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  Frozen in Time

  Frozen in Time

  Twenty Stories

  Joseph Epstein

  TAYLOR TRADE PUBLISHING

  Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

  TAYLOR TRADE PUBLISHING

  An imprint of Rowman & Littlefield

  Distributed by NATIONAL BOOK NETWORK

  Copyright © 2016 Joseph Epstein

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Information Available

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available

  ISBN 978-1-63076-193-6 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-1-63076-194-3 (e-book)

  The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

  For Harvey Pool and Loren Singer,friends from the Old Country

  Contents

  Contents

  Sandy in Her Tub

  Arnheim & Sons

  Oh, Billy, Where Are You?

  Dad’s Gay

  Out of Action

  Wild About Harry

  Widow’s Pique

  Second Family

  Remittance Man

  My Five Husbands

  Irwin Isaac Meiselman

  Adultery?

  Onto a Good Thing

  Race Relations

  The Casanova of LaSalle Street

  Kizerman and Feigenbaum

  The Man on Whom Everything Was Lost

  The Bernie Klepner Show

  The Viagra Triangle

  JDate

  About the Author

  Sandy in Her Tub

  Sandy Reuben is having a good soak before going out that evening for dinner at her parents’, when Jeffrey, her husband, knocks, enters, and sits on the edge of the tub. Sandy looks up from her copy of Vogue.

  “No need to wear a necktie tonight,” she says. “They’ll be just the four of us for dinner.”

  “I wasn’t planning to,” Jeffrey replies. “In fact, I’m not planning to go at all.”

  Sandy drops the magazine outside the tub.

  “We accepted this invitation two weeks ago.”

  “I’ve been unhappy in this marriage for a long time,” Jeffrey says. “I’m out of here.”

  Sandy sits up in the tub, her breasts above the bubble bath.

  “Out of here?”

  Now Sandy is standing, in her full nakedness, water dripping off her, looking as if she had just discovered an eel.

  “Are you fucking crazy?” she says, yells actually. “And why are you telling me this here, now, in the bathroom?”

  Stepping out, she nearly slips on the bubbly wet mess on the floor, and yanks a thick white towel off the nearby towel rack with which she covers herself. “Are you nuts, or what?” she says. She thinks about slapping him, but is afraid if she does so she will lose her hold on the towel.

  Jeffrey gets up from the edge of the tub and leaves the bathroom, slamming the door on his way out. Sandy reaches for her baby-blue terry-cloth robe. Slipping it on, she glimpses herself in the mirror. She has a small potbelly on which there is a caesarean scar from the birth of her third child, blue veins on her legs above her knees, breasts that have begun to sag. She leans in closer, over the double sinks, to the wall-wide mirror to inspect the wrinkles gathered around her eyes.

  Sandra Reuben is fifty-two. She has three children. Jonathan and Jacob are both at New Trier High School; her daughter, Ardis, is thirteen, recently diagnosed as having ADHD and put on Ritalin and just beginning what looks to be a difficult adolescence. A little diva of temperament, she is already showing lots of moodiness, tears, and tantrums. Raising these kids has pretty much been left to Sandy, even though for the past seven years she has been working full-time as a lawyer, specializing in domestic law, for the firm of Ganser & Maher in the Loop.

  Jeffrey has never been a fully engaged father. He went to soccer and little-league games when the boys were younger, but Sandy always felt he was just going through the motions. Jeffrey is a dentist, a periodontist, a successful one. Six or seven years ago, though, he began complaining that his work gave him no satisfaction. He started seeing a therapist, a woman named Lindsay Leibowitz, who has an office in the Old Orchard Professional Building in Skokie, two floors above Jeffrey’s. At brunch at Benny and Max’s one Sunday, they ran into her. Jeffrey introduced them. Dr. Leibowitz looked to be in her late thirties, slender, dark hair, well dressed. They seemed pleased to see each other. Do you suppose, Sandy thought at the time, he’s banging her? Not possible, she concluded, not my schmuckleheimer husband. Now, with Jeffrey’s announcement that he wanted out of their marriage, she had to rethink this earlier judgment.

