by Joshua Cohen
“Or maybe his hobby’s the Holocaust—why not? Whose isn’t?”
“Or maybe it’s another gimmick, like to keep it out of the press that he’s not writing it himself—or like for marketing.”
“Actually the contract provides for that: strictly confidential. He worked it out himself, no agent on his behalf. You’re nondisclosured like a spook. Like a spy. You can forget about any duple credit on the covers, or the two of you breaking names up the spine. No ‘As told to,’ no ‘In collaboration with’—we’re talking no acknowledgment, not even on copyright.”
“Actually that makes the offer compelling.”
Aar went for my bagel, caved it. Laid on the creamcheese, waxy mackerel, frozen sewerlids of tomato and onion. To eat one bagel he had to have two, because he only ate the tops. The tops had all the everything seasonings.
Poppy, sesame, garlic, gravel salt: his breath as he said, “What compels, my friend, is the money.”
“It’s a lot of fucking money.”
“What we’d be getting paid is a lot, what the publisher would be paying is a fucking lot—for him it’s just snot in a bucket.”
“How much would he get?”
“How much I can’t say,” but Aar took up his knife again, pierced one of my yolks, and scribbled in the yellow.
A dozen times my fee.
The waitress came by not to clear us—we weren’t through yet—rather to plunk down two styro cups, and so the magnum was brought up and poured, settled on the table.
She smiled to demonstrate her braces—all there was between the trackmarks at her jugulars and her bangs held back with bandaids—and took the full cups and gave one to our cash register guy and they ¡saluded! each other and us from the takeout window and drank and sparked a swisher cigarillo and passed it. Enjoy.
Aar was in the middle of saying, “Even them—¿comprende? ¿me entiendes? you can’t tell anyone—anything.”
“I get it.”
“Not a word, he was adamant about that,” and Aar was too. “He wanted to contact you directly, wanted to do this without me, represent you himself—he’s even insisting that the publisher not announce the deal.”
“Finnity’s complying.”
“Doesn’t have a choice, and neither do you.”
“Book of the century. Of the millennium. I get it—what’s next? An age is a million years? An epoch 10 million years? Or what’s beyond that—an era or eon?”
“Be serious—there are penalties if anyone blabs.”
“Penalties?”
“Inwired: if word gets out, the contract’s canceled.”
“Abort, abort.”
“Autodestructo.”
“So not a word.”
“Rach.”
“No Rach.”
“Shut your mouth.”
I shut my mouth.
The diner just had pencils—I picked my teeth with a pencil, until a pen was found.
A caper was stuck in my teeth.
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I left Aaron in a stupor—Aar taxiing to his office to process, me to wander stumbling tripping over myself and, I guess, cram everything there was to cram about the internet? or web? One was how computers communicated (the net?), the other was what they communicated (the web?)—I was better off catching butterflies.
I wandered west until, inevitably, I was in front of the Metropolitan.
I used to spend so much time there, so many weekend and even weekday hours, that I’d imagine I’d become an exhibit, that I’d been there so long that I, the subject, had turned object, and that the other museumgoers who’d paid, they’d paid to see me, to watch how and where I walked, where I paused, stood, and sat, how long I paused at whatever I was standing or sitting in front of, when I went to the bathroom (groundfloor, past the temporary galleries of porcelain and crystal, all the tapestries reeking of bathroom), or for cafeteria wine and then out to the steps to smoke, whether I seemed attentive or inattentive, whether I seemed disturbed or calmed—as if I were carrying around this placard, as if I myself were just this placard, selfcataloging by materials, date, place of finding, provenance: carbonbased hominid, 2011, Manhattan (via Jersey)—a plaque and relic both, of paunchy dad jeans, logoless tshirt untucked, sportsjacket missing a button, athletic socks, unathletic sneaks.
I visited the Met for the women, not for meeting them new, but for the reassurance of the old. For their forms that seduced by soothing—for their form, that vessel shape, joining them in sisterhood as bust is joined to bottom.
