Club Revelation
Excerpt

                Don’t worry. Relax.

                Of course.

                You’re not relaxing.

                You just can’t see it.

                Look, a yawn means simply that my body needs to take in more air, not that I am bored with you, Gerry. But if I have to yawn, I just do it. Jesus could be sitting right in front of me, honey, but if my blood is crying out for more oxygen, I just open up my mouth wide in front of the Lord too. He understands what a yawn means. It’s not about you, Gerry. It’s about the air I breathe.

                Gerry Levine rolled down the window of the Toyota and inhaled deeply. The stream of air entered and expanded like a balloon at the base of his throat and then, he imagined, it changed into a tube and snaked down the narrow passages of the throat and lungs. The air was gasoline-tinged and chilly, but he let it blow on his face, and he was oddly comforted.

                "Up with the window, please."

                "Are you dozing, friend?"

                "Wide awake," Gerry reassured Sam (back seat) and Michael (front seat). Michael, however, continued to be an unbeliever, and pulled his knees up in crash protection mode under his chin, with his frayed, malodorous sneakers pressing hard on the dented glove compartment door.

                "Those two white lines, Gerry, are called a lane," Michael said. "Traditionally, on our planet, the driver makes an effort to stay inside the lane."

                "Well, whose planet are we on, then?" Gerry said, and with a flick of a glance over his shoulder, he floored the accelerator, weaved rapidly but skilfully through the crowded traffic, and was now coming fast on the cars ahead.

                "Normal," said Michael, as much a whisper of reassurance to himself as it was a communication to Gerry, "just conduct yourself like the mature, normal human being that we know down deep you aspire one day to be."

                But Gerry did not hear. He understands what a yawn means. Why had Marylee said that?

                "Jezuz Christ, Gerry," Michael screeched as they drifted in front of a truck and its horn suddenly boomed like a sixteen-wheeled Titanic bearing down on them, "do you want to play tennis or end up in a baggy?"

                It was a regular Tuesday night and Gerry Levine and his friends, Michael Klain and Sam Belkin (still dozing noisily, despite the honking, while one of his size-twelve-and-a-half shoes moved menacingly forward toward the gear shift) were bumping along the George Washington Bridge about four miles from the Caracas Health and Racquet Club in Caracas, New Jersey. Gerry continued to push his little ladybug of a Toyota to its mechanical limits, downshifting and lane-hopping around the huge trucks, even dashing diagonally to beat a motorcyclist. He was creating every driving challenge possible to distract himself, he realized, from these troubling thoughts about his wife, Marylee, because a new and still vague lament had entered their life together.

                About a third of the way across the bridge, Gerry was about to bring it up with Sam and Michael, but he hesitated. He just didn’t know well enough what was bothering him, although he was fairly certain now about one thing: it had begun just the other day, when Marylee met with the new renter of the restaurant space in their building. All Gerry really knew was that the renter was very young and very handsome, but perhaps that was enough.

                It’s too bad, Gerry thought as he veered around a blue and white delivery van, that a feeling is not a physical something like a tennis ball that you can see and strike. Or take on and off like the flesh-colored arm brace he had again forgotten to bring tonight. To pursue this, however, risked breaking the mood of mild male sports excitement of their Tuesday tennis nights together.

                Tonight, like every Tuesday between Labor Day and Memorial Day, there was something simple and soothing, exciting yet almost inviolably ordinary about being in Gerry’s rusting 1994 Toyota with its several mysterious squares of red light always blinking on the dashboard. Gerry and his friends, who had known each other nearly half their lives, joked sheepishly about the recent New Year’s Eve-despite the oncoming millennium, they had all been asleep by twelve forty-five, having left Marylee, Judy, and Ellen on the roof of their building with kisses (between sexual and chaste) and a half bottle of champagne unconsumed.

                Tonight, however, the men were sufficiently revived to resume their routine: to drive a little recklessly, to tell each other about fast cars they once had driven, and to assert with pride that they were about to enter the tennis purgatory between advanced beginner and intermediate at the Caracas Health and Racquet Club. In short, they did all they could to ignore the half-century mark rushing up toward them full of lights and warnings like the tollbooth that now loomed up ahead.

