Last Bender

8.2

Early next morning around 11 I was awakened by Joseph’s booming laugh (a rare sound at that hour), followed by Raph’s gentler, drier one. “Which way does it go?” Joseph asked.

There was silence. I got out of bed, put on a robe and came out into the big room. By the door the two men stood looking at a large rectangular canvas, perhaps 6×4. On it were painted stripes, a gold one, a green one, a red one, a white one, repeated. Raph was a few feet back examining the painting which Joseph would turn now one way and now another. “It’s hard to say,” Raph said. “What do you think?”

Joseph looked at me and chuckled. “I think vertical.”

“Why?”

“More like prison bars.”

Raph’s face fell. His ebullience was always perched at the margin. “Do you really think so? What do you think Alex?” His voice was becoming plaintive.

“Oh, I thought it was supposed to be nonfigurative, without narrative content, a statement of pure form.”

“Oh yes, I see,” Raph said, back up on the razor. “Well let’s try it horizontal for a while then and if it feels too ocean linerish we’ll make it into a prison. Heh heh heh.”

Joseph leaned the canvas against the wall on the back of the loft, near Sally’s and my room, where all the canvas’s ended up. It joined a bunch of abstractions he had made with arbitrary procedures on masonite. I went into the kitchen to make coffee. “Coffee?” I yelled.

“No,” said Raph.

“Only if we have ice,” Joseph said.

I put a pot on and joined them at the window. “So Lydia’s not around?” Raph asked.

Joseph and I looked at each other. “Not much,” he said. “New boy friend.”

“Is he a degenerate, someone who slaps her around? These guys think they’re something and she falls for it. I was hoping to see her before Passover. Just to go over the plans. You’re sure you can drive in the city?” he asked me. “It’s an Accord.”

“I think I can handle it Raph. Are you parked on the street?”

“Nah, I put it in the garage. Age makes you a pussy. Age and money. You got enough money, and you can go in your pants like a little child and someone will clean you up. Cynthier has the ticket. Put it on our card.”

I poured a cup for me and yelled, “There’s ice,” and sat down at the table. Raph joined me while Joseph made iced coffee.

“Are we on for dinner?”

“Uh, is that what Sally said?” I asked.

He laughed. “You’ve learned early.”

I sighed and gave up my protest without a wheeze. “What time and where?”

“Let’s just meet here at 6. Go out for an early dinner.”

Joseph sat down. “So who is coming?”

“Well, Bubbe and Isaiah, Lee and Bee, oh yes, and your distant cousin Moishe, he’s about a hundred years old. You never met him. Last time I saw him he had an ear infection, couldn’t hear a thing so everyone shouted at him. I don’t think he had a clue but who knows. He’s a World War I vet. He fought for the Axis powers. The enemy. Austria. He got captured by the British and they put him in a POW camp in Italy. He rotted in there till‘20, ‘21? The things they never teach you. Thousands died, a third of all the prisoners. And that was after the war. But Moishe? He walks out of there and all the way home to his village in Galicia. Anyway, he didn’t like Poland. He was a communist in those days too. He came here to work in a factory but after Israel, I don’t know, something happened to him politically. These guys when they’re young are real ball busters, but you put a few miles on them and they grow their beards and sit around drinking coffee and complaining. I swear to you, you’d go to his house in Queens and it was bedlam. All that shouting. He married some Orthodox woman. Nothing but kids in that house, it was like they were Catholic or something. Now he’s the only one left. Half his kids are dead. He knew my Grandfather back there in Poland. They weren’t just cousins, they were friends. So he’ll be there.” We looked at the floor and out the window. Joseph smoked a cigarette and Raph brooded. Finally he said, “I’m just worried something’s happened to her. No one’s heard a thing, for days?”

“There might have been a message,” Joseph said, so casually it seemed calculated to torture him even more.

“I’m sure she just needs to be out of touch for a while,” I said. Then I added the always helpful, “What can you do?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I’m going to the hardware store to get some things to hang that picture in the hall there of the big room, so when you open the door, before you see the Triptych, you see the stripes.”

When Sally awoke I made coffee and we sat at the table. It was my fourth cup and things were beginning to wash out. The taste of coffee permeated my cheeks and tongue and was starting to come out my pores. Joseph was lying on the couch reading with the TV on.

“So what was that all about?” she asked.

“We’re meeting for dinner at six, when he’s going to hand over the keys. And he’s worried about Lydia.”

“I don’t see how she could do this to him. It’s unconscionable.” She sipped her coffee. She was tired. Her eyes were dull and her skin was bleached, puffy, her lips dry and cracked.

“It’s at least possible that something bad has happened. You saw her when she left.”

“Uh,” she groaned. I had exasperated her. “Every year she does this. Plays on his guilt by making him and everyone else think something truly awful has happened to her. But I’m not buying it. She’s crashing on different floors every night, or sleeping every two days. She’ll ride the subway. She’ll take the 5:30 train to New Haven and sleep all the way there and then go crash in the library at Yale.”

Joseph said, “I did that once.”

“He’s just all eaten up with guilt. It’s pathetic.”

“Her friend was very sick it sounds like.”