I visited to be mothered, essentially, and it was altogether more convenient for me to get that swaddling from the deceased strangers buried uptown than from my own mother down in Shoregirt.
The physique I’m feeling my way around here is that of the exemplary vase: a murky womb for water, tapering. I’m remembering a certain vase from home, from the house I was raised in: marl clay carved in a feather/scale motif, the gashes incised by brush or comb, then dipped transparently and fired, and set stout atop the cart in the hall. That was the pride of my mother’s apprenticeship: a crudely contoured holder for any flowers I’d bring, which she’d let wilt and crumble dry, as if measures of my absence. Yes, coming to the museum like this, confining myself behind its reinforced doors and metal detectors, and within its most ancient deepwide hushed insensible receptacles, will always be my safest shortcut to Jersey, and the displays of the Master of Shoregirt—Moms the potter—who’s put together like this, like all the women I’ve ever been with, except Rach.
Just to the left of the entrance of the Met, where civilization begins, where the Greek and Roman Wing begins—there it was: the dwellingplace of the jugs, the buxom jugs, just begging to surrender their shapes to a substance.
Curvant. Carinated. Bulging. The jar girls, containments themselves contained, immured squatting behind fake glass.
I used to stop, stoop at the vitrines, and pay my respects—breathing to fog their clarity, then wiping with a cuff.
I should say that my virgin encounter with these figures was in the company of Moms, who’d drive the family up 440 N across all of Staten Island for culture, for chemo (the former for me, the latter for Dad, whom we’d drop at Sloan Kettering).
But that Friday this past spring, I didn’t see any maternal proxies. Coming close to these figures, all I could see was myself. At each thermoplastic bubble, each lucite breach, I hovered near and preened. I was shocked, shattered, doubly. My chin quadrupled in reflection. My mouth was a squeezed citron. Stubble bristled at every suggestion. What had been highbrow was now balding.
Returning from that first chemo visit, Moms went and bought some clay, a wheel, some tools. Impractical platters, flaccid flasks: she’d been inspired to pot, moved to mold, vessels for her depression, while I had been, inadvertently, sexualized.
Moms had intended to inculcate only a fetish for art, not for what art must start as: body, the body defined by waist.
Dad, weakened, shriveled—a mummy’s mummy—had six months left to live.
That day, signing day, I took my tour, conducted my ordinary circuit by gallery: first the women, then the men. Rounding the rotundities, before proceeding to those other busts, those heads.
Staved heads—of the known and unknown, kings of anonymity with beards of shredded feta, or ziti with gray sauce—separated for display by the implements that might’ve decapitated them. If it’s venerable enough, weaponry can look like art, just like commonplace inscriptions can sound like poetry—Ozymandias, anyone? “this seal is the seal of King Proteus”?
The armor of a certain case has always reminded me of cocoons, chrysalides, shed snakeskin—all the breastplates and armguards and sheaths for the leg just rougher shells from an earlier stage of human development. The armor featured in an adjacent case, with its precisely positioned nipples and navels, sculpted pecs and abs, would’ve been even stranger without them. The men without bodies were still better off than the men just lacking p
enises, or testes. Regardless, statuary completed only by its incompletion, or destruction, resounded with me, while the swords hewed through my noons, severing neuroses.
But then I returned, I always returned, to my women, closing the show, a slow, agonizingly slow circumflexion.
Fertility goddesses, that’s what the archaeologists who’d dug them up had said, that’s what Moms had said, and I’d believed her—these women were the idols of women and women were the idols of men and yet we kept smashing them (I understood only later), smashing with rose bouquets, samplers of marzipan and marrons glacés, getaway tickets, massage vouchers, necklaces, bracelets, and words.
It strikes me that Moms herself might’ve believed that these odd lithic figurines were for fecundity, because everything else had failed her—the inability to conceive (and the inconceivability of) were fates she’d share with Rach, or else the problem was mine.
And Moms might even have been so distraught by Dad’s decline as to have placed genuine faith in the power of that petrified gallery—guiding me through rooms now changed, antiquity redecorated since 1984—because suddenly I wasn’t enough, she wanted another: a boy, though what she needed was a girl in her image.
