Short Takes by Michael Meltsner

Author:Michael Meltsner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: fiction, law, novel, new york, death penalty, courts, liberal, journeys, law schools, random house, meltsner
Publisher: Quid Pro, LLC

Arrangements

THERE ARE times when to distract me from my daily balancing act I wish Connie would take a lover. Perhaps she already has and I don’t know it. That marks the biggest change—not that she might have or that occasionally I want her to, but that I wouldn’t know it. “Look,” I say, “man is a player, but in the city we don’t have the space or time enough for outdoor sports, so we have affairs. That’s what we do—secret affairs. Polygamy is out. Keeping a mistress is burdensome. Go have yours. You don’t need my permission.” The tears flow, covering the scorn. But I am steadfast in the right. If an edict came down from the seat of power banning these intimate moments caught on the run, the center really would not hold. After raging at our kids and looking for a good war, we would take to the streets, mobs of would-be lovers blindly vandalizing midtown. And the higher you go, the deeper the need to escape. If you doubt it, look at the recent history of the Presidency.

Annie, my own favorite ex-lover, nagged me into taking her out to the Island to have a look at my old neighborhood. Fire had destroyed the house of my childhood, now replaced by a boxy builder’s special. The boardwalk was fringed with old-age homes. My public school had been torn down, and the penny arcade was a grimy variety store where everything cost sixty-nine cents. On the empty lots near the ocean the city had built high-rise public housing. Only the Orthodox temple looked unchanged, though the window I broke playing stick ball was no longer cracked. The kids had scattered as worshipers poured out of the building sure that a pogrom was in progress, but I stood my ground. The first to arrive, young men in their early twenties wearing tight-fitting suits, wool knitted ties, trimmed beards and broad-rimmed, felt-banded hats, came at me with fists stiffly held like hammers. No wonder the Germans could kill them, I thought, simply pointing in explanation at the broom handle, secure in my American understanding of innocence.

They failed to strike but gripped me hard and hustled me into the shul to await the arrival of two Irish cops. The broken minyan chattered like hungry starlings in a tree. Old men in black silk peered through the circle that formed around the pew in which I was tossed, eager to see the storm trooper. It never occurred to me that I might be harmed. This was my country; they must be here on sufferance. I finally put an end to it merely by saying, “I am Jewish.” They stopped in mid-chirp. I retrieved the pink rubber ball everyone called a “spaldeen,” though it was manufactured by the Spalding Company of Chicopee, Massachusetts, and held it aloft like an orb. This told the cops their business was over; they ordered me to beat it.

Annie enjoys stories of my childhood but tries not to show it.

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