The Funeral of Leonard C. Schwartzman |
Issue 6
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Distracted, Allison pulls up to the gate of Eveningtide Cemetery. She’s been here before, many times it feels, and now she’s trying to think of when and who and why the hell should this be so hard for her to remember.
The line of black Teslas snaking up to the security guard’s booth gleams like a river of wealth and she taps her chapped lower lip with a cracked fingernail, worried about being on time and wondering why nothing is easy anymore. The nail cracks and she swears loudly. “Fuck!” There’s nobody in her car with her and the windows are up, but she wishes someone was around to hear her yell. She examines the nail. Another sixty-dollar manicure shot to shit. Cracked fingernails, cracked lips; she is all cracks these days, little fissures and holes getting larger by the day, widening with a centrifugal force that will eventually become the real story of her life. The old expression about things falling through the cracks comes to mind and she laughs a little and looks at her hair and make-up in the rearview mirror. Not bad for a forty-nine year old working mom with a stay-at-home husband. In the grand scheme of things the cracks could always be wider. Now where was she…oh yes, funerals! Was it Brian Chernowitz, she wonders, thinking about her old college friend who felt sick one day, was diagnosed with stomach cancer the next, and then died what felt like the next? He was her first friend to die and she remembers what her mother said to her when she called to tell her about it. “First of many, dear. First of many.” It's finally her turn at the gate and she rolls down the window as she fumbles with the volume knob of her stereo. She’s been listening to a podcast that’s either about time management, happiness, or sadness – she can’t tell which – and she doesn’t want the skinny young security guard with the pencil moustache and clipboard currently leaning into her car window thinking she’s a nutcase. The only reason she downloaded it was because the host had billed herself as the West Coast’s foremost anger specialist, a credential that both intrigued and challenged her. “Name please,” the young guard asks her. “Oh,” she smiles, trying not to look as flustered as she feels. “Allison Krantz.” He looks at his clipboard and frowns. “I’m not seeing that name on my list of funerals. Are you sure…” “Oh, no no…,” she laughs a little too enthusiastically, “not my name. Right. Sorry. It’s not my funeral we’re here for. Ha!” She thinks of her mother’s wisdom. “Not yet anyway!” The guard narrows his eyes at her and it makes her feel like she’s been caught desecrating one of the nearby graves. “Leonard Schwartzman,” she says meekly, and as he checks his clipboard she thinks of the scene in Eyes Wide Shut where people have to say the password “Fidelio” to get into the orgy with Tom Cruise. She wonders what kind of orgy she’d get into using the password “Leonard Schwartzman.” “Fine,” the guard says, his eyes finally emerging from the busy bureaucracy of the cemetery, “that’s in the B’Emet chapel. Have you…” Again, she can’t help herself, and she starts to giggle. “What?” he wants to know. “Nothing,” she says, waving her hands around, wishing it would all just go away; everything going on at work, climate change, the kids dissatisfied with their extracurriculars. All these things, these distractions, take up equal room in her brain and it makes it so hard for her to focus. “It’s just when you said that it sounded like you were about to ask me if I’ve ever dined with you before.” He hands her a parking pass and points up the hill. “Please proceed to the top of Mt. Mitzvah. Parking will be on your right. Someone will be there to show you to your funeral.” “Thanks,” she says, putting the car in gear. “Your Hebrew pronunciation is great, by the way. ‘B’Emet’. ‘Mitzvah’. You nailed it.” “Please pull ahead, ma’am,” he says, pulling his head from her car window. “And have a nice day.” ***
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Adam Greenfield's debut novel, Circa, was published in April, 2018, by Pelekinesis Press and was the August pick of The Nervous Breakdown Book Club that year and was a nominee for Best Literary Fiction novel by Forward Review. His follow-up novel, Mountain Lion Blues, was runner-up for the Red Hen Press Book of the Year award. It will be released by Pelekinesis this Summer. Adam's short fiction – for which he's been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes - has appeared in a variety of literary journals including Hidden Peak Press, Outsider Ink, Mungbeing, Prole and many others. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two daughters.
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Out in front of her the hillside slopes up and away into the endless blue Southern California sky. Her car moves silently up the wide road, pitch-black and smooth, and she smiles contentedly as she lets the cool breeze in to soothe her face. Nothing but green grass as far as the eye can see, encrusted here and there with sparkling chips of grey tombstones and small serious clusters of tall trees that look lost in deep Talmudic thought. She passes a number of chapels that all look the same from the outside and wonders idly if inside they have distinct themes, like the Madonna Inn, and which one Deirdre might have chosen for her late father, whose funeral it was she was here for.
Allison forces herself to think of her friend and colleague and why she is here. Deirdre’s father had died suddenly the Saturday before, but it’s hard for her not to feel the beauty of the place coiling itself around her heart. Besides, it’s nice being out of the office without having Marty and the kids around. How often was she ever by herself anymore? When was she ever truly alone? She’s not sure if being lost in the beauty of a thing or a place is the same as being distracted, but if it is, she thinks that it’s not fair. Appreciating a thing isn’t the same as idle thinking, because admiring a thing butted right up against beauty and love and you’d never call those a waste of time, would you?
