EDELMAN’S BAR MITZVAH was just the beginning. A few months later, Alex was a veteran of Windows on the World, which seemed to be the destination of choice for Bar Mitzvah parties, although there were other opulent destinations as well. He had seen adults get drunk, and had stolen half-finished drinks off the adult tables to drink himself. He had watched classmates anxiously sing Hebrew words, be praised by rabbis, and later receive envelope after envelope from friends and relatives, each containing a check of biblical proportions.
He had been barraged by clowns and magicians and enthusiastic disc jockeys who played “Ring My Bell” and “Push Push in the Bush” when they wanted to get people dancing, and who then played the soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever once they were. He possessed, along with a closetful of stupid door prizes, the more abstract but lasting memory of himself jumping around spastically on the dance floor in a rare moment of inhibition, while simultaneously puzzling over whether what the Bee Gees said about the New York Times’s effect on man was true.
And now it was spring. The stack of Great Jews in Sports was down to one, and it made sense that Phil Singer should get the last book. Phil was good at sports, the fastest kid in the grade, but the connection went beyond that; he had the special grace of great athletes, a kind of magic that infuses their every gesture with possibility. He would change things. He already had, in the small scale of the eighth grade. He was the grade’s leading mystic and delinquent. And he was Alex’s friend.
Singer’s Bar Mitzvah promised to be different from all the others, and at first glance it was—it was even fancier. After Phil had done his duties at the Park Avenue Synagogue, they were all loaded onto a pair of waiting buses and shipped down Fifth Avenue to the Plaza Hotel ballroom. Bouquets of flowers sat on each table, above which hung clusters of white helium balloons. Already Alex could sense a weird panic in the eyes of his friends. There had been such a buildup to this Bar Mitzvah that something had to happen. A big brass band played quietly, though ominously, as though they were just limbering up, and would start to seriously swing once people had had a chance to digest.
The boys wore their suits and exulted in the discovery that the bartenders scattered around the Plaza ballroom were willing to serve them drinks. The Singer myth expanded another notch. The girls, meanwhile, continued to refine their adultlike behavior. They wore dresses and elegant suits, they had had their hair done, they wore makeup and jewelry, and they carried it all off with a kind of ease, as though they dressed this way all the time.
Alex was seated at the same table as Tania. She looked assured and womanly as she engaged in conversation with Marcy Goldblum.
“And then she got up to go to the bathroom and missed the backseat scene,” Tania was saying now, “and when I told her about it later she was so pissed.”
“That was the most intense scene of the movie,” replied Marcy.
“What backseat scene?” said John Goldman, who was sitting next to Alex. “Why is it that I never understand what the hell anyone is talking about?”
“They’re talking about a dirty scene in a movie,” said Alex.
“We’re talking about Saturday Night Fever,” said Marcy from across the table, in a loud aggressive voice that seemed to scold the two boys for trying to have a conversation of their own.
Tania didn’t even look over. She just tossed her hair a little. She nodded knowingly as she spoke and elegantly brought her fork to her mouth. She was quite womanly, Alex thought. She was wearing a pretty dress with lace frills around the collar and sleeves; a provocative pink ribbon tied together the two pieces of fabric holding her breasts, as though it were a shoe lace. Alex stared intently at her hands as she used her silverware, as though for tips, and occasionally he stared at the space between her breasts, covered but not entirely obscured by the ribbon. He imagined Ugly George’s hand reaching out and gently tugging at that ribbon until it came apart.
“I didn’t see Saturday Night Fever,” said John. “My mother wouldn’t let me.”
Alex stared at him incredulously, torn between hating him passionately for being a geek and admiring him for having the audacity to say the truth, which, as it happened, was the same truth that applied to Alex. He would have seen the movie anyway had it not been for the fact that the Jaws 2 experience still lurked, with accompanying soundtrack, in the back of his mind. He had been forbidden from seeing Jaws 2 but had snuck in on his own one afternoon a few days before leaving for sailing camp. He returned from sailing camp with awards in riflery, archery, and tennis, but the only water that had touched his skin either came out of a shower or was heavily chlorinated, and every time someone touched his leg in the pool he became hysterical.
