Zoology. Ben Dolnick
in the office are a little strange.”
“What things?”
“Nothing. Enough. Tell me more about work. When do you start?”
“Just tell me what’s strange.” I knew how I was acting, but I didn’t care.
“Mona’s one of these people who gets a lot of crushes. She’s just young. How old are you now?”
“Eighteen.”
“Jesus. I’m not talking about it anymore.” The rest of my slice looked as good to eat as my stack of napkins.
“We don’t have to talk about it, just tell me what you meant. Then I promise I’ll stop.”
“No.” He put his big soft hand on my arm and looked right into my eyes like I was a mental patient. “No.” Once he’d decided I got it, he said, “Listen, I’d been meaning to talk about something anyway. Really Lucy’s been bugging me about it, just a couple of little things about staying with us—”
Had Mona seen David’s facial hair? Since he was fourteen he’d had to shave twice a day, and still he had a five-o’clock shadow by two o’clock. I once walked in on him in the bathroom with shaving cream all over his shoulders.
In high school he was the manager of the JV baseball team, and he never went to a single school dance, not even after Mom said she’d ground him if he didn’t ask someone. But while he worked in his room at night—when he was chubby and seventeen and I was chubbier and nine—I sat on the floor for as long as he’d let me, listening to his stories, mostly about the guys on the team.
“Seth and Pete screwed Carrie Feldman on the hood of Seth’s car, right in the parking lot. All three of them buck naked.” My penis would almost tear through my pajamas. “Last weekend Jon went to a place on N Street, and for ten bucks a Korean girl let him rub her all over with hot oil.” I’d throw tantrums when Mom would come in to make me go to bed. Just one more minute. Thirty more seconds. David sitting there muttering while he stapled packets at his desk was better than any TV show.
One night in his freshman year at Emory, when I was in fifth grade, he called home to talk to me. “I’m in trouble,” he said, almost whispering. “Big, big trouble. I’ve seriously never felt this bad. Everybody said it was going to be so different. But it’s not. It’s the exact same fucking thing.”
I wouldn’t have been any more terrified if he’d told me he had a brain tumor. I kept it secret from Mom and Dad, and I called him the next day, hiding in the bathroom with the portable phone crackling. After thirty seconds he said he had to run because his friends were leaving for a Braves game, and he never talked about feeling bad again. When we visited him that spring, he took me to a party at his frat, and I ended up playing Sonic the Hedgehog in the messiest bedroom I’ve ever seen with a guy with a yarmulke and a red beard.
While we dumped our crusts, he said, without looking at me, “What’s happening with you and girls, by the way?”
“I had something at home, but, you know, just looking around.” (Mona, we could play barefoot Frisbee in the park.)
“Nothing wrong with that,” he said. (I’d put suntan lotion on your shoulders, leave love notes on your side of the bed.)
Out on the street he puffed out his cheeks, glanced down at his watch, and said, “Time to get back to it.” He shook my hand again, squinting in the light, and said, “Look. Don’t worry too much about Lucy. Bottom line: I’m enjoying having you live with us, and it’s my place as much as it’s hers.”
In the elevator after one of my first days at work, Sameer asked me, sounding shy, if I liked to play Ping-Pong. He and Janek, the tall doorman from Slovakia, played every day on the seventh floor, next to the laundry room, with broken paddles and a baggy net and only one ball that wasn’t cracked. In middle school, before one of David’s friends jumped on our basement table and snapped two of the legs, I used to play most afternoons with Dad. We didn’t keep score—Dad said, smiling, that he didn’t like the idea of beating me. I kept score myself, though, and by eighth grade I beat him at least as often as he beat me. But now I couldn’t seem to remember how I used to grip the paddle, and my backhand wouldn’t stay on the table.
“Yesterday,” Sameer said, while we rallied, “I read a fascinating article in a magazine in the doctor’s office. In Elizabeth, New Jersey, there is a man who funds his life and his exorbitant family merely by the sale of his own hair.” The sounds of the game were as steady as a metronome. Janek sat in a chair by the door, picking at the rubber skin on his paddle. “This man has been blessed with the most lustrous and healthful hair that doctors have ever seen, and when he sells a full head of it—a head of hair more beautiful than Daryl Hannah’s—he earns for it upward of twenty thousand dollars, and this is hair he produces simply by the existence of his head.”
“Sameer, I am thinking that you read too much,” Janek said. “Every minute spent in a book is a minute spent not in a woman.” He laughed, and a speck of the foam that was always in the corners of his mouth flew onto the floor. Janek looked, every time I saw him, like he hadn’t shaved in three days, and there was something damaged-seeming about his body. He was at least a foot taller than me and Sameer, but he stood with a tilt that reminded me of Frankenstein cartoons—once when he pulled his left pant leg up I thought I saw a rubber foot.
“I will admit I read to the point of sheerest infirmity,” Sameer said, not looking away from the table. “When you one day pay me a visit, Henry, you may say that you have never seen so many books in your life. They are piled from the floor as well as on top of every surface, and all of them are both old and extremely well-read, first by me but also by my son, who is turning out to be a first-rate mind, albeit one without a sense of dedication. Even in the oven and in the cabinets there are stacks and stacks of books at all angles.”
“I don’t like to read any more than two things,” Janek said, still grinning, still foaming. “I read the instructions on how to cook food, and I read the instructions on how to cook women.” He held his arm out to give me five and spread his eyes wide, hoping we’d collapse against each other like teammates at the end of a game.
“As much is evident,” Sameer said. “Because otherwise you would be too distraught for foolishness by the news that there has been still another suicide bombing in Israel, in which seventeen different people have passed away. Every time an Israeli takes his place on a bus or in a café, he is risking the end of his life, and these are even the citizens who have no military association whatsoever. It is no better what Israelis are doing with the Palestinians. For our unfortunate friend Janek I already know the answer, but are you a religious man, if I may ask?”
“Not really,” I said. “I’m Jewish, but I don’t go to temple or anything.”
A little ripple of shock ran over his face. “You are a Jew? Oh, the Jewish people are a most fascinating people to me. I will tell you a horrifying secret. I have been studying the Jewish people for many years, and for the past year I have even been taking lessons from a dear friend in the art of reading Hebrew. Janek can verify as much. I do not read with much speed, but each night I practice my characters for one hour sharply, and I find improvement in myself every day. Oh, it is so wonderful that you are a Jew. Are you an Orthodox Jew, a Conservative Jew, or a Reformed Jew, if I may ask?”
“You had better click the lock on your door when you sleep,” Janek said. “Sameer loves a Jew even more than he loves a blond woman.”
Most of their fighting seemed like just a show for me, but now Sameer looked truly embarrassed. With his lips pulled back and his teeth gritted, he fired his next shot as hard as he could into Janek’s chest. It couldn’t have hurt more than a pinch, but it was enough to make Janek stop smiling. Sameer turned back to me, served a cracked ball from his pocket, and said, “The Jews have, in my opinion, played one of the most instrumental roles in every matter of human development. They have studied medicine, literature, music, and many other fields in which they have made great strides for all of humankind.