The Sleep-Over Artist

by Thomas Beller

  It had a strange smell.

  She had a limp.

  She was a complainer, a nag, but not in any big-picture way—she didn’t write to Congress demanding the world be made a better place; she wrote to the landlord castigating him for the drip in her kitchen sink. Also, she was a glarer. Medusa had nothing on these glares.

  She was the sort of person for whom the word “difficult” was used diplomatically by those closest to her; those less close used words less diplomatic.

  Alex vividly recalled an argument between Aunti B and his father, years after it happened, and marveled at the power she was able to exert over his normally implacable dad, whose temper, though simmering palpably below the surface, flared so rarely. She was over for dinner—a relatively infrequent event—and had made an idle remark about the red wine. Alex didn’t hear the remark, but assumed it was disparaging. Even at seven he had a keen ear for his aunt’s disparaging remarks and also for the slight comic edge underlying them, as though she knew there was an element of absurdity in her constantly judging everything to be lacking. For his father, however, the humor was a little too subtle on that occasion, or too familiar, and he responded sharply. Voices were raised. Alex watched his father’s neck redden in a way he had never seen before, starting just above the shoulders and rising up through his neck and then his face. It wasn’t pink like a blush. It was darker, more ominous, like the red wine.

  What could make his father so angry? Why would he boil over with rage like that?

  There was something about her voice that naturally rose to a volume just a touch too loud, that took on a tone that was a little too insistent, and it was made even more contentious, perhaps, by that Viennese accent. She had a voice that suggested that all things being equal she would be just as happy to argue as to talk.

  “Tell me something about Vienna,” he once asked her.

  “The Viennese,” she said, “are great haters.”

  But she did not hate Alex. In fact her love for him was undiluted and unqualified. She lived frugally, but on his birthday and at Hanukkah he received from her a healthy check, which grew in proportion to his age, and during his freshman year in college she made a generous loan without hesitation. There was something deliciously reckless about those checks. It wasn’t even the sum that impressed him. It was her handwriting. Sometimes you can tell in what spirit a check was written just from the handwriting. Her checks were always written in an unbounded spirit of generosity.

  THERE WERE CERTAIN rituals observed, unintentionally, whenever he visited her. These rituals were at once a comfort and a source of agony. They charmed him and they made him cringe. They included, but were not limited to:

  The Lock Symphony. She had three locks on her door, and it was difficult, for reasons he never understood, to get them all unlocked at once, so he always spent a period of time in the hall listening to the locks click this way and that with periodic tugs at the still-locked door.

  The way that when she finally got the door open she would look up and then farther up, very conspicuously, because he had grown much taller than she was, and she never tired of making a display of amazement at his height.

  The way that when her eyes met his she burst into that strange weeping laugh of hers.

  The way she always insisted on cooking for him. Sometimes she made gnocchi, which he loved, and which, she said, her own mother used to make, and sometimes just chicken and rice, which she loved, but which her mother did not make, or at least it didn’t ever become part of the ongoing commentary that took place as she cooked. “I like rice” was a refrain of hers, almost an anthem. She always laughed when she said it. Nothing could be funnier for Aunti B than the fact that she liked rice.

  She seemed to take real pleasure in feeding him, but he found it excruciating to watch her cook. He would sit at the kitchen table and watch her hobble around, adjusting the flame on her old stove, stirring the pots. She couldn’t touch an item of food without his imagining her limping through a supermarket, alone, picking it off the shelf and giving it a long and close inspection to make sure it was “the best.” This made it impossible for him to enjoy her food, in spite of the fact that he knew how much love went into the making of it, which in turn made him hate himself for hating her food, which further diminished his enjoyment of the food. And also, he understood on some subsonic, gut level that finding that one excellent tomato among the many mediocre ones was among the deeply satisfying experiences that life has to offer. Yet his youthful self rebelled at the thought that these little pleasures were in fact one of life’s great prizes—that, and having someone with whom to share your tomato.

  The one thing that made all this bearable for Alex was that he felt that on some unspoken level Aunti B understood his feelings, and forgave him for them.

  Then there was the black-and-white photograph of his father on the living-room table, at which he always stared for a moment. There was a similar picture at his mother’s house, but this one was slightly different. The one at his mother’s featured his father with a softer expression. This one, taken perhaps a minute before or after the one at his mother’s, featured a handsome man with a lined face and black hair that was combed back over his head in what seemed a rakish manner. He was in leisure mode, but pensive. He looked off to the side, lost in thought, absent even in his presence. It seemed appropriate that Aunti B should have this one; it was as if she liked being in the presence of this brooding, ambivalent, handsome, and elusive younger brother.

  She often peppered her speech with bits of German, which he enjoyed. Whenever his father had uttered a few words of German it had made Alex convulse with laughter. Why was it so hilariously funny when his father spoke German? He had heard the language spoken in other contexts, and it was the most absolutely unfunny language he had ever heard. But when his father unleashed a few phrases it sent him into hysterics. Her German had a similar if less potent effect.

