C HAPTER T WENTY-THREE

We have never before had hangovers together. Yet another new experience on this most memorable of weekends.

It’s ten-thirty when I awaken, ninety minutes until Zero Hour with Doris. I open my eyes and immediately squint them against the morning light. My tongue is dry and my head is pounding. It’s a mild hangover, a beer hangover, and I know what to do to get rid of it.

“Coffee,” I say out loud.

“Great idea,” Jake moans into his pillow.

I’m a little stiff as I get up to make it. My long-dormant muscles are having a hangover of their own, from the gardening and the cobblestone stealing.

We drink the coffee black and scalding hot. We do not have to discuss the day ahead. We both know that we’ll be facing his mother together, showing up at her place shoulder to shoulder, like a pair of hired guns. And at some point, Jake will pull the trigger and unveil the master plan for his future.

Jake’s eyes are puffy, but I figure the coffee and a shower should straighten him out. We’re a little bit shy with each other, and I guess that makes sense. We know so much more about each other than we did twenty-four hours ago. It’s almost as if we’ve finally been introduced, after nearly eighteen years.

Neither of us is hungry. We’re both anxious but eager to get through the task ahead.

“You want to shower first?”

“Whatever you say, Dad.”

I happen to have a great shower. The water hits you in a needle spray that’s both pleasure and penance for whatever you did the night before. Jake always takes a good long time in my shower, and this time is no different. He comes out with his hair slicked straight back, the ends of it touching his collarbones. “God, that felt good.”

“I think I’ve got clean underwear here for you.”

“I’ll find it. You’d better shower, Dad, it’s past eleven.”

He wants to be there by noon. He doesn’t want to put it off for a single minute, and suddenly I realize that I don’t, either. Enough already. It’s time for Columbia University professor Doris Perez, Ph.D, to find out what everybody else already knows.

I strip down, go to the shower, and take the needle spray full-force in my face, as hot as I can stand it. Then, slowly, I turn the temperature knob until the water is warm, then tepid, then cool, then cold. It’s my own private hangover remedy, and I recommend it highly to anyone who does not have a heart condition.

Minutes to high noon. We are walking to the apartment on Eighty-first Street. Jake is carrying his bulky blue laundry sack, while I’m carrying his guitar.

“You okay, Jake?”

“Never better.”

“Never better, he says. We’re about to break some pretty rough news to your mother, and all I can say is that I hope you know CPR.”

“She won’t need it,” Jake says. “This isn’t going to kill her.”

“She may kill me.”

“I won’t let that happen, either, Dad.”

When we get to the building I’m ashamed to feel my knees tremble. I catch Jake by the elbow, just as he’s about to climb the stoop. “Maybe you should see if she’s home first, before I come in.”

“No way she’s home yet. We’re a little early. And you know that’s she’s always a little late.”

“I feel kind of funny going in there without her…permission.”

“I’m giving you my permission. I live here, too. Come on.”

We climb the four flights to the apartment. Jake gets the door open and says, “After you, Dad.”

I have not set foot in this place since Doris and I split. On the rare occasions the three of us have hooked up since then, it was always in a public place, and I never thought I’d be back.

But I’m back. I step over the threshold into the very dwelling where Doris and I began our thing on that drunken night so long ago.

“Must feel weird for you, huh, Dad?”

“Weird isn’t even the word for it.”

I feel as if I’ve entered a fortune-teller’s parlor. Doris always had a lot of books and paintings and gewgaws, but now it’s totally out of control. There’s not an inch of shelf space or wall space that isn’t covered, crammed, packed, or stacked. Most of this stuff looks both fragile and irreplaceable. This has gone beyond collecting, and straight into the realm of storage.

“Christ,” I say, “your mother does have a tendency to accumulate, doesn’t she?”

“Yeah, it’s in her nature. She surrounds herself with stuff to make her feel safe, I think. But I’m not sure it works.”

An ancient gray cat with milky-blind eyes and bald spots on his back limps into the room. Jake squats to stroke him. “Come here, Jasper.”

I’m stunned. “That’s Jasper? He’s still alive?”

“Well, barely. We had Max put to sleep about a year ago, and we should do the same with this guy, but Mom keeps putting it off.”

