Somehow, after that, Cello began to think of herself as his collaborator, he said. He didn’t say anything about her access to funds and institutes and city politicians, her cachet as a Berlin personality, the retired black American artist married to Schuzburg Tools. We were having lunch in Café Einstein, near Nollendorfplatz, Herr Issyvoo’s old stomping ground, and I would have wagered that some of its cultured clientele had heard of Cello. It felt as though Hayden and I were meeting in secret, because he had asked me not to tell her of our appointment.
I wanted to ingratiate myself to him. I liked the conspiratorial atmosphere, but I couldn’t think what would be the equivalent of nylons in our exchange. When he complained about Cello’s tendency to rewrite his music, he ended by laughing it off, saying that she was just headstrong, and rubbing his sinewy neck.
He said he didn’t mind if I smoked, but he wouldn’t. I emptied two sugar packets into my cup. He only smoked after dinner. No wonder my skin was the way it was and his was perfect. He never used cologne; what beguiled was his wonderful Bond Street soap. His gray cashmere sweater was fragrant. His shoes were Italian, a brand I’d never heard of. He confessed to a weakness for clothes. He was a gay guy who got the boys he went after. I could tell. He did his hunting late at night, in clothes I never saw, among boys loaded with attitude and shirtless in autumn.
Stravinsky had three face-lifts, Hayden said. He said that Cello couldn’t bring herself to write about a black person shitting on Europe. It was going to be a problem, he said. Maybe Rimsky-Korsakov could set what she’d written, but he couldn’t. He said he thought better of letting me read her libretto because it was bad enough that he had even told me about their collaboration. She’d not mentioned it to me.
* * *
Cello and I were communicating mostly through the occasional phone message she left on my tiny bed. Rosen-Montag’s people called more often than Chicago. I hadn’t been around for dinner in a long time, and the one Sunday lunch out in Wannsee that I’d gone to over the summer had been a torment because I was missing a date with Manfred. When I told Hayden about Manfred, he said, “For who can make straight what God hath made a ’mo.”
I’d only told him because I hadn’t wanted to go back to Cello with the latest. She’d said nothing when I told her that there was an assistant architect working with me on the Lessing Project who was beginning to mean a great deal to me. We cared about each other, I said. Cello gave me no opening. She looked straight ahead. Two of her children played in the back seat of the Mercedes. She did not want me to discuss boys around them, I decided.
When Manfred accused himself of being lazy, of not having the self-respect to resign, I would tell him that that wasn’t true. “There’s a difference between troubled and lazy.”
He didn’t let me talk to him about what his trouble might be, which was why I ended up laying out to Hayden the facts of an afternoon when the trees in Berlin’s squares and along its boulevards were still full.
I’d left Manfred in his corner pub, seething as usual about the German fascist past. The next day he picked me up for our excursion to the radio tower and racetrack constructed in the 1920s dressed in the jeans and shirt he’d had on the night before. An American beauty was smiling up from the passenger seat of his Deux Chevaux. I stood there, a homo with a picnic lunch from Kaufhaus des Westens, “KaDeWe,” the woolly mammoth of a department store not far from Europa Center.
* * *
Mom used to say, “You have to kid yourself. How else do you keep going? That’s always been my motto: keep kidding yourself.”
* * *
I kept the ChiChi to myself. It was not a threat to my adult life. It was my time off, my skip through the looking glass, the boys’ club where in my head I scored all night, gently moving the poet’s thigh, that second thigh, and that left leg.
The loveliness of autumn in Berlin could not penetrate the ChiChi’s door. Behind it the atmosphere was like that of a ship far from land. Travelers tired of one another’s company, the regulars remembered that they’d bought me drinks every summer when I ran out of money. To them, I had arrived via helicopter, bringing supplies, more troops, the USO, or something. I bought everyone in the bar a drink my first night back. I paid off Big Dash’s tab. I wanted to wash after he smothered me in a humid embrace.
