The taxi meter said $3.10 when they reached his building. Zach was careful to pull out the four singles, not the hundred—except there was no hundred, not in his bill compartment nor any other slot in his wallet. He paid the driver, rode the elevator up to his office, and emptied his wallet on his desk. Credit cards, business cards, social security card, gym ID, restaurant receipts, shoemaker’s ticket, dry cleaners bill, snapshot of Anabelle—everything was there but the C-note. His pockets, turned inside out, yielded two gum wrappers and a paper clip. He’d been distracted lately but not so inept or flush that he would misplace a hundred dollar bill. Sorting through his mental calendar, he tried to recall the last time he’d seen it, the last person who’d been anywhere near his wallet.
Babka. She had pulled off his pants. His wallet was in his pants. The pants spent the night on the floor beside her bed. She had awakened before he did. While he was in the shower, she’d been alone with his pants, and his wallet. All true, but the idea of Babka Tanenbaum stealing from him was absurd on its face. She might live in a funky studio and drink a little too much, but she was a Jewish girl from Queens. A Barnard girl. The child of survivors. A recovering investment banker. A yeshiva girl, for God’s sake.
CHAPTER 15
PERFORMANCE ART
THE NEXT TIME HE CLIMBED THE FIVE FLIGHTS TO Babka’s studio, Zach was greeted by what appeared to be a Navajo sandpainting on the floor at her threshold. She said it was made of rice flour and she had dyed, sifted, and designed it herself, and based it on the ritual art done by Tamil women who make new patterns at their doorways every morning.
“It’s called a kolam,” she said. “It represents two things: the boundary between public and private space and the wonder of new beginnings.”
Zach took great pains to cross the threshold carefully but his mere passage whipped up a dust storm. “God, I’ve ruined it!”
“Not ruined, altered.” Babka smiled beatifically. “The kolam is meant to be transitory. It reminds us that life must be created anew each day.”
Zach’s kook detector was emitting a low whine. Holly Golightly popped into his head, crystals, the Age of Aquarius. He didn’t need sand art to remind him of life’s impermanence. He had only to think of his dead relatives. Touched as he was by Babka’s effort, he also knew how appalled his mother would have been to see all that good flour go to waste. But he praised the kolam maker for her industriousness and offered to sweep up the flour so she could reuse it.
“There are no second chances in art,” she said, “only in life.”
About a month into their spirited, distinctly non-domestic relationship, Babka invited Zach for a home-cooked meal. Imagining her in an apron was a stretch but he needn’t have tried; she met him at the door wearing a long black dress turned inside out and back to front.
“It’s backward night,” she announced, fingering the string of beads that hung backward from her neck down her spine. She walked backward to the table, offered Zach a backward-turned chair, and served him dinner in reverse order: coffee, after-dinner mints, baklava, veggie burgers, lentil soup, avocado, dip, chips, and a scotch on the rocks.
“It’s a performance piece, right? You’re bored with the normal order of things?”
“I’m never bored,” Babka replied, stretching languidly on the llama spread.
“You feel we’re going backward? We shouldn’t move forward?”
“Don’t be so literal, Zach.”
“Then I give up.”
“It’s an exercise in mindfulness.”
“Walking backward doesn’t make me mindful, Babka, it makes me dizzy.”
“Dizzy beats entropy, at least it’s dynamic,” she said. “It forces us to pay attention to things we usually take for granted. It’s what happens when we make love. We’re conscious of every movement, every sensation.”
“Now you’re talking,” Zach laughed, walking backward to the bed, where they resisted entropy in the normal sequence, foreplay to climax.
Though she’d claimed the dinner was homemade, leaving the building the next morning, Zach caught sight of the store-bought containers spilling out of one of the garbage cans lined up on the sidewalk. He didn’t think she could cook in the first place—her kitchen barely had enough flatware, much less a whisk or blender—so he wasn’t entirely surprised to discover evidence of her culinary deception. However, he chose to take it as proof of something more flattering—her desire, as with the kolam, to please him.
