Playworld

The Agony of Defeat

The Agony of Defeat

Of course, it was an election year.

In the run-up to November, I didn’t give the candidates much thought.

During my sessions with Elliott, we often stopped at the Second Avenue diner.

We took our seats at the counter, the waiter winked at Elliott while taking another order, and I realized that he probably saw the good doctor eight times a day.

The cook kept the radio above the griddle tuned to the news.

Ten-Ten WINS, I was sure to hear my father’s voice say at least once before we left, You give us twenty-two minutes, we’ll give you the world.

The anchor led with the presidential race, the tightening October poll numbers.

Elliott slapped the Formica with his open palm, a bit of performance he played self-consciously when the waiter arrived, ordering a cup of black coffee for himself and a chocolate egg cream for me.

Elliott’s hands were laced around his cup.

“Maybe we should’ve gone with Ted Kennedy,” he said.

“A lot of enthusiasm swirling around him.

Nostalgic, to be sure.

All that Camelot crap.

Kennedy was no Lancelot, let me tell you.

The guy didn’t agonize about cozying up to the nearest Guinevere either.

But there’s a lesson in that.

In politics, as in art, put your money where your inspiration is.” The hostage crisis, Elliott observed, was like an endless stretch of bad weather for our president, “as if he needed stronger headwinds besides this economy.” Elliott shook his head.

“Am I right, or what?”

I shook mine too. An egg cream, I reflected, didn’t have an egg in it.

“Of course, Teddy screwed up with Chappaquiddick,” Elliott continued. “That was probably disqualifying.”

“I can’t disagree,” I said, because I’d found the more I agreed, the more camouflaged I was by his monologue, the less we discussed my terrible grades.

As for my own politics, my sense of Carter was acquired by pure osmosis and was bound up in a whole other series of images from the nightly news, Time, and Newsweek, a collage soundtracked by the complaints of grown-ups—which I picked up at our get-togethers, particularly Al Moretti’s and my father’s, and could imitate pitch-perfectly—of endless gas lines and a small group of Saudis I figured was OPEC.

“He’s a fucking disastah, ” said Al, “a hick and a scold with his bullshit red sweatah and his crisis of confidence crap.

Don’t tell me I’m the problem.

Don’t tell me I’ve got the malaise.

You can lead a horse to water, but if you’re the leader of the free world, you make the fucker drink.” Failure, as I look back on it now, swirled around our president like the sands that choked those helicopters’ rotors during the botched Operation Eagle Claw hostage rescue; was like the black water that flooded Kennedy’s car and filled Mary Jo Kopechne’s lungs after they went sailing over the bridge in Chappaquiddick.

“But this Reagan character,” Elliott said to me now, “this former GE spokesperson,” he added with disdain. “Don’t even get me started on him as governor. At least the American people aren’t that stupid to elect him to the highest office. We’re not that stupid, are we, Aldo?”

Aldo, the short-order cook, visible in the service window, leaned down to look at us beneath the pennants of order tickets. “I could use a raise,” he said.

“Speaking of,” Elliott said to the waiter. He pulled a five from his fat black wallet, its fold stuffed with so many bills it looked like a slim book of poems. “Keep the change.”

As for Reagan, Elliott, Al, and my father wrote him off as a lightweight or worse—this again entirely according to their chatter—as hawkish, racist, repressive, and dangerously unqualified, not to mention fiscally irresponsible.

And here too my assessment was Polly-want-a-cracker parroted from bits and pieces I could glean from conversations at the dinner table and during the Sunday morning news shows. Play the part of the bright, underachieving kid who kept up with current affairs, and according to Elliott—which Dad reported to Mom—I was “full of potential.”

“Look at his record in California,” Elliott said. “Mr. Maximum Freedom until the college kids start protesting at People’s Park and he sends in the National Guard.”

“Bloody Thursday,” I said, and shook my head in disgust.

“It’s fascist, is what it is,” Elliott said. Pleased by my input, he stopped and reached out to shake my hand. “You’ve had a bumpy start to high school. But you’re righting the ship. You’re turning it around.”