Then, apropos of nothing, it occurs to her that this wouldn’t be a terrible place to live.
Soon enough, her mother’s voice weighs in, imperious and bright. Soon enough.
At the top of the hill she finds the car lot, parks, and stands for a moment with her eyes shut tight against the utter stillness of the place, which she can feel like the calming weight of lying under a heavy blanket. She opens her eyes, looks around for someone she knows, and seeing no one, walks by herself to the door of the chapel.
She’s thinking that she doesn’t want to cry during the funeral as she takes a thin program from the man at the door. Leonard’s grandkids, Deirdre’s kids, will probably speak and she knows their stories of fishing trips and late night runs to the ice cream store with Grandpa will just destroy her.
The old man who hands her the program smiles wanly at her, probably a friend of Leonard’s, possibly the next to go, and she matches his smile, not wanting to go too big or too small. She barely knew Deirdre’s dad, had met him at a few parties over the years, and she is pretty sure that he even tried to hit on her once. “If I were only forty years younger…” he’d said to her after they were introduced, leaving the words there to float chum-like.
If she did wind up crying it wouldn’t be for him, of course. How do you cry for an eighty-five year old man who died playing tennis? That’s not sad; it’s a fucking miracle. Crying is just something she does now. Maybe it’s her age or maybe it’s because she’s knee-deep in a career she’s already peaked at, in that stage of parenting where the kids only need her when there’s a problem, and a marriage that still had love at its core, but with none of the accoutrements. Sex? Gone. Romance? Gone. Conversation? A series of logistical negotiations that has her turning to the bottle first thing she walks in the door every night. The drinking started as a way to explain the weeping to Marty and the boys who saw her as someone to be feared in the house, someone to walk on tip-toes around because crying was scary and you never knew what might set her off. So she drank to give the crying a reason, but, like all the other distractions in her life, it too took on a life of its own, and now the crying and the drinking had become two separate things.
All that to say, she was primed for a distraction. A bad one. Which was right when Josh’s text popped up.
Allison forces herself to think of her friend and colleague and why she is here. Deirdre’s father had died suddenly the Saturday before, but it’s hard for her not to feel the beauty of the place coiling itself around her heart. Besides, it’s nice being out of the office without having Marty and the kids around. How often was she ever by herself anymore? When was she ever truly alone? She’s not sure if being lost in the beauty of a thing or a place is the same as being distracted, but if it is, she thinks that it’s not fair. Appreciating a thing isn’t the same as idle thinking, because admiring a thing butted right up against beauty and love and you’d never call those a waste of time, would you?
Then, apropos of nothing, it occurs to her that this wouldn’t be a terrible place to live.
Soon enough, her mother’s voice weighs in, imperious and bright. Soon enough.
At the top of the hill she finds the car lot, parks, and stands for a moment with her eyes shut tight against the utter stillness of the place, which she can feel like the calming weight of lying under a heavy blanket. She opens her eyes, looks around for someone she knows, and seeing no one, walks by herself to the door of the chapel.
She’s thinking that she doesn’t want to cry during the funeral as she takes a thin program from the man at the door. Leonard’s grandkids, Deirdre’s kids, will probably speak and she knows their stories of fishing trips and late night runs to the ice cream store with Grandpa will just destroy her.
The old man who hands her the program smiles wanly at her, probably a friend of Leonard’s, possibly the next to go, and she matches his smile, not wanting to go too big or too small. She barely knew Deirdre’s dad, had met him at a few parties over the years, and she is pretty sure that he even tried to hit on her once. “If I were only forty years younger…” he’d said to her after they were introduced, leaving the words there to float chum-like.
If she did wind up crying it wouldn’t be for him, of course. How do you cry for an eighty-five year old man who died playing tennis? That’s not sad; it’s a fucking miracle. Crying is just something she does now. Maybe it’s her age or maybe it’s because she’s knee-deep in a career she’s already peaked at, in that stage of parenting where the kids only need her when there’s a problem, and a marriage that still had love at its core, but with none of the accoutrements. Sex? Gone. Romance? Gone. Conversation? A series of logistical negotiations that has her turning to the bottle first thing she walks in the door every night. The drinking started as a way to explain the weeping to Marty and the boys who saw her as someone to be feared in the house, someone to walk on tip-toes around because crying was scary and you never knew what might set her off. So she drank to give the crying a reason, but, like all the other distractions in her life, it too took on a life of its own, and now the crying and the drinking had become two separate things.
All that to say, she was primed for a distraction. A bad one. Which was right when Josh’s text popped up.
***
The chapel is crowded with friends and family in various stages of the grieving process, and it is absolutely freezing.
She tugs at the collar of the expensive sweater she’s chosen especially for the day, a new black thing she hopes straddles the line between mourning and sexy because she has plans after this and there won’t be time to change.
She fiddles with one of the buttons as she looks from face to face trying to gauge who is there out of obligation and who is truly grieving. Her mind invents stories about the people filling the chapel, she gives them histories and purpose, she bestows unimaginable hardships upon them and then magnanimously empathizes with the injustices she’s imagined.
