by E. J. Levy
“It’s not an offer I make lightly,” she said. At the time Tuni was performing off-Broadway and was, what she called, a “minor celebrity.” She knew how to make an impression. But I was already falling in love with Margaret. I said I would think about it. And I have.
“Did you see Kay Boyle died?” I ask, taking a seat.
“Yeah,” she says. “Who’s gonna replace those guys?”
“Who knows.”
“No one has politics anymore,” Tuni says. “Not the old school politics where it’s part of the way you live. I mean look at Ben. He’s this hugely successful playwright and still he lives in the same crummy apartment on Twenty-first Street and eats tuna sandwiches. He has those deep socialist values where you can’t decide anything unless five people have discussed it. The man lives by committee.”
“People don’t have politics anymore,” I say. “They have parties.”
“Of course then there are people like Lena who should never become involved in politics,” Tuni offers. “She thinks a party is a social event. ‘The Communist party? I’d love to come. I have a fabulous red dress. The Nazi party? Love to.’”
I smile and watch her talk, her white moon face suspended above the black marble table. I know what she means. Still, I think it’s not politics, but something less tangible that we’ve misplaced. We do not know how to live our lives anymore, if we ever did. We paste them together from scraps, odd bits. We fake love affairs. Develop routines. Go into therapy. Visit the zendo, the ashram. Adopt Japanese religions and French literary theories. We borrow, we beg, we steal. We miss the point. We long for it.
I think of a night last year after one of these meetings with Tuni, just after our big young country had declared war on a small old country. I was on the subway platform at Christopher-Sheridan, one a.m., with two sailors in spanking white uniforms trimmed in navy blue stripes and round white caps like dog food dishes. They were drunk and yelled at the elderly black man behind the glass who was selling them tokens. They wanted directions.
They were oddly anachronistic, the two sailors, arrogant and naive and so very white. They looked like they’d been scrubbed with bristled brushes and soap, their faces were creamy, matte red at the cheeks, they looked like they would smell like babies, new and moist. Like sheets.
They seemed to be posing for pictures no one was taking, pictures they had seen: pictures from another war we won, their fathers, my father, the war that came after the war to end all wars (spoken of like an august and distant relative—Great Uncle, Great War). How odd to see them then—half a century later—stepping through the turnstile straight out of a Gene Kelly flick. Playing victorious as if the last fifty years hadn’t happened: No House Committee on Un-American Activities, no civil rights movement, no Selma, no King, no Dylan or Leary or acid or Beatles or Stonewall, Marilyn, Joplin, Nicaraguan Revolution. Done with change, they would turn back the century as if it were a time bomb on which the clock was running down.
For three weeks after Christopher is discharged from the hospital Tuni calls his apartment and leaves messages on his machine, but he never calls back. Then, one Saturday evening, Thomas answers the phone. She can hear Christopher in the background, asking who it is and a muffled sound as Thomas covers the receiver. “Tell them I’m dead,” Christopher says. “They can save their sympathy for the starving children in Crown Heights or Somalia or wherever it’s chic to be starving these days. Who is it anyway?” When Tuni offers to bring by some Chinese food, she can hear Christopher instruct Thomas to tell her thanks but no.
“He’s really not up to seeing anyone. I’m sorry,” Thomas offers.
“Don’t worry about it,” Tuni says. “Well, I’d invite you out Tom, but I’m sure you wouldn’t want to leave Chris.”
“Invite me out,” Thomas whispers.
So they meet at a Greek diner at the south end of Central Park. Thomas, who is only twenty-eight, looks drawn and tired and aged. He slides into the red leather booth and kisses Tuni chastely on the cheek. They chat for awhile about mutual acquaintances, how funny the weather’s been lately—hot then cold—the hole in the ozone layer, give their orders.
“I want you to know that it’s not that Chris doesn’t want to see you,” Thomas begins when the food arrives. “It’s just been a rough time for him.” He circles the rim of his coffee cup with the tip of his index finger.
