Shining City Read online

  Nathan pointed, and Marcus swung his eyes to a corner of the room. What appeared to be a bearded, three-hundred-pound motorcycle gang member was stenciling a tattoo of a snake curled around an apple next to the spaghetti strap on the bare shoulder of a ten-year-old girl.

  “So, can we hire the dude?” Nathan asked. Marcus smiled and shook his head in a way intended to convey amusement at the question, but gave no hint of a real answer. Nathan, his receptors pulsating in anticipation of his own bacchanal, ran off before Marcus had a chance to reply.

  Marcus had heard plenty of stories of local bar mitzvahs: the Laker Girls gyrating to “Hava Nagila”; a boy entering his circus-tented reception borne aloft in a fringed carriage by four steroid-engorged, silver-thonged Nubians whose bulging muscles glistened beneath the ten-thousand-dollar lighting design; a proud father, who held the patent to a Velcro-like material, had reconfigured, flooded, then frozen a ballroom at the Four Seasons Hotel, giving everyone ice skates as party favors and presiding over a Winter Extravaganza. This wasn’t the circle in which the Ripps family moved—the spare-no-expense world of the grandiose gesture. They had heard about these events and had been thinking Roon Primus would do something equally opulent and frivolous. But Marcus and Jan were surprised, maybe even a little disappointed, when he proved a more tasteful host than anticipated, the half-naked woman on their son’s slender forearm and the baby elephant notwithstanding.

  Roon was placing a big hand on his shoulder now and kissing Jan on the cheek as he thanked them for coming.

  “I liked your speech,” Marcus told Roon, who had given a sentimental talk about his son at the service that morning and seemed nearly on the verge of tears in doing so.

  “I had one of my corporate communications guys write it. He clarified how I felt.” Roon’s voice was deep and resonant. Even when he spoke quietly, it seemed to boom. He whispered in Marcus’s ear: “Don’t think I don’t know this whole deal is bullshit. But you gotta give the people what they want, and you try and get some good out of it. You’re doing a bar mitzvah, right?”

  “You’re on the guest list.”

  Roon magnanimously ignored the social equality implied in Marcus’s statement.

  “Kyoko looks beautiful,” Jan said. Kyoko was Roon’s tall, slim, and elegant Japanese-American wife, who at that moment could be seen posing for the Vanity Fair photographer beneath a life-sized ice sculpture of her son.

  Roon thanked Jan with a distracted nod. He was a big man, over six feet, and weighed nearly two hundred pounds. His real name was Ronald, which he found pompous and old-fashioned. He’d been given the name Roon in high school by a friend who was so stoned that his brain had misfired, and instead of Ron the word Roon tripped off his coated tongue. Marcus wasn’t surprised at how easily Ron Primus let go of his name, encouraging everyone to call him Roon, even his teachers. Roon knew how to let go of things, move on, as his previous wife would have been happy to attest.

  Roon’s hand felt heavy on Marcus’s shoulder, where he had left it a little longer than Marcus would have liked. Then, suddenly, it was gone. Roon greeted a tall, elegantly dressed man with a smile like a cash register. It took Marcus a moment to realize that it was the governor of California. Marcus listened to their conversation for a moment (reminiscing about a conference in Davos), then, when it became apparent that he was now invisible, turned his attention back to Jan. She shook her head at the politician’s rudeness, but before she could say what she was thinking the overhead lights (cued by an unseen and well-paid stage manager) dimmed, and a spotlight hit a DJ who was standing in the middle of the dance floor. He was a youngish, grinning Caucasian, with thick curly hair and a Chiclet grin, in a white suit over a black silk T-shirt and two-toned, black-and-white wingtips. Crackling with nervous energy, he waved his hand like a wand and parted the buoyant revelers.

