Forty-Second

Forty-Second

          For Ezra it wasn’t just the sex. That was just part of how Salli made him feel as if he really did matter, like matter-of-factly adopting things he liked as her own, listening to his thoughts and ideas seriously, and sharing her mind unselfconsciously with him.

          They’d been together for a half a year. He wondered if it would last.

          Then he received an email from Frank.

          Frank was his parents’ older son. Ezra never used the word brother in regard to him. They’d been estranged for almost three decades. Well into his sixties, Ezra still had nightmares in which Frank bullied and vexed and otherwise tormented him mercilessly.

          The verbose and self-centred email informed him that Frank was doing wonderfully, had retired from active participation in his law firm, but remained a senior partner in it, thereby keeping the big bucks flowing. He owned a large lakefront house in Western Ontario just north of the border with Minnesota and a beach house in Costa Rica, had a new wife who adored him, was happier than he’d ever been in his life, and would be in Auckland, the city where Ezra lived, in no small part because of its distance from Frank and their late and enormously unlamented mother, in about a month.

          Ezra replied, almost automatically: ‘Thanks for the warning, I guess, but Auckland’s a big enough place so that we won’t have to take any extraordinary measures to avoid running into each other whilst you’re here.’

          Ezra showed Salli the email and his response.

          She already knew more than she wanted to know about Frank. Sometimes Ezra’s nightmares had awakened her, too. She said nothing.

          The same day Frank’s reply popped up on Ezra’s gmail account: ‘It’s not a warning, dipshit. I just want reconciliation with my little brother before I die.’

          When Ezra showed this to Salli he pointed out that ‘little brother’ was shorthand for ‘I’m condescending to you and claiming superiority over you,’ and that his use of ‘reconciliation’ was shorthand for ‘re-establishing the abusive relationship that I used to enjoy and you used to endure.’ The last time they’d seen each other may have been when electric typewriters were hot stuff, but he hadn’t changed at all.

          People like him don’t.

          ‘Listen,’ Salli had said, ‘y’know, this family shit isn’t going to go away on its own, y’know. I think you definitely should front up to him and try to get some sort of closure. Put your demons to rest, y’know?’

          ‘Being an arrogant bully is integral to his personality, Salli. I won’t let him bully me and I don’t want to lose my self-respect.’

          ‘Just standing up to him could actually do you a world of good, y’know.’

          ‘But, you see, listen – I’m afraid that if I actually see his face and hear his voice I’ll abandon my commitment to the principle of non-violence, and my self-respect relies on that commitment a lot.’

          ‘I’ll be there with you.’

          When Ezra emailed Frank to say he’d meet him he included the observation that it was only because Salli thought he should.

          Frank responded that he thought that his little brother would’ve affiliated himself with someone who could at least know how to spell her own name.

          When he showed this to Salli she counselled patience.

          After a few days’ back and forth, during which Frank managed to hone Ezra’s hatred to a fine point, but during which Ezra also managed to assert himself by getting Frank to agree grudgingly not to address him as ‘little brother’ – by assuring him that he’d turn his back and leave if he did so – they wound up agreeing to meet in the overpriced café of some hideous high-rise hotel downtown.

          When Ezra and Salli opened the door to the café and he saw Frank at the far end of the room he felt terror grip his knees and his chest and the sides of his mouth. The tightly barbered fringe around his hairless, golfer’s-tan pate and the fussy little moustache had turned grey, but the jolly cruelty in the eyes and the ominous smirk were just as Ezra remembered. A pale-magenta Polo golf shirt draped over Frank’s flabby, pear-shaped torso. As he waved to Ezra and Salli he visibly puffed out his chest.

          The wife, as yet still unnamed, seemed to be visibly shrinking as she sat there. Smallish to begin with, her shoulders were hunched forward and her fingers were interlaced on the table in front of her. Her frightened-looking eyes flickered from her hands to various places around the room from beneath the fringe of her neck-length, bob-cut, obviously dyed chestnut hair.

          Salli urged Ezra across the room. As they approached the table Frank stood up and spread his arms wide for an embrace.

          Ezra shuddered, ‘Don’t touch me.’

          Frank’s face took on the caricature of injured innocence, then returned to the smirk that seemed to be its default setting. He lowered one of his arms to gesture vaguely at his wife.

          ‘My wife, Lois. This is my brother Ezra and his – what is your actual legal relationship? – Salli. With an “i” at the end.’ Ostentatiously concealing his mouth behind the back of his hand as if he were telling Lois a secret, but speaking loudly enough for anyone in that part of the café to hear, he added, ‘She has trouble with spelling.’

          Ezra had alerted Salli about Frank’s passion for goading people, recalling how once, when they’d been in their early thirties and still a few years from complete estrangement, Frank had picked him up to drive to some dismal family get-together. Frank was then a navy lawyer, an officer, of course, as his way of draft-dodging. He’d stopped off at his office on the way to the do, and the Shore Patrolman who’d checked his ID at the gate had given his civilian-clad, out-of-shape presence the once-over, pausing at Frank’s contemptuous smirk before saluting them through.

          ‘I’ll never forget,’ Ezra told Salli, ‘the way he gloated when he told me how much he loved seeing that impotent hatred in their eyes.’

