Reboot

By Jeffrey Green

What would you do if you had made a mess of your life and suddenly got a chance to start over again? 
By an ironic twist of fate, Frank Oliviero, an unfaithful husband and shady jewel dealer, isn’t in his office, where he was supposed to be, in the World Trade Center when the Twin Towers are destroyed. Impulsively, rather than face a messy divorce and financial and legal complications, he decides to remain officially dead and start his life over again from zero. 
Still grieving for the thousands of victims of the disaster from which he was unaccountably spared, he now has to cope with the consequences of his presumed demise: separation from his daughters, his parents, and his siblings, and the challenge of becoming a better man in a new country.
He presents his life story in a document addressed to someone whose identity gradually becomes clear as the novel unfolds.

Jeffrey M. Green was born and raised in New York City and attended the Little Red School House, a progressive school in Greenwich Village. He graduated from Princeton, summa cum laude, in French, spent a year at the University of Poitiers as a Fulbright scholar, and then earned a doctorate in Comparative Literature at Harvard. In 1973 he moved to Jerusalem with his wife and their daughter, and he has been living there since then. 
Until 1979 he held various jobs, including a three-year stint teaching in the English department of the Hebrew University, until he became a freelance translator from Hebrew and French. During his long career he translated a dozen novels by the distinguished Israeli author, Aharon Appelfeld, other fiction, and many academic books published by major university presses.
He has written two books in Hebrew, a book on translation published by the University of Georgia Press, as well as fiction, poetry, essays, and innumerable book reviews. He became obsessed with the subject of the present novel, the story of a man who was thought to have died in the attack on the World Trade Center, and worked on it for more than ten years, until he finally discovered the right way to tell that story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Europa Edizioni
• Release date: Jan 29, 2024
• ISBN: 9791220149389

Book preview

JEFFREY M. GREEN

REBOOT

© 2023 Europe Books | London

www.europebooks.co.uk | [e-mail]

ISBN 9791220145763

First edition: December 2023

REBOOT

To my family

CHAPTER 1

I want you to know who I am before we marry, but I know you won’t read this in English. I can speak Spanish, your native language, my own childhood language, but I never learned to write well in it. As for Hebrew, I can speak it, too, but I certainly would never be able to write what I want to write in Hebrew, and you’re not so comfortable reading in Hebrew anyway. So in the end, I’ll have to tell it to you. But it will help me figure things out if I write them down before I try to tell you. Anyway, you know most of it.

I’m from New York. I grew up in Queens. My parents lived in a modest single family wooden house in a modest neighborhood and had modest ambitions. I always wanted to own a big house in an affluent neighborhood, wear expensive clothes, and travel first class. From as far back as I can remember, I’ve loved gems. The first time my parents took me to the Museum of Natural History, when I was six or seven, I was so fascinated by the exhibit of gems, they had to drag me away from it in tears. I must have visited the gems a hundred times before graduating from high school. Even after I had memorized every piece of information about the displays, I made pilgrimages there and would stand for a quarter of an hour or more, mesmerized by huge diamonds and emeralds, sapphires, and jade, and especially by the natural crystals.

The mineral perfection of the crystals spoke to me of an order of beauty, beyond the confused turmoil of human life. I knew that many of the gems had been produced by enormous heat and unimaginable pressure, the heaving and smashing of the earth’s crust, and that geological violence had produced objects of sublime loveliness. Communing with the stones behind plate glass in the Museum of Natural History was for me what listening to Bach can be for a music lover. I was transfixed.

Looking back on my life, I see that the gems represented a kind of almost metaphysical truth that I ignored for much too long. I’m hardly a poetical person, but the vocabulary of precious stones mesmerized me. Just the term precious stones rolled around in my mouth. For my twelfth birthday my parents gave me a lapidary machine, a rolling cylinder that you loaded with sand, water, and ordinary-looking stones. The sand polished the stones so that after some time they were smooth and glossy, almost like jewels. I recited the resonant names of gems and semi-precious stones like a sacred litany: sapphire, ruby, carnelian, amethyst, emerald, jade, turquoise, obsidian, amber, pearl, and diamond. I learned the different ways that diamonds were cut. I memorized the description of the four rows of jewels in the high priest’s breastplate in the book of Exodus, more or less the only part of the Bible I had read: carnelian, chrysolite, and emerald; turquoise, sapphire, and amethyst; jacinth, agate, and crystal; lapis lazuli, and jasper. I learned their names in Spanish too: una piedra sárdica, un topacio, un carbuncle, una esmeralda, un zafiro, un diamante, un rubí, un ágata, una amatista, un berilo, un onix, y un jaspe.

