The Joke

by

Larry Gaffney

IN 1951, MAX BIELER BOUGHT A FAILED RESTAURANT in downtown Binghamton and turned it into an Army-Navy store. His family members, who were not shy with their opinions, assumed he would call it Max’s Army-Navy Store. But Max was determined to call it Mac’s, and no squawking by his family could alter his mind. Suits and diamond rings you bought from a Jew, he said, but it was better if the man who sold you surplus combat boots was a Scot or an Irishman named Mac, an American tough guy. Besides, he explained, an apostrophe attached to his name invited confusion. It would sound like Max is an Army-Navy store, a crazy idea if ever there was one.

Now, twenty years later, Max had installed his son-in-law, Ben, as second-in-command. Ben was a thin, nervous-acting man with glasses and a mustache, and a receding hairline at too early an age, which, Max believed, was one of the reasons he acted nervous. Max was himself almost completely bald, but somehow it suited him – short and barrel-chested with a prominent nose, a fast talker fast on his feet, and not a person, by the way, that anyone would take for a Scot or an Irishman.

Ben had married Max and Miriam’s only child, Rachel, whom they had tried to raise without turning her into a princess. But Rachel was so adorably appreciative of the nice things they gave her that they gave her even more nice things, and a princess she became. Nevertheless, Rachel had a level head on her shoulders. She worked hard at being a dutiful wife to Ben and a nurturing mother to their twin girls, and pitched in with the family business. She had worked at the shop before getting pregnant, and now that the twins were in school she was back on a part-time basis. Rachel’s expectations of royalty included a luxurious home, expensive jewellery, her hair and nails done every week, and Chinese or deli ordered in when she didn’t feel like cooking, which was often. These Ben provided for her, while grumbling a little in his nervous, balding way. At the store Rachel was known for her sharp tongue with the help, who called her a Jewish princess when she was out of earshot.

One morning while Max was sneaking a cigarette in the alley behind the store, he heard one of his employees say to another, “How does Rachel eat a banana?”

Hearing his daughter’s name, Max moved quietly to a spot where he could peer through the storeroom window without being seen. “I don’t know,” said the other employee, whereupon the first one mimed the holding of an invisible banana, the meticulous peeling of it, and the pushing, with his free hand, of his head down upon the banana.

Wincing, hurt to the core by this employee he liked, a charming and handsome college boy who performed his job cheerfully and well, Max understood that he had witnessed the miming of an enforced blow job. The other employee, a soft-bellied family man of Hispanic descent, laughed at the joke. Max threw his unfinished cigarette to the pavement and entered the storeroom. “It’s time for work,” he said, making no effort to disguise his anger. Max knew how to forgive and forget, but not when an anti-Semitic joke was directed at his daughter. He wanted to fire the boy outright, an impulse he subdued. Relations between them were never the same, and within a month the boy had wisely tendered his resignation. Juan, who had laughed at the joke, stayed on a bit longer in the chilly atmosphere of Max’s disapproval, and found another job in retail before the Christmas rush. Good riddance to both of them, thought Max.

