by Hesh Kestin
It was not the Tintis who had gotten past the security downstairs but Terri Cats. Of course. Why should they even bother to call to say she was coming up? She had a key. She knew all the desk clerks, had for years. Hurriedly I got into a red silk robe from Shushan’s closet and stepped out into the living room.
“Well, well,” Terri said. “The young lion.”
“Just the zoo kind.”
“Not from what I hear,” she said, rising to kiss me on both cheeks like a French sister-in-law in those movies I loved at the Eighth Street Cinema. “God, Russell, you smell like pussy.”
“There may be a reason for that,” I said.
The reason reentered from the kitchen with a cup of coffee and handed it to Terri. I had almost reached for it.
“I’ll get yours, sweetheart,” Darcie said, then turned to Terri. “The tough guy here takes it black.”
It occurred to me Darcie had not asked how our guest wanted hers. “You okay?” I asked.
“Compared to what?”
“Compared to a couple of days ago. The whole country’s in sackcloth and ashes.” I pointed to the television, where a crowd of reporters was waiting to shout questions at Lee Harvey Oswald in what would go down in history as the world’s most viewed perp walk. “In case you didn’t notice.”
“You know what?” Terri said, shrugging her delicate shoulders for emphasis. “Every day half a million people die in this country alone, a good many of them in agony. Do you really think I’m going to sweat the death of a fucking politician?”
Although I’d felt much the same, the harshness of its expression was not so much unpleasant as personal: I was being reprimanded for a softy. “A death’s a death.”
“He fucking had it coming,” she said. “I told you he wanted to do good. He just never got around to it. Kennedy was a fraud.”
“Aren’t we all?”
“Oh, for crying out loud, Russell,” she said. “Yes, we all create illusions for other people to believe, and for us as well. But when it comes to serious stuff—love, hate, work, things that matter—it helps when we know the difference. In my professional opinion, kid, the man didn’t even know he was a fraud. The new president, that’s a whole different story. He’s the most real president since Truman. You’re going to see things happen, not just talked about.”
“Like.”
“War, peace, that kind of thing. He’s going to do things, some good, some bad, maybe even tragic. But he’s not the kind of jerk-off that invades Cuba with three CIA guys and two hundred pissed off out-of-shape ex-country club types who want their cigars back. If we have a war, Johnson is the kind of guy who is going to unleash the dogs. And I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s the president that changes the black-white equation in this country.”
“He’s a Texan.”
“Exactly,” Terri said. “You think a Yankee is going to get in there and bang heads in the South? No, Johnson is going to prove himself by out civil-rightsing the civil rightsers. It’s the way of the world. Look at you. Last week you were a kid who lived in books. Now you have one of the world’s biggest private libraries upstairs and I’ll bet you haven’t cracked one book in it.”
My God, I thought. She’s right. “I’ve been busy.”
“Yeah,” she said, winking. “I heard.”
Darcie handed me a fresh cup of coffee, then sat close to Terri and put her head on her shoulder. Terri reached around and began stroking Darcie’s back under her robe. Darcie made a noise I had not heard. It wasn’t a loud shudder or the muted orgasmic scream that went off like a distant siren, growing louder as she grew closer. It was a purr.
“What the fuck is that, Russell?”
“What the fuck is what?”
Darcie shifted to look as Terri pointed.
This was worse than junior high. From under the soft folds of Shushan’s red silk robe a part of me was pointing back.
“Tsk, tsk,” Terri said.
If she was going to say something to further humiliate me I’ll never know what it was, because just at that moment a muffled shot exploded softly in the room, like a gun fired under a down pillow, followed by sounds of a struggle, men hollering, and Dan Rather shouting in excitement, “This is unbelievable. It appears Lee Harvey Oswald has been shot. I repeat. Lee Harvey Oswald, accused assassin of President Kennedy, has been shot live on tv.”
Probably every conversation in America stopped at that moment, as ours did, but mixed with the shock I shared in seeing a second murder of national proportions only two days after the first was my own special shock—of recognition. “My God,” I said aloud to myself. “I know that man. That’s Jack—” I searched my memory for the name. “That’s Jack Ruby!”
“Who’s Jack Ruby?” Terri asked.
Fear flushed through me. “Shushan’s friend,” I said. “He was just here.”
41.
With serpentine grace Terri extricated herself from Darcie, rose silently from the couch and switched off the set. Standing there she seemed to replace Dan Rather, Lee Oswald, Jack Ruby, everything. “Shushan knew this guy?”
“Knew?”
“Knew, knows. I’m asking you a direct question, sweet-face. I’m his sister. I want to know.”
I looked to Darcie. She took the hint and went straight to the bedroom and shut the door. “It could be his double.”
“With the same name? They just said it. Jack Ruby.”
“I don’t know.”
Terri came and sat beside me so that I could smell more than her perfume—which was, however inappropriately, Joy. It could just as well have been Fear. Her face an inch from mine, she fixed me with her eyes. I could hear her swallow, almost feel it. “Russell, listen to me. Listen carefully. This is trouble.”
