Victor used his one phone call on his Grandma Nicky. He felt awful, given the charge and the late hour, but she barely reacted when he told her he was in jail. “Our jail?” she asked, as if they had a regular jail. She must have taken a pain pill before bed, because instead of asking any other questions, she just made a tight groan. “I’ll be right there.”
He felt a thin relief. At least he didn’t have to call his mother. But shortly after being returned to the holding pen, a desk clerk appeared with a message. “Hey, Electric,” she announced, eliciting snickers from the other inmates in his cell. “Your granny called back. She’s going to be delayed. Since we picked you up having your little party in her Lexus, she said she has to figure out a way to get here.”
Victor put his head in his hands. In addition to being humiliated by the circumstances of his arrest, being around cops always brought him back to the fire. Though officers had rescued him and his sister, Mindy, from the basement — where they’d been hiding, stupidly, like they were waiting out a tornado — they’d also been the ones to bring them to the hospital, St. Raphael’s, and court. He wished he could find strength in this familiarity, to “locate growth in patterns,” like Dr. Yuder had taught him, but he’d never actually figured any of that out.
“You haven’t practiced enough,” Mindy said, and she was right, as usual. He hated practicing. It made everything feel so rehearsed. At least Scott Sulz, who’d been a year above him in grade school and who was now amusing his fellow prisoners with tales of past arrests, hadn’t recognized him. How ironic that his eyeliner, dyed hair, tatty clothes, and legal last name change — the same things that cued his mother’s disdain and caused him to flee from her house to Nicky’s — now protected him. He only wished that he’d touched up his roots.
To kill time, he mused on some new lyrics for Electricked Out, his queer, song-by-song rebuttal to Bowie’s Aladdin Sane. But as he worked up a line about the man he’d been caught with — The lure of smoke on his suntanned skin/The leather backseat charged with sin — he saw his grandma enter the station. Walking directly to the clerk, she set her good handbag on the counter and shook the night from her stiff blonde coif. “My name is Nicholah Edelbaum,” she said, “and I’ve come for my grandson.”
Nicky’s Lexus had been parked at the time of the arrest, so he had managed to avoid a DUI, but the open container of Wild Turkey, combined with the morals charge, gave the cops cause to seize the car. The impound lot, Victor recalled,from a youthful run-in with his Volvo, was once attached to this station, but the department had apparently sold the parcel to a developer.
“Impound’s in Kego now,” the officer said. Nicky asked for the desk phone. Though he’d never seen his grandma take a cab, he assumed that she must have taken one there, and was calling another to shuttle them to the lot. It took only one word to shatter this illusion.
“Evelyn,” she said, without even a hello. “When you get this message, you need to come back here. Now we need a ride to Impound.”
Evelyn was his grandma’s best friend, Evie Fein. The two of them had met wearing identical dresses to their first day of third grade and had been battling for primacy ever since. Once, during a brunch at Nicky’s, they had argued for hours over which of them was the first to buy a Mr. Coffee, a fight that remained unsettled even when Evie drove the three blocks to her house and returned with a receipt.
“Inconclusive,” Nicky had announced. “She’s had these pre-dated before.”
Evie arrived at the station before his release. She stared at him through the bars of the cell. “Aren’t they supposed to put people like you in protective custody?”
Victor managed a tinny smile. Though his grandma had always been the prettier of the two, Evie was more incisive. She set her hand on Nicky’s shoulder. “I’ll call Saully Zucker tonight. Hopefully we can keep this out of the Jewish News.”
Nicky winced as the sergeant led Victor out of the cell. “I don’t know what to say about this, Vickeleh.”
Victor took the baggie the officer handed him and removed his wallet. The trio of condoms hidden behind it unfurled. “Maybe we don’t need to say anything at all?”
Evie stayed silent until they were almost at Impound. “If I were you, Nicky, I’d get rid of that car,” she said. “Obviously I don’t have anything against Victor, or his lifestyle. But when Ira Kuplin choked to death in my father’s delivery van, we sold it. It’s like a sick horse. You don’t want it around.” She honked and waved as she drove off.
Victor felt ashamed walking his grandmother across the trash-strewn lot, filled with the pimped-out SUVs of teenage drug dealers and the drunk-wrecked muscle cars of lakeside rednecks. Her white Lexus looked like the single good tooth in the mouth of a derelict. He maneuvered toward the passenger door, but Nicky clutched her shoulder, which she had been threatening to have replaced for years. “You’re driving.”