  Aunti B always referred to his father by his childhood nickname, “Sundy.” It made Alex happy to hear such an affectionate nickname. “Sundy” was the name for that part of his father’s life that was unknowable, when his father was a child and had a child’s delights and a child’s miseries, and it was also the name for that strange interrupted adolescence when, at the age of fourteen, his father had made a mad dash across a freezing river in the middle of the night, and then found his way across the Italian border, where he met up with his older brother Frank, Karl’s father, in Turin. The whole series of events in which his father’s family left Vienna, scattered across Europe, and somehow reconvened in New York seemed, in Alex’s imagination, to have a zany, madcap quality.

  From his Aunti B he received several verbal snapshots of his father as a child, and the image that appeared was of a self-sufficient and somewhat self-absorbed boy with a mischievous and melancholy demeanor. Apparently it was normal back then to bring your own snacks on train rides, and Sundy always arrived with a big bag of apples. The touchstone image of his father’s youth was of his serious-faced father sitting on a train, shy, handsome, jet-black hair and mischievous monkey eyes, munching apple after apple down to the core.

  SHE TRAVELED TO Europe often, and alone, and sent him postcards. He got a postcard from Vienna once.

  “My God,” his mother had remarked. “To think how she must have felt walking around that city.”

  “How do you think she felt?” he asked.

  “How do you think it would feel to have to leave where you are from, where you spent your whole childhood, and then years later return, after all that had happened?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Try and imagine,” she said.

  “I can’t,” he said.

  “Try,” she said.

  “That’s what happened to you,” he said. “You don’t have to imagine it.”

  “Yes,” she said, “but it’s different.” She had a slight aversion to talking about her past, which, as he grew older, he found more and more curio
us.

  He couldn’t really imagine what either of his parents had gone through before they got to America. The entire convulsion of life that took place in the wake of World War II was something he was prepared—throughout high school and even college—to pay somber lip service to, but could not really engage or grasp. Like most children of immigrants he had a primary, if unconscious, wish to not be an immigrant. He could rattle off certain facts about his parents, but they had no resonance to him. His father had grown up in Vienna, his mother in Israel, though her parents had made a narrow escape from Berlin just after she was born. He understood these dislocations, but they didn’t move him. His mother knew this, and he could tell it saddened and angered and heartened her all at once. She played it cool, and waited for that surge of curiosity and gratitude that descends on children as they approach the age their parents were when they were born, and so begin to fathom the hard choices that preceded their existence.

  While he was growing up, however, Alex was, as far as he was concerned, an American. And part of being an American, he felt on some level, was thinking only about America.

  “Spell it,” his father once said, interrupting his eight-year-old boy’s recitation of the merits of the Declaration of Independence.

  “Spell what?”

  “This country you’re so fond of.”

  “A-M-A-R-I…”

  “The great patriot,” said his father. “He can’t even spell his own country’s name.”

  “DO YOU KNOW?” Aunti B said, her cadence Viennese, Jewish, inquiring, playful.

  “Do I know what?”

  “Do you know who you look like?”

  It wasn’t troubling at first, the first hundred or so times. He knew he looked like his father. After the first hundred times, however, it became like Viennese water torture, one innocent question landing again and again on the same spot in his head.

  WHEN AUNTI B spoke of “Sundy” her face became warm in a way that was incongruous with her normal, agitated persona. Alex enjoyed basking in the unqualified love his aunt was lavishing not just on himself but on this other young boy whom he did not know but who would through some mysterious act of alchemy evolve into the man who was his father. But for all the pleasures of these moments of love, he felt repulsed by them, too. They provoked in him a strange and nearly carnal disgust for his aunt, for her limp, for the sad frightened way her mouth turned down at the corners, for her accent, for her loneliness and barrenness.

  The syntax of her speech was strange, and so too was the entire grammar of her existence. She had never married. She lived alone. She worked as a psychologist at a state mental institution. Alex felt sorry for the patients.

  When he left her apartment, a mere fifteen blocks from his own, at the end of his infrequent visits it was always with a sense of relief. Alex would bound down the stairs and burst forth into the unruly life of Amsterdam Avenue feeling as though he had escaped.

  From what?

  He stayed away from her because they were of the same blood and that made it impossible for him to really take her in, to sample her being in more than the most tiny and intermittent quantities, because there is something impossible about close family with whom your life is not entwined on a day-to-day routine. They are like the sun—warm, nourishing, but too powerful to look at directly. Their secrets are at once a novelty and too familiar. They are an occasion for superficial courtesy and also the fathoming of depths in which lurks some strange shared secret of the blood; they provoke a kind of claustrophobia. Perhaps that is why Alex always preferred the families of his friends: he could swim into their waters and swim out—their secrets couldn’t really hurt him.

