She pulled it down, showing more cleavage, and said, “Is this good?” She was quite young and looked a little confused by the bright light.
“Yes, that’s great,” said Ugly George. “Great.” Then the hand reappeared at the bottom of the screen. Ugly George was persistent. His hand was like a pale moth that kept flitting back to the bright light of her breast. “You know what would be ideal?” he said.
Her face responded coolly to the suggestion. “You want me to take it all the way off?” The hand reached out and gave a gentle tug. She cooperated. Two breasts popped out. Alex and half the adolescent male population of Manhattan let out a silent, heart-thumping cheer. Unfortunately the palpitations of his heart were echoed by his mother’s footsteps thudding gently in the hall. He spun the television dial and threw himself back onto her bed. The spin was as arbitrary as roulette.
Alex’s mother often walked in on her son watching strange programs. Cooking shows. News specials. And now she found a preacher extolling his congregation on the merits of God and the perils of sin. He made exaggerated gestures with his arms and punctuated his sentences with long meaningful stares into the camera. Alex stared at him with the same blank rapt expression he always had when he watched television. She watched this for a while, standing next to the bed. Finally she turned to him and asked, “Does this interest you?”
“Sort of,” he mumbled. “It was just on.”
This exchange depressed him far more than abandoning the beautiful woman and her breasts. The real business of his life was, more and more, conducted on a subterranean level, out of his mother’s sight, and he felt a pang of sadness and pity for her now, as she puzzled over this strange new fragment like an archaeologist who has found yet another incongruous item on her dig.
“This is a mistake,” he wanted to explain. “This guy talking about Jesus is a fluke. It doesn’t accurately reflect my interests and you shouldn’t draw any conclusions from it.” But this explanation would have to lead to other, impossible explanations, and so he just kept quiet, and suffered through five minutes of the preacher vehemently insisting that Jesus Christ loves you, and that if you love Jesus He will save you, but only if you let Him into your heart. Then it was time for bed.
THE NEXT MORNING Alex stood still while his mother helped him with his tie. She tugged at the knot, tightening it, and he pretended to be having an out-of-body experience, so as to not be so close to her face. His father had not lived long enough to teach Alex how to knot a tie, and his mother wasn’t too good at it either, so they made it a perennial joint enterprise, a shared task of pulling and tugging until they got it right. Alex felt he could do it on his own at this point, but wasn’t quite ready to deprive his mother of the task.
He was on his way to Phil Singer’s Bar Mitzvah. It was a cold blustery day in April, and Singer’s Bar Mitzvah was the grand finale of a year-long circuit of Bar Mitzvahs. Under his arm was a gift-wrapped copy of Great Jews in Sports. In a rare moment of foresight last fall, Alex had fished ten copies of this book out of a discount bin and had them gift-wrapped, thereby resolving the Bar Mitzvah gift problem. They sat in an ever-shrinking stack in his room.
“It’s cold,” his mother said as he headed for the door. “Let me get your scarf.” He stood in the doorway while she went and got his scarf. He could picture all her movements through the apartment by the sounds of her footsteps, receding and then approaching again, hurried and purposeful. She handed him the scarf. “Have a wonderful time,” she said.
He glared at her because of the word “wonderful,” which was a typical word for his mother. It was impractical and romantic and strange. Furthermore it was too dignified. There was something barbaric about these Bar Mitzvahs. Without the context of either school or home, whatever humanity existed within each individual eighth-grader was submerged, and they became one pulsating headless group of stimulation seekers, constantly seeking out new life forms to devour. Bar Mitzvahs were like petri dishes in which the germs that composed his class were allowed to commingle and multiply.
Today’s Bar Mitzvah boy, Phil Singer, was the coolest person in the grade and, amazingly, someone Alex felt close to, but he did not think “wonderful” was the word for what lay in store.
“I’m not going to have a wonderful time,” said Alex stoically. “I may have a good time. And that’s a maybe.”
“All right,” she said. “Then have a good time. Have whatever time you want to have.”