                They left Manhattan and the great bridge’s suspended lights behind them and slid in an instant into New Jersey, where Gerry took the twenty-mile-an-hour Caracas turnoff at forty. He downshifted hard and kept it at twenty-five to avoid the cop who usually waited in ambush behind the dazzling herds of reindeer that still grazed, illuminated, on Caracas’s modest front lawns. Then in another eight minutes of banter about their jobs, sports, politics, and Christmas versus Hanukah, they turned into the club parking lot.

                Here as the trunk popped open for them to get at their rumpled athletic bags and racquets, Gerry hesitated again over his worn sample books, a sheaf of overdue bills from his suppliers, a camera that he used to photograph each new installation, and a half gallon of antifreeze curled up beside the oily jumper cables. How, he wondered for an instant, can a man spend so many long years, decades now, buying and selling floor coverings? Yet he still liked the sound of these words that seemed to be always on his lips-linoleums and congoleums-all the eums that reminded him of a long-ago Latin class in high school in which he had excelled and which had given him a fleeting sense of mastery. This thought rose quickly out of Gerry but expired in the brisk air of the parking lot, along with other thoughts associated with the implements and emblems of workaday concerns.

                Yet tonight they lingered there longer than usual among the neon-lit Volvos, BMWs, and Subarus parked in their jaunty diagonal slots, as if the men did not want to relinquish the moment. Sam Belkin too was trying to prepare his mind for tennis by taming his preoccupation: finding financing for his most recent documentary project, a film on the economic and social plight of the world’s tiniest nations. The obvious funding sources-these various impoverished atolls and archipelagoes themselves, with a total population smaller than that of a good doorman building-collectively didn’t have a plugged nickel to help him make his $1 million production budget. And Sam knew this because he had taken every ambassador out to lunch, some more than once. Unless he could come up with $300,000 in the next few months, he was beginning to think of dropping the project altogether.

                Sam stretched his tall frame upwards and stared at a glittering splash of stars unusually bright tonight in the sky over Caracas. An intuition with the power of joy and release filled him and for an instant he knew with irreducible certainty that, should there be life on other planets, the extraterrestrials too would not have the slightest interest in funding his documentaries. He sighed extravagantly, extracted his two black-holstered cell phones from his pockets, and settled them into the trunk of Gerry’s Toyota like a gunfighter hanging up his firearms before entering a tamer precinct.

                "Shutting the trunk, Klain," Sam said.

                "Shut away," Michael answered.

                As Gerry and Sam peered above the lights of the parking lot to argue about which bright light above the radio tower was Venus, Michael, a librarian by day and hobbyist philosopher by night (if anyone would listen), tossed his dog-eared copy of Being and Nothingness (which he had been fondling on his lap throughout the drive) into the Toyota’s back seat. He confirmed that Gerry had his keys (they had been locked out once), and clicked the door shut.

                Together, the three men entered the club and quickly surveyed the dimly lit space for its inhabitants: the slouching tennis players, waiting nervously on dark blue chairs for their court time, always reminded them of the cabin of an airplane at thirty thousand feet at around four A.M.. Their eyes traveled to a TV mounted high on the opposite wall playing the night’s big game and then to the stocky, illuminated soda machine below it. Gerry, Sam, and Michael now began their search for an available player who might make a fourth.

                This pursuit was always part of the Tuesday night ritual and could be even more enjoyable than their game. It was animated by the unspoken agreement that a well-preserved sixty- or even seventy-year-old was preferable to a player their own age because the former usually played even more slowly than this fiftyish trio. In this manner, despite mounting evidence of volleys that they could no longer handle and serves that meandered over the net to land with all the force of a snowflake, Gerry, Sam, and Michael could often create a game where they sustained for two precious hours of play the illusion that they were keeping the rampaging diminishments of midlife at bay.

                An unabashed hypochondriac, Michael in particular craved playing with older and sometimes retired doctors, these days in particular a frequently recruited white-haired cardiologist from Iran named Ganesh, who often haunted the bar and had a surprisingly powerful backhand. Tonight, however, there was no Ganesh; indeed no one at all appropriate could be found, so they trooped onto the court, piled jackets, bags, and water bottles in a heap by the net posts, and prepared to play their usual game of Canadian doubles.

