So erratic were Levi-levy’s parenting, fidelity, and wakefulness that his disinhabiting his Tribeca loft following an argument with his pretty if always exhausted-looking wife, Charmaine, elicited neither comment nor much notice in the neighborhood. When Levi-Levy had been living with spouse and five children—all boys, spawned in two-year intervals, coinciding with the new staggered interregnum between Winter and Summer Olympics—his comings and goings from their loft bore no relation to school starting times, office hours, market openings, or retail schedules. His peregrinations followed no discernible pattern, though they stemmed from one obvious source—his pathological sleeplessness. Rather than medicating it away with the newly derived sleep aids with names that evoked compact cars (Lunesta, Sonesta), Levi-Levy would try to drink and eat his insomnia into submission with martinis and steaks. This meant he might be passed out, say, from 3 p.m. till 6 p.m. and then remain awake for the next 72 hours.
To see him stumble down Laight Street at 5 a.m. on a Monday morning wearing a New York Mets cap, woman’s orange-frame sunglasses, and oversize black-leather police jacket was as statistically probable as seeing him stumble down West Broadway at 5 p.m. on a Sunday night. In other words, Levi-Levy was perfectly unpredictable. So no one took note after Charmaine had opened one of his credit card statements and observed that in one month Levi-Levy had spent $10,523.67 on steak, liquor, Holocaust literature, and comic books (oh, and he had bought a cello) and asked a few questions that led to his furious condemnation of her “Cheney-like, Ashcroft-like, Yoo-like, Gonzalez-like” invasion of his privacy (“What’s next, you prying NSA hag—wire-tapping?”) and a raging departure. Not even his children had noticed that their father was no longer living under the same roof.
Charmaine had been angry with him for so long that she had gone beyond forgiving him, passing straight through that to resignation. The catalyzing incident had come when she first spotted their 10-year-old, Ely, behind the wheel of the family Town & Country, as the boy, his face frozen in attentiveness, his eyes parallel to the top of the steering wheel, drove their minivan up Vestry Street. Alone. Charmaine was standing in front of their building with their youngest in a Snap-n-Go seat. Levi-Levy, who had said he was going to get the car, was nowhere in sight. He had apparently given the keys to Ely and told him to go pick up Mommy. Charmaine recalled the lessons Levi-Levy had given Ely in the driveway up at her parents’ country house, as Ely, his lips pursed in concentration, signaled left and came to a stop within two feet of the curb.
And where was Levi-Levy? Charmaine asked after she had angrily yanked her son from the car.
His father, Ely explained, had recalled a last-minute errand he had to run and hailed a taxi going uptown.
Levi-Levy’s impulsiveness had reached the point where he might kill them all.
Surprisingly, his taking up residence in his office—a studio apartment in the East Village where he kept his comic books and various antique martini mixing sets and where, at some point in the 90s, he had shifted his entire VHS porno collection, which he had planned to have transferred to DVD, before that technology too was superannuated, so that he praised himself (“genius move”) for having procrastinated as long as he had—meant Levi-Levy was more assiduous about being on hand in the mornings to walk his children to their various day-care centers, preschools, kindergartens, and elementary schools and afternoons to various sports leagues and tennis appointments. He also now made it a point to catch a SportsCenter during his sleepless nights so that he could discuss with his sons the various baseball results and could dissuade his middle boys, Elan and Etan, from lying to him about ballplayer exploits. (He had once gone half a day believing that Bobby Parnell had pitched a perfect game.)
It was infuriating to Charmaine that all the boys remained besotted with their spendthrift and utterly capricious father. Each and every one of his dark habits—from his prodigious red-meat-eating to his comic-book-buying to his assembling of plastic model battleships to the possibility they would find him asleep in the morning on a recliner wearing headphones attached to a turntable playing theremin music turned up so loud it sounded like a truck backing up—only served to raise their esteem for him. Their loyalty sprang in part from their childish wonder that Levi-Levy could actually, physically, simultaneously lift all five boys. He was a freak of nature that way, forklift-strong, almost hunchbacked, but, like an insect, able to lift more than his own body weight. As if all those steaks were actually being turned into muscle.
The boys would giggle and holler as they rode him, children balanced on arms and astride neck, precariously perched on his shoulders or standing with their toes curled around the top of his belt. They were like some six-headed monster as they made their way down Greenwich Street in this manner. Here come the Levi-Levys, Ely would shout: an entire basketball team, with coach!