I have since learned that scholars aren’t sure what all the original Hebrew words refer to, but does that matter?

When I was in junior high school, I began to cut out advertisements and articles from the fashion pages of the newspaper about high-end jewelry. I memorized the names and addresses of the most exclusive jewelry stores and the most fashionable designers on Manhattan. It was frustrating to me that my father wasn’t wealthy enough to buy jewelry for my mother. My older sister married a fairly rich guy, but she has terrible taste in jewelry. I sometimes took the subway into midtown Manhattan and would stand for conspicuous lengths of time in front of the windows of Tiffany, Cartier, Henry Winston, and other stores, until guards came out to size me up.

I dreamed of becoming a salesman in one of those mesmerizing stores, spending all day in the company of precious stones, gold, silver, and platinum, sharing my love of jewelry with sophisticated, wealthy, glamorous clients.

One spring day, when I was a gangly tenth grader, the manager of a fine store came out to make sure I wasn’t planning a robbery. She was tall and slender, an elegant woman, maybe forty years old – I had no clear idea of how old adults were. When I told her how much I loved the jewelry, she invited me in to let me admire. I had never before dared to cross the threshold of any of those awe-inspiring stores. I stood transfixed in front of the display cases.

Boys usually aren’t interested in jewelry, the woman told me. She asked me to tell her something about myself. There were no customers, and she had some spare time. I didn’t think of my background as particularly interesting, but in fact it was unusual. My father and his parents were Spanish. He was born in 1932, and his parents had to flee to southern France from Franco’s regime when he was quite young. They barely escaped being deported from France during the war and made it to the US in the late 1940s. I never knew my father’s revolutionary parents, who died before I was born. He learned English well, but he always spoke with an unplaceable accent, half French, half Spanish. His parents were poor, and he had to work hard to help support them, to get a college degree at night, and to make it up into the lower middle class. I admired my father. He had no brothers or sisters.

My mother was born in Cuba. Her father died young, and she had no memory of him. Her mother married an American, who brought her to New York with him. She also had no brothers or sisters. The man I remember as my grandpa was a generous soul, not too bright or successful, but soft-spoken and gentle. It was confusing for me, as a child, to learn that he wasn’t really my mother’s father.

Like my father, mom was a teenager when she came to the United States, and she was always more comfortable speaking Spanish than English. Her stepfather spoke it fluently, but with a heavy American accent.

Spanish was the language of our household when I was growing up, though I usually answered in English when my parents spoke to me in Spanish. Hearing my name and knowing that my parents and I spoke Spanish, people always assumed I was Catholic, but I wasn’t. Religion was not a presence in my formative years. My father’s radical parents were avowed atheists, my mother’s stepfather was Presbyterian by birth and never went to church, and my mother’s mother, Fortuna, never told anyone, not even her daughter, that she was a Syrian Jew until a year or two before she died. Amazingly to her family, she had arranged to have a Jewish funeral for herself. We attended and had no idea what to do. I never found out how my parents met.

Back in America, my name was Frank Oliviero. I was a good-looking young man. In high school I was athletic and competitive. I played basketball and ran cross country, I played some tennis, and later on I took up squash. I also got together with some men to play basketball every week, when I was in town. While I was in high school I also worked in a local jewelry store so I could buy stylish clothes for myself, what I thought were stylish clothes.

My father, Gilberto was also tall and thin, but very austere and introverted. He wore cheap dark suits until they were baggy and frayed, and then for a while longer. You might have taken him for a priest. It’s too bad you never met him. You’ve met my mother, Serena. She was always stocky, with dark, curly hair, thick, sensuous lips, and big, dark eyes. She made up in vivacity for what Gilberto lacked in cordiality. She was a nurse, like you. She worked in the pediatric department of a nearby hospital and needed all the friendliness and warmth she could muster.