MAX HAD OPENED THE STORE when he was forty, after years of working for other people as an assistant haberdasher, produce manager, and counterman at a hardware store. It thrilled him to finally have his own business, to make all the decisions himself without answering to blockheads – though in fairness most of his supervisors had been rational men. A few not so rational, including a burly Irishman who drank, as so many of them did, and ran the IGA almost into ruin before the home office replaced him with a useful man of Romanian descent, with whom Max felt a certain kinship, his own people having their roots in Hungary, right next door to Romania. The informal study of ethnic roots was a hobby for Max. He took this hobby no deeper than noting a person’s last name and figuring out – or bluntly asking – its ethnic origin. No one was ever offended, because Max showed good-hearted enthusiasm for the varieties of behaviour based on where a person’s family came from. He enjoyed ethnicity, was tickled by the way angry Italians spat out their words like machine gun fire, their hands in rapid motion. He liked the loud, easy laughter heard at gatherings of Negroes. Of course he had learned not to call them Negroes anymore. Shula, his rigorously intellectual niece, had given him a dressing-down the last time he used that word. “You pick on me for no reason,” he told her after she had similarly criticized him for saying “Chinaman.” “I’m not prejudiced at all.” But if pressed, Max would have admitted that he had his preferences, such as for Irishmen with their glittering speech. All Jews should like Irishmen, he reasoned, because in the Jewish culture language skills were admired, and he had seldom met an Irishman who was not a good talker. The boy who had told the joke about his daughter was Kevin Norton, and Max had heard him inform a customer that Norton was originally Naughton, an Irish name. So that meant Ed Norton on The Honeymooners was an Irishman. The show, one of his favourites, made gentle fun of ethnic groups. There was a neighbour lady called Mrs. Manicotti, and Max doubted that the Italian anti-defamation people had been riled up because one of their own was named after a noodle. They had their hands full at any rate being stereotyped as Mafiosi.

While these vaguely disturbing thoughts flitted through his mind, Max drove along the highway that would take him to the supermarket and then home. His workday was over, Ben capably manning the store by himself. Secretly Max was not a fan of Ben, but that was of Ben as a husband to his daughter. As a manager Ben was fine, his nervous energy put to good use in pestering the help and keeping everything neat and being on the lookout for shoplifters. But Max could tell that Rachel was not so happy with the marriage. Nothing was ever said of this (not even to Miriam during mother-daughter talks, because Miriam would have told him), but Max knew the score just by seeing the changes in Rachel over the years. She seemed to be a woman who was not having her tensions released.

Max pushed that thought from his head. Ever since hearing the joke, he had struggled with unbidden images of his dark-eyed, dark-haired daughter engaged in oral sex, whether she wanted to be or not. Thinking of it now, yet again, he cursed Kevin Norton and turned on the radio so that something else would fill his mind. Jerry Vale’s voice soothed him as he steered the car into the parking lot. It was 3:15. Most people would still be at work, so it was unlikely Max would run into anyone he knew. In addition to a handful of grocery items, he intended to buy something that would make him feel slightly embarrassed as it sat on the conveyor belt, waiting to be plucked into the air and price-checked by the cashier.

Victory Supermarket was vast and bright. Aisle after aisle of gaily coloured things to eat and drink, to wash with, to keep an attractive home. Victorious indeed were the shoppers who could load their carts with such wonderful objects as green peppers, purple plums, red boxes of pasta, yellow containers of dish soap, moon-white stacks of cellophane-wrapped paper plates. This, precisely, was the inventory of Max’s cart. In a moment he would glide into the frozen food section, but now he stood alone in the aisle that displayed products for the parents of newborns. Max spotted what he was looking for and dropped it into his cart. He paused, then grabbed a bag of diapers as well.

The cashier who assisted Max was an attractive black girl sporting a wide corona of tightly curled hair. An Afro they called it. The girl had waited on him before. She didn’t know who he was, but judging by her smile and cheery hello, she remembered him. Not that it mattered. Why should he care what a total stranger thought of him? And she wouldn’t think anything was odd anyway, since the diapers would account for the large tub of Vaseline he was buying. He watched its slow transport upon the conveyor belt, almost sickened by the colour – a cheesy yellowish-white – visible through the plastic. He wondered if he should make some offhand remark about the twins. They were no longer in diapers, but the girl wouldn’t know that. In the end all he did was silently pay for his purchases with a twenty and hurry the hell out of there.