“It doesn’t have to be,” I said, not believing it. “This guy Jack Ruby, he probably knows two thousand people. Think about it. Even the Dallas cops knew him, know him. They let him get into the room. They let him get close enough to shoot. Not everybody he knows, who knows him, is going to be implica—”
Terri raised her finger to my mouth.
Despite my fear I wanted to feel it in my mouth. “It means nothing,” I said.
She pressed her finger hard on my lips. “We don’t know what it means. We probably can’t know. Not all of it. But believe me, sweet-face, this is not good.” Although it seemed impossible, she drew closer. I could see the fine peach fuzz on her cheek, the smudge of mascara where she had been a bit less than exact, the flecks of gold in her brown eyes. “What the fuck do you know about this?”
“Nothing, I swear.”
“Where’s my brother?” she said. It was not a question but a threat. Then a cry of desperation: “Where’s Shushan?”
“I don’t know,” I whispered. “Maybe dead.”
“Maybe,” she said slowly, “not.”
“I just don’t know.”
With that the toughest woman I had ever met dissolved onto my shoulder in tears. They poured down her face and onto my neck, then darkened the red silk of my robe—Shushan’s robe. She wept for what seemed like an hour. Probably it was only minutes. Eventually Darcie came out—she must have heard the sobbing—and took up a position on Terri’s other side, hugging her until they wept together, all three of us a human sandwich of confusion, doubt, fear, despair. We might have remained that way all afternoon but for the phone.
It was the front desk. “Mr. Newhouse, sorry to disturb you, but there’s a man downstairs wants to come up.”
“Does he have a name?”
“A lot of names. Says you know him. He’s a dentist.”
42.
This was expected, but not so soon, not mere moments after the assassin of John F. Kennedy—the alleged assassin: we would never know—was himself murdered on network television by a man I had met. I had thought him a clown. Maybe he was. But unlike Oswald, who was declared dead at the same hospital Kennedy’s lifeless body had been delivered to two days earlier, there was no doubt of
Jack Ruby’s guilt. We had all seen him do it.
Or heard. “On the radio as I was parking,” Feivel (Franklin) said, sweat beading on his brow and dripping into his big eyes so that he had to remove his rimless glasses and mop them with the white handkerchief that always stood like a ready flag of surrender in his breast pocket. Probably he had never thought of it as anything other than decoration, as though any of us was immune to tears. “There’s parking on the street. Sunday. The only day, aside from holidays, you can park free. I’m just backing in, I heard it. The man who killed the president is killed.”
“A tragedy,” I said.
“A big mess,” he said. He sat where I pointed, on the green couch whose back was to the door, his long frame folding in slow-motion like a mournful concertina. He wore a brown suit, a figured tan tie of some sort of artificial silk, and between his brown shoes and the one-inch cuff of his trousers thin brown socks with white clocks embossed on them.
After Darcie, dressed only in a shimmering silver robe—apparently compensated companions traveled prepared—served him a cup of coffee, I signaled her to join Terri in the bedroom. I could still hear sobbing through the door. Certainly Feivel (Franklin) could as well. He had the good sense not to ask. Maybe he thought I was twice the man I was. One bedroom, two women. I caught him peering at the other doors—who knew how many women I had in the place? “Nice digs,” he said.
“Digs?”
“You know—”
“Yeah, dat’s da way gangstahs tawk, eh?”
“I mean no disrespect.”
“None taken,” I said. “Coffee just right?”
He probably would have nodded in satisfaction to a cup full of hot piss. He sipped. “This Jack Ruby, you don’t think he’s...”
“Oh, he is.”
“He doesn’t have to be. What kind of name is Ruby?”
“Made up,” I said.
“Made up?”
“Shortened from Rubinstein probably,” I said. “That’s just a guess.”
“I was thinking the same, Mr. Newhouse.”
“I was Russell two weeks ago.”
“Time changes people.”
“So which is it, Feivel or Franklin?”
“Whatever you like.”
“Rubashkin or Robinson?”
“It’s legally changed,” he said, still sweating. He must have had glands like sacks. “Cost three hundred and seventy-five smackers.” He reconsidered. “Dollars. People call me what they like. I can’t get a court order against that. Legally is one thing.” He sipped again. There couldn’t be much left in the cup. “So you think, you’re sure—”
“He’s a Jew, Feivel.”
“He doesn’t have to be.”
“Did you see his face?”
“I heard it on the radio.”
“I could turn on the television,” I said with no such intention. If I never saw Jack Ruby’s face again I would be content. All I could do was see it, without a television. “He’s a Jew, trust me.”
“What do you think? It’s bad, right?”
“For the Jews?”
“For the Jews.”
“It was pretty bad for Lee Harvey Oswald.” My visitor didn’t react. “That was a joke.”
He nodded avidly. “I get it.”
“You worry about bad for the Jews, good for the Jews?”
“Doesn’t everyone? I mean, every Jew?”
“I don’t know, Feivel. But I know why you’re here.”
“You said to come. If it’s the wrong time—my God it’s probably the wrong time.” His eyes went to the bedroom door. “I mean, with the killing, and the president, and...”
“Feivel, stop sweating,” I said. “You’re among friends. I’m a paid up member of the Bhotke Society, isn’t that right?”
