Last Bender

3.2

We got pizza on Ninth Avenue and walked to our usual stoop. They were selling Christmas trees on the street and the air smelled of pine and kerosene from the heaters where the men warmed their fingers. The sky was overcast and a thin, chilly breeze blew in off the river. Down the block, on the corner, a sidewalk Santa rang his bell. A man walked by dragging an enormous Christmas tree like a carcass. It was just warm enough to sit outside and eat. Simon sat on one side of the ornate stoop and I huddled in the other.

“So what’s wrong with you today?” Simon asked, staring intently at his pizza. He turned it pointy end down and let all the oil dribble out. Sometimes when he did this the cheese would slide off and the slice was ruined. Then he dabbed up the orange grease with a napkin.

“It’s nothing.”

“It’s not nothing, the way you were pricing up those books.”

An annoying crazy man was walking towards us. Our eyes met. It was time to look hard so he wouldn’t talk to us. After the danger passed I said, “It’s a girl, Sally.”

He raised his eyebrows, “A girl. And I thought you were gay.”

“Well, I don’t think so.”

“But have you ever slept with a woman?”

I told him about Carla Baducci.

“No, no no. That doesn’t count. Anyone can do that.”

“I can’t stop thinking about her. We were at this weird party she gave with her boyfriend.”

“She has a boyfriend?”

“Yes. He’s gay.” I said it just the way she did. I had the actual sensation of her voice in my mouth. It was psychosis with synesthesia and echolalia.

He launched into a long loud laugh. When he was done he said, “Then what’s he doing with her? Or is he bisexual?” leaning on the bi in such a way as to render the whole idea ludicrous. He shook his head. “You’ve got nothing to worry about. It won’t last if he’s gay. He’ll revert.”

“It’s making me crazy. I can’t stop thinking about her. I mean, we talked on the phone last night for like two hours. The conversation won’t stop going on in my head. I slow it down and speed it up, looking for flaws or hidden significance.” Then I told him, briefly, how I had met Sally.

“What did you talk about on the phone then?”

“Oh, everything. She told me about her communist grandfather, and the one who’s a diamond merchant in Switzerland. He lives in a hotel overlooking Lake Geneva. Or the uncle in Haifa who turns off his hearing aid. He’s a Lurianic Cabbalist. We talked a lot about Roy. She’s very curious about my fathers, so I told her all about them. The idea of my mother marrying three times intrigues her. The idea of three fathers seems to obsess her.”

“Did you tell her about Bobbie Kennedy or Martin Luther King?” My father, the lawyer, worked for Robert Kennedy, and before that, in the fifties, for the NAACP. He knew both men well.

“I tried not to.” It was an embarrassing thing. People always ask a lot of questions. Or they explain him to me. I know almost everybody I meet’s opinion about the Kennedy family.

“Big mistake. Put up the pictures where she’ll see them.”

I shook my head. “No, no celebrity photos, sorry. That’s cheating.”

“All’s fair.”

“She says stuff and it seems to mean more than one thing.”

“She’s pregnant with meaning.”

“Gravid.”

“Over determined.”

“I think so. She’s into psychoanalytic theory.”

“Oh my God. The Law of Resemblances. The science of meaningful puns. More absurd than abstruse. The ‘pataphysical Freud.”

“Well, pace Carla Baducci, it all depends. In the case of God and Good, it’s absurd, but what about Godhead and Good Head?”

“Ha. You know what Nabokov called Freud?”

“The Viennese witch doctor.” He laughed. “Come on now,” I said. “You’ve read all of Jung.”

He waved it off. “That’s not the same thing.”

“And you dishonor your father–”

“My whole life is a dishonor to my father, as far as he’s concerned. I mean, the man is a clinical psychologist. You would think he would have empathy and insight, that he would be tolerant. But every time I walk in that door, there he is in his chair with the Times and a bottle of Red Stripe, and the first thing out of his mouth is, ‘Some faggot came in on dust,’ or, ‘Did you see the drag queen defecating on the sidewalk?’ you know, making drag queen sound dirtier than shit. Think about it, twenty years at Bellevue Alex, there’s not an analytical thought left in his head.”

“I suppose.”

“There’s a reason why Freud treated neurotics you know. Cause no one else would ever believe him. He’s totally nuts. Ever read Totem and Taboo? Oh, he wallows around in it there. They say Jung’s the racist but at least he went to the Navajo and asked them where the mind was. And you know what, they didn’t point to their heads and they didn’t point to their genitals they pointed to their hearts. Well they’re all mad, Jung included. Do you know Blake’s Mad Song? The wild winds weep, /And the night is a-cold; /come hither Sleep, /And my griefs infold.” He sighed. “There’s nothing wrong with madness in love or a literary critic. But Freud’s an art killer. He does more harm to art than he ever did to those crazy rich people he analyzed.”

