by Kluge, P. F.
He didn’t even try! Or so, at first, it seemed. Sure, he made some kind of response, impressive enough, but only if you didn’t know what Kenny could do. I heard him mention some U.N. Resolutions, and the Balfour Declaration, and the Old Testament, but it was plodding and mechanical. He sounded the way I used to sound, when we debated together, when he pleaded with me to insert some “snap, crackle, and pop” into my presentation. And the British antagonist, the Oxford Union style debater, dripping irony, kept hammering away, arching eyebrows, sighing heavily, playing to the cameras and claiming victory. That was when Kenny got him.
“It seems that we don’t agree,” Kenny said, a flabbergasting simplicity which stopped the Brit cold. “I guess that’s why we’re here.”
“True,” he said.
“Too bad. Smart men arguing. I’m smart and our Palestinian friend is smart and you’re smart. Maybe even as smart as you think you are. How old are you, anyway?”
“I don’t see what …”
“Just asking,” he said. Something was up. Kenny sounded like a Jewish uncle on early television show, echoes of George Jessel, Danny Kaye. That wasn’t his way of speaking. “Of course, if it’s a sensitive point.”
“Thirty two,” the Brit snapped. His father had been a celebrated iconoclast, back home. The son had transplanted that persona to a richer market. An Oxford Union hit-man. So I was rooting for Kenny, after all.
“Thirty two,” Kenny repeated. “And … you don’t mind my asking … you’re not from this country?”
“This is absurd,” the Brit asked, turning to the host. But she was intrigued as well. Even the PLO guy seemed amused. “I don’t see what this contributes, Mr. Hauser, but it should be perfectly clear where I’m from.”
“England, I guess. If not, I’ve got to hand it to you, you sure do have the accent down.”
“It’s not an accent, Mr. Hauser. It’s the way the English language sounds.”
“Well, thanks. That’s an extra treat. My last question, I promise. You’ve been a citizen here, for how many years?”
I loved it. The taxi driver manner, the yenta inquisition, the ruptured, tacked-on clauses. Go, Kenny!
“I’m a British subject …”
“Okay,” Kenny said, “enough already. Too much, maybe. I apologize. I hope I haven’t gone too far. Forgive me.”
Enough already! Earlier they’d been thrashing about dual loyalty, conflict of interest—American Jews, Jewish Americans, the whole drill. Now Kenny had exposed his adversary as a stateless talking head with dual loyalties of his own. Maybe, no loyalties at all. A global ambulance chaser.
“Forgive you?” the Brit said. He was fast on his feet, it turned out. “I can forgive all sorts of things, Mr. Hauser, including your kitschy, pandering persona. There are other things at stake here and more lives than your own, which remain at gravest risk as long as you defend the policies of a belligerent, theocratic garrison state, zealous at home and manipulative … endlessly manipulative … abroad.”
“Back to Israel,” Kenny said with a sigh. “Not Syria or Libya. Garrison, belligerent, zealous et cetera, et cetera. No, not those. Israel. And manipulative. That clinches it. Israel for sure. So let me say my piece and I’ll be brief, because we’ve been here a long time now and I’d like Mr. Massawi to have a moment before we close, okay, it only seems fair.”
The moderator nodded agreement. Well done, Kenny, I thought. He’d determined closure. He’d speak, then the PLO representative. The Brit was history.
“You look in from the outside,” Kenny said, facing the camera. “And it seems to you that lots of outrageous, unfair things go on over there. My friend, the British subject, has given you the list. Part of it, at least. Matters of land and law, employment, education, political power at home. Military action nearby. Manipulation abroad. Here, especially. Lobbying, propagandizing, you only have to read the newspapers, even the ones my friend says are slanted in Israel’s favor. No end of problems. Granted. My problem is this. With all my best efforts—my cleverest manipulations—I still worry. I worry that, given a chance, even half a chance to destroy Israel—make that, destroy and get away with it—their neighbors would take it. That’s my problem.”
“You’re part of the problem!” the Brit interrupted.
“Better a problem I know,” Kenny retorted, “than a solution I don’t.”