“The wind’s at my back,” I said.

“Onward,” Elliott said.

“ándale,” I said. “Arriba, arriba.”

But as an actor, it was difficult not to recognize, even at times appreciate, Reagan’s actor slickness, his stealth-comic timing made more obvious and suspect to me by his pomaded hair, the sometimes just barely perceptible tremor that he used to amplify his sense of disbelief, as if the stupidity or obvious hypocrisy of a comment set his head a-bobble.

Just four days before the election, for homework in American government class, we had to watch Carter and Reagan’s first and only debate and write three paragraphs about three issues discussed.

“There you go again,” Reagan kept saying to Carter, as if it were off the cuff, although I knew a canned line when I heard one. I called Cliffnotes to get his thoughts and maybe tweak mine based on his, but even before we could start, Cliff said, “Did I tell you about Pilchard?”

Simon Pilchard had spent the past several weeks with a taped splint holding his nose in place, his eyes fading from a raccoon-like black to blue and green after the severe break Cliff had accidentally inflicted upon him. We hadn’t spoken to him since the accident, but we’d occasionally seen him trudging to the basement with Kepplemen, carrying his headgear now affixed with a face guard that resembled a hockey goalie’s.

“His father’s suing us,” Cliff continued. Pilchard’s father was a well-known judge and shouldn’t have needed the money.

“For what?”

“Pain and suffering and the denial of his son’s love.”

“How much?”

“Fifty thousand.”

“Oh, snap!”

“I’m going to kill that piece of shit,” Cliffnotes said with uncharacteristic venom. “He’s fucking with my family.”

On election night, my parents took Oren and me with them to vote.

Their voting station was at P.S.87, on Seventy-Eighth Street.

Dad let me pull the lever that drew the curtain.

He showed me how to flip the smaller levers that punched his ballot, saying the names aloud as if he were narrating a documentary.

I worried that other voters might hear, since his voice carried, and when I paused to ask him about one of the candidates—“Is he good?”—he said only, “He’s a Democrat.” A great smash of gears, as if we were on a service elevator, when he pulled the lever once more to open the curtain.

It was dark by now, and we walked down Broadway. Dad was walking ahead of us, which drove Mom crazy. “Go get your father,” she orderedme.

There was an enormous crash. From our side of the street a storefront’s glass exploded, and for a moment on the sidewalk there lay a man covered in frost.

His jacket and pants, even his face, were powdered white. Shattered glass piled around him like rock salt. He was quickly up and running at full stride, across the avenue, headed east.

Three butchers—heavyset, wearing yarmulkes and bloodstained aprons—were in pursuit. The carving knives they carried glinted in the headlights.

Here Oren showed his age and huddled with Mom.

We heard sirens in the distance, and within moments, a squad car’s flashers strobed across Broadway. Dad was never shy about asking police or bystanders questions.

His bravery in such moments was unmatched, part of his actor’s chutzpah.

He treated any official like his personal 411 and, after consulting with the cops, rejoined us with the official report.

Mom was angry at him for abandoning us; Oren and I were angry for Mom.

“Do you want to know what happened or not?” Dad asked her.

It turned out that earlier in the day, along with a partner, the man had attempted to rob the store, a crime the butchers had foiled.

When the two perps made their getaway, one ran out the front door, the other toward the back, accidentally locking himself in the freezer.

He’d spent the day hiding out, but rather than die of hypothermia, he finally made a break for it.

Dad, chastened, made it a great show of letting Mom take his arm for the remainder of our walk.

When we arrived home and turned on the television to see the returns, nearly half the country was blue. No states west of Texas had posted their returns, but John Chancellor was already calling the race for Reagan, a sports announcer, a film actor, a governor of California, is our projected winner at eight fifteen Eastern Standard Time.

“Holy shit,” Mom said. Oren and I laughed because she never cursed.

