Everything Changes

an anniversary gift a few years earlier, when he’d declared a newfound, if typically fleeting, passion for photography. As he and Anna scrambled for their clothing, my mother walked calmly down the stairs of our attached house and then three blocks over to the Ace Pharmacy, where she dropped off the film to be developed. The Nikon hanging from her shoulder irritated her, so she tossed it into a corner trash can, bought herself a diet soda, and took a long walk.
    In the days that followed, an eerie calm beset our house, none of us willing to shatter the inscrutable, fragile truce that had somehow been forged in the aftermath of this event. My siblings and I were able to piece together what had happened, because the walls of our attached townhouse in Riverdale were paper thin, and my parents’ whispered bedroom arguments, my father’s desperate pleas and my mother’s bitter recriminations, were easily discernible from the hall bathroom.
    I was twelve years old, Pete nine, and Matt an already angry seven. We all knew this meant trouble. Even Pete, who was mildly retarded and didn’t always catch on, knew some bad shit was afoot, but none of us really believed this might be the watershed event. It wasn’t the first time this had happened. We all knew the drill, even Pete. Dad screwed up, things got tense for a while, and then Dad made up for it. He’d once even confided in me that when it came to him and my mother, he was the comeback king.
    But there would be no comeback this time. A few weeks later my mother sent out her Jewish New Year cards, and instead of a family portrait, that year’s picture was my father and Anna at the horrifying instant of their discovery. No airbrushing, no posing, just the raw, messy truth of middle-aged coupling captured from a blunt angle, anatomy as nature never intended it to be seen.
    Norman King, my father, was a popular character in the neighborhood. He walked the streets like a politician, greeting everyone he passed by name, and if he didn’t know your name, he’d either introduce himself or say, “Good morning, chief.” He was the sort of man who was on a first-name basis with all the shopkeepers, and knew to ask after their wives, children, or parents with perfect specificity. He would draw the men into lengthy discussions of their businesses, offering suggestions and tax-planning strategies. His job in the bookkeeping department of a large Manhattan corporation lent him the aura of white-collared big-business expertise, and he took great pains to burnish that image, not in the least because he believed in it, often throwing on a tie even just to run out to the grocery store for a carton of milk. He came across as a guy who knew how everything was wired, who had the inside track. His own slew of failed entrepreneurial ventures never seemed to diminish this perception, even to him. “Your failures are the foundation upon which your success is built,” he would say grandly. Occasionally, as I grew older, it would occur to me to wonder what success, exactly, he was referring to, but he spoke with such assuredness that I instantly doubted my own doubts, and that, in actuality, was his greatest gift. He was the most believable bullshit artist I’ve ever known.
    Norm was also abundantly chivalrous to the ladies, greeting them with a gallant flourish and flattery, always able to point out a new haircut or dress. He was on friendly terms with most of the women in our neighborhood, and if it ever seemed to me that there was an inappropriately sexual nature to some of these relationships, I dismissed the thought out of hand and chalked it up to my own immaturity, until he started getting caught. Mostly, I enjoyed walking the streets with him, basking in his popularity, feeling like the son of a king.
    So it had to have been a devastating blow to Norm when my mother sent out those cards. It went well beyond the public documentation of his infidelity; it was a humiliation of the highest order, the emperor exposed, warts and all, in the unforgiving clarity of 200 ASA Kodacolor. She knew what she was doing, my mother. After years of silently suffering these betrayals, not only had she hatched a plan that trashed his reputation, shattering forever the carefully cultivated persona he’d been refining for years, but she was also forcing her own hand, making further reconciliation impossible. Because now, when she felt herself weakening and leaning toward her customary forgiveness,