Jobs for Eli Beyer
Susan Land
Eli makes himself look away as Lisa smooths down her beautifully folded camisole. He doesn’t want to see her close the suitcase. He feeds the woodstove, stares into the fire, listens to her humming and zipping and wheeling. When she points out that watching fire is a waste of heat, he imagines slamming shut the iron door, watching the potbelly quiver. A dick move. He could shake something loose, even crack the foundation of Lisa’s house.
He shuts the hot iron door. He’s an adult, even if he has to remind himself of this fact. He’s afraid next she’ll say something about that ad he’d promised to get out a week ago. He wants to get it exactly right. He’d been distracted by the wooden handle of a cleaver that was begging to be beveled. A car honks, and she smiles and touches his sweater, which sparks, and she gives him a promising kiss goodbye. The second she’s gone, he carves her name at the base of the woodstove, in tiny letters no one could see without kneeling, head to the floor. As if she were an idol. A wave of Jewish guilt makes Eli slice a scratch in the iron casting, ugly but discreet.
Then feeling hopeful about their relationship, he gets to work. And he doesn’t stop. And by the afternoon of the evening of Lisa’s homecoming, he has submitted the ad to all three Hudson Valley magazines aimed at entrepreneurs. The tagline is lame: Signs by Eli Beyer. But the logo is good: a guy sits in a chair next to a straight-arm wooden post with hooks. Just the post and the hooks. There’s no sign hanging from the hooks. The guy is holding a wooden plank in his lap and carving letters. The hand is Eli’s. The knife is Eli’s antique folding blade. The holes in the wooden plank correspond to the hooks on the post—no easy feat of perception.
The phone rings. Maybe Lisa’s ride bailed, he hopes, and she needs him to pick her up at the train station. But the screen says Mt. Sinai Hospital. Eli says, “Hello?” He prays: Let it be spam.
“Mr. Eli Beyer?” A guy with a social-worker’s intensity. Can’t be good.
“Yes.”
“Mr. Noah Beyer is your father?”
“Yes….”
“He’s here, Eli. He’s been through a life-threatening dental emergency. It was determined by a team of specialists that sepsis could spread to his brain within a matter of hours. We’re asking for your consent.”
“For what?”
“Surgery. He’s had it. He was under anesthesia for almost two hours. A difficult operation. He’s in the recovery room. Mr. Beyer, it took a while to find your phone number. We suggest everyone carry contact numbers. You could give him a card to put in his wallet.”
“How is he? My father? How’s he doing?”
“He’s almost 80 and he’s still fighting a nasty infection. He’ll require IV antibiotics for 72 hours. He very much wants to see you. He’s refused to see your brothers.”
“Half-brothers.” Who’d been ready to testify against their father had that money-laundering case gone to trial.
“Well, I hope you will come if you possibly can.” Who the hell asked you? But a tiny part of Eli doesn’t want the old guy to die without giving them both another chance.
“I’ll come after I get out of work. I’m an hour and a half upstate.” A bigger part of Eli demands: A chance at what?
“Someone will have the Medicare forms and consents. Go straight to the admitting desk.”
“What about his wife? Isn’t she there?”
“She has a daughter getting married in Israel. She’s with the daughter. Your father was on his way to the airport when his tooth blew up.”
“Oh, right.” Eli had blown off that wedding invitation. He’s never met the bride’s mother, his second stepmother, much less the bride.
Eli hangs up and thinks about trains. There’s a schedule on the refrigerator, but he doesn’t have the will to go into the kitchen to look at it. And anyway, he can’t leave without seeing Lisa. It’s been three nights, the longest they’ve been apart in their almost two years together. The longest either of them has ever been in a relationship with anyone. How the hell can she insist they’re too young to talk about getting married?
They are both twenty-eight, both born in 1983, and Eli’s mother died when she was only thirty-five. Way too young. Two weeks and a day later, on his fourteenth birthday, Eli slashed images of flames into walls, turning his bedroom into a virtual crematorium. That was a period he has said nothing about to Lisa. She already, sometimes, seems worried about her attraction to the not-particularly-hot Jewish guy who overnight, in another state, had become her serious boyfriend.
But Eli believes that their meeting was fated. She was in Iowa for a conference of arts administrators. He had just completed his MFA in printing and his future was vague. He’d been told he’d make a good printing instructor, but there were no job openings that year, even for adjuncts. Her clarity about life had beguiled him, as did her lack of any sort of pretentious bullshit. Her hair was straight and shiny and almost blond. She said he reminded her of Paul Rudd in Clueless, her middle-school crush. He told her he liked being a Paul Rudd type better than he liked being a trust-fund douche. She pointed out that in Clueless, Rudd was a bit of a trust-fund douche. They laughed and had sex and they both thought the sex was great. Neither of them had tattoos, making them their own separate race.
Lisa ran a network of crafts fairs, where she sold sketches written about animals by children. The kids pretended to be endangered creatures, missing their lost relatives and lost habitats. The profits from the sketches went half to The World Wildlife Fund and half to a foundation that helps elderly crafts people with rent and medical bills. Eli offered to frame the pictures behind glass and attach hooks for hanging. They discussed how much more the framed works would sell for. Curled up against him, smoothing down the hair on his arm, Lisa offered Eli a home in the Hudson Valley, and a booth on the fair circuit. She knew just where he’d find customers for his woodblocks prints of knives and, especially, his sign-carving skills. And she’d bought a house with an extra room she’d been planning to rent out.
As soon as he’d moved in—to her room, not the extra one, that stayed empty—he offered to pay off her $100,000 mortgage. She waved the suggestion away. Something about tax breaks and security, but asked if he’d lend her money for refinancing costs. Cut her mortgage payments in half. “Just the points and the fees come to $7500.” She explained what points were. He’d never bought a house, never borrowed money.
She took the money and said she hoped that it wasn’t from some criminal enterprise—so she must have researched his father’s 1996 arrest: the money-laundering charges, which had been dropped within weeks, live on forever thanks to Wikipedia. Eli told her that the money was from his mother’s life insurance. Said it matter-of-factly, as if his grief and shame had been invoiced, his credit report wiped clean.
Now every time a holiday comes around, Lisa wants to meet Eli’s family and show them the house. Eli nixes any invitations. He hates how fragile and out of control his father makes him feel; maybe Lisa should meet the old guy while he’s in the hospital and weak. If nothing else, she could help Eli deal with the hospital bureaucracy.