Dad sat down on the bed. As Oren and I were leaving, Mom, who’d draped her arm over his shoulders, asked us, over her own, to close the door.

—

The Saturday after Thanksgiving, the usual crowd gathered at The Saloon, a restaurant across the street from Lincoln Center. Elliott and Lynn. His daughter, Deborah, and her husband, Eli. Al Moretti, my parents. And lo and behold, the Shahs.

Their two daughters, Danny and Jackie, had performed in The Nutcracker matinee and were still in stage makeup, their hair bunned and cheeks rouged, their lipstick so bright they looked like pageant contestants.

I hadn’t seen Naomi since our last meeting, and when the Shahs arrived at our long table, I whispered to my mother, whom I was sitting next to, “You didn’t tell me the Shahs were coming.” “Was I supposed to?” Mom asked.

Naomi brought Danny and Jackie over to greet her.

She stood with a hand on each of her daughters’ shoulders.

The pair spoke to Mom with something close to reverence. My mother gave the two girls her complete attention, asking them about their performance that afternoon.

Naomi took the opportunity to look at me and smile weakly, almost apologetically and imploringly—for all the guests, for this encroachment upon our time together. For some sign from me that I too had missed her and wished that we could be somewhere else, alone. And beneath her daughters’ conversation she said, “Hey, Griffin,” and then, almost accusatorially, “It’s been a while.”

When I could not summon a response, Mom said, “Griffin, an adult is talking to you.” She turned back to Naomi’s girls, which seemed to create a zone of silence where Naomi could ask more intimately, in a tone that was almost taciturn, “How are you?”

“I’m okay.”

“School going good? Now that your show’s over.”

“Better,” I said.

“I’m glad,” she said, with real feeling.

I caught Oren’s eye. I sent him my telepathic red alert. He was standing next to Elliott and Sam while they talked. He noticed my alarm and then nodded that I meet him midpoint at the long table. “Oren and I are going to go play Space Invaders, ” I said to Naomi, and left to join him.

We had some money of our own but decided to see how much we could grift from each one of the adults. We started with Al, who was talking with Dad. “Shel,” he was telling my father, “what can I say? My heart’s shattered. I mean”—he stretched his arm out in front of his crotch—“my cock was out to here for this kid. I was like the man of fucking steel.”

Oren tapped his shoulder and blinked his eyes sweetly while I made the ask.

“Al,” I said, “don’t be sad, you’re a good guy.”

“That’s sweet of you, Oren.”

“Griffin.”

“Whichever. Now what the fuck do you want?”

“A dollar.”

“For?”

“Space Invaders.”

“Who?”

“It’s a video game.”

“Maybe for a Shirley Temple I might.”

“Okay then,” Oren cut in, “how about for two Shirley Temples?”

“It’ll rot your teeth.”

“How about to go away?” Oren said.

“Let me see what I got in change,” and he put his cigarette in his mouth and stuffed his hands in his jeans’ pocket.

Mom never carried cash, so we didn’t bother asking and moved on to hit up Deborah’s husband, Eli. He always wore a suit but on Sundays was casual and lost the tie. After pulling a dollar bill from his wallet, Eli, in a moment of earnestness, held it up and said, “Only if you teach me how to play later,” to which we agreed, knowing full well it was a contract we’d never have to honor.

Deborah was next. She was smoking a Virginia Slim. She liked to make a big deal about connecting with us, about having a conversation, and turned her chair to face me. The drawer of her lower jaw slid forward to suck on her thin cigarette, so that it pointed up slightly. She palmed my elbows and properly oriented me; she finger-combed the curls from my eyes. She said, “Let me get a look at you, Mr. Handsome,” so I took the moment to get a look at her—her bobbed hair and heavily freckled face, her barracuda bone structure. “Now tell me, what’s going on? How’s school? What’s your favorite subject? What’s the last interesting thing you read?”

“Romeo and Juliet,” I said.

“Very good, very good, I like your taste, Shakespeare’s still relevant, who’s your favorite character?”