I remember the two cats darting in front of me on my first night with Doris. Now one of them is dead, and the other one’s darting days are long past.

“You know, this cat was here…” I shut up, let the sentence dangle.

“The very first night you were with Mom,” Jake says matter-of-factly. “Well, that makes sense. He just turned twenty, believe it or not. He’s a tough old bastard.”

I squat beside Jake and stroke Jasper’s head. He’s staring at me, but I’m sure he sees nothing. He yawns in my face, exposing crooked yellow fangs.

“Christ, that breath!”

“Yeah,” Jake chuckles, “it’s pretty bad. Like he’s rotting from the inside out. He hasn’t got long now.”

My stomach sinks at the sound of a key in the door. It opens, and in walks Doris, carrying a small black suitcase.

How long has it been since I’ve seen her? Three years? Five years? I can’t even remember. Her hair has gone totally gray, and she’s done nothing to color or highlight it, and it still tumbles down her back the way it always has. She wears black boots that make a clacking sound on hardwood floors, black slacks, a black sweater, and what can only be called a cape across her shoulders—black, of course, a silken thing that floats behind her when she walks.

Doris has always been aware of her own sense of drama. When she enters a classroom at Columbia the students are intimidated by the sound of the boots and the sight of the cape, as if Zorro has just arrived to teach them advanced Spanish literature. She takes a few steps inside before she notices me squatting on the floor, stroking the cat.

“Oh my God.”

“Hello, Doris,” I say. “It’s good to see you.” This isn’t quite the truth, but I suspect it’ll be the last lie that’ll be told today.

Doris is absolutely stunned. For a moment it looks as if she’s thinking about calling the cops. Instead, she puts on her glasses, which I notice are bifocals.

“You got older,” she says, examining me through the upper halves.

“Yeah, somehow I couldn’t get around it.”

“Gained some weight.”

“Correct again. Nice to see you’ve got that same keen eye for detail.”

She continues to stare at me as Jake gets up and gives her a kiss on the cheek.

“Hi, Mom. Did you have a good time at the conference?”

“As good a time as one can have in Schenectady,” she murmurs, turning at last to look at her son. Her eyes widen in alarm. “My God! Your arms! What happened to your arms?”

Doris grabs Jake by the elbows and turns them to inspect his inner forearms, which are covered with dozens of small red scratches. She obviously thinks he’s been shooting heroin, that two nights in my lackadaisical care have turned him into an intravenous drug user.

“It’s nothing, Mom. Just a few scratches from barnacles.”

“Barnacles!”

And I figure what the fuck, and dive right into it.

“We were helping my father steal cobblestones from Flushing Bay at low tide,” I explain helpfully. “They were covered in barnacles.” I hold out my forearms. “See, I got scratched, too.”

Doris looks at me as if I’ve lost my mind. “Hold on, hold on. You went to see Danny?”

“Yes, that was part of the weekend festivities.”

“Why?”

“Why not?”

“Because he’s not exactly the sort of person Jacob should get to know!”

“I disagree, Doris. I figured it was time he met his grandfather, before it was too late.”

“Oh, this is just dreadful!”

“Calm down, Mom,” Jake says. “We had a good time.”

“Stealing cobblestones? That’s your idea of a good time?”

Doris is flying now. She shuts her eyes and holds her hands out defensively. “I don’t even want to hear the details, but you say you were stealing cobblestones with Danny?”

“Not really stealing,” I say. “They were stuck in the muck. Nobody even knew they were there. We just took them.”

“Kindly select the correct verb, Sammy. You said you stole them. Now you simply took them. Which is right?”

“We acquired them, Mom,” Jake says helpfully. “You happy with that verb?”

Doris opens her eyes, which are burning bright. She’s looking right at Jake. “Do you see now why I’ve kept you away from that man all this time?”

“Not really, Mom.”

“What if you’d been caught? What if you suddenly had a crime on your record?”

Doris turns to me. “Did you think of that, in the midst of your cobblestone frolics? He’ll be applying to colleges soon! Do you realize what a criminal record would do to his chances? One stupid little thing like this cobblestone stunt, and the course of his life is changed forever!”

“We didn’t go out there to steal cobblestones, Doris. It was just a little task that came up in the midst of our family reunion.”

“Ohhh, Sammy.”

