We lived together five years. Then one day Stefan left the house and he didn’t come back. Our marriage was ended. And indeed, why not? We had each wearied of the struggle between us. We each wanted to take a breath in rooms free of that oppressive tension. We wanted that more than we wanted to be together. I dismantled the flat, sold everything in it, left graduate school (always an abstraction to me), and returned to New York. I was thirty years old, and I was relieved to be alone. I moved into the little tenement apartment on First Avenue and got myself a job writing for a weekly newspaper. I fixed up the apartment. In no time at all the place was cozy. The colors all worked this time: no surprises between the can and the wall. I had a desk built that was just right for me: high enough, slim enough, manageable enough. I worked during the day, and in the evening I lay down on the couch to read. Often, however, I lost the concentration for reading rather quickly, and then I’d find myself lying there for hours on end, staring into space.
These were years when women like myself were being called New, Liberated, Odd (myself I preferred Odd, I still do), and indeed, I was new, liberated, odd during the day when I sat at the desk, but at night when I lay on the couch staring into space my mother materialized in the air before me, as if to say, “Not so fast, my dear. All is not done between us.”
We are on Delancey Street, walking toward the Williamsburg Bridge. My mother has surprised me by calling to say, “How about walking across the bridge with me to my old neighborhood?” (Her family had moved to Brooklyn a few years before she met my father and Williamsburg had been her last neighborhood as an unmarried girl.)
“But, Ma,” I say, “you hate the Lower East Side. You’re always refusing to cross Houston Street.” (When relatives from Israel want to go to Orchard Street she takes them down to Houston, points across six lanes of traffic, and leaves. “I’ve had enough of Orchard Street,” she tells them.)
“Well, to walk across the bridge, I’ll manage the East Side somehow. Besides, I haven’t been on Delancey Street in thirty years. I’m curious.”
As we cross the crowded, filthy, immigrant street, now black and Puerto Rican instead of Jewish and Italian, she marvels at how changed it all is. I tell her nothing has changed, only the color of the people and the language spoken. The hungry, angling busy-ness of Delancey Street—the cheap clothing stores, the jumbled shoe carts, the linens at discount and the furniture on installment, the thousand hole-in-corner shops selling candy and razor blades, shoelaces and cigarettes, flashlights and clotheslines—is all still in place.
We near Essex Street and my mother says, “Remember the Levinsons? I wonder if the store is still here.”
Remember the Levinsons!
“Of course I remember the Levinsons,” I say. “Yes, I think the store is still here.”
“Do any of the boys work in the store? The youngest one—Davey, was it?—if I remember, he refused. You knew him later, didn’t you?”
“Yes, he refused. Yes, I knew him.”
“Do you ever see him anymore?”
Ten years ago on Fourteenth Street a solidly built, half-bald man wearing a shapeless tweed coat, with soft dark hair curling around a high naked forehead, and dark eyes narrowed behind black-framed glasses, said hesitantly to me, “Is that you?” I stopped and looked hard at the stranger.
“Davey,” I said. “Davey Levinson.”
He smiled at me. “What’re ya doin’ now?”
“I’m a journalist, Davey. I work for newspapers and magazines.”
He peered at me. I was sure he hadn’t understood journalist or newspaper. Then he said, “You like Baudelaire?” and he took Baudelaire out of one tweed pocket. “You like Zen?” he said. “I got Zen, too.” He removed Zen from the other tweed envelope.
Three days later we fell into bed. “There’s a lot of things I can’t do,” Davey said, “but one thing I can do is fuck.” He was as good as his word. We went under together, and stayed under for six months.
I shake my head no, I don’t see Davey anymore.
“What a bunch they were,” my mother laughs as we near the old Levinson clothing store on Essex at the corner of Delancey. “Remember them all? The four boys and Dorothy? And her, the mother? ‘Levinson,’ I used to say to her, ‘take the enema bag off the table before your husband comes home, and the shoes, too.’ But she wouldn’t listen to me. She’d only cry because he didn’t love her. And he? Jake Levinson? He slept with every woman who walked into the store. He never came up to the country to see them the whole summer. Maybe one weekend he came. She’d stand in the kitchen, always in that wet housedress, and cry and cry because he didn’t love her and the children called her imbecile.
