by Yoram Kaniuk
Our new apartment on Cornelia Street near Sheridan Square, where I’d stored my paintings, our furniture, our books and our records, next door to which Lee had a studio—that’s where I went from LaGuardia after a long flight in what was then the latest airplane, the DC-7, though because jetliners were coming in, it had a short life. Lee was just standing there when I went in. We mumbled hello to one another. Lee was standing sipping from a bottle of Cutty Sark and she asked, What are we doing here? I said that we had to be in the same place on the same day sooner or later. She asked, Why? She wanted to be angry but she hadn’t yet mustered sufficient strength. I tried being clever and said that it was randomness being justified after the fact as having been necessary, like Brother Juniper tries to do in Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey, which is about an attempt to comprehend, theologically speaking, why five people die when “the finest bridge in all Peru” collapses—why they were there in Peru in July of 1714 in the first place, and why them in particular, at that precise moment, why he of all people, Brother Juniper, happened to be standing there to witness the disaster, which it made no sense for God to allow. Lee thought for a moment and said, We had some great years, and we had some interesting years. I made you laugh. With you everything is always a drama, that’s why you’re sad even though inside the sadness you’re funny too, but you really hurt me when you went off to have an affair with my sister-in-law, I hated you but I also admired the depravity you’re capable of, which you try to hide by overcompensating with your guilty conscience but your conscience isn’t always on the right side. How sad your face looks and how convenient your so-called shyness is, every woman you meet wants to breastfeed you, the sweet baby from Tel Aviv, and you really are sweet, sure, a real sweetheart with a tragic and beautiful face. But all your insecurity always leads to suffering because you don’t know how to love, because you don’t believe that someone is capable of really loving you. I know that people can love me. That’s not why I’ve got problems. All your life you’ve been apologizing. You love wallowing in your own self-righteousness. Each one of your paintings is always the last one. Each day is the last. Tomorrow you’re always going to die. The day after tomorrow there’ll be a funeral and I’ll be sorry I didn’t come to see you sooner. You go to a funeral and think, Ah, I might as well stay put, it’s coming in any case—and how old are you? Twenty-seven?
You ruined my career, said Lee in a empty voice. I could have been a star but you worked on the Jewish Russian in me who had to be a penniless artist and because of you I let Shirley MacLaine become a star and I appeared at the Henry Street Playhouse. But I loved that about you too, if “love” is the right word, I wanted you to be my enemy because you wanted the most important things for me, you wanted to purge my soul of impurities, you wanted me to stand on the razor’s edge and touch eternity, but it wasn’t me you saw in your glass-bottomed boat in the sewers, but yourself. You realized that unlike art, literature, poetry, or music, which can all have a forever, dance and theater have only a present and you robbed me of it so that I’d be, as your precious Dostoevsky puts it, worthy of my suffering. You, you’re both strong and weak. On the one hand you’ve got the strength to do what you want and believe, while on the other you want to succeed not like yourself but like the people you despise for not doing it the same way as you. You want to be my performance at the Henry Street Playhouse but still to succeed like Shirley MacLaine. You’re frightened of everything. Arthur used to bring you pills and say that you suffered from every phobia under the sun. And now I see it, I see how scared you are, I see how after you left me for years and weren’t with me when I needed you, when I was deep in the shit, when I’ve finally had enough, when I want to leave, to live, to breathe, instead of thanking me for releasing you, for sending you off to the life you want and are worthy of, you beg me to stay, beg without shame, because you’ve got what Arthur called autophobia which is, as far as I remember, the morbid fear of being alone. Marlon Brando saw something noble and strong in you but he despised you too though he was as curious as ever about you and you used him and he hated seeing you envy his money and success but he admired you for understanding that what he wanted most in the world was to be a botanist because he loved flowers, but you betrayed him anyhow, and you know what I’m talking about. You cheated him. He said that not only are you the only person in New York who actually replies when asked how you are, but also that you’re a talented man—but not a decent one. That the greatness in you, if it’s there, will be in the art you hate and will surely run away from because it it’ll never lead to thousands of people applauding you, will never give you the success you both desire and mock. The stupid story about your night with Barbara, the one whose jeans had that button with “Lee” stamped on it, that story did the rounds all over town and everybody laughed, and Sandy wrote that idiotic TV play, and I thought, Why does it have to be that way, who’s that fat cow anyway? I’m a thousand times smarter and sexier and just better than Barbara, and when you got Billie Holiday up onstage with Percy Heath while she was high, and everybody cried, what interested you was that you were part of a historic moment that wasn’t yours; being Charlie Parker’s friend was more important for you than Charlie Parker himself, who you didn’t understand because you didn’t believe that somebody could like you for who you are, for better or worse, you didn’t believe that he needed you and loved you and let you, only you in all the world, paint him how he was.