She looks for her friends from work she is supposed to be sitting with and not seeing them takes a seat about halfway back. She slides down a long wooden bench and smiles at the old man she winds up next to. The ring of hair he has left on his head is ridiculously white and thick plumes of hair sprout from his ears. His eyes are fixed on the coffin at the front of the room and he’s sitting at the edge of his seat, expectantly, like he’s waiting for a horse race to begin.
Instead of allowing herself to slide back into the easy melatonin slipstream of her distractions, she forces herself to stay in the present, and she makes a point of examining every square inch of the room; letting her gaze first elbow its way through the line of old mourners who keep trickling in and then move secretly across the walls finally winding up at the front of the chapel where two massive bouquets of flowers flank an unadorned pulpit. Behind that, at the back of the riser, is the plain pine box that reminds her suddenly of every promise she’s ever made and how much time she has left to fulfill them.
She cranes her neck around again looking for her coworker, Lisa. A sea of unfamiliar faces, heads swiveling this way and that as they take in their surroundings, bob back at her and for a moment she thinks of them as one gigantic creature with a hundred eyes and just as many allergies, here to metastasize the occasion as much as to mark it.
Where the fuck are you? She texts.
Three dots appear as Lisa writes a response. The ellipses of fate, Allison thinks.
In the back. Where the fuck are you? Allison turns and looks but doesn’t see a single face she recognizes.
Where? she types. Wave.
I am. Lisa writes back. And then: Are you sure you’re at the right funeral. Lol.
A little flare of panic ignites in her stomach and she gropes underneath the bench for her purse where she shoved the funeral program.
Before she finds it though, another text comes through. This one’s from Josh.
He tells her that he’s waiting for her at the Sheraton near Universal Studios just a mile or so up the road. He’s writing to tell her that he’s checked in and then he sends her a picture of the bed, still made up in that perfectly unbreakable hotel way and she can already feel the darkness of the room and then the coldly crisp sheets as she imagines sliding beneath the covers. The blackout shades will obliterate their bodies, forcing them into an alliance of atoms and molecules. Just sweat and dust. That’s what she wants to be. She craves obliteration the way she used to crave love.
Outside the room, when they’re done, they’ll hear the quiet crush of kids running down the carpeted hallway, taking a break between rounds at the amusement park she’s been to with her own kids many times. Maybe it’s at that point the apologies will begin. Him first. Her to follow. Explanations and justifications. She’s fine with all that, amazed at how high of a tolerance for insincere apologies she’s developed. More than anything she hopes they can skip the awkward stuff at the beginning, the small talk and the celibate smiles, all that stuff which isn’t what she’s here for, that has nothing to do with the distraction.
For the last week she’s had this constant debate going on in her head about whether or not to go through with it and sometimes it’s all she can think about and she counts the days until he’s going to be in town the same way she used to count down the days leading up to Winter Break when she was a kid, a girlish thrill she hasn’t felt in ages, this feeling of passion being a purpose instead of a bad habit, of endless possibilities.
And then in the next moment she’ll have convinced herself that it’s a terrible idea and she’ll start to text him that she can’t go through with it. It’s worse than crazy to her in those moments. Stupid, which is the thing she fears the most. She thinks that she can live with anything except feeling like she’s done something stupid. She thinks of what that much guilt will feel like, the force of it, how it will crush her, and Marty and the boys will see her bent over under the weight of it, a sliver of herself, and they’ll know what she did because what else could flatten a person out like that?
Back and forth, round and round, minute by minute she’s becoming undone. Even now she’s still not sure whether or not to go through with it. Not really. She stops and closes her eyes, takes a big breath, tries to feel the ground beneath her feet which have gone numb. She knows she’s there, in the chapel, waiting for Leonard Schwartzman’s funeral to begin, but she can’t exactly feel herself. Not really. Her skin, her bones, the perfect machinery of her body, all of it reverberating in spite of her, singing its divine grace notes on her behalf like a paid witness.
And still it’s not enough. A distraction may not be a reason to live, but living without distraction isn’t reasonable either.
When are you going to be here? Josh texts her. She can feel his impatience as she reads the words and it makes her sweat even though the room is still an icebox.
Soon, she writes back, her fingers trembling.
How soon?
When Josh texted her a month ago she was surprised to hear from him. They’d been high school sweethearts, but it had hardly been a love affair for the ages. They’d started as friends, getting high together, going to the movies in these big teenage landmasses of kids that eventually started to calve off couples as a matter of lust. They’d been two of the last to go. She’d never really thought of him “that way” before. He was funny and cute, but he was kind of loud, if she was going to be honest, and his breath might have smelled a little sour.
It was at a party one night at the beginning of the second semester of senior year that it finally happened. They were both drunk sitting on someone’s couch listening to something vaguely profound like the Smiths or The Cure and out of nowhere he’d tilted his head her way and blew across the top of his beer bottle so that it made a sweet low whistle sound and he whispered in her ear, “If I don’t kiss you right now, I’m going to kill myself.”