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Levi-Levy’s indifference to other people’s schedules, to his wife’s financial worries, to his own deadlines, stemmed partially from the insomnia but more fully from his self-regard at believing what had, years ago, been said and written of him: that Levi-Levy was a genius.
He had been a precocious success, the writer of a one-man show, performed by an actor who would go on to greater acclaim, that had been both funny and poignant. It hadn’t been Levi-Levy’s intention for the show to be a comedy, yet that was how it played, in part because the actor’s manic portrayal, inspired by his study of Levi-Levy’s manic behavior, had given the material surprising layers. A good Broadway run was followed by award nominations and offers to work on other material, additional plays, television scripts, book contracts, all of which Levi-Levy accepted and then unpromptly failed to deliver.
Levi-Levy had never really been the toast of the town, but enough glasses had been raised so that he could still convince himself and a few others that whatever had been uncorked to make that now long-ago hit show the success it had been could be again made to flow. In person, if you weren’t married to him and he showed up close to the agreed-upon time, and you fed him steak, he could be funny and personable and his erratic nature, frequent sexual innuendo, and surprising shtick—like his show, it played as comedy though that wasn’t Levi-Levy’s intention—of self-aggrandizement could loose small sums of money from those seeking to produce or direct something funny.
But, again, as Charmaine would occasionally remind him to his reliable ire, that show had been a long, long time ago, several administrations ago, several economic expansions and contractions ago, before cell phones or hybrid cars, before, in fact, the Internet, before the kids, before they had even moved down to Tribeca, where Charmaine had had the foresight to borrow a half-million for 3,000 square feet on Vestry. It was Charmaine who had called the mortgage brokers, who had secured the loan using her good credit—at some point, she had warned her husband, his age and his credit score would intersect—and who had signed over a check to herself from Levi-Levy’s agent to make the down payment. And so they had became owners instead of renters. Levi-Levy, of course, had fought her every step of the way. It was this loft, second and third-mortgaged, that was keeping the kids dressed and Levi-Levy in T-bones and Beefeater.
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Now, with Levi-Levy no longer expected to show up at home with any regularity, Charmaine was sleeping soundly and could, for the first time in years, count on Levi-Levy to actually deliver at least 40 percent of the children to their schools. This meant she could make it to her literary agency before 10 a.m. She did occasionally miss his big, boozy, hairy body, but the truth was she had been missing that for years anyway, since early in their courtship, when she discovered that Levi-Levy would actually get dressed after they had made love and go out to the kitchen, order Chinese food, or a pizza, and then fall asleep on the sofa in his clothes.
But she had found him powerfully attractive, blue-eyed, fair, curly hair, muscular, broad-shouldered, thickly chested in the manner she had associated with those Israeli commandos who had raided Entebbe. (In fact, she realized watching an old rerun one night that he resembled Stephen Macht, the actor who played Lieutenant Colonel “Yoni” Netanyahu in the made-for-TV Raid on Entebbe.)
Mornings, her old apartment on Leroy Street would look like a bear had broken in overnight and been rummaging through the living room and Levi-Levy would be gone, off to a breakfast of steak and eggs and a bloody Mary at Noho Star.
She had compromised for years. Their marriage based on some theoretical value of Levi-Levy’s genius and striking looks traded for her practical ability to earn a living as a literary agent. There were periods, brief, fleeting, noisy, early in their marriage, when Levi-Levy had been flush. First payments for screenplays, first halves of advances, the gate from a touring version of his show with a lesser actor. But Levi-Levy would run through it with shocking profligacy. It had been funny the first 10 times he did it, but a few years into their marriage, when Charmaine accepted that she was virtually on her own here—Levi-Levy had even failed to keep up enough points to continue his Writer’s Guild health insurance—she found it less charming and more selfish.
“What would you rather have?” Levi-Levy would ask when she confronted him about his spending, “A boring shmuck with a pension and a 401(k)? Or a sexy genius with a big . . . ”
And he said the word. In front of the boys.
