Love,
Agnes.
‘Come,’ said Buckaroo Umberman one evening that September. ‘Come fuck with me.’
This was in a little Thai place, right at the point where Chinatown had begun to infiltrate and Little Italy begun to decay. It was an isolated joint on an island at the tip of an asphalt playground; you could see the black guys playing B-ball in the night through the front window. We’d been there for hours – hours and hours – drinking Thai beer first and then wine with the spicy food, and now bourbon. Buck and me, an ambitious mayoral aide named Alvin, and an Influential Chicago Guy named Frank Stain. Younger men on the make, the two others and I, letting Umberman hold court and philosophize. This of course he did at length and we’d been treated throughout the evening to a choice selection of sociological Umbermanisms.
On African-Americans: ‘What are they complaining about? Slavery, slavery, you made us slaves, this, that. Christ, if it weren’t for slavery, they’d still be in Ethiopia saying, “Thank you for the grain of rice, Mr Relief-man.”’
On Germans: ‘The bacteria of the western world. Why d’you think they call ’em germ-men? Lookit: who ate the body of Rome? Who caused the cancer of Europe? Every time. Read your history. The Berlin Wall should have a quarantine sign on it.’
On immigrants in general and Slavic taxi drivers in particular. ‘They come here. Why do they come here? To be free, to be Americans, only they don’t want America to be like America, they want it to be like their country, which is what they’re trying to get away from. I’m in a cab, the guy, the hack, is from Russia, he can’t get through Times Square ’cause there’s a demonstration. He shakes his head, “Too many demonstrations in dees country,” he says. “Too much freedom.” I mean, fuck you, go home.’
There were also Hispanics, who didn’t want us to teach them English so we wouldn’t ‘oppress them out of being ignorant.’ And Those Who Expressed Empathy for the Muslim World, when it was ‘An entire culture founded on the principle of slaughtering everyone who doesn’t agree with you.’
These little tirades, which we mocked, which we disputed, which we waved off, bound us to him because they liberated the mutterings of our own hearts – notions we didn’t really believe but which had been so long imprisoned by the tyranny of liberal decency that they had begun to seem like secret truths. He was our id, like I said; or maybe he was our Miltonic Satan, or the B-side of Plato’s Republic, or maybe just a fat, sweaty, more or less canny New York pol who, from mere boredom or for sheer glee, had offered us a peek up the hot nookie of the city system and now drew us in for the rest of the show. What I thought about him depended on my alcohol intake, and I’d had a lot that night. And now, when we were all feeling warm and at one and in-the-know, he lifted up his hands in beatification, and said, ‘Come. Come fuck with me.’
This was to me in particular. Alvin and Frank Stain were laughing in their sleeves and seemed already to know the drill.
‘Hey,’ I said, ‘you’re a cute guy, Buckster-man, but pussy is my beat.’
There was much hilarity at this and Alvin shook his head at the noodle-stained tablecloth, repeating it, ‘Pussy is my beat. Pussy is my beat.’
‘I love him,’ Buckaroo told the others. ‘I love him.’
I looked from one to the next to the next, smiling stupidly. ‘What,’ I said. ‘What?’
We piled into the Tax Commission President’s Cadillac. Alvin drove, we all smoked cigars, we all laughed very loudly and kept our windows nearly shut. It seemed to us – to me, I know, anyway – that there was something wonderful, something terrific and exciting and exclusive – elect – about the fact that the government car was crowded with our sprawled limbs and rollicking with hardy-hars, that it was hot and thick with stinky smoke and the smell of whiskey. The rest of the city – the country – outside that car, just couldn’t get the half of it.
Out we piled then onto a ritzy block which I saw for only a moment. An east Fifties cul-de-sac between First and the river, brick towers with entrances back from the road. Into one of these we walked, Buck with his chest thrust out and his cigar nestled in the moist circle of his mouth, the rest of us following after him like ducklings, chomping our own cigars or jerking them up from our sides for quick puffs like movie criminals. Right past the doorman, who only glanced up and then glanced away; pooling together in the elevator which was dark with the doors closed, and soft and velvety with the paisleyed mirrors on the ceiling above.
‘So?’ I said.
The others faced the door and watched the light moving behind the numbers and stood like Buck: erect; tin soldiers.