                While Gerry and Michael jogged twice around the perimeter of the court to warm up, Sam dropped down on the baseline to do fifteen vocal, grunting push-ups before they started their practice hits and serves in the still promising fluorescent air. Perhaps tonight, Gerry thought, everyone will play like the heavy-hitting team from the nearby college that periodically practiced at Caracas but which was mercifully absent this evening.

                Then the game began. Gerry’s windmill serve looked as if it just might be on tonight, Michael thought, as it whooshed through and landed just millimeters from the centerline for an unheard-of first ace. On the next points, however, Michael, the existential rabbit among them, zigged and zagged for all balls no matter how hopeless, like a Sisyphus in short white pants. He continually adjusted his glasses and his carefully arranged headbands, one red and one white, to find the perfect position where he could see clearly and also dam up his profuse sweating before it streamed into his eyes. Gerry was amused by the cascades of perspiration that Michael, a skinny man of 138 pounds, was able to produce. As usual, Michael said it was nerves. This would have been a good opening for Gerry to mention Marylee’s remote behavior and the considerable time she had been spending with the new tenant, but he let the opportunity pass again, with some regret.

                For once the sets began in earnest, there were no more opportunities; the intense, if mediocre, tennis was too serious  to leave room for discussing their wives. Anyway, their marriages were all long-standing and secure-or at least tonight they still believed this was the case; a fairly secure and happy conjugal condition was what they had in common and therefore could commonly ignore. So they played the by turns energetic, by turns lugubrious tennis of fairly contented men who were old friends and whose easygoing competitiveness was enough to make the games interesting yet agreeable. They exchanged jokes at the net and mimicked each other’s awkwardness at the service line. They shouted "Good get!" or "Beautiful placement!" Yet they also meant: How in God’s name have we become such old farts that we compliment each other on that?

                Let it be, Gerry was thinking. Keep your eye on the ball and let it be. But tonight he whiffed his forehand and double-faulted with amazing regularity, and the ball seemed to pass right through, as if the gut of his racquet were a gaping window. On the way home, Gerry was so demoralized that Michael drove-an unusual occurrence. After ten minutes of silence, when they arrived at the tollbooth, Sam leaned over to him in the back seat and said, "Gerry, nobody in the history of the Caracas Health and Racquet Club-among whom have been nonagenarians hitting prone from iron lungs-no one, my good friend, has ever played as poorly as you did tonight. What the hell is on your mind?"

                Gerry opened his mouth to answer, his lips even formed the first syllable of his wife’s name, but nothing came out.

This night-and on all of what they called their Caracas Nights-Marylee Jeffers, Judy Klain, and Ellen Belkin were generally content to let the State of New Jersey, its health clubs, Toyota mechanics, police officers, toll-takers, and elected officials, deal with their husbands.

                While Gerry, Michael, and Sam played tennis, or played at tennis, as Ellen had put it when she handed Sam an apple and sent him down to Gerry’s waiting car, the old brownstone, which the three couples had bought together fifteen years before, reverted to the women, who, after all, had put in the most work restoring it. The 1882 structure was on a quiet ailanthus-lined street six buildings in from Broadway in the heart of the Upper West Side. It had stairs that creaked on all five flights, thick red and black carpeting, dark polished wooden banisters, elaborately framed hallway mirrors, two daguerrotypes of a sail-strewn New York Harbor (Michael’s find), and an agreeably bracing nineteenth-century mustiness that no amount of Judy’s Janitor-in-a-Drum could remove.

                Above the restaurant space that stood two steps below street level and in the shade of the ailanthus, each couple had their own apartment: Judy and Michael’s stark Buddhist retreat (hers, not his) on the parlor floor above the restaurant; upstairs, Ellen’s media control center: books by the thousands, in Dewey Decimal order, in custom-built white cases on six walls, with three video monitors (this, the mark of Sam) above the mantel; and on the fourth floor, Marylee and Gerry’s place, the sparest, most modern and minimalist living area, done in a style that Marylee had dubbed Scandinavian-Jewish dance studio.