Something about the way Tania moved, the way she talked, the way she brought her fork to her mouth, made her seem much too good for the bacterial fungus that composed eighth-grade society. Alex was intent on interacting with her in a civilized manner, but could not seem to manage it. She liked art, and spent time after school in the art studio painting, and once Alex had seen her all by herself after school, walking with a canvas wrapped up under her arm. He was by himself as well. This was the perfect opportunity for him to express his admiration for her, to show he was interested in art, and to generally distance himself from the baboonlike behavior of his classmates. Practically hyper-ventilating with effort, he had made himself call out to her as she walked by.
“Let me see it!” he said.
He was referring to the canvas, but Tania hurried past without looking up. He stood there amazed at this misunderstanding, but unable to correct it.
Now he tried to glance at her surreptitiously, but his glances kept devolving into stares, which would be broken only when her eyes raked briefly across his face and he immediately looked down. Unwilling and also unable to muster the grabby aggressive prerogative of his classmates, or Ugly George for that matter, he had no strategy except to be so passive and pathetic and conspicuously inept that she would be forced to take pity on him, approach him, talk to him, get to know him really well, and then, on her own volition, for no real reason—and here Alex’s thoughts became vague and possessed of the illogic of dreams—she would take off her shirt, and let him see, just because she felt like it.
He understood that this was an unrealistic scenario, but was at a loss for anything to replace it.
Eventually the party became wild and dispersed. The grown-ups got drunk and danced. The kids got drunk and danced. The usual ritual of boys grabbing girls was played out. The swing band was replaced by a disc jockey. Phil Singer made out very publicly with Audrey Stevens, and then they both disappeared, and a joke made the rounds that they had rented a room. Then Audrey reappeared and said Phil had passed out on the one of the couches outside.
Gradually all the kids came out to view the body. He lay there looking very peaceful, with envelopes bulging out of all his pockets. The only thing askance was his feet, which were not really in a comfortable position, but turned in towards each other.
“Oh jeez, Phil becomes a man,” said Mrs. Singer when she saw her son. She stroked his face and put a pillow under his head and then went and got a shoe box and put all the envelopes in it. An older lady came out and looked down at Phil and then at the assembled youth who were standing around.
“Who did this?” she demanded of the crowd, as though someone had forced Phil to get drunk, or had perhaps hit him over the head and robbed him. “Who did this to Philly?”
She was, Alex surmised from the “Philly,” the grandmother. He wanted very much to explain to this woman that no one had done anything to Phil Singer, quite the contrary, this was yet another small bit of philanthropy that Phil had doled out to the rest of the class in a moment of generosity—he wanted to explain that her grandson was a great guy because he had single-handedly changed the definition of cool in the eighth grade—he had written the word TULL on the back of his down jacket, instantly catapulting Jethro Tull into the front rank of popular bands in the grade, and had the
n, once this happened, drawn a single canceling line through the word. This in a class where the most popular boys had previously been neat fastidious creeps like Arnold Gerstein who didn’t even want his down jacket to get wet. Phil did bong hits before the morning bus and once brought a bottle of vodka into school, which he shared with a large group of boys during lunch, leading to Allen Fluss’s infamous vomit in geometry episode. Phil was a rebel who understood that things were fucked up and was willing to do something about it. If what he was willing to do was pass out at his own Bar Mitzvah, then so be it!
All this raced through Alex’s mind, which the woman seemed to read like a ticker tape, for she turned towards him and said, with a quivering accusatory finger raised in his direction, “You! What have you done to Philly?”
“Me?” said Alex, more a croak than a statement.
“You! The ringleader!”
