He looked at his mother with this thought in his head, and she appeared to expire. She closed her eyes and her face melted into the sad and grotesque posture of an old person in repose. How had this happened to her? She wasn’t made for this part of life, the old part. As he had grown she had diminished, and so it would continue until he became a something and she became a nothing. Life was a zero-sum game.
Sheila shrugged. They watched Muriel breathe.
“Well,” Bronfman said, “I guess we should go.”
Her eyes fluttered open, her face set hard—she was someone different now.
“Going?” she said. “Already?”
“I thought you were asleep.”
“Go, then. It’s what you do. You come and you go, but, mostly, you go.”
“I’ll check in later,” Bronfman said.
“I don’t give a shit,” she said.
“Mother!”
“Don’t Mother me. You know what I mean, and if you don’t know what I mean I will try. To speak. Plainly.”
He waited. Sheila looked to Bronfman for a clue to what should happen now, but he had nothing for her.
“Giving a shit,” Sheila said. “I have never really understood what that means. Wouldn’t one want to give a shit to somebody, because giving a shit would illustrate how they felt about it, whatever it was. Because who wants to be given a shit?”
“I agree,” Bronfman said. “It’s better to give one. It would have substantially more impact.”
Muriel seemed to drift deeper into her pillow, her shrunken head enveloped in its downy folds. Her eyes were empty. It was as if she really were possessed, as if someone or something was speaking through her. “I apologize for making this so hard,” she said. “But I suppose that’s what mothers are for. I’m sorry.”
“That’s okay,” Sheila said. “I can tell you have a heart of pure gold.”
“Really?”
“Fort Knox–grade gold,” she said. “I’m surprised you don’t have a platoon here guarding it.”
Muriel laughed. “That’s why I installed the alarm,” she said. “In case someone tries to steal my heart.”
This brief exchange made Bronfman happy. He felt that he had achieved everything he’d come for.
“Well,” Bronfman said, “I guess we should go.”
“Probably,” his mother said. “I’m drifting away.”
“Do you want the television on or off?” He could turn it on the old-fashioned way if she wanted: manually.
“Off,” she said. “No—on. The public station. There’s a show on about the Great Depression.” She shook her head and looked away toward nothing—a wall. An empty wall. “I know about the Great Depression, Sheila. I’m having one now.”
“Mrs. Bronfman,” Sheila said. She leaned over and kissed Muriel’s shriveled cheek and smiled into her old eyes. “It was good to meet you.”
“Are those flowers for me?” she said, bright-eyed, real, human. “You are the sweetest girl in the world. Thank you. Set them down here. Thank you so much.”
And she closed her eyes again. “Bye now,” she said.
They closed the door behind them. The security system engaged with a beep and a blinking yellow light. Had Bronfman needed to go back in there for any reason, he couldn’t. Not even to kiss his mother good-bye. Her own son, and he didn’t know the code. Bronfman was overcome with what was perhaps his very first epiphany, face to face with a metaphor for his life: he had yet to learn the code for almost anything at all.
Bettina had disappeared. Sheila and Bronfman walked out of the house and up the walk past the monkey grass to his car, totally silent. Bronfman felt the need to apologize, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t apologize for his own mother.
They sat in the car, doors locked. Safe. The brief terribleness over. When they were in Florida together, he thought, their shoulders browned by the sun, this would be one of those times they would look back on and laugh. Bronfman took Sheila’s hand and held it, affirming their successful visit and subsequent escape.
“Off a cliff,” they said, both of them, at the very same time.
“Jinx,” Sheila said. Then she kissed him and he kissed her—again, at the exact same time—jinxing themselves with love.
DAY
SEVENTY
ONE
Bronfman got the call just before lunch. It was Bettina. She didn’t have to tell him why she was calling; as soon as he heard her voice, he knew. Bettina had never called him, ever, and there was only one reason that she ever would.
