Kingdom of the Young

by Edie Meidav

  At some point in the visit, it would reach an end. Again she would purse her beaklike face into a kiss and lean down, giving that bony forehead a dry kiss and inhaling his odor, happy that in two minutes she could descend in the elevator and five minutes later could be out inhaling fresh air in greedy gulps.

  Some three months into his stay at the home, one of the rare doctors anyone had ever sighted on the floor stopped in and breezily invited her to come into his office, a kind of closet next to the women’s bathroom, behind where they usually kept the rolling mop cart. He was a big, bearish man, the kind she fancied in the years when her husband first started wandering, but she was too old, she was foolish, he had no eyes for her. He pretended to engage in deep study of the husband’s chart and then took off his glasses, an act which he must have done lots of times with many wives. With professional, compassionate pacing he offered her this: the patient only had a few weeks of life.

  How can you know such things?

  I’m not God, but there are signs. Small ones. Nurses say he tugs at bedclothes. I just stepped in to see him. His eyes are glassy. His vital signs are okay, but when he sleeps, his breath stops for up to forty-five seconds. You of course have seen the rot creeping up his fingers?

  She said nothing, knowing the rot to be the outward disease of her husband’s groping soul, but believed the doctor in terms of the death sentence. Nothing could be deferred.

  You know, he said, as if in consolation, your husband seems popular enough on the ward.

  She felt her own heart stop, even as she said goodbye to the doctor, whose last name she immediately forgot, though it rhymed with Rimini, a place in which she had enjoyed her laughing honeymoon.

  Immediately, and though she’d been looking forward to the descent in the elevator, she had to restitute matters. Feeling more like a hooked fish than a bird, she reeled back to her husband’s room where she waited for a nurse to finish mopping up the path between the bed and the bathroom with ammonia. Finally alone with the man into whose sparkling eyes she had gazed just before betrothal, bright as if a crystal into which, if she peered long enough, she could discern such cheery potential, she sat in the chair next to the bed—usually she sat at the one next to his feet, but now she felt required to whisper—and waited before voicing her first sincere apology in their more than forty years of marriage: I’ve been cold.

  He huffed back, rather fishlike himself. Had he not been able to make a coherent sentence only twenty minutes earlier? Maybe the pill he took to dry up the fluid filling his lungs wasn’t working. Dosages had to be upped. Or maybe he was deep into a vision, this the term she preferred to hallucination: that much she continued to do for the husband’s pride, never once calling him demented.

  Perhaps he gasped something like: I love you too. All she knew was she had to lean close to hear him, as if he wished to tug her, small bones and all, into the grave. She was inhaling death: his muttering had turned to some unseen arena of private, attentive angels huddled close to his mouth.

  Then he opened his eyes and looked straight at her, managing to speak more loudly, intelligibly enough that she could understand: Thank you for bringing me to this palace.

  For a second, she looked for irony. Finding none, she knew how well she had consigned him to something he saw as heaven.

  He looked up at her with a childish glee that just as quickly turned plaintive. Nurse, nurse—

  She came closer, caught his hands, surprised she was choking.

  What, darling?

  A tenderness she had rarely used with him, ready for revelation.

  Here they call me the Groper! he said, clear-minded.

  I know, she murmured, using the voice she hadn’t used with him for years, soft as tissue. Outside the door, for a second, she thought she glimpsed a nurse floating by, but surely this was because of the wetness filling her own eyes. There arose in her head the wish—perhaps the clearest in a life strewn with wishes—that she could again view the husband who might have been hers, the one she could have helped sustain, a man faithful and brave against all incursions.

  They fight to serve me! he went on.

  She lied: Good, because I was not sure about bringing you here—(this, when it had been one of the most resolute decisions of her life).

  Be that—? he began, then voiced, loudly enough that she could hear, the three sweetest words in the English language: You were right! And just after, the two of them began what may as well have been their very first conversation, and if it failed to participate with the usual laws of both gravity and relationships, be that as it may, they found a way to start over.