“Yeah, think of all the bad movies.”

“Suddenly Last Summer.”

“The Fountainhead.”

We saw those movies together at Theater 80. He clapped his hands softly and held them to his chin, laughing. “Oh my god, remember that shot? Of Gary Cooper and the jackhammer?”

“O.K. So Freud’s bad for art.”

His voice dropped with false portent. “So you think she’s some kind of a psychic voyeur? A collector of classical neuroses? Your multiple fathers become like a case study for her, and you’re misled into believing she loves you.”

“Is that so ridiculous?”

“How does she smell? Cause that’s very important. You don’t wanna be kissing someone who smells even just a little bit bad. People think there are races, and creeds, and ethnicities, but there are only olfactory lineages, fractured around the globe, in big forks and clades. And don’t think there isn’t someone out there who thinks shit smells like a spring night. The phone’s no good for this. You’ve got to break a sweat with her. You’ve got to take her dancing.”

I scoffed. “I can’t do that.”

He looked exasperated. “But that’s what dancing’s for. A dress rehearsal. A way to smell and taste and move, when it doesn’t cost a thing. It’s a test drive you have to take.”

“Well,” I said, feeling very discouraged, “I don’t know how to do that. It would embarrass us both. Maybe we could take a sauna together.”

“That would be some test drive.”

“But you know, I did smell her in the bar. Right through her shirt.”

“Was it perfume?”

“No, it was sweat.”

“And?”

I shook my head hallucinating the moment in my nostrils. “It was great.”

“Well, like I said, it won’t last. He’ll revert. And even if he’s bi, it still doesn’t matter. Ever hear of a bisexual going from a man to a man or a woman to a woman? No. They always go the other way, cause that’s what they get bored of. I’ll tell you what I do. Every year, I get together with this Taoist dyke I met on Fire Island, and we have tantric sex for two days.”

“Is this going to be something weird? I’m not sure I’m up for it.”

“No. It’s just a way to recharge your Chi. She’s all Yin and I’m all Yang. Now, we don’t start out that way; I start out with a good charge of Yin, but the guys are sucking it out of me. It gets spread thin between us till we’re all Yin deprived. And the same goes for her. All the Yang goes to the gals. So we do this Taoist ritual. Two days before the full moon closest to the summer solstice we meet in a secluded beach hut on Martha’s Vineyard. We sit, interpenetrating for hours without moving, just meditating, breathing. All day long we sit like that and through the night, completely naked, sometimes just touching, sometimes not. The idea is not to come but to absorb each other’s Chi, which is circulating between you, and your body becomes like a resistor coil, building up the charge. At the end of two days we fuck like crazy, and then it’s like exploding chakras. After that we go back to our lives for another year. She gets my Yang, I get her Yin.”

I thought about it. “What is it, chemical then?”

“No, ethereal substance. Desire is dimensional, where spirit bodies meet. Here, everything is divided against itself. But there it’s just the one desire.” We wadded up our bags, brushed off our legs, and walked.

“Well, I’m in it now,” I said.

He smiled and shook his head. “Yes you are.”

The distance to the end of the day suddenly seemed immense. “I hate going back there,” I said.

“Yeah, me too. But something good happened. Two things actually.”

“What’s that?”

“Well, I was talking to a friend of mine at FIT. He can get me work doing windows at Bloomingdales.” He didn’t break stride but turned to smile at me.

“Really.”

“Yeah and the other one, I can’t keep it to myself, I have to tell you. I met a man at The Loft, dancing. He’s Italian, from Milan. He said he can get me modeling work there. I’d make enough in a few months to go to Florence and study painting.”

“Maybe he just wants to sleep with you.”

“Well he’s already done that. Anyway, he’s married.”

I stopped mid stride. “What was all that business you were giving me about bisexuals? Do you just say whatever pops into your head?”

He blinked and looked around. “Sure, don’t you? Anyway, all I have to do is scrape together airfare. I figure I can get some off my father, as long as it’s a loan, and my sister’ll lend me five hundred dollars. I know once I get there I can make some bucks. My Italian’s not bad and they love black models.”

Simon followed me up to the stock area. I took my sweater off a peg and put it on.

“Maybe if it works out you can come over,” he said, still excited by the idea of Italy.

