The Other Side of the World Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Tag Sale

  Charlie’s Story

  Make-A-Wish

  Also by Jay Neugeboren, available from Two Dollar Radio

  Copyright Page

  for Eric and Eliza

  “Mine is a most peaceable disposition. My wishes are: a humble dwelling with a thatched roof, but a good bed, good food, milk and butter of the freshest, flowers at my window, and a few fine tall trees before my door; and if God wants to make my happiness complete, he will grant me the joy of seeing some six or seven of my enemies hanging from those trees. Before death I shall, moved in my heart, forgive them all the wrong they did to me in their lifetimes. One must, it is true, forgive one’s enemies—but not before they have been hanged.”

  —Heinrich Heine, Thoughts and Ideas

  Tag Sale

  On the morning Seana showed up for my father’s tag sale, I was in Borneo, so that I didn’t get his letter giving me the news until I was back in Singapore. Before his letter came, I’d had no plans to return to the States, and my father, who—quintessential Max—had the finely-tuned habit of rarely if ever putting pressure on me and, thus, of not allowing hopes to become expectations, had never asked if or when I might be coming back.

  I’d been working in Singapore the previous three years for a company that dealt in palm oil, and during the years I worked for them, palm oil had surpassed soy bean oil as the most widely produced vegetable oil in the world. My job, mostly, was to monitor various stages of development, production, and sales—to make sure the contractors we hired did what we’d contracted for, and that what we promised to deliver was delivered safely and at the agreed-upon price. It was the most lucrative job I’d ever had, and though life in Singapore was tolerable—I worked hard, played hard, and was on the receiving end of a multitude of perks—it didn’t thrill me. Borneo did, however, and during some of my visits there—mini-vacations I was able to tack on to business trips—I’d thought of sending my father a round-trip plane ticket so I could show him why it was I found Borneo so enchanting, and why I sometimes fantasized living there for the rest of my life.

  But it wasn’t the news about Seana showing up for my father’s tag sale that made me put this kind of fantasy on hold and, instead, to put in for a leave-without-pay in order to return home. What did that was Nick Falzetti’s death.

  It was because of Nick that I’d gone to Singapore, and he had died in a freak accident on the first Saturday night after my return to Singapore from a weekend in Borneo. Nick and I had been buddies, on and off, when we were undergraduates at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, and for a few years after, and when, during our tenth college reunion we hung out together, he’d sold me a bill of goods on moving to Singapore so I could live the kind of good life he’d been living.

  Nick’s parents lived in Tenants Harbor, a small town a few miles from the Maine coast, about halfway up the state to Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park, and his ex-wife, Trish, whom I’d gone with before she met Nick, lived with their son Gabe not far from Nick’s parents. I wanted to pay my respects to Nick’s family—to his parents and to Trish—but after I’d made the decision to do so, what began to get me down was thinking about the kind of messy stuff Nick, Trish, and I had gotten into way back, and once I’d gone and booked my flight and wrote my father that I was coming home, I found myself imagining, far more than was good for me, what it would be like to be with her again. And I began thinking, too, that she might be far too pleased by news of Nick’s death for anyone’s good.

  By the time I arrived home, my father’s tag sale was history, and Seana, who bought the works, had moved in with him. A good deal for them both, she claimed: She got all his leftovers—and he got her.

  Here’s the ad my father had put in the local papers: Tag Sale. Retired University Professor offering material from unpublished and/or abandoned novels and stories. Items include: titles, epigraphs, opening paragraphs, opening chapters, final paragraphs, plot notions and summaries, character sketches, lists, research notes, random jottings, and select journal entries. Saturday and Sunday, 9 AM to 4:30 PM. Rain or shine. 35 Harrison Avenue, Northampton. No book dealers, please.

  Seana—Seana Shulamith McGee O’Sullivan—had been one of my father’s graduate students in the late eighties—his best and brightest, and also, to his ongoing delight, his most successful. Although Seana’s first novel, Triangle, was far too raunchy to have been chosen by Oprah—it was about a mother-daughter-father ménage à trois that had a deliciously happy ending—it wound up outselling most Oprah selections and staying on The New York Times best-seller list for over a hundred weeks.

  I met Seana for the first time in the spring of 1988, when my father let me sit in on one of his at-home writing workshops. I’d just passed my thirteenth birthday—I know this because I’d been Bar Mitzvahed three weeks earlier—and I remember watching Seana sitting cross-legged on the floor next to the fireplace, chewing on and off at a hangnail on her left index finger while the women in the class kept giving her looks of disdain and envy she clearly relished.

  My father always cooked a sumptuous dinner for his students—never boiled up spaghetti or ordered out for pizza—and he served it on our good china, on a white damask linen tablecloth, with napkins to match, and while he and I were doing the dishes afterwards, I asked about Seana and the way the women in the class had been looking at her. “Ah,” my father sighed. And then: “I mean, after all, son, what young woman wouldn’t be resentful and envious of Seana? All that talent and productivity… and beautiful too!”

