“Ah, come on, Dad—Sprout Loaf? Organic Beet Fritters? mmm-mmm!”

“Gets a man droolin just thinkin about it!”

They are presently joined by Otis, the really picky one, still hungry because Vyrva’s recipes tend toward the experimental, so even more take-out menus are added to the pile and negotiations threaten to run well into the night, further complicated by Horst’s Rules of Life, such as avoid restaurants with logos where the food has a face or wears a whimsical outfit. They end up as always ordering in from Comprehensive Pizza, whose menu of toppings, crusts, and formatting options runs to about the thickness of a Hammacher Schlemmer catalog at holiday time and whose delivery area arguably does not even include this apartment, requiring the usual Talmudic telephone discussion over whether they will bring food to begin with.

“Long as I’m tubeside by nine,” Horst being a devoted viewer of the BPX cable channel, which airs film biographies exclusively, “U.S. Open coming up, golfer biopics all this week, Owen Wilson as Jack Nicklaus, Hugh Grant in The Phil Mickelson Story . . .”

“I was planning to watch a Tori Spelling marathon on Lifetime, but I can always use the other TV, please, make yourself right at home here.”

“Mighty accommodating of you, my lit-tle everything bagel.”

The boys are rolling their eyes, more or less in sync. The pizzas arrive, everybody starts grabbing, turns out this trip Horst plans on staying in New York for a while. “I took a sublet on some office space down at the World Trade Center. Or should I say up, it’s the hundred-and-something floor.”

“Not exactly soybean country,” Maxine remarks.

“Oh, it don’t matter where we are anymore. The open-outcry era’s coming to an end, everybody’s switching over to this Globex thing on the Internet, I’m just taking longer to adjust than most, trading don’t work out, I can always be an extra in dinosaur movies.”

Very late, managing to detach herself from the complexities of the hashslingrz ticket, Maxine is drawn to the spare bedroom by a voice from the TV set there, speaking with a graceful derangement of emphasis, almost familiar—“I respect your . . . experience and intimacy with the course but . . . I think for this hole a . . . five-iron would be . . . inappropriate . . . ” and sure enough, here’s Christopher Walken, starring in The Chi Chi Rodriguez Story. And Ziggy and Otis and their father all on the bed snoozing in front of it.

Well, they love him. What’s she supposed to do about that? She wants to lie down next to them, is what, and watch the rest of the movie, but they’ve taken up all available space. She goes in the living room and puts it on there, and falls asleep on the couch, though not before Chi Chi wins the 1964 Western Open by a stroke, over Gene Hackman in a cameo as Arnold Palmer.

If you were really as bitter as everybody—well, Heidi—thinks you should be about this, she tells herself just before nodding off, you’d get a restraining order and send them to camp in the Catskills . . .

Next day Horst takes Otis and Ziggy down to his new office at the World Trade Center, and they eat lunch at Windows on the World, which has a dress code, so the boys wear jackets and ties. “Like going to Collegiate,” Ziggy mutters. There happens to be a more-than-moderate wind blowing that day, making the tower sway back and forth in five-, what feel like ten-foot excursions. On days of storm, according to Horst’s co-tenant Jake Pimento, it’s like being in the crow’s nest of a very tall ship, allowing you to look down at helicopters and private planes and neighboring high-rises. “Seems kind of flimsy up here,” to Ziggy.

“Nah,” sez Jake, “built like a battleship.”

10

Saturday night at Kugelblitz, despite the lighting crew getting stoned and confusing or forgetting cues and the kids playing Sky and Sarah, who have been going steady in real life, breaking up loudly and publicly at the dress rehearsal, Guys and Dolls is a roaring success, which will look even better on the DVD Mr. Stonechat, the director, is shooting of it, given the many sight-line issues at the Scott and Nutella Vontz Auditorium, whose architect owing to some sort of mental condition kept changing his mind about such nuances of design as getting rows of seats to actually face the stage and so forth.

The grandparents holler bravos and take snapshots. “Come back to the apartment,” Elaine giving Horst the usual shviger evil eye, “we’ll have coffee.”

“I’ll walk you all to the corner,” sez Horst, “but then I have to go see about some business.”

“We hear you’re taking the boys out west?” sez Ernie.

“Midwest, where I grew up.”

“And you’re just going to hang around in the video arcades all day,” Elaine being as nice as pie.

“Nostalgia,” Horst tries to explain. “When I was a kid, it was the golden age of arcades then, and now I guess I can’t bring myself to admit it’s over. All this home-computer gaming, Nintendo 64, PlayStation, now this Xbox thing, maybe I just want the boys to see what blowing aliens away was like in the olden days.”

“But . . . isn’t it technically kidnapping? Across state lines and whatever?”

“Ma,” Maxine surprising herself here, “he’s . . . their dad?”

“My gallbladder, Elaine, please,” advises Ernie.

The corner, mercifully. Horst waves. “See you guys later.”

“Call if you’re gonna be too late?” Maxine trying to remember what normal and married sounds like. Eye contact with Horst would be nice also, but no soap.

“This time of night?” Elaine wonders after Horst is out of earshot. “What kind of ‘business’ can that be, again?”

“If he came with us, you’d be complaining about that,” Maxine wondering why suddenly now she’s defending Horst. “Maybe he’s trying to be polite, you’ve heard of that?”

“Well, we bought enough pastry to feed an army, maybe I should just call—”

“No,” Maxine growls, “nobody else. No litigation lawyers, no drop-by ob-gyns in Harvard running shorts, none of that. Please.”

“She will never let that go,” sez Elaine, “one time. So paranoid, I swear.”

“Who does she get it from,” Ernie doesn’t exactly ask. Being a passage from a duet Maxine may possibly have heard once or twice in her life. Tonight, beginning as a temperate discussion of Frank Loesser as an operatic composer, the conversation soon unfocuses into general opera talk, including a spirited exchange about who sings the greatest “Nessun Dorma.” Ernie thinks it’s Jussi Björling, Elaine thinks it’s Deanna Durbin in His Butler’s Sister (1943), which was on television the other night. “That English lyric?” Ernie making a face, “sub–Tin Pan Alley. Awful. And she’s a lovely girl, but she’s got no squillo.”

“She’s a soprano, Ernie. And Björling, he should have his union card revoked, that Swedish lilt he puts on ‘Tramontate, stelle,’ unacceptable.”

And so forth. When Maxine was a kid, they kept trying to drag her along to the Met, but it never took, she never made the transition to Opera Person, for years she thought Jussi Björling was a campus in California. Not even dumbed-down kiddy matinees featuring TV celebs with horns out the sides of their helmet could get her interested. Fortunately it only skipped a generation, and both Ziggy and Otis now have turned into reliable opera dates for their grandparents, Ziggy partial to Verdi, Otis to Puccini, neither caring that much for Wagner.

“Actually, Grandma, Grandpa, all due respect,” it occurs to Otis now, “it’s Aretha Franklin, the time she filled in for Pavarotti at the Grammys back in ’98.”

“‘Back in ’98.’ Long, long ago. Come here, you little bargain,” Elaine reaching to pinch his cheek, which he manages to slide away from.