A Changed Man (11 page)

“Hi there,” says Roberta.

“Oh, hi, Roberta!” The fear of sounding sullen makes Bonnie trill like Minnie Mouse.

“This recovering skinhead thing could be
dynamite.
” Roberta turns thumbs up at Bonnie. It’s not Roberta’s fault that she’s the older version of the high-school successes whose mission was to keep Bonnie off the cheerleading squad. But one of the perks of being so long past high school is the maturity that turns girls who despised one another into women who can cooperate and see one another’s good points. Bonnie likes it that Roberta’s bitchy, passive-aggressive pep-squad energy is deployed in the service of Brotherhood Watch. And no doubt Roberta thinks that Bonnie’s nerdy sincerity is persuasive and reassuring to potential big-ticket donors.

“How did last night work out?” asks Meyer. “With our friend Mr. Nolan.”

Does Roberta know that Bonnie was chosen to take Vincent home? Vincent moving into her West Ninth Street doorman building is not an honor she wants.

“We survived,” Bonnie replies. “He was perfectly well behaved.”

“I meant to call you,” Meyer says. “And I’m sorry. I fell asleep.”

Meyer thought about calling her, with all he has on his mind! Of course, he should have called. Look whom he sent to stay at her house.

“And your sons?” says Meyer. “Danny and Max? How did they react?” So Meyer really is thoughtful. Bonnie wants to believe he cares. It impresses her that, with a major foundation to oversee, with the weight of the world on his shoulders, he takes time to worry about her boys. A lesser man in Meyer’s place wouldn’t remember their names.

“It wasn’t exactly love at first sight. But they understood.”

“Bonnie, if this is too much…,” says Meyer. “Irene couldn’t believe it when I told her you’d offered to take Vincent home. She couldn’t believe I let you do it. I thought she’d never forgive me—”

“We’ll be fine.” Bonnie knocks on Meyer’s desk. “It will probably turn out to be a learning experience.” Bonnie hates the phrase
learning experience.
So why is she using it now? Because she’s lying, and she isn’t. She wishes she could go back to her regular, more or less peaceful existence with her kids. But there’s something interesting about life with the bizarro houseguest. Anyway, this is not the moment to express her doubts. It’s time to give Meyer the breezy reassurance he wants.

“They’re good boys,” pronounces Meyer. Bonnie beams, though she’s aware that Meyer hardly knows them. They
are
good boys. And Meyer knows that, just as he knew that Vincent wouldn’t murder them in their beds. What was it that Vincent said? Danny and Max admire her.

“I’m sure they’re great kids,” says Roberta, dutifully. “Of course they get it. An idiot
child
can see how we can make this skinhead thing work.”

“Vincent Nolan,” says Bonnie. “The skinhead’s name is Vincent Nolan.”

“Got that. Vin-cent No-lan.” Roberta draws out the syllables for as long as it takes to jot down his name in her Daily Reminder. “Beautiful. The first thing we need is a press release. We can take it from there.”

“How soon can you get the release out?” Meyer asks.

“As soon as I get some information.” Why is Roberta looking at Bonnie? Roberta is the experienced publicist who came to them via a circuitous route that snaked from the music business through the World Wildlife Fund. Bonnie and Roberta started working at the foundation around the same time. Early on, they’d gone out for lunch, an awkward occasion during which Roberta told Bonnie about her marriage to an Egyptian graduate student who disappeared after six months and divorced her two years later. Was it some kind of green-card scam? Roberta never said. Was she waiting for Bonnie to ask? They never had lunch together again, except on official occasions.

“What do you need?” says Bonnie. “Former ARM member comes to work with Brotherhood Watch.”

“That’s the headline,” says Roberta. “Now give me some text. What turned this guy’s head around? What made him come to
us?
”

“Maybe you should talk to him.” Bonnie wishes she hadn’t said that. What if Vincent prefers Roberta to Bonnie? What an inappropriate thought. Vincent’s a hard-luck case trying to change—not a potential boyfriend. The fact that it took Bonnie so long to catch on about Joel and Lorraine has made her afraid that’s she’s missing all sorts of important clues to the most deceptively simple male-female exchanges. Once, during the months of couples counseling that Joel insisted they go through, Bonnie brought up how betrayed she felt by Joel’s insistence that nothing was going on with Lorraine, that it was all in Bonnie’s mind. At which point the therapist, Dr. Steinweiss, reminded her that they weren’t there to deal with the past, but only with the future. This is about the boys, Joel said. And Dr. Steinweiss agreed.