He tried to hide the bourbon bottle before she got in, but she was too quick. Worse than this, the car still smelled like Duncan — a combination of Marlboro Lights, Polo cologne, and dry-cleaning fluid, common to older suburban Detroit queers. It gave Victor the stirrings of a hard on. “I’m really sorry, Grandma,” he said.
“Dead horse,” Nicky muttered. “You’ll detail the car, and we’ll put this behind us.” She fastened her seatbelt over her fur. “But you’re definitely coming with me to Evie’s great-granddaughter’s Bat Mitzvah now.”
Victor sunk into the driver’s seat. He wished his wagon was running, that he had the money to fix it, to head to New York, anywhere. “Won’t my mother and Mr. Levine be there?”
Nicky nodded, but she had rescued him far too often for him to offer any real resistance. They’d always shared a special bond. They were both middle children — “bridges, occasionally islands,” she’d pointed out. While the rest of his family saw her as calculating and superficial, he found her inspiring, a girl from Detroit’s Jewish ghetto elevated by carriage, costume, and advantageous marriages. She’d been the only one to stand by him through his coming out, his dropping out, and his taking his show on the road. She didn’t just support his ambitions, she admired them. He turned left out of the lot. “Ok, Grandma.”
***
By the time he woke up the next morning, Nicky had already completed the Free Press crossword. He grabbed a slice of her fresh Mandel bread and sat at the breakfast table, but instead of reading and quizzing him on the headlines like usual, she simply gestured at the door to the attached garage. The toolbox-shaped car cleaning kit she’d bought him for his seventeenth birthday sat at the threshold. He’d been storing it in her basement since the last time he stayed with her, after leaving college for the final time. “I already changed the batteries,” she said.
Victor unlatched the top and poked through the messy array of compounds and polishing discs. “I hope I remember how to use the attachments.”
“I’m sure it will come back to you.”
Like many other Detroit boys, Victor had grown up obsessed with cars. He’d done book reports on obscure local marques. He’d attended the auto show Downtown, once taking an hours-long bus ride by himself to get to Cobo Hall. And when he got his license, he’d accepted Nicky’s offer to buy him a used car. But instead of the Chevy Cavalier her accountant recommended, he’d convinced her to gift him the cash equivalent. This allowed him to acquire his dream car, a beige 1976 Volvo station wagon, and to create a small fund for repairs, a financial cushion he soon squandered on his first guitar, piercing, hit of Ecstasy, and tattoo, splurges that pretty much defined who he was now: a twenty-four year-old, broke, gay, college dropout; wannabe glam rock musical composer, without a job, an education, or a home; and mired in Nicky’s largesse. With the Volvo back in Pete’s shop, awaiting payment prior to the installation of parts, he also lacked any reliable means of escape.
To celebrate the refurbishment of her car, Nicky cooked Victor’s favorite childhood dinner, roast chicken, twice-baked potatoes, and seven-layer cake. He put his vegetarianism aside, again, and tucked in. Nicky seemed delighted. She even indulged her habit of sucking the marrow from her chicken bones. She stared into the sliding glass door at her own reflection. “Since it seems like you’ll be here for a bit,” she said, rotating her shoulder. “Maybe now is the time to arrange that surgery?”
“Yeah, maybe,” he said. He raised a drumstick in toast. “To…a season of chicken dinners.” Nicky smiled.
On Thursday, before her bridge game, Nicky had Victor chauffeur her to the mall to see her hairdresser. They’d been to Lights, Camera, Beauty twice a month since he’d arrived, and the routine was the same as usual. Her frosted stylist, Gordon, positioned Nicky in a chair and chatted with her endlessly, but spent the entire session attempting to cruise Victor in the gilt-framed mirror. Victor kept his face buried in Spin. He was trying to figure out how to respond to a card from Rhonda that had arrived in the mail that morning. It had an image of a dewy daisy on the front. It was a sympathy card. The inside was blank, save three lines. “I hear that I’ll be seeing you at the Fein Bat Mitzvah. Mr. Levine and I would like to talk to you about your situation. I hope that you can be civil, since we will be in public.”