He stood in the small vestibule outside their apartment, and she stood in the doorway while the elevator came.
“You look very handsome,” she said, smiling, as though she knew she should refrain from this sort of comment, but couldn’t resist.
There she goes again, he thought. Handsome. What kind of word was that? When a girl at school liked another boy, she called him cute. But then did he want his mother to call him cute? The thought was disturbing. He was rescued by the elevator.
“Goodbye,” he said. The elevator door closed. There was a small window in the elevator door through which they could see each other for one last second. It was only at this moment, as his mother stood framed by that little window, smiling at him and meeting his gaze, that his feelings of contempt and disgust for her abated, and were replaced by a wrenching and overwhelming sensation of love. Then the elevator dropped, the picture disappeared, and he was descending in what he had come to feel was the world’s slowest elevator, a tiny decompression chamber between his home and the real world.
HE TOOK A taxi to the Park Avenue Synagogue, which in spite of its name was located on Madison Avenue. There was a group of boys on the sidewalk standing around talking in their gray three-piece suits. Gerstein, Conroy, Fluss, Edelman, and Cohen. They sounded like a law firm, and all except for Gerstein would eventually graduate from law school. Gerstein was a cynical and manipulative creep who had been popular and attractive ever since he stood up in the sandbox. These waning months of eighth grade would be the last uncomplicated and happy months of his life; soon the world would get complicated, and he would be unable to get complicated with it.
Someone racing up Madison in a taxi might have mistaken this group for a bunch of brash young executives, but Alex recognized them as a bunch of leering and belligerent adolescents, spoiled brats, and, he had to admit, the sorry group of humans he spent a lot of his time with. Alex had by now witnessed rabbis of all shapes and sizes explain that the Bar Mitzvah was the ceremony that celebrated a boy’s passage to manhood. Gerstein, Edelman, and Fluss had already had theirs. The transformation was not evident.
Alex joined the group.
“Nice jacket, Fader,” said Gerstein, his good friend. “Do you wear the same underwear to every Bar Mitzvah too?”
“Nice face,” Alex replied, and immediately marveled at his inability to say anything insulting to anyone else, while, on the other hand, every insult directed at him was like a radioactive thorn which leaked poison into his system for hours if not weeks after it was inserted. Already he felt a tiny vibration of hatred towards his mother for having bought him this stupid blue blazer and gray slacks. At least, he reflected, Gerstein had not called him fat. He was not even that fat anymore, but he had been when he first arrived at the school in fourth grade, and had continued to be for several years, and now he was like a character actor who is not allowed to change his character—Fat.
“Today is going to be good,” said Cohen. “The Plaza.”
“Singer is a maniac,” said Fluss.
“I hope we get a good gift,” said Gerstein.
“I hope it’s better than a little cup that says ‘Arnold’s Bar Mitzvah’ on it,” said Fluss, referring to Gerstein’s Bar Mitzvah gift a month earlier.
“I wonder if Singer will be wasted when he reads from the Torah,” said Cohen.
“Scott would be so pissed if Singer messed up,” said Fluss. Scott was Phil Singer’s father.
“Scott!” said Edelman.
“Scott!” replied Fluss, as though
responding to mating call. “Scott Scott Scott Scott!” he continued. All the boys started bleating the name “Scott.” They sounded like honking geese. Alex joined in meekly. It was the strange custom of all of Alex’s classmates to refer to their own and everyone else’s father by their first names. The mention of one of these names sent all his friends into peals of ecstatic laughter, as though it were the most ridiculous thing they had ever heard. Were his father still alive, Alex could not imagine taking any pleasure in referring to him as Sol and to chanting his name derisively with them.
