Tell Me How This Ends Well Read online

  He remembered L.A. by night, the four-leaf clovers of interconnected roadways, everything set down and arranged like a vast, eerie circulatory system whose heart bled gasoline and whose lungs exhaled exhaust. We’re all leaving behind not just carbon footprints but a smogasbord of toxic delicacies for future generations, he thought, picturing his nephews and trying to remember their names, which he couldn’t. What he did remember were the semis, the tractor-trailers, the Pacific Ocean off to their left somewhere, and the romantic, russet-edged California sunsets, which, for as long as they lasted, made him feel nostalgic for his childhood in Texas. Even today, he still had never set eyes on anything as spellbinding as a Texas sunset. New York City came a close second. And Berlin—Berlin didn’t even make the cut, though he often lied and told Diet otherwise. That was what coupledom had done to him—he perjured himself constantly under the oath of love he’d taken.

  “I’m going to call an ambulance,” he said to Diet, whose head remained tilted at what looked like an odd, uncomfortable angle. Jacob took a gentle hold of his chin and lightly turned his head to fit more squarely in the seat, so that the headrest supported his neck. “Does your neck hurt? Do you feel dizzy? Are you seeing stars? Do you feel light-headed?”

  “My head hurts a little, but that is nothing,” Diet said, stoical. “When I was a boy, I fell into a well in my friend Andre’s backyard and bumped my head much worse than that. Twenty minutes later I was eating Kaiserschmarrn like nothing happened. I do not need a hospital, mein Schatz. If I start to feel weird, I will tell you.”

  “Look at me,” Jacob insisted, as Diet turned to face him. “Tell me how tall the Fernsehturm is and when it was built.” Diet let out a recalcitrant huff and answered: 365 meters high, Berlin’s TV tower was erected from 1965 to 1969. “Now spell your name backward.” Diet spelled his name backward. “What’s the longest German word in the dictionary?”

  Diet thought about this for a second, then took a deep breath and exhaled. “Rind​fleische​tikett​ierungsübe​rwach​ungsa​ufgabenübertragung​sgesetz. But I am not certain about it,” he said. “I believe it was retired. Maybe it is the second longest?”

  “Doesn’t matter. What matters is that nothing got scrambled. But—and this is a huge but—the second you feel unwell, you have to tell me, and we’re going to the emergency room,” Jacob said, stroking the back of Diet’s neck again and wondering if Diet knew just how much he loved that head of his and everything inside of it. “I think once we get to the Valley, it’d be a good idea if you were checked out by a doc-in-the-box.”

  “Jacob, please, enough,” Diet said. “I am not a little child. If I die because of a slight bump on the head, then this is what is supposed to happen.”

  He hated when Diet spoke like this, full of a ghoulish fatality and cynicism that continued to take Jacob by surprise. Though he didn’t share Diet’s morbid determinism when it came to death and dying, there was something singularly freeing in it, he supposed. It lived inside every German he met and spoke to, a quality and view of life so un-American that for his first couple of months in Berlin he had a hard time taking any of it seriously, as if each German was born with his or her DNA already encoded with instructions on how to die. Death not as a horrifying, unfathomable, and unexpected end, the bogeyman of time, but as the ultimate categorical imperative, a duty to die to leave behind an impression on the world, an imprint of having lived, of having been there. Sometimes, though, Jacob wished Diet would just lighten the fuck up.

  “Wait here. I’ll be right back. And don’t fall asleep,” Jacob commanded, hopping out of the car and hurrying through the swash to the lonesome pay phone—perhaps the last pay phone in all of America—sitting beside bound stacks of firewood on sale for $29.99 and the large metallic bin of bagged ice, each going for a whopping $8. When had frozen water become a luxury item? Was it designer ice? In his absence, had Starbucks expanded into the niche ice market as well? If he didn’t distract himself with such bagatelles, he knew he would fall apart completely.

  Once he was standing at the pay phone, though, Jacob found himself at a loss. He observed the quaint plastic and metal relic with fascination, the coin slot, the tarnished keypad, the numbers and letters smudged off from constant use and abuse. Berlin still had its share of pay phones, but who used a pay phone in L.A. anymore? Drug dealers, he guessed, and anyone having some kind of dastardly business to do, that’s who.

