by Sonia Taitz
“In part, yes,” says Jude, trying to be honest (they have been so honest up to now; it seems a virtuous sign of love). “But I also think you’re like me. Tired, a little washed-up. The fun ran out. The work was drying up. Tell the truth, Collum. You came to me only as a last resort.”
His face turns red. Again, he collects himself.
“No, my dear,” he says, with an exaggerated patience. “YOU came to me. When your marriage dried up. When you got a bit bored. Fishing through Facebook, if I recall. Poking at anything that seemed remotely likely.”
“OK,” she concedes frankly, “That’s true. I was dejected and felt past it. But you leapt at the idea. I was a way out. Just like before—you needed to run away. Love becomes like a lifeboat, you know? It doesn’t have to, but that’s what it is sometimes. You bailed on your life and there I was.
“Collum. Admit it. You’re the one who took it to this level. Hunted me down. Tried to make it real.”
Collum listens to what she says. He considers it carefully.
“Tried to make it real,” he repeats. “Is that what you said?”
“Well, it’s real—I mean, look at us—but it’s not the answer to all of life’s big quandaries, now, is it? And I’m starting to wonder, is anything the answer to all of life’s big quandaries?”
“You have never taken me seriously,” he responds, each word rising in volume, “NEVER thought I was good enough. NEVER believed how much I loved you. I’ve hated you for that. Did I not say that I bought you a house in Tahiti? Long ago? When things were flush?”
“Stop shouting. This whole afternoon you’ve been totally rude to me.”
“Hoity-toity. You think you’re better than me. You’re a bitch.”
“OK, now you’re being really—”
“DID I NOT SAY THAT I BOUGHT YOU A HOUSE IN TAHITI??”
She nods, silent. Yes, you said it, you lunatic. Just go there and lock yourself in. Stop screaming and stop hurting everything you touch.
“Thank you. And did I not I fall down the stinkin’ bog for love of you?”
“Collum, I can’t be the reason—”
“I’M TALKING!!!” he roars. Jude has never seen Collum this way. Then again, she’d never seen his last fight with his father, that moment of fury and payback for a lifetime of hurt. He was out of his mind. A lost boy, kicked out, exiled out of his own very sanity.
For a moment she feels pity for him, and this makes her try again. She will apologize if it helps. If it gives him some relief. If it stops this scene and turns it around.
“Sorry, my darling. I’m so sorry. Shhhh . . .”
Jude puts her hand on his; he flings it off with a broad, harsh gesture.
“I have come here a broken man. Yes. I drank. Yes, I cursed and rowed. Yes. I said awful things about certain peoples of the world, the blacks and the kikes and the bitches and the benders. But who do you think started all that pain inside of me? Huh?”
“I always thought it was your father, Collum.”
“IT WAS YOU, JUDY! YOU! YOU! YOU!!”
“But—”
“HE never deliberately lied! You did! Bloody snob like your dad! You all thought you were too good for me; you had second thoughts about the guttersnipe, didn’t you! The riffraff! The little snot-nose!
“DAD never turned on me! You did! That man was true to his heart and soul!! I gave you MY heart, not once, but twice now. Twice I sniveled and begged for your mercy. But it was never enough, not then and not now. I was never enough for the likes of you. I TOLD you I’ve cut off everyone and everything, and you don’t—you don’t—it means NOTHING to you!”
“No, I believe you, Collum,” Jude stutters. “Of course I do. It means—”
“YOU, little Jappy Princess Kikerton, YOU couldn’t possibly understand the PAIN I’m in and the lengths to which I’ll go to stop it. I’ve cut myself off. I’m bleeding from loneliness. I’m a stump of whatever I was. But that’s not enough for you, is it? But guess what? I’m as good as any one of your perfect rabbis, clean as that Rebbe Gipstein you were so fond of, clean as any Jew, your CHOSEN cocks, your KOSHER dills.”
“You’re being really weird.”
“That’s not weird. I’ll show you weird.”
She hopes he is joking.