Noah Beyer claims Eli needs a father in a way his other sons don’t because Eli had lost a mother. That is always the phrase.
As if Eli hadn’t paid close enough attention and had left her behind somewhere, like a computer charger. But Eli had paid plenty of attention to his mom. And she’d delighted in Eli, and in dancing, and in teaching step classes to ladies who adored her flourishes—until she slipped one day and wrecked her knee. Eli was ten and about to become obsessed with video games and knives. The rest of his mother’s short life now seems a blur of her getting fatter and sadder.
His father’s life since his mother’s death seems like a percussive series of trying attempts to interest his artistic, broody son in something productive. Lately, Noah’s been looking for a non-profit scheme to simultaneously ensnare Eli and clean up the besmirched family name.
Lisa is home and Eli goes to her. She holds on for a moment longer than he expects and he takes off her coat. Then she juts out a hip and strikes a tough girl pose in her professional skirt and shoeless feet in the fuzzy socks that have been hidden under her boots. She brags, “My nephew called me his badass aunt.” Eli wants to pick her up and carry her to the bed and welcome her home with his tongue and his cock and forget about his father’s oozing mouth--
But he’s not going to blow off this visit. A hospitalized father’s appeal to a son is a thing that deserves to be done right, even for the Noah/Eli Beyers of the world.
She changes into her jeans and hangs up the skirt and Eli tells her he got the ad out. She nods, in boss mode. He got it out late and deserves no extra credit. Fair enough. Then he tells her about seeing a fox family crossing the road. “I was coming back from a job in Red Hook.” She likes foxes, and she likes Eli to be out of the house on jobs. Any job: engraving, carving, fixing some sad old hippie’s broken TV stand.
She unpacks a tin of oatmeal cookies and puts them on a plate, explaining that they were baked by her father’s ancient mother. “She has a first edition Fanny Farmer cookbook. Try one!” He tells Lisa that one of his ancient relatives had given him a dictionary for his bar mitzvah. “Boys were supposed to like to look up curse words.”
“Did you?”
“No. My father had a filthy mouth. He was hard to shock.” Part of Eli is turned on by the idea of her knowing what he actually did to that dictionary. A sick part. But how tender would she be? How cold?
She’s moved on, explaining her search for a good location for a temporary Christmas shop. She updates him on a place in Hershey, Pennsylvania. “Lots of tourists for the chocolate factory. And Devin has connections there.”
Eli nods, sad in a new way. Devin Fitzgerald does security work for fairs and farmers markets. He also makes stained-glass chandeliers and lampshades, and mirror frames that Eli can’t imagine anyone buying. Last week, when he first saw Devin’s work, he caught Lisa’s smile in the reflection of greens and purples—a spinning mobile of fish that hung from an almost invisible cord—and mumbled something about tacky crap.
That triggered their first real fight. In a corner of the store, she hissed at him about his hipster arrogance. Eli couldn’t defend himself, but he bought her the stained-glass mobile. When they got home, they couldn’t figure out how to hang the damn thing. She said Devin would know. “And he’d enjoy seeing where it ended up.”
So super handy Devin came over with his toolkit, and Eli was polite, and Devin was competent, as well as enchanted with Lisa’s enchantment. The goddamn mobile is still hanging above her roll-out desk.
And as she goes on about Devin’s connections and the holiday store, Eli imagines throwing the cookie plate against a wall. The shards would be a goldmine of cutting shapes. He runs a finger back and forth along the rim of the plate, imagining the fissures, the satisfaction of scratching out crap in the stained glass. He mumbles, “My father is in the hospital.”
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s a serious dental thing. I should visit him. He’s eighty.” Eli remembers holding his father by the elbow after his seventy-fifth birthday blowout, helping him get into a car at the end of the evening. Eli had imagined carving his father’s sharp elbow bone into a knife. But he’d been happy enough to be able to help his father that day, sad to see the old guy’s trouble with depth perception.
“Want to come with me? To the hospital?” he asks, and immediately worries that he’s made a mistake. He can handle some forms. He can call his father’s lawyer. He can do this without letting Lisa seem him shrivel up around Noah. “It’s okay if you don’t want.”
“I do want to. You could use the support.” As if he’s one of the artists she nurtures, not a special one; they’re all special to her.
“I need a kiss.” She complies, especially for him. And on the train, Lisa nestles in closes. The local train never gets warm. She asks how his parents met. Eli says, “She was a college student who posed for an artist who was visiting the campus. My father and the artists were friends. He was thirty years older that she was, and he got her pregnant.”
Noah had insisted on a DNA test when she refused to take his cash for an abortion. Eli tells Lisa, “He’s always taken pride in how he looked at the DNA report and looked at the change the pregnancy had made—my mom had stopped messing around with cocaine, gained some nice weight. Noah told her, ‘Let’s do this right.’” Eli didn’t add that then all hell broke loose with the wife and sons Noah already had. “He figured that’s what money is for,” he added.
“For breaking up families?”
“Yeah. He’s a real old-school sweetheart,” Eli says, and thinks: who likes his sons to carry knives—and to expect to be stabbed in the back in the world of men.
He suddenly wants to get out at the next stop, take the first train home, fax the forms, grill a great dinner for Lisa. His father respects grilling but thinks cooking in the kitchen is for pussies. Eli’s half-brothers think the same thing. And they all hate each other.
“How exactly did your mother die?” Lisa asks.
“Unclear.” Deliberately unclear. “Diet pills, I think. Speed, basically.”
“Illegal? Legal?”
“Legal by default. Now no more questions about her death, okay?” Ricocheting with the train, feeling somewhere between panicky and numb, he draws her even closer, pretending they’re a single down-jacketed bear. “Will you do the talking with the hospital administrators? You’re great at that stuff,” he says.
“You bet.”
On the lobby level of the hospital, she makes sure the papers get into the proper folders, and that a copy is made for Eli’s records. She’s not thinking about Devin, Eli’s sure about that. As they kiss in the elevator, he doesn’t want the door to ever open.
Mr. Beyer, the hall nurse informs them, is most definitely awake. He has swelling on one side of his face, which is to be expected. But he seems to be fighting off the infection. “Your father insists he will wear his fancy shoes in the bed. His feet hurt him if he’s barefoot.”
Eli says, “Holy hell.”