If so, then that studio she had erected at home—her installation of a kiln in Dad’s neglected garage—must be regarded as a shrine, a temple to opportunity lost.
Now, when it comes to art, and I mean every discipline: lit, sculpture, painting, music, and theater (but only Rach liked dance, because she danced)—when it comes to any medium, I’m divided. Not between styles, between perfections. Mark my museum map with only the oldest and newest. Roll me in scrolls, volumina of vellum and parchment, papyri. But then also pile up all the new books appearing, seasonally stack the codex barrage—how else to live, without contemporaries to hate? Forget their books—I mean how to live without their bios, their autobios to peruse and hold against my own?
Beginnings to romanticize and endings to dread—I’ll take anything but the middles, all that received or established practice crap. Because the middle was where I grew up—bounded by house and garage filled with clay—a cramped colorless room filled with clayey boyhood, which my mother was bent on modeling not for greatness, but for portability and durability and versatile use. Moms’s hands that were her English, the puffy wrists behind the pads digging in, poking holes in me so I might perceive life only as she perceived it—threatening, but beautiful if I’d be careful. This was her way because from earliest age she’d been foreign to even herself, as the youngest and the only girl after six brothers, dumbsy, clumsy, inconcinnous, a dreamer, whose family fell in the snow around her, around Kraków, and who’d lived like “an extinct girl dinosaur”—meaning arousing of a hideous pity—until my father married her home.
She’d had difficulties having sex, and so difficulties getting pregnant. Her baby was late, was me. She’d told me about the drugs. Pergonal, Clomid. The barren superstitions. Don’t sit on snow or ice or rock, do bathe in water infused with moss from the walls of the shul on Szeroka Street. Dad had mentioned, only once, as he was dying, that Moms’s war had been “tough,” “hard knocks,” which was how he’d recount each tax quarter. A solo CPA after being laidoff as an auditor with Price Waterhouse, he’d never applied his actuarial MS but kept it in a depositbox at the bank. Moms is a public school speech-language pathologist/audiologist, retired. Anyway, Dad’s instructions: “Help your mother out,” “Kaddish if she insists.”
Moms: what she lost in family, she gained in body.
She was dense with her dead—with Dad’s passing becoming ever more solid, ever more embonboobed, rubicund. Zaftig, not obese.
Steatopygous—which doesn’t have to be italicized, it’s already my language—all italics do is make what must be native, not. Anyway, it’s not from the Latin, but Greek. Steatopygous meaning possessed of fat buttocks, and implying fat all around, the thighs, hips, waist, a gluteal gut, even adipose knees, unfortunate but vital. That’s what Moms’s lady statuettes are technically called—steatopygi, or steatopygia. Thrombosed bulges, throbbing clots—my mother’s hindquarter was always a veiny maze, a varicose labyrinth, though not just hers: weighty were the bases of all the women in my family, my mother’s family. My grandmother, my greatgrandmother, every aunt and cousin—Holocaust fodder. Heavy Jewesses, thickly rooted Jewesses, each swinging a single pendulous braid. From Poland, the Russian Pale, that settled and mortaring mixture. Upper Paleolithic, Lower Neolithic, lower and swollen. Marbled in calcite, schist, steatite, striated with stretchmarks of red rivers, the Vistula, the Bug. They were made out of stone and many of them even had hearts of stone—not Moms, though, despite how tough Rach found her. Yes, yes, Rach—she was the hard one, the skinny, the taut, all rib and limb, a spindly wife more like a plinth, like a pediment.
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Coming out of the Met with all those gods on the brain—all those haloed faces seared into my own—it’s an adjustment to sense normally. That’s why the museum abuts the park, so that its patrons can walk in solitude—“walking in the garden in the cool of the day”—to get their glaze back.
Or—in the collecting heat of that Friday, a freak faineant warmth that unnerved me. I wasn’t myself because enriched, beyond the pecuniary. Distracted by the thought of a second self. Distracted by the thought of a second book.