Victor didn’t know how to be civil with his mother. He didn’t know how to be anything of his own around Rhonda. He felt like he was always just reacting to her. Despite all that had happened — the flailing outrage of the fire, her abandoning him and Mindy with their absent father to marry Mr. Levine, emancipating herself from him to avoid helping with college — she still acted as though he should be delighted to welcome her return in his life, like some exiled monarch. He’d ignore her requests, blow off their appointments, do the opposite of whatever she suggested. When that failed, he’d withdraw and disappear. But she never even really noticed. His recent visit here, to stay with her at her house, had been part of a new tactic, one Dr. Yuder had suggested years ago, inviting her into his life on his terms, and insisting she display some modicum of maternal behavior, but that proved impossible. Mindy engaged with their mother distantly, superficially, treating Rhonda as if she were a barely tolerable colleague she’d just run into at the supermarket. But he was still hooked, fishing for justice.
He wanted to call his sister. She’d gone down to Key West a few months back for a summer job, and just stayed, dropping out of school, calling herself by her middle name, and living in a youth hostel. “I’m creating negotiable distance,” she’d said when they’d last spoken a few weeks back, naming another of Dr. Yuder’s tactics.
“From me?” he’d asked.
“Don’t be stupid,” she’d said.
“Call me soon,” she’d said. He hadn’t.
He dropped the magazine into his lap. Gordon’s eyes were already seeking him in the mirror. “Stop me if I’ve said this before,” he stage-whispered to Nicky, shielding her face from a blast of hairspray. “But don’t you think it’s a tribute that your grandson has chosen to live his life as a blonde, like you? Even if his is just a budget drugstore shade.”
“He’s glam rock,” Nicky said. “He has to be glamorous.”
“True.” Gordon tamped at her hair. “But I don’t think anyone in your family should go to any party of Evie Fein’s with their roots showing.” He patted the chair next to Nicky’s. “Get up here, Ziggy, and I’ll dye you to match.”
Victor had never had a professional color job before. He found the process tedious, with all the brushing and foil, and the result made him look a bit too polished, like an airbrushed photo of his self-image. Still, when Nicky suggested they visit Saks right after to find him an outfit for the Bar Mitzvah, he obliged without protest. He even agreed to work with a personal shopper, and they strolled through the Menswear department with the slim Thai man like they were in a makeover montage. Victor was drawn immediately to a velvet Valentino suit, a broad-lapelled, green three-piece that shimmered like the surface of an algaed pond. Nicky suggested something more refined. “Think platinum instead of gold,” she said, quoting Gordon. The salesman directed them to a rack of narrow, metallic, Jil Sander two-pieces, and brought out razor-creased versions in graphite and steel blue before locating a brownish-black one in his size. “Bring us colorful shirts and ties.” Nicky smiled. “A star has to shine.”
Victor had seen the suit’s price tag. “Grandma,” he said. “This is too much.”
“Too much what? To look our best, we must have the best.”
“But, what about other stores? Looking for the best deal?”
“The solution to shopping is buying,” she said, perhaps her most revered axiom. She pushed him toward the dressing room. “Now, march. You don’t want to be shown up by Gary Fein, do you?”
Victor smiled. But once he was inside the mirrored booth, he slumped into the bench. His head flopped against the flimsy wall. He hadn’t thought of Gary Fein.
Gary was a distant cousin to the Bat Mitzvah girl — the son of Evie’s nephew, Dr. Seymour Fein, and his wife, Elaine. Though Gary was three years older, and clearly a sadist, Victor had been coerced into friendship with him by Rhonda, pushed into an endless series of playdates as a mask, he later realized, for her long-term affair with Gary’s father. He had been the first boy Victor ever kissed, the first whose penis he ever touched, and the first to stimulate his prostate, this last bit accomplished rather forcefully with the leg of a G.I. Joe doll. It was also with Gary that he’d first uncovered hard evidence of their parents’ affair, spying them groping each other by the wet bar at a Super Bowl party. Even long after the affair ended, this connection endured, becoming a quasi-incestuous form of foreplay. Gary affectionately called him “little brother” whenever they saw each other, and Victor couldn’t help but be aroused by it. At some family wedding when he was still in high school, Gary had led him into a supply closet and masturbated them both to climax. At a Fein funeral the following year, Gary had rushed him into the chapel bathroom and wordlessly pushed his face to his crotch. They hadn’t seen each other since. It had probably been five years.