A cloud of smoke was pouring over the top of the steel wall separating the storage area from the stock room. Leonard was back there with another employee whose name I forget. They were a lethal combination, boorish, loud and smoky.

Leonard laughed, making a sound like Ha ha hEE. Simon put his hand on his hips, and mouthed Ha ha hEE.

“Man,” Leonard said, “did you see that chick? Holy fucking shit.”

“Get out of here.”

“No man, she was fucking hot. Did you see those big fucking tits, man?” Simon cupped his chest in his hands and made like he was showing off his breasts.

“Fuck that, she had nigger tits.” Simon put his hands to his lips and mouthed, oh my god, and fanned himself.

“Ha ha hEE! You’re just fucking stupid. That bitch was Puerto Rican.”

“Like there’s a difference? Who the fuck cares.”

“In that tight skirt, I could taste her pussy.” Simon touched his cheek and dropped his jaw.

“You mean her asshole.”

“After you cleaned it with your tongue.” It was hard not to laugh now because Simon made the best stink face I’ve ever seen.

“I told you I don’t eat that shit, man.”

“Who’s the nigger now? I’d be all over it.”

“Let’s go.”

They walked into the room looking weak from laughter and nicotine, shaking their heads and coughing up stuff from their lungs. Only gradually did they notice us. They looked a little chastened, caught being naughty, but not really apologetic.

“Ha ha hEE! Simon and Alex. Tell me Simon, do you eat pussy? Hey, I’m just fucking with your head. Forget about it.”

I was ashamed and horrified before, but now I cringed. Simon stood there blinking and all three of us were staring at him, wondering what he’d do. He had made a joke of it, but it obviously couldn’t end there. It was not even the first time something like it had happened, just the worst.

“So what, you’re trying to figure out if I’m gonna say something? Like get you fired? As if there weren’t a thousand other assholes like you out there, ready to take your place. Or maybe I’ll get violent, lose my mind, or maybe you want me to scrape and cower and call you baws.” He shook his head and turned as if to walk away. But then he stopped and stared at Leonard in disbelief. “You hear me standing around, talking about fucking white chicks, or white people this, or Jews that? Doesn’t happen, does it? You don’t even know what I think about all that. Cause I keep my mouth shut here, at work, where we all have to be. And maybe, just maybe, I don’t talk that way at all. BOO!” he shouted. Leonard flinched and Simon laughed. Then he put on a mask of tragedy, as if he were going to cry and quoted Othello in a rich, theatrical accent, “I took by th’ throat the uncircumcised dog and smote him thus–” and he stabbed himself with his fist. “Nigger done gone mad! It’s time for a break.”

“So you won’t say anything?” Leonard asked.

I followed Simon down the stairs and out onto the street. It was drizzling into the slow December dark.

“Simon, I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“That was awful.”

“Well, awful’s getting attacked by dogs. That was just nasty and low-minded. I think I’m gonna quit.”

“No. I think you should say something. You could get him fired.”

“For what, four bucks an hour? Do you see yourself here for the rest of your life?”

“No.”

“Then it’s just a question of when you leave.”

“So that’s it then? Who’m I gonna talk to now?”

He tilted his head. “Go get another job.”

“I haven’t got your options. No one wants to put clothes on me, and I don’t know how to do store windows.”

“I’ll miss you Alex, but I won’t miss this job.”

“Milan is far away.”

He flipped it off with his head. “Milan. We’ve got time.”

As I stirred the pasta sauce that night I thought about what had happened at work. I always assumed people litigated injustice. It bothered me that he would let it go. Litigation was the family business. When I was a kid I rarely saw my father for months at a time, and when he was home he was exhausted, rumpled and silent, driven by fears I didn’t understand, atavisms, behaviours, attitudes, anticipations passed on from father to son, preparing for The Blow. He had trained himself not to flinch, to return the blow and go on the offensive. But there were other fears, of police, the FBI, informers; of red scares and witch hunts and pogroms.

The event in the stockroom, the expressions in their eyes, the pallid stupidity of the light, broiled in my head yet all I did was push the spoon around in the sauce a little faster than usual. Reduced tomatoes, a slight sheen of emergent oil on the surface, creamed against the wooden spoon. I scattered in a chiffonade of basil. The sharp, piney odor melted into the steaming sauce. A grind of pepper. And then a tentative knock on the door. So tentative at first I didn’t hear it. I looked in the peephole. There she stood, in the eye of the fish, crying, hair messed up, cheeks smudged with mascara.