The windows of the ChiChi were painted over and then completely obscured by the haphazard decoration: a mass of tiny Christmas lights, the wires stapled to the walls; plastic ferns and plastic ivy everywhere on nails, hung with dozens of mutilated garden elves, some just torsos with dusty knives still in them. There were some good things from Odell’s collection of music posters and walls of postcards from servicemen and refugees and former barmaids who hadn’t forgotten the help and home Zippi and Odell had given them in cold, indifferent Berlin. The place looked like the inside of a shoebox of secrets. It was so swathed and coated and coded, no one ever knew what time it was outside. Nights passed unseen.
The dark toilets were beyond the ebony dance floor. The red kitchen was behind the green bar; the racks of green and brown and clear bottles and glasses looked over the bar at the crazy windows. Small round red tables were placed under the windows and along the remaining wall space. You took a seat and maybe someone interesting would join you.
I was always going to be in Zippi’s good books, I felt, because I found postcards from the turn of the twentieth century, racist cartoons, images of grinning black clowns over words such as “I haven’t seen you in a coon’s age.” I had a whole wall to myself of these sociable postcards that laughed at black people. It was behind the bar, off to the side of Zippi’s cash register. She admitted that Odell had to explain them to her. She put the wine bottle back without comment when I held up my hands and ordered a cola.
I’d come back on a good night, but then I had to stay away until the next fat envelope of cash was pushed toward me across the magenta-headed girl’s metal table in the office hut. I had to lie low again after another insane night of throwing money around in the ChiChi. Big Dash and some of the other black guys lined up along the bar raised glasses and cheered me, The Party. I didn’t tell them I’d stopped drinking and they apparently hadn’t noticed the colas and water with gas, no ice.
Big Dash was oblivious, unaware that he smelled of the restaurant where he washed dishes, not caring that two foreigners, Italians, deep into whatever they were talking about, were not in the least charmed by his 2:00 a.m. Bessie Smith impersonation. When really high, he’d lean on the bar and sway and sing stupidly. “Does he hold your head down … till you can’t breathe … Does he grab your head and wish you had a ponytail…” He thought he had a black diva’s power. What voice he ever had he’d destroyed a long time ago.
Odell could be depended on to walk over and turn up the music on the deluxe cassette player on its own shelf below the glasses and bottles. Odell usually played funk until midnight and jazz until dawn. He controlled the selections and the volume. The mood in the ChiChi was sometimes determined by how Odell was feeling, what he wanted to hear. Everything came back to what was the latest in his stormy marriage to Zippi, and often, to prove a point, he’d throw himself into some aspect of the business, whether designing a new ad or ordering a new outside lamp, but always at a weird hour. A storeroom between the two toilets held a number of previously ordered and uninstalled improvements. The new piece of equipment wouldn’t be what he’d wanted or right for their look and he’d send it back, eventually.
He did everything for the business, for the ChiChi. He washed the bar every morning, mopping around the dozing and the drugged up. It was theirs, his and Zippi’s; it kept them us-against-the-world, however much they battled each other on a slow night. I felt that they stayed understaffed in order to keep themselves up to their necks. Odell had been in the army, stationed forever in Giessen. One year he didn’t re-up, but the cops back in Los Angeles were making life too hard for black men. He missed not having to worry about them, a feeling he’d n
ever got tired of in Europe. He came back to Berlin to take pictures. He was drawn into his own pictures, like an anthropologist. He stayed.
I knew that much from his conversation about politics. He and the man I had right away taken to be his new dealer went on for some time in Black Power fashion. I thought it was risky for someone who was a dealer to go by the name of Bags. My height, but twice my girth, dark-skinned Bags had a shaved, shiny head. The tattoo on his left forearm was very evolved. Everything about him made me uncomfortable, as though I knew that one day I’d be questioned about him under oath. He, too, was ex-military. Bags would have the latest unemployment figures for black men his age in the States. When guys in their circle talked about going back, he would point to black unemployment. “They don’t want us.”
* * *
The authentic mattered to Odell, wherever he came across it, and he liked Big Dash, didn’t seem to notice anything off-putting about the man. They went back a ways, but I didn’t know anything more. I was not in their circle. My place was over by Zippi and her cash register. I was her regular, much as I longed to be one of Odell’s, a masterpiece of muscle bundles. But she claimed me, and she commented a great deal in between glances on what her man was probably getting up to with his buddies over there.