“Please don’t.”
“I will. I’d be happy to cut something else off, if you know what I mean!”
She doesn’t.
“Hey, Collum—I love you and you’re—you’re overreacting.” Even to herself, her words sound dull and dry. This poor man’s pain goes well beyond anything Jude has ever seen, even her father’s anguish at its worst.
Collum crawls over to his bag and pulls out a gleaming new double-bladed knife, which he unsheaths from a black leather case.
“What’s that?” Jude says, beginning to panic. No one knows where she is. She could actually die here.
“Don’t you recognize it? Your boys had brisses, didn’t they, Davey? The other one, I forget his name, what was it? Moishe??”
“Joseph,” she says quietly.
“Like my Lord’s own dad, but I don’t advise him taking the paternity test, cuz you never know what a lady’s up to. Anyway. What was I saying. Ah yes, the blessed bris! Eight days to look like a sloppy goy, and then—zip! CLEAN!
“Shall I cut it off for you?” he says. “Would that even satisfy you, you greedy little bitch?”
“Your—cut off your foreskin, you mean?”
“Shall I JEW myself for you, so that you’ll love me all the way? Shall I ‘whither thou goest,’ or are you STILL NOT READY TO GO?”
“Collum, please! You’re acting crazy—”
“I learned Yiddish for you,” he peals, voice cracking, “and Hebrew; that’s a damned hard language! I learned the Torah, I immersed myself in a mikveh—did you think that experience was nothing to me?
“I wanted to be like you and your dad and your people, to be baptized new and Jewish like David, the sweet singer of Israel, like your own lucky boy . . .”
He pauses. “This knife is called an izmel, by the way—”
“A what?”
“IZ-MEL! What’s the difference what it’s called anyway? It’s time for action now, for the car chase! Time for the bang-bang and the cut-cut-cut! OK? I knew I wasn’t good enough for you before, was I?
“But I swear to God I will be now!”
“Collum, you were always good enough, that wasn’t the—”
“Was I? Was I really? I was scum in my house, and scum in yours, that’s what I know. But I want you to love me—so I’ll cut it if it makes you happy, if it makes you accept me for once in this hellish life of mine.”
“Where did you even get that knife? It looks dangerous!”
“It is dangerous. It’s the big one they use for adults, like me. But I’ll bleed for you. Because love, as we Christians know, is bloody bloody slaughter on the cross. I’ve done it before. I know what it feels like to shed my blood for the love of someone . . .”
“I never wanted that,” says Jude quietly, remembering how his father had beaten him for her sake, on the last night of their youth.
“No pound of flesh for you today then, my love?”
Jude stands up abruptly. It is time to leave. She turns away from Collum, facing the door to their room, and takes a quick breath of resolve.
Even now, it is hard to go. Her life has long been humdrum, and here it is: the passion incarnate. She doesn’t want it.
“Would you rather I use this for other holy quests?” he says to her back. “Like finding the truth in a false witness? Like rooting out the evil in my midst?”
“In your what? Collum—what are you doing!”
He’s grabbed her with one strong arm, whipping her around to face him. With his free hand, Collum holds the circumcision blade against Jude’s throat. Their bodies are close; their faces truly close, as though they will kiss. And they could. They both think of it; each feels the other think of it. It really
could go either way, even then. They could try to make love again. A new beginning, after the storm. With forgiveness.
Instead, Collum lifts the knife and slices the air with it. He is careless with it. He thinks about killing his tormenting woman. He can’t think of anything else but kissing or killing her.
“WHY??” he begs, sobbing, as though bottomless pain has an answer. “WHY DID YOU BETRAY ME, LITTLE JUDAS?”
“God, please be careful,” she pleads. He is accidentally cutting his own hand with the double blade. Little rivulets of blood race down his wrists, his arms. “You’re hurting yourself!”
“Nothing could hurt me like you hurt me that night.”