She knew exactly what he meant, that he wanted to be wild and free and romantic, to feel important and wise beyond his years, so grown-up it hurts not to be grown-up. She wanted all that too and they got together, spent the last few months of high school screwing in every nook and cranny they could find.
If Josh had reached out at any other time in her life she would have just ignored him. But this wasn’t any other time and when a message from him popped up on Instagram she found herself curious, open to the idea of lives that had nothing to do with her own. He was divorced, he wrote to her, the father of two “amazing boys”, but he was also lonely and he thought of her often. Did she ever think of him?
Truthfully, she didn’t. Oh, maybe once in a while when she took a drunken inventory of all the people she’s ever known, or when The Smiths came on the radio, she’d spare him a thought or two, an evil grin if she was particularly plastered, but on the whole, there wasn’t much about him she remembered.
She clicked on his profile and braced herself for the worst, for the living embodiment of Tommy Bahama or one of those guys who worshipped crypto or Formula One. But it wasn’t anything like that. It was just Josh Canter and all these old memories of him came rushing back. How she used to love to run her fingers through his curly brown hair and the staggering innocence of his hazel eyes. Her heart had melted a little and she’d texted him back and before she knew it they were chatting all the time. Weeks of texting, of reminiscing and complaining. She wanted to know all about divorce and he’d told her how much it had sucked at first, but now he was enjoying his single life, excited to be dating again, looking forward to a future that seemed more wide open than the one that had been waiting for him before his wife had hit him with divorce papers.
She’s not sure when the texting veered into talking about sex, but she certainly wasn’t surprised when it did. It felt inevitable in a way, the way it had when they were the only couple left in their friend group that hadn’t started hooking up yet. Late into the night, Marty snoring gently next to her, she let him coax her into smutty conversations, touching herself beneath the covers, moaning herself to sleep in the blankest spaces of the night.
And then a couple of weeks ago he’d told her he was coming to town for a conference. He’d have a room at the Sheraton and he’d really like to see her. Did she want to come?
Yes, she’d written back. Of course she did.
It didn’t help that every one of the things she can look back on with the benefit of thirty plus years of surreal hindsight, not to mention the late-night erotic sessions on the phone which were easily the most exciting thing to happen to her in the last decade, were balanced by something that was currently driving her nuts about Marty and the boys. The smug look on his face when Marty showed her the Millennial erectile dysfunction drugs he’d ordered off the internet or the sly looks he and the boys gave one another whenever she would cry, patronizing expressions that looked rehearsed and that cut her to the quick because she knew that they’d been talking about her behind her back.
Deirdre’s father’s funeral had provided the perfect cover for the rendezvous and the proximity of the cemetery to Josh’s hotel seemed almost too good to be true. Less than a mile away. She was tempted to call it fate, but then reminded herself of what Deirdre and her family were going through. Maybe not fate then. But certainly something.
There were no good reasons, it seemed, to say no, but her doubts were real and she’s still not sure what she should do when the funeral is over. Josh isn’t aware of any of this. She is afraid of telling him because it’s been so perfect up to now. No fights, no arguments, just this thing that kept picking up speed, growing and growing, heading towards an unavoidable outcome that, looking back on it now, seemed so clear from the beginning; it is the distraction she wished for, the obliteration she craved.
And now the funeral is starting.
She tugs at the collar of the expensive sweater she’s chosen especially for the day, a new black thing she hopes straddles the line between mourning and sexy because she has plans after this and there won’t be time to change.
She fiddles with one of the buttons as she looks from face to face trying to gauge who is there out of obligation and who is truly grieving. Her mind invents stories about the people filling the chapel, she gives them histories and purpose, she bestows unimaginable hardships upon them and then magnanimously empathizes with the injustices she’s imagined.
She looks for her friends from work she is supposed to be sitting with and not seeing them takes a seat about halfway back. She slides down a long wooden bench and smiles at the old man she winds up next to. The ring of hair he has left on his head is ridiculously white and thick plumes of hair sprout from his ears. His eyes are fixed on the coffin at the front of the room and he’s sitting at the edge of his seat, expectantly, like he’s waiting for a horse race to begin.
Instead of allowing herself to slide back into the easy melatonin slipstream of her distractions, she forces herself to stay in the present, and she makes a point of examining every square inch of the room; letting her gaze first elbow its way through the line of old mourners who keep trickling in and then move secretly across the walls finally winding up at the front of the chapel where two massive bouquets of flowers flank an unadorned pulpit. Behind that, at the back of the riser, is the plain pine box that reminds her suddenly of every promise she’s ever made and how much time she has left to fulfill them.
She cranes her neck around again looking for her coworker, Lisa. A sea of unfamiliar faces, heads swiveling this way and that as they take in their surroundings, bob back at her and for a moment she thinks of them as one gigantic creature with a hundred eyes and just as many allergies, here to metastasize the occasion as much as to mark it.
Where the fuck are you? She texts.
Three dots appear as Lisa writes a response. The ellipses of fate, Allison thinks.
In the back. Where the fuck are you? Allison turns and looks but doesn’t see a single face she recognizes.
Where? she types. Wave.
I am. Lisa writes back. And then: Are you sure you’re at the right funeral. Lol.
