by Yoram Kaniuk
Gandy said there was a surprise party for Tennessee Williams at the Hawaiian Room and we were invited. Bird didn’t want to go. I asked Gandy who invited us and he said, You remember the woman Adele fixed me up with for an orgasm? She’s a friend of Tennessee’s. She looked angry when we arrived because apparently she hadn’t exactly invited Gandy, but she soon vanished into the beautiful and respectable crowd and Gandy managed not to notice. Young Jewish ladies in Hawaiian costumes and garlands of exotic flowers on their heads and chests stood at the entrance to the hall and they looked exotic when they swayed in their Hawaiian grass skirts to what they call the hula-hula, and whispered to one another in Yiddish so that no one would understand what they were saying, and they sang Hawaiian songs between jokes at the expense of the arriving guests, mumbling something in an ancient Hawaiian melody that I remember my grandfather Mordechai the baker singing in his bakery on a crowded street in Tel Aviv. The girls served us drinks: Cointreau in avocado goblets and pineapple juice laced with Drambuie. The lights were dim. People were dancing and laughing, eating and drinking. We were given leis to hang around our necks and were decked out in all kinds of exotic flowers. There was a big pool in the middle of the hall and some boisterous friends threw Williams into it and laughed and he laughed too, but when I stood near him I saw no sign of happiness on his face. Some guests were less polite than others and wondered where they knew Gandy and me from, but we managed to mutter something that sounded satisfyingly mysterious and so no one wondered any more. We ate and drank as much as we possibly could and Gandy shoved fruit and delicacies that looked Chinese but had Hawaiian names into the pockets of a big coat he’d brought specifically for this purpose. I saw Ginger Rogers from a distance. She was radiant. She was wearing a white dress, smiling a white smile. Rogers and Fred Astaire were always what the world was supposed to be. Magnificent. Beautiful. Eternal. America. Shirley Temple had conquered India for us and the children of a Tel Aviv full of sand and sycamores, and Rin Tin Tin was the voice of yearning, and the most sensational thing we saw at the movies in the community center was when Flash Gordon or some other hero rescued an Indian boy who was hiding in a barrel of apples and the bad guy stuck a knife into it but couldn’t reach him. Ginger was a Yankee Doodle of a woman. The world in divine Technicolor. It was said of her that she really did have a heart of gold. In a wonderful film I saw numerous times, a rich suitor buys her everything and drives her around in a Rolls-Royce, as I recall—but she is undecided. She wants to hate this man, but she’s poor and the jerk buys her expensive jewelry and she almost succumbs to him, so finally the idiot takes her to his psychiatrist friend, who is Fred Astaire, of course, to persuade her to marry him. He waits downstairs drinking in his Cadillac. Fred, like any typical psychiatrist, sits in an office the size of a football field with mirrored walls. A fairy-tale New York can be seen through the window. A large desk in front of him and a couch to the side of it. They look at one another, Fred and Ginger, music playing in the background, then he gets up and dances a little Freudian dance for her. She smiles sadly and dances a Jungian dance for him. He sings to her. She sings to him. I said to Gandy, Look how probability theory is nonsense. We just saw Fred Astaire in Harlem, and now her. I would have given five years of my life to dance with her. Gandy was just happy because he wanted the chance to sell her some of the sketches he’d brought with him, of course. As he showed her the sketches, he whispered something into her ear and I could see her rummaging in her purse and taking out bills and at the same time staring at me in amusement. Her jaw dropped and Gandy, with the money stuffed into his pocket, walked past me quickly and whispered, There’s no time, she’s coming, you’re a Russian refugee, you jumped over the Iron Curtain and you were wounded, you limp, you adore her. She came toward me. I limped toward her. We met halfway. She said, A pleasure, and I said, I no speak English, I Russian, Stalin, admire for you, see cinema with you and husband underground, KGB. She was excited. She said, Sweetie, Fred isn’t really my husband, but I didn’t understand of course, she said to several people who were standing nearby, Look at this brute, jumped over the Iron Curtain and got wounded, poor thing. Naïve, doesn’t understand anything, it was all on account of me, he saw my movies underground. I put my arm around her waist and she drew me close, it was intoxicating. She guided me with all the affection of a nurse tending to a wounded child, we started dancing, me hopping like someone who had been wounded jumping over Iron Curtains and she explaining to all the people drawing near—wondering at the sight of this beautiful woman in white dancing with a brute skipping ungraciously—how nice I was and that I had jumped over the Iron Curtain just so I could dance with her. All the who’s who were becoming jealous. Gandy was standing next to the buffet table picking it clean, and only Tennessee Williams was still standing over there and Gandy whispered something in his ear, Williams looked from me to Ginger and back again and laughed uproariously and almost fell back into the pool. I whispered to her, Me cellar, film with you and Fred, friend go Siberia because you, I pulled my arm from her back for a moment and made as if I was slitting my throat with a knife, people sighed, one woman blew me a kiss. I said, This do people who love Ginger Rogers, and I saw the tears well up in her eyes, and at that moment someone turned up the lights so that they could photograph the occasion.