FROM WATCHING THE EVENING NEWS and paging through an occasional issue of Time and Newsweek, Max knew there was a sexual revolution going on. Not in my house, he joked to his golf buddies when the subject came up at the Nineteenth Hole. It was customary for these men of business, law, medicine and such to shake their heads in dismay at the antics of the long-haired anti-establishment barbarians who had once been their obedient children. They hoisted glasses of beer in the clubhouse and spoke worriedly of their pot-smoking, bed-hopping progeny. Max didn’t have that worry – Rachel was twenty-seven, had taken a degree from Cazenovia, seemed as conservative in her opinions as her parents. When talk turned to the sexual revolution, the men moaned that it had passed them by. But Max wondered. Some of the wives of these men, even in middle age, radiated carnality, especially after a few cocktails. And although Max would not speak of it to anyone, he was content with a wife who kept him reasonably satisfied.

For Miriam, sex wasn’t very important. She said so herself. She didn’t like talking about sex, and Max respected this, so their infrequent copulations were garnished with grunts and heavy breathing but few words. Max had a vigorous sex drive, and once a month or so his wife would agree to go all the way. All the way. What was he, a teenager, fumbling with buttons and bra straps in the back seat of a car? But Max had no real complaint. When they made love Miriam was as attentive as she could be with the lights off and no talking. He really wished they would talk a little, at least after the deed was done, because he worried that she was not being satisfied. One time he did ask her if she had been satisfied (he found it difficult to utter the words “come” or “orgasm” in her presence). She brushed him off, saying “I’m fine, don’t worry about it.” And that was that. Occasionally her responses would be more vivid, and Max considered that she might be having some kind of low-level, restrained orgasm. But he didn’t know much about sex. There had only been one girl before Miriam, a skinny blonde he picked up on leave in New York City during his army days. He took her to a cheap hotel, where they did it three times that night, and she came every time, with wild abandon and a variety of noises, including words and entire phrases. He figured she was a nympho, a creature his more experienced friends had told him to watch out for, to shtupp but not to get involved with, because a nympho would always cheat on you – she couldn’t help herself. But that was years ago, and everything was changing too fast. During a recent golf trip to the Adirondacks, Max had stopped at a bookstore in Albany and bought a copy of The Joy of Sex, with its alarming and provocative illustrations of ordinary people, not porn stars with their florid sex organs. Taking it home he read it through, indulged a few fantasies he had never thought of before, then tossed it in a dumpster on the way to work one morning. He’d been hiding it under a pile of shingles in the garage, but what if Miriam found it? These new-fangled positions and perversions were not for a respectable Jewish couple of a certain age. In any case, Max was satisfied with what they did. Besides their occasional copulations, Max enjoyed being serviced by his wife’s hand whenever he shyly displayed his ardency, and sometimes that was twice in the same week. The tubs of Vaseline he bought were kept in a table next to the bed, along with a stack of clean washcloths. These his wife would matter-of-factly remove from the drawer. Then she would dim the lights and begin her work. It was Max’s job to pull back the sheet and covers, and to spread a towel underneath his bottom so the lubricant and what came out of him would not stain everything. Despite the routine aspect of it all, Miriam was always upbeat, had no difficulty in talking, and might even tease him a little, warning him not to finish too quickly, and those rare and saucy words always had the opposite effect of what they intended. With an amusing nod to the world of business he inhabited, she called what came out of him his product. Max was allowed to lie back and do nothing while Miriam employed the washcloth gently, warning him not to move because there was still some product that needed to be cleaned up. As another man might eagerly shop for pornographic items at an “adult” store, Max took secret pleasure in tracking down the softest of washcloths at Fowler’s Department Store.

All of which meant that Max had been fine with the physical part of his marriage. But after he heard the joke, things took a turn for the worse.