The nurse tells him she’s seen worse. “He’s polite—as long as he gets what he’s exactly wanting.”
Noah Beyer, sitting up straight in the hospital bed, wears a zebra-print bathrobe. His fancy shoes point to the ceiling. Eli takes in the asymmetry of his father’s face and imagines drawing a caricature of the old man with popcorn popping madly inside his left cheek. A buff guy in a suit sits in a corner. “Dad, this is Lisa,” Eli says, as Muscle Guy stands up. “My girlfriend. I work for her.” Already Eli can feel himself shrinking.
“Louder!”
Eli announces, “Her name is my girlfriend Lisa Guthry. She’s in charge of the largest crafts fair circuit on the East Coast.” What a stupid thing to say.
His father smiles. “What a pretty boss you have.”
She says, “Eli’s skill is incredible. He does fantastic caricatures. And custom fence posts. And hand-carved signs.” She says this as if it would impress a storage-unit tycoon. Then she reaches out her hand. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
The tycoon smiles his old snake-charmer smile. She seems delighted to hold his decrepit hand. Oh Jesus. Even lopsided and leery, Eli’s father has a way. Then he turns to Eli and says: “I’ll bet you like working for her.” Managing to imply: “I’ll bet you like her tits.” He gestures for them to sit and for the guy in the corner to leave. “Ahan, go to the cafeteria. Get yourself something. Bill the room. I’ll call if I need anything.”
“I’ll wait outside in the hallway, sir.” Ahan has an African accent.
“Suit yourself.” The patient shrugs. “My nurse. Private. For what it’s worth.” Eli senses his father’s exhaustion. But the old guy orders, “Sit! Both of you, sit, sit.”
Eli takes the chair closest to the head of the bed. Lisa sits by Eli. He asks, “So how’re you doing, Dad?”
“Been better. They told me my tooth was a disgusting minefield of dreck. No need to further discuss.”
Eli says, “Cool.”
Noah swallows dramatically. Then he asks, “So? You two are—what?” He turns to Lisa for the answer.
Eli reaches for her hand. He kisses his knuckles. She tells his father, “We’re living together.”
“Living together, uh? Sounds promising.”
Eli recalls the knife in his pocket. He wants to carve Lisa’s name, seal in the promise, but there seems to be no wood in the hospital room.
His father adds: “We used to call it shacking up.”
Lisa says, “I know.”
“Good for you. Well, I can’t offer you two a drink at the moment. But Eli’s not a drinker,” Noah assures Lisa, out of the blue. “You could do worse. Look at him. He’s healthy. Handsome. I never looked so good. And even I’m healthy except for this goddamn hole in my mouth. But his mother’s side, believe it or not—his mother’s side had brains and class.”
Noah waits, as if expecting Lisa to explain her designs on his genetically could-be-worse son. She turns to Eli and does her version of a shrug: head tilt, no shoulder involvement. Eli comes up with a distraction. “Come visit us next Thanksgiving. Whattaya say, Dad? I’ll make the turkey on our new grill. We can have squash from Lisa’s garden.”
Noah snaps, “Speak louder.” Grumbles to Lisa, “I used to hate how he’d mutter. Does he mutter at home?”
“He’s quiet sometimes.” She slips her hand in Eli’s father’s hand and squeezes it. Eli watches how her hair falls, tries to imagine drawing her silhouette.
Then he repeats the invitation, louder, at a range the makes him sound bossier than he wants to sound.
Noah says, “Lisa, did you know I’ve been trying to get Eli to come to work for me?”
“I didn’t.” She flips her hair, a sign that she’s on high alert.
“I’ve been trying for years. He’d be good at schmoozing. You know that word?”
“Of course. It’s a great skill.”
“Old ladies and fairies all love him. Am I right?”
“That’s enough,” Eli snaps. “We should go, Dad. Let you get some sleep.”
Noah snaps back, “Sit still. I’m awake.”
“Hear out your father,” Lisa says firmly. Then, to Noah, “But please don’t say ‘old ladies and fairies.’ Just say that your son has a nice manner. Which he does.”
The old man grins. “Fine. Well put. Thank you. He has a nice manner.” He pauses and then adds, “I’ve done my best to raise him well.”
Then your best was pretty fucking awful. Eli rages silently. Noah treated Eli’s mother like a nanny who was on the verge of getting fired. Called her a bitch, which his mother tolerated, because she loved being Eli’s mother—until that slip while teaching the step class, followed by Eli’s middle-school obsession with Metal Gear Solid. When she tried to keep him away from the PlayStation, he echoed his father and upped the game, called her a cunt. Sweet kid.
Now Noah is telling them, “I’ve been talking to my tax guys about expanding the family’s philanthropy. Eli, we might have a place for you that you’d especially like.”
Eli says nothing. His father winks at Lisa. “If you can spare him…”
She asks, “What do you have mind?”
“The rollout of the Beyer Mental Health Foundation, with Eli as the chairman of the board.” Eli watches his girlfriend, sitting even straighter than she usually does, fall in love with this idea. Another goddamn job. She’s transfixed. Doesn’t have a clue that Noah is toying with Eli, forcing the son to wonder how much his father’ll say about Eli’s psychiatric history. Noah says, “I’ve been talking to my financial advisors.” Oh good. Thank god it’s about money. “There are remarkable tax incentives. And we have connections.”
Like Devin but not Christmas stores connections.
She says, thinking aloud, “Eli would need a new suit.”
His father is sensing a win here. “You take him shopping and send me the bill. Maybe you’d even like to work with him. How does co-chair sound?”
“It sounds great to me,” she says to Eli. “The timing is great: you’ll get tired of having me for your boss.”
Eli blurts out, “How about a foundation for children of mothers who’ve killed themselves?"
“Don’t listen to him,” his father barks.
Eli sneers. “Why not? I’d have the street cred for that.”
Lisa gets the calm face she gets at meetings with too many loud egos. Eli usually finds her calmness soothing. Now he finds it cold.
His father mutters: “The pills killed your mother.”
Eli hisses: “You’re the one who kept sending her away to weight-loss prison.”
“She begged for that prison. It cost a thousand bucks a day.”
“I doubt she begged. She was so depressed she could hardly get out of bed.” Eli hears his voice nearly shaking.
His father gets louder: “Do you ever read any of those articles I send you? I’ve sent you dozens of reports. Big-shot research: Columbia. Stanford. No one back then knew what those pills she took were capable of. Don’t you open your mail?”