“For both of you,” Tuni says, but Thomas continues to stare at his cup as if he hasn’t heard her.
“His sister slit her wrists in Ohio,” he says matter-of-factly. “The day Christopher was released from the hospital.”
“Christ, Thomas.”
“She wasn’t handling Christopher’s illness very well,” he says, tapping the saucer with the back of his nail. “It’s so ironic, isn’t it?” he looks up at her. “I mean, here’s Christopher fighting for his life and his sister kills herself.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“That’s because there is nothing to say,” he tells her. “Nothing.”
The hospital discharged Christopher because they said there was nothing more they could do for him. “Can you imagine being so sick even a hospital won’t take you?” she asks. “I guess for them he’s just another guy they can’t help, but for Chris it’s his only life.”
“What would you do if you were dying?” I ask. “Not that we aren’t.”
“You mean imminently?”
“Yeah.”
“Depends.”
“On what?”
“Of what?”
“How about diphtheria?” I propose. “Influenza? Anthrax.”
“Burn the fields,” she says, roused by the mention of her favorite disease.
“Dutch Elm,” I press.
“I’d go to Holland and buy wooden shoes and dance in the Amsterdam ballet. How about you?” she asks. I think of what I might have said a year ago, how I might have imagined Margaret beside me reading. Now I think I will die on my feet, traveling.
Ever since Margaret left, I find I spend a lot of time on subways. Just riding them. Last Saturday, I crossed three boroughs on the F and 7 trains, riding from Nathan’s Hot Dog stand at Coney Island to the Chinese pastry shops on Main Street, Flushing, and back again. I ride at all hours—three a.m. with the musicians, the transvestites, the nurses in their scuffed orthopedic shoes going home from the late shift; just before dawn, among the sleepy brown workers who catch a few extra winks on their way to low-paying jobs with lousy hours.
At first it was by mistake. I was coming home after work a few months ago, reading a book and thinking about Margaret and why she had left and what I could’ve done differently, when I found myself at Far Rockaway, just having forgotten to get off. Then there were other times I’d jump confidently onto a train only to find it was going in the wrong direction, Uptown instead of Downtown, or to Queens instead of up the West Side. After a while I just stayed on. The train would pull into my station, the doors would open, and I would sit there, with all the other people going to other places, going with them.
Christopher comes in and out these days. Sometimes he is incredibly lucid, like a drowning man who understands he’s going to drown. They say there is this remarkable clarity when you’re facing death. Time slows down and you see everything happening. As if your life had nothing to do with you. As if it were someone else’s story you were telling that bore no relation to your own. Sometimes Christopher is like that, Tuni says. With this uncanny clarity. And then there are other days when he’s demented. He’ll march the three of them out for ice cream at Häagen-Dazs and when they get there he’ll start raving about the absence of his favorite flavor, or he’ll force Thomas to take him to Chase Manhattan bank only to refuse to make a deposit and it will take an hour to find out that he’s forgotten his account number and had been too embarrassed to say so.
“I need to talk to Tuni Lewis,” Christopher announced two days ago, after a week in a coma. Thomas, amazed, brought Christopher the phone.
“Hi, munchkin, how’re tricks?” Christopher asked Tuni.
“Fine, Chris. And how are you?”
“Oh, fine, you know. So when am I going to see you?”
“Name a time.”
“How about tomorrow morning?”
“I’ll be there.”
When she arrives at eight the next morning, Thomas leads her to the living room where Christopher is arranged on the couch among oily pillows and yellowing linen. He has not eaten in two weeks and Tuni tells me that she is amazed that a person can look like that and still be alive. Thomas leans over to wake Christopher and tell him Tuni’s arrived.
“I’ll leave you two alone, I guess,” Thomas says. “I have a couple of errands to run.”
“Sure,” Tuni says. “We’ll be fine, won’t we Chris?”
“Of course,” Christopher says, eying Thomas. “Who’s he?”
“I’ll be back in a few hours,” Thomas says, and he turns and walks away down the hall.