IT WASN’T ONLY THE JOKE. Conflict was in the air. The Baby Boomers had it too soft – probably hadn’t been spanked enough. Not that Max had ever raised a hand to his daughter, or was inclined to violence upon even the snottiest children. But the kids were out of control. The drugs and sex, the music – most of which was just noise to his ears – and the unyielding stridency of the sit-ins and political rallies. All of this was hurting the country. On the other hand, Max thought the Vietnam business was a disaster. Why should we stick our noses in the affairs of Asian communists? He had lost some relatives in the Nazi death camps, so he understood the need for countries to interfere when atrocities were afoot, but this was different. And he didn’t trust Nixon and his gangsters. So he wasn’t without sympathy for these young people – it’s just that they were too angry and rude and used obscene language to shock their elders. His daughter and her husband – they were Boomers too, but had been raised in good Jewish homes and now were absorbed in commerce, and Mao’s Little Red Book wouldn’t help them balance the figures at the end of the month. Max knew about the Little Red Book because Shula kept waving it around. From what Max had heard, Mao was as prolific a killer as Hitler and Stalin, but he kept mum when Shula started in about politics. Max loved Shula. He remembered her as a little girl with curly hair who laughed often and feared nothing, the type who would propel her swing higher than anyone else’s while shrieking with joy. But now you had to walk on eggshells around her. When the diapers that Max bought as subterfuge had accumulated in the trunk of his car, he decided to give them to Shula. She was childless, thank God, even though she was putting it out for a frizzy-haired, foul-mouthed kid who always wore an army jacket – an affront, in Max’s view, to a military that stood between America and communists from Russia and elsewhere who wanted to overrun us and would not treat kindly the young Jews who shouted slogans and held their fists in the air during marches for international brotherhood, because the communists, just like any other group of people, had plenty of Jew-haters in the ranks. Max knew that Shula had her hand in a lot of causes and might know impoverished young mothers who could use the diapers. But when he presented them to her, she eyed him suspiciously.

“Where did you get these?” she asked.

“What do you mean where did I get them? Somebody gave them to me, that’s all.”

She persisted. “To sell in the shop? Somebody thought an Army-Navy store sells diapers?”

“How do I know what he thought? Just take the diapers, I have no use for them.”

But Shula was digging in for a cross-examination. “It doesn’t make sense . . .” she began. Max waved her off. They were standing in the parking lot of the apartment complex where she lived with her boyfriend. Max had pulled his Lincoln Continental into the slot next to her orange Volkswagen Bug. The diapers were in a cardboard box that had once held cartons of Salem cigarettes. He dropped the box to the pavement. “Take the diapers or throw them in the trash, I really don’t care.”

While driving away, Max fretted that news of this incident might get back to Miriam, who would have questions of her own. Fortunately, it never came up.

SO IN THIS ATMOSPHERE of tension that electrified the country, and even people’s personal lives by osmosis, the worm of desire for oral sex started gnawing at the apple of Max’s marriage. It was hardly an obsession – he didn’t think about it that often. The problem was that when he thought about sex at all, this other thing always crept into view. Pretty girls came into the store, or passed him on the sidewalk, or stood next to him at the Home Dairy Cafeteria where he got his lunch, and whereas previously his inchoate longings for them lacked specificity, he now found himself concentrating on their mouths. Never before had he appreciated the diversity of lips, the different ways that teeth gave structure to the flesh surrounding them, or the multifarious tics, grimaces, smiles, and frowns that animated these delightful feminine apertures. In the cafeteria, with the cunning of a pervert, he positioned himself to watch, from over a book or behind a newspaper, the tongue-play of women at their puddings and yogurts. And for the first time in his thirty-seven years of loving cohabitation with Miriam, he began to feel disappointed that oral pleasure was not part of their routine. Still, he couldn’t bring himself to raise the topic with her. When would he do this? At the dinner table? While they were driving to the country club? In the bedroom, when she was humming to herself and already reaching for the drawer where the Vaseline and washcloths were kept? No, he didn’t want to ruin a good thing. So he said nothing, and, to his shame and horror, entertained thoughts of being with a professional woman of the night.