You know me. I inherited my mother’s conviviality but not her softness. I was popular with my classmates in school and college, and when I went on plane trips for work, I always chatted up my neighbors. I never minded being talked into buying something, so I had no qualms about talking other people into buying expensive jewelry or talking women into having sex with me. That’s something you have to know, too.

I had an especially close relationship with my late father-in-law, Morton Fishman, which didn’t keep me from doing business behind his back, partly because I knew that Morton was far slier than I was, and shady things were going on behind my back. We were like two card-sharks who admired each other’s skill and enjoyed each other’s company (without ever letting on about anything).

After they retired, Gilberto spent his time reading philosophy and literature in French and Spanish, and Serena was involved in volunteer work. They were devoted grandparents of my daughters, and the other grandchildren. Gilberto was quiet and a bit severe in his demeanor with grownups, but he loosened up with little children, and they loved him. My grandmother, Fortuna, lost her second husband in the 1990s. She used to babysit for me and my siblings when we were little. She was a kind lady and sang songs to us in a strange kind of Spanish that I later learned was Ladino, the language of the Jews expelled from Spain in 1492. Without telling anyone, she had begun to frequent a Sephardic synagogue, reverting to Jewish roots no one even suspected she had, like the Marranos. Her first husband was Jewish, and she tracked down some distant Syrian Jewish cousins, both hers and his, who came to her funeral when she died. At the end of the service in the funeral home and at the site of her grave, the rabbi who was officiating handed me a piece of cardboard with unintelligible words written on it in English letters. You’re her oldest grandson. Read it out loud, he ordered me. Now I know that it was the kaddish, the Aramaic prayer that Jewish mourners recite. I stumbled through the strange words, which meant nothing to me at the time. After the funeral, those relatives disappeared again, making no effort to stay in contact with the Oliviero family. But they did tell my mother and me that we were, in fact, Jewish, according to Jewish law. This information meant very little to me. I was in my second year of college and didn’t expect my Jewish ancestry to have any impact on my life.

Some people never have enough money, and some people have too much money – and a few rare people in the middle are satisfied with what they have, like my parents. The only debt they ever had was their mortgage, and they’d paid that off years ago. They never bought a car. My father had a few cheap, dark suits that he used to wear to work, and some conservative casual clothes for the weekend. My mother worked in a nurse’s uniform, and she only bought clothes on sale. Their house was comfortable, but unprepossing. They let the furniture sag and the rugs fray, they never remodeled the kitchen, and they never bought a new appliance until the old one was beyond repair. They went to the movies now and then and socialized with friends and relatives who were equally modest in their needs. When I was young, the way they lived drove me crazy.

From the time I was in high school, I belonged wholeheartedly to the category of people who didn’t have enough money. Even before I was old enough to work legally, I always had after-school or weekend jobs, and I bought myself the kind of clothes I would have had if my parents had been wealthy with fairly vulgar taste. When I think about those clothes today, I’m embarrassed. At college I lived at home and saved money by bringing sandwiches for lunch. I was careful not to waste a dime, so I could take girls out to dinner in fine Manhattan restaurants and make them think I was rich.

When I got into the retail jewelry business, selling in one of the stores I had always loved to look at, I concentrated on the people with too much money. I discovered what they had in common with the people who didn’t have enough: they always wanted more. But their standard of living wouldn’t be affected adversely if they spent thousands of dollars on a diamond necklace or emerald earrings. My conscience was always clear if I talked them into spending more than they intended to. Besides, I assured them, fine jewelry held its value. It was an investment. I was a persuasive salesman.

I got to know Morton Fishman when I was working in a very exclusive jewelry shop in midtown Manhattan. Although he owned his company, and it was a big one, he always took care to know his customers personally. He supplied gems and semi-precious stones to jewelry makers, he brought out-of-town customers to the stores that bought from him, and he helped them make sales outside of New York. Morton and I clicked from the moment we first set eyes on each other, and I miss him.

I wanted to go to an Ivy League college. I had high college board scores, but my high school grades weren’t good enough to win a scholarship, and my family couldn’t afford to send me to Columbia or Cornell, so I went to Queens College, lived at home for the first two years, and majored in geology. After college, while I was working in the jewelry store, I studied for an MBA in sales and finance in the evenings.

