My Old Man

by Amy Sohn

  A cute brunette waitress with thick but perfectly shaped eyebrows came up to me. I held up two fingers. I love being able to hold up two fingers; it’s a privilege I don’t often have. She ushered me to a table in the back and as I was taking my seat I saw Powell coming through the door. He was wearing a loose linen white shirt that looked expensive and hid his paunch. He scanned the room with an expression devoid of any first-date anxiety and when he spotted me he nodded formally and headed over. As he bent down to sit I got a clear view of the top of his head. He had a comb-back like my dad, but less loss.

  “You’re on time,” he said.

  “I usually never am,” I said. “I overestimated the length of the walk.” He shot me a questioning look and I felt like an idiot for posturing. The top three buttons of his shirt were undone and I noticed some curly black-and-gray hairs protruding from his upper chest. I wanted to rub my face in that gray lawn.

  The waitress came over and set down some menus. “Good to see you,” he told her congenially.

  “You too,” she said.

  Here I was thinking I was the mayor of Cobble Hill when he was the big guy on campus. I wondered how often he came here, if he was in the habit of eating alone. New York was the only city in the world that attached no shame to solitary dining. I once saw Diane Sawyer eating a pastrami sandwich alone at a diner on Forty-third Street and it made my entire month.

  “Can I get you two anything to drink?” said the waitress.

  “I was maybe going to order a glass of wine,” I said hesitantly.

  “Why don’t we get a bottle?” asked Powell. Again with the up-sell. Either he was into me or he was a lush.

  “That would be fine,” I said, trying not to sound too excited. He looked at the wine list, reached into his shoulder bag, and pulled out a pair of bifocals.

  “Do you prefer red or white?” he asked, perching them low on his nose. I wanted to yank them off and straddle his face.

  “Red.”

  “Hmmm. How ’bout the Côtes du Rhône?”

  “Great,” I said, pretending I had a clue about wine when we barely served any at the bar.

  When the waitress left he rested both arms on the table and said, “Have you been a victim of the Merlot crime?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Most bartenders force it on women,” he said. “Say you walk into a bar alone, you’re waiting for an inordinately attractive gentleman friend to meet you, champing at the bit to see his dashing silhouette”—he flashed his eyes—“and the bartender says, ‘Can I get you anything to drink?’ You say, ‘Yes, what kind of red wine do you have?’ Nine times out of ten he says, ‘We’ve got a very nice Merlot,’ and you wind up ordering it.”

  “I have noticed that,” I said.

  “There’s this assumption that women want a light wine, a smooth one, instead of something more complex and heavy. And often the Merlot is the more expensive. So they push it on the broads. And I think it’s a crime against humanity!” His eyes were wide and deranged. I wondered whether he felt this passionate about all things or just red wine injustice.

  The waitress came back with the bottle, presented it, and poured some in his glass. He took a sip, cocked his head, and said, “Lovely.” I loved that “lovely.” Powell came across cultured but not stuck up. The waitress filled my glass, then his, and disappeared. He raised his glass and said, “To the death of Merlot.”

  “To the death of Merlot,” I said. We clinked and I took a sip. It was rich. “That tastes good.”

  “What did I tell ya?” he said. He put his down and moved the base around in a circle on the table before taking his next sip. As I watched him swirl that base I felt as though I was on a bona fide date with a bona fide man, not a boy, not a pansy, not a pushover. I wanted to be his trophy wife.

  I imagined him taking me to the theater and introducing me as his little rabbi. We could go to art galleries and independent film awards and whenever we went out he’d know the right wine to order. As soon as he became my boyfriend he’d start sending a black limo to pick me up from Roxy and take me to his place. When he opened the door I’d fall into his arms and tell him the horrible stories of the married men and yuppie snobs. “There, there,” he’d cluck as he kissed away my tears and carried me onto the bed for some CAT.