She’d appeal to Big Dash to tell her what was going on, but as queenie as he was in the muumuu-like roominess of his unpleasant shirts, he would not sell out a man to his woman. Though a gay guy, he was not a “girlfriend.”
“If I’m going to be dealing with Odell when he’s in this kind of mood,” he said by way of accepting my offer of a drink.
Zippi signaled to me. She told me that that was enough. Big Dash could barely stand as it was. I mustn’t treat him anymore. They were taking care of him, keeping him up to a certain amount of alcohol per day, but no more.
“Oh no, she’s not talking about my business tonight,” Big Dash pleaded with the ceiling just as we both turned to look at him.
I thought that Zippi was also looking out for me, letting me know that I didn’t have to keep up the grandiose level of generosity. It was okay for The Party to be over. I was permanent, a regular, not leaving on a jet plane. But more than anything, she wanted Big Dash to be able to walk, because she spoke to Odell through him for much of the night. To bring lemons, to get the glasses their one busboy forgot. A mediator was supposed to prevent either one of them from misreading the tone of the other, a thing they never did by themselves, whether in English or German, as far as I could tell.
“You’ve burned your hand.”
“Well, you know my hand. It’s like a wall.”
And yet at some point in the evening, because of the game of Chinese whispers they played through Big Dash, one or the other would explode.
Zippi avoided my questions about how they met, saying only that they had both been with other people and it was complicated. They’d been together eleven years. I couldn’t tell how old she was. I suspected she was probably older than Odell, who had not been sent back to Nam because of his skill with engines, someone whispered. He remained on the base in Germany. They said Zippi had broken with her mother over her black lover. The one time I pretended to be so drunk I could ask about the gossip, she hunched her shoulders and swiped at her adorable black bangs, as if to say, “You know how it is.”
She paid me the compliment of speaking to me in cryptic expressions, half phrases, sighs, as if I, too, understood the helplessness of her kind of love for Odell, that hip-film total surrender to his animal presence that her bearing told me she experienced daily, a submission, a sexual drowning that was the secret of existence. I was going to be excluded from the mystery for the rest of my life, AIDS promised.
“That son of a bitch owes me one hundred and twenty marks. He promised,” Big Dash complained suddenly into his fists on the bar.
“The amount of farting that must go on in your brain,” someone, a “brother,” yelled at him after a while.
Everyone was performing, because of the new element I’d introduced, so I thought. Manfred wanted to sit at the bar and the whole joint scoped him, so I imagined, talking to Bags about something called foti seng that elephants ate.
Bags said that for years he didn’t know fresh asparagus and didn’t know that eating asparagus made your urine smell. He thought the urinal where he was standing needed cleaning or that his towels were going moldy. He didn’t know until his woman at the time told him. He said he thought she would save him, but she was too busy removing the asbestos in buildings that went up in the city during the construction boom to have any love left over for him.
“Six hundred and thirteen ways to go nuts,” Big Dash said, arms raised in exhortation of the bottles behind the bar. “Vectors of existence,” he pronounced, hissing like a black preacher.
Bags went over to investigate a possible customer, and Big Dash rolled along the bar in our direction, stopping far from Odell, who usually stayed where he could also keep an eye on the kitchen door. The ChiChi’s snack menu was erratic, even with a microwave back there.
“Why don’t you walk on my back for a good half an hour.” Big Dash’s breath could have stopped a dog race.
“Okay, pal.” Burt Lancaster stuck his nose into his tall glass.
“No, tread on me. For real.”
I’d wanted to show Zippi what complicated was; I’d wanted to show off Manfred, and Cello’s end-of-the-week business trip to Zurich removed her as a threat to my playacting. Dram was more than happy for Manfred to be mine. They got on well because of their leftist pasts and their consequent mistrust of the left. The nanny from Kent made bangers and mash of the most elegant sort. Dram didn’t go back to the office, but then Cello had called to say good night to the children later than expected.