“I’ve read the articles,” Lisa announces, with the decency to blush.
Eli snaps, “What the hell were you doing going through my stuff?”
“I was snooping. I’m sorry, Eli.”
Eli thinks, God, I love her. Even this snoopy version of her. What the hell is wrong with me?
His father tells Lisa, “When his mother overdosed, we assumed she’d had a heart condition we didn’t know about.”
Eli says, “We pretended to assume.”
“Listen!” Noah orders. “Both of you listen. Diet pills smuggled from Brazil were killing women like your mother, not just your mother, Eli, and no one had a clue. Lisa knows that. She’s smart.”
Eli says, “She didn’t hear Mom talk about wanting to die while you were out fucking whoever. But I heard her. For two fucking years. And you just kept sending her away.”
His father shouts, in spite of the obvious pain it causes him, “It was the pills, Eli!” Eli envisions slicing off the swollen part of his father’s face and almost gags. Noah Beyer spits blood into a cup.
On the train heading back upstate, Eli tells Lisa how, when his mother died, he’d gone from being a skilled thirteen-year-old carver to being a straight-up vandal. “I cut CUNT into that big bar mitzvah dictionary. Then my father came in and told me to lie to the insurance lawyer about what happened to my mother. He said I’d get a big settlement. ‘Untainted money,’ he called it, meaning it wouldn’t be connected to his businesses. He said I’d appreciate it someday. I think he actually believed that. All I had to do was pretend that my mom was happy except for her weight.”
There is more to the story, but Lisa doesn’t need to hear it: how after his father had left the room Eli had sliced the dictionary into ribbons. Then smashed a picture frame, shattering the glass, and used one of the shards to slice up a photograph of his parents. He’d liked the feel of the glass as a tool, a novelty tool, an affair of a tool—because he was married to his pocketknife. With the glass he sliced up a curtain, a rug, a sheet. He almost sliced off the fringe of a prayer shawl that he’d received for his bar mitzvah, but instead, he sliced his jeans, and bits of his thigh underneath the jeans.
That was by mistake.
He wasn’t one of those cutters. But he ended up in a hospital ward for four days, surrounded by those cutters.
Back upstate, Lisa walks ahead of Eli through the station parking lot and gets into the driver’s seat. The car had been hers before it was theirs. As she pulls into the driveway, she says, “So insurance money from your mother’s death paid the fees for my nice new mortgage.” It isn’t a question. He hears the disgust in her voice. She wants no part of Eli’s insurance. “The rates are low right now. I’m going to looking into refinancing again. Maybe if I take out a bit more, I can pay you back immediately.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I might not have to.” She turns off the headlights.
Eli stomps inside and takes a swipe at the mobile, but it just keeps swinging. He grabs his knife and slashes a wall—makes a three-foot gash with a horizontal trajectory. If he’s going to defile the house, he might as well actually defile it, though he knows it’s a dick move. When Lisa doesn’t follow him up to bed, he assumes she’s at her desk, disentangling their finances.
But in the morning, he finds her on her knees, spackling the wall. When she hops up and greets him with a “Hey,” he isn’t prepared for her delight, doesn’t trust it, is afraid to get too close.
He says, “I would have fixed that. Or paid someone to. ”
“I know you would have, but I don’t want your father to see it. I’ve invited him here to recover.”
“Wait. You what? When?”
“After you went to bed, I called and invited him. No point in waiting until Thanksgiving. I told him about the extra room and the extra bathroom. Just for a couple of nights. Until his wife gets home.”
“Why would you do that?” Do you have the hots for the buff nurse?
“It’ll be great. We’ll have time, the three of us, to focus a mission statement for the mental health foundation.”
Eli stares at the compact beauty of this almost-blond monster of hubris. She says, “I want this for you. For us. I need you to want to do it.”
“You didn’t do it for us. That’s a lie and you know it is.”
“I could bring together the crafts community and the therapy community and the alternative-therapy community.” She turns away, gets on her knees, and goes back to work on the wall. He’s almost shaking. She’s almost babbling: “We could help so many people get jobs. People with MFAs in printing and glass arts. We could sponsor free workshops and mentally ill people could get coping skills using their hands.”
“You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
“You know, your father was impressed that I’d bought a house with the intention of renting out space to pay the mortgage.”
“I’m sure he was.”
“You need to make things right with your family, Eli.”
“It’s my family.”
Lisa turns and stands. “Well, this is my house.” She holds her ground, as Devin’s barely turning mobile sends out purples and yellows and reds, bruising the half-patched wall. “I can pay you back your $7500 today, unless you want interest,” she seems to be sneering—though later, Eli can’t be sure. Maybe he only imagined the sneer.
But he is certain he hears himself say, “We’re over.”
And they are. Lisa writes him a check. He donates to the fund for aging craftspeople and the World Wildlife Fund in her honor. $7500 to each cause. She thanks him in a letter, the only letter he has from her. But she doesn’t end up with the stained-glass guy, who isn’t, it turns out, a bad guy. It turns out Devin has a friend, an American Sufi, who’s created a nondenominational sacred space in the woods in the Berkshires for cremated remains. This friend hires Eli to engrave the plaques on a wall with the names of those whose ashes have been scattered.
Sometimes Eli takes the plaques down and works indoors, but in decent weather he usually works among the pine trees. And he watches people, not many, but usually one or two each day, approach the wall and kneel, or touch a plaque, or cry. He’s been hoping, having read up on Sufis, to one day see a whirling dervish. It hasn’t happened yet.
Once in a while, a mourner will stick around and tell Eli about the life of a person whose name is on a plaque—a wife who grew and harvested raspberries and then canned raspberry jam, a father who played the piano and told horrible jokes. Eli will listen to the joke out of respect. Sometimes a mourner will ask Eli about his loss, assuming he’s also grieving. He’ll usually reply that he’s just there to work on the plaques, though sometimes he’ll mention that he once lost someone he loved.
And now and then, slowly, gradually, pretending to be just another mourner, Eli would come up with old memories about his mother—the playdough she made with flour and water, her passion for obscure children’s songs she discovered on old LPs at the library, her dancing, their dancing, mother and son. And he would come to feel her presence among sad strangers, as if her name was on the wall, carved deeper than any other, closer to the wood and almost warm, almost whispering it’s alright, Eli, almost bleeding.
