The Nimrod Flipout: Stories (4 page)

Benny Brokerage had been waiting for them in the doorway for almost half an hour, and when they arrived he tried to act as if it didn’t make him mad. “It’s all her fault,” the older man said, sniggering, and held out his hand for a firm, no-nonsense shake. “Don’t believe Butchie,” the peroxide urged him. She looked at least fifteen years younger than her man. “We got here earlier, except we couldn’t find any parking.” And Benny Brokerage gave her his foxy smile, like he really gave a shit why she and Butchie were late. He showed them the apartment, which was almost completely furnished, with a high ceiling and a kitchen window that almost gave you a view of the sea. He’d barely gotten through half the usual round, when Butchie pulled out his checkbook and said he’d take it, and that he was even OK with paying a year’s rent up front, except that he wanted a little bit off the top, just so he could feel like he wasn’t being taken for a ride. Benny Brokerage explained that the owner was living abroad, so he wasn’t at liberty to lower the price. Butchie insisted it was small change. “As far as I’m concerned,” he said, “you can take it off your commission. What’s your cut?” “Eight,” Benny Brokerage said after a moment’s pause, preferring not to risk a lie. “So you’ll still be left with five,” Butchie announced, and finished writing out the check. When he saw that the broker wasn’t holding out his hand to take it, he added, “Look at it this way, the market’s gone through the floor, and five percent of something is a lot more than eight percent of nothing.”

Butchie, or Tuvia Minster, which was the name that appeared on the check, said the peroxide would drop by the next morning to pick up an extra key. Benny Brokerage said no problem, except it had to be before eleven, because he had some appointments after that. The next day, she didn’t show. It was already eleven-twenty, and Benny Brokerage, who was aching to leave but didn’t really want to stand her up, pulled the check out of the drawer. It had the office phone numbers, but he preferred to avoid another tedious conversation with Butchie, and went for the home number instead. It wasn’t until she answered that he remembered he didn’t even know her name, so he opted for “Mrs. Minster.” On the phone, she somehow sounded a little less dumb, but still she couldn’t remember who he was or that they’d made an appointment for that morning. Benny Brokerage kept his cool, and reminded her slowly, the way you do when you’re talking to a child, how he had met with her and her husband the day before, and how they’d signed for the apartment. There was no response on the other end and when she finally asked him to describe what she looked like, he realized he’d really blown it. “The truth is,” he crooned, “I must have the wrong number. What did you say your husband’s name was? That’s it then. I was looking for Nissim and Dalia. Directory Assistance strikes again. I’m really sorry. Good-bye,” and he slammed the receiver down before she had a chance to answer. The peroxide arrived at the office fifteen minutes later, eyes at half-mast and a face that hadn’t been washed yet. “I’m sorry.” She yawned. “It took me half an hour to find a cab.”

The following morning, when he arrived at the office, there was a woman waiting outside on the sidewalk. She looked about forty, and something about the way she was dressed, about her fragrance, was so not-from-around-here, that when he spoke, he instinctively went for his most genteel pronunciation. Turned out she was looking for a two-or three-room place. She’d prefer to buy, but she didn’t rule out a rental, as long as it was available right away. Benny Brokerage said he did happen to have a few nice apartments for sale, and that because the market was in a slump they’d be reasonably priced. He asked her how she’d found him, and she said she’d looked in the Yellow Pages. “Are you Benny?” she asked. He said no—that there hadn’t been a Benny for ages, but that he’d kept the name in order not to lose the goodwill. “I’m Michael,” he said, smiling. “The truth is that when I’m on the job, even I forget sometimes.” “I’m Leah,” the woman said, smiling back. “Leah Minster. We spoke on the phone yesterday.”

“This is a little uncomfortable,” Leah Minster said all of a sudden, out of nowhere. The first apartment had been too dark, and they were walking through the second one. Benny Brokerage tried to play dumb, and started talking about how simple it would be to renovate, and stuff like that, as if she’d been referring to the apartment. “After you phoned me,” Leah Minster said, ignoring his reply, “I tried to talk it over with him. At first he lied, but then he got tired of lying, and confessed. That’s what the apartment is for. I’m leaving him.” Benny Brokerage continued showing her around, thinking to himself that it was none of his business, and that there was no reason for him to get uptight. “Is she young?” Leah Minster persisted, and he nodded and said, “She’s not nearly as attractive as you are. I hate having to say a thing like this about a client, but he’s an idiot.”

The third apartment had better light, and when he showed her the view of the park from the bedroom window, he felt her moving closer, not touching him exactly, but close enough. And even though she liked the apartment, she wanted him to show her another one. In the car, she kept asking him all sorts of questions about the peroxide, and Benny Brokerage tried to put her down but stay kind of vague at the same time. He didn’t really feel comfortable, but he went on anyway, because he saw it was making her happy. Whenever they stopped talking, there was a kind of tension, especially at the stoplights, and somehow he just couldn’t think of anything to say, the way he usually could, or come up with a little story to take their minds off being stuck. All he could do was stare at the traffic light and wait for it to change. At one of the intersections, even when the light changed, the car in front of them, a Mercedes, didn’t move. Benny Brokerage slammed the horn twice and cursed the driver through the window. And when the guy in the Mercedes didn’t seem to give a damn, he stormed out of the car. Turned out there was nobody to pick a fight with though, because the driver, who seemed at first to be dozing, didn’t wake up, even when Benny Brokerage nudged him. Then the ambulance crew arrived and said it was a stroke. They searched the driver’s pockets and the car, but they couldn’t find any ID. And Benny Brokerage felt kind of rotten for cursing the guy without a name, and he was sorry for the mean things he’d said about the peroxide too, even though that really had nothing to do with it.