“If she read the papers she’d have some idea of what’s going on with that.”

“You don’t know what he’s got. The point is she was frightened and upset.”

“Lydia is a drama queen. She has been all her life. She’s gonna walk in here in time to go out to the beach.” We sat in silence watching the building across the street. “Well, I can’t wait for a break from Merchant.”

“Just being out at the beach will be nice. It’s supposed to be sixty and sunny all weekend.”

“Where’s dinner?”

“He hasn’t said.”

“I hope he doesn’t tell the turd story.”

“The what?”

“You haven’t heard it?”

“The turd story, no.”

“I’m surprised he didn’t tell you. I’ve heard it twice. Well, I’d rather just let him do it.”

“I’m curious now. You’ve aroused me with shit.”

“I am only revealing the hidden signifier. So where were you last night? I got home and you were mysteriously gone.”

“Tammy called. She was very upset because her father got busted giving someone a blow job at the 96th Street Exit off the Henry Hudson.”

“So what did she want?” She sounded a little jealous.

I said, “Want? She wanted to thread her meat on my skewer.”

“That’s gross.”

“She wanted to hear Elton John records. I couldn’t sleep anyway. One of my regulars it turns out is a librarian at Columbia. He pretty much offered me a job there. He said to come by his office, he’d show me the stacks. I want to ask him about library school.”

“What do you mean library school?”

“We’ve talked about it.”

“But I don’t even know where I’m going to grad school.”

“Do you even know when or if?”

“That’s ludicrous. Of course I’m going. If not in the fall, then I’ll go in the spring or the fall after. Let’s see how things work out.”

“I have to do something. I can’t just keep working shit jobs watching you work with your friends all night long, and sleep half the day and then go off to the library. It’s like, we trudge together, but we never see each other. At least if I were in school too I’d have that to do.”

“We see each other every day, twice a day, and we sleep all night together. I don’t call fucking you trudging.”

“But sometimes you’re out and I’m in, and less often the other way, you’re in and I’m out, like last night–”

“Last night! More like I was out while you were in.”

Jesus! I loved talking to her. “If I don’t have a more serious life, what am I gonna do with you? I have to have something here. I can find a school near where you go, but I have to know that that is what I should be doing, not have it be something I do with an expectation and then you don’t go.”

She fluffed up her hair and rubbed her eyes. “I don’t have any idea of what you mean.”

“I mean a couple of things. I mean first of all I’m not going to apply to schools outside of the city if we aren’t going there together. And I also mean that the fact that it’s not equal between us will start to make a difference when you go to grad school. So I need to go to grad school or library school–”

“Of course you do. But if you’re asking me to commit to something a year from now.”

I felt this cold open up in my gut. “What.”

“I’m just saying a year is a long time.”

What was I hearing, I wondered. There seemed to be some awful, fatal end to this line of conversation. “You don’t see yourself with me in a year?”

“I’m not saying that.”

“Yes you are. That’s what you said.”

“What I said is a year is a long time.”

“And commit. You used that word. I can tell you that I can commit to being with you in a year and a half, that’s not a problem.”

“Of course I plan on being with you. I have no plan not to be with you. I have no plan. There can be no plan.”

“What can there be?”

“What there is.” I thought about it. This was the turn. I took it. I nodded. She said, “You can plan on grad school or library school.”

“Well library I think. You yourself agreed with Roy.”

“Library, yes, OK about the library school. Just, see what the deadlines are.”

“You have no idea where you’re applying?”

She thought about it and shook her head. “Definitely Hopkins, Yale, Cornell, Brown, Duke…”

“Duke’s down south.”

“Yeah, but it’s an oasis. You’d never know it. People fly in and out.” I wondered what my mother would say to that.

We showered and dressed and picked up our dirty clothes from around the loft. Raph came in out of breath and observed, “It’s a beautiful day.” Joseph stretched out. He was in faded black sweat pants and a white T-shirt. His pale bony shins stood exposed when he got up and walked barefoot over to his father. They started to putter and by five had finished putting up the stripes, finally in the horizontal position, after many alternations, all carried forth in patient, slightly ironic conversations that were clipped, despite containing immeasurable variation in meaning.

On the table were take-out cartons of hot and sour soup and cold sesame noodles and broccoli with garlic sauce. Sally was folding laundry from the baskets and the kitchen was hot and humming. It had a L’Assomoire feel of slow corruption with steam and irons.

Raph went out to meet Cynthia while we finished packing. Joseph carefully stowed away two bottles of vodka and four bottles of wine, wrapping each in tee shirts so they wouldn’t clink. Everyone was afraid to drink in front of Raph, though on holidays they did. Cynthia was drunk at Thanksgiving, by the time I arrived at 11. She met me at the door with a square plastic tumbler of red wine, and said hello grandly, giving me a kiss on the cheek and hugging me. “Come in, come in, have a glass of wine,” she said, leading me by the hand past the table heaped with spoils. They ate Thanksgiving at 9pm.