ACROSS THE STREET from Max and Miriam’s grand, beautifully furnished home on the city’s west side lived Timothy Worthington, a professor emeritus at SUNY Binghamton. A widower in his seventies, his thick silver hair tied in a ponytail, Worthington moved through life with the vigor of a much younger man. Slender and still athletic, he often played doubles at the club with Miriam, and on weekends liked to putter in his yard wearing jeans and a tattered sweater. Sometimes Max would cross the street to assist Worthington in clearing brush from his plot of land. On such occasions the two men would relax afterwards on the patio, drinking coffee and talking of sports, politics, the neighbourhood, whatever came up. Worthington liked and respected Max, a genial, obviously intelligent fellow who ran a successful business – not an easy thing to do. And Max was a little in awe of Worthington, whose wit and erudition enlivened their chats. Max knew that the professor was often away on the business of higher education, attending conferences at fancy places like Harvard and Yale. Curious to know if his friend ever used paid escorts when out of town, he decided to nose around a little. “So Tim,” he began, “when you’re at one of those conferences, what does a guy like you do with himself at night?”

Tim was wearing a pair of old tennis shoes. He removed the left one and banged it on the concrete floor of the patio, trying to get the mud off. “Oh, just the usual. I order room service and watch TV. Go over my notes, read a book.” Done with the banging, he slipped his white-socked foot back into the shoe, reached for his coffee cup with two hands and sighed with pleasure at the warmth of it. This was late afternoon on a day in March, raw and windy. Max probed again.

“Sounds pretty dull. What about the hotel bar? Don’t they have women hanging around waiting to be picked up?”

Over the rim of his coffee cup, Tim’s light blue eyes gleamed with amusement. “What an odd line of questioning. To answer you, no I don’t really go in for that kind of thing anymore.”

Max laughed and made a feeble, inarticulate protest that trailed off in the wind whistling through the cracks of the patio roof. Tim rested the cup in his lap and gazed into the yard, where the same wind was working double-time to agitate the many shrubs and boughs. “The thing is, Max, even if I had a mind to step back into that arena, I’m not sure I could. I haven’t told anyone around here yet, but my ticker is winding down.”

Max sat up straight in his patio chair. “What?”

Tim smiled easily. “I had an episode a few weeks ago. Pain in the chest, almost fainted. I’m told it’s congenital, that I’ve been lucky to stick around as long as I have. Who knew?”

Max was shaken. “Are you on medicine?”

“They gave me some pills, but I don’t always take them. What’s the point? I’ve had a good life. Anyway, I’m not a prime candidate for an evening of . . . what do they call it these days? Ah yes, balling. I listen to hippie slang when I’m on campus. Me and my old lady, we balled last night. Well, whatever they call it, it’s a distant memory for me.”

Max said a few words of comfort but the conversation deteriorated, and he went home to his wife in a gloomy mood.

THEN, OUT OF THE BLUE, a good thing happened. Max’s Uncle Jake, who had made a fortune in Chicago real estate, passed away and provided for Max in the will. Although Max hadn’t seen his uncle in years, he had a few hours of genuine sadness, because Jake had always treated him well. But to live in good health to ninety-three was plenty, and it was not improper for everyone to stop with the mourning and move on. The inheritance was large enough so that Max decided to act on a thought he had been contemplating for months. He would retire from the shop.

Miriam had seen this coming. She approved. They could move to Florida now, keeping a small apartment in Binghamton so as not to miss out on everything in the twins’ lives. And Max, always generous, unveiled his plan to give ownership of the store free and clear to Rachel and Ben. This he told them at the family’s favourite steak house, Scotch ‘N Sirloin, where they went for celebratory dinners. Rachel, besotted with glee, leaned over and planted a kiss on her father’s cheek, and beamed at her mother, too far away to kiss at the moment. Through the commotion Max noticed that Ben was not smiling. Miriam saw this, too, and they exchanged a quick worried glance. Ben kept nodding his head, thanking Max and Miriam, saying it was very generous, very kind. Rachel hugged Ben with one arm, rather stiffly, it seemed to Max.

And so the Fates, which throw a seven one minute and snake eyes the next, came down hard on the losing side of things, for it was soon apparent that Ben was having a nervous breakdown.