“Take it easy, Mom.”

Doris turns back to Jake. “Well, now you know your grandfather. But you cannot tell me that you actually like this man.”

“Danny? He’s great. He’s a pisser. And he likes you, Mom. He actually proposed a toast to you.”

Doris doesn’t seem to be getting enough air. She lets her head fall, pushes her hair back. “Danny Sullivan! Of all people!”

“I heard about what he did to my name card in the nursery. Pretty funny.”

“Oh, you think that was funny? Obliterating my name? Contaminating a germ-free zone by barging into the nursery like an absolute lunatic?”

“He’s a passionate guy, Mom.”

Doris lifts her head, rolls her eyes heavenward. “All right, then, Jacob, tell me. I might as well know everything. Tell me all about these…cobblestones.”

“Danny found a bunch of cobblestones at low tide, and we helped him carry them to his car. Some dopey Parks Department cop tried to stop him, so Danny flattened him with one punch, and then Dad talked the guy out of arresting him. Aw, Mom, it was amazing. Talk about teamwork! You should have been there.”

The words hit Doris like a barrage of bullets. I don’t know how she is still standing, but she is. “You’re telling me that your lunatic grandfather actually struck a policeman.”

“Well, not really a policeman. Some jerk in a uniform who works for the Parks Department.”

“Jacob, listen to me carefully, now. I don’t want you going near that grandfather of yours, ever again.”

“I’m going out to Flushing next Saturday to help him put down a cobblestone path.”

“No, you are not.”

“Mom. I’m going. That’s all there is to it.”

Doris thinks this is going to be the big issue of the day. She can’t even hear the night train coming down the tracks. She suddenly realizes she’s still holding her suitcase, and sets it on the floor. I remain squatting, stroking Jasper.

Doris says to me, “Leave that cat alone and tell me why you’re here.”

The time has come. I give Jasper one last pat on the head before pushing at my knee to get to my feet. While I’m doing this, Doris foot-pushes her suitcase off to the side, where it comes to rest against Jake’s guitar case. Before I can speak, Doris beats me to it.

“What’s this?”

“Dad bought me a guitar.”

“A guitar?” Doris shakes her head. “That’s a purchase you may regret, Sammy. You don’t want to know what Jacob does when he grows tired of a musical instrument.”

“I know about the cello, Doris. He’s promised me he won’t incinerate the guitar.”

She’s startled that I know about the cello. She’s about to say something else, but then she notices Jake’s big blue bag. “What is this?”

The time has come at last. And before I can speak, Jake beats me to it. “That’s my stuff from school.”

“Stuff?”

“From my locker.”

Her face darkens. “Jacob?”

“I got kicked out of school, Mom.”

She puts a hand over her mouth, as if to block a scream. She’s actually trembling, and it looks as if she’s struggling to keep from attacking him.

“I got fired from my job,” I say, if only to distract her rage from Jake. Her other hand goes up to her mouth, and her eyes are wide-open above the hands, the eyes of the girl in the horror movie who sees the monster coming coming toward her and can’t do a thing about it.

Doris staggers backward until the backs of her legs bump the sofa cushions, and then my ex-wife collapses on the couch, landing on her ass in the middle of it, arms and legs spread like a sky diver. But she has no parachute. Instead, the cape billows behind her head, slowly settling as it loses air. Doris lets out a scream that comes all the way from her ankles and sends Jasper fleeing in what could be the final sprint of his life.

Jake runs to get his mother a glass of water. She’s still screaming when he brings it to her, knocking the glass from his hand and then leaping from the couch to smack my face.

I see stars as I hit the floor, and I’m vaguely aware that Jake is engaged in a physical struggle with Doris. I look up and see that he’s trying to embrace her, while she pushes at his chest.

“Mom, please!” he says, but Doris wails away, as if she’s just been told that her only son has just died in a car crash. And maybe that would have been easier for Doris to take. There’s no disgrace in a car crash.

It feels like hours but it’s only minutes before Jake calms her down and gets her to sit back down on the couch. All the while Doris is making whimpering noises, sounds of mourning for her son’s lost future. I get up off the floor and find some paper towels to mop up the water and pick up the pieces of broken glass. Doris is quaking, literally quaking, as if the temperature has just plummeted fifty degrees, but actually the room is quite warm. Jake takes her hands in his and squeezes them.