Now, with his credit cards cut off from hers, his checking account no longer linked to hers, even his cell phone number sliced off from her account, she could at least be assured that he was no longer doing more damage. She had contained it, cauterized it, and she did take some smug pleasure in imagining Levi-Levy, in his stupid woman’s sunglasses and baseball cap, finishing his martinis and steaks and bottle of 95 Leoville and then finding that his credit card wouldn’t work.
Charmaine, after pushing out five kids, was enjoying the prospect of being single, and when one of her clients asked her out for a drink—no, no, not a writer, she wouldn’t do that again—a chef whose cookbook she had sold for a good sum, she shrugged and said fine. She had always been skinny, and after each birth she was a regular and frequent sight up and down Greenwich trotting in black tights and Prada parka behind a jogger stroller. She was just now worked back to her old 125 pounds two years after Elan was born. And, she didn’t mind saying it, she felt hot again.
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If you live in New York when you are single, and then newly married, you assume that somehow, by the time your children are school age, or at least middle-school age, you will have accumulated wealth sufficient to send them to the good private schools. But those children grow up fast, and so you settle, deciding, well, public primary school is fine, the schools have improved, the test scores are rising, and you’ve moved into a great neighborhood with a famously sought-after K through 5. Surely, by the time middle school rolls around, the funds will be there for Saint Ann’s or Dalton or Collegiate. But after those years of stretching for the loft, for the summer place, for the car and insurance to take you from loft to summer place, it turns out that $33,000 a year per kid (after tax) hasn’t really materialized. Oh, and now you are too entrenched, with the city, Tribeca even, so much a part of your identity that you can’t move out to the suburbs, you can’t uproot the kids, the wife’s business, the whole network of friends, and so you stay and confront what you swore would never happen to your kids: public middle school. The schools they all say are terrible, horrible, dangerous, soul-killing.
The schism of parental haves and have-nots, of kids with rich grandparents and kids without, becomes clear when parents begin touring the various public-middle-school options. For one thing, some parents don’t even bother, barely even paying attention to the test scores other parents fret over, because the tests they are worried about are the ones given by private schools. A few of the more privileged might go through the motions of touring Nest or Lab or ISE or the other good public middle schools, but many won’t even bother, smug as they are that little Gabe or Nat or Julie or Sammy will be going to Saint A’s. While other parents, almost ashamedly, go on every tour, show up at every middle-school night, exchange dozens of e-mails with middle-school coordinators, and convene in worried klatches with other parents, fretting about the 3.97 scored on State Assessment English when a 4.0 was required. With five boys, Charmaine knew she didn’t have a choice, and the only salvation for her kids was to get them into someplace safe and minimally decent. But when Charmaine handed to Levi-Levy, who had shown up in the loft to collect a milk crate full of books about the Holocaust that he intended to reread, a letter from the school informing them that Ely had been tardy 26 times, he shrugged and said, “That’s my boy!”
Yes, you arrogant putz, that is your boy, she had told him, and he will not be getting into Lab or any of the other prized public middle schools with 26 Lates! There was, however, a solution. And she handed to Levi-Levy a flier that had accompanied this Dear Parent letter saying that perfect parental attendance—four Tuesdays in a row from 8:40 a.m. to 10 a.m.—at Ely’s school’s Punctuality Improvement Program would scrub the offending tardies from the child’s academic record.
Levi-Levy was outraged. “This is classic blame the parents.”
“And they are completely right in this case.”
The other fathers were surprised when Levi-Levy, with little Etan on his shoulders and a Holocaust historical atlas under his arm, waved off coffee explaining he had to attend the Punctuality Improvement Program. The sound engineer looked at him, shook his head, and asked Etan, “What have you done with Levi-Levy?”
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Corrine, the woman who had conceived the Punctuality Improvement Program and who had pioneered and implemented many of the strategies she would be suggesting over the next four weeks, had once suffered from chronic tardiness before finally hitting bottom and deciding she had to change her life. She explained this to the eight mothers and one father gathered around the short-legged library tables in the middle of the second-floor school library. It surprised Levi-Levy that some of the mothers here, each bearing a Dear Parent letter, were busily attempting to convince Corrine that their sons or daughters hadn’t actually been late the reported number of times, or that they were late but it was the fault of the bus system, the subway system, the weather, the kitchen, the father, the sibling. Corrine urged these mothers to admit they were powerless over their tardiness.
