Lola Bensky

by Lily Brett

  Pimp was a licensed private detective. She owned her own agency. She was forty-seven. She had been divorced three times and had three children, Esther, Elijah and Ezekiel. The three children were from her first marriage. Her first ex-husband, David Feingold, had agreed that the children could be called Feinblatt, which, as Pimp had pointed out to him, already contained half of his name. David Feingold was a very reasonable man, unlike Pimp’s second and third ex-husbands, and Pimp appreciated that.

  Pimp, when greeted with ‘How are you?’, unlike Lola, never paused to consider the actual question. She never wondered whether her kidneys were functioning well or whether her gastrointestinal tract was intact and unimpeded. Pimp’s corporeal condition was something she hardly thought about. Twinges in her abdomen, aches in her legs or arms, or a pain, an inflammation or throb or cramp or stitch in any of her other body parts went uninterpreted and uninvestigated.

  Lola tried to keep in check her anxieties about possible physical ailments. She knew her fear of illness or disease, or any bodily disorder, was linked to being the child of death-camp survivors. She tried to bear this in mind when she found herself panicking about her spleen or adrenal glands. Lola knew that terrible things could be done to bodies. She knew that in the male experimental section of Block 28 in Auschwitz, petroleum substances were injected and rubbed into the skin of prisoners’ arms and legs. This caused huge abscesses, which contained a black liquid that reeked of petroleum. The Germans conducted experiments like this in an attempt to recognise any self-inflicted wounds among those Germans who were trying to avoid military service. The experiments were like a children’s game with whimsical rules and nonsensical conclusions.

  ‘Great,’ Pimp always replied to anyone inquiring into her well-being. Great was a word Lola could never force out of her vocal chords. Lola thought very few things were great. Almost everything could be qualified.

  Mr Someone Else, when asked how he was, often said, ‘Fabulous’. His reply made Lola’s anxiety levels soar. She felt compelled to offer up a prayer or touch wood or blink five times. She had no evidence that the blinking or the prayers or rushing for a piece of wood worked. But then, as she regularly told herself, she had very little evidence that they didn’t.

  Mr Someone Else said ‘fabulous’ with the joy of someone who savours his happiness. Feeling happy didn’t bother him. Lola tempered her happiness. She let it surface in dribs and drabs so that it wouldn’t be too noticeable to herself and to others. Outright joy was something that, despite three analysts on two continents and thousands of hours of analysts’ couches, she felt she would never master. She was so much more at home with uncertainty and anguish.

  Mr Someone Else woke up almost every morning feeling happy. Happy and peaceful. And grateful. Grateful for Lola, grateful for the three children, grateful to be living in New York and grateful to be alive. He was a painter. He painted beautiful and moving abstract images of mortality, and the fragility and poetry of what it meant to be human. Abstract images of life and its passages and pathways. Mr Someone Else worked well, he ate well, he emptied his bowels regularly and he slept well.

  Lola had trouble sleeping. She thought she’d probably had trouble sleeping since she was a child. She often had nightmares. One of the recurring nightmares started when Lola was about seven. In these nightmares, she would be upright in a universe, hundreds of feet in the air. She would be walking and talking, in mid-air, in this elevated galaxy. It all looked normal, but hundreds of feet up in the air was not where Lola wanted to be. She would try to get herself back down to earth, but nothing she could do could budge her out of the sky and back onto solid ground. She used to wake up terrified. And began to dread going to bed at night. These and other recurring nightmares stayed with Lola for years. And so did the dread of going to bed.

  In later years, Lola wondered what she had been doing up in the air. Was she up there with all the dead? She felt a familiarity with the dead. She felt she had memories of people she had never met. Cousins whose voices she’d never heard. An aunt with Lola’s overly curly hair and her nose and high cheekbones and patterns of speech and wide feet. Was she with an uncle, who was pinching her cheeks and telling her that she looked like both of her grandmothers? She could see herself floating in these nocturnal journeys and outings, but couldn’t quite make out who she was floating with.

  ‘It was a little bit easier at night,’ Renia used to say to her. Renia was talking about the death camp and how she lay on her bunk with her neighbours’ ribs and wrists and ankles digging into her, and, wide awake, dreamt of her mother’s thick potato soup and her honey cake. ‘It was nearly like being with my mother, nearly like eating a meal,’ she would say.

