He glances at me again, to see if I’m laughing. But I don’t even try to pretend. I order a beer and a vodka chaser. What was it he said? You need some numbing to get through this.
Numbing? A general anesthetic is what I need.
He resumes his frantic darting around. Like he’s prodding himself onward. A single spotlight illuminates him from above, and vibrant shadows accompany his body. His motion is reflected, with a strange delay, on the curves of a large copper urn positioned by the wall behind him, perhaps a remnant from some play that was once produced here.
“Talking about my birth, Netanya, let’s dedicate a moment to that cosmic event. Because me—and I’m not talking about now, when I’m at the pinnacle of the entertainment business, a wildly popular sex symbol…” He lingers, nodding with his mouth wide open, allowing them to finish up their laughter. “No, I mean back-in-the-day me, at the dawn of my history, when I was a kid. Back then, I was super screwed up. They put all the wires together in my head the wrong way, you cannot believe what a weirdo I was. No, really”—he smiles—“want some laughs, Netanya? Do you really want to laugh?” Then he scolds himself: “What a stupid-ass question! Helloooo! It’s a stand-up show! Do you still not get that? Putz!” He gives his forehead a loud, unfathomably powerful smack. “That’s what they’re here for! They’re here to laugh at you! Not so, my friends?”
It was an awful blow, that slap. An outburst of unexpected violence, a leakage of murky information that belonged somewhere completely different. The room is silent. Someone crushes a hard candy between his teeth and the sound reverberates through the club. Why did he insist that I come? What does he need a hired gun for, I wonder, when he’s doing such an excellent job himself?
“I got a story for you,” he calls out as if that slap never happened. As if there were no white splotch on his forehead turning red, as if his glasses were not bent. “Once, when I was maybe twelve, I decided I was going to find out what happened nine months before I was born that turned my dad on so much that he jumped my mom like that. And just so you understand, other than me there was no evidence of any volcanic activity in his pants. Not that he didn’t love her. Let me tell you, all that man did in his life from the second he opened his eyes in the morning till he went to bed, all his futzing around with the warehouses and the mopeds and the spare parts and the rags and the zippers and the thingamajigs—just pretend you know what I’m talking about, okay? Nice city, Netanya, nice city—all that crap, for him, more than making a living, more than anything, was to impress her. He just wanted to make her smile at him and stroke his head: Good doggy, good doggy. Some men write poetry to their beloveds, right?” “Right,” a few people answer, still startled. “And some guys serenade them, right?” “Right!” a few more feeble voices chime in. “And some guys, I don’t know…they buy them diamonds, or a penthouse, an SUV, designer enemas, right?” “Right!” several voices shout, eager to please now. “And then there are the ones like Daddy-o, who buy two hundred pairs of fake jeans from an old Romanian woman on Allenby Street and sell them from the back room of the barbershop as original Levi’s, and all for what? So he can show her in his little notebook that night how many pennies he made off—”
He stops, his eyes wander around the room, and for a moment, inexplicably, the audience holds its breath as if having seen something along with him.
“But really touch her, the way a man touches a woman, even a little pat on the ass in the hallway, just a schmeer—that, I never saw him do. So you tell me, my friends. After all, you’re smart people, you chose to live in Netanya. Explain to me, then, why he never touched her. Hey? God only fucking knows. Wait, what—?” He perches on his tiptoes and flutters his eyelids at the audience with an emotional, grateful look. “You really want to hear about this? You’re really in the mood for a bunch of shaggy-dog stories about my royal family?” Here the audience is divided: some cheer encouragingly, others yell at him to start telling jokes already. The two pale bikers in black leather drum their hands on the table and make their beer glasses jump around. It’s hard to know which side they’re on; perhaps they just enjoy fanning the flames. I still can’t tell if they’re two boys, or a boy and a girl, or two girls.
