“But your text,” Greg says. “I thought you wanted . . .”
Lillian crosses her arms.
“ . . . me?” Greg says.
She’s laughing now. Sun comes through the skylight, suspending Greg in a beam of rising dust. Lillian sucks hard on her e-cig as if, with enough force, she might manage to pull in some actual smoke.
“What I like about you, Greg, is that you don’t overthink things. You’re a man of action and reaction. Take the way you waltzed in here and took off your clothes. Did it cross your mind that I was joking?”
He shakes his head.
“If this were Nazi Germany, you’d be first in line to operate the gas chamber.”
“I’m Jewish.”
“Self-hating.”
He shrugs in agreement, mimes turning the crank.
“You went on a date,” says Lillian. “With a woman named Sophia Dall.”
“I didn’t get her last name.”
“It’s Dall.”
“Okay.”
“So I need you to rack that brain of yours and try to remember if at any time during your two-hour convergence of shame and small talk, she mentioned her ex-boyfriend Jay Devor.”
“She did, yeah.”
Greg gives her the rundown: vape pen, MoMA, a shared order of overpriced tostadas, an au revoir peck on Greg’s cheek. When Greg brought up #Occupy, Sophia had explained that her ex, Devor, had organized the riot, but had left before it started. She’d been with Devor all that night.
“But you’re saying she told you he organized the riot?”
“He wasn’t even there, Lil. He didn’t know about the murder until the next day.”
“Well look at you, Detective Greg. I should get you a badge and a gun. Maybe a cute little sheriff’s hat,” says Lillian.
Greg, it seems, has done something right.
She says, “Button your shirt before I go blind.”
28.
They eat at the dining table, a third of which is taken up by Stuart’s twenty-seven-inch quote unquote travel laptop. The only stamps on the laptop’s passport: kitchen, dining room, living room, bedroom. Stuart types with one hand while eating with the other. A strand of lo mein dangles from his lips for a second before being sucked in. No one asks him to put the computer away. Those arguments ended ten years ago, during the salad days of Diablo, when it became clear that turning away was not, for Stuart, an option. At least during Michael’s childhood he shut off the computer once in a while. These days, it’s cause for minor celebration when he deigns to come downstairs. No wonder Rachel’s so stunted and armored, so attuned to the dangers of showing you care. Michael would be too had he grown up with the late model version of his parents that she did, all those noodle cup dinners eaten alone, or the belabored science projects so hurtfully ignored.
If there’s one thing Michael wants on this brief trip, it’s to make clear to his sister that, despite their differing lifestyles and history of emotional distance, and despite Rachel’s understandable reservations, he’d like to try to forge a friendship. Throughout his library research on communism, what Michael kept coming back to was Marx’s directive to raze the family and strip it for parts, each member a worker with no time or room for the hierarchical shackles of eating together at a small round table and asking each other about their days. This seemed like a miscalculation on Marx’s part, a deep failure to understand certain biological imperatives.
Marx had nine kids, Michael knows, and yet feelings of fatherhood are hardly mentioned in his writings, or, at least, in the small sample of his writings Michael’s read. Marx didn’t understand how lucky he was. Reproduction came easy and perhaps that was it; not until you’ve wanted something so hard for so long, until you’ve lain sleepless in bed on hundreds of nights praying to a God you don’t believe in, or sat in doctors’ waiting rooms squeezing your wife’s hand, or injected her thigh with an IVF needle, can you appreciate what the loss of that family might mean.
This is why communism would never triumph. People would always care more for their spouses and children than for anonymous strangers. They would not abandon the illusory dream of protecting their families in fenced-off mansions and airbag-equipped SUVs, of fortifying them with stem cell steaks and pricey D vitamins that boost immune defense, of cradling their delicate bodies on Casper mattresses made from high-density memory foam. A man would always want more than factory camaraderie and communal showers, not for himself, but for those that he loves. For all its flaws, capitalism takes this into account. It’s one thing to its credit, an understanding of this deep human need to provide.
And yet, look at what happens when someone like Michael can no longer provide. The American Dream—that beautiful stage set that looked so real on opening night—is now, with its props sealed in boxes and its actors gone home, revealed as a depthless façade. He finishes his bourbon, pours another.
“Is that your third whiskey?” asks Lydia, an Ashkenazi Jew known to drink vodka until blackout, who thinks brown liquor is devil’s juice for redneck gentiles. “You’re not turning into an alcoholic are you? It’s worrying, Michael. Whiskey’s so strong.”
“Second,” says Michael, though it’s his fourth. He doesn’t feel drunk, just tired. He hasn’t slept more than a couple hours since arriving in the Berkshires, up all last night picturing Ricky’s future: skin nipped by worms, coffin splintered and piercing the body’s remains. To push this image from his mind, Michael tried and mostly failed to catalog the thirty-plus years of their friendship. He doesn’t know if it’s fatigue or what, but each night since the murder it’s like he remembers less, to the point that he can’t, with certainty, recall even the contours of Ricky’s face, or the texture of his voice; as if Ricky, without his corporeal form, has become liquid and ill-defined, a multiplicity of opposing details that don’t add up to a graspable whole.
Rachel scoops lo mein onto her plastic plate. Though Lydia hasn’t observed
