Good for the Jews

8. August 2006

246 Chapter Eight August 2006 Some old friends of his parents gave Doug a lift to Mose’s apartment. “Hello,” Doug burbled into the apartment building’s intercom, “it’s me.” “Hello, me.” “Doug, I mean.” “A visitation in the night,” Mose called back and buzzed him in. “You don’t mind?” Doug said, on entering. “Mind? What’s to mind? But you’ll see I’m not at my best.” Used Kleenex were scattered on the ›oor around Mose’s La-Z-Boy. A book was cracked open in the seat of the chair. “We’ll sit,” Mose said, indicating the small table and two chairs that sat by the “bar” separating his small kitchen from his living room. The apartment was a lot nicer than the stuff Mose put in it. Doug could always tell when something had been bought by Ellen, and when it was just the ratty old furniture that Mose had been schlepping around for years. It didn’t take too much to guess that Ellen had been the one to pick the actual apartment—a slick redo of a former elementary school with fancy ‹xtures and a shiny kitchen counter, but otherwise the same sheetrock and ›at gray carpeting that Doug saw in the apartments where his college friends lived. Mose’s building had a view of the lake, 247 but Mose’s apartment wasn’t on the lakeside. It was in the basement, which was actually the ground ›oor. His place opened on to a small patio that he never seemed to use. Doug didn’t even try to explain to his friends why he so liked the old man. What could he tell them anyway? Not one of them could distinguish between the world without Brandi and the world with Brandi. Even her foster parents said, “It’s God’s will.” As if life didn’t make one bit of difference, as if it was just a thing you bumbled around in for a designated amount of time, before God, souring on your efforts to make a mark or pay off your mortgage or make peace with your adult children, said, “Well, fuck, that’s enough of that.” Mose was different, though. He wife Rachel had been dead for decades, and he said there wasn’t a day that went by that he didn’t miss her. “So that’s why you never remarried, huh?” Doug said, not needing Mose to answer and so not fully hearing him say, “Well, not exactly.” There was another thing that Mose and Doug shared: a lack of fondness for the bond that had drawn them together. Doug was old enough not to have fantasies of his parents getting back together, but fantasize he did. And Mose clearly didn’t want Ellen to marry Alex. “The best thing we can do to drive them apart,” Mose had said that ‹rst night, when he drove Doug home from the dinner party at Ridgeway, “is to support them entirely.” “You’re all lonely here,” Doug said now as he settled himself into Mose’s apartment, readying himself for one of their unlikely dives into Jewish mysticism or Philip Roth’s sex obsession or Yiddish curses. Bar mitzvah training for the Unitarian in despair! Not that it was always Jewish. One night Doug said, “What is existentialism? I mean, I sort of know what it is . . . but not exactly.” And instead of saying something like “What do you know?” and Doug saying something dumb like “It’s gotta involve black clothes, cigarettes and acting like a general shit,” Mose said, “Well, let’s ‹nd out.” Then he’d shuf›ed over to one of his bookshelves, pulled out Sartre’s What Is Existentialism? and read out loud, only stopping (when his voice got hoarse) to summarize the major points. Now Mose said, “Lonely, what lonely? I have my friends.” He pointed to the brown volume lying on the seat of his La-Z-Boy. “My friends and my tissues. A summer cold, which I may have represented as something more to Ellen, but I’m counting on you not to tell the truth. Did you enjoy the party?” “Not at all,” Doug said. “I heard there was some sort of bitch-slap between my dad and Hyman Clark, though.” “Is that so? Now that interests me.” “It does? Why?” “I’ll tell you why. Because that Hyman...