The Family Tabor

Is it wrong that she wants the warmth of her family’s attention, to retain their newly revived belief that love is not beyond her reach, that love has found her again?

Absolutely not.

And not telling the truth is kinder—she wouldn’t want to be responsible for torching Harry’s big award weekend.

That’s not the real reason.

She’s a coward, plain and simple, lacking the kind of bravery needed to come clean about her whale of a lie.

And that makes her think of the story from Hebrew school that she never got straight—was Jonah saved, regurgitated out of the whale’s massive mouth, and into the cleansing water, as she could be if she came clean, or did he die in there? He probably died in there.

The pretend lover, the few relationship details she has coyly shared with her family about Aaron Green, illuminate what she tries to forget: the Phoebe who existed at twenty-three, in love with a long-haired boy named Elijah, who threw himself into life with abandon. The only former love who has never reached out to her.

Over the years, she has debated whether the way she let him go has been responsible for her perennial single status, the diminution, then disappearance, of that magnetism she once took for granted.

Sometimes late at night in her office she searches for Elijah’s name, but no engine finds him, not even one other person with his name seems to exist in the whole great world, and she wonders if he went off the grid, as he swore he wanted to do someday. Or if he is dead.

She was a foolish young woman back then, and did him wrong, did herself wrong, too. She had lacked the courage to face him and explain she didn’t possess his audacity to live an explorative life, that the idea of dropping out, even temporarily, frightened her, that the life she was living gave her the comfort and certainty she needed and desired. She had disappeared on him, shunned his calls, deleted his emails, hid in the tiny bathroom in the small apartment she then had, until he removed his finger from the buzzer, until his rapping against the door stopped—she imagined him putting his tongue to his knuckles and tasting the blood, inhaling the iron scent of confusion. It had taken four months before he gave up, before she sighed in relief, then flinched in horror, that she had murdered something so rare with silence.

It sounds like a bad country song, Phoebe thinks.

Then she thinks, no, it feels biblical, the resultant suffering she has endured since tossing away that long-ago love.

The mundane intrudes. Her car requires fuel and she swings into her regular station. At the pump, she listens to the rush of the gasoline, watches the gallons ratchet up. On the other side of the tanks, a man extracts himself from his low-slung convertible, runs his card through, and starts doing the same.

“Happy Saturday morning,” he says to Phoebe across the concrete divide. He is rather handsome. His smile is nice, so are his eyes. But drawing love to herself would never happen at a gas station.

“Bonjour,” she says.

“Are you French?”

“Oui.” And with that floating oui comes the thought that she’s wrong about where love could happen. It could happen here, but it’s too late, she’s declared herself French. Why didn’t she simply say hello in her native English?

“Are you visiting, or do you live here?”

This interest of his, surely it’s been triggered by the allure of her supposed foreignness. If she’d said, “Hello,” he would have said, “Lovely day, enjoy it,” filled his tank and driven away.

Because it’s a lost cause, she shakes her head and says, “Je suis désolée. Je ne parle pas l’anglais.”

“You don’t speak English?”

“Non.” She could backpedal the lie that she doesn’t speak English, but not the lie that she’s French.

She feels his eyes on her as she hangs up the hose, screws on the fuel cap, enters the car, shuts the door, and starts the engine. At the exit, she glances in her rearview mirror and the man is looking in her direction, his hand raised in what could be a wave.

When she’s back on the road, she yells at herself. He could have been the one, and what a story they could have told, about how their love ignited over premium unleaded at Shell. Real love, maybe, rather than the illusory love she shares with Aaron Green, whose invention was to find the real thing.

She cranks up the music and the first artist loud out of the speakers is like a finger wagging in her face. One of her favorites, with a stage name that’s a play on Chet Baker. She’s never listened to Chet Baker, but she likes Chet Faker, his cool, moody music, and she forces herself to sing along, to drown out how aptly his stage surname applies to her—faker, faker, faker.