  For the tag sale—after education, the region’s second largest industry, my father contended—what he’d done was to lay out on our front porch and lawn stuff that had not made its way into his published work, and that, in the time he estimated he had left—he was seventy-two and calculated his remaining productive years at sixteen—he did not expect ever to look at again.

  In addition to being one upon whom nothing was lost, he wrote, he wanted to be one from whom nothing was lost. That, he explained, had been the modest raison d’être for what he’d come to call, before Seana’s arrival, ‘The First and Last Annual Max Eisner Literary Tag Sale.’ But then, as in any good novel, the wonderful and unpredictable had occurred: First (and only) person in line on a bright, chilly New England Saturday morning in early October, there was Seana—gorgeous, voluptuous, brilliant Seana, and in her mature incarnation—eager to pluck up everything so that, she announced at once, she would make sure that nothing would be lost.

  What I found myself imagining when I read about my father’s tag sale was that the first sets of folders Seana came to that morning were laid out on three mahogany nesting tables that, one inside the other, had lived in a corner of our living room, by the driveway window, all through my childhood. My father had taken the tables from his mother’s apartment in Brooklyn after she died—they’d sat in a corner of his living room throughout his childhood (one of his mother’s famous “space-savers”)—and even though my father and I lived in a three-story Victorian house, and had a large living room, along with a larger dining room, smaller music room and library, and lots of surfaces on which to set down food and drinks, my father would, as his mother had, put out the three tables whenever we had company.

  When I imagined the tables on our front lawn, one beside the other, what they also brought to mind were my father’s wives and girlfriends, each of whom, as he grew older, was younger than the one before, and all of whom seemed, in the way I pictured them, like a series of older, larger women within whom—as in a set of Russian matryoshka dolls—younger, leaner, more beaut
iful women lived.

  My father had had five wives, starting with my mother (who was two years older than he was), and there were also a dozen or so long-term girlfriends, though none of the girlfriends had ever moved in with him. Still, my father was not, he’d state whenever I asked about a new relationship—this usually in response to his inquiries about my love life—a philanderer. “I’ve always been an unregenerate serial monogamist,” he’d say, “though I really do love women.”

  In all their varieties, he might have added, and as different as we were in most ways, in this we were alike, because whenever a friend would offer to fix me up with someone and ask what my type was, I’d be stumped. Like my father, I had no particular preferences because, like him, I found most women, whether girlfriends or friend-friends, more interesting—and better company—than guys. And because just about always—the thing I know my father valued above all, once you’d gotten past whatever it was you found initially attractive, and maybe because, it occurs to me, it was his pre-eminent quality—they were usually kinder than guys.

  Be kind, my father would say to me from as far back as I can remember, and for a long list of situations—whether it had to do with guys I played against in sports, store clerks who were incompetent, strangers who were rude, or friends and relatives who were nasty—be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.

  The quote was from Philo, he said, and I grew up imagining that the name belonged to the man who’d invented the kind of pastry dough you use to make strudel or spanakopitas. When I was ten or eleven, though, I found out who Philo was, and the way it happened tells you things about my father you wouldn’t suspect from the quiet, somewhat shy man he was most of the time.

  I was changing out of my uniform after a basketball game at our local YMCA on a Saturday afternoon when my father came into the locker room to see how I was doing, and while we were going over the game, one of the guys along our row of lockers called another guy a faggot. Without hesitating, my father walked over to the boy and told him that using such a term was vulgar and unacceptable, that he hoped the boy would never use it again, and that, to this end, he intended to speak with the boy’s father. My father waited for the boy to get dressed, after which he accompanied him to the Y’s lobby, where he told the boy’s father—a huge guy, six-three or -four, wearing a Boston Bruins hockey shirt—what had happened.

  When the man told my father to mind his own goddamned business, my father repeated what he’d said to the boy: that use of such a word was vulgar and unacceptable, and that it demeaned not only the person to whom it referred, but, more profoundly, the person who had the unexamined need to employ such a word.

  The man laughed in my father’s face, then jabbed him in the chest, told him that it took one to know one and that he’d better watch his own ass or he’d wind up skewered butt-first on a flagpole. Grabbing the front of my father’s shirt, the man said that he bet the last time my father had seen pussy was when he shoveled out cat shit at the A.S.P.C.A.

  A woman at the Y desk picked up a phone—a crowd had gathered—but my father gestured to her to put it down and, very calmly, he addressed the man who was holding his shirt, and the way he did it made me think ‘Uh-oh!’, because even though my father could be a polite and accommodating man most of the time, he could, at times, be seriously roused, and then—watch out!

  “Sir,” he said to the man. “I would have you know that I have known more fine women in my lifetime than have ever existed in your imagination.”

  The man warned my father not to be a professor smart-ass, made a fist, and said the only reason he’d been holding back till then was because he didn’t like to hit little old men. At this point, my father, who was five-foot-six and weighed perhaps one-fifty, stepped forward and pointed to the ceiling. “Well, look at that,” he said, and as soon as the man looked up, my father stomped down hard on one of the man’s feet, and let loose with a swift one-two combination to the guy’s mid-section. When the man doubled over, my father gave him a terrific roundhouse chop to the side of the head that dropped him straight to the floor.