  One night as I was telling him about the evil Italian guy who liked the way I shook, he’d get a look on his face that I knew meant inspiration was about to strike. He’d race to his Herman Miller chair, stick a sheet into the typer (he’d be too much of a purist to use a computer), and write the opening scene of his most brilliant film, about a rabbinical-school dropout bartender who kept crying on the job. Chai-ote Ugly. It would be sad and funny, true yet surreal, a really good cartography of the unique concerns of My Generation.

  He would write one scene a night, as I sat on the bed and watched his back, and when he reached the last page he would yawn, “I’m a genius,” and throw me to the bed, where I’d joyfully let him violate me. When he finished he’d send it to his agency, Undertake, the hottest in Hollywood (I knew it was his because I’d seen his name mentioned in a recent New York Times article about them), and they’d set it up immediately.

  Within an hour Kirsten Dunst would sign on to play the lead role of Reva the bartender, and the producers would insist she wear a prosthetic ski-jump Jewish nose, even though mine isn’t ski-jump at all. Penny Marshall, the world’s most raging quasi-Jew, would sign on to direct, and it would wind up getting nominated for three Oscars—one for Penny, one for Kirsten, and one for the makeup woman who did the ski-jump nose.

  The night of the awards they’d haul a TV into Roxy and all the morons who hit on me would stare slack-jawed as I came down the red carpet with Powell on my arm, wondering why I never took them up on their offers when clearly I had a fetish for old ugly men. I’d return from LA to a huge parade on Smith Street, so elaborate it would rival the opening ceremony for the Gowanus Canal, and I’d be hailed as the Neighborhood Gal That Inspired an Oscar-Winning Film.

  Powell was inspecting his menu. Even though he had on his glasses he was holding it a foot away, which seemed to defeat the point of wearing glasses. As he read he reached his hand up and stroked the ends of his mustache with his index and middle finger. I wondered if he knew he’d made the Universal Sign for Cunnilingus. He closed the menu with a loud contented sigh and said, “I’m ready.”

  “What are you getting?”

  “The ribeye steak. You?” I inspected the fish choices. They all looked kind of bland. Except for the lobster.

  The last time I had eaten shellfish was tenth grade, when as president of BReaSTY I arranged a lecture by a Staten Island professor who’d written a book on Judaism and vegetarianism. I was so inspired by his take on Judaism’s mandate of kindness to animals I became a vegetarian the next day, which made me kosher by default. I never ate much shellfish anyway and I hated the smell of bacon, so going kosher was easy. By senior year of Wesleyan I had gone back to meat eating but I never went back to shellfish because it made me too uncomfortable. The thought of eating a fish that could walk made me ill, like a form of evil so gross I wouldn’t be able to take one swallow.

  But now it all seemed stupid and pointless. I hated the idea that what you ate made you a better or worse Jew. The point of kashrut was to make you think about being Jewish every time you put something in your mouth and tonight I wanted to put something in my mouth that wasn’t Jewish at all.

  The waitress came over. Powell ordered and I announced proudly, “I’m going to get the lobster.”

  “Lobster?” he said. “I thought you were a rabbi.” The waitress raised a brow and then moved away.

  “I told you, I dropped out. Besides, the motto of Reform Judaism is ‘choice through knowledge.’ ”

  “I like this branch,” he nodded. “No kosher, and broads can preach. So tell me exactly what happened.”

  I took a big swig of wine and told him how awful and out of place I’d fe
lt at school those first few months. I told him how drippy and nonartistic the other students were, and how most of them were Judaic studies majors with bad skin and huge, unjustified egos. I told him how even the gay students were by the book and obsequious and how all anyone seemed to care about that first year was jockeying for position with professors. Then I told him about my inadvertent murder at Memorial and how it had been the final straw.

  He didn’t say anything for a while and then he nodded and said, “Better you dropped out than lip-synched your way to leadership.”

  “I know,” I said. “I just wish my parents weren’t so disappointed.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-six.”

  “What do you care what your parents think?”

  “I shouldn’t,” I said. “But they live really close by and they’re overinvested in what I do.”

