by Ali Eteraz
The bars in Center City weren’t open yet. The reliable one near Shula’s Steakhouse, toward Fairmount, which tended to open earlier, couldn’t serve me today, because the bartender would have to call her manager to get his login information and he was currently indisposed. I cursed, wound my bag around my body, and headed toward Ben Franklin Parkway, gazing at its Parisian sweep. On a regular day I would evaluate the architecture, its Gothic cathedrals, the neoclassical fountains in their ovals, the honeycomb condos straight out of the Soviet avant-garde, and compare it to the places I had traveled to, trying to create a narrative about the history they were suffused with. Today I was indifferent. My hand stayed in my pocket, touching and releasing the cell phone like Lenny with his mouse. I wanted to call Richard Konigsberg. He was the man for moments like this. He was the one person I knew who not only understood the intricacies of this American life, but also knew how to explain them.
It took awhile to dial. I lost reception the first time and tried again. He picked up on the fourth ring.
“Hello.”
“Are you in town?”
“Yup.”
“I thought you would be in Chicago.”
“Still here, buddy.”
“Let’s meet up, then,” I said. “Right now—”
“But I’m at a strip club . . .”
“What kind of strip club opens this early?”
“The kind that stays open all night.”
“Don’t they run out of girls?”
“They have seventy-two every night.”
“Please. Come to the art museum café. It’s important.”
“How important?”
“Plutus let me go. I’m too angry to talk on the phone.”
“Shit.” I heard shock in his voice. “All right, see you soon. And don’t do anything stupid.”
I hung up and looked around. I was at St. Peter’s Cathedral, a good distance from the art museum, but despite the cold I decided to walk it. Philadelphia was America’s only major walkable city. You could go from the Delaware River to the Schuylkill River in a light, easy stroll. You could go from Geno’s and Pat’s in the south to King Fried Chicken near Temple Hospital in the north. Most locals were comfortable walking around Philadelphia, especially in Center City, where the chances of running into a familiar face were very high, and each encounter was heightened by the joy that came with being on foot. How had Philadelphia resisted the otherwise inexorable domination of the car and the highway? It must have been an act of collective resistance of some kind. But who had resisted? When? No doubt the fateful encounter between the peripatetic and the vehicular took place long before my time, as was the case with most things in America. But I hadn’t gotten to see it. I was among those who came of age after the end of history.
I passed the Rodin Museum. The statue of the Thinker was up front, sitting hunkered in the snow, rendered white-skinned by the powder. I thought about going to sit at his feet and doing a little wail and whine, but he seemed too stentorian, too analytical, too lacking in melancholy. I recalled that the poet Rilke used to be Rodin’s assistant. And even though Rilke had been quite the sentimentalist, none of that tenderness seemed to have made its way into the Thinker. Looking at the statue, unforgiving and aloof, a philosopher with his eye on some prize beyond this world, beyond time, colder than the icicle beard on him right now, darker than the gray skies above, I could understand why Rilke had gone toward softness, love. Rilke as a reaction to Rodin. It was a good thought to have. I would have to use it at some party I might hold in the future, assuming I was ever worth visiting again.
Inside, they charged me for a ticket. When I first arrived in Philadelphia, years ago, you weren’t obligated to pay. There was a box you could drop dollars into if you wanted. But as Philadelphia became more corporate, welcomed more people coming down from New York and coming up from DC, it changed. Now the guards played another game. If they thought you could afford it, they scuttled you into a line and made you pay. A kind of class-based profiling. And that was not even the worst thing about it. By taking away the voluntariness of the contribution they changed the way a person came to art. Now you didn’t come like a lover, making an offering. You came like a debtor. You didn’t enjoy for the sake of enjoyment; you enjoyed because you had paid.
It had been a good idea to walk. The distance gave me an opportunity to calm down and replay what had happened. I paid the entry and went to the café located on the second floor. I ordered a vanilla cappuccino and reserved a latte for my guest.