“Not true! Really? You’re really and truly up for Days of Our Lives: The Greenstein Saga? No, no, let me get this straight, Netanya, is this some kind of attempt to crack the riddle of my magnetic personality?” He flashes me an amused, teasing look. “You really think you can succeed where every researcher and biographer has crapped out?” Virtually the whole audience applauds. “Then you really are my friends! We’re BFFs, Netanya! Sister cities!” He melts and opens his eyes wide in a look of boundless innocence. The crowd rolls around laughing. People grin at one another. A few stray smiles even make their way to me.
He stands downstage, the sharp points of his boots protruding over the edge, and counts the hypotheses on his fingers: “Number one: Maybe he worshipped her so much, my dad, that he was afraid to touch her? Number two: Maybe she was grossed out by him walking around the house with a black hairnet on after he washed his hair? Number three: Maybe it was because of her Holocaust, and the fact that he wasn’t in it, not even as an extra? I mean, the guy not only did not get murdered, he wasn’t even injured in the Holocaust! Number four: Maybe you and I are not quite ready for our parents to meet yet?” Laughter in the audience, and he—the comic, the clown—darts around the stage again. The knees of his jeans are ripped, but he boasts a pair of red suspenders with gold clips, and his cowboy boots are adorned with silver sheriff stars. Now I notice a sparse little braid dangling on the back of his neck.
“Long story short, just to finish this up so we can get the show on the road, yours truly opened up a calendar, flipped back exactly nine months from his birth, found the date, and quickly ran off to the pile of Revisionist newsletters my dad collected—took up half a room in our house, that Revisionism; the other half was for the rags and the jeans and the Hula-Hoops and the ultraviolet cockroach killers. Just pretend—”
“—you understand,” a few voices from the bar jubilantly complete his flourish.
“Nice city, Netanya.” Even when he laughs, his look is calculating and joyless, seeming to monitor the conveyor belt on which the jokes emerge from his mouth. “And the three of us, I mean the biological matter of our family, we squeezed into the room and a half that was left, and by the way, he wouldn’t let us throw out a single page of that party newsletter: ‘Mark my words, this will become the bible of future generations!’ he used to say, wagging his finger, and his little mustache would perk up like someone had electrified his balls. And there, on exactly that date, nine months before I hatched and forever upended the ecological balance, what do you think yours truly came across? The Sinai Campaign, on the nose! Do you see where I’m going with this? Isn’t it some crazy shit, you guys? Abdel Nasser announces he’s nationalizing the Suez, the canal is slammed shut in our face, and my dad, Hezkel Greenstein of Jerusalem, five foot two, hairy as an ape, and with lips like a girl’s, doesn’t even take one second to consider before he goes off to open her up! So really, if you think about it, you could say that I’m a retaliatory operation. You know what I mean? I’m payback! You dig me? We had the Sinai Campaign, the Battle of Karameh, Operation Entebbe, Operation whatever-the-fuck-else, and then we had the Greenstein Campaign, which is still partially classified, so I cannot divulge all the details, but we happen to have here tonight a rare recording from the war room, though the audio is of mediocre quality: ‘Spread your legs, Mrs. Greenstein! Take this, Egyptian tyrant!’ Badaboom-ching! Sorry, Mom! Sorry, Dad! My words were taken out of context! I have betrayed you yet again!”
He slaps himself in the face again, savagely, with both hands. Then once more.
I’ve had a metallic, rusty taste in my mouth for a few seconds. People near me pull back in their chairs, eyelids fluttering. At the table next to me a woman whispers something sharply to her husband and picks up her purse, but he put
s his hand on her thigh to hold her back.
“Netanya, mon chéri, salt of the earth—by the way, is it true that if someone on the street around here asks you what time it is, chances are he’s a narc? Just kidding! Joke!” He shrinks his whole body down, crowding his eyebrows in, and his eyes dart around. “There isn’t someone from the Alperon family here by any chance, is there, so we can pay him our respects? Or the Abutbuls? Any of Dedeh’s guys? Beber Amar isn’t here? One of Boris Elkush’s relatives? Maybe Tiran Shirazi is honoring us with his presence tonight? Ben Sutchi? Eliyahu Rustashvili…”
Feeble claps gradually chime in, which seem to help people break out of the paralysis that gripped them a moment earlier.