“Mom. Everything’s going to be all right.”

She waits for a gust of shivering to go through her before asking, “Why did this happen?”

Jake takes his essay from his back pocket and hands it to her.

“Read this, Mom.”

She adjusts her bifocals before settling in to read it. She just keeps staring at the pages, long after she’s finished. She’s had time to read it three or four times before finally saying, “How ridiculous. Didn’t they realize you were being ironic?”

“No, I wasn’t. I meant every word. They wanted an apology, and I refused.”

Doris neatly folds the pages and hands them back to Jake. “I’ll straighten this whole thing out tomorrow.”

“Mom. There’s nothing to straighten out. Even if they let me back in, I wouldn’t go.”

“Jacob.”

“Mother…”

They glare at each other, neither surrendering an inch, and I suddenly remember the way they used to clash when I lived with them. He was barely old enough to walk when he began standing his ground against his mother, refusing to eat cauliflower, refusing to go to bed, and even in the midst of this crisis I have to marvel over the power of the stubbornness gene.

These two are fully capable of an all-day standoff, and to break it I say to Doris, “Don’t you want to know why I got fired?”

She doesn’t answer, but she does look at me, which is encouraging.

“The headmaster called me up and said it was an emergency. Obviously, he tried to reach you first, and when he couldn’t he moved on to the secondary parent. My boss wouldn’t give me an hour off, so he fired me because I went to the school without his permission.”

Jake is stunned. “Holy shit, Dad, it was my fault you got fired!”

“Don’t worry about it, Jake. Best thing that could have happened to me.”

“Enough,” Doris says. “We’ve got a slightly bigger problem than your dubious journalistic career here.” She points at me. It is literally the finger of blame. “You could have taken care of this, but you deliberately fouled it up so you could stop paying for school.”

“Not true. I’ve been writing those checks for years. Why would I wait to bungle it up in his senior year?”

“Because you’re spiteful.”

“Mom. Dad didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Ohhh God, why is this happening?”

“For an agnostic, Doris, you’re talking to God an awful lot.”

She gives me a laser look through eyes narrowed to slits. “You’ve had a hell of a weekend, haven’t you?”

“Yeah, Doris, a lot has happened. Speaking for myself, and without going into detail, all I can really tell you is that I hate myself a lot less today than I did on Friday.”

“Ohh, how wonderful for you. Your son’s life is in tatters, but the main thing is, you feel better about yourself.”

“Thanks to Jake,” I add.

“I feel better about myself, too, Mom,” Jake says. “This was a really good weekend.”

She ignores him, keeping that laser look trained on me. “Fuck you,” she says. “Fuck you and whatever twisted impulse it was that made you want to turn our son into a high school dropout.”

“I never had any such impulse. Come on, Doris, do you know me at all?”

“I don’t believe I do. And you don’t know me, either, and so what? That’s all ancient history! The main thing is that our son is a high school dropout!”

“Dad dropped out of high school, and he’s done all right.”

I roll my eyes, bring them back down in time to see that Doris’s mouth has dropped open.

“You weren’t supposed to tell her, Jake.”

“Is this true?”

“Yes, Doris, it’s true. Everything you’re hearing today is true, true, true.”

“You told me you went to City College!”

“Well, honey, it was the eighties. I said a lot of things when I was trying to score.”

“Ohhhhh my God!”

“You keep summoning God, Doris, and the big guy might just show up.”

She spreads her arms, hands stretched toward the heavens. “What else?” she asks the ceiling. “What else has happened?”

“Well, on the bright side, Peter Plymouth gave me a seven-thousand-dollar refund.”

“And you gladly took it.”

“I’ll split it with you, Doris.”

“Hang on to it. You’ll be writing checks for Jacob’s new school.”

“No, he won’t,” Jake says. “I am not enrolling anywhere else. I have had it with school.”

The words seem to linger in the air, like skywriting. Doris can only stare at Jake, who stares right back at her.

“I’ve got a plan, Mom,” he continues. “I haven’t even told Dad yet because I wanted to tell you both about it at the same time.”