  Lola had recently had dinner with an acquaintance, Rebecca Eisenhood, a lawyer whose mother had also been in Auschwitz. ‘My mother is the happiest person I know,’ Rebecca Eisenhood had said. ‘My mother is always happy, always kind, always looking on the bright side. She wakes up cheerful and always cheers up everyone around her.’ Lola had known, immediately, that there was no future in the friendship with Rebecca Eisenhood.

  ‘She’s the happiest person you know?’ Lola said.

  ‘Yes. She’s happy all the time,’ Rebecca said.

  ‘There’s something wrong with that,’ Lola said.

  ‘What?’ said Rebecca. ‘It’s an inspiration.’

  Lola thought Rebecca’s mother’s state was more distressing than inspirational. No one should be happy all the time.

  ‘Your mother was in Auschwitz, wasn’t she?’ Lola said.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Rebecca Eisenhood said, in an oddly jaunty tone of voice, as though a stay in Auschwitz was, like an expensive spa or Buddhist retreat, restorative and rejuvenating.

  ‘Does your mother ever talk about what happened to her in Auschwitz?’ Lola asked.

  ‘Of course not,’ Rebecca Eisenhood said. ‘Why should she?’

  Lola noticed that Rebecca Eisenhood, who had pale skin, pale hair and pale eyelashes, just picked at her food. Picked with miniscule little flicks of her fork. Actually she was prodding the food rather than picking at it, rearranging the carefully plated dish of falafel-crusted tilapia and roasted fiddlehead ferns and a quinoa couscous.

  ‘I’m so full,’ Rebecca Eisenhood said at the end of the meal. Lola looked at the rearranged plate. The tilapia was untouched, not one of the fiddlehead ferns was missing. About a dozen grains of quinoa seemed to have gone astray and landed scattered and disarrayed on the table.

  Oh, God, there’s something wrong with all of us, Lola thought. Something did seem out of whack with almost all the children of survivors of death camps she’d met. They were, too often, dour or excessively restrained or seemed blanketed by a fog.

  No wonder it was a relief for Lola to become Pimp. Pimp wasn’t dodging afflictions and impediments. Pimp didn’t have a lot of doubt. She didn’t have a lot of fear. She just did whatever she had to do. If she had to fly to the other side of the country, she got on a plane and flew there. She could sit in the middle of a crowded subway seat. She could stand in large crowds. She didn’t examine her every move. She ate what she wanted to. She had no idea of the calorie value of an apple, a carrot, a boiled egg or a block of chocolate.

  When Lola was Pimp, she felt calm. Rearranging and adjusting the small and large moments in Pimp’s existence gave Lola a serenity. She put the words into sentences and phrases with a peacefulness she rarely felt. She shifted semicolons and quotation marks with the tranquillity of a Zen priest. There was a gratifying orderliness about ordering and reordering worlds and words. About placing and replacing vows, vowels and events.

  Lola loved words. They were so reliable. Verbs and pronouns didn’t suddenly decide they wouldn’t speak to each other. Sentences stayed stable. Phrases and clauses didn’t develop dislikes or become erratic. Any shocking revelations between vowels and consonants were mostly in Lola’s control.

  A single word could be so complete. Like the word ‘plethora’. P
lethora contained no absence. Lola felt filled with absence. Absence could be surprisingly filling. It seemed to take up a lot of space. Lola often wondered how something that wasn’t there could be so present. There was the absence of people. The aunts, uncles, cousins she was meant to have grown up among. The grandparents she had never met but missed. There was the absence of answers and the absence of questions. Questions that were not answered and questions that were never asked. There was the absence of her mother. Her mother, who had so frequently felt absent in life, was, dead, very absent.

  There were words that were weighted with absence. Lola couldn’t say the word ‘goodbye’. For Lola, the word contained a departure as rigidly and firmly final as death. ‘See you, see you,’ she would chorus when someone she loved, or even just cared about, said goodbye. The absence pierced Lola and left large gaps. Gaps that made her feel unsteady and unanchored. Surrounded by people who loved her, Lola felt alone and in peril.

  Sometimes, when being touched by Mr Someone Else, or walking with her son or talking to Mrs Gorgeous, Lola felt whole. And at peace. A peace that infiltrated her bones and her brow. The same peacefulness she felt when she was assembling and disassembling words and paragraphs and chapters.