Each attendee was encouraged to seek out the specific causes of the lateness—they could just look at their excuses for a convenient list—and then figure out a solution to each of those problems. If the subway was the reason they were late, then they had to allow an extra half-hour for the subway; if getting the kids dressed was the issue, then more time for that. But those strategies would come later. This week, Corrine explained as she passed out a worksheet, they were to go through their morning routine and note how much time each activity was allotted—getting dressed, eating breakfast, brushing teeth, etc.—and then figure out how much time each actually took. (Unnoticed by Corrine was the irony that Levi-Levy’s presence here with his second-youngest son meant that Etan would be an hour late for his drop-off at Washington Market.)
The late mothers were an attractive bunch, Levi-Levy was pleased to notice. He recognized a few of them from the yard during drop-off, the mulatto with the French accent, the tall Canadian, and even the sound engineer’s broad-shouldered wife. What’s her name? Brooke, good-looking shiksa brunette, seated next to him, studiously bent over her worksheet, filling it out.
Levi-Levy looked at his worksheet. He had no idea how long it took for his son to brush his teeth, get dressed, eat his waffles. Though he suddenly had an inspiration.
“What if my son sleeps in his clothes and skips brushing his teeth?” Levi-Levy asked Corrine. “That’s what I do.”
Frisky Brooke surprised Levi-Levy by laughing and hitting him in the thigh, as if she were in on the joke.
But he, of course, hadn’t been joking.
“I was thinking of limiting my daughter to just one cigarette in the morning, you know, with her coffee,” she added.
Everyone then laughed at Levi-Levy’s next suggestion that his son could simply drive himself to school.
Brooke handed Levi-Levy a note saying, “I’m so stoned I don’t think I can handle this.” And she stood up and walked out. Levi-Levy had been made excited by the presumed intimacy of Brooke’s note and quickly gathered up Etan, who had been flipping uncomprehendingly through Levi-Levy’s atlas, dribbling spittle onto Treblinka and Majdanek, and followed her.
“Remember, next week, bring your strategies!” he heard Corrine shouting after him.
_____________
Running with Etan in one hand and the Holocaust book in the other, he caught up with Brooke downstairs. “Let’s get some steak,” he suggested. And she was just stoned enough at 9:45 a.m. on a Tuesday to say yes.
It is difficult to find quality steak in the morning, even in the new Tribeca, so after dropping off Etan, Levi-Levy agreed to come back downtown to City Hall Restaurant to meet Brooke, though it was risky having breakfast with a mom at such a local spot.
Levi-Levy’s infidelities had to this point been contained to formerly young actresses lured by his promises of impending staged readings of his work through the theater company with which he remained loosely affiliated. Or he occasionally would bang a student taking classes at the theater company, though the manager of the company had several times warned Levi-Levy about this practice, reminding Levi-Levy that only teachers doing actual company work with the students were supposed to be screwing them.
He found initiating an affair with a fellow parent, mother of his son’s classmates—someone, in other words, who by her routines and circle of friends, by her own marriage to one of the guys Levi-Levy had coffee with occasional mornings, knew him and his kind, and would nod knowingly when he mentioned Ornette solos or John Williams novels even if she didn’t really know what the hell he was talking about—deeply conducive to higher quality sex. Brooke seemed to find his eccentricities and unconventionality charming. Brooke’s husband, the sound engineer, was a pretentious, boring type, a geek really, a techie posing as an artist, not a real creative, not a genius like Levi-Levy. It must have thrilled Brooke, Levi-Levy thought in his frequent grandiose moments, to be lying with such a talent as he was, after that sterile, over-scrubbed little half-Asian she was used to.
Their late-morning meetings in his studio, which since he had taken it up as his primary venue for insomnia had become a toxic-smelling cavern with opened tubes of epoxy laying around and dried out from his half-completed assembly of model warships atop his stacks of comic books and Holocaust literature—the images of hypertrophied superheroes, bending gun barrels, deflecting bullets, withstanding explosions, contrasting with the grainy black-and-whites of ghetto families carrying their bundles as they were rounded up—would become almost a narcotic for Levi-Levy. She would beg him to open a window to clear out the fumes, and so she could smoke one of her half-marijuana, half-tobacco cigarettes, and upon conclusion of their coupling, he would fall, deliciously, into long, uninterrupted, unprecedented sleep.