  IN SEVENTH GRADE he spent weekend after weekend at Joe Ford’s apartment in the Dakota, an arrangement of high-ceilinged rooms so labyrinthine that Joe’s mother, Carol, would sometimes bump into him in a hallway with a surprised expression, as though she hadn’t realized he was still in the house. He often went with the Fords to their country house, a weekend farm (someone else ran it), where he was given small chores, just like Joe and his brother, George. One morning he was told to take a pot of leftover cous-cous out to the chickens. He had really loved the cous-cous the previous evening but had eaten only a civilized portion, as he was always on good behavior when a guest. In the chicken shack he stood there throwing meager amounts of cous-cous to the hysterical chickens and stuffing his face with the rest. It was a strange and pathetic lapse into the role of thief. He was stealing the chickens’ breakfast.

  Once, when they were eating in a restaurant one Sunday night on their way back to the city, Joe’s father, Carlo, had bellowed at Alex: “Stop bending over your plate! Animals go down to their food, humans bring their food up to them!”

  “All right, Carlo,” he had muttered, and sat erect. Afterwards as they all ambled to the parking lot, Joe’s older brother, George, had grabbed Alex’s arm and hissed: “You don’t call my father Carlo! You call him Mr. Ford!” He said this with a degree of hatred that brothers usually reserve for other brothers. Alex was terrified, but also ecstatic, understanding the implicit compliment he had been paid—he had become a character in the lives of the Fords, a serious competitor, a player.

  His friends’ brothers and sisters knew him and either liked or resented him with a siblingish intensity. Their maids knew him, and with them he always had slightly confused relations. It was with the maids that the reality of his circumstance was felt most acutely—he was neither a special guest to be doted on nor a member of the employing family. With the maids he shared smiles, or cursory nods, but with the doormen he was usually exuberant. He tended to adore the doormen, because they (literally) let him in. For entire weekends he would disappear into the homes of others. He would eat their food, watch their television, chat intimately with their parents, showering them with uncomplicated precocity, good manners, attentiveness, as though he were auditioning for the role of son. He didn’t see his sleep-overs as a slight to his own mother. With her he was most at home, natural, and happy; his traveling road show was merely a testament to what a good job she had done, as he saw it. But as far as sleep-overs went, he never reciprocated. During all those years he never had one friend sleep over at his own house.

  But his own home was, at least, where he lived. He could take vacations from it, but he had to return. Aunti B’s house was possessed of whatever qualities his own home had that drove him so adamantly away, but he didn’t live there. So he never went.

  His friends’ parents’ eyes would sometimes come to rest on him at the dinner table as if to say: “You’re still here?”

  Meanwhile his aunt, who loved him, sat alone in her apartment.

  And when he graduated from college and moved back to New York, he became a sleep-over artist at the apartments of his girlfriends.

  One afternoon, checking his answering machine from his girlfriend Debbie’s house, he found a message that began: “Yo, cuz. You’ll never believe who this is.”

  ALEX WAS NOT the main focus of his Aunti B’s love. There was always “Karly,” his cousin, about whom he received periodic updates—he was still playing in a band, he was living in Brazil, he had moved to Australia, he was back in Philadelphia driving a tow truck at night and drove up on his motorcycle to stay for a weekend now and then.

  When Alex’s father was still alive the two families convened periodically. The grown-ups would huddle over coffee and cold cuts while Alex and Karl wandered off for long discussions which usually involved Karl, who was nine years older than Alex, leisurely holding forth on his various experiences with women, and also his various experiences with drugs, and also his various experiences with women while on drugs.

  “The key to girls is that the more you do what you want to do, the more they’ll do what you want them to do,” he explained. “And you can never be afraid of grossing girls out. They need to be grossed out sometimes. It’s good for them.”

  Karl always talked about his imminent stardom (he played guitar),
and even though Alex was nine years old, and therefore already comprehending of the little deceptions older people were likely to commit towards making themselves sound happy or important, he believed what his cousin told him, and admired him for it.

  The same could not be said for Karl’s parents, Frank and Linda. There was always a strange distance between Karl and his mother and father. They tended to look at him with a fixedly beneficent expression, as though trying to will themselves to accept an experiment that hadn’t turned out right. Frank was a successful professor specializing in childhood development, one of those ironies made extra-cruel by the fact that life, at its deepest level, should not be ironic. Most mornings he administered to Karl an absentminded pat on the head on his way to work, where he orchestrated vast research projects about child-rearing.

  Alex’s relationship with Karl had ground to halt on a cold winter day when Alex was twelve. They got into a fight at Aunti B’s house. Karl had taken Alex bowling, and they had gone to Aunti B’s afterwards for dinner. Everything went well until Alex was on his way out the door and Aunti B tried to give him ten dollars for a cab. For some reason Karl objected violently to this. A strange three-way fight broke out. It was one of those odd pieces of family choreography that makes no real sense, leaves no lasting marks, and yet somehow changes a fundamental equilibrium among those involved. Karl and Alex drifted apart, and once apart they drifted farther apart. There were no uncles to unite them. And after the fight at Aunti B’s, there was no aunt at whose house they might convene. They simply went off into separate worlds.

  Aunti B loved Alex like a nephew, but she loved Karl like a son. Alex was glad for that. She clearly loved Karl more than she loved him, if one can make such distinctions, and Alex was happy to make such distinctions. He was grateful someone else shouldered a greater responsibility for his crazy aunt. He was glad they had each other.