Nicky called over the partition, checking on his progress, and Victor stood and dressed listlessly. He looked ridiculous, like a fugitive from his worthless life. But the cut of the suit did flatter his scrawny body, elongating his torso without broadening his shoulders, and the material shone like it was made of some exotic alloy. With a faded t-shirt and the right accessories, he thought, it could even be worn on stage. He peeked again at the price tag — $1550 — but he strutted out of the dressing room and reveled in Nicky’s praise. “It’s perfect,” she said.
Victor carried the bags out to the Lexus on his own and returned to pick up his grandmother curbside. He carefully pocketed the receipt.
“I feel bad,” he said. “Letting you do all of this for me.”
“You’re not letting me,” Nicky said. “And you know it’s not just for you.”
At Nicky’s urging, Victor called Rhonda the day before the Bat Mitzvah. Trying to reach her on the phone recalled his childhood traumas of rejection, but Nicky insisted. “I’ve known your mother since she was in high school,” she said. “A good skirmish weakens her resolve.”
Victor proved himself a dilettante in the art of war. Rhonda bowled through his false courtesies. She accused him of trying to undermine her authority. Then, she pirouetted the conversation back to herself — her disappointment in his dropping out of college, her concern at his unmoored lifestyle, her humiliation at how all of this would reflect on her and her husband. “We’re worried you’re going to make a scene at the Bat Mitzvah with your behavior or costume,” she said. “Mr. Levine will have clients there.”
“I’m going as Nicky’s guest,” he said. “Really, it has nothing to do with you.”
“Choosing to stay with her over me has nothing to do with me? Choosing to indulge your relationship with her instead of fixing ours has nothing to do with me?” she shouted. “We were supposed to be trying. You were supposed to be here trying, right now, with me. That was the deal, if you want my support, our support, for your ‘career’, like you said. Your sister apologized for the fire. For what you tried to do to me. Why haven’t you?”
Victor felt lost in her logic. “Why…would she apologize…to you?”
“Your sister and I see how it’s all connected, the problems, with you hogging my attention, and making me take her for granted. She’s very upset with you.”
“Mindy and I talk. We’re good,” Victor lied. “And… I always kind of thought…” he said slowly. “That you would be the one… to apologize.”
“For the fire?” she said. “I didn’t start it.”
Victor felt his forehead prickling like someone had crossed wires in his brain. He started to cry a little, just tears, not noise, thankfully. He had no idea how to respond. He hadn’t done the work. He wished he was some other kind of person, a snitty queen who could toss off a withering remark, something that would steal someone’s breath, bring down the curtain. Fortunately, the call waiting beeped insistently. “It’s Nicky’s doctor,” he lied. “I have to go.”
It was his friend Pete. The Volvo was finally finished and Victor needed to come downtown and settle up. “When can you get your homo ass down here?”
“Probably not until next week. I have family obligations. And I’d need a ride.”
“She can’t drive that far with her shoulder, and I don’t think she’s actually been within Detroit city limits since 1966. Plus, I can’t really broach the subject of leaving right now. She’s talking about finally having her surgery. I think she’s expecting me to stick around for a while.”
“Well, you best get broaching. I need $950 now, even if I have to drive your Electricked Spaceship up to West Jewfield myself,” Pete said. “Actually, I can come up there tonight. I can be there by seven o’ clock. You can drive me back to Hamtramck. Maybe we can catch a show.”
After the call, Victor lay on the bed in the guest room with his hand over his head. Eventually, he forced himself to get up. He tried on a series of dumb outfits before settling, as usual, on his pegged black jeans and an old Descendants t-shirt. He tried calling his new friend Roderick in New York, to ask again about the apartment he’d mentioned, about what he’d have to do to get it, but his boyfriend was home. “Don’t call on this number. Call my office,” he whispered, “sexy.” Victor removed the Saks receipt, pressed flat in his wallet, and stared at it.
When he slipped back into the kitchen, he saw that Nicky had set the table for two and was marinating filets. The Scrabble box was already on the chair next to his.
She looked him up and down. “You could have told me you were going out.”
“Sorry. It was sort of last minute.”
“Do I need to say that I’d prefer that you don’t take my car?”
Victor smiled weakly. “My friend Pete is coming to get me — the mechanic. In the Volvo, actually. It’s finally done.”
Nicky rolled her lips. “Well. That’s good news.”
“I guess … And I talked to my friend in New York. That producer I told you about who’s going to help with my music, and stuff. He said I could come any time. I mean, once you’re okay.”
She looked down at the steaks as if their soft, marbled muscles concealed a rune. “I’m fine.” Keeping her motions tight, she took the extra filet off the broiler pan, slid it into a bag, and sealed it up.