“Hi, Bettina,” he said. There was an ocean roar of static. Behind it he thought he could hear Bettina crying a little, or maybe just trying to hold back the tears. Or maybe he was providing the emotional backdrop himself. “She died,” he said. “Didn’t she?”
“Who?”
“Muriel,” he said. The word sounded strange on his lips, especially in these circumstances. “Mom.”
Bettina laughed. “I wish. Sometimes. She’s so crazy. No, it’s worse than that.”
“Worse?” He tried to keep his voice down, but the word exploded from his mouth. He felt eyes on him. He smiled and turned away, facing his cubicle wall. But how could it be worse? She could be dying, in the process of dying, on the floor choking or writhing in pain, having a heart attack, bleeding to death, unconscious after falling down the stairs, suicidal—and here was Bettina calling him and not the hospital? He had made a special sheet of important numbers, and the hospital was on it. 911! What was so hard about that? Three buttons!
“I can’t do much with her anymore, Mr. Bronfman. She had me get out some clothes and dress her up. She looks real nice. Jewelry, too, and a scarf, even though I told her it was hot out there, she didn’t need that scarf. But that’s okay. I guess it looks nice, too.”
“Bettina.” Bronfman was confused. The fact of his mother’s death had entered his own life with such force that it was already lodged within him like a bullet. Now that she was still alive, he had to recalibrate. It wasn’t easy, but he did it. “What’s going on?”
“She’s waiting for you, Mr. Bronfman, out front. Waiting on you to come pick her up.”
“I’m at work, Bettina. Can’t you—I don’t know what’s going on. What’s going on?”
“She wants to take you for a ride somewhere. That’s all I know. She’s out there just standing in the gutter. She’s like a statue. You’ve got to come, Mr. Bronfman. I don’t know what might happen. I can’t get her inside. Come on now.”
“Okay,” he said. “Okay.”
He hung up, grabbed his phone and his keys. The whoosh of the world blew through his ears and emptied out his head. He was on autopilot now, blank as a fresh sheet of paper.
“Your highness,” Sorsby said, rising above the wall. Bronfman stopped. “I continue to investigate the intricacies of this devilishly opaque corporation. I’m moving into some dangerous waters, infested with killer sharks.”
“Thank you,” Bronfman said.
“I’m bighearted, apparently,” Sorsby said, disappearing. “And I kinda hate it.”
TWO
She was exactly where Bettina had said she would be. She was wearing worn-out jeans and a paisley shirt, the neck cut in a low V. He didn’t know she even had clothes like this anymore. She waved as he pulled up, and smiled, as if something about this was normal. He slowed to a stop and she opened the door, but she didn’t get in. She waited for her son to clear the seat, which was crowded with mail and flyers, an empty soda bottle, and a handful of his business cards, which, after the condo win, he’d been taking with him everywhere, just in case another jar found its way into his life. He tossed it all in the backseat.
“Edsel,” she said, slipping in and sitting down gingerly, with distaste, as if she were resting her backside on a small turd. “Thank you for coming, Edsel. I know it was on short notice. But there’s something I want to do, something I want to show you, and it’s a beautiful day and who knows, if I don’t do it now, when I ca
n, I might not ever be able to. I’ve been watching a nature show about the polar ice caps. Have you ever seen film of how the ice is falling away there, piece by piece, dropping into the ocean with a crash and melting? It’s called calving. That’s how it feels, getting old. I’m calving.”
“Don’t talk that way.”
“Jesus Christ, Edsel. Be real, at least for a moment or two. Even I know Bettina can’t take care of me much longer and it’s off to the old folks’ home for me. They’ll probably put me in an ankle bracelet, too—I’ll be a flight risk. I’m fucking crazy.”
“You don’t sound crazy.”
“I get these moments,” she said. “Clouds parting. Clarity. This is one of them. Let’s carpe diem this motherfucker. Turn around. I’ll tell you exactly where to go.”