Bonnie could tell Roberta what Vincent said yesterday in Meyer’s office, about his experience at the rave. Roberta, being Roberta, will quickly figure out that Vincent’s tale about his rock-concert revelation may not be the ideal anecdote for their demographic.

“Bonnie could work with him,” Meyer says. “Find out what his story really is, and then put it in a form that the public will want to hear—”

“I’m having a thought,” says Roberta. “Call me crazy, but…wouldn’t it be amazing if Vincent could talk at the benefit dinner? And we could get some coverage, get mailings out while it’s still possible to buy tickets. That could change the whole picture.”

No one’s going to correct her. It might not change the whole picture, but it’s worth a try. And Roberta’s not saying anything they haven’t already thought.

Outside Meyer’s window, the shadow of an airplane flickers over the buildings, a visual echo of the pall that’s fallen over the room. That word,
tickets,
has transformed them into three girls without dates for the prom. Joel used to blame Bonnie when they had nowhere to go, no invitations for Labor Day or, God forbid, New Year’s Eve. Bonnie weighs her reluctance to feel this way against her anxieties about what Vincent might do at such a dinner. Neither Meyer nor Roberta know that he says
Jap
and
Rican.
But for now, it’s impossible to weigh the possible harm against the possible good. Anyhow, it’s not Bonnie’s decision. Meyer will decide.

“Bonnie, talk to our friend again,” Meyer says. “You and Vincent work together. Get something down on paper for Roberta so she can send out a release.”

“Sure, I can do that.” And it’s true. Bonnie loves taking on a challenge. Besides, she’s the right person. She already knows more about Vincent than anyone at the office. Plus she knows what will interest the sort of partygoers who can buy tables and invite their twelve best friends to dinner. Maybe Vincent can give a speech without using
Jew
as a verb. Did he talk that way with his cousin? Bonnie would rather not know.

“It’s not just about a dinner,” Meyer says. “It’s about the future. This is someone we can work with, a man whose cooperation may inspire us to devise new outreach programs. For now, we need to stay open to his potential. And to all the reasons why God has sent him to us.”

Put that way, the job facing Bonnie sounds a lot more attractive than interrogating Vincent until he comes up with a more acceptable story than the one about the Ecstasy-addled rave.

“The sooner the better,” Roberta says.

“Pronto,” says Bonnie. “I promise.”

Whatever Bonnie expects to see when she gets back to her office—Vincent going through her files—is not what she finds. He’s standing at the window, staring out so fixedly that he doesn’t move until Bonnie says, “Hello-o?”

“You know what’s weird?” Vincent says. “No one down there knows me. Each one of those windows represents—what?—ten people, and each building has thousands and thousands of people inside, and thousands more on the streets, millions of people out there, and none of them, not
one
of them, knows that I exist.”

Bonnie comes up behind him and gazes down at the city—the place that doesn’t know Vincent. What a narcissist this guy is! And yet Bonnie’s moved. His loneliness is so intense that it’s all she can do not to cry out, “No one knows me, either!” But that wouldn’t be true. Somewhere out there are friends, acquaintances, former colleagues, neighbors, landlords, doctors, dentists, the guys in the bodega where she buys coffee.

“I have a feeling. Just a bleep on the radar.” Bonnie knows she sounds like Meyer. “But I have a feeling that soon lots of people will know who you are.”

“You think so?” says Vincent.

“Trust me on this,” says Bonnie.

Bonnie has the strangest thought: She’s like Satan tempting Christ. Offering him the world. Looking down from…where? The Bible’s not Bonnie’s strong suit. Anyway, Bonnie’s got it wrong. She’s not offering Vincent a chance to trade his soul for worldly power. She’s offering him a chance to change himself, and then to change what’s down there.

M
RS
. G
RABER WRITES
on the blackboard,
TALIBAN
, in
capital letters, then faces the class and says, “Okay, boys and girls, or should I say
men and women,
let’s play a game. Everyone close his or her eyes. Now imagine all the girls in the room covered by black veils. Imagine that a new law has been passed. Woman can no longer drive.”

Danny thinks: They can’t drive anyway. As far as he’s concerned, most of the girls in the room could be walking around in black plastic trash bags, and school would be a more beautiful place. Though if Chloe were wearing a trash bag, Danny couldn’t have spent the first half of class idly wondering what would happen if he leaned forward and touched her tattoo. But didn’t the article Mrs. Graber just read aloud say that Afghan girls could no longer go to school? Did she somehow miss that?