Only we remained on the dance floor. The stars and starlets stood around us in a circle. Their diamonds sparkled in the light and looked like the Milky Way. She asked, What did you dream about most in Russia? I said, You, only you. She was delighted and said to the people surrounding us as we danced, Cute, he sat in the camps and thought of me. I was surprised that no one asked how a curtain could be made of iron and how you jumped over it anyway. Those were the McCarthy days, everyone hated the Reds. People on the street rehearsed rapid evacuation into atomic bomb shelters. They purchased gas masks. Some of the guests at the party were out of work thanks to McCarthy. I was a young Russian who had dared and was now a source of hope. Ginger put on her best PR face. She was no longer a young girl. She was Fredless. She fluttered like a charming butterfly and the crowd applauded and I said some words in Russian Hebrew that I remembered from the Habima Theater, and she called to her friends, What grace this poor guy has, and pressed me close to her. I put on an expression like a wounded dog, the lights got brighter. Startled women fled the light lest their ages be revealed. Being so close to her, I could see Ginger’s radiant face, her sparkling white teeth, but I saw too, all at once, that her neck was furrowed, wrinkled. Her face had been lifted and was still boyish but you can’t fool the neck. I stared as if hypnotized, embarrassed and sad for her, and she saw me staring, she put a hand on her neck, startled, shouting, Turn the lights down! Everyone moved aside, apart from the younger partygoers, Ginger looked at me with a mixture of entreaty and anger, perhaps hate, drew away from me, the Iron Curtain had been forgotten. She hurried away with her hand still stuck like a knife into her neck. Gandy grabbed a bottle of brandy and Williams smiled and pushed a bottle of Four Roses into my hand, and we left.
Grasshoppers hear through their knees, I told Gandy, and he asked, So what, and I said that if I could paint what had just happened through my knees I’d be Rembrandt. Lee left again and came back. Wally Cox became more and more attached to Marilyn Gennaro who’d come to visit with her beautiful eyes painted with blue kohl as though she were an ancient Egyptian, but there were other blue marks on her face as well, and Lee explained that Wally beats all his women so he beats Marilyn too, he can’t help it, he has to beat them, and Marilyn didn’t want to hear a single word said against the man she loved. Ugly, and he could barely see through his thick glasses, and he tyrannized women, but they still wanted him. Marilyn, the Madonna who attracted men like moths to a flame and never gave in to any of them was now completely overwhelmed with her total devotion for Wally, who hadn’t even courted her; she would lay in bed and he would just smack her over and over. He starred in a summer replacement series called Mr. Peepers, about a bumbl
ing teacher, and he was a huge success; I went to his house with Lee. He made a face and said I was jealous of him. I didn’t say anything because I preferred for him to get all his anger out on me. And Lee, who had remained a communist at heart, decided to assist with a revue of former stars who were unable to work because of McCarthy. The stars were Zero Mostel—who had been famous and now went hungry with a flower in his lapel and an artist’s hat from Montparnasse from the last century and who was spending his time painting—and Jack Gilford and Sono Osato, who was a half-Japanese, half-Irish dancer whose husband was a Moroccan Jew who imported Volkswagens to America. The revue was funny, but people were afraid to come, people dressed like FBI agents who really were FBI agents and wore Humphrey Bogart-style fedoras sat in the empty hall and scribbled in notebooks. Even the press were afraid to write about such an excellent show filled with such stars. It didn’t last long.