“I’M READY TO share my space,” Babka Tanenbaum announced one night as he walked her home from a movie. “Want to move in?”
They’d been seeing one another for scarcely three months. Zach waited for her to say, “April fool!” He knew what day it was. That morning in the office, he’d found an ice cream cone melting on his desk that turned out to be a trick rubber sculpture. But Babka wasn’t kidding. She had cleared out two drawers and a third of her closet so he could move some of his stuff in.
No thanks. Been there, done that. Then again, bashert or not bashert, that was the question, and living together might be the answer. What greater test of compatibility could there be than to share a one-room studio 24/7?
Which is how it came to pass that eighteen months after Zach Levy left Cleo Scott’s calm, beige, three-room apartment overlooking Central Park, he was lugging a suitcase five flights up to Babka’s excessively swagged bower, having convinced himself that he was living with her “on spec.”
Just because he never bothered to kiss the mezuzah nailed to his Spring Street doorpost—and didn’t miss its absence when he lived at Cleo’s—didn’t mean he wanted to occupy a Jewish home without one. So he suggested that they put up a mezuzah on her doorpost and was pleased when Babka not only agreed but remembered to have the Judaica shop insert the proper handwritten prayer scroll inside.
A few weeks after he’d moved in, Babka went one step further; she suggested they make a traditional Friday night meal just to see if they remembered how. Foraging in one of her kitchen cabinets, she came up with a kiddush cup even more tarnished than Zach’s and a dusty pair of candlesticks. He went to the Lower East Side and bought Shabbos candles, kosher wine, a braided challah, a quart of chicken soup, a pound of cooked brisket, a few side dishes, and a bunch of white daisies. They set the table with more fabric—white linen over the multicolored madras. Babka lit the candles and recited the blessing. Zach said the motzi over the bread and the kiddush over the wine, the one-line version that most Jews memorize in childhood, then sat down and was delighted when she picked up after the word “hagefen” and continued saying the rest of the blessing, the whole kiddush by heart.
In the full flush of his gladness, the words of the doctor at the Jewish Home sounded in Zach’s head: prayers are often the last thing to go.
But as time went on, aspects of Babka set off red flags. Her drinking bothered him. The frequent lack of food in the house. The unannounced drop-ins (Charles, the jazz man, wasn’t unique). Even small things, like her cloying air freshener. Most of all, he was irritated by her work—not her commitment to it or the time she spent doing it, but the work itself. If not incomprehensible, performance art struck him as ludicrous and self-indulgent. Why it was called “art” in the first place and how anyone could put it on a par with “the arts” was beyond him. Though some of her productions were cute and clever, to him they boiled down to schtick. Admittedly, he had a tendency to reject what he could not understand (see Ulysses, twelve-tone music, meditation)—and when exposed to the obscure, he sometimes became defensive—but the fact remained: Babka’s “art” annoyed him, occasionally to the point of disdain.
One sunny Sunday morning, Brubeck on the stereo, they were in bed under the skylight—Zach working on a crossword puzzle, Babka, swathed in her yellow silk robe, jotting notes for a new piece—when she suddenly unscrewed the finial off one of the lamps and plopped its shade on her head. He knew this was how she worked, making notes, and trying out props as she diagrammed a new script
. A few weeks ago, when he discovered her wearing a kitchen colander on her head, its aluminum dome stuck with wildflowers, he had made the mistake of guffawing. She accused him of being too “obtuse” to see the juxtaposition of the colander (symbolizing the housewife’s domestic prison) and the wildflowers (thwarted freedom trying to push through), and she’d given him the deep freeze for a couple of hours afterward.
This time, determined to behave, Zach set aside his crossword puzzle and tried to convey a humble interest in the lampshade.
“You’re allowed to laugh,” she said. “This is supposed to be funny.” The Barnard Alumni Association had enlisted Babka to perform at her class reunion and she was planning a piece on gender and comedy that would explore the question, “Why are male comedians allowed to be both funny and sexy while female comedians are seen as desexed?” Zach chuckled when she tied the lampshade to her head with the sash from her robe and waddled toward him, Charlie Chaplin-style. “How sexy is this?” she asked.
