“He’s a guard.”
“Why do they have a guard at a restaurant? In case the cheeking escapes?”
He looked at her, uncomprehending, then at his water glass from several angles.
A waitress arrived and food came soon after — a huge bowl of soup they hadn’t ordered. Tooly launched herself at it before Paul could protest. She spooned it in ravenously, while he held her hair out of the way. Plates seemed to emerge from the kitchen at random, dishes served whenever it suited the cook. Presently, another arrived. “Oh, no!” Tooly said. “Fish!”
“It’s not one from the tank,” Paul said unconvincingly. “Anyway, we have to eat it or it’ll be perceived as an insult.”
“By the fish?”
Paul chewed on one side of his mouth, gazing off as if there were something untoward about dining, a necessary embarrassment like toileting.
“Was your job okay today?”
“Was it okay?” he said, the wrinkle tightening between his eyebrows. “I heard that my father is sick.”
“Shall we venture to America to see him?”
“Why are you talking like that?” he said. “I just told you my father’s sick.”
“Sorry.”
“We can’t go back. And that’s that.”
When Tooly was younger, she had met Paul’s father, but had no memories of him, only images from two photographs: one of a cheerful bald man with a mustache and a butterfly collar clowning around; the other of a youth in an army uniform. Burt Zylberberg, a basketball player in college and later an insurance salesman, had converted from Judaism to Catholicism as a young man, and served as a chaplain in World War II. During the Anzio invasion, an explosion shredded his legs. He and his wife, Dorrie, had intended to start a family after the war, but the extent of his wounds precluded that. They adopted a boy, Paul, and settled in Northern California. They were jovial parents, particularly Burt, an indefatigable optimist despite his infirmity. But they were so different from their adopted child, an earnest boy without any spiritual inclination. Yet he was intensely loyal to them. Whenever people asked if he thought of finding his real parents, he grew annoyed — he had no curiosity about those people, and never developed any. Paul went on to study computer science at UC Berkeley, which gave him access to high-end mainframes. In the wee hours, he haunted the computer lab, partly because all the interesting hardware was available then, but also to escape his peers’ cavorting. The hum of mainframes produced in him a conditioned response of tranquillity. During his final year of college, a surprise came: his parents informed him that he had an elder brother. When World War II was breaking out, they’d given up a baby, and that child had grown up and found them. This biological son — having just met Burt and Dorrie — already interacted with them with an ease and warmth that were alien to Paul. Rather than spurring him to seek his own biological kin, the development instilled the sense that he had no origins at all.
Paul placed his credit card on the bill, and went to the toilets. Tooly waited and waited, then wandered toward the front door, which a waitress opened for her. Outside, the air was hair-dryer hot and smelled of exhaust. Pedestrians gushed down the sidewalk, a human river coursing past the Chinese-Thai shopfronts displaying vases, gongs, ceramic lions, meat grinders. She found herself swept away, bundled along among strangers until the end of the block. On her return to the restaurant, Paul had still not come back from the bathroom. She approached it, heard his inhaler hissing in there, and she whispered his name.
Sheepishly, he edged out, a water stain down his trousers. “The sink area was all flooded but I didn’t see,” he said. “I leaned against the counter and got soaked. It looks …” As if he’d urinated down his khakis.
“I’ll ask for a napkin,” she suggested.
“Don’t say anything, Tooly!”
“Can we just run out?”
“I haven’t got my credit card back.”
“I could knock over the water. Then everything will be wet and they won’t see the difference.”
“That’s a terrible idea.”
“I can run through the restaurant and you chase after me, shouting that I poured water on you.”
“We can’t do that.”
But they did, to the bewilderment of the waiters and diners. Paul hunched forward in humiliation, mumbling his lines. “Why did you do that?” he said, rushing after her.
“I poured water all over you!”
“You’re a bad person! Where’s my credit card? Look what you did!”
“I threw water all over!”
Outside, he crossed his hands over his crotch as she searched for taxis, waving wildly at the passing traffic. “Don’t make a scene,” he pleaded.
In the cab, Paul said, “I wasn’t really angry in there.”
“I know you weren’t.”
They arrived back at Gupta Mansions, took the elevator up, unlocked the front door. “Good to be home,” he said.
As they looked at this latest apartment, it felt like home to neither of them.
1999
BLINKING TO WAKEFULNESS, she glanced at her few possessions with estrangement: corduroys splayed across the floor, sweater and coat heaped on sneakers, bra twisted over a low-rise of books. She pushed open her bedroom door and clomped across the main room toward the toilet.
“Good mornink,” Humphrey said in his thick Russian accent. Seated on the couch holding a book, the old man nearly said more, but thought better of it, knowing Tooly to be grumpy at this hour, barely 11:30 A.M.
She lapped water from the bathroom faucet, then returned to her bedroom, pulled on her oatmeal cable knit and a dressing gown, its belt dragging along the cold concrete floor. At her window, she raised the blinds, contemplating their little-trafficked street under the shadow of the Gowanus Expressway in Brooklyn. The sidewalks were icy that November day. Shoes hung from the power lines, tossed up there years earlier by kids who’d long since grown into adults.
Much as Tooly wanted to impose her mood on the morning, she couldn’t resist Humphrey in the other room. He’d probably been waiting hours for her company. When she joined him, he had a steaming cup of coffee for her on the Ping-Pong table. She collected it, sat at the other end of the couch, and frowned in order to win a few minutes’ silence. He turned a page, pretending to read, though he peeked at her from under his overflowing eyebrows, raccoon shadows below his eyes, creases around his mouth, which kept tightening, ready to pounce on a conversation, then relenting. Humphrey, who was seventy-two, wore baby-blue slacks high around his gut, a polyester dress shirt of the small size he’d once been, and a loosened paisley tie, all from the thrift shop. Bits of stubble, like toast crumbs, adhered around his thin lips and prickled the cords of his throat; one ashen sideburn was longer than the other, giving the impression that he might tip over. “I’m so tired,” he sighed, “of being loved for my beautiful body.”
She smiled, took a sip of coffee, and plucked the book from his hands: The Maxims of La Rochefoucauld.
“I also have maxim in life,” Humphrey informed her. “My maxim is never let Tooly Zylberberg take book, because it goes and never comes back.”
“If I borrow a book and like it,” she contended, “it becomes mine by law.”
“I overrule this law.”
“I appeal to a higher court where I’m the judge, and I uphold the law.”
“System is flawed,” he observed.
“I have my own maxim in life: Why is it so freezing here?” She reached behind the couch frame to where he dumped his bedcovers each morning and dragged up his comforter, wrapping herself in it. (He slept on the couch and made efforts to move from it minimally. His seat was at the far end, amid a swamp of newspaper pages that he’d flung into the air in contempt. Under the cushion, he stuffed clippings and crosswords that over time had elevated him; each time he sat, newsprint crunched.)