Then she put the mixture in an electric mixing bowl at high speed and busied herself brushing butter in cake molds and dusting them with flour, taking out utensils and ingredients like a nurse preparing an operating theater. "You have to be ready, because there is no time to waste," she nearly whispered as she lowered the speed in the mixer. Finally, the mixture was a pastel yellow and had quadrupled in volume.
"Now," she announced in a low and hungry voice. "Now we fold." She sifted a light layer of flour onto the mixture by barely tapping the sifting hoop three times. "Folding is everything. If you don't have the hands for folding, you can't do anything. You are not mixing, not stirring. You caress the mixture with the spatula." She held his hand in hers and rubbed the palm gently and then placed a rubber spatula in it. "I'll show you," she said as she guided his hand. "Gently," she whispered. "Oh, that's nice. Mmm. You have to get rid of all the pockets of flour, but don't let the air out. Yes ... that's good. Turn the bowl slowly You keep doing the same slow motion with your right hand and you slowly turn the bowl with your left.
"Now," she ordered as she brought over a pot of melted butter, "I'll pour and you fold."
It was true. Nathan was astounded to realize that as she poured the cooled liquid butter, it released the same perfume that came off her warm body, slightly moistened by sweat in the hot afternoon. Her skin shone as though it were buttered. His hands trying not to tremble, he gently folded as she poured. She carefully emptied the light, fluffy mixture into cake molds and slid them in an oven.
"Now," she said, and she untied her apron and dropped it to the ground. It was true. She was naked. She had coiffed.
Nathan caressed her breasts, gently, like folding a woman's genoise batter. Then they went to the bed and fell on each other hungrily—for precisely thirty minutes.
"Cake's ready," she announced, and jumped out of bed, went to the sink and washed, put on her apron, and handed another to the now naked Nathan. She pulled out a cake, put it on the counter, and put her ear next to it. "Come here," she said, and Nathan, still recovering from the last exactly thirty minutes, staggered over. "Listen," she said, holding her ear close to the cake and tapping it. "Hear that?"
Nathan brought his ear close and heard a slight rustling, almost hissing noise as she tapped the cake.
"It's perfect," she said. "Next we are making a dobos torta. Hungarian. Hungarian is the best. My father doesn't admit this, but it's true. In 1962 they celebrated the seventy-fifth anniversary of Dobos's invention of the cake. My father doesn't like this story because they were Communist. He thinks people only suffer under Communism. But in 1962 they made a dobos torta that was six feet in diameter. Hungarians attach a lot of importance to size. But this one that we are making is twelve inches, which is a profitable-size cake. Smaller—too much labor per slice. Larger—too hard to cut a reasonable serving."
As she leaned over, working, Nathan looked at her moist and shining back. Above the apron string was the beginning of the tattoo. He had seen the rest now. It was a spoon with something dripping out of it arching gracefully down one buttock. When had she gotten that? Why?
"Hungarians make nine or sixteen of these for layers. They also do a slightly different cake, folding the beaten whites into the beaten yolks, but this is better. I take these four and split them in fourths." She began sawing a thin layer off the first cake. "And I'll have sixteen.
"We have to start on the buttercream," she declared while crumbling chocolate in a double boiler.
Had he not been entangled in this woman's body three minutes ago in the most impassioned embrace of his life? Nathan wondered. Is she just playing with me? And what have I done? Betrayed Sonia and Sarah for—for a twelve-inch dobos torta? Why?
"The chocolate buttercream. That's what you do it for," Karoline said in wild-eyed excitement. "The whole cake is just an excuse to eat chocolate buttercream." She was boiling sugar and water. "You can test this with a sugar thermometer. But there is a better way." She poured a glass of cold water from the faucet and with a wooden spoon deposited one drop of syrup in the water. Then she reached in with her fingers. Taking her free hand, she pushed aside Nathan's apron, exposing his chest, and pressed on him the small, gummy clear drop of sugar she had rolled in her wet fingers. It fell off and she kissed the spot on his chest. "If it stuck, the sugar hadn't been heated enough. It can't be sticky when it cools." She turned to the electric mixer, where egg yolks were being slowly beaten. Nathan was rubbing his chest and looking at her, looking troubled. "The kiss was free," she said. "Not part of the test."