  When the DJ intoned “Let’s kick it old school!” barely audible music gave way to the overly familiar thumping bass and drum of the hip-hop nation, now expanded to include seemingly every white child in America, and the recorded voice of a rapper, whose shrewdest career move involved getting shot, began to discourse at great length, and with appropriate sound effects, about his scrotum. The toothy DJ had the guests clapping along to the admittedly infectious song when another spotlight illuminated the faux doors at the head of the stairwell, and they turned out to not be faux at all. The doors, bright lights bouncing off their gold veneer, burst open to reveal a thirteen-year-old, barely five feet tall, Takeshi Primus, grinning maniacally. But Takeshi was not alone. On each arm was a motivational dancer, a professional let’s-get-this-party-started girl whose job consisted of dragging funk-impaired guests onto the dance floor, where they endeavored, through a combination of bumping, grinding, and generally exhorting, to ramp the energy of the event up to the desired level of hysteria. Clad in skintight spandex catsuits, these women each held one of the Amerasian bar mitzvah boy’s arms and, to the adoring cheers of the assembled guests, together led him down the grand staircase and into the roiling maw of his celebration.

  Marcus took in the spectacle with stunned disbelief. He looked at his wife, who didn’t return his glance, so amazed was she by the picture of the prepubescent Takeshi strutting between the adult women. As the crowd continued to applaud, the music increased in volume. Takeshi and his escorts reached the floor, and the trio danced together for a moment, the boy doing a slightly spastic amalgamation of the moves he’d seen in videos. The women enthusiastically followed along, then encouraged the surging throng to join them on the dance floor. Meanwhile, the rapper had reached the refrain of his song, so as the happy partygoers moved as one in a celebratory mosh, the incantational words thrusting from the speakers were:

  She a ho, she a ho, she a mothafuckin’ ho, ho-ohhh …

  Chapter 2

  No one aspired to live in Van Nuys. In a gamy corner of the San Fernando Valley, it was a hardscrabble neighborhood of mini-malls, fast-food joints, and cheap motels with rooms by the hour. The air was thick with skyborne detritus, and in the summer the mercury spiked to a hundred and twenty degrees. The people who resided there were mostly hard-working Hispanics who wanted a better life for their families, preferably somewhere with less gunfire. But on the western reaches was an enclave of several streets where the lawns were wider, the houses larger, and the occupants slightly more prosperous. No one here belonged to a country club, but neither did they fear that the finance company was going to repossess their pickup truck. This is where the Ripps family lived, in a two-story, three-bedroom house at 112 Magdalene Lane.

  It was after eleven o’clock that night, and a cool wind was blowing in from the desert. They had arrived home from the party an hour earlier, and Marcus was in the bathroom, preparing himself for bed more elaborately than usual. He ordinarily performed his serious ablutions in the morning, but he intended to seduce his wife tonight and didn’t want her to be able to cite his not having taken a shower, or having a stubbly beard, as an excuse. After Nathan was born, they had gone through a period where, like many couples with young children, their sexuality assumed the aspect of a grizzly bear in January, which is to say it went into hibernation. This woeful situation was compounded by Nathan’s regular nocturnal visits to their bed. But as their son grew older and better able to make it through the night without coming in to confer with his parents, they began to have sex more regularly. As the years went on, they would reliably consummate once or, if they were feeling particularly relaxed, twice a week. Now, Marcus would have settled for occasional sex, but Jan seemed to have lost interest—money worries, Nathan’s learning issues, the uncertain future of the boutique she co-owned—it was all enough to make her behave as if physical intimacy was not only off the agenda, but gone from her consciousness entirely. She had told Marcus it was just for the time being, that the fires would be stoked and they would once again behave as they had in the past. But he had serious doubts. Tonight he intended to force the issue. In a reasonable manner, of
course, since Marcus was not the kind of man who would actually force anything.

  Fresh from his hot shower, there was a fine sheen of perspiration on his body as he finished shaving. He wiped off a couple of errant wisps of shave cream that flecked his face and examined his reflection in the mirror. Marcus looked relatively good. His cheeks were smooth and the skin on his face was tight. He still had most of his hair, and, unlike many men his age, he didn’t have to suck in his stomach when he stood naked in front of his wife. He noticed a lonely nose whisker extruding from his right nostril. Wielding a tweezer, he quickly excised it. Then he grabbed a bottle of Listerine from the medicine chest, took a mouthful of the foul-tasting liquid, swished it around, and spat into the sink.