There were four girls but only two bedrooms. Alvin and I sat out in the living room while Buck and Frank Stain took a woman each behind closed doors. The two other girls poured us champagne from a rolling bar and we paired off and sat at opposite ends of the long room. Alvin nestled with his girl in the loveseat over by the door, and I could see them, almost silhouettes, breathing over their glasses into one another’s faces. Juliet and I sat more chastely on the sofa by the garden windows, I backed up against one arm, she leaning casually against the other.
She was pretty, Juliet, and young. A little fleshy maybe at the thighs and cheeks but it was like baby fat and made her seem even younger. So did her makeup: too much makeup, like a kid would put on, so that her eyes seemed to turn up at the corners and the whites glistened painfully. She was wearing a very short skirt and a halter-top, her middle bare. Her skin was very white; the word ‘creamy’ came to mind. To protect myself, I concentrated mostly on her face, which was pert and innocent under bobbed black hair.
‘Well,’ I said ironically – more ironical than I felt – waving my drink around drunkenly – more drunken than I was – ‘nice place you have here. Or something.’
She laughed. ‘Yeah, it is really nice. I just love it.’
We both looked across the room, for lack of anything better to do, and, yep, it was nice all right. Half moons of low-watt light playing on French poster art and the framed covers of Weimar sheet music. Colorless modern furniture draped with knitted afghans and tasseled shawls for style. A wooden floor with ovals of rich-looking white shag rug here and there. Homey, hip, youthful; nice. Only now, at the far wall, Alvin and his girl were leaning toward each other, for a tentative kiss first and then a longer one. I looked back at Juliet and we both shrugged and laughed.
‘Listen, uh …’ I said, and I went into a sort of bashful, ear-tugging, averted-eye routine which I thought I was pretty good at. ‘I don’t want to throw a wrench in the works or anything, but I’m not going to do this, okay?’
‘Sure. Okay,’ she said. She watched me as she touched her lips to the surface of her champagne.
‘It’s really nothing personal. If I were going to do this, you’re the first person I would do it with, really. But I’m married, I’ve got a kid; my sainthood is pending and I don’t want to screw it up.’
I thought that was worth a smile at least, but apparently she didn’t get it. After a confused moment, she said, ‘No, really, it’s okay. It’s nice. A lot of guys, you know, aren’t like that.’
‘Well …’ Still shyly. ‘What can I say? There you are.’
‘What does your wife do?’
‘Oh, well, you know, our son’s only nine months old so he’s a lot of work still. She teaches meditation sometimes.’
‘Oh, no kidding? That’s really great. I’m into meditation. I’m really into Tai Chi.’
‘Oh, sure, Tai Chi is great. She does that sometimes.’
‘Oh really? Wow, that’s interesting. Yeah, I think it’s really great. It’s so, you know, like: non-violent or anything. But it’s really good for your concentration and muscle tone!’ She pulled up straight and touched her naked midriff with a long painted fingernail to indicate her muscle tone.
‘Right,’ I said, watching her fingers. ‘Right.’
Frank Stain finished with his bedroom first so we went in there. When Juliet took he
r clothes off, I was breathless and felt I was truly in luck, maybe even blessed. Her body was white all over. She was short and had round breasts and looked very cuddly indeed.
Frank’s girl must have made the bed fresh. It had new sheets – they were printed thick with violets – and was neatly turned down. When Juliet and I were under the covers – the instant I folded myself around her – I went into a state of near-swooning delight. She was so white to look at, so hot and pliant in my arms, she smelled so of youthful talc and fresh perfume – she was so new all of her, and I had not dared to believe, no matter how often I’d dreamed it, that I would ever touch a naked woman but my wife again. She was very wet inside and expansive – I could feel it even with the condom on – and it put me off for a moment because it made me think of other men coming in her; but only for a moment and then it was a luxury. When I kissed her, the lipstick tasted thick on her lips, a fact which seemed to me very womanly and thrilling. I fucked her with enormous happiness and many tender caresses. Every moment of it was mindless joy.
