Tell Me How This Ends Well: A Novel - Hardcover

Thursday, April 14, 2022

Los Angeles welcomed them with a dark, moody sky that broke open halfway through breakfast. The drizzle fell gently at first, then more profoundly, in sheets that ricocheted off the sidewalk, spotting the windows of the overcrowded IHOP on Sepulveda. Even for that late-morning hour, closing in on eleven, every table, booth, and countertop was occupied. Someone, probably the reedy, pimple-ridden shift manager, had set his iMuse to play every awful electro-punk-funk artist in his arsenal, an eternal, cacophonic loop of sinister screeches, the latest craze perpetrated on the teen- age masses by a currently dying (again) music industry. The songs, which were forced upon them from four floating speakers hovering in the corners of the room, blasted through the bacon-grease-filled air. Each one collided with the other and sounded exactly like, if not worse than, the next, each vying for a top spot in Jacob’s memory as the most craptacular and inappropriate accompaniment to breakfast, in this case pecan praline pancakes and Belgian waffles, which he and Dietrich were trying to consume while also struggling to carry on a conversation.

Around them, all was din and dystopia, and for a moment Jacob looked up from his plate of congealing syrup and butter, wondering if they hadn’t wandered into some sort of bizarre casting call— girls in pale purple tutus performed pirouettes in the aisles; boys in Wranglers, cowboy boots, and spurs played horseback with imaginary whips and a few misplaced whinnies; a couple of the dads wore big red clown noses and frizzy orange Afro wigs; and many of the moms fed their saurian offspring lines from scripts, as they them- selves shoveled eggs Benedict into their mouths.

“I thought you told me in L.A. the sun is continuous,” Dietrich said, his German accent far more pronounced when he was tired or irritated. Or both, which was currently the case, Jacob suspected.

“And I thought you told me it rarely snowed in Berlin,” Jacob said. “I guess we both did some exaggerating.”

“I realize the historical and momentous ramifications of rain- fall in this part of America, but still I was hoping we would leave that damp far behind us in Germany,” he said, his heavy, dark soul more crestfallen than usual, his jet-lagged disappointment already palpable and nearly unbearable to Jacob.

Too tired to rise to the bait, Jacob just smiled, blinking his burning brown eyes, wanting nothing more than to get to his brother’s house in the San Fernando Valley, take a shower, then fall into a deep, uninterrupted coma of sleep. However, the famished and equally fatigued Dietrich had spotted the quaint facade of the International House of Pancakes—“I hop, you hop, we all hop for IHOP!” he sang, pointing at the Dutch-inspired house with its orange cantilevered roof and blue trim—and had asked Jacob to stop. More like commanded, but Jacob was used to it. He applied a new varnish of syrup to his stack of rubbery pancakes in the hopes of revitalizing his appetite, which had flagged the moment the waitress had set the plate in front of him. So there they were, still only a few blocks from LAX, one of the most dreaded points of reentry into the

country for Jacob, who never imagined he’d find himself back here so soon. God only knew how long it would take to get to Calabasas with this traffic, he thought, where his mishpucha, the immediate ones, were gathering like a terrifying golem made from the clay of behavioral tics and personality disorders—a litany of ills and a penchant for hypochondriasis and full-blown neuroses, with bouts of accompanying sanctimony, blinding narcissism, and a plain, old- fashioned, wrath-of-God-style guilt, which bound it all together in one neat package.

Speaking of guilt, any second now Jacob expected a deluge of texts and calls from the golem wondering where they were, he and Guess Who’s Coming to Dieter—one of his dad’s more amusing puns, although Jacob need not have reminded him that he was named Dietrich, not Dieter—and braced himself for the inevitable telephonic Jacobson onslaught by shoveling another forkful of cold, spongy pancake into his mouth. It was only after he was choking on the oversaturated hunk of surprisingly dry, inedible flapjack that he realized that none of them had a way of getting in touch with him—he still had his German cell, rendered useless here in the States—and relaxed, the muscles in his neck also relaxing, which allowed him to swallow, his throat having all but closed up when he pictured the grueling, emotionally withering days ahead.