One of Dram’s husky sisters had set up a Ping-Pong table in the smaller salon. After the nanny and then Dram had left us, Manfred and I played. The to-and-fro with him eased me into a light-footed condition he moved to end quickly, gently. He simply laid his paddle aside and suggested we head toward his pub in Schöneberg. I proposed the ChiChi instead, one of those crazy places that gave rise to the very Berlin expression Big Fun.
He turned down his sleeves before we headed inside. Once acclimated to the smoky dark, he’d been powerfully relieved—it was clear—to find himself in a sort of black vets’ bar and not the auntie bar he’d braced himself for. His formal manner toward Zippi was his way of saying that he could make himself at home among my black brethren.
Odell’s jazz tape got him going in a near monologue about Dexter Gordon in Denmark. Sometimes there was more English speaking going on in the ChiChi than German. We didn’t often get to hear how really fluent Odell was. He rewound the tape so that they could go over this or that fine point. Manfred said he’d have to go because he had to get his car home. But one of Bags’s customers sent him a U.S. Army–style boilermaker.
Manfred rolled a cigarette, dropped the shot glass in the beer, and took his boilermaker around Big Dash’s ass. He was down at Odell’s end of the bar, with Dexter Gordon, and in a flash of her scarf Bags’s German customer joined them. Zippi made me another coffee. Their coffeemaker was like a miniature vending machine. A button caused the milk to pour into the cup with the coffee. I lit a cigarette and gave Zippi a look that said things were complicated. But her look as she placed the saucer on the bar and rested her hands on either side of it said that actually things weren’t that complicated.
Sure enough, Manfred bowed to Zippi and gave my neck a massage with one paw. All of Bags’s cheaply dressed but attractive customer swayed as Manfred held the door for her and her scarf and saluted Odell once more.
Zippi marched down to Odell’s end of the bar and had words with him. He took his time changing the music and taking over down by her end. As he came toward the cash register, I moved to the other side of the bar in the opposite direction and followed Zippi through the door to the kitchen, where she was walking toward the spliff Bags and the busboy
were sharing. She held it out to me and I drew in the smoke.
* * *
Manfred pressed my left hand flat between his hands and said that I had a Balzac thing going with coffee. I couldn’t help myself. I didn’t know Balzac had died of caffeine poisoning. I didn’t know that Balzac believed in ghosts. I was never going to know how fat it was, but to sit with him, to receive Manfred’s thoughts, to be impressed by his expressiveness made me happy. I didn’t know that Balzac was masturbating under the cloak in Rodin’s statue.
He told me of the best date he’d ever had. A girl who’d torn off his clothes made him drive from Greenwich Village to L.L. Bean in Freeport, Maine. They stopped in New Hampshire to buy booze. She just stuck her hands down his pants and they were off. They did it five times their first time. He loved her, but she was bulimic, and he could not get along with her mother. Manfred was both touched and embarrassed that I cried.
Yet I no longer accepted rides in his Deux Chevaux from the Lessingsdorf site, his yellow hard hat flung onto the back seat with the mess of his life. All roads he took led to his pub in Schöneberg. Instead, I had those soulful walks at last, in the brisk late autumn air, the waning light turning even nearby figures into silhouettes. I went into the Tiergarten, in a way that I would not have dared to enter Chicago’s Midway at the same hour. I emerged at the Great Star, Der Grosser Stern, a large traffic circle around a several-story monument finished with cannons captured from the French after the fall of Sedan in 1872. I took the long way around and dived back into the landscape of wet branches in the evening streetlights.
I ignored the boys not giving me a second look and made my way to the workshop, a forgotten encampment, with so many inside the Nissen huts unsure of what to do next, how to proceed. Women ran Rosen-Montag’s life until he broke out for however long he chose to, reminding them whose court it was. When he was away, and had refused to allow his wife to accompany him, his wife was impossible, sick with rage at the staff in the huts, sick with rage toward the contractors at the different sites, and sick with the unexpressed. Manfred had heard that three firms of builders were about to be dismissed. Everyone was staying out of everyone else’s way, it felt like to me, as though not to be noticed was a way to keep your job.
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