After rousing from those rejuvenating four hours, he would hail a taxi to one of his son’s schools, where he would collect Etan or Elan or Ely or Elmer and walk them home, resuming his usual jocularity with his sons for an hour or two at the loft until Charmaine came home, sent away the nanny, and the evening ritual of feeding and bathing would begin.
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Separation is supposed to be hell on the kids, Charmaine had observed, yet her boys were thriving, though the oldest was beginning to suspect that even by Levi-Levy’s quirky standards he was home less frequently than before. But the younger boys, turned in as they were by 8 p.m., never noticed their father slipping out and away.
How sharp was the injustice Charmaine felt, then, when she went out for a drink with the chef, returned home after the kids were in bed, and then the next morning received angry silence from her betrayed sons! Even Levi-Levy, it turned out, had made an appearance the previous night, barging in with Chinese food, steak sandwiches, and Justice League DVDs for the boys who, after a certain hour, kept asking where mommy was. It was unfair enough, she felt, that his frequent and insistent dunners were calling for him here. Collection agents, wise to every attempt at deflection, routinely ignored her when she said it was best to reach Levi-Levy on his cell phone.
“Where were you?” Ely demanded of Charmaine as he sat before a bowl of corn flakes.
“Out with a client,” she answered.
He was suspicious, but not sure exactly of what or how to express his notions. Something, he knew, wasn’t right about his family, but what exactly was amiss? He had no ready answer, or even the tools to formulate a coherent question.
“We’re going to tour ISE today,” Charmaine reminded him. “So you don’t need to bring a lunch.”
“Where’s Daddy?” Etan suddenly demanded.
The elevator doors sliding open provided the answer as Levi-Levy strode back into the loft, ready to deliver children.
Yes, their marital dissolution had made Levi-Levy into a model father—present (almost ubiquitous), dependable and patient. After his initial, strenuous protests, he had completed the Punctuality Improvement Program without further complaint. And, even more perplexing, he seemed—how could she put this?—rested. He happily passed along to her the strategies he had picked up at the program—get the boys only one color and type of sock so you don’t waste time looking for a match, all homework and school work should be packed in backpacks before the boys go to bed, and Levi-Levy’s reluctant concession: no more steaks for breakfast.
It was when she was on her way to work that she considered his about-face, his improved demeanor, and, generally, almost uncertifiable mien and concluded that Levi-Levy was probably sleeping with someone. Here she’d been expecting to feel the dark jealousies and angry recriminations of infidelity, to enact or elicit the sad confessions and tearful accusations and the hollow feeling that it had all been a sham, the marriage, the life built together, if her husband was now finding emotional and physical sustenance outside the marriage. From a lifetime with Levi-Levy, she was familiar enough with each and every one of these emotions to be able to number the stages of grief and then forgiveness, and she surprised herself now by her equanimity.
Instead of anger or betrayal or frustration or jealousy, she felt that perhaps it was for the best. She had observed among her circle, among the fellow parents, the other mothers, an enhanced friskiness in the air was causing some divorces, separations, and broken homes—but then, she wondered, how many extramaritals were simply being quietly buried within the vault that is the secured core of a good marriage? Why shouldn’t these husbands and wives have a fling here, at this last stage where they might reasonably pass as sexually attractive, or at least before the sight of their own naked bodies repulsed even themselves?
That might also be the self-justification of the cuckolding wife, of course, as she was sure her body would play host to the chef in a matter of days and was looking forward to the intrusion. When they met to discuss his cookbook, a logical software extension of his sprawling Tribeca restaurant empire, his flagship place, his bakery, the German restaurant, now the sushi place, and soon a new restaurant in Los Angeles and another in a Las Vegas casino, he hadn’t even known their children had attended the same school. The project had been easy to package, the chef’s telegenic looks and almost comical accent ensuring he would be an easy talk-show booking, the offers at the high end of the range she had predicted, the mood of their meetings and conversations increasingly celebratory, the flirtation that she had at first correctly taken to be his default demeanor gradually increasing to unmistakable intensity.