Last period, he and Chloe cut study hall and sneaked down to the riverbank and split a joint of high-grade Jamaican. Being stoned in school is an improvement on not being stoned in school, and not at all what you’d expect. It doesn’t make you eat everything in the cafeteria, or get paranoid, or giggle and stumble around and crash into the lockers. Everything seems more interesting, as if every thought has a litter of thoughts that give birth to other thought-babies.

Danny squeezes his eyes shut and tries to imagine what it might be like if the Taliban took over Clairmont. Okay, his mom couldn’t drive to work. Nor would Danny be taking Driver’s Ed from Mrs. Limpovski, aka Mrs. Blimpovski, whose scary ass pastes you against the driver’s side door. Mrs. Graber wouldn’t be teaching this class.

Danny opens his eyes to let the lingering afterimage of Blimpovski’s ass out of his head, and finds himself staring into the black hole of Mrs. Graber’s stare. Linda Graber hates him. She hates all the boys. Her forehead gleams with sweat. No wonder. The classroom’s broiling, and she’s wearing a short-sleeved turtleneck, a variation on what she’s worn every day for the past two weeks since she finally found out what every kid in school has known since Christmas. Someone had put up a Web site, grabermole.com, on which you could post school gossip and flame the teachers. On the homepage were photos of Mrs. Graber, with close-ups of the giant brown birthmarks all over her neck and chest.

The text underneath one photo said: “Enter today’s contest! Name the continent that the splotch above resembles. (Hint: Australia!)” No one, at least not Danny’s friends, knows who put it up and then took it down when the principal offered amnesty, if the site came down, to whoever did it. Danny thought it was cruel. Yet some part of him thinks that Linda Graber deserved it.

The geniuses who designed the site are probably not in World Civilizations, the class for the retards who can’t get into AP American History. Two things Danny’s grateful for: One, his mom doesn’t seem to know there’s an AP class, so two, she doesn’t know Danny’s not in it.

Mrs. Graber glares at Danny. Does she think he put up the Web site? He wishes he had the computer skills. But he wouldn’t have done it. Linda Graber’s moles aren’t her fault, though plenty of other things are. If she weren’t so mean, her skin wouldn’t have gotten its own home page. No one has posted a photo of Mrs. Blimpovski’s ass.

To escape Graber’s cattle prod of a stare, Danny shuts his eyes again.

“Wake up,” says Mrs. Graber. “Yoo-hoo. You over there. The living dead.” Danny’s chest contracts until he realizes she means the whole class. World Civilizations has run out of steam ever since they finished the textbook about how the nations of the world have contributed to world civilization. Danny remembers nothing except the potato famine and Marco Polo bringing back pasta from China. Which could be a problem, with finals coming up. In these last weeks of school, the kids—that is, the ones so dumb they don’t realize there’s no point kissing up to the teacher in a class like World Civilizations—are bringing in articles from the newspaper, about AIDS, or Africa, or, today, Afghanistan.

Graber waltzes over to Smitty, the most pitiful kid in the room.

“Mis-ter Smith,” she says. “Seeing as how you haven’t passed one test since the semester began, you might want to listen and make a few notes before we’re looking at summer school.” She sounds like the witch in
The Wizard of Oz.
She skips away from the vulcanized ruin that, seconds ago, was Smitty.

“Lights, please,” says Mrs. Graber. Someone dims the light, and an image flashes on the wall: an Afghan woman in one of those shiny, pleated body bags.

Mrs. Graber reads aloud by the beam of the penlight that sometimes, when she feels naughty, she shines in kids’ eyes. “Among the most controversial Taliban edicts is a law requiring non-Muslims to wear an identifying badge.” Another click, and there’s a shot of an old Jewish man in Germany with a yellow star sewn to his coat. In case one single person doesn’t get where Linda Graber’s going with this. Half the class is Jewish. They’ve known about yellow stars since birth. The rest caught up in eighth grade when they did Anne Frank. And yet it makes Danny self-conscious, as if it’s his personal problem.

Maybe he shouldn’t have smoked that joint. There
is
a downside to the slippery ease with which each thought leads to others, in this case to a memory from last night.

In the middle of the night, he’d gotten up to piss and found a copy of
Soldier of Fortune
on the bathroom floor. It might as well have been a turd floating in the toilet, or a copy of
Penthouse
with its pages stuck together. That’s how grossed out Danny was by this evidence of Vincent Nolan’s presence. Did this mean that the Nazi sat here and took a shit and read this? Or that he sat here and read it and jerked off? Which would have been more disgusting?