A little flare of panic ignites in her stomach and she gropes underneath the bench for her purse where she shoved the funeral program.
Before she finds it though, another text comes through. This one’s from Josh.
He tells her that he’s waiting for her at the Sheraton near Universal Studios just a mile or so up the road. He’s writing to tell her that he’s checked in and then he sends her a picture of the bed, still made up in that perfectly unbreakable hotel way and she can already feel the darkness of the room and then the coldly crisp sheets as she imagines sliding beneath the covers. The blackout shades will obliterate their bodies, forcing them into an alliance of atoms and molecules. Just sweat and dust. That’s what she wants to be. She craves obliteration the way she used to crave love.
Outside the room, when they’re done, they’ll hear the quiet crush of kids running down the carpeted hallway, taking a break between rounds at the amusement park she’s been to with her own kids many times. Maybe it’s at that point the apologies will begin. Him first. Her to follow. Explanations and justifications. She’s fine with all that, amazed at how high of a tolerance for insincere apologies she’s developed. More than anything she hopes they can skip the awkward stuff at the beginning, the small talk and the celibate smiles, all that stuff which isn’t what she’s here for, that has nothing to do with the distraction.
For the last week she’s had this constant debate going on in her head about whether or not to go through with it and sometimes it’s all she can think about and she counts the days until he’s going to be in town the same way she used to count down the days leading up to Winter Break when she was a kid, a girlish thrill she hasn’t felt in ages, this feeling of passion being a purpose instead of a bad habit, of endless possibilities.
And then in the next moment she’ll have convinced herself that it’s a terrible idea and she’ll start to text him that she can’t go through with it. It’s worse than crazy to her in those moments. Stupid, which is the thing she fears the most. She thinks that she can live with anything except feeling like she’s done something stupid. She thinks of what that much guilt will feel like, the force of it, how it will crush her, and Marty and the boys will see her bent over under the weight of it, a sliver of herself, and they’ll know what she did because what else could flatten a person out like that?
Back and forth, round and round, minute by minute she’s becoming undone. Even now she’s still not sure whether or not to go through with it. Not really. She stops and closes her eyes, takes a big breath, tries to feel the ground beneath her feet which have gone numb. She knows she’s there, in the chapel, waiting for Leonard Schwartzman’s funeral to begin, but she can’t exactly feel herself. Not really. Her skin, her bones, the perfect machinery of her body, all of it reverberating in spite of her, singing its divine grace notes on her behalf like a paid witness.
And still it’s not enough. A distraction may not be a reason to live, but living without distraction isn’t reasonable either.
When are you going to be here? Josh texts her. She can feel his impatience as she reads the words and it makes her sweat even though the room is still an icebox.
Soon, she writes back, her fingers trembling.
How soon?
When Josh texted her a month ago she was surprised to hear from him. They’d been high school sweethearts, but it had hardly been a love affair for the ages. They’d started as friends, getting high together, going to the movies in these big teenage landmasses of kids that eventually started to calve off couples as a matter of lust. They’d been two of the last to go. She’d never really thought of him “that way” before. He was funny and cute, but he was kind of loud, if she was going to be honest, and his breath might have smelled a little sour.
It was at a party one night at the beginning of the second semester of senior year that it finally happened. They were both drunk sitting on someone’s couch listening to something vaguely profound like the Smiths or The Cure and out of nowhere he’d tilted his head her way and blew across the top of his beer bottle so that it made a sweet low whistle sound and he whispered in her ear, “If I don’t kiss you right now, I’m going to kill myself.”
She knew exactly what he meant, that he wanted to be wild and free and romantic, to feel important and wise beyond his years, so grown-up it hurts not to be grown-up. She wanted all that too and they got together, spent the last few months of high school screwing in every nook and cranny they could find.
If Josh had reached out at any other time in her life she would have just ignored him. But this wasn’t any other time and when a message from him popped up on Instagram she found herself curious, open to the idea of lives that had nothing to do with her own. He was divorced, he wrote to her, the father of two “amazing boys”, but he was also lonely and he thought of her often. Did she ever think of him?
Truthfully, she didn’t. Oh, maybe once in a while when she took a drunken inventory of all the people she’s ever known, or when The Smiths came on the radio, she’d spare him a thought or two, an evil grin if she was particularly plastered, but on the whole, there wasn’t much about him she remembered.
She clicked on his profile and braced herself for the worst, for the living embodiment of Tommy Bahama or one of those guys who worshipped crypto or Formula One. But it wasn’t anything like that. It was just Josh Canter and all these old memories of him came rushing back. How she used to love to run her fingers through his curly brown hair and the staggering innocence of his hazel eyes. Her heart had melted a little and she’d texted him back and before she knew it they were chatting all the time. Weeks of texting, of reminiscing and complaining. She wanted to know all about divorce and he’d told her how much it had sucked at first, but now he was enjoying his single life, excited to be dating again, looking forward to a future that seemed more wide open than the one that had been waiting for him before his wife had hit him with divorce papers.