  MODERN PARABLES #1: THEFT

  Don’t worry, I didn’t take all the soaps.

  I didn’t think you did, the older man says, searching.

  Someone else might call the look the older man shoots his young comrade almost comical. In some version of later, the young man will tell his friends: Hey, but you should’ve seen his face. God I nailed him with the line about soap.

  And much later the young man will say: It was a great ride, like the guy thought he was adopting me.

  The message being that spirit will always trump vessel, art patron, and most stingingly, youth age. The artist had played lapdog to the rich and almost famous for a whirl, but now he’d say that period had ended, because he was to stay eminently unadoptable, untainted, meant for larger theft. This is what his listeners were meant to understand. The soap comment would nail coffins previously thought unnailable for the older man, whose name was Lew not Lou, because Lew retained a defunct era’s reserve about Jewishness.

  In the hotel room, the younger man shoulders his pack which may as well be a rock star’s guitar, so great is the swagger.

  A changing of shifts: the younger man has been put up here, at no little expense, by Lew, who sees him as either a version of what might have been or what might yet be attained. A splashy party having taken place the night before, not at a gallery but at a club filled with shiny coatgirls and dark alcoves, dark coatgirls and shiny alcoves, all the orchestration of the young man’s career Lew has been designing, maid service still to come to this one trashed room—but the younger man has to head out. Head out, because the jostle of outside streets will reward him more than shared breathing space with an older man whose possessiveness starts to rub him wrong. The word parasite, nebulously attaching itself to either of them, forms somewhere toward the back of the young man’s cranium.

  The younger man has made a career of kleptomania, which is why the art world has celebrated him. You enter a show as a viewer and don’t notice when or how your pocket is picked. To achieve his ends, the artist hires accomplices and distracting devices. Strobe lights, sirens, smooth young talkers. At the end of the show you are always free to swing by the front desk and pick up anything stolen from you, though you’re also free to choose signing the items over as a contribution to the artist. Such potlatch has proven titillating enough. Lew adopted the artist after having the German gold watch he bought for himself at retirement, forever kept inside his vest pocket, lifted. Lew chose to sign it over to the young artist, not guessing it would end up forgotten in the top drawer of a bedside table inside some girl’s house. A person could be freed by such magic.

  When the artist, whose self-given name is Maxx, was growing up in one of those bar-flanked strips ninety minutes away from New York City, as a child thinking the name of his town was Ninety Minutes North, he used to justify his own high school acts of theft as the work of a latter-day Robin Hood. He’d steal from one clothing store which had a corporate head famed for masturbation at board meetings and attacking models. If kleptomania covered over Maxx’s mixed ability in paint, sculpture, or even doodling, well, it took him a while to come to his schtick but once he did, age seventeen, he dropped out. As he said on his blog: Manet couldn’t have predicted today but Manet—or was it Monet?—was blind, the younger man not just making a joke for Lew when he had stumbled over the names.

  Maxx
does have an endearing stutter that comes out under stress. Also a sister who still lives upstate and though it has been a long while since he had any real abode—last fixed place was boarding school, later were admired in the press as a friend’s sofa, apartment, villa—he has told Lew he still belongs in some higher tree-flocked sphere, still feeling meant to be another boy in a white shirt racing into Grand Central to catch the 4:20 so he won’t be the last in his dorm. A coed boarding school—had any scene ever been riper for contentment? He the black-cloaked outsider, the full-scholarship boy, there for artistic promise, while the older man relishes this part of the boy’s upbringing because it didn’t unrelate to his own boarding school experience, single-sex because that’s all that was around in Lew’s time, the Jew thing back then suppressible.

  In his own version of later, Lew imagines telling his mayflower wife, because he still has a wife with whom he reads the paper, attends outings, shares a house: The boy doesn’t know a thing about gratitude, who can blame him, it’s his generation.