  Marcus self-fluffed in the manner of a peacock displaying his feathers. Having achieved the hoped-for degree of subtle tumescence, the one that said I don’t have a full erection beneath this towel wrapped around my waist, but one could quickly appear should the conditions be propitious, he stepped into the bedroom, where he was greeted by the sight of his mother-in-law seated on the bed. Dressed in a turquoise track suit, Lenore Griesbach was an elfin woman with short, graying hair. She wore large, heavy-rimmed glasses that made her milky eyes appear as if they were expanding. Jan sat next to her.

  “Mom got fired today,” she said. Lenore had moved in with them two months ago, having been widowed a year earlier. Wanting to contribute to the household, she had gotten a job at a nearby megastore called JackMart and each day would pack a bag lunch and ride the bus to work. She looked crestfallen.

  “I would have qualified for the health plan if I’d worked another two weeks,” she informed him. Marcus was feeling ridiculous in his towel, the sight of his mother-in-law having considerably dimmed his ardor. “You two have been so nice. I wanted to show my appreciation, so I was baking peanut butter meringue cookies. Anyway, I came in to ask if someone could come down and help me read the label on the peanut butter. I want to make sure it doesn’t have any transfats.” Although Lenore had been raised in Brooklyn, she bore no trace of the accent.

  “Would you go down with her, Marcus?” A glimmer of sweetness was visible in Jan’s end-of-day fatigue. Marcus put a robe on over the towel and dutifully accompanied his mother-in-law downstairs.

  The house had been built in the postwar boom of the 1950s, the original kitchen torn out and replaced over thirty years ago in a style that could only be called unfortunate. Awash in olive green, the countertops, oven, stove, and refrigerator had all faded at different rates. The combined effect was that of being inside a large avocado. The cracked linoleum, once a bright, cheery yellow, was now the shade of bad teeth. Cabinets of pressed wood were lined with peeling paper on which chipped dishware reposed. It was all neatly kept, so its threadbare aspect was ignored. They did not have the means to do anything about it anyway. Bertrand Russell, their ten-year-old terrier, was stretched out on his tartan bed chewing a plastic stick when Marcus and Lenore entered. The dog was named for the author of A History of Western Philosophy and possessed none of the yip-snap qualities than can make the small breeds so annoying. He dropped his stick and ambled over to Marcus, who reached down and scratched his head.

  Marcus glanced at the peanut butter jar and in an even voice that did not belie his irritation told Lenore that it contained no dangerous ingredients. Marcus did not generally resent Lenore’s presence. He liked his mother-in-law the way he liked house plants or cumulonimbus clouds, things that didn’t require much attention but could be appreciated when you had the time. She intended to stay indefinitely, though, so it was important that he encourage as much self-sufficiency as possible. As he was about to leave, she touched him lightly on the arm, peered through her glasses, and said “I want to pitch in, Marcus, so if you’ve got a job for me around the house …”

  He told her she could walk the dog if she’d like. “And you might want to get a stronger prescription for your glasses.” Then he hitched up his towel and went back upstairs.

  The diaphanous yellow curtains ruffled in the bedroom where Jan was propped up on pillows, reading medical literature she’d downloaded from the Internet.

  “I’m not really in the mood,” she said.

  Marcus lay next to his wife completely naked, having dropped the towel to the floor as he climbed into bed, and was rubbing her breast with the palm of his hand. He loved his wife’s breasts and usually began his foreplay there. They were of medium size, not too big or too small, their pleasing symmetry undisturbed by the infinitesimal southerly migration that had begun a year or two earlier. That they were enshrouded in the suburban burka of a fraying flannel nightgown did nothing to curtail his passion this evening. His semi-erection lay against her leg, but the way she was reacting, you would have thought he was rubbing the bed post. “Can you get in the mood?” he asked gently. Knowing this was going to be challenging, he had vowed to keep his tone as seductive as possible and not reveal any frustration, no matter how initially recalcitrant she was. When Jan didn’t respond, despite the continued circular movements of his palm over her nipple (which refused to react in any measurable way), he sensed that the breast strategy was not working and, ever the optimist, moved his hand between his wife’s thighs and attempted to part them. It was like trying to crack a safe that had no combination.