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For Levi-Levy, Brooke’s abrupt cessation of fornication—it happened that quickly, the stoned Brooke literally pushing him out of her, standing up, and getting dressed, as if waking from a peculiar and not entirely pleasant dream—meant a return to his sleeplessness. It was while he was chewing a New York strip at a Village steakhouse that he considered the facts: Brooke hadn’t been to see him in a few days. His texts went unanswered. So this is what middle-aged dumping feels like, he thought, pouring more wine and flipping through a catalogue of an upcoming comic-book auction. It felt similar, he reflected, to getting dumped as an adolescent, only without the public scorn that he had always imagined was heaped upon him as a boy who had been deemed unfit by a particular girl. It had been so long since he had felt reflective about anything that, as he considered his life without the prospect of morning sex with Brooke, he felt an unfamiliar pang of nostalgia. For what, he couldn’t be sure. It being his habit to launch himself from his bed and busy himself or stuff himself rather than ever undertake the fitful habit of sorting through his past, he found that now his mind’s eye was being borne back ceaselessly into the recent past, the fun sex, and then further, to his life with Charmaine, his children, the chaotic years of so many kids and so many uncompleted projects. He hated to consider it but now felt compelled: What exactly had he been doing all these years? Numerous failed plays that never made it out of readings. Film scripts abandoned in the middle of the second act. A third of a novel about time-traveling superheroes who go back in time to stop the Holocaust. An output incommensurate with his genius.
What if . . . what if his great achievement had been his family, his boys, all well brought up—so far—and fully vaccinated? Each observed by his teachers at various points as being clever, funny, and, though they never said this because they weren’t allowed, but was unstated subtext, potential geniuses like their father. They were popular boys, and beautiful. So who was he to have decided that his great genius had to be deployed in the service of scripted or written entertainment? Perhaps his genius was as a father.
Levi-Levy walked down Hudson Street and wondered at his sudden susceptibility to introspection. Maybe this was the midlife crisis he had heard about, catalyst in his father’s generation for sports-car and fashionable-clothes-buying. If he had ever wondered about such a hackneyed subject before, it had been to conclude he was unsusceptible to it. Weren’t superheroes of the mind exempted? He now admitted he was not.
In the school gymnasium, he took up his position on the sideline, having arrived in time to catch the second half of his second-oldest’s basketball game. Ethan was a fitful player, capable, at least for an eight-year-old, of surprising stretches of smart basketball, which meant he wouldn’t dribble the ball aimlessly until a better player stole it or hoist air balls from distant areas of the floor. But as the Hornets, Ethan’s team, built a small lead in the second half, something strange was happening: Ethan played great basketball. Every time he got the ball, he shot. And every time he shot, he scored. He was in the zone, and feeling it to such an extent that he wasn’t even smiling or laughing or celebrating his baskets but merely running down the floor to take up his defensive position. The other fathers, like Rankin the gangster, had also noticed, and a few had even begun shouting “Pass it to Ethan” in acknowledgement that this was their best chance to score. The most ridiculous confirmation of Ethan’s hotness was when he received the ball near the top of the key, pivoted, then began dribbling down the lane, reversed course, and began dribbling away from the basket and put the ball up over his left shoulder. He wasn’t even looking at the basket. By then, a few dads had come over to Levi-Levy and were patting him on the back, as if Ethan’s performance were somehow related to Levi-Levy’s parenting or DNA or at least keeping the boy alive long enough so that this 15 minutes of basketball were possible.
After the game, after the 2, 4, 6, 8, who do we appreciate for the losing Celtics, when Levi-Levy and Ethan were walking up Greenwich, Levi-Levy couldn’t restrain himself from reaching over and tousling the boy’s head repeatedly. He was so proud of his son, he realized, happier than he would have been at his own achievements. The boys were his life. His family was his life. When he got home, he decided, he would give Charmaine the good news. He was moving back home. He was ready.
_____________
They talked after the children were asleep. Charmaine listened but found his reasoning flawed. For one thing, he was a better father now that he was no longer living under the same roof. And she rejected categorically the prospect of remerging their finances or, more accurately, remerging her finances with his anti-finances. She had other reasons she didn’t want to admit. She had met the chef three times this past week and was looking forward to the fourth. They talked, and it was no, no, and no, and Levi-Levy, reduced to undignified begging, saw that he could not persuade her. He supposed that tactical retreat was now called for. She would, he convinced himself, sooner or later relent. He gathered up another box of his books and took the elevator down to Vestry, and went out into the cold night as if he wasn’t terrified of the world.