  And his wife, suppressing irritation with this latest project, another quest for meaning by a man with too much money for his own good, a man seeking the grime of an artist who uses exotic materials to make his work, because human feces and urine were already so done, will harrumph, because she knows more than anyone about Lew’s portraits on canvas, the nude figures and abstract slashes, dust-covered and languishing in the unused drawing room the way that Lew, who’d had something of a beginning, there in the height of things, coming right at the end of the Cedar Bar but before the hippies, is looking for something unworkable as a seahorse who could live eternally, though all he gets is more like an insignia on someone else’s cloth napkin.

  And despite his advanced age—or perhaps because of it—Lew keeps himself together, is still quite groomed, shaves every morning, naturally tall, hunkering over others in a leather bomber jacket that in all eras had the impeccable attribute of looking out-of-date.

  It means something to him, the jacket, a steal on Bleecker Street before he’d come into his fund, back when he’d been young and playing poor, like kids of today, eating restaurant scraps thrown out the back door, affecting touches of poverty, living in the village and burning to depict the world they see. Back then he’d thought you could flame hot strokes across a canvas and others’ understanding of the noumenal world would shift merely because he had lived. Later he would take lysergic acid and feel he conspired with nature to become the channel for all that was visionary, connected, and true.

  And now here he was, living an outtake from a life he hadn’t chosen, and at such moments he could feel the greatest self-contempt, following this youngster out of a hotel room, saying, Wait! You forgot your other bag, which was of course true, the younger man having thought he needed only one bag to achieve the effect of walking out on someone with disdain though after all the artist was no longer an adolescent, though he too would one day seek ways to be closer to fire, or might kill himself in the union of principles, reality with pleasure, after the puncture of his skin by one too many needles, the artist pushing twenty-five already—

  —and from the bag the older man holds while chasing him down, hundreds of tiny soaps are already falling, one calligraphy-covered soap after another, you would almost call it the loveliest of tumbles there onto a faded argyle patch of hotel carpet in a city where even pigeons shriek in a pitch gone desperate.

  DREAMERS

  DOG’S JOURNEY

  I.

  Waves lack surface when you are weak, nothing risen quickly enough to keep you up, and keep pulling toward midpoint between both islands where you could be lost but must keep going like a brute force of nature despite the dwindled sap in your arms. If you never had faith, you find enough to say if this is what you have in store for me, either kill me this next moment or I will be your humble servant for the rest of my life, just strike me down now and let us not wait for jellyfish or sharks or else please stick by me and just let me get there.

  II.

  Other barefoot kids call you Bones because you are long and ropy and you are with them pressing your nose to the grill of the gym in your neighborhood after school. One day you ask the coach what it takes to train since you have seen him wrapping big kids’ hands or ambling about spraying water into their mouths from a tumbler. The strangeness of such motherly gestures makes you think he may be that odd adult who doesn’t bite, Jimenez with brows raised in the center as if the worst he has seen shocked him into generous surprise. When he asks how old you are and you say seven, he says your height qualifies you as eight and you get to start the next day.

  No reason needed. All you did was ask. On the way to the gym, you kick a can because this is something you always do but two days later no longer need because you will not walk but instead rehearse positions that burn once you get there, the backstep and combinations while your mind stays sharp, this time one-two-two and the next one-shuffle-one, the bob and weave but also just the sheer joy of battering an object that could be anyone, you controlling the bag that loves you back, making you spark with focus. What Jimenez lends you is heart, your eyes fixed below the chin where his pulse throbs, the trick to make your gaze a tabletop no matter if he tests you by walking circles around barking the periphery!—a word which at first you think means throat, his a kinder growl than those you’ve known. Your knees bent, stance wide, and for a second no one can stop you even if on your first time trying a roundhouse, you knock yourself off center. The next lands square on his pad. When he is pleased, the corners of the mouth lift despite whatever invisible bulk tugs them down, the heaviness meaning someone like you comes once in a lifetime. Don’t fall asleep looking at my face, he roars, eyes on the periphery! One day you stop hitting with your fourth and fifth knuckles though to use the second and third takes trust, but these will not wear out so quickly, he promises, dancing back before lunging over, holding the pads. Don’t breathe not yet but slide forward, remember the sequence, double jab and cross, under, knees bent, duck and slide back, block, chin to chest, shoulders hunched, the way you should have been back when your father used to come at you. To punch Jimenez’s pad is to swallow confusion. Sometimes he says jab through, give it more, but then says, what, you want to kill me? That middle ground dances away, hard to find the balance of warning that lives in his eyes. Don’t look, he says, but can you help it? You make sure not to hurt this first man who shows caring, holding pads for you to thump but then taking a surprise jab. You must learn his way. Duck and learn. And the great curve of pleasure through your gut when the footwork falls and the pattern bursts, less about remembering to turn on this toe, no, the other, knee bent, and just about socking through like one of the old revolutionary songs they drove into you back in school.