Susan Land
Eli makes himself look away as Lisa smooths down her beautifully folded camisole. He doesn’t want to see her close the suitcase. He feeds the woodstove, stares into the fire, listens to her humming and zipping and wheeling. When she points out that watching fire is a waste of heat, he imagines slamming shut the iron door, watching the potbelly quiver. A dick move. He could shake something loose, even crack the foundation of Lisa’s house.
He shuts the hot iron door. He’s an adult, even if he has to remind himself of this fact. He’s afraid next she’ll say something about that ad he’d promised to get out a week ago. He wants to get it exactly right. He’d been distracted by the wooden handle of a cleaver that was begging to be beveled. A car honks, and she smiles and touches his sweater, which sparks, and she gives him a promising kiss goodbye. The second she’s gone, he carves her name at the base of the woodstove, in tiny letters no one could see without kneeling, head to the floor. As if she were an idol. A wave of Jewish guilt makes Eli slice a scratch in the iron casting, ugly but discreet.
Then feeling hopeful about their relationship, he gets to work. And he doesn’t stop. And by the afternoon of the evening of Lisa’s homecoming, he has submitted the ad to all three Hudson Valley magazines aimed at entrepreneurs. The tagline is lame: Signs by Eli Beyer. But the logo is good: a guy sits in a chair next to a straight-arm wooden post with hooks. Just the post and the hooks. There’s no sign hanging from the hooks. The guy is holding a wooden plank in his lap and carving letters. The hand is Eli’s. The knife is Eli’s antique folding blade. The holes in the wooden plank correspond to the hooks on the post—no easy feat of perception.
The phone rings. Maybe Lisa’s ride bailed, he hopes, and she needs him to pick her up at the train station. But the screen says Mt. Sinai Hospital. Eli says, “Hello?” He prays: Let it be spam.
“Mr. Eli Beyer?” A guy with a social-worker’s intensity. Can’t be good.
“Yes.”
“Mr. Noah Beyer is your father?”
“Yes….”
“He’s here, Eli. He’s been through a life-threatening dental emergency. It was determined by a team of specialists that sepsis could spread to his brain within a matter of hours. We’re asking for your consent.”
“For what?”
“Surgery. He’s had it. He was under anesthesia for almost two hours. A difficult operation. He’s in the recovery room. Mr. Beyer, it took a while to find your phone number. We suggest everyone carry contact numbers. You could give him a card to put in his wallet.”
“How is he? My father? How’s he doing?”
“He’s almost 80 and he’s still fighting a nasty infection. He’ll require IV antibiotics for 72 hours. He very much wants to see you. He’s refused to see your brothers.”
“Half-brothers.” Who’d been ready to testify against their father had that money-laundering case gone to trial.
“Well, I hope you will come if you possibly can.” Who the hell asked you? But a tiny part of Eli doesn’t want the old guy to die without giving them both another chance.
“I’ll come after I get out of work. I’m an hour and a half upstate.” A bigger part of Eli demands: A chance at what?
“Someone will have the Medicare forms and consents. Go straight to the admitting desk.”
“What about his wife? Isn’t she there?”
“She has a daughter getting married in Israel. She’s with the daughter. Your father was on his way to the airport when his tooth blew up.”
“Oh, right.” Eli had blown off that wedding invitation. He’s never met the bride’s mother, his second stepmother, much less the bride.
Eli hangs up and thinks about trains. There’s a schedule on the refrigerator, but he doesn’t have the will to go into the kitchen to look at it. And anyway, he can’t leave without seeing Lisa. It’s been three nights, the longest they’ve been apart in their almost two years together. The longest either of them has ever been in a relationship with anyone. How the hell can she insist they’re too young to talk about getting married?
They are both twenty-eight, both born in 1983, and Eli’s mother died when she was only thirty-five. Way too young. Two weeks and a day later, on his fourteenth birthday, Eli slashed images of flames into walls, turning his bedroom into a virtual crematorium. That was a period he has said nothing about to Lisa. She already, sometimes, seems worried about her attraction to the not-particularly-hot Jewish guy who overnight, in another state, had become her serious boyfriend.
But Eli believes that their meeting was fated. She was in Iowa for a conference of arts administrators. He had just completed his MFA in printing and his future was vague. He’d been told he’d make a good printing instructor, but there were no job openings that year, even for adjuncts. Her clarity about life had beguiled him, as did her lack of any sort of pretentious bullshit. Her hair was straight and shiny and almost blond. She said he reminded her of Paul Rudd in Clueless, her middle-school crush. He told her he liked being a Paul Rudd type better than he liked being a trust-fund douche. She pointed out that in Clueless, Rudd was a bit of a trust-fund douche. They laughed and had sex and they both thought the sex was great. Neither of them had tattoos, making them their own separate race.
Lisa ran a network of crafts fairs, where she sold sketches written about animals by children. The kids pretended to be endangered creatures, missing their lost relatives and lost habitats. The profits from the sketches went half to The World Wildlife Fund and half to a foundation that helps elderly crafts people with rent and medical bills. Eli offered to frame the pictures behind glass and attach hooks for hanging. They discussed how much more the framed works would sell for. Curled up against him, smoothing down the hair on his arm, Lisa offered Eli a home in the Hudson Valley, and a booth on the fair circuit. She knew just where he’d find customers for his woodblocks prints of knives and, especially, his sign-carving skills. And she’d bought a house with an extra room she’d been planning to rent out.
As soon as he’d moved in—to her room, not the extra one, that stayed empty—he offered to pay off her $100,000 mortgage. She waved the suggestion away. Something about tax breaks and security, but asked if he’d lend her money for refinancing costs. Cut her mortgage payments in half. “Just the points and the fees come to $7500.” She explained what points were. He’d never bought a house, never borrowed money.
She took the money and said she hoped that it wasn’t from some criminal enterprise—so she must have researched his father’s 1996 arrest: the money-laundering charges, which had been dropped within weeks, live on forever thanks to Wikipedia. Eli told her that the money was from his mother’s life insurance. Said it matter-of-factly, as if his grief and shame had been invoiced, his credit report wiped clean.
Now every time a holiday comes around, Lisa wants to meet Eli’s family and show them the house. Eli nixes any invitations. He hates how fragile and out of control his father makes him feel; maybe Lisa should meet the old guy while he’s in the hospital and weak. If nothing else, she could help Eli deal with the hospital bureaucracy.
