by Joel Deutsch
The doorbell chimed, jolting Daniel awake. He was lying on his unmade bed fully clothed except for his shoes. He looked over at the red L.E.D. display on the clock radio, and saw that it was almost 11 in the morning. What time had he left Jacqueline sitting on her couch sipping coffee and reading her Wall Street Journal? 6? 7? He had meant just to take a short nap to make up for the hours of sleep lost the previous night to love, or whatever it was when someone didn’t even ask you to stay to breakfast, and then shave and shower and get on with his Sunday.
Groggily,, in stocking feet, he padded into the living room and squinted through the peephole. It was Irina.
“The kid yours?” asked the LAPD desk sergeant at Hollywood Station as he glanced down to read the business card he had just accepted from Daniel. “Oh. You his attorney?”
“a friend,” said Daniel. “And this is his mother,” he added, explaining Irina beside him. Upon which Irina extracted her California driver’s license from a wallet and laid it on the counter, face up.
“Thanks,” said the desk sergeant. “that’s fine.” He was a gray-haired cop with tired, kindly eyes.
“the young man won’t be needing an attorney, by the way. He’s not under arrest.”
“Then why you keep him all night?” Irina demanded to know. Daniel, recalling her considerable English fluency in their conversation the day before, noticed the loss of past tense grammar under stress, saw in her face a combination of maternal fury and habituated intimidation. Even ten years in America, it struck him, couldn’t erase the ingrained mistrust of authority, even authority as mundane as that vested in this obviously decent LAPD officer.
“He was apprehended in the company of two felony suspects we had warrants on, Ma’am,” said the sergeant. “But our detectives have satisfied themselves that he’s not affiliated with those gentlemen. So as soon as he’s brought out here to collect his belongings and sign some papers, he’s all yours.”
A haggard-looking Sasha, his face shadowed with two days and nights worth of stubble because he had learned that non-bearded modern-style Orthodox Jewish men abstained from shaving on the Sabbath, his white shirt limp and badly wrinkled , his black fedora and black suit absurdly funereal under the bright midday sun, followed the two adults across the police department parking lot to Daniel’s Camaro at a sheepish distance. Irina climbed into the cramped back seat to let her long-legged son sit up front. Pulling out onto Wilcox Avenue and heading home, Daniel felt, for an eerily familiar and comfortable few seconds, like a husband and a father again, until Irina shattered his contemplative moment by asking Sasha something very angrily in Russian. What had happened, Daniel assumed.
“Nichivo,” came the glum answer. Which Daniel had inferred by that time from exchanges overheard and body language observed around the building meant it’s nothing, never mind, no big deal. A familiar teenager’s nonresponse to unwelcome interrogatories. He wondered how his daughter Melanie was doing up at Berkeley, and made a mental note to call or at least to email her.
Once home, Daniel mowed down his own whiskers with his buzzing Norelco and took a long hot shower. Then he donned a clean short-sleeved shirt that he wore tails out with faded Levis and a scuffed ancient pair of brown Topsiders.
The rundown boat shoes dated back to the one and only time , ten years ago, when he’d consented to join Sheila’s father aboard the 25-foot sloop he sailed out of the Marina.
Jack Rubin was a pugnacious, sarcastic little man with a muscular, white-haired barrel chest, comically big ears, and a startlingly high-pitched voice. He owned a thriving chain of TV and audio stores—”Video Warehouse prices will blow your mind, not your budget, he promised on camera in late-night commercials—and had turned Daniel and Sheila’s family room into an ever-evolving, state-of-the-art home entertainment center, free of charge. He was not an easy man to deny. But Daniel, completely uninterested in things nautical and freaked out at being trapped at sea with his annoying father-in-law for an entire Sunday, had screwed up every task that Jack assigned him, then spewed a stomachful of half-digested salami sandwiches and Michelob into the Santa Monica Bay before staggering down to the little cabin to lie on the bed while everything spun around and around. An embarrassed Sheila and her mother, Ruth, had taken turns laying cold compresses on Daniel’s forehead while the other helped Jack on deck with the sailing. Melanie, then ten years old, had sat at the foot of the bed in her bathing suit, sipping from a can of warm Canada Dry ginger ale and writing furiously in one of the gray-covered composition books she took with her everywhere she went in those days, wincing each time her dark braids brushed a sun-burned bare shoulder. She’d been going through her Harriet The Spy period. The budding writer, already in evidence.
Irina had invited him over for a late lunch with her family. He was reluctant, and why shouldn’t he be, he thought. What could she possibly expect of him, and he was sure that she expected something, just because he’d accompanied her to pick up Sasha at the police station? Did she hope for him To straighten out the kid, who had obviously gone off the deep end with this heavy religious trip he was on? Sure, it looked a little crazy, but it was almost certainly just an identity crisis thing, an acting out of individuation issues, as Sheila would describe it.
Which was normal enough, no?. After all, at Sasha’s age, he had fled his own upbringing in the opposite direction. His first breakfast in the dorm cafeteria at Berkeley, he had giddily requested a double order of forbidden bacon strips with his scrambled eggs, and relished every delicious, transgressive bite. And then, after all the years of Hebrew school, Sabbath school, Bar Mitzvah and Confirmation, had never set foot inside a synagogue again,. Not even for his and Sheila’s wedding, which was held in the same Biltmore Hotel ballroom Sheila’s father had rented for the dinner and party, the only concession to both sets of parents being the young, long-haired and mustachioed Reform rabbi who they found to officiate with just enough in the way of prayer and ritual to provide the right touch of ceremonial Jewish gravity.
How he had envied Dylan for having the sheer chutzpah to simply reinvent himself, to turn Abe and Beatrice Zimmerman’s good little bobby into an incongruously cerebral, Shylock-beaked faux Okie guitar-picking troubadour with a penchant for lyrical surrealism and a secret rock and roll heart. Sure, Dylan had gone through his Jesus period, and then the rumored apprenticeship in Judaism with some Chasidic rebbe, and now who knew where he was at, anymore. But that wasn’t the point.
As for the lunch invitation, what the hell, he thought. All the lonely summer, he had told himself to hurry up and get back out into the world. And so here was the world, coming straight at him, first Jacqueline and now Irina and her goofy Yeshiva bocher offspring, and instead of feeling thankful, what was his first impulse but to duck. He recalled the sage advice of the Yaqui Indian brujo in a book everyone had been reading back in the day, up in Berkeley. Hay que ponerse en el medio del camino. One must put oneself in the middle of the road.
He had already opened the door and was about to step out when he thought to check his land line and cell phone for voice mail, having turned both of them off so he could sleep, and to check for email, too. He closed the door again, went back to his bedroom to switch on the PC on his cluttered desk, and while it was going through its startup routine he hurried into the kitchen, pulling his cell phone from his pants pocket and jabbing its On button, which caused it to emit a four-tone heraldic resurrection theme nearly identical to the one he had just heard come from the computer, like a small lost creature answering its mother’s cry.
To be continued…