                Somehow, however, despite Marylee’s best efforts, their floor had recently begun to seem cold and uninviting to her. She did not know why she no longer liked the half dozen items of smooth, light, veneered wooden furniture, or the large and immensely heavy glass table in the dining room that had given Gerry a slight hernia the one time he had tried to move it, or the abstract wire mobile that hung down between ceiling fans. Even the shining parquet Gerry had put down himself had begun to seem tacky. At least she still loved her kitchen, with its ceiling wine-glass rack and the inexpressible feeling it always gave her that the best meal was yet to be cooked. However, Marylee’s eye would then alight on the several oil paintings on Jewish themes mounted on otherwise serenely empty white walls in the living room. These especially were getting on her nerves tonight.

                They included Moses stumbling down Mount Sinai carrying tablets that reminded her precisely of the shape and color of 500-milligram Advil (Marylee did have a bad headache); then there was Jacob struggling with the Lord as His angels ascended a sinuous ladder of roped light to Heaven above. This composition had always struck Marylee as having the look of a Biblical construction site accident. However, her favorite among what she called her poor Jewish paintings collection was a three-by-four-foot scene on the wall that opened into the kitchen. This painting depicted the brazen serpent emerging from the rod Aaron flung down before Pharaoh and Moses as they lobbied to let the Jewish people go. It used to remind Marylee of the stories of snakehandlers she had heard about in Virginia when she was a little girl. Now she could no longer stand to look at it.

                Gerry and Marylee had received these pictures as gifts from the Belkins (Ellen had disassociated herself from the selection), who had bought them from a struggling street artist in Haifa, when Sam was on location there taping interviews with Holocaust survivors years ago. Because of their association with this fraught subject and because Sam actually liked them-and still did-Gerry and Marylee had let the pictures remain on their walls for, now, eight long years. This evening, however, on her way to meet Judy and Ellen, as Marylee paused in front of Aaron and Moses, she stuck the nail of her pinkie into an egregious glob of green paint that for the past three weeks she had found particularly ugly. When Marylee deftly flicked it off Pharaoh’s headdress, she exhaled with relief out of all proportion to the gesture, and continued upstairs to the Museum.

                The Museum-or more accurately, the three couples’ Museum of the 1960s-was the common space on the fifth floor of the brownstone: fifteen hundred square feet of 1960s nostalgia crammed with yellowing copies of the East Village Rat and other underground newspapers, books, LPs of the Beatles, Stones, Donovan, and Dylan, a poster of Che Guevara, a rucksack overflowing with assorted berets military and otherwise, a canteen allegedly dropped by a soldier of the 101st Airborne defending the Pentagon against anti-Vietnam War demonstrators (Judy and Michael had been among them), a New York Times clipping of the memorial to Alison Krause and the other students killed at Kent State, beanbags, encrusted tubes of body paint used at Woodstock, and various other memorabilia precious beyond words, such as a fret allegedly preserved from one of Jimi Hendrix’s self-shattered guitars. No one could part with any of this junk-and certainly not Sam’s reel-to-reel Wollensack tape recorder, which still could play (if he could find the reel) Barry Goldwater’s acceptance speech at the 1964 San Francisco Republican Convention. The Museum-Ellen had come up with the name-was the capstone of the building, uniting the couples’ apartments and giving the place a secret and creaky charm, a kind of grown-ups’ history playhouse.

                The nostalgia that pervaded the building was often sad and powerful-a nostalgia both for the real past (their old suitcases, Birkenstocks, engineer boots, backpacks, and duffel bags were everywhere) and also a past that never was, because the first plan for the Museum had been to outfit it as a nursery. However, there were no toys or tricycles or now-dusty stacking rings in sight, since none of the couples, despite some strenuous efforts, had any children, nor, given Marylee, Judy, and Ellen’s age, did it seem likely they ever would.

                Up and down the common stairway of their building, eating an apple or transporting a glass of white wine by its long stem, the women visited each other on tennis Tuesdays, much as they had done when they had met in the dormitories at Barnard College thirty blocks north. In jeans, thick socks, sweatpants, and T-shirts, they dropped in on each other, sipped half a glass of tea, left, skipped back down or up to their apartments to do an errand, or, like tonight, returned to the Museum.

                Judy, who had put on far too much weight since school, tonight substituted for her usual sweats a large dress, snugly pinned under the breasts and then sailing down to her ankles. Ellen had her usual slew of student essays to correct; a selection from the week’s papers almost always accompanied her, like the president’s nuclear codes, tucked into a tattered, sturdy brown folder that lived beneath her armpit.