Then I became friendly with Professor Irwin Corey who was known as the World’s Foremost Authority and wasn’t a professor at all, but had what he called a PhD in the science of laughter, and who was in many ways the inventor of modern stand-up comedy. But when he started appearing at the Copacabana with a hat to collect money for the children of the recently-executed Rosenbergs, he was gently dismissed. He continued appearing at the Blue Angel because Max Gordon wasn’t scared of anyone and said that if Hitler hadn’t managed to kill him then McCarthy and Ronald Reagan wouldn’t either. Irwin would take me to his home on Long Island and used to buy paintings from me. Irwin liked to try and avoid paying toll on the highway and so would stop at the booth and mumble, looking for the right words, coughing, fumbling, his face red, the drivers behind him all honking their horns, until finally a cop would wave us through, yelling, Corey, you’re not funny!
He would come onstage wearing shabby clothes and a long tie that trailed onto the floor and with his hair all disheveled, holding a sheet of paper. He’d mutter something to himself, read what was written on either side of the paper, then think for a few minutes, grimacing. No one said a word. After thinking for a long time, he’d start with, However…
One day he called and said he’d heard that my friend Chan Canasta, a Jewish magician from British television, was in New York and he wanted to throw him a party. Chan arrived in New York and called, as if he knew. He said he wanted to see my new paintings and we met at my home and he looked at the paintings and then we went out and sat at Nedick’s on Second Avenue. Canasta was a tall man, pale eyes, an officer who’d deserted from the Polish army and joined the British. He fought in Greece. He was wounded and came back, but he had no name because he didn’t register when he first arrived as a deserter from the Polish army.
He went to England and became a success. He always said he wasn’t a magician. Claimed that something in his brain was just fucked up, that’s all. He explained that he knew things but didn’t know where from. He had this crazy thing in his head, he’d say, that’s all, same as Mozart had but in reverse. Mozart composed music at the age of five. You, too, have the same ability as me in your brain but you don’t know how to activate it. No one knows how to activate this ability. It’s self-activating. In my case, due to a defect in my head that might be called “positive,” if that doesn’t sound conceited, whatever happens happens, and then everyone accuses me of pulling some sort of trick on them. But I don’t deceive people. I don’t know how to saw a woman in half or escape from a barrel wrapped in chains. But I can read the whole of today’s New York Times in one hour or even less and you can ask me whatever question you like about what’s written on any page and I’ll know what it says on each and every page and even on which line it says it, and I’ll be able to recite what it says back to you, so is that a trick? Surely there’s no sleight of hand there! So they say I’m a cheater, because if I’m not then how do I know? True, the next day I won’t remember, but look, I don’t even read the paper. Who has time to read? All I do is glance at each page and you’ve seen how I can photograph what I look at and retain it in my head. I’m the negative, and part of my brain transforms it into a positive again. So what? Is it my fault? What else can I do if people like to be tricked and like to disbelieve that the tricks aren’t real? I’ve got a camera in my eyes and a darkroom in my brain and I’m the only one. I make money from something I don’t even like doing because I always have to convince people that I can really do it and I don’t like having to convince people. Do you know many people who can absorb a hundred newspaper pages in a single day? Chan Canasta’s Hebrew name was Chananel, and sometimes he failed but that didn’t deter him because he claimed that it only served to prove that he was a freak and not a magician, because if he was a magician he wouldn’t make mistakes. His dream was to be an artist. He wanted me to help him. He was always asking. He said, I want you to help me like you promised me in Paris. I told him I’d help him.