He coughed in earnest and glanced up at Dietrich, whose face was blank save for that tiny moue of his, a wry smile Jacob still had trouble reading, although by then they’d been together for three years—the first two remarkably good, this one remarkably bumpy, with another two months left to go. For now, however, Jacob considered Dietrich the love of his thirty-eight-year-long life, loving him all the more when Dietrich slid his glass of watery orange juice toward him and ordered him to drink it. Was it too much to say Jacob’s wants had changed already and that instead of a shower and bed, what he actually wanted was to fast-forward through the next four days, to look down upon L.A. from the height of thirty thousand feet out the tiny window of his tinier coach seat? How, he wondered again, had he let his siblings talk him into this trip? It was one thing to subject himself to the unpredictable heart of Julian Jacobson, patriarch pro tem, yet a different thing altogether to wish his dad upon the unsuspecting Dietrich.

The coughing subsided. And with it so did the last of Jacob’s appetite. It fled out the door into the rainy street, where one of those British-inspired, double-decker tour buses, clearly lost and in search of more affluent pastures, like Beverly Hills, ran it over in cold blood. No matter, as Jacob had been talking to Dietrich just that morning about shedding the weight he’d put on in Berlin, due in large part to the addictively heavy German food and miraculously delicious, buttery pastry. (For a country of such historical darkness, they’d certainly managed to create the lightest, tastiest breads in all of Europe, surpassing, in Jacob’s estimation, even the French.) Just another reason to push the plate of soggy pancakes toward the slim, marathon-running Dietrich, who, at twenty-six, never gained a sin- gle ounce and remained as lithe and striated with muscle as he was in the photos Jacob had seen of him at sixteen. The fucker. Dietrich, who finally finished his waffles, started on Jacob’s plate, releasing a satisfied smile and a coo of pleasure after every bite.

“Knock yourself off,” Jacob said, grinning at his own use of this idiomatic faux pas Dietrich had made on what was destined to be their second date, although neither of them knew to call it that back then. They’d gone for ice cream in the East Village and Jacob, hav- ing devoured his within minutes, took his spoon and dipped it into Dietrich’s. “Knock yourself off,” the German had said, as serious as ever. Jacob laughed, correcting him. If he had to guess, he’d have told anyone who cared that that was the moment he’d fallen in love. “Tu dir keinen Zwang an!” Dietrich replied humorlessly, and Jacob understood he might have stretched the joke too thin, at least this morning when their nerves were, respectively, fried and fraying. Dietrich proceeded to knock himself off, slicing the pancakes into precise wedges with his knife and fork, while Jacob flagged down the waitress, who dove at the table as if it were an end zone and she a wide receiver. “I am not your cashier. Pay up front,” she said, then was gone, leaving a scintilla of powdered sugar and sweat in her wake.

Jacob left Dietrich to spoon up the syrupy butter and headed for the cash register near the door. Standing in line to pay for what had to be one of the most awful excuses for a breakfast he hadn’t had the desire to eat in some time, he pulled out a Deutsche Bank ATM card and set it on the counter.

“We don’t take that,” said the cashier, a pregnant teen with braces. She pointed to a small laminated sign taped to the glass that read in schwarzenegger we trusted, all others pay cash. Returning the card to his pocket, Jacob, bleary-eyed, pulled out a wad of bills and handed the girl a twenty. “Look, mister, do you want me to call the manager? American . . . dinero,” she said, enunciating the words slowly as though he were a dumb foreign schmuck. She wasn’t half wrong, as Jacob had been living abroad for well over two years and was acting just like, well, a dumb foreign schmuck.

He apologized and repocketed the twenty-euro bill just as Diet- rich approached, peeling the proper currency from his fancy, silver money clip, which was in the shape of an undulating German flag blowing in a strong breeze. Jacob glanced at the money clip, which shimmered faintly under the garish Suntopia solar-flare tubes, the opening lines to “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” gathering in a poetical storm inside him. When he and Dietrich emerged from the main carnival tent that was the IHOP into the cold, soaking rain that was L.A., the lines came up and out of him with an irrepressible urgency and, what’s more, in a startlingly clear, effortless Deutsch (it must have been the fatigue, for he’d never been so nimble with Dietrich’s native tongue), lingering on the last two lines, his favorite:

“Oh frag’ nicht, ‘Was ist es?’

Laß uns gehen und unseren Besuch machen.”

“ ‘Oh, do not ask, “What is it?” Let us go and make our visit,’ ” Dietrich said.

As they hurried through the sloshy parking lot arm in arm, Jacob considered the heroic couplet and the voice of the boy who’d just translated and recited it. He loved Dietrich all the more for his willingness to go and make their visit, for his good-naturedness in the face of what was bound to be a fiasco of phenomenal proportions.