“Absolutely. Mr. Shushan Cats too.”
“Be that as it may, Feivel, you have nothing to fear. You brought out half the society to Mulberry Street on Friday. You did good.”
“The others, some of them had to work. And some are religious—on a Friday, before the Sabbath. It’s hard for them.”
“You did good. Don’t worry about it.”
“The important thing is we demonstrated our support for a fellow member.”
“Believe me, Feivel, if Shushan himself had been there he would have been impressed.”
“Any time,” he said. “Any place. Whatever you need, the Bhotke Young Men’s Society is with you. Like we say, from birth to death.” His face dropped. “Not that I’m suggesting...”
“Don’t sweat it,” I said.
“It’s a chronic condition, Mr. Newhouse. In the summer I’m like a bathhouse. Even in November I can’t stop my body from—”
I left him to go into the bedroom to get my wallet. Both women were stretched out on the sheets I had so recently stained with Darcie. Now the big blonde held Terri in her arms as she continued to sob, softly now, almost beyond hearing, her chest heaving but making little sound. I left the wallet and came back to see Feivel standing, looking at the Jimmy Ernst on the wall.
“It’s a black painting,” he said. “All in black. Different colors of black.”
“We pride ourselves on the appropriate art for every occasion,” I said. “Feival, on your way out, I want you to have this check.”
“Oh, there’s no need for that. I did what I could. As president of the society that’s my job.”
“It’s not for you, dummy. It’s for the society. I want you to arrange a memorial for Shushan.”
“He’s dead then?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea, but since we may never know it seemed to me only right that we should somehow mark his presence among us with a stone. I checked—there’s nothing in Jewish law that says we can’t. We just shouldn’t carve on it in memorium or put on a date of death, because maybe he’s not.”
“Maybe he’s not?”
“Nobody knows,” I said.
Feival unfolded the check. “This is one big stone. I don’t know if they have a stone this big, or if Beth David would allow it.”
“Feivel, remind me not to let you work on my teeth. Twenty-five thousand dollars is not what I want you to spend on the stone. I don’t know. Spend five hundred. The rest I want you and the Bhotke Society to find a charity, something worthwhile, where it will do good. Tell whoever it is if they use it well there will be more every year on the anniversary of Shushan’s disappearance. Plenty more. But it has to be a good cause.”
“A yeshiva?”
“What else you got?”
“Hospitals, libraries.”
“More personal.”
“I’d have to think,” he said, looking again down at the check. As with the check for Dr. King, it was a serious sum of money in 1963. “Maybe we could plant a grove in Israel. For those from Bhotke who died in the camps.”
“They’re dead.”
“They should be remembered. It could be a whole forest. Something substantial.”
I’d hoped the dentist would bring it up, so I wouldn’t have to reveal an emotion I took care to conceal. “An orphanage,” I said. “Something for kids who are alone.”
“An orphanage.”
“That’s a good idea, Feivel. I’m glad you thought of it.”
After pushing him out the door I went through the bedroom—both women were sleeping now, Darcie snoring softly like a slipper dragged rhythmically across a sandy floor—and climbed to the silence of Shushan’s penthouse, then entered his office. I opened the file cabinet where I had discovered my father’s employment record, the drawer containing Shushan’s arsenal of Louisville Sluggers. They seemed to be dozing there, waiting for their owner to take them out. In the toilet I opened my red robe and pissed for what seemed like an eternity into the spotless black porcelain bowl as I re-examined the brightly lit painting opposite that I had seen—whether copy or original—so many times at the Frick down the street. I flushed and left Georges de la Tour to return downstairs. Exhausted, I la
y beside the two women, Terri again the meat in a human sandwich, and joined them in the surcease of sleep.
At some point—it was dark—I woke to the sound of subtle activity beside me, and opened my eyes. I had always been curious about what lesbians did. It was beautiful in its way, lyrical almost, a velvety sliding, totally muliebricious, uncompromised by the requirements of an architecture God or nature had designed. It seemed so much more intimate than anything I had ever done with a woman, trust replacing thrust, a purity of endless moaning. Though I understood I might be more than a spectator—Darcie proffered a smiling glance of welcome while Terri’s face was hidden between her thighs—I was emotionally unable. Having dreamed of Terri Cats for two weeks, shuddered at her touch, I could not bring myself to make a move in her direction: circumstance had knocked the testosterone clear out of me.
When the phone rang I grabbed at it, the two women ignoring the interruption as they were content to ignore me.
It was Fritzi. “Russell?”
“The same.”
“What are you doing tomorrow morning, my boy?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Depends who gets killed next.”
“What?”
“Kennedy, Oswald. Maybe they’ll take out Jack Ruby. Who knows?”
“Who cares? Tomorrow Shushan’s trial opens.”
“Shushan who?”
“Don’t play with me, Russell.”
“How can they have a trial if he’s... gone?”
“They can’t,” Fritzi said with some finality. “That’s why I need you there.”
The women were writhing beside me like fecund snakes, the high smell of female lust filling the room like an acidulous cloud. “Fritzi, I have to take Shushan’s place in jail as well—is that what you’re telling me?”