It was time for the Palestinian to have his say. Then the credits flitted across and the names of the foundations that paid for the show and I saw Kenny leaning forward, chatting with the Palestinian, kibitzing even, while the British fellow sat rigid and angry. Then he was gone—Joan’s husband. My old friend. I thought things over for a while, some of the connections between then and now. Then I called New Jersey.
Looking out my window, I saw a Land Rover with Jersey plates moving slowly down the street, heading for a parking garage I’d recommended, proceeding cautiously, like an army patrol car in a newly-captured city where snipers lurked on rooftops. Five minutes later, I saw them on the sidewalk. They dressed like Jersey. In Joan’s case, it wasn’t unappealing: black slacks, shiny, maybe leather, maybe not, and a yellow blouse, frilly and silky, that made me hope she was spending the night. Kate had dressed somberly, in a suit-like thing that suggested she was visiting a kid who’d gotten into trouble at college.
I buzzed them in and waiting for them at the elevator. Kate was the first out the door.
“Welcome to New York,” I said. While I hugged her, she looked over my shoulder at the room behind me, curious about what she had gotten herself into. I motioned her inside and faced Joan.
“I didn’t know exactly what kind of clothing …”
“You’re fine,” I reassured her. I held her hands, smiling at her, trying to run off her worries, though I had some worries of my own about this evening. “My house is your house.”
A few words about my place. Costly. That would be the first word. Tenth and top floor, view of the park. Like all apartments, it started out empty. In a room off the kitchen—the maid’s room, once—I made my original nest: a Sears card table, a typewriter and a hard chair. Poet’s corner, monk’s cell, whore’s crib, this area where I worked. Bit by bit the place filled up and now I could look around and see trips I took, various Backyard Adventures and Faraway Places. A temple door from Thailand, a pair of hardwood-and-wicker chairs from the Philippines, a wall full of batiks from Bali, some oversized book ends—ceramic cherubs— from Hong Kong, a kitchen loaded with state of the art Italian pots and pans and an espresso machine that, with all its valves and knobs, resembled the control panel of a submarine, Captain Nemo in command. The place disoriented people. And the group from New Jersey were no exceptions.
“How you doing, buddy?” Gooker asked when he arrived. Maroon jacket, wine-colored pants, blue-shirt open at the collar. “How long you lived here?”
“Years. Who’s counting?”
“Oh.” And then. “You planning on staying?”
“I’m not planning on leaving. Put it that way.”
“I’ll be damned,” Gooker said. He studied an elaborate five-foot tall birdcage, a copy of a Victorian house, all porches and gables, I’d brought home from Sri Lanka, that sat between an Elvis lamp and a teak humidor. “Geez. The loot. Hell of a yard sale, you could have.”
“People say, they can’t tell if I’m just moving in or just moving out.”
“Do you entertain much?”
“Mostly on the road,” I said. “Or I go out.”
“I figured, when I didn’t smell anything cooking,” Gooker said. “I guess all you need is a place to empty out your suitcase. And anyway, you got the city all around you.”
“All around,” I said, concentrating on opening a bottle of champagne that Iberia Air had sent over.
“You own this place, or what?” Gooker asked.
“I own it.”
“You and the bank, huh?”
“No, just me.”
“What’s it … a cond
o?”
“Co-op,” I said, pouring into four long-stemmed champagne glasses. One of them had some packer’s straw in the bottom. That would be my glass. “It’s almost the same thing. Coops are a little fussier about who they take.”
“I could do things with this,” Kate said, looking around constructively. “It has possibilities.”
“George doesn’t need any hanging plants,” Gooker argued. “It’s a bachelor pad, is all. Okay if I explore?” I nodded and he headed down the hall, glass in hand. Sitting in the living room with Kate and Joan, half listening to Kate’s remodeling schemes, something about how certain paints and papers could “bring the sunlight” into my room.
“What’s the program?” Gooker shouted from down the hall.
“I thought we’d look around the neighborhood some, before we eat.”
“I just parked …” he protested.
“That’s okay,” I said. “We’ll walk.”
“Walk?”
“To the park. It’s nice.”
“Central Park!?”
“Relax,” Joan said.