Lee stood there, pale. She was proud of all she’d said, but it hurt her to say it. I tried to say something. Don’t talk, she whispered, and sat down in our old armchair and buried her face in her hands and spoke as though from inside a vacuum-sealed room and it sounded like a controlled explosion and she said, I’m happy in West Side Story, you want to be like everybody else but you’re different, it’s not your fault, why do you try to be like everyone else when you can’t? It’s infuriating. It’s just self-flagellation. You even enjoy being wrong. You’ve never liked or hated what others saw and liked or didn’t like in you. Marlon said that you went to a movie house on Broadway and stood in the balcony to see Viva Zapata! but he saw how you were turning your nose up at the movie and he thought, This schmuck is here with me and still he’s acting like a snob, I’m not sure about him, he doesn’t look all that good, why isn’t he home with Lee, but you never were. At least you saved me from dependence on you. Marlon showed me respect, not you. When you asked him that infuriating question, why he was so attracted to Movita, and he told you that she screws like a motorcycle, you spread it all over town. He broke off all contact with you, but to this day you still think you’re friends because he hung that picture of your mother over his bed. I loved and still love your mother too. I write to her. You can’t hold a candle to her because you’re not warm and unassuming like her. You like to humiliate yourself and you like to believe that you’re worthless and you actually enjoy wallowing in it all. I’m happy with Jerry Robbins. He loves me more than you’re capable of. He’s only loved two women in his lifetime: Nora Kaye and me. Both of us aren’t beautiful. He doesn’t need us as decoration, he isn’t just some faggot who wants to look good in company, he loves us. He’s considerate, he listens to me, he doesn’t judge me, he doesn’t think I’m too fat. You’ve got a nice side too, sure, you know how to love, but only for a moment, only when you conquer someone new. Yeah, you’re sensitive, you’re very sympathetic about other people’s sorrows so long as it doesn’t get in your way. If there’s a funeral and you liked the person but you want to finish a painting, you’ll always find a way of lying and not going because, even though you liked him, that one painting is more important. No, you don’t know how to really love a woman. To love her pettiness. You want someone angelic and queenly. That’s why you like elbowing your way to the stars. What have you got to do with Eva Gabor, who you tried to cozy up to like an idiot? Or Monique van Vooren for that matter? They’re larger than life, larger than your life, and so you kiss their asses and do them favors and t
hrow your brain out the window and act so proud of the fact that you can walk down the street with a floozy from TV. Have you ever noticed that you brag about having been a soldier, but never about your paintings? Hanoch and Oved are always saying, So what if you fought in a war? There are millions who fought and were wounded in wars, but how did you learn how to paint? Have you ever told anyone what really happened to you along the way? You really are a genuine bohemian because unlike the rest of us here you didn’t rebel against your parents, against the bourgeoisie, because you didn’t have to, you came from a rebellious country. But look, I no longer want any part of it, I don’t want to be your excuse for legitimizing your sadness anymore, for those demons that live in your paintings and tell you their stories. I hate you and hating is a wonderful emotion, because I also have the love of a genius like Robbins.
I sat in silence for a long time and then I told Lee a few things about us and her and me. Not a lot. A few. She listened and burst out laughing and then into tears. I went to the Cedar Bar, drank, and told everybody there that I loved Lee Becker and she’d left me.