“Now don’t get me wrong, Netanya, I’m just making sure, just doing reconnaissance. You see, whenever I have a gig somewhere, first thing I do is log on to Google Risk.”
He suddenly tires, as if emptied out all at once. He puts his hands on his hips and breathes quickly. He stares into space, his eyes congealed in his face like an old man’s.
—
He called me about two weeks ago. At eleven-thirty at night. I had just come back from walking the dog. He introduced himself with a certain tense and celebratory anticipation in his voice, which I did not respond to. Confused, he asked if it was me, and whether his name didn’t sound familiar. I said it didn’t. I waited. I loathe people who quiz me like that. The name rang a bell, but it was faint. He wasn’t someone I’d met through work, of that I was certain: the aversion I felt was a different kind. This was someone from a more inner circle, I thought. With a greater potential for harm.
“Ouch,” he quipped. “I was sure you’d remember…” He chuckled heavily, and his voice was slightly hoarse. For a moment I thought he was drunk. “Don’t worry,” he said, “I’ll keep this short and sweet.” And here he giggled: “That’s me: short and sweet. Barely five-two on a good day.”
“Listen, what do you want?”
There was a stunned silence, then he asked again if it was me. “I have a request for you,” he said, abruptly focused and businesslike. “Hear me out and decide, and no big deal if you say no. No hard feelings. It’s not something that’ll take up a lot of your time, just one evening. And I’m paying, obviously, however much you say, I won’t haggle with you.”
I was sitting in the kitchen, still holding the dog’s leash. She stood there weak and sniffling, looking up at me with her human eyes as if surprised that I was still on the phone.
I felt oddly exhausted. I had a sense that there was a second, muted conversation going on between me and this man, which I was too slow to pick up. He must have been waiting for an answer, but I didn’t know what he was asking. Or maybe he’d made his request and I hadn’t heard. I remember looking at my shoes. Something about them, the way they pointed at each other, brought a lump to my throat.
—
He slowly walks toward a worn, overstuffed red armchair on the right side of the stage. Perhaps it, too—like the big copper urn—is left over from an old play. He collapses into it with a sigh, sinks farther and farther down until it threatens to swallow him up.
People stare at their drinks, swirl their glasses of wine, and peck distractedly at their little bowls of nuts and pretzels.
Silence.
Then muffled giggles. He looks like a little boy in a giant piece of furniture. I notice that some people are trying not to laugh out loud, avoiding his eyes, as though afraid to get mixed up in some convoluted calculus he is conducting with himself. Perhaps they feel, as I do, that in some way they already are embroiled in the calculus and in the man himself more than they intended to be. He slowly lifts his feet, displaying the high, almost feminine heels of his boots. The giggles grow louder, until laughter washes over the entire club.
He kicks his feet and flutters his arms as if drowning, yells and sputters, and finally uproots himself from the depths of the armchair, leaps up, and stands a few steps away from it, panting and staring at it fearfully. The audience laughs with relief—good old slapstick—and he gives them a threatening glare, but they laugh even harder. He finally deigns to smile, soaking up the laughs. That unexpected tenderness softens his face again, and the audience responds. The comic, the entertainer, the jester, savors the reflection of his smile in his viewers’ faces; for a moment one can almost imagine he believes what he sees.
But then once again, as though incapable of tolerating the affection for more than a second, he stretches his mouth into a thin, disgusted line. I’ve seen that grimace before: a little rodent gnawing on himself.
—
“I’m really sorry for bursting into your life like this,” he said in that late-night phone call, “but I guess I was hoping that thanks to some, you know, devotion of youth”—he sniggers again—“after all, you could say we started out together, but you know, you went your own way, and you did a great job, big respect…” Here he paused, waiting for me to remember, to finally wake up. He could not have imagined how stubbornly I was holding on to my comatose state, or how violent I could be toward anyone who tried to sever me from it. “It’ll take me a minute to explain, tops. So worst-case scenario, you’ve given me a minute of your life. Cool?”