I was so scattered, I’m still not sure what to write: About my back aching from where I’d slept? my head still gauzed, Pharaohnically wrapped, from when I’d been woken up? about the cut on my neck? the slit from chin’s caruncle to neck like an against the grain shaving mishap, just healing? Rach had responded to Moms’s thank you gratuitousness by throwing a bisque dish for our keys, which struck a sill and splintered all over me.
The window had broken. Rach was expecting me to replace it. I was expecting her to replace it. We both were aware of this, but only she might’ve been consciously waiting.
I was—instead—counting my bounty.
Writing mental checks, but not for windows, before I’d written a word.
I still haven’t written a word—just musings about museums, snarks about parks, observations to obelize: two frisbeeists freed from their cubicles—a professorial but perverted uncle emeritus—a Caribbean nanny strollering her employer along the reservoir. I was imposing topiary on trees, and rhymes between their branches and trunks.
I’d rather be procrastinating—I’d rather be doing anything—rather jog, rather run—than record that moment.
When I approached the bench.
When I recognized him.
Now what I like about lit is that though you feel you know the characters involved, you don’t—you get all the benefits of having a relationship, with none of the mess. The fictional, the factually nonexistent, don’t leave msgs or txt. You’ll never have your own story about meeting Raskolnikov shuffling the aisles of Zabar’s, or about bumping into Werther or, more bizarrely, Bouvard and Pécuchet on line at Han’s Fruit & Vegetable—anyway, if you did bump into them, having been exiled from home yourself, like a fairytale knight errant sent out to seek not your fortune but tampons, how would you know? From their “teeth gnashing”? their “furrowed brows”? all those antique gestures? or just those antiquated translations? Forget the fictional characters—how many authors are being stopped on the street?
Another feature, but of the Victorian serial novel: They always doubled up, they repeated, reviewed, just in case the reader skipped an installment. Or was diverted by a major business decision.
I’d just made a major business decision, having contracted for a book for which I had absolutely no qualifications.
Or my only qualification was my name, the JC halfloops I stopped strolling—I stopped.
I’d just quit the presence of immemorial Basileis and marmoreal Caesares—the likenesses of infamous men who’d raped and plundered Europe and Asia as if only for my entertainment. Yet this—he—was what jarred me. This guy who�
�d always played the shrewn but happy hubby, the patient catchphrasey Pop. A minor B-celeb, a situational tragicomedian.
He was sensitive, but gave the impression of impersonating himself. His handsomeness was stilled, like the lines of his face were just distortion in his reception. In terms of painting: chiaroscuro cheeks, a worried craquelure mouth. In terms of sculpture: the nosetip curiously chipped, puttied cosmetically.
This cameo was atop a bench off the reservoir path, crowded by pigeons pecking at the matzah slivers he tossed. A proper picnic was spread in the grass.
I gathered myself and approached him, setting the flock to flying, a claque clapping its wings and wallaing west—like in film when directors seeking indistinct background chatter have their extras, forbidden by union rules from pronouncing anything scripted, repeat the same word at the same time but at different speeds and in different tones, walla supposedly being the most effective or just traditional choice, which happens to be an Amerindian word for “water,” as well as slang for “really?” in Hebrew and Arabic—really?
Because sitting next to him was Rach.
I started fabricating immediately—as if I were Rach—began peddling their presence to myself: this was just a routine appointment enlivened with nature. A meeting negotiated into a harmless park outing. Their commercial was about to be shot, had been shot and was about to air. This was crunchtime, kinks had to be smoothed, geriatric touches retouched.
I remember thinking that their conversation—this situation—was itself a commercial, an infomercial, a public service announcement warning: you’re not as witty as you think.
The actor noticed me before she did, and he recognized too—two stars in rare midday conjunction. His face tanned a shade deeper, and went rumpled as if by a gust, like the dewed pollenstrewn picnic blanket—a bedsheet, one of ours.
Rach collapsed into her lap.