  “In my youth, you see,” my father said, and without breathing hard, “I studied at the Flatbush Boys Club with the great champion Lew Tendler, who himself had learned the trade, in and out of the ring, from the immortal Benny Leonard.”

  The man opened his eyes, but stayed where he was while my father advised him never to discount the benefits of a good education in teaching us that the use of verbal insults against those we deem inferior only served to reveal our own ignorant shortcomings.

  After word of the incident got around, my father became a hero to my friends, who, when they hung out at our house, would ask him for boxing tips, and it turned out that my father knew more than a little bit about the sport. He had published a novel, Prizefighter, when he was in his twenties, and it was based in part on the life of Barney Ross, a Jewish boxing champion who’d also been a war hero, and had, from the morphine they gave him for pain when he was wounded, become a drug addict, and then a recovered drug addict. My father had been a pretty good bantamweight himself in Police Athletic League competitions, though he never did A.A.U. or Golden Gloves, and when my friends asked, he’d offer them basic stuff about feints and jabs and being alert to an opponent’s weaknesses, and, using Ross as an example, about the will to win, which derived, he asserted, from fighting for something larger than yourself.

  My father told us Ross’s story: how Ross’s father was a Talmudic scholar who owned a grocery store in Chicago and was killed by gangsters in a hold-up, and how the family was made so poor by the father’s death that two of Ross’s brothers, along with his sister, were placed in an orphanage. The result was that whenever Ross was in the ring, he’d imagine he was fighting against his father’s murderers, and when he won the first of his three world championships, he used the prize money to rescue his brothers and sister from the orphanage.

  After he’d finish telling us about Ross—or about Tendler, or Leonard, or “Kid” Kaplan, or Abe Attell, or Daniel Mendoza, or other great Jewish fighters—and after he’d given us a few pointers, he’d stop, hold up an index finger to indicate that the most important advice was coming, and then touch his tongue with his finger and emphasize that because it could produce words that allowed you to avoid a fight, or if you had to fight, that allowed you to distract your opponent, the tongue remained far and away your most important weapon.

  “And always, always,” he would add, “be kind—fight as hard as you can, but at the same time don’t forget to nurture the kindness in your heart, the way Barney Ross did”—and one time when he gave out the saying, a friend asked if it was from Ross, and my father said no, that it was from Philo, and my friend asked who Philo was, and my father explained that Philo had been a philosopher from Alexandria who lived about fifty years before Christ, was known as Philo-the-Jew, and had been instrumental in the founding of Christianity by having combined elements of Greek mystery religions with Jewish theology.

  My father usually had answers to most questions my friends asked, and if he didn’t, he’d say, “Now that’s an interesting question—may I get back to you on it?” In truth, I grew up in awe not so much of things like his boxing expertise, but of his mind, of its sheer range and intelligence, though he would dismiss praise from me and others by acknowledging that yes, maybe he had a few smarts, but if he did they were merely a result of the lucky genetic hand he’d drawn at birth.

  In this, he said, he liked to think he had something in common with James Michener, though my father’s own writing—the one novel, along with a few short stories, and two books about other writers (Henry James and Willa Cather)—could not, of course, compare with Michener’s work, either in output or style. Although Michener had a low reputation among academics, my father considered him ‘a great humanist,’ and would outrage his colleagues—something he never minded doing—by teaching a course every few semesters on Michener’s essays and novels.

  He o
wned all of Michener’s more than fifty books, many of them real door-stoppers, along with copies of some of his screenplays, and to encourage students, he would point out that Michener (whom he referred to as ‘the Rabbi Akiba of fiction’) hadn’t published his first book until he was past forty years old. He may not have been the greatest prose stylist, my father would say—something Michener himself readily conceded—but his books were richly informed, made readers of millions of people, and were—their great distinction—unlike those of any other writer, living or dead.

  Like Michener, who never used researchers until he was hooked up to dialysis machines in his last years, my father was gifted with a photographic memory: if he read a page once, he had only to relax enough to locate the page somewhere in his mind and the sentences would be there for him. What helped make things easy between us was that it never seemed to bother him that I wasn’t drawn to matters intellectual or literary, and clear, too, early on, that I lacked not only his intelligence, but his phenomenal memory. Nor was I a particularly good student—I worked hard to get a B average in high school, and at UMass, where I was a business major, I worked even harder to get a three-point average. Still, as long as I applied myself, did the best I could, and, what my father considered most important of all—remained curious about the world—he seemed satisfied.

  “The wonderful thing about you, Charlie,” he said to me on the afternoon of my college graduation—repeating what he’d said on previous such occasions: my Bar Mitzvah, my graduations from junior high and high school, and what he’d say each time I started a new job or brought home a new girlfriend—“the wonderful thing about you is that you’ve never disappointed me.”

  Sometimes I wondered why. It wasn’t that I’d screwed up so terribly, but more that I’d never succeeded especially well at any one thing: I hadn’t married, or bought a house or an apartment, or made a ton of money, or—the nut of the thing—ever really had any clear idea of what I wanted to do with my life. More to the point, and what worried me from time to time: I’d never had much of a desire to do anything in particular with my life.