Collum’s voice has gone almost inaudible, but his grip is still there. His lips are pressed thin, and he pinches his eyes closed, tasting the bitter resentment in everything. She could have saved him. She could have saved him, and everything would have been different. He wouldn’t be feeling this pain.
Her voice trembling, Jude tries to explain why she’d failed to run away with him so long ago. Her father had suffered a stroke that night. She had felt awful for contributing to it—going against his rules and falling in love with a forbidden boy. The one thing her father had asked her not to do. He was never the same after that. It took almost a year for him to walk and talk again—and he had never managed to walk or talk well. Less than five years later, he had had another massive stroke and died.
Collum listens intently. His breath becomes slower. He sighs, as though with relief. “And you thought you didn’t need to tell me about any of this?”
“What do you mean? I did tell you! I told you every single detail! First I tried to call you, and your father answered, so I hung up. So then I wrote you a letter—a really long letter—and stuck it under your door! Your mother was in the house. She would have picked it up. Didn’t you get it?”
“You know there was never any letter.”
“It’s the truth, Collum.”
“What are you saying? Mum would have given it to me. She liked you.”
“Maybe she tore it up. Maybe she didn’t want to hurt you any more. Or maybe she did it to keep your dad from having a stroke.”
Collum looks at Judy, softening. He does believe that. His mother Betty always protected Neil, the master of her world. They were planning to move to Australia; this letter might have stood in the way of her husband’s wishes. Collum, she must have reasoned, did not need to hear from this girl anymore. What good would words have done him? He was soon flying to the other end of the world, and the fewer ties, the better, Betty would have thought. No need to stir up any more trouble. The world had enough trouble as it was. Let it lie.
Collum drops the knife and holds Jude to his chest.
“You’re squeezing me so hard—”
“Oh, my love,” he says, gripping her even more closely, “I never wanted to scare you. I’d never have harmed a hair on your head, don’t you know that? I just felt so hurt. I believe you now. Please, Judy. I’ve come all this way for you. Come with me now. I’ve left my wife and my kids and even my career—”
Collum leans his head on Jude’s shoulder. It feels heavy, like a bowling ball. Collum has acted insane, and the thought of him now makes Jude feel ill. Love is supposed to be unconditional, eternal, but she feels it alter in this very room. Now that she feels safe, she feels disgusted, an awful mix of pity and contempt.
The boy she’d loved had had the best and purest soul. A brave and loving boy, looking up at her through blackened eyes, through tears. But time has passed. It is too late. He is pathetic now; he seems as sick as his father had been. And now his tormented brain is on top of her, a dead weight she could never manage to lift. No one could. Jude thinks of the harsh word “skull,” the endpoint of all this passion. There is pain in the world; there is pain in some people’s hearts that will never be salved on this earth. His father’s. Her father’s. Sometimes her own. But some people’s pain becomes harsh and contagious and deadly.
“Where would we go?” she says, pulling away as though from a weaving tramp on the street. “The NYU dorms? To that cousin of mine who now commutes from Scarsdale?”
“I told you where. Ta-heee-teeee!”
He is making that dreamy place sound repulsive. That is the oddest phenomenon, she thinks. How fast he’s fading away, growing smaller. The last thing she wants is him.
“Why not the moon, huh? All we need is a space helmet and those special silver boots, right?” Jude is cruel because she is sad and disappointed. The Collum she knew has gone mad and dropped her. He thinks he is still clutching her, but he’s already dropped her down to hell.
“Judy. You’re the crazy one now! I actually have a house there. Privacy. My own island, for Christ’s sake!”
“Yes, I’m crazy, Collum. You’re just totally sane.”
“That house is real as we are.”
“But we’re not real. This isn’t me, anyway. Not right now. I don’t feel normal at all. I’m feeling like I’m in some awful horror movie.”
She hears herself say words that would destroy her, coming from him. She feels like a murderer—she needs no knife—but the truth is the truth.
“What happened to the sweet girl who took me in? What happened to your promise not to leave me?” he pleads, voice cracking.