This was perhaps the least accurate description of himself that Alex had ever heard. He couldn’t face this hysterical woman, and he suddenly couldn’t face the mirth of the Bar Mitzvah party. He saw that a number of people were drifting off into an adjoining room, and he followed them.
He walked into the cream-and-candy-colored sitting area which was adjacent to the ladies’ room. Couches and easy chairs and throw pillows were placed elegantly here and there, and the beige carpet gave the strange piece of theater unfolding before his eyes a hushed, unreal quality.
Greg Neuman and Jack Gold were struggling with Tania Vincent, who was strangely quiet while she tried to get them off. After occupying the huge cathedral of the ballroom for so long, this small, pretty, enclosed space seemed illicit and private. The room was filling up with kids, as though some accident had just occurred, and they were gathering around to rubberneck. Except the accident was in progress.
“Stop it!” Tania finally gasped. “Stop it!” She kept saying that over and over again. What was so strange was that rather than performing a hit-and-run attack, which was the normal mode of operation, Greg Neuman and Jack Gold were struggling with Tania as though she were a running back in football whom they were trying to tackle. Then there was a ripping sound. Jack Gold had managed to get his hand into that space where the pink ribbon was, and had torn the dress, and just then Arnold Gerstein came running over and grabbed both of Tania’s arms and held them behind her back, and for one split second Tania’s dress was pulled all the way down to her waist and her breasts fell forward, completely exposed, jiggling and awkward. Every person in the room screamed. The girls screamed in horror and the boys screamed as though they were at a sporting event and the home team had just scored. Alex started laughing with hysterical glee, and within his own laughter he heard hoarse yelps of panic and fear. Everyone was yelling and running around, and he just stood there watching it unfold, amazed at the momentum of events. Tania was crying now, her hands cupping her breasts, while several pairs of hands tried to pry them off or squeeze the parts that were not covered. Her friends came to the rescue. There were shrieks and screams. Ellen Levine was pounding Jack Gold in the face, and Tania broke away and ran for the ladies’ room.
Every boy in the room followed in hot pursuit. There was no context to their actions, just wild giddiness, the chase, the yelling, the brief glimpse of that which had been imagined for so long. Alex, swept up in the momentum of what was happening, ran with them.
Tania pushed through the door to the ladies’ room, and it had hardly closed before eight more boys were clamoring to get through the same door. The cream-colored hues of the sitting room had given way to the harsh reality of the fluorescent light. Tania ran into one of the stalls, slammed the door shut, and locked it. The boys leapt over its sides like braying animals. Tania shrank back in tears. Alex was among the first to leap onto that flimsy metal partition. He looked down at Tania. The first thing he saw was her braces. Tania didn’t have the kind of mouth that showed her teeth, but now her mouth was configured in the figure eight of sobs, and they gleamed in the light. She clutched her torn dress to herself.
She was crying real sobs. Under the bright fluorescent lights, all that womanliness was gone. Alex could see the thin blue veins on her chest and neck and face; her whole body seemed pale and bluish in that light, except for her flushed cheeks; her tears streaked mascara and her hair was a mess.
For one brief moment, as he vaulted up onto the edge of the bathroom stall, Alex had felt ecstatic. For the first time he felt part of his group, part of his class, and his world. Then, when he saw Tania, the feeling abated. He hung there, feet dangling, eyes bulging from the strain of the thin metal wall pressing into his stomach, looking down at her. He wanted very much to say something. He wanted to apologize. But this was not a good time for apologies. His pride at finally having done something vied with his shame at what he had done.
Eventually he was herded into the group of boys that the Plaza Hotel security staff, who had burst onto the scene in their uniforms, walkie-talkies cackling, identified as the criminal element. The criminal element stood there unworried.
Phil Singer’s grandmother appeared on the scene and again became hysterical at the sight of Alex. “It’s him!” she cried. Alex was amazed to note that he felt flattered by this misunderstanding.