When the chanting subsided, the boys turned to go inside. The Park Avenue Synagogue, at Eighty-eighth and Madison, was just three blocks south of Alex’s barber shop, Michael’s, and Alex suddenly thought of it. Michael’s specialized in children. It had been founded sometime during the Kennedy administration, and its interior design had not been revised since. The walls were covered with pictures of the Kennedy kids sporting a haircut called the John-John. The chairs were large imperial contraptions made of white porcelain and red leather that went up and down, and some of them had little toy cars, orange and green, built around them, for the youngest children, which gave the place a carnival atmosphere. Every kid got a Tootsie pop while his hair was cut. There was a small room in the back where particularly distressed children were taken, so their screams and wails would not disturb everyone else. Alex had been a frequent visitor to this back room when he was very young. He remembered the cooing sounds of the barber, his mother’s hand caressing him, and the shrill snip snip of the scissors next to his ear. Above all, as he entered the cool interior of the Park Avenue Synagogue, he remembered his own screams. A bloody corpse would not have provoked more hysterical cries of distress.
Why had he screamed like that? Now, at age thirteen, it was a mystery to him. Already a small pool of his own humanity had slipped forever beyond his reach, locked under a pane of glass through which he could only peer, as though he were looking at an exhibit at a museum. He no longer cried in Michael’s barbershop. But then, it occurred to him, he rarely went. His hair was long and unruly. There had been a palace coup on the subject of hairstyles a couple of years ago, and the John-John had been deposed. He took his seat amidst the pre-service hum of conversation and took out a Bible from the rack in front of him, not to read, just to hold, like an amulet. He too, in his own small way, had taken steps away from being a boy and towards being a man, although there had been no ceremony to commemorate it. He wasn’t even sure it was an event worth celebrating.
THE IDEA OF a Bar Mitzvah had never been discussed between Alex and his mother, and he had never given it any thought until the beginning of the eighth-grade school year, when the invitations began to arrive. He remembered the first one, which he and his mother had puzzled over with the unabashed awe of primitives who have found a functioning matchbook. It was a large square envelope, cream-colored and made of a paper stock less flexible than certain kinds of wood. The type on the enclosed invitation was thick enough to read by touch. There were copious amounts of gauzy tissue paper in there as well, and other envelopes, already stamped, with RSVP cards asking for commitments to far-off dates. The slightly askance stamp was the only evidence that a human being had had anything to do with this assemblage of objects.
“What I don’t understand,” said Alex at the time, “is that I don’t think Richard Edelman even likes me. Why is he inviting me to his Bar Mitzvah?”
“Maybe he does like you,” his mother, ever the optimist, had replied.
“No, that’s not an issue, okay? That’s not possible. Maybe he just invited the whole grade.” He was making a joke.
Edelman had in fact invited the whole grade. Six weeks after the invitation arrived, Alex had been stuffed into a jacket and tie and sent off to attend a service in which Edelman, a nervous boy who, at the age of thirteen, had a body that suggested that not one single pubic hair had yet sprouted on it, stood robed in strange garments and read Hebrew for an interminably long period of time. Alex sat there in the synagogue along with the rest of his class. The boys sat in one section and the girls in another. Afterwards there was a bus that took everyone down to the World Trade Center. The invitation had said: “Reception at Windows on the World.”
Windows on the World was a restaurant on the top floor of one of the World Trade Center towers. Therefore it had a view. Everyone was very excited about the view, and for the first ten minutes the whole class flocked to the windows and pressed their faces against it, peering out at New Jersey or the Atlantic Ocean, depending on which way they were facing. Windows on the World was a distinguished restaurant which served very good food at exorbitant prices, and the presence of fifty screaming kids would have depressed and angered many of the lunch patrons, had they been there. But no one was there, because, for a fee equal to about two years’ school tuition for their son, the Edelmans had rented the place out.
Alex was one of those whose face was pressed eagerly to the glass one hundred and one stories above the ground. But in a short while he unstuck his nose and began walking around the tables, looking at the name cards that were written out in neat script and sat on every plate.
He lingered among the tables, feeling intimidated by the array of silverware and the fancy lettering on the name cards. He had sat through that lunch with a stiff posture, had spoken hardly at all, and had made a point of keeping his elbows off the table. For some reason he was under the impression that his mother was going to be judged by his behavior here, and he wanted to make a good showing.