Victor sat at the table and tried to help fill in the bits Nicky had missed in that day’s crossword. Genteel; stylish: JAUNTY, he wrote, imitating her blocky print. Intend to hamper: SABOTAGE. “There’s just the question of…” He looked up. She was already by her purse, withdrawing her crocodile skin checkbook.
“Should I make it out to cash, again?” she said.
***
Nicky decided against their attending the lengthy Bat Mitzvah service, which was being held at an Orthodox synagogue way out in Oak Park. “I hate how they split the genders,” she said. “I’ve never preferred the company of women.”
Instead, she began getting ready for the party right after lunch, adhering to the rigorous routine she’d drilled into him as a boy, and which he’d followed before any open mic night he’d performed at: bath, feet, hair, face, hands, clothing, accessories, jewels. “You can come in after face,” she said. As far as he knew, no one had ever seen Nicky without her makeup, not even her husbands.
Victor got himself up to face as well. He used some dark brown eyeliner to add a bit of theater to his look, and when he went in to join Nicky in his t-shirt and boxers, she seemed to approve. Her vintage, mink-trimmed suit was laid out on her bed next to his, like sets of holy vestments, and after their hand cream had absorbed, they helped each other into their outfits.
Once she’d buttoned her jacket, she led him to her dressing room and had him reach up in her accessories closet for a python bag and pair of matching pumps. She sat on the Lucite bench to try them on, patting the spot next to her on the lilac vinyl cushion. Victor joined her to tie his combat boots, buffing their polished surface with an old wood-handled shoe brush. Then, Nicky opened her jewelry box.
Though Rhonda had encouraged his interest in jewelry, she’d always pushed back against his fascination with more colorful gems. “An opal is not a stone for a man,” she’d said.
Nicky had no such limits, letting him toy with all of her baubles, or wear them around her house — even the ones that contained their shared birthstone. “Never be ashamed of beautiful things,” she’d say.
She fished in the case and pulled out a tangle of tennis bracelets. Caught in their gleaming noose was a ring he’d always loved, a square-cut black opal surrounded by diamonds and set in 18-karat gold. She placed it in his palm and closed his fingers around it. “For you,” she said solemnly. “To keep.”
Victor slipped the ring onto his pinky. It warmed to his skin. But before he could even say thank you, Nicky stood and led them to the full-length mirrors for a final once over. She adjusted a curl, dusted his shoulder. They looked horrifically beautiful, like Nazi debutantes, like vampires. Nicky squeezed his hand gently. “Our last hurrah.”
Victor planned to hit the bar as soon as they entered the banquet hall. He wanted to down a few drinks right away, so his buzz would peak before his mother arrived and then diminish before he had to drive home. Unfortunately, Nicky kept him close as they waded into the crowd. He was girded, but instead of her usual pinched hellos and veiled jibes, in every interaction she introduced him lavishly, expressing her good fortune at his presence, praising his devotion. She even bragged about his upcoming move to New York.
By the time Nicky finally dispatched him for cocktails, the bar was mobbed. Victor stood impatiently, eyeing the room. The few Bat Mitzvah’s he’d attended in middle school had been dismal affairs in strip-mall catering halls, differentiated only by some “themed” cakes and centerpieces. The Kanters, by contrast, had gone all-in on Becky’s magic motif, with partitioned archways made from giant playing cards, glittery star balloons dragging on the draped velvet ceiling, and life-sized posters of famous magicians lining the walls. A live band played “Black Magic Woman” on a red curtained stage. Victor felt hypnotized by the song’s sleazy riffs. Then, on an easel at the edge of the wings, he spotted a Vaudeville-style placard. TONIGHT ONLY, it announced, Gary the Great!
His mind spooled. Magic had been one of Gary Fein’s adolescent hobbies. And, as with nearly every other interest of his — mummies, photography, medieval torture — Victor had become its sexual victim. He recalled being chained to a pipe in the Fein’s basement, naked, while Gary probed with his magic wand.
As if on cue, Gary Fein appeared, offering an icy scotch in a sweaty napkin. He looked much the same as he always had, like a tolerably handsome Jewish boy struggling not to look too Jewish. He was deeply tanned, his nose job was holding, and his bushy eyebrows had been plucked into astonished arcs. Even with the black top hat and bow tie, he looked like a cut-rate sportswear model. “Gary the Great, I presume?”