EIGHT

HARRY CLICKS THE TEMPERATURE button on his watch. Still early, but the heat is inching up, the norm for August, when Labor Day is still a couple of weeks away. Yesterday at five, it peaked at 114. Today, it could reach 108 by noon. He reaches into his bag for a bottle. Forty-five minutes ago, it could have been a frozen weapon; now it’s just plastic holding cold water, which he swigs.

Levitt has gone out the gate, to the parking lot, has popped his trunk, seeking a dry shirt, then holds his phone up in the air. “Hey, Harry, I’ve got to make a call,” he yells.

“Do what you need to do,” Harry yells back, and sits down on the weather-worn bench on the court.

Levitt usually receives and returns one or two during their matches, always a patient querying him about her recent mammoplasty, or blepharoplasty, or rhinoplasty, or rhytidoplasty, or platysmaplasty, or abdominoplasty, or gluteal augmentation—the medical terms Levitt has taught him for breast implants, eyelidlifts, nose jobs, face-lifts, neck-lifts, tummy tucks, and rounding buttocks that have fallen down or flattened with age. Levitt’s features are slightly simian and he sweats like the hairy beast that he is not, and having some of the work he performs on others executed on his own visage and body would not be amiss, but it is impossible to feel sorry for the plastic surgeon in such demand that he is located on the court for matters involving not life or death, but vanity. He is the most pleasant doctor Harry has ever known and Levitt says it’s because the work he does is nearly 100 percent elective, only a tiny smattering medically required, and as a result, he rarely tangles with insurance companies: he’s paid up front and in full before he ever numbs an area or puts someone under and lifts the finest of scalpels, ready to perform his surgical-artiste magic. As Levitt’s Maserati demonstrates, he is cleaning up in his business of smoothing and sanding and defatting and plumping Palm Springs women of a certain age, of which there are many. Men, too, more and more, as Levitt always reminds him.

Harry swigs again, feeling pleased with the way he’s playing, keeping Levitt running, even if the memory of those dachshunds is still rolling around in his head. That might be the worst thing he’s done in his life, leaving those dogs behind, tearing out his young daughters’ hearts. Still, the girls survived, and all his children are healthy and happy, frequently phoning to fill him in on the progress of their lives, visiting regularly. He’s done right by his children, whom he loves so much, done right by them all of the time, except for that lapse in judgment regarding King David and Queen Esther.

Levitt, leaning against his car, is speaking into his phone, one hand moving slowly up and down, as if compressing the air, a gesture Harry recognizes as Calm down. Some matron is worried about something. From what Levitt has told him, he’s never botched a procedure or a surgery or been sued for malpractice; the toughest thing about what he does is convincing people they need to be patient, that swelling requires time to subside, that stitches will dissolve as they should, that bruising will fade, leaving behind vulnerable pink skin as unblemished as a baby’s, that they will, eventually, be exactly as they desire.

Harry understands that need people have for reassurance, to be told many times that everything will be okay.

And that’s exactly what he told that young Owen Kaufmann from the Palm Times.

That dealing with closed countries, secretive emigration quotas, malfunctioning airports, armed military, corrupt officials, extreme weather, and all the other details that attend moving Jews from around the globe to this patch of arid heaven is often easier than providing the necessary calm to families breathlessly checking off days until they have the proper paperwork in hand, are boarding a plane, stretching their necks to view the despised countries they are finally leaving behind, itching to begin their new lives awaiting them here in Palm Springs. No matter the education provided about what to expect and no matter how clear Harry’s people on the ground have been, he must calm them again when they land, are taken to their new home, and discover it is not the sprawling house plus pool of their dreams, but an acceptable apartment near to the very decent first jobs he has found them. And that when they were told they would be living in the desert, it meant a dry place that is usually hot or hotter or hottest, and the items they’ve packed into their bulging, double-strapped suitcases, like snowsuits and fleece-lined boots, would no longer be required. Acclimating to the heat takes time, they are all repeatedly told when still in Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Romania, Lithuania, Hungary, Slovakia, Belarus, Moldova, Bulgaria, Czechia, Slovakia, and, lately, China. And he tells them again when they arrive, but they can’t really understand the notion of desert heat

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