Always tightly wound, Ben had finally blown a gasket. He didn’t start drinking or taking drugs or engaging in any other kind of dramatic misbehaviour. What he did was curl up in bed and do a lot of weeping. “Weeping about what?” said Max when he first heard of this. “Is he crippled? Does he have cancer?”

“He blames the pressure,” said Rachel, her eyes made darker by the circles beneath them. “He can’t deal with running a business and having a family.”

Max realized that anything he could say now would be in the manner of pure invective, not useful to anyone. He retreated, hoping that things would miraculously work themselves out, but they didn’t. Interested parties urged Ben to seek psychiatric help, and this certainly would have happened but for Rachel’s revelation that she had for a long time been falling out of love with her weak-kneed failure of a husband. She wanted a divorce. It was best for her and the twins, and Ben could go to the devil. Max leapt into action, getting her the sharpest lawyer he knew. He told Rachel that when she was free he would sign the store into her possession. But she had no interest in the store. She would find something else to do, after first joining a gym and enrolling in night classes at SUNY, the disciplines yet to be determined. She would roar into futurity, slimmer, still pretty, the bright and beautiful twins not a burden but a gift to any single man who might appear on the horizon, and Max understood that finding a new husband was her first priority.

Years later, long after the store had been sold to a stranger and Rachel was settled into a better marriage, and Max was telling someone the tale of this most difficult time in the Bieler family saga, he would shake his head sadly and say of Ben, who had eventually taken his life, that everything had hinged on this one fact: All his son-in-law had to do was get out of bed, go down to the store, and turn the key in the lock. But he couldn’t even do that.

DURING ALL OF THIS STURM AND DRANG, Max continued to daydream about oral sex. No doubt the strain of what was going on with his family only made his fantasies more intense and difficult to push aside. When the divorce proceedings were nearly at an end, and one week after the closing on the store – now the property of an actual Scottish American named MacTavish – Max and three of his buddies headed northeast to a resort in the Berkshires. It was a golf trip with the added benefit of occurring in mid-October, when the turning leaves were at their peak. Since the forecast called for rain, the other three suggested they might put the trip off for a week, but Max blustered, calling them sissies, and they went. He had a plan.

It was a Thursday to Sunday outing. Three good mornings on the links. Except that it started raining on Friday night, and the local TV weatherman gave them the bad news that Saturday would be a washout. The grumbling and accusations that Max endured were good-natured, as there were other things to do besides golf. There was college football on TV, and a bowling alley and an indoor pool on the premises. But Max surprised them by taking an impromptu trip to see a long-lost cousin suddenly in Boston on business. He promised to be back by their Sunday morning tee-off time.

On the two-hour drive to Boston, Max tried to convince himself he needed to do this – to get it out of his system. In Binghamton he had sent away for a copy of the Boston Phoenix, a so-called underground newspaper, and in the classifieds had found an ad for an escort service that seemed legit. The paper was with him now, folded on the passenger seat, the ad for the service prominently displayed.

As soon as he was settled in his hotel, he would make the call.

ISTVAN BIELER, Max’s bull-necked and bull-headed father, was a house painter who once worked for J.P. Morgan. The tycoon gave him the job of painting the walls of his office. Istvan opined that the colour of the paint was all wrong, and offered to choose a more appropriate shade. He was told to work with the paint he had been given. In a store room he found a colour he preferred and did it his way. His subsequent termination threw his family into poverty and chaos – and this was during the depression. In old age, apropos of nothing in particular, he would sometimes sigh deeply, and in his thick Slavic accent mouth a phrase that summed up his philosophy of life: “Many disappointments . . .”

In the hotel room, lying on his back and staring at the ceiling, Max sighed his father’s familiar words.

“What was that, hon? Sorry, I didn’t hear you.”

“It was nothing,” said Max.

