Authors: Adam Mansbach
RISK twists his face into a look you'd give a crazy person. “No,” he tells Linda, and then adds, “I was at a bar mitzvah,” hoping the invocation of old Yahweh might set a mood of righteous indignation.
He watches his mother's jaw edge forward, her lips bunch and jut into what looks almost like a kissing posture. You could bounce quarters off her cheeks, they're so taut. RISK possesses the sheer dumb tenacity to hold on to his lie forever, and he knows Linda knows it. His guess is that she's doubly pissed off because she holds an unplayable trump cardâeyewitness testimony she can't mention without compromising its source. The town's full of her spies.
So what's her move? An unsupported, talon-pointing accusation, just to relieve the tension? Dismissal, to be followed by consultation with cocounsel when cocounsel returns from laying out the newspaper at two in the morning, until which time she will maintain her current rigor mortisâlike carriage, somehow prying that face open long enough to feed herself dinner?
Instead, Linda turns and walks three steps. She lifts the telephone from the wall-mounted cradle, jabs at its soft belly.
“Don't bother Dad at work, Ma,” RISK says by way of free advice, like a chess player tapping his queen. Hasn't Linda figured out yet how pathetic this gambit is, how powerless it makes her look and feel?
She turns her back on him. “Hi, Dad. Is Mom there?”
RISK spins on the fulcrum of his ass until he's vertical.
Linda speaks into the phone. “Oh. Well, I'm bringing your grandson overâ¦. Because he's driving me crazy, and I don't want him in my house, that's why.”
Tristan, on the other end, mounts what must be an objection. He's working, probably.
“Well then, Dad, you know what? You can take a few hours off. Do something for somebody else for a change.” She slams the receiver back in place, or tries to; it doesn't catch, and falls onto the countertop, prone.
Linda looks at her son. “Get in the car.”
For once, RISK does as he's told. He sits there for five minutes, watching Mr. Cassell wax his yellow Lotus in the passenger-side mirror. The Freedmans have gone through three across-the-street neighbors during their tenure at 19 Algonquin Road, all of them youngish Anglo families captained by men who devote their Saturday afternoons to maintaining the never-driven luxury cars cloistered in their garages. RISK has spent countless mornings chewing cereal and studying these energetic automobile enthusiasts, unable to discern the slightest similarity between them and his father, who's driven the same blue Toyota as long as RISK can remember and faces spring thunder-showers in a raincoat he bought in college.
Stole from a hobo in college,
as Linda likes to say.
She climbs aboard, yanks on her seat belt, slaps the shift into reverse. The twenty-minute trip to New Haven is wordless. RISK checks off familiar landmarks as the minivan closes in on the house; when he was young, every ride through this neighborhood had been a guided tour, whether the driver was his mother, dropping him off, or his grandmother Amalia, taking him home. Linda would regale her son by pointing out the crucial sites of her childhood: the empty lot that had once been a candy store, her still-standing elementary school with its small concrete playground, the immense yellow Victorian in which Marcy Pontis and her darling black Lab, Grendel, had resided.
Amalia's tours were grander in scope, cultural surveys of an area dense with writers, scientists, and historians, most associated somehow with Yale, where she's taught writing since 1969, the year the university began admitting female undergrads, and with the Brodskys. She graded their importance on a scale of epithets: the
well known,
the
prominent,
the
famous,
the
esteemed,
the
great.
It was during those drives that RISK began to grasp the level of accomplishment that was the cover charge at his grandparents' parties. He never would have guessed. Nary a guest ever breathed a grandiose wordânot that RISK could understand, anyway. Nor did they dress their parts. These were first-generation American successes, men and women who'd traveled the well-tramped path from Brooklyn or the Lower East Side or the Bronx to City College; Hunter for the women, not Amalia's alma mater, Vassar. They'd never learned to spend money on clothes.
The minivan pulls up before the Brodskys' house, and Linda barely allows her son to shut the door before hitting the gas. If she intends to pick him up tomorrow, or let him find his own way home, or have the locks at 19 Algonquin Road changed and his belongings piled on the curb by sundown, she makes no mention of her plans. RISK does not inquire.