Years later, when I went to New York to look for the footprints I’d left in the city, I went to visit Larry Kert with my friend Jerry Tallmer. Most of the people I’d known were dead. Or had disappeared. He was the only one of all the people I’d known who hadn’t died and still lived in the Village. Wally Cox was dead. Marilyn Gennaro, Wally’s wife, had committed suicide. Their daughter the belly dancer had committed suicide too. Gandy was dead. Bob was dead. Lee was dead. Larry said that Leonard Bernstein would be dead in six months, and he was. Jerome Robbins would die within a year. Mina Metzger was dead. Dolores, who’d changed her name, was dead. Ethel was dead. Beulah Weil was dead. Marshall was dead. Frank Silvera was dead. Julie Gibson was dead. Eva Gabor was dead. Cyril Johnson was dead. Mara Lebo was dead. Melita was dead. Al Elliot was dead. Fanny was dead. Kubrick was dead. Sherry was dead. Mary was dead. Hiram Hayden was dead. Louise was dead. Arthur Cohen was dead. Lewis Milestone was dead. Ruth Sobotka was dead. Mira had disappeared. Beautiful Marie Barr was hiding in Idaho. Miles, who towards the end looked like a Cro-Magnon with thinning hair, was dead. Libby and her Indian Ambassador had vanished in England. Freddie’s wife was dead. James Jones was dead. Jerry Robbins was dead. Bird was still dead. And years after he’d died, when they made the movie, Bird, I was asked to go and interview Chan Parker. I said I wasn’t sure she’d remember me. I had been a passing shadow in her life. Two days later they told me to go anyway. On a rainy day at Orly a Renault 25 limousine was waiting, whose driver was a Frenchman who looked like an FBI agent from an American movie. Traffic was heavy. The driver put a blue light on the roof of the car and used a siren and the other cars moved aside and we passed through like the Children of Israel in the wilderness. It was an appropriate way of arriving at Champmotteux, a small village whose houses were two hundred years old, with a church in the square and lots of empty fields, and I told the driver he’d worked wonders and he looked at me as though I’d just complimented the chef at La Tour d’Argent for managing to make boiled eggs.
Chan was standing at the door of an old house. On the refrigerator behind her was a poster: Bird Lives! There were paintings and drawings hanging in her house that looked familiar and it took me a few minutes to realize that they were mine. No, she hadn’t forgotten. The ice was broken. Chet Baker was dead. Prez was dead. Louis Armstrong was dead. Little Baird was a chef in Kentucky. But I went to Christopher Street with Larry Kert. In the area around Bank, West Eleventh, and Fourth, people shuffled along slowly, looking like shadows. They walked holding hands. Pale, dying old people leaning on consumptive young people. Bodies like shadows of bodies. Hundreds of frightened people. Eyes gaping from fallen faces. Like the Vale of Tears, for those who’ve seen it. Hundreds of lonely, shivering people. Larry Kert looked bad. His face was sunken. His cheeks smooth. His hair shorn. Almost nothing remained of the beauty he once had. He hugged me and we sat down. Two silent men were in the room, gazing into space. And he said, All the people you see here will be dead in one to three years. Me and all the rest. We tried talking about Lee. Larry said he hadn’t seen her before she died, just like nobody else had seen her, he would ask her to help a sick dancer friend and she wouldn’t come and then he would spot her in a wheelchair because she had cancer and she would turn her face away so as not to see him. It’s sad here, he said. If they don’t find a drug in the next three years none of the people you see here will be alive. My sister Anita was here and she fainted when she saw me. Her husband’s a doctor who hunts wild animals in Africa and hangs their heads on the walls, and there’s an empty space on the wall and she said it’s waiting for her head between the heads of the bears, wolves, and deer. Maybe I’ll be hung there, but who’d want to put up a head like this? I sat there stunned. Hundreds of gray people. Without hope.