She’s not sure when the texting veered into talking about sex, but she certainly wasn’t surprised when it did. It felt inevitable in a way, the way it had when they were the only couple left in their friend group that hadn’t started hooking up yet. Late into the night, Marty snoring gently next to her, she let him coax her into smutty conversations, touching herself beneath the covers, moaning herself to sleep in the blankest spaces of the night.
And then a couple of weeks ago he’d told her he was coming to town for a conference. He’d have a room at the Sheraton and he’d really like to see her. Did she want to come?
Yes, she’d written back. Of course she did.
It didn’t help that every one of the things she can look back on with the benefit of thirty plus years of surreal hindsight, not to mention the late-night erotic sessions on the phone which were easily the most exciting thing to happen to her in the last decade, were balanced by something that was currently driving her nuts about Marty and the boys. The smug look on his face when Marty showed her the Millennial erectile dysfunction drugs he’d ordered off the internet or the sly looks he and the boys gave one another whenever she would cry, patronizing expressions that looked rehearsed and that cut her to the quick because she knew that they’d been talking about her behind her back.
Deirdre’s father’s funeral had provided the perfect cover for the rendezvous and the proximity of the cemetery to Josh’s hotel seemed almost too good to be true. Less than a mile away. She was tempted to call it fate, but then reminded herself of what Deirdre and her family were going through. Maybe not fate then. But certainly something.
There were no good reasons, it seemed, to say no, but her doubts were real and she’s still not sure what she should do when the funeral is over. Josh isn’t aware of any of this. She is afraid of telling him because it’s been so perfect up to now. No fights, no arguments, just this thing that kept picking up speed, growing and growing, heading towards an unavoidable outcome that, looking back on it now, seemed so clear from the beginning; it is the distraction she wished for, the obliteration she craved.
And now the funeral is starting.
***
The rabbi steps to the pulpit. He is young and polished, too well-dressed for death in his bespoke suit and charming haircut.
He clears his throat politely, coughing into his hand, and then looks down solemnly at the widow and other family members in the front row, measuring the silence he conjures just by being there. It all feels so canned to Allison, so practiced. The way he nods, the way he doesn’t smile, the way his youth protrudes into the room like a teenage boy’s sweat pant erection.
Before he starts he casts a solemn eye back at the coffin that lies a few feet behind him, and then he begins chanting something in Hebrew and his voice is low, climate-controlled, but it still manages to fill the room, billowing out like a flag into every corner and beneath the seats, it caresses and flows and despite herself and her mistrust of people like this young clergyman she finds herself being swept away a little. Her mind does a bit of tumbling as she once again considers what to do about the distractions she wished for and now finds herself suddenly awash in and then for no reason she starts thinking that she’d probably rather have a young doctor than a young rabbi if she had to make a choice between the two, her immortal soul feeling a bit flimsier than her general health these days.
The prayer finishes and he launches straight into the next part and he does that thing that rabbis always do, he asks them a question, he wants them to reflect because it’s not enough to be told what to think, but that there should be some responsibility that the rest of them should shoulder as well.
“What makes a life?” he asks simply and she can feel the crowd stir slightly, bodies moving to accommodate this new thing they’ve been asked to take on. “How do we begin to consider a thing like the life of Meyer Horowitz?”
At first the name doesn’t really register. All those Jewish old man names sound vaguely similar to her, like guttural spa music. They are names that are not so much pronounced as they are wielded, all sharp edges and burnt bridges, but she can’t deny the comfort she feels in them too, the austere humanity written in between the syllables.
But then he says it again, “Meyer Horowitz knew what a life was,” and it dawns on her what has happened. She fumbles in her purse for the program and sees that she is indeed at the funeral of Meyer A. Horowitz and not Leonard C. Schwartzman. How did this happen? she wonders as a sickening flutter of deep disappointment wilts its way through her body. Stupid question. She knows exactly how it happened. Distractions.
The rabbi continues his speech and she looks slyly around, trying to figure out how to escape, but she sees no obvious path. She’d have to get up and walk past eight or nine octogenarians who will definitely make the biggest deal of all time out of this disruption, and then all eyes will turn toward her, and maybe the rabbi would stop, and the family would turn and she’d have to see their faces, their eyes shiny and wet, and they’d know she was in the wrong place, too. And then Meyer himself would most certainly lift the lid of the coffin and he’d sit up slowly, pointing a bony finger at her, and even he would know, even a dead man would know what she was planning to get up to in the cheap hotel up the street. And then what would she do? How would she live with that?
No, she decides, she will just have to wait it out. There are no two ways about it.
She starts to absent-mindedly shred the program in her clammy hands and hopes that Meyer’s life wasn’t so dissimilar from Leonard’s that she won’t be able to look Deirdre in the eye tomorrow at work and tell her what a wonderful man her father was. A great father, husband, grandfather, colleague…all of it, every last thing that makes a life. How different could they be? she asks herself. How many variations of a life are there?
Her eyes closed, she lets out a little groan of dismay, and hears a voice next to her pipe up.
“Don’t be so sad. He was a fucking putz.” She doesn’t say anything for a moment, praying that she’s having an auditory hallucination or some similar brand of psychological self-recrimination, but then she hears it again, old and crotchety, whispering in her ear.