"The test."
"For the sugar," she asserted, slowly adding the syrup to the eggs. Then she added little cubes of butter. Why did the butter always excite him? He knew what would be next. He put his arms around her, but she pushed them off. "Not yet. It's not chocolate yet." She started to add the melted chocolate. By the time the buttercream was chocolate, Nathan was struggling to resist the temptation to pounce on her like a famished predator. He didn't care about the dobos torta. But she did.
"Now, let's see about your hands," she said, going to the refrigerator and taking out a mixing bowl filled with white, fluffy, unbaked meringue. "Fold this into the buttercream. Very gently With nice hands."
He obeyed, and after she built the torta into thin, alternating layers of cake and buttercream and put it in the refrigerator to set, he used his now well-trained hands on her.
They were outlaws, outside the law, far beyond the rules, so they were free to do anything. She entered him with her fingers. He spanked her with a rubber spatula, which made her squeal in delight. She decorated between his legs, applying French meringue with a pastry tube until he had a huge baroque ornament of white swirls and little stars. Then she licked it like an ice-cream cone.
"I'll show you what I like," Nathan said, taking another pastry bag, filling it with chocolate buttercream, placing swirls around her breasts, decorating the nipples with little stars the way she had shown him to do, giving the bag a little twist before lifting up. And then he feasted.
She rolled over resplendently across the bed, and, eyeing her tattoo, he started at the spoon and followed the drip with his tongue across her buttock. It had already become a favorite route.
"You like my tattoo," he heard her say from the other end of the bed.
"Yes," he answered obediently Yes, he did. Nothing mattered anymore. She had made him like her tattoo. A victory for her—defeat for him. He loved the way she defeated him. He could feel it pulling him deeper into a desire that offered the ultimate pleasure—complete and total destruction. He was not even disturbed by these thoughts. He was excited by them.
Then she showed him how to make the caramel wedge and pipe buttercream with the pastry bag—with which he had already had sufficient practice to finish the cake, making neat rows on the top so the caramel wedges could be placed at jaunty angles, making the top of the cake look like a broken plane of some cubist portrait.
When it was finished—tall cylinder in a purple tan chocolate with amber wedges of tilted carmel crowning the top—they briefly admired it.
"Wait one minute," she said, and slipped it into the refrigerator. Then they went back to the bed. Nathan was amazed. She had turned him into some extraordinary male force, tireless, athletic, insatiable. And then they collapsed.
He looked at his watch: 8:10. He jumped out of bed.
"Wife and child waiting?" she jabbed.
He was ashamed. But it was an inescapable truth.
"Not so fast," she said as he struggled to slip on his clothes. "Sit over there." She pointed to a chair by a table. He sat there, and she carefully cut a wedge of dobos torta. It was striped—thin stripes of yellow cake alternating with taupe-colored buttercream, the airy, textured cake suspended in layers of dense buttercream, the caramel sharp, sweet, and crunchy. Just when he thought his senses had been exhausted.
You have to love a woman who can do this for you, thought Nathan, and he lied to himself and pretended
he meant the pastry. Did he love her? Oh God, don't let me love her.
He had to go. She saw him to the landing of the stairway.
"Don't ever come back," he heard her say. In the dark stairwell, a certain shine on her eyes told him she was crying. "Damn it, why do I do this?" she muttered.
"Do what?" he protested.
"Do what?" she repeated mockingly. "Just don't come back. A great afternoon. We enjoyed it. I'll give you the torta if you want. Bring it home to your little girl."
He realized that she was right and walked silently down the steps. Four steps down, and then he turned. "I am going to have to come back. We both know that."
"Yes, and then you'll have to come back again and again and again. And then finally do you know what you will do? The same stupid thing that men always do. You will decide to confess. You will tell your wife everything and beg absolution."