“Your inaugural meal in L.A. I wanted to pay,” Jacob said, once they were safely ensconced in the rental car. (Another rhyming couplet, this one left him drained of amusement, however.) He was acutely aware of not wanting to seem cheap in Dietrich’s eyes. It was a fine balance. The harder he tried to master it, the more often it left him feeling like a skinflint or an utter mooch. He wanted to provide, to split everything fairly and evenly down the middle, from the rent they shared to the food they ate. But 1-2-3-Speak!, where he taught basic English to recent Russian and Israeli immigrants and business English, whatever that was, to German yuppies looking to emigrate to the financial districts of London and Manhattan, only paid a measly twelve euros per hour, which was, even by Berlin standards, insulting. As generous as Dietrich was with his money, Jacob knew there’d soon come a reckoning when he, Jacob’s own personal Shylock, would demand Jacob pay up, lest Dietrich exact his pound of flesh another way. He didn’t want to think about any of it, what with the heavy rains, the sudden merge onto the treacherous 405, which was nothing but red, beady-eyed taillights as far as he could see, and in a car that was not his, but he quickly did another tally of how much he thought he owed Dietrich—close to five thousand euros. This sum just happened to be the same amount that he’d withdrawn from his checking account in Berlin and that now lined the bulging front pockets of his stretchy, baggy jeans, stretchy and baggy because of the twenty extra pounds he’d put on in the past year alone.

“If it makes you feel any better,” Dietrich said, pulling out the page of directions, which he’d printed before they left Berlin, “I will let you buy me dinner but not tonight. Didn’t I tell you? I am to dine with Lucius Freund. He will prepare a delicious meal.”

“Meal? Lucius Freund? What are you talking about? You told me you didn’t know anyone in L.A.,” Jacob said, his voice pinched with jealousy. “So who is he, huh? Who?” He thought he was joshing Dietrich, but if this were the case, why then did he feel the ex- plosive aftermath in his capillaries and his circulation speed up, the razzmatazz of blood in his face? “He’s German, this guy? How’d you meet him?”

“Jay, keep your eyes on that road, please,” Diet said. Even after spending years of his life in Baltimore, at Johns Hopkins, then in Manhattan, at New York University, Diet still sometimes had trouble differentiating between the, this, and that. “Yes, Lucius Freund, he is a hunk of a man. I have been planning this rendezvous with him for weeks and months. So now is as good a time as any, I think, to tell you that I am leaving you for him. Please pull over and let me out. I cannot do this anymore.”

Incoherent with exhaustion, Jacob nearly did as Diet ordered, though pulling over would have involved crossing four lanes of high- way. Besides, who the hell broke up with someone doing sixty-five miles per hour in traffic like this on the fucking 405? This was a fucking joke. Wait. Was Dietrich actually joking? Jacob’s jet-lagged brain could barely think straight. “Pull over? Are you kidding me?” he asked. Up ahead he saw red and slammed on the car’s brakes just before his front end married the back end of the black Mercedes SUV, which had stopped short. As he did, Diet was thrown forward out of his seat—rarely a passenger, he’d forgotten to buckle his seat belt—and banged his head against the windshield.

“Oh, oh my God,” Jacob said, as Diet crumpled in his seat and went still. The Mercedes SUV, that wicked black carriage of evil, thought Jacob, found an opening in the congestion and sprang away, spraying the car with dirty, oily drops. Jacob tried the wipers, albeit to no avail—the cleaning solution proved useless, the wipers even less so, streaking the glass and further straining his already limited visibility. The rain came down harder and faster, intensifying Jacob’s feeling of bewilderment and failure. He glanced at the unmoving man beside him, at the purplish welt forming in the center of his forehead, a mean-looking bull’s-eye, and felt more love for him than he had ever felt for anyone in his entire life. Hadn’t he raised his arm and flung it out in protection, an involuntary response to danger, right before he slammed on the brakes? “Why weren’t you wearing your seat belt?” he asked. He wondered if Diet had suffered a concussion, if the impact would have long-term ill effects, and if he shouldn’t get off the highway and hightail it to a hospital. But he had no earthly idea if there was even a hospital nearby. He looked around frantically for the page of directions but couldn’t find it.

Jacob switched on the hazards and limped into the far-right lane, doing the best he could with the information he had, his copilot out cold beside him. He imagined what it would be like to live without Diet, and the very idea of it was unendurable. What if his brain’s bleeding? What if he’s dying right this second? Jacob thought, massaging the back of Diet’s neck, which was still warm if lightly sweaty, a good sign. “You can leave me for Lucius Freak or Lucien Freud or Lucius Fiend or whatever his ...