“She was so beautiful, poor thing,” my mother says, walking through the blare and garbage of Delancey Street. “Dark and lovely, just like the children. But fat. Oy, was she fat. Remember how fat she was? And she got fatter as the years went on. I came to see her once, here, right here”—she points down Essex Street—“in the apartment above the store. Remember? You came with me. I thought, She’s filling up the room. How will she get out, or back in? But good-natured? None more good-natured than she. When you were sick, and I was falling away from exhaustion, she sat up all night with you, putting mustard plasters on your chest. Remember? It was terrible! All she wanted was Jake, and all she got was sitting up nights with sick children.”
Mrs. Levinson sat up with the children for the rest of her life, and worse, infinitely worse, the children sat up with her. They yelled and screamed, pounded their fists, flung themselves at sex and drugs, night school and mar-nage, and not one of them left Essex Street. When Davey and I met up again he had a sixteen-year-old son. He had gotten a girl in the neighborhood pregnant (“I fucked her on the kitchen sink while her parents were listening to the Yiddish radio station in the next room”), and at nineteen he had been a husband and a father, living down the block from his parents. (Davey on family life: “When my son was an infant my wife put him on the bed without any protection. I told her to put pillows around him. She wouldn’t. One night we were watching TV and I heard from the other room a thud to remember for the rest of my life. I went in and he was laying on the floor like an overturned cockroach, stunned. I went back in the living room. I gave her a shot in the mouth I think she can feel it to this day.”)
We’re nearing the approach to the Williamsburg Bridge. “There’s so much traffic!” my mother cries. “How do we get onto the bridge? I’m confused.” I’m confused myself, the walkway is hard to find. I turn and turn, wheeling amid gas fumes and hamburger grease, rock radio and screaming mothers. Suddenly Delancey Street is overpowering. The frantic accumulation, the noise, the urgency are an oppression. I stand there, feeling ill, and I am remembering how loving Davey had become, finally, oppressive in much the same way: all noise and frenzy, a tumult of poverty and helplessness.
When Davey and I were together we went back one summer afternoon to Ben’s Bungalows. The place was sad, silent, dusty, long fallen into disuse and disrepair. On the bus Davey had become moody. “I would say that I’ve had an unhappy life,” he said. “Not only because of what my life has actually been, but because of what life is. I’m disappointed. Not only because I don’t have the creative powers I want. I’m disappointed because the trees don’t talk to me, or the grass or the flowers. I’m disappointed because the flies mistake me for a piece of horseshit.” And when we got to Ben’s, and were tramping about the deserted grounds, he said, “I’m glad we came back here. I’m glad that we came and saw the place abandoned, and destroyed, and the brambles growing over everything. Because that’s the truth. I’m glad we came and saw the truth. If we hadn’t we might have always thought that it was just us. That it was just that we didn’t make it but somehow all the others did. That it was just us that missed our connection somehow, didn’t take the right road, or make the right move.”
Davey always said “us” to me, as though our lives and our destinies were one, and I guess as long as I was
sleeping with him he had the right to consider me an honorary Levinson. But I kicked and thrashed against that “us,” and we ended in despair.
When I met him on Fourteenth Street Davey was a social worker, living in the Grand Street housing project and working in the Chinatown welfare office. He did nothing but go to his job and read. He read on the subway going to work, at his desk during his lunch hour, and after supper on his bed, a huge mahogany bedstead propped against the wall of an otherwise empty room. He read Thomas Mann and Herman Wouk, Bernard Malamud and Rod McKuen, Dylan Thomas and Philip Wylie, Marcel Proust and Alan Watts. For Davey, reading was a laser beam—narrow, focused, intent—driving into a vast darkness. In his late twenties, after he had left his wife and son, he discovered therapy, and psychoanalysis became the great drama of his life. He absorbed its language and its insights in much the same way that he read great literature: he grew wise in a vacuum.