“A man toddling in a lampshade wouldn’t be sexy either,” Zach said. “Where does the sexism come in?”
“When a woman does it, she’s making men laugh. She’s in control, which disturbs the conventional power balance.”
“I get that. It makes sense. And it’s provocative.”
“Thanks. I’m also going to weave into my feminist critique an homage to five great women comedians.”
“Let me guess: Sophie Tucker, Fanny Brice, Gertrude Berg—who am I missing?”
“Joan Rivers and Gilda Radner,” Babka replied. “You see! You couldn’t even think of five women. Comedy is dominated by men.”
“Jews too, right? All five of your women comedians are Jewish. I bet you’re going to have fun with this one.”
Babka smiled. “I hope so. But the spoof’s in the pudding.”
That’s when—consciously or not—he stepped in it. “This comedy and gender thing could be very complex and deep. Maybe it would be better if you wrote an article about it.”
“Better than what?” her smile vanished.
“Acting it out. Seems a shame to bury big ideas in performance art.” He noticed the expression on her face. “Sorry. I guess I really don’t get it.”
“Performance artists deal with big ideas all the time,” she seethed. “We use our words, bodies, and props to express the truth of the human condition.”
He nodded but pushed it. “I guess I’ve always felt that if art has to be explained, it’s not working.”
Babka shuffled across the studio in her daffy plush slippers—Ronald Reagan’s face on one foot, Nancy Reagan’s on the other—and opened the louvered doors of the kitchen alcove. The wide caftan sleeves of her yellow robe obstructed Zach’s view but he could distinguish the sound of the freezer door and the syrupy trickle of frozen vodka from the sound of the refrigerator door and the louder splash of Tropicana. Ten in the morning and she was making herself a screwdriver.
“Are you actually drinking already?”
“My house, my habits,” she said and turned her back on him.
She was right, of course. Yet, Zach couldn’t get past her sensibility any more than he could get past Cleo’s religion. He wanted to love someone without reservation.
“I didn’t mean to upset you,” he said. “I just want to understand your profession.”
“My profession?” Now she faced him, fiercely. “You make me sound like an accountant. I don’t think you’ve understood a word I’ve said.”
If he wanted to get past this, Zach knew what he would have to say next. “I do understand, Babka. My sense of humor jumped the track, that’s all. I love your stuff; it’s brilliant.”
Her expression softened. “I need to find some ankle-strap shoes for my Sophie Tucker,” she said as she returned to the closet.
Zach picked up his crossword puzzle but couldn’t concentrate. If he was able to tolerate Cleo’s racist memorabilia, why not Babka’s performance art? Cleo had pickaninies, Babka had ostrich feathers. Cleo skewered history, Babka skewered art. Yet here, too, there was a difference that made all the difference: Cleo’s collection was a blip in an otherwise even personality. Babka the performer appeared to be synonymous with Babka the person, and Zach wasn’t sure he could take the double dose.
A few months later, he went to a little theater in Brooklyn to watch her perform a piece she called “Jewry Duty,” which began with a fusillade of joke lines:
“What’s a Jewish dilemma?”
“Free ham.”
“How does a Jew know when his wife’s dead?”
“The sex stays the same but the dishes pile up in the sink.”
“What’s the difference between circumcision and crucifixion?”
“In a crucifixion, they throw out the whole Jew.”
“How do you fit six million Jews in one car?”
“Two in front, three in back, the rest in the ashtray.”
Zach couldn’t take any more. He got up without waiting for intermission and, along with about a dozen other people, left the theater. Her performance was inexcusable. Nothing could justify it—not artistic freedom, not satire, not parody, not anything.
“I saw you leave,” Babka said when she let herself into the studio an hour later.
“Half the audience left, in case you didn’t notice.” Zach was packing, shoving his underwear in the duffel.
“Half stayed.”
“What you did on that stage was sick. Sick and sickening.”
“I’m glad you’re upset,” she replied, coolly. “The piece was supposed to be disturbing.”
“Well, by that standard, you’ve got yourself a hit.”