  “Banging her,” “schmuckleheimer”—Sandy learned such talk from her father, who always spoke around her as if she were the son he never had. She also used such language at Ganser & Maher, where she is the only woman partner. Her father, Max Lansky, is a cardiac surgeon, on the staff at Rush-Presbyterian. No one has fewer pretensions than her father; no one was more critical or more openly, almost proudly cynical. “I assume the worst about people,” he told Sandy when she was in her teens, “and I’m not often disappointed.”

  Sandy once asked her father why he was so judgmental.

  “Judgmental?” Max said. “Judgmental? Wherever did my beautiful daughter find such a stupid goddamn word? If by judgmental you mean that I make lots of judgments, you’re right. At work I judge whether and where to cut a vein or clean out and reconnect an artery. I’m always making judgments. And why restrict my doing so to veins and arteries? Isn’t it as important to make careful judgments about people, about their weaknesses, strengths, overall quality? Always be judgmental, sweetheart, there’s no other way to live.”

  Max—he always insisted Sandy, his only child, call him by his first name—did not have a high opinion of Jeffrey Reuben.

  “Why anyone would want to be a dentist beats me,” he said when Sandy first mentioned she was going out with Jeffrey. “To stand there all day with your hands in other people’s mouths, I don’t get it.” That Max had his own hands, with their short thick fingers, in other people’s chests, Sandy chose not to point out.

  If Sandy’s father hadn’t much regard for Jeffrey’s profession, he was even more dubious about his future son-in-law’s personality. “What’s he, a depressive?” he asked Sandy the first time she brought Jeffrey home. Max even criticized his posture. Jeffrey was tall, thin, slouched in the way tall young men—he was 6'3"—who were never good athletes sometimes are.

  “Is the kid nervous around me,” Max asked, “or is he just missing a personality?”

  Jeffrey was daunted by Max Lansky. Who wouldn’t have been? Sandy and Jeffrey were the same age, and he was going into his last year of dental school when he proposed. Max asked Sandy why she wanted to marry him.

  “Because he’s solid, he’s steady, and he loves me—he really loves me,” she said. She didn’t tell Max that he could also make her laugh. Quiet and reserved though he seemed, when courting her, Jeffrey would do goofy madcap, whimsical things. Once at Gio’s Restaurant in Evanston, out with their friends the Ehrlichs, when the waiter took their drink orders before dinner, he neglected to ask Sandy what she wanted. When she said that
she would like a margarita, the waiter said he was sorry but her friend (nodding here at Jeffrey) had instructed him, when she was in the ladies’ room before they were seated, that she had problems with alcohol and was not on any account to be served a drink. Another time, when they were at a dinner party with people she hadn’t met before, she noticed everyone speaking slowly to her, enunciating carefully. Only when the woman sitting on her left apologized for not being able to sign did she begin to understand, as Jeffrey confessed later, that he had told the other people at the party that she was deaf but an excellent lip reader. But not long after they were married, this kind of thing stopped; Jeffrey, for some reason, had lost his whimsy, his sweet silliness.

  Jeffrey’s parents had run a dry cleaners, on Devon, west of California, before they sold out to a Korean syndicate and moved to Delray Beach. Max paid for the wedding, a “pretty goddamn gaudy affair, if I do say so myself,” or so he described it, at the Gold Room at the Drake Hotel. He lent his new son-in-law the money to buy into the practice of a man in his sixties named Jerome Werner. (The money has long since been repaid.) He also helped the kids, as Marsha Lansky still referred to Sandy and Jeffrey, with the down payment on their first house in Morton Grove. With the spread of bypass heart surgery, of which he did a lot, Max Lansky had become a rich man.

  Sandy had never seen her father actually operate on anyone, but she had seen him at Rush-Presbyterian, his stomping ground. She met him one day before lunch in the surgical waiting room while she was still in high school.