When Richard Konigsberg arrived, half an hour later, he came in through the back entrance, where he had parked. I rose up with a smile. It was very taxing.
He was a tall, thin man, who wore loose-fitting suits and wide-brimmed black hats that would make him appear like some Orthodox rabbi, were it not for the fact that he was clean-shaven and every third sentence from his mouth was either laced with profanity or merged nature and women in some vulgar fashion. And these comments tended to come out in the most inappropriate moments. “Do you think that girl’s bush is deciduous or coniferous?” he had asked about an acquaintance for whom Marie-Anne had been maid of honor. “Do you think that girl would make me cum cumulus or cirrus?” was what he asked about a secretary he once hired. The more convoluted his metaphor, the more likely he was to sleep with the girl. He had never said anything about Marie-Anne.
Richard was a self-made millionaire. His family was among the few that hadn’t left for the Main Line when the urbanites turned sub. His architect father never really kept a good job, and the family had mostly come up on his mother’s income as a corner-shop psychic. Richard had decided that the way out of the lower-middle-class morass was by way of politics. And swinging from far-right to far-left and settling in the middle, he had made his way into city hall as an advisor, and from there to Plutus, where we had met. After a few years there, he had gone off to practice law with a corporate firm that he had pulled out of bankruptcy. Last we’d talked, he was going to buy out a smaller firm in New York. They represented private plaintiffs defrauded by the big investment banks.
“So, buddy, what a fucking emergency this is. I was taking a nice happy stroll in cleavage canyon, and now here I am.” He put his hat down and brushed snowflakes from its brim.
“What’s her name?” I asked, trying to seem casual.
“I’m not too good with names,” he said. “Especially not strippers.”
“With the amount you’ve given away to strippers you could’ve gotten married to a very high-maintenance princess.”
“I’m too much of a redistributionist,” he said.
“Perfect excuse for promiscuity.”
The bit of banter lifted none of the darkness from the meeting.
“So they let you go,” he doubled back. “Tell me what happened.”
There was a silence. I felt reluctant at having elevated my anxiety and panic to such a degree that I had dragged him away from his brief moment of fun and pleasure. I could see that he had come in carrying a good deal of strain on his face. I should have thought more before calling. He had always said that I was his scion at Plutus. He was probably going to take this whole thing in a personal way.
I started by describing the face-off in the office and what George Gabriel said about being an advocate. Then I provided the backstory, which, really, was just the party at my house, and the three days in the office before that.
“That’s it?” Richard tapped the table. “This guy doesn’t talk to you for a week. Comes to your party. Then, the next workday, he’s all, Go home, see you, don’t let the door hit you?”
“That sums it up.”
Richard grew quiet. Underneath the uncouth vulgarity, Richard’s mind was a beehive of syllogism. I could see the processes shooting off in his eyes. He muttered like he was counting the Omer. I was always soothed when he did that, especially when he did it in front of me. It made me feel that I was protected by some ancient brotherhood going back to that firebrand
who had risen against the pharaoh. It was the pluck and passion accumulated and strengthened over thousands of years of persecution. It was a cache that I didn’t have access to, because I came from a people who had been defeated and never recovered and had nothing to give to those of us who had started a new life in the West. I folded my arms and waited.
“What’s the guy’s name? The one they brought in.”
“George Gabriel.”
Richard lost his grip on his cup. One of the children sitting near us let out a yelp and laughed. The spilled latte slid toward the edge of the table. I made a dam with a napkin. The children liked what I had done and clapped. A smile appeared on my face. Neither child looked anything like me. That made the smile turn hollow.
“George Gabriel?”
“Yeah,” I said. “You know him?”
“I do. German guy. Married to a journalist at Der Spiegel. She lives and travels through all those -stan countries, exposing corruption, agitating for more openness. I know his wife a little better, but they are really very similar.”
“In what way?”