I asked him to come to Bill Dana’s and he agreed. There were about twelve of us there, including two of Steve Allen’s writers. Wally came with Marilyn who Bill asked to pour drinks and she already looked like a shadow of her former self. There was Lee and I and Irwin Corey and Al Brown, who must be the only man in New York to live in the same apartment from 1947 to the day I’m writing these words, with the same telephone number, the same cheerful smile, the same talent for playing his viola the whole while. There was somebody else too and we drank. The air was filled with tension, tension of the “Let’s see how this schmuck gives us the business” variety. Everyone looked at Chan Canasta like doctors examining a wound. He started with card tricks, moved on to a New York Times that he knew backward and forward, and then, as expected, they started mumbling that he’d just managed to memorize the paper. Bill said, Page six, in the sports section, line five, from the words “There is,” and Chan Canasta recited it. It made me laugh how they believed that an ordinary man could learn a newspaper like the New York Times by heart in a day. Canasta, who didn’t rise to their bait, asked Bill Dana if he had ever visited Bill’s home before. Cynical Bill was forced—and I could see how hard it was for him—to answer in the negative. Canasta smiled and told me to take a look in Bill’s bookcase and think of a book. Don’t move your head toward the book, he said, move your eyes over the books and decide on one. I did. He told Bill to think of a page number from one to fifty. Bill thought. Chan told Wally Cox to think of a line number from two to twenty and then without even thinking or pretending it was difficult, he rattled off something about Dryden. Now there was a heavy silence. I pulled out the book I’d looked at and read, History of English Literature, by H. A. Taine D.C.L., Chatto & Windus, London, 1906. Bill opened the book with a look of absolute hostility and said, I chose page twenty-three, and he looked. Wally, withdrawn into himself, said, Line fifteen, and Bill read the line that Canasta had declaimed. Wally shook and screeched, It’s a fake, it can’t be! Chan smiled and asked him to look in the bookcase and think of a book and again he gave them the rules and knew the correct line. Chan spoke quietly like someone who knows all about people and said, Let’s say I snuck in here last night and read all the books and learned them by heart and learned every paragraph, each line and its number on the page, yes, since I’ve only been in New York for three days, it’s stamped in my passport, and I spent two of the three days with my cousin in Long Island, which can be proven, so let’s assume that I came here last night and read the entire library, about a hundred books. No, let’s even say that I’m lying to you, that I came here who knows when, came some time ago and broke in here and read a hundred books, which is millions of words, and still remember them today. Do you have any rational way of refuting what you’ve just seen?
We relaxed afterward and they asked questions, but there was still a deep suspicion in the air.
In the end Chan stopped making a living from his strange mind and successfully devoted himself to painting in London and Tel Aviv. He hated himself so he came to love gimmicks. Once, during his show on British television, he said that in another second all the TV sets show
ing him would be turned off. And then the TV sets all over England turned off. Twenty seconds later they all came back on and Chan said he was only joking and the BBC apologized—but he never explained. Chan wasn’t a big one for explanations. He was contemptuous of his powers and said that they were nothing to be amazed at because they were just nonsense and what was so miraculous about a miracle anyway? In his youth he had been a talented mathematician and still said that one simple equation was more interesting than all his tricks. He actually said, I’m a genius who doesn’t fall into any real category, so I became a circus clown. I joined him for a two-week tour once. He also appeared on various television shows, including Steve Allen’s. On every show they asked him the same stupid questions. In his screechy voice, Wally accused me of aiding and abetting a charlatan. Marilyn, who was upset, saw that Wally was angry, and behaved abominably by agreeing with her husband.
A week later Canasta was supposed to go to Hollywood and Lee always liked saying that Hollywood was a nice place if you were an orange and she told him and he replied, I’m going as a Polish orange. She was fascinated by him and went along. She loved magic. She loved mystery. Maybe that’s what connected us, that’s what she told her Aunt Raya once. She loved watching burlesque shows. She asked Canasta and me to go with her to one. There were still a few clubs of that kind left in New Jersey. We went into a huge hall shrouded in antiquity. It was a faded place, where American comedy had been born, but the comedy had gone on its way, leaving only a memory behind, an ember of the laughing man. Now there were hundreds of men leering, not laughing, as an ugly female dwarf danced. She was followed by a fat triple-chinned stripper. And then the ancient vaudeville artistes performing sketches from the twenties—still alive and kicking. The audience reveled in it, ate popcorn, smoked cigars, belched, shouted encouragement and jeered and played with themselves and then more strippers came on and they all shouted, Take it off! Lee loved the place. It’s where she learned how to comport herself on stage, she told me. And then, Wait, she said, watch this. The star of the show came on. Silence. A beautiful stately woman wearing a high-necked blue gown. She stood quietly and looked disdainfully at the audience, like a queen. The audience was quiet. She took a book from the purse she was holding and began reading a Yeats poem. She read it slowly, stressing each word, with perfect precision, and the audience waited patiently. A few new visitors who were apparently there for the first time shouted, Take it off already! But the others, most of them old timers, shut them up. Chan mumbled something and sounded like he was choking.