Guests at the Babel home usually brought their private stashes and on festive evenings, wherever Raph was there was a room full of people who had all snuck off to pour a couple of shots into their coffee cups. It was hard to imagine he didn’t know what was going on but the man walked around in a convincing impersonation of a fog. Sometimes the dumb dogs aren’t so much dumb as disobedient. Animals turn you into an authoritarian, they reveal your hidden totalitarian impulses, feed desires for adulation and order. It is corrupting. Soon your tautology is in place. The rebel dog is a dog who has no intelligence for the intelligent dog obeys. Perhaps then he checked out because he disagreed but didn’t wish to spoil the fun.

We took the train to Canal and walked to this Sichuan restaurant on East Broadway.

After we had ordered the food, during a lull in the conversation, Raph turned to me and said, “I haven’t told you about the floating turd.”

Cynthia shook her head and drank down a cup of tea and poured another from the steel pitcher. “Do we have to?”

“Don’t be so up tight,” Raph said. “It’s a funny story, like a Bunuel movie. Here we are in a South Hampton mansion, I don’t know what else to call it–”

“It’s a bungalow. Two bedrooms and a modest yard.”

“A half a million bucks, at least! I think more like two. It’s on the beach for god sake.”

“They’re friends. Business friends, but good people.”

“Who said bad people? Three couples for dinner, in a mansion, bungalow, whatever, there’s wine on the table, a white cloth, crystal chandelier. You’d think in vino veritas, huh?

“Dinner’s over, we blow out the candles and take our coffee to the living room. I had to go to the bathroom, so I excuse myself and go into the downstairs bathroom and there’s this turd floating in the toilet. To be sanitary, I flushed before I did my thing, but it doesn’t go down. I take a leak and flush again but still, it won’t go down. For some reason, it disturbed me. I didn’t want people to think it was mine! Can you imagine? I slink back to the living room and as the night wore on, I noticed how each person would excuse themselves and return with this pained, melancholy expression on their faces. I was really struck by it.

“Towards the end I started to watch our host, a man I had barely acknowledged for years, because you know, we never, whatever, anyway, it was plain as day that he was suppressing a laugh. It was like, we were in his social experiment. He was fucking with us and observing the results. I started to look around the room. There were pictures (inane ones), placed in odd spots on the wall. I’ve read about people who cut peepholes into their walls and install cameras and mikes.”

“Oh,” moaned Cynthia. “It gets longer and more involved each time, as if you were rehearsing this.”

“Where’s the food? Is it taking a long time?” he asked.

“We just ordered,” she said.

“It’s been five minutes,” Sally said. “I wonder why it didn’t go down.”

“What do I know about that, the physiology of it.” He looked around for our waiter and then at each of us, as if he were trying to ascertain guilt and innocence.

The food arrived, thank god. “So, what time will you leave?” Cynthia asked, taking a dumpling and passing them on to Joseph. Joseph was suddenly alert. A question had been asked. He looked at Sally.

“Eight,” she said. “We’ll be there at–”

Sally looked at me. I said, “If we don’t get lost and there’s no traffic and nothing happens, 10:30.”

“All right,” she nodded. “I got the lamb from the butcher, and the cleaning woman came three times this week, but I’m only now done with the laundry, so you will have to make up all the beds, but I’ll get out the china and the silverware. I got what you need for the haroseth.”

Joseph said, “As long as you remember the gefilte fish. ‘He took one part of the carp unto him and one part of the pike unto him and one part of the whitefish unto him and made of it a paste.’”

“Maybe it wasn’t a turd at all,” Raph said. “Maybe it was a matzo ball! Who’s having ribs?”

“You ordered those,” Sally said.

“Sally makes the best haroseth,” Cynthia said.

“Oh please mom it’s just the Israeli Folk Dancing Club recipe, which is the same as the one on the back of the package.”

“Now dear, it’s not about the notes, you know that, it’s the way you play them.”

It was a long night made longer by the cold reverberations of our talk, what she had stirred up, the future, time. I felt safe again, but with a difference, I had glimpsed that this would end. We walked up Mott to Canal and then over to Mulberry Street for biscotti and espresso. Nothing tasted good. The lemon ice was bitter, and the espresso full of dregs. We put them in a cab to Penn Station and as it pulled away Raph rolled down the window and yelled, “Tell Lydia to call if you talk to her. The machine is on all the time.”

The machine  will not stop

driving our unwinding sheet

Back at the loft we found Christopher and Sylvio seated in the dark at the long worktable by the door. They weren’t saying a word. Sylvio had a cigarette going. We entered speaking loudly and turned on the light. They flinched.

“Could you turn that off please?” Christopher said.

Joseph was putting on the TV. Sally shut off the light and said, “What are you doing?”

Christopher said, “Mushrooms,” and started to laugh. Sylvio smiled. I saw his teeth! Was he eating mushrooms as well?

“It’s much better in the dark,” Sylvio said. “We were sitting with the light on before, but it was too agitating.”

“I think we said aggravating.”

“Possibly we did.”

I sat on the couch next to Joseph. We were all packed up. There was nothing to do. So we watched The Getaway.

Christopher and Sylvio sat for a long while in the dark and then joined us around the TV. They were too afraid to go anywhere. Sally and I went to bed at two when they put on Tom Snyder.