He would announce, “Anger is fear,” and observe in three admirably concise paragraphs why this elegant cliché remained worthy of our attention. He would deliver epigrammatic bits of wisdom: “People are like pool balls after the cue ball has shot into them, rolling every which way, continually hitting each other, knocking each other out of the way, full of greed, envy, violence, jealousy.” And he would give me moral instruction: “You must observe without blame or praise, acceptance or rejection.” These delights of the mind never seemed to go anywhere, or to be seriously related in a way that mattered. His intelligence was like a piece of railroad track severed at either end from the main connection, with a single train car riding it back and forth between stations, imitating motion and journey.
Meanwhile, I couldn’t believe I was sleeping with Davey Levinson. Every time we went to bed I felt both twelve and thirty-five. I hungered for him, burrowed into him, couldn’t get enough of him. I gave without stint and took without stint. We made love around the clock, ate Chinese food at three in the morning, and played the New Yorker’s game of mutual analysis. Later I began to buck and withdraw, turn on him like a snake, be amazed and outraged to find myself there with him (how did I get back here, how did I get back here), but for many months whatever we said and did delighted me.
Davey was a recapitulation of my history with men—when I considered him powerful I’d been a clumsy belligerent; when I saw he was weak I became a desirous woman—except that with Davey, for the first time, I saw the configuration whole. I saw my bondage, and I was shamed by my release. How angry and scared I became when I had clear sight! And how pained that it was through Davey I had achieved it. Because I knew Davey. I could imagine him right through to the center. I loved his appetite and I recognized his fears: they were my own. I knew how Davey had gotten to be the way he was, and in his presence I knew better how I had gotten to be the way I was. For a time this openly shared knowledge made us friends. There was between us a mute tenderness for our common beginning. The way we slept was emblematic of our relationship: we lay curled around ourselves facing each other.
One Monday morning, as he was leaving, Davey said, “I hope your week will be productive, constructive, and creative.” I nodded, flung my arms around him, buried my lips in his neck, and murmured, “Without greed, violence, envy, or jealousy.” His cheeks reddened, he laughed and hugged me closer. But the day was coming when he wouldn’t laugh, and certainly he would not draw me closer.
I had confided my fears and insecurities to him. He took them seriously, as a lover is required to do. He did not take seriously what they signified. I was often away on assignment, he was always waiting for me to come home. It began to dawn on him, I think, not only that my struggle with myself over my work was long-lasting and that work would repeatedly take me away from him, but that he was not similarly engaged and he had nothing to take him away.
When we had been together six months Davey disappeared. I didn’t hear from him and I was unable to reach him, either by phone or by mail. Two weeks passed. Then I called one day and he answered the phone. I said hello, and he began speaking in tongues. A strange psychospiritual-metaphysical babble seemed to have taken possession of him. I kept saying, “What are you talking about?” Finally, in a loud, clear voice, he said, “You must exorcise your father’s spirit. Your masculine-feminine natures are pulling at each other. You are not a whole woman. I can only marry a whole woman.”
I received this information in silence. Then I said, “Well … in the meantime … can’t we just fuck?”
The following Saturday we spent an exhausting, obsessed twenty-four hours together. We made love continuously, and he talked endlessly at me. Over and over again he said to me, “I am the universe. You must spread your legs wide, open your womb to me. In me will be united all that you are, all poetry, kindness, tenderness, aggressiveness, all that is vibrant, glowing, alive, beautiful in the universe. If you marry me your children will all be virile, robust, poets, makers of music, full of majesty. If you don’t they will be faggots and lesbians, evil and diseased.” He crooned, hissed, and spat at me. We left the house once to go to a movie. Sitting in the dark, in relation to nothing that was happening on the screen, he gripped my arm and whispered in my ear, “The masculine and the feminine are one. You will not let them be one. In you is both the masculine and the feminine, the light and the dark, the black and the void. Let them come together and you will be one, you will be whole, you will be all, the woman and the man, the universal human.”