  He took a deep, panicked breath, recalling the last call he’d had with his siblings a few months ago, a harrowing conversation in which they discussed their mom’s failing health and the management of her care—or rather the mismanagement of it, they all agreed with alarm, even Edith—if it were left up to their dad.

  “Ma should just move to Cali,” Mo had said. “From where I’m sitting, that’s an easy slam-dunk. So are we done here? Because the twins and I are almost at the studio.” In the background, one of the twins had been melting down, shrieking as if he were being either held against his will or waterboarded by the other twin, Jacob hadn’t been able to tell which.

  “You better untie him and release him back into the wild, Mo,” Jacob had said.

  “That’s a terrible thing to say,” Edith had said, finally piping up. She’d been so quiet that Jacob had all but forgotten her. “Hey, Bax, it’s your auntie Thistle,” thickly slathering the Southern accent in her voice and sounding, to Jacob, like Roy Rogers, if Roy Rogers had been a female with a BA from Harvard, an MA from Princeton, and a PhD from Georgetown. So more like Dale Evans, he’d mused, or Mr. Ed’s other half. Mrs. Edith? “Bax, can you do Auntie Thistle a favor and—”

  “Baxter Judah Orenstein-Jacobson, I need you to zip it right this instance or else you will never see your beloved Wii again,” Mo had said.

  It’s instant, not instance, Jacob had thought dourly, rolling his eyes.

  “Really, Mo. Threats?” Edith had asked.

  “Hey, Thistle, when you’re raising five boys—hell, even one boy; hell, even a houseplant—you can say whatever you want,” Mo had said. “Until then, do me a favor and uckfay offay, okay?”

  “It’s a good plan, Mo, but you know Dad’s not going anywhere,” Jacob had put in, trying to redirect the derailing conversation.

  For a moment, he had wanted to carry this outside—this call that had been shaping up to be yet another unpleasant round of hide-and-heat-seeking-missile with his brother and sister—and had gone to the sliding-glass door, finally deciding against it when he’d realized he’d have to bundle up in his parka and put on his snow boots because the balcony, which jutted out from the building and looked like a man with a protruding lower jaw, had been packed under a mound of fresh snow and months-old ice. Berlin in winter.

  The sight of the balcony that night had had a profoundly negative effect on Jacob, recalling a remark he’d made to Diet, when they’d first taken possession of the flat, about how the balcony reminded him of his dad’s obscenely pronounced underbite, which went hand in hand with the rest of his handsome albeit cavemanlike face, thick, bushy eyebrows, broody, overhanging brow. All he needed was a club, Jacob had told Diet, and his dad could have been part of one of those dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History. Also, he liked to grunt a lot and bang his fists.

  “I heard that desert climates are better on the lungs for people with her condition. I read that someplace. I’ll find it and email it to you,” Edith had said. “She’s seventy-two years old, though. Maybe it’s just too late to do anything?”

  “We shouldn’t even give them a choice. We should just demand it,” Mo had said.

  “Um, again, good plan, Mo, but not exactly feasible,” Jacob had said. “I mean, you have met Julian Jacobson, haven’t you?”

  “The old man just needs to relocate his habits out here. He can still garden, go fishing, and hit the gym—it’s not like we live in effing Georgia. No offense, Edith.”

  “None taken,” she’d said, although clearly offended. “Look, I’m going
to be brutally honest, because someone has to be: Ma’s dying. She’s never going to get better, only worse. And what, Mo, you and Pandora are going to look after her if, God forbid, something happens to Daddy? What about you, Jacob? You’re going to move back from Berlin? And before either one of you says it, I may be a childless spinster, but I’m not about to give up my cushy-ass job, which I love by the way and thank you very much, to be her caregiver. I love her to death, but it’s just not something I see myself doing. What’s the current state of her health anyway? Do either of you know? According to Daddy, she could hang on for another year or more, but maybe that’s just wishful thinking? At some point we’re going to need to talk about some kind of managed care.” Edith had gone on in her usual self-absorbed way. “But then again it seems Daddy’s in tip-top shape and all of that. But you know how quickly that could change. It just takes one fall and…By the way, I’ve done some reading on those places and from what I’ve read they aren’t as odious as they once were. I’ll send you both links to the articles.”

