Read A Night at the Operation for Free Online Page B

admit that anything I do is less than perfect, because that would reflect on her skills as a parent. So when someone asks, I am a successful businessman, a responsible son, and, no doubt, a joy to behold.
    But she’s also a devoted realist, without the romantic streak my father and I share, and she—without so much as a word spoken aloud—maintained that my purchase of the Rialto to create Comedy Tonight would eventually lead to financial ruin, heartbreak, and possibly the end of civilization as we know it (assuming you think that would be a bad thing).
    I’d bought the Rialto with money from three sources: The first was the sale of my first—and let’s be clear, only—novel, Woman at Risk, to a production company in Hollywood that turned it into a movie called Split Personality , only because calling it A Bastardization of Elliot Freed’s Novel That Doesn’t Make Any Sense probably would have been bad at the box office. Probably.
    Because I didn’t want to have a mortgage on the theatre, I’d used all the cash from the movie sale, and had also sold my childhood home, which I’d been living in at the time, having inherited it from my parents when they moved to an “active adult community” in Monmouth County. I wasn’t aware that they were active, but the community board hadn’t blocked their entry, so I guess they passed the test.
    That money, plus the book money, plus the alimony I get from Sharon—about which she never complains, most of the time—paid for the Rialto, which I now call Comedy Tonight. But the purchase had left a razor-thin margin of error in my profit margin, which is a euphemism for the amount of money I lose each week by showing classic comedies to audiences in the Judd Apatow era.
    But I was talking about my mother, wasn’t I? The thing you really need to know about Gloria Freed is that she was never happier than the day I married Sharon. If your son can’t be a doctor, what could be better than being married to one! When Sharon and I (mostly Sharon, although I filed the papers) decided to divorce so she could be with Gregory, I was less concerned about my own emotional well-being than that of my mother.
    Now, there were real tears in her eyes, and I started to see her as something more than my mother: she was a woman who was scared to death.
    “Close the door,” she suggested, but I shook my head.
    “It gets too tight in here. With just two of us, we’re already re-creating the stateroom scene from A Night at the Opera .”
    Mom stared at me, not understanding. I got the classic comedy gene from my father.
    “It’s the Marx Brothers. Groucho is on this ocean liner, and he gets a really tiny stateroom. Then Chico and Harpo and Allan Jones emerge from his trunk, and more and more people come in, crowding the room beyond anything that seems physically possible, until Margaret Dumont opens the door and everyone falls out.”
    She stared at me some more. “That’s funny?”
    “Let’s leave the door open. Maybe Sharon will come in, and we’ll see her.”
    “Sharon!” my mother cried. On his best day, William Shatner couldn’t overact this blatantly.
    I took her hands in mine. “Mom,” I said. “She’s fine. I promise.”
    “You really think so?”
    “I’m sure of it.” As I put my arms around her, I glanced over her shoulder and made a quick check of the answering machine on the desk. The light wasn’t blinking.
    We stayed that way for a few seconds, until I felt my mother look up in the direction of the door. I turned to see Dad standing in the doorway, his pants rolled up to the knees and his shoes soaked through with water. For a guy who could wear a white suit and manage to paint an entire room without getting a drop of color on his clothes, this was the equivalent of showing up naked on the pitcher’s mound in Yankee Stadium.
    “Dad . . .” I began.
    But he didn’t let me get too far. “I think you have a burst pipe,” he said. “You could film an Esther