It is terrifying to watch someone die slowly, Tuni will tell me later. You think they cannot go on, but they do. If something doesn’t come along and kill you, you can last a long time almost dead.
Pumped up on the morphine that he injects during his frequent visits to the bathroom, Christopher is cheerful and vague throughout the morning and early afternoon. When he slips into sleep, Tuni goes to the kitchen and makes them tea. When she returns to the couch with a tray of cups and saucers and a steaming pot, he gently takes her hand and places it on his chest, clasping it to his bony sternum, so she can feel his heart throbbing under her palm.
“It hurts here,” he says simply.
She asks him if he remembers Jessica Ro, a former lover of hers and a former dancer. “The Korean chick with no hair,” he says.
“Yeah,” Tuni says, relieved by his recollection. “She’s working with me now, selling our clothing line on the West Coast.”
“My friend Tuni owns a clothing company, too,” he says.
“I am Tuni,” she says.
“Well, I told him I was happy to go see a drag show, but not that one,” Christopher exclaims. Then, abruptly lucid with pain, “Can you help me to the bathroom,” he asks. “I’ve got to go.”
“Sure,” Tuni says.
After his shot, Christopher lies back on the couch. “See you two later,” he says, although Tuni is the only one there. “Bye-bye, munch-kins. Bye-bye. Bye-bye, munchkins.”
Among the things Margaret left behind when she left me was a sweatshirt I had given her depicting a pair of bespectacled rabbits on ice skates skating round and round and round. It still has her smell in it, a smell of incense and wood smoke and flannel. Lately I’ve taken to wearing it around the house, sleeping on Margaret’s side of the bed, I spend a lot of time reading the books she left behind. Wondering what she saw in them. Christopher Isherwood on his guru, Yeats’s translation of the Patanjali’s Sutras, Buddhist poets, feminist theologians.
I am reading in the living room early one evening when I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror above the hearth. For a moment I think it is Margaret seated there, in her rabbit sweatshirt, reading Isherwood. But then I realize it is only me in disguise. Only me pretending to be someone else.
Tuni is standing in the foyer, wearing a black cape and an enormous black sun hat with a broad floppy brim, when I arrive at the International Center of Photography.
She tells me Christopher’s back in the hospital. The chemo they’ve given him has ruined his bone marrow. He’s not producing enough red blood cells. They have to give him new blood. There’s the chance of a marrow transplant, but it’s an experimental procedure and his insurance company isn’t sure they’ll cover it.
We walk up a curved staircase to the gallery where the photos of Soviet Jews are on display. People in suits and leather bomber jackets are shuffling through the rooms carrying plastic glasses of red and white wine close to their chests. The people in the photos are crowded too: pressed against door jambs, cowering under chandeliers, dwarfed by their bookshelves and Kurdistan rugs.
When we reach the last of the rooms, I launch into a monologue on the evident influences. Cartier-Bresson. Vuillard. The French fascination with moral claustrophobia.
“It was brilliant,” I pronounce in full-blown rabbi-speak.
“I thought they were pretty nice,” Tuni says, in what I imagine she imagines is my family’s Midwestern dialect.
“Are you imitating me?” I ask her as we move toward the exit.
“Well, I thought someone here ought to be representing your personality. It had to at least put in an appearance, don’t you think?”
We push silently through the bodies. Through other people’s perfume and cigar smoke and nervous human smells.
“I miss you,” she says quietly when we reach the top of the stairs.
“I’m here.”
“No. You’re not.”
I feel around in my pocket for bits of things and try to identify them: a dime, the stem of an apple, a bank machine receipt.
“I don’t know who I am when I’m with you anymore,” Tuni says.
“I’m not trying to move in on you.”
“You’ve taken over my personality.”
“I’ve adopted your verbal mannerisms, that’s all. I do that with perfect strangers. Don’t take it personally,” I say.
“Fran,” she says angrily. Then more softly, “I depend on the people I love to be who they are.” I think of how little she knows about me, how in all the time we have been friends we have never had an ordinary conversation, a simple, plain, brown-paper-bag conversation, the sort of conversation I routinely had with Margaret by the stove, eating chips from a bag, walking to the subway. Tuni and I have performed for each other, like tightrope walkers; afraid to fall.