  Jacob had heard her tap-tap-tapping away on her keyboard to locate the links and shoot them off in an email. Here is my sister, he’d thought, our Thistle of the Congregation of the Path of Least Resistance.

  “From what you’ve read? Edith, are you insane?” Mo had said. “Those places are La Brea tar pits of death and despair, and I’m not sticking our mother in one of them. She says he’s taking good care of her.”

  “It’s the least he could do after she’s catered to that man’s every single agonizing need for her entire adult life,” Jacob had said.

  “Remember what happened to Grandpa Ernie? He went in and never came out,” Mo had continued, ignoring him.

  “He was ninety-six years old,” Jacob had said. “He wasn’t going to come out even if they’d put him up at the Plaza.”

  “Look, I get that she deserves some happiness after all the shit Daddy put her through. Yes, okay, I admit it—he’s never been easy to live with. But Ma chose him, stayed with him, and clearly still adores him,” Edith had said.

  “Here’s to loving difficult men,” Jacob had said, thinking about Diet, who was difficult in his own way, and Mo, who was difficult in his, and even himself, who, until quite recently, had thought he’d come to terms with and healed from the worst of his dad’s treachery, all those years of unwarranted hostility, by finding Diet and moving to Berlin. Unfortunately, he’d begun to realize that he’d unwittingly managed to smuggle the tyranny of his dad in through customs with him. Pieces of him, at least, and the worst pieces at that.

  “Okay, so we’re here,” Mo had said, “and I really have to go.”

  “Bye-bye, Baxter, bye-bye, Dexter,” sang Edith. “See you at Pesach!”

  “You’re right, Thistle. She does deserve some happiness. And if Dad weren’t around, we wouldn’t even need to be having this conversation,” Mo had said, almost as an afterthought. “It would be totally mute.”

  Moot, Jacob had thought, not mute, but he’d also let this go because Mo had started getting one of his brilliant ideas, which was that Jacob and Diet should come to L.A. for Passover and that between Edith and him, they could come up with the money to pay for the airfare. Though generous, the invitation had reeked of collusion, and Jacob had called his siblings out on it.

  “This isn’t coming directly from the old man?” he’d asked, because it would have been just like him to persuade his two older children to gang up on and guilt-trip his youngest.

  “Not at all,” Edith had said, though Jacob hadn’t believed her.

  “Mo, tell me the truth,” Jacob had said because he knew Mo wouldn’t lie, at least not in front of his sons.

  “It’s the truth,” Mo had said, put off by the insinuation, it seemed. “I do get brilliant ideas sometimes, Jacob, you uckingfay utzpay.”

  “You mean like that thing you just said—‘if Dad weren’t around,’ ” Jacob had said. “Care to elaborate?”

  “Yeah, well, just thinking out loud. But seriously, have you guys thought about what happens if she really does go before he does?” Mo had asked.

  Jacob had always assumed his mom would outlive his dad. He’d spent his entire life dreaming of it, praying for it. Yet Julian Jacobson was in fine fettle, as his sister had so kindly pointed out, as sound of mind and body as he’d ever been, even at his advanced age. This had been a sudden, horrifying revelation to Jacob, who’d tried to shake it off but couldn’t. It had made him shudder. It had nauseated him. And if he’d let himself go there, he might even have said it brought out a murderous rage and that he’d do and say anything to see his mom happy again. “It just doesn’t seem fair, does it?”

  The three sat with this without speaking for a couple of minutes. “What aren’t you telling us, Mo?” Jacob had asked, full of suspicion.

  “It’s just…Give me a second,” Mo had said. “Boys, Daddy needs you to be good and quiet for a minute, so let’s plug in your ear bugs—that’s what they call them; aren’t they adorable?—for a minute, okay?”