                When they settled into the Museum’s circle of broken beanbags, the chaise lounge with only one arm, and the hassock that proclaimed, in graffitiesque letters, DICK NIXON/KICK ME, Marylee said she had an announcement to make about a potential new tenant for the restaurant space, which had been empty far too long. The candidate, she said, was about twenty-five, with a Southern accent that reminded Marylee of home. The financials he submitted presented some difficulties, she went on, because the young man did not appear able to undertake the monthly payments all on his own. "Yet somehow," she said with a reassuring smile she directed at both her friends like a lighthouse beacon, "I just know it will be all right."

                "Anyone feel like a joint?" Ellen abruptly asked as she looked up from the papers on her lap. "Why is it that, after all these years, freshmen themes still make me want to get a little high?"

                "Not during the business part of the meeting," said Marylee.

                "Since when did we ever have a business part of our meetings?" Judy asked. "We just sit around, get high, and ramble until what needs to get attention gets it. Then we bitch a little about the guys, hug, and go to bed."

                "Well, maybe things are different tonight," Marylee said.

                After the debacle of Curry by Murray, the last restaurant tenant, and the space having been idle these last four months, Marylee urged them to be content with this new tenant, even though he did seem, well, a little irregular. The nearly $4,000 monthly rental was needed to cover the brownstone’s mortgage, and they all could use the financial relief. She hoped Judy and Ellen would not ask too many questions and instead rely on her usual good business judgment.

                They drifted around the Museum as they always did-the place was like their own in-house flea market-had more tea, although Marylee switched to wine, and Ellen eventually had her Woodstock-era antique joint of Mexican grass, which hung from her lips like a smoking relic; it was not really worth the anticipation; it never was any more. They eventually reconvened for business on one of the Upper West Side’s few extant and miraculously still functioning waterbeds, not only still afloat but also fitted out with pillows on several of which was crocheted HO HO HO CHI MINH, THE VIET CONG ARE GONNA WIN, provenance unknown. Ellen put on at low volume Roy Orbison’s greatest hits, they began to sing along, and then, thanks to the wine, the stale weed, the watery undulations, and the cozy warmth of the Museum, and who knew what else, the world suddenly seemed a more perfect place.

                Although a desire to be silent about the new tenant once again enveloped her, Marylee also knew she should say more, a lot, in fact. Yet what was the harm in just thinking about him herself for a bit longer, what was the rush to puncture the amiable anesthesia of the moment?

                "So, okay, what’s the tenant like?" Ellen finally asked. "Really."

                "Physically?"

                "Sure, why don’t you start with the internal organs!"

                Marylee paused. "I couldn’t quite say. He’s sort of all over just plain nice, a very nice and helpful young man, like people used to be."

                "A non-New Yorker?" Judy asked.

                "Oh absolutely. Like I told you. Very far away. I actually think the South. The most important thing is that he appears to love us," Marylee added quickly, "and he wants to begin renovations immediately."

                "Well, that’s reassuring. Is the paperwork covered?"

                "It will be."

                "More wine?"

                "What’s his name?

                "William Harp."

                "You’re kidding."

                "Why would I kid?"

                "Because it sounds like an alias, a pseudonym," Ellen said. "Serial killer."

                "Must be," said Judy.

                "Kills with wire. Piano and harp," said Ellen.

                Marylee stood and ran her fingers through a large jar of vermilion clay beads on the floor beside the waterbed. She stared at the three-foot face of Eugene McCarthy still campaigning at her from his New Hampshire primary poster, 1968. She rearranged a shelf with a tangle of hopelessly knotted lanyards and a broken-down hookah and rhetorically demanded, "When are we going to throw all this stuff away?"

                "Never," answered Ellen. "What kind of restaurant are we going to have, ML?"

                "I really don’t know. He’s peculiar, but he puts a smile on my face. Happy meals, I guess."

                "What’s gotten into you?" Ellen said to her. "Gerry make love to you this morning before work?"

                "Must be," she answered vacantly.

                "Sex has made her crazy," said Judy. "And not a bad way to go it is."

                "Shall I proceed with the lease?" Marylee asked.

                "I have no time for legal papers this week," said Ellen, "or to interview Harp. Whoever he is, we trust you completely."