The hooker’s appearance had been his first disappointment. She looked to be almost forty, had teased red hair, and wore too much makeup. The second disappointment was the condom he had to wear, because he certainly wasn’t going to risk catching something and infecting Miriam and watching his marriage go completely haywire. The condom was too tight, and he didn’t have enough feeling down there. The final disappointment was that the oral sex didn’t work. In addition to the lack of feeling there was Max’s brain, which seemed to have a mind of its own and wouldn’t shut up about the chance that his wife had tracked him down and was about to burst into the room. He didn’t believe this at all, but it put Miriam in his head, and that was enough.

The hooker – she had introduced herself as Jackie – was sympathetic. Max had told her he was here because his wife wouldn’t do oral sex. “Jewish women and blow jobs,” said Jackie. “It’s a funny thing.”

“How so?”

“I’ll tell you a joke,” she said, and before Max could stop her, she did. “Why was the Jewish bride smiling?”

“I don’t know,” said Max.

“Because she knew she’d given her last blow job.”

Max didn’t laugh.

Jackie said, “Jewish women don’t like to give head. Based on what their husbands tell me, that’s a known fact.”

Max had not taken off his watch. He looked at its luminous hands and numbers. There were twenty minutes left in the hour he had paid for.

Jackie noticed his glance. “What can I do for you, hon?”

Max thought about it. A naked woman lay next to him in the bed, leaning on her elbow. He could smell her perfume. Beneath the sheet the sole of her foot pressed warmly against his leg. “I guess you can use your hand,” he said.

A MONTH LATER, with the holidays looming, Max often found himself in a state of anxiety. Ben, not yet the suicide he would become, suddenly did an about face and contested the divorce. People in the Bieler family stayed up far too late talking on the phone about the trouble. Max missed going to the store every day, wondered if he’d made a fatal error. You heard about men who retired thinking that now life would be all sunny skies and golf, and then they dropped dead in a year. And to make matters worse, he now carried with him the guilt of his tryst with the hooker. It didn’t matter that the blow job had been aborted. Max had violated the sacred contract of his marriage. He needed to talk to someone about it, but who? Max had a lot of friends but lacked a bosom pal he could share everything with. If his older brother Sam were still alive it would be different, but Sam was three years in the grave, done in by the skin cancer that came with his early retirement to Florida. Retirement wasn’t always such a great idea, Max noted ruefully. Rabbis were good for this sort of thing, but Max had an indifferent relationship with the rabbi at their temple and would feel like a hypocrite showing up at the man’s office for advice. He wished there were a woman he could talk to. He even thought of confessing all to Miriam, before the panic of reason shook him back to his senses. But maybe there was someone.

TWO DAYS BEFORE THANKSGIVING, Max rose at his customary hour of seven, breakfasted on toast with butter and blueberry jam, read the morning paper back to front, and set off on his daily constitutional. Theirs was a good neighbourhood for walking. The clean, level sidewalks led to a ridge overlooking a reservoir. Here the path became dirt and grass. Under his sneakers, the grass was stiff with frost. Overhead, the wintry mist was being burned away by the sun. Max walked briskly, with purpose – grateful for his strong constitution and the steady beating of his dependable heart. Anyone watching him now would think he was a man truly blessed, an early-riser in a well-to-do neighbourhood taking his exercise. And so it was except for the clamour in his brain.

He made the circuit around the reservoir and headed back to his street. He knew that Miriam, exhausted by the mentoring of their daughter, was still in bed. No one was astir, the big houses and their pretty lawns silent. Seeing a light in Worthington’s window, he proceeded to the front porch.

Worthington’s doorbell made the old-fashioned ding-dong sound. Max listened for footsteps. Nothing. His hesitant index finger moved toward the nipple again, but retreated into the pocket of his grey hooded sweatshirt. Maybe his friend was out back, drinking coffee on the patio. Max followed the flagstones around the side of the house.