  “Marcus, don’t,” she said, pushing his hand away. He nuzzled her neck, brushed his lips against it lightly.

  “Come on, baby …” and, once more into the breach, Marcus sent his hand toward her warm pudendum. Despite lack of interest, Jan could not stop generating natural mammalian warmth, and Marcus mistook this heat for desire, so when he began rubbing again, she shoved his hand away with considerably more force.

  “I said no! Stop!”

  This order was as unmistakable as a rock falling on his head. Marcus rolled onto his back and stifled the urge to leave the room immediately, punctuating his departure with a theatrical door slam that would let her know exactly how he felt. But he just stared at the ceiling and waited a moment before he looked at her and said “Jan, let me ask you something, and, look, I don’t want you to be upset …”

  “What?”

  “Are we ever going to make love again?”

  “Of course.”

  “Any idea when?”

  “I’m worried about my mother’s eyes, Marcus. She thinks she might be going blind.”

  Now he folded his arms across his chest, exhaled, and resumed his examination of the ceiling. A crack had begun to form there. The house needed a paint job, but that was going to have to wait. How is a normal husband supposed to respond to something like this, he reasonably wondered? What is the strategy of a married man when his sex life has been hijacked by the health of his mother-in-law? It was blurred vision this week, next week it could be a broken hip. Once the body started to go, it was just a farrago of decay, one thing after another in a morbid parade of decomposition that could go on for years.

  “She’s really upset about getting fired from JackMart.” It was as if Jan was consciously trying to tamp down any possibility of a sexual connection between them. She might as well talk about ethnic cleansing.

  Marcus contemplated his future and audibly moaned. If his wife intended to create a link between her mother’s physical condition and their sex life, he faced the horrifying possibility of their never having sex again. He glanced at Jan who, freed from the discomfort of his advances, was again perusing the medical literature. She didn’t look particularly fetching. Her nightclothes swallowed her, and Marcus realized the effect was not uncalculated. Jan hadn’t been sleeping well and, with her face free of makeup, the dark circles under her eyes were more vivid.

  Marcus was not the type of man who cheated on his wife. It wasn’t so much that he didn’t desire other women when he found himself in a relationship. He did. Yet the guilt, the double-dealing, the play-acting philandering required were too much of a strain on what was an essentially gentle soul. Just thinking about it made him
nervous.

  He had slept with fewer than ten women before he met Jan, and six of them were in college (four of them were inebriated at the time, so he wasn’t sure if they really counted). He was not a man who kept score. Rather, he was one of those males burdened with a need to feel genuine affection for his sexual partner, or at least be convinced he did, and this limited his encounters when he was single. As for divorce, that was not in his calculations. For one thing, there was Nathan, who Marcus loved in a way that was difficult for him to describe. He did not envision seeing the boy on Wednesdays and alternate weekends. No, Marcus was sticking around. He was not going to allow his libido to dictate the general condition of his life. His thoughts wandered to the Guatemalan woman who worked at the taco stand where he occasionally ate lunch. She was slender, and wore faded jeans over scuffed boots, and fitted white blouses against which her burnished brown skin glowed. Once, when he’d been standing in line, she had needed to get past him and had lightly squeezed his upper arm as she did. He had tried to flex his muscle before she removed her fingertips. As he lay silently next to his brooding wife, his hand had strayed absently to his groin and without realizing it he had begun stroking himself.

  “What are you doing?” Jan had looked up from a paragraph on the draining of fluid from the eye, her gaze drawn by the subtle motions taking place next to her.

  Marcus quickly removed his offending hand and blurted, perhaps a little defensively, “Nothing!”

  “If you’re going to play with yourself, go into the bathroom or something. Jeez, Marcus … and put something on. What if Nathan walks in … or my mother? Is the door even locked?”

  Marcus got up from the bed and ambled to the dresser. Opening one of his drawers, he pulled out a pair of cotton pajama bottoms. Marcus never liked stepping into pajamas in front of his wife. He thought he looked silly. But now, his sex life apparently somnolent, if not dead, he didn’t care.