Leah Minster sat beside him in the car, looking pale. He drove her back to the office and made them both some coffee. “The truth is that I didn’t tell him anything,” she said, and took a sip of the instant. “I was lying actually, just so you’d tell me about her. I’m sorry, I just had to know.” Benny Brokerage smiled and told himself and her that there was no harm done really, that all they’d done was see a couple of apartments and some poor guy who’d dropped dead, and that if there was anything to be learned from the whole experience it was to thank God they were alive—or something along those lines. She finished her coffee, said sorry again, and left. And Michael, who still had a few sips to go, looked around his office, a two-by-three-meter cubicle with a window overlooking the main drag. Suddenly the place seemed so small and transparent, like the ant colony he got for his bar mitzvah a million years ago. And all the goodwill that he’d boasted about so solemnly just two hours earlier sounded like a load of crap. Lately, he didn’t much like it when people called him Benny. He didn’t like it at all.

By the end of the first term, Ehud Guznik was already the tallest boy in his class, maybe even in the whole grade. And besides that, he had a new sports bike, a squat, hairy dog with the eyes of one of those old men who’ve been waiting in line at the public health clinic all morning, a girlfriend from his class who wouldn’t kiss on the mouth but would let him touch the boobs she didn’t have, and a straight-A report card, except for geography, and even that was because the teacher was a bitch. In short, Ehud had nothing to complain about, and his parents were bursting with pride. You couldn’t bump into them without having to listen to a little anecdote about their amazing child. And people, like people, would nod at them in a mixture of boredom and genuine admiration, and say, “Wonderful, Mr./Mrs. Guznik, that’s really wonderful.” But what really counts isn’t what people say to your face. It’s what they say behind your back. And behind their backs, the first thing people said about Max and Felicia Guznik was that they kept getting smaller. Over a single winter, they seemed to have lost at least nine inches each. Mrs. Guznik, once considered imposing, now barely reached the breakfast cereal shelf in the grocery store, and Max too, who once stood close to five-ten, had already moved the car seat all the way forward so he could reach the gas pedal. Very unpleasant, and all the more obvious when they stood next to their giant of a son, only in the fourth grade but already a head taller than his mommy.

Every Tuesday afternoon, Ehud went to the school yard with his father to play basketball. Ehud’s father thought Ehud had great potential, because he was both tall and smart. “All through history, the Jews were always considered a smart people, but very short,” he liked to explain to Ehud while they practiced shooting baskets. “And every once in a blue moon, when a big schlub did get born, for some reason, he always turned out to be such a knucklehead that you couldn’t even teach him what a hook shot is.” But you could teach Ehud, and he got better from week to week. And lately, ever since his father started getting shorter, they were evenly matched. “You,” his father would tell him on the way home from the court, “you will be a great player someday, the Moshe Dayan of basketball, except without the patch.” The compliments made Ehud very proud, even though he’d never seen Moshe Dayan shoot hoops, but even more than he was proud, he was worried. Worried about the scary way his parents were shrinking. “Maybe all parents are like that,” he sometimes tried to reassure himself out loud, “and next year, they’ll teach us about it in science class.” But deep in his heart, he knew something was wrong. Especially after Netta, who’d said yes when he asked her to go steady with him five months before, swore to him on the Bible that her parents, from the time she was little, had stayed more or less the same height. The truth was that he wanted to talk to them about it, but he felt there were things it was better not to talk about. Netta, for example, had a kind of light fuzz on her cheeks, like a beard, and Ehud always pretended he didn’t notice, because he thought maybe she herself didn’t know and if he told her she’d just feel bad. Maybe it was the same thing with his parents. Or even if they did know, maybe they were still glad he didn’t notice. Things went on like that until after Passover. Ehud’s parents kept getting smaller, and he kept acting as if nothing was happening. And the truth is that no one would ever have figured it out if it hadn’t been for Zayde.

From the time he was a puppy, Ehud’s dog was attracted to old people. And that’s why his favorite thing was walking in King David Park, where all the old people from the retirement home went to get some air. Zayde could sit next to them and listen to their long stories for hours. They were also the ones who gave him the name “Zayde”—Grandpa—a name he liked a whole lot better than the original “Jimmy” he got at the pound. Of all the old men, Zayde’s favorite was an old geezer in a billed cap who talked to him in Yiddish and fed him blood sausage. Ehud also liked that old man, who made Ehud swear, the first time they met, never to get on an elevator with Zayde, because, according to him, dogs don’t understand the concept of an elevator, and going into a kind of small room in one place and then seeing the doors open on another place altogether shakes their confidence in their spatial perception and, in general, makes them feel extremely inadequate. He didn’t offer Ehud any blood sausage, but he did treat him to jelly beans and chocolate coins wrapped in gold. That old man must have died, or moved to a different home, because they didn’t see him in the park anymore. Sometimes Zayde still barked and ran after a different old man who looked enough like him, then whimpered a little when he found out he was wrong, but that was all.