“What are you going to do?” Gerstein said to one of the men with walkie-talkies. “You’re just security guards. We pay you guys.” They were kept in the room just long enough for the truth of this statement to dissipate a little. Tania, for her part, had rearranged her dress and seemed amazingly composed. She walked out without saying a word, her chin held high, flanked by all her friends, who called the boys assholes over their shoulders.
Soon afterwards the party began to disperse. Alex walked through the Plaza’s glittering lobby, his knees loose and bouncy with nervous energy, the plush springy carpet making him feel as though he might float up towards the ceiling. None of the guests in the lobby knew of the events that had just occurred in the ladies’ room, yet it seemed as though they could fathom them, understand their context, grasp the dreamlike quality of their sequence, and perhaps forgive them with a knowing wink.
The same could not be said for the world beyond the Plaza’s heavy front door, the real world. He pushed through it and was greeted by a slap of cold moist air. It was dusk, and cloudy, and the city looked a bit blue, as though it weren’t getting enough oxygen. He had moved through the ballroom, and that small warmly lit sitting room, and the bright fluorescent bathroom, like a Super Ball racing through the air for longer than seemed natural. But now gravity reasserted itself, and time returned to its normal pace.
He walked up Central Park South to Sixth Avenue, shivering a little in the cold air. He took his scarf out of his pocket and tied it tightly around his neck. He had cab fare but decided, as some kind of penance, to take the Number 5 bus. He waited for the Number 5 until the sky was black and his teeth were chattering, and then decided to come up with some other form of penance and took a cab.
When he got into his apartment he felt its warmth envelop him as though a blanket had been thrown over his shoulders. His mother was sitting at the kitchen table, reading. He fled past her to his room.
“Did you have a nice time?” his mother called after him.
“Yes!” he said, more a yelp than a comment. He stepped into his room, and pulled the door shut.
The Harmonie Club
ARNOLD GERSTEIN OFTEN TOOK FRIENDS TO HIS FATHER’S club, the Harmonie, on Sixty-first just off Fifth Avenue, where they could “use the facilities” (as Arnold’s father put it) for free. They would shoot hoops on the small basketball court, whose wooden floor had taken on a yellow-orange patina from years of use. Then they would smash a squash ball around in one of the bright cubelike squash courts, and when they got tired of that, spend some time heaving barbells in the weight room. From there they hit the sauna and then, after showers, went downstairs to the dining room for lunch, which Arnold signed for on his father’s account. (Arnold usually had turkey with mayo, on white.)
Arnold had been going to the Harmonie Club on and off all his life, at first with his father and later with friends. There was some sort of formality about checking in that his father never observed; instead he just nodded to the men at the front desk, a curt but friendly nod accompanied by an equally curt and slightly facetious salute. It was an acknowledgment that these men at the front desk existed, that they were manning the ship, keeping at bay the hordes that thronged through Fifth Avenue and Central Park. Arnold absorbed this gesture thoughtlessly; everything he absorbed was as though through osmosis, so that the things he was good at, such as math, or wearing an expression that combined elements of sweetness and hostility in such a way as to make everyone around him seem beholden to him, he understood intuitively, without any sense of struggle up from a base of ignorance towards a peak of understanding, and those things he did not understand intuitively, such as English, or having any kind of emotion that was motivated by something other than greed, he did not absorb. “English,” for Arnold, was just a subject in school, but his inability to understand it was symbolic of his inability to understand or have any natural affinity for such things as memory, feeling, camaraderie, compassion, curiosity, and even love, all of which were out of sight, shrouded in a fog bank of ignorance, and therefore didn’t bother him.
When Arnold entered the Harmonie Club he gave the men at the front desk the same vague nod as his father, and walked by without giving it any thought.
ALEX FADER, WHO accompanied Arnold on some of these visits to the Harmonie Club, gave it some thought. That nod was like a secret password that no one had told him about; it was a key that, by his witnessing it, had accidentally fallen into his possession. He pocketed it coolly, knowing that he would one day put it to use.
The Sleep-Over Artist Page 5