“Probably Mercutio. I had to memorize one of his speeches.”

“Our teacher showed us the movie in class,” Oren said. “There was a nude scene and we saw Romeo’s butt.”

Deborah, ignoring Oren, nodded seriously at me and, after tipping her cigarette’s cherry over the ashtray, took a long pull at it and blew the smoke from her nostrils. “So you like English then,” she said. “The communication arts. Very important. You could be a corporate speechwriter or go into advertising with those skills.”

“If you think about it,” Oren said, “Griffin’s already in advertising.”

“You know,” Deborah said, ignoring him again and winding things up with the same story about me that she always recounted, “I’ll never forget a conversation you and I had when you were seven. You’d been watching all these horror movies, and I asked you what you liked about them so much, and you know what you told me?”

“Wait,” I said, “let me think,” and took my chin in hand, pretending to recall the moment I had no recollection of whatsoever. “I said,” brightening, “they made me appreciate how good my life was!”

“And I thought that was a pretty profound answer.”

Deborah snapped open her purse and gave us a two-dollar bill, which Oren plucked from her. “We’re keeping this as a collector’s item,” he said as we swung back around to Dad, who seemed to have anticipated us.

Dad said, “Can you break a twenty?” which killed Al.

“Actually,” Oren said, and produced a wad from which he began thumbing change, “I can.”

“Go ask your mother,” Dad said.

Next to Al sat Elliott, who was the easiest to grift because of the tacit rules about speaking with him at these gatherings. He affected a sort of cloudy indifference, a happy disinterest, that I took to be a buffer. He had no desire to talk about anything personal whatsoever since all he ever did was talk to us about personal things, but especially tonight, when everyone was determined to ignore the election results or process the stunning outcome. Consequently, he did not greet us head-on but always seemed, at least at first, to notice us after a moment, like someone calling across to him at a loud and crowded party.

“Elliott,” Oren said, “I had the craziest dream.”

Elliott signaled the waiter and, after rattling his highball, pointed to his Scotch.

“It had episodes and cliffhangers like Batman, but it started with me in my bunk bed, and Mom and Dad were in there too—”

“Yeah?” Elliott said. “Both of them?”

“And Mom was naked, and both Dad and I were in our underwear.”

“Let’s talk about this next week.”

“Okay, but Griffin and I were wondering if we could have some money for video games.”

Elliott stuffed a ten in Oren’s palm. Oren said, “I’ll bring you change,” to which Elliott replied, “Keep it, play till your heart’s content,” and then we steeled ourselves before approaching Elliott’s wife, Lynn.

She presented a massive challenge. A hulking presence at the far end of the table, dew-eyed and manatee-quiet among so many jabberers, she sat, as she always did, directly across from Elliott, their respective seats saved before their arrival as if every event they attended were one they were hosting. She was taller than her husband and hunched forward with her elbows resting on the table, her arms folded over each, these cradling her enormous breasts. This motionlessness, coupled with her short sandy hair and her expression of permanent disappointment and intolerance, plus the fact that she’d been a high school math teacher, added to her intimidating countenance. She was the sort of person who, upon greeting you at her door on Halloween, responded to the question “Trick or treat?” with “Trick.”

“And what can I do you gentlemen for?” she asked.

“A dollar,” Oren said.

“I already gave to the March of Dimes.”

“We’re playing Space Invaders. ”

“How much is a game?” she asked.

“A quarter.”

“You know,” Lynn said, “when you think about it, a quarter is a lot of money.” Like magic she produced a quarter between her thumb and index finger and held it toward us. When I reached to grab it, she quickly withdrew her hand. “Let me ask you this. If you saved a quarter once a week for a year instead of wasting it on a pinball game, how much would you have by next November?”

“Thirteen dollars,” said Oren, who sensed a trap but remained riveted.

“Correct,” Lynn said. “So you put that money in the bank at twelve percent interest, and then how much have you got?”

Oren, mumbling, tapped his thumb to the tips of his remaining fingers. “Almost fifteen bucks!” he said.

