Good for the Jews

2. December 2005

Chapter Two December 2005 His meeting with Hyman wasn’t until ‹ve, but Alex arrived early, warming his hands against his cheeks and offering the usual pleasantry to the hostess about the cold, before taking a stool at the new bar. Behind the wall of liquor bottles, there was a restaurant—Four stars. You have to try it, people said, if you could stand the preciousness and vague grotesquery of a ‹ve-course tasting menu. The tables (a ›ight up, the whole place in the former of‹ces of a life insurance company) looked out on the Capitol Building, lit at this hour like a Disney Land castle of democracy. But Alex couldn’t see the dome now. The bar was relegated to a windowless corner of the restaurant. As he sat, he looked out on precisely nothing. He ordered and thought of a sign he’d once seen as a boy, below a Des Moines diner: “Senior Citizens Happy Hour, 7–9 A.M.” Was it supposed to be funny? He didn’t get it. One day, there had actually been two old drunks, passed out in front of the diner. At the time, Alex thought they were fake drunks, propped against the diner for a joke photograph, but he never asked, and here he was now far from Des Moines, sitting down to his own early-hour Manhattan. Too early, he fretted, though he enjoyed, as he always enjoyed, the ‹rst burning sweet sip, its suggestion that day was done. No matter that day was far from done. If chocolate milk suggested permission the way alcohol did 109 . . . But there Alex left the proposition, noting only that it would be good for Wisconsin’s dairy industry. Alex pulled a thick stack of papers from his briefcase. He had to approve a math curriculum, ‹nish the long-range ‹scal plan for the school board and hire three new teachers. It was too much to do. It was always too much to do. And that was in good times. These days, he felt in need of an extra set of hands and eyes to get through his days. As a leader, Alex’s skill had always been his ability to delegate, but that had been impossible since the previous October when Greg Shardon, the new assistant superintendent, entered Alex’s of‹ce, rubbed his ‹nger below his thick brown moustache, and said he needed to schedule a meeting, that he had to leave in June. “Excuse me?” Alex had said, disbelief and maybe a bit of outrage in his voice. The man had only been working for Alex for three months. But then Greg explained: he’d been diagnosed with ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease. “Oh, Christ, Greg,” Alex blurted. It wasn’t like cancer, where you might have a good prognosis or beat the odds of a bad prognosis. Or even heart disease, where you might hope to live well, then exit the world in a few quick moments of pain. “The thing is I thought I’d be ‹ne for awhile,” Shardon said, “but you may have noticed, I’ve been tripping a lot.” Alex hadn’t noticed. “Lord, I’m sorry. You do what you have to do.” “It’s just my family, and I . . .” Alex stood and embraced the man. “You don’t need to explain anything to me.” Though he barely knew the guy, Alex already cared about him. Greg was a tall, rangy man who loved hiking and ‹shing. He and his brother were going to hike the Grand Canyon over Christmas break. Hurry up and do it, while they had the chance, despite a weakness in Greg’s right leg, a constant sense that it was going to give out. Sitting at the bar, wishing the bartender would put out some fancy snack mix, Alex thought of how he had to drag himself to the gym each day, how he forced himself to go running or swimming. Mostly because he didn’t want to get fat again. Certainly not because he loved it. If he’d been given Greg’s diagnosis, the last thing he’d do was hike. He’d embrace sloth. Or maybe that wasn’t true. What with Ellen in his life, he might push himself. But he wouldn’t be doing it for himself. He’d do it 110 for her. His mind darted brie›y from...