On Tuesday of the following week I left New York on a journalistic assignment. An hour before I was to go, Davey called.
“Don’t respond,” he hissed at me. “Simply listen to what I say. Let it all flow through your mind as I’ve taught you. Let it flow through, right through. Then you will think about it.”
I coughed.
“Don’t respond, I say!”
Silence. Long silence. Then: “Your father was a witch, he bewitched you, left you guilty, that’s why you feel like a shmuck and inferior. That’s your true mission as a reporter. You’re traveling around to find your father, or whatever it is he represents. When you find it you’ll stop traveling. Take the picture of your father in your bedroom down off the wall. That’s the witch in you that keeps it up there. Take it down and turn it to the wall. Take it down. And remember. Talk to no one. Not to your mother or to your friends. No one. Only to God.” He stopped speaking. I dared not open my mouth. Then he said, “Goodbye. I love you. When you’re ready we’ll have babies, and you’ll be transformed into the Queen of Israel.”
Within a month Davey had made his way to Orthodox Judaism. Overnight he became an eighteenth-century Jew wearing black clothes, sidelocks, and a huge gray-black beard. We met once more. He leaned across the table in a filthy ultra-kosher restaurant on East Broadway to warn me that I must become a good Jewish wife or my soul was lost forever. His breath on my face was hot and sour. At last, I felt his panic and his terrible longing. Within myself, I shrank from him, repelled. This is the last, I thought, absolutely the last.
“There’s a policeman,” my mother is saying. “Ask him how we get onto the bridge.”
We walk over to the cop standing in the middle of the traffic island, cars sweeping past us in all directions.
“How do we get onto the bridge?” I ask.
The cop stares at me. “Why?” he asks.
“We’d like to walk across it.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“No, I’m not. Why?”
“Lady, every week three to seven people get mugged on this bridge. What chance do you think you two will have? I definitely recommend you forget the whole thing.”
“So,” my mother says dully. “Nothing’s changed on Delancey Street, has it?”
“Come on, Ma. We’ll take the subway.”
I sat at the desk and I struggled to think. That’s how I liked to put it. For years I said, “I’m struggling to think.” Just as my mother said she was struggling to live. Mama thought she deserved a medal for swinging her legs over the side of th
e bed in the morning, and I guess I did, too, just for sitting at the desk.
In the little tenement apartment on First Avenue the fog came rolling in the window. Vapor thickened the air, and mist filled the room. I sat with my eyelids nailed open against the fog, the vapor, the mist, straining to see through to my thoughts, trapped inside the murk. Once every few weeks the air cleared for half a second, and quick! I’d get down two paragraphs of readable prose. Time passed. Much time. Much dead time. Finally, a page. Then two pages. When there were ten pages I rushed to print. I looked at my paragraphs in print: really looked at them. How small, I thought. How small it all is. I’ve been sitting here so long with these pages, and they’re so small. A man said to me, “Good insight. Pity you didn’t have time to develop it.” A woman said, “What you could do if you didn’t have to meet journalistic deadlines. A shame there’s no government subsidy.” I started to speak. Misery dissolved in my mouth, glued my lips shut. What would I say if I could speak? And to whom would I say it?
I “struggled” on.
Two years after I left Davey Levinson sitting in the restaurant on East Broadway I interviewed Joe Durbin for a story I was writing on a rent strike. He was a labor organizer on the left, and a throwback to the romantic figures of my earliest life. The union movement was Joe’s passion. He had been an official in the CIO, known every labor leader from John L. Lewis to Walter Reuther, and had organized all over the historical map: California in the thirties, Michigan in the forties, New York in the fifties. He was twenty years older than me, and he was married. The age difference gave me my control. A week after the interview he called to suggest dinner. We were together six years.
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