          Thus prepared, Salli kept her tone low, soft, and non-confrontational as she replied pleasantly, ‘I work as a copy editor and proofreader for Auckland University Publications.’

          She could take care of herself, all right. Ezra realised that he was the only one at risk.

          ‘Well, what do you expect,’ Frank had triumph in his voice, ‘from a college in a place where they don’t even know how to spell “color”?’

          Frank chuckled at this, his face expressing smug satisfaction at having scored a one-up in such a naughty-but-witty manner. Lois smiled shyly. Ezra and Salli looked at him stone-faced.

          The waiter appeared and took their order for coffees and muffins. Ezra was careful to order just a flat white, without his usual preference for soy milk, which he knew would give Frank the opportunity to go on attack with ridicule. Salli looked over at him with sad, understanding eyes.

          The waiter left.

          ‘I thought New Zealand was a white country,’ Frank sneered. ‘With some natives, of course. Mayrees, you call the monkeys? And now, since I’ve been here just about every other person I’ve seen has slanty eyes. Shit!’ he grumped, ‘might as well be in China.’

          Ezra and Salli just looked at each other. Ezra had primed her about Frank’s delight in racism.

          ‘That little swish, for instance’ Frank continued, waving in the waiter’s general direction, ‘looks like some sort of raghead. They should stay where they came from.’ He breathed loudly in and out, his fleshy cheeks puffed out, indicating indignation.

          ‘Unlike our grandparents, eh Frank?’ Ezra ventured.

          ‘I didn’t think those sand niggers were allowed to be fudge-packers, anyway. Amazing!’

          Keeping her voice calm and non-confrontational, Salli said, ‘My mother’s parents were originally from Syria, and my Uncle Joe has been openly gay for decades.’

          All Frank could think of in the way of response was to breathe loudly and indignantly with his cheeks a bit more, finally muttering something that sounded like, ‘Unnatural.’

          Despite himself, Ezra tried to bring the conversation around to something conversational. ‘New Zealand is closer to Asia than it is to North America, y’know.’

          ‘Oh, la-di-fucking-da! You eat sheep chow mein?” Frank laughed heartily at this.

          ‘I love the Asian influence in Auckland,’ Ezra went on, ignoring him. ‘I mean, a couple of my most promising pupils were born in China.’

          ‘Still, teaching, huh? Well, after all, he who can, does …’

          ‘I supplement my pension by coaching some of Auckland’s best young chess players …’

          ‘Oh yeah! I forgot! Ezzie the Chezzie! Taking up that wussy game because you knew you couldn’t beat me at anything else, which wasn’t surprising because you throw like a girl!’ His eyes twinkled as he chanted, ‘Ezzie throws like a girr-ull! Ezzie throws like a girr-ull,’ in the time-honoured childhood bullies’ taunt, his tongue rolling sensually around the inside of his mouth in glee.

          Ezra said nothing. Frank chuckled warmly.

          ‘So you decided to take it up for real once you realised that you’re too boring even to be a teacher, did you?’ He smirked some more. ‘I don’t suppose you became a Grandmaster or some such shit?’

          ‘I’m an International Master.’

          ‘What’s that? A good-try title for hacks who aren’t good enough to make Grandmaster?’ He held up his fingers and wiggled them in a caricature of trembling. ‘Wooo! I’m so impressed!’

          ‘I’ve been ranked forty-second in the world.’ Ezra knew at once that this had been a mistake.

          ‘Forty-second?’ Frank crowed so loudly that most of the people in the café turned to look. ‘FORTY-SECOND! You spend your life on some wussy game and the best you can do is forty-second – and then you seem proud of it!’ His eyes glittered with joyous contempt and he ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth again, screwing his face up into a paroxysm of smirking delight. Then he began to chant loudly in the playground bully’s sing-song, ‘Ezzie is a loser! Ezzie is a LOOZ-er!’

          For just an instant Ezra’s eyes displayed measureless depths of traumatic pain as they locked on Frank’s merrily gloating ones, then he moved to his feet with the speed of a martial artist, grabbed the ceramic sugar-packet caddy from the table top, and smashed it with full force into Frank’s mouth. Teeth scattered. Blood splattered.

          Frank fell backwards, his chair tipping to the floor. Ezra pounced onto him before he’d completely landed, striking him again, this time hitting the side of his face, where Frank’s cheekbone made a sickeningly loud cracking sound as the eye closed. More blood flowed. Within an instant he hit him again, flattening his nose, covering Frank’s face and pale-magenta golf shirt with copious amounts of blood.

          Salli tried to pull Ezra away from behind, but his strength was that of the pent-up rage of a lifetime.

          As the waiter arrived and slowly placed his tray with elegant care on the table Ezra smashed the crockery into Frank’s face again.

          Then the waiter, a customer from a nearby table, and Salli managed to restrain Ezra. He went limp for a moment, let out a deep breath, and stumbled limply to his feet. They gingerly released him.

          He turned to the waiter and said in a voice of infinite tiredness, ‘I suppose you should phone the authorities, eh?’

          Lying on his back, his rump still in the toppled chair, Frank’s whimpering almost drowned Ezra’s soft voice out.

          (N.B. 600-700 million people in the world play chess. The world’s chess federations have about 8,000,000 registered players, of whom about 2,000,000 are considered competitive.)