I opened the door. Something about the tears angered me. I had a flash that I would be called upon to empathize in a way that would rule out a sexual relationship. I had a strong conviction that I was no longer interested in becoming thrall to an exchange of chaste love. What I really wanted was some profane, preferably vulgar, sexual activity that would be ongoing and fairly constant. Perhaps I was unnaturally delayed in maturation or perhaps I was a realist, since this is scarcely possible for a teenager. Oh, but I was not in control of anything.

She worked her face up into a smile and said, “Hi Alex, how are you?”

“Is everything all right?”

She tried to collect herself by pulling at her shirt and sniffling, then attempted to protest that she was fine but failed, and so she started to sob. I offered whatever comfort I could. Anyone else I would have folded in my arms and soaked up the tears as the earth does rain. But she was Sally. I had to annul her gravity. I bent a little at the waist and held her loose, trembling body, her breasts pressed against mine. They slowed the spasms of grief. I let go of myself. I didn’t resist. I held her to me and wondered at the luck that had on this lousiest of days brought Sally to my door.

“I’m sorry,” she said, moving away, smiling genuinely now. “This is a bad time. I can see. I should go.”

I gambled she had no desire to leave. “No no, please. I was just making dinner.”

“Hazan?”

“How’d you guess?”

“Just lucky. Have you got any wine?”

The sauce was thicker, oilier on top and bubbly. I turned away from her to stir. “Just some scotch Roy gave me for Christmas.”

“Isn’t it a little early for that?”

“No, last Christmas.”

“Scotch,” she sighed. “Maybe just a little.”

She drank it down easily enough, gasping a bit on the first sip. She sat backwards on the wooden chair, resting her face on her hands. “He doesn’t want to be with me,” she said in a blank voice. I emptied the bag of tagliatelle into the boiling water. She moved her knees rhythmically against the chair. “He says he tried. I know he did. But it hurts so much Alex, I love him, I do. He liked me, he loved me, we were friends. We talked. I never met a man who talked to me like that before. But you have to see his face when we have sex, it’s so sad. He said he didn’t like using condoms, but I don’t want to take a chance on herpes. His last boy friend had herpes and warts and all this stuff I don’t want to get. And he washes after. Then I just gave him blowjobs. But he wouldn’t do 69 with me and he wouldn’t say why. I said, ‘Go down on me!’ He made a face and I knew I had to drag it out him. He said that vaginas smell like cheese and they gross him out! It’s like he’s two different people. He pretends I’m a man to have sex with me. All he thinks about is this missing Phallus of his. It wasn’t supposed to matter!” She gulped down some more scotch. “Is that what all men think? Gorgon Medusa I’m prepared to be, but the Gorgonzola of 15th street?”

“I’m sure all men think different things,” I said, since I couldn’t really contribute much empirical evidence one way or the other of what all men thought about vaginal odors. I didn’t know myself, not since the day I was born anyway. Well, there was junior high, when I finger fucked this girl on her brother’s bunk bed, and then those other times in high school. Perhaps Simon was right and there was some sort of olfactory homing signal. I tossed the pasta in the sauce and somewhat awkwardly grated Pecorino Romano into the steaming bowl.

As we ate off of plates on our laps I explained a little about my day. She was outraged. “What’s wrong with Simon? Why didn’t he slug him?”

After thinking about it a little I said, “Well, for one thing, I don’t think Simon would slug anyone.”

“Oh come on, he’s a boy, he grew up in New York City.”

“Did Joseph ever slug anyone?”

She shook her head. “No, Joseph was funny.”

“Well that’s what Simon was. And he’s tall too.”

“That never helped Joseph any. I would have hit him, right in the face. So did you quit? Both of you? Or are you suing? I’d sue too. Then slugging him would be a mistake.”

“He’s also our boss. Anyway, we were both so stunned and there was something absurdly funny about it.”

“No, I don’t see that at all.”

“The man’s an insect. Do you take offense at mosquitoes?”

She looked hurt. “Maybe you haven’t been out on the North Fork in June, but I do take offense at mosquitoes.”

I mused it over. Her reaction was substantially close to mine yet the thought of losing my job was unsettling, almost to the point of nausea. Whole months of barrenness opened before me, like the white expanse of an unmarked calendar. All of that rent not paid accumulating, should another job prove to be elusive. “There is some comfort I derive from having a steady, part time job. It appears to preserve freedom without the burden of responsibility,” I said.

“But he’s your best friend.”

“Yeah. So, what ever he does, I’ll do, I guess.”

We carried our plates to the kitchen. I ran hot water over them and left them in the bottom of the sink. I brewed espresso and poured two glasses of scotch. The conversation returned to Christopher Gold. We were bonding over grievances. Shared indignation is a powerful accelerant to friendship, in the right circumstances. Finally I said, “But you knew that he was gay.”