Knowing about the chemistry of gems, about the way they are formed in the earth’s crust, about crystals, and about precious metals is useful in the jewelry business, both for detecting counterfeit stones and for telling a good story to clients. If you know what natural forces produced a gem, you appreciate its beauty even more.

My knowledge and love of gems attracted Morton Fishman’s attention. I could identify all the stones he brought in to sell, and I knew where most of them were mined. He invited me to lunch in local coffee shops a couple of times. Morton was rich, but he wasn’t a high liver, which is what I wanted to be. He knew that my taste for expensive clothes and food would be an advantage in representing his company, along with my almost absolute love of gems, which he shared. True, I wanted to make a lot of money, and Morton understood that, because he had been there. But it was more than the money. It was the beauty of fine jewelry, of perfectly cut diamonds. After about six months of these conversations, he offered me the job of my lifetime.

I want to emphasize that I was scrupulously honest in the store where I worked – not that I had a choice. The security was beyond belief. But I was never tempted to steal or cheat. I loved my work. I loved spending hours in the company of those beautiful jewels. I loved meeting the jewelry designers who made exclusive items for the stores. I loved helping women choose the right ornaments, and men looking for gifts for the women in their lives. The stores were silent, decorous, splendid.

While I was in high school I had a job with a good-sized neighborhood jewelry shop that sold standard, shiny things. I cleaned the glass cases, arranged the jewelry, and sold wedding and engagement rings, charm bracelets, pendants, and ladies’ watches set in diamonds.

Our customers were local people who were intimidated by fine Manhattan stores and afraid of being cheated. We were local, we didn’t stock outlandishly expensive items, and customers felt comfortable.

I worked in that store while I was in college. When I was ready to move on to someplace more suitable to my ambitions, the owner helped me by writing a strong letter of recommendation. We had become pretty good friends, and he was sorry to see me go. He was getting old and hinted that he hoped I would buy him out. But he understood me. All during college I kept going back to visit the manager of the midtown jewelry store, where you could hardly buy anything for less than a few thousand dollars, and when I finished college she offered me a job as a salesman. That’s where I was working when Morton discovered me.

I became his personal assistant and, as I got familiar with the business, and he came to trust me (especially after I married his daughter) as his representative. I did a lot of traveling. Morton’s two sons worked in the business, but they weren’t jealous of me. They were introverts (a bit anal) who liked to work in the office, keep the accounts, and do the financial planning. They didn’t care whether we were selling precious stones or golf clubs. They were glad to have me take over the face-to-face contacts with customers and suppliers. We were a good team. The company grew until we needed a lot of office space and could afford to rent it in the World Trade Center. Every window of our office had a spectacular view of lower Manhattan and New York Harbor.

My first wife, Stella, was pretty and bright when we first met, and I didn’t marry her only because she was the boss’s daughter. I was twenty-seven and not exactly living a monastic existence. I had moved out of my parents’ house as soon as I could afford it – really before I could afford it. When I was a junior in college I shared an apartment with a couple of other students. After I graduated and started working in the jewelry store, I found a neat little place in Brooklyn Heights. The manager of the store suggested to me that if certain women clients asked me to bring their purchases to their apartments after the store closed, because they were afraid to carry the jewelry in the street, I could interpret the invitation any way I pleased. She arranged to get me a pistol license because I was carrying gems. No one ever tried to mug me. Once every couple of months, not all that often, I became a kind of jewelry-gigolo. I’d deliver a necklace or bracelet to a purchaser, get invited to stay for a drink, go to bed with her, shower, be treated to supper, and make my way home. In the beginning it wasn’t easy to have sexual desire for those wealthy women because of their attitude.

But I like people, even rich women who act as if anything in the world is theirs for the taking. I’m not judgmental – at least I wasn’t then. I was afraid their husbands would come home unexpectedly, but that never happened. The husbands were out with their mistresses, I guess, and their wives wanted revenge.

I had a very close friend, Paula Altman, the kind of friendship people call with privileges these days. I met Paula while I was still in high school, and she was a junior in Queens College. She found me standing in front of the windows of Cartier, thought I was cute, and discovered she didn’t come from far from me in Queens. After that I met her on the street once or twice. She