“Meyer Horowitz was a grade-A cocksucker. Trust me. A bona fide piece of shit. Don’t cry for him.”
Opening her eyes, she turns and looks at the old man next to her. He is grinning and nodding, his wrinkled hands folded patiently between his legs.
“Are you talking to me?”
“Of course I’m talking to you,” he loud-whispers. “You’re crying and let me tell you…you don’t have to. This asshole was one of the lousiest sons of bitches to ever live. My business partner for forty years! Forty years! For forty years he cheated me out of money, slept with my wife…he once crashed my Lincoln, driving drunk, and I had to bug him for months to pay to have it fixed. Do you think I ever saw the money? Do you?”
The old man is sermonizing now, a whisper version of the rabbi’s rhapsodizing, and she is vaguely awe-struck, moved almost by his enthusiasm.
Flecks of spit arc off his lips onto her sweater, but she doesn’t move. She’s transfixed by his hiss of a smile, by the tufts of white hair shooting from his ears like cartoon steam, by his old Jewish man accent that’s impossible to place except to know that the country he comes probably doesn’t exist anymore.
“After this I’m going back to my house. I have one of those Ooja boards…”
Against her better judgement she interrupts him. “Ouija?”
“Yeah!” he says excitedly, touching her hand. His fingers are freezing, Meyer Horowitz cold. “That’s it. I made one out of an old pizza box and I’m going to do a séance and tell Meyer what a son of a bitch I think he is.” He pokes her gently. “You know what? You should come with me. You should follow me, skip the shiva, and we can tell this chazer what’s what. You know?”
“Shh,” she tries to quiet him, puts a hand on his leg.
“Why should I be quiet? I want him to hear.” He looks up toward the ceiling. “The only way life makes any sense is if you get to hear what people say about you after you die. Otherwise,” he shrugs his shoulders, “why bother?”
Her phone buzzes and when she checks it she sees messages from Marty, who wants to know if she’ll be eating dinner with them, one from Lisa, who’s asking if she’s going to the shiva after the funeral, and one from Josh that says simply “ETA”?
She sighs and drops her phone back in her purse, tries to quiet the blood she feels moving around her body like the ball bearings in a pachinko machine. And then, almost against her will, her eyes drop and she feels herself drifting off into sleep, suddenly the only place she wants to be, and when she opens them again the old man is nudging her with his elbow. The funeral is over and there’s a line of well-wishers snaking up the aisle to the front of the chapel where the family is shaking hands and giving kisses and when she doesn’t move the would-be occultist shrugs and moves past her.
The line grows shorter and shorter but she stays in her seat, unable to find the will to move, to make a decision, and pretty soon she’s the last one in the chapel. Meyer Horowitz’s family wait for her at the front of the room and she can see they’re getting impatient, that they’re ready to get to the smoked fish and the hugging and the mirrors that will be covered for the next seven days turning the house into a stone. She thinks it’s not a bad idea. Maybe she should do the same. Cover the mirrors, cover the family, cover Josh and the old man with his homemade Ouija board and lifelong grudges. Cover it all and just sit. Just be for a little while. She’s just so goddamned sleepy. No, not sleepy…she is exhausted. No distractions. She craves nothing now save the sound of her own breath.
In and out.
In and out.
Leonard Schwartzman...In.
Meyer Horowitz…Out.
Just breathing feels nice and she lets the peace overtake her and just sits with it. Sits until it is time to go.
He clears his throat politely, coughing into his hand, and then looks down solemnly at the widow and other family members in the front row, measuring the silence he conjures just by being there. It all feels so canned to Allison, so practiced. The way he nods, the way he doesn’t smile, the way his youth protrudes into the room like a teenage boy’s sweat pant erection.
Before he starts he casts a solemn eye back at the coffin that lies a few feet behind him, and then he begins chanting something in Hebrew and his voice is low, climate-controlled, but it still manages to fill the room, billowing out like a flag into every corner and beneath the seats, it caresses and flows and despite herself and her mistrust of people like this young clergyman she finds herself being swept away a little. Her mind does a bit of tumbling as she once again considers what to do about the distractions she wished for and now finds herself suddenly awash in and then for no reason she starts thinking that she’d probably rather have a young doctor than a young rabbi if she had to make a choice between the two, her immortal soul feeling a bit flimsier than her general health these days.
The prayer finishes and he launches straight into the next part and he does that thing that rabbis always do, he asks them a question, he wants them to reflect because it’s not enough to be told what to think, but that there should be some responsibility that the rest of them should shoulder as well.
“What makes a life?” he asks simply and she can feel the crowd stir slightly, bodies moving to accommodate this new thing they’ve been asked to take on. “How do we begin to consider a thing like the life of Meyer Horowitz?”
At first the name doesn’t really register. All those Jewish old man names sound vaguely similar to her, like guttural spa music. They are names that are not so much pronounced as they are wielded, all sharp edges and burnt bridges, but she can’t deny the comfort she feels in them too, the austere humanity written in between the syllables.