“That whole generation of Germans,” he said. “They feel like since they confronted the question of Hitler and accepted responsibility for it, they can now judge the rest of the world. They see fascism everywhere, though never in themselves.”
“What was all that dormant, latent, mysterious stuff? If anything I was doormat, not dormant.”
Richard added a second napkin to the dam. “Hard to say.” He paused as the waitress came over to give us extra napkins. She was a young brown-skinned girl with pink Mohawk hair. Behind her apron she had on tattered fishnet stockings and short shorts. “I need to hear more.”
“There’s nothing more. I have been in the guy’s company only twice and the second time was to let me go.”
“At your house. Was Marie-Anne there? Did she, you know, rub him the wrong way?”
“She doesn’t rub, you know that.”
“Maybe he expected a little rubbing?”
I knew Marie-Anne well enough to know that she never gave off invitational signals. Even when I wanted her to be flirtatious she limited herself to friendliness. Ever since the illness there had been a drop-off there as well. “I don’t think so.”
We were interrupted by the Rach 3 ringtone of my phone. It was a number I didn’t recognize. Thinking that perhaps it was someone administrative from Plutus, I excused myself and ducked into an alcove containing a yet-to-be-announced exhibition. The paintings seemed to be of no painter I had ever seen before. The cityscapes looked European, but I couldn’t place which city it was. Even my knowledge of art history was disappointing today.
It was Candace. There was North Indian classical music in her background.
“Are you home?” she asked. “I’m coming to your house.”
“No, I’m not,” I said. “But why? I mean, why are you coming?”
“I remembered something else he said,” she told me breathlessly. “When will you be home? I’m in a cab. I’m almost there.”
“George Gabriel? I’m at the art museum. Across from my house. Come to the back of it. I’m there with a friend. Come over, come right now.”
Richard and I stepped outside to wait for Candace and bummed cigarettes off a couple of college kids cowering behind a pillar. Upon seeing Richard’s watch they demanded that we pay them for the cigarettes. Richard negotiated a two-for-one deal and congratulated them for being attentive to the ways of the world. “Fuck capitalism,” one of the kids replied.
Candace emerged from the cab in the same peacoat from earlier and a red Siberian bucket hat with two small fur pompoms. Her delicate face was framed nicely by the hat and made her appear like a revolutionary intellectual. She tugged at her red gloves and waved as she paid.
“I hired Candace a couple years ago,” I told Richard by way of explanation. “She says she has something to share.”
“Cute girl,” Richard said in a whisper before she got close to us. “But no rack.”
“She isn’t an offering.”
I brought Candace over by the elbow and the three of us headed back to the café. We occupied the same table as before. The only difference was that Richard switched seats with me so he could stare at the waitress.
“So what do you bring?” Richard turned to Candace before she even placed an order for coffee.
Candace looked at me for confirmation.
“You can talk to him,” I said. “He’s like my lawyer.”
“And former head of Plutus,” he added.
She seemed relieved to hear that. “Well, like I said, Friday night at the party I was really drunk, and so was he, so take all of this with a grain of salt. But George was obsessed with the bookshelf. There was this one term he kept using. I had forgotten all about it till after I left you at the elevator earlier today. I sat down in my cube and opened my phone and saw this word I had saved in my notes. It’s where I write down all the words whose meanings I have to look up.”
She presented the phone and laid it on the table. There were a number of words there. Arrogate. Quixotic. Ataraxia. But the phrase she pointed to was at the very end of the list. Residual Supremacism.
My personhood drained out of some hole at the bottom of my feet. I remembered George using that term with me.
“I know what the words mean,” she said. “But I wasn’t sure if it was some psychological condition or technical term. He kept pointing to the bookshelf and repeating it. I haven’t put together what it has to do with him firing you, but deep down I know there’s a connection. That’s why I rushed out.”
“Residual supremacism,” Richard said. “It’s causing me lingual perplexism.”