He did as she told him. This was the mother he knew, his real mother, a version of whom he kept sequestered in a box in his brain, because he didn’t want to lose her. This was a memory he could put in the box. She led him out of the neighborhood and onto the highway, briefly, just for a couple of miles, and then they took the Eighth Avenue exit into Southside. Southside had gentrified in the past few years, sidewalks teeming with the upwardly mobile hip, a few miles and a few years ahead of the neighborhood where Crouton’s gallery was. But years ago it had been a skuzzy repository for long-haired layabouts and drugs, lots of drugs. In the middle of the small downtown neighborhood was a concrete fountain, where there was an old man on his knees, clutching a Bible, praying. He had been there for decades, but the story was that he was praying for Southside’s young miscreants. The praying didn’t work: this was where they gathered to buy and sell, and to find quick and easy company for the night.
“Pull over,” she said.
He squeezed into a narrow space in front of a sushi place. Raw fish. Bronfman had never really understood the appeal.
“There, by the fountain,” she said. “That’s where I met your father.”
“There?”
“There. I was desperate for some weed, and this was the place to get it. Back then you could buy an ounce for twenty-five dollars. I was working, living alone, I had a lot of disposable income, so that was nothing to me. Your father walked up and stared at me for what seemed like an eternity, and said something like ‘Amazing. I just got a fortune cookie, and it said, “You are about to meet a most beautiful woman.” This is the first time one of those fortunes has come true.’ It was a line, a bad one, but I appreciated the attention. I scored a lid, and we walked over to the IHOP across the street.”
The IHOP was still there, and it seemed that it always would be. It was open twenty-four hours, seven days a week. It served coffee and waffles and sausage and eggs. Bronfman had been there many times, and it hit him hard, like a knee in his chest: he’d eaten in the same place his father had before he was his father. Maybe in the same seat.
“Roy and I hit it off,” she said, speaking in a rush of parentheses and vocalized dashes. “I mean, obviously. I didn’t lie down for just anybody back then—well, for the most part. There was an era when I was … the term was … ‘easy.’ (I kind of loved being easy. It was so … easy.) But that passed. I wasn’t like that back then. Roy. Thick black hair he brushed back with his hand. It was a little greasy, sure, but kind of the way the beatniks wore it decades ago. A strong chin and a smile like the sun. Heavy eyebrows, but they worked on him. Very dreamy. We shared a plate of scrambled eggs and link sausages. White toast with butter dripping off the sides. He put three entire sugar packets in his coffee, four creamers. God. And we just talked and talked. He made me feel like I was the only person in the world, that what we were doing—sitting in a booth at the IHOP—was the most important thing going on anywhere. You know what’s that like, Edsel?”
“I do,” he said, because he had felt that way with Sheila at least three times in their short romance—short but, compared with his mother’s relationship with his father, a relative lifetime. The first was when they were watching Bonanza (three episodes from the very end of the series) and she paused the TV to tell him the backstory of every character—not to show off that she knew everything there was to know about them but because she wanted Bronfman to inhabit the same moment in the same way that she was. To share it. The second time, they were crossing the street and he took her hand without thinking about it, and she gripped his with an immediacy that was almost desperate, as if she had been waiting for his loving hand all her life, and to him that moment felt as if all the eyes in the universe were trained on them. The third time, he knocked on the door of her condominium, and when she opened it she was crying. “I don’t know why,” she said. “Nothing happened. Sometimes…” And he brought her close in an inescapable hug, and her face was flush against his shoulder, and he thought it was not impossible that his coat was soaking up every tear she shed, and when she looked up again she was smiling. It felt like a magic coat. He felt like a magic man.
“That’s good,” she said. She gave him a motherly pat on the knee. “Sheila’s a catch. So. We were there for hours—two or three of them, I guess—and we walked over to the Cellar for a drink.” She pointed to the Universal Insurance Company. “Gone now. But it was a nice place—the bar was from the forties, and, sitting there drinking, you felt like you were taking part in a hallowed tradition. The manager and I, Edgar, we were friends. He kept a little bottle of Afrin with him, but he dumped the Afrin and put this mixture of cocaine and water in it, and so he was tweaking all night long. He’d give me a bump if I asked him.”