But then he says it again, “Meyer Horowitz knew what a life was,” and it dawns on her what has happened. She fumbles in her purse for the program and sees that she is indeed at the funeral of Meyer A. Horowitz and not Leonard C. Schwartzman. How did this happen? she wonders as a sickening flutter of deep disappointment wilts its way through her body. Stupid question. She knows exactly how it happened. Distractions.
The rabbi continues his speech and she looks slyly around, trying to figure out how to escape, but she sees no obvious path. She’d have to get up and walk past eight or nine octogenarians who will definitely make the biggest deal of all time out of this disruption, and then all eyes will turn toward her, and maybe the rabbi would stop, and the family would turn and she’d have to see their faces, their eyes shiny and wet, and they’d know she was in the wrong place, too. And then Meyer himself would most certainly lift the lid of the coffin and he’d sit up slowly, pointing a bony finger at her, and even he would know, even a dead man would know what she was planning to get up to in the cheap hotel up the street. And then what would she do? How would she live with that?
No, she decides, she will just have to wait it out. There are no two ways about it.
She starts to absent-mindedly shred the program in her clammy hands and hopes that Meyer’s life wasn’t so dissimilar from Leonard’s that she won’t be able to look Deirdre in the eye tomorrow at work and tell her what a wonderful man her father was. A great father, husband, grandfather, colleague…all of it, every last thing that makes a life. How different could they be? she asks herself. How many variations of a life are there?
Her eyes closed, she lets out a little groan of dismay, and hears a voice next to her pipe up.
“Don’t be so sad. He was a fucking putz.” She doesn’t say anything for a moment, praying that she’s having an auditory hallucination or some similar brand of psychological self-recrimination, but then she hears it again, old and crotchety, whispering in her ear.
“Meyer Horowitz was a grade-A cocksucker. Trust me. A bona fide piece of shit. Don’t cry for him.”
Opening her eyes, she turns and looks at the old man next to her. He is grinning and nodding, his wrinkled hands folded patiently between his legs.
“Are you talking to me?”
“Of course I’m talking to you,” he loud-whispers. “You’re crying and let me tell you…you don’t have to. This asshole was one of the lousiest sons of bitches to ever live. My business partner for forty years! Forty years! For forty years he cheated me out of money, slept with my wife…he once crashed my Lincoln, driving drunk, and I had to bug him for months to pay to have it fixed. Do you think I ever saw the money? Do you?”
The old man is sermonizing now, a whisper version of the rabbi’s rhapsodizing, and she is vaguely awe-struck, moved almost by his enthusiasm.
Flecks of spit arc off his lips onto her sweater, but she doesn’t move. She’s transfixed by his hiss of a smile, by the tufts of white hair shooting from his ears like cartoon steam, by his old Jewish man accent that’s impossible to place except to know that the country he comes probably doesn’t exist anymore.
“After this I’m going back to my house. I have one of those Ooja boards…”
Against her better judgement she interrupts him. “Ouija?”
“Yeah!” he says excitedly, touching her hand. His fingers are freezing, Meyer Horowitz cold. “That’s it. I made one out of an old pizza box and I’m going to do a séance and tell Meyer what a son of a bitch I think he is.” He pokes her gently. “You know what? You should come with me. You should follow me, skip the shiva, and we can tell this chazer what’s what. You know?”
“Shh,” she tries to quiet him, puts a hand on his leg.
“Why should I be quiet? I want him to hear.” He looks up toward the ceiling. “The only way life makes any sense is if you get to hear what people say about you after you die. Otherwise,” he shrugs his shoulders, “why bother?”
Her phone buzzes and when she checks it she sees messages from Marty, who wants to know if she’ll be eating dinner with them, one from Lisa, who’s asking if she’s going to the shiva after the funeral, and one from Josh that says simply “ETA”?
She sighs and drops her phone back in her purse, tries to quiet the blood she feels moving around her body like the ball bearings in a pachinko machine. And then, almost against her will, her eyes drop and she feels herself drifting off into sleep, suddenly the only place she wants to be, and when she opens them again the old man is nudging her with his elbow. The funeral is over and there’s a line of well-wishers snaking up the aisle to the front of the chapel where the family is shaking hands and giving kisses and when she doesn’t move the would-be occultist shrugs and moves past her.
The line grows shorter and shorter but she stays in her seat, unable to find the will to move, to make a decision, and pretty soon she’s the last one in the chapel. Meyer Horowitz’s family wait for her at the front of the room and she can see they’re getting impatient, that they’re ready to get to the smoked fish and the hugging and the mirrors that will be covered for the next seven days turning the house into a stone. She thinks it’s not a bad idea. Maybe she should do the same. Cover the mirrors, cover the family, cover Josh and the old man with his homemade Ouija board and lifelong grudges. Cover it all and just sit. Just be for a little while. She’s just so goddamned sleepy. No, not sleepy…she is exhausted. No distractions. She craves nothing now save the sound of her own breath.
In and out.
In and out.
Leonard Schwartzman...In.
Meyer Horowitz…Out.
Just breathing feels nice and she lets the peace overtake her and just sits with it. Sits until it is time to go.