Babka grabbed her cleansing cream and started wiping off her makeup. “You felt threatened, so you shut down. You missed the point of the piece.”
“Oh yeah, what was the point?”
“That people tolerate hate speech as long as it’s couched in humor. Their bar for shock gets so high that everything slips under it. They don’t even notice when a joke goes too far. Denigration turns to dehumanization but they’re still laughing.” She seemed to ignore Zach’s packed bag. “Remember the experiment where researchers discovered that if you toss a live frog in a pot of boiling water, it will keep trying to jump out, but if you start it off in cold water and gradually turn up the heat, it will die without a fight?” She threw the soiled tissues in her wastebasket and swiveled to face him. “Well, the audience was my frog, I started them off on ordinary borsht belt humor then gradually turned up the heat. The ashtray line should have horrified them, but what happened? A few people, including you, walked out. None of you protested, you just turned away and took no responsibility. The rest stayed. My jokes got more and more detestable but they didn’t yell at me; they stayed and they laughed.”
“That’s because they were shell shocked.”
“I’m telling you they laughed. No one shouted me down. No one threw a program at me.”
“You could have prepared us for what was coming. Producers usually warn us when a play is going to include strobe lights or gunshots so we don’t freak out. At least you could have announced that there’d be a talk-back session after the performance. You could have put a note in the Playbill, some kind of apology.”
“In case you haven’t noticed, I don’t do apology.”
ZACH DIDN’T LEAVE her that night. Something kept him in the gypsy tent with the huge skylight and the willful, wacky Babka Tanenbaum—his skepticism no match for her enchantments and his rationalizations. They weren’t the first couple to have differences. So what if performance art was Greek to him? Habeas corpus was Latin to her. Mustn’t nitpick the relationship to death. Excellence is the enemy of the good. Nobody’s perfect. Babka unsettled him but she also captivated him. Maybe because, for all her mishegas, she was fiery, adoring, and never boring. Maybe because she was sexy. Maybe because she knew the long version of the kiddush by heart.
CHAPTER 16
THE EVIL TONGUE
ON T
HE BUS FROM PORT AUTHORITY TO THE NEW JERSEY Jewish Community Center where Babka would be performing, Zach opened the Times to a full-page ad that took his breath away: Cleo’s face, life size, promoting the Harlem Chamber of Commerce, with the headline: “Experience the Vibrant Rebirth of 125th Street. Let the New Harlem Surprise You!” He tore out the page, folded it, and put it in his breast pocket.
At the New Jersey bus depot, he was met by Babka’s host, the director of the JCC’s Arts and Culture Committee, a voluble octogenarian who grilled him all the way to the venue.
“It must be a kick, living with such a talent. Where does Babka get her ideas?” The woman took her veined hands off the steering wheel as she gestured, making Zach tense. “Does she rehearse or improvise? I just love the title of tonight’s show, don’t you?”
Zach didn’t remember the title until they drove into the JCC’s parking lot and he saw it on the marquee:
BABKA TANENBAUM IN
“MOLLY GOLDBERG WAS A YENTA”
TONIGHT AT 8
Babka’s popularity in Jewish settings perplexed him since most of her performance pieces focused on stock characters and caricatures (“Jewry Duty” being in a category of its own). Yet she was a favorite of synagogues and JCCs, and won raves from reviewers in Jewish publications. Almost every article cited her yeshiva training, as if it gave her license to abuse.
The JCC’s auditorium was state of the art—plush seats, digital lighting board, a broad stage. The curtain rose on the facade and courtyard of a brick apartment house, a dead ringer for Zach’s old building in the Bronx. Babka was leaning on a windowsill, her bosom padded to appear matronly, her hair pinned up in a bun. Channeling Molly Goldberg, the matriarch of the fifties television family, the performer called across the courtyard to an unseen neighbor:
“Yoo-hoo, Mrs. Mandelbroit! You home? Oh, hello there, darling. How come you weren’t in shul last Shabbos? You missed a wonderful sermon about gossip.”
Single Jewish Male Seeking Soul Mate Page 19