“Oh, Mom,” Bronfman said. Already he was exhausted, reengineering the concept of who and what his mother was from moment to moment. Information overload. “No. You did—you did not do cocaine.”
“Occasionally,” she said. “It was free, Edsel.”
“That makes it okay?” he said. “And weren’t you a little old for all this? You were older than I am now.”
“No one is older than you are now, Edsel.” She smiled, touching on one exquisite memory after another. “I had a Manhattan, and then another, and he had the same. He told me he laid cable for the telephone company, but not for long. He was putting money away to go to grad school to be a teacher. A high-school teacher. Somewhere in Wisconsin? Idaho? I can’t remember. He loved kids. He was the oldest of five, but he couldn’t have one of his own because of some ailment, lazy sperm or some such—motility, that’s what it was. They couldn’t swim. That’s an important detail in this story, Edsel. Obviously. But I believed him, because I think it was true. I think he believed it was true. Though who knows if that would have made any difference.” She shrugged. “Drive on up the hill to the Econo Lodge.”
The Econo Lodge was a cheap one-story motel that on garishly lit signage used to boast free air-conditioning; now it was free wireless. Bronfman turned into the parking lot. The car idled, sputtering flatulently.
“2D,” she said, pointing a shaky finger, the nail shiny with bright-red polish. “Right there. That’s where you happened.”
“Where I happened,” he said, a mindless echo.
“Where Roy and I had sex, where I got pregnant. And where you—”
“No, no,” he said, holding up a hand. “You can stop there. I get it.”
“Not that we knew that at the time. At the time, it was pure, unmitigated lust. Powerful stuff.”
Bronfman felt anesthetized. 2D. Both of them were staring vacantly at the door. But Bronfman had seen and heard enough. From the drug bazaar to the hot dripping butter to Room 2D—enough. There is so much in the world that’s not necessary to know to get along. He did not have to know about electricity, or about how cars worked, or whether a chromosome was bigger than a gene, or was it the other way around? This was on that same list. He didn’t have to know any of this. And he was just about to put the car into reverse and take his mother home when she placed her hand on his.
“Let’s go in,” she said.
“No,” he said. “I get it. That’s where my life began. With someone yo
u’d never seen before and would never see again. I can imagine it all. But I would rather not.”
“Please, Edsel.”
“We can’t go in. Can’t. Cannot.”
“Why not?”
“Because … we can’t. It’s not our room, for starters.”
“Rent the room. It can’t be that much.” She looked around her—the rusted drainpipes, the open Dumpster. “It’s the same old crappy place it used to be.”
“Mom. Seriously.”
“Just go do it, Edsel. I will pay you back if that’s the problem.”
“That’s definitely not the problem.”
She glared at him. “Then what is the problem?”
He kept forgetting that she was losing her mind. That she was old, demented. That maybe nothing, none of what she was telling him now, was even remotely true. Weirdly, remembering this reassured him. If none of it had meaning, it didn’t matter what he did.
Then the door to 2D opened. A maid came out, wheeling her cart of linens and baby bottles of shampoo. She moved on to 3D, letting the door fall closed behind her. But it didn’t close, not all the way. It came to rest before the lock engaged. Both of them saw it.
“It’s a sign,” Muriel said.
He pulled up into the open parking space directly in front of the room, and almost before the car was in park he had opened the door and was stepping out. He reflexively looked left, right, already forecasting a nasty retribution; they don’t mess around at dumps like this. But maybe the presence of his old mother would forestall a thorough beating.
She was fearless, though. She pushed open the door and they walked into the stale, bleak, synthetic darkness of the cheapest motel room in Birmingham. The blinds were drawn. The open door allowed a rush of sun to pour into the room, but somehow the room didn’t feel that much brighter. The small double bed, the pressed-wood dresser, the bathroom sink, and, above it, the old cloudy mirror—it felt like such a dismal place to Bronfman, the last stop in a life of many last stops.