  “Here comes Dr. Lansky now,” the receptionist told her. Sandy looked down the hall and saw her father approach, in his white coat, his name in blue thread sewn in cursive over the left breast pocket, his heels clicking against the marble floors as if he were wearing boots. (They were Bruno Magli loafers.) He might have had a white silk scarf tossed over his shoulder, which he didn’t, like a test or fighter pilot, so authoritatively heroic did he seem. Nurses, patients, families of patients, everyone looked upon Dr. Max Lansky with uncomplicated reverence. Sandy reflected that her father may have held in his hands the hearts of many of the people in this room. At that moment she wished she didn’t have to call him Max but instead could call him Daddy. Max Lansky was 5'4", 5'5", tops, stocky, dark, with a thick head of still black hair. He gave off fumes of strength, physical as well as mental. His eyes, like his hair, were black, and his hairline low. He had been a superior athlete as a boy—a gymnast and a swimmer at Senn High School, a champion at both. He must have radiated confidence his entire life, or so his daughter thought.

  Max had had more to do with raising Sandy than did her mother. By the time she was seven or eight, Sandy realized that her mother, Marsha, was steady enough but not inspiring in the way Max was. Max was his wife’s protector, he was also the family’s social playmaker, and Marsha felt no need to struggle against his domination. Marsha had been pretty as a girl, small, bosomy, dark, on the model of Elizabeth Taylor, but without much force. “You’ve got your mother’s good looks and my brains, kiddo,” Max once told Sandy, “and those aren’t bad cards to have drawn in life. A man’s mind and a woman’s body can make for an interesting hand. I’ll be eager to see how you play it.”

  Sandy has long thought that her father must be disappointed in her. He had sent her east to school, to Wellesley, where she did well, but where she also decided against going to medical school. Max never said anything about this decision, but it couldn’t have been to his liking. Max insisted that Sandy at least enroll in law school, so that she have serious work to do in life. In his rough way, Max was a bit of a feminist. So at her father’s expense she went to the University of Chicago.

  When Sandy told her father that Jeffrey Reuben had asked her to marry him, Max said, “You know, kid, Rocky Marciano’s mother is supposed to have been glad that her son gave up his baseball career to become a boxer: ‘I didn’t raise the boy to become a catcher,’ she’s supposed to have said. I didn’t raise my daughter to marry a dentist, kiddo. But I also didn’t raise her to let me stand in her way. I hope it works out.” Not exactly a fatherly blessing, but there it was.

  Jonathan was born the third year of Sandy and Jeffrey’s marriage, and Jacob arrived two years later. Max soon took the boys in hand. He had regular-season Bears tickets, on the forty-yard line, and when they reached the ages of nine and seven, the boys went with him to games. He bought them baseball mitts, paid to have a glass backboard erected just off the Reubens’ driveway, spent more time with the boys than most grandfathers would. They adored him.

  If Jeffrey felt rivalrous about Max’s relationship with his sons, he never made an issue of it. Max picked up the boys on a Saturday or Sunday, almost as if he were Sandy’s first husband with weekend visitation rights. Jeffrey tended to view it as giving him more time to indulge his own interests: trading stocks on his computer, fiddling with a 1962 vintage Jaguar E-Type that he kept in the garage, jogging. Max never expressed his feelings about his son-in-law in front of him, but he had a way of ignoring him that was perhaps worse than direct insult.

  At four o’clock on Friday afternoons, Jeffrey had his regular session with Dr. Leibowitz. When Sandy asked Jeffrey what he talked about during these sessions, he tended to be vague. His relationship with his parents, he would say, or his perhaps too great need to succeed in the world. She wanted to ask him if he discussed their sex life during his sessions with Dr. Leibowitz but held back.