Danny sat on the edge of the tub and—suddenly nervous in his own bathroom—skimmed what turned out to be a weirdo fashion magazine, full of ads for boots and military gear, camping equipment, water canteens that these morons called “hydration systems.” Fake army medals to pin on your fake camouflage fatigues. And then, of course, the gun ads. At first it gave Danny the creeps, but after a while he got into one particularly silvery semiautomatic rifle, Model 92b1. It seemed so light and streamlined, like an alien praying mantis. He paged past photos of covert operations in foreign countries, paused at a piece about a former U.S. diplomat turned South American drug lord, then moved on to an article about the Oklahoma City bombing, which, like several others in the issue, offered evidence proving that Tim McVeigh could not have acted alone. A second yellow rental van, something about a motel. Danny couldn’t follow it. Maybe he’d been sleepy.

This morning, when he woke up, the magazine was gone. Max probably hadn’t seen it, which made it seem like a private message from Vincent Nolan to Danny.

In the kitchen, he’d almost mentioned it when Mom and Max were complimenting themselves on how
good
they were to adopt a homeless guy. He’d wanted his mother to know what her new pal was reading, especially since she’d made such a point of his being a reader. It’s hard to say what busting Vincent for having the magazine would have added to the information already provided by his tattoos. Well, how about this? The tattoos were about the past. He could have changed his mind since then. But he’s reading the magazine
now.
Something told Danny to save the magazine for some occasion when he might need it.

“Danny?” Mrs. Graber’s jackhammer voice shatters his private moment. “Are you with us? Are you ay-
lie-ive?
”

Why is she singling out Danny? He takes it back about weed never making you paranoid in school.

Danny and Mrs. Graber lock eyes. Total communication. She knows he hasn’t been listening. He knows she’s disappointed in him, and also in herself for once again failing to reach him. Everything is understood except, he hopes, how high he is. And why is she saying his name? She’s reading from a list. Which means that there must be other names besides his.

“Danny, you are one of three students left who have not yet deigned to inform me about the topic of your final paper.”

Deign this, Danny thinks. But wait. It’s all coming back to him. Final. Paper. Topic. Pick an individual who has changed the course of twentieth-century history.

“Hitler.” Why did Danny say that? Could it be because he’s sharing a bathroom with the führer?

“That’s quite a demanding subject,” Mrs. Graber says. “Do you really think you want to take on such a challenging topic after having spent the whole year occupying that seat without giving any indication that you plan to do any work at all? Also you might think twice about spending your time studying a man who did so much harm, a man who was so evil—”

“Kiss my ass” slips out, like a burp.

“What was that?” Mrs. Graber doesn’t need to raise her voice. No one’s breathing.

“Nothing.” Danny
has
to sound innocent. This could go so many ways.

Mrs. Graber hesitates. Does she want to make serious trouble? Does she hate Danny enough to start something that would mean
her
staying after school?

“So is Hitler okay?” asks Danny.

“Obviously,” she says. The class is all so glad the tension’s defused, they laugh, as if it’s a joke. Mrs. Graber writes something—presumably “Hitler”—next to Danny’s name.

Not a second too soon, the bell rings.

“Bring in your newspaper clippings,” Mrs. Graber sings after them. The minute the classroom door opens, her voice sweetens into something approaching normal.

In the hall, Danny slows down until Chloe is trotting along beside him.

“That was tough,” says Danny. “I mean, I was totally wasted—”

“Oh, were you?” One of the things he is learning from Chloe is never to admit, not even to your best friend, that you are not in control. “You must have been high. Picking Hitler—are you crazy? Everyone’s doing Nelson Mandela. Every retard knows that’s how you get a good grade in Linda Graber’s class. You do Nelson Mandela. Or maybe Mother Teresa. Or Elie Wiesel.”

Danny thinks his mom might know Elie Wiesel. Why didn’t he pick him? “What did Mother Teresa ever do? I mean, compared to Hitler.”

Two pigtails, frosted pink today, jiggle like antennae as Chloe rocks her pretty head back and forth to underline the sarcasm. “Because Mother Teresa represents the
values
”—she’s imitating Linda Graber—“we’ve learned about in World Civilizations.”

“Values?” says Danny. “Boring. Values is a girl thing.”

“So what’s a boy thing?” Chloe asks.

“Hitler,” Danny says.