                "I don’t know about completely," said Judy. "But you obviously have a good feeling for the guy. He’s not a fly-by-night, is he?"

                Marylee shook her head.

                "He’s not going to do something dumb like nine hundred varieties of bagels that will die instantly?"

                Marylee assured Judy that though he was young, he did seem to know the business and to have lots of energy.

                "Well, what is it?"

                "What is what?"

                "There is something on the tip of your tongue," Judy said to Marylee. "Spit it out. What is there about the place, or is it the kid?"

                "Nothing, really," Marylee said, choosing her words carefully, "except that I think he is devout. Religious. Personally quite religious."

                "That’s excellent," said Ellen, "mainly because my impression is that such people usually have a sense of responsibility. They don’t ever scoot out without paying the rent because they feel God is the ultimate landlord."

                "I couldn’t agree more," said Marylee, very much relieved. "I couldn’t put it better myself. You know what else is a plus about him? He has a sense of humor. He told me he thinks God has a problem with the Upper West Side."

                "That’s because not even God can find an affordable studio here anymore. I say go right ahead. Rent to him. Just make sure he has insurance and that we are covered during the renovations and for three months on the deposit. Right?"

                "Of course I’ll make sure," she said.

                Marylee finished her wine, set it on an old Muntz TV stool, and stepped through the ornate empty frame of a mirror that she remembered having brought up from Virginia twenty years ago. She unearthed a Cabbage Patch Kid from underneath a collection of doilies and handed it to Judy. She blew dust off a copy of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, one of whose black corners was turned up like a ski jump.

                She handed the anthology to Ellen, who flipped through it and said, "Who remembers the difference between dramatic irony and verbal irony? Please write three succinct paragraphs. Who agrees that we really have got to jettison this shit?"

                "I say throw it all out," said Marylee. "I’m attached to none of it."

                "Since when?" asked Ellen. "You were always the biggest packrat of all."

                "Not any more. Don’t know. I just feel light all over."

                Judy, who had begun meditating five years ago, said, "Even though the Buddha counsels in the Four Noble Truths on the dangers of clinging, I want to hold onto this stuff forever."

                A brightly lit disk with the boy’s handsome face emblazoned on it approached and then receded in Marylee’s mind-she puzzled about what it reminded her of, and then realized: it was like a cameo in an old movie. She reached down into the box of books marked POLITICAL and lifted up a volume by Herbert Marcuse, then one by Frantz Fanon. The discontent among the classes was universal and inevitable. There was no arguing with that, although there was a time a few decades ago when she would have argued. She sighed and returned the well-thumbed paperbacks to the box.

                "If we don’t throw this stuff out, then someone," said Ellen, "has absolutely got to dust. Just because we love the Sixties doesn’t mean we have to breathe them. Anyone know where the grass went?"

                "Enough," said Judy, as her own eyes began to close. "I think we’ve all had enough."

                Marylee looked up as Ellen withdrew an essay from her folder, shook it out noisily like the deli man popping open a bag, and began to correct it. She sensed Ellen was irritable tonight, and, sure enough, in an instant she looked up from the essay before her and said to Judy: "I really find it irritating when you drop off like that and start meditating right in front of us without any warning. It’s very personal, and I frankly find it out of place, Judy. It’s like flossing your teeth in public."

                "I don’t mind her doing it," said Marylee.

                "You don’t mind anything," Ellen snapped. "But, Judy, honestly, why do we always have to look at you meditating? You never say, Excuse me! It’s like looking at your stomach digesting, only it’s your mind digesting itself."

                "I like that," Judy said. Yet, eyes closed, she went on meditating, and Ellen went on correcting, and Marylee felt like a graduate student living in a dormitory that never was, with the world and every possibility and career still open before her.

                "I don’t care if you start cutting your nails, or flossing or whatever," Marylee said. "You’re my friends, and I love you."

                Ellen peered up skeptically over the tops of her glasses and scrutinized Marylee. "I think the winter and the end of the millennium and the end of the world have made you pale. Are you sure you are not coming down with a cold? La grippe? Postnasal drip?"

                "No," said Marylee softly. Then she added, "Oh, maybe something." But she knew that this was false. She had never felt better in her life.

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