“Fourteen dollars and fifty-six cents, to be exact. Imagine what you could buy at Hanukkah with that kind of money. A special present,” she said, slowly nodding, “that gives lasting joy instead of bing boop bleep over there.” She dismissed the game with a flick of her wrist, and Oren shook his head. Hanukkah. Eight days of gifts we were missing out on because of our diluted blood. “Roses are red,” Mom liked to say, “violets are bluish. If it wasn’t for me, we’d all be Jewish.”

“I’m going to give you this quarter,” Lynn said sadly, and handed it to Oren, folding his fingers over it and then laying her palm on his fist, as if she had gifted him an heirloom. “I want you to go now and have your fun, but I also want you to remember this little lesson.”

Oren asked me if we should approach Naomi and I said no. When I asked him if we should approach Sam, he said, “That’s embarrassing.”

It was while we were sitting at the tabletop video game and sipping our Shirley Temples that Naomi appeared.

I felt her hip at my side, her elbow touching my shoulder, and then I caught her face’s reflection in the black glass while the screen flashed. She bent farther forward so that we were nearly temple to temple. She tucked her hair behind her ear, her scent and the tick-tock of her necklace’s pendants fogging me in embarrassment.

“What’s the object here?” Naomi asked.

“Clear the board,” Oren said. It was his turn and he was transfixed. “Before the aliens land.”

“I like the squid one,” Naomi said.

“I like the crab,” Oren said.

“Which one do you like?” Naomi asked me.

The aliens’ march was to the beat of a snare drum, and I felt like Oren’s laser cannon: nowhere to hide while his bunkers disintegrated.

“You look skinny,” Naomi said, still watching the screen. “You should come to the table and order something to eat.”

“I’ve got another turn,” I said, and then Oren’s avatar was destroyed.

“Suit yourself,” she said. “But don’t leave without catching up.”

We stared at the screen until she left. When I glanced up Oren was looking at me.

“Grody,” he said.

Naomi did not approach me again that night, although back at the table she took the seat next to my father and, for the rest of the evening, seemed to be in competition with Al as to who could laugh loudest at his jokes.

She knocked her shoulder against Dad’s whenever he said something witty, or she pushed herself away from him while blurting out, “Shel, you’re terrible.”

Sam took the seat next to Mom and gave her his blinking, smug attention.

He was quick to laugh at his own jokes.

His laugh was horrible; it was like something you’d write in a speech bubble; it ended with a hideous gurgle.

Throughout the rest of the evening, he would lean across Mom’s person, as if to hear her better, in the rare instances when he would listen.

Oren and I had been seated next to her, at the table’s far corner with Danny and Jackie, who huddled in our presence or peeked toward us warily, like rabbits in a nest.

What exactly were they afraid of? At one point, Mom, who sat with her elbow at rest on her crossed legs and chin propped on her palm, turned to face me.

Sam was finishing up a sentence: “Don’t you worry, Lily, this administration’s going to unshackle this economy from so many restrictions and red tape, the energy it unleashes will be orgiastic,” upon which he put his arm over her shoulders to give her a loving squeeze; and my mother, now that she held my gaze, crossed her eyes.

At moments such as these, she was the only person in the room I trusted.

As for Naomi, I managed not to say goodbye.

My family walked home through Lincoln Center.

We headed west past the plaza’s fountains, past Moore’s Reclining Figure sculpture, doubled in its reflection pool, past the theater and along the upper walkway that ran parallel to Sixty-Fifth Street far below.

The gusts off the river assailed us here, elevated as we were.

It was a lightless stretch, and the towering limestone beams to our left were perfect places for muggers to hide.

Dad and Mom walked ahead of Oren and me, a little unsteadily, arm in arm, the sight of which calmed my tingling spider sense.

The pavement beneath our feet was dotted with bird shit, and when I looked up, I could see the huddled pigeons, sheltered from the wind in the overhang’s ledges, puffed and fat and armored against the growing cold.