“But that’s just a label. Sexuality isn’t just about one thing or another.”

“Still, he likes men, and you’re not a man.”

“Your logic is bad.”

This was one of the most illogical things I had ever heard. “I’m sorry?”

“Too linear. You don’t understand about the difference between sex and gender, Alex.”

I made a mistake and said, “Well, explain then.”

Her expression became remote and serious. Literary theory is a pretty humorless affair. They profess to believe there are no absolute truths, and then assert them with total abandon. She tilted her head and licked her lips. “Think of the male as a human being who does not possess a vagina or breasts and the female as a human being who does.”

“I see your point I guess–”

“And what’s my ‘point’?” she asked, pointing with her finger.

“Conventionally women are defined as men without penises.”

“The difference between penis and phallus is the difference between sex and gender. The penis is the male sexual organ. The vagina is the female sexual organ. The phallus is the power to define reality, the power to signify. No one can possess the phallus though men, because they do possess a penis, think they can, and try to convince women that this is so. The word woman attaches to the female being and she becomes all that is other. Penis = phallus, vagina = lack. Everything passive, dark, receptive, Yin, abyss, chaos, night, matter, mother…” Every time she said vagina she pointed to her crotch and every time she said penis she pointed to mine.

“So penis never refers to an actual penis, nor does it mean phallus.”

“Penis is just a signifier in a chain of signifiers. It can only signify a difference.”

I took her glass. “More scotch?”

“Have you read James Hillman?”

“Who’s he?”

“Oh, a mystical shrink. Joseph’s reading him. Suicide and the Soul.”

“Sounds cheerful.”

She looked at the glass and then at me. “I’ll take another.” She followed me into the kitchen. “Do you need help?”

“Not with the dishes, but you can help me with something else. The chiropractor–”

“Your third father, the normal one.”

“I wouldn’t call him normal, but I can see why you would think that. He has a granddaughter, Denise. I spend Christmas day with his family and I want to make her a charm bracelet.”

“I thought your mother only married Jewish professionals.”

“That’s true,” I said, getting a box down off the top of the refrigerator. The top of the refrigerator was where I kept bread and pasta, in a sealed plastic tub, so the cockroaches wouldn’t get to them. Important items went on top of this tub. “But there’s been some sliding in his family. Both of his children married Catholics and they celebrate Christian holidays. He doesn’t seem to care. And there is something incredibly Jewish about the way they go about doing it. In the morning they go to the Christian side to open presents and eat ham and that night they go to Denise’s father’s house out in Queens. He’s a chiropractor too. The chiropractor’s brother and sister and their husband and wife and their kids and their kid’s kids are all chiropractors too. It’s the family business. It’s a bunch of Jewish back crackers celebrating Christmas with cold cuts and pickles. Anyway, I’ve got this stuff here. Can you help me?”

We sat down on the couch and I took out the small gold chain, a bag of metal charms and a needle-nose pliers.

“I can’t hold the charm and chain right,” I said.

“Oh, I’m good at that stuff. I can sew.”

“That’s very traditional.”

“My grandmother taught me.”

“The Communist?”

“No, the one who lives in Geneva, Bubbe. She does needle point. When I was a little girl, she spoke to me in Russian and showed me different stitches, how to tie knots.” I held the chain. “That’s a cute rabbit. Where’d you get it?”

“This store on Broadway. They had all the stuff, even the pliers.”

“How old is Denise?” She opened the tiny gold ring and put it through the link, which I held taut for her.

“Four and a half I think. You’re so good at that. My hand shakes.”

“It’s the coffee.” She took the horse from the bag, attached it, and then the clown. We bent over the work in silence. Her fingers were thin, with big knuckles, like a stick covered with ink marks and little bites. I love hands. Hands and feet. Wherever you look on the body, there is the soul. A knuckle, a navel, a nipple, eyes or lips, each has its expression, its purpose. She touched my hand to steady it, as she threaded the lamb and then the dog. “Steady,” she said. “I almost have it.” My nipples tingled. Her hand was on mine. Our lips were a finger’s width apart. The green welled up in her eyes. There was nothing at all between us and a kiss. “There,” she said. “Done. Denise will love it.” She left her hand on mine.

“It’s beautiful. Thank you.”

“We did it together.”

I pulled my hand away and stood. “She’ll really love this. Denise will really really love it.”

Sally looked like she had just swallowed ice. When she left she kissed me on the cheek.