One day, after Passover, Ehud came home from school in a bad mood, and when he finished walking Zayde, he didn’t feel like going up the stairs, so they took the elevator. He felt a twinge as he pressed the 4 button, but said to himself that the old man was probably dead anyway, which definitely meant he didn’t have to keep his promise. When the elevator door opened, Zayde peered out, walked back into the elevator, contemplated for a second, and fainted dead away.

Ehud and his frightened parents went straight to the vet, who was quick to reassure them about the dog. But that vet was much more than your ordinary vet. He was a family doctor and a gynecologist from South America who, at some point in his life, for personal reasons, had decided to treat animals. And that doctor needed only one look to realize that the Guzniks were suffering from a rare family disease, a disease that resulted in Ehud’s growing taller and taller, but at his parents’ expense. “It’s simple math,” the vet explained. “Every inch added on to the child is an inch subtracted from the parents.” “And this disease,” Ehud probed, “when does it end?” “End?” The vet tried to camouflage his sorrow behind his thick Argentinean accent. “Only when the parents disappear.”

All the way home, Ehud cried and his parents tried to comfort him. Strangely enough, their terrible fate didn’t bother them at all. In fact, they almost seemed to enjoy it. “Lots of parents are dying to sacrifice everything for their children,” his mother explained to him when he was already in bed, “but not all of them get the chance. Do you know how awful it is to be like Aunt Bella, who sees her son growing up to be short, stupid, and untalented, just like his father, and she can’t do a thing about it? Okay, it’s true that, in the end, we’ll disappear, but so what? In the end, everyone dies, and your father and me, we won’t even die, we’ll just fade away.”

The next day, Ehud went to school without really feeling like it, and got thrown out of Bible class again. He was sitting on the steps near the gym feeling sorry for himself when suddenly he realized something: if every inch he grew was at his parents’ expense, all he had to do to save them was stop growing! Ehud hurried to the nurse’s office and slyly asked for all the information she had on the subject. From all the brochures she shoved at him, Ehud learned that if he wanted to put up a real fight against growing, what he had to do was smoke a lot, eat very little and at irregular hours, and sleep even less, preferably with lots of interruptions.

He gave his ten-o’clock-recess sandwich to Shiri, a nice, chubby girl from the other fourth-grade class. He ate as little as he could at meals, and to keep people from suspecting, he always passed the meat and dessert to his faithful dog, who waited under the table with sad eyes. The sleeping thing worked out by itself, because since that meeting with the vet, he couldn’t sleep for ten minutes without waking up from terrifying, guilt-ridden nightmares. Which left the business with the cigarettes. He smoked two packs a day, cheap and unfiltered. Two whole packs, not one cigarette less. His eyes got red and his mouth filled with a bitter taste, and he also started to cough, an old man’s cough, but not for a minute did he think of quitting.

A year and something later, on the day report cards were formally handed out, Matt Zlotnitski and Raz Samara were already taller than he was. Raz also became Netta’s new boyfriend after she dumped Ehud on account of the bad breath he’d developed. In fact, that year Ehud’s popularity declined. To tell the truth, the kids stopped talking to him completely because they said his chronic cough got on their nerves, and besides, his marks were going down and he wasn’t good at sports anymore. The only one who still spoke to him was Shiri, who had started out liking him because of the sandwiches but later took to him because of his personality and other things, and they spent hours together, talking about all kinds of stuff he’d never talked about with Netta. Ehud’s parents stopped shrinking at eight inches, and after the doctor confirmed it, Ehud even tried to stop smoking but couldn’t. He went to an acupuncturist and a hypnotist, and they both said that the main reason he couldn’t stop was pampering and character, but Shiri, who actually liked the smell of the cigarettes, consoled him by saying that it really didn’t matter.

On Saturdays, Ehud would put his parents in his shirt pocket and take them for a bike ride. He pedaled slowly enough for the stout Zayde to keep up with them, and when his parents fought inside his pocket, or just got tired of each other, he would move one of them to another pocket. Once, Shiri even went with them, and they rode to the park and had a real picnic. And on the way back, when they stopped to look at the sunset, Ehud’s father whispered loudly to him from his pocket, “Kiss her. Kiss her!” which was a little embarrassing. Ehud quickly changed the subject and talked to her about the sun and how hot and big it was and all kinds of things like that, until it was dark, and his parents fell asleep deep in his pocket. When he’d exhausted all his stories about the sun and they’d almost reached Shiri’s house, he told her about the moon and the stars too, and their effect on each other, and when those stories were finished too, he coughed and shut up. And Shiri said to him, “Kiss me,” and he kissed her. “Way to go, son!” he could hear his father whisper from the depths of his pocket, and he felt his emotional mother jab him with her elbow and softly weep with joy.