  If Sandy were the one in therapy and sex came up, she probably would have said that of course their sex wasn’t what it was when they were much younger. What with three kids to raise, and her husband running a lucrative dental practice—he had four dental technicians, prepping patients, taking X-rays, assisting him in gum surgeries—and her working full-time handling domestic cases in the Loop, sex was much reduced in their priorities. Sandy was OK with that, she could live with it. Whether Jeffrey could was a question she never bothered to ask.

  When Sandy told her father that Jeffrey had begun to undergo psychotherapy, Max’s only reaction was to tell her he wasn’t surprised to hear it. “I hope he doesn’t get hooked on it. For lots of people it’s the goddamn highlight of their week, their fifty minutes with their shrink, pay please on your way out. I hope your husband doesn’t turn out to be one of those sad schmucks.”

  In fact, Jeffrey was going on his seventh year in therapy without having a very clear set of complaints, at least so far as Sandy was able to discern. When her father asked her why her husband was in therapy, the best she could offer was that Jeffrey was unhappy. “Really,” said Max. “Unhappy? Too bad. But then, I hear, so is Africa.”

  Her robe tied, a towel round her still wet hair, Sandy walks into the large dressing room she shares with Jeffrey. A small suitcase is missing, as are a number of his shirts, a suit, and pairs of trousers. In his dresser, she discovers that he had also taken underwear, socks, and handkerchiefs. She calls out his name—the kids are out of the house—and receives no answer. She has no idea where Jeffrey might have gone. Maybe to his new lady friend. “On second thought,” she says to herself, adapting a formula her father once told her were W.C. Fields’s deathbed words, “fuck ’im.” She decides to go to dinner without Jeffrey.

  What Sandy hasn’t decided is whether or not she will tell Max and Marsha about Jeffrey’s departure. But when her mother opens the door, with her father standing right behind her, and asks where Jeffrey is, Sandra blurts out, “He’s gone. I guess we’re getting a divorce.”

  Her mother looks properly shocked, is speechless, in fact.

  “So you’ve finally decided to get rid of him,” Max says.

  “Not quite accurate,” says Sandy. “Jeffrey is leaving me. For another woman, I suspect.”

  “No kidding,” says Max. His right eyebrow shoots up, as Sandy imagined it might do when examining the heart and arteries of a patient beyond saving. “I wouldn’t have thought the kid had it in him.”

 
At dinner—Marsha has made veal scallopini, asparagus, a salad; Max opens a bottle of Pinot Noir—they discuss what is to be done.

  “Any notion who the dentist’s lucky lady might be?” Max asks Sandy.

  “I don’t know for sure if there is another lady,” Sandy says. “But if there is, my best guess is his therapist. But then it could be one of his patients, or even one of the girls who work for him.”

  “He does know that he’s divorcing a divorce lawyer, does he not?” Max puts in. “May I say that I fully expect you to take him for everything he’s got, including his own fillings?”

  “Right now I don’t think that’s the question, Max,” says Sandy.

  “What is?” her father asks.

  “The question is to find out what’s really going on. Why he’s found life with me no longer tolerable? And also what room in his new life does he plan to allot his children?”

  “How about you, baby?” Sandy’s mother asks. “How’re you holding up?”

  “This came as a surprise, Marsha, I have to tell you.”

  “Get over the shock, kid,” Max says. “View it as strictly an opportunity, a chance to get your life back. You’re still an attractive woman, and with brains.”

  Sandy recalls the view of herself in the mirror an hour or so ago. Had Max seen it, he might have revised his estimate. As for her brains, her father always seemed to think more of them than did she.

  “He sounds confused,” Marsha says. “I mean the way he told you he was leaving, then running out of the house. That’s not rational. Like he’s undergoing a midlife crisis.”

  “Midlife crisis? Surely you don’t believe in such horseshit, do you, dear?” says Max, spearing a long, slender asparagus.

  “For all I know,” Sandy added, “that may be Jeffrey’s explanation to himself.”

  “I hope you nail his ass to the barn door,” says Max, and asks Sandy to pass the platter with the veal.