But at our sad parting ceremony, I’d tried to persuade Lee to give it another try, I was scared to death of living alone and without her, and she said, Look, let’s put things in order. You’re staying here. I’ll take care of the divorce. It’s easy to do in your Mexico. I’m not going to wait around for you to lie to me again. Now we have to decide what each of us is taking. She asked, What are you taking, the books or the records? And what furniture? She waited for an answer. There was no mercy in her voice. I tried to say something, but without success. In the end I said, The books because you don’t read, and she got insulted and really finished me off by taking all the records, some of which were valuable, some were presents from Lady Day and Prez and Bird and Ben Webster. The radio was playing plaintive, winter afternoon music. It was a tough room. I tried telling her stories. To amuse her. To bring her back. She was cold. She took a few pieces of furniture and the records. I got the divorce papers by mail from Mexico two years later. The last twenty years of her life were shrouded in mystery. Even her best friends didn’t know exactly what happened to her. She died of cancer after founding the American Dance Machine. Even her brother couldn’t explain what had happened to her exactly. Nobody believed she’d died of the disease. It was thought that her husband had killed her. She’d had a nose job. She didn’t want to see any of her old friends. Her father died. Her brother visited Israel and forgave me. She even refused to say good-bye to him. Her husband’s name was Paris Theodore, the son of Nenette Charisse, sister-in-law of Cyd Charisse, who was of Egyptian-Coptic extraction. And she called herself Mrs. Theodore, not Lee Becker. At the end of her life she drew a curtain and demanded that it remain closed over her past and the world. She erased Lee Becker and created a new character who died of cancer. She was no longer liked. Dancers spoke ill of her. She gave her children Arab names. She became an anti-Semite. Paris made weapons. He designed and sold guns. He claimed he was a descendant of King Farouk. Al Brown says he was maybe the grandchild of an Egyptian Jew, but others claim that Lee had converted to Christianity, and if she did, why did she give her two children Arab names? Paris treated her as if he was an effendi and maybe she tried to kill him and ended up sticking to him out of hatred. He had made a bundle, but didn’t agree to pay for her burial. I don’t know who did. Not her brother and not her sister. They only read about her death in the Times. It was said that she never mentioned her earlier life. She never admitted that she’d been married to me. Jerry Tallmer, one of the founders of the Village Voice, one of my friends who survived the old days, didn’t even know where she was living. He sent me Lee’s obituary from the Times. It didn’t say a thing I already knew. Nothing about her family. Nothing about me. Nothing about her friends. Nothing about the shows she’d done. Or maybe just a bit about that.
A few years before she died I met her after not having seen her for almost thirty years. We sat looking at one another. She said, Can you tell me what there was between us? I said no. Do you remember being close? I said no. She told me about her children. She looked good, she was pleasant to me, and I told her about my daughters and she asked about my mother, I told her she had died, a
nd we parted. Then she was dead.
But after we separated, after her speech, I was broke again. My few paintings and drawings had almost all been sold. A hot summer’s day. You could have swum in the humid air. I bumped into Lovejoy. I hadn’t seen him since he used to shout to his hookers on Sixth Avenue near Alex’s Borscht Bowl. He said he was very happy to see me. I said, We haven’t seen one another for years, how come you’re happy to see me? He explained that he’d just been thinking about me because a good friend of his was urgently looking for a painter and asked if I wanted to make a little money, and this was my chance. I thought, Why not? Lee had left. There was nobody around. Gandy was in Vermont.