“You always said—you made me believe you’d love me forever,” he sobs, dropping down to his knees. Jude feels sorry for Collum. She feels pity for him and his dreams, and for herself and her own dreams.
Both of them fall silent. How beautifully stupid they once were, thinks Jude, to ever have believed that there was a “village” or a dorm, or even a South Sea island, where young and total love could last forever.
Still, she hesitates. She had loved Collum once, and a part of her still loves the deathless boy inside him. Maybe the love isn’t gone—maybe it has been stunned for a moment, traumatized, and will rally again. She doesn’t want it to be gone.
But what about his temper? Will that rally again? That boy had attacked his own father—there was no need to break his bones. And just now, Collum has held a blade to her throat. Does she want a life with this volatile man—a man who rages exactly as Neil Whitsun had, so many years ago? A man who, she knows, has left a family, a wife and children, down under—and could forget them there?
She could never forget her boys. They seem so old in her mind when she compares them to the cuddly children they once were. But in comparison to adults, they are still not fully formed. They need her, and love her as she loves them. Even the cavalier Joey had sent her a card at the start of term, saying he was fine. He did it because she had asked him to, to reassure her that she knows something, however little, about him. That he is fine, and that he will always tell her he is fine.
And what about Slam? Is he to become the male equivalent of Gingerean, valued only when useful, a bull that is milked for seed and then slaughtered? A racehorse that won’t or can’t race—and so, to the glue factory? Davey had told her about those poor horses at Angel-Fire, how close they had come to being sold by the pound for meat. Is that what we do with people who don’t do precisely what we want?
“Lust for me, Slam?”
“I care about you, but I don’t lust for you. I can’t force it.”
“Then die, you shit!”
Is it that simple? For many married couples, it is. Divorce is an option. But she wants to go home now, she wants what is ordinary and customary. She wants this love racket to stop.
“Collum,” she says, her voice almost prim. “Hear me out.”
His deep blue eyes are full of tears, and he raises them to her. There is the gray, and there the flecks of orange, and none of it matters anymore.
“You’re saying NO. That’s what I hear. So I don’t need your clever Talmudisms that make you right when you’re so clearly, horribly WRONG!”
Collum’s entire face, Jude notices, is as red as his nose veins. Especially when he screams at her.
> “Talmudisms? Not that I’m proud of it, but unlike you, Rebbe Gipstein, I’ve never studied Talmud in my life! And what are you trying to imply with that particular word?”
He rises to her bait:
“That you’re a wily Shylock, that’s all. Worse. I actually offered you a pound of flesh, but it wasn’t enough, was it?”
“You’re right. I’m worse than Shylock. And I guess I’m personally responsible for all the world’s wars,” she adds, referring to a Neil Whitsun pamphlet. “Is that what you really think?”
“My dad never lied to me like you did,” he repeats. “I won’t waste my life on you. You’re not worth it. This could have been epic! Something I know something about!”
He does; as Colm Eriksen, he has produced and starred in epics about the Basques, the ancient Aryans, and the Incas, each in the respective, dying tongue.
“But instead of an epic—instead of a story that will never die out—”
Collum bends down and reclaims his circumcision knife with a swoop. His words fly, spraying the air with furious spittle:
“GET OUT NOW! Run! That’s all you know how to do anyway, you wandering—”
Jude knows he will say “Jew.” She waits for her father’s prophecy to come true, full force.
Instead Collum concludes with an epic bellow: “CUNT!!!”
Without a word, Jude gathers her things and walks out.
Now Collum throws himself on the bed, still warm from their bodies. He begins to stab at the mattress, pounding like a lover and a killer. He slices it down the middle, top to bottom. Tufts of batting fly in the air, a spark flies, and a little spring sproings. He stops.
The knife stays upright now, angry and unappeased. Collum stares at it as he opens the bottle of champagne he has brought, having anticipated that his Judy would say yes to him that night. They would have toasted their new lives together. She would have been everything to him. He would have worshipped her forever, with all his passion and all that is holy. He would have kept his oldest promises, and she would have kept hers.