Now, there are some I know who believe an experience – a kiss, a dawn, a work of art – needs no words to complete it, and others nowadays who say the blathering afterward is all, an experience in itself. They can get quite wrought up arguing about it; I know, I know. But had champions of each side been contending on the sidewalk before me as I strolled home alone that blissful evening, contending no matter how ferociously, I think I would’ve slapped them on their shoulders together and, grinning, said, ‘Each thing in its time, me boy, my dearie, each and every thing in its own blessed time.’ Because with Juliet – I explained to myself, as I strolled and hummed and considered – I had been just drunk enough to achieve the wordless buzz required for full enjoyment, but not too drunk to perform the required actions, and that was the perfection of the thing. Ah, but now – now, along Central Park South, with the air cool and unusually clean; and the deep shadowy parkland of trees to my right that were not yet dying but luxuriating still in the wind with all their leaves; and the traffic lights and headlights on the boulevard to my left sparkling red and green and yellow and brightly white in the crisp air; and the great stone hotels rising straight up above them like unleashed genies; and my sense that all Manhattan, the city of my successes, was swelling on every side of me like a crescendo – well, there was a good deal of gentle pleasure to be had in contemplation.
That walk home, it wasn’t the old walks, the Agnes walks, because it was full of thoughts, but it was awfully fine. The others, Frank and Alvin, had tried to coax me into more carousing – careless, I thought – with their girls out in local bars. But Buckaroo was understanding and clapped me on both shoulders as a father would and, solemnly assuming responsibility for the car, sent me on my way.
I decided to walk – I needed to think – and there was a dark period first. This was as I wandered in a zigzag pattern past the unlit brownstones of the east Fifties and up the sparsely trafficked avenues there, the after-midnight avenues. General principles of conscience concerned me then: it seemed so much illicit pleasure simply could not go unpunished. I reeked of perfume, for instance, I could smell it even in the open air, and who knew what other clues there were to my transgression? As I lost myself in an increasingly complex labyrinth of excuses and stratagems, concealment began to seem impossible to me and detection certain. Then, as I was approaching Grand Army Plaza where the sky first grew broad and the city great, and Fifth Avenue unrolled like a black velvet ribbon from the feet of the magnificent hotel, the specific truth occurred to me. It was nearly one a.m., Charlie would have run Marianne ragged all day, she was sure to be sound asleep by now. When I came in, she might stir, she might murmur that she was glad to have me back, that she felt safer with me in the house and so on, but she wouldn’t wake up, she never did. I’d simply put the perfumed clothes in my gym bag and send them to the dry cleaners from work the next morning. I’d shower Juliet’s smell off me before I climbed into bed. And it would be fine, everything would be fine.
With this, my mind started to clear and the stroll along Central Park West began. I became blithe as I went, and warm with well-being even in the brisk weather. Precious, heart-held memories of Juliet formed and evanesced within me, making my viscera toasty and my psyche companionable. And my love for Marianne and Charlie, in their sleeping innocence, had risen up refreshed as well, I realized, as did my lost affection for myself, who had turned out to be such a bold and regular fellow. So much of life, I thought, was such a waste of worry when so much turned out so well so often. There was too much strain, too much contention in the world in general, not only in philosophical matters, but in politics, and personal relations too. The whole world, it seemed to me, ought to have a single shoulder so I could slap it genially, and say: Be at peace, my darlings everywhere. Each thing in its time, each little thing trots along in its God-made time.