Victor reached out for a handshake, but Gary glowered and pulled him in for a grinding hug. Victor swallowed. “Nice to see you.”
“Same. You’re here with Nicky?”
“Yeah. She’s over there trading barbs with the alter kackers. You alone?”
“I brought my boyfriend. First time at a family event. There, by the queen of hearts.” Gary pointed at a balding, olive-complected man in round gold-rimmed glasses. “I know he’s nebbishy, but he’s Israeli and in med school, which makes my sexuality far more palatable to the family.” He leaned in again. “Between you and me, we do our own thing.” His boozy breath was hot on Victor’s ear. “What about you, Electric, are you seeing anyone? I mean, besides that old Arab queen you got arrested with?”
Victor felt like he’d been punched in the kidneys. “You know about that?”
“It was in the Jewish News.” Gary nodded gravely. “Kidding! Uch. You should see your face. Evie let it slip last night at the out-of-towners’ dinner. You know how she is. But don’t worry, Vickeleh. No one here cares.”
No one, Victor thought. The implication being that everyone knew. All these old people who’d been at his bris, his bar mitzvah, these children of immigrants who’d slaved to build up menial schmate and gasket businesses for his generation to inherit — they had been forced to confront his idea of success: being plowed by a 37-year-old Iraqi accountant in the back of his grandma’s car. He slugged back the drink and surveyed the crowd. They all seemed to be staring at him and whispering, or intentionally looking away.
Gary clapped his shoulder again. “Really, don’t sweat it.” He kneaded Victor’s neck. “People expect that kind of behavior from a rock star.”
“I haven’t finished the one dumb musical I’ve been writing for years. I sing on the street for spare change. Nicky supports me,” Victor said. “I’m not a star.”
Gary eyed him salaciously, like a lion considering a gazelle. “You are to me.”
Victor felt lubricated by Gary’s fawning gaze, no matter how dodgy it actually was. But just then, he felt something shift. Like a songbird sensing a drop in air pressure, he perceived an intrusive presence. His mother.
He turned around slowly so as not to draw her attention. Instead of joining the reception line, she had paused, posing, between a vault of face cards. Her hair was straightened and dyed an unnatural shade of copper, like a counterfeit penny. She was wearing a sequined black bolero jacket over matching palazzo pants and a low-cut ivory tuxedo bib, and she was carrying a giant silver wand. As she waved it, it spewed glitter. She stood there, hand on hip, repeating this action, until someone nearby pointed and gasped. Victor felt himself sinking.
Gary ran a knuckle down Victor’s spine. “You want to get out of here?”
Victor imagined being dragged off by Gary, mauled in the catering kitchen’s walk-in fridge, or in the alley behind a greasy dumpster. But before he could consent, or not-not consent, he caught sight of his grandma. She was sitting at their table as his mother and Mr. Levine approached. “Sorry,” he said. “I have to rescue Nicky.”
“Family first.” Gary licked his wet lips. “Find me later?”
Victor approached the table obliquely so as not to cross his mother’s path, arriving just as she did. A hug seemed impossible, a handshake too inciting, so he just stood behind Nicky and set his hands on her shoulders. She winced.
Rhonda’s eyes darted up and down. “Don’t you look nice,” she said, adding just enough of an uptick at the end for the statement to linger as a question.
“Nicky picked out this suit for me.”
“How thoughtful.” She waited for Victor to comment on her costume, but he said nothing, not even to note the big new diamond ring on her finger. “That Dior is stunning on you, Nicky. I think you wore it to my wedding.”
“The engagement brunch I hosted.” She patted Victor’s hand. “Vickeleh has been taking very good care of me. I thought he deserved a reward, especially before he heads off to New York.”
“Now I feel bad that I didn’t buy him a getting-out-of-prison gift.”
“Jail,” Victor said. “And that was just a misunderstanding.”
“Of course it was,” Rhonda said. “Despite your sainted ways, persecution always lands upon you. You’re twenty-three now. You should stop acting like a child.”
“I’m twenty-four. And I am a child. I’m your child.”
His mother looked like she was rushing toward some crippling reply, but the dinner chime sounded, like a bell signaling the end of a round. She twisted the band of her new ring. “We’re not done,” she muttered.
Victor fell into his seat. Nicky took his hand. “Don’t worry. It will pass.”