"Jews don't beg for absolution."
"Yes, they do. From their wives. And then she will hate me. And here in my neighborhood will be this probably very nice woman with a beautiful little girl, and they will know everything about me. And they will hate me. Good-bye, Nathan Seltzer." And she turned and started to slam the door shut.
"Wait, Karoline!" he cried out, and she stopped.
"What?"
Perhaps he just couldn't think of anything else to say, something to break the finality of the door swinging shut. She was waiting.
"When you were a child, did your parents send you to swimming lessons?"
"What?"
"You know, did they send you somewhere to learn how to swim?"
"Yes."
"They did?"
"Yes."
"Where?"
"The Y."
"The Y?"
"You know, YMCA or YWCA."
Nathan nodded.
"See ya." And she closed the door.
When the Talmud lists the obligation of a father, it lists a few very precise things. It says nothing about being faithful to the mother of his children or—and this was certainly not Nathan's own fault—child. Just a few things. Studying Torah, teaching a craft, going to the YMCA.
Nathan came home fearing he smelled of chocolate buttercream, of butter, of Karoline Moellen. But all Sonia said was, "How is Nusan?" He almost had to recall who Nusan was.
Sonia was very excited. She had had what she regarded as a major breakthrough on her play. "You said it when we first met, remember?"
"What?"
"They never met. They lived in different times. Now I realize how to do it. Emma Goldman moves into this house on Thirteenth Street with her lovers. She realizes that the house is haunted—haunted by—a Mexican woman—named Margarita. Do you see?"
"That could work," said Nathan, realizing there would be new pages to photocopy. He looked at her, at her fleshy, generous body and her long, beautiful fingers. Had he ever noticed how long they were? He must have, but suddenly it seemed he was once again seeing her for the first time. It seemed he had never loved her as much as at this moment—her and their daughter—and he wrapped his long arms around his wife, thinking of everything he was in danger of losing. And to his astonishment, he made love to her. He may have made love to her better than he had ever done before. Would it make her suspicious?
Now he understood that the more sex a man had, the more he wanted. That was why monks refused sex. He used to wonder how they could bear it. When he was a teenager, this was an important topic with his Italian schoolmates. But now he knew that only through abstinence could the sex drive be diminished. Which was a sensible goal, because there was absolutely nothing in human nature as self-destructive as sexual desire.
Nathan got out of bed and looked at his naked body in the mirror. He felt fit. Sex would keep him trim. He had been thinking of taking up running to burn off his tellas. But now he had a much better idea. "Do you think I am gaining weight?" he asked Sonia only now because for the first time in months he was confident that he wasn't. Sonia only moaned in response. She was asleep. Nathan returned to the bed and held her, and they slept that way, holding each other.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Not Easy to Be Puerto Rican
FELIX, EL CUQUEMANGO, had been a Puerto Rican for more than ten years. He noted with a sense of accomplishment that when Chow Mein needed an El Dominicano, he completely passed him over and recruited a real Puerto Rican. He was passing in this neighborhood where they didn't like Dominicans. A Dominican selling grass was a link to Colombian cartels. A Puerto Rican selling the same stuff on the same street was a friendly neighborhood dealer. Cuquemango had heard that in the old days even the white people used to deal. Now white people got less excited about Puerto Ricans, not that they knew a Dominican from a Puerto Rican. Lots of people were dealing. There was even a Panamanian working Tenth Street. The job was good money and required no green card. Cuquemango didn't need a green card, nor did he live down on Rivington. He was passing for an East Village Puerto Rican.
But on warm Sundays, Cuquemango liked merengue and he didn't like plenas. The Puerto Ricans always complained that merengue was too loud. The casita was theirs, and in the summer it was the best place in New York. It was supposed to remind them of those places in western Puerto Rico where they had never been. But Cuquemango had actually been to them. He landed in western Puerto Rico and had even picked coffee in the mountains and lived briefly with a family in a two-room farmhouse that looked like the casita.