Being alone with some paint, the quiet, some brushes was good for me. Painting apartments is nice. It’s serene, and I know paint and think about it and nobody expects you to be an artist. So I went to a building on Central Park West in the afternoon, because Lovejoy had told me that the friend slept late. It was a splendid building, big and old with two art nouveau turrets and windows of different shapes, lots of decorations and sloping roofs. I got into a well-tended elevator of the old type, completely covered in a brown weave, and the elevator boy, who in fact was so old that he quaked on his feet, took me up to the top floor. I rang the bell and a woman was waiting because she’d already been informed by the lobby that I was on my way up. I told her who I was. She opened her mouth in a yawn you could drown in and asked, Who? I explained and said, Lovejoy sent me. She was wearing a faded robe and her breasts were visible through her nightgown and her face was pale as if she’d removed her makeup with sandpaper though there were still traces of it by her ears. Her lips were white. She said it wasn’t such a great pleasure to meet me and they’d told her from downstairs why I was coming but she didn’t remember exactly and so I told her I was the painter and she said, Ah, yes! Come on in. The great artist has arrived. The living room was shrouded in darkness. The door to the next room was open and on the big round bed lay sleeping a young woman who didn’t for a moment stop writhing and grinding her teeth like a rabbit. The woman who’d opened the door said her name was Mary Lou and she took me into the kitchen and put on some water. She yawned again and said, What? Isn’t it early in the morning? You’ve got an early-morning look about you and anyway you woke me up so I’ll make you some Colombian coffee that you won’t forget in a hurry. We had a conversation that didn’t begin anywhere in particular and led nowhere. We sniffed each other like dogs. She talked about goldfish, about Texas, how somebody could die of a heart attack without feeling it happen, about sleeping pills, sex improvement pills, pills for apathy. I drank my coffee, which was tasty, and told her I’d once been down on the Panhandle and met an old guy who bought Cadillacs, and she said it was a cute story. It came out, it just came out, because I didn’t know what to say and I didn’t understand where I was and how it could actually be early morning despite being afternoon. She didn’t really hold up her end of the conversation and in any case whenever there’s a silence I get scared and start talking even more and that’s just the way I’d already missed out on a few of my life’s more beautiful moments, and Lee had once said that I could have got twice as many girls into bed if I’d talked less about Tolstoy and death and the divine depths of sorrow, and I told Mary Lou because it just came out that I’d had a grandpa just like the old man in Texas and I saw flashes of anger cross her face and she told me, Get it into your head right now that there’ll be no intimate or personal relations between us. And then, after her anger abated, she added that the story about my grandpa was a trick, but let’s move on. Her hair was unkempt and she looked as though she’d replaced her skin with something else beneath her faded robe. She said that she and Tina, the beautiful girl asleep in the next room, worked on what was called the telephone. I smiled. She asked why I was smiling, and I said that telephone operators didn’t live in fine apartments like this and she said it wasn’t actually that kind of telephone. If you’re a friend of Lovejoy’s then you’ll know. I said I wasn’t his friend and didn’t know. She said he’d said that we were like brothers. I said I had a sister and almost no brothers, sort of like this girl I knew who was almost pregnant. Mary Lou said that was cute but I’d been asked to paint and not to tell her the story of my life. In this apartment the stories end as soon as you walk through the door. A guy comes, goes, and comes. There’s no connection between the beginning and the end. And my name isn’t exactly Mary Lou. And the room where Tina’s sleeping is the one I want you to paint. You look good and that’ll make it difficult for me, but I’m not interested in good-looking young men. Are you married? Not anymore, I replied. She asked, What does your wife do? I said that she was acting and dancing in West Side Story and she said she’d seen it and it was nice and who was she in the show, and I explained and she asked, How did you get along? And I said that we’d made each other’s life a misery and she said, But she’s a good dancer, I saw her with the Ballet Russe too in A Streetcar Named Desire. Marriage gets in the way of a love life. I said I hoped her clients wouldn’t smell the fresh paint at night and she got angry. A real rage. She almost shouted, Who do you think you are? Do you think I’d take a client into my own bed? Into my own apartment? Are you crazy? This is the temple of my life. Here we play jazz. We have a ball here. This apartment is for me and my friends. There are enough hotels in town. She took care to keep my coffee cup filled, but I wanted to go see the room I was supposed to paint so I’d know what I was in for. She paced up and down looking as though she wanted me to feel that she was a lifeline, that she provided a real service to the upper echelons of humanity, and she said she loved art but she knew humanity mainly from the ass down. Lovejoy told me that you killed Arabs in the desert and that you beat out seven nations.