A Brilliant Novel in the Works Read Free Page A

she said in her Israeli accent,
then she shook her head and left me alone. And slowly, second by second, my
world of worries came back. Another item on my list: the shame of my mother’s
disappointment.
    As I sat there over dinner with my parents, listening to them talk about
the latest tragedy in the Middle East, it was clear to me that there was only
one thing to do. And so I started making a mental list of household items
that could—without anyone’s help—knock me unconscious
.
    Chapter Three
Righteous Room
    Shmendrik and Ally are fabulous people. It’s always fun when
we go out with them. We drink. We laugh. We drink more. We
laugh more. We can tell dirty secrets and dirty jokes and blur
them all together until we’ve poured our hearts out like we’ve
been blending one of my mother’s gazpachos and it’s two in
the morning and we’re not ready to leave the damn bar until
they kick out the four crazy adults who are acting like they’re
seventeen.
    I like seeing how much Julia cares about Shmen, even if
sometimes it means tension about his drinking or his inability
to hold onto a job, or my fear that, in his inebriation, he’ll spill
the
borscht
to Julia about our little low-interest, never-really-pay-back
loan structure.
    So, naturally, I’m resentful about going out with them
when I could’ve been brooding alone at home with a blank
piece of paper in front of me.
    When we get to the Righteous Room, Shmen and Ally are,
as usual, already there. There are four untouched martinis at
the table. Hellos and kisses go all around, Julia admires Ally’s
sexy little boots, Ally admires Julia’s hair, which gets longer
and seems redder each time, I tell Shmen that he’s getting too
skinny, and Shmen tells me that I’m getting too bald. We each
take sips of our martinis, a few words about the weather—
that crazy rain—and then Shmendrik points out that beside
my glass and Julia’s glass there are napkins with handwritten
numbers on them. I have 12 and Julia has 10.
    Shmen has to elbow Ally, who smiles in that shy way that
she smiles, and then she explains Shmen’s game to us. One
number is the number of horses Ally has owned and the other
is the number of men she’s kissed. “That is,” she says, “before
I fell in love with this man,” and she puts her arm around
Shmen.
    “You’ve got ten seconds to figure it out,” Shmendrik tells us.
And that’s how the night begins.
#
    Ally takes care of injured horses and brings them back to
health for almost no pay. Imagine it: this skinny little woman
calming a fifteen-hundred-pound horse. But this explains
how she handles Shmen and her daughter, who both have
more energy than a dozen injured horses.
    It turns out that Ally has owned more horses than she has
kissed men and that Shmen has had more surgeries than apples
and that when Julia was a kid, she wrote 9 unanswered letters
to Frank Sinatra and 7 to Johnny Cash. When it’s my turn, I put
the number 21 on a napkin and give it to Ally and then give
the number 7 to Shmen. I say, “One number is the number of
therapists I’ve had. The other is the number of lovers.”
    My wife sighs. “No brainer,” she says, and she takes a sip of her drink.
#
    The martinis are a thing I started. It’s always gin, always
straight up, always dry, always three olives. Not two, not
one. Sometimes they pretend that they don’t like this drink,
especially my wife. She’ll make a face, like it’s a nasty medicine
for a nasty disease, but I know she loves something about it.
The hint of berry, the clean burn down the throat, and the
pleasure of taking on a ritual that comes from a generation
that is mostly just a shadow in our world. I got this habit
from my father. That man drank at least one martini a day for
fifty years. Toward the end of his life, when the doctor said
he shouldn’t drink so much, he began drinking even more,
realizing that he didn’t have much more time left to enjoy
them. The