He sounded like a man of my age, but he used a younger generation’s slang. Nothing good was going to come of this. I closed my eyes and tried to remember. Devotion of youth…Which youth was he referring to? My childhood in Gedera? The years when we moved around because of my father’s business, from Paris to New York to Rio de Janeiro to Mexico City? Or perhaps when we returned to Israel and I went to high school in Jerusalem? I tried to think fast, to find my escape route. His voice towed a sense of distress, shadows of the mind.
“Look,” he burst out, “is this an act, or are you such a big shot that you won’t even…How can you not remember?!”
No one had spoken to me like that for a long time. It was a breath of fresh air, purifying the disgust I felt toward the hollow deference that usually surrounded me, even three years after retiring.
“How can you not remember something like that?” he kept fuming. “We took a class together for a whole year with that Kalchinski guy in Bayit va-Gan, and then we used to walk to the bus together.”
It slowly started to come back. I remembered the little apartment, dark even at midday, and then I remembered the gloomy teacher, tall and thin and hunched, who looked like he was holding up the ceiling with his back. There were five or six of us boys, all useless in math, who came from a few different schools to take private lessons with him.
He kept up a torrent of speech, reminding me of long-forgotten things. He sounded hurt. I listened and yet I didn’t. I lacked the strength for these emotional upheavals. I looked around the kitchen seeing things I had to fix, or paint, or oil, or caulk. House arrest, as Tamara used to call the endless list of chores.
“You blocked me out,” he finally said, incredulous.
“I’m sorry,” I murmured, and only when I heard myself say it did I realize I had anything to be sorry for. The warmth of my voice was revealing, and from that warmth there emerged a fair-skinned, freckled boy with splotches on his cheeks. A short, skinny boy with glasses and prominent lips that were defiant and restless. A boy who talked quickly and was always slightly hoarse. And I remembered instantly that despite his fair skin and pale pink freckles, his thick curly hair was jet black, a contrast of colors that had made a great impression on me.
“I remember you!” I exclaimed. “Of course, we used to walk together…I can’t believe I could have…”
“Thank God,” he sighed, “I was starting to think I’d made you up.”
—
“And gooood eeeevening to the stunning beauties of Netanya!” he bellows as he resumes his dance across the stage, clicking his heels. “I know you, girls! I know you all too well. I know you from the inside…What was that, table thirteen? You have some nerve, you know!” His face darkens and for a moment he seems genuinely hurt: “Hitting a shy, intr
overted guy like me with such an invasive question. Of course I’ve had Netanya women!” He gives a full, round grin. “Beggars can’t be choosers, times were hard, we had to make do…” The audience, men and women, slap their hands on the tables, booing, whistling, laughing. He crouches on one knee opposite a table of three bronzed, giggling old ladies with blue-tinted hairdos made up mostly of air. “Well hello, table eight! What are you beauties celebrating tonight? Is one of you becoming a widow at this very second? Is there a terminal man taking his final breath in the geriatric ward as we speak? ‘Go on, buddy, keep going,’ ” he cheers on the imaginary husband. “ ‘One more push and you’re free!’ ” The women laugh and pat the air with affectionate scolding. He dances around on the stage and almost falls off the edge, and the audience laughs louder. “Three men!” he yells, holding up three fingers. “An Italian, a Frenchman, and a Jew sit in a bar talking about how they pleasure their women. The Frenchman says: ‘Me, I slather my mademoiselle from head to toe with butter from Normandy, and after she comes she screams for five minutes.’ The Italian says: ‘Me, when I bang my signora, first of all I spread her whole body from top to bottom with olive oil that I buy in this one village in Sicily, and she keeps screaming for ten minutes after she comes.’ The Jewish guy’s mute. Nothing. The Frenchman and the Italian look at him: ‘What about you?’ ‘Me?’ says the Jew. ‘I slather my Golda with schmaltz, and after she comes she screams for an hour.’ ‘An hour?’ The Frenchman and the Italian can’t believe their ears: ‘What exactly do you do to her?’ ‘Oh,’ says the Jew, ‘I wipe my hands on the curtains.’ ”
A Horse Walks into a Bar Page 2