Doris forces a cruel laugh. “A plan, eh? I can’t wait to hear it, Jacob. Do you intend to take some kind of menial job with your glorious eleventh grade education?”

“No, Mom, I don’t.”

“Are you going to just hang around the house? Sleep until noon every day? That I would not tolerate.”

“I wouldn’t want to do that.”

“Well what, then?”

Jake looks at his mother, then at me. There should be a drumroll for what he’s about to say, whatever it is, but it’s out so fast that it’s almost an anticlimax.

“I’m moving to Paris.”

Doris makes a snorting sound of disbelief, a sound I can’t help echoing with a similar sound of my own. This is his big plan, the plan he’s refused to reveal for the past two days? It’s a little farfetched. In fact, it’s outright crazy.

“Paris?” Doris shrieks.

“Yeah. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long time.”

Jake says it as if it’ll be a nostalgic return to the banks of the river Seine. Strange, coming from a kid who’s never been more than a few hundred miles from New York City.

Doris is holding her head at the temples. “Why in the world do you want to do this?”

“I’ve read a lot about it, and it seems like a cool city. Also, I’ve been studying French for years. Might as well make some use of it.”

Doris has to find a way into his plan, a way to temper the lunacy of it, and suddenly it comes to her. The hands fall from her temples. “What I think you’re saying is, you want to go to school in Paris.”

Jake rolls his eyes. “No, Mom, that’s not what I’m saying. Not everything in this world begins and ends in a classroom. Sometimes the world is the classroom.”

“But, Jacob, without a structure—”

“I just want to live there, okay? I”ll make my own structure.”

“Doing what?”

“Reading. Writing.”

“Writing what?”

“Stories. Poems.” He pats the guitar. “Maybe some songs.”

“Ohhh, I see,” Doris says. “Like your hero, that ridiculous Jim Morrison of The Doors.” She shoots a withering look at me, the one who introduced our son to the music of the hard-drinking, ill-fated Lizard King, found dead in a bathtub in Paris at age twenty-seven.

She turns back to Jake, wise at last to his intentions. “You want to mirror the Morrison experience, is that right?”

“Well,” Jake says, “everything but the fatal bath part.”

I can’t take any more of this. “Hey, Jake, come on. What’s this really all about?”

“It’s not about anything, Dad. I’ve wanted to do it for a long time, and now I can.”

“How can you do it?” Doris asks. “It takes money to do such a thing, a lot of money. You’ll need an apartment, plus food, plus travel expenses…. I won’t pay for it, and on this issue I’m sure your father feels the same way.”

“You don’t have to pay for it. Neither do you, Dad.”

Doris forces a laugh. “Oh, I see. Are you going to hitchhike across the Atlantic?”

“I turn eighteen in three weeks.”

The statement seems to come out of nowhere. Doris and I look at each other to see if the other one understands it, but we both come up blank.

“Yes, you do turn eighteen in three weeks,” Doris says. “We’ll get a cake and candles and have a party for you, if you like, but what does any of that have to do with this insane notion you have about moving to Paris?”

“I want my money. And when I turn eighteen, I can have it.”

Jake looks at Doris, then at me, and finally at both of us. “I’m entitled to my money, and there’s nothing either of you can do to stop me from getting it, goddamnit.”

So this is his plan, a plan that’s landed in our laps like a meteor. I didn’t see this coming, and I know Doris didn’t, either. She puts a hand to her throat, shakes her head. She turns to me, and all I can do is shrug. What can we do? The kid remembered. We’d always thought he’d been too young at the time to remember, but he remembers, all right.

“And please don’t tell me I can’t afford it,” Jake says, “because I know better.”

He grins at us. I’m caught by conflicting feelings. I don’t know whether to shake his hand and congratulate him, or belt him in the mouth for outsmarting his parents.

“Jake,” I say, “I have to hand it to you. You are one crafty bastard.”

“Thanks, Pop.”

Doris is silent. Her mouth is shut, and her lips have disappeared. They may never reappear again.

What was I saying before, about money being an abstract thing to Jacob Perez-Sullivan? I guess I was wrong. He understands it, all right, and now he’s eager to get what he believes is rightfully his.

He’s smarter than his two parents put together. Kinder, too, but that really doesn’t take much. And now he’s ready to take off with the fortune he earned before he ever even knew what money was.