Noah Beyer claims Eli needs a father in a way his other sons don’t because Eli had lost a mother. That is always the phrase.
As if Eli hadn’t paid close enough attention and had left her behind somewhere, like a computer charger. But Eli had paid plenty of attention to his mom. And she’d delighted in Eli, and in dancing, and in teaching step classes to ladies who adored her flourishes—until she slipped one day and wrecked her knee. Eli was ten and about to become obsessed with video games and knives. The rest of his mother’s short life now seems a blur of her getting fatter and sadder.
His father’s life since his mother’s death seems like a percussive series of trying attempts to interest his artistic, broody son in something productive. Lately, Noah’s been looking for a non-profit scheme to simultaneously ensnare Eli and clean up the besmirched family name.
Lisa is home and Eli goes to her. She holds on for a moment longer than he expects and he takes off her coat. Then she juts out a hip and strikes a tough girl pose in her professional skirt and shoeless feet in the fuzzy socks that have been hidden under her boots. She brags, “My nephew called me his badass aunt.” Eli wants to pick her up and carry her to the bed and welcome her home with his tongue and his cock and forget about his father’s oozing mouth--
But he’s not going to blow off this visit. A hospitalized father’s appeal to a son is a thing that deserves to be done right, even for the Noah/Eli Beyers of the world.
She changes into her jeans and hangs up the skirt and Eli tells her he got the ad out. She nods, in boss mode. He got it out late and deserves no extra credit. Fair enough. Then he tells her about seeing a fox family crossing the road. “I was coming back from a job in Red Hook.” She likes foxes, and she likes Eli to be out of the house on jobs. Any job: engraving, carving, fixing some sad old hippie’s broken TV stand.
She unpacks a tin of oatmeal cookies and puts them on a plate, explaining that they were baked by her father’s ancient mother. “She has a first edition Fanny Farmer cookbook. Try one!” He tells Lisa that one of his ancient relatives had given him a dictionary for his bar mitzvah. “Boys were supposed to like to look up curse words.”
“Did you?”
“No. My father had a filthy mouth. He was hard to shock.” Part of Eli is turned on by the idea of her knowing what he actually did to that dictionary. A sick part. But how tender would she be? How cold?
She’s moved on, explaining her search for a good location for a temporary Christmas shop. She updates him on a place in Hershey, Pennsylvania. “Lots of tourists for the chocolate factory. And Devin has connections there.”
Eli nods, sad in a new way. Devin Fitzgerald does security work for fairs and farmers markets. He also makes stained-glass chandeliers and lampshades, and mirror frames that Eli can’t imagine anyone buying. Last week, when he first saw Devin’s work, he caught Lisa’s smile in the reflection of greens and purples—a spinning mobile of fish that hung from an almost invisible cord—and mumbled something about tacky crap.
That triggered their first real fight. In a corner of the store, she hissed at him about his hipster arrogance. Eli couldn’t defend himself, but he bought her the stained-glass mobile. When they got home, they couldn’t figure out how to hang the damn thing. She said Devin would know. “And he’d enjoy seeing where it ended up.”
So super handy Devin came over with his toolkit, and Eli was polite, and Devin was competent, as well as enchanted with Lisa’s enchantment. The goddamn mobile is still hanging above her roll-out desk.
And as she goes on about Devin’s connections and the holiday store, Eli imagines throwing the cookie plate against a wall. The shards would be a goldmine of cutting shapes. He runs a finger back and forth along the rim of the plate, imagining the fissures, the satisfaction of scratching out crap in the stained glass. He mumbles, “My father is in the hospital.”
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s a serious dental thing. I should visit him. He’s eighty.” Eli remembers holding his father by the elbow after his seventy-fifth birthday blowout, helping him get into a car at the end of the evening. Eli had imagined carving his father’s sharp elbow bone into a knife. But he’d been happy enough to be able to help his father that day, sad to see the old guy’s trouble with depth perception.
“Want to come with me? To the hospital?” he asks, and immediately worries that he’s made a mistake. He can handle some forms. He can call his father’s lawyer. He can do this without letting Lisa seem him shrivel up around Noah. “It’s okay if you don’t want.”
“I do want to. You could use the support.” As if he’s one of the artists she nurtures, not a special one; they’re all special to her.
“I need a kiss.” She complies, especially for him. And on the train, Lisa nestles in closes. The local train never gets warm. She asks how his parents met. Eli says, “She was a college student who posed for an artist who was visiting the campus. My father and the artists were friends. He was thirty years older that she was, and he got her pregnant.”
Noah had insisted on a DNA test when she refused to take his cash for an abortion. Eli tells Lisa, “He’s always taken pride in how he looked at the DNA report and looked at the change the pregnancy had made—my mom had stopped messing around with cocaine, gained some nice weight. Noah told her, ‘Let’s do this right.’” Eli didn’t add that then all hell broke loose with the wife and sons Noah already had. “He figured that’s what money is for,” he added.
“For breaking up families?”
“Yeah. He’s a real old-school sweetheart,” Eli says, and thinks: who likes his sons to carry knives—and to expect to be stabbed in the back in the world of men.
He suddenly wants to get out at the next stop, take the first train home, fax the forms, grill a great dinner for Lisa. His father respects grilling but thinks cooking in the kitchen is for pussies. Eli’s half-brothers think the same thing. And they all hate each other.
“How exactly did your mother die?” Lisa asks.
“Unclear.” Deliberately unclear. “Diet pills, I think. Speed, basically.”
“Illegal? Legal?”
“Legal by default. Now no more questions about her death, okay?” Ricocheting with the train, feeling somewhere between panicky and numb, he draws her even closer, pretending they’re a single down-jacketed bear. “Will you do the talking with the hospital administrators? You’re great at that stuff,” he says.
“You bet.”
On the lobby level of the hospital, she makes sure the papers get into the proper folders, and that a copy is made for Eli’s records. She’s not thinking about Devin, Eli’s sure about that. As they kiss in the elevator, he doesn’t want the door to ever open.
Mr. Beyer, the hall nurse informs them, is most definitely awake. He has swelling on one side of his face, which is to be expected. But he seems to be fighting off the infection. “Your father insists he will wear his fancy shoes in the bed. His feet hurt him if he’s barefoot.”
Eli says, “Holy hell.”