  “So spill it, Mo,” Jacob had said, and Mo had taken a deep breath and given them their mother’s most recent prognosis: bad. Superfucking bad. “How did you find out? Why didn’t Ma tell Thistle and me?”

  “Pandora just happened to call her on her cell right after she’d been to the doctor,” Mo had said. “Four months. That’s what Pandora said the doctors gave her.” An absolute silence had fallen upon each of the Jacobson siblings, a silence that none of them had experienced since they had been children and taken their seats around the dinner table, their hands freshly washed and their mouths freshly zipped shut, sitting there like that until Julian took his own seat and their mother broke the silence by asking him how his day in the lab had been. “Apparently we’re not supposed to know, so we never had this conversation, okay?”

  “I just can’t believe it,” Jacob had said. “You’re sure she said four months?”

  “She should get a second opinion,” Edith had said. “I hope that wife of yours was cognizant enough to tell her that, Mo. Did she? What does Daddy say about it?”

  “Dad doesn’t know. No one is supposed to know,” Mo had said. “That’s the way Ma wants it. Honor her wishes, Thistle, and don’t open your mouth.”

  “Don’t you take that tone of voice with me, Moses Jacobson,” she’d said. “This is our mother we’re talking about, and I’ll do whatever I think is best for her, not what’s best for—”

  “Will you two just shut up for a second?” Jacob had interjected, pressing his fingertips against his closed eyes and massaging his eyeballs, which had ached from the backup of tears that he would not allow himself to cry, not yet, but after, later, in bed with Diet, who would hold him close and wipe the tears away with a finger. “You’re right, Mo. It just doesn’t seem fair. So what exactly are you suggesting?” he’d asked.

  “I think another conversation might be in order,” Mo had said. “That’s what I’m suggesting. For Mom’s sake, is all.”

  “For Mom’s sake,” one of the twins had repeated, unplugging and wanting to join the adult conversation, one that, if he’d known any better, Jacob had thought, he would have understood that none of the adults wanted to be having, for it had seemed to him that it was far too soon to be having this conversation. Wasn’t it only just yesterday that he and his mother had been wandering around Dillard’s department store looking for school clothes for him, a secret trip that no one—not his brother or his sister or his father—knew about? It’s too fucking soon, he’d thought.

  “That’s right, Dex. Good boy,” Mo had said. “So, Jacob, let us know about Passover, because we’d love to have you. And about that other thing—just give it some thought. Well, this is Mo Orenstein-Jacobson signing off for now!”

  “I don’t see how it matters if Ma dies before Daddy,” Edith had said. “He’d just go on as before and stay in that house until he couldn’t cope anymore.”

  “Oh, cut the crap, Edith. If Mom goes before he does, then
we’ll never get rid of him. He’ll lord his money, which is actually her money, over us and he’ll force himself on you and Mo. Without her, he’ll just get worse and worse, saying every horrible thing that pops into that reptilian brain of his. The only reason I even talk to him is because I know how much it’d hurt Mom if I don’t. I love you, Edith, I do, but you need to wake the fuck up,” Jacob had said. “So tell me again why I’d subject Dietrich to him, much less myself?” Yet as soon as he’d said it, he understood the reason why exactly. For Mom’s sake, he had thought, reflecting Mo’s sentiment.

  “The five of us together again,” she’d said. “Just think about it.”

  Now, in a sodden gas station parking lot, lifting the phone’s receiver to his ear, Jacob thought about his sister, who was still floating on a tranquil (if not tranquilized) sea of denial when it came to their dad, how she’d never been as anti-Julian as he and Mo had been, because, as she claimed, she’d never had cause to be. Never had cause to be? Jacob could only laugh, recounting all the times their dad used to call her fat to her face and make fun of the boys she brought home. Though too young to remember all of it, Jacob was still definitely able to recall important moments and events, like when she had spoken up and asked to be called Thistle, invoking the name for the first time in the car ride home from her bat-mitzvah reception, Turtle Bay Country Club. A distant relation, a second cousin once removed whom no one recalled inviting, had kept referring to her as Thistle, like the leggy, fourteen-year-old model from Kiev with flowing, curly red tresses who had just graced the cover of Vogue.