Again, the sky, the city, yawned sumptuously as Central Park West opened into Columbus Circle. And I admired Columbus up there on his column as I strolled by him, hands in my pockets, on the sidewalks of the roundabout below. I’d read in the papers recently that some liberal scholars were pecking at his reputation now, castigating him for the natives he had dispossessed, the cultures erased, even the Redskins who’d been obliterated after he was gone. But where would they have found the room to think such thoughts if he had not uncorked the crimped nations from their histories and let them light out here over the open land? You see, this was just the sort of thing I had in mind tonight. They had no peace, these critics, these mantis-like intellects who had never been to sea; they had no peace within themselves, as I had, because they could not accept that disasters too will happen, must happen, that all things must happen in their time and – and this was my culminating revelation for the evening – there is never any justice to them, to anything, ever. That may not seem like much of a revelation, but these things depend a good deal on how they hit you, and this hit me there with all the clarity of that cool September. There is no justice. The word refers to nothing. My wife might sometime discover that I’d cheated on her, which would certainly be unpleasant for everyone, but then she might not, which would simply be terrif. It was all a matter of chance and circumstance and maybe the vagaries of the tell-tale heart. Surely others got away with this sort of thing. And worse than this: Take the Buckaroo. And if the Buckaroo was caught out in his indiscretions then what about Joey Turpentine, the FBI informer who’d been sent to get him – he was probably the Barcos killer, for crying out loud, and he was working with the police! And surely, the world over, there were other murderers thriving, drinking champagne through their Decembers, doing the cha-cha and such. Why, Dr Mengele butchered children who climbed onto his table still sucking their thumbs and he drowned in old age, which is a sweet sort of dying, or so I hear. And then other innocent children simply got leukemia and shriveled to death with wide eyes, clutching their teddy bears, and who was going to put a stop to that? You see? I told the wide world, you see? All this fret about the way things simply are. A million courthouses, pharisaical at best, corrupt more likely, each as useful as Boss Tweed’s in the end; and stultifying gods to exact imaginary vengeance; and new rituals to keep weaklings safe and new principles to murder for; and blame, blame, blame – we make such villains of each other – all rather than accept this founding nubbin of reality: there’s no help for it, there’s no changing it over the long run, these are the jokes, folks. There is no justice.
And so, with that little misunderstanding cleared up, I sauntered north on Columbus Avenue whistling a happy tune, content that a wise man might yet live his life in any way he chose and be as glad as health and luck would let him, and every inch as free.
Dear Harry,
I must be the only person here who hates to see autumn come. It’s so beautiful – the leaf smell in the forest, the watercolors in the hills of trees, and all that shit. But I can’t enjoy it. I don’t feel like I can enjoy anything right now. Which is utter bullshit
really. It’s something that really pisses me off about myself: all this self-indulgent, bourgeois languishing. It used to make Roland nuts. He used to say I was just torturing myself so I could feel like I was suffering because I thought it would make my work better or reconnect me with my father or something. Well, he was right. It’s bullshit. I’ll never experience real suffering like that, like he did. Do you know what happened the first time my mother met him? I love this story. My mother lived in Forest Hills at the time, that’s where she grew up. Her parents had come over from Poland a long time before, and her father owned a candy store on Queens Boulevard. When she was a kid, my mother used to work there sometimes or play in the stock room. They sold the usual stuff like magazines and toys and so forth. And one day, Mom found a little watercolor set in the stockroom and her father let her have it. She started painting what she called her ‘little pictures’, and she was apparently pretty good at it, although I never saw her do it, she never did it while I was alive. So one day, when she was sixteen or so, this handsome young guy came into the store and he saw my mother working behind the counter, and she was doing a watercolor because the place was empty. The guy turned out to be an art teacher at Queens College which, of course, my mother’s parents thought was very impressive. And he started going into raptures over my mother’s paintings and saying how much talent she had and so on. So her parents agreed to let my mother go over to his studio for lessons after school sometimes. And she would paint there and he would lean over her shoulder, instructing her, breathing on her neck, touching her hand – and pretty soon, sure enough, he seduced her, and she was in love with him. She once told me she used to lie on this little Hollywood bed he had and look up at the passing clouds through his skylight and think how beautiful the world was. While he was fucking her, I assume. I remember this shocked me at the time she told me: my mother having unmarried sex! The whole story, actually, shocked me pretty much even though she didn’t tell it to me until I was seventeen or so. Anyway, her affair with the teacher went on for about three months and – surprise, surprise – she got pregnant. So she went to him and told him and, to her absolute shock, he went all thunderous on her and pointed her at the door saying he refused to have anything further to do with such a tramp! My mother was absolutely frantic. What was to become of her? But finally, a friend told her about a doctor in the city who would help her out. So in she went, clutching her handbag, trembling, tearful. And in this dingy little office – a third-floor walk-up on the lower east side – there was My Father, The Abortionist. Not that he was really: he just had a practice of mostly poor Jews, a lot of refugees, and he believed, as my mother put it, that ‘a girl’s life shouldn’t be destroyed because of one mistake.’ He was apparently very kind and gentle to her and only took a few dollars from her for form’s sake. I guess he scraped her – my mother didn’t go into the details, thank God – but she said it was very painful, even though he gave her a drug that made her woozy during it. Then, after it was over, she said she lifted up on her elbows on the table and she saw him standing over the toilet. She said he must have just flushed the fetus down there. And he was davening, up and down, you know, and chanting to himself: he was saying Kaddish! I mean, Jews don’t even do that, say the prayer for the dead over fetuses. And here was this guy who must have seen so many bodies just a few years before – fields of bodies that you couldn’t walk on without stepping on a friend’s ribcage or a mother’s throat or a child’s hand – and he was praying over an embryo the size of his thumbnail. Which he’d just cut out himself and flushed down the crapper besides. And I’m not even sure he believed in God! It’s weird. I never knew what he thought or what he was thinking really. He never told me anything. I’m not even sure how much he told my mother. She used to tell me: We couldn’t ask, we couldn’t upset him, he’d been through so much already. His daughter, his darling daughter, my sister, had died, you see – and I was alive. I had to make him happy enough for two children, my mother said, both for myself and for the child who was dead. It never occurred to me, of course, that I had to do the same for her as well. So I kept quiet, I didn’t ask, I never asked to know more. And when I was a little girl, I used to watch him, trying to figure it all out. When he was reading the newspaper or watching TV, I used to sneak in the living room doorway and stare at him, trying to get into his head, trying to imagine what he’d seen and done and what he thought about things. I remember specifically he had this Bible on the shelf, a Hebrew Bible, and he used to take it down sometimes and sit in his chair holding it open and just meditate on it, just look down at the open book with this intense, tragic stare, without ever even turning the page. And I would watch him from the doorway, wondering, you know: what is he thinking, what’s in his head? When I was about fourteen, just after my mother and I moved out, moved to Mahopac, I started reading the Bible myself – just trying to sort of get the feel of what had been going on in his mind, just wanting the same words to be in my mind that had been in his so I would get some feeling of connection with him. It took me almost a year, but I read the entire book cover to cover. And I would even try to think about it the way I figured he would think about it. I would try to meditate on each page the way he had, thinking the same kind of intense, profound, tragic thoughts I thought he would. I took notes on it, I wrote down my thoughts in my diary and, over the year, I developed this big theory, being all of fifteen, that the whole Bible was all just one story about how suffering and injustice slowly informed a person’s understanding of God. You start with the child’s paradise and then come to a consciousness of good and evil and are expelled into the world of suffering; then you create a God who punishes evil and rewards good; then, when that fails in face of the facts, you get a historical God who works through nations over the long run; and finally, when even that doesn’t play out, you get the acquiescence to suffering and unknowability that you get in Job and Ecclesiastes. (For the grownups, that is; for the kiddies, they tack on the Hollywood ending where Jesus saves the day.) I won’t bore you with the whole thing, but it was a very detailed theory with all sorts of complex exegeses about brother supplantation and the crisis of Noah and the movement from personal triumph in Genesis to national slavery in Exodus, the inevitability of kingship and empire and so on; I wrote pages and pages. The point is: I imagined I was really getting into my father’s mind. I imagined that, when he read that great old Bible of his, he was trying to travel back through all the terrible things that had happened to him, and back through all the terrible things that had happened to our race, and trying to recreate in himself the acquiescence, the acceptance, of the preacher in Ecclesiastes, or of Job – and I thought, well, now I was traveling back with him, so that now I understood him, so that now we were together in this endeavor. The punchline, if you can call it that, is that one day, after I’d finished reading the book and had had all these thoughts, I came home to visit him. And we were talking about school and movies – about nothing, like we always did. And my father went out of the room for a few moments, maybe to the bathroom. And for the first time, I felt worthy to reach up to the high shelf and take down his sacred Bible. Because I knew too now, see, I understood too. And I pulled the book down slowly, reverently – but secretly, because I didn’t want him to know. And I held it lightly in my hands – and it opened! It fell open naturally to a page in Deuteronomy. And there, pressed between the pages, was a lock of hair. Blonde hair, silken like a child’s. Lena’s probably. In fact, I’m sure of it. He probably got it from his uncle, who escaped before the war and lived in Israel. And that’s what he’d been meditating on all that time.