“Yeah,” he nodded, but he didn’t feel confident. Nicky’s conflicts with her own son, his father, had festered for fifty years, since her affair and divorce from her first husband. They hadn’t spoken in decades. Victor spread his napkin in his lap. He wished he could crawl under it.
He had been dreading dinner and its canned conversations, but the group they were seated with, all of whom had been old for his entire life, brightened the chatter with off-color anecdotes. They talked about their youth between the wars, fighting dirty for the unions, vying for cronyism in the local Democratic machine, running bootleg Canadian booze in stolen cars. Victor wondered if they were trying to coax him from his funk, to make him feel part of some lineage of rebellious Detroit Jews. But as the salads were cleared, Nicky leaned in and muttered. “The same fakokta stories every time.” He’d just never been seated at the grownups table.
Gary’s show began just as the entrees were served. The room mostly ignored the wooden performance. Even Victor couldn’t pay attention, alternating between watching the tricks and eyeing his mother, cataloging her solicitous contact with Doctor Fein, who sat to her right, and Mr. Levine, on her left.
The audience’s attention suddenly rallied as Gary’s cousin Sheila appeared on stage with the Bat Mitzvah girl, wheeling out a giant white lacquer steamer trunk. “For my final trick,” Gary announced, as the ladies curtsied and exited. “I’ll need a volunteer. Who dares to enter…The Peculiar Box?” He unclasped the brass latches and stroked the interior with the tip of his wand. Lined with fuchsia satin, it looked like Liberace’s coffin.
Nicky tapped Victor’s elbow, to nudge him on stage.
“I always ruined Gary’s tricks,” he said. But, at that moment, he saw his mother snap to attention. He raised his hand just as she did. Gary was already looking at him.
“Ladies and Jews,” he called, “Please welcome, straight — well, direct — from New York, where he’s developing his first smash musical, the one and only Victor Electric!”
Victor felt flattered by Gary’s puffery, however phony it was. He didn’t even mind, as he walked to the stage, being the butt of several jokes about being Peculiar. But as he climbed into the box, a familiar feeling emerged. It wasn’t stage fright. It was deeper. It went back to his adolescence: to dressing in drag for the seventh-grade talent show, to being caught leering in the boys’ locker room, to squalid escapades in the Fein’s basement. He was about to be humiliated. Gary smiled greasily, tucking in Victor’s lapel. “Stay as flat to the bottom as you can.”
Before he could answer, Gary shut the trunk, and locked him in. It was musty inside, and close. But while he expected to feel imprisoned, Victor felt oddly secure. All eyes were on him, but no one could see him. Even the muffled gasps from the audience couldn’t break his thrall. In fact, he found relief in the idea that Gary was doing something rash out there — dousing the trunk in gasoline, or entombing it in cement. He pressed himself against the thin cushion and awaited his doom.
Suddenly, one — and then a second — sword was thrust into the tight space above his chest, crossing at impossible angles. Victor gasped in a way he hoped was audible. When the third sword was pushed in, slowly, deliberately, he moaned, and continued to do so, adding a gurgle with the fourth and fifth. The plastic prop knives weren’t sharp, but they were jagged, and as he ran his finger along the edge of one, it drew a drop of blood. He smeared a line on his forehead, marked a teardrop under an eye. By the seventh sword, he made only a hissing release, shaking a bit, and then lay still. The audience shrieked and called out his name, but he felt at ease. He thought, it’s a sign. Though of what, he was unsure.
While he was still dangling in this reverie, Gary rapped on the lid three times, and a trap door opened behind his calves. Victor remained huddled inside, impassive, until the Bat Mitzvah girl’s mother suddenly appeared at the hatch.
“Christ, Victor,” she hissed. “Haven’t you spent enough time locked up recently?”
Sheila ushered him behind the curtain. “Run onstage once the box is opened,” she said. He nodded, but as soon as she released his arm, he leapt from the wings. He edged his way around to the far end of the room, and watched as Gary opened the empty box, ad-libbing expertly as Sheila walked onstage shrugging and shaking her head. The audience wheezed and glanced around. Mysterious organ music played on a loop. Victor counted to twenty, slowly. Then, he began strutting down the center aisle, in the dark. People nearby murmured and pointed, and eventually the spotlight found him. There were gasps as he jumped onto the stage. There was blood on his cuff, but he pretended not to notice.