“Okay,” I said. I appreciated her advice. In the few hundred yards we’d covered on Columbus Avenue, I’d commented on yuppies and gentrification. I’d chatted our way through a gamut of boutiques, chocolate chip cookie shops, ice-cream parlors and Korean fruit stands. Walking towards the park, I’d pointed out where Ed Bradley lived and Kiri te Kanawa, where John Lennon died, where Paul Simon and Carrie Fisher had wed. And, like a tour guide who wasn’t sure of his customers’ tastes—did they want to photograph? shop? meet natives?—I’d been hoping something, anything, would impress them.
“I just wanted this to work out,” I said.
“It will or it won’t,” she shrugged. “Don’t worry about them.”
“I’m not worried about them,” I said. “I was worried about you.”
She smiled at that. “I’m glad you’re worried … that you care, I mean. But I don’t want you to worry about me, George. Ever. That’s a ground rule. Okay?”
“Okay,” I said, sounding nonchalant, but my heart leapt. Ground rule, she said. Ground rule! Ground rules were what you established at the beginning of a game. Before you played! Did that mean we’d be playing a game? That night? A night game, yet! Is that what ground rule meant? Or did all of this over-calculation, this will-she-or-won’t-she mean that I was back in high school?
Once you got them moving, Kate and Gooker were game. It wasn’t the skyline that impressed them. It was the sight of a dog owner picking up his pet’s turds with a glad-bag he’d put over his hand, then reversing the bag and depositing the package in a garbage can.
“I love it,” he said. “Hey, George. It’s like baseball or fly casting. It’s all in the wrist.”
“Fifty bucks if you don’t pick it up and they catch you,” I said.
“What’s it for people?”
“Huh?”
“No kidding. On the way to your place, the block between your place and the parking garage, there’s these two cars, a station wagon with Connecticut plates and Porsche and there’s a bum taking a dump—Jee … sus … right on your doorstep, practically. They won’t believe me at work.”
“You sure?” The fact was the guys at Gooker’s tire place would love this story, because for them New York existed as confirmation, not as reproach. They fed off bag ladies, rapes, muggings. The way kids built an imaginary world around their Lionel trains, they dreamed about what could happen on subways, and shuddered with pleasure when their dreams—other peoples’ nightmares—came true.
“This reminds me of when we used to come into the City on class trips,” Gooker remarked. We’d arrived at the Sheep Meadow. People were sunning themselves on the grass, flying kites, listening to the pennant race on the radio. There were musicians all over the park, playing for change, a Dixieland band near the bowling green, a guitarist doing Beatles stuff at Strawberry Fields and, right where we were, four black guys, puppeteers who moved bird-like figures to the dips and glides of 1950’s doo-wop. The Moonglows’ “Ten Commandments of Love.” There was no getting away from those old songs. While Kate and Joan listened to the music, Gooker and I sat on a park bench. “We went to the United Nations, I remember. And the Statue of Liberty. What else?”
“The Museum of Natural History,” I said. “That’s right up the street.”
“Oh yeah. They still got the dinosaurs? I guess so. It’s not like you have to bring in next year’s model, when you’re talking dinosaurs. It’s funny. Milk cartons! Whenever I think of class trips, I think of milk cartons.” Gooker fell silent, trying to figure out his memory. Then he shrugged and gave it up. He noticed some women who came walking by, a couple sassy Latinas, sharp-featured, cocky, the f-word peppering their talk, their laughter.
“Wow!” Gooker said. “The hits just keep on coming! What I’d give for a shot at one of those. Both!”
“Hey,” I said, gesturing at his wife and high school sweetheart, not ten feet ahead, arm in arm with Joan.
“Let me tell you something, George. Okay? You’re not married and I, as you just pointed out, am. You with me so far?”
“Yes.”
“Try staying married to the same woman for a couple decades, and no time off for good behavior. Every time you climb on board, you know that’s the same ride you’ll be taking forever. Try it, George. You marry them … well, you get laid before you marry … and it’s like driving a sports car, brand new, mint condition. Man, you’re speeding, you’re downshifting, you’re laying rubber ’round corners, a Grand Prix driver. Shit! Couple years pass, kid or two comes along, she’s something else, something Detroit-made, heavier, more power under the hood, more room in the trunk. Solid. Holds the road. Good mileage. Sort of car you can take for long trips and not worry about breakdowns, not if you’ve been giving her regular maintenance.”