  At home your mother watches as if you have grown tentacles. Don’t care. Slop meals into your gut before heading back to the gym. One, two, side, then curl, three, five, block. You’ve known the other kids in the place forever but if they used to be able to hurl the casual insult about your stringy legs, inside these walls you predict their moves three paces ahead. This one will throw an undercut, no, four, you disgrace no one but your vision sharpens. No need to wear a helmet like the older kids since a knowing pulses at the base of your palm, the one you stretch out after practice, unfurling the map of your future, a way out, bending your fingertips back toward your shoulders, making the intention of your mind and fist one. Less distance, get close, make it your game, Jimenez whispers, play it. After-hours in that light slanted down late, you and the bag study the day. Punch back what you missed. Until you stop Jimenez will not either but there comes a point where his face thins and he sprays water into your mouth from the angled straw, making a step in jest as if to spray the little kids loyally covering your old spot outside, noses against the grill, shadow-boxing and spitting the way you never did since you were too awed to move, something big stilling you into being the last dog at the lair who then outlasts the rest, who knew Jimenez would never c
hase you off. Only now does he tell you to quit for the day, Jimenez seated on an overturned oil can to unwrap your hands while offering stories chewed out the corner of his mouth. Tactics of the greats. Hunger, he always says, quoting the great Dempsí. Sure, hunger, but no one gets fat on dreams, he says, confusing you. Which is better, hunger or dreams? He talks about aim and you cannot help looking at his nose, fallen with its massive sewn-up gorge on one side as if someone slid a machete out from putty. The nose and bloated knuckles, the first and second of his right hand puffed like a girl’s breasts. My trophies, he calls them, one day you, he says, half-cuffing the side of your head. One day you will be his trophy. One day you study him the way you did back at the grill, the way he spits a pellet chaw of tobacco into the milk can nailed to the wall and he says terrible habit, follow my words, not my acts. Once the kids leave, behind them the yellow dogs clump at angles, those who love the stink of the place the way you do, a history of fluid soaked into split rubber mats and gloves but still what does Everlast mean? Jimenez also knows little English but he knows the one pair of Everlast in the gym goes to you, and you hang them on their rusted hook with dedication, in love like maybe the dogs who might think the stink of the gloves and mats come from one eternal, sweaty mother body. It must be Jimenez who names the children and dogs your first fans but after he does, whenever you see them, crouched or prone, you can’t help some inner nod at their powers of recognition.

  When your history teacher calls you to the head of your class, it is not to rap your raw knuckles because you cannot recall which white man had come to rape and plunder the virgin territory of the island nation but because at nine you are getting selected for some tournament not in your hometown but in the largest city near you. A royal mestizo, the teacher says, confusing you. While you have barely traveled beyond your town’s own mountains, your little pue-blito unknown even if Jimenez forms athletes who stream from their homes to haul glory to the nation. Apart from Jimenez, your town is mainly dust stretched short next to mountains from which cowboys ride out into the main street, along where the government took over families’ tobacco farms, slicing them up and giving them back in pieces though mostly just swallowed, a town known for guavas and tobacco, not trophies and gloves, but the warmth of these becomes enough for you to wear your love openly. Probably you love your gloves too much, Jimenez tells you one day, his smack blasting onto your shoulders. Nothing wrong with love, he says, helping you up.