He came from a richer place—richer land but poorer people—in the green fertile valley of the Cibao in the northern Dominican Republic. He often thought of those tough, balding mountains and the green valley floor where the soil underneath was as dark as blood and the turquoise wooden-shingled towns where people cared about one another. That was how he remembered it, anyway. Why was it that the richer the land, the poorer the people? The land in Manhattan was not good. But the people here did well nevertheless, a lot better than in the rich-soiled Cibao.
His family raised eggs. They were the only ones for many miles to raise them, so it was a good business. But not good enough to support twelve children. A Haitian woman once told him, "Always have eggs around you because eggs are life. They have power." It must have been true, because his family had a great number of eggs around them and they kept having babies.
He did always keep a hard-boiled egg on him, which he had the habit of rolling one-handed between the fingers of his right hand. Even hard-boiled, an egg is fragile, and he might have hoped that the delicate egg's presence would force his life to be more gentle. He held it in his hand as he crossed a choppy, foaming sea in a small boat from the Dominican Republic with two dozen other people, scrambling to shore near Aguadilla. Most of the others were sick as they dragged themselves quickly across the night beach to the bush. But Felix was hungry, and he ate his egg. They were all put into a van and taken to the coffee slopes in the Puerto Rican mountains. All for the five hundred pesos he had prepaid in the Dominican Republic. He hated picking coffee and understood that to do anything else, he would have to learn how to be Puerto Rican.
Immigration officers were Puerto Rican, and they could always spot a Dominican. In Santo Domingo, before crossing over, they were schooled in the trip-up words used by the INS. When they hold up the little olive-size green fruits, do not say "limoncita." It is gnipa. And le-chosas are papayas. One day, at a lunch counter ordering pigeon peas and rice, he heard himself say "guanduks" instead of "gandules." No one caught it, but he resolved to learn how to be completely Puerto Rican—not just the words, but the accent, the haircut, the clothing, the walk. People from the Cibao did not have those giveaway traces of Haitian blood, and with his hair, nose, and lips he could pass. Once he looked and walked and sounded like a Puerto Rican, he moved to San Juan, where the only job he could find was washing dishes in a restaurant owned by Cubans, which clearly marked him as an illegal alien. It took him another four months before he found a job in a Puerto Rican restaurant, a little fish place in Santurce, and successf
ully passed.
Once his Puerto Rican was good enough, he just got on a plane. It was Christmastime. Puerto Ricans create chaos at Christmastime, filling all the San Juan flights, carrying bags full of pork-filled pasteles and bottles of boozy coquita and other Christmas things, making noise and traffic on their way to New York to visit their relatives, who then told them that life was good in New York except for the hijo de puta Domini-canos who were moving into the neighborhood wearing no socks, eating bananas, and making too much noise.
As long as he was a Puerto Rican, there was no immigration and no passport. He was just another American, a spic in New York, an American spic in the Loisaida. "American Spic" was the title of one of the most famous poems by the neighborhood laureate, Gilberto Banza.
No one in New York was looking for a Puerto Rican dishwasher. Unskilled jobs would mark him as an "illegal alien"—it was not enough to be alien, you were an illegal alien. Everyone was hiring illegal aliens. But Felix had to get a U.S. citizen job, and he had no skills. He found a part-time job as the assistant to a super of a building on Avenue B. Then he met Chow Mein Vega. He started going over to the casita and playing congas for Chow Mein. He had heard that Chow Mein was a big star, and he thought playing congas would earn him. But no one ever seemed to pay Chow Mein Vega anymore.
Felix wanted to go back to the Cibao someday, but only when he had all the money he needed for the rest of his life, because he knew that once he was there, he could not make any more. In the meantime, he had a mother in the Dominican who was waiting for money from her son in America.
In those days, there were two Dominican things Felix did not want to do: sell grass on Tenth Street and live on Rivington with the rest of the Dominicans. In time he did both.
Boogaloo On 2nd Avenue Page 13