His classmates did not feel the same compulsion. Specifically, the gang of boys, led by Phil Singer, who more or less ran the grade, and to whom Alex had tangentially attached himself, discovered that Mr. Edward Edelman, who was presiding over this celebration of his son’s Bar Mitzvah with evident pride, smoked a pipe. To correspond with his son having invited his whole eighth-grade class, Edward Edelman had invited the entire executive staff of the electronics firm of which he was vice-president, and was busy greeting them and making jokes and spotting small intrigues of conversation and affiliation that were bubbling around the room. So he was very surprised when a rumor welled up among the younger generation that the stuff in his pipe was not tobacco, but marijuana. He reassured himself that no one actually believed he was smoking pot, but Edward Edelman was, on some deep and partially buried level, a nice man, and furthermore he was genuinely moved by his son’s Bar Mitzvah, and proud of the event he was putting on, and all these genuine human emotions made him vulnerable. Alex’s classmates had a desire to attack vulnerability that was as natural and innate as their ability to detect its presence.
And so from the depths of the party came the chant “Eddie is stoned! Eddie is stoned!” And soon kids were running around laughing hysterically and screaming, “Crazy Eddie! He’s in-sane!”
Soon Mr. Edelman’s expression became strained. One of his colleagues sidled up to him and said, “What’s up, Crazy Eddie?” Mr. Edelman had the nauseating premonition that it was a name that would stick around the office for years. The sight of a gang of thirteen-year-olds running around calling him Eddie was not part of the fantasy he had long nurtured for how this day would unfold. He put his pipe away. He stopped milling around the party and hung back in a corner, looking a bit tired and aggrieved. Eventually he was discarded as the favored object of scorn because the troublesome group of boys were distracted by a more interesting target. They began harassing a group of girls. One girl in particular seemed to be the object of their scorn and desire. From across the room he could see that she looked genuinely frightened by the group of boys that encircled her. An hour earlier Mr. Edleman would have intervened, but he had been mauled into submission and simply turned his gaze elsewhere, back to the real world of adults and serious business.
WHAT CRAZY EDWARD Edelman had looked away from was a heated discussion between a group of girls and a group of boys. Greg Neuman, who did double duty as class clown and class pervert, had tried to grab Marcy Goldblum’s
breast. Marcy—who was still two years away from the nose job she already fantasized about, who was popular, and who didn’t have much of a breast to grab—knocked his hands away with an aristocratic slap. A conversation, or rather an inarticulate screaming match, followed, in which the girls more or less tried to explain that the boys couldn’t just grab, they had to at least try and talk to them. After a minute of this, Greg, who was crashing from the initial sugar rush of euphoria he experienced whenever he touched a girl, walked over to Tania Vincent and grabbed her breast.
Tania had wavy golden hair, pale skin, and a pretty nose. Her claim to fame in the eighth grade was that she had breasts. Her breasts made it impossible for most of the boys in the grade to interact with her in a civilized manner.
Now, everyone watched Greg’s knotty little fingers sink into Tania’s right breast. She screamed. The girls shrieked and the boys let out a yell as though someone had just hit a home run, and in one short instant the essential architecture of Bar Mitzvah socializing for the remainder of the year had been established. It was a peculiar form of flirtation that mixed elements of tag and rape. There was a weird element of status involved as well, since only the more popular boys did the grabbing, and only the more popular girls had to run around with their hands over their breasts.
In the midst of all the screaming, Alex looked across the room and was amazed to see Mr. Edelman off in the distance, watching the proceedings, but standing immobile. He had been beaten into submission by the eighth grade. Years later Alex would still think about the Bar Mitzvahs of that year and wonder that such behavior was allowed by the adults. But by then Alex would know that adults were full of their own fears and anxieties, and were as mortal and prone to error as any eighth-grader, if not more so.
The Sleep-Over Artist Page 4