  It was surprisingly satisfying to fit the pieces of a detective plot together. Like slotting the curved and irregular parts of a jigsaw puzzle into a clear picture. The details were all there. All visible. Nothing was missing. There were no loose threads and no ragged edges. It was soothing for Lola to unravel and uncover the cases that the Ultra-Private Detective Agency investigated. To decode and deconstruct the mysterious and the unsettling.

  Lola used to think that psychoanalysis would do this for her. Locate and root out everything that was disturbing or disquieting. She used to think that analysis was the answer. She had a less idealised view now. She thought analysis could help, but it couldn’t rebuild or reconstruct or even renovate some of the ingrained infrastructure of her psyche. She had thought that with the decades of analysis she’d had, she would be reborn. Instead, she was grappling with many of the same issues. With possibly more understanding and, now that the agoraphobia had subsided, more equilibrium. Still, there was so much she couldn’t get rid of.

  She still often woke up in the morning engulfed in fear. She had to get out of bed, walk around, brush her teeth and see that nothing had changed. That her teeth looked the same. That her hair and her eyes and her nose were still there. That she was in SoHo, New York. That it was just another ordinary day. And nothing ominous was on its way. Unlike Mr Someone Else, Lola never woke up unhurried and happy. She got out of bed as soon as she woke up, in an effort to shake off the half-light of the unconscious. She had to show herself that she was in her own home. That everything was the same as it had been yesterday and the day before.

  Lola looked at Patrice Pritchard. She had no idea what Patrice had been saying. Lola had switched off, something she was trying to stop herself doing, and hadn’t heard a word Patrice had said. Patrice was now talking about paperbacks and mass paperbacks and author demographics.

  ‘Next month we’ll start the publicity campaign for the paperback,’ Patrice said. ‘We’re pitching you as the author of sensitive celebrity profiles.’

  ‘Why do you have to say “celebrity”?’ Lola said. ‘I’ve interviewed a ton of people no one’s ever heard of. A shoe-repair guy from Uzbekistan, identical-twin kidney transplant surgeons, a clown and a cardiothoracic surgeon, among others.’

  ‘Why a cardiothoracic surgeon?’ said Patrice Pritchard.

  ‘Cardiothoracic surgery has always fascinated me,’ Lola said. ‘It requires brute strength and enormous sensitivity.’

  ‘You are strange,’ said Patrice Pritchard. ‘I don’t mean strange in a bad way,’ she added. ‘I mean you are a very sensitive person. And a sensitive writer.’ Lola didn’t mind being called strange. She didn’t think it was offensive. She was a bit tired of being thought of as sensitive.

  If she hadn’t been thought of as a sensitive writer, she would never have met Mr Someone Else. She had been asked to do a profile of his dying wife, a poet. ‘We need someone sensitive,’ the newspaper editor had said. Lola had met Mr Someone Else, briefly. They had talked for two or three minutes when she had arrived to interview his wife. Lola knew that Mr Someone Else and his wife had had an unhappy marriage and had been separated when she had been diagnosed with breast cancer. He had gone back to her and nursed her through the two years of her illness. Two weeks after Lola’s article had come out, Mr Someone Else’s wife had died. She was thirty-eight. Mr Someone Else was thirty-two.

  Lola saw him again a few weeks later, in a small bookshop in an inner suburb of Melbourne. He almost ran over to her. ‘I was born to be with you,’ he said. Lola was startled. Few people had greeted her that way. She started laughing. ‘I’ve been dreaming about you my whole life,’ he said. Lola didn’t know what to say. She started to laugh again. Six weeks later they were together.

  ‘I didn’t mean to say that you are strange,’ Patrice Pritchard said.

  ‘I don’t mind being thought of as strange,’ Lola said.

  ‘But I don’t think of you as strange,’ Patrice said. ‘I think of you as very sensitive.’

  Maybe her so-called sensitivity accounted for some of her phobias, Lola thought. Until she was in her mid-twenties, she had been fearless. She could do anything, go anywhere. Her third analyst had told her she had been counter-phobic. And now, here she was, almost fifty-two and placing endless restrictions on herself. She could only sit in an aisle seat at the cinema and at the theatre. She was unable to get on the subway. As soon as she started the descent below ground, her heart would begin to pound.