I nodded, awed by the ugly vitality of Gooker’s metaphor. Which wasn’t over yet.
“And then, more years, and you’re one year older after every one of them, and you can’t kid yourself anymore. If it drives like a truck, and steers like a truck, if it groans going uphill and runs over you going down … it’s a truck. And you, my friend, are a teamster.”
“Jesus,” I said. But he still wasn’t done. Gooker was on a roll, the sort of effortless roll I used to think writing was like. Before I wrote. Gooker was a natural. Put a pencil in his hand, nothing would happen. Shove a tape-recorder on the table, silence would reign. But walking around the world, he was something else again.
“Which is where I am now. Teamster. But I see what’s next. I see what I’ll be climbing into. A slow-moving black limo that goes through traffic with the lights on. We’re talking hearse. So there you have it. Every now and then I go joy riding. I take a spin in one of the sporty new models, foreign-made.”
Gooker took over after that. He kibitzed with the taxi driver who took us down Fifth Avenue. He bantered with the drug dealers in Washington Square, high-fiving someone who’d offered him a nickel bag. “I could operate in this burg,” he said, and it seemed he was saying it especially to me. In Soho, he feigned serious interested in an over-sized oil of an anorexic woman, something that would go good in his showroom. And, though Kate admonished him sometimes, whispering, tugging at him, rolling her eyes in what was supposed to be despair, I could see that she was loving it.
“Jersey comes to New York,” Joan whispered.
“Does it ever,” I said. “Gooker’s a piece of work. A free-range chicken.”
“You got that right.”
“How about you, George? It’s none of my business. You were married. You’re single. What’s it like? What are you like?”
“My old man says Germans are like pumas. We mate for life.”
“That’s your answer?”
“I’ve had affairs,” I said. “Plus … especially at the beginning … a lot of room service.”
“You sounded like you could be talking about visiting the dentist,
‘Had my checkups.’”
“Had my checkups too. ‘Look ma, no cavities.’”
“Why do I feel like I didn’t get the whole story on Miss Thailand?”
“You didn’t. It was a heart-breaker. We started out as friends She was in a jam. A government guy … a Mr. Big … was after her. Impossible for her to say no and keep her job. I helped her out. And we were lovers. I thought we were. But as soon as she arrived here, she was gone. I never even told my old man about her. Thank God.”
“Are you still friends?”
“She’s in town. She imports art. Has a shop on the east side. I stopped by once, just to see. I guess I remind her of bad times. It was complicated.”
“Does that mean …” I could feel her bristle. “Usually when people say, it’s complicated, it means, I’ll tell you, if you insist, but there’s no way you’ll understand it. Is that what you’re saying to me, George?”
“No,” I said quickly. She could be touchy. Jersey girl, sneaky smart, her intelligence a concealed weapon. “No. Complicated means I’m still figuring it out myself. Obviously.”
“Another thing. Obviously. When people say obviously at the start of a sentence, in that certain way, well obviously, it’s as plain as day, they think you should know it already.”
“Okay,” I said, holding up my hands in surrender. “Okay.”
“It doesn’t sound like a marriage at all.”
“Not like my parents had,” I said. Suddenly Mom and Pop seemed like people out of another time. They were still-lifes. When I pictured them, I saw old photographs, almost like the ones on Pauline Kennedy’s book shelf. And it was odd, walking down a street in Soho, being reproached by the memory of them.
A stamped tin ceiling, white walls, dark booths crowded with slow, serious eaters: by New Jersey standards, the place I took them to was dingy. No barroom and the bathrooms were downstairs in the basement. The place didn’t even have a parking lot. The most I hoped for was that my guests would find it “charming.” And that they’d like the food. Italian food didn’t travel well. Too far outside the Lincoln Tunnel, life went out of pasta, crust came off bread, tomato sauce was catsup and espresso was something you used when the package absolutely, positively had to be there overnight. But it had gone well.