“I know what he’s talking about.” I tapped my chin. “Do you remember, Richard, when my mom visited after my dad passed away? Well, one of her last acts in life was to stick this miniature copy of the Koran on top of my bookshelf inside a hand-stitched pouch. It’s the kind of Koran you might get at an airport gift shop. I swear, I never once saw it there, not until George noticed it the other night. We were all drinking, so I didn’t think anything about it. I just put it back where I found it.”
“A Koran? What’s the connection with residual supremacism? Did you read it to him? Did you try to convert him?”
“No, I didn’t try to convert him. But I do remember George asking me why I was putting the Koran above the Nietzsche.” My breath caught in my throat. My eyes closed in regret. “I’m right, aren’t I? I fucked up when I put the Koran above Nietzsche. He even asked me why I did that. But I thought he was only joking. Maybe he thought mine was some kind of symbolic gesture. You know, like when people make a minaret higher than a steeple.”
Richard twisted Candace’s hat which she had set down on the table. “I don’t know,” he said. “I mean, the Koran thing is weird, but come on. That a Muslim has a Koran in his house is not entirely—”
I slapped the hat in his hand. It landed upside down as if jesters were about to erupt. “Muslim? I’m not a fucking Muslim.” The children near me clapped. The waitress made a face.
Richard put his hands up. “We can go after Plutus.”
Upon hearing about Richard going after her paycheck, Candace spoke up: “Do what when?”
Richard slammed a palm. “We allege discrimination. We link the things George said to you in the office with this residual supremacist crap. I think a court, especially an urban Philadelphia court, may be interested in hearing about a blond-haired German firing a dark-haired, dark-skinned subordinate based on religious discrimination—”
“No,” I snapped. “I’m not about to go around claiming anti-Muslim discrimination when I’m not a Muslim.”
Richard sighed and launched into a lecture on American history, invoking everything from the Declaration of Independence to Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. DuBois and JFK and Justice Brandeis and the X-Men and Ellen DeGeneres. He even tried singing the acronym “EEOC” like do-re-mi.
But I didn
’t hear him out. I vacated my seat and leapt from the art museum, taking the back exit overlooking the river. Richard was old and patient and didn’t chase after me, and although Candace tried to, I left her behind very quickly.
I stepped out into the cold, my eyes fixed on the river. The ice was a dirty gray blanket with an occasional piece of knotted wood sticking out above the surface, like fingers pointed at me, accusing me of being a Muslim, the Fascist of today. And the disembodied nature of the incrimination meant that I could lodge no protest.
* * *
From the back of the art museum it wasn’t a long walk down the hill to our building; but in my loafers, with the iciness caused by the perpetual northside shadow of the museum, it was treacherous going. I slipped and slid and stumbled through the stamped snow, using mental transference to take me to a giant green meadow somewhere, where I didn’t feel any of the vertiginous vibrations of confusion, where the clouds made collages in the shapes of rabbits peeking and dragonflies bursting and the sky sang a libretto of soporific blue silliness. Not this gray. Not this cold. Not this weight.
Crossing Kelly Drive, passing the Joan of Arc statue, weaving through the scaffolding erected around one of the museum’s annexes under refurbishment, I clawed and unclawed my hands. I imagined Marie-Anne examining my hands with pity, like she did that one sleet-splattered winter in Atlanta a decade ago. On one of our dates she had asked me why my fingers had a hookish bend to them and I had said it was because I had started writing love notes to her. That was the first time she had told me she loved me. And for a brief time I had been called Captain Hook. The world had been good then. The worst thing it turned me into was a fictional character.
It started snowing again. A flake landed on my eyelash. The smash of the eyelid made it melt. I became weary. The cold day seemed to flicker. I peered up at the lampposts. They looked like they wore helmets of smoke. I was reminded of nights in Bethesda, where Marie-Anne and I had moved after college, back when I was trying to fake it as a film director and she had been working on her first—and eventually only—attempted novel. We had loved smoking opiates. The world had been freer then. It hadn’t cared to snare me.