  “Because ya letting them!” he cried. “You’re drawn to the security and complacence of the well-traveled path! And now that you’ve stepped off I guarantee you will pay a price. When I told my mother I was going into the movie industry she came down with pneumonia she was so brokenhearted.”

  “And that’s a good thing?”

  “Of course it is! What a thrilling time this must be for you! How lucky I am to meet you now!” I nodded gingerly, not sure whether he acted like a lunatic with everybody or just with me. “Lemme tell you, it’s no easy process to tear off the shackles of the bourgeois ideal.”

  “What exactly is the bourgeois ideal, Mr. Powell?”

  “You gotta stop calling me that,” he said. “It’s annoying.”

  “Sorry. What exactly is the bourgeois ideal, Hank?”

  “The bourgeois ideal is an inability to think for oneself. A commitment to a lifestyle of pointless, mind-numbing domesticity without any thought as to the implication of the choice. Look around the neighborhood at all these women selling their asses. Shacking up with rich men so they can be spared the process of having to work for a living. It’s a dangerous new trend, this gentrified prostitution, and it frightens me.”

  “Does this have something to do with your divorce?”

  “Of course it has something to do with my divorce! You know how much money I made last year? About a million dollars. You know how much money I have right now? None! Because my ex-wife got all my money in the settlement!”

  “How’d you make a million dollars?”

  “Uncredited rewrites.”

  My career curiosity had overtaken my romantic curiosity. “Really?” I said. “What did you rewrite?”

  “I’d rather not say. But if the Writers Guild weren’t run by a bunch of smog-headed imbeciles I’d have my toilet paper rolling off a platinum statuette. The point is my ex-wife was a feminist when I met her. She didn’t shave her pits. But as soon as the marriage ended she played the damsel in distress. There is no telling what a scorned woman will do under the counsel of a good Jewish attorney. Money turns individuals into animals. My ex-wife is only one of them. The pursuit of bourgeois values corrupts the human soul.” I imagined his wife as litigious and frightening, with humongous fake breasts, triceps of steel, and a fake Catherine Zeta-Jones–esque sheen.

  “What does she do?” I asked.

  “She lives off her alimony!” There were no illusions here; this man would never marry again. “I don’t know why I’m even talking to you,” he said, waving his hand. “You grew up in this neighborhood and liked it enough to stay. Which means you must have a very strong domestic urge yourself.”

  I felt totally attacked. Here I was trying to be a nice piece of ass and he was lumping me in with the Ubermoms. “Hey!” I said. “You live here too!”

  “That’s because I couldn’t afford to buy in Manhattan. You know why? Because my ex-wife got all my money in the settlement!” He sighed, seeming to collect himself slightly. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying you’re like those mother whores. You just have a strong bourgeois leaning. That’s why you wanted to be a rabbi: to make your parents happy.”

  “That’s not true!” I said, a little too loudly. “I became a rabbi because I thought Reform Judaism needed more women, that I could stand a chance of actually changing things.”

  “That’s just white noise,” he said. “You have the obedient mind of an only daughter mixed with the hyperambitious striving of an only son. You’re torn between the feminine and the masculine. You have a real animus about you.”

  “You mean in the Jungian sense?”

  “Yes. I, on the other hand, have a very strong anima, which is what continually ruins me in relationships. I have a maternal urge, an urge to take care, so I seek out women in turmoil. I’m drawn to violent women. Violent and crazy.”

  “I’m not violent or crazy,” I said sadly.

  “Who said I was drawn to you?” I jerked my head up, hurt. His face was deadpan and he gave no sign of reassurance. “Deep down you’re a gullible innocent but on first meeting you project a very strong animus. That’s why I bit into your cookie. So you knew that when it came to me, you could never be the bigger man.”

  “You think I want to be a man?”

  He nodded solemnly like a shrink. “You’re textbook if I ever saw one. You don’t want to accept the things about you that make you female. You want to reject them. That’s why you chose a male occupation. You can never progress until you stop being ruled by your animus. Women can never win. They must be won.”

