As he spoke, Schloss had taken him in: his darting eyes, the silver hair that came down over his collar, striking because of how meticulous he had always been about his appearance. “What do you have to say about the steak versus its competitors?” Epstein was known to demand of the waiter. But now the plate of Dover sole remained untouched, belying his usual appetite. Only when the waiter came by to ask if anything was wrong did Epstein look down and remember the food, but all he did then was push it around with his fork. It was Schloss’s sense that what had happened to Epstein—the divorce, the retirement, everything coming loose, coming away—had begun not with a book but rather with the death of his parents. But afterward, when Schloss put Epstein into the back of the dark sedan waiting outside the restaurant, the lawyer paused for a moment with his hand on the car’s roof. Looking in at the strangely vague Epstein in the dark interior, he wondered briefly whether there was something more grave going on with his longtime client—a kind of neurological turbulence, perhaps, that might develop toward the extreme before it was diagnosed as medical. At the time, Schloss had brushed the thought off, but later it came back to him as prescient.
And indeed at last, after nearly a year of chipping away at the accumulations of a lifetime, Epstein arrived at the bottommost layer. There, he hit on the memory of his parents, who had washed up on the shores of Palestine after the war and conceived him under a burned-out bulb that they had not had enough money to replace. At the age of sixty-eight, having cleared a space to think, he found himself consumed by that darkness, deeply moved by it. His parents had brought him, their only son, to America, and once they’d learned English, resumed the screaming match that they’d begun in other languages. Later his sister Joanie came along, but she, a dreamy, unresponsive child, refused to take the bait, and so the battle remained triangulated. His parents screamed at each other, and they screamed at him, and he screamed back at them, together and separately. His wife, Lianne, had never been able to accustom herself to such violent love, though at the beginning, having come from a family that suppressed even its sneezes, she had been attracted to its heat. Early on in their courtship, Epstein had told her that from his father’s brutality and tenderness he’d learned that a person can’t be reduced, a lesson that had guided him all his life, and for a long time Lianne thought of this—of Epstein’s own complexity, his resistance to easy categorization—as something to love. But in the end it had exhausted her just as it had exhausted so many others, though never his parents, who remained his tireless sparring partners, and who, Epstein sometimes felt, had lived on with such tenacity only to torment him. He’d taken care of them until the end, which they’d lived out in a penthouse he bought for them in Miami, with deep-pile carpets that came up to their ankles. But he had never found peace with them, and only after their deaths—his mother following his father within three months—and after he’d given nearly everything away did Epstein feel the sharp stab of regret. The naked bulb sputtered on and off behind his inflamed lids when he tried to sleep. He couldn’t sleep. Had he accidentally given sleep away, along with everything else?
He wanted to do something in his parents’ names. But what? His mother, while still alive, had proposed a memorial bench in the little park where she used to sit, while upstairs his father was giving up his mind in the presence of Conchita, the live-in nurse. Always a big reader, his mother would bring a book with her to the park. In her last years, she had taken up Shakespeare. Once Epstein overheard her telling Conchita that she had to read King Lear. “They probably have it in Spanish,” she’d told the nurse. Every afternoon, when the sun was no longer at its peak, his mother rode down in the elevator with a large-print edition of one of the Bard’s plays in the knockoff Prada bag she had bought—over Epstein’s protests that he would buy her a real one—from an African selling them at the beach. (What did she need with real?) The park was run-down, the play equipment caked with the shit of seagulls, but there was no one in the neighborhood under the age of sixty-five to climb on it, anyway. Had his mother been serious about the bench, or had she suggested it with the usual sarcasm? Epstein couldn’t say, and so, to be sure, a bench of ipe that could withstand the tropical weather was ordered for the grimy Florida park, bolted with a brass plate that read, IN MEMORY OF EDITH “EDIE” EPSTEIN. “I AM NOT BOUND TO PLEASE THEE WITH MY ANSWER.”—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. He left the Colombian doorman of his parents’ building $200 to shine it twice a month at the same time that he polished the brass in the lobby. But when the doorman texted him a photo of the pristine bench, it seemed to Epstein that it was worse than if he had done nothing. He remembered how his mother used to call him when too much time had gone by since he’d last phoned, and in a voice hoarse from sixty years of smoking, would quote God who called out to the fallen Adam: “Ayeka?” Where are you? But God knew where Adam was physically.
On the eve of the first anniversary of his parents’ deaths, Epstein decided two things: to take out a $2 million line of credit on his Fifth Avenue apartment, and to go on a trip to Israel. The borrowing was new, but Israel was a place he’d returned to often over the years, drawn back by a tangle of allegiances. Ritually installing himself in the fifteenth-floor executive lounge of the Hilton, he had always taken visits from a long line of friends, family, and business associates, getting into everything, dispensing money, opinions, advice, resolving old arguments and igniting new ones. But this time his assistant was instructed not to fill his schedule as usual. Instead, she was asked to set up appointments with the development offices of Hadassah, the Weizmann Institute, and Ben-Gurion University, to explore the possibilities of a donation in his parents’ names. The remaining time should be kept free, Epstein told her; perhaps he would finally hire a car to tour parts of the country he had not been to for many years, as he had often spoken of doing but hadn’t, because he’d been too busy having it out, getting overly involved, and going on and on. He wanted to see the Kinneret again, the Negev, the rocky hills of Judea. The mineral blue of the Dead Sea.
As he spoke, his assistant, Sharon, glanced up, and in the familiar face of her employer she saw something she didn’t recognize. If this worried her a little, it was only because knowing what Epstein wanted, and exactly the way he liked things, was what made her good at her job, and it mattered to her to be good at it. Having survived his explosions, she’d become aware of the generosity that lived alongside Epstein’s temper, and over the years he’d won her loyalty with his.