  ‘The line we’re going with for the paperback,’ Patrice Pritchard said, ‘is “Author of sensitive celebrity profiles creates hilariously sensitive private detectives.”’

  ‘Can you be hilariously sensitive?’ said Lola.

  ‘Of course you can,’ said Patrice.

  ‘Do you think they are sensitive?’ Lola said.

  ‘Of course they are sensitive,’ said Patrice. ‘Harry can barely speak or leave his computer. And poor Schlomo feels sorry for everyone, including the perps.’

  Lola loved hearing Harry spoken about as though he were a real person. She thought of Harry and Schlomo as real people. She felt as though she knew them and their families well. She felt a sympathy for Schlomo’s wife, as Schlomo, apart from being able to focus very sharply on how to switch lanes when he has driving, could be irritatingly absent-minded. And his fixation on the weather and the umbrella that was always affixed to him could drive Lola, who herself had more than a passing interest in the weather, mad.

  ‘It’s so fabulous to have you as an author,’ Patrice Pritchard said. ‘It has restored my faith in love and marriage and success.’ Although Lola didn’t quite understand what Patrice Pritchard meant, she felt that it was intended as a compliment. However, the wide-reaching implications of Lola’s supposed achievements in terms of love, marriage and book sales had made Lola’s chest feel tight again. When her chest constricted like this, Lola found it hard to take deep breaths. Her chest didn’t seem to want to expand. As though it was cringing in horror, hunched and bent under the weight of that all-encompassing, ill-placed praise.

  Patrice kissed Lola goodbye, twice. Once on each cheek. Lola was surprised. At their previous meetings, Patrice had offered her a quick, firm handshake. Maybe this new affection was derived from the imagined perfection Patrice had bestowed upon her. Lola was glad to be leaving. She hoped that outside, in the familiar carbon monoxide-tinged air, her chest might un-crush itself and expand.

  Walking home, Lola looked at herself in the reflection of the window of Sur La Table, a kitchenware store on Spring Street. She definitely wasn’t thin, she thought to herself. She wasn’t fat, at least she wasn’t fat in places that could easily be seen. Her thighs were still a bit chunky, but then very few people ever saw Lola’s thighs.

&nbs
p; She had lost weight slowly. All those hours on analysts’ couches had finally removed some of her hunger. She had also been aided by becoming very anxious when she overate. She tried to stick to seventeen-hundred to eighteen-hundred calories a day when she was at home, and tried to make sure she enjoyed what she ate and didn’t go overboard on any chocolate dessert when she ate out. Lola wondered if Renia would have been happy about Lola’s weight loss. Or would it have removed a bond between them? Or worse, maybe the weight loss would have unnerved Renia? Lola sometimes thought that she steadied her own nerves by continuing to feel fat.

  Lola inhaled deeply. Her chest had decompressed. Being outside had helped. Lola loved the smell of the streets in New York. The particular combination of food, cars and people. Lola loved New York. It had taken her a while to settle in. To acclimate to the fast speed and the direct speech employed by most New Yorkers. Now, she liked the lack of circumlocution. The lack of convoluted queries that circled and orbited the nature of the inquiry, winding and twisting and turning, and exasperating everyone on the way with a feigned politeness. Lola didn’t miss sentences such as ‘You wouldn’t, by any chance, happen to know where I could find the subway?’ instead of ‘Where’s the subway?’

  The direct language in the city extended to its terminology. When Lola had first heard that all the lofts in their building were being exterminated, she was bewildered. The notice seemed ordinary enough. The exterminator will begin on the lower floors at eight a.m., the notice said. Lola watched a neighbour read the notice. He was Jewish and didn’t seem at all panicked.

  Lola had thought that ‘extermination’ only referred to the murder of Jews. She found out that it also included insects and rodents. The pest exterminator visited the building every month. It took Lola quite a few months not to feel alarmed at the thought of mass exterminations.

  Lola knew that when she got home, Mr Someone Else would be in his studio painting to loud music. Probably Bob Dylan. Luckily, Lola’s study was at the other end of the loft. And when she shut her study door, she effectively shut out Bob Dylan. Lola also knew that when Mr Someone Else saw her, he would put down his brushes and come over and kiss her. He never just kissed her once. He showered her with kisses until she either started laughing or wriggled out of his grip. Just like her mother.