Max knew that certain moments in a person’s life would burn themselves forever into the memory and the soul. Now was such a moment. Tim Worthington, clad only in bathrobe and slippers, lay supine on the grass. One arm had flopped out beside him, the other embraced his chest. His eyes were open, his mouth slightly ajar. The bathrobe had fallen open at the waist, and Max bent low to cover his friend’s nudity. Judging by Tim’s pallor and stiffness, he had been dead for a while.

Tim had collapsed next to the rusty oil drum he used for burning leaves and twigs. A shimmering vapor of heat rose from the drum. A green plastic bag was on the ground, its contents spilled out. They were magazines that had not made it into the burn can. Max looked into the can and saw the glowing ashes of the magazines that were in the final stages of incineration.

He wasn’t sure what to do next, but being a practical man he took a quick inventory of his choices. He would rush home and call the police. That’s what you did in these situations. They would arrive concurrent with an ambulance. There was no indication of foul play, so the cops would do whatever was required when there was a natural death in a backyard. Max would stand around answering questions, then leave everything to the authorities.

Max had already touched Tim’s bathrobe, but this wasn’t a crime scene so he wasn’t worried about it. He glanced down at the magazines. Then he looked closer, alarmed by what he saw.

They were pornographic magazines of a type he had never encountered. Smack on the covers, not partially hidden by black bars or anything else, were naked young men with enormous genitals. He poked the sprawled pile with the toe of his sneaker, exposing more covers. Some depicted stark acts of sodomy. Max had no problem with the existence of homosexuals – live and let live was his motto – but he was squeamish about seeing such things. He looked at his dead friend and knew what must be done.

There were too many magazines to put in the drum – they would never burn by the time the police came. The authorities would learn Tim’s secret, and soon enough others would know. Max shoved the magazines into the green bag and tied the ends of it together. He carried the bag around the house and across the street and put it in the trunk of his car. Then he went inside and called the police.

FOR DAYS THE HOMOSEXUAL PORNOGRAPHY sat in the trunk, being driven around town to the mall, the dentist, the Finkelsteins’ house for dinner. Worry was eating Max alive. Finding an alley and throwing the magazines into a dumpster seemed like a simple enough operation. But what if he was seen? The observer could fish out the filthy things and notify the cops, describing the cream and brown Lincoln Continental and the short, Jewish-looking guy who was the illegal dumper. Maybe a Dudley Do-Right who would even jot down the license number. For all Max knew, the magazines themselves were illegal. And what if fate put Max on a street where the cops had set up a roadblock to catch drug pushers? Sir, would you open the trunk please? Hey Fred, come here and take a look at these.

Why had he gotten involved at all? Tim had led a double life – let him pay for it with posthumous disgrace. But it was too late now. So on a Sunday morning Max drove to an alley downtown and got rid of the incriminating evidence. In the empty dumpster the green bag made an echoing thud that matched the rapid pounding of his heart. First The Joy of Sex, now this. There was something wrong with a man’s life if he was always throwing pornography into dumpsters. He had driven down the street twice before pulling into the alley, making sure no one was watching. Nobody saw him. He got away scot-free.

Miriam was at the dining room table, busying herself with Hanukkah cards. Max put his hands on her shoulders and bent over to kiss her on the neck. She turned around, a look of wonder on her face. Kissing for no particular reason was not foreign to them, but it was always on the cheek or the lips.

“What was that for?” she said.

“I’m not allowed to kiss my wife?”

“On the neck? Since when?”

“Never mind,” said Max. “What is there to eat? I’m suddenly hungry.”

Miriam turned back to her cards and envelopes. “Give me five minutes. I’ll make you something.”

“Thank you. You’re a good wife.”

Miriam’s pen stopped moving. Without turning around she said, “What are you guilty of?” Max laughed. “Everything.” He went into the living room and turned on the TV to watch the Giants game and wait for Miriam to bring him something on a tray. He hoped it would be a brisket sandwich, because he was ready to start enjoying life again.