His grandparents' door is unlocked, as always. RISK crosses the foyer, sidestepping the blast of mothball air that rolls toward him like tumbleweed, and appraises himself in a brass-framed mirror suspended above a table cluttered with tins of lemon candy, unopened mail, two shrink-wrapped VHS copies of
Blockbusters,
and his grandmother's students' manuscripts in their manila folders. A stack of books abuts the wall, topped with a gift-wrapped, ribboned rectangle that can only be another one. It has been sitting there since Christmas. At least the attached envelope is open.
“Hello,” RISK calls, not expecting an answer. He heads for the kitchen, pours himself a glass of cranberry juice, and grabs a container of mixed nuts from the snack cabinet. The household's only television is enshrined here, a dusty wood-grained model squatting on a countertop above the breakfast table. RISK slumps before it, jiggle-sifts the tin until two almonds breach the sea of peanuts, pops one in his mouth.
He flips twice through the mundane alphabet of channels before settling on MTV, in the hopes that he might witness the miraculous: a rap video aired outside the daily hour to which the music is confined, boxed in on either side by endless whiteboy crap rock. No such luck. He takes in a Madonna video and a string of commercials, then rises when he hears his grandfather's chair roll across the floor above. RISK positions himself at the foot of the front staircase and waits to greet him, but nothing happens. Tristan is probably standing before his typewriter, evaluating his last page, or crouched over the machine, banging out a final paragraph before calling it a day. Or before granting himself a bathroom break, then pressing on. There's no particular reason to believe he's coming down at all, really.
RISK wanders back into the kitchen, turns the TV off, consumes a cashew and a filbert, returns to the landing just as the old man appears around the bend.
“Hey, Grandpa.”
Tristan reaches the bottom and lays a hand on RISK's shoulder. “So. What the hell have you done to your old lady?”
RISK shrugs. “I was drinking.”
Tristan lifts an index finger. “Good idea.” He points toward the living room bar, and RISK backs out of his way. Tristan makes a slow beeline for it, and pours them each a scotch. “Have we got some nuts or something?”
“Sure.” RISK darts to the kitchen, dumps the contents of the tin into a wooden serving bowl shaped like a fish, and reunites with his grandfather on the living room couch.
Tristan reaches for the bowl and fills his palm. “Now, really. Why has your mother deposited you here?”
“Where's Grandma?”
Tristan gestures with a fist full of nuts. “Off teaching or something. I don't recall. What day is it?”
“Saturday, Gramps. I don't think there's any class.” He reaches for a yellow legal pad lying on the coffee table, pulls a red Sharpie from his pocket, and absentmindedly begins to trace the outline of a piece.
“Quite right.” Tristan peers at the leather-banded watch slung loosely around his wrist. “I imagine she'll return soon. We've got to have some dinner, for Christ's sake.” He crosses his legs, jiggles his ice. “Where were you drinking?”
RISK adds some old-school 3-D effects to his outline. “At a bar mitzvah I was DJing.”
“You mean to tell me you were boozing it up in temple?” From the expression on the old man's face, RISK can't tell if his grandfather finds the notion scandalous or funny.
“Yeah, but not
in
temple. They had a party for the kid afterward, with a bar. It's not like I was swigging from a brown bag during the service.”
“I see. How much would you say the affair cost the parents of this young schmuck?”
“Plenty. Renting the space from the synagogue's a few thou in itself. Then you've got food, music, party favors. Each kid got a hollow ceramic sneaker with his name stenciled on itâI guess it was supposed to be like a pencil holder or something. They were filled with bags of green M&M's, the bar mitzvah kid's favorite candy. Oh, and there was a caricature artist, too, drawing pictures of the guests.”
Tristan shook his head. “It's the end of the goddamn Jews. You know what I got for my bar mitzvah?”
“A tongue sandwich with mustard and a gold pen. Which you bet in a craps game against Sammy Fischer.”
“Correct.”
“What ever happened to him anyway?”