“I wouldn’t know how,” I say. But she has already turned to go. I admire the rippling of her cape as she descends the broad red-carpeted staircase.
On the subway home I sit beside the door in a narrow single-person seat wedged between an armrest and the conductor’s box. Across from me a young black woman wearing a velvet hat sleeps, her head falling onto her chest, her lips parting. Beside her is the Hasid in his black coat and felt bowler. His yellowed beard unravels over his chest as he sleeps. He has wire-rimmed glasses; a few brown age spots show on his cheeks. But it is his hands I notice. How his right hand is spread open on his knee, palm up as if in supplication. The fingers of his left gathered together like the hooked beak of a tulip tree blossom, and twisted out from his leg in the wrong direction. It is a small gesture, this wayward hand. But significant. Defying convention. I study him across the aisle before I begin to draw the fingers of my left hand together and lay them against my knee, turning them outward. My right hand open upward on my other knee. I look over at the Hasid again to check that I’ve got it right and find him staring at me. His eyes moist and bloodshot. He yells something in what I take for Yiddish and swats his hand in a gesture I could not possibly misunderstand.
In the final week before Christopher died, whenever he walked—which was not often—he floated. His feet hardly reached the floor. His was not so much a death, Tuni will tell me later, as an unbecoming. “He unbecame himself.” His body did not so much give out, as erase into the air.
I imagine, sometimes, how it must have been the night Christopher died. How Thomas spent the wee hours of the morning walking around Manhattan by himself. If he thought about it, it might have occurred to him that he was putting himself in danger, in harm’s way, tempting hurt to hurt him more that he might feel something. It is the feeling nothing that frightens him, I think. The great weightlessness since Christopher’s heart stopped. I imagine it is because of that, because he cannot feel anything anywhere on his body, that Thomas walks that night through the streets of Manhattan from the hospital at Seventy-sixth to a theater in the forties, where he can sit in the dark and watch people move and let someone he will never know touch his body, which he no longer re
cognizes as anybody.
THE THREE CHRISTS OF MOOSE LAKE, MINNESOTA
IT’S NOT LIKE WE BELIEVED THAT THEY WERE THE SONS of God or anything, but for awhile (before Dr. Davidson and all the publicity, before it became a story, when we were still just folks caught up in the mystery of the thing), we felt kind of special—chosen, you might say—to be host to the three Christs of Moose Lake, Minnesota. I felt—I don’t know how else to put this—blessed. It brought Karen to the hospital after all, and what can I call that if not a blessing?
You’ve probably heard about them by now. The three guys at the Moose Lake Hospital for the Mentally Ill, who all claimed to be the son of God, aka Jesus Christ. It was Dr. Davidson’s idea to bring the three of them together to see if “confrontation with a similar delusion” would shock them back into reality. That was what Karen told me anyway. I wasn’t in on the details of their therapy, of course, being an orderly. My job was to keep things in line. To help patients into the toilet and hold them up under the shower and tie them down when that kind of thing was necessary. It isn’t glamorous work, I admit, a glorified bouncer really—the sort of work you might expect a guy like me to do, if you saw me in the Piggly Wiggly—but it’s honest and it’s a step up from the life my father led.
Of course some of what you hear about the Christs is just plain wrong. Nothing more than publicity seeking by some of the staff, looking for their fifteen minutes. It’s not true that the hospital’s bricks wept blood or that the Virgin Mary appeared in the parking lot. (Mr. Martinez’s son has the Virgin of Guadalupe spray painted on his rear windshield, like those Jesus Saves vanity plates you see sometimes. Amazing, maybe, but hardly miraculous.) It’s not true what they said in the Weekly World News either, that when they gave the three Christs the Myers-Briggs personality test, one of the Christs scored clear off the charts: neither ENTJ (“The Executive”) nor ISFP (“The Artist”), but INRI.