The nurse tells him she’s seen worse. “He’s polite—as long as he gets what he’s exactly wanting.”
Noah Beyer, sitting up straight in the hospital bed, wears a zebra-print bathrobe. His fancy shoes point to the ceiling. Eli takes in the asymmetry of his father’s face and imagines drawing a caricature of the old man with popcorn popping madly inside his left cheek. A buff guy in a suit sits in a corner. “Dad, this is Lisa,” Eli says, as Muscle Guy stands up. “My girlfriend. I work for her.” Already Eli can feel himself shrinking.
“Louder!”
Eli announces, “Her name is my girlfriend Lisa Guthry. She’s in charge of the largest crafts fair circuit on the East Coast.” What a stupid thing to say.
His father smiles. “What a pretty boss you have.”
She says, “Eli’s skill is incredible. He does fantastic caricatures. And custom fence posts. And hand-carved signs.” She says this as if it would impress a storage-unit tycoon. Then she reaches out her hand. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
The tycoon smiles his old snake-charmer smile. She seems delighted to hold his decrepit hand. Oh Jesus. Even lopsided and leery, Eli’s father has a way. Then he turns to Eli and says: “I’ll bet you like working for her.” Managing to imply: “I’ll bet you like her tits.” He gestures for them to sit and for the guy in the corner to leave. “Ahan, go to the cafeteria. Get yourself something. Bill the room. I’ll call if I need anything.”
“I’ll wait outside in the hallway, sir.” Ahan has an African accent.
“Suit yourself.” The patient shrugs. “My nurse. Private. For what it’s worth.” Eli senses his father’s exhaustion. But the old guy orders, “Sit! Both of you, sit, sit.”
Eli takes the chair closest to the head of the bed. Lisa sits by Eli. He asks, “So how’re you doing, Dad?”
“Been better. They told me my tooth was a disgusting minefield of dreck. No need to further discuss.”
Eli says, “Cool.”
Noah swallows dramatically. Then he asks, “So? You two are—what?” He turns to Lisa for the answer.
Eli reaches for her hand. He kisses his knuckles. She tells his father, “We’re living together.”
“Living together, uh? Sounds promising.”
Eli recalls the knife in his pocket. He wants to carve Lisa’s name, seal in the promise, but there seems to be no wood in the hospital room.
His father adds: “We used to call it shacking up.”
Lisa says, “I know.”
“Good for you. Well, I can’t offer you two a drink at the moment. But Eli’s not a drinker,” Noah assures Lisa, out of the blue. “You could do worse. Look at him. He’s healthy. Handsome. I never looked so good. And even I’m healthy except for this goddamn hole in my mouth. But his mother’s side, believe it or not—his mother’s side had brains and class.”
Noah waits, as if expecting Lisa to explain her designs on his genetically could-be-worse son. She turns to Eli and does her version of a shrug: head tilt, no shoulder involvement. Eli comes up with a distraction. “Come visit us next Thanksgiving. Whattaya say, Dad? I’ll make the turkey on our new grill. We can have squash from Lisa’s garden.”
Noah snaps, “Speak louder.” Grumbles to Lisa, “I used to hate how he’d mutter. Does he mutter at home?”
“He’s quiet sometimes.” She slips her hand in Eli’s father’s hand and squeezes it. Eli watches how her hair falls, tries to imagine drawing her silhouette.
Then he repeats the invitation, louder, at a range the makes him sound bossier than he wants to sound.
Noah says, “Lisa, did you know I’ve been trying to get Eli to come to work for me?”
“I didn’t.” She flips her hair, a sign that she’s on high alert.
“I’ve been trying for years. He’d be good at schmoozing. You know that word?”
“Of course. It’s a great skill.”
“Old ladies and fairies all love him. Am I right?”
“That’s enough,” Eli snaps. “We should go, Dad. Let you get some sleep.”
Noah snaps back, “Sit still. I’m awake.”
“Hear out your father,” Lisa says firmly. Then, to Noah, “But please don’t say ‘old ladies and fairies.’ Just say that your son has a nice manner. Which he does.”
The old man grins. “Fine. Well put. Thank you. He has a nice manner.” He pauses and then adds, “I’ve done my best to raise him well.”
Then your best was pretty fucking awful. Eli rages silently. Noah treated Eli’s mother like a nanny who was on the verge of getting fired. Called her a bitch, which his mother tolerated, because she loved being Eli’s mother—until that slip while teaching the step class, followed by Eli’s middle-school obsession with Metal Gear Solid. When she tried to keep him away from the PlayStation, he echoed his father and upped the game, called her a cunt. Sweet kid.
Now Noah is telling them, “I’ve been talking to my tax guys about expanding the family’s philanthropy. Eli, we might have a place for you that you’d especially like.”
Eli says nothing. His father winks at Lisa. “If you can spare him…”
She asks, “What do you have mind?”
“The rollout of the Beyer Mental Health Foundation, with Eli as the chairman of the board.” Eli watches his girlfriend, sitting even straighter than she usually does, fall in love with this idea. Another goddamn job. She’s transfixed. Doesn’t have a clue that Noah is toying with Eli, forcing the son to wonder how much his father’ll say about Eli’s psychiatric history. Noah says, “I’ve been talking to my financial advisors.” Oh good. Thank god it’s about money. “There are remarkable tax incentives. And we have connections.”
Like Devin but not Christmas stores connections.
She says, thinking aloud, “Eli would need a new suit.”
His father is sensing a win here. “You take him shopping and send me the bill. Maybe you’d even like to work with him. How does co-chair sound?”
“It sounds great to me,” she says to Eli. “The timing is great: you’ll get tired of having me for your boss.”
Eli blurts out, “How about a foundation for children of mothers who’ve killed themselves?"
“Don’t listen to him,” his father barks.
Eli sneers. “Why not? I’d have the street cred for that.”
Lisa gets the calm face she gets at meetings with too many loud egos. Eli usually finds her calmness soothing. Now he finds it cold.
His father mutters: “The pills killed your mother.”
Eli hisses: “You’re the one who kept sending her away to weight-loss prison.”
“She begged for that prison. It cost a thousand bucks a day.”
“I doubt she begged. She was so depressed she could hardly get out of bed.” Eli hears his voice nearly shaking.
His father gets louder: “Do you ever read any of those articles I send you? I’ve sent you dozens of reports. Big-shot research: Columbia. Stanford. No one back then knew what those pills she took were capable of. Don’t you open your mail?”
