Trying to help, Simon read every article and book he could find about senile dementia, but learned nothing that gave himself or Mom comfort. I tried reading about it, too, but gave up a few pages into one book that said having a loved one with dementia was like attending a funeral every day of your life. I threw the paperback out; after all, hadn’t we grown up in a house consumed by mourning? I couldn’t embrace any more of it; I was not that strong.
My mother was, or thought she was. “I will take care of him,” she insisted. And she could, for a while. Bathing him, feeding and dressing him, talking to him constantly as if to lure him back out of the fog that had descended on him so quickly. It was agonizing to hear her talk and talk to our father, pulling only puzzled and strange comments out of him. He wondered where he was, or why she was bothering him. I knew some kind of crisis was coming when he stopped speaking English, and only answered us, when he did, in Yiddish.
It made my Mother furious, for some reason; maybe she took it personally, took it as an escape from her, because they had always spoken English between them. Yiddish was something my Dad used—as an adult—fairly clumsily. But his parents had spoken it at home, and now the words of his childhood were back. I had learned some and could understand what he was saying. But Mom was so angry it seemed to block her ears.
Given his deterioration, Mom had taken legal steps to reorganize their estate so that he could not inherit if she died before he did, but that was the only time Simon or Dina had mentioned Mom’s Will to me.
I learned most of this secondhand because visiting was too painful. Dina would call me with desolate announcements: “He told Mom he hates her.” Or: “He keeps asking me who ‘that woman’ is in the apartment.” Or: “He’s incontinent most of the time.” And we would reflect on the horror in silence. I remembered once in 4th grade losing control of my bowels just as I got home, and my mother’s appalled orders, sending me right to the bathroom to strip and bathe. I kept apologizing to her all day but she grimly ignored me, washing out my soiled shorts in the bathroom sink as angrily as someone chiseling an inscription off a memorial stone. And this kind of horrible discomfort and humiliation was happening to her again—but with her husband? Unimaginable.
Driving out from Manhattan on the Long Island Expressway to see Dad that day, I remembered how much, and how oddly, our Mother disliked Long Island, disliked anything even vaguely rural. “So many trees,” she sniffed, like a dowager forced to step around a homeless man blocking her limo. It had always struck me as some kind of affectation whose meaning I couldn’t understand. Now it hurt to think of all those trees and neither of our parents able to see—or at least appreciate them.
The nursing home, an hour and a half from the Upper West Side, was good for its kind, or good enough, with a high staffto-patient ratio. The shell of my father was washed every day, shaved, his hair and nails kept trimmed and neat. Simon and Dina had both assured me that he never got bed sores, and that there had been enough money set aside for his care. The unspoken part was that he would probably not live too much longer, given the congestive heart failure that was creeping up on him.
The place was called Cedars of Lebanon, which struck me as grotesque. Nobody here was tall and strong any more; they were all shrinking, shriveling into themselves.
But the place was disgustingly cheerful, so intent on making you feel serene it gave me a headache just to walk down a corridor. The walls and carpeting everywhere were rose-pink or pale blue. Impressionist prints or posters, cheerfully matted and framed, hung in all the public areas, with lights over them to give the appearance of discrimination and taste. The overhead lights were unmercifully bright, and nothing hid the hopelessness, the sense of this building being just a giant refuse bin, where elderly men and women had been dumped because there was no place else for them. The few previous times I’d been there, I’d thought of suicide, vowing I would never let myself end up so helpless, so sick, so devoid of life. And in Michigan, every time I used to read about another one of Dr. Jack Kevorkian’s exploits, I felt grateful knowing that I wouldn’t have to suffer from a lingering, crippling disease if I didn’t want to.
My first time at the nursing home, a brisk, chunky, gaptoothed nurse had cheerily given me a small tour that was worthy of Hamlet’s gravedigger. When we passed a stairwell, she assured me that patients were encouraged to use the elevator. “Because if they fall—” she shrugged “—they could be there for hours.” She said “they” with an utter lack of compassion—as if she were a lab assistant talking about her mice. And in the brief look at the library with freestanding metal shelving, she leaned to me and said confidentially, “Don’t bother donating books. They don’t read much, unless it’s large type.”
My father’s floor was the worst because it was for those who were completely incapable of activities of any sort. Here people were beyond communication, beyond being entertained, though the TVs kept playing. The ancient-looking patients slumped in wheel chairs, had to be fed (several at a time). The sprightly signs, the decorated bulletin boards in the rooms, the briskly cheerful nurses (cheerful that they could move and speak, I often thought)—none of it could camouflage the macabre gargoyles propped up in the wheelchairs and “gerry” chairs that kept them from hurting themselves. Every visitor whose eyes met mine had the same ravaged look: “This could be you.”
In the car, Simon had told me he visited as often as he could, to check on Dad’s care, and to keep him well-dressed, because we all had images in our head of badly dressed nursing home patients—people mis-buttoned, carelessly wearing plaids and stripes together, or colors that clashed, as if it didn’t matter anymore. It mattered to Simon and Dina, and to me. Simon kept him supplied with the Old Spice cologne he had loved, and he smelled remarkably fresh, but still looked like a caricature of himself: wasted and gray. The life had gone out of him, taking his color, his animation, his gusto. This was not my father. This was a shadow, a ghost.