“Fischer? Who the hell cares?”
RISK finishes his drink and points toward the staircase with his chin. “How's it going up there?” he ventures.
Tristan's eyes narrow. “What is this, an interview? Terribly. I don't have the stamina for this shit anymore.”
“You've been saying that for as long as I can remember. But every time I come over, you're in your study.”
“And what have I published in that time? One shitty book, the year you were born.”
“I liked
The Organist.
”
“You're not old enough to understand how bad it is. I tried to be a man of the times, go with the flow for once instead of against it, so I wrote a sex novel. It wasn't me, sonny. I've never cheated in my life. Probably the only writer alive who can say so. That novel was my infidelityâI cheated on myself. The critics were right that time; I've thrown better novels in the trash can. But I was desperate to come in out of the wilderness and publish something.”
It is far more than his grandfather usually volunteers. “Tell me about your process,” RISK says, emboldened. “I mean, do you start with a plot andâ”
Tristan grimaces. “For God's sake. Talking about it will do me in for sure.”
RISK stares at the carpet, prepared to endure the thirty seconds of awkward silence that will pass before his grandfather conjures a topic of his own. After ten, though, he decides to push. It's his job in the family, has been since RISK was a toddler. Nobody had ever dared disturb Tristan before he came along; that's the way his mother tells it anyway. At three, he wriggled free of her admonishmentsâor had she set him loose?âand barged into his grandfather's study. Climbed onto Tristan's lap, to the novelist's consternation and, after a moment's consideration, his delight.
“C'mon, Grandpa. Tell me something. Anything. I'm not gonna learn jackshit from the failed novelists teaching English at my school.”
The old man snorts. “What makes you think you want to write?”
“I'm good at it.”
“That's not a reason.”
“It beats working?”
“If that's what you think, forget it.”
RISK caps the Sharpie, taps it against his jawbone. “I want to make sense of this fucked-up world.”
Tristan takes both glasses to the bar, pours refills. “I suppose that'll do. Until you come up with something better.” He hands RISK a second scotch, larger than the first, and returns to his seat. “Imagine you're taking a dump. I'm willing to bet that every single time you wipe your ass, you do it the exact same way. Maybe you ball up the paper against your thigh, or fold it over your hand. It doesn't matter. The point is, you've probably never bothered to notice how you do it, this thing you've done thousands upon thousands of times.”
“A writer notices.”
“No. A writer finds somebody else to wipe his ass, so he can concentrate on writing.” Tristan sips his scotch. “That's a joke. Yes, a writer notices.” He runs a palm over his soft white hair. “I could really do with a haircut. It's either that or buy a violin.”
He shifts to look at the pad in his grandson's lap. “What are you doing there?” RISK holds it up for him, not sure he likes where this might go.
“What does it say?”
“RISK. My alias.”
Tristan squints. “I don't see it.”
RISK traces each letter for him. “It's supposed to be hard to read. Another graffâ” He stops himself, not wanting to utter the word. “Another writer would be able to read it.”
“
Writer,
you say?”
“The guys who do this stuff, they call themselves writers. Because the medium is words.”
“I see. The subways in the city used to be covered with this sort of thing, you know.”
RISK can't help but smile. “Yeah, I know. Guys figured out that if they wrote their names on trains, a million people a day would see it. That's the allureâfame.”
“Writing and fame. There's a match made in hell. You actually do this sort of thing, or do you confine yourself to paper?”
“No,” says RISK, feeling his face flush. The burn of the liquor draws away the heat. “I mean, yeah, I actually do it. I'm not bad.”
“It can't be legal, of course.”
“Well, getting away with it is half the fun. And there are rules. Private property's off-limits, sort of.”
“Deface the public and respect the private, is that it? Reverse communism?”
“I never thought of it like that. Most guys, their philosophy is basically that the system fucks them over, so they're gonna strike back, claim something. Beautify the city, or destroy it. Those two words are almost interchangeable when it comes to writers.”
“Creative destruction. More reverse communism.” Tristan peers down his nose, considers the ice melting in his glass. “Another drink?”