“I’ve read the articles,” Lisa announces, with the decency to blush.
Eli snaps, “What the hell were you doing going through my stuff?”
“I was snooping. I’m sorry, Eli.”
Eli thinks, God, I love her. Even this snoopy version of her. What the hell is wrong with me?
His father tells Lisa, “When his mother overdosed, we assumed she’d had a heart condition we didn’t know about.”
Eli says, “We pretended to assume.”
“Listen!” Noah orders. “Both of you listen. Diet pills smuggled from Brazil were killing women like your mother, not just your mother, Eli, and no one had a clue. Lisa knows that. She’s smart.”
Eli says, “She didn’t hear Mom talk about wanting to die while you were out fucking whoever. But I heard her. For two fucking years. And you just kept sending her away.”
His father shouts, in spite of the obvious pain it causes him, “It was the pills, Eli!” Eli envisions slicing off the swollen part of his father’s face and almost gags. Noah Beyer spits blood into a cup.
On the train heading back upstate, Eli tells Lisa how, when his mother died, he’d gone from being a skilled thirteen-year-old carver to being a straight-up vandal. “I cut CUNT into that big bar mitzvah dictionary. Then my father came in and told me to lie to the insurance lawyer about what happened to my mother. He said I’d get a big settlement. ‘Untainted money,’ he called it, meaning it wouldn’t be connected to his businesses. He said I’d appreciate it someday. I think he actually believed that. All I had to do was pretend that my mom was happy except for her weight.”
There is more to the story, but Lisa doesn’t need to hear it: how after his father had left the room Eli had sliced the dictionary into ribbons. Then smashed a picture frame, shattering the glass, and used one of the shards to slice up a photograph of his parents. He’d liked the feel of the glass as a tool, a novelty tool, an affair of a tool—because he was married to his pocketknife. With the glass he sliced up a curtain, a rug, a sheet. He almost sliced off the fringe of a prayer shawl that he’d received for his bar mitzvah, but instead, he sliced his jeans, and bits of his thigh underneath the jeans.
That was by mistake.
He wasn’t one of those cutters. But he ended up in a hospital ward for four days, surrounded by those cutters.
Back upstate, Lisa walks ahead of Eli through the station parking lot and gets into the driver’s seat. The car had been hers before it was theirs. As she pulls into the driveway, she says, “So insurance money from your mother’s death paid the fees for my nice new mortgage.” It isn’t a question. He hears the disgust in her voice. She wants no part of Eli’s insurance. “The rates are low right now. I’m going to looking into refinancing again. Maybe if I take out a bit more, I can pay you back immediately.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I might not have to.” She turns off the headlights.
Eli stomps inside and takes a swipe at the mobile, but it just keeps swinging. He grabs his knife and slashes a wall—makes a three-foot gash with a horizontal trajectory. If he’s going to defile the house, he might as well actually defile it, though he knows it’s a dick move. When Lisa doesn’t follow him up to bed, he assumes she’s at her desk, disentangling their finances.
But in the morning, he finds her on her knees, spackling the wall. When she hops up and greets him with a “Hey,” he isn’t prepared for her delight, doesn’t trust it, is afraid to get too close.
He says, “I would have fixed that. Or paid someone to. ”
“I know you would have, but I don’t want your father to see it. I’ve invited him here to recover.”
“Wait. You what? When?”
“After you went to bed, I called and invited him. No point in waiting until Thanksgiving. I told him about the extra room and the extra bathroom. Just for a couple of nights. Until his wife gets home.”
“Why would you do that?” Do you have the hots for the buff nurse?
“It’ll be great. We’ll have time, the three of us, to focus a mission statement for the mental health foundation.”
Eli stares at the compact beauty of this almost-blond monster of hubris. She says, “I want this for you. For us. I need you to want to do it.”
“You didn’t do it for us. That’s a lie and you know it is.”
“I could bring together the crafts community and the therapy community and the alternative-therapy community.” She turns away, gets on her knees, and goes back to work on the wall. He’s almost shaking. She’s almost babbling: “We could help so many people get jobs. People with MFAs in printing and glass arts. We could sponsor free workshops and mentally ill people could get coping skills using their hands.”
“You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
“You know, your father was impressed that I’d bought a house with the intention of renting out space to pay the mortgage.”
“I’m sure he was.”
“You need to make things right with your family, Eli.”
“It’s my family.”
Lisa turns and stands. “Well, this is my house.” She holds her ground, as Devin’s barely turning mobile sends out purples and yellows and reds, bruising the half-patched wall. “I can pay you back your $7500 today, unless you want interest,” she seems to be sneering—though later, Eli can’t be sure. Maybe he only imagined the sneer.
But he is certain he hears himself say, “We’re over.”
And they are. Lisa writes him a check. He donates to the fund for aging craftspeople and the World Wildlife Fund in her honor. $7500 to each cause. She thanks him in a letter, the only letter he has from her. But she doesn’t end up with the stained-glass guy, who isn’t, it turns out, a bad guy. It turns out Devin has a friend, an American Sufi, who’s created a nondenominational sacred space in the woods in the Berkshires for cremated remains. This friend hires Eli to engrave the plaques on a wall with the names of those whose ashes have been scattered.
Sometimes Eli takes the plaques down and works indoors, but in decent weather he usually works among the pine trees. And he watches people, not many, but usually one or two each day, approach the wall and kneel, or touch a plaque, or cry. He’s been hoping, having read up on Sufis, to one day see a whirling dervish. It hasn’t happened yet.
Once in a while, a mourner will stick around and tell Eli about the life of a person whose name is on a plaque—a wife who grew and harvested raspberries and then canned raspberry jam, a father who played the piano and told horrible jokes. Eli will listen to the joke out of respect. Sometimes a mourner will ask Eli about his loss, assuming he’s also grieving. He’ll usually reply that he’s just there to work on the plaques, though sometimes he’ll mention that he once lost someone he loved.
And now and then, slowly, gradually, pretending to be just another mourner, Eli would come up with old memories about his mother—the playdough she made with flour and water, her passion for obscure children’s songs she discovered on old LPs at the library, her dancing, their dancing, mother and son. And he would come to feel her presence among sad strangers, as if her name was on the wall, carved deeper than any other, closer to the wood and almost warm, almost whispering it’s alright, Eli, almost bleeding.