Gary gripped his hand and raised it over their heads. Victor’s new ring caught the stage lights and cast a stunning glow. He angled the opal into the beam to spread its magic higher, over the audience, and their roar increased. He could see that even his mother was clapping. Holding Gary’s soft hand in his, he took a bow.
Nicky was beaming as he returned to their table. “You were great.” She wet the corner of her napkin, and daubed the blood from his face.
She patted his hand, then held it. “How about some dessert?”
Victor pushed to the front of the buffet line and loaded up a plate with Nicky’s favorite treats — halva, blackberries, tiny éclairs; the diet of a czarina — and as they picked over them, a parade of his grandmother’s friends shuffled over to say their goodbyes. They all noted how well Victor had performed, and how at home he appeared on stage. He couldn’t tell if they were sincere, or twisting some invisible knife, but he didn’t really care. He told each of them, “It’s all because of Nicky.” She smiled every time.
His mother appeared at the end of this queue. Instead of making a comment, she plunged a thumb and forefinger into the watch pocket of her jacket and removed a hexagonal plastic claim check, presenting it triumphantly like it was the product of some sleight-of-hand. Victor couldn’t help but smirk. “Come on,” she said. “I’ll walk with you to get your grandma’s fur.”
The coat-check line was long, and for a while, they simply stood there in tandem, his mother toying with her big new diamond. Victor vowed that he wouldn’t be the one to speak first. It’s the Levine Diamond, he’d overheard Rhonda say to someone at the party. But it comes with a curse. Mr. Levine.
They watched together silently as Evie Fein returned from the counter, struggling with her heavy mink. Victor stepped out of line to help, wanting to show off the manners Nicky had taught him. He held the coat aloft behind Evie’s outstretched arms and pulled it up onto her broad shoulders. It landed like a sack of grain.
Evie let out a satisfied grunt. “You performed so well, Vickeleh. Like mother, like son, I suppose.” She leered at Rhonda. Then she glanced outside. It had begun to sleet. Shivering slightly, she drew in the collar of her coat with her gloved hand, and as she turned to leave, beneath all her eye makeup, Victor swore that he saw her wink.
“Evie Fein knows everything,” his mother said, reading his mind like she often did. “She always has. When she was a teenager, they thought she was a witch.”
Victor tried to hold in his laugh. They had reached the front of the line, and his mother set her chit on the counter. As Victor placed his and Nicky’s alongside it, his new ring caught the light from the lobby’s chandelier.
Rhonda took up his hand in both of hers like she was cradling a baby bird. “An Adelaide Opal,” she said. “Your grandmother’s lover, Bert, bought this for her when they were together in Acapulco — while she was still married to your Papa. He was the love of her life.” She turned it in the light, as if verifying its optical density. He thought she was going to pull out a loupe and appraise it right there. Instead, she looked him up and down, and pursed her lips. “You seemed so happy up there. The fake blood may have been a bit much, but with this audience — they’re either kids, or they’re almost dead — I guess you have to shout to the rafters.” The girl brought his coat and set it on the counter. “I know you’re shy about it because you don’t want to be…exposed. But you’re like me. You’re a performer. You always have been.” She locked eyes with him, like she was trying to seduce him, like she knew she’d already succeeded. She gave his hand a dainty tap. “It suits you. Hold on to it for as long as you can.”
Victor wasn’t sure exactly what she was referring to. She’d never really complimented him before. He shrugged. “All I did was disappear.”
Rhonda fished a tip out of her handbag, a five, and waited for the girl’s attention before placing it in the jar, face up. But she made no move to pick up her coat.
“We’ll help you. There will be conditions — I want to hear whatever you’re working on, for one — but we’ll help you.” The fur was new, one Victor hadn’t seen before, full-length, dark, fine, and softer than mink — maybe crown sable. He picked the coat up from the counter, bowed gallantly as if he were her liege, and lifted it up behind her. But he held it a little high, so she had to strain to find the armholes. Her hands flicked in the air helplessly, her big new diamond ring flashing in the gaudy light. “Lower,” she commanded. “Lower.”
Brett Berk is a Detroit-born, Manhattan-based queer writer, freelancing regularly for the New York Times, Vanity Fair and the Wall Street Journal. Previously a preschool teacher and director, as well as a university fiction writing instructor, his stories have been published in Other Voices, Tin House and Fiction, among others, garnering the Chicago Literary Award and residencies at MacDowell and Breadloaf. Find him at https://brettberk.com/
ELEVENTH HOUR LITERARY 