  “I thought you didn’t believe in The Rules.”

  “I don’t. But I do believe in different sex roles. Twenty years ago I had this dream. I was working as a short-order cook, living in a walk-up in Astoria that overlooked an air shaft. I drank a quart of Jim Beam a day and fell asleep each night on the floor of the kitchen, my mouth pressed against the refrigerator grate. One morning I woke up, my head spinning. I had dreamed that a pigeon and an ant were having a fight, and then the pigeon flew away and shat on the ant’s back, and the ant died, crushed by the weight of the crap. As I awoke I heard these words on my tongue, as clear and vibrant as if God was whispering them in my ear: ‘Women are sin, men want sin. Men are soul, women want soul.’ That’s Aphorism Number One of Powell’s Aphorisms.”

  He stared at me triumphantly as though he’d told me the meaning of life. “I’m not sure what it means,” I said.

  “It’s men who have the connection to the spiritual world!” he exclaimed. “Women want to but they don’t have it. They are anchored, they are sensual and earthy, but they resent it. Men have their heads in the clouds but seek out women so they can be vicariously anchored in the life of the body.”

  I got this image of Priya, my Indian resident advisor frosh year at Wes, staring down at me with disapproval. This was not the kind of stuff you could get away with saying at a left-wing college.

  “Don’t you have it backwards?” I said. “I think it’s women who are more in touch with nature, more spiritual.”

  “No!” he shouted. “Women think they’re in touch with nature but they’re not. They’re not!” His face was red and his eyes were gleaming.

  “What does this have to do with the dream?”

  “The ant was the woman, the pigeon the man.”

  “What does it mean that the pigeon killed the woman with his crap?”

  “There was someone in my life at the time, someone I was angry with. Also, I was having a number of digestive problems as a result of my poor drinking habits.”

  “I think I’m beginning to get it,” I said, grinning. “Women are fire, men are sand. Women are water, men are ice. Women are nature, men are nurture.”

  “Don’t mock my aphorisms,” he said. “That’s Aphorism Number Two of Powell’s Aphorisms.”

  “How many are there?”

  “Five.”

  I wolf-whistled. “That’s a lot.”

  “I’ve been alive a long time.”

  “What are the others?”

  “I can never remember them all at once. That’s one a the downs
ides of being alive a long time.”

  Though I wasn’t sure how I felt about Powell’s philosophy of the sexes, I loved listening to his stories. With guys my own age we got through all our stories early on because we hadn’t lived long enough to fill more. That’s why everything went downhill from there—once you tell all your stories there’s nothing left to do but dissect movies, reference Seinfeld episodes, and complain about your friends behind their backs.

  Powell was a raging narcissist and had read too much Jung but he was awake. Half of me wanted to tell him he was full of it and the other half wanted to keep listening because it was more fun to be with someone crazy than someone wrong.

  So he wasn’t a Jew but what did that matter? We could still make a go of it. At rabbinical school there was an unwritten policy that you couldn’t be ordained if they knew you were living with a goy, but now that I had left, nobody was watching. I could sleep with an insane Gentile, marry him, even.

  Maybe the entire reason Neil Roth had croaked before my eyes was so that I could stop having the wool pulled over them. Maybe he died so I could meet Powell and know not to turn the other way. I wasn’t a flounderer; I was responding to a message from God, a different kind of God than the one I had always envisioned. He wasn’t sitting in a throne but a plush leather armchair and he looked sort of like Hugh Hefner, with a burgundy robe hanging open over his fat naked frame. Instead of yelling at me for having walked out on my calling, he was saying in a complacent Yiddish accent, “Do vat you want. Hev a good time. Don’t answer to anyone but yourself.”

  The waitress came over with the food and set it down in front of us. My lobster looked like it was suffering in that sea of sauce. I tore into a claw, the least sympathetic part.

  “How you doin’ over there?” said Powell.

  “I’m having some trouble with it, actually.”

  He reached over. “You use the nutcracker like this. Then you ease out the flesh.”